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“In the hospital at Pasewalk,” Halstead replied, as if he had answered the question a hundred times. “There was an American soldier in the bed beside mine, recovering from his own wounds. It’s amazing what one can learn with months on end of having nothing else to do but learn.” Halstead looked back over his shoulder and grinned. “What do you say let’s go find our hotel and get some rest? You promised me an all day tour tomorrow, and Doctor Albright and Mister Williams should be meeting us tomorrow evening.” “What if they don’t show, mein Führer?” Hess asked with an intense flash of sad eyes beneath a heavy brow. He hailed a rickshaw in Arabic, whose driver pulled up beside the two visitors and released his vehicle to reach for their bags. “Oh, they will, Rudi, they will,” Halstead assured his companion. He shook his head and pulled his smaller suitcase close to his chest when the driver reached for it, and climbed into the rickshaw ahead of the other passenger before setting the suitcase on its end and between his legs. “Doctor Albright especially will be very eager to meet us, if he has followed my previous instructions.” Hess, who was growing used to these cryptic comments from the party leader, gave the name of their hotel in the same Arabic he had learned as a youth in this city-on-a-sea, and the driver picked up the handles of his vehicle to pull his two passengers through the teeming throngs of Alexandria.
############“Come, Rudi, tell me what’s wrong.” Halstead nodded slowly when a fezzed waiter approached with a silver coffee urn, and he lazily exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke into the air above his and Hess’s dessert plates. Hess waved the waiter away, then leaned over his untouched baklava to peer intensely across the table set for two. “I am angry.” |