In the Presence of Mine Enemies (39 page)

Buckliger nodded. “Sounds reasonable.
Danke schön
. Your number's about what I'd figured for myself.”

Heinrich wondered how to take that. He didn't think Buckliger could have made these calculations for himself. The new
Führer
had been a bureaucrat, but not that kind of bureaucrat. But Buckliger didn't sound as if he were just trying to make himself sound clever. After a moment, Heinrich realized working out how much the Americans were likely to cheat wasn't only a mathematical calculation. It was also a political calculation. And if anybody could make political calculations, the
Führer
was, or needed to be, the man.

“Happy to help, sir,” Heinrich said. His own interior calculations hadn't taken more than a second and a half.

Heinz Buckliger gave him another one of those I'm-just-a-regular-fellow smiles. “Good. I like to have clever people working for me. It keeps the wheels going round.” He got to his feet and nodded to the SS troopers. “Come on, boys. Now we go and talk with Field Marshal Tetzlaff.” Out they went, some of the guards preceding Buckliger, the rest following.

A considerable silence reigned in the room after the
Führer
left. Heinrich tried to get back to what he'd been doing beforehand, but discovered he couldn't, not when everybody was staring at him. He simply sat there, dazed. The two thoughts that kept going round and round in his head were
Oh, thank God—I got away with it
and
Lise will never believe this, not in a million years
.

“Well, well,” Willi said at last. “You and Field Marshal Tetzlaff, is it? And he came to see you first. Not too shabby,
Herr
Gimpel. No, sir, not too shabby.” He got to his feet and saluted, as he had a few minutes earlier for the
Führer
.

That roused the Berliner's almost automatic cynicism in Heinrich. “Oh,
Quatsch,
” he said. The room exploded in laughter. People came over to pound him on the back and shake his hand. Ilse perched on a corner of his desk, showing a lot of leg. She eyed him with frank calculation. She'd never looked at him
that
way before. He didn't particularly want her looking at him that way now.

I'm supposed to be invisible, dammit,
he thought.
How
can I be invisible when people keep…noticing me?
He felt absurdly indignant.

“Seriously, Heinrich my boy, I'd say your promotion chances just got themselves a kick in the pants.” Willi didn't sound serious. He was grinning. To Heinrich's relief, his friend also didn't sound jealous. Willi went on, “I can just see your next performance review. There's the examiner, looking over what you've done. ‘
Ach, ja,
consulted with the
Führer
.' What can he say about
that
?”

“I don't know. If he's like most performance examiners, he'll find something rude,” Heinrich answered. He hadn't meant it for a joke, but everybody laughed. Someone the
Führer
consulted had to be a very funny fellow. Heinrich reached for the telephone. “Excuse me, please. I'm going to call my wife.”

Ilse stopped posing. She got down from his desk and stomped back to Willi's. Heinrich thought
that
was funny. He dialed for an outside line. When the dial tone shifted, he called his home number.
“Bitte?”
Lise said.

“Hi, sweetheart. It's me,” Heinrich said. “You'll never guess who just came in….”

 

“The
Führer
came to see a friend of mine last week,” Esther Stutzman told her boss with what she hoped was pardonable pride.

Dr. Dambach nodded. He never seemed to get very excited about anything. “Good for your friend,” he answered now. “I also know some people who have met him, though I haven't myself.”

“Neither have I.” Esther had never imagined wanting to meet the ruler of the Greater German
Reich
and the Germanic Empire, either. But maybe Buckliger was different. Maybe. Even wondering felt not only strange but also more than a little unnatural.

“I've been doing something interesting,” Dr. Dambach said.

“Oh? What's that?” Esther asked, as she was plainly meant to do. Whatever it was, it didn't involve the coffeemaker. What the pediatrician thought interesting there was liable to seem ghastly to anybody else. Some of the
things he'd done trying to fix coffee merited the word. Lately, though, the coffeemaker had been fine.

When he spoke, Esther wished he'd spent his time messing with the machine, for he said, “Do you remember how the Kleins' genealogy charts had two different versions?” He made it a casual question, for he didn't know how important it was to Esther.

“Yes, I do,” she answered.
I'm not likely to forget,
went through her head.
You didn't know it, but you were trying to kill me, too
.

And he still was, still in perfect ignorance. “Well, I've been going through some of the other patients' charts, to see if I can find more with the same problem.”

“I certainly hope not!” Esther exclaimed. Dr. Dambach would reckon the horror in her voice a horror of disorder and illegality, the sort of horror he had himself. And, indeed, she was acquainted with that horror in her everyday life. But what made her voice go high and shrill now was old and deeper and less…less Germanic. It was raw fear, fear of disaster, fear of death. She had to fight to hold it in check as she asked, “Have—have you found any?”

Dr. Dambach paused to sip from the cup of coffee she'd made for him. That only gave her a few more seconds to worry and to try to remember whether Walther had had to change anybody else's pedigree. She didn't think so. No, she didn't
think
so, but doubt tore at her. Maybe she'd forgotten. Maybe he'd done it without bothering to tell her. It wouldn't have seemed that important at the time. Now it loomed as big as the world.

The pediatrician set down the foam cup. “As a matter of fact, yes,” he said deliberately, and Esther wanted to sink down through the floor. But then he went on, “Not quite like the Klein baby's case, though.”

Esther dared breathe again, if barely. “What's the difference?” she asked. The question was dangerous, but it had to come out. Dr. Dambach wouldn't read too much into it…would he? He'd all but invited it…hadn't he?

