The Man with the Iron Heart

by Harry Turtledove

  Lou cut Steinbrecher’s body down. “Bury this crap,” he said. Sometimes nothing went the way you wished it would.

  XVIII

  Jurgen had been in Paris twice before. He’d paraded through the City of Light in June 1940. Everything seemed possible then. Hell, everything seemed likely. The Wehrmacht had done what the Kaiser’s army never could. France lay naked at Germany’s feet.

  With a smile, Jurgen remembered how tired he’d been as he marched under the Arc de Triomphe. Tired? Hell, he’d been out on his feet. So had most of the Landsers who tramped along with him. They’d had a month of hard fighting to get to where they were, and they’d felt every minute of it.

  But great days, great days. England would give up next, and that would end the war. The Reich would take its rightful place in the sun. Everybody would be happy, and he could take off the Feldgrau and go back to being a longshoreman again.

  Only things worked out a little differently. Yeah, just a little, Jurgen thought wryly. When he came back to Paris, it was December 1943. The Red Army had just chased his division out of Kiev. He’d been on the Eastern Front for a couple of years. He’d stopped one bullet and one shell fragment by then. His left elbow didn’t bend much, but if you were right-handed you could live with that.

  Paris…wasn’t the same. Winter, sure. But also shortages of everything. Electricity only a few hours a day. Not much heat. The streets empty of cars. Skinny, shabby people on foot or making do with bicycles. The restaurants couldn’t cook what they couldn’t get. Even the whores just went through the motions.

  Well, Jurgen wasn’t the same as he’d been in 1940, either. He’d only imagined he was tired back in the old days. He hadn’t had exhaustion seep into his bones, into his very soul. In 1943, he’d hibernated like a dormouse all the way across Europe in his railway car. He’d hardly looked out to notice what Lancasters and B-17s and B-24s were doing to the Vaterland.

  He’d seen bad things fighting through France. He’d thought he’d seen everything. What the hell did he know? He was just a kid. What he’d seen in Russia, what he’d done in Russia…Even now, he shied away from remembering that. And it wasn’t as if the Ivans didn’t play the game the same filthy way. What they did to some of the guys they captured…Jurgen shied away from remembering that, too. You always saved one cartridge for yourself. You didn’t want them getting hold of you. Oh, no!

  So he wasn’t afraid of doing himself in. He might have needed to do it long before this if Reichsprotektor Heydrich’s men hadn’t plucked him from the depot and turned him into a holdout. He still wanted to live, but all that soldiering had taught him you didn’t always get what you wanted.

  So here he was in Paris again, in the cab of a U.S. two-and-a-half-ton truck. He wore olive-drab American fatigues that fit pretty well but not quite well enough. He had papers that showed he was somebody called Paul Higgins. It was the kind of name even a German who knew no English could pronounce well enough. He’d traveled across France with it. He didn’t have far to go now.

  Once more, Paris wasn’t the same. It was nighttime. All the lights were on. That struck him as perverse. But Paris didn’t worry about air raids now. And it seemed to have been captured by Americans. Olive drab was everywhere. So were trucks just like the one he drove. They made traffic on the narrow, winding streets horrendous.

  After a while, he realized not all the olive-drab uniforms had Americans in them. A French flic directing traffic in a kepi looked like an Ami from the neck down. Maybe not all the deuce-and-a-halfs had American drivers. Jurgen chuckled. He knew one that damn well didn’t.

  He checked the map on the seat beside him. That was funny, too. He could see where he was going, by God! He just had to find the right way to get there. Also on the seat lay a Sturmgewehr and a couple of extra magazines. He’d taken them out of hiding when he got into town. He might need to do some shooting on the last leg of the trip. Extra steel sheets armored his doors. Heydrich’s mechanics hadn’t had to do that. The Ami who’d driven the truck before it was stolen had taken care of it. He hadn’t wanted to stop a German bullet. Jurgen didn’t want to stop an American round, or even a French one. Not now. Not when he’d come this far.

  He came up alongside the Champ du Mars: a rectangle of greenery and geometrically precise garden in the heart of Paris. The Eiffel Tower loomed ahead. Beyond it lay the Pont d’Jena. Napoleon had beaten the Prussians at Jena; Jurgen knew that. The French named their bridges for battles they’d won. There wouldn’t be a Pont d’Ardennes in Paris any time soon.

