The Man with the Iron Heart

XXVIII

California again. Diana McGraw had never gone to the West Coast before poor Pat got killed. Now she’d lost track of how many times she’d come out here. It wasn’t surprising. She sometimes lost track of where she was. She’d get off a train or wake up in a hotel bed and think, Wait! This is… Then it would come to her. But she still got those weird moments of dissociation. She got them more often as she traveled more, in fact.

No danger of that here, though. She hadn’t taken the train to San Francisco. She’d flown in a big, droning DC-4 (from St. Louis, anyhow; she’d taken the train to get that far). The plane didn’t give her as much room as a Pullman berth would have, but it got where it was going much faster. And the ride was surprisingly smooth, except for some turbulence climbing over the Rockies.

“We’ll be fine, folks,” the pilot said over the intercom as the airliner bumped through air pockets. “I flew the Hump during the war. Next to that, this is a piece of cake.” People sheepishly smiled at one another. Diana felt embarrassed about her jitters. The DC-4 went right on flying.

So here she was, talking to a sea of people in Golden Gate Park, about as far west as she could go if she didn’t want to start swimming. She could smell the Pacific Ocean. It smelled different from the Atlantic…cleaner, somehow. She didn’t think that was her imagination, not when she’d been in New York City not long before. The breeze that blew off the ocean tugged at her hair and pulled wisps loose in spite of everything bobby pins could do.

“This fight started two years ago now,” she said. “When we set out, nobody thought we had a prayer. The government was going to do whatever it was going to do. Listen to people who thought it was doing things wrong? Fat chance!”

Applause rolled up from the crowd like rising surf. The sun came out from behind a cloud. The day got warmer. The breeze from the Pacific felt friendlier. It was somewhere in the sixties. Tonight, it would be somewhere in the fifties. Diana knew she was in San Francisco, all right. But she couldn’t tell by the weather if it was March or May, August or October or December.

“We made Harry Truman listen! He didn’t want to, but he had to,” she said, and the crowd’s cheers got louder. “He said he knew best. We showed him he didn’t. He said he wanted to go on wasting lives in Germany. We told him he couldn’t. He said he’d do it anyway. We elected a Congress that wouldn’t let him.”

“That’s right!” Several people in the front rows shouted the same thing at the same time. Diana couldn’t make out all the other cries of approval, but she had no doubt that was what they were.

She remembered the big slug of gin that kindly neighbor’d given her the day she got the War Department telegram. It had done a lot for her. But the noise that meant a lot of people agreed with her about something important-no, that a lot of people followed her over something important-had a kick gin couldn’t come close to. (It had kick enough to let her forget-part of the time-that some people who didn’t follow her had guns. She got nervous whenever she thought about Gus van Slyke. Had that bullet been aimed at her?)

“And we did it! We, the people of the United States! We did it!” Diana didn’t show her nerves. She liked to quote the Constitution whenever she could. It made the blockheads who still called her anti-American have a harder time. “Our boys are coming home. Before too much longer, we’ll be out of Germany for good. No other family will have to go through what too many families have gone through already. And that will be good for the whole country.”

“It sure will!” The cry rose up from the thousands out there on the grass.

“But we aren’t finished yet,” Diana went on. “We’ve only started. That stubborn man in the White House still wants to do all the things the Eightieth Congress won’t let him do. He’s started to show his cards. He’s going to campaign against Congress next year. He’s going to try to bring back enough people who think like him so he can do all the foolish things he wants to. Folks, he’s going to campaign against the little people. He’s going to campaign against us! Will we let him get away with it?”

“Nooo!” This time, the crowd’s reply was a long wolf howl. Diana wished it would carry all the way to Washington. Maybe not now. Come November next year, it would.

“No is right. We know what we want, and we know how to get it,” Diana said. “After we send Harry Truman home-and Bess, and Margaret, and Margaret’s piano-we’ll go right on forming our more perfect union. We can do it. We will do it. We are the people.”

“We are the people!” the crowd roared as Diana stepped away from the microphone. She waved to them. They shouted louder than ever. Some of them cried out her name. If she’d grinned any wider, the top of her head would have fallen off. Who needed gin-who needed anything else-when you could have…this?

