The Man with the Iron Heart

VI

The Indiana state Capitol was one impressive building. Diana McGraw had never seen it before, not in person, even though Anderson was only about twenty miles outside of Indianapolis. A housewife in a suburban town didn’t need to hobnob with state legislators. But, since she’d already seen her Congressman, the idea of coming here intimidated her less than it would have before.

Now that she’d seen the U.S. Capitol, this one also seemed a little less splendid than it would have. It was built in the same neo-Roman style, but the dome was smaller and narrower, the proportions altogether less grand. Well, so what? Indiana wasn’t Washington, and most of the time that was a good thing.

Dressed in black, she got out of the family Pontiac. Ed sat stolidly behind the wheel, lighting a Chesterfield. This wasn’t his show-it was hers. He mourned their son by himself, within himself. Diana was the one with the fiery conviction that what had happened to Pat shouldn’t happen to any other mother’s son. She was the one who was damn well going to do something about it, too.

She glanced at her watch. It was still a quarter to ten. Of course she’d made sure she got here early. Things wouldn’t start for another forty-five minutes. And when they did…She wasn’t sure what would happen then. You couldn’t be sure till you went and did something.

A man across the street whistled and waved. It wasn’t a wolf whistle-he was trying to get her attention. When she looked up, he called, “Mrs. McGraw?”

“That’s me.” She nodded automatically.

He loped across the street toward her, dodging cars like a half-back. He wore a snap-brim fedora and a sharp suit that didn’t hang well on his pudgy frame. Behind him came a bareheaded guy in his shirtsleeves who carried a big camera. “I’m E. A. Stuart, from the Times,” the man in the lead said. “S-T-U-A-R-T. No W. We talked on the phone. This sounds interesting. Jack here’ll take photos.”

“Hi,” Jack said around the stub of a smelly cigar.

“Pleased to meet you both,” Diana said. “What does the ‘E.A.’ stand for?”

Jack grunted laughter. E. A. Stuart sighed. “You really want to know? Ebenezer Amminadab,” he answered resignedly. “My ma read the Bible too darn much, you want to know what I think. But that’s how come I use E.A.”

“Amminadab,” Diana echoed in wonder, hoping she was pronouncing it right. “Well, now that you mention it, yes. About your mother, I mean.”

“He was the only kid in kindergarten who went by his initials,” Jack said.

“Oh, shut up,” E. A. Stuart told him, and Diana was sure the reporter had heard the joke way too many times before. Stuart turned back to her. “How many people you expect here?”

“Hundreds,” she said, more confidently than she felt. Where were they? She’d made phone calls. She’d sent wires. She’d got answers. No, more: she’d got promises. Satan surely fried people who said they’d do something and then didn’t come through. That wouldn’t do her any good, though. If this fizzles…I’ll try something else, that’s all, she told herself. Quitting never entered her mind.

Another woman wearing mourning got out of a car. The old De Soto drove off. The woman, who shouldered a sign as if it were an M-1, came over to Diana.

So did another reporter. He introduced himself as Chuck Christman, from the Indianapolis News. The photographer he had in tow might have been Jack’s younger brother. The way the newspapermen razzed one another showed they’d been covering the same stories for a long time.

The other woman was Louise Rodgers, from Bloomington. She was about Diana’s age-no big surprise there-and she’d lost a boy to a roadside bomb two weeks after the German surrender. “The papers and the news on the radio just whitewash everything,” she told E. A. Stuart and Chuck Christman.

“We’re here now,” Christman pointed out.

“Months late and how many lives short?” Louise Rodgers said. “Till I heard from Diana, I didn’t think I could do anything about David-that’s my son; no, was my son-except sit around the house and cry all day. But if we can keep other mothers from crying, that’s better.”

“You said it,” Diana agreed. The reporters scribbled.

More women drifted in. Some of them had lost sons after the Nazis allegedly gave up, too. Others hadn’t, but still hated the idea of so many soldiers dying after the war was supposed to be over and victory won. Some men joined them, too-not many, but some. Two were veterans who’d been wounded in France or Germany. Another, older, was like Ed; he’d caught a packet in 1918.

