In The Presence of mine Enemies

XIII

The matron who ran the foundlings' disciplinary home reminded Alicia of Frau Koch. Like the Beast, she was perfectly Aryan: blond, blue-eyed, fair. And, also like the Beast, she had a face like a boot. She was tough and mean and ready to lash out at any moment. Alicia wondered why people like that had-or wanted-anything to do with children.

"Gimpel!" the matron said now, sticking her head into Alicia's room. "Come with me. This minute."

"Jawohl!" Alicia didn't know why the matron wanted her to come, or where she was going. Asking questions was not encouraged. Blind obedience was.

Alicia had to hurry to keep up with the matron, whose soldierly stride conceded nothing to smaller people. The woman always looked angry at the world. This morning, she seemed even angrier than usual. She kept glaring down at Alicia and muttering things the girl couldn't quite make out.Maybe I'm lucky, Alicia thought, and shivered.

"In here." The matron pulled open the door to her own office. Alicia hadn't been there since the day the Security Police pulled her sisters and her out of school. And there were Francesca and Roxane now. They sat on identical metal folding chairs and wore identical wary expressions. The matron pointed to another chair by theirs. "Sit down," she told Alicia. The next word seemed aimed at all three Gimpel girls: "Wait."

Still muttering, the matron stalked to another door and flung it open. In came…"Daddy!" Alicia shrieked, and ran to him. Her sisters' squeals might even have been higher and shriller, but couldn't have been any more delighted. The three of them put together almost knocked their father off his feet.

He bent down to kiss and squeeze all of them. Behind his glasses, tears gleamed in his eyes. "I've come to take you home," he said huskily. "The Security Police have seen that I'm not a Jew after all, and if I'm not a Jew, the three of you can't possibly be Mischlingen. And since you aren't, you don't have to stay here any more."

Francesca broke free of his arms and rounded on the matron. "I told you we weren't filthy, stinking Jews. Itold you so, and you didn't want to listen. Well, now you see I knew what I was talking about." She had her hands on her hips. She might have been an irate housewife telling off a clerk who'd been rude to her. The matron turned bright red. Her formidable fists clenched. But she didn't say a thing.

Daddy was more polite. He asked the matron, "Is there paperwork I have to fill out so I can take my girls home?"

"Paperwork?" The woman nodded jerkily. Little by little, her angry flush faded. "Ja,there is paperwork. There is always paperwork,Herr Gimpel." She took forms from filing cabinets and out of her desk. Daddy signed and signed and signed. The matron studied everything. She finally nodded. "You may take them. Their behavior here has been…acceptable."

"I'm glad," Alicia's father said. "They should never have been brought here in the first place, but I'm glad." He gathered up the girls. "Come on, kids. Let's go."

Alicia had never left any place so gladly in all her life, not even the doctor's office after a shot. As Daddy led the three sisters towards a bus stop down the street from the foundlings' home, Roxane said, "They thought we were Jews! Ugly, smelly, yucky Jews!" She made a horrible face.

"They sure did. They're pretty dumb," Alicia chimed in. She and her father knew the truth, but her little sisters didn't. She had to hold up a mask in front of them. That wasn't any fun, but she'd just found out how needful it was.

"Well, they were wrong, weren't they?" Daddy said. Francesca and Roxane nodded emphatically. Half a heartbeat later, so did Alicia. Her father had to hold up a mask, too. Maybe the blackshirts had put a tiny microphone in his clothes. Maybe they were still listening. You never could tell. You never could be too careful, not where the Security Police were concerned.

Up came the bus. Daddy stuck his card in the slot four times. After a while, they got off and transferred to another bus. Then they did it again. The third bus took them into Stahnsdorf and, a little more than an hour after they'd set out, stopped at the corner up the street from their house.

Daddy herded Alicia and her sisters off the bus. "Let's go. Mommy's waiting."

When they got down onto the sidewalk, Francesca and Roxane raced up the street. Alicia hung back. She looked up at her father. "Is everything all right?" she asked. "Really all right?"

He smiled. "I know what you mean." As she had, he spoke cagily. "Everything is as good as it can be, sweetheart. We're out here. We're free, the way we should be, because they shouldn't have grabbed us in the first place." Yes, he too was playing to an invisible audience that might or might not be there. "I'm afraid we won't see some friends so much, and that's too bad, but…" He shrugged. "There are worse things."

"The Dorsches?" Alicia asked.

Daddy stopped. "How do you know about the Dorsches?"

"The Security Police were asking me questions, just like they were with Francesca and Roxane." Alicia tried to remember just what the blackshirt had said. "Is Frau Dorsch really 'a piece and a half'?" She wasn't precisely sure what it meant, but it sounded impressive.

Her father turned red. He coughed a couple of times. After a long, long pause, he said, "Not…quite," in a small, strangled voice.

Alicia almost asked for more details. But the front door opened then. Her sisters ran into her mother's arms. "Mommy!" she shouted, and broke into a run herself.

Mommy had a hug for her, too, and kisses. "I know you were all brave girls," she said. Alicia's little sisters nodded eagerly. So did she, with a secret smile on her face. She'd had to be brave in a way Francesca and Roxane hadn't, because she'd known the truth and had to hide it, and they hadn't.

Their mother tousled her hair. She had a secret smile on her face, too. Yes, she'd meant that especially for Alicia. It went right over Francesca and Roxane's heads. Alicia's smile got wider. She liked secrets…well, most secrets, anyway. The big one she carried? She still wasn't so sure about that. One thing she was sure of, though, and all the more so after this ordeal: like it or not, it was hers.

Daddy came up the steps. "Did you tell them about the surprise yet?"

"Of course not," Mommy answered. "If I told them, it wouldn't be a surprise any more, would it?" Naturally, that set all three Gimpel girls clamoring. Their mother looked innocent till she'd almost driven them crazy. Then she said, "If people look in the kitchen, they may find…something."

They ran in. Roxane's gleeful squeal rang out a split second ahead of her sisters'. The cake was enormous, and covered with gooey white icing. Big blue letters spelled out WELCOME HOME! When Mommy cut the cake, it proved to be dark, dark chocolate, with cherries and blueberries between the layers. She gave them huge slices, and when Francesca asked, "Can we have some more?" she didn't say anything about ruining their appetites. She just handed out seconds as big as the firsts.

Everything was so wonderful, it was almost worth getting grabbed by the Security Police. Almost.

Walther Stutzman muttered to himself. Threading his way past the electronic traps on the virtual road that led to Lothar Prutzmann's domain wasn't his worry. He had their measure now. Sooner or later, an SS programmer would come up with some new ones, and Walther would need to spot them before they closed on him. Today, though, getting in had been easy enough. So was looking around once he'd got inside.

No, what made him mutter was not finding what he was looking for. Heinrich had given him a good description of the man who'd released him from prison: tall, blond, a major in the Security Police. By what the man had said, he was a Jew.

But Walther had been pretty sure he knew about all the handful of Jews in the SS. None of them, from what he recalled, matched this fellow. Looking through the records only confirmed that.

