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"Oh, thank you,Frau Stutzman," Dr. Dambach said when Esther set a foam cup of coffee on his desk. The pediatrician took a sip, then eyed her. "You're looking happy this morning."
"Am I?" Esther said. Her boss nodded. She shrugged and smiled. "Well, maybe I am. It's a beautiful day, isn't it?"
Dambach nodded again. "It certainly is. I saw more of it than I really wanted to, as a matter of fact."
"Did you?" Esther knew she was supposed to say something like that.
"I certainly did," Dambach answered. "I wanted to get here early so I could go through some of the medical journals that keep piling up"-sure enough, he had a stack of them on his desk, and a scalpel in place of a knife to open the pages of the numbers that didn't come cut from the printers-"but I got caught in a traffic jam, so I didn't come in more than five minutes earlier than usual."
"That's too bad," Esther said. "What happened? Was anyone badly hurt?"
Dr. Dambach shook his head. "It wasn't an accident. It was a political parade, if you can believe such a thing."
Up until very recently, Esther wouldn't have been able to believe it. The only parades allowed would have been those organized by the government, and they would have been publicized in advance. Someone efficient like Dambach would have known one was coming and would have chosen a route it didn't block. Things had changed, though. Esther asked, "Who was parading?"
"People who like that fat fraud of a Stolle," Dambach answered. "The man's out for himself first, last, and always. Anyone who can't see as much needs to go to an optometrist, if you ask me. Or do you think I'm wrong?" He tacked on the last question with the air of a man suddenly realizing the person he was talking to might disagree with him.
"I've told you before, I don't really pay a whole lot of attention to politics," Esther said. "I think everybody knows what our problems are. If the election could help get rid of some of them, that would be nice. And if it can't"-she shrugged-"then it can't, that's all."
"You have a sensible attitude," the pediatrician said. "Most people are fools. They expect the sun, the moon, and the little stars from this new Reichstag. Don't they see that most of the members will be the same old scoundrels who've been ru
"I suppose not." Esther paid more attention to politics than she let on. She had more hope for the election than she let on, too. That hope was probably what made her add, "Isn't conscience supposed to be the still, small voice that says someone may be watching? Maybe the Bonzen will behave better when they knew people can vote them out if they don't."
"Maybe." Plainly, Dambach went that far only to be polite. "My guess is, they'll hold this election and maybe one more, and then they'll forget about them again-and we'll go back to sleep for another seventy or eighty years."
"Well, you could be right." Esther retreated to the receptionist's station in a hurry. Her boss's cynicism was like a harvester rolling over the fragile young shoots of her optimism and cutting them down. Maybe Dambach was right. The whole history of the Reich argued that he was. But Esther didn't-wouldn't-like it.
She got busy with the billing. As long as she was thinking about that, she didn't have to worry about anything else. Irma should have taken care of more of it than she had the evening before. Fuming at her also kept Esther from fretting about politics.
And then patients and their parents-as always, mostly mothers-started coming in. Nobody could get excited about Rolf Stolle or Heinz Buckliger or Lothar Prutzma
Mothers talked in the waiting room, though thanks to their children she could hear them only fitfully. She did prick up her ears when Rolf Stolle's name came up. The woman who mentioned him wasn't talking about politics, though, or not exactly. If what she said was true, Stolle had made a pass at her sister. From everything Esther had heard, her sister was far from unique.
"That's not good," another mother said. Her toddler made a swipe for her glasses. She blocked the little arm with the practiced ease of someone who'd done it many times before. "That's not good, either, sweetheart," she told the boy, and then went back to politics: "Still, even if he does make passes at everything in a skirt, he won't send the blackshirts out to knock your door down in the middle of the night. Which counts for more?"
"Sometimes we need the Security Police," yet another woman said. "Look how they found a Jew a while ago. In this day and age, a Jew sneaking around in Berlin! If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what would."
All the women in the waiting room nodded. Esther had to nod, too. Someone might be watching her, wondering about her. Heinrich's arrest had made the papers and the radio and televisor. No one had said a public word about his release. As far as people knew, the blackshirts were doing their job, keeping Berlin and the Reich Judenfrei and safe from all sorts of Untermenschen. As far as people knew, that was an important job.
People didn't know as much as they thought they did. Esther wished she could tell them that. But they wouldn't listen, except for the ones who'd report her to Lothar Prutzma
A woman came out of an examination room leading a blond four-year-old boy by the hand. Esther made arrangements for a follow-up visit in a week, then called to one of the women in the waiting room: "You can bring Sebastian in now,Frau Schreckengost."
"About time!"Frau Schreckengost sniffed. "My appointment was for fifteen minutes ago, after all."
"I'm so sorry," Esther lied-Frau Schreckengost, a doughy, discontented-looking woman, was the one who'd said Germany needed the Security Police. "Dr. Dambach has to give all his patients as much time as they require."
"And keepme waiting,"Frau Schreckengost said. As far as she was concerned, the world revolved around her, with everyone else put in it merely to dance attendance upon her.
And if that didn't make her a typical German, Esther couldn't think of anything that would.
Susa
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 Susa