In The Presence of mine Enemies

VIII

Like the rest of the jews in the Greater German Reich, Lise Gimpel had never been to, never even seen, High Holy Days services. She'd heard about going to a synagogue to celebrate the New Year and the Day of Atonement from her grandfather. Being able to worship openly struck her as even more amazing than the holidays themselves.

She couldn't so much as fast on Yom Kippur.Don't do anything to get yourself noticed was a Jew's unbreakable rule. If, say, Roxane asked,Why aren't you eating, Mommy? — how could she answer? Whatever she said, her daughter might tell a school friend she'd stayed hungry all day long. If that reached the wrong ears…Even so small a thing could mean disaster.

And so she ate breakfast with everybody else, and silently apologized to God. Heinrich, no doubt, was doing the same thing. By the somber expression on Alicia's face, so was she. Lise had told her what the holidays were and what they meant and how they were supposed to be celebrated if only that were possible. Francesca and Roxane ate pancakes and sausage without the slightest idea that today was different from any other day.

Heinrich got to his feet and grabbed his attache case. "I'm off," he said. "I'll see you all tonight." Collecting kisses all around, he hurried out the door. It closed behind him. Lise sighed and smiled at the same time. She didn't worry about him running off with Erika Dorsch or anybody else, even if she teased him. He wasn't the sort to leave unfinished anything he started. If his eyes sometimes wandered-well, he was a man. His hands and, more to the point, his heart didn't.

"Come on, eat up," Lise told the girls. "Then get out of your nightgowns and into school clothes. I know you don't have to leave as early as Daddy does, but you can't lie around eating grapes all day, either."

She got giggles from the younger two girls and a disdainful sniff from Alicia, who said, "You've used that one before, Mommy."

Lise wasn't about to put up with literary criticism before eight in the morning, especially when she hadn't finished her coffee (the biggest advantage she saw to not fasting on Yom Kippur was that she didn't have to miss it). She said, "I don't care whether I have or not. It's still true. Get moving."

Alicia was the one she had to bully, the one a bird or a book or anything else might distract from the business at hand. Francesca could barely grunt before ten, but she did what she had to do on automatic pilot. Roxane liked mornings, probably because her sisters didn't.

Lise got them out the door in good time. She always did, and she always breathed a sigh of relief once they were gone, too.Especially today, she thought. The Day of Atonement she wanted to herself. Had things been different, gathering with her fellow Jews would have been sweet. But, though they got together on minor holidays like Purim, they didn't dare meet on the big ones. Someone might be watching, might be listening, might be wondering. You never could tell.

She sat down in front of the televisor. It was off. She left it off, too. She didn't want any distractions, not while she was doing her best to forgive the people who'd troubled her during the past year. In spite of her earlier forgiving thoughts about Heinrich, she wasn't surprised when Erika rose to the top of the list. Lise's smile was slightly sour. Erika couldn't help being what she was, any more than a tiger could.

Things around a tiger had a way of ending up dead. Things around Erika…

Methodically, Lise went through the rest of the list, starting with Herr Kessler, who'd vexed her because he vexed Alicia, and ending with the cleaner who had returned a linen blouse with a scorch mark and without two buttons. Then she took on the hard one she attempted every Yom Kippur: to forgive the German people.

She'd never done it, not in her heart. She'd never even come close, and she knew it. That wasn't only because their crimes were so enormous, either. Worse, they had no idea they'd committed crimes. They were convinced they walked the path of truth and justice and righteousness. If they didn't see they had anything to atone for, what was the point to forgiving them? Was there any? Not that she'd ever been able to see.

This year…This year, for the first time since she was a girl, she wondered. Heinz Buckliger seemed to have some idea that the Reich and the Volk of the Reich didn't come to their dominant position in the world with hands perfectly clean. If the Fuhrer thought the German people stood in need of atonement for some things…Well, how much did that mean?

Buckliger hadn't said a word about Jews, not in his speech on the televisor and not in anything else Heinrich and Walther had been able to uncover. But he had cast some doubt on the overwhelming importance of Aryan blood. And how much didthat mean?

"I want to hope," Lise murmured, to herself and possibly to God. "It's been so long. Iwant to hope."

Willi Dorsch glowered in mock severity-Heinrich Gimpel hoped the severity was mock, anyway-as he climbed aboard the bus that would carry Heinrich and him to the Stahnsdorf train station. He sat down next to Heinrich and demanded, "Well, what have you got to say for yourself?"

Did he know? Had Erika been as forthright as she often was? Or had he just added two and two and come up with-surprise! — four? If he did know, he was going to have to come out and say so. "Well, how does 'good morning' sound?" Heinrich answered.

"It'll do." With a grin, Willi thumped him on the back. "Better than a lot of things you could have told me."

"I'm so glad." Heinrich hoped irony would keep Willi from noticing he was telling the exact and literal truth. Having got away with one question, he tried another: "And how are you today?"

"I could be worse. I have been worse. I probably will be worse again before too long," Willi answered. Heinrich concluded he and Erika hadn't fought during the night. The way things had been going with them, that was indeed something. His friend went on, "How about yourself?"

"Me? I just go on from day to day," Heinrich said. That was true enough. Getting through the High Holy Days every year reminded him of just how true it was.

"Just go on from day to day," Willi repeated, and sighed gustily. "Christ, I wish I could say the same. I never know if tomorrow will blow up in my face."

Neither do I,Heinrich thought.And you're talking about your marriage. I'm talking about my life. He'd grown very used to thinking things he couldn't say. What he could say was, "I hope everything turns out all right."

"You're a good fellow, you know that?" Willi sounded a little maudlin, or maybe more than a little, as he might have after too much to drink. But this morning he didn't smell like a distillery, and he didn't wince at every noise and every sunbeam like a man with a hangover. Maybe he really was just glad to have a friend. And how glad would he be after a few ill-chosen words from Erika?

Those words evidently hadn't come. Maybe they wouldn't. Heinrich dared hope. In the Reich, the mere act of hoping was-had to be-an act of courage for a Jew. With a shrug, Heinrich said, "All I know is, I've got too much work waiting for me at the office."

"Ha! Who doesn't?" Willi said. "Our section could have twice as many people in it, and we'd still be behind. Of course, if the new Fuhrer cuts the assessments in the Empire the way he's been talking about, we'll all end up out of work."

"Do you think he will?" Heinrich asked with even more genuine curiosity than he dared show.

"Me? I'm not going to try and guess along with him any more, no, sir," Willi said. "I was wrong a couple of times, and all that proves is, I shouldn't do it."

The bus pulled into the train station. Heinrich and Willi hurried off. They both paused to buy copies of the Volkischer Beobachter from a vending machine, then went to the platform to catch the commuter train into Berlin.

They sat side by side, reading the paper. Heinrich, as usual, went through it methodically. Willi was a butterfly, flitting from story to story. He found as many interesting tidbits as Heinrich did, and sometimes found them faster. "Americans question assessment," he said, pointing to a piece on page five.

Heinrich, who hadn't got there on his own yet, flipped to the story. He read it, then shook his head. "They can question, but it won't do them much good," he said. "The occupying authorities will collect their pound of flesh one way or another."

