“In Munich. I shall have to make discreet inquiries. What you should not do is go to one of the ladies walking up and down on the sidewalk. You saw the movies—your male appendage turns black and falls off. You must have seen those movies.”
“I saw them. And then you go crazy and die.”
“Exactly. I’d love to know where that fat little man met the blonde.”
“Maybe we can find him and ask.”
“He’s funny-looking, but he also looked smart. He wouldn’t tell us, and in any event, we don’t know what Major Harold N. Wallace has in mind for us to do.”
Cronley had a very clear mental image of Elsa in her see-through underwear and then of her without it.
A business relationship it is going to have to be.
I can’t go on this way.
—
Cronley followed Dunwiddie down the carpeted fifth floor of the hotel looking for Room 507.
“Here it is,” Dunwiddie announced.
There was a small, neatly lettered sign nailed to the door: XXVII CIC DET.
Dunwiddie pushed it open, went in, and Jimmy followed.
This isn’t a room, Cronley immediately decided when he saw how the room was furnished.
More like the Presidential Suite. Or the Reichsführer Suite.
The plump young man from the dining room was sitting behind an ornate gilded desk.
“What do you want?” the young man challenged in a thick German accent.
“Who are you?” Tiny Dunwiddie challenged.
“I am asking the questions,” the young man said.
It came out “duh k-vestions”—the accent so thick that Cronley smiled.
“Well, you don’t get any answers until I hear who you are,” Dunwiddie replied.
An interior door opened and Major Harold N. Wallace, wearing insignia-less pinks and greens, came into the room.
“Well, I see you’ve found us in all this squalor,” Wallace said.
“Yes, sir,” Tiny and Jimmy said in chorus.
“Say hello to Sergeant Friedrich—Freddy—Hessinger,” Wallace said. “Freddy, this is First Sergeant Dunwiddie, and I think I should warn you that his bite is just about as bad—maybe a little worse—than his bark. And this is Second Lieutenant Cronley, who unlike most second lieutenants seems to know what he’s doing.”
Hessinger smiled uncomfortably and said, formally, “How do you do?”
Cronley had to smile again at both the formality and the accent.
“Well, come on in,” Wallace said, and waved them through the door. “You better come, too, Freddy.”
Through the door was a luxuriously furnished sitting room, equipped with a desk even more ornate than Hessinger’s, and off of which three doors opened. One of them was ajar and Cronley could see an enormous bed.
“Sit,” Wallace ordered, indicating two chairs and a couch, all ornately carved and upholstered, facing his desk.