The Man with the Iron Heart Read online

  “You California jerks think everything’s a goddamn earthquake,” another GI answered. “That’s a motherfucking bomb going off, is what that is. One huge honker of a bomb, too.”

  That echoed Lou’s thoughts much too well. He looked around in all directions. At least even money the jail’s gray bulk would hide whatever had just happened…But no. There it was, off to the northwest: a swelling cloud of black smoke and dust.

  Major Hawkins had already proved he had a foul mouth. He outdid himself now. Then he rounded on Lou. “What do you wanna bet that’s the fucking courthouse? You CIC cocksuckers are such hot shit, how come you didn’t keep the fanatics from blasting it to the moon?”

  “Oy!” Lou clapped a hand to his forehead. That hadn’t occurred to him. But as soon as he heard it, he would have bet anything he owned that Hawkins was right. The older officer’s words had that oracular feeling of truth to them. A bomb there couldn’t be anything else. Well, it could, but he was only too sure it wasn’t. A moment later, he said, “Oy!” again, and, “Aren’t the judges working in there now?”

  If they could have bottled what Major Hawkins said then, they could have heated water in every house in Nuremberg for a year. “In spades,” the portly major added, in case Lou didn’t think he meant it.

  Lou had other things on his mind. “C’mon!” he said. “Maybe we can do some good hauling people out of the ruins.”

  “You go on, Lieutenant,” Hawkins said, shaking his head. “Me, I aim to sit tight and do what I’m supposed to be doing. For all we know, those mothers are trying to lure us away from here so they can rush this place and spring the big prisoners while we’re all making like a Chinese fire drill.”

  “Right,” Lou said tonelessly. And the major was, no two ways about it. That didn’t make Lou like him any better. Sketching a salute, Lou took off.

  He trotted on parallel to the Pegnitz, the river that ran through town. The river made a better guide than the streets. With so much of Nuremberg ruined, what was street and what was rubble weren’t always easy to tell apart. As he hurried toward the Palace of Justice, he sadly clucked several times. The fanatics could sound reasonable. That sheet they’d put out would make some people back in the States go, See? They only want to run their own affairs and be left alone. But, no matter how they sounded, they went and did something like this….

  Lou loped past a pile of wreckage about a story and a half tall. That gave him his first good look at the Palace of Justice-or rather, what had been the Palace of Justice. He skidded to a stop, gravel and shattered bits of brick scooting out from under his boots. “Holy crap,” he yelped.

  Somebody must have screwed up. That was the first thing that occurred to him. The American occupiers had gone out of their way to protect the jail. They hadn’t taken so many precautions at the Palace of Justice. The authorities must have thought no one would attack it till the Nazis honchos went on trial.

  Oops.

  What the American authorities had thought might have been reasonable. That turned out not to matter when reasonable was also wrong. Somebody-who? — would have to answer questions now that the pooch was screwed. We did everything we reasonably could… In his mind, Lou could already hear the calm, sober voice explaining things. Whoever the voice belonged to, it would be calm and sober. He was sure of that. Would calm sobriety be enough to save the dumb fuckup’s career? It might. You never could tell.

  But that would be tomorrow’s worry. Today’s was more urgent. Shattered wreckage of a truck-probably one of the ubiquitous GMC deuce-and-a-halfs-blazed in front of what was left of the Palace of Justice. Three wings had projected out from the main body of the building. One of those wings-the central one, the one in front of which the truck had stopped-was just gone, clean off the map. The other two were shattered, tumbledown, smoking, ready to fall down any second now.

  Christ! How much TNT did that fucking truck carry? Lou wondered. The sleepless, analytical part of his mind instantly supplied the answer, and a sneer to go with it. Two and a half tons, dummy. The Palace of Justice sure as hell looked as if a 5,000-pound bomb had gone off right in front of it.

  Some of the rubble shook. Lou thought more of it was falling down, but that wasn’t what was going on. A dazed, bleeding American soldier pushed a door off of himself and tried to stand up. He keeled over instead.

