The Man with the Iron Heart (22 page)

“Always good advice,” Lou agreed. He tapped his driver on the shoulder. “On to Cologne.”

“Yes, sir.” The driver had make jokes about smells and perfume till Lou was sick of them. For a wonder, the guy seemed to realize as much, and cut it out. Maybe the age of miracles wasn’t dead after all.

The British zone lay northwest of the bigger stretch of territory the USA administered. Signs in German lined the road.
THE FANATICS HURT YOU!
they said, and
THE WAR IS OVER
, and
DON’T LET THE MADMEN GET AWAY WITH IT
. Lou didn’t know how much the propaganda helped, but it sure couldn’t hurt. He wished U.S. military authorities were trying more of the same thing.

There’d been more fighting here than in most of the American zone. Wrecked trucks and tanks—U.S., British, and German—still lay by the side of the road and in the fields. They made Lou nervous: too many of them offered perfect hiding places for a diehard with a
Panzerschreck
or a Schmeisser or even a Molotov cocktail. Hastily dug graves were scattered over the countryside, some still marked by no more than a bayoneted rifle thrust into fresh-dug earth, sometimes with a helmet on it, sometimes without.

Only makeshift bridges led across the Rhine to Cologne. Bombing had destroyed some of the real ones, and the Nazis the rest. In the Rhineland, relatively close to England, Cologne had got the hell bombed out of it all through the war, and then the Germans fought in the ruins. Lou hadn’t thought a city could be in worse shape than Nuremberg, but this one was.

He presented his papers at an enormous tent near the ruins of the train station. “Care for a glass of beer?” asked the British Intelligence major who cleared him.

“I’d love one. Thanks,” Lou answered. “Although after what the Jerries did to Ivan last week…”

“They’ve played with poisoned liquor here, too. Haven’t they in your zone?”

“Yeah, but with hard stuff, not beer. And they’ve done it by nickels and dimes, not all at once like they did with the Russians.”

“By nickels and dimes,” the major murmured. Lou realized people from the other side of the Atlantic sometimes needed to pause and decipher American lingo, too.

The beer was excellent, far better than anything you could get back in the States. The Germans might be murderous,
“Heil!”
-screaming brutes, but by God they could brew.

Lou was halfway down his stein when the man he was waiting for strode into the tent. The British major—his name was Hudgeons—introduced them in fluent German: “
Herr
Adenauer, this is
Oberleutnant
Weissberg, of U.S. Counter-Intelligence.
Oberleutnant,
this is Konrad Adenauer, former lord mayor of Cologne, former denizen of one of the late regime’s concentration camps, and current founder of the Christian Democratic Union.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Lou said. Most Germans these days claimed to have been anti-Nazi. Adenauer really had been. He was around seventy, with thin, foxy features and a perpetually worried air. Well, he’d earned the right to that.

“A lieutenant,” Adenauer said sadly. “Well, I suppose I am pleased to meet you, too. Not your fault your superiors don’t take this more seriously.” No matter what he claimed, he was affronted. Europeans set more stock on status and rank than Americans did; Lou’d seen that before. Adenauer thought he deserved a colonel or something. Chances were he was right, too.

“Tell me about your new party,
Herr
Adenauer,” Lou urged.

“Before 1933, I belonged to the Catholic Center. Thanks to the Nazis, though, this party is now
kaput.
No point trying to make a dead body into Lazarus,” Adenauer said, and Lou nodded. He only wished the Nazis made as quiet a corpse as the Catholic Center Party did. Hudgeons’ batman or whatever the noncom was called fetched Adenauer a mug of beer. After a healthy swig, the German went on, “So we try something new, eh? Germany needs a responsible conservative party. We will not work with those, ah, to the right of us. We know better.”

“Hope so,” Lou said. Back in 1933, plenty of conservatives thought they could work with the Nazis. Hitler’s henchmen chewed them up and swallowed them.

“We do—from experience,” Adenauer said. “If Germany is to become a democracy—a proper democracy—she must sooner or later have her own parties. And they must be independent, and be seen to be independent. Otherwise, our folk will think they are tools of the occupiers, and will not want much to do with them. They will instead work with Heydrich’s maniacs…and with those on the left. We also aim to form a bulwark against Communism.”

Maybe the American occupation authorities had sent Lou to Cologne instead of somebody more senior so they wouldn’t seem too interested in the Christian Democratic Union. That was possible, but Lou didn’t believe it. His superiors didn’t have the subtlety for a move like that. They were paying for the lack, too.

