In The Presence of mine Enemies

XI

Lise Gimpel knew something was wrong when Heinrich poured himself a healthy slug of schnapps as soon as he got home from the office. He didn't do that on days when things went well. Then he'd have a bottle of beer, if he had anything at all. But when she asked him what the trouble was, he jumped as if she'd poked him with a pin. "Nothing," he said quickly: much too quickly.

She paused, wondering where to go from there-wondering whether to go anywhere from there. But what he'd said and the way he'd said it were too blatant to ignore. She picked her words with care: "You don't lie to me much. When you do, you aren't very good at it."

"Oh," he said, and then,"Scheisse." He knocked back the schnapps at a gulp. Lise blinked. That wasn't his style at all. As if to prove it, he coughed several times. His cheeks turned pink. Embarrassment or schnapps? Schnapps, Lise judged. Heinrich coughed again, this time as if he'd started to say something and swallowed it at the last moment.

"Well, are you going to tell me about it or not?" Lise asked.

For some reason, that set her husband off again, in a different way. If his laugh wasn't hysterical, it came close. Finally, he said, "I suppose I'd better. This is all by way of explaining how I managed to get a champagne stain on my ass this afternoon."

Now it was Lise's turn to say, "Oh." She didn't know what she'd been looking for. Whatever it was, that wasn't it. "I'm listening," she told him, which seemed safe.

He talked. It took about ten minutes and another drink, this one gulped down as fast as the first. Lise had seen and heard for herself some of what Heinrich was talking about. At the time, she hadn't realized it applied to him in particular; she'd thought Erika was venting her spleen at the world at large. "…and that's that," Heinrich finished. "That, as a matter of fact, is pretty definitely that. I don't think there will be any more bridge games with the Dorsches after this."

Bridge, just then, wasn't the first thing on Lise's mind. "How do you feel about all this?" she asked.

"Glad it's over." Heinrich reached for the schnapps bottle again.

That he did made Lise sure he wasn't saying everything on his mind. "Pour some for me, too," she told him. "If you've earned three, I think I'm entitled to one." After a sip, she went on, "You kept quiet about this for months."

"I kept hoping everything would just…settle down," Heinrich said.

"Is that what you were hoping for?" Lise said. Erika Dorsch made formidable competition. Those cool Aryan good looks, and the suggestion of raw heat underneath…Lise took another swallow of schnapps, larger than the first. Formidable indeed.

"If I'd hoped for the other, it would have been easy enough to get."

"Why didn't you?" she asked. "It might have been the easiest way out of the trouble."

Heinrich shook his head. "My life is complicated enough. It has to be, because of what I am-what we are. If you think I want any more complications on top of that, you're crazy. And besides, I love you."

She would have liked it better if he'd put those in the other order. Being who and what she was herself, though, she understood why he hadn't. She prodded a little, anyhow: "And you were enjoying yourself, weren't you, with a, a beautiful woman"-there, she'd said it-"falling all over you?"

"I might have enjoyed it a hell of a lot more if I hadn't been scared to death all the damn time," he said. "This is mylife we're talking about, mine and lots of other people's. I hope I'm not stupid enough to put that on the line for a roll in the hay. If-" He drank instead of finishing.

"If what?" Lise asked. Her husband didn't answer. He peered out the kitchen window, resolutely pretending he hadn't heard. Lise almost repeated the question. But she could make a good guess at what he'd swallowed. It would have been something like,If I weren't a Jew, or if she were…

She supposed she could get angry at him for even that much. What was the point, though? Things were the way they were. There was no world where Heinrich was agoy or Erika a Jew.A good thing, too, Lise thought, and finished her schnapps with a gulp. She poured the glass full again.

"We're both going to go to sleep in the middle of supper," Heinrich said.

"That's all right. That's the least of my worries right now," Lise answered. "You turned her down. She's going to be angry-you said so yourself. What can she do to you? What can she do to us?"

"I thought about that," Heinrich said. "I can't see anything. Can you? She's not going to pour gasoline on the house and set it on fire, or anything like that."

"I suppose not," Lise admitted. She didn't stop worrying, though. How could any Jew in her right mind stop worrying? If you weren't worrying, you were likely to miss something that might kill you.

"Is it all right?" Heinrich asked anxiously.

"It could be better," Lise said, and he flinched. Considering all the things that might have happened, and all the different kinds of unpleasantness that might have sprung from them, she decided she had to relent, and she did: "It could be worse, too. So I guess it's all right. But if any more beautiful blondes make a play for you, you might want to let me know a little sooner."

"I promise," he said.

She snorted. "Or, of course, you might not want to let me know at all. But I hope you do." He had no answer for that, which was, in its own way, reassuring.

When Susanna Weiss watched Czechs demonstrating on the televisor without getting arrested, she was astonished. When she saw Frenchmen demonstrating, she was shocked. But there they were, marching by the Arc de Triomphe with signs that said "LIBERTY,EQUALITY,FRATERNITY!" That slogan had been outlawed for seventy years. Ever since 1940, the motto of the French state had been Work, Family, Country. But, while the older phrase might have been forbidden, it hadn't been forgotten. Here it was, for all the world to see.

As in Prague, policemen stood around watching without doing anything. In their round, flat-crowned kepis, they looked even more French than the demonstrators. But they collaborated with the Reich more enthusiastically than the Czechs did-or they had up till now, anyhow.

For the French, collaboration had meant survival. To Germany, Czechoslovakia had been an annoyance. France had been the deadly foe. Crushed in 1870, avenged in 1918, she'd been crushed once more in 1940 and never allowed to get off her knees again. From that day till this, French Fascists had toed the German line. Anyone who didn't toe the line disappeared, mostly forever. When Germany spat, France swam. But while she swam, she breathed, if softly.

And now, with anyone who'd lived under liberty, equality, and fraternity a white-haired ancient, these Frenchmen-and a few Frenchwomen, too-showed they remembered them. And they got away with it. Susanna stared and stared.

Horst Witzleben said, "This peaceful demonstration was photographed by a German cameraman. No French televisor coverage was on the scene. The French regime would sooner not admit its citizens can find fault with it."

Susanna stuck a finger in her ear. "Did I really hear that?" she asked. No one was in the apartment with her but the cat, and Gawain, fat, lazy thing that he was, lay asleep on the sofa, his tail curled over the tip of his nose. But Susanna had to ask somebody. Germans had been making scornful gibes about Frenchmen since the very beginnings of the Reich, and no doubt long before. Still, Susanna had never heard one like this. It said,We're going somewhere new, and you haven't got the nerve to follow us.

The next story was about corruption in the Iron Guard, the Romanian Fascist party. Susanna had no trouble believing there was corruption in the Iron Guard. They'd held power for a long time, and corruption wasn't rare in the Balkans (or, come to that, anywhere else). Talking about it was. When a fat Iron Guard official who spoke German with a comic-opera accent spluttered out denials, he did his cause more harm than any accuser could have.