  Lou hurried over to him and pulled away more bricks and stones and chunks of woodwork. The wounded man’s left ankle bent in a way an ankle had no business bending. Lou fumbled at his belt. Sure as hell, he still carried a wound dressing and a morphine syrette. The guy needed about a dozen bandages, but Lou covered up a nasty cut on the side of his head, anyhow. The morphine was probably also sending a boy to do a man’s job, but it was what he had. He stabbed the wounded soldier and bore down on the plunger.

  To his amazement, the GI opened his eyes a few seconds later. “What happened?” he asked, his voice eerily calm. Maybe the morphine was doing more than Lou’d thought it could.

  “Truck bomb.” Lou added the obvious: “Great big old truck bomb.”

  “Boy, no shit,” the man said. “You musta stuck me, huh?” When Lou nodded, the guy went on, “You think you can splint my ankle while the dope’s working? Best chance I’ll get.”

  “I’ll try. I’m not an aid man or anything.”

  The wounded soldier waved that aside. Lou got to work. He had no trouble finding boards, and he cut up the other GI’s trouser leg to get strips of cloth to tie the splint into place. Morphine or no morphine, the guy wailed when he straightened that shattered ankle as best he could.

  Some aid men were there. More ambulances rolled up, bells clanging, as Lou wrestled with the splint. Some soldiers set up a.50-caliber machine-gun position, too. Lou wondered if they’d gone Asiatic till one of them said, “Assholes ain’t gonna run another truck in here and blow up all the guys who came in to help.” That hadn’t occurred to Lou, but some of the Americans seemed properly paranoid. He supposed that was good.

  Stretcher bearers carried a groaning wounded man past him and the fellow he was helping. All badly hurt men sounded pretty much the same, no matter where they came from. But Lou happened to look up at just the right moment. He saw a not-so-familiar uniform on the stretcher.

  “Holy cow!” he blurted, in lieu of something stronger. “Is that General Nikitchenko?” He was proud of knowing the name of the Soviet judge for the upcoming trial.

  To his surprise, the man on the stretcher knew some English. “I is Lieutenant Colonel Volchkov,” he said. “Alternate to Iona Timofeye-vich. The general, he is-” He broke off, gathering strength or looking for a word. After a moment, he found one: “Kaput.” It wasn’t exactly English, but it wasn’t exactly not English, either. Lou had no trouble understanding it, anyhow.

  “We’re gonna get you patched up, Colonel. Don’t you worry about anything right this minute-you’ll be fine,” one of the medics said, and then, to his own comrade, “Get moving, Gabe. Soon as he goes into an ambulance, we’ll come back for this poor sorry son of a bitch.” His hands were full; he pointed with his chin at the soldier Lou was splinting.

  “Who you callin’ a sorry son of a bitch?” the GI demanded, and Lou’s admiration for morphine leaped forward again. The medics didn’t bother arguing. They lugged Volchkov away, then returned for the man with the broken ankle.

  More wounded people staggered from the wreckage. Some were women. Secretaries? Clerks? Translators? Cleaning ladies? Lou had no idea. All he knew was, bombs weren’t chivalrous. That also applied to the American bombs that had leveled most of Nuremberg, but he didn’t worry about those.

  Corpsmen and other GIs also carried women out on stretchers, in blankets, or sometimes just in their arms. Wounded women were slightly shriller than wounded men; otherwise, there wasn’t much difference between them. Most of the casualties here, not surprisingly, seemed to be men.

  Lou thought for a moment that someone in a dark robe had to be a woman. Then he saw the p
erson was wearing a man’s black dress shoes-one, anyhow, because the other foot had only a sock on it. A judge, he realized dully. American? French? British? That hardly mattered.

  The medics didn’t bother with some of the bodies-and pieces of bodies-they found in the smoking wreckage. They piled them off to one side: a makeshift morgue, one growing rapidly. And they cursed the fanatics with a weary hatred that made the close-cropped hair at the nape of Lou’s neck try to stand on end. Turn the guys who wore Red Crosses loose on the Nazis and they might clean them out in twenty minutes flat.

  Or, worse luck, they might not.

  That enormous explosion hadn’t just brought American soldiers out to see what had happened and do what they could to help. Shabby, scrawny Germans stared at the wreckage of the Palace of Justice and at the rows of corpses off to one side. They didn’t seem especially horrified-but then, they’d seen plenty worse.

