The Man with the Iron Heart

XXVI

President Truman had a high, raspy, annoying voice. Diana McGraw had never really thought of it that way till after Pat got killed, but she sure did now. Of course, for the past couple of years Truman had been saying things she didn’t like and didn’t agree with. That made a difference, whether she thought so or not.

“We will carry the President’s radio address live at the top of the hour,” the radio announcer said, sounding as proud as if Truman were Moses about to read the brand new Ten Commandments on his station.

Even stolid Ed snorted at the fellow’s tone. “Are we supposed to get excited, or what? It’s not like Truman can do a Fireside Chat or anything.”

“Not likely!” Diana exclaimed. “When FDR said something, you wanted to believe him. Whenever Truman opens his mouth, you know he’s going to lie to you. That’s all he knows how to do.”

The radio filled up most of the time till the top of the hour with commercials. In a way, Diana supposed that was good: it meant there were plenty of things to buy again. During the war, a lot of normal stuff had been unavailable-and a lot of ads went away. Diana had to admit she hadn’t missed them. Now the stuff was back, and so were the pitchmen trying to convince people it was wonderful. Everybody knew the war was over…except the stubborn Missouri mule-no, jackass-in the White House.

At last, and precisely as if he were selling soap or cigarettes, the announcer said, “And here is the President of the United States!”

A long electric hiss. A burst of static, cut off almost instantly. Then Harry Truman’s voice came out of the radio speaker: “Good evening, my fellow citizens. The Nazis still lurking in Germany have proved again how dangerous they are. Laughing at the very idea of justice, they flew a C-47 into the building where their captured leaders would have gotten a fairer trial than any they gave their countless victims. This C-47 was hijacked in the air. As best we can determine, the American pilot and copilot were both callously murdered. The Nazis seem to have been able to smuggle extra explosives onto the airplane. We are still investigating how they did it.”

“Because somebody who should’ve kept his eyes open was asleep at the…darn switch,” Ed McGraw said. “Anybody can see that.”

If anybody can see it, why did you say it? Diana wondered-one more thought she wouldn’t have had before a death in Germany turned things upside down and inside out for her. All she said out loud was a quick, “Hush. I want to hear him.”

“Much as we wish they weren’t, the Nazi fanatics are still dangerous,” Truman went on. “Because they are, our soldiers need to stay in Germany until we can be sure the country will stay peaceful and democratic-that’s ‘democratic’ with a small ‘d’-after we go home.”

“They wouldn’t be fighting if we weren’t there to give them big, fat, juicy targets!” Diana burst out.

“Some people will say the fanatics wouldn’t still be fighting if we weren’t in Germany,” Truman said, as if he were sitting in the kitchen with the McGraws.

Ed chuckled and lit a cigarette. “They oughta put you in the White House, babe.”

“How could I do worse?” Diana said. “It wouldn’t be easy.”

“The Republican Party in Congress seems to feel that way,” Truman said.

“Not just Republicans! Not even close!” Diana said hotly.

“It would be nice if the world were so simple. Or it would be nice if the Republicans weren’t so simple.” Truman wouldn’t-didn’t-miss a chance to throw darts at the opposition. “But the fact is, the Nazis have a long history of attacking anybody and everybody they can reach. The world knows that, to its sorrow.”

“We’ve got the atom bomb. They don’t,” Diana said.

“If we run away from Germany, the first thing the Nazis will do if they get back into power is start working on an atom bomb,” the President said. “They will deny it. They will swear on a stack of Bibles that they would never do anything like that. They told the same lies after World War I, and look what happened to the people who believed them then-the Lindberghs and the Liberty Lobby and the rest of the fools.

“And the second thing the Nazis will do if, God forbid, they get back into power is start working on a rocket that can reach the United States from Germany,” Truman said. “They had one on the drawing board when V-E Day came and made them shelve their plans. If they build a transatlantic rocket with an atom bomb in its nose, nobody is safe any more. Nobody. Not a single soul. Not anywhere in the world.”

“Yeah, yeah, enough with the Buck Rogers bull…manure,” Ed said. “If pigs had wings, we’d all carry umbrellas.” Diana smiled at him. He might not be exciting, but his heart was in the right place. His head, too.

