In the Presence of Mine Enemies (20 page)

“People are starting to show where they stand,” Heinrich replied.

“I'd say so,” Willi Dorsch agreed. “And if that SS man's faction wins, I'd say we'll see our budget cut.”

Heinrich shrugged. “The
Waffen
-SS has always thought it could do the
Wehrmacht
's job. The next time it's right will be the first.”

“Not to hear its officers tell the story.” Willi shrugged, too. “Ah, well. Ours is not to wonder why. Ours is but to do or die.”

“You so relieve my mind,” Heinrich said. Willi laughed. He could talk blithely about dying—he didn't have to worry about it very much. Heinrich, on the other hand, had days when he felt he was living on borrowed time, and that it was about to run out. The feeling would have been bad enough had he worried about himself alone. Worrying about the rest of his folk left in the
Reich
seemed twenty times worse.

As they sat down at their desks, Willi said, “You see, though? It's just like I said. Nobody cares what the limeys did, and nobody's calling a Party congress to pick the next
Führer
. So much for the precious first edition. The big shots will do the choosing, same as always.”

“It does look that way,” Heinrich agreed, and did his best not to sound too unhappy in case the room was bugged. “They're taking their time, too.”

“They've got to find somebody they can all at least stand,” Willi said, which was doubtless true. “That weeds out the zanies and the men who only have a following in one faction.”

“So it does.” If Heinrich thought,
A Party congress would do better still, because then everything would be out in the open,
he kept it to himself. Willi was right: no Party congress would choose Kurt Haldweim's successor. That being so, to go on talking about the first edition might mark a man as a dangerous dissident.

He settled in to work. No matter what the
Waffen
-SS thought, the
Wehrmacht
was the strong right arm of the Greater German
Reich
. And no matter who became
Führer
—even if it turned out to be that belligerent
Ober
gruppenführer
's candidate—the
Wehrmacht
had to go on. It had to—and it would. Plenty of people like Heinrich Gimpel (though not many of them
just
like Heinrich Gimpel) made sure it kept running smoothly.

Willi asked, “Are we on for tonight?”

“The brains of the outfit hasn't told me anything different,” Heinrich said, by which he meant Lise. Willi grinned; he sometimes called Erika the High Command in the same way. Carefully, Heinrich added, “We might do better if we don't talk politics too much, though.”

Willi's grin slipped. “You know that, and I know that, but whether Erika knows that…. Well, we'll find out.”

That was what Heinrich was afraid of, but he made himself smile and nod. The date for dinner and bridge alarmed him, so that part of him wished he'd backed out. If Willi and Erika's marriage was blowing up, he didn't want it to blow up in his face. But what would Erika do if he made that too obvious? He didn't want to find out. Getting back to work was something of a relief.

Willi didn't joke any more about Erika being the one who wanted Heinrich over. Heinrich wished he would have. If he was joking about it, he probably wasn't brooding over what it meant. If he wasn't joking…Well, who could say?

They got through the day's work. Canteen rumor was full of talk about the rejected
Obergruppenführer
. Since Heinrich and Willi had seen that happen, they scored points for eyewitness accounts. Another analyst sighed enviously, saying, “I'd've paid money to watch one of those arrogant so-and-sos head off with a flea in his ear.” Several other people nodded.

Rumor also spoke of
Bonzen
from the Party and from the Navy who had been admitted to
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
. Heinrich tried to read tea leaves from that. All he could see was that the Navy, like the
Wehrmacht,
was a conservative service. If they were joining with one section of the Party, maybe with an SS faction different from that
Obergruppenführer
's…They might be trying to promote a candidate, or they might be trying to block one. Only time would tell.

Heinrich and Willi rode home together. “See you a little before seven,” Willi said as he got off the bus. “We can all watch Horst and then get down to cards.”

“All right.” Heinrich hoped it would be.

Katarina came over to babysit the girls. Käthe was a kid sister, closer in age to Alicia than to Lise. Heinrich suspected she'd been a surprise to her parents. He wished he could ask them even such a nosy question; a drunken truck driver had broadsided their little VW a few years before, and they hadn't survived the wreck. A People's Court gave the truck driver summary justice, but that didn't bring back the Franks.

Tante
Käthe fascinated the children. She dyed her brown hair a yellow as artificial as oleomargarine, and sometimes wore styles that looked like what SS uniforms would have been if they were designed to titillate rather than terrify.
In my day, you'd have done a stretch in a camp for clothes like that,
Heinrich thought. He laughed at himself.
And if going on about “In my day…” doesn't make me an old fogy, I don't know what would
.

Tonight Katarina had on dungarees of blue American denim, which were almost as scandalous as some of her other clothes. She refused to be ordinary. That was dangerous for a Jew. On the other hand, a fair number of young men and women dressed the way she did, so she had a crowd into which she could blend in.

“Have fun with your bridge,” she told Heinrich and Lise. She might have been saying,
Have fun with your warm milk and slippers
. Käthe's eyes sparkled as she turned to the girls. “While they're gone, we'll have
real
fun, won't we?”

“Ja!”
Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane chorused, entranced. Every so often, Heinrich wondered what
real
fun consisted of. He'd never found the girls' heads spinning with hashish after
Tante
Käthe watched them, so he didn't lose sleep over it, but he did wonder.

Getting out of the house felt good, even if it was only for the short jaunt over to the Dorsches'. As Heinrich and Lise got off the bus, she said, “Willi and Erika are lucky to live so close to their bus stop.”

