The Man with the Iron Heart

XXVII

To Shmuel Birnbaum, K-rations and U.S. Army field kitchens were the greatest inventions in the history of the world. He ate and ate, and never once worried whether what he was eating had pork in it. “I quite caring about that during the war,” he told Lou Weissberg. “If it’s food, you eat it.”

“What with the little you got after the Nazis came through, who could blame you?” Lou said sympathetically.

“Oh. The Nazis. Sure. But I meant the last war, sonny.” One other thing the DP had made the acquaintance of was a safety razor with a limitless supply of blades. His cheeks were as smooth as Lou’s these days, but the stubble he’d had when Lou first met him was gray heading toward white, as was his hair. “Since 1914…a war…a revolution…a civil war…a time to watch yourself…another war…Been a long, long time since I made a fuss about what I got, as long as I got something.”

“You embarrass me because I had it easy in America,” Lou said.

“Your folks were smart-they got out. If I’d been smart, I would’ve got out, too,” Birnbaum said. “But I thought, It’s not so bad. It’s even getting a little better, maybe. Maybe not, too. For sure not, the way things worked out.”

“We’ll take you to a different valley tomorrow,” Lou said. “Maybe this will be the one where they made you dig.”

Maybe, nothing. Alevai this will be the one where they made you dig, Lou thought. The U.S. Army had been giving Birnbaum a guided tour of all the Alpine valleys in southern Germany. So far, he hadn’t found the right one. Lou hoped there was a right one. You never could tell what you’d get when you dealt with the Russians. He’d wanted to for a long time. Now that he had…

Would Captain Bokov of the NKVD sit in his Berlin office and laugh his ass off because a no-account DP was getting fat on U.S. Army chow? Had Birnbaum ever been in one of these valleys? No doubt he’d been in Auschwitz; Lou had seen too many of those tattoos to doubt that this one was authentic. But that wasn’t reason enough-the Army in its infinite wisdom had decided it wasn’t reason enough-to be especially nice to him.

If he didn’t come through…Well, what’s the worst they can do to me? Discharge me and ship me home to Jersey. Which, when you got right down to it, would be a hell of a lot more fun than what he was doing here.

But he hated getting played for a sucker. He didn’t want the NKVD to do it, and he didn’t want a no-account Jew who said he hadn’t had a square meal since 1914 to do it, either. He wanted…“Heydrich’s head on a plate,” he muttered.

“I hope I can give him to you,” Shmuel Birnbaum said. “They didn’t tell us what we were doing. They just told us to dig, and they got rid of anybody who didn’t dig fast enough to suit ’em. Then they sent the rest of us to Auschwitz, also for disposal. Just dumb luck they didn’t get around to me before the Red Army came.”

“Sure,” Lou said. Birnbaum’s story sounded good. It felt good, which might have counted for even more. Lou had heard a lot of bullshit since he got to the Continent. He didn’t think this was more of the same piled higher and deeper. But he’d never know for sure unless the DP delivered.

Birnbaum looked at him. “You don’t think I can do it.”

“I hope you can do it. I hope like anything you can,” Lou said.

“Heydrich…” Birnbaum tasted the name. “It wouldn’t be enough. There’s no such thing as enough, not for that. But it would be something, anyway. And after so much nothing, something’s not too bad.”

“Yeah.” Lou nodded. “You’re right.” He was sure what Germany would be like if Heydrich and his pals took over: the way it had been when Hitler was running it, only trying to find a place in a new, tougher, more suspicious world. That was…about as bad as things could get, as far as he was concerned.

Suppose they squashed the Heydrichites. What would Germany turn into then? Lou had no idea. That politician-Adenauer-had thought it could turn into a civilized democracy like England and France and America. Maybe. But Lou had trouble believing it. If Germany could turn into a democracy like that, wouldn’t Adenauer still be alive?

Shmuel Birnbaum stopped shoveling food into his face. “Let’s go,” he said.

It wasn’t so simple, of course. One jeep could rattle along the winding roads that slid through valleys and climbed the passes between them. It might get through. If Heydrich’s goons decided it looked harmless, or if they were off making pests of themselves somewhere else, it would. But there was no guarantee-not even close.

And in these parts, it wasn’t just Heydrich’s goons you needed to worry about. Deserters and brigands and bandits prowled the mountainside, sometimes singly, sometimes in platoon strength. You wanted to show enough firepower to make them decide not to bother you.

