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“You look very nice in your uniform,” she said. “And please don’t say ‘so do you.’”
“All right,” he said. “I won’t.”
“I always wondered what happened to you,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t have an address, so I couldn’t write.”
“The last time I saw you, you slapped my face,” he said, and was a little proud of himself. The way to handle this situation was not to stick the baby Fairbairn into her skull and scramble her brains, but to get her mad.
She flushed, but she met his eyes.
“I was young, Eric,” she said, “and you had no right to expect from me what you did.”
When he did not respond, she smiled and cocked her head, a
gesture he found very attractive.
“I’m working for your father,” she said. “What about that?”
“Working for my father?”
“At the FEG office in Hoescht,” she said. “I’m a secretary.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Berlin,” he said.
“Oh, good,” she said. “There’s a two-hour wait for the Berlin train. We can have a nice visit.”
He nodded.
She cocked her head again and looked at him intently. And then she took his arm and led him out of the aisle onto the connecting platform between cars.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“I don’t know how to begin… There’s an interesting story going around about you, Eric,” she said evenly.
“Is that so?”
“My father told my mother,” she said. “I overheard them. I didn’t hear it all. And when I asked him, he wouldn’t tell me.”
“Wouldn’t tell you what?”
“What I did hear was that a friend of his, a Minister in the Foreign Ministry, had told him that you were seen in Casablanca.”
“I was in Morocco, of course,” he said. “You remember el Ferruch?”
“In the uniform of an American officer,” Elizabeth von Handleman-Bitburg said.
She was looking into his eyes now. As he was trying to frame a reply, she said:“Oh, my God, it’s true!”
“What I’m supposed to do now,” Eric said, almost conversationally,“is kill you.”
Her face went white, and her tongue came out and licked nervously at her lips.
“And I suppose what I’m supposed to do is scream,” she said, very softly. Then she met his eyes again. “Are you going to kill me?”
“Shit!” Fulmar groaned.
