In the Presence of Mine Enemies (71 page)

 

“Prützmann is a kike! Prützmann 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 about
this
,” she said. “She was going on and on about how wonderful the
Reichsführer
-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 Prützmann 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
Reichsführer
-SS was against all the changes the new
Führer
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
Führer,
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
Führer
made them freer than they used to be.”

“Holland has joined in the call for the rightful
Führer
'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 Prützmann.”

“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
Reichsführer
-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.

H
EINRICH
G
IMPEL HAD YELLED
, “D
OWN WITH THE
SS!”
AND
“We are the
Volk
!” and “All the world is watching!” and “Prützmann is a kike!” all day long. He was tired and hungry. Some sandwiches and fruit had got to the crowd, but none had got to him. The SS's armored vehicles hadn't opened fire, but they hadn't left, either. They showed no sign of leaving. Nor was he sure they would let him—or anyone else—go.

The officer commanding the lead panzer had stayed down inside the turret for a while. Now he came out again, bullhorn in hand. “Yell as loud as you please!” he blared. “No one will hear you. No one will care. Your pirate televisor station is in the hands of the State Committee!”

“Liar!” people shouted. They shouted worse things than that, too. The panzer commander let the abuse wash over him as if it didn't matter. More than anything else, that convinced Heinrich he was probably telling the truth. If he'd got angry or defensive, he might have been bluffing. As things were, he seemed to think,
Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me
. And all the sticks and stones here were on his side. The crowd in front of the
Gauleiter
's residence had only words.

Still stubborn, Rolf Stolle boomed, “You don't dare let what you do see the light of day. If you were honest, you would have started shooting while the cameras were rolling.”

Beside Heinrich, Willi nervously shifted from foot to
foot. “I wish he wouldn't say things like that, dammit. He'll give the bastard ideas.”

“He's got ideas already. He has to,” Heinrich answered. “Don't you think they've been screaming in his ear to open up for hours? He hasn't done it yet. Stolle's working on his conscience.”

“Son of a bitch is an SS man,” Willi said. “He had it surgically removed, just like the rest of them.”

“Ha,” Heinrich said: a mournful attempt at a laugh. Many a true word was spoken in jest. He wished Willi hadn't spoken these; they felt altogether too true.

Slowly, slowly, the sun sank toward the northwest. Berlin wasn't far enough north to get white nights in summer, nights where twilight never turned to real darkness, but sunset came late and darkness didn't last long. All the same, Heinrich feared it would last long enough to mask dark deeds.

He looked around for Susanna. When he spied her, their eyes met. She smiled and waved. “We've both chosen our spot,” she said. “I think it's a good one.”

A good one to get killed in,
Heinrich thought. But maybe that was part of what Susanna had meant. She got passionately devoted to causes—and if you weren't passionately devoted to being a Jew these days, you weren't a Jew at all. Even so, Heinrich wanted to live. He had another generation at home to worry about. Susanna hadn't been lucky enough to hook up with anyone with whom she got along.

Looking for hope, he pointed up to the rooftop televisor cameras. “They're still filming, even if the signal isn't going out. The fear that people might see it one of these days may do for a conscience where nothing else will.”

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 Prützmann'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 Prützmann 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.

“I
am
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 Prützmann's lair not far from the
Führer
'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 Prützmann
, 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
Reichsführer
-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 Prützmann's alleged
Übermenschen
. 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. Susanna 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
Wehrmacht
always 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 Prützmann's
. She whooped again. The
Reichsführer
-SS hadn't known what he was getting into. He hadn't known, but he was finding out in a hurry.

Prützmann'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.