In The Presence of mine Enemies

XV

Heinrich Gimpel had yelled, "Down with the SS!" and "We are the Volk!" and "All the world is watching!" and "Prutzmann is a kike!" all day long. He was tired and hungry. Some sandwiches and fruit had got to the crowd, but none had got to him. The SS's armored vehicles hadn't opened fire, but they hadn't left, either. They showed no sign of leaving. Nor was he sure they would let him-or anyone else-go.

The officer commanding the lead panzer had stayed down inside the turret for a while. Now he came out again, bullhorn in hand. "Yell as loud as you please!" he blared. "No one will hear you. No one will care. Your pirate televisor station is in the hands of the State Committee!"

"Liar!" people shouted. They shouted worse things than that, too. The panzer commander let the abuse wash over him as if it didn't matter. More than anything else, that convinced Heinrich he was probably telling the truth. If he'd got angry or defensive, he might have been bluffing. As things were, he seemed to think,Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me. And all the sticks and stones here were on his side. The crowd in front of the Gauleiter 's residence had only words.

Still stubborn, Rolf Stolle boomed, "You don't dare let what you do see the light of day. If you were honest, you would have started shooting while the cameras were rolling."

Beside Heinrich, Willi nervously shifted from foot to foot. "I wish he wouldn't say things like that, dammit. He'll give the bastard ideas."

"He's got ideas already. He has to," Heinrich answered. "Don't you think they've been screaming in his ear to open up for hours? He hasn't done it yet. Stolle's working on his conscience."

"Son of a bitch is an SS man," Willi said. "He had it surgically removed, just like the rest of them."

"Ha," Heinrich said: a mournful attempt at a laugh. Many a true word was spoken in jest. He wished Willi hadn't spoken these; they felt altogether too true.

Slowly, slowly, the sun sank toward the northwest. Berlin wasn't far enough north to get white nights in summer, nights where twilight never turned to real darkness, but sunset came late and darkness didn't last long. All the same, Heinrich feared it would last long enough to mask dark deeds.

He looked around for Susanna. When he spied her, their eyes met. She smiled and waved. "We've both chosen our spot," she said. "I think it's a good one."

A good one to get killed in,Heinrich thought. But maybe that was part of what Susanna had meant. She got passionately devoted to causes-and if you weren't passionately devoted to being a Jew these days, you weren't a Jew at all. Even so, Heinrich wanted to live. He had another generation at home to worry about. Susanna hadn't been lucky enough to hook up with anyone with whom she got along.

Looking for hope, he pointed up to the rooftop televisor cameras. "They're still filming, even if the signal isn't going out. The fear that people might see it one of these days may do for a conscience where nothing else will."

Susanna nodded. "Here's hoping."

Beside Heinrich, Willi said, "That should last us for another hour, maybe even another hour and a half. But what happens when it gets dark?"

Heinrich eyed the setting sun. He almost said something about Joshua and making the sun stand still. At the last minute, though, he didn't. Not too long after he said something Biblical to Erika, he'd ended up in one of Lothar Prutzmann's prisons. He didn't think Willi would accuse him of being a Jew. All the same, prison would be one of the better things that might happen to him if things went wrong here.

Joshua he was not. In due course, the sun sank below the horizon. Twilight began to deepen. Shadows spread and lost their sharpness. Faces farther away grew dim and indistinct. Venus blazed low in the western sky. Above it, Saturn was dimmer and yellower…and that ruddy star between them had to be Mars. Heinrich almost wished he hadn't recognized it. Tonight, he wanted nothing to do with the god of war.

Lights on Rolf Stolle's residence were bright, but not bright enough to illuminate the square in front of it after the sun went down. The panzers and armored personnel carriers turned on their lights. That, though, Heinrich knew, was not for the benefit of the crowd confronting them. Their crews wouldn't want anybody to sneak up with a Molotov cocktail or a grenade in the dark.

And then, off in the distance but swelling rapidly, Heinrich heard one of the sounds he'd listened for and dreaded all day long: the rumbling snarl of more diesel engines heading toward the Gauleiter 's residence.

He wasn't the only one who heard them. A low murmur of alarm ran through the crowd.

Willi Dorsch managed a creditable chuckle. "I don't know what we're worrying about," he said. "They've already got enough firepower here to massacre the lot of us."

"You always did know how to cheer me up when I was feeling low," Heinrich answered, and Willi laughed out loud.

The officer in charge of the lead panzer raised his bullhorn and aimed it at Rolf Stolle: "It's all over now. You can see it's all over. Surrender to me, and I'll make sure they don't shoot you 'by mistake.'"

"You can take your 'by mistake,' fold it till it's all corners, and shove it right on up your ass, sonny boy," the Gauleiter of Berlin shouted. "If you want me, if Prutzmann wants me, you'll have to kill me, on account of I'm damned if you'll take me alive and give me a show trial. Buckliger let himself get caught, the poor, sorry son of a bitch. To hell with me if I intend to."

"He's got balls," Willi said admiringly.

"I know," Heinrich said. "But if they take him out, they'll take out everybody who's here with him."

He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the engine noise and clanking, clattering treads of the approaching armored vehicles. Willi gave an airy shrug, as if to say,Easy come, easy go. Heinrich clapped him on the back. He regretted being here less than he'd thought he would. Susanna was right. This was a good place to stand.

Down the people-clogged street, farther away from the Gauleiter 's residence, jeers and hisses and derisive whistles rang out as the new contingent of armored fighting vehicles came into sight. If a hothead in the crowd had an assault rifle and opened up on the panzers from sheer frustration, that could touch off a massacre. Damn near anything could touch off a massacre now, and Heinrich knew it only too well.

"Iam sorry about Erika," Willi said suddenly, as if he too was thinking this was the end, and some things should not go unspoken.

Tears stung Heinrich's eyes. He nodded. "It's all right," he said. "Don't worry about it."

And then the noises from down the street changed. As if by magic, boos and curses were transmuted into wild, even frantic, cheers. Heinrich's head, which had been hanging on his chest, came up like a dog's when it took an unexpected scent. So did Willi's. So did Susanna's. They all leaned toward the startling new noise. Heinrich willed words to come through the mad joy.

