In the Presence of Mine Enemies (7 page)

When the train pulled into the station in Berlin, Heinrich and Willi naturally went the same way, for they had to catch the same bus to the same office. The story about the SS man intrigued Heinrich enough to make him wave the
Völkischer Beobachter
under Willi Dorsch's nose and ask, “Did you see this?”

“Which?” Willi asked. He sounded more distant than usual, but not actively unfriendly. Heinrich pointed to the story. “Oh, that,” Willi said. “Yes, I saw it. Politics. Has to be.”

“Politics?” Heinrich said it with such surprise, he might never have heard the word before.

Willi gave back an impatient nod. “I don't see what else could be going on.”

“I just figured somebody knew somebody,” Heinrich said. “You know what I mean.”

“Oh, sure.” Willi nodded again, with a little more animation this time. “It's possible, I suppose, but how likely is it? Who could a bunch of froggies know who's got the clout to land somebody with SS runes on his collar tabs in hot water? Pigs will fly before we see that.” He started walking faster. “Come on—there's the bus, just waiting for us.”

It did wait. They even found seats, which they didn't
manage every day during the morning rush. “Politics,” Heinrich repeated. “Well, I suppose you're right.”

“You bet I am,” Willi said as the bus pulled out of the station. He patted Heinrich on the knee. “You have any other problems you can't see your way around, you come to your Uncle Willi, and he'll set you right.”

He smiled a superior smile. If Erika admired Heinrich for anything, it was his brains—it couldn't very well have been his body or his looks, as he was ruefully aware. And if Willi felt smarter than he was, then all of a sudden he didn't seem such a threat. He hoped that was how things were working inside his friend's head, anyhow. He didn't want to be a threat to anybody or anything. Threats were visible. He couldn't afford that kind of visibility.

And maybe Willi was right, too. To most of the Germanic Empire's subjects, politics had to seem simple. The Germans gave orders, and the subjects obeyed. Subjects who didn't obey paid for it, often with their lives. (Sometimes subjects who did obey paid with their lives, too, but they seldom knew that ahead of time.)

But, seen from within the ruling bureaucracy, things weren't so simple.
Wehrmacht
and SS officials warily watched one another. The
Wehrmacht
and civilian administrators didn't always see eye-to-eye, either. And the administrators and the SS quarreled over who really represented the National Socialist Party. It wasn't just a factional split, either. Personalities in each camp further complicated things. The
Führer,
Kurt Haldweim, was supposed to keep everyone going in the same direction, but Haldweim had celebrated his ninety-first birthday just before last Christmas. For his age, he was said—frequently and loudly said—to be vigorous and alert, but how much did that prove?

When the bus stopped in front of
Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
headquarters, Willi Dorsch had to nudge Heinrich. “We get off here, you know,” he said, enjoying the tiny triumph. “No matter what great thoughts you think, they won't do you any good if you can't find the place where you're supposed to use them.”

“You're right, of course.” Heinrich stood up, feeling fool
ish. As he hurried to get off the bus, he noted that Willi sounded much more like his usual self.
And why? Because I'm acting like an idiot. I've never heard of the power of positive stupidity, but this must be it
.

The guards at the front of the building saw the two of them five mornings a week. Nonetheless, they held out their hands for identity cards. They not only matched photos, they also fed the cards, one after the other, into a machine reader. Only after a light on it glowed green twice in a row did they stand aside.

“Nice to know I'm me,” Willi said, sticking his card into his wallet again. He pointed at Heinrich. “Or maybe I'm you today, and you're me. The machine didn't say anything about that.” He laughed.

So did Heinrich, relieved to see Willi acting like his usual silly self. But one of the guards scowled suspiciously at Willi. The other eyed the card reader, as if wondering if it could change a man's true identity. Sometimes Heinrich worried about the younger generation's brains, if any. But he knew people had been doing that since the days of the Pyramids, so he kept quiet about it.

“Pass on!” the second guard barked, still sending the machine a fishy stare.

Once inside the building with Willi, Heinrich said, “He's not going to trust that gadget for the next week. You're a subversive, you know.”

Willi drew himself up in mingled alarm and hauteur. “That's a fine thing to call me in this place.” But he was joking again, and kept right on doing it: “Did you lay down the trail of bread crumbs last night? No? How the devil are we going to find the way to our desks, then?”

Oberkommando der Wehrmacht
was something of a maze, but not so bad as Willi made it out to be. Old-timers who remembered how things were before central Berlin got rebuilt said the old headquarters building really had been a nightmare to navigate. This one was just big, with lots of corridors and lots of rooms along each one. Even strangers—strangers with security clearances—found their way without too much trouble. Heinrich and Willi were in their places in a couple of minutes.

As soon as Heinrich sat down, he turned on his computer and entered the password that gave him access to his files. He tapped the keyboard and looked over his shoulder at Willi, saying, “These things are the biggest change since I came to work here. Used to be only a few specialists had them. Now they're everywhere, like toadstools after a rain.”

“They're handy, all right.” Willi had his computer up and running, too. “Sometimes I wonder who's in charge, though, us or the machines.”

“I have a friend”—Heinrich didn't name Walther Stutzman—“who says they could all be connected into one giant linked system.”

“There's a hell of a difference between ‘could' and ‘will,'” Willi said. “I don't believe it'll happen, not in a million years. Can you imagine the security nightmare with that kind of system? Anybody could put anything on it. Anybody could
find
anything on it. The Party's got too much sense to let that sort of nonsense get started. You couldn't stop it once it did; it'd be like unscrambling an egg.”

