The Man with the Iron Heart

by Harry Turtledove

  “The Republican Party in Congress seems to feel that way,” Truman said.

  “Not just Republicans! Not even close!” Diana said hotly.

  “It would be nice if the world were so simple. Or it would be nice if the Republicans weren’t so simple.” Truman wouldn’t-didn’t-miss a chance to throw darts at the opposition. “But the fact is, the Nazis have a long history of attacking anybody and everybody they can reach. The world knows that, to its sorrow.”

  “We’ve got the atom bomb. They don’t,” Diana said.

  “If we run away from Germany, the first thing the Nazis will do if they get back into power is start working on an atom bomb,” the President said. “They will deny it. They will swear on a stack of Bibles that they would never do anything like that. They told the same lies after World War I, and look what happened to the people who believed them then-the Lindberghs and the Liberty Lobby and the rest of the fools.

  “And the second thing the Nazis will do if, God forbid, they get back into power is start working on a rocket that can reach the United States from Germany,” Truman said. “They had one on the drawing board when V-E Day came and made them shelve their plans. If they build a transatlantic rocket with an atom bomb in its nose, nobody is safe any more. Nobody. Not a single soul. Not anywhere in the world.”

  “Yeah, yeah, enough with the Buck Rogers bull…manure,” Ed said. “If pigs had wings, we’d all carry umbrellas.” Diana smiled at him. He might not be exciting, but his heart was in the right place. His head, too.

  “Do the Republicans in Congress see that?” Harry Truman answered his own question: “They don’t. They might as well be ostriches, not elephants, the way they’ve stuck their heads in the sand. They flat-out refuse to put any money in the budget for keeping our armed forces in Germany. Without money, we will have to start bringing troops home.”

  “Good!” Diana said. “That’s the idea! We should have done it a long time ago. If we had, maybe…Pat’d still be alive.” Her voice roughened at the last few words; she still couldn’t talk about him without wanting to cry.

  “I know, hon,” Ed said softly, and he sounded husky, too.

  There on the radio, Truman kept chattering away: “An old proverb talks about being penny wise and pound foolish. It’s so old, it goes back to the days before our independence. Nowadays, we’d understand it better if it talked about penny wise and dollar foolish. The point of it is, you’re making a mistake if you only worry about what’s right in front of you and not about what happens half a mile or a mile or five miles farther down the road. And that’s exactly what the Republicans who are starving our forces in Germany are doing.”

  “My…heinie!” Diana had heard an awful lot of bad language the past couple of years. She’d used more of it herself than she ever did before. But she still tried not to when Ed could hear her.

  He chuckled now, knowing-of course! — what she hadn’t said. “Way to go, babe. You tell ’em.”

  “They won’t listen to me,” Truman said sadly.

  “That’s ’cause they’ve got better sense than you do!” Diana also had a lot of practice talking back to politicians on the radio.

  This time, the President didn’t seem to listen to her. “Trouble is, they’re Republicans, and that just naturally means they aren’t what you’d call good at listening,” he continued. “All the same, they’d better hear this, and hear it loud and clear. If they make us clear out of Germany, if they make us leave long before we really ought to, what happens afterwards is their fault. They’ll be responsible for it. I know the situation we have now isn’t very pretty. What we’ll get if we go their way will be worse. And they will be to blame for it.”

  A Bronx cheer didn’t count as cussing. Diana sent the radio the wettest, juiciest raspberry she could. Ed laughed out loud.

  “I wish I didn’t have to tell you things like this,” Harry Truman said. “But, unlike some people I could name, my job is to tell you what’s so, not what sounds good or what might get me a few extra votes. Thanks. Good night.”

  “That was the President of the United States, Harry S Truman,” the announcer said, as if anybody in his right mind didn’t already know.

  “He’s full of…malarkey,” Diana declared as Ed turned off the radio.

  Her husband laughed again. “You better believe it.” He bent down and gave her a kiss. Then he nuzzled her neck. “So to heck with him for a little while, anyways.”

  “Yeah. To heck with him.” Diana went upstairs to the bedroom willingly enough. You needed to keep a man happy every so often. She didn’t have anything against Ed. When it was over and he turned on the nightstand lamp so he could find his cigarettes, he had a big, sloppy grin plastered across his face. Diana made herself smile, too. She’d just started to warm up when, too soon, it was over. Was that happening more and more these days, or was she simply noticing more?

