In The Presence of mine Enemies

IV

Heinrich and Lise Gimpel were defending against a small slam in spades, doubled, that Willi Dorsch was playing. Heinrich was the one who'd doubled. With the ace of hearts in his hand, why not? One more trick after that, he thought, ought to come from somewhere. That ace had been his opening lead-whereupon he'd discovered, painfully, that Erika had a void in hearts. Willi had grinned like the Cheshire Cat when he trumped the beautiful, lost ace.

One trick for the defenders had materialized, when the clubs split evenly and Heinrich's queen survived. He couldn't see where they would come up with a second one, the one that would set the contract. His two meager trumps were gone, pulled, and Lise had had only one.

Willi led the queen of diamonds. Heinrich glumly tossed out the seven. The ace lay face-up on the table in the dummy's hand. Willi confidently didn't play it, instead choosing the three. Lise didn't even smile as she ruined the finesse by laying her king on top of the queen. "Down one," she said sweetly.

"Oh, for God's sake!" Willi said. He might have added something more pungent than that, but the three Gimpel girls had gone to bed only a few minutes before and could have heard if he did. He sent Heinrich an accusing stare. "You were the one who doubled. I was sure you had that…miserable king."

"I doubled on the strength of the ace," Heinrich said. "When you ruffed it, I thought we were doomed. Let's finish the hand-maybe we'll come up with another trick, too."

Lise led. Willi handily took the rest of the tricks, but he and Erika still went down one. His wife sighed mournfully.

"I would have played that one the same way." Heinrich came to Willi's defense.

"Would you?" Erika didn't sound as if she believed it.

"Sure I would," he said. "Lise didn't bid at all during the auction. You have to figure what strength we've got is in my hand."

"Maybe." Erika still seemed dubious-and annoyed at her husband. "Ifyou'd tried that finesse, Heinrich, it probably would have worked."

Willi Dorsch didn't say anything. He did turn red, though, as he gathered up the cards. Heinrich tried to defuse things, saying, "Ha! Don't I wish? I've had more finesses go down in flames than the Russians lost planes the first day we hit them."

"But you don't run them unless you need to," Erika said. "Willi tried that one for the sake of being cute. We could have made without it."

She spoke as if her husband weren't there. Willi noticed, too, and turned redder than ever. "We were in trouble if Ididn't try that finesse," he insisted.

"I don't think so," Erika said.

"Whose deal is it?" Lise asked. That might not have been the wisdom of Solomon, but it sufficed to forestall the argument. The next hand was unexciting; the Gimpels bid two hearts and made three. The hand after that, Erika Dorsch made four spades and chopped off the Gimpels' leg.

She didn't say anything to Willi. She made such a point of not saying anything to him, he turned red all over again. "Yes, you're a genius," he growled. "There. I admit it. Are you happy now?"

"I just played it sensibly," Erika said. "It's not that you haven't got brains, sweetheart. It's just that you don't always bother using them. If you ask me, that's worse, because you could." Things would have been bad enough if she'd left it there, but she added, "Heinrich, now, he gets the most from what he's got between his ears."

Lise Gimpel sent her husband a hooded look. He didn't need it to know this was several different flavors of trouble. The most immediate one was between Willi and Erika. Willi took a deep breath. By the nasty glint in his eyes, Heinrich knew with sudden, appalled certainty just what he was going to say. It would have been crude in a locker room. At the bridge table, it would have been a disaster. Heinrich got there first, saying, "If I'm as smart as all that, why aren't I rich? If I'm as smart as all that, why wasn't I smart enough to pick a better-looking face, too?"

He hoped that would help calm Willi, who was by anybody's standards better-looking than he was. And it might have, if Erika hadn't poured gasoline on the fire: "Some things, we can't choose. Some things…we can." She was looking straight at her husband.

Willi had managed to get some grip on his temper. His voice was thick with anger when he said, "We'll talk about this later," but at least he seemed willing to talk about it later instead of having a row right there on the spot.

"Why don't I bring out the coffee and cake?" Lise said. "I think maybe we've had enough bridge for the night."

Heinrich hoped Erika would hop up and help, but she didn't. She was, he slowly realized, as angry at Willi as he was at her. She might have realized what her husband had almost said, too-or maybe she was angry for reasons that had nothing to do with bridge but came out over the game. Sitting there with them, waiting for Lise to come back, Heinrich felt like a man in the middle of a minefield.

When the minefield went up, though, it went up from an unexpected direction. Erika Dorsch turned her blue gaze on him and asked, "What do you think of the whole business about the first edition of Mein Kampf?"

Few residents of the Reich would have been comfortable answering that question. It horrified Heinrich for all sorts of reasons, most of which Erika knew nothing about. He tried to pass it off lightly: "What I think doesn't matter. What the powers that be think will be what counts."

"It's what I told Heinrich at the office: that whole business is nothing but a lot of garbage," Willi said. "Nobody who counts will pay any attention to it."

The blue glare Erika turned on him might have come from twin acetylene torches. "I already know what you think. I ought to-I've heard it often enough. I'm trying to find out what Heinrich thinks."

Wherever that anger came from, it was genuine. Heinrich wondered whether Erika really had her sights set on him, or whether she was only using him to make Willi angry and jealous. Either way, it worked. Willi visibly steamed. Heinrich said, "Like I told you, I don't know what to think. How about you, Erika?" He regretted the last question as soon as the words were out of his mouth, which was, of course, too late.

"Me? I think it's about time somebody brought this up," she said. "Who is the Reich for, if it's not for the people in it? And if it's for us, shouldn't we have some say about who runs it?"

Heinrich agreed with that, to the extent that he could. He would never have dared to say it out loud, though. Willi Dorsch sneered. "My wife, the democrat. This iswhy Hitler changed things after the first edition. Look what that kind of nonsense got the French. Look what it got the Americans. If you go around electing politicians, they'll kiss the backsides of the people who voted them in. You need men who canlead, not follow."

At long last, Lise brought in the cakes and coffee. She set plate and cup in front of Willi. "Here. Why don't you lead off on this?"

"Thanks, Lise," Willi said as he cut himself a slice of cake. "I don't hear you going on about how wonderful the stupid first edition is. You've got the sense to know it's rubbish."

His wife said, "I'm with Heinrich. I can't do anything much about it one way or the other. What's the point of fussing over something like that?"

"Thereis a point," Erika Dorsch insisted. "If the Party Bonzen know the people are looking over their shoulder and just waiting to throw them out if they do something stupid or feather their own nests, maybe they'll watch themselves."

Heinrich had the same hope. Wouldn't leaders responsible to the people they ruled be milder than leaders responsible to no one but their courtiers? They could hardly be harsher. No matter what he hoped, though, he'd had keeping quiet and staying noncommittal inalterably drummed into him. Silence meant more than security. Silence meant survival.

And that held true for others besides the last few hidden Jews, as Willi pointed out: "When all this is over, when we've got ourselves a new Fuhrer, the Security Police are going to take a good, long look at everybody who babbled about the first edition and how wonderful it is. They may figure some people are just fools, and let them off the hook. But some people, the agitators, will win themselves noodles for their big mouths." The camp slang for a bullet in the back of the neck had become part of the ordinary German language.

