In The Presence Of My Enemies

Willi led the queen of diamonds. Heinrich glumly tossed out the seven. The ace lay face-up on the table in the dummy's hand. Willi confidently didn't play it, instead choosing the three. Lise didn't even smile as she ruined the finesse by laying her king on top of the queen. "Down one," she said sweetly.

"Oh, for God's sake!" Willi said. He might have added something more pungent than that, but the three Gimpel girls had gone to bed only a few minutes before and could have heard if he did. He sent Heinrich an accusing stare. "You were the one who doubled. I was sure you had that…miserable king."

"I doubled on the strength of the ace," Heinrich said. "When you ruffed it, I thought we were doomed. Let's finish the hand-maybe we'll come up with another trick, too."

Lise led. Willi handily took the rest of the tricks, but he and Erika still went down one. His wife sighed mournfully.

"I would have played that one the same way." Heinrich came to Willi's defense.

"Would you?" Erika didn't sound as if she believed it.

"Sure I would," he said. "Lise didn't bid at all during the auction. You have to figure what strength we've got is in my hand."

"Maybe." Erika still seemed dubious-and annoyed at her husband. "Ifyou'd tried that finesse, Heinrich, it probably would have worked."

Willi Dorsch didn't say anything. He did turn red, though, as he gathered up the cards. Heinrich tried to defuse things, saying, "Ha! Don't I wish? I've had more finesses go down in flames than the Russians lost planes the first day we hit them."

"But you don't run them unless you need to," Erika said. "Willi tried that one for the sake of being cute. We could have made without it."

She spoke as if her husband weren't there. Willi noticed, too, and turned redder than ever. "We were in trouble if Ididn't try that finesse," he insisted.

"I don't think so," Erika said.

"Whose deal is it?" Lise asked. That might not have been the wisdom of Solomon, but it sufficed to forestall the argument. The next hand was unexciting; the Gimpels bid two hearts and made three. The hand after that, Erika Dorsch made four spades and chopped off the Gimpels' leg.

She didn't say anything to Willi. She made such a point of not saying anything to him, he turned red all over again. "Yes, you're a genius," he growled. "There. I admit it. Are you happy now?"

"I just played it sensibly," Erika said. "It's not that you haven't got brains, sweetheart. It's just that you don't always bother using them. If you ask me, that's worse, because you could." Things would have been bad enough if she'd left it there, but she added, "Heinrich, now, he gets the most from what he's got between his ears."

Lise Gimpel sent her husband a hooded look. He didn't need it to know this was several different flavors of trouble. The most immediate one was between Willi and Erika. Willi took a deep breath. By the nasty glint in his eyes, Heinrich knew with sudden, appalled certainty just what he was going to say. It would have been crude in a locker room. At the bridge table, it would have been a disaster. Heinrich got there first, saying, "If I'm as smart as all that, why aren't I rich? If I'm as smart as all that, why wasn't I smart enough to pick a better-looking face, too?"

He hoped that would help calm Willi, who was by anybody's standards better-looking than he was. And it might have, if Erika hadn't poured gasoline on the fire: "Some things, we can't choose. Some things…we can." She was looking straight at her husband.

Willi had managed to get some grip on his temper. His voice was thick with anger when he said, "We'll talk about this later," but at least he seemed willing to talk about it later instead of having a row right there on the spot.

"Why don't I bring out the coffee and cake?" Lise said. "I think maybe we've had enough bridge for the night."

Heinrich hoped Erika would hop up and help, but she didn't. She was, he slowly realized, as angry at Willi as he was at her. She might have realized what her husband had almost said, too-or maybe she was angry for reasons that had nothing to do with bridge but came out over the game. Sitting there with them, waiting for Lise to come back, Heinrich felt like a man in the middle of a minefield.

When the minefield went up, though, it went up from an unexpected direction. Erika Dorsch turned her blue gaze on him and asked, "What do you think of the whole business about the first edition of Mein Kampf?"

Few residents of the Reich would have been comfortable answering that question. It horrified Heinrich for all sorts of reasons, most of which Erika knew nothing about. He tried to pass it off lightly: "What I think doesn't matter. What the powers that be think will be what counts."

"It's what I told Heinrich at the office: that whole business is nothing but a lot of garbage," Willi said. "Nobody who counts will pay any attention to it."