“They called the last one the war to end war. This time, the stupid war can’t even end itself,” he said. The reporters liked that. They both wrote it down.

Diana went back and opened the Pontiac’s rear door. She took her own picket sign off the backseat. BRING OUR BOYS HOME FROM GERMANY NOW! it said. “Come on,” she told the other demonstrators.

Heart thuttering, she led them to the sidewalk in front of the capitol. She’d never done anything like this before. Till Pat got killed, she’d never imagined doing anything like this. Nothing like a kick in the teeth to boot you out of your old routine.

HOW MANY DEAD? one sign asked. TOO MANY DEAD! another answered. WHY ARE THEY STILL THERE? another demanded. ISN’T THE WAR OVER YET? a sign inquired rhetorically. STOP THE WAR DEPARTMENT’S LIES! another said. 1000+ DEAD SINCE SURRENDER! another sign declared. Anybody who carried one without either a question mark or an exclamation point seemed out of place.

Another contingent of picketers came up the street. ILLINOIS MOTHERS SUPPORT BRINGING TROOPS HOME! announced the sign their leader carried. GERMAN OCCUPATION WASTES AMERICAN LIVES! another one said. A decorated veteran carried that sign.

“Good to see you!” Diana called to the Illinoisans. She could hear how relieved she sounded. Well, she’d earned the right, by God. They’d said they would come down. It was an easy train trip from Chicago. But promises were worth their weight in gold. She remembered what she’d thought a little earlier about the Devil and people who didn’t come through.

Now, where were the people from Ohio? They’d promised, too. Which meant…She’d have to see what it meant, or whether it meant anything.

A man driving a battered Model A Ford stopped right in the middle of Capitol Street. The bakery truck behind him almost rearended him, but he either didn’t notice or didn’t care. He leaned out the window and shouted, “Communists! You’re all nothin’ but a bunch of lousy Reds!”

“We’re Americans, that’s what we are!” Diana shouted back. The demonstrators near her cheered. We have to carry flags next time, she thought, and wished she could write that down so she wouldn’t lose it.

“Communists!” the man in the Model A yelled again. He shook his fist at the people on the sidewalk.

The bakery-truck driver leaned on his horn. So did somebody stuck in back of him. The man in the Model A shook his fist once more, maybe at them, maybe at the picketers, maybe at the world. He put the decrepit old car in gear. It wheezed on down the road.

“Well, people are noticing us,” said the woman at the head of the Illinois group. Her name was Edna Somebody-right this minute, Diana couldn’t remember what.

She nodded. “That’s the idea. Now where are those folks from Columbus and Cincinnati? They said they’d be here.”

“Isn’t that them?” Edna Somebody pointed up the street. Lopatynski, that was her name. No wonder I couldn’t come up with it for a second, Diana told herself.

Sure enough, here they came, like the cavalry riding up over a hill in the last reel of a Western serial. OHIO SAYS TOO MANY HAVE DIED FOR NOTHING! their leader’s sign said. THE WAR DEPT. STILL WANTS WAR! declared another. And a haggard woman’s sign poignantly asked, WHAT DID MY ONLY SON DIE FOR?

Another car stopped on Capitol, this one with a screech of brakes. “Traitors!” yelled the man inside. His face was beet red; he all but frothed at the mouth. “They oughta string up the lot of you!”

Diana worked hard to stay calm. She’d feared-no, she’d known-people would shout things like that. She’d done her homework, too. “The Constitution says we can peaceably assemble and petition for a redress of grievances. My son got blown up months after the surrender. Isn’t that a grievance?”

The red-faced man’s arm shot up and out in a salute the Germans had made odious all over the world. “Heil Hitler!” he said. “You fools want the Nazis back again.” He drove off before horns blared behind him.

Edna Lopatynski’s laugh was shaky, but it was a laugh. “Well, Diana, are we Communists or are we Nazis?”

