The Man with the Iron Heart

by Harry Turtledove

  Colonel Shteinberg pointed to one of the women, a statuesque brunette. “You, bitch-come outside with us,” he snarled. He wasn’t really speaking German at all, but Yiddish. She’d be able to follow it, though. And it ought to frighten her even more. Most Germans hadn’t had anything direct to do with killing Jews. But they’d had a notion of what was going on even so. They didn’t like the idea of Jews holding power over them now. They feared revenge-and well they might.

  Her lower lip trembled, but she came. As soon as she got out into the hall and the door closed behind her, Bokov slapped her in the face. She stared at him, her mouth an O of injured astonishment. She had eyes green as jade.

  She didn’t squawk, which wasn’t what he wanted. “Scream your head off,” he told her. “Give those other pigdogs back there something to worry about.”

  When she obeyed, he felt as if he were standing in front of an air-raid siren. “Enough, already!” Shteinberg said, and she shut it off as abruptly as she’d let loose. The Jewish NKVD man went on, “So you’re one of the ones who thought you could wipe out the Red Army, eh?”

  “I work in a shoe factory,” the dark-haired woman said. “One of your men pulled me out and said he would shoot my little son if I didn’t come here and give your officers drinks and-” She stopped, then made herself finish: “-and anything else they wanted.”

  Bokov didn’t know if she was telling the truth. Her story sounded as if she could be, though. “Tell us what happened here,” he said.

  “They gave me these clothes to wear,” she said. The black and white maid’s outfit didn’t cover that much of her. After a sigh, she continued, “I brought drinks. I brought food. I got groped a couple of times, but nothing worse.”

  The Red Army officers would still have been more or less sober. And the sour resignation in the woman’s voice said she might have been on the receiving end of worse when the Russians took Berlin. Nobody knew how many rapes there’d been then. A lot, though; no doubt of that.

  “Go on,” Bokov told her. “When did people start getting sick?”

  “A little before midnight,” she answered. “At first we thought it was because they were drinking like…well, because they were drinking so much.” She had sense enough not to tell a Russian that Russians drank like swine. But Bokov already knew that-knew it from experience. He could have been lying out there stiffening in the snow himself. When he remembered how much he’d looked forward to this feast, and how pissed off he’d been when he came down sick…When he remembered all that, he quickly thought about something else.

  “Do you know any of the people-the Germans, I mean-who got out of here before the poison showed itself?” he asked.

  “Nein, mein Herr.” Curls bobbed back and forth as the woman shook her head. “I never saw any of them before. Your man must have liked my looks and thought I would make a good whore here.” She looked defiance at him, daring him to deny that was what the Red Army man had in mind. When Bokov just waited, she shrugged and went on, “I think most of the women got picked that way. The men behind the bar might be a different story. They didn’t get chosen for their looks, anyhow.”

  She made good sense, even if she was trying to get the NKVD men to leave her alone. Colonel Shteinberg went back into the smoking room, presumably to grab one of the barmen.

  Bokov carried on alone with her. “Show me your papers,” he snapped. He wrote down her name: Elfriede Taubenschlag, a hell of a mouthful. Then he said, “So you have a boy, eh? Where’s your husband?”

  “He died in an air raid last year,” she answered bleakly. “He was home, getting over a wound, and he was out drinking beer with some other soldiers in the same boat, and the tavern got hit. I think most of what we buried was him. I hope so.”

  If she was looking for sympathy, she was looking in the wrong place. Bokov slapped her again, almost hard enough to knock her over. “Hitler shouldn’t have started the war if he didn’t want it to come home,” he snapped.

  “If you treat us like this, no wonder we give you poison,” she said.

  This time, he did knock her down. She might not have wanted to yelp, but she did anyway. Bokov had to fight the urge to murder her right there. If he hadn’t thought it came from the benzedrine roaring through him, he wouldn’t have bothered fighting. “We’ll kill all of you if we need to, cunt. Nobody’d miss you a bit. It’s what you tried to do to us.”

  Elfriede Taubenschlag kept quiet. She could see he would kill her if she argued. He could read her face, now bruised, too. Like so many Germans, she wasn’t sorry Hitler had started the war. She only regretted losing.

  Bokov shoved her back toward the smoking room. “Any luck?” Colonel Shteinberg asked him, pausing with a barman whose flat nose and scarred forehead said he’d done some prizefighting.

  “Not much,” Bokov answered, eyeing the German to see if he followed Russian. Seeing no signs of that, he went on, “Since the bitches were chosen for their looks, the barmen look like a better bet.”