"It's the-!" More cheers drowned whatever the key word was. "It's not the-!" Frustrated again, Heinrich swore and kicked at the paving slates. But the third time was the charm. "It's not the goddamn Waffen- SS. It's the Wehrmacht-and they're on our side! "

Heinrich threw back his head and howled like a wolf. A crazy grin on his face, he grabbed Willi's hand and pumped his whole arm up and down as if he were jacking up a car. He shoved through the crowd toward Susanna. She was coming toward him, too. Laughing and crying at the same time, they squeezed each other. He was forty centimeters taller than she was. He had to bend down a long way to give her a kiss-and he did.

Susanna only half remembered actually clambering up onto this panzer. It hadn't been more than fifteen minutes earlier, but already it seemed like a mad fever dream. The panzer had handholds welded to the turret and the chassis so soldiers could cling to it and ride along. But the gray, capable engineers who'd designed it surely had never dreamt it would clatter through the neon nighttime streets of Berlin with as many people aboard as it carried.

The panzer commander seemed taken aback by the whole business himself. He rode head and shoulders out of the cupola, and couldn't have been as young as he looked-could he? "Be careful!" he shouted over and over again to his unexpected load of passengers. "If you fall off, you'll get squashed!"

He was bound to be right about that. This panzer was second in a long column rolling from Rolf Stolle's residence toward Lothar Prutzmann's lair not far from the Fuhrer 's palace. Susanna wondered where Heinrich had gone. He wasn't on this panzer. Was he riding another one, or had his usual prudence come back to life and persuaded him to stay away from places where guns were liable to go off?

Prudence? Susanna laughed. Nothing that had happened all this mad day had had even a nodding acquaintance with prudence. It wasn't even prudence that had kept the SS men from fighting it out when they found themselves outgunned by the Wehrmacht. They still could have killed Stolle then, as they could have killed him a hundred times earlier on. But their hearts hadn't been in their orders, and so they hadn't started shooting and had given up at the first excuse they got. SS men! Who would have imagined it?

Not Prutzmann, Susanna thought, and chuckled evilly.

Here and there in the city, she did hear spatters of gunfire, but only a few. The panzer commander heard them, too. "What are you people going to do when we get where we're going?" he asked plaintively.

"Hang the Reichsfuhrer — SS from a lamppost, that's what!" bawled a burly man near Susanna. She and the rest of the panzer-riders cheered.

"But we're liable to have to shoot some of those SS bastards, and they're liable to shoot back," the Wehrmacht man said. Whenever the panzer passed under a streetlight, the little silver Totenkopf on his black coveralls glittered for a moment.

"Give us guns!" that burly man said. "We'll shoot 'em ourselves!" Through more cheers, he went on to describe in vivid terms the personal and moral shortcomings of the SS. Then he nodded to Susanna. "Meaning no offense, ma'am."

"It doesn't bother me," she said. "They're much worse than that." The man blinked, then grinned enormously. Susanna grinned back.

SS men had barricaded the grounds around their brooding headquarters. What they'd run up looked much more formidable than the flimsy makeshifts the people of Berlin had erected in front of Rolf Stolle's residence. But there was no swarming mass of people behind these barricades: only Prutzmann's allegedUbermenschen. And, as the first panzer stopped and turned its lights on them, the SS men looked quite humanly nervous, even if they did clutch assault rifles and a few antipanzer rocket launchers.

The commander of the lead panzer yelled, "You fuckers open up on us and we'll slaughter every goddamn one of you. We'll laugh while we're doing it, too. You shot our boys at the televisor station, and we owe you plenty. You got that?" He ducked down into the turret. The panzer's engine began to race and roar. The commander reemerged to issue a one-word order he surely hadn't learned in any training school: "Charge!"

His panzer thundered forward. It hit a parked truck head-on and hurled it out of the way. Susanna screamed with delight. Her panzer rumbled through the breach the lead machine had made. Others followed. So did trucks and armored personnel carriers full of Wehrmacht soldiers. The SS men didn't fire a shot. Troopers in Wehrmacht gray urban camouflage came down from their vehicles and began disarming the men who'd made careers of spreading fear and now suddenly discovered there were people who weren't afraid of them.

Fear is what they had,Susanna realized.The Wehrmachtalways had more muscle. Up till now, it never used what it had. Politics held it back. But tonight the gloves are off, and it's nobody's fault but Lothar Prutzmann's. She whooped again. The Reichsfuhrer — SS hadn't known what he was getting into. He hadn't known, but he was finding out in a hurry.

Prutzmann's office was on the third floor of the SS building, right above the monumental entryway. Anyone who paid attention to the news knew that much. The Wehrmacht panzer commanders evidently did. Half a dozen 120mm cannon rose and swung to point straight at the famous chamber.

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. "Prutzmann!" he shouted, his amplified voice echoing from the granite and concrete and glass. "Come out with your hands up, Prutzmann! We won't kill you if you do. You'll get a trial."

And then we'll kill you,Susanna finished mentally. Hearing Lothar Prutzmann'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 Reichsfuhrer — 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, Prutzmann!" 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 Reichsfuhrer — 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 SSSchweinehund? Where's Prutzmann? 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 Prutzmann'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 Prutzmann 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 Prutzmann!"

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 Prutzmann'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 thingshad 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 Fuhrer '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 Fuhrer '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.

"Wehrmachtor SS?" somebody called nervously.

"Bugger the SS with a pine cone," the machine gunner answered, and fired another burst into the air. "We're thereal 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 Fuhrer 's palace. Sandbagged machine-gun nests outside the entrance 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 Prutzmann 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 Fuhrer '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 Fuhrer 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 Fuhrer!" people shouted, and, "We won't take orders from Globocnik!" and, "Down with the SS!" Heinrich 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 Fuhrer '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. "Prutzmann'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.

There in the glare of the panzers' lights, an SS radioman did call…whom? Somebody at Prutzmann's headquarters, Heinrich supposed. He could tell when the radioman got his question answered. The fellow suddenly sagged, as if his skeleton had turned to rubber. He spoke to the officer who'd parleyed with the Wehrmacht soldiers. The officer clapped a hand to his forehead in an altogether human gesture of despair: the kind of gesture Heinrich had never imagined seeing from an SS man.

