A medic-no, a doc: he wore captain’s bars-looked up when Lou ducked into the tent. “You Weissberg? Heard you were coming.”
“Call me Lou.” Lou had captain’s bars of his own, brand new ones. That was more for time served than for anything he’d actually accomplished, and he knew it too well. He went on, “I wish your watchdogs woulda got the word. They wouldn’t’ve felt me up like I was Jane Russell. How’re the krauts?”
“One of ’em’s got a sucking chest. He’s in bad shape-dunno if he’ll make it,” the Army doctor answered. “Other guy’s got a smashed-up leg. Maybe I’ll have to amputate, maybe not. Penicillin and sulfa give him a chance to keep it, anyhow. Ten years ago, it would’ve been gone for sure. You can talk to him-he’s with it. The one with the chest wound keeps going in and out, know what I mean?”
“Oh, yeah. I’ve seen fellows like that before,” Lou said.
“Our guys waxed these assholes-cleaned their clocks,” the doctor said. “Sure hope it gets into the papers.”
“Me, too, but I can’t do a thing about that,” Lou said. “So, I can talk to this one, huh?” He pointed to the German with a leg wrapped in bloody bandages.
“Yeah. He’s got plenty of morphine in him, too-he needs it. So if he’s flying, maybe he’ll sing for you. You can hope, anyway.”
“I sure can.” Lou leaned over the German, who wore a neater, less raggedy Feldgrau tunic than he’d seen for a while. And the man still had on a set of shoulder straps, with a senior sergeant’s rank badges, which had been against regulations since the dreadfully misnamed V-E Day. Well, the Jerry had bigger things than that to worry about.
Lou switched to Deutsch: “Hey, you! Herr Feldwebel! Can you hear me?”
The kraut’s eyes opened. They were aluminum-gray, a genuinely scary color. But they also looked back at Lou from a million miles away. Plenty of morphine and then some, Lou thought. “I’m not a goddamn Feldwebel,” the German said. “I’m a Scharfuhrer, and don’t you forget it.” Contempt and weariness warred in his voice.
He had to be doped out of his skull, or he’d never admit to owning Waffen-SS rank. Lou decided to roll with it. “Sorry, Herr Scharfuhrer,” he said. “Tell me who sent you out on this dumbheaded mission that got you shot.”
“God damn Egon to hell and gone. He can lick my asshole, the son of a whore.” Lou thought the Scharfuhrer would bust right open, but he didn’t. No matter how full of drugs he was, he knew what he was supposed to say when somebody started interrogating him. “My name is Bauer, Rudolf Bauer. I am a Scharfuhrer, Waffen-SS.” He gave Lou his serial number. “By the Geneva Convention, I am not required to tell you more.”
“Pigdog!” Lou yelled, loud enough to make the doctor jump. “Do you think the Red Army gives a rat’s ass about the Geneva Convention?”
Bauer’s aircraft-skin eyes widened. Lou watched him try to fight the morphine. “But-” he sputtered. “But-I am in the American zone. You are wearing an American uniform.”
Shit, Lou thought. But shit wasn’t what came out of his mouth. Once upon a time, somebody who’d come back from a visit to smashed Berlin had taught him how to cuss a little in Russian. He’d never imagined that would come in handy, but maybe it did now. “Gavno!” he yelled, and, for good measure, “Yob tvoyu mat’!”
Hearing him, a real Russian likely would have laughed his ass off. A drugged and wounded SS man was in no position to realize what a lousy accent he had. Rudolf Bauer gulped. The way his Adam’s apple swelled and contracted, he might have been in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. He started to give his name, rank, and pay number again-he had nerve.
“Shut up!” Lou yelled. “Tell me who sent you out! What’s Egon’s whole name?”
Had he been a real Russian interrogator, he probably would have kicked that wounded leg about then. Morphine or no morphine, Bauer would’ve gone right through the roof of the tent. Lou didn’t have the stomach for it, even if the doctor wouldn’t have reported him. But Bauer didn’t have to know that.
