The Man with the Iron Heart (53 page)

Up until Berlin fell to the Red Army, this had been Alois Hitler’s tavern. From everything Bokov had heard, the
Führer
’s half-brother wasn’t a bad fellow. With a different last name, he would have been indistinguishable from a thousand other saloonkeepers. Bokov didn’t know what had happened to him in the wake of the
Reich’s
collapse. Alois Hitler hadn’t been important enough in the grand scheme of things for anybody to worry about him.

Shmuel didn’t seem to know about the tavern. Bokov couldn’t resist telling him, just to see the look on his face. It was everything the NKVD man could have hoped for. The DP stopped in his tracks. “I won’t go in there!”

“Like hell you won’t,” Bokov said. “If I’ve got to, you’ve got to. A minute ago, you said you weren’t going anywhere except where I told you to. And I’m damn well telling you to.”

“Hitler’s place!” Shmuel cried in horror.

“Hitler’s place,” Captain Bokov agreed. “But not
that
Hitler, and it hasn’t been his place for a couple of years now. So get your sorry old ass in gear.”

“Hitler’s place!” the DP said again. Shaking his head, he went inside with Bokov.

It smelled like tobacco smoke and beer and sweat: like the inside of a tavern, in other words. The light was dim. Whether the man behind the bar was Fent himself or just a hireling, he looked nothing like any Hitler ever born. That was a relief.

Americans were sitting at two or three tables. Even just sitting there, they irritated Bokov. They had so much, and didn’t have the faintest idea how well off they were. An officer at one of the tables nodded to Bokov. The NKVD man walked over and sat down. Again, Shmuel followed. The DP was still muttering to himself.

A barmaid hurried up. She was pretty, although on the skinny side. Bokov thought a lot of German women were skinny, which didn’t keep him from laying them when he got the urge. But this gal was skinny even by German standards. He preferred his women with something to hold on to.

He ordered beer. So did Shmuel. The Americans already had seidels in front of them. The barmaid hustled away. A Russian wouldn’t have moved so fast, not at a no-account job like that. Germans did apply themselves, no matter what they were up to. It was one of the things that made them dangerous.

Both Americans looked like Jews. That matched Bokov’s briefing. The barmaid came back with two more mugs of beer. Bokov raised his and trotted out the phrase he’d been told to use: “To cooperation between allies.”

“To nailing down the ironheart!” one of the Americans returned: the proper answer. He went on, “I’m Frank. This is Weissberg.”

Maybe those were real names, maybe not. Bokov hadn’t been told to hide his identity, so he said, “Bokov.” He jerked a thumb at the DP. “And this is Shmuel Birnbaum.” He would have identified a new-model mortar the same way—he thought of Shmuel more as a weapon than as a human being.

But a new-model mortar wouldn’t have gulped beer as if it would be outlawed tomorrow. A new-model mortar wouldn’t have waved to the barmaid for a refill, or pinched her on the butt when she brought it. She glared at him and got out of there in a hurry. And a new-model mortar wouldn’t have said, “I can talk for myself.”

“We saw you before!” the American called Weissberg exclaimed. “We gave you some chow and some cash.”

“You did,” Birnbaum agreed. He nodded at Bokov. “This guy and his pal made it all disappear. Well, I got to eat some of the chocolate.”

Suspicion sparked in Bokov. This was bending the arm of coincidence if not breaking it. The Americans were both scowling at him, no doubt for abusing a fellow
zhid.
Well, the hell with ’em. As if reporting to his own superiors, he said, “This man was shot by a guard for approaching the perimeter around our courthouse too closely. The guard might have killed him had another officer and myself not intervened. Naturally, we searched the prisoner. Naturally, we confiscated personal property.”

“So you’re releasing him now, right?” Weissberg said. “Will you give it back?”

“Not our policy,” Bokov answered, which was true enough. Colonel Shteinberg had done whatever he’d done with the ten-dollar bill, and Bokov had bought himself a fancy dinner and some fine cigars with the five. And if the Yankees thought Birnbaum deserved to have the money, they could go fuck themselves. If provoked, Bokov was ready to tell them so.

Weissberg looked as if he wanted to press it. The other officer—Frank—said something in English. Weissberg still looked mutinous, but he shut up. Frank spoke directly to the DP: “You know where the Hangman’s dug in, do you?”

