Disclaimer: What would you actually do if I said I did own them? But, just in case, no, only J.D. is mine.

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A Little Bit of Honesty Goes a Long, Long Way

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"Herr Klink, may I ask you one more question?"

Wilhelm Klink regarded the young man sitting across the table from him in the café where they had been meeting for the last several weeks. "Of course. That is what we're here for is it not?"

"This is the big one, the lynchpin to your part of the story, I guess you'd say, so please be honest with me. Did you know what my uncle and his men were up to?"

"Bob's your uncle?" Klink asked in surprise. Bob. Hogan had met with him briefly after the war and had insisted on "Bob". Americans and their constant need for unwarranted familiarity. Everyone must be 'pals' with everyone. There's simply no sense of propriety at all, he thought with an inward sigh. And why Bob? I thought he liked Rob? "I was unaware you were actually related to Colonel Hogan. I…" he broke off, unsure of how to go on.

"You're surprised because of my race?" the younger man asked with a pleasant smile.

"Forgive me, but I understand your country is currently undergoing a considerable amount of turmoil over the subject."

James David Kinchloe - J.D. he insisted - appeared not to hold the issue against him. "I understand. The Loving v. Virginia ruling that made interracial marriage legal nationwide was only a few years ago."

Klink didn't press the issue, feeling it would be uncouth to probe further.

"In any case, I'd like to return to my question," J.D. went on. "Did you know, Herr Klink? Did you know before that night in the woods outside of Stalag 13?"

Klink hesitated. He would have preferred to let sleeping dogs lie; no matter what answer he gave there would be those who turned against him.

Isn't that just as true now? he asked himself, looking out at the May sunshine. They see you, a German man of a certain age, and of course they ask themselves what you did in the war. And then they treat you according to what assumption they've made. Will the world knowing the truth be so much different?

The difference is, the truth will write it in stone.

He took a sip of his coffee before answering. "No," he finally answered.

"Did you suspect anything at all? Not even unconsciously?"

Klink regarded the man in front of him. He was taller and leaner than Sergeant Kinchloe, if Klink was remembering correctly, but then he hadn't even recognized the man when he had played a doorman in… where was it, Paris? "It's difficult to say. Strangely, I don't remember feeling much surprise when the truth came out that night in the woods, so perhaps that is true."

"So if you didn't know before that, what made you save the Allied spies in your camp from Major Hochstetter?"

He thinks he already has the answer, Klink thought, just like that sneaky reporter from London seven years ago, the one who looked like a rat, or that self-satisfied American who wrote about the story right after the war.

"Robert Hogan got to you, didn't he?" the young Herr Kinchloe asked. "He gets to everybody."

"No, it had nothing to do with Hogan," Klink said. He could see the young man - oh so, so young - trying not to smile. An old man trying to salvage his pride, that's what he thinks. The one-time Kommandant of the toughest prisoner of war camp in Germany, desperately wanting to believe that there was at least one thing he did during the war that didn't involve the dashing Colonel Hogan pulling his strings. He could see the young man's look of patronizing scepticism, and just as he was about to open his mouth, Klink dropped his bomb.

"It wasn't Hogan at all. It was Sergeant Carter."

Ah, the smugness of youth. Wilhelm Klink had changed quite a bit after the war, but a touch of his old glee at getting the best of someone sparked inside him. "Whatever is the matter, Herr Kinchloe? You look like you were kissed by a moose."

"I… I'm sorry, what?"

"It's a German expression. It means you look surprised."

"I am. How did Sergeant Carter… well, convince you to save him and his friends? He rambles a bit too much to be that much of a salesman."

Klink raised his coffee cup again to hide a smirk. "Is it always about 'selling things' with Americans?"

"Well… uh…no, but…"

"In any case, I think you're underestimating the Sergeant. He fooled quite a few of us with his German officer act, from what I've read over the years."

"Still…"

Klink took pity on the man. "In any case, it wasn't - what do you call it, a 'sales hit'?"

"Sales pitch," the younger man corrected.

"Yes, 'sales pitch'. Sergeant Carter made no sales pitch. He made me reconsider my position by doing the one thing Hogan didn't."

"And what was that?"

"Telling the truth."

An eager light, unmissed by the older man, lit up the writer's eye. "Please, you gotta tell me more," J.D. Kinchloe insisted.

Klink leaned back and tried to remember while a waitress delivered a chocolate beignet and refilled his cup. "I don't think I can replicate the Sergeant's…"

"Homespun way of talking?" Kinchloe suggested.

"That would perhaps be the polite way to phrase it."

"Don't worry about it. If I need to, I think I can make it sound like him in the book."

"Very well, then." He chewed thoughtfully on the beignet before beginning. After finishing and then dabbing delicately at his mouth with his napkin, he began.

"I can't remember why Sergeant Carter was in my office alone - likely on cleaning duty - but Major Hochstetter had just stormed out moments ago, nearly knocking the Sergeant down in the process. That's when Carter said something that - try as I might - I could not get out of my head for a long time."