“Do the Republicans in Congress see that?” Harry Truman answered his own question: “They don’t. They might as well be ostriches, not elephants, the way they’ve stuck their heads in the sand. They flat-out refuse to put any money in the budget for keeping our armed forces in Germany. Without money, we will have to start bringing troops home.”

“Good!” Diana said. “That’s the idea! We should have done it a long time ago. If we had, maybe…Pat’d still be alive.” Her voice roughened at the last few words; she still couldn’t talk about him without wanting to cry.

“I know, hon,” Ed said softly, and he sounded husky, too.

There on the radio, Truman kept chattering away: “An old proverb talks about being penny wise and pound foolish. It’s so old, it goes back to the days before our independence. Nowadays, we’d understand it better if it talked about penny wise and dollar foolish. The point of it is, you’re making a mistake if you only worry about what’s right in front of you and not about what happens half a mile or a mile or five miles farther down the road. And that’s exactly what the Republicans who are starving our forces in Germany are doing.”

“My…heinie!” Diana had heard an awful lot of bad language the past couple of years. She’d used more of it herself than she ever did before. But she still tried not to when Ed could hear her.

He chuckled now, knowing-of course! — what she hadn’t said. “Way to go, babe. You tell ’em.”

“They won’t listen to me,” Truman said sadly.

“That’s ’cause they’ve got better sense than you do!” Diana also had a lot of practice talking back to politicians on the radio.

This time, the President didn’t seem to listen to her. “Trouble is, they’re Republicans, and that just naturally means they aren’t what you’d call good at listening,” he continued. “All the same, they’d better hear this, and hear it loud and clear. If they make us clear out of Germany, if they make us leave long before we really ought to, what happens afterwards is their fault. They’ll be responsible for it. I know the situation we have now isn’t very pretty. What we’ll get if we go their way will be worse. And they will be to blame for it.”

A Bronx cheer didn’t count as cussing. Diana sent the radio the wettest, juiciest raspberry she could. Ed laughed out loud.

“I wish I didn’t have to tell you things like this,” Harry Truman said. “But, unlike some people I could name, my job is to tell you what’s so, not what sounds good or what might get me a few extra votes. Thanks. Good night.”

“That was the President of the United States, Harry S Truman,” the announcer said, as if anybody in his right mind didn’t already know.

“He’s full of…malarkey,” Diana declared as Ed turned off the radio.

Her husband laughed again. “You better believe it.” He bent down and gave her a kiss. Then he nuzzled her neck. “So to heck with him for a little while, anyways.”

“Yeah. To heck with him.” Diana went upstairs to the bedroom willingly enough. You needed to keep a man happy every so often. She didn’t have anything against Ed. When it was over and he turned on the nightstand lamp so he could find his cigarettes, he had a big, sloppy grin plastered across his face. Diana made herself smile, too. She’d just started to warm up when, too soon, it was over. Was that happening more and more these days, or was she simply noticing more?

Because she didn’t want to make Ed angry or upset, she didn’t say anything about it. He finished the cigarette, gave her a tobacco-flavored kiss, then got up to use the bathroom and brush his teeth. Five minutes later, he was snoring.

Diana lay there in the darkness. It should have been better than this, shouldn’t it? Once upon a time, it had been better than this, hadn’t it? Hadn’t it?

She was a long time sleeping.

Lou Weissberg wondered what the hell Brigadier General R.R.R. Baxter’s initials stood for. There they were, three R’s in a row on the nameplate on Baxter’s desk. Readin’, ’Ritin’, ’Rithmetic Baxter? It seemed as likely as anything else. A company-grade officer couldn’t very well come right out and ask a general something like that. Lou would just have to let his imagination run wild.

He glanced over at Howard Frank. Was the same burning question uppermost in Frank’s mind, too? The other Jewish officer didn’t seem to keep glancing at the nameplate the way Lou did. But did that mean anything?

Baxter had cold blue eyes that bifocals did nothing to warm up. He eyed Lou and Major Frank in turn. If either man impressed him, he hid it goddamn well. Well, he doesn’t impress me, either, Lou thought. Except his initials. A star on each shoulder put R.R.R. Baxter among the Lord’s anointed in the Counter-Intelligence Corps. He wouldn’t give a rat’s ass whether he impressed a lonely subordinate or not.

“How’s your German, boys?” he asked in that language. His own Deutsch had a strong American accent, but he was plenty fluent.

