The Man with the Iron Heart (36 page)

“I wonder what it’d cost to air-condition the house,” Diana said when they left a theater one night. It was after ten, but still sweltering outside.

“I can tell you what,” Ed answered. “More than we can afford, that’s what. I make pretty good money, but not that kind.” He opened the Pontiac’s passenger door. Diana slid in. She knew he was right. Ed went around to get in on the street side. As he started the car, he went on, “You’ll be taking your trips, anyway. The trains are air-conditioned, and so are the hotels, right?”

“A lot of the time, anyhow,” Diana agreed.

“Well, that’s something, anyways.” Ed put the car in gear. “Where do you go next? Detroit?”

“No, Minneapolis,” she said.

He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “That’s right. I forgot. Detroit’s later. But they were both up north, and I mixed ’em up. It’s a wonder you can keep everything straight. Maybe it’ll be cooler up there. You can hope.”

“Sure,” Diana said, and then, after cautious silence, “Does it bother you that I’m gone so much?”

“Nah.” To her relief, Ed didn’t hesitate even a little bit. “It needs doin’. I couldn’t hack anything like that. I ain’t got the waddayacallit—the personality. But you’re goin’ great guns. Pat’d be proud of you. Honest to God, babe, he would.”

“Thanks.” Tears stung Diana’s eyes. She did sometimes wonder what their son would have thought of her campaign against the government. That was foolishness. She never would have started it if one of Heydrich’s fanatics hadn’t killed him and opened her eyes.

Minneapolis turned out to be hot, too. The paper there said the heat wave ran all the way up to Winnipeg, on the other side of the border. The Canadians were lucky. They didn’t have to try to help hold Germany down.

The ground around Minneapolis was as flat as if it had been ironed, and puddled with ponds and lakes of all sizes. Most of the people were tall and fair. They spoke with a slight singsong Scandinavian accent, and said
“Ja”
when they meant yes. Most of the time, they didn’t seem to notice the way they talked. Every once in a while, they would grin wickedly and put it on twice as thick to drive an out-of-towner loopy.

Signs printed in red on white—
STOP THE BLEEDING IN GERMANY! RALLY AT LORING PARK!
—were tacked to telephone poles and pasted to walls everywhere on the short car ride from the Great Northern depot to Diana’s hotel. “Looks like you folks have done a terrific job getting ready,” Diana told the couple who’d met her at the station.

“Well, we try,” said Susan Holmquist, who ran the Minnesota fight against the war.

“
Ja,
we do,” agreed her husband, Sven. They both seemed surprised at her praise. Other places, people acted as if they wanted a medal for pitching in. Not here, not with the Holmquists.

Quietly, Susan added, “Danny would have wanted it this way. If you do something, do it right.” Sven nodded. They’d lost their son at almost the same time as Diana lost Pat. A German wearing explosives under his clothes blew himself up in a crowd of GIs, and Danny Holmquist was one of the unlucky ones.

Loring Park had—inevitably—a two-lobed lake at its heart. Susan said the ice skating was terrific during the winter. Diana had tried ice skating exactly once, and sprained an ankle. Besides, just then she was amazed the little lake wasn’t steaming. The air shimmered under the swaggering sun.

A bunting-draped platform with a mike stood near a statue of Ole Bull. A plaque at the base of the statue explained that Ole Bull was a nineteenth-century Norwegian violinist. A good thing, too, because Diana wouldn’t have known otherwise. What he was doing immortalized in bronze in a Minneapolis park…Well, it was a Scandinavian part of the country.

Picketers paraded and chanted. Their placards carried all the slogans Diana had seen so often before. Some of them, she’d come up with herself. By now, she had trouble remembering which ones those were. They all blurred together.

People who disagreed with the picketers shouted and hooted. Bored-looking cops kept them from doing anything more. In places like New York City or Pittsburgh, the cops wouldn’t have looked bored. A lot more of them would have been here, too. Even so, they might not have been able to keep the two sides apart. Folks in these parts seemed to have better manners.

