The Man with the Iron Heart (30 page)

One of the women in the gang sent Bokov a look full of vitriol. He stared back stonily, and she was the first to drop her eyes. He and the Red Army hadn’t had anything to do with this death. It lay in the Anglo-Americans’ ledger. Captain Bokov only wished the bombing had done more, and done it sooner. Then fewer Soviet citizens might have died.

The woman muttered something the NKVD man didn’t catch. By the way several of the other Germans nodded, she was bound to be lucky he couldn’t hear her.

He thought about seizing her anyway, and the laborers who’d nodded. He could; rounding up a few Red Army men to take them away would be a matter of moments. The only question was whether it would be worthwhile. It would teach these Germans they couldn’t flout Soviet authority.

But it would also make their friends and families—who wouldn’t understand the progressive Soviet line toward provocations—more likely to throw in with the Heydrichites or at least to keep silent about their banditry. That calculation made Bokov stalk off instead of yelling for Russian soldiers.

It also made him stop in dismay a few paces later. If he was calculating about the Heydrichites as if they were serious enemies…“Fuck my mother!” he exclaimed. If he was thinking of them that way, then they really were. Diehards, fanatics, bandits…Names like those minimized them. They were enemy combatants, and this was still a war.

L
OU
W
EISSBERG DIDN’T SPEAK
F
RENCH.
C
APTAIN
J
EAN
D
ESROCHES
didn’t speak English. They were both fluent in German. Lou felt the irony. He couldn’t tell what, if anything, Desroches felt; the French intelligence officer had a formidable poker face.

“Hechingen. Something’s up with Hechingen,” Lou said
auf Deutsch.

“And what would that be?” Desroches inquired.

“I don’t exactly know,” Lou answered. “But a couple of the fanatics we’ve caught lately have talked about it. I don’t mean men we caught together, either—one we nabbed up near Frankfurt and the other by Munich. So something’s going on.”

“Unless they want you to think something is while they really strike somewhere else,” Desroches said. “I mean—Hechingen?” He rolled his eyes. “The most no-account excuse for a town God ever made.”

“I don’t know much about the place,” Lou admitted. “But I’ll tell you something you may not know—Hechingen is where the German nuclear physicists got captured.”

“You mean, before Heydrich’s
salauds
captured them back?” Desroches used one word of French, but Lou had little trouble figuring out what it meant. His opposite number went on, “Besides, what difference does that make now?”

“I don’t know what difference it makes.” Lou was getting tired of saying he didn’t know, even if he didn’t. “But it’s liable to make some, and you guys ought to be on your toes on account of it.”

“You tend to your zone, Lieutenant,” Desroches said icily. “We will handle ours.”

“We can send some men if you’re short,” Lou offered.

He knew he’d made a mistake even before the words finished coming out of his mouth. Poker face or no, Captain Desroches gave the impression of a blue-haired matron who’d just been asked to do something obscene. “That will not be necessary,” he said. After a moment, as if feeling that wasn’t enough, he added, “You offer an insult to a sovereign and independent power,
Monsieur.
”

“I didn’t mean to,” Lou said, instead of something like
Will you for God’s sake come off it?

France threw its weight around as if it would’ve had any weight to throw around if the United States and Britain—de Gaulle’s scorned “Anglo-Saxons”—hadn’t saved its bacon. But you couldn’t tell that to any Frenchman, not unless you really wanted to piss him off. Lou didn’t have the nerve to ask Desroches how he came to know German so well. Life in France had been…complicated from 1940 to 1944.

The Frenchman lit a cigarette: one of his own, a Gauloise. To Lou, the damn thing smelled like smoldering horseshit. He fired up a Chesterfield in self-defense. Through the clouds of smoke, Desroches said, “I will take you at your word.” Everything about the way he glared at Lou shouted
You lying son of a bitch!

Since Lou was lying, or at least stretching the truth, he couldn’t call Desroches on it. He said, “If you don’t want our soldiers—”

“We don’t,” Desroches broke in.

