The Man with the Iron Heart

by Harry Turtledove

  She raided the icebox for leftovers and heated them on top of the stove. As she ate, she read the rest of the paper. Two more poor GIs blown up when a roadside artillery shell went off as their jeep drove by-another soldier wounded, too. She shook her head. Such a senseless waste!

  She wished she hadn’t had that exact thought. Ed’s face appeared in her mind when she did. That wasn’t fair, and she knew it. They’d had a lot of good years together. They’d raised two good kids. If Pat had come home right after V-E Day, everything would still be fine. Everything still was fine-unless she decided it wasn’t.

  Why did Ed have to look so much like a 1933 De Soto with a dented fender and a broken taillight?

  “Nothing wrong with Ed. Not a single, solitary thing,” she said, there where nobody else could hear.

  But that wasn’t what bothered her. What bothered her was, there wasn’t enough right with Ed.

  She got on the phone again. The busier she stayed, the less time she’d have to look at things like that.

  XXIV

  Berlin. Broken capital of the Third Reich. Quadruply occupied symbol of Allied solidarity, even when there wasn’t a hell of a lot of Allied solidarity to go around. A place where Heydrich’s fanatics pulled off enough bombings and other atrocities to generate more Allied solidarity than there would have been otherwise.

  Lou Weissberg stared at the wreckage-some of it mighty grandiose wreckage, too-for all the world like a tourist. Behind him, Howard Frank also did some tall rubbernecking. Lou lit a cigarette. Smoking helped you not notice the other thing that remained in the air, even two years and more after the fighting was said to be over. A lot of people had died here, and not so many of them lay in graves.

  His superior smoked away with him. Major Frank puffed like a steam engine on an uphill grade. “Maybe we’ll bring it off this time,” he said.

  A blackbird chirped, sounding like a robin back home. Like those good old American robins, blackbirds ate worms. What the worms ate…was perhaps better left uncontemplated in Berlin.

  “Maybe we will.” If Lou sounded as if he didn’t believe it, that was only because he didn’t. “We tried it in ’45-and they blew up the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. We tried it in ’46-and Frankfurt is still waddayacallit…radioactive. So what the hell will they do here?”

  “We got the Nazi big shots here. That’s something, anyhow,” Frank said. “I wouldn’t’ve given good odds we’d manage that.”

  “Chances are Heydrich’s waiting till they go on trial,” Lou said. “Then his merry men will try something really juicy, know what I mean?”

  “Merry men, my ass.” But Frank’s green-persimmon pucker said he knew just what Lou meant, no matter how much he wished he didn’t. He glanced east. “Trial’s gonna be in the Russian zone, so the security monkey’s off our back, anyway.”

  “Unless they holler for help,” Lou said.

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Howard Frank said. “They wouldn’t do that unless they were in deeper shit than they are now.”

  “I guess,” Lou said. Scuttlebutt said that back in 1942, when things looked black for the USSR, Stalin asked FDR and Churchill for American and British divisions to fight alongside the Red Army on the Eastern Front. Scuttlebutt even said he’d promised to let them keep their own command structure, which for a Russian leader was like handing over the crown jewels and the key to whatever he used instead of Fort Knox. The Anglo-American troops didn’t go. Trucks and avgas and Spam and ammo did, by the bazillions of tons. And Uncle Joe found enough Soviet bodies to make Hitler blow his brains out.

  And that was what so many of them turned into, too-bodies. To this day, you could smell them, and the Germans they’d taken with them, in Berlin.

  Lou and Major Frank smoked their cigarettes down to teeny-tiny butts before tossing them away and lighting new ones. The tobacco scroungers were on those little, spit-soaked dog-ends like Dracula on a pretty girl’s neck. Tobacco fueled what was left of the German economy-and you could even smoke it.

  Labor gangs shifted rubble one broken brick at a time. Old people, women who’d probably been chic once upon a time, and shabby demobilized soldiers labored side by side. Everybody was skinny. The ration was supposed to be up to 1,500 calories a day, which wasn’t saying much. You’d lose weight doing nothing on 1,500 calories a day. Doing hard physical labor…

  Considering what the Germans had done in occupied Europe, Lou had trouble working up much sympathy. He suspected the Red Army men in the Russian zone found it even tougher.

