“We ought to know the truth about what’s going in,” she said. “Isn’t that what we fought the darn war for?” The news about Pat had horrified Ed into swearing in front of her. She couldn’t imagine a calamity that would make her swear in front of the neighbors.
“You’re right,” Betsy said. She took Stan back from Buster.
The baby was eight months old. He had two teeth. He could say “dada” but not “mama” yet, which irked Betsy. He smiled whenever anybody smiled at him or whenever he just felt like smiling. Why not? He had no idea what was going on, the lucky little guy.
Betsy’s face crumpled. “He’ll never get to know his Uncle Pat now,” she said-almost the same thought as Diana’s. Betsy started crying again. Stan stared at her. He could cry whenever he felt like it, too-could and did. He wasn’t used to seeing Mommy do the same thing.
A neighbor touched Diana on the arm. “If there’s anything we can do over the next few days, sweetheart, you sing out, you hear? Anything at all, and don’t be shy,” she said. “If we don’t help each other, who’s gonna?”
“Thanks, Louise. God bless you.” That made Diana think of something else. She still could think straight if she worked at it. “Ed! We’ve got to call Father Gallagher.”
“We sure do.” He shook his head, which made his jowls wobble some more. “So much to take care off. And for what? For a waste, a big dumb waste.”
“That’s what it is, all right. Nothing else but. And nobody should have to die on account of a big, stupid waste,” Diana said. “Not Pat, and not nobody-uh, anybody-else, either. It’s wrong, don’t you see? It’s wrong.” More nods said her neighbors thought so, too.
V
If Lou Weissberg hadn’t known what he was looking for, he never would have found it. Even knowing, he almost walked right past the forest bunker. Sergeant Benton saved him, pointing and saying, “Reckon that’s it, sir.”
“Is it?” Lou turned back-and got a raindrop in the eye. Mud squelched under his boots. It was a miserable day to go poking through the woods. But he finally saw the join between the regular forest floor and artfully camouflaged dug-up ground. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.” He gestured to the squad of GIs who’d come with them. “Okay, guys-we’re here. Spread out and form your perimeter.”
“Right.” The corporal in charge of them sounded no happier to be futzing around in the middle of the Bavarian woods than Lou was. Nobody’d asked his opinion, though, and nobody was likely to. “Take your positions,” he told his men. “And for Chrissake watch out for trip wires unless you want your balls blown off.”
Thus encouraged, the soldiers moved out around the bunker. Half of them carried M-1s, the others grease guns. If they had to, they could put a lot of lead in the air. Nobody touched off a Bouncing Betty, for which Lou thanked the God in Whom he’d had more and more trouble believing since he found out about Dachau and Belsen and the murder camps farther east.
He would rather have come out here by himself, or just with Toby Benton. Several horrors had proved that Americans traveling alone or in pairs weren’t safe, though. And so he had a squad along to remind the krauts that they’d been defeated and surrendered and given up.
Of course, he wasn’t exactly safe even with the hired muscle along. As the corporal had reminded his men, Heydrich’s goons liked booby traps. The fanatics were too goddamn good at concealing them, too.
Sergeant Benton was an artist in his own right. He also had some specialized tools: a battery-powered detector to find metallic mines and a long, thin wooden probe to find the ones that weren’t. And he had wire-cutters to take care of the trip wires he-like the corporal-assumed would be there. And they were.
“Okey-doke, Lieutenant,” he said after a good deal of careful work. “Looks like we can dig now.”
Lou nodded to the corporal. That worthy said, “Rojek!”
One of the GIs jerked as if stung by a wasp. “What’d I do to deserve this?”
“You was born lucky,” the corporal answered. “C’mon. Get your ass over here.”
Muttering bitterly, Rojek did. He used his entrenching tool with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “I oughta write my Congressman,” he said.
The corporal gave him the horse laugh. “Yeah, like they give a shit about us. Now tell me another one.”
Before long, Rojek banged the tool against a roof of logs and planks. “Can’t go through that,” he said with some satisfaction. “I ain’t no beaver.”
“You want beaver, go back to Nuremberg and fraternize with some,” the corporal said.
