In The Presence of mine Enemies

V

After giving the flag the nationalsocialist salute, Herr Kessler led Alicia Gimpel's class in singing "Deutschland uber Alles" and the "Horst Wessel Song": the German and Party anthems. That wasn't part of the usual morning routine, but he explained, "This is a special day, children, because the Reich has a new Fuhrer." His right arm shot out again. "Heil Buckliger!"

"Heil Buckliger!" Alicia and her classmates echoed dutifully. She hadn't known about the new Fuhrer till breakfast this morning, when her mother and father talked about him. Aunt Kathe hadn't watched Horst Witzleben, the way her parents did. Instead, she'd played with Alicia and her sisters, and sung silly songs, and told stories that were not only funny but also a good deal sassier than the ones the Gimpel girls heard from anybody else in the family.

Herr Kessler said, "The new Fuhrer will do wonderful things for the Reich and for the Germanic Empire. He is very wise and very good and very strong. He must be all those things, or he never would have been chosen Fuhrer."

He sounded very sure. Almost all the pupils in the classroom nodded without a moment's hesitation. Alicia nodded, too. She was learning to be a chameleon. But she couldn't help wondering,How does he know?

"Will things be any different now,Herr Kessler?" asked a boy-Alicia didn't see who.

The teacher frowned. The question was good enough that he had to answer it, but for a moment he seemed unable to find a way.Maybe nobody told him what to say, Alicia thought.He doesn't seem very good at figuring things out for himself. At last, Kessler said, "I think things will be better. The new Fuhrer is a young man-not too much older than I am-and he is active and vigorous. The old Fuhrer was very old indeed. He was sickly and feeble. Some of you may have grandparents or great-grandparents who are like that."

Several children nodded. Behind Alicia, Emma Handrick raised her hand. When Herr Kessler called on her, she said, "When my great-granddad got that way, my folks took him to a Reichs Mercy Center. Is that what they did with the old Fuhrer? "

"No.Gott im Himmel, no!" The teacher turned very red. The question must have rocked him. Alicia couldn't remember him ever saying anything about God before. She couldn't remember any of her teachers saying anything about God. She'd always had the idea that they weren't supposed to.Herr Kessler needed a moment to gather himself. Then he said, "Kurt Haldweim lived out his whole life. He had to, you see, because he was serving the Reich. Do you understand?"

"Ja, Herr Kessler," Emma answered. She wasn't going to argue with him.

Alicia wanted to. Before she found out she was a Jew, she might have. She didn't dare stick out her neck now. Not being able to say what she thought sometimes made her feel as if she were choking. She wanted to cheer when a boy stuck up his hand. When the teacher pointed his way, he asked, "Excuse me,Herr Kessler, but if the old Fuhrer was all feeble, whydidn't they take him to a Reichs Mercy Center? Isn't that what you're supposed to do, before he becomes a burden?"

"the Fuhrer is not a burden," Kessler said stiffly. "the Fuhrer cannot be a burden. the Fuhrer is the Fuhrer."

By the way he spoke, that was supposed to settle things. Nobody in the class asked any more questions about the Reichs Mercy Centers, so maybe it did. Or maybe all the children realized asking more questions like that would only land them in trouble.

And maybe Herr Kessler realized he hadn't satisfied everybody with his answers, for he quickly changed the subject and plunged into the day's usual lessons. No one could challenge him on those. He went back to being the classroom Fuhrer, lord of all he surveyed.

For the history lesson, he rolled up the usual map of the world as it was now and rolled down a different map, one that showed the way things had been before the Second and Third World Wars. "Do you see how tiny the Reich was in those days, and how big our enemies were?" he said. "And yet we beat them, because we were Aryans and they were full of Jews. France, England, Russia, the United States-all full of Jews. And they fell into our hands one after another. What does this tell you? Alicia Gimpel!"

She sprang to her feet. "That Aryans are superior to Jews,Herr Kessler."

"Very good. Be seated."

She knew her lessons. She could recite them without fail. Reciting them when she didn't believe them, though, made her feel all slimy inside. She wanted to know what was true. She wanted to say what was true. She knew she would get in trouble if she did. That made going on with what she learned in school necessary. It didn't make it palatable.

Herr Kessler asked the next question of someone else. It was also anti-Semitic. Alicia didn't like hearing it, either. She wondered how Herr Kessler would like listening to anti-Aryan questions all day. She suspected he would get sick of it in a hurry.

She sighed. Things had been a lot simpler before she knew what she was.

When Lise Gimpel was a girl, she'd grated cabbage by hand. As often as not, that had involved grating some fingertip or knuckle in with the cabbage. Her father, an engineer, had always found that funny-they weren'this fingertips or knuckles, after all. When she yelped, he would say, "Adds protein," and puff on his pipe.

These days, Lise used a plastic rod to guide quartered chunks of cabbage into the maw of the food processor. The push of a button, a whir, and the job was done-not even a tenth the time, and never any need to reach for the Mercurochrome. But every time she did it, she imagined she smelled pipe tobacco.

She bit her lip. She'd been pregnant with Francesca when the damned drunk cut short her parents' lives. Alicia had been only a toddler then. She didn't remember her grandparents, and they'd never got to know their other grandchildren. Sometimes life seemed dreadfully unfair.

Lise laughed, not that it was funny.As if a Jew in the Third Reichshould look for fairness. But somehow God seemed extra malicious in piling a personal disaster on top of the one she'd been born with.

Alicia came into the kitchen. She liked to help cook. So did Roxane. Francesca didn't care one way or the other. Lise was glad to see her daughter. "Hello, sweetheart," she said. "How did it go today?" Talking with Alicia would help ease her out of her gloom.

So she thought, anyway, till Alicia blurted, "Mommy, do I have to be a Jew? I don't think I want to."

Before Lise answered, she automatically looked around. "Where are your sisters?"

"Upstairs doing homework. I finished mine."

"All right. Good. You have to be careful even saying that word." Lise put her hands on Alicia's shoulders. "Now-why don't you? What happened today that made you think you don't?"

"It's not just today," Alicia answered. "It's everything that's happened since I found out. People just keep saying mean things-horrible things-about Jews-and everybodybelieves them. It's like they're callingme names all the time."

"Oh, my dear." Lise gave Alicia a squeeze. Her daughter's head already came up past her shoulder. "I remember that, and I remember how much it hurt, too. They don't know any better, that's all."

"But if I weren't a Jew, then it wouldn't matter any more." Alicia could be as painfully logical as her father, though at ten she didn't always see as far as she needed to.

Lise cocked her head to one side to make sure she didn't hear one of Alicia's sisters charging downstairs at the worst possible moment. Even after she'd satisfied herself that they were busy, she needed a few seconds to marshal her thoughts. "If you decide that's what you end up wanting, pumpkin, you can do it. You can always pretend what we told you isn't real. We said so, remember?"

Alicia nodded. "I want to do that."

"You can. But I have to tell you, it may not be quite so simple. If you beat eggs together to scramble them, can you separate the whites out again afterwards to make meringue?"

"Of course not," Alicia said.

"Well, you can always live as though you're not a Jew, pretend you're not a Jew," Lise said. "But you'll know even so. You'll have to know. You can't very well forget, can you?"

