The Man with the Iron Heart

XXV

NKVD Lieutenant General Yuri Pavlovich Vlasov wore a permanent scowl. I would, too, Vladimir Bokov thought, warily eyeing Vlasov’s pinched, pulled-down mouth and angry, bristly eyebrows. The assistant chief of the NKVD’s Berlin establishment was cursed, and would be cursed till the day he died, with an unfortunate family name.

Red Army General Andrei Vlasov was the worst traitor the USSR had had in the Great Patriotic War. After surrendering to the Nazis, he’d commanded what Goebbels called the Russian Liberation Army, a Fascist puppet force of other Soviet traitors. And, after the Wehrmacht surrendered, he’d been captured and shot, and better than he deserved, too.

Yuri Vlasov had no family connection to him; the surname wasn’t rare. But the stench that went with it lingered. No Soviet citizen could say the word Vlasovite without feeling as if shit filled his mouth. Vlasov met the problem the same way Captain Bokov would have were he stuck with it: by acting ten times as tough as he would have otherwise.

So it was no great surprise when Yuri Vlasov’s cold, narrow-eyed glare-he had Tartar eyes like Bokov’s, and his were also dark-swung from the captain to Colonel Shteinberg and back again, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. And it was no great surprise when he barked, “Nyet.”

“But, Comrade General, we have this excellent information-new and excellent information,” Moisei Shteinberg said. “We have it, and we can’t do anything with it ourselves. It’s like having a pretty girl when you can’t get it up.”

Much less earthy than most Russians, Shteinberg hardly ever cracked jokes like that. Maybe he shouldn’t have cracked this one. Lieutenant General Vlasov’s right hand cramped into a white-knuckled fist; his cheeks and ears blazed red. Had he tried playing games with some German popsy with big tits and come up short?

Whether he had or he hadn’t, he snarled, “Fuck your mother, Shteinberg. I told you you couldn’t go to the American pricks, and you goddamn well can’t. That is an order. Do you understand it?”

“Da, Comrade General,” Shteinberg answered tonelessly: the only thing he could say.

Those fierce Tartar eyes lit on Bokov again. He wished they wouldn’t have. “What about you, Captain?” Vlasov demanded. “Do you also understand the order?”

“Da, Comrade General,” Bokov said, as Shteinberg had before him.

“Khorosho.” But it wasn’t good enough to suit Vlasov, for he rounded on Shteinberg once more. “You’re a zhid yourself, so you were born sneaky-just like this so-called informant of yours. Asking if you understand isn’t enough. Will you obey the order?”

Bokov didn’t know whether the loophole had occurred to Shteinberg. It had occurred to him: a measure of his own rage and desperation. He waited to see what Shteinberg would say. The Jew said what he had to say yet again: “Da, Comrade General.” He sighed afterwards, which did him not a fart’s worth of good.

Yuri Vlasov proceeded to nail things down tight: “You will obey, too, Captain Bokov?”

“Da, Comrade General. I serve the Soviet Union.” Bokov did his best to turn the ritual phrase of acknowledgment into a reproach.

His best wasn’t good enough. “All right, then. That’s settled,” Vlasov said, relentless as a bulldozer. “Fuck off, both of you.”

They…fucked off. Once outside of-well outside of-Yuri Vlasov’s office, Bokov began, “I’d like to-”

“Wait in line, Captain. I’m senior to you,” Shteinberg said. “So many people like him, and we beat the Hitlerites anyway. Only goes to show Germany was pretty screwed up, too.”

“But this Shmuel-” Bokov kept spluttering phrases. “We ought to-”

Colonel Shteinberg took him by the elbow and steered him out of NKVD headquarters before he could splutter a phrase that would cook his goose. “No,” Shteinberg said, regretfully but firmly. “He gave us an order. We promised to obey it. If we go back on that…” He shivered, though the day was warm enough and then some. “Even if it worked out well, they’d still make examples of us.”

