Chapter One Thousand Five Hundred Forty-Eight
15th March 1963
Tempelhof, Berlin
Ben was left wondering exactly what had happened a week earlier. As he walked across the alley to Marie’s birthday party. Attending a child’s party wasn’t normally the sort of thing that he would do, but he had been asked to come and help out.
A week earlier he had fallen back asleep briefly and when he had woken up, he had come downstairs to find his mother having to comfort Kiki who had started crying when questioned hard about just who she was. It had not been until after Kiki had pulled herself together and left that he had told his mother some of the truth. That in Kiki’s involvement with the FSR she had been caught up in the middle of the worst meatgrinder that the Korean War offered. That had a profound effect on her behavior.
The night before she might have had a blasé attitude, but she was still trying to process what had happened with that ambush that she had gone through a lot closer to home. Once she had fallen asleep, Ben had seen how she had started thrashing around in her sleep and he had ended up having to practically hold her down. That even though she was asleep, her terror was evident. Even though she had calmed down when he had hugged her it had scared him, though he was not about to tell his mother about that. Her seeing Kiki burst in tears was bad enough.
Still though his mother had not been about to let what she had seen go. Yes, Kiki was one of Kat’s adopted nieces. Unlike most of the others though, she still had a family. Her mother’s family had been a branch of the Romanovs and her father was from an extremely old Junker family. Following the untimely death of her mother, Kiki had been sent by her father to live with Kat. She was hardly the impoverished child of exiles that his mother had thought that she was.
“Then why all the secrecy then?” Nadine had asked.
“She is desperate to be seen as separate from her family” Ben replied, “That is why she kept volunteering for the toughest assignments, so that people don’t automatically assume that she had everything just handed to her. She has had some bad luck lately, the FSR team she was leading got attacked and Kiki blames herself for it.”
Ben had worried that he had said too much when he had said that. All his mother would have needed to have done was open a newspaper and it would be obvious who Kiki really was.
“Why are you involved with her though?” Nadine asked, “She has hurt you in the past and with what she has put herself through, I can only see things getting more complicated.”
Ben had then tried to explain how special he thought Kiki was to his mother only to have her stop him. “I am concerned that you are in love idea of her and might not fully understand who she is” Was what his mother had said concluding the conversation. When he had heard later that Kiki had returned to Rangsdorf, he had been relieved even if he missed her.
Now entering Kat’s house through the kitchen, he saw Kiki was chatting with Nancy Jensen, the odd American expat whose husband had commanded the Marine Infantry in Korea. She saw Ben and smiled as if everything was right in her world. He knew that it was false and was something she put on. When he had asked about that, she had said that it was something that most people did. Just in the role that she had been born into it needed to be in place constantly. It was also why Kiki said that she liked to be around people who didn’t realize who she was because she could just drop all pretense.
The irony was that Ben’s mother disliked how much Kiki hid from her while having no idea it was the actual person who Kristina von Preussen really was who she was dealing with as opposed to the cartoonish figure that the tabloids and the entertainment shows made her out to be. It all played into why Kiki said that their relationship was ultimately going to be impossible. Sooner or later some journalist was going to figure it out and the last thing Kiki wanted was for Ben’s life to be upended because of her.
Heading up the stairs, through the hallway and finding the Gräfin and Marie in the parlor. Ben saw that there seemed to be a substantial number of children running around the house and an equal number of adults, presumably their parents, looking around curiously. Small wonder that Kiki had asked Ben for help managing this mob. Marie was wearing the blue dress and white apron that she seemed to be wearing every time that Ben saw her. His mother had said that Katherine was lucky in that her daughter’s obsessions were practical and inexpensive.
Marie lit up when Ben entered the parlor. He recalled when Katherine and Douglas had brought her home shortly after he had moved in. Seven years earlier.
“So, how old are you today?” Ben asked Marie though he already knew the answer.
“Everybody asks me that” Marie said earnestly, “Ask them.”
That was quite an answer from a seven-year-old.
“Well, many kind regards then” Ben said to Marie who smirked at him.