“Ganz gut, Herr General,” Howard Frank said. Lou nodded.

“Figured as much, but I wanted to make sure. From what I hear, German will work well enough,” Baxter said.

“Well enough for what, sir?” Lou paused, filled by a hope he hardly dared believe. “Has the Red Army finally decided to work with us?”

“Not the Red Army,” Baxter replied, and Lou’s hope crashed and burned. Then it rose phoenixlike from the flames, for the CIC big wheel went on, “The NKVD. The Russians wanted to try the top Nazis in their zone in Berlin ’cause we screwed it up twice. If they did it right, they figured they could score propaganda points off of us. Well, they ended up with egg on their face, too. They don’t like that any better than we would. They’re proud people.”

“After what they went through against the Germans, pride’s about all they’ve got left,” Lou remarked.

“Pride and most of Eastern Europe,” R.R.R. Baxter pointed out. “But, yeah, I know what you mean. They paid for everything they got-paid in blood. Now they’ve got something they can’t use themselves. That’s all I know about it. Right this minute, that’s all anybody who isn’t a Russian knows about it. Your job is to find out what it is and what we can do with it.”

“Why us, sir?” Frank asked. “Why not somebody with more clout?”

“For one thing, you’ve both been heard to say we ought to work more with the Russians,” Brigadier General Baxter answered. Lou blinked. He had said things like that. How closely were people here monitored, though, if the higher-ups knew he’d said it? Well, that one answered itself, didn’t it? Baxter went on, “And the Russians don’t want to make a big deal out of this. If it doesn’t work out, the blame won’t land on them-that’s our best guess. So they don’t want anything more than a midlevel contact. Not yet, anyhow. You’re it, the two of you…if you’re game, of course.”

If you aren’t, you’re nothing but a couple of gutless, worthless pieces of shit. Baxter didn’t say that, but he didn’t have to. One other thing he might not have said was a couple of gutless, worthless Jewish pieces of shit. Maybe such a rude, unfair thought never once crossed his mind. Maybe. But plenty of American officers still had their doubts about Jews in spite of Hitler.

Which was why Lou said, “Oh, hell, yes, sir!” as fast as he could-but no faster than Howard Frank said, “You’d better believe it, sir!”

R.R.R. Baxter nodded smoothly. He wasn’t a general for nothing, Lou realized-he knew how to get people to do what he wanted. He sure did. “Glad to hear it, gentlemen,” he said. “We’ll work out the details of the meeting with the Russians, and we’ll go from there.”

“COME ON,” VLADIMIR BOKOV SNAPPED AT SHMUEL. “GET MOVING, dammit.”

“I’m right here with you,” the Jewish DP said. “I’m not going any place but where you tell me to.”

“Too fucking right you’re not. You wouldn’t last long if you did,” Bokov said. Maybe there really were snipers with beads drawn on Shmuel’s gray head. Or maybe Bokov would have to plug him if he tried to bug out. The NKVD man didn’t know for sure. Shmuel couldn’t know, either.

Together, they crossed to the south side of the Wittenbergplatz. Whoever’d set up this meeting had an evil sense of humor. Captain Bokov suspected Yuri Vlasov was taking a measure of revenge for having his hand forced. The sign above the tavern proclaimed that it was Fent’s Establishment. And so it was…now. If you looked closely, though, under Fent’s name you could still make out the smeared letters that spelled out who the former proprietor had been.

Up until Berlin fell to the Red Army, this had been Alois Hitler’s tavern. From everything Bokov had heard, the Fuhrer’s half-brother wasn’t a bad fellow. With a different last name, he would have been indistinguishable from a thousand other saloonkeepers. Bokov didn’t know what had happened to him in the wake of the Reich’s collapse. Alois Hitler hadn’t been important enough in the grand scheme of things for anybody to worry about him.

Shmuel didn’t seem to know about the tavern. Bokov couldn’t resist telling him, just to see the look on his face. It was everything the NKVD man could have hoped for. The DP stopped in his tracks. “I won’t go in there!”

“Like hell you won’t,” Bokov said. “If I’ve got to, you’ve got to. A minute ago, you said you weren’t going anywhere except where I told you to. And I’m damn well telling you to.”

“Hitler’s place!” Shmuel cried in horror.

