“Right away,” he goes on, “Ma had me write to Thea. I told her how Pop insisted he’d cover the return passage for them all to come home. She was real grateful, but they’d started a family, a new life, she said, and besides, the government had a neutrality deal. Then Hitler invaded, and her letters stopped. So Ma started writing Thea herself. We heard nothing back, but folks in town said it was the same for them, that the mail just wasn’t getting through.”

The fact I wasn’t there for the family through all this stirs me with guilt. But then I recall what I witnessed tonight, and with it, my need to be objective. I find an excuse to distance myself by settling on the chair as Arie downs another gulp. Regathering my queries, I latch onto one posed by Bogart—validly, it now seems. “So you transferred into intelligence. They say from the Corps of Engineers, that’s no easy doing.”

He shrugs in agreement. “My language skills helped, learning some German too. Still took plenty of persistence and rubbing elbows to get the okay. I just figured an intelligence post was the best way to at least keep tabs on the area.”

“To gauge if your sister’s family was safe.”

He nods, resting his flask on his lowered knee. “With my level of clearance pretty limited, I wasn’t going to find out much. But it was better than doing nothing while we waited for word from her.”

“Did you? Hear from Thea?”

“Eventually did, yeah. Got a smuggled letter about their going into hiding.”

My delight over the letter’s arrival swiftly dissipates at the idea of the families living in such fear. Impatiently I prompt, “And then…”

“And then, I went to Moretti for a favor. In addition to looking out for you,” he clarifies. “I asked him to sneak a letter to Thea through an agent on one of his drops. Told him I needed my sister to stay strong, to hear she wasn’t forgotten.”

While the sentiment is sound—even through their separation, Arie always spoke of her fondly—a gap in his recount tugs at me. “How’d you know, though, where to send the note?”

“She told me. In her letter.”

“That…seems terribly risky. Don’t you think?”

“Would’ve been, if she hadn’t used a code of sorts. She was always real smart like that.”

Intrigued, I raise a brow automatically, spurring him to explain.

“She wrote about us playing hide-and-seek as kids, using the basement of a brewery. Except there was never any brewery,” he says. “I got the hiding part. The rest stumped me until I ran it past my folks, and Ma remembered from earlier. Thea had written a few times about a fella named Brouwer, a shipping associate of Jacob’s father. He and his mother would come for dinner on occasion. So you see?”