sometimes wore styles that looked like what SS uniforms would have been if they were designed to titillate rather than terrify.In my day, you'd have done a stretch in a camp for clothes like that, Heinrich thought. He laughed at himself.And if going on about 'In my day…' doesn't make me an old fogy, I don't know what would.
Tonight Katarina had on dungarees of blue American denim, which were almost as scandalous as some of her other clothes. She refused to be ordinary. That was dangerous for a Jew. On the other hand, a fair number of young men and women dressed the way she did, so she had a crowd into which she could blend in.
'Have fun with your bridge,' she told Heinrich and Lise. She might have been saying,Have fun with your warm milk and slippers. Kathe's eyes sparkled as she turned to the girls. 'While they're gone, we'll havereal fun, won't we?'
'Ja!' Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane chorused, entranced. Every so often, Heinrich wondered whatreal fun consisted of. He'd never found the girls' heads spinning with hashish after Tante Kathe watched them, so he didn't lose sleep over it, but he did wonder.
Getting out of the house felt good, even if it was only for the short jaunt over to the Dorsches'. As Heinrich and Lise got off the bus, she said, 'Willi and Erika are lucky to live so close to their bus stop.'
Heinrich nodded. 'I've thought the same thing.' Thinking along with your wife was supposed to be another mark of fogydom. He didn't care. He liked thinking along with Lise.
When he rang the bell, Erika opened the door. She smiled at the Gimpels. 'Come on in,' she said. 'Horst will be on in a minute, and Willi wouldn't miss him for the world.' Erika made watching the news sound like a vice.First danger sign, Heinrich thought.
From the front room, Willi's voice rose in excitement: 'Come quick, everybody! I think we've got a new Fuhrer! ' That sent Heinrich and Lise-and Erika-hurrying to join him.
'Germany, awake!' Horst Witzleben spoke in millions of homes as if he were a close friend. 'After long and serious discussions, senior Party, SS, and military leaders have chosen the present minister of heavy industry, Heinz Buckliger, to guide the future of the Greater German Reich and the Germanic Empire. I am proud to be among the first to say, 'Heil Buckliger!'' His arm shot out in the Nazi salute.
Behind him, a new picture appeared on the screen. Heinrich wouldn't have known Heinz Buckliger from the man in the moon. He proved to be a ruddy-faced man of about fifty, with a thick shock of graying blond hair and a toothy smile. 'He's so young!' Erika Dorsch said. A moment later, she added, 'And handsome, too.'
Heinrich didn't know about handsome. Young the new Fuhrer certainly was: younger by far than Kurt Haldweim had been when he began to lead the Reich. 'They passed over a lot of senior people to put him in place,' Willi said. 'The new generation's here at last.'
'The new head of the Reich was born in Breslau in 1959,' Horst Witzleben said. That made Buckliger more than forty years younger than Haldweim-closer to two generations than one. The newsreader went on, 'He studied economics in Munich, graduating with highest honors from the university there. Before joining the Ministry of Heavy Industry, he served for seven years in the Allgemeine — SS, rising to the rank of Hauptsturmfuhrer.'Captain, Heinrich thought, automatically translating to what he thought of as a real rank. Not bad. Not spectacular, but not bad.
'Once in the Ministry,Herr Buckliger rapidly became known as an efficiency expert,' Witzleben said. 'He has promised to bring that passion for efficiency to the Reich as a whole. Here is his first statement after his selection.'
Heinz Buckliger sat at his desk in the Fuhrer 's palace in what was obviously a piece of videotape. 'Volk of the Greater German Reich, I accept the role of Fuhrer with pride, but also with great humility,' he said in a pleasant if not ringing baritone. 'Mindful of the triumphs of the past, I shall do all I can to lead you to a still more glorious future. Many things have grown slack in recent years. I hope to tighten them, and to make the Reich and the Germanic Empire run more smoothly. With your help, I know I shall succeed.'
'He sounds all right,' Willi said as Horst Witzleben reappeared and began talking about the congratulations pouring into the Reich on Buckliger's rise to supreme power.
