“Fuck the French! Fuck the Americans, too.” The first part of what Bokov said came out fiercely. His voice faltered when he tried the second curse.
Colonel Shteinberg gave back a sad nod. “You begin to see what I mean. The French are nothing…by themselves. But the Americans are a different story. You can despise them, but you can’t ignore them. They have those damned bombs, and they have the big bombers that can carry them into the motherland. If they say, ‘No, you can’t do this,’ then we can’t, not till we have atom bombs of our own.”
“Fuck the Americans!” Bokov said again, this time as savagely as he wanted to. “Fuck them in the ass! If they walk away from their worry when it’s our worry, too, and then they don’t let us clean it up-”
“Yes? What then? What can we do about it?” Shteinberg asked.
“Those bastards,” Bokov whispered, in lieu of admitting the Soviet Union couldn’t do a damn thing. “Those cocksucking bastards. They have to want to see the Fascists reestablish themselves. If they walk out and they don’t let us walk in…What other explanation is there?” Bokov had made a career out of looking for plots against the USSR. He didn’t need to look very hard to see one here.
“Do you know what the really mad thing is, Volodya?” Shteinberg said.
“Everything!” Bokov raged.
“No. The really mad thing is that every intelligence report I’ve seen says the American officers here in Germany don’t want to leave. The soldiers do, but who cares what soldiers think? The officers are all furious. They don’t want to see the Nazi monster come back to life. Neither does Truman. He fought against the Germans in the last war.”
Bokov figured Truman had basically the same powers as Stalin’s. “Then he should arrest the fools who are screwing up his policies. Do they want to fight three German wars?”
“They don’t think they’ll have to. They’ve got the bomb, and they’ve got those planes, and they think that’s all they’ll ever need,” Shteinberg answered.
“Truman should drop the bomb on them, then,” Bokov said. “Why doesn’t he put them all behind barbed wire, or else two meters down in the ground?”
“Americans are soft. Would they be walking away from Germany if they weren’t?” Shteinberg said. “Not always-they fought well enough before the surrender.”
“Took them long enough to do it,” Bokov said scornfully. He’d heard that the Americans lost only 400,000 dead against Germany and Japan combined. For the Red Army, that was a campaign, not a war.
“Yes, it did. Almost took them too long-although the Anglo-American attack on Sicily and Italy helped us a lot after Kursk, because Hitler took troops away from the east to fight them.” Shteinberg looked annoyed at himself. “But that’s not what I was talking about. They’re soft with one another, too. They don’t have a strong secret police force, and they don’t clean out their troublemakers with purges.”
“They’ll live to regret it,” Bokov said, and then, “No. Some of them won’t live to regret it, and they’ll regret it while they’re dying.”
“I understood you,” Shteinberg said.
Bokov would have been surprised if his superior hadn’t. He had little use for Jews, but nobody could say they weren’t a brainy bunch. That was how they got by. So many of the Old Bolsheviks had been Jews-but, however brainy they were, the purges nailed almost all of them sooner or later.
“Are you sure the Americans won’t let us go in and clean up their mess?” Bokov asked, hoping against hope (and painfully aware the USSR hadn’t cleaned up its own Heydrichite mess).
“Sure? I’m not sure of anything.” Colonel Shteinberg tapped a shoulder board, which showed the two colored stripes and three small stars of his rank. “These don’t turn me into a prophet. I’m just telling you how things look to me. I’ll tell you something else, too: I hope I’m wrong.”
“So do I, sir!” Bokov said. But Shteinberg was a brainy Jew. Maybe not a prophet, but his take on the shape of things to come felt as real to Bokov as if he’d already read it in Red Star or Pravda.
Another Goddamn Alpine valley, Lou Weissberg thought as the jeep chugged to the top of another goddamn Alpine pass. Then the driver amazed him by waving at the vista ahead and saying, “Wow! That’s mighty goddamn pretty, y’know?”
Lou looked at it with new eyes. All of a sudden, it wasn’t just a place he had to get into, get through, and get out of in one piece. It wasn’t a part of work he was doing. It wasn’t one more place much like too many other places he’d visited lately, and too much like too many more he’d probably visit soon.
