In the Presence of Mine Enemies (11 page)

Francesca reached into the box and pulled out a stuffed dragon. “You nasty old Jew, you're trying to fool us. You'd better get out of here or I'll burn your ears off.”

Roxane made the doll retreat. “I'll figure out another way to get your gold, then—you see if I don't.”

“Oh, no, you won't,” Francesca retorted. “I'm an Aryan dragon, and I'm too tough for you.”

Alicia got to her feet. “I don't think I want to play any more.”

“Why not?” Roxane said. “Things are just getting good.” She looked down at the doll. “Aren't they?” It responded—she made it respond—with a thoroughly evil chuckle and a, “That's right,” in the high, squeaky voice she'd used before.

“She's a wet blanket, that's why,” Francesca said. “She's been a wet blanket for weeks now, and I'm tired of it.”

“Wet blanket! Wet blanket!” Roxane sang, now in her own voice, now in the one she'd invented for the Jew doll.

“I am not!” Alicia said angrily. “This is a stupid game, that's all.”

Roxane got angry, too. “You're just saying it's stupid because I'm doing something I thought up all by myself.” She wheeled out the heavy artillery: “I'm going to tell. Mommy says you can't do things like that.”

And Francesca was also angry, in a quieter way. “How can you say it's a stupid game when you thought up half of it?”

“Because—” But Alicia couldn't say what she couldn't say. Knowing what she knew and not being able to talk about it threatened to choke her. “Because it is, that's all.”

“I'm going to tell,” Roxane said again.
“Mommy!”

“You and your big mouth,” Alicia said, whereupon her little sister opened it as wide as she could and stuck out her tongue. Alicia was tempted to grab that tongue and give it a good yank, but it was too slimy for her to do it.

“What's going on?” came from the ground floor. Ominous footsteps on the stairs followed, each one louder than the one before. Their mother appeared at the doorway to Francesca and Roxane's room. “Can't the three of you play together nicely?”

“I didn't want to play any more, that's all,” Alicia said.

“That's not all. You didn't like my ideas, that's what it is,” Roxane said, and proceeded to explain in great detail what her ideas were.

Understanding kindled in their mother's eyes. She started to say something, then closed her mouth again. Awe trickled through Alicia.
She can't tell, either,
she thought.
She's a grownup, and
she
can't tell
. That spoke more clearly than anything else of how important the secret was. It was important enough to constrain a grownup, and grownups by the very nature of things were beyond constraint.

Their mother tried again. This time, she succeeded. “Play the game, Alicia,” she said gently. “Go ahead and play the game. It's all right. That's what we have to do.”

“See?” Triumph filled Roxane. “Mommy told you to.”

And so she had. But she'd told Alicia something else, too, something that had gone by Roxane and Francesca.
That's what we have to do
. People who weren't Jews were going to say things about them. They were going to mock them. They couldn't help it. They believed all the things they'd learned in school. (Alicia still half believed them herself, which sometimes left her half-sick with confusion.) If you couldn't get used to that, if you couldn't pretend it wasn't anything, you'd give yourself away.

“All right,” Alicia said. “I'll play the game.”

By the way their mother smiled, she'd also sneaked a message past her sisters. “Good, Alicia,” Lise Gimpel said. “In that case, I'll get back to what I was doing.” She went down the hall. She went down the stairs.

Roxane eyed Alicia expectantly. Francesca eyed her suspiciously, as if to say,
You can't just start and stop like that
. But Alicia could. At first, she felt as if she were in one of the little plays students sometimes had to put on at school, as if this weren't happening to her but to the person she was pretending to be. The longer she did it, though, the more natural it got.

She and her sisters foiled the doll that was being a Jew. Another doll brought an—imaginary—sack of gold, so the dragons, who'd been tricked out of theirs, got to keep their
cave. Then, while the Jew was gloating over his ill-gotten gains, more dolls, these proper Aryans, swooped down on him. They took him away to another box.

