The Man with the Iron Heart

VIII

Bernie Cobb swore as he tramped through the woods and fields outside of Erlangen. Fog puffed from his mouth and nose at each new obscenity. When he looked back over his shoulder, he could see his footprints in the snow.

“Fuck this shit,” he said. “I was doin’ this same crap a year ago, when the krauts hit us in the Bulge. That’s how-”

“You got frostbite in your feet,” Walt Lefevre finished for him. “We heard it before, Bernie.”

“Yeah, well, this is still a crock,” Cobb said. “War’s been over since May, for cryin’ out loud. So how come I’m still lugging a fucking grease gun around and making like there’s bandits in the woods?”

“On account of there are bandits inna woods.” Sergeant Carlo Corvo talked out of the side of his mouth. He’d never said he had Mafia connections, but he’d never said he didn’t, either. Connections or no, he was a bad guy to screw around with. “We gotta make sure the cocksuckers stay hid and don’t come out an’ make trouble, see?”

“Good luck,” Bernie said. Sergeant Corvo gave him a dirty look. But he couldn’t say Bernie was wrong, not when the fanatics had kicked up so much trouble already. Warming to his theme, Bernie went on, “I wish I had my Ruptured Duck, goddammit. I didn’t sign up to chase diehards through the boonies after the war was done.”

“You signed up to do whatever the fuck Uncle Sam tells you to do,” Sergeant Corvo said. “If he wants you to dig latrines from now till 1949, you’ll fuckin’-A do that. And you’ll like it, too, ’cause he’d find somethin’ worse for ya if ya didn’t. Right now he wants you to go asshole-hunting. You oughta be good at it.”

Experience taught you how much you could argue with a noncom. Corvo took less kindly to backtalk than most. He isn’t Uncle Sam, even if he thinks he is, Bernie thought bitterly. But Corvo’s three stripes made him a more than unreasonable facsimile.

“Look for tracks,” Corvo went on. “That’s what we gotta do. With the snow on the ground and the leaves off the trees and the bushes, those Nazi shitheels can’t hide out here no more. We’ve already found a buncha bunkers on account of that.”

At least one of those bunkers had blown sky-high while American soldiers were searching it, too. Maybe more than one. If Bernie were in charge of things, he would keep stuff like that as hush-hush as he could. But he’d known one of the guys who went up in this particular blast. Pete would never try and draw to an inside straight again.

“Something moved over there.” Walt pointed towards a stand of trees a couple of hundred yards away.

“A bird? A deer, maybe?” Bernie didn’t want it to be anything worse.

Lefevre shook his head. “I don’t think so. It ducked back behind a trunk, like.”

“Fuck,” Sergeant Corvo said. For once, Bernie agreed with him completely. “Spread out, youse guys,” Corvo went on. “If that asshole’s got one o’ them automatic rifles, it’s like goin’ up against a BAR, ’cept the German piece only weighs half as much.”

Two grease guns and an M-1. Not impossible odds, but not good, either, not against a weapon that fired full automatic out to…farther than this. How come the krauts made the good tanks and the good guns? Bernie wondered. We’re fuckin’ lucky we won…. Or did we?

He had a finger on the trigger as he slowly approached the trees. He felt all alone. Hell, he was all alone. One burst wouldn’t get everybody that way. But one burst could sure chop him down. When the surrender came, he’d thought he’d got free of this kind of dread. He licked dry lips. No such luck.

Something stirred behind one of those skeleton-branched trees. “Halt!” Bernie yelled. “Hande hoch!” His accent was horrible, but at least he remembered to use German, not English.

He hit the dirt while he was yelling. A good thing, too, because three or four bullets cracked past the place where he’d stood a second earlier.

He started shooting-not aimed fire, but plenty to make the diehard keep his head down. Walt and Carlo were banging away, too. If the fanatic was a kid, maybe he wouldn’t know which way to answer. If, on the other hand, he was a Waffen-SS vet who’d swing for war crimes if they caught him, he damn well would.

He fired at Sergeant Corvo, who had the M-1. That could hit from farthest away, so it was the right move. Wanting to run, Bernie scuttled forward instead. He could smell his own rank fear. The Jerry headed back to another tree. Bernie squeezed off a burst of his own. At least one round caught the kraut in the back. He pitched forward onto his face in the snow.