"I can try." Alicia screwed up her face. Lise could tell she was doing her best to pretend that that evening with the Stutzmans and Susanna had never happened. Lise could also tell, by her daughter's despairing expression, that she was having no more luck than anyone else would have. Alicia pointed an accusing finger at her. "You and Daddy didn't tell me anything about that."

"No, we didn't," Lise admitted. "We thought it would be pretty obvious-and we didn't know you wouldn't want to be a Jew."

"I haven't got much choice, have I?" Alicia asked bleakly.

"You have a choice in the way you live." Lise picked her words with great care. "You haven't got a choice about what youare, not any more. When you have children, you'll have a choice about telling them what they are."

"Why would I ever want to put anybody else through this?" Alicia said.

Were there any Jews left in the Reich who hadn't asked themselves that question at least once? Were there any who hadn't asked it a thousand times? Quietly, Lise answered, "Because if you don't, then the Nazis win. They say we don't deserve to live, we don't deserve to be here at all. And if you don't tell your children what they are, who they are, aren't you saying you think the Nazis were right all along?"

"Weren't they?" Pain filled Alicia's voice. "If they thought Jews were horrible, ifeverybody thought Jews were horrible, if nobody tried to stop the SS from doing what it did, maybe Jews-maybewe really were horrible. Maybe wedeserved what happened."

That was another thought that had probably crossed every surviving Jew's mind. People saw themselves, at least in part, in the mirror their neighbors held up to them. If the mirror showed a twisted image, wouldn't they start to believe that was the way they really seemed? How could they help it?

"Some people did try to stop the SS. Not enough, though, and most of them got killed. But I don't think anybody deserves to be killed for what he is," Lise said. "You can't help that. If youdo something bad enough, maybe you deserve to die. That's a whole different argument, though. For just trying to live, and to get along as best you can?" She shook her head. "No, sweetheart."

Her daughter looked haunted. That was fair enough, too. How many millions of ghosts crowded the Germanic Empire? Better, maybe, not to try to count them all. That way lay despair. Alicia said, "I sure hope you're right."

So do I,Lise thought.But how can I know? How can anybody know? One thing she did know was that she had to conceal her doubts from her daughter. She said, "Of course I am."

"What am I going to do?" Alicia said, more to herself than to Lise.

But Lise answered her, with forced briskness: "What are you going to do? Since you've finished your homework and your sisters haven't, you're going to take a bath. And make sure you rinse all the shampoo out of your hair and wash behind your ears. Sometimes you leave enough dirt to grow potatoes in."

"Potatoes." Alicia thought that was funny. She was a child; she couldn't stay gloomy for long. She went up the stairs singing, "I'm my own vegetable garden."

Lise envied her that ability to swing away from sadness so fast.I used to be able to do that, she thought.I wonder where it went. Wherever it went, it was gone for good now. She went to the cupboard and poured herself a glass of schnapps. She hardly ever drank when she wasn't with other people who were drinking, but today she made an exception.

When Heinrich came through the door a few minutes later, Alicia-who hadn't yet started getting rid of the potatoes-Francesca, and Roxane all swarmed downstairs to give him hugs and kisses. He needed a couple of minutes to wade through them and make his way into the kitchen. He hugged Lise and kissed her, then noticed the glass of schnapps on the counter near the sink. "Tough day?" he asked. Lise nodded. Her husband pointed to the glass. "Must have been. You don't usually do that. What happened?"

"Later." Lise nodded in the direction of the children.

"Oh." Heinrich nodded, too. He went to the cabinet for a glass of his own and also filled it full of schnapps. "Well, here's to us."

"To us," Lise agreed. They both drank. Their daughters wandered into the kitchen. Roxane wanted to help. Francesca wanted to tell her father about something that had happened at school. Lise couldn't tell what Alicia wanted-maybe just to remind herself that they were a family. Alicia kept eyeing her little sisters with an expression that said,I know something you don't know.

By what she'd said to Lise a little while before, she wished she didn't.

After a while, the girls went back upstairs. "Make sure you get clean," Lise reminded Roxane-she'd sometimes skip a bath if she saw the chance.

"Well?" Heinrich asked.

Lise sighed. In a low, weary voice, she said, "Alicia said she didn't want to be a Jew. She said maybe the Einsatzkommandos knew what they were doing when they got rid of us."

"Oh. Oh, hell." Heinrich reached for his glass of schnapps and gulped at it. The laugh that burst from him was an ugly sound, one that had nothing to do with mirth. "Well, God knows she's not the first one of us to feel that way."

"I understand that," Lise said. "But still…"

"Yes. But still." Another swig and her husband's glass was empty. He poured it down like that about as often as Lise drank alone. With another ugly laugh, he said, "Did I ever tell you I wanted to be an SS man when I was a little boy? Before I knew, I mean."

"No." Lise shook her head in astonishment. They'd been married almost fifteen years, but startling things still surfaced, like rocks working their way up through thin soil. "No, you never said a word about that."

"Well, I did. I thought the black uniform was the most wonderful thing in the world, and of course this wasn't too long after we beat the United States, so SS men were heroes in all the movies and televisor shows where Wehrmacht men weren't. When my father told me, I didn't want to believe him. For a long time after that-along time, I'm telling you-I thought we had it coming to us."

"You never said anything about that. Never," Lise said.

Instead of answering right away, Heinrich poured himself another glass of schnapps. His back was to her as he said, "It's not exactly something I'm proud of, you know."

"I think we all go through it," Lise said. "You sound like you had it worse than most of us, though."

"I probably did." Her husband shook his head, still not looking at her. "No, I certainly did. Even now, there are days when working at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht seems like a poor second best, and I ought to have the SS runes on my collar tabs."

"Could you have kept up the masquerade if you did?" Lise asked.

"Some people do," Heinrich said, and she nodded. He sighed. "I'm glad-most of me is glad-I didn't have to try, though. Do you want me to talk with Alicia? Is she all right?"

"Maybe don't push it too hard right now," Lise said after a little thought. "You know how, how-overwhelming it can be. I think she'll settle down. She just realized she'll alwaysknow what she is, no matter what she decides to do about it."

"Ah, yes," Heinrich said. "That's another moment we all have, sure enough. The curse of knowledge…"

"Alicia thinks it's a curse right now," Lise said.

"I don't know what to do about it." Heinrich set about emptying that second glass of schnapps. "I wish I did, but I don't think anybody who's…in our boat does."

"We ought to have the Stutzmans over again," Lise said. "Anna's been coping with it for more than a year now. Maybe she can help Alicia-and even if she can't, they can play together. And I was on the phone with Esther this afternoon, and she says Susanna's back from London with all sorts of wild stories."

"Sounds good to me," Heinrich said. "I'm going to have lunch with Walther in the Tiergarten tomorrow. I'll set something up then, and you can call Susanna."

"All right." Lise nodded. "What does Walther want to talk about?" She assumed he wanted to talk about something. People met in Berlin's greatest park to get out in the open air-and also to get away from the possibility of talking where microphones might overhear.

Her husband answered with a shrug. "Don't know yet. I'll find out."

"Fair enough," Lise said. "What's new at work?"

