The Man with the Iron Heart (65 page)

Now the Germans got to jump up and down on the other pan in the scale. If the Anglo-Americans and the Russians (oh, yes—and the French, too) didn’t like it, let them have the joy of figuring out what to do about it. The Americans had already decided they didn’t know. The English weren’t likely to be far behind. And then…

Then what?
Peiper wondered. But he knew.
Then we take over, that’s what.
The Anglo-Americans would leave behind political parties and policemen to try to keep the National Socialists from reclaiming the power that was rightly theirs. Peiper chuckled. How long would that last? Not bloody long!

In the German-occupied East, how many Russian policemen had also served the Red Army or the NKVD? Way too goddamn many—Jochen Peiper knew that for sure. And how many German policemen in the occupied
Reich
also served the German Freedom Front? Quite a few—Peiper also knew that for sure.

“The fight goes on,” he murmured, and nodded to himself. “Whoever has the most patience—he wins.” He nodded again. The Americans and the English had already seen more trouble than they’d ever wanted. Before too long, the French would, too. Without the Anglo-Americans to prop them up, they weren’t much. The Russians…Jochen Peiper grimaced. The Russians were a different story. Against the Russians, you had to look a lifetime down the line if you were going to accomplish anything. But a free and independent and National Socialist
Deutsches Reich
in western Germany would do for a start. Peiper thought they could win that much pretty soon.

A
NYBODY COULD GO TO
N
EW
Y
ORK
C
ITY TO INTERVIEW TROOPS COMING
home. Since Tom Schmidt couldn’t go to Germany, he didn’t want to go to New York. Yes, lots of people—and lots of reporters—did, but wasn’t that the point? What were your chances of finding an interesting story if you did the same thing as everybody else? Pretty goddamn slim, that’s what.

And so Tom went to Baltimore instead. It was a major port, nobody else except people from there gave two whoops in hell about it, and it was only a little more than an hour by train from Washington. How could you not like the combination?

It was chilly and rainy there, as it had been when he set out from Union Station. Winter wasn’t on the calendar yet, but it sure was in the air. He stood under an umbrella a few paces beyond the tent that called itself a deprocessing center and waited for demobilized soldiers to come by. Out at the end of the pier squatted the
Peter Gray,
as unlovely a rustbucket as shipfitters had ever slapped together. Tom wondered who the Liberty ship was named for. Not the one-armed outfielder on the 1945 Browns, surely? But what other even slightly famous Pete Gray had there been?

MPs discouraged him from getting to the returning soldiers before they went through the deprocessing center. That irked him. “I happen to know other people have been able to talk to them beforehand,” he fumed.

All he got back from the sergeant in charge of the MPs was a shrug and a dismissive, “Sorry, sir.” The three-striper didn’t sound one bit sorry. Tacking insult on to injury, he added, “You understand—we’ve got our orders.”

So did the guards at Dachau and Belsen.
Tom almost said it. He would have if he’d figured it would do him any good. But the boss MP’s dull eyes and blunt features argued that he would have made a pretty good concentration-camp guard himself. That being so, hearing himself compared to one would have pissed him off all the more. He had no real reason to run Tom in, which might not stop him from inventing one. Sometimes the smartest thing you could do was keep your mouth shut.

Here came a soldier proudly wearing a shiny new Ruptured Duck on his lapel. “Talk to you a minute?” Tom asked. “Tom Schmidt, from the
Chicago Tribune.
” Taking notes, he realized, would be a bitch. It was like driving the hills of San Francisco, where you needed one foot on the gas, one on the brake, and one on the clutch. Here he needed one hand for the umbrella, one for the pencil, and one for the notebook.

As things turned out, he didn’t need pencil or notebook this time. The GI shook his head and kept walking. “Sorry, Mac. All I wanna do is haul ass for the train station, get aboard, and head for home.”

“Where is home?” Tom was nothing if not persistent. It did him no good this time. The soldier or ex-soldier or whatever he was shook his head again. He splashed every time his Army boots came down on the concrete. That had to be better than slopping through mud, though. Slowly, as if in a Hollywood dissolve, the curtain of rain made him disappear.

Here came another tired-looking GI. Tom took another shot at it: “Tom Schmidt,
Chicago Tribune.
Can I talk to you for a little bit?”