That was such obvious truth, Bokov didn’t waste his breath arguing it. He did say, “That goddamn fathead will be sorry he gave his stupid order.”

“One way or another, things will even out,” Shteinberg said. “Unless, of course, they don’t.”

A crew of German Stevedores In Overalls Loaded Crates InTO the C-47. First Lieutenant Wes Adams eyed his cargo manifest. Equipment, it said, which told him exactly nothing. “You know what we’re taking to Berlin?” he asked his copilot.

“Buncha boxes and two krauts,” answered Second Lieutenant Sandor Nagy-he inevitably went by Sandy.

The krauts were on the manifest, too, at the bottom. “Wonder who they paid off to get a lift,” Wes said.

Sandy shrugged. “Beats me. They finagled it, though, one way or another. So we’ll haul ’em and kick ’em off the plane and say bye-bye.”

The Germans came aboard right on time. They were krauts, all right-probably figured somebody’d execute ’em for showing up five minutes late. The guy was pale and skinny, in a suit that had been new about when the Depression started. The woman would have been pretty if not for a scar on one cheek. The way she scowled at Wes and Sandy made the pilot bet she’d got the scar in a wartime air raid.

Tough shit, lady, Wes thought. He pointed to a couple of folding seats right behind the cockpit. “Sit here. Buckle yourselves in. Stay here till we get to Berlin.”

“Kein Englisch.” The guy spread his hands regretfully. Wes repeated himself, this time in rudimentary German. “Ach, ja. Zu befehl,” the man said, and the gal nodded.

Wes eyed him. Zu befehl was what a Jerry soldier said when he got an order, the way an American would go Yes, sir. Well, there weren’t a hell of a lot of German men who hadn’t gone through the mill. And he and his lady friend were settling into the uncomfortable seats peaceably enough. “Let’s go through the checklist, Sandy,” Wes said with a mental shrug.

“Sure thing, boss,” the copilot replied.

Everything came out green. Wes set an affectionate hand on the Gooney Bird’s steering yoke. A C-47 would fly through things that tore a fighter to pieces, and take off with all kinds of shit showing up red. He’d done that kind of thing during the war more often than he cared to remember. You didn’t have to in peacetime flying, which was nice.

Twin 1,200-horsepower Pratt and Whitney radial engines fired up as reliably as Zippos. Wes and Sandy taxied out to the end of the runway. Taxiing was the only thing that could get tricky in a C-47. In tight spaces, you really needed pilot and copilot both paying close attention. But they had plenty of room here.

When the tower gave clearance, Wes gunned the engines. He pulled back on the yoke as the C-47 got to takeoff speed. Up in the air it went-sedately, because it was a transport, and a heavily laden transport at that-but without the least hesitation. If you wanted to fly something from here to there, this was the plane to do it.

They headed up toward 9,000 feet, where they’d cruise to Berlin. No need to worry about oxygen, not lazing along down here like this. Wes leaned back in his seat. “This is the life,” he said over the Pratt and Whitneys’ roar.

“Beats working,” Sandy agreed. The C-47 bounced a little as it ran into some turbulence. It was enough to notice, not enough to get excited about. Wes had flown straight through thunderstorms. A Gooney Bird was built to take it.

Because of the engine noise, he didn’t hear the cockpit door open. Motion caught from the corner of his eye made his head whip around. There stood the German couple. They both held pistols-no, cut-down Schmeissers. “What the fuck?” Wes said.

“Sorry, friend,” the man said. He spoke English after all.

That was Wes’ last startled thought. Then the submachine guns barked.

Luftwaffe Oberleutnant Ernst Neulen and the former Flak-hilferin he knew only as Mitzi-what you didn’t know, you couldn’t tell-pulled the Amis’ bodies out of their seats. “Good job,” he told her as he settled into the pilot’s seat himself. It was bloody, but that wouldn’t matter for long.

“Vielen Dank,” she said primly, as if he’d complimented her on her dancing.

