The Man with the Iron Heart (54 page)

“Yes, I do. And yes, go ahead.” Tom wasn’t happy about it, but he meant it. If you said something was off the record and then went ahead and used it anyway, in nothing flat nobody would talk to you off the record any more. And you needed to hear that kind of stuff, even if you couldn’t use it.

“Okay. This is Ollie Weyr talking, not Captain Weyr. Way it looks to me is, guys like you are a big part of the reason Congress won’t pay for the German occupation any more. If you weren’t pissing and moaning about every little thing that goes wrong over there—”

“And every big one,” Tom broke in.

“Shut up. I’m not done. Maybe Germany’ll be fine once we get out. I don’t know. You can’t know ahead of time. But it’s like the President said on the radio not long ago. If things go wrong, if the Nazis get back in, I know where a bunch of the blame lands.”

“And you say I make speeches?” Tom laughed in the Navy captain’s face. “You ought to look in a mirror some time.”

“At least I’m working for my country,” Weyr said.

“So am I. Last time I looked, the First Amendment was part of what we were fighting for,” Tom retorted. “Too much to expect anybody from the government to understand that.”

“Yeah, you hot reporters go on and on about the First Amendment. All I’ve got to say is, you’re using it to help guys who’d stamp it out first chance they got. We had those SOBs squashed a couple of years ago.”

“You wish you did,” Tom interrupted. “In your dreams, you did.”

“If they start running Germany again, it won’t be because the military failed,” Weyr said. “It’ll be because the press and the pressure groups made it impossible for us to do our job.”

“Can I quote you on that?” As soon as Tom asked, he wished he hadn’t. Now he’d given Weyr a chance to say no.

And Weyr did, or close enough: “That was still Ollie talking, not Captain Weyr. If you want to say it’s a military officer’s personal opinion, go ahead. It’s not the Navy’s official opinion. I can’t speak for the Army, but I’ve never heard anything to make me think it’s their official opinion, either.”

“But a lot of their people believe it, too?” Tom suggested.

Captain Weyr only shrugged. “You said that. I didn’t.”

Too bad,
Tom thought.

B
ERNIE
C
OBB WALKED THROUGH
B
AD
T
ÖLZ, LOOKING FOR A PLACE
where he could buy a beer. The town sat in the foothills of the Alps south of Munich. The old quarter, where he was, lay on one side of the Isar; the new district, on the other side of the river, was a lot more modern. Mineral-water springs were what brought people here—people who weren’t GIs with a few days’ leave from prowling through Alpine passes, anyway. And there had been a training school for SS officer candidates here, too. That was out of business now…Bernie hoped.

“Cobb!” called another dogface—no, the guy was a three-striper.

“Sergeant Corvo!” Bernie said. “Jesus! I figured they woulda shipped you back to the States a long time ago.”

“Not me.” Carlo Corvo shook his head. As usual, he talked out of the side of his mouth. Also as usual, a cigarette dangled from one corner. “Draft sucked me in, yeah, but I’ve gone Regular Army. I got better chances in uniform than I ever would back in Hoboken—bet your ass I do.”

“You nuts?” Bernie said. “You got better chances of stopping a bullet or getting your balls blown off.”

“Nah.” Corvo shook his head. “I don’t exactly come from the good part of town—not that Hoboken’s got much of a good part. I don’t exactly hang around with the nice kind of people, neither. I shoot somebody over here, I don’t gotta worry about cops on my tail or spending time in the slammer.”

Mob connections? Bernie’d always wondered about that with Corvo. The swarthy sergeant still wasn’t exactly saying so. Not exactly, no, but it sure sounded that way.

Meanwhile, Corvo asked, “How come you ain’t back in—where was it? Arizona?”

“New Mexico,” Bernie answered. “Not enough points. I’m young. I’m single. I was out of action for a while after the Bulge ’cause of my feet, so I missed out on a couple of campaign stars. And besides, the cocksuckers keep bumping up how many a guy needs before they ship him out. A little luck, though, it won’t be too much longer.”

“You mean the money cutoff?” Sergeant Corvo said.

Bernie nodded. “What else? If they bring everybody home, they can’t very well leave me here all by my lonesome. Hope like hell they can’t, anyway.”

