The Man with the Iron Heart

Like so much of the American presence in Nuremberg these days, the Quonset hut that housed the officers’ club cowered behind rings of barbed wire and sandbagged machine-gun emplacements. The GIs who manned those emplacements seemed extra jumpy this morning. Lou would have, too. If Heydrich’s goons could knock over the Eiffel Tower, for Christ’s sake, what was one stinking officers’ club?

Not worth noticing. Lou hoped.

Even so early, the place was more crowded than it usually was at night. Tobacco smoke hazed the air. Almost every man in there, from lowly second lieutenant to bird colonel, held a copy of the Herald- Trib or of Stars and Stripes, which also had that picture of the Tower in mid-fall. And almost every man in there was drinking hard.

“What’ll it be, sir?” asked the PFC tending bar when Lou squeezed up to him. Once upon a time, a Jerry had worked back there. After what happened to the Russians in Berlin, that didn’t look like a good idea any more.

“Bourbon on the rocks,” Lou said. “Make it a double. I’ve got some catching up to do.”

“Yes, sir. Comin’ up.” The kid poured in two generous jiggers of Kentucky lightning and some ice cubes. “Hell of a mornin’, ain’t it?”

“Man, you said a mouthful.” Lou looked around. Major Frank was sitting with a tough, skinny major named Ezra Robertson. Robertson, who was from Vermont or New Hampshire-Lou couldn’t remember which-was supposed to help the prosecutors in the war-crimes trials. If the twice-derailed trials ever got off the ground, no doubt he would.

Frank waved. Lou snagged a chair and joined the two majors. He raised his glass. “Mud in your eye.” Frank and Robertson both had glasses in front of them. They drank with him. The bourbon ran down his throat like sour- mash fire. “Whew!” He shook his head. “Tastes funny this time of day.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t go with powdered eggs, that’s for damn sure.” Major Robertson waved his hands. “Sure isn’t stopping anybody, though.”

“It’s like it was us. This is even worse than that radium bomb in Frankfurt. Who would’ve thought anything could be?” Howard Frank said gloomily. He put his head in his hands. Had he drunk himself sad already? Not a world record, maybe, but pretty fast. His voice was muffled as he went on, “We are screwed. We are so fucking screwed.”

“Not yet, goddammit,” Robertson said. “The fanatics can annoy us. They can embarrass us. But they can’t beat us. They can’t make us pack up and go-not a chance in church, gentlemen. They flat-out aren’t strong enough. The only people who can beat us is us.” He frowned. “Uh, are us? Hell, you know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” Lou said. “That’s why we’re screwed. Elections coming up. What happens when all the people who’re squealing ‘Get out of Germany now!’ go into Congress?”

“So fucking screwed,” Frank intoned again, as if it were a dirge. And so it was much too likely to be.

“Red Army doesn’t have to worry about this election shit,” Robertson said. “Uncle Joe tells ’em hop, and up they go.”

“Fanatics are giving them a hard time, too,” Lou said. “They’re finding out how much fun the other end of a partisan war is.”

“They don’t like it for beans, that’s for sure,” Robertson agreed. “Their war-crimes people-all officers, you know-cuss as much as they can in English or German. Then they go back to Russian and really cut loose.”

“We ought to do more with their Intelligence people. By God, we really should,” Lou said. “We’ve got the same enemy, just like we did before V-E Day.”

A considerable silence followed. Lou considered it-unhappily-while Major Frank and Major Robertson looked at each other. How far into his mouth had he stuck his foot? At last, voice gentle, Frank said, “That won’t go very far if you try to push it up the line. I told you so before.”

The bourbon at an unaccustomed hour might have hit Lou harder than he figured, for he said, “Why, dammit? About time somebody did.”

Ezra Robertson looked down into his now-empty glass. “You know what ‘PAF’ stands for, Captain?” he asked quietly.

