The Man with the Iron Heart

needed saying-as for her ideas. She hardly cared. They were as warming as the bright California sun. It was snowing back home. Did it ever snow here?

“Congress is heading our way. Maybe that will push Truman in the right direction. Maybe. But how many more American boys will get blown up on occupation duty that doesn’t need doing before the President sees the light? Too many! Even one more would be too many!”

“That’s right!” If anything, the roar from the packed seats was even louder than it had been before. Diana finished her speech. She waved and flashed a two-finger V for Victory as she stepped away from the mike.

Sam Yorty wrapped things up: “Remember to give, folks, if you haven’t given already. Changing people’s minds costs money. I wish it didn’t, but it does. Please be generous. Show you support our cause.”

They did, with everything from nickels to twenty-and even fifty-dollar bills. Quite a few silver dollars ended up in the donation buckets. The government hadn’t minted them since 1933, but they still circulated out West. Diana had seen that on other trips across the Rockies. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a big silver cartwheel in her hand back in Anderson. Probably not since before the war.

“I think we did a heck of a job,” Yorty said. When Diana saw what they’d taken in, she wouldn’t have dreamt of arguing with him.

“The motherfuckers were ordered to surrender all their munitions, dammit!” The Red Army lieutenant colonel was almost comically outraged.

Vladimir Bokov looked down his nose at him-not easy, not when the Red Army was several centimeters taller, but he managed. “And you’re all of a sudden surprised because the Fascists didn’t, Comrade? They’ve had mortars and antitank rockets all along. When they figured out something new to do with artillery shells, of course it figured they’d start pulling those out of their dicks, too.”

“Well, why don’t you miserable bluecaps stop them, then?” the lieutenant colonel shouted. “What the hell good are you if you can’t do something like that?”

“What was your name again, Comrade?” Bokov asked softly.

A question like that from an NKVD man should have turned the Red Army officer to gelatin. It didn’t, which made him either very brave or very stupid. “Kuznetsov. Boris Aleksandrovich Kuznetsov,” he growled. “If you have to blame me, go ahead. Even a camp’s a better bet than going down some of these German roads.”

Maybe that proved he didn’t know much about camps. On the other hand, the way things were these days, maybe it didn’t. That possibility worried Bokov. He said, “We’re not the only ones with the problem. The Americans have it, too. By the way they squawk, they have it worse.”

“Americans always squawk. It’s what they’re good for-that and jeeps and trucks and Spam.” Kuznetsov’s bulging belly said he’d probably put away a lot of Spam. Since Bokov liked it, too, he couldn’t mock the Red Army man. Kuznetsov went on, “This is just a fucking mess. They blow us up, and there’s nobody around to avenge ourselves on. What kind of chickenshit way to fight is that?”

“A damned nasty one,” Bokov answered. Lieutenant Colonel Kuznetsov blinked. Bokov continued, “What do you want us to do? We shoot people by the thousands. We’ve shipped so many to Siberia, pretty soon everybody north of the Arctic Circle will speak German. We’ve captured the Devil’s grandmother’s worth of Nazi artillery.”

“This Nazi officer we captured used to intercept our signals. He said that whenever we started talking about the Devil’s relatives, it was a sure sign things were really fucked up,” Kuznetsov said. “Looks like he was right.”

“Huh,” was all Bokov said. So even the Germans knew that!

Before he had to come up with anything more, an explosion rocked the already-battered building in which he worked. All the windows rattled. One of them fell in with a tinkle of shattering glass. Only luck it hadn’t speared him and Kuznetsov with flying shards. Frigid February air streamed in through the sudden new opening.

“Bozhemoi!” Kuznetsov burst out, and then loosed a stream of mat that proved zeks in the gulag didn’t know everything there was to know about cussing. He finished, “That was too cocksucking close.”

“No shit.” Bokov jumped to his feet. “I’m going to see what happened-and if I can help.”

“Well, you talk like a soldier, even if you’ve got that blue band around your cap,” Kuznetsov said. Instead of wanting to deck him as he should have, Vladimir Bokov felt obscurely pleased. The two men dashed out of Bokov’s third-story office together.

They couldn’t get down the stairs as fast as they would have wanted, because other NKVD and Red Army men clogged them. Some would be useful when they got to the bomb site. Others would just stand around rubbernecking. Bokov had seen that before.

The crater was in a small square a couple of blocks away. A market of sorts had sprung up there. Berliners traded whatever happened to have come through the war in one piece for food and firewood. Sometimes women who didn’t have anything else traded themselves. More than anything else, that was what drew Red Army men to the place. And the Red Army men had drawn the…

Truck. It was a truck. Part of the chassis was still recognizable even after blast and fire. The stink of cordite or some high explosive much like it filled the cold air-that and burned rubber and burnt flesh.

Bokov did some swearing of his own. His obscenity wasn’t so inspired as Boris Kuznetsov’s, but it would have to do. The motionless bodies and pieces of bodies he didn’t have to worry about. They were beyond worry now. The Red Army men and locals down and moaning were a different story-if anything, a sadder story, because they were still suffering. What had happened seemed all too obvious. Now Bokov had to do what little he could in its wake.

Lieutenant Colonel Kuznetsov spoke in a voice like iron: “This kind of shit has happened too fucking often. We’ve got to get a handle on it. We’ve got to, goddammit. If we don’t, those Nazi cunts will run us out of Germany yet.”

That kind of defeatist talk could get him sent to a camp, too. But, looking at the crater the bomb had blown in the pavement, at the bodies, at the freshly shattered apartment blocks around the edges of the square-a couple of them on fire-Bokov had trouble feeling anything but defeatist himself.

“They haven’t tried one so close to us for a while.” Moisei Shteinberg might have appeared out of nowhere. He sounded altogether dispassionate as he surveyed the scene. “I’m surprised they did. They don’t seem to have got enough for their bomb.”

“You’re a cold-blooded prick of a zhid, aren’t you?” Kuznetsov said.

“I try to think with my head, not with my belly,” Shteinberg answered calmly. “Chances are it’s lucky for you that I do, too.”

Bokov stooped to bandage a Red Army sergeant with gashes in one arm and the other leg. Here it was, going on two years since Berlin fell, and he still routinely carried wound dressings in a pouch on his belt. What did that say? For sure, nothing good.

“Spasibo, Comrade Captain.” The sergeant managed something between a grimace and a wry grin. “Fuck me if I ever come here looking to get my cock sucked again.”

“I don’t blame you,” Bokov said. “Did you notice the truck before the bomb went off?”

“Nah.” The young underofficer shook his head. “I was just looking for a woman who wasn’t old enough to be my mother.”

Ambulances and fire engines screamed into the square, tires screeching, sirens wailing. The men on one of the fire trucks swore horribly when they discovered the bomb had broken a water main. They got a pathetic pissy dribble from their hose, nothing more. The ambulance drivers and their helpers started loading the injured-Red Army men first-into their vehicles.

With help from Bokov, the wounded sergeant hopped toward the closest one. His mangled leg wouldn’t bear his weight. Bokov hoped he would keep it. The sergeant managed one more word of thanks as he flopped into the back of the ambulance.

The bomb hidden in a jeep at the edge of the square blew up then.

Next thing Bokov knew, he was on his hands and knees. His trousers tore. The cement scraped his legs. Dirt and pebbles and bits of broken glass dug into his palms. He felt as if someone had banged his ears with garbage- can lids, or maybe with hatch covers from a Stalin tank.

And the ambulance had shielded him from the worst of the blast. It hadn’t flipped over onto him, either,