Empire and Honor Read online

  He had a mental image of the absolutely worn-out shoes she had been wearing when he first saw her.

  “Where did you come from, Frau von Wachtstein?”

  “Pomerania,” she said. “Do you know where that is?”

  “Yes, I do. You walked all the way?”

  “Most of the way. The usual price for a woman’s transportation is one I didn’t want to pay.”

  He nodded.

  “I shouldn’t have said that either,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “I wasn’t thinking of our current situation.”

  What the hell does she mean by that?

  That with me, she’d be willing to pay the usual price?

  You are out of your fucking mind, Jimmy Cronley!

  Paying for the two uniforms wiped out the last of the stack of scrip twenty-dollar bills and he had to take a second stack from his other boot.

  [SEVEN]

  In the Kapitän on the way to the Kurhotel Marburg, the smell of Chanel No. 5 told him she had decided not to wait until she had her bath before applying that.

  —

  “This is the Goethe Suite,” the manager of the Kurhotel Marburg said, “normally reserved for colonels and general officers. But Major Connell explained the situation. I hope you will be comfortable, Frau von Wachtstein. If you need anything, just pick up the telephone.”

  “Thank you,” Elsa said.

  “And per Major Connell’s request, Lieutenant,” the manager went on, handing him a key, “I’ve put you near to Frau von Wachtstein—in 408a, next door. It’s usually where aides-de-camp are placed. There is a connecting door to 408, the Goethe Suite. It’s locked.”

  “I’ll be next door when you need me, Frau von Wachtstein,” Cronley said.

  Cronley went to 408a and let himself in.

  Compared to the rooms in the suite in which Frau von Wachtstein had been installed, 408a was small. But compared to his room in the Alte Post Hotel, it was almost luxurious.

  He saw the door connecting 408a with 408, noting that it seemed substantial and that the locking mechanism could be operated only from within the Goethe Suite.

  Which is a good thing, otherwise I might go completely bananas and “accidentally” burst in there to get a look at that woman in her bathtub.

  A woman who is thirty-two fucking years old, looks older, and, as another consideration, is under the personal protection of a bird colonel who has Major Connell, a ruthless bastard himself, scared shitless. . . .

  What the fuck am I thinking?

  If I get two inches—hell, a half inch—out of line with Frau von Wachtstein, then it’s auf Wiedersehen, good life in the good ol’ Twenty-second.

  I’ll wind up changing tracks and bogie wheels in the mud in some tank company in Grafenwöhr.

  Cronley sat in an armchair, lit a cigar, found a copy of the Army newspaper Stars & Stripes, and started to read it.

  And, when he had finished going through it, fell asleep.

  —

  “Well, Mr. Cronley, how do I look?” Frau von Wachtstein asked.

  Startled awake, he stood up.

  She was standing in front of him, wearing the Uniform, Class A, Female Officer’s.

  How the hell did she get in here?

  She unlocked the connecting door, Stupid, and came through it, that’s how.

  “Very nice,” he said.

  You don’t look fifty anymore. You don’t even look thirty-two.

  And you smell good. You must have used half of that bottle of Chanel No. 5.

  “Do you have a knife?” she asked.

  “Excuse me?”

  “A knife,” she said. “To cut things.”

  He searched in his pocket and came out with a pocketknife adorned with the insignia of the Boy Scouts of America. It had been a present on his promotion to Star rank in BSA Troop 36, Midland, Texas.

  He extended it in the palm of his hand. She took it.

  “That should do nicely,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  “That’s what you do in the CIC,” he said. “Protect secrets.”

  “The CIC? I saw that on the door of the Alte Post Hotel. What does it mean?”

  “It stands for Counterintelligence Corps.”

  “Like the German Sicherheitsdienst? Secret police?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You don’t look to be old enough for duties like that.”

  “I get the least important duties.”

  “Like taking care of someone like me?”

  “I didn’t mean that,” he said.

  “Major Connell said he was throwing you to the wolves,” she said. “That you were sort of expendable.”

  “I think Major Connell forgot—or never knew—that you speak English. I can’t imagine him saying what he did otherwise.”

  “That’s what I thought. Well, I will try to do nothing that will get you in trouble.”

  “Thank you.”

  She met his eyes. Hers were blue, and they made him uncomfortable.

  “What are you going to do with the knife?” he asked, looking at it.

  “I don’t want to keep calling you Mr. Cronley,” Elsa said. “What’s your name?”

  “You can call me Jimmy or Jim.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “In Texas you can call a man Jimmy and it’s all right. Other places—up north, in the Army—you hear a man called Jimmy, you suspect he’s a little funny.”

  He made a waving gesture with his hand.

  “I take it you’re not a little funny,” she said, smiling as she mimicked the waving gesture.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Jimmy, do you think it’s all right for someone to hide something . . . something of value? Something that’s yours?”

  “Hide it from whom?”

  “Right now, Major Connell. Maybe, probably, later from this Colonel Mattingly he’s so afraid of.”

  “No. If it’s yours, you should have the right to hide it from anybody you please. But I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “When I took off my clothing to take my bath, I looked at it, and realized I never would have to wear it again.”

