'Gott im Himmel!' Willi burst out. In the background, Erika asked what was wrong. He relayed what Lise had just told him.
'The children?' Erika said. 'Du lieber Gott!I didn't even think about the children!'
'That's terrible,' Willi said to Lise. 'Is there anything I can do?'
'I've got Heinrich a lawyer. I hope it helps,' Lise answered. 'It should. He's innocent, so there's no way they can prove he's a Jew.' She assumed more people than Willi Dorsch were listening to her telephone calls. She wouldn't have admitted what Heinrich was even to Willi alone. With the Security Police surely tapping the line, she wouldn't admit anything to anybody.
'There you go,' Willi said. 'Keep your chin up, and everything will turn out all right.' He sounded like a man whistling past a graveyard.
Lise said, 'Thanks,' anyhow. Willi meant well. That probably wouldn't do Heinrich any good, but it was there. She went on, 'I'm going to go. They left the house a hell of a mess.'
'Oh. All right. Take care of yourself. We're thinking about you.' Willi hung up.
So did Lise.Thinking about me? Thinking what about me? she wondered.Thinking I may be a Jew myself? But that wasn't fair. Willi had sounded the way a friend ought to sound. And Erika seemed genuinely horrified when he told her the Security Police had grabbed the girls, too.
They're good friends if they call, thinking Heinrich's not a Jew. They'd be better friends if they thought he was a Jew and called anyway. Maybe they did think so. But Lise would be a fool to ask them, and they would be fools to tell her.
Shaking her head, she got back to work.
'You! Gimpel!' a blackshirted jailer roared, and Heinrich sprang to his feet and stiffened to attention as if he were back in elementary school. Back then, he would have worried about a paddling. Now two more men from the Security Police leveled assault rifles at him. The jailer unlocked his cell and swung the door open. 'Come with us.'
'Jawohl!' Heinrich said. Another grilling? Another tentative thumping? Or were they really going to get down to business this time?
'Hands behind your back,' the jailer told him when he'd stepped out into the corridor. Numbly, he obeyed. The man cuffed them behind him, then gave him a shove. 'Get moving.'
Feet light with fear, he obeyed. He couldn't do anything about his flopping trousers now. They didn't seem to care-they were hauling him along. They took him by a different route this time. He didn't know if that was good or bad. His heart thuttered. One way or the other, he'd find out.
They brought him to a room divided in half by a thick glass wall. A grill let someone on his side talk with someone on the other side. And someone did wait on the other side: a tall man, almost as tall as Heinrich, with an impressive mane of gray hair. The stranger wore a sharp pinstripe suit and carried a crocodile-leather attache case with fittings that looked like real gold.
'Your mouthpiece.' The jailer sounded disgusted. Neither he nor his gun-toting pals showed any sign of leaving the room. Whatever Heinrich said to the lawyer, he'd say in front of them.
He hardly cared. He shuffled to the grill. He had to stoop a little to put his mouth by it. He didn't care about that, either. 'Who are you?' he asked. 'Can you get me out of here? Did Lise hire you?'
'Your wife, you mean?Ja. My name's Klaus Menzel, and I don't have any idea whether I can spring you,' answered the man on the other side of the grill. 'I'll give it my best shot, though. All billable hours either way.' He sounded cheerfully mercenary.
Somehow, that made Heinrich like him more, not less. He seemed less likely to be a Security Police plant, someone put in place to get Heinrich to spill his guts. Of course, if they'd wanted him to do that, they would have kept the guards out of the room.
'Do you know who falsely alleged you're a Jew?' Menzel asked. Again, the way he put things cheered Heinrich. He wasn't assuming his client was guilty. He wasn't acting as if he was assuming that, anyway.
Hearing him talk like that made Heinrich want to help him. Unfortunately, he couldn't. He tried to spread his hands. The cuffs wouldn't let him. He said, 'I haven't the slightest idea. Will the Security Police tell you?'
