THE MATRON WHO RAN THE FOUNDLINGS' DISCIPLINARY home reminded Alicia of Frau Koch. Like the Beast, she was perfectly Aryan: blond, blue-eyed, fair. And, also like the Beast, she had a face like a boot. She was tough and mean and ready to lash out at any moment. Alicia wondered why people like that had-or wanted-anything to do with children.
"Gimpel!" the matron said now, sticking her head into Alicia's room. "Come with me. This minute."
"Jawohl!" Alicia didn't know why the matron wanted her to come, or where she was going. Asking questions was not encouraged. Blind obedience was.
Alicia had to hurry to keep up with the matron, whose soldierly stride conceded nothing to smaller people. The woman always looked angry at the world. This morning, she seemed even angrier than usual. She kept glaring down at Alicia and muttering things the girl couldn't quite make out.Maybe I'm lucky, Alicia thought, and shivered.
"In here." The matron pulled open the door to her own office. Alicia hadn't been there since the day the Security Police pulled her sisters and her out of school. And there were Francesca and Roxane now. They sat on identical metal folding chairs and wore identical wary expressions. The matron pointed to another chair by theirs. "Sit down," she told Alicia. The next word seemed aimed at all three Gimpel girls: "Wait."
Still muttering, the matron stalked to another door and flung it open. In came…"Daddy!" Alicia shrieked, and ran to him. Her sisters' squeals might even have been higher and shriller, but couldn't have been any more delighted. The three of them put together almost knocked their father off his feet.
He bent down to kiss and squeeze all of them. Behind his glasses, tears gleamed in his eyes. "I've come to take you home," he said huskily. "The Security Police have seen that I'm not a Jew after all, and if I'm not a Jew, the three of you can't possibly be Mischlingen. And since you aren't, you don't have to stay here any more."
Francesca broke free of his arms and rounded on the matron. "I told you we weren't filthy, stinking Jews. Itold you so, and you didn't want to listen. Well, now you see I knew what I was talking about." She had her hands on her hips. She might have been an irate housewife telling off a clerk who'd been rude to her. The matron turned bright red. Her formidable fists clenched. But she didn't say a thing.
Daddy was more polite. He asked the matron, "Is there paperwork I have to fill out so I can take my girls home?"
"Paperwork?" The woman nodded jerkily. Little by little, her angry flush faded. "Ja,there is paperwork. There is always paperwork,Herr Gimpel." She took forms from filing cabinets and out of her desk. Daddy signed and signed and signed. The matron studied everything. She finally nodded. "You may take them. Their behavior here has been…acceptable."
"I'm glad," Alicia's father said. "They should never have been brought here in the first place, but I'm glad." He gathered up the girls. "Come on, kids. Let's go."
Alicia had never left any place so gladly in all her life, not even the doctor's office after a shot. As Daddy led the three sisters towards a bus stop down the street from the foundlings' home, Roxane said, "They thought we were Jews! Ugly, smelly, yucky Jews!" She made a horrible face.
"They sure did. They're pretty dumb," Alicia chimed in. She and her father knew the truth, but her little sisters didn't. She had to hold up a mask in front of them. That wasn't any fun, but she'd just found out how needful it was.
"Well, they were wrong, weren't they?" Daddy said. Francesca and Roxane nodded emphatically. Half a heartbeat later, so did Alicia. Her father had to hold up a mask, too. Maybe the blackshirts had put a tiny microphone in his clothes. Maybe they were still listening. You never could tell. You never could be too careful, not where the Security Police were concerned.
Up came the bus. Daddy stuck his card in the slot four times. After a while, they got off and transferred to another bus. Then they did it again. The third bus took them into Stahnsdorf and, a little more than an hour after they'd set out, stopped at the corner up the street from their house.
Daddy herded Alicia and her sisters off the bus. "Let's go. Mommy's waiting."
When they got down onto the sidewalk, Francesca and Roxane raced up the street. Alicia hung back. She looked up at her father. "Is everything all right?" she asked. "Really all right?"
He smiled. "I know what you mean." As she had, he spoke cagily. "Everything is as good as it can be, sweetheart. We're out here. We're free, the way we should be, because they shouldn't have grabbed us in the first place." Yes, he too was playing to an invisible audience that might or might not be there. "I'm afraid we won't see some friends so much, and that's too bad, but…" He shrugged. "There are worse things."
"The Dorsches?" Alicia asked.
Daddy stopped. "How do you know about the Dorsches?"
"The Security Police were asking me questions, just like they were with Francesca and Roxane." Alicia tried to remember just what the blackshirt had said. "Is Frau Dorsch really 'a piece and a half'?" She wasn't precisely sure what it meant, but it sounded impressive.
Her father turned red. He coughed a couple of times. After a long, long pause, he said, "Not…quite," in a small, strangled voice.
Alicia almost asked for more details. But the front door opened then. Her sisters ran into her mother's arms. "Mommy!" she shouted, and broke into a run herself.
Mommy had a hug for her, too, and kisses. "I know you were all brave girls," she said. Alicia's little sisters nodded eagerly. So did she, with a secret smile on her face. She'd had to be brave in a way Francesca and Roxane hadn't, because she'd known the truth and had to hide it, and they hadn't.
Their mother tousled her hair. She had a secret smile on her face, too. Yes, she'd meant that especially for Alicia. It went right over Francesca and Roxane's heads. Alicia's smile got wider. She liked secrets…well, most secrets, anyway. The big one she carried? She still wasn't so sure about that. One thing she was sure of, though, and all the more so after this ordeal: like it or not, it was hers.
Daddy came up the steps. "Did you tell them about the surprise yet?"
"Of course not," Mommy answered. "If I told them, it wouldn't be a surprise any more, would it?" Naturally, that set all three Gimpel girls clamoring. Their mother looked innocent till she'd almost driven them crazy. Then she said, "If people look in the kitchen, they may find…something."
They ran in. Roxane's gleeful squeal rang out a split second ahead of her sisters'. The cake was enormous, and covered with gooey white icing. Big blue letters spelled out WELCOME HOME! When Mommy cut the cake, it proved to be dark, dark chocolate, with cherries and blueberries between the layers. She gave them huge slices, and when Francesca asked, "Can we have some more?" she didn't say anything about ruining their appetites. She just handed out seconds as big as the firsts.
Everything was so wonderful, it was almost worth getting grabbed by the Security Police. Almost.
Walther Stutzman muttered to himself. Threading his way past the electronic traps on the virtual road that led to Lothar Prutzmann's domain wasn't his worry. He had their measure now. Sooner or later, an SS programmer would come up with some new ones, and Walther would need to spot them before they closed on him. Today, though, getting in had been easy enough. So was looking around once he'd got inside.
No, what made him mutter was not finding what he was looking for. Heinrich had given him a good description of the man who'd released him from prison: tall, blond, a major in the Security Police. By what the man had said, he was a Jew.
But Walther had been pretty sure he knew about all the handful of Jews in the SS. None of them, from what he recalled, matched this fellow. Looking through the records only confirmed that.
So who was the major, then? More to the point,what was he? Someone who'd tried a last trick to get a suspected Jew to reveal himself? That would have been Walther's guess, but it didn't fit the way Heinrich had described the scene a couple of days earlier. A joker? Or a real Jew, unknown to Walther and his circle of friends?
That would be good-the more who survived, the better. But it also raised doubts, frightening ones. Now somebody outside the circle, somebody no one in the circle knew, knew something about somebody in it. The last thing a Jew in the Third Reich wanted was for anybody to have a handle on him.
What can I do?Walther wondered. One thing that occurred to him was tracking down everybody on duty at the prison the day Heinrich was released. Not many majors would have been there. One of them should have been the man who turned his friend loose.
Before he could do that, though, his boss came back from lunch and bellowed, "Walther! You here, Walther?"
Three quick keystrokes, and everything incriminating vanished from his monitor. Three more made his electronic trail vanish. "I'm here," he called. "What's up?"
Gustav Priepke stuck his beefy face into Walther's cubicle. "You smart son of a bitch," he said fondly. "You goddamn know-it-all bastard."
"I love you, too," Walther said in his usual mild tones. His boss roared laughter. Still mildly, he asked, "Could you at least tell me why you're swearing at me today?"
"Delighted, by God," Priepke answered. "You're not only a smart son of a bitch, you're a thieving son of a bitch, too. You know that?"
Excitement tingled through Walther. Now he had a pretty good idea of what his foul-mouthed boss was talking about. "The code ran, did it?"
"Bet your sweet ass it did," Gustav Priepke said. "And backward compatibility looks as good as you said it would. We've got a real live modern operating system, or we will once we root out the usual forty jillion bugs. And we won't lose data, on account of it'll be able to read all our old files."
"That's-terrific," Walther said. Computer experts in the Reich had talked about modernizing the standard operating system for years. They'd talked about it, but they hadn't done it-till now. He was proud he'd had a part, and not such a small one, in turning talk into the beginning of reality.
And then he wonderedwhy he was proud. A new operating system would only make German computers more efficient. It would help the government work better, and the government included the SS. It might make the search for hidden Jews more effective. This was a reason to be proud?
Yes, in spite of everything, it was. If he didn't take professional pride in his own skill, his own competence, life turned empty. Whatever he did, he wanted to do well.
As smoothly as only a man with no worries in the world could, his boss changed the subject: "You going to vote when the elections for the new Reichstag come up in a few weeks?"
"I suppose so," Walther answered. "You know I don't get very excited about politics." He didn't show that he got excited about politics, which wasn't the same thing at all. But Priepke-and the rest of the outside world-saw only the calm mask, not the turmoil behind it.
"Shit, I don't get excited about the usual politics, either," Gustav Priepke said. "But this isn't the usual garbage-or it had better not be, anyhow. If you've got a chance to make a real difference, grab with both hands." The gesture he used looked more nearly obscene than political, but got the message across.
"You really think it will make a difference?" Walther asked.
"It had better, by God," Priepke rumbled ominously. "You wait and see how many Bonzen go out on their ears when they run where people can vote against 'em. A lot of those stupid bastards really believe everybody loves them. I want to see the looks on their fat faces when they find out how wrong they are." Gloating anticipation filled his laugh.
Without answering in words, Walther pointed up to the ceiling with one index finger and cupped his other hand behind an ear. Had his boss forgotten he was bound to be overheard by someone from Lothar Prutzmann's domain?
Priepke gestured again, this time with undoubted, un-abashed obscenity. "Hell with 'em all," he said. "That's the point of this election-to teach the goddamn snoops we've got lives of our own. And if they don't like it, they can screw themselves."
He means it,Walther thought dizzily.He doesn't care if they're listening. He doesn't think it matters. He looked up to-no, past-the ceiling he'd just pointed at.Please, God, let him be right.
Another department staff meeting. Another dimly lit conference room foggy and stinking with Franz Oppenhoff's cigar smoke and innumerable cigarettes and pipes. Susanna Weiss drew a face hidden by a pig-snouted gas mask. Wishful thinking, unfortunately. She scratched out the sketch. As it vanished, she wondered why she bothered bringing a pad to these gatherings. Nothing worth noting ever got said.
At the head of the long table, the chairman stood up. Professor Oppenhoff waited till all eyes were on him. Then, after a couple of wet coughs, he said, "A change is coming. It is a change for which we must all prepare ourselves."
"The budget?" Half a dozen anxious voices said the same thing at the same time.
But Oppenhoff shook his head. "No, not the budget. The budget is as it should be, or close enough. I speak of a more fundamental change." If he'd been trying to get everyone's attention, he'd succeeded. Even Susanna looked his way. What could be more fundamental to a university department than its funding? Oppenhoff nodded portentously. "I speak of the changes that may come to pass in the Reich itself."
Two or three professors who cared about nothing more recent than the transition from Old High German to Middle High German leaned back in their leather-upholstered chairs and closed their eyes. One of them began to snore, and so quickly that he must have had a clear conscience. Susanna, by contrast, leaned forward. This was liable to be interesting after all.
And if the department chairman expectedher to review the political situation again, she would, but he might not care for what she had to say. Like a lot of people in the Greater German Reich, she thought she could get away with much more than she had only a few months before.
But Professor Oppenhoff did not call on her. Instead, ponderously leaning forward, he spoke for himself: "Changes, I say again, may come to pass in the Reich itself. There has been much talk of openness and revitalization, some of it from those most highly placed in the state. And a certain amount of this is, no doubt, good and useful, as anyone will recognize."
He paused to draw on his cigar.Now that he's shown he can say nice things about reform, what will he do next? Susanna wondered, and promptly answered her own question.He'll start flying his true colors, that's what.
Just as promptly, Oppenhoff proved her right. "In all this rush toward change for the sake of change, we must not lose sight of what nearly eighty years of National Socialist rule have given the Reich, " he said. "When the first Fuhrer came to power, we were weak and defeated. Now we rule the greatest empire the world has ever known. We were at the mercy of Jews and Communists. We have eliminated the problems they presented."
We've killed them all, is what you mean. Susanna's nails bit into the soft flesh of her palms.Not quite all, you pompous son of a bitch.
"All this being so," Oppenhoff continued, "some of you might perhaps do well to wonder why any fundamental changes in the structure of the government are deemed necessary. If you feel that way, as I must confess I do myself, you will also be able to find candidates who support a similar point of view."
Puff, puff, puff. "Change for the sake of change is no doubt very exciting, very dramatic. But when things are going well, change is also apt to be for the worst. Some of you are younger than I. Many of you, in fact, are younger than I." Oppenhoff chuckled rheumily. That was about as close to anything resembling real humor as he came. "You will, perhaps, be more enamored of change for the sake of change than I am. But I tell you this: when you have my years, you too will see the folly of change when the German state has gone through the grandest and most glorious period in its history."
With a wheeze and a grunt, he sat down. His chair creaked as his bulk settled into it. Susanna couldn't have said why she was so disappointed. She'd known Oppenhoff was a reactionary for years. Why should one more speech make her want to cry-or, better, to kick him where it would do the most good?
