The Man with the Iron Heart

VII

In Nuremberg, the city jail was near the center of town. The Palace of Justice-a fancy name for the local courthouse-lay off to the northwest. It had taken some bomb damage. That didn’t surprise Lou Weissberg. In Nuremberg, it was much easier to list the buildings that hadn’t taken bomb damage than to set down the ones that had.

Bomb damage or not, the Allies were going to try the Nazi big shots they’d captured at the Palace of Justice. The American judge and his opposite numbers from the UK, France, and the Soviet Union would give Goring and Hess and Ribbentrop and Streicher and Jodl and Keitel and the rest the fair trials they hadn’t given to countless millions. And then, without the tiniest bit of doubt, most of those goons would hang or face a firing squad or die in whatever other way that extraordinary court decreed.

In the meantime, the Nazis cooled their heels in the Nuremberg jail as if they were ordinary burglars or wife beaters. Well, not quite. They had a wing of the jail all to themselves. They had a lot more guards in that wing than anybody in his right mind would have wasted on burglars or wife beaters.

And the jail was surrounded by barbed wire and sandbagged machine-gun nests and concrete antitank barriers. The pointed obstacles looked to Lou like German designs. They’d probably been yanked from the Siegfried Line and carted back here. In a way, Lou appreciated the irony. The obstacles intended to slow up American and British tanks were now going into action against the krauts who’d made them.

In another way, that irony was scary. Almost six months after the alleged surrender, the occupation authorities needed to stay buttoned up tight to make sure the Germans didn’t liberate their leaders.

If they somehow did, that would give the United States a godawful black eye. All the same, Lou wondered how much Reinhard Heydrich wanted to have to do with men who might have the rank to order him around. Somebody like Goring wouldn’t be able to resist trying. And Heydrich, damn his little shriveled turd of a soul, was managing just fine by himself. Anybody who tried to jog his elbow might come down with a sudden and acute case of loss of life.

Lou eyed the jail again. “Fuck,” he said softly. Despite all the barbed wire and the antitank barriers and the machine-gun nests and the swarms of jittery dogfaces manning the position, somebody’d managed to stick one of the fanatics’ new propaganda sheets on the wall.

Shaking his head, Lou walked over and tore the sheet down. It was what Europeans used for typing paper, a little taller and a little skinnier than good old 8¹/₂? 11. Lou had seen English and German versions of the propaganda sheet. A printer was giving the fanatics a hand. If the occupation authorities caught him at it, he’d be sorry. Lou snorted under his breath. That didn’t seem to worry the bastard one whole hell of a lot.

This was the English version. It was obviously translated from the German, translated by somebody better with German than with English. WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR? it said: smudgy type on cheap paper.

What Germans desire to acquire by victory is the fulfillment of the idea that an individual shall be respected for his own self. This is what makes life worth living for us.

“Assholes,” Lou muttered. The Nazis had sure respected Jews and Gypsies and Russians for their own selves, hadn’t they?

We fight for the sake of our own culture, the propaganda sheet went on. If you had invaders ruthlessly occupying your own land, you too would rise up against them. How can a brave folk do anything else?

“Assholes,” Lou said again, louder this time. Tito’s guerrillas, Russian partisans, the French maquis-what did the SS and the Wehrmacht do to real freedom fighters when they caught them? Everybody knew the answer to that one. Lou had seen a photo a German soldier took of a hanged Russian girl maybe eighteen years old. Around her neck the SS had put a warning placard in German and Russian: I SHOT AT GERMAN SOLDIERS.

Once we have once more our own state back in our hands, we solemnly vow that we seek no new foreign conflict. Europe has seen enough of war, the sheet declared, as if Hitler hadn’t had thing one to do with that war and the way the Nazis fought it. All we seek is a fair peace and our own national self-determination, which is the proper right of any free people.

What kind of self-determination did the Reich give Poles and Scandinavians and Dutchmen and Belgians and Frenchmen and Yugoslavs and Greeks and Russians and…? But Germans had a knack for feeling a shoe only when it pinched them.

