In the Presence of Mine Enemies (64 page)

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
Führer
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 jour
nals 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 Prützmann 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 Prützmann'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 keep
me
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
Führer
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
Führer
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
Führer
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't
just
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
Führer
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
Führer
talked at people, talked down to them. Rolf Stolle reminded them what they were missing.

Of course, if he ever moved to the
Führer
'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
Führer
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
Führer
. Horst Witzleben soon cut away to dramatic footage of an industrial accident in Saarbrücken. 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, for
tunately, 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.)