In The Presence of mine Enemies Read online

  A swarthy young man who wore a neat black beard and had a turban wrapped around his head hurried past Susanna. "Please to excuse me," he said in musically accented German.

  "Aber naturlich,"she replied with regal politeness. The beturbaned young man went up the stairs two at a time and into the east wing of the university building. The Department of Germanic Languages shared the wing with the German Institute for Foreigners, which since 1922 had been instructing those from abroad on the German language and German culture, and the more recent Institute for Racial Studies, which helped decide which foreigners deserved to survive and be instructed about the blessings of German culture.

  The fellow who'd gone past Susanna in such a rush had to be from Persia or India, probably the latter. Despite their complexions, folk from those lands got credit for being Aryans, and so lived on as subjects-sometimes even privileged subjects-within the Germanic Empire.

  Had the young man been born farther west, had he been an Arab rather than an Aryan…As far as the Institute for Racial Studies was concerned, anti-Semitism extended to Arabs as well as Jews. Some of the things the Reich had done, and had browbeaten the Italians into doing, in the Middle East were on a scale to rival the destruction of the Slavic Untermenschen in Eastern Europe.

  We aren't the only ones,Susanna thought with a shudder.We remember better than most of the others, though. That is one thing we have always done: we remember. But so do the Nazis. Can we really hope to outlast them? Heinrich and Walther think so, or say they do, but do they believe it when a noise outside wakes them up in the middle of the night?

  She didn't know how they kept from screaming when they heard a noise like that. She had no idea at all howshe kept from screaming when she heard a noise like that. Even fourth-generation Nazis who'd never had an ideologically impure thought in their lives started sweating at noises in the night.They might know their thoughts were unsullied, their bloodlines uncontaminated. Yes, they might know, but did the Security Police? You never could tell.

  And if you really had something to hide…

  So far, though, all the noises Susanna had heard in and around her block of flats were those of everyday life: neighbors trying to go in and out quietly or sometimes too drunk to bother, a tree branch scraping on her window, traffic swishing by outside, once in a great while the trashcan-rattle of an accident. No men in high-crowned caps and black trenchcoats pounding on the door and roaring,"Judin, heraus!"

  Not yet. Never yet. But the fear never went away, either.

  With another shiver, Susanna hurried down toward the garden, down toward the statues of the men who had advanced German scholarship. And if she tried not to look at Breker's bronze of Heisenberg, well, even the Security Police weren't going to notice that.

  Heinrich Gimpel kissed Lise and went up the street to the bus stop. He got there five minutes before the bus did. As it stopped, the door hissed open in front of him. He fed his account card into the fare slot, then withdrew it and stuck it back in his wallet as he looked up the aisle for a seat. He found one. At the next stop, a plump blond woman sat down next to him. When Willi Dorsch got on a couple of stops later, he and Heinrich nodded to each other, but that was all.

  Not sitting with Willi didn't break Heinrich's heart. His friend had been cooler than usual since the awkward end to their evening of bridge.Does he worry that I'm looking for an affair with Erika? Heinrich shook his head as Willi sank into a seat near the back of the bus. He enjoyed looking at Erika Dorsch, but that wasn't the same thing at all. Even Lise, who wasn't inclined to be objective about such things, understood the difference.

  But then a new, troubling thought crossed Heinrich's mind.Or does Willi think Erika's looking for an affair with me? Even if Willi didn't think Heinrich wanted the affair, he might not be so happy about seeing him every morning. And Heinrich hadn't the faintest idea what he could do about that.

  The bus made its last few stops and pulled into the train station. Everyone got off. Almost everyone went to the platform for the Berlin-bound commuter train. As people queued up, Heinrich and Willi weren't particularly close. Heinrich sighed. More often than not, the two of them had chatted and gossiped like a couple of Hausfrau s all the way in to the city. It hadn't happened the past few days, and it didn't look as if it would today, either.

  It didn't. When the train came into the the Stahnsdorf station, Willi sat down on the aisle next to a taken window seat. The seat on the other side of the aisle was taken, too. Whatever Willi Dorsch wanted, Heinrich's company wasn't it. Willi pulled a copy of the Volkischer Beobachter out of his briefcase and started to read.

