In the Presence of Mine Enemies (6 page)

Not knowing what to say to that, he didn't say anything.
And
does
Willi have reason to worry about me?
he wondered. The mere idea made him nervous for all sorts of reasons, of which temptation was among the least important. When he was tempted by a woman like Erika Dorsch, that showed how urgent the other reasons were.

Not saying anything proved a good idea on general principles, for Lise and Willi both came back into the dining room at the same time. Willi carried a tray with four glasses of Kirsch on it. He couldn't resist doing a little routine with the tray, as if he were one of the English butlers in such demand among wealthy German families. Lise laughed. Erika rolled her eyes up to the ceiling. Plainly, she found her husband less than amusing tonight.

Willi handed everyone a glass of cherry brandy, then raised his own in salute.
“Sieg heil!”
he said.

“Sieg heil!”
The others echoed the words. Erika sounded subdued. Heinrich made sure he seemed enthusiastic. So did Lise. If they were the good National Socialists and Aryans they pretended to be, they had to sound that way when they hailed victory…didn't they? All at once, Heinrich wondered. Erika really was an Aryan and, he presumed, a good Nazi. She
didn't worry about sounding indifferent. But, being who and what she was, she could afford to slack off on small things. The Gimpels couldn't afford to slack off at all. Like Caesar's wife, they had to be above suspicion, for suspicion meant disaster.

“That's quite a nightcap,” Heinrich said, and mimed being hit over the head with a club.

“You can sleep late tomorrow,” Willi Dorsch said, knocking back his own Kirsch.

Lise snorted. “You know our children too well to say anything silly like that. Francesca likes to sleep in, but Alicia and Roxane will be up at the crack of dawn.”

“Ghastly habit,” Willi said. “Our two like to lie in bed, the lazy good-for-nothings.” He stuck out a finger in Heinrich's direction. “Meant to ask you:
are
the Americans going to make their assessment this fiscal year?”

“I'm…not sure,” Heinrich answered cautiously. He knew the Americans were unlikely to, but didn't want to say so in front of Lise and Erika, neither of whom had the security clearance to hear such things.

Willi's wave said he understood why his friend was being so cagey. It also said he thought Heinrich was being a wet blanket. He asked, “Are we gearing up to wallop the Americans if they don't meet the assessment?”

“Not that I've heard,” Heinrich said, which combined caution and truth.

“I haven't, either,” Willi said. “You know how I was complaining a while ago about not living in glorious times?” He waited for Heinrich to nod, then went on, “I didn't think we were getting
this
soft when I grumbled, I'll tell you that.”

“I don't think we're soft,” Heinrich said. “Germany rules the biggest empire the world has ever seen. Ruling and conquering are different businesses. A ruler can forgive things a conqueror would have to step on.”

“Not if he wants to keep on ruling, he can't,” Willi said, going red in the face.

“No, Heinrich's right,” Erika said, which made Lise raise an eyebrow and made Willi turn even redder. Erika went on, “If you want to hold a country down without a rebellion every other year, you—”

“Kill the first two or three batches of rebels and everybody who's related to them,” Willi broke in. “After a while, the people who are left—if there are any—get the idea and settle down. That's what finally worked for us in England.”

In a way, he was right; England hadn't risen against the
Reich
since the mid-1970s. Even so…Heinrich said, “‘Finally' is a word with a lot of bodies behind it. When we can, we ought to run things more…more efficiently. That's the word I want.” It was, he hoped, a word that wouldn't rouse the interest, let alone the anger, of the Security Police.

“We ought to run, period,” Lise said. “Käthe's going to be impatient with us.” She didn't want any sort of political argument, even with friends. In that, she was undoubtedly wise. When she rose to her feet, Heinrich followed suit as automatically as he would have in the bridge game.

