Willi groaned when he had to get up. 'My head's going to fall off,' he said. 'I almost wish it would.'
'You can probably get aspirins in the station, if you need them that badly,' Heinrich said.
'Well, so I can. And so I will. And I can get coffee, too, even if it's shitty coffee. I was going to wait till I made it to the office and buy them at the canteen, but to hell with that. I feel too lousy.' Willi sounded as haggard as he looked.
When they got to the station, he made a beeline for the little concession stand at the back. Heinrich, meanwhile, bought a Volkischer Beobachter from a vending machine. Willi joined him on the platform a couple of minutes later. He too had a paper under his arm. He peeled two aspirin tablets from a foil packet and used a gulp of coffee to wash them down. Heinrich said, 'That's got to be hell on your stomach, especially if you drank too much last night.'
'Now ask me if I care,' Willi answered. 'The way my head's banging, I'm not going to worry about anything farther south.'
He winced when the train came up, even though it was powered by electricity, and not nearly so noisy or smelly as a steam engine or a diesel locomotive would have been. He let Heinrich sit by the window, and pulled his cap down low on his forehead to keep as much light as he could out of his eyes. When the train got moving, he pretended to read the Volkischer Beobachter, but his yawns and his glazed expression said it was just pretense.
Heinrich, by contrast, went through the paper with his usual care. He tapped a story on page three. 'The Fuhrer 's going to speak on the televisor tomorrow night.'
'Be still, my beating heart.' Willi was indifference personified. 'I've heard a speech or two-thousand-in my time.'
'I know, I know. Most of the time, I'd say the same thing.' Heinrich tapped the Beobachter again. 'But don't you think this particular speech might be interesting, after what he said in Nuremburg?'
'Nobody knows what he said in Nuremburg-nobody except the Bonzen, and they aren't talking much,' Willi replied. But he'd heard the same rumors Heinrich had; he'd heard some of themfrom Heinrich. And maybe the aspirins and coffee were starting to work, for he did perk up a little. 'All right, maybe it will be interesting,' he admitted. 'You never can tell.'
'If he's serious about some of the things he said there-'
'The things people say he said there,' Willi broke in.
'Yes, the things people say he said there.' Heinrich nodded. 'If he said them, and if he meant them-'
Willi interrupted again: 'Half the people-more than half the people-will watch the football game anyhow, or the cooking show, or the one about the SS man where the American spy's always right on the edge of falling out of her dress. I swear she will one of these days.'
Heinrich was damned if he'd let his friend outdo him for cynicism. 'She won't when she's on opposite the Fuhrer 's speech,' he answered. 'The programming director's head would roll if she ended up stealing that much of the audience.'
'Mm, you've got a point there,' Willi said. 'Too bad.' He managed a bloodshot leer.
'South Station!' came the call as the train glided to a halt. 'All out for South Station!' Heinrich hurried up the escalators to catch the bus to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. Willi shambled along after him like something created in a mad scientist's experiment that hadn't quite worked.
As soon as they got to the office, Willi headed off to the canteen. He returned with a large foam cup of coffee in each hand, and poured them both down in record time. Not surprisingly, he went to the men's room shortly thereafter, and then again a few minutes later. 'Vitamin P,' he said sheepishly when he came back after the second trip. 'And speaking of Vitamin P, why didn't you tell me my eyes looked like two pissholes in the snow?'
'What could you have done if I had?' Heinrich asked.
'Well, nothing, but even so…' Willi opened those vein-tracked eyes very wide now. 'I'm awake. I may live. I may even decide I want to.'
Ilse came up to set some papers on his desk. She started to turn away, then stopped and did one of the better double takes Heinrich had seen. 'Good God! What happened to you?' she said, almost exactly echoing his words of an hour earlier.
'Erika and I had a small disagreement last night,' Willi answered. 'Yes, that's about right. Just a small disagreement.'
'You poor dear!' Ilse was the very picture of sympathy, fussing over him, straightening his collar, and generally making him feel three meters tall. He lapped it up like a cat in front of a bowl of cream. Heinrich had to suppress a strong impulse to retch. On the other hand, he wondered how long it had been since Erika buttered Willi up like that. Such artful dodges weren't her style.
Later that morning, Willi said, 'I'm going to lunch with Ilse today.'
'Why am I not surprised?' The tart retort came out of Heinrich's mouth before he could stop it.
His friend turned red. 'I don't know. Why aren't you? You've got things going good for you now, so you get all sanctimonious. If you were the one with troubles, I wouldn't look down my nose at you.'
'You wouldn't? What's the fun in having a nose if you don't look down it?' Heinrich replied, even more deadpan than usual.
Willi looked at him, started to say something, and then started to laugh instead. 'Dammit, how am I supposed to stay angry at you when you come back with things like that?'
'If you work at it, I expect you'll manage,' Heinrich said, again with next to no inflection in his voice. He got another laugh from Willi, too, although he hadn't been joking.
Ilse snuggled up to Willi as they walked toward the door. Willi slipped his arm around her waist. Heinrich went back to his paperwork.Would I do something like that if I were having trouble with Lise? he wondered.Who knows? Maybe I would. But he had trouble imagining trouble with Lise.Maybe I don't understand how lucky I am.
The telephone on Willi's desk rang. Heinrich was going to let it keep ringing till whoever was on the other end got sick of it and hung up. But what if it turned out to be somebody with important business? He picked up his own phone and dialed Willi's extension to transfer the call. 'Analysis-this is Heinrich Gimpel.'
'Oh, hello, Heinrich-I wanted to talk to Willi.' That was Erika Dorsch's voice. Heinrich winced. He wished he'd let the phone ring. When he didn't answer right away, she asked, 'Where is he?' in a way he didn't like at all.
He responded with the exact and literal truth: 'You missed him by two minutes-he just went to lunch.'
'And he didn't go with you, obviously,' Erika said. Heinrichreally wished he hadn't answered the telephone. Willi's wife went on, 'Did he go with the lovely and talented Ilse instead?'
'I, ah, didn't see him leave,' Heinrich said, which was true in the highly technical sense that he'd looked down at the papers on his desk before Willi actually opened the door.
'Now tell me another one, Heinrich. You aren't much of a liar, you know,' Erika said. The way she meant it, that might have been true. In several ways she knew nothing about, it couldn't have been more wrong. That she knew nothing about those several ways proved how wrong it was.
He said, 'Erika, I'm not his father. I'm not his watchdog, either. I don't keep an eye on him every minute.'
'Somebody ought to,' Erika Dorsch said bitterly. 'Is something wrong with me, Heinrich? Am I ugly? Am I unattractive?'
'You ought to know better than that,' he said, too surprised at the question not to give her an honest answer.
'Should I?' she said. 'If something isn't wrong with me, why have we only made love six or seven times this year? Why is Willi going around with that round-heeled little chippie instead of me?'
'I don't know,' Heinrich answered, which was also certainly true. If he'd had a choice between…But he didn't have choices like that, so what was the point of imagining he did? He said, 'Don't you think you'd do better asking Willi? He might actually tell you.'
'He'd tell me a load of garbage. That's what he's been telling me all along,' Erika said. 'What's he been telling you? That's probably more garbage.'
Heinrich pretended not to hear her. Bad enough to have to listen to both sides in a dissolving marriage. To tell tales from one to the other…He shook his head. No. He didn't know much about such things, but he knew better than that.
