Looking for hope, he pointed up to the rooftop televisor cameras. "They're still filming, even if the signal isn't going out. The fear that people might see it one of these days may do for a conscience where nothing else will."
Susanna nodded. "Here's hoping."
Beside Heinrich, Willi said, "That should last us for another hour, maybe even another hour and a half. But what happens when it gets dark?"
Heinrich eyed the setting sun. He almost said something about Joshua and making the sun stand still. At the last minute, though, he didn't. Not too long after he said something Biblical to Erika, he'd ended up in one of Lothar Prutzmann's prisons. He didn't think Willi would accuse him of being a Jew. All the same, prison would be one of the better things that might happen to him if things went wrong here.
Joshua he was not. In due course, the sun sank below the horizon. Twilight began to deepen. Shadows spread and lost their sharpness. Faces farther away grew dim and indistinct. Venus blazed low in the western sky. Above it, Saturn was dimmer and yellower…and that ruddy star between them had to be Mars. Heinrich almost wished he hadn't recognized it. Tonight, he wanted nothing to do with the god of war.
Lights on Rolf Stolle's residence were bright, but not bright enough to illuminate the square in front of it after the sun went down. The panzers and armored personnel carriers turned on their lights. That, though, Heinrich knew, was not for the benefit of the crowd confronting them. Their crews wouldn't want anybody to sneak up with a Molotov cocktail or a grenade in the dark.
And then, off in the distance but swelling rapidly, Heinrich heard one of the sounds he'd listened for and dreaded all day long: the rumbling snarl of more diesel engines heading toward the Gauleiter 's residence.
He wasn't the only one who heard them. A low murmur of alarm ran through the crowd.
Willi Dorsch managed a creditable chuckle. "I don't know what we're worrying about," he said. "They've already got enough firepower here to massacre the lot of us."
"You always did know how to cheer me up when I was feeling low," Heinrich answered, and Willi laughed out loud.
The officer in charge of the lead panzer raised his bullhorn and aimed it at Rolf Stolle: "It's all over now. You can see it's all over. Surrender to me, and I'll make sure they don't shoot you 'by mistake.'"
"You can take your 'by mistake,' fold it till it's all corners, and shove it right on up your ass, sonny boy," the Gauleiter of Berlin shouted. "If you want me, if Prutzmann wants me, you'll have to kill me, on account of I'm damned if you'll take me alive and give me a show trial. Buckliger let himself get caught, the poor, sorry son of a bitch. To hell with me if I intend to."
"He's got balls," Willi said admiringly.
"I know," Heinrich said. "But if they take him out, they'll take out everybody who's here with him."
He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the engine noise and clanking, clattering treads of the approaching armored vehicles. Willi gave an airy shrug, as if to say,Easy come, easy go. Heinrich clapped him on the back. He regretted being here less than he'd thought he would. Susanna was right. This was a good place to stand.
Down the people-clogged street, farther away from the Gauleiter 's residence, jeers and hisses and derisive whistles rang out as the new contingent of armored fighting vehicles came into sight. If a hothead in the crowd had an assault rifle and opened up on the panzers from sheer frustration, that could touch off a massacre. Damn near anything could touch off a massacre now, and Heinrich knew it only too well.
"Iam sorry about Erika," Willi said suddenly, as if he too was thinking this was the end, and some things should not go unspoken.
Tears stung Heinrich's eyes. He nodded. "It's all right," he said. "Don't worry about it."
And then the noises from down the street changed. As if by magic, boos and curses were transmuted into wild, even frantic, cheers. Heinrich's head, which had been hanging on his chest, came up like a dog's when it took an unexpected scent. So did Willi's. So did Susanna's. They all leaned toward the startling new noise. Heinrich willed words to come through the mad joy.
"It's the-!" More cheers drowned whatever the key word was. "It's not the-!" Frustrated again, Heinrich swore and kicked at the paving slates. But the third time was the charm. "It's not the goddamn Waffen- SS. It's the Wehrmacht-and they're on our side! "
Heinrich threw back his head and howled like a wolf. A crazy grin on his face, he grabbed Willi's hand and pumped his whole arm up and down as if he were jacking up a car. He shoved through the crowd toward Susanna. She was coming toward him, too. Laughing and crying at the same time, they squeezed each other. He was forty centimeters taller than she was. He had to bend down a long way to give her a kiss-and he did.
Susanna only half remembered actually clambering up onto this panzer. It hadn't been more than fifteen minutes earlier, but already it seemed like a mad fever dream. The panzer had handholds welded to the turret and the chassis so soldiers could cling to it and ride along. But the gray, capable engineers who'd designed it surely had never dreamt it would clatter through the neon nighttime streets of Berlin with as many people aboard as it carried.
The panzer commander seemed taken aback by the whole business himself. He rode head and shoulders out of the cupola, and couldn't have been as young as he looked-could he? "Be careful!" he shouted over and over again to his unexpected load of passengers. "If you fall off, you'll get squashed!"
He was bound to be right about that. This panzer was second in a long column rolling from Rolf Stolle's residence toward Lothar Prutzmann's lair not far from the Fuhrer 's palace. Susanna wondered where Heinrich had gone. He wasn't on this panzer. Was he riding another one, or had his usual prudence come back to life and persuaded him to stay away from places where guns were liable to go off?
Prudence? Susanna laughed. Nothing that had happened all this mad day had had even a nodding acquaintance with prudence. It wasn't even prudence that had kept the SS men from fighting it out when they found themselves outgunned by the Wehrmacht. They still could have killed Stolle then, as they could have killed him a hundred times earlier on. But their hearts hadn't been in their orders, and so they hadn't started shooting and had given up at the first excuse they got. SS men! Who would have imagined it?
Not Prutzmann, Susanna thought, and chuckled evilly.
Here and there in the city, she did hear spatters of gunfire, but only a few. The panzer commander heard them, too. "What are you people going to do when we get where we're going?" he asked plaintively.
"Hang the Reichsfuhrer — SS from a lamppost, that's what!" bawled a burly man near Susanna. She and the rest of the panzer-riders cheered.
"But we're liable to have to shoot some of those SS bastards, and they're liable to shoot back," the Wehrmacht man said. Whenever the panzer passed under a streetlight, the little silver Totenkopf on his black coveralls glittered for a moment.
"Give us guns!" that burly man said. "We'll shoot 'em ourselves!" Through more cheers, he went on to describe in vivid terms the personal and moral shortcomings of the SS. Then he nodded to Susanna. "Meaning no offense, ma'am."
"It doesn't bother me," she said. "They're much worse than that." The man blinked, then grinned enormously. Susanna grinned back.
SS men had barricaded the grounds around their brooding headquarters. What they'd run up looked much more formidable than the flimsy makeshifts the people of Berlin had erected in front of Rolf Stolle's residence. But there was no swarming mass of people behind these barricades: only Prutzmann's allegedUbermenschen. And, as the first panzer stopped and turned its lights on them, the SS men looked quite humanly nervous, even if they did clutch assault rifles and a few antipanzer rocket launchers.