Page 156

Maximilianstrasse 178

Munich, American Zone of Occupation, Germany

0655 4 November 1945

Special Agent Friedrich Hessinger was sitting at a small table in a far corner of the dining room when Cronley walked in.

A waiter followed Cronley to the table and took their order. When he had gone, Hessinger asked, “How did it go with Mrs. Colonel Schumann last night?”

“I bought her dinner and then we went to bed.”

“You weren’t listening when I told you that would be dangerous?”

It took a moment for Cronley to take his meaning.

“Screw you, Freddy.”

“A little joke,” Hessinger said. “But you should watch what you say. You should have said, ‘After dinner she went to her room. And then I went to mine.’”

“Fuck you.”

“You shouldn’t talk to me that way. Officers are not supposed to say unkind things to enlisted men. It hurts our feelings. And then we can go to the inspector general to complain. You know our IG, right? Colonel Schumann?”

Delighted with his own wit, Hessinger was smiling broadly.

“And today what are Mrs. Colonel Schumann’s plans for you?”

“I’ll call her after we eat and see how I can be of service.”

“Do that. We can’t afford to have her pissed at you.”

—

Cronley didn’t think Rachel was pissed at him, but he did suspect that the bloom had begun to come off their roses, so to speak.

After dinner, when they had gone to his room, there had been maybe ten minutes of athletic thrashing about on his bed, followed by maybe sixty seconds of breath-catching. Then Rachel had matter-of-factly announced that she’d better get back to her room, “Tony will probably call.” She had then dressed as quickly as she had undressed and left.

That was probably, he decided, his punishment for his refusal to take her to Kloster Grünau. His reaction to her leaving had been one of relief. Although Ole Willie had answered the call of duty, the cold fact seemed to be that since he now accepted that he really shouldn’t be fucking Rachel, he really didn’t want to.

There were a number of reasons for this, high among them that the late Mrs. James D. Cronley Jr. had startled him by returning to his thoughts while he and Rachel were having dinner. While he didn’t think the Squirt was really riding around on a cloud up

there playing a mournful tune on her harp while looking down at him with tear-filled eyes as he wined, dined, and prepared to fuck a married woman who had two children—he wasn’t completely sure she wasn’t, either.

It had also occurred to him that maybe Rachel had also been thinking of her children, or more accurately, as herself as the mother of two children who should not be fucking a young captain. Maybe, he thought, she had for the first time really considered the consequences of their getting caught.

—

“She wanted me to take the Kapitän and drive her to Kloster Grünau,” Cronley told Hessinger. “She said she would love to be able to tell her husband that she got into the monastery after he couldn’t.”

“Taking her to Kloster Grünau would be even more stupid than taking her to bed. What did you tell her?”

“That I had been ordered to stay in Munich until I heard from Colonel Frade.”

“And she believed you?”

“She didn’t like it, but she believed me.”

“I asked you what do you think she’ll want you to do for her today?”