and sat down in it. 'By how much can we reduce their assessment to let their economy breathe a little easier and still keep ours going?' Noticing Heinrich still stood at attention, he waved him to his chair. He also waved to the rest of the people in the office. 'Relax, I told you. Go back to work. Pretend I'm not here.'
With those trigger-happy SS guards eyeing everybody, that wouldn't be easy. Heinrich dizzily sank into his seat. Of itself, the calculating part of his mind engaged the Fuhrer 's question. Even as another part of him wailed,This can't be happening, he heard himself saying, 'Well, sir, a lot of that depends on how much the Americans think they can get away with not paying if you let up on them. They're looking for signs of weakness.'
'I don't want to be weak,' Buckliger said. 'I do want the Reich to be able to stand on its own two feet without being propped up so much from outside. That sets a bad example, and it sets a bad precedent, too, don't you think?'
He cocked his head to one side. Heinrich realized he really was waiting for an answer.I want the Reichto grow like an onion-with its head in the ground. No, he couldn't very well say that.'Ja, mein Fuhrer,' was less truthful but much safer. As for the numbers…His right hand, flying on automatic pilot, cleared the figures he'd been working with and started entering the ones that would let him answer Buckliger's question.
'You have the data at your fingertips,' the Fuhrer said approvingly. 'That's good. That's very good. Efficient.'
'Thank you, sir. Assuming the Americans will keep on paying the same percentage of a lower assessment as they do of the current one, I would say you could reduce it by…' His voice trailed off as his fingers flew on the keypad. He considered the answer the computer had given him, then passed it to Buckliger: 'By about nine percent.'
'Those are the figures from the machine, right?' Buckliger said. Heinrich nodded. the Fuhrer asked, 'What's your personal opinion of them?'
'That if you reduce the proposed assessment by nine percent, you'll get back fifteen to twenty percent less. That's if you don't go out and take the full assessment by force. Give the Americans a centimeter and they'll take a kilometer.'
'I want to use less force in America, not more,' Buckliger said. Since he was moving a division back to the Reich, Heinrich believed him. He went on, 'All right, then. To get nine percent less revenue from the Americans, by how much would I have to reduce the assessment?'
That was a genuinely interesting question. 'This is only an estimate, you understand,' Heinrich warned as he started stroking the keypad again. 'The computer is very good with numbers, not so good at figuring out how much people are liable to cheat.'
'Aber naturlich.'the Fuhrer laughed. 'We need other people for that.'
'Uh, yes, sir,' Heinrich said. Then he gave his attention back to the screen. Designing a function on the fly to figure out how much more enthusiastically the Americans would cheat if they saw their risks as diminished was nothing he'd ever tried before, but he did it. He punched ENTER one last time, looked at the answer on the screen, and slowly nodded to himself. 'I'd say a formal cut of six percent,mein Fuhrer, would give you an actual cut of nine.'
Buckliger nodded. 'Sounds reasonable.Danke schon. Your number's about what I'd figured for myself.'
Heinrich wondered how to take that. He didn't think Buckliger could have made these calculations for himself. The new Fuhrer had been a bureaucrat, but not that kind of bureaucrat. But Buckliger didn't sound as if he were just trying to make himself sound clever. After a moment, Heinrich realized working out how much the Americans were likely to cheat wasn't only a mathematical calculation. It was also a political calculation. And if anybody could make political calculations, the Fuhrer was, or needed to be, the man.
'Happy to help, sir,' Heinrich said. His own interior calculations hadn't taken more than a second and a half.
Heinz Buckliger gave him another one of those I'm-just-a-regular-fellow smiles. 'Good. I like to have clever people working for me. It keeps the wheels going round.' He got to his feet and nodded to the SS troopers. 'Come on, boys. Now we go and talk with Field Marshal Tetzlaff.' Out they went, some of the guards preceding Buckliger, the rest following.
