The Man with the Iron Heart Read online

  The phone rang. She picked it up. “Diana McGraw,” she said crisply. The phone rang all the time these days. She had to answer it as if she were running a business. What else was she doing, when you got right down to it? She was just glad she wasn’t on a party line; the ringing that wasn’t for them would have driven all the other people crazy.

  “Hello, Mrs. McGraw. This is E. A. Stuart,” the reporter said.

  She’d already recognized his voice. She’d never imagined she would get to know reporters so well, but it didn’t impress her. She would gladly have traded everything-travel, getting acquainted with prominent people, even meeting the President-to have her only son back again. But God didn’t make deals like that. Too bad. It was almost enough to tempt you into atheism.

  Since she couldn’t have what she wanted, she did what she could with what she had. “What can I do for you, Mr. Stuart?” She used other reporters’ first names. With Ebenezer Amminadab Stuart, formality seemed a better choice.

  “I was wondering if you had any comment on the speech Senator Taft made this afternoon,” Stuart said.

  She would see that speech when today’s Post or New York Times got to Anderson…three or four days from now. “Can you tell me what he said?” she asked. “If it got reported on the radio, I missed it.” Radio news made even the local papers look thorough. When you had to shoehorn everything into five minutes’ worth of air time…Well, you couldn’t. That was about the size of it.

  “Basically, he said Truman doesn’t know what he’s doing in Germany. He said Truman had won the war, but he was losing the peace. He said we heard all through the war how wicked the German people were. If that’s true, he said, they aren’t worth any more American lives. And if it’s not true, why were the President and the whole government lying to the American people from Pearl Harbor to V-E Day?”

  “Wow!” Diana said.

  “That’s not a, mm, useful remark,” E. A. Stuart reminded her.

  “Sorry. You’re right, of course,” Diana said. “Let me see…. Youcan say I agree with everything the Senator said, and he put it better than I could have.”

  “Okey-doke.” She could hear Stuart’s pencil skritching across paper. “Yeah, you may not like Taft-an awful lot of people don’t-but you have a devil of a time ignoring him.”

  “No kidding,” Diana said. “Has Truman answered him yet?”

  “Yup. He doesn’t waste any time-when somebody pokes him with a stick, he pokes right back.” E. A. Stuart sounded admiring and approving. Diana understood why: Truman made good copy. To a lot of reporters, nothing mattered more. They didn’t much care what public figures said or did, as long as it sold newspapers. Mercenaries, Diana thought scornfully. She had to deal with people like that, and to be interesting in her own right for them. She didn’t have to like them.

  When Stuart showed no inclination to go on, Diana prodded him: “Well? What did Truman say?”

  “He said Taft is like a guy yelling from the bleachers. He’s never been a manager in the dugout, let alone a player on the field. He said Taft doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but what can you expect from a guy up in the cheap seats?”

  “The only reason he’s not in the bleachers himself is that FDR died,” Diana snapped. She had the uneasy feeling that Roosevelt wouldn’t have wanted to pull troops out of Germany, but she didn’t mention it to E. A. Stuart. The less you said that could make the people on your side unhappy with you, the better off you were. She’d learned all kinds of unsavory but needful lessons about how to run a political campaign.

  Stuart chuckled. “He’d probably call that baptism by total immersion. He’d have a point, too.”

  “Phooey,” Diana said. “And you can quote me.”

  “Well, maybe I will,” the reporter answered. “Won’t take up any more of your time now. ’Bye.” The line went dead. I’ve got other things to do, he meant: one more polite lie. Diana had learned a raft of them the past few months.

  “What did Stuart want?” Ed asked.

  “My comments on something Senator Taft said, and on the President’s answer to it.” Diana had said things like that often enough by now that she almost took them for granted-almost, but not quite. “Taft makes good sense. Truman’s full of malarkey.”

  “Well, what else is new?” her husband said.

  Germans ambled into the market square in Erlangen to hear what Konrad Adenauer had to say. Bernie Cobb didn’t give a damn about the politician from the British zone. He wouldn’t be able to follow the speech anyhow. He’d picked up a little more German since the so-called surrender: enough to order drinks and food, and enough to get his face slapped if he tried to pick up the waitress afterwards. Politics? Who cared about politics?

