Ed McGraw looked down at his wristwatch. “Boy, I’m a whole year fast,” he said.
Buster Neft laughed. So did Betsy. Stan looked around, wide-eyed. He’d stayed up way past his bedtime, but New Year’s Eve was special. He would be three pretty soon, which seemed impossible to his grandmother.
Diana McGraw only smiled at Ed’s joke. He made it about every other New Year. And when he wasn’t a year fast, he was a year slow. Yeah, Diana had heard it before, too many times. She’d heard just about everything from him too many times.
“The ball is dropping!” the announcer said. “Happy New Year!”
“Happy New Year!” Ed lifted his beer. All the grownups had drinks of one kind or another. Even Stan had a glass of grape juice. If he wanted to pretend it was wine-well, why not?
Betsy raised her highball in Diana’s direction. “Here’s to you, Mom! If anybody made 1947 what it was, you’re the one.”
“Thanks,” Diana said. Along with the rest of her family, she drank the toast. It was true enough. American soldiers were coming home from Germany. Most of them were already back, and the ones who weren’t would be before long. Diana had had a lot to do with that.
And now it was-literally was, this past minute or so-last year’s news. The second phone line here didn’t ring as often as it had even a couple of months earlier. The withdrawal wasn’t controversial any more; it was an accomplished fact. By the nature of things, accomplished facts weren’t news. The world was starting to forget about Diana McGraw and Mothers Against the War in Germany. Why not? They’d won.
Pretty soon, she’d go back to being just another housewife from Anderson, Indiana. Up till Pat got killed, she hadn’t thought about being anything else. She still wished she’d never had any reason-well, never had that reason, anyhow-to think about anything else.
But she’d got used to going all over the country for the cause. She’d got used to fielding phone calls from reporters and Congressmen and other important people. She’d got used to being an important person herself. And she could watch that fade like a cheap blouse the first time it met bleach. Once you’d been famous-even a little bit famous-how did you get used to ordinary life?
Baseball players had to deal with it. So did actors who had one or two hit movies and then saw their careers fizzle out. Some managed gracefully. Others grabbed the limelight a little while longer by doing something disgraceful.
Diana might have managed that if news of her tryst with Marvin (she still couldn’t remember his last name) had made the papers. Everybody on the other side would have been delighted to see her exposed as a woman without any morals to call her own.
But nobody knew about that little encounter except the parties involved. She had no idea whether Marvin’s conscience bothered him. She would have bet against it. He was a man, after all. Men took what they could get, and tried to get it even when they couldn’t.
Women weren’t supposed to do things like that. Which didn’t mean they didn’t, only that they weren’t supposed to. What bothered Diana most about ending up in bed with Marvin Whoozis was how much fun she’d had while it was going on. Marvin had casually shown her more varieties of delight in half an hour than Ed had since the end of World War I. Darn it, when Ed went Over There, couldn’t a Mademoiselle from Amentieres have taught him a little something? Evidently not.
And having a better idea of what she was missing only left Diana more frustrated when Ed wanted to lay her down. He still hadn’t figured out exactly what was wrong, even if he knew something was. She had no idea how to tell him, either. If she suddenly wanted him to start doing this and that when he’d never done-probably never even imagined doing-this and that before, what would he think? Most likely, that some other guy had done this and that with her while she was on one of her junkets.
He’d be right, too.
If only this and that-especially that-didn’t feel so good! If only she hadn’t got smashed with Marvin! If only…fame weren’t rolling away like the afternoon train bound for Indianapolis.
Which brought her back to where she’d started, full circle.
She realized Betsy’d just said something. She also realized she had no idea what. “I’m sorry, dear,” she said. “Your old mother was woolgathering there, I’m afraid. Must be second childhood coming on.”
“Oh, sure,” her daughter said with a snort. “What I said was, Buster and I’d better head for home. Stan won’t last much longer, and-”
“Not sleepy,” Stan declared, but he spoiled it with a tonsil-showing yawn.
“We know you’re not, Killer, but we’re going home anyway,” Buster said. Stan yawned again. He was too “not sleepy” to put up much of an argument. Buster went on, “Maybe I’ll show up for my shift tomorrow, and maybe I won’t.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Ed agreed. “Hey, tomorrow’s Friday. Who wants to work a one-day week right after New Year’s?”