'So he does,' Heinrich agreed. 'But he's plainly someone's fair-haired boy. I wonder whose.' His first guess for the new Fuhrer 's patron was Lothar Prutzmann, head of the SS: once an SS man, always an SS man. That wasn't a sure thing, but it was the way to bet.
'All right, now we know,' Erika said. 'After that, the rest of the news will be small potatoes. Shall we play some cards?'
'Good idea,' Lise said. Heinrich nodded. Willi's sigh said he would have liked to stay in front of the televisor, but democracy was alive and well in the Dorsch household, even if the big wheels in the German government had been able to ignore it in choosing Heinz Buckliger.
The very first hand they played, Willi bid and made a small slam in clubs. Heinrich and Lise couldn't do a thing about it. If you didn't have the cards, you were stuck. Willi chortled. Heinrich said, 'I wonder what's on the news.'
On the next hand, Erika Dorsch made three no-trump: as quick and one-sided a rubber as possible. Lise said, 'Heinrich's right. Watching the news seems better and better.' Their hosts laughed at them.
They played steadily, with a couple of pauses when Erika helped the Dorsches' son and daughter with their homework and one when Willi broke up a squabble between the children. 'This all looks and sounds familiar,' Heinrich said.
'Life goes on,' Erika said, 'one way or another.' If that wasn't a hooded glance she sent toward Willi, Heinrich had never seen one.
Willi himself affected not to notice. Or maybe he really didn't notice; you never could tell with Willi. He said, 'Whose deal is it?'
'Mine, I think,' Lise answered. She gather up the cards and started shuffling. 'It is now, anyway.'
Heinrich got the contract when everybody passed at two hearts. Playing it was routine, so much so that things got sidetracked halfway through when Lise and Willi started arguing about a newspaper story on
Babylonian archaeology that they'd both seen and Heinrich and Erika had somehow missed. Willi insisted the find proved Hammurabi's code was 250 years older than everyone had thought up till now; Lise was just as sure it proved no such thing. As people will when disagreeing about something of such monumental unimportance, they both got more and more certain they were right. As they pointed fingers at each other, they might have forgotten anyone else was in the room-or, for that matter, on the planet.
Heinrich set his cards on the table, face down. Lise hardly ever got so excited when she argued with him, and he was glad she didn't. If Willi raised his voice and turned red-well, Willi was in the habit of doing such things. 'A good thing they're friends, or they'd murder each other,' Heinrich remarked to Erika.
With all the noise Lise and Willi were making, he wasn't sure she even heard him. But she nodded. 'Willi's as bad as the children,' she said, like Heinrich talking under the noise of the argument. 'You, now, you have too much sense to waste your time with such foolishness.'
'I don't know,' he said. 'Lise's doing it, and she's got more sense than I do.'
'Maybe.' Erika waved her hand. 'But I don't want to go to bed with Lise.'
What Heinrich wanted to say was,Are you out of your mind? Even if she did want to sleep with him (which struck him as strange enough when she was married to the much handsomer Willi), to say so in front of her husband and his wife? Maybe she'd known what she was doing, though, because neither Willi nor Lise leaped from a chair with a cry of fury. They were too busy quarreling over cuneiform styles and tree-ring chronology and other things about which neither of them knew a great deal.
Which left Heinrich the question of how to respond. Part of him knew exactly how he would like to respond. The rest of him told that part to shut up and forget about it. If he hadn't been happy with Lise, or maybe if he'd just been a few years younger, a few years randier, a few years stupider (assuming those last two weren't one and the same), that one part might have won the argument, especially since he got the idea he could have taken Erika right there on the card table without making either Willi or Lise notice.
But, things being as they were, yielding to temptation wasn't practical. And so he answered, 'I'm sorry, but with all the racket these two are making, I didn't hear a word you said.'
Erika Dorsch's sour smile told him she didn't believe a word of it. Whatdid she believe? That he didn't want to go to bed with her? Or just that he didn't want to do anything about it then and there?Isn't that an interesting question?
Deciding he didn't want to know the answer, Heinrich reached out and waved his hand up and down between
