The Man with the Iron Heart

Some of them tried to run away. They stepped on other people. No, they trampled them-they weren’t being polite about it. More screams and yells and wails rang out, which only led to more trampling as chaos spread.

Lieutenant Offenbacher stepped around the red, red pool as he strode to the microphone. “This assembly is canceled,” he declared. “This is a crime scene, a murder investigation.” That didn’t stop the panic in the crowd, either. If anything, it made matters worse.

The fireworks got canceled, too.

Official Washingtoncelebrated the Fourth of July on the Mall. The President made a speech. No doubt it was full of patriotic fervor. The fireworks display was second to none. With Uncle Sam footing the bill, they could afford to make it lavish.

Tom Schmidt wasn’t there. Somebody else was covering President Truman’s hot air for the Chicago Tribune. Unofficial Washington gathered in Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, to tell official Washington what it thought of Truman’s German policy. Official Washington, of course, was hard of hearing.

“No,” Tom muttered as Clark Griffith, who owned the Washington Senators-first in boos, first in shoes, last in the American League-tore into Truman. “Official Washington is hard of listening.”

“What’s that?” another reporter asked him.

“Nothing. Just woolgathering,” Tom lied. He wrote the line down. Sure as hell, it would help the column along.

Griffith finally ran out of words and backed away from the microphone. Next batter up was Congressman Everett Dirksen of Illinois. Dirksen had kind of fishy features, wildly curly hair, and the exaggerated gestures of a Shakespearean ham actor. The combination should have made him ridiculous. Somehow, it didn’t. His baritone bell of a voice had a lot to do with that. So did the genuine outrage that poured from him now.

“Out in Indiana, they are killing us-killing us, I tell you!” he thundered, pounding a fist down on the lectern. “Councilman Augustus van Slyke tried to exercise his rights under the First Amendment of our great Constitution. He tried to peaceably petition our government for redress of grievances. And our government has a great many grievances to redress, but I shall speak of that another time. Augustus van Slyke tried to tell the truth to the powers that be, and what became of him? What became of him? He was shot dead, my friends, shot down like a dog in the highway, without so much as a bunch of lace at his throat!”

Something stirred in Tom Schmidt as he scribbled notes. That was from a poem. He’d read it in high school. “The Highwayman,” that was it, though he was damned if he could remember who wrote it. Well, he could check Bartlett’s when he got back to the bureau. Only somebody like Dirksen (though there wasn’t really anybody like Dirksen-he was one of a kind) would throw a poem into a political speech.

But it worked. The hum that rose from the crowd said it worked. Half the people there, maybe more, must’ve read “The Highwayman” or heard somebody recite it. Dirksen might be a crazy fox, but a fox he was.

“How dare they? How dare they?” He pounded the lectern again. “They are no longer content with lying to us. No, that does not satisfy them any more, for they begin to see that we begin to see through the tissue of their lies. And so, where words will not suffice them, they commence to argue with bullets. But will even bullets stop us, friends?”

“No!” the crowd roared. That cry must have rattled windows in the White House. Harry Truman wasn’t there to hear it-he’d be speechifying to his friends right now. If he had any friends. To his supporters, anyhow. Maybe he’d hear it on the Mall, too.

Hammier than any actor, Dirksen cupped a hand behind one ear. “What was that?” he asked mildly.

“No!” That oceanic crowd-roar came again, even louder this time. Tom’s ears rang. A little nervously, he wondered how many people here carried guns. Some pulp horror writer-Schmidt couldn’t come up with his name, either, and it wouldn’t be in Bartlett’s-once advanced a rule about raising demons. Do not call up that which you cannot put down. Had Everett Dirksen ever heard of that rule? The White House was right across the street. If the crowd tried to storm it, Councilman van Slyke wouldn’t be the only one who got shot today. Unh-unh. Not even close.

“They say, in Indianapolis, they have yet to find the murderer-to find the filthy assassin.” Dirksen hissed the last word with poisonous relish. “He shot a man dead in broad daylight, before witnesses uncounted, and they have yet to find him? My friends, how hard are they looking?”

Another roar rose up from the throng gathered together in the hot, sticky July night. This one was wordless, and all the angrier for that. Suddenly, Tom Schmidt wasn’t just anxious any more. He was scared green. Politics was what you did instead of shooting people who didn’t think like you. But once you started shooting, where did you stop? Anywhere?

If the Second Revolution-or maybe the Second Civil War-starts here, it’s a hell of a story, yeah, Tom thought, but am I gonna live long enough to file it?

And then he caught a break. Maybe the whole country caught a break-he was never sure afterwards, but he always thought so. Over on the Mall, the super-duper fireworks show began.

The noise was like gunfire, but the polychrome flameflowers and torrents of blazing sparks exploding across the velvet-black sky proclaimed by their beauty their peace. Everett Dirksen looked over his shoulder at them. That was probably sheer reflex to begin with, but he seemed transfixed by the spectacle-he couldn’t look away.

At last, he did. He lifted his glasses with one hand and rubbed at his eyes with the other. Then, softly at first but with his great voice swelling as the words poured out of him, he began to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was a bitch of a song to sing, but he did it. He raised his hands, and the crowd joined in.

Tom Schmidt started singing before he quite realized he was doing it. He couldn’t carry a tune in a sack, but it didn’t matter right then. None of the reporters nearby sounded any better than he did. Chances were most of the people in Lafayette Park wouldn’t run Alfred Drake or Ethel Merman out of business any time soon, either. That also turned out not to matter. Added all together, they sounded pretty damn good.

“The bombs bursting in air…” Tears ran unashamed down Everett Dirksen’s cheek, glistening in the spotlights. Did he mean them, or could he bring them on at command? With Dirksen, you never could tell. But half the hard-bitten newshounds near Tom were sniffling, too, as bombs did burst in air. And nobody stormed the White House.

XXV

NKVD Lieutenant General Yuri Pavlovich Vlasov wore a permanent scowl. I would, too, Vladimir Bokov thought, warily eyeing Vlasov’s pinched, pulled-down mouth and angry, bristly eyebrows. The assistant chief of the NKVD’s Berlin establishment was cursed, and would be cursed till the day he died, with an unfortunate family name.

Red Army General Andrei Vlasov was the worst traitor the USSR had had in the Great Patriotic War. After surrendering to the Nazis, he’d commanded what Goebbels called the Russian Liberation Army, a Fascist puppet force of other Soviet traitors. And, after the Wehrmacht surrendered, he’d been captured and shot, and better than he deserved, too.

Yuri Vlasov had no family connection to him; the surname wasn’t rare. But the stench that went with it lingered. No Soviet citizen could say the word Vlasovite without feeling as if shit filled his mouth. Vlasov met the problem the same way Captain Bokov would have were he stuck with it: by acting ten times as tough as he would have otherwise.

So it was no great surprise when Yuri Vlasov’s cold, narrow-eyed glare-he had Tartar eyes like Bokov’s, and his were also dark-swung from the captain to Colonel Shteinberg and back again, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. And it was no great surprise when he barked, “Nyet.”

“But, Comrade General, we have this excellent information-new and excellent information,” Moisei Shteinberg said. “We have it, and we can’t do anything with it ourselves. It’s like having a pretty girl when you can’t get it up.”

Much less earthy than most Russians, Shteinberg hardly ever cracked jokes like that. Maybe he shouldn’t