“Erika!” Pastor Dannberg said, both warningly and compassionately.
“It’s the truth,” Erika said. “And the truth, I believe the Bible says, ‘shall make you free.’ ”
“It also says, ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged,’ ” Pastor Dannberg said.
“I meant no offense,” Erika said.
“And certainly none was taken,” Netty said.
Erika signaled to the maid for another flute of champagne.
“I really had meant to say two things,” Erika said, when she’d taken a healthy sip of the champagne. “The first was to tell you that we’re having roast boar today, sort of in memory of all the boar your husband and my father and brother took together over the years.”
“What a nice thought!” Netty said. And thought: There it is again. What’s her agenda?
“And the second was to suggest that although you and Frau Naylor and I are meeting for the first time, this is really a gathering of friends. You two and Inge, I know, are very close. The pastor has been my good friend, in good times and bad, since I was a little girl. And he’s told you how he feels about Oberst Lustrous, who was a good friend of my father and my brother. What I’m driving at is that I would be honored to be permitted to address you by your Christian names.”
“Oh, I would really like that,” Netty said.
And is this where we get the pitch?
“Welcome to my home, friend Natalie,” Erika said.
“Please, my friends call me ‘Netty.’ ”
Erika smiled. “Welcome to my home, friends Netty and Elaine,” she said and kissed both of them on the cheek. And then Inge Liptz kissed all three of them on the cheek.
Why do I think Inge is on the edge of tears? What the hell is going on here?
A maid announced the luncheon was served.
The dining room was on the third floor of das Haus im Wald. A dumbwaiter brought the food from the kitchen on the first floor. One wall of the dining room was covered with a huge, heavy curtain.
When Erika von und zu Gossinger threw a switch and the curtains slowly opened, Netty and Elaine saw that a huge plate-glass window offered a view of farmlands.
And of the border between the People’s Democratic Republic of Germany and West Germany.
Netty knew a good deal about the border. She’d spent much of her life married to a man who patrolled it. First, he’d served as a second lieutenant in a jeep or armored car, and now as the colonel of the regiment responsible for miles of it.
The border was marked with a thirteen-foot-tall steel-mesh fence topped with barbed wire. Watchtowers had been built wherever necessary so the fence and the land leading up to it could not only be kept under observation but swept with machine-gun fire, some of it automatically triggered when a detection device of one kind or another sensed someone in the forbidden zone.
The forbidden zone, several hundred yards wide, had been cleared of trees and was heavily planted with mines. There were two roads, one on either side of the fence, one for East German border guards, and the other for West German border guards and the vehicles of the Eleventh Armored Cavalry Regiment.
“That’s Gossinger land over there,” Erika said. “Just about as far as you can see. You’ll notice I did not say, ‘Used to be Gossinger land.’ One day the family will get it back.”
Netty said what came to her mind.
“That fence is an obscenity.”
“Yes, it is,” Erika agreed simply.
What does she do? Sit here and look at what the family’s lost?
Or is this another part of the setup I now know is coming?
“Well, why don’t we sit down and have our luncheon?” Erika said.
Pastor Dannberg said a brief grace, and then two maids served a course of roast boar, roast potatoes, spinach, and sauerkraut. Glasses were filled with liebfraumilch. Netty sipped hers very slowly, and held her hand, politely, over her half-full glass when one of the maids tried to fill it.
Dessert was bread pudding. Cognac was offered but declined all around, except by Frau Erika von und zu Gossinger, who held her snifter in her palm not nearly long enough to warm it before taking a hefty swallow.
“Elaine,” Frau Erika von und zu Gossinger said, “I hope you won’t take this to mean that Inge is a gossip but she tells me that not only are you and Netty friends but your husbands as well.”
I guess that was the opening statement.
“Allan,” Netty said, “Elaine’s husband, saved my husband ’s life in Vietnam. They’re very close.”
“The reason I brought that up,” Erika said, “is that I am about to get into a subject I would really rather share only with friends.”
