So it was back to partisan political-bashing, and maybe that was Elvis Presley in a cornfield!
"I'm a goddamned millionaire!" exclaimed Drew Latham, walking hand in hand with Karin up the dirt road in Granby, Colorado.
"I still can't get over it!"
"Harry loved you very much," said De Vries, looking above, awestruck at the majestic Rocky Mountains.
"You never doubted that, did you?"
"I never verbalized it either. Except for a few hundred thousand for Mother and Dad, which they'll never use, he left it all to me."
"What surprises you so?"
"Where the hell did he get it?"
"The lawyers explained that, my dear. Harry was a single man with few expenses, studied the various markets both here and in Europe, and made some rather brilliant investments. That's not unlike him."
"Harry," mused Drew quietly, drawing out the name. ""Kroeger implanted that goddamned awful thing in his brain. The autopsy said that it was a new science and could be duplicated. Then it blew his head apart-after he died. Suppose he hadn't?"
"The doctors and the scientists say it could not be perfected for decades, if ever."
"They've been wrong before."
"Yes, they have.. .. I forgot to tell you, we received a telegram from Jean-Pierre Villier. He's reopening Coriolanus and wants us both there in Paris on the first night."
"How can you put it gracefully that a lot of French caterwauling doesn't exactly thrill me?"
"I'll phrase it another way."
"Christ, there are still so many questions!"
"You don't have to burden yourself with them, my darling. Ever.
We're free. Let others do the cleanup, your work is finished."
"I can't help it.. .. Harry said a nurse in the Brotherhood valley alerted the Antinayous that he was coming out. Who was she, and what happened to her?"
"It's in the Mettmach report, the one you only glanced at-' I
"It was too painful," Latham broke in.
"I will one day, but all that medical stuff about my brother-well, I just didn't want to read it."
"The nurse was an assistant to Greta Frisch, Kroeger's wife. She had been forced to sleep with von Schnabe, the commandant, on orders from the new Lebensborn. She got pregnant, and took her own life in the Vaclabruck forest."
"The Lebensborn, such a lovely pastoral sound, yet so brutal, so warped.. .. Still, we found Mettmach in the Vaclabruck. My God, almost a full-blown military base in a backwoods wilderness!"
"It's become a five-thousand-acre penal colony where the prisoners, male and female, are issued only neo-Nazi uniforms, red armbands included. The armbands, however, are sewn in the front of their clothing, not on their arms, the way they made the Jews wear the Star of David during the Third Reich."
"It's wild, really wild."
"It was Ambassador Kreitz's idea. He said it will remind them why they are there as prisoners, not privileged members of society."
6 "Yes, I know, and I'm still not sure I buy it. Couldn't it work the other way, uniformed prisoners of war bonding together?
Swearing undying loyalty to their cause?" .
"Not with their workloads, schedules, and constant lectures about the Nazi past which are accompanied by films and slides of the most brutal atrocities. They're instructed to write papers on what they observed. We hear that many come out of those lectures weeping and falling on their knees in prayer. Remember, Drew, the heavy work aside, no one acts harshly, toward the inmates.
Everything is completely firm but courteous."
"The head doctors are going to have a prolonged psychiatric field day. It could be the beginning of a whole new prison system.
"Then something decent could come out of an indecent madness."
"Maybe, but don't count on it. There are always others waiting in the wings. Their names may be different, the cultures different, but the common denominator is always the same.
"Do it our way, under our authority, no deviations permitted."
"So we must, all of us everywhere, be on the alert for such people, such causes, hoping our leaders will perceive them and have the courage to move swiftly, but not irrationally."
"Don't you get tired of always summing things up so well?"
"My husband-when he was my husband in the early days-usually said, "Will you please stop being so boringly academic." I guess he was right. The only life I ever had was academic, it was all that was offered me."
"I'd never say anything like that to you .. .. By the way, you did more of the follow-up than I did-"
"Naturally," interrupted Karin, "you had to fly back to your mother and father. They need their surviving child in their grief."