Little by little, the officer pulled himself together. He stepped forward again. "You seem to be right," he called bleakly to the Wehrmacht panzer commander. "What do you want from us?"

"Give us Globocnik," the Wehrmacht man said. "The rest of you lousy sons of bitches can go back to your barracks. We'll deal with you later if we decide you're worth the trouble."

The SS officer drew back to hash things out with his comrades. Heinrich couldn't hear a word they said through the growl of the armored fighting vehicles' engines and the shouting and oaths from the crowd. Those soon coalesced into a chant of, "Globocnik! Globocnik! Give us Globocnik!" Heinrich happily howled it along with everybody else.

When a squad of blackshirts with assault rifles turned and went purposefully into the Fuhrer 's palace, he stopped chanting and thumped Willi on the shoulder. "They're going to get him!" he exclaimed. "They really are!"

"Either that or they're going to try to sneak him out of here," Willi said. "This place has got to have more secret escape routes than Brazil's got coffee beans."

"Their buddies will pay for it if they do that," Heinrich reminded him. "And besides, who'd want to rally behind Odilo Globocnik? Prutzmann, maybe. Whatever else he was, he was sly. But Globocnik? He was never anything but a false front for other people to work behind."

Willi thought that over, then nodded. "Well, when you're right, you're right." He grinned at Heinrich. "You should try it more often." Heinrich snorted.

A shot rang out inside the Fuhrer 's palace. Hearing it over the engine, Heinrich jerked and almost fell off the armored personnel carrier. "Is that Globocnik taking Prutzmann's way out?" he said. "Or was he 'shot while attempting to escape'?" The familiar SS euphemism for an execution had a fine ironic flavor here.

"We'll find out," Willi said. "What a man-the twenty-four-hour Fuhrer!" He made as if to spit to show his contempt, but held back when he realized he was all too likely to spit on someone.

A few minutes later, the squad of SS men came out again. They half led, half dragged a lurching figure in their midst. Blood ran from their captive's head, but he seemed no worse than stunned. "Here's Globocnik!" one of the blackshirts shouted. "He tried to shoot himself, but he didn't have the balls to do it right. His hand twitched when he pulled the trigger, so all he did was crease his scalp. You want him, you're welcome to him."

They shoved Odilo Globocnik down the steps toward the waiting Wehrmacht men. He staggered as if drunk, his arms flailing wildly. But the soldiers never got him. Instead, the baying mob surged forward.

Globocnik wailed once as they swarmed over him. The Wehrmacht men might have been able to stop it. They stayed in their panzers and APCs and did not a thing.

And when the people were through, they hanged the twenty-four-hour Fuhrer by the heels from a lamppost. Heinrich looked once, then turned away, glad he hadn't eaten much since breakfast. What was left of Odilo Globocnik hardly looked like a human being at all.

Here was one morning where Esther Stutzman was glad she didn't have to go to work. She poured herself a second cup of coffee, turned on the televisor, and sat down in front of it. Horst Witzleben stared out at her. Behind him were the tarmac and buildings of Tempelhof Airport.

She'd caught him in the middle of a sentence: "-by Me-662 fighters,Luftwaffe Alfa is expected to land in about five minutes. The return of Heinz Buckliger from his confinement on the island of Hvar will, hoffentlich, bring to an end this bizarre episode in the history of the Reich. AFuhrer overthrown by Putsch, a man named Fuhrer overthrown by the outraged Volk, the powerful Reichsfuhrer — SS dead by his own hand…" Horst shook his head, as if to say the events of the past couple of days left him as baffled and bemused as anyone else.

Two of the escorting Luftwaffe fighters touched down side by side, smoke spurting from their tires as they hit the runway. Then the Fuhrer 's personal jetliner landed. Two more sleek, deadly-looking Me-662s came in just behind it.Wehrmacht panzers rumbled forward to help form a protective cordon around Luftwaffe Alfa. If any diehard SS men tried to take out the Fuhrer, they'd have their work cut out for them.

As soon as Luftwaffe Alfa had taxied to a stop near a terminal, airport workers wheeled a stairway to the plane's front door. In their wake strode Rolf Stolle, his shaved head gleaming in the summer sun. Bodyguards in Berlin police gray surrounded the Gauleiter. Seeing them reminded Esther how much things had changed. How many Nazi bigwigs had she seen on the televisor over the years? More than she wanted-she knew that. How many of them had had SS bodyguards in black? Every damned one. But no more. No more.

The door opened. A couple of alert-looking Wehrmacht men with assault rifles emerged first, making sure the coast was clear. Only after one of them nodded did Heinz Buckliger come out, Erna behind him. He waved awkwardly toward the televisor cameras broadcasting the scene across the Germanic Empire.

In a low voice, Horst said, "The signs of the Fuhrer 's ordeal remain on his face."

Esther found herself nodding. Buckliger's features were pale and ravaged. He blinked against the sunshine as if he hadn't seen it in weeks, not days. Esther wondered what the SS had done to him while it had him in its clutches. He might have aged ten years in this small space of time.

Rolf Stolle, by contrast, fairly burst with youthful energy even though he was older than the Fuhrer. He shook off his guards and bounded up the stairway toward Buckliger. The Wehrmacht men with the rifles looked uncertainly at each other for a moment. Then they both grinned and stepped aside to let him pass.

Still quietly, Horst Witzleben said, "Here is a meeting the world will long remember."

At the top of the stairs, Stolle stuck out his hand. Buckliger took it in a tentative way. One of them must have been wearing a microphone-maybe both of them were-for their words came clearly from the televisor set. "Welcome home,mein Fuhrer," the Gauleiter of Berlin boomed. "We had a little bit of a mess here, but we cleaned it up for you just fine."

"Good. That's good." Heinz Buckliger sounded as worn and weary as he looked. He was the Fuhrer, Stolle only the Gauleiter. Yet Rolf Stolle, by some mysterious reversal, was the one who seemed possessed of the greater authority. Or maybe the reversal was not so mysterious after all. Buckliger had had things done to him during the Putsch. Stolle had gone out and done things himself. How much of a difference that made Esther could see for herself as the two men confronted each other.