"Not much. We're all waiting to see what sort of Fuhrer Heinz Buckliger makes, same as everybody else." Heinrich held up a hand. "Wait. I take it back. There is one other interesting thing. These past few days, Willi's been very friendly with Ilse, for whatever that may be worth."

"The secretary?" Lise asked. Heinrich nodded. Her next question was obvious: "Is she worth being friendly to?"

"Well, she doesn't do anything for me," he answered. "Of course, I'm not Willi, and I'm not squabbling with my wife. I hope I'm not, anyway." He leaned over and kissed her.

"You'd better not be," Lise said. "How does Ilse compare to Erika?"

"As far as looks go, she doesn't," Heinrich said. "But she's not telling Willi all the different kinds of fool he is every time he turns around, either. That's got to count for something, wouldn't you think?"

"It would with me," Lise agreed. "But with a man, who can say?" Heinrich made a face at that, but he didn't try to argue with her.

Walther Stutzman liked the Tiergarten. He enjoyed eating lunch there, regardless of whether he needed to talk with someone in something approaching privacy. If he brought a sandwich and some fruit and a vacuum flask of coffee to the large park west of the Brandenburg Gate, he could imagine himself in the country-if the country in which he imagined himself included plenty of other people eating, watching birds, strolling hand in hand, walking or running for exercise, or lying around in the sun in any clothing or next to none. The Berlin police did frown on complete public nudity, but more as a matter of excessive zeal than one of criminal intent. And what might go on under cover of the bushes…neither Walther nor the police were in the habit of investigating too closely.

Today he made a point of getting to the Tiergarten early, so he could stake out a bench before the noontime crowd made looking for one a hopeless chore. The grass was long and green. Come fall, a snorting harvester would mow it down and turn it into hay for animal fodder. In the meantime, it grew as it would.

He found a place to sit near the Hubertus fountain and the bronze fox-hunting group at the center of the park. He smiled, pleased with himself; he'd told Heinrich to start looking for him by the fountain. And here came his friend. Heinrich's gangly height and ungainly walk made him impossible to miss. Walther stood up and waved. A couple of beats slower than he should have, Heinrich waved back and came toward him.

"Hello," Walther said. "Nice day, isn't it?"

"Why, so it is," Heinrich said in mild surprise, as if he'd only just realized it. Maybe he had; there were times when Walther wondered how much that went on outside his own head his friend noticed. Heinrich sat down beside him."Was ist los?"

"You know about the Kleins?" Walther said.

"Oh, yes." Heinrich nodded, his long face set in unhappy lines. "I do know about that. What's up with them?"

"I changed their genealogy, to give them a couple of possibly Jewish ancestors," Walther said. Heinrich nodded again. With a sigh, Walther went on, "Their pediatrician is too damned efficient, though. He compared the revised chart with one he had from when their first son was born, and he noticed the changes. He not only noticed, he called in the genealogical authorities."

"Yes, I've heard all this," Heinrich said. "Esther told Lise, and Lise told me. It's a mess. One more thing for the Kleins-and for all of us-to worry about. Robert and Maria are still free, aren't they? That would be all we need, if they hauled them in for questioning-that on top of the poor baby."

"We're probably lucky we haven't seen more Tay-Sachs cases," Walther said. "So few of us left these days, and we marry among ourselves so much… But that's not what I wanted to talk about."

"What, then?" Heinrich asked.

"I made a mistake when I altered the Kleins' charts," Walther said. "Anything that gets us noticed for any reason at all is a mistake. The question is, how do I fix it?"

"Howcan you fix it? It's done," Heinrich said. A very pretty blond girl in a short sun dress walked by, leading a dachshund on a leash. Heinrich noticed her-and the ridiculous little dog.

Walther knew a certain amount of relief that some of the real world did impinge on his friend. He said, "Well, that's what I wanted to ask you about. I could go back into the Reichs database again, and change the Kleins' records back to the way they were before I meddled the first time. Or I could just leave them alone and hope the storm blows over. Which do you think is the better bet?"

Heinrich's eyes got a faraway expression. Walther wasn't the avid bridge player some of Heinrich's goyishe friends were, but he'd sat down at the card table with him a few times. He wore this look when he was figuring out whether to run a finesse. He said, "If you leave things alone, they may decide the system hiccuped, or they may bring in the Kleins to try to find out what they know."

"That's how I see it," Walther agreed.

He wondered if Heinrich even heard him. His friend went on without even a pause for breath: "But if you change things a second time, they may decide the system hiccuped once but now it's back to normal, or they may decide somebody who isn't supposed to has access to it and can fiddle with it whenever he pleases."

Walther Stutzman nodded again. "I see it like that, too."

"All right, then," Heinrich said. "Both ways, if they think it's a hiccup, everything is fine. So which is more likely and more dangerous-them questioning the Kleins or them questioning the software in the database system? With the Kleins, it goes from no Jews in the woodpile to a few possible Jews in the woodpile a long time ago."

"On paper," Walther said. The Kleins were as Jewish as the Stutzmans or the Gimpels. He needed to make sure Heinrich remembered that. "If they have a baby with Tay-Sachs disease, that's a red flag about what they really are."

"It's a red flag, but it's not proof. This diseasecan happen to gentiles, too," Heinrich said.

"If the genealogical authorities want to snoop, they're liable to find enough proof to satisfy them," Walther said. "And there's no law that says they can't question the Kleinsand check the database programming."

Heinrich looked astonished. Maybe he'd been so caught up ineither-or that that hadn't occurred to him. Walther wished it hadn't occurred to him, too. Unfortunately, it was all too likely to occur to the authorities. He said, "This isn't damned if I do or damned if I don't. It's liable to be damned if I doand damned if I don't."

"I'm afraid you're right," Heinrich said.

"I'm afraid I'm right, too," Walther said. "And I'm afraid, period."

"You'd better be afraid. We'd all better be afraid," Heinrich said somberly. "If we're not afraid, we're dead. I think our best chance is sitting tight now, though. There's nothing to show the Kleins had any way to fiddle with the genealogical records, is there? He's a musician, and she's a Hausfrau. They can't lean on them too hard, not when the changes are so small."

He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself as well as Walther. "Theycan do anything they want," Walther said bluntly, and his friend winced and nodded, for that was undoubtedly true. He went on, "What they choose to do…may be a different story. I hope you're right about that. So you think we ought to wait and see what happens, then?"

"Don't you think that's our best bet?" Heinrich asked.

Walther Stutzman sighed. "Overall, probably," he said. "But it's liable to be rough as hell on the Kleins. They're already trying to deal with what their baby has. If the genealogical authorities or the Security Police land on them, too-well, how much can one family take?"

Heinrich didn't answer. Walther hadn't expected him to. No one could answer that question for himself till the time of testing came, let alone for anyone else. Instead, Heinrich came back with a question of his own: "If you change the Kleins' records again, don't you think the genealogical authorities and the Security Police are liable to land onyou? How much can you take, Walther?"

And that was the other side of the coin. "I don't know," Walther said. "Here's hoping I don't have to find out, and the Kleins don't, either."

"That's interesting." Heinrich Gimpel tapped his copy of the Volkischer Beobachter to show Willi Dorsch what was interesting.

Willi shifted on the commuter-train seat beside Heinrich. "Which?" he said. "Oh, the story about the budget? Well, what to you expect Buckliger to say? Easy enough to promise to bring things under control. Doing it?" He shook his head. "Don't hold your breath."

