The Man with the Iron Heart (2 page)

No one at that conference had come right out and said Germany aimed to get rid of all the Jews in the territory she held. Nobody’d needed to. The high functionaries had understood what was what. So did Himmler, of course.

“Can you imagine the circus they’d have if they took the
Führer
alive?” Heydrich asked softly.

That turned out to be a keen shot, keener than he’d expected. Imagining, Himmler looked almost physically ill. “It must not happen!” he choked out. Maybe he was also imagining the circus the Allies would have if they took him alive. And maybe—no, certainly—he had reason to. Heydrich had had imaginings like that more often than he liked since the Czechs almost assassinated him.

“I hope it doesn’t. I pray it doesn’t,” he said now. “But this is war—war to the finish, war to the knife. Shouldn’t we be ready for anything, even the possibility of the worst?”

“What exactly have you got in mind?” the Reichsführer asked. Himmler’s voice was almost back to normal. Almost, but not quite.

“You’ll know, sir, probably better than I do, how much trouble the Russian partisans have given the
Wehrmacht,
” Heydrich said.

“And the
Waffen
-SS,” Himmler put in. “Several of our formations are in action behind the lines against those devils.”

“Yes, sir. And the
Waffen
-SS,” Heydrich agreed. “And the Soviets improvised those bands on the spur of the moment after the war broke out against them a year and a half ago. How much grief could we give enemy occupiers if we started preparing now, this instant, setting aside weapons and training men to fight as partisans if the worst comes? The more we did in advance, the more ready we’d be if, God forbid, they had to do what we’d trained them for.”

Himmler didn’t answer for some little while. He plucked at his lower lip with thumb and forefinger. That lip was oddly full, oddly sensuous, for the hard-boiled leader of an even more hard-boiled outfit. At last, he said, “This is not a plan I can deliver to
the Führer.
He remains unshakably convinced we shall emerge victorious in spite of everything.”

“I hope he’s right.” Heydrich knew he couldn’t very well say anything else.

“So do I. Of course.” By the way Himmler said it, he wasn’t optimistic no matter what he hoped.

“But don’t you think it’s something that needs doing?” Heydrich persisted. “It might not be something we could manage to scrape together at the last minute, with everything going to the devil around us. If we’d taken Moscow the first autumn and hanged Stalin in front of the Kremlin, what would the Soviet partisan movement be worth now?”

Himmler plucked at his red lower lip again. He let it spring back into place with a soft, liquid
plop.
After another pause, he said, “If we were to go forward with these preparations, it would be an SS undertaking.”

“Aber natürlich, Herr Reichsführer!”
Heydrich exclaimed. “This is the SS’s proper business. The
Wehrmacht
fights ordinary battles in ordinary ways. We need to be able to do that, too, but we also need to be able to do whatever else the State may require of us.”

“Jaaaa.”
Himmler let the word stretch. Seen through the pince-nez, his stare didn’t seem too dangerous—if you didn’t know him. Unfortunately, Heydrich did. The
Reichsführer
-SS said, “Since you propose this project, do you expect to head it?”

“Yes, sir,” Heydrich answered without the least hesitation. “I’ve been thinking about it for some time—since things, ah, first went wrong last fall at Stalingrad and in North Africa. Even if worse comes to worst, it would give us the chance to do the enemy a great deal of harm. In the end, it might save the
Reich
despite what would ordinarily be reckoned a defeat.”

“Do you think so?” Himmler looked and sounded unconvinced.

But Heydrich nodded. “I do. Especially in the west, the enemy is basically soft. How much stomach will he have for occupying a country where his soldiers aren’t safe outside their barracks—or inside them, either, if we can smuggle in a bomb with a time fuse?”

“Hmm,” Himmler murmured. He plucked once more.
Plop
—the lip snapped back. Heydrich thought the mannerism disgusting, but couldn’t very well say so. Pluck. Plop. Finally, the
Reichsführer
said, “Well, you’ve given me a good deal to think about. I can hardly deny that. We’ll see what comes of it.”

“The longer we wait, the more trouble we’ll have doing it properly,” Heydrich warned.

“I understand that,” Himmler said testily. “I have to make sure I can get it moving without…undue difficulties, though.”

