Down to Earth

“When do you go up again?” Claudia sounded wistful, not excited. She enjoyed having her father down on the ground.

Drucker enjoyed it, too. But, as he had to be, he was intimately familiar with the duty roster. As the roar from the A-45 slowly faded, he said, “I’m scheduled for next Thursday.” Claudia sighed. So did Kathe. He glanced over at his wife. “It won’t be so bad.”

She sighed again. He prudently kept driving. She knew how much he loved going into space; he knew better than to rhapsodize about it. He even enjoyed weightlessness, which put him in a distinct minority. And coming back after being away gave him several honeymoons a year. Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder, he thought, cheerfully butchering Shakespeare-American spaceman had taught him the pun, which didn’t work in German.

When they got back to their neat, two-story home on the outskirts of Greifswald, the children hurried to the door and went inside. Drucker didn’t bother locking it unless everyone was going to be away longer than for an hour’s shopping. Greifswald had few thieves. Few people were rash enough to want to risk falling foul of the Ministry of Justice.

“Let’s get the packages out of the boot,” Kathe said.

“You have to wait for me-I’ve got the key,” Drucker reminded her. He pulled it from the ignition switch and walked up to the front of the car. As he walked, his mouth twisted. He, or rather Kathe, had fallen foul of the Ministry of Justice. They’d found out she had, or might have had, a Jewish grandmother-which, under the racial-purity laws of the Reich, made her a Jew, and liable to liquidation.

Because Drucker was a Wehrmacht officer, and one with important duties, he’d been able to pull strings. The Gestapo had set Kathe free, and given her a clean bill of racial health. But pulling those strings had cost him. He’d never rise above his present rank, not if he served his country till he was ninety. From what the commandant at Peenemunde said, he was lucky he hadn’t been thrown out of the service altogether.

He opened the boot. Kathe scooped up the bundles-clothes for the children, who outgrew them or, with the boys, wrecked them faster than he thought they had any business doing. He didn’t really want to think about clothes, though. He slipped an arm around his wife’s waist. Kathe smiled up at him. He leaned over and planted a quick kiss on her mouth. “Tonight…” he murmured.

“What about it?” By the smile in her voice, she knew just what he had in mind, and liked the idea, too.

Before he could answer, the telephone rang inside the house. He let out a snort of laughter. “We don’t have to worry about that. It’ll be Ilse calling Heinrich or else one of Claudia’s school friends. Nobody bothers with old folks like us.”

But he was wrong. Claudia came hurrying to the door, pig-tails flying. “It’s for you, Father-a man.”

“Did he say which man he was?” Drucker asked. Claudia shook her head. Drucker scratched his. That eliminated everyone military, and most of his civilian friends, too-though his daughter would have recognized their voices. Still scratching, he said, “All right, I’m coming.” He slammed down the Volkswagen’s boot lid and went inside.

He’d shed his overcoat by the time he got to the phone; the furnace kept the house toasty warm. Picking up the handset, he spoke briskly: “Joha

“Hello, Hans, you old son of a bitch,” said the voice on the other end of the line. “How the hell are you? Been a goddamn long time, hasn’t it?”

“Who is this?” Drucker demanded. Whoever he was, he sounded not only coarse but more than a little drunk. Drucker couldn’t place his voice, but couldn’t swear he’d never heard it before, either.

Harsh, raucous laughter di

“Who is this?” Drucker repeated. He was begi

He turned out to be wrong again. The other fellow said, “How many Lizard panzers did we blow to hell and gone in Poland, you driving and me at the gun?”

No wonder the voice seemed as if he might have known it before. “Grillparzer,” he said in slow wonder. “Gunther Grillparzer. Christ, man, it’s been close to twenty years.”

“Too goddamn long,” agreed the gu

Drunk, all right, Drucker thought. “What do you mean?” he asked sharply. When Grillparzer didn’t answer right away, he found another, more i

“What have I been doing?” Grillparzer echoed. “Oh, this and that, old son. Yeah, that’s about right-a little of this, a little of that, a little of something else now and again, too.”

Drucker sighed. That meant the panzer gu

“Like I say, you’ve come up in the world,” the gu

“How much do you need?” Drucker asked patiently. “I’m not what you’d call rich-nobody with three kids is likely to be-but I’ll do what I can for you.”

He’d expected-he’d certainly hoped-Grillparzer would babble in sodden gratitude. That didn’t happen, either; it wasn’t his day for guessing right. Instead, the ex-gu

Ice prickled up Drucker’s back. “Yes, I remember that,” he said. Toward the end of the fighting, the SS had arrested the regimental commander, Colonel Heinrich Jager, in whose panzer Drucker and Grillparzer had both served. The panzer crew had rescued him before he got taken away from the front, and had bundled him into the airplane of a Red Air Force senior lieutenant-a pretty woman, Drucker recalled-bound for Poland. No one but the panzer crew knew what had happened to those SS men. Drucker wanted to keep it that way. “Don’t talk about it on the phone. You never know who might be listening.”

“You’re right-I don’t,” Grillparzer agreed with good humor that struck Joha

Drucker was feeling anything but cheerful. “What do you want from me?” he asked, hoping against hope it wasn’t what he thought.

But it was. “Whatever you’ve got, and then another fifty pfe

After a look around the living room to make sure nobody in his family could hear, Drucker pressed his mouth against the phone and spoke in a low, urgent voice. “My arse. If you bring me down, I’ll sure as hell take you with me. If you don’t think I’ll sing when they start working me over, you’re out of your goddamn mind.”

But Gunther Grillparzer laughed again. “Good luck,” he said. “You’re the first fellow who’s called me Gunther in a devil of a long time. Name got too hot for me to keep wearing it. The papers I’ve got with this one are damn good, too. All I have to do is write the Gestapo a letter. I don’t even have to sign it-you know how those things go.”