W E B Griffin - Honor 2 - Blood and Honor

by Blood

  A doorman and a bellboy-a boy; he looked about twelve or thirteen- came down the wide marble stairs to the car.

  Goltz opened his door for Peter to get out, and von Tresmarck went to the trunk to reclaim Peter's small canvas bag.

  "I will leave word what time I'll be here in the morning," Goltz said.

  "Thank you, Herr Standartenf�hrer," Peter said, and clicked his heels. "And thank you, Sturmbannf�hrer." Von Tresmarck nodded but did not say anything. "It was a pleasure to see you again, Frau Sturmbannf�hrer," Peter concluded, clicked his heels again, and marched up the stairs after the bellboy.

  He did not look back at the car.

  The lobby of the hotel was crowded with well-fed, well-dressed, prosper-ous-appearing people. There seemed to be fewer blond, fair-skinned people here than in Buenos Aires, but he wondered if this was just his imagination.

  He was shown to a suite on the second floor, a foyer, a sitting room and room with a large double bed. When he opened the vertical blinds, he saw there was a balcony overlooking the water. He went out on it.

  A few moments later he left the room, descending to the main-floor corridor by a wide flight of carpeted marble stairs, rather than by the elevator. He had just decided that the place reminded him somewhat of the gambling casino in Baden-Baden when, glancing down a side corridor, he saw the hotel casino.

  He went in. He was not a gambler, but he was curious. Three-quarters of the casino's tables were in use. He watched roulette for a few minutes, then bac-carat, and that was enough.

  When he left the casino, he passed through the hotel dining room, which was in the center of the building. It was a large, somewhat dark room from whose three-story-high ceiling hung four enormous crystal chandeliers. There was a grand piano at one end of the room, beside the bar, and a pianist was play-ing Johann Strauss. The bar was crowded.

  A headwaiter offered him a table but he declined.

  He left the hotel and walked around the street across from it. The smell of burning beef caught his nostrils, and he followed it to a small restaurant where an amazing amount of beef was cooking over glowing wood ashes.

  He had a steak, french fried potatoes, a tomato and lettuce salad, and washed it down with a bottle of the local beer. He was surprised that the bill was so small.

  On the way back to the hotel he stopped at a newsstand, where there was an array of American magazines. There was nothing in German except for yester-day's Buenos Aires Frei Post. He bought copies of Time, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, and a man's magazine, with a racy picture of a woman in a bathing suit on the cover, called Esquire.

  He carried them back to the Casino Hotel, nobly decided against quench-ing the thirst his first beer had caused by having a second in the bar, and walked back up the stairs and down the wide corridors to his suite.

  There, he called room service and ordered three bottles of the local beer on ice in a wine cooler. That much beer would last him until he finished reading the magazines. By then it would be time for supper. He would then go back to the small restaurant, have another steak and perhaps another beer. He would then return to the hotel stuffed and sleepy.

  He took off his trousers and shirt and hung them neatly in the closet beside his jacket. He jerked the bedspread off the bed, arranged pillows against the headboard, took off his shoes and socks, laid the magazines out, and settled himself comfortably in the bed to wait for room service.

  The knock came just as he opened Esquire.

  "Come," he said as he reached for the money on the bedside table to tip the waiter.

  "You must have been rather sure that I would come!" Inge von Tresmarck called from the door.

  He turned to look at her.

  "The last thing I expected you to do was come," he said, truthfully.

  "But you are glad to see me?"

  "Delighted," he lied.

  She walked to the bed and sat down on it. She laid her hand on the maga-zines.

  "You really didn't expect me, did you?"

  "No. What about your husband?"

  "I don't think we have to worry about him," Inge said. "Not this afternoon, anyway. They went right in Werner's study and closed the door."

  "They may have already opened the door and are wondering where you are."

  "I'm shopping," she said. "Where else would I be?"

  "Your husband looked at me strangely at the airport."

  "Werner looks that way at every good-looking young man," she said.

  There was a knock at the door.

  "Oh, you were expecting someone," Inge said petulantly. "Not me. But someone''

  "That's probably my beer."

  "Your beer?"

  "I ordered beer."

  "Well, let him in, and order champagne," she said. "I don't drink beer. Don't you remember?"

  She stood up and walked to the bathroom.

  "Come!" Peter ordered.

  A waiter entered carrying three bottles of beer in an ice-filled silver cooler.

  "I've changed my mind," Peter said. "What I really need is a bottle of champagne. Is that going to cause any problem?"

  "No, Se¤or," the waiter said, and walked to the desk, taking from it a leather-bound wine list. He opened it and handed it to Peter.

  Over the waiter's shoulder, Peter could see Inge in the bathroom. Smiling naughtily, she was working her skirt down over her hips.

  He didn't recognize one name among the twenty different champagnes on the list. He ordered by price, selecting one twice as expensive as the cheapest listed, but considerably cheaper than the most expensive.