“You’re right,” he said, and listened to the surprise in his own voice. “That is mighty goddamn pretty.”
A village lay far below. The steep-roofed houses and the church spire looked like toys. A stream ran by the village, silvery as mercury in the sunlight. The fields were a vibrant green. The meadows above them were a different vibrant green. Specks of gray and brown moved slowly across the meadows: not lice and fleas but sheep and cattle and maybe horses.
Above the meadows were fir forests. They too were green, but another green altogether, a green that knew what cold and death were and yet a green that would stay green after fields and meadows went gold and then gray. And above the firs? Black jagged rock streaked with snow and ice and a sky as blue as a bruise on God’s cheek.
“Mighty goddamn pretty,” Lou repeated, sounding even more surprised the second time he said it.
Shmuel Birnbaum stirred beside him. “Vus?” the DP asked, more than a little irritably. He didn’t speak English, so he didn’t know the vista was mighty goddamn pretty. Lou told him. Birnbaum looked down the valley. He looked back at Lou, as if wondering about the size of his brainpan. “Pretty? It’s got Germans in it, right?”
“Well, yeah. But-” This time, Lou listened to himself floundering. “I mean, it didn’t get bombed or anything.”
True, no craters marred the meadows’ complexions. What bomber pilot in his right mind would have wasted high explosives on Fuss-waschendorf, or whatever the village was called?
Birnbaum delivered his own two-word verdict: “Too bad.”
American Jews, seeing what the Nazis had done to their European kinsfolk, were shocked and appalled and grimly determined no such catastrophe should ever befall Jewry again. Eastern European Jews, or the relict of them remaining after Hitler’s blood-drenched tide rolled back, often made their American cousins seem paragons of meekness and mercy. They hadn’t just seen what the Nazis were up to; they’d gone through it. As with so many things, experience made all the difference.
The convoy of jeeps and armored cars drove down into the valley. Lou’s heart thumped harder as the kid behind the machine gun swung the muzzle back and forth through a long arc. Nobody’d fired on them yet. Lou approved of that. He wanted it to continue for, oh, the next six or eight million years.
“This place look familiar?” he asked.
Shmuel Birnbaum shook his head. “Nah. Just another fucking valley. Where I come from, it’s flat. Never imagined there were so many mountains and valleys in the whole world, let alone one corner of one shitty country.”
“Uh-huh,” Lou said. The Alps stretched over way more than a corner of one country. Giving Birnbaum geography lessons struck him as a waste of time. It might turn out to matter, though. If they had to cross into the American zone in Austria, he’d need to try and deal with a whole new military bureaucracy. The prospect did not delight his heart, or even his descending colon.
They stopped in the village for lunch. The locals stared at them as if they’d fallen from the moon. Some of the stares were because they wore American uniforms, which likely weren’t much seen in these parts. Others were aimed more specifically at Lou and Birnbaum. “Aren’t those a couple of…?” one villager said to another, not realizing the strangers could follow his language.
“Don’t be silly,” his friend answered. “We got rid of them.”
Lou’s laugh came straight out o
f a horror movie. “Don’t believe everything you hear, fool,” he said in German in a voice from beyond the grave. A moment later, he wished he hadn’t thought of it like that. Countless Jews in the grave, or dead and denied even the last scrap of dignity.
But he scared hell out of the krauts. They edged around him and Shmuel Birnbaum as if they were seeing ghosts. He and the DP were heavily armed ghosts, too. Mess with them and you might end up talking from the back side of beyond yourself.
Out of the village. Through the valley. Some of the Germans up on the meadows were bound to be herdsmen. Others were more likely bandits, whether on Heydrich’s team or not. The convoy moved fast enough and had enough weaponry to keep them from causing trouble.
Up the next pass. The jeeps climbed like mountain goats. The armored cars labored but managed. Once past the crest, they got another mighty goddamn pretty view.
Beside Lou, Shmuel Birnbaum gasped and stiffened. “This one,” he choked out.
