Who could know indeed? Laura thought.
Stefan said, “They also wanted whomever they sent to be reliable and capable of keeping his mission a secret. I was the ideal choice.”
“An SS officer, a spy, and the first chrononaut,” Chris said. “Wow, what a fascinating life.”
“May God give you a life far less eventful,” Stefan Krieger said. Then he looked at Laura more directly than previously. His eyes were a beautiful, pure blue, yet they revealed a tortured soul. “Laura . . . what do you think of your guardian now? Not an angel but an aide to Hitler, an SS thug.”
“No thug,” she said. “Your father, your time, and your society may have tried to make a thug of you, but there was an inner core they couldn’t bend. Not a thug, Stefan Krieger. Never. Not you.”
“No angel, though,” he said. “Far from an angel, Laura. Upon my death, when the stains on my soul are read by He who sits in judgment, I’ll be given my own small space in hell.”
The rain drumming on the roof seemed like time flowing away, many millions of precious minutes, hours and days and years pouring through gutters and downspouts, draining away, wasted.
After she had gathered up the unfinished food and thrown it into dumpster behind the motel office, after she’d gotten three more Cokes from the machine, one for each of them, she at last asked her guardian the question she had wanted to ask him from the moment he had come out of his coma: ‘Why? Why did you focus on me, on my life, and why did you want to help me along, to save my butt now and then? For God’s sake, how does my fate tie up with Nazis, time travelers, the fate of the world?”
On his third trip into the future, he explained, he had traveled to California in 1984. California because his previous two trips — two weeks in 1954, two weeks in 1964 — had shown him that California was perhaps the coming cultural and current scientific center of the most advanced nation on earth. Nineteen eighty-four because it was a neat forty years from his own time. He was not the only man going through the gale by then; four others began making jaunts as soon as it was proved safe. On that third trip Stefan had still been scouting the future, learning in detail what had happened to the world during and after the war. He was also learning what scientific developments of the intervening forty years would most likely be taken back to Berlin in ’44 to win the war for Hitler, not because he intended to help in that design but because he hoped to sabotage it. His researches involved reading newspapers, watching television, and just circulating in American society, getting a feel for the late twentieth century.
Leaning back on his pillows now, recalling that third journey in a voice utterly different from the gloom with which he had described his grim life up to 1944, he said, “You can’t imagine what it was like for me to walk the streets of Los Angeles for the first time. If I had traveled one thousand years into the future instead of forty, it couldn’t have seemed more wondrous. The cars! Cars everywhere —and so many of them German, which seemed to indicate a certain forgiveness for the war, acceptance of the new Germany, and I was moved by that.”
“We have a Mercedes,” Chris said. “It’s neat, but I like the Jeep better.”
“The cars,” Stefan said, “the styles, the amazing advancements everywhere: digital watches, home computers, videotape recorders for watching movies in your own living room! Even after five days of my visit had passed, I was in a state of pleasant shock, and looked forward each morning to new wonders. On the sixth day, as I passed a bookstore in Westwood, I saw a line of people waiting to have copies of a novel signed by the author. I went inside to browse and to see what kind of book was so popular, to help me a bit in understanding American society. And there you were, Laura, at a table piled with copies of your third novel and your first major success, Ledges.”