  Heinrich also read the Nazi Party newspaper: one more bit of protective coloration. He found a seat halfway down the car from Willi, got out his own copy, and looked it over. He did find it professionally useful every now and then. What the Party decided could dictate what Oberkommando der Wehrmacht did next. Reading the paper carefully-especially reading between the lines-gave clues about which way the wind was blowing at levels of the Party more exalted than those in which Heinrich traveled.

  Today he went to the imperial-affairs section first. It still looked as if the United States was going to fall short on its occupation assessment. Heinrich kept waiting for someone in the Foreign Ministry or the Fuhrer 's office to comment. So far, no one had. That in itself was interesting. When he first started at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the Americans wouldn't have got a warning if they were late or came up short on what they owed. They would simply have been punished. Thingswere more easygoing these days.

  Some things were, anyhow. A small story announced the execution of a dozen Serbs for rebellion against the Reich. Serbs had touched off the First World War, almost a hundred years ago now. They'd been nuisances ever since. And another story told of the jailing of an SS man who'd been caught taking bribes in a French town near the English Channel.

  Such shameless corruption,the Volkischer Beobachter declared,cannot be tolerated in an orderly, well-run state. Heinrich nodded to himself. He'd seen three or four anti-corruption drives since his university days. That the Reich needed a new one every few years told how well they worked.

  This one, though, gave signs of being more serious than some of its predecessors. An SS man, behind bars? That was news of the man-bites-dog sort. Heinrich wondered which German bigwigs the Frenchmen who'd been shaken down happened to know. Odds were they'd known somebody. SS men seldom got into trouble for what they did even inside Germany, let alone in occupied territory.

  When the train pulled into the station in Berlin, Heinrich and Willi naturally went the same way, for they had to catch the same bus to the same office. The story about the SS man intrigued Heinrich enough to make him wave the Volkischer Beobachter under Willi Dorsch's nose and ask, "Did you see this?"

  "Which?" Willi asked. He sounded more distant than usual, but not actively unfriendly. Heinrich pointed to the story. "Oh, that," Willi said. "Yes, I saw it. Politics. Has to be."

  "Politics?" Heinrich said it with such surprise, he might never have heard the word before.

  Willi gave back an impatient nod. "I don't see what else could be going on."

  "I just figured somebody knew somebody," Heinrich said. "You know what I mean."

  "Oh, sure." Willi nodded again, with a little more animation this time. "It's possible, I suppose, but how likely is it? Who could a bunch of froggies know who's got the clout to land somebody with SS runes on his collar tabs in hot water? Pigs will fly before we see that." He started walking faster. "Come on-there's the bus, just waiting for us."

  It did wait. They even found seats, which they didn't manage every day during the morning rush. "Politics," Heinrich repeated. "Well, I suppose you're right."

  "You bet I am," Willi said as the bus pulled out of the station. He patted Heinrich on the knee. "You have any other problems you can't see your way around, you come to your Uncle Willi, and he'll set you right."

  He smiled a superior smile. If Erika admired Heinrich f
or anything, it was his brains-it couldn't very well have been his body or his looks, as he was ruefully aware. And if Willi felt smarter than he was, then all of a sudden he didn't seem such a threat. He hoped that was how things were working inside his friend's head, anyhow. He didn't want to be a threat to anybody or anything. Threats were visible. He couldn't afford that kind of visibility.

  And maybe Willi was right, too. To most of the Germanic Empire's subjects, politics had to seem simple. The Germans gave orders, and the subjects obeyed. Subjects who didn't obey paid for it, often with their lives. (Sometimes subjects who did obey paid with their lives, too, but they seldom knew that ahead of time.)

  But, seen from within the ruling bureaucracy, things weren't so simple.Wehrmacht and SS officials warily watched one another. The Wehrmacht and civilian administrators didn't always see eye-to-eye, either. And the administrators and the SS quarreled over who really represented the National Socialist Party. It wasn't just a factional split, either. Personalities in each camp further complicated things. the Fuhrer, Kurt Haldweim, was supposed to keep everyone going in the same direction, but Haldweim had celebrated his ninety-first birthday just before last Christmas. For his age, he was said-frequently and loudly said-to be vigorous and alert, but how much did that prove?