She wondered if the story after the St. Pauli Girl beer advertisement would be subversive, too, but it wasn't: it talked about the Brazilian football team, one of the favorites in the upcoming World Cup. Susanna almost switched it off; she had only slightly more interest in football than in suicide. But the longer she watched the piece, the more interesting it got. Here were some of the finest footballers in the world, footballers expected to give the mighty Germans a run for their money. Were they Aryans? Hardly. Oh, several of them obviously had some white blood. But Negro and American Indian ancestry predominated on the Brazilian team.

"Isn't that interesting?" Susanna murmured. The people at the Propaganda Ministry were working with a light hand. They weren't saying,Look at these Brazilian mongrels. They're really quite impressive, aren't they? Instead, the message was simply,This is what the team that will challenge Germany looks like. If watchers decided the Brazilian mongrels were impressive, they'd do it on their own. That they were getting the chance was remarkable enough.

Heinz Buckliger had said before that he had his doubts about the Nazis' racial doctrines. He and his people were practicing what he'd preached. Here they'd shown black and brown men as human beings.

Would they ever do the same with Jews? Susanna wasn't going to hold her breath. For one thing, in National Socialist dogma Jews and Aryans were natural enemies, like capitalists and proletarians in the dead lore of Communism. For another, Jews' craftiness made them all the more dangerous. And, for a third, Jews were thought to be extinct, so why bother rehabilitating them? Even the most radical reforms had limits.

Walther Stutzman used a couple of different portals to get into SS databases and see what the blackshirts were up to. He didn't like messing with them. Any time he poked around in there, he exposed himself to a certain risk of detection, even if he did have the proper passwords and some highly improper masking programs. Every so often, he went sniffing in spite of the risk. Not knowing what Lothar Prutzmann and his cohorts were up to was also risky.

Today at lunch, he started in at one of the usual places, a weak spot that had been in the software ever since his father put it there. If and when the Reich finally did go over to the long-promised new operating system, it would have weak spots, too. Walther had put a few into the code himself. Out of so many millions of lines, who would find those few? One of these days, his son Gottlieb could exploit them.

That was what he was thinking as he started the electronic journey toward Lothar Prutzmann's secrets. More from habit than for any other reason, he kept an eye on the monitor as the probe went through. When he saw an alphanumeric group that didn't look the way it was supposed to, he blinked. When he saw two, ice ran through him and he hit the ABORT key. If that wasn't a trap, he'd never seen one. Now he sat there wondering if it had caught him.

He didn't think so. He had programs that would muddy the trail, and he hadn't gone in far enough to be fully noosed…had he? He paused in indecision, something he didn't do very often. Then, reluctantly, he nodded to himself. Only one way to find out, and he badly needed to know.

He liked the second portal less than the first. It was closer to a busy stream of electronic traffic. If he made a mistake, he'd stick out like blood on the snow.Just like that, he thought unhappily. And if the bloodhounds were waiting for him here, too…

His finger stayed on the ABORT key all the way through the insertion process. If the hounds had been a little more subtle, they would have nabbed him the first time. He hated giving them another chance.

But, as far as he could tell, everything went fine now. He got inside the SS network without its being any the wiser. And, once he was inside, he could look at the other portal from the rear, so to speak. The trap pointed outward. He'd thought it would. People who designed traps like that were convinced of their own cleverness. They didn't think anyone could sneak up on them from behind.

And they had been very clever indeed, even if not quite clever enough. The more Walther studied their trap, the nastier it looked. If his probe had gone just a little farther through the portal, it would have been seized and traced back to its beginnings, and not one of his masking programs was likely to have done him much good. Oh, yes, the thing had teeth, sharp ones.

He wondered if he could draw those teeth, leave the trap seeming dangerous but in fact harmless. Shaking his head, he decided against it, at least for now. That wouldn't be something to ad-lib on a lunch hour. If he tried it, he would have to be perfect. The trapper would come back every so often to see what he'd caught. Everything would have to look fine to him.

Walther glanced down at his watch. Yes, it would have to be another time. People would start coming back from lunch pretty soon. He couldn't afford to take the chance of being seen doing that kind of work. And he was through the other portal. If he was going to look around inside Lothar Prutzmann's domain, he had to do it now.

Too much information. Not enough time to sift through it. That protected SS secrets as well as any encryption algorithm, probably better. If Walther couldn't find what he was looking for, what difference if it stayed in plain sight? You couldn't read what you couldn't find.

He did find proof of Prutzmann's hand behind the "Enough Is Enough" article in the Volkischer Beobachter. Under other circumstances, that would have delighted him. As things were, he shrugged. If Heinz Buckliger didn't already know who'd put Dr. Jahnke up to writing that piece, he was a fool. So far, he hadn't acted like one.

Still…A message revealing in which SS directory all the dirt on "Enough Is Enough" lurked wouldn't hurt. Walther had ways of bouncing such a message through the data system till it became impossible to trace. He used them.

And he was back to working on the new operating system by the time his boss lumbered back into the office. Gustav Priepke stuck his head into Walther's cubicle, saw what he was up to, and nodded approval. "That goddamn Japanese code really will save our asses, won't it?" he said.

"We've got a chance with it, anyhow," Walther answered.

"Good. Good. That was a hell of a good idea, using it," Priepke said. Walther started to thank him, but just nodded instead. Unless he misread the signs, his boss had forgotten whose idea it was in the first place. Because it was working so well, Priepke had decided it was his.

Had things been different, Walther wouldn't have let him get away with that. As they were…As they were, if Priepke was angling for fame and glory, he could have them. Walther didn't want them. They were no good to him. The less he was in the public eye, the better he liked it. And if his boss got a bonus and a raise, that was all right, too. The Stutzmans had plenty. They needed no more. No Jew dared be or even think like a money-grubber these days.

"We'll do fine," Priepke said, as if Walther had denied it. "We'll do just fine."

"Of course we will," Walther said.

When Gottlieb Stutzman came home for a weekend's leave from his Hitler Jugend service, Esther was amazed at how brown and muscular he'd become. "They work us pretty hard," her son said, scratching at his mustache. That was thicker and more emphatically there than it had been a year before, too. He wasn't a boy any more. He was visibly turning into a man.

"How is it?" Esther fought to keep worry out of her voice. She'd been afraid ever since Gottlieb left the house. She hadn't feared he would be caught, or hadn't feared that any more than usual. He looked like an Aryan. He wasn't circumcised. He had the sense to keep his mouth shut about his dangerous secret.

But in a setting like that, suffused with the propaganda of the state and the Volk, what would have been easier than turning his back on the secret? It was a burden he didn't have to carry. Nobody did. If you chose to forget you were a Jew, who could make you remember?

Esther's fear swelled when Gottlieb shrugged and said, "It's not so bad." But then he went on, "Or it wouldn't be, if I weren't different." Esther let out a heartfelt sigh of relief. He accepted that difference, then. She'd thought he had, she'd thought he would, but you could never be sure. He gave her a quizzical look. "What was that for?"

"Just because-and don't you forget it," Esther answered.

"Sure." Gottlieb, plainly, was humoring his mother. Since he hadn't had much practice, he wasn't very good at it. The doorbell rang. "Who's that?" he asked as Esther started for the door.

