In The Presence Of My Enemies

Heinrich Gimpel kissed Lise and went up the street to the bus stop. He got there five minutes before the bus did. As it stopped, the door hissed open in front of him. He fed his account card into the fare slot, then withdrew it and stuck it back in his wallet as he looked up the aisle for a seat. He found one. At the next stop, a plump blond woman sat down next to him. When Willi Dorsch got on a couple of stops later, he and Heinrich nodded to each other, but that was all.

Not sitting with Willi didn't break Heinrich's heart. His friend had been cooler than usual since the awkward end to their evening of bridge.Does he worry that I'm looking for an affair with Erika? Heinrich shook his head as Willi sank into a seat near the back of the bus. He enjoyed looking at Erika Dorsch, but that wasn't the same thing at all. Even Lise, who wasn't inclined to be objective about such things, understood the difference.

But then a new, troubling thought crossed Heinrich's mind.Or does Willi think Erika's looking for an affair with me? Even if Willi didn't think Heinrich wanted the affair, he might not be so happy about seeing him every morning. And Heinrich hadn't the faintest idea what he could do about that.

The bus made its last few stops and pulled into the train station. Everyone got off. Almost everyone went to the platform for the Berlin-bound commuter train. As people queued up, Heinrich and Willi weren't particularly close. Heinrich sighed. More often than not, the two of them had chatted and gossiped like a couple of Hausfrau s all the way in to the city. It hadn't happened the past few days, and it didn't look as if it would today, either.

It didn't. When the train came into the the Stahnsdorf station, Willi sat down on the aisle next to a taken window seat. The seat on the other side of the aisle was taken, too. Whatever Willi Dorsch wanted, Heinrich's company wasn't it. Willi pulled a copy of the Volkischer Beobachter out of his briefcase and started to read.

Heinrich also read the Nazi Party newspaper: one more bit of protective coloration. He found a seat halfway down the car from Willi, got out his own copy, and looked it over. He did find it professionally useful every now and then. What the Party decided could dictate what Oberkommando der Wehrmacht did next. Reading the paper carefully-especially reading between the lines-gave clues about which way the wind was blowing at levels of the Party more exalted than those in which Heinrich traveled.

Today he went to the imperial-affairs section first. It still looked as if the United States was going to fall short on its occupation assessment. Heinrich kept waiting for someone in the Foreign Ministry or the Fuhrer 's office to comment. So far, no one had. That in itself was interesting. When he first started at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, the Americans wouldn't have got a warning if they were late or came up short on what they owed. They would simply have been punished. Thingswere more easygoing these days.

Some things were, anyhow. A small story announced the execution of a dozen Serbs for rebellion against the Reich. Serbs had touched off the First World War, almost a hundred years ago now. They'd been nuisances ever since. And another story told of the jailing of an SS man who'd been caught taking bribes in a French town near the English Channel.

Such shameless corruption,the Volkischer Beobachter declared,cannot be tolerated in an orderly, well-run state. Heinrich nodded to himself. He'd seen three or four anti-corruption drives since his university days. That the Reich needed a new one every few years told how well they worked.

This one, though, gave signs of being more serious than some of its predecessors. An SS man, behind bars? That was news of the man-bites-dog sort. Heinrich wondered which German bigwigs the Frenchmen who'd been shaken down happened to know. Odds were they'd known somebody. SS men seldom got into trouble for what they did even inside Germany, let alone in occupied territory.

When the train pulled into the station in Berlin, Heinrich and Willi naturally went the same way, for they had to catch the same bus to the same office. The story about the SS man intrigued Heinrich enough to make him wave the Volkischer Beobachter under Willi Dorsch's nose and ask, "Did you see this?"

"Which?" Willi asked. He sounded more distant than usual, but not actively unfriendly. Heinrich pointed to the story. "Oh, that," Willi said. "Yes, I saw it. Politics. Has to be."

"Politics?" Heinrich said it with such surprise, he might never have heard the word before.

Willi gave back an impatient nod. "I don't see what else could be going on."

"I just figured somebody knew somebody," Heinrich said. "You know what I mean."