“Nope,” Sergeant Benton said. “I only wish to God you were.”
The explosion had taken out most of a city block. The damage wasn’t so obvious in fallen Berlin. The lost capital of the Reich had already taken more bombs and shells and rockets and small-arms fire than any town this side of Stalingrad. After all that, what difference did one more explosion make?
Captain Vladimir Bokov knew too well the difference this one explosion made. The bloodstains on still-standing walls and on the battered pavement were noticeably fresher than most in Berlin. And he could also make out bits and pieces of the GMC truck some clever German had packed with explosives before driving it up to some parading Russian soldiers and blowing them up-and himself with them.
“You see, Comrade Captain,” Colonel Fyodor Furmanov said. He’d led those parading Red Army troops. Only dumb luck no flying piece of truck got him in the kidneys-or in the back of the neck. He had burns and scrapes and bruises, nothing worse…and he seemed embarrassed to remain alive while so many of his soldiers didn’t.
“Oh, yes. I see,” the NKVD man said. Colonel Furmanov flinched. He knew his next stop might be a labor camp somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. “What kind of precautions did you take to keep that truck from getting close to your men?”
Furmanov flinched again. Bokov eyed the decorations on his chest. They said the Red Army officer had had himself a busy war. He spread his hands now. “Comrade Captain, I took none. The responsibility is mine. I thought the war was over. I thought no one would strike at us. I was wrong-and my poor men paid the price for my mistake.”
“You didn’t expect that the Fascist would be willing to blow himself up if that meant he could strike at the Soviet Union?” Bokov asked.
“No,” Colonel Furmanov said stonily. “If you believe what the Yankees are saying, the Japanese fight like that. But the Germans don’t-didn’t, I should say. Not before the surrender, they didn’t. You must know that as well as I do, Comrade Captain.”
His words said the right things. His tone said he doubted whether an NKVD man knew anything about what had gone on at the front-but didn’t say so blatantly enough to let Bokov call him on it. Abstractly, the captain admired the performance. The only way he could respond to the challenge was by pretending not to notice it. And so he simply nodded and said, “Yes. I do know.”
“Well, then.” Colonel Furmanov sighed. He’d been right to come out and accept responsibility. It would have landed on him anyhow. Being ready for it made him…look a little better.
Bokov lit another of his American cigarettes. When he handed Furmanov the pack, the older officer stared in surprise before taking it. Furmanov leaned close to get a light from Bokov’s cigarette. After giving it to him, the NKVD man spoke slowly and deliberately: “It seems, Comrade Colonel-it seems, I say-that some Nazis have decided to continue resistance in spite of the regime’s formal surrender. This bomb in the truck…is not an isolated incident.”
He didn’t want to admit that. Coming out and saying it made the USSR-and, maybe even more to the point, the NKVD-look bad. Easier by far to let this officer vanish into the gulag. Maybe he’d come out in ten years, or more likely twenty-five. Or maybe they would use him up before he finished his sentence, the way they did with so many.
If this were an isolated incident, Furmanov would be gone. As things were, though…“There are reports from the American occupation zone of Germans using explosives to kill U.S. soldiers-and killing themselves in the process.”
“Bozhemoi!” the infantry colonel exclaimed. “In the American zone, too? There really is a resistance, then!”
“It would seem so, yes,” Bokov said. “We are also trying to see whether these bombings are connected to Marshal Koniev’s assassination.”
Colonel Furmanov said “My God!” again. Then he cursed the Nazis with a fluency Peter the Great might have envied. And then, after he ran down, he asked, “What can we do about it?” He held up a hand. “Can we do anything about it that leaves more than maybe three motherfucking Germans alive?”
“That is the question.” Bokov impersonated Hamlet. After a moment, he added, “Why do you care? I promise you, nobody in Moscow will.” The Nazis had come much too close to wiping the Soviet Union off the map. Anything to help ensure that that never happened again seemed good to the men who shaped Soviet policy. It seemed good to Vladimir Bokov, too, not that his opinion on such things mattered a fart’s worth.