"He sounds like he means it, though." Heinrich read out loud: "'For too long, the Greater German Reich has balanced its budget only with the aid of tribute from other lands within the Germanic Empire. If we are the greatest nation the world has known, should we not be able to pay our own way?'"

"Hell with that," Willi said. "Make the other bastards pay instead. They're the ones who lost. You wait and see. He's got it off his chest now: the new Fuhrer can talk tough. But nothing's going to change."

Willi usually had good political sense. Heinrich reminded himself of that. Still, he couldn't help adding, "He's going on about high labor costs, too, and how we need to be honestly competitive and not just dictate favorable exchange rates to the rest of the world. We can't quite dictate to the Japanese, and look how their electronics have come on the past ten years."

"Are you going to tell me they stack up to Zeiss?" Willi snorted. "Don't make me laugh."

"A friend of mine works for Zeiss, and he's not laughing," Heinrich said. "You're right-what the Japanese make isn't as good as our stuff. But it's good enough to work, and it's a lot cheaper. For people who haven't got a whole lot of Reichsmarks to spend-"

"People who think like Jews," Willi broke in.

Heinrich shrugged. "Joke all you please." To Willi, it was just a joke, too. Heinrich knew he should be used to gibes like that. Hewas used to them, in the sense that his face didn't show what he thought. But they still burned. He went on, "No matter how you joke, though, plenty of people who can't afford our electronics can afford to buy from the Japs."

Willi twirled his finger in a gesture that had meantso what? for the past two generations. "That hasn't really got much to do with the budget, you know."

Although Heinrich didn't know any such thing, he didn't argue. He'd been taught since childhood not to disagree too strongly with anyone. Instead, he rustled the Volkischer Beobachter and changed the subject a little, saying, "What do you make of this? the Fuhrer says, 'As part of an ongoing effort to strengthen the state, a thorough examination of its political underpinnings must also be undertaken.' What's that mean?"

"What? Where does he say that?" Willi opened up his own copy of the paper again. "Have to tell you, I missed it."

"Page four, third column, about halfway down."

"Page four…" When Willi finally found it, he shook his head. "He couldn't have buried it any deeper in a graveyard, could he?" He rubbed his chin and frowned. "I have to admit, I don't know exactly what that means. I bet nobody else does, either, except maybe Buckliger. It might just be the sort of stuff politicians use to pad out a speech." But he was still frowning. "You wouldn't put padding there, though-not usually. He wanted to say it, and he wanted to say it where not many people would notice he'd said it. I sure didn't. You notice everything, don't you?"

"Me? Only thing I notice is, we're coming into the Berlin station." Heinrich folded his newspaper and stuck it in his briefcase. Easier to carry just one thing when they hurried up the escalators to the level where they caught the bus to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. Willi did the same.

A three-car accident snarled traffic to a fare-thee-well. Ambulances, police vehicles, and rubberneckers meant nothing could get through at a busy intersection. The police were slower setting up detours than they should have been, too. Everyone in the bus grumbled and complained. That did no one any good. Heinrich and Willi got to work half an hour late.

The guards at the entrance clucked sympathetically as the two of them hurried up the steps. "Came from South Station, didn't you?" one guard said when Heinrich held out his identity card. "Things are buggered up good and proper between there and here."

"Don't I know it!" Heinrich said. "I thought I'd be on that damned bus forever." The card went through the reader. The light flashed green. The guard returned the card and waved him through.

Willi joined him a moment later. "At least we're not the only ones," he said. "Misery loves company."

"Misery doesn't love anything," Heinrich said. "That's what makes it misery."

"Jawohl, Herr Doktor Professor!" Willi came to attention and saluted. "Thank you so much for clearing that up for me."

"When we work in the same room, I can't even tell you to go away," Heinrich said sadly.

They navigated the maze of corridors to get to the room they shared with several other budget analysts, secretaries, and clerks. Willi promptly disappeared from his desk. Heinrich knew he was heading to the canteen for coffee, and didn't think anything of it. Willi came back with two foam cups. He kept one and, with a flourish, handed the other to the secretary he and Heinrich shared. Ilse stammered out thanks, simpering like a starstruck teenager. Willi preened. Heinrich fought not to gag.

He had plenty to keep him busy. He always did. His fingers flashed across the keys of his adding machine. The number and function keys had grown smooth and shiny from long use. Some of the more senior men in the department were getting new adding machines, half as big and half as noisy as the old ones. The new machines came from Japan. Heinrich wondered if Willi knew. As for himself, he didn't want to give up the one he'd used for so long. In a lot of ways, he was intensely conservative. Change made him suspicious; it might lead to exposure. As long as things went on as they had up till now, his family and he stayed safe.

The phone on Willi's desk rang. Heinrich noticed it only peripherally. He was trying to unravel by exactly how much the Americans were pretending to be poorer than they really were. He might not have noticed the phone on his own desk. The Americans used numbers the way a cuttlefish used ink: to obscure, to conceal, to confuse. Figuring out what lay behind their smokescreen took not only patience but imagination.

But in spite of his best effort to focus on the columns of numbers in front of him, Willi's loud, angry voice eventually pierced his concentration: "Dammit, Erika, don't call me here for crap like that! I haven't got time to worry about it, and I sure as hell haven't got time to deal with it."

Heinrich looked up. He couldn't help himself. He saw he wasn't the only one. Nor, of course, was Willi the only one who'd ever had his personal life intrude on work. But he was the one with problems at the moment, which meant he was the one everybody else was pretending not to listen to now. That he was one of the more flamboyant men in the office only made his troubles more fascinating.

Erika said something. Heinrich couldn't make out what it was, but she sounded angry, too. He wouldn't have wanted to talk to her the way Willi just had. Whatever she said, it struck a nerve. Willi went red from the base of his neck all the way up to his forehead and ears. "That's a lie, too," he growled. "I'm just being friendly. You wouldn't know about friendly, would you?"

Someone must have told Erika about Ilse-or maybe Willi was being friendly, or more than friendly, with some woman Heinrich knew nothing about. He looked back to the numbers the Americans had submitted to the Reich. Before he could do anything but look, Erika said something else.

"Me?" Willi exclaimed. "Me?You've got your nerve! What about you and-" He didn't go on. Instead, he slammed the receiver into its cradle hard enough to start a young earthquake.

Had be been about to say,What about you and Heinrich? Erika hadn't been subtle. She'd done everything but send up a flare, in fact. Up till now, Willi hadn't paid much attention-or so it seemed. But maybe he could see what was right under his nose after all.

Or, then again, maybe he couldn't. His color faded as quickly as it had risen. He managed a smile of sorts as he swung his swivel chair toward Heinrich. "Women are strange creatures-you know that?" He might have been imparting some great philosophical truth. "We can't live with them, and we can't live without them, either."

Fourteen placid, happy years of marriage with Lise looked better and better to Heinrich. "I hope everything turns out all right for you," he said.

"So do I," Willi said. "Sometimes, though, what can you do?" He sounded as happy-go-lucky as usual. He meant,You can't do anything-things will either work out or else they won't. If Heinrich's marriage were in trouble when he wanted to keep it going, he would have tried everything under the sun-and looked in the dark, too, in case it was hiding something the sun didn't show. Did that mean Willi didn't want to keep his marriage going, or did it mean he didn't want to try? Heinrich didn't know. He couldn't tell. He wondered if Willi knew.