“Good shot!” Corvo called. He was up and cradling his rifle, so the fanatic hadn’t done anything too drastic to him. “Let’s see what we got. Careful, now-liable to be trip wires for mines around here. You don’t want your balls bounced, watch where you put your clodhoppers.”

With so much free and almost-free pussy over here, Bernie took good care of his balls. He raised and lowered his booted feet with utmost caution. The Germans used a trip wire so thin you could barely see it even when you were looking for it.

The fanatic was still twitching when Bernie came up to him, but he wouldn’t last. He’d caught the whole burst: one in the lower left part of his back, one as near dead center as made no difference, and one just below the right shoulderblade. He turned his head to look at the American. “Mutti,” he choked.

“Your mama ain’t gonna help you now, kid,” Bernie said roughly. The other two GIs came up behind him. He bit down on the inside of his lower lip, hoping he wouldn’t heave. The diehard was a kid: with those smooth cheeks, he couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Well, he wouldn’t see sixteen now.

“Fuckin’ good shooting, Cobb,” Sergeant Corvo said. “They’re all the same size when they pick up a gun.” Just to be on the safe side, he grabbed the fanatic’s piece. Sure as hell, it was one of those nasty new automatic rifles. It looked ugly as sin, all plastic and rough metal, but it was very bad news. That big, banana-shaped clip held what looked like a week’s worth of ammo.

“Mutti,” the German said again, on a weaker note now. No, he wouldn’t last long. Well, good riddance. But even so…

Bernie spat in the snow. “I don’t like shooting kids, goddammit,” he said. “And those Nazi cocksuckers are using more of them all the time.”

“Sure they are,” Walt said. “Kids don’t mind shooting you, not even a little bit. It’s cowboys and Indians for them-a game, like.”

“Sure-that’s what bothers me,” Bernie said. “They don’t even know the score. Doesn’t seem fair to point ’em at us. This little asshole probably didn’t even figure he could get hurt-”

“Till you put three in his ten-ring,” Corvo broke in. “Get it through your head, man-fair went out the window as soon as these guys didn’t come out with their hands up after the surrender. They catch you, you ain’t goin’ into no POW camp. They catch you, they’ll cut your cock off and shove it down your throat. You think this half-grown fucker wasn’t playin’ for keeps?”

“Unh-unh.” Bernie didn’t hesitate there. He’d come too close to getting ventilated.

“Okay. Maybe you ain’t as dumb as you look. Maybe.” Corvo turned the kid over. That seemed to finish killing him-close enough, anyway. Bernie didn’t notice exactly when he quit breathing for good. The sergeant went on, “We’ll go through his pockets. Maybe he’s stupid-maybe he carried something the CIC guys can do something with.”

But he didn’t. About the most interesting things on the kid’s corpse were three or four little one-pfennig coins: cheap zinc, dark with corrosion, but still displaying the Nazi eagle and swastika. They weren’t legal tender any more. The occupation authorities had come down like a ton of bricks on symbols of the old regime. Well, maybe even a fanatic needed to remind himself what he was fighting for.

Mournfully, Walt said, “Now we’ll have to search this whole goddamn wood, see if there’s a bunker hidden here somewhere. Boy, I’m really looking forward to that.”

“Gotta be done,” Sergeant Corvo said.

Lefevre didn’t argue with him. Neither did Bernie Cobb. The noncom wouldn’t be down on his belly probing. He wouldn’t be doing pick-and-shovel work, either. Bernie knew he and Walt damn well would. No wonder Corvo didn’t mind the prospect so much. Who ever minded the hard work somebody else was doing?

Captain Howard Frank slapped a film canister down on Lou Weissberg’s desk. Lou eyed it as if wondering if it had an explosive charge inside. Truth to tell, that wouldn’t have much surprised him. “Nu?” he asked.

“Nu, nu,” Frank agreed, one Jew to another. “And a new headache, too.”

Lou could have done with a Bromo-Seltzer. He tried to make light of it: “I thought you were going to appoint me morale officer and have me show the troops the latest Western.”

“Ha. Funny,” his superior said-about as much as the joke deserved. “I had to rout out a morale officer, ’cause I needed a projector to run this verkakte thing. It’s even got sound. Somewhere, Heydrich’s assholes have themselves a regular photo lab.”

“What…exactly is it?” Lou wondered if he wanted to know. A photo lab? What the hell were the fanatics doing now?

