The Man with the Iron Heart

by Harry Turtledove

As if to punctuate his words, the thump of not-too-distant explosions rattled the windows that gave Major Frank a look at the devastation outside. Lou tensed, ready to hit the dirt. Before he did, a veteran’s judgment told him he didn’t have to. Howard Frank didn’t dive under his desk.

  “Only a mortar,” Lou said. Frank nodded. Mortars were the small change of this war. Unless one came down close to you, you didn’t have to worry about them. (Much good that did old Adenauer, Lou reminded himself.) But trucks full of explosives and Heydrichite fanatics wearing vests stuffed with TNT and nails were what you really needed to worry about.

  The Germans had surrendered more than a year before. This kind of picayune crap-maybe a couple of GIs wounded, maybe just something smashed-looked as if it could go on forever. Are we ready to hold these shitheads down forever? Lou wondered. He was. He was much less sure about the rest of his country.

  Lights from light bulbs. Slightly stale air. The hum of fans in the background. Reinhard Heydrich hardly heard them any more, not unless he made a conscious effort and listened. Nowadays, this was where he belonged: deep underground. The raid into the British zone that netted the German physicists only rubbed his nose in the truth. However much he wished he were, he wasn’t a field operative any more.

  This is what happens to a field marshal…or to a Fuhrer, he thought. The Allies spread stories about how Hitler had gone mad down in his bunker. Heydrich didn’t think that was happening to him…but he’d changed, no doubt about it.

  He was damn glad his wife and children made it to Spain while things were falling apart in the Reich. A lot of people had used that escape route, and Franco wouldn’t give them up. Of course, the whole war would have gone differently if Franco had let the Wehrmacht take Gibraltar away from England…. Hitler came back from that meeting saying he would rather have three teeth pulled than dicker with the Caudillo again.

  At least Heydrich didn’t have to worry that the Yankees would try to use Lina and the kids against him. Better still, he didn’t have to worry that the Russians would. Whatever they tried wouldn’t have swayed him-he was sure of that-but it might have clouded his judgment. He couldn’t afford that, not when he had to fight this unbalanced, unequal kind of war.

  Oberscharfuhrer Klein came in with the latest stack of newspapers from all over Germany-and from beyond. He laid a copy of Le Figaro on Heydrich’s desk and pointed to a photo on the front page. “Isn’t this disgusting?” he growled. “They’re so damned proud of themselves because they tied themselves to the Amis’ apron strings.”

  The photo showed a French panzer rumbling down the Champs Elysees. It looked rather like a Panther; Heydrich knew the French army was using some of those it had taken more or less intact. His French was rusty, but he could make sense of the story under the photo. It bragged about how the French-built panzer showed that France was a great power again.

  Heydrich wanted to spit on the newspaper. “How great was France in 1940?” he growled.

  “That’s what I was thinking, Herr Reichsprotektor.” Hans Klein leered. “I was on leave in Paris in ’42, and the girls were pretty great-I’ll tell you that. Leave a few Reichsmarks on the dresser and they’d do whatever you wanted. They’d smile while they did it, too.” He chuckled reminiscently. “Those were the days, all right.”

  “And now the same girls suck off the Americans-some great power,” Heydrich said. Klein laughed out loud. Heydrich’s eyes, already narrow, narrowed further. “We ought to teach them a lesson, Hans. We really should. Maybe another one for the English, too. As if England could have beaten us if she hadn’t let herself get overrun by American niggers and Jews.”

  “Damn right, sir.” Klein sounded hearty, but only for a moment. Then he asked, “Um…What have you got in mind?”

  “I don’t know yet,” Heydrich admitted. “But something. There has to be something. No security to speak of in France or England-not like here. Getting people and the stuff they need across the border should be easy as you please.”

  “Ja.” Klein nodded. “You’ve got that right-for France, anyway. England may be harder, though. Miserable Channel.”

  Heydrich nodded, too, unhappily. England’s natural moat wasn’t even a good piss wide, but it had been plenty to frustrate the Reich in 1940. “Moving our personnel-that should be manageable,” the Reichsprotektor said, thinking out loud. “What they need…there’s the hard part.”

  “Shame we don’t have any U-boats left,” Hans Klein remarked.