So who was the major, then? More to the point,what was he? Someone who'd tried a last trick to get a suspected Jew to reveal himself? That would have been Walther's guess, but it didn't fit the way Heinrich had described the scene a couple of days earlier. A joker? Or a real Jew, unknown to Walther and his circle of friends?

That would be good-the more who survived, the better. But it also raised doubts, frightening ones. Now somebody outside the circle, somebody no one in the circle knew, knew something about somebody in it. The last thing a Jew in the Third Reich wanted was for anybody to have a handle on him.

What can I do?Walther wondered. One thing that occurred to him was tracking down everybody on duty at the prison the day Heinrich was released. Not many majors would have been there. One of them should have been the man who turned his friend loose.

Before he could do that, though, his boss came back from lunch and bellowed, "Walther! You here, Walther?"

Three quick keystrokes, and everything incriminating vanished from his monitor. Three more made his electronic trail vanish. "I'm here," he called. "What's up?"

Gustav Priepke stuck his beefy face into Walther's cubicle. "You smart son of a bitch," he said fondly. "You goddamn know-it-all bastard."

"I love you, too," Walther said in his usual mild tones. His boss roared laughter. Still mildly, he asked, "Could you at least tell me why you're swearing at me today?"

"Delighted, by God," Priepke answered. "You're not only a smart son of a bitch, you're a thieving son of a bitch, too. You know that?"

Excitement tingled through Walther. Now he had a pretty good idea of what his foul-mouthed boss was talking about. "The code ran, did it?"

"Bet your sweet ass it did," Gustav Priepke said. "And backward compatibility looks as good as you said it would. We've got a real live modern operating system, or we will once we root out the usual forty jillion bugs. And we won't lose data, on account of it'll be able to read all our old files."

"That's-terrific," Walther said. Computer experts in the Reich had talked about modernizing the standard operating system for years. They'd talked about it, but they hadn't done it-till now. He was proud he'd had a part, and not such a small one, in turning talk into the beginning of reality.

And then he wonderedwhy he was proud. A new operating system would only make German computers more efficient. It would help the government work better, and the government included the SS. It might make the search for hidden Jews more effective. This was a reason to be proud?

Yes, in spite of everything, it was. If he didn't take professional pride in his own skill, his own competence, life turned empty. Whatever he did, he wanted to do well.

As smoothly as only a man with no worries in the world could, his boss changed the subject: "You going to vote when the elections for the new Reichstag come up in a few weeks?"

"I suppose so," Walther answered. "You know I don't get very excited about politics." He didn't show that he got excited about politics, which wasn't the same thing at all. But Priepke-and the rest of the outside world-saw only the calm mask, not the turmoil behind it.

"Shit, I don't get excited about the usual politics, either," Gustav Priepke said. "But this isn't the usual garbage-or it had better not be, anyhow. If you've got a chance to make a real difference, grab with both hands." The gesture he used looked more nearly obscene than political, but got the message across.

"You really think it will make a difference?" Walther asked.

"It had better, by God," Priepke rumbled ominously. "You wait and see how many Bonzen go out on their ears when they run where people can vote against 'em. A lot of those stupid bastards really believe everybody loves them. I want to see the looks on their fat faces when they find out how wrong they are." Gloating anticipation filled his laugh.

Without answering in words, Walther pointed up to the ceiling with one index finger and cupped his other hand behind an ear. Had his boss forgotten he was bound to be overheard by someone from Lothar Prutzmann's domain?

Priepke gestured again, this time with undoubted, un-abashed obscenity. "Hell with 'em all," he said. "That's the point of this election-to teach the goddamn snoops we've got lives of our own. And if they don't like it, they can screw themselves."

He means it,Walther thought dizzily.He doesn't care if they're listening. He doesn't think it matters. He looked up to-no, past-the ceiling he'd just pointed at.Please, God, let him be right.

Another department staff meeting. Another dimly lit conference room foggy and stinking with Franz Oppenhoff's cigar smoke and innumerable cigarettes and pipes. Susanna Weiss drew a face hidden by a pig-snouted gas mask. Wishful thinking, unfortunately. She scratched out the sketch. As it vanished, she wondered why she bothered bringing a pad to these gatherings. Nothing worth noting ever got said.

At the head of the long table, the chairman stood up. Professor Oppenhoff waited till all eyes were on him. Then, after a couple of wet coughs, he said, "A change is coming. It is a change for which we must all prepare ourselves."

"The budget?" Half a dozen anxious voices said the same thing at the same time.

But Oppenhoff shook his head. "No, not the budget. The budget is as it should be, or close enough. I speak of a more fundamental change." If he'd been trying to get everyone's attention, he'd succeeded. Even Susanna looked his way. What could be more fundamental to a university department than its funding? Oppenhoff nodded portentously. "I speak of the changes that may come to pass in the Reich itself."

Two or three professors who cared about nothing more recent than the transition from Old High German to Middle High German leaned back in their leather-upholstered chairs and closed their eyes. One of them began to snore, and so quickly that he must have had a clear conscience. Susanna, by contrast, leaned forward. This was liable to be interesting after all.

And if the department chairman expectedher to review the political situation again, she would, but he might not care for what she had to say. Like a lot of people in the Greater German Reich, she thought she could get away with much more than she had only a few months before.

But Professor Oppenhoff did not call on her. Instead, ponderously leaning forward, he spoke for himself: "Changes, I say again, may come to pass in the Reich itself. There has been much talk of openness and revitalization, some of it from those most highly placed in the state. And a certain amount of this is, no doubt, good and useful, as anyone will recognize."

He paused to draw on his cigar.Now that he's shown he can say nice things about reform, what will he do next? Susanna wondered, and promptly answered her own question.He'll start flying his true colors, that's what.

Just as promptly, Oppenhoff proved her right. "In all this rush toward change for the sake of change, we must not lose sight of what nearly eighty years of National Socialist rule have given the Reich, " he said. "When the first Fuhrer came to power, we were weak and defeated. Now we rule the greatest empire the world has ever known. We were at the mercy of Jews and Communists. We have eliminated the problems they presented."

We've killed them all, is what you mean. Susanna's nails bit into the soft flesh of her palms.Not quite all, you pompous son of a bitch.

"All this being so," Oppenhoff continued, "some of you might perhaps do well to wonder why any fundamental changes in the structure of the government are deemed necessary. If you feel that way, as I must confess I do myself, you will also be able to find candidates who support a similar point of view."

Puff, puff, puff. "Change for the sake of change is no doubt very exciting, very dramatic. But when things are going well, change is also apt to be for the worst. Some of you are younger than I. Many of you, in fact, are younger than I." Oppenhoff chuckled rheumily. That was about as close to anything resembling real humor as he came. "You will, perhaps, be more enamored of change for the sake of change than I am. But I tell you this: when you have my years, you too will see the folly of change when the German state has gone through the grandest and most glorious period in its history."

With a wheeze and a grunt, he sat down. His chair creaked as his bulk settled into it. Susanna couldn't have said why she was so disappointed. She'd known Oppenhoff was a reactionary for years. Why should one more speech make her want to cry-or, better, to kick him where it would do the most good?

