Elmore Leonard - Up in Honey's Room

“He didn’t want to search the house, the grounds?”

“It was time for supper,” Walter said. “He was hungry, so he left . . . with Honig.”

Jurgen thought he was going to say “with my Honey.”

“But he’s coming back,” Jurgen said.

“We have to believe that,” Walter said. “He knows you. You must have told him you lived here at one time and of course have friends here?”

Jurgen nodded.

“Yes, he’ll come back. I’m going to speak to Helmut,” Walter said, looking at the three cutters. They stood by the cow now hanging head-down, all three of them sharpening their knives. “Helmut, Reinhard and Artur, excellent men. Helmut will take you with him when he leaves.”

Jurgen said, “I’m going to live with Helmut?”

“No, you’re going to stay with the countess, Vera Mezwa. Helmut will deliver you. I’ll drive into Farmington to call her on a pay phone, tell her you’re coming. I think she won’t mind taking care of you, have something to do for Germany at this depressing time, something that will please her.”

“It sounds like you’re giving me to her as a gift, something to cheer her up.” He thought Walter was smiling but couldn’t be sure. “Is she really a countess?”

“She’s Ukrainian. Married a Polish count.”

“Killed in the war.”

“Yes, a hero. They sent his wife here, trained in military intelligence. Vera Mezwa was the most important German agent in America.”

“How old is she?”

“I don’t know. Older than you.”

“Is she attractive?”

“What difference does it make what she looks like? She’s going to hide you.”

Jurgen believed a woman with the name Vera Mezwa, a countess, a German espionage agent, could not be as boring as Walter. He was ready to move on.

Vera Mezwa’s eyes and Jurgen’s eyes met on the same level. She took his hand, stepped close and kissed him on one cheek and then the other, Jurgen feeling her lips brush his skin and they were eye to eye again, Jurgen knowing she was glad to have him here but not making a show of it. He could tell by the way she took his arm saying, “Come, let’s sit down and be comfortable,” her English bearing the hint of a Slovak sound. He had known Ukrainians in Hamtramck, a part of Detroit, who spoke English trying to sound American. She said, “Tell me what you like to drink.”

Her manner confident, the leader of a spy ring, but with a wonderful scent that softened her before his eyes. He saw her lying on a bed naked and imagined muscle beneath the curves of her body, but with the breasts of a bodybuilder, and could tell she dyed her hair, preferring the raw tint of henna and a deep-red lip rouge, quite startling against her pale, powdered features. She was a handsome woman in the style of Central Europe and he liked her immediately.

“Whatever you’re having,” Jurgen said, confident it would be a drink with alcohol.

Her heels brought her eye to eye with him, her age would be somewhere in her late thirties, perhaps forty. Her age didn’t matter to either of them. The living room furniture was formal, dull. Jurgen imagined it already here when she moved in. They took cigarettes from a silver dish, Vera lighting them with her Ronson, Vera sitting with him on the sofa, Vera facing him, her legs drawn up in a wool skirt, a shade of rose that matched the sweater she wore and was loose on her body, nothing beneath the sweater, pearls displayed in the open neck. Her head raised and she was looking past Jurgen.

He turned enough to see a young man wearing a white apron over his T-shirt and red neckerchief standing in the room waiting, his hands on his hips, shoulders somewhat slumped, a slim young fellow standing relaxed as he waited.

Vera said, “Bo, the vodka in the refrigerator, please.”

Jurgen watched him turn without a word and go off through the dining room. He believed the young man wore his full head of blond hair in bangs and over his ears in the style of Buster Brown.

“Bo’s my houseman,” Vera said, “Bohdan Kravchenko. He was my husband’s steward aboard ship when my husband, Fadey, was running the blockade during the siege of Odessa, June to October 1941. Perhaps you know already Fadey’s ship was sunk and he went down with it. Bo was in my employ when Odessa fell to the Romanians you pushed ahead of your troops. An Einsatzgruppen, one of your death squads, found him and put him in a labor camp with Jews, Communists, Romas, and made him wear a pink triangle that identified Bo as a homosexual. The Jews’ color was yellow.”

Jurgen said, “He escaped?”

“Finally,” Vera said. “But first Bohdan gave all his food each day for ten consecutive days to an inmate, a man who somehow was in possession of a butter knife and didn’t know what to do with it. Bo honed the small knife on a stone until he had the edge he wanted. He cut the throat of a guard who made him kneel down and open his mouth and the SS thug would try to piss in it from two meters away. Bo crept into the guards’ barracks, found the pisser sleeping and sliced open his throat, and two more while he was at it, without making a sound. He would have been shot whether they found he killed the brutes or not, they were shooting everybody. We left Odessa-I brought Bo with me to Budapest dressed as a woman and finally to America as part of the agreement I made with the German espionage service.”

Vera stubbed out her cigarette and lighted another.

“Listen to this. One night at the Brass Rail, downtown, he tells the sissies he’s getting drunk with he works for a German spy. The Federal Bureau hears of it. They ask Bohdan would he like to work for them, become an agent of the United States and spy on me. Or, be locked up as an enemy alien and sent back to the Ukraine after the war. Bo hopes someday to become a citizen of the USA and he said yes, of course, and asked how much they would pay him. They asked him how much he valued his freedom. That was his pay. He tells me about it, he’s going to spy on me. I asked him, ‘What are they giving you, a medal?’ No, nothing. I said, ‘Why don’t you become a double agent and spy on them for me?’ I said, ‘Don’t we have a good time together? Don’t I let you wear my jewelry?’ It’s all costume. We make up things he gives them that sound to be true, so they’ll keep him in their employ. But they already knew things about me. That I was recruited by Miss Gestapo herself, Sally D’Handt, a famous agent for the Germans. That I went to spy school in Budapest and was accepted into Division One of Abwehr, the Intelligence Section. How could the Federal Bureau know all this about me? I was impressed.”

Bohdan came to them with a frosted bottle of Smirnoff and aperitif glasses with stems he carried upright between his fingers.

“Bo, I’m telling Jurgen what you do for the Federal Bureau.”

Bo places the glasses on the cocktail table.

“We love making up stories to tell them. How I overhear Vera talking on the phone about saboteurs planning to blow up the tunnel to Canada.”

“And the Ambassador Bridge,” Vera said.

Bo filled the three glasses and sat across the cocktail table from Vera and Jurgen, close enough to pick up a vodka, drink it off and pour himself another.

Vera said, “Tell Jurgen what you’d do if you were Walter.”

“If I had to go through life looking like Himmler? I’d cut my own throat. With a butter knife I have, a keepsake.” He winked at Jurgen.

“Be nice,” Vera said. “Captain Schrenk is to be held in respect.” She said to Jurgen, “If Bo turns the music on and asks you to dance, tell him thank you but you’d rather not. Bo sometimes is impulsive.”

“With the kind of impulses she likes,” Bo said.