"Ah, a pound of flesh." Willi laughed wistfully. "I remember how much fun that used to be."

Heinrich winced at the pun. Maybe that wince was what made him ask, "What about Ilse?" Normally, he would think such a thing, but he wouldn't say it. The wry joke had made him drop some of his defenses. He didn't like that. He couldn't afford to drop them, even for an instant.

Willi blinked. He hadn't expected the question, any more than Heinrich had expected to ask it. After a pause when Heinrich wondered if he would answer at all, he said, "Ilse's sweet, and she's good in bed, but it's not the same, you know what I mean?"

"I…think so," Heinrich said. He thought about making love with a near-stranger after so long with Lise and nobody else. Yes, that would be very odd, especially the first few times. Then he thought about making love with Erika, who was, after all, anything but a stranger. What wouldthat be like?Cut it out, he told himself sternly. Most of him listened.

"You're lucky, being happy where you are," Willi said, and dove back into the newspaper.

"Yes, I suppose I am," Heinrich said, which was certainly the truth, for he would have been stuck where he was whether he was happy or not. Divorce drew notice to a couple, even these days. Jews mostly stayed married no matter how badly they got along.

A lot ofgoyim did the same thing. Willi said, "If it weren't for the kids, and if it weren't for the way people look at you funny afterwards, Erika and I would have split up by now. Hell, we may yet, in spite of all that stuff."

"I hope not," Heinrich said, which was true for all kinds of reasons his friend didn't understand. He chose one Willi would: "If you guys broke up, we'd have to find somebody else to beat at bridge."

"Ha! Whathave you been smoking?" That touched Willi's pride where a lot of other gibes wouldn't have. And if he thought of Heinrich as a rival at the card table, maybe he wouldn't worry about him any other way.

The train pulled into South Station. Heinrich and Willi rode the escalators to the upper level, where they caught the bus to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. Heinrich went to his desk with more than a little apprehension-not only because now he knew Willi was sleeping with Ilse, but also because the Americans were acting up. When they did that, they made his job harder. He had enough other things to worry about without trouble from the far side of the Atlantic.

But sure as hell, four people came up to him in the first hour he was there, all of them with the Beobachter in their hands. They all wanted to know what the Yankees would do, and what the Reich would do to them after they did it. "We'll have to wait and see," Heinrich said again and again, which satisfied no one.

He said the same thing to two more men on the telephone. One was a lieutenant general, a man who disliked ambiguity of any sort. "Dammit, I need to know if we're going to move or not," the officer growled.

"So do I, sir," Heinrich answered. The general swore and hung up.

When the telephone rang again, Heinrich felt like swearing, too. "Budget analysis-Gimpel speaking," he said.

"Good morning to you,Herr Gimpel. This is Charlie Cox, calling from Omaha." The American's German was fluent, but had the flat accent English-speakers gave the language.

"I know your name,Herr Cox. You are in the Department of the Treasury,nicht wahr? What can I do for you today?"

"You can tell me how serious Herr Buckliger is about a new deal for the different parts of the Germanic Empire." Cox didn't beat around the bush. And that, of course, would bethe question in the eyes of any American administrator.

It was alsothe question, or at least closely related tothe question, in Heinrich's eyes. It happened to be one he couldn't answer, either for Charlie Cox or for himself. "I'm very sorry,Herr Cox," he said, and meant it. "I don't make policy. I just implement it when someone else has made it."

Cox grunted. "Well, I don't suppose I really could have expected you to say anything else. But you've got to have some kind of idea about how things will work out. You're a hell of a lot closer there than we are here."

"If I knew, I would tell you," Heinrich answered, and he might even have meant that. "But I'm afraid I don't. The person who sets policy, whom I mentioned a moment ago, is the Fuhrer, no one else. When he decides what he wants to do, we will do it."

"Do it to us," Cox muttered in English. Heinrich was less fluent in that language than, say, Susanna Weiss, but he spoke it well enough. Even though the Empire ran on German, English came in handy for dealing with Americans. Charlie Cox had just put his life in Heinrich's hands.

"Sooner or later, we will all see what the Fuhrer has in mind," Heinrich said. While true, that was unlikely to be comforting. "In the meantime, I suggest you pay your assessments promptly. That way, there won't be any unfortunate incidents both sides might regret."

"Incidents we would regret a hell of a lot more than the Reich does." Cox dared say that in German.

"Probably," Heinrich agreed. "The losing side does have a way of regretting incidents more than the winners."

"If we didn't know that already,Herr Gimpel, the past forty years would have proved it to us," Cox said. "Auf wiedersehen." He hung up.

From his desk a couple of meters away, Willi Dorsch asked, "The Americans?"

Heinrich nodded. "Oh, yes. Did you expect anything else? They want to see how much they can get away with, too."

"Who doesn't, these days?" Willi said. "If we had any Jews left, they'd be trying to persuade us they were good Aryans, too." He laughed at the absurdity of the notion.

Heinrich laughed, too. But the shriek inside didn't go away. One of these days, he would have an ulcer-or a stroke. A stroke had killed his father. Things came back to haunt you one way or another.

Ilse set some envelopes and a small package on his desk. "Morning mail delivery,Herr Gimpel," she said.

"Thank you," he answered, hardly looking up.

She went over to Willi's desk and gave him the same sort of stuff. "Here's yours, Willi," she purred in a bedroom voice.

"Thanks, sweetie." He made as if to grab her. Laughing, she spun away.

Heinrich punched keys on his calculator with altogether needless violence.If you're going to have an office romance, can't you at least pretend you're not? he wondered.It makes life easier for everyone around you-especially people who know your wife.

A moment later, another question crossed his mind.Am I angry at Willi, or am I just jealous? He shook his head. He didn't want Ilse. But the idea of having his choice between two women he did want…He shook his head again, annoyed at himself for poking beneath the surface. Purely in the abstract-or so most of him insisted-he liked that idea pretty well.Maybe I am jealous of Willi after all.

Alicia Gimpel liked the idea of a new year that began around the end of summer, a new year that corresponded to the beginning of the new school year. She liked it so well, she wished she could talk about it with her sisters and her friends. But her mother and father had both warned against that. "You never can tell who might be listening, or what they might know," her father had said. She could see how that made sense, but she didn't like it.

On the day the new school year started, she and everybody else who'd put up with Herr Kessler seemed happy enough even without a real New Year's celebration. At the bus stop, Emma Handrick said, "I feel like they just let me out of a camp. Whatever happens now, it can't be worse."

"He was awful, all right," Alicia agreed. She turned to Francesca, who stood close by. With a big-sisterly combination of concern and sadism, she said, "Maybeyou'll have him next year."

"You're mean!" Francesca said shrilly. "I've got Frau Koch this year. Isn't that bad enough?"

"Getting stuck with the Beast is pretty bad, all right." Alicia spoke with sincere but detached sympathy. She hadn't been unlucky enough to have Frau Koch herself.

