The Man with the Iron Heart

Maybe she wasn’t the only one who felt that way. A man in a suit bustled out of the crowd and headed toward the speakers’ platform. He had a pointed chin and a high forehead-he was going to lose his hair, but he hadn’t lost too much yet. Diana noticed his person less than she noticed that the police were letting him through. “Who is that guy?” she whispered to Susan. “What’s he doing?” Is he safe? was what she really meant.

“That’s Mayor Humphrey. Hubert Humphrey,” Susan answered. The name meant nothing to Diana. The Minneapolis woman went on, “He’s pro-administration all the way.”

Humphrey hopped up onto the platform. “May I say a few words?” he asked. His voice was a light tenor, a bit on the shrill side.

“This isn’t your show, Mr. Mayor,” Sven Holmquist said. “This is ours.”

But Hubert Humphrey grabbed the mike anyway. “Folks, I just want you to think about one thing,” he said loudly. Diana got the idea that there would be no such thing as a few words from him. He went on, “If we run away from Germany, the Nazis win. All the soldiers who’ve died will have died for nothing. For nothing-do you hear me? We will have wasted years and tens of thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars. Is that what you want? Cutting and running won’t-”

Diana took the microphone away from him. He looked astonished-he wasn’t used to people doing anything like that. “Mr. Humphrey, Mr. Holmquist was right. This is our show,” Diana said. “If you want your own, you can have it, I’m sure.”

“I only meant-” Humphrey began.

“I don’t care what you meant, sir.” Diana cut him off. It wasn’t easy-he was used to talking through or over other people. But, with the mike in hand, she did it, adding, “When I was a girl, Wilson talked about the War to End War. What did he know? Was he right? What do politicians ever know? Let the people decide, if you please.”

The crowd really applauded then. Hubert Humphrey looked amazed all over again. He eyed Diana as if he were seeing her for the first time. “There’s more to you than meets the eye,” he said.

“I don’t know about that. I don’t care, either,” Diana answered. “All I know is, this is our show, and we’re going to run it. Get down off this platform before I ask the police to run you in for interfering with a public meeting.”

He blinked. “You would, wouldn’t you?”

“Mr. Humphrey, it would be a pleasure. Now get down,” Diana said. And Humphrey did, because he had to know she wasn’t bluffing. She gave the microphone back to Sven Holmquist. “If you’d go on from where you were interrupted, please…”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, something not far from awe in his voice. “Donald Andrew Barclay. Peter LeRoy Barker…”

A room. A couple of armed guards. A bright light. A prisoner. An interrogator. How many times had that scene played out during the war, and in how many countries-to say nothing of how many movies? Now Lou Weissberg was in the driver’s seat. The light shone into Hauptsturmfuhrer Egon Steinbrecher’s face. They’d been through several sessions by now. Lou was fast running out of patience with the captured German.

“Look,” he said in reasonable tones, “you’re a dead man. The Geneva Convention doesn’t apply. Your side surrendered. If you fight on after that, it’s your tough luck.”

The SS captain licked his lips. He’d been slapped around a little, but nothing more. Lou and the Americans generally didn’t like torture. Unless you had to tear something out of somebody right this second, what was the point? And Steinbrecher didn’t know anything like that. Lou got the feeling he wasn’t up to being a suicide warrior, the way too many of Heydrich’s fanatics were. But he tried to hold a bold front: “So why have you not killed me, then?”

“Why do you think?” Lou said. “So we can squeeze you. If you sing pretty enough, we may even let you keep breathing. Who all was in your cell?”

“You already know that,” Steinbrecher said. “They had bad luck when they attacked your men.”

“Those were the only ones?” Lou asked. The German nodded. Lou laughed in his face. “Tell me another one.”

“It is the truth.” Steinbrecher sounded affronted that anyone could doubt his word. He yawned. He hadn’t had much sleep since he got nabbed. That wasn’t quite torture, not to Lou’s way of thinking. And it could soften a guy up, or at least make him punchy and stupid.

“How do you get your orders?” Lou asked.

“There is-there was-a drop in a hollow tree fifty meters behind my shop,” Steinbrecher said. “Sometimes a piece of paper would show up there. It would tell me what to do. I would do it. I do not know who put the paper in, so you need not ask me that.”

“I’ll ask you whatever I damn well please,” Lou snapped. The trouble was, he believed Steinbrecher here. That was how undergrounds all over the world ran their operations. If you didn’t know who gave you your orders, you couldn’t tell the other side if they caught you. Lou grimaced; this wasn’t going the way he wanted. He took another stab at it: “You can’t do any better, it’s time for the blindfold and cigarette.”

This time, the SS man gulped. And he named half a dozen names, all of them men living in Pforring. “They all hate you,” he declared.

“We’ll check it out,” Lou said. He left the interrogation room and made a telephone call. An hour and a half later, he got an answer. The men were…just men. Nothing showed they had any connection with the fanatics.

An hour after that, Hauptsturmfuhrer Egon Steinbrecher stood tied to a pole in front of a wall. He declined the blindfold, but accepted a cigarette-ironically, a Lucky-from Lou, who commanded the firing squad. “I die for Germany,” he said as he finished the smoke.

“You die, all right,” Lou agreed. He stepped aside and nodded to the half-dozen GIs. “Ready…Aim…Fire!” Their M-1s barked. Steinbrecher slumped against the pole. He died fast; Lou didn’t have to finish him off with his carbine. That was a relief, anyhow. He’d had this duty before, and he hated it.

He also hated not getting more-hell, not getting anything-out of Steinbrecher. Maybe he hadn’t known the one right question to ask, the one that would have made the German sing. Maybe there hadn’t been any one right question. All he had now was one more dead Nazi, which wasn’t bad, but wasn’t good enough.

In the first days of the occupation, they’d taken newsreels of executions like this and shown them in German theaters. That quickly stopped; the films raised sympathy for Heydrich’s goons, not the fear U.S. authorities wanted. No camera crew here. Just the squad, and a couple of the GIs looked as if they wanted to be sick.

Lou cut Steinbrecher’s body down. “Bury this crap,” he said. Sometimes nothing went the way you wished it would.

XVIII

Jurgen had been in Paris twice before. He’d paraded through the City of Light in June 1940. Everything seemed possible then. Hell, everything seemed likely. The Wehrmacht had done what the Kaiser’s army never could. France lay naked at Germany’s feet.

With a smile, Jurgen remembered how tired he’d been as he marched under the Arc de Triomphe. Tired? Hell, he’d been out on his feet. So had most of the Landsers who tramped along with him. They’d had a month of hard fighting to get to where they were, and they’d felt every minute of it.

But great days, great days. England would give up next, and that would end the war. The Reich would take its rightful place in the sun. Everybody would be happy, and he could take off the Feldgrau and go back to being a longshoreman again.

Only things worked out a little differently. Yeah, just a little, Jurgen thought wryly. When he came back to Paris, it was December 1943. The Red Army had just chased his division out of Kiev. He’d been on the Eastern Front for a couple of years. He’d stopped one bullet and one shell fragment by then. His left elbow didn’t bend much, but if you were right-handed you could live with that.