“I don’t know whether I want to go on after that,” said the San Francisco politico who followed her to the mike. The sympathetic laugh he got was enough to let him launch into his speech. He ripped into the Truman administration even harder than Diana had. The crowd loved it.

Policemen prowled the edge of the crowd to keep pro-administration hotheads from starting trouble. Diana hoped they’d do more good than they had in Indianapolis. Pickets who followed the Truman line did march beyond the cops’ perimeter. They shouted and heckled, but they were a long way from the speakers’ platform. And there weren’t very many of them. Diana marveled at that. When she was first starting out, opponents outnumbered and outshouted allies as often as not. No more. The country had swung her way. She shook her head, standing up there in the cool breeze off the Pacific. She’d made the country swing her way.

The sun was going down toward the sea when the rally broke up. Diana went to dinner with some of the locals who’d spoken in the park. The Cliff House looked out over the sea. You could watch the sun set, have a couple of drinks, and eat fish and clams and scallops that had been doing whatever they did in the ocean only a few hours before.

You could also watch the sea lions and water birds on Seal Rocks. Diana didn’t think she’d ever seen wild seals before. These beasts weren’t real wild; they hardly moved at all. A big white bird lit on one sea lion’s back. The animal just sat there on the rock. Maybe it was asleep, and the bird didn’t wake it up.

“Can I drive you back to your hotel?” the politico who’d come on after Diana asked when dinner was done. His name was Marvin Something; she couldn’t remember what. She also couldn’t remember if he was a city councilman or a county supervisor. She wasn’t sure it made any difference. The city of San Francisco filled all of San Francisco County.

“Thanks. That’s nice of you,” she said.

And it was. The Palace Hotel was way over on the other side of town, near the Bay. San Francisco was a compact city, but even so….

Marvin drove a Packard. Diana tried not to hold it against him; she was still biased in favor of General Motors cars. Traffic had started to thin out. He didn’t take long to get to the hotel at the corner of New Montgomery and Market. The Palace was famous for, among other things, endings. Before the big earthquake of 1906, a King of Hawaii had died there. Afterwards, and after a rebuilding, it was the place where President Harding breathed his last.

“Funny,” Diana said. “I wasn’t anywhere near so sorry when Harding passed away as I was when FDR died. I don’t think anybody was.”

“I know I wasn’t,” Marvin said. “But Roosevelt was special, and Harding was just kinda there, if you know what I mean. You didn’t feel like your father’d just died.”

“That’s what it was, all right. Except Roosevelt was everybody’s father,” Diana said. She’d had so much land on her in a few months in 1945-the President’s death (which really did feel like a family member’s), and then poor Pat’s. She wondered how she’d got through it.

Marvin found a parking space right by the hotel. If that wasn’t a miracle, it came close. He jumped out, hurried around the hood, and held her door open so she could get out. “Can I buy you a drink?” he asked as she did.

“I’m kind of tired…but sure. Why not?” she said. Sometimes you needed an extra one-maybe an extra two-to come down from the excitement a good rally stirred up. “Help me sleep tonight.”

“There you go,” Marvin agreed.

After that drink, Diana said, “I’m getting tight.” Because it wasn’t just a drink. How many had she had at the Cliff House? She couldn’t remember, which probably wasn’t a good sign.

But Marvin said, “Bird can’t fly on one wing,” and waved to the bartender again. Diana snickered. It wouldn’t have seemed so funny if she hadn’t had a good deal already, but she had, so it did. Following that train of logic-if it was a train, and if it was logic-seemed pretty funny, too.

She wobbled when she got up and headed for her room. Somehow, she wasn’t surprised when Marvin came with her. They walked right past the house dick-he couldn’t have been anything else-on the way back to the elevators. He nodded and touched the brim of his fedora and didn’t stir from the chair where he lounged. His job was to keep out-of-town businessmen from bringing hookers up to their rooms. A respected local civic leader? A dignitary who’d led a rally? He didn’t think twice about letting them by.

Diana didn’t think twice about it, either, not till she found that Marvin had walked into the room with her. That turned out to be a little too late. He was nuzzling her neck and nibbling her ear, and then he was kissing her.

