The Man with the Iron Heart

happened-whoever’d designed that storage system had screwed up in a big way. Which didn’t mean Heydrich could do anything about it now.

The struggle went on regardless. Most ways, it went pretty well. The fellow who’d come up with the bright idea of using exploding trucks and cars in sequence to do more damage would win himself a Knight’s Cross. That scheme was a beauty-it could hardly work any better. Heydrich had no authentic Knight’s Crosses to hand out, but he could improvise. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t done it before. An Iron Cross Second Class with the proper ribbon- which he did have-would do the job just fine. Everyone would know it stood for a real Ritterkreuz. Besides, a medal truly wasn’t iron and ribbon-it was a reminder of what the holder had done to earn it.

Heydrich touched the Knight’s Cross that hung at his own throat. Even if he weren’t wearing it, he would know he had it, and why. That was the only thing that mattered. He went through the latest pile of newspapers and magazines from the outside world that Hans had left on his desk. The French were still vowing to rebuild the Eiffel Tower: de Gaulle had made another speech before their Chamber of Deputies.

Another story in the International Herald-Tribune told how the English, apparently without any political speeches, were already rebuilding Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s. Reinhard Heydrich nodded to himself. If he hadn’t come upon a fundamental difference between the two races there, he didn’t know when he ever would. The English monuments had been bombed later. He had no doubt they would rise again first.

But then, on an inside page, he found a story that interested him even more. The American Congress (a vaguely obscene name for a parliament, he’d always thought) was still wrangling about whether to pay for keeping U.S. soldiers in Germany. Signs were that Congress didn’t want to, but the President still did.

Heydrich knew what he would do in Harry Truman’s place. The leaders of Congress who didn’t want to go along with him would get a visit from…what did the Amis call their Gestapo? From the FBI, that was it. Then they would see things Truman’s way. If they didn’t, their funerals would no doubt be well attended.

If Truman had plans along those lines, the Herald-Tribune didn’t talk about them. It wouldn’t, of course. But Heydrich didn’t believe Truman would do the obvious, necessary thing. Americans were fools. They were rich fools, fools with enormous factories, but fools all the same. The factories let them smash the Wehrmacht. Still, they had no stomach for what came after even a victorious war….

Or did they? A German magazine had a glowing article about the police force the Amis were organizing in their zone. Heydrich already knew about that, naturally. But getting the American slant-for what else was the magazine but an American propaganda rag? — was interesting. Very interesting, in fact.

Before the collapse, the writer had worked for the Volkischer Beobachter; Heydrich recognized his name. Well, he’d landed on his feet. He claimed that this new police corps would protect order and guard against extremism, whether from the left or the right. He also claimed the Amis were building it up to be strong enough and reliable enough to do its duty under any conceivable political circumstances.

“Any?” Heydrich murmured. That was a large claim, to say the least. And Heydrich also knew enough to translate it from journalese into plain German. The writer obviously hoped most of his readers didn’t. If the Americans decided to hop on their planes and boats and go back across the Atlantic where they belonged, the new police corps would stay behind as their surrogates.

During the war, Germany had set up plenty of police outfits like that. The French Milice fought the French resistance harder than any German outfits in France ever did. Latvian and Lithuanian policemen cheerfully delivered Jews to the Germans for disposal. General Nedic’s militia in Serbia harried the Titoists.

All of those police forces fell apart when the German military might supporting them waned. Did the Amis think the same thing wouldn’t happen to their sheep dogs after they went home? If they did, they really were fools.

And did they think their fancy new police corps wasn’t riddled with traitors? Heydrich shook his head. With true German patriots, he thought. It depended on how you looked at things, though. Some of Nedic’s men had warned Tito’s followers what their outfit was up to. Some members of the Milice played a double game with the resistance.

Some members of the Americans’ German police were in touch with the forces that aimed to restore the Reich to greatness, too. Heydrich usually knew what the would-be oppressors had in mind before they tried it. None of their moves had hurt him yet. He had to be careful-the Americans weren’t too naive to plant false information-but so far he’d outsmarted them.

How many men from the Milice had de Gaulle’s French forces shot or imprisoned? What had the Titoists done to Nedic’s militia? How had the Russians treated Germany’s Latvian and Lithuanian collaborators? Heydrich slowly smiled. None of that would be a patch on the revenge he aimed to take on the German police who cozied up to the Americans.

“Revenge on the USA, too,” he said, as if reminding himself. Von Braun and the other slide-rule soldiers at Peenemunde had made rockets that could hit London from the Continent. They’d planned much bigger beasts: rockets that could hit America from Europe. Only the collapse kept the scientists from building them.

A lot of those scientists were twiddling their slide rules for the United States these days. Others were working for the Russians. But some remained in Germany. And the Reich still had plenty of scientists and engineers who could learn rocketry if they needed to.

Which they would. A rocket that could reach New York City with an atom bomb in its nose would teach the Americans they couldn’t tell Germany what to do any more. And rockets like that could also reach far into Russia- farther than the Wehrmacht ever got. As soon as Germany built them, Stalin would have to think twice before he started any new trouble.

Heydrich could hardly wait.

XXIII

Lou Weissberg’s mother had talked about how good it felt not to have to wear a corset when they fell out of fashion after World War I. Lou always nodded. What were you supposed to do when your mother went on about something that wouldn’t matter to you in a million years?

Except now it did. He’d escaped his own canvas-and-metal contraption not long before. His leg didn’t bother him too much, either. He was…no, not quite good as new, but getting there, anyway. On this second anniversary of V-E Day, that wasn’t so bad.

It was a bright spring morning. Sunshine. Puffy white clouds drifting across the sky. Vibrant greens. Songbirds chirping their heads off. Storks nesting on chimneytops wherever chimneys still stood. And the stink of undiscovered bodies buried in rubble, the stink that never seemed to disappear from Nuremberg but did fade in the chilly wintertime.

Howard Frank snorted when Lou remarked on it. “Yeah, well, those are the krauts we don’t have to worry about,” Frank said.

“Ha!” Lou said around a mouthful of scrambled eggs and hash browns. “Don’t I wish that was funny!”

“I know, I know.” Major Frank lit a cigarette. “At ten o’clock we get to listen to General Clay telling us how wonderful everything’s going.”

“Oh, boy.” Lou had no trouble restraining his enthusiasm. General Eisenhower’d gone back to the States at the end of the year before. Staying any longer would have tarnished his reputation as the man who’d won the war in Europe…assuming the war in Europe had been won. Germany was Lucius Clay’s baby now, and a damned ugly baby to find on your doorstep it was, too.

“Next interesting question is whether the fanatics mortar us while we’re listening to Clay tell us how wonderful everything is,” Frank said.

“You’re chipper today, aren’t you?” Lou said. In lieu of answering, his superior smoked his Chesterfield down to a tiny butt, stubbed it out, and lit another one.

German cops on street corners stiffened to attention as the two American officers went to listen to General