Stolle said, "Everything will proceed as you have ordered,mein Fuhrer." He sounded deferential. No matter how he sounded, he wasn't. He promptly proved as much, too, for he went on, "After the elections, the Reichstag will be a different place, and we'll really be able to get something done. About time, too."

"Ja,"Buckliger said. But his expression was that of a man who'd bitten into something sour. Stolle hadn't said,You'll really be able to get something done. He'd assumed power would lie with the Reichstag, not the Fuhrer. And Heinz Buckliger, who'd been far away and under guard while Stolle led resistance against the SSPutsch, couldn't contradict him.

The Gauleiter of Berlin drove that home: "The Volk saved your regime,mein Fuhrer." He was most subversive when he sounded most modest. "If they'd sat on their hams, you'd be a dead man, and so would I. But they liked the way the wind was blowing, and I maybe pointed them in the right direction once they got riled up. The first edition was right. Trust the Volk and they'll never let you down."

Adolf Hitler hadn't said any such thing, in the first edition of Mein Kampf or anywhere else. But Buckliger, again, was in no position to tell Stolle he was wrong. the Fuhrer said, "Revitalization will continue." It was his first effort to get in a word for the program he'd pushed so hard.

And Rolf Stolle graciously granted him a nod. "Oh,ja, ja, revitalization." He might have been humoring a child. "But that's only the beginning. We've got to do something good and final about the SS, too, make goddamn sure the lousy blackshirts can't make trouble again. And we've got to give democratic rights back to some other Aryan peoples, too, not just to the Volk of the Reich."

Buckliger's eyes widened. He coughed in astonishment. "I am sure that this is not the place for such discussions," he said.

Stolle thumped him on the back-again, or so it seemed to Esther, indulgently. "Well, maybe you're right. You ought to get rested up, get ready to deal with the new Reichstag that'll be coming in after the elections."

The camera cut away from the scene at the top of the airplane steps. A few months before, it never would have lingered so long. During the time of the previous Fuhrer, it never would have gone there at all. In tones full of wonder, Horst Witzleben said, "This is an extraordinary day in the history of the Reich. Let me repeat that: an extraordinary day. Heinz Buckliger returns to a state far different from the one he left when he went on holiday. Not all the differences are obvious yet. Some that seem obvious may not last. But surely some changes will be deep and far-reaching. Where the Volk once comes out into the streets against those who have proclaimed themselves to be the government…well, how can things possibly remain the same after that?"

Esther didn't know if things could stay the same after that. She also didn't know if their being different for the Reich as a whole would make them different for her. Buckliger and Stolle remained Nazis. She didn't expect any Nazi to have much use for Jews. But there were Nazis…and then there were Nazis. With a choice between this pair and the overthrown duo of Prutzmann and Globocnik, she knew where she stood. And the German people stood with her. If that wasn't a miracle, what was?

Susanna Weiss got out of bed early on Sunday morning. If that didn't prove it was an unusual Sunday, she couldn't imagine what would; sleep, on weekends, was a pleasure she took seriously. So was coffee, any morning of the week. She said something unfortunate but memorable when she found she was out of cream. Then, discovering whipped cream in the refrigerator, she brightened. That would do. It would more than do, in fact. On reflection, she added a shot of brandy to the coffee. She had a sweet roll with it, which made her feel thoroughly Viennese.

But she left her apartment with Berlin briskness. This wasn't just any Sunday. This was the election day the late, unlamented Lothar Prutzmann and his stooge of a Globocnik hadn't been able to hijack. She wanted to vote early. She really wanted to vote early and often, an American phrase that had been making the rounds in the Reich the last few days, but she didn't think she could get away with it.

Her polling place was around the corner, in a veterans' hall. She couldn't remember the last time she'd voted. What was the point, when the results were going to be reported as 99.64 percentja regardless of what they really were-and when votingnein was liable to win you a visit from the Security Police?

As soon as she came out of her building, she stopped in surprise. However brisk she'd been, she hadn't been brisk enough. The line for the polling place already stretched around the block and came back toward her. Normally, she hated queuing up. Now she joined the line without a qualm.Why is this night different from all other nights? went through her head. The Passover question, the Jewish question, almost seemed to fit the Reich today. Germany really might be different after this election. It might. Or it might not. Life came with no guarantees. A Jew surviving in the Nazis' Berlin knew, had to know, as much.

A man in a battered fedora, a windbreaker, and a pair of faded dungarees got into line behind her. "Guten Morgen," he said, scratching his chin. He needed a shave. "Now we get to tell the bastards where to head in."

He might be a provocateur. Susanna knew that, too. On this morning of all mornings, she couldn't make herself care. "You bet we do," she answered. "I've been waiting a long time."

"Who hasn't?" the whiskery man said. "They never wanted to listen before. Now, by God, they're gonna have to." He cursed the SS and the Party Bonzen without great imagination but with considerable gusto.

Up and down the line-which rapidly got longer behind Susanna-people were doing the same thing. They couldn't all be provocateurs…could they? Susanna didn't think so. The SS couldn't arrest everybody in the city. If they did, nothing would get done. And the blackshirts had their own worries at the moment. The Wehrmacht was gleefully cutting them down to size, with Heinz Buckliger and Rolf Stolle cheering the soldiers on.

Had Buckliger understood the animosity ordinary people felt toward the state when he ordered these elections? If he had, would he have ordered them? Susanna had trouble believing that. But order them he had, and now he'd be stuck with the results. Prutzmann's failed Putsch might have been the best thing that could have happened to reform. It reminded people what they could be in for if they voted to keep the status quo.

The queue snaked forward. The closer to the polling place people got, the nastier the things they had to say about that status quo. Men and women who came out of the veterans' hall strutted and swaggered, proud grins on their faces. Nobody needed to ask how they'd voted.

The hall smelled of old cigars and spilled beer. Helmets were mounted on the wall: big, cumbersome ones with flaring brims from the First World War and the lighter and sleeker models German soldiers had worn during the Second and Third. The uniformed precinct leader stood around looking important. Clerks in mufti did the real work.

"Your name?" one of them said when Susanna came up to him. She gave it. He made sure she was on a list in front of him, then went on, "Your identity papers." She displayed the card; she would no more leave home without it than she would without a top. Once the clerk was satisfied, he used a ruler to line through her name and address in red. Then he handed her a ballot. "Choose any vacant booth… Next!"

