Frank had set a piece of paper on the tabletop. He finished writing on it, then passed it and his pen over to Weissberg. The other American officer read it, signed it, and slid it across to Vladimir Bokov.
Bokov had some trouble with it. He was familiar with German cursive. Even using German, the Americans wrote the Roman alphabet in a different way. But the NKVD man puzzled it out. Received from NKVD Captain Bokov one displaced person, by name Shmuel Birnbaum, believed to possess important information concerning the Nazi resistance. The two signatures followed.
“Good enough,” Bokov said. “I hope this guy does you-does us-does everybody-some good. I put my dick on the chopping block to get him to you people-you’d better believe that.”
Both Americans nodded back at him. “Our nuts are on the line, too,” Weissberg said. “We kept trying to tell people our side and yours needed to work together better. Against the fanatics, there’s only one side.”
“It looks that way to me, too.” Bokov waved to the barmaid. “Fresh ones all around, sweetheart.” When she brought them, she made a point of giving Shmuel Birnbaum a wide berth. The DP’s crooked grin said he knew why and didn’t give a fuck. Captain Bokov raised his seidel. “Death to the Heydrichites!”
They could all drink to that. “Death to the Heydrichites!” they chorused. Bokov emptied the mug at one long pull. The Germans were motherfuckers, no doubt about it, but they could sure as hell brew beer.
The Captain-Navy Captain, or the equivalent of an army colonel-looked at Tom Schmidt as if he wanted to clean him off the sole of his shoe. “No,” the officer said in a voice straight from the South Pole. “I will not authorize your entry into Germany. You may sail to England or France if you like. But if you come under military jurisdiction in Germany, you will be expelled at once, if you don’t get tossed in the brig-uh, the stockade-instead.”
“That’s not fair!” Tom squawked. “Plenty of other reporters get to go see our boys climbing onto ships.”
“A technical term applies here, Mr. Schmidt: tough shit.” The four-striper had the whip hand. He knew it, and he enjoyed it. “Those members of the press did not violate security arrangements in Germany. They were not sent home from the country. You did, and you were, and you don’t get a second chance.”
“You were censoring the news!” Tom exclaimed. He sounded more pissed off than he was. He’d figured the military would hold a grudge for what had happened in Germany. But taking a shot at Captain Weyr here for censorship would look good in his column.
And Weyr played straight into his hands, saying, “Sometimes censorship is necessary, Mr. Schmidt. Sometimes it’s even essential.”
“Yeah, sure,” Tom said, as any reporter worth his press credential would have.
“It is, dammit,” the Navy officer insisted. “Would you have printed a story that told the Germans we’d hit Normandy, not Calais?” He sent Tom another dogshit-on-my-sole look. “You probably would have.”
“Up yours, Captain,” Tom said evenly. Captain Weyr’s jaw dropped. His subordinates couldn’t tell him stuff like that, no matter how much they wanted to. But military discipline didn’t bind Tom. And, if the military wanted to make a point of screwing him, neither did ordinary politeness. He went on, “You make it sound like I’m not a patriot or something, and that’s a bunch of crap. Of course I know why you had to keep the invasion a secret. The movie of that poor damn GI–Cunningham, that was his name-that’s a different story. You didn’t want ordinary Americans seeing what was going on in Germany-seeing how the occupation was screwing things up.”
“For one thing, I deny that the occupation is screwed up,” Weyr said.
“Then you’d better pull your head out of the sand and look around,” Tom said. “The lions are getting close.”
“Amusing. You should be a writer.” Weyr had a Philadelphia Main Line kind of condescension he’d probably been born with. Plenty of officers were snotty or arrogant, but only a blueblood could bring off condescending so well. He continued, “You seem to forget what an important factor in war morale can be.”
Bingo! Tom pounced: “You seem to forget the war’s over. You want everybody else to forget it, too. The Secretary of State talked about occupying Germany for the next forty years. How can we do that if it’s peacetime? How can you imagine the American people will put up with this for the next forty weeks, let alone forty years?” He held up a hand to correct himself. “The Presidential election’s a little further than forty weeks off-but only a little.”