“Comrade Captain, if we send Germans up the smokestack the way the SS got rid of Jews, I’ll wave bye-bye to them while they burn. You’d best believe I will,” Furmanov said. “You can see by my record that I’m not soft on these fuckers. But if we do something that makes them desperate enough to go after my men without caring whether they live or die themselves…That I care about, because it endangers Soviet troops for no good reason.”
“The Germans aren’t doing what they’re doing because of how we’re treating them.” Now Bokov spoke with authority. “Like I said, they’re pulling the same damned stunts in the American zone, and you know the Americans go easy on them-Americans and Englishmen are halfway toward being Fascists themselves.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Colonel Furmanov agreed. “So why are they doing it, then?”
“I told you why. Some of them don’t think the war is over yet,” Bokov said. “Our job here will have two pieces, I think. One will be to hunt down the bandits and criminals who are to blame for these outrages.”
“Da.” Furmanov nodded. “You don’t commandeer a truck and load it full of shit like that by yourself. You’re right, Comrade Captain-some kind of conspiracy must lie behind it.”
Russians saw conspiracies as naturally as Americans saw profits. Like Americans chasing the dollar, they often saw conspiracies that weren’t there. Not this time, Bokov was convinced. Furmanov had it straight-somebody who put a lot of explosives in a truck and set it off had to have an organization behind him.
Then Furmanov asked, “What’s the other piece of your puzzle?”
“What you’d expect,” Bokov replied. “Somewhere out there are Germans who know about this conspiracy without being part of it. We have to find out who they are and make them tell us what they know. And we have to make all the Germans left alive more afraid to help the bandits than anything else in the world. If even one of them betrays us, they all have to suffer on account of it.”
Colonel Furmanov nervously clicked his tongue between his teeth. “This is what I was talking about before, Comrade Captain. With policies like this, we risk driving Germans who would stay loyal-well, quiet, anyhow-into the bandits’ arms.”
“They’ll be sorry if they make that mistake.” For all the feeling in Bokov’s voice, he might have been talking about the swine at a pig farm. “But they won’t be sorry long.”
“When the Hitlerites invaded the Soviet Union, they didn’t try to win the goodwill of the workers and peasants. Because they didn’t, the partisan movement against them sprang to life.”
Colonel Furmanov walked a fine line here, and, again, walked it well. He didn’t point out that the Nazis had enjoyed plenty of goodwill when they stormed into places like the Baltic republics and the Ukraine. That was true, but pointing it out could have won him a stretch in the camps. He also didn’t point out that Stalin’s policy here would be the same as Hitler’s there. That would have been even more likely to let him learn what things were like in a cold, cold climate. And he didn’t point out that the Russian partisans got massive amounts of help from unoccupied Soviet territory. Who would help these diehard Nazis?
Nobody. Captain Bokov hoped not, anyway.
Instead of arguing with Furmanov or even pointing out any of those things, Bokov said, “We’ll do all we can to track down the Fascists. The place to start, I think, is with the truck. How did the Germans get their hands on it?”
He hadn’t expected an answer from the infantry officer, but he got one: “So much stuff is going back to the motherland, Co
mrade Captain, that nobody pays much attention to any one piece. Maybe that truck was ours to begin with, or maybe it was one the Germans captured from us or from the USA. If somebody told one of our sentries he was taking it somewhere on somebody’s orders, the sentry might not have bothered to check. He’d figure, Who’d lie about something like that? Or do you think I’m wrong?”
Bokov wished he did. A German with nerve could probably disappear a truck just the way Furmanov described. “Shit,” Bokov said wearily. “One more thing we have to tighten up. I suppose I should thank you.”
“I serve the Soviet Union!” Furmanov said, which was never the wrong answer.
“We all do,” Bokov agreed. But, while it wasn’t the wrong answer, it might not be the right one, either.
III
When Tom Schmidt thought of Nuremberg, he thought of Triumph of the Will. He was a reporter. He knew he wasn’t supposed to do stuff like that. But how could you help it if you’d seen the movie? Precision marching. Torchlight parades. Searchlights stabbing up into the air, building the columns for a cathedral of light. (Nobody then had mentioned that the searchlights were also part of the city’s aircraft-defense system.)
