In The Presence of mine Enemies

VI

Heinrich Gimpel kissed Lise, grabbed his attache case, and headed out the door. It was a fine, bright summer morning, the sun already high in the sky. The orbiting weather platforms predicted that this heat wave would last for the rest of the week. A heat wave in Berlin would have been nothing in Algiers, or even in Rome, but it was better than the week of rain and mist that could come even in the middle of July.

Volkswagens and the occasional Mercedes zoomed past Heinrich as he stood at the corner and waited for the commuter bus. He'd never seen much point to owning a motorcar. To him, they were just swank, and more expensive than they were worth. With the buses and trains, you could get anywhere you needed to go.

As if to prove as much, the commuter bus pulled up a minute later. He got on, fed his account card into the slot, reclaimed it, and found a seat. A few stops later, Willi Dorsch got on, too. He plopped himself down beside Heinrich with a grunted,"Guten Morgen."

"Guten Morgen,"Heinrich said."Wie geht's?"

"Well, I'll tell you, it could be better," Willi answered. "How's it going with you?"

"I'm doing all right." Heinrich couldn't tell Willi how worried he was about the Kleins. That would have required too much in the way of explanation. But he could sound sympathetic when he asked, "What now?"

Unlike him, Willi wasn't inclined to suffer in silence. When Willi felt wronged, the whole world heard about it. And so, all the way to the train station, Heinrich got a blow-by-blow account of his friend's latest tiff with his wife: who'd said what, who'd thrown what, and how Willi had had to sleep on the sofa in the front room. "Why is it," Willi asked, "that when you have a row with your woman, you're always the one who sleeps on the couch? She stays in bed and she stays comfortable. My back is killing me."

"I don't know. I never really thought about it," Heinrich said. Except when Lise was in the hospital after giving birth to one of their girls, the two of them had never slept apart.

"I never thought about it, either, not till this morning," Willi said. "Erika acts like it's a law of nature-she isn't happy, so I have to go somewhere else. You call that fair? Do you?"

The bus came up to Stahnsdorf's train station just then. Heinrich didn't need to answer, which was probably just as well. As far as he could remember, he'd never heard of a woman sleeping on the sofa while a man stayed in bed. It didn't seem fair. It wasn't anything he'd ever had to worry about himself, but it didn't.

In the station, he put fifteen pfennigs into a vending machine and pulled out a copy of the Volkischer Beobachter. Even in buying a newspaper, he fed the Party's coffers. Were he the good German he pretended to be, he supposed that would have made him feel proud, or at least patriotic. As things were, it left him mildly-perhaps a little more than mildly-irked. He couldn't even find out what was going on in the world without helping to finance his own destruction.

Willi put coins in the machine and got a paper, too. Along with the other people who'd ridden the bus to the station, they went to the platform to wait for the train to downtown Berlin. Heinrich glanced at his watch. They wouldn't have to wait long.

When the train pulled up a very few minutes later, the commuters fed their account cards into the slot one after another. Willi was in front of Heinrich in the queue. He sat down by a window, and thumped the seat next to him to show Heinrich was welcome. They both started reading the papers.

"Buckliger's going to talk to a bunch of big shots in Nuremberg tomorrow," Heinrich remarked. "I wonder what he'll have to say."

"Whatever the Bonzen want to hear," Willi predicted. "What other point is there in going to Nuremberg?" He spoke with a Berliner's cynicism and a Berliner's certainty that no other place in the Reich really mattered.

"Maybe," Heinrich said. "But maybe not, too. He didn't say what everybody expected him to the last time, you know."

He waited to see what Willi would make of that. Willi started to tell him he didn't know what he was talking about-started to and then, very visibly, stopped. "That's true," his friend said. "He didn't. But why would you go to Nuremberg to say anything that's out of the ordinary? Out of the ordinary isn't what Nuremberg is for."

"Who knows?" Heinrich shrugged. "If we're confused after he makes his speech, Horst will tell us what to think about it."

"Well, of course he will," Willi Dorsch said, with no irony Heinrich could hear. "Telling us what to think is what Horst Witzleben is for."

"He's good at it, too," Heinrich said.

"Not much point to having a Propaganda Ministry where the people aren't good at what they do, is there?" Willi said.

"Oh, I don't know. Look at the Croats," Heinrich said. The Croatian Ustasha did their jobs with an enthusiasm even the Gestapo found frightening. The German secret police were-mostly-professionals. The Croats were zealots, and proud of being zealots.

But Willi shook his head. "They want to show how frightful they are, and so they do. The national sport down there is hunting Serbs. And if the Serbs had been on the winning side, their national sport would have been hunting Croats. And do you know what else? They would have bragged about it, too. Tell me I'm wrong."

He waited. Heinrich thought it over. "I can't," he said, "not when you're right."

To his surprise, Willi looked angry. "You'd be more fun to argue with if you didn't admit you were wrong when you're wrong," he complained with mock severity.

"No, I wouldn't," Heinrich answered.

"Yes, you-" Willi broke off and sent him a reproachful stare. "Oh, no, you don't. You're a devil, is what you are."

"Danke schon. I do appreciate that."

"You would," Willi said. They both laughed. The train pulled into the Berlin station. Everything seemed the way it had in happier, less nervous times. Then Willi asked, "When are we going to play some more bridge? It's been too long."

Air-raid sirens started howling inside Heinrich's head. He couldn't show them, though, any more than he could show so much of what he felt. He couldn't even show this particular alarm in front of Lise. He'd dug that trap for himself, and now he'd fallen into it. Knowing he had, he said, "Why don't you and Erika come over Friday of next week after work?"

"Sounds good," Willi said.

Did it? Heinrich was anything but sure. He did think-he certainly hoped-Erika was less likely to say or do anything drastic at his house than at hers. If he turned out to be wrong…If I turn out to be wrong, Lise will clout me one, and I'll deserve it. Still, next to some of the other things that could happen, even a clout from his wife didn't seem too bad.

Then he had no more time for such worries. He stuffed the Volkischer Beobachter into his briefcase and performed the elaborate dance that took him from the downstairs train platform to the upstairs bus queue. As with any dance, if you had to think about what you were doing, you didn't do it so well. Willi matched his movements as smoothly as one ballerina in an ensemble conforming to another.

Their reward for such a performance was not an ovation but standing room on the bus that would take them to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. Someone on the bus hadn't seen soap anywhere near recently enough. Heinrich took in small, shallow sips of air, which might have helped a little. Then Willi muttered, "Who brought along his polecat?" You couldn't take small, shallow sips of air when you were laughing like a loon.

Once they got to the office, Heinrich phoned home and let Lise know about the invitation: he was a well-trained husband. "That sounds like fun," she said, which proved she didn't know everything that was going on. Heinrich couldn't tell her, either, and not just because Willi's desk was only a couple of meters away.

Willi, for that matter, might not have heard a word he said. Willi was busy flirting with Ilse. By the way she laughed and teased him back, his plot was thickening nicely. "Shall we go out to lunch?" he asked her.

"Why not?" she said.

