#but i also have to imagine that there were layers of deference built into that

[cannibalisticskittles]

YES!!!!! god i wish we had gotten more than just the tiniest taste of matilda's real motivations because it drives me nuts speculating about what the fuck her deal was. she genuinely cared to an extent (and don't even get me started on the line she can give you at a high enough friendship level where she tells you you remind her of one of her kids) but she also had to be so manipulative and calculating (the annoyance i imagine pen had when matilda announced that she wanted the civil corps to conduct that investigation into possible hidden water..... like, what a way to make it clear that she's casting suspicion off of herself and will 100% leave pen and miguel to take the blame if anything is discovered. and yet, it had to have been expected on his part as well. aughhh, what that dynamic would've been like behind closed doors -- fascinating). just.... committing completely to the sweet, caring minister persona and then switching easily to the poor, caring mother while she's also trying to get logan to turn on you and smash you to death with a goddamn robot............

pen using the relic weapon against howlett makes. a hell of a lot more sense than him pummeling him without them, lmao. but YES it still comes out to the same result -- killing someone for the sake of duty and preventing them from ruining the mission, with absolutely no challenge or sport in it.

i want. to have words with the english localization team. what the fuck is UP with some of these choices, huh??? what's with the insistence that he has parallels with gaston?? where??? where are these supposed parallels??? he's strong and he has an ego, sure, but he's also a competent and dedicated soldier?? he lies with an ease that even grace can't detect?? (altho. c'mon girl. really. really??? you can't see through that 12 lovers thing??? okay.) i would kill for a compilation of differences that happened via translation, god.

and of course, what else is there to say about the dropped experimentation stuff except that i DIE.

On the topic of songs that makes one think of Pen, I feel that "For the departed" by Shayfer James, though not a perfect fit for him, works in regard to him forcing the builder away by acting cruel, and him possibly feeling like he has to follow through with his role as a villian to sandrock because he has already done so many terrible things. (Though admittedly I'm probably in headcanon territory right now)

I don't think it's headcanon territory at all! He basically confirms that by saying this:

He knows his list of murders (and it's pretty long, according to Avery) makes it terribly complicated for him to be accepted back into society. Miguel and Larry are forgiven because they never killed anyone - they tried to, yes, but they never actually managed to. Their hands are still clean, so they are considered still "redeemable".

Meanwhile Pen is stuck in some weird limbo thanks to Pathea. I mean, they could have made him just a war criminal (but remember, he's a war criminal for the Alliance. In Duvos he's a hero, and Duvos is full of good, hopeful people, too), without any ties to Howlett's death.

In that case, since he didn't kill anyone related to the other characters, his crimes would have been less "heavy" (like with Aadit from MTAP, who is implied to be the Knight, but who can still marry you and have babies with you). It would have been like: "Yeah, he's a murderer, but he never killed anyone we know and he's ready to change for the Builder, so..." "Yeah, Miguel tried to shoot Logan, but everything worked out in the end, so..." "Yeah, Larry the Geegler tried to kill us, but he never did and now he needs our help, so..."

And Pen actually mentions this slight, but crucial nuance if you choose another dialogue option:"Ouch, though, Skinny! I mean, I thought we were at least still kinda cool. I mean… I didn't even kill anyone you know personally! Or you!"

But since he killed Logan's dad (and Logan is the poster boy of the game, the perfect man who can do no wrong and who brings Pathea so many sweet dollars), he's reduced to cartoon villain tier.

[hr306565-blog]

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[tak4hir0]