“You're right,” Heinrich said. “It only stands to reason.” He knew he had more book smarts than Willi. But his friend was plenty shrewd, and understood the way the world—especially the part through which he moved—worked.

“You bet I'm right,” Willi said now. “Once security starts to slip, everything's in trouble.”

“Ja,”
Heinrich said absently. He was busy typing in another password, the one that gave him access to the
Wehrmacht
's information links. Thanks to Walther, he knew a lot more passwords than he was supposed to. He carried them in his memory; he wasn't mad enough to write any of them down. He wasn't mad enough to use any of them, either, except in direst emergency. The one he entered he'd acquired legitimately, in the course of his job. “I want to find out what's going on with the United States.”

“Yes, that will be interesting,” Willi Dorsch agreed. “If they're going to fall short of their assessment, that will put
our
budget in the red.”

“Further in the red,” Heinrich said.

Willi nodded. “Further in the red, true. The powers that be won't like it.”

“The Americans will scream that we're trying to get blood from a turnip,” Heinrich predicted.

“They've been screaming that ever since we beat them,” Willi said. “So far, blood's come out every time we've squeezed.”

“True, but I don't suppose it can go on forever,” Heinrich said. “Look at France. Look at Denmark. They don't pay their way any more—we spend more both places than we take out. We would in Britain and Norway, too, if they hadn't struck oil in the North Sea.” He waited to see if Willi would argue with him. He could call up the budget numbers with a couple of keystrokes and use them as a club to beat his friend over the head.

But Willi didn't argue. He knew Heinrich always had facts and figures at his fingertips. Instead, Willi poked through a different part of the
Wehrmacht
network. He cherished oddities the way Heinrich cherished precision. He got more attention—and certainly more laughs—with them than Heinrich did with tribute assessments, too. That was fine with Heinrich, who didn't want attention anyhow.

Willi scrolled down, scrolled down, then all at once stopped short. “Well, I'll be damned,” he said, and let out a low whistle of astonishment.

“Was ist los?”
Heinrich asked, as he was surely supposed to.

“They just found three families of Jews in some backwoods village in the Serbian mountains,” Willi answered. “Probably hadn't seen German soldiers more than three or four times since the war ended. Can you believe it? Real live Jews, in this day and age? Men had their cocks clipped and everything. The damned Serb headman says he didn't know he was doing anything wrong harboring them. Likely story, eh? You can't trust Serbs, either—look at those bandits in the news today—and that's the God's truth.”

His rant let Heinrich pull his face straight. “What happened to them?” he asked, his voice steady, mildly curious,
as if it had nothing to do with him. Willi drew a thumb across his throat. Heinrich nodded. “Just what they deserved,” he said.
Yisgadal v'yiskadash sh'may rabo:
the opening words of the Mourner's Kaddish, lovingly taught him by his father, echoed in his mind. So did another thought.
If I show my grief, I am dead. My family is dead. My friends are dead
. He showed not a thing.

 

Herr
Kessler leaned forward. To Alicia, as to every other student in the class, he seemed to be leaning straight toward her. He took a deep breath. His usually sallow cheeks turned red. He let out the breath in a great shout:
“Jews!”

Everybody jumped. Half a dozen girls squealed. Alicia's own start, her own squeal—nearly a shriek—hadn't betrayed her after all. In fact, no one paid any attention to her. All eyes were riveted on the teacher.

And
Herr
Kessler was wrapped up in his own performance.
“Jews!”
he roared again, even louder than the first time. “Our brave
Wehrmacht
soldiers caught up with more than a dozen filthy, stinking Jews in the mountains of Serbia. Otto Schachtman!” His forefinger stabbed out at a boy.

Otto sprang to his feet. “
Jawohl, Herr
Kessler!”

“Show me immediately the location of Serbia on the map. Immediately!”

Otto couldn't do it, though the occupied country was plainly labeled. The teacher paddled his backside. He took the swat in stoic silence. Showing pain would have earned him another one. He didn't get in trouble for sitting down with great care, though. Alicia had only so much sympathy for him. She could have found Serbia without the label; she'd always been good at geography. But why couldn't poor Otto just
read
?

Herr
Kessler pointed out Serbia himself. Then he went back to his tirade: “You see now, dear children, why we must stay ever on our guard. The hateful enemy still lurks within the borders of the Germanic Empire. Like a serpent, the Jew waits until our attention is turned elsewhere. He waits, and then he
strikes
! We must track him down and hunt him out wherever he may hide. Do you understand?”

“
Ja, Herr
Kessler,” the children chorused. Alicia made sure her voice rang as loud as any of the others. She was still frightened at the idea of being a Jew, but it didn't throw her into blind panic any more. She'd had a little while to get used to it, a little while even to develop an odd sort of pride in it.

But then the teacher pointed at her. “Alicia Gimpel!”

She was out of her chair and at attention behind it in a heartbeat. “
Jawohl, Herr
Kessler!”

“What is a Jew?”

All she had to do was point at her own chest and say,
I am a Jew,
to ruin herself and everyone she loved. She knew that. Knowing it came close to bringing the blind panic back. It came close, but didn't quite manage—not least because the familiar fear at being unexpectedly called on left little room for the other.

She knew her lessons well. No one in the class knew them better. “The Jew is the opposite of the Aryan,
Herr
Kessler,” she recited. “He is and remains the typical parasite, a sponger who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon as a favorable medium invites him. Wherever he appears, the host people dies out after a shorter or longer period. Existence impels the Jew to lie, and to lie perpetually. He lacks idealism in any form. His development has always and at all times been the same, just as that of the peoples corroded by him has also been the same.”