Emma said, "I wonder what this Herr Peukert is like. He's new. Nobody knows anything about him yet." The noise of a motor made her look down the street. She nodded to herself-the bus was coming. "Whatever he's like, he can't be worse than Kessler." She spoke with the conviction of someone who'd been paddled more often than she thought she should have.

The schoolyard held more confusion than usual that morning, with students lining up in front of unfamiliar rooms-and with new kindergartners not sure they should line up at all. Their teachers came out early and shouted them into place. Alicia smiled at the little kids from the height of just-turned-eleven. It had, of course, been a million years ago whenshe had so little idea of what to do. Even Roxane was starting first grade now.

"Guten Morgen, Kinder."A man's voice close by made Alicia forget the kindergartners and her little sister, too.

"Guten Morgen, Herr Peukert," she said, along with the rest of the fifth-graders in her line. Somebody-she couldn't see who-said, "Guten Morgen, Herr Kessler," out of habit. That drew a few giggles from children close by, but the chorus must have drowned it out for the new teacher, since he didn't react.

Alicia sized him up. He was very tall-within a couple of centimeters of two meters. Was he taller than her father? She thought so. The resemblance ended with height.Herr Peukert was blond and bronzed and broad-shouldered. He held himself so straight, he might have had a ramrod in place of his spine.

Behind Alicia, Emma breathed, "Oh! Isn't he gorgeous?"

Under the new teacher's ice-blue stare, several of the boys in line tried to stand straighter themselves. Before taking the class inside, Peukert called off names from the roll book he carried. He looked at the students as they answered, matching faces to names. Alicia looked back steadily when he came to hers. She wasn't thinking of herself as a Jew just then, only as somebody wondering what the next year-a very long time for a fifth-grader-would be like.

"Here!" Emma said when Herr Peukert called her name next. Her voice held a funny catch Alicia had never heard in it before. She looked back over her shoulder. Emma was gazing at the new teacher with what could only be adoration. Alicia had never before found a recognizable thing to go with the word. Now she did.

When Herr Peukert finished calling the roll, he led the class into the room. The children sat down in the same alphabetical order they'd used to take their places in line. Then they rose to give the flag the Party salute and to call out, "Heil Buckliger!" Daily rituals accomplished, they sat down again.

Alicia didn't expect much to happen on the first day of the new school year, and she proved right.Herr Peukert talked a little about what he expected them to learn in the upcoming term. "Ask questions," he urged them. "Things are changing. What we used to think we were sure of isn't always so clear any more. Some people think this is exciting. It frightens others. However you feel, though, it won't go away any time soon. You'd better get used to it."

He passed out arithmetic books, grammar books, books of stories, and geography books to the students. Alicia filled out a white card and a blue card for each textbook, giving her name, her teacher's name, the title of the book, and the condition of the copy she had. The cards warned her that her parents would have to pay if she damaged the book.

"Question,Herr Peukert!" Trudi Krebs raised her hand.

"Go ahead, Trudi," the teacher said. Alicia nodded, impressed in spite of herself. One way students judged teachers was by how fast they learned the names of the children in their class. Peukert was doing well.

"Sir, where are our history books?" Trudi asked.

That flabbergasted Alicia. She'd been so busy filling out cards and sneaking glances at the books she had got, she hadn't noticed one was missing. She made a face-not quite what her parents annoyed her by calling her Angry Face, but close. She didn't like missing things, not one bit.

Herr Peukert took the question in stride. "I told you, things are changing. They're writing a new history book, but it isn't done yet, so I can't give you that one. They've decided the old one isn't so good, so I can't give you that one, either. For a while, we'll make do without one."

How could things in history change? That flummoxed Alicia all over again. Either they'd happened or not, right? So it seemed to her. Or did the teacher mean the new history book would get rid of some lies in the old one? That would be good, if it happened. She didn't suppose she could ask him if the old book was full of lies. Too bad.

"Question,Herr Peukert!" That was Emma Handrick. Alicia wanted to poke a finger in her ear. Emma never asked questions. She didn't care enough about school-except when it came to avoiding the paddle-to bother with them. And then Alicia understood. Emma still didn't care about school. She cared about Herr Peukert.

"Go ahead," the teacher said. He didn't remember Emma's name right away, as he had with Trudi's.

Emma must have noticed. She was noticing everything about him. But she plowed ahead anyway: "Herr Peukert, is the Fuhrer always right?"

There was a question to make politically alert people sit up and take notice. Trudi Krebs stared at Emma. So did Wolfgang Priller, who liked the way things always had been much better than Trudi seemed to. Emma was oblivious. All she'd wanted was to make the teacher pay attention to her.

She'd done that.Herr Kessler would have said yes and gone about his business.Herr Peukert looked thoughtful. By Emma's soft sigh, that made him seem more intriguing. Slowly, he said, "When he speaks as the head of the Reich or the head of the Party, he tells us which way we need to go, and we need to follow him. When he's just talking as a man…well, any man can be wrong."

Even you?Alicia thought.Herr Kessler never would have admitted anything like that, not in a million years. Alicia had always liked school; she soaked up learning the way a sponge soaked up water. But the days ahead looked a lot more interesting than the ones with Herr Kessler that she'd just suffered through.

When they went out for lunch, Emma sighed and looked back over her shoulder toward the classroom. "Isn't he wonderful?" she said.

"He's…not bad," Alicia answered. The one was higher praise from her than the other was from Emma.

Susanna Weiss had always watched the evening news with interest. If she wanted to know what was going on in the Reich and the world (or what the powers that be wanted people to think was going on-not always the same thing, or even close to it), that was the place to start. Since Kurt Haldweim's death, she'd watched the news with fascination, which also wasn't the same thing.

"Good evening," Horst Witzleben said from her televisor screen. The set from which he spoke hadn't changed. Neither had his uniform. But something about him had. Susanna had needed a while to notice it, let alone figure out what it was. Before Heinz Buckliger became Fuhrer, Witzleben had talked to the people of the Greater German Reich. Now he talkedwith them. The difference was subtle, but she was convinced it was real.

She glanced down at the quiz she was grading. Most of her undergraduates wouldn't have recognized a subtlety if it walked up and bit them in the leg.Would I, when I was twenty? she wondered. Without false modesty, she thought she would have done better than they could. Of course, she was a Jew. Spotting subtleties helped keep her alive.

She scrawled Not necessarily! in red beside a sweeping generalization, then paused with her pen frozen a couple of centimeters above the page. How did she know none of her students was a Jew? She didn't. All she knew was, none of them came from a family she was acquainted with. Given how secretive Jews had to be, that didn't prove a thing. There could be another little Jewish community in Berlin, parallel to hers but unaware it existed.

If that went on for a few hundred years and then they got to come out into the light of day once more, would one group recognize the other as Jews? Or would their beliefs have changed so much in isolation that one saw the other as nothing but a pack of heretics?

Susanna laughed at herself. Talk about building castles in the air! She'd not only lost the thread of the student's argument, such as it was, she'd also lost track of what Horst was saying. Pretty impressive woolgathering, especially when what she'd wondered about was so completely unprovable-to say nothing of unlikely.