Maybe it was because, in spite of everything, she'd let herself get her hopes up. Heinz Buckliger had done more to open the Reich than his three predecessors put together. He seemed intent on doing more still-and if he didn't, Rolf Stolle might. Some of the folk the Wehrmacht had conquered were reminding Berlin that they still remembered who they were, and that they'd once been free-and they were getting away with it.
Yes, the Security Police had grabbed Heinrich Gimpel and his children, but they'd let them go. The accusation that he was a Jew hadn't come from anyone who really knew, but from, of all things, a woman scorned. Susanna had trouble imagining anyone chasing Heinrich hard enough to want him dead when she didn't get him. It only went to show, you never could tell.
The point was, though, that theyhad let him go. In a world where that could happen, what couldn't? Heinrich's release only made Franz Oppenhoff's comfortable, complacent words seem all the worse.
Susanna almost burst with the temptation of throwing that in Oppenhoff's face. She'd sometimes morbidly wondered which of the Jews she knew was likeliest to get caught. She'd thought she herself topped that list, just because she had the most trouble keeping her mouth shut when she ran into something wrong. Heinrich and Lise were almost stoic in the way they refused to let what went on around them bother them. Susanna was a great many things, but not a stoic. And yet here she sat, as safe and free as a Jew in the Reich could be. No, you never could tell.
"Herr Doktor Professor?" That was Konrad Lutze, who'd gone to the Medieval English Association meeting in London with Susanna-who'd almost gone instead of Susanna.
"Yes?" Oppenhoff smiled benignly.Of course he does, Susanna thought.Lutze pisses standing up. How can he do anything wrong, with an advantage like that?
And then Lutze said, "Herr Doktor Professor, shouldn't we return to the first principles of National Socialism and let the Volk have the greatest possible say in the government of the Reich? Please excuse me, but I don't see how this could do anything but improve the way the Reich is run."
Professor Oppenhoff looked as if he'd just taken a bite out of a hot South American pepper without expecting it. Susanna stared at Konrad Lutze, too, but with a different sort of astonishment. He was an indifferent scholar. Everyone in the department except possibly Oppenhoff knew that. She'd always figured him for more of a careerist than someone who truly loved knowledge. He was the last man she would have imagined sticking out his neck.
And he'd just thrown reform in the department chairman's face. What did that say? That Oppenhoff's politics were even more dinosaurian than Susanna had thought? What elsecould it say?
Back to work. Heinrich Gimpel climbed onto the bus that would take him to the Stahnsdorf train station. While he sat in prison, he'd wondered if he would have a job if he got out. It hadn't been his biggest worry. Next to a noodle or a shower, being alive and unemployed didn't look so bad.
But he still had his place. Nobody at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters had said so out loud when he called to inquire, but he got the feeling his superiors there enjoyed putting him back in that slot, because it gave the armed forces a point in their unending game against the SS.
Three stops later, Willi Dorsch got on the bus. His face brightened when he saw Heinrich. Then, almost as abruptly, it fell. The seat next to Heinrich was empty. Willi hesitantly approached. Heinrich patted the artificial leather to show he was welcome. (Back when Heinrich was a boy, people had called the stuff Jew's hide. You didn't hear that much any more. Till the reform movement started, Heinrich hadn't thought about it one way or the other. Now he dared hope it was a good sign.)
"It's damn good to see you," Willi said, shaking his hand. With a wry smile that twisted up one corner of his mouth, he added, "You'd probably sooner knock my block off than look at me."
"It's not your fault," Heinrich said, and then, cautiously, "How's Erika?"
"She's…better. She's glad the girls are all right. She's glad you're all right, too." That wry smile got wrier. "She wanted to find out just how good you could be, didn't she?"
"Well…yes." Dull embarrassment filled Heinrich's voice.
"I never would have figured that," Willi said. "And I really never would have figured that she'd go and call the Security Police. Sometimes I wonder if I know her at all. Now I suppose telling you I'm sorry is the least I can do."
Being sorry wouldn't have mattered if the blackshirts had got rid of Heinrich-and of Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane. Still…"It's over," Heinrich said. "I hope to God it's over, anyhow."
"Erika's sorry, too. If she weren't, she wouldn't have swallowed those stupid goddamn pills." Willi shook his head. "She swears up and down she didn't think they would go after you and the girls the way they did."
Heinrich only grunted. When she picked up the phone, whathad Erika thought the Security Police would do? Invite him up for coffee and cakes? Plainly, she'd regretted what she did afterwards. At the time? At the time, she'd no doubt wanted him dead.
He asked a question of his own: "Are the two of you really going to patch things up now, or will you go on squabbling?"And cheating on each other, he added, but only to himself. He always tried to stay polite-maybe even too polite for his own good.
Willi answered with a shrug. "I don't know what the hell we're going to do. If it weren't for the kids…But they're there, and we can't very well pretend they're not." How much did he worry about his son and daughter when he took Ilse out for lunch and whatever else he could get away with? Maybe some. He did love them. Heinrich knew that. Love them or not, though, he went right on doing whathe wanted to do.
At the train station, Heinrich shelled out fifteen pfennigs for a Volkischer Beobachter. So did Willi. As Heinrich carried the paper toward the platform, a sudden thought made him glance toward the other man. "When they grabbed me, did it make the news?" he asked.
"Ja,"Willi answered uncomfortably. "A Jew in Berlin-I mean, somebody they thought was a Jew in Berlin-isnews."
"Did anybody say anything when they let me go?"
Now Willi looked at him as if he'd asked a very dumb question indeed. And so he had. "Don't be silly," Willi said. "When was the last time the SS admitted it made a mistake? The twelfth of Never, that's when."
The train rumbled up. Doors hissed open. Heinrich and Willi fed their cards into the fare slot, then sat down side by side and started reading their papers. The upcoming election dominated the headlines. Rolf Stolle had given another speech calling on the Fuhrer to move harder and further on reforms. The Volkischer Beobachter covered it in detail, quoting some of the juiciest bits. A year earlier, even if the Gauleiter of Berlin had presumed to give such a speech, the Beobachter would have pretended he hadn't.
Out of the commuter train. Up the escalators. Onto the bus. Into downtown Berlin traffic. Willi looked out the window and shook his head. He said, "I'm glad I'm not driving in this."
"You'd have to be crazy to want to," Heinrich agreed. But the swarms of cars clogging every street argued that a hell of a lot of peoplewere crazy.
Out of the bus. Up the steps to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. Nods to the guards. Identification cards. One of the guards nudged his pal. "Hey, look, Adolf! Here's Gimpel back."
Adolf nodded. "Good. I didn't figure you were really a kike,Herr Gimpel. The Security Police couldn't grab their ass with both hands."
"I'm here." Heinrich pocketed his card once more. What would Adolf have said, knowing he was a
Jew? That seemed only too obvious. But they'd decided he wasn't, or at least decided they couldn't show he was. There was an improvement in the way things worked. When Kurt Haldweim was Fuhrer, suspicion alone would have earned him a trip to the shower.
He got to his desk late. Analysts and secretaries-and Wehrmacht officers, too-kept stopping him in the corridor to shake his hand and tell him they were glad to see him. He was slightly dazed by the time he finally did walk up to the familiar battleship-gray metal desk. He hadn't realized so many people cared.
He was just about to sit down in his squeaky swivel chair when Ilse spotted him. "Oh,Herr Gimpel, I'm so happy you're back!" she squealed, and ran up to him and gave him a hug and a kiss. Then she laughed. "Now I've got lipstick on you, the way I do with Willi."
Willi chose that moment to have a coughing fit. Heinrich would have, too. Ilse turned and made a face at her lunchtime lover. She pulled a tissue from her purse and rubbed at Heinrich's cheek. She drew back, looked him over, and rubbed a little more.
"There! All better," she said briskly.
"Is it?" Heinrich said. She nodded. He was almost as much an object to be dealt with for her as he had been for the Security Police. Her ministrations were a lot more enjoyable, though.
Off she went. Heinrich sat down. The chair did squeak. He tried to remember what he'd been doing when the blackshirts grabbed him. Before he could even come close, Willi stalked over and spoke in a mock-tough voice: "Trying to steal another woman of mine, are you?"
Heinrich hoped it was just mock-tough. He said, "The only thing I'm trying to do is mind my own business and have people leave me alone. Up till now, I never realized how hard that was."
Willi laughed and slapped him on the back. "All right. I can take a hint." Heinrich wasn't at all sure Willi could. But his friend-and in spite of everything, Willi did still seem to be his friend-went back to his desk and got to work. With real relief, Heinrich did the same. He knew he wouldn't accomplish much this morning. It would be like coming back from vacation: he'd need to figure out what had gone on while he was out before he could do anything useful.
Here, what had gone on while he was out couldn't have been more obvious if it had marched by with a brass band. The Americans were kicking up their heels. They took Heinz Buckliger's policy for weakness. Payments were lagging. Excuses were some of the plainest lies he'd ever seen. Over on the other side of the Atlantic, they were finding out how much they could get away with.
So far, they seemed to be doing exactly that. Panzers hadn't rolled out to plunder the countryside-or to surround the American legislature and bureaucrats in Omaha and make them cough up what was due the Reich. Haldweim would have arrested people. Himmler would have machine-gunned people. Up till now, Heinz Buckliger hadn't even squawked.
If I were running things…But Heinrich wasn't. He wondered if anyone was, or if the people above him were just letting everything drift till they got orders from the Fuhrer. With worries closer to home, would Buckliger give orders about the USA?
"How about some lunch?" Willi asked. Heinrich looked up in astonishment. It couldn't be lunchtime yet. But his watch insisted it was ten to twelve. Willi went on, "How about Admiral Yamamoto's?"
"Sounds good to me." After cabbage stew in prison, any real food sounded good to Heinrich. Several big meals at home had only just begun to fill the hole inside him.
Shrimp tempura, teriyaki beef, and a plate of Berlin rolls enlivened with soy sauce and wasabi went some way toward hole-filling. Miso soup came with the meal. So did rice, which was to be expected, and potato salad, which never failed to leave him bemused. It was pretty good potato salad, but he didn't think the average Japanese came home to potato salad every night-or any night. But Admiral Yamamoto's wasn't the only Japanese place in Berlin that included potato salad in its meals, so maybe he was wrong. More likely, the restaurant owners just knew what their customers favored.
As usual, plenty of customers favored Admiral Yamamoto's. It drew people from every government agency within several kilometers, along with hotel clerks, shopgirls, and even the occasional Japanese tourist hungry for the tastes of home and discovering that the restaurant offered…some of them.
Heinrich ate, rather clumsily, with chopsticks. He sipped a good wheat beer, which went well with the spicy, salty lunch. And he listened to the people chatting at nearby tables. The tables were so close together, he couldn't help listening to his neighbors. One question he heard over and over was, "Who are you going to vote for?"
Once, to his astonishment, he heard one trooper from the Waffen -SS division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler ask that of his pal. He was even more astonished when the second trooper answered, "Me? Stolle, who else?" The tough young Aryan warrior sounded as if no other choice besides the radical Gauleiter of Berlin were possible. And the first man nodded, plainly agreeing with him.
"I wasn't sure what I thought of this whole election business," Heinrich said. "Sounds like everybody's excited about it, though."
"Sure does," Willi agreed. "I'm as surprised as you are, maybe more so. And once the votes get counted, I can think of some other people who'll be more surprised yet." He mouthed Lothar Prutzmann's name, but he didn't say it out loud, not in a restaurant full of strangers.
"Someone else might be surprised, too." Heinrich mouthed the Fuhrer 's name, and Willi nodded. "I don't think he expected Rolf to get so popular so fast."
Willi nodded again, but he said, "Still, the two of them ought to be able to work together. They're going in the same direction. It's not like that other fellow, the one who wants to turn back the clock."
"No, I wouldn't think so. I sure hope not," Heinrich said. "The only thing that worries me is, what happens if the one of them gets jealous of the other?" Yes, not naming names was definitely a good idea. A few months earlier, Heinrich wouldn't have dared to talk about Party rivalries in a public place with or without names. Back in the days when Kurt Haldweim was Fuhrer, he would have been leery about doing it even if private.
As usual, Willi Dorsch had more nerve than he did (of course, Willi hadn't been hauled away from his desk by the Security Police, either). "Buckliger should've run for the Reichstag himself," Willi said. "This way, Stolle will be able to say, 'The Volk chose me, but who chose you?' If elections really do stick, that could matter. It could matter a lot."
"You're right," Heinrich said. Willi might not notice something like his wife making a play for another man, but he missed very little when it came to politics.
And, when Heinrich tried to pay the tab, Willi wouldn't let him. "Next time, fine, but not right after the Security Police let you go. You don't need to show me you're no cheap Jew. I believe it."
"That's nice," Heinrich said. Willi laughed at the irony in his voice. But it held more irony than Willi knew. It was especially nice that Willi thought Heinrich wasn't a Jew when he really was. Had Willi-or anybody else-been truly convinced he was, he wouldn't be full of Japanese food right now. He would have been disposed of, and so would his children.
Willi got to his feet. "Shall we head back?" he said. "I know you're dying to, with all the catching up you've got to do."
Heinrich rose, too. "I don't mind," he said. Willi rolled his eyes and shook his head at such dedication. Heinrich meant it, though. He wasn't dying to get back to the office, but, as he'd thought a moment before, he would have been dying-or dead-if he couldn't go back. Given that stark choice, sitting at a desk and adding up long columns of figures didn't look bad at all.
Alicia Gimpel's class went out to eat their lunches and play on the schoolyard. She was about to walk out with the other boys and girls when her teacher called her name. She stopped. "What is it,Herr Peukert?" she asked.
"You've only been back in school for a couple of days, Alicia," he said. "You don't need to work so very hard to make up all the assignments you missed."
"But I want to get them out of the way!" Alicia exclaimed. "Then I won't have to worry about them any more."
"I'm not going to worry about them now, or not very much,"Herr Peukert said. "You're a good student, and you've shown you can understand the material. That's what really matters." He hesitated, then went on, "And it's not as if you could help being absent, not with what happened to you. I'm glad you're back."
"Thank you,Herr Peukert. I'm glad I'm back, too," Alicia said. "Are you sure it's all right about the work? I don't mind doing it." Like her father, she was glad to have the chance to work.
