In The Presence of mine Enemies Read online

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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