Three jeeps with.50-caliber machine guns, two M8 armored cars with 37mm guns. With luck, that kind of convoy would be enough to persuade Werewolves and freelance brigands to leave them alone. The heavy machine guns and the cannon outranged anything the Jerries were likely to pack themselves. All the soldiers had Garands or M2 carbines or grease guns, too.

And so did Shmuel Birnbaum. When Lou first gave him the submachine gun, he asked if Birnbaum knew how to use it. The DP gave back a lizard’s stare. “I point. I pull the trigger. If it doesn’t shoot, I fiddle with the safety till it does.”

“It doesn’t even have a safety,” Lou said.

“All right, then. So I shoot. What else do I need to know? Anything?” Birnbaum asked. For the kind of fighting he’d need to do-if he needed to do any-he didn’t need to know anything else. Lou shut up.

They rolled past a monument to American ineptitude, a burnt-out ammo dump. It had gone up in fire and smoke a couple of months earlier, and taken half a dozen GIs with it. Back home, it probably hadn’t made more than page four, except in the dead men’s home towns. Too many other things were going on in Germany-this was just small change from a guerrilla war.

Birnbaum’s gaze flicked to the sooty craters and scattered shell casings that marked the remains of the dump. “How’d they do it?” he asked.

“If I knew, I would tell you,” Lou answered. “If we’d known ahead of time, we might have stopped them.”

The DP grunted. “They need stopping. Not just for this. For everything.”

“You’re right. They do,” Lou agreed.

“Do I hear straight? Are you Americans really starting to go home from Germany?” Birnbaum asked.

“You hear straight. I wish you didn’t, but you do.”

“Meshigge,” Birnbaum said, and Lou smiled in spite of himself. The DP spoke the same funny Yiddish dialect he did himself, with most of the vowels shifted forward in the mouth. It still meant crazy, however you pronounced it.

“And if I don’t come through?” the DP asked bleakly. “What happens then? You give me a kigel?” Most people would have pronounced that kugel. It meant, literally, a noodle. To German guards, slave laborers, and camp inmates, it also meant a bullet in the back of the neck.

“No. We don’t do that. We won’t give you back to the Russians, either.” Lou sighed. “But vey iz mir, I want Heydrich dead. If anything will show the folks back home what we’re doing here is worthwhile, that’s it.”

“Me, I just want Heydrich dead, and all the rest of those….” Shmuel Birnbaum broke off, shaking his head. “I can’t find a word bad enough. Pogroms? Purges? I didn’t know what trouble was till the Nazis came though. That camp…What I saw there…” He rubbed at the place where the tattooed number he would wear the rest of his life lay under his sleeve. Whatever his eyes were looking at, it wasn’t the latest Alpine valley.

Hesitantly, Lou said, “I saw Dachau and Belsen.”

“Practice,” Birnbaum said scornfully. “The shitheads did those for practice. Once they got it figured out…Fuck. What do you know? What can you know? Don’t expect me to tell you. Like I say, there are no words.”

“What’s the old fart going on about, sir?” asked the driver, who couldn’t have been over nineteen. “Sounds nasty, whatever it is.”

Hearing English jolted Lou halfway out of helpless horror. “The murder camps the Nazis built in Poland,” he answered. “He lived through one.”

“They really did that shit?”

“They really did,” Lou said solemnly. “You would’ve come over here after the surrender, wouldn’t you?”

“Uh, yes, sir. All I wanna do is get my ass back to Dayton in one piece, too.”

“Right.” Lou couldn’t talk to the driver, any more than Birnbaum could talk to him. No reason for the kid to have visited any of the camps in Germany. He wouldn’t have seen the corpses and the shambling, diseased living skeletons. He wouldn’t have smelled what a place like that was like. And he probably wouldn’t believe there were worse places. How could you believe that, in a world where God had anything to do with anything?

And if this guy had trouble believing it over here, what about all the safe tens of millions across the Atlantic? What was Reinhard Heydrich to them but a name? What were Dachau and Belsen and Auschwitz and all the others but names? Lou shivered. If the Army did punch Heydrich’s ticket, would the folks back home decide the job was really done now and figure it was one more reason to yank the boys out of there and forget the nasty mess ever happened?

But if killing Heydrich made the fanatics give up…“Gotta try,” Lou muttered.

“What’s that?” Birnbaum asked him.