Roxane closed the lid. “And that'll be the end of him,” she chortled. Then, in a more practical frame of mind, she added, “Till we need him for another game, anyhow.”

“See, Alicia?” Francesca said. “That was pretty good.”

“I suppose so,” Alicia said: for her, no small admission, and more than enough to satisfy her sister.
But it's not all a game,
she thought. Some of the things her father had said made that very plain.
If you put a real person in a box and close the lid and go, that'll be the end of him. He won't come out again for the next game
. Roxane wouldn't understand. She was too little. Alicia had trouble understanding it herself. One of the teachers at her school, though, had had the misfortune to step in front of a bus. And
Frau
Zoglmann would never be back again.

Death was permanent, no matter what Roxane thought. Yes, death was permanent. And so was fear.

“A
REN
'
T YOU GOING TO LUNCH
?”
ASKED
W
ALTHER
S
TUTZMAN'S
boss, a big, beefy fellow named Gustav Priepke.

Walther shook his head. “Not today. I'm swamped.”

“You?” Priepke scratched his head. “Maybe we need more system designers. If you've got as much as you can handle, everybody else is bound to be drowning. You're the one who keeps the whole section afloat.”

“Thanks.” Just at that moment, Stutzman would have preferred a less enviable efficiency record. He said, “If I get a chance, I'll grab something at the office canteen later on.”

His boss made a face. “Make sure you tell your wife you may never see her again first. I'm going down the street to a real restaurant instead.” Off he went. The belly that hung over his belt said he liked good food, or at least lots of food.

Alone in the cubicle, Walther typed in a security code he wasn't supposed to use. Because of what he did, he had unusual access to the
Reich
's electronic networks. He could have wreaked untold havoc if that were what he wanted. It wasn't. Staying invisible, and helping other people stay invisible, counted for much more.

Nobody at Zeiss Computing should have been able to access the official genealogical records of the Germanic Empire. But Walther's father had helped transfer those records from paper to computers. He'd left a few highly unofficial ways to get into them. Those wouldn't stay safe if anyone used them too often. Here, though…Here, Stutzman judged the risk worth taking.

Richard Klein's ancestry appeared on the monitor in front of him. His own father had given Richard's grandfather a perfect Aryan pedigree, at least in the database. In those terror-filled days, no one had taken the least chance with blight on a family tree. Now, though, if someone suddenly suspicious because of the dreadful misfortune that had befallen Richard's baby should compare electronic records with whatever lingered in a dusty file drawer somewhere…

“That would not be good,” Walther murmured.

He went back seven generations in Klein's family and changed the entry under
Religion
for one of his multiple-great-grandmothers from
LUTHERAN
to
UNKNOWN
. Then he did the same thing with two of Maria Klein's even more distant ancestors. After studying his handiwork, he nodded to himself and left the genealogical records.

That should take care of it,
he thought. Possible Jews so far back in the woodpile were safe. Anyone applying for the SS had to show his ancestors had been
Judenfrei
for longer than that, but Richard Klein, who made a good living playing the trombone, was never going to apply for that service. And finding distant ancestors who might have been Jews in his family tree and his wife's would keep the Security Police from wondering if the Kleins themselves carried their blood and their faith down through the generations.
It had better, anyhow
.

One more danger remained. A program on a machine somewhere in the Zeiss works recorded every keystroke every employee made. If anyone ever started wondering about one Walther Stutzman, he could go through the record and see that Walther had done things he wasn't authorized to do. He could…till Walther keyed in the phrase
RED CHALK AND GREEN CHEESE
. A dialog box appeared on his monitor. He entered the time he'd begun fiddling with the genealogical records and the time he'd left them. The hidden override on the keystroke monitor would substitute a copy of what he'd been doing yesterday during that period for what he'd actually done today.