Maybe it was because, in spite of everything, she'd let herself get her hopes up. Heinz Buckliger had done more to open the Reich than his three predecessors put together. He seemed intent on doing more still-and if he didn't, Rolf Stolle might. Some of the folk the Wehrmacht had conquered were reminding Berlin that they still remembered who they were, and that they'd once been free-and they were getting away with it.

Yes, the Security Police had grabbed Heinrich Gimpel and his children, but they'd let them go. The accusation that he was a Jew hadn't come from anyone who really knew, but from, of all things, a woman scorned. Susanna had trouble imagining anyone chasing Heinrich hard enough to want him dead when she didn't get him. It only went to show, you never could tell.

The point was, though, that theyhad let him go. In a world where that could happen, what couldn't? Heinrich's release only made Franz Oppenhoff's comfortable, complacent words seem all the worse.

Susanna almost burst with the temptation of throwing that in Oppenhoff's face. She'd sometimes morbidly wondered which of the Jews she knew was likeliest to get caught. She'd thought she herself topped that list, just because she had the most trouble keeping her mouth shut when she ran into something wrong. Heinrich and Lise were almost stoic in the way they refused to let what went on around them bother them. Susanna was a great many things, but not a stoic. And yet here she sat, as safe and free as a Jew in the Reich could be. No, you never could tell.

"Herr Doktor Professor?" That was Konrad Lutze, who'd gone to the Medieval English Association meeting in London with Susanna-who'd almost gone instead of Susanna.

"Yes?" Oppenhoff smiled benignly.Of course he does, Susanna thought.Lutze pisses standing up. How can he do anything wrong, with an advantage like that?

And then Lutze said, "Herr Doktor Professor, shouldn't we return to the first principles of National Socialism and let the Volk have the greatest possible say in the government of the Reich? Please excuse me, but I don't see how this could do anything but improve the way the Reich is run."

Professor Oppenhoff looked as if he'd just taken a bite out of a hot South American pepper without expecting it. Susanna stared at Konrad Lutze, too, but with a different sort of astonishment. He was an indifferent scholar. Everyone in the department except possibly Oppenhoff knew that. She'd always figured him for more of a careerist than someone who truly loved knowledge. He was the last man she would have imagined sticking out his neck.

And he'd just thrown reform in the department chairman's face. What did that say? That Oppenhoff's politics were even more dinosaurian than Susanna had thought? What elsecould it say?

Back to work. Heinrich Gimpel climbed onto the bus that would take him to the Stahnsdorf train station. While he sat in prison, he'd wondered if he would have a job if he got out. It hadn't been his biggest worry. Next to a noodle or a shower, being alive and unemployed didn't look so bad.

But he still had his place. Nobody at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters had said so out loud when he called to inquire, but he got the feeling his superiors there enjoyed putting him back in that slot, because it gave the armed forces a point in their unending game against the SS.

Three stops later, Willi Dorsch got on the bus. His face brightened when he saw Heinrich. Then, almost as abruptly, it fell. The seat next to Heinrich was empty. Willi hesitantly approached. Heinrich patted the artificial leather to show he was welcome. (Back when Heinrich was a boy, people had called the stuff Jew's hide. You didn't hear that much any more. Till the reform movement started, Heinrich hadn't thought about it one way or the other. Now he dared hope it was a good sign.)

"It's damn good to see you," Willi said, shaking his hand. With a wry smile that twisted up one corner of his mouth, he added, "You'd probably sooner knock my block off than look at me."

"It's not your fault," Heinrich said, and then, cautiously, "How's Erika?"

"She's…better. She's glad the girls are all right. She's glad you're all right, too." That wry smile got wrier. "She wanted to find out just how good you could be, didn't she?"

"Well…yes." Dull embarrassment filled Heinrich's voice.

"I never would have figured that," Willi said. "And I really never would have figured that she'd go and call the Security Police. Sometimes I wonder if I know her at all. Now I suppose telling you I'm sorry is the least I can do."

Being sorry wouldn't have mattered if the blackshirts had got rid of Heinrich-and of Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane. Still…"It's over," Heinrich said. "I hope to God it's over, anyhow."

"Erika's sorry, too. If she weren't, she wouldn't have swallowed those stupid goddamn pills." Willi shook his head. "She swears up and down she didn't think they would go after you and the girls the way they did."

Heinrich only grunted. When she picked up the phone, whathad Erika thought the Security Police would do? Invite him up for coffee and cakes? Plainly, she'd regretted what she did afterwards. At the time? At the time, she'd no doubt wanted him dead.

He asked a question of his own: "Are the two of you really going to patch things up now, or will you go on squabbling?" And cheating on each other, he added, but only to himself. He always tried to stay polite-maybe even too polite for his own good.

Willi answered with a shrug. "I don't know what the hell we're going to do. If it weren't for the kids…But they're there, and we can't very well pretend they're not." How much did he worry about his son and daughter when he took Ilse out for lunch and whatever else he could get away with? Maybe some. He did love them. Heinrich knew that. Love them or not, though, he went right on doing whathe wanted to do.

At the train station, Heinrich shelled out fifteen pfennigs for a Volkischer Beobachter. So did Willi. As Heinrich carried the paper toward the platform, a sudden thought made him glance toward the other man. "When they grabbed me, did it make the news?" he asked.

"Ja,"Willi answered uncomfortably. "A Jew in Berlin-I mean, somebody they thought was a Jew in Berlin-isnews."

"Did anybody say anything when they let me go?"

Now Willi looked at him as if he'd asked a very dumb question indeed. And so he had. "Don't be silly," Willi said. "When was the last time the SS admitted it made a mistake? The twelfth of Never, that's when."

The train rumbled up. Doors hissed open. Heinrich and Willi fed their cards into the fare slot, then sat down side by side and started reading their papers. The upcoming election dominated the headlines. Rolf Stolle had given another speech calling on the Fuhrer to move harder and further on reforms. The Volkischer Beobachter covered it in detail, quoting some of the juiciest bits. A year earlier, even if the Gauleiter of Berlin had presumed to give such a speech, the Beobachter would have pretended he hadn't.

Out of the commuter train. Up the escalators. Onto the bus. Into downtown Berlin traffic. Willi looked out the window and shook his head. He said, "I'm glad I'm not driving in this."

"You'd have to be crazy to want to," Heinrich agreed. But the swarms of cars clogging every street argued that a hell of a lot of peoplewere crazy.

Out of the bus. Up the steps to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. Nods to the guards. Identification cards. One of the guards nudged his pal. "Hey, look, Adolf! Here's Gimpel back."

Adolf nodded. "Good. I didn't figure you were really a kike,Herr Gimpel. The Security Police couldn't grab their ass with both hands."

"I'm here." Heinrich pocketed his card once more. What would Adolf have said, knowing he was a

Jew? That seemed only too obvious. But they'd decided he wasn't, or at least decided they couldn't show he was. There was an improvement in the way things worked. When Kurt Haldweim was Fuhrer, suspicion alone would have earned him a trip to the shower.