Mathias (Matt) Biilmann is CEO of Netlify, a company he co-founded in 2014 and today is one of the fastest growing web development platforms. He has been … More about Mathias ↬ Web-oriented databases, frameworks like Nuxt and Next.js, and even frameworkless approaches are evolving the Jamstack, but the core principles are more powerful than ever.It’s been five years since I first presented the idea of the Jamstack architecture at SmashingConf in San Francisco 2016, a talk inspired by many conversations with colleagues and friends in the industry. At that point, the idea of fundamentally decoupling the front-end web layer from the back-end business logic layer was only an early trend, and not yet a named architectural approach. The New Front-end Stack. Javascript, APIs and Markup. A presentation from 2016 by Matt Biilmann. Watch on VimeoStatic site generators were emerging as a real option for building larger content-driven sites, but the whole ecosystem around them was nascent, and the main generators were pure open-source tools with no commercial presence. Single Page Applications were the basis of some large-scale web apps, like Gmail, but the typical approach to building them was still backend-centric. Fast forward to 2020, Jamstack hit the mainstream, and we saw millions of developers and major brands like Unilever, Nike, and PayPal embrace the architecture. Vital initiatives like the Covid Tracking Project were able to scale from 0 to 2 million API requests on the Jamstack. Frameworks like Nuxt became commercial businesses, and we celebrated large public companies like Microsoft and Cloudflare as they launched early Jamstack offerings. As the commercial space has heated up and the developer community has grown, there’s also been more noise, and we’re even starting to test the boundaries of Jamstack’s best practices. It feels like the right time to both revisit the original vision some of us had five years ago, and look ahead at what the changes in the technological landscape will mean for the future of the Jamstack architecture and the web. Let’s start out by quickly revisiting the core principles that have made the architecture prove popular. Compiling The UIIn the Jamstack architecture, the UI is compiled. The goal is to do the right work at the right times — with a preference for doing as much work as possible ahead of time. Many times, the entire site can be prerendered, perhaps not even requiring a backend once deployed. Decoupled FrontendsDecoupling the frontend from back-end services and platforms enforces a clear contract for how your UI communicates with the rest of the system. This defaults to simplicity: your frontend has a limited contact surface with anything outside itself, making it less complicated to understand how external changes will affect its operation. Pulling Data As NeededOf course, not everything can be prerendered, and the Jamstack architecture is capable of delivering dynamic, personalized web apps as well as more globally consistent content. Requesting data from the frontend can power some rich and dynamic applications. A good example is the frontend of our own Netlify UI, which is itself a Jamstack application built and run on Netlify. We pre-compile an app shell, then use asynchronous requests to hit our API to load data about our users and their sites. Whether you’re using REST, GraphQL, or WebSockets, if you’re precompiling as much of the UI as possible and loading data to give your users a dynamic, customized experience, then you’re shipping the Jamstack architecture. Jamstack In 2021 And BeyondThere’s more innovation happening across the Jamstack ecosystem than ever before. You can see a rapid evolution of the back-end services, developer tooling, and client-side technologies that are combining to enable development teams to build experiences for the web that would have seemed out of reach only a couple of years ago. I want to point to three trends I see shaping up for Jamstack developers in the near future: 1. Distributed Persistent Rendering (DPR)More than anything, Jamstack’s inherent simplicity has made the process of building and deploying web applications much easier to reason about. Code and content updates can be pre-rendered as clean, atomic deployments and pushed right to the edge, creating strong guarantees around reliability and performance without the need to manage complex infrastructure. But pre-rendering a larger website may also mean waiting several minutes each time there’s a new deployment. That’s why I think we are seeing so much innovation happening to make builds smarter and faster — especially for larger sites and web apps. Take for example the raw speed of esbuild, the new “extremely fast JavaScript compiler.” A production bundle that may take Parcel or Webpack over a minute to compile can be completed by esbuild in under a second. And build tools like Vite and Snowpack lean on native ES modules to make local development feel nearly instantaneous. Like the assets generated during a build, those rendered by DPR at request time would remain in the CDN cache until invalidated by the successful completion of a new deploy. This would allow developers to consider the assets rendered during a deploy, and those rendered on demand from requests to DPR functions contained in that deploy, as all belonging to the same logical atomic deploy. (Large preview)In the React ecosystem, some newer frameworks like Remix or Blitz are starting to lean more on the “run everything on a server” approach we’ve all known in the past. There’s a risk of bringing back much of the complexity we’ve worked to escape. Layers of caching can help make server-side apps more performant, but developers lose the guarantees of atomic deployments that make Jamstack apps easy to reason about. Blitz seems to be moving the monolith into the frontend. This can make full-stack apps runnable on typical Jamstack platforms, but without any clear decoupling between the web experience layer and the back-end business logic layer. I think decoupling the frontend from the backend is fundamental to the Jamstack approach and responsible for unlocking so many of its benefits. What I see gaining real momentum are the “hybrid” frameworks like Next.js, Nuxt.js, and SvelteKit that allow developers to seamlessly mix pages pre-rendered at build time with other routes that are rendered via serverless functions. The challenge is that serverless functions (while certainly scalable) have their own set of performance implications. Ultimately, I see the community moving towards an extremely powerful trio that provides Jamstack developers request-level control over the performance profile of any site or application: Delivering pages entirely pre-rendered at build time,Delivering pages dynamically via serverless functions, orBuilding pages on-demand that then persist as static CDN assets.Next.js has done quite a bit of work on a concept of Incremental Static Regeneration. The idea is to ensure high-performance pages by paring serverless functions with different caching strategies like Stale While Revalidate. While the idea of distributing some of the builds to an on-demand approach that still includes strong caching guarantees is a powerful technique, unless developers explicitly opt-out of the stale-while-revalidate approach, the atomic deploy guarantee will be violated by serving a mix of stale and fresh assets from different deploys. Currently the benefits of ISR are also exclusive to a singular framework and only deeply integrated into the offerings of a single provider. At Netlify, we see a lot of promise in the idea of allowing developers to render critical pages at build time, while deferring other pages (like older blog posts, for example) to be built only when and if they are requested. We’re calling the approach Distributed Persistent Rendering or DPR. It’s an architecture for incremental builds that can be compatible across almost every framework and Jamstack site generator, from 11ty to Nuxt to Next.js. DPR will dramatically reduce upfront build times for larger sites, solving a core criticism of static site generation. On Jamstack.org, we’ve opened a Request For Comments to involve the entire community in our efforts to give developers more options for how pages are rendered while adhering closely to the principles that have made Jamstack so popular. By giving this architecture a name and refining it with community input, we can help Jamstack developers build patterns around it — regardless of the framework. 2. Streaming Updates From The Data LayerIf you develop web applications, you’ve likely followed the evolution of state management libraries as developers have built more and more complex web interfaces using tools like React, Vue, and Svelte. But state management has largely been an in-browser and in-memory concern. Each browser tab essentially has its own state, but can be quite complex to connect that local browser state of your application back to the data services that power it. Luckily, this is improving as more and more services now support real-time data subscriptions. Hasura, OneGraph, and Supabase all offer this capability and I only expect to see wider adoption across all providers as the underlying data stores are cached and distributed to the edge for fast global performance. Take Twillio’s expanding APIs: they now not only offer streaming video but also streaming “data tracks,” which can be used to create complex collaboration apps that stay continually synchronized across participants. Finally, new providers are emerging that aggregate data across back-end services. Whether or not you use GraphQL as a query language, it’s really compelling to imagine the power of connecting your UI to a single, standard stream of updates from multiple underlying APIs. 3. Developer Collaboration Goes MainstreamThe Jamstack is built on a Git workflow — an approach that scales really well to larger development teams. But going forward, we’ll start to see how these traditionally developer-focused tools will expand to involve everyone across the company: developers, sure, but also writers, editors, designers, and SEO experts. When you think of collaboration, you tend to think of synchronous edits—the multiple cursors that fly around a Google Doc, for example. We are seeing that style of live collaboration come to CMS tools like Sanity and design tools like Figma. But so much work often happens asynchronously, and non-developers traditionally haven’t enjoyed the powerful tools that developers use to seamlessly branch, stage, and merge changes with collaborative discussion attached to each pull request. Early on in the Jamstack, some clever git-based CMS tools emerged to help non-developers manage content like code — perhaps without even knowing that each change they made was being git-committed just like a developer working from the terminal. We’re now starting to see new tools tackle visual page edits in a way that remains compatible with popular Jamstack site generators like Gatsby and Next.js. All of this lowers the bar to collaboration for non-developers and we’ll only see that trend accelerate. And it’s not just non-developers joining in on the collaboration: deep integrations between tools are bringing more automated contributions into our dev, build, and deploy workflows. Just browse the comment history on a GitHub pull request to see how many tools are now integrated to run automated tests and catch errors before they are deployed. Updates to Netlify’s docs, for example, aren’t just linted against our code standards, they are also linted against our content standards, ensuring we stay consistent with our style guide for vocabulary, language, and phrasing. Teams can also now easily tie performance budgets and SEO standards to each deployment, again with alerts and logs tied directly to GitHub issues. I would expect to see those sorts of integrations explode in the coming year, allowing a git-based workflow to underpin not just code changes, but also content, data, design assets — you name it. Friendly interfaces into these Git workflows will allow more contributors to comment, commit, and collaborate and bring developer productivity tooling further into the mainstream. Enabling Scale And Dynamic Use CasesWhile Jamstack stays true to the core concepts of decoupling the frontend from the backend and maintaining immutable and atomic deploys, new build strategies and compute primitives have the potential to unlock extremely large-scale sites and dynamic, real-time web applications. Jamstack developers — and now entire web teams, marketers, and product managers — have much to look forward to in this space. Further Reading And References“How The COVID Tracking Project Scaled From 0 To 2M API Requests In 3 Months,” Netlify, Netlify Blog“Incremental Static Regeneration: Its Benefits And Its Flaws,” Cassidy Williams, Netlify Blog“Distributed Persistent Rendering: A New Jamstack Approach For Faster Builds,” Matt Biilmann, Netlify BlogGlossary, Jamstack.org (vf, il)

[browsingcopy]

Altogether Somewhere: On Growing Roots Amidst Shifting Sands and Moving Landscapes

A response to Charles Lim’s SEA STATE

I come from Singapore, a country plagued with “a history of amnesia,” in the words of poet Alfian Sa’at. One of our national day songs written by Dick Lee titled “Home” contains the line: “I will always recall the city, know every street and shore.” It is odd to sing this knowing that “every street and shore” is constantly shifting—the sounds of construction are pervasive, highways are ever-widening and the sea is constantly being reclaimed.

An oft-told narrative is one of Singapore’s growth from a third-world fishing village to a first-world smart nation within the span of 50 years. A lesser-known story is one of how our total land area has grown from 578 square kilometres in 1819 to 719 square kilometres today. The fact that 25% of our country’s land mass is reclaimed may have astounded German, French and Italian visitors to Charles Lim’s SEA STATE pavilion at the Venice Biennale. But they may be less of a surprise to our neighbours in Cambodia, Indonesia and Vietnam, whose sands we draw upon in dredges. Where there were fishing villages on stilts on the sea, now stand ports, airports, luxury hotels and casinos, built with sand imported both legally and illegally through smuggling and deals with corrupt officials. Riverbanks collapse, estuaries erode, mangrove wildlife and coastal livelihoods are lost. Yet, the drawing and redrawing of our coastline and skyline continually defer their political and ethical implications on both regional and national levels.