Lou started to crumple the sheet and toss it aside. Then he caught himself, even though CIC already had plenty of copies. A major with a double chin was giving orders to some GIs. Lou walked over to him and said, “Major, I just found this stuck to the wall here. How come somebody was able to put it up?”

The major snatched the paper out of his hand, gave it one quick, scornful glance, and barked, “Who the hell are you, Lieutenant, and who the hell do you think you are?”

“I’m Lou Weissberg, Counter-Intelligence Corps,” Lou said calmly. “And who are you…sir?”

By the way he said it, he made the title one of reproach, not respect. The major took a deep breath and opened his mouth to scorch him. Then the man had very visible second thoughts. Even a lieutenant in the CIC might have connections that could make you sorry if you crossed him. As a matter of fact, Lou did. Raising when you really held a full house gave you confidence that showed.

“My name’s Hawkins-Tony Hawkins,” the major said in a different tone of voice. He took a longer look at the propaganda sheet. “You found this goddamn thing here-at the jail?”

“Just now, like I said. Right over there.” Lou pointed. “You’ve got this whole shebang around the building, and I wondered how some Jerry snuck this thing in here and put it up without anybody noticing.”

“Goddamn good question,” Major Hawkins said. “Fuck me if I know for sure, but my best guess is-”

His best guess got interrupted. The explosion wasn’t anywhere close by, but it was big. The ground shook under Lou’s feet. One of the soldiers said, “That an earthquake?”

“You California jerks think everything’s a goddamn earthquake,” another GI answered. “That’s a motherfucking bomb going off, is what that is. One huge honker of a bomb, too.”

That echoed Lou’s thoughts much too well. He looked around in all directions. At least even money the jail’s gray bulk would hide whatever had just happened…But no. There it was, off to the northwest: a swelling cloud of black smoke and dust.

Major Hawkins had already proved he had a foul mouth. He outdid himself now. Then he rounded on Lou. “What do you wanna bet that’s the fucking courthouse? You CIC cocksuckers are such hot shit, how come you didn’t keep the fanatics from blasting it to the moon?”

“Oy!” Lou clapped a hand to his forehead. That hadn’t occurred to him. But as soon as he heard it, he would have bet anything he owned that Hawkins was right. The older officer’s words had that oracular feeling of truth to them. A bomb there couldn’t be anything else. Well, it could, but he was only too sure it wasn’t. A moment later, he said, “Oy!” again, and, “Aren’t the judges working in there now?”

If they could have bottled what Major Hawkins said then, they could have heated water in every house in Nuremberg for a year. “In spades,” the portly major added, in case Lou didn’t think he meant it.

Lou had other things on his mind. “C’mon!” he said. “Maybe we can do some good hauling people out of the ruins.”

“You go on, Lieutenant,” Hawkins said, shaking his head. “Me, I aim to sit tight and do what I’m supposed to be doing. For all we know, those mothers are trying to lure us away from here so they can rush this place and spring the big prisoners while we’re all making like a Chinese fire drill.”

“Right,” Lou said tonelessly. And the major was, no two ways about it. That didn’t make Lou like him any better. Sketching a salute, Lou took off.

He trotted on parallel to the Pegnitz, the river that ran through town. The river made a better guide than the streets. With so much of Nuremberg ruined, what was street and what was rubble weren’t always easy to tell apart. As he hurried toward the Palace of Justice, he sadly clucked several times. The fanatics could sound reasonable. That sheet they’d put out would make some people back in the States go, See? They only want to run their own affairs and be left alone. But, no matter how they sounded, they went and did something like this….

Lou loped past a pile of wreckage about a story and a half tall. That gave him his first good look at the Palace of Justice-or rather, what had been the Palace of Justice. He skidded to a stop, gravel and shattered bits of brick scooting out from under his boots. “Holy crap,” he yelped.

Somebody must have screwed up. That was the first thing that occurred to him. The American occupiers had gone out of their way to protect the jail. They hadn’t taken so many precautions at the Palace of Justice. The authorities must have thought no one would attack it till the Nazis honchos went on trial.

Oops.

