“Holy shit.”
“Yeah.” Savannah had to laugh, his words were so sincerely heartfelt. God, she loved that about him—his honest reaction to the world around him. “After she found that out, Rose went back to New Jersey, and unlocked the door to his cell. And you know what? He took her to Maryland and married her.”
Ken was as tickled by that as she’d been. He laughed softly. “I like this guy. He was smart enough to get why she did what she did. Some guys would’ve been too busy being pissed off that she managed to lock them up in the first place, you know? Bent out of shape—hurt pride—because she got the upper hand. They wouldn’t be able to see past it to the reason why she did it. I mean, it was because she loved him, right? She risked an awful lot for him. Technically, what she did probably wasn’t treason, but it was close.”
“My grandfather was a pretty amazing person,” Savannah agreed.
He shifted slightly in the darkness, and she held her breath, but he didn’t come any closer. “Did you get a chance to know him?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry,” Ken said. Also heartfelt.
Savannah wanted to cry. “Me, too. Mostly sorry for my grandmother. Until I read her book, I never realized how much she must have loved him.” She cleared her throat, trying to make it stop aching, afraid she was going to break down again. Twice in one day. God, what would he do? She cleared her throat again. “Anyway, they got married, and he was supposed to go back to Germany at the end of the month, and, well, my grandmother managed to convince him to take her with him.”
“Jesus, to Berlin? How the hell did she do that?”
She opened her mouth to tell him, but he didn’t let her speak.
“If we were to wake up tomorrow and find ourselves transported to New York in 1943,” he said hotly, “there’s nothing you could do to convince me to take you to Berlin, you better believe that.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t love me, so . . .” She’d meant it as a joke, a weak one, sure, but it lay there absolutely flatly since he didn’t even pretend to laugh. In fact, he didn’t say anything at all.
Savannah cleared her throat. “She used, well, sex as a weapon—her words from the book. She’s not shy in describing her relationship with Hank. I mean, she didn’t go into details, but pretty much every time he started making noise about how dangerous it would be, she took him to bed and convinced him she’d be fine as long as they were together.”
Ken finally laughed. “She brainwashed him. It probably didn’t take long before he started to associate intense pleasure with even just the thought of her going to Germany with him. The poor sucker didn’t stand a chance. Especially if she was anything at all like you in bed.”
Now there was a compliment—of sorts—that she didn’t quite know what to do with.
“Thanks,” she finally said. “Kenny.”
It was his turn to be quiet, and she held her breath, wondering if he remembered what he’d said to her last night when she’d called him that. Fuck me, Kenny. She was far too chicken, far too polite, to say those words aloud. But it was what she wanted. She didn’t just want to sleep beside him tonight. She wanted to sleep with him. She wanted them to be lovers again.
Desperately.
The silence stretched on, and she felt compelled to break it. “They set up a kind of a scam,” she told him. “Rose and Hank. Rose’s contacts in Germany—the ones she’d been sending all that false information to for years—were told that the FBI had cracked down on a number of Nazi spies, including Ingerose Rainer. When she later showed up in Germany with my grandfather, she told the Nazis that she’d escaped with his help. That he helped her make her way to South America. And from there, he took her with him to Germany.”
She paused, but he didn’t say anything. So she kept going, mostly to fill the silence. “They hid their marriage from the Nazis—no one would’ve believed it anyway because Hank was Austrian royalty. Someone in his position wouldn’t go and marry some nothing American girl, right? But they pretended they’d become intimate friends during their travels, and Hank set her up in Berlin as his assistant-slash-mistress.
“They lived in Berlin and provided information to the Allies until early 1945.”
Ken finally spoke. “Jesus God. That long?”
“Yeah. In ’45, there was a serious threat from friendly fire as both the Americans and Russians approached Berlin—along with the usual dire consequences from the Nazis if they were found out as spies. Hank took Rose to London—kicking and screaming, no doubt. She was pregnant with my father and uncle, although neither Rose nor Hank knew it at the time. The war wasn’t over, so my grandfather went back to Berlin. And that’s as far as I got in the book.”
“That’s pretty amazing,” he said. “And very cool that your grandmother wrote it all down. You must be proud. You know, knowing that this is where you come from. Having those kinds of people in your family.”
“Just because your grandmother’s a hero doesn’t mean you’re automatically one, too.”
“You said last night that you thought she was probably a lot like you.” So he did remember at least some of what was said last night.
“Scared,” she told him. “She was scared, like me. That’s what I meant. Believe me, I wouldn’t have gone to Berlin in 1943 to spy on the Nazis.”
“But you’d go to Jakarta in 2002 to help your uncle.”
She made a disparaging noise. “Not quite the same thing.”
“Yeah, well, I know you don’t see it,” he told her, “but you really are like her. Your grandmother.”