All he succeeded in doing was getting his wife angry again. "So what shall we do, then?" Erika snapped. "Sit on our hands and keep quiet because we're afraid? Pretend we're nothing but a bunch of Mussulmen?" That was camp slang, too, slang for prisoners who'd given up and were waiting to die.

Her question prompted only one answer from Heinrich.Yes, he thought.What else is there? Don't you realize what you're up against?

Maybe Erika didn't. She'd lived a life of comfort and privilege, confident she was one of the Herrenvolk. So had most Germans in the forty years since the United States went down. They were top dogs, and seldom had to think about how they stayed on top.

Sure enough, Erika stuck out her chin and said, "I'm just as good an Aryan as any of the Party big shots.

I'm just as good an Aryan as Kurt Haldweim was-and so are you, Willi, and Heinrich and Lise, if you'd just stand up on your hind legs about it." Could sheer Aryan arrogance pave the way for the measures the first edition of Mein Kampf outlined? There was a notion that hadn't occurred to Heinrich up till now.We're all set about everyone else, so we must be equal to one another. It made a very Germanic kind of sense. But just because Erika thought it was true, would anyone else? That was liable to be a different story.

Willi said, "I think we'd better head for home. Some nights there's just no reasoning with some people."

Though he did his best to sound cheerful, Heinrich thought he was fuming underneath. Erika didn't help when she said, "I've been telling you that for years, and you never paid any attention to me."

They were still sniping at each other when they left the Gimpel house and headed up the street toward the bus stop. Heinrich closed the door behind them. "Whew!" he said-a long whoosh of air. "Yes." Lise stretched the word to three times its usual length. "That was a fascinating evening, wasn't it?"

"There's a good word for it." Heinrich could imagine several other words he might have used. Fascinating was the safest one he could come up with. "I don't think you're part of the problem between Willi and Erika," his wife said.

"That's good," he answered, most sincerely. "I don't think you're part of the problem," Lise repeated, "but I think Erika thinks you're part of the solution."

"You…may be right." Heinrich didn't want to admit even that much. It felt dangerous: not dangerous in the hauled-off-to-an-extermination-camp sense, but dangerous in the simpler, more normal, this-complicates-my-life sense. He was not the sort of man who cared for danger of any sort.

Lise tapped her foot on the tile of the entry hall. "And if I am right, what are you going to do about it?"

"Me? Nothing!" he exclaimed. The alarm in his voice must have got through to her, because she relaxed-a little. "Good," she said.

"That's the right answer." She paused pensively. "Erika's a very good-looking woman, isn't she?" Heinrich couldn't even say no. She would have known he was lying. "I suppose so," he mumbled.

"Maybe it's not such a bad thing you have more on your mind than most husbands." Lise tried to eye him severely, but a smile curled up the corners of her mouth in spite of herself. The same thing had occurred to Heinrich not so long before. He was not about to admit that to Lise. He told himself Security Police torturers couldn't have torn it from him, but he knew he was liable to be wrong. Those people were very good at what they did, and got a lot of practice doing it. He realized he had to say something. He couldn't just keep standing there. Otherwise, Lise was liable to think he thought it was too bad he had more on his mind than most husbands, which was the last thing he wanted. "I know when I'm well off," he told her.

That turned the tentative, reluctant smile wide and happy. "Good," she said. "You'd better." She paused. "Do you know when you're well off well enough to help me clean up?"

"I suppose so," he said once more, as halfheartedly as he had when admitting Erika Dorsch was pretty.

Lise sent him a sharp look. Then she figured out why he'd sounded the way he had. She made as if to throw something at him. "It's a good thing I've known you for a long time," she said.

"Yes, I think so, too," Heinrich said, and that, for once, turned out to be just the right answer.

Esther Stutzman turned the key to get into Dr. Dambach's outer office. "Good morning,Frau Stutzman," the pediatrician called from his inner sanctum.

"Good morning, Doctor," she answered. "Have you been here long?"

"A while," Dambach said. "Would you please see to the coffeemaker? It's turning out nothing but sludge."

"Of course." When Esther did, she discovered he'd put three times as much coffee on the filter as he should have. She didn't point that out to him; experience had taught her that pointing such things out did no good. With children, he knew what he was doing. With the coffeemaker…no. She just set things to rights and brought him a proper cup of coffee.

"Danke schon,"he said. "I don't know what goes wrong when I put my hands on that machine, but something always does. I can't understand it. I follow the instructions…"

"Yes, Doctor," Esther replied. From what Irma, the afternoon receptionist, said, she wasn't the only one who'd given up arguing with Dambach about the coffeemaker.

He sipped from the cup Esther had brought him. "This is much better," he told her. "I don't know how you make that miserable thing behave, but you always manage to." Esther only smiled. If the pediatrician wanted to think she was a genius when it came to coffee, she wouldn't complain. He tapped at the papers on his desk. "I've found something interesting-something peculiar, even."

Was he trying to show that he was good for something even if he couldn't make coffee worth a damn? Esther already knew that. She also knew she had to ask, "What is it, Dr. Dambach?" and sound interested when she did.

And then, all of a sudden, shewas interested, vitally and painfully interested, for he said, "Do you remember the case of Paul Klein a few days ago?"

"The poor baby with that horrible disease?" Esther said, doing her best not to think,The poor baby who's a Jew.

"Yes, that's right. I have found a fascinating discrepancy on his parents' genealogical records."

Dear God! Did Walther make a mistake?None of the fear Esther felt showed on her face. If she'd shown fear whenever she felt it, she would have gone around looking panic-stricken all the time. When she said, "Really?" she sounded intrigued, but no more than a good secretary should have.

Dr. Dambach nodded. "I don't know what to make of it, either," he said. "In the records I got from the Reichs Genealogical Office, both Richard and Maria Klein are shown to have distant ancestors who may possibly have been…well, Jews."

"Good heavens!" Esther had had a lot of practice simulating that kind of shock.

"As I say, these were distant ancestors," Dambach went on hastily. "Nothing to involve the Security Police, believe me. I don't care for that business any more than you do."I doubt that, Esther thought.I doubt that very much. The pediatrician, fortunately oblivious, continued. "But the slight Jewish taint would help account for the presence of the Tay-Sachs gene on both sides of the family."

"I see," Esther said. What she didn't see was where the problem lay in that case.

Dambach proceeded to spell it out for her: "While I was going through the Kleins' records, I happened to come across another copy of their family tree, one they'd given me when Paul's older brother, Eduard, was born.Those pedigrees show unquestioned Aryan ancestry on both sides of the family, as far back as can be traced."

"How…very strange," Esther said through lips suddenly stiff with dread. Changing a computer record threw any future hounds off the scent, yes. But compare the change to a printout from before it was made…I should have pulled those records from Eduard's chart,Esther thought. But it had never crossed her mind. Eduard had been born before she came to work at Dambach's office, and she'd forgotten about his files. Guilt made her want to sink through the floor.

