Frau Herzog carried the boy to the bench of a refectory table and posed him there with the leg beside him. “Six months,” she said.
She led him out to the barn, where a man dressed in duck overalls was busy delivering a pair of calves, so persuasively that my grandfather began to doubt the information he had been given by the shopkeeper. The overalls fit and so did the face, lean and raw-boned with patient blue eyes. Before Frau Herzog called out to him and interrupted his work, the man’s face wore an expression of blissful absorption in the procedure and its proper execution, usual enough with engineers but presumably not unknown among farmers.
The man in the overalls inquired as to the nature of my grandfather’s business. My grandfather turned to Frau Herzog. Speaking in the most formal German he could muster, he made the polite suggestion that her son was no doubt wondering when she would be returning to the kitchen. He made the deliberate mistake of addressing her as “Frau Stolzmann.” A blush filled in the pale skin between her freckles and spread to the hollow of her throat. My grandfather took it for embarrassment, but it might just as well have been rage.
“Go,” Stolzmann told her.
She seemed to be about to try to remonstrate or make some case, but in the end she kept silent and left the barn. Stolzmann turned back to the parturient animal in the stall. It was working over its pale pink firstborn with its tongue, raising moist spikes and whorls in the dappled tan coat. The cow lifted its head as if hearing a sound that alarmed it. It made an oddly human sound of uncertainty. It clunked drunkenly two steps to the side. A smell of iron filled the barn. Veiled in its pearly amnion, the second calf squirted out of its mother. The sound was like a boot being pulled from the mud.
“She had twins,” my grandfather said. “Is that common?”
“Not very common, no,” Stolzmann said.
He tended to the newborn, squatting beside it. He moved with deliberation and apparent calm, but my grandfather could see that he was stalling for time, going over his story, his head twitching a little from side to side as he aired it to himself. My grandfather waited him out. At last the cow seemed to lose patience with Stolzmann and brought the charade to an end by interposing itself between him and the calves. Stolzmann tumbled backward and sat down hard. My grandfather almost laughed.
When Stolzmann stood up and turned to my grandfather, he had his face arranged to represent what he must have hoped would pass for rustic matter-of-factness, calves safely delivered, another chore done out of the day’s long schedule. He saw the Walther in my grandfather’s hand. He sighed. He wiped his hands on the coveralls. They left long bloody streaks.
“I’m looking for a colleague of yours,” my grandfather said, lowering the gun. “At the Mittelwerk.”
“The Mittelwerk,” Stolzmann repeated. His tone committed him to nothing. He might have heard of the Mittelwerk once or twice. He might just have been trying the word for the sound of it. He might have been trying to imagine what type of mittel was manufactured in this peculiar-sounding werk.
“We know you were employed there. You have been identified by witnesses.” By trial and error my grandfather had learned that when he needed to tell a lie in the course of an interrogation, the technique that worked best was to sound like what he was saying bored him to tears. “We have the paymaster’s ledgers and your name appears there.” He fished a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and put one to his lips.
“If you please,” Stolzmann said, sounding considerably less noncommittal. “No fire.” He gestured to the hay bales stacked man-high in the stall behind my grandfather, in the stalls to either side of him, in the loft.
My grandfather lit a match, held it to his cigarette, then gave it a shake. He tossed the match over his shoulder without looking to make sure it had gone out. “I want you to understand,” he said. “I would gladly burn down this barn and everything in it if doing that would bring me one step closer to Freiherr von Braun.”
A muscle twitched at the hinge of Stolzmann’s jaw. Understanding leaked into his eyes, along with a hint of contempt. At the time my grandfather was not sure how to read that contempt but later thought he understood. Stolzmann had been looking down on him, a filthy and haggard American dogface, and on the backward empire whose army he served in, bent on stealing the stars they could not attain on their own.
“Tell me where he is hiding,” my grandfather said. “I urge you to cooperate, or I will be obliged to see that you are arrested and imprisoned.”
“If you must,” Stolzmann said, working hard in his own right to sound dreadfully bored. “Do your duty, Lieutenant. Obviously, I am at the mercy of you and your country now. And its prisons.”
“Oh, not our prison,” my grandfather said in his sleepiest tone. “I’m going to have to hand you over to the Russians.”
Stolzmann blinked. He gestured to my grandfather’s cigarette and put out a hand. My grandfather handed him the pack and said he could keep what was left. Stolzmann lit a Lucky with the careful flame of his lighter. He cupped a hand under the end of the cigarette to intercept any coals that might fall out. He inhaled without bothering to conceal his pleasure in the quality of the cigarette. “I’ve never heard of this von Braun. I’m sorry.”
My grandfather made a rough and hasty estimation of Stolzmann’s weight, his reach, his agility, preparing for violence, but Stolzmann’s eyes flicked to his right and he looked abruptly irritated. There was a scrape. My grandfather turned around. Frau Herzog was carrying the boy, hugging him against her. The chunky brown shoe of the artificial leg protruded from the cuff of his trousers. My grandfather could not see either of her hands.
“Tell him,” she said to Stolzmann. “Help him, he is going to help Martin.”
“Go back to the house,” Stolzmann said.
She set the boy down. She was holding my grandfather’s M1911, which he had exchanged for the Walther. Her finger snaked around the Browning’s trigger. She raised her arm and took aim. But it was Stolzmann she was pointing the gun at, not my grandfather. “Tell him,” she said again.
“Yes,” my grandfather said. “Tell me.”
Stolzmann smoked attentively, watching the coal at the end of his cigarette. My grandfather could hear the lapping of the mother cow’s tongue. The widow moved the gun a little down and to the right, aiming for Stolzmann’s shoulder. She pulled the trigger. Stolzmann cried out and looked suitably surprised but suffered no other ill effects, since the magazine of my grandfather’s gun was empty.
My grandfather did not like the smug smile that crept across Stolzmann’s face. He asked Frau Herzog for the Browning and took an extra clip from a pocket of his coat. He gave her back the gun. He hoped she would not use it to shoot him. Frau Herzog raised the Browning and, having already demonstrated her willingness to put a bullet into her paramour, took aim at Stolzmann’s shoulder again. Stolzmann’s smile was retired for the evening.
“Wernher is not hiding,” Stolzmann told my grandfather. “He is being hidden.”
“By whom?” my grandfather said.
Stolzmann and Frau Herzog eyed each other and engaged in a telepathic exchange that ended when she racked the slide of the Browning.
“By the SS,” Stolzmann said. “To ensure that you don’t find him. They’re afraid that von Braun will surrender as soon as the opportunity presents itself, and offer his services to the American government.”
“Why would he do that?”