“Hitler’s place,” Captain Bokov agreed. “But not that Hitler, and it hasn’t been his place for a couple of years now. So get your sorry old ass in gear.”

“Hitler’s place!” the DP said again. Shaking his head, he went inside with Bokov.

It smelled like tobacco smoke and beer and sweat: like the inside of a tavern, in other words. The light was dim. Whether the man behind the bar was Fent himself or just a hireling, he looked nothing like any Hitler ever born. That was a relief.

Americans were sitting at two or three tables. Even just sitting there, they irritated Bokov. They had so much, and didn’t have the faintest idea how well off they were. An officer at one of the tables nodded to Bokov. The NKVD man walked over and sat down. Again, Shmuel followed. The DP was still muttering to himself.

A barmaid hurried up. She was pretty, although on the skinny side. Bokov thought a lot of German women were skinny, which didn’t keep him from laying them when he got the urge. But this gal was skinny even by German standards. He preferred his women with something to hold on to.

He ordered beer. So did Shmuel. The Americans already had seidels in front of them. The barmaid hustled away. A Russian wouldn’t have moved so fast, not at a no-account job like that. Germans did apply themselves, no matter what they were up to. It was one of the things that made them dangerous.

Both Americans looked like Jews. That matched Bokov’s briefing. The barmaid came back with two more mugs of beer. Bokov raised his and trotted out the phrase he’d been told to use: “To cooperation between allies.”

“To nailing down the ironheart!” one of the Americans returned: the proper answer. He went on, “I’m Frank. This is Weissberg.”

Maybe those were real names, maybe not. Bokov hadn’t been told to hide his identity, so he said, “Bokov.” He jerked a thumb at the DP. “And this is Shmuel Birnbaum.” He would have identified a new-model mortar the same way-he thought of Shmuel more as a weapon than as a human being.

But a new-model mortar wouldn’t have gulped beer as if it would be outlawed tomorrow. A new-model mortar wouldn’t have waved to the barmaid for a refill, or pinched her on the butt when she brought it. She glared at him and got out of there in a hurry. And a new-model mortar wouldn’t have said, “I can talk for myself.”

“We saw you before!” the American called Weissberg exclaimed. “We gave you some chow and some cash.”

“You did,” Birnbaum agreed. He nodded at Bokov. “This guy and his pal made it all disappear. Well, I got to eat some of the chocolate.”

Suspicion sparked in Bokov. This was bending the arm of coincidence if not breaking it. The Americans were both scowling at him, no doubt for abusing a fellow zhid. Well, the hell with ’em. As if reporting to his own superiors, he said, “This man was shot by a guard for approaching the perimeter around our courthouse too closely. The guard might have killed him had another officer and myself not intervened. Naturally, we searched the prisoner. Naturally, we confiscated personal property.”

“So you’re releasing him now, right?” Weissberg said. “Will you give it back?”

“Not our policy,” Bokov answered, which was true enough. Colonel Shteinberg had done whatever he’d done with the ten-dollar bill, and Bokov had bought himself a fancy dinner and some fine cigars with the five. And if the Yankees thought Birnbaum deserved to have the money, they could go fuck themselves. If provoked, Bokov was ready to tell them so.

Weissberg looked as if he wanted to press it. The other officer-Frank-said something in English. Weissberg still looked mutinous, but he shut up. Frank spoke directly to the DP: “You know where the Hangman’s dug in, do you?”

“Not for sure,” Birnbaum said. That took nerve. He had to know he’d be better off going with the Americans than staying in Soviet hands. If these Yanks decided they didn’t want him, he’d never get the chance to pinch another barmaid’s ass. He went on, “I was digging and digging down in the mountains. Then they sent me to Auschwitz. They hadn’t got around to killing me before the Red Army ran ’em out, so I lived.”

“You might be grateful,” Bokov said.

“For getting rescued? I am. For getting shot? For getting robbed? No offense, Comrade Captain, but I could’ve done without those,” the DP said. The American called Weissberg let out a snide chuckle.

“If you weren’t snooping around the perimeter, nobody would have had any reason to shoot you,” Captain Bokov said irritably.

“Snooping? What snooping? I was just walking along when that asshole guard yelled something-God knows what-and then he opened up, the dumb schmuck,” Shmuel Birnbaum said.

“That was his job. We were trying to protect the courthouse, dammit,” Bokov said.