  “Doesn’t look like they’ll have their trial any time soon,” a middle-aged man remarked to his wife.

  She shrugged. “So what? It wouldn’t have been anything but propaganda anyhow,” she said. He nodded. He took out a little can of tobacco-scrounged from butts, no doubt-and started rolling himself a cigarette.

  Lou wanted to kick him in the nuts and punch his stringy Frau in the nose. But the goddamn kraut was right. God only knew when the authorities would be able to try Goring and Ribbentrop and the rest of those jackals. And who’d want to sit on the bench now and judge them? Hell, who’d dare?

  “Goddamn Heydrich to hell and gone,” Lou muttered. But damn him or not, his fanatics had won this round.

  The McGrawshad a fancy radio set. It did everything but show you pictures of what was happening at the other end. And now, with this newfangled television thing, that was coming, too. Back before the war, when people first started talking about it, Diana figured it was all Buck Rogers stuff and would never come true.

  Well, these days it didn’t do to laugh too hard at Buck Rogers. Look at rockets. Look at the atom bomb. And television was plainly on the way, even if it wasn’t here yet.

  Once upon a time, the telegraph and typewriter and telephone were Buck Rogers stuff, too-except Buck wasn’t around yet to give them a name. Diana’s mouth tightened. She wished the telegraph had never happened. Then she wouldn’t have heard about Pat…. She shook her head. That wasn’t the point. The point was, he never should have got killed in the first place.

  She’d timed it perfectly. The tubes needed a little while to warm up. Almost the first thing she heard once they did was “This is William L. Shirer, reporting to you from Nuremberg.”

  He’d been reporting from Europe since before the war started. He’d covered it from Berlin during the Nazis’ first fantastic run of triumphs. She and Ed had both read Berlin Diary. Now he was back on the other side of the Atlantic, broadcasting from the undead corpse of the Third Reich. And the photos she’d seen of him-he was a skinny little bald guy who wore a beret and smoked a pipe-didn’t detract (too much) from his authoritative voice and plain common sense.

  “As you will have heard by now, Reinhard Heydrich’s brutal diehards bombed the Palace of Justice in this city. The leading captured war criminals from the Nazis regime were to have gone on trial there for war crimes in a few days. Now those trials have been indefinitely postponed. Many people here doubt whether they will ever take place.”

  “Ain’t that a…heck of a thing?” Ed said.

  Diana shushed him. She wanted to hear William L. Shirer. “The death toll is known to be close to two hundred,” the correspondent went on. “Among the dead are the French, Russian, and American judges and the British alternate. The Russian and British alternates are among the badly wounded, as is Judge Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor.”

  “Two hundred dead,” Diana echoed, her voice rising in disbelief. “And for what? To give those thugs the kind of trial they don’t begin to deserve.”

  Now Ed raised a hand to quiet her. William L. Shirer continued, “American authorities believe the fanatic who drove the truck loaded with explosives up to the Palace of Justice died in the blast he touched off. Before General Patton’s recent death, he said the idea wasn’t to die for your country but to make the so-and-so’s on the other side die for theirs. Like the Japanese, the German fanatics seem to have taken this idea too much to heart. After these messages, I’ll be back with an American officer who will talk about the problems posed by enemies who don’t care whether they survive.”

  A recorded chorus started singing the praises of a particular laundry soap. Diana knew from painful experience that it wasn’t worth the money if you used it with hard water. If you listened to the chorus, it was the greatest stuff in the world. But then, you deserved whatever happened to you if you took radio advertisements seriously.

  William L. Shirer returned. “With me is Lieutenant Louis Weissberg of the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps,” he said. “Thanks for coming on, Lieutenant.”

  “Thanks for having me, Mr. Shirer.” By the way Weissberg talked, he was from New York City or somewhere not far away.

  “Tell us a little about why it’s harder to defend against enemies who plan to die after completing their missions.”

  “For all the reasons you’d expect.” Lieutenant Weissberg didn’t say You dummy, but you could hear it in his voice. Shirer wasn’t a dummy-nowhere close-but he remembered that some of the people in his audience were. After a beat, Weissberg went on, “They don’t have to worry about escape routes. And they can take chances ordinary soldiers never would, because they don’t expect to get away anyhow. If you have the nerve to press the detonator, it’s all over in a hurry.”

