The Man with the Iron Heart

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New Year’s Eve. New Year’s Day. The big holiday in the Soviet year. Behind Christmas in the Gregorian calendar, but conveniently ahead of the old Julian reckoning the Orthodox used. This year, celebrating the slide from 1945, the year of victory, to 1946, the year of…what? The year when the Soviet Union didn’t need to worry about victory any more. Not much, anyhow.

And, here in Berlin, the year where the Russians could celebrate in style. Here where Fascism had grown, here where it had done its bloody-handed best to annul the Revolution and destroy the Soviet people…How many officers would swill up the loot of a conquered country? How many frightened German barmen would pour the drinks? How many frightened German barmaids would serve them? How many of those frightened German barmaids would serve the conquerors in other ways later on, whether they much wanted to or not?

Three days earlier, Vladimir Bokov had been looking forward to getting his own drunken blowjob from some blond German bitch. Life wasn’t fair. He’d thought so for a long time. Now he was sure of it. Instead of going off and drinking till he puked and getting his cock sucked, he lay tossing on the meager mattress of a steel-framed cot, knocked flat by the nastiest case of influenza he’d ever had.

Colonel Shteinberg lay one cot to his left. Shteinberg looked like hell. No doubt Bokov looked like hell, too, but he couldn’t see himself. He and his superior were both running a fever close to forty Celsius. Bokov’s head ached. So did every other part of him. Sometimes he shivered and wished he had more blankets. Five minutes later, sweat would river off of him.

He was, in short, a mess. So was Moisei Shteinberg. The only difference between them was that Bokov remembered liking Christmas when he was a small, small boy before the Revolution. Shteinberg never would have given a damn about it.

A male nurse-a Red Army private who’d done something wrong and was lucky not to have drawn some worse punishment-brought them aspirins and glasses of heavily sugared hot tea. The tea stayed down. Some of the other things Bokov had tried didn’t want to. He had vivid memories of that, and wished he didn’t.

The sullen nurse moved no faster than he had to. No doubt he wished he were out carousing, too. And he had plenty to keep him busy. Bokov and Shteinberg weren’t the only ones down with the grippe-not even close. As the aspirins lent Bokov’s wits brief clarity, he thought, You’ll probably catch it yourself, you sorry fucker.

“This is shit,” Colonel Shteinberg said-maybe the little white tablets were also helping him think straighter. “We’ll be flat on our backs for days more, and then feeling steamrollered for another week after that. Pure shit, nothing else but.”

“Don’t worry about it, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov said.

Shteinberg gave him a bleary stare. “Don’t worry? Are you out of your mind? Why not?” He plucked at the cold compress on his forehead-except, if it was anything like Bokov’s, it wasn’t cold any more.

“Because all the officers out drinking tonight will be just as bad off as we are,” Bokov answered. “They’ll have more fun getting there”-no German girl was going to suck him off tonight, not when he couldn’t get it up with a crane-“but they’ll be fucked over, too.”

“Maybe,” Shteinberg said grudgingly. “But do you suppose the stinking Heydrichite fanatics will drink themselves blind tonight? Not likely! They’re no fools, damn them-they know how we do things. And you just wait and see if they don’t try something while we’re plastered out of our minds.”

That struck Captain Bokov as much too likely. He shrugged anyway. It hurt-but what didn’t right now? This was even worse than a hangover, and he hadn’t even had the pleasure of getting plastered himself. Definitely unfair.

“Comrade Colonel, the two of us can’t do a thing about it,” he said.

“Too right we can’t,” Shteinberg agreed. “I feel like dogshit.”

“Da.” Bokov looked around for that private. He wanted more tea, and he wanted his compress soaked in cold water again-or, better yet, in the snow outside.

He didn’t see the fellow. Where the devil had he gone? Was he off smoking a cigarette? Or had he cached a flask somewhere? Was he swigging right this second? Bokov’s spirit lusted after vodka. His body told his spirit it had to be kidding. Sometimes you had to listen to your body, even if you didn’t want to.

The orderly came back. He didn’t look so sullen now. Sure as hell, he’d found some way to make himself feel better. And if the men he was supposed to be taking care of got short shrift, that was their hard luck. They were already sick, weren’t they?