I only became more conscious of these realities when I encountered and engaged with the various phases of SEA STATE through sitting with the work, listening to its lulling siren-like voice, digesting the catalogue and attempting to grasp the rich curatorial and artistic research underpinning the decade-long project over the course of breakfast and dinner conversations with Charles and curator Shabbir Hussein Mustafa. Growing up in Singapore, I was always surrounded by rapid modernisation, the loss of significant cultural and heritage sites, and the strange resurrection of demolished buildings like the National Theatre and old National Library in the form of giant floats paraded at the annual Chingay parade, prolonging a nostalgia that no longer exists in present memory. I find it jarring to imagine a similar fate for architectural landmarks such as Golden Mile Complex and Tower—spaces that are significant and familiar to me, where I’ve built connections and friendships over Thai food and open-air rooftops.

Architect Tan Cheng Siong behind the iconic horseshoe-shaped Pearl Bank apartments recalled what it was like during the early days of Singapore’s post-independence urbanisation: “It was an interesting challenge for young people like us. I can remember thinking ‘very good, we are a free people now.’ But at the start, we were so badly informed and had nothing to hang on to. The neighbours, the community, the streets and the shops all these things were lost in some of the early apartments, but young people like me were rushing to fulfil our ambitions. Our parents were the ones that felt lonely every now and then.” The curved corridors of Pearl Bank were designed as an antidote to this growing loneliness and social dislocation, with kitchens facing inwards to encourage people to invite neighbours in for chicken curry. The physical structures in Singapore barely stay long enough. Pearl Bank is slated to be demolished in 2019. Memories attached to old buildings often exist only as projections of the mind or are glimpsed as superimpositions on current, newer replacements. In Between Stations, writer Boey Kim Cheng laments the loss of old spaces in Singapore’s Central Business District: “But in my mind, both the Arcade and Change Alley form a continuum of light and shade, an interim one that is neither outside nor inside, blurring interior and exterior, time and space, past and present.”

In one edition of OH! Open House, I was standing amongst a group in the garden of somebody’s house in Potong Pasir when ceramic artist Michelle Lim reflected as she shaped mud: “Nowhere is sacred, nowhere is permanent. Nowhere where you can build your stories over and over again.” OH! tells alternative stories of Singapore through art by working with artists to create site-specific works in unconventional locations such as strangers’ homes and under-utilised public spaces. I lived in Potong Pasir when it was under the stronghold of the opposition party. Residents of ground-floor HDB flats took great care in nurturing small gardens—trellises, patios, benches and swings spilled over onto public land. In the years that followed the change in hands during the 2011 General Elections, Potong Pasir’s landscape was no longer stuck in the 1980s and quickly evolved. Sidewalks were built, barricades erected, covered walkways constructed, bridges repainted, roads tarred, street lamps installed and lifts upgraded. For the first time, an NTUC FairPrice supermarket sprouted and POSB bank opened a branch. In describing her former hometown, Lim commented, “It’s changed so much that I wouldn’t even know if I’ve arrived.”

My father grew up in this neighbourhood and often went jogging through the quiet, hilly terrain of tombstones in Bidadari. He knew the dimly-lit streets well enough to walk home with his eyes closed. When my great grandmother passed away at the age of 93, we moved into her house. Like my father, I grew to develop my own memories of this neighbourhood. I learnt that several notable persons from Christian, Muslim, Hindu and Sinhalese communities were interred at Bidadari cemetery. The graves have since been exhumed, slopes flattened, trees uprooted, making way for Housing Development Board (HDB) flats in what is touted as “the new Bishan,” a bustling district which also occupies a plot of land built on a former cemetery. Bidadari, or “angel of paradise” in Malay, is derived from the Sanskrit word “widyadari,” an angelic being in Hindu mythology. It used to house kampong villages, the Japanese-style garden and lake Alkaff Gardens, and the istana or palace of Zubaidah binti Abdullah (née Cecilia Catharina Lange), the Danish second wife of Sultan Abu Bakar of Johor. Later in the OH! tour, as we were traversing through the former Bidadari cemetery at sunset, I smiled to myself when our guide warned us: “Be careful there are a lot of roots.”

How do we begin to unpeel the layers of our histories and uncover the rhizomic roots? Not too long ago Singapore separated from Malaysia, but between the tears and pregnant pauses, it remains to this day an issue that is still not fully talked about. To quote Josephine Chia, author of Kampong Spirit Gotong Royang: Life in Potong Pasir from 1955 to 1965, “The separation from Malaya was traumatic and no one really talks about this. But we had uncles and aunties and cousins who lived across the highway... I’m Peranakan so I had relatives in Penang and Melaka. And suddenly, you couldn’t be friends anymore.” This history is further complicated by the fact that most immigrants are divorced from Java, Sarawak, Yemen, Fujian, Guangdong, Hainan, Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, Punjab and other places where their ancestors came from.

Separations and traumas on a national scale often have large repercussions on the individual. In talking to a friend from Bayreuth, he described how even today, his parents only go on family holidays in West Germany and avoid the East at all costs. Even though it has been 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the invisible wall lingers on in their minds. Differences in powers, ideologies, religions and races have resulted in crimes against humanity and acts of violence inflicted upon oppressed communities. Although Germany has recognised its role in the Holocaust, it is still coming to terms with the genocide in Namibia. Turkey continually refuses to recognise the Armenian genocide. Malaysia has only just begun a public inquiry into the mass graves of Rohingyas. While underlying traumas exist, they are often buried deep within our national consciousnesses. Yet, we feel their reverberations every day. We are at once connected yet isolated from our past, present and each other.

We all have an innate need for security and belonging. French philosopher Simone Weil once wrote that “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.” The idea of home may be associated with a permanent residence. However, the reality is landscapes, cultures, lifestyles, populations, borders and national identities sometimes change faster than we can acclimatise. Political systems can disappear overnight. The only method to counteract against collective feelings of uprooting is our individual attempts at rooting, even if they are temporal. I recall our first 12 days in Venice, working almost non-stop from the moment we wake to the moment we sleep. In my journal, I wrote “SEA STATE submerges us in this endless underwater continuum that lingers even as we lie flat in bed. We call it the vaporetto effect, the feeling that you're bobbing on a platform floating on the sea, waiting for a boat to come.” For awhile, that felt like home, truly.

[creativitytoexplore]

The Konigsberg Affair by David W Landrum https://ift.tt/34GKli0 In Nazi Germany, a US diplomat discovers a clandestine smuggling operation, and must make a difficult choice; by David W Landrum.

