Heinrich was damned if he'd let his friend outdo him for cynicism. "She won't when she's on opposite the Fuhrer 's speech," he answered. "The programming director's head would roll if she ended up stealing that much of the audience."
"Mm, you've got a point there," Willi said. "Too bad." He managed a bloodshot leer.
"South Station!" came the call as the train glided to a halt. "All out for South Station!" Heinrich hurried up the escalators to catch the bus to Oberkommando der Wehrmacht headquarters. Willi shambled along after him like something created in a mad scientist's experiment that hadn't quite worked.
As soon as they got to the office, Willi headed off to the canteen. He returned with a large foam cup of coffee in each hand, and poured them both down in record time. Not surprisingly, he went to the men's room shortly thereafter, and then again a few minutes later. "Vitamin P," he said sheepishly when he came back after the second trip. "And speaking of Vitamin P, why didn't you tell me my eyes looked like two pissholes in the snow?"
"What could you have done if I had?" Heinrich asked.
"Well, nothing, but even so…" Willi opened those vein-tracked eyes very wide now. "I'm awake. I may live. I may even decide I want to."
Ilse came up to set some papers on his desk. She started to turn away, then stopped and did one of the better double takes Heinrich had seen. "Good God! What happened to you?" she said, almost exactly echoing his words of an hour earlier.
"Erika and I had a small disagreement last night," Willi answered. "Yes, that's about right. Just a small disagreement."
"You poor dear!" Ilse was the very picture of sympathy, fussing over him, straightening his collar, and generally making him feel three meters tall. He lapped it up like a cat in front of a bowl of cream. Heinrich had to suppress a strong impulse to retch. On the other hand, he wondered how long it had been since Erika buttered Willi up like that. Such artful dodges weren't her style.
Later that morning, Willi said, "I'm going to lunch with Ilse today."
"Why am I not surprised?" The tart retort came out of Heinrich's mouth before he could stop it.
His friend turned red. "I don't know. Why aren't you? You've got things going good for you now, so you get all sanctimonious. If you were the one with troubles, I wouldn't look down my nose at you."
"You wouldn't? What's the fun in having a nose if you don't look down it?" Heinrich replied, even more deadpan than usual.
Willi looked at him, started to say something, and then started to laugh instead. "Dammit, how am I supposed to stay angry at you when you come back with things like that?"
"If you work at it, I expect you'll manage," Heinrich said, again with next to no inflection in his voice. He got another laugh from Willi, too, although he hadn't been joking.
Ilse snuggled up to Willi as they walked toward the door. Willi slipped his arm around her waist. Heinrich went back to his paperwork.Would I do something like that if I were having trouble with Lise? he wondered.Who knows? Maybe I would. But he had trouble imagining trouble with Lise.Maybe I don't understand how lucky I am.
The telephone on Willi's desk rang. Heinrich was going to let it keep ringing till whoever was on the other end got sick of it and hung up. But what if it turned out to be somebody with important business? He picked up his own phone and dialed Willi's extension to transfer the call. "Analysis-this is Heinrich Gimpel."
"Oh, hello, Heinrich-I wanted to talk to Willi." That was Erika Dorsch's voice. Heinrich winced. He wished he'd let the phone ring. When he didn't answer right away, she asked, "Where is he?" in a way he didn't like at all.
He responded with the exact and literal truth: "You missed him by two minutes-he just went to lunch."
"And he didn't go with you, obviously," Erika said. Heinrichreally wished he hadn't answered the telephone. Willi's wife went on, "Did he go with the lovely and talented Ilse instead?"
"I, ah, didn't see him leave," Heinrich said, which was true in the highly technical sense that he'd looked down at the papers on his desk before Willi actually opened the door.
"Now tell me another one, Heinrich. You aren't much of a liar, you know," Erika said. The way she meant it, that might have been true. In several ways she knew nothing about, it couldn't have been more wrong. That she knew nothing about those several ways proved how wrong it was.
He said, "Erika, I'm not his father. I'm not his watchdog, either. I don't keep an eye on him every minute."
"Somebody ought to," Erika Dorsch said bitterly. "Is something wrong with me, Heinrich? Am I ugly? Am I unattractive?"
"You ought to know better than that," he said, too surprised at the question not to give her an honest answer.
"Should I?" she said. "If something isn't wrong with me, why have we only made love six or seven times this year? Why is Willi going around with that round-heeled little chippie instead of me?"
"I don't know," Heinrich answered, which was also certainly true. If he'd had a choice between…But he didn't have choices like that, so what was the point of imagining he did? He said, "Don't you think you'd do better asking Willi? He might actually tell you."
"He'd tell me a load of garbage. That's what he's been telling me all along," Erika said. "What's he been telling you? That's probably more garbage."
Heinrich pretended not to hear her. Bad enough to have to listen to both sides in a dissolving marriage. To tell tales from one to the other…He shook his head. No. He didn't know much about such things, but he knew better than that.
"Can you get a little time off?" she asked. "If you come over here, I can tell you how things really are."
What was that supposed to mean? What it sounded like? If it did, would he kick himself for the rest of his days if he said no? Most red-blooded males would. He could arrange things so Lise never knew, and…
"Erika," he said gently, "I don't think that would be a good idea right now."
"No?" She sounded tragic. "You mean you don't want me, either?"
"I-" He stopped. One more question for which there was no safe answer. He did his best: "I'm married to Lise, remember? I like being married to Lise. I want to stay married to her." He looked around to make sure nobody in the big room was paying too much attention to him. He couldn't do anything about anyone who might monitor the call. It wouldn't land him in trouble, anyhow. He consoled himself with that.
A long, long silence followed. At last, Erika said, "I didn't know people talked that way any more. Well." Another silence. "She's luckier than she knows-or else you can't get it up, either." The line went dead.
Heinrich stared at the telephone, then slowly replaced the handset in the cradle. He'd been ready to sympathize with Erika-even if he wasn't ready to go to bed with her-and to think Willi was a louse and a fool for not giving her more of what she obviously wanted. But if she kept making cracks like that, he didn't see how he could sympathize with either one of them-except they were both his friends. He muttered something that didn't help and trudged off to the canteen.
Susanna Weiss loved good food. What she didn't love was cooking. She should have; learning to cook, and to be happy cooking, was drummed into girls in the Greater German Reich in school and in the Bund deutscher Madel. With Susanna, it hadn't taken. With Susanna, the more something was drummed into her, the less likely to take it was.
Frozen and freeze-dried food had come a long way since she was a girl. A lot of the advances had been military first; nothing was too good for the Reich 's soldiers and sailors. Little by little, things had trickled out to the civilian world as well. A faint stigma still clung to eating such food too often. It said you were lazy, or you didn't care enough about your family to take care of them yourself. Being a Jew, Susanna didn't worry about stigmas that were merely faint. And she was convinced she had better things to do with her time than stand in front of a stove. When she ate in her flat, she had frozen or freeze-dried food most of the time.