In the Presence of Mine Enemies (51 page)

If he wasn't going to go forward and do what she ob
viously wanted him to do, he should have turned on his heel and got out of there as fast as he could. He realized that later. At the moment, captivated if not quite captured, he simply stared. “Where's your sister?” he blurted.

Erika laughed musically. She sat up, which put even more of her on display as the lingerie gave ground. “You were the one who said she'd be here,” she answered. “I never did.”

Heinrich thought back. She was right. He'd assumed what he wanted to assume. Maybe she'd let him—no, she'd certainly let him—do that, but she hadn't lied. The collar of his uniform shirt felt much too tight. “I'd better go,” he muttered—the first half-smart thing he'd said, and it wasn't any better than half-smart.

“Don't be silly. You just got here.” Erika patted the couch by her. “Sit down. Make yourself at home. Have something to drink.”

He didn't. “This is…” He cast about for a word. He didn't take long to find one. “This is ridiculous. What on earth do you want with me?”

“About what you'd expect,” she answered. “Do I have to draw you a picture? I don't think so—you're smart. And you're
gemütlich
. You're…not bad-looking.” He almost laughed. Even she couldn't push it any further than that. Then venom filled her voice as she went on, “And Willi's a two-timing asshole. So why not?”

She leaned forward to pick up one of the flutes. A pink nipple appeared for a moment as the lace shifted. Then it vanished again. Heinrich hadn't added a memory to the
things I'm glad I saw even if I wasn't supposed to
file since he was sixteen. He did now.

“Why not?” Erika repeated, this time making it a serious question. “Who'd know? Nobody but us, and I'd get some of my own back. Willi's probably out fucking that little whore right now.”

So he was. Heinrich knew that, where Erika only suspected it. But she'd asked him why not, and he thought he owed her an answer. That was also, at best, half-smart. Again, he didn't realize it till later. His thinking, just then,
was less sharp than it might have been. He said, “I love my wife. I don't want to do anything to hurt her.”

Erika laughed at him. “You sound like a script from the Propaganda Ministry—except I happen to know that every Propaganda Minister from Goebbels on has screwed around on his wife whenever he got the chance. So where does that leave you?”

“Say whatever you want,” he answered. “I don't think this is a good idea.”

“No? Part of you does.” Erika wasn't looking at his face.

Heinrich intended to have a good long talk with that part, too. The trouble was, it talked back. Unhappily, he said, “Find some other way to get even with Willi. Find some way to make him happy, if you can, and for him to make you happy, too. I know the two of you used to be.”

Her eyes flashed. “You don't know as much as you think you do.”

“Who ever does, when it's somebody else's marriage?” Heinrich said reasonably—he was reasonable most of the time, even when being reasonable wasn't. “But that's how it looked from the outside.”

“I don't care how it looked,” Erika said. “And I didn't ask you to come over here to tell you stories about my miserable marriage.”

“No, you asked me to come over here so you could blow holes in it—and in mine,” Heinrich said.

“Mine's already got holes in it,” Erika said. Heinrich waited to see if she'd add anything about his. She didn't. Instead, she went on, “I asked you to come over so I could forget about mine for a little while.”

She wouldn't forget hers. Heinrich was blind to many things that went on around him, but not to that. If this went forward, Willi would be in the back of her mind—or more likely the front of her mind—every second. She'd be gloating and laughing at him with every kiss, with every caress. Didn't she see as much herself?

He thought about asking her. While he thought, Erika lost patience. “Heinrich,” she said in a voice more imperious than seductive, “are you going to make love to me or not?”

He had to fight the giggles. They wouldn't do just now. What she reminded him of was a
Hitler Jugend
physical-training instructor who'd always bawled out, “Well, are you going to push yourselves or not?”

“Well?” she said when he didn't answer right away. He bit down hard on the inside of his cheek. The giggles were very close.

He had to say something. What came out was, “I'm sorry, Erika.”