Bokov drifted into a restless, uneasy sleep-the only kind he’d had since this miserable thing landed on him like a Katyusha rocket. His dreams were confused and dark. That was all he remembered of them.

Then a doctor with a thin, clever Jewish face much like Colonel Shteinberg’s was shaking him awake. Another doctor, this one an authentic Slav, was waking the NKVD colonel. “Get up,” the Jew told Bokov. “We need you.”

“What is it?” Bokov tried to sit up. His head swam. “I beg your pardon, Comrade Physician. I am not well.” He gulped, hoping the juices in his stomach would stay down. He wasn’t kidding, not even a little bit. In the next bed, Shteinberg was also feebly protesting.

“You don’t have time to be sick,” the Jewish doctor said bluntly. “The fucking Nazis have poisoned half the officer corps in Berlin, maybe more. You’ve got to track them down and pay them back. Give me your arm.”

“Bozhemoi! How?” Bokov exclaimed. Automatically, he stuck out his left arm. The doctor undid the cuff on his uniform tunic, then rolled up his sleeve and tapped at the inside of his elbow to bring up the veins there. As soon as he found one, he stuck a hypodermic needle into it and pushed in the plunger. Bokov shook, not only from the influenza but also because he flat-out hated needles. The doctor knew his stuff; he didn’t let the hypodermic slip out of the vein till he’d finished the injection. “What did you shoot me with?” Bokov asked. “I didn’t think there was any medicine for the grippe.”

“There isn’t,” the doctor said. “You’ll still be sick. But with enough benzedrine in you, you’ll be able to work anyhow. We’ll feed you pills from now on, but we want to get you up and moving right away.”

He knew how to get what he wanted. The dose he shot into Bokov was brutally effective. The NKVD man’s heart pounded as if he’d drunk fifty cups of strong coffee all at once. His snot dried up. So did his mouth. So did his eyeballs. His brain felt on fire. He knew he still had the influenza. He also knew he’d have to pay for this artificial vitality, and that he’d be even sorrier later than he was before the injection. But all that would wait. Right this second, he was raring to go.

“Poisoned? How?” he demanded. Far from being fuzzy with sickness, his wits raced at triple time. He beat the doctor to the answer: “Fuck my mother if they didn’t put something in the booze for the New Year’s bash!”

“Right the first time-wood alcohol,” the Jew said. “Lots and lots of wood alcohol. They must have been setting this up for weeks, the fucking cunts. It’s the best thing in the world to use if you’re poisoning liquor. You won’t notice it while you’re drinking. Most people even like the taste. But afterwards…Afterwards, it’ll kill you if you drink enough. And it’ll leave you blind even if you don’t.”

Bokov nodded. He knew what wood alcohol could do. Plenty of illicit liquor got cooked up in the Soviet Union. Some of it was as good as any you could buy in the government stores. Some was better: a labor of love. But some was pure poison. He’d heard people say you could get rid of the bad stuff if you filtered booze through a loaf of black bread. Bokov didn’t know whether that was true-he’d never tried it. He did know they wouldn’t have filtered their drinks at the New Year’s feast. They’d have poured them down as fast as they could.

Over in the next bed, Colonel Shteinberg had also risen like a drug-fueled Lazarus. “You will have held the bartenders and the serving women?” he demanded of the doctor who’d injected him back to life.

The only answer he got was a broad-shouldered shrug. “They told me to run my cock over here and start your motor,” the man answered. “I don’t know what all else they’re doing. If it weren’t for the commotion in the hall, they wouldn’t even’ve told me how come I had to do that.”

Like so many Red Army officers, he’d carried out his orders precisely and to the letter, and hadn’t taken one step beyond them. Stalin had terrified initiative out of the whole country. If being wrong landed you in the gulag, you couldn’t take the chance. That kind of caution had cost casualties, maybe even battles. What would it cost here?

Would anybody at the banquet hall have kept his head enough to think to make the necessary arrests? Bokov had to hope so. (Would the barmen and barmaids have been the ones who poisoned the liquor? No way to know till you started hurting them.)

“Come on,” Shteinberg said, and then, “Where the devil are my valenki?” Bokov had already found his own felt boots under his cot. He was pulling them on. His superior grunted when he came up with his.

“Here.” The Jewish doctor gave Bokov a vial of pills. “Take two of these whenever you start slowing down. They’ll keep you going for three or four days. Eat a lot. Drink a lot. If you were an airplane, you’d be running on your reserve tank.”