“I'll get your coats out of the closet,” Erika said, which meant she thought the evening was at an end. Willi walked out to the front hall with them, but he didn't say anything. Heinrich hoped his friend wasn't fuming about being contradicted. It wouldn't have been so bad had Heinrich been the only one to disagree with him. But when Erika did, too, that must have felt like a stab in the back. Willi managed a smile and a bad joke when the Gimpels headed for the bus stop. That eased Heinrich's mind. But, after the door closed behind Lise and him, Willi's voice rose angrily—and so did Erika's.

“What's that all about?” Lise pointed back toward the Dorsches' house.

“I think Willi thinks he ought to be jealous of me,” Heinrich said unhappily.

“Jealous? Jealous how?” his wife asked. He didn't answer. His wife walked on for a couple of paces before stopping short. “Jealous like
that
?” Even more unhappily, Heinrich nodded. “And does he have reason to be jealous like that?” Lise inquired ominously.

“Not on account of me,” Heinrich said. That covered the most important part of the question. Not quite all of it, though; he felt he had to add, “I'm not so sure about Erika.”

They got to the brightly lit bus stop. Lise tapped her toe
on the cement of the sidewalk. “I can't fault her taste, but I did see you first, you know. Kindly remember it.”

“I will. For all sorts of reasons, I will,” Heinrich said.

“She's pretty. You'd better,” Lise said. The bus rolled up just then, which saved him from having to answer: a small mercy, but he took what he could get.

F
RANZ
O
PPENHOFF LOOKED AT
S
USANNA
W
EISS THROUGH
spectacles that grotesquely magnified his bloodshot blue eyes. “I fail to see the necessity for this journey,” he said, and scratched at the bottom edge of a white muttonchop sideburn.

Susanna looked back at the department chairman with a loathing she tried to conceal. “But,
Herr Doktor
Professor, it is the annual meeting of the Medieval English Association—and only the third time it's met
in
England since the war.”

Oppenhoff paused to light a cigar. It was a fine Havana, but the smoke still put Susanna, who didn't use tobacco, in mind of burning long johns. She coughed, not too ostentatiously. After a puff, he said, “Many—even most—of these meetings are a waste of time, a waste of effort, and a waste of our travel budget.”

“Oh?” Somehow, Susanna made one syllable sound dangerous. “Is that what you said when Professor Lutze asked to attend?”

“I didn't….” Professor Oppenhoff paused, evidently deciding he couldn't get away with the lie direct. He tried again: “I thought the conference would enhance his professional development, he being—”

“A man?” Susanna finished for him.

“That is not what I was going to say.” The chairman sounded offended.

Susanna Weiss
was
offended. “What were you going to say, then,
Herr Doktor
Professor? That Professor Lutze is
junior to me? He is. That he has published less than half of what I have? He has. That what he
has
published is superficial compared to my work? It is, as any specialist will tell you.” She smiled with poisonous sweetness. “There. You see? We agree completely.”

Professor Oppenhoff tried to draw on the cigar again, but choked on the smoke. Susanna held the poisoned smile till his coughs subsided into wheezes. He wagged a shaky forefinger at her. “You have not the attitude of a proper National Socialist woman,” he said severely.

“Do I have the attitude of a proper National Socialist scholar?” No matter how offended, no matter how angry Susanna was, she took care to throw back the Party's name as if she were returning a lob in a game of tennis. “Don't you think that is how you ought to judge me?”

“You should be turning out babies, not articles,” Oppenhoff said.

That she remained unwed, that she had no children, was a private grief for Susanna. Her back stiffened. Her private griefs were none of Oppenhoff's damned business. “If Professor Lutze's work is good enough to let him deserve to go to London for the Medieval English Association meeting, what part of mine disqualifies me from going, too?” She didn't say Lutze didn't deserve to go, no matter what she thought. That would have got her another enemy. Academic politics were nasty enough without trying to make them worse.

“The travel budget…” the chairman said portentously.

This time, Susanna's smile was pure carnivore. “I've spoken with the accountants. We have plenty. In fact, they recommend that we spend more before the end of the fiscal year in June. If we have unexpended funds, people are liable to decide we don't need so much next year.”