She could have yelled. She could have clouted him. Maybe she would have if she’d been sober. And maybe she would have, if Ed had left her happier the last few times they’d slept together. Don’t I deserve something better than that? she thought. Even though she wasn’t sure whether Marvin was it, she lay down with him to find out.

He surprised her. Well, of course he did-she didn’t know what he was going to do before he did it, the way she had with Ed the past umpteen years. And he did some things Ed would never have dreamt of doing. Diana discovered she enjoyed them, and wondered why the devil Ed hadn’t thought of them.

Then she stopped thinking about Ed. She stopped thinking at all, as she discovered that enjoyed was much too mild a word.

In due course, Marvin grunted and quivered. Then he grinned. “How about that?” he said as he slid away. He sounded indecently pleased with himself, and that was exactly the right word.

“How about that?” Diana echoed. She was delighted at what had just happened-she was too honest with herself to have any doubts on that score. But she was also angry at herself for being so delighted. And which counted for more…she was damned if she could say.

Marvin, fortunately, didn’t hang around afterwards. Why should he? He’d got what he wanted. He quickly dressed, knotted his tie with fussy precision, slipped on his jacket, grinned one more time as he blew her a kiss, and he was gone.

Which left Diana all alone in the fading afterglow. “I didn’t come here for this,” she told the hotel room. It didn’t say anything. It wasn’t that it didn’t believe her. It flat didn’t care. How many times, from how many people, had it heard the same thing before?

She jumped off the bed. The stories it could have told…She didn’t want to hear them. But she’d have to sleep in it tonight unless she curled up on the floor. And just because she hadn’t come there for that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. Now she had to try to figure out what it meant and what she was supposed to do about it.

Vladimir Bokov didn’t love paperwork, but he was good at it. Interrogation reports, intelligence estimates, disposition reports, all the minutiae of totalitarianism in action…How could you know what you’d done to people, or how many of them you’d done it to, unless you kept careful records?

Someone, somewhere, someday, would pay attention to all the paperwork he turned out. It might be Colonel Shteinberg, who had to subsume Bokov’s reports into his own. Or it might be someone back in Moscow, someone who would decide whether Bokov rose or fell because of the documents he produced. He intended to rise. Good paperwork and good connections were the road to higher ground in the Soviet Union.

He was detailing the lies a captured Heydrichite tried to palm off as gospel truth when an explosion almost lifted him out of his chair and dropped him on the floor. His first, automatic, response was annoyance. How was he going to get anything done if people kept blowing things up around him?

Only afterwards did he wonder what the Fascist bandits had blown up this time. If that wasn’t a truck exploding, he’d never heard one. Maybe NKVD and Red Army security had made the hapless driver touch off his all-wheel-drive bomb far from its intended target.

Maybe. It had happened before. But it hadn’t happened very often. Bokov had his doubts.

A telephone rang in an office down the hall. Somebody answered it, listened, and let fly with an impassioned stream of mat. The phone slammed down. Hard enough to break it? If not, it wasn’t from lack of effort. A roar of pure rage followed: “Fuck their mothers-the cunts got the Red Army monument!”

Bokov sprang to his feet with a foul-mouthed, furious shout of his own. Someone’s head would roll in the dust for that. The monument had been unveiled on November 7, 1945, to commemorate the anniversary of the October Revolution (a name that showed how the Julian calendar had complicated life in prerevolutionary Russia). It was made of marble from the wreckage of the Reichs Chancellery, and topped with a bronze of a Soviet soldier with bayoneted rifle flanked by what were supposed to have been the first two Red Army tanks into Berlin.

Colonel Shteinberg burst into Bokov’s office. “You heard?” the senior NKVD man asked.

“I heard,” Bokov agreed grimly. “Shall we go find out just what they did to it?”

“Not till we’re ordered to,” Shteinberg answered. “They’ve got that trick of using one blast to draw more people in, then touching off another one. Why run into a trap?”

“Well, you’re right,” Bokov said-the Heydrichites would try that whenever they thought they could get away with it. Something else occurred to him: “Would even two and a half tonnes of explosives blow up that monument?”

