The Man with the Iron Heart

before the NKVD and the Red Army started throwing in reinforcements.

Bokov was still nervous. He wasn’t the only one, either.

Moisei Shteinberg didn’t just twitch. He quivered. As a Jew, he had extra reason to want to see Goring and Ribbentrop and Rosenberg and Streicher and the rest of the brutes dead. And, as a Jew, he had extra reason to fear what would land on him if anything went wrong.

“They cannot get through,” he said to Bokov, surveying the fortified belt from the outside.

“No, Comrade Colonel, they can’t,” Bokov agreed. He was a little easier in his mind than Shteinberg was. He was no Jew. He was no colonel, either. Less blame for any failure would stick to him. He could hope so, anyhow.

He did hope so. With all his heart.

“They can’t give it to us up the ass, either.” Shteinberg went on worrying as if Bokov hadn’t spoken. “We have our own generator. We’ve sealed off the water lines. We’ve sealed off the sewer lines. We’ve got our own water tower by the courthouse. We’ve got a sealed-off septic tank to handle the drains. The Heydrichites can’t possibly get at or get into any of that stuff. They can’t, dammit.”

“You’re right, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov said. What else was he supposed to say? You couldn’t very well go wrong agreeing with your superior officer. And, as far as he could see, Colonel Shteinberg was right.

Right, maybe, but not reassured. He looked up into the air. The only planes there were a couple of the ubiquitous C-47s. They were too far away to let Bokov tell if they were American originals or the Soviet copies called Li-2s: the one had its entry door on the left side of the fuselage, the other on the right. It hardly mattered either way. They sure as the devil weren’t German.

Even Shteinberg saw as much. “The Luftwaffe’s dead. I don’t miss those wolves at all,” he said. “Ever have a Stuka bomb your trench?”

“No, sir.” Bokov hadn’t seen front-line service.

“Only happened to me once, and I’m not sorry,” Shteinberg said. “It was early in the war. I had to deal with a major who lost his head.” Lost his head probably meant something like retreated without orders. And deal with certainly meant something like kill. “I was going to take him away, and this damned thing with a shark mouth painted on its nose screamed down on us, and…Well, I didn’t have to worry about the major any more. Not enough of him left to bury. It could have been me.”

It could always be you. In the Soviet Union, that was as axiomatic as anything out of Euclid. The knock on the door, the tap on the shoulder…It didn’t have to be nearly so dramatic as a screaming shark-mouthed dive bomber.

No wonder Shteinberg was so jumpy. No wonder everybody with a blue stripe around his cap was.

Another C-47 flew by, this one right overhead. “Don’t worry too much, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov said. “We’ll make it work.”

“Da,” Shteinberg said, and then, “We’d better.”

Red Army sentries discouraged Germans from getting too close to the fortified zone. They shouted one warning-they’d learned to say “Heraus!” After that-usually only seconds after that-they opened fire.

They did just that this morning. Bokov heard the sharp, peremptory cry-German was a wonderful language for giving orders. He heard the sharp stutter of a three-round burst from the guard’s PPSh submachine gun when somebody didn’t listen to the order no matter how wonderfully peremptory it sounded. And he heard a screech that said at least one of those rounds connected.

Sure as hell, somebody was down and thrashing maybe seventy-five meters outside the perimeter. Bokov and Shteinberg loped over to him. He was a half-starved fellow with a beak of a nose and several days’ worth of gray stubble on his chin and cheeks. At the moment, he was clutching his left leg and cussing a blue streak.

Seeing two NKVD men bearing down on him only made him turn his indignation on them. “That verkakte mamzer went and shot me!” he exclaimed in what came fairly close to German.

“Nu? What did you expect him to do? Give you a big kiss?” Moisei Shteinberg replied in the same language. Bokov could follow it well enough to realize what was going on. A Jew. A DP, he thought.

The guard came up. He didn’t want to see two NKVD men, either. Anxiously, he said, “He didn’t move when I yelled. Orders are to open fire if they don’t move. I did what everybody above me told me to do.”

“It’s all right,” Bokov told him. “You’re not in trouble. Go back to your post.” With an enormous sigh of relief and a parade-ground salute, the guard obeyed.

“How bad are you hit?” Colonel Shteinberg asked the wounded man. The fellow pulled up his trouser leg. He had a bloody groove in the outside of his calf. Shteinberg waved dismissively. “That isn’t worth getting excited about.”

“Easy for you to say. It isn’t your leg, either,” the Jew-no, the other Jew-retorted. “Hurts like shit.” He didn’t say Scheisse; he said govno. Chances were he’d started out in Poland or the Soviet Union, then. Where he’d been since…

Bokov spoke German, not Yiddish: “Why didn’t you clear out when the guard warned you?”

“Gevalt! Some warning!” the DP said-Bokov had figured he’d be able to follow regular Deutsch. “The fucking Nazis couldn’t kill me off, so now you Russian mamzrim try and finish the job for them? A kholeriyeh on you!”

“Mamzrim?” Bokov asked Shteinberg. It had to be the plural of the earlier insult, but Bokov didn’t know what the insult meant to begin with.

“Bastards,” Shteinberg supplied economically. He gave his attention back to the DP. “Everybody’s got a sob story these days. Some of them are even true. The rest aren’t good for wiping your ass.”

Muttering under his breath, the skinny man displayed a tattoo on his arm. “Know what that means, you-?” He bit back whatever he’d been about to add: no doubt a good idea.

But Colonel Shteinberg had to nod. Bokov also recognized a death-camp serial number. This fellow had seen hell on earth, all right. If he kept mouthing off, he might get to compare the Nazi and Soviet versions of it, too.

“And before they shipped me to Auschwitz, they had me digging their fucking mines for them in the mountains,” the Jew went on. “I go through all that, I live through all that, and your miserable shithead puts a hole in my leg. The way you talk, I should thank him.”

“Maybe you should,” Shteinberg said. “He could have hit you in the head.”

“Wait,” Vladimir Bokov said. Both Colonel Shteinberg and the DP looked at him in surprise. Bokov eyed the survivor. “You say you worked in the mines in the mountains. Down in the Alps?”

“That’s right,” the skinny man said. “What about it?”

“Were you just…digging out gypsum or whatever it was?” Bokov asked.

“No-tea with fucking lemon wedges,” the DP snapped. “What the devil else would I be doing down there?”

Bokov seldom faced such sarcasm, not from a man he was interrogating. The half-swallowed chuckle that came from Colonel Shteinberg didn’t help, either. Doing his best to ignore sarcasm and amusement, Bokov asked, “Did the Nazis care how much you brought up?”

“They cared how much I dug,” the wounded Jew answered. “If you didn’t do enough to suit ’em, you were a goner right there.”

“But did they care how much-fuck, call it gypsum-you brought up, or just how much you dug?” Bokov persisted, excitement tingling through him despite his best efforts to hold it down.

“Oh,” Shteinberg said softly. “I know what you’re driving at.”

“I sure don’t,” the DP said. Shteinberg had spoken Russian, not Yiddish or German. The DP still followed him.

That didn’t surprise Bokov, not after his earlier guesses. “Just answer my question,” he snapped, this time with an NKVD officer’s authority in his voice.

After frowning in memory-and, no doubt, in pain as well-the DP said, “As long as we moved rock, they didn’t