Lou realized he’d used English again. The DP understood yes and no and shit and fuck, but not much more. Lou returned to Yiddish: “Maybe the Nazis will quit once we get rid of their leader.”

“Maybe they will-but it’s about as likely as snow is black,” Birnbaum said. Lou snorted; he’d heard that one from his old man more times than he could count.

They passed into another valley. This one wasn’t the one where Birnbaum had been made to dig, either. “Hell,” Lou said with a sigh. They drove on. Moses had wandered in the wilderness for forty years. The way Germany was unraveling, Lou wasn’t sure he had forty days and forty nights. That was…what? Noah’s flood. But Lou thought this one was flowing the wrong way.

When soldiers came home from Europe right after V-E Day, they came back to the United States in triumph. Pretty girls greeted them with flowers and kisses. They paraded through the streets. The same for the GIs and Marines coming back from the Pacific.

It wasn’t like that now. Harry Truman wasn’t bringing men home from Germany because he wanted to. He was doing it because Congress was giving him no choice. He was dragging his heels and grabbing at things as the new anti-occupation majority forced him down this road. And he, and all the branches of government he could still command, were doing their level best to pretend none of this was happening.

No press releases announced when troopships brought soldiers home from Germany. No welcoming committees waited for the returning troops. If the War Department could have disguised them with false noses and false names, it would have.

Diana McGraw didn’t think that was right or fair. The way things had gone wrong in Germany wasn’t the soldiers’ fault. If the American government hadn’t put them in an impossible situation…But it had, even if it was still too stubborn to believe as much.

And so she waited for a Liberty ship chugging into New York harbor. With her were local leaders of the movement to bring the troops home. And, since it was New York City, with them were more reporters and cameramen than you could shake a stick at.

The press didn’t bother her. She kept looking back over her shoulder toward the buildings behind the harbor, though. Any sniper lurking there had a clean shot, all right. The warm wetness of Gus van Slyke’s blood splashing her arm…She shivered, though the autumn day was mild enough. For several years after Ed came back from Over There, he’d wake up shrieking from nightmares where he revisited what he’d been through. Now Diana understood why.

“What exactly are you doing here today?” a reporter from the New York Times asked her.

She was ever so glad to get away from her own thoughts. “Our troops deserve a proper welcome,” she answered. “They haven’t done anything wrong.” Instead of a picket sign, she carried a big American flag today. Her colleagues had flags, too.

The reporter eyed the tired-looking ship, which tugs were nudging into place against the pier. Soldiers crowded the deck. They were staring at the amazing New York City skyline. Diana understood that, even if she’d looked at the buildings in a different way. You thought you could stay blase about how New York looked. After all, you’d seen it a million times in the movies, right? But the difference between the movies and the genuine article was about like the difference between a picture of a steak dinner and the real thing on the table in front of you.

After a bit, the reporter’s gaze slid from the GIs to their welcoming committee. “Don’t you think they would have liked to see people closer to their own age?” he asked.

Diana looked at the people on the pier in a new way. Most of them, like her, had been born in the nineteenth century. And those were definitely twentieth-century men on the ship. “I suppose they would,” she admitted, which made the man from the Times blink. “But if we weren’t here, they wouldn’t see anybody at all. That would be wrong, no matter what Truman thinks. So here we are.”

She wasn’t quite right. At the base of the pier stood a big olive-drab tent, with MPs flanking it. A sign above the open flap said U.S. ARMY DEPROCESSING CENTER, and, in smaller letters just below, ENTRY REQUIRED. Of course there would be paperwork to finish before soldiers could set foot in the United States again. But the soldiers or clerks or clerk/soldiers inside the tent weren’t what a returning GI wanted to see and hear.

The tugboats pulled away from a Liberty ship. Sailors pushed through the soldiers so they could lower the gangplank. The far end thudded down onto the pier. The young men in olive-drab cheered and whooped.

“Welcome home!” Diana and the rest of the welcomers shouted, waving their flags. “Welcome back!”

Still in neat Army single file, the soldiers tramped past them toward the deprocessing center. “Who are you folks, anyways?” one of them asked.

“We’re the people who got you out of Germany, that’s who,” Diana answered proudly. Moses might have told the children of Israel I’m the person who got you out of Egypt in the same tone of voice.

And the way the returning soldier’s face lit up told her she hadn’t wasted her time with him. “Much obliged, ma’am!” he exclaimed, and marched on.