  Because she didn’t want to make Ed angry or upset, she didn’t say anything about it. He finished the cigarette, gave her a tobacco-flavored kiss, then got up to use the bathroom and brush his teeth. Five minutes later, he was snoring.

  Diana lay there in the darkness. It should have been better than this, shouldn’t it? Once upon a time, it had been better than this, hadn’t it? Hadn’t it?

  She was a long time sleeping.

  Lou Weissberg wondered what the hell Brigadier General R.R.R. Baxter’s initials stood for. There they were, three R’s in a row on the nameplate on Baxter’s desk. Readin’, ’Ritin’, ’Rithmetic Baxter? It seemed as likely as anything else. A company-grade officer couldn’t very well come right out and ask a general something like that. Lou would just have to let his imagination run wild.

  He glanced over at Howard Frank. Was the same burning question uppermost in Frank’s mind, too? The other Jewish officer didn’t seem to keep glancing at the nameplate the way Lou did. But did that mean anything?

  Baxter had cold blue eyes that bifocals did nothing to warm up. He eyed Lou and Major Frank in turn. If either man impressed him, he hid it goddamn well. Well, he doesn’t impress me, either, Lou thought. Except his initials. A star on each shoulder put R.R.R. Baxter among the Lord’s anointed in the Counter-Intelligence Corps. He wouldn’t give a rat’s ass whether he impressed a lonely subordinate or not.

  “How’s your German, boys?” he asked in that language. His own Deutsch had a strong American accent, but he was plenty fluent.

  “Ganz gut, Herr General,” Howard Frank said. Lou nodded.

  “Figured as much, but I wanted to make sure. From what I hear, German will work well enough,” Baxter said.

  “Well enough for what, sir?” Lou paused, filled by a hope he hardly dared believe. “Has the Red Army finally decided to work with us?”

  “Not the Red Army,” Baxter replied, and Lou’s hope crashed and burned. Then it rose phoenixlike from the flames, for the CIC big wheel went on, “The NKVD. The Russians wanted to try the top Nazis in their zone in Berlin ’cause we screwed it up twice. If they did it right, they figured they could score propaganda points off of us. Well, they ended up with egg on their face, too. They don’t like that any better than we would. They’re proud people.”

  “After what they went through against the Germans, pride’s about all they’ve got left,” Lou remarked.

  “Pride and most of Eastern Europe,” R.R.R. Baxter pointed out. “But, yeah, I know what you mean. They paid for everything they got-paid in blood. Now they’ve got something they can’t use themselves. That’s all I know about it. Right this minute, that’s all anybody who isn’t a Russian knows about it. Your job is to find out what it is and what we can do with it.”

  “Why us, sir?” Frank asked. “Why not somebody with more clout?”

  “For one thing, you’ve both been heard to say we ought to work more with the Russians,” Brigadier General Baxter answered. Lou blinked. He had said things like that. How closely were people here monitored, though, if the higher-ups knew he’d said it? Well, that
one answered itself, didn’t it? Baxter went on, “And the Russians don’t want to make a big deal out of this. If it doesn’t work out, the blame won’t land on them-that’s our best guess. So they don’t want anything more than a midlevel contact. Not yet, anyhow. You’re it, the two of you…if you’re game, of course.”

  If you aren’t, you’re nothing but a couple of gutless, worthless pieces of shit. Baxter didn’t say that, but he didn’t have to. One other thing he might not have said was a couple of gutless, worthless Jewish pieces of shit. Maybe such a rude, unfair thought never once crossed his mind. Maybe. But plenty of American officers still had their doubts about Jews in spite of Hitler.

  Which was why Lou said, “Oh, hell, yes, sir!” as fast as he could-but no faster than Howard Frank said, “You’d better believe it, sir!”

  R.R.R. Baxter nodded smoothly. He wasn’t a general for nothing, Lou realized-he knew how to get people to do what he wanted. He sure did. “Glad to hear it, gentlemen,” he said. “We’ll work out the details of the meeting with the Russians, and we’ll go from there.”

