“Didn’t we just! I was thinking the same thing a little while ago. And that reminds me of something else…. Where the devil did I see it?” Heydrich pawed through papers. He didn’t like being an administrator; he craved action. But unless he knew what was going on, he wouldn’t know what to act on. His desk wasn’t especially neat, but after a few seconds he found what he was looking for. “They grabbed as many of our nuclear physicists as they could catch and took them over to England right after the surrender.”
“Did they? I hadn’t heard that, but it doesn’t surprise me.” Klein nodded to himself. “Nope, doesn’t surprise me one goddamn bit. The British’d want to grill ’em, and they wouldn’t want the Russians to grab any of them.”
“Right on both counts,” Heydrich agreed. “Same kind of race with them as there was with the engineers who built our rockets. You can bet the Ivans got their hands on some of both groups, too, damn them. But that’s not the point.”
“Well, what is the point, then, sir?” Klein asked reasonably.
“The point is that ten of these fellows with the high foreheads came back to Germany on the…” Heydrich paused to check the sheet of paper he’d uncovered. “On the third of January, that’s when it was. Just a couple of weeks ago. They landed at Lubeck, in the British zone. Now they’re staying at a tricked-out clothing store in Alswede, not far away.”
“Lubeck? Alswede?” Dismay filled Klein’s voice. “That’s up by the Baltic-and no more than a long spit from the edge of the Russian zone. The Tommies’d better hope the NKVD doesn’t try a snatch-and-grab.”
“They do have some security,” Heydrich admitted reluctantly. “And they make sure the physicists can’t just go wandering off on their own. They have an evening curfew. The brains can’t leave the British zone, and their families are hostages to make sure they behave. The Tommies don’t say that’s how things are, but it’s what they amount to.”
“Better than nothing, I suppose. Still not good,” Klein said.
Now Heydrich nodded; he felt the same way. But he turned the talk in a different direction: “I’ve made inquiries up there. The British are going to really start letting people go any day now. Harteck and Diebner plan to go the Hamburg. Heisenberg and Hahn aim to start up their old institute in Gottingen. Von Weizsacker and Bagge and some of the others are thinking about joining up with them there. They all know more than they did during the war. If nothing else, they’ve learned a lot from the enemy. And that means…” He let his voice trail away and waited.
People talked about watching a light come on on somebody’s face. Heydrich watched it happen with Johannes Klein. “Sweet suffering Jesus!” the Oberscharfuhrer exclaimed. “We can grab ’em ourselves, put ’em to work making bombs for us!”
“We can sure grab them. I aim to try,” Heydrich agreed. “That way, we deny them to the British-and to the Russians. I don’t know how much they can actually do for us. We won’t have a lot of the equipment they’d need, and we may not be able to take it-steal it-without giving away too much. Still, all we can do is try.”
“Yes, sir!” Klein’s eyes glowed. “When we’ve got a bomb like that for ourselves, nobody will be able to kick us around any more, not ever again.”
“That’s right, Hans. As a matter of fact, we’ll be able to do some kicking ourselves.” Reinhard Heydrich’s predatory smile said he looked forward to it. But then the smile faded like an old photograph left too long in the sun. He started shuffling through the papers on his desk again.
“What’s up, sir?” Klein inquired.
“Some other business that needs taking care of,” Heydrich said: an answer that wasn’t. “All this stuff happens at the same time, and you can’t let any of it get away from you or you’re screwed. It’s a miracle the Fuhrer handled so much so well for so long.”
“And then after a while he didn’t,” Klein said. Heydrich gave him a look. The noncom stuck out his chin. “Oh, c’mon, sir. you know it’s true. He screwed up the Russian war like nobody’s business. And when we still weren’t doing real bad, you know, nobody’d make terms with us, ’cause the Anglo-Americans and Stalin only figured the Fuhrer would use the time to rebuild and then jump ’em again. And he would have, too. Tell me I’m wrong.”
Heydrich couldn’t. Every word was gospel. All the same…Klein must not have had that internalized Fuhrer looking over his shoulder. “Will you say the same thing about me?” Heydrich asked dryly.
