Hearing her speak German as opposed to French-a losers' language-took the wind from his sails, as she'd thought it might. "Ah…nothing," he said. "I didn't mean anything by it."
She switched languages again, this time to English: "Let me see your identity card."
He didn't ask what right she had to see it. He just handed it over. She acted as if she had the right. As far as he was concerned, that put her above doubt. She studied the card, nodded coldly, pulled a notebook and pen from her handbag, and wrote something down (actually, it was "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote," but the fascist would never know-and surely wouldn't have been able to read her scrawl anyhow). Only then did she return the identity document. Trembling, the Englishman put it back in his wallet.
"Vous avez cran,"Professor Drumont remarked as both fascists dashed from the lift and hurried away.
"Guts? Me? Give me leave to doubt." Susanna shook her head. "What I have is a-how would you say it in French? — a low tolerance for being pushed around. I think that would be it."
Drumont shrugged a very Gallic shrug. "It amounts to the same thing in the end. Now, where do we register for the meeting?"
To Susanna's annoyance, they had to walk up a flight of stairs to find registration. "If I had known that, we could have got out sooner," she grumbled. "We would not have had to spend so much time in the car with thosesalauds."
"It could be that you were too hard on them," Professor Drumont said gently. "You are, after all, a German. You may not always understand the…the strains upon other folk in the Germanic Empire."
That was a brave thing for him to say, or possibly a foolish one. Somebody from one security organization or another was bound to be keeping an eye on the Medieval English Association. Susanna could have been that person, or one of those people, as easily as not. The Frenchman's words were also funny, in an agonizing way.I don't know about the strains on other folk in the Germanic Empire, eh? Well, Professor, have you ever contemplated the strains on Jews in the Empire? She doubted that. Oh, yes. She doubted it very much indeed.
And yet…Her gaze flicked over to Professor Drumont. What did he look like? A gray-haired Frenchman, nothing else. But suppose he were a Jew. How could she tell? He would no more dare reveal himself to a near-stranger than would she. Sudden tears stung her eyes. She blinked angrily as she waited to get her name badge.We might be ships passing in the night. We might be, but neither of us would ever know. And not knowing is the worst thing of all.
Heinrich Gimpel leaned back in his swivel chair. "Lunch?" he asked.
"Sounds good to me." Willi Dorsch nodded. "Where do you feel like eating today?"
"I've got kind of a yen for Japanese food," Heinrich answered. Willi made a horrible face. Heinrich needed a moment to realize what he'd said. He held up a hasty hand. "I didn't do that on purpose."
"For one thing, I don't believe you," Willi said. "For another, if you're telling the truth, that just makes it worse. Unconscious punning? If that's not enough to send you up before a People's Court, what would be?"
In spite of himself, Heinrich shivered. Few who appeared before the judges of a People's Court ever appeared anywhere else again. He pushed the dark thought out of his mind, or at least out of the front part of it. "Well,does Japanese food suit you?" he asked.
"I was going to suggest it myself, till you made me lose my appetite," Willi said. "Admiral Yamamoto's is only a couple of blocks from here. How's that sound?"
Heinrich rose-all but leaped-from his chair. "Let's go."
The Japanese who ran Admiral Yamamoto's had come to Germany ten or fifteen years earlier, to study engineering. He'd got his degree, but he'd never gone home to Tokyo. Some of the sushi he served would have got him odd looks if he had. What he called a Berlin roll, for instance, had seaweed and rice wrapped around thinly cut, spicy white radish and a piece of raw Baltic herring. It might not have been authentic, but it was good, especially washed down with beer. Heinrich ordered half a dozen, and some sashimi as well.
"I don't quite feel like raw fish today," Willi Dorsch said, and chose shrimp tempura instead. The batter in which the shrimp were fried wasn't what it would have been on the other side of the world, either, but it was tasty. In place of tempura sauce, Willi slathered the shrimp with wasabi. "It's green, not white, but it cleans out your sinuses just like any other horseradish."
