Squoosh! If you dropped a rock on a pumpkin from a third-story window, it would make a noise like that. Maybe five meters from Bokov, a brick plummeting from the Devil’s sister only knew how far smashed in a soldier’s skull. The poor bastard thrashed like a chicken that had just met the hatchet. He was as dead as a chopped chicken, too.
“Those clapped-out cunts! They did it again!” When Moisei Shteinberg swore like that, somebody’d spilled the thundermug into the soup. And the Heydrichites damn well had.
Bokov ever so cautiously looked out of the trench. The courthouse was a sea of flame, with black, greasy smoke already towering high into the sky over it. Hadn’t an American bomber slammed into the Empire State Building not so long before? Maybe that was what gave the bandits the idea for this raid.
But the Empire State Building was still standing. The architects who designed it must have seen that it might be a target and strengthened it accordingly. Nobody’d ever imagined a nondescript police courthouse in Berlin might get clobbered by an explosives-packed C-47 going flat out. Who in his right mind would have? And it stood no more.
“Comrade Colonel!” Bokov shouted, suddenly thinking of something else that should stand no more.
He needed to shout several times before he got Shteinberg’s notice. Everybody’s ears were stunned. At last, the Jew growled, “What is it?” He glowered at Bokov as if he thought all this was his fault.
“Don’t get pissed off at me, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov said. He had a good notion of whose fault it really was. “I know what we need to do next.”
“You do, do you?” Suspicion filled Shteinberg’s voice. “And that is…?”
“Sir, we need to go have another talk with Lieutenant General Vlasov.”
Moisei Shteinberg thought it over. Slowly, he smiled a smile that should have shown shark’s teeth instead of his own yellowish set. As he smiled, he nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “We do.”
Yet again, the Anglo-americans and the Russians (to say nothing of the remora French, which was what they deserved to have said of them) would not get to put on their show trial for the leaders of the Third Reich and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. A small, cold smile stole across Reinhard Heydrich’s face as he went through newspaper and magazine accounts. Some of the photos were truly spectacular.
So were some of the editorials. One American writer feared the German resistance would start what he called “a reign of terror in the air.” He imagined fighting men seizing planes full of passengers and flying them into buildings all over Europe and maybe even in the States. He imagined seizing laden planes and crashing them on purpose. He even imagined seizing planes and flying them to, say, Franco’s Spain to hold the passengers hostage till the German Freedom Front’s demands were met.
He had one hell of an imagination. None of that stuff had occurred to Heydrich. As far as he was concerned, the attack on the Berlin courthouse was a one-off job. But he recognized good ideas when somebody stuck them in front of his nose. He started taking notes.
Only a handful of these hijackings and atrocities would be needed to throw air transport into chaos all over the world, the editorial writer warned. Would travelers put up with the delays and inconveniences necessary to ensure no one can smuggle weapons or explosives aboard aircraft? It seems most unlikely.
It seemed pretty unlikely to Heydrich, too. He wrote himself more notes. Throw air transport into chaos all over the world? That sounded good to him. He didn’t know whether grabbing a few planes would have the effect this fellow foretold, but he could hardly wait to find out.
Hans Klein walked into his office with more papers and magazines. “We’ve got ’em jumping like fleas on a hot griddle, Herr Reichsprotektor,” the noncom said.
“Good. That’s the idea. May they jump out of Germany soon.” Heydrich bounced some of the American editorial writer’s ideas off of Klein. “What do you think?” he asked, respecting the veteran’s solid common sense. “Can we do these things? Would they cause as much trouble as the Ami thinks?”
“They might,” Klein said slowly. “We don’t have many pilots left to aim at buildings, but anybody with balls can crash a plane. And if you were going to fly to Spain instead of crashing, you could likely point a gun at the regular pilot and make him take you there.”
“Well, so you could.” Heydrich wrote that down, too. Some men who weren’t willing to throw their lives away for the Reich would be willing to fight for it. They might make good hijackers…and quite a few people from the Third Reich had already taken refuge in friendly-even if officially neutral-Spain.
