Harry Turtledove - In The Presence Of My Enemies

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

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

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

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

"If those don't turn into famous photos-" Heinrich began.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Do you know when he'll be back?"

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

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

Survival instincts,she thought, and shook her head. She'd always believed Heinrich had strong ones. But if he did, why had he gone running to stick his head in the lion's mouth? At first, she was inclined to blame Willi. A moment later, though, she shook her head again. Heinrich hadn't taken Willi all that seriously-not seriously enough to let Willi talk him into risking his life-even before the trouble with Erika.

The trouble with Erika…Lise saw, or thought she did. Before the blackshirts grabbed Heinrich and flung him into prison, he never would have done anything so crazy. Now, though, he'd lain in the hands of the SS. Maybe he thought anything that might help stop that committee with the silly name was worth doing.

It will happen just the same, with you there or without you. Lise couldn't shout that to Heinrich, no matter how much she wanted to. He'd had an attack of patriotism-and wasn't that a strange fit to come over a Jew at the beating heart of the Third Reich? Was the difference between Lothar Prutzmann and Odilo Globocnik on the one hand and Heinz Buckliger and Rolf Stolle on the other really so enormous?

Lise wished she hadn't asked herself the question that way. The answer looked much too much like yes.

She turned on the televisor. Most of the stations were broadcasting reruns of daytime dramas or quiz shows or weepy advice shows. Every so often, words would glide across the bottom of the screen.You are ordered to obey the decrees of the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich, the crawl said, over and over and over again.

The Berlin channel was different. It showed the crowd milling around Rolf Stolle's residence and, now, the stalled armored vehicles in front of it. "We are still here," a frightened-sounding announcer said over the noise of the crowd. "I don't know how long we can stay on the air, though. If we didn't have our own generator, we would have been shut down already. SS men have come here, but our guards turned them back. The guards have since been heavily reinforced by Wehrmacht troops."

Was that a warning to Prutzmann and his henchmen? Or was it a bluff? The announcer seemed nervous enough to make the latter seem a real possibility. But then the picture switched to a tape of Stolle kicking at a panzer's iron tire and bellowing at the SS man leaning out of the turret. Seeing the Gauleiter 's nerve made Lise willing to forgive the announcer's nerves.