“Right.” Bokov could feel that. He wrapped his greatcoat around himself. “Ready, Comrade Colonel?”

“You’d best believe it.” Shteinberg barked hard, mirthless laughter. “See? We get to go to the party after all.”

“Just what I wanted,” Bokov said in a hollow voice. Benzedrine or no benzedrine, the colonel’s chuckle also sounded less lively than it might have.

A jeep waited outside the barracks. Bokov and Shteinberg piled in. the jeep took off toward the south and west. “Potsdam?” Shteinberg asked. “Again?”

“Yes, sir. That palace with the German name,” the driver answered.

“The Schloss Cecilienhof.” Bokov didn’t make it a question. The Red Army noncom behind the wheel nodded. Bokov muttered. That was where Stalin had met with the American President and British Prime Minister. More recently-not even two months ago now-the Red Army had celebrated the anniversary of the Russian Revolution there. And now this.

“We got careless. We got predictable.” Moisei Shteinberg took the words out of his mouth. “We came back to the same place three times in a row, and the fucking Nazis went and made us pay.”

“Somebody should answer for that, sir,” the noncom said. “Even in the trenches, you don’t stick your head up in the same place three times. A sniper’ll put one through your ear if you’re dumb enough to try it.”

Voice dry as the inside of his own mouth, Bokov said, “Whoever planned our party would have gone to it himself. Chances are decent he’s a casualty, too.”

He was shivering by the time the jeep got to the Cecilienhof. It wasn’t just the cold-it was the influenza trying to jump on him again. He choked down two of the pills the doctor had given him. Colonel Shteinberg did the same thing.

They had to pass through several belts of security. That would have been funny if it weren’t so grim. No fanatics could get in and shoot up the place-but nobody’d bothered to vet the booze. Shteinberg said it: they’d got careless. And they’d played right into the bandits’ hands.

An English country house for the Kaiser’s daughter-in-law: that was how the Schloss Cecilienhof got started, just before World War I. Country house, nothing, Bokov thought, the benzedrine making his heart drum again. It’s a goddamn country palace, is what it is.

And, at the moment, it was a country palace in one of the nastier districts of hell. Spotlights spread harsh light on the snow-covered grounds around the main buildings-and on the uniformed bodies stacked there like cordwood. One of the bodies wasn’t uniformed, but wore black tie and boiled shirt. A barman had poured it down on the sly…and got what the officers he was serving got. “He didn’t know the shit was poisoned,” Bokov said, pointing to the corpse in the fancy suit.

“You wouldn’t expect many to,” Shteinberg answered. “Some American said three can keep a secret if two of them are dead. He knew what he was talking about.”

“Sensible, for an American,” Bokov said. He jumped down from the jeep. The noises from inside the Cecilienhof sounded like something from a low-rent district in hell, too. He didn’t want to go in there, and he knew he had to. Then he stopped almost in spite of himself. “Comrade Colonel, tell me-please tell me-that isn’t Marshal Zhukov.”

“It is.” Shteinberg’s voice was hard and flat. “The revenge Stalin will take…Unless…” He quickly shook his head and went inside.

Unless what? Bokov wondered. Unless Stalin decided to get rid of the popular Zhukov and blame it on the Heydrichites? Was that what the other NKVD man meant? Even if it was, Bokov didn’t believe it. If Stalin wanted Zhukov shot, shot Zhukov would be, and never mind that he was the leading soldier in the Red Army. But that Bokov could wonder-and that Shteinberg could, too-spoke volumes about how the system they lived under worked.

Bokov had no time to read those volumes, and no interest in them. He was, after all, part of the system himself. He followed his superior into the Cecilienhof.

It was as bad as he’d expected, maybe worse. The palace stank of sweat and smoke and vomit and shit. Men reeled here and there, some clutching their bellies, others rubbing frantically at their eyes. “Who turned out the lights?” a major shouted furiously. The lights were blazing. His eyes had gone dark. Wood alcohol, sure as the devil, Bokov thought.

“The NKVD men!” a sergeant shouted. “They’ll take over!”

“Thank God!” another noncom exclaimed. Now the monkey’s off our backs, he meant. Nobody could blame the poor underofficers for screwing up if they weren’t in charge.