When lunchtime came, Heinrich said, "Shall we go to Admiral Yamamoto's?"

Willi nodded. "Why not? We haven't been there since the day old Haldweim kicked the bucket."

"Uh, right." True, the old Fuhrer was dead. Even so, Heinrich couldn't have made himself talk about the ruler of the Germanic Empire so casually-so callously, even. Willi, confident in his perfect Aryanness, could be more expansive.Or maybe he doesn't think about it at all. Maybe he just says the first thing that comes out of his mouth.

Heinrich found that hard to imagine, let alone believe. But Willi was a law unto himself. He had been for as long as Heinrich had known him, and no doubt for years before that.

Sitting in the Japanese restaurant, eating Berlin rolls and sashimi and rice and washing them down with a seidel of beer (German beer, not Japanese-Japanese electronics were fine, but Japanese beer couldn't measure up to the Reinheitsgebot, the medieval purity law, and was barred from the Greater German Reich), Heinrich tried not to worry about anything except the havoc the wasabi was playing with his sinuses. But Admiral Yamamoto's got customers from a lot of ministries, and the SS men at the next table were too loud to ignore.

"Did you read the Volkischer Beobachter this morning?" one of them demanded of his pals. "Didyou?"

"Can SS men read?" Willi said-in Heinrich's opinion, not nearly quietly enough.

"I saw it, all right," another blackshirt-a bruiser-answered. "That goddamn son of a bitch."

"Takes one to know one," Willi said-again, much too loud.

"Oh,Willi," Heinrich murmured. The other table held five SS men. If they got mad, it wouldn't even be a brawl. It would be a slaughter. But getting Willi to pay attention…was like getting him not to lead away from kings. You could wish, and much good wishing would do you.

Then the first SS man, a Sturmbannfuhrer, said, "He's going to bring it in by the back door. You wait and see if he doesn't."

Before Willi could make yet another rude comment-and Heinrich knew just what sort of rude comment he would make about that-the bruiser nodded and said, "Bet your ass he is. 'A thorough examination of its political underpinnings.'" He made a loud retching noise.

And Willi Dorsch, canny political creature that he was, suddenly became quiet as a mouse. If he could have wiggled his ears, he would have swung them toward the table full of SS men. Heinrich felt the same way. The blackshirts weren't talking about just any goddamn son of a bitch. They were talking about Heinz Buckliger, newly chosen Fuhrer and the most powerful man on the planet.

"Sure as hell, we'll hear more crap about the first edition," another SS man predicted gloomily. "If we'd hadour way, we'd've knocked that stinking nonsense over the head once and for all."

"That's about the size of it," the Sturmbannfuhrer — the most senior man at the table-agreed. "But the Wehrmacht wouldn't play ball with us, and so we got stuck with this asshole."

A fragment of Latin went through Heinrich's head.Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Whowould watch the watchmen? The SS was and always had been a law unto itself. Maybe, between them, the rest of the Party and the Wehrmacht could keep it in check. And, by all the signs, the SS itself had split on a candidate to replace Kurt Haldweim. That seemed promising. If no one else could, maybe some of the watchmen would keep an eye on the rest.

"He's young, too." The bruiser sounded depressed at the prospect.

"Well, maybe-" But the Sturmbannfuhrer broke off. Whathad he been about to say?Maybe he won't live to get old? No, that wasn't the sort of thing to blurt out in a crowded restaurant. Had Heinrich wanted to say it, he couldn't imagine anyone but Lise whom he trusted enough to hear it. Even as things were, the blackshirts had run their mouths far more than he thought wise.

He looked at his watch. "Getting on towards one o'clock," he said. "We'd better head back to the office." Willi looked at him as if he'd lost his mind, or possibly started speaking Chinese. He wanted to hang around and listen to the SS men. That was exactly why Heinrich wanted to leave. He kicked his friend in the ankle under the table. Reluctantly, Willi left his chair. Heinrich paid the bill. They left the restaurant together.

Once out on the sidewalk, Willi practically exploded with excitement. "Did you hear them?" he demanded. "Did youhear them? Practically talking treason, right there in Admiral Yamamoto's!"

"Don't be silly. How can SS men talk treason?" Heinrich said. "What they want is what the state wants. And if you don't believe me, just ask them."

"Ha!" Willi said. "I didn't know you were such a funny fellow."

"I wasn't joking."

"I know. That only makes it funnier, but you have to look at it the right way to see it." Willi walked along for a while, whistling a tune from the new show about a theater owner who wanted an excuse to close down his firetrap of a house, booked a dreadful play about the evil machinations of Churchill and Stalin, and found to his horror that it was bad enough to become a comedy smash. The show itself was a comedy smash in Berlin, too, and had already spawned several companies touring the rest of the Reich. After a block or so, Willi stopped whistling-a mercy, because he was flat. He said, "Well, I hate to admit it, but you were right."

"About what? Getting out of Yamamoto's? You bet I was."

"No, no, no." Willi impatiently shook his head. "About that piece in the Beobachter this morning. If those bastards don't like it, there's got to be more to it than I thought. Buckliger does need to take a good long look at our underpinnings after all." A girl with nice legs came toward them. Willi said not a word about her underpinnings. Heinrich knew then that his friend was serious. After a few more steps, Willi added, "You may have been right about something else, too."

"What, twice in one day?" Heinrich said. "Such compliments you pay me. I've caught up with a stopped clock."

"No, you haven't, because this other one was a while ago." Willi waited to make sure Heinrich was suitably chastened, then went on, "If our lovely luncheon companions don't care for the first edition, it's probably got something going for it, too."

"You never said anything like that before." Heinrich didn't try to hide his surprise.

"That's because I thought it was a load of garbage before," Willi answered. "But if those Schweinehunde think the same thing…then they're wrong, and that means I must be wrong, too."

Heinrich made as if to feel his forehead. "You must be feverish, is what you must be. Saying I'm right? Saying you're wrong? Delirium, if you ask me."

"Get away from me." Willi sidestepped to escape Heinrich, and almost bumped into a man wearing the light blue of a Luftwaffe official. They made mutual apologies. The Luftwaffe man kept going up the street, towards Admiral Yamamoto's. Willi looked back over his shoulder. "Iam in a state. I can't help wondering if that fellow's on his way to plot with the thugs in black shirts."

That hadn't even occurred to Heinrich. "If you see plotters behind every potted plant, they're going to put you in a rubber room, you know."

"Not if the plotters are really there," Willi said. "Was Hitler wrong when he said everybody ganged up on Germany after the First World War? No, because everybody really did. You only get in trouble when you see things that aren't there."

"Right." Heinrich knew when arguing with Willi was more trouble than it was worth. This looked to be one of those times.

When they got back to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, Ilse came up to them and said, "Excuse me, Willi, but you got another call from your wife." She rolled her eyes to show what she thought of that. The secretary was supposed to call Willi Herr Dorsch. That she didn't made Heinrich Gimpel want to roll his eyes. She did address Willi as Sie rather than using the intimatedu, but she sounded as if she were usingdu even when she wasn't.

