“He has a reason this time or he’s showing off. Look, everybody, here’s an honest-to-God Nazi superman I brought to the party.”
Honey said, “If you think Jurgen will disappear by tomorrow-”
“That’s where I’m stuck. What do I do about it?”
“Don’t they have agents watching the house?”
“That’s why I can’t barge in.”
“I have to assume,” Honey said, “the FBI guys know what they’re doing. Don’t they?”
“They do, only their scenario’s different from mine.”
“You’re afraid Jurgen’s gonna slip by them,” Honey said, “and you’ll have to start all over. What’s he like?”
“Jurgen? He’s a nice guy, he’s smart, he’s funny. He can do different accents.”
“How old is he?”
“I think he’s twenty-six.”
“What’s he look like?”
“He has dark blond hair, blue eyes, he’s five nine and a half, one forty-five, he’s always tan, his legs, ’cause he likes to wear short pants.”
“Is he good-looking?”
“Girls like him, they think he’s cute. I’d see girls that worked in the administration building, just outside the gate, watching him through the wire fence. One of them pulling on the front of her blouse like she needed air. He had a girlfriend at that time, a hot young babe, he’d sneak out of camp to visit.”
“You mean he’d escape. What did the hot babe do?”
“It was an experience,” Carl said, “to know her. She went from the debutantes’ ball to a cathouse in Kansas City, became a very expensive call girl and got rich, saved it, didn’t get into opium. She’s gonna write a book, says I won’t believe some of the things happened to her in her life. I think she was sixteen working in the cathouse. Shemane had a sideways look she’d give you.” Carl grinned. He said, serious now, “She’s a redhead.”
“You liked her,” Honey said.
“I already have a redhead.”
“But you lusted after her. Was she famous?”
“In Kansas City.”
“Will she name names in her book?”
“I told her don’t get any good guys in trouble, that’s all.”
Honey said, “Tell me what you want to do.”
“About Jurgen?”
“About now. What do you want to do?”
They had their drinks and cigarettes sitting low in the sofa, both of them sunk into the cushions that crushed to fit their shapes, close enough to reach out and touch each other.
Carl said he needed a guide since he’d lost Kevin for a while. If she’d like to fill in he’d write a letter to get her off work for a few days and pay her for her time. Or have someone in the FBI office write the letter.
“I call in sick,” Honey said, “it’s no problem. Yeah, I’d love to take you around. I have a car a friend’s letting me use while he’s at Benning jumping out of planes. He’s an instructor, airborne. It’s a 1940 Model A coupe, but I don’t have any gas stamps. The guy’s just a friend of mine.”
Carl said he’d get her stamps, but they’d do their running around and maybe surveillance in the Pontiac. He had maps he’d show her.
Honey said, “Wow, maps.” She said, “I’m thinking we should go across the street for dinner. The Paradiso, right there, I think is the best restaurant in Detroit. Outside of the Chop House. It’s Italian, but not heavy on the tomato sauce Italian. Really good scaloppini and Tosca, the house salad’s terrific, and they have collard greens like back home. I told them they ought to have grits on the menu. Whenever I fix calves’ liver and bacon I make a little gravy to put on the grits.”
Carl said, “I crumble bacon in my grits.”
Honey said, “Are you hungry?”
“I’m not in any hurry.”
“The trouble is, if you’re hungry and you eat first, and then decide what you want to do or just let it happen, there are certain things you’d be too full to, you know, throw yourself into.”
“Certain things,” Carl said.
“I went with a guy from Argentina during another entire year of my life, after the entire year I spent with Walter. Those two were night and day. Arturo, the guy from Argentina, could order dinner in five languages and choose just the right wines. He said only one restaurant in Detroit had a decent wine list, the London Chop House, so that’s where we went. We’d come back to his digs at the Abington, kick our shoes off and have cognac and coffee. The Abington had a dining room, but we only used it if we were too tired to go out. This is when Art would start fooling around in his Latin way, very serious about it, after the dinner and three different kinds of wine.”
“You drank three bottles?”
“Once in a while we’d finish them off. The first time we went out together he said he came to Detroit six times a year for meetings at GM.”
“How’d you get together?”
“We started talking. A young woman from Grosse Pointe, I’ll call her, very tailored, brought him along while she tried on dresses. We talked for maybe fifteen minutes and he asked me out. I said, ‘What about your girlfriend?’ He said, ‘She’s my mother,’ deadpan, and we went out.”
“Did he buy her a dress?”
“She had two that she liked. I thought he’d show off and tell her she could have both. No, he said he didn’t care for either of the dresses. The tailored young woman handled it. She said, ‘Okay,’ and was just a little bit cold.”
“And he never saw her again.”
“I don’t know, I never asked about her, or what he was doing at General Motors.”
“He told you he came to Detroit six times a year.”
“Never stayed more than a week, and wanted to see me each time he came. I said, ‘You’re asking me to sit and wait for the phone to ring?’ He called me every day from Buenos Aires.” She sipped her drink. “We worked it out. I liked him, he was fun, he was thoughtful. He came every month for five days whether he had a meeting at GM or not. I thought that was sweet.”
“Did he want to marry you ’cause his wife didn’t understand him?”
“I think he was married and had kids, but it never came up. He was Latin and fun at the same time. I called him Art. Or I’d call him a Latin from Manhattan and he’d say ‘You can tell by my banana.’ He was a terrific dancer.” She was quiet a few moments. “He had something to do with auto racing. He took me to the Indy 500 the year we were seeing each other. Walk along Gasoline Alley, he knew just about everybody, and you could tell they liked him. Mauri Rose won that year, qualified at a hundred and twenty-one miles an hour and led thirty-nine laps out of two hundred.” She said, “After Pearl Harbor, December of that year, I never heard from him again.”
She told him she was going to change, get out of the suit she’d been wearing all day picking up lint and put on a dress. “The paper’s right there.” She said, “Decide when we should have dinner,” giving him a look. Or maybe not, he wasn’t sure. She said, “I’ll be, oh, fifteen minutes or so.”
It made him think of Crystal Davidson eighteen years ago going into her bedroom while he was waiting for Emmett Long. Crystal telling him, “Don’t get nosy,” but left the door open. It wasn’t a minute later she stepped into plain sight wearing a pink-colored teddy, the crotch sagging between her white thighs. She thought he was from a newspaper. He told her, “Miss, I’m a deputy United States marshal. I’m here to place Emmett Long under arrest or put him in the ground, one.” A line he’d prepared for the occasion.
Now he was looking through the front section of the