“You sure did great, didn’t you?” Birnbaum jeered.

Before Bokov could tell him where to head in, the Yankee called Frank said, “Take it easy, both of you. Maybe it all worked out for the best.”

“In this best of all possible worlds? I don’t think so,” Shmuel Birnbaum said.

By the way both Americans winced and pulled faces, the DP had made a joke. Vladimir Bokov almost asked what it was. He didn’t get it. Only one thing held him back: the fear of being thought uncultured. Nye kultyurny was a muscular insult in Russian. It meant you’d just come off the farm with manure on your boots-or, more likely, on your bare feet. It meant drool ran down your chin. It meant you picked your nose and ate the boogers in public. It meant…It meant Bokov kept his mouth shut, was what it meant.

Weissberg said, “We’ll want to take him back with us, you know. He’ll do a better job going back to the mountains and showing us where he was than he would trying to draw a map or something.”

“Yes, I understand that,” Bokov said. “I am authorized to turn him over to you. I will want a receipt. And we’ll expect better cooperation in U.S.-Soviet affairs, especially if he does you some good.”

“You’ll want us to do more of what you want, you mean,” the Jew called Frank said, which was true enough. “I can’t promise, but….”

“Da, da,” Bokov said impatiently. Neither one of these guys was of a rank where his promise meant anything. Neither side was dealing at a level like that. Bokov had hoped the Americans would, but they weren’t always as naive as you wished they were.

“A receipt?” Shmuel said. “What am I, a sack of beans?”

“You’re a sack of hot air, is what you are.” Bokov knew him better than the Americans did, but they’d find out. “We have to hope you’re not a sack full of farts. The one thing we know about you is, you hate the Nazis, too. This is our chance to get some of your own back against them.”

“Too little, too late,” the DP said bleakly. “Everybody who ever meant anything to me is dead-up the fucking smokestack. Most I can hope for is to try and keep that shit from happening again.”

“That’s…better than nothing.” Weissberg sounded hesitant about saying even so much. And well he might have, when his country and his loved ones had come through the war with hardly a scratch. Here again, Bokov had more in common with Birnbaum, and more understanding of him, than his fellow Jew did.

Frank had set a piece of paper on the tabletop. He finished writing on it, then passed it and his pen over to Weissberg. The other American officer read it, signed it, and slid it across to Vladimir Bokov.

Bokov had some trouble with it. He was familiar with German cursive. Even using German, the Americans wrote the Roman alphabet in a different way. But the NKVD man puzzled it out. Received from NKVD Captain Bokov one displaced person, by name Shmuel Birnbaum, believed to possess important information concerning the Nazi resistance. The two signatures followed.

“Good enough,” Bokov said. “I hope this guy does you-does us-does everybody-some good. I put my dick on the chopping block to get him to you people-you’d better believe that.”

Both Americans nodded back at him. “Our nuts are on the line, too,” Weissberg said. “We kept trying to tell people our side and yours needed to work together better. Against the fanatics, there’s only one side.”

“It looks that way to me, too.” Bokov waved to the barmaid. “Fresh ones all around, sweetheart.” When she brought them, she made a point of giving Shmuel Birnbaum a wide berth. The DP’s crooked grin said he knew why and didn’t give a fuck. Captain Bokov raised his seidel. “Death to the Heydrichites!”

They could all drink to that. “Death to the Heydrichites!” they chorused. Bokov emptied the mug at one long pull. The Germans were motherfuckers, no doubt about it, but they could sure as hell brew beer.

The Captain-Navy Captain, or the equivalent of an army colonel-looked at Tom Schmidt as if he wanted to clean him off the sole of his shoe. “No,” the officer said in a voice straight from the South Pole. “I will not authorize your entry into Germany. You may sail to England or France if you like. But if you come under military jurisdiction in Germany, you will be expelled at once, if you don’t get tossed in the brig-uh, the stockade-instead.”

“That’s not fair!” Tom squawked. “Plenty of other reporters get to go see our boys climbing onto ships.”

“A technical term applies here, Mr. Schmidt: tough shit.” The four-striper had the whip hand. He knew it, and he enjoyed it. “Those members of the press did not violate security arrangements in Germany. They were not sent home from the country. You did, and you were, and you don’t get a second chance.”

