Dragon's Teeth

by Sinclair, Upton;

The upshot was that Magda Goebbels declared the proposed show a worthy cultural enterprise. She said that the Führer had very decided tastes in art, he despised the eccentric modern stuff which was a symptom of pluto-democratic Jewish decadence. Lanny said he had understood that this was the case and it was one of his reasons for coming to Berlin. The work of Detaze was simple, like most great art; it was clean and noble in spirit. He would be happy to take specimens of it to show to the Führer in advance, and the Frau Reichsminister said that possibly this might be arranged. He offered to leave the paintings and photographs for the Herr Reichsminister to inspect, and the offer was accepted. He took his departure feeling hopeful that Marcel Detaze might become a popular painter among the Germans. He wondered, had Marcel heard about the Nazis in the spirit land, and what would he make of them? Lanny would have liked to go at once to consult Madame Diseuse—but who could guess what his irreverent ex-stepfather might blurt out in the séance room!

  XI

  Lanny’s second duty was to get in touch with Oberleutnant Furtwaengler and invite him and his wife to dinner. He explained that it was his wish to show the paintings to Seine Exzellenz, the Herr Minister-Präsident General Göring. Such was now the title—for the newspapers had just made known that the Reichspräsident Feldmarschall von Hindenburg had been pleased to make the Minister-Präsident into a General of the Reichswehr. The Oberleutnant confirmed the news and showed pride in the vicarious honor; it had been somewhat awkward having his chief a mere Hauptmann while in command of several generals of the Prussian Polizei.

  Lanny said he was sure that Seine Exzellenz must be a lover of art; he assumed that the new furnishings in the official residence—that great black table and the gold velvet curtains—must represent Seine Exzellenz’s taste. The staff officer admitted that this was so, and promised to mention Detaze to the great man. Lanny said that during the past three months he had been in London, Paris, New York, Cannes, and Vienna; the young Nazi, who had never been outside of Germany, was impressed in spite of himself, and wanted to know what the outside world was saying about the Führer and his achievements. Lanny said he was afraid they were not getting a very fair picture; apparently the National Socialist representatives abroad were not serving their cause too efficiently. He told of things he had heard, from various persons having important titles and positions; also of efforts he had made to explain and justify—the latter being in reality things that he had heard Lord Wickthorpe say. Lanny added that he had some suggestions which he would be glad to make to Seine Exzellenz if this busy man could spare the time to hear them. The young staff officer replied that he was sure this would be the case.

  Not once did Lanny mention the name of Robin. He wanted to see if the Oberleutnant would bring it up; for that would give him an idea whether Göring had taken the staff officer into his confidence. Near the end of the evening, while Irma was off practicing her German on the tall and rather gawky country lady who was the Frau Oberleutnant, the officer said: “By the way, Herr Budd, did you ever hear any more from your young Jewish friend?”

  “Not a word, Herr Oberleutnant.”

  “That is certainly a strange thing.”

  “I had been hoping for some results from the inquiries which you were kind enough to say you would carry on.”

  “I have done all that I could think of, Herr Budd, but with no results.”

  “It was my idea that in the confusion of last spring, various groups had been acting more or less independently, and the records might be imperfect.”

  “I assure you we don’t do things that way in Germany, Herr Budd. In the office of the Geheime Staats-Polizei is a complete card-file covering every case of any person who is under arrest for any offense or under any charge of even the remotest political nature. I don’t suppose that your friend could have been arrested, say for drunk driving.”

  “He does not drink and he does not drive, Herr Oberleutnant. He plays delicately and graciously upon the clarinet, and is a devoted student of your classics. If you should give him the beginning of any quotation from Goethe he would complete it and tell you in what work it was to be found.”

  “It is really too bad, Herr Budd. If there is anything you can suggest to me—”

  “It has occurred to me that the young man might be in some place of confinement outside of Prussia, and so might not appear in your police card-file. Suppose, for example, that he was in Dachau?”

  Lanny was watching his dinner companion closely; but if the officer smelled the rat, he was a skillful actor. “Your friend could not be in Dachau,” he declared, “unless he were a Bavarian. Being a Berliner, he would be in Oranienburg or some other place near by. However, if you wish, I will cause an inquiry to be made through the Reichsregierung, and see if anything can be turned up.”

  “That is most kind of you,” declared Lanny. “It is more than I should have ventured to ask in a time when you and your associates have your hands so full. Permit me to mention that while the young man’s name is actually Freddi, some official may have assumed it to be Friedrich, or they might have listed him as Fritz. Also it is conceivable that some one may have set him down as Rabinowitz, the name which his father bore in the city of Lodz.”

  The staff officer took out his notebook and duly set down these items. “I will promise to do my best, Herr Budd,” he declared.

