In the Presence of Mine Enemies (56 page)

“That's the way things work, all right,” Heinrich said. But then he did a little more thinking of his own. “That's the way things work
now,
all right. If the
Volk
chooses the
Reichstag,
though, will it be so easy to ignore? What's the point to having a real election if right afterwards you go and pretend you never did?”

“You're right there,” Willi admitted. “I don't see the point to that, either. Maybe Buckliger does.”

“Who knows?” Heinrich said. “Who knows for sure about anything that's going on these days? We'll just have to wait and see.”

“Sounds like traffic through Berlin, doesn't it?” Willi said as the commuter train came into South Station. “Of course, there's usually a lot more waiting than seeing with that.”

“Maybe it won't be so bad,” Heinrich said. Before Willi could say anything sardonic, he forestalled him: “Maybe it'll be worse.”

As a matter of fact, they got to
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
headquarters fifteen minutes early. Had they been fifteen minutes late, they both would have cursed and fumed. Early they took for granted. Heinrich looked out across Adolf Hitler Platz toward the
Führer
's palace. Aside from a few joggers and a gaggle of early-rising Japanese tourists snapping photos, the vast square was echoingly empty. No
Gauleiter
growling out a speech this morning. No thumping, swaggering SS band trying to drown him out. No Dutch demonstrators, either.

Willi was looking across the square, too. “Almost gets boring to see it this quiet, doesn't it?” he remarked.

“It does,” Heinrich said in bemusement. “It really does.”

They went up the stairs and, after getting their identities confirmed, into the headquarters building. Heinrich sat down at his desk and immediately yawned. He got up and went to the canteen with Willi to fortify himself with a cup of coffee. He squirted some hot chocolate into the cup, too, from the machine next to the coffeemaker. “Viennese today, aren't we?” Willi said.

“Oh, but of course.” Heinrich put on an Austrian accent. Willi laughed.

A Viennese aristocrat—even a Viennese headwaiter—would have turned up his nose at the concoction Heinrich had put together. But it was hot and it was sweet and it had plenty of caffeine. With all that going for it, Heinrich wasn't inclined to be fussy. After he finished it and tossed the cup in the trash, he thought about going back for another one. But his brains were moving a little faster, so he buckled down and got to work instead.

Ilse wandered over to Willi's desk and started playing with little ringlets of hair that hung down over the back of his collar. Without looking away from his computer screen, he swatted her on the fanny. She squeaked. She seemed to have recovered nicely from discovering that Rolf Stolle had had his fun with her and that his roving eye had then roved on.

She and Willi were all but molesting each other when they went off at noon. Heinrich had no doubt they would pick a restaurant somewhere close to a hotel. He walked back to the canteen. The lunch special there was roast pork. As he had all his life, he ate it without a second thought. He liked pork, though he'd had better than this.

When Willi and Ilse came in after a long, long lunch break, Willi mimed smoking a lazy cigarette. Ilse thought that was the funniest thing in the world.

Heinrich was plowing through an analysis of near-future American business activity when he looked up to discover three blackshirts standing around his desk.
“Was ist hier los?”
he asked in surprise but no real alarm.

“You are Heinrich Gimpel?” one of them asked.

He nodded. “That's me.” He wondered if they wanted to take him to confer with Heinz Buckliger again.

They didn't. The two lower-ranking blackshirts grabbed him and hauled him out of his chair. The senior man said, “You are under arrest.”

“Arrest?” Heinrich yelped in disbelief. “What for?”

“Suspicion of being a Jew.”

H
ERR
P
EUKERT WAS TALKING ABOUT NEGATIVE NUMBERS
when a clerk from the office came into the room and took him aside to speak with him. Alicia was glad for the break. Her head was spinning. When you added negative numbers you really subtracted, and when you subtracted negative numbers you really added? It sounded crazy, to say nothing of confusing.

“What?” The teacher, who had been speaking quietly, exclaimed in surprise. The clerk nodded and muttered something else.
Herr
Peukert shook his head. The clerk nodded again. The teacher sighed and shrugged. “Alicia Gimpel!” he said.

Alicia jumped up to her feet. “
Ja, Herr
Peukert?”

“Please go to the office with
Fräulein
Knopp here. Something has come up.”

“
Jawohl, Herr
Peukert.” Alicia wondered what was going on. It sounded as if her mother needed to pull her out of class for some reason or other. Had Mommy forgotten to tell her about a dentist's appointment, or something like that? She was usually good about remembering all kinds of things, but she had forgotten once.

The way
Fräulein
Knopp kept looking at her all the way back to the office made her wonder. When they were almost there, the clerk asked, “Are you really?”

“Am I really what?” Alicia asked. But the clerk didn't answer.

