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.'
The blue glare Erika turned on him might have come from twin acetylene torches. 'I already know what you think. I ought to-I've heard it often enough. I'm trying to find out what Heinrich thinks.'
Wherever that anger came from, it was genuine. Heinrich wondered whether Erika really had her sights set on him, or whether she was only using him to make Willi angry and jealous. Either way, it worked. Willi visibly steamed. Heinrich said, 'Like I told you, I don't know what to think. How about you, Erika?' He regretted the last question as soon as the words were out of his mouth, which was, of course, too late.
'Me? I think it's about time somebody brought this up,' she said. 'Who is the Reich for, if it's not for the people in it? And if it's for us, shouldn't we have some say about who runs it?'
Heinrich agreed with that, to the extent that he could. He would never have dared to say it out loud, though. Willi Dorsch sneered. 'My wife, the democrat. This iswhy Hitler changed things after the first edition. Look what that kind of nonsense got the French. Look what it got the Americans. If you go around electing politicians, they'll kiss the backsides of the people who voted them in. You need men who canlead, not follow.'
At long last, Lise brought in the cakes and coffee. She set plate and cup in front of Willi. 'Here. Why don't you lead off on this?'
'Thanks, Lise,' Willi said as he cut himself a slice of cake. 'I don't hear you going on about how wonderful the stupid first edition is. You've got the sense to know it's rubbish.'
His wife said, 'I'm with Heinrich. I can't do anything much about it one way or the other. What's the point of fussing over something like that?'
'Thereis a point,' Erika Dorsch insisted. 'If the Party Bonzen know the people are looking over their shoulder and just waiting to throw them out if they do something stupid or feather their own nests, maybe they'll watch themselves.'
Heinrich had the same hope. Wouldn't leaders responsible to the people they ruled be milder than leaders responsible to no one but their courtiers? They could hardly be harsher. No matter what he hoped, though, he'd had keeping quiet and staying noncommittal inalterably drummed into him. Silence meant more than security. Silence meant survival.
And that held true for others besides the last few hidden Jews, as Willi pointed out: 'When all this is over, when we've got ourselves a new Fuhrer, the Security Police are going to take a good, long look at everybody who babbled about the first edition and how wonderful it is. They may figure some people are just fools, and let them off the hook. But some people, the agitators, will win themselves noodles for their big mouths.' The camp slang for a bullet in the back of the neck had become part of the ordinary German language.
All he succeeded in doing was getting his wife angry again. 'So what shall we do, then?' Erika snapped. 'Sit on our hands and keep quiet because we're afraid? Pretend we're nothing but a bunch of Mussulmen?' That was camp slang, too, slang for prisoners who'd given up and were waiting to die.
Her question prompted only one answer from Heinrich.Yes, he thought.What else is there? Don't you realize what you're up against?
Maybe Erika didn't. She'd lived a life of comfort and privilege, confident she was one of the Herrenvolk. So had most Germans in the forty years since the United States went down. They were top dogs, and seldom had to think about how they stayed on top.
Sure enough, Erika stuck out her chin and said, 'I'm just as good an Aryan as any of the Party big shots.
I'm just as good an Aryan as Kurt Haldweim was-and so are you, Willi, and Heinrich and Lise, if you'd just stand up on your hind legs about it.' Could sheer Aryan arrogance pave the way for the measures the first edition of Mein Kampf outlined? There was a notion that hadn't occurred to Heinrich up till now.We're all set about everyone else, so we must be equal to one another. It made a very Germanic kind of sense. But just because Erika thought it was true, would anyone else? That was liable to be a different story.