“Go get your umbrella,” Neulen told her.

She gave him a smile-a twisted one, because of that scar. Then she went back into the cargo compartment. The forwardmost crate had a trick side that opened easily if you knew what to do. Mitzi did. She shrugged on the parachute she found inside.

That done, she stepped into the cockpit again for a moment. “Good luck,” she told him.

“You, too,” he answered, his voice far away. He was cautiously fiddling with the throttle. Did it work German-style or like the ones in French and Italian planes, where you had to push instead of pulling and vice versa? Some young German pilots had bought a plot by forgetting the difference after training on foreign aircraft. Oberleutnant Neulen found out what he needed to know and relaxed.

“I’m going to bail out now,” Mitzi said.

“Right,” Neulen agreed, still getting a feel for the plane. It was a hell of a lot more modern than the trimotored Ju52/3s that had hauled cargo and soldiers for the Reich. He wouldn’t have wanted to try to land it, though he’d heard even coming in wheels-up was a piece of cake for a C-47. But he didn’t have to worry about that.

Mitzi disappeared again, no doubt heading for the cargo door. Neulen hoped she would make it down in one piece. She’d practiced on the ground, but she’d never jumped out of an airplane before. She’d never really landed, either. Well, all you could do was try and hope for the best.

He also hoped the Americans-or was the C-47 over the Russian zone by now? — wouldn’t grab her as soon as she touched ground. How much did she know? Too much: Neulen was sure of that. He hoped for the best again. German patriots on the ground would do their best for her when she landed, anyhow. He was sure of that.

He felt the door open, and heard the howl of the wind inside the cargo bay. Out Mitzi went. He felt that, too. “Luck,” Neulen said softly.

He flew on toward Berlin. He was about fifteen minutes outside the city when the radio crackled to life: “You’re a little north of the flight path. Change course five degrees right.”

“Five degrees right. Roger,” Neulen said in English, and made about half the change.

“Still a little north,” the American flight controller said. “You okay, Wes? You sound like you got a cold in the head.”

“I am okay,” Neulen answered, and said no more-less was better.

Pretty soon, the flight controller came back: “You’re still off course, and you’re up too high, too. Make your corrections, dammit. Is the aircraft all right?”

“All fine,” Neulen said. He did come down-why not? How fast could they scramble fighters? Nobody flew top cover over Berlin: someone was liable to go where he shouldn’t, and then the Russians and Anglo-Americans might start shooting at one another. Keep them happy as long as he could. Neulen didn’t want them phoning their flak batteries either.

He was below 2,000 feet-600 meters, he translated mentally-when he overflew the airport. “What are you doing, man? Are you nuts?” the flight controller howled. “They’re gonna ground your stupid ass forever!”

“Not that long,” Neulen answered. He gunned the C-47, almost straight into the early-morning sun.

“This time, we try the bastards. This time, we hang the bastards,” Lou Weissberg said savagely. “I want to watch ’em swing. I want to hear their necks crack. All of ’em-and especially Streicher’s, the antisemitic motherfucker.”

“That’s not a Christian thought,” Howard Frank observed.

“Damn straight…sir,” Lou said. “I’m not a Christian, any more than you are. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth sounds great to me. Let the Nazis turn the other cheek…under a hood, in the wind.”

“Okay,” Frank said. “Ribbentrop and Keitel and Jodl are the ones I want most. The one plotted the war, and the other two fought it. And Goring for the Luftwaffe, even if he was pretty useless once the fighting started.”

“Worse than useless. Didn’t he tell Hitler he could keep the Germans in Stalingrad supplied by air?” Lou said.

