Harry Turtledove - The Man with the Iron Heart

Lou Weissberg wanted to go back to the States. He didn’t want to examine any more mangled flesh. He didn’t want to smell the sick-sweet stench of death any more, either. (Not that you could avoid it in Germany, not in towns where the Army Air Force or the RAF had come to call…and in a lot of places the Army’d gone through, too.)

That stench was mild here, two days after the bombing with most of the dead meat taken away. Mild or not, it was there, and it made his stomach want to turn over. Toby Benton’s mouth twisted, too. “Hell of a thing-uh, sir,” the sergeant said.

“You better believe it.” Lou’s nod was jerky. “Twenty-three dead, they’re saying now. And almost twice that many wounded bad enough to need treatment.”

“Shit.” Benton’s drawl almost turned it into a two-syllable word. “Good thing the Jerries didn’t get so many of our guys for every one of theirs while the fighting was still going on. We had more people than they did-more stuff too-but not that much more.”

“Mm.” Lou hadn’t thought of it in those terms, which didn’t mean the ordnance sergeant was wrong. “If you were out to turn somebody into a walking bomb, how would you go about it?”

“Same way these fuckers did, I reckon,” Benton replied. “The Nazis bite the big one, but nobody ever said they couldn’t handle shit like this. Explosives-around the guy’s middle, I guess, so they wouldn’t show so much. Scrap metal, nails, whatever the hell for shrapnel. A battery. A button to push. And kapow! ”

“Yeah. Kapow! ” Lou’s echo sounded hollow, even to himself.

“What do we do about shit like this, Lieutenant?” Benton asked. “If this asshole wasn’t just your garden-variety nut, seems to me like we got ourselves some trouble. The way we fight is, we want to live, and we want to make sure the other sons of bitches don’t. Always figured the krauts played by the same rules. But if all of a sudden-like they don’t give a shit no more, sure as hell makes ’em harder to defend against.”

“I know.” Lou clenched his fist and pounded it against the side of his thigh. He didn’t notice he was doing it till it started to hurt. Then he quit. “God damn it to hell, Toby, the war in Europe is over. They surrendered. We can do whatever we want to their people, and they’ve got to know it.”

“Yes, sir,” Sergeant Benton agreed. “That’s how come I hope he was a nut. If they’ve got waddayacallems-partisans…Russians and Yugoslavs gave old Adolf a fuck of a lot of grief with guys like that. I guess even the froggies caused him some trouble.” After hitting the beach on D-Day, his opinion of France and things French could have been higher.

“Well, it’s not my call, thank God,” Lou said. “I haven’t got the stomach for lining rows of people up against a wall and shooting ’em. Even Germans-except camp guards and mothers like that.” His voice went ferocious. He’d done Latin in college before the war, and remembered coming across the Roman Emperor who wished all mankind had one neck, so he could get rid of it at a single stroke. Back then, he’d thought that was one of the most savage things he’d ever heard. He felt the same way about SS men himself these days.

“Shit, sir, it wouldn’t be so bad if it was only them. But all these chickenshit civilians and Wehrmacht guys who swear on a stack of Bibles they didn’t know squat about any concentration camps…No, sirree, not them. My ass!” Benton made as if to retch, and for once the death reek had nothing to do with it.

“Uh-huh.” Lou nodded. “And the real pisser is, they expect us to believe that crap. How dumb do they think we are?” He knew the answer to that: your average German-your average German with a guilty conscience-thought your average American was pretty goddamn dumb. By the way some U.S. officers were willing to use Nazis to help get the towns they were in charge of back on their feet, maybe your average German hit the nail right on the head, too.

“You gonna talk with the town councillor who was here?” Benton asked. “What the hell’s his handle, anyway?”

“Herpolsheimer,” Lou said with a certain gloomy relish. “Anton Herpolsheimer. Jeez, what a monicker. Yeah, I’ll talk to him. Don’t know what he would’ve seen that our GIs didn’t, but maybe something.”

Herr Herpolsheimer’s house stood next to the post office on the Hugenottenplatz. Once upon a time, the Germans had taken in persecuted French Protestants instead of clobbering them. Worth remembering they could do such things…Lou supposed.

“Hey, Joe, got any gum?” a kid maybe eight or nine years old called in pretty fair English as Lou and Sergeant Benton neared the house. Benton ignored him. Lou shook his head. He wasn’t feeling sympathetic to Germans, even little ones, right then. The kid dropped back into German for an endearment: “Stinking Yankee kikes!”

“Lick my ass, you little shitface,” Lou Weissberg growled in the same language. “Get the fuck out of here before I give you a noodle”-German slang for a bullet in the back of the neck. He might have done it, too; his hand dropped toward the.45 on his belt before he even thought.

The kid turned white-no, green. How many uncomprehended insults had he got away with? He damn well didn’t get away with this one. He disappeared faster than a V-2 blasting off.

“Wow!” Benton said admiringly. “What did you call him?”

“About a quarter of what he deserved.” Lou pushed on, his thin face closed tight. The ordnance sergeant had the sense not to push him.

Lou took some satisfaction in banging on Anton Herpolsheimer’s front door. If the town councillor thought the American Gestapo was here to grill him…it wouldn’t break Lou’s heart.

When the door didn’t open fast enough to suit him, he banged some more, even louder. “We gonna kick it down?” Sergeant Benton didn’t sound bothered.

“If we need to.” By then Lou looked forward to it.

But the door swung wide then. A tiny, ancient woman in a black dress-housekeeper? — squinted up at the two Americans. “You wish…?” she asked in a rusty voice, as politely as if they were holding teacups with extended pinkies.

“We must see Herr Herpolsheimer at once,” Lou said. If she tried to stall, she’d be sorry, and so would the councillor with the funny name.

But she didn’t. She nodded and said, “ Jawohl, mein Herr. Please wait. I will bring him.” Then she hurried away.

“ ‘Jawohl,’ huh?” Sergeant Benton didn’t know much German, but he followed that. “The way she talks, Lieutenant, you’re one heap big honcho.”

“I should be-not ’cause I’m me, but ’cause I’m an American,” Lou said. “We tell these German frogs to hop, they’d better be on the way up before they ask, ‘How high?’”

“Now you’re talkin’!” Benton said enthusiastically. Lou nudged him-here came Councillor Herpolsheimer.

Nobody’d told Lou that the bomber had wounded Herpolsheimer. But the old German walked with a limp. His left arm was in a sling. An almost clean bandage was wrapped around his head. “Good day, Herr Herpolsheimer,” Lou said, more politely than he’d expected to. “I’m here to ask some questions about the, ah, unfortunate events of the other day.”

“Unfortunate events? I should say so!” Herpolsheimer had a gray mustache and bushy gray eyebrows. (Lou could see only one of them, but the other was bound to look the same.) The old German added, “That maniac!”

“Do you know who he was? Had you seen him before?” Lou asked.

“No. Never.” Herpolsheimer winced a little as he shook his head. Maybe he had a concussion to go with his more obvious injuries. He said, “I fought in the last war. That’s where I got this.” He used his good hand to brush his leg, so he’d had the limp before he went out to watch the Yanks play baseball. The gesture was oddly dignified, almost courtly. “I fought in the last war,” he repeated. “No one back then would have done such a thing-not a German, not a Frenchman, not an Englishman. Nobody. Not even an American.” He seemed to remind himself what his interrogator was.