  Howard Frank was also eyeing the skinny krauts. “Now if we sent everybody who looked at us sideways off to a camp-”

  “We’d be just like the Russians. And just like the Nazis,” Lou finished for him. “But we’re not. Hell, we can’t even keep our own guys here.”

  “Last GI in Germany, close the door on your way out,” Frank agreed. “Gotta admire Congress, don’t you?”

  “God must love idiots, or He wouldn’t have made so many of them,” Lou said, which might have been an answer or might not.

  “Yeah, but how come so many of ’em got elected?” Frank said. “You ready to go back to the States yet?”

  “A lot of me is. I’ve been away from my family way too goddamn long-I mean way,” Lou said. “Hate to leave feeling like I didn’t do my job, though. If I could punch Heydrich’s ticket before I climbed on a plane or a boat or a unicycle or whatever the hell…”

  “I got a picture of you on a unicycle. I got a picture of you back in the hospital after you fall off the fuckin’ unicycle, too,” Frank said. Lou Weissberg, not the most graceful of men, maintained a dignified silence.

  During the war, there’d been a German propaganda photo of a soldier raising the swastika flag over the ruins of Stalingrad. That didn’t quite work out for Hitler’s crew. Right before V-E Day, Stalin got his answer: a photo of a Red Army man planting the hammer and sickle on the Reichs Chancellery in Berlin. The Wehrmacht gave up a few days later, and everything was supposed to be hunky-dory from then on out.

  Well, theory was wonderful.

  Getting into the Russian zone to see the Chancellery wasn’t easy. You had to clear a checkpoint, sign a log, show your ID, and get patted down. You also had to talk to a Red Army lieutenant who spoke American English like a native and probably was one.

  “Okay-youse guys are legit,” the guy said: a turn of phrase Lou heard all the time from New Jersey high-school kids in his English classes. The Red Army soldier went on, “We gotta keep our eyes open, y’know? Damn Fascist hyenas try and pull all kinds of sneaky stunts.”

  “Sure,” Lou said. He’d heard that hyena line, too-mostly from people who read the Daily Worker. It came from Russia there, and it came from Russia here.

  If anything, the Russian zone in Berlin looked worse than the American zone. It was the eastern part of the city, and the part where the fighting had been heaviest. The labor gangs here were guarded by Russian soldiers with submachine guns that looked as if they’d been made in somebody’s basement. For all Lou knew, they had.

  The Chancellery and the other fancy buildings from which the Nazis had run the Reich were all smashed wreckage. Lou took out a Brownie and clicked away. “These’ll remind me they got some of what was coming to them, anyhow,” he said. He wasn’t the only Allied soldier photographing the ruins, either. Amateur shutterbugs nodded to one another, all probably thinking the same kinds of thoughts.

  “Americans? You have any money? You have any cigarettes?” The guy who asked spoke Yiddish, not German. He rolled up a sleeve on his frayed shirt to show a number tattooed on his upper arm. He’d lived through the death camps, then. His face was all nose and staring eyes. Even now, more than two years after he’d been liberated, he looked as if a strong breeze-hell, a weak breeze-would blow him away.

  “Here, buddy.” Lou handed him a pack of Luckies and five bucks and half a D-ration chocolate bar he had in a jacket pocket.

  Major Frank was similarly generous
. “Beat it,” he told the displaced person after giving him stuff. “Somebody’ll knock you over the head if you hang around.”

  “Thank you both. If I still believed in God, I would ask His blessings on you,” the DP said. He disappeared like a cockroach vanishing down a crack in the floor.

  “If I still believed in God…” Lou echoed, in Yiddish and then in English. It sounded just as bad either way. But when you’d been through what the DP had, when millions of people who went into the camps came out only as smoke from a crematorium chimney, when God-if there was a God-sat there and watched without doing anything…The Chosen People? Chosen for what? For this? Lou had done his best not to think about it. If you did think about it, how could you go on believing?

  Lou started to ask Howard Frank about that. Then, seeing the look on the other Jew’s face, he didn’t. Frank was wrestling with the same demons. When you did start to think, how could you help it?

