"They do that," Heinrich said. "Maybe if we stopped feeding her, she wouldn't. We've talked about it, but we haven't done it yet."
Alicia looked up from her book. "I've heard that one before, Daddy." Jab delivered, she went back to reading.
Willi Dorsch winced again. "They get dangerous awfully early, don't they?" He wasn't looking at Alicia, though. He was looking at Erika. This time, luckily, she was the one who didn't notice.
Lise came out to the front room. "Hello, hello," she said, and then caught sight of the jug of wine. "Gott im Himmel!If we drink all that, we'll pass out under the table like a bunch of Russians."
"I think that's part of Willi's evil plot," Heinrich said, "except that he was going to pour all of the wine downmy throat."
"Oh, he was, was he?" Lise sent Willi a mock-ferocious glare. "He doesn't think he needs to get me drunk, too? I'm insulted."
Alicia closed her book. "I'm going upstairs," she announced. "How is a person supposed to hear herself think around here?" Except for the pronoun, she was quoting her father. The indignant flounce, however, was all her own.
"That one's going to be trouble." Erika Dorsch's voice held nothing but admiration.
"That one's already trouble," Heinrich replied. "Well, let's see how the cards go. And let's see what we've got here." He handed Lise the jug of Rhine wine. She made as if to stagger under the weight, but then took the wine back into the kitchen to use the corkscrew. When everybody was at the table with a glass of wine, Heinrich said, "I heard something interesting at lunch today," and told of what the officers had to say about Heinz Buckliger's speech.
The longer he went on, the unhappier Willi looked. Heinrich wondered why. Willi's politics weren't nearly so reactionary as, say, those of the SS men in Admiral Yamamoto's. But then Erika turned to Willi and said, "You didn't tell me anything about this. You said you had lunch with Heinrich today, didn't you?"
"Well, yes," Willi said.Well, no, Heinrich thought.If you tell your wife lies, you can't expect me to know about them. But Willi recovered brilliantly: "Old man Kallmeyer came over to the table and started bending my ear about depreciation. I couldn't pay any attention to the juicy stuff."
Erika didn't buy that, or not right away. "Why wasn't he bending Heinrich's ear, too?"
"Don't be silly," Willi said. "Heinrich already knows everything there is to know about depreciation."
That wasn't true, but it was plausible. Erika eyed her husband, eyed Heinrich, and slowly nodded. "Well, maybe," she admitted. "But I wish you'd been paying attention to what really matters."
"I was," Willi said. "If Kallmeyer gets mad at me, my job turns into hell on earth."
Erika hardly paid any attention to him. She was thinking about what Heinrich had said. "If the government is going to admit it made mistakes and told lies…it's like the end of the world. Who knows where it will end?"
"Not at the bridge table," Lise said. "Shall we play?" With some people, getting together to play bridge was just an excuse to sit around and talk and drink. For the Gimpels and the Dorsches, it was an excuse to sit around and talk and drink, but it wasn'tjust an excuse. They all took the cards seriously (Willi took them as seriously as he took anything, anyhow). The wine and the snacks and the chatter were all very well, but the evenings revolved around the bridge game.
As they cut the cards to see who would deal, Lise glanced at Heinrich for a split second. He answered just as quickly with an eyebrow raised and lowered. He'd already told her what he'd heard in the canteen, and he hadn't said a word about Willi's being there. The eyebrow said there were good reasons why he hadn't.
Willi won the cut and dealt like a machine-a machine that desperately needed repair and oiling. He tossed out cards seemingly at random. He would do that every once in a while, for comic effect. Sometimes he would misdeal doing it, too. When everyone ended up with thirteen cards, Heinrich breathed a silent sigh of relief. He arranged his hand. It was nothing special, but he could open up at one heart and see what Lise had.
"Four diamonds," Willi announced, sounding proud of himself.
"Oh, dear," Heinrich said. He knew what a preempt like that meant-Willi had a diamond suit as long as his arm, and not much else. Seeing that he had a singleton six of diamonds himself, that didn't much surprise Heinrich.Do I want to jump in at the four level myself? He looked at his hand again. He knew he couldn't. "Pass."
Erika and Lise also passed. Willi went down two, but he had a hundred honors points in diamonds, so he broke even on the hand. And he'd kept Heinrich and Lise from finding out they could easily have made two hearts, which meant the preempt worked.
"If you'd made that hand, I would have figured you cooked the deal on purpose," Heinrich said as he shuffled for the next one.
"Who, me?" Willi looked innocent: one of his less convincing expressions. "I'm not smart enough to do anything like that."
"How right you are," Erika murmured.
Willi's smile seemed cheerful enough. "You can be replaced," he said. It might have been one of their usual gibes. It might have been…if Ilse hadn't come back from lunch with her buttons misaligned. Heinrich looked down at the table till he was sure his face wouldn't give anything away.
He and Lise got to five clubs. She'd bid them first, so she played the hand. She went down one when the trumps split badly against her. "Looks like everything's going to be above the line tonight," Heinrich said.
Nobody went down on the next hand, because nobody had cards good enough for an opening bid. They tossed that one in and tried again. When Erika Dorsch bid three diamonds on the hand after that and not only made the contract but added an overtrick, she got a round of applause.
Erika and Willi won the first rubber, a long, inartistic affair. After the clinching hand, Lise said, "Let's take a break. I'll get a little something to eat." She went into the kitchen.
Willi got up, too. "Rhine wine's revenge," he said, and headed in the other direction.
That left Heinrich alone at the table with Erika, exactly where he didn't want to be. "I'm going to give Lise a hand," he said, and started to rise.
But when Erika said, "Wait," he didn't see what else he could do. She asked, "Was Willi at lunch with you today?"
He didn't want to lie. He didn't want to tell the truth, either. In the end, he didn't say anything. That was also unlikely to help, as he knew only too well.
And it didn't. Erika's eyes narrowed. "Uh-huh," she said, packing a world of meaning into two wordless syllables. "Well, where was he, then?"
"I don't know." Heinrich could tell the literal truth there, and did, gladly.
By then, telling the truth didn't help, either. Erika asked the next question he dreaded: "Wherever he was, who was with him?"
"How am I supposed to know that if I don't know where he was?" Heinrich hoped he sounded reasonable, but feared he sounded desperate.
Erika sent him the sort of look he hadn't got since the last time he'd tried explaining to a teacher why he didn't have his homework. But before she could call him a liar to his face or ask another question he didn't want to answer, the toilet down the hall flushed. Out came Willi, whistling.Saved by-well, no, not the bell, Heinrich thought.
"That'sbetter," Willi said.
Lise brought in a tray of cold cuts and crackers and cheese. "Here," she said. "We don't have to think about this."
"I didn't have to think about what I was doing before," Willi said.
"Are you sure?" Erika asked, in tones that would have given him credit for any disgusting habit. Heinrich built himself a snack. That was probably the safest thing he could do. Even scratching his head struck him as dangerous.