In the Presence of Mine Enemies (18 page)

Still, there were compensations. First and foremost, there was London itself. Along with her ideas for articles, Susanna was also bringing home enough new books—used books, actually—to make excess baggage charges all but certain. Her campaign against the bookstores of London would have made General Guderian sit up and take notes. She always shopped as if she were a big-game hunter organizing a safari. All she lacked were beaters to drive the books off the shelves and into the range of her high-powered account card. She had to find the volumes and pick them out herself—but that was part of the sport.

Along with the books, she was bringing back several pairs of shoes. She'd gone after them with the same effective bravado she'd used on her bookstore campaign. She was particularly proud of one pair, which were covered all over with multicolored sequins. If she wore them to a faculty meeting, she might give the department chairman
heart failure—and if that wasn't worth trying, she didn't know what would be.

She had one more reason for hating to leave London, too: no matter how stodgy the MEA had been this year, the British Union of Fascists across the street had more than made up for it. Susanna thought she might have spent more time at the Crown than she had at the Silver Eagle. She'd got to know several BUF men who thought she was a delegate to
their
gathering: not the sort of compliment she most wanted, perhaps, but a compliment all the same.

“'Ere's the little lydy!” they would roar when they spotted her, and other endearments in dialects never heard among the scholars of medieval English. They pressed buttons and badges and stickers on her, and bought her pints till her back teeth floated. She would rather have had Scotch, but the rank-and-file fascists were a beer-drinking crowd.

They were also a crowd overwhelmingly in favor of doing business the way the first edition of
Mein Kampf
outlined. “Only stands to reason, don't it, dearie?” said a bald-headed, broken-nosed bruiser named Nick, breathing beer fumes into Susanna's face. “It's the buggers 'oove already got it made 'oo don't want ordinary blokes to 'ave their say.”

“That certainly seems reasonable to me,” Susanna said. Her precise, well-educated tones sent Nick and his pals into gales of laughter. She couldn't help liking them. If there was any hope for changing the way things worked, it rested on their shoulders. But the way they kept laughing while they bragged of brawls and brutalities past chilled her.
If they knew I was a Jew, they would laugh like that while they stomped me to death
.

She forgave, or at least forgot, their hypothetical sins when they smuggled her onto the floor for the climactic session of their assembly. They didn't think of it as smuggling, of course, and she wore enough BUF ornaments that no one, not her companions and not the even nastier thugs at the doors, even noticed that a membership badge was not among the gewgaws.

Things were undoubtedly livelier here than they were at the Medieval English Association meeting. People roared out songs in raucous choruses. The tunes came from British popular music. Some of the words were fierce, some were funny, some were obscene. Most were either for or against the first edition. Here and there, people for the older rules brawled with people opposing them. BUF guards tried without too much luck to keep the two sides apart.

A beer bottle smashed on the floor a couple of meters from Susanna's feet. “Someone will get killed!” she exclaimed.

“Some of these bastards deserve killing,” Nick answered.

The brute simplicity of fascism had always fascinated and repelled Susanna at the same time. Somebody doesn't like the way you're going? Get rid of him, and then keep on going that way anyhow. If you're strong enough, you can, and it proves you were right all along.

There was, of course, a certain problem…. “Suppose they decide you are the ones who need killing?” Susanna asked.

“Only goes to show they're a pack of bloody sods, eh?” Nick said.

One of the ruffian's pals, though, saw what Susanna was driving at. “If they let counting 'ands stand for banging 'eads, I expect we will, too,” he said. “That's what this business is about, right?” Susanna nodded. After a moment, reluctantly, so did Nick.

Another bottle shattered, this time on somebody's head. Friends led the bleeding man out of the hall. Susanna shivered, feeling as if she'd been swept back through time. This was how the Nazis had started ninety years earlier: gathering in taverns for what were as much brawls as meetings. No Communists would come to try to break up this conclave, though. Another shiver. If any Communists were left alive, they were as much in hiding as the
Reich
's handful of Jews.

Bang! Bang! Bang!
To her relief, that wasn't gunfire. It was the chairman plying his gavel in front of the micro
phone on the podium. “That will be enough of that,” Charlie Lynton called, his amplified voice booming through the hall.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Settle down!” Lynton was in his mid-fifties, with an upper-class English accent that belied his birth in Edinburgh. He was smooth and smart. He had to be smart; he'd headed the British Union of Fascists since the mid-nineties, and steered as independent a line as he could without rousing German wrath.

“Which way will he go, do you think?” Susanna asked.

“Oh, 'e's with us,” Nick said, and the men around him nodded. “'E can win a show of 'ands, and 'e knows it.”

His friends' heads bobbed up and down. One of them, a fellow everybody called Blinky Bill because of his squint, said, “It's them other old fools on the platform we've got to worry about.”

Sure enough, a good many of the uniformed men up there looked as if they'd been chewing lemons. Things had run the same way for almost seventy years, ever since Britain fell to the
Wehrmacht
. As old guards will, the old guard here had expected them to keep on running the same way forever. But whatever else Charlie Lynton was, he was a breath of fresh air in a party that hadn't seen much for a long time.

He plied the gavel again.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Come on, lads, settle down,” he called once more. “Let's have some order here.” No call could have been better calculated to appeal to fascists. Putting things in order—their notion of order—was fascists'
raison d'être
.

But even that precious call didn't work here. At the same time as Nick was bellowing, “Huzzah for the first edition!” another fascist with an even more impressive set of lungs roared, “To hell with the bloody first edition!” Chaos broke out anew.

