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“Frau Erika?” Lustrous said.
“Of course,” she said. “Karl, would you go into Gross-pappa ’s office for a moment?”
Karl didn’t like it all, but he nodded curtly and walked to the far end of the library. Lustrous saw there was an office of some kind in an adjoining room. There was a desk, a typewriter, a leather armchair, and several tables in a small room lined with bookcases.
“When my father was very angry about something,” Frau Erika said, “he used to go there to write the editorial. He said it was very difficult to stay angry in there.”
“Then I have to presume most of the editorials I read were not written here,” Lustrous said.
Frau Erika smiled at him.
“He also used to say losing your temper had to be a sin; it was so pleasurable,” she said.
Lustrous smiled and turned to Netty.
“Can I have that, please, honey?” he asked.
Netty dug in her purse and came up with a plasticized Xerox copy of the newspaper photograph. Spec5 Sam Rowe, Sergeant Major Dieter’s jack-of-all-trades, had spent several hours doing the best he could.
Netty handed it to her husband, who wordlessly handed it to Frau Erika.
She looked at it carefully and then at Lustrous.
“Yes, that’s him. It must have been taken at the time. My God, he was so young! Only nineteen!”
“I’m afraid I have to tell you that he was kille
d in Vietnam, ” Lustrous said.
Erika met his eyes for a moment, then nodded.
“Somehow I knew that,” she said. “He said . . . he said that I would probably not hear from him much, he wasn’t much at writing letters. But that as soon as he came home from the war, he would come back. I was very young. I believed him. Even when there were no letters at all. It’s easy to believe when you are young.”
“For what it’s worth, he died a hero,” Lustrous said.
“It doesn’t mean anything to me but it will to Karl,” Erika said and raised her voice. “Karl, kumst du hier, bitte!”
She sounded almost gay. Lustrous saw the cognac snifter was just about empty and then looked at Netty and saw the pain in her eyes.
The boy came back from the small office.
“Yes, Mother?”
“Oberst Lustrous has brought a photograph, from a newspaper, of your father,” Erika said.
The boy said nothing. Erika handed him the plastic-covered clipping.
He looked at it and then at his mother.
“He never came back to us, Karl, because he was killed in the war,” Erika said.
“Your father was quite a hero, Karl,” Lustrous said.
“Mother said he is dead,” the boy said.
“He was killed while trying to rescue other helicopter pilots, ” Naylor said.
“So how, if I may ask, will that affect things?” the boy asked.
