The Man with the Iron Heart

XVII

Ravens were nasty birds. Lou Weissberg hadn’t seen many-truth to tell, he couldn’t remember seeing any-back in New Jersey. He hadn’t even seen that many crows. But he’d found out more than he ever wanted to know about ravens in the months before the German surrender. They pecked out corpses’ eyes and worried at wounds to make them bigger and get at the exposed flesh. Sometimes they didn’t wait till what they were pecking at was a corpse.

Here they were again, on the road between Nuremberg and Munich. The day before, a squad’s worth of fanatics had tangled with about an equal number of GIs. More often than not, the krauts’ assault rifles and Schmeissers would have given them a firepower edge over American troops. Not this time-three of the dogfaces were BAR men. The Brownings chewed up the fanatics and left them…ravens’ meat.

Vultures prowled the grass along with the ravens. European vultures were hawkier than their American equivalents. They looked as if they wouldn’t mind going out and killing something when the carrion ran short. Well, they didn’t need to do any extra work today. The GIs with the BARs had taken care of that for them.

The Americans had lost one dead and three wounded. The Germans were mostly dead. They’d given themselves a nasty surprise, sure as hell. But the GIs had captured a couple who were only wounded-he didn’t get to interrogate fanatics all that often.

Plenty of U.S. soldiers surrounded the tent that housed the wounded Aryan supermen. Most of the time, the Jerries would have gone to a hospital in Munich or Nuremberg. Not today, Josephine. So soon after the radioactive attack on Frankfurt, the brass wasn’t sure Heydrich’s goons wouldn’t try another one. A tent in the middle of nowhere didn’t make a promising target for that kind of thing.

Jumpy troopers made Lou show his ID three different times and frisked him twice before he got inside the tent. In the Far East, he’d heard, Army discipline was going right down the crapper. The Japs actually believed they were licked. American troops might not want to be in Europe, but they didn’t get slack and dick around here. Nothing concentrated the mind like the possibility you might get your head blown off.

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.”

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.

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