  That made Heydrich think some more. A few of the submarines that had surrendered had put in at German ports. Regretfully, he shook his head. “We haven’t got the people to man one. And even if we did, the Allies would shit bricks if one of those boats went missing. Can’t have that, not when we’re trying to keep a secret.”

  Klein grunted. “Yeah, you’re right, sir. Too damn bad, but you are.”

  “A fishing boat, maybe?” Heydrich wondered. “That might work.” He had no idea how many fishing boats were setting out from German ports these days. Up till this moment, he’d never had any reason to worry about it. And the North Sea and the Baltic were about as far from his redoubt as you could get and still stay in the Reich. “Have to see what we can find out.”

  “Whatever it is, the Tommies won’t like it,” Klein predicted.

  Heydrich didn’t smile very often, but he did now. “That’s the idea, Hans.”

  Summer pressed down on Anderson, Indiana, like a hot, wet glove. Diana and Ed McGraw went to movies on weekends and whenever Ed didn’t come home from the plant too tired during the week. What was playing? They didn’t much care. The theaters had air-conditioning. That counted for more than what went on the screen. The movie houses were packed whenever they went, too. They weren’t the only ones who wanted to beat the heat for a couple of hours.

  “I wonder what it’d cost to air-condition the house,” Diana said when they left a theater one night. It was after ten, but still sweltering outside.

  “I can tell you what,” Ed answered. “More than we can afford, that’s what. I make pretty good money, but not that kind.” He opened the Pontiac’s passenger door. Diana slid in. She knew he was right. Ed went around to get in on the street side. As he started the car, he went on, “You’ll be taking your trips, anyway. The trains are air-conditioned, and so are the hotels, right?”

  “A lot of the time, anyhow,” Diana agreed.

  “Well, that’s something, anyways.” Ed put the car in gear. “Where do you go next? Detroit?”

  “No, Minneapolis,” she said.

  He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “That’s right. I forgot. Detroit’s later. But they were both up north, and I mixed ’em up. It’s a wonder you can keep everything straight. Maybe it’ll be cooler up there. You can hope.”

  “Sure,” Diana said, and then, after cautious silence, “Does it bother you that I’m gone so much?”

  “Nah.” To her relief, Ed didn’t hesitate even a little bit. “It needs doin’. I couldn’t hack anything like that. I ain’t got the waddayacallit-the personality. But you’re goin’ great guns. Pat’d be proud of you. Honest to God, babe, he would.”

  “Thanks.” Tears stung Diana’s eyes. She did sometimes wonder what their son would have thought of her campaign against the government. That was foolishness. She never would have started it if one of Heydrich’s fanatics hadn’t killed him and opened her eyes.

  Minneapolis turned out to be hot, too. The paper there said the heat wave ran all the way up to Winnipeg, on the other side of the border. The Canadians were lucky. They didn’t have to try to help hold Germany down.

  The ground around Minneapolis was as flat as if it had been ironed, and puddled with ponds and lakes of all sizes. Most of the people were tall and fair. They spoke with a slight singsong Scandinavian accent, and said “Ja” when they meant yes. Most of the time, they didn’t seem to notice the way they talked. Every once in a while, they would grin wickedly and put it on twice as thick to
drive an out-of-towner loopy.

  Signs printed in red on white-STOP THE BLEEDING IN GERMANY! RALLY AT LORING PARK! — were tacked to telephone poles and pasted to walls everywhere on the short car ride from the Great Northern depot to Diana’s hotel. “Looks like you folks have done a terrific job getting ready,” Diana told the couple who’d met her at the station.

  “Well, we try,” said Susan Holmquist, who ran the Minnesota fight against the war.

  “Ja, we do,” agreed her husband, Sven. They both seemed surprised at her praise. Other places, people acted as if they wanted a medal for pitching in. Not here, not with the Holmquists.

  Quietly, Susan added, “Danny would have wanted it this way. If you do something, do it right.” Sven nodded. They’d lost their son at almost the same time as Diana lost Pat. A German wearing explosives under his clothes blew himself up in a crowd of GIs, and Danny Holmquist was one of the unlucky ones.