Lou nodded. You picked up all kinds of weird stuff in the CIC. Most of it you put right back down again, because you couldn’t use it. But bits and pieces stuck whether you could use them or not. “Premature Anti-Fascist,” Lou said. “Guys who went to Spain to fight for the Republic and like that.”

“Yeah. And like that,” Robertson agreed. “Guys who could’ve given us a lot of special help during the regular fighting, too. Only most of ’em never got the chance, on account of we didn’t trust ’em as far as we could throw ’em. You go yelling we should team up with the NKVD, you’ll end up in that same basket, y’know.”

“I’m no Red,” Lou said. Some of the Americans who’d come over to administer prostrate Germany had had those leanings. A few of them were now working directly for Uncle Joe, because they’d headed for the Soviet zone one jump ahead of the internal investigators.

“We know you aren’t,” Major Frank said. “But if you start talking about working with the Russians, you’ll bump up against people who’ve never heard of you before.”

“And they’ll nail you to the cross,” Ezra Robertson added.

“Oy,” Lou said dryly. Howard Frank snorted. Major Robertson didn’t get it. Lou hadn’t expected him to-goys would be goys. Lou only wished he thought the New Englander was wrong. With a sigh, he went on, “Might almost be worth throwing away my Army career for. I think it needs doing.”

“Wouldn’t just be your Army career,” Robertson said. “You’d fubar your whole life. Every place you looked for a job, people would go, ‘He’s the one who…’ You don’t believe me, find one of those guys who fought in the Lincoln Brigade and see how much fun he’s had wearing ‘PAF’ ever since.”

He might have been talking about the weather. He couldn’t have been much more matter-of-fact if he were. And he seemed more likely to know what he was talking about than most weathermen of Lou’s acquaintance. (Lou remembered the Frenchman who’d gone into the Seine. Talk about luck!)

“Shit,” Lou said. He got back up and headed for the bar again. One double wasn’t enough to get him where he wanted to go. As the PFC built him a refill, he decided two might not get him there, either.

Oberscharfuhrer Klein came into Reinhard Heydrich’s office with a stack of newspapers that had found their way…here…from the French zone and from France itself. They all went on and on about the downfall of the Eiffel Tower, and about what France was doing to pay the Germans back.

After quickly flipping through them, Heydrich asked, “Have you seen these, Hans?”

“I’ve looked at a few of ’em, anyhow,” the veteran noncom answered. “Sounds like the Frenchies are pissing themselves-and pissing on us.”

“It does, doesn’t it?” Heydrich said, not without satisfaction. “And it sounds like there’s a regular partisan war going on in the French zone. Plenty of people will pick up a rifle when they think what happens to them if they don’t will be worse.”

“Ja, I saw that, too,” Klein said. “More than one of the stories blame it all on us. ‘Heydrichite fanatics,’ they say.” He sounded proud of the label.

“Scheisse,” said Heydrich himself. “Our people aren’t doing anything in the French zone right now. Nothing, you hear me? I ordered our cells there to stay quiet, because I knew the French would go out of their minds for a while if Voss managed to bring the Tower down.”

“They’re bad enough anyway-much worse than the Englanders or the Americans. Sometimes they’re worse than the damned Russians, too,” Klein said.

“Well, the damned Russians really did beat the Wehrmacht in the end. That makes them feel better,” Heydrich said. “The French never did-the Anglo-Americans had to rescue them. So they’re still afraid their cocks are too small, and they act tough to try and make up for it.”

Hans Klein guffawed. “That’s telling ’em, sir!”

“The only thing they’ll do in the occupation zone is get us more recruits,” Heydrich said. “Anybody who’s willing to grab a gun and fight them on his own is liable to be someone we can use.”

“If our people are lying low, how do we find ’em? How do they find us?” Klein asked.

Heydrich only shrugged. “We’ll manage. We’ll do it later if we don’t do it right away. We’re in this for the long haul, Hans. If we’re still down here in 1955 or 1960, then we are, that’s all.”

Klein looked down at his hand. “If we are, I’ll be pale as a ghost.”