“We’ve got saws along,” Lou said. The look Private Rojek gave him proved glares weren’t lethal.
But the corporal spread the wealth. Another GI got to play woodsman. He cut through enough logs to open a space a skinny man could use to get in. Lou filled the bill. Before dropping down, he shone a flashlight into the bunker. He didn’t want to land on a detonator-or on a bunch of knife blades or bayonets pointing up. The fanatics came up with lots of ways to make the occupation more…interesting.
This time, he didn’t see anything like that. “I knew I should’ve been a dentist,” he remarked as he lowered himself into the hole. “Then I wouldn’t’ve had to mess around with crap like this. But no. I wanted to study English lit, so when I volunteered they put me in CIC. My mother gets to say ‘I told you so.’”
He let himself drop, and landed with a thump on the floor of hard-packed dirt. A damp, musty smell filled his nostrils. Nobody’d been in this bunker for a while. A prisoner had told the Americans about it, though, so they had to find it and take it out of circulation.
Which would do how much to win the fight against the fanatics? How many of these bunkers were scattered all over Germany-and Austria, and the German-settled parts of Czechoslovakia, and maybe other places, too? Heydrich was a son of a bitch, no two ways about it, but by all the signs he was a goddamn thorough son of a bitch.
Lou turned slowly, playing the flashlight around the bunker. A small stove sat in one corner, with a pipe leading up through the roof to the forest floor above. Neither he nor Benton had spotted where the stovepipe emerged. However much you hated them, nobody could say the Jerries weren’t good at what they did.
The walls were planked. Neat metal brackets on them held Mausers and Schmeissers and close to a dozen of the halfway-between weapons the Germans had started fielding in the last year of the war. Assault rifles, they called them; some people said Hitler himself hung the handle on them. True or not, it wasn’t a bad monicker. They used a longer, heavier cartridge than a submachine gun’s pistol round, and fired at full automatic out to three or four hundred yards. GIs who’d run into them said they were very bad news.
Sergeant Benton’s head and shoulders appeared above, blocking most of the cold, gray light that drizzled in through the hole. “Is it the goods, Lieutenant?” he asked.
“Looks that way,” Lou said.
“Shucks.” Benton sounded disappointed. “Reckon Ludwig gets to keep his family jewels after all. Too goddamn bad.”
“Heh,” Lou said tightly. He didn’t think CIC would have made the prisoner sing soprano if he’d tried to string his U.S. interrogators along, but he wasn’t sure. With the war allegedly over, nobody seemed sure what the rules were for Germans captured in arms against the occupiers. Some U.S. officers called them francs-tireurs and shot them without trial. Some grilled them mercilessly, declaring that the Geneva Convention didn’t apply. And some treated them as POWs. There were no orders from on high; the brass was as confused as everyone else.
Just to make matters even more delightful, the fanatics kidnapped GIs and murdered them and left their bodies in prominent places with placards saying things like VENGEANCE FOR OUR FALLEN COMRADES. Sometimes they would just cut a man’s throat. Sometimes they’d get more creative. Lou remembered the poor bastard with his cock stuck in his…. He shook his head-shuddered, really. He didn’t want to remember that.
He used the flashlight again. A ma
keshift desk-a filing cabinet, a couple of crates, and boards across them-stood in the corner opposite the stove. Lou walked over to it. He started to open the top file-cabinet drawer. Then he thought better of it.
“Hey, Toby!” he called.
Benton came back. “What have you got, Lieutenant?”
“Stick your head in a little further and see.” Lou lit up the desk. “Just the kind of thing the Jerries’d booby-trap, looks like.”
“Want me to pull its teeth?”
“If you think you can. Maybe we’ll get lucky. The Germans love paperwork. If they give us a roster of half the bastards who’ve been driving us buggy-”
“We’ll take it. Yeah.” Sergeant Benton nodded. “Okay. I’ll have me a look.” His shoulders were wider than Lou’s; he had to wiggle to fit through the hole. He dropped into the bunker.
“Don’t do anything you’re not sure about,” Lou told him. “A booby trap here could be wired to enough TNT to blow up this whole fucking forest.”