Susan Holmquist made a speech. The crowd in front of the podium—not too big, not too small—listened politely. They applauded politely at the right places. Reporters took notes. Photographers photographed. It was all very civilized. If everybody behaved like this, World War II probably never would have happened. But…

Susan introduced Diana, who got a bigger hand. Stepping up to the microphone, Diana thought of how scared of public speaking she’d been when she started out. She wasn’t any more. She’d done it often enough to let it lose its terrors.

She hammered away at the points she’d made so many times before. Why was the USA still in Germany? Why had so many young men died after victory was declared? Why couldn’t the Americans—or anyone else—squash the German fanatics? How long would it go on? How much more money and how many more lives would it cost?

She cut her speech shorter than usual. They were going to do something different here. They were going to read out, one after another, the names of all the servicemen and-women killed in Germany since what was laughably called V-E Day.

Sven Holmquist came up with a typewritten sheet of paper. “Irving Sheldon Aaronson,” he intoned. “Hovan Abelian. Creighton Abrams. Manuel José Acevedo…”

Diana found herself nodding as she listened to name following name. It was oddly impressive, oddly dignified. And it brought home, one name at a time, just what the United States had already thrown away.

Maybe she wasn’t the only one who felt that way. A man in a suit bustled out of the crowd and headed toward the speakers’ platform. He had a pointed chin and a high forehead—he was going to lose his hair, but he hadn’t lost too much yet. Diana noticed his person less than she noticed that the police were letting him through. “Who is that guy?” she whispered to Susan. “What’s he doing?”
Is he safe?
was what she really meant.

“That’s Mayor Humphrey. Hubert Humphrey,” Susan answered. The name meant nothing to Diana. The Minneapolis woman went on, “He’s pro-administration all the way.”

Humphrey hopped up onto the platform. “May I say a few words?” he asked. His voice was a light tenor, a bit on the shrill side.

“This isn’t your show, Mr. Mayor,” Sven Holmquist said. “This is ours.”

But Hubert Humphrey grabbed the mike anyway. “Folks, I just want you to think about one thing,” he said loudly. Diana got the idea that there would be no such thing as
a few words
from him. He went on, “If we run away from Germany, the Nazis win. All the soldiers who’ve died will have died for nothing. For nothing—do you hear me? We will have wasted years and tens of thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars. Is that what you want? Cutting and running won’t—”

Diana took the microphone away from him. He looked astonished—he wasn’t used to people doing anything like that. “Mr. Humphrey, Mr. Holmquist was right. This is
our
show,” Diana said. “If you want your own, you can have it, I’m sure.”

“I only meant—” Humphrey began.

“I don’t care what you meant, sir.” Diana cut him off. It wasn’t easy—he was used to talking through or over other people. But, with the mike in hand, she did it, adding, “When I was a girl, Wilson talked about the War to End War. What did he know? Was he right? What do politicians ever know? Let the people decide, if you please.”

The crowd really applauded then. Hubert Humphrey looked amazed all over again. He eyed Diana as if he were seeing her for the first time. “There’s more to you than meets the eye,” he said.

“I don’t know about that. I don’t care, either,” Diana answered. “All I know is, this is our show, and we’re going to run it. Get down off this platform before I ask the police to run you in for interfering with a public meeting.”

He blinked. “You would, wouldn’t you?”

“Mr. Humphrey, it would be a pleasure. Now get down,” Diana said. And Humphrey did, because he had to know she wasn’t bluffing. She gave the microphone back to Sven Holmquist. “If you’d go on from where you were interrupted, please…”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, something not far from awe in his voice. “Donald Andrew Barclay. Peter LeRoy Barker…”

A
ROOM.
A
COUPLE OF ARMED GUARDS.
A
BRIGHT LIGHT.
A
PRISONER.
An interrogator. How many times had that scene played out during the war, and in how many countries—to say nothing of how many movies? Now Lou Weissberg was in the driver’s seat. The light shone into
Hauptsturmführer
Egon Steinbrecher’s face. They’d been through several sessions by now. Lou was fast running out of patience with the captured German.

