Susanna nodded. "Here's hoping."
Beside Heinrich, Willi said, "That should last us for another hour, maybe even another hour and a half. But what happens when it gets dark?"
Heinrich eyed the setting sun. He almost said something about Joshua and making the sun stand still. At the last minute, though, he didn't. Not too long after he said something Biblical to Erika, he'd ended up in one of Lothar Prutzmann's prisons. He didn't think Willi would accuse him of being a Jew. All the same, prison would be one of the better things that might happen to him if things went wrong here.
Joshua he was not. In due course, the sun sank below the horizon. Twilight began to deepen. Shadows spread and lost their sharpness. Faces farther away grew dim and indistinct. Venus blazed low in the western sky. Above it, Saturn was dimmer and yellower…and that ruddy star between them had to be Mars. Heinrich almost wished he hadn't recognized it. Tonight, he wanted nothing to do with the god of war.
Lights on Rolf Stolle's residence were bright, but not bright enough to illuminate the square in front of it after the sun went down. The panzers and armored personnel carriers turned on their lights. That, though, Heinrich knew, was not for the benefit of the crowd confronting them. Their crews wouldn't want anybody to sneak up with a Molotov cocktail or a grenade in the dark.
And then, off in the distance but swelling rapidly, Heinrich heard one of the sounds he'd listened for and dreaded all day long: the rumbling snarl of more diesel engines heading toward the Gauleiter 's residence.
He wasn't the only one who heard them. A low murmur of alarm ran through the crowd.
Willi Dorsch managed a creditable chuckle. "I don't know what we're worrying about," he said. "They've already got enough firepower here to massacre the lot of us."
"You always did know how to cheer me up when I was feeling low," Heinrich answered, and Willi laughed out loud.
The officer in charge of the lead panzer raised his bullhorn and aimed it at Rolf Stolle: "It's all over now. You can see it's all over. Surrender to me, and I'll make sure they don't shoot you 'by mistake.'"
"You can take your 'by mistake,' fold it till it's all corners, and shove it right on up your ass, sonny boy," the Gauleiter of Berlin shouted. "If you want me, if Prutzmann wants me, you'll have to kill me, on account of I'm damned if you'll take me alive and give me a show trial. Buckliger let himself get caught, the poor, sorry son of a bitch. To hell with me if I intend to."
"He's got balls," Willi said admiringly.
"I know," Heinrich said. "But if they take him out, they'll take out everybody who's here with him."
He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the engine noise and clanking, clattering treads of the approaching armored vehicles. Willi gave an airy shrug, as if to say,Easy come, easy go. Heinrich clapped him on the back. He regretted being here less than he'd thought he would. Susanna was right. This was a good place to stand.
Down the people-clogged street, farther away from the Gauleiter 's residence, jeers and hisses and derisive whistles rang out as the new contingent of armored fighting vehicles came into sight. If a hothead in the crowd had an assault rifle and opened up on the panzers from sheer frustration, that could touch off a massacre. Damn near anything could touch off a massacre now, and Heinrich knew it only too well.
"Iam sorry about Erika," Willi said suddenly, as if he too was thinking this was the end, and some things should not go unspoken.
Tears stung Heinrich's eyes. He nodded. "It's all right," he said. "Don't worry about it."
And then the noises from down the street changed. As if by magic, boos and curses were transmuted into wild, even frantic, cheers. Heinrich's head, which had been hanging on his chest, came up like a dog's when it took an unexpected scent. So did Willi's. So did Susanna's. They all leaned toward the startling new noise. Heinrich willed words to come through the mad joy.
"It's the-!" More cheers drowned whatever the key word was. "It's not the-!" Frustrated again, Heinrich swore and kicked at the paving slates. But the third time was the charm. "It's not the goddamn Waffen- SS. It's the Wehrmacht-and they're on our side! "
Heinrich threw back his head and howled like a wolf. A crazy grin on his face, he grabbed Willi's hand and pumped his whole arm up and down as if he were jacking up a car. He shoved through the crowd toward Susanna. She was coming toward him, too. Laughing and crying at the same time, they squeezed each other. He was forty centimeters taller than she was. He had to bend down a long way to give her a kiss-and he did.