“That’s what I’ve heard,” Major Frank agreed. “Even so, he was one of Hitler’s right-hand men when the Nazis were coming up. If that’s not reason enough to put a noose around his neck-”

“Reason enough for all of them. Reason enough and then some. And this time they will get it. Oh, boy, will they ever.” Lou eyed the fortified ring the Russians had built around their courthouse. He eyed it from a distance of several hundred yards, because the Russians were liable to start shooting if anybody-anybody at all-got too close. One American officer had already got plugged for not reacting fast enough to “Heraus!” Luckily, he’d live. Nobody except maybe the NKVD knew how many Germans were wounded or dead.

Major Frank was looking the other way. “Pretty soon they go through the maze and in.”

“Yeah.” Lou nodded. Soviet Stalin tanks, U.S. Pershings, and British Centurions would surround the halftracks carrying the accused to justice. The road had been widened-the Russians had blown up the buildings to either side-so the heavy armor could do just that. Demolitions people swept for mines every half hour. Even the sewers were blocked off, as they were around the court. No rescue for the Nazi big shots.

“Won’t be long,” Frank said, glancing down at his watch. “In they’ll go. The judges are already waiting for them.”

“Uh-huh. Just like they were back in Nuremberg.” Lou ground his teeth together, a split second too late to keep the words from escaping. That goddamn fanatic with his truck full of explosives…Lou counted himself lucky not to have been there when the blast went off. Too many of the men who would have tried the Nazis had died in it.

“Kineahora!” Howard Frank exclaimed.

Lou nodded vigorously. He hadn’t wanted to put the whammy on what was about to happen-just the opposite.

“Here they come,” Frank said.

Hearing the heavy rumble of approaching motors, Lou started to nod one more time. But he didn’t, because that heavy rumble was approaching much too fast. And it wasn’t coming up the widened road, either. It was…in the air? In the air!

The C-47 thundered over them at treetop height, maybe lower. The wind of its passage almost knocked Lou off his feet. “What the fuck?” he choked out-his mouth and eyes and nose were all full of dust and grit that wind had kicked up.

Ahead, a few of the Red Army men guarding the courthouse started shooting at the mad Gooney Bird-but only a few, and too late. Much too late. “It’s gonna-” Horror as well as dust clogged Major Frank’s voice. He tried again: “It’s gonna-”

And then it did.

It wasn’t just a hurtling C-47 crashing into the courthouse. Somehow, the fanatics had loaded the plane with explosives. It could carry more than a deuce-and-a-half could. And when the shit went off…

Lou Weissberg and Howard Frank stood more than a mile from the blast. It hammered their ears and rocked them all the same. Lou staggered again, as he had only seconds before when the transport roared by overhead. The fireball that went up dwarfed the courthouse. By then, Lou had seen newsreel footage of what happened when an atom bomb blew up. This wasn’t just like that. A baby version. An ordinary blockbuster, Lou thought dazedly. Plenty bad enough.

“Gottenyu!” Frank burst out. “The bastards just took out the judges again, and the lawyers, and-”

“Vey iz mir!” Lou clapped a hand to his forehead. He heard Major Frank as if from very far away. He wondered if his ears would ever be the same. He’d wondered the same thing plenty of times before the sadly misnamed V-E Day. It had always come back then. Maybe it would now. He also wondered why he hadn’t thought of what Frank had. Because you’re punchy, dummy: the answer supplied itself.

More slowly than he might have, he noticed a rumble and clatter from behind him. He turned. Sure as hell, here came the tanks protecting the Nazi Bonzen on their way to trial. On their way to…nothing, now. Judges and attorneys had gone up in the fireball, but the foulest criminals in the history of the world were fine. The way things were going, they’d probably die of old age.

Helplessly, Lou started to laugh and cry at the same time. He waited for Major Frank to slap him silly and tell him to snap out of it. That was what happened when you got hysterical, right? But when he looked over at the other officer, he saw Frank doing the same goddamn thing.

Vladimir Bokov decided the fortifications around the courthouse seemed even more impressive from within than when viewed from the outside. Standing in a trench along the route by which the war criminals would at last come to justice, he couldn’t actually see very much. Even so, he knew he was in the middle of that maze of trenches and minefields and concrete antitank obstacles and barbed wire and machine-gun nests and…everything under the sun. Everything anyone could think of, including artillery and antiaircraft guns and thousands of Red Army and NKVD men.