“You don’t have to use them,” Lou went on, as if the other man hadn’t spoken. “But do keep an eye on Hechingen. If anything happens there, I sure hope you’ll let us know. My superiors—all the way up to General Eisenhower—sure hope you will.”

“Is that a threat?” Desroches demanded. “What will happen if we don’t?”

“I’m only a lieutenant. I don’t make policy. But the people above me said it could be important enough to affect how much aid France gets.” Lou eyed Captain Desroches, who was wearing U.S.-issue combat boots and a U.S. Army olive-drab uniform with French rank badges. Most of the French Army was similarly equipped, from boots to helmets to M-1 rifles to Sherman tanks (though they were also using some captured German Panthers). French soldiers ate U.S. C-and K-rations and slept in U.S. pup tents.

Desroches followed Lou’s gaze down himself. He went red. “You Americans have the arrogance of power,” he said.

“Aw, bullshit,” Lou said in English. As he’d figured, Captain Desroches got that just fine. In German, Lou went on, “Hitler had the arrogance of power. If we had it, you guys would be going
‘Heil
Truman!’ right now.”

Desroches turned redder. He stubbed out his foul cigarette and lit another one. “Perhaps you are right. I phrased it badly. I should have said that you Americans have the arrogance of wealth.”

That did hit closer to the mark. Lou was damned if he’d admit it. “We have some worries about Hechingen—that’s what we have. France and the USA are allies,
ja?
We pass the worries on to you, the way allies are supposed to. If anything happens there, we hope you’re ready and we hope you’ll let us know—the way allies are supposed to.”

Captain Desroches sent up more smoke signals. “I will take this report back to my superiors, and we will do…whatever we do. Thank you for this…very interesting session, Lieutenant. Good day.” He got up and stamped out of Lou’s crowded little Nuremberg office.

“Boy, that was fun,” Lou said to nobody in particular. Dealing with the French was more enjoyable than a root canal, but not much.

He went to Captain Frank’s office down the hall. Frank was talking to a German gendarme—who also wore mostly U.S.-issue uniform, though dyed black—and waved for him to wait. Lou cooled his heels in the hallway for fifteen minutes or so. Then the Jerry came out looking unhappy. Lou went in.

“Nu?”
Frank asked. Lou summarized his exchange with Desroches. His superior muttered to himself. “You sure we were on the same side?”

“That’s what folks say,” Lou answered.

“Are they going to pay any attention to Hechingen?” Captain Frank asked.

“My guess is, it’s about fifty-fifty, sir,” Lou said. “They sure are touchy bastards, aren’t they?”

“Oh, maybe a little,” Frank said. They both laughed, but neither smiled.

“Other thing is, sir, we don’t know for sure the fanatics’ll hit Hechingen, and we don’t know for sure the froggies’ll tell us if they do,” Lou said.

“Uh-huh. Ain’t we got fun?” Frank tacked on another mirthless laugh. “Gotta be something to do with the damn bomb scientists, doesn’t it?”

“Looks that way to me,” Lou agreed. “That’s where we grabbed those guys in the first place. But it
could
be something else, I guess. If they’ve got a big old stash of mortar rounds or
Panzerfausts
or something outside of town, they might be all hot and bothered about those instead.”

“Yeah. They might.” Howard Frank didn’t sound as if he believed it. Well, Lou didn’t, either.

Jerry Duncan got back to Anderson whenever he could. He got to see his wife, Betsy, more that way. They’d been married for going on thirty years, and still got on well.

And he’d long since decided that any Congressman who turned Washington into his full-time home town deserved to lose his next election—and probably would. He also knew he was liable to lose his next election anyhow. The Democrats were putting up a decorated and twice-wounded veteran named Douglas Catledge.

Even though it was still spring, Catledge’s posters and signs were everywhere.
VOTE CATLEDGE!
they shouted.
SUPPORT OUR PRESIDENT
!
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS!