“Look,” he said in reasonable tones, “you’re a dead man. The Geneva Convention doesn’t apply. Your side surrendered. If you fight on after that, it’s your tough luck.”

The SS captain licked his lips. He’d been slapped around a little, but nothing more. Lou and the Americans generally didn’t like torture. Unless you had to tear something out of somebody right this second, what was the point? And Steinbrecher didn’t know anything like that. Lou got the feeling he wasn’t up to being a suicide warrior, the way too many of Heydrich’s fanatics were. But he tried to hold a bold front: “So why have you not killed me, then?”

“Why do you think?” Lou said. “So we can squeeze you. If you sing pretty enough, we may even let you keep breathing. Who all was in your cell?”

“You already know that,” Steinbrecher said. “They had bad luck when they attacked your men.”

“Those were the only ones?” Lou asked. The German nodded. Lou laughed in his face. “Tell me another one.”

“It is the truth.” Steinbrecher sounded affronted that anyone could doubt his word. He yawned. He hadn’t had much sleep since he got nabbed. That wasn’t quite torture, not to Lou’s way of thinking. And it could soften a guy up, or at least make him punchy and stupid.

“How do you get your orders?” Lou asked.

“There is—there was—a drop in a hollow tree fifty meters behind my shop,” Steinbrecher said. “Sometimes a piece of paper would show up there. It would tell me what to do. I would do it. I do not know who put the paper in, so you need not ask me that.”

“I’ll ask you whatever I damn well please,” Lou snapped. The trouble was, he believed Steinbrecher here. That was how undergrounds all over the world ran their operations. If you didn’t know who gave you your orders, you couldn’t tell the other side if they caught you. Lou grimaced; this wasn’t going the way he wanted. He took another stab at it: “You can’t do any better, it’s time for the blindfold and cigarette.”

This time, the SS man gulped. And he named half a dozen names, all of them men living in Pförring. “They all hate you,” he declared.

“We’ll check it out,” Lou said. He left the interrogation room and made a telephone call. An hour and a half later, he got an answer. The men were…just men. Nothing showed they had any connection with the fanatics.

An hour after that,
Hauptsturmführer
Egon Steinbrecher stood tied to a pole in front of a wall. He declined the blindfold, but accepted a cigarette—ironically, a Lucky—from Lou, who commanded the firing squad. “I die for Germany,” he said as he finished the smoke.

“You die, all right,” Lou agreed. He stepped aside and nodded to the half-dozen GIs. “Ready…Aim…Fire!” Their M-1s barked. Steinbrecher slumped against the pole. He died fast; Lou didn’t have to finish him off with his carbine. That was a relief, anyhow. He’d had this duty before, and he hated it.

He also hated not getting more—hell, not getting anything—out of Steinbrecher. Maybe he hadn’t known the one right question to ask, the one that would have made the German sing. Maybe there hadn’t been any one right question. All he had now was one more dead Nazi, which wasn’t bad, but wasn’t good enough.

In the first days of the occupation, they’d taken newsreels of executions like this and shown them in German theaters. That quickly stopped; the films raised sympathy for Heydrich’s goons, not the fear U.S. authorities wanted. No camera crew here. Just the squad, and a couple of the GIs looked as if they wanted to be sick.

Lou cut Steinbrecher’s body down. “Bury this crap,” he said. Sometimes nothing went the way you wished it would.

Jürgen had been in Paris twice before. He’d paraded through the City of Light in June 1940. Everything seemed possible then. Hell, everything seemed likely. The
Wehrmacht
had done what the Kaiser’s army never could. France lay naked at Germany’s feet.

