The Man with the Iron Heart Read online

  “My name is Matthew Cunningham, private, U.S. Army.” He paused to lick his lips and glance left again. Then he rattled off his serial number and went on, “I am a prisoner of the German Freedom Front. They say they will, uh, execute me if U.S. authorities don’t meet their, uh, just demands. For now, I’m being well treated.” The mouse under one eye, the split lip, and the fear all over his face gave the lie to that.

  “U.S. forces are to leave Germany at once. Germany is to be free to determine its own destiny like any other nation. The struggle for national liberation will go on until victory is won, no matter what. You cannot hope to outlast the aroused German folk. So-called prisoners of war must also be released to return to their loved ones. Germany demands peace and justice.” Cunningham gulped, then whispered one more word: “Please.”

  He disappeared. More squiggles flashed across the screen. Then it showed pure white, which faded as Bruce turned off the projector. Lou turned on the room lights. “Jesus,” he said.

  “You betcha,” Captain Frank agreed: a slightly chubby, fundamentally decent man in a hell of an unpleasant place. “How’d you like to get one of those every week, or maybe every day?”

  “Jesus!” This time, Bruce beat Lou to the punch.

  “Is he really a GI?” Lou asked. “Not just a kraut who speaks good English?”

  “A Matthew Cunningham was reported as AWOL in Frankfurt last week,” Frank answered. “We’re bringing in some of his buddies to make sure this is really him, but for now it’s a pretty good bet.”

  “Yeah.” Lou nodded. The kid on the screen sounded just like a Yank. “Shit. What do we do next?”

  “That isn’t for the likes of you or me to decide,” Captain Frank said. “But you can bet your last dime we won’t pack up and go home. You can bet we won’t turn all the Jerry POWs loose, either. How many divisions’ worth of new recruits would we give Heydrich if we did?”

  “What about the chuckleheads back home?” Bruce said. “What’ll they do when they see this thing? How loud will they squawk?”

  “We ain’t gonna show it to ’em,” Frank said. “We ain’t gonna say boo about it. You want to spend the next twenty years in the Aleutians, son? You’ll be lucky to get off that easy if you open your big yap where a reporter can hear. Got it?”

  “Oh, yes, sir,” Bruce said solemnly. “But how do you know this is the only print those Nazi bastards made?”

  “Fuck,” Captain Frank whispered. “I didn’t even think of that.”

  Lou hadn’t thought of it, either. He realized he should have. Maybe Bruce really had worked in a movie theater. That would have got him used to thinking about more than one copy of a film at a time. To Lou, a movie was a movie. But how many people, in how many theaters all over the country, could watch the same movie at the same time? Lots. Lots and lots.

  The captain visibly tried to pull himself together. “Lou, when you were watching this…this piece of crap, did you see anything that gave you a clue about maybe where it was made?”

  “Let me think, sir,” Lou said. It wasn’t easy. All he’d looked at was the GI’s face. Behind it were…planks. That didn’t help much.

  “By the lighting, it was shot with floods, not with the sun,” Bruce said. “You could tell by the shadows.”

  “He’s right.” Lou wished he would have come up with that. It was obvious…once somebody else pointed it out.

  “Yeah.” Captain Frank nodded. “Good one, Bruce. You think it was in one of their goddamn bunkers, then?”

  Now he’s asking the shavetail, Lou thought resentfully. Well, Bruce knew more about this stuff than he did himself.

  “Probably,” the morale officer said. “And they’ve got-how many of ’em?”

  “Too many, that’s for sure,” Frank said gloomily. “Could’ve been in the woods, could’ve been inside Frankfurt somewhere, could’ve been…any place at all, near enough. Gevalt!”

  “Brass’re gonna spit rivets when they see this,” Lou said.

  “Now tell me one I don’t know,” his superior replied. “Half of me thinks we just ought to ditch this film, pretend we never got it.”

  “Except that’d be curtains for Cunningham,” Lou said.

  “Yeah.” Captain Frank sighed heavily. “But it’s curtains for him anyway, if those Nazi shitheads follow through. You think we’ll get out of Germany to keep them from shooting a hostage? Don’t make me laugh.”