What the American authorities had thought might have been reasonable. That turned out not to matter when reasonable was also wrong. Somebody-who? — would have to answer questions now that the pooch was screwed. We did everything we reasonably could… In his mind, Lou could already hear the calm, sober voice explaining things. Whoever the voice belonged to, it would be calm and sober. He was sure of that. Would calm sobriety be enough to save the dumb fuckup’s career? It might. You never could tell.

But that would be tomorrow’s worry. Today’s was more urgent. Shattered wreckage of a truck-probably one of the ubiquitous GMC deuce-and-a-halfs-blazed in front of what was left of the Palace of Justice. Three wings had projected out from the main body of the building. One of those wings-the central one, the one in front of which the truck had stopped-was just gone, clean off the map. The other two were shattered, tumbledown, smoking, ready to fall down any second now.

Christ! How much TNT did that fucking truck carry? Lou wondered. The sleepless, analytical part of his mind instantly supplied the answer, and a sneer to go with it. Two and a half tons, dummy. The Palace of Justice sure as hell looked as if a 5,000-pound bomb had gone off right in front of it.

Some of the rubble shook. Lou thought more of it was falling down, but that wasn’t what was going on. A dazed, bleeding American soldier pushed a door off of himself and tried to stand up. He keeled over instead.

Lou hurried over to him and pulled away more bricks and stones and chunks of woodwork. The wounded man’s left ankle bent in a way an ankle had no business bending. Lou fumbled at his belt. Sure as hell, he still carried a wound dressing and a morphine syrette. The guy needed about a dozen bandages, but Lou covered up a nasty cut on the side of his head, anyhow. The morphine was probably also sending a boy to do a man’s job, but it was what he had. He stabbed the wounded soldier and bore down on the plunger.

To his amazement, the GI opened his eyes a few seconds later. “What happened?” he asked, his voice eerily calm. Maybe the morphine was doing more than Lou’d thought it could.

“Truck bomb.” Lou added the obvious: “Great big old truck bomb.”

“Boy, no shit,” the man said. “You musta stuck me, huh?” When Lou nodded, the guy went on, “You think you can splint my ankle while the dope’s working? Best chance I’ll get.”

“I’ll try. I’m not an aid man or anything.”

The wounded soldier waved that aside. Lou got to work. He had no trouble finding boards, and he cut up the other GI’s trouser leg to get strips of cloth to tie the splint into place. Morphine or no morphine, the guy wailed when he straightened that shattered ankle as best he could.

Some aid men were there. More ambulances rolled up, bells clanging, as Lou wrestled with the splint. Some soldiers set up a.50-caliber machine-gun position, too. Lou wondered if they’d gone Asiatic till one of them said, “Assholes ain’t gonna run another truck in here and blow up all the guys who came in to help.” That hadn’t occurred to Lou, but some of the Americans seemed properly paranoid. He supposed that was good.

Stretcher bearers carried a groaning wounded man past him and the fellow he was helping. All badly hurt men sounded pretty much the same, no matter where they came from. But Lou happened to look up at just the right moment. He saw a not-so-familiar uniform on the stretcher.

“Holy cow!” he blurted, in lieu of something stronger. “Is that General Nikitchenko?” He was proud of knowing the name of the Soviet judge for the upcoming trial.

To his surprise, the man on the stretcher knew some English. “I is Lieutenant Colonel Volchkov,” he said. “Alternate to Iona Timofeye-vich. The general, he is-” He broke off, gathering strength or looking for a word. After a moment, he found one: “Kaput.” It wasn’t exactly English, but it wasn’t exactly not English, either. Lou had no trouble understanding it, anyhow.

“We’re gonna get you patched up, Colonel. Don’t you worry about anything right this minute-you’ll be fine,” one of the medics said, and then, to his own comrade, “Get moving, Gabe. Soon as he goes into an ambulance, we’ll come back for this poor sorry son of a bitch.” His hands were full; he pointed with his chin at the soldier Lou was splinting.

“Who you callin’ a sorry son of a bitch?” the GI demanded, and Lou’s admiration for morphine leaped forward again. The medics didn’t bother arguing. They lugged Volchkov away, then returned for the man with the broken ankle.

