Susanna Weiss got back from a shopping run along the Kurfurstendamm a little past seven on a cold, snowy February evening. She set down her packages-three pairs of shoes, including some gloriously impractical high-heeled sandals-took off her foxskin hat, and got out of her overcoat. Then she dithered for a moment, wondering whether to make dinner right away or sit down and watch the rest of the news first.
She poured a knock of Glenfiddich over ice and turned on the televisor. That wasn't Horst Witzleben's face that appeared on the screen. It was Charlie Lynton's. The head of the British Union of Fascists spoke good, if accented, German. He was saying, "-intend here to bring the democratic principles of the first edition into effect as soon as possible. Most seats in the next Parliamentary elections will be contested. I particularly admire the Fuhrer for looking on this course with favor, and for recognizing that he need not yield to the forces of reaction."
His image disappeared. Horst's replaced it. "Along with the Scandinavian leaders, Great Britain stands foursquare behind the Greater German Reich 's revitalization effort," the newscaster said. "We'll be back in a moment."
The picture cut away to an obviously German farm family somewhere in the conquered East-probably on the broad plains of the Ukraine. The advertisement was for Agfa color film. The smiling father took pictures of his wife and children. Relatives in a crowded German apartment admired them when they came in the mail. That not only promoted the film, it also urged Germans to go out and colonize. The Propaganda Ministry didn't miss a trick. Susanna smiled when that phrase went through her mind. It made her think of Heinrich and his passion for bridge.
Another advertisement followed, this one for Volkswagens. They still looked buggy, as they had for more than seventy years. But the lines were smoother, more rounded, now. The engine had moved to the front, the trunk to the rear. The engine was water-cooled these days, and didn't sound flatulent. The bumpers were actually good for something besides decoration. The VW still had a bud vase on the dashboard, though.
Horst Witzleben returned. "In St. Wenceslas Square in Prague, several hundred persons gathered near the statue of the saint to protest the incorporation of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia into the Reich, " he said.
St. Wenceslas' equestrian statue was surrounded by figures of other Bohemian saints. Counting the large base, the statue stood seven or eight times as high as a man. It dwarfed the men and women at its base and the signs they carried. Some of those signs were in German. They said things like FREEDOM FOR THE CZECHS! and WE REMEMBER! Others, in Czech, presumably said the same thing.
And some of the demonstrators carried flags: the blue, white, and red banners of the long-vanished Republic of Czechoslovakia. A chill ran through Susanna when she recognized those flags. How many years had it been since anyone dared show them in public? Almost as amazing as the sight of the Czechoslovak flags was that of the policemen who stood watching the demonstration without storming in to break it up and throw everybody in sight into jail or a concentration camp.
"Because the protest was peaceful and orderly, no arrests were made," Horst Witzleben said, and he went on to a different story. He spoke as if that had been standard practice in the Third Reich from the beginning, not the next thing to a miracle.
A fat official pontificated about improvements to the harbor in Hamburg. Susanna hardly heard him. Though they'd vanished from the screen, she kept seeing those Czechoslovak flags fluttering in the long shadow St. Wenceslas cast. If those flags could come out of the dark backward and abysm of time-if they could come out and survive-what else might follow them? Susanna shivered with awe.
And then something else occurred to her. She shivered again, this time a lot less happily. Did even Heinz Buckliger know all that might follow if he let people say what they really thought? No one in the Greater German Reich, no one in the part of the Germanic Empire on this side of the Atlantic, had been able to do that for a lifetime. How much was bottled up? And how would it come out?
When the telephone on his desk rang, Heinrich jumped. That happened about a third of the time. When he was really concentrating, the outside world seemed to disappear. It seemed to, but it didn't. As if to prove as much, the phone rang again.
He picked it up. Willi was laughing at him. Ignoring his friend, he used his best professional tones: "Analysis Section, Heinrich Gimpel speaking."
"Hello, Heinrich." Had Willi heard the voice on the other end of the line, he would have stopped laughing, and in a hurry: it was Erika.
"Hello." Heinrich did his best to keep his own voice normal. It wasn't easy. "What…what can I do for you?"
"I'm at my sister's house. Leonore lives at 16 Burggrafen-Strasse, just south of the Tiergarten. Do you know where that is?"
"Yes, I think so," Heinrich said automatically. Then he wished he could deny everything. Too late, of course. For wishes like that, it always was.
"Good," Erika said: another questionable assumption. "Come over at lunchtime. We need to talk."
"You, me, and your sister?" Heinrich said in surprise. He hardly knew Erika's sister. Leonore, if he remembered right, was separated from a mid-ranking SS officer. She was a year or two younger than Erika and looked a lot like her, but wasn't quite so…carnivorouswas the word that came to Heinrich's mind. He asked, "What about?"
"I'm not going to go into it on the phone," Erika said, which, considering that the lines into Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters were monitored as closely as any in the Reich, was probably a good idea.
Heinrich thought it over. If Leonore were there, things couldn't get too far out of hand. And even if they did, all he had to do was walk out. "All right," he said. "I'll see you a little past twelve." Erika hung up without another word.
Willi looked up from whatever he was working on. "Going out to lunch with Lise and her sister, eh?" he said, proving he'd been snooping.
Thank God I didn't say Leonore's name,Heinrich thought. He managed a rather sickly answering smile. That avoided the lie direct, anyhow. Willi took it for agreement. He went back to the papers scattered across his desk. Heinrich, who kept his work area almost surgically neat, wondered how Willi ever found anything. But he did. Though he had his problems, that wasn't one of them.
When Heinrich wanted to do something at lunch, the time before he could leave crawled on hands and knees. Today, when he really didn't, hours flew by. Had he done anything more than blink once or twice before he got up from his desk? If he had, it didn't feel that way. At the same time, Willi headed out the door with Ilse. That had to mean Rolf Stolle never called her back. Willi was smirking. Seeing him with the secretary made Heinrich a little less uncomfortable about paying a call on his wife, but only a little.
Why didn't I say no?Heinrich wondered, waiting for the bus that would take him up to the park. He could have stood Erika and her sister up even after saying yes, but that never occurred to him. What he said he would do, he did.
Brakes squealing, the bus stopped in front of him. He climbed aboard, stuck his account card in the slot, and then put it back in his pocket. The bus wasn't too crowded. He sat down as it pulled out into traffic.
Ten minutes later, he got off at Wichmannstrasse, a little north of Burggrafen-Strasse. When he looked across to the Tiergarten, he saw that it wasn't very crowded, either. Not surprising, on this cold, gray winter's day. A few stubborn people sat on the benches and fed the squirrels and the few stubborn birds that hadn't flown south.
Reluctantly, he turned his back on the park and walked south down Wichmannstrasse to where it branched, then turned right onto Burggrafen-Strasse. The neighborhood dated from the last years of the nineteenth century or the start of the twentieth. Time had mellowed the bricks on the housefronts. Here and there, gray or greenish or even orange lichen spread over the brickwork, as if it came not from the time of the Kaisers but from the Neolithic age.