Heinrich could have thought of any number of reasons why not, but nobody'd asked him. He went to lunch at the canteen, by himself. The meatloaf was grayish, with slices of what he hoped was hard-cooked egg scattered through it. He made the mistake of wondering what sort of meat had gone into the loaf. Then he wondered why he was eating it if he couldn't tell.

A couple of tables over, an officer looked at lunch and said, "They don't waste anything at those camps, do they?" After that, Heinrich finished the boiled beans that came on the side, but he didn't touch the meatloaf again. He was sure the officer had to be joking. He was sure, but still…

Willi and Ilse were a long time coming back from lunch. Heinrich wondered what they were eating. Then, hastily, he wondered where they were eating. That seemed safer.

He eyed them when at last they did come back. Willi didn't look particularly smug. Ilse didn't look rumpled. That proved nothing, one way or the other. Heinrich knew as much. He eyed them anyhow. Curiosity-nosiness, to be less polite about it-wouldn't leave him alone.

Would Willi brag on the way back to Stahnsdorf? The answer turned out to be no; if there was anything to brag about, Willi concealed it. Instead, he went on and on about the havoc he intended to wreak at the bridge table. "In your dreams," Heinrich said sweetly.

"Sometimes dreams are better than the way things really work out," Willi said. "Sometimes." And that, oracular in its ambiguity, was as close as he came to saying anything about whatever he had or hadn't done with Ilse-or perhaps about the way things had gone for him and Erika. Heinrich thought about asking him to explain, thought about it and then lost his nerve.

The next day's Volkischer Beobachter said not a word about the new Fuhrer 's speech in Nuremberg. Neither did the paper from the day after that. Had Buckliger made it? If he had, what had he said? The Beobachter, the chief Party newspaper, wasn't talking. Nor was anyone else: no one Heinrich knew, anyhow. He scratched his head, wondering what the devil that meant.

Alicia Gimpel had been helping her younger sisters with their homework ever since Francesca started going to school. Why not? She was bright, she remembered her lessons, and she'd had them only a couple of years before. Sometimes she got impatient when the younger girls didn't catch on right away. That had made Francesca angry more than once. Now Francesca helped Roxane, too-and sometimes got impatient when she didn't catch on right away. For reasons Alicia couldn't quite follow, her father and mother thought that was funny, though they'd yelled at her when she showed impatience.

She was slogging her way through reducing a page of fractions to lowest terms when Francesca came into her bedroom and said, "I'm stuck."

"With what?" Alicia was sick of fractions, and the one she was about to tackle-39/91-didn't look as if it would ever turn into anything reasonable. Whatever Francesca was working on had to be more interesting than arithmetic.

"I'm supposed to write a poem about Jews, and I can't think of anything that rhymes," Francesca said anxiously.

"How long does it have to be?" Alicia asked-the automatic first question when confronting schoolwork.

"Eight lines!" By the way Francesca said it, her teacher was expecting her to turn in both parts of Faust tomorrow morning.

"What have you done so far?" Alicia asked. Sometimes her sister got brain cramps and wanted her to do all the work instead of just helping. She didn't like that.

But Francesca had a beginning. "Jews are nasty. Jews are bad./They hurt Aryans and make them sad," she recited in the singsong way children have with rhymes.

"That's a start, all right," Alicia said encouragingly. "Only six lines to go."

"But I can't think of anything else!" Francesca wailed. "Besides, once I've said that, what else do I need to say?"

What would happen if I told you you were writing a poem about yourself?Alicia wondered. Trouble was, she had a pretty good notion of the answer.You'd have hysterics, that's what. She'd learned the word not long before, and fallen in love with it. It sounded much grander than pitching a fit.

She took a deep breath, willing herself to forget what she'd found out earlier in the year. If she imagined she still was the way she had been then, helping with assignments like this one came easier. She said, "Maybe you can say the same thing over again in a different way."

"Like how?" Francesca asked, interested but doubtful.

Alicia flogged her muse and came up with a line: "Jews were Germany's bad luck." She eyed her sister. "Now you find something that rhymes."

Francesca screwed up her face as she thought. Her sudden smile was like the sun coming out from behind a cloud. "That's why we made them a dead duck!" she exclaimed.

It wasn't very good poetry; it rhymed, but the rhythm was off. Alicia started to say so, but then, for a wonder, held her tongue. For somebody in Francesca's grade, it would do. And criticizing it would only get Alicia more deeply involved in shaping the poem, which was the last thing she wanted. Pretending she wasn't something she was came hard enough around strangers. It was harder still with her sisters.

Francesca, inevitably, wanted more help. "Give me another line," she said.

"No," Alicia said. "Come on. You can do it yourself."

Her sister hauled out the heavy artillery: "I'll tell Mommy."

It didn't work. "Go ahead," Alicia answered. "You're supposed to do your own homework, and you know it."

"You're mean!" Francesca said.

"I've got my work to do, too," Alicia said. Compared to writing rude verses about Jews, even reducing

39/91 to lowest terms didn't look so bad. "You're so mean! You lie and cheat!" When Francesca got angry, she didn't care what she said. She just wanted to wound.

But she didn't, not here. "That's good," Alicia said. Her sister gaped at her. "That's good," she repeated. "That will do for another line, if you change 'you' into 'they.'"

"Oh." Francesca thought about it. The sun came out from behind the clouds once more. "You're right. It will." She thought a little more. "They are so mean. They lie and cheat./And take away the food we eat." She looked toward Alicia, who was suddenly a respected literary analyst again, for her reaction.

And Alicia nodded. She didn't think it was wonderful poetry, but she also didn't think Francesca's teacher was expecting wonderful poetry. The lesson was more about hating Jews than about writing poetry, wonderful or not. Alicia stared suspiciously at 39/91. To encourage Francesca-and to encourage her to go away-she said, "See? Just two lines left."

"Uh-huh." Francesca didn't go away, but she didn't nag Alicia any more, either. Now that she'd come up with more than two lines mostly on her own, she could make others. "We're glad they aren't here any longer./Without them, the Reich grows ever stronger." She beamed. "I'm done!"

"Write them all down before you forget them," Alicia advised.

Francesca hurried off to do just that. A couple of minutes later, she cried out in despair: "I forgot!"

Alicia remembered the deathless verses. She recited them for her sister-slowly, so Francesca could get them down on paper. Francesca even said thank you, which would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along.

Back to arithmetic. 39/91? Now, 3 went into 39 evenly, but did it go into 91? No-she could see that at a glance.They're trying to trick me, she thought.This is going to be one of those stupid fractions that doesn'treduce, that's already in lowest terms. Then, remembering that 3? 13 made 39, she idly tried dividing 13 into 91. To her surprise, she discovered she could. 3/7, she wrote on the answer sheet.

Francesca sounded like a stampeding elephant going downstairs (Roxane, who was smaller, somehow contrived to sound like an earthquake). "Listen, Mommy!" she said from down below.

"Listen to what?" the Gimpel girls' mother asked. "I'm fixing supper."

"Listen to this poem I wrote," Francesca said proudly. She didn't mention anything about help from her big sister. In most circumstances, that would have infuriated Alicia, more because of its inaccuracy than for any other reason. Here, she didn't much mind.

