In the Presence of Mine Enemies (24 page)

“Sure as hell, we'll hear more crap about the first edition,” another SS man predicted gloomily. “If we'd had
our
way, we'd've knocked that stinking nonsense over the head once and for all.”

“That's about the size of it,” the
Sturmbannführer
—the most senior man at the table—agreed. “But the
Wehrmacht
wouldn't play ball with us, and so we got stuck with this asshole.”

A fragment of Latin went through Heinrich's head.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
Who
would
watch the watchmen? The SS was and always had been a law unto itself. Maybe, between them, the rest of the Party and the
Wehrmacht
could keep it in check. And, by all the signs, the SS itself had split on a candidate to replace Kurt Haldweim. That seemed promising. If no one else could, maybe some of the watchmen would keep an eye on the rest.

“He's young, too.” The bruiser sounded depressed at the prospect.

“Well, maybe—” But the
Sturmbannführer
broke off. What
had
he been about to say?
Maybe he won't live to get old?
No, that wasn't the sort of thing to blurt out in a crowded restaurant. Had Heinrich wanted to say it, he couldn't imagine anyone but Lise whom he trusted enough to hear it. Even as things were, the blackshirts had run their mouths far more than he thought wise.

He looked at his watch. “Getting on towards one o'clock,” he said. “We'd better head back to the office.” Willi looked at him as if he'd lost his mind, or possibly started speaking Chinese. He wanted to hang around and
listen to the SS men. That was exactly why Heinrich wanted to leave. He kicked his friend in the ankle under the table. Reluctantly, Willi left his chair. Heinrich paid the bill. They left the restaurant together.

Once out on the sidewalk, Willi practically exploded with excitement. “Did you hear them?” he demanded. “Did you
hear
them? Practically talking treason, right there in Admiral Yamamoto's!”

“Don't be silly. How can SS men talk treason?” Heinrich said. “What they want is what the state wants. And if you don't believe me, just ask them.”

“Ha!” Willi said. “I didn't know you were such a funny fellow.”

“I wasn't joking.”

“I know. That only makes it funnier, but you have to look at it the right way to see it.” Willi walked along for a while, whistling a tune from the new show about a theater owner who wanted an excuse to close down his firetrap of a house, booked a dreadful play about the evil machinations of Churchill and Stalin, and found to his horror that it was bad enough to become a comedy smash. The show itself was a comedy smash in Berlin, too, and had already spawned several companies touring the rest of the
Reich
. After a block or so, Willi stopped whistling—a mercy, because he was flat. He said, “Well, I hate to admit it, but you were right.”

“About what? Getting out of Yamamoto's? You bet I was.”

“No, no, no.” Willi impatiently shook his head. “About that piece in the
Beobachter
this morning. If those bastards don't like it, there's got to be more to it than I thought. Buckliger does need to take a good long look at our underpinnings after all.” A girl with nice legs came toward them. Willi said not a word about her underpinnings. Heinrich knew then that his friend was serious. After a few more steps, Willi added, “You may have been right about something else, too.”

“What, twice in one day?” Heinrich said. “Such compliments you pay me. I've caught up with a stopped clock.”

“No, you haven't, because this other one was a while ago.” Willi waited to make sure Heinrich was suitably chas
tened, then went on, “If our lovely luncheon companions don't care for the first edition, it's probably got something going for it, too.”

“You never said anything like that before.” Heinrich didn't try to hide his surprise.

“That's because I thought it was a load of garbage before,” Willi answered. “But if those
Schweinehunde
think the same thing…then they're wrong, and that means I must be wrong, too.”

Heinrich made as if to feel his forehead. “You must be feverish, is what you must be. Saying I'm right? Saying you're wrong? Delirium, if you ask me.”

“Get away from me.” Willi sidestepped to escape Heinrich, and almost bumped into a man wearing the light blue of a
Luftwaffe
official. They made mutual apologies. The
Luftwaffe
man kept going up the street, towards Admiral Yamamoto's. Willi looked back over his shoulder. “I
am
in a state. I can't help wondering if that fellow's on his way to plot with the thugs in black shirts.”

That hadn't even occurred to Heinrich. “If you see plotters behind every potted plant, they're going to put you in a rubber room, you know.”

“Not if the plotters are really there,” Willi said. “Was Hitler wrong when he said everybody ganged up on Germany after the First World War? No, because everybody really did. You only get in trouble when you see things that aren't there.”

“Right.” Heinrich knew when arguing with Willi was more trouble than it was worth. This looked to be one of those times.

When they got back to
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht,
Ilse came up to them and said, “Excuse me, Willi, but you got another call from your wife.” She rolled her eyes to show what she thought of that. The secretary was supposed to call Willi
Herr
Dorsch. That she didn't made Heinrich Gimpel want to roll his eyes. She did address Willi as
Sie
rather than using the intimate
du,
but she sounded as if she were using
du
even when she wasn't.

“What did Erika want?” Willi asked. “Do I want to know?”

Ilse pouted. Willi's eyes lit up. The Berlin rolls roiled in Heinrich's stomach. Ilse said, “She wouldn't leave a message—just told me to tell you to call her back. And she said she wondered why I was there when you weren't. That wasn't very nice.”

Scowling, Willi said, “I'll call her. I don't know what I'll call her, but I'll call her.” Ilse thought that was very funny. Heinrich retreated to his desk. He'd never seen financial statements look so alluring.

But, however much the numbers beckoned, he couldn't avoid hearing Willi's side of the conversation—if a shouting match could be dignified by the term. The longer it went on, the louder and angrier Willi got. At last, he slammed down the phone.
“Scheisse,”
he muttered.