“Uh-huh. Don’t I know it?” Benton advanced on the desk with unhurried calm. “I ain’t gonna get cute-believe you me I ain’t. I aim to climb on a ship and go home one of these days whether the krauts like it or not.”
“Sounds good to me,” Lou agreed.
As if he hadn’t spoken, Benton went on, “So if I think they’re getting sneaky, I’ll just back off. I’m good at this business, but I know there’s guys where I’m not even in their class. So…”
He went to work on the top drawer. Lou stood there and waited. He did his best to act relaxed, but sweat trickled from his armpits down his sides. Sweat was supposed to cool you off. These beads felt boiling hot. He told himself that was his imagination. It had to be, but so what?
Benton started to open the drawer, then paused. With a grunt, he went around to the side of the file cabinet and shone his flashlight into the narrow space between its back and the wall. “Uh-huh,” he said on a thoughtful note.
“What’s up?”
“Looks like a wire goin’ back there-two wires, matter of fact, one for top and one for bottom. If I’d’ve pulled…Well, who knows? But I don’t aim to find out.”
“Can you cut ’em?”
“Oh, sure.” Benton seemed surprised he needed to ask. “Be a second or two-gotta fit the wire-cutters to the extensions so they’ll reach. Can you lean over and shine a light down while I work? Otherwise I kinda need three hands. Lean over the desk, I mean. Don’t touch nothin’ if you can help it, you know?”
“I’ll try.” Lou did, wishing he were six inches taller so he had more to lean with. “How’s that?”
“Over to the left a tad…There you go.” Lou couldn’t see what Benton was doing. He heard a couple of clunks, then one soft twang, then another. The sergeant sighed. “Okay-now I’ve pulled all its teeth. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
Are you sure? Not asking was as tough as standing there radiating unconcern had been. If Lou didn’t trust Benton to do this job right, he should have brought someone else along. Doubting him out loud would piss him off, and might hurt his confidence. That could make him goof later, which neither of them would enjoy.
Lou opened the top drawer. Nothing blew up. He wasn’t astonished to find the drawer full of potato-masher grenades. “No sweat, Lieutenant,” Benton said. “I cut the wire that woulda tripped those fuckers right away.”
“That’s nice,” Lou said. “You do the bottom drawer, too?”
“Better believe it.”
Thus encouraged, Lou also opened that one. He found more grenades. Whistling between his teeth, he turned the flashlight on the papers in the crates. To his disappointment, they weren’t anything he could use to track more fanatics. Some were comic book-style four-panel illustrations of how to fire the Panzerfaust and the Panzerschreck. Others were propaganda posters showing bestial-looking American soldiers assaulting Aryan children while a mother watched in horror. The German caption read Roosevelt sends kidnappers, gangsters, and convicts in his army.
Toby Benton read as much German as he read Choctaw. The pictures told their own story, though. “Nice to know they love us,” he said dryly.
“This is old stuff,” Lou said. “They printed it while the war was still going on-before FDR died.”
“Well, we’ll still get rid of it,” Benton said. “We’ll clean out all this crap, and that’ll be one bunker the bastards’ll never use again.”
“Sure it will. And that’ll leave-how many just like it?” Lou’d had this unhappy thought not long before. “A million? Nah, let’s look on the bright side-a million minus one.”
Benton gave him a quizzical look-not the first he’d got from the stolid noncom. “Would you sooner leave it here?”
“No, no.” Lou shook his head. “But I was hoping it’d give us a lead to more of the diehards, and it doesn’t look like it will. Shutting down places like this won’t put out the fire.”
“Neither will not shutting ’em down,” Sergeant Benton answered, and Lou couldn’t very well tell him he was wrong.
Congressman Jerry Duncan scrawled his signature on a letter commending a constituent for collecting a ton and a half of scrap aluminum. With the war over, people would find different things to do with their spare time and energy. They’d still need letters of commendation from their Congressmen, though. Jerry Duncan was morally certain of that.