And Hitler haranguing the faithful. Tom’s German grandparents had settled in Milwaukee-well, one of his grandmothers was from Austria, but it amounted to the same thing. His own Deutsch wasn’t great, but it was good enough. Hitler didn’t say anything wonderful in the film, but the way he said it….
Even on the screen, it made Tom sit up and take notice. And the shots of the people listening to it live-! The men in their brown or black uniforms and the boys in Hitler Jugend shorts stared in awe. They might have been listening to the Pope, or to the Second Coming of Jesus.
The women, though, were the ones who really got to him. Wide eyes; open mouths; slack, ecstatic features…They looked as if they were on the edge of coming themselves. If old Adolf could do that without laying a finger on them-well, it was plenty to make Tom jealous.
So that was what he thought of when he thought of Nuremberg. Postwar reality was a little different. Yeah, just a little, he thought with a wry chuckle. It was a field of wreckage as far as the eye could see. A U.S. Army information officer told him the town had suffered ninety-one percent destruction. That included the vast majority of the public buildings, though a couple of churches might prove salvageable. About half the prewar housing was ruins now.
That helpful information officer said there were something like 12,000,000 cubic meters of rubble to clear away. The first big raids came in late 1943, the last in early 1945. Tom wondered how many years hauling away the bricks and timber and plaster and concrete would take. By the way Nuremberg looked now, it might take forever.
If it did, he wouldn’t be heartbroken. Along with the rubble, today’s Nuremberg had something else Triumph of the Will didn’t show: fear. American soldiers here, as throughout the U.S. occupation zone, didn’t travel in groups smaller than four. They always went armed. Representing the Milwaukee Sentinel, Tom was officially a noncombatant. That hadn’t kept him from acquiring a helmet and a grease gun. The M3A1 was almost as ugly as a British Sten gun, but it could chew up a lot of bandits at close range. Since it could, Tom didn’t sweat the aesthetics.
He did wish he had eyes in the back of his head. When he mentioned that to a GI, the dogface laughed at him. Then the fellow said, “Sorry, Mac. If I don’t laugh, I bang my head against a wall. Laughing hurts less-I guess. We’re all as jumpy as cats in a room full of rocking chairs.”
“Nice to know it isn’t just me,” Tom said. “But it shouldn’t be like this. They surrendered. If they mess with us now, we can treat them however we want. It’s all in the laws of war, right?”
“Like I know from the laws of war.” The soldier wore a PFC’s single stripe. No, he wouldn’t be chewing the fat with Patton or Eisenhower any time soon. “All I know is, we’ve shot hostages, and it don’t do no good. Fuckin’ krauts still shoot at us and plant mines and blow themselves up like they’re Japs. Me, I quit goin’ to movies on account of they go after us double when there’s crowds of us like that.”
“Uh-huh.” Tom wrote that down. “Doing without movies is a real hardship. What do you do instead?”
“Waddaya think I do, man?” the GI returned. “I do without, like you said.”
Tom wrote that down, too; it was a good line. “How do we get a handle on these German tactics?”
“Hanging that Heydrich item up by the balls’d make a decent start, I guess,” the PFC answered. “He’s the one supposed to be back of this shit, right? What’s the reward for his worthless carcass up to?”
“Half a million bucks-tax-free if an American bags him,” Tom said. “Not exactly worthless, not if you’re the one who hits the jackpot.”
“You know what I mean. I-” The soldier paused as a couple of Germans mooched past. One of them was in civvies; the other wore a beat-up Wehrmacht uniform with all the trim removed. The guy in the uniform glanced over at the Americans as if wondering what his chances for a handout were. The other man, who was older, kept his head down. With all the stones and broken bricks and other bits of crap on the ground, that wasn’t the worst idea in the world.
And if he doesn’t make eye contact and get us nervous, his odds for seeing tomorrow bump up, Tom thought.
“Okay. Now they’re out of range,” the GI said. He relaxed-fractionally.