“No officers here still on the job?” Shteinberg asked, in the tones of a man hoping against hope.

But the two noncoms shook their heads. Bokov wasn’t surprised, either. Why else would a man come to a New Year’s festival, except to drink himself blind? And how many Red Army officers had done just that here tonight?

“Have you got the Germans under guard?” Bokov asked.

The two underofficers gave each other apprehensive looks. “Comrade Captain, we have…some of them,” answered the one who’d spoken first. “Some went home before people started getting sick.” He paused unhappily. “Some may have slipped out when the Devil’s grandfather got loose, too. Things were pretty confused there for a while.”

Whenever a Russian hauled the Devil’s kin into a conversation, he knew he was in the middle of a mess. Bokov knew it, too. As far as he could see, things were still plenty confused. Part of him wanted to lie down and forget about everything but the influenza. But neither duty nor benzedrine would let him.

A word from him or Shteinberg could destroy these noncoms. What point, though? They hadn’t done anything wrong. Most of the ones who had screwed up were poisoned, which served them right. If I weren’t sick, I’d be poisoned, too, Bokov thought.

“Comrade Captain, what do we do if the Nazi bandits rise up now?” the other conscript asked. “Who’d give orders to help us fight back?”

“People like you,” Bokov answered. “And if they try it, we’ll whip them right out of their boots. I hope they do-fuck your mother if I don’t. If they come out and fight fair, we’ll smash them like the cockroaches they are. The one way they can hurt us is by sneaking around like this.”

“Unfortunately, they’re too damned good at sneaking.” Colonel Shteinberg’s voice was dry as usual. Only the way his hands shook and the unnatural glitter in his eyes told of the war between disease and drugs inside him. He went on, “Take us to the Germans. Let’s see what we can get out of them.”

Guards with submachine guns stood outside the door to the room where the servers were corralled. Nobody was going anywhere now. Of course, it was much too likely that anyone with guilty knowledge had already got away. As Bokov and Shteinberg went in, one of the guards muttered to another: “Never thought I’d be glad to see the damned Chekists get here.”

“Shut up,” the other fellow hissed. “They’ll hear you.”

If Bokov didn’t have bigger things to worry about…But he did. If Moisei Shteinberg heard the whispers from the Red Army men, he also gave no sign.

Inside the splendid chamber-a plaque said it had been the smoking room-huddled a gaggle of scared-looking Fritzes. Bokov nodded glumly to himself: sure as hell, the women were chosen for looks and figures. The Red Army men in charge were careful about that. About some other things, things that turned out to matter more, they weren’t.

Colonel Shteinberg pointed to one of the women, a statuesque brunette. “You, bitch-come outside with us,” he snarled. He wasn’t really speaking German at all, but Yiddish. She’d be able to follow it, though. And it ought to frighten her even more. Most Germans hadn’t had anything direct to do with killing Jews. But they’d had a notion of what was going on even so. They didn’t like the idea of Jews holding power over them now. They feared revenge-and well they might.

Her lower lip trembled, but she came. As soon as she got out into the hall and the door closed behind her, Bokov slapped her in the face. She stared at him, her mouth an O of injured astonishment. She had eyes green as jade.

She didn’t squawk, which wasn’t what he wanted. “Scream your head off,” he told her. “Give those other pigdogs back there something to worry about.”

When she obeyed, he felt as if he were standing in front of an air-raid siren. “Enough, already!” Shteinberg said, and she shut it off as abruptly as she’d let loose. The Jewish NKVD man went on, “So you’re one of the ones who thought you could wipe out the Red Army, eh?”

“I work in a shoe factory,” the dark-haired woman said. “One of your men pulled me out and said he would shoot my little son if I didn’t come here and give your officers drinks and-” She stopped, then made herself finish: “-and anything else they wanted.”

Bokov didn’t know if she was telling the truth. Her story sounded as if she could be, though. “Tell us what happened here,” he said.

“They gave me these clothes to wear,” she said. The black and white maid’s outfit didn’t cover that much of her. After a sigh, she continued, “I brought drinks. I brought food. I got groped a couple of times, but nothing worse.”

The Red Army officers would still have been more or less sober. And the sour resignation in the woman’s voice said she might have been on the receiving end of worse when the Russians took Berlin. Nobody knew how many rapes there’d been then. A lot, though; no doubt of that.

