The Man with the Iron Heart Read online

  “And so we have this running sore instead,” Diana said. “How long will the Germans go on murdering GIs, sir? Will we still have soldiers over there in 1949? In 1955? Do you think the American people will let something this senseless go on that long?”

  “Holding down the Nazis and holding out the Reds isn’t senseless,” Truman insisted. “If we’d done things the right way after World War I, we never would’ve had to fight World War II.”

  “Getting thousands of soldiers killed after everybody said the war was over is senseless.” Diana could dig in her heels, too. “Grandchildren who’ll never be born…” She told herself not to puddle up. That wasn’t easy, but she managed.

  “I have to do what I think is right,” Truman said. “I have to think of the long term, not just today and tomorrow.”

  “If you foul up today and tomorrow, what’s the long term worth?” Diana retorted. “And if you foul up today and tomorrow, the American people will throw you out before you can do anything about it later on.”

  “Chance I have to take,” Truman said.

  “You’ll be sorry, sir,” Diana told him. “I am already, and you will be.”

  X

  New Year’s Eve. New Year’s Day. The big holiday in the Soviet year. Behind Christmas in the Gregorian calendar, but conveniently ahead of the old Julian reckoning the Orthodox used. This year, celebrating the slide from 1945, the year of victory, to 1946, the year of…what? The year when the Soviet Union didn’t need to worry about victory any more. Not much, anyhow.

  And, here in Berlin, the year where the Russians could celebrate in style. Here where Fascism had grown, here where it had done its bloody-handed best to annul the Revolution and destroy the Soviet people…How many officers would swill up the loot of a conquered country? How many frightened German barmen would pour the drinks? How many frightened German barmaids would serve them? How many of those frightened German barmaids would serve the conquerors in other ways later on, whether they much wanted to or not?

  Three days earlier, Vladimir Bokov had been looking forward to getting his own drunken blowjob from some blond German bitch. Life wasn’t fair. He’d thought so for a long time. Now he was sure of it. Instead of going off and drinking till he puked and getting his cock sucked, he lay tossing on the meager mattress of a steel-framed cot, knocked flat by the nastiest case of influenza he’d ever had.

  Colonel Shteinberg lay one cot to his left. Shteinberg looked like hell. No doubt Bokov looked like hell, too, but he couldn’t see himself. He and his superior were both running a fever close to forty Celsius. Bokov’s head ached. So did every other part of him. Sometimes he shivered and wished he had more blankets. Five minutes later, sweat would river off of him.

  He was, in short, a mess. So was Moisei Shteinberg. The only difference between them was that Bokov remembered liking Christmas when he was a small, small boy before the Revolution. Shteinberg never would have given a damn about it.

  A male nurse-a Red Army private who’d done something wrong and was lucky not to have drawn some worse punishment-brought them aspirins and glasses of heavily sugared hot tea. The tea stayed down. Some of the other things Bokov had tried didn’t want to. He had vivid memories of that, and wished he didn’t.

  The sullen nurse moved no faster than he had to. No doubt he wished he were out carousing, too. And he had plenty to keep him busy. Bokov and Shteinberg weren’t the only ones down with the grippe-not even close. As the aspirins lent Bokov’s wits brief clarity, he thought, You’ll probably catch it yourself, you sorry fucker.

  “This is shit,” Colonel Shteinberg said-maybe the little white tablets were also helping him think straighter. “We’ll be flat on our backs for days more, and then feeling steamrollered for another week after that. Pure shit, nothing else but.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov said.

  Shteinberg gave him a bleary stare. “Don’t worry? Are you out of your mind? Why not?” He plucked at the cold compress on his forehead-except, if it was anything like Bokov’s, it wasn’t cold any more.

  “Because all the officers out drinking tonight will be just as bad off as we are,” Bokov answered. “They’ll have more fun getting there”-no German girl was going to suck him off tonight, not when he couldn’t get it up with a crane-“but they’ll be fucked over, too.”

  “Maybe,” Shteinberg said grudgingly. “But do you suppose the stinking Heydrichite fanatics will drink themselves blind tonight? Not likely! They’re no fools, damn them-they know how we do things. And you just wait and see if they don’t try something while we’re plastered out of our minds.”