XXVIII
California again. Diana McGraw had never gone to the West Coast before poor Pat got killed. Now she’d lost track of how many times she’d come out here. It wasn’t surprising. She sometimes lost track of where she was. She’d get off a train or wake up in a hotel bed and think, Wait! This is… Then it would come to her. But she still got those weird moments of dissociation. She got them more often as she traveled more, in fact.
No danger of that here, though. She hadn’t taken the train to San Francisco. She’d flown in a big, droning DC-4 (from St. Louis, anyhow; she’d taken the train to get that far). The plane didn’t give her as much room as a Pullman berth would have, but it got where it was going much faster. And the ride was surprisingly smooth, except for some turbulence climbing over the Rockies.
“We’ll be fine, folks,” the pilot said over the intercom as the airliner bumped through air pockets. “I flew the Hump during the war. Next to that, this is a piece of cake.” People sheepishly smiled at one another. Diana felt embarrassed about her jitters. The DC-4 went right on flying.
So here she was, talking to a sea of people in Golden Gate Park, about as far west as she could go if she didn’t want to start swimming. She could smell the Pacific Ocean. It smelled different from the Atlantic…cleaner, somehow. She didn’t think that was her imagination, not when she’d been in New York City not long before. The breeze that blew off the ocean tugged at her hair and pulled wisps loose in spite of everything bobby pins could do.
“This fight started two years ago now,” she said. “When we set out, nobody thought we had a prayer. The government was going to do whatever it was going to do. Listen to people who thought it was doing things wrong? Fat chance!”
Applause rolled up from the crowd like rising surf. The sun came out from behind a cloud. The day got warmer. The breeze from the Pacific felt friendlier. It was somewhere in the sixties. Tonight, it would be somewhere in the fifties. Diana knew she was in San Francisco, all right. But she couldn’t tell by the weather if it was March or May, August or October or December.
“We made Harry Truman listen! He didn’t want to, but he had to,” she said, and the crowd’s cheers got louder. “He said he knew best. We showed him he didn’t. He said he wanted to go on wasting lives in Germany. We told him he couldn’t. He said he’d do it anyway. We elected a Congress that wouldn’t let him.”
“That’s right!” Several people in the front rows shouted the same thing at the same time. Diana couldn’t make out all the other cries of approval, but she had no doubt that was what they were.
She remembered the big slug of gin that kindly neighbor’d given her the day she got the War Department telegram. It had done a lot for her. But the noise that meant a lot of people agreed with her about something important-no, that a lot of people followed her over something important-had a kick gin couldn’t come close to. (It had kick enough to let her forget-part of the time-that some people who didn’t follow her had guns. She got nervous whenever she thought about Gus van Slyke. Had that bullet been aimed at her?)
“And we did it! We, the people of the United States! We did it!” Diana didn’t show her nerves. She liked to quote the Constitution whenever she could. It made the blockheads who still called her anti-American have a harder time. “Our boys are coming home. Before too much longer, we’ll be out of Germany for good. No other family will have to go through what too many families have gone through already. And that will be good for the whole country.”
“It sure will!” The cry rose up from the thousands out there on the grass.
“But we aren’t finished yet,” Diana went on. “We’ve only started. That stubborn man in the White House still wants to do all the things the Eightieth Congress won’t let him do. He’s started to show his cards. He’s going to campaign against Congress next year. He’s going to try to bring back enough people who think like him so he can do all the foolish things he wants to. Folks, he’s going to campaign against the little people. He’s going to campaign against us! Will we let him get away with it?”
“Nooo!” This time, the crowd’s reply was a long wolf howl. Diana wished it would carry all the way to Washington. Maybe not now. Come November next year, it would.
“No is right. We know what we want, and we know how to get it,” Diana said. “After we send Harry Truman home-and Bess, and Margaret, and Margaret’s piano-we’ll go right on forming our more perfect union. We can do it. We will do it. We are the people.”
“We are the people!” the crowd roared as Diana stepped away from the microphone. She waved to them. They shouted louder than ever. Some of them cried out her name. If she’d grinned any wider, the top of her head would have fallen off. Who needed gin-who needed anything else-when you could have…this?