There were no vacant booths, not with the way people had swarmed to the polls. Susanna waited till a woman came out of one. She ducked into it herself, pulling the curtain closed behind her. She wasn't in Rolf Stolle's district, but she knew which candidate here supported reform and which was a Party hack. She knew which candidate for the Berlin city council was which, too. Voting for candidates had never mattered to her. Voting against them-being able to vote against them-carried a kick stronger than Glenfiddich straight up.

She put the ballot in its envelope, emerged from the booth (a tall man immediately took her place), and handed the envelope to the clerk. He put it in the ballot box, intoning, "Frau Weiss has voted."

"Fraulein Doktor Professor Weiss has voted," she corrected crisply. Every so often, the formidable academic title came in very handy. Half a dozen people in the veterans' hall looked her way. The clerk stared at her as she walked out.

She wanted to know right away how the election turned out. She couldn't, of course, because the polls were still open. Talking about results till they closed might have influenced those who hadn't voted yet, and so wasverboten. That made most of Sunday pass in what felt like anticlimax.

She turned on the televisor a few minutes before eight that evening. Watching the end of an idiotic game show seemed a small price to pay for what would follow. At eight o'clock precisely, Horst Witzleben came on the screen in place of the Sunday night film that normally would have run. "Today is a watershed day for the Greater German Reich, " the newscaster declared. "In Germany's first contested elections since 1933, candidates favoring the reform policies of Heinz Buckliger and Rolf Stolle appear to be sweeping to victory all across the country."

Hearing Stolle's name mentioned in the same breath as the Fuhrer 's was new since the failed Putsch. The Gauleiter 's status had risen as Buckliger's fell. The one was a hero, the other a victim. Even in the Reich, it turned out, there was such a thing as moral authority.

A map of Germany appeared in gray on the screen. Here and there, it was measled with green spots. There were also red spots, but far fewer of them. "Green shows pro-reform candidates with substantial leads in their districts," Witzleben said. "Red shows candidates of the other sort who are in the lead. If we look more closely at Berlin"-the map changed as he spoke-"we see that every district but one in the capital of the Reich supports reform. Rolf Stolle himself is being sent to the Reichstag by a margin of better than six to one over his foe, building contractor Engelbert Hackmann."

"Good," Susanna murmured. That wasn't a surprise, but it was a relief.

The map went back to coverage of the whole Reich. More of it had turned green. Some more had turned red, too, but not nearly so much. Then it shifted again, this time to a detailed look at the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Most of that area was green, except for a few red patches in the former Sudetenland.

Horst Witzleben continued, "Along with electing delegates to the Reichstag, the people of the Protectorate are also voting on a nonbinding referendum concerning their relationship with the Reich. Latest returns show that seventy-seven percent favor the declaration of independence proclaimed by the Unity organization in the wake of the Putsch, while only twenty-three percent wish to continue as a Reichs protectorate-in effect, a province of the Reich. Most of the delegates elected are pledged to bring this issue to the attention of the new Reichstag, and to seek relief."

That was pretty dizzying, too. True, the referendum had no official weight, any more than the declaration had. But it wouldn't have been on the ballot if those things didn't count for something. And the Czechs had shown a lot of nerve in reminding the world they hadn't forgotten the freedom they'd known between the first two World Wars. How could a Reichstag chosen on the basis of self-determination ignore it once in office?

Maybe they'll say the Czechs are only Slavs, and too ignorant to know what they're talking about, Susanna thought cynically. But in that case, why give them the chance to speak their minds? Susanna had yet to hear anyone, no matter how radical a reformer, speak up for letting Poles or Ukrainians or Russians tell the world what they wanted. Their opinions didn't matter. Why else had God put them on earth except to be worked to death?

And no one had spoken up for keeping Heinrich Gimpel and his daughters alive when they were arrested. Had the authorities decided he was a Jew and they first-degree Mischlingen, they would have been killed, and that would have been that. The Reich had come further in the past year than in the previous lifetime. It still had a long way to go. Susanna suspected neither Buckliger nor Stolle realized how far.

Maybe Charlie Lynton did, over in London. He had the British Union of Fascists out several steps in front of the German National Socialists. That took special nerve in a subject ally. And the white-haired Czech playwright who led Unity seemed to have a good understanding of where the Reich needed to go. Whether it would go there was another question.

More and more of the map filled in. There were spots where red predominated over green: Bavaria, parts of Prussia, rural Austria (Vienna was a different story). But it looked as if reformers would have a solid majority. How solid would it have been had Prutzmann not tried his Putsch? Susanna feared it would have been much less so, but nobody would ever know now.

Then the camera cut away from the map, away from the studio. There was Heinz Buckliger, walking through the little square in front of the Gauleiter 's residence with Rolf Stolle. Stolle was pointing to the makeshift memorials that had sprung up where SS panzers crushed Berliners: flowers, candles, notes tothe dead, and one big sign that said,FREIHEIT UBER ALLES!

"The two chief architects of this remarkable day confer," Horst said quietly.

It didn't look like a conference to Susanna. It looked as if the Gauleiter was lecturing the Fuhrer. And it looked as if Heinz Buckliger was taking it. He would nod whenever Stolle stuck out a finger and made a point. Once, Stolle laughed at something and slapped him on the back, hard enough to stagger him. Buckliger took that, too, though it was anything but the gesture of a subordinate to a superior. Despite their titles, it didn't seem as if the Gauleiter were the Fuhrer 's subordinate.

Stolle pointed to the FREIHEIT UBER ALLES! sign. Buckliger earnestly nodded again. Stolle didn't really understand what the sign meant, either. Susanna had already realized that. But if you said the words often enough, didn't you sooner or later have to go where they led you?

Didn't you?We'll find out, Susanna thought.

Francesca came bounding up to Alicia at lunchtime. "Guess what!" she cried.

"I don't know," Alicia said. "What?"

"Frau Koch is gone!" her sister caroled. "Gone, gone, gone! We've got a new teacher. His name is Herr Mistele. He smiles at people like he means it. Smiles! The Beast is gone. Gone, gone, gone!"