Several other young men thanked the welcomers, too. But a skinny kid with curly brown hair and a nose like the business end of a churchkey opener stopped in front of Diana and said, “You’re Mrs. McGraw, aren’t you?”

Diana smiled. “That’s right,” she said, not without pride.

“Well, you can geh kak afen yam,” the kid told her. She didn’t know what it meant, but it didn’t sound like a compliment. And it wasn’t, because the soldier went on, “You’ve gone and messed up the whole country, that’s what you’ve done. We need to be in Germany. We need to stay there. If the Nazis grab it again, that’ll be the worst thing in the world.”

“We aren’t stopping the Nazis,” Diana said.

“We sure were slowing ’em down,” the soldier said. “Once we’re all gone-”

She went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “All we were doing-are doing-over there is bleeding for no reason.” She’d had this argument dozens of times before. She was ready to have it again. Ready? She was eager.

And so was the returning GI. “It’s not for nothing,” he insisted hotly. “It’s-”

The guy behind him, who was half again his size, gave him a shove and cut him off. “C’mon, Izzy. Move it, man. This ain’t the place for politics. I wanna go get my Ruptured Duck, darn it.” Having ladies around kept even most soldiers talking clean.

Izzy plainly thought it was a perfect place for politics. But the momentum of the crowd swept him down the pier. He was bound for the deprocessing center whether he wanted to go there or not.

Hearing what the bigger soldier called him made a light go on in Diana’s head. “Oh,” she said. “I should’ve known.”

Several of the New York-based activists nodded wisely. “You can’t expect those people to be reasonable,” a man said. The New Yorkers nodded again, almost in unison.

“Well,” Diana said, and then, a beat later, “Most regular Americans appreciate what we’re doing, anyway.”

“I should hope so!” the man agreed. He waved his flag. More and more soldiers coming home from Germany clumped by them.

Hans Klein had set the International Herald-tribune right in the middle of Reinhard Heydrich’s desk. The picture on the front page was plenty to seize the Reichsprotektor’s attention. There was a long file of marching U.S. soldiers, photographed with New York City’s skyscrapers in the background. GIS LEAVING OCCUPATION DUTY, the headline read. Heydrich stared and stared. A picture of a beautiful woman was nothing next to this. He hadn’t felt so splendid since…when?

Since that Czech’s gun jammed. More than five years ago now, he thought, wonder filling him. So much had happened since, so very much. Not all of it was what he’d expected. Not much of it was what he’d wanted. And so many things had yet to happen. The Reich and the Party would be redeemed.

Klein came in. Had he been skulking in the corridor, waiting for Heydrich to pick up the marvelous newspaper? His grin said he had. “How about that?” he said.

“How about that?” Heydrich echoed, and his thin lips also shaped a smile. “Like so many whipped dogs, they’re running. Running!”

“That was the idea all along,” the Oberscharfuhrer reminded him.

“Aber naturlich,” Heydrich said. “But getting them to do it-! I thought we would have to keep going longer than this. But the Americans pulled as much as we pushed. More! We never came close to hurting them enough to make them go.”

“And the American government didn’t shoot those people marching and squawking,” Klein said. “I’m damned if I understand why not.”

Since Heydrich didn’t, either, he only shrugged. “You use your enemy’s weaknesses against him. That’s the whole idea in war. That’s how we beat France. We made a big, showy threat in Holland and Belgium, and the French and English couldn’t run fast enough to fight there. Then the real thrust came through the Ardennes, where France was weak, and the Wehrmacht paraded under the Arc de Triomphe.”

“The French won’t want to get out of their zone now,” Hans Klein predicted.

“Yes, I know.” That France had an occupation zone in Germany still infuriated Heydrich. The USA, the UK, the USSR-they’d earned the right to try to hold down the Reich, anyhow. But what had the French done? Ridden on other people’s coattails, and damn all else. The Reichsprotektor pulled his thoughts back to what needed doing next. “Now that the Amis are going, I don’t think the Tommies will stick around much longer. England isn’t what it used to be. When America spits, the English go swimming.”

“I like that.” Klein grinned again.

“And if we hold two zones”-Heydrich pursued his own train of thought-“we have enough of the Reich to do something worthwhile with. Not the Grossdeutsches Reich, maybe, but a Deutsches Reich again.”

“I like that, too.” But Hans Klein hadn’t finished, for he asked, “How much will the Russians like it, though?”