He muttered to himself. This was only the third time he could remember using the override. It carried risks of its
own. Those, though, were smaller than the risk of showing he was mucking about with anything connected to Jews. He couldn't think of any risk bigger than that one.

After he got back from the canteen—where lunch, Gustav Priepke notwithstanding, wasn't half bad—he called Esther. “I've taken care of the shopping,” he said.

“Oh, good,” his wife answered. “You'll bring home something nice for me, won't you?”

Walther laughed. “Of course. What else have I got to spend my money on?”

“That's why I love you: you have the right attitude,” Esther said. They chatted for a couple of minutes. Then he hung up. He assumed any line out from the office could be tapped at any time. Esther had understood what he was telling her, though, and he didn't think anyone from the Security Police could have.

His boss stuck his head into Stutzman's cubicle. Priepke was smoking a pipe apparently charged with stinkweed. “Everything under control?” he asked.

“Everything except that.” Walther pointed at the pipe. “I thought they outlawed poison gas a long time ago.”

“Ha!” Priepke took it out of his mouth and blew a smoke ring. “If you ask me, it's all to the good.”

“How's that?” Walther asked. He'd been kidding on the square; the pipe really was vile.

“How? I'll tell you how.” Another smoke ring polluted the air. “If there are any Jews around, I'll gas 'em out.” Priepke threw back his head and guffawed.

Walther laughed, too, a little more than dutifully. How many times had he heard jokes like that? More than he could count. What could he do but laugh?

 

The Lufthansa airliner taxied toward the terminal at Heathrow Airport. First in German and then in English, the chief steward said, “Baggage claim and customs are to your left as you leave the aircraft. You must have your baggage with you when you clear customs. All bags are subject to search. Obey all commands from customs officials. Have a pleasant stay in London.”

Obey all commands. Have a pleasant stay
. Susanna Weiss
snorted. The steward saw no irony there. Neither did the hack who'd written his script. And neither did the hack's bosses, who'd told him what to write.

“Purpose of your visit to the United Kingdom?” a British customs man asked in accented German.

“I am here for the meeting of the Medieval English Association,” Susanna replied in English. She was more fluent in his tongue than he was in hers.

Maybe she was
too
fluent, fluent enough to get taken for a fellow national despite her German passport. Whatever the reason, the customs man went through her baggage with painstaking care while other passengers headed out to the cab stand. She fumed quietly. Arguing with a petty functionary while he did his job was likely to make him more thorough, to cost more time. At last, finding nothing more incriminating than copies of
Anglo-Saxon Prose
and
One Hundred Middle English Lyrics,
the customs man stamped her passport and said, “Pass on”—still in German.

“Thank you so much,” Susanna said—still in English. The sarcasm rolled off him like water off oilcoth.

She let out a sigh of relief when she saw black British taxis still waiting at the cab stand. A cabby touched the brim of his cap. “Where to, ma'am?”

“To the Silver Eagle Hotel, please,” Susanna answered.

“Right y'are,” he said cheerfully, and tossed her bags into what the British called the boot. He held the door open for her, closed it after her, and got behind the wheel. The cab pulled away from the curb. Susanna had a momentary qualm, as she did whenever she came to Britain. Then she remembered they
did
drive on the left here, and the cabby wasn't drunk or insane—or, if he was, she couldn't prove it by that.

London's sprawl was even more vast than Berlin's. The British capital also had a far more modern look than the centerpiece of the Germanic Empire. After the fight Churchill's backers had put up trying to hold the
Wehrmacht
out of London, not much from the old days was left standing. Susanna had seen pictures of the old Parliament building, Big Ben, and St. Paul's cathedral. Pictures were all that remained. And after the war, London had taken a
generation to start rebuilding, and still hadn't finished the job. German urban planners often came here to see how their British counterparts were doing what they needed to do. Whizzing past one newish block of flats or industrial park after another, Susanna wondered why. The British had worked here with a clean slate, which no one ever would with a German city.

