After taking a long pull from the quart flask, Jethro said, “Milo, my good old friend, you are about to be made privy to a secret known by no one else with the sole exception of Colonel James Lewis. I’ll not ask for or expect any avowals that you’ll not betray my trust in you, for did I not trust you implicitly, you’d not be here this day.
“Milo, forgive me, please, but I have not been completely candid with you in the years since I first met you. I am married, Milo, and you are about to meet my wife, Martihe Stiles, as well as my two children, Per and Gabrielle.
“Before you ask the obvious, Milo, no, it has not been an easy life for her, but she understands me, my self-imposed exile and penance, she loves me deeply, and our children bind us one to the other despite my lengthy absences and necessarily brief returns. She is much younger than I am. I have known her for much of her life, you see, for she is the daughter of two old and very dear friends from my first days in Europe, years ago.
“I first bought this farm as a place for her to rear our children, before ever there were any to rear. It is fortunate that I happened to buy this particular farm, in this particular place, for now, with my necessary trips to Washington every so often, I am able to spend more time with her and them than ever before.” He chuckled. “So much so, that now it would appear that Martine will be bringing forth a new little brother or sister for them in about six months’ time.”
Jethro’s pretty young wife was not the only surprise awaiting him in the rambling, gracious brick house nestled among its bounteous gardens fringed by a profusion of outbuildings with rolling meadows stretching out on every hand.
While a servant drove the Lincoln away, the petite blond woman first greeted her husband with an embrace and unabashed kisses. Even after bearing two children, so slender and fine-boned was she that her three-month pregnancy was already obvious, but her face radiated her soul-deep happiness and her blue eyes glowed with love each time she looked at the graying officer.
She welcomed Milo in a cultured French tinged with both Parisian and the Swiss dialect, beckoned over another servant to take his bag, then herself ushered him into her home. There, in the comfortably furnished and lavishly decorated parlor to the left of the entrance foyer, four wing chairs faced a huge hearth on which a log fire was laid but not yet lit behind a pierced-brass screen. Two of these chairs were occupied.
Rank and increased responsibilities had not made an easily obvious change in one line or hair of James Lewis’ appearance. His new pinks and blouse fitted him like a glove, as his uniform always had for as long as Milo had known the man; the silver eagles on his shoulders did not look at all out of place on the sometime first sergeant, and the row of campaign and award ribbons affixed over the breast pocket of that selfsame blouse told at a casual glance that here stood not just another new-made civilian-soldier. But even as he pumped Lewis’ big, hard hand, Milo was reeling numbly in shock at sight of the other guest in Jethro’s home.
Dr. Sam Osterreich’s uniform was the dark blue of the Navy, the sleeves of his blouse encircled with the four wide, gold stripes indicating the rank of Navy captain, the full equivalent of James Lewis’ rank.
Later, as the four men sipped wine and talked, the story came out. “You see, Milo,” said Lewis, “back when I was twistin’ tails to get that pissant shithead Jarvis from off of your ass, I come to find out you had been in a hospital in Chicago back in the late thirties and the doctor what had done first took care of you was just then a major at Dix, up in Jersey. When I got in touch with him, he said he’d do all he could for you because he knowed fuckin’ well you wasn’t no Nazi because of how you’d got in a lot of trouble when you got on the shitlist of some Nazi Bund priest in Chicago and that that was how you come to join the Army to start out with.
“But, besides that, he put me in touch with Sam here, who’s still at Bethesda like he was then, and has some kinda pull—believe you me he has!—more’n you can shake a fuckin’ stick at, too. It was him, almos’ all him, what got your balls outen that crack, Milo, and give that dumb shitface Jarvis a comeuppance he had just been a-beggin’ for for a fuckin’ long time. Afore it was done, some first-class, fuckin’ remain’s had been done on him, too, a coupla fuckin’ new assholes worth, I tell you. ‘Cause of you and whatall he was tryin’ to do to railroad you, Doc Sam, here, he not only was able to get you bailed outen the shit, but he got poor Schrader and two, three other guys from our division off the fuckin’ hook, too. Like old maids sees burglars under ever’ bed and in ever’ closet, thishere fuckin’ scabsucker Jarvis was seein’ fuckin’ Nazis ever’ place he come to look; if a soldier could talk German good, to that fuckin’ Jarvis, it meant he was a Nazi spy. The brass-balled fucker even had the gumption to ask me, flat out, if the real reason I was stickin’ up for you wasn’t because my mama’s maiden name was Gertrude Bauer. And he damned fuckin’ near got hisself busted down a whole helluva lot further than he did, too, when he asked Colonel Kessler if he’d been borned in this country and how long ago was the last time he was in Europe. Milo, that fuckin’ li’l bastard’s mouth’s gonna dig him a fuckin’ grave!”
Osterreich, looking chubbier than Milo remembered him, holding his crystal wineglass delicately by its stem, shook his head sadly. “The former Major, now Lieutenant, Jarfis is a sad case, misplaced to .begin, then terribly overworked. He is not possessed of either emotional or of physical strength or endurance, unfortunately. He is seriously crippled by some rather sefere phobias and a most irrational belief he has in his intuitife powers.
“The unfortunate man is skirting perilously close to a nervous collapse at the best of times and I therefore made a recommendation that he be hospitalized or separated for the good of the Army. But he apparently possessed of some influential friends is and he only was reduced in rank, reprimanded and then sent on his way to continue, one supposes, to ferret out Nazi sympathizers and spies.
“And the saddest of all about him is that he most likely a real Nazi would not know. A real spy would easily hoodwink such a man as him, for he is far from truly intelligent and the most of his boasted intuition mainly is self-delusion.
“I know Nazis, gentlemen, I attended several meetings of the fledgling National Socialist German Workers’ Party in the nineteen hundred and twenties, and in those early days of the party I was honored and welcomed and made much of as a former cavalry officer of the Imperial Austrian Army. All of this was, of course, before the fact of my Jewishness became all-important to them. I impart to you all no secret, here. It all is well known to any who wish to learn of it, for it was not only the National Socialists’ meeting I attended now and then, but the Communists’, the Monarchists’, the Anarchists’ and many another group, all of whom I found to be basically the same—a cadre of wild-eyed but cunning fanatics attempting to form hordes of troubled, desperate, demoralized German men and women into a political power base.
“The man Jarfis knows nothing about the Nazis, although had he been a German in Germany, he would no doubt have made them a good recruit, though he is too unstable to have been able to rise very far in their ranks. His ideas of Nazism are terribly skewed and twisted and distorted. I feel very sorry for him, for he truly is suffering, but there is nothing I can do for him. Under present circumstances, he is the responsibility and the very great problem of the Army, not the Navy.”
Martine Stiles and Milo got along every bit as well from the start as had he and her husband. Throughout the courses of the sumptuous dinner served that Friday night, she chatted gaily with Milo and the others, slipping effortlessly from English to French, Danish, German, Italian and Spanish, though she carefully limited all general conversation to her British-accented English for the benefit of James Lewis, who was not a linguist.