“It’s a dangerous job for a woman.”

“Is it less dangerous for a man?” She shook her head violently. “No, no, it is settled. We will go together. Papa will learn what there is to be learned, and we will make our plans, and we will leave for Prague tomorrow night after the meeting. Then-”

“What meeting?”

“Our local Bund. The Sudetendeutsche Bund of Pisek. After you address the meeting, we will-”

“After I what?”

“Address the meeting. It was Papa’s idea.”

“I just bet it was.”

“Will you listen, please? The government police know you are in the country, right? But they do not know why. Tomorrow you will appear at the meeting. You will give them the usual inspiring speech about the need to annex the Sudetenland once again to the Fatherland. We have heard it often enough, but it is a message we never tire of listening to. There will be spies at the meeting, of course. Throughout the country there are spies. They will report you to the authorities, and the authorities will guess that you are traveling through Czechoslovakia trying to stir up German communities. They will not like this.”

“Can you blame them?”

“You don’t understand. They will know that you are in Czechoslovakia, but they will miss the point of your visit. Right now they suspect you are here to liberate a Slovak. This may make them unsure. They will still want to catch you, to arrest you, but perhaps they will be less certain that you will turn up in Prague. And, while they comb this area for you, you and I will go to Prague tomorrow night and make our plans to get the Slovak out of jail.”

I didn’t say anything. She watched me, her eyes anxious. There was a certain amount of lunacy in old Neumann’s idea, but at the same time it might have a grain of merit to it as well. Any sort of false trail might make the game easier when we got to Prague.

“You will do it?”

A bloody Nazi speech to a batch of Sudetenland fanatics. How on earth could I manage to get the words out? I thought about this, and even as I did so I felt the old phrases coming automatically to mind. Just the same old pap they had been listening to for years, that was all it would have to be. And why shouldn’t I be able to do it?

“All right,” I said.

“Oh, good,” she said, and she turned to look directly into my eyes, and the ice-blue of her own eyes turned suddenly to the hot blue of a gas flame, and all at once she lunged at me and wrapped her arms around me and tumbled me down onto the bed. Her breasts pressed against my chest and her hips bounced merrily and her mouth was hungry.

She’s a Nazi, I kept telling myself. Forget how her mouth tastes, forget how her body feels. Forget she’s a woman. And forget that two and two is four, and that the sky is blue. And-

She drew slowly away from me. “There is no time now,” she said. “No time at all.”

I didn’t say anything.

“My father will be home any moment now. He is always furious when he catches me with a man. Do you know what he does when he catches me?”

“What?”

“He whips me. Do you know where he whips me?” She picked up one of my hands and touched the appropriate parts of her body. “Here,” she said, “and here, and once even here. Can you imagine?”

I couldn’t stop imagining.

She arose reluctantly from the bed; she stepped languorously to the door of the room. “My father will not come to Prague with us,” she said. “We will be alone.”

I did not say anything.

“You’ll take me to Prague with you, won’t you? Even if I am a woman?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps especially because I am a woman?”

“Perhaps.”

“Aryan men and women must labor together to rebuild the Fatherland,” she said. It had the air of a memorized speech. Perhaps I would deliver it to the Bund the next night. “You’re a nice Aryan man. And I’m an Aryan woman. I think we might enjoy… laboring together.”

“It might not even seem like labor.”

She giggled. The door opened, and she vanished, and the door closed behind her. I rolled over on the bed and told myself again that she was a Nazi. The thought did not seem to have retained its earlier impact. I tried to invent my speech for the Bund and had worlds of difficulty concentrating on it. I opened the windows and tried to air her scent from the room. It lingered persistently. She had not been wearing perfume; it was the sweet smell of Greta herself that clung to my bedspread.

I went into the bathroom and took a cold shower. It didn’t do a damned bit of good.

Chapter 5

“So it is settled,” Neumann said at dinner. “You and Greta will go to Prague together.”

“Yes.”

“And you will speak tomorrow night at our meeting.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sure you will be an inspiration to our membership, Herr Tanner.” He sighed. “You are an activist, you see. And what are we? Passive sympathizers, if the truth be known, and little more than that. We shout out ‘Heil Hitler!’ We pledge ourselves to the cause of Anschluss with Greater Germany. But what is it that we do? We do nothing.”

“Papa, that’s not true!”

He turned to her. “Oh? But it is true, my little one.” His little one was a foot and a half taller than he was. “What do we do? We make speeches and listen to others make speeches. We read pamphlets and books. We contribute money when it is needed, but never give so much that we impoverish ourselves. And beneath it all we live our comfortable middle-class lives. We drink our beer and eat our schnitzels and sausages. We vow that we would die for Germany, but you see few of us dying. Lip service, that is all it is.”

A word from me seemed called for. “People like you and your daughter,” I said, “are the backbone of our movement.”

“You are good to say so.”

“It is the truth.”

“Perhaps. But how can we be at the backbone, we who have so little in the way of backbone ourselves?” He broke off sharply, pushed his chair back from the table, jumped to his feet. “It shall be different in the future,” he pledged, his back as straight as possible, his chest out and his chin in. “Heil Hitler!”

He strutted away from the table like a toy soldier. Greta put her hand on my arm. “Sometimes Papa takes things too seriously,” she said. “He cannot relax. He feels he has been given a mission to perform for Germany, but he does not know what it is, and it eats at him and drives him mad with frustration.”

“He should know that he is doing his part.”

“Perhaps he wants to do more than his part. He did not show this to you, but he is very proud that Heinz Moll sent you to him, that he is able to be of assistance to you. It is important to him. He has encountered, oh, a great deal of trouble over the years, you know. Not only since the war. Even during it, when we were a part of Germany. I was not even born then, but I have heard talk. It was very hard for him.”

“How?”

She hesitated, then licked her lips. “He might not forgive me for telling you.”

“I’ll say nothing to him.”

“Please don’t. You see, Papa was a member of the Sudeten Nazi League even before the annexation. Long before the annexation. And they teased him then. His theories about race.”

“Why?”

“His… well, his physique. He is short, you know. And he is dark, both his hair and his complexion. And his eyes, I don’t know if you noticed, but his eyes are brown.”

“Not exactly the Nordic ideal.”

“No, not at all. And his foot, you know. Poor Papa.” She lowered her eyes. “Mama told me it was even worse for him during the war. You know of Hitler’s policies for improving the race? People who were found to be… uh… defective-”

“I know.”

“I would never question the wisdom of the Fuehrer’s ideas. I believe in them very strongly myself. But they cannot be applied to everyone. Not to the leading supporters of the Fatherland.”