The train pulled into South Station. Heinrich and Willi went up to catch the bus to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. Whenever Heinrich saw somebody carrying a Volkischer Beobachter, he tried to eavesdrop. How were Berliners taking this? For that matter, how were people in Breslau and Bonn and other second-rate towns taking it? This might not play out so neatly, or so quickly.
He heard only two snatches of conversation, both from people going down escalators as he was going up past them. One was "-damn fool-" and the other "-about time-"…and both could have meant anything or nothing. So much for eavesdropping.
Nobody on the bus out of South Station seemed to be talking about "Enough Is Enough." That might have been out of a sense of self-preservation; people on that bus were heading for the beating heart of the Greater German Reich and of the Germanic Empire. Or it might just have been to drive Heinrich crazy. He wouldn't have been surprised.
When he got off in front of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters, he looked across Adolf Hitler Platz to the Fuhrer 's palace. Buckliger wasn't there now, of course. But if he didn't already have a copy of the Volkischer Beobachter, he would soon. What he did after that would say a lot about who ran the Reich.
As usual, Heinrich and Willi gave the guards at the top of the stairs their identification cards. One of the guards said, "We'll see if Stolle wants the blackshirts standing watch over him after what's in today's papers."
"Would you?" Willi asked. The guard waited till the card showed green on the machine reader, then shook his head.
That aspect of things hadn't occurred to Heinrich until then. If he were Rolf Stolle, would he want Prutzmann's henchmen keeping him safe? He didn't think so. Who could arrange a tragic accident more easily than bodyguards? Nobody. Nobody in all the world.
Ilse was on the telephone when Heinrich and Willi walked into their big office. She hung up a moment later, her face flushed with excitement. "The Gauleiter is taking me out to lunch today! Me! Can you believe it? Isn't it amazing?"
Heinrich didn't say anything. Willi said, "Amazing," in tones suggesting the only thing along those lines to delight him more would have been an outbreak of bubonic plague. Ilse might not even have noticed his gloom. Next to Rolf Stolle, a budget analyst wasn't amazing at all.
How would Willi handle that? Heinrich sat down, got to work, and watched his friend from the corner of his eye. Willi sat there and fumed: so openly that Heinrich wondered if the office smoke detectors would start buzzing. If Stolle came to pick Ilse up, he might need protection against more than Lothar Prutzmann and the SS.
But the Gauleiter of Berlin didn't come in person. And the men who did take Ilse off to whatever rendezvous Stolle had set up weren't the blackshirted guards who'd accompanied him on his last visit to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. They wore the gray uniforms of ordinary Berlin policemen, men much more likely to follow Stolle than Prutzmann. Willi noticed that, too. Heinrich could see it on his face. It didn't make him look any happier.
Willi's worries, of course, were personal. Heinrich's were more on the order of,If the SS tries to assassinate Stolle, could those fellows keep him safe? Only one answer sprang to mind-how the devil do I know?
Ilse came back from lunch very, very late, with a big bouquet of roses in her arms and schnapps on her breath. She giggled a lot and didn't do much work the rest of the afternoon. Somehow, Heinrich doubted Rolf Stolle had spent their time together talking about how to reform National Socialism.
Lise Gimpel got the last of the dishes in the sink as her husband called, "Hurry up, sweetheart. Horst is just coming on."
"Here I am." Lise sat down beside him on the sofa. She couldn't help adding, "I'd have been here sooner if you'd helped."
"Oh." Heinrich looked astonished, as if that hadn't occurred to him. It probably hadn't. She was just going to beat him about the head and shoulders for his male iniquity when he asked, "Why didn't you say something sooner, when I could have given you a hand?"
That hadn't occurred to her. "I thought you'd be tired from your day at the office."
"By now we're both tired. It's the tired time of day."
He was right about that. Before Lise could say so, Horst Witzleben's handsome, blond, ultra-Aryan features filled the screen. A moment later, after the newscaster's greeting, the scene cut away to a Junkers jet airliner-Luftwaffe Alfa,the code name was-landing at Tempelhof Airport. "Our beloved Fuhrer, Heinz Buckliger, returned to the capital this afternoon after a highly successful tour of the Scandinavian countries," Witzleben said. "He spoke briefly to reporters before going on to his official residence."
The televisor showed Buckliger standing behind a lectern ornamented with the usual gilded Germanic eagle holding a swastika in its claws. Heinrich leaned forward intently. "This is important, really important," he said. "If he ignored the piece that Jahnke put out last week-"
"Why don't you just listen and find out what he said?" Lise asked. Her husband looked flabbergasted again, so much so that she almost laughed at him.
"I was pleased to visit our fellow-Aryan friends and neighbors to the north," the Fuhrer said, "and particularly pleased to hear their leaders' expressions of support for the course upon which the Reich has embarked. Those leaders feel, as I do, that anyone who seeks to put the brakes on reform is suffering from a bad case of nostalgia for the dead days that will not and cannot return."
"Yes!" Heinrich exploded, as if the German team had scored the winning goal in overtime in the World Cup finals.
"It is proving harder than expected to get rid of old thoughts and habits, but we must not turn back," Buckliger went on. "Recently, some have claimed that we can justify everything that has happened in terms of world-historical necessity. But not all such deeds can be explained away. They are alien to the principles of National Socialism and only took place because of deviations from basic National Socialist ideals."
He went on from there, but that was the meat of it. When he finished, the picture cut back to Horst Witzleben. The newsreader said, "While certain uninformed persons have taken irresponsible positions in the papers, the Fuhrer has made it unmistakably clear that a freer examination of the past and the lessons to be drawn from it is essential to strengthening and reforming National Socialist thought and practice."
Heinrich leaned over and kissed Lise. The kiss developed a life of its own. Suddenly, he didn't seem tired at all. On the screen, Horst kept on talking, but she had no idea what he was talking about. She didn't much care, either. When they finally broke apart, she said, "Gott im Himmel!If I'd known politics didthat for you, I'd have got interested in it a long time ago."
He laughed. She might have been half kidding. On the other hand, she might not have. She wasn't sure herself. He said, "Up till last year, politics just made me want to get sick. But now they're…exciting, you know what I mean?"
"I certainly thought so," she said. She kissed him this time.
"What are the children doing?" he asked hoarsely when they came up for air again.
"Something in their bedrooms. Something too close to our bedroom. We ought to wait till they go to bed."
"Some things shouldn't wait." Her husband let his hand fall on her thigh. "Do you think we can get away with it if we're quick? The worst that can happen is, they embarrass us a little."