The Man with the Iron Heart by Harry Turtledove Read Free Book Online Page B

him,”
Herr
Herpolsheimer said slowly. “I might have paid more had I thought he was a foreigner. But he didn’t seem to stand out. Oh, he looked like someone who’d been through a lot, but a lot of people look like that nowadays.” He stuck out his wattled chin, as if to say,
And it’s all your fault, too.
    Lou didn’t think it was all the Allies’ fault. If Hitler hadn’t swallowed Austria, raped Czechoslovakia, invaded Poland, invaded Denmark and Norway, invaded the Low Countries and France, bombed the crap out of England, sunk everything he could in the North Atlantic, invaded the Balkans and North Africa, and then invaded Russia…
Details, details,
Lou thought.
    But arguing politics with a Jerry was a waste of time. “It seemed like this guy, whoever he was, placed himself to hurt as many Americans as he could before he, uh, exploded himself.” That wasn’t supposed to be a reflexive verb, but nobody’d had to talk much about human bombs before.
    Herr
Herpolsheimer understood him, which was the point of the exercise. The old man nodded. “Yes, I thought so. He did it with definite military effect.”
    “Wunderbar,”
Lou muttered. If he’d been speaking English, he would have said
Terrific
the same way.
    Herpolsheimer eyed him. “Your German is quite good,
Herr Oberleutnant,
but I do not think I have heard an accent quite like yours before.”
    “I wouldn’t be surprised. Half the time, it isn’t German, or isn’t exactly German—it’s Yiddish.” Lou waited.
Come on, you old bastard. Let’s hear the speech about how you didn’t know what those wicked Nazis were doing to the Jews here. No, you had no idea at all.
    The town councillor clicked his tongue between his teeth. “My niece had a Jewish husband,” he said after a moment.
    “Had?” Lou didn’t like the sound of that.
    “Max hanged himself in 1939, after
Kristallnacht,
” Herpolsheimer said. “He could not get a visa to any foreign country, and he could not live here. In his note, he said he did not wish to be a burden on Luisa. She did not believe he was one—but, the way things went, she might have come to do so….”
    What were you supposed to say after something like that? Lou couldn’t think of anything, so he got out of there as fast as he could. Then he had to tell Sergeant Benton what Herpolsheimer had said, which made him feel great all over again. “Son of a bitch,” the ordnance sergeant said when he got done. “
Son
of a bitch. Ain’t that a bastard?”
    “
Mazeltov,
Toby,” Lou said. “That may be the understatement of the year.”
    “Hot damn,” Benton said. “So what the hell are we going to do about this asshole who turned himself into a bomb?”
    “What you said, pretty much—hope he’s one lone nut and there’s no more like him,” Lou answered. “Past that, I have no idea—I mean, none. And I may be breaking security to tell you the higher-ups don’t, either, but I don’t think I’m surprising you much.”
    “Nope,” Sergeant Benton said. “I only wish to God you were.”
             

    T HE EXPLOSION HAD TAKEN OUT MOST OF A CITY BLOCK. T HE DAMAGE wasn’t so obvious in fallen Berlin. The lost capital of the
Reich
had already taken more bombs and shells and rockets and small-arms fire than any town this side of Stalingrad. After all that, what difference did one more explosion make?
    Captain Vladimir Bokov knew too well the difference this one explosion made. The bloodstains on still-standing walls and on the battered pavement were noticeably fresher than most in Berlin. And he could also make out bits and pieces of the GMC truck some clever German had packed with explosives before driving it up to some parading Russian soldiers and blowing them up—and himself with them.
    “You see, Comrade Captain,” Colonel Fyodor Furmanov said. He’d led those parading Red Army troops. Only dumb luck no flying piece of truck got him in the kidneys—or in the back of the neck. He had burns