“You were censoring the news!” Tom exclaimed. He sounded more pissed off than he was. He’d figured the military would hold a grudge for what had happened in Germany. But taking a shot at Captain Weyr here for censorship would look good in his column.

And Weyr played straight into his hands, saying, “Sometimes censorship is necessary, Mr. Schmidt. Sometimes it’s even essential.”

“Yeah, sure,” Tom said, as any reporter worth his press credential would have.

“It is, dammit,” the Navy officer insisted. “Would you have printed a story that told the Germans we’d hit Normandy, not Calais?” He sent Tom another dogshit-on-my-sole look. “You probably would have.”

“Up yours, Captain,” Tom said evenly. Captain Weyr’s jaw dropped. His subordinates couldn’t tell him stuff like that, no matter how much they wanted to. But military discipline didn’t bind Tom. And, if the military wanted to make a point of screwing him, neither did ordinary politeness. He went on, “You make it sound like I’m not a patriot or something, and that’s a bunch of crap. Of course I know why you had to keep the invasion a secret. The movie of that poor damn GI–Cunningham, that was his name-that’s a different story. You didn’t want ordinary Americans seeing what was going on in Germany-seeing how the occupation was screwing things up.”

“For one thing, I deny that the occupation is screwed up,” Weyr said.

“Then you’d better pull your head out of the sand and look around,” Tom said. “The lions are getting close.”

“Amusing. You should be a writer.” Weyr had a Philadelphia Main Line kind of condescension he’d probably been born with. Plenty of officers were snotty or arrogant, but only a blueblood could bring off condescending so well. He continued, “You seem to forget what an important factor in war morale can be.”

Bingo! Tom pounced: “You seem to forget the war’s over. You want everybody else to forget it, too. The Secretary of State talked about occupying Germany for the next forty years. How can we do that if it’s peacetime? How can you imagine the American people will put up with this for the next forty weeks, let alone forty years?” He held up a hand to correct himself. “The Presidential election’s a little further than forty weeks off-but only a little.”

“I am not the Secretary of State. You have no business taking his words out of context and trying to put them in my mouth,” Captain Weyr said. “But do you think you did Private Cunningham’s family any favors by making sure that vile film got plastered onto movie screens all over the country?”

Tom did feel bad about that, even if he hadn’t felt bad enough to keep from getting the film back to the States. “If I thought the brass was sitting on the film to save his family’s feelings, maybe I wouldn’t have done what I did,” he answered. “But I don’t-and neither do you.”

“That’s twice now you’ve put words in my mouth,” Weyr said.

“Oh, give me a break!” Tom rolled his eyes. “The brass was doing what the brass always does. It was trying to hide the bad news. Sometimes you can get away with that in wartime. See? I admit it! But the war’s over and done with. Harry Truman said so. He even acted like it. Rationing’s dead as a dodo. He wants it both ways here, though. The war’s over and done with…except when the brass says it’s not. The American people aren’t dumb enough to fall for that, Captain.”

“I take it back. You should be a politician, Mr. Schmidt, not a writer. You sure seem to like making speeches,” Weyr said. “But you can huff and puff as much as you want. You still won’t blow the Pentagon down.”

“Too big for that, all right. Even flying an airplane into this place wouldn’t knock down much of it,” Tom said.

As if he hadn’t spoken, Captain Weyr went on, “And you can also huff and puff as much as you want, here in my office or in your column, and you won’t get to Germany to watch the troops coming home…. May I speak off the record? Do you respect that?”

“Yes, I do. And yes, go ahead.” Tom wasn’t happy about it, but he meant it. If you said something was off the record and then went ahead and used it anyway, in nothing flat nobody would talk to you off the record any more. And you needed to hear that kind of stuff, even if you couldn’t use it.

“Okay. This is Ollie Weyr talking, not Captain Weyr. Way it looks to me is, guys like you are a big part of the reason Congress won’t pay for the German occupation any more. If you weren’t pissing and moaning about every little thing that goes wrong over there-”

“And every big one,” Tom broke in.

“Shut up. I’m not done. Maybe Germany’ll be fine once we get out. I don’t know. You can’t know ahead of time. But it’s like the President said on the radio not long ago. If things go wrong, if the Nazis get back in, I know where a bunch of the blame lands.”

“And you say I make speeches?” Tom laughed in the Navy captain’s face. “You ought to look in a mirror some time.”