Her mother's voice floated up the stairs: "All right. Go ahead."

And Francesca did. Either she'd already memorized it or she had her paper along with her. "What do you think?" she asked when she was done.

If Francesca had written the poem all by herself and then read it to her, Alicia knew she would have been speechless, at least for a moment. Her mother didn't hesitate, even for a heartbeat. "That's very good, dear," she said, and sounded as if she meant it. "Are you playing a game with Alicia and Roxane, or is it for school?"

"For school," Francesca answered.

"Well, I'm sure you'll get a good grade. Now go on back upstairs and let me finish dealing with the tongue here. I want to be sure your father doesn't have to wait too long to eat before he gets home from work."

Francesca thundered up the stairs again. To Alicia's relief, she didn't stop to talk any more, but went straight into her room. That left Alicia alone to wonder about something more complicated than fractions.

She knew she was smarter than most grownups. They sometimes knew more things than she did, but that was only because they'd been around longer, which often struck her as most unfair. Up till now, she'd never had any trouble learning whatever she set out to learn.

But what her mother had just done was beyond her, and she knew it. How had Mommy managed to sound so natural with no warning at all? Alicia knew Jews had to if they wanted to survive. She'd already slipped more times than she could count, though. She hadn't got caught yet, but she knew she'd slipped. As far as she could tell, her mother and father never slipped, not like that.

She sighed. Up till now, she'd been sure adults ruled the roost for no better reason than that they were bigger than children and could shout louder. That had always struck her as most unfair. But now, after listening to her mother perform, she thought she might be willing to admit that maybe, just maybe, there was something to this business of growing up after all.

No word in the Volkischer Beobachter. Day followed day, and the Party newspaper said not a thing about Heinz Buckliger's speech to the Bonzen in Nuremberg. The longer the silence lasted, the more puzzling it got for Heinrich Gimpel. No matter how much curiosity gnawed at him, though, he couldn't do anything about satisfying it.

He couldn't even show he was curious, not after the first day or two. That curtain of silence had to have fallen for a reason, even if he had no idea what the reason was. Asking too many questions under circumstances like that was dangerous.

Willi Dorsch plainly felt the same way. He kept his head down and his mouth shut. If his ears were open-well, then they were, that was all. Open ears were safe enough, because they didn't show.

But Heinrich was the one who caught the first break. The Friday Willi and Erika were going to come over for bridge in the evening, Willi took Ilse out to lunch again. Heinrich was curious about that, too, and couldn't show he was curious, either. He went to the canteen, ordered the day's special-a chicken stew with heavy gravy and too many onions-and sat down at a small corner table to eat.

He'd got there early; the place wasn't very full. Over the next half hour, more officers and analysts, technicians and clerks, sweepers and secretaries came in, sometimes by themselves, sometimes in pairs, most often in groups. The loners and pairs took the tables at the edges, while the groups mostly used the bigger tables in the middle of the room. Things got loud in a hurry.

Heinrich did his best to listen without seeming to, even if separating signal from noise wasn't easy. When he heard the word "Nuremberg" from the table behind him, he wished he could prick up his ears. As things were, he could only sit there, slowly eat the unappetizing stew, and try to hear what the two officers-he thought two officers had walked past him and sat down at that table, although he wasn't a hundred percent sure-who were also eating lunch were saying.

"He stuck his foot in it, if you ask me," one of the men declared.

The other fellow grunted. "The cook stuck his foot in this stew, if you ask me. Troops in the field would mutiny if it came in a ration tin. For people at headquarters, though, it's plenty good enough."

"Dammit, I'm serious," the first man said.

"So am I," his friend replied. "And if I have to finish this, I'll be critical." He made a gagging noise. Heinrich almost stopped paying attention. Everybody groused about the food at the canteen, which didn't stop people from coming.

But then the first officer said, "He had no business saying things like that to the bigwigs-none, I tell you."

"No?" the second officer said. "For one thing, we don't know justwhat he said, because nobody's talking on the record."

"Oh, we know, all right," the first man said. "And it's because he said that kind of rubbish that nobodyis talking."

A longish pause followed, as if the second officer was deciding how to respond to that, and whether to respond at all. At last, he said, "I don't know. If what we hear is what really happened, some of what he said at Nuremberg has needed saying for a long time. What did he say that wasn't true? Answer me that, if you please."

"Who cares whether it was true?" the first man retorted. "It was-undignified, that's what it was."

Who cares whether it was true?If that didn't sum up the way things had gone all through the history of the Reich, Heinrich couldn't imagine what would. He was in a better position to know than the vast majority of his countrymen. Another pause at the table in back of him. Then, slowly, the second officer said, "Doing things like going in the red when we're the strongest country in the world-that'sundignified, if you ask me. Telling the truth about lies we told and mistakes we made a long time ago…What's undignified about that? How do we get better if we don't even know where we were?"

"What has raking up all that old stuff got to do with whether the budget's balanced or not?" the first officer said.

"If my watch has run two hours slow for weeks, I won't get the right time when I look at it, will I?" the other man said.

"If your watch has run slow for weeks, you're a Dummkopf, " the first officer said. "You go out and buy a new battery-or else a new watch."

"That's what the truth is-a new battery. And we've needed one for a lot longer than weeks. It's just that nobody had the nerve to say so."

The first officer came back with something in broad Bavarian dialect. It sounded pungent, but Heinrich couldn't quite make out what it meant-to him, broad Bavarian was hardly German. And he couldn't sit there much longer without making people realize he was eavesdropping. He got to his feet, dumped the foam plate and plastic utensils in the trash, and headed back to his desk. Whathad Heinz Buckliger said down in Nuremberg? Whatever it was, he had a notion why the Beobachter hadn't printed it.

He wondered whether Willi had heard anything interesting at lunch. If rumors about whatever had happened in Nuremberg were starting to circulate here at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters, they were bound to be bubbling with SS men and Party officials, too. And people liked to blab.

But when Willi and Ilse got back, it was obvious they hadn't been paying attention to anything but each other. He didn't have lipstick on his collar, but his hair went every which way and his tie was yanked askew. Ilse's blouse was buttoned wrong. When she realized that and fixed it, she got a fit of the giggles.

Well, well-or maybe not so well,Heinrich thought.Bridge tonight is liable to be even more interesting than it has been lately.

Susanna Weiss got her first hint of something out of the ordinary that same afternoon, when the telephone in her office rang. She muttered an unpleasantry. She had neither classes nor students on Friday afternoons. If she couldn't do her research and writing then, when would she ever get the chance? Never, maybe. She picked up the phone. "Bitte?"

"Guten Tag,Susanna. This is Rosa,Herr Doktor Professor Oppenhoff's secretary. The Herr Doktor Professor would like to see you in his office immediately."

"Would he?" Susanna muttered. Rosa was a withered old crone; Susanna often thought of her as Grendel's mother, straight out of Beowulf. She was also studiedly rude to Susanna. She would never have presumed to call a male professor in the Department of Germanic Literature by his first name: he would have been Herr Doktor Professor So-and-So. Susanna, Rosa implied, was no better than hired help herself. But Rosa was Professor Oppenhoff's right hand and two or three fingers of his left. With a sigh, Susanna made herself say, "I'm coming."