"That's wonderful. Too bad it didn't happen sooner," Alicia said, and Francesca's head bounced up and down in unreserved agreement. Alicia asked, "Did he say why the Beast left?" With Frau Koch not there, Alicia came out with the nickname without looking over her shoulder first to see whether any other teachers could hear.

Francesca frowned. "He said…" She paused, trying to make sure she got the words just right. "He said, with the political something the way it was-"

"The situation?" Alicia broke in.

"That's right. That's the word I couldn't come up with." Francesca started over: "He said, with the political sit-u-a-tion the way it was, it was better if Frau Koch did something else for a while. As far as I'm concerned, she can do something else forever."

"Maybe she will," Alicia said. "She liked Lothar Prutzmann a lot, didn't she?" Francesca nodded again. Alicia continued, "Well, with Prutzmann dead and gone and with the Putsch down the drain, naturally they're going to get rid of people like that. She's probably lucky she's not in jail. Or maybe she is."

"Ooh!" her sister said. "Ooh! Ihope she is. She said Daddy deserved to be, back when they grabbed him and us. I hope she finds out what it's like." Francesca liked revenge.

"It could happen." Alicia didn't mind the idea of the Beast behind bars, either-far from it. And when one side won a political fight, the other side suffered. That had been true in the Reich ever since the Night of the Long Knives. Sooner or later, though, didn't revenge have to stop, or at least slow down? If it didn't, who'd be left after a while? That made more sense than Alicia wished it did. All the same, she couldn't help hoping vengeance wouldn't stop till Frau Koch got what was coming to her. She waved and called, "Hey, Trudi! Listen!"

"What's up?" Trudi Krebs called.

Alicia nudged her sister. "Tell her."

Francesca did. Trudi's eyes widened. "Really?" she whispered. Francesca crossed her heart.I don't think Jews are supposed to do that, went through Alicia's mind.She hadn't done it since she found out what she was. Then she stopped worrying about it. Trudi put one arm around her and the other around Francesca and started dancing both of them around in a circle, whooping while she danced.

"What's going on?" another girl called. Trudi and Francesca both shouted out the news. The other girl jumped straight up in the air. Then she ran over and started dancing, too. More girls heard the news, too, and joined the circle. It got bigger and bigger, spinning dizzily around the playground. A few boys even danced with them, mostly ones who'd had the Beast and knew what Francesca's class was escaping.

"Was ist hier los?" A man's voice-a teacher's voice-stopped the exuberance in its tracks where nothing else would have. "Alicia Gimpel, tell me at once."

"Jawohl, Herr Peukert." All panting and sweaty, Alicia paused. "It's nothing,Herr Peukert. We're just…happy,Herr Peukert."

Would he ask why they were happy? Would their being loud and disorderly count for more? It would have with a lot of teachers.Herr Peukert kept right on looking stern. But then, slowly and thoughtfully, he nodded. "Happy is not a bad thing for children to be. You may continue." He turned his back on the circle. He didn't turn around when the dancing started again.

"He knows why," Francesca whispered to Alicia. "He knows, but he doesn't care." Wonder filled her face.

"Nobody cares about what happened to the Beast." Alicia corrected herself: "Except that she's gone, I mean." She couldn't think of a better reason to dance.

When lunch ended and students went into their classrooms again, hers buzzed with the news. Nobody could hold still. Nobody could keep quiet. A lot of Alicia's classmates had suffered through a year with Frau Koch. Some of the ones who hadn't had a brother or sister who had, the way Alicia did. And all the boys and girls knew what the Beast was like.

Herr Peukert put up with it longer than Alicia thought he would. At last, though, he said, "Enough. If you want to dance at lunch or after school, that's your business. When you're here, though, we have work to do. You may not care about it now, but some of it will be important later on. Kindly buckle down and pay attention."

And they did, or most of them did. The bargain seemed fair to Alicia. The boys and girls-mostly boys-who kept on being noisy were the ones who were always noisy in class.Herr Peukert had a lot more patience than Herr Kessler had, but he didn't own an infinite supply. He gave the loudest, most obnoxious boy a swat. The whack of paddle on backside did an amazing job of calming the others down.

Nobody on the bus going home told the children to be quiet. They giggled and squealed and sang songs, most of them about the things a Beast did in the woods. They would have danced in the aisle, but that was too much for the long-suffering bus driver. "You got to stay in your seats," he shouted over the din in the bus. "You got to. Them's the rules, by God."

The children did sit down. Maybe that was simply fear about what would happen to them if they didn't, but maybe it was something more, too. In the Reich, few arguments carried more weight thanthem's the rules. The rules and good order went hand in hand, and German children learned to obey along with their other lessons.

But we wouldn't obey Lothar Prutzmann, even if the Beast thought we ought to,Alicia thought. Then something else crossed her mind-what do you mean, we?She couldn't automatically think of herself as a German any more. That was what being a Jew did to her: it made her an outsider in her own country.

Part of her still wished for the feeling of belonging she'd had before she found out what she was. But, considering a lot of the things Germans had done, maybe being on the outside looking in was the better part of the bargain.

Had Lise Gimpel expected miracles from the new Reichstag, she would have been disappointed. Since she expected very little, she found herself pleasantly surprised every now and again. The delegates chose Rolf Stolle as their Speaker. The Gauleiter used his new bully pulpit to go right on slanging Heinz Buckliger for not doing enough, and for not doing it fast enough. That didn't surprise Lise at all.

Laws cutting back the powers of the SS did. So did the public hangings of a couple of Lothar Prutzmann's chief henchmen. The dangling bodies-shown on the evening news-declared the new laws had teeth. The lesson was unsubtle and thoroughly Nazi, but no less effective for that.

Holland held elections, too, and chose a parliament with a non-Fascist majority. Panzers didn't roll. The German Foreign Ministry said not a word. Dutchmen didn't dance in the streets. They didn't seem to want to give the Reich any excuse to change its mind. Lise couldn't blame them.

As summer gave way to fall, Heinrich said the Americans were getting friskier than ever. "What will they do?" Lise asked him. "Will they try to rebel?"

"I don't think so. I hope not," her husband answered. "That would be just what…some people needed." He still spoke carefully. The house might be bugged.