“At least I’m working for my country,” Weyr said.

“So am I. Last time I looked, the First Amendment was part of what we were fighting for,” Tom retorted. “Too much to expect anybody from the government to understand that.”

“Yeah, you hot reporters go on and on about the First Amendment. All I’ve got to say is, you’re using it to help guys who’d stamp it out first chance they got. We had those SOBs squashed a couple of years ago.”

“You wish you did,” Tom interrupted. “In your dreams, you did.”

“If they start running Germany again, it won’t be because the military failed,” Weyr said. “It’ll be because the press and the pressure groups made it impossible for us to do our job.”

“Can I quote you on that?” As soon as Tom asked, he wished he hadn’t. Now he’d given Weyr a chance to say no.

And Weyr did, or close enough: “That was still Ollie talking, not Captain Weyr. If you want to say it’s a military officer’s personal opinion, go ahead. It’s not the Navy’s official opinion. I can’t speak for the Army, but I’ve never heard anything to make me think it’s their official opinion, either.”

“But a lot of their people believe it, too?” Tom suggested.

Captain Weyr only shrugged. “You said that. I didn’t.”

Too bad, Tom thought.

Bernie Cobb walked through Bad Tolz, looking for a place where he could buy a beer. The town sat in the foothills of the Alps south of Munich. The old quarter, where he was, lay on one side of the Isar; the new district, on the other side of the river, was a lot more modern. Mineral-water springs were what brought people here-people who weren’t GIs with a few days’ leave from prowling through Alpine passes, anyway. And there had been a training school for SS officer candidates here, too. That was out of business now…Bernie hoped.

“Cobb!” called another dogface-no, the guy was a three-striper.

“Sergeant Corvo!” Bernie said. “Jesus! I figured they woulda shipped you back to the States a long time ago.”

“Not me.” Carlo Corvo shook his head. As usual, he talked out of the side of his mouth. Also as usual, a cigarette dangled from one corner. “Draft sucked me in, yeah, but I’ve gone Regular Army. I got better chances in uniform than I ever would back in Hoboken-bet your ass I do.”

“You nuts?” Bernie said. “You got better chances of stopping a bullet or getting your balls blown off.”

“Nah.” Corvo shook his head. “I don’t exactly come from the good part of town-not that Hoboken’s got much of a good part. I don’t exactly hang around with the nice kind of people, neither. I shoot somebody over here, I don’t gotta worry about cops on my tail or spending time in the slammer.”

Mob connections? Bernie’d always wondered about that with Corvo. The swarthy sergeant still wasn’t exactly saying so. Not exactly, no, but it sure sounded that way.

Meanwhile, Corvo asked, “How come you ain’t back in-where was it? Arizona?”

“New Mexico,” Bernie answered. “Not enough points. I’m young. I’m single. I was out of action for a while after the Bulge ’cause of my feet, so I missed out on a couple of campaign stars. And besides, the cocksuckers keep bumping up how many a guy needs before they ship him out. A little luck, though, it won’t be too much longer.”

“You mean the money cutoff?” Sergeant Corvo said.

Bernie nodded. “What else? If they bring everybody home, they can’t very well leave me here all by my lonesome. Hope like hell they can’t, anyway.”

“Stupid fuckin’ assholes can’t even see the ends o’ their pointy noses, let alone past ’em,” Corvo said. “We bail out now, we’ll just hafta fight the Jerries again later on.”

“Later on suits me fine,” Bernie said. “Maybe my number won’t come up then. I don’t owe Uncle Sam one thing more, and he owes me plenty.”

Carlo Corvo sighed. “Always useta think you had pretty good sense.”

“I do. I’m not gonna catch Heydrich on my own. So why should I care more about the Army than the Army cares about me? I’ve been away from home more than three years now. Enough is enough. I’m looking out for number one.” Bernie paused. “I’m looking for some beer, too. You know any decent joints?”

By the way Corvo hesitated, knowing where to drink in Bad Tolz wasn’t the question for him. Whether he wanted to drink with Bernie was. At last, with another sigh, the noncom nodded. “Yeah. C’mon-I’ll show you. If you don’t wanna be no lifer, can’t hardly blame you for thinkin’ like you do, I guess.”

“Love you too, Ace,” Bernie said. He followed Corvo down the narrow, winding street.