“Beats me,” Shteinberg said. “They wouldn’t do it any good, though.” He paused, his face suddenly thoughtful rather than angry or resigned. “Wait a minute. Didn’t you write the memo about alertness last year to make sure we protected that monument?”

“I did, Comrade Colonel,” Bokov said. Nobody would be able to claim he hadn’t done his part. Paperwork wasn’t just for giving enemies of the state what they deserved. If you’d served the Soviet Union the way you should have, and if you had the papers to prove it, you were bulletproof.

“But of course that was last year. No one could expect a unit to stay alert for a whole year.” Sarcasm dripped from Shteinberg’s voice like juice from a ripe peach after you took a bite. Then he paused again. “Of course, I don’t know if the same unit still has the duty. All the same, though, that memo went everywhere in the Soviet zone, didn’t it?”

“That’s what I heard, sir.” Bokov didn’t have the paperwork to prove it had, not at his beck and call. Somebody would. People could find out exactly where it had gone. If it was supposed to have gone everywhere and hadn’t, people could find out who’d dropped the ball.

A sergeant stuck his head into Bokov’s office. He looked relieved when he saw Moisei Shteinberg. “A telephone call for you, Comrade Colonel.”

“I’m coming.” Shteinberg hurried away. He came back about ten minutes later. Bokov couldn’t read his expression. The colonel asked, “Do you know-did you know-a lieutenant colonel named Surkov? A tanks officer?”

“Surkov…” Bokov had to think before he answered, “Wasn’t he one of the men with the armored regiment in the division that guarded the monument last year? I talked to him about…about tricks the Heydrichites might try.” It came back to him now. “Why, sir?”

“Because as soon as the monument went up, he took his service pistol out of the holster, stuck it in his mouth, and blew off the top of his head.”

“Oh…damnation,” Bokov muttered. Poor Surkov must have decided killing himself looked like a better bet than whatever the Red Army and the NKVD would do to him. He might not have been wrong, either. Remembering what he’d talked about with the newly dead officer, Bokov said, “Don’t tell me the Heydrichites used one of our tanks to get the explosives to the monument.”

Colonel Shteinberg jerked in surprise, then froze into catlike immobility. “How did you know that, Volodya, when I only found out about it myself just now?” he asked, his voice ominously quiet.

“I didn’t know, sir. But Surkov and I talked about that kind of trick. He knew it was a possibility. Or he knew a year ago. But he and his men must have slacked off and stopped worrying about it when nothing happened. Then something did-and he would’ve remembered he should’ve been on his toes. And since he wasn’t…” Bokov mimed shooting himself.

“I see. Yes, that makes good sense.” Colonel Shteinberg lifted his cap in salute. Mockingly? Bokov was damned if he could tell. Shteinberg went on, “Your deduction is fine indeed. You should be Sherlock Bokov, not Vladimir.”

Bokov had read his share of Sherlock Holmes stories in translation. Many Russians had; unlike so many English and American authors, Arthur Conan Doyle was ideologically inoffensive. All the same, he said, “How much good does it do to know who the criminal is when you can’t catch him because he’s blown himself to smithereens?”

“A point,” the senior NKVD officer admitted. “But only some of a point. These Fascist jackals run in packs. Sometimes the trail of one will lead you to the next.”

“Sometimes it will, yes, sir. Only sometimes it won’t.” Bokov hesitated, then hurried on so that what he said came from his mouth and not Shteinberg’s: “Doesn’t look like the Americans have done anything with that damned DP we gave them, for instance.” Shteinberg couldn’t blame him for that if he’d already blamed himself. He hoped Shteinberg couldn’t, anyhow.

The Jew stayed silent so long, Bokov started to worry. At last, though, Shteinberg said, “Don’t lose any sleep over that one, Volodya. If it doesn’t work out, then it doesn’t. But the world won’t end if one single solitary cat happens to land by a bowl of cream.”

Would he have said the same thing had the man they let go been an anti-Fascist German, not another Jew? Vladimir Bokov had his doubts. By the nature of things, he had to keep them to himself.

“And besides-” Shteinberg added, and not another word. But when he puffed out his cheeks, narrowed his eyes, and glowered, he did a remarkable impression of Lieutenant General Yuri Vlasov. Maybe there was a mike hidden in Bokov’s office, maybe not. There was no cinema camera. Nobody but the two of them would ever know he’d just wordlessly said they’d given the evil-tempered general a finger in the eye. And Bokov couldn’t prove a thing.

