In The Presence Of My Enemies

Susanna Weiss turned on the news. She'd timed it perfectly. The computer graphics of the opening credits were just dissolving into Horst Witzleben's face. "Good evening," the newsreader said. "The Fuhrer today submitted an absentee ballot to the voting chairman of his precinct, as did his wife." The televisor showed Heinz Buckliger and his wife, a skinny blond woman named Erna, handing sealed envelopes to a uniformed official who looked slightly overwhelmed at having so much attention focused on him.

Witzleben went on, "The absentee ballots are necessary because the Buckligers will not be in Berlin for the election next week. They are going on holiday at the Croatian island of Hvar. Except for a ceremonial meeting with the Poglavnik of Croatia, they have no events scheduled for the time when they will be away, though it is expected that the Fuhrer will offer some comment on the results of the upcoming election."

He disappeared again. This time, the shot cut to Tempelhof Airport, where the Buckligers were shown boarding Luftwaffe Alfa. The big, specially modified jet airliner taxied down the runway and lumbered into the air. As usual, fighters escorted it to its destination.

"In other news," Horst Witzleben said, "the Gauleiter of Berlin continued to call for accelerated reform." There was Rolf Stolle, shouting away from the second-floor balcony of the Gauleiter 's residence to a few hundred people in the small square below. The scene seemed to Susanna a parody of the Fuhrer delivering an address to tens or hundreds of thousands of people in Adolf Hitler Platz.

But, as she realized when she'd watched a little more, it wasn'tjust a parody. It was also a comment, and a barbed one. Pounding his fist and bellowing up there on his little balcony with the old-fashioned iron railing (even rusty in places), Stolle made a genuine human connection with his audience. No Fuhrer since Hitler had been able to do that. The Reich and the Germanic Empire had grown too overwhelmingly large. By the nature of his job, the Fuhrer talked at people, talked down to them. Rolf Stolle reminded them what they were missing.

Of course, if he ever moved to the Fuhrer 's palace, he would have to behave as Himmler and Haldweim and Buckliger had before him. Behaving that way was part of what being the Fuhrer involved. Maybe Stolle didn't realize that yet. Maybe he did, but didn't want anyone else to know he did. Susanna wondered which would be more dangerous.

The Gauleiter got less air time than the Fuhrer. Horst Witzleben soon cut away to dramatic footage of an industrial accident in Saarbrucken. A helicopter plucked a workman out of what looked like a sea of flames. More than a dozen other Germans hadn't been so lucky. "Along with the Aryans, an unknown number of Untermenschen also perished," Horst said, and went on to the next story.

Laborers from Poland or Russia or the Ukraine or Serbia or Egypt who'd been lucky enough to be chosen to stoke furnaces or clean chemical tanks or do some other work too hard or too nasty for Aryans and do it till they dropped instead of going to the showers right away…This was their epitaph: one sentence on the evening news. It was more than most of their kind would ever get, too.

With a shiver, Susanna turned off the televisor. If they'd decided Heinrich was a Jew, he would have needed a miracle to get sent to one of those man-killing jobs. The powers that be would probably have just given him a noodle and gone on about their business. And there was no doubt at all about what would have happened to his girls. They were too young to do any useful work, and so…

"And so," Susanna muttered. She went into the kitchen and poured two fingers of Glenfiddich into a glass. She almost knocked it straight back, but that was a hell of a thing to do to a single-malt scotch.Ice? she wondered, and shook her head. She was chilly enough inside anyhow. She sipped the smoky, peat-flavored whiskey. Its warmth, dammit, couldn't reach where she was coldest.

That didn't stop her from topping up the drink a little later on. Put down enough and it would build a barrier against thought. She wasn't often tempted to get drunk, but that one dispassionate sentence on the news had gone a long way toward doing the trick. Heinz Buckliger talked about disclosing and ending abuses. Did he even begin to know what all the abuses in the Reich were? Susanna had begun to hope so. Now all her doubts came flooding back again.

The telephone rang. Her hand jerked-not enough, fortunately, to spill any scotch. "Who's that?" she asked God. God wasn't listening. When was the last time He'd ever listened to a Jew? It rang again. She walked over and picked it up."Bitte?"

"Professor Weiss? Uh, Susanna?" A man on the other end of the line, a nervous-sounding man.

"Yes? Who is this?" Not a student, whoever it was. No student would have had the nerve to call her by her first name, even hesitantly.

"This is Konrad Lutze, Susanna."