When Jerry spoke at the local American Legion hall, he met that one head-on. “Anybody who says I don’t support our troops is a liar,” he declared. “It’s just that simple, folks. I don’t support keeping our troops in the wrong place at the wrong time for all the wrong reasons. I’m afraid Harry Truman does. We did what we needed to do in Germany. To do what Truman wants, we’ll need soldiers there for the next fifty years. If that’s what you’ve got in mind, you’d better vote for the Democrats. But I’ll tell you what I think. I think it’s no accident they use a donkey to stand for their party.”

He got a few chuckles and more than a few smiles. Plenty of the guys who hung around the hall had known him for years. After he made his speech, everybody went to the bar and hoisted a few. A younger guy wearing a Ruptured Duck on the lapel of his tweed jacket stuck a forefinger in Jerry’s chest and declared, “The Germans deserve every goddamn thing that happened to them. I was there. I saw…Hell, Mr. Duncan, you don’t want to know most of what I saw.” He gulped down his highball.

“I don’t say they don’t. I’ve never said they don’t,” Jerry answered. “What I do say is, our boys don’t deserve what’s happening to them in Germany right now. We won the war. We knocked the Nazis flat. Isn’t that enough?”

“They aren’t knocked flat enough,” the newly returned soldier said. He hurried back to the bar and reloaded. Then he planted himself in front of Jerry Duncan again.

“They won’t cause any more trouble now,” Duncan said confidently. “They can’t. We’ve got the atomic bomb, and they don’t. If they get out of line—
wham!
We blow ’em off the map.”

“What about the Russians?” asked the guy with the Ruptured Duck.

“Well, what about the Russians?” Jerry said confidently. “If you believe General Groves, it’ll be years and years before they figure out how to make an atom bomb—if they ever do. And they won’t let Germany get too big for its britches, either.”

“Mm—maybe.” The younger man didn’t sound convinced. He jabbed a forefinger at Jerry again. “And you waste too much time with that crazy McGraw gal.”

Before Jerry could answer that, a middle-aged guy in a chambray shirt and dungarees spun the youngster toward him. “Diana McGraw isn’t crazy. My daughter graduated high school with her boy Pat. I’ve known her and Ed since dirt. He fought the krauts the last go-round, same as me, and he’s been at Delco-Remy ever since. And Diana…How do you expect her to feel when her only son gets bumped off after the goddamn war’s supposed to be over and done with?”

“‘Supposed to be’ is right. Thanks, Art,” Jerry said.

“Any time, Jerry,” Art answered. “Me, I dunno if I’d go whole hog, the way Diana went and did. But, hey—I’ve got girls. They didn’t have to head out and get their asses shot off. Uh, pardon my French.”

“Maybe,” the new vet said again. Then he went off to finish the fresh highball somewhere else.

Art laughed. “We whipsawed him, you and me.”

“I guess we did,” Jerry agreed. That wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind. Showing the other guy he was wrong—or showing him he’d get popped in the snoot if he kept mouthing off—wasn’t how you won his vote. You made him like you. If he liked you, he wouldn’t care whether you kept a cashbox marked
BRIBES
on your desk back in Washington. He’d vote for you because he thought you were a good fellow, and he wouldn’t need any better reason.

Hell, there was no better reason.

Another man, one more of Jerry’s vintage, came over to him and said, “Y’know, I hate like the dickens to cut and run in Germany.”

“If you make a mistake, don’t you try and get out from under it?” Jerry said. “If what we’re doing in Germany isn’t a mistake, what would you call it, Ron?”

Ron grinned—the Congressman remembered his name. Jerry remembered a gazillion names, but his constituents didn’t think about that. They just noticed that he remembered
theirs.
Jerry nodded to himself.
Make them like you,
he repeated silently. Nothing made somebody like you more than recalling his name. It made him seem important in your eyes…regardless of whether he really was.

