“I do not have the advantage of possessing an air fleet, Exzellenz.” Lanny had heard that Göring possessed a sense of humor.
“Sometimes I learn about them by telephone the night before,” explained the other, with a smile. “They carry a story to the effect that the Jewish moneylender, Johannes Robin, has disappeared in Germany. We do not care to have the outside world get the impression that we are adopting American customs, so I had the matter investigated at once, and have just informed the press that this Schieber has been legally arrested for attempting to carry a large sum of money out of the country on board his yacht. This, as you may know, is forbidden by our law.”
“I am sorry to hear that news, Exzellenz.”
“The prisoner is liable to a penalty of ten years at hard labor—and it will be very hard indeed, I can assure you.”
“Naturally, Exzellenz, I cannot say anything about the matter until I have heard Johannes’s side of the story. He has always been a law-abiding citizen, and I am sure that if he broke the law it was by oversight. He was setting out on a yachting cruise, and one cannot sail to strange lands without having cash on board to purchase food and fuel.”
“It is absolutely requisite to have a permit from the Exchange Control Authority, and our records show that no such document had been issued. The law has been on the books for more than a year, and has been well advertised. We cannot afford to have our country drained of wealth, nor our currency depreciated on the world markets. At the present time, owing to the scoundrelism of the Marxist-Jews who have ruled Germany, our gold reserve is down to eight and one-half per cent, and the very life of our state is imperiled by the activities of these Schieberschweine. I would consider myself justified in proceeding against Johannes Robin for high treason, and may decide to do so.”
“Naturally, Exzellenz, I am distressed to hear all this. Is it your intention to grant me the privilege of an interview with the prisoner?”
“There is something even more important than the protection of the Reich’s currency and that is the protection of its good name. We are indignant concerning the slanders which have been broadcast by the enemies of our Regierung, and we intend to take all possible steps against these devils.”
“So far as Johannes is concerned, Exzellenz, I can assure you positively that he has no such motives. He is an entirely non-political person, and has gone to extremes to keep friendly. He has always supposed that he had friends inside the N.S.D.A.P.”
“I am taking steps to find out who they are,” replied the head of the Prussian state. “When I do, I shall shoot them.”
It was, in a way, as if he had shot Lanny. From behind those rolls of fat the American saw cold blue eyes staring at him, and he realized that this war-eagle was a deadly bird of prey.
“Let us get down to business, Mr. Budd. I am willing to negotiate with you, but I require your word of honor as a gentleman that whatever information I impart and whatever proposals I make will be strictly between us, now and for the future. That means exactly what it says, and the reason I am seeing you is that I have been told that you are a man who will keep his bargain.”
“I do not know who has spoken that good word for me, Exzellenz, but I assure you that I have no desire in this matter except to help an old friend and connection by marriage out of the trouble into which he has stumbled. If you will enable me to do this, you may be sure that neither Johannes nor I will have any interest in making publicity out of the unfortunate affair.”
“It happens that this matter was started by other persons, but now I have taken charge of it. Whatever you have heard to the contrary you are to disregard. Johannes Robin is my prisoner, and I am willing to turn him loose on certain terms. They are Nazi terms, and you won’t like them, and certainly he won’t. You may take them to him, and advise him to accept them or not. I put no pressure upon you, and make only the condition I have specified: the matter will be under the seal of confidence. You will agree never to reveal the facts to anyone, and Johannes will make the same agreement.”
“Suppose that Johannes does not wish to accept your terms, Exzellenz?”
“You will be bound by your pledge whether he accepts or rejects. He will be bound if he accepts. If he rejects, it won’t matter, because he will never speak to anyone again.”
“That is clear enough, so far as regards him. But I don’t understand why you have brought me in.”
“You are in Berlin, and you know about the case. I am offering you an opportunity to save your friend from the worst fate which you or he can imagine. A part of the price is your silence as well as his. If you reject the offer, you will be free to go out to the world and say what you please, but you will be condemning your Jew to a death which I will make as painful as possible.”
“That is clear enough, Exzellenz. It is obvious that you have me as well as Johannes. I can do nothing but accept your proposition.”
V
Lanny knew that this man of Blut und Eisen was engaged in turning the government of Germany upside down. He was kicking out officials of all sorts, police chiefs, mayors, even professors and teachers, and replacing them with fanatical Nazis. This very day, the papers reported, the lower legislative chamber of the Prussian state was scheduled to meet and tender its collective resignation, so that Göring might replace them with his party followers. But with all this on his hands he had time to explain to a young American visitor that he, the head of the Prussian state, was not to be numbered among the anti-Jewish fanatics; his quarrel with them was the purely practical one, that they had swarmed upon the helpless body of postwar Germany to drain her white. They had been speculators in marks who had profited by the most dreadful national calamity of modern times. “You can look at our school children, Mr. Budd, and have no difficulty in picking out those who were born in the years from 1919 to 1923, because of their stunted size.”
Lanny would have liked to say that he knew many Germans who had sold marks; but it would have been the worst of blunders to get into an argument. He listened politely while the head of the Prussian government employed barrack-room phrases, some of which an American esthete had never heard before.