Menzel shrugged. He had broad shoulders and a narrow waist, as if he were a retired soldier or-perhaps more likely-a football player who'd stayed in shape into his fifties. He said, 'They're supposed to. Of course, they don't always do what they're supposed to.' He raised his voice and called out to a blackshirt on Heinrich's side of the glass: 'Isn't that right, Joachim?'
'Screw you, you damn fraud,' answered one of the men with an assault rifle. 'You had your way, the Reich 'd be ass-deep in kikes. Then they'd study law and squeeze you out of business. Serve you right, too.'
He sounded more amused than angry. For that matter, so did the lawyer. How often had they harassed each other? A good many times, plainly. Heinrich asked, 'When will you know if you can get me out?'
'I'm not sure,' Menzel said with another shrug. 'When they hear somebody might be a Jew, they grab first and ask questions later. Depends on what they turn up next. Depends on how much of an uproar they want to get their bowels into, too. I can promise you the moon, but I don't know if I can deliver.'
That wasn't what Heinrich wanted to hear. He would have loved to be promised the moon, all wrapped up in a pretty pink ribbon. But, again, Klaus Menzel seemed to work in the realm of the possible. Heinrich said, 'What's your best guess?'
'I'll find out as fast as I can. A few days, most likely,' the lawyer answered.
'Is Lise all right? The girls?'
'Your wife is fine. She's mad as hops because they made a mess of your house when they searched it. I like her. She's good people, and she doesn't scare easy.' Menzel hesitated. As soon as he did, Heinrich feared he knew what was coming next. And he was right: 'They've got your kids. If you were a Jew, they'd be first-degree Mischlingen, and subject to the same sanctions.' That was a bloodless, legalistic way to put it. What Menzel meant was,They'll kill them, too.
Heinrich groaned. 'They can't!' But they could. They'd been doing it for seventy years. Why should they stop now? He'd had a surge of panic when he heard the blackshirts searched his house. Lise must have managed to dispose of the photos before they got there. Otherwise, Menzel wouldn't have been able to do anything at all for him, probably wouldn't even have been allowed to see him. He would have been dead by now, and so would his children.
'Try not to worry too much,' the lawyer said. 'If you come out, the kids come out, too.'And if you don't, they don't. That hung in the air. But if Heinrich didn't come out, he'd die. He wouldn't be able to worry then, either.
Will Alicia hold up?He didn't have to fret about the other two, not for that. They didn't know what they were. But if Alicia broke, if they broke her…
'You're out of time, Gimpel,' said one of the men from the Security Police. 'Back to your cell. And as for you, you lousy shyster…' He sent Klaus Menzel an obscene gesture. Laughing, Menzel returned it.
They marched Heinrich out of the room with the glass partition.You're out of time, Gimpel. The words tolled like a funeral bell inside his mind. And it wouldn't be his funeral alone. They had the girls, too.
No matter how grim tomorrow looked, you had to get on with today. So Esther Stutzman told herself, over and over and over again. But when a friend and his children were in the hands of the Security Police-and when, if they hurt him long enough and badly enough, he might cry out her name-it wasn't easy.
She tried to carry on as if nothing were wrong. When she went in to Dr. Dambach's office, she said not a word about Heinrich Gimpel. Dambach already knew she knew the Kleins. If he found out she was friends with someone else suspected of being a Jew, he might start wondering about her. The best way to stay safe was not to let anybody wonder.
'Guten Morgen, Frau Stutzman,' the pediatrician said when she came in. 'I was just about to start making coffee.'
Those were words to alarm anybody. 'Why don't you let me take care of that?' Esther said quickly. 'Then you can do something, uh, useful instead.'
'Well, all right,' Dambach said. 'As long as you're here, I'll start reviewing medical journals. With so much being published these days, it gets harder and harder to stay up to date.'
'I'm sure it must,' Esther said. 'Yes, you get on with that, and I'll bring you some nice coffee just as soon as it's made.'
'Thank you very much,' he said, and went back into his private office. Esther let out a sigh of relief: one small
