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Walther glanced down at his watch. Yes, it would have to be another time. People would start coming back from lunch pretty soon. He couldn't afford to take the chance of being seen doing that kind of work. And he was through the other portal. If he was going to look around inside Lothar Prutzma
Too much information. Not enough time to sift through it. That protected SS secrets as well as any encryption algorithm, probably better. If Walther couldn't find what he was looking for, what difference if it stayed in plain sight? You couldn't read what you couldn't find.
He did find proof of Prutzma
Still…A message revealing in which SS directory all the dirt on "Enough Is Enough" lurked wouldn't hurt. Walther had ways of bouncing such a message through the data system till it became impossible to trace. He used them.
And he was back to working on the new operating system by the time his boss lumbered back into the office. Gustav Priepke stuck his head into Walther's cubicle, saw what he was up to, and nodded approval. "That goddamn Japanese code really will save our asses, won't it?" he said.
"We've got a chance with it, anyhow," Walther answered.
"Good. Good. That was a hell of a good idea, using it," Priepke said. Walther started to thank him, but just nodded instead. Unless he misread the signs, his boss had forgotten whose idea it was in the first place. Because it was working so well, Priepke had decided it was his.
Had things been different, Walther wouldn't have let him get away with that. As they were…As they were, if Priepke was angling for fame and glory, he could have them. Walther didn't want them. They were no good to him. The less he was in the public eye, the better he liked it. And if his boss got a bonus and a raise, that was all right, too. The Stutzmans had plenty. They needed no more. No Jew dared be or even think like a money-grubber these days.
"We'll do fine," Priepke said, as if Walther had denied it. "We'll do just fine."
"Of course we will," Walther said.
When Gottlieb Stutzman came home for a weekend's leave from his Hitler Jugend service, Esther was amazed at how brown and muscular he'd become. "They work us pretty hard," her son said, scratching at his mustache. That was thicker and more emphatically there than it had been a year before, too. He wasn't a boy any more. He was visibly turning into a man.
"How is it?" Esther fought to keep worry out of her voice. She'd been afraid ever since Gottlieb left the house. She hadn't feared he would be caught, or hadn't feared that any more than usual. He looked like an Aryan. He wasn't circumcised. He had the sense to keep his mouth shut about his dangerous secret.
But in a setting like that, suffused with the propaganda of the state and the Volk, what would have been easier than turning his back on the secret? It was a burden he didn't have to carry. Nobody did. If you chose to forget you were a Jew, who could make you remember?
Esther's fear swelled when Gottlieb shrugged and said, "It's not so bad." But then he went on, "Or it wouldn't be, if I weren't different." Esther let out a heartfelt sigh of relief. He accepted that difference, then. She'd thought he had, she'd thought he would, but you could never be sure. He gave her a quizzical look. "What was that for?"
"Just because-and don't you forget it," Esther answered.
"Sure." Gottlieb, plainly, was humoring his mother. Since he hadn't had much practice, he wasn't very good at it. The doorbell rang. "Who's that?" he asked as Esther started for the door.
"Alicia Gimpel," Esther answered. "She was going to visit A
"Why should I?" He laughed. "It's not like I'm going to pay any attention to Alicia one way or the other."
"All right," Esther said. Gottlieb no doubt admired one pretty Fraulein or another. Of course he did-at seventeen, what was he but a hormone with legs? No matter whom he admired, though, if he was as serious as he seemed to be about staying a Jew and passing it on, he would marry another Jew. Seventeen would pay no attention to eleven, but twenty-four might find eighteen very interesting. Seven years, right now, would feel like an eternity to Gottlieb. To Esther, they felt just around the corner.
She opened the door. There were Alicia and Lise. As Alicia came in festooned with sleeping bag, change of clothes, and the other impedimenta of a sleepover, A
"It is, isn't it?" Esther said. They both smiled: here, for once, was irony that didn't hurt. Esther waved back toward the kitchen. "Come in and have a cup of coffee and say hello to Gottlieb. He got a free weekend and came home to visit."
Lise followed, but she said, "You should have called. Alicia could have come over some other time."
"Don't worry about it," Esther answered. "Gottlieb won't even notice she's here." Another smile from both of them. Some of the thoughts that had occurred to Esther had surely occurred to Lise, too. The Gimpels had three girls to marry off. They would have started thinking about possibilities a long time ago.
"My goodness, Gottlieb," Lise Gimpel said. "You're looking very…fit."
"I sort of have to be," he answered with a broad-shouldered shrug. "If you can't do what they throw at you, they make your life so nasty, you get into shape just so they'll leave you alone."
"What are they telling you now that we've got a new Fuhrer? " Lise asked him.
He didn't shrug now. He leaned forward; this interested him. "When I first started, it was the same old stuff I'd always got in school," he said. "But it's changed since then."
"Well, what are they saying these days?"
"A lot more about what good exercise it is and how we'll make friends we'll keep for the rest of our lives," Gottlieb said. "A lot less about how it's getting us ready to be soldiers who'll go out and slaughter the Reich 's enemies. A lot less about our shovels, too."
Esther frowned. "Your shovels?"
Her son nodded. "In the Wehrmacht, it's your rifle. That's what people say, anyhow. In the Hitler Jugend, it's our shovels. We have to carry them with us everywhere. We have to keep them polished-the blade and the handle. If you let your shovel get rusty or you lose it, I don't know what they do to you. Something horrible-I know that. Nobody wants to find out what."
"Shovels," Esther repeated. It made sense, of a sort. The Hitler Youth was a dress rehearsal for the Army. Someone who knew how to take care of a shovel and had the discipline to do it-even if the act itself was fundamentally meaningless-would quickly learn how to take care of a rifle and gain the discipline to do it. And that would not be meaningless at all.
"The drillmasters don't yell at us as much as they used to, either," Gottlieb said. "Of course, we've been in for a while now, too. We know what we need to do. They don't have to yell at us all the time any more."
"What do you do for fun?" Esther asked.
"Polish our shovels," Gottlieb answered, deadpan. Esther made a face at him. He gri
"You can't sleep all the time," Esther said, even if that was a risky assumption to make about teenagers.