Harry Turtledove - In The Presence Of My Enemies

HEINRICH GIMPEL GLANCED AT THE REPORT ON HIS DESK TO make sure how many Reichsmarks the United States was being assessed for the Wehrmacht bases by New York, Chicago, and St. Louis. As he'd thought, the numbers were up from those of 2009. Well, the Americans might grumble, but they'd cough up what they owed-and in hard currency, too; none of their inflated dollars. If they didn't, the panzer divisions might roll out of those bases and take what was owed the Germanic Empire this year. And if they collected some blood along with their pound of flesh, the USA might complain, but it was hardly in a position to fight back.

Heinrich entered the new figures on his computer, then saved the study he'd been working on for the past couple of days. The Zeiss hard disk purred smoothly as it swallowed the data. He made two backups-he was a meticulously careful man-before shutting down the machine. When he got up from his desk, he put on his uniform greatcoat: in Berlin's early March, winter still outblustered spring.

Willi Dorsch, who shared the office with Heinrich, got up, too. "Let's call it a day, Heinrich," he said, and shook his head as he donned his own greatcoat. "How long have you been here at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht now?"

"Going on twelve years," Heinrich answered, buttoning buttons. "Why?"

His friend cheerfully sank the barb: "All that time at the high command, and a fancy uniform to go with it, and you still don't look like a soldier."

"I can't help it," Heinrich said with a sigh. He knew too well that Willi was right. A tall, thin, balding man in his early forties, he had a tendency to shamble instead of parading. He wore his greatcoat as if it were cut from the English tweeds professors still affected. Setting his high-crowned cap at a rakish angle, he raised an eyebrow to get Willi's reaction. Willi shook his head. Heinrich shrugged and spread his hands.

"I'll just have to be martial for both of us," Willi said.His cap gave him a fine dashing air. "Doing anything for dinner tonight?" The two men lived not far from each other.

"As a matter of fact, we are. I'm sorry. Lise invited some friends over," Heinrich said. "We'll get together soon, though."

"We'd better," Willi said. "Erika's going on again about how she misses you. Me, I'm getting jealous."

"Oh,Quatsch, " Heinrich said, using the pungent Berliner word for rubbish. "Maybe she needs her glasses checked." Willi was blond and ruddy and muscular, none of which desirable adjectives applied to Heinrich. "Or maybe it's just my bridge game."

Willi winced. "You know how to hurt a guy, don't you? Come on. Let's go."

The wind outside the military headquarters had a bite to it. Heinrich shivered inside his greatcoat. He pointed off to the left, toward the Great Hall. "The old-timers say the bulk of that thing has messed up our weather."

"Old-timers always complain. That's what makes them old-timers." But Willi's gaze followed Heinrich's finger. They both saw the Great Hall every day, but seldom really looked at it. "It's big, all right, but is it big enough for that? I doubt it." His voice, though, was doubtful, too.

"You ask me, it's big enough for damn near anything," Heinrich said. The Great Hall had gone up sixty years before, in the great flush of triumph after Britain and Russia fell before the planes and panzers of the Third Reich. It boasted a dome that reached two hundred twenty meters into the sky and was more than two hundred fifty meters across: sixteen St. Peter's cathedrals might have fit within the enormous monument to the grandeur of the Aryan race. The riches of a conquered continent had paid for the construction.

The dome itself, sheathed in weathered copper, caught the fading light like a tall green hill. At the top, in place of a cross, stood a gilded Germanic eagle with a swastika in its claws. Atop the eagle, a red light blinked on and off to warn away low-flying planes.

Willi Dorsch's shiver had only a little to do with the chilly weather. "It makes me feel tiny."

"It's a temple to the Reich and the Volk. It's supposed to make you feel tiny," Heinrich answered. "Set against the needs of the German race and the state, any one manis tiny."

"We serve them. They don't serve us," Willi agreed. He pointed across the Adolf Hitler Platz toward the Fuhrer 's palace on the far side of the immense square next to the Great Hall. "When Speer ran the palace up, he was worried the size of it would dwarf even our Leader himself." And, indeed, the balcony above the tall entranceway to the Fuhrer 's residence looked like an architectural afterthought.

Heinrich's short laugh came out as a puff of steam. "Not even Speer could look ahead to see what technology might do for him."

"Better not let the Security Police hear you talk that way about a Reichsvater." Willi tried to laugh, too, but the chuckle rang hollow. The Security Police were no laughing matter.

Still, Heinrich was right. When the Fuhrer 's palace went up, another huge eagle had surmounted the balcony from which the Germanic Empire's ruler might address his citizens. The eagle had been moved to the roof when Heinrich was a boy. In its place went an enormous televisor screen. Adolf Hitler Platz held a million people. When the Fuhrer spoke to a crowd these days, even the ones at the back got a good view.

A bus purred up to the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht building. Heinrich and Willi got on with the rest of the officials who greased the wheels of the mightiest military machine the world had known. One by one, the commuters stuck their account cards into the fare slot. The bus's computer debited each rider eighty-five pfennigs.

The bus rolled down the broad boulevard toward South Station. Berlin's myriad bureaucrats made up the majority of the passengers, but not all. A fair number were tourists, come from all over the world to view the most wonderful and terrible avenue that world boasted. Blase as any native, Heinrich usually paid scant attention to the marvels of his home town. Today being what it was, though, the oohs and ahhs of people seeing them for the first time made him notice them, too.

Sentries from the Grossdeutschland division in ceremonial uniform goose-stepped outside their barracks. Tourists on the sidewalk, many of them Japanese, photographed the Fuhrer 's guards. Inside the barracks hall, where tourists wouldn't see them, were other troops in businesslike camouflage smocks. They had assault rifles, not the ceremonial force's old-fashioned Gewehr 98s, and enough armored fighting vehicles to blast Berlin to rubble. Visitors from afar were not encouraged to think about them. Neither were most Berliners. But Heinrich reckoned up Grossdeutschland 's budget every spring. He knew exactly what the barracks held.

Neon lights came on in front of theaters and restaurants as darkness deepened. Dark or light, people swarmed in and out of the huge Roman-style building that held a heated swimming pool the size of a young lake. It was open twenty-four hours a day for those who wanted to exercise, to relax, or just to ogle attractive members of the opposite sex. Its Berlin nickname was the Heiratbad, the marriage bath, sometimes amended by the cynical to the Heiratbett, the marriage bed.

Past the pool, the Soldiers' Hall and the Air and Space Ministry faced each other across the street. The Soldiers' Hall was a monument to the triumph of German arms. Among the exhibits it lovingly preserved were the railroad car in which Germany had yielded to France in 1918 and France to Germany in 1940; the first Panzer IV to enter the Kremlin compound; one of the gliders that had landed troops in southern England; and, behind thick leaded glass, the twisted, radioactive remains of the Liberty Bell, excavated by expendable prisoners from the ruins of Philadelphia.