to wait and see.'
'Sounds like traffic through Berlin, doesn't it?' Willi said as the commuter train came into South Station. 'Of course, there's usually a lot more waiting than seeing with that.'
'Maybe it won't be so bad,' Heinrich said. Before Willi could say anything sardonic, he forestalled him: 'Maybe it'll be worse.'
As a matter of fact, they got to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters fifteen minutes early. Had they been fifteen minutes late, they both would have cursed and fumed. Early they took for granted. Heinrich looked out across Adolf Hitler Platz toward the Fuhrer 's palace. Aside from a few joggers and a gaggle of early-rising Japanese tourists snapping photos, the vast square was echoingly empty. No Gauleiter growling out a speech this morning. No thumping, swaggering SS band trying to drown him out. No Dutch demonstrators, either.
Willi was looking across the square, too. 'Almost gets boring to see it this quiet, doesn't it?' he remarked.
'It does,' Heinrich said in bemusement. 'It really does.'
They went up the stairs and, after getting their identities confirmed, into the headquarters building. Heinrich sat down at his desk and immediately yawned. He got up and went to the canteen with Willi to fortify himself with a cup of coffee. He squirted some hot chocolate into the cup, too, from the machine next to the coffeemaker. 'Viennese today, aren't we?' Willi said.
'Oh, but of course.' Heinrich put on an Austrian accent. Willi laughed.
A Viennese aristocrat-even a Viennese headwaiter-would have turned up his nose at the concoction Heinrich had put together. But it was hot and it was sweet and it had plenty of caffeine. With all that going for it, Heinrich wasn't inclined to be fussy. After he finished it and tossed the cup in the trash, he thought about going back for another one. But his brains were moving a little faster, so he buckled down and got to work instead.
Ilse wandered over to Willi's desk and started playing with little ringlets of hair that hung down over the back of his collar. Without looking away from his computer screen, he swatted her on the fanny. She squeaked. She seemed to have recovered nicely from discovering that Rolf Stolle had had his fun with her and that his roving eye had then roved on.
She and Willi were all but molesting each other when they went off at noon. Heinrich had no doubt they would pick a restaurant somewhere close to a hotel. He walked back to the canteen. The lunch special there was roast pork. As he had all his life, he ate it without a second thought. He liked pork, though he'd had better than this.
When Willi and Ilse came in after a long, long lunch break, Willi mimed smoking a lazy cigarette. Ilse thought that was the funniest thing in the world.
Heinrich was plowing through an analysis of near-future American business activity when he looked up to discover three blackshirts standing around his desk.'Was ist hier los?' he asked in surprise but no real alarm.
'You are Heinrich Gimpel?' one of them asked.
He nodded. 'That's me.' He wondered if they wanted to take him to confer with Heinz Buckliger again. They didn't. The two lower-ranking blackshirts grabbed him and hauled him out of his chair. The senior man said, 'You are under arrest.'
'Arrest?' Heinrich yelped in disbelief. 'What for?'
'Suspicion of being a Jew.'
XII
Herr Peukert was talking about negative numbers when a clerk from the office came into the room and took him aside to speak with him. Alicia was glad for the break. Her head was spinning. When you added negative numbers you really subtracted, and when you subtracted negative numbers you really added? It sounded crazy, to say nothing of confusing.
'What?' The teacher, who had been speaking quietly, exclaimed in surprise. The clerk nodded and muttered something else.Herr Peukert shook his head. The clerk nodded again. The teacher sighed and shrugged. 'Alicia Gimpel!' he said.
Alicia jumped up to her feet. 'Ja, Herr Peukert?'
'Please go to the office with Fraulein Knopp here. Something has come up.'
'Jawohl, Herr Peukert.' Alicia wondered what was going on. It sounded as if her mother needed to pull her out of class for some reason or other. Had Mommy forgotten to tell her about a dentist's appointment, or something like that? She was usually good about remembering all kinds of things, but she had forgotten once.
The way Fraulein Knopp kept looking at her all the way back to the office made her wonder. When they were almost there, the clerk asked, 'Are you really?'
'Am I really what?' Alicia asked. But the clerk didn't answer.
When they got to the office, Alicia was surprised to find Francesca and Roxane already there. They looked surprised to see her. Roxane asked, 'Are you in trouble, too?'
'I didn't think so,' Alicia said.
'If they call you to the office, you're in trouble.' Roxane spoke with experience born of more mischief than both her sisters together had got into.
Fraulein Knopp went into the inner office, the principal's office. Alicia heard her say, 'They're all here now.'
But the principal-a gray-haired, severe woman named Frau Fasold-didn't come out. Half a dozen large men in black uniforms did. One of them had a gray mustache that made him look like the boss. Sure enough, he was the one who spoke up: 'You will come with us immediately, children, until this question is answered.'
Roxane wasn't one to let anybody, even an enormous officer in an intimidating uniform, get the better of her. She tilted her head back so she could look him in the eye and said, 'What question?' Alicia was suddenly, horribly, afraid she already knew.
And sure enough, the officer said the worst thing in the world: 'The question of whether your father, Heinrich Gimpel, is a Jew, and of whether the three of you are first-degree Mischlingen, subject to the same penalties as full-blooded Jews.'Subject to being shot or gassed or anything else we feel like doing to you, he meant.
A terrified scream bubbled up in Alicia's throat. But before she could let it out and give everything away, Francesca screamed first, and her shriek was pure fury: 'That's a lie!' She went on, just about as loud, 'We're no damned, stinking, big-nosed, big-lipped, lying, cheating, germy Jews! And neither is Daddy! And don't you say he is, either!' She kicked the Security Police officer in the shin.
'Teufelsdreck!' he shouted. He swung back his hand as if to slap Francesca. Roxane grabbed it and bit him. He roared in pain. 'You idiots!' he yelled at his men. 'Seize them!' He had to yell, because Roxane let go of him and started screeching it was all a lie, too.
That told Alicia what she had to do. She added her voice to the clamor, and did her best to fight and to get away before one of the big men grabbed her. 'Christ, they sure don't act like a bunch of kikes,' the man said, panting with the effort of hanging on to her.
Francesca and Roxane, of course, were convinced they were no such thing. Alicia realized she had to act as if she were, too. It was the only chance she and her sisters had…if they had any chance at all.
Frau Fasold finally did emerge from her office. She disapprovingly surveyed the chaos in the outer room. Shaking her head, she fixed the officer with the gray mustache with an icy blue glare. 'Really,mein Herr, ' she said in a voice just as icy. 'Is this disorder altogether necessary?'
Her manner could paralyze any student. It seemed to have the same effect on the Security Police man. 'These are, uh, Jews, or, uh,Mischlingen, anyway,' he said in a low voice. 'We can't, uh, be too, uh, careful.'
'These are children-and fine children, too, I might add,'Frau Fasold said. Even in Alicia's terror, that astonished her. The principal never had a good word for anybody.Frau Fasold went on, 'Why didn't you bring panzers and helicopters and flamethrowers, too? Then you could have been safe.' She all but spat her contempt in the blackshirt's face.
He turned red. 'We have our orders, ma'am,' he said stonily. 'We have to carry them out.'
'Orders for murdering children?' Frau Fasold said. 'Why?'