  Cronley had a quick mental image of her standing naked beside the bathtub, looking down at her discarded clothing.

  Picture changing bogies and tracks in the mud, Stupid!

  “No reason that you would have to,” he said.

  “What I wanted to do was burn it, burn it all.”

  “No problem, Frau von Wachtstein. Give it to me and I’ll burn it.”

  “If I’m to call you Jimmy, why don’t you call me Elsa?”

  “All right, give me your old clothes, Elsa, and I’ll burn them.”

  “Come with me,” she said, and led him through the connecting door to the Goethe Suite.

  When they had been shown the Goethe Suite by the manager, Cronley was shown only the sitting room. Elsa now led him into the bedroom, and through that into the bathroom.

  She pointed at a pile of discarded clothing—her overcoat, blouse, skirt, and sweater—on the floor. On top were a gray and well-worn brassiere and a pair of gray baggy underpants. He saw that the elastic waistband of the underpants had been replaced with what looked like two shoelaces tied together.

  No wonder she wanted to get rid of this crap and burn it!

  “I’ll get it,” he said.

  “I forgot to ask for underwear when we were at the clothing place, or the PX,” Elsa said. “Could you . . . ?”

  “I don’t know about the PX. But I’m sure they have it at the clothing store. We’ll just have to go back.”

  The first thing Cronley thought was that the underwear in the clothing store was probably going to be olive drab.

  Well, maybe white.

  Then he suddenly thought: Jesus Christ! If she didn’t have any underwear to put on, that
means she’s not wearing anything under her uniform.

  “Could we?” Elsa asked.

  “Certainly,” Jimmy said. “We can go back there right now if you’d like.”

  Of course she’d like,Stupid.

  She’s naked under her uniform.

  He bent over, intending to scoop up her discarded clothing.

  “Wait,” she said. “There’s a problem there.”

  He straightened up and looked at her.

  “What I started to talk about before,” Elsa said.

  “You’re hiding something in there?” Cronley guessed. “What?”

  She opened his pocketknife and dropped to her knees beside the pile of clothing. She separated the skirt from the pile, then attacked the waistband seam with the blade, sawing her way through the stitching.

  The first thing she retrieved was a ring, a square-cut diamond set in gold. She handed it to him.

  It looks like my mother’s engagement ring.

  Three karats at least. Maybe four.

  “That’s the ring Karl—my husband—gave me when we became engaged,” Elsa said, as she moved his knife to another part of the waistband.

  This time she came out with another square-cut diamond, this one larger than the one in the ring—Jesus Christ, it’s enormous!—and suspended from a necklace studded for most of its length with diamonds.

  She handed this to him.

  “This was my father’s gift to my mother on their twenty-fifth anniversary.”

  She met his eyes again.

  “I would rather that Major Connell and Colonel Mattingly not know I have these,” she said. “Are you going to have to tell them?”

  Of course I’m going to have to tell them.

  For all I know, your husband—or for that matter, your boyfriend—took them away from a rich Jew just before she was marched into the gas chamber!

  And if they’re really yours, and Connell will know how to find that out, no problem.

  “That’s all that’s left,” she said, almost as if to herself, “of everything.”

  And then she spoke directly to him.

  “Everything the traitors owned—after July ’44—was forfeited to the Reich. Everything. And if the SS had found me, they would have gotten this, too.”

  She’s probably lying through her teeth.

  But how could she look at me with those blue eyes and lie to me?

  “I was never in your bathroom,” Jimmy then said. “You never showed me either the ring or the necklace.”

  “Thank you,” Elsa said.

  “Give me ten minutes to find some way to burn this stuff. Then we’ll go back to the clothing sales store.”

  “I’ll go with you to burn them,” Elsa said, adding, “please.”

  —

  The manager of the Kurhotel was very cooperative and asked no questions when Cronley told him what he wanted to do.

  Probably because Connell told him to give me whatever I asked for, and he’s afraid of Connell and/or the CIC.

  The manager led them to a furnace in the basement.

  Cronley fed Elsa’s clothing onto the glowing coals and watched as they finally burst into flame.

  When there was nothing left of the clothing but gray ash, Cronley closed the furnace door.

  “So ends my old life,” Elsa said, “and begins my new one.”

  “Yeah,” Cronley said.

  The manager waved them onto the stairs. Cronley waved Elsa ahead of him.

  Her buttocks moved under the pink skirt of the uniform, and his imagination went to work.

  —

  They went to the clothing sales store in the Quartermaster Depot, where the same German clerk from earlier now told Elsa that while they stocked underwear, it was “GI.” The PX, the clerk said, had a much nicer and larger selection.

  At the PX, Elsa selected a mixed bag of black and red and pink brassieres and underpants. Paying for them exhausted Stack Two of Jimmy’s back pay, requiring him to take a third wad of twenties from his boot top.

  “Thank you again,” Elsa said, touching his arm.

  Cronley now wondered if he was going to get any of what he had spent back from Connell—never mind all of it—and decided that he wouldn’t.