  He and the other GIs at the edge of the square weren’t there to listen to the speech. They were there to frisk the krauts mooching in, to make sure nobody was carrying a Luger or wearing an explosive vest. All Bernie knew about the Adenauer guy was that he was anti-Nazi. Well, no kidding! Otherwise, the occupying authorities never would’ve let him open his yap.

  But if the American authorities liked him, you could bet your last pfennig that Heydrich and the fanatics wouldn’t. Which was why U.S. soldiers were searching the German men who came to listen to Adenauer.

  “What I want to do is pat down the broads,” Bernie said. “Not all of ’em-you can keep the grannies and stuff. The cute ones. Hey, it’d be strictly line of duty, right?”

  “Line of bullshit is what it’d be, Cobb,” said Carlo Corvo. The sergeant pointed toward the WACs and nurses who were searching German women. “See? It’s taken care of.”

  One of the gals they were checking was a tall, auburn-haired beauty-just the kind Bernie’d had in mind. “Yeah, but they don’t put their hearts into their work the way I would.”

  “Your heart? Is that what you call it these days?” Sergeant Corvo asked. But he was leering at the good-looking German gal, too.

  None of the Jerries they frisked had anything lethal on him. Nobody else yelled out an alarm, either. And none of Heydrich’s goons blew himself up, and a few dogfaces with him, in frustration because he couldn’t get close enough to Konrad Adenauer.

  The German politico came out to what Bernie thought of as extremely tepid applause. Hitler would have had the Germans screaming themselves sick. Maybe they’d learned better than to get too excited about politicians. More likely, Adenauer was about as exciting as soggy corn flakes without sugar. He was an old fart with a sly face that would have served him well in a poker game.

  An American officer introduced Adenauer to the crowd in what sure sounded like fluent German to Bernie. Quite a few officers and some enlisted men could go pretty well auf Deutsch. Some had studied in school. Others, like this Lieutenant Colonel Rosenthal, came by it in different ways.

  Bernie wondered what Adenauer thought of having a Jew present him to his own countrymen. Or did Keith Rosenthal’s being an American count for more? Wasn’t Adenauer trying to show that Germans could handle their own affairs? Well, sure they could-as long as the occupying authorities said it was okay.

  Despite the lukewarm hand Adenauer got, he waved as he stepped up to the microphone. Maybe the krauts had had all their political enthusiasm knocked out of them by now. If they had, that probably wouldn’t be such a bad thing. When Bernie said so, Sergeant Corvo nodded. “You better believe it wouldn’t,” he opined. “Or maybe this Adenauer guy is as much of a boring old shithead as he looks like.”

  Corvo always said exactly what he meant. Whether Adenauer was getting his message across was liable to be another story. If he fired up the krauts in the crowd, they hid it well. Again, chances were that was good news.

  “You know a little of the lingo, right, Sarge?” Bernie said. “What’s he going on about?”

  “He says Germany has to…do something with England and France.”

  “Germany sure did something to ’em,” Bernie said.

  “Shut up,” Corvo snapped. �
�When you talk, I can’t make out what he’s going on about…. He says Germany needs to reconcile, that’s what it is. He says Germany has a lot to atone for…. Yeah, he’sa Catholic, all right. Catholics like to talk about atoning for shit.”

  “If you say so,” answered Bernie, a Methodist who hadn’t seen the inside of a church any time lately. New Mexico was full of Catholics, of course: well, as full of them as a mostly empty state could be. But he paid even less attention to their religion than to his own.

  How long would Adenauer go on? Some of Hitler’s rants had lasted for hours, hadn’t they? Did the Jerries expect all their politicians to match that? If they did…If they did, they were even screwier than Bernie Cobb gave them credit for, which was saying a mouthful.

  Fighting through France and Germany, Bernie’d hated land mines worse than anything else. They lay in wait for you, and if you stepped on one or tripped over a wire, that was all she wrote. Right behind them-right behind them-came mortar rounds. Ordinary artillery announced itself. Somebody yelled, “Incoming!” and a bunch of dogfaces hit the dirt or dove for holes. But half the time you didn’t know the bad guys had opened up with a mortar till the first bomb tore your buddy’s leg off…or maybe yours.