"Strange indeed. I've never seen another case like it," Dr. Dambach said. "And what's even stranger is, I called the Reichs Genealogical Office yesterday afternoon, and they said their records show no signs of tampering."

Thank heaven for that,Esther thought.Walther's safe. But were Richard and Maria Klein? "Maybe…I hate to say this of people, but maybe they tried to hide their Jews in the woodpile, and used altered documents to do it," Esther suggested, doing her best for them. "Even if you're not enough of a Mischling to be disposed of, a lot of folks don't care to have anything to do with you if you've got even a trace of Jew blood."

"Altering official documents is illegal," Dambach said severely. But then he paused, a thoughtful expression on his round face. "Still, I suppose it could be. It makes more sense than anything I thought of. I would have hoped, though, that the Kleins might have trusted their children's physician. I am, after all, a man with some experience of the world. I know that a small taint of Jewish ancestry may be forgiven. It's not as if they were half breeds or full bloods, for heaven's sake-as if there were such folk at the heart of the Reich in this day and age."

"Of course not, Doctor. What a ridiculous idea." Esther Stutzman clamped down hard on a scream. Dr. Dambach thought of himself as a man of the world, but he thought-he'd been trained to think-of Jews as different from other people. He thought of himself as tolerant for being willing to ignore some distant trace of Jewish ancestry. And so, for the Greater German Reich, he was…

The pediatrician arranged papers in a neat stack. "As I say, I am a man with some experience of the world. I have seen forged genealogical papers before. You would be surprised how many people want to claim a grander ancestry than they really own. Most of them are crude jobs, though-altered photocopies and such. But what the Kleins gave me with Eduard seems perfectly authentic."

That's because itisperfectly authentic, at least as far as the Reichs Genealogical Office knows. "As long as you have the proper information now, is there really any point to making a fuss?" Esther said. If Dambach said no, she could go out to her receptionist's station and breathe a sigh of relief when he wasn't looking.

But Dambach didn't say anything at all. He just sat there eyeing the different sets of genealogical records. Esther knew she'd pushed things as far as she could. If she said another word, her boss would start wondering why she was sticking up for the Kleins so much.Don't let anyone start wondering about you might have been the eleventh commandment for Jews in the Reich. A smile on her face, she walked out of Dr. Dambach's private office.

She had plenty with which to busy herself out front: filing, billing, preparing dunning letters for people whose payments were late. She bit her lip when the pediatrician used the telephone, even though she couldn't make out whom he was calling.His wife, his brother, his mother, she thought hopefully.

The telephone she was in charge of-not Dambach's personal line-began to ring, too. Patients and their parents-mostly their mothers-started coming in. She scheduled appointments and led children and the grownups with them back to examination rooms. Once, she made a followup appointment with a specialist for a boy whose broken arm wasn't healing as straight as Dambach would have liked.

As noon approached, the flood of people coming in slowed down and the flood of people going out picked up. Dr. Dambach sometimes worked straight through lunch, but this didn't look like a day where he would have to. Esther relaxed a little. She got the chance to look around for things she could take care of before she went home. That way, Irma wouldn't have to worry about them this afternoon, and Esther herself wouldn't have to worry about them tomorrow morning.

The last patient had just left when the door to the waiting room opened again. Esther looked up in annoyance-was someone trying to bring in a child without first making an appointment? Unless it was an emergency, she intended to send anyone that foolish away with a flea in his ear.

But the tall man in the unfamiliar dark brown uniform was not carrying a baby or holding a child by the hand. He nodded to her. "This is the office of Dr. Martin Dambach?" he inquired, his accent Bavarian.

"Yes, that's right," Esther answered. "And you are…?"

"Maximilian Ebert,Reichs Genealogical Office, at your service." He actually clicked his heels. Esther tried to remember the last time she'd seen anyone outside of the cinema do that-tried and failed. The man from the Genealogical Office went on, "Dr. Dambach is in?"

Esther wanted to tell him no. Had she thought that would make him go away and never come back, she would have. As things were, she had to hide alarm and reluctance when she nodded. "Yes, he is. One moment, please." She went back to Dr. Dambach's office. The pediatrician was eating a liverwurst sandwich. "Excuse me, Doctor, but a Herr Ebert from the Reichs Genealogical Office is here to see you."

"Is he?" Dr. Dambach said with his mouth full. He swallowed heroically; Esther thought of an anaconda engulfing a tapir. When Dambach spoke again, his voice was clear: "I didn't expect him so soon. Please tell him he can come in." He stuck the remains of the sandwich in a desk drawer.

"Danke schon, gnadige Frau," Ebert said when Esther delivered the message, and he clicked his heels again.Dear lady? Esther wondered. That took politeness a long way when talking to a receptionist. Did he like her looks? It wasn't mutual. He was dark and jowly, and she thought he'd have a nasty temper if he weren't trying to be charming. She was careful to stand well away from him when she led him to the doctor's private office.

They didn't bother closing the door. Esther heard bits of conversation floating out: "…obviously genuine…" "…alsoobviously genuine…" "…don't know what to make of…" "…wouldn't bother but for the Jewish aspect…" "…a puzzlement, without a doubt…"

After twenty minutes or so, Dr. Dambach and Maximilian Ebert emerged together. The man from the Genealogical Office asked Esther, "What do you know of this business about the Kleins?"

"Should we be talking about this with her?" Dambach asked.

"I don't see why not," Ebert said. "She's obviously of impeccable Aryan stock. Well,Frau "-his eye picked up the little name badge at her station-"ah,Frau Stutzman?"

"Only what Dr. Dambach has told me," Esther answered.Obviously of impeccable Aryan stock. She couldn't shriek laughter, however much she might want to. Cautiously, she went on, "I do know the Kleins a little away from the office." If she didn't say that, they could find out. Better to admit it. "They've always seemed like good enough people. I'm sorry their child has this horrible disease." Every word of that was true-more true than Maximilian Ebert could know.

"Have you any idea how they could have got two different sets of genealogical records, each one plainly authentic?" Ebert asked.

"No. I don't see how it's possible," she answered, which was anything but the truth.

"Are you really sure theyare both authentic?" Dr. Dambach asked.

"As certain as I can be without the laboratory work to prove it," Ebert said. "I'll take both of them with me to get that. And then, if they do both turn out to be genuine, we'll have to figure out what that means. At the moment, Doctor, I have no more idea than you do. And now I must be off. A pleasure to meet you,Frau Stutzman.Guten Tag." He touched the brim of his cap and strode out of the office.

"Now we'll get to the bottom of this." Dr. Dambach sounded as if he looked forward to the prospect.

"So we will." Esther hoped she sounded the same way, even if it was another lie. No-especially if it was another lie.

The Medieval English Association meeting was winding down. In another couple of days, Susanna Weiss would have to fly back to Berlin. The conference hadn't been the most exciting she'd ever attended. She was bringing home material for at least two articles. That would keep Professor Oppenhoff happy. But there hadn't been any really spectacular papers and there hadn't been any really juicy scandals. Without the one or the other, the conclave itself would go down as less than memorable.