With a smile, Jürgen remembered how tired he’d been as he marched under the
Arc de Triomphe.
Tired? Hell, he’d been out on his feet. So had most of the
Landsers
who tramped along with him. They’d had a month of hard fighting to get to where they were, and they’d felt every minute of it.

But great days, great days. England would give up next, and that would end the war. The
Reich
would take its rightful place in the sun. Everybody would be happy, and he could take off the
Feldgrau
and go back to being a longshoreman again.

Only things worked out a little differently.
Yeah, just a little,
Jürgen thought wryly. When he came back to Paris, it was December 1943. The Red Army had just chased his division out of Kiev. He’d been on the Eastern Front for a couple of years. He’d stopped one bullet and one shell fragment by then. His left elbow didn’t bend much, but if you were right-handed you could live with that.

Paris…wasn’t the same. Winter, sure. But also shortages of everything. Electricity only a few hours a day. Not much heat. The streets empty of cars. Skinny, shabby people on foot or making do with bicycles. The restaurants couldn’t cook what they couldn’t get. Even the whores just went through the motions.

Well, Jürgen wasn’t the same as he’d been in 1940, either. He’d only imagined he was tired back in the old days. He hadn’t had exhaustion seep into his bones, into his very soul. In 1943, he’d hibernated like a dormouse all the way across Europe in his railway car. He’d hardly looked out to notice what Lancasters and B-17s and B-24s were doing to the
Vaterland.

He’d seen bad things fighting through France. He’d thought he’d seen everything. What the hell did he know? He was just a kid. What he’d seen in Russia, what he’d done in Russia…Even now, he shied away from remembering that. And it wasn’t as if the Ivans didn’t play the game the same filthy way. What they did to some of the guys they captured…Jürgen shied away from remembering that, too. You always saved one cartridge for yourself. You didn’t want them getting hold of you. Oh, no!

So he wasn’t afraid of doing himself in. He might have needed to do it long before this if
Reichsprotektor
Heydrich’s men hadn’t plucked him from the depot and turned him into a holdout. He still wanted to live, but all that soldiering had taught him you didn’t always get what you wanted.

So here he was in Paris again, in the cab of a U.S. two-and-a-half-ton truck. He wore olive-drab American fatigues that fit pretty well but not quite well enough. He had papers that showed he was somebody called Paul Higgins. It was the kind of name even a German who knew no English could pronounce well enough. He’d traveled across France with it. He didn’t have far to go now.

Once more, Paris wasn’t the same. It was nighttime. All the lights were on. That struck him as perverse. But Paris didn’t worry about air raids now. And it seemed to have been captured by Americans. Olive drab was everywhere. So were trucks just like the one he drove. They made traffic on the narrow, winding streets horrendous.

After a while, he realized not all the olive-drab uniforms had Americans in them. A French
flic
directing traffic in a kepi looked like an Ami from the neck down. Maybe not all the deuce-and-a-halfs had American drivers. Jürgen chuckled. He knew one that damn well didn’t.

He checked the map on the seat beside him. That was funny, too. He could see where he was going, by God! He just had to find the right way to get there. Also on the seat lay a
Sturmgewehr
and a couple of extra magazines. He’d taken them out of hiding when he got into town. He might need to do some shooting on the last leg of the trip. Extra steel sheets armored his doors. Heydrich’s mechanics hadn’t had to do that. The Ami who’d driven the truck before it was stolen had taken care of it. He hadn’t wanted to stop a German bullet. Jürgen didn’t want to stop an American round, or even a French one. Not now. Not when he’d come this far.

He came up alongside the Champ du Mars: a rectangle of greenery and geometrically precise garden in the heart of Paris. The Eiffel Tower loomed ahead. Beyond it lay the Pont d’Jena. Napoleon had beaten the Prussians at Jena; Jürgen knew that. The French named their bridges for battles they’d won. There wouldn’t be a Pont d’Ardennes in Paris any time soon.

