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"Everything was fine when I left the house this morning," Esther said, still dazed. "Or I thought it was, anyhow."
"Well, it isn't fine now," Dambach said. "Heaven only knows when it'll be fine again. Talk about your hypocrites and whited sepulchers!" He made as if to spit again, and again seemed barely able to check himself.
"What do you mean?" Esther asked.
"Don't you recall?" Dr. Dambach said in surprise. "The whole business with the Kleins and how they escaped the suspicion of being Jews after they had that poor baby with Tay-Sachs disease?"
"Of course I remember that they ended up being set free," Esther answered. "Didn't that nasty man from the Reichs Genealogical Office say they got away because Lothar Prutzma
"Maximilian Ebert. A nasty man indeed." Dambach's round face was roundly disapproving. "But you seem to miss the point, or at least part of the point. What is the most likely explanation for the fact that Prutzma
"I'm very sorry, Doctor, but you're right-I think I am missing the point," Esther said.
The pediatrician clucked reproachfully. "The most likely explanation for the fact that Lothar Prutzma
Esther hadn't known she looked horrified, but she supposed she might have. She remembered the hidden Jew, the practicing Jew, in the SS who'd helped Heinrich escape. He wasn't one of the little group of which she was a part. Walther hadn't been able to identify him for sure even after tapping into SS records. Whoever he was, though, he'd preserved his identity. Lothar Prutzma
Dr. Dambach rammed that point home: "Nothing but a damned hypocrite-excuse me, please-as I told you before. 'Duty-bound to the highest conception of Aryan blood and honor,' the Reichsfuhrer -SS claimed, when the odds are he is not fully of Aryan blood himself. Tell me,Frau Stutzman, where is the honor in a lie?"
"I…don't see it, either," Esther said. Her boss nodded. Why not? She'd agreed with him. If that didn't make her a clear thinker, what would? She went on, "Do you mind if I call my husband from here, Dr. Dambach? I'd like to meet him for lunch."
"Go right ahead," Dambach answered. "But would you be kind enough to put the coffee on first? I really would like some, but I held off on making it till you got here. You always have better luck with the machine than I do."
It's not luck. It's following the bloody directions. But Esther said, "I'll take care of it right away." A Putsch might have overthrown the Fuhrer, but Dr. Dambach messing with the coffee machine would have been a real catastrophe…
Susa
The telephone rang-once, twice, three times. Then a woman picked it up. "Department of Germanic Languages."
"Guten Morgen,Rosa," Susa
"Yes, of course,Fraulein Doktor Professor," Rosa answered. "Now that we're finally rid of that stinking Buckliger, a lot of people are celebrating."
"I'm sure they are," Susa
She switched the televisor to the Berlin cha
Ice ran down Susa
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, Susa
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 cha
"Deutschland erwache!"a young man shouted from a side street. Cheers answered him. Susa
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? Susa
Flags fluttered over the crowd. Most were the usual national ba