Heinz Buckliger sat at his desk in the Fuhrer 's palace in what was obviously a piece of videotape. "Volk of the Greater German Reich, I accept the role of Fuhrer with pride, but also with great humility," he said in a pleasant if not ringing baritone. "Mindful of the triumphs of the past, I shall do all I can to lead you to a still more glorious future. Many things have grown slack in recent years. I hope to tighten them, and to make the Reich and the Germanic Empire run more smoothly. With your help, I know I shall succeed."
"He sounds all right," Willi said as Horst Witzleben reappeared and began talking about the congratulations pouring into the Reich on Buckliger's rise to supreme power.
"So he does," Heinrich agreed. "But he's plainly someone's fair-haired boy. I wonder whose." His first guess for the new Fuhrer 's patron was Lothar Prutzmann, head of the SS: once an SS man, always an SS man. That wasn't a sure thing, but it was the way to bet.
"All right, now we know," Erika said. "After that, the rest of the news will be small potatoes. Shall we play some cards?"
"Good idea," Lise said. Heinrich nodded. Willi's sigh said he would have liked to stay in front of the televisor, but democracy was alive and well in the Dorsch household, even if the big wheels in the German government had been able to ignore it in choosing Heinz Buckliger.
The very first hand they played, Willi bid and made a small slam in clubs. Heinrich and Lise couldn't do a thing about it. If you didn't have the cards, you were stuck. Willi chortled. Heinrich said, "I wonder what's on the news."
On the next hand, Erika Dorsch made three no-trump: as quick and one-sided a rubber as possible. Lise said, "Heinrich's right. Watching the news seems better and better." Their hosts laughed at them.
They played steadily, with a couple of pauses when Erika helped the Dorsches' son and daughter with their homework and one when Willi broke up a squabble between the children. "This all looks and sounds familiar," Heinrich said.
"Life goes on," Erika said, "one way or another." If that wasn't a hooded glance she sent toward Willi, Heinrich had never seen one.
Willi himself affected not to notice. Or maybe he really didn't notice; you never could tell with Willi. He said, "Whose deal is it?"
"Mine, I think," Lise answered. She gather up the cards and started shuffling. "It is now, anyway."
Heinrich got the contract when everybody passed at two hearts. Playing it was routine, so much so that things got sidetracked halfway through when Lise and Willi started arguing about a newspaper story on
Babylonian archaeology that they'd both seen and Heinrich and Erika had somehow missed. Willi insisted the find proved Hammurabi's code was 250 years older than everyone had thought up till now; Lise was just as sure it proved no such thing. As people will when disagreeing about something of such monumental unimportance, they both got more and more certain they were right. As they pointed fingers at each other, they might have forgotten anyone else was in the room-or, for that matter, on the planet.
Heinrich set his cards on the table, face down. Lise hardly ever got so excited when she argued with him, and he was glad she didn't. If Willi raised his voice and turned red-well, Willi was in the habit of doing such things. "A good thing they're friends, or they'd murder each other," Heinrich remarked to Erika.
With all the noise Lise and Willi were making, he wasn't sure she even heard him. But she nodded. "Willi's as bad as the children," she said, like Heinrich talking under the noise of the argument. "You, now, you have too much sense to waste your time with such foolishness."
"I don't know," he said. "Lise's doing it, and she's got more sense than I do."
"Maybe." Erika waved her hand. "But I don't want to go to bed with Lise."
What Heinrich wanted to say was,Are you out of your mind? Even if she did want to sleep with him (which struck him as strange enough when she was married to the much handsomer Willi), to say so in front of her husband and his wife? Maybe she'd known what she was doing, though, because neither Willi nor Lise leaped from a chair with a cry of fury. They were too busy quarreling over cuneiform styles and tree-ring chronology and other things about which neither of them knew a great deal.
Which left Heinrich the question of how to respond. Part of him knew exactly how he would like to respond. The rest of him told that part to shut up and forget about it. If he hadn't been happy with Lise, or maybe if he'd just been a few years younger, a few years randier, a few years stupider (assuming those last two weren't one and the same), that one part might have won the argument, especially since he got the idea he could have taken Erika right there on the card table without making either Willi or Lise notice.
But, things being as they were, yielding to temptation wasn't practical. And so he answered, "I'm sorry, but with all the racket these two are making, I didn't hear a word you said."
Erika Dorsch's sour smile told him she didn't believe a word of it. Whatdid she believe? That he didn't want to go to bed with her? Or just that he didn't want to do anything about it then and there?Isn't that an interesting question?
Deciding he didn't want to know the answer, Heinrich reached out and waved his hand up and down between Willi and Lise. "Can we get back to bridge, please?" he asked loudly.
His wife and Erika's husband both blinked, as if they were coming back to the real world. Willi said, "I don't know why you're so impatient. We just started talking-"
"And talking, and talking," Erika broke in, her voice acid-edged.
"Itwas fifteen minutes ago," Heinrich said.
"Oh,Quatsch, " Willi said. Then he looked at his watch and blinked again. He grinned a rather sickly grin. "Oh. Well, maybe it was." Lise seemed almost as surprised as he did.
"It's your lead, Willi, if you can think of anything besides ancient history," Erika said.
"Let me look at the last trick, please," Willi said, which went a long way toward proving he couldn't. He examined it, muttered to himself, and threw out a low diamond. As far as Heinrich could see, the lead might have come at random as readily as from reflection on what had gone before.
Heinrich made the contract. He and Lise went on to win the rubber, though not by nearly so much as they'd lost the first one. Shuffling for the first hand of the next rubber, Willi said, "We'll really hammer you this time."
"Tell me a new story," Heinrich answered. "I've heard this one before, and I don't believe a word of it."
"You'll see." Willi picked up his hand, arranged it in suits, and said, as casually as if he were asking the time, "Three no-trump."
"What?" Heinrich stared. His own hand didn't have opening strength, but he hadn't imagined Willi owned that kind of powerhouse. He hadn't seen a three-no opening in at least five years. He passed. So did Erika. Willi yelped and sent her a wounded look. Visions of another slam must have danced in his head. Lise passed, too. Heinrich led. Erika laid out her hand as dummy. It was ten-high-no wonder she'd passed.
Willi didn't even make the three he'd bid. With no strength on the board, he had to play everything out of his own hand, and came up one trick short. The honors bonus for all four aces more than made up for that. Even so, he let out a sorrowful sigh. "Twenty-eight high-card points I was looking at, and down one! I'll never see another hand like that."
The rest of the evening's bridge was less dramatic. The Gimpels and Dorsches ended up about even. As Heinrich and Lise walked to the bus stop, she asked, "What did you and Erika talk about while Willi and I were wrangling over Babylonians?"