Up in Honey's Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

trying to keep his nose out of Honey’s orange, red, and ochre kimono. She sat on the sofa now, the middle cushion between them.
    â€œYou’ve got a federal marshal calling you?”
    â€œFrom the Tulsa office, yeah. He asks for me by name since I’m the one spoke to him the first time he called.”
    â€œHe knew you from home?”
    â€œActually,” Kevin said, “I’m originally from Bixby, across the river from Tulsa. I don’t know this marshal but I’d heard of him and I find out he’s famous. Law enforcement people respect him, so you listen to what he has to say. He makes remarks the way you do, with a straight face. Anyway, he had the Bureau office in Tulsa send us additional information about the two escaped POWs. They’re from a camp near Okmulgee, Afrika Korps officers, one of them a major in the SS. With the information was a statement from the Tulsa marshal saying he knows one of them from lengthy conversations and observing him for a time.”
    â€œWhich one,” Honey said, “the SS guy?”
    â€œThe other one.” Kevin checked his notebook and Honey laid her arm along the sofa’s backrest. Kevin looked up saying, “The marshal claims he knows the guy, and knows—doesn’t just have reason to believe—he knows they came here when they escaped.”
    â€œTo Detroit.”
    Kevin looked at his notebook again. “The SS major is Otto Penzler. The other one is Jurgen Schrenk, a young guy, twenty-six, a tank commander with Rommel.”
    Honey said in her way, “Don’t tell me Jurgen lived in Detroit before the war. What did his father do?”
    She let Kevin stare as she drew on her Chesterfield, raised her face, and blew a thin stream of smoke before saying, “Why else would he come here from a prison camp? He must have friends.”
    Kevin said, “You’re having fun, aren’t you? Jurgen’s dad was a production engineer with Ford of Germany. He brought his wife and the boy along when he came here as an adviser on speeding up Ford assembly lines. Henry thought Hitler was doing a fine job getting Germany on its feet again. Jurgen’s family made their home at the Abington Apartment Hotel on Seward. I think they were here two years, Ford Motor paying expenses.”
    Honey said, “How old was Jurgen?”
    â€œBy the time they left”—Kevin looking at his notebook again—“he would’ve been—”
    â€œAbout fourteen?”
    â€œFourteen,” Kevin said and looked up.
    â€œYou talk to Walter about the escaped prisoners?”
    â€œIn the past week we’ve talked to most all of the names on our watch list of Nazi sympathizers, including Walter. He said he’s never heard of Jurgen Schrenk. How’d you know he was fourteen?”
    â€œI guessed. ’Cause Walter was fourteen when he came here,” Honey said. “Or the way he used to tell it, when he was brought here against his will. We’re at the Dakota Inn one time having a few, Walter said he attended a going-away party in this bar a few years ago. To honor a family going home to Germany after living here awhile. I don’t remember how long exactly or the family’s name, or if Waltersaid anything about the dad being with Ford. Walter was hung up on the kid. He said, ‘Fourteen years old, the boy goes home to a new Germany, at the most glorious time of its history. I was fourteen, I was brought here and taught to cut meat.’”
    â€œThat’s how he said it?”
    â€œPretty much word for word.”
    â€œThis was before the war.”
    â€œI think he met the boy about 1935.”
    â€œIf Walter missed Germany so much, what was stopping him from going back?”
    â€œYou know how many times I asked him that? He’d say it was his destiny to be here, so he shouldn’t complain.”
    â€œWhat’s that mean exactly, his fate? There’s