"What did Erika want?" Willi asked. "Do I want to know?"

Ilse pouted. Willi's eyes lit up. The Berlin rolls roiled in Heinrich's stomach. Ilse said, "She wouldn't leave a message-just told me to tell you to call her back. And she said she wondered why I was there when you weren't. That wasn't very nice."

Scowling, Willi said, "I'll call her. I don't know what I'll call her, but I'll call her." Ilse thought that was very funny. Heinrich retreated to his desk. He'd never seen financial statements look so alluring.

But, however much the numbers beckoned, he couldn't avoid hearing Willi's side of the conversation-if a shouting match could be dignified by the term. The longer it went on, the louder and angrier Willi got. At last, he slammed down the phone."Scheisse," he muttered.

Heinrich felt like saying the same thing. If Willi and Erika were fighting, she'd be looking for a shoulder to cry on, and the first shoulder she was likely to look for was his. His shoulder wouldn't be the only thing she was looking for, either. He stared up to the heavens-or at least to the sound-deadening tiles and fluorescent panels of the ceiling. What red-blooded man wouldn't want a beautiful blonde in hot pursuit of him? Heinrich didn't, and he had one. Most of the men who would have liked nothing better had to do without. If that wasn't unfair, he couldn't imagine what would be.

"Guten Morgen,Dr. Dambach," Esther Stutzman called as she walked into the pediatrician's office.

"Guten Morgen, Frau Stutzman." Dambach's voice floated out from the back. "How are you today?"

"I'm fine, thanks. How are you?" Esther answered. He didn't ask her to help him set the coffeemaker to rights, which had to mean he hadn't tried messing with it before she got there. She took a look. Sure enough, it wasn't even plugged in. She loaded it with water and ground coffee and put in a filter. "I'm making coffee, Dr. Dambach," she called. "Would you like some when it's ready?"

"Ja, bitte,"he said. "Somehow, you always get it just right."

"I'm glad you like it," she said, in lieu of calling him a thumb-fingered idiot. He wasn't an idiot, and she knew it. He was a very sharp man; she could wish he were less so. But, whenever he got near a coffeemaker, thumb-fingered he definitely was. Before long, she brought him a steaming foam cup. "Here you are, Doctor."

"Danke schon."Dambach sipped. "Yes, that's very good. And you know just how much sugar I take, too."

"I should, by now." Esther lingered for a moment, wondering if he felt like making small talk. Sometimes he did; more often he didn't. When he picked up the coffee cup again, she slipped back to her station and looked at the morning's appointments. When she saw Paul Klein's name on the list, she grimaced. If only she'd thought to look in Eduard's chart…

She tried not to think about that as she checked the computer to see whose bills were overdue. She printed out polite dunning letters for those whose first notice this was, sterner ones for people getting a second reminder, and letters threatening legal action for two dedicated deadbeats. She happened to know Dr. Dambach had never sued anybody, but with a little luck the people who hadn't paid him wouldn't.

She took the letters in to him for his signature. She could have made the squiggle that passed for that signature at least as well herself, but that wasn't how things were done. "Oh, the Schmidts," Dambach muttered when he came to one of the strongest letters. "I just heard they bought themselves a new Mercedes-and they paid cash."

"Oh, dear," Esther said. "Maybe you really ought to talk to your lawyer, then."

The pediatrician shook his head. "I don't want to have anything to do with the courts, not if I can help it. Whether you're right or you're wrong, you go into court a pig and you come out a sausage. I'd rather do without the fee. But seeing the Schmidts spend their money on everything but their bills does sometimes tempt me to prescribe ipecac for their brat."

Esther laughed; she knew he was even less likely to do something like that than he was to sue. Take his anger out on a child? Impossible. Unthinkable. But what if he found out a child he treated was a Jew? She had no doubt he would call the authorities, and never lose a moment's sleep afterwards worrying about what happened to it or to its family. He was conscientious, law-abiding-a good German.

She took the signed letters and made envelopes for them. The stamps she used were black-and-white mourning issues for Kurt Haldweim. As she put them on one by one, she wondered about the folk among whom she lived-something else she'd done many times before. Germans were the sort of people who would stay on the path and off the grass in a park even if someone was shooting a machine gun at them.

And yet…A lot of the Jews surviving in Berlin were there because Germans had helped their parents or grandparents get false papers during the war. Without the right papers, life in the Reich had been impossible even so long ago. They'd been easier to get then, when enemy bombs sent records up in smoke and replacements were issued without many awkward questions. More than a few friends and neighbors had vouched for Jews, and some of them, discovered, had paid for their kindness with years in prison or with life itself.

And some Jews in Nazi hands had kept themselves alive-for a while-by going out onto the streets of Berlin and capturing other Jews still free. Set them in the scales against the brave Germans and it taught you…what? Esther sighed. Only what anyone with a gram of sense already knew: that there were good Jews and bad Jews, in proportions not much different from those of any other folk.

The door to the outer office opened. Esther looked at the clock in surprise. Was it nine already? It really was. In came a squat, heavyset woman with jowls and protruding eyes. She looked like nothing so much as a bulldog. And her seven-year-old daughter, poor thing, might have been her in miniature.

"Good morning,Frau Bauriedl," Esther said. "And how is Wilhelmina today?"

"Well, that's what I want the doctor to see,"Frau Bauriedl answered.

She brought Wilhelmina in every couple of weeks regardless of whether anything was really wrong with the little girl. Dr. Dambach tried to discourage her, but he hadn't had much luck. She did pay her bills on time; neither Esther nor any of the other receptionists had ever had to send her even the most polite letter.

The telephone rang. "Excuse me," Esther said, glad for an excuse not to have to talk to Frau Bauriedl. She picked up the handset. "Dr. Dambach's office."

"Frau Stutzman?" The woman on the other end of the line waited for Esther to agree that she was herself, then went on, "This is Maria Klein,Frau Stutzman. I'm…I'm afraid I'm going to have to cancel Paul's appointment this morning. You see, we are under investigation for something…something of which we are certainly not guilty. Good-bye." She hung up.

She hadn't let on that she knew Esther in any way except as the pediatrician's receptionist. There in the warm, bright, sterile calm of Dambach's office, Esther shivered as if caught in a Lapland blizzard. Was Maximilian Ebert or some other hard-faced Nazi in the uniform of the Reichs Genealogical Office or the Security Police standing next to Maria, listening to every word she said and how she said it? Or was she just afraid her line was tapped?

Under investigation. How long had it been since the Germans caught a Jew in Berlin? It must have been some time not long after Esther found out she was one. There had been a great hue and cry then. How much more strident would it be now, when the whole Reich was thought to be Judenfrei for years? And if the Kleins were found guilty of such a heinous crime, what else would the investigators be able to tear out of them?

When Esther got to her feet, her legs didn't want to hold her up. She held on to the top of the desk for a moment till she steadied. She made the trip back to Dr. Dambach's personal office more by main force of will than any other way. He looked up from a medical journal, a question on his face. "That telephone call was from Frau Klein," Esther said carefully. She had to watch every word, too, in case her turn came up next. "She won't be bringing Paul in this morning after all."

"No?" Dambach said. "Have she and her husband decided to take him to the Reichs Mercy Center, then? It's the only sensible thing to do, I'm afraid."

