The Man with the Iron Heart

by Harry Turtledove

  Jerry whistled softly. “I believe you,” he said, and meant it: she radiated conviction. “Over a thousand? Good Lord!”

  “You have to understand,” she said. “If some German killed Pat in the Battle of the Bulge, I wouldn’t be here talking with you now. I’d be as sorry as I am, but not quite the same way. War is war, and things like that can happen. But we’re at peace now, or we’re supposed to be. Why did Pat have to die almost five months after the war was supposed to be over? Why have a thousand American kids died after it was supposed to be over?”

  “That’s…a better question than I thought it would be when you made this appointment,” Jerry said slowly. Like a lot of Midwestern Republicans, he’d wanted nothing to do with the war in Europe when it broke out. He hadn’t called himself an isolationist, but he hadn’t been far from thinking that way, either.

  Then Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Of course he voted for the declaration of war. He wanted to-he was as furious as anybody else. And if he hadn’t, his district would have tarred him and feathered him and ridden him out of Congress on a rail.

  Hitler declared war on the USA. That saved him from wondering how he would have voted when Roosevelt asked for war against Germany. Maybe not knowing was just as well.

  “What do you want me to do, Mrs. McGraw?” he asked.

  “Get some answers,” she said at once. “Why are we still over there now that the war’s over? What are we doing over there that could possibly be worth a thousand lives? Why is the War Department trying to hush up everything that’s going on over there?”

  Those were all good questions. Jerry Duncan said so. They were especially good questions for a Republican to ask, since they could hold a Democratic administration’s feet to the fire. “And what will you be doing yourself?” Jerry inquired.

  “Me?” Diana McGraw sounded surprised he needed to ask. “I’m going to the papers and the radio stations. You can’t keep things secret forever, Congressman. You just can’t.”

  “You’re right,” Duncan said. “You’re absolutely right. Some of the mistakes we made in the first part of the war…Well, thank God we didn’t lose on account of them. Sometimes I wonder why we didn’t. Believe me, I do. And the public still doesn’t know about a lot of them.”

  “A few weeks ago, I would have been shocked if you told me something like that. Shocked. Now I believe you,” she said. “Why do those people want to sweep everything under the rug?”

  “To keep folks from pointing a finger at their mistakes.” Again, Jerry replied without hesitation. With a politician’s facility, he chose not to remember that he’d voted against the draft bill that passed by a single vote the summer before Pearl Harbor, and that he’d also voted against more money for the War and Navy Departments before the USA actually got into the fighting. Pointing a finger at the administration’s mistakes was easy. Pointing a finger at his own…

  “High time somebody did,” Mrs. McGraw said. “Germany’s smashed. It’s knocked flat. It’s not going to magically come back to life if we bring our boys home.”

  “I hope not.” Jerry did remember that people had said the same thing after World War I. But nobody’d blown up American doughboys in the aftermath of that fight. Who could say now what would have happened had the Germans tried it then?

  “Let’s get on with it,” she said crisply. “How many GIs will the fanatics have killed by this time next week or next month or next year? And why will those GIs have died? For what?”

  “For making sure the Nazis don’t come back and start up again.” Jerry knew exactly what his Democratic colleagues would say. He said it himself, to see how Diana McGraw responded.

  She snorted. She looked at him as if she’d found half of him in her apple. She was nothing but a housewife, but she made him flinch. “Oh, nonsense,” she said, and somehow she got more scorn into that than a cigar-puffing committee chairman would have from Oh, bullshit. “How do you hold down a whole country?” she went on. “And how do you fight people who’ll blow themselves up to get rid of you? If they’re already willing to die, what can you do to make them quit?”

  Jerry Duncan opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. Nobody in America had been able to find a good answer to that. One of the things the public didn’t know was how much damage Japanese kamikazes had done. How much more would they have inflicted if the USA’d had to invade the Home Islands? Jerry silently thanked God for the A-bomb. It had saved one hell of a lot of American casualties. Probably kept a good many Japs from joining their ancestors, too, not that he gave a rat’s ass about them.

