In The Presence Of My Enemies

But Alicia had an answer for her: "I'll tell you why-because everybody here knows what you are. You don't have to keep any secrets."

Her friend nodded, but then started to laugh. "Don't tell that to Gottlieb, that's all I've got to say. He knew for five years before they could tell me, and it was driving him crazy. Crazier."

"Oh." Alicia hadn't thought of that. "Well, everybody knows now, anyway. Some of the things Francesca and Roxane say make me want to smack 'em, and I can't, because they'd wonder why."

"Just pay no attention to them," Anna told her-easier said than done. She went on, "Gottlieb didn't pay attention to me when I said stupid stuff like that for all those years. Of course, he doesn't pay much attention to me now that I know better, either. I'm just a kid, he says." Her snort was intended to convey how little older brothers knew.

Alicia didn't know anything about older brothers-or younger brothers, for that matter. She wasn't much interested in learning more, either. The boys in her class were the worst sort of vermin: a poor recommendation for the male half of the species. When she said, "Gottlieb's notso bad," she was offering Anna an enormous concession. She'd known him all her life, after all.

But so had Anna, and at much closer quarters. If no man is a hero to his valet, no boy is to his little sister. "It's-peaceful now that he's off at the Hitler Jugend camp most of the time," Anna said.

"Peaceful," Alicia echoed. With Gottlieb gone, Anna had her parents all to herself. Alicia tried to imagine what that would be like. She couldn't. She hadn't even been two when Francesca was born. She didn't remember what being an only child was like, and she'd never know now. When she got bigger, she was the one who'd leave for a Bd M camp. Her little sisters would get more attention from Mommy and Daddy, which hardly seemed fair.

"Here, let's do this," Anna said. The game that followed ended up involving the Vicki, several of the stuffed hedgehogs-including a big one who was bright red and had a devil's horns and pitchfork-an imaginary and magical snowstorm, and the willow tree that grew just outside Anna's window. In the summertime, when it had all its leaves, the willow was full of peeping finches and warblers; woodpeckers scuttled along the bigger branches and drummed as they drilled their way after caterpillars. Now the branches and twigs were bare. Still, a house sparrow perched on one and peered into the bedroom with beady black eyes.

"Look!" Alicia pointed at the sparrow. "It's an SS bird." It got incorporated into the game, which had been short of villains up till then.

They groaned when Anna's mother called them down to supper.Frau Stutzman put Alicia between Anna and Gottlieb at the table, the same way a nuclear engineer would put cadmium between two uranium bricks. "So," Gottlieb said, his voice very much a man's, "how do you like being one of us?"

That was a question Alicia couldn't have heard at the supper table at her house. "It's all right. I've kind of got used to it," she said. But then she decided something more was called for, and she added, "It is what I am, after all. I ought to know about it."

Gottlieb gave her a suddenly thoughtful look. "I said something like that, too. I took longer than you have to figure it out, though."

Alicia needed a little while to realize that was a compliment of sorts. Anna's surprised expression did more to help her figure it out than Gottlieb's words themselves. She had no idea what to do with praise from a seventeen-year-old boy, and so she didn't do anything but go on with supper. It was beef tongue with potatoes and carrots and onions, which she liked.Frau Stutzman spiced the tongue differently from the way her mother did, but it was still good.

Over dessert,Herr Stutzman started telling Gottlieb about something he called a software trap. He hadn't gone very far before he stopped speaking German, or at least any sort of German Alicia understood. Gottlieb followed well enough, and gave back some of the same gibberish. "You got through, though?" he said at last.

"Through the second portal, like I told you. That's how I got the backside look at the trap," his father answered.

"I hope that's not all you did," Gottlieb said.

"Well, I didn't have as much time as I wanted after the trouble at the first portal, and I did want to see what almost bit me," Walther Stutzman said. "But I got to look around a little. The Reichsfuhrer -SS isn't very happy with the Fuhrer."

Like Alicia's father, Gottlieb and Anna's had a way of saying things that were important as if they weren't. What sort of fireworks could go off if the leader of the SS didn't like what the leader of the Reich was doing? Before Alicia could do more than begin to wonder about that, Anna said, "Let's get back to the game."