“Sir?”
“The poor chap goes home for lunch, and his hot water heater blows up. Blows him and his wife up.”
“I see what you mean,” Cronley said.
And now where are you going to go?
“Let’s get off those depressing subjects,” Parsons said. “To what? Back to my curiosity, I suppose. I got the feeling, Mr. Cronley, from the way you rattled off ‘General-Büros Süd-Deutsche,’ et cetera, so smoothly that you’re comfortable speaking German?”
“I speak German, Colonel.”
“Fluently?”
“Yes, sir. My mother is a Strasbourgerin. A war bride from the First World War. I got my German from her. Colonel Mannberg tells me I could pass myself off as a Strasbourger.”
“I’m jealous,” Parsons said. “I got what little German I have from West Point, and I was not what you could call a brilliant student of languages. What about you, Captain Dunwiddie? How’s your German?”
“I can get by, sir.”
“You said before you’re from an Army family. Do you also march in the Long Gray Line?”
“No, sir. I’m Norwich.”
“Fine school. Did you know that General White, I.D. White, who commanded the ‘Hell on Wheels’—the Second Armored Division—went to Norwich?”
“Yes, sir,” Dunwiddie said. “I did.”
“Warren, like General George Catlett Marshall, went to VMI,” Parsons said. “That leaves only you, Mr. Hessinger. I’m not sure if I can ask General Gehlen or Colonel Mannberg, or whether that would be none of my business.”
&nbs
p; “I never had the privilege of a university education, Colonel,” Gehlen said.
Cronley was surprised, both at that, and also that Gehlen had chosen to reply, to furnish information, however harmless it was, about himself.
“I wasn’t bright enough to earn a scholarship,” Gehlen went on. “My father, who owned a bookstore, couldn’t afford to send me to school. Germany was impoverished after the First World War. So I got what education I could from the books in my father’s store. And then, the day after I turned eighteen, I joined the Reichswehr as a recruit. My father hated the military, but he was glad to see me go. One less mouth to feed.”
What the hell is Gehlen up to? He didn’t deliver that personal history lesson just to be polite.
“The what? You joined the what?” Ashley asked.
“The Reichswehr, Major,” Hessinger furnished, “was the armed forces of the Weimar Republic. It was limited by the Versailles treaty to eighty-five thousand soldiers and fifteen thousand sailors. No aircraft of any kind. It existed from 1919 to 1935, when Hitler absorbed it into the newly founded Wehrmacht.”
Fat Freddy delivered that little lecture because Gehlen delivered his history lesson. Which means he’s figured out why Gehlen suddenly decided to chime in.
Why can’t I?
Because I’m not as smart as either of them, that’s why.
“You seem very familiar with German history, Mr. Hessinger,” Parsons said.
“It is the subject of my—interrupted by the draft—doctoral thesis, Colonel.”
“And you were where when you were drafted?”
“Harvard, sir.”
“But you’re German, right?”