  Lou didn’t think so, not for a minute. But something else occurred to him. “If Bruce here is right-and I bet he is-this isn’t the only copy around. If another surfaces after we make this one disappear, we’ll spend the rest of our days in Leavenworth, making big ones into little ones.”

  Frank sighed again. “Well, you ain’t wrong. I wish like hell you were. All right, already. I’ll kick it up the line. Somebody with more rank than me can figure out where we go from here.” He paused to light a cigarette and smoked half of it in short, savage puffs. “And you’re right about something else, too, goddammit.”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “Any which way, poor Cunningham’s fucked.”

  Fraternizing remained against regulations for GIs. THAT didn’t mean as much as the brass wished it did. The Americans occupying Germany were as horny as any other young men. They had a prostrate nation at their feet. And plenty of Frauleins were cute and persuadable. Quite a few didn’t need much persuading. They figured lying down with one of the conquerors was the best way to land on their feet. More often than not, they turned out to be right.

  The same held true for American reporters, only more so. The occupying authorities couldn’t give them orders against fraternizing. Some had wives back home but didn’t care. Tom Schmidt was single and thirty-two. Sometimes he felt like a kid in a candy store. Sometimes he was a lot happier than that.

  His latest flame, Ilse, was small and dark and slim-skinny, if you wanted to get right down to it. There weren’t many fat Germans these days, and a lot of the ones who were fat had been Party Bonzen and weren’t to be trusted. Ilse was close to his age. She didn’t wear a ring, but a pale circlet on the third finger of her left hand said she had. Had Fritz or Karl gone to the Eastern Front and not come home? Or did he lie in or under some field in Normandy? Ilse hadn’t volunteered answers, and Tom hadn’t gone looking for them. As long as she said yes often enough, he didn’t require anything else.

  She lived in a cellar. Most surviving Nurembergers did, because so much above ground was only wreckage. She had a couple of lanterns and a little coal stove that kept the place warm enough. Thanks to Tom, she had plenty of fuel for them, and plenty to cook on the little stove.

  He sometimes wondered whether one person could eat that much and stay that skinny. But if she had kids, he never saw them. He never saw their clothes or toys when he came to call. Again, he didn’t push it. No, answers weren’t what he wanted from her.

  There weren’t many places to take a girl for a date. No movie houses, except the ones for American soldiers. No fancy restaurants. The only public eateries open were soup kitchen-style places that served potatoes and cabbage and U.S. Army rations to keep people from starving. You could walk in the parks, if you didn’t mind bomb craters and shattered trees and a reek of death whenever the wind swung the wrong way.

  Or you could get down to basics and go to bed. Tom didn’t mind. If that wasn’t a guy’s idea of heaven, he didn’t know what would be. Ilse never complained. If she had, he would have looked for someone else. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have other choices. Oh, no.

  One evening, he brought her a carton of K-rations-less romantic than long-stemmed roses, maybe, but the way to a girl’s heart in occupied Germany. She received them with hugs and kisses and promises of even better things later on. Then she surprised him, saying, “And I have for you also etwas… something.” She’d learned some English in school before the war, then forgotten most of it till she turned out to need it again. Tom had about that much German. They managed.


  “What is it, babe?” he asked now.

  “I know not.” She gave him a small parcel wrapped in old newspapers.

  He frowned. “Where’d you get it?”

  “A man give it to me.” He knew what the look on his face must have said, because even by the light of two kerosene lanterns he could see her flush. Hastily, she went on, “Not that kind of man. Not a man I ever see before. He give. He say, ‘Give to the Amerikaner.’ He go.”

  “Hah.” Tom wondered if he ought to open it. It was small for a bomb, but you never could tell. “What did he look like?”

  “A man.” Ilse shrugged. “Not big. Not small. Like a man who go through the Krieg… the war.” That meant almost every male here from fourteen to sixty.

  “Okay.” Tom wasn’t sure it was, but what else could he say? He pulled out a pocket knife to cut the string holding the parcel together, then tore the newspaper. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but a reel of movie film wasn’t it. “Huh!” He couldn’t do anything with it till he found somebody with a projector-probably somebody from the Army. “Would you recognize this guy if you saw him again?”