He took another sip of coffee. Was he trying to drive her crazy? If he was, he was doing a bang-up job. He set the cup on his desk again. “The Kleins' charts showed two dif
ferent family trees, so it made me wonder whether they had more Jews in their ancestry than they were willing to admit,” he said, and cocked his head to one side, waiting for her response.

She made herself nod. “I remember.”
I'm not likely to forget. I almost got them killed. I almost got more of my friends killed, and my family, and me
. The nod showed only polite agreement. None of the nightmare underneath came out.

“I haven't found any more cases like that,” Dambach repeated.

“I hope not!” Esther repeated herself, too. “You'd better not!” Her knees didn't want to hold her up. She felt giddy with relief. “But what have you found? You said you'd found something.”

“I have found that people will lie even when there is no good reason for them to lie.” The pediatrician looked as disgusted as if he'd discovered maggots on a dressing that was supposed to be sterile. “I have found people inventing inflated ancestries for themselves, people trying to connect themselves with noble families—one family even trying to connect itself to the Hitlers. All of the forgeries are inept. Many of them are pathetic. But they riddle the files. Why?” He looked at Esther as if he really believed she had an answer.

She did the best she could: “There are people who want to seem more important than they really are.”

“It's so stupid!” Dr. Dambach said. “And it could be dangerous to them, too. If I think a child's ancestry is different from what it really is, I'm liable to make the wrong diagnosis. Don't people think of
that
?”

“Most of them probably don't,” Esther said. Working for the pediatrician had gone a long way toward convincing her most people thought very little—certainly less than she'd believed when she took the job. Then, because she couldn't help herself, she asked, “What are you going to do about these fake pedigrees?”

She knew she probably should have left well enough alone. But her boss had reported the Kleins without a second thought. Would he prove as hard on people he didn't suspect of being Jews?

“I've already done it, as a matter of fact,” he said. “I've talked with the
Reichs
Genealogical Office. They want me to forward some of the more serious cases of abuse to them for possible prosecution. And they suggested I write an article for a medical journal, alerting other physicians to the problem.”

Esther eyed him with reluctant respect. He did what he thought was right, no matter whom it involved. She could wish he didn't think getting rid of Jews was right. How many people in the
Reich
didn't, though? Pitifully few. That was probably the hardest part of being a Jew in Berlin these days. Everyone you met was sincerely and honestly convinced you had no right to exist.

Asking any more questions might have made Dambach wonder why she was so curious. Instead, she said, “I'm sure the article will be very interesting.”

“Articles in journals are not supposed to be interesting. They are supposed to be informative,” Dambach said, a touch of frost in his voice.

“Why not both?” Esther asked.

The pediatrician shook his head. “That would not be good,
Frau
Stutzman. I have occasionally seen an article that is frivolous, and who could hope to learn from such a thing?” He was serious himself, as serious as he wanted medical articles to be. Esther couldn't understand it. She thought she would learn more from an article that was entertaining as well as fact-filled. That anyone could think otherwise hadn't occurred to her. But Dr. Dambach did.

Arguing with the boss when his mind was made up struck her as one of the more pointless things she could do. Instead, she went back out to the receptionist's desk and worked on billing and medical records till patients started coming in. Out of curiosity, she looked at some of the genealogical records in the charts. She soon saw that Dr. Dambach was right. Some of the pedigrees were faked, and pretty obviously faked.
Foolishness,
she thought. The Kleins and her own family had the best of good reasons for tampering with their ancestries: what was more important than survival? But changing a great-grandfather for the sake of vanity? What was that? What
could it be but the urge to buy a Mercedes if your neighbor had a new Audi?

She almost didn't notice the outer door to the waiting room open. But the yowl of a baby brought her back to the real world in a hurry. She closed a chart and looked out. “Oh,
guten Morgen, Frau
Baumgartner,” she said. “How is little Dietrich today?”

“Teething,”
Frau
Baumgartner answered. She would have been a pretty strawberry blond if she hadn't had dark circles under her eyes. “He never wants to sleep any more, and if he doesn't sleep, I can't sleep, either. I hope the doctor can give me something to make him more comfortable.”

“I hope so, too,” Esther said. “Your appointment isn't till a quarter to ten, though, you know.”

Frau
Baumgartner nodded. “
Ja
. I do know. But I thought that if I got here early, I might get to see the doctor early, too.”

Sometimes things did work out like that. Sometimes they didn't. “I can't promise you anything, not yet,” Esther said. “If some of the people with earlier appointments don't show up, though…”

Little Dietrich jammed his fingers into his mouth. Somehow, he managed to let out an earsplitting howl despite the obstruction. His mother looked frazzled. “Oh, I hope they don't!” she said fervently.

Another mother came into the waiting room, this one with a two-year-old who was tugging at her ear. The little girl howled even louder than Dietrich Baumgartner. “
Guten Tag, Frau
Abetz,” Esther bellowed over the din. “Liselotte's earache isn't any better, is it?”

“What?” said
Frau
Abetz, who couldn't have heard the Trump of Doom through that racket.

Esther repeated herself, louder this time.
Frau
Abetz took the screaming Liselotte into an examination room. She had one of the nine o'clock appointments
Frau
Baumgartner coveted. The move redistributed the noise without making it much softer, at least for Esther. Dr. Dambach emerged from his sanctum. “Going to be one of those quiet mornings, is it?” he said with a wry
chuckle, and went into the examination room himself. Moments later, Liselotte screamed louder than ever.