In The Presence of mine Enemies

I

Heinrich Gimpel glanced at the report on his desk to make sure how many Reichsmarks the United States was being assessed for the Wehrmacht bases by New York, Chicago, and St. Louis. As he'd thought, the numbers were up from those of 2009. Well, the Americans might grumble, but they'd cough up what they owed-and in hard currency, too; none of their inflated dollars. If they didn't, the panzer divisions might roll out of those bases and take what was owed the Germanic Empire this year. And if they collected some blood along with their pound of flesh, the USA might complain, but it was hardly in a position to fight back.

Heinrich entered the new figures on his computer, then saved the study he'd been working on for the past couple of days. The Zeiss hard disk purred smoothly as it swallowed the data. He made two backups-he was a meticulously careful man-before shutting down the machine. When he got up from his desk, he put on his uniform greatcoat: in Berlin's early March, winter still outblustered spring.

Willi Dorsch, who shared the office with Heinrich, got up, too. "Let's call it a day, Heinrich," he said, and shook his head as he donned his own greatcoat. "How long have you been here at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht now?"

"Going on twelve years," Heinrich answered, buttoning buttons. "Why?"

His friend cheerfully sank the barb: "All that time at the high command, and a fancy uniform to go with it, and you still don't look like a soldier."

"I can't help it," Heinrich said with a sigh. He knew too well that Willi was right. A tall, thin, balding man in his early forties, he had a tendency to shamble instead of parading. He wore his greatcoat as if it were cut from the English tweeds professors still affected. Setting his high-crowned cap at a rakish angle, he raised an eyebrow to get Willi's reaction. Willi shook his head. Heinrich shrugged and spread his hands.

"I'll just have to be martial for both of us," Willi said.His cap gave him a fine dashing air. "Doing anything for dinner tonight?" The two men lived not far from each other.

"As a matter of fact, we are. I'm sorry. Lise invited some friends over," Heinrich said. "We'll get together soon, though."

"We'd better," Willi said. "Erika's going on again about how she misses you. Me, I'm getting jealous."

"Oh,Quatsch, " Heinrich said, using the pungent Berliner word for rubbish. "Maybe she needs her glasses checked." Willi was blond and ruddy and muscular, none of which desirable adjectives applied to Heinrich. "Or maybe it's just my bridge game."

Willi winced. "You know how to hurt a guy, don't you? Come on. Let's go."

The wind outside the military headquarters had a bite to it. Heinrich shivered inside his greatcoat. He pointed off to the left, toward the Great Hall. "The old-timers say the bulk of that thing has messed up our weather."

"Old-timers always complain. That's what makes them old-timers." But Willi's gaze followed Heinrich's finger. They both saw the Great Hall every day, but seldom really looked at it. "It's big, all right, but is it big enough for that? I doubt it." His voice, though, was doubtful, too.

"You ask me, it's big enough for damn near anything," Heinrich said. The Great Hall had gone up sixty years before, in the great flush of triumph after Britain and Russia fell before the planes and panzers of the Third Reich. It boasted a dome that reached two hundred twenty meters into the sky and was more than two hundred fifty meters across: sixteen St. Peter's cathedrals might have fit within the enormous monument to the grandeur of the Aryan race. The riches of a conquered continent had paid for the construction.

The dome itself, sheathed in weathered copper, caught the fading light like a tall green hill. At the top, in place of a cross, stood a gilded Germanic eagle with a swastika in its claws. Atop the eagle, a red light blinked on and off to warn away low-flying planes.

Willi Dorsch's shiver had only a little to do with the chilly weather. "It makes me feel tiny."

"It's a temple to the Reich and the Volk. It's supposed to make you feel tiny," Heinrich answered. "Set against the needs of the German race and the state, any one manis tiny."

"We serve them. They don't serve us," Willi agreed. He pointed across the Adolf Hitler Platz toward the Fuhrer 's palace on the far side of the immense square next to the Great Hall. "When Speer ran the palace up, he was worried the size of it would dwarf even our Leader himself." And, indeed, the balcony above the tall entranceway to the Fuhrer 's residence looked like an architectural afterthought.

Heinrich's short laugh came out as a puff of steam. "Not even Speer could look ahead to see what technology might do for him."

"Better not let the Security Police hear you talk that way about a Reichsvater." Willi tried to laugh, too, but the chuckle rang hollow. The Security Police were no laughing matter.

Still, Heinrich was right. When the Fuhrer 's palace went up, another huge eagle had surmounted the balcony from which the Germanic Empire's ruler might address his citizens. The eagle had been moved to the roof when Heinrich was a boy. In its place went an enormous televisor screen. Adolf Hitler Platz held a million people. When the Fuhrer spoke to a crowd these days, even the ones at the back got a good view.

A bus purred up to the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht building. Heinrich and Willi got on with the rest of the officials who greased the wheels of the mightiest military machine the world had known. One by one, the commuters stuck their account cards into the fare slot. The bus's computer debited each rider eighty-five pfennigs.

The bus rolled down the broad boulevard toward South Station. Berlin's myriad bureaucrats made up the majority of the passengers, but not all. A fair number were tourists, come from all over the world to view the most wonderful and terrible avenue that world boasted. Blase as any native, Heinrich usually paid scant attention to the marvels of his home town. Today being what it was, though, the oohs and ahhs of people seeing them for the first time made him notice them, too.

Sentries from the Grossdeutschland division in ceremonial uniform goose-stepped outside their barracks. Tourists on the sidewalk, many of them Japanese, photographed the Fuhrer 's guards. Inside the barracks hall, where tourists wouldn't see them, were other troops in businesslike camouflage smocks. They had assault rifles, not the ceremonial force's old-fashioned Gewehr 98s, and enough armored fighting vehicles to blast Berlin to rubble. Visitors from afar were not encouraged to think about them. Neither were most Berliners. But Heinrich reckoned up Grossdeutschland 's budget every spring. He knew exactly what the barracks held.

Neon lights came on in front of theaters and restaurants as darkness deepened. Dark or light, people swarmed in and out of the huge Roman-style building that held a heated swimming pool the size of a young lake. It was open twenty-four hours a day for those who wanted to exercise, to relax, or just to ogle attractive members of the opposite sex. Its Berlin nickname was the Heiratbad, the marriage bath, sometimes amended by the cynical to the Heiratbett, the marriage bed.

Past the pool, the Soldiers' Hall and the Air and Space Ministry faced each other across the street. The Soldiers' Hall was a monument to the triumph of German arms. Among the exhibits it lovingly preserved were the railroad car in which Germany had yielded to France in 1918 and France to Germany in 1940; the first Panzer IV to enter the Kremlin compound; one of the gliders that had landed troops in southern England; and, behind thick leaded glass, the twisted, radioactive remains of the Liberty Bell, excavated by expendable prisoners from the ruins of Philadelphia.

