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 foo
t. 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 th
e 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."
In The Presence of mine Enemies Page 48
