In the Presence of Mine Enemies (60 page)

“Wonderful.” Lise's voice stayed flat, now choking back a scream. Erika hadn't cared if she killed Heinrich—hell, she'd wanted him dead. But she drew the line at the girls.
How generous of her
.

“When she's better, she'll go back to the Security Police and tell them it was all a lie. I swear she will,” Willi said. “She wants to make things right if she can.”

“Wonderful,” Lise repeated, as flatly as before.

“It'll be all right. It really will.” Willi was all but babbling. His laugh was nervous, but it was a laugh. “I know Heinrich's not a Jew—believe me, I know; don't get me wrong—but the way things are nowadays, Buckliger might not even care if he was.” He laughed again.

Don't you have any sense in your head? Don't you know they're bound to be tapping my phone?
Lise couldn't say that, because, of course, they
were
listening. Before she could say anything, someone knocked on the front door. “I've got to go,” she told Willi, and hung up in a hurry. It didn't sound like the knock the Security Police used. It didn't declare,
We'll kick the door open if you don't let us in right this minute
. But you never could tell.

Guts knotting, Lise turned the knob and swung the door on its hinges. It wasn't the Security Police. It was Adela Handrick, Emma's mother, a rather squat blond woman who wore expensive clothes in loud colors that didn't suit her sallow skin.

Up till now, the neighbors had stayed away from the
Gimpel house. The plague might have struck here. “Hello,” Lise said hesitantly. “Uh—won't you come in?”

Frau
Handrick shook her head. Lise got a whiff of some fancy cologne. “No, that's all right,” the other woman answered. She sounded nervous, too, and licked her carefully reddened lips. “I just wanted to tell you that Stefan and I”—Stefan was her husband—“hope everything goes…as well as it can for you. Emma says she wants to see Alicia back in school, too.”

Tears stung Lise's eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you very much.”

Seeming to take courage, Adela Handrick said, “You're all good people. Everybody in the neighborhood knows it. This is all nothing but a bunch of garbage. But”—an expressive shrug—“what can you do? You have to be careful. Maybe things will be better after the elections. But maybe they won't, too.”

Even suggesting that they might be better was a wonder. Lise said, “All I want is for Heinrich and the girls to come home.”

“What else?”
Frau
Handrick said. “Even if you were Jews, you'd probably want the same thing. Who could blame you?” She dipped her head. “Take care of yourself.” Without another word, she started up the street toward her own house.

Lise stared after her. Willi'd said the one thing. Now she'd said the other. Maybe a lot of people paid as little attention to what they got taught in school about hating Jews as they did about geometry. But how could you afford to find out?

 

Alicia Gimpel had always been good at remembering her lessons. That helped her now. The Security Police were trying to get her to admit she knew her father was a Jew. They didn't have a real interrogation room at the foundlings' home. They had to make do with an office. A desk lamp glaring into her eyes was almost as bad as some of the fancy lights they would have had back at their own headquarters.

“You must have known!” one of them shouted. He slammed his fist down on the desk. Alicia jumped. So did
the gooseneck lamp. He had to grab it to keep it from falling over. “How could you not know your own father is a stinking Jew?”

“He is not!” Alicia said shrilly. “That's a lie, and you know it!” She took her cue from her little sisters. They thought they were telling the truth, which gave them an edge on her. But she was acting for her life. And, while some people might not have learned their lessons, she knew what her teachers had drilled into her. “Jews are bloodsucking tyrants. They cheat people at business. They crawl around their betters with vilest flattery. They always try to steal credit where they don't deserve it. That's what
Mein Kampf
says! Does Daddy do any of those things? You know he doesn't!”

“Jesus!” said a blackshirt behind Alicia. “She's even worse than the other two brats. Maybe that son of a bitch really isn't a goddamn sheeny.”

“Why'd they grab him, then?” asked the one at the desk. “If they grab you, you bet your ass you deserve it.” He glowered at Alicia. He had a red, beefy face, with black-heads on his nose and between his eyebrows. His teeth were yellow; his breath stank of old cigars. “If you don't tell us the truth, you'll be sorry.”

“I
am
telling the truth,” Alicia lied. “Why don't you believe me? All I want to do is go home.” She sure told the truth there. She wanted to cry, but held back her tears. When she did cry, it felt as if the Security Police had won something from her.

The blackshirts hadn't slapped her or hit her or done anything worse than that. As far as she knew, they hadn't hurt her sisters, either. Maybe even the Security Police didn't like the idea of torturing little girls. Alicia had her doubts about that. If you joined the Security Police, you had to want to hurt people, didn't you? More likely, they weren't sure enough about Daddy to have too much of that kind of fun.

They won't find anything out from me,
Alicia vowed.
And they really won't find anything out from Francesca and Roxane
.

Scowling, the blackshirt who smelled like cigar butts
said, “What do you know about”—he looked down at some notes on the desk—“Erika Dorsch?”

“
Frau
Dorsch?” Alicia said in surprise—this was a new tack. “The Dorsches are Daddy and Mommy's friends, that's all.” This fellow couldn't think she was a Jew…could he?

With a leer, the man from the Security Police asked, “Is this Dorsch gal
real
good friends with your old man?” The other blackshirts laughed.

Most of that went over Alicia's head. “I don't know,” she answered. “They all play bridge together and they talk till it's late.”

“Bridge?” The blackshirt threw back his head and snorted in contempt. He needed to blow his nose. Alicia fought against revulsion. The man asked, “What
other
games do they play?” His pals laughed again.

