Which means I shouldn’t have brought her.
Which is yet another indication that we shouldn’t be together—that she’d be far better off with any of the nice, safe guys her parents are trying to match her with.
Mother asked what I was thinking. And the truth is—pardon my French—I was thinking with the head of my dick.
And, wow, I’ve really fucked this up . . .
“Dunwiddie didn’t say why you were coming,” Fortin said, and added, “with a priest.”
“I like to think of myself as a scholar/priest, Colonel,” McGrath said. “My specialty is heretical religions. I’m in Germany looking into the one that Heinrich Himmler started.”
“Am I supposed to believe that you and James are simply friends? And that you have no connection with the DCI?”
McGrath shrugged, then said, “Let me throw this up for your edification. I trust you’re familiar with Colonel Cletus Frade of the DCI?”
Fortin nodded.
“When Colonel Frade was a fighter pilot on Guadalcanal,” McGrath went on, “I was the fighter group’s chaplain. Cletus asked me to help him find out more about Himmler’s heretical religion. I’m happy to do so.”
“And that’s what you’re doing in Strasbourg?” Fortin pursued.
“You must be the very good—relentless—intelligence officer Jimmy tells me you are,” McGrath said. “Actually, I’m in Strasbourg for several reasons. First, on the way, Jimmy told me about Saint Heinrich the Divine’s Wewelsburg Castle—”
“I’m having trouble believing any of that,” Fortin put in.
“Well, I’m very interested in getting a look at it,” McGrath said. “And, second, I’m here because Mrs. Cronley—Jimmy’s mother—made me promise to hold him to his promise to look in on the widow of her recently deceased nephew, Jimmy’s cousin.”
“I presume you’re talking about the late SS-Sturmführer Luther Stauffer,” Fortin said, but it sounded like a question.
“Correct. And, third, Jimmy wants to ask you—”
“You have a cousin who was in the SS?” Ginger asked Cronley, incredulously.
“I did until Odessa got him to bite on a cyanide capsule in the Tribunal Prison.”
There was again a look of disbelief in her eyes, followed by a look of horrified acceptance.
It hurts seeing her react this way. Maybe I wasn’t thinking with my dick, which means I am in love with her . . .
If that’s true, I’ve got to get her away from me.
Get her and the baby away from me.
“What about his widow?” Ginger asked. “Do you know where she is? I’d like to see her.”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible, madame,” Fortin said. “She’s in the Sainte-Marguerite Prison.”
“Why?” Ginger said, her tone on the edge of unpleasantness.
“The Ministry of Justice is in the process of deciding whether she is to be tried for collaboration or turned over to the Americans for trial on charges of crimes against humanity. At the Nuremberg Tribunal. And when that decision is made, I’m going to inquire into her connection with Odessa.”
“She’s a Nazi?”
“There seems little question about that,” Fortin said. “She and her husband were given the privilege of being married in that castle, Wewelsburg, that James describes as the Church of Saint Heinrich the Divine. In a Nazi ceremony in accordance with the rituals of this new Nazi religion.”
“Jean-Paul,” Cronley said, “as much as I hate to leave this delightful subject, how about we bring you and Pierre up to date on the prison break, and then you tell us what you know, suspect, or have heard about said subject?”
“I was about to suggest that,” DuPres said.