“Stupid fuckin’ assholes can’t even see the ends o’ their pointy noses, let alone past ’em,” Corvo said. “We bail out now, we’ll just hafta fight the Jerries again later on.”

“Later on suits me fine,” Bernie said. “Maybe my number won’t come up then. I don’t owe Uncle Sam one thing more, and he owes me plenty.”

Carlo Corvo sighed. “Always useta think you had pretty good sense.”

“I do. I’m not gonna catch Heydrich on my own. So why should I care more about the Army than the Army cares about me? I’ve been away from home more than three years now. Enough is enough. I’m looking out for number one.” Bernie paused. “I’m looking for some beer, too. You know any decent joints?”

By the way Corvo hesitated, knowing where to drink in Bad Tölz wasn’t the question for him. Whether he wanted to drink with Bernie was. At last, with another sigh, the noncom nodded. “Yeah. C’mon—I’ll show you. If you don’t wanna be no lifer, can’t hardly blame you for thinkin’ like you do, I guess.”

“Love you too, Ace,” Bernie said. He followed Corvo down the narrow, winding street.

To Shmuel Birnbaum, K-rations and U.S. Army field kitchens were the greatest inventions in the history of the world. He ate and ate, and never once worried whether what he was eating had pork in it. “I quite caring about that during the war,” he told Lou Weissberg. “If it’s food, you eat it.”

“What with the little you got after the Nazis came through, who could blame you?” Lou said sympathetically.

“Oh. The Nazis. Sure. But I meant the last war, sonny.” One other thing the DP had made the acquaintance of was a safety razor with a limitless supply of blades. His cheeks were as smooth as Lou’s these days, but the stubble he’d had when Lou first met him was gray heading toward white, as was his hair. “Since 1914…a war…a revolution…a civil war…a time to watch yourself…another war…Been a long, long time since I made a fuss about what I got, as long as I got
something.
”

“You embarrass me because I had it easy in America,” Lou said.

“Your folks were smart—they got out. If I’d been smart, I would’ve got out, too,” Birnbaum said. “But I thought,
It’s not so bad. It’s even getting a little better, maybe.
Maybe not, too. For sure not, the way things worked out.”

“We’ll take you to a different valley tomorrow,” Lou said. “Maybe this will be the one where they made you dig.”

Maybe, nothing.
Alevai
this will be the one where they made you dig,
Lou thought. The U.S. Army had been giving Birnbaum a guided tour of all the Alpine valleys in southern Germany. So far, he hadn’t found the right one. Lou hoped there was a right one. You never could tell what you’d get when you dealt with the Russians. He’d wanted to for a long time. Now that he had…

Would Captain Bokov of the NKVD sit in his Berlin office and laugh his ass off because a no-account DP was getting fat on U.S. Army chow? Had Birnbaum ever been in one of these valleys? No doubt he’d been in Auschwitz; Lou had seen too many of those tattoos to doubt that this one was authentic. But that wasn’t reason enough—the Army in its infinite wisdom had decided it wasn’t reason enough—to be especially nice to him.

If he didn’t come through…
Well, what’s the worst they can do to me? Discharge me and ship me home to Jersey.
Which, when you got right down to it, would be a hell of a lot more fun than what he was doing here.

But he hated getting played for a sucker. He didn’t want the NKVD to do it, and he didn’t want a no-account Jew who said he hadn’t had a square meal since 1914 to do it, either. He wanted…“Heydrich’s head on a plate,” he muttered.

“I hope I can give him to you,” Shmuel Birnbaum said. “They didn’t tell us what we were doing. They just told us to dig, and they got rid of anybody who didn’t dig fast enough to suit ’em. Then they sent the rest of us to Auschwitz, also for disposal. Just dumb luck they didn’t get around to me before the Red Army came.”

“Sure,” Lou said. Birnbaum’s story sounded good. It felt good, which might have counted for even more. Lou had heard a lot of bullshit since he got to the Continent. He didn’t think this was more of the same piled higher and deeper. But he’d never know for sure unless the DP delivered.

Birnbaum looked at him. “You don’t think I can do it.”

“I hope you can do it. I hope like anything you can,” Lou said.

“Heydrich…” Birnbaum tasted the name. “It wouldn’t be enough. There’s no such thing as enough, not for that. But it would be something, anyway. And after so much nothing, something’s not too bad.”

