In The Presence Of My Enemies

But sure as hell, four people came up to him in the first hour he was there, all of them with the Beobachter in their hands. They all wanted to know what the Yankees would do, and what the Reich would do to them after they did it. "We'll have to wait and see," Heinrich said again and again, which satisfied no one.

He said the same thing to two more men on the telephone. One was a lieutenant general, a man who disliked ambiguity of any sort. "Dammit, I need to know if we're going to move or not," the officer growled.

"So do I, sir," Heinrich answered. The general swore and hung up.

When the telephone rang again, Heinrich felt like swearing, too. "Budget analysis-Gimpel speaking," he said.

"Good morning to you,Herr Gimpel. This is Charlie Cox, calling from Omaha." The American's German was fluent, but had the flat accent English-speakers gave the language.

"I know your name,Herr Cox. You are in the Department of the Treasury,nicht wahr? What can I do for you today?"

"You can tell me how serious Herr Buckliger is about a new deal for the different parts of the Germanic Empire." Cox didn't beat around the bush. And that, of course, would bethe question in the eyes of any American administrator.

It was alsothe question, or at least closely related tothe question, in Heinrich's eyes. It happened to be one he couldn't answer, either for Charlie Cox or for himself. "I'm very sorry,Herr Cox," he said, and meant it. "I don't make policy. I just implement it when someone else has made it."

Cox grunted. "Well, I don't suppose I really could have expected you to say anything else. But you've got to have some kind of idea about how things will work out. You're a hell of a lot closer there than we are here."

"If I knew, I would tell you," Heinrich answered, and he might even have meant that. "But I'm afraid I don't. The person who sets policy, whom I mentioned a moment ago, is the Fuhrer, no one else. When he decides what he wants to do, we will do it."

"Do it to us," Cox muttered in English. Heinrich was less fluent in that language than, say, Susanna Weiss, but he spoke it well enough. Even though the Empire ran on German, English came in handy for dealing with Americans. Charlie Cox had just put his life in Heinrich's hands.

"Sooner or later, we will all see what the Fuhrer has in mind," Heinrich said. While true, that was unlikely to be comforting. "In the meantime, I suggest you pay your assessments promptly. That way, there won't be any unfortunate incidents both sides might regret."

"Incidents we would regret a hell of a lot more than the Reich does." Cox dared say that in German.

"Probably," Heinrich agreed. "The losing side does have a way of regretting incidents more than the winners."

"If we didn't know that already,Herr Gimpel, the past forty years would have proved it to us," Cox said. "Auf wiedersehen." He hung up.

From his desk a couple of meters away, Willi Dorsch asked, "The Americans?"

Heinrich nodded. "Oh, yes. Did you expect anything else? They want to see how much they can get away with, too."

"Who doesn't, these days?" Willi said. "If we had any Jews left, they'd be trying to persuade us they were good Aryans, too." He laughed at the absurdity of the notion.

Heinrich laughed, too. But the shriek inside didn't go away. One of these days, he would have an ulcer-or a stroke. A stroke had killed his father. Things came back to haunt you one way or another.

Ilse set some envelopes and a small package on his desk. "Morning mail delivery,Herr Gimpel," she said.

"Thank you," he answered, hardly looking up.

She went over to Willi's desk and gave him the same sort of stuff. "Here's yours, Willi," she purred in a bedroom voice.

"Thanks, sweetie." He made as if to grab her. Laughing, she spun away.

Heinrich punched keys on his calculator with altogether needless violence.If you're going to have an office romance, can't you at least pretend you're not? he wondered.It makes life easier for everyone around you-especially people who know your wife.

A moment later, another question crossed his mind.Am I angry at Willi, or am I just jealous? He shook his head. He didn't want Ilse. But the idea of having his choice between two women he did want…He shook his head again, annoyed at himself for poking beneath the surface. Purely in the abstract-or so most of him insisted-he liked that idea pretty well.Maybe I am jealous of Willi after all.

Alicia Gimpel liked the idea of a new year that began around the end of summer, a new year that corresponded to the beginning of the new school year. She liked it so well, she wished she could talk about it with her sisters and her friends. But her mother and father had both warned against that. "You never can tell who might be listening, or what they might know," her father had said. She could see how that made sense, but she didn't like it.