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“No, sir. And the PX, sir, to provide Frau von Wachtstein with toiletries?”
“I’ll call them and authorize the sale to you of whatever Frau von Wachtstein requires.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I will do what I can to protect you, Cronley,” Connell then said. “But it probably won’t be much.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“Carry on, Lieutenant Cronley,” Connell said, and then switched to German and told Frau von Wachtstein that Lieutenant Cronley was going to take care of her and that if there were any problems, she should not hesitate to bring them to his attention.
Before leading Elsa from the office, Cronley wondered how the hell Frau von Wachtstein was supposed to bring any problems to Connell’s attention, and they were in the Kapitän before he realized that Connell had not addressed the subject of who was going to pay for the Officers’ Sales Store and the PX items.
What the hell, it’s not a problem.
After not getting his pay at either Fort Knox or Camp Holabird, it had caught up with him a week before. He had been carrying around thick wads of scrip twenty-dollar bills—the Army-issued currency designed to keep real dollars out of the economy—totaling a little over a thousand dollars.
I’ll worry about getting repaid later.
—
“Your call, Frau von Wachtstein, what would you like to do first? Go to the hotel? Or the clothing store? Or the PX?”
“Or the what?”
“The PX. It stands for Post Exchange. It’s a store where you can buy soap and shampoo, and other stuff.”
Elsa considered the question before replying.
“If I was asked what I want most in the world right now, it would be a long, hot bath.”
Cronley had a quick shaming moment, wondering what she would look like climbing naked into a bathtub. Or standing in a shower.
“To the hotel then?” he asked.
“But eventually, I would have to get out of the tub,” Elsa continued, “and then I would be standing there in the nude, with nothing to put on but these dirty rags.”
He had another shaming mental picture of Elsa standing there in the nude pondering her choices.
“First things first,” she said. “Soap and shampoo. Then cl
othing. Then the hotel and a long, hot bath.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Cronley said.
[SIX]
The PX was not far from the Alte Post Hotel.
When Elsa was finished selecting what she needed—including a bottle of Chanel No. 5, which she said was the first she’d seen since her husband had brought her a bottle back from Paris in 1940—it made quite a stack on the checkout counter, the movement of which was solved by the purchase of a Valve Pak canvas suitcase.
It also substantially thinned one of the wads of twenty-dollar bills after Cronley retrieved it from where he had been carrying it—inside the calf of his Western boots.
The Officers’ Sales Store was on the other side of town, in the Quartermaster Depot.
On the way, Elsa volunteered, “We had a Kapitän like this.”
“You and your husband?”
