For all Sarah knew, they had side-by-side bunks in the Dachau camp. Or maybe they'd all been shot. She wouldn't have been surprised. If you were a German Jew-or an Aryan rash enough to remember you were also a human being-you couldn't win.

A trolley rattled by. The motorman ignored Sarah and her mother, as they ignored him. Jews weren't supposed to ride streetcars, either, except going off to the work gangs in the morning or coming back from them at night. No, you couldn't win.

"I hope our soles will last," her mother said. Leather and even synthetics for shoe repairs were impossible to come by. Sarah nodded. She hoped her soul would last, too.

Victory will come soon. So the official from the German department in charge of interned neutrals had assured Peggy Druce. Konrad Hoppe, that was the bastard's name. Well, Herr Hoppe wasn't as smart as he thought he was. Here it was a month later, and Germany was still fighting hard.

Here it is, a month later, Peggy thought. More than a month. Pretty soon it'll be spring. And here I am, still stuck in goddamn Berlin.

The RAF had come over several times. French planes had dropped bombs once or twice. Even the Russians had shown up, flying all the way across Poland and eastern Germany in bombers said to be bigger than anybody else's.

None of that had done a hell of a lot of actual damage. Berlin was a long way off for enemy planes-a long way off from anywhere civilized, in Peggy's biased opinion. The bombers had to carry extra fuel, which meant they couldn't carry so many bombs.

German searchlights ceaselessly probed the night sky, hunting marauders. German antiaircraft fire was like a million Fourths of July all folded into one. It didn't do much good, though.

That had to be part of why Berlin seemed so jumpy to Peggy These days, Berliners talked about Hermann Call Me Meyer Goring as Hermann the Kike-but in low voices, to friends they trusted, in places where the Gestapo was unlikely to overhear. They were less discreet than they might have been, though. Peggy wouldn't have heard-and chuckled about-Hermann the Kike if they weren't.

But she was careful where she chuckled, too. She judged that most of Berlin's Angst came simply from victory deferred. Had the Wehrmacht paraded through Paris when Herr Hoppe thought it would, chances were the generals wouldn't have tried whatever they tried. Or had that happened earlier? Nobody officially admitted anything. After whatever it was didn't work, Peggy stopped hearing so many juicy jokes. Passing them on didn't just land you in trouble any more. You could, with the greatest of ease, end up dead.

SS men in black uniforms and soldiers in field-gray seemed to compete with one another in arresting people and hauling them off God knew where to do God knew what to them. Peggy had never been so glad she carried an American passport. It was sword and shield at the same time. You couldn't walk more than a block without somebody snapping, "Your papers!" at you.

And when you showed them, what a relief it was to pull out the leatherette folder stamped in gold with the gold old American eagle and olive branch rather than the German one holding a swastika in its claws. "Here you are," Peggy would say, and show off the passport with all the pride-and all the relief-she felt.

So far, the talisman had never failed. Whether she displayed it to SS man, Abwehr official, or ordinary Berlin cop, it always made him back off. "Oh," he would say, whoever he happened to be this time around. Sometimes the German would salute after that; sometimes he'd just turn away in disappointment, or maybe disgust. But he would always let her go on.

Then, three blocks farther along, some other jumped-up kraut reveling in his petty authority would growl, "Your papers!" The whole stupid farce would play out again.

Once, a particularly reptilian SS man-again, in Peggy's biased opinion-tried out his English on her, demanding, "What is an American doing in Berlin?"

"Trying to get out, pal. Nothing else but," Peggy answered from the bottom of her heart. "You want to send me home, I'll kiss your shiny boots." And were they ever. She could have put on her makeup using the highly polished black leather for a mirror.

For some reason, the SS man didn't like that, either. "It is a privilege to come to the capital of the Reich," he spluttered.

"I'm sure the RAF thinks so, too," Peggy said sweetly.

The SS man was a fine, fair Aryan, which only made his flush more obvious. "Air pirates!" he said, proving he not only read but believed Goebbels' newspapers. "They murder innocent civilians-women and children."

"Sure," Peggy said, and then, incautiously, "What do you think your own bombers are doing?"

"We strike only military targets," the SS man insisted. The scary thing was, he plainly believed that, too.

Peggy wanted to yank off his high-crowned cap and beat him over the head with it, in the hope of knocking some sense into him. But she held back-it was bound to be a lost cause. If you were the kind of jerk who joined the SS, you had to be immune to sense. She contented herself with, "Can I go now?"

"'May.' It should be 'may.'" Proud of winning a battle in her language, the SS man handed back her passport and waved her on.

She turned a corner-and walked straight into a police checkpoint. "Your papers-at once!" a beer-bellied cop shouted. Peggy produced the American passport. The policeman recoiled like Bela Lugosi not seeing his reflection in a mirror. As the SS man had before him, he barked, "What are you doing in Berlin?"

And, as she had before, Peggy answered truthfully: "Trying to get out." Only later did she wonder about taking a big chance twice running. How many chances had she taken? Too damned many-she was sure of that. Hadn't she been proud of acting more mature? She sure couldn't prove it today.

But she got by with it one more time. "Pass," the cop said, writing a note on a sheet clipped to a flat board. Any Gestapo official who examined all the reports various Berlin security officials compiled could figure out everywhere she went. For all she knew, some Gestapo goon did that every day. If she were a spy, it might have meant something. But she was only an interned tourist with a big mouth.

She couldn't even have fun shopping. Window displays had nothing to do with what you could actually buy. And everything you could buy required ration coupons of one kind or another. She got enough for food to keep her going. For almost everything else, the Germans didn't seem to feel obligated to take care of her.

And, after the Athenia went down, she couldn't get out. She'd tried to arrange another train ticket to Copenhagen. She'd tried to arrange a plane ticket to Stockholm. Once she was in Scandinavia, she could get to England. Once she was in England, she could get to the States…if the Germans didn't torpedo her on the way. And if they did, well, going down with her ship sometimes seemed more appealing than staying in Berlin.

But they wouldn't let her out. She got "Your papers!" when she tried to buy her tickets, too. And when she flashed her passport then, it wasn't magic. It was more like poison. They would frown. They would check a list. Then they would say, "I am very sorry, but this is verboten." They liked saying verboten. Telling people no was much more fun than saying yes would have been. You got to watch your victims throw the most delightful tantrums.

Peggy refused to give them the satisfaction. She just walked away both times. After failing to get the plane ticket, she hied herself off to the U.S. embassy. If she couldn't get help there, she figured, she couldn't get help anywhere.

By all the signs, she couldn't get help anywhere. The embassy personnel spoke English, not German, but they might as well have clicked their heels and intoned, "Verboten." What they did say amounted to, "Sorry, but we can't make the German government get off the dime."