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It was far too long since Dorian Red Gloria had been wakened with a kiss. At first it seemed a blissful dream, but slowly he came awake to the reality, and began to participate. Then, as he put his arms about strong shoulders, he breathed in the scent of the person whose kisses he longed for most in all the world.
Not believing his other senses, he opened his eyes. It was true. Klaus Heinz von dem Eberbach was kissing him, inexpertly, but with great enthusiasm.
He could not help but respond, welcoming the Major's invading tongue, but finally he gathered his wits and gently disengaged.
Panting, Klaus sat up and grinned at him. "Why didn't you tell me we're lovers?" he asked.
"What makes you think we are?" he asked in astonishment.
"I remember it, Dorian. I don't know why you kept it from me, except ... it's new, isn't it? I only remember making love with you once. It was recent, nicht wahr?" He laughed again, in that free, innocent way Dorian had never seen when he was himself. "I'm not very good at it, am I? But you are, and you'll teach me." He looked around. "That's really what we came here for, isn't it? Someplace we can be alone together, and not worry about my reputation."
"Klaus - " Dorian began.
The Major shook his head. "I remember very clearly, Dorian. I was frightened out of my mind that first time ... but I'm not afraid now."
"I know what you're remembering, but you don't have the whole picture. We've never really made love."
"Don't lie to me!" Suddenly the tones were those of Iron Klaus. "I may have lost my memory, but I'm not a child to be protected from my own sexuality. The evidence is plain. When I first came to, we were sleeping together. Only when you realized I didn't know you did you separate the sleeping bags. I would have done the same thing, Dorian, if you had been the one to forget me. But just until you remembered."
"You were badly chilled. I used my body heat to warm you, that's all."
"Why do you try to protect me? You've said things, too — you said dreams don't usually trouble my sleep. How would you know that if you had not slept with me?"
"We've slept in the same room, Klaus. Why won't you listen to me?"
"Because you're lying, and I don't understand why. I know I've hurt you. Mein Gott, the first time you told me you loved me, I knocked you out cold!" He stared down at his strong hands for a moment, then back at Eroica. "It's coming back. I did everything I could to drive you away, but you always returned ... and then it seemed I sought you out."
"Not through your own choice. Sometimes I was necessary to the success of your mission."
Some of the bewildered anger faded. "Oh. I see. My career. You're giving me a chance to back out of our relationship because it could destroy my career."
"Well, actually - " Dorian began, then realized it would be exactly the wrong thing to tell Eberbach that the world intelligence community thought they were sleeping together, and it had apparently not harmed Iron Klaus's reputation in the least.
"Actually what?" Klaus demanded.
"Actually, I love you. I won't risk your doing anything you'll regret when your memory returns. Kiss me the way you did just now after that happens, and I'll do anything you want."
The anger and disappointment slowly faded. "All right. I suppose ... if the tables were turned I'd feel the same way."
"You would. You've got the strictest sense of honor of anyone I know."
But the Major didn't make it easy for Eroica to keep to his good intentions. Talk about the tables being turned! Klaus lounged about the cavern wearing as little as the temperature permitted, flaunting his nudity in the pool, and giving Dorian sidelong looks that turned the thief's knees to water.
Eroica found himself bundling up in layers of clothes, then finding excuses to go outside, to escape the heat generated by his companion.
Nevertheless, they spent hours talking, as the Major relentlessly struggled to reconstruct his memories. In a couple of days, Klaus became restless, so they spent a morning journeying down to the avalanche site. The pass was still blocked. With Klaus back in health, it was not difficult to climb back up again — nothing to the nightmare journey Dorian had made dragging the unconscious man.
But Eberbach was not satisfied with his performance. "I'm puffing like a potbellied old man!" he complained when they reached the temple once more. "I'm unforgivably out of condition!"
It was another tease that Dorian steadfastly did not respond to; Klaus was now as self-confident about his attractiveness as the Earl had ever been. If he keeps that up when he goes back to NATO, he'll make his boss forget all about G!
Eroica recognized the taste of his own medicine: just as he had for the past two years reacted to Eberbach's denials and refusals with more determined attempts to melt his icy exterior, so now did Klaus find Dorian's determination not to react merely a challenge to his ingenuity.
And the man was certainly ingenious.
He remembered his exercise program. Eroica had seen the lifts and pushups before, many times, when they had been incarcerated together in the Russian submarine. Then, they had been a means of working off Eberbach's frustration. Now, they were a means of arousing Eroica's. For Klaus chose to perform them Greek gymnastic style ... in the nude. Morning and night. And afterward he would bathe, posing beside the pool as he toweled himself off.
Dorian recognized many of Klaus's moves: they were some of the best of his own. So much for Iron Klaus's pretense that he had not been watching!
Obviously, Eberbach's memories were coming back, but the Earl could tell that they were bits and pieces, the Major using his imagination to try to fill in the blanks ... or to tease answers out of his companion.