“It’s trouble, that’s what. Come see it. I’ll watch it again, too. Maybe one of us’ll spot something I missed the first time. I can hope so, anyway.”

“Okay.” Lou got up. Captain Frank grabbed the canister and carried it off.

The morale officer actually had rigged a screen and a projector in one room of the rambling Nuremberg hotel the CIC had taken for its own. “Why’d you have me take it out of the machine if you want me to run it again?” he asked Captain Frank.

“’Cause I’m dumb, Bruce,” the captain answered. “Do it anyway, okay?”

“Sure.” Bruce was a ninety-day wonder with one gold bar on each shoulder. He wasn’t about to argue. He threaded the film through the projector. He did that very well. For all Lou knew, he was a morale officer because he’d been a projectionist before Uncle Sam grabbed him. As he turned on the machine, he said, “Hit the lights, will you?”

Lou stood closest to the switch, so he flicked it. Squiggles and scribbles filled the screen as leader ran through. Then, without warning, a scared-looking young man stared out at him. The man wore U.S. uniform and looked as if he’d been worked over. His eyes kept sliding to the left, toward something off-camera. A rifle, aimed at his head? Lou wondered. Something like that, unless he missed his guess.

“My name is Matthew Cunningham, private, U.S. Army.” He paused to lick his lips and glance left again. Then he rattled off his serial number and went on, “I am a prisoner of the German Freedom Front. They say they will, uh, execute me if U.S. authorities don’t meet their, uh, just demands. For now, I’m being well treated.” The mouse under one eye, the split lip, and the fear all over his face gave the lie to that.

“U.S. forces are to leave Germany at once. Germany is to be free to determine its own destiny like any other nation. The struggle for national liberation will go on until victory is won, no matter what. You cannot hope to outlast the aroused German folk. So-called prisoners of war must also be released to return to their loved ones. Germany demands peace and justice.” Cunningham gulped, then whispered one more word: “Please.”

He disappeared. More squiggles flashed across the screen. Then it showed pure white, which faded as Bruce turned off the projector. Lou turned on the room lights. “Jesus,” he said.

“You betcha,” Captain Frank agreed: a slightly chubby, fundamentally decent man in a hell of an unpleasant place. “How’d you like to get one of those every week, or maybe every day?”

“Jesus!” This time, Bruce beat Lou to the punch.

“Is he really a GI?” Lou asked. “Not just a kraut who speaks good English?”

“A Matthew Cunningham was reported as AWOL in Frankfurt last week,” Frank answered. “We’re bringing in some of his buddies to make sure this is really him, but for now it’s a pretty good bet.”

“Yeah.” Lou nodded. The kid on the screen sounded just like a Yank. “Shit. What do we do next?”

“That isn’t for the likes of you or me to decide,” Captain Frank said. “But you can bet your last dime we won’t pack up and go home. You can bet we won’t turn all the Jerry POWs loose, either. How many divisions’ worth of new recruits would we give Heydrich if we did?”

“What about the chuckleheads back home?” Bruce said. “What’ll they do when they see this thing? How loud will they squawk?”

“We ain’t gonna show it to ’em,” Frank said. “We ain’t gonna say boo about it. You want to spend the next twenty years in the Aleutians, son? You’ll be lucky to get off that easy if you open your big yap where a reporter can hear. Got it?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Bruce said solemnly. “But how do you know this is the only print those Nazi bastards made?”

“Fuck,” Captain Frank whispered. “I didn’t even think of that.”

Lou hadn’t thought of it, either. He realized he should have. Maybe Bruce really had worked in a movie theater. That would have got him used to thinking about more than one copy of a film at a time. To Lou, a movie was a movie. But how many people, in how many theaters all over the country, could watch the same movie at the same time? Lots. Lots and lots.

The captain visibly tried to pull himself together. “Lou, when you were watching this…this piece of crap, did you see anything that gave you a clue about maybe where it was made?”

“Let me think, sir,” Lou said. It wasn’t easy. All he’d looked at was the GI’s face. Behind it were…planks. That didn’t help much.

“By the lighting, it was shot with floods, not with the sun,” Bruce said. “You could tell by the shadows.”

“He’s right.” Lou wished he would have come up with that. It was obvious…once somebody else pointed it out.

“Yeah.” Captain Frank nodded. “Good one, Bruce. You think it was in one of their goddamn bunkers, then?”