My secretary told me the meeting with Golper was on and that he was waiting for me at a small restaurant seven miles away. Since it was urgent, I left at once. I stuck the reports of the incident that involved him into a diplomatic case, headed to the garage, and threw the satchel into the sidecar of my BMW R75 motorcycle. I am the only US diplomat who lives in this part of the German state of Prussia. We have a Consulate in Konigsberg, but there are enough Americans in the local settlements and surrounding countryside to warrant having a representative for them so they did not have to go all the way to K-Town when they needed something or got into a scrape. I pulled out on the road that led to the largest town in the area. To my left, the Baltic, grey and choppy, spread north toward Scandinavia and the Arctic. Gulls screeched. The road was clear that morning. I turned the throttle open and felt the cold, raw morning air buffet my face. I liked riding in weather like this. Sometimes after a long ride on a blustery day my face felt like the top layer of skin had been sandpapered off, but the pain was worth the thrill of riding fast, of wind, mist, and rain on my skin - and of nothing ahead but the air and the road. My R75 ran like a dream. The Germans know how to build machines. For a little while, I could forget my job as a diplomat. Americans over here got in trouble. They had affairs with German wives, young boys, underage girls; they got drunk and in fights in bars; they swindled people and took advantage of the local populace. Then they ran (sometimes literally) to the house where I lived and worked to ask for help - or for refuge. Sometimes I felt like a priest who, through years of sitting in the confession booth, knows the pathetic or shocking sins of the people in his parish. I knew the sins of my countrymen - and countrywomen. Though I could shove these sordid episodes into a compartment in my mind, they always were there to emerge and mess with my gut. The outlines of the small city where I was to meet Golper appeared. I saw the old church tower and the roofs of the buildings around the city square. People were out shopping, visiting, transacting business. On the courthouse a Nazi banner flapped in the sea breeze. I slowed to a halt, parked my motorcycle at the address the ambassador had given me, climbed off, and headed for the gasthöff where Golper had agreed to meet with me. I went in and saw him sitting at a table, a stein of beer in front of him. His three bodyguards - I assumed they were this - sat at a table near the front door. Two local citizens sat and played dominoes at a table a little further off. Golper looked up and gave me a crooked smile. "Welcome, Mr. Popper." I sat down, looked over at his bodyguards and back at him. "You guys are causing me woe," I said. "We're sorry, of course. I guess I should have been a good little boy and let those bastards beat the hell out of me like they did to the Kaltenborn family, Samuel Bossard, Harold Dahlquist and Roland Velz." He had recited the names of American citizens assaulted by German paramilitary the past few months. Meacham Golper had lived here several years. He came from New York and had grown up in the ethnic sprawl of the Big Apple. From a German-speaking home, he fit right into this area of Europe. He spoke Deutsch so well the Germans could not believe he was not a native. He also spoke fluent Polish - besides English and Yiddish and Russian. His polyglot abilities landed him in international business. He managed a highly profitable shipping firm in Konigsberg, though he lived out in the country in a palace built by the Teutonic knights. Of late, he had landed in a conflict with the government. Government - it would be more accurate to say he got in a conflict with the thugs and criminals running in packs across Germany now that Hitler and Röhm had come to power. The brownshirts loped through the streets of German cities like gangs looking for people to intimidate. They had frightened most of the population of Berlin, Cologne, Munich and Frankfurt, into submission. Konigsberg too. Every now and then a contingent of them showed up in our small city. They strutted around flying Nazi banners and singing patriotic songs. Everyone knew to give the arm-extending Hitler salute when the passed by. Foreigners who did not do so, and German citizens who were not aware of the new requirement, were roughed up. Golper caused a row by turning the tables on the brownshirts one afternoon. Out for a stroll, he turned a corner and came upon a parade of maybe twenty Sturmabteilung marching down the main street of town. Five of them in the rear beat drums and played trumpets and fifes. Two in front carried Nazi standards - the now-familiar red banner with a white circle and black swastika in the center. The town folk, most of who were politically conservative and did not like the Nazis, knew enough to cheer and stick their arms up. Some even said, "Sieg heil," or "Heil Hitler." Golper knew what was expected but stood with his hands in his pockets and watched the troupe go by. The reaction came immediately. The two commanders of the brownshirt unit broke ranks and strode over to where he stood. They demanded he give the salute. "I'm an American," he answered in his flawless, unaccented German. "Since I am not a citizen of your country, I am not compelled to salute the symbol of your ruling party. I only salute my own nation's flag." They stood, fulminating. Legally, he was right. Still, they were piqued and wanted to have the last word. This is where the trouble started. "Maybe so," one of them said. "But people who observe that you do not salute the symbol of our Fatherland might get the wrong idea. They don't know you are an American. They might suppose you are a disloyal German - or a Communist or a Jew." "I am not a Communist," Golper said, "but I am a Jew." The younger of the two, I was told by a couple of eye-witnesses, turned beet red and, in a spasm of rage, drew back his arm to strike Golper. He never delivered the blow. In a split second, one of Golper's bodyguards knocked him cold. The other brownshirt leader, who was older, stared a moment, stunned, roared out his anger, and lunged at Golper. Another KO put him down on the cobblestones. The parade had stopped and the brownshirts gaped at what had just befallen their leaders. Most of them were just kids - members of the Jungenbond, a sort of perverted version of the Boy Scouts the Nazis had come up with. They stared and, seeing Golper's tall, Aryan-looking bodyguards eyeing them, turned tail and ran. Now I had to undo the damage at the diplomatic level. "We need to talk about it," I said. "Beer always helps," he answered. He ordered me one. Golper had red hair and the kind of ruddy face that went along with having red hair. I would put his age at a little over forty. I knew from my file that he had fought with distinction in World War I. He had built his shipping business up from nothing. Today he was worth millions. The waitress brought a stein over. The Germans drink their beer at room temperature. "I do miss a good cold one," Golper said, reading my expression. "A toast." I raised my glass indicating that he could propose it. "To the Sturmabteilung - bad health and short life." He said this in German. I scanned the room, afraid someone had heard us. The two men up front did not look up from their game of dominoes. The waitress had walked back to the bar and was washing glasses. "I see they have you on edge too." "It might be best to accommodate them." "Popper, I would rather shovel shit than show deference to those goddamned thugs. Shoveling shit is an honest living, so it would be preferable to accommodating the stormtroopers, as they call themselves - which is also a travesty. I fought against General Hutier's stormtroopers in France during the War, and I respected them. They were tough. These paltry bastards wouldn't have lasted two days in one of his units." I looked over at the three men sitting at the table on the other side of the room. "So who are your bodyguards?" I asked. "Would you like to meet them?" We got up and went over to see them. They rose as we approached. Ironically, the men looked like they could have been members of the Sturmabteilung. Tall, blond, they had the bearing of soldiers. They were trim, fit, and muscular. "Gentlemen, let me introduce you to my friend. This is Shimen Lapid, Eli Shalit, and Michael Hartman. Gentlemen, may I present to you the representative of the United States government for this district, Solomon Popper." "Joel," I said. This rankled me. I go by my middle name, Joel, not by my given name of Solomon. That bastard Golper knew I was a Jew and meant to make a point of it. The way I was raised, I feel as out of place in a synagogue as a snake-handler from Kentucky would feel in an Episcopal Church. Except for having a little better food on the Sabbath and my sisters getting married under a canopy, there was nothing to distinguish me from any other New Yorker. When questionnaires had a set of choices for "Religious Preferences," I always checked "Other." Of the three men, two were American and one Russian. I found out, in our short conversation, that all of them were Zionist settlers from British Palestine. A report circulated to the Consulate suggested Golper had a connection with the endeavor of settling Jews in that territory, though we had no more information on it. Their presence suggested the connection was more significant than the embassy imagined. The men, polite but taciturn, settled back to their beer. Golper and I returned to our table. "I didn't know you had a connection with the Palestinian project," I told him when we were seated and sipping our beer once more. "I have a connection, yes. I'm even helping your friend and mistress Anoushka get there. She and her family will be safe when the Nazi tyranny fully engulfs this land." I had broken up with Anoushka three months ago. Golper seemed to have his own private intelligence-gathering agency and a thick file on me. "Anything else you would like to tell me about myself that I don't know?" He laughed. "I don't normally get mixed up in local politics, especially with a bunch of overgrown boys who like to play soldier and think wearing a