  Inge ducked behind the bathroom door a split second before the waiter turned to leave. When she heard the door close, she reappeared, now naked, posing in the door with her hand on her hip.

  He felt a stirring in his groin.

  She is a good-looking woman. And it is apparently true that a stiff prick has no conscience.

  "Please tell me you don't think I'm fat," she said.

  "I don't think you're fat," Peter said. "Foolish, perhaps, but not fat."

  "Why foolish?" she said, walking to the bed.

  "You have a husband," Peter said. "I would guess a jealous husband."

  She sat down on the bed and rested her hand on his leg, just below his shorts.

  "Werner worries that I will succumb to the attentions of some tall, dark, and very rich Uruguayan rancher, and that there would be talk," Inge said. "There aren't very many blondes here, and a great many tall, dark, and very rich Uruguayan ranchers seem to be fascinated with us."

  Her hand moved under his shorts.

  "Oh, you are glad to see me, aren't you? I wasn't really sure."

  "I don't know how soon the waiter will be back with the champagne," Pe-ter said.

  "I don't want to start something and then be interrupted," she said. "So we will just tease each other until the waiter comes and goes."

  She moved her hand on him, then took it out of his shorts.

  "Tell me about Werner," Peter said. "Was he around when we knew each other?"

  "He's been around forever," she said. "He used to work for Goltz in the Of-fice of the Reichsprotektor."

  "You were married to him?"

  "No. Let me think. Was I? No, I wasn't. I was then Frau Obersturmbann-f�hrer (The SS rank equivalent to lieutenant colonel) Kolbermann," she said. "I would have thought I would have told you about Erich."

  "You didn't."

  "Erich was then on the Eastern Front with the Waffen-SS"-the military branch of the SS-"He was killed shortly before von Paulus surrendered the Sixth Army at Stalingrad."

  "I'm sorry."

  "I needed another husband, of course," Inge said, matter-of-factly. "Some-one who could keep me out of the hands of the Labor Ministry."

  "Excuse me?"

  Inge lay down on the bed beside him.

  "Liebchen, do I look like the sort of girl who should spend ten hours a day sewing shoes together-or worse, in a shoe factory?"

  "
No, you don't," Peter said, chuckling.

  "I was safe for a while," Inge explained. "Daddy had me on the payroll at the mills. I was 'constructively employed in industry essential to the war effort.'

  Then the mills were bombed out, and Albert Speer (Reichs minister for Armaments and War Production) decided they weren't worth rebuilding. Which put Daddy and me on the 'available labor' list. Daddy-who doesn't know the first thing about steel; he spent his entire life at the mills-was sent to the Saar, where he's living in one room and working as sort of a clerk in the Kruppwerke. The Labor Ministry ordered me to report to Gebruder Pahlenberg Schuhfabrik in Potsdam as a 'trainee.'"

  "What kind of a trainee?"

  "I never found out. Erich came along right then and swept me off my feet- he was on a twenty-day furlough from the east. A whirlwind romance. He had friends in the police side of the SS who could deal with the Labor Ministry. The wife of a Waffen-SS Obersturmbannf�hrer heroically serving the Fatherland on the Eastern Front certainly could not be expected to do something as undigni-fied as working in a shoe factory. It would be terrible for his morale."

  "An older man, was he?" Peter asked.

  "Older than you and me, Liebchen, younger than Werner. Actually, he was rather nice. I felt sorry for him. He was a Hamburger, and had lost his wife and two children in the bombing. And his apartment, too, of course."

  "Why the older men?"

  "Well, for one thing, younger men tend to be lieutenants and captains- you're an exception, of course, Peter. And they don't seem to be able to afford drinking at the Hotel am Zoo, much less to take on the responsibility of a wife with expensive tastes."

  "And Werner can, I gather?"

  "I don't think he really could," Inge said. "Now, of course, it's different."

  "How?" Peter asked.

  There came another knock at the door.

  "Ah, the champagne," Inge said, "that was quick."

  She jumped out of bed and ran into the bathroom. Peter went to the door, took the champagne in its cooler and two glasses from the waiter, and signed for it, without letting the waiter into the room.

  Inge came out of the bathroom as he was unwinding the wire around the cork.

  "The champagne's not bad here," she said. "The wine's very nice. And the food is marvelous!"

  "I've noticed," Peter said.

  He worked the cork out with his thumb, and poured champagne into the glasses.

  "I would have preferred to marry someone like you," she said. "But you weren't available, were you?"

  "No, I wasn't."

  "You were my first failure," she said. "Perhaps that's why I was-am-so fascinated with you."

  "How a failure?"

  "You didn't fall in love with me, and beg me to be faithful to you when you went back to the war."

  "Everybody else did?"

  "Everybody else I took to the Hotel am Wansee did," she said. "I saved the Wansee for special people."

