In the Presence of Mine Enemies (57 page)

“Thanks,” Lise said, and hung up. She could have made other calls: to her sister, to the Stutzmans, to Susanna Weiss, to a few—so few!—other people she knew. She could have, but she didn't. She had a plausible reason for calling the Kleins' house. She couldn't bring them under greater suspicion by doing so. That wasn't true of the others. She didn't want the Security Police wondering about her side of the family and her friends. Even if the worst happened to her, they could go on.

Besides, they would hear soon enough, one way or the other.

She called the lawyer and set up an appointment first thing in the morning—and got his promise to try to make sure nothing drastic happened before then. She'd just hung up the phone there when someone started banging on the front door.

She didn't need three guesses to know who that was. The banging went on and on. As she walked out to get the door, she wondered if she would be able to keep that appointment after all.

 

Susanna Weiss sat on her couch, a glass of Glenfiddich in her hand. The news was on, but she couldn't pay attention to Horst tonight. She took a long pull at the scotch. It wasn't the first one she'd had. It wouldn't be the last one she intended to have, either. If she felt like hell in the
morning—and she probably would—well, that was why God made aspirin.

“Heinrich,” she muttered, and shook her head in wonder mingled with despair. When Maria Klein asked her to meet for a drink, she'd known something was wrong. Something, yes, but
that
? She shook her head again.

Of them all, Heinrich Gimpel was the last one she'd expected to get caught. He was the one who never took chances, who never seemed to have the nerve to take chances. No Jew could afford to draw too much notice. But Heinrich often went out of his way to be not just solid and unexciting but downright boring. Susanna sometimes wondered what Lise, who was a good deal more lively, saw in him. She supposed something had to be there.

And now the Security Police had him. How hard were they leaning on him? How hard
could
they lean on him? The
Führer
had asked for information from him, after all. They had to know that. Even if he was a Jew, it should count for something…shouldn't it?

She finished her drink, got up, and poured herself another one. It all depended on how much they knew, or thought they knew. If they were sure Heinrich was what they said he was, they would go ahead and do whatever they wanted with—and to—him. The more doubts they had, the more careful they'd need to be. So it seemed to Susanna, anyway. They wouldn't want to tear answers out of a man who might be able to get his own back one day…would they?

They might not care. They might decide that, once they'd used him up, he wouldn't be able to do anything to them anyhow. Who in the
Reich
in the past seventy years had been able to do anything to the organization Lothar Prützmann now ran? Nobody. Nobody at all.

Horst went away. Susanna couldn't remember a single thing he'd talked about. A game show came on, with a wisecracking host and a statuesque blond sidekick. Susanna usually turned off the televisor the instant the news ended. Tonight, she left it on, more for the sake of background noise than for any other reason.

The questions were stupid. Some of the answers the con
testants gave were even stupider. And the way the people jumped up and down and squealed—men as well as women—made Susanna cringe.
This
was the
Herrenvolk? This
was the material from which the Nazis had forged a
Reich
they said would last for a thousand years?

“If this is the master race, Lord help the rest of the world,” Susanna said. But what had the Lord done for the rest of the world? Given most of it German overlords, that was what. How could you go on believing in a God Who went and did things like that?

Susanna looked down and discovered her glass was empty again. That, fortunately, was easy to fix. The book-crowded living room swayed a little when she got up. She made it to the kitchen and back without any trouble, though—and she didn't spill the fresh drink, either. As for how and why you could go on believing in a God Who did dreadful things—people had been wrestling with that at least since the time of Job. She wasn't going to settle it one drunken, frightened night in Berlin.

And if she drank enough, maybe she'd even stop worrying. She set about finding out.

 

Heinrich Gimpel sat in a cell that held a cot whose frame was immovably set in the concrete of the floor, a sink, a toilet, and damn all else. Whenever he stood, he had to hang on to his trousers. They'd taken away his belt—his shoelaces, too.

Of course, the first thing they'd done when they got him here was yank down his trousers and his underpants. They'd grunted when they saw he was made the same way they were. One of them said, “Is that all you've got?” He supposed that sort of insult was meant to tear him down so he'd be easier meat when they really started questioning him. He wondered why they bothered. He was already about as frightened as he could be. He was so frightened, he reckoned it a minor miracle he had anything at all to show down there.

They hadn't beaten him—not yet, anyway. They hadn't drugged him, either. They'd just tossed him in this cell and left him alone. He didn't know what that meant. Were they
working up something particularly horrible? Or were they unsure he was what they thought he was?

Think, Heinrich, dammit,
he told himself. If he could change the mess he was in to any degree, it would have to be with his brains. But what were the odds he
could
change it? Slim, and he knew as much. Still, he had to try.

If I were truly a
goy,
how would I act?
He'd still be frightened. He was sure of that. If you weren't frightened after the Security Police grabbed you, you had to be crazy. But he would also be outraged. How
dared
they think him a dirty Jew? The anger he generated was ersatz, but after a while it started to feel real. He wondered if actors worked themselves into their roles this way.

For the time being, he had no one for whom to show off his fine synthetic fury. None of the cells close by had anyone in it. No guards tramped past. Why should they? He wasn't going anywhere.

“I want a lawyer!” he said loudly. “This is all a stupid frame-up! Get me a lawyer!” Maybe nobody was listening. He wouldn't have bet on it, though. A Security Police prison was bound to have microphones.

After what seemed a very long time—he didn't have his watch any more—two blackshirts came up the corridor. One pushed a food cart. The other carried an assault rifle. “Stand away from the bars,” he ordered in a bored voice. Heinrich obeyed. The man pushing the cart shoved a tray into his cell.