swastika arm band makes them one. But this time I couldn't put up with the insults." "I'll grant as much, but what you did will only provoke more harassment." "Like what happened to those Americans in Berlin? Is our government going to stand by and let those gangsters abuse us like they've been doing lately?" "We've filed protests over all of those incidents. Of course, your bodyguards complicated things." "Were they supposed to just stand by and let the krauts beat me up so you could lodge a protest?" "We're doing all we can, Mr. Golper, to protect our citizens over here. You called the brownshirts a gang, and your characterization is accurate. They are a gang and they act like a gang. They'll want to avenge the members of their band of thugs that you hurt. They're mobilizing the ST units from Konigsberg, Zinten, and Insterburg to converge on our city for a rally that could easily turn violent. You might be targeted." "Can't you protect the Americans in this region?" "We'll try our best. But picking fights with the brownshirts is not a good strategy for creating a peaceful environment." "I won't gainsay that. I'll try to be more careful." He looked around and lowered his voice. "And, by the way, Mina sends her greetings." Up to now he had failed to get a rise out of me. This jab hit home. I sat silent a long moment and then spoke. "You must spend a lot more time over in Palestine than I realized." "I've got to go now. Come to my place tonight at six. Dinner. I'll explain it all to you. You might find it an interesting conversation." He drained his beer and left me sitting there. His three bodyguards followed him out the door. When I got back on my bike, I opened it up all the way. The motorcycle shot along the road at top speed. I felt the vibration of the engine shake my body and the wind batter my frame, chilling me to the bone. Back at my residence I told my valet I did not want to be disturbed, poured a whisky, and down in a chair. I gazed out the window at the grey sky and the slate-colored water of the Baltic Sea. Though the water was rough, five cargo ships went by as I sat there and drank. All of them might have belonged to Golper. He knew something about Mina Lavington, who, since she had settled in Palestine, went by the name of Chava Zurer. Mina was my first lover. Golper knew how to throw good punches. I never imagined he could reach into my life to pluck a string that would resonate so painfully. I knew her in school. We went to a rough school, and as a Jewish girl she took a lot of crap from people. She got it from teachers as well as students. Mina was smart and sharp - athletic too. She did gymnastics and played on the girls' softball team. Our families were friends. She graduated in the top ten of our class. I think she might have been valedictorian if some of her teachers had not graded her so hard because she was a Jew. We hung out. I got my first kiss from her. And, one night, after we went to see the Dodgers play, she asked me to come to her family's apartment. I was so naïve I focused my mind on how to make a good impression on her family. When we got there, the place was deserted. It was the first time for both of us, I remembered our clumsiness, her hymeneal blood, my over-eagerness, but I also remember how sweet it was. She and I were lovers from our junior year. We might have walked the old familiar road of marriage and kids but that she went away for a summer to work on a farm - she called it a kibbutz - in the Jewish area of Palestine. She left in May and returned in August. I registered amazement when I saw her. Of course, there was the tan, but she looked taller and stronger. She seemed more confident. Talking with her, I found out she had become an ardent Zionist. This rattled me. Mina had never been political. A lot of kids in my school had picked up on the Marxist ideas going around, but Mina never paid much attention to any sort of ideology. When she came back from Palestine, though, she had brought the notions of the Zionist movement hook, line, and sinker. I wondered if maybe she had found a new guy over in the Promised Land. If she had, it did not end what she and I had shared. Three days after we were back, and at her bidding, we rented a room and spent the night. She felt so different in my arms I could hardly believe it was the same woman. We made love at dusk and then at night and again at three am. We sneaked out before the sun came up and constructed alibis about where we had been. Her increased strength seemed to have increased her desire, which was fine with me. She talked a lot about Palestine, the Jewish people, and Zionism. I listened to her stories. Her eyes lit up as she talked about the increasing number of Jews settling in the British colony; of how they were draining the swamps and transforming the country from a fen to a place of productive farms where everyone owned a share and lived as equals. "We work hard. We do strength training. We've got to be strong to defend ourselves. So I've done calisthenics, weight work-outs, hiking and running." "Who do you have to defend yourself against?" "Bandits. Arab militants. They attack us sometimes. I think you would like it there, Joel. You could train some guys there to box." Inspired by Barney Ross, Max Baer and other champion Jewish fighters, I had trained at boxing clubs since I was in high school. "You should come over with me next summer." As it turned out, I did not go with her. I finished a second whisky and went to clean up and change. Dinners at Golper's place were usually fancy affairs. I didn't ride my motorcycle. The US government knows that good-quality vehicles are necessary to create a classy impression of their diplomatic corps and had blessed me with a Cord 812 Phaeton - a car that dazzled the Germans to no end. I drove through the deepening darkness and arrived at Golper's place. The windows were brightly lit. Stars gleamed over the turrets of the old castle. I had expected something like a gala, but only my vehicle occupied the circular driveway. I parked. A valet came to escort me inside. Golper, dressed elegantly for dinner, greeted me. Standing not far from him was Mina. I had not seen her in eight years. In high school, she was just a girl - a beautiful, strong, mature girl to be sure, but not quite an adult. Now I saw her in the fullness of her womanhood. She wore her hair long. She still possessed the strength that I had noticed the first year she came back from Palestine, but looked comfortable with it, whereas that first year she had seemed awkward with it. Now, settled into herself, she wore her strength and her full maturity with confidence. I admired, just for a second, the light brown hair, green eyes, symmetrical face that was square and beautifully featured, eyes, straight nose, a small, slightly bowed mouth, her strong shoulders and full breasts mounted atop a slender waist and long legs. She wore a simple blue blouse and a black skirt that came to the middle of her knees. I had to remind myself not to stare. In a flash my mind remembered her in her beautiful white nakedness: the slope of her arms and shoulders, her breasts with dark nipples above her flat stomach and powerful rib cage, the strong thighs and swath of dark brown hair that thatched her opening. Her firm knees and ankles gave uplift to the top part of her body. I thought of the gasping way she made love, of how she had educated me into the mysteries of sexuality, and of what a marvelous teacher she had been. It seemed like a dream now. She stepped forward. "Hello, Joel. It so good to see you again." She took hold of my shoulders and gave me a kiss. The kiss generated even more specificity of memory. "Wonderful to see you, Mina. You're more beautiful than ever." "I like to think I'm better looking than when I was a gawky eighteen-year-old girl." "Gawky you never were." Golper, who had been watching all this with benign amusement, gestured toward the dining room. "Shall we eat?" He escorted us to the next room. A long table occupied the center. Two young women in black maid's livery stood nearby. Broad windows on the north side looked out on the Baltic. Stars pulsated white and blue and reflected in the expanse of water. Lights of ships moving across the sea-lanes added their artificial glow to the night. The servers brought in salad to begin the meal. I felt too anxious to talk to Mina - like when I was fifteen and too nervous to talk to girls I liked. She looked over at me and smiled. I remembered her smile in her bedroom when her parents were away, the lights of the City filtering in, the shadows on her body accentuating her curves and lines. "I hear some good things about you, Joel," she said. "I'm surprised anyone in Palestine hears about me." "Quite the opposite. Your journalism is popular. Your article on the anti-Semitism in the State Department circulated all over the protectorate." "That was a stupid thing to do and I'm still wondering why I did it. It made me lots of enemies in Washington. I'll probably never go very far in the foreign service because of it." "Why would you want to work for people like that?" "Only a few people in the State Department are biased. I hoped calling attention to it would change that. I think I can do some good by staying in and calling attention to what's wrong on Capitol Hill." "Admirable. It's a lonely post you have." She hardly knew how lonely it was. "Sometimes," I replied. "And you, Mina - I haven't heard much of what you're doing these days." "I live on a communal settlement. We work together - mostly farming. We've started a couple of business ventures as well. I'm also trained as a soldier. We have to fight to defend ourselves." I had already noticed how strong she looked. Even through her dress made out of thick material I could see her strength. As we ate, she gave me a detailed description of her life in a Jewish enclave in Palestine. "We call a collective farm a kibbutz. It's Hebrew. It means 'clump' or 'gathering.' We're learning to speak the language of the ancient Israelites." "Speak it? For everyday conversations? You're using the sacred tongue to talk about how much manure to spread on the cabbage patch?" "Why not? King David did. The settlers who come to our farm and the adjoining area speak