In The Presence of mine Enemies

by Harry Turtledove

  "Your mouthpiece." The jailer sounded disgusted. Neither he nor his gun-toting pals showed any sign of leaving the room. Whatever Heinrich said to the lawyer, he'd say in front of them.

  He hardly cared. He shuffled to the grill. He had to stoop a little to put his mouth by it. He didn't care about that, either. "Who are you?" he asked. "Can you get me out of here? Did Lise hire you?"

  "Your wife, you mean?Ja. My name's Klaus Menzel, and I don't have any idea whether I can spring you," answered the man on the other side of the grill. "I'll give it my best shot, though. All billable hours either way." He sounded cheerfully mercenary.

  Somehow, that made Heinrich like him more, not less. He seemed less likely to be a Security Police plant, someone put in place to get Heinrich to spill his guts. Of course, if they'd wanted him to do that, they would have kept the guards out of the room.

  "Do you know who falsely alleged you're a Jew?" Menzel asked. Again, the way he put things cheered Heinrich. He wasn't assuming his client was guilty. He wasn't acting as if he was assuming that, anyway.

  Hearing him talk like that made Heinrich want to help him. Unfortunately, he couldn't. He tried to spread his hands. The cuffs wouldn't let him. He said, "I haven't the slightest idea. Will the Security Police tell you?"

  Menzel shrugged. He had broad shoulders and a narrow waist, as if he were a retired soldier or-perhaps more likely-a football player who'd stayed in shape into his fifties. He said, "They're supposed to. Of course, they don't always do what they're supposed to." He raised his voice and called out to a blackshirt on Heinrich's side of the glass: "Isn't that right, Joachim?"

  "Screw you, you damn fraud," answered one of the men with an assault rifle. "You had your way, the Reich 'd be ass-deep in kikes. Then they'd study law and squeeze you out of business. Serve you right, too."

  He sounded more amused than angry. For that matter, so did the lawyer. How often had they harassed each other? A good many times, plainly. Heinrich asked, "When will you know if you can get me out?"

  "I'm not sure," Menzel said with another shrug. "When they hear somebody might be a Jew, they grab first and ask questions later. Depends on what they turn up next. Depends on how much of an uproar they want to get their bowels into, too. I can promise you the moon, but I don't know if I can deliver."

  That wasn't what Heinrich wanted to hear. He would have loved to be promised the moon, all wrapped up in a pretty pink ribbon. But, again, Klaus Menzel seemed to work in the realm of the possible. Heinrich said, "What's your best guess?"

  "I'll find out as fast as I can. A few days, most likely," the lawyer answered.

  "Is Lise all right? The girls?"

  "Your wife is fine. She's mad as hops because they made a mess of your house when they searched it. I like her. She's good people, and she doesn't scare easy." Menzel hesitated. As soon as he did, Heinrich feared he knew what was coming next. And he was right: "They've got your kids. If you were a Jew, they'd be first-degree Mischlingen, and subject to the same sanctions." That was a bloodless, legalistic way to put it. What Menzel meant was,They'll kill them, too.

  Heinrich groaned. "They can't!" But they could. They'd been doing it for seventy years. Why should they stop now? He'd had a surge of panic when he heard the blackshirts searched his house. Lise must have managed to dispose of the photos before they got there. Otherwise, Menzel wouldn't have been able to do anything at all for him, probably wouldn't even have been allowed to see him. He would have been dead by now, and so would his children.

  "Try not to worry too much," the lawyer said. "If you come out, the kids come out, too."And if you don't, they don't. That hung in the air. But if Heinrich didn't come out, he'd die. He wouldn't be able to worry then, either.

  Will Alicia hold up?He didn't have to fret about the other two, not for that. They didn't know what they were. But if Alicia broke, if they broke her…

  "You're out of time, Gimpel," said one of the men from the Security Police. "Back to your cell. And as for you, you lousy shyster…" He sent Klaus Menzel an obscene gesture. Laughing, Menzel returned it.

  They marched Heinrich out of the room with the glass partition.You're out of time, Gimpel. The words tolled like a funeral bell inside his mind. And it wouldn't be his funeral alone. They had the girls, too.

  No matter how grim tomorrow looked, you had to get on with today. So Esther Stutzman told herself, over and over and over again. But when a friend and his children were in the hands of the Security Police-and when, if they hurt him long enough and badly enough, he might cry out her name-it wasn't easy.

