Hessinger examined them and nodded his understanding of what they were.
“I am investigating a shooting,” Augie announced.
“Somebody shot Claudette?” Hessinger asked. “Somebody” came out Zumbody.
You sonofabitch!
“I asked if you knew her,” Augie snapped.
“Is she all right?”
“So you do know her?”
“I asked if she’s all right.”
“I’m asking the questions,” Augie snapped.
Hessinger shrugged in resignation, and then leaned toward the door to Suite 507 and unlocked it with a key he had hanging around his neck with his dog tags. He then went through it, and turned on the lights.
“Shit!” Augie said, and followed him inside.
He found himself in a luxuriously furnished office. He saw Hessinger sit behind a large, ornately carved desk and pick up the telephone.
“Sorry, sir, to wake you,” Hessinger said. “But you better come to the office right now.”
The German accent was still there, so Augie put that together:
He doesn’t look like a Jew—but what does a Jew look like?
He’s a German Jew. The CIC is full of them.
Why didn’t I think of that before? So is the CID full of ex–German Jews?
“My boss is coming,” Hessinger announced.
He then rose from the desk and walked across the office and opened a door.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Augie demanded.
“To the coffee machine,” Hessinger replied. “I don’t think well when somebody gets me up in the middle of the night until I have my coffee.”
Augie saw Hessinger switch on an electric coffeemaker.
Hessinger turned from it and said, “Sie haben einen Akzent.”
I have an accent?
What’s that, Chubby, the pot calling the kettle black?
Hessinger went on: “Sind Sie ein Deutscher? Ein deutscher Jude?”
Augie, without consciously deciding to do so, angrily replied in German: “Nein, ich bin kein Deutscher. Und kein Jude. Ich bin ein gottverdammter Amerikaner! Meine Familie ist amerikanisch seit der gottverdammten Revolution gewesen!”
Hessinger nodded, then replied in English: “If you’ve been American since the revolution, that makes you a Pennsylvania Dutchman. I know a great deal about you people.”
“‘You people’?” Augie repeated incredulously.
“Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, went to General Washington and told him that the peasants conscripted to serve in the Landgrave de Hesse-Kassel’s Regiment of Infantry, commonly called ‘the Red Coats,’ were unhappy with their lot and could probably be induced to desert if they were offered six hundred and forty acres of land and a mule. Washington thought it was a good idea, and told the Marquis to give it a try. It succeeded. About thirty percent of the regiment went, as we say, ‘over the hill.’ Where do you live in the States? Bucks County, Pennsylvania?”