“As you say, sir!” Heydrich was all obedience, all subordination. Why not? Himmler played the cards close to his chest, but Heydrich was pretty sure he’d won.

Lichtenau was a little town—not much more than a village—a few miles south and west of Nuremberg. Charlie Pytlak walked down what was left of the main street, a BAR cradled in his arms. He had the safety off and a round chambered. He knew the Nazis had surrendered the day before, but some damnfool diehards might not have got the word—or might not care. The only thing worse than getting it during the war was getting it afterwards.

He admired the shattered shops and houses and what had probably been a church. The bright spring sun cast his shadow ahead of him. “Wow,” he said with profound unoriginality, “we liberated the living shit out of this place, didn’t we?”

“Bet your ass, Sarge,” said Dom Lombardo. He’d liberated a German submachine gun—a machine pistol, the krauts called it. He kicked a broken brick out of the way. “Got any butts on you?”

“Sure thing.” Pytlak gave him a Chesterfield, then stuck another one in his own mouth. He flicked a flame from his Zippo to light both cigarettes; his unshaven cheeks hollowed as he sucked in smoke. He blew it out in a long stream. “Dunno why they make me feel good, but they do.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Lombardo agreed. “Couldn’t hardly fight a war without cigarettes and coffee.”

“I sure wouldn’t want to try,” Pytlak said. “I—”

He broke off. Half a dozen German soldiers came around a corner. A couple of them wore helmets instead of Jerry field caps—a sign they’d likely fought to the end. One of the bastards in ragged, tattered field-gray still carried a rifle. Maybe he just hadn’t thought to drop it. Or maybe…

“Hold it right there, assholes!” Pytlak barked. His automatic rifle and Dom’s Schmeisser swung to cover the enemy soldiers.

The Germans froze. Most of them raised their hands. The guy with the Mauser slowly and carefully set it down in the rubble-strewn street. He straightened and reached for the sky, too. May 1945 was way too late to die.

One of the krauts jerked his chin toward the Chesterfields Charlie and Dom were smoking. He wasn’t dumb enough to lower a hand to point.
“Zigarette, bitte?”
he asked plaintively. His buddies nodded, their eyes lighting up. The past couple of years, they must have been smoking hay and horseshit, except for what they could take from POWs.

“I can’t give ’em any, Sarge,” Lombardo said. “I had to bum this one offa you.”

“Fuck. I don’t wanna waste my smokes on these shitheads. A week ago, they’d’ve tried to waste me.” Pytlak looked the Germans over. They were pretty pathetic. A couple of them couldn’t have been more than seventeen; a couple of the others were nearer fifty than forty. The last two…The last two had been through the mill and then some. One of them wore an Iron Cross First Class on his left breast pocket. But they were whipped, too. You could see it in their eyes.

Charlie flicked the BAR’s safety on. He leaned the weapon against a wall and dug in his pocket for more cigarettes. As he started toward the Germans, Dom said, “I’ll cover you.”

“You goddamn well better, Ace.”

But there was no trouble. The German soldiers seemed pathetically grateful as Pytlak passed around the Zippo. And well they might have. The way things were in the ruins of the
Reich
these days, he could have got blown for half a dozen Chesterfields. He really was wasting them on these guys.

He scooped up the rifle the one guy had carried. Its safety was off, too. He took care of that. Then he tapped the other kraut’s Iron Cross. “Where?” he asked. The guy just looked at him. “Uh,
wo
?” Like most GIs, he’d picked up a few words of German.

“Ah.” The Jerry got it. “Kharkov.” He pointed east. “Russland.”

“Right,” Charlie said tightly. If you listened to the Germans, all of them had done all their fighting on the Eastern Front. Trouble with that was, Uncle Joe’s boys fought back a hell of a lot harder than the Nazis figured they would. As the war wound down, all the Germans wanted to do was get away from the Red Army so they could hand themselves over to Americans or Englishmen.

Well, these guys had made it. Charlie carried the rifle back to Dom and handed it to him. “Here. You can handle this and your grease gun. I’ve gotta lug the BAR around.”