  That struck Captain Bokov as much too likely. He shrugged anyway. It hurt-but what didn’t right now? This was even worse than a hangover, and he hadn’t even had the pleasure of getting plastered himself. Definitely unfair.

  “Comrade Colonel, the two of us can’t do a thing about it,” he said.

  “Too right we can’t,” Shteinberg agreed. “I feel like dogshit.”

  “Da.” Bokov looked around for that private. He wanted more tea, and he wanted his compress soaked in cold water again-or, better yet, in the snow outside.

  He didn’t see the fellow. Where the devil had he gone? Was he off smoking a cigarette? Or had he cached a flask somewhere? Was he swigging right this second? Bokov’s spirit lusted after vodka. His body told his spirit it had to be kidding. Sometimes you had to listen to your body, even if you didn’t want to.

  The orderly came back. He didn’t look so sullen now. Sure as hell, he’d found some way to make himself feel better. And if the men he was supposed to be taking care of got short shrift, that was their hard luck. They were already sick, weren’t they?

  Bokov drifted into a restless, uneasy sleep-the only kind he’d had since this miserable thing landed on him like a Katyusha rocket. His dreams were confused and dark. That was all he remembered of them.

  Then a doctor with a thin, clever Jewish face much like Colonel Shteinberg’s was shaking him awake. Another doctor, this one an authentic Slav, was waking the NKVD colonel. “Get up,” the Jew told Bokov. “We need you.”

  “What is it?” Bokov tried to sit up. His head swam. “I beg your pardon, Comrade Physician. I am not well.” He gulped, hoping the juices in his stomach would stay down. He wasn’t kidding, not even a little bit. In the next bed, Shteinberg was also feebly protesting.

  “You don’t have time to be sick,” the Jewish doctor said bluntly. “The fucking Nazis have poisoned half the officer corps in Berlin, maybe more. You’ve got to track them down and pay them back. Give me your arm.”

  “Bozhemoi! How?” Bokov exclaimed. Automatically, he stuck out his left arm. The doctor undid the cuff on his uniform tunic, then rolled up his sleeve and tapped at the inside of his elbow to bring up the veins there. As soon as he found one, he stuck a hypodermic needle into it and pushed in the plunger. Bokov shook, not only from the influenza but also because he flat-out hated needles. The doctor knew his stuff; he didn’t let the hypodermic slip out of the vein till he’d finished the injection. “What did you shoot me with?” Bokov asked. “I didn’t think there was any medicine for the grippe.”

  “There isn’t,” the doctor said. “You’ll still be sick. But with enough benzedrine in you, you’ll be able to work anyhow. We’ll feed you pills from now on, but we want to get you up and moving right away.”

  He knew how to get what he wanted. The dose he shot into Bokov was brutally effective. The NKVD man’s heart pounded as if he’d drunk fifty cups of strong coffee all at once. His snot dried up. So did his mouth. So did his eyeballs. His brain felt on fire. He knew he still had the influenza. He also knew he’d have to pay for this artificial vitality, and that he’d be even sorrier later than he was before the injection. But all that would wait. Right this second, he was raring to go.

  “Poisoned? How?” he demanded. Far from being fuzzy with sickness, his wits raced at triple time. He beat the doctor to the answer: “Fuck my m
other if they didn’t put something in the booze for the New Year’s bash!”

  “Right the first time-wood alcohol,” the Jew said. “Lots and lots of wood alcohol. They must have been setting this up for weeks, the fucking cunts. It’s the best thing in the world to use if you’re poisoning liquor. You won’t notice it while you’re drinking. Most people even like the taste. But afterwards…Afterwards, it’ll kill you if you drink enough. And it’ll leave you blind even if you don’t.”

  Bokov nodded. He knew what wood alcohol could do. Plenty of illicit liquor got cooked up in the Soviet Union. Some of it was as good as any you could buy in the government stores. Some was better: a labor of love. But some was pure poison. He’d heard people say you could get rid of the bad stuff if you filtered booze through a loaf of black bread. Bokov didn’t know whether that was true-he’d never tried it. He did know they wouldn’t have filtered their drinks at the New Year’s feast. They’d have poured them down as fast as they could.