Susanna only half remembered actually clambering up onto this panzer. It hadn't been more than fifteen minutes earlier, but already it seemed like a mad fever dream. The panzer had handholds welded to the turret and the chassis so soldiers could cling to it and ride along. But the gray, capable engineers who'd designed it surely had never dreamt it would clatter through the neon nighttime streets of Berlin with as many people aboard as it carried.
The panzer commander seemed taken aback by the whole business himself. He rode head and shoulders out of the cupola, and couldn't have been as young as he looked-could he? "Be careful!" he shouted over and over again to his unexpected load of passengers. "If you fall off, you'll get squashed!"
He was bound to be right about that. This panzer was second in a long column rolling from Rolf Stolle's residence toward Lothar Prutzmann's lair not far from the Fuhrer 's palace. Susanna wondered where Heinrich had gone. He wasn't on this panzer. Was he riding another one, or had his usual prudence come back to life and persuaded him to stay away from places where guns were liable to go off?
Prudence? Susanna laughed. Nothing that had happened all this mad day had had even a nodding acquaintance with prudence. It wasn't even prudence that had kept the SS men from fighting it out when they found themselves outgunned by the Wehrmacht. They still could have killed Stolle then, as they could have killed him a hundred times earlier on. But their hearts hadn't been in their orders, and so they hadn't started shooting and had given up at the first excuse they got. SS men! Who would have imagined it?
Not Prutzmann, Susanna thought, and chuckled evilly.
Here and there in the city, she did hear spatters of gunfire, but only a few. The panzer commander heard them, too. "What are you people going to do when we get where we're going?" he asked plaintively.
"Hang the Reichsfuhrer — SS from a lamppost, that's what!" bawled a burly man near Susanna. She and the rest of the panzer-riders cheered.
"But we're liable to have to shoot some of those SS bastards, and they're liable to shoot back," the Wehrmacht man said. Whenever the panzer passed under a streetlight, the little silver Totenkopf on his black coveralls glittered for a moment.
"Give us guns!" that burly man said. "We'll shoot 'em ourselves!" Through more cheers, he went on to describe in vivid terms the personal and moral shortcomings of the SS. Then he nodded to Susanna. "Meaning no offense, ma'am."
"It doesn't bother me," she said. "They're much worse than that." The man blinked, then grinned enormously. Susanna grinned back.
SS men had barricaded the grounds around their brooding headquarters. What they'd run up looked much more formidable than the flimsy makeshifts the people of Berlin had erected in front of Rolf Stolle's residence. But there was no swarming mass of people behind these barricades: only Prutzmann's allegedUbermenschen. And, as the first panzer stopped and turned its lights on them, the SS men looked quite humanly nervous, even if they did clutch assault rifles and a few antipanzer rocket launchers.
The commander of the lead panzer yelled, "You fuckers open up on us and we'll slaughter every goddamn one of you. We'll laugh while we're doing it, too. You shot our boys at the televisor station, and we owe you plenty. You got that?" He ducked down into the turret. The panzer's engine began to race and roar. The commander reemerged to issue a one-word order he surely hadn't learned in any training school: "Charge!"
His panzer thundered forward. It hit a parked truck head-on and hurled it out of the way. Su
sanna screamed with delight. Her panzer rumbled through the breach the lead machine had made. Others followed. So did trucks and armored personnel carriers full of Wehrmacht soldiers. The SS men didn't fire a shot. Troopers in Wehrmacht gray urban camouflage came down from their vehicles and began disarming the men who'd made careers of spreading fear and now suddenly discovered there were people who weren't afraid of them.
Fear is what they had,Susanna realized.The Wehrmachtalways had more muscle. Up till now, it never used what it had. Politics held it back. But tonight the gloves are off, and it's nobody's fault but Lothar Prutzmann's. She whooped again. The Reichsfuhrer — SS hadn't known what he was getting into. He hadn't known, but he was finding out in a hurry.
Prutzmann's office was on the third floor of the SS building, right above the monumental entryway. Anyone who paid attention to the news knew that much. The Wehrmacht panzer commanders evidently did. Half a dozen 120mm cannon rose and swung to point straight at the famous chamber.