“If they stole a tank, they couldn’t have done it with one lone man,” Bokov said. “Did we know where they did it yet? Do we know how?”

“We may. I don’t.” Moisei Shteinberg sighed. “Something went wrong somewhere-you can count on that. We forgot about a machine, or we figured the Germans couldn’t make it start because we couldn’t, or a guard got drunk and passed out, or the Heydrichites knocked somebody over the head, or somebody who spoke Russian had forged papers, or…” He spread his hands as if to say he could go on.

Some of the schemes he proposed struck Bokov as more likely than others, but any one of them was possible. “Why do we fuck up like this all the time?” Bokov burst out.

“It’s not as though the rest of the Allies haven’t got bitten, too.” The other NKVD man gave such consolation as he could. “And the Germans lost the big war, so they aren’t immune, either.”

“What does that mean?” Bokov answered his own question: “The whole human race is fucked up, that’s what!”

One of Shteinberg’s dark eyebrows rose a few millimeters: “And this surprises you because…?”

Joe Martin nodded to Jerry Duncan. “The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Indiana,” the Speaker of the House said.

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” Jerry said. “I rise to discuss the administration’s flawed-no, I should say failed-policy in Germany.”

“You’ve got no right to do that,” Sam Rayburn growled from the other side of the aisle. “The administration can’t carry out its policy in Germany, because you people won’t let it. Running away and giving the place back to the Nazis is your policy, not the President’s.”

Bang! Speaker Martin brought down his gavel with obvious relish. “The gentleman from Texas is out of order, as I am sure he knows perfectly well.”

“I’ll tell you what’s out of order,” Rayburn said. “This idiotic retreat you’re ramming down everybody’s throat is out of order, that’s what.”

Bang! Bang! “That will be quite enough of that, Mr. Rayburn. Quite enough.” Martin often repeated himself for emphasis. Diana McGraw does the same thing, Jerry thought. Then he wondered if he did it himself without noticing. The Speaker of the House went on, “Mr. Duncan has the floor. You may continue, Mr. Duncan.”

“Thank you again, Mr. Speaker,” Jerry said. “It’s nice to have somebody on my side up there. I’m still getting used to that.”

A ripple of laughter ran through the not especially crowded House chamber. Even Sam Rayburn smiled gruffly. While he was up on the dais, he hadn’t been on Jerry’s side, and he didn’t give two whoops in hell who knew it.

“We had the wrong troops in the wrong places, and they were trying to accomplish the wrong mission,” Jerry went on. “Other than that, everything was fine with President Truman’s policy.”

Most Republicans in the chamber applauded, along with the growing number of anti-occupation Democrats. Catcalls and boos rose from the pro-administration Democrats, and from the Republicans, mostly in the Northeast, who couldn’t see their way clear to agreeing with the majority in their own party.

“We tried everything we knew how to do. Did we manage to stop the German partisans, or even slow them down very much? We did not,” Jerry said. “No one’s been able to slow them down very much. The way they blew up the Russians’ monument in Berlin proves that. If the Russians can’t keep them from doing things like that, nobody’s going to be able to.”

The Russians are tough, evil bastards. They can do all the stuff we haven’t got the stomach to do ourselves. Jerry didn’t come right out and put that in his speech, but it lay below and behind his words. By the way several Congressmen nodded, they heard what he wasn’t saying-heard it loud and clear.

“Isn’t it time we deal with what we’ve got instead of what we wish we had?” he asked. “Let the damned Nazis come out in the open-not because we love them, because we know they’re there. Once they are out in the open, they won’t be able to cause nearly so much trouble.”

“Tell it to Frankfurt,” Sam Rayburn said. “How many years before it’ll be fit for human beings to live there again?”

“Mr. Duncan has the floor,” the Speaker said, and used the gavel again.

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The partisans weren’t out in the open when they attacked our poorly guarded compound in Frankfurt,” Jerry said. “When they come out of hiding, we’ll know who they are and where their strength lies. And we will sit over them with our planes and our bombs, and we will make sure they stay inside their own borders.”