“Sure hope not, sir,” the Oberscharfuhrer answered. “But wouldn’t you rather have somebody tell you to your face you’re going wrong instead of being too scared to open his mouth till after everything’s down the shitter?”
If you told Hitler he was wrong to his face, you’d pay for it. If you were lucky like some of his generals, you’d retire whether you wanted to or not. If you weren’t…well, that was one of the things concentration camps were for.
“A point, Hans,” Heydrich admitted. “Still, even if you do tell me I’m going wrong, I reserve the right to think you’re full of crap.”
“Oh, sure,” Klein said. “Officers always do. Every once in a while, they’re even right.” He sketched a salute and ambled out into the rocky corridor. Heydrich stared after him. Noncoms who’d been around for a long time always thought they deserved the last word. Every so often, you had to remind them why you were in command. Every so often-but maybe not today.
Lou Weissberg held up a copy of the International Herald-Tribune . It had a front-page story about a demonstration in California against the continued American occupation of Germany. The story called the demonstration “the largest and loudest yet.”
Captain Howard Frank grimaced when he saw the paper. “I already read it,” he said. “Hot damn.”
“Yup.” Lou nodded. “Story didn’t make the Stars and Stripes. Funny how that works, huh?”
“Funny, yeah. Funny like a truss.” Captain Frank made a small production out of lighting a cigarette. He held out the pack to Lou. “Want one?”
“Thanks.” Lou flicked a Zippo to get his started. After a couple of puffs, he said, “Y’know, we can lick our enemies. We knocked these Nazi assholes flat. If Stalin fucks with us, we’ll wallop him into the middle of next week. He’s gotta know it, too. But how the devil are we supposed to beat the people who say they’re on our side?”
“Good question. If you’ve got a good answer, go tell Eisenhower. Hell, write it up and tell Truman,” Frank said.
“Thanks a bunch-sir.”
Howard Frank held up his hand. “Hey, I’m not kidding-not even a little bit. We can’t stay here if the folks back home decide we ought to pack up and leave. If your Congressman tries to buck ’em, they’ll throw him out on his ass this November. If Truman tries, they’ll throw him out in ’48. And where will we be then?”
“Up shit creek, that’s where. And they’ll be ‘Sieg heil!’ing from what used to be the American zone twenty minutes after the last C-47 takes off,” Lou said.
Frank stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one. “Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe we can hang around long enough to teach the Germans how to stand on their own two feet. You said that Adenauer guy over in Cologne impressed you. Gotta be more where he came from.”
“I’m sure there are.” But that wasn’t agreement, because Lou went on, “But if we leave the way that McGraw broad and her pals want us to, those guys won’t have the chance to stand up for themselves. The Nazis’ll bump ’em off, first chance they get. And then we start worrying about World War III, all in one lifetime.”
“Maybe not,” Frank said. Lou made a rude noise. In a more rules-conscious army, it might have landed him in the stockade. Captain Frank just laughed. “You said Stalin’s scared of us. Well, yeah, but he’s fucking terrified of the Germans. If we do pull out, he’s liable to head for the Rhine to make sure we don’t get round two of the Third Reich.”
“We can’t let him do that. France shits its pants if he does-same with Italy,” Lou said gloomily
. “So we go to war against him on account of the fucking krauts? God, that’d be a kick in the nuts, wouldn’t it? And it sounds a hell of a lot like World War III, too.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Captain Frank eyed the glowing coal of his cigarette. “You’d think that when everybody says a war is over, it’d really be over.”
“Yeah. You would.” Lou put out his cigarette, too. The ashtray was soldier-made from the base of a 105mm shell. “I figured I’d be home by now. I figured my wife’d be expecting another baby by now.”
“Okay. I understand what you mean. Morrie’d probably be getting a little brother or sister if they’d given me a Ruptured Duck when I thought they would,” Frank said. “But things after the surrender didn’t work out the way anybody hoped. You know that. And what we’re doing here is worth doing. You know that, too. Hell, everybody knows that.”
“Not Diana McGraw and her crowd. And it seems like her crowd gets bigger every day.” Lou tapped the Herald-Trib with his index finger. “That guy who smuggled out the Cunningham film is with these people, too. Tom Shit, whatever the hell his name was.”
