In the Presence of Mine Enemies (53 page)

That was a question Alicia couldn't have heard at the supper table at her house. “It's all right. I've kind of got used to it,” she said. But then she decided something more was called for, and she added, “It is what I am, after all. I ought to know about it.”

Gottlieb gave her a suddenly thoughtful look. “I said something like that, too. I took longer than you have to figure it out, though.”

Alicia needed a little while to realize that was a compliment of sorts. Anna's surprised expression did more to help her figure it out than Gottlieb's words themselves. She had no idea what to do with praise from a seventeen-year-old boy, and so she didn't do anything but go on with supper. It was beef tongue with potatoes and carrots and onions, which she liked.
Frau
Stutzman spiced the tongue differently from the way her mother did, but it was still good.

Over dessert,
Herr
Stutzman started telling Gottlieb about something he called a software trap. He hadn't gone very far before he stopped speaking German, or at least any sort of German Alicia understood. Gottlieb followed well enough, and gave back some of the same gibberish. “You got through, though?” he said at last.

“Through the second portal, like I told you. That's how I got the backside look at the trap,” his father answered.

“I hope that's not all you did,” Gottlieb said.

“Well, I didn't have as much time as I wanted after the trouble at the first portal, and I did want to see what almost bit me,” Walther Stutzman said. “But I got to look around a little. The
Reichsführer
-SS isn't very happy with the
Führer
.”

Like Alicia's father, Gottlieb and Anna's had a way of saying things that were important as if they weren't. What sort of fireworks could go off if the leader of the SS didn't like what the leader of the
Reich
was doing? Before Alicia could do more than begin to wonder about that, Anna said, “Let's get back to the game.”

“All right,” Alicia said, though she wouldn't have minded sitting around and listening some more, either. The Stutzmans talked more openly than her own family did. Of
course, they weren't keeping the secret around the house any more. They'd probably been a lot more careful before Anna knew.

It'll be years before we can tell Roxane,
Alicia thought sadly. But Gottlieb had been thinking the same thing about Anna even longer.
We have something in common
. That was a pretty funny idea. It stayed in Alicia's mind for a little while. Then the vile deeds of the wicked SS bird made her forget all about it.

 

Susanna Weiss loathed faculty meetings. Nothing worthwhile ever got done in them, and they wasted inordinate amounts of time. But
Herr Doktor
Professor Oppenhoff loved them with a bureaucratic passion. Since he headed the Department of Germanic Languages, everyone else had to go along. Susanna eyed the conference room as if it were some especially nasty part of a concentration camp.

Part of her knew that was foolishness. The only poison gas in the room came from Oppenhoff's cigar. Two steam radiators kept the place comfortable, even toasty, despite the chill outside. Sweet rolls and coffee waited on a table next to the window; she didn't have to try to survive on camp swill. No SS guards prowled with guns and dogs. But she was stuck here when she didn't want to be, which gave the meeting the feel of imprisonment.

She listened with half an ear to a report congratulating the department for its impressive publication record. Three of the articles Professor Tennfelde mentioned were hers. She yawned even so. She'd learned to do it without opening her mouth, so it didn't show nearly so much. Tennfelde was dull, dull, dull. If he lectured this way, his students would be anesthetized.

The report finally ended. The spatter of applause the faculty gave seemed to signal relief that it was over. But Tennfelde knew who his primary audience was, and he'd pleased Franz Oppenhoff. “Very informative,” the department chairman declared. “Very informative indeed.”

Susanna drew a doodle of an alarm clock with a long white beard. And more reports were coming. None of them
had anything to do with her. She could have gone her whole life long without knowing or caring what the interlibrary-loan committee had done lately, or whether discussions on merging the Flemish and Dutch subdepartments had progressed any further, especially since they hadn't.

She also yawned—open-mouthed this time—through a report on financial planning from a professor who specialized in the
Nibelungenlied
and dabbled in the stock market on the side. If he'd done well, he wouldn't have had to worry about his university salary. He plainly did worry about it, which meant he hadn't done well. Why anyone would want advice from a bungling amateur was beyond Susanna. She had a thoroughly professional accountant and broker, and no worries as far as money was concerned. Other things, yes. Money, no.

Again, though, Professor Oppenhoff seemed pleased. “I would like to thank
Herr Doktor
Professor Dahrendorf for that interesting and enlightening presentation. “He puffed on his Havana. Then he said, “And now
Fräulein Doktor
Professor Weiss will enlighten us on the current political situation and the changes we have seen in recent times.”

Why, you miserable son of a bitch!
Susanna thought. Oppenhoff hadn't warned her he was going to do any such thing. He sat there looking smug and pleased with himself. If she made an ass of herself, the rest of the department would assume she was incompetent, not that he'd set her up.

I'd better not make an ass of myself, then
. “Thank you, Professor Oppenhoff,” she said. She would sooner have substituted another verb for
thank,
but she gained a few seconds to gather herself even so. Some of these people couldn't get through a lecture even with the text on the lectern in front of them. She'd always prided herself on being able to think on her feet.
Well, here we go
.

First, the obvious. “Reform will continue. I believe it will intensify. The
Führer
has seen that we cannot stay strong by living on booty forever. That saps the fiber of the
Volk
.” If Heinz Buckliger could use what sounded like Party doc
trine for purposes that would have horrified an
alter Kämpfer,
so could she. She went on, “He has also seen that it is in the interest of the
Reich
to allow more expression of national consciousness within the Empire, especially among Germanic peoples.” Czechs weren't Germanic, Frenchmen only marginally so. Susanna shrugged. That
especially
covered her.