Heinrich nodded. “I've thought the same thing.” Think
ing along with your wife was supposed to be another mark of fogydom. He didn't care. He liked thinking along with Lise.

When he rang the bell, Erika opened the door. She smiled at the Gimpels. “Come on in,” she said. “Horst will be on in a minute, and Willi wouldn't miss him for the world.” Erika made watching the news sound like a vice.
First danger sign,
Heinrich thought.

From the front room, Willi's voice rose in excitement: “Come quick, everybody! I think we've got a new
Führer!
” That sent Heinrich and Lise—and Erika—hurrying to join him.

“Germany, awake!” Horst Witzleben spoke in millions of homes as if he were a close friend. “After long and serious discussions, senior Party, SS, and military leaders have chosen the present minister of heavy industry, Heinz Buckliger, to guide the future of the Greater German
Reich
and the Germanic Empire. I am proud to be among the first to say, ‘
Heil
Buckliger!'” His arm shot out in the Nazi salute.

Behind him, a new picture appeared on the screen. Heinrich wouldn't have known Heinz Buckliger from the man in the moon. He proved to be a ruddy-faced man of about fifty, with a thick shock of graying blond hair and a toothy smile. “He's so young!” Erika Dorsch said. A moment later, she added, “And handsome, too.”

Heinrich didn't know about handsome. Young the new
Führer
certainly was: younger by far than Kurt Haldweim had been when he began to lead the
Reich
. “They passed over a lot of senior people to put him in place,” Willi said. “The new generation's here at last.”

“The new head of the
Reich
was born in Breslau in 1959,” Horst Witzleben said. That made Buckliger more than forty years younger than Haldweim—closer to two generations than one. The newsreader went on, “He studied economics in Munich, graduating with highest honors from the university there. Before joining the Ministry of Heavy Industry, he served for seven years in the
Allgemeine
-SS, rising to the rank of
Hauptsturmführer
.”
Captain,
Heinrich thought, automatically translating to
what he thought of as a real rank. Not bad. Not spectacular, but not bad.

“Once in the Ministry,
Herr
Buckliger rapidly became known as an efficiency expert,” Witzleben said. “He has promised to bring that passion for efficiency to the
Reich
as a whole. Here is his first statement after his selection.”

Heinz Buckliger sat at his desk in the
Führer
's palace in what was obviously a piece of videotape. “
Volk
of the Greater German
Reich,
I accept the role of
Führer
with pride, but also with great humility,” he said in a pleasant if not ringing baritone. “Mindful of the triumphs of the past, I shall do all I can to lead you to a still more glorious future. Many things have grown slack in recent years. I hope to tighten them, and to make the
Reich
and the Germanic Empire run more smoothly. With your help, I know I shall succeed.”

“He sounds all right,” Willi said as Horst Witzleben reappeared and began talking about the congratulations pouring into the
Reich
on Buckliger's rise to supreme power.

“So he does,” Heinrich agreed. “But he's plainly someone's fair-haired boy. I wonder whose.” His first guess for the new
Führer
's patron was Lothar Prützmann, head of the SS: once an SS man, always an SS man. That wasn't a sure thing, but it was the way to bet.

“All right, now we know,” Erika said. “After that, the rest of the news will be small potatoes. Shall we play some cards?”

“Good idea,” Lise said. Heinrich nodded. Willi's sigh said he would have liked to stay in front of the televisor, but democracy was alive and well in the Dorsch household, even if the big wheels in the German government had been able to ignore it in choosing Heinz Buckliger.

The very first hand they played, Willi bid and made a small slam in clubs. Heinrich and Lise couldn't do a thing about it. If you didn't have the cards, you were stuck. Willi chortled. Heinrich said, “I wonder what's on the news.”

On the next hand, Erika Dorsch made three no-trump: as quick and one-sided a rubber as possible. Lise said,
“Heinrich's right. Watching the news seems better and better.” Their hosts laughed at them.

They played steadily, with a couple of pauses when Erika helped the Dorsches' son and daughter with their homework and one when Willi broke up a squabble between the children. “This all looks and sounds familiar,” Heinrich said.

“Life goes on,” Erika said, “one way or another.” If that wasn't a hooded glance she sent toward Willi, Heinrich had never seen one.

Willi himself affected not to notice. Or maybe he really didn't notice; you never could tell with Willi. He said, “Whose deal is it?”

“Mine, I think,” Lise answered. She gather up the cards and started shuffling. “It is now, anyway.”

Heinrich got the contract when everybody passed at two hearts. Playing it was routine, so much so that things got sidetracked halfway through when Lise and Willi started arguing about a newspaper story on Babylonian archaeology that they'd both seen and Heinrich and Erika had somehow missed. Willi insisted the find proved Hammurabi's code was 250 years older than everyone had thought up till now; Lise was just as sure it proved no such thing. As people will when disagreeing about something of such monumental unimportance, they both got more and more certain they were right. As they pointed fingers at each other, they might have forgotten anyone else was in the room—or, for that matter, on the planet.

Heinrich set his cards on the table, face down. Lise hardly ever got so excited when she argued with him, and he was glad she didn't. If Willi raised his voice and turned red—well, Willi was in the habit of doing such things. “A good thing they're friends, or they'd murder each other,” Heinrich remarked to Erika.

With all the noise Lise and Willi were making, he wasn't sure she even heard him. But she nodded. “Willi's as bad as the children,” she said, like Heinrich talking under the noise of the argument. “You, now, you have too much sense to waste your time with such foolishness.”