  “So we’ll see what Uwe here knows,” Shteinberg said. Then he fell back into rasping, guttural Yiddish: “And if he doesn’t sing like a damned canary, we’ll see how he likes Siberia.”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’,” Uwe said-like most Germans, he had no trouble with the Jews’ dialect.

  “No, huh? If we strip off your monkey suit, will we find an SS tattoo under your armpit?” Shteinberg asked. The Red Army often liquidated SS men it captured. As the war wound down toward disaster for them, some of the Nazi supermen had their blood-group marking surgically removed so it wouldn’t betray them. But a fresh scar right there could also be a death sentence.

  “Got no tattoos,” Uwe said stolidly. He pulled up one trouser leg to show he did have an artificial foot. “Goddamn French 75 nailed me outside of Dunkirk in 1940. I tended bar ever since I got out of the hospital. Even the Volkssturm wouldn’t take me with a leg and a half.”

  Bokov had thought the only prerequisite for the Germans’ last-ditch militia was a detectable pulse, but maybe he was wrong. The answer didn’t faze Shteinberg, who asked, “How about Heydrich’s crowd? You don’t have to run fast to pour wood alcohol into the vodka.”

  “I don’t know nothin’ about that, and I ain’t no fuckin’ Werewolf,” Uwe said. “Fuckin’ war’s over. We lost. All I want to do is get on with my life.”

  “If you know who poisoned it, you’ll live better,” the Jew told him. “We help people who help us.”

  Uwe grunted. “Happens I know a couple of dykes who’re pretty much Reds. They make it through the war without the SS grabbing ’em. Red Army shoots its way into Berlin at last. Dykes come out waving and yelling, ‘Kamerad!’ Know what happens next? They get gangbanged. Believing Goebbels’ bullshit cost me my foot. What do I win for believing yours?”

  A trip to the gulag, Bokov thought. You ran your mouth like that, you were asking for it. “Let’s see your papers,” Bokov said. “We may want to ask you more questions later, and we’ll need to know where to find you.”

  By his documents, the German was Uwe Kupferstein. Bokov carefully noted his name and address. He didn’t know whether they’d need to question Kupferstein some more or just stuff him onto an eastbound train so he could see how he liked life as a zek. Well, that was a worry for another time.

  “How are you doing?” Shteinberg asked as the barman stumped back away. The fellow had had practice with that foot; he hardly limped at all.

  “I’ve been better, Comrade Colonel, but I’ll keep going as long as the pills let me,” Bokov answered. “How are you?”

  “About the same.” The Jew sighed and clicked his tongue between his teeth. “We won’t find the answers here tonight-this morning, I should say.” The eastern horizon was starting to lighten.

  “I don’t suppose we will, either.” Bokov sighed, too. “But we’ve got to try.”

  “Oh, yes. And we have to be seen trying, too.” Maybe the influenza and the benzedrine were what made Shteinberg s
ail close to the edge: sail over it, really. Shaking his head at what had come out of his mouth, he added, “Let’s go interrogate two more.” Feeling in his pocket to make sure he still had the vial the doctor had given him, Bokov followed him back to the smoking room.

  When Lou Weissberg passed from the zone to the British, the way the Tommies inspected his papers and examined his jeep told him things were just as rugged here as they were where he’d come from. “Having fun with the diehards, are you?” he said.

  To his way of thinking, the corporal checking his documents had his chevrons on upside down. The man was pale, almost pasty, and had an ugly scar on his left cheek. He wore a new-style British helmet, halfway between the old tin hat and the American pot. “Too bloody right we are,” he answered, his accent even further from Lou’s than Toby Benton’s drawl was. “When we catch them, they die hard, all right.”

  Officially, the Americans didn’t do things like that. Germans caught in arms after the surrender weren’t legally POWs-they were classed as enemy combatants instead. Still, orders were to give them at least a drumhead hearing before shooting them. Lou happened to know those orders didn’t always get observed. The French thought their mere existence absurd: Frenchmen were practical people. Evidently Englishmen were, too.

  “You seem to pass muster, Leftenant.” Yes, the corporal spoke English, but not the kind a Yank from New Jersey would use. He gestured with his Sten gun. “Pass on-and for Christ’s sake keep your bleedin’ eyes open.”

  “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, no
t yet. Could something like the Christian Democratic Union make a difference? Lou didn’t know-but if it could, he was all for it.

  XI

  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 cliches 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.