Elmore Leonard - Up in Honey's Room

“Looking for Jurgen,” Carl said. “He’d sneak out for a few days and show up at the OK Cafe, PW printed on the back of his short pants-always wore those Afrika Korps shorts-and wait there for the MPs to come get him. The last time he broke out we’re certain it was Shemane drove Jurgen and Otto to Fort Smith and bought ’em their getaway car, a ’41 Studebaker.”

Virgil said, “You ever gonna arrest her?”

“Shemane’s mom was along for the ride. She raised hell with the agents bringing ’em back from Arkansas. She said they were on their way to Hot Springs to take the waters and had not socialized with any Germans or ever would. I told the agents in Tulsa I’d let Shemane think she’s off the hook. Wait for her to leave her mom and go up to Detroit. She does, you got Jurgen. She doesn’t, they weren’t as nuts about each other as I thought. I said to one of the U.S. attorneys, ‘What’re you gonna bring her up on, sleeping with the enemy? You want to charge this poor girl, who’s gone to bed with some of the most prominent criminal defense lawyers in America?’”

Virgil said, “Is that true?”

“Pretty much. I’m counting on Jurgen sticking by Otto, doing what he can to keep him under wraps. Some of those heavy-duty Nazis, the SS guys, refuse even to learn English. Otto’s SS, but he’s tricky. I have a hunch he can get by pretty well in English. Jurgen still might have a time getting him to quit clicking his heels in public, get him to slouch and say things like ‘how they hangin’?’ Unless Otto’s got too much of a Kraut accent to take him anywhere. But I think the main reason they’re still in Detroit, Jurgen has friends there, people willing to help him out.”

“Hiding him,” Virgil said.

“Or they got Jurgen a new identity, birth certificate, and 4F card. He might even have something working he thinks is fun, while he’s teaching Otto to speak American. Jurgen told me one time the Escape Committee, the hard-ass Nazis that run the camp inside, wanted him to study blowing up an ammunition dump they heard about, out in the country south of McAlester. Jurgen telling me about it shows what he thought of the Committee. He said, ‘Even if I could blow it up, this place in the middle of nowhere, who would hear the explosion?’ He’s saying, What good would it do? Working some kind of sabotage now, this late in the war, makes no sense at all. The Battle of the Bulge was Germany’s last full-out assault. They pushed off the sixteenth of December with a thousand tanks and by the twentieth of January they had a hundred thousand casualties and lost eight hundred of the tanks. We lost a lot of good soldiers, but we pushed the Krauts back to where they’d started, pretty much done. It was their last assault but, boy, it cost us.”

Virgil said, “If the war over there ends pretty soon, what happens to Jurgen and Otto?”

“I take ’em back to the camp. The Committee’s had prisoners killed, ones they saw as weaklings pretending they’re faithful Nazis. Had ’em hanged in the washroom to look like they committed suicide. Jurgen said in a statement he left with the camp commander, he and Otto had to get out of there or they’d be the next ones strung up. In the meantime the Committee guys have been sent to Alva in the western part of Oklahoma, the camp where they keep the thugs, the super-Nazis.”

“By now,” Virgil said, “you must have this Detroit FBI agent in your pocket.”

“He’s a good guy, Kevin’s helping me out. He’s still new, doesn’t know he’s not supposed to talk to strangers, like marshals.”

“You tell him there’s a book written about you?”

“Kevin says it wasn’t in the library so I sent him one.”

“You started out, you musta had a hundred copies. How many you got left?”

“I still have some. I call Kevin, ‘You find my Krauts yet?’ Five months they’ve been looking, no luck. They’re working to get the goods on a Nazi spy ring and have different ones under surveillance. I asked him where the spies got their secret stuff, from the paper? He said I sound like a girl he’s been talking to, Honey Deal. She was married to one of the Detroit Nazis for a year, divorced him in ’39. Kevin says Honey’s single, good-looking and smart, keeps up on the war-that impressed him-without having anybody in it to worry about. Kevin has our sheet on the two guys, so he knows Jurgen lived in Detroit at one time and should have friends that are still around. Kevin said, ‘Fourteen years old when he went back to Germany, in ’35.’ He says Honey Deal thinks there’s a good chance her ex-husband knew him. Walter Schoen. Kevin said they asked Walter about him. All he did was shake his head.”

“I imagine,” Virgil said, “you want to talk to this guy yourself.”

“I’ve been thinking about it, and his ex-wife, Honey. I asked Kevin if he thought Walter Schoen was attractive to women. He said, ‘You think Heinrich Himmler is? That’s who Walter looks like.’ What I wanted to know was why a smart, good-looking girl from East Kentucky would care to marry him? Kevin said, ‘Honey thought she could change him, turn him around.’ I said, ‘Hell, that’s what all women try to do.’ He said she told him marrying Walter was the biggest mistake of her life, so far. I’ll get with her first,” Carl said, “then Walter Schoen. Kevin talked to his boss and he talked to the Bureau office in Tulsa, and they vouched for me, so I can do pretty much what I want.”

“Since the Hun was a friend of yours.”

“He could be, once the war’s over. I hope he stays alive.”

Narcissa Raincrow, Virgil’s common-law wife of thirty-nine years, called out supper was ready and served them fried chicken and rice with gravy at the round table in the back part of the kitchen. Narcissa, fifty-four now, had been living here since she was sixteen, hired to wet-nurse Carl when his mother, Graciaplena, died giving birth to him. This was in 1906. Virgil had married Grace and brought her here from Cuba after the war with Spain. Carl was named for Grace’s father, Carlos. Narcissa, unmarried, had delivered a child stillborn and needed to give her milk to a newborn infant. When Carl first brought his wife, Louly, to the house he told her that by the time he’d lost interest in Narcissa’s breasts, his dad had acquired an appreciation, first keeping her on as housekeeper and cook, finally as his common-law wife. Virgil thought she looked like Dolores Del Rio only heavier.

Narcissa said to Carl eating his chicken, “I got a letter from Louly you can read if you want. I write her, she always answers my letter.”

Carl said he talked to her on the phone every week.

Virgil said, “You tell the FBI agent your wife’s a marine?”

“I tell everybody I meet,” Carl said, “Louly’s a gunnery instructor at a marine air base. Shows recruits how to fire a Browning machine gun from the backseat of a Dauntless dive-bomber without shooting off the tail. Louly’s having all the fun.”

“He misses the war,” Virgil said.

“He would still be in it,” Narcissa said, “he wasn’t shot that time.” She said to Carl, “You lucky, you know it?” And said, “Virgil tell you the FBI man called?”

“I tried him, he was gone for the day,” Carl said, busy with his chicken and rice. “I’ll see him tomorrow.”

“How come he asked for Carlos Webster?”

Carl saw his dad stop eating his supper to watch him.

“I told Kevin I was Carlos. I’m thinking of using it again while I’m in Detroit.”

“Nobody’s called you that since you were a boy,” Virgil said. “Or up to when you joined the marshals and they started calling you Carl. You’d tell ’em you’re Carlos and come near having fist-fights over it till your boss calmed you down. You recall why you wanted to stick with Carlos?”