Old people still called the Air and Space Ministry the Reichsmarschall 's Office, in memory of Hermann Goring, the only man ever to hold that exalted rank. Willi Dorsch used its more common name when he nudged Heinrich and said, "I wonder what's happening in the Jungle these days."

"Could be anything," Heinrich answered. They both laughed. The roof of the ministry had been covered with four meters of earth, partly as a protection against bombs from the air, and then lavishly planted, partly to please Goring's fancy (his private apartment was on the top floor). The Reichsmarschall was almost fifty years dead, but the orgies he'd put on amidst the greenery remained a Berlin legend.

Willi said, "We aren't the men our grandfathers were. In those days, they thought big and weren't ashamed to be flamboyant." He sighed the sigh of a man denied great deeds by the time in which he chanced to live.

"Poor us, doomed to get by on matter-of-fact competence," Heinrich said. "The skills we need to run the Empire are different from the ones Hitler's generation used to conquer it."

"I suppose so." Willi clicked his tongue between his teeth. "I envy you your contentment here and now. I almost joined the Wehrmacht when I was just out of the Hitler Jugend. Sometimes I still think I should have. There's a difference between this uniform"-he ran a hand down the front of his double-breasted greatcoat-"and the ones real soldiers wear."

"Is that your heart talking, or did you just remember you're not eighteen years old any more?" Heinrich said. His friend winced, acknowledging the hit. He went on, "Me, I'd fight if the Vaterland needed me, but I'm just as glad I don't have to carry a gun."

"We're all probably safer because you don't," Willi said.

"This is also true." Heinrich took off his thick, gold-framed glasses. The street outside, the interior of the bus, and even Willi next to him turned blurry and indistinct. He blinked a couple of times, then set the glasses back on the bridge of his nose. The world regained its sharp edges.

The neon brilliance of the street outside dimmed as the bus went past the shops and theaters and started picking up passengers from the Ministries of the Interior, Transportation, Economics, and Food.More uniforms that don't have soldiers in them, Heinrich thought. The buildings from which the new riders came were shutting down for the day.

Two ministries, though, like the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, never slept. A new shift went into the Justice Ministry to replace the workers who left for home. German justice could not close its eyes, and woe betide the criminal or racial mongrel upon whom its all-seeing gaze settled. Himself a thoroughly law-abiding man, Heinrich still shivered a little whenever he passed that marble-fronted hall.

The Colonial Ministry stayed busy, too. Much of the world fell under its purview: the farming villages in the Ukraine, the mining colonies in central Africa, the Indian tea plantations, the cattle herders on the plains of North America. As if picking that last thought from Heinrich's mind, Willi Dorsch said, "How many Americans does it take to screw in a lightbulb?"

"The Americans have always been in the dark." Heinrich clucked sadly. "Your father was telling that one, Willi."

"If he was, he sounded more relieved than I do. The Yankees might have been tough."

"Might-have-beens don't count, fortunately." Isolation and neutrality had kept the United States from paying heed as potential allies in Europe went down one after another. It faced the Germanic Empire and Japan alone a generation later-and the oceans weren't wide enough to shield it from robot bombs. Now it was trying to get back on its feet, but the Reich didn't intend to let it.

Just ahead lay another monument to German victory: Hitler's Arch of Triumph. Heinrich had been to Paris on holiday and seen the Arc d'Triomphe at the end of the Champs-Elysees. It served as a model for Berlin's arch, and was a model in scale as well. The Arc d'Triomphe was only-only! — about fifty meters tall, less than half the height of its titanic successor. The Berlin arch was almost a hundred seventy meters wide and also a hundred seventeen meters deep, so that the bus spent a good long while under it, as if traversing a tunnel through a hillside.

When at last it emerged, South Station lay not far ahead. The station building made an interesting contrast to the monumental stone piles that filled the rest of the avenue. Its exterior was copper sheeting and glass, giving the traveler a glimpse of the steel ribs that formed its skeleton.

The bus stopped at the edge of the station plaza. Along with everyone else, Heinrich and Willi filed off and hurried across the square toward the waiting banks of elevators and escalators. They walked between more displays of weapons from Germany's fallen foes: the wreckage of a British fighter shown inside a lucite cube, a formidable-looking Russian panzer, the conning tower of an American U-boat.

"Into the bowels of the earth," Willi murmured as he reached out to grab the escalator handrail. The train to Stahnsdorf boarded on the lowest of the station's four levels.

Signs and arrows and endless announcements over the loudspeaker system should have made getting lost inside the railway station impossible. Heinrich and Willi found their way to the commuter train without conscious thought. So did most Berliners. But the swarms of tourists were grit in the smooth machine. Uniformed boys from the Hitler Jugend and girls from the Bund deutscher Madel helped those for whom even the clearest instructions were not clear enough.

All the same, the natives grumbled when foreigners got in the way. Dodging around an excited Italian who'd dropped his cheap suitcase so he could use both hands to gesture at a Hitler Youth in brown shirt, swastika armband, and Lederhosen, Willi growled, "People like that deserve to be sent to the showers."

"Oh, come on, Willi, let him live," Heinrich answered mildly.

"You're too soft," his friend said. But they rounded the last corner and came to their waiting area. Willi looked at the schedule display on the wall, then at his watch. "Five minutes till the next one. Not bad."

"No," Heinrich said. The train pulled into the station within thirty seconds of the appointed time. Heinrich thought nothing of it as he followed Willi into a car. He noticed only the very rare instances when the train was late. As the two men had done on the bus, they put their account cards into the fare slot and sat down. As soon as the computer's count of fares matched the car's capacity, the doors hissed shut. Three more cars filled behind them. Then the train began to move. Acceleration pressed Heinrich back against the synthetic fabric of his seat.

Twenty minutes later, an electronic voice rang tinnily from the roof-mounted speakers: "Stahnsdorf! This stop is Stahnsdorf! All out for Stahnsdorf!"

Heinrich and Willi were standing in front of the doors when they hissed open again. The two commuters hopped off and hurried through the little suburban station to the bus stop outside. Another five minutes and Willi got up from the local bus. "See you tomorrow, Heinrich."

"Say hello to Erika for me."

"I'm not sure I ought to," Willi said. Both men laughed. Dorsch got off the bus and trotted toward his house, which stood three doors down from the corner.

Heinrich Gimpel rode on for another few stops. Then he got off, too. His own house lay at the end of a cul-de-sac, so he had to walk for a whole block.It's healthy for me, he told himself, a consolation easier to enjoy in spring and summer than in winter.

Thesnick of his key going into the lock brought shouts of, "Daddy!" from inside the house. He smiled, opened the door, and picked up each of his three girls in turn for a hug and a kiss. They ranged down in age from ten by two-year steps.

Then he lifted his wife as well. Lise Gimpel squawked; that wasn't part of the evening ritual. The girls giggled. "Put me down!" Lise said indignantly.

"Not till I get my kiss."