More wounded people staggered from the wreckage. Some were women. Secretaries? Clerks? Translators? Cleaning ladies? Lou had no idea. All he knew was, bombs weren’t chivalrous. That also applied to the American bombs that had leveled most of Nuremberg, but he didn’t worry about those.

Corpsmen and other GIs also carried women out on stretchers, in blankets, or sometimes just in their arms. Wounded women were slightly shriller than wounded men; otherwise, there wasn’t much difference between them. Most of the casualties here, not surprisingly, seemed to be men.

Lou thought for a moment that someone in a dark robe had to be a woman. Then he saw the person was wearing a man’s black dress shoes-one, anyhow, because the other foot had only a sock on it. A judge, he realized dully. American? French? British? That hardly mattered.

The medics didn’t bother with some of the bodies-and pieces of bodies-they found in the smoking wreckage. They piled them off to one side: a makeshift morgue, one growing rapidly. And they cursed the fanatics with a weary hatred that made the close-cropped hair at the nape of Lou’s neck try to stand on end. Turn the guys who wore Red Crosses loose on the Nazis and they might clean them out in twenty minutes flat.

Or, worse luck, they might not.

That enormous explosion hadn’t just brought American soldiers out to see what had happened and do what they could to help. Shabby, scrawny Germans stared at the wreckage of the Palace of Justice and at the rows of corpses off to one side. They didn’t seem especially horrified-but then, they’d seen plenty worse.

“Doesn’t look like they’ll have their trial any time soon,” a middle-aged man remarked to his wife.

She shrugged. “So what? It wouldn’t have been anything but propaganda anyhow,” she said. He nodded. He took out a little can of tobacco-scrounged from butts, no doubt-and started rolling himself a cigarette.

Lou wanted to kick him in the nuts and punch his stringy Frau in the nose. But the goddamn kraut was right. God only knew when the authorities would be able to try Goring and Ribbentrop and the rest of those jackals. And who’d want to sit on the bench now and judge them? Hell, who’d dare?

“Goddamn Heydrich to hell and gone,” Lou muttered. But damn him or not, his fanatics had won this round.

The McGrawshad a fancy radio set. It did everything but show you pictures of what was happening at the other end. And now, with this newfangled television thing, that was coming, too. Back before the war, when people first started talking about it, Diana figured it was all Buck Rogers stuff and would never come true.

Well, these days it didn’t do to laugh too hard at Buck Rogers. Look at rockets. Look at the atom bomb. And television was plainly on the way, even if it wasn’t here yet.

Once upon a time, the telegraph and typewriter and telephone were Buck Rogers stuff, too-except Buck wasn’t around yet to give them a name. Diana’s mouth tightened. She wished the telegraph had never happened. Then she wouldn’t have heard about Pat…. She shook her head. That wasn’t the point. The point was, he never should have got killed in the first place.

She’d timed it perfectly. The tubes needed a little while to warm up. Almost the first thing she heard once they did was “This is William L. Shirer, reporting to you from Nuremberg.”

He’d been reporting from Europe since before the war started. He’d covered it from Berlin during the Nazis’ first fantastic run of triumphs. She and Ed had both read Berlin Diary. Now he was back on the other side of the Atlantic, broadcasting from the undead corpse of the Third Reich. And the photos she’d seen of him-he was a skinny little bald guy who wore a beret and smoked a pipe-didn’t detract (too much) from his authoritative voice and plain common sense.

“As you will have heard by now, Reinhard Heydrich’s brutal diehards bombed the Palace of Justice in this city. The leading captured war criminals from the Nazis regime were to have gone on trial there for war crimes in a few days. Now those trials have been indefinitely postponed. Many people here doubt whether they will ever take place.”

“Ain’t that a…heck of a thing?” Ed said.

Diana shushed him. She wanted to hear William L. Shirer. “The death toll is known to be close to two hundred,” the correspondent went on. “Among the dead are the French, Russian, and American judges and the British alternate. The Russian and British alternates are among the badly wounded, as is Judge Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor.”

“Two hundred dead,” Diana echoed, her voice rising in disbelief. “And for what? To give those thugs the kind of trial they don’t begin to deserve.”

