A Matter of Honor

Chapter Thirty

Sergeant Strasser was on the phone, face hard and flushed, when Lasari came into the apartment. The sergeant listened, nodded and made a final note on the phone pad.

When he hung up, he ignored Lasari and spoke directly to Pytor Vayetch and Herr Rauch, his voice respectful, almost obsequious. “He did not go to Philo Park at all today,” he said. “He had food sent up, stayed in his room. He phoned down to the concierge, booked a flight to Leige. Now he has checked out of the hotel, luggage and all.” He glanced at the phone pad. “Lufthansa flight 981. It leaves in an hour. Neal is going to the airport to make sure he’s on it.”

Vayetch nodded but neither he nor Herr Rauch spoke. Vayetch sat with a drink in his hand and Rauch was at a side table, eating supper from a tray set with Rosenthal china. Strasser turned to Lasari with a cold smile and said, “Your luck is holding, Jackson. Your gumshoe general is leaving town.”

Lasari had spent the last two days in the back bedroom with Eddie Neal or Strasser seated at the apartment bar or lounging in an armchair near the front door, on watch at all hours. Greta had brought Lasari sandwiches and fruit and kept a carafe of fresh water on his bedside table. Once she had come into his room carrying her small portable radio, but Strasser followed moments later to take it away. “You’re not here for her to entertain, buddy,” the big sergeant had said.

Several times Lasari heard the phone ringing, the opening and closing of the front door, and an occasional murmur of voices, the words too indistinct to understand.

It was already dark in the old city when Strasser sent Greta to tell Lasari he wanted to see him. Now, after nearly forty-eight hours of solitude and near silence, Lasari was aware of both the unnatural loudness and bitter anger in his voice.

“You call it luck, Strasser? What the fuck’s lucky about it?” he said. “I never saw the old bastard in my life, that’s how lucky I am. Never laid eyes on him.”

“That seems likely enough,” Vayetch said. “But how do we know the truth about what you revealed to him?” Vayetch went on. “It’s plausible enough that General Weir checked you out with headquarters in Frankfurt. I can believe he found you, not the other way around.” He shrugged. “But the rest of it, what you talked about, what you let slip — we have only your word, don’t we?”

Lasari knew he could not let the heat of his anger warp his judgment, he must not give away the one edge he had, the knowledge that they had taped every word he spoke in Philo Park, even his commands to the dogs.

“As far as proof goes,” he said, “the only test is one of logic. What do I gain by lying to you? You’re my ticket, my only ticket, out of the spot I’m in. If you honestly think the old man knows how and why I’m connected with you guys, you’d better blow me away right now.

“The man’s out for revenge. It has nothing to do with me. He’s looking for somebody who killed his policeman son in Chicago. I happened to spend a night with a girl there. She left my name on the old man’s phone tape, wanted to talk to his son about me. Maybe a guilt thing, maybe she wanted him jealous. I’d just met her...”

Lasari turned to Strasser. “Check it with Malleck, for Christ’s sake! That mother knows where I was when his hyenas found me.” Strasser looked at Pytor Vayetch. “The ginzo here’s right, Mr. Vayetch. It all hangs together. He was with the chick earlier that night. It was afterward she got herself into trouble.”

“Yes. I understand the young lady took a lot of punishment.” Vayetch eyed Lasari with a tight smile. “Is this information a matter of complete indifference to you, Mr. Jackson? That this girl who gave you sanctuary, that you’d made love to throughout the night, was beaten bloody only moments after leaving you? Aren’t you angry about that?”

A silence settled in the room, broken only by fleshy sounds as Herr Rauch savored the veal sausages Greta had served him. He cut each wurst into four pieces, then used blunt fingers to dip the meat into a pot of mustard. After each carefully chewed and relished mouthful, he took a swallow of beer. Vayetch watched impassively as Rauch dipped a corner of his napkin into the beer, then wiped the rim of the stein clean of mustard.

“He’s like that from the war,” Vayetch said. “There was much starvation in Silesia when he was a boy.”

Greta had moved closer to Lasari. “It must be terrible for you about that Chicago lady, George. I remember a ‘Kojak’ show when bad men kidnapped his niece and threatened to beat her up and kill her. The family was very close, Greeks, you know. Everyone but Kojak turned chicken, like Ernie calls it, and...”

“Shut up, Greta!” Strasser said. “Will you shut up and get Herr Rauch a clean glass for his beer?”

“Let me tell you how I feel,” Lasari said to Vayetch. “I feel nothing. Like I told that old fool. I’m just a buck-assed private in this man’s army and I’m not going to screw up now. He was a pretty shrewd bastard. He was trying to work on me about that girl. I told him what I’m telling you. She was a one-night stand. I’m sorry she got herself hurt, I don’t get my kicks that way, but I didn’t know who she was or what she was. I didn’t know she knew the old man’s son, and I wouldn’t recognize her again if she walked through the front door buck naked. I know I’m up to my ass in trouble and I’m not looking for more of it.”

Pytor Vayetch smiled and settled back in his chair, sipping his drink until Greta came back from the kitchen. She bent one knee and touched the hem of her skirt in a mock curtsy. “Your order, sire,” she said, smiling at Rauch and putting the clean stein and a fresh bottle of beer on his tray. Rauch grunted but he did not raise his eyes or change his expression.

