In the Presence of Mine Enemies (69 page)

Walther swore softly. He'd just lost his boss's good opinion. But now, good opinion or not, maybe he could do more than grouse about what was going on. Maybe.

If anybody came into his cubicle while he was doing it, he was dead. That meant he had to work fast. If he made a mistake, though, he was just as dead. Sweat ran down his face and streamed from his armpits. He could smell his own fear. Just making his fingers hit the right keys was an effort.

He planted what Esther had given him about Lothar Prützmann's niece in more than a dozen places in the
Reich
's computer network: places where SS officials, party big shots, and
Wehrmacht
officers were likely to find the news. What they would do with it when they found it…well, who could say? But Walther knew he'd done what he could.

Covering his tracks went faster than inserting the false data—or were they true data? Esther's boss seemed to think so. Walther hardly cared. Using reports of Jewish blood to try to bring down the
Reichsführer
-SS struck him as blackly delicious. Prützmann couldn't even start a pogrom if the move failed—against whom would he strike? And even if he got all the surviving Jews, there weren't enough left to make a decent pogrom.
See how you like it
.

One last keystroke…One last check…There. He was free. His swivel chair creaked as he leaned back in it. He'd earned the sigh of relief that burst from him. He'd not only done what he could do, he could relax….

For about fifteen seconds. Then a programmer screamed, “Reactionary!” at the same time as another one yelled, “Radical!” One of them—Walther never knew which—shouted, “Asshole!” That cut across political
lines. The meaty
thock!
of fist smacking flesh followed a heartbeat later.

“Fight! Fight!” The cry and the sound of people rushing toward the brawl took Walther back to the school playground and the fifth grade. He didn't get up. He would have gone running then. He hoped he was a grownup now.

Not so distant battle made the walls of Walther's cubicle shake. He stayed right where he was. He'd just taken worse chances than any of the hotheaded fools punching away at one another. If they wanted to waste time on black eyes and bloody noses, they could do that. But information packed a bigger wallop than even the hardest fist.

He hoped.

 

“We are the
Volk
!” chanted the crowd outside Rolf Stolle's residence, and, “Panzers go home!” and, “All the world is watching!” Heinrich sang with the rest. He was getting hoarse, but he kept on. He felt more real, more alive, while he was making noise. He also felt there was a better chance the SS armored vehicles wouldn't start shooting if the people in front of them stayed noisy.

A couple of hours had gone by now, and the officer in the lead panzer hadn't opened up yet. Every so often, he would raise the bullhorn to his mouth and order the crowd to disperse. No one paid any attention to him.

He'd ducked down into the panzer turret several times, probably to use the radio. What was he telling his superiors? What were they telling him? How much of what they were telling him was he heeding? Wouldn't they be yelling for him to murder everybody in sight?

“All the world is watching!” Heinrich called. “All the world is watching!” He hoped the world was watching. If it was, Prützmann's goons hadn't seized the Berlin televisor station. The cameras on the rooftops kept on panning over the crowd and the panzers. That was a good sign…wasn't it?

“Heinrich.”

He jumped. He hadn't seen Susanna come back to him. He'd been watching the lead panzer and the officer standing head and shoulders out of the cupola. Good
panzer officers were supposed to stand like that. They could see much more than if they stayed buttoned up inside. It also made them much more vulnerable to anything their foes did. He dragged his attention back to Susanna. “What is it?”

“You should go home,” she told him. “You've got a family. One person here more or less won't make any difference.”

She made good sense. After a moment, Heinrich shook his head anyway. “A lot of people here have families. If they all left…” He shook his head again. “Besides, now that I am here, I want to see how things play out.”

“What would Lise say?” Susanna asked. That was a low blow. Before he could recover, she pointed to the panzer's cannon. “If the shooting starts, you won't see anything, or not for long.”

“Neither will you,” Heinrich pointed out. “I don't see you going anywhere.”

She shrugged. “I'm a hothead. You're not. You're supposed to be too smart to do things like this.” She sounded almost annoyed at him.

Before he could answer, there was a stir in the crowd behind them, back toward the doorway to Rolf Stolle's residence. The panzer commander was already looking that way. When his jaw dropped, Heinrich decided he'd better turn around. He did. His view wasn't as good as the SS man's, but after a moment he froze in astonishment, too.

“What is it?” Susanna demanded impatiently. “You tall people…”

“It's…It's Stolle.” Heinrich had to work to bring forth the words. “He's coming out.”

“What?” Susanna exclaimed in horror. “He's crazy. They'll kill him. For God's sake, somebody's got to stop him!” She was looking at Heinrich, as if she expected him to deliver a red-card tackle on the
Gauleiter
of Berlin.

More and more people spied Rolf Stolle and the squad of gray-clad Berlin policemen who surrounded him. Along with them came two photographers, one with a Leica, the other with a small televisor camera on his shoulder. Some of the people, like Susanna, called out for him to go back into the residence and stay safe. But there
was a rising cry of, “Rolf! Rolf! Rolf!” as others cheered his courage. And there was another cry, one Heinrich had never dreamt he'd hear in Berlin and one he gladly joined, shouting it out with all his might: “Down with the SS! Down with the SS!”

Beside him, Willi Dorsch was yelling Stolle's name. He paused for a moment to shout into Heinrich's ear: “He's fucking out of his mind, but Christ! he's got balls.”

“You ought to take Horst's place,” Heinrich yelled back. “He couldn't have said it better.” Willi's smirk said he wasn't sure whether Heinrich was joking. Heinrich nodded—he'd meant it, all right.

