“I had thought,” the man said softly, so softly that I had to strain to hear, “that with the death of National Socialism in Germany, fascism was once and for all defeated. It wasn’t. The Islamic strain is even more virulent than the Italian and German varieties. My parents — you knew them, didn’t you, Madame Petrou?”
“I did.”
“They were Nazis in the thirties, rejoiced when Hitler took over, hated the Jews. Oh, yes, they admitted it later, when I was a boy. They were just children in the thirties, innocent, foolish and proud as all children are, but when they saw the devastation of Germany, when they realized that Hitler had murdered millions of people in concentration camps, then.. they lived with the guilt of their earlier approval all their lives. I saw that guilt. It haunted them. This stain was on Germany, on Germans, this foul, evil, bloody stain…”
He paused and, listening but not seeing, I thought maybe he was trying to regain his composure. “We are all committed,” the man said forcefully. “We are all convinced we are doing the right thing. But there is a traitor among us and we must ferret him out.”
“Or her.” That was a female voice I didn’t recognize. Perhaps the future ex — Mrs. Zetsche.
“I am ready for bed.” Marisa.
“Of course,” the man said. “My bodyguards will be in the hallway all night.” So the man was Zetsche. He apparently rang a bell. In less than a minute I heard and saw someone enter the room. “Werner will escort you to your rooms. We will discuss this matter tomorrow at breakfast. Gute Nacht.”
They rose from their chairs in the living room and made their way toward the hallway as I wrapped up my cord and stowed the stethoscope mike.
I was walking around that trophy room in high dudgeon, tired, wishing I could spend twelve hours in bed, silently cussing and revisiting my decision to stay married to the green paycheck, when I got a glimpse through one of the windows of a man walking across the lawn. Just a dark figure, striding purposely.
Now what?
I thought about calling Grafton and giving him a piece of my mind, then decided against it. I checked the pistol in my waistband.
I d feel a lot better about all of this if I got busy and shot somebody.
CHAPTER TEN
As I climbed the stairs behind the four people from the living room, staying so far behind them I was out of sight, I was adjusting the gain and contrast knobs on the goggles. I was smack up against the limitations of the technology: I could see the four people in front of me, and I could count two more images of what should be people, faint images, merely blobs of color. In infrared, the lights in the. hallways looked like stars.
When the four people in front of me went into bedrooms — at least they looked like bedrooms, with hot water radiators for heat and attached bathrooms with hot water pipes — I looked for an empty bedroom beside them to hole up in. The building reminded me of an old hotel that had been renovated. How this architectural monstrosity survived World War II was a mystery. Maybe it was damaged and restored. I found an empty bedroom and went in.
With the door closed, I tried to find the other people who were in the house. Located three, this time. I was still diddling with the knobs when the goggles died. One second they worked, then the various heat sources faded away to nothing. Didn’t take me long to figure out that the battery was as dead as Adolf Hitler.
I sat there in the darkness cursing my luck. That didn’t do a lot of good, so I installed three stethoscope microphones so I could at least listen to the goings-on in the rooms around me and in the hallway. What I heard was two women in the bathroom.
Zetsche and his girlfriend were in the bedroom beyond the Petrous. All I could hear was murmurs, which might have been conversation or something else, such as television audio. Difficult to say. Of course, even if I did hear them, they would probably be talking in German, which wasn’t one of my languages.
I used the facilities myself, then settled down on a chair with the earphones in my ears. Without the goggles, this was the best I could do.
Before long the Petrou women fell silent. Conversation continued, still inaudible, for about an hour from the room beyond that; then it, too, faded away, leaving the big house in silence.
The night crawled along. Occasionally I heard measured footsteps— one of the bodyguards, I concluded, walking the hallways. Between footsteps there was no sound except the gentle patter of raindrops on the windowpanes. Amazing that the microphones picked that up so well.
One o’clock came and went. I tried to keep my eyes open by debating the issues. Was Marisa an assassin, was this really the line of work for me, and should I punch Jake Grafton in the nose the next chance I got? Unfortunately there were no clear answers; my eyelids got heavier and heavier and I slept.
For Marisa, nights were the worst. When the house was dark and silent her memories came flooding back, and her fears and anxieties and private hurts.
“Why won’t you tell me about my mother?” she demanded of her father during a rare visit. She had been a teenager then, thirteen or fourteen, sure that she knew the difference between right and wrong, sure of her ability to heal a broken world.
“There is nothing you need to know,” he said, in that condescending, self-righteous manner that she had grown to despise.
“I am not a child,” she retorted hotly. “Tell me the truth and I will live with it, as you do.”
“I am your father and you are still a child, a young woman. You must learn to trust my wisdom. I have made the right choice.”
“You ask for trust and yet you have none. Where is the justice and wisdom in that?” She had been tart in those days, argumentative. Her teachers even wrote notes to her putative parents, Georges and Grisella.
“I am a man and you are a woman. And I am your father.”
“What you are is a misogynist.” If he expected her to surrender, he didn’t know his daughter.
“What I am is a Muslim,” he retorted firmly. “I believe in Allah. I believe that the Prophet set forth the relationship between men and women in the holy Koran, and the relationship between father and daughter. I demand your respect and obedience to my will.”
“You may demand it, but you would be wiser to earn it.”
That was the first time she had seen him angry, out of control. “You would be wise to hold your tongue, child,” he said firmly.
For the first time in her life, she was frightened of him. The beast within had been revealed. He was like a prophet from the Old Testament, a visionary who saw only good and evil, and if you were not among the good, the obedient, then you were evil. It was in his eyes.
She saw it and remained silent.
She had seen the inner man. At that moment she knew the truth, knew him for the righteous, bigoted fanatic that he was.
Oh, her poor mother! To marry such a man! To sleep with him and have his child! And to gradually learn the truth, as she must have. It was like a nightmare from Shakespeare.
Tonight, in Wolfgang Zetsche’s house, she thought of those moments, relived them as she had many times in the years since.
“You are my daughter and will obey me,” he had said with cold steel in his voice. Yet it had been his eyes that held her mesmerized. Eyes are wonderous things: Most people use them to look out at the world, yet the eyes of her father allowed the world to look at the man within. At least, they did on those rare moments when he lost control and his face no longer obeyed his will. Then one could see the raging passions and illogical fanaticism on full display.
It had been a sobering moment for her, a glimpse of the truth at the core of her life. She didn’t know anything of her mother, except that she must have been a woman, and her father was insane. She felt as if she were an alien who had just landed on planet Earth and upon meeting the natives asked aloud, Who are these creatures?
It wasn’t long after that, Marisa reflected tonight, when her father began to discuss Islam, the holy Koran,