The Scharfuhrer gulped again. Then he whimpered; the leg had to hurt in spite of everything. “Talk, you stinking turd!” Lou screamed. In a horrible way, it was fun. He could see why SS and NKVD men enjoyed what they did for a living…and he wondered if he’d be able to look at himself in the mirror when he shaved tomorrow morning.
In a very small voice, Bauer whispered, “He is Hauptsturmfuhrer Steinbrecher.”
Aha! “Where do I find this cocksucker?” Lou demanded.
He’s dead. A BAR blew his brains out. If Bauer said that and stuck to it, how could anybody prove he was lying-short of kicking his leg, anyhow? But once a prisoner started talking, he often sang like a nightingale. “He lives in the town of Pforring, outside Ingolstadt,” Bauer said. “He is a mechanic there.”
“How about that?” the doctor muttered-he spoke German, then.
“Yeah-how about that?” Lou agreed. “A break. Maybe. Sure could use one.” The fanatics were good. You couldn’t break into their cells very often. But if this Egon Steinbrecher was happily repairing stuff in Pforring, and if Lou and some GIs dropped in (you never could tell if somebody kept a Schmeisser handy)…“See you later, Doc.”
Lou tore out of the tent. He corralled some of the guys guarding the scene of the firefight. They piled into three jeeps and roared off toward Pforring, about twenty minutes away.
Most of the small town was intact. One block on the outskirts and then two more a little farther on had had the bejesus knocked out of them. Lou’d seen that kind of thing before. Those were the places where the krauts tried to make a stand when the American army came through.
At Lou’s order, the jeep stopped by an old woman carrying a few sticks of firewood. “Where do I find Egon Steinbrecher, the mechanic?” Lou asked her.
“Three blocks that way and one block up.” She pointed. “A brick house with a shed to one side.” If she was lying, she was damn good on the spur of the moment.
The dogface driving the jeep didn’t know German. Lou gave him the directions. The other two jeeps zoomed after his.
There was the house. There was the shed. There was the guy who had to be Steinbrecher, working on something broken with a pair of pliers. Lou pointed a grease gun at his midsection. “Hold it right there!” Lou yelled. “Drop the pliers! Hands high!”
Clank! The pliers fell on the cement floor. “Was ist los?” Steinbrecher said as he raised his hands. “I have done nothing wrong.”
“We’ll see about that,” Lou said in German, and then, in English, to one of his men, “Frisk him, Sandy. And check under his arm for the tattoo.”
“Sure thing, Captain.” The GI patted Steinbrecher down. He found nothing more lethal than a clasp knife. But, when he undid the German’s shirt and looked under his left armpit, he grunted and nodded. “Yeah, he’s got it.” Wearing your blood group on your skin made transfusions quick and easy and safe even if you were badly hurt and couldn’t tell the doctor what group you were. Egon Steinbrecher hadn’t bothered getting his tattoo removed as the war wound down.
“Bring him along, then,” Lou told Sandy. “We’ll question him back in Nuremberg.”
“But I have done nothing wrong!” Steinbrecher bleated again.
“Yeah, tell me another one,” Lou answered. He didn’t remember the last time he’d felt so good. Something had actually worked out for a change.
A Major in dress uniform read from a statement in a Pentagon press room: “Nine of Heydrich’s fanatics were killed and two captured. One of them later died of his wounds. An SS captain was also captured afterwards. American losses in the skirmish were one dead, three wounded. We believe the captured officer will give us valuable information about the fanatics’ organization and resources.” He looked out at the reporters. “Questions, gentlemen?”
Tom Schmidt’s hand shot up. When the major nodded to him, he said, “Why should a story like this impress us? Germany surrendered more than a year ago. Shouldn’t it be quiet over there by now?”
; One of the things Tom had learned in Germany was how to read campaign and decoration ribbons. Among others, the major wore one for a Purple Heart with two tiny oak-leaf clusters attached. He also wore an expression that said he wanted to scrape Tom off the bottom of his shoe. “When you grow up, Mr. Schmidt, you learn there’s a difference between what ought to be and what is,” he said in the flat voice of formal hostility. “And you learn you have to deal with what is, not what ought to be.”
Some of the reporters in the briefing room snickered. They weren’t all administration backers, either. Tom’s ears felt incandescent. “Well, let me ask that another way, then, Major,” he said, doing his best not to show his own fury. “How could we have dealt with what was a year ago so we wouldn’t have this mess on our hands today?”