"Yes, I'm sure." The teacher hesitated again. Finally, nodding to himself, he asked, "Has anyone given you a hard time about…about where you were, and why?"
"No, sir," Alicia answered, which wasn't strictly true. Wolf Priller and a couple of other boys had teased her, but it hadn't been too bad-certainly nothing where she felt she ought to tattle. "But…" Now she was the one who paused.
"But what?"Herr Peukert asked. "The charge made against you was serious, but it was false. Now that it's been shown to be false, people have no business-none-throwing it in your face. Do you understand?"
"Ja, Herr Peukert." Alicia would have let it go at that if her teacher hadn't sounded angry that anybody could still be bothering her. Since he did, though, she added, "It's not me, sir-it's my sister."
"Some of the students in your sister's class are giving her trouble?" Peukert sounded angrier still. "Who is your sister's teacher? We'll deal with this."
Alicia's heart sank. She wished she'd kept her mouth shut. "Francesca's in, uh,Frau Koch's class, sir." She'd almost saidthe Beast's class, but not quite. "The boys and girls aren't giving her any trouble, though. It's…it's Frau Koch." She waited to see if the sky would fall.
"Oh." The word seemed heavy as lead as it came from Herr Peukert's throat. "That's…very unfortunate, Alicia. I'm sorry. I don't know just what to do about that. I don't know if I can do anything about that. Some people…Some people can't be reasonable about some things. It's…too bad when those people get put in charge of others, but sometimes it happens."
"It's not fair. It's not right," Alicia said. "She shouldn't say those things. Daddy'snot a Jew, and that means my sisters and me-and I -aren't Mischlingen." Part of that was true, anyhow. She and Francesca and Roxane weren't Mischlingen. They were full-blooded Jews. Alicia knew what she had to say, though.
Herr Peukert looked troubled. "If you like, Alicia, I will speak to the principal. But I have to tell you, I don't know how much good it will do, or if it will do any good at all. Inside their classrooms, teachers do as they see fit, as long as they teach what they are required to teach. And I know Frau Koch has been at this school a long time, much longer than the principal has."
He waited. Alicia needed a few seconds to understand what he was saying. If he talked to the principal, the principal might tell the Beast to go easy on Francesca. Because she told her, though, that didn't mean Frau Koch would do it. She might act meaner than ever, to get even with Francesca for trying to land her in trouble. Knowing the Beast, that was just what shewould do.
"Maybe you'd better let it alone, then," Alicia said reluctantly.
"I think you're being smart." Her teacher sounded relieved.
Alicia didn't feel smart. She felt shoddy. This was the same as not standing up to somebody on the playground even if you were right, because he'd beat the snot out of you if you tried. Sometimes you had to make choices like that. When you got to be a grownup, from what she'd seen, you had to make choices like that all the time. No matter what you ended up doing, you couldn't be sure it was the right thing. Sometimes therewas no right thing.
Herr Peukert said, "Why don't you go out and play now, Alicia? This business with your sister will sort itself out sooner or later."
"Sooner or later," Alicia echoed in mournful tones. Whenever a grownup said that, he meantsooner. Whenever a child heard it, she heardlater. As far as Alicia knew, there was no bridge across that chasm between the generations.
She went out. Emma Handrick and Trudi Krebs waved to her. She went over to them and started chatting. Everything was pretty much the way it would have been if the blackshirts hadn't taken her away. Pretty much…
Even while she was talking with her friends, though, part of her mind was chewing on something Herr Peukert had said about the Beast.Some people can't be reasonable about some things. It's too bad when those people get put in charge of others, but sometimes it happens.
He'd been talking about Frau Koch. He hadn't meant anything more. Alicia knew that. But she couldn't help thinking the words applied to the first Fuhrer at least as well as they did to the Beast.
"Oh, thank you,Frau Stutzman," Dr. Dambach said when Esther set a foam cup of coffee on his desk. The pediatrician took a sip, then eyed her. "You're looking happy this morning."
"Am I?" Esther said. Her boss nodded. She shrugged and smiled. "Well, maybe I am. It's a beautiful day, isn't it?"
Dambach nodded again. "It certainly is. I saw more of it than I really wanted to, as a matter of fact."
"Did you?" Esther knew she was supposed to say something like that.
"I certainly did," Dambach answered. "I wanted to get here early so I could go through some of the medical journals that keep piling up"-sure enough, he had a stack of them on his desk, and a scalpel in place of a knife to open the pages of the numbers that didn't come cut from the printers-"but I got caught in a traffic jam, so I didn't come in more than five minutes earlier than usual."
"That's too bad," Esther said. "What happened? Was anyone badly hurt?"
Dr. Dambach shook his head. "It wasn't an accident. It was a political parade, if you can believe such a thing."
Up until very recently, Esther wouldn't have been able to believe it. The only parades allowed would have been those organized by the government, and they would have been publicized in advance. Someone efficient like Dambach would have known one was coming and would have chosen a route it didn't block. Things had changed, though. Esther asked, "Who was parading?"
"People who like that fat fraud of a Stolle," Dambach answered. "The man's out for himself first, last, and always. Anyone who can't see as much needs to go to an optometrist, if you ask me. Or do you think I'm wrong?" He tacked on the last question with the air of a man suddenly realizing the person he was talking to might disagree with him.
"I've told you before, I don't really pay a whole lot of attention to politics," Esther said. "I think everybody knows what our problems are. If the election could help get rid of some of them, that would be nice. And if it can't"-she shrugged-"then it can't, that's all."
"You have a sensible attitude," the pediatrician said. "Most people are fools. They expect the sun, the moon, and the little stars from this new Reichstag. Don't they see that most of the members will be the same old scoundrels who've been running things all along? They won't turn into angels just because people were able to write an X beside their names."
"I suppose not." Esther paid more attention to politics than she let on. She had more hope for the election than she let on, too. That hope was probably what made her add, "Isn't conscience supposed to be the still, small voice that says someone may be watching? Maybe the Bonzen will behave better when they knew people can vote them out if they don't."
"Maybe." Plainly, Dambach went that far only to be polite. "My guess is, they'll hold this election and maybe one more, and then they'll forget about them again-and we'll go back to sleep for another seventy or eighty years."
"Well, you could be right." Esther retreated to the receptionist's station in a hurry. Her boss's cynicism was like a harvester rolling over the fragile young shoots of her optimism and cutting them down. Maybe Dambach was right. The whole history of the Reich argued that he was. But Esther didn't-wouldn't-like it.
She got busy with the billing. As long as she was thinking about that, she didn't have to worry about anything else. Irma should have taken care of more of it than she had the evening before. Fuming at her also kept Esther from fretting about politics.
And then patients and their parents-as always, mostly mothers-started coming in. Nobody could get excited about Rolf Stolle or Heinz Buckliger or Lothar Prutzmann with toddlers screaming in the background. Today, the racket seemed more a relief than a distraction. Telephone calls kept Esther busy, too. The busier she stayed, the less she had time to wonder if all of Buckliger's reforms were nothing but new makeup on the same old Party face.
Mothers talked in the waiting room, though thanks to their children she could hear them only fitfully. She did prick up her ears when Rolf Stolle's name came up. The woman who mentioned him wasn't talking about politics, though, or not exactly. If what she said was true, Stolle had made a pass at her sister. From everything Esther had heard, her sister was far from unique.
"That's not good," another mother said. Her toddler made a swipe for her glasses. She blocked the little arm with the practiced ease of someone who'd done it many times before. "That's not good, either, sweetheart," she told the boy, and then went back to politics: "Still, even if he does make passes at everything in a skirt, he won't send the blackshirts out to knock your door down in the middle of the night. Which counts for more?"
"Sometimes we need the Security Police," yet another woman said. "Look how they found a Jew a while ago. In this day and age, a Jew sneaking around in Berlin! If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what would."
All the women in the waiting room nodded. Esther had to nod, too. Someone might be watching her, wondering about her. Heinrich's arrest had made the papers and the radio and televisor. No one had said a public word about his release. As far as people knew, the blackshirts were doing their job, keeping Berlin and the Reich Judenfrei and safe from all sorts of Untermenschen. As far as people knew, that was an important job.
People didn't know as much as they thought they did. Esther wished she could tell them that. But they wouldn't listen, except for the ones who'd report her to Lothar Prutzmann's henchmen. Too bad. Too bad, but true.
A woman came out of an examination room leading a blond four-year-old boy by the hand. Esther made arrangements for a follow-up visit in a week, then called to one of the women in the waiting room: "You can bring Sebastian in now,Frau Schreckengost."
"About time!"Frau Schreckengost sniffed. "My appointment was for fifteen minutes ago, after all."
"I'm so sorry," Esther lied-Frau Schreckengost, a doughy, discontented-looking woman, was the one who'd said Germany needed the Security Police. "Dr. Dambach has to give all his patients as much time as they require."
"And keepme waiting,"Frau Schreckengost said. As far as she was concerned, the world revolved around her, with everyone else put in it merely to dance attendance upon her.
And if that didn't make her a typical German, Esther couldn't think of anything that would.
Susanna Weiss turned on the news. She'd timed it perfectly. The computer graphics of the opening credits were just dissolving into Horst Witzleben's face. "Good evening," the newsreader said. "The Fuhrer today submitted an absentee ballot to the voting chairman of his precinct, as did his wife." The televisor showed Heinz Buckliger and his wife, a skinny blond woman named Erna, handing sealed envelopes to a uniformed official who looked slightly overwhelmed at having so much attention focused on him.
Witzleben went on, "The absentee ballots are necessary because the Buckligers will not be in Berlin for the election next week. They are going on holiday at the Croatian island of Hvar. Except for a ceremonial meeting with the Poglavnik of Croatia, they have no events scheduled for the time when they will be away, though it is expected that the Fuhrer will offer some comment on the results of the upcoming election."
He disappeared again. This time, the shot cut to Tempelhof Airport, where the Buckligers were shown boarding Luftwaffe Alfa. The big, specially modified jet airliner taxied down the runway and lumbered into the air. As usual, fighters escorted it to its destination.
"In other news," Horst Witzleben said, "the Gauleiter of Berlin continued to call for accelerated reform." There was Rolf Stolle, shouting away from the second-floor balcony of the Gauleiter 's residence to a few hundred people in the small square below. The scene seemed to Susanna a parody of the Fuhrer delivering an address to tens or hundreds of thousands of people in Adolf Hitler Platz.
But, as she realized when she'd watched a little more, it wasn'tjust a parody. It was also a comment, and a barbed one. Pounding his fist and bellowing up there on his little balcony with the old-fashioned iron railing (even rusty in places), Stolle made a genuine human connection with his audience. No Fuhrer since Hitler had been able to do that. The Reich and the Germanic Empire had grown too overwhelmingly large. By the nature of his job, the Fuhrer talked at people, talked down to them. Rolf Stolle reminded them what they were missing.
Of course, if he ever moved to the Fuhrer 's palace, he would have to behave as Himmler and Haldweim and Buckliger had before him. Behaving that way was part of what being the Fuhrer involved. Maybe Stolle didn't realize that yet. Maybe he did, but didn't want anyone else to know he did. Susanna wondered which would be more dangerous.
The Gauleiter got less air time than the Fuhrer. Horst Witzleben soon cut away to dramatic footage of an industrial accident in Saarbrucken. A helicopter plucked a workman out of what looked like a sea of flames. More than a dozen other Germans hadn't been so lucky. "Along with the Aryans, an unknown number of Untermenschen also perished," Horst said, and went on to the next story.
Laborers from Poland or Russia or the Ukraine or Serbia or Egypt who'd been lucky enough to be chosen to stoke furnaces or clean chemical tanks or do some other work too hard or too nasty for Aryans and do it till they dropped instead of going to the showers right away…This was their epitaph: one sentence on the evening news. It was more than most of their kind would ever get, too.
With a shiver, Susanna turned off the televisor. If they'd decided Heinrich was a Jew, he would have needed a miracle to get sent to one of those man-killing jobs. The powers that be would probably have just given him a noodle and gone on about their business. And there was no doubt at all about what would have happened to his girls. They were too young to do any useful work, and so…
"And so," Susanna muttered. She went into the kitchen and poured two fingers of Glenfiddich into a glass. She almost knocked it straight back, but that was a hell of a thing to do to a single-malt scotch.Ice? she wondered, and shook her head. She was chilly enough inside anyhow. She sipped the smoky, peat-flavored whiskey. Its warmth, dammit, couldn't reach where she was coldest.
That didn't stop her from topping up the drink a little later on. Put down enough and it would build a barrier against thought. She wasn't often tempted to get drunk, but that one dispassionate sentence on the news had gone a long way toward doing the trick. Heinz Buckliger talked about disclosing and ending abuses. Did he even begin to know what all the abuses in the Reich were? Susanna had begun to hope so. Now all her doubts came flooding back again.
The telephone rang. Her hand jerked-not enough, fortunately, to spill any scotch. "Who's that?" she asked God. God wasn't listening. When was the last time He'd ever listened to a Jew? It rang again. She walked over and picked it up."Bitte?"
"Professor Weiss? Uh, Susanna?" A man on the other end of the line, a nervous-sounding man.
"Yes? Who is this?" Not a student, whoever it was. No student would have had the nerve to call her by her first name, even hesitantly.
"This is Konrad Lutze, Susanna."
"Is it?" she said. "Well, this is a surprise. What can I do for you, uh, Konrad?" She had almost as much trouble using his first name as he'd had with hers.
She really did wonder what he wanted, too. Something to do with her work? With his work? With department politics? She tried to steer as clear of those as she could. With national politics? If he thought she was going to talk about those on the telephone, he had to be a little bit crazy, too. She wasn't anywhere near sure that was safe.
But after a couple of hesitant coughs, he said, "I was, uh, wondering if you would, uh, like to go to dinner and the cinema with me on Saturday night. That new thriller is supposed to be very good."