When they got to the office, Alicia was surprised to find
Francesca and Roxane already there. They looked surprised to see her. Roxane asked, “Are you in trouble, too?”

“I didn't think so,” Alicia said.

“If they call you to the office, you're in trouble.” Roxane spoke with experience born of more mischief than both her sisters together had got into.

Fräulein
Knopp went into the inner office, the principal's office. Alicia heard her say, “They're all here now.”

But the principal—a gray-haired, severe woman named
Frau
Fasold—didn't come out. Half a dozen large men in black uniforms did. One of them had a gray mustache that made him look like the boss. Sure enough, he was the one who spoke up: “You will come with us immediately, children, until this question is answered.”

Roxane wasn't one to let anybody, even an enormous officer in an intimidating uniform, get the better of her. She tilted her head back so she could look him in the eye and said, “What question?” Alicia was suddenly, horribly, afraid she already knew.

And sure enough, the officer said the worst thing in the world: “The question of whether your father, Heinrich Gimpel, is a Jew, and of whether the three of you are first-degree
Mischlingen,
subject to the same penalties as full-blooded Jews.”
Subject to being shot or gassed or anything else we feel like doing to you,
he meant.

A terrified scream bubbled up in Alicia's throat. But before she could let it out and give everything away, Francesca screamed first, and her shriek was pure fury: “
That's a lie!”
She went on, just about as loud, “We're no damned, stinking, big-nosed, big-lipped, lying, cheating, germy Jews! And neither is Daddy! And don't you say he is, either!” She kicked the Security Police officer in the shin.

“Teufelsdreck!”
he shouted. He swung back his hand as if to slap Francesca. Roxane grabbed it and bit him. He roared in pain. “You idiots!” he yelled at his men. “Seize them!” He had to yell, because Roxane let go of him and started screeching it was all a lie, too.

That told Alicia what she had to do. She added her voice
to the clamor, and did her best to fight and to get away before one of the big men grabbed her. “Christ, they sure don't act like a bunch of kikes,” the man said, panting with the effort of hanging on to her.

Francesca and Roxane, of course, were convinced they were no such thing. Alicia realized she had to act as if she were, too. It was the only chance she and her sisters had…if they had any chance at all.

Frau
Fasold finally did emerge from her office. She disapprovingly surveyed the chaos in the outer room. Shaking her head, she fixed the officer with the gray mustache with an icy blue glare. “Really,
mein Herr,
” she said in a voice just as icy. “Is this disorder altogether necessary?”

Her manner could paralyze any student. It seemed to have the same effect on the Security Police man. “These are, uh, Jews, or, uh,
Mischlingen,
anyway,” he said in a low voice. “We can't, uh, be too, uh, careful.”

“These are children—and fine children, too, I might add,”
Frau
Fasold said. Even in Alicia's terror, that astonished her. The principal never had a good word for anybody.
Frau
Fasold went on, “Why didn't you bring panzers and helicopters and flamethrowers, too? Then you could have been safe.” She all but spat her contempt in the blackshirt's face.

He turned red. “We have our orders, ma'am,” he said stonily. “We have to carry them out.”

“Orders for murdering children?”
Frau
Fasold said. “Why?”

The Security Police officer turned redder. “It is our duty.”

“God help you, in that case,” the principal told him.

He turned his back on her, the way a petulant second-grader might have. Unlike a petulant second-grader, he didn't get a swat for being rude. Alicia wished he would have. He deserved one. But nobody was paying any attention to what she wished. The officer with the mustache nodded to his men. “Take them away.”

They had their orders. They carried them out. It was their duty.

 

Lise Gimpel had just got back from the drugstore when the telephone rang. She muttered to herself. She'd been about to make a fresh pot of coffee. The ringing phone didn't magically shut up, the way she wished it would. She went over and picked it up.
“Bitte?”

The first thing she heard was a car horn blaring. Was somebody playing a practical joke? Then, as traffic noises continued, she realized the call was from a pay phone on a busy street. “Lise, is that you?” a man asked.

“
Ja
. Willi?” she answered doubtfully.

“Dammit, I wish you hadn't said my name.” Yes, that was Willi. But why was he calling from a pay phone and not from his desk? No sooner had the question formed in her mind than she found out, for he went on, “Listen, they've just arrested Heinrich for—for something completely ridiculous. I've got to go. 'Bye.” He slammed the phone down in its cradle. The line went dead.

As if moving in a dream, Lise hung up, too. But it wasn't a dream. It was a nightmare, the worst nightmare she could have.
Something completely ridiculous
could mean only one thing, and it wasn't ridiculous, not to her. Like any Jew in Berlin, she'd rehearsed this disaster in her mind, hoping and hoping she would never have to use the plans she'd made. So much for that hope. She might not have long. They might be coming for her right now.

