In the Presence of Mine Enemies (31 page)

His boss nodded. “If you're on the trail of something, keep after it. I'll have an extra hot dog for you.” Off he went—and, knowing him, he'd probably have two.

Walther waited till more people went off to lunch, whether at the American place—it was called, for no reason he could see, the Greasy Spoon—or somewhere else. When the big room that held his cubicle had quieted down, he used one of those access codes he wasn't supposed to have. This one took him to an archive of the
Führer
's speeches. He wanted to—and he was convinced he needed to—find out just what Heinz Buckliger had said at Nuremberg, because it had so many people hopping.

The Nuremberg speech was there in the menu, sure enough. When he tried to call it up, though, it demanded another authorization code from him, one with a much higher security level. He blinked. He'd never seen anything like that before, not for a speech. He knew the second code, but hadn't imagined he would have to use it. What
had
Buckliger been talking about? Nuclear bombs and missile design?

Even after he entered the authorization code, the system hesitated before it coughed up the text of the
Führer
's speech. He got ready to bail out in a hurry and cover his tracks. But then the speech did come up. If someone—or something electronic—was making special note of his presence, none of his own tools for detecting such things sensed it.

He quickly scrolled through the speech to see how long it was. When he did, he got another surprise. It seemed to go on forever. The
Führer
had the privilege of length, of course. Had any ruler of the Third
Reich
ever used it so extravagantly as Heinz Buckliger had here, though? Maybe the
Völkischer Beobachter
hadn't published it because it would have filled two days' editions.

Walther started to read. He couldn't go through the
whole speech in detail, as he'd intended. It was just too damned long; he wouldn't have been halfway through by the time his boss got back from the Greasy Spoon. So he skimmed—and even skimming was plenty to make him sit up and take notice.

Buckliger came right out and said things that everybody knew but that nobody—certainly not the
Führer
—ever talked about. What had Lothar Prützmann and the rest of the leaders of the SS thought when he declared, “For far too long, this state has been founded on one thing and one thing only: terror”? If that didn't infuriate them…

If that didn't infuriate them, the speech had plenty of other things to do the job. The new
Führer
said that all his predecessors, from Hitler on, had received reverence as if they were gods, “but they are only men, with all the failings to which men are heir.” Walther found himself nodding. That seemed obvious when you came out and said it—but who in the nearly eighty years of the
Reich
's history
had
come out and said it? Nobody—and a ruling
Führer
least of all.

And Heinz Buckliger had also said, “Force can win victories, but force alone cannot maintain them forever without more expense than Germany can readily afford.” If that didn't fly in the face of everything the
Reich
had stood for since the early days, what did?

With each new bombshell, Walther wanted to slow down and read more carefully. He knew he couldn't, not with his boss and his colleagues coming back soon, not if he wanted to see as much of what was there as possible. But he wanted to.

If he had slowed down, he wouldn't have come to the question the new
Führer
asked near the end of the speech: “If everything we say about Aryan descent is true, how do we explain the recent rapid progress of the Japanese, who have not mingled their blood with Aryan stock any time recently?”

How Buckliger answered that question, Walther didn't find out; he had to get the speech off his monitor because the room started filling up again. But that the
Führer
thought to ask it said more than any answer could. No, they couldn't very well publish this speech. The country wasn't ready. And Walther would have bet anything he owned that the Party and SS
Bonzen
who'd listened to it at Nuremberg hadn't been, either.

H
EINRICH
G
IMPEL HAD TRIED THE
G
REASY
S
POON BEFORE
, and hadn't been much impressed. No matter how trendy the American place was, he didn't like the food all that much. But if Richard and Maria Klein wanted to go there to celebrate, he and Lise weren't about to tell them no. The Kleins had reason to celebrate. The Security Police didn't call off an investigation every day, not when they were trying to find out if you were a Jew.

“I wish we could throw a proper party at home,” Maria said. She'd been thin and pale to begin with, and the troubles of the past few months had only made her thinner and paler. She had a very nice smile, though, even when she shrugged and said, “You know how things are liable to be.”

“Oh, yes.” Heinrich nodded. So did Lise. If the authorities were still looking for evidence, what better way to get it than to fill the Kleins' house with microphones and listen to everything they said—and, if they did throw a party, to everything their friends said, too?

Richard took a big bite out of his cheeseburger. He had a musician's hands, all right: long, clever fingers, the tips slightly spatulate from endless hours of practice. He said, “I don't have any idea what finally made them quit. They just said, ‘All right, we're done. Go on about your business. Doesn't look like you are what we thought you were.'” He had too much sense to say
Jew
where anyone who wasn't might hear. Grinning with relief, he sipped from a mug of beer.

“Was it your lawyer?” Lise asked. “From what Susanna says, he's a tiger.”

The Kleins shrugged in unison. “He made a lot of noise, I'll say that for him,” Maria answered. “I don't know how much real good he did, though.”

A girl in what was supposed to be an American waitress's outfit from before the Third World War came up to the table. “Hi!” she said—the standard server's greeting at the Greasy Spoon. She returned to German to ask, “Would you like some dessert? Cherry pie, maybe, or brownies?”

“We're not quite ready yet,” Heinrich said.

“Okay,” she said brightly, doing her best to project old-time American enthusiasm. “I'll come back later, then.” Away she went. Heinrich wondered whether waitresses in the United States had really worn clothes like that. Wouldn't the customers have been too distracted to order?

“I think maybe the lawyer helped,” Richard said. “It helped that we had the nerve to hire one. That told them that we really hadn't done what they said we had.”

“Good,” Heinrich said. “
Danken Gott dafür
.” He still wondered what the authorities had been thinking. A lot of times, they arrested people just because they felt like arresting them, not because the people had actually done something. Things did seem looser under Buckliger than they had under Kurt Haldweim, but were they loose enough for the powers that be to let Jews slip through their fingers? Heinrich had his doubts.