Susanna's mouth fell open. After her unfortunate experience with the drunk, she'd largely sworn off the male half of the human race. Because she was what she was, eligible bachelors were few and far between for her, and she hadn't thought he was eligible enough once she found out how he poured it down. (He, meanwhile, had married and was the father of a baby boy. Some people weren't so fussy as she was. From everything she'd heard, he still drank like a fish.)
How long had the silence stretched? Long enough for Konrad Lutze to say, "Hello? Are you still there?"
"I'm here," she answered. "You…startled me, that's all."
"What do you say?" he asked. "We would have things to talk about, anyhow. That is not so bad-do you know what I mean? If I go out with someone I just happened to meet, and she says, 'So, what do you do?' and I answer, 'I am a professor of medieval English at Friedrich Wilhelm University,' where do I go from there? Her eyes glaze over. I have never yet met a nurse or a librarian or a salesgirl who gave a damn about Piers Plowman or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."
"I believe that." Giggling would have been rude, no matter how much Susanna wanted to. Being a Jew made her feel so alone in the world, it had hardly occurred to her that being a professor of medieval English literature could do the same thing. She did believe Konrad Lutze. Not many ordinary people would care about Piers Plowman.
"Will you, then?" Now he seemed almost pathetically eager.
Will I, then?Susanna asked herself. Every so often, Jews did fall in love with gentiles. Most of them stopped being Jews almost as completely as if the blackshirts had carted them away. Dinner and a film weren't falling in love, not by themselves. But, by the way Lutze talked, he hoped that was how things would work out. And Susanna wasn't interested in anything that didn't have a good chance of turning serious.
So…would she, then? Could she even imagine being serious about a gentile? (Whether she could imagine being serious about Konrad Lutze seemed an altogether different, and much smaller, question.)
"I-I'm sorry, Konrad," she heard herself say. "I'm afraid I've got other plans that evening."
"I see," he said heavily. "Well, I'm sorry I've taken up your time. I hope I wasn't too much of a bother. Good night." He hung up.
So did Susanna. Part of her felt as if she'd passed a test, maybe the hardest one she'd ever face. The rest…She filled her glass with Glenfiddich and poured it down the hatch as if it were so much rotgut. Then, two or three minutes later, she did it again.
Her head started to spin. She didn't care. Tonight, she would have been good company for the drunk she'd dumped. She'd feel like hell tomorrow. That was all right. She felt like hell right now, too.
Admiral Yamamoto's again. A big plate of Berlin rolls, herring and onion and seaweed and rice. Wasabi to heat them up. Wheat beer to wash them down. Imperfectly Japanese. Perfectly good.
The place was jammed, as usual. Heinrich and Willi sat at a tiny table wedged up against the wall. Bureaucrats and soldiers. SS men and Party Bonzen. Businessmen and tourists. Secretaries and shopgirls. A radio going in the background. Nobody paying any attention to it. Nobody able to pay any attention to it, because you couldn't hear anything but the din of people chattering.
After a bite of his shrimp tempura, Willi said, "Beats the hell out of what they were feeding you a little while ago, doesn't it?"
Heinrich eyed him. Try as he would, he couldn't find any irony. Reluctantly, fighting hard not to believe it, he decided Willi meant that as a simple comment, not as any sort of jab or gibe. Anyone else would have, anyone else at all. Heinrich nodded. "I thought of that the last time we were here. You might say so. Yes, you just might."
An SSHauptsturmfuhrer a couple of tables over laughed uproariously at something one of his underlings had said. He waved a seidel in the air for a refill. Willi raised an eyebrow. "Noisy bastard. Even for this joint, he's a noisy bastard."
"Ja."Heinrich eyed the fellow. He'd seen him before. Even more to the point, he'd heard him before, right here. "Last time we were in this place at the same time as he was, he was pitching a fit about the first edition. I wonder what he thinks with the election just a few days away."
"Is it that same captain?" Willi tried not to be too obvious looking him over. "By God, I do believe you're right. All those SSSchweinehunde look the same to me." He said that very quietly. He might despise blackshirts, but he didn't want them knowing he did. Everyone who wasn't in it despised the SS. Hardly anybody dared to come right out and say so where anyone but trusted friends could hear.
Am I still Willi's trusted friend?Heinrich wondered.When it comes to Lothar Prutzmann's boys, I suppose I am-they threw me in the jug, after all. When it comes to Erika… When it came to Erika, if he never set eyes on her again, that would suit him down to the ground.
The Hauptsturmfuhrer poured down his fresh mug of beer. One of the noncoms with him said something Heinrich couldn't make out. The officer nodded. Putting on a comic-opera Japanese accent, he said, "They want an erection, ret them go to a borderro!" He made not the slightest effort to keep his voice down, and howled laughter right afterwards. His henchmen thought it was pretty funny, too.
"Charming people," Willi muttered-again, so softly only Heinrich could hear.
"Aren't they?" Heinrich agreed. "Shows they're good and serious about moving the Fuhrer 's reforms ahead, too."
Neither his words nor Willi's seemed disrespectful to the SS. If anyone was secretly recording their conversation, he would have a hard time proving sardonic intent-unless he also recorded the Hauptsturmfuhrer 's joke. Even then, he might think they approved of what the officer had said. Saying one thing and meaning another was an art people learned young in the Greater German Reich.
Not that SS men had to worry about such things. Of course, much of what they said amounted to,I'm going to punch you in the nose, and you can't do a thing about it. When that was the message, subtlety lost its point.
A pair of Wehrmacht officers got to their feet and stalked out. The looks they sent the Hauptsturmfuhrer would have melted titanium. But not even they had the nerve to confront him directly.
He noticed. He laughed. He said something to the other SS men at the table with him. To Heinrich, they sounded like carrion crows cawing over the body of something that would soon be dead. Their black uniforms only emphasized the resemblance. And what sort of untimely demise would the blackshirts anticipate with so much glee? Only one thing occurred to Heinrich: the death of reform, the death of the chance to speak your mind, the death of the chance to remember the past as it really was, the death of the chance not to make the same mistake again.
He shivered, though it was a warm spring day and the crowded restaurant fairly radiated heat. He gulped what was left of his beer almost as fast as the Hauptsturmfuhrer had drained his. Then he took out his wallet and laid down enough money to cover the bill. "Come on," he told Willi. "Let's get out of here."
Willi hadn't quite finished lunch. He started to say something-probably something pungent. But whatever he saw in Heinrich's face made him change his mind. "Give me half a minute," was as much protest as he offered. He devoured his last tempura shrimp in hardly more time than he'd promised. Still chewing, he got to his feet. "All right. I'm ready."
"Thanks," Heinrich said once they were out on the sidewalk.
"Don't worry about it." With an expansive wave, Willi brushed aside gratitude.
They walked toward the bus stop. After a few strides, Heinrich asked, "Why didn't you argue with me more?"
"Are you kidding?" Willi said. "You looked like a goose walked over your grave. You were going to get the hell out of there regardless of whether I came along. So I figured I might as well come." He made things sound simple. He usually did-whether they were or not.
"Thanks," Heinrich said again. After another few paces, he added, "It wasn't a goose-but you're close enough."
"Come on, Heinrich!" Lise said. "Do you want to be late for work?" She looked toward the stairway. Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane should have come down for their breakfast. They hadn't, not yet. Lise threw her hands in the air. "Does everybody want to be late this morning?"
"I'm going, I'm going," her husband said. He put down his coffee cup, gave her a quick, caffeinated kiss, grabbed his attache case, and hurried out the front door, calling, "Good-bye, girls!" as he went.
Only silence from the second floor. Two minutes later, though…Lise decided that couldn't possibly be a herd of buffalo on the stairs, which meant it had to be her daughters. They swarmed into the kitchen. By the way they ate, she hadn't fed them for six or eight weeks. Eggs, bacon, sweet rolls-where were they putting it all?
"I ought to make you take off your shoes and see if you're hiding breakfast in there," Lise said. The girls made faces at her. The time they'd spent in that foundlings' home didn't seem to have done them any harm. Francesca and Roxane were still sure they'd gone there by mistake. Alicia knew better, even if she couldn't say so while her sisters were around. But even she was young enough to have a lot more resilience than most grownups would have. And she was young enough for death not to seem altogether real to her, which also helped.
Lise wished she could say the same. She'd died ten thousand times before her husband and children came home.
Then Roxane raced up the stairs with a wail of dismay: "I forgot to do my arithmetic homework!"
Unlike her sisters, she did such things every once in a while. This time, at least, she remembered she'd forgotten. "Work fast!" Lise called. "You still have to catch the bus."
"We could go on, Mommy," Francesca said.
"No, wait for your sister. You've got time." Lise looked at the clock on the range. "I hope you've got time. She'd better not take too long." Another glance at the clock. Why couldn't mornings ever run smoothly?Because then they wouldn't be mornings, that's why.
"She could do some of her homeworkon the bus," Alicia suggested.
"Let her do as much as she can upstairs," Lise said. Roxane liked to chat with friends when she rode to and from school. She was always talking about how they said this to that, or that about this. Once she was out of the house, even the threat of getting in trouble might not hold her to doing what she needed to do. "Hurry up, Roxane!"
"I'm hurrying!" That was a frantic screech.
Just when Lise was about to go upstairs and get her littlest daughter, Roxane came pounding down. "All right. I'm done." She was all smiles again.
"For heaven's sake, try to remember to do your homework when you're supposed to," Lise said. Roxane nodded solemnly. She'd be good now-till the next time she wasn't. Then they would go through this again.Well, so what? Lise thought.Next to getting arrested and killed, forgotten arithmetic isn't so much of a much, now is it?
Kisses all around. If Lise's were more heartfelt than they had been before the girls got taken away-well, then they were, that was all. Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane probably didn't even notice. Good-byes. Out the door the girls went. There was Emma Handrick, just coming out of her house up the street. If she wasn't late, they weren't, either. And she wasn't. So they weren't.
Lise closed the door. Sudden quiet inside the house. Not just quiet-peace. Time seemed to slow down after the frantic jangling of getting her family off to work and school. Now she could fix herself another cup of coffee, sit back, and listen to music for a little while. She could, and she would. After half an hour or so, her own batteries recharged, she could get on with the things she had to do today.
Plenty of cream and plenty of sugar in the coffee, a Strauss waltz coming from the radio, a couple of song thrushes and a blackbird hopping in the back yard hunting for worms…It wasn't bad. It would have been better if she hadn't gone through terror not long before, but it wasn't bad.
And then the waltz disappeared. It hadn't ended; it just stopped, halfway through. Close to a minute of dead air followed.Somebody's going to catch it, Lise thought. Foulups like that didn't happen very often.
Music began again. But this still wasn't the vanished waltz. It was "Deutschland uber Alles." The "Horst Wessel Song" came hard on its heels. Lise's brief sense of peace had shattered well before she heard the second national anthem. There hadn't been a mistake at the radio station. Something had gone wrong, badly wrong, somewhere in the wider world.
The "Horst Wessel Song" ended. After another stretch of silence, a man's voice came on the air: "The following important statement comes to you from the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich."
What the devil is the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich?Lise wondered. She'd never heard of it. The government had nine million different committees and bureaus and commissions, so she didn't know how much that proved, but if it wasn't important, what was it doing on the air like this?
"the Fuhrer, Heinz Buckliger, has been taken ill on the island of Hvar," the man said. "As a result of this illness, he no longer has the capacity to rule our beloved Reich. Under such emergency conditions, the State Committee will administer affairs."
Lise frowned. That sounded like…But it couldn't be. Nobody since the Night of the Long Knives, more than seventy-five years earlier, had tried to seize power like this.
The announcer went on, "We address you at a great and critical hour for the future of the Vaterland and of our Volk. A mortal danger now looms large over our great Vaterland. The policy of so-called reforms, launched at Heinz Buckliger's initiative and allegedly designed to ensure the Reich 's dynamic development, has in fact gone down a blind alley. This is the result of deliberate actions on the part of those who trample on the laws of the Greater German Reich so they can stage an unconstitutional Putsch and gather all personal power into their hands. Millions of people now demand stern measures against this gross illegality."
"Du lieber Gott!" Lise exclaimed. Whoever was on the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich, they really meant it.
"By order of the State Committee, citizens of the Reich are to remain calm," the announcer said-and if that wasn't a command designed to spread panic, she didn't know what would be. The fellow continued, "The holding of meetings, street processions, demonstrations, and strikes isverboten. In case of need, a curfew and military patrols will be imposed. Important government and economic installations will be placed under guard by the SS, which remains loyal to the ideals of the state even in this time of corruption."
Aha!Lise thought. Now she could make a good guess about who was behind the Committee and the Putsch.
"Decisive measures will be taken to stop the spreading of subversive rumors, actions that threaten the disruption of law and order and the creation of tension, and disobedience to the authorities responsible for implementing the state of emergency." What did the announcer feel about the words in front of him? Was he for the Putsch? Did he hate it? He read like a machine, droning on mechanically: "Control will be established over all radio and televisor stations. Now serving as interim Fuhrer of the Reich and of the Germanic Empire is Odilo Globocnik-"
"Who?" Lise had heard no more of him than she had of the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich. His name hardly even sounded German.
"-who has previously served the state as High Commissioner for Ostland Affairs." He'd been in charge of slaughtering Slavs, in other words. And now they were bringing his talents to the Reich itself? Lise shivered. The difference between bad and worse was much bigger than the difference between good and better. Much, much bigger.
CEILING SPEAKERS IN OBERKOMMANDO DER WEHRMACHT headquarters carried the announcement of Heinz Buckliger's incapacity moments after Heinrich and Willi sat down at their desks. "Decisive measures will be taken to stop the spreading of subversive rumors, actions that threaten the disruption of law and order and the creation of tension, and disobedience to the authorities responsible for implementing the state of emergency. Control will be established over all radio and televisor stations. Now serving as interim Fuhrer of the Reich and of the Germanic Empire is Odilo Globocnik, who has previously served the state as High Commissioner for Ostland Affairs." After the announcement, "
Deutschland uber Alles" and the "Horst Wessel Song" rang out again.
Heinrich looked at Willi. Willi looked back at Heinrich. "It's an SSPutsch!" Heinrich said.