Now he’s asking the shavetail, Lou thought resentfully. Well, Bruce knew more about this stuff than he did himself.

“Probably,” the morale officer said. “And they’ve got-how many of ’em?”

“Too many, that’s for sure,” Frank said gloomily. “Could’ve been in the woods, could’ve been inside Frankfurt somewhere, could’ve been…any place at all, near enough. Gevalt!”

“Brass’re gonna spit rivets when they see this,” Lou said.

“Now tell me one I don’t know,” his superior replied. “Half of me thinks we just ought to ditch this film, pretend we never got it.”

“Except that’d be curtains for Cunningham,” Lou said.

“Yeah.” Captain Frank sighed heavily. “But it’s curtains for him anyway, if those Nazi shitheads follow through. You think we’ll get out of Germany to keep them from shooting a hostage? Don’t make me laugh.”

Lou didn’t think so, not for a minute. But something else occurred to him. “If Bruce here is right-and I bet he is-this isn’t the only copy around. If another surfaces after we make this one disappear, we’ll spend the rest of our days in Leavenworth, making big ones into little ones.”

Frank sighed again. “Well, you ain’t wrong. I wish like hell you were. All right, already. I’ll kick it up the line. Somebody with more rank than me can figure out where we go from here.” He paused to light a cigarette and smoked half of it in short, savage puffs. “And you’re right about something else, too, goddammit.”

“What’s that, sir?”

“Any which way, poor Cunningham’s fucked.”

Fraternizing remained against regulations for GIs. THAT didn’t mean as much as the brass wished it did. The Americans occupying Germany were as horny as any other young men. They had a prostrate nation at their feet. And plenty of Frauleins were cute and persuadable. Quite a few didn’t need much persuading. They figured lying down with one of the conquerors was the best way to land on their feet. More often than not, they turned out to be right.

The same held true for American reporters, only more so. The occupying authorities couldn’t give them orders against fraternizing. Some had wives back home but didn’t care. Tom Schmidt was single and thirty-two. Sometimes he felt like a kid in a candy store. Sometimes he was a lot happier than that.

His latest flame, Ilse, was small and dark and slim-skinny, if you wanted to get right down to it. There weren’t many fat Germans these days, and a lot of the ones who were fat had been Party Bonzen and weren’t to be trusted. Ilse was close to his age. She didn’t wear a ring, but a pale circlet on the third finger of her left hand said she had. Had Fritz or Karl gone to the Eastern Front and not come home? Or did he lie in or under some field in Normandy? Ilse hadn’t volunteered answers, and Tom hadn’t gone looking for them. As long as she said yes often enough, he didn’t require anything else.

She lived in a cellar. Most surviving Nurembergers did, because so much above ground was only wreckage. She had a couple of lanterns and a little coal stove that kept the place warm enough. Thanks to Tom, she had plenty of fuel for them, and plenty to cook on the little stove.

He sometimes wondered whether one person could eat that much and stay that skinny. But if she had kids, he never saw them. He never saw their clothes or toys when he came to call. Again, he didn’t push it. No, answers weren’t what he wanted from her.

There weren’t many places to take a girl for a date. No movie houses, except the ones for American soldiers. No fancy restaurants. The only public eateries open were soup kitchen-style places that served potatoes and cabbage and U.S. Army rations to keep people from starving. You could walk in the parks, if you didn’t mind bomb craters and shattered trees and a reek of death whenever the wind swung the wrong way.

Or you could get down to basics and go to bed. Tom didn’t mind. If that wasn’t a guy’s idea of heaven, he didn’t know what would be. Ilse never complained. If she had, he would have looked for someone else. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have other choices. Oh, no.

One evening, he brought her a carton of K-rations-less romantic than long-stemmed roses, maybe, but the way to a girl’s heart in occupied Germany. She received them with hugs and kisses and promises of even better things later on. Then she surprised him, saying, “And I have for you also etwas… something.” She’d learned some English in school before the war, then forgotten most of it till she turned out to need it again. Tom had about that much German. They managed.

“What is it, babe?” he asked now.

“I know not.” She gave him a small parcel wrapped in old newspapers.

He frowned. “Where’d you get it?”

“A man give it to me.” He knew what the look on his face must have said, because even by the light of two kerosene lanterns he could see her flush. Hastily, she went on, “Not that kind of man. Not a man I ever see before. He give. He say, ‘Give to the Amerikaner.’ He go.”