“Till one of their rockets lands on New York City-or Washington,” Rayburn said.

“Oh, come off it!” Jerry rolled his eyes. “I do believe the distinguished gentleman from Texas has been pawing through too many of those magazines with the bug-eyed monsters on the cover.”

He got a laugh, but it was a more nervous laugh than he would have liked. And Rayburn said, “The gentleman from Indiana had better tell that to London and Antwerp. Anybody who hit London yesterday will be able to hit New York-and Moscow-tomorrow.”

Jerry was saved not by the bell but by the gavel. “The gentleman from Texas is out of order, as I’ve reminded him before,” Joe Martin said. “It’s also my opinion that his argument forgets all about where we are today.”

Martin got a much bigger, much deeper laugh than Jerry Duncan had. When the Speaker of the House cracked a joke, Congressmen who knew what was good for them found it funny. Some Speakers had long memories for slights of any kind. Sam Rayburn had, when he was on the rostrum in front of the House. You crossed him at your professional peril. Joe Martin seemed more easygoing than the dour Texan, but he might yet find he needed to toughen up one of these days.

Now he nodded to Jerry. “You may continue, Mr. Duncan. Hopefully, you may continue without further interruptions from the peanut gallery.” He glanced in Sam Rayburn’s direction. Rayburn looked back, unrepentant.

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I was almost done,” Jerry said. “I did want to add for the record that I’m proud the person who first publicly pointed out that the President’s German policy has no clothes on is from my district. The whole country owes Mrs. Diana McGraw a vote of thanks.”

“She has a lot to answer for, all right, but that’s not the same thing,” Rayburn said. Speaker Martin gaveled him into silence-about a dozen words too late to suit Jerry.

By now, Bernie Cobb had seen too goddamn many German Alpine valleys. The most excitement he’d ever got was when the blast that sealed one mineshaft touched off an underground collapse.

When they stuck him in the back of a truck and hauled him off on what he figured was another wild-goose chase, he just shrugged. Most of the other soldiers under the canvas roof pissed and moaned right from the start. One of them even asked him, “Why aren’t you bitching like the rest of us?”

“What’s the use?” Bernie answered. “We’re going where they tell us to, and we’ll do what they say once we get there.”

“That’s what’s wrong,” the other GI said.

“It’s the fuckin’ Army. This is how it works,” Bernie said, more patiently than he’d expected. “Besides, would you rather be back in Nuremberg or Munich or somewhere like that? Out in the open, at least you’ve got a chance of seeing the fanatics before they start shooting at you.”

“I don’t want to be here at all,” the other soldier said. Several more men nodded. The guy doing the talking went on, “Damn war was supposed to be over almost two and a half years ago. Only reason we’re still fucking around in this miserable country is that Harry Truman’s a goddamn jerk.” His friends nodded some more.

The sentiment had its points. Bernie had said things not very different himself. Hearing it from a punk who plainly hadn’t seen Germany before V-E Day only pissed him off, though. “You better remember, the Jerries don’t know you don’t wanna be here,” he said. “You don’t keep your eyes open, they’ll punch your ticket for you toot sweet. Or else you’ll be the star in one of their movies, and then we’ll find what’s left of you by the side of the road. So keep your eyes open and your mouth shut, huh?”

“Sorry, General!” the new draftee said. His friends snickered. They would all have edged away from Bernie, except the truck was too tightly packed to make edging away possible, let alone practical.

Bernie barely had room to snake a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket. After he lit up, one of the guys who’d made it plainest that he thought Bernie was an idiot tried to cadge a smoke from him. Bernie was tempted to tell him to shove it. The other guy likely would have done that to him. But he’d learned you always shared in the field-if you ran out of this or that, somebody else would share with you.

He couldn’t help saying, “I don’t look like such a jerk now that I’ve got something you want, huh?”

“Yeah, well-” The fellow did manage to seem faintly embarrassed. He held the Chesterfield out to Bernie. “Can you give me a light, too?”

“Jeez Louise!” Bernie said, but he did.

After a while, the truck stopped at a checkpoint. An MP with a grease gun eyed the soldiers in the back with a look that said he thought they were all SS men in disguise. “Who won the American League pennant in ’44?” he demanded fiercely.