“They’re going to get it. This time, they’re going to get it. And we’re going to give it to them.” He spoke with a certain somber pride. “We are: the workers and peasants of the Soviet Union.” And the NKVD, of course, and the Anglo-Americans, and even the afterthought that was France. But he knew the propaganda line, and he needed next to no conscious thought to echo it. Any Soviet citizen had plenty of practice with that.

And Moisei Shteinberg nodded. “We’ll do it right. We’ll show the Americans how to do it right.” That also came straight from the propaganda line. But then he lowered his voice to something not far above a whisper: “I wish we could show the Americans…”

“That fucking stupid pigheaded Vlasov.” Captain Bokov also whispered. Because of the Soviet traitor, taking the NKVD general’s name in vain felt extra filthy. And if the soldiers around them overheard him, they’d think he was cursing the collaborator.

“I-” Shteinberg’s head came up, as a wolf’s would have at an unexpected noise in the forest. “What’s that?”

Whatever it was, it got louder and closer much too fast. “Mother-cocksuckingfuck!” a Red Army sergeant shouted, and pointed into the sky.

Not very far into the sky-the C-47 roared by almost close enough to knock off Bokov’s cap. That was how it felt, anyhow. Colonel Shteinberg, the damned clever Jew, was quicker on the uptake than Bokov. “Nooo!” he howled-a wail of fury and despair-and fired a burst from his submachine gun at the plane.

Here and there, a few other Chekists and Red Army men shot at it. But most, like Vladimir Bokov, watched in frozen surprise. One antiaircraft gun opened up-only one, as far as Bokov could tell. Whatever its shells ended up hitting, they missed the C-47. It slammed into the courthouse at something over 350 kilometers an hour.

The blast knocked Bokov flat even though he was in the trench. He and Colonel Shteinberg fell all over each other, in fact. And they fell on the foul-mouthed sergeant, or he fell on them, and everybody close by was falling over everybody else. And then chunks of masonry and sheet metal and everything else that went into a building and an airplane started falling on them, and some of that was on fire.

Squoosh! If you dropped a rock on a pumpkin from a third-story window, it would make a noise like that. Maybe five meters from Bokov, a brick plummeting from the Devil’s sister only knew how far smashed in a soldier’s skull. The poor bastard thrashed like a chicken that had just met the hatchet. He was as dead as a chopped chicken, too.

“Those clapped-out cunts! They did it again!” When Moisei Shteinberg swore like that, somebody’d spilled the thundermug into the soup. And the Heydrichites damn well had.

Bokov ever so cautiously looked out of the trench. The courthouse was a sea of flame, with black, greasy smoke already towering high into the sky over it. Hadn’t an American bomber slammed into the Empire State Building not so long before? Maybe that was what gave the bandits the idea for this raid.

But the Empire State Building was still standing. The architects who designed it must have seen that it might be a target and strengthened it accordingly. Nobody’d ever imagined a nondescript police courthouse in Berlin might get clobbered by an explosives-packed C-47 going flat out. Who in his right mind would have? And it stood no more.

“Comrade Colonel!” Bokov shouted, suddenly thinking of something else that should stand no more.

He needed to shout several times before he got Shteinberg’s notice. Everybody’s ears were stunned. At last, the Jew growled, “What is it?” He glowered at Bokov as if he thought all this was his fault.

“Don’t get pissed off at me, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov said. He had a good notion of whose fault it really was. “I know what we need to do next.”

“You do, do you?” Suspicion filled Shteinberg’s voice. “And that is…?”

“Sir, we need to go have another talk with Lieutenant General Vlasov.”

Moisei Shteinberg thought it over. Slowly, he smiled a smile that should have shown shark’s teeth instead of his own yellowish set. As he smiled, he nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “We do.”