“Hah.” Tom wondered if he ought to open it. It was small for a bomb, but you never could tell. “What did he look like?”

“A man.” Ilse shrugged. “Not big. Not small. Like a man who go through the Krieg… the war.” That meant almost every male here from fourteen to sixty.

“Okay.” Tom wasn’t sure it was, but what else could he say? He pulled out a pocket knife to cut the string holding the parcel together, then tore the newspaper. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but a reel of movie film wasn’t it. “Huh!” He couldn’t do anything with it till he found somebody with a projector-probably somebody from the Army. “Would you recognize this guy if you saw him again?”

“What is ‘recognize’?” Ilse asked.

“Know. Uh, kennen.”

She thought. “Vielleicht. Um, it might be. Or it might not.”

He could watch the gears turning in her head. She was no dope. Who would give her something to give to an American reporter? Well, anybody might, but the best bet was one of Reinhard Heydrich’s merry men. And if you admitted to recognizing one of those bastards, you were much too likely to die before your time. No wonder she stayed cagey.

And a lot of her mind was on other things: “Shall I make for us supper?”

“Sure, babe. Go ahead,” Tom answered.

Ilse could do things with K-rats to turn Army cooks green with envy-Army cooks who didn’t just want to get the hell out of Germany and go home, that is, assuming there were any such animals. And Tom was able to show his appreciation in a way much more enjoyable than helping with the dishes (he’d done that once, but only once-having a man volunteer help with housework bewildered her).

Afterwards, sprawled over him warm and naked under the covers, Ilse said, “You will with this Kino-this film-careful be?”

“You betcha, sweetheart,” Tom assured her.

“Das ist gut.” She nodded seriously. “I do not want you to lose.”

Was that because he made a good meal ticket, or did she actually fancy him between the sheets? One more question Tom was liable to be better off not asking. Tom ran a hand along her slim curves and let it rest on her backside: almost like a boy’s but not quite. No, not quite. Let’s hear it for the difference, he thought. Aloud, he said, “Don’t you worry about a thing. I’ll be fine.”

One of the lanterns had gone out. The other was guttering low. Even in the dim red light remaining, he could read her expression: she thought she’d just heard something really and truly dumb. “Always I worry,” she said.

Tom needed a couple of days to track down a corporal whose duties included running movies to keep the GIs happy-well, happier. “Yeah, I can show you that,” the two-striper said, eyeing the reel. “What is it? Stag film?” The idea perked him up. “I can sure as hell show you that, buddy.”

And watch it yourself, too, Tom thought, amused. “I don’t know what it is. I got it in town.” He didn’t say anything about Ilse. “Run it and we’ll both find out.”

“Sound and everything-how about that?” the projectionist said as he set things up. “Gonna look a little washed out-this room ain’t as dark as it oughta be. Well, let’s see what we got.” He clicked a switch.

The projector whirred into action. Tom didn’t think a German would have handed Ilse a dirty movie to pass on to him, but he didn’t know what else to expect. It wasn’t a sweaty kraut grappling with a buxom blond Fraulein. It was…

“My name is Matthew Cunningham, private, U.S. Army. My serial number is-”

Tom gaped while the captured American soldier poured out the German Freedom Front’s demands. Only after the short film ended did he realize he should have been taking notes. He was sitting on the biggest story of the-what? Day? Week? Month? Not the year, not in 1945. But the biggest one since the Nuremberg Palace of Justice went up in smoke, anyhow.

“Run it again,” he said urgently.

“I dunno if I oughta,” the corporal answered. “You should take this straight to the brass.”

“I will.” Tom had no idea whether he’d keep the promise. “But I’ve got to know what’s in it first.”

“We oughta kill all of them kraut motherfuckers,” the GI said as he rewound the film. “Either that or get the hell outa here and let ’em kill each other off. I sure as shit wouldn’t mind seeing Rochester again, I’ll tell ya that.”

“You and Jack Benny both,” Tom said. The corporal laughed way more than the joke deserved. After horror, that often happened. And if Matthew Cunningham’s terrified face wasn’t the face of horror…then the shambling skeletons at Dachau and Belsen and the murder factories the Russians found in Poland were. The Nazis had so goddamn much to answer for. How could anybody turn his back on that? But how could anybody keep soaking up casualties after the surrender that wasn’t, either?

