In the Presence of Mine Enemies (44 page)

The coffee hadn't had time to get cold before the tele
phone rang. He picked it up. “Analysis section, Heinrich Gimpel speaking.”

“
Guten Morgen, Herr
Gimpel,” an American-accented voice said. “Charlie Cox here.
Wie geht's mit Ihnen?
”

“I'm fine, thanks,” Heinrich answered automatically. Then he blinked. “It's not morning where you are,
Herr
Cox. It's still the middle of last night. Are you up early or up late?”

“Late,” Cox said easily. “I wanted to ask you something unofficial.”

“Well, go ahead,” Heinrich told him. “Of course, an answer to a question like that is worth its weight in gold.”

“Aber natürlich,”
Cox said. He knew the answer wouldn't really be unofficial, then. By the nature of things, it couldn't be. That meant the “unofficial” question wasn't, either. Cox proceeded to ask it: “Just exactly how serious is
Herr
Buckliger about reforming the National Socialist system?”

“That's a good question,” Heinrich said. He could see why the American and his leaders wanted to find out. A lot of other people in the Germanic Empire and in the Greater German
Reich
wanted to find out, too. Heinrich wouldn't have been surprised if Heinz Buckliger were one of them. He went on, “The only thing I can tell you, though, is that I don't know.”

“Unofficially, dammit.” Charlie Cox sounded annoyed.

You idiot. Don't you think there's a bug on this phone? Someone will be listening to you—and to me—if not right this second, then when he plays a tape
. Aloud, Heinrich replied, “Official or unofficial, you'd get the same answer from me. Come on, Charlie. Use your head.”
You'd better
. “I'm not at the level that makes policy. All I do is carry it out.”

“The
Führer
talks to you,” Cox said.

So that news had got across the Atlantic, had it? Either it had spread more widely than Heinrich thought or the Americans had better spies than Intelligence gave them credit for. That wasn't Heinrich's immediate worry, though. He said, “For heaven's sake, he just asked me for a few figures so
he
could set policy. That's what the
Führerprinzip
is all about.”

“Ja,”
Cox agreed. “But if he likes the first edition as much as he says he does, how much does he care about the
Führerprinzip?
”

A lot of people in the Empire and in the
Reich
were also wondering about that. “I'm very sorry,” Heinrich said, “but I still don't know. If you want advice—”

“I'll take whatever you give me,” the American broke in. “You've always seemed like a decent fellow.”

Are you naive enough to assume that about anyone in the
Reich,
or do you think I'm naive enough to be flattered?
In a way, Heinrich
was
flattered, but not in a way that would do Cox any good. He said, “The only real advice I can give you is, wait and see. What the
Führer
does will show you exactly what he has in mind.”

“I was hoping for a little advance warning.” But he must have realized he wouldn't get it from Heinrich. With what might have been either a sigh or a yawn, he said, “All right. I'm going on home to bed. Thanks for your time,
Herr
Gimpel.” He hung up.

So did Heinrich, with quite unnecessary force. Willi said, “Sounded like somebody was trying to get something out of you.”

“An American,” Heinrich said. “I think I'd better write up a report.” If he did, the people surely monitoring the line would have less reason to read disloyalty into anything he'd said. As he began to type, though, he wondered how much good it would do. If the powers that be decided he was disloyal, they wouldn't worry about evidence. They'd invent some or do without and just get rid of him.

Will they, under this
Führer
?
That Heinrich could wonder said how much things had changed—and how much they hadn't.

 

Walther Stutzman was a straight-thinking, rational man. He had to be, to make himself a success at the Zeiss computer works. Every so often, though, he found himself bemused by what he and a few others did—had to do—to keep themselves hidden from the all-too-nearly omniscient eye of the state.

Hitler had thundered that there was a Jewish conspiracy
against the German
Volk,
against the
Reich
. At the time, he'd been talking through his hat. The Jews hadn't been plotting against Germany. Most of the Jews
in
Germany had thought of themselves as being as German as anybody else. Now, on the other hand…

Now the handful of Jews remaining in Berlin, in Germany as a whole, had to conspire against the
Reich
if they wanted to go on breathing. Hitler's extermination camps had had the ironic effect of calling into being what hadn't existed when he started making speeches. Even now, it wasn't the sort of conspiracy he meant. It didn't aim to take over the
Reich,
just to hide the few surviving Jews from it. But a conspiracy it undoubtedly was.

Here sat Walther, controlling computer codes that would have earned him a bullet in the back of the neck if anyone knew he had them. Some of the codes erased his tracks after he'd used others, which made discovering him harder. Over at
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht,
Heinrich Gimpel kept his ear to the ground. There was a Jew in a fairly high place in the Foreign Ministry. There were even three or four in the SS. Walther had helped create false pedigrees for a couple of them. The others he just knew about; he wasn't sure how they'd established their bona fides. His own work there still worried him. If it unraveled, so much was liable to unravel with it. Several other important ministries also held a Jew or two.

When a Jew in one place heard something that might be important, others soon found out about it. A chief undersecretary or a deputy assistant minister could meet with a friend at dinner or telephone a colleague in another ministry—sometimes not a Jew himself, but someone who could be expected to spread the news to the Jew who needed to know it. Heinrich said the American phrase was a grapevine. That fit well enough.

