The Man with the Iron Heart

side of the road,” Bokov answered. “The wire gets stretched, the wire gets broken, and bam! ”

Colonel Shteinberg understood what that meant, all right. “Gevalt!” he exclaimed. Captain Bokov blinked. His superior spouted Yiddish about as often as he spouted mat. Shteinberg had to be truly provoked to come out with either. By the way he hastily lit a cigarette, he wanted to pretend he hadn’t done it here. He blew out smoke and sighed. “One more way for the Heydrichites to get in our hair.”

“I’m afraid so,” Bokov said. “Damned if we do and damned if we don’t, if you know what I mean. We’ve already had some casualties on account of this. So have the Americans, I gather.”

“Nice to know the Fascist hyenas aren’t saving all their cute tricks for us alone,” Shteinberg said. “I suppose this report’s on my desk, too. It just hasn’t surfaced yet.”

“Believe me, Comrade Colonel, I understand that.” Bokov spoke with great sincerity. Even though he swam easily through the sea of Soviet bureaucracy, he said, “What else does more than paperwork to keep us from accomplishing anything really important?”

Shteinberg sent a meditative plume of smoke up toward the ceiling. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I ought to send you to a camp for saying such a thing. Maybe you’re right and I ought to send you to a camp for saying such a thing.”

Captain Bokov laughed. He didn’t think Shteinberg was serious. On the other hand, the only way you knew for sure when someone was serious about a crack like that was when the burly Chekists knocked on your door in the wee small hours. Bokov had made it through the frightful nights of 1937 and 1938. He hoped times like those would never come again.

“Besides,” Shteinberg continued, as if what he’d just said meant nothing at all (exactly what Bokov hoped it meant), “unless something goes wrong somewhere else, I’m not getting into a jeep tonight, not for anything. I’m not going to drink tonight, either, not unless I have some German taste the booze first.”

“Makes sense,” Bokov said, remembering last year’s madness once more and wishing he could forget it. Perhaps rashly, he asked, “So what will you do, then?”

“Me? I’m playing chess with Marshal Stalin, what else?” Shteinberg said.

Bokov shut up. Whatever his superior would be doing, it had None of your damned business written all over it. Bokov didn’t know what he’d be doing as 1946 turned into 1947, either. Like Shteinberg, and for all the same reasons, he was leery of drinking on New Year’s Eve. True, the Heydrichites probably wouldn’t try the same stunt two New Year’s Eves in a row. But they might decide the Soviets would figure they wouldn’t try the same stunt twice running, and try it anyhow to see what happened. Why take chances?

Red Army soldiers-and, no doubt, their French and Anglo-American counterparts-started shooting rifles and pistols in the air about half past eleven. That gave Bokov one more reason for thinking staying quietly indoors was a good idea. If you went outside without a helmet, a falling bullet could punch your ticket for you just fine.

And how many murders were getting committed under cover of that small-arms fire? By Heydrichites? By ordinary robbers? By husbands sick of wives and wives sick of husbands? Most of them wouldn’t be the NKVD’s worry, for which Bokov thanked…No, not God, he decided. I thank my good luck.

Front-line soldiers had no trouble sleeping through worse gunfire than this. So they insisted, especially after they took aboard a good cargo of vodka. Vladimir Bokov hadn’t seen the kind of action that would have inured him to such a racket. He kept waking up whenever a new set of drunks squeezed off yet another annoying volley.

Bokov also kept going back to sleep. No noncom came to shake him out of bed with word of some horrid atrocity from the Fascist bandits. That might not mean a lot of progress, but it meant some. And it meant a halfway decent night’s sleep, if not a great one. You took what you could get. If it wasn’t too great, you thanked whatever you thanked that it wasn’t too bad.

Bokov finally gave up and got out of bed about half past six. It was still dark; the sun wouldn’t be up for a while yet. Berlin was only three or four degrees of latitude south of Moscow. It had long summer days and long winter nights. Bokov rubbed his chin. Whiskers rasped under his fingers. His beard wasn’t especially heavy, but he’d have to shave this morning.

A jeep started up outside. Bokov went to the window to see what was going on. It might have been raiders taking off after planting a bomb. It might have been, but it wasn’t. It was Colonel Shteinberg taking off with an extraordinarily pretty brunette. Sunrise might be more than an hour and a half away, but Bokov had no trouble seeing that. The Soviet barracks blazed with light, to help hold the Heydrichites at bay.

“Well, well,” Bokov said softly, and then again: “Well, well.” Plenty of Soviet officers were screwing German women: that general he’d visited in Dresden sprang to mind. It wasn’t encouraged (though raping German women had been, at least unofficially, as the Red Army stormed into the Reich), but the Soviets didn’t try to declare it off-limits the way the U.S. Army did. The women were there. They were in no position to say no. Of course men would screw them.

Moisei Shteinberg, though…For one thing, he was NKVD, which meant he had more to keep quiet about than most Red Army men. For another, he was a Jew. Was he avenging himself every time he stuck it in there? Or was he just a man who got horny like any other man, even if he’d had his cock clipped?

“Interesting,” Bokov murmured. And it might give him a hold on Shteinberg. It also might not, but finding out could be interesting, too.

A new face up there on the rostrum. Sam Rayburn was just another Congressman again. Well, not just another Congressman-Rayburn remained House Minority Leader. But after you’d been Speaker, House Minority Leader wasn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss, as John Nance Garner had famously said (and been famously misquoted) about another Washington office.

Jerry Duncan grinned like a fool. Well, pride could do that to a man. Instead of Rayburn’s combative, bald, round-faced visage (which made him sound like Churchill, whom he resembled not at all), there was the aristocratic New England countenance of Joseph W. Martin. Joe had represented his Massachusetts district since just after the Indians got chased out of it. He finally had his reward. The GOP finally had its reward. Joe Martin was Speaker of the House.

It was a cold day outside, cold enough to snow. Some of the Democrats staring up toward Joe Martin were bound to be thinking, A cold day in hell. Well, maybe Satan was juggling snowballs, because the Republicans had their majority back.

What Jerry was thinking was that traffic would go to hell. Coming from central Indiana, he took snow for granted. Washington didn’t. The town didn’t get it often enough. People didn’t know how to drive in it. The street authority, or whatever they called it here, didn’t know how to keep the main highways cleared. It would be a mess till it melted.

Joe Martin raised the gavel and brought it down again. “The Eightieth Congress is now in session,” he declared. There. It was official. The Speaker went on, “We have a lot of things to try to set right. The American people expect it of us. No-they demand it of us.”

Along with most of the other Republicans, Jerry nodded. He had all he could do not to clap his hands. The Democrats, by contrast, all looked as if they’d been issued lemons and ordered to suck on them. From Pearl Harbor through V-J Day, Congress had shown a bipartisan spirit unusual in its raucous history. That wouldn’t go on any more.

It’s Truman’s fault, not ours, Jerry thought with the smug righteousness a majority could bring. If he didn’t want to keep on occupying Germany when any idiot can see that’s a losing proposition, we could get along with him just fine. But let’s see him occupy Germany if we don’t give him any money to do it.

The Speaker of the House said the same thing, only more politely: “It’s time to take a long, hard look at our foreign policy. It’s also time to get our fiscal house in order. I think we’ll see that the two of those go hand in hand.”

More solemn nods from the Republicans-and from the Democrats who didn’t think they’d make it to the Eighty-first Congress if Truman went on pouring men and money down the German rathole. More scowls from the President’s loyalists-and from the Republicans who feared Hitler’s ghost or Stalin’s reality more than they feared the