Willi nodded. "It sure as hell is," he agreed. And then he said, "Odilo fucking Globocnik?" in tones of absolute disbelief.
"Be careful, Willi!" Ilse exclaimed. "If you talk like that, who knows what kind of trouble you'll end up in?"
In times like these, that might have been excellent advice. But Willi only shook his head. "Odilo fucking Globocnik?" he repeated, even more amazed and disgusted than before.
Over the patriotic music blaring out of the intercom, Heinrich said, "He's Prutzmann's puppet. He can't be anything else."
"Well, I should hope not," Willi said. "He's certainly nothing by himself. Didn't he get in trouble for driving drunk a while ago?"
"Beats me," Heinrich said. "I don't remember hearing that, but you could be right."
"I think so, but I'm not sure," Willi said. "Who the hell pays attention to the Odilo Globocniks of the world?"
Running feet in the corridor. Before Heinrich could respond to his friend's bon mot, someone-a soldier-stuck his head in the room and called, "Globocnik's on the televisor! They've got it on in the canteen!" The man didn't wait, but thudded down the hall in his jackboots and repeated his message for the next big office.
"Come on!" Half a dozen people said the same thing at the same time. Wheels squeaked as analysts pushed swivel chairs back from desks. A few stolid people went right on working. The rest, Heinrich and Willi among them, swarmed out of the room and toward the canteen.
So many men-and a few women-were going that way, something not far from a rugby scrum broke out in the corridor. Heinrich took an elbow or two and gave out a couple of his own. He squeezed into the canteen just in time to hear somebody yell, "Shut up!"-which made the clamor from the people already crowding the room drop a little.
Because Heinrich was ten or twelve centimeters taller than most people, he got a good look at the televisor screen even though he couldn't get close to it. Odilo Globocnik wasn't in the Fuhrer 's office in the palace across the square from Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters, or in the even more magnificent study in the Reichskanzellerei. He spoke from a studio that could have been anywhere.
And Globocnik himself was as unimpressive as his surroundings. He was in his fifties, and had the face of a street bruiser who'd gone to fat. His eyes and his short nose were both red-streaked. Heinrich would have bet that Willi was right and he did drink, probably a lot. He'd jammed his uniform cap down low on his forehead, perhaps to keep the bright studio lights out of those watery eyes.
He was reading from a text on a lectern in front of him, very obviously and not very well. "We will, uh, restore law and order. We will check anti-Party tendencies, at home and abroad. We will stamp out nationalist, uh, adventurism." His voice was a gravelly croak. His big, soft jowls wobbled as he spoke.
When he reached up to turn a page on his speech, his plump, beringed hand shook. Was he stumbling over the speech because he was a stupid lout or because he'd had a snootful before he got in front of the camera-or maybe both?
How much did any of that matter, though? In the background, out of focus and only half visible but instantly recognizable all the same, sat Lothar Prutzmann. The Reichsfuhrer- SS might choose to rule through a puppet, but he was bound to be the power behind the Putsch. And what could anybody else do about it?
Nothing,was the only answer that occurred to Heinrich, who'd just got out of the clutches of the Security Police. But then someone in the crowded canteen said, "This is the national channel. What's on the Berlin channel?"
The buzz that rose from that made it hard to hear what Odilo Globocnik was saying-not that missing his speech meant missing much. "Will Stolle let them get away with this?" somebody asked.
"Can Stolle do anything to stop it?" somebody else came back.
"If he can't, nobody can." Two people said that.
AWehrmacht colonel, no less, turned the dial on the televisor set. On the Berlin channel, a frightened-looking man sat on what looked like a quiz-show set. He was saying, "-not know how long you will be able to hear me,meine Damen und Herren. Armed men claiming to be from the Security Police have come to this studio. Our guards refusing to let them in, they opened fire. There have been casualties on both sides. We have asked for help from the Berlin city police, but we do not know if it will come or if it will be enough. We-"
The Wehrmacht colonel's voice rang out: "Sauer!"
"Ja, Herr Oberst?"someone-presumably Sauer-said.
"Get two companies of men to that studio on the double. They are to hold it at all costs. They will be reinforced if necessary. Do you understand me?"
"Jawohl, Herr Oberst!"Sauer started shoving his way out of the canteen. "Let me through!" The crowd parted for him like the Red Sea for Moses.
A telephone rang behind the man on the set. He didn't look like an announcer. He looked like a director suddenly in front of the camera instead of behind it. When the bell sounded, he jumped. He grabbed the phone, listened, said,"Ja," a couple of times, and hung up. He started talking even before he turned back toward his audience: "Meine Damen und Herren,that was Rolf Stolle, the Gauleiter of Berlin. He calls the arrest-that is what he terms it, the arrest-of the Fuhrer illegal, and says Globocnik and Prutzmann and the forces of darkness-so he calls them-fear elections and the exposure of the truth and-"
He disappeared. There was Rolf Stolle himself, his shaved head gleaming as he glared out of the televisor set. "Am I on?" he rasped, and then, "Volkof the Reich, anyone who can hear me, listen and listen good. This is an SSPutsch, nothing else but. If you stand up against it, it will come to pieces right in front of your noses. If they don't shoot me, I'll kick 'em right in the teeth. Don't let the bastards pull the wool over your eyes, the way they've been doing for years. They-"
When his angry face vanished from the screen, everyone in the canteen groaned. But the feed didn't turn into predigested pap or a smiling SS announcer explaining that everything was fine. It went back to that harried-looking man in the Berlin station's studio. He said, "We've lost our transmission from the Gauleiter 's residence. I don't know whether it has just been cut off or they are under attack there. I-" The phone behind him rang again. He jumped again, too, and snatched the handset off the cradle. When he hung up this time, he looked relieved. "That was Rolf Stolle. He is still free. He-"
A cheer rang out, drowning his next few words. Heinrich joined it. He pumped his fist in the air. Willi Dorsch pounded him on the back.
"-wants you to come to the square in front of his residence," Stolle's amateur spokesman said when Heinrich could next hear him over the din. "How can the SS cut him down when all Berlin is watching? It may be dangerous, but-"
Heinrich waited to hear no more than that. He turned around and started swimming upstream against the throngs still battling to get into the cafeteria. "Where are you going?" Willi asked him.
"To Stolle's residence. Weren't you listening?" Heinrich answered. "After what Prutzmann's bully boys just did to me, you think I'm going to let them screw the Reich, too, if I can do anything to stop 'em?" The Reich would be worse off with the SS in charge than with Heinz Buckliger, yes. Jews, he had no doubt, would be disastrously worse off. But his being a Jew played only a small part in this. As he'd said, it was personal.
He didn't look behind him. Suddenly, though, he had help breasting the crowd. "I'm with you," Willi said.
When Esther Stutzman turned the key to the outer door and walked into the waiting room, the radio in Dr. Dambach's office was blaring out patriotic marches. She scratched her head. The pediatrician didn't usually listen to that kind of music. He wanted something soft and calm in the office, something that might soothe both a crying baby and a worried mother.
"Dr. Dambach?" Esther called.
He must not have heard her over the thump of drums and the bronze clangor of bugles. Then the march ended and an announcer said, "Now, here is Reichsfuhrer- SS Lothar Prutzmann to explain the goals of the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich."
"Dr. Dambach?" Esther called again, her voice this time rising in astonishment. What on earth had happened while she was coming to work?
Now her boss heard her. "Come in here and listen to this," he said. "I think they've gone right off the deep end."
It sounded that way to Esther, too. She hardly remembered to close the door behind her before hurrying into Dr. Dambach's inner office. In a surprisingly high, thin voice, Prutzmann was saying, "-obvious symptoms of overwork and stress necessitated the Fuhrer 's stepping down for reasons of health. Odilo Globocnik, our interim Fuhrer, has already shown that he is fully up to the demands of the position."
"What the-?" Esther said. Dambach just pointed at the radio and mouthed,Listen.
"We have already outlined the prohibitions necessary for the success of the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich." The Reichsfuhrer -SS brought out the cumbersome name without a bobble. He might have been mulling it over in his mind for a long, long time before pronouncing it in public. He went on, "Now we must set forth the goals for which we struggle.
"First, we shall roll back the anti-Germanic, antistate measures Herr Buckliger was unwise enough to introduce. Aryan supremacy must always be the primary objective of the Greater German Reich. We struggle for the richness and variety of the Aryan's life in peacetime. We struggle for man's right to Kultur. This is the basis of the new social order in Europe. The capable individual must be able to occupy by his efforts the place for which he is fitted. And we struggle for the final solution to the question regarding the worker's standing. In the Reich, the path leading the worker to a secure existence has already been trodden. German workers are no longer proletarians. They have a legal claim to work, an adequate wage, medical care, and pensions. All this the so-called reforms of the Buckliger regime have threatened. But we, duty-bound to the highest concept of Aryan blood and honor, have rescued the state from his clutches. Order will soon be fully restored, so long as you obey. Thank you, and good morning.Heil Globocnik!"
The patriotic marches resumed, as loud and bombastic as before. With a gesture of disgust, Dr. Dambach turned the radio way down. "Isn't that a fine kettle of fish,Frau Stutzman?" he said. "They blather about law and order, but what's their blathering worth? I respect law and order. They don't. They throw such things over the side as soon as it'stheir ox being gored. Pah!" For a moment, Esther thought he would spit on the carpet.
"Everything was fine when I left the house this morning," Esther said, still dazed. "Or I thought it was, anyhow."
"Well, it isn't fine now," Dambach said. "Heaven only knows when it'll be fine again. Talk about your hypocrites and whited sepulchers!" He made as if to spit again, and again seemed barely able to check himself.
"What do you mean?" Esther asked.
"Don't you recall?" Dr. Dambach said in surprise. "The whole business with the Kleins and how they escaped the suspicion of being Jews after they had that poor baby with Tay-Sachs disease?"
"Of course I remember that they ended up being set free," Esther answered. "Didn't that nasty man from the Reichs Genealogical Office say they got away because Lothar Prutzmann's niece had also had a Tay-Sachs baby?"
"Maximilian Ebert. A nasty man indeed." Dambach's round face was roundly disapproving. "But you seem to miss the point, or at least part of the point. What is the most likely explanation for the fact that Prutzmann's niece had a baby with Tay-Sachs?"
"I'm very sorry, Doctor, but you're right-I think I am missing the point," Esther said.
The pediatrician clucked reproachfully. "The most likely explanation for the fact that Lothar Prutzmann's niece had a baby with Tay-Sachs disease-not the only explanation, mind you, but the most likely one-is that there is in fact Jewish blood in Prutzmann's family. Jews are the most common carriers of the disease-and who would have a better chance of concealing such an unfortunate pedigree than the Reichsfuhrer -SS?…Yes,Frau Stutzman, you may well look horrified. I don't blame you a bit."
Esther hadn't known she looked horrified, but she supposed she might have. She remembered the hidden Jew, the practicing Jew, in the SS who'd helped Heinrich escape. He wasn't one of the little group of which she was a part. Walther hadn't been able to identify him for sure even after tapping into SS records. Whoever he was, though, he'd preserved his identity. Lothar Prutzmann might have had Jewish ancestors, but he was no Jew.
Dr. Dambach rammed that point home: "Nothing but a damned hypocrite-excuse me, please-as I told you before. 'Duty-bound to the highest conception of Aryan blood and honor,' the Reichsfuhrer -SS claimed, when the odds are he is not fully of Aryan blood himself. Tell me,Frau Stutzman, where is the honor in a lie?"
"I…don't see it, either," Esther said. Her boss nodded. Why not? She'd agreed with him. If that didn't make her a clear thinker, what would? She went on, "Do you mind if I call my husband from here, Dr. Dambach? I'd like to meet him for lunch."
"Go right ahead," Dambach answered. "But would you be kind enough to put the coffee on first? I really would like some, but I held off on making it till you got here. You always have better luck with the machine than I do."
It's not luck. It's following the bloody directions. But Esther said, "I'll take care of it right away." A Putsch might have overthrown the Fuhrer, but Dr. Dambach messing with the coffee machine would have been a real catastrophe…
Susanna Weiss' hand shook as she dialed the telephone. She had both the radio and the televisor going full blast. Lothar Prutzmann talked about duty and Aryan blood on the radio. Odilo Globocnik was speaking on the televisor-rambling, rather, and not making a whole lot of sense. If he wasn't drunk, he could have made money doing impressions of someone who was.
The telephone rang-once, twice, three times. Then a woman picked it up. "Department of Germanic Languages."
"Guten Morgen,Rosa," Susanna said to Professor Oppenhoff's secretary. "This is Professor Weiss. Will you please post a notice in my classes that I won't be in today?"
"Yes, of course,Fraulein Doktor Professor," Rosa answered. "Now that we're finally rid of that stinking Buckliger, a lot of people are celebrating."
"I'm sure they are," Susanna said, and hung up in a hurry. Now she knew what sort of politics the department chairman's secretary had. She wished she didn't, though it wasn't really a surprise. Professor Oppenhoff himself was probably out in a Bierstube downing a couple of seidels and smoking one of his smelly cigars and singing along to the asinine lyrics of the "Horst Wessel Song."
She switched the televisor to the Berlin channel. There was Rolf Stolle staring out of the screen, sweaty and disheveled and furious. "If you can still see me, the thieving bastards in the SS haven't won yet," he growled. "They think they can get away with dirty deeds done in the dark of night, like they have for so long.I think they're full of shit. I think the Reich has seen enough of that to last it forever. I think it's seen too goddamn much. And I think the Volk are going to show Lothar Prutzmann what they think of him, and of his lousy henchmen. If you think the same way, come and join me.Deutschland erwache! "
Ice ran down Susanna's spine.Germany, awake! had been a Nazi slogan years before the Party took power. To hear it thrown in the face of the Reichsfuhrer -SS…to hear it thrown in Lothar Prutzmann's face made Susanna's mind up for her. She turned off the televisor and hurried out of her flat.
It was a lovely day. Puffy white clouds floated across the blue sky. A blackbird chirped in a linden tree, yellow beak open wide to let out the music. The breeze, which came out of the west, brought the clean smell of grass and flowers and other growing things from the Tiergarten only a few blocks away.