A graffito, gone before she could read it. Then she saw another one, painted in big blue letters on the side of a wall.
LET US CHOOSE
! it said. A moment later, the same message appeared again.

“What's that all about?” she asked the taxi driver.

“What's what, ma'am?”

“‘Let us choose.'”

“Oh.” He drove on for a few seconds, then asked, “You're…not a Brit?”

She'd fooled him into thinking she was a native speaker. This time, unlike going through customs, that pleased her enormously. What praise could be higher for someone who'd learned a foreign language? But she had to answer: “No, I just got here from Berlin.”

“Oh,” he said again, more portentously this time. “There's…well, there's some talk of 'ow to run the British Union of Fascists.” He nodded to himself. “Yes, that's what it is, all right.”

That might have been some of what it was, but not all. Having lived so much of her life hiding things from others, Susanna recognized when somebody wasn't saying everything he might have. She didn't push the cabby. If she had, he would have decided she worked for the
Gestapo
or some other German security outfit, and would have clammed up altogether.

Even now, almost the Biblical threescore and ten after the conquest, people on the streets here were thinner and shabbier than their German counterparts. Their gaze had a certain furtive quality to it. It wouldn't rest on any one thing for long, but flicked now here, now there. Seldom did anyone meet anyone else's eye. In Germany, people were careful about the Security Police, but most of them knew they were unlikely to draw suspicion unless they stepped
out of line. Here, security agencies assumed anybody could be the enemy, and everybody knew it.

“'Ere you are, ma'am,” the cabby said, pulling up in front of a glass-and-steel pile decorated, if that was the word, with an enormous eagle of polished aluminum. It wasn't quite the Germanic eagle that so often bore a swastika in its talons, but it certainly made anyone who saw it think of that eagle at first glance. “'Ope you 'ave a pleasant stay at the Silver Eagle. Your fare's four and tuppence.”

Susanna handed him a crown. He pocketed the big aluminum coin stamped with the image of Henry IX on one side and the lightning bolts of the British Union of Fascists on the other. “I don't need any change,” she said, “but I would like a receipt.”

“Right you are. I thank you very much.” He wrote one for the five shillings she'd given him, then got her bags out of the boot and set them on the sidewalk.

He was about to drive off when she pointed across the street to the even bigger and more garish hotel there. A lot of the people—almost all of them men—going in and out of that hotel were in uniforms of one sort or another. “Is that where the British Union of Fascists is holding its meeting?”

“Yes, ma'am,” the taximan said. “They always gather at the Crown, they do.” A crown of aluminum anodized in gold outdid even the silver eagle on Susanna's hotel for gaudiness. Before she could find any more questions, he put the cab in gear and whizzed away.

WELCOME
,
MEDIEVAL ENGLISH ASSOCIATION
! The banner in the lobby of the Silver Eagle greeted newcomers in English, German, and French. Not all the people queuing up in front of the registration desk were tweedy professorial types, though. Close to half were hard-faced men in those not-quite-military uniforms.
Overflow from the Crown,
Susanna realized. This might prove a very…interesting meeting. She remembered the convention in Düsseldorf a few years before, when the medievalists had shared the hotel with a group of mushroom fanciers. She'd had the best omelette she'd ever eaten, but several of her colleagues and even more of the mushroom lovers came
down sick at a feast she'd missed. Luckily, no one died, but she knew two or three professors who'd sworn off mushrooms for good.

Two British fascists in front of her talked as if they were alone in the hotel lobby. One said, “Nationalism and autonomy aren't just catchphrases to trot out on the wireless whenever morale needs a bit of pumping up.”

“They'd bloody well better not be,” his friend agreed. “We can run our own show here, by God. We don't need someone from the Continent to tell us how to handle the job.”

The first man nodded so vehemently, his cap almost flew off his head. “That's right. Sir Oswald started banging heads almost as soon as Adolf did. If the Germans let
us
choose, we'll do fine. If they don't…”