"How hard would the government…the way it is now…try to stop them?"

"I don't know that, either," Heinrich said. "But if the government…the way it is now…didn't try to stop them, I don't think it would be the government for very long."

"But they really have put a boot on the SS's neck," Lise protested.

"I wasn't talking about the SS. I was talking about the Wehrmacht, " Heinrich said. "The Army won't put up with weakness here, and it won't want to let the Yankees get too strong. They aren't like the Dutch or the Czechs. They could be rivals. They could be worse rivals than the Empire of Japan, because they're more like us. The Wehrmacht wouldn't like that at all, and how can you blame it?"

Lise eyed her husband before answering. He'd tacked on the last half dozen words, she judged, to keep anyone on the other end of a bug happy. "Who possibly could?" she said in the same spirit. "After it broke up the Putsch, who could blame it for anything?"

Heinrich started to nod, then caught himself and wagged a finger at her, as if to say,Naughty, naughty. Lise stuck out her tongue. Maybe she'd meant you couldn't blame the Wehrmacht for anything because it hadn't done anything blameworthy. Or maybe she'd meant you didn't dare blame it for anything, because it was the greatest power in the land. Which? Her green eyes dancing, she shook her head. She was a woman. She was entitled to her mysteries. And she wasn't altogether sure herself.

"What about the Czechs?" she asked, changing the subject a little. "Will the Reich let them go?"

Her husband shrugged. "Beats me. They have the vote last summer to back up their declaration of independence. And if anybody can outfinagle the Foreign Ministry, it's the fellow they've got leading Unity. He can make you feel ashamed when you do something that isn't on the up-and-up, and how many people are able to do that? But…"

"Yes. But." Lise knew why Heinrich hesitated. The Czechs were Slavs, and Slavs, even Slavs like the Czechs who'd been entangled in German affairs since time out of mind, were in the National Socialist way of thinking Untermenschen. If you once started making concessions to Untermenschen, didn't you acknowledge they might not be so inferior after all? And if you acknowledged that, how did you justify the massacres and the slave labor that had filled the last seventy years?

Even more to the point, if you acknowledged that Slavs-or some Slavs-might not be Untermenschen, didn't you take a step towards acknowledging that Jews also might not be Untermenschen?Could a National Socialist government take a step in that direction?

"the Fuhrer has said mistakes were made in years gone by," Heinrich said; if the Fuhrer said it, it couldn't possibly be treasonous-as long as he stayed Fuhrer. "If we decide to set some of those mistakes to rights, that wouldn't be so bad."

"No. Of course it wouldn't," Lise answered. Even though the Czechs were doing most of the agitating these days, they'd got off relatively easy. How could the Reich make amends to the relative handful of Poles and Russians and Ukrainians who still survived?

And, for that matter, how could the Reich make amends to the handful of Jews who, in spite of everything, still survived? Lise knew an impossibility when she saw one. Come to that, she didn't want a parade of blackshirts and Party Bonzen clicking their heels and apologizing to her. That sort of spectacle might appeal to Susanna, but then Susanna reveled in opera. All Lise wanted was to be left alone, to get on with her life regardless of what she happened to be.

"We're asking questions we couldn't even have imagined a couple of years ago," Heinrich said. "Next to the questions, the answers don't seem quite so important."

"Says who?" Lise inquired sarcastically. "If the Security Police had come up with a different answer to their question a few months ago, you wouldn't be here trying to come up with answers to yours."And the girls wouldn't be here, either, she thought,and it wouldn't matter whether I was here or not because I'd be dead inside.

After a brief pause, her husband nodded. "Well, you're right," he said. One of the reasons they'd stayed pretty happily married the past fifteen years was that they were both able to say that when they needed to.

"Politics!" Lise turned the word into a curse. "I wish politics never had anything to do with us. I wish we could just go on about our business."

"Part of our business is making the Reich better. That's part of everybody's business right now, I think," Heinrich said. "If we don't make it better, what'll happen? We saw before the election-other people will make it worse, that's what."

Lise wanted to quarrel with him. But she remembered too well the horror that had coursed through her when Lothar Prutzmann's tame announcer started going on about the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich. And, remembering, she too said those three little words almost as important as I love you: "Well, you're right."

Heinrich, Lise, and the girls closed their umbrellas when they came up onto the Stutzmans' front porch. The walk from the bus stop had been wet, but not too wet. Winter was thinking about making way for spring. It hadn't got around to doing it yet; still, the worst of the nasty weather was probably past. Heinrich dared hope so, anyway.

All three Gimpel girls raced for the doorbell. Francesca rang it a split second before Alicia or Roxane could. Heinrich and Lise smiled over the girls' heads. They would do that at elevators, too, which made their parents require that they take turns pressing those buttons.Anyone would think they're children or something, went through Heinrich's mind. He smiled again.

Esther Stutzman opened the door. "Come in! Come in! Welcome! Welcome!" she said, and stood aside. Delicious odors wafted out of the doorway: cooking meat, new-baked bread, and something else, something spicy, Heinrich couldn't quite place.

"Oh, good-you've got a mat out," Lise said. "We don't want to drip all over your front hall." She wagged a warning finger at the girls. "Don't you go running all over till you get out of your raincoats, do you hear me?" The warning came just in time. Alicia was trembling with eagerness to charge up to Anna's room.

"Is Susanna here?" Heinrich asked.

"She got here twenty minutes ago," Esther answered. Now she and Heinrich were the ones who smiled. Susanna always showed up early. Esther turned to Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane. "Why don't we hang those coats on the bar for the shower curtain in the downstairs bathroom here? That way, they won't get anything else wet." Heinrich and Lise followed so they could hang their coats in the bathroom, too.

Lise asked, "Did Gottlieb get leave from the Hitler Jugend?"

Esther shook her head. "I'm afraid not. He's stuck somewhere out in the provinces, communing with his shovel." Heinrich's laugh wasn't far from a giggle. He hadn't been ideal material for the Hitler Jugend; he was slow and ungainly and nearsighted and none too strong. But, by God, his spade had always gleamed, blade and handle both. He'd seen at once that survival lay in that direction, and he'd been right. He hadn't been an analyst yet, but he'd already thought like one.Communing with his shovel. He'd have to remember that. He could tell it at the office. Who hadn't gone through the Hitler Jugend?