Rolf Stolle's residence wasn't far, either: easy walking distance. The Gauleiter of Berlin had stayed in the same old downtown building long after the national government and Party apparatus took up their quarters in the grandiose structures Hitler had run up one after another to celebrate his triumphs. National officials might have been telling the Berliners,You're not important enough to come along with us. The Nazis had always distrusted and looked down on freethinking, left-leaning Berlin.
And now, at long, long last, the Berliners had a chance-a slim chance, maybe only a ghost of a chance, but a chance-to pay them back. On that slim chance, Susanna hurried toward the Gauleiter 's residence. Her heels clicked out a quick rhythm on the slates of the sidewalk.
She didn't see unusual numbers of soldiers or SS men or, for that matter, Berlin policemen on the streets. Most of the shops were open. A lot of them had televisors gabbling away. Some were tuned to the national channels. Others-a surprising number-showed Rolf Stolle, who went on bellowing defiance at the world.
"Deutschland erwache!"a young man shouted from a side street. Cheers answered him. Susanna wished Rosa could have heard them.Maybe only a ghost of a chance, but a chance, she thought, and walked faster. Her shoes started to pinch. She should have chosen a more comfortable pair. Her shoulders straightened. She wasn't going back now.
When she rounded a corner a couple of blocks from Stolle's residence, she stopped in her tracks. Ahead was nothing but a sea of people. No, not quite nothing but: they'd made barricades of trash cans and benches and planters and whatever else they could get their hands on. Men and women scrambled over them and shakily perched on top. How much good would they do against panzers? Susanna feared she knew the answer to that, but the very fact that the Berliners had dared to run them up heartened her.
Flags fluttered over the crowd. Most were the usual national banners: the black swastika on a white disk in a red field. But, just as she'd got chills seeing pictures of vanished Czechoslovakia's flag flying in Prague, so she did here once more. A few of the banners waving around Rolf Stolle's residence showed the black, red, and gold of the Weimar Republic, which had been extinct even longer than the Czechoslovak state. If people dared showthat flag in public, maybe there really was hope.
She worked her way up the street and into the square that faced the residence. It took patience and the occasional shove. Everybody was trying to get closer to Rolf Stolle: to hear him if he came out, to protect him if the SS came after him. Feeling like a chamois or some other nimble creature of the Alps, she scrambled over an overturned trash can. It shook only a little under her feet; instead of garbage, it held dirt and stones and chunks of concrete, to make it harder to move. They'd also give people ammunition of sorts if the SS did come. Rocks against panzers…The mere idea was enough to make her wobbly.
When she stumbled, a fellow in a bus driver's uniform steadied her. "Thanks," she said.
"You're welcome." His grin showed crooked teeth and vast excitement. "This is fun, isn't it, telling the Bonzen to go stuff themselves?"
"It's-" Susanna had been about to deliver a brilliant off-the-cuff lecture on how important this moment was for the future of the Reich and the Volk. She found herself grinning back instead. "Yes, by God. Itis fun! We should have done it a long time ago." The bus driver's shiny-brimmed cap bobbed up and down as he nodded.
Televisor cameras on rooftops peered down at the crowd. Did they belong to the Berlin station, or was Lothar Prutzmann gathering evidence for later revenge? For that matter, why hadn't the SS knocked the Berlin station off the air by now? Maybe the blackshirts weren't as efficient as they wanted everybody to believe.
Some people waved to the cameras. Others aimed obscene gestures at them. Somewhere not far away, a raucous shout rang out: "All the world is watching! All the world is watching!"
It rose like the tide. "All the world is watching! All the world is watching!" Susanna joined in, hardly even realizing she was doing it. She hoped it was true. Itcould be. Other stations, in the Reich and beyond it, could be picking up the Berlin broadcasts and retransmitting them. They could-if they had the nerve.
What was going on outside of Berlin? Susanna had no idea. Whatever it was, how much would it matter? Not much, she suspected. One way or the other, history would be made right here.
Someone stepped on her foot. He said, "Sorry, lady," so he probably hadn't done it on purpose. She pressed on. After a while, she got what would have been a pretty good view of Stolle's balcony…if a beanpole in a black leather trenchcoat hadn't been standing right in front of her.
She hadn't got as far as she had in life by being shy. She poked him in the small of the back and said, "Excuse me, please, but could you move to one side or the other?"
The beanpole turned around. He wore an irritated expression-which dissolved a moment later. "Susanna! What are you doing here?"
"Committing treason just like you, if things don't go our way."
Heinrich Gimpel grimaced. "Well, yes, there is that. But sometimes you have to try, eh?"
"I've always thought so." Susanna fit her words into pauses in the All the world is watching! chant. Heinrich, on the other hand, had always believed in staying under a flat rock. Amazing what even a short stretch in the hands of the blackshirts could do…
He patted the back of the man next to him, who was almost his height and wore an identical greatcoat. "You've met my friend Willi Dorsch, haven't you?"
"Oh, yes, I certainly have," Susanna said as Dorsch-who looked as Aryan as an overfed SS man-turned and nodded to her. She couldn't resist asking, "And how is your wife?"
By Heinrich's horrified expression, he wished she would have kept quiet. Well, too late now. She'd never been as cautious as he was. Willi Dorsch winced. "Dammit, I had nothing to do with that," he said, which, from everything Heinrich had told Susanna, was true. Willi went on, "I just wish it hadn't happened. We all wish it hadn't happened, even Erika."
From everything Heinrich had said, that was true, too. If Susanna did any more prodding, she might start more trouble than she wanted. No point to pushing anyhow, not when she'd got the needle under Willi's skin. And then, even if she'd wanted to, she lost the chance to add anything more, for a great roar from the crowd would have drowned out whatever she said.
"There's Stolle!" Heinrich shouted.
He could see over most of the people in front of him. Susanna couldn't even see over him and Willi Dorsch. She had to take his word for it that the Gauleiter of Berlin had come out onto his little balcony. Showing himself took nerve. The SS was bound to have assassins in the crowd.
"You are the Volk!" Rolf Stolle boomed through a microphone. "You are the Aryans! You are the people who would have chosen your own leaders if Loathsome Lothar Prutzmann hadn't hijacked an election he didn't think his cronies could win. But do you know what?" A perfectly timed pause. "You're going to win anyway-we'regoing to win anyway-and there won't be enough lampposts to hang all those blackshirted pigdogs on!"
"Jaaaaaa!"An enormous, ecstatic, almost orgasmic cry rose from the crowd. Susanna screamed her lungs out just like everybody around her, even staid Heinrich. Part of her thought they were all out of their minds. The rest, though, wondered whether Lothar Prutzmann had even the faintest idea how big a monster he'd called into being.
The Tiergarten was quiet and peaceful. No one in the park seemed to know or care that the SS had staged a Putsch that morning. Esther Stutzman wondered whether such normality showed that nobody gave a damn or simply that it was a nice summer's day and strolling with an arm around your girlfriend's waist or lolling on the grass in the sun counted for more than whose fundament rested on the chair behind the desk in the main office of the Fuhrer 's palace. Were the people in the park too apathetic to care about the Putsch or too sane?
Did the difference matter?
Here came Walther, hurrying past a juggler keeping a stream of brightly colored balls in the air and an upside-down hat on the ground in front of him for spare change, past a hooded crow and a red squirrel screeching at each other over a discarded crust of bread, and past a couple on the grass who'd almost forgotten anyone else was around.
Esther got up from her bench. Walther gave her a quick kiss. "Lord, I'm glad to have an excuse to get away!" he exclaimed. "The Zeiss works are going nuts."
"That bad?" she asked.
"Worse," he told her. "About one man in five is all for Prutzmann and the SS. More, I think, are against them. But when the two sides start screaming at each other, there's another whole big lot who wish they'd both shut up and go away."
"I wouldn't be surprised if the whole country's like that," Esther said.
"Neither would I," Walther said. "So what's going on? I know something must be, from the way you sounded on the phone."
"Dr. Dambach was talking this morning, talking about Lothar Prutzmann and his family…" Esther went on to explain what the pediatrician had said. Then she asked, "Do you think we can do anything with that?"
"I don't know." Walther looked half intrigued, half appalled. "Do you think weshould do anything with it?"
"I'm not sure. I was hoping you would be." Esther's hand folded into frustrated fists. "If we don't, and if the SS takes over…"
"But Prutzmann's liable to win whether we do that or not," Walther said. "And if he does-or maybe even if he doesn't-using it's liable to putus in more danger."
Every word he said was true. Esther knew as much. Walther was nothing if not sensible. All the same, she said, "If we don't do anything, if we don't even try to do anything, what good are we? We might as well not be here. What difference would it make if they had wiped us out?"
"I haven't got a good answer for that," her husband said slowly. "About as close as I can come is, if we do try to do something, we'd better pick our spots with care, because we won't get many of them. Is this one? Is Buckliger that important? Are you sure?"
Before Esther could answer, the traffic noise around the Tiergarten changed. It was always there in the background, the only real reminder that the park lay in the middle of a great city. But suddenly it leaped from background to foreground. Esther had never heard such a deep-throated roar of diesel engines and rattling of treads, not even at a construction site.
She turned her head. Through the screen of bushes, she saw a column of panzers and armored personnel carriers purposefully pushing eastward, in the direction of Rolf Stolle's residence. The breeze shifted-or maybe the armored column made its own breeze. The harsh stink of diesel fumes suddenly clashed with the Tiergarten's green, growing smells.
The panzers rumbled past and were gone. Esther turned to Walther, raw terror on her face. To her surprise, he leaned forward and kissed her on the lips, almost as if he were one of the pair of lovers not far away who hadn't even looked up as the deadly machines went by.
"Well, sweetheart, you were right," he said. "Sometimes you have to try." He got to his feet and hurried away, off toward the Zeiss works, off toward trouble. Esther stared after him, hoping she'd done the right thing, fearing she'd just made the worst mistake of her life.
The crowd in the square outside Rolf Stolle's residence was for the most part orderly and well-mannered. Heinrich would have been surprised if it had been otherwise: it was a crowd full of Germans, after all. People shared cigarettes and whatever bits of food they happened to have. The Gauleiter threw the ground floor of the residence open to the throng. Two neat bathroom queues, one for men and one for women, formed seemingly of themselves.
Every so often, a chant of, "All the world is watching!" or, "We are the Volk! " would start up, last for a little while, and then die away. The rooftop cameras kept carrying pictures of the scene to the outside world. Heinrich hoped they did, anyhow. By the way the cameramen stayed with them, they were still working. He hoped so there, too. The more people who knew Berlin wasn't taking Lothar Prutzmann's
Putsch lying down, the better.
And then, instead of defiant chants, cries of alarm rang out from the distant fringes of the crowd: "Panzers! The panzers are coming!"
"Scheisse,"Willi Dorsch said, which summed up what ran through Heinrich's mind.
Some of the men and women who'd come to Stolle's residence decided they wanted no part of facing up to SS armor. They pressed away from the panzers and armored personnel carriers growling up the streets. Others as automatically advanced on the armored vehicles.After all these years, Berlin still breeds street fighters? Heinrich thought in amazement. He himself stood irresolute for a long moment.
Susanna surged toward the panzers without the slightest visible hesitation. The only thing that surprised Heinrich was that she didn't have a Molotov cocktail in one hand and a cigarette lighter in the other. After standing there for another few seconds, he went toward the armor, too. It didn't feel like bravery. Desperation was a much stronger part of the mix.
Willi grabbed his arm. "Are you nuts?"
"Probably." Heinrich shook free. "Go the other way, if you'd rather. I won't hold it against you."
"Scheisse,"Willi said again, in doleful tones. "You're going to get both of us shot, or more likely just run over." As Heinrich had waited before following Susanna, he waited before following Heinrich. But follow he did.
Berlin might still breed street fighters, but they were amateurs up against professionals. The panzers rolled over the barricades the crowd had run up as if they weren't there. As they crushed the second one, a horrible shriek rang out, for a moment rising above even the roar of their engines. After that, the lead panzer had blood on its left track.
The death might have broken the crowd. Instead, it infuriated the Berliners. They shook their fists at the black-coveralled panzer crewmen who rode with their heads and shoulders out of the vehicles. "Murderers!" they shouted. "Butchers! Assassins!Schweinehunde! "
Pulling a bullhorn out of the turret, the officer commanding the lead panzer aimed it at the crowd like a weapon. "Disperse!" he blared. "Disperse, in the name of the Volk of the Greater German Reich."
But that only roused fresh fury among his foes. "We are the Volk!" they shouted, over and over again. "We are the Volk!" Some of them added, "And who the hell are you?" They swarmed toward the armored vehicles. The driver of the lead machine stopped. He could only go forward by crushing scores of people under his treads-or by pulling out his personal weapon and opening fire on the crowd. He didn't. He was a fresh-faced young man, probably under twenty, and seemed astonished that people weren't listening to his superior's orders.
"Go home!" His superior seemed astonished, too, even with his voice electronically amplified. "Go home, and you will not be harmed!"
"We are the Volk! Weare the Volk!We are the Volk!" The chant swelled and swelled. Through it, individuals shouted insults at Lothar Prutzmann: "He's afraid of elections!" "He threw down the Fuhrer because he wants the job himself!" "He wants you to murder Stolle the same way you just murdered that poor sap at the barricade!"
By then, Heinrich was up within ten or twelve meters of the lead panzer. He could see the frown on the driver's face, and the deeper one on the panzer commander's. Things were not going according to plan. The SS men didn't like that at all, and didn't seem to know what to do about it.
And Heinrich could also see the panzer's two machine guns, and the enormous yawning bore of the cannon. If the commander ordered a couple of rounds of high-explosive or, if he had it, grapeshot…He'd clear a path in front of him, all right. His panzer, and the vehicles behind it, would wade in gore all the way to Rolf Stolle's residence.Some of that gore would be mine, too. Heinrich wondered why he wasn't even more frightened.Because it's too late now, he decided.If he does start shooting, I can't do anything about it. He looked around for Susanna. He could hear her, somewhere not far away, but he couldn't see her.
