Willi said, 'I think we'd better head for home. Some nights there's just no reasoning with some people.'
Though he did his best to sound cheerful, Heinrich thought he was fuming underneath. Erika didn't help when she said, 'I've been telling you that for years, and you never paid any attention to me.'
They were still sniping at each other when they left the Gimpel house and headed up the street toward the bus stop. Heinrich closed the door behind them. 'Whew!' he said-a long whoosh of air. 'Yes.' Lise stretched the word to three times its usual length. 'That was a fascinating evening, wasn't it?'
'There's a good word for it.' Heinrich could imagine several other words he might have used. Fascinating was the safest one he could come up with. 'I don't think you're part of the problem between Willi and Erika,' his wife said.
'That's good,' he answered, most sincerely. 'I don't think you're part of the problem,' Lise repeated, 'but I think Erika thinks you're part of the solution.'
'You…may be right.' Heinrich didn't want to admit even that much. It felt dangerous: not dangerous in the hauled-off-to-an-extermination-camp sense, but dangerous in the simpler, more normal, this-complicates-my-life sense. He was not the sort of man who cared for danger of any sort.
Lise tapped her foot on the tile of the entry hall. 'And if I am right, what are you going to do about it?'
'Me? Nothing!' he exclaimed. The alarm in his voice must have got through to her, because she relaxed-a little. 'Good,' she said.
'That's the right answer.' She paused pensively. 'Erika's a very good-looking woman, isn't she?' Heinrich couldn't even say no. She would have known he was lying. 'I suppose so,' he mumbled.
'Maybe it's not such a bad thing you have more on your mind than most husbands.' Lise tried to eye him severely, but a smile curled up the corners of her mouth in spite of herself. The same thing had occurred to Heinrich not so long before. He was not about to admit that to Lise. He told himself Security Police torturers couldn't have torn it from him, but he knew he was liable to be wrong. Those people were very good at what they did, and got a lot of practice doing it. He realized he had to say something. He couldn't just keep standing there. Otherwise, Lise was liable to think he thought it was too bad he had more on his mind than most husbands, which was the last thing he wanted. 'I know when I'm well off,' he told her.
That turned the tentative, reluctant smile wide and happy. 'Good,' she said. 'You'd better.' She paused. 'Do you know when you're well off well enough to help me clean up?'
'I suppose so,' he said once more, as halfheartedly as he had when admitting Erika Dorsch was pretty.
Lise sent him a sharp look. Then she figured out why he'd sounded the way he had. She made as if to throw something at him. 'It's a good thing I've known you for a long time,' she said.
'Yes, I think so, too,' Heinrich said, and that, for once, turned out to be just the right answer.
Esther Stutzman turned the key to get into Dr. Dambach's outer office. 'Good morning,Frau Stutzman,' the pediatrician called from his inner sanctum.
'Good morning, Doctor,' she answered. 'Have you been here long?'
'A while,' Dambach said. 'Would you please see to the coffeemaker? It's turning out nothing but sludge.'
'Of course.' When Esther did, she discovered he'd put three times as much coffee on the filter as he should have. She didn't point that out to him; experience had taught her that pointing such things out did no good. With children, he knew what he was doing. With the coffeemaker…no. She just set things to rights and brought him a proper cup of coffee.
'Danke schon,'he said. 'I don't know what goes wrong when I put my hands on that machine, but something always does. I can't understand it. I follow the instructions…'
'Yes, Doctor,' Esther replied. From what Irma, the afternoon receptionist, said, she wasn't the only one who'd given up arguing with Dambach about the coffeemaker.
He sipped from the cup Esther had brought him. 'This is much better,' he told her. 'I don't know how you make that miserable thing behave, but you always manage to.' Esther only smiled. If the pediatrician wanted to think she was a genius when it came to coffee, she wouldn't complain. He tapped at the papers on his desk. 'I've found something interesting-something peculiar, even.'
