In the Presence of Mine Enemies (23 page)

Walther Stutzman sighed. “Overall, probably,” he said. “But it's liable to be rough as hell on the Kleins. They're already trying to deal with what their baby has. If the genealogical authorities or the Security Police land on them, too—well, how much can one family take?”

Heinrich didn't answer. Walther hadn't expected him to. No one could answer that question for himself till the time of testing came, let alone for anyone else. Instead, Heinrich came back with a question of his own: “If you change the Kleins' records again, don't you think the genealogical authorities and the Security Police are liable to land on
you
? How much can you take, Walther?”

And that was the other side of the coin. “I don't know,” Walther said. “Here's hoping I don't have to find out, and the Kleins don't, either.”

 

“That's interesting.” Heinrich Gimpel tapped his copy of the
Völkischer Beobachter
to show Willi Dorsch what was interesting.

Willi shifted on the commuter-train seat beside Heinrich. “Which?” he said. “Oh, the story about the budget? Well, what to you expect Buckliger to say? Easy enough to promise to bring things under control. Doing it?” He shook his head. “Don't hold your breath.”

“He sounds like he means it, though.” Heinrich read out loud: “‘For too long, the Greater German
Reich
has balanced its budget only with the aid of tribute from other lands within the Germanic Empire. If we are the greatest nation the world has known, should we not be able to pay our own way?'”

“Hell with that,” Willi said. “Make the other bastards pay instead. They're the ones who lost. You wait and see. He's got it off his chest now: the new
Führer
can talk tough. But nothing's going to change.”

Willi usually had good political sense. Heinrich reminded himself of that. Still, he couldn't help adding, “He's going on about high labor costs, too, and how we need to be honestly competitive and not just dictate favorable exchange rates to the rest of the world. We can't quite dictate to the Japanese, and look how their electronics have come on the past ten years.”

“Are you going to tell me they stack up to Zeiss?” Willi snorted. “Don't make me laugh.”

“A friend of mine works for Zeiss, and he's not laughing,” Heinrich said. “You're right—what the Japanese make isn't as good as our stuff. But it's good enough to work, and it's a lot cheaper. For people who haven't got a whole lot of Reichsmarks to spend—”

“People who think like Jews,” Willi broke in.

Heinrich shrugged. “Joke all you please.” To Willi, it was just a joke, too. Heinrich knew he should be used to gibes like that. He
was
used to them, in the sense that his face didn't show what he thought. But they still burned. He went on, “No matter how you joke, though, plenty of people who can't afford our electronics can afford to buy from the Japs.”

Willi twirled his finger in a gesture that had meant
so what?
for the past two generations. “That hasn't really got much to do with the budget, you know.”

Although Heinrich didn't know any such thing, he didn't argue. He'd been taught since childhood not to disagree too strongly with anyone. Instead, he rustled the
Völkischer Beobachter
and changed the subject a little, saying, “What do you make of this? The
Führer
says, ‘As part of an ongoing effort to strengthen the state, a thorough examination of its political underpinnings must also be undertaken.' What's that mean?”

“What? Where does he say that?” Willi opened up his own copy of the paper again. “Have to tell you, I missed it.”

“Page four, third column, about halfway down.”

“Page four…” When Willi finally found it, he shook his head. “He couldn't have buried it any deeper in a graveyard, could he?” He rubbed his chin and frowned. “I have to admit, I don't know exactly what that means.
I bet nobody else does, either, except maybe Buckliger. It might just be the sort of stuff politicians use to pad out a speech.” But he was still frowning. “You wouldn't put padding there, though—not usually. He wanted to say it, and he wanted to say it where not many people would notice he'd said it. I sure didn't. You notice everything, don't you?”

“Me? Only thing I notice is, we're coming into the Berlin station.” Heinrich folded his newspaper and stuck it in his briefcase. Easier to carry just one thing when they hurried up the escalators to the level where they caught the bus to
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
headquarters. Willi did the same.

A three-car accident snarled traffic to a fare-thee-well. Ambulances, police vehicles, and rubberneckers meant nothing could get through at a busy intersection. The police were slower setting up detours than they should have been, too. Everyone in the bus grumbled and complained. That did no one any good. Heinrich and Willi got to work half an hour late.

The guards at the entrance clucked sympathetically as the two of them hurried up the steps. “Came from South Station, didn't you?” one guard said when Heinrich held out his identity card. “Things are buggered up good and proper between there and here.”

“Don't I know it!” Heinrich said. “I thought I'd be on that damned bus forever.” The card went through the reader. The light flashed green. The guard returned the card and waved him through.

Willi joined him a moment later. “At least we're not the only ones,” he said. “Misery loves company.”

“Misery doesn't love anything,” Heinrich said. “That's what makes it misery.”

“
Jawohl, Herr Doktor
Professor!” Willi came to attention and saluted. “Thank you so much for clearing that up for me.”

“When we work in the same room, I can't even tell you to go away,” Heinrich said sadly.

They navigated the maze of corridors to get to the room they shared with several other budget analysts, secretaries,
and clerks. Willi promptly disappeared from his desk. Heinrich knew he was heading to the canteen for coffee, and didn't think anything of it. Willi came back with two foam cups. He kept one and, with a flourish, handed the other to the secretary he and Heinrich shared. Ilse stammered out thanks, simpering like a starstruck teenager. Willi preened. Heinrich fought not to gag.