Savannah snorted. “I thought I was so much like my mother. Wearing her clothes . . . ?”
“Oh, yeah. Right.” Ken actually laughed. He had absolutely no shame. “That’s true, too. But that’s easy to fix. You’ve just got to stop wearing those butt-ugly clothes.”
“And what, pray tell, would you have me wear?” she asked, far more comfortable discussing this than doing a point by point comparison of herself and Rose.
“I like you in my clothes,” he answered. “Cutoff shorts. T-shirt with no bra—hey, it works for me.”
“Cutoffs and a T-shirt. In court?”
“Okay, then maybe you should wear the kind of dresses some of the women in that village wore.”
“A sarong? Oh, that would go over really well with the appellate judges.”
“They’ll love it. Bright colors. Bare shoulders. No bra. Mmm hmm.”
“I’m sensing a pattern here.”
“You asked,” he said cheerfully. “And while you’re at it, you’ve got to lose the scary ‘do.”
“The . . . what?”
“Your hair,” Ken explained. “When I came to the hotel you were all . . . de-curled and neat. Throw away your blow dryer, babe. The Martha Stewart look is way not you.”
She laughed her disbelief. “I do not wear my hair like—”
“Your hair is adorable. It’s all curly and cute and shit. Why do you pretend it’s not?”
“Some people might not want to be cute and shit, thank you very much. Other people—male people—don’t take you seriously if you’re cute and shit.”
“Your grandmother successfully made a career out of it—probably exactly for that reason,” he countered. “Because no one took her seriously, think of all that she got done. You know, I think you should use the shower and shake method on your hair—just let it dry wild. That and a what’s-it-called? Sarong. Oh, yeah. Or one of those gauzy, hippie-style dresses. The see-through ones. I like them, too.”
“Well, thanks for the fashion tips, Mr. Camouflage Boxer Shorts. Jeez.”
“You asked,” he said again, laughing.
“So all I have to do is ask, and you’ll just tell me whatever I want to know? That’s very interesting. I’ve been meaning to ask you about your father.”
He stopped laughing.
“Maybe you should,” Ken said. He shifted so that he was leaning back more comfortably against the fallen tree th
at made up the back wall of their blind. “What do you want to know about him? Besides the obvious—that he was a son of a bitch with a mean streak.”
He waited to see what she would ask. Did he hit you? Did you ever fight back? Did you celebrate when you heard he died?
He heard her move slightly in the darkness, heard the quiet sound of her breathing. She drew in a slightly deeper breath before speaking. “Did you love him?”
Ken laughed his surprise. Of all the questions she could have asked . . . “Yes.” The word hung there in the darkness, and he felt compelled to add, “He was my father, you know? But I hated him, too.”
“Why?”
Shit, another unexpected question. She knew damn well that there was violence involved, but he suspected she didn’t want to put the words in his mouth by asking Did he hit you? Or did he beat you? Which was it? Because there was definitely a difference. He’d lived through both, and he knew.
“He was inconsistent,” he told her. “I hated him because he was so freaking inconsistent. One day he’d beat the shit out of me for not cleaning my room, and the next he’d beat the shit out of me because my room was too clean—that meant I was namby-pamby, you know, a mother’s boy. If he’d given me rules, I would’ve followed them. Instead, he kept me guessing.”
“If he’d given you rules, then he wouldn’t have been able to beat you up,” she said.
“Yeah, you’re probably right. He was such an asshole. But he taught me a hell of a lot about pain management.” Ken laughed.
“That’s not funny.” Savannah’s voice was tight.
“No,” he said, sobering. “You’re right. It’s not. He . . . he didn’t know what to do with me. He was a football player—college ball. He coached the high school team in town. I was his only son, and this total freak.”
“In his eyes,” she pointed out.
“No, I really was a freak. I was skinny and kind of small for my age, which never helps when you’re a kid. I also always knew exactly what not to say in any given situation and I was completely unable to keep it from coming out of my mouth. I still have that problem some of the time. You know, blurting out the first stupid thing that comes into my head?”
“That doesn’t make you a freak.”
“It does when you’re in high school. I was like the antithesis of cool. I was a gearhead without any money to buy the gear, which is a bad combination.
“I didn’t exactly run with the football crowd, but my father was convinced that if I went out for the team, I’d somehow magically become the son he wanted. That was the first time I got in his face and told him no, I wouldn’t do it. Up to that point, I’d never challenged him—at least not more than passive aggressively. You know, playing the punching bag—refusing to stay down when he kicked the shit out of me. Never letting him see me act hurt. I swear, I could’ve had a broken leg, but if he was in the room, I would’ve walked on it. No, I would’ve danced on it. But this time . . . I really didn’t want to play football. It wasn’t my game, you know? It wasn’t that I wasn’t athletic; I liked rock climbing. And for a while, I was into cross country running. I was good when it came to endurance. I still am. That’s probably why I stayed with Adele for so long.”
