"You must understand," Hausen said, "I was a force to be reckoned with from an early age. What my father had done revolted me. I can still hear him calling me to join them, as though it were a carnival sideshow I mustn't miss. I can hear the young man's moans, his attackers's blows, the way their shoes scraped against the pavement as they moved around him. It was disgusting. My mother loved my father and sent me away that night to keep us from destroying one another. I went to live with a cousin in Berlin.

"While I was in Berlin I formed an anti-Nazi group. I had my own radio program when I was sixteen and police protection a month later. One of the reasons I left the country to go to school was to get away from the death threats. I was never insincere about my convictions." He glared at Ballon. "Never, do you understand?"

"What about Gerard?" Hood asked.

"It isn't much different from what I told you earlier," Hausen said. "Gerard was a rich, spoiled young man who learned about me from my father. He viewed me as a challenge, I think. The White Wolves had failed to stop me through intimidation. Gerard wanted to stop me through argument and intellect. The night he killed those girls he was trying to show me that only sheep and cowards live inside the law. Even as we fled he said that the people who change the world operate by their own rules and make others live by them."

Hausen looked down. Hood glanced at Ballon. The Frenchman was angry.

"You were involved in those killings," said the Colonel, "yet you did nothing except to run and hide. Whose side are you on, Herr Hausen?"

"I was wrong," Hausen said, "and I've been paying for it ever since. I would give anything to go back to that night and turn Gerard in. But I didn't. I was scared and confused and I ran. I've been atoning, M. Ballon. Every day and night, I atone."

Hood interjected, "Tell me about your father."

Hausen said, "I saw my father twice after the night he attacked the Jewish boy. Once was at the Dupre estate when Gerard and I fled there. He asked me to join them and said it was the only way I could save myself. He called me a traitor when I refused. The second time was the night my father died. I went to his side in Bonn and with his dying breath he called me a traitor again. Even on his deathbed I wouldn't give him the acquiescence he sought. My mother was there. If you'd like, you can call her on Mr. Hood's telephone to confirm it."