  “What is ‘recognize’?” Ilse asked.

  “Know. Uh, kennen.”

  She thought. “Vielleicht. Um, it might be. Or it might not.”

  He could watch the gears turning in her head. She was no dope. Who would give her something to give to an American reporter? Well, anybody might, but the best bet was one of Reinhard Heydrich’s merry men. And if you admitted to recognizing one of those bastards, you were much too likely to die before your time. No wonder she stayed cagey.

  And a lot of her mind was on other things: “Shall I make for us supper?”

  “Sure, babe. Go ahead,” Tom answered.

  Ilse could do things with K-rats to turn Army cooks green with envy-Army cooks who didn’t just want to get the hell out of Germany and go home, that is, assuming there were any such animals. And Tom was able to show his appreciation in a way much more enjoyable than helping with the dishes (he’d done that once, but only once-having a man volunteer help with housework bewildered her).

  Afterwards, sprawled over him warm and naked under the covers, Ilse said, “You will with this Kino-this film-careful be?”

  “You betcha, sweetheart,” Tom assured her.

  “Das ist gut.” She nodded seriously. “I do not want you to lose.”

  Was that because he made a good meal ticket, or did she actually fancy him between the sheets? One more question Tom was liable to be better off not asking. Tom ran a hand along her slim curves and let it rest on her backside: almost like a boy’s but not quite. No, not quite. Let’s hear it for the difference, he thought. Aloud, he said, “Don’t you worry about a thing. I’ll be fine.”

  One of the lanterns had gone out. The other was guttering low. Even in the dim red light remaining, he could read her expression: she thought she’d just heard something really and truly dumb. “Always I worry,” she said.

  Tom needed a couple of days to track down a corporal whose duties included running movies to keep the GIs happy-well, happier. “Yeah, I can show you that,” the two-striper said, eyeing the reel. “What is it? Stag film?” The idea perked him up. “I can sure as hell show you that, buddy.”

  And watch it yourself, too, Tom thought, amused. “I don’t know what it is. I got it in town.” He didn’t say anything about Ilse. “Run it and we’ll both find out.”

  “Sound and everything-how about that?” the projectionist said as he set things up. “Gonna look a little washed out-this room ain’t as dark as it oughta be. Well, let’s see what we got.” He clicked a switch.

  The projector whirred into action. Tom didn’t think a German would have handed Ilse a dirty movie to pass on to him, but he didn’t know what else to expect. It wasn’t a sweaty kraut grappling with a buxom blond Fraulein. It was…

  “My name is Matthew Cunningham, private, U.S. Army. My serial number is-”

  Tom gaped while the captured American soldier poured out the German Freedom Front’s demands. Only after the short film ended did he realize he should have been taking notes. He was sitting on the biggest story of the-what? Day? Week? Month? Not the year, not in 1945. But the biggest one since the Nuremberg Palace of Justice went up in smoke, anyhow.

  “Run it again,” he said urgently.

  “I dunno if I oughta,” the corporal answered. “You should take this straight to the brass.”

  “I will.” Tom had no idea whether he’d keep the promise. “But I’ve got to know what’s in it first.”

  “We oughta kill all of them kraut motherfuckers,” the GI said as he rewound the film. “Either that or get the hell outa here and let ’em kill each other off. I sure as shit wouldn’t mind seeing Rochester again, I’ll tell ya that.”

  “You and Jack Benny both,” Tom said. The corporal laughed way more than the joke deserved. After horror, that often happened. And if Matthew Cunningham’s terrified face wasn’t the face of horror…then the shambling skeletons at Dachau and Belsen and the murder factories the Russians found in Poland were. The Nazis had so goddamn much to answer for. How could anybody turn his back on that? But how could anybody keep soaking up casualties after the surrender that wasn’t, either?

  “My name is Matthew Cunningham, private, U.S. Army….”

  “I am Nikolai Sergeyevich Golovko, Superior Private, Red Army….”

  Vladimir Bokov watched the film to the end. It didn’t take long. Then he turned to Colonel Shteinberg, who’d summoned him to see it. “All right, Comrade Colonel. There it is. What are we going to do about it?”