“I am not the Secretary of State. You have no business taking his words out of context and trying to put them in my mouth,” Captain Weyr said. “But do you think you did Private Cunningham’s family any favors by making sure that vile film got plastered onto movie screens all over the country?”
Tom did feel bad about that, even if he hadn’t felt bad enough to keep from getting the film back to the States. “If I thought the brass was sitting on the film to save his family’s feelings, maybe I wouldn’t have done what I did,” he answered. “But I don’t-and neither do you.”
“That’s twice now you’ve put words in my mouth,” Weyr said.
“Oh, give me a break!” Tom rolled his eyes. “The brass was doing what the brass always does. It was trying to hide the bad news. Sometimes you can get away with that in wartime. See? I admit it! But the war’s over and done with. Harry Truman said so. He even acted like it. Rationing’s dead as a dodo. He wants it both ways here, though. The war’s over and done with…except when the brass says it’s not. The American people aren’t dumb enough to fall for that, Captain.”
“I take it back. You should be a politician, Mr. Schmidt, not a writer. You sure seem to like making speeches,” Weyr said. “But you can huff and puff as much as you want. You still won’t blow the Pentagon down.”
“Too big for that, all right. Even flying an airplane into this place wouldn’t knock down much of it,” Tom said.
As if he hadn’t spoken, Captain Weyr went on, “And you can also huff and puff as much as you want, here in my office or in your column, and you won’t get to Germany to watch the troops coming home…. May I speak off the record? Do you respect that?”
“Yes, I do. And yes, go ahead.” Tom wasn’t happy about it, but he meant it. If you said something was off the record and then went ahead and used it anyway, in nothing flat nobody would talk to you off the record any more. And you needed to hear that kind of stuff, even if you couldn’t use it.
“Okay. This is Ollie Weyr talking, not Captain Weyr. Way it looks to me is, guys like you are a big part of the reason Congress won’t pay for the German occupation any more. If you weren’t pissing and moaning about every little thing that goes wrong over there-”
“And every big one,” Tom broke in.
“Shut up. I’m not done. Maybe Germany’ll be fine once we get out. I don’t know. You can’t know ahead of time. But it’s like the President said on the radio not long ago. If things go wrong, if the Nazis get back in, I know where a bunch of the blame lands.”
“And you say I make speeches?” Tom laughed in the Navy captain’s face. “You ought to look in a mirror some time.”
“At least I’m working for my country,” Weyr said.
“So am I. Last time I looked, the First Amendment was part of what we were fighting for,” Tom retorted. “Too much to expect anybody from the government to understand that.”
“Yeah, you hot reporters go on and on about the First Amendment. All I’ve got to say is, you’re using it to help guys who’d stamp it out first chance they got. We had those SOBs squashed a couple of years ago.”
“You wish you did,” Tom interrupted. “In your dreams, you did.”
“If they start running Germany again, it won’t be because the military failed,” Weyr said. “It’ll be because the press and the pressure groups made it impossible for us to do our job.”
“Can I quote you on that?” As soon as Tom asked, he wished he hadn’t. Now he’
d given Weyr a chance to say no.
And Weyr did, or close enough: “That was still Ollie talking, not Captain Weyr. If you want to say it’s a military officer’s personal opinion, go ahead. It’s not the Navy’s official opinion. I can’t speak for the Army, but I’ve never heard anything to make me think it’s their official opinion, either.”
“But a lot of their people believe it, too?” Tom suggested.
Captain Weyr only shrugged. “You said that. I didn’t.”
Too bad, Tom thought.
Bernie Cobb walked through Bad Tolz, looking for a place where he could buy a beer. The town sat in the foothills of the Alps south of Munich. The old quarter, where he was, lay on one side of the Isar; the new district, on the other side of the river, was a lot more modern. Mineral-water springs were what brought people here-people who weren’t GIs with a few days’ leave from prowling through Alpine passes, anyway. And there had been a training school for SS officer candidates here, too. That was out of business now…Bernie hoped.
“Cobb!” called another dogface-no, the guy was a three-striper.
“Sergeant Corvo!” Bernie said. “Jesus! I figured they woulda shipped you back to the States a long time ago.”