  “Perhaps it will be better if you do not trouble Seine Exzellenz with this matter,” added the visitor. “I know that he must be the busiest man in the world, and I do not want him to think that I have come to Berlin to annoy him with my personal problems.”

  Said the staff officer: “He is one of those great men who know how to delegate authority and not let himself be burdened with details. He has time for social life, and I am sure he will be interested to hear what you have to report from the outside world.”

  Said the undercover diplomat: “I got some reactions of the British Foreign Office to Seine Exzellenz’s speech in Geneva. Lord Wickthorpe was really quite stunned by it. You know how it is, the British have been used to having their own way of late years—perhaps much too easily, Herr Leutnant. I doubt if it is going to be so easy for them in future!”

  22

  Still Get Money, Boy!

  I

  It was Lanny’s hope that as soon as his arrival was announced in the papers he would receive some sort of communication from whoever had taken the trouble to write that Freddi was in Dachau. He was careful in his newspaper interviews to declare himself a non-political person, hoping that some of his former acquaintances among the Social-Democrats would take the hint. But the days passed, and no letter or telephone call was received. Lanny had got from Rahel a list of Freddi’s former comrades; most of them would probably be under arrest, or in hiding, “sleeping out,” as it was called, never two nights in the same place. Before trying to meet any of them, it seemed wiser for Lanny to try out his Nazi contacts. It would be difficult to combine the two sorts of connections.

  He went to call on Heinrich Jung, who burst into his customary excited account of his activities. He had recently come back from the Parteitag in Nürnberg; the most marvelous of all Parteitage—it had been five days instead of one, and every one of the hundred and twenty hours had been a new climax, a fresh revelation of das Wunder, die Schönheit, der Sieg hidden in the soul of National Socialism. “Honestly, Lanny, the most cynical persons were moved to tears by what they saw there!” Lanny couldn’t summon any tears, but he was able to bring smiles to his lips and perhaps a glow to his cheeks.

  “Do you know Nürnberg?” asked Heinrich. Lanny had visited that old city, with a moat around it and houses having innumerable sharp gables, crowded into narrow streets which seldom ran straight for two successive blocks. An unpromising place for the convention of a great political party, but the Nazis had chosen it because of its historic associations, the memories of the old Germany they meant to bring back to life. Practical difficulties were merely a challenge to their powers of organization; th
ey would show the world how to take care of a million visitors to a city whose population was less than half that. Suburbs of tents had been erected on the outskirts, and the Stormtroopers and Hitler Youth had slept on straw, six hundred to each great tent, two blankets to each person. There had been rows of field kitchens with aluminum spouts from which had poured endless streams of goulash or coffee. Heinrich declared that sixty thousand Hitler Youth had been fed in half an hour—three half-hours per day for five days!

  These were specially selected youth, who had labored diligently all year to earn this reward. They had been brought by special trains and by trucks, and had marched in with their bands, shaking the air with songs and the great Zeppelin Meadow with the tramp of boots. For five days and most of five nights they had shouted and sung themselves hoarse, making up in their fervor for all the other forty-four political parties which they had wiped out of existence in Germany. Only one party now, one law, one faith, one baptism! A temporary hall had been built, accommodating a small part of the hundred and sixty thousand official delegates; the others listened to loud-speakers all over the fields, and that served just as well, because there didn’t have to be any voting. Everything was settled by the Führer, and the million others had only to hear the speeches and shout their approval.

  Heinrich, now a high official in the Hitler Youth, had been among those admitted to the opening ceremonies. He lacked language to describe the wonders, he had to wave his arms and raise his voice. The frenzied acclaim when the Führer marched in to the strains of the Badenweiler Marsch—did Lanny know it? Yes, Lanny did, but Heinrich hummed a few bars even so. After Hitler had reached the platform the standards were borne in, the flags consecrated by being touched with the Blood Flag, which had been borne in the Munich civil struggle. Heinrich, telling about it, was like a good Catholic witnessing the sacred mystery of the Host. He told how Ernst Röhm had called the roll of those eighteen martyrs, and of all the two or three hundred others who had died during the party’s long struggle for power. Muffled drums beat softly, and at the end the S.A. Chief of Staff declared: “Sie marschieren mit uns im Geist, in unseren Reihen.”

  Five days of speechmaking and cheering, marching and singing by a million of the most active and capable men in Germany, nearly all of them young. Heinrich said: “If you had seen it, Lanny, you would know that our movement has won, and that the Fatherland is going to be what we make it.”

  “I had a long talk with Kurt,” said Lanny. “He convinced me that you and he have been right.” The young official was so delighted that he clasped his friend’s hand and wrung it. Another Hitler victory. Sieg Heil!