The picture cut away to an advertisement for Volkswagens, and she realized the whole lead story had gone in one ear and out the other. It had been…something to do with banditry in the Caucasus, she thought. She wouldn't have sworn to it. In one ear and out the other, all right.

Mercifully, the singing advertisement ended. Horst Witzleben's handsome, regular features returned to the screen. He said, "the Fuhrer announced today that a division of occupation troops will soon return to the Reich from the United States.Herr Buckliger said, 'The situation no longer calls for so large a force in a country nearly as Aryan as our own.'"

Susanna frowned. Not very long before, Buckliger had questioned whether Aryan blood really mattered as much as Party doctrine said it did. Now he was using it as an excuse to pull soldiers back from the USA. What did he really think about it? Did he have any consistent beliefs, or was he just grabbing whatever tools came to hand for a given job?

Before Susanna could decide what she thought about that, Witzleben went on, "In London, Charles Lynton, the recently chosen head of the British Union of Fascists, applauded the Fuhrer 's move."

The newsreader's face disappeared again, to be replaced by Charlie Lynton's boyish visage. In pretty good German, Lynton said, "This important step can only lead to better relations between the Reich and the states that make up the Germanic Empire. Recognizing the proud history of many of these states,Herr Buckliger begins to give them some say in their internal affairs, for which I applaud him."

Instead of returning to Witzleben, the camera cut away to an advertisement for Agfa cameras and film. That gave Susanna a moment to scratch her head and think. Was Buckliger really giving the USA any say in its internal affairs? She'd taken the troop transfer as a cost-cutting measure. There'd been a lot of those lately. But maybe Lynton had a point. With fewer Wehrmacht soldiers around to point guns at their heads, the Americans would be able to do more as they pleased, with less fear of having their actions forcibly overruled.

When the advertisement ended, Horst Witzleben came back on camera. "The leaders of France, Denmark, and Finland were also quick to express their unreserved approval for Herr Buckliger's order." Their photos came up on the screen, but they didn't get quoted, as Charlie Lynton had. Witzleben continued, "And the King of Italy and the Duce both termed the Fuhrer 's move a positive step. In other news…"

That chorus of approval and applause didn't sound as if it had sprung from nowhere. It sounded as if Heinz Buckliger had carefully orchestrated it ahead of time. While Witzleben showed horrific footage of a train wreck in Hungary, Susanna wondered what that meant if it was true. It struck her that Buckliger was a politician of a sort that no previous Fuhrer, except maybe Hitler in his early days, had ever needed to be. She took that for a good sign.

But then she frowned again. Why did Buckliger need to be that kind of politician, where Hitler through most of his career, Himmler, and Haldweim hadn't? The only answer that occurred to her was that Buckliger was facing opposition of a sort his predecessors had never met. They'd ordered and been obeyed. He was ordering, too, but it also seemed he was cajoling and maneuvering in ways they hadn't had to.

Hitler invented Party doctrine, or most of it,Susanna thought.Himmler and Haldweim believed in it. They didn't rock the boat-though there were long stretches when Haldweim didn't do much of anything. Buckliger's different. Buckliger isrocking it, sure as hell. No wonder the old guard's unhappy. And no wonder he has to-what's the English phrase? — to wheel and deal, that's it. If he doesn't, he's in trouble.

Witzleben's next story was a tribute to the Gauleiter of Bavaria, a paunchy, jowly, white-haired man in a gorgeous uniform who was finally retiring after leading the Party organization in his state for more than forty years. And there was Heinz Buckliger, shaking his hand as he stepped down. "Herr Strauss' contributions cannot be overestimated," the Fuhrer said graciously. "He served the Reich and the Party long and well. New blood comes, though. Such is the way of nature."

Buckliger said no more than that. He let pictures do the rest of the work for him. There he stood, strong and vigorous, next to the doddering official who'd been in charge for so long.Which would you rather see over you? the image asked without words.

Doing something like that would never have occurred to gray, astringent Kurt Haldweim. For one thing, he'd been even older than Strauss, old enough to have fought in the Second World War. For another, all through his long rule he'd never believed in putting anybody out to pasture. And, for a third, he, like Himmler, had taken the televisor largely for granted. Buckliger didn't. Like Hitler long before him, he understood exactly how much pictures could do.

Susanna wished she hadn't thought of it that way. She wanted to like Buckliger, wanted to trust him, wanted to believe him, wanted to reckon him a new star in the Nazi firmament. He was different from anything she'd ever known. But did that make himreally different? Did it make himbetter? Hitler, after all, had been dead for years before she was born.

She shook her head. The longer Hitler stayed in charge of things, the more power he'd gathered into his own hands. Buckliger seemed to be going in the opposite direction. He hadn't quashed Charlie Lynton for proclaiming his allegiance to the first edition, the democratic edition, of Mein Kampf. He'd even talked about it himself.

And so?Susanna wondered.The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. Shakespeare wasn't quite medieval English. When the quotation occurred to her, she had to look it up to see which play it came from. She shivered when she found it. It was from The Merchant of Venice.

When Heinrich Gimpel found something he could sink his teeth into, he worked like a man possessed. His surroundings all but disappeared, leaving nothing but the numbers he was manipulating, his right hand dancing on the calculator or the keypad of the computer keyboard, and the figures going up on the screen.

The only reason he looked up from this particular blitz of calculations was to take another sheet full of raw data out of his in-box. When he did, he saw the office full of SS men in camouflage smocks, assault rifles at the ready. All the guns seemed to point straight at him.

He froze, the sheet of paper still between thumb and forefinger.

Willi Dorsch burst out laughing. A couple of the SS men grinned, too. "What's the matter, Heinrich?" Willi said. "Didn't you even notice them come in?"

"Uh, no," Heinrich said sheepishly.

Willi laughed some more. "I didn't think so. The way you were working there, the world could have ended, and you'd never have known the difference."

What went through Heinrich's mind was,Oh, thank God. Maybe they haven't come for me, then. He took another, less horrified, look at the big, blond, hard-faced men. When he didn't see them with eyes full of terror, the muzzles of their assault rifles pointed every which way.

"Uh-" He still couldn't avoid that dismayed stutter. "Whatare they doing here, then?"

Before Willi could answer, Heinz Buckliger strode into the room.

Along with everybody else at a desk, Heinrich sprang to his feet. He drew himself up as straight as he could. His right arm shot out. "Heil Buckliger!" he bawled at the top of his lungs. He remained in place, frozen like a statue.

Casually, the Fuhrer returned the salute. Even more casually, he waved to the men in the analysis section. "Relax," he said, sounding much more like a human being than an icon. "This isn't anything fancy. I'm here to pick somebody's brain, that's all." He peered down at a piece of paper, then up, then down at the paper again.It's an office plan, Heinrich realized.He's comparing the plan to the room. And then, to his amazement, Buckliger's eyes met his. "You're Gimpel,nicht wahr?" the Fuhrer said.

For a mad moment, Heinrich wanted to deny it. Clearly, that wouldn't do. He managed to mumble, "Uh, ja, mein Fuhrer."