Adele.
Holy God, he’d actually brought Adele into this conversation. He decided to strike first with the personal questions that were sure to follow. “How well did you know her?”
“Not very well,” Savannah was quick to say. She was eager, apparently, to talk about this. He didn’t know whether to be glad or afraid. “She was a senior when I was a freshman. You know what that’s like. She was everything; I was just slightly more important than a ball of dryer lint.
“We lived in the same dorm and she and her roommates took me and my roommates under their wing. Sort of. They bought us beer and took us to parties. That kind of thing. Adele was supposed to be a genius, but . . . Well, I was never particularly impressed by her scholarly brilliance. It didn’t come across in conversations. I think I was more dazzled at first by her charisma.”
“Yeah, she had a ton of charisma. Good word for it.”
“I was pretending to be an intellectual—here I was at Yale, right?” She laughed. “I managed to elevate her to goddess status when I found out that some of the papers she wrote got published—”
“No fucking way! Published?”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
“That’s weird.”
“Published where?” he asked.
“I don’t remember exactly. Some prestigious English Lit. journal, I think.”
“English? Not math?” His head was spinning.
“It was definitely English Literature. I remember one of the papers was on Thomas Hardy. Very profound.”
Ken started to laugh. “Well, fuck a duck.”
“I can’t believe she didn’t tell you.”
“She didn’t tell me because I wrote those papers for her.”
“What?”
“Her strengths were in math and science. I handled all her history and English requirements pretty much from day one.”
Savannah was silent, absorbing that. He didn’t blame her. He still couldn’t quite believe it himself. One of his papers had been published. English Literature. Jesus, the guys were going to give him shit for that. He had to laugh.
“You were going to college yourself, plus you were in the Navy. Why would you do Adele’s work, too?” Savannah finally asked.
Yeah, in hindsight, that didn’t seem so smart. What could he tell her? That he’d been blinded by the sex? “You must think I’m a real loser.”
“I think you’re crazy, but . . . I think you must have loved her very much. I could see it, you know. It was in everything you did when you were with her. I know I only saw you a few times, but . . .”
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
“Did she sleep with other guys when you weren’t around?” she guessed. “Are you really sure you want to know that, Kenny?”
Did he? “Yeah.” Without quite saying the word yes, Savannah had just given him a great big affirmative to that question. And yet he felt . . . nothing. A slight sense of sadness as the final nail went into the coffin of the innocent dreamer he’d once been.
“Do you still love her?” Savannah whispered.
Ken laughed, suddenly scared to death. He wanted to be honest with her about Adele, but he wasn’t sure if he could do that without telling her everything. And he wasn’t ready to tell her everything.
“That’s kind of a tricky question, Van,” he said slowly, trying for once to choose his words carefully, “because I’ve had this, um, kind of new insight recently? And it makes me, well, believe that for all those years, I only thought I was in love with Adele.”
“You mean, you weren’t really?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible I loved her, but on a scale from one to ten—assuming you can love in varying degrees—it was probably only about a three or a four at the most. You know, with ten being the kind of love that makes you, I don’t know, ready to die for someone, I guess, but at the same time, ready to live for them, too.”
She was silent, so he kept going, hoping that something he said would make her understand. “With Adele, it was . . . I don’t know, I guess it kind of turned into an obsession. I definitely wanted her in every sense of the word. And I was in love with the idea of being in love, but . . . I do that a lot. You know—think I’m in the number ten kind of love when it’s really something else entirely? Infatuation, maybe. Or it’s lust. Or both. Usually both. Infatuated lust. I think it could have become, you know, like an eight or a nine even, if Adele had tried—just a little bit. But . . .”
“She didn’t deserve you,” Savannah told him tightly. He could picture her face, so fierce and he had to smile.
“I don’t know,” he said, trying to lighten things up. “Maybe she did. I wasn’t much of a prize at the time. I was pretty relentless. She called m
e her boomerang. She’d throw me away, but I’d come zipping right back. She came back to me, too, though. It was a very unhealthy relationship. Lots of high drama. Did you know she got a restraining order against me?”
“Oh, my God,” Savannah said. “No.”
“It was the best thing she ever did for me,” Ken admitted. “At the time, I was devastated. She didn’t give me any kind of warning. And when she got the court order, our relationship wasn’t any different than it had been in the past. See, she was always breaking up with me and telling me it was over for good, but she always, always came back. Why should this time be any different, right? So I did what I always did. I still went to see her when I got liberty. I called her all the time—definitely excessively, I admit that. But that’s what had worked in the past, right? There was no violence, though. Not against her. Okay, I did deck her new boyfriend in the lobby of a movie theater. But he hit me first. I would never hit a woman. Never.”
Troubleshooters 04 Out of Control Page 43