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"But how could it be different?" Willi asked. "What other way to do things is there?" He'd said Heinrich was more content living in the world as it was, but he was the one for whom that world was water to a fish. He couldn't see beyond what was to what might be.
"There has to be something," Heinrich answered. He didn't know what it was, either, but he could see the possibility. As a Jew, he necessarily perceived the Reich from an outsider's viewpoint. Sometimes, as now, that proved useful. But he found himself longing for Willi's simple certainties at least as often.
"I think the British are just out to make trouble," Willi said now. "They're probably plotting with the Americans. The damned Anglo-Saxons have always been jealous of Germany. For years, they tried to keep the Reich from taking its rightful place in the sun. Now they're paying for it, and I say it serves them right."
He'd learned those lessons in school. So had Heinrich Gimpel. But Heinrich, for reasons of his own, had found he needed to doubt a lot of what his teachers said. As far as he could tell, Willi never doubted. Does that make him a fool, or the luckiest man I know?
"They've spent a long time paying for it," Heinrich said.
"Good," Willi Dorsch declared. "So did we."
"Well, yes." Heinrich couldn't-didn't dare-disagree with that. "Still, I do wonder what's in the first edition."
From his herringbone jacket to his long, narrow, bony face to his decaying teeth, Professor Horace Buckingham might have been a stage Englishman. Even his own countrymen had trouble following his Oxonian accent. It had made the panel discussion on Chaucer's "Wife of Bath's Tale" an ordeal for Susa
When the panel ended, the audience applauded politely. Buckingham turned to Susa
"Not bad." Susa
"Would you care to discuss things further over a drink?" he asked. The way he smiled said scholarship wasn't the only thing on his mind.
I don't want to be within three meters of you, let alone closer. The retort hovered on the tip of Susa
"Fascinating. Indeed." Professor Buckingham departed with marked haste. At first Susa
Under different circumstances, that might have been fu
Association didn't start sidling away from her, it would be a miracle, and God was depressingly stingy with miracles these days.
She went across the street to the Crown Hotel anyhow. She'd never been able to resist political drama. This was the genuine article-what Americans called, for no reason she could fathom,the real Mc Coy. On the surface, everything seemed exactly as it should have. Union Jacks and BUF flags with lightning bolts that resembled the SS runes flew at half-staff in commemoration of Kurt Haldweim. English and Scottish fascists had praised the departed Fuhrer to the skies. They'd also spent at least as much time patting one another on the back as the scholars of the MEA had done.
That was the surface. Underneath, and sometimes not so far underneath, things were different. Susa
But these tough-looking men in uniforms and shiny jackboots carried signs that said,REMEMBER THE FIRST EDITION! The mere idea was enough to make Susa
To make sure their British colleagues and, more to the point, the National Socialists in Germanydid remember, other paraders carried ba
British policemen in their blue uniforms and tall helmets stood on the sidewalk watching the fascists' procession. They didn't seem to know what to make of it. Neither did the German occupation authorities. Ifthey had decided to come out and quash it, they would have used panzers and rocket-firing fighter jets. They'd done that more than a few times in the earlier years of the occupation, though not so often lately.
As for Susa
Susa
Whistles shrilling, the British bobbies waded into the fray. They flailed away with their truncheons, whacking brawlers on both sides with fine impartiality. "Break it up!" they bawled. "Break it up, you bloody sods!" But nobody on either side seemed to want to break it up.
Even as the men who extolled the first edition fought, they raised a chant in English: "The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!"
Odd sort of battle cry,Susa
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.