If you told Hitler he was wrong to his face, you’d pay for it. If you were lucky like some of his generals, you’d retire whether you wanted to or not. If you weren’t…well, that was one of the things concentration camps were for.
“A point, Hans,” Heydrich admitted. “Still, even if you do tell me I’m going wrong, I reserve the right to think you’re full of crap.”
“Oh, sure,” Klein said. “Officers always do. Every once in a while, they’re even right.” He sketched a salute and ambled out into the rocky corridor. Heydrich stared after him. Noncoms who’d been around for a long time always thought they deserved the last word. Every so often, you had to remind them why you were in command. Every so often-but maybe not today.
Lou Weissberg held up a copy of the International Herald-Tribune . It had a front-page story about a demonstration in California against the continued American occupation of Germany. The story called the demonstration “the largest and loudest yet.”
Captain Howard Frank grimaced when he saw the paper. “I already read it,” he said. “Hot damn.”
“Yup.” Lou nodded. “Story didn’t make the Stars and Stripes. Funny how that works, huh?”
“Funny, yeah. Funny like a truss.” Captain Frank made a small production out of lighting a cigarette. He held out the pack to Lou. “Want one?”
“Thanks.” Lou flicked a Zippo to get his started. After a couple of puffs, he said, “Y’know, we can lick our enemies. We knocked these Nazi assholes flat. If Stalin fucks with us, we’ll wallop him into the middle of next week. He’s gotta know it, too. But how the devil are we supposed to beat the people who say they’re on our side?”
“Good question. If you’ve got a good answer, go tell Eisenhower. Hell, write it up and tell Truman,” Frank said.
“Thanks a bunch-sir.”
Howard Frank held up his hand. “Hey, I’m not kidding-not even a little bit. We can’t stay here if the folks back home decide we ought to pack up and leave. If your Congressman tries to buck ’em, they’ll throw him out on his ass this November. If Truman tries, they’ll throw him out in ’48. And where will we be then?”
“Up shit creek, that’s where. And they’ll be ‘Sieg heil!’ing from what used to be the American zone twenty minutes after the last C-47 takes off,” Lou said.
Frank stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one. “Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe we can hang around long enough to teach the Germans how to stand on their own two feet. You said that Adenauer guy over in Cologne impressed you. Gotta be more where he came from.”
“I’m sure there are.” But that wasn’t agreement, because Lou went on, “But if we leave the way that McGraw broad and her pals want us to, those guys won’t have the chance to stand up for themselves. The Nazis’ll bump ’em off, first chance they get. And then we start worrying about World War III, all in one lifetime.”
“Maybe not,” Frank said. Lou made a rude noise. In a more rules-conscious army, it might have landed him in the stockade. Captain Frank just laughed. “You said Stalin’s scared of us. Well, yeah, but he’s fucking terrified of the Germans. If we do pull out, he’s liable to head for the Rhine to make sure we don’t get round two of the Third Reich.”
“We can’t let him do that. France shits its pants if he does-same with Italy,” Lou said gloomily. “So we go to war against him on account of the fucking krauts? God, that’d be a kick in the nuts, wouldn’t it? And it sounds a hell of a lot like World War III, too.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Captain Frank eyed the glowing coal of his cigarette. “You’d think that when everybody says a war is over, it’d really be over.”
“Yeah. You would.” Lou put out his cigarette, too. The ashtray was soldier-made from the base of a 105mm shell. “I figured I’d be home by now. I figured my wife’d be expecting another baby by now.”
“Okay. I understand what you mean. Morrie’d probably be getting a little brother or sister if they’d given me a Ruptured Duck when I thought they would,” Frank said. “But things after the surrender didn’t work out the way anybody hoped. You know that. And what we’re doing here is worth doing. You know that, too. Hell, everybody knows that.”
“Not Diana McGraw and her crowd. And it seems like her crowd gets bigger every day.” Lou tapped the Herald-Trib with his index finger. “That guy who smuggled out the Cunningham film is with these people, too. Tom Shit, whatever the hell his name was.”
“Schmidt,” Captain Frank corrected primly. Then he shot Lou a dirty look. “Funny guy. You and Danny Kaye and Groucho Marx. You ought to have your own radio show. You’d sell tons of toothpaste and shaving soap.”
“All Yehudim. If Hitler had his way, he would’ve made us into shaving soap.” Lou hesitated, then went on, “Some of the Jewish guys over here, they don’t hardly seem to give a damn. Sure doesn’t stop ’em from laying German broads.”
“Nope. Me, I’d sooner jack off. If I fucked one of those bitches, I’d break every mirror I own,” Frank said. Lou nodded; he felt the same way. But, a moment later, his superior went on, “Other people see it different, that’s all. I heard one guy say he was getting his revenge nine inches at a time.”
Lou snorted. “A fucking braggart. Or maybe a braggart fucking-who knows?” Captain Frank sent him another severe look. He ignored it; he was used to them. “More fun than going up against the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS, I will say that.”
“Or than going up against the fanatics,” Frank said. “Know what I heard?”
“’Fraid I don’t. But you’re gonna tell me, aren’t you?” Lou said.
“Sure am. The MPs here grabbed a couple of German broads with VD who say people told ’em not to get cured. They wanted these gals to make as many of our guys come down venereal as they could.”
“Makes a twisted kind of sense,” Lou said. “Or it did, anyway, before sulfa and penicillin. A guy with a drippy faucet’s just as much a casualty as a guy who got shot in the leg. He was, anyway, till you could cure him with a needle in the ass or a handful of pills.”
Captain Frank suddenly looked alert. He pulled a fountain pen from his left breast pocket and scribbled a note. “Something to remember: Heydrich and the other bastards down in the salt mines or wherever the hell they are don’t know everything we can do. They’ve got old German intelligence reports-”
“And new newspapers,” Lou broke in.
“Mm-hmm. And those.” Howard Frank nodded. “And which bunch has more crap mixed in with the good stuff is anybody’s guess.”
“Well, you’ve got that right, sir. If Hitler’s intelligence on us were any good, he never would’ve taken us on. Christ, if his intelligence on Russia were any good, he would’ve let Stalin alone, too,” Lou said.
“Back toward the end of ’41, the Germans had already wiped out as many divisions as they thought the Red Army had,” Frank said. “At the start, they didn’t know the Russians had the T-34, either. You kinda lose points with your bosses when you miss stuff like the best tank in the war, y’know?”
“Oh, maybe a few,” Lou said, which wrung a dry chuckle out of the captain. Then Lou asked, “What are we missing that we ought to see?”
For a moment, Captain Frank looked almost comically astonished. He was in the intelligence racket, too. Did he really imagine he saw everything there was to see? Didn’t imagining something like that take colossal-almost Germanic-arrogance? Captain Frank started to say something, then closed his mouth. What he did say was probably quite different from what had almost come out: “You’re a disruptive son of a bitch, you know that?”
“Thank you, sir,” Lou said, which earned him another pointed glance. “But I’m serious. God knows the Nazis have their blind spots, but so do we. If we try to shrink ’em, maybe we can.”