“I want a lawyer,” Heinrich said again. “You've got to get me out of here. The
Führer
himself has consulted me.”

They ignored him. He might have known they would. How many prisoners had they seen? Thousands, without a doubt. How many had admitted they were guilty? Even one?

He ate what they gave him: cabbage stew with little bits of salt pork in it (did they think he would pick them out if he was a Jew?) and a chunk of brown bread. It wasn't as good as what he got at the canteen at work, but it wasn't a whole lot worse. He turned on the water in the sink and drank from the cupped palm of his hand till he'd had enough to cut his thirst.

Then he lay down on the cot on his back and stared up at the rough concrete of the ceiling. He hoped they hadn't grabbed Lise and the girls, too. He did his best to pray, but that didn't come easy. If God had let this happen to him, how reliable was He? But if you didn't believe, what point to staying a Jew?

Good question. He had no answer. He felt empty, useless. What happened to him now was out of his hands. He hoped it was in God's. He knew for certain it was in the Security Police's.

He fell asleep with his glasses on. He never heard the fellow with the cart retrieve his tray, which he'd left by the bars. He stayed asleep till a key clicked in the lock and half a dozen blackshirts burst in. “On your feet, you
Schweinehund,
you kike, you stinking sheeny!” they screamed.

Blearily, he obeyed. What time was it? Somewhere in the middle of the night, he thought.
I have to keep saying no. Whatever they do to me, I have to keep saying no
. If they killed him, they killed him. With a little luck—maybe a lot of luck—he could keep his family and friends alive.

The Security Police hustled him along the corridor. His pants fell down. They wouldn't let him pull them up again.

“I'm no Jew. I want a lawyer,” he said.

“Shut up!” they shouted in unison. One of them stuck an elbow in his ribs. It hurt. He grunted. He'd never make a cinema hero, laughing at wounds that would kill the average hero. On the other hand, they could have done worse to him than they did.

INTERROGATION
, said the sign over the door to the chamber where they took him. It wasn't quite,
All hope abandon, ye who enter here,
but it was, in the most literal sense of the words, close enough for government work.

They slammed him down into a hard chair and shackled him at wrists and ankles. They shone bright lights in his face. He'd seen this scene at the movies, too. The hero usually mocked his tormentors. Heinrich felt much more like screaming. He managed to keep quiet, which might have been the hardest thing he'd ever done.

“So, Jew…” said a voice from somewhere behind the glaring lights.

“I'm no Jew!” Heinrich exclaimed. “Jesus, are you people out of your minds?” The more offended and horrified he sounded, the better the chance he had…if he had any chance at all.

One of the blackshirts lifted his glasses off his nose. Another one slapped him in the face. His head snapped to the side. His ears rang. He blinked. It didn't do much good. Without glasses, the whole room was blurry.

“Don't spew your lies,” the voice said. “You'll only make it worse for yourself.”

How could I?
he wondered bleakly. “But you've got the wrong man!” he wailed. “I've worked for
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
for almost twenty years now, and—”

Another slap. This time, his head jerked the other way. “Tearing down everything the
Reich
builds up,” the voice growled.

An opening! “
That's
a lie!” Heinrich said. “Look at my evaluations, if you don't believe me. I've served the
Reich
. I've never hurt it.” That was true. He'd hated himself because it was true, too. Working for the regime might save him now, though. Quickly, desperately, he went on, “Ask the
Führer,
if you don't believe me.”

Raucous laughter from the interrogator. “Tell me another one, Jewboy. As if the
Führer
cares about the likes of you.”

One of the blackshirts who'd frog-marched him into the room muttered to the man behind the lamps. That man, whom Heinrich still hadn't seen, let out a scornful grunt. Then he shifted gears. He started hammering away at Heinrich's pedigree.

That pedigree was, of course, fictitious from top to bottom. The interrogator would have caught out a lot of Jews, grilling them about ancestors they didn't have. But Heinrich was a meticulous man. He knew the ancestors he didn't have as well as the ones he did—maybe better, since more about the fictitious ones had gone down on paper. He had to remind himself to throw in “I don't know”s every so often. How many people really could recite chapter and verse about great-great-grandparents off the tops
of their heads? He didn't want the blackshirts to think he'd memorized a script, even if he had.

They slapped him a few more times. It stung, but he endured it. They weren't working anywhere near so hard as they might have to break him. Maybe they weren't sure what they had. Heinrich clung to that hope.

At last, after what could have been half an hour or three hours, the head man said, “Take the kike back to his cell. We'll have another go at him later.”

Back Heinrich went. He could have done without that promise from the interrogator. But he hadn't told the Security Police anything. And they still hadn't roughed him up too badly.
It could be worse,
he thought. On his way out of an interrogation, that would do.

 

Alicia Gimpel envied her sisters. No matter what the Nazi matrons asked them, they couldn't give anything away. When they denied they were Jews, they believed those denials from the bottom of their hearts. Some of the blackshirts would remember taking them out of school for a long time.

The matrons called this place a foundlings' disciplinary home. The other children in here were ragged and scrawny, but very clean. The whole building reeked of disinfectant. They'd separated the Gimpel girls, maybe to keep them from coming up with a story together. For Francesca and Roxane, there wasn't any story to come up with. They were genuinely outraged at what was happening to them. Alicia had to pretend she was, too. If she could manage that, she had a chance. She might have a chance, anyway.