Bang! Bang! Bang!
Lynton pounded so hard, he might have used a gun if he'd had one. “Enough!” he shouted, and he had the microphone working for him. By the way the word resounded through the hall, that might have been God shouting up there—on the assumption, which Susanna found unlikely, that God took an interest in the internal squabbles of the British Union of Fascists.

“First edition! First edition!” This time, it was an organized chant, deep and rolling and thunderous. The British had learned their lessons well; similar shouts of,
“Sieg heil!”
resounded through Nazi rallies in Berlin and Munich and Nuremberg.

The first edition's foes weren't so well disciplined. They had no counterchant prepared. Shouting out their protests as individuals, they couldn't drown the cries of those who favored change.

“First edition! First edition!” Susanna shouted with her comrades—her friends, she supposed she had to call them for the moment. The endless chant was intoxicating. It beat in her brain. It beat in her blood. Back home, she had as little to do with National Socialism as she could without drawing suspicion to herself. She hadn't really appreciated the power of mass rallies. Now that she found herself in the middle of one, she understood. She felt caught up in something greater than herself. It wasn't a feeling she was used to having. She distrusted it, but oh, it was heady!

Charlie Lynton let the chant build for two or three minutes, then used the gavel once more. “Enough!” he boomed for a second time. “We've got a lot to get through, and we won't do it if we spend all our bloody time shouting at each other.” He took a piece of paper from the breast pocket of his black uniform tunic. Most BUF men put Susanna in mind of brigands. A few reminded her of Army officers. Charlie Lynton somehow contrived to look like a corporate executive, epaulets notwithstanding. “I have here,” he said, “a message from his Majesty, King Henry IX.”

Where nothing else had, that won him silence and complete attention. Henry was like King Umberto in Italy: he had no real power, but enormous prestige. The
Duce
and the Italian Fascist Party didn't have to listen to Umberto, but they did if they were smart—and most of them wanted to. The same held true here for Charlie Lynton and the BUF with respect to King Henry.

“‘My loyal, brave, and faithful subjects,'” Lynton read, “‘I am pleased and proud that so many of you should wish to return to the earliest and, in my view, the
best traditions of the party so closely affiliated with your own. Wishing you wisdom in your debate, I remain, Henry,
Deo gratia
King of England and Defender of the Faith.'”

Beside Susanna, Nick erupted volcanically, with a great roar of glee and delight. Susanna clapped her hands and whooped, too. Like the British Union of Fascists, King Henry had found a way to praise democracy and the National Socialists at the same time. That wasn't easy. Susanna hadn't even imagined it was possible. But they'd done it here.

And will we?
she wondered wistfully.
How
are
we going to go about choosing the next
Führer
?
No one on the RRG or the BBC had said much about that. Deliberations were proceeding: that was as much as anybody would admit. It sounded more like a criminal case than anything else. Susanna grimaced.
It probably is
.

Up on the platform, someone from the old guard was inveighing against the first edition and everything it stood for. The longer he talked, the more loudly the rank and file booed and jeered and mocked him. Seeing as much, Charlie Lynton let him go on and on and on. He hurt his own cause worse than Lynton could have.

When the old man finally stumped back to his seat on the rostrum, the BUF leader smiled out at the rank and file and said, “Well, I think that tells us a good deal about where we all stand, doesn't it?”

A few stubborn souls booed and hooted at Lynton. But their outcry seemed almost lost in the big hall, for most of the foes of the first edition sat in embarrassed silence, as if ashamed to admit they agreed with the disastrous speaker and disagreed with both their chairman and their King. “That's done it, by God!” Nick boomed, and planted a beery kiss on Susanna's cheek. Part of her wanted to haul off and slap him. The rest was too excited at being here even to mind very much.

“We have a quorum,” Charlie Lynton said. “Time to call the question. Shall we change our rules to give back to the members of the British Union of Fascists the powers that are rightfully theirs, as outlined in the first edition of
Mein
Kampf,
or shall we go on as we have been for so long, with the few dictating to the many?”

One of the advantages of being chairman was that Lynton not only got to guide the debate but also to frame its terms. Had he opposed the change, he might have called it destroying tradition and giving in to mob rule. Since he didn't…

Reform passed overwhelmingly, by better than three to one. This time, Susanna kissed Nick on his bristly cheek. To her astonishment, the hard-bitten British fascist blushed a brighter red than she ever had.

“Thank you, friends,” Lynton said when the tally was complete. “You've done the right thing, and you've done a brave thing. And now let us hope our German colleagues may profit by our example.”

 

Herr
Kessler's forefinger shot out like a striking serpent. “Alicia Gimpel!”

Alicia leaped to her feet. She stood at stiff attention. “
Jawohl, Herr
Kessler!”

“What is the principle upon which the National Socialist Party and all fascist parties are founded?”

“The
Führerprinzip, Herr
Kessler,” Alicia answered. “The principle that the leader of the party knows best the direction in which it should go.” She'd learned that the year before. She didn't forget her lessons.

“Correct,” her teacher growled. “Be seated.” Kessler prowled in front of the blackboard. That was the only word Alicia could find for the way he moved. He might have been a lion or a leopard hunting for something to tear to pieces. She wondered what had put him in such a dreadful temper. He glared at the class. “Does anyone have any business telling the National Socialist Party of the Greater German
Reich
how to run its affairs? Anyone at all?”

“No,
Herr
Kessler,” the children chorused—that was obviously the answer he wanted.