In The Presence of mine Enemies Page 4

  Only the Empire of Japan, with Southeast Asia, China, the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and Australia all shown in yellow, came anywhere close to matching the Germanic Empire in size. The Japanese were strong enough to survive for the time being, not strong enough to make serious rivals for the Reich.

  "And the Japanese, of course, are not Aryans,"Herr Kessler said. "Because of this, they have no true creativity of their own. Already they have fallen behind us in technology, and they will fall further behind with each passing year. Our triumph may not come soon, but it is sure." The children nodded solemnly. They knew how important being an Aryan was. Alicia did-all the more so now that she realized she wasn't one.

  Math came next. They passed in their homework and did problems on the blackboard. Alicia got hers right. Emma botched hers.Herr Kessler frowned. He flipped through papers. "You were correct on your homework," he rumbled ominously. "Why do you fall down here?"

  "I don't know,Herr Kessler," Emma said. "I'm sorry,Herr Kessler." She sounded sorry, too-sorry about what would happen to her when her mother found out she wasn't doing so well.

  "Your paper from last night is as good as Alicia Gimpel's," the teacher said, and Alicia's heart leaped into her mouth. Had he realized Emma was copying? But he only set the homework down and went on, "Now you must learn to follow through, as Alicia has done."

  "Jawohl, Herr Kessler!" Emma didn't seem worried about cheating. How many times had she copied work before, and from how many different students? Enough to take it for granted-that was plain.

  Oddly, Emma's matter-of-factness helped Alicia at lunch. If Emma could keep the teacher from suspecting she was a cheater, why couldn't Alicia keep anyone from suspecting she was a Jew? Emma left evidence, if only Herr Kessler had looked more closely. Alicia didn't: no Hamantaschen in her lunch pail, no mark of Cain on her forehead.Father was right, she thought with enormous relief.If I don't make a silly mistake, no one will think I'm anything but what I've always seemed to be. And one of the things she'd always been was somebody who despised mistakes of any kind, and especially silly ones.

  The afternoon turned out to be a snap. She was good in science, and good enough at the computer keyboard-like her father, she was less than graceful, and couldn't type as fast as some of her classmates, but she was accurate. No one gave her any trouble going home, either. Her first day knowing she was a Jew, and she'd got away with it.

  A three no-trump contract. Three tricks to play. Heinrich Gimpel needed to take all three to make it. No help in the dummy. Lise sat across the table from him, but they'd got where they were largely out of his hand. He didn't needmuch help; he held the ace and queen of spades and the ace of diamonds. But the king of spades remained unaccounted for. Did Willi Dorsch have it on his right, or did Erika on his left?

  Willi had taken the last trick, so it was his lead. He grinned at Heinrich, who smiled back. They both knew what was what. Grinning still, Willi flipped out the jack of spades.

  Heinrich kept smiling, too, as much by main force as anything else. Now he had to choose. If he played the queen and Erika had the king, he'd go down. If he played the ace and the king didn't drop, he'd also go down, because he'd have to lead the queen for the last trick, and the king would clobber it.

  He glanced at Willi, who chuckled, enjoying his perplexity. Then he looked at Erika. She was worth looking at: heart-shaped face; blue, blue eyes; a wide, generous mouth; gilt hair that hung to her shoulders. However much he enjoyed the excuse to study-hell, to ogle-his friend's wife, though, all the study told him nothing about her hand. Erika took bridge seriously.

  The ace or the queen? The lady or the tiger? The devil or the deep blue sea? Heinrich looked back at Willi Dorsch. "You like to lead away from kings," he remarked, and played the queen.

  Erika sluffed a heart.

  "Ha!" Heinrich said in triumph. He laid down the last two aces. "Made it!"

  "Dammit!" Willi said. He laid down the king of spades and the king of diamonds.

  "That's the rubber," Erika said sadly. She wrote in the scorebook.

  Lise said, "Willi, if you'd led the diamond we would have gone down. Heinrich would have had to take. Then he would have led the ace of spades, and you would have dropped the jack-and had the king waiting for the queen."