“Heydrich’s goons take Konrad seriously,” Major Hudgeons put in. “A bloke with a bomb under his clothes tried to take him out, but the bloody thing didn’t go off. We nabbed him, and we’ve learned some interesting things about how the fanatics operate in our zone.”

“I lit a candle in the church of St. Pantaleon to thank the Lord for sparing me,” Adenauer said. “I take it as a sign that I am meant to succeed. And if I fail, what is left for Germany but the old dreadful choice between brownshirts and Reds?”

“Sooner or later—sooner, with luck—Germany will need to stand on her own two feet again,” Hudgeons said. “So we see it, anyhow. The only other choice is sitting on this country forever, and that would be…difficult.”

Lou thought it was just what Germany deserved. Whether the rest of the USA felt the same way was liable to be a different story. People with picket signs marching in front of the White House? Congressmen and Senators with them? If they’d done that while the war was still going, it would have been treason, or something close to it. It still felt that way to Lou, even though the fighting was officially over. But more and more Americans seemed to think otherwise. And fewer and fewer dogfaces on occupation duty wanted to do anything more than pack up and go home in one piece.

“We can stand up, stand alongside of the United States and Britain and France as a free and prosperous democracy,” Adenauer said. “We
can.
But we will not, not until people are able to go about their business without worrying whether a fanatic will blow himself up in the market square or explode a truck in front of the church on Sunday morning. However much you may hate it, fear is a weapon.”

He had a point. Lou wished he knew how to keep Heydrich’s men from making everybody else afraid. No one seemed to know how to do that, not yet. Could something like the Christian Democratic Union make a difference? Lou didn’t know—but if it could, he was all for it.

Sometimes you stepped on a dog turd and came out smelling like a rose. Sometimes the bread landed butter side up. Sometimes, even in the newspaper game, you had to go easy on the clichés and just write.

When the Army booted Tom Schmidt out of Germany, he’d been afraid he would have to quit reporting and find a real job. If he didn’t have to go that far, he’d figured he would end up on a weekly in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that never got word of his fall from journalistic grace.

He’d been doing what he thought was right when he passed on the fanatics’ film of luckless Private Cunningham. He’d had the nasty feeling that would make him a villain to almost everyone outside the news business. To his surprise, he turned out to be wrong. A startling—and growing, which was even more startling—number of people back in the USA were loudly calling for President Truman to bring all the GIs home from Germany. They weren’t always people he was comfortable with, but he was in no position to be choosy.

He was, for instance, a staunch New Dealer. The
Chicago Tribune
had gone after FDR from the minute he got nominated to run against Hoover. The
Tribune
showed no signs of letting up on Democrats just because a new fanny sat in the Oval Office swivel chair, either. But when it offered him a slot in Washington at twice the money he’d been making before he had to come home, how could he say no?

He couldn’t. He didn’t even try. He had no trouble snagging an apartment in Washington. Now that the war was over, or mostly over, or whatever it was, more people flowed out of the capital than came in. His landlord was almost pathetically eager to have him.

He didn’t have much trouble finding a replacement for Ilse, either. An awful lot of people left in Babylon by the Potomac were secretaries and clerk-typists. Making connections wasn’t hard. Myrtle was more expensive than Ilse; she wouldn’t put out for K-rations. What the hell? You couldn’t have everything.

When Tom applied for a White House press credential, he wondered if the flunkies there would tell him to fold it till it was all corners and then stuff it. But, after one of them made a phone call to a higher-up, everything went snicker-snack.

“Thanks,” he said, wondering how his vorpal blade managed to slice through red tape.

“It ain’t your pretty face, buddy,” the press secretary’s subordinate replied. “If we turned you down, how much crap would you crank out about how we were stifling free expression? So we won’t stifle it. You want to ask the President questions, go ahead. Five gets you ten he spits in your eye.”

Roosevelt had been a gentleman right down to his paralyzed toes. From what Tom heard, Harry Truman was anything but. If he thought you were a son of a bitch, he’d call you one. Well, it made for good copy. “I’ll take my chances,” Tom said.

“You sure will.” The other man sounded as if he looked forward to it.

If Truman cussed him out…Tom had been cussed out by experts. You couldn’t quote a President cussing—there were unwritten rules about such things, as there were about reporting on, say, a Senator’s lady friends—but you could probably get the idea across one way or another.

