The Man with the Iron Heart

hatred of the entire civilized world.”

That was good, as far as it went. A lot of Englishmen didn’t think it went nearly far enough. Winston Churchill, wandering in the wilderness after the electorate turned him out of office the year before, aimed his thunder at the Labour government. “How could these barbarous swine smuggle the tools of their filthy trade into our fair country?” he demanded. “How could they do so altogether undetected? ‘Someone had blundered,’ Tennyson said. The poet never claimed to know who. I hope we shall do rather better than that in getting to the bottom of our shameful failure here.”

Major Frank walked into Lou’s office while he was drowning his sorrows in coffee. Somehow this latest outrage didn’t make him want to run out and get crocked the way the fall of the Eiffel Tower had. Maybe you could get used to anything, even enormities. Wasn’t that a cheery thought?

Howard Frank pointed to the picture of the ruins of St. Paul’s on the front page of the Herald- Trib. “Well, the fuckers got the frogs and they got the limeys,” he said. “Next thing you know, they’ll make it to Washington and blow up the Capitol.”

Lou eyed him. “If they wait till the new Congress gets sworn in next January before they try it, they’ll do the country a big favor.”

“Now, now.” Frank clucked at him like a mother reproaching a little boy. “We have to respect the will of the people.”

“My ass,” Lou said, and then, a long beat later, “sir.”

“Dammit, we really do,” Major Frank said. “If we don’t, what’s the difference between us and the fucking Nazis?”

“What did Trotsky tell one of the guys who followed him? ‘Everybody has the right to be stupid, Comrade, but you abuse the privilege.’ Something like that, anyhow,” Lou said. “Well, the American people are abusing the privilege right now, goddammit, and we’ll all end up paying ’cause they are.”

“Treason,” Frank said sadly.

“Damn straight,” Lou agreed. “Call the MPs and haul me off to Leavenworth. I’ll be a hell of a lot safer in Kansas than I am here.”

“If they don’t get to take me away, they don’t get to take you, either,” Frank said. “And I ain’t going anywhere.”

“Ha! That’s what you think,” Lou told him. “Fucking isolationists in Congress won’t give Truman two bits to keep us here. We’ll all be heading home pretty damn quick. Got a cigarette on you?”

“You give me all this crap I don’t need and then you bum butts offa me?” Major Frank shook his head in mock disbelief. “I oughta tell you to geh kak afen yam.” Despite the earthy Yiddish phrase, he tossed a pack down onto the newspapers on Lou’s desk.

When Lou picked it up and started to extract a cigarette, he paused because his eye caught a phrase he’d missed before. “Here’s Heydrich, the smarmy son of a bitch: ‘Thus we remind the oppressors that the will to freedom still burns strong in Germany.’ And we’re gonna turn our backs on this shit and just go home?” He did light up then, and sucked in smoke as hard as he could.

Frank reclaimed the pack. He lit a cigarette of his own. “Way you talk, I’m one of the jerks who want to run away. I’m on your side, Lou.”

“Yeah, I know, sir. Honest, I do. But-” Lou’s wave was expansive enough to cover two continents’ worth of discontent and the Atlantic between them. “Do these people want to fight another war in fifteen or twenty years? Do they think the Nazis won’t take over again if we quit? Or the Russians if the Nazis don’t?”

“What we need is Heydrich’s head nailed to the wall,” Howard Frank said. “If we get rid of him and things start settling down, maybe we can make the occupation work after all.”

“That’d be something,” Lou agreed. “Not much luck yet down in the mountains, though. A few weapons caches, but those are all over the fucking country. No Alpine Redoubt-or if there is, it’s as close to invisible as makes no difference.”

“Those may not be the same thing,” Frank said thoughtfully.

“Huh,” Lou said, also thoughtfully, and then, “You’ve got a point. Redoubt or not, though, you know what Germany is these days?”

“Sure, a fucking mess,” Frank answered.