Russian, German, Yiddish, Polish, Lithuanian, English... you name it. Rather than trying to accommodate one language, we're just going to start new - going back to our roots." "I'm impressed." "You should be," Golper commented. "And maybe you should be over there yourself." Golper had no doubt done research on me and knew my lack of religious fervor. "I think I can do more good by serving in the US Diplomatic Corps - at least for right now." "We're in agreement on that," Golper said. We had just finished dessert and wine. The serving women would bring us coffee soon, but I could see that the words my host had just spoken were a cue. He had brought me here to ask something of me. Now I would find out what it was. Mina was in on it. The request would undoubtedly relate to the current situation in Palestine. "Do you know much about what's going on in Palestine?" Golper asked. "Only what's been in the news. The settlers and the Arabs are fighting." "The British are worried that the Arabs will support the Germans when war breaks out - and it will break out pretty soon. They have restricted Jewish immigration and will continue to do so." I began to get annoyed. "Look, why don't you just tell me up front what's going on and why you brought me here?" Golper looked over at Mina and then back at me. "I think I can safely tell you, Popper. I'm in the resettlement business. I use my ships to take Jews who emigrate from Russia and the Baltic nations and ferry them to Palestine - Ertz Israel it will eventually be. Now that the British are clamping down, limiting the number of settlers we can bring, we have to do this clandestinely. We also run guns so the settlements can defend themselves." "You didn't invite me over to tell me this." "Do you remember Marion Warner?" he asked. I knew Marion from school. He had been a gung-ho advocate of the Zionist project to settle Jews in Palestine. I liked him because, like me, being a Jew was more of a cultural thing. Unlike me, being Jewish in the secular sense did matter a lot to him. I especially remembered him because he had taken me up in an airplane. He had money, had learned to fly, and owned a DH 60 Cirrus Moth. One sunny afternoon he and I flew the two-seater out to sea. I remembered the exhilaration of flying and the sense of freedom it gave. Marion eventually served four years in the Army Air Corps and then, like Mina, emigrated to Palestine. "I remember him. How does he fit into this?" "He flies for us," Golper said. "For us?" "Mina and I are involved in the immigration project - to get our people to Palestine before war breaks out and Europe shuts down." I glanced out at the Baltic. So that was it. "Your ships from Konigsberg aren't carrying what's on the cargo manifesto?" "They carry what I list. It's just that, below decks, they have a few hundred people we're smuggling into the land." "And how does Warner fit into this?" "He flies missions for us. The Nazis caught him." "Caught him?" "He had some engine trouble and had to land in a field not far from here. The brownshirts captured him. He had a Russian - a military leader we want to get to Israel; the Russians want to keep him for when the Germans attack. The brownshirts are holding them both. He also has some documents on him we don't want them to see." "Why are they holding him?' "They're suspicious. You know how these people work. They have no legal reason to hold him, but they think they are above the law. He's an American citizen. They're holding him illegally." "The consulate in Konigsberg has a lot more clout that I do. Why don't you call them?" "We don't want the Consulate to know about our operation." "Why not?" "A lot of people in Washington are not far from being brownshirts themselves. And there are a whole knot of bankers who are afraid if we antagonize the Nazis they might default on the debts Germany owes us. If they find out we're running an unauthorized operation taking thousands of German Jews out of the country, they'll shut us down." "So you think I'm a loyalist?" "I think you might become one. I know you're not keen on your heritage. Let's be frank and lay our cards on the table. We need your help and you are on our side whether you want to be or not. We know you can trust us because of that." Silence fell - a very tense silence. For a moment I wondered if Golper had brought Mina along to offer to me as a reward if I agreed to the mission, but I dismissed the idea. Still, I thought I would ask. "How does Miss Zurer fit into this?" "I fit in because we used to be in love and because I know our people matter to you." "I've never been religious." "Neither have I. What we're doing is building a homeland. It will be for the religious, yes. But also for people like you and me. Can you help us out?" I looked at her. God, what a beautiful woman, I thought. She and Golper waited for me to reply. "If I agree," I said, "what Mina's role in the deal?" "She will accompany you when you go to arrange for Marion's release. He knows you, of course, but would think you are simply coming because you're the embassy contact in this part of the country. She will be the signal to him that you're okay and that he is to cooperate. And she also will keep you safe." I looked at him and over at her. They were dead serious, though Mina's eyes were soft. I liked to think I saw a spark of the old-time feeling there. The silence had grown too tense. "All right," I said. "I'll see if I can get them to free him." "I think you can, Joel," Golper said. "I hope I'm not overstepping the bounds of propriety by calling you that." "We can be on a first-name basis. Your first name is Meacham, but you've always gone by Melvin." He smiled. "I wouldn't think you could find something like that out." "We have a file on you." Afterward, we went to the parlor. Golper lit up a cigar. I had never smoked. Apparently Mina didn't either. We had some good brandy - too good. After a couple of hours and several glasses of the stuff, Golper stretched in his chair. "You'll never make it home, Popper. You're soused. I don't want you to get in an accident. You can stay here." I might have objected but when I got up out of my chair I almost fell over. I nodded as he chuckled. Mina maintained an austere silence. Golper led me to a room. I settled into a comfortable bed and fell asleep at once. A noise woke me early in the morning and opened my eyes the sky pre-dawn grey over the sea. More noise. I rolled over to see Mina standing just past the door to my room. She wore a simple white cotton nightgown. She smiled at my startled expression. "Nothing has changed, Joel," she said. She pulled the nightgown off. Without any ado or fanfare, she got in bed with me. The grogginess and headache from drinking too much last night miraculously disappeared. She lay down beside me. I gripped and pushed into her. The ripple of strength that came down her back into her hips then into the muscles around her velvety opening sent shocks of pleasure through me. I thanked my lucky stars (couldn't thank God, since I didn't figure he would approve of this) that I had continued to train as a boxer and that my strength was at least equal to hers. I worked out at a local boxing club and sparred with Germans who were into fisticuffs. Mina bucked like a colt, twisted her hips, locked her legs around mine, bit me, swore and cursed in English, Polish, and what I assumed was Hebrew. We went off at the same time. Afterwards, it took me a couple of minutes to get my breath and orient myself. I realized we had not used protection. We lay side by side. I wanted to talk to her, but there are times when silence is the proper utterance. After what must have been ten minutes, she spoke. "I love you." I tried not to laugh and the effort brought a twisted grin to my face. "I can hardly believe that, Mina." "Why?" "You've forged a new life for yourself - without me." "Who says I was without you? A person can live in another person's heart and mind." "You're not in love with one of your fellow kibbutzniks?" "I won't say I haven't had my flings - but they're different - ideological and manipulative. The kibbutz men are like most converts - not to Judaism but to Zionist ideology. They are too zealous and too sure they're absolutely right and the rest of world is wrong. They scorn anyone who compromises what they believe is orthodoxy." I did not reply. A long silence passed then she spoke. "I hope you don't think I slept with you to get you to go on our mission. You can banish that thinking from your mind. I'm not that much of a slut." "You were never a slut." A long silence, then she said, "Come with me to Palestine." "Who's the convert now?" "Not me. I'm not urging you to become a convert to anything. In fact, I want you there so I don't become a convert." "It would be hard to leave what I have." "What do you have, Joel?" "A job I like. The chance at a career." "You shot your career in the foot when you wrote those articles. Those rich goyim don't forget. They won't forget that you called attention to what they don't want anybody to know." She was probably right. I regretted writing those opinion pieces. I had already felt a chill from the higher ups in Berlin (except for Ambassador Dodd, but he was an exceptional man). "Let's get on the other side of this little undertaking. Then we'll talk about the future." I felt a twinge of shame as I looked at her, the curve of her breasts, the beauty of her light hair falling over her shoulders. "You're the most beautiful woman in the world," I said. A sad look crossed her face. "All I hear back home is that I'm a good comrade; or a fine, strong woman who could give birth to a whole platoon of healthy Jewish settlers - like I was breeding stock - a cow or a healthy filly. I get sick of it." "I can't imagine how any man would think of you that way." "They do," she said curtly. She went off to clean up. I lay back and enjoyed the feeling. It had been a while. Occasionally I made it with a woman from the expatriate community - Anoushka Blacoviac being my most frequent lady friend. When she was not able to arrange to be around much, a trusted German associate discretely arranged for me to rendezvous with various whores. It had been a long time since I had slept with a woman I loved - it had, in fact, been the last time I was with Mina. I