Tom’s chance came on a blustery day in the middle of January. He presented his pass at the front gate of the White House, wondering if the guards would turn him away at the last minute. But they didn’t. One of them said, “Lucky stiff—you get to go inside. Goddamn cold out here.”

They wouldn’t have had anything to complain about in the White House press room. Tom figured he’d come out as a ham: thoroughly cooked, and just as thoroughly smoked. His own Old Gold added only a little to the tobacco haze. Truman’s press secretary came in and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.” Charlie Ross was a longtime Missouri newspaper man. He was an even longer-time friend of Truman’s; they’d gone to high school together. Rawboned, with a lock of gray hair that flopped down onto his forehead, he stood several inches taller than the President.

But Truman ran the show. He bustled in and started sassing several correspondents he knew well. They returned fire. Truman wasn’t Stalin—giving him a hard time wouldn’t cost you your head. He looked out over the crowd of reporters. When his eyes met Tom’s, he said, “Haven’t seen you here before. You new?”

“Yes, sir. Tom Schmidt, from the
Chicago Tribune.
”

“Oh. You’re him.” Truman looked as if somebody’d just farted. “Charlie wanted to give you the bum’s rush, but I said no. You don’t have to go sneaking around any more, Mr. Schmidt. If you’ve got something to say, say it to my face. Believe me, I can take the heat.”

“Thanks, Mr. President,” Tom said. “I wouldn’t’ve had to sneak if your people in Germany weren’t hiding how badly things are going there.”

“They’re still fighting in Germany, Mr. Schmidt, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Truman said tartly. “We don’t want to spread information that can help the fanatics.” He might be tart, but he was also smart: he didn’t use the word
war.
The war, after all, was over.

Sure it is,
Tom thought. “Well, yes, sir,” he replied. “But since the Nazis were the ones who kidnapped that poor GI and then filmed him, don’t you think they already knew what was going on?”

Truman glowered at him over the tops of his metal-rimmed glasses. Tom felt as if he were getting grilled by his principal after some high-school scrape. No doubt the President wanted him to feel just that way. “During the War Between the States, Abe Lincoln asked why he had to order a young deserter shot but let the clever so-and-so who conned him into deserting go free,” Truman said. “All these years later, it’s still a damn good question. Or don’t you think morale matters?” He skated around war again.

“Of course I do, Mr. President,” Tom said. “But I think truth matters, too. Or what are we fighting for? Hitler was the one who went in for the big lie.”

Truman’s nostrils flared as he snorted angrily. “I suppose you think we should have pointed a big arrow with neon lights at the Normandy beaches and run up a billboard that said ‘We’re going to invade here.’ Some things need to be kept secret, that’s all. Go ahead—tell me I’m wrong.”

“Not me.” Tom shook his head. “But you can hide anything you want behind that kind of smoke screen. Like I said, we weren’t keeping this from the Nazis. We were keeping it from our own people. I don’t think that’s right.”

“Heydrich’s so-and-so’s didn’t snatch Private Cunningham because they figured we’d yield to those demands they made him mouth,” Truman snapped. “They released that movie because they wanted to confuse decent Americans and to scare them.
Schrechlichkeit,
they call it. Frightfulness. We tried to suppress it to keep that from happening—at my order, in case you’re wondering. But you played straight into their murderous hands. Thank you one hell of a lot, Mr. Schmidt. I hope you’re proud.”

Tom had thought the President would say his commanders in Germany had made the decision and he backed them because they were the experts and they were on the spot. Something like that, anyhow. But Harry Truman didn’t seem to work that way. He’d done what he’d done, and he was ready to argue about it. Right or wrong, he had the courage of his convictions.

“And now I’ve wasted enough time on you,” he continued. “Too much time, to tell you the truth. Let’s get back to business. Who else has got a question for me?” Hands shot into the air. Truman pointed at a heavyset bald man. “Drew?”

“How long can we keep troops in Germany if the American people decide they don’t want to any more?” Drew Pearson asked.

If the look the President sent him didn’t scream
Et tu, Brute?,
Tom had never seen one that did. “Since I don’t believe the American people are going to decide any such thing, that isn’t worth answering,” Truman said.

“Diana McGraw will tell you you’re wrong, sir,” Pearson responded.

“I respect Diana McGraw. I sympathize with her, too, and with all the good people who’ve lost loved ones because of Heydrich’s fanatics. Hitler called Heydrich the man with the iron heart, and for once Adolf wasn’t lying.” Truman deigned to shoot Tom another glare. Then he went on, “I talked with her when she came to picket the White House last month. I’m convinced she’s sincere. I’m also convinced she’s wrong. If we run away from Germany without finishing the job we set out to do there, we’ll be worse off in the long run than if we stay. And not in the very long run, either.”