Despite thatimmediately, when Susanna got to the department chairman's office, she had to cool her heels for almost fifteen minutes before Rosa ushered her into the exalted presence: another way of putting her in her place. It didn't work. She'd expected nothing else. She'd brought an article with her, and took notes while she waited. Rosa couldn't even complain about that.

At last, Rosa said, "Professor Oppenhoff will see you now."

How did she know? She hadn't gone in to ask. "Thank you so much-dear," Susanna said, and scribbled a last deliberate note before entering the chairman's malodorous sanctum.

Franz Oppenhoff wasn't actually smoking a cigar when she came in, but sour smoke and the stubbed-out corpses of several in the ashtray served as all-too-vivid reminders of his habit. Unlike his secretary, he was scrupulously polite, saying, "And how are you today,Fraulein Doktor Professor?"

"Well enough, thank you," Susanna answered. "What can I do for you today, sir?"

"Professor Lutze has had several…interesting things to say about the recent meeting of the Medieval English Association in London," Oppenhoff said.

"Oh, yes-the meeting you were reluctant to let me attend." Susanna didn't believe in letting anyone off the hook.

Professor Oppenhoff coughed and scratched at the bottom edge of his left muttonchop. The gesture and the flamboyant whiskers made Susanna think of Emperor Franz Joseph and the dying days of Austria-Hungary. "Hmm…ah…hmm," Oppenhoff said. He needed to pause and gather himself before he could come out with actual words: "Be that as it may, were you not intimate with the British Union of Fascists during your stay in England?"

"Intimate? I should hope not!"

The department chairman went red. "With their deliberations, I should say."

"Oh, with their deliberations?" Susanna sounded as if that were occurring to her for the first time. Franz Oppenhoff turned redder. She grudged him a nod. "Yes, I suppose so."

"And they had something to do with…with matters pertaining to the first edition of Mein Kampf? " Professor Oppenhoff chose his words with uncommon care, which only made him more opaque than ever.

Susanna nodded again. "That's right, they did. Excuse me,Herr Doktor Professor, but what does this have to do with the Department of Germanic Languages?"

"Perhaps nothing. Perhaps very much indeed." Oppenhoff, who was usually fussy and precise, was fussy and imprecise today. He scratched at his side-whiskers again. "You are not familiar with the Fuhrer 's recent remarks in Nuremberg?"

"I'm sorry, Professor, but Herr Buckliger is not in the habit of confiding in me."

Oppenhoff stared at her. Irony was a weapon he seldom encountered, and he seemed to have no idea how to cope with it. "Er-yes," he managed.

"What did the Fuhrer say?" Susanna asked. "That's important for every German."And even more important for every Jew.

"Well…" The chairman hesitated.He doesn't know himself, or doesn't know much, Susanna realized. Isn't that interesting? Oppenhoff as much as confirmed her thought when he broke out of his hesitation: "I do not have this at first hand, but I am given to understand that he addressed the principles underlying National Socialist rule in the Reich and the Germanic Empire."

"Did he?" Susanna said-as neutral a remark as she could find. "I'm sorry, but I don't see what that's got to do with anything in the department."

"No?" Professor Oppenhoff looked at her in surprise. "If National Socialist doctrine changes, why then naturally our presentation must also change in accordance with it."

He worried more about what was ideologically appropriate than about what was true. Susanna had known that before, but hadn't had her nose rubbed in it like this up till now. She could add two and two, though. "Did the Fuhrer talk about the first edition of Mein Kampf? "

"I believe so, and about other matters related to that topic," Oppenhoff answered. "Since you saw developments in England, I thought you would be able to contribute some insight into what is likely to follow here in the Reich."

What couldcontribute some insight mean buttell me how to think? As far as Susanna could remember, the last original idea Franz Oppenhoff had had was to use staples rather than paper clips to hold multipage documents together. Such things were his province; he made a better bureaucrat than he did an academic. She would have pitied him more if he hadn't been proud of that. "I'm sorry,Herr Doktor Professor, but I really couldn't tell you," she said. "We'll have to wait and find out what the people think, won't we?"

"What…the people think." By the way the department chairman brought out the phrase, Susanna might have said it in Gothic-it plainly meant nothing to him.

She nodded. "Yes, sir. That's how the British fascists interpret that passage of the first edition, anyhow. Herr Lynton put considerable weight on it. What else could our new Fuhrer mean?"

"I don't know." Oppenhoff made a production of taking a Havana from his gold-plated cigar case, getting it going, and blowing noxious fumes in Susanna's direction. "Things seemed satisfactory as they were," he said plaintively. "This being so, what point to changing them?"

Had Susanna been only another German, she might have had more sympathy-perhaps even pity-for Franz Oppenhoff. Since she was what she was, though, she didn't think everything had been fine before. "Change comes,Herr Doktor Professor," she said, trying to sound gentle and not scornful. "It comes, and we have to be ready for it."

"This is true." But the department chairman still looked like a large, white-haired, wrinkled, cigar-smoking little boy on the edge of a tantrum. "No matter how true it is, I don't like it!" he burst out.

"I'm sorry," said, Susanna, who, if she'd ever prayed for anything in her life, prayed for change now.

The doorbell rang. "There they are," Heinrich Gimpel said.

"Well, let them in," Lise answered. "The house isn't as clean as it ought to be, but no house with children in it is ever as clean as it ought to be. They have two of their own. At least they'll understand."

Heinrich opened the door. Willi Dorsch thrust a big jug of Rhine wine at him. "Here," Willi said. "If I get you drunk enough, maybe you won't remember to count the cards while we're playing."

"Thanks." Heinrich took the wine. "You seem to be forgetting something, though."

"What's that?"

"If we all get drunk-"

"If we all get drunk, who knows what will happen?" Erika Dorsch said from behind Willi. She looked at Heinrich.

Willi didn't see that. He laughed, saying, "If we all get drunk, we won't remember, so whatever happens, it won't count."

Is that how you explained things to Ilse at lunch?Heinrich wondered. One more question he couldn't ask. He hefted the jug, saying, "Come on in. We'll drink some of this, anyhow, and we'll see how bad the bridge gets."

"Not to worry." Willi laughed again. "We can play bad bridge drunk or sober."

"Some of us certainly can," Erika murmured. The smile fell off her husband's face. She pointed to Alicia, who was reading on the sofa. "My goodness, she's getting big, isn't she?"

"They do that," Heinrich said. "Maybe if we stopped feeding her, she wouldn't. We've talked about it, but we haven't done it yet."

Alicia looked up from her book. "I've heard that one before, Daddy." Jab delivered, she went back to reading.

Willi Dorsch winced again. "They get dangerous awfully early, don't they?" He wasn't looking at Alicia, though. He was looking at Erika. This time, luckily, she was the one who didn't notice.

Lise came out to the front room. "Hello, hello," she said, and then caught sight of the jug of wine. "Gott im Himmel!If we drink all that, we'll pass out under the table like a bunch of Russians."