“Sorry?” The heat that might have been passion turned to fury. One way or another, it
would
come out. “You think you're sorry now?
I'll
make you sorry, God damn you! Get out of here!” She grabbed the empty champagne flute and threw it at him. He ducked. It smashed against the wall behind him. He beat a hasty retreat as she reached for the full one. That got him in the seat of the pants. It didn't break till it hit the floor.

He had his greatcoat and cap on (the cap askew) and was out the door before he realized he had a wet spot back there. He shrugged. The coat would cover it till he got back to the office, and then he could sit on it till it dried. All things considered, he would rather have eaten lunch.

L
ISE
G
IMPEL KNEW SOMETHING WAS WRONG WHEN
H
EINRICH
poured himself a healthy slug of schnapps as soon as he got home from the office. He didn't do that on days when things went well. Then he'd have a bottle of beer, if he had anything at all. But when she asked him what the trouble was, he jumped as if she'd poked him with a pin. “Nothing,” he said quickly: much too quickly.

She paused, wondering where to go from there—wondering whether to go anywhere from there. But what he'd said and the way he'd said it were too blatant to ignore. She picked her words with care: “You don't lie to me much. When you do, you aren't very good at it.”

“Oh,” he said, and then,
“Scheisse.”
He knocked back the schnapps at a gulp. Lise blinked. That wasn't his style at all. As if to prove it, he coughed several times. His cheeks turned pink. Embarrassment or schnapps? Schnapps, Lise judged. Heinrich coughed again, this time as if he'd started to say something and swallowed it at the last moment.

“Well, are you going to tell me about it or not?” Lise asked.

For some reason, that set her husband off again, in a different way. If his laugh wasn't hysterical, it came close. Finally, he said, “I suppose I'd better. This is all by way of explaining how I managed to get a champagne stain on my ass this afternoon.”

Now it was Lise's turn to say, “Oh.” She didn't know what she'd been looking for. Whatever it was, that wasn't it. “I'm listening,” she told him, which seemed safe.

He talked. It took about ten minutes and another drink, this one gulped down as fast as the first. Lise had seen and heard for herself some of what Heinrich was talking about. At the time, she hadn't realized it applied to him in particular; she'd thought Erika was venting her spleen at the world at large. “…and that's that,” Heinrich finished. “That, as a matter of fact, is pretty definitely that. I don't think there will be any more bridge games with the Dorsches after this.”

Bridge, just then, wasn't the first thing on Lise's mind. “How do you feel about all this?” she asked.

“Glad it's over.” Heinrich reached for the schnapps bottle again.

That he did made Lise sure he wasn't saying everything on his mind. “Pour some for me, too,” she told him. “If you've earned three, I think I'm entitled to one.” After a sip, she went on, “You kept quiet about this for months.”

“I kept hoping everything would just…settle down,” Heinrich said.

“Is that what you were hoping for?” Lise said. Erika Dorsch made formidable competition. Those cool Aryan good looks, and the suggestion of raw heat underneath…Lise took another swallow of schnapps, larger than the first. Formidable indeed.

“If I'd hoped for the other, it would have been easy enough to get.”

“Why didn't you?” she asked. “It might have been the easiest way out of the trouble.”

Heinrich shook his head. “My life is complicated enough. It has to be, because of what I am—what we are. If you think I want any more complications on top of that, you're crazy. And besides, I love you.”

She would have liked it better if he'd put those in the other order. Being who and what she was herself, though, she understood why he hadn't. She prodded a little, anyhow: “And you were enjoying yourself, weren't you, with a, a beautiful woman”—there, she'd said it—“falling all over you?”

“I might have enjoyed it a hell of a lot more if I hadn't been scared to death all the damn time,” he said. “This is
my
life
we're talking about, mine and lots of other people's. I hope I'm not stupid enough to put that on the line for a roll in the hay. If—” He drank instead of finishing.