  “Isn’t it just?” Shirer agreed ruefully. “We’re standing here in front of what would have been the courtyard for the trial of the century-the trial that would have warned the world no one can get away with wars of aggression any more-and there’s not much left, I’m afraid. Do you have any idea how the fanatic in the truck was able to pull up right in front of the building?”

  “Well, Mr. Shirer, if a jeep isn’t the most common military vehicle in Germany these days, a deuce-and-a-half is. We’ve got more of ’em here than a dog has fleas. Put a guy in an American uniform in the driver’s seat-and you can bet that kraut was wearing one-and nobody paid any attention to him till too late,” Weissberg said.

  William L. Shirer asked the same question Diana McGraw would have: “Isn’t that a severe security breach?”

  “Sure,” Weissberg answered, which took Diana by surprise. “We slipped up, and we paid for it. We have to hope we don’t do it again, that’s all.”

  “Who was responsible for protecting the Palace of Justice?” Shirer asked. “And what’s happened to him since the bombing?”

  “Sir, I don’t have the answer to either of those questions,” Weissberg replied. “You gotta remember, I’m just a lieutenant. I see little pieces of the picture, not the whole thing. You’d do better asking General Eisenhower or somebody like that.”

  “For the record, I have asked General Eisenhower’s headquarters,” Shirer said. “Spokesmen there declined to comment. They claimed that anything they said might damage an officer’s career. What do you think of that?”

  Weissberg ducked again: “If they aren’t going to say anything about it, you can’t really expect me to, can you?”

  “Never hurts to try,” Shirer answered easily. “Thank you for your time, Lieutenant Weissberg.”

  “Sure,” Weissberg said. William L. Shirer went off the air. The commercial this time was for a brand of cigarettes that, in Ed’s memorable phrase, tasted like it came out of a camel’s rear end.

  Diana was steaming. “You see how things go?” she demanded of her husband. “Do you see? They know who was supposed to take care of that building. They know he was asleep at the switch. But will they say so? Don’t hold your breath! Will anything happen to him because he was asleep at the switch? Don’t stay up late waiting for that, either.”
/>   “Army always takes care of its own,” Ed said.

  “Two hundred dead,” Diana said one more time. “They aren’t just sweeping dirt under a rug. They’re shoveling it onto graves. That’s wrong.” That’s wrong, dammit! was what she wanted to say, but the habits of her whole adult life with Ed suppressed the swear word.

  “You’re doing everything you know how to do,” Ed said. “You’re in the papers. You’re on the radio, for cryin’ out loud. Me, I couldn’t get in the newspaper if I robbed a bank. That suits me fine, too.”

  “It suited me fine-till Pat got murdered,” Diana answered. “But this craziness won’t stop till we make it stop. If I have to get my name in the paper to do that, I will.”

  “Babe, I’m not arguin’ with you,” her husband said. You’d better not, not about this, Diana thought. That wasn’t fair, though, and she knew it. Ed had backed her play as much as was in him to do. It wasn’t his fault that she was the more outgoing one in the family.

  And speaking of outgoing, or going generally…“I’ll need to make another trip to Washington,” she said.

  He grunted. “Can we afford it?” he asked. A reasonable question: he’d always brought in the money, while Diana figured out how to spend it. The arrangement worked well for them, but it meant she had a better notion of what was in the checkbook and the savings account than he did.

  She nodded briskly. “Not to worry. We could swing it by ourselves, but we won’t have to. We’ve got donations coming in like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve started…oh, I guess you’d call it a business account. Mothers Against the Madness in Germany, I’m calling it.”

  Ed grunted again. “What’ll it do to our taxes? And can the government use it to come after us if we don’t keep everything straight? They got Al Capone on a tax rap when they couldn’t nail him for anything else, remember. If they sent him to Alcatraz, they can sure take a whack at us.”

  “They wouldn’t do that,” Diana answered with the sublime confidence of one sure of the righteousness of her cause. On a more practical note, she added, “And I’ve talked to a bookkeeper. He says he knows how to keep everything straight.”