In The Presence Of My Enemies

"Maybe," Willi said. "It's the only thing I thought of that made any sense at all, too. But it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, if you know what I mean. He can find a district full of Prussian cabbage farmers or Bavarian beer brewers that would elect him no matter what."

"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" Heinrich agreed. The more they talked about it, the more normal their tone became. The more freedom all the people of the Reich got, the more they seemed to take it for granted. The more they got, the more they craved? Was that true, too? Could that be true? Maybe it could. Maybe it really could. But who would have believed it a year before?

Willi suddenly looked sly. "The other side of the coin is what happens if Buckliger doesn't run for the Reichstag. If he doesn't, he's still Fuhrer. He's still got all the Fuhrer 's powers. He can tell it what to do."

"That's the way things work, all right," Heinrich said. But then he did a little more thinking of his own. "That's the way things worknow, all right. If the Volk chooses the Reichstag, though, will it be so easy to ignore? What's the point to having a real election if right afterwards you go and pretend you never did?"

"You're right there," Willi admitted. "I don't see the point to that, either. Maybe Buckliger does."

"Who knows?" Heinrich said. "Who knows for sure about anything that's going on these days? We'll just have to wait and see."

"Sounds like traffic through Berlin, doesn't it?" Willi said as the commuter train came into South Station. "Of course, there's usually a lot more waiting than seeing with that."

"Maybe it won't be so bad," Heinrich said. Before Willi could say anything sardonic, he forestalled him: "Maybe it'll be worse."

As a matter of fact, they got to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters fifteen minutes early. Had they been fifteen minutes late, they both would have cursed and fumed. Early they took for granted. Heinrich looked out across Adolf Hitler Platz toward the Fuhrer 's palace. Aside from a few joggers and a gaggle of early-rising Japanese tourists snapping photos, the vast square was echoingly empty. No Gauleiter growling out a speech this morning. No thumping, swaggering SS band trying to drown him out. No Dutch demonstrators, either.

Willi was looking across the square, too. "Almost gets boring to see it this quiet, doesn't it?" he remarked.

"It does," Heinrich said in bemusement. "It really does."

They went up the stairs and, after getting their identities confirmed, into the headquarters building. Heinrich sat down at his desk and immediately yawned. He got up and went to the canteen with Willi to fortify himself with a cup of coffee. He squirted some hot chocolate into the cup, too, from the machine next to the coffeemaker. "Viennese today, aren't we?" Willi said.

"Oh, but of course." Heinrich put on an Austrian accent. Willi laughed.

A Viennese aristocrat-even a Viennese headwaiter-would have turned up his nose at the concoction Heinrich had put together. But it was hot and it was sweet and it had plenty of caffeine. With all that going for it, Heinrich wasn't inclined to be fussy. After he finished it and tossed the cup in the trash, he thought about going back for another one. But his brains were moving a little faster, so he buckled down and got to work instead.

Ilse wandered over to Willi's desk and started playing with little ringlets of hair that hung down over the back of his collar. Without looking away from his computer screen, he swatted her on the fanny. She squeaked. She seemed to have recovered nicely from discovering that Rolf Stolle had had his fun with her and that his roving eye had then roved on.

She and Willi were all but molesting each other when they went off at noon. Heinrich had no doubt they would pick a restaurant somewhere close to a hotel. He walked back to the canteen. The lunch special there was roast pork. As he had all his life, he ate it without a second thought. He liked pork, though he'd had better than this.

When Willi and Ilse came in after a long, long lunch break, Willi mimed smoking a lazy cigarette. Ilse thought that was the funniest thing in the world.

Heinrich was plowing through an analysis of near-future American business activity when he looked up to discover three blackshirts standing around his desk."Was ist hier los?" he asked in surprise but no real alarm.

"You are Heinrich Gimpel?" one of them asked.

He nodded. "That's me." He wondered if they wanted to take him to confer with Heinz Buckliger again. They didn't. The two lower-ranking blackshirts grabbed him and hauled him out of his chair. The senior man said, "You are under arrest."

"Arrest?" Heinrich yelped in disbelief. "What for?"

"Suspicion of being a Jew."

XII