He got to his desk late. Analysts and secretaries-and Wehrmacht officers, too-kept stopping him in the corridor to shake his hand and tell him they were glad to see him. He was slightly dazed by the time he finally did walk up to the familiar battleship-gray metal desk. He hadn't realized so many people cared.

He was just about to sit down in his squeaky swivel chair when Ilse spotted him. "Oh,Herr Gimpel, I'm so happy you're back!" she squealed, and ran up to him and gave him a hug and a kiss. Then she laughed. "Now I've got lipstick on you, the way I do with Willi."

Willi chose that moment to have a coughing fit. Heinrich would have, too. Ilse turned and made a face at her lunchtime lover. She pulled a tissue from her purse and rubbed at Heinrich's cheek. She drew back, looked him over, and rubbed a little more.

"There! All better," she said briskly.

"Is it?" Heinrich said. She nodded. He was almost as much an object to be dealt with for her as he had been for the Security Police. Her ministrations were a lot more enjoyable, though.

Off she went. Heinrich sat down. The chair did squeak. He tried to remember what he'd been doing when the blackshirts grabbed him. Before he could even come close, Willi stalked over and spoke in a mock-tough voice: "Trying to steal another woman of mine, are you?"

Heinrich hoped it was just mock-tough. He said, "The only thing I'm trying to do is mind my own business and have people leave me alone. Up till now, I never realized how hard that was."

Willi laughed and slapped him on the back. "All right. I can take a hint." Heinrich wasn't at all sure Willi could. But his friend-and in spite of everything, Willi did still seem to be his friend-went back to his desk and got to work. With real relief, Heinrich did the same. He knew he wouldn't accomplish much this morning. It would be like coming back from vacation: he'd need to figure out what had gone on while he was out before he could do anything useful.

Here, what had gone on while he was out couldn't have been more obvious if it had marched by with a brass band. The Americans were kicking up their heels. They took Heinz Buckliger's policy for weakness. Payments were lagging. Excuses were some of the plainest lies he'd ever seen. Over on the other side of the Atlantic, they were finding out how much they could get away with.

So far, they seemed to be doing exactly that. Panzers hadn't rolled out to plunder the countryside-or to surround the American legislature and bureaucrats in Omaha and make them cough up what was due the Reich. Haldweim would have arrested people. Himmler would have machine-gunned people. Up till now, Heinz Buckliger hadn't even squawked.

If I were running things…But Heinrich wasn't. He wondered if anyone was, or if the people above him were just letting everything drift till they got orders from the Fuhrer. With worries closer to home, would Buckliger give orders about the USA?

"How about some lunch?" Willi asked. Heinrich looked up in astonishment. It couldn't be lunchtime yet. But his watch insisted it was ten to twelve. Willi went on, "How about Admiral Yamamoto's?"

"Sounds good to me." After cabbage stew in prison, any real food sounded good to Heinrich. Several big meals at home had only just begun to fill the hole inside him.

Shrimp tempura, teriyaki beef, and a plate of Berlin rolls enlivened with soy sauce and wasabi went some way toward hole-filling. Miso soup came with the meal. So did rice, which was to be expected, and potato salad, which never failed to leave him bemused. It was pretty good potato salad, but he didn't think the average Japanese came home to potato salad every night-or any night. But Admiral Yamamoto's wasn't the only Japanese place in Berlin that included potato salad in its meals, so maybe he was wrong. More likely, the restaurant owners just knew what their customers favored.

As usual, plenty of customers favored Admiral Yamamoto's. It drew people from every government agency within several kilometers, along with hotel clerks, shopgirls, and even the occasional Japanese tourist hungry for the tastes of home and discovering that the restaurant offered…some of them.

Heinrich ate, rather clumsily, with chopsticks. He sipped a good wheat beer, which went well with the spicy, salty lunch. And he listened to the people chatting at nearby tables. The tables were so close together, he couldn't help listening to his neighbors. One question he heard over and over was, "Who are you going to vote for?"

Once, to his astonishment, he heard one trooper from the Waffen — SS division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler ask that of his pal. He was even more astonished when the second trooper answered, "Me? Stolle, who else?" The tough young Aryan warrior sounded as if no other choice besides the radical Gauleiter of Berlin were possible. And the first man nodded, plainly agreeing with him.

"I wasn't sure what I thought of this whole election business," Heinrich said. "Sounds like everybody's excited about it, though."

"Sure does," Willi agreed. "I'm as surprised as you are, maybe more so. And once the votes get counted, I can think of some other people who'll be more surprised yet." He mouthed Lothar Prutzmann's name, but he didn't say it out loud, not in a restaurant full of strangers.

"Someone else might be surprised, too." Heinrich mouthed the Fuhrer 's name, and Willi nodded. "I don't think he expected Rolf to get so popular so fast."

Willi nodded again, but he said, "Still, the two of them ought to be able to work together. They're going in the same direction. It's not like that other fellow, the one who wants to turn back the clock."

"No, I wouldn't think so. I sure hope not," Heinrich said. "The only thing that worries me is, what happens if the one of them gets jealous of the other?" Yes, not naming names was definitely a good idea. A few months earlier, Heinrich wouldn't have dared to talk about Party rivalries in a public place with or without names. Back in the days when Kurt Haldweim was Fuhrer, he would have been leery about doing it even if private.

As usual, Willi Dorsch had more nerve than he did (of course, Willi hadn't been hauled away from his desk by the Security Police, either). "Buckliger should've run for the Reichstag himself," Willi said. "This way, Stolle will be able to say, 'The Volk chose me, but who chose you?' If elections really do stick, that could matter. It could matter a lot."

"You're right," Heinrich said. Willi might not notice something like his wife making a play for another man, but he missed very little when it came to politics.

And, when Heinrich tried to pay the tab, Willi wouldn't let him. "Next time, fine, but not right after the Security Police let you go. You don't need to show me you're no cheap Jew. I believe it."

"That's nice," Heinrich said. Willi laughed at the irony in his voice. But it held more irony than Willi knew. It was especially nice that Willi thought Heinrich wasn't a Jew when he really was. Had Willi-or anybody else-been truly convinced he was, he wouldn't be full of Japanese food right now. He would have been disposed of, and so would his children.

Willi got to his feet. "Shall we head back?" he said. "I know you're dying to, with all the catching up you've got to do."

Heinrich rose, too. "I don't mind," he said. Willi rolled his eyes and shook his head at such dedication. Heinrich meant it, though. He wasn't dying to get back to the office, but, as he'd thought a moment before, he would have been dying-or dead-if he couldn't go back. Given that stark choice, sitting at a desk and adding up long columns of figures didn't look bad at all.

Alicia Gimpel's class went out to eat their lunches and play on the schoolyard. She was about to walk out with the other boys and girls when her teacher called her name. She stopped. "What is it,Herr Peukert?" she asked.

"You've only been back in school for a couple of days, Alicia," he said. "You don't need to work so very hard to make up all the assignments you missed."

"But I want to get them out of the way!" Alicia exclaimed. "Then I won't have to worry about them any more."