"Alicia Gimpel," Esther answered. "She was going to visit Anna and sleep over tonight. They set it up before we knew you were coming home, and it was a little late to cancel by then. I hope you don't mind?"

"Why should I?" He laughed. "It's not like I'm going to pay any attention to Alicia one way or the other."

"All right," Esther said. Gottlieb no doubt admired one pretty Fraulein or another. Of course he did-at seventeen, what was he but a hormone with legs? No matter whom he admired, though, if he was as serious as he seemed to be about staying a Jew and passing it on, he would marry another Jew. Seventeen would pay no attention to eleven, but twenty-four might find eighteen very interesting. Seven years, right now, would feel like an eternity to Gottlieb. To Esther, they felt just around the corner.

She opened the door. There were Alicia and Lise. As Alicia came in festooned with sleeping bag, change of clothes, and the other impedimenta of a sleepover, Anna bounded down from upstairs to greet her. Through the squeals, Lise said, "It's a shame they don't like each other-tragic, in fact."

"It is, isn't it?" Esther said. They both smiled: here, for once, was irony that didn't hurt. Esther waved back toward the kitchen. "Come in and have a cup of coffee and say hello to Gottlieb. He got a free weekend and came home to visit."

Lise followed, but she said, "You should have called. Alicia could have come over some other time."

"Don't worry about it," Esther answered. "Gottlieb won't even notice she's here." Another smile from both of them. Some of the thoughts that had occurred to Esther had surely occurred to Lise, too. The Gimpels had three girls to marry off. They would have started thinking about possibilities a long time ago.

"My goodness, Gottlieb," Lise Gimpel said. "You're looking very…fit."

"I sort of have to be," he answered with a broad-shouldered shrug. "If you can't do what they throw at you, they make your life so nasty, you get into shape just so they'll leave you alone."

"What are they telling you now that we've got a new Fuhrer? " Lise asked him.

He didn't shrug now. He leaned forward; this interested him. "When I first started, it was the same old stuff I'd always got in school," he said. "But it's changed since then."

"Well, what are they saying these days?"

"A lot more about what good exercise it is and how we'll make friends we'll keep for the rest of our lives," Gottlieb said. "A lot less about how it's getting us ready to be soldiers who'll go out and slaughter the Reich 's enemies. A lot less about our shovels, too."

Esther frowned. "Your shovels?"

Her son nodded. "In the Wehrmacht, it's your rifle. That's what people say, anyhow. In the Hitler Jugend, it's our shovels. We have to carry them with us everywhere. We have to keep them polished-the blade and the handle. If you let your shovel get rusty or you lose it, I don't know what they do to you. Something horrible-I know that. Nobody wants to find out what."

"Shovels," Esther repeated. It made sense, of a sort. The Hitler Youth was a dress rehearsal for the Army. Someone who knew how to take care of a shovel and had the discipline to do it-even if the act itself was fundamentally meaningless-would quickly learn how to take care of a rifle and gain the discipline to do it. And that would not be meaningless at all.

"The drillmasters don't yell at us as much as they used to, either," Gottlieb said. "Of course, we've been in for a while now, too. We know what we need to do. They don't have to yell at us all the time any more."

"What do you do for fun?" Esther asked.

"Polish our shovels," Gottlieb answered, deadpan. Esther made a face at him. He grinned. He'd got her, and he knew it. He went on, "A lot of the time, we just sleep when we get the chance. They do run us pretty ragged."

"You can't sleep all the time," Esther said, even if that was a risky assumption to make about teenagers.

But Gottlieb didn't deny it. He said, "We read. We listen to the radio-there's no televisor in the barracks. We play cards. We're not supposed to do it for money, but I'm about fifteen Reichsmarks ahead so far." He looked smug. Then he added, "And there's a Bund deutscher Madel camp about half a kilometer from ours. Some of the guys sneak over there after lights-out."

There it was, the thing Esther feared. Lots of Bd M camps were near those of the Hitler Jugend. Surprising numbers-or maybe numbers not so surprising-of Bd M girls found themselves pregnant every year, too. "What about you?" she asked, her tone as light as she could make it. If some gentile girl won his heart, or a related piece of his anatomy…

"I haven't. I don't think I will," he said after due consideration very much like Walther's. "You get into real trouble if they catch you doing that-worse than losing your shovel. And besides, it's like I told Aunt Susanna the night Alicia found out what she is: it just wouldn't be a good idea for me."

Lise Gimpel smiled. Esther kissed him. She got lipstick on his cheek, but he didn't notice and she didn't care. She wanted to say something like,You're a very good boy, and I'm prouder than I know how to tell you. The only thing holding her back was the knowledge that the usual seventeen-year-old male, hearing something of that sort, would go disgrace himself just to take the jinx off.

On the other hand, Gottlieb was not your average seventeen-year-old male. Esther did say it. And Gottlieb proved his sterling qualities: he grinned.

Along with the New Orleans Vicki, which currently held pride of place, Anna's bedroom was full of hedgehogs: stuffed cuddly ones, smaller ones made of painted ceramics or bronze, a hedgehog lamp with the switch in his little black nose, even hedgehogs printed on her sheets. Alicia thought it was all a little too much, but she never would have said so. Besides, today she had something else on her mind.

"You're so lucky!" she burst out as soon as they were alone together. "Solucky!"

"How come?" Anna asked. "I'm just me, same as I always was." She never took herself too seriously.

But Alicia had an answer for her: "I'll tell you why-because everybody here knows what you are. You don't have to keep any secrets."

Her friend nodded, but then started to laugh. "Don't tell that to Gottlieb, that's all I've got to say. He knew for five years before they could tell me, and it was driving him crazy. Crazier."

"Oh." Alicia hadn't thought of that. "Well, everybody knows now, anyway. Some of the things Francesca and Roxane say make me want to smack 'em, and I can't, because they'd wonder why."

"Just pay no attention to them," Anna told her-easier said than done. She went on, "Gottlieb didn't pay attention to me when I said stupid stuff like that for all those years. Of course, he doesn't pay much attention to me now that I know better, either. I'm just a kid, he says." Her snort was intended to convey how little older brothers knew.

Alicia didn't know anything about older brothers-or younger brothers, for that matter. She wasn't much interested in learning more, either. The boys in her class were the worst sort of vermin: a poor recommendation for the male half of the species. When she said, "Gottlieb's notso bad," she was offering Anna an enormous concession. She'd known him all her life, after all.

But so had Anna, and at much closer quarters. If no man is a hero to his valet, no boy is to his little sister. "It's-peaceful now that he's off at the Hitler Jugend camp most of the time," Anna said.

"Peaceful," Alicia echoed. With Gottlieb gone, Anna had her parents all to herself. Alicia tried to imagine what that would be like. She couldn't. She hadn't even been two when Francesca was born. She didn't remember what being an only child was like, and she'd never know now. When she got bigger, she was the one who'd leave for a Bd M camp. Her little sisters would get more attention from Mommy and Daddy, which hardly seemed fair.