  Willi thought for a couple of seconds, then said, "Dammit," again, on a different note this time.

  "I've spent the last fifteen years trying to teach him not to do things like that, and I haven't had any luck," Erika said. "I don't think you will, either."

  "I'm a stubborn goose," Willi remarked, with a certain amount of pride. He gathered up the cards and swept them into a neat pile. "Have we got time for another rubber?"

  "What timeis it?" Heinrich looked at his watch. "A quarter past twelve." He raised his eyes to Lise. "What will your sister say?"

  "That we're pushing it," she answered. She turned to Erika Dorsch and spread her hands. "You know how it is. You don't want to get your best babysitter mad at you, because if you do you'll never get out of the house again."

  "Oh, yes." Erika nodded. The Dorsches' son and daughter were asleep in their bedrooms.They hadn't had to worry about babysitters tonight. And Heinrich hadn't had to worry about bringing Alicia along. Maybe she'll talk to Katarina about things, if her sisters give her the chance, he thought.That will help. She thinks Aunt Kathe's interesting. Lise and I are just-Mama and Papa.

  Willi got to his feet. "Don't disappear quite yet. I'll fix one for the road." He headed off into the kitchen.

  "Oh, good heavens. My back teeth are already floating." Lise headed off, too, in the direction of the bathroom.

  That left Heinrich briefly alone with Erika Dorsch. In a film, he would have run a finger around the inside of his collar. He'd never quite figured out whether she knew how provocative she was. Had things been otherwise, he might have been tempted to find out. As they were…every once in a while, he was tempted to find out anyhow. He'd never yielded to temptation. Too much rode on it.

  All she said was, "You played that well," which hardly encouraged fantasies.

  Heinrich shrugged. "I thought it was the best chance I had to make. And the four of us have been playing bridge a long time. I know how Willi's beady little mind works." He grinned to make sure Erika didn't take him seriously.

  She smiled, too, but only for a moment. "You think about things," she said in musing tones. "And you think other people-even women-can think about things, too." She paused, then added, "I wonder if Lise has any idea how lucky she is." She eyed him speculatively.

  Not knowing what to say to that, he didn't say anything.And does Willi have reason to worry about me? he wondered. The mere idea made him nervous for all sorts of reasons, of which temptation was among the least important. When he was tempted by a woman like Erika Dorsch, that showed how urgent the other reasons were.

  Not saying anything proved a good idea on general principles, for Lise and Willi both came back into the dining room at the same time. Willi carried a tray with four glasses of Kirsch on it. He couldn't resist doing a little routine with the tray, as if he were one of the English butlers in such demand among wealthy German families. Lise laughed. Erika rolled her eyes up to the ceiling. Plainly, she found her husband less than amusing tonight.

  Willi handed everyone a glass of cherry brandy, then raised his own in salute."Sieg heil!" he said.

  "Sieg heil!" The others echoed the words. Erika sounded subdued. Heinrich made sure he seemed enthusiastic. So did Lise. If they were the good National Socialists and Aryans they pretended to be, they had to sound that way when they hailed victory…didn't they? All at once, Heinrich wondered. Erika really was an Aryan and, he presumed, a good Nazi. She didn't worry about sounding indifferent. But, being who and what she was, she could afford to slack off on small things. The Gimpels couldn't afford to slack off at all. Like Caesar's wife, they had to be above suspicion, for suspicion meant disaster.

  "That's quite a nightcap," Heinrich sa
id, and mimed being hit over the head with a club.

  "You can sleep late tomorrow," Willi Dorsch said, knocking back his own Kirsch.

  Lise snorted. "You know our children too well to say anything silly like that. Francesca likes to sleep in, but Alicia and Roxane will be up at the crack of dawn."

  "Ghastly habit," Willi said. "Our two like to lie in bed, the lazy good-for-nothings." He stuck out a finger in Heinrich's direction. "Meant to ask you: are the Americans going to make their assessment this fiscal year?"

  "I'm…not sure," Heinrich answered cautiously. He knew the Americans were unlikely to, but didn't want to say so in front of Lise and Erika, neither of whom had the security clearance to hear such things.