“Yeah.” Lou nodded. “You’re right.” He was sure what Germany would be like if Heydrich and his pals took over: the way it had been when Hitler was running it, only trying to find a place in a new, tougher, more suspicious world. That was…about as bad as things could get, as far as he was concerned.

Suppose they squashed the Heydrichites. What would Germany turn into then? Lou had no idea. That politician—Adenauer—had thought it could turn into a civilized democracy like England and France and America. Maybe. But Lou had trouble believing it. If Germany could turn into a democracy like that, wouldn’t Adenauer still be alive?

Shmuel Birnbaum stopped shoveling food into his face. “Let’s go,” he said.

It wasn’t so simple, of course. One jeep could rattle along the winding roads that slid through valleys and climbed the passes between them. It might get through. If Heydrich’s goons decided it looked harmless, or if they were off making pests of themselves somewhere else, it would. But there was no guarantee—not even close.

And in these parts, it wasn’t just Heydrich’s goons you needed to worry about. Deserters and brigands and bandits prowled the mountainside, sometimes singly, sometimes in platoon strength. You wanted to show enough firepower to make them decide not to bother you.

Three jeeps with .50-caliber machine guns, two M8 armored cars with 37mm guns. With luck, that kind of convoy would be enough to persuade Werewolves and freelance brigands to leave them alone. The heavy machine guns and the cannon outranged anything the Jerries were likely to pack themselves. All the soldiers had Garands or M2 carbines or grease guns, too.

And so did Shmuel Birnbaum. When Lou first gave him the submachine gun, he asked if Birnbaum knew how to use it. The DP gave back a lizard’s stare. “I point. I pull the trigger. If it doesn’t shoot, I fiddle with the safety till it does.”

“It doesn’t even have a safety,” Lou said.

“All right, then. So I shoot. What else do I need to know? Anything?” Birnbaum asked. For the kind of fighting he’d need to do—if he needed to do any—he
didn’t
need to know anything else. Lou shut up.

They rolled past a monument to American ineptitude, a burnt-out ammo dump. It had gone up in fire and smoke a couple of months earlier, and taken half a dozen GIs with it. Back home, it probably hadn’t made more than page four, except in the dead men’s home towns. Too many other things were going on in Germany—this was just small change from a guerrilla war.

Birnbaum’s gaze flicked to the sooty craters and scattered shell casings that marked the remains of the dump. “How’d they do it?” he asked.

“If I knew, I would tell you,” Lou answered. “If we’d known ahead of time, we might have stopped them.”

The DP grunted. “They need stopping. Not just for this. For everything.”

“You’re right. They do,” Lou agreed.

“Do I hear straight? Are you Americans really starting to go home from Germany?” Birnbaum asked.

“You hear straight. I wish you didn’t, but you do.”

“Meshigge,”
Birnbaum said, and Lou smiled in spite of himself. The DP spoke the same funny Yiddish dialect he did himself, with most of the vowels shifted forward in the mouth. It still meant
crazy,
however you pronounced it.

“And if I don’t come through?” the DP asked bleakly. “What happens then? You give me a
kigel
?” Most people would have pronounced that
kugel.
It meant, literally, a noodle. To German guards, slave laborers, and camp inmates, it also meant a bullet in the back of the neck.

“No. We don’t do that. We won’t give you back to the Russians, either.” Lou sighed. “But
vey iz mir,
I want Heydrich dead. If anything will show the folks back home what we’re doing here is worthwhile, that’s it.”

“Me, I just want Heydrich dead, and all the rest of those….” Shmuel Birnbaum broke off, shaking his head. “I can’t find a word bad enough. Pogroms? Purges? I didn’t know what trouble was till the Nazis came though. That camp…What I saw there…” He rubbed at the place where the tattooed number he would wear the rest of his life lay under his sleeve. Whatever his eyes were looking at, it wasn’t the latest Alpine valley.

Hesitantly, Lou said, “I saw Dachau and Belsen.”

“Practice,” Birnbaum said scornfully. “The shitheads did those for practice. Once they got it figured out…Fuck. What do you know? What
can
you know? Don’t expect me to tell you. Like I say, there are no words.”

“What’s the old fart going on about, sir?” asked the driver, who couldn’t have been over nineteen. “Sounds nasty, whatever it is.”