Still, there were compensations. First and foremost, there was London itself. Along with her ideas for articles, Susanna was also bringing home enough new books-used books, actually-to make excess baggage charges all but certain. Her campaign against the bookstores of London would have made General Guderian sit up and take notes. She always shopped as if she were a big-game hunter organizing a safari. All she lacked were beaters to drive the books off the shelves and into the range of her high-powered account card. She had to find the volumes and pick them out herself-but that was part of the sport.

Along with the books, she was bringing back several pairs of shoes. She'd gone after them with the same effective bravado she'd used on her bookstore campaign. She was particularly proud of one pair, which were covered all over with multicolored sequins. If she wore them to a faculty meeting, she might give the department chairman heart failure-and if that wasn't worth trying, she didn't know what would be.

She had one more reason for hating to leave London, too: no matter how stodgy the MEA had been this year, the British Union of Fascists across the street had more than made up for it. Susanna thought she might have spent more time at the Crown than she had at the Silver Eagle. She'd got to know several BUF men who thought she was a delegate totheir gathering: not the sort of compliment she most wanted, perhaps, but a compliment all the same.

"'Ere's the little lydy!" they would roar when they spotted her, and other endearments in dialects never heard among the scholars of medieval English. They pressed buttons and badges and stickers on her, and bought her pints till her back teeth floated. She would rather have had Scotch, but the rank-and-file fascists were a beer-drinking crowd.

They were also a crowd overwhelmingly in favor of doing business the way the first edition of Mein Kampf outlined. "Only stands to reason, don't it, dearie?" said a bald-headed, broken-nosed bruiser named Nick, breathing beer fumes into Susanna's face. "It's the buggers 'oove already got it made 'oo don't want ordinary blokes to 'ave their say."

"That certainly seems reasonable to me," Susanna said. Her precise, well-educated tones sent Nick and his pals into gales of laughter. She couldn't help liking them. If there was any hope for changing the way things worked, it rested on their shoulders. But the way they kept laughing while they bragged of brawls and brutalities past chilled her.If they knew I was a Jew, they would laugh like that while they stomped me to death.

She forgave, or at least forgot, their hypothetical sins when they smuggled her onto the floor for the climactic session of their assembly. They didn't think of it as smuggling, of course, and she wore enough BUF ornaments that no one, not her companions and not the even nastier thugs at the doors, even noticed that a membership badge was not among the gewgaws.

Things were undoubtedly livelier here than they were at the Medieval English Association meeting. People roared out songs in raucous choruses. The tunes came from British popular music. Some of the words were fierce, some were funny, some were obscene. Most were either for or against the first edition. Here and there, people for the older rules brawled with people opposing them. BUF guards tried without too much luck to keep the two sides apart.

A beer bottle smashed on the floor a couple of meters from Susanna's feet. "Someone will get killed!" she exclaimed.

"Some of these bastards deserve killing," Nick answered.

The brute simplicity of fascism had always fascinated and repelled Susanna at the same time. Somebody doesn't like the way you're going? Get rid of him, and then keep on going that way anyhow. If you're strong enough, you can, and it proves you were right all along.

There was, of course, a certain problem… "Suppose they decide you are the ones who need killing?" Susanna asked.

"Only goes to show they're a pack of bloody sods, eh?" Nick said.

One of the ruffian's pals, though, saw what Susanna was driving at. "If they let counting 'ands stand for banging 'eads, I expect we will, too," he said. "That's what this business is about, right?" Susanna nodded. After a moment, reluctantly, so did Nick.

Another bottle shattered, this time on somebody's head. Friends led the bleeding man out of the hall. Susanna shivered, feeling as if she'd been swept back through time. This was how the Nazis had started ninety years earlier: gathering in taverns for what were as much brawls as meetings. No Communists would come to try to break up this conclave, though. Another shiver. If any Communists were left alive, they were as much in hiding as the Reich 's handful of Jews.

Bang! Bang! Bang!To her relief, that wasn't gunfire. It was the chairman plying his gavel in front of the microphone on the podium. "That will be enough of that," Charlie Lynton called, his amplified voice booming through the hall.Bang! Bang! Bang! "Settle down!" Lynton was in his mid-fifties, with an upper-class English accent that belied his birth in Edinburgh. He was smooth and smart. He had to be smart; he'd headed the British Union of Fascists since the mid-nineties, and steered as independent a line as he could without rousing German wrath.

"Which way will he go, do you think?" Susanna asked.

"Oh, 'e's with us," Nick said, and the men around him nodded. "'E can win a show of 'ands, and 'e knows it."

His friends' heads bobbed up and down. One of them, a fellow everybody called Blinky Bill because of his squint, said, "It's them other old fools on the platform we've got to worry about."

Sure enough, a good many of the uniformed men up there looked as if they'd been chewing lemons. Things had run the same way for almost seventy years, ever since Britain fell to the Wehrmacht. As old guards will, the old guard here had expected them to keep on running the same way forever. But whatever else Charlie Lynton was, he was a breath of fresh air in a party that hadn't seen much for a long time.

He plied the gavel again.Bang! Bang! Bang! "Come on, lads, settle down," he called once more. "Let's have some order here." No call could have been better calculated to appeal to fascists. Putting things in order-their notion of order-was fascists'raison d'etre.

But even that precious call didn't work here. At the same time as Nick was bellowing, "Huzzah for the first edition!" another fascist with an even more impressive set of lungs roared, "To hell with the bloody first edition!" Chaos broke out anew.

Bang! Bang! Bang!Lynton pounded so hard, he might have used a gun if he'd had one. "Enough!" he shouted, and he had the microphone working for him. By the way the word resounded through the hall, that might have been God shouting up there-on the assumption, which Susanna found unlikely, that God took an interest in the internal squabbles of the British Union of Fascists.

"First edition! First edition!" This time, it was an organized chant, deep and rolling and thunderous. The British had learned their lessons well; similar shouts of,"Sieg heil!" resounded through Nazi rallies in Berlin and Munich and Nuremberg.

The first edition's foes weren't so well disciplined. They had no counterchant prepared. Shouting out their protests as individuals, they couldn't drown the cries of those who favored change.

"First edition! First edition!" Susanna shouted with her comrades-her friends, she supposed she had to call them for the moment. The endless chant was intoxicating. It beat in her brain. It beat in her blood. Back home, she had as little to do with National Socialism as she could without drawing suspicion to herself. She hadn't really appreciated the power of mass rallies. Now that she found herself in the middle of one, she understood. She felt caught up in something greater than herself. It wasn't a feeling she was used to having. She distrusted it, but oh, it was heady!

Charlie Lynton let the chant build for two or three minutes, then used the gavel once more. "Enough!" he boomed for a second time. "We've got a lot to get through, and we won't do it if we spend all our bloody time shouting at each other." He took a piece of paper from the breast pocket of his black uniform tunic. Most BUF men put Susanna in mind of brigands. A few reminded her of Army officers. Charlie Lynton somehow contrived to look like a corporate executive, epaulets notwithstanding. "I have here," he said, "a message from his Majesty, King Henry IX."