"Here, let's do this," Anna said. The game that followed ended up involving the Vicki, several of the stuffed hedgehogs-including a big one who was bright red and had a devil's horns and pitchfork-an imaginary and magical snowstorm, and the willow tree that grew just outside Anna's window. In the summertime, when it had all its leaves, the willow was full of peeping finches and warblers; woodpeckers scuttled along the bigger branches and drummed as they drilled their way after caterpillars. Now the branches and twigs were bare. Still, a house sparrow perched on one and peered into the bedroom with beady black eyes.

"Look!" Alicia pointed at the sparrow. "It's an SS bird." It got incorporated into the game, which had been short of villains up till then.

They groaned when Anna's mother called them down to supper.Frau Stutzman put Alicia between Anna and Gottlieb at the table, the same way a nuclear engineer would put cadmium between two uranium bricks. "So," Gottlieb said, his voice very much a man's, "how do you like being one of us?"

That was a question Alicia couldn't have heard at the supper table at her house. "It's all right. I've kind of got used to it," she said. But then she decided something more was called for, and she added, "It is what I am, after all. I ought to know about it."

Gottlieb gave her a suddenly thoughtful look. "I said something like that, too. I took longer than you have to figure it out, though."

Alicia needed a little while to realize that was a compliment of sorts. Anna's surprised expression did more to help her figure it out than Gottlieb's words themselves. She had no idea what to do with praise from a seventeen-year-old boy, and so she didn't do anything but go on with supper. It was beef tongue with potatoes and carrots and onions, which she liked.Frau Stutzman spiced the tongue differently from the way her mother did, but it was still good.

Over dessert,Herr Stutzman started telling Gottlieb about something he called a software trap. He hadn't gone very far before he stopped speaking German, or at least any sort of German Alicia understood. Gottlieb followed well enough, and gave back some of the same gibberish. "You got through, though?" he said at last.

"Through the second portal, like I told you. That's how I got the backside look at the trap," his father answered.

"I hope that's not all you did," Gottlieb said.

"Well, I didn't have as much time as I wanted after the trouble at the first portal, and I did want to see what almost bit me," Walther Stutzman said. "But I got to look around a little. The Reichsfuhrer — SS isn't very happy with the Fuhrer."

Like Alicia's father, Gottlieb and Anna's had a way of saying things that were important as if they weren't. What sort of fireworks could go off if the leader of the SS didn't like what the leader of the Reich was doing? Before Alicia could do more than begin to wonder about that, Anna said, "Let's get back to the game."

"All right," Alicia said, though she wouldn't have minded sitting around and listening some more, either. The Stutzmans talked more openly than her own family did. Of course, they weren't keeping the secret around the house any more. They'd probably been a lot more careful before Anna knew.

It'll be years before we can tell Roxane,Alicia thought sadly. But Gottlieb had been thinking the same thing about Anna even longer.We have something in common. That was a pretty funny idea. It stayed in Alicia's mind for a little while. Then the vile deeds of the wicked SS bird made her forget all about it.

Susanna Weiss loathed faculty meetings. Nothing worthwhile ever got done in them, and they wasted inordinate amounts of time. But Herr Doktor Professor Oppenhoff loved them with a bureaucratic passion. Since he headed the Department of Germanic Languages, everyone else had to go along. Susanna eyed the conference room as if it were some especially nasty part of a concentration camp.

Part of her knew that was foolishness. The only poison gas in the room came from Oppenhoff's cigar. Two steam radiators kept the place comfortable, even toasty, despite the chill outside. Sweet rolls and coffee waited on a table next to the window; she didn't have to try to survive on camp swill. No SS guards prowled with guns and dogs. But she was stuck here when she didn't want to be, which gave the meeting the feel of imprisonment.

She listened with half an ear to a report congratulating the department for its impressive publication record. Three of the articles Professor Tennfelde mentioned were hers. She yawned even so. She'd learned to do it without opening her mouth, so it didn't show nearly so much. Tennfelde was dull, dull, dull. If he lectured this way, his students would be anesthetized.

The report finally ended. The spatter of applause the faculty gave seemed to signal relief that it was over. But Tennfelde knew who his primary audience was, and he'd pleased Franz Oppenhoff. "Very informative," the department chairman declared. "Very informative indeed."

Susanna drew a doodle of an alarm clock with a long white beard. And more reports were coming. None of them had anything to do with her. She could have gone her whole life long without knowing or caring what the interlibrary-loan committee had done lately, or whether discussions on merging the Flemish and Dutch subdepartments had progressed any further, especially since they hadn't.

She also yawned-open-mouthed this time-through a report on financial planning from a professor who specialized in the Nibelungenlied and dabbled in the stock market on the side. If he'd done well, he wouldn't have had to worry about his university salary. He plainly did worry about it, which meant he hadn't done well. Why anyone would want advice from a bungling amateur was beyond Susanna. She had a thoroughly professional accountant and broker, and no worries as far as money was concerned. Other things, yes. Money, no.

Again, though, Professor Oppenhoff seemed pleased. "I would like to thank Herr Doktor Professor Dahrendorf for that interesting and enlightening presentation. "He puffed on his Havana. Then he said, "And now Fraulein Doktor Professor Weiss will enlighten us on the current political situation and the changes we have seen in recent times."

Why, you miserable son of a bitch!Susanna thought. Oppenhoff hadn't warned her he was going to do any such thing. He sat there looking smug and pleased with himself. If she made an ass of herself, the rest of the department would assume she was incompetent, not that he'd set her up.

I'd better not make an ass of myself, then. "Thank you, Professor Oppenhoff," she said. She would sooner have substituted another verb forthank, but she gained a few seconds to gather herself even so. Some of these people couldn't get through a lecture even with the text on the lectern in front of them. She'd always prided herself on being able to think on her feet.Well, here we go.

First, the obvious. "Reform will continue. I believe it will intensify. the Fuhrer has seen that we cannot stay strong by living on booty forever. That saps the fiber of the Volk." If Heinz Buckliger could use what sounded like Party doctrine for purposes that would have horrified analter Kampfer, so could she. She went on, "He has also seen that it is in the interest of the Reich to allow more expression of national consciousness within the Empire, especially among Germanic peoples." Czechs weren't Germanic, Frenchmen only marginally so. Susanna shrugged. Thatespecially covered her.

"Also, the possibility of error in the past has been admitted," she said. "This appears to be a healthy development. If we know we have made mistakes, and we know which mistakes we have made, we are less likely to make similar ones in the future."We won't murder millions of Jews again, because there aren't that many left. We might have a hard time murdering thousands of them.

"Not everyone inside the Party is pleased with the direction reform is taking. I think the Jahnke letter in the Beobachter proves that. No one I know believes Jahnke could have published that letter without official, ah, encouragement. It's fairly obvious which officials encouraged him, too." She looked around at the language and literature professors. By their expressions, it wasn't obvious to a lot of them. They were safe. They were comfortable. Why should they get excited about politics?

"On the other hand, we've also seen that some reform has spurred a call for more reform," Susanna said. "Some people-people in high places, too-don't believe the Fuhrer is moving fast enough. Like those who oppose any reform at all, they may grow harder to ignore as time goes on."

She looked Franz Oppenhoff in the eye. "And that,Herr Doktor Professor, about sums it up."

