He got from behind the wheel and followed her to the house. The large, ornate, varnished wood door opened as they reached it. A middle-aged maid stood there.
“Take the Major’s things to the guest room,” Inge ordered in heavily German-accented Spanish.
“Sí, Señora. Bienvenido, Señor.”
“You’re at the end of the corridor to the right,” Inge said, gesturing up the stairs.
“Thank you,” he said, and extended the Chevrolet keys to her.
She put them in her purse, then pointed to a door. “In there,” she said.
It was the sitting. On a heavy wooden table against one wall was an array of bottles.
“What’s your pleasure, Señor?” Inge said in her terrible Spanish. “We have English—scotch—and German, and native, and even some American. The local brandy’s not at all bad.”
“Sounds fine,” Peter said.
“Then that’s what we’ll have,” she said, and poured stiff drinks into short, squarish glasses. She handed him his drink and tapped her glass against it. “Prosit, Schatzie,” she said.
“Prosit, Inge,” he said, and took a swallow.
“Don’t look so worried,” she said, switching to German, when she had taken a healthy swallow. “I’m calm. OK?”
“Good,” he said.
“Are you going to tell me what happened on that beach? I’ve tried to get Werner to tell me, but he says he doesn’t really know. I don’t know whether he really doesn’t know, or considers it a state secret.”
“I have the feeling he knows,” Peter said. “Ambassador Schulker knows, in some detail.”
“So tell me. I want to know what he’s facing.”
“A little later,” Peter said. “What I need right now is the toilet, and then a shower.”
She looked into his eyes, then nodded. “I was in there this morning,” she said. “So I know there’s soap and towels.”
“Thank you,” he said, and drained his glass. She did the same thing, then turned to the table to pour herself another.
When he reached his room, the maid had just finished unpacking his satchel; she then informed him that, with his permission, she would touch up his uniform with an iron.
He thanked her, then waited for her to leave.
He locked the door after her, then undressed and took a shower. When he came out of the bathroom, naked, toweling his hair, to fetch his change of linens, Inge was in the bedroom, wearing a blue dressing gown.
“Oh,” she said. “Is that what we’re going to do? Play ‘You show me yours, and I’ll show you mine’? I loved playing that when I was a little girl.”
She pulled her dressing gown open and then closed it, but not before he saw that she was naked under it.
“This is not smart, Inge,” Peter said, quickly wrapping the towel around his waist. “What if he comes home?”
“First he’s going to do whatever he has to do at the embassy, and then he’s going to go weep on his lover’s manly chest,” she said. “He won’t be home until very late. Not before ten or eleven, anyway. Maybe he won’t come home at all. He knows how to find Brazil, too.”
“I can’t believe you’re serious.”
“Whatever Werner is, he’s not stupid,” she said. “One of his options is to obey his orders and go to Berlin. His problem there is that Goltz is dead, which means he doesn’t know who now has his Kripo dossier”—Kriminalpolizei, the Criminal Police division of the Gestapo—“the one with all those pictures of him cavorting naked with handsome boys. If that’s in the wrong hands, he’s liable to be arrested the moment he steps off the plane. And that’s even before they get around to asking what happened in Argentina. His other option is to empty the ‘special’ bank account—and the last time I looked, there was almost a quarter of a million American dollars in it—and put that money somewhere safe, go to Brazil, turn himself in to the Brazilians, or maybe even the Americans, and declare that he is now, after prayerful thought, really opposed to that terrible Adolf Hitler.”
Christ, that possibility never entered my mind!
“You think that’s possible, Inge?”