  Well, he wasn’t going as far as the Pont d’Jena anyhow. He cut hard left and made for the base of the Tower. A flic’s whistle shrilled-he wasn’t supposed to do that. He started to reach for the assault rifle. Spraying a few bullets around would buy him the time he needed.

  But nobody opened up on him. Nobody tried to block him. The Paris cop blew his whistle again, furiously. He thought Jurgen was a drunk Ami on a joyride. Jurgen laughed. Sorry, flic.

  Orders were to see if he could drop the Tower straight down onto the Pont d’Jena, to double the damage from its fall. One look told Jurgen that wouldn’t happen. The supports were positioned so it had to go down diagonally to the bridge. Nobody back in Germany had remembered that.

  Well, if it went into the Seine, that would screw things up pretty goddamn well. Jurgen thought it was tall enough to reach. As he drove under the more northerly of the riverside supports, somebody-probably that policeman-fired a pistol at the truck. Too little, too late: like everything the French did.

  Jurgen’s finger found the detonator button on the side of the steering column. He wished he could watch what was about to happen. It ought to make one hell of a show. Oh, well. You couldn’t have everything. “Sieg heil!” Jurgen said, and stabbed the button hard.

  Lou Weissberg stared at the front page of the International Herald-Tribune. Some photographer was going to win himself a Pulitzer Prize for this pic, the way that guy in the Pacific had for his shot of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima the year before.

  There was the Eiffel Tower, still mostly lit up, leaning at a forty-five-degree angle to the rest of the skyline. But it didn’t keep leaning, the way the Tower of Pisa did. It crashed all the way down, the last hundred feet or so going right into the Seine.

  “What a mess,” Lou muttered. “What a fucking mess!”

  He read the story, though the headline-TOWER FALLS! — and the photo got the message across by themselves. Sometimes the details carried a morbid fascination of their own. He learned that, counting radio antenna, the Tower was (had been) more than a thousand feet high: taller than anything manmade except the much newer Empire State Building. It weighed about 10,000 tons, or as much as the water a heavy cruiser displaced. And now…it was 10,000 tons of scrap iron.

  Shaking his head, Lou turned to the Continued on page 3. The inside page had another shot of the toppled Tower, this one taken in the cold gray light of dawn. As it lay on the ground-and in the river-it reminded him of nothing so much as one more soldier shot dead in the war.

  The story said eighty-one people had died when the Eiffel Tower fell. Some had been on it, others under it or caught in the blast of the exploding truck that sheared through one of its enormous feet. And a weatherman who’d been up at the very top reading a barometer got pitched into the Seine and was fished out with nothing worse than a broken wrist.

  “Fuck!” Lou said when he read that. “Sometimes you’d rather be lucky than good.” If he were that weatherman, he thought he’d go out looking for wallets.

  Next to the inside photo and the continuation of the story from the front page was another one. Seeing its headline-GERMAN FREEDOM FRONT CLAIMS BLAST-Lou ground his teeth. Heydrich’s goons had released a statement by planted communiques, telephone calls, and their clandestine radio station. The stinking bastards didn’t miss a trick, God damn their black-hearted souls to hell.

  If you believed them (and Lou, unfortunately, had no reason not to), the fellow w
ho’d brought the tower down was an Unteroffizier-a lousy corporal-named Jurgen Voss. He gave up his life gloriously for the future liberation of the Fatherland and its folk, the statement said. Let all who dare to oppose us beware!

  Of course, a lousy corporal from the last war, a fellow by the name of Hitler, had done a lot more damage than this Jurgen Voss ever dreamt of. But it sure wasn’t bad for a first try.

  General de Gaulle’s statement only made page four. Lou thought putting Heydrich ahead of him was chickenshit, but what could you do about newspapermen? “The Tower shall rise again,” de Gaulle declared. “Nazi Germany never will.” Slowly, Lou nodded. That had style. If only he could be as confident himself as de Gaulle sounded.

  Harry Truman’s response went right next to the French leader’s. “Today, we are all Frenchmen,” the President said. That was pretty good, too. Truman went on, “This latest vile Nazi atrocity shows the desperation of the madmen who refuse to accept the verdict of history.”