Was it? For someone old and in torment from, say, cancer, it might be. For a baby? But, on the other hand, for a baby doomed to a lingering, horrible, certain death? Esther just didn't know. That was beside the point now, though. Shaking her head, she answered, "No, because she and her husband are-under investigation, she said."

"Are they?" Dr. Dambach didn't need to ask why they were being investigated. He was the one to whom the possibility had first occurred. "Well, I'm sure the authorities will get to the bottom of it. If they do turn out to be Jews, who could have imagined such a thing in Berlin in the twenty-first century?"

"Yes, who?" Esther hoped she matched his tone. Feeling spiteful, she added, "And Frau Bauriedl is here with Wilhelmina."

"Is she?" The pediatrician scowled. "It's a shame the powers that be aren't investigating her. The Kleins have always seemed like nice people. But appearances can be deceiving. If they're Jews…" He shook his head. "We certainly can't let that sort of thing go on, can we?"

Before Esther had to come up with a response to that, the telephone rang again. "Excuse me, Doctor," she said, and hurried out to answer it. A worried mother had a three-year-old who was throwing up. Esther fit her into the slot the Kleins had vacated. Even that made her want to cry.

The worst of it was, she didn't dare call people to warn them. If the Kleins were under suspicion, she and Walther might be, too. Her warnings could turn into betrayals. She wouldn't risk that. Even if she called to say she would be dropping by to pass on some news-even that might be too much. She had to assume she was being watched, being listened to. Maybe she wasn't. She hoped-she prayed-she wasn't. But she couldn't take the chance. She had to act as if she were.

And what's the use of praying to a God Who has made us fair game all over the world for a lifetime? That question and others of the same sort floated to the surface like rotting corpses whenever times turned black. Only one answer had ever occurred to Esther. She fell back on it now.If I don't believe, if I turn my back and walk away, then aren't I saying the Nazis were right all along, and we shouldn't go on?

Usually, that was enough to keep her on her course. She could be very stubborn. A Jew who wasn't stubborn these days didn't stay a Jew. When times got uncommonly black, though, she couldn't help wondering,Did I stay on course for so long-for this?

If God couldn't forgive her for wondering…Too bad for Him,she thought.

"Come right in,Frau Bauriedl, Wilhelmina," she said. "I'm sure Dr. Dambach will be so glad to see you again." If Dambach couldn't forgive her for lying…Too bad for him.

A woman brought in a wailing toddler who was tugging at his ear. She looked harried. "I hope the doctor can see me soon," she said. "Rudolf started this at ten last night, and he's been going ever since. My husband and I haven't had much sleep."

"There's only one patient in front of you,Frau Stransky," Esther said. "I'm sure it won't be too long. Would you like some coffee while you're waiting?"

"Oh, please!" Frau Stransky said, as if Esther had offered her the Holy Grail. Esther gave her a cup. By the way she gulped it down, she wished she had an intravenous caffeine drip hooked up instead. Esther had had mornings like that, too, even if her children hadn't had to go through many earaches.

More women came in with children in tow. In the examination room,Frau Bauriedl droned on and on about Wilhelmina's imaginary afflictions. The only thing really wrong with Wilhelmina was that she looked like her mother.

At last, after too long, Dr. Dambach must have got a little more abrupt than he was in the habit of doing. Frau Bauriedl's tones grew shriller and more indignant. "The nerve!" she said as she swept her daughter past Esther. "I think we'll see someone else the next time." She'd made that threat before. Esther wished she would do it, but she hadn't yet.

Whenever the door to the waiting room opened, Esther had to fight against a flinch. Would it be someone in the somber uniform of the Security Police? Whenever the phone rang, her hand wanted to shake as she reached for it. Would someone be warning her of a new disaster?

If the Security Police had operatives in Dr. Dambach's office, they were disguised as worried mothers-one of the most effective disguises Esther could imagine, and also one of the most unnecessary. All the phone calls featured more worried mothers except one. That one had a worried father: a cartoonist who worked out of his house. "Ja, Herr Wasserstein, you can bring Luther in at half past two this afternoon," Esther told him.

As soon as Irma came in during the lunch hour, Esther left. She had one more anxious moment walking out of the building. Would they bundle her into a car and take her away to God only knew where? They didn't. She walked to the bus stop. No one bothered her at all.

But the fear didn't go away. It never would.

Susanna Weiss had lived in fear ever since she was ten years old. Fear made her angry. It always had. She'd been living with rage since she was ten, too. Most of the time, she lived with it by making everyone around her live with it. That had made her more respected-and certainly more feared-than any of the other handful of female professors in the Department of Germanic Languages. "Don't mess with her-it's more trouble than it's worth" was the watchword these days at Friedrich Wilhelm University, not just in the department but also in the administration.

Some things, though, were too big and too strong to fight.

Jews didn't-couldn't-fight the apparatus of the Nazi Party. That was as much an article of faith these days as Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. The Reich bestrode the world like a colossus. And we petty Jews walk under its huge legs, and peep about to escape our dishonorable graves.

Susanna knew that was a misquotation, no matter how true it was. Shakespeare, these days, was more vitally alive in Germany than in his native land. A series of splendid nineteenth-century translations left his words much closer to modern German than his original language was to modern English, which made him easier for people here to follow.

If the Reichs Genealogical Office was going to start asking questions of the Kleins…Her heart turned to a lump of ice within her. She couldn't help it, any more than a bird was supposed to be able to keep from letting a snake mesmerize it.

"Do you want to talk here?" she asked Esther Stutzman. "Or would you rather go over to the Tiergarten? It's only a couple of blocks."

Her apartment was small and cramped and full of books, and even closer to the university than to the park. It ate up an inordinately large chunk of her salary, but she couldn't think of anything on which she would rather have spent her money.

Esther set a teacup down on a table crowded with ill-informed essays on The Canterbury Tales. "Well, that depends," she said carefully, and waited.

It depends on whether you think someone has planted a microphone here. That was what she meant, all right. Susanna looked around the place. She had books in German and English and Dutch and all the Scandinavian languages (including Old Icelandic). Paintings and prints filled the wall space bookshelves didn't. An alarmingly authentic reproduction of the helmet from the Sutton Hoo ship stared from an end table. She was not the neatest of housekeepers. If the Security Police had sneaked in to bug the place, she would never know it till too late.

"Why don't we walk?" she said. "The park is very nice in the afternoon."

"Then let's go." Esther got to her feet.

And the Tiergartenwas very nice in the afternoon, too. The sun was bright and warm. Sparrows hopped here and there, trying to steal bread crumbs from the pigeons that pensioners fed.Germans are a strange folk, Susanna thought.They're very kind to animals. They save their savagery for people, where it really counts.

"All right," she said. "Tell me how this happened."

Esther did, flaying herself in the process. To make matters worse, she had to flay herself in a bright, cheerful voice so people walking or cycling past wouldn't wonder what the two women were talking about so intently. "If only I'd found Eduard Klein's old genealogy chart, none of this would have happened," she said, a wide, false smile on her face. "But I didn't think to look, and so the Kleins…have a problem." She could say that safely enough. Anyone might have a problem.