Their daughter and son-in-law and grandson headed out into the cold. Stan dozed off on Buster’s shoulder before the Nefts even made it out the door. It closed behind them. That left Diana and Ed all alone.
“Happy New Year, babe,” he said.
“You, too,” she replied automatically, even as she wondered, How?
“Want to-you know-celebrate, like?”
Her answering yawn was pretty much authentic. “Can we hold off a day? I’m really sleepy, and I don’t have to pretend I’m not, the way Stan does.”
Ed chuckled. “He’s a corker, all right. Yeah, it’ll keep a day. Sure.”
He was accommodating, which meant she’d have to be accommodating tomorrow night. And she’d lie there thinking about what Marvin knew and he didn’t, and…. Stop that! she told herself firmly. But herself didn’t want to listen.
“Hey, babe,” he said, more anxiety than he usually showed in his voice. “It’ll be okay, right?”
“Sure, Ed.” She might have been soothing little Stan. How? she wondered again.
“You did what you set out to do. I’m proud of you,” Ed said.
“I just wish I’d never set out to do it. I wish I’d never had to,” Diana said. And that was nothing but the truth. If Pat were alive…But he wasn’t, and he never would be. She started to cry. She’d been doing that a lot lately. Ed took her in his arms. He thought he knew all the reasons he was soothing her.
Lou Weissberg was taking papers out of filing cabinets and stuffing then into boxes when Howard Frank came in to see how he was doing. Lou was glad for the chance to stop for a couple of minutes. “Last man out of Germany-is me, or maybe you,” he said.
Major Frank winced. “It’s not quite that bad,” he said.
“Close enough, goddammit,” Lou said. “A garrison in Berlin. A few air bases and a little bit of armor-just enough to make the Red Army think twice about marching in…if we’re very, very lucky. Not enough to hold down the goddamn fanatics, and fat chance we’ll ever bring any guys back to take care of that.”
“The Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats say they can whip the Nazis in any halfway honest election. The German police say they can fight the bastards off. They get a lot of the equipment we’re leaving behind,” Frank insisted.
“Yeah, all the other parties were so wonderful at stopping Hitler in 1933, too,” Lou said, which made his friend flinch again. “And how many German cops still get up on their hind legs and whinny every time they hear the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’?”
“Some, sure. Not too many. I hope.” Major Frank spread his hands. “We’ve done the best we could, considering….”
“Yeah. Considering.” Lou made an ordinary word sound extraordinarily foul.
“Unless you want to stay here as a civilian, we’re heading for home day after tomorrow,” Frank said. “In its infinite wisdom, Congress has decided that’s the best thing-the very best thing-the United States can do.”
“Oh, yeah. Every fucking American Jew ever born is dying to be a civilian in Germany. Dying is just what I’d do here, you
bet.” Lou’s loud opinion of Congress and its infinite wisdom would have got him shot for treason in any totalitarian country-and in about half the democracies currently in business, too.
All Howard Frank did was sadly wag an index finger and say, “Naughty, naughty.” A moment later, he added, “You must be slipping, man. I’ve called those assholes way worse than that.”
“Well, goody for you,” Lou said. “You gonna resign your commission after we get back to the States?”
This time, Major Frank looked genuinely sorrowful. He nodded anyway. “Yeah. After we go and do this, I don’t see any point to staying in. You?”
“Same here,” Lou said. “Back to my family, back to teaching English, back to being a civilian. And I’ll spend the rest of my days hoping I can live out the rest of my days before things blow up again, know what I mean?”
“Don’t I wish I didn’t!” Frank exclaimed. “Now that you’ve cheered me up, I’ll go back and cram more of my crap into boxes. The records will all be on file-if anybody ever bothers to look at ’em.”
“Yeah,” Lou said. “If.”