“I’d be happy to take a walk . . .” Elaine said.
“I’d rather you stayed,” Netty said.
Frau Erika nodded.
“Netty,” she said, “I’m afraid I’m going to try to impose on your friendship, and your husband’s friendship, in dealing with a matter of some delicacy.”
“I can’t imagine you imposing,” Netty said.
Oh yes I can.
“And I’m sure my husband,” Netty continued, “would be honored to try to do whatever you asked of him.”
“Thank you,” Erika said. “A little over twelve years ago, it was on February thirteenth, a child, a boy, was born out of wedlock to an eighteen-year-old girl.”
“That’s always sad,” Netty said.
Five-to-one Daddy’s an American.
“The father was an American,” Erika said. “A helicopter pilot.”
No fooling? How many thousands of times has some GI knocked up a German girl and promptly said, “Auf wiedersehn! ”
Pastor Dannberg slid an envelope across the table to Netty.
“That’s the boy,” he said. “He’s a fine young man. Very bright.”
Netty opened the envelope and took out a photograph of a skinny blond boy of, she guessed, about twelve.
Hell, she said, “. . . over twelve years ago.”
The boy was wearing short pants, knee-high white stockings, a blue jacket with an insignia embroidered on the breast pocket, a white shirt and tie, and a cap, sort of a short-brimmed baseball cap with red-colored seams and the same insignia.
That’s the uniform of Saint Johan’s School, as I damn well know, for all the marks I spent sending two of mine there.
Okay. So this poor kid—not poor, unfortunate: Saint Johan ’s is anything but cheap—is in Saint Johan’s. Which explains why Pastor Dannberg is involved.
“Handsome child,” Netty said and slid the photograph to Elaine.
“Beautiful child,” Elaine said.
“It has become necessary for the mother to get in contact with the boy’s father,” Erika said.
“A question of child support?” Netty said. “I’m sure my husband will do whatever he can . . .”
“No. Not of child support.”
“The father’s been supporting the boy?”
I’ll be damned. A horny sonofabitch who’s met his obligations.
“I don’t think . . . I know . . . he doesn’t know the boy exists, ” Erika said. “No effort was ever made to contact him.”
My God, why not?
“May I ask why now?” Netty said.
“The boy’s mother is very ill,” Erika said. “And there is no other family.”
“Oh, how sad!” Netty said.
And what will happen, if Freddy can track Daddy down, is that he will deny, swearing on a stack of Bibles, that he ever took a fraulein to bed all the time he was here and that he certainly has no intention of starting now to support somebody else’s bastard.
Goddammit. Men should be castrated at birth.
But what did she say? It wasn’t a question of child support?
Netty carefully considered her words, then continued: “As I’m sure you’re aware . . . and you, Pastor Dannberg . . . I’m ashamed to say that this boy is not the first child to be abandoned by an American soldier. Do you
have the father’s name?”
“Jorge Castillo,” Erika said. “He was a helicopter pilot and he was from Texas.”
“May I speak bluntly?” Netty asked after a long moment ’s thought.
“Of course.”
“I think my husband can probably find this man—that seems an unusual name—but I also think it’s possible, even likely, that this man will be less than willing to acknowledge a child who, as you said, he doesn’t even know he’s had.”
“We’ve thought about that, of course,” Pastor Dannberg said.
“And, however remote,” Erika added, “there is the possibility that he will be pleased to learn he has a son and be willing to assume his parental obligations.”
There is also the possibility that pigs can be taught to whistle. In twelve years—if this guy wasn’t already married —Poppa already has a wife and children and the last thing he wants his wife to know is he left a bastard in Germany who he is now expected to take into his happy home.
“Please believe me when I say I’m trying to be helpful,” Netty said. “But there are certain questions I just have to ask.”
“I understand.”
“Does the mother have other children?”
“No. She never married.”
Well, that answers my next question: What does Mamma’s husband have to say about this?