"You put that much on and it'll blow off the top of your head." Heinrich used wasabi mixed with soy sauce for his sushi and sashimi, too, but not nearly so much.
"Ah, well, what difference does it make? No brains in there anyhow." Willi took a big bite, and found out what difference it made. He grabbed for his own stein to try to put out the fire. When he could speak again, he said, "I'mnot going to tell Erika about this."
"Mm," Heinrich said-the most noncommittal noise he could find. Anything that had anything to do with Erika Dorsch made him nervous. He didn't want Willi thinking he had designs on her. He didn't want her having designs on him. He didn't want…He shook his head. He couldn't say he didn't want Erika. He didn't want her enough to throw away what he was for her, and to endanger his family and friends.
When I found out I was a Jew, I knew it meant I had to watch a lot of things. I never imagined then that it would rob me of adultery, too. Such irony appealed to him.
But when he laughed, Willi asked, "What's so funny?"
He couldn't tell the truth. One thing he'd soon learned about being a Jew was always to have a cover story handy. He said, "The look on your face after you took that mouthful, that's what."
"Oh. Well, you can't really blame me," Willi Dorsch said. "If you ask me, wasabi's the first step toward what goes into atomic bombs."
That made Heinrich laugh without needing any cover story. "I wouldn't be surprised," he said, and then, looking out the window, "What's going on? Everybody's stopping. Is there a traffic accident down the street?"
"We would have heard it, wouldn't we?" Willi sent the wasabi paste a suspicious glance. "Unless this stuff made my ears ring, too."
The owner of Admiral Yamamoto's came out from the kitchen. In his accented German, he said, "Meine Damen und Herren,please excuse me for disturbing your meals, but I have just heard important news on the radio. the Fuhrer of the Germanic Empire, Kurt Haldweim, has passed away. Please accept my deepest sympathies and condolences." He bowed stiffly, from the waist, arms at his sides, and then disappeared again.
Heinrich Gimpel stared down at his half-eaten lunch. He'd known this day might be coming, yes, but he hadn't thought it would come quite so soon.
Willi took a last big bite of tempura. If the wasabi bothered him this time, he didn't let it show. He got to his feet, took out his wallet, and pulled out enough money to cover his lunch and Heinrich's. "Come on," he said, suddenly all business. "We'd better get back to the office."
"You're right." Heinrich rose, too.
Half the diners in Admiral Yamamoto's were finishing up in a hurry and getting out. That surprised Heinrich not at all. Given where the restaurant was, most of the people who lunched here would work for the Wehrmacht or the SS or the Party. Haldweim had no obvious successor. Intrigue and jockeying for position had begun years earlier, when he started having "colds." Now things would come out into the open.
"Who will it be?" Willi murmured as they hurried up the street. The same thought was uppermost in
Heinrich's mind, too.
When they got back to Adolf Hitler Platz, they saw Horst Witzleben's perfect image on the huge televisor screen on the front wall of the Fuhrer 's palace. The square was filling up fast as people got the news. Already, the large swastika flag above the palace had been lowered to half-staff. Witzleben's almost operatic voice blared from powerful speakers: "Even so soon, messages of sorrow and mourning have begun pouring in from around the world. In a moving joint tribute, the King and the Duce of the Italian Empire spoke of Kurt Haldweim as a man of power and a man of peace. The Emperor of Japan has expressed his sympathy with the German people on their loss, in which the Emperor of Manchukuo joins. The Caudillo of Spain described our beloved Fuhrer as a man of world-historical proportions, while the Peron of Argentina termed him a model for all rulers aspiring to greatness." Someone's arm slid a paper onto Witzleben's desk. The news reader glanced down at it. "And this just in: the Poglavnik of Croatia has declared a day of mourning in his country, while stating that the Fuhrer 's memory will live in the hearts of men forever."