He'd wanted her to make a hash of it. She knew that. She'd had to suffer through a string of indignities no professor who pissed standing up would have had to endure. This was only the latest, and far from the worst. Now she wanted to see whether Oppenhoff would have the gall to claim she hadn't made a proper presentation. If he did, she intended to scorch him.

He scratched at the edge of his side-whiskers, coughed once or twice, and looked down at the papers in front of him. Still looking down at them, he mumbled, "I must thank you for your clear, concise report." People more than half a dozen seats from him undoubtedly didn't hear a word.

"Danke schon,Professor Oppenhoff. I'm glad you liked it," Susanna said loudly. She would get the message across, even if the department chairman didn't feel like doing it.

The meeting ground on. Oppenhoff didn't call on her any more. He did keep glancing over to her every so often. She smiled back sweetly, wishing she could display a shark's teeth instead of her own.

Heinrich Gimpel was finishing up a bowl of rather nasty cabbage stew in the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht canteen when a uniformed guard coming off his shift walked in and said, "Something juicy's going on out in the Adolf Hitler Platz."

"What now?" somebody asked him. "More damned Dutchmen yelling, 'Freedom!'? They probably won't even bother arresting them these days."

But the guard shook his head. "No, it's bigger than any of that piddling crap. They've got a podium and televisor cameras and all kinds of stuff."

That sounded interesting. Heinrich got up, threw out his trash, and put his tray on a moving belt that took it back to the dishwashers. By the clock, he should have gone straight to his desk. He decided to ignore the clock for once. Willi and Ilse had taken plenty of long lunches without ending the world. He figured he could get away with one, especially since he was only going out onto the square in front of headquarters.

As soon as he walked out of the building, he saw the guard was right. In fact, Adolf Hitler Platz held not one commotion but two. Proud banners flying ahead of it, an SS band full of tubas and thumping drums strutted through the square playing marches as loud as they could. If they weren't trying to drown out the man on the podium…

It was a bright spring day. It wasn't very warm-it couldn't have been above ten Celsius-but the sun shone down brightly. It gleamed off the speaker's head, which wasn't just bald but shaven. As soon as Heinrich recognized Rolf Stolle, he knew exactly why that band was blaring away.

He hurried down the steps and across the paving toward the podium from which the Gauleiter of Berlin was addressing a good-sized crowd. Stolle had a microphone. Even so, he was barely a match for the booming band.

He not only knew it, he took advantage of it, saying, "You see how it is,Volk of the Reich? Some of the powers that be don't want you to hear me. They don't want me reminding you that we need to go forward, not sit around with our thumbs up our…" He stopped and grinned. "Well, you know what I mean. And I'll tell you something else I mean, too. These are the people in charge of protecting the Fuhrer. He wants reform. He doesn't want enough of it. He doesn't want it quick enough. But he wants it. They don't. I've told Heinz and told him, 'Don't let these people get behind you so they can stab you in the back,' but he doesn't want to listen."

Stolle stuck out his chin and thrust his fist forward. The pose made him look like Mussolini. "Heinz Buckliger is a good man. Don't get me wrong," he said. "A good man, yes. But a little too trusting."

Whatever he said next, the thundering SS musicians drowned it out. Instead of getting angry about that, he laughed. He even sang a few bars of the march they were playing. People laughed and clapped their hands. Stolle grinned. He struck another pose, this time a silly one. When Heinrich thought of him as a clown, he hadn't been so far wrong. An appreciative audience made Stolle come alive.

The band moved a little farther away from the podium. The Gauleiter moved a little closer to the microphone. "If those noisy SS bastards will just go home, I'll get on with my speech," he said.

A man in the crowd shouted, "SS go home!" He shouted it again. Then three or four more people took up the call. Before long, everybody who'd come to Adolf Hitler Platz to hear Rolf Stolle was yelling, "SS go home!" The cry echoed from the long front wall of the Fuhrer 's palace. Could Heinz Buckliger hear it in there? If he could, what did he think?

Heinrich wondered, but not for long. He was caught up in the thrill of shouting, "SS go home!" He never would have had the nerve to be first to yell such a thing. In the middle of thousands of others, his voice was only one, indistinguishable from the rest.They'll have a hell of a time arresting all of us, he thought, and yelled louder than ever. "SS go home! SS go home!SS go home! "

The chant swelled and swelled. Looking at the excited faces and sparkling eyes of the men and women all around him, Heinrich realized he wasn't the only one who'd wanted to say that for years. How many Germans did? How many would, if they got the chance? He smelled the acrid sweat of fear, but people kept shouting.

Rolf Stolle leaned toward the microphone again. "SS go home!" he called, leading the chorus. "SS go home!"

Heinrich watched the band. Would the musicians deign to take any notice of the people clamoring for them to leave? If they did, wasn't that a sign of weakness? If they didn't, how long before hotheads started throwing rocks and bottles and whatever else they could get their hands on at them? And what would the SS men do then? And what would the crowd-the mob? — do in reply?

Maybe those same questions were going through the band leader's head. Maybe he didn't like the answers that occurred to him, either. As if continuing a regular performance-which this was anything but-he led the musicians to the edge of the enormous square. They kept on playing, but they no longer interfered with Rolf Stolle's speech.

As the crowd roared in triumph, Stolle shouted, "Do you see,Volk of the Reich? Do you? Without you, they're nothing. And they aren't with you, are they?"

"No!" That was a great, pain-filled howl. Again, Heinrich yelled as loud as anyone. Had schnapps ever left him this giddy? He didn't think so.

"I was going to talk for a while longer, friends, but you just made my speech for me," the Gauleiter of Berlin boomed. The crowd cheered. Rolf Stolle went on, "And do you know what else? By this time tomorrow, the whole Reich will know what you've done!"

Ecstatic cheers drowned out the now-distant SS band. Heinrich joined them, but hesitantly. He thought Stolle was likely right. He wasn't so sure that delighted him. If this footage showed up on Horst Witzleben's newscast, would gimlet-eyed SS technicians pore over it, trying to identify every single person-every single subversive person-in the crowd? Could they identifyhim?

Most of the time, things like that would have left him scared to death. Today, he felt too much exultation, too much exaltation, to care very much. Germans-Germans! — had just told the SS (even if it was only a marching band) where to head in. He'd joined them. The SS (even if it was only a marching band) had retreated. And nobody had got shot.

If that all wasn't a reason to make a man feel three meters tall, Heinrich couldn't imagine what would be.

Something was going on. Lise Gimpel could tell as much by the way Heinrich acted when he came home from work. He had almost a mad scientist's gleam in his eye, an air of excitement, he didn't even try to hide. He wouldn't tell her what it was all about, though. That made her want to smack him.

The most he would say was, "We'll watch Horst after supper." Since he said that about three nights a week, it didn't give Lise much of a clue about why he wanted to see the evening news.

Dinner ran late, too. The chicken Lise was roasting took longer to get done than she'd thought it would. The family didn't finish eating till just before seven. Normally, Lise would have done the dishes while the news was on. If she missed the first couple of stories, well, the world wouldn't end. Tonight, she got the feeling it might. She left plates and silverware and glasses in the sink and sat down next to Heinrich to find out what Horst Witzleben had to say for himself-and why her husband had been looking wild-eyed ever since he walked through the front door.