She made as if to bite his nose instead, but then let him kiss her. He set her feet back on the carpet and held her a little longer before letting her go. She made a pleasant armful: a green-eyed brunette several years younger than he who'd kept her figure very well. When he released her, she hurried back toward the kitchen. "I want to finish cooking before everyone gets here."

"All right." He smiled as he watched her retreat. While he hung up his greatcoat and took off his tie, his daughters regaled him with tales out of school. He listened to three simultaneous stories as best he could. Lise came out again long enough to hand him a goblet of liebfraumilch, then started away.

The chimes rang before she got out of the front room. She whirled and stared at the door. "I am going to boot Susanna right into the net," she declared.

Heinrich looked at his watch. "She's only ten minutes early tonight. And you know she's always early, so you should have been ready."

"Hmp," Lise said while he went in to let in their friend. Meanwhile, the girls started chorusing, "Susanna is a football! Aunt Susanna is a football!"

"Heinrich, why are they calling me a football?" Susanna Weiss demanded. She craned her neck to look up at him. "I'm short, yes, and I'm not emaciated like you, but I'm not round, either." She shrugged out of a mink jacket and thrust it into his hands. "Here, see to this."

Chuckling, he clicked his heels. "Jawohl, meine Dame."

She accepted the deference as no less than her due. "Fraulein Doktor Professor will suffice, thank you." She taught medieval English literature at Friedrich Wilhelm University. Suddenly abandoning her imperial manner, she started to laugh, too. "Now that you've hung that up, how about a hug?"

"Lise's not watching. I suppose I can get away with it." Heinrich put his arms around her. She barely came up to his shoulder, but her vitality more than made up for lack of size. When he let go, he said, "Why don't you go into the kitchen? You can pretend to help Lise while you soak up our Glenfiddich."

"Scotch almost justifies the existence of Scotland," Susanna said. "It's a cold, gloomy, rocky place, so they had to make something nice to keep themselves warm."

"If that's why people drink it, your boyfriend is lucky he didn't set himself on fire here a couple of years ago."

"Myformer boyfriend,danken Gott dafur." All the same, Susanna blushed to the roots of her hair. Her skin was very fine and fair, which let Heinrich watch the flush advance from her throat. "I hadn't found out he was a drunk yet, Heinrich."

"I know," he said gently. If he teased her too hard, she'd lose her temper, and nothing and nobody was safe if that happened. "Go on. Lise's trying that recipe you sent her."

The girls waylaid Susanna before she got to the kitchen. Though she'd never been married, she made an excellent ersatz aunt. She took children seriously, listened to what they had to say, and treated them like small adults. Heinrich smiled. Come to that, she was a small adult herself. He knew better than to say so out loud.

Walther and Esther Stutzman arrived a few minutes later, along with their son, Gottlieb, and daughter, Anna. Anna promptly went off with the Gimpel girls; she was a year older than Alicia, the eldest of the three. Heinrich Gimpel stared at Gottlieb. "Good heavens, is that a mustache?"

The younger male Stutzman touched a finger to the space between his nose and upper lip. "It's going to be one, I hope." At the moment, the growth was hard to see. For one thing, he'd only just turned sixteen. For another, his hair was even fairer than his father's. And, for a third, he'd chosen to keep untrimmed only a toothbrush mustache; the first Fuhrer 's style was newly popular again.

Walther Stutzman differed from his son in appearance only by the presence of twenty-odd years and the absence of even the vestiges of a mustache. As he handed Heinrich his topcoat, he asked quietly, "Tonight?"

"Yes, I think Alicia's ready," Heinrich answered, as quietly. "I told her she could stay up late. How has Anna done, the past year?"

"Well enough," her father said.

"We're still here, after all," Esther Stutzman put in. A slim woman with light brown hair, she peered at Heinrich through glasses thicker than his own. Somehow, in spite of everything, her laugh held real mirth. "And if she hadn't done well, we wouldn't be, would we?"

"Wouldn't be what, Aunt Esther?" Alicia Gimpel asked, a doll under one arm.

"Wouldn't be standing out here in the hall if we expected the curly-haired Gestapo to listen in." Esther's grin took all sting from the words.

Imitating her father, Alicia said, "Oh,Quatsch! " Anna Stutzman tried to sneak up behind her, but she whirled before she got tickled. Both girls squealed. They ran off together, Alicia's brown curls bobbing beside Anna's blond ones. They were very much of a height; though Anna was older, Alicia was tall for her age.

"Dinner!" Lise called from the kitchen. "Dinner, dinner, dinner!" Everyone trooped into the dining room. Heinrich Gimpel and Gottlieb Stutzman dropped the leaves on the table to accommodate the unusual crowd. Walther, meanwhile, fetched in a couple of extra chairs, and Susanna Weiss placed them around the table.

They all paused to admire the fragrantly steaming pork roast before Heinrich attacked it with fork and carving knife. With onions, potatoes, and boiled parsnips, it made a feast to fight the chill outside and leave everyone happily replete. Most of the talk that punctuated the music of knife and fork was praise for Lise's cooking.

Smooth wheat beer mixed with raspberry syrup went with the meal. The two younger Gimpel girls usually got only small glasses. Tonight, they found grownup-sized mugs in front of them. Francesca and Roxane proudly drained them dry, and were nodding by the time their mother brought out dessert. They munched their way through the little cakes stuffed with prunes or apricots or mildly sweet chocolate, but the filling sweets only made them sleepier. The food and beer slowed Alicia down, too, but she was buoyed by the prospect of sitting up and talking with the adults.

Seeing her daughter's excitement, Lise said, "She doesn't know yet how boring we can be, with our chatter of children and taxes and work and who's going to bed with whom."

"Whois going to bed with whom?" Esther asked. "It's more interesting than taxes and work, that's for sure."

Susanna parodied a Hitler Jugend song:

"In the fields and on the heath, We lose strength through joy."

Gottlieb Stutzman blushed almost as red as she had before. She teased him: "Why, Gottlieb, don't you hope to meet a friendly maiden when you go to work your year in the fields?"

"It is not…not practical, not for me," he answered stiffly, rubbing a finger over his peach-fuzz mustache.

"It is not practical for any of us, as Susanna knows." Walther Stutzman gave her a severe look. "It is also not practical for us to sing that song anywhere but among ourselves. If the Security Police hear it-"

"It's wiser not to draw the attention of the Security Police, anyway," Lise Gimpel said with her usual solid good sense. "Even children know that." She looked at her own two younger children, who were valiantly trying not to yawn. "After I get the table cleared away, time for the little ones to go to bed."

Heinrich nodded to Walther and Gottlieb Stutzman. "Nice to have some other men in the house for a change," he remarked.

"You are outnumbered, aren't you?" Walther said. "I kept the numbers even. But then, that's what they pay me for." He held a moderately important post with the computer-design team at Zeiss.

