In The Presence Of My Enemies

"I ought to make you take off your shoes and see if you're hiding breakfast in there," Lise said. The girls made faces at her. The time they'd spent in that foundlings' home didn't seem to have done them any harm. Francesca and Roxane were still sure they'd gone there by mistake. Alicia knew better, even if she couldn't say so while her sisters were around. But even she was young enough to have a lot more resilience than most grownups would have. And she was young enough for death not to seem altogether real to her, which also helped.

Lise wished she could say the same. She'd died ten thousand times before her husband and children came home.

Then Roxane raced up the stairs with a wail of dismay: "I forgot to do my arithmetic homework!"

Unlike her sisters, she did such things every once in a while. This time, at least, she remembered she'd forgotten. "Work fast!" Lise called. "You still have to catch the bus."

"We could go on, Mommy," Francesca said.

"No, wait for your sister. You've got time." Lise looked at the clock on the range. "I hope you've got time. She'd better not take too long." Another glance at the clock. Why couldn't mornings ever run smoothly?Because then they wouldn't be mornings, that's why.

"She could do some of her homeworkon the bus," Alicia suggested.

"Let her do as much as she can upstairs," Lise said. Roxane liked to chat with friends when she rode to and from school. She was always talking about how they said this to that, or that about this. Once she was out of the house, even the threat of getting in trouble might not hold her to doing what she needed to do. "Hurry up, Roxane!"

"I'm hurrying!" That was a frantic screech.

Just when Lise was about to go upstairs and get her littlest daughter, Roxane came pounding down. "All right. I'm done." She was all smiles again.

"For heaven's sake, try to remember to do your homework when you're supposed to," Lise said. Roxane nodded solemnly. She'd be good now-till the next time she wasn't. Then they would go through this again.Well, so what? Lise thought.Next to getting arrested and killed, forgotten arithmetic isn't so much of a much, now is it?

Kisses all around. If Lise's were more heartfelt than they had been before the girls got taken away-well, then they were, that was all. Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane probably didn't even notice. Good-byes. Out the door the girls went. There was Emma Handrick, just coming out of her house up the street. If she wasn't late, they weren't, either. And she wasn't. So they weren't.

Lise closed the door. Sudden quiet inside the house. Not just quiet-peace. Time seemed to slow down after the frantic jangling of getting her family off to work and school. Now she could fix herself another cup of coffee, sit back, and listen to music for a little while. She could, and she would. After half an hour or so, her own batteries recharged, she could get on with the things she had to do today.

Plenty of cream and plenty of sugar in the coffee, a Strauss waltz coming from the radio, a couple of song thrushes and a blackbird hopping in the back yard hunting for worms…It wasn't bad. It would have been better if she hadn't gone through terror not long before, but it wasn't bad.

And then the waltz disappeared. It hadn't ended; it just stopped, halfway through. Close to a minute of dead air followed.Somebody's going to catch it, Lise thought. Foulups like that didn't happen very often.

Music began again. But this still wasn't the vanished waltz. It was "Deutschland uber Alles." The "Horst Wessel Song" came hard on its heels. Lise's brief sense of peace had shattered well before she heard the second national anthem. There hadn't been a mistake at the radio station. Something had gone wrong, badly wrong, somewhere in the wider world.

The "Horst Wessel Song" ended. After another stretch of silence, a man's voice came on the air: "The following important statement comes to you from the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich."

What the devil is the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich?Lise wondered. She'd never heard of it. The government had nine million different committees and bureaus and commissions, so she didn't know how much that proved, but if it wasn't important, what was it doing on the air like this?

"the Fuhrer, Heinz Buckliger, has been taken ill on the island of Hvar," the man said. "As a result of this illness, he no longer has the capacity to rule our beloved Reich. Under such emergency conditions, the State Committee will administer affairs."

Lise frowned. That sounded like…But it couldn't be. Nobody since the Night of the Long Knives, more than seventy-five years earlier, had tried to seize power like this.