“Go on,” Bokov told her. “When did people start getting sick?”

“A little before midnight,” she answered. “At first we thought it was because they were drinking like…well, because they were drinking so much.” She had sense enough not to tell a Russian that Russians drank like swine. But Bokov already knew that-knew it from experience. He could have been lying out there stiffening in the snow himself. When he remembered how much he’d looked forward to this feast, and how pissed off he’d been when he came down sick…When he remembered all that, he quickly thought about something else.

“Do you know any of the people-the Germans, I mean-who got out of here before the poison showed itself?” he asked.

“Nein, mein Herr.” Curls bobbed back and forth as the woman shook her head. “I never saw any of them before. Your man must have liked my looks and thought I would make a good whore here.” She looked defiance at him, daring him to deny that was what the Red Army man had in mind. When Bokov just waited, she shrugged and went on, “I think most of the women got picked that way. The men behind the bar might be a different story. They didn’t get chosen for their looks, anyhow.”

She made good sense, even if she was trying to get the NKVD men to leave her alone. Colonel Shteinberg went back into the smoking room, presumably to grab one of the barmen.

Bokov carried on alone with her. “Show me your papers,” he snapped. He wrote down her name: Elfriede Taubenschlag, a hell of a mouthful. Then he said, “So you have a boy, eh? Where’s your husband?”

“He died in an air raid last year,” she answered bleakly. “He was home, getting over a wound, and he was out drinking beer with some other soldiers in the same boat, and the tavern got hit. I think most of what we buried was him. I hope so.”

If she was looking for sympathy, she was looking in the wrong place. Bokov slapped her again, almost hard enough to knock her over. “Hitler shouldn’t have started the war if he didn’t want it to come home,” he snapped.

“If you treat us like this, no wonder we give you poison,” she said.

This time, he did knock her down. She might not have wanted to yelp, but she did anyway. Bokov had to fight the urge to murder her right there. If he hadn’t thought it came from the benzedrine roaring through him, he wouldn’t have bothered fighting. “We’ll kill all of you if we need to, cunt. Nobody’d miss you a bit. It’s what you tried to do to us.”

Elfriede Taubenschlag kept quiet. She could see he would kill her if she argued. He could read her face, now bruised, too. Like so many Germans, she wasn’t sorry Hitler had started the war. She only regretted losing.

Bokov shoved her back toward the smoking room. “Any luck?” Colonel Shteinberg asked him, pausing with a barman whose flat nose and scarred forehead said he’d done some prizefighting.

“Not much,” Bokov answered, eyeing the German to see if he followed Russian. Seeing no signs of that, he went on, “Since the bitches were chosen for their looks, the barmen look like a better bet.”

“So we’ll see what Uwe here knows,” Shteinberg said. Then he fell back into rasping, guttural Yiddish: “And if he doesn’t sing like a damned canary, we’ll see how he likes Siberia.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’,” Uwe said-like most Germans, he had no trouble with the Jews’ dialect.

“No, huh? If we strip off your monkey suit, will we find an SS tattoo under your armpit?” Shteinberg asked. The Red Army often liquidated SS men it captured. As the war wound down toward disaster for them, some of the Nazi supermen had their blood-group marking surgically removed so it wouldn’t betray them. But a fresh scar right there could also be a death sentence.

“Got no tattoos,” Uwe said stolidly. He pulled up one trouser leg to show he did have an artificial foot. “Goddamn French 75 nailed me outside of Dunkirk in 1940. I tended bar ever since I got out of the hospital. Even the Volkssturm wouldn’t take me with a leg and a half.”

Bokov had thought the only prerequisite for the Germans’ last-ditch militia was a detectable pulse, but maybe he was wrong. The answer didn’t faze Shteinberg, who asked, “How about Heydrich’s crowd? You don’t have to run fast to pour wood alcohol into the vodka.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about that, and I ain’t no fuckin’ Werewolf,” Uwe said. “Fuckin’ war’s over. We lost. All I want to do is get on with my life.”

“If you know who poisoned it, you’ll live better,” the Jew told him. “We help people who help us.”

Uwe grunted. “Happens I know a couple of dykes who’re pretty much Reds. They make it through the war without the SS grabbing ’em. Red Army shoots its way into Berlin at last. Dykes come out waving and yelling, ‘Kamerad!’ Know what happens next? They get gangbanged. Believing Goebbels’ bullshit cost me my foot. What do I win for believing yours?”

