“—but the chances of you being a pedophile are between infinitesimal and nonexistent.”
“You have to be careful,” Dieter said. “You can’t just invite men to your home when she’s here. The world is a sordid, terrible place. Some men are disgusting and will attack anything. You never know until it’s too late.”
“Right,” Wulf said. “I’ll take that into consideration.”
Dieter’s chest hurt.Breathinghurt. “Don’t take any chances with her. Can you imagine if something happened to her,too?”
Wulf’s voice was low, almost gentle, “If I had had the slightest question about you, you wouldn’t be here.”
“You should have questions about everyone,” Dieter said, “absolutely everyone.”
“That sounds like experience talking.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I promise that I will leave no one alone with my sister, even you.”
“She’s a pretty little girl, right? Other men will notice that.”
Wulf looked at the chandelier above them. “I don’t think of her that way. You know how we think of other men’s bodies as—utilitarian? Men might as well be silver coffee-can robots for all we care. It’s kind of like that. Flicka is like a puppy to me. I react to her like I would an excitable dog. I’m careful about the paws so I don’t get stomped in the groin, but I don’t want to have sex with it.”
Dieter nodded. “Okay. Just be careful. The world is a terrible place, Wulfram.”
“Come,” Wulf said. “Herr and Frau Keller will doubtlessly call us to supper soon. All right?”
Dieter scrubbed his face with his palms. “All right.”
They ate supper, and effervescent little Flicka charmed him with her funny gossip about her boarding school.
Dieter recognized several of the surnames of the children she went to boarding school with, and he made a note to tell Wulfram about them sometime that Flicka would not be sent to the kitchen for ice cream before supper.
After supper, they adjourned to the television room where Frau and Herr Keller popped by every few moments, Dieter was pleased to see, and they watched a movie that wasn’t too scary for Flicka to sit up and watch.
At first, she crawled all over her brother, sitting on his lap and rubbing his neck from behind the couch. Every time Frau or Herr Keller dropped in, she scampered over to see what they had brought.
Seriously, at ten years old, Flicka was a blond Pekinese puppy scurrying around the floor.
That night, Flicka ended up sound asleep over both their laps while they watched a late movie.
Her blond head lay on Wulf’s knees. She drooled in her sleep, making a wet spot that spread down Wulf’s knee toward his ankle.
Which meant that her feet were in Dieter’s lap.
She dreamed and kicked him in the nuts.
Hard.
She was only around on weekends and holidays when she was little, of course, because she went to boarding school.
Over the months and years that Dieter spent first as a guest at Wulfram’s house and then as his Head of Security, Flicka grew from a Pekinese mop to a yellow Labrador pup, all paws and elbows and knees and hard, whacking tail.
Dieter developed a flinch whenever that daffy child threw herself at him, turning to protect his testicles with his thigh, lest one of her sharp, bony body parts nail him yet again.
When she was sleepy, though, she was cuddly as a kitten, and Dieter could let his guard down as she snuggled between the two of them on the couch as they talked and watched the television.
He’d nicknamed herDurchlauchtigwithin those first few months, a royal style higher than the joke name that he called her brother,Durchlaucht.
Durchlauchtmeant Serene Highness and was a gender-neutral term for a high-ranking royal such as a prince. In Dieter’s mouth, it was sarcastic as hell because Dieter was Wulf’s superior in the Swiss army.