  Lou frowned. That also sounded good. Chances were it’d play well back in the States. It was a vile atrocity, no two ways about it. But were Heydrich and his chums madmen? Were they desperate? If they were, they hid it much too well.

  Fighting the USA-and the UK, and the USSR-toe-to-toe hadn’t worked out so well for the Third Reich. Fighting a partisan war was a whole different story, dammit. If you were trying to drive the other guy nuts and hurt him way worse than he could hurt you…Well, if you were trying to do something like that, how could you play your hand better than Heydrich had?

  It was nine in the morning. Lou headed for the officers’ club anyway. He needed something to turn off part of his brain. Right now, bourbon would do.

  Like so much of the American presence in Nuremberg these days, the Quonset hut that housed the officers’ club cowered behind rings of barbed wire and sandbagged machine-gun emplacements. The GIs who manned those emplacements seemed extra jumpy this morning. Lou would have, too. If Heydrich’s goons could knock over the Eiffel Tower, for Christ’s sake, what was one stinking officers’ club?

  Not worth noticing. Lou hoped.

  Even so early, the place was more crowded than it usually was at night. Tobacco smoke hazed the air. Almost every man in there, from lowly second lieutenant to bird colonel, held a copy of the Herald-Trib or of Stars and Stripes, which also had that picture of the Tower in mid-fall. And almost every man in there was drinking hard.

  “What’ll it be, sir?” asked the PFC tending bar when Lou squeezed up to him. Once upon a time, a Jerry had worked back there. After what happened to the Russians in Berlin, that didn’t look like a good idea any more.

  “Bourbon on the rocks,” Lou said. “Make it a double. I’ve got some catching up to do.”

  “Yes, sir. Comin’ up.” The kid poured in two generous jiggers of Kentucky lightning and some ice cubes. “Hell of a mornin’, ain’t it?”

  “Man, you said a mouthful.” Lou looked around. Major Frank was sitting with a tough, skinny major named Ezra Robertson. Robertson, who was from Vermont or New Hampshire-Lou couldn’t remember which-was supposed to help the prosecutors in the war-crimes trials. If the twice-derailed trials ever got off the ground, no doubt he would.

  Frank waved. Lou snagged a chair and joined the two majors. He raised his glass. “Mud in your eye.” Frank and Robertson both had glasses in front of them. They drank with him. The bourbon ran down his throat like sour-mash fire. “Whew!” He shook his head. “Tastes funny this time of day.”

  “Yeah, it doesn’t go with powdered eggs, that’s for damn sure.” Major Robertson waved his hands. “Sure isn’t stopping anybody, though.”

  “It’s like it was us. This is even worse than that radium bomb in Frankfurt. Who would’ve thought anything could be?” Howard Frank said gloomily. He put his head in his hands. Had he drunk himself sad already? Not a world record, maybe, but pretty fast. His voice was muffled as he went on, “We are screwed. We are so fucking screwed.”

  “Not yet, goddammit,” Robertson said. “The fanatics can annoy us. They can embarrass us. But they can’t beat us. They can’t make us pack up and go-not a chance in church, gentlemen. They flat-out aren’t strong enough. The only people who can beat us is us.” He frowned. “Uh, are us? Hell, you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah,” Lou said. “That’s why we’re screwed. Elections coming up. What happens when all the people who’re squealing ‘Get out of Germany now!’ go into Congress?”

  “So fucking screwed,” Frank intoned again, as if it were a dirge. And so it was much too likely to be.

  “Red Army doesn’t have to worry about this election shit,” Robertson said. “Uncle Joe tells ’em hop, and up they go.”

  “Fanatics are giving them a hard time, too,” Lou said. “They’re finding out how much fun the other end of a partisan war is.”

  “They don’t like it for beans, that’s for sure,” Robertson agreed. “Their war-crimes people-all officers, you know-cuss as much as they can in English or German. Then they go back to Russian and really cut loose.”

  “We ought to do more with their Intelligence people. By God, we really should,” Lou said. “We’ve got the same enemy, just like we did before V-E Day.”