Heinz Buckliger seemed used to people mumbling and stammering when they spoke to him. "Good," he said. "I want to talk with you about the Americans." He snagged the chair by Heinrich's desk with his ankle, pulled it closer, and sat down in it. "By how much can we reduce their assessment to let their economy breathe a little easier and still keep ours going?" Noticing Heinrich still stood at attention, he waved him to his chair. He also waved to the rest of the people in the office. "Relax, I told you. Go back to work. Pretend I'm not here."

With those trigger-happy SS guards eyeing everybody, that wouldn't be easy. Heinrich dizzily sank into his seat. Of itself, the calculating part of his mind engaged the Fuhrer 's question. Even as another part of him wailed,This can't be happening, he heard himself saying, "Well, sir, a lot of that depends on how much the Americans think they can get away with not paying if you let up on them. They're looking for signs of weakness."

"I don't want to be weak," Buckliger said. "I do want the Reich to be able to stand on its own two feet without being propped up so much from outside. That sets a bad example, and it sets a bad precedent, too, don't you think?"

He cocked his head to one side. Heinrich realized he really was waiting for an answer.I want the Reichto grow like an onion-with its head in the ground. No, he couldn't very well say that."Ja, mein Fuhrer," was less truthful but much safer. As for the numbers…His right hand, flying on automatic pilot, cleared the figures he'd been working with and started entering the ones that would let him answer Buckliger's question.

"You have the data at your fingertips," the Fuhrer said approvingly. "That's good. That's very good. Efficient."

"Thank you, sir. Assuming the Americans will keep on paying the same percentage of a lower assessment as they do of the current one, I would say you could reduce it by…" His voice trailed off as his fingers flew on the keypad. He considered the answer the computer had given him, then passed it to Buckliger: "By about nine percent."

"Those are the figures from the machine, right?" Buckliger said. Heinrich nodded. the Fuhrer asked, "What's your personal opinion of them?"

"That if you reduce the proposed assessment by nine percent, you'll get back fifteen to twenty percent less. That's if you don't go out and take the full assessment by force. Give the Americans a centimeter and they'll take a kilometer."

"I want to use less force in America, not more," Buckliger said. Since he was moving a division back to the Reich, Heinrich believed him. He went on, "All right, then. To get nine percent less revenue from the Americans, by how much would I have to reduce the assessment?"

That was a genuinely interesting question. "This is only an estimate, you understand," Heinrich warned as he started stroking the keypad again. "The computer is very good with numbers, not so good at figuring out how much people are liable to cheat."

"Aber naturlich."the Fuhrer laughed. "We need other people for that."

"Uh, yes, sir," Heinrich said. Then he gave his attention back to the screen. Designing a function on the fly to figure out how much more enthusiastically the Americans would cheat if they saw their risks as diminished was nothing he'd ever tried before, but he did it. He punched ENTER one last time, looked at the answer on the screen, and slowly nodded to himself. "I'd say a formal cut of six percent,mein Fuhrer, would give you an actual cut of nine."

Buckliger nodded. "Sounds reasonable.Danke schon. Your number's about what I'd figured for myself."

Heinrich wondered how to take that. He didn't think Buckliger could have made these calculations for himself. The new Fuhrer had been a bureaucrat, but not that kind of bureaucrat. But Buckliger didn't sound as if he were just trying to make himself sound clever. After a moment, Heinrich realized working out how much the Americans were likely to cheat wasn't only a mathematical calculation. It was also a political calculation. And if anybody could make political calculations, the Fuhrer was, or needed to be, the man.

"Happy to help, sir," Heinrich said. His own interior calculations hadn't taken more than a second and a half.

Heinz Buckliger gave him another one of those I'm-just-a-regular-fellow smiles. "Good. I like to have clever people working for me. It keeps the wheels going round." He got to his feet and nodded to the SS troopers. "Come on, boys. Now we go and talk with Field Marshal Tetzlaff." Out they went, some of the guards preceding Buckliger, the rest following.

A considerable silence reigned in the room after the Fuhrer left. Heinrich tried to get back to what he'd been doing beforehand, but discovered he couldn't, not when everybody was staring at him. He simply sat there, dazed. The two thoughts that kept going round and round in his head were Oh, thank God-I got away with it and Lise will never believe this, not in a million years.

"Well, well," Willi said at last. "You and Field Marshal Tetzlaff, is it? And he came to see you first. Not too shabby,Herr Gimpel. No, sir, not too shabby." He got to his feet and saluted, as he had a few minutes earlier for the Fuhrer.

That roused the Berliner's almost automatic cynicism in Heinrich. "Oh,Quatsch, " he said. The room exploded in laughter. People came over to pound him on the back and shake his hand. Ilse perched on a corner of his desk, showing a lot of leg. She eyed him with frank calculation. She'd never looked at him that way before. He didn't particularly want her looking at him that way now.

I'm supposed to be invisible, dammit,he thought.How can I be invisible when people keep…noticing me? He felt absurdly indignant.

"Seriously, Heinrich my boy, I'd say your promotion chances just got themselves a kick in the pants." Willi didn't sound serious. He was grinning. To Heinrich's relief, his friend also didn't sound jealous. Willi went on, "I can just see your next performance review. There's the examiner, looking over what you've done. 'Ach, ja,consulted with the Fuhrer.' What can he say aboutthat?"

"I don't know. If he's like most performance examiners, he'll find something rude," Heinrich answered. He hadn't meant it for a joke, but everybody laughed. Someone the Fuhrer consulted had to be a very funny fellow. Heinrich reached for the telephone. "Excuse me, please. I'm going to call my wife."

Ilse stopped posing. She got down from his desk and stomped back to Willi's. Heinrich thoughtthat was funny. He dialed for an outside line. When the dial tone shifted, he called his home number."Bitte?" Lise said.

"Hi, sweetheart. It's me," Heinrich said. "You'll never guess who just came in…"

"The Fuhrer came to see a friend of mine last week," Esther Stutzman told her boss with what she hoped was pardonable pride.

Dr. Dambach nodded. He never seemed to get very excited about anything. "Good for your friend," he answered now. "I also know some people who have met him, though I haven't myself."

"Neither have I." Esther had never imagined wanting to meet the ruler of the Greater German Reich and the Germanic Empire, either. But maybe Buckliger was different. Maybe. Even wondering felt not only strange but also more than a little unnatural.

"I've been doing something interesting," Dr. Dambach said.

"Oh? What's that?" Esther asked, as she was plainly meant to do. Whatever it was, it didn't involve the coffeemaker. What the pediatrician thought interesting there was liable to seem ghastly to anybody else. Some of the things he'd done trying to fix coffee merited the word. Lately, though, the coffeemaker had been fine.

When he spoke, Esther wished he'd spent his time messing with the machine, for he said, "Do you remember how the Kleins' genealogy charts had two different versions?" He made it a casual question, for he didn't know how important it was to Esther.

"Yes, I do," she answered.I'm not likely to forget, went through her head.You didn't know it, but you were trying to kill me, too.

And he still was, still in perfect ignorance. "Well, I've been going through some of the other patients' charts, to see if I can find more with the same problem."