  Willi's wave said he understood why his friend was being so cagey. It also said he thought Heinrich was being a wet blanket. He asked, "Are we gearing up to wallop the Americans if they don't meet the assessment?"

  "Not that I've heard," Heinrich said, which combined caution and truth.

  "I haven't, either," Willi said. "You know how I was complaining a while ago about not living in glorious times?" He waited for Heinrich to nod, then went on, "I didn't think we were gettingthis soft when I grumbled, I'll tell you that."

  "I don't think we're soft," Heinrich said. "Germany rules the biggest empire the world has ever seen. Ruling and conquering are different businesses. A ruler can forgive things a conqueror would have to step on."

  "Not if he wants to keep on ruling, he can't," Willi said, going red in the face.

  "No, Heinrich's right," Erika said, which made Lise raise an eyebrow and made Willi turn even redder. Erika went on, "If you want to hold a country down without a rebellion every other year, you-"

  "Kill the first two or three batches of rebels and everybody who's related to them," Willi broke in. "After a while, the people who are left-if there are any-get the idea and settle down. That's what finally worked for us in England."

  In a way, he was right; England hadn't risen against the Reich since the mid-1970s. Even so…Heinrich said, "'Finally' is a word with a lot of bodies behind it. When we can, we ought to run things more…more efficiently. That's the word I want." It was, he hoped, a word that wouldn't rouse the interest, let alone the anger, of the Security Police.

  "We ought to run, period," Lise said. "Kathe's going to be impatient with us." She didn't want any sort of political argument, even with friends. In that, she was undoubtedly wise. When she rose to her feet, Heinrich followed suit as automatically as he would have in the bridge game.

  "I'll get your coats out of the closet," Erika said, which meant she thought the evening was at an end. Willi walked out to the front hall with them, but he didn't say anything. Heinrich hoped his friend wasn't fuming about being contradicted. It wouldn't have been so bad had Heinrich been the only one to disagree with him. But when Erika did, too, that must have felt like a stab in the back. Willi managed a smile and a bad joke when the Gimpels headed for the bus stop. That eased Heinrich's mind. But, after the door closed behind Lise and him, Willi's voice rose angrily-and so did Erika's.

  "What's that all about?" Lise pointed back toward the Dorsches' house.

  "I think Willi thinks he ought to be jealous of me," Heinrich said unhappily.

  "Jealous? Jealous how?" his wife asked. He didn't answer. His wife walked on for a couple of paces before stopping short. "Jealous likethat?" Even more unhappily, Heinrich nodded. "And does he have reason to be jealous like that?" Lise inquired ominously.

  "Not on account of me," Heinrich said. That covered the most important part of the question. Not quite all of it, though; he felt he had to add, "I'm not so sure about Erika."

  They got to the brightly lit bus stop. Lise tapped her toe on the cement of the sidewalk. "I can't fault her taste, but I did see you first, you know. Kindly remember it."

  "I will. For all sorts of reasons, I will," Heinrich said.

  "She's pretty. You'd better," Lise said. The bus rolled up just then, which saved him from having to answer: a small mercy, but he took what he could get.

  II

  Franz Oppenhoff looked at Susanna Weiss through spectacles that grotesquely magnified his bloodshot blue eyes. "I fail to see the necessity for this journey," he said, and scratched at the bottom edge of a white muttonchop sideburn.

  Susanna looked back at the department chairman with a loathing she tried to conceal. "But,Herr Doktor Professor, it is the annual meeting of the Medieval English Association-and only the third time it's metin England since the war."

  Oppenhoff paused to light a cigar. It was a fine Havana, but the smoke still put Susanna, who didn't use tobacco, in mind of burning long johns. She coughed, not too ostentatiously. After a puff, he said, "Many-even most-of these meetings are a waste of time, a waste of effort, and a waste of our travel budget."

  "Oh?" Somehow, Susanna made one syllable sound dangerous. "Is that what you said when Professor Lutze asked to attend?"

