The Man with the Iron Heart (13 page)

“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.

“H
ERE YOU ARE
, C
ONGRESSMAN.”
G
LADYS 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.

R
EINHARD
H
EYDRICH WAS A THOROUGH MAN.
W
HEN 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
Oberscharführer
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
Führer
’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
Führer
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 Röhm 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?”