Franz Oppenhoff went gray with horror. A budget cut was every department chairman's nightmare. He threw his hands in the air. Cigar ash fluttered down onto his desk like snow. “Go to London,
Fräulein Doktor
Professor Weiss! Go! Uphold the reputation of the university!” Not quite inaudibly, he added, “And get the devil out of my hair.”

Susanna pretended not to hear that. Having got what she wanted, she could afford to be gracious. “Thank you very much, Professor Oppenhoff. I'll make my travel arrangements right away.” In fact, she'd already made them. If she hadn't been able to browbeat Oppenhoff into letting her go, she would have had to cancel. She could easily have afforded the plane ticket and hotel, but she couldn't have gone during the semester without leave from on high. Now she had it.

“Is there anything else?” Professor Oppenhoff inquired.

She was tempted to complain that her office was smaller and had a worse view than those of male professors less senior than she—she seldom did things by half. Here, though, she judged she'd pushed the chairman about as far as she could. “Not today, thanks,” she said grandly, like a snooty shopper declining a salesgirl's assistance. Small, straight nose tilted high, she strode out of Oppenhoff's office.

Spring was in the air when she left the east wing of the university complex and walked out into the chestnut grove that lay between the wings. The chestnuts were still bare-branched, but the first leaf buds had begun to appear. Soon the trees would be gloriously green, with birds singing and nesting in them. For now, Susanna could see down to the garden and the bronze statues of the great scholars there: Wilhelm von Humboldt, the founder of the university; his brother, Alexander; Helmholtz; Treitschke; Mommsen; and Hegel.

Towering above all the other statues was a colossal bronze of Werner Heisenberg. Arno Breker, Hitler's favorite sculptor, had commemorated the physicist at the first
Führer
's personal request. Susanna had seen photos of Heisenberg. He was tall, yes, but on the scrawny side, almost as much so as Heinrich Gimpel. Breker had turned him into one of his countless Aryan supermen: broad-shouldered, deep-chested, with a narrow waist and thighs like a draft horse's. The usual heroic Breker nude struggled to burst forth from the suit in which the sculptor had reluctantly had to drape his subject.

Susanna sighed. If Heisenberg and the other German
scientists hadn't been so quick to see the implications of atomic fission…She sighed again. The world would be different, but who could guess how? One of the things she'd seen was that different didn't necessarily mean better.

A swarthy young man who wore a neat black beard and had a turban wrapped around his head hurried past Susanna. “Please to excuse me,” he said in musically accented German.

“Aber natürlich,”
she replied with regal politeness. The beturbaned young man went up the stairs two at a time and into the east wing of the university building. The Department of Germanic Languages shared the wing with the German Institute for Foreigners, which since 1922 had been instructing those from abroad on the German language and German culture, and the more recent Institute for Racial Studies, which helped decide which foreigners deserved to survive and be instructed about the blessings of German culture.

The fellow who'd gone past Susanna in such a rush had to be from Persia or India, probably the latter. Despite their complexions, folk from those lands got credit for being Aryans, and so lived on as subjects—sometimes even privileged subjects—within the Germanic Empire.

Had the young man been born farther west, had he been an Arab rather than an Aryan…As far as the Institute for Racial Studies was concerned, anti-Semitism extended to Arabs as well as Jews. Some of the things the
Reich
had done, and had browbeaten the Italians into doing, in the Middle East were on a scale to rival the destruction of the Slavic
Untermenschen
in Eastern Europe.

We aren't the only ones,
Susanna thought with a shudder.
We remember better than most of the others, though. That is one thing we have always done: we remember. But so do the Nazis. Can we really hope to outlast them? Heinrich and Walther think so, or say they do, but do they believe it when a noise outside wakes them up in the middle of the night?

She didn't know how they kept from screaming when they heard a noise like that. She had no idea at all how
she
kept from screaming when she heard a noise like that. Even fourth-generation Nazis who'd never had an
ideologically impure thought in their lives started sweating at noises in the night.
They
might know their thoughts were unsullied, their bloodlines uncontaminated. Yes, they might know, but did the Security Police? You never could tell.

