all.' Not only did he mean it, it sounded like an answer to what she'd just said. He could have done much worse.
He could also have done better. Erika's sour laugh proved that. 'Wish for the moon while you're at it.'
Heinrich could have laughed even more sourly. When she wished for the moon, the wildest thing she could think of was repairing what had gone wrong between her husband and her. Heinrich's wish would have been not only lunar but lunatic: he would have wished for the chance to live openly as what he was. He knew too well that that wasn't going to happen no matter how hard he wished.
All that went through his mind in what couldn't have been more than a heartbeat. Erika hardly even paused as she went on, 'You don't need to wish, do you? You've really got the world by the tail.' He did laugh then. He knew he shouldn't, but he couldn't help himself. That made Erika angry. 'You do,' she insisted.
'Not likely,' Heinrich said. He couldn't tell her why, but hoped his voice carried conviction.
Evidently not, for she said, 'No? I didn't see the Fuhrer paying a call on my dear Willi.'
If anybody had called Heinrichdear in that tone of voice, he would have run away as fast as he could. He answered, 'He might have, but I'm the specialist on the United States, and he wanted to find out something about the Americans.' Even that was more than he felt comfortable saying. Along with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he also worshiped Security, a jealous god indeed. But Erika already knew what he did. If she didn't wish Willi would dry up and blow away, she could figure this out for herself.
Slowly, she said, 'There are times when you're too damned modest for your own good, too.'
She's angry atmenow, he realized in astonished dismay.What the devil did I do? 'I told you the truth,' he said.
'No, I'll tell you the truth,' Erika said. 'The truth is, the Fuhrer came to see you. You, not anybody else. The truth is, that's important. It could make you important. And the truth is, you don't seem to want to do anything about it or even admit it.'
She might have been a wife giving a husband a pep talk. Shewas a wife giving a husband a pep talk. The only trouble was, she wasn't Heinrich's wife, and she didn't know him as well as she thought she did. 'I don't want to be important,' he said, which was not the smallest understatement he'd ever made. 'I don't, Erika, and that's the truth, too.'
A long silence followed. Heinrich hoped she would lose her temper, hang up on him, and either leave him alone or just think of him as her husband's friend-somebody who was fun to drink wine with and a decent bridge player, but nothing more than that.
What he hoped for and what he got were two different things. 'Well, at least you know your own mind,' Erika said at last. 'At least you've got a mind to know. You don't do all of your thinking below the belt. I like that. It's different in a man.'
Did she realize how much of her own thinking she was doing below the belt? Not as far as Heinrich could see, she didn't. He almost pointed it out to her. At the last minute, he didn't. Talking with her about things below the belt struck him as a very bad idea.
'I'd better go,' was what he did say. 'Is there a message for Willi?'
'Tell him I hope Ilse gives him the clap,' Erika answered promptly. 'He won't have the chance to give it to me, and you can tell him that, too.' She did hang up then, loudly.
Heinrich hung up, too. Rubbing at his ear, he pulled a message pad from his top desk drawer.Erika called while you were out, he wrote.No need to call her back. If she wanted to deliver any more forceful message, she could do it herself. He put the small sheet of yellow paper on Willi's desk. It didn't spontaneously combust. As he retreated to his own desk, he wondered why.
Willi came back to the office about half an hour later. He looked almost indecently pleased with himself-and that probably was the word for it, too. Ilse, by contrast, just sat down and started typing. Willi picked up the message. 'What's this?' he said. He read it and set it down, then started to laugh. He looked over at Heinrich. 'What did she really say?'
'You can ask her yourself and find out,' Heinrich answered.
'No, thanks.' Willi laughed again. 'She thinks the world revolves around her. High time she finds out she's wrong.'
Don't you do the same?Heinrich wondered. But he couldn't ask Willi that, any more than he could have asked Erika about the way she thought. Neither one of them would have taken the question seriously, and they both would have got angry at him. He wanted that no more than he wanted any other kind of notice.
Willi said, 'You're our fair-haired boy right now. Why don't you fix Erika up with Buckliger? That would make everybody happy.'
'You really are out of your mind!' Heinrich exclaimed in horror.
'Thank you,' Willi said, which only disconcerted him more. 'I thought it was the-what do you call it? — the elegant solution, that's what I'm trying to say.'
'Shall I tell you all the things that are wrong with it?' Heinrich asked. 'How much time have you got? Have you got all day? Have you got all week?'
'What I've got is a report to write.' Willi looked lugubrious. 'The boss wants it this afternoon, too. I'm going to have to rush like hell to finish it on time.'
'You wouldn't, if-' Heinrich broke off. Telling Willi he'd have less to do now if he hadn't spent a long, long lunchtime screwing his secretary was true. Some true things, though, just weren't helpful.
'Yes, Mommy,' Willi said, which proved this was indeed one of those things.
'All right. All right.' Nothing annoyed Heinrich like being condescended to. 'But if you're going to complain about what you've got to do, you'd better have a look at what you've been doing.'
'I did. A nice, close look, too.' Willi's expression left no doubt what he meant.
Heinrich found nothing to say to that, which was no doubt exactly what Willi'd had in mind. Shaking his head, he went back to work. Over at the other desk, Willi looked as desperately busy as a man juggling knives and torches. He would type like a man possessed, then shift to the calculator, mutter at the results, and go back to the keyboard.
At five o'clock, Heinrich got up. He put on his coat and his cap. 'I'm heading for the bus stop,' he said. 'Are you coming?'
'No, dammit.' Willi shook his head, looking harassed. 'I'm still busy.'
'Too bad,' Heinrich said, and left. Willi stared after him, then plunged back into the report.
IX
When Susanna Weiss listened to the radio in her office, she usually hunted for Mozart or Handel or Haydn or Beethoven or Bach. Verdi or Vivaldi would do in a pinch. The Italians were reckoned frivolous, but they were still allies; you couldn't get in trouble for listening to them.
She sometimes let Wagner blare out into the hallway, too. That was protective coloration, pure and simple, and not only because she despised him as an anti-Semite. No matter how the Nazis had slobbered over him for the past eighty years and more, she couldn't take him seriously.
A lone, lorn woman stands upon a stage trying to make herself heard,an Englishman had written at the start of the twentieth century.One hundred and forty men, all armed with powerful instruments, well-organised, and most of them looking well-fed, combine to make it impossible for a single note of that poor woman's voice to be heard above their din. She'd seen it that way long before she ran into Jerome K. Jerome. Now she couldn't even listen to Wagner without wanting to giggle.
These days, though, less classical music lilted from the radio. She tuned it to the news station more and more often. A lot of what she heard was the same wretched sort of propaganda she'd avoided for years.
A lot of it, but not all. Every so often, startling things came out of the speaker. She listened in the hope of hearing more of them.
Whenever the Fuhrer made a speech, she found herself urging him on, thinking,You can do it. I know you can. And sometimes Heinz Buckliger would, and sometimes he wouldn't. Sometimes he was flat and pedestrian, praising manufacture or agriculture or the Hitler Youth. Then, as she had with too many boyfriends, she decided she'd been