Oberscharfuhrer Klein’s thoughts ran on a different track: “Damn shame that poor Mitzi gal’s chute didn’t open when she jumped.” His mouth twisted. “Too much time to think on the way down.”
“Ja,” Heydrich said, and left it right there. At his quiet orders, the man who’d packed Mitzi’s parachute made sure it wouldn’t open. Why take chances? She was much too likely to get captured and grilled after she landed.
When you issued orders like that, you had to do it quietly. If it got out that you’d thrown away someone’s life-especially a woman’s-on purpose, your own people would give you trouble. Never mind that it was the only reasonable thing to do. What you saw as reasonable, they’d see as coldhearted.
And now Heydrich wanted to find a discreet way to dispose of the man who’d packed Mitzi’s chute. As soon as that fellow started pushing up daisies, he wouldn’t be able to blab to the enemy. He wouldn’t be able to blab to his own pals, either.
None of which showed on the Reichsprotektor’s face. Once upon a time, the Fuhrer’d called him the man with the iron heart. If you were going to hold a position like his, an iron heart was an asset, no two ways about it.
“One more embarrassment for the enemy,” he said. “With any luck at all, it will make the Amis squeal even louder than they are already.”
“Ja!” Klein perked up. He was always eager to look in that direction. “Tomorrow belongs to us.”
“Well, of course it does,” Reinhard Heydrich said.
Lieutenant General Vlasov had looked and acted like a son of a bitch the last time Bokov and Shteinberg called on him. He seemed even less friendly now. For twenty kopeks, his expression said, both the other NKVD men could find out how they liked chopping down spruces in the middle of Siberian winter.
However much he hated them, though, he couldn’t just tell them to fuck off, the way he had before. He might want to; he plainly did want to. But the Heydrichites had humiliated the Soviet Union before the world when they crashed that plane into what would have been the war criminals’ courthouse. Striking back at them any way at all looked like a good idea.
It did to Captain Bokov, anyhow, and to Colonel Shteinberg. Whether it did to Yuri Vlasov…We’ve got to find out, dammit, Bokov told himself.
“I know what the two of you are here for,” Vlasov rasped. “You’re going to try and talk me into sucking the Americans’ cocks.”
“No, Comrade General, no. Nothing like that,” Shteinberg said soothingly. Yes, Comrade General, yes. Just like that, Vladimir Bokov thought fiercely. He wanted to watch Vlasov squirm. Maybe they could have kept the crash from happening if only the miserable bastard had put his ass in gear.
“Don’t bother buttering me up, zhid,” Vlasov said. “Nothing but a waste of time.”
“However you please…sir.” Moisei Shteinberg held his voice under tight control. “My next move, if you keep dicking around with us, is to write to Marshal Beria and let him know how you’re obstructing the struggle against the Heydrichite bandits.”
“You wouldn’t dare!” General Vlasov bellowed.
“Yes, I would. I’ve already done it,” Shteinberg said. “And if anything happens to me, the letter goes to Moscow anyway. I’ve taken care of that, too…sir.”
“Fuck your mother hard!”
“Maybe my father did,” Shteinberg answered calmly. “But at least I know who he w
as…sir.”
Could looks have killed, Yuri Vlasov would have shouted for men to come and drag two corpses out of his office. Bokov wondered whether the general would try something more direct. He also wondered how much good this move would do him and Shteinberg even if they turned out to be right. He shrugged, with luck invisibly. If it helped the fight against Heydrich’s bandits, he’d worry about everything else later.
“All right. All right.” Vlasov spat the words in Shteinberg’s face. “Take this other kike to the Americans, then. Go ahead. Be my guest. They’ll probably be a bunch of Jews, too. As far as I’m concerned-” He broke off, breathing hard.
“Yes, sir?” Shteinberg’s voice was polite, even curious. Bokov was curious, too. What had Vlasov swallowed? Something like As far as I’m concerned, Hitler knew what he was doing with you people? Bokov wouldn’t have been surprised. Plenty of his fellow-Russians felt that way. He didn’t love Jews himself. But you could damn well count on them to be anti-Fascist.