Heinrich felt like saying the same thing. If Willi and Erika were fighting, she'd be looking for a shoulder to cry on, and the first shoulder she was likely to look for was his. His shoulder wouldn't be the only thing she was looking for, either. He stared up to the heavens—or at least to the sound-deadening tiles and fluorescent panels of the ceiling. What red-blooded man wouldn't want a beautiful blonde in hot pursuit of him? Heinrich didn't, and he had one. Most of the men who would have liked nothing better had to do without. If that wasn't unfair, he couldn't imagine what would be.

 

“
Guten Morgen,
Dr. Dambach,” Esther Stutzman called as she walked into the pediatrician's office.

“
Guten Morgen, Frau
Stutzman.” Dambach's voice floated out from the back. “How are you today?”

“I'm fine, thanks. How are you?” Esther answered. He didn't ask her to help him set the coffeemaker to rights, which had to mean he hadn't tried messing with it before she got there. She took a look. Sure enough, it wasn't even plugged in. She loaded it with water and ground coffee and put in a filter. “I'm making coffee, Dr. Dambach,” she called. “Would you like some when it's ready?”

“Ja, bitte,”
he said. “Somehow, you always get it just right.”

“I'm glad you like it,” she said, in lieu of calling him a
thumb-fingered idiot. He wasn't an idiot, and she knew it. He was a very sharp man; she could wish he were less so. But, whenever he got near a coffeemaker, thumb-fingered he definitely was. Before long, she brought him a steaming foam cup. “Here you are, Doctor.”

“Danke schön.”
Dambach sipped. “Yes, that's very good. And you know just how much sugar I take, too.”

“I should, by now.” Esther lingered for a moment, wondering if he felt like making small talk. Sometimes he did; more often he didn't. When he picked up the coffee cup again, she slipped back to her station and looked at the morning's appointments. When she saw Paul Klein's name on the list, she grimaced. If only she'd thought to look in Eduard's chart….

She tried not to think about that as she checked the computer to see whose bills were overdue. She printed out polite dunning letters for those whose first notice this was, sterner ones for people getting a second reminder, and letters threatening legal action for two dedicated deadbeats. She happened to know Dr. Dambach had never sued anybody, but with a little luck the people who hadn't paid him wouldn't.

She took the letters in to him for his signature. She could have made the squiggle that passed for that signature at least as well herself, but that wasn't how things were done. “Oh, the Schmidts,” Dambach muttered when he came to one of the strongest letters. “I just heard they bought themselves a new Mercedes—and they paid cash.”

“Oh, dear,” Esther said. “Maybe you really ought to talk to your lawyer, then.”

The pediatrician shook his head. “I don't want to have anything to do with the courts, not if I can help it. Whether you're right or you're wrong, you go into court a pig and you come out a sausage. I'd rather do without the fee. But seeing the Schmidts spend their money on everything but their bills does sometimes tempt me to prescribe ipecac for their brat.”

Esther laughed; she knew he was even less likely to do something like that than he was to sue. Take his anger out on a child? Impossible. Unthinkable. But what if he found
out a child he treated was a Jew? She had no doubt he would call the authorities, and never lose a moment's sleep afterwards worrying about what happened to it or to its family. He was conscientious, law-abiding—a good German.

She took the signed letters and made envelopes for them. The stamps she used were black-and-white mourning issues for Kurt Haldweim. As she put them on one by one, she wondered about the folk among whom she lived—something else she'd done many times before. Germans were the sort of people who would stay on the path and off the grass in a park even if someone was shooting a machine gun at them.

And yet…A lot of the Jews surviving in Berlin were there because Germans had helped their parents or grandparents get false papers during the war. Without the right papers, life in the
Reich
had been impossible even so long ago. They'd been easier to get then, when enemy bombs sent records up in smoke and replacements were issued without many awkward questions. More than a few friends and neighbors had vouched for Jews, and some of them, discovered, had paid for their kindness with years in prison or with life itself.

And some Jews in Nazi hands had kept themselves alive—for a while—by going out onto the streets of Berlin and capturing other Jews still free. Set them in the scales against the brave Germans and it taught you…what? Esther sighed. Only what anyone with a gram of sense already knew: that there were good Jews and bad Jews, in proportions not much different from those of any other folk.

The door to the outer office opened. Esther looked at the clock in surprise. Was it nine already? It really was. In came a squat, heavyset woman with jowls and protruding eyes. She looked like nothing so much as a bulldog. And her seven-year-old daughter, poor thing, might have been her in miniature.

“Good morning,
Frau
Bauriedl,” Esther said. “And how is Wilhelmina today?”

“Well, that's what I want the doctor to see,”
Frau
Bauriedl answered.

She brought Wilhelmina in every couple of weeks regardless of whether anything was really wrong with the little girl. Dr. Dambach tried to discourage her, but he hadn't had much luck. She did pay her bills on time; neither Esther nor any of the other receptionists had ever had to send her even the most polite letter.

The telephone rang. “Excuse me,” Esther said, glad for an excuse not to have to talk to
Frau
Bauriedl. She picked up the handset. “Dr. Dambach's office.”

“
Frau
Stutzman?” The woman on the other end of the line waited for Esther to agree that she was herself, then went on, “This is Maria Klein,
Frau
Stutzman. I'm…I'm afraid I'm going to have to cancel Paul's appointment this morning. You see, we are under investigation for something…something of which we are certainly not guilty. Good-bye.” She hung up.