Every so often, a chant of, "All the world is watching!" or, "We are the Volk! " would start up, last for a little while, and then die away. The rooftop cameras kept carrying pictures of the scene to the outside world. Heinrich hoped they did, anyhow. By the way the cameramen stayed with them, they were still working. He hoped so there, too. The more people who knew Berlin wasn't taking Lothar Prutzmann's
Putsch lying down, the better.
And then, instead of defiant chants, cries of alarm rang out from the distant fringes of the crowd: "Panzers! The panzers are coming!"
"Scheisse,"Willi Dorsch said, which summed up what ran through Heinrich's mind.
Some of the men and women who'd come to Stolle's residence decided they wanted no part of facing up to SS armor. They pressed away from the panzers and armored personnel carriers growling up the streets. Others as automatically advanced on the armored vehicles.After all these years, Berlin still breeds street fighters? Heinrich thought in amazement. He himself stood irresolute for a long moment.
Susanna surged toward the panzers without the slightest visible hesitation. The only thing that surprised Heinrich was that she didn't have a Molotov cocktail in one hand and a cigarette lighter in the other. After standing there for another few seconds, he went toward the armor, too. It didn't feel like bravery. Desperation was a much stronger part of the mix.
Willi grabbed his arm. "Are you nuts?"
"Probably." Heinrich shook free. "Go the other way, if you'd rather. I won't hold it against you."
"Scheisse,"Willi said again, in doleful tones. "You're going to get both of us shot, or more likely just run over." As Heinrich had waited before following Susanna, he waited before following Heinrich. But follow he did.
Berlin might still breed street fighters, but they were amateurs up against professionals. The panzers rolled over the barricades the crowd had run up as if they weren't there. As they crushed the second one, a horrible shriek rang out, for a moment rising above even the roar of their engines. After that, the lead panzer had blood on its left track.
The death might have broken the crowd. Instead, it infuriated the Berliners. They shook their fists at the black-coveralled panzer crewmen who rode with their heads and shoulders out of the vehicles. "Murderers!" they shouted. "Butchers! Assassins!Schweinehunde! "
Pulling a bullhorn out of the turret, the officer commanding the lead panzer aimed it at the crowd like a weapon. "Disperse!" he blared. "Disperse, in the name of the Volk of the Greater German Reich."
But that only roused fresh fury among his foes. "We are the Volk!" they shouted, over and over again. "We are the Volk!" Some of them added, "And who the hell are you?" They swarmed toward the armored vehicles. The driver of the lead machine stopped. He could only go forward by crushing scores of people under his treads-or by pulling out his personal weapon and opening fire on the crowd. He didn't. He was a fresh-faced young man, probably under twenty, and seemed astonished that people weren't listening to his superior's orders.
"Go home!" His superior seemed astonished, too, even with his voice electronically amplified. "Go home, and you will not be harmed!"
"We are the Volk! Weare the Volk!We are the Volk!" The chant swelled and swelled. Through it, individuals shouted insults at Lothar Prutzmann: "He's afraid of elections!" "He threw down the Fuhrer because he wants the job himself!" "He wants you to murder Stolle the same way you just murdered that poor sap at the barricade!"
By then, Heinrich was up within ten or twelve meters of the lead panzer. He could see the frown on the driver's face, and the deeper one on the panzer commander's. Things were not going according to plan. The SS men didn't like that at all, and didn't seem to know what to do about it.
And Heinrich could also see the panzer's two machine guns, and the enormous yawning bore of the cannon. If the commander ordered a couple of rounds of high-explosive or, if he had it, grapeshot…He'd clear a path in front of him, all right. His panzer, and the vehicles behind it, would wade in gore all the way to Rolf Stolle's residence.Some of that gore would be mine, too. Heinrich wondered why he wasn't even more frightened.Because it's too late now, he decided.If he does start shooting, I can't do anything about it. He looked around for Susanna. He could hear her, somewhere not far away, but he couldn't see her.
"Disperse!" the panzer commander shouted again through the bullhorn. "Go peacefully to your homes, and you will not be harmed. In the name of the Volk of the Greater German Reich, disperse!" That was what they'd told him to say before he set out from his barracks, and he stubbornly went right on saying it.
They didn't seem to have told him what to do if it didn't work. And it didn't. Instead of making the people around Stolle's residence leave, it just seemed to make them more stubborn, too. "We are the Volk!" they shouted back, ever louder. "Weare the Volk!We are the Volk!"
The SS officer stared at them, his gray eyes wide. What was going on in his mind? Did he understand that what he'd been told and what he was seeing and hearing didn't add up? How could henot understand? Heinrich laughed at himself. SS men weren't trained to understand anything but the brute simplicity of orders.
But in that case, why hadn't this fellow already opened fire? Did he realize thatwas the Volk in front of him? Heinrich laughed again. Questions. Answering questions. What else was an analyst good for? When these questions got answered, it was all too likely to be with blood and iron. Bismarck could turn a phrase, all right.
Meanwhile, the tableau held. "We are the Volk!" Heinrich shouted again. Did the SS officer believe him, believe the others? He didn't start shooting, anyhow. "Weare the Volk!"
Gustav Priepke plopped his fat bottom down on the corner of Walther's desk. "It's a goddamn crock, that's what it is," Walther's boss said. On a smaller scale, he reminded Walther a little of Rolf Stolle.
"It certainly is," Walther answered, hoping Priepke would go away if he didn't say much. He wasn't supposed to have access to the networks where he needed to plant rumors about Lothar Prutzmann. How could he get at them with Priepke staring over his shoulder? He couldn't, and he knew it.
"Odilo Globocnik?" His boss shook his head. "Sounds like a goddamn skin disease. And Lothar Prutzmann? Lothar Prutzmann is a dose of the clap, and he aims to give it to the Reich."
"Uh-huh." Walther looked at the pictures of Esther and Gottlieb and Anna on the gray, fuzzy wall of his cubicle. He looked up at the sound-absorbing tiles on the ceiling. He looked everywhere but at Gustav Priepke. He agreed with every word Priepke said. But the longer Priepke hung around saying it, the less chance he had to try to set things right.
"They say Buckliger's ill. My ass!" his boss said. "They're sick of him, that's what. I just hope to Christ they haven't given him a noodle, eh?"
"Uh-huh," Walther said again, and then, "You know, you'd better be careful. If you keep carrying on like that, people are liable to remember."
Gustav Priepke slid off the desk like a walrus sliding off an ice floe. He said, "If you're not going to show some balls now, goddammit, when will you ever? Or maybe you haven't got any to show?" When Walther didn't answer, Priepke lumbered off, shaking his head.
Walther swore softly. He'd just lost his boss's good opinion. But now, good opinion or not, maybe he could do more than grouse about what was going on. Maybe.
If anybody came into his cubicle while he was doing it, he was dead. That meant he had to work fast. If he made a mistake, though, he was just as dead. Sweat ran down his face and streamed from his armpits. He could smell his own fear. Just making his fingers hit the right keys was an effort.