“Schmidt,” Captain Frank corrected primly. Then he shot Lou a dirty look. “Funny guy. You and Danny Kaye and Groucho Marx. You ought to have your own radio show. You’d sell tons of toothpaste and shaving soap.”
“All Yehudim. If Hitler had his way, he would’ve made us into shaving soap.” Lou hesitated, then went on, “Some of the Jewish guys over here, they don’t hardly seem to give a damn. Sure doesn’t stop ’em from laying German broads.”
“Nope. Me, I’d sooner jack off. If I fucked one of those bitches, I’d break every mirror I own,” Frank said. Lou nodded; he felt the same way. But, a moment later, his superior went on, “Other people see it different, that’s all. I heard one guy say he was getting his revenge nine inches at a time.”
Lou snorted. “A fucking braggart. Or maybe a braggart fucking-who knows?” Captain Frank sent him another severe look. He ignored it; he was used to them. “More fun than going up against the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS, I will say that.”
“Or than going up against the fanatics,” Frank said. “Know what I heard?”
“’Fraid I don’t. But you’re gonna tell me, aren’t you?” Lou said.
“Sure am. The MPs here grabbed a couple of German broads with VD who say people told ’em not to get cured. They wanted these gals to make as many of our guys come down venereal as they could.”
“Makes a twisted kind of sense,” Lou said. “Or it did, anyway, before sulfa and penicillin. A guy with a drippy faucet’s just as much a casualty as a guy who got shot in the leg. He was, anyway, till you could cure him with a needle in the ass or a handful of pills.”
Captain Frank suddenly looked alert. He pulled a fountain pen from his left breast pocket and scribbled a note. “Something to remember: Heydrich and the other bastards down in the salt mines or wherever the hell they are don’t know everything we can do. They’ve got old German intelligence reports-”
“And new newspapers,” Lou broke in.
“Mm-hmm. And those.” Howard Frank nodded. “And which bunch has more crap mixed in with the good stuff is anybody’s guess.”
“Well, you’ve got that right, sir. If Hitler’s intelligence on us were any good, he never would’ve taken us on. Christ, if his intelligence on Russia were any good, he would’ve let Stalin alone, too,” Lou said.
“Back toward the end of ’41, the Germans had already wiped out as many divisions as they thought the Red Army had,” Frank said. “At the start, they didn’t know the Russians had the T-34, either. You kinda lose points with your bosses when you miss stuff like the best tank in the war, y’know?”
“Oh, maybe a few,” Lou said, which wrung a dry chuckle out of the captain. Then Lou asked, “What are we missing that we ought to see?”
For a moment, Captain Frank looked almost comically astonished. He was in the intelligence racket, too. Did he really imagine he saw everything there was to see? Didn’t imagining something like that take colossal-almost Germanic-arrogance? Captain Frank started to say something, then closed his mouth. What he did say was probably quite different from what had almost come out: “You’re a disruptive son of a bitch, you know that?”
“Thank you, sir,” Lou said, which earned him another pointed glance. “But I’m serious. God knows the Nazis have their blind spots, but so do we. If we try to shrink ’em, maybe we can.”
“Japs sure blindsided us when they hit Pearl Harbor. We never dreamt they’d be dumb enough to jump on us like that, so they caught us flat-footed,” Frank said. “They were tougher all kinds of ways than we expected. We didn’t know any more about the Zero than the Germans knew about the T-34. And kamikazes…” His voice faded.
“Before the Japs finally quit, we played down how much trouble an enemy who didn’t care if he lived could be,” Lou said. “I guess we were smart-the Japs would’ve done more of that shit if they knew how bad it hurt us. But it seems to me we believed our own propaganda. We didn’t think the krauts could give us much trouble if they pulled stunts like that. Shows what we knew, huh?”
“Other thing we didn’t think was that they would pull shit like that,” Lou said. “Before the surrender, they didn’t hardly. The Master Race must’ve learned something from the Japs. Who woulda believed it?”