Well, he wasn’t going as far as the Pont d’Jena anyhow. He cut hard left and made for the base of the Tower. A
flic’s
whistle shrilled—he wasn’t supposed to do that. He started to reach for the assault rifle. Spraying a few bullets around would buy him the time he needed.

But nobody opened up on him. Nobody tried to block him. The Paris cop blew his whistle again, furiously. He thought Jürgen was a drunk Ami on a joyride. Jürgen laughed. Sorry,
flic.

Orders were to see if he could drop the Tower straight down onto the Pont d’Jena, to double the damage from its fall. One look told Jürgen that wouldn’t happen. The supports were positioned so it had to go down diagonally to the bridge. Nobody back in Germany had remembered that.

Well, if it went into the Seine, that would screw things up pretty goddamn well. Jürgen thought it was tall enough to reach. As he drove under the more northerly of the riverside supports, somebody—probably that policeman—fired a pistol at the truck. Too little, too late: like everything the French did.

Jürgen’s finger found the detonator button on the side of the steering column. He wished he could watch what was about to happen. It ought to make one hell of a show. Oh, well. You couldn’t have everything.
“Sieg heil!”
Jürgen said, and stabbed the button hard.

L
OU
W
EISSBERG STARED AT THE FRONT PAGE OF THE
I
NTERNATIONAL
Herald-Tribune.
Some photographer was going to win himself a Pulitzer Prize for this pic, the way that guy in the Pacific had for his shot of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima the year before.

There was the Eiffel Tower, still mostly lit up, leaning at a forty-five-degree angle to the rest of the skyline. But it didn’t keep leaning, the way the Tower of Pisa did. It crashed all the way down, the last hundred feet or so going right into the Seine.

“What a mess,” Lou muttered. “What a fucking mess!”

He read the story, though the headline—
TOWER FALLS!
—and the photo got the message across by themselves. Sometimes the details carried a morbid fascination of their own. He learned that, counting radio antenna, the Tower was (had been) more than a thousand feet high: taller than anything manmade except the much newer Empire State Building. It weighed about 10,000 tons, or as much as the water a heavy cruiser displaced. And now…it was 10,000 tons of scrap iron.

Shaking his head, Lou turned to the
Continued on page 3.
The inside page had another shot of the toppled Tower, this one taken in the cold gray light of dawn. As it lay on the ground—and in the river—it reminded him of nothing so much as one more soldier shot dead in the war.

The story said eighty-one people had died when the Eiffel Tower fell. Some had been on it, others under it or caught in the blast of the exploding truck that sheared through one of its enormous feet. And a weatherman who’d been up at the very top reading a barometer got pitched into the Seine and was fished out with nothing worse than a broken wrist.

“Fuck!” Lou said when he read that. “Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good.” If he were that weatherman, he thought he’d go out looking for wallets.

Next to the inside photo and the continuation of the story from the front page was another one. Seeing its headline—
GERMAN FREE
DOM FRONT CLAIMS BLAST
—Lou ground his teeth. Heydrich’s goons had released a statement by planted communiqués, telephone calls, and their clandestine radio station. The stinking bastards didn’t miss a trick, God damn their black-hearted souls to hell.

If you believed them (and Lou, unfortunately, had no reason not to), the fellow who’d brought the tower down was an
Unteroffizier
—a lousy corporal—named Jürgen Voss.
He gave up his life gloriously for the future liberation of the Fatherland and its folk,
the statement said.
Let all who dare to oppose us beware!

Of course, a lousy corporal from the last war, a fellow by the name of Hitler, had done a lot more damage than this Jürgen Voss ever dreamt of. But it sure wasn’t bad for a first try.

General de Gaulle’s statement only made page four. Lou thought putting Heydrich ahead of him was chickenshit, but what could you do about newspapermen? “The Tower shall rise again,” de Gaulle declared. “Nazi Germany never will.” Slowly, Lou nodded. That had style. If only he could be as confident himself as de Gaulle sounded.