  When the bus stopped in front of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters, Willi Dorsch had to nudge Heinrich. "We get off here, you know," he said, enjoying the tiny triumph. "No matter what great thoughts you think, they won't do you any good if you can't find the place where you're supposed to use them."

  "You're right, of course." Heinrich stood up, feeling foolish. As he hurried to get off the bus, he noted that Willi sounded much more like his usual self.And why? Because I'm acting like an idiot. I've never heard of the power of positive stupidity, but this must be it.

  The guards at the front of the building saw the two of them five mornings a week. Nonetheless, they held out their hands for identity cards. They not only matched photos, they also fed the cards, one after the other, into a machine reader. Only after a light on it glowed green twice in a row did they stand aside.

  "Nice to know I'm me," Willi said, sticking his card into his wallet again. He pointed at Heinrich. "Or maybe I'm you today, and you're me. The machine didn't say anything about that." He laughed.

  So did Heinrich, relieved to see Willi acting like his usual silly self. But one of the guards scowled suspiciously at Willi. The other eyed the card reader, as if wondering if it could change a man's true identity. Sometimes Heinrich worried about the younger generation's brains, if any. But he knew people had been doing that since the days of the Pyramids, so he kept quiet about it.

  "Pass on!" the second guard barked, still sending the machine a fishy stare.

  Once inside the building with Willi, Heinrich said, "He's not going to trust that gadget for the next week. You're a subversive, you know."

  Willi drew himself up in mingled alarm and hauteur. "That's a fine thing to call me in this place." But he was joking again, and kept right on doing it: "Did you lay down the trail of bread crumbs last night? No? How the devil are we going to find the way to our desks, then?"

  Oberkommando der Wehrmachtwas something of a maze, but not so bad as Willi made it out to be. Old-timers who remembered how things were before central Berlin got rebuilt said the old headquarters building really had been a nightmare to navigate. This one was just big, with lots of corridors and lots of rooms along each one. Even strangers-strangers with security clearances-found their way without too much trouble. Heinrich and Willi were in their places in a couple of minutes.

  As soon as Heinrich sat down, he turned on his computer and entered the password that gave him access to his files. He tapped the keyboard and looked over his shoulder at Willi, saying, "These things are the biggest change since I came to work here. Used to be only a few specialists had them. Now they're everywhere, like toadstools after a rain."

  "They're handy, all right." Willi had his computer up and running, too. "Sometimes I wonder who's in charge, though, us or the machines."

  "I have a friend"-Heinrich didn't name Walther Stutzman-"who says they could all be connected into one giant linked system."

  "There's a hell of a difference between 'could' and 'will,'" Willi said. "I don't believe it'll happen, not in a million years. Can you imagine the security nightmare with that kind of system? Anybody could put anything on it. Anybody couldfind anything on it. The Party's got too much sense to let that sort of nonsense get started. You couldn't stop it once it did; it'd be like unscrambling an egg."

  "You're right," Heinrich said. "It only stands to reason." He knew he had more book smarts than Willi. But his friend was plenty shrewd, and understood the way the world-especially the part through which he moved-worked.

  "You bet I'm right," Willi said now. "Once security starts to slip, everything's in trouble."

  "Ja,"Heinrich said absently. He was busy typing in another password, the one that gave him access to the Wehrmacht 's information links. Thanks to Walther, he knew a lot more passwords than he was supposed to. He carried them in his memory; he wasn't mad enough to write any of them down. He wasn't mad enough to use any of them, either, except in direst emergency. The one he entered he'd acquired legitimately, in the course of his job. "I want to find out what's going on with the United States."

  "Yes, that will be interesting," Willi Dorsch agreed. "If they're going to fall short of their assessment, that will putour budget in the red."

  "Further in the red," Heinrich said.

  Willi nodded. "Further in the red, true. The powers that be won't like it."

  "The Americans will scream that we're trying to get blood from a turnip," Heinrich predicted.