Now Ed raised a hand to quiet her. William L. Shirer continued, “American authorities believe the fanatic who drove the truck loaded with explosives up to the Palace of Justice died in the blast he touched off. Before General Patton’s recent death, he said the idea wasn’t to die for your country but to make the so-and-so’s on the other side die for theirs. Like the Japanese, the German fanatics seem to have taken this idea too much to heart. After these messages, I’ll be back with an American officer who will talk about the problems posed by enemies who don’t care whether they survive.”

A recorded chorus started singing the praises of a particular laundry soap. Diana knew from painful experience that it wasn’t worth the money if you used it with hard water. If you listened to the chorus, it was the greatest stuff in the world. But then, you deserved whatever happened to you if you took radio advertisements seriously.

William L. Shirer returned. “With me is Lieutenant Louis Weissberg of the U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence Corps,” he said. “Thanks for coming on, Lieutenant.”

“Thanks for having me, Mr. Shirer.” By the way Weissberg talked, he was from New York City or somewhere not far away.

“Tell us a little about why it’s harder to defend against enemies who plan to die after completing their missions.”

“For all the reasons you’d expect.” Lieutenant Weissberg didn’t say You dummy, but you could hear it in his voice. Shirer wasn’t a dummy-nowhere close-but he remembered that some of the people in his audience were. After a beat, Weissberg went on, “They don’t have to worry about escape routes. And they can take chances ordinary soldiers never would, because they don’t expect to get away anyhow. If you have the nerve to press the detonator, it’s all over in a hurry.”

“Isn’t it just?” Shirer agreed ruefully. “We’re standing here in front of what would have been the courtyard for the trial of the century-the trial that would have warned the world no one can get away with wars of aggression any more-and there’s not much left, I’m afraid. Do you have any idea how the fanatic in the truck was able to pull up right in front of the building?”

“Well, Mr. Shirer, if a jeep isn’t the most common military vehicle in Germany these days, a deuce-and-a-half is. We’ve got more of ’em here than a dog has fleas. Put a guy in an American uniform in the driver’s seat-and you can bet that kraut was wearing one-and nobody paid any attention to him till too late,” Weissberg said.

William L. Shirer asked the same question Diana McGraw would have: “Isn’t that a severe security breach?”

“Sure,” Weissberg answered, which took Diana by surprise. “We slipped up, and we paid for it. We have to hope we don’t do it again, that’s all.”

“Who was responsible for protecting the Palace of Justice?” Shirer asked. “And what’s happened to him since the bombing?”

“Sir, I don’t have the answer to either of those questions,” Weissberg replied. “You gotta remember, I’m just a lieutenant. I see little pieces of the picture, not the whole thing. You’d do better asking General Eisenhower or somebody like that.”

“For the record, I have asked General Eisenhower’s headquarters,” Shirer said. “Spokesmen there declined to comment. They claimed that anything they said might damage an officer’s career. What do you think of that?”

Weissberg ducked again: “If they aren’t going to say anything about it, you can’t really expect me to, can you?”

“Never hurts to try,” Shirer answered easily. “Thank you for your time, Lieutenant Weissberg.”

“Sure,” Weissberg said. William L. Shirer went off the air. The commercial this time was for a brand of cigarettes that, in Ed’s memorable phrase, tasted like it came out of a camel’s rear end.

Diana was steaming. “You see how things go?” she demanded of her husband. “Do you see? They know who was supposed to take care of that building. They know he was asleep at the switch. But will they say so? Don’t hold your breath! Will anything happen to him because he was asleep at the switch? Don’t stay up late waiting for that, either.”

“Army always takes care of its own,” Ed said.

“Two hundred dead,” Diana said one more time. “They aren’t just sweeping dirt under a rug. They’re shoveling it onto graves. That’s wrong.” That’s wrong, dammit! was what she wanted to say, but the habits of her whole adult life with Ed suppressed the swear word.

“You’re doing everything you know how to do,” Ed said. “You’re in the papers. You’re on the radio, for cryin’ out loud. Me, I couldn’t get in the newspaper if I robbed a bank. That suits me fine, too.”

