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He straightened up and looked at her.
“What I started to talk about before,” Elsa said.
“You’re hiding something in there?” Cronley guessed. “What?”
She opened his pocketknife and dropped to her knees beside the pile of clothing. She separated the skirt from the pile, then attacked the waistband seam with the blade, sawing her way through the stitching.
The first thing she retrieved was a ring, a square-cut diamond set in gold. She handed it to him.
It looks like my mother’s engagement ring.
Three karats at least. Maybe four.
“That’s the ring Karl—my husband—gave me when we became engaged,” Elsa said, as she moved his knife to another part of the waistband.
This time she came out with another square-cut diamond, this one larger than the one in the ring—Jesus Christ, it’s enormous!—and suspended from a necklace studded for most of its length with diamonds.
She handed this to him.
“This was my father’s gift to my mother on their twenty-fifth anniversary.”
She met his eyes again.
“I would rather that Major Connell and Colonel Mattingly not know I have these,” she said. “Are you going to have to tell them?”
Of course I’m going to have to tell them.
For all I know, your husband—or for that matter, your boyfriend—took them away from a rich Jew just before she was marched into the gas chamber!
And if they’re really yours, and Connell will know how to find that out, no problem.
“That’s all that’s left,” she said, almost as if to herself, “of everything.”
And then she spoke directly to him.
“Everything the traitors owned—after July ’44—was forfeited to the Reich. Everything. And if the SS had found me, they would have gotten this, too.”
She’s probably lying through her teeth.
But how could she look at me with those blue eyes and lie to me?
“I was never in your bathroom,” Jimmy then said. “You never showed me either the ring or the necklace.”
“Thank you,” Elsa said.
“Give me ten minutes to find some way to burn this stuff. Then we’ll go back to the clothing sales store.”
“I’ll go with you to burn them,” Elsa said, adding, “please.”
—
The manager of the Kurhotel was very cooperative and asked no questions when Cronley told him what he wanted to do.
Probably because Connell told him to give me whatever I asked for, and he’s afraid of Connell and/or the CIC.
The manager led them to a furnace in the basement.
Cronley fed Elsa’s clothing onto the glowing coals and watched as they finally burst into flame.
