"Danke schon, gnadige Frau," Ebert said when Esther delivered the message, and he clicked his heels again.Dear lady? Esther wondered. That took politeness a long way when talking to a receptionist. Did he like her looks? It wasn't mutual. He was dark and jowly, and she thought he'd have a nasty temper if he weren't trying to be charming. She was careful to stand well away from him when she led him to the doctor's private office.
They didn't bother closing the door. Esther heard bits of conversation floating out: "…obviously genuine…" "…alsoobviously genuine…" "…don't know what to make of…" "…wouldn't bother but for the Jewish aspect…" "…a puzzlement, without a doubt…"
After twenty minutes or so, Dr. Dambach and Maximilian Ebert emerged together. The man from the Genealogical Office asked Esther, "What do you know of this business about the Kleins?"
"Should we be talking about this with her?" Dambach asked.
"I don't see why not," Ebert said. "She's obviously of impeccable Aryan stock. Well,Frau "-his eye picked up the little name badge at her station-"ah,Frau Stutzman?"
"Only what Dr. Dambach has told me," Esther answered.Obviously of impeccable Aryan stock. She couldn't shriek laughter, however much she might want to. Cautiously, she went on, "I do know the Kleins a little away from the office." If she didn't say that, they could find out. Better to admit it. "They've always seemed like good enough people. I'm sorry their child has this horrible disease." Every word of that was true-more true than Maximilian Ebert could know.
"Have you any idea how they could have got two different sets of genealogical records, each one plainly authentic?" Ebert asked.
"No. I don't see how it's possible," she answered, which was anything but the truth.
"Are you really sure theyare both authentic?" Dr. Dambach asked.
"As certain as I can be without the laboratory work to prove it," Ebert said. "I'll take both of them with me to get that. And then, if they do both turn out to be genuine, we'll have to figure out what that means. At the moment, Doctor, I have no more idea than you do. And now I must be off. A pleasure to meet you,Frau Stutzman.Guten Tag." He touched the brim of his cap and strode out of the office.
"Now we'll get to the bottom of this." Dr. Dambach sounded as if he looked forward to the prospect.
"So we will." Esther hoped she sounded the same way, even if it was another lie. No-especially if it was another lie.
The Medieval English Association meeting was winding down. In another couple of days, Susanna Weiss would have to fly back to Berlin. The conference hadn't been the most exciting she'd ever attended. She was bringing home material for at least two articles. That would keep Professor Oppenhoff happy. But there hadn't been any really spectacular papers and there hadn't been any really juicy scandals. Without the one or the other, the conclave itself would go down as less than memorable.
Still, there were compensations. First and foremost, there was London itself. Along with her ideas for articles, Susanna was also bringing home enough new books-used books, actually-to make excess baggage charges all but certain. Her campaign against the bookstores of London would have made General Guderian sit up and take notes. She always shopped as if she were a big-game hunter organizing a safari. All she lacked were beaters to drive the books off the shelves and into the range of her high-powered account card. She had to find the volumes and pick them out herself-but that was part of the sport.
Along with the books, she was bringing back several pairs of shoes. She'd gone after them with the same effective bravado she'd used on her bookstore campaign. She was particularly proud of one pair, which were covered all over with multicolored sequins. If she wore them to a faculty meeting, she might give the department chairman heart failure-and if that wasn't worth trying, she didn't know what would be.
She had one more reason for hating to leave London, too: no matter how stodgy the MEA had been this year, the British Union of Fascists across the street had more than made up for it. Susanna thought she might have spent more time at the Crown than she had at the Silver Eagle. She'd got to know several BUF men who thought she was a delegate totheir gathering: not the sort of compliment she most wanted, perhaps, but a compliment all the same.
"'Ere's the little lydy!" they would roar when they spotted her, and other endearments in dialects never heard among the scholars of medieval English. They pressed buttons and badges and stickers on her, and bought her pints till her back teeth floated. She would rather have had Scotch, but the rank-and-file fascists were a beer-drinking crowd.
They were also a crowd overwhelmingly in favor of doing business the way the first edition of Mein Kampf outlined. "Only stands to reason, don't it, dearie?" said a bald-headed, broken-nosed bruiser named Nick, breathing beer fumes into Susanna's face. "It's the buggers 'oove already got it made 'oo don't want ordinary blokes to 'ave their say."
"That certainly seems reasonable to me," Susanna said. Her precise, well-educated tones sent Nick and his pals into gales of laughter. She couldn't help liking them. If there was any hope for changing the way things worked, it rested on their shoulders. But the way they kept laughing while they bragged of brawls and brutalities past chilled her.If they knew I was a Jew, they would laugh like that while they stomped me to death.
She forgave, or at least forgot, their hypothetical sins when they smuggled her onto the floor for the climactic session of their assembly. They didn't think of it as smuggling, of course, and she wore enough BUF ornaments that no one, not her companions and not the even nastier thugs at the doors, even noticed that a membership badge was not among the gewgaws.
Things were undoubtedly livelier here than they were at the Medieval English Association meeting. People roared out songs in raucous choruses. The tunes came from British popular music. Some of the words were fierce, some were funny, some were obscene. Most were either for or against the first edition. Here and there, people for the older rules brawled with people opposing them. BUF guards tried without too much luck to keep the two sides apart.
A beer bottle smashed on the floor a couple of meters from Susanna's feet. "Someone will get killed!" she exclaimed.
"Some of these bastards deserve killing," Nick answered.
The brute simplicity of fascism had always fascinated and repelled Susanna at the same time. Somebody doesn't like the way you're going? Get rid of him, and then keep on going that way anyhow. If you're strong enough, you can, and it proves you were right all along.
There was, of course, a certain problem… "Suppose they decide you are the ones who need killing?" Susanna asked.
"Only goes to show they're a pack of bloody sods, eh?" Nick said.
One of the ruffian's pals, though, saw what Susanna was driving at. "If they let counting 'ands stand for banging 'eads, I expect we will, too," he said. "That's what this business is about, right?" Susanna nodded. After a moment, reluctantly, so did Nick.
Another bottle shattered, this time on somebody's head. Friends led the bleeding man out of the hall. Susanna shivered, feeling as if she'd been swept back through time. This was how the Nazis had started ninety years earlier: gathering in taverns for what were as much brawls as meetings. No Communists would come to try to break up this conclave, though. Another shiver. If any Communists were left alive, they were as much in hiding as the Reich 's handful of Jews.
Bang! Bang! Bang!To her relief, that wasn't gunfire. It was the chairman plying his gavel in front of the microphone on the podium. "That will be enough of that," Charlie Lynton called, his amplified voice booming through the hall.Bang! Bang! Bang! "Settle down!" Lynton was in his mid-fifties, with an upper-class English accent that belied his birth in Edinburgh. He was smooth and smart. He had to be smart; he'd headed the British Union of Fascists since the mid-nineties, and steered as independent a line as he could without rousing German wrath.