“Not for sure,” Birnbaum said. That took nerve. He had to know he’d be better off going with the Americans than staying in Soviet hands. If these Yanks decided they didn’t want him, he’d never get the chance to pinch another barmaid’s ass. He went on, “I was digging and digging down in the mountains. Then they sent me to Auschwitz. They hadn’t got around to killing me before the Red Army ran ’em out, so I lived.”

“You might be grateful,” Bokov said.

“For getting rescued? I am. For getting shot? For getting robbed? No offense, Comrade Captain, but I could’ve done without those,” the DP said. The American called Weissberg let out a snide chuckle.

“If you weren’t snooping around the perimeter, nobody would have had any reason to shoot you,” Captain Bokov said irritably.

“Snooping? What snooping? I was just walking along when that asshole guard yelled something—God knows what—and then he opened up, the dumb
schmuck,
” Shmuel Birnbaum said.

“That was his job. We were trying to protect the courthouse, dammit,” Bokov said.

“You sure did great, didn’t you?” Birnbaum jeered.

Before Bokov could tell him where to head in, the Yankee called Frank said, “Take it easy, both of you. Maybe it all worked out for the best.”

“In this best of all possible worlds? I don’t think so,” Shmuel Birnbaum said.

By the way both Americans winced and pulled faces, the DP had made a joke. Vladimir Bokov almost asked what it was. He didn’t get it. Only one thing held him back: the fear of being thought uncultured.
Nye kultyurny
was a muscular insult in Russian. It meant you’d just come off the farm with manure on your boots—or, more likely, on your bare feet. It meant drool ran down your chin. It meant you picked your nose and ate the boogers in public. It meant…It meant Bokov kept his mouth shut, was what it meant.

Weissberg said, “We’ll want to take him back with us, you know. He’ll do a better job going back to the mountains and showing us where he was than he would trying to draw a map or something.”

“Yes, I understand that,” Bokov said. “I am authorized to turn him over to you. I will want a receipt. And we’ll expect better cooperation in U.S.-Soviet affairs, especially if he does you some good.”

“You’ll want us to do more of what you want, you mean,” the Jew called Frank said, which was true enough. “I can’t promise, but….”

“Da, da,”
Bokov said impatiently. Neither one of these guys was of a rank where his promise meant anything. Neither side was dealing at a level like that. Bokov had hoped the Americans would, but they weren’t always as naïve as you wished they were.

“A receipt?” Shmuel said. “What am I, a sack of beans?”

“You’re a sack of hot air, is what you are.” Bokov knew him better than the Americans did, but they’d find out. “We have to hope you’re not a sack full of farts. The one thing we know about you is, you hate the Nazis, too. This is our chance to get some of your own back against them.”

“Too little, too late,” the DP said bleakly. “Everybody who ever meant anything to me is dead—up the fucking smokestack. Most I can hope for is to try and keep that shit from happening again.”

“That’s…better than nothing.” Weissberg sounded hesitant about saying even so much. And well he might have, when his country and his loved ones had come through the war with hardly a scratch. Here again, Bokov had more in common with Birnbaum, and more understanding of him, than his fellow Jew did.

Frank had set a piece of paper on the tabletop. He finished writing on it, then passed it and his pen over to Weissberg. The other American officer read it, signed it, and slid it across to Vladimir Bokov.

Bokov had some trouble with it. He was familiar with German cursive. Even using German, the Americans wrote the Roman alphabet in a different way. But the NKVD man puzzled it out.
Received from NKVD Captain Bokov one displaced person, by name Shmuel Birnbaum, believed to possess important information concerning the Nazi resistance.
The two signatures followed.

“Good enough,” Bokov said. “I hope this guy does you—does us—does everybody—some good. I put my dick on the chopping block to get him to you people—you’d better believe that.”

Both Americans nodded back at him. “Our nuts are on the line, too,” Weissberg said. “We kept trying to tell people our side and yours needed to work together better. Against the fanatics, there’s only one side.”

“It looks that way to me, too.” Bokov waved to the barmaid. “Fresh ones all around, sweetheart.” When she brought them, she made a point of giving Shmuel Birnbaum a wide berth. The DP’s crooked grin said he knew why and didn’t give a fuck. Captain Bokov raised his seidel. “Death to the Heydrichites!”

They could all drink to that. “Death to the Heydrichites!” they chorused. Bokov emptied the mug at one long pull. The Germans were motherfuckers, no doubt about it, but they could sure as hell brew beer.