It was Vayetch who broke the silence. He looked hard at Lasari, then nodded. His tone was formal. “I think we can trust you. I don’t think you’re concealing anything from us. Logically, as you point out, it is to your advantage not to deceive us, but logic has little to do with human behavior.”

Vayetch put his well-manicured lingers together, tips to tips, then stared into the hollow of his hands. “We three gentlemen here. Sergeant Strasser, Herr Rauch and myself, the operative personnel so to speak, are in agreement. We are ready to update our schedule and proceed with plans, Sergeant Strasser has already cut orders for you to rejoin your comrades in the Lucky Thirteenth. Herr Rauch and I will personally drive you back to Regensburg. On the way we will have a little talk. We will let you know exactly what we expect of you. Is that clear?”

“It will be, I’m sure.”

“You have no questions now, you do not wonder why you have our trust?”

“No.”

Herr Rauch finished his beer and patted his lips with a silk handkerchief. He turned to look directly at Lasari for the first time. Then, with the tip of a big finger, he lifted the lid of a miniature piano on the coffee table, an ornate reproduction of a baby grand, painted a glossy white and etched with gold. Concealed inside was a tape recorder. Rauch pressed a key and a click sounded, then a faint humming. There were background noises from Philo Park but Tarbert Weir’s recorded voice sounded as clearly as if he were standing in the apartment.

“You’re doing a hell of a good job with those dogs, soldier.”

“They get confidence doing what they’re told. That’s how they’re bred.”

Rauch pressed the fast-forward button, passing over a rapid squeal of voices till he came to the words... “I’m a buck-ass private in the U.S. Army doing my duty on assignment in Germany. I’ve got papers and orders I don’t know you or anything about a man you say got killed in Chicago. I don’t know why the hell you picked me.” Then came the sound of Lasari reprimanding the dog.

Herr Rauch manipulated the tape machine and played the same speech over three times, listening intently, narrowing his eyes in concentration. Then he pressed the fast-forward. “Here’s the part I admire most,” he said. “Clever, deeply subtle, almost Germanic of you, Jackson.”

Lasari’s voice, recorded close to Danke’s collar as he knelt on one knee beside the dog, sounded through the room, hard and sharp-edged. “I know I’m a good-looking guy, so this wouldn’t be the first time I got propositioned. Either you walk away from here right now and don’t bother me again or I’m going to yell for the Polizei and report you as a goddamn pederast...”

Herr Rauch snapped off the tape, cutting through General Weir’s voice in mid-answer. “You understand now why we believe we can trust you,” he said.

Greta was smiling with wonder. “That’s the most marvelous thing,” she said, “hearing everything they said like that. You could put it in a bedroom some time.”

Herr Rauch took the tape reel out of the miniature piano, put it in his pocket and stood to leave. Pytor Vayetch drained his Scotch and joined him at the door. Rauch was frowning, showing displeasure.

“We forget something, Herr Rauch?” Strasser said anxiously.

With an abrupt gesture, Rauch took out his wallet and handed Greta several deutche marks. “For you, fraulein. There is a cologne, made in Berlin, I think, something very clean in aroma, like pine trees and fresh apples. Juni-Wasser, my old nurse called it. I wish you would try it as a favor to me, fraulein, a favor to the world. Unless, of course, you like to smell like soap in a public lavatory.”

When they had gone Sergeant Strasser turned the key in the door and put it in his pocket. He went to the bar and poured gin over ice, then shook in droplets of Angostura bitters until the drink was as rosy as red wine. He took the drink to his bedroom, leaving the door ajar.

Greta followed Lasari to his room behind the kitchen, her cheeks red with humiliation, eyes bright with tears of rage.

“That big, fucking farmer! Who does he think he is? Ernest buys my perfume at the PX. You like it, don’t you, George?” She blew gently on her wrist, then held it close for Lasari to sniff. “Isn’t that like a Hollywood girl?”

“It’s great, Greta, just great. A lot of Stateside ladies are wearing that, but on you it smells special.”

She smiled at him and said, “No matter what you say about yourself, it must have been terrible to know they hurt that girl. Would you like to talk about it?”

She stood in the doorway, the toes of her white boots on the outside of the door still, as if it were a barrier or a starting line.

A spasm of alarm went through Lasari’s warning system. As she reached out to touch his hand, he made an imperceptible move backward. “Greta, it’s like I said before — I hardly knew her one way or another.”

“I could tell you other things,” she said softly. “I know what those big farmers want to say to you on the way to Regensburg...”

“I don’t think that’s what Strasser has in mind for you this evening,” he said.

“He’s already started to get drunk, George.”

“Then you go in and sober him up. That’s what he probably wants.”

“I know about something else,” Greta said. “Something even Ernie doesn’t know I know.”

Lasari looked at her steadily. “I’m not going to touch you, Greta. I want you to turn around and walk back where you belong.”

“I know you like me, George.”

“That doesn’t matter. Your boy friend is wearing the stripes, remember. I’m just a boarder here.”

From the click of her booted heels in the hallway, he knew Greta had walked past Strasser’s bedroom. Moments later, he heard the drone of a television set from the front room.

Lasari turned off his table lamp and lay down on top of the coverlet. Outside it had begun to snow and he could hear the click of sleet against the window. He tried to distract himself and then gave in helplessly to memories of another snow, that night in Chicago when he sat opposite Bonnie Caidin. She had been pale and thin, with shadows under her eyes, but her face had been fragile and perfect, without a mark on it.