"Disperse!" the panzer commander shouted again through the bullhorn. "Go peacefully to your homes, and you will not be harmed. In the name of the Volk of the Greater German Reich, disperse!" That was what they'd told him to say before he set out from his barracks, and he stubbornly went right on saying it.
They didn't seem to have told him what to do if it didn't work. And it didn't. Instead of making the people around Stolle's residence leave, it just seemed to make them more stubborn, too. "We are the Volk!" they shouted back, ever louder. "Weare the Volk!We are the Volk!"
The SS officer stared at them, his gray eyes wide. What was going on in his mind? Did he understand that what he'd been told and what he was seeing and hearing didn't add up? How could henot understand? Heinrich laughed at himself. SS men weren't trained to understand anything but the brute simplicity of orders.
But in that case, why hadn't this fellow already opened fire? Did he realize thatwas the Volk in front of him? Heinrich laughed again. Questions. Answering questions. What else was an analyst good for? When these questions got answered, it was all too likely to be with blood and iron. Bismarck could turn a phrase, all right.
Meanwhile, the tableau held. "We are the Volk!" Heinrich shouted again. Did the SS officer believe him, believe the others? He didn't start shooting, anyhow. "Weare the Volk!"
Gustav Priepke plopped his fat bottom down on the corner of Walther's desk. "It's a goddamn crock, that's what it is," Walther's boss said. On a smaller scale, he reminded Walther a little of Rolf Stolle.
"It certainly is," Walther answered, hoping Priepke would go away if he didn't say much. He wasn't supposed to have access to the networks where he needed to plant rumors about Lothar Prutzmann. How could he get at them with Priepke staring over his shoulder? He couldn't, and he knew it.
"Odilo Globocnik?" His boss shook his head. "Sounds like a goddamn skin disease. And Lothar Prutzmann? Lothar Prutzmann is a dose of the clap, and he aims to give it to the Reich."
"Uh-huh." Walther looked at the pictures of Esther and Gottlieb and Anna on the gray, fuzzy wall of his cubicle. He looked up at the sound-absorbing tiles on the ceiling. He looked everywhere but at Gustav Priepke. He agreed with every word Priepke said. But the longer Priepke hung around saying it, the less chance he had to try to set things right.
"They say Buckliger's ill. My ass!" his boss said. "They're sick of him, that's what. I just hope to Christ they haven't given him a noodle, eh?"
"Uh-huh," Walther said again, and then, "You know, you'd better be careful. If you keep carrying on like that, people are liable to remember."
Gustav Priepke slid off the desk like a walrus sliding off an ice floe. He said, "If you're not going to show some balls now, goddammit, when will you ever? Or maybe you haven't got any to show?" When Walther didn't answer, Priepke lumbered off, shaking his head.
Walther swore softly. He'd just lost his boss's good opinion. But now, good opinion or not, maybe he could do more than grouse about what was going on. Maybe.
If anybody came into his cubicle while he was doing it, he was dead. That meant he had to work fast. If he made a mistake, though, he was just as dead. Sweat ran down his face and streamed from his armpits. He could smell his own fear. Just making his fingers hit the right keys was an effort.
He planted what Esther had given him about Lothar Prutzmann's niece in more than a dozen places in the Reich 's computer network: places where SS officials, party big shots, and Wehrmacht officers were likely to find the news. What they would do with it when they found it…well, who could say? But Walther knew he'd done what he could.
Covering his tracks went faster than inserting the false data-or were they true data? Esther's boss seemed to think so. Walther hardly cared. Using reports of Jewish blood to try to bring down the Reichsfuhrer -SS struck him as blackly delicious. Prutzmann couldn't even start a pogrom if the move failed-against whom would he strike? And even if he got all the surviving Jews, there weren't enough left to make a decent pogrom.See how you like it.
One last keystroke…One last check…There. He was free. His swivel chair creaked as he leaned back in it. He'd earned the sigh of relief that burst from him. He'd not only done what he could do, he could relax…
For about fifteen seconds. Then a programmer screamed, "Reactionary!" at the same time as another one yelled, "Radical!" One of them-Walther never knew which-shouted, "Asshole!" That cut across political lines. The meatythock! of fist smacking flesh followed a heartbeat later.
"Fight! Fight!" The cry and the sound of people rushing toward the brawl took Walther back to the school playground and the fifth grade. He didn't get up. He would have gone running then. He hoped he was a grownup now.
Not so distant battle made the walls of Walther's cubicle shake. He stayed right where he was. He'd just taken worse chances than any of the hotheaded fools punching away at one another. If they wanted to waste time on black eyes and bloody noses, they could do that. But information packed a bigger wallop than even the hardest fist.
He hoped.
"We are the Volk!" chanted the crowd outside Rolf Stolle's residence, and, "Panzers go home!" and, "All the world is watching!" Heinrich sang with the rest. He was getting hoarse, but he kept on. He felt more real, more alive, while he was making noise. He also felt there was a better chance the SS armored vehicles wouldn't start shooting if the people in front of them stayed noisy.
A couple of hours had gone by now, and the officer in the lead panzer hadn't opened up yet. Every so often, he would raise the bullhorn to his mouth and order the crowd to disperse. No one paid any attention to him.
He'd ducked down into the panzer turret several times, probably to use the radio. What was he telling his superiors? What were they telling him? How much of what they were telling him was he heeding? Wouldn't they be yelling for him to murder everybody in sight?
"All the world is watching!" Heinrich called. "All the world is watching!" He hoped the world was watching. If it was, Prutzmann's goons hadn't seized the Berlin televisor station. The cameras on the rooftops kept on panning over the crowd and the panzers. That was a good sign…wasn't it?
"Heinrich."
He jumped. He hadn't seen Susanna come back to him. He'd been watching the lead panzer and the officer standing head and shoulders out of the cupola. Good panzer officers were supposed to stand like that. They could see much more than if they stayed buttoned up inside. It also made them much more vulnerable to anything their foes did. He dragged his attention back to Susanna. "What is it?"
"You should go home," she told him. "You've got a family. One person here more or less won't make any difference."
She made good sense. After a moment, Heinrich shook his head anyway. "A lot of people here have families. If they all left…" He shook his head again. "Besides, now that I am here, I want to see how things play out."
"What would Lise say?" Susanna asked. That was a low blow. Before he could recover, she pointed to the panzer's cannon. "If the shooting starts, you won't see anything, or not for long."
"Neither will you," Heinrich pointed out. "I don't see you going anywhere."
She shrugged. "I'm a hothead. You're not. You're supposed to be too smart to do things like this." She sounded almost annoyed at him.
Before he could answer, there was a stir in the crowd behind them, back toward the doorway to Rolf Stolle's residence. The panzer commander was already looking that way. When his jaw dropped, Heinrich decided he'd better turn around. He did. His view wasn't as good as the SS man's, but after a moment he froze in astonishment, too.
"What is it?" Susanna demanded impatiently. "You tall people…"
"It's…It's Stolle." Heinrich had to work to bring forth the words. "He's coming out."
"What?" Susanna exclaimed in horror. "He's crazy. They'll kill him. For God's sake, somebody's got to stop him!" She was looking at Heinrich, as if she expected him to deliver a red-card tackle on the Gauleiter of Berlin.
More and more people spied Rolf Stolle and the squad of gray-clad Berlin policemen who surrounded him. Along with them came two photographers, one with a Leica, the other with a small televisor camera on his shoulder. Some of the people, like Susanna, called out for him to go back into the residence and stay safe. But there was a rising cry of, "Rolf! Rolf! Rolf!" as others cheered his courage. And there was another cry, one Heinrich had never dreamt he'd hear in Berlin and one he gladly joined, shouting it out with all his might: "Down with the SS! Down with the SS!"
Beside him, Willi Dorsch was yelling Stolle's name. He paused for a moment to shout into Heinrich's ear: "He's fucking out of his mind, but Christ! he's got balls."
"You ought to take Horst's place," Heinrich yelled back. "He couldn't have said it better." Willi's smirk said he wasn't sure whether Heinrich was joking. Heinrich nodded-he'd meant it, all right.
The noise of its hydraulics lost in the tumult, the turret of the lead panzer traversed a few degrees, so that that cannon and the machine gun beside it bore directly on the advancing Rolf Stolle. But the Gauleiter kept coming, and the panzer commander didn't open fire.
Instead, he raised the bullhorn to his lips: "Herr Stolle, you are at the center of an illegal and seditious rally, one outlawed by the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich. Dismiss your followers and surrender to duly constituted authority at once."
Rolf Stolle didn't have a bullhorn. With his big bass voice, he hardly needed one. "Not likely, sonny boy! And if an illegal committee says we're illegal, that means we deserve a medal, far as I'm concerned."
A great cheer rose behind his words: "Rolf! Rolf! Rolf!" His name in the crowd's mouth sounded like the baying of a pack of hounds. Were they baying for freedom? Heinrich didn't know, but he shouted, "Rolf!" along with everybody else.
Stolle pushed through the crowd till he stood alongside the panzer. The officer in charge of it had to lean over awkwardly to keep an eye on him. The Berlin policemen got between the Gauleiter and the next panzer farther back. They might protect him against its machine guns. If its cannon spoke…
But Rolf Stolle wasn't thinking about getting shot. He aimed to cause the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich as much trouble as he could. The still photographer and the televisor cameraman both captured his scornful kick at the panzer's iron road wheel.
"If those don't turn into famous photos-" Heinrich began.
"It'll be because Prutzmann makes sure nobody ever sees them," Willi said. Heinrich bit his lip. His friend wasn't wrong.
Stolle shook his fist at the panzer officer leaning out of the cupola. "Go back to your barracks!" he bellowed. "Get the hell out of here! Using force now is intolerable-intolerable, I tell you. The Volk of the Reich will not let this illegal, tyrannical Putsch stand. The men who made it have no sense of shame and no sense of honor. All proper SS personnel, men loyal to the state and not just to the Reichsfuhrer -SS, should show their high sense of racial courage and have nothing to do with this thievery."
"Rolf! Rolf! Rolf!" the crowd shouted, and, "Down with the SS!" Heinrich got a good look at the panzer officer's face. The man looked as stunned as if he'd just taken a right to the chin. Whatever he'd been looking for when his superiors sent him rolling toward the Gauleiter 's residence, this sure wasn't it. His orders were probably simple: go over there and arrest Stolle or kill him. They wouldn't have said anything about thousands of Germans (and even a couple of hidden Jews) furiously determined that he do no such thing.
Stolle and a couple of his biggest bodyguards had their heads together. The policemen raised him up onto their shoulders so the crowd could see him better. They staggered a little-he was a big man himself-but they held him. The cheers came louder and fiercer than ever. Stolle waved, not just to the crowd but also to the panzer commander.
"It doesn't look like they're going to shoot your Gauleiter right this minute," he called.
"Rolf! Rolf! Rolf!" The people shouted louder than ever. Heinrich's ears rang. He was yelling, too: "Down with the SS! Down with the SS!" And then both chants faded and a new one rose, driven straight into the face of the lead panzer commander: "Go home! Go home! Go home! Go home!"
If he'd looked stunned before, he seemed positively poleaxed now. He disappeared down into the turret. Jeers sped him on his way. "Go home! Go home!" The cry swelled and swelled.
Inside the panzer there, he was bound to be on the radio again. What were his distant superiors telling him? Kill! Strike! Destroy! Now! What else could they be saying? If they bagged both Buckliger and Stolle, the game was theirs. What was he telling them? That wasn't so obvious.
He came out again. He still looked as if he didn't know what hit him. Along with everyone else, Heinrich poured abuse down on his head. Then Rolf Stolle raised his right hand. Silence rippled outward, even to those who couldn't see the Gauleiter. Into it, Stolle spoke to the panzer officer: "You have taken your oath to the Volk. You cannot turn your guns against the Volk. The days of this Putsch are numbered. You must not cover the honor of the German soldier with the blood of the Volk. You must not, I tell you." His voice burned with terrible urgency. "You cannot blindly follow the men who made this Putsch. Here in Berlin, Lothar Prutzmann's naked grab for power will not prevail. The Volk will. The first edition of Mein Kampf will. And we will stay in the streets till we bring those bandits to justice!"
An avalanche of cheers thundered down on him. He grinned and pumped his fist in the air. The lead panzer commander, or any other SS man whose gun bore on Stolle, could have ended things then and there. But no one opened fire.Now they know what the people think of them, Heinrich thought.They don't want to be even more hated than they are. And that the people could show what they thought, and that even SS men might believe it mattered, was not the smallest part of Heinz Buckliger's revitalization program all by itself.
Lise Gimpel dialed Heinrich's number. In her ear, the phone rang once, twice, three times. Someone picked it up. "Oberkommando der Wehrmacht,Analysis section." A woman's voice.
"Ilse? I want to talk to Heinrich. This is his wife," Lise said.
"I'm sorry,Frau Gimpel, but he's not here," the secretary answered.
"Do you know when he'll be back?"
"I'm sorry, but I have no idea. As soon as we heard…what had happened, he and Herr Dorsch and some other people, uh, left the building."
"Left the building?…Oh." Lise needed a moment, but she figured out what Ilse meant. They'd headed for Rolf Stolle's residence. That had to be it. Ilse wouldn't come right out and say so, though, not when the phones were bound to be monitored. She might have round heels, but she definitely had strong survival instincts. "Thank you," Lise said, both for the information and for the nonincriminating way the secretary had given it to her. She hung up.
Survival instincts,she thought, and shook her head. She'd always believed Heinrich had strong ones. But if he did, why had he gone running to stick his head in the lion's mouth? At first, she was inclined to blame Willi. A moment later, though, she shook her head again. Heinrich hadn't taken Willi all that seriously-not seriously enough to let Willi talk him into risking his life-even before the trouble with Erika.
The trouble with Erika…Lise saw, or thought she did. Before the blackshirts grabbed Heinrich and flung him into prison, he never would have done anything so crazy. Now, though, he'd lain in the hands of the SS. Maybe he thought anything that might help stop that committee with the silly name was worth doing.
