And Francesca was also angry, in a quieter way. 'How can you say it's a stupid game when you thought up half of it?'
'Because-' But Alicia couldn't say what she couldn't say. Knowing what she knew and not being able to talk about it threatened to choke her. 'Because it is, that's all.'
'I'm going to tell,' Roxane said again.'Mommy!'
'You and your big mouth,' Alicia said, whereupon her little sister opened it as wide as she could and stuck out her tongue. Alicia was tempted to grab that tongue and give it a good yank, but it was too slimy for her to do it.
'What's going on?' came from the ground floor. Ominous footsteps on the stairs followed, each one louder than the one before. Their mother appeared at the doorway to Francesca and Roxane's room. 'Can't the three of you play together nicely?'
'I didn't want to play any more, that's all,' Alicia said.
'That's not all. You didn't like my ideas, that's what it is,' Roxane said, and proceeded to explain in great detail what her ideas were.
Understanding kindled in their mother's eyes. She started to say something, then closed her mouth again. Awe trickled through Alicia.She can't tell, either, she thought.She's a grownup, and shecan't tell. That spoke more clearly than anything else of how important the secret was. It was important enough to constrain a grownup, and grownups by the very nature of things were beyond constraint.
Their mother tried again. This time, she succeeded. 'Play the game, Alicia,' she said gently. 'Go ahead and play the game. It's all right. That's what we have to do.'
'See?' Triumph filled Roxane. 'Mommy told you to.'
And so she had. But she'd told Alicia something else, too, something that had gone by Roxane and Francesca.That's what we have to do. People who weren't Jews were going to say things about them. They were going to mock them. They couldn't help it. They believed all the things they'd learned in school. (Alicia still half believed them herself, which sometimes left her half-sick with confusion.) If you couldn't get used to that, if you couldn't pretend it wasn't anything, you'd give yourself away.
'All right,' Alicia said. 'I'll play the game.'
By the way their mother smiled, she'd also sneaked a message past her sisters. 'Good, Alicia,' Lise Gimpel said. 'In that case, I'll get back to what I was doing.' She went down the hall. She went down the stairs.
Roxane eyed Alicia expectantly. Francesca eyed her suspiciously, as if to say,You can't just start and stop like that. But Alicia could. At first, she felt as if she were in one of the little plays students sometimes had to put on at school, as if this weren't happening to her but to the person she was pretending to be. The longer she did it, though, the more natural it got.
She and her sisters foiled the doll that was being a Jew. Another doll brought an-imaginary-sack of gold, so the dragons, who'd been tricked out of theirs, got to keep their cave. Then, while the Jew was gloating over his ill- gotten gains, more dolls, these proper Aryans, swooped down on him. They took him away to another box.
Roxane closed the lid. 'And that'll be the end of him,' she chortled. Then, in a more practical frame of mind, she added, 'Till we need him for another game, anyhow.'
'See, Alicia?' Francesca said. 'That was pretty good.'
'I suppose so,' Alicia said: for her, no small admission, and more than enough to satisfy her sister.But it's not all a game, she thought. Some of the things her father had said made that very plain.If you put a real person in a box and close the lid and go, that'll be the end of him. He won't come out again for the next game. Roxane wouldn't understand. She was too little. Alicia had trouble understanding it herself. One of the teachers at her school, though, had had the misfortune to step in front of a bus. And Frau Zoglmann would never be back again.
Death was permanent, no matter what Roxane thought. Yes, death was permanent. And so was fear.
III
'Aren't you going to lunch?' asked Walther Stutzman's boss, a big, beefy fellow named Gustav Priepke.
Walther shook his head. 'Not today. I'm swamped.'
'You?' Priepke scratched his head. 'Maybe we need more system designers. If you've got as much as you can handle, everybody else is bound to be drowning. You're the one who keeps the whole section afloat.'
'Thanks.' Just at that moment, Stutzman would have preferred a less enviable efficiency record. He said, 'If I get a chance, I'll grab something at the office canteen later on.'
His boss made a face. 'Make sure you tell your wife you may never see her again first. I'm going down the street to a real restaurant instead.' Off he went. The belly that hung over his belt said he liked good food, or at least lots of food.
Alone in the cubicle, Walther typed in a security code he wasn't supposed to use. Because of what he did, he had unusual access to the Reich 's electronic networks. He could have wreaked untold havoc if that were what he wanted. It wasn't. Staying invisible, and helping other people stay invisible, counted for much more.
Nobody at Zeiss Computing should have been able to access the official genealogical records of the Germanic Empire. But Walther's father had helped transfer those records from paper to computers. He'd left a few highly unofficial ways to get into them. Those wouldn't stay safe if anyone used them too often. Here, though…Here, Stutzman judged the risk worth taking.
Richard Klein's ancestry appeared on the monitor in front of him. His own father had given Richard's grandfather a perfect Aryan pedigree, at least in the database. In those terror-filled days, no one had taken the least chance with blight on a family tree. Now, though, if someone suddenly suspicious because of the dreadful misfortune that had befallen Richard's baby should compare electronic records with whatever lingered in a dusty file drawer somewhere…
'That would not be good,' Walther murmured.
He went back seven generations in Klein's family and changed the entry under Religion for one of his multiple-great-grandmothers from LUTHERAN to UNKNOWN. Then he did the same thing with two of Maria Klein's even more distant ancestors. After studying his handiwork, he nodded to himself and left the genealogical records.
That should take care of it,he thought. Possible Jews so far back in the woodpile were safe. Anyone applying for the SS had to show his ancestors had been Judenfrei for longer than that, but Richard Klein, who made a good living playing the trombone, was never going to apply for that service. And finding distant ancestors who might have been Jews in his family tree and his wife's would keep the Security Police from wondering if the Kleins themselves carried their blood and their faith down through the generations.It had better, anyhow.
One more danger remained. A program on a machine somewhere in the Zeiss works recorded every keystroke every employee made. If anyone ever started wondering about one Walther Stutzman, he could go through the record and see that Walther had done things he wasn't authorized to do. He could…till Walther keyed in the phrase RED CHALK AND GREEN CHEESE. A dialog box appeared on his monitor. He entered the time he'd begun fiddling with the genealogical records and the time he'd left them. The hidden override on the keystroke monitor would substitute a copy of what he'd been doing yesterday during that period for what he'd actually done today.
He muttered to himself. This was only the third time he could remember using the override. It carried risks of its own. Those, though, were smaller than the risk of showing he was mucking about with anything connected to Jews. He couldn't think of any risk bigger than that one.
After he got back from the canteen-where lunch, Gustav Priepke notwithstanding, wasn't half bad-he called Esther. 'I've taken care of the shopping,' he said.
'Oh, good,' his wife answered. 'You'll bring home something nice for me, won't you?'
Walther laughed. 'Of course. What else have I got to spend my money on?'
'That's why I love you: you have the right attitude,' Esther said. They chatted for a couple of minutes. Then he hung up. He assumed any line out from the office could be tapped at any time. Esther had understood what he was telling her, though, and he didn't think anyone from the Security Police could have.
His boss stuck his head into Stutzman's cubicle. Priepke was smoking a pipe apparently charged with