Plump and smooth and well-manicured, he was morally certain of a good many things. Like most Republicans, he was morally certain four terms were too many for any one President, and especially for a Democrat. Well, God had taken care of that. Now that That Man wasn’t in the White House any more, 1948 looked a lot rosier for the GOP.
So did 1946. With any luck at all, his party would recapture at least one house of Congress for the first time since the Hoover administration. Duncan had just been getting his feet under him in his law practice in those days. Another world back then, one without Hitler, without the atom bomb, without FDR’s alphabet-soup agencies, without American boys stationed all over the world and trying to figure out what the hell was going on…
Well, people right here in Washington were trying to figure out what the hell was going on, too. Jerry Duncan knew damn well he was. So much had happened so fast since the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. And even after V-E Day and V-J Day, things didn’t seem to have slowed down.
His secretary stuck her head into his inner office. “What’s up, Gladys?” Jerry asked, glad to escape his own thoughts.
“That woman from Anderson is here to see you, Congressman.”
“She is?” Duncan glanced at his wristwatch in surprise. “How’d it get to be three o’clock already?” He’d been doing this, that, and the other thing. By what he’d accomplished, it shouldn’t even have been lunchtime. Plenty of people lived their whole lives three steps behind where they should have been. He supposed he ought to be glad he didn’t get the feeling more often. But it still rattled him. He tried to pull himself together. “Well, tell her to come in.”
“Sure.” Gladys withdrew without closing the door all the way. He heard her say, “You can go in now.”
“Thank you.” The door opened again. Duncan got to his feet. The woman who came in was about as old as he was. She must’ve been hot stuff when she was younger. She wouldn’t have been bad now if she weren’t wearing black…and if the look on her face didn’t say hot stuff was the furthest thing from her mind. “Congressman Duncan?” she said. Automatically, Jerry nodded. She held out her hand. “I’m Diana McGraw.”
As automatically, Duncan shook it. Her grip was firm but cool. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. McGraw,” he said. “And I was very sorry to hear about your tragic loss. Please accept my sympathies. Too many boys are dead.”
Her nod was bitter and determined at the same time. “Yes. Too many boys are dead,” she agreed. “And for what, Congressman? For what? Why did Pat have to die, after the war was supposed to be over?”
Gladys came in with a tray. “Coffee?”
> “Please.” Jerry was glad for the interruption. “Won’t you sit down, Mrs. McGraw?” he asked while Gladys poured two cups.
“Thank you.” She sat stiffly, as if her machinery needed oiling. Gladys put cream and sugar into Jerry’s cup, then looked a question at her. “Black is fine,” Mrs. McGraw said.
“Here you are, then.” The secretary set cup and saucer near the edge of Jerry’s desk, then went out again.
Without preamble, Diana McGraw said, “Do you know how many American soldiers besides my Pat have been killed since the Nazis said they surrendered?”
Congressman Duncan started to answer, but caught himself. “No, I don’t know, not exactly. The War Department hasn’t publicized the numbers, whatever they are.”
“It sure hasn’t,” Mrs. McGraw agreed with a sniper’s smile. “How many do you think, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Over a hundred-I’m sure of that,” Jerry said. “Some of the atrocities do get into the papers. I wouldn’t be surprised if it were twice that number, maybe even three times.”
She smiled that frightening smile again. It made Jerry Duncan want to dive for cover. “The true figure is at least a thousand dead. At least.” She seemed to repeat herself for emphasis. “That doesn’t count wounded. All since the so-called surrender.”
Cautiously, Jerry asked, “How do you know?” Do you really know? was what he meant. Still picking his words with care, he went on, “As I say, the War Department doesn’t go out of its way to talk about figures.”
“Would you, if you had to talk about figures like that?” Diana McGraw returned. “As for how I know, well, I have connections.” She held up a hasty hand. “Not political connections, not the kind you usually think about. But when Pat and Betsy were in school, I was in the PTA. I was Central Indiana vice-chairwoman for several years, as a matter of fact. I went to a couple of the national conventions. I know mothers all over the country. Ever since Pat…died, I’ve been on the phone. I’ve been sending wires. My friends have been asking questions where they live. That’s what they’ve found out, and I believe them.”
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 9