“Thanks a bunch,” Dom said, slinging the Mauser. But Charlie knew he was right. The Schmeisser didn’t weigh even half as much as a Browning Automatic Rifle. And he was a sergeant, and Dom nothing but a PFC. What point to rank if you couldn’t use it?

They marched the Germans out of Lichtenau. There was a camp of sorts a couple of miles outside of town: a big barbed-wire cage in a field, now rapidly filling up with Jerries. If the surrendered soldiers had to sleep out in the open and eat U.S. Army rations for a while—well, too goddamn bad.

A truck’s carcass lay by the side of the road. It wasn’t a big, snorting GMC model from the States, but some shitty little German machine. It must have been machine-gunned from the air and then burned like a son of a bitch. Later, a tank or a bulldozer shoved it to one side so it wouldn’t block traffic.

A German in civvies was fiddling around in the wreckage. “Wonder what he’s up to,” Charlie said.

“Scrap metal—waddaya wanna bet?” Dom returned. “Fucking scavengers are gonna be everywhere for months. Years, probably.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Charlie laughed. “We turned this whole stinking country into scrap metal and garbage. Just what the assholes deserved, too.”

“I ain’t arguing,” Dom said.

The POW camp looked to be getting more organized by the minute. Charlie had to sign a paper saying he’d brought in six krauts. The corporal who manned a typewriter actually gave him a receipt for them. “The fuck’m I supposed to do with this?” Pytlak asked. “I feel like I just got into the slave-trading business.”

“Hang on to it,” the typist said. “We need to ask you anything about these guys, now we can.”

“Hot damn,” Charlie said, and then, “Jesus! I gotta figure out how many points I have. Sooner I get out of the Army, happier I’ll be.”

You earned discharge points for time in the service, for time overseas, for medals, for campaign stars on theater ribbons, and for kids under eighteen back home. Eighty-five would bring you home. Till now, Pytlak hadn’t worried about them much. But the war was over. That still took getting used to; damned if it didn’t.
And damned if I wanna hang around on occupation duty, either,
he thought.

“Don’t get hot and bothered, man,” the typist advised him. “They’re gonna ship all our asses to the Pacific so we can punch Hirohito’s ticket for him, too.”

Charlie’s reply was detailed and profane. Dom also chimed in with some relevant opinions. The corporal just grinned. He’d got under their skins, so he won the round. The really evil thing was, on top of that he was liable to be right.

Finally, in disgust, Pytlak said, “I’m gone. Next to this crap, Lichtenau looks goddamn good. You with me, Dom?”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Lombardo said.

They were both shaking their heads as they trudged back toward the town. “Fight the fuckin’ Japs,” Charlie muttered. “That’s just what I fuckin’ need. Time they ship my butt home, I’ll have a long white beard.”

Dom was more than ready to help him bitch. Dom was always ready to help a guy bitch. He’d been pretty handy with that Schmeisser when they really needed it, too. Before long, it’d be nothing but a souvenir—that or more scrap metal, one. Charlie had heard they weren’t letting GIs ship weapons home. One more chickenshit regulation, almost as bad as getting a receipt for POWs.

He and Dom came up to the corpse of the German truck. The scrounger who’d been messing around there was gone. “Who’s that asshole gonna sell his scrap to?” Charlie said. “Us—you wait and see. We’re dumb enough to pay good money to put these mothers back on their feet now that we stomped ’em.”

“Yeah, that’s like us, all right,” Dom agreed. “We—”

The truck blew up. Next thing Charlie knew, he was sprawled on the ground a surprisingly long way from the road. Dom—no, a piece of Dom—lay not far away. Charlie tried to reach out. His arm didn’t want to work. When he looked down at what was left of himself, he understood why. It didn’t hurt. Then, all at once, it did.

His shriek bubbled through the blood filling his mouth. Mercifully, blackness enfolded him.

L
IEUTENANT
L
OU
W
EISSBERG LOOKED AT THE CRATER BY THE SIDE OF
the road. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “Looks like a five hundred-pound bomb went off here.”

That won him the first respectful glance he’d got from the ordnance sergeant already on the scene. “Damn near, sir,” Toby Benton agreed, his slow Texas or Oklahoma drawl halfway to being a different language from Lou’s clotted New Jersey. “Reckon some Jerries snuck one of their two hundred and fifty-kilo jobs into the truck an’ then touched the mother off. Blew two of our guys to hell and gone.” He pointed over to the corpses.

