How many dead? Twenty million? Thirty? Somewhere between one and the other, probably, but Bokov would have bet nobody could have said where. He knew-everybody knew, even if it wasn’t something you talked about-the Germans had inflicted far more casualties on the Red Army than the other way around.
But that wasn’t all. That was barely the beginning. The Germans had slaughtered Jews, commissars, intellectuals generally. Would the USSR’s intelligentsia ever be the same? And so many civilians had starved or died of disease or simply disappeared under German occupation.
It wasn’t all one-sided. The labor gang dug up an arm bone with some stinking flesh still clinging to it. As nonchalantly as if such things happened every day (and no doubt they did, or more often than that), a scrawny old geezer with a white mustache shoveled the ruined fragment of humanity into a wheelbarrow with the rest of the wreckage.
One of the women in the gang sent Bokov a look full of vitriol. He stared back stonily, and she was the first to drop her eyes. He and the Red Army hadn’t had anything to do with this death. It lay in the Anglo-Americans’ ledger. Captain Bokov only wished the bombing had done more, and done it sooner. Then fewer Soviet citizens might have died.
The woman muttered something the NKVD man didn’t catch. By the way several of the other Germans nodded, she was bound to be lucky he couldn’t hear her.
He thought about seizing her anyway, and the laborers who’d nodded. He could; rounding up a few Red Army men to take them away would be a matter of moments. The only question was whether it would be worthwhile. It would teach these Germans they couldn’t flout Soviet authority.
But it would also make their friends and families-who wouldn’t understand the progressive Soviet line toward provocations-more likely to throw in with the Heydrichites or at least to keep silent about their banditry. That calculation made Bokov stalk off instead of yelling for Russian soldiers.
It also made him stop in dismay a few paces later. If he was calculating about the Heydrichites as if they were serious enemies…“Fuck my mother!” he exclaimed. If he was thinking of them that way, then they really were. Diehards, fanatics, bandits…Names like those minimized them. They were enemy combatants, and this was still a war.
Lou Weissberg didn’t speak French. Captain Jean Desroches didn’t speak English. They were both fluent in German. Lou felt the irony. He couldn’t tell what, if anything, Desroches felt; the French intelligence officer had a formidable poker face.
“Hechingen. Something’s up with Hechingen,” Lou said auf Deutsch.
“And what would that be?” Desroches inquired.
“I don’t exactly know,” Lou answered. “But a couple of the fanatics we’ve caught lately have talked about it. I don’t mean men we caught together, either-one we nabbed up near Frankfurt and the other by Munich. So something’s going on.”
“Unless they want you to think something is while they really strike somewhere else,” Desroches said. “I mean-Hechingen?” He rolled his eyes. “The most no-account excuse for a town God ever made.”
“I don’t know much about the place,” Lou admitted. “But I’ll tell you something you may not know-Hechingen is where the German nuclear physicists got captured.”
“You mean, before Heydrich’s salauds captured them back?” Desroches used one word of French, but Lou had little trouble figuring out what it meant. His opposite number went on, “Besides, what difference does that make now?”
“I don’t know what difference it makes.” Lou was getting tired of saying he didn’t know, even if he didn’t. “But it’s liable to make some, and you guys ought to be on your toes on account of it.”
“You tend to your zone, Lieutenant,” Desroches said icily. “We will handle ours.”
“We can send some men if you’re short,” Lou offered.
He knew he’d made a mistake even before the words finished coming out of his mouth. Poker face or no, Captain Desroches gave the impression of a blue-haired matron who’d just been asked to do something obscene. “That will not be necessary,” he said. After a moment, as if feeling that wasn’t enough, he added, “You offer an insult to a sovereign and independent power, Monsieur.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Lou said, instead of something like Will you for God’s sake come off it?
France threw its weight around as if it would’ve had any weight to throw around if the United States and Britain-de Gaulle’s scorned “Anglo-Saxons”-hadn’t saved its bacon. But you couldn’t tell that to any Frenchman, not unless you really wanted to piss him off. Lou didn’t have the nerve to ask Desroches how he came to know German so well. Life in France had been…complicated from 1940 to 1944.
The Frenchman lit a cigarette: one of his own, a Gauloise. To Lou, the damn thing smelled like smoldering horseshit. He fired up a Chesterfield in self-defense. Through the clouds of smoke, Desroches said, “I will take you at your word.” Everything about the way he glared at Lou shouted You lying son of a bitch!
Since Lou was lying, or at least stretching the truth, he couldn’t call Desroches on it. He said, “If you don’t want our soldiers-”
“We don’t,” Desroches broke in.
“You don’t have to use them,” Lou went on, as if the other man hadn’t spoken. “But do keep an eye on Hechingen. If anything happens there, I sure hope you’ll let us know. My superiors-all the way up to General Eisenhower-sure hope you will.”
“Is that a threat?” Desroches demanded. “What will happen if we don’t?”
“I’m only a lieutenant. I don’t make policy. But the people above me said it could be important enough to affect how much aid France gets.” Lou eyed Captain Desroches, who was wearing U.S.-issue combat boots and a U.S. Army olive-drab uniform with French rank badges. Most of the French Army was similarly equipped, from boots to helmets to M-1 rifles to Sherman tanks (though they were also using some captured German Panthers). French soldiers ate U.S. C-and K-rations and slept in U.S. pup tents.
Desroches followed Lou’s gaze down himself. He went red. “You Americans have the arrogance of power,” he said.
“Aw, bullshit,” Lou said in English. As he’d figured, Captain Desroches got that just fine. In German, Lou went on, “Hitler had the arrogance of power. If we had it, you guys would be going ‘Heil Truman!’ right now.”
Desroches turned redder. He stubbed out his foul cigarette and lit another one. “Perhaps you are right. I phrased it badly. I should have said that you Americans have the arrogance of wealth.”
That did hit closer to the mark. Lou was damned if he’d admit it. “We have some worries about Hechingen-that’s what we have. France and the USA are allies, ja? We pass the worries on to you, the way allies are supposed to. If anything happens there, we hope you’re ready and we hope you’ll let us know-the way allies are supposed to.”
Captain Desroches sent up more smoke signals. “I will take this report back to my superiors, and we will do…whatever we do. Thank you for this…very interesting session, Lieutenant. Good day.” He got up and stamped out of Lou’s crowded little Nuremberg office.
“Boy, that was fun,” Lou said to nobody in particular. Dealing with the French was more enjoyable than a root canal, but not much.
He went to Captain Frank’s office down the hall. Frank was talking to a German gendarme-who also wore mostly U.S.-issue uniform, though dyed black-and waved for him to wait. Lou cooled his heels in the hallway for fifteen minutes or so. Then the Jerry came out looking unhappy. Lou went in.
“Nu?” Frank asked. Lou summarized his exchange with Desroches. His superior muttered to himself. “You sure we were on the same side?”
“That’s what folks say,” Lou answered.
“Are they going to pay any attention to Hechingen?” Captain Frank asked.