“No,” Diana answered firmly. “We’re Americans. If the government is doing something stupid, we’ve got the right to say so. We’ve got the right to make it stop. And that’s what we’re doing.” She looked around. Chuck Christman and E. A. Stuart were both close enough to hear what she’d said.

Yes, she’d expected to get called a traitor and a Communist. That anybody could think she was trying to help the Nazis after Heydrich’s lunatics murdered Pat…Her free hand folded into a fist. She wanted to clock that guy. The nerve!

Several cops stood around watching the picketers go back and forth. One of them ambled over to Diana and fell into step beside her. “You running this whole shebang?” he inquired.

“I organized it, anyhow,” she said. “I don’t know that anybody’s in charge.”

“Yeah, well, if it goes wrong you’re the one we’ll jug,” the policeman said. “Keep doing like you’re doing. Stay spaced out. Let people through. Stuff like that. Long as you play by the rules, we won’t give you no trouble. I think you’re full of hops myself, but that’s got nothin’ to do with what’s legal.”

“My son got killed for no reason,” Diana said tightly. “President Truman never has said why we still need to be in Germany. I don’t think he knows, either.”

“He’s the President of the United States.” The cop sounded shocked.

“He was a Kansas City machine politician till FDR dumped Henry Wallace,” Diana retorted. “He’s only President ’cause Roosevelt died. He’s not infallible or anything.”

“Huh.” Shaking his head, the policeman went away.

Several men who looked like state legislators-they were mostly portly, they had gray hair, and they wore expensive suits-came out onto the Capitol steps to watch the demonstration. Some of them shook their heads, too. They must figure we’re a bunch of crackpots, Diana thought. Well, we’ll show ’em!

One of the legislators got into an argument with his colleagues. Another man ostentatiously turned his back on him. Diana wondered if the first guy was on her side. She could hope so, anyhow.

A car horn blared. The driver stuck his left hand out of the window, middle finger raised. He didn’t bother slowing down.

Lobbyists and lawyers with briefcases passed through the picket line on the way to doing business in the Capitol. “You should be ashamed,” one of them said, but he took it no further than that. More ordinary people went through, too-men in work clothes, women in dresses they’d got from the Sears catalogue or made themselves.

A couple of them said unkind things, too. But one fellow who looked like a mechanic said, “Give ’em hell, folks!” and flashed a thumbs-up. Diana wanted to kiss him. Not everybody hated them! She’d hoped that was true, but she hadn’t been sure.

A fat, middle-aged man stood on the sidewalk watching the demonstrators. Every time Diana turned around and got another look at him, he got hotter and hotter. Edna Lopatynski also saw it. “That fellow’s going to make trouble,” she said quietly.

“I’m afraid you’re right,” Diana answered. “But what can we do about it?”

They went back and forth twice more before the fat man blew a fuse. “Commies!” he yelled. “Nazis!” He didn’t know which brush to tar them with, so he used both. Then he charged into them, fists flailing.

A woman squalled when he hit her. Another woman stuck out a foot and tripped him as he rampaged past her. A man sat on him and kept him from doing anything worse than he’d already done.

The Capitol police came over in a hurry this time, and came over in force. The fat man yelled obscenities. “I dink he boke by dose,” said the woman he’d hit. Her nose was sure bleeding: red spotted the front of her white blouse. Jack and the photographer from the News both took pictures of her.

“You can’t haul off and belt a lady like that, buddy,” one of the policemen said. “You’re under arrest.”

“Lady?” The fat man found several other things to call her, none of them endearments. Then he said, “You oughta haul her off to jail for doing crap like this. You oughta haul every goddamn one o’ these yahoos off to jail, and you oughta lose the key once you do.”

“They may be jerks, but they aren’t breaking any laws,” the flatfoot answered. “Assault and battery, now…” He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “You should be ashamed of yourself. She ain’t even half your size.”

“A rattlesnake isn’t big, either, but it’s still poison.” The fat man had strong opinions.

So did Diana. She wanted to tell the cops to haul him off and lose the key. No matter what she wanted, she made herself go on marching without saying anything. The police didn’t like her. They wouldn’t appreciate her sticking her oar in. If she just let them do their job…

They did it. They got the fat man up onto his feet, cuffed his hands behind him, and led him away. He swore a blue streak all the way, which did him exactly no good.