  Loring Park had-inevitably-a two-lobed lake at its heart. Susan said the ice skating was terrific during the winter. Diana had tried ice skating exactly once, and sprained an ankle. Besides, just then she was amazed the little lake wasn’t steaming. The air shimmered under the swaggering sun.

  A bunting-draped platform with a mike stood near a statue of Ole Bull. A plaque at the base of the statue explained that Ole Bull was a nineteenth-century Norwegian violinist. A good thing, too, because Diana wouldn’t have known otherwise. What he was doing immortalized in bronze in a Minneapolis park…Well, it was a Scandinavian part of the country.

  Picketers paraded and chanted. Their placards carried all the slogans Diana had seen so often before. Some of them, she’d come up with herself. By now, she had trouble remembering which ones those were. They all blurred together.

  People who disagreed with the picketers shouted and hooted. Bored-looking cops kept them from doing anything more. In places like New York City or Pittsburgh, the cops wouldn’t have looked bored. A lot more of them would have been here, too. Even so, they might not have been able to keep the two sides apart. Folks in these parts seemed to have better manners.

  Susan Holmquist made a speech. The crowd in front of the podium-not too big, not too small-listened politely. They applauded politely at the right places. Reporters took notes. Photographers photographed. It was all very civilized. If everybody behaved like this, World War II probably never would have happened. But…

  Susan introduced Diana, who got a bigger hand. Stepping up to the microphone, Diana thought of how scared of public speaking she’d been when she started out. She wasn’t any more. She’d done it often enough to let it lose its terrors.

  She hammered away at the points she’d made so many times before. Why was the USA still in Germany? Why had so many young men died after victory was declared? Why couldn’t the Americans-or anyone else-squash the German fanatics? How long would it go on? How much more money and how many more lives would it cost?

  She cut her speech shorter than usual. They were going to do something different here. They were going to read out, one after another, the names of all the servicemen and-women killed in Germany since what was laughably called V-E Day.

  Sven Holmquist came up with a typewritten sheet of paper. “Irving Sheldon Aaronson,” he intoned. “Hovan Abelian. Creighton Abrams. Manuel Jose Acevedo…”

  Diana found herself nodding as she listened to name following name. It was oddly impressive, oddly dignified. And it brought home, one name at a time, just what the United States had already thrown away.

  Maybe she wasn’t the only one who felt that way. A man in a suit bustled out of the crowd and headed toward the speakers’ platform. He had a pointed chin and a high forehead-he was going to lose his hair, but he hadn’t lost too much yet. Diana noticed his person less than she noticed that the police were letting him through. “Who is that guy?” she whispered to Susan. “What’s he doing?” Is he safe? was what she really meant.

  “That’s Mayor Humphrey. Hubert Humphrey,” Susan answered. The name meant nothing to Diana. The Minneapolis woman went on, “He’s pro-administration all the way.”

  Humphrey hopped up onto the platform. “May I say a few words?” he asked. His voice was a light tenor, a bit on the shrill side.

  “This isn’t your show, Mr. Mayor,” Sven Holmquist said. “This is ours.”

  But Hubert Humphrey grabbed the mike anyway. “Folks, I just want you to think about one thing,” he said loudly. Diana got the idea that there would be no such thing as a few words from him. He went on, “If we run away from Germany, the Nazis win. All the soldiers who’ve died will have died for nothing. For nothing-do you hear me? We will have wasted years and tens of thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars. Is that what you want? Cutting and running won’t-”

  Diana took the microphone away from him. He looked astonished-he wasn’t used to people doing anything like that. “Mr. Humphrey, Mr. Holmquist was right. This is our show,” Diana said. “If you want your own, you can have it, I’m sure.”

  “I only meant-” Humphrey began.

  “I don’t care what you meant, sir.” Diana cut him off. It wasn’t easy-he was used to talking through or over other people. But, with the mike in hand, she did it, adding, “When I was a girl, Wilson talked about the War to End War. What did he know? Was he right? What do politicians ever know? Let the people decide, if you please.”

  The crowd really applauded then. Hubert Humphrey looked amazed all over again. He eyed Diana as if he were seeing her for the first time. “There’s more to you than meets the eye,” he said.