"I think that's part of Willi's evil plot," Heinrich said, "except that he was going to pour all of the wine downmy throat."

"Oh, he was, was he?" Lise sent Willi a mock-ferocious glare. "He doesn't think he needs to get me drunk, too? I'm insulted."

Alicia closed her book. "I'm going upstairs," she announced. "How is a person supposed to hear herself think around here?" Except for the pronoun, she was quoting her father. The indignant flounce, however, was all her own.

"That one's going to be trouble." Erika Dorsch's voice held nothing but admiration.

"That one's already trouble," Heinrich replied. "Well, let's see how the cards go. And let's see what we've got here." He handed Lise the jug of Rhine wine. She made as if to stagger under the weight, but then took the wine back into the kitchen to use the corkscrew. When everybody was at the table with a glass of wine, Heinrich said, "I heard something interesting at lunch today," and told of what the officers had to say about Heinz Buckliger's speech.

The longer he went on, the unhappier Willi looked. Heinrich wondered why. Willi's politics weren't nearly so reactionary as, say, those of the SS men in Admiral Yamamoto's. But then Erika turned to Willi and said, "You didn't tell me anything about this. You said you had lunch with Heinrich today, didn't you?"

"Well, yes," Willi said.Well, no, Heinrich thought.If you tell your wife lies, you can't expect me to know about them. But Willi recovered brilliantly: "Old man Kallmeyer came over to the table and started bending my ear about depreciation. I couldn't pay any attention to the juicy stuff."

Erika didn't buy that, or not right away. "Why wasn't he bending Heinrich's ear, too?"

"Don't be silly," Willi said. "Heinrich already knows everything there is to know about depreciation."

That wasn't true, but it was plausible. Erika eyed her husband, eyed Heinrich, and slowly nodded. "Well, maybe," she admitted. "But I wish you'd been paying attention to what really matters."

"I was," Willi said. "If Kallmeyer gets mad at me, my job turns into hell on earth."

Erika hardly paid any attention to him. She was thinking about what Heinrich had said. "If the government is going to admit it made mistakes and told lies…it's like the end of the world. Who knows where it will end?"

"Not at the bridge table," Lise said. "Shall we play?" With some people, getting together to play bridge was just an excuse to sit around and talk and drink. For the Gimpels and the Dorsches, it was an excuse to sit around and talk and drink, but it wasn'tjust an excuse. They all took the cards seriously (Willi took them as seriously as he took anything, anyhow). The wine and the snacks and the chatter were all very well, but the evenings revolved around the bridge game.

As they cut the cards to see who would deal, Lise glanced at Heinrich for a split second. He answered just as quickly with an eyebrow raised and lowered. He'd already told her what he'd heard in the canteen, and he hadn't said a word about Willi's being there. The eyebrow said there were good reasons why he hadn't.

Willi won the cut and dealt like a machine-a machine that desperately needed repair and oiling. He tossed out cards seemingly at random. He would do that every once in a while, for comic effect. Sometimes he would misdeal doing it, too. When everyone ended up with thirteen cards, Heinrich breathed a silent sigh of relief. He arranged his hand. It was nothing special, but he could open up at one heart and see what Lise had.

"Four diamonds," Willi announced, sounding proud of himself.

"Oh, dear," Heinrich said. He knew what a preempt like that meant-Willi had a diamond suit as long as his arm, and not much else. Seeing that he had a singleton six of diamonds himself, that didn't much surprise Heinrich.Do I want to jump in at the four level myself? He looked at his hand again. He knew he couldn't. "Pass."

Erika and Lise also passed. Willi went down two, but he had a hundred honors points in diamonds, so he broke even on the hand. And he'd kept Heinrich and Lise from finding out they could easily have made two hearts, which meant the preempt worked.

"If you'd made that hand, I would have figured you cooked the deal on purpose," Heinrich said as he shuffled for the next one.

"Who, me?" Willi looked innocent: one of his less convincing expressions. "I'm not smart enough to do anything like that."

"How right you are," Erika murmured.

Willi's smile seemed cheerful enough. "You can be replaced," he said. It might have been one of their usual gibes. It might have been…if Ilse hadn't come back from lunch with her buttons misaligned. Heinrich looked down at the table till he was sure his face wouldn't give anything away.

He and Lise got to five clubs. She'd bid them first, so she played the hand. She went down one when the trumps split badly against her. "Looks like everything's going to be above the line tonight," Heinrich said.

Nobody went down on the next hand, because nobody had cards good enough for an opening bid. They tossed that one in and tried again. When Erika Dorsch bid three diamonds on the hand after that and not only made the contract but added an overtrick, she got a round of applause.

Erika and Willi won the first rubber, a long, inartistic affair. After the clinching hand, Lise said, "Let's take a break. I'll get a little something to eat." She went into the kitchen.

Willi got up, too. "Rhine wine's revenge," he said, and headed in the other direction.

That left Heinrich alone at the table with Erika, exactly where he didn't want to be. "I'm going to give Lise a hand," he said, and started to rise.

But when Erika said, "Wait," he didn't see what else he could do. She asked, "Was Willi at lunch with you today?"

He didn't want to lie. He didn't want to tell the truth, either. In the end, he didn't say anything. That was also unlikely to help, as he knew only too well.

And it didn't. Erika's eyes narrowed. "Uh-huh," she said, packing a world of meaning into two wordless syllables. "Well, where was he, then?"

"I don't know." Heinrich could tell the literal truth there, and did, gladly.

By then, telling the truth didn't help, either. Erika asked the next question he dreaded: "Wherever he was, who was with him?"

"How am I supposed to know that if I don't know where he was?" Heinrich hoped he sounded reasonable, but feared he sounded desperate.

Erika sent him the sort of look he hadn't got since the last time he'd tried explaining to a teacher why he didn't have his homework. But before she could call him a liar to his face or ask another question he didn't want to answer, the toilet down the hall flushed. Out came Willi, whistling.Saved by-well, no, not the bell, Heinrich thought.

"That'sbetter," Willi said.

Lise brought in a tray of cold cuts and crackers and cheese. "Here," she said. "We don't have to think about this."

"I didn't have to think about what I was doing before," Willi said.

"Are you sure?" Erika asked, in tones that would have given him credit for any disgusting habit. Heinrich built himself a snack. That was probably the safest thing he could do. Even scratching his head struck him as dangerous.

Erika had come right out and propositioned him, or as near as made no difference, and she didn't see anything wrong with that. The only place where she saw anything wrong was with what Willi did. Willi had had some sort of interesting time with Ilse. But if he ever found out what Erika had said to Heinrich…

It sounded like one of the televisor dramas that ran on weekday afternoons. Unfortunately, it was real.If Willi finds out, will he try to knock Erika's block off, or mine? Heinrich got up and poured himself another glass of wine. That was a more interesting question than he really wanted to contemplate.

In the kitchen, Lise had missed the byplay. "We're all cheerful tonight, aren't we?" she remarked.

