In the Presence of Mine Enemies (52 page)

Walther glanced down at his watch. Yes, it would have to be another time. People would start coming back from lunch pretty soon. He couldn't afford to take the chance of being seen doing that kind of work. And he was through the other portal. If he was going to look around inside Lothar Prützmann's domain, he had to do it now.

Too much information. Not enough time to sift through it. That protected SS secrets as well as any encryption algorithm, probably better. If Walther couldn't find what he was looking for, what difference if it stayed in plain sight? You couldn't read what you couldn't find.

He did find proof of Prützmann's hand behind the
“Enough Is Enough” article in the
Völkischer Beobachter
. Under other circumstances, that would have delighted him. As things were, he shrugged. If Heinz Buckliger didn't already know who'd put Dr. Jahnke up to writing that piece, he was a fool. So far, he hadn't acted like one.

Still…A message revealing in which SS directory all the dirt on “Enough Is Enough” lurked wouldn't hurt. Walther had ways of bouncing such a message through the data system till it became impossible to trace. He used them.

And he was back to working on the new operating system by the time his boss lumbered back into the office. Gustav Priepke stuck his head into Walther's cubicle, saw what he was up to, and nodded approval. “That goddamn Japanese code really will save our asses, won't it?” he said.

“We've got a chance with it, anyhow,” Walther answered.

“Good. Good. That was a hell of a good idea, using it,” Priepke said. Walther started to thank him, but just nodded instead. Unless he misread the signs, his boss had forgotten whose idea it was in the first place. Because it was working so well, Priepke had decided it was his.

Had things been different, Walther wouldn't have let him get away with that. As they were…As they were, if Priepke was angling for fame and glory, he could have them. Walther didn't want them. They were no good to him. The less he was in the public eye, the better he liked it. And if his boss got a bonus and a raise, that was all right, too. The Stutzmans had plenty. They needed no more. No Jew dared be or even think like a money-grubber these days.

“We'll do fine,” Priepke said, as if Walther had denied it. “We'll do just fine.”

“Of course we will,” Walther said.

 

When Gottlieb Stutzman came home for a weekend's leave from his
Hitler Jugend
service, Esther was amazed at how brown and muscular he'd become. “They work us pretty hard,” her son said, scratching at his mustache. That was thicker and more emphatically there than it had been a year before, too. He wasn't a boy any more. He was visibly turning into a man.

“How is it?” Esther fought to keep worry out of her voice. She'd been afraid ever since Gottlieb left the house. She hadn't feared he would be caught, or hadn't feared that any more than usual. He looked like an Aryan. He wasn't circumcised. He had the sense to keep his mouth shut about his dangerous secret.

But in a setting like that, suffused with the propaganda of the state and the
Volk,
what would have been easier than turning his back on the secret? It was a burden he didn't have to carry. Nobody did. If you chose to forget you were a Jew, who could make you remember?

Esther's fear swelled when Gottlieb shrugged and said, “It's not so bad.” But then he went on, “Or it wouldn't be, if I weren't different.” Esther let out a heartfelt sigh of relief. He accepted that difference, then. She'd thought he had, she'd thought he would, but you could never be sure. He gave her a quizzical look. “What was that for?”

“Just because—and don't you forget it,” Esther answered.

“Sure.” Gottlieb, plainly, was humoring his mother. Since he hadn't had much practice, he wasn't very good at it. The doorbell rang. “Who's that?” he asked as Esther started for the door.

“Alicia Gimpel,” Esther answered. “She was going to visit Anna and sleep over tonight. They set it up before we knew you were coming home, and it was a little late to cancel by then. I hope you don't mind?”

“Why should I?” He laughed. “It's not like I'm going to pay any attention to Alicia one way or the other.”

“All right,” Esther said. Gottlieb no doubt admired one pretty
Fräulein
or another. Of course he did—at seventeen, what was he but a hormone with legs? No matter whom he admired, though, if he was as serious as he seemed to be about staying a Jew and passing it on, he would marry another Jew. Seventeen would pay no attention to eleven, but twenty-four might find eighteen very interesting. Seven years, right now, would feel like an eternity to Gottlieb. To Esther, they felt just around the corner.

She opened the door. There were Alicia and Lise. As Ali
cia came in festooned with sleeping bag, change of clothes, and the other impedimenta of a sleepover, Anna bounded down from upstairs to greet her. Through the squeals, Lise said, “It's a shame they don't like each other—tragic, in fact.”

“It is, isn't it?” Esther said. They both smiled: here, for once, was irony that didn't hurt. Esther waved back toward the kitchen. “Come in and have a cup of coffee and say hello to Gottlieb. He got a free weekend and came home to visit.”

Lise followed, but she said, “You should have called. Alicia could have come over some other time.”

“Don't worry about it,” Esther answered. “Gottlieb won't even notice she's here.” Another smile from both of them. Some of the thoughts that had occurred to Esther had surely occurred to Lise, too. The Gimpels had three girls to marry off. They would have started thinking about possibilities a long time ago.

“My goodness, Gottlieb,” Lise Gimpel said. “You're looking very…fit.”

“I sort of have to be,” he answered with a broad-shouldered shrug. “If you can't do what they throw at you, they make your life so nasty, you get into shape just so they'll leave you alone.”

“What are they telling you now that we've got a new
Führer?
” Lise asked him.

He didn't shrug now. He leaned forward; this interested him. “When I first started, it was the same old stuff I'd always got in school,” he said. “But it's changed since then.”

“Well, what are they saying these days?”

“A lot more about what good exercise it is and how we'll make friends we'll keep for the rest of our lives,” Gottlieb said. “A lot less about how it's getting us ready to be soldiers who'll go out and slaughter the
Reich
's enemies. A lot less about our shovels, too.”