“She raised the boy by herself? And never married?”
“She never married and she raised the boy by herself,” Erika said.
“This is an indelicate question,” Netty said. “Forgive me for asking it. But I have to. How does she know this man is the father?”
“She knows. No other possibility exists. He was her first, and only, lover. They were . . . together . . . three times. The first night, and then the next.”
“I really hate to say this, but how can we know that?”
“Because I’m telling you,” Erika said.
“But, Erika, how do you know?” Netty pursued.
“Because we are talking about my son, Netty,” Erika von und zu Gossinger said.
[TWO]
Headquarters Eleventh Armored Cavalry Regiment Downs Barracks Fulda, Hesse, West Germany 1545 7 March 1981
The sergeant major of the Eleventh “Blackhorse” Armored Cavalry Regiment, a stocky thirty-nine-year-old from Altoona, Pennsylvania, named Rupert Dieter, put his shaven head in the door of the colonel’s office.
“You have time for the colonel’s lady?” Dieter asked.
Colonel Frederick J. Lustrous, Armor, a tall, muscular forty-five-year-old, was visibly surprised at the question— Netty almost never came to the office—but rose to the occasion.
“There was some doubt in your mind, Sergeant Major?”
“She told me to ask, Colonel,” Sergeant Major Dieter said.
“Inform the lady nothing would give me greater pleasure, ” Lustrous said.
Headquarters of the Eleventh Armored Cav was a three-story masonry building built—like most facilities occupied by the U.S. Army—in the years leading up to World War II for the German Army.
Stables built for the horses of the Wehrmacht now served as shops to maintain the tanks, armored personnel carriers, and wheeled vehicles used by the Blackhorse to patrol the border between East and West Germany.
Fulda traces its history to a monastery built in 744 A.D. It lies in the upper Fulda River valley, between the Vogelsberg and Rhoen mountain ranges.
Since the beginning of the Cold War, it had been an article of faith—with which Colonel Lustrous personally, if very privately, strongly disagreed—in the European Command that when Soviet tanks rolled into West Germany they would come through the “Fulda Gap.”
The mission of the Blackhorse was to patrol the border, now marked by barbed wire, observation towers, mined fields, and whatever else the East Germans and their Soviet mentors could think of to keep East Germans from fleeing the benefits of Marxist-Leninism and seeking a better life in West Germany.
It was Colonel Lustrous’s private belief—he was a student of Soviet tactics generally and of the Red Army Order of Battle in great detail—that if the Red Army did come through the Fulda Gap, they would do so in such numbers that they would cut through the Blackhorse—which was, after all, just three squadrons spread out over a very long section of the border—like a hot knife through butter.
The most the Blackhorse could do, if Soviet T-34 tanks came, would be to slow them down a little, like a speed bump on a country road. Lustrous was confident that the men of the Blackhorse would “acquit themselves well” if he was wrong and the Russians came. By that, he meant they would not run at the first sight of the Russians but fight.
Many—perhaps most—of his men would die, and the dead would be better off than those who survived and were marched off into Soviet captivity. Lustrous was a student of how the Red Army treated its prisoners, too. Lustrous knew a great deal about the Soviets and their army. He truly believed that “Know your enemy” was a military principle right up there with “Don’t drink on duty.” Failure to abide by either would very likely get you killed.
He was now on his third tour on the border between East and West Germany. He’d been a Just Out of West Point second lieutenant assigned to the Fourteenth Constabulary Squadron in Bad Hersfeld in 1948. The Fourteenth had been redesignated the Fourteenth Armored Cavalry Regiment when Captain Lustrous returned to the border after service in the Korean War. And when Colonel Lustrous returned from Vietnam, he found “the Regiment” was now the Eleventh “Blackhorse” Armored Cavalry, the colors of the Fourteenth having been furled for reasons he never really understood.
