In the Presence of Mine Enemies (12 page)

Susanna didn't find out what he thought would happen then, because the pair of uniformed men reached the head of the queue and advanced on the desk clerk. A moment later, another clerk waved to Susanna.

To her relief, the hotel hadn't lost her reservation. She'd feared the fascist contingent might have had enough clout to oust the medievalists, but evidently not. “You are a German national?” the clerk asked.

“Yes, that is correct,” Susanna answered. To the outside world, it was. How a Jew could feel like a German national after everything the Third
Reich
had done was a different question, but one each survivor wrestled with silently and alone, not in front of a registration clerk.

“Your passport, please,” the man said. He was years younger than Susanna, but had shiny white teeth of perfect evenness and alarmingly pink gums: dentures. A lot of Englishmen and -women needed false teeth. Even before it was conquered, Britain hadn't been able to raise all the food it needed, and the people often preferred things like sweets and potato crisps to more nourishing food. They paid the price in dentistry.

“Here.” Susanna handed him the document. He opened the red leatherette cover with the swastika-carrying eagle embossed in gold, compared her photograph to her face, and wrote the passport number in the registration book.
Then he gave the passport back to her. She put it in her purse. Things were looser here than they were in France—looser here than they were for foreigners in Germany, too, for that matter. She didn't have to surrender the passport to the clerk for the duration of her stay.

He turned the registration book toward her and held out a pen. “Your signature, please. This also acknowledges your responsibility for payment. You will be in Room 1065. The bank of lifts is around the corner to your left. Here is the key.” He handed it to her. “Enjoy your stay.”

“Thank you,” she said. As if by magic, a bellman appeared with a wheeled cart to take charge of her bags. He was a scrawny little man with—almost inevitably—bad teeth and a servile smile that put them on display. She gave him a Reichsmark when they got up to the room. The swastika-bedizened banknote brought out another smile, this one broad, genuine, and greedy. A Reichsmark wasn't much to her, but it was worth more than a pound here; ever since the war, Germany had pegged the exchange rate artificially high. The bellman did everything but tug his forelock before bowing his way out of the room.

After unpacking, Susanna took the lift back downstairs to the lobby. She shared the little car with a professor from the Sorbonne whom she knew, and with two hulking, uniformed British fascists. Professor Drumont read, wrote, and understood modern English perfectly well, but did not speak it fluently. Susanna enjoyed the chance to practice her own rusty French.

The fascists' disapproval stuck out like spines. “Bloody foreigners,” one of them growled.

He was at least thirty centimeters taller than Susanna. Since she couldn't look down her nose at him, she looked up it instead.
“Was sagen Sie?”
she inquired with icy hauteur.

Hearing her speak German as opposed to French—a losers' language—took the wind from his sails, as she'd thought it might. “Ah…nothing,” he said. “I didn't mean anything by it.”

She switched languages again, this time to English: “Let me see your identity card.”

He didn't ask what right she had to see it. He just handed it over. She acted as if she had the right. As far as he was concerned, that put her above doubt. She studied the card, nodded coldly, pulled a notebook and pen from her handbag, and wrote something down (actually, it was “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote,” but the fascist would never know—and surely wouldn't have been able to read her scrawl anyhow). Only then did she return the identity document. Trembling, the Englishman put it back in his wallet.

“Vous avez cran,”
Professor Drumont remarked as both fascists dashed from the lift and hurried away.

“Guts? Me? Give me leave to doubt.” Susanna shook her head. “What I have is a—how would you say it in French?—a low tolerance for being pushed around. I think that would be it.”

Drumont shrugged a very Gallic shrug. “It amounts to the same thing in the end. Now, where do we register for the meeting?”

To Susanna's annoyance, they had to walk up a flight of stairs to find registration. “If I had known that, we could have got out sooner,” she grumbled. “We would not have had to spend so much time in the car with those
salauds
.”

“It could be that you were too hard on them,” Professor Drumont said gently. “You are, after all, a German. You may not always understand the…the strains upon other folk in the Germanic Empire.”

That was a brave thing for him to say, or possibly a foolish one. Somebody from one security organization or another was bound to be keeping an eye on the Medieval English Association. Susanna could have been that person, or one of those people, as easily as not. The Frenchman's words were also funny, in an agonizing way.
I don't know about the strains on other folk in the Germanic Empire, eh? Well, Professor, have you ever contemplated the strains on Jews in the Empire?
She doubted that. Oh, yes. She doubted it very much indeed.

And yet…Her gaze flicked over to Professor Drumont. What did he look like? A gray-haired Frenchman, nothing else. But suppose he were a Jew. How could she tell? He
would no more dare reveal himself to a near-stranger than would she. Sudden tears stung her eyes. She blinked angrily as she waited to get her name badge.
We might be ships passing in the night. We might be, but neither of us would ever know. And not knowing is the worst thing of all
.

 

Heinrich Gimpel leaned back in his swivel chair. “Lunch?” he asked.

“Sounds good to me.” Willi Dorsch nodded. “Where do you feel like eating today?”

“I've got kind of a yen for Japanese food,” Heinrich answered. Willi made a horrible face. Heinrich needed a moment to realize what he'd said. He held up a hasty hand. “I didn't do that on purpose.”

“For one thing, I don't believe you,” Willi said. “For another, if you're telling the truth, that just makes it worse. Unconscious punning? If that's not enough to send you up before a People's Court, what would be?”

In spite of himself, Heinrich shivered. Few who appeared before the judges of a People's Court ever appeared anywhere else again. He pushed the dark thought out of his mind, or at least out of the front part of it. “Well,
does
Japanese food suit you?” he asked.

“I was going to suggest it myself, till you made me lose my appetite,” Willi said. “Admiral Yamamoto's is only a couple of blocks from here. How's that sound?”

