Schulze tactfully ignores the tension that spikes the air around the table. “Let me know if you change your mind.”
“I am curious,” Leonhard says once the steward has retreated through the air lock, “what would prompt you to use the word friend in describing our new acquaintanceship? I have seen you a handful of times and spoken with you never.”
“Oh. I beg your pardon. I was referring to your wife.”
“My wife is your friend?”
“I assumed so. Given that she has something that belongs to me. That’s a really friendly liberty. Wouldn’t you say?”
There are any number of ways to gain the advantage in a situation, but the American has his favorites: a surprise attack or an unexpected silence. Given that he wants the Adelts to be startled into revealing what they know, silence isn’t the optimal choice. This first salvo has the desired effect. Both Leonhard and his wife are disconcerted, instantly on the defensive.
Leonhard sets down his glass.
Gertrud picks hers up. Sips. Swallows. Arranges her face—as women are wont to do—for battle.
So predictable, the American thinks, so easily baited.
Leonhard is as still as a statue.
Gertrud is practically quivering with the suppressed desire to lunge across the table and throttle him.
“I’m certain I don’t know what you mean,” she finally says.
“I’m certain you do.”
“I hope you are able to explain your presumption, Herr Douglas. I confess that I’m not currently in a good humor, and this game—or whatever it is—is doing little to improve my mood,” Leonhard says, draping an arm across Gertrud’s back. He cups the ball of her shoulder with his palm. The move is not protective. It’s proactive. His fingers spread wide, and the tips press lightly into the thin fabric of her dress. He is restraining her.
Gertrud has rallied from the surprise. Her grin is sly. “I have nothing that belongs to you.”
He dismisses this argument with a wave of his hand. “Semantics. Let’s not be juvenile. You have an item that was recently in my care.”
“I’d question how well you were caring for this item if you’ve lost it.”
Again, the American thinks the best tactic here would be aggression, not caution. He settles into his chair as though settling into a foxhole.
“I have lost many things in my thirty-eight years. I lost my first tooth in the driveway of my parents’ house. Bloody mess that was too. My brother knocked it out. I lost my first library book three months later when I fell off a rotten log and into a pond. Again, my brother’s fault. He pushed me in while I was reading The Wind in the Willows. I lost my first school race to that same brother, the dirty cheater. He was six years older and thought it his moral obligation to teach me humility. A number of years later I lost my virginity in a brothel in France. My brother thought it a sad fate for a man to die never having been with a woman, and since he had no control over whether I’d get cut to pieces by machine gun fire he did what he could and ensured that I had a bit of worldly experience before I stepped on the battlefield. I don’t remember the girl’s name, but I do remember my brother laughing until he pissed himself when I stumbled around the next morning in a drunken haze fretting over whether or not I’d just acquired syphilis. I didn’t, in case you’re wondering. The whores in France were uncharacteristically hygienic that year. But the worst loss of my life thus far has been the death of my brother. He was lying in a hospital in Coventry at the end of the Great War, recovering from shrapnel wounds, when a German zeppelin flew overhead and dropped a handful of artillery shells. That’s the kind of loss that stays with a man. Not an idiotic dog tag. But that tag is the answer to an eighteen-year search for the man who dropped those artillery shells. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like to have it back. I would like to find that man and forgive him so I can lay to rest this god-awful burden I’ve carried for almost two decades.”
There are many things that the American is not good at. The list could stretch for miles. And at the very tattered end would be a single word: forgiveness. But people want to believe good of others. They long for things like hope and reconciliation and redemption. They tout those virtues. Write about them. Press them on their children. But it’s hard for a man to stay alive as long as the American has if he’s prone to such sympathetic notions. He will forgive the man who killed his brother only after he has put a bullet in his skull.
The American can see Gertrud sorting through a variety of possible responses. It’s as though they are laid out on a flat space in her mind and she’s shuffling through them, looking for something appropriate. He can detect a glimmer of doubt. She wants to believe him. But she knows better. And though his story is true she has no way of being certain. In the end she picks a response that is relatively benign.
“You don’t know his name?”