"I certainly hope not!" Esther exclaimed. Dr. Dambach would reckon the horror in her voice a horror of disorder and illegality, the sort of horror he had himself. And, indeed, she was acquainted with that horror in her everyday life. But what made her voice go high and shrill now was old and deeper and less…less Germanic. It was raw fear, fear of disaster, fear of death. She had to fight to hold it in check as she asked, "Have-have you found any?"

Dr. Dambach paused to sip from the cup of coffee she'd made for him. That only gave her a few more seconds to worry and to try to remember whether Walther had had to change anybody else's pedigree. She didn't think so. No, she didn'tthink so, but doubt tore at her. Maybe she'd forgotten. Maybe he'd done it without bothering to tell her. It wouldn't have seemed that important at the time. Now it loomed as big as the world.

The pediatrician set down the foam cup. "As a matter of fact, yes," he said deliberately, and Esther wanted to sink down through the floor. But then he went on, "Not quite like the Klein baby's case, though."

Esther dared breathe again, if barely. "What's the difference?" she asked. The question was dangerous, but it had to come out. Dr. Dambach wouldn't read too much into it…would he? He'd all but invited it…hadn't he?

He took another sip of coffee. Was he trying to drive her crazy? If he was, he was doing a bang-up job. He set the cup on his desk again. "The Kleins' charts showed two different family trees, so it made me wonder whether they had more Jews in their ancestry than they were willing to admit," he said, and cocked his head to one side, waiting for her response.

She made herself nod. "I remember."I'm not likely to forget. I almost got them killed. I almost got more of my friends killed, and my family, and me. The nod showed only polite agreement. None of the nightmare underneath came out.

"I haven't found any more cases like that," Dambach repeated.

"I hope not!" Esther repeated herself, too. "You'd better not!" Her knees didn't want to hold her up. She felt giddy with relief. "But what have you found? You said you'd found something."

"I have found that people will lie even when there is no good reason for them to lie." The pediatrician looked as disgusted as if he'd discovered maggots on a dressing that was supposed to be sterile. "I have found people inventing inflated ancestries for themselves, people trying to connect themselves with noble families-one family even trying to connect itself to the Hitlers. All of the forgeries are inept. Many of them are pathetic. But they riddle the files. Why?" He looked at Esther as if he really believed she had an answer.

She did the best she could: "There are people who want to seem more important than they really are."

"It's so stupid!" Dr. Dambach said. "And it could be dangerous to them, too. If I think a child's ancestry is different from what it really is, I'm liable to make the wrong diagnosis. Don't people think ofthat?"

"Most of them probably don't," Esther said. Working for the pediatrician had gone a long way toward convincing her most people thought very little-certainly less than she'd believed when she took the job. Then, because she couldn't help herself, she asked, "What are you going to do about these fake pedigrees?"

She knew she probably should have left well enough alone. But her boss had reported the Kleins without a second thought. Would he prove as hard on people he didn't suspect of being Jews?

"I've already done it, as a matter of fact," he said. "I've talked with the Reichs Genealogical Office. They want me to forward some of the more serious cases of abuse to them for possible prosecution. And they suggested I write an article for a medical journal, alerting other physicians to the problem."

Esther eyed him with reluctant respect. He did what he thought was right, no matter whom it involved. She could wish he didn't think getting rid of Jews was right. How many people in the Reich didn't, though? Pitifully few. That was probably the hardest part of being a Jew in Berlin these days. Everyone you met was sincerely and honestly convinced you had no right to exist.

Asking any more questions might have made Dambach wonder why she was so curious. Instead, she said, "I'm sure the article will be very interesting."

"Articles in journals are not supposed to be interesting. They are supposed to be informative," Dambach said, a touch of frost in his voice.

"Why not both?" Esther asked.

The pediatrician shook his head. "That would not be good,Frau Stutzman. I have occasionally seen an article that is frivolous, and who could hope to learn from such a thing?" He was serious himself, as serious as he wanted medical articles to be. Esther couldn't understand it. She thought she would learn more from an article that was entertaining as well as fact-filled. That anyone could think otherwise hadn't occurred to her. But Dr. Dambach did.

Arguing with the boss when his mind was made up struck her as one of the more pointless things she could do. Instead, she went back out to the receptionist's desk and worked on billing and medical records till patients started coming in. Out of curiosity, she looked at some of the genealogical records in the charts. She soon saw that Dr. Dambach was right. Some of the pedigrees were faked, and pretty obviously faked.Foolishness, she thought. The Kleins and her own family had the best of good reasons for tampering with their ancestries: what was more important than survival? But changing a great-grandfather for the sake of vanity? What was that? What could it be but the urge to buy a Mercedes if your neighbor had a new Audi?

She almost didn't notice the outer door to the waiting room open. But the yowl of a baby brought her back to the real world in a hurry. She closed a chart and looked out. "Oh,guten Morgen, Frau Baumgartner," she said. "How is little Dietrich today?"

"Teething,"Frau Baumgartner answered. She would have been a pretty strawberry blond if she hadn't had dark circles under her eyes. "He never wants to sleep any more, and if he doesn't sleep, I can't sleep, either. I hope the doctor can give me something to make him more comfortable."

"I hope so, too," Esther said. "Your appointment isn't till a quarter to ten, though, you know."

Frau Baumgartner nodded. "Ja. I do know. But I thought that if I got here early, I might get to see the doctor early, too."

Sometimes things did work out like that. Sometimes they didn't. "I can't promise you anything, not yet," Esther said. "If some of the people with earlier appointments don't show up, though…"

Little Dietrich jammed his fingers into his mouth. Somehow, he managed to let out an earsplitting howl despite the obstruction. His mother looked frazzled. "Oh, I hope they don't!" she said fervently.

Another mother came into the waiting room, this one with a two-year-old who was tugging at her ear. The little girl howled even louder than Dietrich Baumgartner. "Guten Tag, Frau Abetz," Esther bellowed over the din. "Liselotte's earache isn't any better, is it?"

"What?" said Frau Abetz, who couldn't have heard the Trump of Doom through that racket.

Esther repeated herself, louder this time.Frau Abetz took the screaming Liselotte into an examination room. She had one of the nine o'clock appointments Frau Baumgartner coveted. The move redistributed the noise without making it much softer, at least for Esther. Dr. Dambach emerged from his sanctum. "Going to be one of those quiet mornings, is it?" he said with a wry chuckle, and went into the examination room himself. Moments later, Liselotte screamed louder than ever.

And it was one of those mornings.Frau Baumgartner did get to take Dietrich in twenty minutes early, but that did nothing for the general level of peace and quiet, of which Esther saw very little. Every few minutes, another mother would bring in a shrieking baby or toddler. The phone kept ringing at the most inconvenient moments, too.

By the time the lunch break arrived, Esther felt as if she'd worked two whole days, not half of one. As a pediatrician, Dr. Dambach had to have more than an ordinary mortal's share of patience, but he also seemed to be feeling the strain. "I ought to put some brandy in this coffee," he said, pouring himself a fresh cup.

