The Shooters (Presidential Agent 4)

"He…made your mother pregnant and then just left? I don't care if you like it or not, that makes him a sonofabitch in my book. Oh, Charley, I'm so sorry."

"Hold the pity," he said. "For one thing, we don't know that he behaved dishonorably. For one thing, he didn't know she was pregnant. He did promise her he would write, and then never did. It is entirely possible that had he written, and had she been able to reply that she was in the family way, he would have done something about it. I like to think that's the case. Genes are strong, and he was my grandparents' son. But he didn't write, he didn't know, and we'll never know whether or not he would have gone back to Germany when he came home from Vietnam"-he drained his martini glass-"because he didn't come back from Vietnam."

"Your poor mother," Beth said. "How awful for her."

"And it's not as if my mother had to go scrub floors or stand under Lili Marlene's streetlamp to feed her bastard son," Castillo said, just a little thickly. "She was the eighteen-year-old princess in the castle, who'd made a little mistake that no one dared talk about.

"Her father, my grandfather, was a tough old Hessian. He was a lieutenant colonel at Stalingrad. He was one of the, quote, lucky ones, unquote-the really seriously wounded who were evacuated just before it fell. He was also an aristocrat. The family name is von und zu Gossinger. Not just 'von' and not just 'zu.' Both. That sort of thing is important in the Almanac de Gotha."

"You sound as if you didn't like him," she said.

"Actually, I liked him very much. He was kind to me. What I think now is that he wasn't all that unhappy that an American, a Mexican-American with a name like Jorge Castillo, had not come back to further pollute the von und zu Gossinger bloodline."

He met her eyes again, quickly averted them again, and reached for the other full martini glass. She snatched it away before his hand touched it.

"You've had enough," she said.

"That decision is mine, don't you think?" Castillo asked, not very pleasantly.

She glowered at him. Then she put the glass to her mouth and drained it.

"Not anymore, it's not," she said.

"You're out of your mind. You'll pass out."

"Finish the story," she said.

"How the hell am I going to get you home?"

"Finish the story," she repeated.

"That's it."

"How did you wind up in San Antonio?"

"Oh."

"Yeah, oh."

He shrugged. "Well, my grandfather and my uncle Willi went off a bridge on the autobahn, and that left my mother and me alone in the castle."

"Why didn't your mother try to get in contact with your father?"

"When he didn't write or come back as he promised, I guess she decided he didn't want to. And I suspect that my grandfather managed to suggest two or three thousand times that it was probably better that he hadn't. I just don't know."

"How did you get to San Antonio?"

"Oh, yeah. Well, you've heard that good luck comes in threes?"

"Of course."

"A year or so after my grandfather and uncle Willi went off the bridge, my mother was diagnosed with a terminal case of pancreatic cancer."

"Oh, God!"

"At that point, my mother apparently decided that wetback Mexican relatives in Texas would be better than no family at all for the soon-to-be orphan son. So she went to the Army, which had been running patrols along the East/West German border fence on our land. She knew a couple of officers, one of them a major named Allan Naylor."

"General Naylor?" she asked.