Yet again, the Anglo-americans and the Russians (to say nothing of the remora French, which was what they deserved to have said of them) would not get to put on their show trial for the leaders of the Third Reich and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. A small, cold smile stole across Reinhard Heydrich’s face as he went through newspaper and magazine accounts. Some of the photos were truly spectacular.

So were some of the editorials. One American writer feared the German resistance would start what he called “a reign of terror in the air.” He imagined fighting men seizing planes full of passengers and flying them into buildings all over Europe and maybe even in the States. He imagined seizing laden planes and crashing them on purpose. He even imagined seizing planes and flying them to, say, Franco’s Spain to hold the passengers hostage till the German Freedom Front’s demands were met.

He had one hell of an imagination. None of that stuff had occurred to Heydrich. As far as he was concerned, the attack on the Berlin courthouse was a one-off job. But he recognized good ideas when somebody stuck them in front of his nose. He started taking notes.

Only a handful of these hijackings and atrocities would be needed to throw air transport into chaos all over the world, the editorial writer warned. Would travelers put up with the delays and inconveniences necessary to ensure no one can smuggle weapons or explosives aboard aircraft? It seems most unlikely.

It seemed pretty unlikely to Heydrich, too. He wrote himself more notes. Throw air transport into chaos all over the world? That sounded good to him. He didn’t know whether grabbing a few planes would have the effect this fellow foretold, but he could hardly wait to find out.

Hans Klein walked into his office with more papers and magazines. “We’ve got ’em jumping like fleas on a hot griddle, Herr Reichsprotektor,” the noncom said.

“Good. That’s the idea. May they jump out of Germany soon.” Heydrich bounced some of the American editorial writer’s ideas off of Klein. “What do you think?” he asked, respecting the veteran’s solid common sense. “Can we do these things? Would they cause as much trouble as the Ami thinks?”

“They might,” Klein said slowly. “We don’t have many pilots left to aim at buildings, but anybody with balls can crash a plane. And if you were going to fly to Spain instead of crashing, you could likely point a gun at the regular pilot and make him take you there.”

“Well, so you could.” Heydrich wrote that down, too. Some men who weren’t willing to throw their lives away for the Reich would be willing to fight for it. They might make good hijackers…and quite a few people from the Third Reich had already taken refuge in friendly-even if officially neutral-Spain.

Oberscharfuhrer Klein’s thoughts ran on a different track: “Damn shame that poor Mitzi gal’s chute didn’t open when she jumped.” His mouth twisted. “Too much time to think on the way down.”

“Ja,” Heydrich said, and left it right there. At his quiet orders, the man who’d packed Mitzi’s parachute made sure it wouldn’t open. Why take chances? She was much too likely to get captured and grilled after she landed.

When you issued orders like that, you had to do it quietly. If it got out that you’d thrown away someone’s life-especially a woman’s-on purpose, your own people would give you trouble. Never mind that it was the only reasonable thing to do. What you saw as reasonable, they’d see as coldhearted.

And now Heydrich wanted to find a discreet way to dispose of the man who’d packed Mitzi’s chute. As soon as that fellow started pushing up daisies, he wouldn’t be able to blab to the enemy. He wouldn’t be able to blab to his own pals, either.

None of which showed on the Reichsprotektor’s face. Once upon a time, the Fuhrer’d called him the man with the iron heart. If you were going to hold a position like his, an iron heart was an asset, no two ways about it.

“One more embarrassment for the enemy,” he said. “With any luck at all, it will make the Amis squeal even louder than they are already.”

“Ja!” Klein perked up. He was always eager to look in that direction. “Tomorrow belongs to us.”

“Well, of course it does,” Reinhard Heydrich said.

Lieutenant General Vlasov had looked and acted like a son of a bitch the last time Bokov and Shteinberg called on him. He seemed even less friendly now. For twenty kopeks, his expression said, both the other NKVD men could find out how they liked chopping down spruces in the middle of Siberian winter.