“It suited me fine-till Pat got murdered,” Diana answered. “But this craziness won’t stop till we make it stop. If I have to get my name in the paper to do that, I will.”

“Babe, I’m not arguin’ with you,” her husband said. You’d better not, not about this, Diana thought. That wasn’t fair, though, and she knew it. Ed had backed her play as much as was in him to do. It wasn’t his fault that she was the more outgoing one in the family.

And speaking of outgoing, or going generally…“I’ll need to make another trip to Washington,” she said.

He grunted. “Can we afford it?” he asked. A reasonable question: he’d always brought in the money, while Diana figured out how to spend it. The arrangement worked well for them, but it meant she had a better notion of what was in the checkbook and the savings account than he did.

She nodded briskly. “Not to worry. We could swing it by ourselves, but we won’t have to. We’ve got donations coming in like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve started…oh, I guess you’d call it a business account. Mothers Against the Madness in Germany, I’m calling it.”

Ed grunted again. “What’ll it do to our taxes? And can the government use it to come after us if we don’t keep everything straight? They got Al Capone on a tax rap when they couldn’t nail him for anything else, remember. If they sent him to Alcatraz, they can sure take a whack at us.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” Diana answered with the sublime confidence of one sure of the righteousness of her cause. On a more practical note, she added, “And I’ve talked to a bookkeeper. He says he knows how to keep everything straight.”

“Okay. I hope he knows what he’s talking about,” Ed said. “From what I hear at the plant, tax law is pretty much whatever the government wants it to be.”

“I asked around. Abe is supposed to be the best in town, bar none,” Diana said.

“You got Abe Jacoby?”

“I sure did,” she said, not without pride.

“How about that?” Ed sounded relieved. “If a smart sheeny like him can’t keep us outa trouble, nobody can. Those people know money like they invented it. Maybe they did-wouldn’t surprise me one bit.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Diana said. “He doesn’t work cheap-”

Ed guffawed. “There’s a hot headline!”

“Yeah, I know.” Diana laughed, too, a little sheepishly. “But, like I said, the money’s there. And he’s charging less than he might have, too.”

“How come? You bat the baby blues at him?” Ed winked to show he was kidding.

“I did no such thing!” Actually, Diana thought Abe was kind of good-looking, which made her sound stuffier than she would have otherwise. “He’s got a nephew in Munich, and he wants to help make sure Sheldon stays safe.”

“Gotcha. That sure makes sense. Blood’s thicker than water. I guess sometimes it’s thicker than money, too.”

“Let’s hope so,” Diana said. “I won’t be the only one going to Washington, either. If we can get into the papers all over the country for picketing in front of the Indiana state Capitol, think what’ll happen after we picket in front of the White House.”

“They’ll arrest you, that’s what,” Ed predicted.

“No, they won’t, not if we stay peaceful-and we will,” Diana said. “That chowderhead jumped our people in Indianapolis. We didn’t start any brawls. We won’t in Washington, either. But Truman has to know we won’t put up with stalling around in Germany.”

“Well, you’ve got that right.” Ed paused a moment, thinking. “Make sure you tell the papers and the radio before you go. That way, they can be there ready to get the story and the photos-the papers can get the photos, I mean.”

“I understood you.” Diana walked over to him, bent down, and gave him a kiss. “And I’ve already talked to the Indianapolis papers, and to the ones in Washington, and to the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times. If you want a story to go all over the country, those last two are the papers to aim for. I haven’t got hold of NBC and CBS yet, but I will.”

“Attagirl! I might’ve know you were a jump ahead of me.” Ed chuckled. “Truman doesn’t know what he’s up against, poor sap. When you start something, you don’t stop till you get it done.”

Maybe he was kidding again, maybe not. Diana didn’t care. “This needs doing, darn it,” she said, and Ed didn’t try to tell her she was wrong-not that she would have listened if he had.

Whenthe jeep carrying Tom Schmidt came to the first checkpoint on the outskirts of Munich, the dogface behind the wheel let out a sigh of relief and lit up a Lucky. “Made it through Injun country one more time,” he said.