A considerable silence reigned in the room after the Fuhrer left. Heinrich tried to get back to what he'd been doing beforehand, but discovered he couldn't, not when everybody was staring at him. He simply sat there, dazed. The two thoughts that kept going round and round in his head were Oh, thank God-I got away with it and Lise will never believe this, not in a million years.
'Well, well,' Willi said at last. 'You and Field Marshal Tetzlaff, is it? And he came to see you first. Not too shabby,Herr Gimpel. No, sir, not too shabby.' He got to his feet and saluted, as he had a few minutes earlier for the Fuhrer.
That roused the Berliner's almost automatic cynicism in Heinrich. 'Oh,Quatsch, ' he said. The room exploded in laughter. People came over to pound him on the back and shake his hand. Ilse perched on a corner of his desk, showing a lot of leg. She eyed him with frank calculation. She'd never looked at him that way before. He didn't particularly want her looking at him that way now.
I'm supposed to be invisible, dammit,he thought.How can I be invisible when people keep…noticing me? He felt absurdly indignant.
'Seriously, Heinrich my boy, I'd say your promotion chances just got themselves a kick in the pants.' Willi didn't sound serious. He was grinning. To Heinrich's relief, his friend also didn't sound jealous. Willi went on, 'I can just see your next performance review. There's the examiner, looking over what you've done. 'Ach, ja,consulted with the Fuhrer.' What can he say aboutthat?'
'I don't know. If he's like most performance examiners, he'll find something rude,' Heinrich answered. He hadn't meant it for a joke, but everybody laughed. Someone the Fuhrer consulted had to be a very funny fellow. Heinrich reached for the telephone. 'Excuse me, please. I'm going to call my wife.'
Ilse stopped posing. She got down from his desk and stomped back to Willi's. Heinrich thoughtthat was funny. He dialed for an outside line. When the dial tone shifted, he called his home number.'Bitte?' Lise said.
'Hi, sweetheart. It's me,' Heinrich said. 'You'll never guess who just came in…'
'The Fuhrer came to see a friend of mine last week,' Esther Stutzman told her boss with what she hoped was pardonable pride.
Dr. Dambach nodded. He never seemed to get very excited about anything. 'Good for your friend,' he answered now. 'I also know some people who have met him, though I haven't myself.'
'Neither have I.' Esther had never imagined wanting to meet the ruler of the Greater German Reich and the Germanic Empire, either. But maybe Buckliger was different. Maybe. Even wondering felt not only strange but also more than a little unnatural.
'I've been doing something interesting,' Dr. Dambach said.
'Oh? What's that?' Esther asked, as she was plainly meant to do. Whatever it was, it didn't involve the coffeemaker. What the pediatrician thought interesting there was liable to seem ghastly to anybody else. Some of the things he'd done trying to fix coffee merited the word. Lately, though, the coffeemaker had been fine.
When he spoke, Esther wished he'd spent his time messing with the machine, for he said, 'Do you remember how the Kleins' genealogy charts had two different versions?' He made it a casual question, for he didn't know how important it was to Esther.
'Yes, I do,' she answered.I'm not likely to forget, went through her head.You didn't know it, but you were trying to kill me, too.
And he still was, still in perfect ignorance. 'Well, I've been going through some of the other patients' charts, to see if I can find more with the same problem.'
'I certainly hope not!' Esther exclaimed. Dr. Dambach would reckon the horror in her voice a horror of disorder and illegality, the sort of horror he had himself. And, indeed, she was acquainted with that horror in her everyday life. But what made her voice go high and shrill now was old and deeper and less…less Germanic. It was raw fear, fear of disaster, fear of death. She had to fight to hold it in check as she asked, 'Have-have you found any?'
Dr. Dambach paused to sip from the cup of coffee she'd made for him. That only gave her a few more seconds to worry and to try to remember whether Walther had had to change anybody else's pedigree. She didn't think so. No, she didn'tthink so, but doubt tore at her. Maybe she'd forgotten. Maybe he'd done it without bothering
