Chapter One Thousand Five Hundred Eleven
22nd September 1962
Tempelhof, Berlin
There were worse things than spending a Saturday morning in. Just when Kat and Doug had finished with other activities, they had nothing better than to do than talk about what was going on with them. It was also a reminder that there were times when Doug seemed to revel in the fact that he didn’t have nearly the number of professional obligations as Kat did.
“They are calling it an annual threat review” Kat said, “What it amounts to is holding Louis’ hand while he gets to hear about all the cranks who would like to see him hung from the nearest lamp post.”
“So, there are disadvantages to you being the Emperor’s Office Wife?” Doug asked with a smirk on his face which caused Kat to hit him over the head with a pillow.
There were times when he was a little too on the money for his own good. This whole Office Wife nonsense was just more of that. Kat had served as Louis’ first wife’s Aide-de-Camp for a long time and had been a surrogate Aunt for his children. Even if her influence on those children was something that she had come to have a number of misgivings about, it was easy to see why the Emperor saw her as one of the few people he knew whose loyalty or motivations he didn’t need to question. There were often times though when Kat felt the need to distance herself from the Emperor and not just because she knew that no one was indispensable. It was because of things like what had just happened. She had spent the prior week telling the people who she paid to mind her financial assets to prepare for an upcoming economic recession and they had turned around and had told her how she could profit handsomely from having that information. It was a reminder of just how far Kat was from where she had started and why people at the top of the heap tended to stay there.
“In all seriousness, just how much danger is Louis in on any given day?” Doug asked, “I thought that he was generally well liked by the public.”
“That’s just it” Kat replied, “He is a public figure and for someone who is relatively harmless, he is certainly the target of a lot of unfocused rage by the worst sort of malcontents and naïve students playing at being radicals.”
“It’s a part of your job to deal with that sort of thing?”
Kat snorted, as she tried not to laugh. “Louis has got people for just that purpose” She said, “I was there because as I said, Louis needed someone he trusted to hold his hand.”
Doug gave Kat a skeptical look. After being married for as long as they had been, he had a good idea of when she wasn’t telling him the entire story.
Schwielowsee
Hera was sitting on the window ledge watching the wooded bank of the lake pass by. The aged calico seemed to be happy so long as she could be close to her preferred human, even if that included Kiki’s new floating home. Kiki just wished that she was as sanguine about the hurtles that life threw in her path as Hera was.
When Kiki had gotten back into her chambers after the medal presentation she had felt as if she had been going insane. Her instructions might have been to accept her due with a smile on her face and that had proven absolutely excruciating for her. Afterwards, she had only wanted to escape from her life and how it had gotten so completely out of control, be someone else for a while. She had weeks of leave ahead of her, so the only thing that Kiki had been certain of was that she would not be missed. That had been when she had discovered that she had months of backpay and that the allowance that the family trust had given her amounted to a great deal of money. More than enough to do what she wanted, and the issue was only where she would go.
Kiki tried to remember when she had last been happy or at least content and had made a decision that would probably convince those who knew her that she had gone completely insane. As she looked from the glass enclosed pilothouse of eighteen-meter motor barge that she had bought a week earlier, Kiki realized that they would probably be right. The name that had been bestowed upon the barge by the previous owner was ML Meta and Kiki saw no reason to change it.
Oddly, Louis Junior had been very enthusiastic about her choice and had spent a day teaching her how to pilot the barge. He had been in Korea at the same time as she had been but had a very different experience. Where Kiki had been up to her eyeballs in the aftermath of the conflict, Louis had been a bit more removed. First aboard the SMS Brandenburg as a part of the Captain’s Staff and later piloting a Landing Craft that he said was remarkably similar to Kiki’s barge in its handling. She had a feeling that there was a joke in that which she didn’t quite get, and Louis had not explained it to her.
Today, Kiki was headed down the Havel River in search of adventure or at least a bit of peace. She had been told that she was on leave for at least the next month and that in order to return to service, she would need medical clearance and that would include a psychological evaluation. It was hardly a surprise that she was not in any rush to go back.