In the Presence of Mine Enemies (72 page)

One of the panzer commanders had a bullhorn, probably the same model as the SS panzer man had used outside of Rolf Stolle's residence. “Prützmann!” he shouted, his amplified voice echoing from the granite and concrete and glass. “Come out with your hands up, Prützmann! We won't kill you if you do. You'll get a trial.”

And then we'll kill you,
Susanna finished mentally. Hearing Lothar Prützmann's unadorned surname blare from the bullhorn was a wonder in itself, a wonder and a portent.
How the mighty have fallen,
it said. Unadorned surnames blared at prisoners in interrogation cells. The
Reichsführer
-SS had surely never expected such indignities to be his lot.
Too bad for him
.

No answer came from the famous office. The lights were on in there, but closed venetian blinds kept Susanna from seeing inside. “Don't screw around with us, Prützmann!” the
Wehrmacht
commander shouted. “You have five minutes. If you don't come out, we'll come in after you. You'll like that a lot less, I promise.”

Susanna looked at her watch, only to discover she'd somehow lost it. She shrugged. Five minutes wouldn't be hard to figure out. All the civilians on the panzer with her—and on the other
Wehrmacht
machines—shouted and cursed the
Reichsführer
-SS. Between their cries (including her own)
and the rumble of the panzers' engines, whatever was happening more than a few meters away got drowned out.

The deadline had to be drawing near. The man commanding Susanna's panzer leaned down into the turret, presumably to give the gunner his orders. The commander had just straightened when a tall blond man in the uniform of a Security Police major came out with a handkerchief tied to a pointer to make a flag of truce. “Don't shoot!” he shouted.

“Why not?” said the commander of the lead panzer. “Why the hell not, you SS
Schweinehund?
Where's Prützmann? He's the one we want.”

“He's dead,” the blond Security Police major answered. “He stuck a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Didn't you hear the bang?”

A frantic tumult of cheering rose from the civilians. Through it, the lead panzer commander used the bullhorn to say, “Show me the body. Till I see the body, I figure this is some sort of scheme to buy time for him to get away.” The blond major started to go back into the building. The panzer commander stopped him: “Hold it right there, buddy. If they don't bring Prützmann's body out,
you're
the one who's dead meat.”

“Have it your way,” the major said. “You will anyhow.” He turned and shouted back into SS headquarters: “Hans-Joachim! Detlef! Bring him out! They want to see him.”

Noxious diesel fumes from the idling panzer made Susanna cough. A dull headache pounded behind her eyes. It all put her in mind of Professor Oppenhoff's cigars. She didn't care. To see Lothar Prützmann dead, she would have gone through worse than this.

Or so she thought, till two SS men—she supposed they were Hans-Joachim and Detlef—dragged out a corpse. Each had hold of a highly polished boot. The body wore the black dress uniform of a high-ranking SS official. In the glare of the panzers' lights, the blood that ran from the back of the head was shockingly scarlet. Susanna's stomach lurched. Death—anyone's death—was better contemplated at a distance than seen close up.

Again, so she thought. But the man who commanded her
panzer said only, “It's a fresh corpse, anyhow. They don't drip that way very long.” If that wasn't the voice of experience, she'd never heard it.

The commander of the lead panzer got down from his machine and bounded up the stairs to the entrance two at a time so he could get a good look at the body. He stooped beside it, then slowly straightened. With a fine flair for the dramatic, he spread his arms wide and waited till every eye was on him. Then and only then did he shout, “It's Prützmann!”

Susanna squealed. A great roar of joy rose from the crowd. That burly man on the panzer with her planted a big, smacking kiss on her cheek. He needed a shave. His beard rasped her skin. He smelled of schnapps and onions. She couldn't have cared less.

Where's Heinrich?
she wondered again.
Is he seeing this, too?
That, she cared about. After a spell in Lothar Prützmann's prison, Heinrich of all people deserved to see his corpse.

 

“Where's that friend of yours, that Susanna?” Willi Dorsch bawled in Heinrich's ear.

“I don't know,” Heinrich shouted back. “I haven't seen her in a while.” The two of them had precarious perches on an armored personnel carrier full of
Wehrmacht
soldiers. As it rattled west through the streets of Berlin, one of the crew fired short machine-gun bursts into the air whenever he felt like it. The noise was shattering.

“If somebody starts shooting back at that trigger-happy maniac, we're all ground round.” Willi sounded absurdly cheerful.

“This charming thought already occurred to me, thanks.” Heinrich didn't.

Willi laughed. “So many crazy things have already happened today, I'm just not going to worry any more. One way or another, it'll all work out.”

“Maybe it will.” By then, Heinrich was past arguing. In fact, he couldn't very well argue, because a hell of a lot of crazy things
had
happened. The wind of their passage whipped around his glasses and made his eyes water. That wind was cool, but not especially clean; it was full of diesel
exhaust from the other armored vehicles in this convoy. How many panzers and armored personnel carriers and self-propelled guns (to say nothing of soft-skinned trucks) were trundling around Berlin tonight? Even more to the point, how many different sides were they on? And what would happen when those on one side bumped up against those from another?

Rat-a-tat-tat!
The machine gunner squeezed off another exuberant burst. A tracer round drew a hot red line across the night. Nobody returned fire. Heinrich approved of that. Somewhere, though, those bullets would be coming down. Even as falling lumps of lead, they could kill: they'd be falling from a long way up.

Treads growling and grinding, the armored personnel carrier turned left. Heinrich started to laugh. “What's funny?” Willi asked.