“Not me.” Carlo Corvo shook his head. As usual, he talked out of the side of his mouth. Also as usual, a cigarette dangled from one corner. “Draft sucked me in, yeah, but I’ve gone Regular Army. I got better chances in uniform than I ever would back in Hoboken-bet your ass I do.”
“You nuts?” Bernie said. “You got better chances of stopping a bullet or getting your balls blown off.”
“Nah.” Corvo shook his head. “I don’t exactly come from the good part of town-not that Hoboken’s got much of a good part. I don’t exactly hang around with the nice kind of people, neither. I shoot somebody over here, I don’t gotta worry about cops on my tail or spending time in the slammer.”
Mob connections? Bernie’d always wondered about that with Corvo. The swarthy sergeant still wasn’t exactly saying so. Not exactly, no, but it sure sounded that way.
Meanwhile, Corvo asked, “How come you ain’t back in-where was it? Arizona?”
“New Mexico,” Bernie answered. “Not enough points. I’m young. I’m single. I was out of action for a while after the Bulge ’cause of my feet, so I missed out on a couple of campaign stars. And besides, the cocksuckers keep bumping up how many a guy needs before they ship him out. A little luck, though, it won’t be too much longer.”
“You mean the money cutoff?” Sergeant Corvo said.
Bernie nodded. “What else? If they bring everybody home, they can’t very well leave me here all by my lonesome. Hope like hell they can’t, anyway.”
“Stupid fuckin’ assholes can’t even see the ends o’ their pointy noses, let alone past ’em,” Corvo said. “We bail out now, we’ll just hafta fight the Jerries again later on.”
“Later on suits me fine,” Bernie said. “Maybe my number won’t come up then. I don’t owe Uncle Sam one thing more, and he owes me plenty.”
Carlo Corvo sighed. “Always useta think you had pretty good sense.”
“I do. I’m not gonna catch Heydrich on my own. So why should I care more about the Army than the Army cares about me? I’ve been away from home more than three years now. Enough is enough. I’m looking out for number one.” Bernie paused. “I’m looking for some beer, too. You know any decent joints?”
By the way Corvo hesitated, knowing where to drink in Bad Tolz wasn’t the question for him. Whether he wanted to drink with Bernie was. At last, with another sigh, the noncom nodded. “Yeah. C’mon-I’ll show you. If you don’t wanna be no lifer, can’t hardly blame you for thinkin’ like you do, I guess.”
“Love you too, Ace,” Bernie said. He followed Corvo down the narrow, winding street.
XXVII
To Shmuel Birnbaum, K-rations and U.S. Army field kitchens were the greatest inventions in the history of the world. He ate and ate, and never once worried whether what he was eating had pork in it. “I quite caring about that during the war,” he told Lou Weissberg. “If it’s food, you eat it.”
“What with the little you got after the Nazis came through, who could blame you?” Lou said sympathetically.
“Oh. The Nazis. Sure. But I meant the last war, sonny.” One other thing the DP had made the acquaintance of was a safety razor with a limitless supply of blades. His cheeks were as smooth as Lou’s these days, but the stubble he’d had when Lou first met him was gray heading toward white, as was his hair. “Since 1914…a war…a revolution…a civil war…a time to watch yourself…another war…Been a long, long time since I made a fuss about what I got, as long as I got something.”
“You embarrass me because I had it easy in America,” Lou said.
“Your folks were smart-they got out. If I’d been smart, I would’ve got out, too,” Birnbaum said. “But I thought, It’s not so bad. It’s even getting a little better, maybe. Maybe not, too. For sure not, the way things worked out.”
“We’ll take you to a different valley tomorrow,” Lou said. “Maybe this will be the one where they made you dig.”
Maybe, nothing. Alevai this will be the one where they made you dig, Lou thought. The U.S. Army had been giving Birnbaum a guided tour of all the Alpine valleys in southern Germany. So far, he hadn’t found the right one. Lou hoped there was a right one. You never could tell what you’d get when you dealt with the Russians. He’d wanted to for a long time. Now that he had…
Would Captain Bokov of the NKVD sit in his Berlin office and laugh his ass off because a no-account DP was getting fat on U.S. Army chow? Had Birnbaum ever been in one of these valleys? No doubt he’d been in Auschwitz; Lou had seen too many of those tattoos to doubt that this one was authentic. But that wasn’t reason enough-the Army in its infinite wisdom had decided it wasn’t reason enough-to be especially nice to him.