Where nothing else had, that won him silence and complete attention. Henry was like King Umberto in Italy: he had no real power, but enormous prestige. The Duce and the Italian Fascist Party didn't have to listen to Umberto, but they did if they were smart-and most of them wanted to. The same held true here for Charlie Lynton and the BUF with respect to King Henry.

"'My loyal, brave, and faithful subjects,'" Lynton read, "'I am pleased and proud that so many of you should wish to return to the earliest and, in my view, the best traditions of the party so closely affiliated with your own. Wishing you wisdom in your debate, I remain, Henry,Deo gratia King of England and Defender of the Faith.'"

Beside Susanna, Nick erupted volcanically, with a great roar of glee and delight. Susanna clapped her hands and whooped, too. Like the British Union of Fascists, King Henry had found a way to praise democracy and the National Socialists at the same time. That wasn't easy. Susanna hadn't even imagined it was possible. But they'd done it here.

And will we?she wondered wistfully.How arewe going to go about choosing the next Fuhrer?No one on the RRG or the BBC had said much about that. Deliberations were proceeding: that was as much as anybody would admit. It sounded more like a criminal case than anything else. Susanna grimaced.It probably is.

Up on the platform, someone from the old guard was inveighing against the first edition and everything it stood for. The longer he talked, the more loudly the rank and file booed and jeered and mocked him. Seeing as much, Charlie Lynton let him go on and on and on. He hurt his own cause worse than Lynton could have.

When the old man finally stumped back to his seat on the rostrum, the BUF leader smiled out at the rank and file and said, "Well, I think that tells us a good deal about where we all stand, doesn't it?"

A few stubborn souls booed and hooted at Lynton. But their outcry seemed almost lost in the big hall, for most of the foes of the first edition sat in embarrassed silence, as if ashamed to admit they agreed with the disastrous speaker and disagreed with both their chairman and their King. "That's done it, by God!" Nick boomed, and planted a beery kiss on Susanna's cheek. Part of her wanted to haul off and slap him. The rest was too excited at being here even to mind very much.

"We have a quorum," Charlie Lynton said. "Time to call the question. Shall we change our rules to give back to the members of the British Union of Fascists the powers that are rightfully theirs, as outlined in the first edition of Mein Kampf, or shall we go on as we have been for so long, with the few dictating to the many?"

One of the advantages of being chairman was that Lynton not only got to guide the debate but also to frame its terms. Had he opposed the change, he might have called it destroying tradition and giving in to mob rule. Since he didn't…

Reform passed overwhelmingly, by better than three to one. This time, Susanna kissed Nick on his bristly cheek. To her astonishment, the hard-bitten British fascist blushed a brighter red than she ever had.

"Thank you, friends," Lynton said when the tally was complete. "You've done the right thing, and you've done a brave thing. And now let us hope our German colleagues may profit by our example."

Herr Kessler's forefinger shot out like a striking serpent. "Alicia Gimpel!"

Alicia leaped to her feet. She stood at stiff attention. "Jawohl, Herr Kessler!"

"What is the principle upon which the National Socialist Party and all fascist parties are founded?"

"the Fuhrerprinzip, Herr Kessler," Alicia answered. "The principle that the leader of the party knows best the direction in which it should go." She'd learned that the year before. She didn't forget her lessons.

"Correct," her teacher growled. "Be seated." Kessler prowled in front of the blackboard. That was the only word Alicia could find for the way he moved. He might have been a lion or a leopard hunting for something to tear to pieces. She wondered what had put him in such a dreadful temper. He glared at the class. "Does anyone have any business telling the National Socialist Party of the Greater German Reich how to run its affairs? Anyone at all?"

"No,Herr Kessler," the children chorused-that was obviously the answer he wanted.

He nodded, his face still intent and angry. "No is correct. So what should we do when the Englishmen have the nerve to tell us such things? What should we do?" A boy's hand flew up in the air. Kessler pointed at him. "Wolfgang Priller!"

The boy leaped to his feet. "Punish them,Herr Kessler!" His voice was loud and shrill.

Kessler nodded again, and scribbled in the roll book. "You have the proper German spirit, Priller," he said. "I also think this would be the best course for the Reich to take. But what wewill do…" He looked most unhappy. "Without a Fuhrer, who can say what we will do? And if we do nothing, if we allow the English to get away with their insolence, is this not a sign of weakness?"

"Ja, Herr Kessler," the class said dutifully.

"What about the first edition,Herr Kessler?" a girl asked.

"Trudi Krebs," the teacher murmured. "Do your father and mother speak of the first edition? Do they?" he asked sharply. The girl nodded. He wrote in the roll book again, then slammed the book shut with a dreadful finality. He did not answer Trudi's question.

Silence-a particular kind of silence-filled the classroom.She's in trouble, Alicia thought, and then,and her mother and father are liable to be in trouble, too. Even before she'd found out she was a Jew, her parents had taught her not to say too much to other grownups. Most children in the Germanic Empire got similar lessons. The less you showed the outside world, the safer you stayed.

But Trudi had slipped. Children sometimes did. Alicia knew that was why she couldn't tell Francesca and Roxane what they really were, why she had to go on listening to them say horrible things about Jews when they were Jews themselves, why she'd said horrible things about Jews herself till not very long before…and why she had to go on saying horrible things about Jews now, just to make sure no one ever suspected.

Herr Kessler breathed out hard through his nose. He knew what sort of silence that was, too. "The first edition of Mein Kampf, " he said heavily, "is full of Adolf Hitler's earliest thoughts about the way the National Socialist Party should work. Most of these were wonderful thoughts, marvelous thoughts.Aber naturlich — our beloved first Fuhrer was a wonderful man, a marvelous man, a brilliant man. But sometimes, when he looked back at what he had written, he found later that he had better ideas yet."

Wolfgang Priller raised his hand again. "Question,Herr Kessler!" The teacher nodded. Wolf said, "Is it like when you have us revise a theme?"

"Yes. Exactly!" Herr Kessler's smile, for once, was broad and pleased and genuine. "That is exactly what it is like. And if even Adolf Hitler saw that he could improve his work by revision, I trust you will see you can do the same."

The children nodded, Alicia among them. She was playing the chameleon again, though, for inside she sniffed scornfully. She hated revising more than anything else she did at school. It struck her as a waste of time. If you thought a little before you settled in to work, so you did it right the first time, why did you need to fiddle around with it afterwards?

"So you see," the teacher went on, "if the great and wise first Fuhrer changed Mein Kampf, as he did, the first edition must be of smaller worth than those that came later. Anyone who would argue otherwise must surely suffer from a lack of proper understanding."

When the children went out to the schoolyard to play at lunchtime, no one had anything to do with Trudi Krebs. Most of her classmates pretended she wasn't there. Some of them-mostly boys-talked about her as if she weren't there. "Boy, is she going to get it," Wolfgang Priller predicted with a certain gloomy relish. "They'll knock on her door in the middle of the night, and then…" He didn't say what would happen then, but he didn't have to. The other children shuddered in delicious horror. Everybody knew the kinds of things that happened when they knocked on your door in the middle of the night.

