"I thought about that," Heinrich said. "I can't see anything. Can you? She's not going to pour gasoline on the house and set it on fire, or anything like that."
"I suppose not," Lise admitted. She didn't stop worrying, though. How could any Jew in her right mind stop worrying? If you weren't worrying, you were likely to miss something that might kill you.
"Is it all right?" Heinrich asked anxiously.
"It could be better," Lise said, and he flinched. Considering all the things that might have happened, and all the different kinds of unpleasantness that might have sprung from them, she decided she had to relent, and she did: "It could be worse, too. So I guess it's all right. But if any more beautiful blondes make a play for you, you might want to let me know a little sooner."
"I promise," he said.
She snorted. "Or, of course, you might not want to let me know at all. But I hope you do." He had no answer for that, which was, in its own way, reassuring.
When Susanna Weiss watched Czechs demonstrating on the televisor without getting arrested, she was astonished. When she saw Frenchmen demonstrating, she was shocked. But there they were, marching by the Arc de Triomphe with signs that said "LIBERTY,EQUALITY,FRATERNITY!" That slogan had been outlawed for seventy years. Ever since 1940, the motto of the French state had been Work, Family, Country. But, while the older phrase might have been forbidden, it hadn't been forgotten. Here it was, for all the world to see.
As in Prague, policemen stood around watching without doing anything. In their round, flat-crowned kepis, they looked even more French than the demonstrators. But they collaborated with the Reich more enthusiastically than the Czechs did-or they had up till now, anyhow.
For the French, collaboration had meant survival. To Germany, Czechoslovakia had been an annoyance. France had been the deadly foe. Crushed in 1870, avenged in 1918, she'd been crushed once more in 1940 and never allowed to get off her knees again. From that day till this, French Fascists had toed the German line. Anyone who didn't toe the line disappeared, mostly forever. When Germany spat, France swam. But while she swam, she breathed, if softly.
And now, with anyone who'd lived under liberty, equality, and fraternity a white-haired ancient, these Frenchmen-and a few Frenchwomen, too-showed they remembered them. And they got away with it. Susanna stared and stared.
Horst Witzleben said, "This peaceful demonstration was photographed by a German cameraman. No French televisor coverage was on the scene. The French regime would sooner not admit its citizens can find fault with it."
Susanna stuck a finger in her ear. "Did I really hear that?" she asked. No one was in the apartment with her but the cat, and Gawain, fat, lazy thing that he was, lay asleep on the sofa, his tail curled over the tip of his nose. But Susanna had to ask somebody. Germans had been making scornful gibes about Frenchmen since the very beginnings of the Reich, and no doubt long before. Still, Susanna had never heard one like this. It said,We're going somewhere new, and you haven't got the nerve to follow us.
The next story was about corruption in the Iron Guard, the Romanian Fascist party. Susanna had no trouble believing there was corruption in the Iron Guard. They'd held power for a long time, and corruption wasn't rare in the Balkans (or, come to that, anywhere else). Talking about it was. When a fat Iron Guard official who spoke German with a comic-opera accent spluttered out denials, he did his cause more harm than any accuser could have.
She wondered if the story after the St. Pauli Girl beer advertisement would be subversive, too, but it wasn't: it talked about the Brazilian football team, one of the favorites in the upcoming World Cup. Susanna almost switched it off; she had only slightly more interest in football than in suicide. But the longer she watched the piece, the more interesting it got. Here were some of the finest footballers in the world, footballers expected to give the mighty Germans a run for their money. Were they Aryans? Hardly. Oh, several of them obviously had some white blood. But Negro and American Indian ancestry predominated on the Brazilian team.
"Isn't that interesting?" Susanna murmured. The people at the Propaganda Ministry were working with a light hand. They weren't saying,Look at these Brazilian mongrels. They're really quite impressive, aren't they? Instead, the message was simply,This is what the team that will challenge Germany looks like. If watchers decided the Brazilian mongrels were impressive, they'd do it on their own. That they were getting the chance was remarkable enough.
Heinz Buckliger had said before that he had his doubts about the Nazis' racial doctrines. He and his people were practicing what he'd preached. Here they'd shown black and brown men as human beings.
Would they ever do the same with Jews? Susanna wasn't going to hold her breath. For one thing, in National Socialist dogma Jews and Aryans were natural enemies, like capitalists and proletarians in the dead lore of Communism. For another, Jews' craftiness made them all the more dangerous. And, for a third, Jews were thought to be extinct, so why bother rehabilitating them? Even the most radical reforms had limits.
Walther Stutzman used a couple of different portals to get into SS databases and see what the blackshirts were up to. He didn't like messing with them. Any time he poked around in there, he exposed himself to a certain risk of detection, even if he did have the proper passwords and some highly improper masking programs. Every so often, he went sniffing in spite of the risk. Not knowing what Lothar Prutzmann and his cohorts were up to was also risky.
Today at lunch, he started in at one of the usual places, a weak spot that had been in the software ever since his father put it there. If and when the Reich finally did go over to the long-promised new operating system, it would have weak spots, too. Walther had put a few into the code himself. Out of so many millions of lines, who would find those few? One of these days, his son Gottlieb could exploit them.
That was what he was thinking as he started the electronic journey toward Lothar Prutzmann's secrets. More from habit than for any other reason, he kept an eye on the monitor as the probe went through. When he saw an alphanumeric group that didn't look the way it was supposed to, he blinked. When he saw two, ice ran through him and he hit the ABORT key. If that wasn't a trap, he'd never seen one. Now he sat there wondering if it had caught him.
He didn't think so. He had programs that would muddy the trail, and he hadn't gone in far enough to be fully noosed…had he? He paused in indecision, something he didn't do very often. Then, reluctantly, he nodded to himself. Only one way to find out, and he badly needed to know.
He liked the second portal less than the first. It was closer to a busy stream of electronic traffic. If he made a mistake, he'd stick out like blood on the snow.Just like that, he thought unhappily. And if the bloodhounds were waiting for him here, too…
His finger stayed on the ABORT key all the way through the insertion process. If the hounds had been a little more subtle, they would have nabbed him the first time. He hated giving them another chance.
But, as far as he could tell, everything went fine now. He got inside the SS network without its being any the wiser. And, once he was inside, he could look at the other portal from the rear, so to speak. The trap pointed outward. He'd thought it would. People who designed traps like that were convinced of their own cleverness. They didn't think anyone could sneak up on them from behind.
And they had been very clever indeed, even if not quite clever enough. The more Walther studied their trap, the nastier it looked. If his probe had gone just a little farther through the portal, it would have been seized and traced back to its beginnings, and not one of his masking programs was likely to have done him much good. Oh, yes, the thing had teeth, sharp ones.