The Man with the Iron Heart

was one other German guy in the crowd. He was the same age as most of the GIs, which meant he’d likely been a soldier himself, but he wore baggy, nondescript civvies. They weren’t what made Bernie notice him as he pressed his way in among the soldiers back of third base. The guy had the worst thousand-yard stare Bernie’d ever seen, and he’d seen some lulus.

“Ball!” the ump said. And it was a ball-it sent the batter staggering away from the plate like the last one to Bernie a couple of minutes before.

Blam! Bernie flattened out before he knew he’d done it. It might be July, but he still had his combat reflexes. An explosion made him hit the dirt faster than a high hard one at his ear.

“What the fuck?” That was the first baseman, sprawled a few feet away from him. “Christ, we playin’ on a goddamn minefield?”

Bernie cautiously raised his head. He didn’t have a sidearm, let alone his M1. The war was over, dammit.

It was sure over for some of the guys who’d been watching behind third. Over permanently. Bodies and pieces of bodies lay everywhere. Half of somebody’s left leg bled ten feet in front of the low mound. Other gruesome souvenirs spattered the left side of the infield.

Screams rose from wounded American soldiers. So did cries for a medic. Bernie ran over to do what he could for the injured men. It wasn’t much. He didn’t carry wound dressings or a morphine syrette, the way he would have while the war was still cooking. By the helpless looks and muffled profanity that came from the other unhurt GIs, neither did anybody else.

Bernie crouched by a guy who was clutching at a bloody leg. “You want a tourniquet on that?” Bernie asked him. He could improvise one with a shoelace and a stick. When the hell would an ambulance show up?

“I don’t think so. I ain’t bleedin’ that bad,” the other answered. In a wondering voice, he added, “He blew himself up.”

“Huh?” Bernie said brilliantly. “Who?”

“That fuckin’ kraut. He blew himself to kingdom come. Blew half of us with him, too, the goddamn son of a bitch.”

“He didn’t step on a mine? Somebody didn’t step on a mine?”

A siren warbled, approaching from the direction of downtown Erlangen. The warble meant it was a German vehicle. Bernie wasn’t inclined to be fussy, not right now. The guy with the gash in his leg went on, “Nah, not a chance. Look at what’s left of the asshole.”

Not much was, and even less between the knees and the neck. Bernie gulped and looked away in a hurry. He’d hoped he would never see shit like that again. No such luck.

Just as the ambulance pulled up, the wounded GI yanked what looked like a tenpenny nail out of his leg. “Jesus!” he said, staring at three inches of pointed iron. “The mother didn’t just have explosives. He had his own fuckin’ shrapnel!”

“That’s nuts,” Bernie said. “Who ever heard of a kamikaze Nazi?”

“Maybe you better put somethin’ around my leg,” the other guy said. “It’s bleeding more now that I pulled that sucker out.”

“Okay.” Bernie sacrificed a leather shoelace to the tourniquet.

Three krauts hopped out of the ambulance. They stared at the carnage in disbelief. “Der Herr Jesus!” one of them blurted. Another one crossed himself. Then they got to work. Their unflustered competence made Bernie guess they’d been Wehrmacht medics up till a few weeks earlier.

One Jerry spoke some English. Unhurt and slightly wounded men followed his orders as if he were an American officer. He plainly knew what he was doing.

But when he started to pick up the remains of the fellow who’d blown himself up, the sergeant who’d been doing umpire duty pushed him away. “Leave what’s left of that bastard right where he’s at,” the noncom said.

“Warum?” the German asked, startled out of his English. He got it back a moment later: “Why?”

“On account of our guys are gonna have to try and figure out how come the shithead went kablooie,” the sergeant said. “It’s a murder, right? You don’t fuck around with the scene of a crime.” More to himself than to the guy from the ambulance, he added, “The stuff you pick up from mystery stories.”

How much of what he said did the German get? Enough so he didn’t go near what was left of the human bomb, anyhow. Bernie Cobb understood all of it. It made much more sense than he wished it did.

Lou Weissberg wanted to go back to the States. He didn’t want to examine any more mangled flesh. He didn’t want to smell the sick-sweet stench of death any more, either. (Not that you could avoid it in Germany, not in towns where the Army Air Force or the RAF had come to call…and in a lot of places the Army’d gone through, too.)

That stench was mild here, two days after the bombing with most of the dead meat taken away. Mild or not, it was there, and it made his stomach want to turn over. Toby Benton’s mouth twisted, too. “Hell of a thing-uh, sir,” the sergeant said.

“You better believe it.” Lou’s nod was jerky. “Twenty-three dead, they’re saying now. And almost twice that many wounded bad enough to need treatment.”

“Shit.” Benton’s drawl almost turned it into a two-syllable word. “Good thing the Jerries didn’t get so many of our guys for every one of theirs while the fighting was still going on. We had more people than they did-more stuff too-but not that much more.”

“Mm.” Lou hadn’t thought of it in those terms, which didn’t mean the ordnance sergeant was wrong. “If you were out to turn somebody into a walking bomb, how would you go about it?”

“Same way these fuckers did, I reckon,” Benton replied. “The Nazis bite the big one, but nobody ever said they couldn’t handle shit like this. Explosives-around the guy’s middle, I guess, so they wouldn’t show so much. Scrap metal, nails, whatever the hell for shrapnel. A battery. A button to push. And kapow! ”

“Yeah. Kapow!” Lou’s echo sounded hollow, even to himself.

“What do we do about shit like this, Lieutenant?” Benton asked. “If this asshole wasn’t just your garden- variety nut, seems to me like we got ourselves some trouble. The way we fight is, we want to live, and we want to make sure the other sons of bitches don’t. Always figured the krauts played by the same rules. But if all of a sudden-like they don’t give a shit no more, sure as hell makes ’em harder to defend against.”

“I know.” Lou clenched his fist and pounded it against the side of his thigh. He didn’t notice he was doing it till it started to hurt. Then he quit. “God damn it to hell, Toby, the war in Europe is over. They surrendered. We can do whatever we want to their people, and they’ve got to know it.”

“Yes, sir,” Sergeant Benton agreed. “That’s how come I hope he was a nut. If they’ve got waddayacallems- partisans…Russians and Yugoslavs gave old Adolf a fuck of a lot of grief with guys like that. I guess even the froggies caused him some trouble.” After hitting the beach on D-Day, his opinion of France and things French could have been higher.

“Well, it’s not my call, thank God,” Lou said. “I haven’t got the stomach for lining rows of people up against a wall and shooting ’em. Even Germans-except camp guards and mothers like that.” His voice went ferocious. He’d done Latin in college before the war, and remembered coming across the Roman Emperor who wished all mankind had one neck, so he could get rid of it at a single stroke. Back then, he’d thought that was one of the most savage things he’d ever heard. He felt the same way about SS men himself these days.

“Shit, sir, it wouldn’t be so bad if it was only them. But all these chickenshit civilians and Wehrmacht guys who swear on a stack of Bibles they didn’t know squat about any concentration camps…No, sirree, not them. My ass!” Benton made as if to retch, and for once the death reek had nothing to do with it.

“Uh-huh.” Lou nodded. “And the real pisser is, they expect us to believe that crap. How dumb do they think we are?” He knew the answer to that: your average German-your average German with a guilty conscience-thought your average American was pretty goddamn dumb. By the way some U.S. officers were willing to use Nazis to help get the towns they were in charge of back on their feet, maybe your average German hit the nail right on the head, too.