  Moisei Shteinberg steepled his fingertips. The senior NKVD officer had a pale, thin face, a blade of a nose, and a dark, heavy beard shadow. He looked like the Jew he was, in other words. “What would you recommend?” He could sound like a bruiser, yes. But, like a lot of Jews Bokov had known, he could also use Russian like a highly educated man.

  “Well, it’s tough luck for Golovko, of course.” Captain Bokov dismissed the hostage right away. The Soviet Union wasn’t going to bend because some stupid senior private let himself get nabbed. The Nazis who’d taken him had to know that, too. They wouldn’t have bent, either-they also played for keeps. “The motherfuckers must be trying to put us in fear, or else to embarrass us.”

  “Yes, I think so, too.” Even though Shteinberg often sounded tough, Bokov rarely heard him actually cuss. Listening to him, you were tempted to forget there was such a thing as mat. “How do you propose to make them change their minds?”

  “How many from their organization are we holding?” Bokov asked.

  “Here in Berlin, or all over our occupation zone?”

  “I think Berlin will do, Comrade Colonel.”

  “Eight or ten we’re sure of-I know we’ve cracked a couple of the bandits’ cells. Another few dozen who may or may not be involved. You know how it is.” Colonel Shteinberg shrugged. “Once you start arresting people, you may as well keep going. You don’t want to miss anybody by mistake.”

  “Da.” Bokov nodded-he felt the same way. “Well, if it were up to me, I’d kill off three or four of the real ones and leave their heads or their balls or whatever for the Nazi pricks to find, along with a message saying they can expect twice as much the next time they want to screw around with us. Best way I can think of to pay back Nikolai Sergeyevich.”

  Shteinberg paused to fill and light a pipe. Stalin smoked one, so a lot of Soviet officials naturally imitated him. Shteinberg brought it off better than most, maybe because Hebraic features weren’t so different from those common in the Caucasus. After a couple of meditative puffs, the Jew said, “Fuck your mother, but that’s a good notion. Go take care of it.”

  Bokov’s jaw dropped. Just when he thought Shteinberg didn’t use mat, the Jew dropped the basic Russian obscenity on him. And he used it the way a real Russian would, too: to say something like This really needs doing, so handle it.

  “I will, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov
said. “Give me a written authorization to take the bastards out of prison and, ah, deal with them. And where do you think I should leave the, ah, remains? We want to make sure the message gets to the right people.”

  Still puffing, Shteinberg scrawled the requisite order. “Anybody asks you questions, tell him to talk to me,” he said, handing Captain Bokov the scrap of paper. Bokov nodded again. He didn’t think anybody would quarrel with an NKVD officer, but the world could be a strange old place. His superior went on, “As for the other, put the bits…Hmm. There’s a place on Stalin Allee they use sometimes. That should get the message across.”

  The USSR was busily turning its chunk of Germany into a proper Socialist state. Where it could, it used German Communists who’d survived the Nazi epoch. But it changed the landscape, too. Lots of streets in Soviet Berlin-and other places in eastern Germany-had new, Marxist-sounding names. Bokov hoped Hitler was spinning in his grave because Stalin had a street named for himself here in the Fascists’ capital. And, on Armistice Day, the Russians had unveiled a huge monument in the Tiergarten, commemorating the Red Army men who’d died taking Berlin away from the Hitlerites. Adolf’s ghost could look at that as much as it pleased.

  Bokov brought his mind back to the business at hand. “Give me the address, sir. I’ll take care of everything.” He wouldn’t have even wiggled without orders. Now that he had them, he couldn’t get in trouble for carrying them out.

  He turned out not to need to show the jailer Shteinberg’s authorization. “Do whatever you please with those people,” the man told him. “If you need to take them all, go ahead. I don’t want them around. The anti-Soviet bandits on the outside are liable to try and liberate them.”

  “They won’t liberate these four fuckers, but you’ve got to hang on to the rest,” Bokov said. “We may sweat more out of them.”

  “Yes, Comrade Captain.” The jailer was the one doing the sweating.

  Bokov shot the prisoners, one after the other. He was no butcher, though. At his orders, a sergeant took care of the necessary mutilation. “These cunts have it coming, eh?” the underofficer said.