"Iam," Willi said, piling a wobbly mountain of meat and cheese on a cracker. "Why wouldn't I be?" When he devoured his creation, he looked like a hamster stuffing sunflower seeds into its cheek pouches. Heinrich wouldn't have believed all that would fit in a man's mouth, but it did.

"Yes, why wouldn't you be?" Bombers were taking off in Erika's voice. Panzers were rolling for the border.Why wouldn't you be, when you were out screwing around? She didn't say it, but it hung in the air.

Somehow, Willi seemed not to hear it. Heinrich didn't know whether to be appalled or jealous. Willi assembled another monster snack. He managed to eat this one, too, and smacked his lips in triumph.Did you do the same thing after you ate…? Heinrich made himself stop, not quite soon enough.

Now Lise realized something was wrong. She didn't know what, but she did find a solution of sorts. Reaching for the cards, she asked, "Whose deal is it, anyway?"

"Mine," Willi said with his mouth full. He took the deck from Lise and started shuffling. "I'll deal them off the bottom this time. Only way to make sure I get myself some decent cards."

"Wouldn't you rather have indecent ones?" Erika asked. Again, Willi only gave back a vague smile. He went on dealing.

Heinrich arranged his hand. "This looks like you dealt it off the bottom, all right," he told Willi.

"I told you I was going to." Willi took a look at his own cards. "One heart."

"Pass," Heinrich said gloomily.

"One no-trump," Erika said, which meant she had some help for Willi but not much. Heinrich told himself not to look at bridge bids as a metaphor for life. As often happened, telling himself was easier than making himself listen.

"Two diamonds," Lise said.

That made Heinrich look at his hand in a new way. He had five diamonds to the queen: not really a biddable suit, not with the rest of the junk that accompanied them, but pretty decent support. His singleton heart looked better, too.

"Two hearts," Willi said.

"Three diamonds," Heinrich said.

Erika passed. So did Lise. Willi muttered to himself. "Three hearts," he said. Now Heinrich passed. His wife had the stronger hand. She was the one who'd have to decide whether to go up. After Erika passed, Lise did, too. Willi made gloating noises. "Mine! All mine!"

Heinrich led a diamond. Erika laid out the dummy, which was about what Heinrich had expected: not much. She did have two little diamonds in it. Willi put one of those on the lead. Lise played the ace and took the trick. Then she threw out the king, saying, "Maybe this will go and maybe it won't." Heinrich didn't think it would. He had five diamonds, he figured Lise for five, the dummy showed two-and that left only one for Willi.

But Willi had two after all, which meant Lise had had only four. No wonder she hadn't rebid them. Willi looked disgusted at setting his second and surely last diamond on the trick. Lise led the eight of spades. Willi took the trick with the ace from his hand. He looked put upon. He didn't want to be there, but he didn't have much in the way of entries to the board.

He played the hand about as well as he could, and ended up going down two anyhow. Lise had stronger cards than he did. "I was going to open at one no-trump," she said, "but I couldn't, not when it got to me, and I had even distribution and no rebiddable suit. So"-she shrugged-"I played defense instead."

"And ran over me," Willi said sadly.

"You were the one who overbid the hand," Erika said.

"The hell I did," Willi retorted. That got to him, where the other sneers hadn't.

Heinrich grabbed the cards and started shuffling. "We've all butchered a hand or two-or twenty-two," he said. "And some of us-I'm not sure now, but I think it's just barely possible-some of us may even have made some other mistakes, too." He started to deal.

"You've got good sense, Heinrich," Willi said gratefully. Erika also nodded. Neither Dorsch looked happy about agreeing with the other. Heinrich wasn't happy about having Erika praise him in any way. It might give her more ideas than she had already-ideas about which Heinrich couldn't and wouldn't do anything.

The second rubber turned out even longer and sloppier than the first one had. Heinrich and Lise took two games out of three, but they went set three times while they were vulnerable and the Dorsches had a couple of hands with honors bonuses, so in spite of "winning" the rubber they came out 150 points in the hole.

"Well, no one will send any of those hands to the bridge magazines," Heinrich said ruefully.

"Oh, I don't know," Willi said. "If they're looking for lessons on how not to do it, I think we just wrote the book."

"Another rubber?" Lise asked.

Willi nodded. "Why not? The night is young, and I am beautiful."

Even Erika laughed, and she'd been sniping at her husband all evening. She still had the tricks they'd taken during the last hand in front of her. She tossed them across the table to Willi. "Shut up and deal."

"Always a good idea," he said, and did. When he picked up his hand and arranged it, he solemnly shook his head. "Nothing's going to go right tonight, though. I pass."

Everybodypassed. Heinrich took the cards and shuffled them extra hard, trying to get rid of the mediocre hands people had been having. He looked at what he'd dealt himself. No such luck, not as far as he was concerned. "Pass."

They all passed again. "At this rate, we'll be here forever," Willi said, which proved economic planners in the USA weren't the only ones given to extrapolating too far from not enough data.

"Give me the cards," Erika said. As she shuffled, she sent the deck a severe look. "Have to be some playable hands in here somewhere." By the way she said it, the cards would go to bed without supper if there weren't. She nodded briskly once she saw her own hand. "One heart."

She won the contract at four hearts, and made it without much trouble. Even Lise murmured, "About time," as she shuffled for the next deal. She and Heinrich made three diamonds and then made two hearts, so they were vulnerable, too.

That sent the deal to Heinrich. He liked the face cards that looked back at him when he picked up his hand. He put things together, and… "One no-trump." Erika passed. Lise made it two no-trump. Willi opened his mouth and then closed it again, as if he wanted to jump in but couldn't, not at the three level. Heinrich said, "Three no-trump. Let's see if we can steal this rubber." Everyone passed.

Erika led. Lise set out the dummy. Heinrich looked at what she had and added it in his head to what he had. He saw eight sure tricks, one more with a spade finesse-and he knew which way he intended to try it, because of Willi's wiggling-and maybe a couple of overtricks if he could set up her clubs and run them.

Everything turned out the way he thought it would. He ran the spade finesse past Willi the first chance he got, while he still had the other suits stopped-vital in no-trump-and it worked. After that, everything else flew on automatic pilot. He ended up making five.

"Very neat," Willi said. "Nothing we could do about that one."

"I don't know," Erika said. "Why didn't you hold up a sign that said,I've got the strength?" Willi bridled. As he had in the auction, he started to say something. This time, Erika forestalled him: "And who did you really have lunch with today?"

"I told you-with Heinrich," Willi answered.

"Yes, you told me. Now try telling the truth, because I know crap when I hear it," Erika snarled. Lise looked at Heinrich in surprise-she'd known something was going on, all right, but she hadn't realized Willi was out-and-out lying. Heinrich did his best to keep all expression off his face. Anything he did or said now was only liable to throw gasoline on the fire.

Willi got to his feet with ponderous dignity. "I don't have to take these kinds of questions," he declared. "You're not the Security Police, even if you think you are." He left the table and walked down the hall again.

Erika looked daggers at his back. "Bastard," she said, just as the bathroom door closed. She turned back to Heinrich and Lise, her eyes going from one of them to the other and then returning. "I swear, there are times when I'd like to sleep with the first man I happen to see, just to pay him back." She was staring squarely at Heinrich when she said that.