“Sir, I am trying to show you progress in the fight against the fanatics, and you don’t want to look at it,” the briefing officer complained.
Tom sniffed. “We won a skirmish. Hot diggety dog. A year ago, did you expect we’d still be having skirmishes today?”
“My opinion on these issues doesn’t matter,” the major said.
“Okay, fine. Did anybody in the War Department or the State Department or the White House expect we’d still be fighting a shooting war in Germany halfway through 1946?”
“That doesn’t matter now,” the major insisted. “The point now is that we have to win it, and we’re going to win it, and we are winning it. This fight we just had-”
“How many years before we can go back into Frankfurt? How many people from there are refugees?” Tom broke in. “Does that say we’re winning?”
The briefing officer turned brick red. “Maybe it would be better if someone else asked questions for a while, Mr. Schmidt.”
“Better for who?” another reporter inquired.
“For whom?” yet another man corrected. Assemble a bunch of people who made their living with words and somebody was bound to turn copy editor on you.
“For people who want full and accurate information, that’s for whom.” The major answered what had probably been a rhetorical question. “The papers only seem interested in bad news. When anything good happens, you don’t want to talk about it.”
Maybe he didn’t know how big a can of worms he was opening. Or maybe he had orders from people above him to try to put the fear of God into the Washington press corps. If he did, it didn’t work. Even the people who’d laughed when he mocked Tom Schmidt started screaming at him now. Tom was sure of that: as far as he could tell, everybody in the briefing room started screaming.
“I’ve had enough!” someone shouted-a variation on one of the Republicans’ campaign slogans.
“To err is Truman!” another reporter added, this time parroting the Republican line. Then he said, “And you’re right up there with him, Major.”
“I don’t know how we got such an unpatriotic press,” the briefing officer said. “You people are worth regiments to Heydrich and his maniacs. Here I’m trying to show you we’re making progress, and you don’t want to listen.”
Tom didn’t laugh out loud, but he felt like it. The major had delivered himself-and, with him, maybe the Truman administration-into the reporters’ hands. Accuse them of supporting the other side and they’d tear you into bloody chunks…all in the name of freedom of the press, of course.
They screamed at the major. They demanded to know what he was talking about. “Are you saying we’re card-carrying Nazis?” one of them yelled. “’Cause I’ll make you sorry if you are!” He was short and fat and wore thick glasses: a born 4-F if there ever was one. The major might have been wounded three times, but as long as he wasn’t in a wheelchair he wouldn’t have any trouble with a twerp like that. Which didn’t stop the reporter, and might even have spurred him on.
The briefing officer didn’t try to back down or cover his tracks the way he should have. He scowled back at the gentleman of the fourth Estate and answered, “I don’t know what you guys are. I wonder what the FBI would turn up if it tried to find out.”
That was blowing on a fire. They told him all the reasons the FBI had no right to do anything like that. They told him how they’d sue J. Edgar Hoover if he tried, and for how much. They didn’t ask him any more questions. They swarmed out of the briefing room, swarmed out of the Pentagon, to write their stories and file them with their papers.
They weren’t the kind of stories the Truman administration would have wanted.
ARMY SUPPRESSES TRUTH! was the headline under which Tom’s piece ran. As those things went, that was one of the milder ones. Tom Schmidt smiled when he saw some of the others. If the Army fucked with him, he’d fuck with it right back.
Lou Weissberg lit a cigarette. In Germany, that made him A rich man-he could afford to smoke his money. Major Frank-the other man’s promotion had come through about the same time as his own-was smoking too. Well, of course they were rich here. They were Americans, after all.
“I was talking to a guy who hit the beach at D-Day,” Lou remarked.
“Yeah?” Howard Frank tried to blow a smoke ring. It was a ragged botch.
“Uh-huh.” Lou nodded. “He told me his LCI was a few hundred yards from the beach when it got hit by a round from an 88.”
“He’s lucky he’s still here to tell you the story, in that case,” Frank said. The German 88-antiaircraft gun, antitank gun, and main armament in the Tiger tank and the Jagdpanther tank destroyer-was one hellacious piece of artillery.
