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.'
'Oh, sure.' Willi nodded again, with a little more animation this time. 'It's possible, I suppose, but how likely is it? Who could a bunch of froggies know who's got the clout to land somebody with SS runes on his collar tabs in hot water? Pigs will fly before we see that.' He started walking faster. 'Come on-there's the bus, just waiting for us.'
It did wait. They even found seats, which they didn't manage every day during the morning rush. 'Politics,' Heinrich repeated. 'Well, I suppose you're right.'
'You bet I am,' Willi said as the bus pulled out of the station. He patted Heinrich on the knee. 'You have any other problems you can't see your way around, you come to your Uncle Willi, and he'll set you right.'
He smiled a superior smile. If Erika admired Heinrich for anything, it was his brains-it couldn't very well have been his body or his looks, as he was ruefully aware. And if Willi felt smarter than he was, then all of a sudden he didn't seem such a threat. He hoped that was how things were working inside his friend's head, anyhow. He didn't want to be a threat to anybody or anything. Threats were visible. He couldn't afford that kind of visibility.
And maybe Willi was right, too. To most of the Germanic Empire's subjects, politics had to seem simple. The Germans gave orders, and the subjects obeyed. Subjects who didn't obey paid for it, often with their lives. (Sometimes subjects who did obey paid with their lives, too, but they seldom knew that ahead of time.)
But, seen from within the ruling bureaucracy, things weren't so simple.Wehrmacht and SS officials warily watched one another. The Wehrmacht and civilian administrators didn't always see eye-to-eye, either. And the administrators and the SS quarreled over who really represented the National Socialist Party. It wasn't just a factional split, either. Personalities in each camp further complicated things. the Fuhrer, Kurt Haldweim, was supposed to keep everyone going in the same direction, but Haldweim had celebrated his ninety-first birthday just before last Christmas. For his age, he was said-frequently and loudly said-to be vigorous and alert, but how much did that prove?
When the bus stopped in front of Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters, Willi Dorsch had to nudge Heinrich. 'We get off here, you know,' he said, enjoying the tiny triumph. 'No matter what great thoughts you think, they won't do you any good if you can't find the place where you're supposed to use them.'
'You're right, of course.' Heinrich stood up, feeling foolish. As he hurried to get off the bus, he noted that Willi sounded much more like his usual self.And why? Because I'm acting like an idiot. I've never heard of the power of positive stupidity, but this must be it.
The guards at the front of the building saw the two of them five mornings a week. Nonetheless, they held out their hands for identity cards. They not only matched photos, they also fed the cards, one after the other, into a machine reader. Only after a light on it glowed green twice in a row did they stand aside.
'Nice to know I'm me,' Willi said, sticking his card into his wallet again. He pointed at Heinrich. 'Or maybe I'm you today, and you're me. The machine didn't say anything about that.' He laughed.
So did Heinrich, relieved to see Willi acting like his usual silly self. But one of the guards scowled suspiciously at Willi. The other eyed the card reader, as if wondering if it could change a man's true identity. Sometimes Heinrich worried about the younger generation's brains, if any. But he knew people had been doing that since the days of the Pyramids, so he kept quiet about it.
'Pass on!' the second guard barked, still sending the machine a fishy stare.
Once inside the building with Willi, Heinrich said, 'He's not going to trust that gadget for the next week. You're a subversive, you know.'
Willi drew himself up in mingled alarm and hauteur. 'That's a fine thing to call me in this place.' But he was joking again, and kept right on doing it: 'Did you lay down the trail of bread crumbs last night? No? How the devil are we going to find the way to our desks, then?'
Oberkommando der Wehrmachtwas something of a maze, but not so bad as Willi made it out to be. Old- timers who remembered how things were before central Berlin got rebuilt said the old headquarters building really had been a nightmare to navigate. This one was just big, with lots of corridors and lots of rooms along each one. Even strangers-strangers with security clearances-found their way without too much trouble. Heinrich and Willi were in their places in a couple of minutes.
As soon as Heinrich sat down, he turned on his computer and entered the password that gave him access to his files. He tapped the keyboard and looked over his shoulder at Willi, saying, 'These things are the biggest change since I came to work here. Used to be only a few specialists had them. Now they're everywhere, like toadstools after a rain.'
'They're handy, all right.' Willi had his computer up and running, too. 'Sometimes I wonder who's in charge, though, us or the machines.'
'I have a friend'-Heinrich didn't name Walther Stutzman-'who says they could all be connected into one giant linked system.'
'There's a hell of a difference between 'could' and 'will,'' Willi said. 'I don't believe it'll happen, not in a million years. Can you imagine the security nightmare with that kind of system? Anybody could put anything on it. Anybody couldfind anything on it. The Party's got too much sense to let that sort of nonsense get started. You couldn't stop it once it did; it'd be like unscrambling an egg.'
'You're right,' Heinrich said. 'It only stands to reason.' He knew he had more book smarts than Willi. But his friend was plenty shrewd, and understood the way the world-especially the part through which he moved- worked.
'You bet I'm right,' Willi said now. 'Once security starts to slip, everything's in trouble.'
'Ja,'Heinrich said absently. He was busy typing in another password, the one that gave him access to the Wehrmacht 's information links. Thanks to Walther, he knew a lot more passwords than he was supposed to. He carried them in his memory; he wasn't mad enough to write any of them down. He wasn't mad enough to use any of them, either, except in direst emergency. The one he entered he'd acquired legitimately, in the course of his job. 'I want to find out what's going on with the United States.'