  Bernie heard a faint hiss, a faint whistle, in the air. He had a second or two to pretend he didn’t. It could have been a flaw in the microphone and speakers. It could have been the wind, which was nasty and cold. It could have been…

  Bam! An 81mm round burst right in the middle of the crowd of krauts listening to Konrad Adenauer. Next thing Bernie knew, he was as flat on the cobblestones as if a deuce-and-a-half had run over him. He wasn’t hurt. In a way, discovering his combat reflexes still worked was gratifying.

  Carlo Corvo had flattened out beside him. Quite a few of the German men were also down on their bellies. Yeah, they’d been through the mill, too. Shrieks said some people were down because the mortar bomb had knocked them down.

  And then another round came in, and another, and another. A trained two-man crew could fire ten or twelve a minute. Morons could use an 81mm once it was aimed. You dropped a bomb down the tube and you made sure it didn’t blow your head off when it came out again. It wasn’t near as tough as designing an atomic bomb.

  “Where the fuck you think they are?” Corvo yelled as fragments whined not nearly far enough overhead.

  “The mortar guys, you mean?” Bernie said. Corvo nodded without raising his head. Bernie’s shrug actually hunched him down lower. “Could be anywhere. With a full charge, one of those cocksuckers’ll shoot a mile and a half.”

  He tried to imagine securing everything within a circle three miles across centered on the market square. His imagination promptly rebelled. Somewhere-in a fenced-in yard or a back alley or up on a roof-a couple of mortarmen were having a high old time. And they could just leave the tube and bipod behind when they finished. How many mortars-German and American and British and Russian-littered the local landscape? Thousands, maybe even millions.

  “C’mon, get up! Get moving!” Corvo shouted. “We gotta make sure Adenauer’s okay. Fanatics are bound to be after him.”

  Bernie hadn’t even thought about that. He hadn’t thought about getting up under fire, either. He’d done it more often than he cared to remember during the war, but the war was over…wasn’t it? But seeing the sergeant stand up brought Bernie to his feet, too.

  Several other U.S. soldiers were also up. Most of them headed for the platform from which Adenauer spoke. Another mortar bomb scythed one of them down. Bernie looked away. You didn’t want to remember what explosives and jagged metal fragments could do to flesh.

  The mortar rounds stopped falling then. Either somebody’d caught the guys serving the nasty little piece or they’d figured they’d done their duty and bugged out. Bernie knew what he hoped. He also knew what he thought. They weren’t the same.

  There lay the auburn-haired gal he’d wished he were searching. Nobody’d want to feel her up now. A bad chest wound, a worse head wound…She was still moving and moaning, but Bernie didn’t think she’d last long. Too bad, too bad.

  He jumped up onto the platform, pointing his M-1 this way and that. It was dumb-he knew as much even while he did it. The bastards who’d done this weren’t close enough for the rifle to do him a nickel’s worth of good. Everybody here in the square with him probably hated the mortarmen as much as he did. But you wanted to hit back somehow, even when you couldn’t.

  “Oh…motherfuck.” Sergeant Corvo used his rifle, too, pointing with the muzzle.

  One of the mortar bombs had blasted Konrad Adenauer off the platform. He lay on his back, staring up at the sky. His thinning gray hair was mussed. A single drop of blood splashed the end of his long, pointed nose. Other than that, his face was untouched. He looked mildly surprised.

  Below his face…Bernie looked away. The mortar rounds had done worse to Adenauer than they had to the pretty woman with the dark red hair. “Motherfuck,” Carlo Corvo said again.

  “You got that right,” Bernie agreed. “He ain’t gonna be making more speeches any time soon. I mean, not unless it’s to St. Peter or the Devil, one.”

  A groan from a little farther away drew their attention to Lieutenant Colonel Rosenthal. He leaned against a wall, clutching one arm with his other hand. Blood leaked out between his fingers.

  “Can I bandage that for you, sir?” Bernie called.

  “I don’t think you’d better.” Rosenthal sounded eerily calm, as wounded men often did. “I’m holding it closed better than a bandage could. If you want to yell for a medic, that’d be good.” He paused as if remembering something. And he was, for he asked, “How’s Adenauer?”

