In the Presence of Mine Enemies (67 page)

“What do you mean?” Esther asked.

“Don't you recall?” Dr. Dambach said in surprise. “The whole business with the Kleins and how they escaped the suspicion of being Jews after they had that poor baby with Tay-Sachs disease?”

“Of course I remember that they ended up being set free,” Esther answered. “Didn't that nasty man from the
Reichs
Genealogical Office say they got away because Lothar Prützmann's niece had also had a Tay-Sachs baby?”

“Maximilian Ebert. A nasty man indeed.” Dambach's round face was roundly disapproving. “But you seem to miss the point, or at least part of the point. What is the most likely explanation for the fact that Prützmann's niece had a baby with Tay-Sachs?”

“I'm very sorry, Doctor, but you're right—I think I am missing the point,” Esther said.

The pediatrician clucked reproachfully. “The most likely explanation for the fact that Lothar Prützmann's niece had a baby with Tay-Sachs disease—not the only explanation, mind you, but the most likely one—is that there is in fact Jewish blood in Prützmann's family. Jews are the most common carriers of the disease—and who would have a better chance of concealing such an unfortunate pedigree than the
Reichsführer
-SS?…Yes,
Frau
Stutzman, you may well look horrified. I don't blame you a bit.”

Esther hadn't known she looked horrified, but she supposed she might have. She remembered the hidden Jew, the practicing Jew, in the SS who'd helped Heinrich escape. He wasn't one of the little group of which she was a part. Walther hadn't been able to identify him for sure even after tapping into SS records. Whoever he was, though, he'd preserved his identity. Lothar Prützmann might have had Jewish ancestors, but he was no Jew.

Dr. Dambach rammed that point home: “Nothing but a damned hypocrite—excuse me, please—as I told you be
fore. ‘Duty-bound to the highest conception of Aryan blood and honor,' the
Reichsführer
-SS claimed, when the odds are he is not fully of Aryan blood himself. Tell me,
Frau
Stutzman, where is the honor in a lie?”

“I…don't see it, either,” Esther said. Her boss nodded. Why not? She'd agreed with him. If that didn't make her a clear thinker, what would? She went on, “Do you mind if I call my husband from here, Dr. Dambach? I'd like to meet him for lunch.”

“Go right ahead,” Dambach answered. “But would you be kind enough to put the coffee on first? I really would like some, but I held off on making it till you got here. You always have better luck with the machine than I do.”

It's not luck. It's following the bloody directions
. But Esther said, “I'll take care of it right away.” A
Putsch
might have overthrown the
Führer,
but Dr. Dambach messing with the coffee machine would have been a real catastrophe….

 

Susanna Weiss' hand shook as she dialed the telephone. She had both the radio and the televisor going full blast. Lothar Prützmann talked about duty and Aryan blood on the radio. Odilo Globocnik was speaking on the televisor—rambling, rather, and not making a whole lot of sense. If he wasn't drunk, he could have made money doing impressions of someone who was.

The telephone rang—once, twice, three times. Then a woman picked it up. “Department of Germanic Languages.”

“
Guten Morgen,
Rosa,” Susanna said to Professor Oppenhoff's secretary. “This is Professor Weiss. Will you please post a notice in my classes that I won't be in today?”

“Yes, of course,
Fräulein Doktor
Professor,” Rosa answered. “Now that we're finally rid of that stinking Buckliger, a lot of people are celebrating.”

“I'm sure they are,” Susanna said, and hung up in a hurry. Now she knew what sort of politics the department chairman's secretary had. She wished she didn't, though it wasn't really a surprise. Professor Oppenhoff himself was probably out in a
Bierstube
downing a couple of seidels
and smoking one of his smelly cigars and singing along to the asinine lyrics of the “Horst Wessel Song.”

She switched the televisor to the Berlin channel. There was Rolf Stolle staring out of the screen, sweaty and disheveled and furious. “If you can still see me, the thieving bastards in the SS haven't won yet,” he growled. “They think they can get away with dirty deeds done in the dark of night, like they have for so long.
I
think they're full of shit. I think the
Reich
has seen enough of that to last it forever. I think it's seen too goddamn much. And I think the
Volk
are going to show Lothar Prützmann what they think of him, and of his lousy henchmen. If you think the same way, come and join me.
Deutschland erwache!
”

Ice ran down Susanna's spine.
Germany, awake!
had been a Nazi slogan years before the Party took power. To hear it thrown in the face of the
Reichsführer
-SS…to hear it thrown in Lothar Prützmann's face made Susanna's mind up for her. She turned off the televisor and hurried out of her flat.

It was a lovely day. Puffy white clouds floated across the blue sky. A blackbird chirped in a linden tree, yellow beak open wide to let out the music. The breeze, which came out of the west, brought the clean smell of grass and flowers and other growing things from the Tiergarten only a few blocks away.

Rolf Stolle's residence wasn't far, either: easy walking distance. The
Gauleiter
of Berlin had stayed in the same old downtown building long after the national government and Party apparatus took up their quarters in the grandiose structures Hitler had run up one after another to celebrate his triumphs. National officials might have been telling the Berliners,
You're not important enough to come along with us
. The Nazis had always distrusted and looked down on freethinking, left-leaning Berlin.

And now, at long, long last, the Berliners had a chance—a slim chance, maybe only a ghost of a chance, but a chance—to pay them back. On that slim chance, Susanna hurried toward the
Gauleiter
's residence. Her heels clicked out a quick rhythm on the slates of the sidewalk.

She didn't see unusual numbers of soldiers or SS men or,
for that matter, Berlin policemen on the streets. Most of the shops were open. A lot of them had televisors gabbling away. Some were tuned to the national channels. Others—a surprising number—showed Rolf Stolle, who went on bellowing defiance at the world.