However much he hated them, though, he couldn’t just tell them to fuck off, the way he had before. He might want to; he plainly did want to. But the Heydrichites had humiliated the Soviet Union before the world when they crashed that plane into what would have been the war criminals’ courthouse. Striking back at them any way at all looked like a good idea.

It did to Captain Bokov, anyhow, and to Colonel Shteinberg. Whether it did to Yuri Vlasov…We’ve got to find out, dammit, Bokov told himself.

“I know what the two of you are here for,” Vlasov rasped. “You’re going to try and talk me into sucking the Americans’ cocks.”

“No, Comrade General, no. Nothing like that,” Shteinberg said soothingly. Yes, Comrade General, yes. Just like that, Vladimir Bokov thought fiercely. He wanted to watch Vlasov squirm. Maybe they could have kept the crash from happening if only the miserable bastard had put his ass in gear.

“Don’t bother buttering me up, zhid,” Vlasov said. “Nothing but a waste of time.”

“However you please…sir.” Moisei Shteinberg held his voice under tight control. “My next move, if you keep dicking around with us, is to write to Marshal Beria and let him know how you’re obstructing the struggle against the Heydrichite bandits.”

“You wouldn’t dare!” General Vlasov bellowed.

“Yes, I would. I’ve already done it,” Shteinberg said. “And if anything happens to me, the letter goes to Moscow anyway. I’ve taken care of that, too…sir.”

“Fuck your mother hard!”

“Maybe my father did,” Shteinberg answered calmly. “But at least I know who he was…sir.”

Could looks have killed, Yuri Vlasov would have shouted for men to come and drag two corpses out of his office. Bokov wondered whether the general would try something more direct. He also wondered how much good this move would do him and Shteinberg even if they turned out to be right. He shrugged, with luck invisibly. If it helped the fight against Heydrich’s bandits, he’d worry about everything else later.

“All right. All right.” Vlasov spat the words in Shteinberg’s face. “Take this other kike to the Americans, then. Go ahead. Be my guest. They’ll probably be a bunch of Jews, too. As far as I’m concerned-” He broke off, breathing hard.

“Yes, sir?” Shteinberg’s voice was polite, even curious. Bokov was curious, too. What had Vlasov swallowed? Something like As far as I’m concerned, Hitler knew what he was doing with you people? Bokov wouldn’t have been surprised. Plenty of his fellow-Russians felt that way. He didn’t love Jews himself. But you could damn well count on them to be anti-Fascist.

No matter how much rope Shteinberg fed Vlasov, the NKVD general was too canny to hang himself. “Go on,” he barked. “If you’re going to do it, go do it-and get the devil out of here.”

“If it works, he’ll take the credit,” Bokov warned once they were safely outside NKVD headquarters.

“Oh, sure,” Shteinberg agreed. “But he’d do that anyway.” Bokov laughed, not that his superior was joking-or wrong.

“Aye,” Jerry Duncan said.

“Mr. Duncan votes aye,” Joe Martin intoned, and the Clerk of the House recorded his vote. They weren’t going to be able to override President Truman’s veto of the bill that cut off funds for the U.S. occupation of Germany. They had a solid majority, including most Republicans and the growing number of Democrats who saw that staying on Truman’s side was lucky not to have cost them their jobs in the last election and that it damn well would get them tossed out next time around. A good majority, yes, but not a two-thirds majority. Too bad, Jerry thought.

The roll call droned on. Sure enough, when it finally finished, they fell twenty-two votes short of ramming the budget down the President’s throat. “Mr. Truman has put himself on record as saying he will not sign a War Department appropriation without money for continuing the occupation of Germany,” Speaker Martin said after announcing the results. “I want to put the House of Representatives on record, too. We will not send him an appropriations bill with that item in it.”

