“You-in Krieg?” Bernie asked them. They looked at each other. “Where?” he said. “Uh, wo?”
“Ostfront,” Wisser answered. “Danzig.” Mommsen nodded again, to show he’d served over there, too.
Bernie grunted. You couldn’t get a Jerry to admit he’d ever taken a shot at an American. If you listened to those guys talk, nobody’d fought between Normandy and central Germany-not a soul. Bernie wished he didn’t know better.
These guys seemed legit, though. He handed back their documents. “Wo gehen Sie?” he asked.
“Nurnberg,” Mommsen answered, pronouncing it the way a kraut would instead of Nuremberg like an American.
They were on the right road. “Okay,” Bernie said, and then, louder, “Move the jeep, Mack!”
Leff did. The Germans put the Kubelwagen back in gear and drove off to the south. “That wasn’t so bad,” Leff said.
“Sure wasn’t,” Bernie agreed. “They should all be so easy.”
Lou Weissberg read the report howard Frank Gave him. Then he handed it back to his superior officer. He didn’t have rank enough to get his own copy. For that matter, neither did Captain Frank. He’d have to give the report to his own superior, who would stow it in a stout safe where no unauthorized eyes could see it.
“Jesus Christ!” Lou exclaimed. He and Captain Frank exchanged self-conscious half-smiles. That was a hell of a thing for a Jew to say, but plenty born in the States did it all the time. “Did the limeys screw the pooch or what?”
“They sure did,” Frank said. “They screwed it like you wouldn’t believe. And so now the fanatics have nine first-rate atomic physicists…somewhere.”
“Can they make a bomb?” Lou asked. “The guy who wrote your little paper doesn’t think so, but does he know his ass from third base?”
“How am I supposed to tell? Do I look like Einstein?” Frank returned. “One thing I will say is that making a bomb seems to take a lot of fancy equipment. Heydrich’s baboons have all kinds of shit, damn them, but I don’t see ’em having that kind of gear. So I’d bet against it.”
“Mm.” Lou nodded. That made sense-a certain amount of it, anyhow. “If they can’t make a bomb, how come the diehards nabbed ’em?”
“Maybe to make us yell and scream and jump up and down like we’ve got ants in our pants,” Captain Frank answered. “Or maybe just for the hell of it-they don’t think the slide-rule boys can pull a rabbit out of the hat, but they don’t want to take the chance they might be wrong. If you were in Heydrich’s shoes, what would you do?”
“Hang myself and save everybody else a lot of trouble,” Lou said promptly. He won a snort from his superior. After a moment, he went on, “Been a week since they made the snatch, right?”
“Yup,” Frank said.
“And nobody’s caught any physicists since. Not many diehards, either.”
“Nope.” The captain turned downright laconic.
“Well, shit,” Lou said. “Chances are that means they got away clean.”
“Yup,” Frank said one more time. “If we’d caught ’em, people like you and me never would have got to see this report. Now it’s gonna be up to us to try and track the bastards down.”
“My aching back!” Lou said. That didn’t satisfy him, so he added, “Gevalt!” Howard Frank’s head bobbed up and down. Lou took the name of the Lord in vain. “The fanatics’ll stash ’em underground somewhere way the hell down south. How many places have they got in the mountains there?”
“Too many-and we haven’t found a tenth of ’em yet,” Frank said. “They were ready for the collapse, damn them. They started getting ready two years before the surrender. That’s what the interrogation reports say, anyhow. Way things look, you’ve got to believe it, too.”
“Uh-huh.” Lou sounded as uncomfortable as his superior. Interrogators didn’t always bother playing by Geneva Convention rules when they caught diehards alive. The Reich had surrendered, after all. And they needed information, and didn’t much care how they got it-especially since the krauts weren’t playing by the rules, either. If a hotshot lawyer or a reporter who sided with the let’s-run-away-from-Germany people back home found out what went on questioning fanatics, the fur would fly. Oh, boy, would it ever! And the Chicago Tribune and the other anti-administration papers would print every goddamn word.
“Well, now you’ve got all the good news,” Captain Frank said. “Where we go from here, God only knows.”
“If He does, I wish He’d tell us.” Lou scowled. God didn’t work that way. If anybody’d had any doubts, what went on during the war would have quashed them. “And I wish He’d tell us why He decided to throw all the Yehudim from France to Russia into the fire.” Nobody knew how many were dead for no other reason than that they were Jews, not even to the closest million.
“Nobody has a good answer for that,” Frank said heavily. “God doesn’t have a good answer for that.” The words should have sounded like blasphemy. To anyone who’d seen the inside of a German concentration camp, they seemed only common sense. Reputable German firms had taken contracts for crematoria and bone crushers and all the other tools that went along with industrialized murder. Lou had followed more paper trails than he cared to remember. And they all led back to businessmen who said things like, We didn’t know what they’d be used for. And how could we say no to the government? The scary thing was, they meant it. Sometimes saying no to the government was the most important thing you could ever do, but try and explain that to a German.
“And Heydrich wants to start it all up again, only worse this time,” Lou said.
“Worse. Yeah,” Captain Frank said gloomily. “Who woulda thought that was possible after the Nazis surrendered? Nothing could be worse’n what they already did, right? Then along comes the atom bomb, and we find out maybe that’s not right after all. Swell old world we got, huh?”
Before Lou could answer, the phone on his desk rang. It was an Army field telephone, patched into a network that also included what was left of the German national telephone system. He picked it up: “Weissberg here.”
“You da guy in charge o’ going after the fanatics?” By the way the GI on the other end of the line talked, he was from New Jersey, too, or maybe Long Island.
“I’m one of ’em,” Lou said. “How come?”
“On account of I got a kraut right here who’s ready t’swear on a stack o’ Bibles he seen that Heydrich drive through town a little while ago.”
“Jesus Christ!” Lou exploded, this time altogether unselfconsciously. “Put him on.”
The German knew some English, but proved more comfortable in his own language. “He had a beard, but I recognized him,” he said. “His picture was all over the papers when the English tried to kill him in the war. There is a reward for me if you catch him, ja?”
“Jawohl,” Lou agreed. The reward for Heydrich, dead or alive, was up to a million bucks. Lou had no idea who this German was or what he’d done between 1939 and 1945. Whatever it was, it was nothing next to Heydrich’s list.
“What’s cooking?” Frank asked. One hand over the mouthpiece, Lou told him. The captain almost jumped out of his skin. “We can catch him! We really can! Find out how long ago this guy saw him and which way he was headed. We can spread the net ahead of him so tight a hedgehog couldn’t sneak through.”
Lou got back on the phone. He asked the Jerry Captain Frank’s questions, then relayed the replies he got: “Less than an hour ago, and heading southeast.”