  Bernie wished he could lie, but didn’t see how it would help. “Sir, he bought a plot.” He raised his voice: “Corpsman! We need a corpsman over here!”

  “Shit!” Rosenthal sounded furious. Then he said “Shit” again, this time in the way Bernie’d heard much too often before: the wound was starting to get its claws into him. Baring his teeth, the American officer went on, “Adenauer was the best hope we had for a Germany that isn’t either Nazi or Red.”

  “‘Was’ is right, sir. He’s a gone goose.” Bernie pointed toward the politician’s crumpled body. People always looked smaller when they were dead. He didn’t know why that was true, but it was.

  “Shit,” Keith Rosenthal said yet again. “Score a big one for Heydrich and his assholes, then. Who’s gonna have the nerve to try and stand up to ’em after this?”

  From in back of Bernie, Carlo Corvo said, “Here comes a medic.”

  “That was quick.” For a moment, Bernie was admiring. Then he wondered how come the aid man had got here so fast. Had the American authorities feared trouble and put the medics on alert, maybe even posted them close by? What did that say about Konrad Adenauer, who’d trusted U.S. security arrangements? It said he’d been a jerk-that was what.

  And what did it say about how things were going in Germany generally? Nothing good. Bernie Cobb was goddamn sure of that.

  Vladimir Bokov had been through the influenza before. You spent a week flat on your back. Then you spent another week feeling as if you’d been beaten with knouts. After that, you were pretty much all right.

  Running on benzedrine while you were at your sickest meant that afterwards you felt as if you’d been beaten with knouts and chains. And you felt that way for three weeks, not one.

  All of which got him scant sympathy from his superiors-not even from Moisei Shteinberg, who was as miserable as he was. “Did influenza keep anyone from holding the Nazis out of Moscow and Leningrad?” Shteinberg demanded. “Did it keep anyone from throwing them out of Stalingrad?” He paused for a coughing fit.

  Influenza probably kept some Red Army men flat on their backs during those fights. Bokov knew better than to say so. Instead, he said, “The Western imperialists have lost one of their reactionary politicians. I suppose we need to protect the leaders of the Social Unity Party of Germany.”<
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  “I suppose so. Ulbricht is…useful, no doubt about it.” Shteinberg spoke with the same not so faint distaste Bokov had used.

  They had their reasons. Walter Ulbricht was useful. He headed the Social Unity Party of Germany, the front through which the USSR intended to rule its chunk of the dead Reich. Like Lenin, he was bald and wore a chin beard. There the resemblance ended. Lenin, by all accounts, had been loyal to no one and nothing but himself-and the revolution.

  Ulbricht, by contrast, was Stalin’s lap dog. He’d spent the war in exile in the USSR, returning to Germany in the Red Army’s wake. He would do exactly what the Soviet Union told him to do, no more and no less. If Heydrich’s hooligans blew him off the face of the earth, Moscow might have to turn to someone less reliable-to say nothing of the propaganda victory his death would hand the bandits.

  With a sigh, Shteinberg went on, “I’m not really enthusiastic about keeping any Germans alive these days, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Well, Comrade Colonel, plenty who were alive on New Year’s Eve are dead now, and plenty more will be,” Bokov said.

  “They had it coming,” Shteinberg said coldly. Mass executions in Berlin and all through the rest of the Soviet zone warned the Germans that having anything to do with the Fascist bandits was a bad idea. Far bigger mass deportations drove home the same lesson. How the camps in the Arctic and Siberia would absorb so many…wasn’t Bokov’s worry. You could always plop prisoners down in the middle of nowhere and have them build their own new camp. If some of them froze before the barracks went up, if others starved-it was just one of those things.

  Bokov had been through the Germans’ murder camps. They sickened him-the Soviet Union had nothing like them. They also struck him as wasteful. They didn’t squeeze enough labor out of condemned people before letting them give up the ghost. Zeks were to use, not just to kill. So it seemed to him, anyhow.

  Shteinberg lit a cigarette. That made him cough, too, which didn’t keep him from smoking. “We never did catch the swine who poisoned the booze,” he wheezed, sucking in more smoke.