other, only to be faced by a semicircle of uniformed men, their tunics emblazoned with the banner of the Fourth Reich, the white lightning bolts descending across the swastikas.
"Have you heard enough, meine Herren?"
said an officer, standing forward of the guards confronting the two foreigners.
"Youthink you are so clever, nicbt wahr? You even converse in English." The soldier held up a small electronic listening device, common in police and intelligence circles.
"This is a wonderful piece of equipment," the officer continued.
"One can zero in on, say, two people in a crowd and hear every word being spoken by shutting out the external noises. Remarkable.. .. You have both been watched since the moment you showed up among our privileged, invited guests, enthusiastically claiming to be two of them. Do you think we're so unsophisticated? Did you really believe we had no computerized lists to scrutinize? When you were nowhere, we cross-checked the foreign labor forces. Guess what we found? Never mind, you know, of course. A gruff Dutch carpenter, and a particularly peevish French electrician.. .. Mitkommen! Zackig! We shall talk for a while, your accommodations unfortunately not the finest, but then you'll find peace, your earthly remains in a deep trench along with the other worms and grubs."
"You people are well versed in such executions, aren't you?"
"I regret to say, Dutchman, that I wasn't alive to participate. But our time will come, my time will come."
Witkowski, Drew, and Karin sat around the colonel's kitchen table in his apartment on the rue Diane. Spread across the surface were the articles Latham had taken from the pockets of the dead neo.
"Not bad," said the army G-2 veteran, alternately picking up the objects and studying them.
"I'll tell youthi's much," he went on, "this bastard son of Siegfried didn't expect to find any trouble at the Bois de Boulogne."
"Why do you say that?" asked Latham, gesturing at his empty whisky glass.
"Get it yourself." The colonel raised his eyebrows and nodded at the brass dry bar just beyond the archway to the living room.
"In this house I pour the first, the rest is up to you. Except for the ladies-ask the lady, you jackass."
"That's a pejorative term," said Drew, standing up and looking at Karin, who shook her head.
"A what?"
"Never mind, Colonel, he's childish," interrupted De Vries.
"But please answer his question. There are no papers, no identification;
why is it 'not bad'?"
"Actually, it's pretty good. He'd tell you that himself if he'd look at the stuff instead of swilling the sauce."
"I've had one drink, Stosh! A damn well-deserved one, I might add."
"I know, lad, but you still haven't really looked, have you?"
"Yes, I have. As I put it all on the table. There's a matchbook from a restaurant called Au Coin de la Famille, a dry cleaning pickup receipt for a store on the avenue Georges Cinq in the name of AndrE-meaningless; a gold money clip with a couple of, I presume, endearing words in German and nothing else; another receipt on a credit card, that name and number so obviously false, or so buried, it would take days to trace it to another blind alley. The banks pay;
that's all the merchants want and they get paid.. .. The rest, I grant you, I didn't examine, but then, what I just told you was the result of approximately eight seconds. Anything else, Colonel?"
"I told you, Mrs. de Vries, he does have merit. I doubt it was even eight seconds-nearer five by my count, because of his wanting a drink so fast."
"I'm impressed," conceded Karin, "but you found other things, other items?"
"Just two. One, another receipt for repairs from a cusi0m boot shop, also in the name of Andre, and the last a crumpled admission to an amusement park outside of Neuilly-sur-Seine-a free admission ticket."
"I never saw those!" protested Latham, pouring himself a drink at the dry bar.
"What do they tell you?"
"Shoes, especially boots, are extremely personal, Mrs. de Vries-"
"Please stop calling me that, sir. Karin will do."
"All right, Karin. Footwear is, shall we say, idiosyncratic; a custom shop services the particular form and shape of an individual foot. If a person goes to such a store, he's usually been there before, that is, if he's been in Paris for any length of time.
Otherwise, he would return to his original boot maker you follow me?"
"I do, indeed. And the amusement park?"
"Why was he issued a free ticket?" interjected Drew, carrying his drink back to the table and sitting down.
"I really didn't sea those, Stosh."
"I know, cblopak, and