“But he’s the one with money.”

Vera closed her eyes and opened them. “I can’t imagine kissing him.”

“But if it gets you what you need-be brave, it won’t hurt you. Take off your dress and ask if he’ll make out a check payable to something German, Dachau? They need funds too, you know, repair the gas chambers, do a little redecorating.”

“In what amount?”

“One hundred thousand simoleons. Life will be bliss for at least ten years.”

“This is too spur of the moment.”

“Vera, take off your undies and get out the invisible ink. The bedroom’s dark. He writes in whatever amount the cheap fuck wants in invisible ink and we write over it what we want.” Bo said, “Listen, why don’t you seduce him tonight?”

“Please-”

“He’s here. He goes home, how do you get to Griffin, Georgia? Ask him to stay. You want to talk to him about going into some business, wigs, expensive wigs made of human hair. I see the little Oriental girl crying as they cut off her beautiful hair. Tell Mr. Aubrey I’ll drive him to Walter’s after, ‘after’ being whenever you’ve finished with him. He won’t stay the night, knowing Walter would give him the silent treatment, not offering a word, but willing to give his left nut to know what happened. So when you’re through fucking Mr. Aubrey, let me know.”

“Please, I don’t like you to use that word.”

“I love it when you’re a prude. You can’t say the word but go wild doing it.”

Jurgen stood with his drink waiting for Walter to arrive and deliver his statement, his plan, whatever it was, to a gathering of ersatz spies, Vera the only genuine one, a paid-at least at one time-espionage agent of the Abwehr, but never with her heart in it. She’d said to him last night, “There is nothing I can do for your people, it’s too late.” She said, “To tell you the truth I would have been more comfortable working for the British a few years ago, in 1938, ’39, when Germany began taking whatever it wanted. I’ve had to rationalize like mad to send information to Hamburg, trying to help the cause of your Führer.” Vera said, “I’ve given up. Still, I don’t want you to be caught. You’re here because Walter can’t be responsible for you and work on his plan. That’s the reason he gave me.”

“It’s enough,” Jurgen said. “But once I meet your associates I can’t risk staying. I don’t know these people.”

She told him about Dr. Michael George Taylor, an obstetrician who saw quite a number of German women in his practice. “He tells them, goes to their ladies’ groups and tells them about the tremendous leap forward the Nazis have made in the history of man. He doesn’t say what they’ve done for women, if anything. He loves Germany because he hates Jews. Don’t ask him why, he’ll recite his speech on the international Jewish conspiracy. I think what he tells anyone who will listen is seditious rather than treasonable, though he did give me information, at least a year ago, about a nitrate plant in Sandusky, where he’s from originally, in Ohio. In the late thirties the doctor lectured on Mein Kampf for ladies’ clubs. Imagine the glazed expressions on the faces of the women.” Jurgen smiled and Vera said, “Yes, but Dr. Taylor doesn’t try to be funny. He’s serious, he’s afraid, he worries. If he’s arrested I’m quite sure he’ll give us up.” She said, “Did you ever read Mein Kampf?”

“I’ve never felt it necessary.”

“Last summer in my backyard the doctor pissed on the American flag. No, he set fire to it and then pissed on it.”

“To extinguish the flame.”

“The fire was out,” Vera said. “I think he simply had to piss.”

He liked Vera and liked being with her; she was warm to him. He knew if he stayed she would take him to bed before long. Unless Bohdan was providing the love, the going-to-bed love. At this time he liked Bo and admired his skirt and sweater, like a baby step into pure decadence, if that’s what he wanted to do. Jurgen hadn’t yet made up his mind about Bo. What all his duties were. What he might be up to. It didn’t matter to Jurgen; he wasn’t going to wait around to find out.

He wished he could help Vera. Think of something she could do with her life, use her personality in some way, when the war was over. If she didn’t go to prison. Bo swore, kissing his Black Madonna holy medal, he had not told the G-men anything they could use against Vera. But Jurgen thought he must, from time to time, tell them things that happened. Good liars spoke in half-truths.

