"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?