"I don't think you're fat," Peter said. "Foolish, perhaps, but not fat."
"Why foolish?" she said, walking to the bed.
"You have a husband," Peter said. "I would guess a jealous husband."
She sat down on the bed and rested her hand on his leg, just below his shorts.
"Werner worries that I will succumb to the attentions of some tall, dark, and very rich Uruguayan rancher, and that there would be talk," Inge said. "There aren't very many blondes here, and a great many tall, dark, and very rich Uruguayan ranchers seem to be fascinated with us."
Her hand moved under his shorts.
"Oh, you are glad to see me, aren't you? I wasn't really sure."
"I don't know how soon the waiter will be back with the champagne," Pe-ter said.
"I don't want to start something and then be interrupted," she said. "So we will just tease each other until the waiter comes and goes."
She moved her hand on him, then took it out of his shorts.
"Tell me about Werner," Peter said. "Was he around when we knew each other?"
"He's been around forever," she said. "He used to work for Goltz in the Of-fice of the Reichsprotektor."
"You were married to him?"
"No. Let me think. Was I? No, I wasn't. I was then Frau Obersturmbann-f?hrer (The SS rank equivalent to lieutenant colonel) Kolbermann," she said. "I would have thought I would have told you about Erich."
"You didn't."
"Erich was then on the Eastern Front with the Waffen-SS"-the military branch of the SS-"He was killed shortly before von Paulus surrendered the Sixth Army at Stalingrad."
"I'm sorry."
"I needed another husband, of course," Inge said, matter-of-factly. "Some-one who could keep me out of the hands of the Labor Ministry."
"Excuse me?"
Inge lay down on the bed beside him.
"Liebchen, do I look like the sort of girl who should spend ten hours a day sewing shoes together-or worse, in a shoe factory?"
"
No, you don't," Peter said, chuckling.
"I was safe for a while," Inge explained. "Daddy had me on the payroll at the mills. I was 'constructively employed in industry essential to the war effort.'
Then the mills were bombed out, and Albert Speer (Reichs minister for Armaments and War Production) decided they weren't worth rebuilding. Which put Daddy and me on the 'available labor' list. Daddy-who doesn't know the first thing about steel; he spent his entire life at the mills-was sent to the Saar, where he's living in one room and working as sort of a clerk in the Kruppwerke. The Labor Ministry ordered me to report to Gebruder Pahlenberg Schuhfabrik in Potsdam as a 'trainee.'"
"What kind of a trainee?"
"I never found out. Erich came along right then and swept me off my feet- he was on a twenty-day furlough from the east. A whirlwind romance. He had friends in the police side of the SS who could deal with the Labor Ministry. The wife of a Waffen-SS Obersturmbannf?hrer heroically serving the Fatherland on the Eastern Front certainly could not be expected to do something as undigni-fied as working in a shoe factory. It would be terrible for his morale."
"An older man, was he?" Peter asked.
"Older than you and me, Liebchen, younger than Werner. Actually, he was rather nice. I felt sorry for him. He was a Hamburger, and had lost his wife and two children in the bombing. And his apartment, too, of course."
"Why the older men?"