  Over in the next bed, Colonel Shteinberg had also risen like a drug-fueled Lazarus. “You will have held the bartenders and the serving women?” he demanded of the doctor who’d injected him back to life.

  The only answer he got was a broad-shouldered shrug. “They told me to run my cock over here and start your motor,” the man answered. “I don’t know what all else they’re doing. If it weren’t for the commotion in the hall, they wouldn’t even’ve told me how come I had to do that.”

  Like so many Red Army officers, he’d carried out his orders precisely and to the letter, and hadn’t taken one step beyond them. Stalin had terrified initiative out of the whole country. If being wrong landed you in the gulag, you couldn’t take the chance. That kind of caution had cost casualties, maybe even battles. What would it cost here?

  Would anybody at the banquet hall have kept his head enough to think to make the necessary arrests? Bokov had to hope so. (Would the barmen and barmaids have been the ones who poisoned the liquor? No way to know till you started hurting them.)

  “Come on,” Shteinberg said, and then, “Where the devil are my valenki?” Bokov had already found his own felt boots under his cot. He was pulling them on. His superior grunted when he came up with his.

  “Here.” The Jewish doctor gave Bokov a vial of pills. “Take two of these whenever you start slowing down. They’ll keep you going for three or four days. Eat a lot. Drink a lot. If you were an airplane, you’d be running on your reserve tank.”

  “Right.” Bokov could feel that. He wrapped his greatcoat around himself. “Ready, Comrade Colonel?”

  “You’d best believe it.” Shteinberg barked hard, mirthless laughter. “See? We get to go to the party after all.”

  “Just what I wanted,” Bokov said in a hollow voice. Benzedrine or no benzedrine, the colonel’s chuckle also sounded less lively than it might have.

  A jeep waited outside the barracks. Bokov and Shteinberg piled in. the jeep took off toward the south and west. “Potsdam?” Shteinberg asked. “Again?”

  “Yes, sir. That palace with the German name,” the driver answered.

  “The Schloss Cecilienhof.” Bokov didn’t make it a question. The Red Army noncom behind the wheel nodded. Bokov muttered. That was where Stalin had met with the American President and British Prime Minister. More recently-not even two months ago now-the Red Army had celebrated the anniversary of the Russian Revolution there. And now this.

  “We got careless. We got predictable.” Moisei Shteinberg took the words out of his mouth. “We came back to the same place three times in a row, and the fucking Nazis went and made us pay.”

  “Somebody should answer for that, sir,” the noncom said. “Even in the trenches, you don’t stick your head up in the same place three times. A sniper’ll put one through your ear if you’re dumb enough to try it.”

  Voice dry as the inside of his own mouth, Bokov said, “Whoever planned our party would have gone to it himself. Chances are decent he’s a casualty, too.”

  He was shivering by the time the jeep got to the Cecilienhof. It wasn’t just the cold-it was the influenza trying to jump on him again. He choked down two of the pills the doctor had given him. Colonel Shteinberg did the same thing.

  They had to pass through several belts of security. That would have been funny if it weren’t so grim. No fanatics could get in and shoot up the place-but nobody’d bothered to vet the booze. Shteinberg said it: they’d got careless. And they’d played right into the bandits’ hands.

  An English country house for the Kaiser’s daughter-in-law: that was how the Schloss Cecilienhof got started, just before World War I. Country house, nothing, Bokov thought, the benzedrine making his heart drum again. It’s a goddamn country palace, is what it is.

  And, at the moment, it was a country palace in one of the nastier districts of hell. Spotlights spread harsh light on the snow-covered grounds around the main buildings-and on the uniformed bodies stacked there like cordwood. One of the bodies wasn’t uniformed, but wore black tie and boiled shirt. A barman had poured it down on the sly…and got what the officers he was serving got. “He didn’t know the shit was poisoned,” Bokov said, pointing to the corpse in the fancy suit.

  “You wouldn’t expect many to,” Shteinberg answered. “Some American said three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. He knew what he was talking about.”