Suddenly the heavy fat fist of the thunder-god Thor came down with a bang on the table. “Jawohl! To business! The Jew who has fattened himself upon our blood is going to disgorge. His yacht shall serve as a means of recreation for deserving party members. His palace shall become a public museum. I understand that it contains a well-chosen collection of old masters.”
“I appreciate the compliment, Exzellenz. Or do you know that I had the pleasure of selecting them?”
“Ach, so!’ Shall I call it the Lanning Budd Museum?” The hard blue eyes twinkled between the heavy layers of fat.
“The museum should be named for the one who institutes it, Exzellenz. Johannes has often told me that he planned to leave it to the public. But now you are doing it.”
“I intend to go about these matters with all proper formality,” said Göring, still with the twinkle. “Our Führer is a stickler for legality. The papers will be prepared by our Staatsanwalt, and the Schieber will sign them before a notary. For the sum of one mark his yacht, for another his palace, and for yet other marks his shares in our leading industrial enterprises and banks. In payment for my services in the above matters, he will give me checks for the amount of his bank deposits—and be sure that I shall cash them before he gets away.”
“You intend to leave him nothing, Exzellenz?”
“Each business transaction shall be for the sum of one mark, and those marks will be his inalienable personal property. For the rest—naked came he into Germany, and naked will he go out.”
“Pardon me if I correct you, sir. I happen to know that Johannes was a rich man when he came into Germany. He and my father had been business associates for several years, so I know pretty well what he had.”
“He made his money trading with the German government, I am informed.”
“In part, yes. He sold t
hings which the government was glad to have in wartime; magnetos which you doubtless used in the planes in which you performed such astounding feats of gallantry.”
“You are a shrewd young man, Mr. Budd, and after this deal is over, you and I may be good friends and perhaps do a profitable business. But for the moment you are the devil’s advocate, predestined to lose your case. I could never understand why our magnetos so often failed at the critical moment, but now I know that they were sold to us by filthy Jewish swine who probably sabotaged them so that we would have to buy more.” The great man said this with a broad grin; he was a large and powerful cat playing with a lively but entirely helpless mouse. On the rug in front of his chair lay a half-grown lion-cub, which yawned and then licked his chops as he watched his master preparing for a kill. Lanny thought: “I am back among the Assyrians!”
VI
The visitor had the feeling that he ought to put up some sort of fight for his friend’s fortune, but he couldn’t figure out how to set about it. He had never met a man like this in all his life, and he was completely intimidated—not for himself, but for Johannes. Your money or your life!
“Exzellenz,” he ventured, “aren’t you being a trifle harsh on one unfortunate individual? There are many non-Jewish Schieber; and there are rich Jews in Germany who have so far managed to escape your displeasure.”
“The Schweine have been careful not to break our laws. But this one has broken the eleventh commandment—he has been caught. Man muss sich nicht kriegen lassen! And moreover, we have use for his money.”
Lanny was thinking: “It isn’t as bad as it might be, because so much of Johannes’s money is abroad.” He decided not to risk a fight, but said: “I will transmit your message.”
The head of the Prussian government continued: “I observe that you avoid mentioning the money which this Schieber has already shipped out and hidden in other countries. If you know the history of Europe you know that every now and then some monarch in need of funds would send one of the richest of his Hebrews to a dungeon and have him tortured until he revealed the hiding-places of his gold and jewels.”
“I have read history, Exzellenz.”
“Fortunately nothing of the sort will be needed here. We have all this scoundrel’s bank statements, deposit slips, and what not. We have photostat copies of documents he thought were safe from all eyes. We will present checks for him to sign, so that those funds may be turned over to me; when my agents have collected the last dollar and pound and franc, then your Jew relative will have become to me a piece of rotten pork of which I dislike the smell. I will be glad to have you cart him away.”
“And his family, Exzellenz?”
“They, too, will stink in our nostrils. We will take them to the border and give each of them a kick in the tail, to make certain they get across with no delay.”
Lanny wanted to say: “That will be agreeable to them”; but he was afraid it might sound like irony, so he just kept smiling. The great man did the same, for he enjoyed the exercise of power; he had been fighting all his life to get it, and had succeeded beyond anything he could have dared expect. His lion-cub yawned and stretched his legs. It was time to go hunting.
“Finally,” said Göring, “let me make plain what will happen to this Dreck-Jude if he ventures to defy my will. You know that German science has won high rank in the world. We have experts in every department of knowledge, and for years we have had them at work devising means of breaking the will of those who stand in our path. We know all about the human body, the human mind, and what you are pleased to call the human soul; we know how to handle each. We will put this pig-carcass in a specially constructed cell, of such size and shape that it will be impossible for him to stand or sit or lie without acute discomfort. A bright light will glare into his eyes day and night, and a guard will watch him and prod him if he falls asleep. The temperature of the cell will be at exactly the right degree of coldness, so that he will not die, but will become mentally a lump of putty in our hands. He will not be permitted to commit suicide. If he does not break quickly enough we will put camphor in his Harnröhre—you understand our medical terms?”
