Francesca broke free of his arms and rounded on the matron. "I told you we weren't filthy, stinking Jews. Itold you so, and you didn't want to listen. Well, now you see I knew what I was talking about." She had her hands on her hips. She might have been an irate housewife telling off a clerk who'd been rude to her. The matron turned bright red. Her formidable fists clenched. But she didn't say a thing.
Daddy was more polite. He asked the matron, "Is there paperwork I have to fill out so I can take my girls home?"
"Paperwork?" The woman nodded jerkily. Little by little, her angry flush faded. "Ja,there is paperwork. There is always paperwork,Herr Gimpel." She took forms from filing cabinets and out of her desk. Daddy signed and signed and signed. The matron studied everything. She finally nodded. "You may take them. Their behavior here has been…acceptable."
"I'm glad," Alicia's father said. "They should never have been brought here in the first place, but I'm glad." He gathered up the girls. "Come on, kids. Let's go."
Alicia had never left any place so gladly in all her life, not even the doctor's office after a shot. As Daddy led the three sisters towards a bus stop down the street from the foundlings' home, Roxane said, "They thought we were Jews! Ugly, smelly, yucky Jews!" She made a horrible face.
"They sure did. They're pretty dumb," Alicia chimed in. She and her father knew the truth, but her little sisters didn't. She had to hold up a mask in front of them. That wasn't any fun, but she'd just found out how needful it was.
"Well, they were wrong, weren't they?" Daddy said. Francesca and Roxane nodded emphatically. Half a heartbeat later, so did Alicia. Her father had to hold up a mask, too. Maybe the blackshirts had put a tiny microphone in his clothes. Maybe they were still listening. You never could tell. You never could be too careful, not where the Security Police were concerned.
Up came the bus. Daddy stuck his card in the slot four times. After a while, they got off and transferred to another bus. Then they did it again. The third bus took them into Stahnsdorf and, a little more than an hour after they'd set out, stopped at the corner up the street from their house.
Daddy herded Alicia and her sisters off the bus. "Let's go. Mommy's waiting."
When they got down onto the sidewalk, Francesca and Roxane raced up the street. Alicia hung back. She looked up at her father. "Is everything all right?" she asked. "Really all right?"
He smiled. "I know what you mean." As she had, he spoke cagily. "Everything is as good as it can be, sweetheart. We're out here. We're free, the way we should be, because they shouldn't have grabbed us in the first place." Yes, he too was playing to an invisible audience that might or might not be there. "I'm afraid we won't see some friends so much, and that's too bad, but…" He shrugged. "There are worse things."
"The Dorsches?" Alicia asked.
Daddy stopped. "How do you know about the Dorsches?"
"The Security Police were asking me questions, just like they were with Francesca and Roxane." Alicia tried to remember just what the blackshirt had said. "Is Frau Dorsch really 'a piece and a half'?" She wasn't precisely sure what it meant, but it sounded impressive.
Her father turned red. He coughed a couple of times. After a long, long pause, he said, "Not…quite," in a small, strangled voice.
Alicia almost asked for more details. But the front door opened then. Her sisters ran into her mother's arms. "Mommy!" she shouted, and broke into a run herself.
Mommy had a hug for her, too, and kisses. "I know you were all brave girls," she said. Alicia's little sisters nodded eagerly. So did she, with a secret smile on her face. She'd had to be brave in a way Francesca and Roxane hadn't, because she'd known the truth and had to hide it, and they hadn't.
Their mother tousled her hair. She had a secret smile on her face, too. Yes, she'd meant that especially for Alicia. It went right over Francesca and Roxane's heads. Alicia's smile got wider. She liked secrets…well, most secrets, anyway. The big one she carried? She still wasn't so sure about that. One thing she was sure of, though, and all the more so after this ordeaclass="underline" like it or not, it was hers.
Daddy came up the steps. "Did you tell them about the surprise yet?"
"Of course not," Mommy answered. "If I told them, it wouldn't be a surprise any more, would it?" Naturally, that set all three Gimpel girls clamoring. Their mother looked innocent till she'd almost driven them crazy. Then she said, "If people look in the kitchen, they may find…something."
They ran in. Roxane's gleeful squeal rang out a split second ahead of her sisters'. The cake was enormous, and covered with gooey white icing. Big blue letters spelled out WELCOME HOME! When Mommy cut the cake, it proved to be dark, dark chocolate, with cherries and blueberries between the layers. She gave them huge slices, and when Francesca asked, "Can we have some more?" she didn't say anything about ruining their appetites. She just handed out seconds as big as the firsts.
Everything was so wonderful, it was almost worth getting grabbed by the Security Police. Almost.
Walther Stutzman muttered to himself. Threading his way past the electronic traps on the virtual road that led to Lothar Prutzmann's domain wasn't his worry. He had their measure now. Sooner or later, an SS programmer would come up with some new ones, and Walther would need to spot them before they closed on him. Today, though, getting in had been easy enough. So was looking around once he'd got inside.
No, what made him mutter was not finding what he was looking for. Heinrich had given him a good description of the man who'd released him from prison: tall, blond, a major in the Security Police. By what the man had said, he was a Jew.
But Walther had been pretty sure he knew about all the handful of Jews in the SS. None of them, from what he recalled, matched this fellow. Looking through the records only confirmed that.
So who was the major, then? More to the point,what was he? Someone who'd tried a last trick to get a suspected Jew to reveal himself? That would have been Walther's guess, but it didn't fit the way Heinrich had described the scene a couple of days earlier. A joker? Or a real Jew, unknown to Walther and his circle of friends?
That would be good-the more who survived, the better. But it also raised doubts, frightening ones. Now somebody outside the circle, somebody no one in the circle knew, knew something about somebody in it. The last thing a Jew in the Third Reich wanted was for anybody to have a handle on him.
What can I do?Walther wondered. One thing that occurred to him was tracking down everybody on duty at the prison the day Heinrich was released. Not many majors would have been there. One of them should have been the man who turned his friend loose.
Before he could do that, though, his boss came back from lunch and bellowed, "Walther! You here, Walther?"
Three quick keystrokes, and everything incriminating vanished from his monitor. Three more made his electronic trail vanish. "I'm here," he called. "What's up?"
Gustav Priepke stuck his beefy face into Walther's cubicle. "You smart son of a bitch," he said fondly. "You goddamn know-it-all bastard."
"I love you, too," Walther said in his usual mild tones. His boss roared laughter. Still mildly, he asked, "Could you at least tell me why you're swearing at me today?"
"Delighted, by God," Priepke answered. "You're not only a smart son of a bitch, you're a thieving son of a bitch, too. You know that?"
Excitement tingled through Walther. Now he had a pretty good idea of what his foul-mouthed boss was talking about. "The code ran, did it?"