In The Presence Of My Enemies

"We'll see what happens when Buckliger comes home, that's all," Willi said. "If he lets this ride…" He didn't go on, or need to. If the Fuhrer accepted a rebuke like this, any hope of change was dead, and things would go on as they always had. If Buckliger didn't accept it, though…If he didn't accept it, things were liable to get very interesting very fast.

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."