“Actually, it was my duty to read them.”
“Really?”
“There’s a German newspaper in Buenos Aires—actually two of them, and some magazines. And I’m sure my counterparts—the military attachés in the British and American embassies—read them. The military principle involved is ‘know your enemy.’”
Cletus Frade, for example.
“Do you think you could get to know the enemy better if we went in there”—she inclined her head toward the door of the room where the sound of the music was coming from—“and danced to the decadent music of Glenn Miller?”
I don’t want to dance with Trudi, and I don’t want to take her to bed.
Because of Alicia?
Or because I know Trudi knows getting in my bed is expected of her, and I feel bad about taking advantage of her?
That never bothered me before.
Why now?
Alicia, of course. I wonder where she is now?
It’s early. There’s five hours’ time difference between here and Buenos Aires.
Maybe she’s having tea with Dorotéa Frade in Claridge’s Hotel.
Or shopping with her for baby clothes in Harrod’s.
Why did I ever get involved with Alicia?
All I am going to do is bring her grief.
“Why not?” Peter said. He drained his scotch, set the glass down, smiled at Trudi, and motioned for her to precede him into the adjacent room.
One of Galland’s white-jacketed orderlies stood almost at attention beside the table that held the phonograph. When one record was finished, he replaced it with another, all the time pretending not to see that Oberstleutnant Henderver’s hands were pressing the girl he was dancing with against him by holding her buttocks, and that Hauptmann Grüner had his hand under the sweater of the girl dancing with him.
“General Galland really likes you,” Trudi said, her mouth close to his ear.
“How do you know that?”
She smells good. That’s French perfume. I wonder where she got it?
You know damned well where she got it, from someone like Henderver, or Willi, maybe from Galland himself.
“He told me,” Trudi said. “He said that I shouldn’t be misled by your looks….”
“My looks?”
“How young you look. He said that you were one of the old-timers, starting in Spain.”
“We
were in Spain,” Peter said.
“And then in Poland and France, and England…”
“Guilty.”
“And that you got the Knight’s Cross from the Führer himself.”