If he didn’t come through…Well, what’s the worst they can do to me? Discharge me and ship me home to Jersey. Which, when you got right down to it, would be a hell of a lot more fun than what he was doing here.
But he hated getting played for a sucker. He didn’t want the NKVD to do it, and he didn’t want a no-account Jew who said he hadn’t had a square meal since 1914 to do it, either. He wanted…“Heydrich’s head on a plate,” he muttered.
“I hope I can give him to you,” Shmuel Birnbaum said. “They didn’t tell us what we were doing. They just told us to dig, and they got rid of anybody who didn’t dig fast enough to suit ’em. Then they sent the rest of us to Auschwitz, also for disposal. Just dumb luck they didn’t get around to me before the Red Army came.”
“Sure,” Lou said. Birnbaum’s story sounded good. It felt good, which might have counted for even more. Lou had heard a lot of bullshit since he got to the Continent. He didn’t think this was more of the same piled higher and deeper. But he’d never know for sure unless the DP delivered.
Birnbaum looked at him. “You don’t think I can do it.”
“I hope you can do it. I hope like anything you can,” Lou said.
“Heydrich…” Birnbaum tasted the name. “It wouldn’t be enough. There’s no such thing as enough, not for that. But it would be something, anyway. And after so much nothing, something’s not too bad.”
“Yeah.” Lou nodded. “You’re right.” He was sure what Germany would be like if Heydrich and his pals took over: the way it had been when Hitler was running it, only trying to find a place in a new, tougher, more suspicious world. That was…about as bad as things could get, as far as he was concerned.
Suppose they squashed the Heydrichites. What would Germany turn into then? Lou had no idea. That politician-Adenauer-had thought it could turn into a civilized democracy like England and France and America. Maybe. But Lou had trouble believing it. If Germany could turn into a democracy like that, wouldn’t Adenauer still be alive?
Shmuel Birnbaum stopped shoveling food into his face. “Let’s go,” he said.
It wasn’t so simple, of course. One jeep could rattle along the winding roads that slid through valleys and climbed the passes between them. It might get through. If Heydrich’s goons decided it looked harmless, or if they were off making pests of themselves somewhere else, it would. But there was no guarantee-not even close.
And in these parts, it wasn’t just Heydrich’s goons you needed to worry about. Deserters and brigands and bandits prowled the mountainside, sometimes singly, sometimes in platoon strength. You wanted to show enough firepower to make them decide not to bother you.
Three jeeps with.50-caliber machine guns, two M8 armored cars with 37mm guns. With luck, that kind of convoy would be enough to persuade Werewolves and freelance brigands to leave them alone. The heavy machine guns and the cannon outranged anything the Jerries were likely to pack themselves. All the soldiers had Garands or M2 carbines or grease guns, too.
And so did Shmuel Birnbaum. When Lou first gave him the submachine gun, he asked if Birnbaum knew how to use it. The DP gave back a lizard’s stare. “I point. I pull the trigger. If it doesn’t shoot, I fiddle with the safety till it does.”
“It doesn’t even have a safety,” Lou said.
“All right, then. So I shoot. What else do I need to know? Anything?” Birnbaum asked. For the kind of fighting he’d need to do-if he needed to do any-he didn’t need to know anything else. Lou shut up.
They rolled past a monument to American ineptitude, a burnt-out ammo dump. It had gone up in fire and smoke a couple of months earlier, and taken half a dozen GIs with it. Back home, it probably hadn’t made more than page four, except in the dead men’s home towns. Too many other things were going on in Germany-this was just small change from a guerrilla war.
Birnbaum’s gaze flicked to the sooty craters and scattered shell casings that marked the remains of the dump. “How’d they do it?” he asked.
“If I knew, I would tell you,” Lou answered. “If we’d known ahead of time, we might have stopped them.”
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 49