“Bring our boys home from Germany!” Diana chanted. The other picketers joined her. Together, they made more noise than the fat man. Diana thought it was obvious they made more sense, too.

“Here you are, Congressman.”Gladys plopped the day’s papers onto Jerry Duncan’s desk.

“Thanks,” he said. “Could you bring me another cup of coffee, too? Can’t seem to get myself perking this morning.”

She grabbed the cup and saucer. “I’ll be right back.”

“Thanks,” he said again, absently this time. He was already starting to study the papers. You had to keep up with what was going on if you wanted any chance to keep your head above water. The New York Times came first. It was much more pro-administration than Jerry was, but had far and away the best coverage of foreign affairs.

Gladys brought back the fresh cup, steam rising from it. Jerry Duncan sipped without consciously noticing where the coffee’d come from. After the Times, he went through the Wall Street Journal for economic news, and the Washington Evening Star, the Post, and the Times-Herald to find out what was going on in his second home.

Those done, he reached for the Indianapolis News and the Indianapolis Times, then for the Anderson Democrat. You also had to stay current with what was going on in your district. If you decided Washington was your first home, not your second, the folks back in Indiana would likely throw you out on your ear next chance they got.

Right in the middle of the News’ front page was a photo of cops dragging off a wild-eyed fellow who could have dropped a few pounds, or more than a few. A woman with a picket sign and what looked like bloodstains on her face and on her blouse watched him go. Man arrested after attacking demonstrator, the caption said.

The story under the photo was almost studiously neutral. It identified the leader of the demonstration as “Diana McGraw, 48, of Anderson.” She was “moved to oppose government policy on Germany after her son, Patrick, was killed there in September, long after the formal German surrender.”

“Hmm,” Jerry said, and went to see what the Times had to say: it was the more liberal paper in town. Because it backed the Democrats, it looked down its nose at anyone presuming to protest against their polices. But even its tone was more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger. Its editorial said, “While we understand Mrs. McGraw’s grief and outrage, and those of other similarly afflicted, the United States must persist in its mission of returning Germany to civilization and democracy to Germany.”

As for the Anderson Democrat, it didn’t seem to know which way to jump. Its name told where its politics lay. On the other hand, Diana McGraw was a home town girl, doing something that got noticed beyond the home town’s borders-not easy, not if your home town was Anderson. “What would you do if it were your son?” she’d asked the Democrat’s reporter after the demonstration ended.

As far as Jerry was concerned, that was the sixty-four-dollar question. Even the Democrat and the Indianapolis Times seemed to understand as much. How could you condemn people who’d lost their boys in combat for wanting to know why? And wasn’t that all the more true when they’d lost boys in combat when there wasn’t supposed to be combat any more?

You might disagree with them-both papers plainly did. But you’d have a devil of a time calling them disloyal. A dead son gave someone carrying a picket sign a decided moral advantage.

Jerry realized he wouldn’t be the only Congressman reading these reports. Come to think of it, he might not have been the only Congressman Diana McGraw saw when she came to Washington. If he wanted to stay in front on this issue, he couldn’t sit on his hands. He had to stand up, or someone else would get ahead of him. His colleagues could and would draw the same conclusions he was drawing.

His own party desperately needed a club with which to clobber the Democrats. The other side had dominated Congress since the start of the 1930s. They’d just won the biggest war in the history of the world. That might set them up to keep winning elections forever if the GOP couldn’t find a shillelagh.

If over a thousand GIs dead since V-E Day weren’t a shillelagh…then the Republicans would never come up with one. Jerry started scribbling notes.

The House was debating a bill that would finish rationing by the end of the year. There wasn’t much debate, because nobody worth mentioning opposed the bill. The whole country hated rationing. The sooner it disappeared forever, the happier everyone would be.

When Jerry raised his hand that afternoon, then, he had no trouble getting the floor. Speaker Rayburn pointed his way and said, “The chair recognizes the gentleman from Indiana.” The wily Texan no doubt hoped Jerry would speak out against the bill. If a Republican wanted to commit political suicide, Sam Rayburn would gladly hand him a rope.