"Our opening story," the newsreader said, "is the collision of two airliners on the runway at Gander, Newfoundland." A map flashed on the screen to show where Gander was. "More than 250 people are confirmed as fatalities. Only seventeen are known to have survived, many of them with severe burns." The televisor showed smoking wreckage, and then one of those survivors coming out of an ambulance on a stretcher.

Lise glanced over at Heinrich. Whatever he'd been waiting for, that wasn't it. She knew a certain amount of relief. She would have worried if he'd got that excited about a plane crash.

Then the picture shifted to Adolf Hitler Platz. Heinrich stiffened. This was it, all right. But why? There was Rolf Stolle, making one of his usual rabble-rousing speeches. And the rabble were indeed roused, as their cheers and shouts showed. But some oom-pah music kept coming close to drowning out the Gauleiter of Berlin. What was that all about?

Then Horst Witzleben said, "Despite attempted interference from an SS marching band,Gauleiter Rolf

Stolle delivered another strong statement supporting the Fuhrer 's reform program this afternoon in central Berlin. His large audience received him favorably, and showed their displeasure at the band's not at all coincidental presence in the square."

His voice cut off. Lise heard people shouting. For a moment, it was just rising and falling noise. Then she made out words: "SS go home! SS go home!"

Ice and fire rivered through her, both together. They'd saidthat? Nothing had happened to them? And now the authorities were showing the pictures on the evening news?

Heinrich grabbed her hand. His voice quivering with excitement, he said, "I wasthere, out in the platz. I was listening to Stolle. And I was shouting for the SS to leave along with everybody else. And theydid!"

"You?" Lise said in amazement. Heinrich nodded. "Was that safe?" she asked.

"I don't know. I think so. I hope so," he answered. "So many people were there, I don't see how they can grab everybody." But he hesitated a little before he said that. Was he trying to convince her or himself or both of them?

"Well, it's done. I hope it turns out all right," she said, and then, "I didn't see you anywhere on the tape."

"Good. I didn't, either," Heinrich said. He'd been watching for himself, then, which meant he was more worried than he let on. Lise sent him a look half affectionate, half exasperated. Hewould try to play down whatever bothered him, because he didn't want her to worry. Once in a great while, that worked. The rest of the time, it only made her worry more.

An advertisement for a breakfast cereal tried to show that eating the stuff would make you rich, athletic, and beautiful. Lise remained unconvinced. "It tastes like library paste," she said.

"I wouldn't be surprised," Heinrich replied, "but how do you know what library paste tastes like?"

"How? I'm the one who helps the girls put school projects together, that's how," Lise said. "I eat the paste, I breathe it, I damn near bathe in it. Last week,Frau Koch wanted everybody in class to make a model of one of the forts the Reich uses to protect German farmers in the Ukraine from bandits. Do you have any idea how much fun it is to glue three strands of tinsel barbed wire to toothpick stakes?"

"As a matter of fact, no," Heinrich admitted. "Is that why you were in such a lousy mood last-when was it? — Wednesday night?"

"You bet it is," Lise said. "And there had to bethree strands of barbed wire, too, by God, or Francesca would have lost points.Frau Koch said so. She really is a beast, if you ask me. Everything else about the project was like that, too: do it exactly this way, or else. How are they supposed to learn anything?"

"I'll tell you what they learn," Heinrich said. "They learn to obey."

Lise hadn't thought of that. But as soon as her husband pointed it out to her, she saw that he was right. School taught more than the multiplication tables and the capital of Manchukuo and how Bismarck unified the Reich. It taught children how to be good Germans, how to be good Nazis. One of the things they needed to know was how to blindly obey anyone set over them. The fortress needs to have three strands of tinsel barbed wire?Jawohl, Frau Koch! Three strands of tinsel barbed wire it shall have! And why does it need to have them? Because Frau Koch says so. No other reason needed.

But Germans-some of them Nazis, no doubt-had stood out there in Adolf Hitler Platz shouting, "SS go home!" They really had. And here was Horst Witzleben, showing them to the whole Reich, to much of the Germanic Empire, with every sign of approval. Would people be chanting the same thing in Oslo tomorrow? In London? Even in Omaha? What would happen if they did?

Horst Witzleben said, "Today, the Fuhrer met with a delegation from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to discuss that region's future relationship with the Greater German Reich. At the close of the meeting, a spokesman for the Fuhrer said that while Bohemia and Moravia, which have been part of the Reich since 1939, cannot reasonably expect to regain their former independence, a larger degree of autonomy within the German federal structure is not beyond the realm of possibility."

The picture cut to the delegation in the palace press room. Its leader, a white-haired man identified as-of all things-a playwright, spoke in Czech-accented German: "What we did here today marks a good beginning. I am not sure Herr Buckliger realizes it is only a beginning, but that is all right. If he doesn't, we will show him."

"They didn't arrest this fellow, either?" Lise said incredulously.

"Doesn't look that way." Heinrich sounded startled, too.

"This is all very strange," Lise said. Her husband nodded. She went on, "I'd almost rather Buckliger had left things alone. Then we'd know where we stood. This way, everything we've been sure of for so long is up in the air."

"What's that myth? Pandora? Is that it? The last thing that flew out was hope." Heinrich paused, frowning. "I think that's how it is."

"Yes, I think so, too," Lise said. "I don't know if I have any, not really. But even wondering if I could…It feels funny. It feels dizzy, like somebody spiked my drink when I wasn't looking."

"I thought so, too, this afternoon," Heinrich said. "But don't get too excited. For every scene like this, there's an 'Enough Is Enough' or something like it. The cards may have been dealt, but they haven't been played yet. And nobody's going to lay down a dummy. We won't get to see anything till it comes out during the hand."

"I suppose not." Lise sighed. "We're going to have to find some new bridge partners, you know."

"One of these days." Heinrich gestured toward the televisor. That Czech playwright was gone, but the memory of his calm assurance lingered. Heinrich said, "Plenty of interesting things happening right now. And pretty soon the kids will learn how to play."

"All sorts of things to pass on to the next generation," Lise said. They both started to laugh. Bridge wasn't even illegal.

SS men, some in black uniforms, others in camouflage smocks, swarmed near the campus of Friedrich Wilhelm University. Snipers with rifles with telescopic sights took positions on rooftops that had never known the footsteps of anyone but occasional repairmen and not-so-occasional pigeons. Susanna Weiss would have been more alarmed if she hadn't known that Heinz Buckliger was coming here to speak.

Along with the SS men, a horde of workmen and technicians had also invaded the university. Banging hammers and buzzing power tools disrupted the quiet that was supposed to foster academic contemplation. Since Susanna had never had any enormous use for quiet, she turned up the radio a little louder to try to drown out the racket of carpentry.

That did the job well enough, but curiosity accomplished what noise couldn't: it made her get up from her work and look out the window.

A platform for the Fuhrer 's upcoming speech was rising in the open space between the two long wings that housed most of the university's classrooms and faculty offices. Rising with it were platforms for televisor cameras. Those would lift the cameramen above the level of the crowd and make sure no one's head got between Heinz Buckliger and his larger audience across the Reich and the Germanic Empire.

