Chapter 24

"You didn't seem very surprised that I was still in the building," I told Fred when I finally was sitting in his front seat with him. For the first ten minutes or so he'd had me crouched down on the passenger-side floor, where I couldn't be seen, just on the off-chance that Cesar and his guys were still around. It seemed sensible; I'd go through a good deal more than that to avoid meeting them again.

"No," he said briefly.

"Was it that obvious that I hadn't gone out?" I asked anxiously. "Do you think they would have known it?"

He considered for a minute. "It was not obvious at all," he finally said. "But when one is pursued, one does not go in a direction that the pursuers might know if there is a choice. One ... pretends, but goes elsewhere."

"You sound like you've had some experience with that," I said lightly.

For a full couple of minutes he didn't say anything. I was thinking I'd made a faux pas somehow with that crack. I knew nothing of Fred's background, and maybe I'd stepped on his toes without thinking or something.

"When I came to this country I was ten years," he said at last. His eyes were focused on the road as he drove, he never even glanced at me. "I came ... we came beyond the law. My uncle was with me, and my aunt, they were all of my family that was left after the war ended. The big war, you understand, the Hitler war." He paused.

"World War Two," I put in.

"Yes. My uncle, you see, was a Nazi. It is not that he believed as they did, not in all things. Perhaps at first, some, I do not know, I was too young. But he was a member of the Party, to live in Germany in that time one had to be in the Party, there was no other way. So they would not allow him into the United States, because he had been in the Party. But he did not want to stay in Germany then, it was very bad in the years after the war. So he paid a man much money, and the man found a place for us on a ship to America. But we could not be seen, either on the ship or when we arrived, so we must spend our time hiding. It was then that I learned the ways in which one might elude a pursuer."

His slight accent, normally not noticeable, had become perceptibly more obtrusive as he spoke.

We were stopped momentarily at a traffic light, and now he turned to look at me. "I am not illegal now, I am citizen. Many years ago there was a time when this was offered to those who had been here for long time, amnesty they called it." He stumbled slightly over the word. "It was not then as it is now, you understand."

That one I understood all right. Amnesty about immigration had become the "a-word," not to be uttered aloud in certain circles. The idea of the current crop of illegals being offered any path at all to citizenship, no matter how torturous, was regarded by many as anathema. A good part of the reason seemed to be that the ungrateful bastards might vote the "wrong" way if they ever gained the right to do that, vote, so pitch every last man, woman and child back out and send 'em home to preserve the American dream for us "true" Americans—whether or not they had a home to go back to.

At least Fred had been allowed a way around the jingoism.

"Well, congratulations then, Citizen Fred," I told him smiling. He nodded, but he was done now. He'd said what he'd had to say. We did most of the rest of the trip in comfortable silence. The final couple of blocks was through one of those Levittown-type neighborhoods, where all the houses seemed to be boxy clones, until he pulled into a driveway beside one of them.

"Larry, you are welcome in my home," he said formally. "Here you may be safe."

I grinned at him and told him thanks.

Inside the place was neat as a pin. He insisted on giving me a guided tour, taking me into every room. The decor showed clear evidence of a woman's touch, his late wife I presumed, but he clearly hadn't changed it since her death. There was a lot of lace in the curtains and bric-a-brac on the shelves—on just about any flat surface, in fact—and the furniture tended toward colorful prints of a type that no man would choose.

At length he ushered me into the kitchen. "You will no doubt be hungry," he said. "I offer you a breakfast if you would like. I do not usually drink coffee at this hour, it interferes with the sleep I must have for the work I do now at night, but this day I will have coffee so that I may stay alert to take you where you will go. You will have some as well?"

Coffee sounded like a great idea, I had a long way to go and a lot of things to accomplish before I'd sleep. So did breakfast. I offered to help, but he'd have none of it; I was relegated to a seat at the small table in the "breakfast nook" with my coffee while he busied himself at the stove.

When he said breakfast he meant breakfast, I discovered. Several rashers of bacon, sausages, eggs, home-fried potatoes, toasted bagels and orange juice found their way onto the table, all still warm when he sat down with me. Between us we polished off everything.