In The Presence Of My Enemies

Lise almost laughed at how surprised he sounded. He'd never dreamt of Heinrich as a rival. She thought her husband was pretty hot stuff. Why wouldn't another woman? But that was a question for a different time. All she said now was, "Go on."

"You know about that, too," Willi said in dismay. Lise didn't deny it. "Why doesn't anybody tell me these things?" he wondered aloud.

"Never mind that now," Lise said, as if there were reasons galore but she had no time to go into them. "Just get on with it, please."

"I guess Heinrich told her no?" Even though Willi put an audible question mark at the end of the sentence, he didn't really sound as if he doubted it. With a sigh, he continued, "Erika…doesn't like people telling her no. And so…and so she…God damn it, Lise, I'mso sorry." Willi's usually cheerful voice held something not far from a sob.

"She was the one who accused Heinrich of being a Jew?" Lise couldn't hear anything at all in her own voice. The words might have come from the throat of some machine. She'd been right, sure enough.

"I'm afraid she was," Willi answered miserably. "He said something about acting like Solomon and cutting a doll in half, and Solomon was King of the Jews, and that put the idea in her mind, I suppose. But she never thought about the children. When she found out about them, that was when she…did what she did."

"Wonderful." Lise's voice stayed flat, now choking back a scream. Erika hadn't cared if she killed Heinrich-hell, she'd wanted him dead. But she drew the line at the girls.How generous of her.

"When she's better, she'll go back to the Security Police and tell them it was all a lie. I swear she will," Willi said. "She wants to make things right if she can."

"Wonderful," Lise repeated, as flatly as before.

"It'll be all right. It really will." Willi was all but babbling. His laugh was nervous, but it was a laugh. "I know Heinrich's not a Jew-believe me, I know; don't get me wrong-but the way things are nowadays, Buckliger might not even care if he was." He laughed again.

Don't you have any sense in your head? Don't you know they're bound to be tapping my phone?Lise couldn't say that, because, of course, theywere listening. Before she could say anything, someone knocked on the front door. "I've got to go," she told Willi, and hung up in a hurry. It didn't sound like the knock the Security Police used. It didn't declare,We'll kick the door open if you don't let us in right this minute. But you never could tell.

Guts knotting, Lise turned the knob and swung the door on its hinges. It wasn't the Security Police. It was Adela Handrick, Emma's mother, a rather squat blond woman who wore expensive clothes in loud colors that didn't suit her sallow skin.

Up till now, the neighbors had stayed away from the Gimpel house. The plague might have struck here. "Hello," Lise said hesitantly. "Uh-won't you come in?"

Frau Handrick shook her head. Lise got a whiff of some fancy cologne. "No, that's all right," the other woman answered. She sounded nervous, too, and licked her carefully reddened lips. "I just wanted to tell you that Stefan and I"-Stefan was her husband-"hope everything goes…as well as it can for you. Emma says she wants to see Alicia back in school, too."

Tears stung Lise's eyes. "Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you very much."

Seeming to take courage, Adela Handrick said, "You're all good people. Everybody in the neighborhood knows it. This is all nothing but a bunch of garbage. But"-an expressive shrug-"what can you do? You have to be careful. Maybe things will be better after the elections. But maybe they won't, too."

Even suggesting that they might be better was a wonder. Lise said, "All I want is for Heinrich and the girls to come home."

"What else?"Frau Handrick said. "Even if you were Jews, you'd probably want the same thing. Who could blame you?" She dipped her head. "Take care of yourself." Without another word, she started up the street toward her own house.

Lise stared after her. Willi'd said the one thing. Now she'd said the other. Maybe a lot of people paid as little attention to what they got taught in school about hating Jews as they did about geometry. But how could you afford to find out?

Alicia Gimpel had always been good at remembering her lessons. That helped her now. The Security Police were trying to get her to admit she knew her father was a Jew. They didn't have a real interrogation room at the foundlings' home. They had to make do with an office. A desk lamp glaring into her eyes was almost as bad as some of the fancy lights they would have had back at their own headquarters.

"You must have known!" one of them shouted. He slammed his fist down on the desk. Alicia jumped. So did the gooseneck lamp. He had to grab it to keep it from falling over. "How could you not know your own father is a stinking Jew?"