He had plenty to keep him busy. He always did. His fingers flashed across the keys of his adding machine. The number and function keys had grown smooth and shiny from long use. Some of the more senior men in the department were getting new adding machines, half as big and half as noisy as the old ones. The new machines came from Japan. Heinrich wondered if Willi knew. As for himself, he didn't want to give up the one he'd used for so long. In a lot of ways, he was intensely conservative. Change made him suspicious; it might lead to exposure. As long as things went on as they had up till now, his family and he stayed safe.

The phone on Willi's desk rang. Heinrich noticed it only peripherally. He was trying to unravel by exactly how much the Americans were pretending to be poorer than they really were. He might not have noticed the phone on his own desk. The Americans used numbers the way a cuttlefish used ink: to obscure, to conceal, to confuse. Figuring out what lay behind their smokescreen took not only patience but imagination.

But in spite of his best effort to focus on the columns of numbers in front of him, Willi's loud, angry voice eventually pierced his concentration: “Dammit, Erika, don't call me here for crap like that! I haven't got time to worry about it, and I sure as hell haven't got time to deal with it.”

Heinrich looked up. He couldn't help himself. He saw he wasn't the only one. Nor, of course, was Willi the only one who'd ever had his personal life intrude on work. But he was the one with problems at the moment, which meant he was the one everybody else was pretending not to listen to now. That he was one of the more flamboyant men in the office only made his troubles more fascinating.

Erika said something. Heinrich couldn't make out what it
was, but she sounded angry, too. He wouldn't have wanted to talk to her the way Willi just had. Whatever she said, it struck a nerve. Willi went red from the base of his neck all the way up to his forehead and ears. “That's a lie, too,” he growled. “I'm just being friendly. You wouldn't know about friendly, would you?”

Someone must have told Erika about Ilse—or maybe Willi was being friendly, or more than friendly, with some woman Heinrich knew nothing about. He looked back to the numbers the Americans had submitted to the
Reich
. Before he could do anything but look, Erika said something else.

“Me?” Willi exclaimed. “
Me?
You've got your nerve! What about you and—” He didn't go on. Instead, he slammed the receiver into its cradle hard enough to start a young earthquake.

Had be been about to say,
What about you and Heinrich?
Erika hadn't been subtle. She'd done everything but send up a flare, in fact. Up till now, Willi hadn't paid much attention—or so it seemed. But maybe he could see what was right under his nose after all.

Or, then again, maybe he couldn't. His color faded as quickly as it had risen. He managed a smile of sorts as he swung his swivel chair toward Heinrich. “Women are strange creatures—you know that?” He might have been imparting some great philosophical truth. “We can't live with them, and we can't live without them, either.”

Fourteen placid, happy years of marriage with Lise looked better and better to Heinrich. “I hope everything turns out all right for you,” he said.

“So do I,” Willi said. “Sometimes, though, what can you do?” He sounded as happy-go-lucky as usual. He meant,
You can't do anything—things will either work out or else they won't
. If Heinrich's marriage were in trouble when he wanted to keep it going, he would have tried everything under the sun—and looked in the dark, too, in case it was hiding something the sun didn't show. Did that mean Willi didn't want to keep his marriage going, or did it mean he didn't want to try? Heinrich didn't know. He couldn't tell. He wondered if Willi knew.

When lunchtime came, Heinrich said, “Shall we go to Admiral Yamamoto's?”

Willi nodded. “Why not? We haven't been there since the day old Haldweim kicked the bucket.”

“Uh, right.” True, the old
Führer
was dead. Even so, Heinrich couldn't have made himself talk about the ruler of the Germanic Empire so casually—so callously, even. Willi, confident in his perfect Aryanness, could be more expansive.
Or maybe he doesn't think about it at all. Maybe he just says the first thing that comes out of his mouth
.

Heinrich found that hard to imagine, let alone believe. But Willi was a law unto himself. He had been for as long as Heinrich had known him, and no doubt for years before that.

Sitting in the Japanese restaurant, eating Berlin rolls and sashimi and rice and washing them down with a seidel of beer (German beer, not Japanese—Japanese electronics were fine, but Japanese beer couldn't measure up to the
Reinheitsgebot,
the medieval purity law, and was barred from the Greater German
Reich
), Heinrich tried not to worry about anything except the havoc the wasabi was playing with his sinuses. But Admiral Yamamoto's got customers from a lot of ministries, and the SS men at the next table were too loud to ignore.

“Did you read the
Völkischer Beobachter
this morning?” one of them demanded of his pals. “
Did
you?”

“
Can
SS men read?” Willi said—in Heinrich's opinion, not nearly quietly enough.

“I saw it, all right,” another blackshirt—a bruiser—answered. “That goddamn son of a bitch.”

“Takes one to know one,” Willi said—again, much too loud.

“
Oh,
Willi,” Heinrich murmured. The other table held five SS men. If they got mad, it wouldn't even be a brawl. It would be a slaughter. But getting Willi to pay attention…was like getting him not to lead away from kings. You could wish, and much good wishing would do you.

Then the first SS man, a
Sturmbannführer,
said, “He's going to bring it in by the back door. You wait and see if he doesn't.”

Before Willi could make yet another rude comment—
and Heinrich knew just what sort of rude comment he would make about that—the bruiser nodded and said, “Bet your ass he is. ‘A thorough examination of its political underpinnings.'” He made a loud retching noise.

And Willi Dorsch, canny political creature that he was, suddenly became quiet as a mouse. If he could have wiggled his ears, he would have swung them toward the table full of SS men. Heinrich felt the same way. The blackshirts weren't talking about just any goddamn son of a bitch. They were talking about Heinz Buckliger, newly chosen
Führer
and the most powerful man on the planet.