“How come you’re sure the two Huns are in Detroit?”

Carl and his dad were sitting in wicker chairs this evening-in shirtsleeves but wearing their felt hats-on the front porch of Virgil’s big California bungalow, the home situated in the midst of his thousand acres of pecan trees.

“What you want to ask,” Carl said, “is how I know they’re still in Detroit, five and a half months later.”

They were talking about Jurgen Schrenk mostly, a POW from the Afrika Korps, tank captain and one of Rommel’s recon officers. Finally, 165 days from the time Jurgen and the other one, Otto Penzler, the SS major, broke out of the Deep Fork prisoner-of-war camp-drove out in a panel truck, the two Krauts wearing suits of clothes made from German uniforms-Carl was free to get after them.

This day he drove the forty miles south, Tulsa to Okmulgee to visit his dad, was the seventh of April, 1945.

Carl and his dad were drinking Mexican beer supplied by the oil company-way better than the three-two local beer. It was part of the deal that let Texas Oil lease a half section of the property, the wells pumping most of forty years while Virgil tended his pecan trees and Carl, when he was still a boy, raised beef he’d take to market in Tulsa. Virgil’s home was a few miles from Okmulgee and across the Deep Fork stream from the POW camp.

“He’s still in Detroit,” Carl said, “ ’cause he hasn’t been caught, or we’d of heard. Jurgen’ll get by, he speaks American with barely an accent. You have to know what words to listen for. I told you he lived in Detroit when he was a kid? He can talk like a Yankee or sound like he’s from Oklahoma, either way.”

“I’d see him,” Virgil said, “the times he’d come with a work crew of prisoners. I swear they all looked like foreigners except Jurgen. I asked him one time was he thinking of setting fire to oil wells and storage tanks, see if he could perform acts of sabotage.”