Automatically, Heydrich’s head swung toward the east. Here deep underground, directions should have been meaningless. For all practical purposes, they were. All the same, Heydrich might have had a compass implanted behind his eyes. He knew from which direction the Red Army would come if it came.

“They won’t like it,” he admitted. “Even so, I don’t think they’ll invade as long as we walk soft for a while once we get in.”

“They’d better not-that’s all I’ve got to say,” Klein replied. “We sure as hell can’t stop ’em if they do.”

Heydrich grunted. “I know,” he said gruffly. “Believe me, trading the Amis for the Ivans is the last thing I want.” And wasn’t that the sad and sorry truth? The German freedom fighters had probably hurt the Russians worse than they’d hurt the Americans. But the Red Army wasn’t going away, dammit. The Russians hunkered down in their occupation zone and fought back.

“Well, Herr Reichsprotektor, what do we do about it, then?” Klein turned Heydrich’s title into a sour joke. What good was a Reichsprotektor who couldn’t protect the Reich?

“My bet is, the Americans won’t let Stalin move all the way to the Rhine,” Heydrich answered. “They look weak leaving Germany themselves. They won’t be able to afford to look weak twice in a row here, especially not when the Reds in China are kicking the crap out of the Nationalists. All we have to do is make sure we look like the lesser of two evils.”

Hitler never had figured that out. Right up to the end, he’d expected the Anglo-Americans to join him in the crusade against Bolshevism. But he’d scared them even worse than Stalin did. And so…Heydrich led the resistance from a hidden mineshaft God only knew how many meters underground.

Klein threw back his head and laughed like a loon. “Sweet suffering Jesus, sir, but that’s funny! We make the Americans run away, and then we use them to keep the Russians from coming in? Oh, my!” He laughed some more.

“It is strange, I know. It should work, though, if we play our cards right. Or do you see it differently?” Heydrich asked. A couple of Foreign Ministry staffers were down here to advise him on such things. He’d talked with them. But he also respected Klein’s judgment. The Foreign Ministry people had brains and education. Klein thought with his gut and the plain good sense that made him win money whenever he sat down to play skat or poker. You needed the whole bunch if you were going to get anywhere.

The Oberscharfuhrer considered. “Yeah, we might bring that off if we’re careful. The Ivans are scared of the atom bomb.”

“Hell, so am I,” Heydrich said. “As soon as we’re able to, we get our own. And we have to get to work on our rockets again, too. Once we can blow Moscow and Washington off the map-”

“We’re back in business,” Klein finished for him.

“Damn right we are,” Heydrich agreed.

Vladimir Bokov neither spoke nor understood English. HE had no trouble at all with German, though. All the Berlin papers, those from the Russian zone and the ones printed in the zones the other Allies held, were full of news and pictures of the American pullout. He wouldn’t have believed it if he weren’t seeing it with his own eyes. Even seeing, he had trouble believing.

“They’re going, Comrade Colonel!” he mourned. “The stupid motherfuckers are really going. Is that why we handed them the DP?”

“We handed them the DP so General Vlasov could bust our balls with it for the rest of our lives,” Moisei Shteinberg answered. “He’ll do it, too-he’s just the type.”

“Too right he is!” Bokov was gloomily aware he was the one who’d pushed hardest for working with the Americans. He wouldn’t be the only one who remembered, either. Everybody who wanted to get ahead of him and everybody who wanted to hold him down would throw it in his face. After a while, nobody would have to. The whole world-the whole world of the NKVD, anyhow, which was the only world that mattered to him-would know he was a fuckup.

“Both the officers who took Birnbaum were Jews, you said. If anything gives me hope, that does,” Shteinberg said. “They’ll push things.”

“I’m sure they want Heydrich’s scalp, Comrade Colonel. But how much will they be able to do when everything’s going to pieces around them? Bozhemoi! You can’t even be sure they’re still on this side of the ocean,” Bokov said.

“Don’t remind me.” Shteinberg scowled. “I just wish I could know we’d take care of things ourselves once the Americans all disappear.”

“What’s to stop us?” Bokov demanded. “If the Fascists grab power in the western zones, of course we’ll run them out and kill as many of them as we can. They can’t even slow us down-we’d be on the Rhine in a week.”

“Of course we would, if we were only fighting the Heydrichites,” Moisei Shteinberg said. “But the Americans don’t want us on the Rhine. Neither do the French.”

“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 of 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.