One of the panzer commanders had a bullhorn, probably the same model as the SS panzer man had used outside of Rolf Stolle's residence. "Prutzmann!" he shouted, his amplified voice echoing from the granite and concrete and glass. "Come out with your hands up, Prutzmann! We won't kill you if you do. You'll get a trial."
And then we'll kill you,Susanna finished mentally. Hearing Lothar Prutzmann's unadorned surname blare from the bullhorn was a wonder in itself, a wonder and a portent.How the mighty have fallen, it said. Unadorned surnames blared at prisoners in interrogation cells. The Reichsfuhrer — SS had surely never expected such indignities to be his lot.Too bad for him.
No answer came from the famous office. The lights were on in there, but closed venetian blinds kept Susanna from seeing inside. "Don't screw around with us, Prutzmann!" the Wehrmacht commander shouted. "You have five minutes. If you don't come out, we'll come in after you. You'll like that a lot less, I promise."
Susanna looked at her watch, only to discover she'd somehow lost it. She shrugged. Five minutes wouldn't be hard to figure out. All the civilians on the panzer with her-and on the other Wehrmacht machines-shouted and cursed the Reichsfuhrer — SS. Between their cries (including her own) and the rumble of the panzers' engines, whatever was happening more than a few meters away got drowned out.
The deadline had to be drawing near. The man commanding Susanna's panzer leaned down into the turret, presumably to give the gunner his orders. The commander had just straightened when a tall blond man in the uniform of a Security Police major came out with a handkerchief tied to a pointer to make a flag of truce. "Don't shoot!" he shouted.
"Why not?" said the commander of the lead panzer. "Why the hell not, you SSSchweinehund? Where's Prutzmann? He's the one we want."
"He's dead," the blond Security Police major answered. "He stuck a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Didn't you hear the bang?"
A frantic tumult of cheering rose from the civilians. Through it, the lead panzer commander used the bullhorn to say, "Show me the body. Till I see the body, I figure this is some sort of scheme to buy time for him to get away." The blond major started to go back into the building. The panzer commander stopped him: "Hold it right there, buddy. If they don't bring Prutzmann's body out,you're the one who's dead meat."
"Have it your way," the major said. "You will anyhow." He turned and shouted back into SS headquarters: "Hans-Joachim! Detlef! Bring him out! They want to see him."
Noxious diesel fumes from the idling panzer made Susanna cough. A dull headache pounded behind her eyes. It all put her in mind of Professor Oppenhoff's cigars. She didn't care. To see Lothar Prutzmann dead, she would have gone through worse than this.
Or so she thought, till two SS men-she supposed they were Hans-Joachim and Detlef-dragged out a corpse. Each had hold of a highly polished boot. The body wore the black dress uniform of a high-ranking SS official. In the glare of the panzers' lights, the blood that ran from the back of the head was shockingly scarlet. Susanna's stomach lurched. Death-anyone's death-was better contemplated at a distance than seen close up.
Again, so she thought. But the man who commanded her panzer said only, "It's a fresh corpse, anyhow. They don't drip that way very long." If that wasn't the voice of experience, she'd never heard it.
The commander of the lead panzer got down from his machine and bounded up the stairs to the entrance two at a time so he could get a good look at the body. He stooped beside it, then slowly straightened. With a fine flair for the dramatic, he spread his arms wide and waited till every eye was on him. Then and only then did he shout, "It's Prutzmann!"
Susanna squealed. A great roar of joy rose from the crowd. That burly man on the panzer with her planted a big, smacking kiss on her cheek. He needed a shave. His beard rasped her skin. He smelled of schnapps and onions. She couldn't have cared less.
Where's Heinrich?she wondered again.Is he seeing this, too? That, she cared about. After a spell in Lothar Prutzmann's prison, Heinrich of all people deserved to see his corpse.
"Where's that friend of yours, that Susanna?" Willi Dorsch bawled in Heinrich's ear.
"I don't know," Heinrich shouted back. "I haven't seen her in a while." The two of them had precarious perches on an armored personnel carrier full of Wehrmacht soldiers. As it rattled west through the streets of Berlin, one of the crew fired short machine-gun bursts into the air whenever he felt like it. The noise was shattering.
"If somebody starts shooting back at that trigger-happy maniac, we're all ground round." Willi sounded absurdly cheerful.