“The Browns. Only time they’ve ever done it,” Bernie answered before anybody else could. “I was already over here by then, but I know that.”

He figured the MP would shut up, but the guy didn’t. “Did they win the Series?” the snowdrop asked. “One of you other clowns-not him.”

“No,” said the soldier who didn’t want to be in Germany at all. “The Cards beat ’em in…was it seven games?”

“Six,” Bernie said.

“Okay.” Now the MP was satisfied. “You guys are Americans, all right. You can go on.”

“What the hell are we getting into?” Bernie asked.

“You think they tell me what’s going on?” the MP said. The PFC driving the truck put it back in gear. It rolled down into the valley.

“Wonder what they woulda done if we didn’t know baseball,” said one of the GIs in the back.

“Fucked us over and wasted a bunch of everybody’s time,” Bernie said. “Then when it finally did get straightened out they would’ve acted like it was our fault for being such a dumb bunch of cocksuckers.”

“You don’t like MPs, do you?” the soldier asked him.

“Gee, how’d you figure that out?” Bernie said, deadpan. Almost everybody back there laughed.

It got warmer as the truck went down into the valley-not warm, but warmer. Bernie munched on part of a D-ration bar. The damn thing tasted the way he’d always thought a chocolate-flavored candle would. It was too waxy to be enjoyable, but a whole bar would keep you running all day. D-rats were supposed to have all the vitamins and stuff you needed. Bernie didn’t know about that. He did know they were the perfect antidote for prunes; if you had to live on them for two or three days, the memory, among other things, lingered for quite a while afterwards. But it was what he had on him. Unlike these new guys, he didn’t feel like scrounging from people he didn’t know.

After a while, the truck stopped. “Ritz Hotel!” the driver shouted. “All ashore that’s going ashore!”

“Funny guy-a fuckin’ comedian,” Bernie said. “He should take it on the radio…and then stuff it.”

“There you go, man,” said the kid who didn’t want to be there. They agreed about something, anyhow.

One by one, the GIs hopped out. It wasn’t the Ritz. It was a bunch of olive-drab tents set down in the middle of the valley. A barbed-wire perimeter and machine-gun nests protected by thick layers of sandbags protected the camp from direct assault.

“What the fuck is all this?” said one of the soldiers who’d got out of the truck with Bernie.

“Whatever it is, I don’t like it. It feels like a trap,” Bernie said. The other soldier gave him a funny look, but he set his jaw, nodded, and waved to the mountains reaching up to the sky on either side. “Fucking fanatics want to throw stuff down on us, who’s gonna stop ’em? High ground counts for a lot.” He spoke from experience, which was something the other guy probably didn’t have.

A captain came out of a tent, followed by an older guy in black-dyed fatigues without any insignia-some kind of civilian attached to the Army. “It’s not a trap, on account of we hold the heights,” the captain said. By the way he talked, he came from New York or New Jersey or somewhere around there. “We hold this whole goddamn valley, matter of fact. And somewhere under it, I hope like hell, is Reinhard Heydrich. We’re gonna dig the son of a bitch out.”

“How many other Nazis has he got with him?” asked one of the other fellows just off the deuce-and-a-half. “They gonna shoot it out with us?” He didn’t sound delighted at the prospect.

“However many pals he has, that’s their tough luck. We’ve got what we need to blast ’em all,” the captain answered. He was skinny and sharp-nosed. A Jew, Bernie judged. So was the fellow in black fatigues, unless he missed his guess. No wonder the officer’d stayed so gung-ho, then. Bernie wasn’t sure he had himself. Then the captain said, “There’s a million bucks on Heydrich’s head, remember. A cool million, and you’ll never hear from the IRS. Think about that, guys.”

They thought about it. They liked it…better than they had before, anyhow. Bernie looked down the valley. Other encampments were in place. And…He started laughing.

“What’s funny?” the captain snapped.

“Sorry, sir,” he said, “but I been here before-patrol last year.” He remembered the farmhouse with the dirty pictures. “Maybe I walked on Heydrich’s grave.”

The captain’s grin made him look years younger. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe you did.”