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker.” Jerry liked the House’s ritual courtesies. “Mr. Speaker, I rise to discuss a related kind of rationing-the rationing of our troops’ lives in Germany.”

Bang! Down came Rayburn’s gavel. “You are out of order, Mr. Duncan!”

“Our occupation policy is out of order, Mr. Speaker,” Jerry said.

Bang! “You are out of order, Mr. Duncan!” Rayburn sounded like God right after the children of Israel did something really stupid. If you could imagine God moon-faced and pouchy and bald, he looked like Him, too.

“Mr. Speaker!” “Point of order, Mr. Speaker!” The cries of protest came from a dozen Republican throats, maybe more. Jerry had wondered whether anyone else would back his play. There’d been a one-paragraph AP squib about the demonstration on page fourteen of the New York Times, nothing more. The same squib showed up in the Evening Star. The Times-Herald and the Post didn’t bother running it. Maybe the other Republicans had noticed anyhow.

Maybe Sam Rayburn had, too. He shook his head, glowering down from his high seat on the marble dais. “This has nothing to do with the measure under consideration, and the gentleman from Indiana knows it.”

“May I address that point, Mr. Speaker?” Jerry called.

“Briefly,” Rayburn growled.

“Thank you. It seems to me, Mr. Speaker, that the bill we were debating mainly has to do with how best to wind down from the war. That’s what I want to talk about, too, because the fighting in Germany’s gone on and on, even though the Nazis said they surrendered last spring. Don’t we need to wind that down?”

Rayburn scowled at Jerry from on high. Then the Texas Democrat said, “That damnfool woman who led her silly march comes out of your district, doesn’t she?”

“Minus the unflattering adjectives, yes, Mr. Speaker, she does,” Jerry answered. Sure as hell, Sam Rayburn didn’t miss much.

“All right, then. Say your say, and after you’re done we’ll ease back to the business at hand. It won’t matter one way or the other.” The Speaker of the House sounded indulgent. He knew the kinds of things Representatives had to do for their constituents.

He might not miss much, but he missed something that day when he didn’t quash Jerry Duncan before Jerry was well begun.

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” Jerry said once more. “I want to know why the United States Army, the mightiest army in the history of the world, hasn’t been able to stamp out these German fanatics. I want to know why we haven’t been able to hunt down this Reinhard Heydrich, who seems to be the brains of the outfit. I want to know why upwards of a thousand servicemen have been killed in Germany since the so-called surrender. And I especially want to know why the War Department is doing its level best to hide all these deaths and to pretend they never happened.”

Members of his own party applauded him. Democrats jeered. A couple of them shook their fists. “President Truman knows what he’s doing!” one man shouted.

“You’re soft on the Germans!” another Democrat added.

“I am not!” Jerry said indignantly. “When we try those thugs we capture, I hope we shoot them or hang them or get rid of them for good some other way. And I expect we will. That has nothing to do with why we’re wasting so many lives in Germany. It has nothing to do with why we can’t stop the insurgency, either. What are we doing in occupied Germany, and why aren’t we doing it better?”

“Sellout!” that Democrat yelled.

“Isolationist!” someone else put in. The minute the Japs hit Pearl Harbor, isolationism became a dirty word.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Speaker Rayburn plied his gavel with might and main. “The House will come to order!” Bang! Bang! “Mr. Duncan, how do you propose to find out what you want to know?” You don’t really care, Rayburn’s words implied. You’re just making political hay.

Jerry pretended not to hear that. If you didn’t notice, you didn’t have to react. He simply responded to what Rayburn actually said: “Questioning some War Department officials would make a good first step, Mr. Speaker.”

“You think so, do you?” Rayburn rasped a chuckle. With a large majority in both House and Senate, Democrats controlled who got questioned. The Speaker made it plain he didn’t aim to let anybody ask the War Department anything inconvenient or embarrassing.