Hearing English jolted Lou halfway out of helpless horror. “The murder camps the Nazis built in Poland,” he answered. “He lived through one.”

“They really did that shit?”

“They really did,” Lou said solemnly. “You would’ve come over here after the surrender, wouldn’t you?”

“Uh, yes, sir. All I wanna do is get my ass back to Dayton in one piece, too.”

“Right.” Lou couldn’t talk to the driver, any more than Birnbaum could talk to him. No reason for the kid to have visited any of the camps in Germany. He wouldn’t have seen the corpses and the shambling, diseased living skeletons. He wouldn’t have smelled what a place like that was like. And he probably wouldn’t believe there were worse places. How could you believe that, in a world where God had anything to do with anything?

And if this guy had trouble believing it over here, what about all the safe tens of millions across the Atlantic? What was Reinhard Heydrich to them but a name? What were Dachau and Belsen and Auschwitz and all the others but names? Lou shivered. If the Army did punch Heydrich’s ticket, would the folks back home decide the job was really done now and figure it was one more reason to yank the boys out of there and forget the nasty mess ever happened?

But if killing Heydrich made the fanatics give up…“Gotta try,” Lou muttered.

“What’s that?” Birnbaum asked him.

Lou realized he’d used English again. The DP understood
yes
and
no
and
shit
and
fuck,
but not much more. Lou returned to Yiddish: “Maybe the Nazis will quit once we get rid of their leader.”

“Maybe they will—but it’s about as likely as snow is black,” Birnbaum said. Lou snorted; he’d heard that one from his old man more times than he could count.

They passed into another valley. This one wasn’t the one where Birnbaum had been made to dig, either. “Hell,” Lou said with a sigh. They drove on. Moses had wandered in the wilderness for forty years. The way Germany was unraveling, Lou wasn’t sure he had forty days and forty nights. That was…what? Noah’s flood. But Lou thought this one was flowing the wrong way.

W
HEN SOLDIERS CAME HOME FROM
E
UROPE RIGHT AFTER
V-E D
AY,
they came back to the United States in triumph. Pretty girls greeted them with flowers and kisses. They paraded through the streets. The same for the GIs and Marines coming back from the Pacific.

It wasn’t like that now. Harry Truman wasn’t bringing men home from Germany because he wanted to. He was doing it because Congress was giving him no choice. He was dragging his heels and grabbing at things as the new anti-occupation majority forced him down this road. And he, and all the branches of government he could still command, were doing their level best to pretend none of this was happening.

No press releases announced when troopships brought soldiers home from Germany. No welcoming committees waited for the returning troops. If the War Department could have disguised them with false noses and false names, it would have.

Diana McGraw didn’t think that was right or fair. The way things had gone wrong in Germany wasn’t the soldiers’ fault. If the American government hadn’t put them in an impossible situation…But it had, even if it was still too stubborn to believe as much.

And so she waited for a Liberty ship chugging into New York harbor. With her were local leaders of the movement to bring the troops home. And, since it was New York City, with them were more reporters and cameramen than you could shake a stick at.

The press didn’t bother her. She kept looking back over her shoulder toward the buildings behind the harbor, though. Any sniper lurking there had a clean shot, all right. The warm wetness of Gus van Slyke’s blood splashing her arm…She shivered, though the autumn day was mild enough. For several years after Ed came back from Over There, he’d wake up shrieking from nightmares where he revisited what he’d been through. Now Diana understood why.

“What exactly are you doing here today?” a reporter from the
New York Times
asked her.

She was ever so glad to get away from her own thoughts. “Our troops deserve a proper welcome,” she answered. “They haven’t done anything wrong.” Instead of a picket sign, she carried a big American flag today. Her colleagues had flags, too.

The reporter eyed the tired-looking ship, which tugs were nudging into place against the pier. Soldiers crowded the deck. They were staring at the amazing New York City skyline. Diana understood that, even if she’d looked at the buildings in a different way. You thought you could stay blasé about how New York looked. After all, you’d seen it a million times in the movies, right? But the difference between the movies and the genuine article was about like the difference between a picture of a steak dinner and the real thing on the table in front of you.

After a bit, the reporter’s gaze slid from the GIs to their welcoming committee. “Don’t you think they would have liked to see people closer to their own age?” he asked.