Chapter One Thousand Five Hundred Fifty-Seven
12th January 1970
Wahlstatt, Silesia
There were a number of things that had gone wrong over the Christmas Holiday and in the week since Not so much that he wanted to rush back to Wahlstatt, but still enough to be a real bother for him. He had plenty of time to reflect on it as he was peeling potatoes as a part of KP, something that he had oddly been forced to volunteer for this time. Bas thought he was insane for doing so, even after Niko had tried to explain the reason why.
Being introduced to the woman who Opa was in a relationship with, that was not the sort of thing that he had expected over the holidays. Was being in relationships the sort of thing that an Opa did? Niko had no idea until it had happened. Then there were his parents bringing a baby home and telling him that she was Ingrid, his new little sister. Opa had taken him aside and told him that as Ingrid’s big brother he had an important role to play, as her protector and occasional tormentor. He suspected that Opa was pulling his leg a bit. Bas had said that he shouldn’t be too concerned. Bas had two younger sisters, Anna, and Gretchen, so he probably knew what he was talking about. They were mostly harmless, having big ideas that everyone knew could never happen in real life or being totally frivolous. Like Bas’ youngest sister Gretchen having an absurd crush on Niko for the last several months, for example.
What had happened since his return to Wahlstatt was basically a continuation of Christmas with constant minor aggravations. First, the long-threatened swimming lessons had proven every bit as harrowing as Niko remembered from the previous year. Swimming in the heated indoor pool in the dead of winter was an unimaginable luxury for most of the students in the school, even the ones from rich families like Niko’s. He couldn’t imagine his grandfather spending that kind of money when there were plenty of places for a boy like Niko to go swimming like his grandfather had when he had been young. However, the emphasis on the “lesson” part of that seemed to suck all the life out of what should have been a lot of fun. Until Niko had arrived in Wahlstatt he’d had no idea that there was a way to swim properly. It just became one more place for the instructors to yell at them.
Finally, there was the reason why Niko had volunteered to do work in the Kitchens this week. Like everyone else in his class, he had moved up and down the ranks of the Cadet Corps. Most recently finding himself advancing further up the ladder than he had managed in the past, to Korporal. This had resulted in getting a peek at how things actually worked in the school and what he learned surprised him.
The assumption had always been that discipline was totally arbitrary. Anger Staber Arbeit, any one of the other staff, or do one of the dozens of things that got you a demerit and you would be looking forward to peeling potatoes and scrubbing pots in the near future. Sometimes it seemed like Staber Arbeit was ticked off and landed one someone with both feet because he felt like it, with the same result. Niko had learned that the system worked very differently than he had thought. The Kitchens needed warm bodies to do the drudgework in order to function properly and the school itself was happy to provide them. There was a list with the names of everyone in Niko’s class in Arbeit’s office that said exactly how many times they had been on KP and when. Naturally, Bas had worked in the Kitchens more than anyone else, but there were no exceptions and Niko figured that there were similar lists for the other classes because he saw plenty of the other students around, both older and a few of the younger. The rub was that if Niko wanted to keep his promotion, he would need to select two of the cadets from his bay in the dormitory to work KP this week. He had selected himself and another in his class who had moved into the bay at the start of the term. That had worked, for now, but was going to happen next month because he couldn’t select himself again.
Dublin, Ireland
“Please don’t tell me that you are calling because you killed someone, again” Jack said into the telephone. He wasn’t sure due to the staticky international call, but he thought heard her give an exasperated sigh before she answered.
“It is still early Jack” Kat replied, “If a Luftwaffe training mission went horribly wrong and a navigation error resulted in the planes being over Ireland. Then a law office in say, Dublin, got hit with five-hundred-kilogram bombs by mistake… That would be an awful tragedy.”
That wasn’t funny, not only because in her current position as the Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe High Command made it so there was a good chance that she had the authority to make it happen. There was also the specter of many people, not just in Ireland but throughout the rest of the world, including much of the Catholic Church, saying that it would be Jack getting his just deserts. Especially if it was at the hands of one of his clients.
“Don’t be annoying Kat” Jack replied.
“You’ll be pleased to know that your name came up at the latest intelligence briefing that I was forced to sit through” Kat said, “That thing you are neck deep in. Don’t you worry about that sticking on your shoe and then tracking it all over your house?”
“I wanted nothing to do with that, but one of us decided it would be fun to tell stories of past hush-hush adventures to a book club in Canada” Jack replied, “Which has been constant source of headaches for me ever since. You’ll be pleased to know that I am fully aware of the possibilities and risks that my work in the Far East presents.”
“I was worried, and I am sorry if I got you caught up in that” Kat replied, “There are experts who don’t fully understand the region.”
“I may not understand the country, but I understand the British” Jack said, “They have centuries of practice when it comes to fighting wars in places where they might not be welcome, finding someone who they can bend towards their ends, and finally knowing that no one will give a shit if they kill the people of that country by the thousands. Now I know you didn’t call to talk about current events.”
“The English translation of Sven Werth’s book is out” Kat said, “Is there any exposure?”
“For you, no” Jack said, “Your father would be in serious trouble, if he wasn’t conveniently dead.”
“Sven wrote that his plan was to turn me and my father against each other” Kat said, “At the time that might have worked.”
Jack knew it would have worked. At the time, Kat learning her father’s connection to some of the things that had happened to her would have caused her to give him to Inspector Werth gift-wrapped. If his time in criminal defense had taught him anything, it was that there were few people who didn’t give in to that sort of anger.