"I was thinking of asking if you could prescribe something stronger than aspirin for a headache," Esther said.

"I will if you like," Dambach answered.

She shook her head. "Thanks, but no. I was only joking-mostly."

When Irma Ritter came in for the afternoon shift, she said, "How are things?"

"Don't ask!" Esther said. "About the only good thing I can think of to tell you is that the office didn't catch on fire."

She thought of one more waiting for the bus that would take her home. Maximilian Ebert hadn't come out from the Reichs Genealogical Office to confer with Dr. Dambach-and to bother her. And that, she was convinced, was very good news indeed.

Wolf Priller walked up to Alicia on the playground. He looked at her as if he'd never seen her before. She looked at him with nothing but suspicion. He had no use for girls, and she had no use for him. Now, though, he wouldn't quit staring. "What do you want?" she demanded after half a minute or so.

"Is it true?" he asked.

"Is what true?"

"Did the Fuhrer really come and talk with your dad, the way people say?"

"Oh, that. Yes, it's true."

Wolf's blue eyes got wider yet. "Wow," he breathed, as if she'd become important on account of the news. She supposed she had-to him, anyway. Then he asked, "How comeyou aren't more excited about it?"

Alicia shrugged. "I don't know. I'm just not." That wasn't the whole truth, or even very much of it. Wolfgang Priller was the last person to whom she wanted to tell the whole truth. The truth was, she didn't know what to think about Heinz Buckliger's call on her father. Before she found out what she was, the visit would have thrilled her as much as it seemed to thrill everybody else.

Now that she knew she was a Jew, the whole structure of the Reich — the structure she had loved-disgusted her. (It disgusted her when she remembered, anyhow. Some of the time, she didn't. Then, for a little while, shewas the good little German she had been and still pretended to be.) But, from what she'd gathered, the new Fuhrer didn't seem to be of the same stripe as the ones who'd come before him. Maybe he wasn't quite so bad after all.

Where did that leave her? In confusion, that was where.

Wolf said, "When I told my dad about it yesterday, he said he'd give this finger"-he solemnly displayed the index finger on his right hand-"to be able to sit down with the Fuhrer and talk about things."

"They didn't talk aboutthings — not like that," Alicia said. "They talked about stuff that had to do with my father's work."

"Even so," Wolf said. "My dad wasso jealous. You have no idea how jealous he was. I am, too. I never thought I'd be jealous of a girl, but I am." And then, as if afraid he'd said too much, he rushed off and savagely booted a football.

Why is he jealous of me?Alicia wondered.I didn't meet the Fuhrer.My father did. She had never run into the phrasereflected glory, but she was groping her way toward the idea.

Wolf wasn't the only one who wouldn't let her alone. Emma sidled up to her, whispered, "Lucky," and then scooted off. She'd done that four different times since hearing the news two days earlier. Alicia counted herself lucky to be alive and safe. Past that, she didn't worry about anything.

Even Trudi Krebs eyed her in a different way. It wasn't approval halfway down the road to awe, the look she got from most of her classmates. She couldn't quite make out what it was. Disappointment? That would have been her first guess.

Why would Trudi be disappointed in her if her father had met the Fuhrer? Was Trudi a Jew? Could she be? Alicia knew she couldn't ask, in case the other girl said no.I'll ask my mom, she thought.She'll know, or be able to find out. Alicia thought Trudi just came from a family of political unreliables. That was almost as dangerous as being a Jew.

Herr Peukert knew about what had happened to Alicia's father, too, of course.Herr Kessler would have made a big fuss about it, till Alicia couldn't stand it any more.Herr Peukert didn't do that. He just seemed…interested. Alicia hardly knew what to make of that. It made her want to talk too much. Had her own secrets been less important, she might have.

When she went to wait for the bus that afternoon, she found Francesca there ahead of her, face thunderous with fury."Gott im Himmel!" Alicia exclaimed. "What's the matter?"

"I got a swat from the Beast," her younger sister answered, looking even angrier than she had already.

Alicia wouldn't have believed she could. "What did you do?" she asked. Francesca, to put it mildly, wasn't the sort who usually got paddled.

"I didn't do anything! Not a single thing!" she burst out now. "She called me up to the front of the class and gave me one anyway, just for the fun of it. I hate her! I'll always hate her!" When she got angry, she didn't fool around. "This isn't a camp with a bunch of Jews in it. It's supposed to be school!"

"You already knew Frau Koch was like that," Alicia said. "Everybody knows it. Why are you so mad now?"

"Because she did it tome!"

Alicia started to laugh. She choked it down before it even began to show. Her sister's outrage was only part of the reason why, and a small part at that. Maybe, at last, she'd found some of the reason people hadn't complained about what the Party did to Jews. Who would complain, when something like that was happening to a small group of other people and not to themselves? That was doubly true because, if theydid complain, such thingswere all too likely to happen to them.

"It will be all right," she told her sister. "Remember, you're only stuck with the Beast for a year. It's not forever."

"It seems like forever!" Francesca often looked for the cloud, not the silver lining. She added, "And then next year I'll probably get Herr Kessler."

She probably would, too. Alicia didn't want to tell her so, especially since that was also when she would find out she was a Jew. How would she react to that? Like Alicia-maybe even more than Alicia-she believed everything she'd learned in school about Jews. She would have to change her mind.

The school bus turned the corner and rumbled toward the stop. Alicia pointed towards it. "Here. We're going home now," she said. Sometimes distracting Francesca worked better than actually answering her.

Heinrich Gimpel had never imagined he could be a celebrity. What occurred to him was a most un-Jewish thought: O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Celebrity meant visibility. Visibility, in his mind, was inextricably wed to danger.

He was stuck with it, though. Half the analysts in Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters made a point of coming up to him and passing the time of day. Even crusty Wehrmacht officers-real soldiers, not just bureaucrats in uniform-unbent around him where they never had before. Some of them-not all, but a surprising number-proved to be pretty good fellows under the crust.

And all because someone stopped at my desk for fifteen or twenty minutes,he thought dazedly.People do that all the time. It shouldn't be so important.

He laughed at himself. Other analysts stopped at his desk all the time. Officers stopped there every now and again. the Fuhrer? The ruler of the Greater German Reich and the Germanic Empire? Well, no. The Fuhrer didn't pay a call on an ordinary analyst every day.

Some people didn't try to cozy up to Heinrich. Some people turned green with envy instead, and wanted nothing to do with him. He was glad Willi didn't. Willi, instead, made a joke of it. "Me? I'm going to get rich from knowing you. How much do you suppose I can charge for twenty minutes of your time? Fifty Reichsmarks? A hundred? A hundred and fifty?" He ran his tongue across his lips. "You could get a pretty fancy floozy for that kind of money, but plenty of people would sooner seeyou. What do you think of that?"

"I think they'd have more fun with a girl," Heinrich answered. Willi laughed till he turned red. Heinrich hadn't been kidding.

Willi didn't seem to have noticed the speculative look Ilse had given Heinrich after the Fuhrer 's visit. Since Heinrich had pretended not to notice it, too, Ilse's dallying with Willi hadn't paused. They were given to enough long lunches to make other analysts grin and nudge one another-but only when they weren't around.

