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“What’s your name?” Halstead asked his mistress-of-the-evening as he led her inside his bedchamber in the Chancellery. “Alabaster,” the young woman replied with a nervous smile as an Ordnertruppe guard closed the door on the sight of the two of them standing beside a bed with a corner of quilt and silk sheet pulled away. Halstead smiled as he indicated a chair next to a table in a corner of the room, a chair sat in with swiftness. “Alabaster. That’s a very unusual name for a fraulein.” He seated himself in the second chair at the table and crossed a leg of his Ordnertruppe uniform. “That’s a very unusual name for anyone.” “My father was a sculptor, mein Führer—” “Adam. Please, call me Adam.” “Adam?” his conversationmate asked with a perplexed frown. “No questions. Just Adam.” The nervous smile returned. “Yes, Adam. My father was a sculptor, before he was killed in the war—” “I’m very sorry to hear that.” Now it was Halstead’s turn to frown. “Thank you. My father was a sculptor, and so he thought his first creation, so to speak, should be named Alabaster.” Halstead’s own smile, a confident one, returned. “Not to press the point, but why the French word? And not the German?” Alabaster’s white throat, first revealed when a Chancellery butler had taken her mink coat from her body, tracked the bob of a petite Adam’s apple. “That’s because my father was French, and not German.” |