“More and more people seem to agree with what she’s saying,” Drew Pearson observed.

“Well, so what? That doesn’t make them right.” Yes, Truman could be as stubborn as a Missouri mule. “And just because there are more of them than there were, that doesn’t mean there are very many of them. Most Americans can see farther than the end of their nose—and a good thing, too.” He nodded to another correspondent. “What’s on your mind, Walter?”

Walter Lippmann asked him a question about farm legislation. Truman answered it with every sign of relief. Most of the time, foreign-policy issues weren’t what swayed elections. In the aftermath of the biggest war in the history of the world—no, not in the aftermath, dammit, because it wasn’t over yet, no matter who’d signed which surrender documents—the usual rules might not apply. But they would if Truman had anything to do with it.

Tom Schmidt remembered the line from
The Wizard of Oz.
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” the Wizard had said desperately. That was only a movie, but the President was trying to pull the same stunt for real. Could he make Germany disappear from voters’ minds? To Tom, that would be a bigger trick than any the Wizard managed.

He wasn’t the only one with such thoughts on his mind. When Truman pointed to another reporter, the man said, “Seems like the Republicans want to use Germany as a club to hit you over the head with in the upcoming elections. What will you do if you have to deal with a Republican Congress next year?”

“Ha! That’ll be the day!” Truman was a dumpy little guy, but he had an actor’s control of his expressions and attitudes. His whole body radiated contempt.

“Work with me, Mr. President,” the newspaperman urged. “Suppose they do win the election. Then they’ll be holding the purse strings. What can you do if they decide not to appropriate any money for the occupation?”

FDR would have set his granite chin and looked indomitable. Harry Truman didn’t have that kind of chin. He didn’t look indomitable, either—he looked pissed off. “They wouldn’t dare,” he snapped. Before the reporter could even try to follow up, Truman shook his head. “I know what you’re gonna say, Bernard. Suppose they do, right? Okay, I’m supposing. And this is what I suppose. No matter what kind of stupid stunts the Republicans try and pull with the budget, this country still only has one commander-in-chief, and you’re looking at him. The United States of American isn’t a box turtle, no matter what some people think. It can’t pull its head and its legs inside its shell and pretend the rest of the world isn’t out there. That got us in trouble before the war. It’d be a lot worse now.”

Yet another reporter said, “If you were to try to do something after Congress said you couldn’t…That’s how Andrew Johnson got impeached.”

“Congress has no business telling me how to run the country’s foreign policy,” Truman retorted. “And this is all moonshine, anyhow. I’m just indulging Bernie there. Everything in Germany will be fine. The Republicans won’t win in November. And even if they do, they aren’t asinine enough to play games with the public purse.”

“You hope,” the reporter said.

“No, I hope they do try it. They’d give me all the platform I need to bang on ’em like a drum in 1948,” Truman replied. “But they’re just not that stupid…. Well, a few of them are, but not many.”

“What if they run Eisenhower against you?” Walter Lippmann asked.

“Nobody knows whether Ike’s a Republican or a Democrat. I’m not sure he knows himself,” the President answered. He got a laugh; even Tom chuckled. Truman went on, “But I am sure of one thing: Eisenhower likes the idea of pulling out of Germany even less than I do. And they said it couldn’t be done! For the isolationists to line up behind him would be as foolish as for the antiwar Democrats to line up behind General McClellan against Lincoln in 1864.”

“But the Democrats did do that,” Lippmann pointed out. Tom thought he remembered the same thing, but hadn’t taken American history in a hell of a long time.

“Damn straight they did—and they got their heads handed to them that November,” Truman said. “If the Republicans want to try what didn’t work for my party in 1948, good luck to ’em.”

He didn’t lack for confidence. Tom had known that before. Seeing it face to face was more than a little daunting, though. He had to remind himself that being confident and having good reasons for confidence were two different critters. Would Harry Truman remind himself of the same thing? Off this morning’s performance, Tom didn’t think so.

“G
OD DAMN THE
R
USSIANS TO HELL AND GONE!”
R
EINHARD
H
EYDRICH
ground out.

Hans Klein made sympathetic noises. “No one ever hit them a lick like the one we gave them New Year’s Eve,” he said. “Not even Stalin purged their officers the way we did.”