The GI—one stripe on his sleeve made him a PFC—paused. “Okay. Why not? You gonna put me in the paper?”

Tom nodded. “That’s the idea. What’s your name?”

“Atkins. Gil Atkins.”

“Where you from, Gil?” If Tom held both the notebook and the umbrella in his left hand, he could take notes…after a fashion.

“Sioux City, Iowa.”

“How about that?” Tom said: one of the rare phrases you could use with almost anything. He’d been to Sioux City. It was a place where nobody died of excess excitement. “What did you do there?”

“Short-order cook.”

“Were you a cook in the Army, too?”

“Not fuckin’ likely. I lugged a BAR.”

“Did you get to Germany before V-E Day or after?”

“After, not that it made much difference. Krauts may have said they gave up, but that didn’t mean shit, and everybody knew it. I’m just glad I made it home in one piece.” The kid’s face clouded over. “Bunch of my buddies didn’t.”

“I’m sorry,” Tom said. Gil Atkins only shrugged; maybe he recognized purely polite sympathy when he heard it. Tom tried again: “So you’re glad to come home from Germany, then?”

“Oh, hell, yes!” Nothing wrong with Atkins’ sincerity.

“What’s the best thing about being back in the States?”

“Lord! Where do I start?” Quite seriously, the returning PFC ticked off points on his fingers: “Let’s see. When I get on the train, I won’t have to worry that the fanatics have planted a block of TNT on the tracks. When I get into a jeep—sorry, I mean a car—I won’t have to watch the bushes by the side of the road to make sure no cocksucker with a rocket or a machine gun can blow it up. When I walk down the street, I won’t have to worry somebody’ll chuck a grenade under my feet and run away. I won’t have to wonder if the guy coming past me has dynamite and nails on under his coat. I won’t have to think the pretty gal pushing the baby carriage has maybe got a big old mine in there instead of a baby. I won’t have to be scared somebody’s gonna bomb the place where I’m sleeping. If I buy myself a shot, I won’t have to wonder whether some asshole poisoned it. I won’t…Shit, buddy, I could go on a lot longer, but you’ve got the message, doncha?”

“I just might, yeah.” Tom mimed writer’s cramp, which made Atkins chuckle. “What do you think about the people who don’t think we ought to be pulling out of Germany?”

“Well, that depends. There were some of those guys over there, and you gotta respect them. I mean, hell, they were laying it on the line like everybody else, y’know? So that was okay. But the people back here, the safe, fat, happy people who wouldn’t be in any danger regardless of what goes on in Germany—fuck them and the horse they rode in on. Those clowns are ready to fight to the last drop of my blood. That’s how it looks to me, anyways.” Gil Atkins chuckled again, this time in mild embarrassment. “You’re gonna have to take out some words before you can put this in your paper, huh?”

“That’s part of the business,” Tom said. “Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. You helped a lot.”

“Only time I ever got in the paper before was on account of a car crash,” Atkins said. “And that one wasn’t even my fault—other guy was drunk, and he sideswiped me.” He bobbed his head and tramped off. Before long, no doubt, he’d find the station. He’d ride back to Sioux City and start scrambling eggs and frying bacon and flipping hamburgers. He’d have a regular job again. Hell, he’d have his life back again. Try as Tom might, he couldn’t see what was so bad about that.

Tom had his own job, too. “Hi. I’m Tom Schmidt, from the
Chicago Tribune.
Can I talk to you for a minute?” This guy with his shiny Ruptured Duck walked past him as if he didn’t exist. Try again—what else could you do? “Hello. My name’s Tom Schmidt. I’m from the
Chicago Tribune….
”

“A
ULD
L
ANG
S
YNE” CAME OUT OF THE RADIO.
G
UY
L
OMBARDO’S
orchestra was playing in the New Year, the same as usual. Over the music, the announcer said, “In less than a minute now, the lighted ball in Times Square will drop. It will usher out 1947 and bring in 1948. Another year to look forward to…”

Ed McGraw looked down at his wristwatch. “Boy, I’m a whole year fast,” he said.

Buster Neft laughed. So did Betsy. Stan looked around, wide-eyed. He’d stayed up way past his bedtime, but New Year’s Eve was special. He would be three pretty soon, which seemed impossible to his grandmother.

