In the Presence of Mine Enemies (49 page)

That made much more sense than Heinrich wished it did. If Lothar Prützmann disliked reform so much, did it have any hope of sticking? If Prützmann disliked Heinz Buckliger's policies so much, did Buckliger have any chance of staying
Führer
for very long? It seemed unlikely, to say the least.

“We'll see what happens when Buckliger comes home, that's all,” Willi said. “If he lets this ride…” He didn't go on, or need to. If the
Führer
accepted a rebuke like this, any hope of change was dead, and things would go on as they always had. If Buckliger didn't accept it, though…If he didn't accept it, things were liable to get very interesting very fast.

The train pulled into South Station. Heinrich and Willi went up to catch the bus to
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
headquarters. Whenever Heinrich saw somebody carrying a
Völkischer Beobachter,
he tried to eavesdrop. How were Berliners taking this? For that matter, how were people in Breslau and Bonn and other second-rate towns taking it? This might not play out so neatly, or so quickly.

He heard only two snatches of conversation, both from people going down escalators as he was going up past them. One was “—damn fool—” and the other “—about time—”…and both could have meant anything or nothing. So much for eavesdropping.

Nobody on the bus out of South Station seemed to be talking about “Enough Is Enough.” That might have been
out of a sense of self-preservation; people on that bus were heading for the beating heart of the Greater German
Reich
and of the Germanic Empire. Or it might just have been to drive Heinrich crazy. He wouldn't have been surprised.

When he got off in front of
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
headquarters, he looked across Adolf Hitler Platz to the
Führer
's palace. Buckliger wasn't there now, of course. But if he didn't already have a copy of the
Völkischer Beobachter,
he would soon. What he did after that would say a lot about who ran the
Reich
.

As usual, Heinrich and Willi gave the guards at the top of the stairs their identification cards. One of the guards said, “We'll see if Stolle wants the blackshirts standing watch over him after what's in today's papers.”

“Would you?” Willi asked. The guard waited till the card showed green on the machine reader, then shook his head.

That aspect of things hadn't occurred to Heinrich until then. If he were Rolf Stolle, would he want Prützmann's henchmen keeping him safe? He didn't think so. Who could arrange a tragic accident more easily than bodyguards? Nobody. Nobody in all the world.

Ilse was on the telephone when Heinrich and Willi walked into their big office. She hung up a moment later, her face flushed with excitement. “The
Gauleiter
is taking me out to lunch today! Me! Can you believe it? Isn't it amazing?”

Heinrich didn't say anything. Willi said, “Amazing,” in tones suggesting the only thing along those lines to delight him more would have been an outbreak of bubonic plague. Ilse might not even have noticed his gloom. Next to Rolf Stolle, a budget analyst wasn't amazing at all.

How would Willi handle that? Heinrich sat down, got to work, and watched his friend from the corner of his eye. Willi sat there and fumed: so openly that Heinrich wondered if the office smoke detectors would start buzzing. If Stolle came to pick Ilse up, he might need protection against more than Lothar Prützmann and the SS.

But the
Gauleiter
of Berlin didn't come in person. And the men who did take Ilse off to whatever rendezvous Stolle had set up weren't the blackshirted guards who'd
accompanied him on his last visit to
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
headquarters. They wore the gray uniforms of ordinary Berlin policemen, men much more likely to follow Stolle than Prützmann. Willi noticed that, too. Heinrich could see it on his face. It didn't make him look any happier.

Willi's worries, of course, were personal. Heinrich's were more on the order of,
If the SS tries to assassinate Stolle, could those fellows keep him safe?
Only one answer sprang to mind—
how the devil do I know?

Ilse came back from lunch very, very late, with a big bouquet of roses in her arms and schnapps on her breath. She giggled a lot and didn't do much work the rest of the afternoon. Somehow, Heinrich doubted Rolf Stolle had spent their time together talking about how to reform National Socialism.

 

Lise Gimpel got the last of the dishes in the sink as her husband called, “Hurry up, sweetheart. Horst is just coming on.”

“Here I am.” Lise sat down beside him on the sofa. She couldn't help adding, “I'd have been here sooner if you'd helped.”

“Oh.” Heinrich looked astonished, as if that hadn't occurred to him. It probably hadn't. She was just going to beat him about the head and shoulders for his male iniquity when he asked, “Why didn't you say something sooner, when I could have given you a hand?”

That hadn't occurred to her. “I thought you'd be tired from your day at the office.”

“By now we're both tired. It's the tired time of day.”

He was right about that. Before Lise could say so, Horst Witzleben's handsome, blond, ultra-Aryan features filled the screen. A moment later, after the newscaster's greeting, the scene cut away to a Junkers jet airliner—
Luftwaffe Alfa,
the code name was—landing at Tempelhof Airport. “Our beloved
Führer,
Heinz Buckliger, returned to the capital this afternoon after a highly successful tour of the Scandinavian countries,” Witzleben said. “He spoke briefly to reporters before going on to his official residence.”

The televisor showed Buckliger standing behind a lectern ornamented with the usual gilded Germanic eagle holding a swastika in its claws. Heinrich leaned forward intently. “This is important, really important,” he said. “If he ignored the piece that Jahnke put out last week—”

“Why don't you just listen and find out what he said?” Lise asked. Her husband looked flabbergasted again, so much so that she almost laughed at him.