Everyone, even the men, pitched in to help Lise cart dirty dishes and leftovers (not that there were many of those) back to the kitchen. The two younger Gimpel girls exchanged their party dresses for long cotton nightgowns. Francesca and Roxane collected kisses from the grownups, then went off to the bedroom they shared-not without a couple of sleepily jealous glances at Alicia, who got to stay up.

Despite being sleepy, Alicia Gimpel felt about to burst from curiosity and excitement. She sat on the edge of the couch. Her eyes flew from her parents to Aunt Susanna or Aunt Esther or Uncle Walther or Gottlieb. As her mother had said, Alicia didn't know what the grownups talked about after she went to sleep, and she could hardly wait to learn.

Her gaze swung to Anna. She stuck out an accusing forefinger. "You've found out what this secret is."

"Yes, I have." Anna sounded serious enough to startle Alicia. She looked back to her father. Behind his glasses, he was blinking quickly, as if fighting back tears. Alicia saw that, but had trouble believing it. She couldn't imagine her father crying. And she couldn't imagine Anna keeping a secret from her. Her mouth twisted down. Her eyes narrowed. It was what her family called her Angry Face. Her father started to raise a hand. Before he could say anything, Anna, who also recognized it, hastily went on, "After tonight, you'll know, too."

"All right," Alicia said, partway mollified. But it wasn't all right. She could tell. "Why are you all staring at me like that? I don't like it!" She twisted around to press her face against a sofa cushion.

"It's an important secret, sweetheart," her mother said. "Come out, please. It's such an important secret, you can't even tell your sisters."

That got through to Alicia. She did pull away from the pillow and stared at her mother, her eyes wide. Her father said, "You can't tell anyone. Not anyone at all, not ever. We've waited till you got old enough so we could tell you, because we wanted to be sure, or as sure as we could be"-sometimes he was maddeningly precise-"you wouldn't give us away by telling somebody you shouldn't."

"I've known for a year now, and I didn't even tellyou, " Anna said. "See how important it is?" She sounded proud of herself. Alicia looked over to Aunt Esther and Uncle Walther. They looked proud of Anna, too. And they also looked frightened. Alicia had never seen them frightened before, but she couldn't mistake it. Seeing that frightened her, too.

"What's going on, then?" she asked. "You're right, Anna-I never knew you had a secret, and we're best friends." She still sounded hurt, but only a little now: whatever it was, her time to learn it had come. She repeated, "What's going on?"

Her father and mother didn't answer, not right away. They looked frightened, too, which alarmed Alicia far more than the fear on the Stutzmans' faces. Whatever this was, it had more weight than anything she could have imagined. At last, after a deep breath, Susanna Weiss spoke one blunt sentence: "You are a Jew, Alicia."

Alicia stared. She shook her head, as if at a joke. "Don't be silly, Aunt Susanna. There are no more Jews, not anywhere. They'rekaputt — finished." She spoke with the assurance of one reciting a lesson well learned in school.

But her father shook his head, too, to contradict her. "Youare a Jew, Alicia. Your sisters are Jews, too. So is Susanna. So are Esther and Walther and Gottlieb and Anna. And so are your mother and I."

He means it. He's not kidding,Alicia realized. Her ears and cheeks felt cold. That meant she was turning pale, all the blood going away from her face. "But-But…" She didn't know how to go on, so she stopped. After a moment, she rallied: "But Jews were filthy and wicked and diseased and racially impure." Perhaps trying to convince herself, she went on, "That's why the wise Reich got rid of them. That's what my teachers say."

"All the textbook lessons." Her father let out a long, long sigh. "I learned them, too."

Walther Stutzman said, "One of the hardest lessons anybody learns is that not everything your teachers tell you is true. For us, it's twice as hard."

"Is Anna filthy?" Alicia's mother asked.

"Of course not." Alicia got angry at the very idea. She looked over at her friend, still wanting Anna to tell her this was all just a game. But Anna looked back with impressively grown-up solemnity. She'd had a year to think about what rode on holding this secret close.

"Are your father and I wicked?" Alicia's mother persisted. "Is Susanna diseased?"

"I can get to feel that way, the morning after too much Scotch," Susanna said.

"Hush, Susanna," Lise Gimpel said impatiently.

"But-what happens if anyone finds out I'm-I'm a Jew?" Alicia pronounced the name with difficulty; it was too strong a curse to fit in the mouth of a well-brought-up ten-year-old. "If my friends at school know, they won't like me any more."

"If your friends at school find out, dear, it will be worse than that," her father said. "If anyone learns you're a Jew, the Einsatzkommandos will come for you, and for your sisters, and for your mother and me, and for the Stutzmans, and for Susanna-and, after that, probably for other people, too." His voice was usually soft and gentle. Now he made it hard as armor plate, sharp as a Solingen dagger.

Alicia couldn't doubt he meant exactly what he said. She'd learned about the Einsatzkommandos in school, too. In the lessons, they were heroes, cleaning up the conquered east and then the ghettos of New York and Los Angeles. But if they came to clean up her family…

Her mother tried to soothe her: "Nobody has to find out, my little one. Nobody will, unless you give yourself away, and us with you. We're well hidden these days, the few of us who are left. We have to be." But worry clouded even her sunny face.She must have learned the same lessons I did, Alicia thought, remembering what her father had said moments before.She's scared of the Einsatzkommandos, too. Her mother repeated, "We're well hidden."

But Alicia wildly shook her head. She knew about the millions who had died in Europe and then, a generation later, in the United States. Every schoolchild knew. The Reich made sure of that.And now they'll come for me! Oh, God, they'll come for me!

"My father helped keep us hidden," Uncle Walther said. "He altered the Reichs genealogical database to show that our families are all of pure Aryan blood. No one looks for us any more, not here at the heart of the Germanic Empire. No one thinks there's any reasonto look. We're safe enough, unless we give ourselves away. Maybe one day, not in our time but when your children or grandchildren have grown up, Alicia, we can be safe living openly as what we are. Maybe. Till then, we go on."

His soft words about changing databases had begun to reassure Alicia. What he didn't know about computers, nobody did. But when he spoke of living openly as Jews, she only stared at him. She felt like an animal caught in a trap. "It will never be safe! Never!" she said shrilly. "The Reich will last a thousand years, and how can there be room in it for Jews?"

"Maybe the Reich will last a thousand years, the way Hitler promised," her father said. "No one can know that till it happens, if it does. But, dear, there have been Jews for three thousand years already. Even if the Germanic Empire lives out all the time Hitler said it would, it will still be a baby beside us. Uncle Walther was right: one way or another, we go on. It's hard to pretend not to be what we really are-"

"I hate it," Susanna Weiss broke in. "I've always hated it, ever since I found out."

Alicia's father nodded. "We all hate it. But when times are dangerous for Jews, the way they are now, what other choice have we got?"

"This isn't the first time Jews have had to be what they are only in secret," Esther Stutzman said. "In Spain a long time ago, we pretended to be good Catholics. Now we have to pretend to be good Aryans and National Socialists. But underneath, we still are what we've always been."

