Here sat Walther, controlling computer codes that would have earned him a bullet in the back of the neck if anyone knew he had them. Some of the codes erased his tracks after he'd used others, which made discovering him harder. Over at Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, Heinrich Gimpel kept his ear to the ground. There was a Jew in a fairly high place in the Foreign Ministry. There were even three or four in the SS. Walther had helped create false pedigrees for a couple of them. The others he just knew about; he wasn't sure how they'd established their bona fides. His own work there still worried him. If it unraveled, so much was liable to unravel with it. Several other important ministries also held a Jew or two.
When a Jew in one place heard something that might be important, others soon found out about it. A chief undersecretary or a deputy assistant minister could meet with a friend at dinner or telephone a colleague in another ministry-sometimes not a Jew himself, but someone who could be expected to spread the news to the Jew who needed to know it. Heinrich said the American phrase was a grapevine. That fit well enough.
And that chief undersecretary or deputy assistant minister sometimes got to propose a policy that-purely by chance, of course (of course!)-made things a little easier, a little safer, for the Jews. Or, bureaucracy being what it was, one of those functionaries could sometimes ignore or soften a directive that might have hurt his people. Very often, one bad scheme blocked was worth three good ones started.
A Jewish conspiracy at the heart of the Reich. Hitler would have had kittens. He would have ordered all the Jews killed, and made horrible examples of the Germans who'd missed them. Walther thought of knives and piano-wire nooses. Himmler would have killed the Jews and made examples of some Germans, too, but he would have got rid of them more humanely. Kurt Haldweim would have got rid of the Jews and reprimanded, maybe demoted, the Germans.
Heinz Buckliger? Walther scratched his head. He didn't know. He didn't dare find out. Who would dare, when the consequences for being wrong were so irrevocable? For the first time in his life, though, he could think of the Fuhrer without a shudder right afterwards.
"Hey, Walther! What are you doing in there?"
The booming voice jerked him out of his reverie. "Nothing much, boss," he answered honestly, hiding a start, too. "Just woolgathering, I'm afraid."
"You?" Gustav Priepke boomed laughter. "That'll be the day. Listen, something's come up, and I need you to take a shot at it."
Walther had told the truth, and Priepke hadn't believed him. That was what he got for having a reputation for working hard. If he'd had a name for doing nothing, he could have been working on six things at once and his boss wouldn't have believed that, either. He did his best to look bright and attentive, even if he didn't feel that way. "What is it?" he asked.
"The new operating system-what else?" Priepke answered. "We've got to make it work, or else." He didn't say or else what, but he didn't have to. The project was long overdue. That it was so long overdue made it harder, too.
"Well, there is one obvious answer we haven't tried yet," Walther said.
"What's that?" his boss asked. "I thought we'd done all the obvious things."
Walther shook his head. "No, there's one thing we haven't done that could save us a lot of time." Priepke let out an interrogative grunt. Walther said, "We could see how much Japanese code we can steal or adapt."
"Donnerwetter!" Gustav Priepke looked at him as if he'd suggested turning every Ratskeller in the Reich into a sushi bar. "What a bastardly idea! What the Japs know about real programming-"
"Is just what we need right now," Walther broke in.
"Jesus Christ!" Priepke said harshly. "You know what Hitler said about the Japs in Mein Kampf. If they didn't have Aryans to steal ideas from, their culture would freeze solid again likethat." He snapped his fingers.
"Do you want to talk about politics or computers?" Walther asked. "I don't care about politics. I don't care at all. What I care about are computers. The Japanese have some ideas we can use, and I think we can extract them without too much trouble. Which counts for more, ideology or the operating system?"
"You wouldn't have dared talk like that in Himmler's time, let alone Hitler's."
"Oh, yes, I would," Walther said. "The Russians had a terrific panzer in the Second World War. The T-34 was better than anything we brought against it, but we had better crews, so we won. Our next panzer, the Panther, borrowed-stole-all sorts of ideas from the T-34. The designers didn't care who built it. All they cared about was that it was a good machine."
His boss grunted again, this time meditatively. Then he said, "What if the code's got traps in it?"
"If we can't find them, are we really smarter than the Japanese?" Walther asked.
One more grunt. Priepke said, "I can't decide that on my own. I don't want the Security Police landing on us with both feet half an hour after we start." He stormed away from Walther's cubicle.
Walther wondered whether he should have kept his mouth shut. Would the Security Police start asking him nasty questions now? All he'd wanted was to do the job the people set over him told him to do. Was that too much to hope for? Maybe it was.No good deed goes unpunished, he thought sourly.
Gustav Priepke didn't come back for more than an hour. That worried Walther, too. Had he got his boss in trouble? Or was the trouble waiting forhim instead? He relaxed-a little-when Priepke did return. The big, burly man gave him a comic-opera Oriental bow. "Velly good. We tly that," he said in what he imagined was Japanese-accented German.
Walther made a face. "I wish I'd never suggested it," he said. Priepke laughed. He thought Walther was kidding, as he'd been. Walther knew too well he wasn't.
A chilly wind blew through Stahnsdorf. Rain was coming, but it hadn't got there yet. Inside the Gimpels' house, everything was warm and cozy. Heinrich moved at his wife's direction, putting this away and dusting that. He didn't move fast enough to suit her. "What's the matter?" she asked. "The Dorsches haven't been over in a while. Don't you feel like playing bridge?"
"It's not that," Heinrich said, and it wasn't. He was always ready to play bridge.
"What is it, then?" Before Lise went on, she looked around to make sure the girls were out of earshot. "Erika making you nervous?"
"Ha," he said in a hollow voice. Erika damn well did make him nervous. He hadn't said a word about running into her at Ulbricht's. He still didn't know what to think about that. The doorbell rang. He wasn't going to get a chance to decide now.
Lise was closer, so she opened the door. They all hugged and said hello and asked about children and said how glad they were to see one another. With a flourish, Willi handed Lise his usual offering of a bottle of wine. "Open it now," he said. "When we make mistakes at the bridge table, we always need something to blame them on."
Erika opened her mouth. Heinrich knew exactly what she was going to say. He didn't feel like having the sniping start before the Dorsches even got out of the front hall. Since he didn't, he forestalled her, asking, "How are-things?"
They could take that any way they wanted. Willi took it the way Heinrich had intended. He waggled his palm back and forth. "So-so," he said. "We have our ups and downs." Never one to leave a setup line alone, he finished, "Maybe not as often as when I was twenty-two, but we manage."
You'd manage more if it weren't for Ilse. Even you know that. Heinrich didn't say it. He did wonder whether Erika would, and how he could deflect her if she started to. Fortunately, she kept quiet. Heinrich wouldn't have wanted to be on the receiving end of the look she sent Willi, though.