In The Presence Of My Enemies

Ice ran down Susanna's spine.Germany, awake! had been a Nazi slogan years before the Party took power. To hear it thrown in the face of the Reichsfuhrer -SS…to hear it thrown in Lothar Prutzmann's face made Susanna's mind up for her. She turned off the televisor and hurried out of her flat.

It was a lovely day. Puffy white clouds floated across the blue sky. A blackbird chirped in a linden tree, yellow beak open wide to let out the music. The breeze, which came out of the west, brought the clean smell of grass and flowers and other growing things from the Tiergarten only a few blocks away.

Rolf Stolle's residence wasn't far, either: easy walking distance. The Gauleiter of Berlin had stayed in the same old downtown building long after the national government and Party apparatus took up their quarters in the grandiose structures Hitler had run up one after another to celebrate his triumphs. National officials might have been telling the Berliners,You're not important enough to come along with us. The Nazis had always distrusted and looked down on freethinking, left-leaning Berlin.

And now, at long, long last, the Berliners had a chance-a slim chance, maybe only a ghost of a chance, but a chance-to pay them back. On that slim chance, Susanna hurried toward the Gauleiter 's residence. Her heels clicked out a quick rhythm on the slates of the sidewalk.

She didn't see unusual numbers of soldiers or SS men or, for that matter, Berlin policemen on the streets. Most of the shops were open. A lot of them had televisors gabbling away. Some were tuned to the national channels. Others-a surprising number-showed Rolf Stolle, who went on bellowing defiance at the world.

"Deutschland erwache!"a young man shouted from a side street. Cheers answered him. Susanna wished Rosa could have heard them.Maybe only a ghost of a chance, but a chance, she thought, and walked faster. Her shoes started to pinch. She should have chosen a more comfortable pair. Her shoulders straightened. She wasn't going back now.

When she rounded a corner a couple of blocks from Stolle's residence, she stopped in her tracks. Ahead was nothing but a sea of people. No, not quite nothing but: they'd made barricades of trash cans and benches and planters and whatever else they could get their hands on. Men and women scrambled over them and shakily perched on top. How much good would they do against panzers? Susanna feared she knew the answer to that, but the very fact that the Berliners had dared to run them up heartened her.

Flags fluttered over the crowd. Most were the usual national banners: the black swastika on a white disk in a red field. But, just as she'd got chills seeing pictures of vanished Czechoslovakia's flag flying in Prague, so she did here once more. A few of the banners waving around Rolf Stolle's residence showed the black, red, and gold of the Weimar Republic, which had been extinct even longer than the Czechoslovak state. If people dared showthat flag in public, maybe there really was hope.

She worked her way up the street and into the square that faced the residence. It took patience and the occasional shove. Everybody was trying to get closer to Rolf Stolle: to hear him if he came out, to protect him if the SS came after him. Feeling like a chamois or some other nimble creature of the Alps, she scrambled over an overturned trash can. It shook only a little under her feet; instead of garbage, it held dirt and stones and chunks of concrete, to make it harder to move. They'd also give people ammunition of sorts if the SS did come. Rocks against panzers…The mere idea was enough to make her wobbly.

When she stumbled, a fellow in a bus driver's uniform steadied her. "Thanks," she said.

"You're welcome." His grin showed crooked teeth and vast excitement. "This is fun, isn't it, telling the Bonzen to go stuff themselves?"

"It's-" Susanna had been about to deliver a brilliant off-the-cuff lecture on how important this moment was for the future of the Reich and the Volk. She found herself grinning back instead. "Yes, by God. Itis fun! We should have done it a long time ago." The bus driver's shiny-brimmed cap bobbed up and down as he nodded.

Televisor cameras on rooftops peered down at the crowd. Did they belong to the Berlin station, or was Lothar Prutzmann gathering evidence for later revenge? For that matter, why hadn't the SS knocked the Berlin station off the air by now? Maybe the blackshirts weren't as efficient as they wanted everybody to believe.

Some people waved to the cameras. Others aimed obscene gestures at them. Somewhere not far away, a raucous shout rang out: "All the world is watching! All the world is watching!"

It rose like the tide. "All the world is watching! All the world is watching!" Susanna joined in, hardly even realizing she was doing it. She hoped it was true. Itcould be. Other stations, in the Reich and beyond it, could be picking up the Berlin broadcasts and retransmitting them. They could-if they had the nerve.