came down to breakfast. Golper greeted me with a grin that was not supposed to be knowing, but he could not disguise his glee. Mina sat at the table and ate a grapefruit. She had put on a sensible business suit. She would pose as my secretary. As we ate, he gave me the details. The brownshirts had detained Warner and the man he was flying out of Russia. They had not officially arrested him. They did not have authority to make arrests and were afraid they had overstepped their jurisdiction and might get in trouble. Rudolf Diels, the head of the German secret police, was not overly friendly toward the brownshirts. But they suspected Warner of wrongdoing, even of espionage. I needed to get there before they made definite plans. If the Nazi party in Berlin decided to question Warner, he might reveal vital information about the smuggling operation. And, worse, they would recognize the Russian, whose name was Mosin. He was a man the Germans would love to get out of circulation so their troops would never have to fight him. Mina and I headed off in the Cord. The weather had turned cold. The sun and clouds fought for dominance of the sky. A cold, stiff wind blew off the sea. The brownshirts had located their headquarters in an old farmhouse maybe twelve miles from Konigsberg. Swastika banners festooned it. Scores of vehicles circled the place. Armed guards stood near the doors. I saw additional guards had posted farther out from the house. They raised their rifles when we approached, though we had called to tell them we were coming. I slowed. The guards demanded I identify myself and when I did they pointed us to a parking slot. We climbed out of the car and were escorted inside the old, spacious house that had served as residence for a big farming family. It was warm inside. The brownshirts had stoked a fire in the fireplace. Two swastika flags covered the walls. It seemed these people had to have one of those everywhere they went. Guards stood on either side of the desk where their commander sat. He identified himself as Jergen Eibeling - about thirty years old with short blond hair and Nordic face. Like many young Nazis, he looked trim and fit. I wondered if he would give the Nazi salute and expect me to return it. He did not. He got right to the point. "Mr. Council, we are not convinced by your explanation of Mr. Warner's activities." "He is an American citizen, Captain Eibeling. As far as I know, he has committed no crime. He had permission to fly from the Soviet Union into Germany." "And bring a Russian with him?" "He is authorized to carry passengers. The passenger had a valid passport and the necessary paperwork to authorize entrance into the country. Again, no crime was committed." (Mosin's paperwork, Golper had told me, was forged.) He had nowhere to go. He might waste my time and his through obfuscation, but it looked like he did not intend to do so. "We will release him. Your American compatriots, like Mr. Golper, seem to like to make trouble for us. Of course, we would expect as much of Jews." I did not reply. I wondered if he knew I was a Jew - or Mina. Probably not. He would have no way of knowing. The German shuffled a sheaf of paper and then tapped them on the desktop to get them straight. "Take him and the other one too." "The embassy will contact you about the recovery of his aircraft." In a moment they had brought Warren and Mosin in. They looked weary but unharmed. Warren recognized me, though he apparently thought I had just come as a representative of the US government. I gave him a look and he communicated that he would not greet me or seem familiar. It might complicate the procedure if the local commander knew we were friends. And I could also tell he recognized Mina and knew we were working for his spy cell. The four of us went out into the cold, clear day. We got Mosin and Warren into the Cord. Just as Mina was crossing in front of the Cord to get in one the passenger side, a hubbub broke out. I heard shouting and, worse, footsteps of running jackboots and the clatter of arms. Someone shouted, "It's Mosin, it's Mosin!" I turned. Mina ran around to the front of the car. Two brownshirts with rifles rushed toward us. One closed in from the other side. Someone had identified the Russian. They did not intend to let him get away. As I stood there, paralyzed with fear, not certain what to do, shots rang out. The two Germans coming at me fell to the pavement only a foot away, their bright blood spurting out, staining the cobblestones, and smoking in the chilly air. A shot sounded behind me. I turned. Mina stood over the prostrate body of a stormtrooper. She had shot him with a pistol. She looked up. "Let's get out of here." I broke from my lethargy. More shots sounded. Brownshirts swarmed out of the building but were brought down by rifle and machinegun fire coming from a copse of trees fifty yards beyond their headquarters. I caught a glimpse of Lapid, Shalit, and Hartman. They were our back-up. They had taken down the first two Germans and now were engaging the group of them that had surged from their headquarters building. I sped around to the driver's door. As I did, Mina turned to get into the car. I saw three stormtroopers round the corner of the building. They were only thirty feet away. Instinct for protection kicked in. I dove, picked up one of the rifles from the fallen guards, leveled it, and fired just as they were drawing a bead on Mina. The bullet glanced off the rifle the brownshirt in the middle had aimed. I think (I was never certain) its velocity knocked the weapon out of the center guard's hands and ricocheted, hitting the one to his left. The one in the center fell, knocking the third guard over. I fired at them as they tried to get up. If they got a shot off, they could hit Mina or me. They could puncture the tires or the engine or gas tank on my Cord. I'm not a good shot, but I hit all three of them, threw down the rifle, and dove into the front seat. (I later found out I had wounded all them severely, but they did recover, fought through and survived the war.) Gunfire rang as I screeched out of the compound and on to the road. I immediately got off the main highway and and on to the rural routes and backroads I knew from riding my motorcycle. Fortunately, the Phaeton was a fast car and we rapidly put distance between us and the Germans. When we were a safely away from the compound, I turned to Mina. "So," I said. She looked at me. Those eyes. "So?" "So this was a set-up?" Warren and Mosin began to converse quietly in the back seat, speaking Russian. "Not like you think. We knew things might not go as planned. We had a back-up course of action." "So Golper's bodyguards were in place and armed, and you had a gun?" "Yes. And we have a plan to get you out of Germany." Realization struck. This incident that would cost me my job and my freedom. Diplomats do not shoot nationals of the country where they are posted. The fallout would be intense. I would be hung out to dry. I would probably spend the rest of my life, or the best part of it, at Sing-Sing or Alcatraz with Al Capone and Baby-Face Nelson. "We've arranged for you to get on a ship and come to Israel." I looked at her. I stared so long I almost ran off the road. "We? Who are 'we'?" "Mr. Golper and his associates." I gripped the steering wheel. Mina leaned toward me. "We didn't want this to happen, Joel," she said, trying to express her sincerity through tone of voice. "But we knew it could happen. We had plans if it did." "Plans that mean exiting the life I've lived up to now?" "What life, Joel? You've never married. From what Meacham tells me, you don't have many friends. After those articles you wrote, your career will go nowhere. Those high-ups in Washington who hated your exposé of their attitudes toward us will delight to see you tarred and feathered and sent to prison." I said nothing. By now our two passengers had quieted down and were listening to our conversation. She went on. "That's not because you couldn't have all of those things I mentioned that you don't have. You had them with me. I had them with you. Since we went our separate ways, neither of us has much of anything in life." She paused. "They'll to block the roads. Can you find Niederwerrenstrausser?" "It's about a mile up ahead." "We'll ditch the car there. Someone will pick us up and take us to the ship." "To take me to Palestine?" "It's your choice. You can stay here and face the music if you want to." The full impact of what I had done began to register even more clearly. The mission to free Warren was unauthorized. I had allied myself with a clandestine organization. In my role as a representative of the United States Foreign Service, I had shot and possibly killed three representatives of the new German government - a government with whom our relations were tense. Mina had nailed it. I had interfered with the arrest of two figures the Germans considered criminals opposed to their government. I was a dead duck. We turned on Niederwerrenstrausser. A mile down the road I saw Golper and his three bodyguards (who had emerged from the gunfight unscathed). We all got out of the car. I wanted to slug Golper but restrained myself. He had me by the balls. My life depended on his good will. He knew it too. He grinned. "You'll like Palestine, Popper," he said. "We've got everything set up. You'll go there with Mina." I looked over at her. Her beauty brought a little comfort in the grimness of the whole thing. I had no choice, but at least I would be with her. It would be like old times, though I would never have wanted it to happen like this. "I'll see to it that you get your car. We've already stolen your motorcycle and packed it on a freighter - and your clothes and personal belongings. I think we got most everything you own. If you'll trust me with your access number, I'll transfer all your money to a Swiss bank before they freeze your assets." He would know I owned no property. Looking out to the sea, I saw a ship sitting at anchor. Two men were speeding from it in a motorboat. They would get us on the ship and take us to Palestine. No choice and no way out. I nodded. Mina came over and took my hand. We stood by the grey, choppy waters of the Baltic and watched as the boat slowed down and drew to shore.