  “I don’t know about that. I don’t care, either,” Diana answered. “All I know is, this is our show, and we’re going to run it. Get down off this platform before I ask the police to run you in for interfering with a public meeting.”

  He blinked. “You would, wouldn’t you?”

  “Mr. Humphrey, it would be a pleasure. Now get down,” Diana said. And Humphrey did, because he had to know she wasn’t bluffing. She gave the microphone back to Sven Holmquist. “If you’d go on from where you were interrupted, please…”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, something not far from awe in his voice. “Donald Andrew Barclay. Peter LeRoy Barker…”

  A room. A couple of armed guards. A bright light. A prisoner. An interrogator. How many times had that scene played out during the war, and in how many countries-to say nothing of how many movies? Now Lou Weissberg was in the driver’s seat. The light shone into Hauptsturmfuhrer Egon Steinbrecher’s face. They’d been through several sessions by now. Lou was fast running out of patience with the captured German.

  “Look,” he said in reasonable tones, “you’re a dead man. The Geneva Convention doesn’t apply. Your side surrendered. If you fight on after that, it’s your tough luck.”

  The SS captain licked his lips. He’d been slapped around a little, but nothing more. Lou and the Americans generally didn’t like torture. Unless you had to tear something out of somebody right this second, what was the point? And Steinbrecher didn’t know anything like that. Lou got the feeling he wasn’t up to being a suicide warrior, the way too many of Heydrich’s fanatics were. But he tried to hold a bold front: “So why have you not killed me, then?”

  “Why do you think?” Lou said. “So we can squeeze you. If you sing pretty enough, we may even let you keep breathing. Who all was in your cell?”

  “You already know that,” Steinbrecher said. “They had bad luck when they attacked your men.”

  “Those were the only ones?” Lou asked. The German nodded. Lou laughed in his face. “Tell me another one.”

  “It is the truth.” Steinbrecher sounded affronted that anyone could doubt his word. He yawned. He hadn’t had much sleep since he got nabbed. That wasn’t quite torture, not to Lou’s way of thinking. And it could soften a guy up, or at least make him punchy and stupid.

  “How do you get your orders?” Lou asked.

  “There is-there was-a drop in a hollow tree fifty meters behind my shop,
” Steinbrecher said. “Sometimes a piece of paper would show up there. It would tell me what to do. I would do it. I do not know who put the paper in, so you need not ask me that.”

  “I’ll ask you whatever I damn well please,” Lou snapped. The trouble was, he believed Steinbrecher here. That was how undergrounds all over the world ran their operations. If you didn’t know who gave you your orders, you couldn’t tell the other side if they caught you. Lou grimaced; this wasn’t going the way he wanted. He took another stab at it: “You can’t do any better, it’s time for the blindfold and cigarette.”

  This time, the SS man gulped. And he named half a dozen names, all of them men living in Pforring. “They all hate you,” he declared.

  “We’ll check it out,” Lou said. He left the interrogation room and made a telephone call. An hour and a half later, he got an answer. The men were…just men. Nothing showed they had any connection with the fanatics.

  An hour after that, Hauptsturmfuhrer Egon Steinbrecher stood tied to a pole in front of a wall. He declined the blindfold, but accepted a cigarette-ironically, a Lucky-from Lou, who commanded the firing squad. “I die for Germany,” he said as he finished the smoke.

  “You die, all right,” Lou agreed. He stepped aside and nodded to the half-dozen GIs. “Ready…Aim…Fire!” Their M-1s barked. Steinbrecher slumped against the pole. He died fast; Lou didn’t have to finish him off with his carbine. That was a relief, anyhow. He’d had this duty before, and he hated it.

  He also hated not getting more-hell, not getting anything-out of Steinbrecher. Maybe he hadn’t known the one right question to ask, the one that would have made the German sing. Maybe there hadn’t been any one right question. All he had now was one more dead Nazi, which wasn’t bad, but wasn’t good enough.

  In the first days of the occupation, they’d taken newsreels of executions like this and shown them in German theaters. That quickly stopped; the films raised sympathy for Heydrich’s goons, not the fear U.S. authorities wanted. No camera crew here. Just the squad, and a couple of the GIs looked as if they wanted to be sick.