“Deutschland erwache!”
a young man shouted from a side street. Cheers answered him. Susanna wished Rosa could have heard them.
Maybe only a ghost of a chance, but a chance,
she thought, and walked faster. Her shoes started to pinch. She should have chosen a more comfortable pair. Her shoulders straightened. She wasn't going back now.

When she rounded a corner a couple of blocks from Stolle's residence, she stopped in her tracks. Ahead was nothing but a sea of people. No, not quite nothing but: they'd made barricades of trash cans and benches and planters and whatever else they could get their hands on. Men and women scrambled over them and shakily perched on top. How much good would they do against panzers? Susanna feared she knew the answer to that, but the very fact that the Berliners had dared to run them up heartened her.

Flags fluttered over the crowd. Most were the usual national banners: the black swastika on a white disk in a red field. But, just as she'd got chills seeing pictures of vanished Czechoslovakia's flag flying in Prague, so she did here once more. A few of the banners waving around Rolf Stolle's residence showed the black, red, and gold of the Weimar Republic, which had been extinct even longer than the Czechoslovak state. If people dared show
that
flag in public, maybe there really was hope.

She worked her way up the street and into the square that faced the residence. It took patience and the occasional shove. Everybody was trying to get closer to Rolf Stolle: to hear him if he came out, to protect him if the SS came after him. Feeling like a chamois or some other nimble creature of the Alps, she scrambled over an overturned trash can. It shook only a little under her feet; instead of garbage, it held dirt and stones and chunks of concrete, to make it harder to move. They'd also give people ammunition of sorts if the SS did come. Rocks against panzers…The mere idea was enough to make her wobbly.

When she stumbled, a fellow in a bus driver's uniform steadied her. “Thanks,” she said.

“You're welcome.” His grin showed crooked teeth and vast excitement. “This is fun, isn't it, telling the
Bonzen
to go stuff themselves?”

“It's—” Susanna had been about to deliver a brilliant off-the-cuff lecture on how important this moment was for the future of the
Reich
and the
Volk
. She found herself grinning back instead. “Yes, by God. It
is
fun! We should have done it a long time ago.” The bus driver's shiny-brimmed cap bobbed up and down as he nodded.

Televisor cameras on rooftops peered down at the crowd. Did they belong to the Berlin station, or was Lothar Prützmann gathering evidence for later revenge? For that matter, why hadn't the SS knocked the Berlin station off the air by now? Maybe the blackshirts weren't as efficient as they wanted everybody to believe.

Some people waved to the cameras. Others aimed obscene gestures at them. Somewhere not far away, a raucous shout rang out: “All the world is watching! All the world is watching!”

It rose like the tide. “All the world is watching! All the world is watching!” Susanna joined in, hardly even realizing she was doing it. She hoped it was true. It
could
be. Other stations, in the
Reich
and beyond it, could be picking up the Berlin broadcasts and retransmitting them. They could—if they had the nerve.

What was going on outside of Berlin? Susanna had no idea. Whatever it was, how much would it matter? Not much, she suspected. One way or the other, history would be made right here.

Someone stepped on her foot. He said, “Sorry, lady,” so he probably hadn't done it on purpose. She pressed on. After a while, she got what would have been a pretty good view of Stolle's balcony…if a beanpole in a black leather trenchcoat hadn't been standing right in front of her.

She hadn't got as far as she had in life by being shy. She poked him in the small of the back and said, “Excuse me, please, but could you move to one side or the other?”

The beanpole turned around. He wore an irritated ex
pression—which dissolved a moment later. “Susanna! What are you doing here?”

“Committing treason just like you, if things don't go our way.”

Heinrich Gimpel grimaced. “Well, yes, there is that. But sometimes you have to try, eh?”

“I've always thought so.” Susanna fit her words into pauses in the
All the world is watching!
chant. Heinrich, on the other hand, had always believed in staying under a flat rock. Amazing what even a short stretch in the hands of the blackshirts could do…

He patted the back of the man next to him, who was almost his height and wore an identical greatcoat. “You've met my friend Willi Dorsch, haven't you?”

“Oh, yes, I certainly have,” Susanna said as Dorsch—who looked as Aryan as an overfed SS man—turned and nodded to her. She couldn't resist asking, “And how is your wife?”

By Heinrich's horrified expression, he wished she would have kept quiet. Well, too late now. She'd never been as cautious as he was. Willi Dorsch winced. “Dammit, I had nothing to do with that,” he said, which, from everything Heinrich had told Susanna, was true. Willi went on, “I just wish it hadn't happened. We all wish it hadn't happened, even Erika.”

From everything Heinrich had said, that was true, too. If Susanna did any more prodding, she might start more trouble than she wanted. No point to pushing anyhow, not when she'd got the needle under Willi's skin. And then, even if she'd wanted to, she lost the chance to add anything more, for a great roar from the crowd would have drowned out whatever she said.

“There's Stolle!” Heinrich shouted.

He could see over most of the people in front of him. Susanna couldn't even see over him and Willi Dorsch. She had to take his word for it that the
Gauleiter
of Berlin had come out onto his little balcony. Showing himself took nerve. The SS was bound to have assassins in the crowd.

“You are the
Volk
!” Rolf Stolle boomed through a mi
crophone. “You are the Aryans! You are the people who would have chosen your own leaders if Loathsome Lothar Prützmann hadn't hijacked an election he didn't think his cronies could win. But do you know what?” A perfectly timed pause. “You're going to win anyway—
we're
going to win anyway—and there won't be enough lampposts to hang all those blackshirted pigdogs on!”