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“Not you. Your boy.”
Surprised, Klaus pressed his ear against the door. “I don’t understand,” his father said. “What would Klaus have to do?”
“Nothing much. More companion than anything else. These trips can be tedious.”
“How long would he be gone?”
“A few days at the most. More important, we’re willing to pay well.”
A long stretch of silence followed before his father answered. “I don’t know. Perhaps we’ll find another way—”
Klaus pushed open the door, bursting into the room. “I can do it. I can.”
His father’s brow furrowed. “I told you to wait in the kitchen.”
“I’m sorry,” Klaus said, stealing a glance at his uncle. He barely remembered the man from when they’d lived with him in Germany. Only that his Uncle Ludwig Strassmair had argued with Klaus’s mother when he’d brought notice that Klaus’s older brother, Dietrich, had been killed in the war. Dietrich, apparently, was not fighting for Germany, as everyone thought, but for the resistance against Nazism. His mother never recovered from Dietrich’s death—or the scandal—and after selling everything to buy them passage to Argentina, she’d cut off all contact with her brother. “Let me go. Please, Father.”
Uncle Ludwig smiled at Klaus. “See? Even the boy is willing.”
His father, however, was not so quick to agree. “Let me talk it over with him. I’ll telephone to let you know my decision.”
“Danke.”
His father waited until Uncle Ludwig drove off, then turned a troubled glance down the hall toward the bedroom where his wife slept. With a tired sigh, he looked at Klaus. “You heard what he said. It’s only for a few days. To Chile and back.”
“I heard.” Klaus watched his father, trying to figure out what he wasn’t telling him. “He only wants a companion. That doesn’t sound too hard.”
“There’s something you should know . . .”
“What, Papa?” he asked when his father didn’t continue.
Again, that sigh. This one more weary than the last. “Your uncle . . . He’s a Nazi. As are his friends.”
Hope fled at the realization that his mother would never allow this. It didn’t matter that Dietrich had chosen to fight for the resistance, she blamed the Nazis for his death.
His father glanced down the hallway once more, then back at Klaus. “Still . . . the war is over. No need to tell her. Or your sister, who blabs everything.”
“But—”
“It would break your mother’s heart.” He put his hands on Klaus’s shoulders, looking him in the eye, giving a half smile. “If there was any other way, we would find it. Yes? But there isn’t . . . You understand?”
Klaus understood all too well. He and his father could overlook the source of income if it bought the medicine his mother desperately needed. What did it matter if a few Nazis slipped into the country? And, as his father said, the war was over. Those men were simply Germans like him.
Besides, it was only for a few days.
Somehow, though, his mother must have overheard, because when he went to visit her, she tried to dissuade him. “I’m going to die anyway,” she said from her sickbed. “What good will that money be then?”
“I won’t let you,” Klaus told her, trying not to see how frail she’d become. These days, she barely got out of bed.
“Dietrich had no choice, fighting against Hitler. We didn’t leave soon enough. But I taught you to do what is right. In this, you have a choice.”
“This is right. For you.”
She said nothing, merely closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.
That night, when he went to say good-bye, he thought she was still asleep. But when he turned to leave, she opened her eyes. “Klaus . . .”
He came into the room, sitting on the edge of her bed.