He tried to look at the floor, at the ceiling, out the window-anywhere but at either Willi's wife or his own. He kept waiting for Willi to flush the toilet again. But Willi, this time, was using the bathroom as a bomb shelter, and odds were he wouldn't come out any time soon.

Silence stretched. At last, warily, Lise said, "Don't you think that's a little…drastic?"

"Why?" Erika didn't keep her voice down. If anything, she pitched it to carry. "If he's fooling around on me, why shouldn't I fool around on him?"

More silence. Heinrich decided he'd better say something. If he didn't, Lise was liable to get the idea he wanted Erika thinking about him like that. He chose his words with even more caution than Lise had: "If you're going to stay married, it's probably a good idea that neither one of you fool around on the other."

"Ha!" Erika said: a one-syllable demolition of the very idea. Lise had started to nod in agreement with her husband. That scornful laugh froze her for a moment with her chin in the air. She looked as if she needed a distinct effort to bring her head back down to a normal posture.

After what seemed like forever, water ran in the pipes at the far end of the hall. Willi came back to the bridge table looking grim. "We'd better go," he said to Erika. "It's getting late."

"It certainly is-in a lot of ways," she answered. "And we have a few things to talk about, don't we?"

"Yes, just a few," Willi said. The Dorsches headed up the street for the bus stop after the most perfunctory good-byes. They were shouting at each other long before they got there.

"Well!" Lise said. "That was another interesting evening."

"Interesting." Heinrich considered. "Mm, yes, that's one word for it, anyhow."

"It was the politest word I could think of," his wife replied. "What exactly did Erika mean there? And whowas Willi at lunch with?"

Answering the second question seemed safer, so Heinrich did that first: "Ilse-again-if lunch is where they went." Lise's eyes widened. Her mouth shaped a silentoh. But her expression said she hadn't forgotten the other question, either. Unhappily, he told her, "Erika probably meant just what she said. She usually does."

"I know she does. That's why I wondered." Lise frowned. "But she was looking at you when she said it. I didn't much care for that. What did you think about it?"

Now there was a question to make a man want to pretend he'd suddenly gone deaf. "It's a compliment of sorts," said Heinrich, whose ears still worked, however much he wished they didn't. His wife coughed dangerously. "Will you let me finish?" he exclaimed. Lise gave back a pace in surprise; he didn't raise his voice very often. He went on, "It's notmuch of a compliment, not when she would have said the same thing to any man who happened to be in the neighborhood." He didn't mention that Erika had already said the same thing about him in particular. He did add, "And I've told you before-I know when I'm well off."

"Oh, you do, do you?" Lise sent him a challenging stare. "How am I supposed to be sure of that?"

He took her in his arms. He kissed her. His hands wandered. "I'll think of something," he said, before adding the father's usual caveat: "If the children stay quiet, anyhow."

He was lucky. They did.

Children in the United States, Alicia Gimpel had learned, got long summer vacations from school. Her teachers said that scornfully. They offered it as one of the reasons Germany had beaten the USA: Americans didn't study enough, and had been too ignorant to take full advantage of their country's riches. No matter what her teachers said, though, the idea sounded wonderful to Alicia.

Here it was the middle of August, and she remained in school. The only real breaks she got were two weeks around Christmas and New Year's and another week at Easter time. The rest of the year was school, punctuated by much-too-occasional holidays.

Herr Kessler said, "Many important things have happened in our country. the Fuhrer is setting us on a new course, and that is the way we shall go. Matthias Walbeck!"

The boy jumped up and came to attention. "Jawohl, Herr Kessler!"

"Tell me how the Fuhrer is changing the Reich."

Poor Matthias couldn't do it. He was a big, strong boy, but good-natured-not a bully at all. Unfortunately, he also was not a scholar at all. He stayed at attention, his face a mask of misery. "I'm very sorry,Herr Kessler," he whispered. "Please excuse me."

Kessler took the paddle off the nail where it hung. Matthias turned and bent over. The teacher delivered a swat that made the boy hop forward. But Matthias let out not a peep. Showing weakness would only have earned him more. "You must study, Matthias," the teacher said. "You must pay attention."

"I will,Herr Kessler. I promise,Herr Kessler," Matthias said. Everyone in the classroom-probably including him-knew the promise would be broken.

The teacher's glower raked the room. Alicia knew the answer. She didn't throw up her hand, though. Volunteering too often got you a reputation as a teacher's pet. She already had more of that reputation than she wanted.

Herr Kessler picked another hapless student, this one a girl. She couldn't answer, either. He swatted her, too. When he was in a bad mood, he would choose children who weren't likely to know what he wanted, just so he could hand out swat after swat. He wasn't the only teacher in the school who did that, either.Frau Koch was universally known as "the Beast" to her students, and had been for years-but not a teacher ever heard the nickname.

After dealing out yet another whack on the bottom,Herr Kessler put the paddle back in its place. "I don't know what the younger generation is coming to," he said sadly. "When the Fuhrer speaks, you must listen. And what is his name, class?"

"Heinz Buckliger,Herr Kessler," the children chorused.

"Very good. You've learned that, anyway," the teacher said. "And Heinz Buckliger has said that not everything we did in days gone by was perfect, so some things must change. And why must things change?"

"Because the Fuhrer is always right,Herr Kessler," the whole class said together.

That was the right answer. Alicia knew it was. Teachers had been drilling it into students since kindergarten. She sang out as confidently as her classmates. So she was amazed when Herr Kessler shook his head. "No. What did I just say?"

They were trained to repeat his words back to him. They did now: "And Heinz Buckliger has said that not everything we did in days gone by was perfect, so some things must change."

"Yes." Kessler nodded. "So why must things change, then?"

"Because the Fuhrer says so." Again, all the children were sure they had it right. Again, Alicia was as sure as any of the others.

But the teacher shook his head once more. "No. You are wrong. What did the new Fuhrer say?"

"That not everything we did in days gone by was perfect, and-"

"Stop!" Herr Kessler held up his hand. "There is the answer. We must change because not everything we did in days gone by was perfect."

He paused to let that sink in. The children murmured among themselves.Herr Kessler didn't correct them, which was at least as astonishing as the lesson he was teaching. Alicia wanted to ask several questions. She didn't think she ought to ask any of them. But Wolfgang Priller's hand rose. "Question, Herr Kessler!"

"Go ahead, Priller." The teacher braced, as if expecting bad news.

Wolf stood up and came to attention. "Sir, if the Fuhrer is always right, the way we know he is, how is it that not everything we did in days gone by was perfect?"

Sure enough, that was one of the questions Alicia had wanted to ask. It had occurred to her because of the logical inconsistency. She suspected it had occurred to Wolf Priller because he remained convinced the Fuhrer was always right. He took to indoctrination the way a duck took to water.

Herr Kessler said, "Heinz Buckliger is the Fuhrer now. If he says not everything we did in days gone by was perfect, is he not right to say so?" Wolfgang Priller frowned as he tried to work that out. Alicia frowned, too. Again, she thought Herr Kessler's logic was that of a dog chasing its own tail. The teacher gestured. "Be seated, Priller." Wolf sat down. He looked as if a dog were chasing its tail inside his head, too.