And that chief undersecretary or deputy assistant minister sometimes got to propose a policy that—purely by chance, of course (of course!)—made things a little easier, a little safer, for the Jews. Or, bureaucracy being what it was, one of those functionaries could sometimes ignore or soften a directive that might have hurt his people. Very
often, one bad scheme blocked was worth three good ones started.

A Jewish conspiracy at the heart of the
Reich
. Hitler would have had kittens. He would have ordered all the Jews killed, and made horrible examples of the Germans who'd missed them. Walther thought of knives and piano-wire nooses. Himmler would have killed the Jews and made examples of some Germans, too, but he would have got rid of them more humanely. Kurt Haldweim would have got rid of the Jews and reprimanded, maybe demoted, the Germans.

Heinz Buckliger? Walther scratched his head. He didn't know. He didn't dare find out. Who would dare, when the consequences for being wrong were so irrevocable? For the first time in his life, though, he could think of the
Führer
without a shudder right afterwards.

“Hey, Walther! What are you doing in there?”

The booming voice jerked him out of his reverie. “Nothing much, boss,” he answered honestly, hiding a start, too. “Just woolgathering, I'm afraid.”

“You?” Gustav Priepke boomed laughter. “That'll be the day. Listen, something's come up, and I need you to take a shot at it.”

Walther had told the truth, and Priepke hadn't believed him. That was what he got for having a reputation for working hard. If he'd had a name for doing nothing, he could have been working on six things at once and his boss wouldn't have believed that, either. He did his best to look bright and attentive, even if he didn't feel that way. “What is it?” he asked.

“The new operating system—what else?” Priepke answered. “We've got to make it work, or else.” He didn't say or else what, but he didn't have to. The project was long overdue. That it was so long overdue made it harder, too.

“Well, there is one obvious answer we haven't tried yet,” Walther said.

“What's that?” his boss asked. “I thought we'd done all the obvious things.”

Walther shook his head. “No, there's one thing we haven't done that could save us a lot of time.” Priepke let
out an interrogative grunt. Walther said, “We could see how much Japanese code we can steal or adapt.”

“
Donnerwetter!
” Gustav Priepke looked at him as if he'd suggested turning every
Ratskeller
in the
Reich
into a sushi bar. “What a bastardly idea! What the Japs know about real programming—”

“Is just what we need right now,” Walther broke in.

“Jesus Christ!” Priepke said harshly. “You know what Hitler said about the Japs in
Mein Kampf
. If they didn't have Aryans to steal ideas from, their culture would freeze solid again like
that
.” He snapped his fingers.

“Do you want to talk about politics or computers?” Walther asked. “I don't care about politics. I don't care at all. What I care about are computers. The Japanese have some ideas we can use, and I think we can extract them without too much trouble. Which counts for more, ideology or the operating system?”

“You wouldn't have dared talk like that in Himmler's time, let alone Hitler's.”

“Oh, yes, I would,” Walther said. “The Russians had a terrific panzer in the Second World War. The T-34 was better than anything we brought against it, but we had better crews, so we won. Our next panzer, the Panther, borrowed—stole—all sorts of ideas from the T-34. The designers didn't care who built it. All they cared about was that it was a good machine.”

His boss grunted again, this time meditatively. Then he said, “What if the code's got traps in it?”

“If we can't find them, are we really smarter than the Japanese?” Walther asked.

One more grunt. Priepke said, “I can't decide that on my own. I don't want the Security Police landing on us with both feet half an hour after we start.” He stormed away from Walther's cubicle.

Walther wondered whether he should have kept his mouth shut. Would the Security Police start asking him nasty questions now? All he'd wanted was to do the job the people set over him told him to do. Was that too much to hope for? Maybe it was.
No good deed goes unpunished,
he thought sourly.

Gustav Priepke didn't come back for more than an hour. That worried Walther, too. Had he got his boss in trouble? Or was the trouble waiting for
him
instead? He relaxed—a little—when Priepke did return. The big, burly man gave him a comic-opera Oriental bow. “Velly good. We tly that,” he said in what he imagined was Japanese-accented German.

Walther made a face. “I wish I'd never suggested it,” he said. Priepke laughed. He thought Walther was kidding, as he'd been. Walther knew too well he wasn't.

 

A chilly wind blew through Stahnsdorf. Rain was coming, but it hadn't got there yet. Inside the Gimpels' house, everything was warm and cozy. Heinrich moved at his wife's direction, putting this away and dusting that. He didn't move fast enough to suit her. “What's the matter?” she asked. “The Dorsches haven't been over in a while. Don't you feel like playing bridge?”

“It's not that,” Heinrich said, and it wasn't. He was always ready to play bridge.

“What is it, then?” Before Lise went on, she looked around to make sure the girls were out of earshot. “Erika making you nervous?”

“Ha,” he said in a hollow voice. Erika damn well did make him nervous. He hadn't said a word about running into her at Ulbricht's. He still didn't know what to think about that. The doorbell rang. He wasn't going to get a chance to decide now.

Lise was closer, so she opened the door. They all hugged and said hello and asked about children and said how glad they were to see one another. With a flourish, Willi handed Lise his usual offering of a bottle of wine. “Open it now,” he said. “When we make mistakes at the bridge table, we always need something to blame them on.”

Erika opened her mouth. Heinrich knew exactly what she was going to say. He didn't feel like having the sniping start before the Dorsches even got out of the front hall. Since he didn't, he forestalled her, asking, “How are—things?”