sushi bar. 'What a bastardly idea! What the Japs know about real programming-'
'Is just what we need right now,' Walther broke in.
'Jesus Christ!' Priepke said harshly. 'You know what Hitler said about the Japs in Mein Kampf. If they didn't have Aryans to steal ideas from, their culture would freeze solid again likethat.' He snapped his fingers.
'Do you want to talk about politics or computers?' Walther asked. 'I don't care about politics. I don't care at all. What I care about are computers. The Japanese have some ideas we can use, and I think we can extract them without too much trouble. Which counts for more, ideology or the operating system?'
'You wouldn't have dared talk like that in Himmler's time, let alone Hitler's.'
'Oh, yes, I would,' Walther said. 'The Russians had a terrific panzer in the Second World War. The T-34 was better than anything we brought against it, but we had better crews, so we won. Our next panzer, the Panther, borrowed-stole-all sorts of ideas from the T-34. The designers didn't care who built it. All they cared about was that it was a good machine.'
His boss grunted again, this time meditatively. Then he said, 'What if the code's got traps in it?'
'If we can't find them, are we really smarter than the Japanese?' Walther asked.
One more grunt. Priepke said, 'I can't decide that on my own. I don't want the Security Police landing on us with both feet half an hour after we start.' He stormed away from Walther's cubicle.
Walther wondered whether he should have kept his mouth shut. Would the Security Police start asking him nasty questions now? All he'd wanted was to do the job the people set over him told him to do. Was that too much to hope for? Maybe it was.No good deed goes unpunished, he thought sourly.
Gustav Priepke didn't come back for more than an hour. That worried Walther, too. Had he got his boss in trouble? Or was the trouble waiting forhim instead? He relaxed-a little-when Priepke did return. The big, burly man gave him a comic-opera Oriental bow. 'Velly good. We tly that,' he said in what he imagined was Japanese- accented German.
Walther made a face. 'I wish I'd never suggested it,' he said. Priepke laughed. He thought Walther was kidding, as he'd been. Walther knew too well he wasn't.
A chilly wind blew through Stahnsdorf. Rain was coming, but it hadn't got there yet. Inside the Gimpels' house, everything was warm and cozy. Heinrich moved at his wife's direction, putting this away and dusting that. He didn't move fast enough to suit her. 'What's the matter?' she asked. 'The Dorsches haven't been over in a while. Don't you feel like playing bridge?'
'It's not that,' Heinrich said, and it wasn't. He was always ready to play bridge.
'What is it, then?' Before Lise went on, she looked around to make sure the girls were out of earshot. 'Erika making you nervous?'
'Ha,' he said in a hollow voice. Erika damn well did make him nervous. He hadn't said a word about running into her at Ulbricht's. He still didn't know what to think about that. The doorbell rang. He wasn't going to get a chance to decide now.
Lise was closer, so she opened the door. They all hugged and said hello and asked about children and said how glad they were to see one another. With a flourish, Willi handed Lise his usual offering of a bottle of wine. 'Open it now,' he said. 'When we make mistakes at the bridge table, we always need something to blame them on.'
Erika opened her mouth. Heinrich knew exactly what she was going to say. He didn't feel like having the sniping start before the Dorsches even got out of the front hall. Since he didn't, he forestalled her, asking, 'How are-things?'
They could take that any way they wanted. Willi took it the way Heinrich had intended. He waggled his palm back and forth. 'So-so,' he said. 'We have our ups and downs.' Never one to leave a setup line alone, he finished, 'Maybe not as often as when I was twenty-two, but we manage.'
You'd manage more if it weren't for Ilse. Even you know that. Heinrich didn't say it. He did wonder whether Erika would, and how he could deflect her if she started to. Fortunately, she kept quiet. Heinrich wouldn't have wanted to be on the receiving end of the look she sent Willi, though.
'Let me go open the wine,' Lise said. 'Why doesn't everybody else sit down?'
Willi dealt the first hand. 'And now to give myself thirteen diamonds,' he said grandly.
