“How do you know you can trust me?” she asked. “I mean, I might just drive to the house, get the money, get back in the car, and go to Brazil myself.”
She met his eyes when he didn’t immediately reply.
Then he said: “But, as you said a moment ago, we’re survivors, and then there’s that other thing.”
“Manfred, you’re naughty!” Inge said. And then she asked, “You are going to take care of me, aren’t you?”
“Of course.”
“Say it. I’m a woman. I can usually tell when a man is lying.”
“I’m going to take care of you, Inge.”
Just as long as you don’t cause me problems.
She kept looking into his eyes.
After a long moment, she said, “I hope I’m not making a fool of myself, but I believe you.”
Inge slid off the bed and started collecting her clothing. She put on her brassiere and then picked up her torn underpants.
She held them out for von Deitzberg to see.
“You’re naughty, Manfred. Look at what you did!”
He felt a stirring at his groin as he looked at her standing there wearing nothing but the brassiere.
“Well, I’ll just have to get another pair at the house,” Inge said, and dropped the underpants into a wastebasket.
“Don’t do it on my account,” he said. “I like you better without them.”
“You’re naughty, naughty, naughty!”
She walked to him and kissed him rather lasciviously.
“I like it,” she said.
“In the morning, Major von Wachtstein—You remember him?”
“The Luftwaffe officer who flies that little airplane?”
“The Fieseler Storch. That’s him. You know him?”
“Slightly.”
“In the morning, he’s going to fly to the airfield here. He should arrive shortly before ten. You will meet him and give him the money. That means it will have to be made into some kind of a package. I don’t want von Wachtstein to know what it is.”
“He doesn’t know about the confidential special fund?”
“No, and I don’t want him to. But there is another man, Anton von Gradny-Sawz, in the embassy, who does.”
“And what’s he going to do with the money, this other man?”
“He is going to buy some property for us in Mendoza, in case the Führer is wrong about the Final Victory and we need someplace to go.”
“ ‘We’ as in you and this other man, or ‘we’ meaning you and me?”
“We meaning you and me,” von Deitzberg said.