  She tried to carry on as if nothing were wrong. When she went in to Dr. Dambach's office, she said not a word about Heinrich Gimpel. Dambach already knew she knew the Kleins. If he found out she was friends with someone else suspected of being a Jew, he might start wondering about her. The best way to stay safe was not to let anybody wonder.

  "Guten Morgen, Frau Stutzman," the pediatrician said when she came in. "I was just about to start making coffee."

  Those were words to alarm anybody. "Why don't you let me take care of that?" Esther said quickly. "Then you can do something, uh, useful instead."

  "Well, all right," Dambach said. "As long as you're here, I'll start reviewing medical journals. With so much being published these days, it gets harder and harder to stay up to date."

  "I'm sure it must," Esther said. "Yes, you get on with that, and I'll bring you some nice coffee just as soon as it's made."

  "Thank you very much," he said, and went back into his private office. Esther let out a sigh of relief: one small catastrophe averted, anyhow. If only the big ones were so easy to get around.

  The whole morning seemed one threatened small catastrophe after another. One by one, Esther managed and mastered them. She felt as if she were dancing between the raindrops without getting wet. Dr. Dambach had no idea most of them even turned up. Keeping him from needing to know about such things was part of her job.

  When Irma Ritter came into the office at lunch, Esther did have to spend an extra five or ten minutes explaining some of the things that had gone on. "You had yourself a busy time, didn't you?" Irma said when she was through.

  "One of those days," Esther answered. She made her escape and went down to the bus stop. She took a different bus from the usual; instead of going straight home, she rode up to the Kurfurstendamm to shop. Walther's birthday was coming up, and so was their anniversary.

  She'd just got off the bus when a noisy parade came down the middle of Berlin's main shopping boulevard. At first, seeing the swastika placards some of the men on foot were carrying, she thought it was only another traffic-snarling Nazi procession. Then she realized she was wrong. It was a Nazi procession of sorts, but not one like any she'd ever seen. Along with the swastikas, the paraders carried placards with slogans like THROW THE RASCALS OUT! and REFORM CANDIDATES FOR THE REICHSTAG! and DOWN WITH THE PARTYBONZEN!

  Men and women on the street stared. Everyone seemed as astonished as Esther was that the authorities would allow such a parade. But then people started to cheer, and to wave at the reform candidates. The politicians-many of whom were fairly prominent Party men themselves-waved back.

  Esther spotted Rolf Stolle marching at the rear of the parade, and she began to understand. The Gauleiter 's bodyguards were gray-uniformed Berlin policemen, not the usual blackshirts. He carried a bullhorn. With his big, booming voice, he hardly seemed to need it.

  "the Fuhrer says you can be free!" he shouted. "That's good, because you've taken too many boots in the face for too long. If you don't believe me, ask Lothar Prutzmann! the Fuhrer says youcan be free, yes. But I say youought to be free! Do you see the difference?"

  Raucous cheers said the crowd on the Kurfurstendamm sidewalks did. People were less restrained now than they had been while Kurt Haldweim was Fuhrer. They'd begun to see that they could say some of the things that had been on their minds for years without worrying that the Security Police would bundle them into a car and ha
ul them off to prison or to a camp.

  But they aren't Jews,Esther thought, wondering how Heinrich was holding up-and whether he was still holding out. She wondered about Alicia, too. What would they do to a child? No one had come to bundle her into a car. That was all she knew. In an important way, that was all she needed to know.

  "Things will look different once we elect a real Reichstag!" Rolf Stolle roared. "Too many have got away with too much for too long. We're going to show the world where the bodies are buried-and we all know there are lots of them."

  More cheers. More shouts. People around Esther waved their fists in the air. She stared at Stolle. He couldn't be talking about Jews…could he? She grimaced. Odds were against it. Plenty of Germans-and others-had gone missing during the Third Reich. Who would get excited about millions of Jews now? Odds were, no one. After the First World War, who'd got excited about all the Armenians the Turks did in? Nobody. Hitler had seen as much, and noted it in Mein Kampf. And he'd been dead right. Yes, that was the word.

  "Some people-some people with fancy jobs and even fancier uniforms-are going to have a lot of explaining to do," Stolle declared. "Will they be able to do it? Good question. Damn good question. We'll find out."

