“Good idea. Thank you. Lie. Tell them we’re already on the way. I’ll bring you up to speed first thing in the morning. ”
“Sir, your call. Since I couldn’t make lunch with Baker Troop today, I thought I might make breakfast tomorrow.”
“Do it,” Lustrous ordered. “I’ll see you when you get here.”
[SIX]
Haus im Wald Near Bad Hersfeld Kreis Hersfeld-Rotenburg Hesse, West Germany 1845 8 March 1981
The first time Major Allan B. Naylor, Armor, saw Carlos Guillermo Castillo, he was standing beside his mother on the flagstone steps of das Haus im Wald as they drove up in Lustrous’s Mercedes. The boy was wearing a nearly black suit with a white shirt and tie and his blond hair was neatly combed.
The Naylors had two sons, a fourteen-year-old and a ten-year -old, and the first thing Allan Naylor thought was, There’s not much fun in that kid’s life.
That was closely followed by, Shit, and now this!
Colonel Lustrous had taken Frau Erika von und zu Gossinger at her word. He and Naylor were still wearing fatigues. Their wives were more formally dressed.
Mother and son waited on the steps for the Lustrouses and the Naylors to get out of the Mercedes and walk up to them.
“How good it is to see you again, Colonel Lustrous,” Frau Erika said, offering her hand. “Welcome.”
“Thank you,” Lustrous said. “May I introduce my good friend, Major Allan Naylor?”
“Of course, Elaine’s husband. How do you, Major?”
Netty walked up to Frau Erika and kissed her on the cheek and then Elaine did.
“And this is my son,” Frau Erika said. “Karl Wilhelm.”
The boy put out his hand first to Netty, then Elaine, then Lustrous, and finally Naylor, and each time said, in English, “How do you do? I am pleased to meet you.”
His English, while obviously not the American variety, was accentless, neither the nasal British variety taught by English teachers at Saint Johan’s—which Allan B. Naylor III had brought home and earned him the nickname “Lord Fauntleroy”—or the to be expected German-accented English of a young German boy.
“My boy goes to Saint Johan’s,” Elaine said. “Allan? Do you know him?”
“He is two forms before me . . . ahead of me,” Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger said. “I know who he is.”
“Why don’t we go in the house and have a cocktail?” Frau Erika said.
A maid in a white apron stood behind a bar set up on a table in the library. There were bottles of Gossingerbrau in dark bottles with ceramic and rubber stoppers, bottles of German and French white and red wine, French and German champagne, bourbon and scotch whiskey, gin, cognac, and an array of glasses to properly serve any of it.
Lustrous, Netty, and Allan Naylor asked for scotch; Elaine Naylor said she thought she would have a glass of Rumpoldskirchener, and Frau Erika poured a snifter heavily with cognac.
“Welcome, friends, all of you, to our home,” Frau Erika said, raising her glass. “What is it you taught my father to say, Oberst Lustrous? ‘Mud in your eye’? Mud in your eye!”
She took, everyone noticed, a healthy pull of her cognac.
“I don’t know what that means,” Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger said.
“Neither do I, come to think of it, Karl,” Lustrous said.
“Is it all right if I call you Karl?”
“Yes, sir. Of course,” the boy said.
“Would you mind, Karl, if we had a private word with your mother?” Lustrous said.
“Of course not, sir.”