"I'm not going to worry about them now, or not very much,"Herr Peukert said. "You're a good student, and you've shown you can understand the material. That's what really matters." He hesitated, then went on, "And it's not as if you could help being absent, not with what happened to you. I'm glad you're back."

"Thank you,Herr Peukert. I'm glad I'm back, too," Alicia said. "Are you sure it's all right about the work? I don't mind doing it." Like her father, she was glad to have the chance to work.

"Yes, I'm sure." The teacher hesitated again. Finally, nodding to himself, he asked, "Has anyone given you a hard time about…about where you were, and why?"

"No, sir," Alicia answered, which wasn't strictly true. Wolf Priller and a couple of other boys had teased her, but it hadn't been too bad-certainly nothing where she felt she ought to tattle. "But…" Now she was the one who paused.

"But what?" Herr Peukert asked. "The charge made against you was serious, but it was false. Now that it's been shown to be false, people have no business-none-throwing it in your face. Do you understand?"

"Ja, Herr Peukert." Alicia would have let it go at that if her teacher hadn't sounded angry that anybody could still be bothering her. Since he did, though, she added, "It's not me, sir-it's my sister."

"Some of the students in your sister's class are giving her trouble?" Peukert sounded angrier still. "Who is your sister's teacher? We'll deal with this."

Alicia's heart sank. She wished she'd kept her mouth shut. "Francesca's in, uh,Frau Koch's class, sir." She'd almost saidthe Beast's class, but not quite. "The boys and girls aren't giving her any trouble, though. It's…it's Frau Koch." She waited to see if the sky would fall.

"Oh." The word seemed heavy as lead as it came from Herr Peukert's throat. "That's…very unfortunate, Alicia. I'm sorry. I don't know just what to do about that. I don't know if I can do anything about that. Some people…Some people can't be reasonable about some things. It's…too bad when those people get put in charge of others, but sometimes it happens."

"It's not fair. It's not right," Alicia said. "She shouldn't say those things. Daddy'snot a Jew, and that means my sisters and me-and I — aren't Mischlingen." Part of that was true, anyhow. She and Francesca and Roxane weren't Mischlingen. They were full-blooded Jews. Alicia knew what she had to say, though.

Herr Peukert looked troubled. "If you like, Alicia, I will speak to the principal. But I have to tell you, I don't know how much good it will do, or if it will do any good at all. Inside their classrooms, teachers do as they see fit, as long as they teach what they are required to teach. And I know Frau Koch has been at this school a long time, much longer than the principal has."

He waited. Alicia needed a few seconds to understand what he was saying. If he talked to the principal, the principal might tell the Beast to go easy on Francesca. Because she told her, though, that didn't mean Frau Koch would do it. She might act meaner than ever, to get even with Francesca for trying to land her in trouble. Knowing the Beast, that was just what shewould do.

"Maybe you'd better let it alone, then," Alicia said reluctantly.

"I think you're being smart." Her teacher sounded relieved.

Alicia didn't feel smart. She felt shoddy. This was the same as not standing up to somebody on the playground even if you were right, because he'd beat the snot out of you if you tried. Sometimes you had to make choices like that. When you got to be a grownup, from what she'd seen, you had to make choices like that all the time. No matter what you ended up doing, you couldn't be sure it was the right thing. Sometimes therewas no right thing.

Herr Peukert said, "Why don't you go out and play now, Alicia? This business with your sister will sort itself out sooner or later."

"Sooner or later," Alicia echoed in mournful tones. Whenever a grownup said that, he meantsooner. Whenever a child heard it, she heardlater. As far as Alicia knew, there was no bridge across that chasm between the generations.

She went out. Emma Handrick and Trudi Krebs waved to her. She went over to them and started chatting. Everything was pretty much the way it would have been if the blackshirts hadn't taken her away. Pretty much…

Even while she was talking with her friends, though, part of her mind was chewing on something Herr Peukert had said about the Beast.Some people can't be reasonable about some things. It's too bad when those people get put in charge of others, but sometimes it happens.

He'd been talking about Frau Koch. He hadn't meant anything more. Alicia knew that. But she couldn't help thinking the words applied to the first Fuhrer at least as well as they did to the Beast.

"Oh, thank you,Frau Stutzman," Dr. Dambach said when Esther set a foam cup of coffee on his desk. The pediatrician took a sip, then eyed her. "You're looking happy this morning."

"Am I?" Esther said. Her boss nodded. She shrugged and smiled. "Well, maybe I am. It's a beautiful day, isn't it?"

Dambach nodded again. "It certainly is. I saw more of it than I really wanted to, as a matter of fact."

"Did you?" Esther knew she was supposed to say something like that.

"I certainly did," Dambach answered. "I wanted to get here early so I could go through some of the medical journals that keep piling up"-sure enough, he had a stack of them on his desk, and a scalpel in place of a knife to open the pages of the numbers that didn't come cut from the printers-"but I got caught in a traffic jam, so I didn't come in more than five minutes earlier than usual."

"That's too bad," Esther said. "What happened? Was anyone badly hurt?"

Dr. Dambach shook his head. "It wasn't an accident. It was a political parade, if you can believe such a thing."

Up until very recently, Esther wouldn't have been able to believe it. The only parades allowed would have been those organized by the government, and they would have been publicized in advance. Someone efficient like Dambach would have known one was coming and would have chosen a route it didn't block. Things had changed, though. Esther asked, "Who was parading?"

"People who like that fat fraud of a Stolle," Dambach answered. "The man's out for himself first, last, and always. Anyone who can't see as much needs to go to an optometrist, if you ask me. Or do you think I'm wrong?" He tacked on the last question with the air of a man suddenly realizing the person he was talking to might disagree with him.

"I've told you before, I don't really pay a whole lot of attention to politics," Esther said. "I think everybody knows what our problems are. If the election could help get rid of some of them, that would be nice. And if it can't"-she shrugged-"then it can't, that's all."

"You have a sensible attitude," the pediatrician said. "Most people are fools. They expect the sun, the moon, and the little stars from this new Reichstag. Don't they see that most of the members will be the same old scoundrels who've been running things all along? They won't turn into angels just because people were able to write an X beside their names."

"I suppose not." Esther paid more attention to politics than she let on. She had more hope for the election than she let on, too. That hope was probably what made her add, "Isn't conscience supposed to be the still, small voice that says someone may be watching? Maybe the Bonzen will behave better when they knew people can vote them out if they don't."

"Maybe." Plainly, Dambach went that far only to be polite. "My guess is, they'll hold this election and maybe one more, and then they'll forget about them again-and we'll go back to sleep for another seventy or eighty years."

"Well, you could be right." Esther retreated to the receptionist's station in a hurry. Her boss's cynicism was like a harvester rolling over the fragile young shoots of her optimism and cutting them down. Maybe Dambach was right. The whole history of the Reich argued that he was. But Esther didn't-wouldn't-like it.

She got busy with the billing. As long as she was thinking about that, she didn't have to worry about anything else. Irma should have taken care of more of it than she had the evening before. Fuming at her also kept Esther from fretting about politics.

