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The reporter approached the two policemen, still dragging the Brownshirt. "Arrest this man," he said. "I found him robbing the office. You will find a stolen jar of coffee in his pocket."
"Release him, please," said the older of the two policemen.
Reluctantly, the reporter let the Brownshirt go.
The second Brownshirt stood beside his colleague.
"What is your name, sir?" the policeman asked the reporter.
"I am Rudolf Schmidt, chief parliamentary correspondent of The Democrat."
"Rudolph Schmidt, I am arresting you on a charge of assaulting the police."
"Don't be ridiculous. I caught this man stealing!"
The policeman nodded to the two Brownshirts. "Take him to the station house."
They grabbed Schmidt by the arms. He seemed about to struggle, then changed his mind. "Every detail of this incident will appear in the next edition of The Democrat!" he said.
"There will never be another edition," the policeman said. "Take him away."
A fire engine arrived and half a dozen firemen jumped out. Their leader spoke brusquely to the police. "We need to clear the b
uilding," he said.
"Go back to your fire station, there's no fire," said the older policeman. "It's just the storm troopers closing down a Communist magazine."
"That's no concern of mine," the fireman said. "The alarm has been sounded, and our first task is to get everyone out, storm troopers and all. We'll manage without your help." He led his men inside.
Carla heard her mother say: "Oh, no!" She turned and saw that Mother was staring at her typewriter, which lay on the pavement where it had fallen. The metal casing had dropped away, exposing the links between keys and rods. The keyboard was twisted out of shape, one end of the roller had become detached, and the bell that sounded for the end of a line lay forlornly on the ground. A typewriter was not a precious object, but Mother looked as if she might cry.
The Brownshirts and the staff of the magazine came out of the building, herded by firemen. Sergeant Schwab was resisting, shouting angrily: "There's no fire!" The firemen just shoved him on.
Jochmann came out and said to Mother: "They didn't have time to do much damage--the firemen stopped them. Whoever sounded the alarm did us a great service!"
Carla had been worried that she would be reprimanded for causing a false alarm. Now she realized she had done exactly the right thing.
She took her mother's hand. That seemed to jerk Mother out of her momentary fit of grief. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve, an unusual act that revealed how badly shaken she was: if Carla had done that she would have been told to use her handkerchief. "What do we do now?" Mother never said that--she always knew what to do next.
Carla became aware of two people standing nearby. She looked up. One was a woman about the same age as Mother, very pretty, with an air of authority. Carla knew her, but could not place her. Beside her was a man young enough to be her son. He was slim, and not very tall, but he looked like a movie star. He had a handsome face that would have been almost too pretty except that his nose was flattened and misshapen. Both newcomers looked shocked, and the young man was white with anger.
The woman spoke first, and she used the English language. "Hello, Maud," she said, and the voice was distantly familiar to Carla. "Don't you recognize me?" she went on. "I'm Eth Leckwith, and this is Lloyd."
ii
Lloyd Williams found a boxing club in Berlin where he could do an hour's training for a few pennies. It was in a working-class district called Wedding, north of the city center. He exercised with the Indian clubs and the medicine ball, skipped rope, hit the punch bag, and then put on a helmet and did five rounds in the ring. The club coach found him a sparring partner, a German his own age and size--Lloyd was a welterweight. The German boy had a nice fast jab that came from nowhere and hurt Lloyd several times, until Lloyd hit him with a left hook and knocked him down.
Lloyd had been raised in a rough neighborhood, the East End of London. At the age of twelve he had been bullied at school. "Same thing happened to me," his stepfather, Bernie Leckwith, had said. "Cleverest boy in school, and you get picked on by the class shlammer." Bernie, whom he called "Dad," was Jewish--his mother spoke only Yiddish. He had taken Lloyd to the Aldgate Boxing Club. Ethel had been against it, but Bernie had overruled her, something that did not happen often.
Lloyd had learned to move fast and punch hard, and the bullying had stopped. He had also got the broken nose that made him look less of a pretty boy. And he discovered a talent. He had quick reflexes and a combative streak, and he had won prizes in the ring. The coach was disappointed that he wanted to go to Cambridge University instead of turning professional.
He showered and put his suit back on, then went to a workingmen's bar, bought a glass of draft beer, and sat down to write to his half sister, Millie, about the incident with the Brownshirts. Millie was envious of his taking this trip with their mother, and he had promised to send her frequent bulletins.
Lloyd had been shaken by this morning's fracas. Politics was part of everyday life for him: his mother had been a member of Parliament, his father was a local councilor in London, and he himself was London chairman of the Labour League of Youth. But it had always been a matter of debating and voting--until today. He had never before seen an office trashed by uniformed thugs while the police looked on smiling. It was politics with the gloves off, and it had shocked him.
"Could this happen in London, Millie?" he wrote. His first instinct was to think it could not. But Hitler had admirers among British industrialists and newspaper proprietors. Only a few months ago the rogue M.P. Sir Oswald Mosley had started the British Union of Fascists. Like the Nazis, they liked to strut up and down in military-style uniforms. What next?
He finished his letter and folded it, then caught the S train back into the city center. He and his mother were going to meet Walter and Maud von Ulrich for dinner. Lloyd had been hearing about Maud all his life. She and his mother were unlikely friends: Ethel had started her working life as a maid in a grand house owned by Maud's family. Later they had been suffragettes together, campaigning for votes for women. During the war they had produced a feminist newspaper, The Soldier's Wife. Then they had quarreled over political tactics and become estranged.