"Come on," Anna said, appearing behind Esther as if by magic. The Gimpel girls were off like three brown-haired shots.

Esther nodded to Heinrich and Lise. "Here we are," she said.

"Yes." Heinrich nodded, too. "Here we are. There were times this past year when I wouldn't have given a pfennig for our chances, but here we are."

"What can I get you?" Esther asked.

"Beer will do," he answered.

"For me, too, please," Lise said.

They followed Esther toward the kitchen. Susanna sat on the sofa, scotch on the table in front of her. She got up to hug Heinrich and Lise. She and Heinrich each raised an eyebrow at the other. They were, in a way, veterans of the same campaign. It hadn't lasted long and there hadn't been many casualties, but it could have been much worse, and they both knew it.

"Did you ever find new bridge partners?" Susanna asked him.

"We play every now and then, but not regularly, not the way we used to," he replied. "Willi and I still get along fine at work, but…"

"Yes. But," Lise said pointedly. "It's hard to play cards with somebody who tried to seduce your husband and then tried to kill him." Heinrich wondered which of Erika's transgressions his wife resented more. Since asking would have landed him in hotter water than knowing was worth, he expected he'd go right on wondering.

Esther came back with two steins of pale gold pilsner. "Here you are." She gave Heinrich one and Lise the other.

"Thanks." Heinrich sipped. He nodded appreciatively. "Is that-?"

"Pilsner Urquell?" Esther said it before he could. She nodded, too. "It's good beer. And besides, buying it sends the Czechs a little money. They deserve all the help we can give them." Her usually sunny face clouded for a moment. "Anyone who wants to get away from the Reich deserves all the help we can give them."

"Omayn,"Lise said softly. She and Heinrich and Esther and Susanna all smiled. That particular pronunciation of the word ordinary Germans said asamen was one Jews could only use among themselves, which meant it was one they couldn't use very often. Hearing it reminded Heinrich he was part of a small but very special club.

"Where's Walther?" he asked, at the same time as Lise was saying, "What smells so good?"

"I'm carving the goose," Walther called from the kitchen, answering both questions at the same time. He added, "It probably won't be the neatest job in the world, because the joints aren't quite in the same places as they are on a capon. But the taste won't change. Esther's responsible for that."

"The two of you cooked goose last summer, too," Susanna said. "Lothar Prutzmann's, I mean."

Esther blushed like a schoolgirl. "Who can say for sure? The Putsch might have fallen apart anyhow. The SS had already started shooting at the Wehrmacht at the Berlin televisor station, and that would have started things rolling downhill on Prutzmann all by itself."

Heinrich shook his head. "Don't sell yourselves short. You weren't in the square when Stolle shouted out that Prutzmann was a Jew. It took the wind right out of the SS panzer troopers' sails, and it gave the crowd something new and juicy to yell at them." He sipped from his beer. "I was yelling it myself." That he'd yelled it embarrassed him now, though it hadn't then.

"So was I, as loud as I could." Susanna sounded proud and guilty at the same time.

Walther came out. He was wearing an apron, to guard against grease. He had a beer in one hand for himself and in the other a glass of liebfraumilch, which he gave to Esther. Heinrich raised his own seidel in salute. "Here's to getting that story out."

"I'm just glad it may have helped," Walther said. "At the time, I wasn't even close to sure I was doing the right thing."

"Who was?" Heinrich answered. "But it worked out-as well as anything could have, anyhow." If he'd had things exactly as he wanted them, everyone would have gathered at his house for supper, the way people had two years before. But he still had to assume the Security Police had planted bugs there, and that they were monitoring them. The blackshirts were down, but they weren't necessarily out.

Esther took his mind off his worries by saying, "Let's eat, shall we?" She went to the base of the stairs and hallooed for the children. Anna's bedroom door opened. She and the Gimpel girls reluctantly emerged. Whatever they'd been doing in there, they'd had a good time at it.

The table groaned with food. The goose was stuffed with sauerkraut and caraway seeds, and was done to perfection. There was liver dumpling soup, a puree of yellow peas, boiled potatoes with plenty of butter to slather on them, and a medley of green peas, carrots, asparagus, kohlrabi, and cauliflower garnished with more butter and salt and chopped parsley. There was home-baked bread with cinnamon and raisins and candied cherries-that accounted for the enticing spicy scent Heinrich had noticed when Esther opened the door. And there was a peach cobbler, if by some accident anyone had room for it.

Pilsner Urquell and liebfraumilch and Glenfiddich flowed freely for the grownups. For the children, as there had been two years earlier, there was wheat beer with raspberry syrup, not a treat they got every day. Anna and Alicia and Francesca were careful about how much they drank. Roxane wasn't. She put down a big glass of beer and turned almost as red as the syrup. She was yawning long before dessert, which didn't keep her from making a pretty good dent in the cobbler.

But that finished her off. Her eyes started to sag shut, no matter how she fought to keep them open. When she swayed in her chair, Heinrich went over and picked her up. "I'm not sleepy," she said indignantly, around a yawn that showed off her tonsils.

"I know, sweetheart," he said, "but I'm going to take you up to Anna's bedroom to rest for a little while anyway." She didn't argue with him, a telling measure of how worn she was. He carried her up the stairs. That was harder work than he'd expected; he'd put away a lot of food himself. When he laid her on the bed, she started to snore. He watched her for a minute or two to make sure she wasn't pretending, then smiled, shook his head once or twice, and went back down to the dining room.

He hadn't even sat down before Francesca said, "Something funny's going on." She pointed to Alicia. "When you turned ten like this, you got to stay up late, too, and Roxane and I had to go to bed. I remember."

Alicia looked at Heinrich. When he didn't say anything, she did: "You'reten now, so it's your turn."

"My turn for what?" Francesca asked, curiosity and suspicion warring in her voice.

Alicia looked at Heinrich again. This time, he knew he had to speak. Despite all he'd eaten and drunk, fear made his heart pound. The past two years had taught him more about danger than he ever wanted to know. But if this didn't go forward through time, what was the point to all that danger? None. None at all. He licked his lips. "Well, Francesca, we've got a secret to tell you…"