No matter how much rope Shteinberg fed Vlasov, the NKVD general was too canny to hang himself. “Go on,” he barked. “If you’re going to do it, go do it-and get the devil out of here.”
“If it works, he’ll take the credit,” Bokov warned once they were safely outside NKVD headquarters.
“Oh, sure,” Shteinberg agreed. “But he’d do that anyway.” Bokov laughed, not that his superior was joking-or wrong.
“Aye,” Jerry Duncan said.
“Mr. Duncan votes aye,” Joe Martin intoned, and the Clerk of the House recorded his vote. They weren’t going to be able to override President Truman’s veto of the bill that cut off funds for the U.S. occupation of Germany. They had a solid majority, including most Republicans and the growing number of Democrats who saw that staying on Truman’s side was lucky not to have cost them their jobs in the last election and that it damn well would get them tossed out next time around. A good majority, yes, but not a two-thirds majority. Too bad, Jerry thought.
The roll call droned on. Sure enough, when it finally finished, they fell twenty-two votes short of ramming the budget down the President’s throat. “Mr. Truman has put himself on record as saying he will not sign a War Department appropriation without money for continuing the occupation of Germany,” Speaker Martin said after announcing the results. “I want to put the House of Representatives on record, too. We will not send him an appropriations bill with that item in it.”
Members of the majority, Jerry Duncan loud among them, clapped their hands and cheered. Several Congressmen shouted “Hear! Hear!” as if they belonged to the House of Commons in London. People who’d voted against the override booed. Some of them shook their fists. Jerry couldn’t remember seeing that kind of bad behavior here. Everybody’s temper was frayed. Maybe things had been like this in the runup to the Civil War. The trial of wills over the occupation was tearing the country apart now.
“Order! We will have order!” The Speaker thumped his gavel. “The Sergeant at Arms has the authority to take whatever steps may prove necessary to restore order,” Joe Martin continued. The Democrats-and a handful of pro-occupation Republicans-went on booing. He banged the gavel again. Something like order slowly returned.
Out of it, Sam Rayburn bawled, “Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker!”
Had Jerry been up there in the Speaker’s seat, he wouldn’t have recognized the Texas Democrat. When Rayburn was Speaker of the House, he’d made a point of ignoring people whose views he didn’t fancy. That was one of the perquisites the Speaker enjoyed, and few Speakers had enjoyed it more than Rayburn.
But Joe Martin said, “The distinguished gentleman from Texas has the floor.” He clung to courtesy even as it collapsed around him.
“Thank you, Mr. Speaker.” Rayburn could also be courtly when he felt like it-and he could be an iron-assed son of a bitch when he didn’t. He sounded slightly surprised. Had he expected Martin to pretend not to hear him? It looked that way to Jerry Duncan. Any which way, Rayburn went on, “You do realize, Mr. Speaker, that if you refuse to give the War Department the money it needs to keep holding down the Nazis, you will force us out of Germany in spite of the President’s conviction, and the U.S. Army’s, that we need to stay there?”
“Yes, Mr. Rayburn, I realize that. And that is the point, after all. In their wisdom, the framers of the Constitution gave Congress the purse strings. Not the President. Not the U.S. Army. Congress. If the President and the Army prove unwise, as they have here, we have the responsibility to exercise wisdom for them,” Joe Martin said.
“Hear! Hear!” This time, Jerry shouted it at the top of his lungs. He was far from the only Representative who did. Opponents of cutting off funds for the occupation yelled back. People on both sides took off their jackets and tossed them aside, as if expecting they’d be brawling in the aisles any second.
“Order! There will be order!” the Speaker of the House insisted loudly. The microphone made each blow of his gavel sound like a gunshot. After what had happened to poor Gus van Slyke-whom he’d known for years-Jerry wished that comparison hadn’t leaped into his mind, but it was the only one that seemed to fit. Also as if using a gun, Martin aimed a forefinger at Sam Rayburn. “The gentleman from Texas may continue-without, I hope, any undue outbursts this time.”
