“Oy!” Lou clapped a hand to his forehead. That hadn’t occurred to him. But as soon as he heard it, he would have bet anything he owned that Hawkins was right. The older officer’s words had that oracular feeling of truth to them. A bomb there couldn’t be anything else. Well, it could, but he was only too sure it wasn’t. A moment later, he said, “Oy!” again, and, “Aren’t the judges working in there now?”
If they could have bottled what Major Hawkins said then, they could have heated water in every house in Nuremberg for a year. “In spades,” the portly major added, in case Lou didn’t think he meant it.
Lou had other things on his mind. “C’mon!” he said. “Maybe we can do some good hauling people out of the ruins.”
“You go on, Lieutenant,” Hawkins said, shaking his head. “Me, I aim to sit tight and do what I’m supposed to be doing. For all we know, those mothers are trying to lure us away from here so they can rush this place and spring the big prisoners while we’re all making like a Chinese fire drill.”
“Right,” Lou said tonelessly. And the major was, no two ways about it. That didn’t make Lou like him any better. Sketching a salute, Lou took off.
He trotted on parallel to the Pegnitz, the river that ran through town. The river made a better guide than the streets. With so much of Nuremberg ruined, what was street and what was rubble weren’t always easy to tell apart. As he hurried toward the Palace of Justice, he sadly clucked several times. The fanatics could sound reasonable. That sheet they’d put out would make some people back in the States go, See? They only want to run their own affairs and be left alone. But, no matter how they sounded, they went and did something like this….
Lou loped past a pile of wreckage about a story and a half tall. That gave him his first good look at the Palace of Justice-or rather, what had been the Palace of Justice. He skidded to a stop, gravel and shattered bits of brick scooting out from under his boots. “Holy crap,” he yelped.
Somebody must have screwed up. That was the first thing that occurred to him. The American occupiers had gone out of their way to protect the jail. They hadn’t taken so many precautions at the Palace of Justice. The authorities must have thought no one would attack it till the Nazis honchos went on trial.
Oops.
What the American authorities had thought might have been reasonable. That turned out not to matter when reasonable was also wrong. Somebody-who? — would have to answer questions now that the pooch was screwed. We did everything we reasonably could… In his mind, Lou could already hear the calm, sober voice explaining things. Whoever the voice belonged to, it would be calm and sober. He was sure of that. Would calm sobriety be enough to save the dumb fuckup’s career? It might. You never could tell.
But that would be tomorrow’s worry. Today’s was more urgent. Shattered wreckage of a truck-probably one of the ubiquitous GMC deuce-and-a-halfs-blazed in front of what was left of the Palace of Justice. Three wings had projected out from the main body of the building. One of those wings-the central one, the one in front of which the truck had stopped-was just gone, clean off the map. The other two were shattered, tumbledown, smoking, ready to fall down any second now.
Christ! How much TNT did that fucking truck carry? Lou wondered. The sleepless, analytical part of his mind instantly supplied the answer, and a sneer to go with it. Two and a half tons, dummy. The Palace of Justice sure as hell looked as if a 5,000-pound bomb had gone off right in front of it.
Some of the rubble shook. Lou thought more of it was falling down, but that wasn’t what was going on. A dazed, bleeding American soldier pushed a door off of himself and tried to stand up. He keeled over instead.
Lou hurried over to him and pulled away more bricks and stones and chunks of woodwork. The wounded man’s left ankle bent in a way an ankle had no business bending. Lou fumbled at his belt. Sure as hell, he still carried a wound dressing and a morphine syrette. The guy needed about a dozen bandages, but Lou covered up a nasty cut on the side of his head, anyhow. The morphine was probably also sending a boy to do a man’s job, but it was what he had. He stabbed the wounded soldier and bore down on the plunger.
To his amazement, the GI opened his eyes a few seconds later. “What happened?” he asked, his voice eerily calm. Maybe the morphine was doing more than Lou’d thought it could.
“Truck bomb.” Lou added the obvious: “Great big old truck bomb.”
“Boy, no shit,” the man said. “You musta stuck me, huh?” When Lou nodded, the guy went on, “You think you can splint my ankle while the dope’s working? Best chance I’ll get.”
“I’ll try. I’m not an aid man or anything.”
The wounded soldier waved that aside. Lou got to work. He had no trouble finding boards, and he cut up the other GI’s trouser leg to get strips of cloth to tie the splint into place. Morphine or no morphine, the guy wailed when he straightened that shattered ankle as best he could.
Some aid men were there. More ambulances rolled up, bells clanging, as Lou wrestled with the splint. Some soldiers set up a.50-caliber machine-gun position, too. Lou wondered if they’d gone Asiatic till one of them said, “Assholes ain’t gonna run another truck in here and blow up all the guys who came in to help.” That hadn’t occurred to Lou, but some of the Americans seemed properly paranoid. He supposed that was good.
Stretcher bearers carried a groaning wounded man past him and the fellow he was helping. All badly hurt men sounded pretty much the same, no matter where they came from. But Lou happened to look up at just the right moment. He saw a not-so-familiar uniform on the stretcher.
“Holy cow!” he blurted, in lieu of something stronger. “Is that General Nikitchenko?” He was proud of knowing the name of the Soviet judge for the upcoming trial.
To his surprise, the man on the stretcher knew some English. “I is Lieutenant Colonel Volchkov,” he said. “Alternate to Iona Timofeye-vich. The general, he is-” He broke off, gathering strength or looking for a word. After a moment, he found one: “Kaput.” It wasn’t exactly English, but it wasn’t exactly not English, either. Lou had no trouble understanding it, anyhow.
“We’re gonna get you patched up, Colonel. Don’t you worry about anything right this minute-you’ll be fine,” one of the medics said, and then, to his own comrade, “Get moving, Gabe. Soon as he goes into an ambulance, we’ll come back for this poor sorry son of a bitch.” His hands were full; he pointed with his chin at the soldier Lou was splinting.
“Who you callin’ a sorry son of a bitch?” the GI demanded, and Lou’s admiration for morphine leaped forward again. The medics didn’t bother arguing. They lugged Volchkov away, then returned for the man with the broken ankle.
More wounded people staggered from the wreckage. Some were women. Secretaries? Clerks? Translators? Cleaning ladies? Lou had no idea. All he knew was, bombs weren’t chivalrous. That also applied to the American bombs that had leveled most of Nuremberg, but he didn’t worry about those.
Corpsmen and other GIs also carried women out on stretchers, in blankets, or sometimes just in their arms. Wounded women were slightly shriller than wounded men; otherwise, there wasn’t much difference between them. Most of the casualties here, not surprisingly, seemed to be men.
Lou thought for a moment that someone in a dark robe had to be a woman. Then he saw the person was wearing a man’s black dress shoes-one, anyhow, because the other foot had only a sock on it. A judge, he realized dully. American? French? British? That hardly mattered.