“I can guess, Exzellenz.”
“He will writhe and scream in pain all day and night. He will wish a million times to die, but he will not even have a mark on him. There are many other methods which I will not reveal to you, because they are our secrets, gained during the past thirteen years while we were supposed to be lying helpless, having the blood drained out of our veins by filthy, stinking Jewish-Bolshevik vampires. The German people are going to get free, Mr. Budd, and the money of these parasites will help us. Are there any other questions you wish to ask me?”
“I just want to be sure that I understand you correctly. If Johannes accepts your terms and signs the papers which you put before him, you will permit me to take him and his family out of Germany without further delay?”
“That is the bargain. You, for your part agree that neither you nor the Jew nor any member of his family will say anything to anybody about this interview, or about the terms of his leaving.”
“I understand, Exzellenz. I shall advise Johannes that in my opinion he has no alternative but to comply with your demands.”
“Tell him this, as my last word: if you, or he, or any member of his family breaks the agreement, I shall compile a list of a hundred of his Jewish relatives and friends, seize them all and make them pay the price for him. Is that clear?”
“Quite so.”
“My enemies in Germany are making the discovery that I am the master, and I break those who get in my way. When this affair has been settled and I have a little more leisure, come and see me again, and I will show you how you can make your fortune and have an amusing life.”
“Thank you, sir. As it happens, what I like to do is to play the works of Beethoven on the piano.”
“Come and play them for the Führer,” said the second in command, with a loud laugh which somewhat startled his visitor. Lanny wondered: Did the eagle-man take a patronizing attitude toward his Führer’s fondness for music? Was he perchance watching for the time when he could take control of affairs out of the hands of a sentimentalist and Schwärmer, an orator with a gift for rabble-rousing but no capacity to govern? Had the Minister-Präsident’s Gestapo reported to him that Lanny had once had tea with the Führer? Or that he had spent part of the previous evening in the Führer’s favorite haunt?
When Lanny rose to leave, the lion-cub stretched himself and growled. The great man remarked: “He is getting too big, and everybody but me is afraid of him.”
VII
Four days and nights had passed since Johannes Robin had been taken captive; and Lanny wondered how he was standing it. Had they been giving him a taste of those scientific tortures which they had evolved? Or had they left him to the crude barbarities of the S.A. and S.S. such as Lanny had read about in the Manchester Guardian and the Pink weeklies? He hadn’t thought it wise to ask the General, and he didn’t ask the young Schutzstaffel Oberleutnant who sat by his side on their way to visit the prisoner.
Furtwaengler talked about the wonderful scenes on the National Socialist First of May. His memories had not dimmed in eighteen days, nor would they in as many years, he said. He spoke with the same naïve enthusiasm as Heinrich Jung, and Lanny perceived that this was no accident of temperament, but another achievement of science. This young man was a product of the Nazi educational technique applied over a period of ten years. Lanny questioned him and learned that his father was a workingman, killed in the last fighting on the Somme—perhaps by a bullet from the rifle of Marcel Detaze. The orphan boy had been taken into a Hitler youth group at the age of fifteen, and had had military training in their camps and war experience in the street fighting of Moabit, Neuköln, Schöneberg, and other proletarian districts of Berlin. He was on his toes with eagerness to become a real officer, like those of the Reichswehr; the S.S. aspired to replace that army, considering such transfer of power
as part of the proletarian revolution. Oberleutnant Furtwaengler wanted to click his heels more sharply and salute more snappily than any regular army man; but at the same time he couldn’t help being a naïve workingclass youth, wondering whether he was making the right impression upon a foreigner who was obviously elegant, and must be a person of importance, or why should the Minister-Präsident of Prussia have spent half an hour with him on such a busy morning?
They were now being driven in an ordinary Hispano-Suiza, not a six-wheeled near-tank; but again they had a chauffeur in uniform and a guard. There were hundreds of such cars, of all makes, including Packards and Lincolns, parked in front of the Minister-Präsident’s official residence and other public buildings near by. Such were the perquisites of office; the reasons for seizing power and the means of keeping it. Leutnant Furtwaengler was going to have a new uniform, as well as new visiting cards; it was a great day in the morning for him, and his heart was high; he needed only a little encouragement to pour out his pride to an American who must be a party sympathizer—how could anyone fail to be? Lanny did his best to be agreeable, because he wanted friends at court.
Johannes had been taken out of the Nazi barracks, the so-called Friesen Kaserne, to the main police headquarters, the Polizeipräsidium; but he was still in charge of a special group of the S.S. It was like the Swiss Guard of the French kings, or the Janissaries of the Turkish sultans—strangers to the place, having a special duty and a special trust. Johannes represented a treasure of several tens of millions of marks—Lanny didn’t know how many, exactly. If he should take a notion to commit suicide, Minister-Präsident Göring would lose all chance of getting that portion of the treasure which had been stored abroad, nor could he get the part stored in Germany without violating his Führer’s “legality complex.”
VIII
Dragon's Teeth Page 41