The noise of its hydraulics lost in the tumult, the turret of the lead panzer traversed a few degrees, so that that cannon and the machine gun beside it bore directly on the advancing Rolf Stolle. But the
Gauleiter
kept coming, and the panzer commander didn't open fire.

Instead, he raised the bullhorn to his lips: “
Herr
Stolle, you are at the center of an illegal and seditious rally, one outlawed by the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German
Reich
. Dismiss your followers and surrender to duly constituted authority at once.”

Rolf Stolle didn't have a bullhorn. With his big bass voice, he hardly needed one. “Not likely, sonny boy! And if an illegal committee says we're illegal, that means we deserve a medal, far as I'm concerned.”

A great cheer rose behind his words: “Rolf! Rolf! Rolf!” His name in the crowd's mouth sounded like the baying of a pack of hounds. Were they baying for freedom? Heinrich didn't know, but he shouted, “Rolf!” along with everybody else.

Stolle pushed through the crowd till he stood alongside the panzer. The officer in charge of it had to lean over awkwardly to keep an eye on him. The Berlin policemen got between the
Gauleiter
and the next panzer farther back. They might protect him against its machine guns. If its cannon spoke…

But Rolf Stolle wasn't thinking about getting shot. He aimed to cause the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German
Reich
as much trouble as he could.
The still photographer and the televisor cameraman both captured his scornful kick at the panzer's iron road wheel.

“If those don't turn into famous photos—” Heinrich began.

“It'll be because Prützmann makes sure nobody ever sees them,” Willi said. Heinrich bit his lip. His friend wasn't wrong.

Stolle shook his fist at the panzer officer leaning out of the cupola. “Go back to your barracks!” he bellowed. “Get the hell out of here! Using force now is intolerable—intolerable, I tell you. The
Volk
of the
Reich
will not let this illegal, tyrannical
Putsch
stand. The men who made it have no sense of shame and no sense of honor. All proper SS personnel, men loyal to the state and not just to the
Reichsführer
-SS, should show their high sense of racial courage and have nothing to do with this thievery.”

“Rolf! Rolf! Rolf!” the crowd shouted, and, “Down with the SS!” Heinrich got a good look at the panzer officer's face. The man looked as stunned as if he'd just taken a right to the chin. Whatever he'd been looking for when his superiors sent him rolling toward the
Gauleiter
's residence, this sure wasn't it. His orders were probably simple: go over there and arrest Stolle or kill him. They wouldn't have said anything about thousands of Germans (and even a couple of hidden Jews) furiously determined that he do no such thing.

Stolle and a couple of his biggest bodyguards had their heads together. The policemen raised him up onto their shoulders so the crowd could see him better. They staggered a little—he was a big man himself—but they held him. The cheers came louder and fiercer than ever. Stolle waved, not just to the crowd but also to the panzer commander.

“It doesn't look like they're going to shoot your
Gauleiter
right this minute,” he called.

“Rolf! Rolf! Rolf!” The people shouted louder than ever. Heinrich's ears rang. He was yelling, too: “Down with the SS! Down with the SS!” And then both chants faded and a new one rose, driven straight into the face of the lead panzer commander: “Go home! Go home! Go home! Go home!”

If he'd looked stunned before, he seemed positively poleaxed now. He disappeared down into the turret. Jeers sped him on his way. “Go home! Go home!” The cry swelled and swelled.

Inside the panzer there, he was bound to be on the radio again. What were his distant superiors telling him? Kill! Strike! Destroy! Now! What else could they be saying? If they bagged both Buckliger and Stolle, the game was theirs. What was he telling them? That wasn't so obvious.

He came out again. He still looked as if he didn't know what hit him. Along with everyone else, Heinrich poured abuse down on his head. Then Rolf Stolle raised his right hand. Silence rippled outward, even to those who couldn't see the
Gauleiter
. Into it, Stolle spoke to the panzer officer: “You have taken your oath to the
Volk
. You cannot turn your guns against the
Volk
. The days of this
Putsch
are numbered. You must not cover the honor of the German soldier with the blood of the
Volk
. You must not, I tell you.” His voice burned with terrible urgency. “You cannot blindly follow the men who made this
Putsch
. Here in Berlin, Lothar Prützmann's naked grab for power will not prevail. The
Volk
will. The first edition of
Mein Kampf
will. And we will stay in the streets till we bring those bandits to justice!”

An avalanche of cheers thundered down on him. He grinned and pumped his fist in the air. The lead panzer commander, or any other SS man whose gun bore on Stolle, could have ended things then and there. But no one opened fire.
Now they know what the people think of them,
Heinrich thought.
They don't want to be even more hated than they are
. And that the people could show what they thought, and that even SS men might believe it mattered, was not the smallest part of Heinz Buckliger's revitalization program all by itself.

 

Lise Gimpel dialed Heinrich's number. In her ear, the phone rang once, twice, three times. Someone picked it up. “
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht,
Analysis section.” A woman's voice.

“Ilse? I want to talk to Heinrich. This is his wife,” Lise said.

“I'm sorry,
Frau
Gimpel, but he's not here,” the secretary answered.

“Do you know when he'll be back?”

“I'm sorry, but I have no idea. As soon as we heard…what had happened, he and
Herr
Dorsch and some other people, uh, left the building.”

“Left the building?…Oh.” Lise needed a moment, but she figured out what Ilse meant. They'd headed for Rolf Stolle's residence. That had to be it. Ilse wouldn't come right out and say so, though, not when the phones were bound to be monitored. She might have round heels, but she definitely had strong survival instincts. “Thank you,” Lise said, both for the information and for the nonincriminating way the secretary had given it to her. She hung up.