“If what?” Lise asked. Her husband didn't answer. He peered out the kitchen window, resolutely pretending he hadn't heard. Lise almost repeated the question. But she could make a good guess at what he'd swallowed. It would have been something like,
If I weren't a Jew, or if she were…

She supposed she could get angry at him for even that much. What was the point, though? Things were the way they were. There was no world where Heinrich was a
goy
or Erika a Jew.
A good thing, too,
Lise thought, and finished her schnapps with a gulp. She poured the glass full again.

“We're both going to go to sleep in the middle of supper,” Heinrich said.

“That's all right. That's the least of my worries right now,” Lise answered. “You turned her down. She's going to be angry—you said so yourself. What can she do to you? What can she do to us?”

“I thought about that,” Heinrich said. “I can't see anything. Can you? She's not going to pour gasoline on the house and set it on fire, or anything like that.”

“I suppose not,” Lise admitted. She didn't stop worrying, though. How could any Jew in her right mind stop worrying? If you weren't worrying, you were likely to miss something that might kill you.

“Is it all right?” Heinrich asked anxiously.

“It could be better,” Lise said, and he flinched. Considering all the things that might have happened, and all the different kinds of unpleasantness that might have sprung from them, she decided she had to relent, and she did: “It could be worse, too. So I guess it's all right. But if any more beautiful blondes make a play for you, you might want to let me know a little sooner.”

“I promise,” he said.

She snorted. “Or, of course, you might not want to let me know at all. But I hope you do.” He had no answer for that, which was, in its own way, reassuring.

 

When Susanna Weiss watched Czechs demonstrating on the televisor without getting arrested, she was astonished. When she saw Frenchmen demonstrating, she was shocked. But there they were, marching by the Arc de Triomphe with signs that said,
LIBERTY
,
EQUALITY
,
FRATERNITY
! That slogan had been outlawed for seventy years. Ever since 1940, the motto of the French state had been
Work, Family, Country
. But, while the older phrase might have been forbidden, it hadn't been forgotten. Here it was, for all the world to see.

As in Prague, policemen stood around watching without doing anything. In their round, flat-crowned kepis, they looked even more French than the demonstrators. But they collaborated with the
Reich
more enthusiastically than the Czechs did—or they had up till now, anyhow.

For the French, collaboration had meant survival. To Germany, Czechoslovakia had been an annoyance. France had been the deadly foe. Crushed in 1870, avenged in 1918, she'd been crushed once more in 1940 and never allowed to get off her knees again. From that day till this, French Fascists had toed the German line. Anyone who didn't toe the line disappeared, mostly forever. When Germany spat, France swam. But while she swam, she breathed, if softly.

And now, with anyone who'd lived under liberty, equality, and fraternity a white-haired ancient, these Frenchmen—and a few Frenchwomen, too—showed they remembered them. And they got away with it. Susanna stared and stared.

Horst Witzleben said, “This peaceful demonstration was photographed by a German cameraman. No French televisor coverage was on the scene. The French regime would sooner not admit its citizens can find fault with it.”

Susanna stuck a finger in her ear. “Did I really hear that?” she asked. No one was in the apartment with her but the cat, and Gawain, fat, lazy thing that he was, lay asleep on the sofa, his tail curled over the tip of his nose. But Susanna had to ask somebody. Germans had been making scornful gibes about Frenchmen since the very
beginnings of the
Reich,
and no doubt long before. Still, Susanna had never heard one like this. It said,
We're going somewhere new, and you haven't got the nerve to follow us
.

The next story was about corruption in the Iron Guard, the Romanian Fascist party. Susanna had no trouble believing there was corruption in the Iron Guard. They'd held power for a long time, and corruption wasn't rare in the Balkans (or, come to that, anywhere else). Talking about it was. When a fat Iron Guard official who spoke German with a comic-opera accent spluttered out denials, he did his cause more harm than any accuser could have.