Trudi sat all alone on a bench, fighting back tears. Alicia wanted to go over and try to give her what comfort she could. Before finding out she was a Jew, she would have. Now she didn't dare. Being what she was made a coward of her. She hated that, hated herself for hanging back. But she didn't move. She wasn't afraid of getting in trouble herself. She'd been in trouble plenty of times. Putting her family and friends in trouble, though, was a different story. She couldn't do that. And so, biting her lip, she stayed where she was.

Alicia wondered if Trudi would even show up at school the next day. But she did, and the day after that, too, and on through the rest of the week.Herr Kessler seemed surprised. Alicia knew she was surprised. If the knock on the door in the middle of the night hadn't come…well, who could say what that meant?

Esther Stutzman liked to shop, though she didn't treat expeditions to the department store like hunting trips across the veldt the way Susanna Weiss did. For a Berliner who enjoyed seeing what there was to see and spending some money, there was only one place to go: the Kurfurstendamm. Back before the Second World War, lots of rich Jews had lived there-lived there openly, which made Esther marvel. They'd got away with it for years, too, till Kristallnacht, when the broad street turned into a glittering ocean of broken glass.

Nowadays, the Kurfurstendamm still glittered, but with multicolored neon signs and the reflections of the sun off plate-glass windows. People came from all over the Germanic Empire-and from the Empire of Japan and the South American countries as well-to part with their Reichsmarks in style.

Fashions on dummies in the plate-glass windows ranged from coquettish to outrageous, while some were both at once.Before long, Esther thought,Anna will want to wear clothes like that. Her sigh was part horror and part mere sadness at the passage of time.

Last year's turbans, she saw, were out of favor. Hats this year looked like nothing so much as the high-crowned, shiny-visored caps Party and SS bigwigs wore, decorated with brightly dyed plumes sprouting from improbable places. Esther eyed them dubiously. She didn't know if she cared to look like a Sturmbannfuhrer who'd just mugged a peacock.

She paused in front of a telephone booth. The man inside might well have come from South America. He was certainly too swarthy to live comfortably within the Greater German Reich. He hung up, came out of the booth, and tipped his fedora to Esther as he hurried into the milliner's shop.

Fumbling in her handbag, she pulled out a fifty-pfennig coin and went into the telephone booth. A man who'd started towards it turned away in disappointment. He would have to find another place from which to call, not that there weren't plenty of public telephones along the Kurfurstendamm. Esther fed the coin into the slot and dialed the number she needed. The phone rang once, twice…

"Bitte?" a woman said in Esther's ear.

"Guten Tag, Frau Klein," Esther answered. "I have an important message for you."

"I'm sorry, but I'm not inter-" Maria Klein broke off, perhaps recognizing Esther's voice. Esther hoped that was why she stopped, anyhow. After a moment, the other woman said, "Well, go ahead, as long as you've got me on the line."

She had the sense not to name names, just as Esther had had the sense not to call from her own home or from Dr. Dambach's office. If the Kleins' phone was tapped (as it might well be, after Dambach had discovered the two versions of their family tree), technicians could trace the call here-but how much would they gain if they did? Precious little, because Esther intended to leave as soon as she hung up.

"Thank you," she said now. "I just wanted to let you know that there are people who know there are two sets. Isn't that interesting?" She tried to sound bright and cheerful, as a telephone solicitor should.

"This, too?" Maria said. "This, too, on top of everything with the baby?"

"I'm afraid so." In the face of the other woman's bitterness, Esther's good cheer collapsed like a burst balloon.And it's my fault, she thought miserably.Mine-nobody else's. She didn't know how she was going to live with that.

"What are we supposed to do now?" Maria Klein demanded. "Gott im Himmel,what are we supposed to do now?"

She wasn't really asking Esther. And if she was asking God, He'd had few answers for Jews these past seventy-five years. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for everything," Esther whispered, and hung up. As soon as she left the booth, another woman went in. She hoped the other woman had happier business. She also hoped the other woman, and whoever used the booth afterwards, would cover up all of her own fingerprints.

Esther wanted to find another phone booth and call Walther, to let him know she'd warned the Kleins. She wanted to, but she didn't. Calls into and out of Zeiss were too likely to be monitored. She could have worked out some sort of code phrase to tell him what she'd done, but she didn't want to take the chance today. Such phrases were fine if nobody was likely to be paying close attention. If, on the other hand, someone was trying to build a case…

With a shiver, Esther shook her head. "No," she murmured.

A man gave her a curious look. Susanna would have frozen him with a glare. Heinrich would have walked past him without even noticing the curious look, which would have confounded him just as well. Esther's way was to smile sweetly at him. He turned red, embarrassed at wondering about such an obviously normal person.

If only you knew,Esther thought. But the truth, no matter how little the Nazis wanted to admit it, was that Jews were, or could be, normal people, some good, some bad, some indifferent. Shylock's words from The Merchant of Venice echoed in Esther's mind.If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?

Esther tried to imagine an SS man tickling a Jew. The picture was enough to set her laughing without the deed-but only for a moment. The Nazis had poisoned Jews, poisoned them by the millions, and the Jews had died.

Shylock went on,and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? She doubted a Jew was left alive who didn't dream of revenge at least once a day. But dreams were only dreams.

Survival is a kind of revenge,Esther thought.Just by living on, by passing our heritage to our children, we beat the Nazis. She smiled. Now Alicia Gimpel knew what she was, too. Pretty soon, her sisters would also know.

And if all went well-and Esther, with her sunny disposition, still hoped it would-Eduard Klein would find out one of these days, too. But then that smile disappeared. No matter how sunny Esther was, she couldn't keep it. The Kleins had passed on some of their heritage to little Paul, too, and he would never live to find out what he was.

Heinrich Gimpel was starting to get used to seeing long black limousines pull up to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht about the time he and Willi got off their bus in front of the building. He was getting used to watching Party and SSBonzen he'd seen on the televisor and read about in newspapers and magazines climbing the steps he climbed every day.

And he was beginning to gauge how the generals in charge of the Wehrmacht liked their high-ranking visitors by the way the guards treated the newcomers at the entrance. If they came to attention and waved the politicking bigwigs through, those officials were in good odor with his bosses. If they made the muckymucks wait, checked identity cards against faces, and fed the cards through the machine reader to get a green light, those men weren't so well liked.

One morning, the machine reader showed a red light. "This is an outrage!" an SSObergruppenfuhrer shouted. "Let me pass!"

"Sorry," a guard replied, obviously enjoying being rude to the SS equivalent of a lieutenant general. "No green light, you don't come in." He turned to Heinrich and Willi. "Next!"

"You have not heard the last of this!" the Obergruppenfuhrer warned. He stormed off, his face as red as the stripe on a General Staff officer's trousers.

Heinrich wondered if his identity card would pass muster, but it did. So did Willi's. Once they got inside, Willi said, "The generals really didn't want to see that fellow, if they programmed the reader to reject his card."

"People are starting to show where they stand," Heinrich replied.

"I'd say so," Willi Dorsch agreed. "And if that SS man's faction wins, I'd say we'll see our budget cut."