The desk behind which Colonel Lustrous now sat was the very same desk in the very same room of the very same building in the kaserne—now called “Downs Barracks”— before which Lieutenant Lustrous had once stood—literally on the carpet—while the then colonel had told him exactly how much of a disgrace he was to the Regiment, to Cavalry and Armor, and the United States Army in general.
Colonel Lustrous really didn’t remember what he had done wrong, only that if the colonel had eaten his ass out at such length and with such enthusiasm it had probably been pretty bad, and was probably alcohol induced, as Netty, whom he had married the day after he’d graduated from the Point, had not yet joined him in Germany to keep him under control.
He had served under the colonel again in the Pentagon, when there were two stars on each of the colonel’s epaulets, and he had been a light colonel, and there was no question in Lustrous’s mind that he now commanded the Blackhorse because the colonel—now with four stars on each epaulet— had told somebody he thought “giving the Blackhorse to Freddy Lustrous might be a pretty good idea.”
Lustrous, who was in well-worn but crisply starched fatigues and wearing nonauthorized tanker’s boots, stood up as his wife came in the office.
He thought, as he often did, that Netty was really a good-looking woman.
She wasn’t twenty as she had been when they had married, but three kids and all this time in the Army had not, in his judgment, attacked her appearance as much as would be expected.
“And to what do I owe this great, if unexpected, honor?” Lustrous said. “I devoutly hope it’s not to tell me that it wasn’t your fault, but that serious physical damage has happened to ‘the Investment.’ ”
He was making reference to the Mercedes 380SEL. It was far too grand an automobile for a colonel. But Lustrous found out that if you didn’t have the Army ship the battered family Buick to Germany when you were ordered there, and, instead, on arrival bought one of the larger Mercedes at the substantial discount offered by the Daimler-Benz people, you could drive the luxury car all through your tour, then have the Army ship it home for you. Then you could sell it in the States for more than you had paid in Germany. And so, to Lustrous, in that sense the family car was the Investment.
Netty was not amused.
Pissed? Or angry? Or both?
“I need to talk to you, Fr
eddy,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here.”
“You want some coffee?” he asked, sitting down and gesturing for her to take a seat.
“No,” she said and then changed her mind. “Yes, I do. Thank you.”
He spun in his chair to a table behind his desk, which held a stainless steel thermos and half a dozen white china coffee mugs bearing the regimental insignia.
He poured an inch and a half of coffee into each of them. That was the way they drank coffee: no cream, no sugar, just an inch and a half. It stayed hot that way and you tasted the coffee.
He stood up, walked to her, and handed her one of the mugs.
“How was lunch?” he asked.
“I don’t think I’ll ever forget it,” Netty said.
The colonel took a sip of coffee and thought, Which tells us that whatever is bothering her happened while she was at lunch.
“Who all was there?” Lustrous asked as he walked back behind his desk.
“Well, Frauburgermeister Liptz, of course,” Netty said. “And Pastor Dannberg of Saint Johan’s. And Frau Erika von und zu Gossinger.”
Inge Liptz, Lustrous knew, was the wife of Fulda’s mayor. Pastor Dannberg was a tiny little man who ran with an iron hand not only Saint Johan’s Church but the Evangalische —Protestant—communities of the area as well. Frau Erika von und zu Gossinger was the only daughter—sort of the old maid aunt, Lustrous thought privately—of the Gossinger family, who owned, among a good deal else, three of the newspapers serving the area, the Gossingerbrau Brewery, and a good deal of farmland.
Lustrous had been surprised when Netty had gotten the invitation to the House in the Woods. Although he and the Old Man had been friends before he killed himself on the autobahn, there had never been an invitation to the house for Netty. The Old Man’s wife was dead, his only son had never married, and the daughter, if she entertained socially, did not, so far as Lustrous knew, ever invite Americans.
“That’s surprising,” Lustrous said. “What was the invitation all about?”
Netty did not reply.
“Just the five of you?” he asked.
“That was it, Fred,” Netty said. “Inge, the Pastor and Frau Erika, Elaine and me.”
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