Shrugging, Duncan said, “You can pull a rug over a pile of dust, but the dust doesn’t go away. It just leaves an ugly lump under the rug.”

Bang! “That will be quite enough of that,” Sam Rayburn said. “Now, returning to the bill we were actually considering…”

Sam Rayburn didn’t want to look at the lump under the carpet. Neither did Robert Patterson, the Secretary of War, even though his department had done most of the sweeping that put it there. And Harry Truman really didn’t want to look at it, and didn’t want anybody else looking at it, either.

Well, too bad for all of them, Jerry thought. It’s there, and they put it there, and I’m damn well going to tell the country about it.

Reinhard Heydrich was a thorough man. When he realized he would have to fight a long twilight struggle after the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS went under, he prepared for it as best he could. He studied English and Russian. He’d never be fluent in either one. But, with a dictionary and patience, he could manage.

English should have been easier. It was German’s close cousin, and used the same alphabet as Heydrich’s birthspeech. But he found himself understanding the Soviets much more readily than the British-to say nothing of the Americans.

Soviet authorities reacted to the holdouts much as he’d expected. Deportations, executions, brutality…That all made sense to him. It was the way he would have attacked the problem were he running the NKVD. It was the way the Reich had attacked the partisan problem in Russia and Yugoslavia. The Germans hadn’t done so well as they would have liked, and Heydrich hoped the Soviets wouldn’t, either. But it was a good, rational approach.

The Americans, on the other hand…

On his desk sat a three-day-old copy of the International Herald-Tribune. The patriot who’d put the paper in a secure drop had circled a story on an inside page in red ink. Heydrich had already read the piece three times. He knew what all the words meant. He even understood the sentences-individually, anyhow. But the story as a whole struck him as insane.

“I thought this must be a joke,” he told Johannes Klein. “A joke or a trick, one.”

“What does it say?” Klein asked. The veteran Oberscharfuhrer did fine in German, and cared not a pfennig’s worth for any other language.

“It says there are rallies in America protesting the soldiers we’ve killed since the surrender. It says the people protesting demand that the Americans take their soldiers out of Germany so we can’t kill any more of them,” Heydrich answered.

“Fine,” Klein said. “When do the machine guns come out and teach these idiots some sense?”

“That’s what I wondered,” Heydrich answered. “That’s what we did to those White Rose traitors, by God.” He shook his head, still angry at the college kids who’d had the gall to object to the Fuhrer’s war policy-and to do it in public, too! Well, they’d paid for it: paid with their necks, a lot of them, and just what they deserved.

“Of course it is,” Hans Klein said. “What else can you do when a fool gets out of line?”

“The Yankees aren’t doing anything to them. Zero. Not even taking them in for questioning. Madness!” Heydrich said. He added the clincher: “One of their Congressmen is even making speeches taking the demonstrators’ side. Can you imagine that, Hans?”

His longtime comrade shook his head. So did Heydrich. He tried to picture a Reichstag deputy standing up in 1943 and telling the Fuhrer the war was lost and he ought to make the best peace he could. What would have happened to a deputy who did something like that? As near as Heydrich could tell, he wouldn’t just die. He would cease to exist, would cease ever to have existed. He would be aggressively forgotten, the way Ernst Rohm was after the Night of Long Knives.

As usual, Klein thought along with him. “So what are they doing to him?”

Heydrich brought a fist down on the newspaper. “Nothing!” he burst out. “This foolish rag goes on about freedom of speech and open discussion of ideas. Have you ever heard such twaddle in all your born days?”

“Not me,” Klein said.

“Not me, either,” Heydrich said. “I read this, and I thought the Yankees were trying to trick us. But a couple of our people have lived in America. They say it really works this way. Any crackpot can get up and go on about whatever the devil he wants.”

“How did they lick us?” Klein asked. No German asked that about the Russians. Stalin put out a fire by throwing bodies on it till it smothered. He commanded enough bodies to smother any fire, too, which had come as a dreadful surprise to the Fuhrer and the General Staff. But the Americans were…well, different seemed a polite word for it.

After some thought, Heydrich said, “That may be the wrong question.”