They’d left the GIs where they lay, so Weissberg could look them over and use his brilliance to pull a Sherlock Holmes and tell everybody what was what. To ordinary soldiers, the Counter-Intelligence Corps did stuff like that. Lou belonged to the CIC. He wished like hell he could do stuff like that. Unfortunately, unlike ordinary soldiers, he knew better.

He went over anyway and trained a camera on the bodies. “I hate taking pictures of these poor guys, you know?” he said, snapping away anyhow. “But I gotta have something to bring back to Nuremberg so the big shots there can see what happened.”

“You better be careful, sir,” Sergeant Benton said.

“How come? Is the ground mined?” Lou stood as still as if he intended to take root right where he was. And if Benton nodded or said yes, that would be about the safest thing he could do.

But the noncom shook his head. “Nah—didn’t mean that. You keep talkin’ the way you are, though, people’re liable to reckon you’re a human being or somethin’.”

“Oh.” Lieutenant Weissberg wondered how to take that. To ordinary grunts, CIC officers probably
weren’t
human beings, if by human beings you meant those who lived the same way they did. Lou had fired his carbine exactly once during the war, when his outfit almost got overrun during the Battle of the Bulge. He’d slept warm and eaten well, unlike most mudfaces. Therefore…this was likely a genuine compliment. He treated it as one, answering, “Thank you, Sergeant.”

“You’re welcome, sir,” Benton said seriously. “I figured you’d be one o’ them behind-the-lines assholes…uh, no offense. But you don’t want to be doing this shit, neither.”

“You better believe it,” Lou said. “Somebody has to, though. German army surrendered. Unfuckingconditionally surrendered. If they think they can get away with crap like this…”

“What do we do about it?” Benton asked. “Take hostages and shoot ’em if the mothers who did this don’t turn themselves in? That’s what the Jerries woulda done, and you can take it to the bank.”

“I know.” Lou’s voice was troubled. “All kinds of things the Jerries would’ve done that I don’t want anything to do with.”

Toby Benton eyed the CIC man in a way he’d seen before: as someone who knew the straight skinny and might be tempted into talking about it. “That stuff they say about those camps—Dachau an’ Belsen an’ them all—they really that bad?”

“No,” Lou said tightly. Just when Benton started to breathe a sigh of relief, he went on, “They’re worse. They’re a thousand times worse, maybe a million. Far as I’m concerned, we should hang all the
mamzrim
who ran ’em. And you know what else? I think we’re going to.”

“If that shit is true—Jesus!—we ought to.” Sergeant Benton paused. “The what? Mom-something?”

“Oh.” Weissberg realized what he’d said. “It’s Yiddish. Means
bastards.
And they are.”

“I ain’t arguin’.” Benton eyed him again, this time not as a source but in another way he’d seen before. “Yiddish, huh? You’re, uh, a Jewish fella?”

“Guilty,” Lou said. How many Jews had the sergeant seen before? If he came off an Oklahoma farm, maybe not many. And was he a Regular Army guy or a draftee? Lou thought he might be career military, and not many Jews were.

“You
really
don’t like the krauts then, right?”

“You might say so, Sergeant. Yeah, you just might. If they were all in hell screaming for water, I’d pull up with a gasoline truck.”

“Heh.” Benton let out only a syllable’s worth of laughter, but his eyes sparked. “I like that—damned if I don’t.”

“Glad you do.” Lou came back over to the crater. “Me, I don’t like
this.
If the Germans think they can fuck around with us while we’re occupying their country…” His voice trailed away. What exactly could—would—the United States do about it?

“Awful lot of guys just want to head on home an’ pick up their lives where they left off,” Sergeant Benton remarked. “Hell, I sure do.” He
was
a draftee, then.

“I know. So do I,” Lou said. He’d been teaching high school English in Jersey City when the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. Nothing would make him happier than going back to diagramming sentences. But he was not the master of his fate or the captain of his soul. The master of his fate was back in Nuremberg, waiting to hear what he had to say about this. He sighed. What
could
he say that wasn’t obvious?