“They wouldn’t go after just two of us…would they?” Schmidt wished he’d managed to swallow the last two words, but he knew what they said about wishes and horses.
To his relief, the PFC didn’t seem to think he was yellow. “Well, you wouldn’t think so,” the man answered seriously. “When they blow themselves up, they try to take out more than two of us at a time. But you don’t wanna drop your guard, you know? If you look like you ain’t payin’ attention, who knows what one of those cocksuckers’ll try?”
“Yeah. Who knows?” Tom’s voice sounded gloomy, even to himself.
“I’ll tell you somethin’, man,” the soldier said. “I ain’t got near enough points for them to hand me a Ruptured Duck and ship my sorry ass home-I didn’t get over here till pretty late in the game. But if they want to throw me on a boat and send me to fight the Japs, I’d sooner do that than this. That’s an honest war, anyways. You know who the bad guys are. They get in your way, you fuckin’ grease ’em. This…Truman said it was over when the Nazis signed the surrender papers, but does it look like it’s over to you?”
“Well…it did for a little while,” Tom said.
“I know. I figured this occupation shit’d be duty you could handle standing on your head.” The American broke off to give another German the once-over. She was young and kind of cute, but that wasn’t why he eyed her the way he did. As she walked off, he sighed and spat in the rubble. “Standing on your goddamn head. Yeah, sure. And then you wake up.”
“Have you heard of any women blowing themselves up?” Tom asked.
“There was one, a coupla weeks ago. Down near…where the fuck was it? It was in Stars and Stripes-you can look it up. Down near Augsburg, that’s where the cunt did it.”
Tom asked one more question: “So if you had your druthers, what would you do with the Germans now?”
“Beats me, man,” the GI said. “Way it looks to me is, we either gotta kill ’em all or else walk away from ’em. Neither one of those is what you’d call a real good answer.”
“I know,” Tom said.
“You got any better ones?” the soldier asked. “You can go all over the place. You ain’t stuck yakking with guys like me-you can talk to officers and shit. Hell, you can even talk to the krauts if you want to, huh?” He made that sound as strange as talking to Martians. To him, maybe it was.
“I could, yeah. If I did, I don’t know how many folks back in Milwaukee’d want to read about it, though.” Tom held up a hand. “And before you ask me, I haven’t run into any officers with ideas much different from yours.”
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“Jeez.” The PFC spat again, mournfully. “We are fubar’d, then. But good.”
Soviet troops shouted orders-in Russian. The Germans they were herding onto trains mostly didn’t understand. The Germans weren’t happy to be in the train station to begin with. The Soviets had hauled them out of their houses and flats and shacks and tents and wherever else they were staying. Some Germans carried a duffel’s worth of worldly goods. More had only the clothes on their backs.
“Where are we going?” “Where are they taking us?” “What’s going on?” “What are they doing?” Germans called out the questions again and again. Hardly any of the soldiers understood. Nobody answered.
Watching the chaos unfold, Vladimir Bokov smiled. The NKVD officer had no trouble following the Germans’ worried questions. In broad outline, he knew the answers to them. But he kept his mouth shut. He was there to observe, not to ease the Germans’ minds. His smile got broader. What he could say wouldn’t make these people feel any better.
A train pulled in. Soviet soldiers already aboard opened the cars’ doors. An indignant German voice rose above the general din: “Was ist hier los? Some of these cars are for transporting freight or-or livestock, not human beings!”
He was right, not that it did him any good. The troops started herding-and then cramming-people onto the train. Men shouted. Women screamed. Children wailed. That did them no good, either.
The NKVD colonel standing next to Bokov chuckled nastily. “Let the pricks find out what it’s like, eh? Not like they didn’t do it to plenty of other people.”
“That’s right, Comrade,” Bokov agreed. No need to worry that Colonel Moisei Shteinberg would prove disloyal to the Soviet state, not when it came to dealing with the Hitlerites. Lots of Jews in the old Russian Empire became revolutionaries because the Tsars mistreated their people. Well, what the Tsars did to Jews was like a kiss on the cheek compared to what the Nazis gave them.
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 5