The crowd was already building. Susanna thought about going downstairs and joining it. Then she thought again. What was the point? She wasn't close to the platform here, but she could see it. If she went down there, she wouldn't be able to see a damned thing, because everybody around her would be taller than she was. Better to stay where she was. She'd hear Heinz Buckliger either way.

Curiosity satisfied and decision made, she went back to grading papers. Plenty of her students understood the scatology in "The Miller's Tale." Far fewer of them understood how the piece fit into The Canterbury Tales as a whole. They enjoyed gross jokes. Finding and defining structure in a work of literature was something else again.

Twenty minutes later, the telephone rang. She picked it up. "Bitte?This is Susanna Weiss."

"Fraulein Doktor Professor, this is Rosa." Professor Oppenhoff's secretary paused for a moment, then said, "The department chairman strongly advises against watching the Fuhrer 's speech from your window."

"He does?" Susanna said indignantly. "Why?"

"Because the SS has told him they may shoot anyone they see appearing in a window. Whoever it is might be an assassin, they say."

"Oh." Now it was Susanna's turn to pause. "Well, I hope you get hold of everybody. Otherwise, we'll need to fill some vacancies next semester."

"I'll do my best," the secretary said, and hung up. Considering how badly they got along, Susanna knew a certain amount of relief that Rosa had called her. The other woman didn't seem to want to see her dead, anyhow. That was something.

Then she started to laugh. "God help anyone who's in the men's room when the phone rings!" she exclaimed.

Even if watching Buckliger's speech turned out not to be such a good idea, she could still listen to it. She opened her window a few centimeters so she could hear better. the Fuhrer wasn't there yet, so none of the SS snipers took a shot at her.

Noise from down below swelled as the crowd built up. You could put a lot of people between the two main wings of the university buildings. From the excited buzz that rose, she knew to the minute when

Heinz Buckliger came into sight.

"Guten Tag,students, faculty, and friends," Buckliger said. His amplified voice sounded a little tinny. Technicians would probably improve it for the radio and televisor. "I am glad to come to this great center of learning. Knowledge is at the heart of the Reich 's progress in war and peace. Without our talented scientists and engineers, we could not have won our great victories. Nor would the peace that followed have been so prosperous, so healthy, or so enjoyable."

He got a hand. Susanna might have known he would. She wouldn't have cheered that, not in a million years. Buckliger proved he was a German after all. The Volk might live prosperous, healthy, enjoyable lives. What about the Jews? The gypsies? Homosexuals? Poles? Russians? Ukrainians? Serbs? Arabs? Negroes? Feebleminded people? Did he think of them at all? Or only of his own comfort? From what he said, the answer seemed all too obvious.

"We need to know ourselves as well," the Fuhrer said, after showing he didn't know himself so well even if he could sound like Marcus Aurelius. Would a Roman Emperor count as an Aryan? Probably not, not when he'd been fighting Germans along the Danube while he wrote the Meditations. Buckliger continued, "And the best way to know ourselves is to tell ourselves the truth.

"We cannot do that while the Reichstag is only a rubber stamp. It has been nothing more for much too long. As Hitler pointed out in the first edition of Mein Kampf, democratic elections are the best way to find representatives who will serve the people who chose them and not themselves alone." He paused for applause, and got it.

"This being so," he went on, "I am calling new elections to the Reichstag, voting to take place on Sunday, July 10. All seats are to be contested. Candidates need not be members of the Party, so long as they are of Aryan blood and good character. Ballots will be secret. There will be no penalty for voting one's conscience. I have not the slightest particle of doubt that the best will prevail. And the Volk and the Reich will be better for it."

The ovation this time was hesitant, as if the Fuhrer 's audience was not sure whether it was allowed to cheer. That didn't surprise Susanna. What Heinz Buckliger had said did. But it was hardly surprising to be surprised in Berlin these days. That speech of Rolf Stolle's in the Adolf Hitler Platz where the crowd drove off the SS band…The SS had gone away, and not only did no one get arrested, the story made the evening news. Heinrich had been there. Up till today, Susanna had been sick with envy. Now she too had a moment of history to claim as her own.

"We National Socialists have ruled Germany wisely and well for many years," Buckliger said. "I have faith that the Volk will recognize our service and give us the large majority in the Reichstag we deserve."

Loud, confident applause rang out. Of course people knew they were safe clapping after the Fuhrer praised the Nazis. Susanna thought Buckliger was probably right about the Party's winning most of the seats in the Reichstag. Even now, how many non-Nazis would be bold enough to run against Party Bonzen? How many who did run would win? Maybe some. Many? It seemed unlikely.

Did Buckliger really believe the Nazis had ruled Germany well and wisely? They'd won, thanks in no small measure to Hitler's demonic energy and Himmler's grim ruthlessness. But the blood of the people they'd murdered-the blood of the peoples they'd murdered-still cried out from the grave…and from the crematorium for those millions who'd never got a grave.

"I know reform, revitalization, cannot come overnight," the Fuhrer said. "The Reich is large and complex.

Those who call for everything to be perfect by tomorrow are naive. But those who say nothing needs repair are willfully blind. Change is part of life. It is here. It will go forward. And it will succeed."

He got another big hand. Susanna was intrigued by his methods. In back-to-back sentences, he'd skewered Rolf Stolle and Lothar Prutzmann. No doubt he meant to show himself as a moderate, as a man embarked on the only possible course. That could work. But she remembered the thought she'd had not so long before. A moderate was also somebody vulnerable from both the left and the right. Did Heinz Buckliger see that?

Most people would say,What do you think you're doing, trying to guess along with the Fuhrer?Susanna cared very little about what most people said. If she had, she would have dropped her Judaism like a grenade with the fuse lit.

Besides, up till the time when Buckliger became Fuhrer, politics in the Reich had been not only appalling but, worse yet, bloody dull. Some of the things that went on were still appalling. But only someone who was deaf and blind would have called them dull. And when things were interesting, how could younot try to guess what would happen next?

Outside, the applause went on and on, though the Fuhrer didn't say anything more. Susanna concluded he was leaving the platform, leaving the university. Pretty soon, the coast would be clear. She could look out her window again without worrying about trigger-happy SS sharpshooters.

In the meantime…In the meantime, she still had her essays to grade. They would have been there even if Kurt Haldweim were still Fuhrer. In a lot of ways, life went on in spite of politics.

And, in a lot of ways, it didn't. How many lives had the politics of the Reich snuffed out? Too many. Millions and millions too many. What did undergraduate essays matter, with that in the back of her mind?

But her life had to go on, no matter what the Reich had done. Shaking her head, she picked up a red pen and got back to work.

A day like any other day. That was how Heinrich Gimpel remembered it afterwards. It could have been any Tuesday. The kids were running around getting ready for school. Francesca was still grumbling about some new idiotic project Frau Koch had inflicted on the class. Roxane was spelling words out loud; she was going to have a test. And Alicia had her nose in a book. Lise had to yell at her to get her to put it down and do the things she needed to do. Yes, everything seemed normal as could be.