'As long as you give me thirteen hearts, I don't mind,' Heinrich said.
Reality returned as soon as he picked up his hand, which showed the usual mixture of suits and ten points. Willi opened with a club. Heinrich passed. Erika said, 'Two clubs,' which meant she had some support for Willi but not a great deal. He took it to three, after which everybody passed. And he made three clubs with no overtricks but without much trouble.
'A leg,' he said as Erika wrote their sixty points under the line.
Heinrich gathered up the cards and started shuffling. 'The only thing legs are good for is getting chopped off,' he observed. He dealt out the next hand and opened with a spade. After a lively auction, he and Lise got to four spades. Willi doubled. If they made it, they would take the game and wipe out the Dorsches' partial score. If they went down, it would get expensive above the line.
Erika led a heart; Willi had been bidding them. When Lise laid out the dummy, Heinrich got an unpleasant surprise. He had the ace, queen, ten, and nine of spades, plus a little one. His wife had four little spades to the eight. That left the king and jack conspicuously missing, along with two little ones to protect them. Considering the other problems he had in the hand, it also left him in trouble.
Willi took the trick with the king of hearts, then led the ace. When that went through without getting trumped, he grinned at Heinrich and said, 'Got you.'
'Maybe.' Heinrich shrugged. He thought Willi had him, too, but he was damned if he'd admit it.
'No maybes about it.' Willi led a diamond. That wasn't the way to finish Heinrich off. He had the ace in his hand, while the king was on the board. He decided he would rather be in the dummy, so he took the trick with the king. Then he led a small spade from the dummy. Willi played another one. Heinrich hesitated, but only for a moment. He set down the ten. Behind the cards of the dummy, Lise blinked.
He felt like shouting when Erika sluffed a club. That meant Willi had all the opposition's spades. No wonder he'd doubled. But it also meant…Happily, Heinrich said, 'I'm going to finesse you right out of your shoes.'
Willi looked revolted. Heinrich didn't blame him a bit. Had he been sitting in that chair instead of this one, he would have been revolted, too. And he had plenty of board entries, so he could get back to the dummy whenever he needed to. He pulled Willi's trumps, one by one; Willi couldn't make any of them good. And he made the contract- doubled.
'A deep finesse,' Willi said mournfully. 'Who would have thoughtyou would run a deep finesse? And who would have thought it would work?'
'I had to,' Heinrich answered. 'It was the only way I even had a chance to make four. So I thought, why not?'
'That's the way to do it,' Erika said. 'If you've got one chance-take it.' She looked right at him as she said that. He passed her the cards in a hurry. He knew too well she wasn't talking about bridge.
In spite of that hand, she and Willi won the rubber. They didn't win by as much as they would have if Willi hadn't doubled. Erika let Willi hear about that when it was over. He gave her a dirty look. 'We won,' he said. 'Quit complaining.'
If that wasn't calculated to annoy her, it certainly did the job. The only way Heinrich found to make them stop bickering was to bring out a fresh bottle of wine, a fancy burgundy. It made Willi wonder aloud whether he'd robbed a bank or started taking kickbacks from the Americans. Heinrich didn't care. If Willi was teasing him, he wasn't throwing darts at Erika. When he wasn't, he was good company-and so was she. Of course, the more they drank, the less they were liable to care what they said. Heinrich knew he might only be putting off trouble. If he didn't put it off, though, he already had it inside the door.
He and Lise won the next rubber. All the hands were cut and dried. Nobody could complain about anyone's play. That relieved Heinrich. How fast the bottle of burgundy emptied didn't, especially since
Willi and Erika drank more of it than Lise and he did. He didn't begrudge them the wine. But he feared it wouldn't just bein vino veritas. In vino calamitas seemed much more likely.
The third rubber also went well enough. Erika and Willi won it as smoothly and as competently as he and Lise had taken the second. Heinrich's only bad moment came when Erika started loudly praising the first edition of Mein Kampf. But he could even cautiously agree with her. She couldn't be far wrong if the Fuhrer was saying the same
