The Man with the Iron Heart

Clay. The policemen wore their black-dyed American uniforms. Some of them had on American helmets, too. Others wore what had been firemen’s helmets, with an aluminum crest to change the outline of what otherwise looked the same as the standard German Stahlhelm. And, with shortages everywhere, some of the cops did wear the Wehrmacht-issue steel helmet.

Pointing to one of those guys-who also carried a U.S.-made submachine gun-Lou said, “That still gives me the willies, y’know?”

Howard Frank didn’t need to ask what in particular was eating him. The major only nodded. “Yeah, me, too,” he agreed. “But what are you gonna do? They may see action, and it’s a damn good helmet. When we switched from the limey-style tin hat to the one we use now, first scheme was to make Stahlhelms and just paint ’em a different color.”

“Fuck. I’m glad we didn’t. That thing screams Nazi! at me.” Since the Kaiser’s engineers had devised the shape in the last war, Lou knew that wasn’t completely rational. He didn’t care. Hitler’s bastards had been trying to kill him, not the Kaiser’s-except for some retreads, no doubt. He gave the next German cop he saw a fishy stare. “Other thing is, how many of these bastards are ratting on us to Heydrich?”

“Bound to be some. Hopefully, not too many.” Howard Frank sounded somewhere between cynical and resigned.

A couple of other guys in dyed-black U.S. uniform came by. They weren’t German police; they had on armbands that said DP. They sure as hell were displaced persons. They talked to each other in some Slavic language-Russian? Polish? Ukrainian? Czech? Serbo-Croatian? Bulgarian? — full of consonants and y’s. One of them carried a grease gun like the cop’s; the other wore a Luger on his belt.

At least they don’t have German helmets, Lou thought. With more and more American soldiers heading home, DPs were doing a hell of a lot of the cooking and cleaning and fetching and carrying. The way things were going, the occupation would probably fall apart without them. On the Eastern Front, the Germans had used Russian POWs-Hiwis, they called them, a contraction from their term for “volunteer assistants”-the same way, and for the same reason: to stretch their combat manpower. Now they were getting it done to them instead. Serves ’em right, too.

Better not to inquire about what happened to any Hiwis who fell into Soviet hands. Lou might want to work more closely with the Russians against the Heydrichites. That didn’t mean he thought they were nice people. But they weren’t on the Nazis’ side, which also counted.

A perimeter of barbed wire, concrete barriers, and machine-gun nests protected the Americans gathering to hear General Clay from German kamikazes driving trucks full of TNT. Mortars…Lou shook his head. He’d already worried about mortars once. If they started coming in, he’d hit the dirt, that was all.

Even as Clay stepped up to the microphone, several enlisted men bawled, “We want to go home!”

Clay looked at them. He had bushy dark eyebrows that told what he was thinking without his saying a word. If he wasn’t thinking stockade right this minute, Lou’d never seen anybody who was.

He had a raspy voice that spoke of a million cigarettes, or maybe a million and one. “I want to go home, too,” he said. “We all want to go home. I don’t know of a single soldier in Uncle Sam’s army who wants to stay in Germany. But we’ve got what they used to call a job of work to do, and we’re going to do it.”

When he paused, some of the soldiers yelled, “We want to go home!” again. They didn’t give a damn about a general or anybody else. They were draftees. They sure didn’t give a damn about winning the war before they left, the way earlier crops of dogfaces had. After all, the war in Europe had been over for two years-hadn’t it? If it hadn’t, why were they all standing around on this nice May morning? Why weren’t they out trying to pick up German broads with chocolate bars?

But if the war in Europe had been over for two years, why all the tank barriers and machine-gun positions and barbed wire? Yeah. Why? Lou wondered, his own thoughts pretty barbed, too.

General Clay charged into that question head-on: “We beat the German army. We walloped the Waffen-SS, too. You know it, boys. Some of you helped do it. And some of you saw what the Nazis did while they were on top. You know why we had to lick them. If we hadn’t, one of these days before too long they would have done that stuff to our friends and neighbors and families.”

“Damn straight,” Howard Frank muttered beside Lou. Lou nodded. As far as he was concerned, Lucius Clay was preaching to the choir. He’d never yet heard of a Jewish soldier who went around shouting We want to go home! Jews understood in their kishkas what this war was all about.

But there weren’t enough Jews to go around, goddammit.

“And they still want to,” Clay went on. “That’s the funny thing about this whole business. Plenty of people back home march around and wave signs and bang drums and yell and scream and shout that we ought to pack up and get the devil out of Germany. But not one of them says the Germans are good guys all of a sudden. Not one of them says the Nazis won’t take over again if we do run away.”

Lou craned his neck. He didn’t see any of the German policemen in their black GI uniforms inside the American perimeter. How hard would they fight the fanatics after the Americans went home? Some of them had spent time in concentration camps under the Third Reich. Those guys would give Heydrich’s goons a smack in the teeth if they could. The rest? Well, who could say?

And, even if the new kraut cops were willing to mix it up with the Nazis, would they stay that way after a sniper picked off their wife or mother or two-year-old? That was already starting to happen. Or suppose a truck full of explosives blew up a police barracks in the middle of the night. That had already happened more than once, too. What would it do to the cops’ morale?

Lost in those gloomy reflections, Lou realized he’d missed some of what General Clay was saying. “-thinks we need to be here,” Clay declared. Then he said, “The President is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States,” so Lou figured out what was going on. “As long as the commander-in-chief thinks we need to stay in this country, we will. The sooner our friends and our foes understand that, the better.”

It sounded good. It would have sounded even better if one of the fed-up GIs hadn’t hollered, “Not if Congress doesn’t give him the cash!”

As if on cue, several other men called, “We want to go home!” again.

“Congress will do whatever Congress does. The President will do whatever he feels he has to do. And we will do whatever the President and our superiors tell us to do.” Clay stuck out his chin. “And so will I, and so will every one of you, too.”

He stepped away from the microphone. Some of the soldiers assembled to listen to him applauded. Lou and Major Frank both made sure they did-but then, they had their reasons. Lou assumed MPs had kept an eye on the hecklers and would give them what-for afterwards. He hoped so, anyway.

Even if they did, though, so what? The mouthy draftees might spend some time in the stockade for disrespect, or whatever other charges had a chance of sticking. While they were there, they’d still have plenty to eat and somewhere soft and dry to sleep. Heydrich’s thugs wouldn’t be trying to bump them off, either. If all you wanted to do was come home in one piece, the stockade didn’t look half bad.

When Lou said as much, Major Frank answered, “Sure, if that’s all you want. But it goes on your record, too. It won’t look so good when you’re trying to land a job once you get home.”

“How many of these guys give a damn?” Lou said. “How many of ’em think that far ahead?”

Howard Frank looked as if he’d put down several too many a while ago and his head was banging like Buddy Rich’s drums. “Mazeltov,” he said sourly.

“For what?” Lou asked.

“For nailing the USA down tight in two goddamn questions, that’s for what,” Frank answered.

Neither one of them had much else to say on the way back to their offices.

As far as Bernie Cobb was concerned, the krauts knew way more about tanks and machine guns and beer than anybody in the United States had ever imagined. The Panzer IVs and Panthers and Tigers (Lions and tigers and bears! Oh, my!) were out of business, thank God. You still had to look out for fanatics with MG42s, but not right this minute, also thank God. As for the beer…

Bernie had a big old stein of it in front of him. He’d already emptied the mug several times. He expected to empty it several more before the day or the night or whatever the hell was through. A bunch of GIs packed the