What irked Heinrich about it at least as much as anything else was that he had to cover Willi's phone during those long lunches. He didn't mind dealing with business. That was what he was there for. Dealing with Erika Dorsch was a different story.

"Analysis section, Heinrich Gimpel speaking," he said after transferring a call from Willi's desk to his own.

"Hello, Heinrich," Erika said. "I was hoping for my husband. Too much to expect, I suppose."

If you really want to talk to Willi, why don't you call him when he's likelier to be here?Heinrich wondered, a little resentfully. He didn't say that out loud. It would only cause trouble. What he did say was as neutral as he could make it: "I'll take a message for you, if you like."

"In a bit," she answered. "Where is he?"

They'd gone around this barn before. "At lunch," Heinrich said.

"He should be back by now, shouldn't he?" Erika said. Heinrich didn't respond to that at all. She asked, "Where did he go?" and then said, "You're going to tell me you don't know. See? I read minds."

"Well, I don't," Heinrich said defensively. "I ate at the canteen today."

"I'm so sorry for you. Wherever he went, did he go there with Ilse?" Erika waited. Again, Heinrich didn't want to answer, either with the truth or with a lie. Her laugh had a bitter ring. "You're too damned honest for your own good, Heinrich."

Was that true? Heinrich didn't think so. He had, after all, been living under an elaborate lie for more than thirty years. Erika didn't know that, of course. As long as nobody who wasn't also living the lie knew, he could go on with it. He realized he would have to respond, though. He said, "I wish you and Willi weren't having troubles, that's all." Not only did he mean it, it sounded like an answer to what she'd just said. He could have done much worse.

He could also have done better. Erika's sour laugh proved that. "Wish for the moon while you're at it."

Heinrich could have laughed even more sourly. When she wished for the moon, the wildest thing she could think of was repairing what had gone wrong between her husband and her. Heinrich's wish would have been not only lunar but lunatic: he would have wished for the chance to live openly as what he was. He knew too well that that wasn't going to happen no matter how hard he wished.

All that went through his mind in what couldn't have been more than a heartbeat. Erika hardly even paused as she went on, "You don't need to wish, do you? You've really got the world by the tail." He did laugh then. He knew he shouldn't, but he couldn't help himself. That made Erika angry. "You do," she insisted.

"Not likely," Heinrich said. He couldn't tell her why, but hoped his voice carried conviction.

Evidently not, for she said, "No? I didn't see the Fuhrer paying a call on my dear Willi."

If anybody had called Heinrichdear in that tone of voice, he would have run away as fast as he could. He answered, "He might have, but I'm the specialist on the United States, and he wanted to find out something about the Americans." Even that was more than he felt comfortable saying. Along with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he also worshiped Security, a jealous god indeed. But Erika already knew what he did. If she didn't wish Willi would dry up and blow away, she could figure this out for herself.

Slowly, she said, "There are times when you're too damned modest for your own good, too."

She's angry atmenow, he realized in astonished dismay.What the devil did I do? "I told you the truth," he said.

"No, I'll tell you the truth," Erika said. "The truth is, the Fuhrer came to see you. You, not anybody else. The truth is, that's important. It could make you important. And the truth is, you don't seem to want to do anything about it or even admit it."

She might have been a wife giving a husband a pep talk. Shewas a wife giving a husband a pep talk. The only trouble was, she wasn't Heinrich's wife, and she didn't know him as well as she thought she did. "I don't want to be important," he said, which was not the smallest understatement he'd ever made. "I don't, Erika, and that's the truth, too."

A long silence followed. Heinrich hoped she would lose her temper, hang up on him, and either leave him alone or just think of him as her husband's friend-somebody who was fun to drink wine with and a decent bridge player, but nothing more than that.

What he hoped for and what he got were two different things. "Well, at least you know your own mind," Erika said at last. "At least you've got a mind to know. You don't do all of your thinking below the belt. I like that. It's different in a man."

Did she realize how much of her own thinking she was doing below the belt? Not as far as Heinrich could see, she didn't. He almost pointed it out to her. At the last minute, he didn't. Talking with her about things below the belt struck him as a very bad idea.

"I'd better go," was what he did say. "Is there a message for Willi?"

"Tell him I hope Ilse gives him the clap," Erika answered promptly. "He won't have the chance to give it to me, and you can tell him that, too." She did hang up then, loudly.

Heinrich hung up, too. Rubbing at his ear, he pulled a message pad from his top desk drawer.Erika called while you were out, he wrote.No need to call her back. If she wanted to deliver any more forceful message, she could do it herself. He put the small sheet of yellow paper on Willi's desk. It didn't spontaneously combust. As he retreated to his own desk, he wondered why.

Willi came back to the office about half an hour later. He looked almost indecently pleased with himself-and that probably was the word for it, too. Ilse, by contrast, just sat down and started typing. Willi picked up the message. "What's this?" he said. He read it and set it down, then started to laugh. He looked over at Heinrich. "What did she really say?"

"You can ask her yourself and find out," Heinrich answered.

"No, thanks." Willi laughed again. "She thinks the world revolves around her. High time she finds out she's wrong."

Don't you do the same?Heinrich wondered. But he couldn't ask Willi that, any more than he could have asked Erika about the way she thought. Neither one of them would have taken the question seriously, and they both would have got angry at him. He wanted that no more than he wanted any other kind of notice.

Willi said, "You're our fair-haired boy right now. Why don't you fix Erika up with Buckliger? That would make everybody happy."

"You really are out of your mind!" Heinrich exclaimed in horror.

"Thank you," Willi said, which only disconcerted him more. "I thought it was the-what do you call it? — the elegant solution, that's what I'm trying to say."

"Shall I tell you all the things that are wrong with it?" Heinrich asked. "How much time have you got? Have you got all day? Have you got all week?"

"What I've got is a report to write." Willi looked lugubrious. "The boss wants it this afternoon, too. I'm going to have to rush like hell to finish it on time."

"You wouldn't, if-" Heinrich broke off. Telling Willi he'd have less to do now if he hadn't spent a long, long lunchtime screwing his secretary was true. Some true things, though, just weren't helpful.

"Yes, Mommy," Willi said, which proved this was indeed one of those things.

"All right. All right." Nothing annoyed Heinrich like being condescended to. "But if you're going to complain about what you've got to do, you'd better have a look at what you've been doing."

"I did. A nice, close look, too." Willi's expression left no doubt what he meant.

Heinrich found nothing to say to that, which was no doubt exactly what Willi'd had in mind. Shaking his head, he went back to work. Over at the other desk, Willi looked as desperately busy as a man juggling knives and torches. He would type like a man possessed, then shift to the calculator, mutter at the results, and go back to the keyboard.

At five o'clock, Heinrich got up. He put on his coat and his cap. "I'm heading for the bus stop," he said. "Are you coming?"

"No, dammit." Willi shook his head, looking harassed. "I'm still busy."

"Too bad," Heinrich said, and left. Willi stared after him, then plunged back into the report.