“He’s drunk, Greta, he probably won’t even remember it.”
“So then I should forget it, is that what you’re saying? That man I live with, who’s going to take me to the United States, that dummkopf who doesn’t even care if someone carves initials on me? Ernie told me he has a cabin on a lake in Wisconsin. Do you know where that is?”
“Yes,” Lasari said. “The Midwest, green country with fir trees and lots of snow in winter. Like Bavaria without mountains.”
She looked around the cluttered room. “Ernie said there are lots of Germans there, that they like cuckoo clocks and strudel and they’d like me... He’s a fucking liar, isn’t he?”
“I think he means it,” Lasari said.
Her eyes were suddenly wide and frightened; her voice dropped to a whisper. “I have something for you, George.”
A whistle sounded from the street below. Lasari went to the window and looked down. He could see a jeep at the curb, Neal standing beside it.
Greta had gone into the bedroom. She tugged at Strasser’s body till he rolled over on his back, coughing and moistening his lips with spittle. She took a key ring from his pocket and unsnapped it from the chain that held it to his belt.
Lasari stood in the bedroom doorway. “I’ve got to go, Greta.”
“He won’t help me,” she said, as if talking to herself. She unlocked the double doors of a floor to ceiling closet, then selected a key to open a drawer. “He’ll never take me to Wisconsin, he’ll run out on me. Ernie’ll give me a couple thousand DM and a teddy bear that plays ‘Tannenbaum’ or something and I’ll never see him again.”
Inside the drawer was a heavy metal box with a separate lock. She opened it.
“Nobody ever did anything for me in my whole life, not my family, not Ernie, no one until you almost let Eddie kill you,” she whispered. She took something from the box, closed it and secured all three locks. Then she stepped back into the front room.
“Don’t tell me a fucking thing you’ve got planned George. Then they can’t make me tell them anything. But I can see it in your eyes, I saw it when you looked at Eddie. You’re not going to do what they say. You’re going to take a chance and run for it...”
“You said to tell you nothing, Greta.”
She held out an American passport. “It was supposed to be for me,” she said. “He paid twenty-five thousand DM for it. It’s a perfect fake, you just have to put your name and the right picture in it. There are machines at the PX that take those pictures.” She sighed. “He’d have sold the passport back on the black market before he’d give it to me.”
She put the passport in Lasari’s hand and closed his fingers over it. “Who loves ya, baby?”
He shrugged. “Kojak, I guess.”
She was beginning to cry. “I was never as dumb as you thought, George. Those TV people aren’t real, they can’t help you, I know that. But at least they can’t hurt you.”
The whistle sounded again and in the bedroom Strasser stirred and threw an arm over his face. “Listen, Greta,” Lasari said. “If Strasser finds out, tell him I stole it. Better still, get out of here tonight, before he wakes. I never thought you were dumb, now for Christ’s sake prove it.”
She shook her head stubbornly. “Not yet. I’ve got to figure out how much he owes me.”
Lasari went down the stairs to the street, where an icy wind was rising off the river. As Neal held open the door of the jeep, Lasari glanced up at the apartment windows. They were clear yellow squares against the darkness, bright but empty.
Chapter Thirty-five
The general swam a dozen laps in the Rhein-Baden pool, then took an icy shower in a stall fitted with crisscross jet sprays. In his third-floor room he opened the windows and looked out on the parks and graveled walks of the spa’s expansive grounds. It was not yet eight o’clock, and sharply cold, but a few of the healthier guests were out in jogging clothes and an elderly man and woman in wheelchairs, plaid robes tucked around them, were being pushed along by uniformed spa attendants under the bare linden trees.
Weir did a half hour of setting-up exercises, then sat down with a towel around his waist for a breakfast of fruit, boiled eggs and toast that had arrived from the room service on the same knock as the items from the pressing room. Fritz Vestrick was not yet in his office when Weir registered, but the desk clerk assured the general that Herr Vestrick would be informed of the honored guest’s presence the moment he arrived.
On the stroke of nine o’clock the phone rang and Vestrick’s voice, showing traces of a southern accent, said, “Hiya, Scotty! Am I coming up or are you coming down?”
“Give me five minutes, Fritz. I’ll be down.”
“Can’t wait to see you, pardner.”
Tarbert Weir put on his freshly pressed Class-A uniform, gray twill trousers, cordovan ankle boots with buckled straps, khaki shirt and tie and an olive drab tunic with three rows of campaign ribbons and decorations and the stars of a general. He checked the insignia on his garrison cap and slapped it across his knee to soften the folds. At the open window he took several deep breaths, then flexed his muscles so the fabric of the tunic stretched tight over his shoulders but moved with ease at the armpits. There was no need to look in the full-length mirror. Weir knew by the flex and stretch exactly how trim he looked.
Herr Vestrick’s office, opening directly off the lobby, was furnished in bleached leather, shining wood and circular carpets with patterns woven in varying shades of blue. In the background, from a tape cassette, came the throaty, sugared tones of Al Jolson singing “My Old Kentucky Home.”
The two men embraced and Vestrick motioned Weir to a chair while he seated himself behind the big desk. Vestrick nodded at the cassette player. “Just once through, Scotty, for old times’ sake. I had it transposed from the old seventy-eight.”
Vestrick was older than Weir by four or five years, a big man with high coloring. He wore the striped trousers and cutaway coat of a traditional boniface. He had been one of the first Luftwaffe pilots shot down over Britain after the United States’ entry into World War II, and had spent the next four years in prisoner-of-war camps in the deep South. After his release, Vestrick had returned to Frankfurt and was working as a busboy in the dining room at the Frankfurter Hof when Weir and Maggie had stopped there on their wedding leave. Weir had been impressed with the German’s fluent English, surprising accent and passionate love of the South. He had arranged for Vestrick to get work as a translator at the Am-Main Army Headquarters. The Jolson recording, now on tape, was one that Tarbert Weir had found in a second-hand record store near the Army College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and sent to Vestrick nearly twenty years ago.
On the last falling tones, Vestrick switched off the cassette and said, “I know about Mark, Scotty. I still subscribe to the Louisville Journal, they covered it under national news.”
For a moment Weir did not trust himself to speak.
“I already called you in Springfield,” Vestrick said, “but they told me you had gone to Virginia.”
“You talked to John Grimes?”
“No, a young lady. I didn’t ask her name.”
“A friend of Mark’s,” the general said.
“Helga wants you at the house for lunch, Scotty. It’s up to you, of course.” Weir shook his head. “I’ll do anything,” Vestrick said. “I’ve got fine staff here. I’ll take a few days off, we’ll go to the mountains, I’ll get drunk with you.”
Weir shook his head again. “That just won’t do it, Fritz. Not this time. There might be something, however. You still flying?”
“Yes, I keep an A36 Bonanza at the local airport.”