  “It’s a good question,” he said, hoping his pause wasn’t too noticeable. “I’ll be honest with you-I don’t know. Maybe some Army officers do-”

  “Fat chance,” Mrs. McGraw broke in.

  “I was going to say, but if they do, they sure haven’t given any sign of it.”

  “No. They haven’t.” Her bitterness was hidden while she planned action. It came back now. “And Pat’s dead, and my grandson will grow up never knowing his uncle, and my husband stumbles around like a man in a daze-no, like a man who’s stopped caring. And he has. And how can you blame him, if Pat died for nothing?”

  “If-” Jerry began.

  She interrupted him again: “If we get our troops out of there because of what happened to Pat, it may turn out to be worthwhile after all. It may. If we don’t…” She shook her head, then brushed at the bit of transparent black veiling that came down over her eyes from her hat.

  She left a few minutes later, back straight, stride determined. She had a Cause, and she’d stick with it come hell or high water. Jerry Duncan stared after her, even though she’d closed the door when she went out. Damned if she hadn’t given him one, too.

  Breslau wasn’t in Germany any more. For that matter, Breslau wasn’t Breslau any more. Stalin had shoved the USSR’s border several hundred kilometers west, and shoved newly resuscitated Poland west about as far at Germany’s expense to make up for it.

  The Poles were calling the place Wroclaw, which they pronounced something like Breslau. Captain Vladimir Bokov didn’t give a damn what they called it. He also didn’t give a damn that he was in Soviet-occupied Poland rather than Soviet-occupied Germany. As long as the Red Army was around, nobody except the Fascist bandits he was trying to root out would give him any trouble. Local officials sure as hell wouldn’t.

  Breslau, Wroclaw, whatever you wanted to call it, had its share of bandits and then some. Its garrison, surrounded on all sides, had held out till just before the general surrender. The Poles were trying to solve their German problem by resettling their countrymen from Lwow and other cities to the east who didn’t want to live under Soviet rule, and by uprooting the local Germans and marching them west toward the new border-at gunpoint, if necessary. That would probably work…in the long run. For the time being, it gave the remaining Germans every reason to support the fanatics.

  Thus, the local Polish governor had just come to a sudden and untimely end. A sniper had put a Mauser round through his head from close to a kilometer away. Shooting Poles had its points; Bokov had done it himself, more than once. Even shooting Communist Party members was sometimes necessary, as anyone who’d worked through the purges of the late 1930s could attest.

  But shooting someone who was in the Soviet government’s good graces went over the line. And so Vladimir Bokov had come east to do something about it. The highway to Wroclaw was wide and fine. It had been part of the German Autobahn system. Now the Poles got to use it.

  There was an American film where one police official told another, “Round up the usual suspects.” The local authorities in Wroclaw, Polish and Russian, seemed to have followed that rule. To them, the usual suspects seemed to include anyone who thought the city should still be called Breslau…should, in other words, stay German.

  They’d rounded up hundreds of Wehrmacht veterans. They’d added all the butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers who’d ever said anything bad about Poles or
Russians. In a town like Wroclaw, that gave them plenty to choose from.

  A captain in a csapka met Bokov outside the wire-fenced camp where the locals were stowing their prisoners. Bokov thought the square-crowned Polish headgear looked asinine, but that wasn’t his worry. After a couple of false starts, he and Captain Leszczynski conversed in German. He could almost understand Leszczynski’s Polish, but Leszczynski didn’t want to try to follow his Russian. The Pole wore three Red Army decorations on his chest, but he was plainly a nationalist as well as a Communist.

  One day, no doubt, Leszczynski would get purged. Bokov was sure of it. Maybe the proud Pole knew it, too. But they were on the same side now.

  “These damned Werewolves are driving us nuts,” Leszczynski said. Bokov was highly fluent in German; he’d studied it for years. Leszczynski spoke it like a native. Before the war, he’d likely used it as much as Polish. The Poles might hate and fear their western neighbors, but they leaned toward them as if drawn by a magnet. In Russian, a traveling fort with a cannon in the turret was a tank, as it was in English. The Poles borrowed pancer from the Germans.