“I mean besides that,” Lou said. “It’s like one of those small-town china shops with a sign in the window that goes YOU DROP IT, YOU BREAK IT, YOU PAY FOR IT. And we dropped it, and we broke it, and-”

“We’re paying for it. Boy, are we ever,” Major Frank said. “But what the folks back home can’t see is, we’ll end up paying even more later on if we bail out now. Hell, could you see that if your kid came home in a box a year and a half after Hitler blew his brains out and the Nazis surrendered?”

“I don’t know, sir-honest to God, I don’t.” Lou stubbed out his cigarette, which had got very small. All the butts in the ashtray would get mixed in with the general trash and then thrown out. And once the stuff got beyond the barbed-wire perimeter, the krauts would pick through it like packrats and get hold of every gram of tobacco and every scrap of crust of burnt toast. Times were tough here. That it was the Jerries’ own goddamn fault made it no less true.

“Well, there you are, then.” Frank had kept on with the conversation while Lou’s wits wandered.

“Yeah, here I am,” Lou agreed. “And you know what else? No matter how fucked up this lousy place is, I need to be here. So do you. So do we-all of us. But how much longer will all the big brains back in Washington let us do what we gotta do?”

“You get that one right, Lou, you win the sixty-four dollars,” Howard Frank said.

Berlin was a ravaged city: no two ways about it. And yet, Vladimir Bokov had come to realize, it could have been worse. The Wehrmacht had done the bulk of its fighting off to the east, trying to hold the Red Army away from the German capital. Blocks in Berlin-especially blocks around the seat of the Nazi government-had got smashed up, certainly. But not every block, every house, had been fought over till one side or the other could fight no more. In that, Berlin differed from Stalingrad or Kharkov or Warsaw or Budapest or Konigsberg or…a hundred or a thousand other places, large and small, on the Eastern Front.

The Germans would be able to rebuild Berlin faster because of that. The women and kids and stooped old men chucking broken bricks into bins one by one had only millions to dispose of, not tens of millions the way they would have if every building had been wrecked. Captain Bokov grimaced. The Soviet line proclaimed that the German people weren’t the USSR’s enemies: only the former Hitlerite regime and the Heydrichite bandits who wanted to resurrect it.

Bokov wasn’t stupid enough to criticize the Soviet line. An NKVD officer who did something like that-assuming anyone could be so idiotic-would soon discover just how far north of the Arctic Circle his country built camps. But, even if he wouldn’t say so out loud, Bokov was a lot more suspicious of the German people than Soviet propaganda suggested he ought to be.

That kid with the peach fuzz and the drippy nose and the mittens full of holes who was chucking rubble into a bucket…was he old enough to have toted a rifle or a Schmeisser the last year of the declared war? Sure he was. The Volkssturm had sucked in plenty of younger guys. And the scrawny bastard working next to him, the one with the gray stubble and the limp…What had he done before he got hurt? He warily watched Bokov, letting his eyes drift down or away whenever the NKVD man looked in his direction.

He probably wasn’t wearing an explosive vest right now-he was too skinny. But if he put one on, with a raggedy greatcoat to camouflage it, and went looking for a crowd of Russians…No, the only Germans Bokov was sure he could trust close to him were naked women. Even then, he’d heard stories that some of them deliberately spread disease to put occupiers out of action.

He didn’t know that was true, but it wouldn’t have surprised him. He’d seen that the Germans deserved their reputation for thoroughness. No one who’d been through one of their murder factories could possibly doubt it. Why wouldn’t they use infected prostitutes as a weapon?

Then a bullet cracked past his head. He forgot about subtle weapons like syphilitic whores. Not a goddamn thing subtle about rifle fire. He heard the report as he threw himself flat in the wreckage-strewn street. Had to be a sniper shooting from long range, if the round beat its sound by so much.

Another bullet pierced the air where he’d stood a moment before. It spanged off a paving stone behind him.