Members of the majority, Jerry Duncan loud among them, clapped their hands and cheered. Several Congressmen shouted “Hear! Hear!” as if they belonged to the House of Commons in London. People who’d voted against the override booed. Some of them shook their fists. Jerry couldn’t remember seeing that kind of bad behavior here. Everybody’s temper was frayed. Maybe things had been like this in the runup to the Civil War. The trial of wills over the occupation was tearing the country apart now.

“Order! We will have order!” The Speaker thumped his gavel. “The Sergeant at Arms has the authority to take whatever steps may prove necessary to restore order,” Joe Martin continued. The Democrats-and a handful of pro-occupation Republicans-went on booing. He banged the gavel again. Something like order slowly returned.

Out of it, Sam Rayburn bawled, “Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker!”

Had Jerry been up there in the Speaker’s seat, he wouldn’t have recognized the Texas Democrat. When Rayburn was Speaker of the House, he’d made a point of ignoring people whose views he didn’t fancy. That was one of the perquisites the Speaker enjoyed, and few Speakers had enjoyed it more than Rayburn.

But Joe Martin said, “The distinguished gentleman from Texas has the floor.” He clung to courtesy even as it collapsed around him.

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker.” Rayburn could also be courtly when he felt like it-and he could be an iron-assed son of a bitch when he didn’t. He sounded slightly surprised. Had he expected Martin to pretend not to hear him? It looked that way to Jerry Duncan. Any which way, Rayburn went on, “You do realize, Mr. Speaker, that if you refuse to give the War Department the money it needs to keep holding down the Nazis, you will force us out of Germany in spite of the President’s conviction, and the U.S. Army’s, that we need to stay there?”

“Yes, Mr. Rayburn, I realize that. And that is the point, after all. In their wisdom, the framers of the Constitution gave Congress the purse strings. Not the President. Not the U.S. Army. Congress. If the President and the Army prove unwise, as they have here, we have the responsibility to exercise wisdom for them,” Joe Martin said.

“Hear! Hear!” This time, Jerry shouted it at the top of his lungs. He was far from the only Representative who did. Opponents of cutting off funds for the occupation yelled back. People on both sides took off their jackets and tossed them aside, as if expecting they’d be brawling in the aisles any second.

“Order! There will be order!” the Speaker of the House insisted loudly. The microphone made each blow of his gavel sound like a gunshot. After what had happened to poor Gus van Slyke-whom he’d known for years-Jerry wished that comparison hadn’t leaped into his mind, but it was the only one that seemed to fit. Also as if using a gun, Martin aimed a forefinger at Sam Rayburn. “The gentleman from Texas may continue-without, I hope, any undue outbursts this time.”

“I hope the same, Mr. Speaker. And I do thank you for recollecting I had the floor,” Rayburn said. “You say you and those who agree with you aim to stop the President and the Army from acting unwisely.”

“I say just that, sir, and it is the truth,” Joe Martin replied. Jerry Duncan nodded vehemently.

“Okay. Fine. You have-the Congress has-this high and fancy responsibility.” Rayburn waited.

The Speaker of the House waved in agreement. “I say that also, and it too is the truth.”

“All right, then. Here is my question for you: what happens when you exercise that responsibility and it turns out to be the biggest mistake since Eve listened to the serpent in the Garden of Eden?” Sam Rayburn demanded ferociously. “President Truman likes the saying ‘The buck stops here.’ When something goes wrong, he admits it. When the blame lands on you-and it will, Mr. Speaker, it will-when it lands on you, I say, will you be man enough to shoulder it?”

“If that happens, which I do not expect-” Speaker Martin began.

“Fools never do.” Rayburn planted the barb with obvious relish.

Bang! went the gavel. “You are out of order, as you know very well.”

“So is the House-the inmates are taking over the asylum.”

Bang! Bang! “Enough!” Joe Martin snapped. Rayburn sat down, grinning. Business resumed. Jerry wished the Texan hadn’t asked such a prickly question.