“No shit,” Lou agreed. “Only reason he is, is the Jerry gunners loaded an AP round instead of high explosive. So the damn thing went through the side of the landing craft, went through two of his buddies, and went straight out through the bottom.”
“Okay. I’m hooked. Give me the next reel of the serial,” Frank said.
“Well, the LCI started to sink like you’d expect,” Lou said. “Not real quick, but it took on more and more water and rode lower and lower…till finally it scraped up onto the beach and the guys who hadn’t got ventilated got out and headed for the war.”
“Mmp.” Major Frank essayed another smoke ring, with no better luck than before. He looked disgruntled, maybe at the miserable puff of smoke, maybe at Lou. “And you’re telling me this story because…?” By the way he said it, he didn’t believe Lou had any reason.
But Lou did. “On account of it kinda reminded me of what we’ve been doing here since the surrender. We’ve been sinking an inch at a time, like. You know what I mean, sir?”
“I only wish I didn’t.” Frank stubbed out the cigarette in his shell-casing ashtray and promptly lit another. As he took a deep drag on the new coffin nail, he asked, “So where’s the beach?”
“The beach?…Oh. I was hoping you could tell me,” Lou said. “If we can’t make it that far before we go under, all we leave is a trail of bubbles, and then we’re gone for good.” He got a fresh smoke going, too. The inside of his mouth felt like sandpaper. Still, the little nicotine buzz was worth it. He’d tried quitting a time or two, but that hurt, so he hadn’t.
“One more time,” Major Frank said, and tilted his head back. This smoke ring was…not good, but better, anyhow. As if it helped jog his brain, he continued, “Maybe if we kill Heydrich…”
“Maybe,” Lou allowed. “If one of our bombs had blasted Hitler in 1943, that would’ve kicked over the anthill for sure.”
To his surprise, Howard Frank looked less than enthusiastic. “They might’ve fought the war better if old Adolf did go to hell halfway through, you know. He told ’em to do a lot of dumbass things, and nobody had the nerve to go, ‘Wait a minute. You’re out of your goddamn mind.’”
Lou grunted. No doubt his superior had something there. Something for the Reich in 1943, for sure. Now? Wasn’t now a different story? “You think Heydrich’s meshiggeh, too?” Lou asked.
“Meshuggeh,” Frank said. “It’s a miracle the krauts can understand you, the kind of Yiddish you talk. It’s all in the front of your mouth.”
“Yeah, yeah, bite me,” Lou said-they’d gone around that barn before, a time or twelve. “I did proper German in college, too. You know that. But do you think Heydrich’s squirrelly?”
“Bite me, sir,” Major Frank said without rancor. He paused to chew on the real question. Reluctantly, he shook his head. “Nah, I guess not. Coldhearted son of a bitch, but that’s not the same thing. For somebody with a crappy hand, he’s played it damn well. Or do you think I’m wrong?”
“Wish I did,” Lou answered. “Boy, do I ever. But I’m not sure how bad his hand really is, y’know? Yeah, his guys can’t fight us straight up any more, like they did before the surrender. But so what? They sure can drive us nuts, same as the Russian partisans did with them. And those assholes were ready for this. They started gearing up a couple of years before the Wehrmacht threw in the towel-stashing guns, getting men out of regular units and salting ’em away…. Not a lot of men, not when you’re talking about a real army. For partisans, though, they got plenty.”
“Ain’t it the truth?” Frank said mournfully. “And how do you stop somebody who doesn’t care if he kills himself as long as he gives you a good one in the balls?”
“Two atom bombs made the Japs believe they honest to God lost,” Lou said. “Our guys over in the Pacific don’t have any trouble now-lucky bastards.”
“You don’t like it where you’re at, you can always put in for a transfer,” Major Frank said. “I’ll endorse it like nobody’s business.”
Lou sent him a reproachful look through the smoke that hazed the office. “You know I don’t want to do this. I want to clobber these Nazi mothers. I’ve got millions of reasons why, too, same as you do. I just wish to hell I knew how we were gonna do it, and that Congress would let us do it.”
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 31