T
HE CAPTAIN
—N
AVY CAPTAIN, OR THE EQUIVALENT OF AN
A
RMY
colonel—looked at Tom Schmidt as if he wanted to clean him off the sole of his shoe. “No,” the officer said in a voice straight from the South Pole. “I will not authorize your entry into Germany. You may sail to England or France if you like. But if you come under military jurisdiction in Germany, you will be expelled at once, if you don’t get tossed in the brig—uh, the stockade—instead.”

“That’s not fair!” Tom squawked. “Plenty of other reporters get to go see our boys climbing onto ships.”

“A technical term applies here, Mr. Schmidt: tough shit.” The four-striper had the whip hand. He knew it, and he enjoyed it. “Those members of the press did not violate security arrangements in Germany. They were not sent home from the country. You did, and you were, and you don’t get a second chance.”

“You were censoring the news!” Tom exclaimed. He sounded more pissed off than he was. He’d figured the military would hold a grudge for what had happened in Germany. But taking a shot at Captain Weyr here for censorship would look good in his column.

And Weyr played straight into his hands, saying, “Sometimes censorship is necessary, Mr. Schmidt. Sometimes it’s even essential.”

“Yeah, sure,” Tom said, as any reporter worth his press credential would have.

“It is, dammit,” the Navy officer insisted. “Would you have printed a story that told the Germans we’d hit Normandy, not Calais?” He sent Tom another dogshit-on-my-sole look. “You probably would have.”

“Up yours, Captain,” Tom said evenly. Captain Weyr’s jaw dropped. His subordinates couldn’t tell him stuff like that, no matter how much they wanted to. But military discipline didn’t bind Tom. And, if the military wanted to make a point of screwing him, neither did ordinary politeness. He went on, “You make it sound like I’m not a patriot or something, and that’s a bunch of crap. Of course I know why you had to keep the invasion a secret. The movie of that poor damn GI—Cunningham, that was his name—that’s a different story. You didn’t want ordinary Americans seeing what was going on in Germany—seeing how the occupation was screwing things up.”

“For one thing, I deny that the occupation is screwed up,” Weyr said.

“Then you’d better pull your head out of the sand and look around,” Tom said. “The lions are getting close.”

“Amusing. You should be a writer.” Weyr had a Philadelphia Main Line kind of condescension he’d probably been born with. Plenty of officers were snotty or arrogant, but only a blueblood could bring off condescending so well. He continued, “You seem to forget what an important factor in war morale can be.”

Bingo! Tom pounced: “You seem to forget the war’s over. You want everybody else to forget it, too. The Secretary of State talked about occupying Germany for the next forty years. How can we do that if it’s peacetime? How can you imagine the American people will put up with this for the next forty weeks, let alone forty years?” He held up a hand to correct himself. “The Presidential election’s a little further than forty weeks off—but only a little.”

“I am not the Secretary of State. You have no business taking his words out of context and trying to put them in my mouth,” Captain Weyr said. “But do you think you did Private Cunningham’s family any favors by making sure that vile film got plastered onto movie screens all over the country?”

Tom did feel bad about that, even if he hadn’t felt bad enough to keep from getting the film back to the States. “If I thought the brass was sitting on the film to save his family’s feelings, maybe I wouldn’t have done what I did,” he answered. “But I don’t—and neither do you.”

“That’s twice now you’ve put words in my mouth,” Weyr said.

“Oh, give me a break!” Tom rolled his eyes. “The brass was doing what the brass always does. It was trying to hide the bad news. Sometimes you can get away with that in wartime. See? I admit it! But the war’s over and done with. Harry Truman said so. He even acted like it. Rationing’s dead as a dodo. He wants it both ways here, though. The war’s over and done with…except when the brass says it’s not. The American people aren’t dumb enough to fall for that, Captain.”

“I take it back. You should be a politician, Mr. Schmidt, not a writer. You sure seem to like making speeches,” Weyr said. “But you can huff and puff as much as you want. You still won’t blow the Pentagon down.”

“Too big for that, all right. Even flying an airplane into this place wouldn’t knock down much of it,” Tom said.

As if he hadn’t spoken, Captain Weyr went on, “And you can also huff and puff as much as you want, here in my office or in your column, and you won’t get to Germany to watch the troops coming home…. May I speak off the record? Do you respect that?”