The grownups all sounded so cool, so collected. As far as they were concerned, everything was fine, and everything would stay fine no matter what. That wasn't how it felt to Alicia. "I don't want to be a

Jew!" she shouted.

Her father's head whipped toward the windows. Sudden stark fright filled his face, and everyone else's. Alicia understood that. She clapped her hands to her mouth. If one of the neighbors heard, the Security Police were only a phone call away.

After a deep breath, her father said, "You have a way out, Alicia."

"What is it?" She stared at him, tears and questions in her eyes.

"You can just pretend this night never happened," he told her. "You know we'll never betray you, no matter what you decide. If you choose not to tell your husband one day, if he's not one of us, and if you choose not to tell your children, they'll never know you-and they-are Jewish. They'll be just like everybody else in the Germanic Empire. But one more piece of something old and precious will have disappeared from the world forever."

"I don't know what to do," Alicia said.

To her surprise, her father got up, came over, and kissed her on top of the head. "You may not realize it, but that's the most grownup thing you've ever said."

Alicia didn't want to sound like a grownup, any more than she wanted to be a Jew. She didn't seem to have much choice about either. Figuring that out was another grownup thing to do, not that she knew it at the time.

"It's not so bad, Alicia," Anna said. "I cried, too, when I found out-"

"So did I," Gottlieb added, which made Alicia's eyes widen. He was so much older than she that she thought of him as practically a grownup.

Anna went on, "But it's special in a way, like being part of a club that won't take just anybody. And it's not like what we are is written on our foreheads or anything like that, even though it does feel like it at first. But if we keep the secret, no one will find out what we are. We even have our own special holidays-today is one."

"What's today?" Alicia asked, intrigued in spite of herself.

"Today is the festival of Purim," her father answered. "The Germans and the Spaniards Aunt Esther was talking about weren't the first people who wanted to get rid of the Jews. We've always stood out a little because we're different from the other people in a country. And a long time ago, in the Persian Empire…"

He got out a Bible to help tell Alicia the story. Not every family had one in its house or flat these days. Still, the National Socialists mostly tolerated quiet Christianity. Alicia's teachers sometimes made scornful noises about a religion better fit for slaves than for heroes, but she'd never heard of the Security Police paying a call on anybody who believed in Jesus. She didn't know what would happen if somebody made a fuss about Jesus, but people knew better than to make fusses about such things. Christianity that wasn't quiet was dangerous, too.

"And so," her father finished, "King Ahasuerus hanged Haman on the very gallows he'd built for Mordechai, and Mordechai and Queen Esther lived long, happy, rich lives afterwards." Caught up in the ancient tale even though she hadn't really wanted to be, Alicia laughed and clapped her hands.

Very softly, Susanna Weiss said, "I wish someone had built a gallows for Hitler and Himmler. So many of our people gone…" She stared down into her snifter of Scotch.

Alicia stared, too-at Aunt Susanna. The first Fuhrer and the first Reichsfuhrer — SS, who'd later followed Hitler as ruler of the Germanic Empire, were saints nowadays, or as close to saints as made no difference. Even with what Alicia had learned tonight, hearing someone wish they'd been hanged was a jolt. And Susanna…Susanna sounded as if she felt guilty for living on where so many of her people-so many of my people, too,Alicia thought wonderingly-had died.

"I wish I could tell my sisters," Alicia said.

Her father and Walther Stutzman smiled at each other. A moment later, Alicia discovered why, for Anna said, "When I found out last year, I said, 'I wish I could tell Alicia.'"

Uncle Walther said, "It's new, little one. It's a shock. I remember how confused finding out what I was made me."

"But you can't say anything to Francesca and Roxane, you know-not anything at all," Alicia's father told her. "They're too little. It would be very dangerous. They'll learn when the time comes, the way you have now. If this secret gets to the wrong ears, we're all dead. Just because there aren't many Jews left doesn't mean people won't start hunting us. We're still fair game."

"Are we-the people in this room-all the Jews who are left?" Alicia asked.

"No," her father said. "There are others, all through Greater Germany and the rest of the Empire. Sooner or later, you'll meet more, and some of them will surprise you. But for now, the fewer Jews you know, the fewer you can give away if the worst happens."

Who?Alicia wondered. Her eyes went far away.Which of our friends are really Jews? She never would have guessed about the Stutzmans, who with their blond good looks seemed perfect Aryans, not in a million years. Her teachers went on and on about how ugly Jews had been, with fat, flabby lips and grotesque hooked noses and almost kinky hair. It didn't seem to be true. What else had they told her that wasn't true?

Her mother said, "Even though we have our own holidays, sweetheart, we can only celebrate them among ourselves. The little three-cornered cakes we had tonight are special for Purim-they're called Hamantaschen."

"'Haman's hats,'" Alicia echoed. "I like that. Serves him right."

"Yes," her mother said, "but that's why you won't be taking any of them to school for lunch. People who aren't Jewish might recognize them. We can't afford to take any chances at all, do you see?"

"Not even with something as little as cakes?" Alicia said.

"Not even," her mother said firmly. "Not with anything, not ever."

"All right, Mama." The warning impressed Alicia with the depth of the precautions she would have to take to survive.

"Isit all right, Alicia?" Her father sounded anxious. "I know this is a lot to put on a little girl, but we have to, you see, or there won't be any Jews any more."

"It really is," Alicia answered. "It…surprised me. I don't know if I like it yet, but it's all right." She nodded in a slow, hesitant way. She thought she meant what she said, but she wasn't quite sure.

She and Anna yawned together, then giggled at each other. Aunt Susanna got up, grabbed her handbag, walked over to Alicia, and kissed her on the cheek. "Welcome to your bigger family, dear. We're glad to have you."

My bigger family,Alicia thought. That, she did like. Aunt Susanna and the Stutzmans had always been like family to her. Finding out they reallywere a family of sorts-or at least part of the same conspiracy of survival-was reassuring, in a way.

Susanna turned to Alicia's father. "I'd better get home. I have to teach an early class tomorrow."

"We ought to go, too," Esther Stutzman said. "Either that or we'll wait till Anna falls asleep-which shouldn't be more than another thirty seconds-bundle her into the broom closet, and leave without her." Her daughter let out an irate sniff.

Alicia's mother and father passed out coats. The friends stood gossiping on the front porch for a last couple of minutes. As they chattered, a brightly lit police van turned the corner and rolled up the street toward the end of the cul-de-sac. "They know!" Alicia gasped in horror. "They know!" She tried to bolt inside, away from the eagle and swastika that had suddenly gone from national emblem to symbol of terror.

Her father seized her arm. Alicia had never thought of him as particularly strong, but he held on tight and made sure she couldn't move. The van turned around and went back up the street. It turned the corner. It was gone.

"There. You see?" her father said. "Everything's fine, little one. They can only find out about us if we give ourselves away. Do you understand?"