  Then he broke out of the parade and away from his bodyguards and plunged into the crowd. Alarm on their faces, the Berlin cops rushed after the Gauleiter. He might have forgotten they existed. He'd spotted a tall, pretty blond woman on the sidewalk. She squeaked in surprise as he squeezed her, kissed her on both cheeks and then on the mouth, and very likely took a few other liberties Esther couldn't see.

  "There!" he said, grinning enormously. "You're going to vote for your good old Uncle Rolf, aren't you, darling?" For good measure, he kissed her again.

  "Uh,ja, " she stammered, sounding as dazed as a hurricane survivor. Men whooped. Women laughed. Rolf Stolle not only had a reputation, he reveled in it.

  He elbowed his way back through the crowd and into the procession down the Kurfurstendamm once more. "Weare the Volk!" he roared through the bullhorn. "This is a Volkisch state. Everybody says that, but nobody says what it means. It means the state is ours, that's what. Weare the Volk!"

  "We are the Volk!" People picked up the rallying cry. "Weare the Volk!We are the Volk!"

  When Heinz Buckliger started calling for reform, had he expectedthis? As Esther ducked into a haberdasher's, she shook her head. She couldn't believe it. But, whether the Fuhrer had expected this or not, this was what he had. And what would he do about it?

  Now that Lise had the house straight again, she went through the motions of everyday life. With Heinrich and the girls gone, all she could do was go through the motions. Nothing she did seemed to mean anything. How could it, without the people who gave it meaning?

  She fixed food for herself and ate it as if she were fueling a machine that needed to keep going. She had trouble figuring outwhy it needed to keep going: more in case her husband and daughters came back than for any independent reason.

  Mechanically, she washed her few dishes. Once that was done, she kept having to find a way to get through the rest of the evening till it was time to try to sleep. She didn't want to watch the news. Horst Witzleben's half-hour suddenly seemed full of nothing but bright, shining lies. People all over the Germanic Empire were demanding their freedom or exulting in new freedom won. Up until a few days before, Lise had exulted with them. Now, with Heinrich in jail and the children stolen, other people's celebrations seemed a grim mockery.

  She cleaned things that didn't need cleaning and read a novel where she knew she was missing one word in three. Every hour or two, she would look up at the clock on the mantel and discover another ten minutes had gone by. Most of her wished she were in captivity with the rest of her family. Staying free didn't make her feel safe-only guilty.

  When the phone rang, she put down the novel without a trace of regret. It wasn't as if she were paying attention to it anyhow. Maybe it was her sister; Kathe owed her a call. Even if the line was bugged, the two of them could talk pretty openly. No snoop could penetrate their pauses and misdirections.

  "Bitte?" Lise said.

  "Guten Abend,Lise." It wasn't Kathe: it was a man. Lise just had time to shift gears and recognize Willi Dorsch's voice before he said, "I'm so sorry."

  "Oh, my God!" Lise blurted. Those words, at this time, were the last thing, the very last thing, she wanted to hear. "What do you know, Willi? What have you heard? Tell me right this second, before I reach down the telephone line and pull it out of you with both hands!"

  By what felt like a miracle, he understood her right away and didn't try to joke around. "Nothing about Heinrich-nothing, I swear," he said quickly. "But Erika's in the hospital. They think she'll be all right, but she's there."

  "Wait," Lise said. Too many things were happening too fast-much too fast for her to follow. "If Erika's in the hospital, I'm the one who's supposed to be sorry, not you."

  "I'm not so sure about that." Willi sounded most unhappy. He also sounded-embarrassed?

  "Willi, please take this one step at a time. You're way,way ahead of me," Lise said. "First tell me why Erika's in the hospital."

  "Well, she took too many pills. Took them on purpose."

  "Why on earth would she do that?" Lise asked in honest amazement. "Not because you've been fooling around on her, for heaven's sake. That wouldn't do it. She'd get even instead."

  A considerable silence followed. Mostly to himself, Willi muttered, "I might have known you'd know about that." Another silence, this one punctuated by a sigh. He gathered himself and went on: "You're not wrong. She did try to get even, only it didn't work out the way she wanted. That's…some of why she took the pills."

  "You'd better tell me the rest of this." Lise thought she knew where he was going, but she wasn't sure, and she didn't want to guess, not here. Too much rode on whether she was right or wrong.

  "Well…" Yet another long pause. "It seems she was trying to get even with me with, uh, with Heinrich, of all people."

  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 aga
in.

  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.