“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.