she could go out to her receptionist's station and breathe a sigh of relief when he wasn't looking.
But Dambach didn't say anything at all. He just sat there eyeing the different sets of genealogical records. Esther knew she'd pushed things as far as she could. If she said another word, her boss would start wondering why she was sticking up for the Kleins so much.Don't let anyone start wondering about you might have been the eleventh commandment for Jews in the Reich. A smile on her face, she walked out of Dr. Dambach's private office.
She had plenty with which to busy herself out front: filing, billing, preparing dunning letters for people whose payments were late. She bit her lip when the pediatrician used the telephone, even though she couldn't make out whom he was calling.His wife, his brother, his mother, she thought hopefully.
The telephone she was in charge of-not Dambach's personal line-began to ring, too. Patients and their parents-mostly their mothers-started coming in. She scheduled appointments and led children and the grownups with them back to examination rooms. Once, she made a followup appointment with a specialist for a boy whose broken arm wasn't healing as straight as Dambach would have liked.
As noon approached, the flood of people coming in slowed down and the flood of people going out picked up. Dr. Dambach sometimes worked straight through lunch, but this didn't look like a day where he would have to. Esther relaxed a little. She got the chance to look around for things she could take care of before she went home. That way, Irma wouldn't have to worry about them this afternoon, and Esther herself wouldn't have to worry about them tomorrow morning.
The last patient had just left when the door to the waiting room opened again. Esther looked up in annoyance-was someone trying to bring in a child without first making an appointment? Unless it was an emergency, she intended to send anyone that foolish away with a flea in his ear.
But the tall man in the unfamiliar dark brown uniform was not carrying a baby or holding a child by the hand. He nodded to her. 'This is the office of Dr. Martin Dambach?' he inquired, his accent Bavarian.
'Yes, that's right,' Esther answered. 'And you are…?'
'Maximilian Ebert,Reichs Genealogical Office, at your service.' He actually clicked his heels. Esther tried to remember the last time she'd seen anyone outside of the cinema do that-tried and failed. The man from the Genealogical Office went on, 'Dr. Dambach is in?'
Esther wanted to tell him no. Had she thought that would make him go away and never come back, she would have. As things were, she had to hide alarm and reluctance when she nodded. 'Yes, he is. One moment, please.' She went back to Dr. Dambach's office. The pediatrician was eating a liverwurst sandwich. 'Excuse me, Doctor, but a Herr Ebert from the Reichs Genealogical Office is here to see you.'
'Is he?' Dr. Dambach said with his mouth full. He swallowed heroically; Esther thought of an anaconda engulfing a tapir. When Dambach spoke again, his voice was clear: 'I didn't expect him so soon. Please tell him he can come in.' He stuck the remains of the sandwich in a desk drawer.
'Danke schon, gnadige Frau,' Ebert said when Esther delivered the message, and he clicked his heels again.Dear lady? Esther wondered. That took politeness a long way when talking to a receptionist. Did he like her looks? It wasn't mutual. He was dark and jowly, and she thought he'd have a nasty temper if he weren't trying to be charming. She was careful to stand well away from him when she led him to the doctor's private office.
They didn't bother closing the door. Esther heard bits of conversation floating out: '…obviously genuine…' '… alsoobviously genuine…' '…don't know what to make of…' '…wouldn't bother but for the Jewish aspect…' '…a puzzlement, without a doubt…'
After twenty minutes or so, Dr. Dambach and Maximilian Ebert emerged together. The man from the Genealogical Office asked Esther, 'What do you know of this business about the Kleins?'
'Should we be talking about this with her?' Dambach asked.
'I don't see why not,' Ebert said. 'She's obviously of impeccable Aryan stock. Well,Frau '-his eye picked up the little name badge at her station-'ah,Frau Stutzman?'