Then one day Eberbach remembered his father, a tank commander in what he insisted on calling the "National Defense Army" during World War II. The war had been over before Klaus was even born, but he was bitterly sensitive about any accusation of Nazism. Eroica knew Klaus was no Nazi, but he had sometimes wondered if the Major's father had been. He couldn't have been an officer in Hitler's army if he hadn't at least paid lip service to the Fuhrer's cause, could he?
"He was a brave man," Klaus said, "but ... he didn't want me to become a soldier."
"He didn't?"
"He said he wanted me to be manly ... but instead of the usual public school, he sent me to the nuns to be educated."
"Perhaps he thought you would get the best education there."
"Oh, the academic training was excellent. I had no difficulty getting into Officer's Training School. I never really thought about the mixed signals my father gave me until I was accepted there. It was the first time I ever saw disappointment in my father's eyes."
"He couldn't have stayed disappointed very long," Dorian said. "He must have been very proud of you."
"German men do not say such things to their sons. When I excelled at sport, or in my studies, he praised me. He made certain I learned discipline and responsibility."
"But he didn't want you to join the military," Dorian said skeptically.
"He never said that, directly. Not ... until he was ill a few years ago."
When Klaus fell silent, Dorian said, "Tell me about it, Klaus."
The Major looked away. "I wanted to be exactly like him," he said. "He taught me to ride, to shoot, to drive ... to sing. I thought he would be pleased that I followed him into the army. Instead, he became ... distant. I was young. I didn't understand. I thought if I made a success .... "
"That he would be pleased."
"Ja. But ... he was so silent. He never said I was wrong, Dorian. He just never said anything. I ... loved my work. I learned to fly. I won commendations. But ... I was a soldier without a war, except for the cold war — and the whole point of that is that it not heat up and provoke a nuclear holocaust. I started to feel useless, and it made me think that that was how my father saw me: a child playing at being a soldier."
Klaus sighed. "Dorian ... do you know what it is to be a German of my generation?"
"How could I?"
"We are an old civilization. Germany has risen from defeat before. But during the Third Reich ... we lost our honor. We ... committed atrocities."
"You didn't, Klaus. You weren't even born then."
"But I inherited the distrust, the hatred ... and the self-doubt. If the ability to commit mass murder was in our parents, how can we know it isn't in us, as well?"
"Ah, Love, it's in everyone. Is that the source of your self-control, Klaus? I've never known anyone as disciplined as you are."
"Perhaps." He fell silent, thinking.
"Are you remembering something?"
"What my father said to me when he thought he was dying."
Dorian waited, wishing his beloved Major would come up with happier recollections. But perhaps he needed to talk about this — it was obviously bringing back some of his memories.
Slowly, Klaus began to speak again. "I wanted to do something positive, so I applied for a position in NATO. When they accepted me, and trained me as an agent, I thought I was finally doing something worthwhile."
"You were. You are."
"Ja. But my father didn't think so. He was ill when I was promoted to Captain and given the second position in my unit — the place Z holds now. I went home wearing my new insignia, to find that my father had had another heart attack while I was on my latest mission. The doctors didn't think he would live."
"I'm sorry," said Dorian, daring to take Klaus's hand. The German did not withdraw it, although he did not seem to notice the touch, either.
"He was ... confused," said Klaus. "When I entered his room, he woke up. He knew who I was, but he thought the war was still going on — he asked me what I had done to be promoted. I ... was not allowed to tell anyone. When I said that, he grew angry. 'Why did you have to be like me?' he asked.
"I told him, 'You are my father. I am honored to follow you.'"
Klaus fell silent, searing pain in his eyes. His grip on Dorian's hand tightened. Dorian had no idea what to say, so he remained still.
Finally, Klaus spoke again. "He said ... it was his fault. He should not have kept from me what he had witnessed. I didn't know what he meant at first ... and then as he rambled, I slowly realized that he was confused about time. He thought ... I had joined the Nazi party."
Klaus was staring at nothing – or at the scene out of his past. He put his other hand over Dorian's, as if to hold him from retreating, although his grip was not too strong to be broken if Dorian had wished to do so. "I was such a fool," he said. "I closed my eyes to what I didn't want to know. My father was an officer in the German army during the war. If he was not a party member himself, he never opposed what he saw the party doing."
"The National Defense Army - " Dorian offered.
"It was all one army!" Klaus said angrily. "I knew that. I deliberately refused to think about it. In order to be a tank commander, my father had to be a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer."
"He did what he had to do to defend his country," said Dorian.
"To defend ... that?" Klaus shook his head. "He knew, Dorian. He ... just followed orders." He shuddered. "That was why he was upset when I joined the army – to my father it meant blindly following orders."
"But it doesn't mean that to you, Klaus," Dorian said softly. "You never hesitate to question your superiors, and you always do what you believe to be right. If you could remember .... "
Forward to Part Eleven
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