She wondered if the story after the St. Pauli Girl beer advertisement would be subversive, too, but it wasn't: it talked about the Brazilian football team, one of the favorites in the upcoming World Cup. Susanna almost switched it off; she had only slightly more interest in football than in suicide. But the longer she watched the piece, the more interesting it got. Here were some of the finest footballers in the world, footballers expected to give the mighty Germans a run for their money. Were they Aryans? Hardly. Oh, several of them obviously had some white blood. But Negro and American Indian ancestry predominated on the Brazilian team.

“Isn't that interesting?” Susanna murmured. The people at the Propaganda Ministry were working with a light hand. They weren't saying,
Look at these Brazilian mongrels. They're really quite impressive, aren't they?
Instead, the message was simply,
This is what the team that will challenge Germany looks like
. If watchers decided the Brazilian mongrels were impressive, they'd do it on their own. That they were getting the chance was remarkable enough.

Heinz Buckliger had said before that he had his doubts about the Nazis' racial doctrines. He and his people were practicing what he'd preached. Here they'd shown black and brown men as human beings.

Would they ever do the same with Jews? Susanna wasn't going to hold her breath. For one thing, in National Social
ist dogma Jews and Aryans were natural enemies, like capitalists and proletarians in the dead lore of Communism. For another, Jews' craftiness made them all the more dangerous. And, for a third, Jews were thought to be extinct, so why bother rehabilitating them? Even the most radical reforms had limits.

 

Walther Stutzman used a couple of different portals to get into SS databases and see what the blackshirts were up to. He didn't like messing with them. Any time he poked around in there, he exposed himself to a certain risk of detection, even if he did have the proper passwords and some highly improper masking programs. Every so often, he went sniffing in spite of the risk. Not knowing what Lothar Prützmann and his cohorts were up to was also risky.

Today at lunch, he started in at one of the usual places, a weak spot that had been in the software ever since his father put it there. If and when the
Reich
finally did go over to the long-promised new operating system, it would have weak spots, too. Walther had put a few into the code himself. Out of so many millions of lines, who would find those few? One of these days, his son Gottlieb could exploit them.

That was what he was thinking as he started the electronic journey toward Lothar Prützmann's secrets. More from habit than for any other reason, he kept an eye on the monitor as the probe went through. When he saw an alphanumeric group that didn't look the way it was supposed to, he blinked. When he saw two, ice ran through him and he hit the
ABORT
key. If that wasn't a trap, he'd never seen one. Now he sat there wondering if it had caught him.

He didn't think so. He had programs that would muddy the trail, and he hadn't gone in far enough to be fully noosed…had he? He paused in indecision, something he didn't do very often. Then, reluctantly, he nodded to himself. Only one way to find out, and he badly needed to know.

He liked the second portal less than the first. It was closer to a busy stream of electronic traffic. If he made a
mistake, he'd stick out like blood on the snow.
Just like that,
he thought unhappily. And if the bloodhounds were waiting for him here, too…

His finger stayed on the
ABORT
key all the way through the insertion process. If the hounds had been a little more subtle, they would have nabbed him the first time. He hated giving them another chance.

But, as far as he could tell, everything went fine now. He got inside the SS network without its being any the wiser. And, once he was inside, he could look at the other portal from the rear, so to speak. The trap pointed outward. He'd thought it would. People who designed traps like that were convinced of their own cleverness. They didn't think anyone could sneak up on them from behind.

And they had been very clever indeed, even if not quite clever enough. The more Walther studied their trap, the nastier it looked. If his probe had gone just a little farther through the portal, it would have been seized and traced back to its beginnings, and not one of his masking programs was likely to have done him much good. Oh, yes, the thing had teeth, sharp ones.

He wondered if he could draw those teeth, leave the trap seeming dangerous but in fact harmless. Shaking his head, he decided against it, at least for now. That wouldn't be something to ad-lib on a lunch hour. If he tried it, he would have to be perfect. The trapper would come back every so often to see what he'd caught. Everything would have to look fine to him.