  “COME ON,” VLADIMIR BOKOV SNAPPED AT SHMUEL. “GET MOVING, dammit.”

  “I’m right here with you,” the Jewish DP said. “I’m not going any place but where you tell me to.”

  “Too fucking right you’re not. You wouldn’t last long if you did,” Bokov said. Maybe there really were snipers with beads drawn on Shmuel’s gray head. Or maybe Bokov would have to plug him if he tried to bug out. The NKVD man didn’t know for sure. Shmuel couldn’t know, either.

  Together, they crossed to the south side of the Wittenbergplatz. Whoever’d set up this meeting had an evil sense of humor. Captain Bokov suspected Yuri Vlasov was taking a measure of revenge for having his hand forced. The sign above the tavern proclaimed that it was Fent’s Establishment. And so it was…now. If you looked closely, though, under Fent’s name you could still make out the smeared letters that spelled out who the former proprietor had been.

  Up until Berlin fell to the Red Army, this had been Alois Hitler’s tavern. From everything Bokov had heard, the Fuhrer’s half-brother wasn’t a bad fellow. With a different last name, he would have been indistinguishable from a thousand other saloonkeepers. Bokov didn’t know what had happened to him in the wake of the Reich’s collapse. Alois Hitler hadn’t been important enough in the grand scheme of things for anybody to worry about him.

  Shmuel didn’t seem to know about the tavern. Bokov couldn’t resist telling him, just to see the look on his face. It was everything the NKVD man could have hoped for. The DP stopped in his tracks. “I won’t go in there!”

  “Like hell you won’t,” Bokov said. “If I’ve got to, you’ve got to. A minute ago, you said you weren’t going anywhere except where I told you to. And I’m damn well telling you to.”

  “Hitler’s place!” Shmuel cried in horror.

  “Hitler’s place,” Captain Bokov agreed. “But not that Hitler, and it hasn’t been his place for a couple of years now. So get your sorry old ass in gear.”

  “Hitler’s place!” the DP said again. Shaking his head, he went inside with Bokov.

  It smelled like tobacco smoke and beer and sweat: like the inside of a tavern, in other words. The light was dim. Whether the man behind the bar was Fent himself or just a hireling, he looked nothing like any Hitler ever born. That was a relief.

  Americans were sitting at two or three tables. Even just sitting there, they irritated Bokov. They had so much, and didn’t have the faintest idea how well off they were. An officer at one of the tables nodded to Bokov. The NKVD man walked over and sat down. Again, Shmuel followed. The DP was still muttering to himself.

  A barmaid hurried up. She was pretty, although on the skinny side. Bokov thought a lot of German women were skinny, which didn’t keep him from laying them when he got the urge. But this gal was skinny even by German standards. He preferred his women with something to hold on to.

  He ordered beer. So did Shmuel. The Americans already had seidels in front of them. The barmaid hustled away. A Russian wouldn’t have moved so fast, not at a no-account job like that. Germans did apply themselves, no matter what they were up to. It was one of the things that made them dangerous.

  Both Americans looked like Jews. That matched Bokov’s briefing. The barmaid came back with two more mugs of beer. Bokov raised his and trotted out the phrase he’d been told to use: “To cooperation between allies.”

  “To nailing down the ironheart!” one of the Americans returned: the proper answer. He went on, “I’m Frank. This is Weissberg.”

  Maybe those were real names, maybe not. Bokov hadn’t been told to hide his identity, so he said, “Bokov.” He jerked a thumb at the DP. “And this is Shmuel Birnbaum.” He would have identified a new-model mortar the same way-he thought of Shmuel more as a weapon than as a human being.

  But a new-model mortar wouldn’t have gulped beer as if it would be outlawed tomorrow. A new-model mortar wouldn’t have waved to the barmaid for a refill, or pinched her on the butt when she brought it. She glared at him and got out of there in a hurry. And a new-model mortar wouldn’t have said, “I can talk for myself.”

  “We saw you before!” the American called Weissberg exclaimed. “We gave you some chow and some cash.”

  “You did,” Birnbaum agreed. He nodded at Bokov. “This guy and his pal made it all disappear. Well, I got to eat some of the chocolate.”