Still out of her depth, Alicia only shrugged. “I don't know about any other games. I don't know what you're talking about.”

“Forget it, Hans,” said one of the fellows behind Alicia. “If this Gimpel bastard is fooling around with her, the kid doesn't know about it.”

That was plain enough for Alicia to understand. She gasped at the very idea. “Daddy wouldn't do any such thing!” she exclaimed. “Not ever!”

All the blackshirts laughed at that. “No, eh?” said the one who was questioning her. “I sure as hell would. She's a piece and a half.” He looked past her to his buddies. “You guys seen a picture of this broad? She's a blonde, good looking, built….” His hands described an hourglass in the air. “Hell, I'd crawl through a thousand kilometers of broken glass just to let her piss on my toothbrush.”

“Ewww!” Alicia's voice rose to a thin squeak. “That's disgusting!” The men from the Security Police thought her horror was funnier than their friend's joke.

The interrogator thought revolting her was pretty funny, too. He kept on asking her questions after that, but he didn't seem so mean and threatening any more. It wasn't much worse than getting grilled by
Herr
Kessler.
He taught
me all kinds of things—including some he probably didn't intend to,
she thought.

Even so, she knew she'd never be able to look at
Frau
Dorsch the same way again.

Finally, the man from the Security Police turned off the desk lamp. “Well, kid, that's enough of that for a while,” he said in oddly intimate tones, as if what they'd been doing together had somehow made them friends. Maybe he thought it had. He stepped back, straightened up, and stretched. Trying to get her to say things that would kill her father—and, incidentally, herself—was all in a day's work for him. “Go on, Ulf. Take her back with the rest of the snotnoses.”

You should talk,
Alicia thought. They'd made her miss supper. This wasn't the first time that had happened. She knew the staff at the foundlings' home wouldn't give her anything till breakfast. If you weren't there when they dished out a meal, that was your tough luck. They weren't actively cruel, but they had no give whatever in them.

She lay down on her cot. Even if the blackshirts hadn't beaten her, she felt trampled and miserable. For Hans and Ulf and the others, this was all just a game, a game they'd played hundreds or thousands of times before. Alicia's life was on the line, and her father's, and her sisters', and she knew it. And she didn't see how she could win.

Paula came into their room. In a practically inaudible whisper, she said, “Here. When I saw they weren't going to let you go, I swiped these for you.” Like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a top hat, she produced two hard rolls from under her dress and tossed them to Alicia.

Alicia blinked. “If they caught you, you'd get in big trouble.”

“Well, then, you'd better destroy the evidence, eh?” Paula wasn't especially smart, not in the way that got you good grades at school. Alicia could tell. But the other girl had a feel for what
needed
doing, one that Alicia couldn't begin to match. She took Paula's advice. The rolls quickly disappeared. They tasted like sawdust. Empty as Alicia was, she didn't care. “Better?” Paula asked when she was done.

“Ja,”
Alicia said. “Thank you!”

“For what?” Paula waved it away. “Those shitheads are giving you a hard time. Anybody can see that. If they were giving a vulture a hard time, I'd try and get him some dead, smelly meat.”

Springs squeaked as Alicia shifted on the cot. One of them poked at her, too, so she shifted again. She stuck her head out and flapped her arms as if she were a vulture. Paula thought that was so funny, she buried her face in her pillow to muffle her laughter. Alicia watched her out of the corner of her eye. The other girl acted like somebody who hated the
Reich
and the Nazis and everything they stood for. But if it was an act and Alicia fell for it, she'd ruin herself and her whole family. And so she wouldn't fall for it.

If Paula really did hate the
Reich
and the Nazis…then she did, that was all. Alicia couldn't afford to let on that she did, too, except for arresting her when they had no business to. And that, maybe, was the hardest, the saddest, thing of all.

 

Heinrich Gimpel sat in his cell, waiting for whatever happened next. That was all he could do. Boredom mixed with occasional terror—that was what his life in prison had been. He could see how the blend was in and of itself part of what broke prisoners down. As he sat on the cot, he could practically feel his mind slowing down, slowing down, slowing….

And he was better equipped than most to fight boredom. He had a fine memory. He could call up books and plays and films in his mind, trying to squeeze out every last detail. He could set up complicated accounting problems and solve them in his head instead of with a calculator. He could remember the last time he'd made love with Lise, and the time before that, and the quickie they'd sneaked in, and….

He could worry. He spent a lot of time worrying. That was part of leaving him here by himself, too. He knew as much, and tried to fight against it. There, he didn't have much luck.

He was brooding and wishing he weren't when guards
clumped up the hallway toward his cell. One opened the door while two others pointed assault rifles at him. He couldn't understand why they thought he was so dangerous. Under different circumstances, it might have been flattering.

“Come on, you,” growled the guard with the key. “Your mouthpiece is waiting.”

As Heinrich rose, he got a whiff of himself. His nostrils curled. He'd done his best to stay clean, but his best wasn't very good. And he was still wearing the uniform in which he'd been arrested. It was ranker than he was.

Down the hall he went, holding up his trousers with one hand. At least they hadn't cuffed him this time. Never mind the assault rifles at his back. He couldn't very well make a break when his pants would fall down if he tried. Without laces, his shoes flopped on his feet, too.

Klaus Menzel stood waiting in the room with the glass partition. The lawyer had on another suit that would have cost Heinrich a month's pay. He stepped up to the grill and said, “I have some good news and some bad news for you. Which do you want first?”

“Give me the good news,” Heinrich said at once. “I haven't heard any in so long….”