Black Tulips

　　March 12, 2007 issue - A few years ago, just as her father was about to disappear into the fog of dementia（痴呆）, journalist Lucinda Franks stumbled upon a small box in a corner of his dilapidated（荒废的） apartment. The contents shocked her. Beneath some mysterious maps and crumpled1 foreign bank notes, she found a military cap embellished2 with the raised metal insignia（记号，标志） of an eagle, a skull3 and crossbones—and a swastika. Franks knew little about her father's military service during World War II, and had always sensed that he was hiding something. Now questions consumed her. "Was my sphinx-like father presenting one character and living another?" she writes in her new memoir4, "My Father's Secret War." "Whose side was he really on?" When she pressed for an explanation, her father refused to talk, citing a decades-old pledge of secrecy5.

　　But after years of detective work and long conversations with her ailing6 father, Franks eventually pieced together most of his story. Fluent in German, he was a spy and occasionally an assassin. The Nazi7 cap was part of his disguise as a member of the Waffen SS, worn the night he broke into a Gestapo headquarters and killed a guard while looking for files with the names of people wanted by the Nazis8. Near the end of his life, he finally tells Franks he kept the hat because of the "death's head" insignia: "I never wanted to forget who these German soldiers really were."