Was he trying to show that he was good for something even if he couldn't make coffee worth a damn? Esther already knew that. She also knew she had to ask, 'What is it, Dr. Dambach?' and sound interested when she did.
And then, all of a sudden, shewas interested, vitally and painfully interested, for he said, 'Do you remember the case of Paul Klein a few days ago?'
'The poor baby with that horrible disease?' Esther said, doing her best not to think,The poor baby who's a Jew.
'Yes, that's right. I have found a fascinating discrepancy on his parents' genealogical records.'
Dear God! Did Walther make a mistake?None of the fear Esther felt showed on her face. If she'd shown fear whenever she felt it, she would have gone around looking panic-stricken all the time. When she said, 'Really?' she sounded intrigued, but no more than a good secretary should have.
Dr. Dambach nodded. 'I don't know what to make of it, either,' he said. 'In the records I got from the Reichs Genealogical Office, both Richard and Maria Klein are shown to have distant ancestors who may possibly have been…well, Jews.'
'Good heavens!' Esther had had a lot of practice simulating that kind of shock.
'As I say, these were distant ancestors,' Dambach went on hastily. 'Nothing to involve the Security Police, believe me. I don't care for that business any more than you do.'I doubt that, Esther thought.I doubt that very much. The pediatrician, fortunately oblivious, continued. 'But the slight Jewish taint would help account for the presence of the Tay-Sachs gene on both sides of the family.'
'I see,' Esther said. What she didn't see was where the problem lay in that case.
Dambach proceeded to spell it out for her: 'While I was going through the Kleins' records, I happened to come across another copy of their family tree, one they'd given me when Paul's older brother, Eduard, was born.Those pedigrees show unquestioned Aryan ancestry on both sides of the family, as far back as can be traced.'
'How…very strange,' Esther said through lips suddenly stiff with dread. Changing a computer record threw any future hounds off the scent, yes. But compare the change to a printout from before it was made…I should have pulled those records from Eduard's chart,Esther thought. But it had never crossed her mind. Eduard had been born before she came to work at Dambach's office, and she'd forgotten about his files. Guilt made her want to sink through the floor.
'Strange indeed. I've never seen another case like it,' Dr. Dambach said. 'And what's even stranger is, I called the Reichs Genealogical Office yesterday afternoon, and they said their records show no signs of tampering.'
Thank heaven for that,Esther thought.Walther's safe. But were Richard and Maria Klein? 'Maybe…I hate to say this of people, but maybe they tried to hide their Jews in the woodpile, and used altered documents to do it,' Esther suggested, doing her best for them. 'Even if you're not enough of a Mischling to be disposed of, a lot of folks don't care to have anything to do with you if you've got even a trace of Jew blood.'
'Altering official documents is illegal,' Dambach said severely. But then he paused, a thoughtful expression on his round face. 'Still, I suppose it could be. It makes more sense than anything I thought of. I would have hoped, though, that the Kleins might have trusted their children's physician. I am, after all, a man with some experience of the world. I know that a small taint of Jewish ancestry may be forgiven. It's not as if they were half breeds or full bloods, for heaven's sake-as if there were such folk at the heart of the Reich in this day and age.'
'Of course not, Doctor. What a ridiculous idea.' Esther Stutzman clamped down hard on a scream. Dr. Dambach thought of himself as a man of the world, but he thought-he'd been trained to think-of Jews as different from other people. He thought of himself as tolerant for being willing to ignore some distant trace of Jewish ancestry. And so, for the Greater German Reich, he was…
The pediatrician arranged papers in a neat stack. 'As I say, I am a man with some experience of the world. I have seen forged genealogical papers before. You would be surprised how many people want to claim a grander ancestry than they really own. Most of them are crude jobs, though-altered photocopies and such. But what the Kleins gave me with Eduard seems perfectly authentic.'
That's because itisperfectly authentic, at least as far as the Reichs Genealogical Office knows. 'As long as you have the proper information now, is there really any point to making a fuss?' Esther said. If Dambach said no,