And then patients and their parents-as always, mostly mothers-started coming in. Nobody could get excited about Rolf Stolle or Heinz Buckliger or Lothar Prutzmann with toddlers screaming in the background. Today, the racket seemed more a relief than a distraction. Telephone calls kept Esther busy, too. The busier she stayed, the less she had time to wonder if all of Buckliger's reforms were nothing but new makeup on the same old Party face.

Mothers talked in the waiting room, though thanks to their children she could hear them only fitfully. She did prick up her ears when Rolf Stolle's name came up. The woman who mentioned him wasn't talking about politics, though, or not exactly. If what she said was true, Stolle had made a pass at her sister. From everything Esther had heard, her sister was far from unique.

"That's not good," another mother said. Her toddler made a swipe for her glasses. She blocked the little arm with the practiced ease of someone who'd done it many times before. "That's not good, either, sweetheart," she told the boy, and then went back to politics: "Still, even if he does make passes at everything in a skirt, he won't send the blackshirts out to knock your door down in the middle of the night. Which counts for more?"

"Sometimes we need the Security Police," yet another woman said. "Look how they found a Jew a while ago. In this day and age, a Jew sneaking around in Berlin! If that doesn't scare you, I don't know what would."

All the women in the waiting room nodded. Esther had to nod, too. Someone might be watching her, wondering about her. Heinrich's arrest had made the papers and the radio and televisor. No one had said a public word about his release. As far as people knew, the blackshirts were doing their job, keeping Berlin and the Reich Judenfrei and safe from all sorts of Untermenschen. As far as people knew, that was an important job.

People didn't know as much as they thought they did. Esther wished she could tell them that. But they wouldn't listen, except for the ones who'd report her to Lothar Prutzmann's henchmen. Too bad. Too bad, but true.

A woman came out of an examination room leading a blond four-year-old boy by the hand. Esther made arrangements for a follow-up visit in a week, then called to one of the women in the waiting room: "You can bring Sebastian in now,Frau Schreckengost."

"About time!" Frau Schreckengost sniffed. "My appointment was for fifteen minutes ago, after all."

"I'm so sorry," Esther lied-Frau Schreckengost, a doughy, discontented-looking woman, was the one who'd said Germany needed the Security Police. "Dr. Dambach has to give all his patients as much time as they require."

"And keepme waiting,"Frau Schreckengost said. As far as she was concerned, the world revolved around her, with everyone else put in it merely to dance attendance upon her.

And if that didn't make her a typical German, Esther couldn't think of anything that would.

Susanna Weiss turned on the news. She'd timed it perfectly. The computer graphics of the opening credits were just dissolving into Horst Witzleben's face. "Good evening," the newsreader said. "The Fuhrer today submitted an absentee ballot to the voting chairman of his precinct, as did his wife." The televisor showed Heinz Buckliger and his wife, a skinny blond woman named Erna, handing sealed envelopes to a uniformed official who looked slightly overwhelmed at having so much attention focused on him.

Witzleben went on, "The absentee ballots are necessary because the Buckligers will not be in Berlin for the election next week. They are going on holiday at the Croatian island of Hvar. Except for a ceremonial meeting with the Poglavnik of Croatia, they have no events scheduled for the time when they will be away, though it is expected that the Fuhrer will offer some comment on the results of the upcoming election."

He disappeared again. This time, the shot cut to Tempelhof Airport, where the Buckligers were shown boarding Luftwaffe Alfa. The big, specially modified jet airliner taxied down the runway and lumbered into the air. As usual, fighters escorted it to its destination.

"In other news," Horst Witzleben said, "the Gauleiter of Berlin continued to call for accelerated reform." There was Rolf Stolle, shouting away from the second-floor balcony of the Gauleiter 's residence to a few hundred people in the small square below. The scene seemed to Susanna a parody of the Fuhrer delivering an address to tens or hundreds of thousands of people in Adolf Hitler Platz.

But, as she realized when she'd watched a little more, it wasn'tjust a parody. It was also a comment, and a barbed one. Pounding his fist and bellowing up there on his little balcony with the old-fashioned iron railing (even rusty in places), Stolle made a genuine human connection with his audience. No Fuhrer since Hitler had been able to do that. The Reich and the Germanic Empire had grown too overwhelmingly large. By the nature of his job, the Fuhrer talked at people, talked down to them. Rolf Stolle reminded them what they were missing.

Of course, if he ever moved to the Fuhrer 's palace, he would have to behave as Himmler and Haldweim and Buckliger had before him. Behaving that way was part of what being the Fuhrer involved. Maybe Stolle didn't realize that yet. Maybe he did, but didn't want anyone else to know he did. Susanna wondered which would be more dangerous.

The Gauleiter got less air time than the Fuhrer. Horst Witzleben soon cut away to dramatic footage of an industrial accident in Saarbrucken. A helicopter plucked a workman out of what looked like a sea of flames. More than a dozen other Germans hadn't been so lucky. "Along with the Aryans, an unknown number of Untermenschen also perished," Horst said, and went on to the next story.

Laborers from Poland or Russia or the Ukraine or Serbia or Egypt who'd been lucky enough to be chosen to stoke furnaces or clean chemical tanks or do some other work too hard or too nasty for Aryans and do it till they dropped instead of going to the showers right away…This was their epitaph: one sentence on the evening news. It was more than most of their kind would ever get, too.

With a shiver, Susanna turned off the televisor. If they'd decided Heinrich was a Jew, he would have needed a miracle to get sent to one of those man-killing jobs. The powers that be would probably have just given him a noodle and gone on about their business. And there was no doubt at all about what would have happened to his girls. They were too young to do any useful work, and so…

"And so," Susanna muttered. She went into the kitchen and poured two fingers of Glenfiddich into a glass. She almost knocked it straight back, but that was a hell of a thing to do to a single-malt scotch.Ice? she wondered, and shook her head. She was chilly enough inside anyhow. She sipped the smoky, peat-flavored whiskey. Its warmth, dammit, couldn't reach where she was coldest.

That didn't stop her from topping up the drink a little later on. Put down enough and it would build a barrier against thought. She wasn't often tempted to get drunk, but that one dispassionate sentence on the news had gone a long way toward doing the trick. Heinz Buckliger talked about disclosing and ending abuses. Did he even begin to know what all the abuses in the Reich were? Susanna had begun to hope so. Now all her doubts came flooding back again.

The telephone rang. Her hand jerked-not enough, fortunately, to spill any scotch. "Who's that?" she asked God. God wasn't listening. When was the last time He'd ever listened to a Jew? It rang again. She walked over and picked it up."Bitte?"

"Professor Weiss? Uh, Susanna?" A man on the other end of the line, a nervous-sounding man.

"Yes? Who is this?" Not a student, whoever it was. No student would have had the nerve to call her by her first name, even hesitantly.

"This is Konrad Lutze, Susanna."

"Is it?" she said. "Well, this is a surprise. What can I do for you, uh, Konrad?" She had almost as much trouble using his first name as he'd had with hers.