  "I thought I took you to the Hotel am Wansee," he said.

  "You usually took girls from the Hotel am Zoo to the Hotel am Wansee?"

  "Only special girls," Peter said. "From the am Zoo and the Adlon."

  "Was I special for you?"

  "Of course."

  "No, I mean, really special?"

  "Of course really special."

  "Tell me the truth, Peter. Was that why you loaned me the money? Because I was special?"

  What money? I loaned her money? I don't remember that.

  "I'm going to pay you back," Inge said. "That's the first thing I thought when I saw you. No. The second thing. The first thing was, 'Ach du lieber Gott, that's Peter. And he's alive. And here.' The second thing was, `I can repay the loan.'"

  "I don't remember a loan, Inge," Peter said. "Truthfully, I don't."

  "You probably thought of it as a payment," she said. "I showed you a good time, and then I asked for a loan, and you 'loaned it' to me."

  "I really don't recall anything about money," he said. "But if I did, forget it."

  "No. I'll pay you back," she said. "It's important to me. If we're going to be here for a long, long time-and thank God, it looks like we will be-I don't want you looking across a dinner table at me ten, fifteen years from now and thinking, 'That old woman was once an amateur prostitute I took to the Hotel am Wansee. I say amateur prostitute because she didn't ask for the money first, the way a professional prostitute would. She asked for a 'loan' afterward, com-plete with a complicated explanation of her financial predicament.'"

  "Your apartment had been burned out," Peter said, remembering. "You couldn't go to the housing people for another one, because you didn't have per-mission to live in Berlin. You did know a place you could get on the black mar-ket, but you didn't have quite all the money you needed...."

  "I needed five thousand Reichsmarks," she said. "And you gave me a check."

  You're right, Peter thought, remembering. I did think you were an amateur prostitute. And I felt sorry for you for having been forced into it by the war- and that was when I was having a premonition of death about once a week-so I wrote you a check, thinking I wouldn't need the money anyway.

  "I didn't think you were a prostitute, Inge, amateur or otherwise," Peter said. "I thought you were a nice girl, alone, and in trouble. And I had the money, so I gave it to you. Loaned it to you."

  "See?" she said. "You said 'gave' and then corrected yourself. You did think I was a prostitute, didn't you?"

  "I told you what I thought."

  "You never thought you'd see the money again, did you?" Inge said. "Tell the truth, Peter!"

  "I didn't care if I did or not," Peter said. "And I don't care now."

  "Why, then, did you think I let you pick me up? And take you to the Hotel am Wansee?"

  "I thought you were dazzled by the Knight's Cross," Peter said, truthfully.

  Later, when you asked for the loan, I thought you were an amateur prosti-tute. That was not good for my ego. Fighter pilots aren't supposed to pay whores. So I forgot it.

  "When I thought about you-and I often thought about you-I used to think that it wasn't your medal that dazzled me, or the aristocratic 'von,' or even your looks, but the fact that the bartender served you French cognac from an unmarked decanter kept under the bar and normally reserved for generals. That meant you were somebody special-the bartenders there are notorious snobs- and that was what attracted me to you."

  "Really?" Peter asked. The conversation was beginning to make him un-comfortable.

  "But today, on the way from the airport, I realized that wasn't it at all."

  "Wasn't it?"

  What the hell is she talking about?

  "It was subconscious," she said. "It was because we were two of a kind."

  What the hell does that mean ?

  "Two of what kind?"

  "Survivors," she said. "I sensed you were a survivor, too. And I was right, wasn't I? We're both here, aren't we? We're among the first survivors."

  "The first survivors of what?"

  "The Thousand Year Reich, of course," Inge said. "That's why I finally married Werner. There were practical considerations, of course. He told me he was being assigned here, and I think I would have married a gorilla if he promised to take me somewhere away from the bombing, somewhere with fresh eggs and meat with no ration coupon, somewhere warm. But the real rea-son was that I sensed-this subconscious thing-that Werner was also a sur-vivor."

  "Werner's a survivor?" Peter asked.

  "If he wasn't a survivor, Liebchen, Werner would be in Sachsenhausen wearing a pink triangle, (Homosexuals in concentration camps were required to wear a pink triangle affixed to their clothing in the same manner as Jews were required to wear a yellow six-pointed star) instead of in Montevideo making himself rich getting Jews out of Sachsenhausen."

  What did she say, "making himself rich getting Jews out of Sachsen-hausen"?

  "Werner's a little light on his feet?" Peter asked, as nonchalantly as he could.

 
She nodded.

  "Do you think Goltz knows?"

  "Of course he does," Inge said. "That's why Werner is here."

  "I don't understand that."

  "You can trust someone who knows you know you have something on him that can send him to the gas chambers," Inge said. "What does Herr Standartenf�hrer Goltz have on you, Peter? Or is it the other way around?"