"I-think so, Father," Alicia said.

"Good." Her father let go of her. "Nowyou can go on in and get ready for bed."

Alicia had never been so glad to go into the house in all her life.

Susanna and the Stutzmans walked off toward the bus stop. Heinrich and Lise Gimpel went back inside the house. Once he closed the door, he allowed himself the luxury of a long sigh of mingled relief and fear. "That damned police van!" he said. "I thought poor Alicia would jump right out of her skin-and if she had, it might have ruined everything."

"Well, she didn't. You stopped her." His wife gave him a quick kiss. "I'm going to make sure she's all right now."

"Good idea," Heinrich said. "I'll start on the dishes." He rolled up his sleeves, turned on the water, and waited for it to get hot. When it did, he rinsed off the plates and silverware and glasses and loaded them into the dishwasher. The manufacturers kept saying the new models would be able to handle dishes that hadn't been rinsed. So far, they'd lied every time.

Heinrich was still busy when Alicia came out for a goodnight kiss. Usually, that was just part of nighttime routine. It felt special tonight.

He said, "You don't have to be frightened every second, darling. If you show you're afraid, people will start wondering what you have to be afraid of. Keep on being your own sweet self, and no one will ever suspect a thing."

"I'll try, Papa." When Alicia hugged him, she clung for a few extra seconds. He squeezed her and ran his hand through her hair. "Good night," she said, and hurried away.

He let out another sigh, even longer than the first. Finding out you were a Jew in the heart of the National Socialist Germanic Empire was not something anyone, child or adult, could fully take in at a moment's notice. A beginning of acceptance was as much as he could hope for. That much, Alicia had given him.

His own father had shown him photographs smuggled out of the Ostlands and other, newer, ones from the USA to warn him how necessary silence was. He still had nightmares about those pictures after more than thirty years. But he still had the photos, too, hidden in a file cabinet. If he thought he had to, he would show them to Alicia. He hoped the need would never come, for her sake and his own.

Lise walked into the kitchen a couple of minutes later. She dragged in a chair from the dining room, sat down, and waited till the sink was empty and the washer full. Then, as the machine started to churn, she got up and gave him a long, slow hug. "And so the tale gets told once more," she said.

As he had with his daughter, Heinrich hung on to his wife. "And so we try to go on for another generation," he said. "We've outlasted so much. God willing, we'll outlast the Nazis, too. No matter what they teach in school, I don't believe the Reich can last a thousand years."

"Alevaiit doesn't." Lise used a word from a murdered language, a word that hung on among surviving Jews like the ghost of Hamlet's murdered father. "But, of course, now that the tale is told, the risk that we'll get caught also goes up. You did just right there, keeping her from running when the police van came by."

"Couldn't have that," Heinrich said gravely. "But she'll be nervous for a while now, and she's so young…" He shook his head. "Strange how the worst danger comes from making sure we go on. No one would ever suspect you or me-"

"Why else buy pork?" Lise broke in. "Why else have a Bible with the New Testament in it, too? Because we'd have to want to commit suicide if we used one that didn't, that's why."

"I know." Heinrich knew more intimately than that: he still had his foreskin. He took off his glasses, wiped his forehead with his sleeve, and set the spectacles back on his nose. "We do everything we can to seem like perfect Germans. I can quote from Mein Kampf more easily than from Scripture. But it's not so easy for a child. I remember."

Lise nodded. "So do I."

"And we still have two more to go." Heinrich let out yet another sigh. He hugged her again. "I'm so tired."

"I know," she said. "It must be easier for me, staying home with the Kinder like a proper Hausfrau. But you have to wear the mask at the office every day."

"Either I pretend to others I'm not a Jew or I pack it in and pretend the same thing to myself. I can't do that, dammit. I know too much." He thought again of the hidden, yellowing black-and-white photographs from the east, and of the color prints from North America. "Wewill go on, in spite of everything."

His wife yawned. "Right now, I'm going on to bed."

"I'm right behind you. Oh-speaking of the office, on the way home today Willi said he admired how content I was here and now."

"Did he? Good," Lise said at once. "If you must wear the mask, wear it well."

"I suppose so. He also asked if we were busy tonight. I said yes, since we were, but we'll be going over there one evening soon."

"I'll arrange for my sister to stay with the girls," Lise said. "Let's give Alicia a little more time to get over her shock before we take her out. And she'll realize Katarina's one of us, too, and maybe talking with her will help."

"Sensible. You usually are."

"Ha!" Lise said darkly. "I'd better be. So had you."

"I know." Heinrich chuckled. "Besides, with the girls at home we'll be able to play more bridge-we won't have to ride herd on them."

"That's true." Lise also laughed. Both of them, by now, were long used to the strangeness of having good friends who, if they learned the truth, might well want to send them to an extermination camp. Heinrichwas looking forward to getting together with Willi and Erika Dorsch for an evening of talk and bridge. Within the limits of his upbringing, Willi was a good fellow.

Heinrich pondered the limits of his own upbringing, which were a good deal narrower than Willi Dorsch's. In one way, telling Alicia of her heritage was transcending those limits. In another, it was forcing them on her as well. In still another…He gave up the regress before he got lost in it. "Didn't you say something about bed?"

"You're the one who's been standing here talking," Lise said.

"Let's go."

When her mother shook her awake, Alicia had to swallow a scream. Evil dreams had filled her night, dreams of being a monster in a world full of ordinary people, dreams of being taken from her parents, dreams of being taken from her parents to a place from which she would surely never return, dreams of… She didn't remember all of them. She hoped she would forget the ones she did remember.

In the instant when her eyes came open, she thought the hand on her shoulder belonged to a man from the Security Police. The scream turned to a gasp of relief as she recognized her mother. "Oh," she said. "It's you."

"Did you think it would be anyone else?"

"Yes," Alicia said.

The one flat, stark word wiped the smile from her mother's face. "Oh, little one," she said, and hugged Alicia. "Now get up and go eat your breakfast-and remember, your sisters don't know, and they mustn't know."

"How am I supposed to hide it?" Alicia asked.

"You have to, that's all," her mother said, which was no help at all. "Now get up and wash your face and eat breakfast and brush your teeth. You've got to be ready when the school bus gets to the stop."

That scream wanted to come out again. Alicia couldn't imagine how she'd get through the day without revealing herself to her teacher and, even more appallingly, to her friends. But she had to try. She'd learned to swim when her father tossed her into a stream and she had to claw her way back to him or drown. So she'd thought at the time, anyhow, though of course he would have saved her if she'd got in trouble.

But if she got in trouble here, no one would save her. No one could save her. She didn't know much about being a Jew, but that seemed all too clear.

She wanted to stay in bed. She wanted to stay in bed forever, in fact. She couldn't, and she knew it. Her mother had already gone down the hall to wake Francesca and Roxane. And there was Francesca, mumbling and grumbling. She hated to get up in the morning. Given half a chance, she would have slept till noon every day.