"This charming thought already occurred to me, thanks." Heinrich didn't.
Willi laughed. "So many crazy things have already happened today, I'm just not going to worry any more. One way or another, it'll all work out."
"Maybe it will." By then, Heinrich was past arguing. In fact, he couldn't very well argue, because a hell of a lot of crazy thingshad happened. The wind of their passage whipped around his glasses and made his eyes water. That wind was cool, but not especially clean; it was full of diesel exhaust from the other armored vehicles in this convoy. How many panzers and armored personnel carriers and self-propelled guns (to say nothing of soft-skinned trucks) were trundling around Berlin tonight? Even more to the point, how many different sides were they on? And what would happen when those on one side bumped up against those from another?
Rat-a-tat-tat!The machine gunner squeezed off another exuberant burst. A tracer round drew a hot red line across the night. Nobody returned fire. Heinrich approved of that. Somewhere, though, those bullets would be coming down. Even as falling lumps of lead, they could kill: they'd be falling from a long way up.
Treads growling and grinding, the armored personnel carrier turned left. Heinrich started to laugh. "What's funny?" Willi asked.
"Back where we started from," Heinrich answered. There on the left stood Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters; on the right, across the wide expanse of Adolf Hitler Platz, the Fuhrer 's palace and the vast, looming bulk of the Great Hall. Dead ahead towered the Arch of Triumph, as usual bathed in spotlights. Heinrich would have bet it had sharpshooters atop it. But were they wearing SS black or the Wehrmacht 's mottled Feldgrau?
The armored column of which the personnel carrier was a part turned right, rumbling toward the Fuhrer 's palace. The panzers and APCs had to go slowly and carefully to keep from crushing people under their tracks. Adolf Hitler Platz wasn't jammed sardine-tight, the way the little square in front of Rolf Stolle's residence had been. It would hold more than a million people. At the moment, it held tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands.
"Wehrmachtor SS?" somebody called nervously.
"Bugger the SS with a pine cone," the machine gunner answered, and fired another burst into the air. "We're thereal soldiers, by God, and if those blackshirted pricks don't know it they'll find out pretty goddamn fast!"
The whoops that came from the crowd said that was what they wanted to hear. But SS men held the Fuhrer 's palace. Sandbagged machin
e-gun nests outside the entrance were plenty to keep the people at a respectful distance. Panzers and armored personnel carriers laughed at machine guns-though Heinrich, on the outside of the armor plate, wouldn't laugh if they opened up. And if the SS had machine guns here, it probably had antipanzer rockets, too.
Heinrich didn't see any Waffen — SS armor. Maybe Lothar Prutzmann had figured he wouldn't need it here once he'd got hold of Stolle. That only went to show he wasn't as smart as he thought he was.
Or does it show I'm not as smart as I think I am?Heinrich wondered. Would Waffen — SS panzers suddenly charge out of the night, their cleated steel tracks tearing up the pavement like those of the Wehrmacht machines? He shrugged. If the officer in charge of the Wehrmacht armor couldn't anticipate a threat like that, he didn't deserve his shoulder straps.
A blackshirt in front of the entrance stepped forward, his hands conspicuously empty. Try as he would to hold it steady, his voice quavered a little when he asked, "What do you want?"
"Globocnik!" Half a dozen Wehrmacht panzer commanders hurled the acting Fuhrer 's name in his face.
One of them added, "We know he's in there. We saw him come in this afternoon."
The crowd of angry civilians with the Wehrmacht men took up the cry: "Globocnik! Globocnik! We want Globocnik!" In a different tone of voice, those shouts would have warmed any politician's heart. As things were, if Heinrich had been Odilo Globocnik, he would have been looking for a place to hide.
Licking his lips, the SS man said, "You are speaking of the rightful Fuhrer of the Greater German Reich and of the Germanic Empire. He orders you-he commands you-to disperse."
Maybe the panzer commanders answered. If they did, they couldn't make themselves heard even with bullhorns. The crowd's roars drowned them out. "Heinz Buckliger is the rightful Fuhrer!" people shouted, and, "We won't take orders from Globocnik!" and, "Down with the SS!" Heinrich gleefully joined that last chant. He liked the others, but that one hit him where he lived.
In The Presence of mine Enemies Page 51