  A considerable silence followed. Lou considered it-unhappily-while Major Frank and Major Robertson looked at each other. How far into his mouth had he stuck his foot? At last, voice gentle, Frank said, “That won’t go very far if you try to push it up the line. I told you so before.”

  The bourbon at an unaccustomed hour might have hit Lou harder than he figured, for he said, “Why, dammit? About time somebody did.”

  Ezra Robertson looked down into his now-empty glass. “You know what ‘PAF’ stands for, Captain?” he asked quietly.

  Lou nodded. You picked up all kinds of weird stuff in the CIC. Most of it you put right back down again, because you couldn’t use it. But bits and pieces stuck whether you could use them or not. “Premature Anti-Fascist,” Lou said. “Guys who went to Spain to fight for the Republic and like that.”

  “Yeah. And like that,” Robertson agreed. “Guys who could’ve given us a lot of special help during the regular fighting, too. Only most of ’em never got the chance, on account of we didn’t trust ’em as far as we could throw ’em. You go yelling we should team up with the NKVD, you’ll end up in that same basket, y’know.”

  “I’m no Red,” Lou said. Some of the Americans who’d come over to administer prostrate Germany had had those leanings. A few of them were now working directly for Uncle Joe, because they’d headed for the Soviet zone one jump ahead of the internal investigators.

  “We know you aren’t,” Major Frank said. “But if you start talking about working with the Russians, you’ll bump up against people who’ve never heard of you before.”

  “And they’ll nail you to the cross,” Ezra Robertson added.

  “Oy,” Lou said dryly. Howard Frank snorted. Major Robertson didn’t get it. Lou hadn’t expected him to-goys would be goys. Lou only wished he thought the New Englander was wrong. With a sigh, he went on, “Might almost be worth throwing away my Army career for. I think it needs doing.”

  “Wouldn’t just be your Army career,” Robertson said. “You’d fubar your whole life. Every place you looked for a job, people would go, ‘He’s the one who…’ You don’t believe me, find one of those guys who fought in the Lincoln Brigade and see how much fun he’s had wearing ‘PAF’ ever since.”

  He might have been talking about the weather. He couldn’t have been much more matter-of-fact if he were. And he seemed more likely to know what he was talking about than most weathermen of Lou’s acquaintance. (Lou remembered the Frenchman who’d gone into the Seine. Talk about luck!)

  “Shit,” Lou said. He got back up and headed for the bar again. One double wasn’t enough to get him where he wanted to go. As the PFC built him a refill, he decided two might not get him there, either.

  Oberscharfuhrer Klein came into Reinhard Heydrich’s offi
ce with a stack of newspapers that had found their way…here…from the French zone and from France itself. They all went on and on about the downfall of the Eiffel Tower, and about what France was doing to pay the Germans back.

  After quickly flipping through them, Heydrich asked, “Have you seen these, Hans?”

  “I’ve looked at a few of ’em, anyhow,” the veteran noncom answered. “Sounds like the Frenchies are pissing themselves-and pissing on us.”

  “It does, doesn’t it?” Heydrich said, not without satisfaction. “And it sounds like there’s a regular partisan war going on in the French zone. Plenty of people will pick up a rifle when they think what happens to them if they don’t will be worse.”

  “Ja, I saw that, too,” Klein said. “More than one of the stories blame it all on us. ‘Heydrichite fanatics,’ they say.” He sounded proud of the label.

  “Scheisse,” said Heydrich himself. “Our people aren’t doing anything in the French zone right now. Nothing, you hear me? I ordered our cells there to stay quiet, because I knew the French would go out of their minds for a while if Voss managed to bring the Tower down.”

  “They’re bad enough anyway-much worse than the Englanders or the Americans. Sometimes they’re worse than the damned Russians, too,” Klein said.

  “Well, the damned Russians really did beat the Wehrmacht in the end. That makes them feel better,” Heydrich said. “The French never did-the Anglo-Americans had to rescue them. So they’re still afraid their cocks are too small, and they act tough to try and make up for it.”

  Hans Klein guffawed. “That’s telling ’em, sir!”

  “The only thing they’ll do in the occupation zone is get us more recruits,” Heydrich said. “Anybody who’s willing to grab a gun and fight them on his own is liable to be someone we can use.”

  “If our people are lying low, how do we find ’em? How do they find us?” Klein asked.