The Man with the Iron Heart

Paris…wasn’t the same. Winter, sure. But also shortages of everything. Electricity only a few hours a day. Not much heat. The streets empty of cars. Skinny, shabby people on foot or making do with bicycles. The restaurants couldn’t cook what they couldn’t get. Even the whores just went through the motions.

Well, Jurgen wasn’t the same as he’d been in 1940, either. He’d only imagined he was tired back in the old days. He hadn’t had exhaustion seep into his bones, into his very soul. In 1943, he’d hibernated like a dormouse all the way across Europe in his railway car. He’d hardly looked out to notice what Lancasters and B-17s and B-24s were doing to the Vaterland.

He’d seen bad things fighting through France. He’d thought he’d seen everything. What the hell did he know? He was just a kid. What he’d seen in Russia, what he’d done in Russia…Even now, he shied away from remembering that. And it wasn’t as if the Ivans didn’t play the game the same filthy way. What they did to some of the guys they captured…Jurgen shied away from remembering that, too. You always saved one cartridge for yourself. You didn’t want them getting hold of you. Oh, no!

So he wasn’t afraid of doing himself in. He might have needed to do it long before this if Reichsprotektor Heydrich’s men hadn’t plucked him from the depot and turned him into a holdout. He still wanted to live, but all that soldiering had taught him you didn’t always get what you wanted.

So here he was in Paris again, in the cab of a U.S. two-and-a-half-ton truck. He wore olive-drab American fatigues that fit pretty well but not quite well enough. He had papers that showed he was somebody called Paul Higgins. It was the kind of name even a German who knew no English could pronounce well enough. He’d traveled across France with it. He didn’t have far to go now.

Once more, Paris wasn’t the same. It was nighttime. All the lights were on. That struck him as perverse. But Paris didn’t worry about air raids now. And it seemed to have been captured by Americans. Olive drab was everywhere. So were trucks just like the one he drove. They made traffic on the narrow, winding streets horrendous.

After a while, he realized not all the olive-drab uniforms had Americans in them. A French flic directing traffic in a kepi looked like an Ami from the neck down. Maybe not all the deuce-and-a-halfs had American drivers. Jurgen chuckled. He knew one that damn well didn’t.

He checked the map on the seat beside him. That was funny, too. He could see where he was going, by God! He just had to find the right way to get there. Also on the seat lay a Sturmgewehr and a couple of extra magazines. He’d taken them out of hiding when he got into town. He might need to do some shooting on the last leg of the trip. Extra steel sheets armored his doors. Heydrich’s mechanics hadn’t had to do that. The Ami who’d driven the truck before it was stolen had taken care of it. He hadn’t wanted to stop a German bullet. Jurgen didn’t want to stop an American round, or even a French one. Not now. Not when he’d come this far.

He came up alongside the Champ du Mars: a rectangle of greenery and geometrically precise garden in the heart of Paris. The Eiffel Tower loomed ahead. Beyond it lay the Pont d’Jena. Napoleon had beaten the Prussians at Jena; Jurgen knew that. The French named their bridges for battles they’d won. There wouldn’t be a Pont d’Ardennes in Paris any time soon.

Well, he wasn’t going as far as the Pont d’Jena anyhow. He cut hard left and made for the base of the Tower. A flic’s whistle shrilled-he wasn’t supposed to do that. He started to reach for the assault rifle. Spraying a few bullets around would buy him the time he needed.

But nobody opened up on him. Nobody tried to block him. The Paris cop blew his whistle again, furiously. He thought Jurgen was a drunk Ami on a joyride. Jurgen laughed. Sorry, flic.

Orders were to see if he could drop the Tower straight down onto the Pont d’Jena, to double the damage from its fall. One look told Jurgen that wouldn’t happen. The supports were positioned so it had to go down diagonally to the bridge. Nobody back in Germany had remembered that.

