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“Wilhelm, he’s twenty years old!”

“I don’t care if he’s fourteen,” Peis said.

“Damn you!”

He laughed and hung up. But what was really funny was that she had outwitted him. As long as von Fulmar stayed at the university, she more than likely would be able to exchange sleeping with Peis, and whoever else it amused him to offer her to, for a really decent kid, with nice eyes, who didn’t treat her like a whore.

The only thing that finally went wrong with Gisella Dyer’s relationship with Eric Fulmar was that it had to end.

And after it ended, of course, she went back to her role as whore-on-call.

Chapter FOUR

Gisella Dyer was distressed.

It was bad enough that on the Eve of the New Year she had to charm

and then sleep with a complete stranger, who, since he was a Standartenführer, would almost certainly be in his fifties. But what made it really bad was that she’d just about allowed herself to believe she no longer had to be one of Peis’s whores-on-call.

She had not jumped at this hope without reason: Because of her father’s knowledge of titanium and other exotic alloys, the Reichsminister Albert Speer had sought him out—personally sought him out—when he had come to the Fulmar Werke in his private train a month before and had installed him, at a flattering honorarium, as “consultant” to the Fulmar Werke.

Her father was obviously now rehabilitated in the eyes of the government. And that should have been clear to Peis.

Despite the virtually limitless power Peis had as the local SS-SD officer, he was a peasant, very much aware of who his betters were. And very much the servant in their presence. After the Reichsminister’s departure, her father told Gisella that Peis looked like he was wetting his pants every time Speer spoke to him.

It just seemed logical that Peis would leave her alone, would probably go out of his way to avoid her in the fear that her father would get him in trouble with Speer.

It had been nice to think about. And then as the days and weeks passed and Peis didn’t call her, it began to seem possible that she was free of Peis for good. She had not been “invited” to any of the pre-Christmas parties he staged for his close friends. Or, until just now, to a New Year’s Eve gathering.

But it was starting all over again. Nothing had changed. And she felt foolish for having hoped.

She did what she could with her hair and dressed carefully (as a whore should, she thought bitterly), even to underwear that was no protection against the cold but would be pleasing to a man.

When the time came, she left the apartment and stood on the snow-covered street wondering which would be the better route to catch the Strassenbahn, which would take her to the Südbahnhof.

The Strassenbahn ride would be shorter if she turned left and went down the hill—the Marburg—that way. But the walk was almost twice as far as it would be if she went off the Marburg in the other direction and caught the Strassenbahn on the other side of the Marburg, by the City Baths.

She decided that since it was snowing, the shorter walk made more sense even if the ride was longer, and she started down the street toward the City Baths, her hands jammed in the pockets of her coat.

After the Strassenbahn put her off into the snow in front of the Südbahnhof and she started walking up the ice-slippery cobblestone road to the Kurhotel, Gisella thought of Eric Fulmar. Probably because she was going to the Kurhotel; she had spent a good deal of time with him in the Kurhotel.

She wondered if he ever thought of her, wherever he was. Probably on the Eastern Front, but possibly, because he was able to walk through rain-drops, in Berlin. Or, for that matter, in Paris or Budapest, safe, warm, and in bed with some woman. Right now she would have been pleased to have been that woman.

She then wondered about the Standartenführer she would be entertaining tonight. Would she be just a little bit lucky, and would he be reasonably young and pleasant? Probably not. Christmas was over.

As she walked into the foyer of the Kurhotel, already crowded with drunk and exuberant New Year’s Eve revelers, she remembered how furious Peis had been—and what Peis had done to her—when one day in the early spring of 1940, after returning for his fourth year at the university, Eric von Fulmar had simply vanished.

Peis had been unable to accept that Fulmar had said nothing to her about that. She still remembered Peis’s words, between brain-jarring slaps:

“You sucked his cock for two years, and he just took off without a whisper? You don’t really expect me to believe that, you stupid cunt!”

Gisella Dyer gave her coat to the attendant and entered the dining room. The room was full, and extra tables had been crowded into it to accept the New Year’s Eve crowd.

She wondered, What does anyone have to celebrate?

She saw Peis at a table across the room. There was a thin, long-haired blonde with him, doubtless some whore of Frau Grumbach’s. And a stocky man in the black uniform of the SS.

She fixed a smile on her face and made her way through the crowded room.