“Well, we did mess up some,” Ron allowed now.

“Oh, maybe a little,” Jerry allowed. In another tone of voice, it would have been polite agreement. The way he said it, it sounded more like the understatement of the year.

Several of the guys standing around laughed. Two or three, though, scowled instead. One of them made a point of turning his back on Jerry. In Nazi Germany or Red Russia, that kind of rudeness would have bought him a ticket to a concentration camp, or maybe to a firing squad. In Anderson, Indiana, it only meant he wouldn’t vote Republican when the election rolled around.

As far as Jerry was concerned, that was bad enough. He wasn’t ready to hang out his shingle and go back to practicing law, even if he would make more money here in Anderson than he did in Washington. Politics was as addictive as morphine. To Jerry, it had a sharper kick, too.

A
PRIVATE STUCK HIS HEAD INTO
L
OU
W
EISSBERG’S OFFICE.
“S
IR,
there’s a Frenchy outside who wants to talk to you,” the kid said.

“Yeah?” Lou set down his pen. “Does he speaka da English?”

“No, sir. But he had a piece of paper with your name written on it. He’s a skinny guy; looks kinda mean, y’know? Got a scar right here.” The private ran a finger along the side of his jaw.

“Ah. Okay. I know who he is.” Lou was depressingly aware he might make a good target for Heydrich’s fanatics. But if that wasn’t Captain Desroches, the Nazis had come up with somebody who could play him in the movies.

“You want I should bring him in?” the GI asked.

Lou pushed back his swivel chair. “Nah. I’ll go out there and talk to him. Any excuse to get outside is a good one.”

Spring was in the air. So was the stench of death, which winter chill had muted, but Lou ignored that. Pigeons and house sparrows hopping on the rubble-strewn street crowded hopefully around his boots, looking for handouts. Starlings in shiny breeding plumage trilled from any high spot they could find. He might have seen and heard the like back in New Jersey. He wished like anything he were back in Jersey.

But he wasn’t, so…. So he watched storks build a big, untidy nest of sticks on top of a chimney. He wouldn’t have seen that in New Jersey, and neither would Roger Tory Peterson.

Captain Desroches, by his expression, didn’t give two whoops in hell about spring, pigeons, sparrows, starlings, or storks. The Gauloise he was puffing on insulated him from the death reek, though it might have smelled worse.

Lou wondered why the Frenchmen had ridden all the way to Nuremberg. As soon as Desroches saw him, Lou stopped wondering. The French officer’s face lit up in an I-told-you-so sneer. It couldn’t possibly be anything else.

And it wasn’t. “A good day to you,
Herr Oberleutnant,
” Desroches said in his Gallic German. “I have for you news from Hechingen.”

“Guten Tag, Herr Hauptmann,”
Lou answered resignedly. “Tell me the news, whatever it is.”

“There was indeed a fearsome raid by these vicious and savage German renegades.” Desroches was as good at the mock-epic as anybody this side of Alexander Pope.

“I’m glad you survived.” Mock-epic was beyond Lou. Sarcastic he could manage, even in German.

“Oh, yes. A great relief. The terrible monsters struck…the rubbish heap outside the building where some of the Nazi scientists got seized last year.” Captain Desroches stubbed out his butt and started another smoke screen.

A sparrow darted in to grab the dog-end, then spat it out after one taste. Lou’s sympathies were with the bird. Before long, though, some German would gladly scavenge the butt. Collect three or four of them and you could roll one nasty cigarette of your own and either smoke it or use it to buy something you needed more.

But that was by the way. “Did the fanatics get anything?” Lou demanded.

“Rubbish, I assume.” Desroches inhaled till his already hollow cheeks looked downright skull-like. “What else is there in a rubbish heap?”

“Well, I don’t exactly know.” That was truer than Lou wished it were. Nobody above him wanted to tell him much about what went into making an atomic bomb. He couldn’t blame his superiors for that, but ignorance made his job harder. “Maybe you’d better tell your story to Captain Frank.”