  One way was to stop thinking about it. They got their chance, and in a hurry. Other beggars had seen them give to the Jewish DP. They might have marked themselves with the brand Sucker. Hungry people in threadbare clothes converged on them from all directions, hands outstretched, voices shrill and desperate.

  Yes, they all needed food. Yes, they were all broke. But there were too many of them for two U.S. Army officers to help much, even if they stripped themselves naked. Lou wasn’t inclined to do that anyway. That almost all the beggars were Germans did nothing to endear them to him any further.

  Major Frank said, “No.” So did Lou. Then they said, “Hell, no!” Then they said, “Go away!” Finally, it was, “Fuck off!” And Lou wondered if he’d have to draw his sidearm to show he meant business.

  Before he did, a couple of Russian soldiers came over to see what the yelling crowd was all about. That got the beggars moving. Did it ever! They didn’t want the Russians to pay any special attention to them. Oh, no!

  The Russians understood bits of German. Lou explained what had caused the fuss. “Stupid to give to a German,” one Russian said.

  By the look on his face, he wouldn’t have been impressed had Lou told him he’d given to a Jew. Lou didn’t try. He just spread his hands and said, “Ja, sehr dumm.” That gave the Russians nothing to chew on. Having broke up the crowd, they went on their way.

  “Ain’t this fun?” Major Frank said.

  “Oh, boy.” Lou nodded. “Some fun.”

  Vladimir Bokov didn’t know a single NKVD man who wasn’t nervous. Twice now the United States had failed to try the leading German war criminals. The first failure had cost the court building and most of the jurists who would sit in judgment on the Nazis. And the city of Frankfurt hadn’t recovered from the second, nor would it for years.

  So it was up to the Soviet Union to do things right this time around. It was up to the Soviet Union to give the thugs who almost overran the world what they deserved. High time for that. Long past time. And if everything went well, the USSR would get the credit for doing what the USA couldn’t.

  But if things failed to go well, the USSR would get the blame. Marshal Stalin had made one thing unmistakably plain: he did not wish the workers’ paradise to be seen as blameworthy in any way. If blame accrued to the Soviet Union, blame would also accrue to the men who should have kept the trial running smoothly. Stalin’s blame.

  Would accrue to the NKVD.

  No wonder Bokov was nervous. No wonder his colleagues twitched if anyone looked at them sidewise, or even if no one did.

  They’d found what had been a minor municipal courthouse still standing near the eastern edge of the Soviet zone in Berlin. Most of the buildings around it had already been leveled. They’d finished the job for a kilometer around in all directions. And they’d fortified that two-kilometer circle in ways that would have made the Soviet generals who planned the fieldworks for the Battle of Kursk jealous.

  The best estimate-given by people who had reason to know such things-was that it would cost any enemy 250 tanks or a couple of divisions of infantry to batter through those fortifications to the courthouse. And that was before the NKVD and the Red Army started throwing in reinforcements.

  Bokov was still nervous. He wasn’t the only one, either.

  Moisei Shteinberg didn’t just twitch. He quivered. As a Jew, he had extra reason to want to see Goring and Ribbentrop and Rosenberg and Streicher and the rest of the brutes dead. And, as a Jew, he had extra reason to fear what would land on him if anything went wrong.

  “They cannot get through,” he said to Bokov, surveying the fortified belt from the outside.

  “No, Comrade Colonel, they can’t,” Bokov agreed. He was a little easier in his mind than Shteinberg was. He was no Jew. He was no colonel, either. Less blame for any failure would stick to him. He could hope so, anyhow.

  He did hope so. With all his heart.

  “They can’t give it to us up the ass, either.” Shteinberg went on worrying as if Bokov hadn’t spoken. “We have our own generator. We’ve sealed off the water lines. We’ve sealed off the sewer lines. We’ve got our own water tower by the courthouse. We’ve got a sealed-off septic tank to handle the drains. The Heydrichites can’t possibly get at or get into any of that stuff. They can’t, dammit.”

  “You’re right, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov said. What else was he supposed to say? You couldn’t very well go wrong agreeing with your superior officer. And, as far as he could see, Colonel Shteinberg was right.