Harry Truman’s response went right next to the French leader’s. “Today, we are all Frenchmen,” the President said. That was pretty good, too. Truman went on, “This latest vile Nazi atrocity shows the desperation of the madmen who refuse to accept the verdict of history.”

Lou frowned. That also sounded good. Chances were it’d play well back in the States. It was a vile atrocity, no two ways about it. But were Heydrich and his chums madmen? Were they desperate? If they were, they hid it much too well.

Fighting the USA—and the UK, and the USSR—toe-to-toe hadn’t worked out so well for the Third
Reich.
Fighting a partisan war was a whole different story, dammit. If you were trying to drive the other guy nuts and hurt him way worse than he could hurt you…Well, if you were trying to do something like that, how could you play your hand better than Heydrich had?

It was nine in the morning. Lou headed for the officers’ club anyway. He needed something to turn off part of his brain. Right now, bourbon would do.

Like so much of the American presence in Nuremberg these days, the Quonset hut that housed the officers’ club cowered behind rings of barbed wire and sandbagged machine-gun emplacements. The GIs who manned those emplacements seemed extra jumpy this morning. Lou would have, too. If Heydrich’s goons could knock over the Eiffel Tower, for Christ’s sake, what was one stinking officers’ club?

Not worth noticing. Lou hoped.

Even so early, the place was more crowded than it usually was at night. Tobacco smoke hazed the air. Almost every man in there, from lowly second lieutenant to bird colonel, held a copy of the
Herald-Trib
or of
Stars and Stripes,
which also had that picture of the Tower in mid-fall. And almost every man in there was drinking hard.

“What’ll it be, sir?” asked the PFC tending bar when Lou squeezed up to him. Once upon a time, a Jerry had worked back there. After what happened to the Russians in Berlin, that didn’t look like a good idea any more.

“Bourbon on the rocks,” Lou said. “Make it a double. I’ve got some catching up to do.”

“Yes, sir. Comin’ up.” The kid poured in two generous jiggers of Kentucky lightning and some ice cubes. “Hell of a mornin’, ain’t it?”

“Man, you said a mouthful.” Lou looked around. Major Frank was sitting with a tough, skinny major named Ezra Robertson. Robertson, who was from Vermont or New Hampshire—Lou couldn’t remember which—was supposed to help the prosecutors in the war-crimes trials. If the twice-derailed trials ever got off the ground, no doubt he would.

Frank waved. Lou snagged a chair and joined the two majors. He raised his glass. “Mud in your eye.” Frank and Robertson both had glasses in front of them. They drank with him. The bourbon ran down his throat like sour-mash fire. “Whew!” He shook his head. “Tastes funny this time of day.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t go with powdered eggs, that’s for damn sure.” Major Robertson waved his hands. “Sure isn’t stopping anybody, though.”

“It’s like it was us. This is even worse than that radium bomb in Frankfurt. Who would’ve thought anything could be?” Howard Frank said gloomily. He put his head in his hands. Had he drunk himself sad already? Not a world record, maybe, but pretty fast. His voice was muffled as he went on, “We are screwed. We are so fucking screwed.”

“Not yet, goddammit,” Robertson said. “The fanatics can annoy us. They can embarrass us. But they can’t beat us. They can’t make us pack up and go—not a chance in church, gentlemen. They flat-out aren’t strong enough. The only people who can beat us is us.” He frowned. “Uh, are us? Hell, you know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” Lou said. “That’s why we’re screwed. Elections coming up. What happens when all the people who’re squealing ‘Get out of Germany now!’ go into Congress?”

“So fucking screwed,” Frank intoned again, as if it were a dirge. And so it was much too likely to be.

“Red Army doesn’t have to worry about this election shit,” Robertson said. “Uncle Joe tells ’em hop, and up they go.”

“Fanatics are giving them a hard time, too,” Lou said. “They’re finding out how much fun the other end of a partisan war is.”