Alicia got out of bed a moment before her mother reappeared in the doorway and said, "Get moving," and then, "Oh. You are."

"Yes, Mama." Being a Jew meant trouble. Alicia could see that. But being late to school meant trouble, too, trouble of a sort she'd known about for years. That trouble she could stay out of. The other…? To Alicia, they both seemed about the same size just then. She was ferociously bright, but she was only ten.

She ducked into the bathroom as her sisters came out of the bedroom they shared. They would camp in the hall waiting for her, so she hurried. When she opened the door again, she pushed past them and back into her room to get dressed. That meant she didn't have to say anything much to them for a little while longer.

Like any ten-year-old girl, she put on the tan blouse and skirt that were the uniform of the Bund deutscher Madel. She remembered how proud she'd been when she turned ten the summer before and could join the League of German Maidens like Anna and her other older friends. Putting on the uniform, with its swastika armband, was a sign she was growing up.

As she pulled up her white socks and tied her stout brown shoes, though, the uniform suddenly seemed a lie, a betrayal.I'm not a German maiden, she thought unhappily.I'm a Jewish maiden. She shivered, though a steam radiator kept her room cozy and warm.

On her bookshelves stood a children's classic from the early days of the Reich, Julius Streicher's Trust No Fox in the Green Meadow and No Jew on His Oath. Like millions of German youngsters across three generations, she'd learned the difference between Aryans and Jews from the slim little volume. The blond, handsome, muscular Aryan could work and fight. The pudgy, swarthy, hook-nosed, flashily dressed Jew was the greatest scoundrel in the Reich. Alicia had believed that with all her heart. It was in a book-in every book. How could it be wrong?

Aryan children with blond or light brown hair jeered as homely, black-haired Jewish children and a Jewish teacher were ousted from their school. A few pages later, an Aryan boy grinned and played a concertina while more ugly Jews with big noses and fleshy lips trudged into exile past a sign that said ONE-WAY STREET. The colorful pictures were so bright and cheerful, they commanded belief. Alicia had the companion volume,The Poison Mushroom, too.

She stared at the caricatures of the Jews. She didn't look like that, nor did her sisters and parents. The Stutzmans and Susanna Weiss didn't, either. Realizing that helped steady her. If Trust No Fox had one lie in it, maybe it had lots of lies in it. With all her heart, she hoped so.

"Alicia!" her mother called. "Hurry up! It's breakfast!"

"Coming!" she said, and put the book away.

"Slowpoke," said Roxane, who with Francesca was already digging in to sausages and eggs. She was the teaser in the family, always looking for ways to get under her older sisters' skins and usually finding one.

Francesca asked the question Alicia had been dreading: "Well, what did you do when you got to stay up late last night?"

Behind Alicia, her mother suddenly stopped bustling about the kitchen. She stood still and quiet, waiting to hear what her oldest daughter would say-and maybe to jump in and help if she had to. "It wasn't very exciting," Alicia answered, as casually as she could. "Just a lot of talk. Grownups." She rolled her eyes. If she exaggerated, it wouldn't hurt, not here. Francesca already knew what she thought of grownups.

Her sister accepted what she said. Her mother started moving again, as if she'd only just noticed she'd stopped. And Alicia…Alicia was sunk in misery. She couldn't ever remember lying to Francesca before.

The girls got their books and went to the bus stop on the corner. Older girls in tan uniforms like Alicia's, older boys in brown Hitler Youth togs, and younger children dressed every which way waited for the school bus. "Hello, Alicia," said Emma Handrick, who lived a few doors away. "Did you get the math homework?"

"Sure," Alicia said, surprised Emma needed to ask; she almost always got the homework.

"Can I copy it from you on the way to school?" Emma asked eagerly. "Please? My mother said she'd clobber me if I got another lousy grade."

She'd asked before. Alicia had always said no. Her father and mother had taught her only to do her own work. They said anything else was dishonest. She'd gone along with that; it fit the way she thought. But today everything seemed up in the air. If she said no, would the neighbor girl denounce her as a Jew?

Whatever else happened, that couldn't. Not just her safety rode on it. So did her sisters' and her parents'. She nodded and smiled. "All right."

Emma's rather doughy face lit up in surprised delight. Francesca and Roxane looked horrified. Roxane had an I'm-going-to-tell expression on her face. Most of the time, that would have worried Alicia. Now she had bigger things to worry about. She felt like Atlas (her class had done Greek mythology the year before), with the weight of the heavens on her shoulders.

The school bus stopped at the corner. The doors hissed open. The children got on. A couple of Alicia's friends waved to her. She waved back, but found a seat with Emma. Her sisters perched together on another pair of seats. Their backs were stiff with disapproval at first, but then they started talking with friends of their own and forgot Alicia's scandalous behavior-for the time being, anyhow.

"You're a lifesaver," Emma said, her pencil racing over the paper. She finished the last problem-they were multiplying fractions-as the bus pulled into the schoolyard. "I even think I see how to do them myself."

"That's good," Alicia said. She wasn't sure she believed it. She was pretty sure shedidn't believe it, in fact. Emma would never be one of the smartest people in the class, which was putting it mildly. But hearing it salved Alicia's conscience.

She put the homework back in her folder and got off the bus. Francesca and Roxane waved as they hurried to the lines in front of their classrooms. Maybe they'd forgiven her sin. Maybe. She took her own place in line-right in front of Emma, in alphabetical order.

At precisely eight o'clock, the classroom door opened. "Come in, children," the teacher boomed.

"Jawohl, Herr Kessler," Alicia and the rest of the class chorused. All over the schoolyard, other classes were greeting their teachers the same way. They all marched into the classrooms in perfect step-well, not quite so perfect in the younger grades.

Again with the others, Alicia set her books and papers on her desk and stood at attention behind her chair. She faced the swastika flag that hung by the door, but her eyes were on Herr Kessler. He stood so stiff, he might have turned to stone. (Alicia thought of Perseus and the Gorgon.)

Suddenly, the teacher's right arm shot up and out."Heil!" he barked.

Alicia and her classmates also honored the flag with the German salute."Heil!" they said. Till this morning, she'd been proud to salute the flag. Why not? Till this morning, she'd been an Aryan among Aryans, one who deserved that privilege. Now? Now everything seemed different. No one else knew what she was, but she did, and the knowledge ate at her. Hadn't Hitler himself called Jews parasites on the nation? Alicia felt like an enormous cockroach. For a wild, frightening moment, she wondered if anyone else could see her metamorphosis.

Evidently not.Herr Kessler got to work on grammar: which prepositions took the dative, which the accusative, and which both and with what changes of meaning. Alicia had no trouble with any of that. But some people did-Emma, for instance. Alicia knew the Handricks had the televisor on all the time; she'd heard her mother talk about it. Even so, if you listened to how educated people talked, if you paid any attention at all, how could you make mistakes? Emma did, and she wasn't the only one.Herr Kessler made notations in the roll book in red ink. Emma's mother was liable to clobber her in spite of the arithmetic homework she'd got from Alicia.

