“Colonel Mattingly and the others are waiting for you in the bar, Captain Cronley,” he announced.
“Colonel, this is Special Agent Hessinger,” Cronley said. “Freddy, this is Colonel Frade.”
“It is my pleasure, Colonel,” Hessinger said.
His accent was so thick that Frade, without thinking about it, replied in German.
“And mine. Who are the others?”
Hessinger recited: “General and Mrs. Greene, Colonel and Mrs. Schumann, Major and Mrs. McClung, Captain and Mrs. Hall, and Major Wallace, sir.”
“Wonderful!” Frade said sarcastically. “This should be lots of fun!”
Hessinger gave him a strange look.
“Lead on, Herr Hessinger,” Frade ordered.
—
“Well, everybody’s here,” General Greene greeted them cordially.
“And about time, too,” Mrs. Greene interrupted. “Mr. Hessinger and I want to get to the English Garden before everything is gone.” She smiled at Hessinger. “Don’t we, Mr. Hessinger?”
Hessinger had told Cronley about the English Garden. It was in the famous Munich park that Germans swapped silverware, crystal, paintings, et cetera, with the Americans for cartons of Chesterfields, Hershey bars, and Nescafé. It was officially illegal, but no one seemed to care.
Hessinger, who had apparently been drafted as interpreter for the general’s lady, smiled wanly back.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Everybody knows everybody else, right?” General Greene asked.
Frade did not know Major Wallace. That introduction was made.
Chairs were produced for Frade and Cronley. They sat down.
“We were beginning to worry,” General Greene went on, when they had taken their seats. “I gather you drove from the monastery?”
“No, sir,” Frade said. “We flew. I’m going to have to fly to Frankfurt first thing in the morning, so we came by Storch.”
“Mattingly and I were just discussing those German airplanes, the Storches, clearing up the mystery, so to speak,” Greene said, smiling broadly.
“What mystery is that, sir?” Frade asked.
“It was something right out of an Abbott and Costello routine. You know, ‘Who’s on first?’” Greene said. “I got a call from an Air Force colonel several days ago demanding to know why a stork with Twenty-third CIC painted on its tail had just taken off from Eschborn. I thought maybe he was drunk, so I said if this was one of those ‘Why does a chicken cross the road?’ jokes, I didn’t have the time for it.
“That pissed him off, so he said I would be hearing from someone else in the Air Force. Sure enough, fifteen minutes later an Air Force two-star is on the phone. This one I knew. Tommy Wilkins. Good guy. We were at the War College together.
“‘Paul,’ he says, ‘what’s your version of the encounter you just had with my guy?’
“So I told him, ending that with ‘Tommy, I didn’t even know what the hell he was talking about. A stork with Twenty-third CIC painted on its tail?’
“Whereupon Tommy grows very serious. ‘Hypothetical question. If I asked you why the CIC is flying Storch aircraft around after we’ve grounded them, you couldn’t answer because it’s classified and I’m not cleared for that, right?’
“That was the first I realized his colonel had been talking about an airplane, not that big bird that brings babies . . .”
Frade and McClung laughed out loud.
“. . . and the first time I realized he had said Twenty-third CIC had been painted on the tail of the big bird which had just delivered a baby to Eschborn . . .”