Diana McGraw only smiled at Ed’s joke. He made it about every other New Year. And when he wasn’t a year fast, he was a year slow. Yeah, Diana had heard it before, too many times. She’d heard just about everything from him too many times.

“The ball is dropping!” the announcer said. “Happy New Year!”

“Happy New Year!” Ed lifted his beer. All the grownups had drinks of one kind or another. Even Stan had a glass of grape juice. If he wanted to pretend it was wine—well, why not?

Betsy raised her highball in Diana’s direction. “Here’s to you, Mom! If anybody made 1947 what it was, you’re the one.”

“Thanks,” Diana said. Along with the rest of her family, she drank the toast. It was true enough. American soldiers were coming home from Germany. Most of them were already back, and the ones who weren’t would be before long. Diana had had a lot to do with that.

And now it was—literally was, this past minute or so—last year’s news. The second phone line here didn’t ring as often as it had even a couple of months earlier. The withdrawal wasn’t controversial any more; it was an accomplished fact. By the nature of things, accomplished facts weren’t news. The world was starting to forget about Diana McGraw and Mothers Against the War in Germany. Why not? They’d won.

Pretty soon, she’d go back to being just another housewife from Anderson, Indiana. Up till Pat got killed, she hadn’t thought about being anything else. She still wished she’d never had any reason—well, never had
that
reason, anyhow—to think about anything else.

But she’d got used to going all over the country for the cause. She’d got used to fielding phone calls from reporters and Congressmen and other important people. She’d got used to being an important person herself. And she could watch that fade like a cheap blouse the first time it met bleach. Once you’d been famous—even a little bit famous—how did you get used to ordinary life?

Baseball players had to deal with it. So did actors who had one or two hit movies and then saw their careers fizzle out. Some managed gracefully. Others grabbed the limelight a little while longer by doing something disgraceful.

Diana might have managed that if news of her tryst with Marvin (she still couldn’t remember his last name) had made the papers. Everybody on the other side would have been delighted to see her exposed as a woman without any morals to call her own.

But nobody knew about that little encounter except the parties involved. She had no idea whether Marvin’s conscience bothered him. She would have bet against it. He was a man, after all. Men took what they could get, and tried to get it even when they couldn’t.

Women weren’t supposed to do things like that. Which didn’t mean they didn’t, only that they weren’t supposed to. What bothered Diana most about ending up in bed with Marvin Whoozis was how much fun she’d had while it was going on. Marvin had casually shown her more varieties of delight in half an hour than Ed had since the end of World War I. Darn it, when Ed went Over There, couldn’t a Mademoiselle from Amentières have taught him a little something? Evidently not.

And having a better idea of what she was missing only left Diana more frustrated when Ed wanted to lay her down. He still hadn’t figured out exactly what was wrong, even if he knew something was. She had no idea how to tell him, either. If she suddenly wanted him to start doing this and that when he’d never done—probably never even imagined doing—this and that before, what would he think? Most likely, that some other guy had done this and that with her while she was on one of her junkets.

He’d be right, too.

If only this and that—especially that—didn’t feel so good! If only she hadn’t got smashed with Marvin! If only…fame weren’t rolling away like the afternoon train bound for Indianapolis.

Which brought her back to where she’d started, full circle.

She realized Betsy’d just said something. She also realized she had no idea what. “I’m sorry, dear,” she said. “Your old mother was woolgathering there, I’m afraid. Must be second childhood coming on.”

“Oh, sure,” her daughter said with a snort. “What I said was, Buster and I’d better head for home. Stan won’t last much longer, and—”

“
Not
sleepy,” Stan declared, but he spoiled it with a tonsil-showing yawn.

“We know you’re not, Killer, but we’re going home anyway,” Buster said. Stan yawned again. He was too “not sleepy” to put up much of an argument. Buster went on, “Maybe I’ll show up for my shift tomorrow, and maybe I won’t.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Ed agreed. “Hey, tomorrow’s Friday. Who wants to work a one-day week right after New Year’s?”

Their daughter and son-in-law and grandson headed out into the cold. Stan dozed off on Buster’s shoulder before the Nefts even made it out the door. It closed behind them. That left Diana and Ed all alone.

“Happy New Year, babe,” he said.