-x-

"Boy! Imagine what he's going to be like if you guys win the war!" Carter huffed indignantly, brushing himself off.

Klink gaped at him. He knew he should discipline the man for his comment, but the words stuck as if they had to be chipped out of a block of ice.

Carter went on, not noticing the other man's state. "I mean, I don't wanna add insult to injury or nothing, but I don't know why you guys aren't happier that we're winning the war. If you win, it's going to guys like that running the joint and bossing everybody around. Gee whiz, that's not a way I'd want to live! No sirree-bob!"

Klink swallowed hard, afraid he was about to be sick. He wanted to rail at the ignorance of the cursed fool in front of him, to give him a lecture on the superiority of the Reich that would blister the man's skin, and then to lock him up in the cooler until his beard was down to his knees. But he couldn't.

No, no! If the Third Reich is victorious…

If the Third Reich is victorious, then the war is over. What use will it have for a Kommandant then?

But what use will it have for the SS?

A cold feeling washed over him. Deep down he knew others saw him as a vain fool, but he was not that foolish. He knew the SS would remain, and worst of all he knew why, but to his abject horror he could suddenly see it, see the future right before his eyes, a future where people like Hochstetter would only gain power while he lost what little he had.

The Sergeant was still babbling on. Really, how does Hogan put up with him? Klink wondered in distracted annoyance.

"Heck, you can see it now!" Carter declared.

"See what, Sergeant?" He'd wanted it to come out forceful, to snap that fool Carter back into remembering exactly where he was in hopes the man would shut up, but it was an obvious failure as the idiot kept going, completely unaware of what he was doing to his audience.

"Not to be a jerk or anything, but it seems to me like none of you Germans trust each other. Not just the military types, neither. Well, I guess it's not like I've seen a whole lot of civilians when you get right down to it, but even regular people don't seem to trust their neighbours round here. It's nothing like back home, I tell you that. 'Course, how's anybody supposed to trust each other when they're always being told to turn each other in for disloyalty or get turned in themselves? You'd be afraid to reach out to anyone at all, or even let'em in your home! What if you're reading the wrong newspaper or something? Or your uncle has too much to drink and starts shootin' his mouth off? Nope, not how I'd want to live. Sounds lonely and dangerous to me. Plus, how're ya supposed to win a war like that? "

"Win the war?"

Carter stopped his sweeping and looked at him. "Say… I don't know, say you're bowling pins."

"Pardon me, Sergeant?" Bowling pins? What nonsense is this?

"Sure, you know, those things at the end of the lane in a bowling alley. You gotta knock'em all down with the ball," Carter explained, taking the older man's puzzlement for ignorance rather than confusion over whatever analogy the American was trying to make. "Anyway, I figure you Germans are like bowling pins. You can't get close or reach out to one another and that makes you easier to knock down. But if you glued all the pins together, like folks holding onto each other, then you'd never be able to knock'em down, would you?"

Klink wondered if this was what apoplexy felt like. "That is not what the Third Reich will be like! The Fuhrer dreams of a better society for all and he will achieve that dream with the German people fully behind him!"

"Gee, I don't know, Kommandant," the oblivious Carter said as he went back to his sweeping, "Isn't he the reason we're in this whole mess in the first place? It's like that saying Schultzie taught me, 'The fish starts stinking at the head.' I know the Germans like him and all, but he's not a good guy, and if you ain't got a good guy in charge, what hope have ya got, win the war or not?"

Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf her

Klink exploded. "SERGEANT CARTER!"

Carter's head whipped up - his eyes wide - at the same time the broom clattered to the floor. Klink was gratified to finally see some panic in the fool's eyes as the younger man held his hands up and started babbling, "Now, now, Kommandant, I didn't mean anything by it! Honest I didn't!"

Despite all of Hogan's wheedling, by nightfall Carter was in the cooler where he'd spend the next two months.

Klink was in bed.

Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf her

He rolled over and kicked at his covers.

He pictured Hochstetter outranking him and rolled over again.

Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf her

There was no sleep for him that night, nor quite a few afterwards. Only visions of rotting fish and falling bowling pins.

-x-

"That's it? That's what turned you around?"

"I struggled with it for many weeks. It was hard to get past the pride Hitler had brought back to us after the first war, especially for those of us who had been in it, but…" Klink sighed deeply, struck by a familiar melancholy, "but one hears things. And after the Sergeant's words, I could no longer delude myself as to what was happening in the world outside anymore. I tried - fear is a powerful blinder - but there was no getting away from it. If even a fool like the Sergeant could see it, how could I not?"

"But it is funny," the young Herr Kinchloe pointed out, "that it was a man you saw as a fool who made you open your eyes in the end."

"Perhaps it is amusing. But it doesn't change the fact that Sergeant Carter said more of truth and substance in ten minutes of blithering on about bowling pins than Hogan said in nearly three years."

Klink got up. He smiled as he left his newspaper and a tip for the waitress on the table. "Perhaps Bob should have considered which approach might have been the most effective right from the beginning. It could have saved him a lot of trouble."

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I used five idioms off the list in this story. Can you spot them all?