In the Presence of Mine Enemies (68 page)

“Jaaaaaa!”
An enormous, ecstatic, almost orgasmic cry rose from the crowd. Susanna screamed her lungs out just like everybody around her, even staid Heinrich. Part of her thought they were all out of their minds. The rest, though, wondered whether Lothar Prützmann had even the faintest idea how big a monster he'd called into being.

 

The Tiergarten was quiet and peaceful. No one in the park seemed to know or care that the SS had staged a
Putsch
that morning. Esther Stutzman wondered whether such normality showed that nobody gave a damn or simply that it was a nice summer's day and strolling with an arm around your girlfriend's waist or lolling on the grass in the sun counted for more than whose fundament rested on the chair behind the desk in the main office of the
Führer
's palace. Were the people in the park too apathetic to care about the
Putsch
or too sane?

Did the difference matter?

Here came Walther, hurrying past a juggler keeping a stream of brightly colored balls in the air and an upside-down hat on the ground in front of him for spare change, past a hooded crow and a red squirrel screeching at each other over a discarded crust of bread, and past a couple on the grass who'd almost forgotten anyone else was around.

Esther got up from her bench. Walther gave her a quick kiss. “Lord, I'm glad to have an excuse to get away!” he exclaimed. “The Zeiss works are going nuts.”

“That bad?” she asked.

“Worse,” he told her. “About one man in five is all for Prützmann and the SS. More, I think, are against them. But when the two sides start screaming at each other, there's another whole big lot who wish they'd both shut up and go away.”

“I wouldn't be surprised if the whole country's like that,” Esther said.

“Neither would I,” Walther said. “So what's going on? I know something must be, from the way you sounded on the phone.”

“Dr. Dambach was talking this morning, talking about Lothar Prützmann and his family….” Esther went on to explain what the pediatrician had said. Then she asked, “Do you think we can do anything with that?”

“I don't know.” Walther looked half intrigued, half appalled. “Do you think we
should
do anything with it?”

“I'm not sure. I was hoping you would be.” Esther's hand folded into frustrated fists. “If we don't, and if the SS takes over…”

“But Prützmann's liable to win whether we do that or not,” Walther said. “And if he does—or maybe even if he doesn't—using it's liable to put
us
in more danger.”

Every word he said was true. Esther knew as much. Walther was nothing if not sensible. All the same, she said, “If we don't do anything, if we don't even try to do anything, what good are we? We might as well not be here. What difference would it make if they had wiped us out?”

“I haven't got a good answer for that,” her husband said slowly. “About as close as I can come is, if we do try to do something, we'd better pick our spots with care, because we won't get many of them. Is this one? Is Buckliger that important? Are you sure?”

Before Esther could answer, the traffic noise around the Tiergarten changed. It was always there in the background, the only real reminder that the park lay in the middle of a great city. But suddenly it leaped from background to foreground. Esther had never heard such a deep-throated roar of diesel engines and rattling of treads, not even at a construction site.

She turned her head. Through the screen of bushes, she saw a column of panzers and armored personnel carriers purposefully pushing eastward, in the direction of Rolf Stolle's residence. The breeze shifted—or maybe the armored column made its own breeze. The harsh stink of
diesel fumes suddenly clashed with the Tiergarten's green, growing smells.

The panzers rumbled past and were gone. Esther turned to Walther, raw terror on her face. To her surprise, he leaned forward and kissed her on the lips, almost as if he were one of the pair of lovers not far away who hadn't even looked up as the deadly machines went by.

“Well, sweetheart, you were right,” he said. “Sometimes you have to try.” He got to his feet and hurried away, off toward the Zeiss works, off toward trouble. Esther stared after him, hoping she'd done the right thing, fearing she'd just made the worst mistake of her life.

 

The crowd in the square outside Rolf Stolle's residence was for the most part orderly and well-mannered. Heinrich would have been surprised if it had been otherwise: it was a crowd full of Germans, after all. People shared cigarettes and whatever bits of food they happened to have. The
Gauleiter
threw the ground floor of the residence open to the throng. Two neat bathroom queues, one for men and one for women, formed seemingly of themselves.

Every so often, a chant of, “All the world is watching!” or, “We are the
Volk!
” would start up, last for a little while, and then die away. The rooftop cameras kept carrying pictures of the scene to the outside world. Heinrich hoped they did, anyhow. By the way the cameramen stayed with them, they were still working. He hoped so there, too. The more people who knew Berlin wasn't taking Lothar Prützmann's
Putsch
lying down, the better.

And then, instead of defiant chants, cries of alarm rang out from the distant fringes of the crowd: “Panzers! The panzers are coming!”

“Scheisse,”
Willi Dorsch said, which summed up what ran through Heinrich's mind.

Some of the men and women who'd come to Stolle's residence decided they wanted no part of facing up to SS armor. They pressed away from the panzers and armored personnel carriers growling up the streets. Others as automatically advanced on the armored vehicles.
After all these years, Berlin still breeds street fighters?
Heinrich
thought in amazement. He himself stood irresolute for a long moment.

Susanna surged toward the panzers without the slightest visible hesitation. The only thing that surprised Heinrich was that she didn't have a Molotov cocktail in one hand and a cigarette lighter in the other. After standing there for another few seconds, he went toward the armor, too. It didn't feel like bravery. Desperation was a much stronger part of the mix.

Willi grabbed his arm. “Are you nuts?”

“Probably.” Heinrich shook free. “Go the other way, if you'd rather. I won't hold it against you.”

