Golden Trap by Hugh Pentecost

did she talk about her child. It was a horror story. A tiny boy taught to hate, screaming obscenities at people suspected of Jewish affiliations, accusing his own mother of having the Jewish taint when she objected to his behavior—and the vicious Colonel Schwartz, delighted with his product, leading the child on to greater and greater extremes, and making it quite clear that he and the boy would both die rather than fall into Allied hands. Perhaps, someday, when it was all over Carole might go back and try, somehow, to transform the child into a human being. Now there was just us—Carole and me. We were both tasting something neither of us had ever had before and never really known existed; a total commitment to another human being.”
    Lovelace’s voice was so low I could scarcely hear him across the room.
    “I went out one day to try to scrounge some sort of food delicacies in the black market where I had connections. We had the silly notion of having a special feast to celebrate our second anniversary—our second week. I came back with some meager supplies—some real coffee, a sausage, ersatz beer, a cheese. There—there was no house! There was rubble, and smoke, and the smell of death. An Allied pilot, crippled by antiaircraft fire, had dropped his bomb load on an area he thought had been destroyed by previous bombings. I—I couldn’t even hope for a moment that Carole had somehow lived through it. We had agreed it wasn’t safe for her to leave the apartment in daylight with Schwartz’s men looking for her. There wasn’t even a lock of hair, a piece of clothing, a stick of furniture left.”
    Lovelace turned abruptly and held out his empty glass to me. I took it, not saying anything, and went into the kitchenette to refill it. When I took it back to him he seemed to have made some sort of effort to steady himself.
    “Sorry to have inflicted my little drama on you,” he said.
    “Rough story,” I said.
    His laugh was a mirthless sham. “The same sort of thing happened to thousands of people. It was war.”
    “Did you ever—?” I checked the question.
    Lovelace raised the Scotch to his lips. This time he swallowed steadily till the glass was empty. He put it down hard on the table back of the couch. “You’re wondering if I ever made any inquiries about Carole’s child—her son. I did. Because, believe it or not, I did love her. Colonel Schwartz died in some kind of crackpot scheme to assassinate General Patton. There was no doubt about his death. The boy was reported to have been killed in one of the last big Allied air raids. I never found any proof of it, but toward the end there were few if any records of that sort kept in Berlin. I—I had several assignments in Berlin, East and West, after the war but I could never find anything to indicate that the boy, named after his murderous father, had survived.”
    “There is no way the boy could have known of your existence,” I said.
    Lovelace shrugged. “Who knows? Schwartz could have been playing cat and mouse with Carole and me—waiting for me to reveal the underground route by trying to get her out.” He let out his breath in a long sigh. “But all that is so very long ago.”
    “So the thing with Marilyn VanZandt really wasn’t more than an adventure of the moment,” I said. “I bring it up because she’ll be back at me about you.”
    “It was more than that,” he said. He lifted his hand and pressed the tips of his fingers against his eyelids. “It was a warm, very real time for both of us. But—she wasn’t another Carole, Mark. There could never be another Carole. I don’t want Marilyn hurt, though, and the best way to prevent it is to keep her away from me. There’s no future in me for her, or anyone else.”
    “What do you want me to tell her?” I asked.
    “That she made a mistake. I’m not Charles Veauclaire.”
    “She won’t buy it. Can’t you see her? It would be a kindness.”
    He gave me a curious look that made me