The problemsgoyimhave aren't so likely to be fatal. Susanna bit her lip. The Kleins would have had a fatal problem even if Esther had purloined the chart. Susanna had never heard of Tay-Sachs disease till a few weeks before, but that kind of problem didn't care whether you'd heard of it. It came right in, introduced itself, and settled down to stay.

"Too late to fret about it now," she told Esther. "It's done. We'll go on."

"Easy for you to say," Esther replied. "You didn't do it. You don't wake up in the middle of the night wishing you had it to do over again."

Susanna shrugged. "If it goes wrong, it goes wrong for me, too. If they squeeze the Kleins tight enough to get them to name you and Walther, do you think they won't name me?"

They walked past a fountain. Esther said, "I want to jump in and drown myself."

"Don't be foolish. If you're foolish, you're liable to give yourself away." Susanna paused to think. Fighting her way up through the male-dominated hierarchies at Friedrich Wilhelm University had taught her one thing: the system was there to be manipulated, if only you could find the lever. She thought she saw one here. "You say Maria told you they were being investigated?"

"That's right." Esther nodded miserably.

"And she was at home?" Susanna persisted.

"Yes." Esther nodded again.

"Then they aren't sure. They can't be sure," Susanna said. "If they were sure, they'd haul her and her husband-and Eduard, too, damn them-off to the Genealogical Office or to the closest police headquarters and go to work on them. Thank God Eduard's too little to know what he is."

Esther remained distraught. "Who says they won't?"

"Nobody says they won't. But if they werereally suspicious, they would have done it already," Susanna said. "That means they're trying to panic people into doing something foolish so they get more to work with."

"They're doing a pretty good job, too," Esther exclaimed.

But Susanna shook her head. As it did with her, fear began to give way to anger. "Not yet. Not if the Kleins can sit tight and keep saying, 'We have no idea how any of this happened.' They ought to find a lawyer, too, a big, noisy one."

"As if a lawyer will do them any good!" Esther said. "What lawyer in his right mind would want anything to do with somebody who might have Jewish blood? The first case he lost, he'd go to the camp along with his clients."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you? But you'd be wrong. There are lawyers who deal with Mischlingsrechts, " Susanna said. "One of the games they play in the Party is accusing somebody they don't like of having Jewish blood. Most of the time, it's a big, fat lie, which is why the attorneys who specialize in mixed-blood lawdon't go to camps. It happened at the university a few years ago, too, which is how I happen to know about it." She made a face, as if she'd smelled something foul. "You wouldn't believe how nasty academic politics can get."

"After all the horror stories you've told, maybe I would," Esther said. Susanna had her doubts. Her friend was simply too nice to imagine the depths to which people could sink. And if that wasn't an aid to survival in the Greater German Reich, Susanna didn't know what would be.

She said, "They ought to threaten to sue, too."

Behind her glasses, Esther's eyes got big. "Sue the government? They'd get shot for even thinking about it!"

Susanna shook her head again. "No, they'd just lose or have their suit quashed before it ever came to trial. But if they talk big, if they hit back hard, people will think they must be innocent, because nobody who's guilty acts like that."

There was, or had been, a saying in English.The Hun is either at your throat or at your feet — that was how it went. It held some truth, too. Germans who thought they had the whip hand acted like it. And those who didn't, groveled.

Esther was a quiet and quietly orderly person herself. Susanna wasn't, and never had been. She hit back whenever she could, sometimes in small ways, sometimes not. Up till now, she'd never had the chance to hit back at the Reich itself. She'd imagined it-what Jew didn't? But dreams of vengeance remained only dreams. She wasn't crazy. She knew they'd never be anything else. Still, even the prospect of tying the system up in knots looked good to her.

"Do you really think I ought to tell this to the Kleins?" Esther asked doubtfully. "Won't it just land them in worse trouble?"

Susanna looked around. Nobody was particularly close to the two of them. No one was paying them any special heed, either. She could speak freely, or as freely as anyone could ever speak in the Greater German Reich. "They're under suspicion of being Jews," she said. "How can they get in worse trouble than that?"

To her surprise, Esther actually thought it over. "Maybe if they were homosexual Gypsies…But then they wouldn't have a baby, would they?"

"No." Susanna fought laughter, though it was only blackly funny. The Reich had been at least as thorough about getting rid of Gypsies as it had with Jews. She didn't know whether any survived. If so, they too were in hiding. As for homosexuals, the few high up in the Party hierarchy and those who traveled in certain circles of the SS did as they pleased. Others still faced savage persecution. Unlike Jews and Gypsies, they couldn't be rooted out all at once, for they kept springing up like new weeds every year. If nothing else, they gave the authorities something to do.

"We've come all the way to the zoo," Esther said in amazement. "Shall we go in and look at the animals?"

"No!" Susanna startled even herself with the force of her reaction. She had to stop and think to figure out why she felt the way she did. "I don't want to look at lions and elephants and ostriches in cages, not when I'm in a cage myself."

"Oh." Esther thought that over, too. After a little while, she said, "But people like the animals. Berliners have always liked animals." As if to prove her point, a man perhaps old enough to have served in the Second World War sat on a park bench scattering torn-up bits of bread for birds and squirrels.

"You're right, but I don't care." Susanna stuck out her chin and looked stubborn. That was the expression Herr Doktor Professor Oppenhoff had come to dread. "They're still trapped in there, and I don't want anything to do with them."

Esther didn't argue. She'd known Susanna long enough to know how impractical arguing with her could be. She just shrugged and said, "In that case, let's head back to your apartment."

"All right." Susanna was glad enough to turn around. She sighed. "I never thought I'd wish I were living in England."

"Why would you?" Esther asked. "Over there, they have their own people watching them, and they have us, too."

"But they have a party that's serious about turning over a new leaf," Susanna answered. "We don't. Oh, people say the new Fuhrer will be something different, but I'll believe it when I see it."

"I hope it's true," Esther said. "Maybe it'll mean easier times for…everybody." She chose the innocuous word because a man in a brown Party uniform came past them. He looked intent on his own business, but Susanna would have used an innocuous word anyplace where he could hear, too.

"Easier times," Susanna said wistfully. "I'll believe that when I see it, too, especially with what's going on now." She wished she hadn't said that as soon as she did; Esther looked on the point of tears. Susanna often talked first and worried about consequences later. When she was younger, she'd thought she would outgrow it. But it seemed to be a part of her. Sometimes that landed her in trouble. Sometimes it proved very valuable. Every so often, it managed both at once. She knew she had to repair the damage here, and did her best: "One way or another, everything will turn out all right."

"I hope so," Esther said, "but I'm sure I don't see how."

"As long as we act the way any other citizens of the Reich would if their rights were being violated, I think we'll do all right," Susanna said.

"If we were any other citizens of the Reich, our rights wouldn't be violated," Esther said. "Not like this, anyhow."

"Not like this, no," Susanna admitted. "But they still would be. That's what the Reich is all about: the government can do whatever it wants, and everybody else has to hold still for it. But people don't. Germans don't, anyway. If it bumps up against them, they bump back."

"Or they get bumped off," Esther said.

Susanna wished she hadn't put it like that, not because she was wrong but because she was right.Or they get bumped off. That had always been the Reich 's answer for everything-and, judging by the past seventy years, a very effective answer it was, too.