“Is that what you guys call it?” The reporter took out a little notebook bound with a spiral wire and wrote it down.

“You betcha, Charlie.” The GI, who answered impartially to Mel or to Horseface, nodded emphatically. “Liable to be some asshole behind a tree, behind a rock, hiding inside any old ruined house or barn-and there sure are enough of ’em.” The cigarette jerked as he spoke.

He wasn’t wrong. Munich and its suburbs had taken sixty-six air raids during the war. The estimate was that it held something like 9,000,000 cubic yards of rubble. And the rubble still held bodies-nobody knew how many. But even in this chilly weather the stink of dead meat hung in the air.

The guards at the checkpoint weren’t delighted to see them. One made Mel pop the hood. Another got down on his stomach and slid a long-handled mirror under the jeep. Tom’s papers got examined with a jeweler’s loupe. “Do you do this to everybody?” Tom asked the MP going over them.

“Sure do,” the noncom answered. “Goddamn krauts can get our uniforms. Stealing a jeep’s easy as pie. And they’re damn good forgers.”

“You must spend a lot of time doing it, then,” Tom said.

“Yes, sir,” the MP said. “Better than letting some bastard through with a bomb, though. They caught a guy a couple of days ago at another checkpoint.”

“What did they do to him?”

“When he saw they were gonna search the car, he hit the switch and blew himself up. He got four of us-one of ’em was a buddy of mine.”

“Sorry.” It wasn’t enough, but it was all Tom could say.

“Yeah. Me, too,” the MP replied. “You look legit, though.” He turned to his comrades. “The jeep clean?” When they told him it was, he nodded. “You can pass on.”

Getting to the Vier Jahreszeiten-the Four Seasons, the hotel where Ike was staying-wasn’t easy. Munich had been plastered to a faretheewell, all right. The roads were all potholes or worse. The jeep also had to clear two more checkpoints before they got to the hotel. And the fortifications around it would have done credit to Stalingrad.

“After what happened up in Nuremberg, Mac, we don’t take no chances,” said the GI who patted Tom down. He was so intimate, Tom halfway expected to be asked to turn his head and cough. But, after the blast at the Palace of Justice, how could you complain? Finding nothing more lethal than notebook, fountain pen, wallet, and a box of cherry cough drops, the soldier let him through.

A generator chugged outside the Vier Jahreszeiten. The biggest part of the city didn’t have power yet. The hotel had taken bomb damage. Tom would have been surprised if it hadn’t. Most of downtown Munich was nothing but bomb damage. But you could tell this had been a hotel once upon a time, which put it ahead of a lot of places.

He had to cool his heels for forty-five minutes before Eisenhower would see him. That was also par for the course. He’d managed to get an appointment with the American proconsul. At last, a spruce young major led him in to the great man. “You’ve got half an hour,” the youngster said.

Terrific, Tom thought. He started with a big one: “How do you see things in Germany now?”

“We’re making progress,” Eisenhower said. “Rubbish getting cleared. Power and sewage works coming back. Industry starting up again. People getting fed. We are making progress.” He repeated it, as if to reassure himself.

“How much trouble are the fanatics causing?” Tom asked.

“More than we wish they were. Less than they wish they were,” Ike answered. “They can’t go on forever. Sooner or later, they’ll run out of men willing to die for a dead cause.” How could he know that? Was he whistling in the dark?

Instead of asking directly, Tom said, “How much support do they have among the people?”

“Well, some Germans aren’t sorry they fought the war. They’re only sorry they lost,” Eisenhower said. “They wouldn’t mind getting in the saddle again-I’m sure of that. But I’m just as sure it won’t happen.”

“What do you think about the movement in America to bring home the occupation troops?” Tom asked.

The room wasn’t warm to begin with. The temperature suddenly seemed to drop twenty degrees. “I’m a soldier. I’m not supposed to have political opinions. But I think that would be a poor policy,” Eisenhower snapped.

“In spite of all the casualties we can’t seem to stop?”

“Yes.” Ike bit off the word. He cut the interview short, too. Tom Schmidt was disappointed but, on reflection, again not surprised.