“I hope the same, Mr. Speaker. And I do thank you for recollecting I had the floor,” Rayburn said. “You say you and those who agree with you aim to stop the President and the Army from acting unwisely.”
“I say just that, sir, and it is the truth,” Joe Martin replied. Jerry Duncan nodded vehemently.
“Okay. Fine. You have-the Congress has-this high and fancy responsibility.” Rayburn waited.
The Speaker of the House waved in agreement. “I say that also, and it too is the truth.”
“All right, then. Here is my question for you: what happens when you exercise that responsibility and it turns out to be the biggest mistake since Eve listened to the serpent in the Garden of Eden?” Sam Rayburn demanded ferociously. “President Truman likes the saying ‘The buck stops here.’ When something goes wrong, he admits it. When the blame lands on you-and it will, Mr. Speaker, it will-when it lands on you, I say, will you be man enough to shoulder it?”
“If that happens, which I do not expect-” Speaker Martin began.
“Fools never do.” Rayburn planted the barb with obvious relish.
Bang! went the gavel. “You are out of order, as you know very well.”
“So is the House-the inmates are taking over the asylum.”
Bang! Bang! “Enough!” Joe Martin snapped. Rayburn sat down, grinning. Business resumed. Jerry wished the Texan hadn’t asked such a prickly question.
XXVI
President Truman had a high, raspy, annoying voice. Diana McGraw had never really thought of it that way till after Pat got killed, but she sure did now. Of course, for the past couple of years Truman had been saying things she didn’t like and didn’t agree with. That made a difference, whether she thought so or not.
“We will carry the President’s radio address live at the top of the hour,” the radio announcer said, sounding as proud as if Truman were Moses about to read the brand new Ten Commandments on his station.
Even stolid Ed snorted at the fellow’s tone. “Are we supposed to get excited, or what? It’s not like Truman can do a Fireside Chat or anything.”
“Not likely!” Diana exclaimed. “When FDR said something, you wanted to believe him. Whenever Truman opens his mouth, you know he’s going to lie to you. That’s all he knows how to do.”
The radio filled up most of the time till the top of the hour with commercials. In a way, Diana supposed that was good: it meant there were plenty of things to buy again. During the war, a lot of normal stuff had been unavailable-and a lot of ads went away. Diana had to admit she hadn’t missed them. Now the stuff was back, and so were the pitchmen trying to convince people it was wonderful. Everybody knew the war was over…except the stubborn Missouri mule-no, jackass
-in the White House.
At last, and precisely as if he were selling soap or cigarettes, the announcer said, “And here is the President of the United States!”
A long electric hiss. A burst of static, cut off almost instantly. Then Harry Truman’s voice came out of the radio speaker: “Good evening, my fellow citizens. The Nazis still lurking in Germany have proved again how dangerous they are. Laughing at the very idea of justice, they flew a C-47 into the building where their captured leaders would have gotten a fairer trial than any they gave their countless victims. This C-47 was hijacked in the air. As best we can determine, the American pilot and copilot were both callously murdered. The Nazis seem to have been able to smuggle extra explosives onto the airplane. We are still investigating how they did it.”
“Because somebody who should’ve kept his eyes open was asleep at the…darn switch,” Ed McGraw said. “Anybody can see that.”
If anybody can see it, why did you say it? Diana wondered-one more thought she wouldn’t have had before a death in Germany turned things upside down and inside out for her. All she said out loud was a quick, “Hush. I want to hear him.”
“Much as we wish they weren’t, the Nazi fanatics are still dangerous,” Truman went on. “Because they are, our soldiers need to stay in Germany until we can be sure the country will stay peaceful and democratic-that’s ‘democratic’ with a small ‘d’-after we go home.”
“They wouldn’t be fighting if we weren’t there to give them big, fat, juicy targets!” Diana burst out.
“Some people will say the fanatics wouldn’t still be fighting if we weren’t in Germany,” Truman said, as if he were sitting in the kitchen with the McGraws.
Ed chuckled and lit a cigarette. “They oughta put you in the White House, babe.”
“How could I do worse?” Diana said. “It wouldn’t be easy.”
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 47