  “Sensible, for an American,” Bokov said. He jumped down from the jeep. The noises from inside the Cecilienhof sounded like something from a low-rent district in hell, too. He didn’t want to go in there, and he knew he had to. Then he stopped almost in spite of himself. “Comrade Colonel, tell me-please tell me-that isn’t Marshal Zhukov.”

  “It is.” Shteinberg’s voice was hard and flat. “The revenge Stalin will take…Unless…” He quickly shook his head and went inside.

  Unless what? Bokov wondered. Unless Stalin decided to get rid of the popular Zhukov and blame it on the Heydrichites? Was that what the other NKVD man meant? Even if it was, Bokov didn’t believe it. If Stalin wanted Zhukov shot, shot Zhukov would be, and never mind that he was the leading soldier in the Red Army. But that Bokov could wonder-and that Shteinberg could, too-spoke volumes about how the system they lived under worked.

  Bokov had no time to read those volumes, and no interest in them. He was, after all, part of the system himself. He followed his superior into the Cecilienhof.

  It was as bad as he’d expected, maybe worse. The palace stank of sweat and smoke and vomit and shit. Men reeled here and there, some clutching their bellies, others rubbing frantically at their eyes. “Who turned out the lights?” a major shouted furiously. The lights were blazing. His eyes had gone dark. Wood alcohol, sure as the devil, Bokov thought.

  “The NKVD men!” a sergeant shouted. “They’ll take over!”

  “Thank God!” another noncom exclaimed. Now the monkey’s off our backs, he meant. Nobody could blame the poor underofficers for screwing up if they weren’t in charge.

  “No officers here still on the job?” Shteinberg asked, in the tones of a man hoping against hope.

  But the two noncoms shook their heads. Bokov wasn’t surprised, either. Why else would a man come to a New Year’s festival, except to drink himself blind? And how many Red Army officers had done just that here tonight?

  “Have you got the Germans under guard?” Bokov asked.

  The two underofficers gave each other apprehensive looks. “Comrade Captain, we have…some of them,” answered the one who’d spoken first. “Some went home before people started getting sick.” He paused unhappily. “Some may have slipped out when the Devil’s grandfather got loose, too. Things were pretty confused there for a while.”

  Whenever a Russian hauled the Devil’s kin into a conversation, he knew he was in the middle of a mess. Bokov knew it, too. As far as he could see, things were still plenty confused. Part of him wanted to lie down and forget about everything but the influenza. But neither duty nor benzedrine would let him.

 
A word from him or Shteinberg could destroy these noncoms. What point, though? They hadn’t done anything wrong. Most of the ones who had screwed up were poisoned, which served them right. If I weren’t sick, I’d be poisoned, too, Bokov thought.

  “Comrade Captain, what do we do if the Nazi bandits rise up now?” the other conscript asked. “Who’d give orders to help us fight back?”

  “People like you,” Bokov answered. “And if they try it, we’ll whip them right out of their boots. I hope they do-fuck your mother if I don’t. If they come out and fight fair, we’ll smash them like the cockroaches they are. The one way they can hurt us is by sneaking around like this.”

  “Unfortunately, they’re too damned good at sneaking.” Colonel Shteinberg’s voice was dry as usual. Only the way his hands shook and the unnatural glitter in his eyes told of the war between disease and drugs inside him. He went on, “Take us to the Germans. Let’s see what we can get out of them.”

  Guards with submachine guns stood outside the door to the room where the servers were corralled. Nobody was going anywhere now. Of course, it was much too likely that anyone with guilty knowledge had already got away. As Bokov and Shteinberg went in, one of the guards muttered to another: “Never thought I’d be glad to see the damned Chekists get here.”

  “Shut up,” the other fellow hissed. “They’ll hear you.”

  If Bokov didn’t have bigger things to worry about…But he did. If Moisei Shteinberg heard the whispers from the Red Army men, he also gave no sign.

  Inside the splendid chamber-a plaque said it had been the smoking room-huddled a gaggle of scared-looking Fritzes. Bokov nodded glumly to himself: sure as hell, the women were chosen for looks and figures. The Red Army men in charge were careful about that. About some other things, things that turned out to matter more, they weren’t.