The Man with the Iron Heart

give a shit. Some of us thought it was funny. Some of us just thought the Nazis were meshigge.”

“Nuts,” Shteinberg translated, adding, “That’s an ass-end-of-nowhere dialect of Yiddish he talks.”

“Who, me?” The skinny Jew sounded affronted. “I’m no dumb Litvak who goes fiss like a snake when he means fish.”

“Shibboleth,” Moisei Shteinberg murmured, which seemed to mean something to the DP even if it didn’t to Bokov. Shteinberg took out a clasp knife and cut some cloth from the DP’s already-ragged trouser leg so he could bandage the bloody gouge. Then Shteinberg frisked him. He found a small chunk of a D- ration bar and-much better hidden-a U.S. five-dollar and a ten-dollar bill. “Where’d you get these?” he asked. “Tell it straight the first time, or you’ll be sorry.”

“Sorry? I’m already sorry,” the skinny man said. Before Shteinberg could say anything else, he went on, “Yeah, I know-I’ll be sorrier. You people know how to take care of that. The guys who gave me the money were a couple of American soldiers. Officers, even, I think. They gave me the chocolate, too. It’s not so great, but it fills you up. I’ve been empty a lot.”

“Americans, eh?” Bokov sounded less suspicious than he would have most of the time. His own thoughts were racing in a different direction. Eyeing the DP, he asked, “Were they Jews, too?”

“Yeah. They talked Yiddish to me, not German. Better than him, too-one of them sounded just like me.” The man sneered at Shteinberg. Captain Bokov wouldn’t have wanted to piss off an NKVD colonel, but the DP didn’t seem to give a damn. “They treated me a hell of a lot better all the way around, if you want to know what I think.”

“Fat chance,” Shteinberg said.

Bokov thought exactly the same thing at the same time. All the same, he asked, “This place where the Nazis had you digging-could you find it again? Could you show us where it is?” He leaned forward, waiting for the answer.

The DP said only, “It ain’t in your zone.”

“I understand that.” Bokov could be patient when he needed to. “But could you?”

“Maybe.” The skinny Jew wasn’t about to admit anything, not till he knew which way the wind blew.

Shteinberg made a fist and brought it down-on the cement next to the fellow’s wounded leg. “Then… maybe…we won’t have to get rough to find out.”

“Are you still thinking along with me, sir?” Bokov asked.

The colonel smiled a vulpine smile. “Maybe,” he said.

The Fourth of July had always been Diana McGraw’s favorite holiday-well, except for Christmas, which was a different kind of thing altogether. The Fourth went with picnics and beer and sometimes going to the park to listen to bands and patriotic songs and speeches and waiting through the long hot sticky day for nightfall at last and cuddling with Ed while fireworks set the sky ablaze above them and the kids went “Ooooo!”

And here was the Fourth come round again. Here she was in a park again, only in Indianapolis, not Anderson. The McGraws had gone to the state capital a couple of times before the war, to see if the fireworks were better. Once they were. They weren’t the next time, so the family didn’t go back.

Diana looked out at the throng of people in the park with her, at the throng of American flags, at the throng of placards. They stretched from just in front of the speakers’ platform to too far away to read, but the ones she couldn’t make out were bound to say the same things as the ones she could. If you were here today, you wanted Harry Truman to bring the boys home from Germany.

If you were here today…She turned to the Indianapolis police officer who stood on the platform with her and the other people who would talk in a while. “How big a crowd to you think we’ve got today, Lieutenant Offenbacher?”

Offenbacher’s beer belly and double chin said he spent most of his time at a desk. He didn’t look happy standing here sweating in the sun. Still, he shaded his eyes with a hand and peered out over the still-swelling mass of people. “From what I can see, and from what I’ve heard from the men on crowd-control duty, I’d say, mm, maybe fifteen or twenty thousand folks.”

Experience had taught Diana that cops cut the size of crowds by at least half-more often two-thirds-when they didn’t like the cause. By now, she’d had a good deal of practice gauging them, too. This one looked more like forty or fifty thousand to her. But even Offenbacher’s estimate was impressive enough.

“Just think,” she said brightly. “We’ve got rallies like this in every big city from coast to coast-and in a lot of cities that aren’t so big, too.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Lieutenant Offenbacher’s voice held no expression whatever.

They had governors and Congressmen and Senators speaking at the rallies, too. It had been less than two years since Diana started her movement. Back then, most politicians wanted nothing to do with it or with her. Jerry Duncan, bless him, was the exception, not the rule. But things had changed. Oh, yes, just a little!

And they also had actors and actresses speaking. It wasn’t bad publicity, not any more. They had singers. They had ministers and priests-next to no rabbis. They had baseball players. (Not all of them, of course. What Ted Williams told them to do with their invitation wasn’t repeatable in polite company. It wasn’t physically possible, either.) They had writers-newspapermen and novelists.

They had some of just about every kind of people who could make other people listen. No, Diana hadn’t known what she was getting into when she started out. She also hadn’t known how many others she could bring along with her.

And they still had people who hated their guts. The cops Offenbacher led weren’t just keeping the anti- occupation crowd orderly. They were also keeping counter-demonstrators from wading into the crowd with their own picket signs-and with baseball bats and tire irons and any other toys they could get their hands on. Some of the chants that rose from their opponents might have made Ted Williams blush.

“Can’t your men arrest them for public obscenity?” Diana asked Offenbacher.

“Well, they could,” the boss cop allowed. “Maybe if things get worse.”

“Worse? How?”

“You never know,” Lieutenant Offenbacher said. Diana understood that much too well. The Indianapolis police sympathized with the counter-demonstrators. They wouldn’t do anything against them they didn’t absolutely have to.

Time to get the show on the road. Diana stepped up to the microphone. “Welcome, ladies and gentlemen,” she said, and paused while cheers and applause drowned out the noise from the opposition’s peanut gallery. “Thank you for coming out this afternoon. We’ve got some terrific people lined up to talk to you, and we’ve got one of the best fireworks shows in town waiting for you after the sun goes down.” More cheers, maybe even louder this time. As they ebbed, Diana went on, “But most of all, thank you for being here, no matter why you came. We still need to show Harry Truman and all the people in Washington with their heads in the sand that there are lots and lots of us, and we aren’t about to go away!”

A great roar swelled up from the crowd: “That’s right!”

“It sure is,” Diana said. “And now it’s my pleasure to introduce our first speaker, City Councilman Gus van Slyke!”

Van Slyke had a belly even bigger than Lieutenant Offenbacher’s. He’d made a fortune selling used cars. He hadn’t come down one way or the other on the German occupation till a friend’s nephew got wounded over there. That convinced him. (That he couldn’t stand Truman probably didn’t hurt.)

“We won the war. By gosh, we did,” he said. His voice was gruff and growly, like a bear’s just waking from hibernation. “Now enough is enough. What are we doing over there in Europe? We’re getting good young men, our best, killed and maimed. We aren’t accomplishing anything doing it. The fanatics are still there, no matter what we’ve tried. And how much money have we flushed away? Billions and bill-”

When Diana heard the sharp pop! it didn’t register as anything but a backfire. But Gus van Slyke fell over. Something warm and wet splashed Diana’s arm-she was wearing a sleeveless dress because of the heat. It was blood. She could smell it. She could smell something else, too-van Slyke had fouled himself. His feet drummed on the platform, but not for long. He lay in a spreading pool of his own gore.

Diana jammed a hand in her mouth to keep from shrieking. Out in the crowd, people did start screaming.