Willi put coins in the machine and got a paper, too. Along with the other people who'd ridden the bus to the station, they went to the platform to wait for the train to downtown Berlin. Heinrich glanced at his watch. They wouldn't have to wait long.
When the train pulled up a very few minutes later, the commuters fed their account cards into the slot one after another. Willi was in front of Heinrich in the queue. He sat down by a window, and thumped the seat next to him to show Heinrich was welcome. They both started reading the papers.
"Buckliger's going to talk to a bunch of big shots in Nuremberg tomorrow," Heinrich remarked. "I wonder what he'll have to say."
"Whatever the Bonzen want to hear," Willi predicted. "What other point is there in going to Nuremberg?" He spoke with a Berliner's cynicism and a Berliner's certainty that no other place in the Reich really mattered.
"Maybe," Heinrich said. "But maybe not, too. He didn't say what everybody expected him to the last time, you know."
He waited to see what Willi would make of that. Willi started to tell him he didn't know what he was talking about-started to and then, very visibly, stopped. "That's true," his friend said. "He didn't. But why would you go to Nuremberg to say anything that's out of the ordinary? Out of the ordinary isn't what Nuremberg is for."
"Who knows?" Heinrich shrugged. "If we're confused after he makes his speech, Horst will tell us what to think about it."
"Well, of course he will," Willi Dorsch said, with no irony Heinrich could hear. "Telling us what to think is what Horst Witzleben is for."
"He's good at it, too," Heinrich said.
"Not much point to having a Propaganda Ministry where the people aren't good at what they do, is there?" Willi said.
"Oh, I don't know. Look at the Croats," Heinrich said. The Croatian Ustasha did their jobs with an enthusiasm even the Gestapo found frightening. The German secret police were-mostly-professionals. The Croats were zealots, and proud of being zealots.
But Willi shook his head. "They want to show how frightful they are, and so they do. The national sport down there is hunting Serbs. And if the Serbs had been on the winning side, their national sport would have been hunting Croats. And do you know what else? They would have bragged about it, too. Tell me I'm wrong."
He waited. Heinrich thought it over. "I can't," he said, "not when you're right."
To his surprise, Willi looked angry. "You'd be more fun to argue with if you didn't admit you were wrong when you're wrong," he complained with mock severity.
"No, I wouldn't," Heinrich answered.
"Yes, you-" Willi broke off and sent him a reproachful stare. "Oh, no, you don't. You're a devil, is what you are."
"Danke schon. I do appreciate that."
"You would," Willi said. They both laughed. The train pulled into the Berlin station. Everything seemed the way it had in happier, less nervous times. Then Willi asked, "When are we going to play some more bridge? It's been too long."
Air-raid sirens started howling inside Heinrich's head. He couldn't show them, though, any more than he could show so much of what he felt. He couldn't even show this particular alarm in front of Lise. He'd dug that trap for himself, and now he'd fallen into it. Knowing he had, he said, "Why don't you and Erika come over Friday of next week after work?"
"Sounds good," Willi said.
Did it? Heinrich was anything but sure. He did think-he certainly hoped-Erika was less likely to say or do anything drastic at his house than at hers. If he turned out to be wrong…If I turn out to be wrong, Lise will clout me one, and I'll deserve it. Still, next to some of the other things that could happen, even a clout from his wife didn't seem too bad.
Then he had no more time for such worries. He stuffed the Volkischer Beobachter into his briefcase and performed the elaborate dance that took him from the downstairs train platform to the upstairs bus queue. As with any dance, if you had to think about what you were doing, you didn't do it so well. Willi matched his movements as smoothly as one ballerina in an ensemble conforming to another.
Their reward for such a performance was not an ovation but standing room on the bus that would take them to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. Someone on the bus hadn't seen soap anywhere near recently enough. Heinrich took in small, shallow sips of air, which might have helped a little. Then Willi muttered, "Who brought along his polecat?" You couldn't take small, shallow sips of air when you were laughing like a loon.
Once they got to the office, Heinrich phoned home and let Lise know about the invitation: he was a well-trained husband. "That sounds like fun," she said, which proved she didn't know everything that was going on. Heinrich couldn't tell her, either, and not just because Willi's desk was only a couple of meters away.
Willi, for that matter, might not have heard a word he said. Willi was busy flirting with Ilse. By the way she laughed and teased him back, his plot was thickening nicely. "Shall we go out to lunch?" he asked her.
"Why not?" she said.
Heinrich could have thought of any number of reasons why not, but nobody'd asked him. He went to lunch at the canteen, by himself. The meatloaf was grayish, with slices of what he hoped was hard-cooked egg scattered through it. He made the mistake of wondering what sort of meat had gone into the loaf. Then he wondered why he was eating it if he couldn't tell.
A couple of tables over, an officer looked at lunch and said, "They don't waste anything at those camps, do they?" After that, Heinrich finished the boiled beans that came on the side, but he didn't touch the meatloaf again. He was sure the officer had to be joking. He was sure, but still…
Willi and Ilse were a long time coming back from lunch. Heinrich wondered what they were eating. Then, hastily, he wondered where they were eating. That seemed safer.
He eyed them when at last they did come back. Willi didn't look particularly smug. Ilse didn't look rumpled. That proved nothing, one way or the other. Heinrich knew as much. He eyed them anyhow. Curiosity-nosiness, to be less polite about it-wouldn't leave him alone.
Would Willi brag on the way back to Stahnsdorf? The answer turned out to be no; if there was anything to brag about, Willi concealed it. Instead, he went on and on about the havoc he intended to wreak at the bridge table. "In your dreams," Heinrich said sweetly.
"Sometimes dreams are better than the way things really work out," Willi said. "Sometimes." And that, oracular in its ambiguity, was as close as he came to saying anything about whatever he had or hadn't done with Ilse-or perhaps about the way things had gone for him and Erika. Heinrich thought about asking him to explain, thought about it and then lost his nerve.
The next day's Volkischer Beobachter said not a word about the new Fuhrer 's speech in Nuremberg. Neither did the paper from the day after that. Had Buckliger made it? If he had, what had he said? The Beobachter, the chief Party newspaper, wasn't talking. Nor was anyone else: no one Heinrich knew, anyhow. He scratched his head, wondering what the devil that meant.
Alicia Gimpel had been helping her younger sisters with their homework ever since Francesca started going to school. Why not? She was bright, she remembered her lessons, and she'd had them only a couple of years before. Sometimes she got impatient when the younger girls didn't catch on right away. That had made Francesca angry more than once. Now Francesca helped Roxane, too-and sometimes got impatient when she didn't catch on right away. For reasons Alicia couldn't quite follow, her father and mother thought that was funny, though they'd yelled at her when she showed impatience.