Esther frowned. “Your shovels?”

Her son nodded. “In the
Wehrmacht,
it's your rifle. That's what people say, anyhow. In the
Hitler Jugend,
it's our shovels. We have to carry them with us everywhere. We have to keep them polished—the blade and the handle. If you let your shovel get rusty or you lose it, I don't know
what they do to you. Something horrible—I know that. Nobody wants to find out what.”

“Shovels,” Esther repeated. It made sense, of a sort. The Hitler Youth was a dress rehearsal for the Army. Someone who knew how to take care of a shovel and had the discipline to do it—even if the act itself was fundamentally meaningless—would quickly learn how to take care of a rifle and gain the discipline to do it. And that would not be meaningless at all.

“The drillmasters don't yell at us as much as they used to, either,” Gottlieb said. “Of course, we've been in for a while now, too. We know what we need to do. They don't have to yell at us all the time any more.”

“What do you do for fun?” Esther asked.

“Polish our shovels,” Gottlieb answered, deadpan. Esther made a face at him. He grinned. He'd got her, and he knew it. He went on, “A lot of the time, we just sleep when we get the chance. They do run us pretty ragged.”

“You can't sleep all the time,” Esther said, even if that was a risky assumption to make about teenagers.

But Gottlieb didn't deny it. He said, “We read. We listen to the radio—there's no televisor in the barracks. We play cards. We're not supposed to do it for money, but I'm about fifteen Reichsmarks ahead so far.” He looked smug. Then he added, “And there's a
Bund deutscher Mädel
camp about half a kilometer from ours. Some of the guys sneak over there after lights-out.”

There it was, the thing Esther feared. Lots of BdM camps were near those of the
Hitler Jugend
. Surprising numbers—or maybe numbers not so surprising—of BdM girls found themselves pregnant every year, too. “What about you?” she asked, her tone as light as she could make it. If some gentile girl won his heart, or a related piece of his anatomy…

“I haven't. I don't think I will,” he said after due consideration very much like Walther's. “You get into real trouble if they catch you doing that—worse than losing your shovel. And besides, it's like I told Aunt Susanna the night Alicia found out what she is: it just wouldn't be a good idea for me.”

Lise Gimpel smiled. Esther kissed him. She got lipstick on his cheek, but he didn't notice and she didn't care. She wanted to say something like,
You're a very good boy, and I'm prouder than I know how to tell you
. The only thing holding her back was the knowledge that the usual seventeen-year-old male, hearing something of that sort, would go disgrace himself just to take the jinx off.

On the other hand, Gottlieb was not your average seventeen-year-old male. Esther did say it. And Gottlieb proved his sterling qualities: he grinned.

 

Along with the New Orleans Vicki, which currently held pride of place, Anna's bedroom was full of hedgehogs: stuffed cuddly ones, smaller ones made of painted ceramics or bronze, a hedgehog lamp with the switch in his little black nose, even hedgehogs printed on her sheets. Alicia thought it was all a little too much, but she never would have said so. Besides, today she had something else on her mind.

“You're so lucky!” she burst out as soon as they were alone together. “
So
lucky!”

“How come?” Anna asked. “I'm just me, same as I always was.” She never took herself too seriously.

But Alicia had an answer for her: “I'll tell you why—because everybody here knows what you are. You don't have to keep any secrets.”

Her friend nodded, but then started to laugh. “Don't tell that to Gottlieb, that's all I've got to say. He knew for five years before they could tell me, and it was driving him crazy. Crazier.”

“Oh.” Alicia hadn't thought of that. “Well, everybody knows now, anyway. Some of the things Francesca and Roxane say make me want to smack 'em, and I can't, because they'd wonder why.”

“Just pay no attention to them,” Anna told her—easier said than done. She went on, “Gottlieb didn't pay attention to me when I said stupid stuff like that for all those years. Of course, he doesn't pay much attention to me now that I know better, either. I'm just a kid, he says.” Her snort was intended to convey how little older brothers knew.

Alicia didn't know anything about older brothers—or younger brothers, for that matter. She wasn't much interested in learning more, either. The boys in her class were the worst sort of vermin: a poor recommendation for the male half of the species. When she said, “Gottlieb's not
so
bad,” she was offering Anna an enormous concession. She'd known him all her life, after all.

But so had Anna, and at much closer quarters. If no man is a hero to his valet, no boy is to his little sister. “It's—peaceful now that he's off at the
Hitler Jugend
camp most of the time,” Anna said.

“Peaceful,” Alicia echoed. With Gottlieb gone, Anna had her parents all to herself. Alicia tried to imagine what that would be like. She couldn't. She hadn't even been two when Francesca was born. She didn't remember what being an only child was like, and she'd never know now. When she got bigger, she was the one who'd leave for a BdM camp. Her little sisters would get more attention from Mommy and Daddy, which hardly seemed fair.

“Here, let's do this,” Anna said. The game that followed ended up involving the Vicki, several of the stuffed hedgehogs—including a big one who was bright red and had a devil's horns and pitchfork—an imaginary and magical snowstorm, and the willow tree that grew just outside Anna's window. In the summertime, when it had all its leaves, the willow was full of peeping finches and warblers; woodpeckers scuttled along the bigger branches and drummed as they drilled their way after caterpillars. Now the branches and twigs were bare. Still, a house sparrow perched on one and peered into the bedroom with beady black eyes.

“Look!” Alicia pointed at the sparrow. “It's an SS bird.” It got incorporated into the game, which had been short of villains up till then.

They groaned when Anna's mother called them down to supper.
Frau
Stutzman put Alicia between Anna and Gottlieb at the table, the same way a nuclear engineer would put cadmium between two uranium bricks. “So,” Gottlieb said, his voice very much a man's, “how do you like being one of us?”