“I was pleased to visit our fellow-Aryan friends and neighbors to the north,” the
Führer
said, “and particularly pleased to hear their leaders' expressions of support for the course upon which the
Reich
has embarked. Those leaders feel, as I do, that anyone who seeks to put the brakes on reform is suffering from a bad case of nostalgia for the dead days that will not and cannot return.”

“Yes!” Heinrich exploded, as if the German team had scored the winning goal in overtime in the World Cup finals.

“It is proving harder than expected to get rid of old thoughts and habits, but we must not turn back,” Buckliger went on. “Recently, some have claimed that we can justify everything that has happened in terms of world-historical necessity. But not all such deeds can be explained away. They are alien to the principles of National Socialism and only took place because of deviations from basic National Socialist ideals.”

He went on from there, but that was the meat of it. When he finished, the picture cut back to Horst Witzleben. The newsreader said, “While certain uninformed persons have taken irresponsible positions in the papers, the
Führer
has made it unmistakably clear that a freer examination of the past and the lessons to be drawn from it is essential to strengthening and reforming National Socialist thought and practice.”

Heinrich leaned over and kissed Lise. The kiss developed a life of its own. Suddenly, he didn't seem tired at all. On the screen, Horst kept on talking, but she had no idea what he was talking about. She didn't much care, either. When they finally broke apart, she said, “
Gott im Himmel!
If I'd known politics did
that
for you, I'd have got interested in it a long time ago.”

He laughed. She might have been half kidding. On the other hand, she might not have. She wasn't sure herself. He said, “Up till last year, politics just made me want to get sick. But now they're…exciting, you know what I mean?”

“I certainly thought so,” she said. She kissed him this time.

“What are the children doing?” he asked hoarsely when they came up for air again.

“Something in their bedrooms. Something too close to our bedroom. We ought to wait till they go to bed.”

“Some things shouldn't wait.” Her husband let his hand fall on her thigh. “Do you think we can get away with it if we're quick? The worst that can happen is, they embarrass us a little.”

“They embarrass us a lot, you mean.” But the thought of sneaking while the girls were awake and only a few meters away held a certain attraction of its own. Lise stood up and turned off the televisor. “Come on. We'd better hurry, though.”

Hurry they did, behind a closed bedroom door. And they got away with it. “Here's to politics,” Heinrich said, still panting a little.

“Never mind politics,” Lise told him. “Put your trousers back on.”

And that turned out to be good advice, too. No more than a minute and a half after they finished getting dressed, Francesca and Roxane started squabbling over a set of colored pencils. They both burst into the bedroom, each loudly pleading her case to the court of parental authority.

That court was primarily Lise. Because of what had just happened, and because of what might have happened had the girls stormed in a few minutes earlier, she was less concerned with fairness and more concerned with getting them out of there as fast as she could than she usually would have been. Neither one of them seemed too happy about her verdict. She took that as a sign she'd come somewhere close to justice, even if she hadn't hit it right on the nose.

Once they were gone, she sent Heinrich an accusing look. “You!”

“Me?” he yelped. “If I remember right, we were both here. And they didn't see anything. So what are you worrying about?”

“What might have been,” Lise answered.

He took that to mean more than she'd intended: “For us, how could what might have been be worse than what really was?”

She thought about it for a long time, and couldn't find an answer.

 

Alicia Gimpel was talking with Emma Handrick and Trudi Krebs, waiting for the bus to take them home from school, when Francesca came up with steam pouring out of her ears. “What's the matter with you?” Alicia asked.

“The Beast, that's what.” Francesca was so furious, she didn't even try to keep her voice down. Had a teacher heard her, she would have got in trouble, and not a little bit, either.

All the girls at the bus stop exclaimed in sympathy. Even some of the boys there did the same. The natural antipathy between
Frau
Koch and children overpowered the natural antipathy between girls and boys. Some of the other children had already had her. The ones who hadn't knew about her.

“What's she done now?” Alicia asked.

“You know that article that was in the paper a little while ago—that ‘Enough Is Enough' thing?” her sister said. “Did your teacher talk about it, too?”

“Some,” Alicia answered. Emma and Trudi nodded. Alicia went on, “
Herr
Peukert was pretty cagey about it, though.”
Herr
Peukert, in fact, had treated the
Völkischer Beobachter
story as if it were a large, poisonous snake. He couldn't ignore it, but he didn't want much to do with it, either. Alicia said, “How come? What did the Beast tell you about it?”

“Oh, my God, you should have heard her!” Francesca said. “She thought it was the greatest thing since
Mein Kampf
. She went on and on about how Dr. Jahnke was a true patriot who really understood what National Socialism was all about, and how everybody who liked these stupid newfangled ideas ought to go straight to the showers.
She said they sounded like a bunch of stinking, big-nosed Jews put them together.”

“Even for the Beast, that's bad,” Trudi said. Several people nodded.

“But that's not the worst of it,” Francesca said. “She's been talking like this ever since ‘Enough Is Enough' came out in the paper. And then yesterday the
Führer
made a speech, and
he
said the article wasn't any good, and we were going to go right on with the new stuff no matter what. And do you know what the Beast said?”

“Did she…say the
Führer
was wrong?” Alicia asked. A year earlier, the bare possibility wouldn't have occurred to her. All sorts of new possibilities had occurred to her in the past year.

Her sister shook her head. Her hair—straighter and a little lighter brown than Alicia's—flipped back and forth. “No. That would have been bad. What she did was even worse. She started going on about how we needed change and how good it was going to be. It was like she hadn't been talking about the other stuff at all. It was scary.”