“My name is Matthew Cunningham, private, U.S. Army….”

“I am Nikolai Sergeyevich Golovko, Superior Private, Red Army….”

Vladimir Bokov watched the film to the end. It didn’t take long. Then he turned to Colonel Shteinberg, who’d summoned him to see it. “All right, Comrade Colonel. There it is. What are we going to do about it?”

Moisei Shteinberg steepled his fingertips. The senior NKVD officer had a pale, thin face, a blade of a nose, and a dark, heavy beard shadow. He looked like the Jew he was, in other words. “What would you recommend?” He could sound like a bruiser, yes. But, like a lot of Jews Bokov had known, he could also use Russian like a highly educated man.

“Well, it’s tough luck for Golovko, of course.” Captain Bokov dismissed the hostage right away. The Soviet Union wasn’t going to bend because some stupid senior private let himself get nabbed. The Nazis who’d taken him had to know that, too. They wouldn’t have bent, either-they also played for keeps. “The motherfuckers must be trying to put us in fear, or else to embarrass us.”

“Yes, I think so, too.” Even though Shteinberg often sounded tough, Bokov rarely heard him actually cuss. Listening to him, you were tempted to forget there was such a thing as mat. “How do you propose to make them change their minds?”

“How many from their organization are we holding?” Bokov asked.

“Here in Berlin, or all over our occupation zone?”

“I think Berlin will do, Comrade Colonel.”

“Eight or ten we’re sure of-I know we’ve cracked a couple of the bandits’ cells. Another few dozen who may or may not be involved. You know how it is.” Colonel Shteinberg shrugged. “Once you start arresting people, you may as well keep going. You don’t want to miss anybody by mistake.”

“Da.” Bokov nodded-he felt the same way. “Well, if it were up to me, I’d kill off three or four of the real ones and leave their heads or their balls or whatever for the Nazi pricks to find, along with a message saying they can expect twice as much the next time they want to screw around with us. Best way I can think of to pay back Nikolai Sergeyevich.”

Shteinberg paused to fill and light a pipe. Stalin smoked one, so a lot of Soviet officials naturally imitated him. Shteinberg brought it off better than most, maybe because Hebraic features weren’t so different from those common in the Caucasus. After a couple of meditative puffs, the Jew said, “Fuck your mother, but that’s a good notion. Go take care of it.”

Bokov’s jaw dropped. Just when he thought Shteinberg didn’t use mat, the Jew dropped the basic Russian obscenity on him. And he used it the way a real Russian would, too: to say something like This really needs doing, so handle it.

“I will, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov said. “Give me a written authorization to take the bastards out of prison and, ah, deal with them. And where do you think I should leave the, ah, remains? We want to make sure the message gets to the right people.”

Still puffing, Shteinberg scrawled the requisite order. “Anybody asks you questions, tell him to talk to me,” he said, handing Captain Bokov the scrap of paper. Bokov nodded again. He didn’t think anybody would quarrel with an NKVD officer, but the world could be a strange old place. His superior went on, “As for the other, put the bits…Hmm. There’s a place on Stalin Allee they use sometimes. That should get the message across.”

The USSR was busily turning its chunk of Germany into a proper Socialist state. Where it could, it used German Communists who’d survived the Nazi epoch. But it changed the landscape, too. Lots of streets in Soviet Berlin-and other places in eastern Germany-had new, Marxist-sounding names. Bokov hoped Hitler was spinning in his grave because Stalin had a street named for himself here in the Fascists’ capital. And, on Armistice Day, the Russians had unveiled a huge monument in the Tiergarten, commemorating the Red Army men who’d died taking Berlin away from the Hitlerites. Adolf’s ghost could look at that as much as it pleased.

Bokov brought his mind back to the business at hand. “Give me the address, sir. I’ll take care of everything.” He wouldn’t have even wiggled without orders. Now that he had them, he couldn’t get in trouble for carrying them out.

He turned out not to need to show the jailer Shteinberg’s authorization. “Do whatever you please with those people,” the man told him. “If you need to take them all, go ahead. I don’t want them around. The anti-Soviet bandits on the outside are liable to try and liberate them.”

“They won’t liberate these four fuckers, but you’ve got to hang on to the rest,” Bokov said. “We may sweat more out of them.”

“Yes, Comrade Captain.” The jailer was the one doing the sweating.

