Higher, on the Belt Road, they stopped for a quick breakfast in a diner that was little more than an open shack with ceiling fans, open to the road on one side, on the other a lanai overlooking the lush Kona countryside descending to the ocean miles below. They sat in a corner, both facing out. Kanani seemed even more alert now that Lett had confided in her. She didn’t talk with the few locals but kept watch behind a Hilo Tribune-Herald with headlines about the growing threat of Communism in Asia and the martial genius of one General Douglas MacArthur. Kanani had scrambled eggs, rice, and toast; Lett, eggs and toast, papaya, Portuguese sausage. He gulped down the good coffee.

Kanani kept staring at him. “So how did they catch you?”

Lett sighed. “They didn’t. I turned myself in.”

Kanani jerked forward. “You what?”

The war had hounded him. It started out as night terrors or reactions to certain sounds or smells. Then it brought fits of fury, a blood rush to the head he couldn’t control. He would black out, not remember a thing. He’d lash out at Heloise. He couldn’t keep a job. His poor French didn’t help. Who was this odd, halting, broken-down American? To keep things under some control, he’d move with a mechanical sort of vacancy. “The nightmares, the episodes, the incidents—it was all getting to be too much as it was, and living as a deserter was only making it worse. Something had to give. Heloise agreed.”

“You’re even braver than I thought.”

“Well, I had no choice. Cutting a deal was the only card I had left. During the Battle of the Bulge, intelligence section had used me for special operations behind the lines. They had found out I had some German, from back in Ohio; a German-speaking Mennonite orphanage had taken me in as a boy. The operations were all classified. I was never to speak of it.”

Kanani pushed back her hair. “You figured you could make that work for you.”

“I figured they at least owed me something.” He said good-bye to Heloise and his boy, no tears this time—there had already been too many shed. He crossed over into occupied Germany, found the first US headquarters he could find in the US Zone. They left him in a cell to stew. He told them his whole story. Criminal Investigations Division passed him to Counterintelligence Corps, who passed him to the men in new suits who had the two photos of him. “I had their attention, you see, because there was this one intelligence officer I knew from the war. A Captain Charles Selfer. The captain is probably the whole reason I ended up how I am. He was the one running me on those missions—before I deserted, that is. But, Selfer was also your rear-line climber type. If anyone had pull, could push papers, it was him.”