  Right, maybe, but not reassured. He looked up into the air. The only planes there were a couple of the ubiquitous C-47s. They were too far away to let Bokov tell if they were American originals or the Soviet copies called Li-2s: the one had its entry door on the left side of the fuselage, the other on the right. It hardly mattered either way. They sure as the devil weren’t German.

  Even Shteinberg saw as much. “The Luftwaffe’s dead. I don’t miss those wolves at all,” he said. “Ever have a Stuka bomb your trench?”

  “No, sir.” Bokov hadn’t seen front-line service.

  “Only happened to me once, and I’m not sorry,” Shteinberg said. “It was early in the war. I had to deal with a major who lost his head.” Lost his head probably meant something like retreated without orders. And deal with certainly meant something like kill. “I was going to take him away, and this damned thing with a shark mouth painted on its nose screamed down on us, and…Well, I didn’t have to worry about the major any more. Not enough of him left to bury. It could have been me.”

  It could always be you. In the Soviet Union, that was as axiomatic as anything out of Euclid. The knock on the door, the tap on the shoulder…It didn’t have to be nearly so dramatic as a screaming shark-mouthed dive bomber.

  No wonder Shteinberg was so jumpy. No wonder everybody with a blue stripe around his cap was.

  Another C-47 flew by, this one right overhead. “Don’t worry too much, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov said. “We’ll make it work.”

  “Da,” Shteinberg said, and then, “We’d better.”

  Red Army sentries discouraged Germans from getting too close to the fortified zone. They shouted one warning-they’d learned to say “Heraus!” After that-usually only seconds after that-they opened fire.

  They did just that this morning. Bokov heard the sharp, peremptory cry-German was a wonderful language for giving orders. He heard the sharp stutter of a three-round burst from the guard’s PPSh submachine gun when somebody didn’t listen to the order no matter how wonderfully peremptory it sounded. And he heard a screech that said at least one of those rounds connected.

  Sure as hell, somebody was down and thrashing maybe seventy-five meters outside the perimeter. Bokov and Shteinberg loped over to him. He was a half-starved fellow with a beak of a nose and several days’ worth of gray stubble on his chin and cheeks. At the moment, he was clutching his left leg and cussing a blue streak.

  Seeing two NKVD men bearing down on him only made him turn his indignation on them. “That verkakte mamzer went and shot me!” he e
xclaimed in what came fairly close to German.

  “Nu? What did you expect him to do? Give you a big kiss?” Moisei Shteinberg replied in the same language. Bokov could follow it well enough to realize what was going on. A Jew. A DP, he thought.

  The guard came up. He didn’t want to see two NKVD men, either. Anxiously, he said, “He didn’t move when I yelled. Orders are to open fire if they don’t move. I did what everybody above me told me to do.”

  “It’s all right,” Bokov told him. “You’re not in trouble. Go back to your post.” With an enormous sigh of relief and a parade-ground salute, the guard obeyed.

  “How bad are you hit?” Colonel Shteinberg asked the wounded man. The fellow pulled up his trouser leg. He had a bloody groove in the outside of his calf. Shteinberg waved dismissively. “That isn’t worth getting excited about.”

  “Easy for you to say. It isn’t your leg, either,” the Jew-no, the other Jew-retorted. “Hurts like shit.” He didn’t say Scheisse; he said govno. Chances were he’d started out in Poland or the Soviet Union, then. Where he’d been since…

  Bokov spoke German, not Yiddish: “Why didn’t you clear out when the guard warned you?”

  “Gevalt! Some warning!” the DP said-Bokov had figured he’d be able to follow regular Deutsch. “The fucking Nazis couldn’t kill me off, so now you Russian mamzrim try and finish the job for them? A kholeriyeh on you!”

  “Mamzrim?” Bokov asked Shteinberg. It had to be the plural of the earlier insult, but Bokov didn’t know what the insult meant to begin with.

  “Bastards,” Shteinberg supplied economically. He gave his attention back to the DP. “Everybody’s got a sob story these days. Some of them are even true. The rest aren’t good for wiping your ass.”

  Muttering under his breath, the skinny man displayed a tattoo on his arm. “Know what that means, you-?” He bit back whatever he’d been about to add: no doubt a good idea.