The Man with the Iron Heart

days, all right.”

“And now the same girls suck off the Americans-some great power,” Heydrich said. Klein laughed out loud. Heydrich’s eyes, already narrow, narrowed further. “We ought to teach them a lesson, Hans. We really should. Maybe another one for the English, too. As if England could have beaten us if she hadn’t let herself get overrun by American niggers and Jews.”

“Damn right, sir.” Klein sounded hearty, but only for a moment. Then he asked, “Um…What have you got in mind?”

“I don’t know yet,” Heydrich admitted. “But something. There has to be something. No security to speak of in France or England-not like here. Getting people and the stuff they need across the border should be easy as you please.”

“Ja.” Klein nodded. “You’ve got that right-for France, anyway. England may be harder, though. Miserable Channel.”

Heydrich nodded, too, unhappily. England’s natural moat wasn’t even a good piss wide, but it had been plenty to frustrate the Reich in 1940. “Moving our personnel-that should be manageable,” the Reichsprotektor said, thinking out loud. “What they need…there’s the hard part.”

“Shame we don’t have any U-boats left,” Hans Klein remarked.

That made Heydrich think some more. A few of the submarines that had surrendered had put in at German ports. Regretfully, he shook his head. “We haven’t got the people to man one. And even if we did, the Allies would shit bricks if one of those boats went missing. Can’t have that, not when we’re trying to keep a secret.”

Klein grunted. “Yeah, you’re right, sir. Too damn bad, but you are.”

“A fishing boat, maybe?” Heydrich wondered. “That might work.” He had no idea how many fishing boats were setting out from German ports these days. Up till this moment, he’d never had any reason to worry about it. And the North Sea and the Baltic were about as far from his redoubt as you could get and still stay in the Reich. “Have to see what we can find out.”

“Whatever it is, the Tommies won’t like it,” Klein predicted.

Heydrich didn’t smile very often, but he did now. “That’s the idea, Hans.”

Summer pressed down on Anderson, Indiana, like a hot, wet glove. Diana and Ed McGraw went to movies on weekends and whenever Ed didn’t come home from the plant too tired during the week. What was playing? They didn’t much care. The theaters had air-conditioning. That counted for more than what went on the screen. The movie houses were packed whenever they went, too. They weren’t the only ones who wanted to beat the heat for a couple of hours.

“I wonder what it’d cost to air-condition the house,” Diana said when they left a theater one night. It was after ten, but still sweltering outside.

“I can tell you what,” Ed answered. “More than we can afford, that’s what. I make pretty good money, but not that kind.” He opened the Pontiac’s passenger door. Diana slid in. She knew he was right. Ed went around to get in on the street side. As he started the car, he went on, “You’ll be taking your trips, anyway. The trains are air- conditioned, and so are the hotels, right?”

“A lot of the time, anyhow,” Diana agreed.

“Well, that’s something, anyways.” Ed put the car in gear. “Where do you go next? Detroit?”

“No, Minneapolis,” she said.

He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “That’s right. I forgot. Detroit’s later. But they were both up north, and I mixed ’em up. It’s a wonder you can keep everything straight. Maybe it’ll be cooler up there. You can hope.”

“Sure,” Diana said, and then, after cautious silence, “Does it bother you that I’m gone so much?”

“Nah.” To her relief, Ed didn’t hesitate even a little bit. “It needs doin’. I couldn’t hack anything like that. I ain’t got the waddayacallit-the personality. But you’re goin’ great guns. Pat’d be proud of you. Honest to God, babe, he would.”

“Thanks.” Tears stung Diana’s eyes. She did sometimes wonder what their son would have thought of her campaign against the government. That was foolishness. She never would have started it if one of Heydrich’s fanatics hadn’t killed him and opened her eyes.

Minneapolis turned out to be hot, too. The paper there said the heat wave ran all the way up to Winnipeg, on the other side of the border. The Canadians were lucky. They didn’t have to try to help hold Germany down.

The ground around Minneapolis was as flat as if it had been ironed, and puddled with ponds and lakes of all sizes. Most of the people were tall and fair. They spoke with a slight singsong Scandinavian accent, and said “Ja” when they meant yes. Most of the time, they didn’t seem to notice the way they talked. Every once in a while, they would grin wickedly and put it on twice as thick to drive an out-of-towner loopy.

Signs printed in red on white-STOP THE BLEEDING IN GERMANY! RALLY AT LORING PARK! — were tacked to telephone poles and pasted to walls everywhere on the short car ride from the Great Northern depot to Diana’s hotel. “Looks like you folks have done a terrific job getting ready,” Diana told the couple who’d met her at the station.

“Well, we try,” said Susan Holmquist, who ran the Minnesota fight against the war.

“Ja, we do,” agreed her husband, Sven. They both seemed surprised at her praise. Other places, people acted as if they wanted a medal for pitching in. Not here, not with the Holmquists.

Quietly, Susan added, “Danny would have wanted it this way. If you do something, do it right.” Sven nodded. They’d lost their son at almost the same time as Diana lost Pat. A German wearing explosives under his clothes blew himself up in a crowd of GIs, and Danny Holmquist was one of the unlucky ones.

Loring Park had-inevitably-a two-lobed lake at its heart. Susan said the ice skating was terrific during the winter. Diana had tried ice skating exactly once, and sprained an ankle. Besides, just then she was amazed the little lake wasn’t steaming. The air shimmered under the swaggering sun.

A bunting-draped platform with a mike stood near a statue of Ole Bull. A plaque at the base of the statue explained that Ole Bull was a nineteenth-century Norwegian violinist. A good thing, too, because Diana wouldn’t have known otherwise. What he was doing immortalized in bronze in a Minneapolis park…Well, it was a Scandinavian part of the country.

Picketers paraded and chanted. Their placards carried all the slogans Diana had seen so often before. Some of them, she’d come up with herself. By now, she had trouble remembering which ones those were. They all blurred together.

People who disagreed with the picketers shouted and hooted. Bored-looking cops kept them from doing anything more. In places like New York City or Pittsburgh, the cops wouldn’t have looked bored. A lot more of them would have been here, too. Even so, they might not have been able to keep the two sides apart. Folks in these parts seemed to have better manners.

Susan Holmquist made a speech. The crowd in front of the podium-not too big, not too small-listened politely. They applauded politely at the right places. Reporters took notes. Photographers photographed. It was all very civilized. If everybody behaved like this, World War II probably never would have happened. But…

Susan introduced Diana, who got a bigger hand. Stepping up to the microphone, Diana thought of how scared of public speaking she’d been when she started out. She wasn’t any more. She’d done it often enough to let it lose its terrors.

She hammered away at the points she’d made so many times before. Why was the USA still in Germany? Why had so many young men died after victory was declared? Why couldn’t the Americans-or anyone else-squash the German fanatics? How long would it go on? How much more money and how many more lives would it cost?

She cut her speech shorter than usual. They were going to do something different here. They were going to read out, one after another, the names of all the servicemen and-women killed in Germany since what was laughably called V-E Day.

Sven Holmquist came up with a typewritten sheet of paper. “Irving Sheldon Aaronson,” he intoned. “Hovan Abelian. Creighton Abrams. Manuel Jose Acevedo…”

Diana found herself nodding as she listened to name following name. It was oddly impressive, oddly dignified. And it brought home, one name at a time, just what the United States had already thrown away.