In The Presence Of My Enemies

Police cars raced up, sirens screeching. The men inside them wore pig-snouted gas masks. They shot tear-gas canisters into the riot. Where nothing else had worked, that did. Fascists for and against the first edition fled.

So did Susanna, not quite soon enough. Her eyes were streaming and her stomach twisting with nausea when she made it back into the lobby of the Silver Eagle. The academics in there were fleeing, too, for fresh wisps of gas came in every time the doors opened.

Susanna repaired to the bar, which seemed a popular port in the storm. Of course, the bar was a popular port in the storm at every academic conference she'd ever attended. She took off her glasses and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. It didn't help much. The single-malt Scotch she ordered didn't help her eyes much, either, but it made the rest of her feel better.

"Dear God in heaven," said a British professor who also staggered in weeping like a fountain, "whatis going on out there?"

Susanna eyed him-blurrily. "Literary criticism," she said.

"Achtung! Form your lines!"Herr Kessler shouted as the schoolchildren got off the bus to one side of the Great Hall. He sounded more like a Wehrmacht drill sergeant than a teacher-but then, that was true a lot of the time. "Take your partner's hand! Hold your flag in your free hand! Now-forward to the end of the queue!"

Alicia Gimpel took Emma Handrick's hand. The alphabet made them line partners, as it made them sit close together. Alicia wished she were paired with someone else. Emma had cold, sweaty palms. Nothing Alicia could do about it. She imagined complaining to Herr Kessler. Imagining the paddling she would get for trying it immediately squelched the idea.

The swastika flag she held in her left hand was bordered in black, a token of mourning for the departed Fuhrer. Kurt Haldweim lay in state under the monstrous dome of the Great Hall. Along with other children from all over Berlin-from all over Germany-Alicia and her school-mates would file past his body and then line the parade route as his funeral procession went past.

"This way!"Herr Kessler shouted.

"No-over here," a uniformed attendant said, pointing in the opposite direction. "Your group is to take its place behind those bigger children." Fuming, his face beet red, the teacher led them to the right place.

"He doesn't know everything," Emma whispered, and smiled maliciously. For that, Alicia forgave her her sweaty palm.

The line moved forward with what the world had learned to call Germanic efficiency. Not even Herr Kessler could find anything to complain about there. Within twenty minutes, Alicia and her classmates had entered the Great Hall. The space under that unbelievable dome seemed even vaster within than without. The interior appointments had a simple grandeur to them. A recess clad in gold mosaic opposite the entrance broke a circle of a hundred marble columns, each twenty-five meters tall. In front of the recess, on a marble pedestal fourteen meters high, stood a German eagle with a swastika in its claws. And in front of the pedestal lay the mortal remains of Kurt Haldweim.

Floral decorations and shrubbery surrounded the casket of gilded bronze in which the Fuhrer lay in state. SS guards stood on either side of the coffin, displaying the many decorations Haldweim had won in his long, illustrious career as a soldier and National Socialists administrator. Yet try as they would, the wizards of ceremony who had staged this scene could not overcome one basic difficulty: the Great Hall altogether dwarfed the pale, still remains of the hawk-faced man who had ruled the Germanic Empire for a quarter of a century.

Haldweim had been Fuhrer far longer than Alicia had been alive; to her, then, he was as one with the Pyramids of Egypt. But the Pyramids remained, and now he was gone. If anything, his last surroundings stressed how transitory any mere man was. To make any sort of show at all, he would have had to be the size of a Brachiosaurus. Alicia had always imagined the Fuhrer as being more than a man, but here she saw at first hand it wasn't so.

Young mourners went by in a steady stream, almost close enough to touch the nearest wreaths. With a ten-year-old's instinctive love of horror, Alicia wondered what would happen if anybody did. She supposed one of those SS men-each as still now as if himself carved from stone-would suddenly spring to life and shoot the miscreant. Or maybe even that wouldn't be enough. Maybe they would drag him away to SS headquarters and take their time disposing of him.

Then she was past the display, past the coffin, past the wizened corpse inside, and walking quickly towards a door of simply human proportions that led out to Adolf Hitler Platz. The square was already filling with people either in uniform-military, Party, and SS-or in civilian mourning attire. "We won't be able to see," Emma whispered in dismay.