She reached for the telephone. It rang again before she could pick it up. She almost screamed. “
Bitte?
” she snapped. If it was some idiot salesman trying to get her to buy carpets…

“
Frau
Gimpel?” A woman's voice this, not a familiar one.

“Yes. What is it, please?”

“
Frau
Gimpel, this in Ingeborg Fasold, the principal at your daughters' school. I don't know how to tell you this, but…the Security Police have taken your daughters. They accuse them of being—forgive me for saying this—they accuse them of being part Jew…. Are you there,
Frau
Gimpel?”

“I'm here.” In her own ears, Lise's voice sounded far
away, eerily calm. “They've arrested my husband, too. It's all a lie, a mistake, of course.” She had to say that. She remembered she had to say that. Somebody might be—probably was—listening.

“Of course.” To her amazement,
Frau
Fasold sounded as if she meant it. She added, “I think it's a shame and a disgrace that they should take children, no matter what. How can a child have done anything bad to anyone? Even if the child
were
a
Mischling,
how could it? Nonsense. Pure
Quatsch
. Good luck to you.”

“Thank you,” Lise said in that same strange, calm voice. Her mind was racing a million kilometers a second.
Mischlingen
. They thought the girls were
Mischlingen
. She was pretty sure they'd arrested Heinrich as a Jew. That should mean they still believed she was an Aryan herself. If they kept on believing that, it might give her the chance to save everyone.

Or it might not help at all. She couldn't tell till she tried.

“If there's anything I can do,
Frau
Gimpel, please don't hesitate to ask,”
Frau
Fasold said.

She really did sound as if she meant that. Lise's eyes filled with tears. “
Danke,
” she whispered. “This is a false accusation. We will beat it.”

“I hope so,” the principal said. “Again, good luck.” She hung up.

So did Lise. Maybe people were more decent than she'd ever dared dream. Willi,
Frau
Fasold…Neither had had to say a word. Both had taken a chance in picking up the phone. But they'd done it.

Lise had her own ideas about how and why Heinrich had been arrested. But finding out if she was right would have to wait. It didn't make any difference, not when she had no time to lose. The blackshirts were liable to come here next, to see what evidence they could dig up against her husband. Or they might not worry about evidence, and simply act. If they did that, Heinrich and the girls were lost.

So they won't do that. You have to think they won't. And if they come looking for evidence, they'd better not find any
. There wasn't much to find: nothing printed in Hebrew, no
Sabbath candlesticks, nothing like that. She had pork ribs in the freezer right now.

But there were those pictures, the ones that had come down from Heinrich's father. Lise had never looked at them, but she knew what they were. They recorded the murder of a people, first on this side of the Atlantic and then, a generation later, on the other. They would have been illegal any time. Now they were worse than illegal—they were incriminating. Heinrich had kept them to show the girls if the time ever came, to remind them what the Nazis did to Jews who revealed themselves.

Well, the girls wouldn't need that kind of reminder any more. Now they had a better one.

She knew which filing cabinet in the study held the photographs. She didn't know which drawer they were in, or which folder. Would the knock on the door come before she found them? That would be the cruelest cut of all.

Here they were! She started to carry the manila folder to the fireplace, then hesitated. They might wonder why she had a fire going, or find the remnants of photos in the ashes. Lise knew she wasn't thinking too clearly. She also knew she couldn't afford to take any chances at all.

She brought the folder into the downstairs bathroom instead. She started tearing the photos into little bits and flushing them down the commode. She couldn't help seeing some of what she destroyed. Here was the raw stuff of history, disappearing one flush at a time. Part of her thought that wasn't right—there should be some record of the Germans' crimes. The rest…She was shaking and in tears by the time the job was done. Heinrich would have shown
that
to little girls? The medicine was strong—too strong, she thought.

And she couldn't keep on shaking and crying. Even though this part of the job was done, she still had more to do. She went to the telephone and dialed. It rang six or seven times before a man said, “
Bitte?
” in a sleepy voice.

“Richard?” she said. “Richard, this is Lise Gimpel.”

“What do you want? You woke me up,” Richard Klein grumbled.

Woke you up? In the middle of the afternoon?
Lise
blinked at that. Then she remembered he was a trombone player. Musicians kept strange hours. “Richard, I need the name and number of that lawyer you used last year. You're not going to believe it, but Heinrich has the same problem you did.”

“Gott im Himmel!”
Klein exploded. He didn't sound sleepy any more. “Hang on. I'll get it for you.” He came back on the line a minute later. “He's Klaus Menzel. Here's his phone number. Have you got something to write with?”

“Yes.” Lise took down the number.

Richard said, “Good luck. Take care of yourself. Let us know what happens.” Those were all things one friend could say to another without giving anything away to anyone tapping the line.