“Scheisse,”
Willi said again, in doleful tones. “You're going to get both of us shot, or more likely just run over.” As Heinrich had waited before following Susanna, he waited before following Heinrich. But follow he did.

Berlin might still breed street fighters, but they were amateurs up against professionals. The panzers rolled over the barricades the crowd had run up as if they weren't there. As they crushed the second one, a horrible shriek rang out, for a moment rising above even the roar of their engines. After that, the lead panzer had blood on its left track.

The death might have broken the crowd. Instead, it infuriated the Berliners. They shook their fists at the black-coveralled panzer crewmen who rode with their heads and shoulders out of the vehicles. “Murderers!” they shouted. “Butchers! Assassins!
Schweinehunde!
”

Pulling a bullhorn out of the turret, the officer commanding the lead panzer aimed it at the crowd like a weapon. “Disperse!” he blared. “Disperse, in the name of the
Volk
of the Greater German
Reich
.”

But that only roused fresh fury among his foes. “We are the
Volk
!” they shouted, over and over again. “We are the
Volk
!” Some of them added, “And who the hell are you?” They swarmed toward the armored vehicles. The driver of the lead machine stopped. He could only go forward by crushing scores of people under his treads—or by pulling out his personal weapon and opening fire on the crowd. He didn't. He was a fresh-faced young man, probably under
twenty, and seemed astonished that people weren't listening to his superior's orders.

“Go home!” His superior seemed astonished, too, even with his voice electronically amplified. “Go home, and you will not be harmed!”

“We are the
Volk
! We
are
the
Volk
!
We are the
Volk
!
” The chant swelled and swelled. Through it, individuals shouted insults at Lothar Prützmann: “He's afraid of elections!” “He threw down the
Führer
because he wants the job himself!” “He wants you to murder Stolle the same way you just murdered that poor sap at the barricade!”

By then, Heinrich was up within ten or twelve meters of the lead panzer. He could see the frown on the driver's face, and the deeper one on the panzer commander's. Things were not going according to plan. The SS men didn't like that at all, and didn't seem to know what to do about it.

And Heinrich could also see the panzer's two machine guns, and the enormous yawning bore of the cannon. If the commander ordered a couple of rounds of high-explosive or, if he had it, grapeshot…He'd clear a path in front of him, all right. His panzer, and the vehicles behind it, would wade in gore all the way to Rolf Stolle's residence.
Some of that gore would be mine, too
. Heinrich wondered why he wasn't even more frightened.
Because it's too late now,
he decided.
If he does start shooting, I can't do anything about it
. He looked around for Susanna. He could hear her, somewhere not far away, but he couldn't see her.

“Disperse!” the panzer commander shouted again through the bullhorn. “Go peacefully to your homes, and you will not be harmed. In the name of the
Volk
of the Greater German
Reich,
disperse!” That was what they'd told him to say before he set out from his barracks, and he stubbornly went right on saying it.

They didn't seem to have told him what to do if it didn't work. And it didn't. Instead of making the people around Stolle's residence leave, it just seemed to make them more stubborn, too. “We are the
Volk
!” they shouted back, ever louder. “We
are
the
Volk
!
We are the
Volk
!
”

The SS officer stared at them, his gray eyes wide. What
was going on in his mind? Did he understand that what he'd been told and what he was seeing and hearing didn't add up? How could he
not
understand? Heinrich laughed at himself. SS men weren't trained to understand anything but the brute simplicity of orders.

But in that case, why hadn't this fellow already opened fire? Did he realize that
was
the
Volk
in front of him? Heinrich laughed again. Questions. Answering questions. What else was an analyst good for? When these questions got answered, it was all too likely to be with blood and iron. Bismarck could turn a phrase, all right.

Meanwhile, the tableau held. “We are the
Volk
!” Heinrich shouted again. Did the SS officer believe him, believe the others? He didn't start shooting, anyhow. “We
are
the
Volk
!”

 

Gustav Priepke plopped his fat bottom down on the corner of Walther's desk. “It's a goddamn crock, that's what it is,” Walther's boss said. On a smaller scale, he reminded Walther a little of Rolf Stolle.

“It certainly is,” Walther answered, hoping Priepke would go away if he didn't say much. He wasn't supposed to have access to the networks where he needed to plant rumors about Lothar Prützmann. How could he get at them with Priepke staring over his shoulder? He couldn't, and he knew it.

“Odilo Globocnik?” His boss shook his head. “Sounds like a goddamn skin disease. And Lothar Prützmann? Lothar Prützmann is a dose of the clap, and he aims to give it to the
Reich
.”

“Uh-huh.” Walther looked at the pictures of Esther and Gottlieb and Anna on the gray, fuzzy wall of his cubicle. He looked up at the sound-absorbing tiles on the ceiling. He looked everywhere but at Gustav Priepke. He agreed with every word Priepke said. But the longer Priepke hung around saying it, the less chance he had to try to set things right.

“They say Buckliger's ill. My ass!” his boss said. “They're sick of him, that's what. I just hope to Christ they haven't given him a noodle, eh?”

“Uh-huh,” Walther said again, and then, “You know, you'd better be careful. If you keep carrying on like that, people are liable to remember.”

Gustav Priepke slid off the desk like a walrus sliding off an ice floe. He said, “If you're not going to show some balls now, goddammit, when will you ever? Or maybe you haven't got any to show?” When Walther didn't answer, Priepke lumbered off, shaking his head.