[homedetective]

Home Inspections Kill Deals

Four Reasons Why Home Inspections Kill Deals:

A buyer may cancel a transaction after a home inspection! It may be tempting to blame overzealous a home inspector when a transaction falls apart after the inspection of some houses. But there’s more to that situation than meets the eye. Estate professionals know there are many ways that deals can fall apart, from credit, financing, appraisals to plain cold feet. But certainly, one of the more common deal killers is the home inspection. But it doesn’t have to be! Houses and Home Inspectors Do Not Kill Deals Four home inspection situations lead to a cancelled transaction. Two things are not on this list are the house and the home inspector. Some estate agents blame the home or the home inspector. However, let’s consider what happens in these situations. Problems are caused when the home inspection report significantly alters the buyer’s expectations about what they thought they were buying. The client may say, “Gee, I thought I was buying a well-maintained home, but now that we have looked closely, I see the house requires a lot more than we expected”. Therefore, the cancellation has everything to do with the client’s expectations coming into the inspection. Agents may wish that the home inspector had been less forthcoming about the condition of the house. The solution to this problem is buyers having more realistic expectations before they sign the contract. My website and blog attempt to teach people skills that will help them look at houses and evaluate risk so they are more prepared to make an offer on the right house. Here are the top four reasons buyers cancel a deal after the inspection. 1) Unprepared buyers There are no classes in university or high school to teach people how houses work or where the risk lies in a residential building. Even professional estate agents have little or no training to help them understand how to look at houses and identify issues. A new generation of homebuyers, many of whom who did not grow up working on their houses with their parents, compounds this problem. 2) Unrealistic expectations Adding another layer of complexity to modern homebuying is the degree of sophistication and the change residential housing has undergone. Most buyers now expect a level of luxury and comfort in a house that buyers could scarcely have imagined fifty years ago. Today, buyers are buying more expensive and more complex homes, yet do not fully understand how they are built or how they work. Furthermore, with an explosion in internet marketing, buyers have less and less time for decision-making. A huge increase in the number of buyers requires quick action with offers, increasing the chance for buyer remorse. 3) Improved reporting Moreover, the consequence of the growth in technology has resulted in the sophistication of home inspections as well. Over the past 15 years, computer-generated reports, digital cameras, and other new tools have led to rapid innovation in inspection methods and reporting. Today, upon hiring a quality home inspector, a buyer can expect to receive a 30- to 60-page report with dozens of colour photos, detailed diagrams, and links to additional information. The result is those homebuyers who have home inspections, have access to more information about the home they are purchasing than ever before. 4) Unprepared sellers Home sellers should prepare for the likelihood of a home inspection in advance. Don't underestimate the importance of making a good impression. Don't make the mistake of thinking all inspectors see past stuff. Furthermore, if the seller’s house is ready for a home inspection, this helps to prevent delays and can prevent surprises. Obvious omissions in the seller’s disclosure can cause a deal to fall through. The question arises ”what else is not listed" when the seller is not completely truthful. Often buyers will accompany the home inspectors during the inspection. Buyers feel uncomfortable asking questions if the seller is present. Therefore, the seller should not accompany the inspector and buyer! It leaves the impression that the seller has something to hide! If the swimming pool is dirty or when the water, electricity and gas are not connected, that part of the inspection may be deferred. When doors are locked and remotes are missing and there are no keys in the doors, this can result in components are not being checked. Deferred portions of the inspection noted in inspection reports create suspicion. The right house at the right price The main reason that deals fall apart after a home inspection is that the findings significantly change what the homebuyers thought they were buying. Many make the mistake of blaming the home inspector or the house. However, all houses have problems, but every house is the right house for the right person at the right price. I’ve inspected houses that would be costlier to fix than they were worth. I have inspected houses on properties worth less than the property itself. However, the buyers wanted to renovate them anyway, because they were in love with the place. If an inspection on a teardown can go well, then really any inspection should be able to be successful. Bad houses are extremely rare, even though unrealistic expectations on the part of buyers or sellers can make them seem like they are common. To my surprise, buyers sometimes read my inspection reports and comment something like, “Oh, you think that house is a bad house". I do not judge houses. All I do is document the condition of the properties! This enables clients to buy them at what they believe is the right price. It is unrealistic expectations that I don’t like. Home Inspectors don’t kill deals! The charge that home inspectors are killing deals is not true. I believe that the real estate industry could do more to prepare agents to teach buyers and sellers an informed way to look at the “bones” of houses. There are not any requirements for new real estate agents to learn anything about houses to get a real estate license. I believe that should change. All houses pose some level of risk! There are skills that both buyers and agents can learn to evaluate that risk and make appropriate offers. A more transparent approach could help buyers and sellers have more realistic expectations. This could save everyone a lot of time and money, resulting in happier clients and better referrals. Also a lot less talk about home inspections killing deals.  I hope this sets the record straight! Read the full article