In the Presence of Mine Enemies (17 page)

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 schön,”
he said. “I don't know what goes wrong when I put my hands on that machine, but something al
ways 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, she
was
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 pe
diatrician, 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 it
is
perfectly 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 lunch, 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 schön, gnädige 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.

They didn't bother closing the door. Esther heard bits of conversation floating out: “…obviously genuine…” “…
also
obviously genuine…” “…don't know what to make of…” “…wouldn't bother but for the Jewish aspect…” “…a puzzlement, without a doubt…”

After twenty minutes or so, Dr. Dambach and Maximilian Ebert emerged together. The man from the Genealogical Office asked Esther, “What do you know of this business about the Kleins?”

“Should we be talking about this with her?” Dambach asked.

“I don't see why not,” Ebert said. “She's obviously of impeccable Aryan stock. Well,
Frau
”—his eye picked up the little name badge at her station—“ah,
Frau
Stutzman?”

“Only what Dr. Dambach has told me,” Esther answered.
Obviously of impeccable Aryan stock
. She couldn't shriek laughter, however much she might want to. Cautiously, she went on, “I do know the Kleins a little away from the office.” If she didn't say that, they could find out. Better to admit it. “They've always seemed like good enough people. I'm sorry their child has this horrible disease.” Every word of that was true—more true than Maximilian Ebert could know.

“Have you any idea how they could have got two different sets of genealogical records, each one plainly authentic?” Ebert asked.

“No. I don't see how it's possible,” she answered, which was anything but the truth.

“Are you really sure they
are
both authentic?” Dr. Dambach asked.

“As certain as I can be without the laboratory work to prove it,” Ebert said. “I'll take both of them with me to get that. And then, if they do both turn out to be genuine, we'll have to figure out what that means. At the moment, Doctor, I have no more idea than you do. And now I must be off. A pleasure to meet you,
Frau
Stutzman.
Guten Tag
.” He touched the brim of his cap and strode out of the office.

“Now we'll get to the bottom of this.” Dr. Dambach sounded as if he looked forward to the prospect.

“So we will.” Esther hoped she sounded the same way, even if it was another lie. No—especially if it was another lie.

 

The Medieval English Association meeting was winding down. In another couple of days, Susanna Weiss would have to fly back to Berlin. The conference hadn't been the most exciting she'd ever attended. She was bringing home material for at least two articles. That would keep Professor Oppenhoff happy. But there hadn't been any really spectacular papers and there hadn't been any really juicy scandals. Without the one or the other, the conclave itself would go down as less than memorable.