  “We’ll deal with them. One way or another, we will,” Bokov said confidently.

  “Jawohl. Aber naturlich.” Irony filled Captain Leszczynski’s voice. Poles didn’t like Russians much better than they liked Germans. They looked down their noses at Russians, though, and hardly bothered to hide it. So did Germans, of course. It was almost less annoying from them than from fellow Slavs.

  “We will,” Bokov insisted. “If we have to kill them all, we’ll do that.”

  “Hmm. Well, maybe.” Captain Leszczynski seemed to be reminding himself they were allies here. “Which prisoners will you want to interrogate?”

  “The ones you think likeliest to know something about Comrade Pietruszka’s murder,” Bokov answered. Before the Pole could say anything, he added, “The ones who hate us worst.”

  “Oh, they all hate us,” Leszczynski said. “The only question is, which ones did something about it?”

  Adrian Marwede said he’d been a Wehrmacht noncom. He still wore a ratty field-gray service blouse. Bokov eyed a slightly darker ring on the left sleeve near the cuff: the sort of ring a cloth cuff-title might leave after it was removed. Only a few Wehrmacht divisions used cuff-titles. However…“You were really in the Waffen-SS, nicht wahr?” All their outfits had them.

  Marwede turned pale. “Well-yes,” he muttered.

  But then Captain Leszczynski took Bokov aside. “When Breslau surrendered, all the defenders were promised life, personal property, and eventual return to Germany-the SS included.”

  “What?” Bokov couldn’t believe it. “Who made such an idiotic promise?”

  With a certain somber relish, the Pole replied, “Lieutenant General Gluzdovsky, commander, Soviet Sixth Army, First Ukrainian Front.”

  Bokov gave him a dirty look. The truth could be far more irritating than any lie. “All right, I won’t knock him around for being an SS swine,” the NKVD man said. “I’ll knock him around because he may know something about what happened to Pietruszka. Does that make you happy?”

  “Pietruszka was a solid man,” Leszczynski said, which could have meant anything.

  Whatever it meant, Bokov could worry about it later. He turned back to Adrian Marwede. “So, SS man…” he said, and watched Marwede flinch. In a Russian’s mouth, that was all too likely a death sentence in and of itself. Bokov let him stew for a few seconds, then asked, “What do you know about Reinhard Heydrich, SS man?”

  “He’s supposed to be a tough bastard.” Marwede sounded less impressed than he might have. He explained why as he went on, “How tough can you be when you hardly ever get near the front?”

  Captain Bokov didn’t care whether Heydrich was personally brave. Things he’d heard made him think Heydrich was, but it didn’t matter one way or the other. The man was a goddamn nuisance-worse than a goddamn nuisance-and needed suppressing. “What do you know about what Heydrich’s up to, SS man?”

  “What? You think the Reichsprotektor talks to the likes of me?” Marwede raised an eyebrow.

  Without changing expression, Bokov slapped him across the face, forehand and backhand. That was good technique; not only did it hurt, it humiliated. The German staggered. “Don’t screw around with me,” Bokov said evenly. “Tell me what I want to know, and don’t give me any shit. You answer another question with a question and what happens next’ll make that look like a love tap. Get me?”

  Marwede spat-spat red, in fact. He nodded gingerly. “Yes, I get you.”

  He got that his life lay in an NKVD officer’s cupped palm. Well, what else did he need to get? If Bokov decided to squeeze…“What do you know about what Heydrich’s up to?”

  “Not much.” Hastily, Marwede went on, “Nobody up at the front ever found out much of what he was up to. All we knew was, there were times we couldn’t get the guns or the ammo we needed. When that happened, people would swear at Heydrich. He was squirreling the stuff away, or guys said he was.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” Captain Leszczynski remarked.

  “So have I,” Bokov said. He knew why, too: it was true. He also knew why Heydrich was squirreling that stuff away-to do just what he and his merry thugs were doing now. The Russian eyed Marwede. “What else do you know? What else have you heard?”