Bokov shot the prisoners, one after the other. He was no butcher, though. At his orders, a sergeant took care of the necessary mutilation. “These cunts have it coming, eh?” the underofficer said.

“Of course,” Bokov answered. The sergeant didn’t seem to care much one way or the other. He was just making conversation while he worked.

Carrying the relevant remains in a canvas duffel-a damned heavy duffel now-Bokov went out onto the chilly streets of Berlin. A large number of the men out and about were Red Army soldiers. With padded jackets and felt boots, they were equipped for worse weather than this. Most of them also carried either a rifle or a submachine gun. If anyone gave overt trouble, they were ready. But what could you do against a fanatic with a bomb under his clothes or in a pushcart-or, worst of all, against a fanatic driving a truck full of explosives?

Most German men mooched around in shabby, threadbare Wehrmacht greatcoats. German winter gear had been a joke the first year of the war, though Bokov doubted the Hitlerites thought it was funny. They’d got better at it later on, but their stuff was never as good as what the Red Army used.

Quite a few German women wore Wehrmacht greatcoats, too. The ones in civilian clothes looked as mousy as they could. They scuttled here and there like cockroaches, trying not to get far from a doorway or alley into which they could escape. Nothing like the orgy of rape that accompanied Berlin’s fall went on any more, but the local women stayed scared. Good, Bokov thought.

Four men in sharp Western suits and topcoats strolled up Stalin Allee, chattering in what had to be English. They stood out like peacocks in a flock of crows. One of them pulled out a notebook and wrote something in it.

Who does he think he is? the scandalized Bokov wondered. Can he spy so openly? But the American or Englishman or whatever he was certainly could. Russians could go freely into the U.S., British, and French zones in Berlin, and it worked the other way, too. That was just wrong. One of these days, somebody would have to do something about it.

Catching Bokov’s eye, one of the foreigners tipped his snap-brim fedora. The NKVD man wouldn’t have minded wearing a hat like that. It had style. He touched the brim of his own officer’s cap and walked on.

Idly, he wondered how well the Americans and British were dealing with bandit troubles in western Germany. He knew they had some; their papers, and those they permitted their Germans, gabbled about them in ways no Soviet censor would have tolerated for an instant. It surprised him. At the end of the war, the Nazis seemed eager to give up to the Western allies but went on fighting like maniacs against the USSR. Heydrich and his followers took on everyone. They really were fanatics, then. Bokov hoped they’d pay for it.

Finding the building he wanted wasn’t easy. Half the houses and shops and offices along Stalin Allee had been flattened or burned. A lot of the others had taken damage of one kind or another. Street numbers were few and far between.

He could have asked a Berliner. He snorted, fog bursting from his nose and mouth. He was damned if he would. Then he snorted again, on a higher note. A Berliner wasn’t just somebody from Berlin. It was also the local word for a jelly doughnut. He could have done with one of those right now.

He finally found what had to be the place. By the way people went in and out, it looked to be a cheap eatery, or maybe a tavern. That made some sense. The fanatics could use the flow of customers to hide whatever they were up to.

Bokov went in. It was a tavern, one of the shoddiest excuses for one he’d ever seen. Three men scurried out a hole in the side wall as soon as they glimpsed his uniform. The bruiser behind the bar kept his hands out of sight. What did he have under there? A Schmeisser? Bokov wouldn’t have been surprised.

In his best German, he said, “There’s a cordon around this place. They’ve already nabbed the rats who ran. If I don’t come out in ten minutes, nobody here will like what happens next.” He was bluffing, but the Germans didn’t know that. He hoped.

“So what’ll it be, then?” the barman asked.

“Beer,” Bokov answered. If they had anything, they had that.

He laid a ten-mark occupation note on the bar. The man took it and started to make change. Bokov waved for him not to bother. With a grunt, the fellow gave him a seidel. “Drink fast,” he suggested.

“Don’t worry-I will.” Bokov did. The beer was surprisingly good. He set the duffel down beside him and turned a little to one side to keep an eye on the men sitting at the battered table. They watched him, too.

“You got your nerve, Ivan, poking your nose in here,” the barman said.

With a shrug, Bokov set down the mug. “All part of a day’s work.” He started out.

“You forgot something,” a man called after him.

“Keep it. You’ll know who needs to hear about it, anyhow.” Bokov didn’t sigh with relief till he’d got a hundred meters away.