And if you really had something to hide…

So far, though, all the noises Susanna had heard in and around her block of flats were those of everyday life: neighbors trying to go in and out quietly or sometimes too drunk to bother, a tree branch scraping on her window, traffic swishing by outside, once in a great while the trashcan-rattle of an accident. No men in high-crowned caps and black trenchcoats pounding on the door and roaring,
“Jüdin, heraus!”

Not yet. Never yet. But the fear never went away, either.

With another shiver, Susanna hurried down toward the garden, down toward the statues of the men who had advanced German scholarship. And if she tried not to look at Breker's bronze of Heisenberg, well, even the Security Police weren't going to notice that.

 

Heinrich Gimpel kissed Lise and went up the street to the bus stop. He got there five minutes before the bus did. As it stopped, the door hissed open in front of him. He fed his account card into the fare slot, then withdrew it and stuck it back in his wallet as he looked up the aisle for a seat. He found one. At the next stop, a plump blond woman sat down next to him. When Willi Dorsch got on a couple of stops later, he and Heinrich nodded to each other, but that was all.

Not sitting with Willi didn't break Heinrich's heart. His friend had been cooler than usual since the awkward end to their evening of bridge.
Does he worry that I'm looking for an affair with Erika?
Heinrich shook his head as Willi sank into a seat near the back of the bus. He enjoyed looking at Erika Dorsch, but that wasn't the same thing at all. Even Lise, who wasn't inclined to be objective about such things, understood the difference.

But then a new, troubling thought crossed Heinrich's mind.
Or does Willi think Erika's looking for an affair with
me?
Even if Willi didn't think Heinrich wanted the affair, he might not be so happy about seeing him every morning. And Heinrich hadn't the faintest idea what he could do about that.

The bus made its last few stops and pulled into the train station. Everyone got off. Almost everyone went to the platform for the Berlin-bound commuter train. As people queued up, Heinrich and Willi weren't particularly close. Heinrich sighed. More often than not, the two of them had chatted and gossiped like a couple of
Hausfrau
s all the way in to the city. It hadn't happened the past few days, and it didn't look as if it would today, either.

It didn't. When the train came into the the Stahnsdorf station, Willi sat down on the aisle next to a taken window seat. The seat on the other side of the aisle was taken, too. Whatever Willi Dorsch wanted, Heinrich's company wasn't it. Willi pulled a copy of the
Völkischer Beobachter
out of his briefcase and started to read.

Heinrich also read the Nazi Party newspaper: one more bit of protective coloration. He found a seat halfway down the car from Willi, got out his own copy, and looked it over. He did find it professionally useful every now and then. What the Party decided could dictate what
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
did next. Reading the paper carefully—especially reading between the lines—gave clues about which way the wind was blowing at levels of the Party more exalted than those in which Heinrich traveled.

Today he went to the imperial-affairs section first. It still looked as if the United States was going to fall short on its occupation assessment. Heinrich kept waiting for someone in the Foreign Ministry or the
Führer
's office to comment. So far, no one had. That in itself was interesting. When he first started at
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht,
the Americans wouldn't have got a warning if they were late or came up short on what they owed. They would simply have been punished. Things
were
more easygoing these days.

Some things were, anyhow. A small story announced the execution of a dozen Serbs for rebellion against the
Reich
. Serbs had touched off the First World War, almost a hun
dred years ago now. They'd been nuisances ever since. And another story told of the jailing of an SS man who'd been caught taking bribes in a French town near the English Channel.

Such shameless corruption,
the
Völkischer Beobachter
declared,
cannot be tolerated in an orderly, well-run state
. Heinrich nodded to himself. He'd seen three or four anti-corruption drives since his university days. That the
Reich
needed a new one every few years told how well they worked.

This one, though, gave signs of being more serious than some of its predecessors. An SS man, behind bars? That was news of the man-bites-dog sort. Heinrich wondered which German bigwigs the Frenchmen who'd been shaken down happened to know. Odds were they'd known somebody. SS men seldom got into trouble for what they did even inside Germany, let alone in occupied territory.