  Suspicion sparked in Bokov. This was bending the arm of coincidence if not breaking it. The Americans were both scowling at him, no doubt for abusing a fellow zhid. Well, the hell with ’em. As if reporting to his own superiors, he said, “This man was shot by a guard for approaching the perimeter around our courthouse too closely. The guard might have killed him had another officer and myself not intervened. Naturally, we searched the prisoner. Naturally, we confiscated personal property.”

  “So you’re releasing him now, right?” Weissberg said. “Will you give it back?”

  “Not our policy,” Bokov answered, which was true enough. Colonel Shteinberg had done whatever he’d done with the ten-dollar bill, and Bokov had bought himself a fancy dinner and some fine cigars with the five. And if the Yankees thought Birnbaum deserved to have the money, they could go fuck themselves. If provoked, Bokov was ready to tell them so.

  Weissberg looked as if he wanted to press it. The other officer-Frank-said something in English. Weissberg still looked mutinous, but he shut up. Frank spoke directly to the DP: “You know where the Hangman’s dug in, do you?”

  “Not for sure,” Birnbaum said. That took nerve. He had to know he’d be better off going with the Americans than staying in Soviet hands. If these Yanks decided they didn’t want him, he’d never get the chance to pinch another barmaid’s ass. He went on, “I was digging and digging down in the mountains. Then they sent me to Auschwitz. They hadn’t got around to killing me before the Red Army ran ’em out, so I lived.”

  “You might be grateful,” Bokov said.

  “For getting rescued? I am. For getting shot? For getting robbed? No offense, Comrade Captain, but I could’ve done without those,” the DP said. The American called Weissberg let out a snide chuckle.

  “If you weren’t snooping around the perimeter, nobody would have had any reason to shoot you,” Captain Bokov said irritably.

  “Snooping? What snooping? I was just walking along when that asshole guard yelled something-God knows what-and then he opened up, the dumb schmuck,” Shmuel Birnbaum said.

  “That was his job. We were trying to protect the courthouse, dammit,” Bokov said.

  “You sure did great, didn’t you?” Birnbaum jeered.

  Before Bokov could tell him where to head in, the Yankee called Frank said, “Take it easy, both of you. Maybe it all worked out for the best.”

  “In this best of all possible worlds? I don’t think so,” Shmuel Birnbaum said.

  By the way both Americans winced and pulled faces, the DP had made a joke. Vladimir Bokov almo
st asked what it was. He didn’t get it. Only one thing held him back: the fear of being thought uncultured. Nye kultyurny was a muscular insult in Russian. It meant you’d just come off the farm with manure on your boots-or, more likely, on your bare feet. It meant drool ran down your chin. It meant you picked your nose and ate the boogers in public. It meant…It meant Bokov kept his mouth shut, was what it meant.

  Weissberg said, “We’ll want to take him back with us, you know. He’ll do a better job going back to the mountains and showing us where he was than he would trying to draw a map or something.”

  “Yes, I understand that,” Bokov said. “I am authorized to turn him over to you. I will want a receipt. And we’ll expect better cooperation in U.S.-Soviet affairs, especially if he does you some good.”

  “You’ll want us to do more of what you want, you mean,” the Jew called Frank said, which was true enough. “I can’t promise, but….”

  “Da, da,” Bokov said impatiently. Neither one of these guys was of a rank where his promise meant anything. Neither side was dealing at a level like that. Bokov had hoped the Americans would, but they weren’t always as naive as you wished they were.

  “A receipt?” Shmuel said. “What am I, a sack of beans?”

  “You’re a sack of hot air, is what you are.” Bokov knew him better than the Americans did, but they’d find out. “We have to hope you’re not a sack full of farts. The one thing we know about you is, you hate the Nazis, too. This is our chance to get some of your own back against them.”

  “Too little, too late,” the DP said bleakly. “Everybody who ever meant anything to me is dead-up the fucking smokestack. Most I can hope for is to try and keep that shit from happening again.”

  “That’s…better than nothing.” Weissberg sounded hesitant about saying even so much. And well he might have, when his country and his loved ones had come through the war with hardly a scratch. Here again, Bokov had more in common with Birnbaum, and more understanding of him, than his fellow Jew did.