“Back where we started from,” Heinrich answered. There on the left stood
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
headquarters; on the right, across the wide expanse of Adolf Hitler Platz, the
Führer
's palace and the vast, looming bulk of the Great Hall. Dead ahead towered the Arch of Triumph, as usual bathed in spotlights. Heinrich would have bet it had sharpshooters atop it. But were they wearing SS black or the
Wehrmacht
's mottled
Feldgrau
?

The armored column of which the personnel carrier was a part turned right, rumbling toward the
Führer
's palace. The panzers and APCs had to go slowly and carefully to keep from crushing people under their tracks. Adolf Hitler Platz wasn't jammed sardine-tight, the way the little square in front of Rolf Stolle's residence had been. It would hold more than a million people. At the moment, it held tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands.

“
Wehrmacht
or SS?” somebody called nervously.

“Bugger the SS with a pine cone,” the machine gunner answered, and fired another burst into the air. “We're the
real
soldiers, by God, and if those blackshirted pricks don't know it they'll find out pretty goddamn fast!”

The whoops that came from the crowd said that was what they wanted to hear. But SS men held the
Führer
's palace. Sandbagged machine-gun nests outside the en
trance were plenty to keep the people at a respectful distance. Panzers and armored personnel carriers laughed at machine guns—though Heinrich, on the outside of the armor plate, wouldn't laugh if they opened up. And if the SS had machine guns here, it probably had antipanzer rockets, too.

Heinrich didn't see any
Waffen
-SS armor. Maybe Lothar Prützmann had figured he wouldn't need it here once he'd got hold of Stolle. That only went to show he wasn't as smart as he thought he was.

Or does it show I'm not as smart as I think I am?
Heinrich wondered. Would
Waffen
-SS panzers suddenly charge out of the night, their cleated steel tracks tearing up the pavement like those of the
Wehrmacht
machines? He shrugged. If the officer in charge of the
Wehrmacht
armor couldn't anticipate a threat like that, he didn't deserve his shoulder straps.

A blackshirt in front of the entrance stepped forward, his hands conspicuously empty. Try as he would to hold it steady, his voice quavered a little when he asked, “What do you want?”

“Globocnik!” Half a dozen
Wehrmacht
panzer commanders hurled the acting
Führer
's name in his face. One of them added, “We know he's in there. We saw him come in this afternoon.”

The crowd of angry civilians with the
Wehrmacht
men took up the cry: “Globocnik! Globocnik! We want Globocnik!” In a different tone of voice, those shouts would have warmed any politician's heart. As things were, if Heinrich had been Odilo Globocnik, he would have been looking for a place to hide.

Licking his lips, the SS man said, “You are speaking of the rightful
Führer
of the Greater German
Reich
and of the Germanic Empire. He orders you—he commands you—to disperse.”

Maybe the panzer commanders answered. If they did, they couldn't make themselves heard even with bullhorns. The crowd's roars drowned them out. “Heinz Buckliger is the rightful
Führer
!” people shouted, and, “We won't take orders from Globocnik!” and, “Down with the SS!” Hein
rich gleefully joined that last chant. He liked the others, but that one hit him where he lived.

“This is nothing but treason!” The SS man had got his nerve back. He sounded angry now, not frightened. “We will not surrender him!”

“Then you're going to be mighty sorry,” one of the
Wehrmacht
panzer commanders said. The crowd bayed agreement.

“So will you, if you try to take him,” the SS man answered.

He was used to making people afraid. He was good at it, too. After all, fear was his stock in trade. The German people had had almost eighty years in which to learn to fear the SS. But today, as Heinrich had seen in front of Rolf Stolle's residence, fear was failing. And intimidating men in panzers that carried big guns was a lot harder than scaring civilians who couldn't fight back.

Jeers and curses rained down on the SS man's head. More rained down on Odilo Globocnik's head. Was he listening, there inside the
Führer
's palace? With a strange, snarling joy Heinrich had never known before, he hoped so. The SS man, in his own coldblooded way, had style. He clicked his heels. His arm shot out toward the crowd in a Party salute. He spun on his heel, executed an about-face of parade-ground perfection to turn his back on the
Wehrmacht
soldiers and the people, and marched away to his comrades.

And, to a certain extent, his intimidation worked even against his formidable foes. He might have been—Heinrich thought he was—bluffing when he warned that the SS could make the
Wehrmacht
sorry. But the panzers' cannons and machine guns waited tensely—waited for they knew not what. A nightjar swooped out of the darkness to snatch one of the moths dancing in the air around the palace lights. The sudden, unexpected streak of motion made men from the SS and the
Wehrmacht
turn their heads towards it. If it had startled one of them into tightening his finger on a trigger…

Heinrich never knew exactly how long the impasse lasted. Somewhere between half an hour and an hour was
his best guess. What broke it was a high, clear sound that pierced both the yells from the crowd and the diesel rumble of the armored fighting vehicles: the sound of one man laughing.

The man was a
Wehrmacht
panzer commander. Like his fellows, he wore radio headphones. He laughed again, louder this time, and raised a bullhorn to his mouth. “Give it up, you sorry bastards!” he blared. “Prützmann's blown his brains out. The
Putsch
is falling down around your ears.”

“Liar!” one of the SS men shouted, an odd desperation in his voice—it wasn't
I don't believe you
but
I don't dare believe you
.

“You've got your own radios,” the
Wehrmacht
panzer commander answered through the bullhorn. “You can find out for yourselves. Go ahead. I'll wait.” He theatrically folded his arms across his chest.