  The only place Connell could get the money was from the XXIInd, and Cronley doubted the XXIInd had funds to pay for clothing for a German national. And Cronley understood that Connell was not at all likely to pay those expenses from his own pocket.

  When they were back in the Kapitän, Cronley told her, “I’m going to have to stop by my quarters and pick up stuff—my toilet kit, a clean shirt, et cetera—if I’m going to spend the night in the Kurhotel.”

  “All right,” she said. “And then do you think we could get something to eat?”

  Jesus, I didn’t even think about feeding her!

  He looked at his watch. It was quarter to seven.

  “When was the last time you had something to eat?” he asked.

  “I had the last of my bread and sausage this morning. All I’ve had since then is that chocolate bar you gave me.”

  “The Mess in the Kurhotel—”

  “‘The Mess’?”

  “The dining room,” he clarified, “opens at seven. It’s pretty good. Can you wait that long?”

  “Of course.”

  [EIGHT]

  Major Connell was leaving his office when Cronley and Frau von Wachtstein walked into the lobby.

  “Well, look at you,” he said in German. “Permit me to say you look very nice, Frau von Wachtstein.”

  “Thank you,” she replied. “All of these things, plus what we bought in the PX, cost a great deal of money, Herr Major.”

  “Well, don’t you worry about that. We’re under orders to take care of your every need,” Connell said, then thought, Which means I’m going to get stuck for everything. “Is there anything else you need?” he added.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Don’t be hesitant to ask,” he said, then looked at Cronley. “Why are you back here?”

  “I came to pick up my toilet kit and a clean shirt, sir,” Cronley said.

  “Oh, that’s right, you’ll be staying at the Kurhotel, won’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You might take Frau von Wachtstein to the Mess there, Cronley. It’s really very good.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If you need anything, you know where to find me,” Connell said.

  “Yes, sir. Thank you.”

  —

  On the way to the Kurhotel, Cronley’s mind turned to Frau von Wachtstein’s intimate undergarments.

  She’s still naked under that uniform; she hasn’t had a chance to put on any of the stuff she bought.

  Well, she can do that as soon as we get to the hotel. Maybe that black brassiere and the matching see-through underpants . . .

  Damn it! Get your filthy mind off her underwear, pervert!

  —

  In the hotel lobby, Elsa pointed to the sign that read DINING ROOM.

  “In there?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  They were shown to a table next to windows that overlooked the Lahn River.

  “The river, the Lahn, is out there,” he said, pointing. “But you can’t see it in the dark.”

  Brilliant conversation, Jimmy!

  “I saw it earlier from my room,” she said.

  A waiter appeared and asked in English with a thick Hessian accent, “May I bring you a cocktail before dinner?”

  “I really would like a glass of wine,” Elsa said, in German, looking at Cronley.

  “I will bring the wine list,” the waiter said.

  “I don’t know anything about wine,” Cronley said.

  “Would you like a cocktail instead?” Elsa said.

  “What I would really like to have is a double Jack Daniel’s on the rocks.”

  “What is that?”

  “Whiskey. Bourbon whiskey. They make it out of corn.”
<
br />   Elsa looked at the waiter. “Bring two. And the menu.”

  “If you want wine, have wine,” Cronley said.

  “I probably wouldn’t know anything on an American list. And besides, beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “You’re not a beggar.”

  “How about a charity case?”

  “Not that either.”

  A menu was produced.

  She opened it, studied the selections, then closed it.

  “Would you order for me? A piece of meat and a potato, please.”

  “I’m going to have a medium-rare Porterhouse and a baked potato and corn on the cob. Would that be all right?”

  “May your charity case ask questions?”

  “You’re not a charity case!”

  “I had the feeling that Major Connell is not going to reimburse you for what you’ve spent—and are spending—on me. Doesn’t that make me a charity case?”

  “What you are is a very beautiful woman with whom I’m having dinner.”

  She started to reply but was interrupted by the delivery of the Jack Daniel’s.

  “This is what we call ‘sipping whiskey,’” Cronley said. “You take small sips. Not big swallows, I mean.”

  He demonstrated.

  She picked up her glass and took a tiny sip.

  “Well?” he said.

  “If I took a big swallow of this, I’d be on the floor.”

  “Then don’t drink it. Order some wine.”

  “Tell me what a Porterhouse is,” she said, and took another tiny sip of the Jack Daniel’s.

  “It’s a beefsteak. A big one. With the bone. On one side of the bone is a small tender part, the filet mignon, and on the other, a larger steak, called—depending on where you are—a Kansas City filet or a New York strip.”

  “That sounds wonderful. You know about meat, I see.”

  “I was raised on a cattle ranch in Texas.”

  “You were a cowboy?”

  “Until I was fourteen. Then I became a roughneck.”

  “A what?”

  “Someone who works on oil rigs. Drilling for oil. Midland sits on what they call the Permian Basin. A very large oil deposit.”

  This is where I should skillfully and subtly work into the conversation that the F-Bar-Z ranch, which cattle ranch has been in the family for three generations—four, counting mine—extends over four sections, and the last time I looked there were two hundred and thirteen horsehead pumps on it extracting oil from the Permian Basin.