But the Kleins were here. Maria nodded. “Thank God for that is right,” she said softly. And if she thought about God in a way different from that of most citizens of the
Reich
—well, who could know by the way she looked or what she said when strangers might hear? Nobody. Nobody at all.

Lise also spoke quietly: “How is Paul?”

“He's no better. He's not going to get better.” Richard Klein spoke through clenched teeth. “They brought in specialists who know a lot more about this disease than Dr. Dambach does. They all say the same thing. When he gets worse, the Mercy Center will be a—a kindness.”

“He's still happy, though,” Maria said. “He's not too bad, and he's too little to know something's wrong with him.”

“That's the one mercy we have,” Richard agreed. “He doesn't know anything is wrong. But we do.” He lifted the seidel of beer, drained it, and waved for a refill. The waitress brought it to him, then swayed off to get something for someone else.

Heinrich watched her. He would have needed to be blind not to watch her. Lise watched him watching her. “Come here often for lunch?” she asked.

“Me? No. It's not close enough to where I work.” Heinrich enjoyed sounding virtuous. “As a matter of fact, Walther Stutzman told me about this place.”

But Lise and Maria Klein stared at him. “Walther?” his wife said in astonishment. He and Lise were happily married. By all appearances, Richard and Maria got on well, too. But the Stutzmans were like two sides of one coin. Lise plainly had trouble imagining Walther coming to a restaurant where the waitresses were as big a part of the attraction as the food.

Taking pity on her, Heinrich said, “His boss has brought him here. Sometimes you can't say no.” He ate some french fries. They were hot and salty, and certainly lived up to the name of the place.

“He says that's how he got here, anyway,” Richard Klein said, his voice sly. “I bet he was just kicking and screaming when his boss dragged him in.” He was waitress-watching, too.

Maria looked at Lise. “What are we going to do with them?”

“Well, we've had them for a while by now,” Lise answered. “I don't suppose they'd bring much if we traded them in on new models.”

“Mm—maybe not.” By the way Maria said it, it was one of those unfortunate, inconvenient facts you just couldn't get around.

Heinrich finished his burger and fries. “If Americans eat like this all the time, why don't they all weigh two hundred kilos?” he said. “I feel like I swallowed a boulder.”

Richard nodded. “Me, too,” he said. But when the waitress came back and asked about dessert again, they both ordered cherry pie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream
slapped on top. So did their wives. Away went the waitress, cheerful as could be.

“
Now
I get it,” Lise said. “They wear what they're almost wearing to get the men to order more.” Heinrich wouldn't have been surprised if she was right, no matter what he'd thought a little while earlier about distractions. He hadn't been too distracted to lay out some extra Reichsmarks, had he?

He found the only defense he could: “You wanted dessert, too, sweetheart, and I don't suppose the girl's clothes had anything to do with that.”

Richard Klein clapped his hands. “That's good. I wish I could come up with snappy comebacks like that.”

“Don't,” Heinrich told him. “They usually just get you in trouble.”

“Listen to him,” Maria said. “This is a man who's been married longer than you have. He knows what's what.”

The waitress came back with a tray heavy with desserts. The two couples dug in. Sure enough, Heinrich made his pie disappear. Nor was he the only one facing an empty dessert plate with an expression of disbelief. “You don't need to put me on the train tonight,” he said. “You can just roll me home.”

“Me, too,” Lise said. “Did I really do that? Tell me I didn't.”

“If you didn't, then we didn't, either,” Richard said. “Let's pretend the whole thing never happened.”

Everybody laughed. Heinrich put money on the table, including an extra Reichsmark or two in appreciation of the waitress's outfit. As he walked out of the Greasy Spoon, he said, “I'm glad everything turned out all right,” from the bottom of his heart. Then, because he was who and what he was, he added, “I wonder why it did.”

Lise sent him the sort of look she always did when he came out with something like that, the look that said she wished he had better sense than to open his big mouth that way. But Richard Klein only laughed and clapped him on the back. “Hell, Heinrich,” he said, “so do I.”

 

Alicia Gimpel repeated the nonsense-sounding syllables that her father had had her memorize:
“Sh'ma yisroayl adonoi elohaynu adonoi ekhod.”

“That's right. That's just right.” Her father nodded. “You've got the
Sh'ma
down very well. And do you remember what the words mean?”

“‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one,'” Alicia said.

“That's right, too,” her father said. “That's the most important prayer we have. It should be the last thing you ever say if, God forbid, there's a time when you have to say a last thing. We few are all that's left of Israel these days. We have to keep it going.”

“I know.” Alicia liked learning things in the secret language, the nearly dead language. It strengthened the feeling of belonging to a special club. “Show me the other thing again,” she urged.

Her father frowned, which made him look even more serious than he usually did. “All right,” he said, “but you've got to be especially careful with this. You can't let your sisters see it, not ever, and you've always got to scratch over it or tear it up into little pieces before you throw it out. That's because it says just what we are if anybody recognizes it.”

“I understand. I promise.” Alicia started to cross her heart, but then checked herself with the motion only half done. If she was a Jew, the cross didn't count for anything, did it? So many things to think about…

With careful attention, her father drew—wrote—four curious characters on a piece of paper:
. “This says
adonoi
—it's the name of God. Now you do it.” He handed her the pen. She started to:
. He set his hand on hers, stopping her. “No, that's not right. Remember what I told you?”

“What do you mean? They look just like the ones you made.” But then Alicia did remember. “Oh. I'm sorry. I started from the wrong end again, didn't I?” Her father lifted up his hand. She began again, writing a
, a
, a
, and then another
. “Why does it go from right to left instead of from left to right, Daddy?”