A trip to the gulag, Bokov thought. You ran your mouth like that, you were asking for it. “Let’s see your papers,” Bokov said. “We may want to ask you more questions later, and we’ll need to know where to find you.”

By his documents, the German was Uwe Kupferstein. Bokov carefully noted his name and address. He didn’t know whether they’d need to question Kupferstein some more or just stuff him onto an eastbound train so he could see how he liked life as a zek. Well, that was a worry for another time.

“How are you doing?” Shteinberg asked as the barman stumped back away. The fellow had had practice with that foot; he hardly limped at all.

“I’ve been better, Comrade Colonel, but I’ll keep going as long as the pills let me,” Bokov answered. “How are you?”

“About the same.” The Jew sighed and clicked his tongue between his teeth. “We won’t find the answers here tonight-this morning, I should say.” The eastern horizon was starting to lighten.

“I don’t suppose we will, either.” Bokov sighed, too. “But we’ve got to try.”

“Oh, yes. And we have to be seen trying, too.” Maybe the influenza and the benzedrine were what made Shteinberg sail close to the edge: sail over it, really. Shaking his head at what had come out of his mouth, he added, “Let’s go interrogate two more.” Feeling in his pocket to make sure he still had the vial the doctor had given him, Bokov followed him back to the smoking room.

When Lou Weissberg passed from the zone to the British, the way the Tommies inspected his papers and examined his jeep told him things were just as rugged here as they were where he’d come from. “Having fun with the diehards, are you?” he said.

To his way of thinking, the corporal checking his documents had his chevrons on upside down. The man was pale, almost pasty, and had an ugly scar on his left cheek. He wore a new-style British helmet, halfway between the old tin hat and the American pot. “Too bloody right we are,” he answered, his accent even further from Lou’s than Toby Benton’s drawl was. “When we catch them, they die hard, all right.”

Officially, the Americans didn’t do things like that. Germans caught in arms after the surrender weren’t legally POWs-they were classed as enemy combatants instead. Still, orders were to give them at least a drumhead hearing before shooting them. Lou happened to know those orders didn’t always get observed. The French thought their mere existence absurd: Frenchmen were practical people. Evidently Englishmen were, too.

“You seem to pass muster, Leftenant.” Yes, the corporal spoke English, but not the kind a Yank from New Jersey would use. He gestured with his Sten gun. “Pass on-and for Christ’s sake keep your bleedin’ eyes open.”

“Always good advice,” Lou agreed. He tapped his driver on the shoulder. “On to Cologne.”

“Yes, sir.” The driver had make jokes about smells and perfume till Lou was sick of them. For a wonder, the guy seemed to realize as much, and cut it out. Maybe the age of miracles wasn’t dead after all.

The British zone lay northwest of the bigger stretch of territory the USA administered. Signs in German lined the road. THE FANATICS HURT YOU! they said, and THE WAR IS OVER, and DON’T LET THE MADMEN GET AWAY WITH IT. Lou didn’t know how much the propaganda helped, but it sure couldn’t hurt. He wished U.S. military authorities were trying more of the same thing.

There’d been more fighting here than in most of the American zone. Wrecked trucks and tanks-U.S., British, and German-still lay by the side of the road and in the fields. They made Lou nervous: too many of them offered perfect hiding places for a diehard with a Panzerschreck or a Schmeisser or even a Molotov cocktail. Hastily dug graves were scattered over the countryside, some still marked by no more than a bayoneted rifle thrust into fresh-dug earth, sometimes with a helmet on it, sometimes without.

Only makeshift bridges led across the Rhine to Cologne. Bombing had destroyed some of the real ones, and the Nazis the rest. In the Rhineland, relatively close to England, Cologne had got the hell bombed out of it all through the war, and then the Germans fought in the ruins. Lou hadn’t thought a city could be in worse shape than Nuremberg, but this one was.

He presented his papers at an enormous tent near the ruins of the train station. “Care for a glass of beer?” asked the British Intelligence major who cleared him.

“I’d love one. Thanks,” Lou answered. “Although after what the Jerries did to Ivan last week…”

“They’ve played with poisoned liquor here, too. Haven’t they in your zone?”

