Peter held up his beer glass.
“That’s a beer,” Henderver said. “I said a drink.” He dragged Peter to the bar and reached under it and came up with a bottle of Dewar’s scotch whiskey.
Scotch? Here in Germany? I wonder where that came from?
Henderver poured stiff drinks in glasses and then raised his to Peter.
“To those of us who have survived,” Henderver said. “For as long as it lasts.”
Peter touched his glass to Henderver’s.
He hadn’t finished the drink when he heard female voices in the foyer, and six young women came into the sitting room a minute later. They were neither quite as good-looking nor as elegant as the young women who could be found in the bars of the Adlon and am Zoo Hotels in Berlin, but they obviously were a Bavarian version of the same breed.
There were several ways to look at them, Peter decided. The most kind was to see them simply as young women looking for eligible young men, with the three K’s as their basic ambition: Kinder, Kirche and Küchen—Children, Church, and Kitchen. According to the Nazi philosophy, these described the female function in life.
Or else they could be considered to be young women looking for attractive young men; and, by and large, Luftwaffe pilots met that description.
Less kindly, they had come to understand that while the chances of getting a Luftwaffe fighter pilot into a wedding ceremony ranged from poor to none, Luftwaffe fighter pilots almost always could be counted on to provide access to food and luxuries not available elsewhere.
Including, of course, to French wine, cognac and Champagne, and even scotch whiskey.
With a couple of drinks of Rémy Martin or Martell to warm your heart, it seemed less important that the young man who had just given you a kilo box of Belgian chocolate, or two pairs of French silk stockings, was interested in getting you in bed, not to the marriage registry office.
Or to convince yourself that it was obviously your patriotic duty to bring joy, or solace, to a young hero of the Third Reich who daily risked his life to protect the Fatherland from the Bolshevik hordes.
“And this, my dear Trudi,” Generalmajor Galland said, “is another old comrade-in-arms, Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein.”
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Herr Baron,” Trudi said.
Trudi looked enough like Alicia to bring her picture clearly into Peter’s mind.
And she looks like a nice girl, like Alicia; there is nothing of the whore, or the slut, in her face.
So what is she doing here?
If the Brazilians were bombing Buenos Aires and I was an Argentine, flying one of their antique American Seversky fighters out of El Palomar, would Alicia be in a place like this smiling at me because I looked like a source of silk stockings or chocolate?
Maybe. If the Gendarmerie Nacionale was setting up roadblocks on the highway to Estancia Santo Catalina, to keep people from moving food around, maybe she would.
No, she wouldn’t, not Alicia.
“The pleasure is mine, Fräulein,” Peter said, and bowed his head at the neck and clicked his heels.
The white-jacketed steward rolled in a tray of hors d’oeuvres.
“Oh, I think I’m going to have some of that!” Trudi declared. “It all looks delicious.”
“I think, Hansel,” General Galland said thirty minutes later, “that you could take Trudi home.”
“Herr General?”
Trudi was smiling at them from across the room. She was warming a brandy snifter in her hands.
“I think she likes you,” Galland said. “But I am not sure, under the circumstances, that that would be such a good idea.”
“It was not my—”
“I was about to suggest if you told her you had to fly first thing in the morning, she might be amenable to spending the night here.”