She really did wonder what he wanted, too. Something to do with her work? With his work? With department politics? She tried to steer as clear of those as she could. With national politics? If he thought she was going to talk about those on the telephone, he had to be a little bit crazy, too. She wasn't anywhere near sure that was safe.

But after a couple of hesitant coughs, he said, "I was, uh, wondering if you would, uh, like to go to dinner and the cinema with me on Saturday night. That new thriller is supposed to be very good."

Susanna's mouth fell open. After her unfortunate experience with the drunk, she'd largely sworn off the male half of the human race. Because she was what she was, eligible bachelors were few and far between for her, and she hadn't thought he was eligible enough once she found out how he poured it down. (He, meanwhile, had married and was the father of a baby boy. Some people weren't so fussy as she was. From everything she'd heard, he still drank like a fish.)

How long had the silence stretched? Long enough for Konrad Lutze to say, "Hello? Are you still there?"

"I'm here," she answered. "You…startled me, that's all."

"What do you say?" he asked. "We would have things to talk about, anyhow. That is not so bad-do you know what I mean? If I go out with someone I just happened to meet, and she says, 'So, what do you do?' and I answer, 'I am a professor of medieval English at Friedrich Wilhelm University,' where do I go from there? Her eyes glaze over. I have never yet met a nurse or a librarian or a salesgirl who gave a damn about Piers Plowman or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight."

"I believe that." Giggling would have been rude, no matter how much Susanna wanted to. Being a Jew made her feel so alone in the world, it had hardly occurred to her that being a professor of medieval English literature could do the same thing. She did believe Konrad Lutze. Not many ordinary people would care about Piers Plowman.

"Will you, then?" Now he seemed almost pathetically eager.

Will I, then?Susanna asked herself. Every so often, Jews did fall in love with gentiles. Most of them stopped being Jews almost as completely as if the blackshirts had carted them away. Dinner and a film weren't falling in love, not by themselves. But, by the way Lutze talked, he hoped that was how things would work out. And Susanna wasn't interested in anything that didn't have a good chance of turning serious.

So…would she, then? Could she even imagine being serious about a gentile? (Whether she could imagine being serious about Konrad Lutze seemed an altogether different, and much smaller, question.)

"I–I'm sorry, Konrad," she heard herself say. "I'm afraid I've got other plans that evening."

"I see," he said heavily. "Well, I'm sorry I've taken up your time. I hope I wasn't too much of a bother. Good night." He hung up.

So did Susanna. Part of her felt as if she'd passed a test, maybe the hardest one she'd ever face. The rest…She filled her glass with Glenfiddich and poured it down the hatch as if it were so much rotgut. Then, two or three minutes later, she did it again.

Her head started to spin. She didn't care. Tonight, she would have been good company for the drunk she'd dumped. She'd feel like hell tomorrow. That was all right. She felt like hell right now, too.

Admiral Yamamoto's again. A big plate of Berlin rolls, herring and onion and seaweed and rice. Wasabi to heat them up. Wheat beer to wash them down. Imperfectly Japanese. Perfectly good.

The place was jammed, as usual. Heinrich and Willi sat at a tiny table wedged up against the wall. Bureaucrats and soldiers. SS men and Party Bonzen. Businessmen and tourists. Secretaries and shopgirls. A radio going in the background. Nobody paying any attention to it. Nobody able to pay any attention to it, because you couldn't hear anything but the din of people chattering.

After a bite of his shrimp tempura, Willi said, "Beats the hell out of what they were feeding you a little while ago, doesn't it?"

Heinrich eyed him. Try as he would, he couldn't find any irony. Reluctantly, fighting hard not to believe it, he decided Willi meant that as a simple comment, not as any sort of jab or gibe. Anyone else would have, anyone else at all. Heinrich nodded. "I thought of that the last time we were here. You might say so. Yes, you just might."

An SSHauptsturmfuhrer a couple of tables over laughed uproariously at something one of his underlings had said. He waved a seidel in the air for a refill. Willi raised an eyebrow. "Noisy bastard. Even for this joint, he's a noisy bastard."

"Ja."Heinrich eyed the fellow. He'd seen him before. Even more to the point, he'd heard him before, right here. "Last time we were in this place at the same time as he was, he was pitching a fit about the first edition. I wonder what he thinks with the election just a few days away."

"Is it that same captain?" Willi tried not to be too obvious looking him over. "By God, I do believe you're right. All those SSSchweinehunde look the same to me." He said that very quietly. He might despise blackshirts, but he didn't want them knowing he did. Everyone who wasn't in it despised the SS. Hardly anybody dared to come right out and say so where anyone but trusted friends could hear.

Am I still Willi's trusted friend?Heinrich wondered.When it comes to Lothar Prutzmann's boys, I suppose I am-they threw me in the jug, after all. When it comes to Erika… When it came to Erika, if he never set eyes on her again, that would suit him down to the ground.

The Hauptsturmfuhrer poured down his fresh mug of beer. One of the noncoms with him said something Heinrich couldn't make out. The officer nodded. Putting on a comic-opera Japanese accent, he said, "They want an erection, ret them go to a borderro!" He made not the slightest effort to keep his voice down, and howled laughter right afterwards. His henchmen thought it was pretty funny, too.

"Charming people," Willi muttered-again, so softly only Heinrich could hear.

"Aren't they?" Heinrich agreed. "Shows they're good and serious about moving the Fuhrer 's reforms ahead, too."

Neither his words nor Willi's seemed disrespectful to the SS. If anyone was secretly recording their conversation, he would have a hard time proving sardonic intent-unless he also recorded the Hauptsturmfuhrer 's joke. Even then, he might think they approved of what the officer had said. Saying one thing and meaning another was an art people learned young in the Greater German Reich.

Not that SS men had to worry about such things. Of course, much of what they said amounted to,I'm going to punch you in the nose, and you can't do a thing about it. When that was the message, subtlety lost its point.

A pair of Wehrmacht officers got to their feet and stalked out. The looks they sent the Hauptsturmfuhrer would have melted titanium. But not even they had the nerve to confront him directly.

He noticed. He laughed. He said something to the other SS men at the table with him. To Heinrich, they sounded like carrion crows cawing over the body of something that would soon be dead. Their black uniforms only emphasized the resemblance. And what sort of untimely demise would the blackshirts anticipate with so much glee? Only one thing occurred to Heinrich: the death of reform, the death of the chance to speak your mind, the death of the chance to remember the past as it really was, the death of the chance not to make the same mistake again.

He shivered, though it was a warm spring day and the crowded restaurant fairly radiated heat. He gulped what was left of his beer almost as fast as the Hauptsturmfuhrer had drained his. Then he took out his wallet and laid down enough money to cover the bill. "Come on," he told Willi. "Let's get out of here."

Willi hadn't quite finished lunch. He started to say something-probably something pungent. But whatever he saw in Heinrich's face made him change his mind. "Give me half a minute," was as much protest as he offered. He devoured his last tempura shrimp in hardly more time than he'd promised. Still chewing, he got to his feet. "All right. I'm ready."