“Not me.” Captain Frank held up a sheet of paper. “Word is that that Adenauer guy you brought from Cologne is gonna speak at Erlangen. You really think he’s the straight goods?”
“He’s no Nazi, if that’s what you mean,” Lou replied. “If you mean, is he the Answer with a capital A, hell, I don’t know. But I sure hope like hell somebody can make the Germans run their own government and not automatically go after all their neighbors. If nobody can-”
“Then we’ve got to do it ourselves,” Frank finished for him. Unhappily, Lou nodded. That was what he’d been thinking, all right. His superior went on, “And God only knows how long we’ll stay here.”
“We need to,” Lou said.
“No shit. But what we need to do and what we’re gonna do, they’re two different beasts, and the jerks back home sure aren’t helping. Time may come when we have to go home, prop up whatever half-assed German government we’ve patched together in the meanwhile, and hope like hell Heydrich and the Nazis don’t knock it over as soon as we’re gone.”
“It won’t happen right away.” Lou took what comfort he could from that. “Not till after the fall elections, anyhow.”
Captain Frank lit another cigarette. He blew out smoke and shook his head. “You’re such a goddamn American, Lou.”
Whatever Lou had expected from the other CIC man, that wasn’t it. “I sure hope so, sir.” He hesitated, then asked, “What exactly d’you mean? I’m damn glad I’m an American, but you don’t make it sound like a compliment.”
Frank sighed. “I don’t mean it for an insult, either. But the Europeans play a deeper game than we do, ’cause they know how to wait and we don’t. Heydrich figures if he can put the Nazis back on top ten years from now, or maybe twenty, he’s won. And he’s right, too, God damn him to hell. But us? We get bored, or we find something new to worry about, or we get sick of spending lives a few here, a few there, when it’s got no obvious point. And so you’re right-we won’t do anything much till after the elections. But that’s only this fall, remember. If the Republicans take Congress-and if they take Congress because they’re yelling, ‘What are we doing in Germany now that the war’s over?’-what can Truman do about it? Not much, not if he wants to get elected in ’48.”
Lou thought about that. He shivered, though a coal stove kept Captain Frank’s office toasty. Then he covered his face. “We’re screwed. We are so screwed.”
“That’s how it looks to me, too,” Captain Frank said. “I hoped like anything you’d tell me I was wrong.”
XII
Diana McGraw paid attention to the newspapers in ways she never had before Pat got kill
ed. Back in those prehistoric days, she’d looked at the funnies and the recipes and the advice and gossip columns. Foreign news? As long as the Americans and their allies kept moving forward-and, from 1942 on, they pretty steadily did-who worried about foreign news?
She did, now. The Indianapolis papers didn’t carry as much as she wanted, as much as she needed. And so the postman brought her the New York Times. She got it a few days late, but that was better than not getting it at all. The same went for the Washington Post. If you wanted to find out what was going on in Congress, you had to read a paper that covered it seriously.
She was reading the Times when she looked up and said, “Ha!”
Ed was rereading The Egg and I. He’d stop and chuckle every so often. Diana had read it, too. The only way you wouldn’t stop and chuckle was if you’d had your sense of humor taken out with your tonsils when you were a kid. But that Ha! was on an entirely different note. “What’s up, sweetie?” Ed asked.
She pointed to the story that had drawn her notice. “This German politician named Adenauer”-she figured she was messing up the pronunciation, but she hadn’t taken any German in high school-“is coming into the American zone to talk to the Germans there.”
“He’s not a Nazi, is he?” Ed answered his own question before Diana could: “Nah, he wouldn’t be. They wouldn’t let him get away with it if he was. So how come you think he’s a big deal?”
“I think we’re pushing Truman and Eisenhower and all the other blockheads running things over there-pushing ’em our way, I mean,” Diana said. “If they set up some kind of German government, that gives ’em an excuse to say, ‘Well, we’ve done what we need to do, so we can bring our boys home now.’”
“Sounds good to me,” Ed said.
She nodded. “To me, too. So let’s hear it for Mr. Konrad Adenauer.” She tried the name a different way this time. Ed only shrugged. He’d come back from Over There with a few scraps of German, but he’d forgotten it in the generation since.
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