“Also, the possibility of error in the past has been admitted,” she said. “This appears to be a healthy development. If we know we have made mistakes, and we know which mistakes we have made, we are less likely to make similar ones in the future.”
We won't murder millions of Jews again, because there aren't that many left. We might have a hard time murdering thousands of them
.

“Not everyone inside the Party is pleased with the direction reform is taking. I think the Jahnke letter in the
Beobachter
proves that. No one I know believes Jahnke could have published that letter without official, ah, encouragement. It's fairly obvious which officials encouraged him, too.” She looked around at the language and literature professors. By their expressions, it wasn't obvious to a lot of them. They were safe. They were comfortable. Why should they get excited about politics?

“On the other hand, we've also seen that some reform has spurred a call for more reform,” Susanna said. “Some people—people in high places, too—don't believe the
Führer
is moving fast enough. Like those who oppose any reform at all, they may grow harder to ignore as time goes on.”

She looked Franz Oppenhoff in the eye. “And that,
Herr Doktor
Professor, about sums it up.”

He'd wanted her to make a hash of it. She knew that. She'd had to suffer through a string of indignities no professor who pissed standing up would have had to endure. This was only the latest, and far from the worst. Now she wanted to see whether Oppenhoff would have the gall to claim she hadn't made a proper presentation. If he did, she intended to scorch him.

He scratched at the edge of his side-whiskers, coughed once or twice, and looked down at the papers in front of
him. Still looking down at them, he mumbled, “I must thank you for your clear, concise report.” People more than half a dozen seats from him undoubtedly didn't hear a word.

“
Danke schön,
Professor Oppenhoff. I'm glad you liked it,” Susanna said loudly. She would get the message across, even if the department chairman didn't feel like doing it.

The meeting ground on. Oppenhoff didn't call on her any more. He did keep glancing over to her every so often. She smiled back sweetly, wishing she could display a shark's teeth instead of her own.

 

Heinrich Gimpel was finishing up a bowl of rather nasty cabbage stew in the
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
canteen when a uniformed guard coming off his shift walked in and said, “Something juicy's going on out in the Adolf Hitler Platz.”

“What now?” somebody asked him. “More damned Dutchmen yelling, ‘Freedom!'? They probably won't even bother arresting them these days.”

But the guard shook his head. “No, it's bigger than any of that piddling crap. They've got a podium and televisor cameras and all kinds of stuff.”

That sounded interesting. Heinrich got up, threw out his trash, and put his tray on a moving belt that took it back to the dishwashers. By the clock, he should have gone straight to his desk. He decided to ignore the clock for once. Willi and Ilse had taken plenty of long lunches without ending the world. He figured he could get away with one, especially since he was only going out onto the square in front of headquarters.

As soon as he walked out of the building, he saw the guard was right. In fact, Adolf Hitler Platz held not one commotion but two. Proud banners flying ahead of it, an SS band full of tubas and thumping drums strutted through the square playing marches as loud as they could. If they weren't trying to drown out the man on the podium…

It was a bright spring day. It wasn't very warm—it couldn't have been above ten Celsius—but the sun shone down brightly. It gleamed off the speaker's head, which
wasn't just bald but shaven. As soon as Heinrich recognized Rolf Stolle, he knew exactly why that band was blaring away.

He hurried down the steps and across the paving toward the podium from which the
Gauleiter
of Berlin was addressing a good-sized crowd. Stolle had a microphone. Even so, he was barely a match for the booming band.

He not only knew it, he took advantage of it, saying, “You see how it is,
Volk
of the
Reich
? Some of the powers that be don't want you to hear me. They don't want me reminding you that we need to go forward, not sit around with our thumbs up our….” He stopped and grinned. “Well, you know what I mean. And I'll tell you something else I mean, too. These are the people in charge of protecting the
Führer
. He wants reform. He doesn't want enough of it. He doesn't want it quick enough. But he wants it. They don't. I've told Heinz and told him, ‘Don't let these people get behind you so they can stab you in the back,' but he doesn't want to listen.”

Stolle stuck out his chin and thrust his fist forward. The pose made him look like Mussolini. “Heinz Buckliger is a good man. Don't get me wrong,” he said. “A good man, yes. But a little too trusting.”

Whatever he said next, the thundering SS musicians drowned it out. Instead of getting angry about that, he laughed. He even sang a few bars of the march they were playing. People laughed and clapped their hands. Stolle grinned. He struck another pose, this time a silly one. When Heinrich thought of him as a clown, he hadn't been so far wrong. An appreciative audience made Stolle come alive.

The band moved a little farther away from the podium. The
Gauleiter
moved a little closer to the microphone. “If those noisy SS bastards will just go home, I'll get on with my speech,” he said.

A man in the crowd shouted, “SS go home!” He shouted it again. Then three or four more people took up the call. Before long, everybody who'd come to Adolf Hitler Platz to hear Rolf Stolle was yelling, “SS go home!” The cry echoed from the long front wall of the
Führer
's palace.
Could Heinz Buckliger hear it in there? If he could, what did he think?

Heinrich wondered, but not for long. He was caught up in the thrill of shouting, “SS go home!” He never would have had the nerve to be first to yell such a thing. In the middle of thousands of others, his voice was only one, indistinguishable from the rest.
They'll have a hell of a time arresting all of us,
he thought, and yelled louder than ever. “SS go home! SS go home!
SS go home!
”