Well, if it went into the Seine, that would screw things up pretty goddamn well. Jurgen thought it was tall enough to reach. As he drove under the more northerly of the riverside supports, somebody-probably that policeman-fired a pistol at the truck. Too little, too late: like everything the French did.

Jurgen’s finger found the detonator button on the side of the steering column. He wished he could watch what was about to happen. It ought to make one hell of a show. Oh, well. You couldn’t have everything. “Sieg heil!” Jurgen said, and stabbed the button hard.

Lou Weissberg stared at the front page of the International Herald-Tribune. Some photographer was going to win himself a Pulitzer Prize for this pic, the way that guy in the Pacific had for his shot of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima the year before.

There was the Eiffel Tower, still mostly lit up, leaning at a forty-five-degree angle to the rest of the skyline. But it didn’t keep leaning, the way the Tower of Pisa did. It crashed all the way down, the last hundred feet or so going right into the Seine.

“What a mess,” Lou muttered. “What a fucking mess!”

He read the story, though the headline-TOWER FALLS! — and the photo got the message across by themselves. Sometimes the details carried a morbid fascination of their own. He learned that, counting radio antenna, the Tower was (had been) more than a thousand feet high: taller than anything manmade except the much newer Empire State Building. It weighed about 10,000 tons, or as much as the water a heavy cruiser displaced. And now…it was 10,000 tons of scrap iron.

Shaking his head, Lou turned to the Continued on page 3. The inside page had another shot of the toppled Tower, this one taken in the cold gray light of dawn. As it lay on the ground-and in the river-it reminded him of nothing so much as one more soldier shot dead in the war.

The story said eighty-one people had died when the Eiffel Tower fell. Some had been on it, others under it or caught in the blast of the exploding truck that sheared through one of its enormous feet. And a weatherman who’d been up at the very top reading a barometer got pitched into the Seine and was fished out with nothing worse than a broken wrist.

“Fuck!” Lou said when he read that. “Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good.” If he were that weatherman, he thought he’d go out looking for wallets.

Next to the inside photo and the continuation of the story from the front page was another one. Seeing its headline-GERMAN FREEDOM FRONT CLAIMS BLAST-Lou ground his teeth. Heydrich’s goons had released a statement by planted communiques, telephone calls, and their clandestine radio station. The stinking bastards didn’t miss a trick, God damn their black-hearted souls to hell.

If you believed them (and Lou, unfortunately, had no reason not to), the fellow who’d brought the tower down was an Unteroffizier-a lousy corporal-named Jurgen Voss. He gave up his life gloriously for the future liberation of the Fatherland and its folk, the statement said. Let all who dare to oppose us beware!

Of course, a lousy corporal from the last war, a fellow by the name of Hitler, had done a lot more damage than this Jurgen Voss ever dreamt of. But it sure wasn’t bad for a first try.

General de Gaulle’s statement only made page four. Lou thought putting Heydrich ahead of him was chickenshit, but what could you do about newspapermen? “The Tower shall rise again,” de Gaulle declared. “Nazi Germany never will.” Slowly, Lou nodded. That had style. If only he could be as confident himself as de Gaulle sounded.

Harry Truman’s response went right next to the French leader’s. “Today, we are all Frenchmen,” the President said. That was pretty good, too. Truman went on, “This latest vile Nazi atrocity shows the desperation of the madmen who refuse to accept the verdict of history.”

Lou frowned. That also sounded good. Chances were it’d play well back in the States. It was a vile atrocity, no two ways about it. But were Heydrich and his chums madmen? Were they desperate? If they were, they hid it much too well.

Fighting the USA-and the UK, and the USSR-toe-to-toe hadn’t worked out so well for the Third Reich. Fighting a partisan war was a whole different story, dammit. If you were trying to drive the other guy nuts and hurt him way worse than he could hurt you…Well, if you were trying to do something like that, how could you play your hand better than Heydrich had?

It was nine in the morning. Lou headed for the officers’ club anyway. He needed something to turn off part of his brain. Right now, bourbon would do.