Walter came in with Joe Aubrey, they approached Jurgen and Joe Aubrey gave him a salute that was stiff, military, and told Jurgen meeting him was a special honor, something he couldn’t wait to tell his grandkids.

Jurgen said, “Oh, you have grandchildren.”

Joe Aubrey said, “My first wife was barren, my second wife frigid, and my third wife’s gonna get traded in she don’t have a duck in the oven by this time next year.”

“You could see a doctor,” Jurgen said, “find out it isn’t your fault your wife can’t conceive.”

“All I have to see,” Joe Aubrey said, “is a good-lookin’ high yella, high-assed Georgia-Hawaiian in Griffin with a light-skinned boy looking dead-on like yours truly when I was a tad.”

Jurgen paused to make sure he understood.

“You’re his father.”

“Don’t say it too loud now.”

“You support him?”

“Twenty dollars every month. I told his mama, ‘You see he behaves. He’s going to that nigger college in Atlanta, Morehouse, when he’s of age.’”

Joe Aubrey looked off and then turned to watch Bo talking to Dr. Taylor.

“My goodness, will you get a load of Bo-Bo, finally showing he’s a girl at heart. Look, he even stands like a girl, one that’s kinda lazy.”

Now he was walking across the Oriental carpet in the middle of the sitting room to join Bo and Dr. Taylor, Aubrey saying, “Hey, Bo-Bo, you had knockers you wouldn’t be a bad-lookin’ broad, you know it?”

Now the doctor was telling Aubrey to leave him alone. “Why do you have to be so crass? Bohdan isn’t bothering you, is he?”

Joe Aubrey turns on the doctor, Jurgen thought and watched him do it, Aubrey saying, “What’re you, Doc, on the fence? Tired of looking up the old hair pie all day, so what’s the alternative? How ’bout a boy dresses like a woman, looks like a woman, acts like one . . . Doc, I know you have a wife name of Rosemary. How’s it work, you go either way?”

Dr. Taylor was saying something about his wife Jurgen couldn’t hear. He felt someone come up next to him. Vera.

“Why can’t he behave himself?”

“He holds Negroes in disdain,” Jurgen said, “but fathers a child by a Negro woman.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“He called the woman high yellow. If ‘yella’ means yellow.”

“You know what a mulatta is, or a quadroon?”

“Ah, I see.”

Vera started to move away and he touched her arm.

“Are you afraid Joe Aubrey will give you up?”

“Joe talks without hearing what he’s saying. He could give me up without realizing it. And Dr. Taylor . . . Dr. Taylor the drug addict.”

Jurgen listened, but now was distracted. He said, “Let me speak to your guests,” and walked across the room to join Vera’s spies: Bohdan with the palm of his hand to his mouth; Walter frowning with all his heart. Frowning when he told Jurgen he was being moved to Vera’s so Walter could concentrate on what he planned to do for the Führer. Still frowning as he admitted yes, Carl Webster had come to see him and lied, saying Jurgen and Otto had been caught and put back in the prison camp. Why? Jurgen said, “To confuse you. Get you to say no, we’re still free.” Jurgen could feel Carl coming closer in his cowboy boots, with each stride. He remembered Carl saying, “I like to hear myself walk.” Hardly ever saying what Jurgen expected. He missed talking to Carl, missed his company, this federal lawman from Oklahoma who believed Will Rogers was the greatest American who ever lived because there wasn’t ever anyone as American as Will Rogers. He was funny and dead-on accurate when he took shots at the government, and he was always a cowboy. Carl said, “You could tell he was the real thing by the hundred-foot reata he carried around, could do tricks with, throwing his loop over whatever you pointed to and never had to untangle it. Jurgen was thinking that if he ever saw Carl Webster again, even if Carl had him handcuffed, he’d ask him how one became a cowboy.