  "I didn't…" Professor Oppenhoff paused, evidently deciding he couldn't get away with the lie direct. He tried again: "I thought the conference would enhance his professional development, he being-"

  "A man?" Susanna finished for him.

  "That is not what I was going to say." The chairman sounded offended.

  Susanna Weisswas offended. "What were you going to say, then,Herr Doktor Professor? That Professor Lutze is junior to me? He is. That he has published less than half of what I have? He has. That what hehas published is superficial compared to my work? It is, as any specialist will tell you." She smiled with poisonous sweetness. "There. You see? We agree completely."

  Professor Oppenhoff tried to draw on the cigar again, but choked on the smoke. Susanna held the poisoned smile till his coughs subsided into wheezes. He wagged a shaky forefinger at her. "You have not the attitude of a proper National Socialist woman," he said severely.

  "Do I have the attitude of a proper National Socialist scholar?" No matter how offended, no matter how angry Susanna was, she took care to throw back the Party's name as if she were returning a lob in a game of tennis. "Don't you think that is how you ought to judge me?"

  "You should be turning out babies, not articles," Oppenhoff said.

  That she remained unwed, that she had no children, was a private grief for Susanna. Her back stiffened. Her private griefs were none of Oppenhoff's damned business. "If Professor Lutze's work is good enough to let him deserve to go to London for the Medieval English Association meeting, what part of mine disqualifies me from going, too?" She didn't say Lutze didn't deserve to go, no matter what she thought. That would have got her another enemy. Academic politics were nasty enough without trying to make them worse.

  "The travel budget…" the chairman said portentously.

  This time, Susanna's smile was pure carnivore. "I've spoken with the accountants. We have plenty. In fact, they recommend that we spend more before the end of the fiscal year in June. If we have unexpended funds, people are liable to decide we don't need so much next year."

  Franz Oppenhoff went gray with horror. A budget cut was every department chairman's nightmare. He threw his hands in the air. Cigar ash fluttered down onto his desk like snow. "Go to London,Fraulein Doktor Professor Weiss! Go! Uphold the reputation of the university!" Not quite inaudibly, he added, "And get the devil out of my hair."

  Susanna pretended not to hear that. Having got what she wanted, she could afford to be gracious. "Thank you very much, Professor Oppenhoff. I'll make my travel arrangements right away." In fact, she'd already made them. If she hadn't been able to browbeat Oppenhoff into letting her go, she would have had to cancel. She could easily have afforded the plane ticket and hotel, but she couldn't have gone during the semester without leave from on high. Now she had it.

  "Is there anything else?" Professor Oppenhoff inquired.

  She was tempted to complain that her office was smaller and had a worse view than those of male professors less senior than she-she seldom did things by half. Here, thou
gh, she judged she'd pushed the chairman about as far as she could. "Not today, thanks," she said grandly, like a snooty shopper declining a salesgirl's assistance. Small, straight nose tilted high, she strode out of Oppenhoff's office.

  Spring was in the air when she left the east wing of the university complex and walked out into the chestnut grove that lay between the wings. The chestnuts were still bare-branched, but the first leaf buds had begun to appear. Soon the trees would be gloriously green, with birds singing and nesting in them. For now, Susanna could see down to the garden and the bronze statues of the great scholars there: Wilhelm von Humboldt, the founder of the university; his brother, Alexander; Helmholtz; Treitschke; Mommsen; and Hegel.

  Towering above all the other statues was a colossal bronze of Werner Heisenberg. Arno Breker, Hitler's favorite sculptor, had commemorated the physicist at the first Fuhrer 's personal request. Susanna had seen photos of Heisenberg. He was tall, yes, but on the scrawny side, almost as much so as Heinrich Gimpel. Breker had turned him into one of his countless Aryan supermen: broad-shouldered, deep-chested, with a narrow waist and thighs like a draft horse's. The usual heroic Breker nude struggled to burst forth from the suit in which the sculptor had reluctantly had to drape his subject.

  Susanna sighed. If Heisenberg and the other German scientists hadn't been so quick to see the implications of atomic fission…She sighed again. The world would be different, but who could guess how? One of the things she'd seen was that different didn't necessarily mean better.