Desroches exhaled an exasperated cloud of smoke. “This is a waste of my time, Lieutenant.”

“If you wasted enough time to drive to Nuremberg and gloat, you can damn well waste a little more. Come on.”

They glared at each other in perfect mutual loathing. But Captain Desroches came. “Hello, Lou,” Captain Frank said when Weissberg led the French intelligence officer into his cubbyhole. “Who’s your friend?”

“Sir, this is Captain Desroches. He doesn’t speak English, but he’s fine with German,” Lou answered in the latter tongue. He nodded to Desroches. “Please tell Captain Frank the story you just told me.”

“If you insist.” Desroches had the air of a man humoring an obvious lunatic. He gave Frank the tale almost word-for-word the way Lou had heard it. “But for the warning from your bright young lieutenant here,” he finished, plainly meaning anything but, “we never would have noticed the garbage-hounds at all. As things were, we fired a few shots, they fired a few shots, and then they ran away. It was, I assure you, nothing to get excited about.”

Captain Frank didn’t look assured. “You say this was outside the place where the German scientists got caught?”

“Yes, I do say that. But so what?” Any comic who wanted to play a Frenchman on the stage would have studied Desroches’ shrug. “A scientist’s rubbish is no different from anyone else’s,
nicht wahr?
”

“I don’t know about that—but I think I’d better find out.”

As far as Lou could tell, Captain Frank didn’t know much more about atom bombs than he did himself. The French captain watched alertly as Frank spoke. Lou suspected Desroches followed more English than he let on.

After talking with somebody, Captain Frank hung up and called someone else. He told Desroches’ story over again. There was a long, long pause at the other end of the line. Then whoever was there shouted,
“Son of a motherfucking bitch!”
Lou heard it loud and clear. So did Captain Desroches, who raised an eyebrow. It must have damn near blown out Frank’s eardrum.

The other officer went on at lower volume for some little while. Captain Frank listened. He scribbled a couple of notes. When he finally rang off, he nodded to Captain Desroches. “Well, thank you for bringing the news. Now we know what we’re up against, anyhow.”

“Which is?” Desroches inquired acidly.

Howard Frank looked right through him. Lou admired that look, and wanted to practice it in front of a mirror. It would cow every rude waiter and sales clerk ever born. “Sorry, but I can’t tell you,” Frank said. “You haven’t got the clearance or the need to know.”

“This is an outrage!” Desroches was almost as loud as the fellow who’d talked with Frank on the phone. Lou looked for him to breathe flame, or for steam to pour out of his ears. “You have no right—”

“I have my orders, Captain,” Frank replied. “I’m sure you understand.”
I’m sure you understand you can fuck off,
he meant.

Desroches called him several things in German. Captain Frank only smiled blandly. Desroches switched to French. Lou hadn’t thought French was much of a language to cuss in. He discovered he’d never heard an expert before. Captain Desroches sounded electrifying, or possibly electrified.

Captain Frank never lost his smile. When the Frenchman slowed down a little, Frank said,
“Et vous. Et votre mêre aussi.”
Even Lou could figure out what that meant. Desroches stormed out. He slammed the door behind him. It didn’t fly off its hinges, but not from lack of effort.

“Wow,” Lou said, listening to Desroches roar down the corridor like a tornado with shoulder boards. Then he asked, “So what was that all about?”

“I talked with this guy named Samuel Goudsmit. He’s a colonel, I think—some kind of science officer,” Frank said.

“Goudsmit,” Lou said musingly. “Kraut?”

“Dutchman,” Captain Frank replied. “And now I know what the fanatics were after—what it looks like they got.”

“Nu?”
Lou said.

“Ten grams of radium, Goudsmit says. The physicists snatched it there when we grabbed them, and one of them must’ve blabbed to Heydrich.”