“Yeah, but with hard stuff, not beer. And they’ve done it by nickels and dimes, not all at once like they did with the Russians.”

“By nickels and dimes,” the major murmured. Lou realized people from the other side of the Atlantic sometimes needed to pause and decipher American lingo, too.

The beer was excellent, far better than anything you could get back in the States. The Germans might be murderous, “Heil!”-screaming brutes, but by God they could brew.

Lou was halfway down his stein when the man he was waiting for strode into the tent. The British major-his name was Hudgeons-introduced them in fluent German: “Herr Adenauer, this is Oberleutnant Weissberg, of U.S. Counter-Intelligence. Oberleutnant, this is Konrad Adenauer, former lord mayor of Cologne, former denizen of one of the late regime’s concentration camps, and current founder of the Christian Democratic Union.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Lou said. Most Germans these days claimed to have been anti-Nazi. Adenauer really had been. He was around seventy, with thin, foxy features and a perpetually worried air. Well, he’d earned the right to that.

“A lieutenant,” Adenauer said sadly. “Well, I suppose I am pleased to meet you, too. Not your fault your superiors don’t take this more seriously.” No matter what he claimed, he was affronted. Europeans set more stock on status and rank than Americans did; Lou’d seen that before. Adenauer thought he deserved a colonel or something. Chances were he was right, too.

“Tell me about your new party, Herr Adenauer,” Lou urged.

“Before 1933, I belonged to the Catholic Center. Thanks to the Nazis, though, this party is now kaput. No point trying to make a dead body into Lazarus,” Adenauer said, and Lou nodded. He only wished the Nazis made as quiet a corpse as the Catholic Center Party did. Hudgeons’ batman or whatever the noncom was called fetched Adenauer a mug of beer. After a healthy swig, the German went on, “So we try something new, eh? Germany needs a responsible conservative party. We will not work with those, ah, to the right of us. We know better.”

“Hope so,” Lou said. Back in 1933, plenty of conservatives thought they could work with the Nazis. Hitler’s henchmen chewed them up and swallowed them.

“We do-from experience,” Adenauer said. “If Germany is to become a democracy-a proper democracy-she must sooner or later have her own parties. And they must be independent, and be seen to be independent. Otherwise, our folk will think they are tools of the occupiers, and will not want much to do with them. They will instead work with Heydrich’s maniacs…and with those on the left. We also aim to form a bulwark against Communism.”

Maybe the American occupation authorities had sent Lou to Cologne instead of somebody more senior so they wouldn’t seem too interested in the Christian Democratic Union. That was possible, but Lou didn’t believe it. His superiors didn’t have the subtlety for a move like that. They were paying for the lack, too.

“Heydrich’s goons take Konrad seriously,” Major Hudgeons put in. “A bloke with a bomb under his clothes tried to take him out, but the bloody thing didn’t go off. We nabbed him, and we’ve learned some interesting things about how the fanatics operate in our zone.”

“I lit a candle in the church of St. Pantaleon to thank the Lord for sparing me,” Adenauer said. “I take it as a sign that I am meant to succeed. And if I fail, what is left for Germany but the old dreadful choice between brownshirts and Reds?”

“Sooner or later-sooner, with luck-Germany will need to stand on her own two feet again,” Hudgeons said. “So we see it, anyhow. The only other choice is sitting on this country forever, and that would be…difficult.”

Lou thought it was just what Germany deserved. Whether the rest of the USA felt the same way was liable to be a different story. People with picket signs marching in front of the White House? Congressmen and Senators with them? If they’d done that while the war was still going, it would have been treason, or something close to it. It still felt that way to Lou, even though the fighting was officially over. But more and more Americans seemed to think otherwise. And fewer and fewer dogfaces on occupation duty wanted to do anything more than pack up and go home in one piece.

“We can stand up, stand alongside of the United States and Britain and France as a free and prosperous democracy,” Adenauer said. “We can. But we will not, not until people are able to go about their business without worrying whether a fanatic will blow himself up in the market square or explode a truck in front of the church on Sunday morning. However much you may hate it, fear is a weapon.”

He had a point. Lou wished he knew how to keep Heydrich’s men from making everybody else afraid. No one seemed to know how to do that, not yet. Could something like the Christian Democratic Union make a difference? Lou didn’t know-but if it could, he was all for it.