  "They've been screaming that ever since we beat them," Willi said. "So far, blood's come out every time we've squeezed."

  "True, but I don't suppose it can go on forever," Heinrich said. "Look at France. Look at Denmark. They don't pay their way any more-we spend more both places than we take out. We would in Britain and Norway, too, if they hadn't struck oil in the North Sea." He waited to see if Willi would argue with him. He could call up the budget numbers with a couple of keystrokes and use them as a club to beat his friend over the head.

  But Willi didn't argue. He knew Heinrich always had facts and figures at his fingertips. Instead, Willi poked through a different part of the Wehrmacht network. He cherished oddities the way Heinrich cherished precision. He got more attention-and certainly more laughs-with them than Heinrich did with tribute assessments, too. That was fine with Heinrich, who didn't want attention anyhow.

  Willi scrolled down, scrolled down, then all at once stopped short. "Well, I'll be damned," he said, and let out a low whistle of astonishment.

  "Was ist los?" Heinrich asked, as he was surely supposed to.

  "They just found three families of Jews in some backwoods village in the Serbian mountains," Willi answered. "Probably hadn't seen German soldiers more than three or four times since the war ended. Can you believe it? Real live Jews, in this day and age? Men had their cocks clipped and everything. The damned Serb headman says he didn't know he was doing anything wrong harboring them. Likely story, eh? You can't trust Serbs, either-look at those bandits in the news today-and that's the God's truth."

  His rant let Heinrich pull his face straight. "What happened to them?" he asked, his voice steady, mildly curious, as if it had nothing to do with him. Willi drew a thumb across his throat. Heinrich nodded. "Just what they deserved," he said.Yisgadal v'yiskadash sh'may rabo: the opening words of the Mourner's Kaddish, lovingly taught him by his father, echoed in his mind. So did another thought.If I show my grief, I am dead. My family is dead. My friends are dead. He showed not a thing.

  Herr Kessler leaned forward. To Alicia, as to every other student in the class, he seemed to be leaning straight toward her. He took a deep breath. His usually sallow cheeks turned red. He let out the breath in a great shout: "Jews!"

  Ev
erybody jumped. Half a dozen girls squealed. Alicia's own start, her own squeal-nearly a shriek-hadn't betrayed her after all. In fact, no one paid any attention to her. All eyes were riveted on the teacher.

  And Herr Kessler was wrapped up in his own performance."Jews!" he roared again, even louder than the first time. "Our brave Wehrmacht soldiers caught up with more than a dozen filthy, stinking Jews in the mountains of Serbia. Otto Schachtman!" His forefinger stabbed out at a boy.

  Otto sprang to his feet. "Jawohl, Herr Kessler!"

  "Show me immediately the location of Serbia on the map. Immediately!"

  Otto couldn't do it, though the occupied country was plainly labeled. The teacher paddled his backside. He took the swat in stoic silence. Showing pain would have earned him another one. He didn't get in trouble for sitting down with great care, though. Alicia had only so much sympathy for him. She could have found Serbia without the label; she'd always been good at geography. But why couldn't poor Otto justread?

  Herr Kessler pointed out Serbia himself. Then he went back to his tirade: "You see now, dear children, why we must stay ever on our guard. The hateful enemy still lurks within the borders of the Germanic Empire. Like a serpent, the Jew waits until our attention is turned elsewhere. He waits, and then hestrikes! We must track him down and hunt him out wherever he may hide. Do you understand?"

  "Ja, Herr Kessler," the children chorused. Alicia made sure her voice rang as loud as any of the others. She was still frightened at the idea of being a Jew, but it didn't throw her into blind panic any more. She'd had a little while to get used to it, a little while even to develop an odd sort of pride in it.

  But then the teacher pointed at her. "Alicia Gimpel!"

  She was out of her chair and at attention behind it in a heartbeat. "Jawohl, Herr Kessler!"

  "What is a Jew?"

  All she had to do was point at her own chest and say,I am a Jew, to ruin herself and everyone she loved. She knew that. Knowing it came close to bringing the blind panic back. It came close, but didn't quite manage-not least because the familiar fear at being unexpectedly called on left little room for the other.