Heinrich shrugged. "The Waffen — SS has always thought it could do the Wehrmacht 's job. The next time it's right will be the first."

"Not to hear its officers tell the story." Willi shrugged, too. "Ah, well. Ours is not to wonder why. Ours is but to do or die."

"You so relieve my mind," Heinrich said. Willi laughed. He could talk blithely about dying-he didn't have to worry about it very much. Heinrich, on the other hand, had days when he felt he was living on borrowed time, and that it was about to run out. The feeling would have been bad enough had he worried about himself alone. Worrying about the rest of his folk left in the Reich seemed twenty times worse.

As they sat down at their desks, Willi said, "You see, though? It's just like I said. Nobody cares what the limeys did, and nobody's calling a Party congress to pick the next Fuhrer. So much for the precious first edition. The big shots will do the choosing, same as always."

"It does look that way," Heinrich agreed, and did his best not to sound too unhappy in case the room was bugged. "They're taking their time, too."

"They've got to find somebody they can all at least stand," Willi said, which was doubtless true. "That weeds out the zanies and the men who only have a following in one faction."

"So it does." If Heinrich thought,A Party congress would do better still, because then everything would be out in the open, he kept it to himself. Willi was right: no Party congress would choose Kurt Haldweim's successor. That being so, to go on talking about the first edition might mark a man as a dangerous dissident.

He settled in to work. No matter what the Waffen — SS thought, the Wehrmacht was the strong right arm of the Greater German Reich. And no matter who became Fuhrer — even if it turned out to be that belligerent Obergruppenfuhrer 's candidate-the Wehrmacht had to go on. It had to-and it would. Plenty of people like Heinrich Gimpel (though not many of themjust like Heinrich Gimpel) made sure it kept running smoothly.

Willi asked, "Are we on for tonight?"

"The brains of the outfit hasn't told me anything different," Heinrich said, by which he meant Lise. Willi grinned; he sometimes called Erika the High Command in the same way. Carefully, Heinrich added, "We might do better if we don't talk politics too much, though."

Willi's grin slipped. "You know that, and I know that, but whether Erika knows that… Well, we'll find out."

That was what Heinrich was afraid of, but he made himself smile and nod. The date for dinner and bridge alarmed him, so that part of him wished he'd backed out. If Willi and Erika's marriage was blowing up, he didn't want it to blow up in his face. But what would Erika do if he made that too obvious? He didn't want to find out. Getting back to work was something of a relief.

Willi didn't joke any more about Erika being the one who wanted Heinrich over. Heinrich wished he would have. If he was joking about it, he probably wasn't brooding over what it meant. If he wasn't joking…Well, who could say?

They got through the day's work. Canteen rumor was full of talk about the rejected Obergruppenfuhrer. Since Heinrich and Willi had seen that happen, they scored points for eyewitness accounts. Another analyst sighed enviously, saying, "I'd've paid money to watch one of those arrogant so-and-sos head off with a flea in his ear." Several other people nodded.

Rumor also spoke of Bonzen from the Party and from the Navy who had been admitted to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. Heinrich tried to read tea leaves from that. All he could see was that the Navy, like the Wehrmacht, was a conservative service. If they were joining with one section of the Party, maybe with an SS faction different from that Obergruppenfuhrer 's…They might be trying to promote a candidate, or they might be trying to block one. Only time would tell.

Heinrich and Willi rode home together. "See you a little before seven," Willi said as he got off the bus. "We can all watch Horst and then get down to cards."

"All right." Heinrich hoped it would be.

Katarina came over to babysit the girls. Kathe was a kid sister, closer in age to Alicia than to Lise. Heinrich suspected she'd been a surprise to her parents. He wished he could ask them even such a nosy question; a drunken truck driver had broadsided their little VW a few years before, and they hadn't survived the wreck. A People's Court gave the truck driver summary justice, but that didn't bring back the Franks.

Tante Kathe fascinated the children. She dyed her brown hair a yellow as artificial as oleomargarine, and sometimes wore styles that looked like what SS uniforms would have been if they were designed to titillate rather than terrify.In my day, you'd have done a stretch in a camp for clothes like that, Heinrich thought. He laughed at himself.And if going on about "In my day…" doesn't make me an old fogy, I don't know what would.

Tonight Katarina had on dungarees of blue American denim, which were almost as scandalous as some of her other clothes. She refused to be ordinary. That was dangerous for a Jew. On the other hand, a fair number of young men and women dressed the way she did, so she had a crowd into which she could blend in.

"Have fun with your bridge," she told Heinrich and Lise. She might have been saying,Have fun with your warm milk and slippers. Kathe's eyes sparkled as she turned to the girls. "While they're gone, we'll havereal fun, won't we?"

"Ja!" Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane chorused, entranced. Every so often, Heinrich wondered whatreal fun consisted of. He'd never found the girls' heads spinning with hashish after Tante Kathe watched them, so he didn't lose sleep over it, but he did wonder.

Getting out of the house felt good, even if it was only for the short jaunt over to the Dorsches'. As Heinrich and Lise got off the bus, she said, "Willi and Erika are lucky to live so close to their bus stop."

Heinrich nodded. "I've thought the same thing." Thinking along with your wife was supposed to be another mark of fogydom. He didn't care. He liked thinking along with Lise.

When he rang the bell, Erika opened the door. She smiled at the Gimpels. "Come on in," she said. "Horst will be on in a minute, and Willi wouldn't miss him for the world." Erika made watching the news sound like a vice.First danger sign, Heinrich thought.

From the front room, Willi's voice rose in excitement: "Come quick, everybody! I think we've got a new Fuhrer! " That sent Heinrich and Lise-and Erika-hurrying to join him.

"Germany, awake!" Horst Witzleben spoke in millions of homes as if he were a close friend. "After long and serious discussions, senior Party, SS, and military leaders have chosen the present minister of heavy industry, Heinz Buckliger, to guide the future of the Greater German Reich and the Germanic Empire. I am proud to be among the first to say, 'Heil Buckliger!'" His arm shot out in the Nazi salute.

Behind him, a new picture appeared on the screen. Heinrich wouldn't have known Heinz Buckliger from the man in the moon. He proved to be a ruddy-faced man of about fifty, with a thick shock of graying blond hair and a toothy smile. "He's so young!" Erika Dorsch said. A moment later, she added, "And handsome, too."

Heinrich didn't know about handsome. Young the new Fuhrer certainly was: younger by far than Kurt Haldweim had been when he began to lead the Reich. "They passed over a lot of senior people to put him in place," Willi said. "The new generation's here at last."

"The new head of the Reich was born in Breslau in 1959," Horst Witzleben said. That made Buckliger more than forty years younger than Haldweim-closer to two generations than one. The newsreader went on, "He studied economics in Munich, graduating with highest honors from the university there. Before joining the Ministry of Heavy Industry, he served for seven years in the Allgemeine — SS, rising to the rank of Hauptsturmfuhrer."Captain, Heinrich thought, automatically translating to what he thought of as a real rank. Not bad. Not spectacular, but not bad.

