In The Presence Of My Enemies

A fat official pontificated about improvements to the harbor in Hamburg. Susanna hardly heard him. Though they'd vanished from the screen, she kept seeing those Czechoslovak flags fluttering in the long shadow St. Wenceslas cast. If those flags could come out of the dark backward and abysm of time-if they could come out and survive-what else might follow them? Susanna shivered with awe.

And then something else occurred to her. She shivered again, this time a lot less happily. Did even Heinz Buckliger know all that might follow if he let people say what they really thought? No one in the Greater German Reich, no one in the part of the Germanic Empire on this side of the Atlantic, had been able to do that for a lifetime. How much was bottled up? And how would it come out?

When the telephone on his desk rang, Heinrich jumped. That happened about a third of the time. When he was really concentrating, the outside world seemed to disappear. It seemed to, but it didn't. As if to prove as much, the phone rang again.

He picked it up. Willi was laughing at him. Ignoring his friend, he used his best professional tones: "Analysis Section, Heinrich Gimpel speaking."

"Hello, Heinrich." Had Willi heard the voice on the other end of the line, he would have stopped laughing, and in a hurry: it was Erika.

"Hello." Heinrich did his best to keep his own voice normal. It wasn't easy. "What…what can I do for you?"

"I'm at my sister's house. Leonore lives at 16 Burggrafen-Strasse, just south of the Tiergarten. Do you know where that is?"

"Yes, I think so," Heinrich said automatically. Then he wished he could deny everything. Too late, of course. For wishes like that, it always was.

"Good," Erika said: another questionable assumption. "Come over at lunchtime. We need to talk."

"You, me, and your sister?" Heinrich said in surprise. He hardly knew Erika's sister. Leonore, if he remembered right, was separated from a mid-ranking SS officer. She was a year or two younger than Erika and looked a lot like her, but wasn't quite so…carnivorouswas the word that came to Heinrich's mind. He asked, "What about?"

"I'm not going to go into it on the phone," Erika said, which, considering that the lines into Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters were monitored as closely as any in the Reich, was probably a good idea.

Heinrich thought it over. If Leonore were there, things couldn't get too far out of hand. And even if they did, all he had to do was walk out. "All right," he said. "I'll see you a little past twelve." Erika hung up without another word.

Willi looked up from whatever he was working on. "Going out to lunch with Lise and her sister, eh?" he said, proving he'd been snooping.

Thank God I didn't say Leonore's name,Heinrich thought. He managed a rather sickly answering smile. That avoided the lie direct, anyhow. Willi took it for agreement. He went back to the papers scattered across his desk. Heinrich, who kept his work area almost surgically neat, wondered how Willi ever found anything. But he did. Though he had his problems, that wasn't one of them.

When Heinrich wanted to do something at lunch, the time before he could leave crawled on hands and knees. Today, when he really didn't, hours flew by. Had he done anything more than blink once or twice before he got up from his desk? If he had, it didn't feel that way. At the same time, Willi headed out the door with Ilse. That had to mean Rolf Stolle never called her back. Willi was smirking. Seeing him with the secretary made Heinrich a little less uncomfortable about paying a call on his wife, but only a little.

Why didn't I say no?Heinrich wondered, waiting for the bus that would take him up to the park. He could have stood Erika and her sister up even after saying yes, but that never occurred to him. What he said he would do, he did.

Brakes squealing, the bus stopped in front of him. He climbed aboard, stuck his account card in the slot, and then put it back in his pocket. The bus wasn't too crowded. He sat down as it pulled out into traffic.

Ten minutes later, he got off at Wichmannstrasse, a little north of Burggrafen-Strasse. When he looked across to the Tiergarten, he saw that it wasn't very crowded, either. Not surprising, on this cold, gray winter's day. A few stubborn people sat on the benches and fed the squirrels and the few stubborn birds that hadn't flown south.

Reluctantly, he turned his back on the park and walked south down Wichmannstrasse to where it branched, then turned right onto Burggrafen-Strasse. The neighborhood dated from the last years of the nineteenth century or the start of the twentieth. Time had mellowed the bricks on the housefronts. Here and there, gray or greenish or even orange lichen spread over the brickwork, as if it came not from the time of the Kaisers but from the Neolithic age.