'Only what Dr. Dambach has told me,' Esther answered.Obviously of impeccable Aryan stock. She couldn't shriek laughter, however much she might want to. Cautiously, she went on, 'I do know the Kleins a little away from the office.' If she didn't say that, they could find out. Better to admit it. 'They've always seemed like good enough people. I'm sorry their child has this horrible disease.' Every word of that was true-more true than Maximilian Ebert could know.
'Have you any idea how they could have got two different sets of genealogical records, each one plainly authentic?' Ebert asked.
'No. I don't see how it's possible,' she answered, which was anything but the truth.
'Are you really sure theyare both authentic?' Dr. Dambach asked.
'As certain as I can be without the laboratory work to prove it,' Ebert said. 'I'll take both of them with me to get that. And then, if they do both turn out to be genuine, we'll have to figure out what that means. At the moment, Doctor, I have no more idea than you do. And now I must be off. A pleasure to meet you,Frau Stutzman.Guten Tag.' He touched the brim of his cap and strode out of the office.
'Now we'll get to the bottom of this.' Dr. Dambach sounded as if he looked forward to the prospect.
'So we will.' Esther hoped she sounded the same way, even if it was another lie. No-especially if it was another lie.
The Medieval English Association meeting was winding down. In another couple of days, Susanna Weiss would have to fly back to Berlin. The conference hadn't been the most exciting she'd ever attended. She was bringing home material for at least two articles. That would keep Professor Oppenhoff happy. But there hadn't been any really spectacular papers and there hadn't been any really juicy scandals. Without the one or the other, the conclave itself would go down as less than memorable.
Still, there were compensations. First and foremost, there was London itself. Along with her ideas for articles, Susanna was also bringing home enough new books-used books, actually-to make excess baggage charges all but certain. Her campaign against the bookstores of London would have made General Guderian sit up and take notes. She always shopped as if she were a big-game hunter organizing a safari. All she lacked were beaters to drive the books off the shelves and into the range of her high-powered account card. She had to find the volumes and pick them out herself-but that was part of the sport.
Along with the books, she was bringing back several pairs of shoes. She'd gone after them with the same effective bravado she'd used on her bookstore campaign. She was particularly proud of one pair, which were covered all over with multicolored sequins. If she wore them to a faculty meeting, she might give the department chairman heart failure-and if that wasn't worth trying, she didn't know what would be.
She had one more reason for hating to leave London, too: no matter how stodgy the MEA had been this year, the British Union of Fascists across the street had more than made up for it. Susanna thought she might have spent more time at the Crown than she had at the Silver Eagle. She'd got to know several BUF men who thought she was a delegate totheir gathering: not the sort of compliment she most wanted, perhaps, but a compliment all the same.
''Ere's the little lydy!' they would roar when they spotted her, and other endearments in dialects never heard among the scholars of medieval English. They pressed buttons and badges and stickers on her, and bought her pints till her back teeth floated. She would rather have had Scotch, but the rank-and-file fascists were a beer-drinking crowd.
They were also a crowd overwhelmingly in favor of doing business the way the first edition of Mein Kampf outlined. 'Only stands to reason, don't it, dearie?' said a bald-headed, broken-nosed bruiser named Nick, breathing beer fumes into Susanna's face. 'It's the buggers 'oove already got it made 'oo don't want ordinary blokes to 'ave their say.'
'That certainly seems reasonable to me,' Susanna said. Her precise, well-educated tones sent Nick and his pals into gales of laughter. She couldn't help liking them. If there was any hope for changing the way things worked, it rested on their shoulders. But the way they kept laughing while they bragged of brawls and brutalities past chilled her.If they knew I was a Jew, they would laugh like that while they stomped me to death.
She forgave, or at least forgot, their hypothetical sins when they smuggled her onto the floor for the climactic session of their assembly. They didn't think of it as smuggling, of course, and she wore enough BUF ornaments that no one, not her companions and not the even nastier thugs at the doors, even noticed that a membership badge was not among the gewgaws.
Things were undoubtedly livelier here than they were at the Medieval English Association meeting. People