“I don’t know whether I want to go on after that,” said the San Francisco politico who followed her to the mike. The sympathetic laugh he got was enough to let him launch into his speech. He ripped into the Truman administration even harder than Diana had. The crowd loved it.
Policemen prowled the edge of the crowd to keep pro-administration hotheads from starting trouble. Diana hoped they’d do more good than they had in Indianapolis. Pickets who followed the Truman line did march beyond the cops’ perimeter. They shouted and heckled, but they were a long way from the speakers’ platform. And there weren’t very many of them. Diana marveled at that. When she was first starting out, opponents outnumbered and outshouted allies as often as not. No more. The country had swung her way. She shook her head, standing up there in the cool breeze off the Pacific. She’d made the country swing her way.
The sun was going down toward the sea when the rally broke up. Diana went to dinner with some of the locals who’d spoken in the park. The Cliff House looked out over the sea. You could watch the sun set, have a couple of drinks, and eat fish and clams and scallops that had been doing whatever they did in the ocean only a few hours before.
You could also watch the sea lions and water birds on Seal Rocks. Diana didn’t think she’d ever seen wild seals before. These beasts weren’t real wild; they hardly moved at all. A big white bird lit on one sea lion’s back. The animal just sat there on the rock. Maybe it was asleep, and the bird didn’t wake it up.
“Can I drive you back to your hotel?” the politico who’d come on after Diana asked when dinner was done. His name was Marvin Something; she couldn’t remember what. She also couldn’t remember if he was a city councilman or a county supervisor. She wasn’t sure it made any difference. The city of San Francisco filled all of San Francisco County.
“Thanks. That’s nice of you,” she said.
And it was. The Palace Hotel was way over on the other side of town, near the Bay. San Francisco was a compact city, but even so….
Marvin drove a Packard. Diana tried not to hold it against him; she was still biased in favor of General Motors cars. Traffic had started to thin out. He didn’t take long to get to the hotel at the corner of New Montgomery and Market. The Palace was famous for, among
other things, endings. Before the big earthquake of 1906, a King of Hawaii had died there. Afterwards, and after a rebuilding, it was the place where President Harding breathed his last.
“Funny,” Diana said. “I wasn’t anywhere near so sorry when Harding passed away as I was when FDR died. I don’t think anybody was.”
“I know I wasn’t,” Marvin said. “But Roosevelt was special, and Harding was just kinda there, if you know what I mean. You didn’t feel like your father’d just died.”
“That’s what it was, all right. Except Roosevelt was everybody’s father,” Diana said. She’d had so much land on her in a few months in 1945-the President’s death (which really did feel like a family member’s), and then poor Pat’s. She wondered how she’d got through it.
Marvin found a parking space right by the hotel. If that wasn’t a miracle, it came close. He jumped out, hurried around the hood, and held her door open so she could get out. “Can I buy you a drink?” he asked as she did.
“I’m kind of tired…but sure. Why not?” she said. Sometimes you needed an extra one-maybe an extra two-to come down from the excitement a good rally stirred up. “Help me sleep tonight.”
“There you go,” Marvin agreed.
After that drink, Diana said, “I’m getting tight.” Because it wasn’t just a drink. How many had she had at the Cliff House? She couldn’t remember, which probably wasn’t a good sign.
But Marvin said, “Bird can’t fly on one wing,” and waved to the bartender again. Diana snickered. It wouldn’t have seemed so funny if she hadn’t had a good deal already, but she had, so it did. Following that train of logic-if it was a train, and if it was logic-seemed pretty funny, too.
She wobbled when she got up and headed for her room. Somehow, she wasn’t surprised when Marvin came with her. They walked right past the house dick-he couldn’t have been anything else-on the way back to the elevators. He nodded and touched the brim of his fedora and didn’t stir from the chair where he lounged. His job was to keep out-of-town businessmen from bringing hookers up to their rooms. A respected local civic leader? A dignitary who’d led a rally? He didn’t think twice about letting them by.
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 51