"Thanks," Heinrich said once they were out on the sidewalk.

"Don't worry about it." With an expansive wave, Willi brushed aside gratitude.

They walked toward the bus stop. After a few strides, Heinrich asked, "Why didn't you argue with me more?"

"Are you kidding?" Willi said. "You looked like a goose walked over your grave. You were going to get the hell out of there regardless of whether I came along. So I figured I might as well come." He made things sound simple. He usually did-whether they were or not.

"Thanks," Heinrich said again. After another few paces, he added, "It wasn't a goose-but you're close enough."

"Come on, Heinrich!" Lise said. "Do you want to be late for work?" She looked toward the stairway. Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane should have come down for their breakfast. They hadn't, not yet. Lise threw her hands in the air. "Does everybody want to be late this morning?"

"I'm going, I'm going," her husband said. He put down his coffee cup, gave her a quick, caffeinated kiss, grabbed his attache case, and hurried out the front door, calling, "Good-bye, girls!" as he went.

Only silence from the second floor. Two minutes later, though…Lise decided that couldn't possibly be a herd of buffalo on the stairs, which meant it had to be her daughters. They swarmed into the kitchen. By the way they ate, she hadn't fed them for six or eight weeks. Eggs, bacon, sweet rolls-where were they putting it all?

"I ought to make you take off your shoes and see if you're hiding breakfast in there," Lise said. The girls made faces at her. The time they'd spent in that foundlings' home didn't seem to have done them any harm. Francesca and Roxane were still sure they'd gone there by mistake. Alicia knew better, even if she couldn't say so while her sisters were around. But even she was young enough to have a lot more resilience than most grownups would have. And she was young enough for death not to seem altogether real to her, which also helped.

Lise wished she could say the same. She'd died ten thousand times before her husband and children came home.

Then Roxane raced up the stairs with a wail of dismay: "I forgot to do my arithmetic homework!"

Unlike her sisters, she did such things every once in a while. This time, at least, she remembered she'd forgotten. "Work fast!" Lise called. "You still have to catch the bus."

"We could go on, Mommy," Francesca said.

"No, wait for your sister. You've got time." Lise looked at the clock on the range. "I hope you've got time. She'd better not take too long." Another glance at the clock. Why couldn't mornings ever run smoothly?Because then they wouldn't be mornings, that's why.

"She could do some of her homeworkon the bus," Alicia suggested.

"Let her do as much as she can upstairs," Lise said. Roxane liked to chat with friends when she rode to and from school. She was always talking about how they said this to that, or that about this. Once she was out of the house, even the threat of getting in trouble might not hold her to doing what she needed to do. "Hurry up, Roxane!"

"I'm hurrying!" That was a frantic screech.

Just when Lise was about to go upstairs and get her littlest daughter, Roxane came pounding down. "All right. I'm done." She was all smiles again.

"For heaven's sake, try to remember to do your homework when you're supposed to," Lise said. Roxane nodded solemnly. She'd be good now-till the next time she wasn't. Then they would go through this again.Well, so what? Lise thought.Next to getting arrested and killed, forgotten arithmetic isn't so much of a much, now is it?

Kisses all around. If Lise's were more heartfelt than they had been before the girls got taken away-well, then they were, that was all. Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane probably didn't even notice. Good-byes. Out the door the girls went. There was Emma Handrick, just coming out of her house up the street. If she wasn't late, they weren't, either. And she wasn't. So they weren't.

Lise closed the door. Sudden quiet inside the house. Not just quiet-peace. Time seemed to slow down after the frantic jangling of getting her family off to work and school. Now she could fix herself another cup of coffee, sit back, and listen to music for a little while. She could, and she would. After half an hour or so, her own batteries recharged, she could get on with the things she had to do today.

Plenty of cream and plenty of sugar in the coffee, a Strauss waltz coming from the radio, a couple of song thrushes and a blackbird hopping in the back yard hunting for worms…It wasn't bad. It would have been better if she hadn't gone through terror not long before, but it wasn't bad.

And then the waltz disappeared. It hadn't ended; it just stopped, halfway through. Close to a minute of dead air followed.Somebody's going to catch it, Lise thought. Foulups like that didn't happen very often.

Music began again. But this still wasn't the vanished waltz. It was "Deutschland uber Alles." The "Horst Wessel Song" came hard on its heels. Lise's brief sense of peace had shattered well before she heard the second national anthem. There hadn't been a mistake at the radio station. Something had gone wrong, badly wrong, somewhere in the wider world.

The "Horst Wessel Song" ended. After another stretch of silence, a man's voice came on the air: "The following important statement comes to you from the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich."

What the devil is the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich?Lise wondered. She'd never heard of it. The government had nine million different committees and bureaus and commissions, so she didn't know how much that proved, but if it wasn't important, what was it doing on the air like this?

"the Fuhrer, Heinz Buckliger, has been taken ill on the island of Hvar," the man said. "As a result of this illness, he no longer has the capacity to rule our beloved Reich. Under such emergency conditions, the State Committee will administer affairs."

Lise frowned. That sounded like…But it couldn't be. Nobody since the Night of the Long Knives, more than seventy-five years earlier, had tried to seize power like this.

The announcer went on, "We address you at a great and critical hour for the future of the Vaterland and of our Volk. A mortal danger now looms large over our great Vaterland. The policy of so-called reforms, launched at Heinz Buckliger's initiative and allegedly designed to ensure the Reich 's dynamic development, has in fact gone down a blind alley. This is the result of deliberate actions on the part of those who trample on the laws of the Greater German Reich so they can stage an unconstitutional Putsch and gather all personal power into their hands. Millions of people now demand stern measures against this gross illegality."

"Du lieber Gott!" Lise exclaimed. Whoever was on the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich, they really meant it.

"By order of the State Committee, citizens of the Reich are to remain calm," the announcer said-and if that wasn't a command designed to spread panic, she didn't know what would be. The fellow continued, "The holding of meetings, street processions, demonstrations, and strikes isverboten. In case of need, a curfew and military patrols will be imposed. Important government and economic installations will be placed under guard by the SS, which remains loyal to the ideals of the state even in this time of corruption."

Aha!Lise thought. Now she could make a good guess about who was behind the Committee and the Putsch.

"Decisive measures will be taken to stop the spreading of subversive rumors, actions that threaten the disruption of law and order and the creation of tension, and disobedience to the authorities responsible for implementing the state of emergency." What did the announcer feel about the words in front of him? Was he for the Putsch? Did he hate it? He read like a machine, droning on mechanically: "Control will be established over all radio and televisor stations. Now serving as interim Fuhrer of the Reich and of the Germanic Empire is Odilo Globocnik-"

"Who?" Lise had heard no more of him than she had of the State Committee for the Salvation of the Greater German Reich. His name hardly even sounded German.

"— who has previously served the state as High Commissioner for Ostland Affairs." He'd been in charge of slaughtering Slavs, in other words. And now they were bringing his talents to the Reich itself? Lise shivered. The difference between bad and worse was much bigger than the difference between good and better. Much, much bigger.