“Well, what’s the right one, then?”

“If they really are this naive”-Heydrich still had trouble believing it, but didn’t see what else he could think if the Herald-Tribune story wasn’t made up-“how do we take advantage of it?”

“Ah. Ach, so.” Once Klein saw the right question, he focused like the sun’s rays brought to a point by a burning glass. Like any long-serving noncom, he had a lot of practice taking advantage of officers with more power but less subtlety. His predicament with them was much like the Reich’s with its occupiers. Heydrich waited to see what he could come up with. After a few seconds, Klein said, “We have to keep fighting the Amis-”

“Aber naturlich!” Heydrich broke in.

“We have to keep fighting, ja.” The Oberscharfuhrer seemed to remind himself of where he’d been before he got to where he was going: “But we should also let them down easy, give them something these people who want to go home can latch on to and use for an excuse so they don’t look like a pack of gutless quitters.”

Like the pack of gutless quitters they really are, Heydrich thought. But Hans Klein wasn’t wrong. The enemy’s morale mattered. Germany had done well with propaganda against the Low Countries and France, then completely botched it against the Russians. Treating them like a bunch of niggers in the jungle wasn’t the smartest thing the Reich could have done. A little late to worry about that now, though. Heydrich leaned forward intently. “What have you got in mind?”

“Well, sir, way it looks to me is, we ought to say something like we’re only fighting to get our own country back again. We ought to let ’em know how much that means to us, and to ask ’em how happy they’d be if some son of a bitch was sitting on their head. And we ought to say we’ll be mild as milk if they just pack up and go away.”

Klein winked at Heydrich. The Reichsprotektor laughed out loud. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that. Of course Germany would rearm the moment it had the chance. And of course German physicists would get to work on atom bombs as soon as they could. That sparked another thought.

“As long as they’ve got this fancy bomb and we don’t, they have the whip hand, too,” Heydrich said. “We should tell them we understand that.”

“And we should promise we’d never go after the bomb. We should promise on a big, tall stack of Bibles.” Hans Klein winked again.

And damned if Heydrich didn’t laugh again. After the last war, the Treaty of Versailles said Germany couldn’t have all kinds of weapons. Her top aeronautical engineers designed civilian planes. Other engineers tested panzers in Russia-the Soviet Union was another pariah state. Artillery designs for Sweden, U-boats for Holland…When Hitler decided it was time to rearm, he didn’t have a bit of trouble. If Germany needed atom bombs to get ready for the next round, she’d have them.

“Can we do something like that, sir?” Klein asked.

“You’d better believe it.” Heydrich got up from his desk and walked over to a file cabinet under the Fuhrer’s framed photo. It held a complete run of Signal, the Reich’s wartime propaganda magazine. Signal was a slick product, printed in many languages; people said enemy publications like Life and Look had stolen from its layout and approach. That wasn’t why Heydrich started poring over back issues, though. They’d run an article he could adapt. He remembered it had come late in the war, after things on the Eastern Front went bad. That helped him narrow things down. He grunted when he found the copy he needed. “Here we go.”

“What have you got?” Hans Klein inquired.

“See for yourself.” Heydrich held out the magazine to him. The article was called “What We Are Fighting for.” It showed a wounded Wehrmacht man on one page, his left arm bandaged and bloody, his mouth open in a shout of anger and pain. On the facing page was a closeup of a blond, blue-eyed little girl, perhaps five years old. The two photos summed up exactly what the Reich was fighting for, but text went with them. That text was what Heydrich wanted.

Klein’s eyes lit up. “Wow! Amazing, sir. I saw this, too. I remember, now that you’re showing it to me again. But I never would have thought of it, let alone come up with it just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“Words are weapons, too,” Heydrich said. “You need to know where you can get your hands on them. Why don’t you go grab yourself some chow? I want to fiddle with this for a while.”

As soon as Klein left, Heydrich sat down again and started writing. He worked in German; he knew he’d make a hash of things if he tried to compose in English. But it would get translated. Other people would suggest changes and add things, too. That was all right. He was fighting again.