History and geography came next. The teacher pulled down a big map of the world that hung above the blackboard. The Germanic Empire, shown in the blood-red of the flag, stretched from England deep into Siberia and India. Paler red showed lands occupied but not formally annexed: France, the United States, Canada. In the Empire's shadow were the little realms of the allied nations: Sweden's gold, Finland's pale blue, the greens of Hungary and Portugal, Romania's dark blue, purple for Spain and Bulgaria, and the yellow of the Italian Empire around the Mediterranean. Africa was mostly red, too, though Portugal, Spain, and Italy kept their colonies on the dark continent and the Aryan-dominated Union of South Africa was another ally, not a conquest.

Only the Empire of Japan, with Southeast Asia, China, the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and Australia all shown in yellow, came anywhere close to matching the Germanic Empire in size. The Japanese were strong enough to survive for the time being, not strong enough to make serious rivals for the Reich.

"And the Japanese, of course, are not Aryans,"Herr Kessler said. "Because of this, they have no true creativity of their own. Already they have fallen behind us in technology, and they will fall further behind with each passing year. Our triumph may not come soon, but it is sure." The children nodded solemnly. They knew how important being an Aryan was. Alicia did-all the more so now that she realized she wasn't one.

Math came next. They passed in their homework and did problems on the blackboard. Alicia got hers right. Emma botched hers.Herr Kessler frowned. He flipped through papers. "You were correct on your homework," he rumbled ominously. "Why do you fall down here?"

"I don't know,Herr Kessler," Emma said. "I'm sorry,Herr Kessler." She sounded sorry, too-sorry about what would happen to her when her mother found out she wasn't doing so well.

"Your paper from last night is as good as Alicia Gimpel's," the teacher said, and Alicia's heart leaped into her mouth. Had he realized Emma was copying? But he only set the homework down and went on, "Now you must learn to follow through, as Alicia has done."

"Jawohl, Herr Kessler!" Emma didn't seem worried about cheating. How many times had she copied work before, and from how many different students? Enough to take it for granted-that was plain.

Oddly, Emma's matter-of-factness helped Alicia at lunch. If Emma could keep the teacher from suspecting she was a cheater, why couldn't Alicia keep anyone from suspecting she was a Jew? Emma left evidence, if only Herr Kessler had looked more closely. Alicia didn't: no Hamantaschen in her lunch pail, no mark of Cain on her forehead.Father was right, she thought with enormous relief.If I don't make a silly mistake, no one will think I'm anything but what I've always seemed to be. And one of the things she'd always been was somebody who despised mistakes of any kind, and especially silly ones.

The afternoon turned out to be a snap. She was good in science, and good enough at the computer keyboard-like her father, she was less than graceful, and couldn't type as fast as some of her classmates, but she was accurate. No one gave her any trouble going home, either. Her first day knowing she was a Jew, and she'd got away with it.

A three no-trump contract. Three tricks to play. Heinrich Gimpel needed to take all three to make it. No help in the dummy. Lise sat across the table from him, but they'd got where they were largely out of his hand. He didn't needmuch help; he held the ace and queen of spades and the ace of diamonds. But the king of spades remained unaccounted for. Did Willi Dorsch have it on his right, or did Erika on his left?

Willi had taken the last trick, so it was his lead. He grinned at Heinrich, who smiled back. They both knew what was what. Grinning still, Willi flipped out the jack of spades.

Heinrich kept smiling, too, as much by main force as anything else. Now he had to choose. If he played the queen and Erika had the king, he'd go down. If he played the ace and the king didn't drop, he'd also go down, because he'd have to lead the queen for the last trick, and the king would clobber it.

He glanced at Willi, who chuckled, enjoying his perplexity. Then he looked at Erika. She was worth looking at: heart-shaped face; blue, blue eyes; a wide, generous mouth; gilt hair that hung to her shoulders. However much he enjoyed the excuse to study-hell, to ogle-his friend's wife, though, all the study told him nothing about her hand. Erika took bridge seriously.

The ace or the queen? The lady or the tiger? The devil or the deep blue sea? Heinrich looked back at Willi Dorsch. "You like to lead away from kings," he remarked, and played the queen.

Erika sluffed a heart.

"Ha!" Heinrich said in triumph. He laid down the last two aces. "Made it!"

"Dammit!" Willi said. He laid down the king of spades and the king of diamonds.

"That's the rubber," Erika said sadly. She wrote in the scorebook.

Lise said, "Willi, if you'd led the diamond we would have gone down. Heinrich would have had to take. Then he would have led the ace of spades, and you would have dropped the jack-and had the king waiting for the queen."

Willi thought for a couple of seconds, then said, "Dammit," again, on a different note this time.

"I've spent the last fifteen years trying to teach him not to do things like that, and I haven't had any luck," Erika said. "I don't think you will, either."

"I'm a stubborn goose," Willi remarked, with a certain amount of pride. He gathered up the cards and swept them into a neat pile. "Have we got time for another rubber?"

"What timeis it?" Heinrich looked at his watch. "A quarter past twelve." He raised his eyes to Lise. "What will your sister say?"

"That we're pushing it," she answered. She turned to Erika Dorsch and spread her hands. "You know how it is. You don't want to get your best babysitter mad at you, because if you do you'll never get out of the house again."

"Oh, yes." Erika nodded. The Dorsches' son and daughter were asleep in their bedrooms.They hadn't had to worry about babysitters tonight. And Heinrich hadn't had to worry about bringing Alicia along. Maybe she'll talk to Katarina about things, if her sisters give her the chance, he thought.That will help. She thinks Aunt Kathe's interesting. Lise and I are just-Mama and Papa.

Willi got to his feet. "Don't disappear quite yet. I'll fix one for the road." He headed off into the kitchen.

"Oh, good heavens. My back teeth are already floating." Lise headed off, too, in the direction of the bathroom.

That left Heinrich briefly alone with Erika Dorsch. In a film, he would have run a finger around the inside of his collar. He'd never quite figured out whether she knew how provocative she was. Had things been otherwise, he might have been tempted to find out. As they were…every once in a while, he was tempted to find out anyhow. He'd never yielded to temptation. Too much rode on it.

All she said was, "You played that well," which hardly encouraged fantasies.

Heinrich shrugged. "I thought it was the best chance I had to make. And the four of us have been playing bridge a long time. I know how Willi's beady little mind works." He grinned to make sure Erika didn't take him seriously.

She smiled, too, but only for a moment. "You think about things," she said in musing tones. "And you think other people-even women-can think about things, too." She paused, then added, "I wonder if Lise has any idea how lucky she is." She eyed him speculatively.

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 gettingthis 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. "Kathe'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 likethat?" 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.