Heinrich rose—all but leaped—from his chair. “Let's go.”

The Japanese who ran Admiral Yamamoto's had come to Germany ten or fifteen years earlier, to study engineering. He'd got his degree, but he'd never gone home to Tokyo. Some of the sushi he served would have got him odd looks if he had. What he called a Berlin roll, for instance, had seaweed and rice wrapped around thinly cut, spicy white radish and a piece of raw Baltic herring. It might not have been authentic, but it was good, especially washed down with beer. Heinrich ordered half a dozen, and some sashimi as well.

“I don't quite feel like raw fish today,” Willi Dorsch said, and chose shrimp tempura instead. The batter in which the shrimp were fried wasn't what it would have been on the
other side of the world, either, but it was tasty. In place of tempura sauce, Willi slathered the shrimp with wasabi. “It's green, not white, but it cleans out your sinuses just like any other horseradish.”

“You put that much on and it'll blow off the top of your head.” Heinrich used wasabi mixed with soy sauce for his sushi and sashimi, too, but not nearly so much.

“Ah, well, what difference does it make? No brains in there anyhow.” Willi took a big bite, and found out what difference it made. He grabbed for his own stein to try to put out the fire. When he could speak again, he said, “I'm
not
going to tell Erika about this.”

“Mm,” Heinrich said—the most noncommittal noise he could find. Anything that had anything to do with Erika Dorsch made him nervous. He didn't want Willi thinking he had designs on her. He didn't want her having designs on him. He didn't want…He shook his head. He couldn't say he didn't want Erika. He didn't want her enough to throw away what he was for her, and to endanger his family and friends.

When I found out I was a Jew, I knew it meant I had to watch a lot of things. I never imagined then that it would rob me of adultery, too
. Such irony appealed to him.

But when he laughed, Willi asked, “What's so funny?”

He couldn't tell the truth. One thing he'd soon learned about being a Jew was always to have a cover story handy. He said, “The look on your face after you took that mouthful, that's what.”

“Oh. Well, you can't really blame me,” Willi Dorsch said. “If you ask me, wasabi's the first step toward what goes into atomic bombs.”

That made Heinrich laugh without needing any cover story. “I wouldn't be surprised,” he said, and then, looking out the window, “What's going on? Everybody's stopping. Is there a traffic accident down the street?”

“We would have heard it, wouldn't we?” Willi sent the wasabi paste a suspicious glance. “Unless this stuff made my ears ring, too.”

The owner of Admiral Yamamoto's came out from the kitchen. In his accented German, he said, “
Meine Damen
und Herren,
please excuse me for disturbing your meals, but I have just heard important news on the radio. The
Führer
of the Germanic Empire, Kurt Haldweim, has passed away. Please accept my deepest sympathies and condolences.” He bowed stiffly, from the waist, arms at his sides, and then disappeared again.

Heinrich Gimpel stared down at his half-eaten lunch. He'd known this day might be coming, yes, but he hadn't thought it would come quite so soon.

Willi took a last big bite of tempura. If the wasabi bothered him this time, he didn't let it show. He got to his feet, took out his wallet, and pulled out enough money to cover his lunch and Heinrich's. “Come on,” he said, suddenly all business. “We'd better get back to the office.”

“You're right.” Heinrich rose, too.

Half the diners in Admiral Yamamoto's were finishing up in a hurry and getting out. That surprised Heinrich not at all. Given where the restaurant was, most of the people who lunched here would work for the
Wehrmacht
or the SS or the Party. Haldweim had no obvious successor. Intrigue and jockeying for position had begun years earlier, when he started having “colds.” Now things would come out into the open.

“Who will it be?” Willi murmured as they hurried up the street. The same thought was uppermost in Heinrich's mind, too.

When they got back to Adolf Hitler Platz, they saw Horst Witzleben's perfect image on the huge televisor screen on the front wall of the
Führer
's palace. The square was filling up fast as people got the news. Already, the large swastika flag above the palace had been lowered to half-staff. Witzleben's almost operatic voice blared from powerful speakers: “Even so soon, messages of sorrow and mourning have begun pouring in from around the world. In a moving joint tribute, the King and the
Duce
of the Italian Empire spoke of Kurt Haldweim as a man of power and a man of peace. The Emperor of Japan has expressed his sympathy with the German people on their loss, in which the Emperor of Manchukuo joins. The
Caudillo
of Spain described our beloved
Führer
as a man of world-
historical proportions, while the
Perón
of Argentina termed him a model for all rulers aspiring to greatness.” Someone's arm slid a paper onto Witzleben's desk. The news reader glanced down at it. “And this just in: the
Poglavnik
of Croatia has declared a day of mourning in his country, while stating that the
Führer
's memory will live in the hearts of men forever.”

“Nice,” Willi remarked. “All that sympathy and a Reichsmark will buy me a glass of beer.”

“Well, what do you expect them to say?” Heinrich asked. He knew what he would say if he had the chance.
One more murderer in a line of murderers. A little smoother than the last two, but a murderer all the same
. Except with Lise, he wouldn't get that chance. Even thinking such things was dangerous.

“Oh, just what they are saying,” Willi answered, turning his back on the televisor. “But how many of them mean it?”

“If you had to mean what you said, we'd have an awful lot of diplomats who never opened their mouths—and the world might be a better place,” Heinrich said. His friend laughed, supposing he'd been joking.

He and Willi went up the broad stairway to the entrance of the
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
building. “Identification cards,” a guard snapped. Heinrich dug out his wallet and produced the card. The guard carefully compared the photo to his face before running the card through the machine reader. Only when the light glowed green did he nod for Heinrich to proceed. Willi got the same treatment.