"Once in the Ministry,Herr Buckliger rapidly became known as an efficiency expert," Witzleben said. "He has promised to bring that passion for efficiency to the Reich as a whole. Here is his first statement after his selection."

Heinz Buckliger sat at his desk in the Fuhrer 's palace in what was obviously a piece of videotape. "Volk of the Greater German Reich, I accept the role of Fuhrer with pride, but also with great humility," he said in a pleasant if not ringing baritone. "Mindful of the triumphs of the past, I shall do all I can to lead you to a still more glorious future. Many things have grown slack in recent years. I hope to tighten them, and to make the Reich and the Germanic Empire run more smoothly. With your help, I know I shall succeed."

"He sounds all right," Willi said as Horst Witzleben reappeared and began talking about the congratulations pouring into the Reich on Buckliger's rise to supreme power.

"So he does," Heinrich agreed. "But he's plainly someone's fair-haired boy. I wonder whose." His first guess for the new Fuhrer 's patron was Lothar Prutzmann, head of the SS: once an SS man, always an SS man. That wasn't a sure thing, but it was the way to bet.

"All right, now we know," Erika said. "After that, the rest of the news will be small potatoes. Shall we play some cards?"

"Good idea," Lise said. Heinrich nodded. Willi's sigh said he would have liked to stay in front of the televisor, but democracy was alive and well in the Dorsch household, even if the big wheels in the German government had been able to ignore it in choosing Heinz Buckliger.

The very first hand they played, Willi bid and made a small slam in clubs. Heinrich and Lise couldn't do a thing about it. If you didn't have the cards, you were stuck. Willi chortled. Heinrich said, "I wonder what's on the news."

On the next hand, Erika Dorsch made three no-trump: as quick and one-sided a rubber as possible. Lise said, "Heinrich's right. Watching the news seems better and better." Their hosts laughed at them.

They played steadily, with a couple of pauses when Erika helped the Dorsches' son and daughter with their homework and one when Willi broke up a squabble between the children. "This all looks and sounds familiar," Heinrich said.

"Life goes on," Erika said, "one way or another." If that wasn't a hooded glance she sent toward Willi, Heinrich had never seen one.

Willi himself affected not to notice. Or maybe he really didn't notice; you never could tell with Willi. He said, "Whose deal is it?"

"Mine, I think," Lise answered. She gather up the cards and started shuffling. "It is now, anyway."

Heinrich got the contract when everybody passed at two hearts. Playing it was routine, so much so that things got sidetracked halfway through when Lise and Willi started arguing about a newspaper story on

Babylonian archaeology that they'd both seen and Heinrich and Erika had somehow missed. Willi insisted the find proved Hammurabi's code was 250 years older than everyone had thought up till now; Lise was just as sure it proved no such thing. As people will when disagreeing about something of such monumental unimportance, they both got more and more certain they were right. As they pointed fingers at each other, they might have forgotten anyone else was in the room-or, for that matter, on the planet.

Heinrich set his cards on the table, face down. Lise hardly ever got so excited when she argued with him, and he was glad she didn't. If Willi raised his voice and turned red-well, Willi was in the habit of doing such things. "A good thing they're friends, or they'd murder each other," Heinrich remarked to Erika.

With all the noise Lise and Willi were making, he wasn't sure she even heard him. But she nodded. "Willi's as bad as the children," she said, like Heinrich talking under the noise of the argument. "You, now, you have too much sense to waste your time with such foolishness."

"I don't know," he said. "Lise's doing it, and she's got more sense than I do."

"Maybe." Erika waved her hand. "But I don't want to go to bed with Lise."

What Heinrich wanted to say was,Are you out of your mind? Even if she did want to sleep with him (which struck him as strange enough when she was married to the much handsomer Willi), to say so in front of her husband and his wife? Maybe she'd known what she was doing, though, because neither Willi nor Lise leaped from a chair with a cry of fury. They were too busy quarreling over cuneiform styles and tree-ring chronology and other things about which neither of them knew a great deal.

Which left Heinrich the question of how to respond. Part of him knew exactly how he would like to respond. The rest of him told that part to shut up and forget about it. If he hadn't been happy with Lise, or maybe if he'd just been a few years younger, a few years randier, a few years stupider (assuming those last two weren't one and the same), that one part might have won the argument, especially since he got the idea he could have taken Erika right there on the card table without making either Willi or Lise notice.

But, things being as they were, yielding to temptation wasn't practical. And so he answered, "I'm sorry, but with all the racket these two are making, I didn't hear a word you said."

Erika Dorsch's sour smile told him she didn't believe a word of it. Whatdid she believe? That he didn't want to go to bed with her? Or just that he didn't want to do anything about it then and there?Isn't that an interesting question?

Deciding he didn't want to know the answer, Heinrich reached out and waved his hand up and down between Willi and Lise. "Can we get back to bridge, please?" he asked loudly.

His wife and Erika's husband both blinked, as if they were coming back to the real world. Willi said, "I don't know why you're so impatient. We just started talking-"

"And talking, and talking," Erika broke in, her voice acid-edged.

"Itwas fifteen minutes ago," Heinrich said.

"Oh,Quatsch, " Willi said. Then he looked at his watch and blinked again. He grinned a rather sickly grin. "Oh. Well, maybe it was." Lise seemed almost as surprised as he did.

"It's your lead, Willi, if you can think of anything besides ancient history," Erika said.

"Let me look at the last trick, please," Willi said, which went a long way toward proving he couldn't. He examined it, muttered to himself, and threw out a low diamond. As far as Heinrich could see, the lead might have come at random as readily as from reflection on what had gone before.

Heinrich made the contract. He and Lise went on to win the rubber, though not by nearly so much as they'd lost the first one. Shuffling for the first hand of the next rubber, Willi said, "We'll really hammer you this time."

"Tell me a new story," Heinrich answered. "I've heard this one before, and I don't believe a word of it."

"You'll see." Willi picked up his hand, arranged it in suits, and said, as casually as if he were asking the time, "Three no-trump."

"What?" Heinrich stared. His own hand didn't have opening strength, but he hadn't imagined Willi owned that kind of powerhouse. He hadn't seen a three-no opening in at least five years. He passed. So did Erika. Willi yelped and sent her a wounded look. Visions of another slam must have danced in his head. Lise passed, too. Heinrich led. Erika laid out her hand as dummy. It was ten-high-no wonder she'd passed.

Willi didn't even make the three he'd bid. With no strength on the board, he had to play everything out of his own hand, and came up one trick short. The honors bonus for all four aces more than made up for that. Even so, he let out a sorrowful sigh. "Twenty-eight high-card points I was looking at, and down one! I'll never see another hand like that."

The rest of the evening's bridge was less dramatic. The Gimpels and Dorsches ended up about even. As Heinrich and Lise walked to the bus stop, she asked, "What did you and Erika talk about while Willi and I were wrangling over Babylonians?"

"Oh, nothing much," Heinrich answered. He knew he would probably end up in trouble for not telling his wife what Erika had said. But if he did tell her, he'd end up in trouble, too.Sometimes you can't win, he thought, and kept walking.