  “Well…nothing I can prove,” Marwede said. Bokov gestured impatiently. The German continued, “Sometimes guys’d go back with light wounds, things that wouldn’t keep them out of action more than two, three weeks, tops. Only they wouldn’t come to the front again when they should’ve healed up. That’d drive our officers crazy.”

  “What happened to them?” Bokov asked. “And don’t tell me you don’t know, either. You Fritzes have paperwork coming out your assholes. I’ve never seen people for paperwork like Germans. If you wanted to find out where these troops were, you could.”

  Marwede held up his right hand with index and middle fingers raised together: the gesture Germans used when they were swearing an oath. “Honest to God, I don’t know. Our officers couldn’t track those guys. It was like they fell off the face of the earth. They just disappeared. Nobody knew where. Nobody could find out where. People said Heydrich had ’em. I don’t know if he did, but people said so.”

  “I’ve heard that before, too,” Leszczynski said.

  “Me, too,” Bokov agreed. He glowered at the SS man. “When did this start happening?”

  “I don’t know exactly.” Marwede set himself for another blow. When it didn’t come, he continued, “First couple of people I can remember disappearing like that were right after Kursk, I think.”

  “Fuck your mother!” Bokov exclaimed in Russian. Marwede scowled; he must have learned what that meant. The NKVD man didn’t care. If the Germans had started collecting holdouts as early as the summer of 1943…they’d have a devil of a lot of them, and the bastards could raise all kinds of hell. Which, when you got right down to it, was nothing he didn’t know already.

  “That I hadn’t heard,” Captain Leszczynski said with calm either commendable or excessive, depending on how you looked at things.

  “Neither had I. As far as I know, nobody’s heard that before,” Bokov said. He wanted to slap the SS man around for no better reason than giving him bad news. The look he gave Marwede should have knocked him over by itself. “Listen, cuntface, if you’re lying to me just to make me trip over my own dick, I’ll hunt you down and cut your balls off and stuff ’em down your throat.”

  He wasn’t lying. Adrian Marwede had the sense to realize as much. “Not me,” he said, using that oath-taking gesture again. “I’ve done plenty of stupid things, but I’m not dumb enough to screw around with the NKVD.”

  So he recognized the collar tabs and cap, did he? That was interesting. “You were dumb enough to join the SS,” Bokov growled. “You’re dumb enough for anything.” 1943? Summer 1943? Bozhemoi!

  VI

  The Indiana state Cap
itol was one impressive building. Diana McGraw had never seen it before, not in person, even though Anderson was only about twenty miles outside of Indianapolis. A housewife in a suburban town didn’t need to hobnob with state legislators. But, since she’d already seen her Congressman, the idea of coming here intimidated her less than it would have before.

  Now that she’d seen the U.S. Capitol, this one also seemed a little less splendid than it would have. It was built in the same neo-Roman style, but the dome was smaller and narrower, the proportions altogether less grand. Well, so what? Indiana wasn’t Washington, and most of the time that was a good thing.

  Dressed in black, she got out of the family Pontiac. Ed sat stolidly behind the wheel, lighting a Chesterfield. This wasn’t his show-it was hers. He mourned their son by himself, within himself. Diana was the one with the fiery conviction that what had happened to Pat shouldn’t happen to any other mother’s son. She was the one who was damn well going to do something about it, too.

  She glanced at her watch. It was still a quarter to ten. Of course she’d made sure she got here early. Things wouldn’t start for another forty-five minutes. And when they did…She wasn’t sure what would happen then. You couldn’t be sure till you went and did something.

  A man across the street whistled and waved. It wasn’t a wolf whistle-he was trying to get her attention. When she looked up, he called, “Mrs. McGraw?”

  “That’s me.” She nodded automatically.

  He loped across the street toward her, dodging cars like a half-back. He wore a snap-brim fedora and a sharp suit that didn’t hang well on his pudgy frame. Behind him came a bareheaded guy in his shirtsleeves who carried a big camera. “I’m E. A. Stuart, from the Times,” the man in the lead said. “S-T-U-A-R-T. No W. We talked on the phone. This sounds interesting. Jack here’ll take photos.”