"What did we do in days gone by that wasn't perfect,Herr Kessler?" another boy called without raising his hand.

Alicia didn't see who it was. Kessler didn't see who it was, either, which had to be lucky for whoever had spoken out of turn. The teacher growled, "I don't have to respond to questions not put in proper form. I don't have to, and I don't intend to. Let us continue with the lesson."

Does that mean you don't know the answer?Alicia wondered, which would have been unimaginable not so long before, when she thought her teachers knew everything.Or does it mean the new Fuhrerhasn't said what the answer is, so there isn't any answer yet? She could see Kessler was parroting what Heinz Buckliger had said, the same way students parroted what the teacher said.

At lunch, Wolf Priller declared, "I don't like these changes. I think they're stupid." Nobody disagreed with him, not out loud. He could beat up any of the other boys in the class.

Alicia wondered if anything would really change, if anything could really change, or if everything that was going on was just a lot of talk. Sometimes people said this or that without meaning a word of it. If the men who ran things wanted to do something like that, they could easily enough.

But there was Trudi Krebs, skipping rope with some other girls and as happy as any of them.Herr Kessler had taken down her name for speaking well of the first edition of Mein Kampf. Wolf Priller had gloated about how the knock on her door would come in the middle of the night. Everybody-including Alicia-had been sure it would happen. It hadn't.

If Kurt Haldweim were still Fuhrer, it would have. Alicia remembered the beaky, waxy face she'd seen in the Great Hall when Haldweim lay in state. No man with a face like that would have let anybody get away with anything. But Trudi and her parentshad got away with it. Therefore, thingshad changed, at least some.

There was logic that didn't chase its own tail. And if Wolf Priller didn't like it, so much the better. Alicia threw her orange peel in the trash and ran to join the girls with the jump rope.

Because of who he was, because of what he did, and because of what he was, Walther Stutzman had access to far more of the Reich 's computer records than anyone else knew about. The problem was being able to use the access codes he had. If anyone spotted strange things on his monitor, he would lose his access privileges in a hurry-and also, very likely, his freedom, and also, quite possibly, his life.

Lunch was a good time to poke around. Most people in Walther's office at the Zeiss works went out to eat. That helped. As usual, he kept his monitor turned so it wasn't easy to see unless you came right into his cubicle. That helped, too. All the same, especially after things had gone so badly wrong fixing the Kleins' genealogy, he got extra nervous whenever he went looking where he wasn't supposed to.

He had to keep doing it, even if it was dangerous. He knew that. Finding out more than he could through ordinary channels might help keep him and all the Jews left in the Reich safe. And he couldn't help being curious, either.

His boss said, "There's a gang of us going over to this new place that serves American hamburgers and hot dogs and fried chicken. Want to come along? Guaranteed heart-burn or your money back."

"Can't do it." Walther pointed to his desk. It was as neat as usual, but did have more stacks of paper on it than people were used to seeing there. "This changeover to the new operating system is tougher than we ever thought it would be. I don't know if we can meet the schedule they've set us."

Gustav Priepke grimaced. "Lord help us if we don't. We've already had three false starts. If we botch it this time, they're liable to throw us out on our ear and hire a bunch of programmers from Japan."

Priepke was kidding on the square, and Walther knew it. The Reich had pioneered in electronic computers-and the core operating system still showed as much, for it lacked protected memory and preemptive multitasking. The Japanese had got off to a later start, and had had the advantage of seeing the mistakes German programmers made. Japanese systems were more robust and often more reliable, even if they weren't so elegant.

"I think we can make it happen, but it's going to take a lot of work," Walther said. "And so…" He apologetically spread his hands.

His boss nodded. "If you're on the trail of something, keep after it. I'll have an extra hot dog for you." Off he went-and, knowing him, he'd probably have two.

Walther waited till more people went off to lunch, whether at the American place-it was called, for no reason he could see, the Greasy Spoon-or somewhere else. When the big room that held his cubicle had quieted down, he used one of those access codes he wasn't supposed to have. This one took him to an archive of the Fuhrer 's speeches. He wanted to-and he was convinced he needed to-find out just what Heinz Buckliger had said at Nuremberg, because it had so many people hopping.

The Nuremberg speech was there in the menu, sure enough. When he tried to call it up, though, it demanded another authorization code from him, one with a much higher security level. He blinked. He'd never seen anything like that before, not for a speech. He knew the second code, but hadn't imagined he would have to use it. Whathad Buckliger been talking about? Nuclear bombs and missile design?

Even after he entered the authorization code, the system hesitated before it coughed up the text of the Fuhrer 's speech. He got ready to bail out in a hurry and cover his tracks. But then the speech did come up. If someone-or something electronic-was making special note of his presence, none of his own tools for detecting such things sensed it.

He quickly scrolled through the speech to see how long it was. When he did, he got another surprise. It seemed to go on forever. the Fuhrer had the privilege of length, of course. Had any ruler of the Third Reich ever used it so extravagantly as Heinz Buckliger had here, though? Maybe the Volkischer Beobachter hadn't published it because it would have filled two days' editions.

Walther started to read. He couldn't go through the whole speech in detail, as he'd intended. It was just too damned long; he wouldn't have been halfway through by the time his boss got back from the Greasy Spoon. So he skimmed-and even skimming was plenty to make him sit up and take notice.

Buckliger came right out and said things that everybody knew but that nobody-certainly not the Fuhrer — ever talked about. What had Lothar Prutzmann and the rest of the leaders of the SS thought when he declared, "For far too long, this state has been founded on one thing and one thing only: terror"? If that didn't infuriate them…

If that didn't infuriate them, the speech had plenty of other things to do the job. The new Fuhrer said that all his predecessors, from Hitler on, had received reverence as if they were gods, "but they are only men, with all the failings to which men are heir." Walther found himself nodding. That seemed obvious when you came out and said it-but who in the nearly eighty years of the Reich 's historyhad come out and said it? Nobody-and a ruling Fuhrer least of all.

And Heinz Buckliger had also said, "Force can win victories, but force alone cannot maintain them forever without more expense than Germany can readily afford." If that didn't fly in the face of everything the Reich had stood for since the early days, what did?

With each new bombshell, Walther wanted to slow down and read more carefully. He knew he couldn't, not with his boss and his colleagues coming back soon, not if he wanted to see as much of what was there as possible. But he wanted to.

If he had slowed down, he wouldn't have come to the question the new Fuhrer asked near the end of the speech: "If everything we say about Aryan descent is true, how do we explain the recent rapid progress of the Japanese, who have not mingled their blood with Aryan stock any time recently?"

How Buckliger answered that question, Walther didn't find out; he had to get the speech off his monitor because the room started filling up again. But that the Fuhrer thought to ask it said more than any answer could. No, they couldn't very well publish this speech. The country wasn't ready. And Walther would have bet anything he owned that the Party and SSBonzen who'd listened to it at Nuremberg hadn't been, either.