It will happen just the same, with you there or without you. Lise couldn't shout that to Heinrich, no matter how much she wanted to. He'd had an attack of patriotism-and wasn't that a strange fit to come over a Jew at the beating heart of the Third Reich? Was the difference between Lothar Prutzmann and Odilo Globocnik on the one hand and Heinz Buckliger and Rolf Stolle on the other really so enormous?
Lise wished she hadn't asked herself the question that way. The answer looked much too much like yes.
She turned on the televisor. Most of the stations were broadcasting reruns of daytime dramas or quiz shows or weepy advice shows. Every so often, words would glide across the bottom of the screen.You are ordered to obey the decrees of the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich, the crawl said, over and over and over again.
The Berlin channel was different. It showed the crowd milling around Rolf Stolle's residence and, now, the stalled armored vehicles in front of it. "We are still here," a frightened-sounding announcer said over the noise of the crowd. "I don't know how long we can stay on the air, though. If we didn't have our own generator, we would have been shut down already. SS men have come here, but our guards turned them back. The guards have since been heavily reinforced by Wehrmacht troops."
Was that a warning to Prutzmann and his henchmen? Or was it a bluff? The announcer seemed nervous enough to make the latter seem a real possibility. But then the picture switched to a tape of Stolle kicking at a panzer's iron tire and bellowing at the SS man leaning out of the turret. Seeing the Gauleiter 's nerve made Lise willing to forgive the announcer's nerves.
Her daughters got home from school just then. She thought that would distract her from what was going on downtown, but it didn't. They were more excited about it than she was. Francesca said, "Frau Koch says we have to do what the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich tells us, and Odilo Globocnik is the new Fuhrer."
"Odilo Globocnik!" Roxane echoed. "Teacher made us learn how to say it."
"Us, too," Francesca said. "The Beast made us memorize his name and State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich, and anybody who couldn't do it got a swat. I did it. She's not going to hitme again." She spoke with grim determination.
"What does your teacher say?" Lise asked Alicia, who hadn't spoken yet.
"He made us learn Herr Globocnik's name," her eldest answered. "He said there wasn't any law for a committee like this one, but that wouldn't matter if they held on to power. He said we'd just have to wait and see, pretty much."
"He'll get in trouble," Francesca said. "Frau Koch says the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich "-since she'd memorized the name, she used it every chance she got-"is going to pay back everybody who ever liked what the old Fuhrer was doing."
"Odilo Globocnik is the new Fuhrer!" Roxane showed off what she'd learned, too.
"If that State Committee wins, they may do what Frau Koch says," Lise said carefully. "But Alicia's teacher has a point. They haven't won yet.Gauleiter Stolle and lots of people are protesting against what they've done." She didn't say that Heinrich was there. Even if things went sour in front of the Gauleiter 's residence, he might get away safe.Well, he might, she insisted to herself. Aloud, she went on, "They're on the televisor, too. Do you want to see?"
"Would you get us snacks first?" Roxane asked.
That seemed reasonable, so Lise did. Then they all went back to the living room. The Berlin channel was showing the tape of Stolle kicking at the panzer again. Francesca, in particular, watched wide-eyed. There was no room for dissent in Frau Koch's universe. Seeing that there was, or might be, in the real world seemed to hearten Lise's middle daughter. Alicia asked, "What are the other stations showing?"
"They were just putting on boring reruns, I suppose to make people think everything is normal," Lise answered. "But we can see what they're doing now."
She changed the channel. It wasn't a daytime drama any more. Horst Witzleben looked out of the screen at her and her children. "I have been given the following statement to read," he said. "And I quote…" He looked down at a paper on his desk. "'Rumors relating to the ancestry of the Reichsfuhrer -SS are false, malicious, and despicable lies. He is of unblemished Aryan descent. This being so, anyone repeating or spreading the false rumors will be subject to the most severe penalties. By order of the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich.' We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming."
Regularly scheduled programming turned out to be a nature film about the migration of storks. "What did that mean, Mommy?" Roxane asked.
"I'm not quite sure," Lise answered.
"He didn't look very happy about it, whatever it was," Alicia said. "He didn't sound very happy, either."
"You're right-he didn't," Lise said. Witzleben had been a cheerleader for Heinz Buckliger's reforms. If he'd actually been as enthusiastic a cheerleader as he'd seemed, what had Prutzmann's bully boys done to persuade him to speak on their behalf? Held a gun to his head? Held a gun to his wife's head? There were, no doubt, all sorts of ways, and they'd be the ones to know them. She changed channels again. The Berlin station was still broadcasting. The crowd around Rolf Stolle's residence was still there. Lise shrugged. "We'll just have to see what happens, that's all."
"Let me through!" somebody with a big voice shouted behind Heinrich. "Get out of my way, dammit! Clear a path!"
"In your dreams, pal," Willi Dorsch said.
Even if they didn't clear a path, the man kept on coming, using his shoulders and his elbows to force his way forward. He was a Berlin police officer. People did try to move aside for him, but in the press of bodies it wasn't easy. "Let me through!" he yelled again. "I've got important news for the Gauleiter."
He pushed past Heinrich and Willi. A moment later, a woman spoke sharply: "You might say, 'Excuse me.'"
For a wonder, the policeman actually did say, "Sorry, lady." Then, as roughly as ever, he went on toward Rolf Stolle, who was still arguing with the commander of the lead panzer.
"Was that your friend who called him on his manners?" Willi asked, grinning.
"Susanna? I do believe it was," Heinrich answered.
"She's got nerve," Willi said admiringly.
"Oh, yes. That she does."
There was a stir when the police officer came up to the gray-uniformed men guarding the Gauleiter of Berlin. They must have recognized him, for they let him through. He spoke to Stolle for perhaps a minute and a half. Heinrich wasn't that far away, but couldn't hear a word he said. He could see Stolle's reaction, though. The Gauleiter stared. His eyes went wide with surprise. Then, to Heinrich's amazement, he threw back his head and bellowed Jovian laughter at the sky.
"What the hell?" Willi said.
"Beats me," Heinrich said.
That great bellow of mirth had made everybody within a hundred meters turn and look at Stolle. With a sense of timing an actor might have envied, the Gauleiter waited for people's attention to wing his way before shouting up to the panzer commander: "Hey, you! SS man!"
"What do you want?" the officer in the black coveralls asked warily.
"You know your boss? The high and mighty Reichsfuhrer -SS? The chief Aryan of all time? Lothar goddamn Prutzmann? You know who I'm talking about?" Rolf Stolle waited again. He looked as if he could afford to let the moment stretch. He also looked as if he was enjoying himself immensely.
The panzer commander saw that as clearly as Heinrich did. His nod was a small masterpiece of reluctance. "I know who you're talking about. What about him?" He didn't use the bullhorn now.
That was sensible. It was even smart. But when he went up against Rolf Stolle's leather lungs, it didn't do him much good. "What about him? I'll tell you what about him, you pickle-faced son of a bitch," Stolle boomed in a voice audible all across the square in front of his residence. "You know what your precious Aryan Prutzmann is? He's a Jew, that's what-nothing but a lousy kike in a fancy uniform!"
"Why, you lying toad!" the panzer commander exclaimed, shocked out of his reticence as the crowd began to buzz.
Stolle shook his bullet head. "Not me, by God! What do you SS bastards use for a motto? 'My honor is loyalty,' that's it. Well, on my honor, it's the truth. It's all over the computers-and Prutzmann's come out and said on the televisor that people aren't allowed to talk about it. If that doesn't make it true, what's likely to? Here." He shoved the newly arrived police officer forward. "Tell him, Norbert."
Norbert told the same story the Gauleiter had, in a higher, thinner voice but with more details. Beside Heinrich, Willi Dorsch listened with his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open. He had to shake himself to turn back to Heinrich. "That can't be true, can it? But if it's a lie, it's a lie that goes right for the throat. And if it's a lie, why would Prutzmann deny it like that? Sounds like panic. And what would make him panic like the truth?"
"Beats me." Heinrich started to quote Hitler about the big lie, but checked himself. He remembered how the Kleins had got released after they were seized. One of Prutzmann's relatives had had a baby with the same horrible disease as theirs. Maybe that was a coincidence. Or maybe the Reichsfuhrer -SS really did have Jews in his woodpile, and his enemies were seizing on it.
Where was Susanna? There, only a few meters away. She was looking back toward him as he was looking for her. When their eyes met, he saw her thoughts were going in the same direction as his. Lothar Prutzmann certainly wasn't a Jew in any meaningful sense of the word. But wouldn't it be luscious if the Reichsfuhrer -SS came to grief because people thought he was?
The panzer commander disappeared down into the turret once more, no doubt to get on the radio yet again. Heinrich would have given a good deal to be a fly sitting on the breech of the cannon in there. No such luck. Whatever the officer said, no one else but his fellow panzer crewmen heard it.
He didn't emerge for some little while. When he did, his troubled features proclaimed that he didn't like much of what he'd heard. Even so, he raised the bullhorn to his lips once more. Gamely, he said, " Achtung!What the Gauleiter says is nothing but a pack of lies. Anyone saying such things about the Reichsfuhrer -SS makes himself liable to severe punishment. You have been warned."
Rolf Stolle laughed again. "Yes, you have been warned,Volk of the Reich," he called, mockery dancing on his voice. "And what have you got to say about that?"
He waited. So did Heinrich. Would the people dare, after they'd been warned not to by men with guns?
They dared. "Prutzmann is a kike!" somebody yelled, and in an instant the whole crowd was chanting it: "Prutzmann is a kike! Prutzmann is a kike!"
Heinrich shouted it, too, as loud as anybody. "Prutzmann is a kike! Prutzmann is a kike!" He looked over to Susanna again. She was shouting the same thing, her hands cupped in front of her mouth. When their eyes met this time, they both started to laugh. They went right on chanting, though. Heinrich had never imagined anti-Semitic slogans could be so much fun.
"Prutzmann is a kike! Prutzmann is a kike!" With her mother and sisters, Alicia watched the crowd in front of Rolf Stolle's residence from the safety of her suburban living room. The panzers in the televisor screen looked like toys, though she knew they were real.
"Kike! Kike!" Roxane chortled gleefully. The word was almost a joke to her. She didn't know that she'd ever seen a Jew, let alone that she was one.
Neither did Francesca. "I wonder what the Beast will tell us aboutthis," she said. "She was going on and on about how wonderful the Reichsfuhrer -SS was, and how brave, and how patriotic. If he's really a dirty Jew…"
"Dirty Jew! Dirty Jew!" Roxane didn't seem to care what she shouted, as long as she could make noise.
Alicia didn't say anything. She didn't know what to say. She sneaked a glance at Mommy, only to find her mother looking as confused as she was. Everything seemed not just upside down but dropped on its head. Alicia didn't know why Rolf Stolle and his followers thought Prutzmann was a Jew. Why hardly seemed to matter. Of all the things they could call the head of the SS, none struck a harder blow against him. Alicia understood that. She also understood that the Reichsfuhrer -SS was against all the changes the new Fuhrer had made. Did that mean using this weapon against him was all right? She didn't know. That wasn't so easy to figure out.
Over the noise of the crowd, the announcer for the Berlin station spoke in a high, excited voice: "British Prime Minister Charles Lynton calls on the men who made the Putsch to end their lawless behavior at once and release the rightful Fuhrer, Heinz Buckliger. He is joined in this call by the leaders of Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and Finland. The premier of France also agrees in principle."
"Can they do that?" Francesca asked in astonishment. The states that made up the Germanic Empire didn't talk back to the Reich. That was a law of nature. Neither did its little allies. Not talking back kept them from getting swallowed up.
"It means they think what's going on here is really, really wrong," Alicia said.
Mommy nodded. "That's what it means, all right. And they're braver than they used to be, because the new Fuhrer made them freer than they used to be."
"Holland has joined in the call for the rightful Fuhrer 's release. And"-even on this day of one astonishing surprise after another, the announcer's voice rose to a startled squeak-"in Prague, a Czech organization called Unity has declared the independence of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia from what it terms the illegal, immoral, and illegitimate government of Odilo Globocnik and Lothar Prutzmann."
"Oh, my," Mommy said. "That will mean more trouble after they get this trouble settled, if they do get it settled."
"When's Daddy coming home?" Roxane asked.
That question had also crossed Alicia's mind. She thought she'd got a glimpse of him-and maybe even of Aunt Susanna-near the panzer closest to Rolf Stolle's residence. But she hadn't been sure, and the camera had panned away before she could say anything.
"Pumpkin, I don't know," Mommy answered. "He went to the square there on the televisor this morning. Getting there was easy then. Getting away is liable to be harder. I'm not even sure they're letting people leave."
Alicia didn't like the sound of that. She tried not to show how worried she was. She had to stay strong, to help Mommy keep her younger sisters from getting upset. All she could do was wait and watch the televisor.
"Nobody's done any shooting here," her mother said. "As long as it stays like that, everything's all right."
And then, suddenly, the Berlin station announcer's voice rose not in surprise but in anger and alarm and fear: "We are under attack! I say again, we are under attack! There are SS troops outside this building, and they are assaulting it as I speak! They want to cut the Volk off from the truth and-"
There were banging noises, and shouts, and what might have been gunshots. Then the screen went blank. Alicia and her mother exclaimed in dismay. Francesca and Roxane were too little to know what that static and those swirling grays meant. As far as Alicia was concerned, they meant the end of hope.
"Change the channel!" Francesca said.
"Wait," Mommy said. "I want to see what comes on next."
What came on next, after three or four minutes of hisses and scratchy noises that made Alicia wish Mommy would change the channel, was a test pattern. Francesca and Alicia groaned. The test pattern lasted longer than the static had. Alicia's patience was wearing very thin when it finally disappeared.
Horst Witzleben's grim face replaced it. The newscaster said, "The illegal and unauthorized broadcasts formerly coming from this station have now ceased. The public is urged and instructed to disregard them, and to ignore the slanderous insults aimed at the Reichsfuhrer -SS. Regular programming will now resume here, and factual bulletins will be issued as necessary. Good evening."
Regular programming turned out to be a rerun of a game show. Alicia looked at her mother. Shaking her head, Mommy got up and turned off the televisor.