Two days later, trucks and halftracks pulled up in front of the commandeered Nuremberg hotel to take departing soldiers and the paperwork of an occupation gone bad north to the sea, and to the ships waiting to carry them across the Atlantic. Outside the building, Lou smoked a last cigarette and shot the shit with one of the German gendarmes who’d be taking over the place once the Americans were gone. Rolf was a pretty good guy. He’d been a corporal during the war-but Wehrmacht, not Waffen-SS. In his dyed-black U.S. fatigues and American helmet, he looked nothing like a German soldier. So Lou tried to tell himself, anyhow.
“We will miss you when you go,” the gendarme said. “You are the only thing standing between us and chaos.”
“You guys will do fine on your own,” Lou answered. You always reassured a sickroom patient, even-especially-when you didn’t think he’d make it.
“I fear the new parties will not have the moral authority they need to oppose the old order,” Rolf said. “I fear we-the police-will not have the weapons to hold back the fanatics.”
“Sure you will,” said Lou, who feared the very same things. Somebody yelled at him from a halftrack. He cussed under his breath, then handed Rolf what was left of the pack of Chesterfields. “Good luck to you, my friend.”
“Danke schon!” The gendarme happily pocketed the smokes. Lou trotted over to the halftrack and clambered up and in. The CIC convoy, protected not only by armored cars but also by Sherman tanks, rumbled away from the hotel, away from Nuremberg-and, soon, away from Germany.
Rolf Halbritter coughed from the dust the retreating convoy kicked up. He shook his head in wonder not far from awe. The Amis were really and truly going-no, really and truly gone.
Which meant…He had a badge pinned on the underside of his collar, where it didn’t show. Now he could wear it openly again. It was round, with a red outer ring that carried a legend in bronze letters: NATIONALSOZIALISTISCHE DEUTSCHE ARBEITERPARTEI. The white inner circle held a black swastika. Every Party member had one just like it. Pretty soon, they’d all be showing it, too.
HISTORICAL NOTE
There really was a German resistance movement after V-E Day. It was never very effective; it got off to a very late start, as the Nazis took much longer than they might have to realize they weren’t going to win the straight-up war. And it was hamstrung because the Wehrmacht, the SS, the Hitler Youth, the Luftwaffe, and the Nazi Party all tried to take charge of it-which often meant that, for all practical purposes, no one took charge of it. By 1947, it had mostly petered out. Perry Biddiscombe’s two important books, Werewolf!: The History of the National Socialist Guerrilla Movement 1944–1946 (Toronto: 1998) and The Last Nazis: SS Werewolf Guerrilla Resistance in Europe 1944–1947 (Stroud, Gloucestershire and Charleston, S.C.: 2000) document what it did and failed to do in the real world.
I have tried to imagine circumstances under which the German resistance might have been much more effective. The Man with the Iron Heart is the result. In the real world, of course, the attack on Reinhard Heydrich that failed in this novel succeeded. Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis were the assassins. They both killed themselves under attack by the SS on 18 June 1942. The SS also wiped the Czech village of Lidice off the map in revenge for Heydrich’s murder. A good recent biography of Heydrich is Mario R. Dederichs (Geoffrey Brooks, translator), Heydrich: The Face of Evil (London and St. Paul: 2006).
How would we have dealt with asymmetrical warfare had we met it in the 1940s in Europe rather than in the 1960s in Vietnam or in the present decade in Iraq? Conversely, how would the Soviets have dealt with it? I have no certain answers-by the nature of this kind of speculation, one can’t come up with certain answers. Sometimes-as here, I hope-posing the questions is interesting and instructive all by itself.
German nuclear physicists really were brought to England for interrogation and then returned to Germany as described here. And the Germans really did leave ten grams of radium behind in Hechingen. Jeremy Bernstein, Hitler’s Uranium Club: The Secret Recordings at Farm Hall (Woodbury, N.Y.: 1996) is the indispensable source for the episode. To this day, no one seems to know what became of the radium.
Unwary readers may suppose that no Congressman would say a President wanted to send troops anywhere to get their heads blown off for his amusement: words I’ve put in a Republican Congressman’s mouth aimed at President Truman. But, as reported in the October 24, 2007, Los Angeles Times, California Democratic Representative Pete Stark did say that, aiming the charge at President Bush. Truth really can be stranger than fiction. A motion to censure Congressman Stark failed, but he did subsequently apologize.
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The Man with the Iron Heart Page 60