Blackbirds on lawns tugged at worms as Heinrich walked up the street toward the bus stop. The sun shone brightly. Spring was really here now. He couldn't recall any other spring that had seemed so hopeful, so cheerful. Was that Mother Nature's fault or Heinz Buckliger's? Heinrich didn't know. He didn't much care, either. He would enjoy the moment for as long as it lasted.

He waited at the bus stop for a few minutes, then got on the bus for the Stahnsdorf train station. Three stops later, Willi Dorsch got on, too. He sat down next to Heinrich."Guten Morgen," he said.

"Same to you," Heinrich answered."Wie geht's?"

"It's been better," Willi said. "I have to tell you, though, it's been worse, too. Erika's been…kind of cheerful lately." He looked this way and that, a comic show of suspicion. "I wonder what she's up to."

"Heh," Heinrich said uneasily. As far as he could tell, Erika had never said anything to Willi about what had happened at her sister's house on Burggrafen-Strasse-or about any of the several things that might have happened there but hadn't. He supposed he should have been grateful. Hewas grateful. But he was also suspicious, and his suspicion had no comic edge to it.

When the bus got to the Stahnsdorf station, he and Willi bought their copies of the Volkischer Beobachter and carried them out to the platform. They climbed aboard the train up to Berlin, sat down together, and started reading the morning news. Almost as if they'd rehearsed it, they simultaneously pointed to the same story below the fold on the front page.

STOLLE ANNOUNCES CANDIDACY, the headline said. There was a small head shot of the Gauleiter of Berlin just below the line of big black type. The story, as bald as any Heinrich had ever seen in the Beobachter, announced that Rolf Stolle was indeed running for the Reichstag.

"Can he do that?" Heinrich said, and then, "How can he do that? He's already Gauleiter." The puzzle offended his sense of order.

But Willi had the answer: "Gauleiter's a Party office.Reichstag member would be a state office. He could hold both at once."

"You're right," Heinrich said wonderingly. The National Socialist Party and the Reich were as closely intertwined as a pair of lovers-or as a tree and a strangler fig. But they weren't quite one and the same.

"I wonder how the Fuhrer will like that," Willi said.

"Stolle trying for a national forum?"

Willi nodded. "Ja. And Stolle trying for votes in general." He lowered his voice. "I mean, who ever voted for Buckliger for anything? Party Bonzen and Wehrmacht bigwigs, sure, but nobody else."

"You're right." Again, wonder filled Heinrich's voice. Till Buckliger's speech at Friedrich Wilhelm University, that wouldn't have mattered. Who'd voted-really voted-for anyone who mattered in the Reich? No one. Elections had been afterthoughts, farces. This one felt different. Stolle must have sensed it, too. He might well have been a clown. Several of the moves he'd made lately convinced Heinrich he was anything but a fool.

And Willi, when it came to politics if not to women, was also anything but a fool. "I wonderwhy the Fuhrer 's not running for a seat in the Reichstag, " he said thoughtfully.

That was an interesting question, too. Heinrich said, "Maybe he's worried he'd lose."

"Maybe," Willi said. "It's the only thing I thought of that made any sense at all, too. But it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, if you know what I mean. He can find a district full of Prussian cabbage farmers or Bavarian beer brewers that would elect him no matter what."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" Heinrich agreed. The more they talked about it, the more normal their tone became. The more freedom all the people of the Reich got, the more they seemed to take it for granted. The more they got, the more they craved? Was that true, too? Could that be true? Maybe it could. Maybe it really could. But who would have believed it a year before?

Willi suddenly looked sly. "The other side of the coin is what happens if Buckliger doesn't run for the Reichstag. If he doesn't, he's still Fuhrer. He's still got all the Fuhrer 's powers. He can tell it what to do."

"That's the way things work, all right," Heinrich said. But then he did a little more thinking of his own. "That's the way things worknow, all right. If the Volk chooses the Reichstag, though, will it be so easy to ignore? What's the point to having a real election if right afterwards you go and pretend you never did?"

"You're right there," Willi admitted. "I don't see the point to that, either. Maybe Buckliger does."

"Who knows?" Heinrich said. "Who knows for sure about anything that's going on these days? We'll just have to wait and see."

"Sounds like traffic through Berlin, doesn't it?" Willi said as the commuter train came into South Station. "Of course, there's usually a lot more waiting than seeing with that."

"Maybe it won't be so bad," Heinrich said. Before Willi could say anything sardonic, he forestalled him: "Maybe it'll be worse."

As a matter of fact, they got to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters fifteen minutes early. Had they been fifteen minutes late, they both would have cursed and fumed. Early they took for granted. Heinrich looked out across Adolf Hitler Platz toward the Fuhrer 's palace. Aside from a few joggers and a gaggle of early-rising Japanese tourists snapping photos, the vast square was echoingly empty. No Gauleiter growling out a speech this morning. No thumping, swaggering SS band trying to drown him out. No Dutch demonstrators, either.

Willi was looking across the square, too. "Almost gets boring to see it this quiet, doesn't it?" he remarked.

"It does," Heinrich said in bemusement. "It really does."

They went up the stairs and, after getting their identities confirmed, into the headquarters building. Heinrich sat down at his desk and immediately yawned. He got up and went to the canteen with Willi to fortify himself with a cup of coffee. He squirted some hot chocolate into the cup, too, from the machine next to the coffeemaker. "Viennese today, aren't we?" Willi said.

"Oh, but of course." Heinrich put on an Austrian accent. Willi laughed.

A Viennese aristocrat-even a Viennese headwaiter-would have turned up his nose at the concoction Heinrich had put together. But it was hot and it was sweet and it had plenty of caffeine. With all that going for it, Heinrich wasn't inclined to be fussy. After he finished it and tossed the cup in the trash, he thought about going back for another one. But his brains were moving a little faster, so he buckled down and got to work instead.

Ilse wandered over to Willi's desk and started playing with little ringlets of hair that hung down over the back of his collar. Without looking away from his computer screen, he swatted her on the fanny. She squeaked. She seemed to have recovered nicely from discovering that Rolf Stolle had had his fun with her and that his roving eye had then roved on.

She and Willi were all but molesting each other when they went off at noon. Heinrich had no doubt they would pick a restaurant somewhere close to a hotel. He walked back to the canteen. The lunch special there was roast pork. As he had all his life, he ate it without a second thought. He liked pork, though he'd had better than this.

When Willi and Ilse came in after a long, long lunch break, Willi mimed smoking a lazy cigarette. Ilse thought that was the funniest thing in the world.

Heinrich was plowing through an analysis of near-future American business activity when he looked up to discover three blackshirts standing around his desk."Was ist hier los?" he asked in surprise but no real alarm.

"You are Heinrich Gimpel?" one of them asked.

He nodded. "That's me." He wondered if they wanted to take him to confer with Heinz Buckliger again. They didn't. The two lower-ranking blackshirts grabbed him and hauled him out of his chair. The senior man said, "You are under arrest."

"Arrest?" Heinrich yelped in disbelief. "What for?"

"Suspicion of being a Jew."