  II

  Most of Irma’s fashionable acquaintances had not yet returned to the city, so she employed her spare time accustoming her ears to the German language. She struck up an acquaintance with the hotel’s manicurist, a natural blonde improved by art, sophisticated as her profession required, but underneath it naïve, as all Germans seemed to Irma. An heiress’s idea of how to acquire knowledge was to hire somebody to put it painlessly into her mind; and who could be a more agreeable injector than a young woman who had held the hands of assorted millionaires and celebrities from all parts of the world, chattering to them and encouraging them to chatter back? Fräulein Elsa Borg was delighted to sell her spare hours to Frau Budd, geborene Barnes, and to teach her the most gossipy and idiomatic Berlinese. Irma practiced laboriously those coughing and sneezing sounds which Tecumseh had found too barbarous. To her husband she said: “Really the craziest way to put words together! I will the blue bag with the white trimmings to the hotel room immediately bring let. I will the eggs without the shells to be broken have. It makes me feel all the time as if children were making it up.”

  But no one could question the right of Germans by the children their sentences to be shaped let, and Irma was determined to speak properly if at all; never would she consent to sound to anybody the way Mama Robin sounded to her. So she and the manicurist talked for hours about the events of the day, and when Irma mentioned the Parteitag, Elsa said yes, her beloved Schatz had been there. This “treasure” was the block leader for his neighborhood and an ardent party worker, so he had received a badge and transportation and a permit to leave his work, also his straw and two blankets and goulash and coffee—all free. Irma put many questions, and ascertained what the duties of a block leader were, and how he had a subordinate in every apartment building, and received immediate reports of any new person who appeared in it, and of any whose actions were suspicious, or who failed to contribute to the various party funds, the Büchsen, and so on. All this would be of interest to Lanny, who might use a block leader, perhaps to give him information so that he could outwit some other block leader in an emergency.

  Elsa’s “treasure” afforded an opportunity to check on the claims of Heinrich and to test the efficiency of the Nazi machine. One of a hundred clerks in a great insurance office, Elsa’s Karl worked for wretched wages, and if it had not been for his “little treasure” would have had to live in a lodging-house room. Yet he was marching on air because of his pride in the party and its achievements. He worked nights and Sundays at a variety of voluntary tasks, and had never received a penny of compensation—unless you counted the various party festivals, and the fact that the party had power to force his employers to grant him a week’s holiday to attend the Parteitag. Both he and Elsa swelled with pride over this power, and a word of approval from his party superior would keep Karl happy for months. He thought of the Führer as close to God, and was proud of having been within a few feet of him, even though he had not seen him. The “treasure” had been one of many thousands of Brownshirts who had been lined up on the street in Nürnberg through which the Führer made his triumphal entrance. It had been Karl’s duty to hold the crowds back, and he had faced the crowds, keeping watch lest some fanatic should attempt to harm the holy one.

  Elsa told how Karl had seen the Minister-Präsident General Göring riding in an open car with a magnificent green sash across his brown party uniform. He had heard the solemn words of Rudolf Hess, Deputy of the Führer: “I open the Congress of Victory!” He had heard Hitler’s own proud announcement: “We shall meet here a year from now, we shall meet here ten years from now, and a hundred, and even a thousand!” And Reichsminister Goebbels’s excoriation of the foreign Jews, the busy vilifiers of the Fatherland. “Not one hair of any Jewish head was disturbed without reason,” Frau Magda’s husband had declared. When Irma told Lanny about this, he thought of poor Freddi’s hairs and hoped it might be true. He wondered if this orgy of party fervor had been paid for out of the funds which Johannes Robin had furnished. Doubtless that had been “reason” enough for disturbing the hairs of Johannes’s head!

  III

  Lanny took Hugo Behr for a drive, that being the only way they could talk freely. Lanny didn’t say: “Did you write me that letter?” No, he was learning the spy business, and letting the other fellow do the talking.

  Right away the sports director opened up. “I’m terribly embarrassed not to have been of any use to you, Lanny.”

  “You haven’t been able to learn anything?”

  “I would have written if I had. I paid out more than half the money to persons who agreed to make inquiries in the prisons in Berlin, and also in Oranienburg and Sonnenburg and Spandau. They all reported there was no such prisoner. I can’t be sure if they did what they promised, but I believe they did. I want to return the rest of the money.”

  “Nonsense,” replied the other. “You gave your time and thought and that is all I asked. Do you suppose there is any chance that Freddi might be in some camp outside of Prussia?”

  “There would have to be some special reason for it.”

  “Well, somebody might have expected me to be making this inquiry. Suppose they had removed him to Dachau, would you have any way of finding out?”

  “I have friends in Munich, but I would have to go there and talk to them. I couldn’t write.”

 
; “Of course not. Do you suppose you could get leave to go?”

  “I might be able to think up some party matter.”

  “I would be very glad to pay your expenses, and another thousand marks for your trouble. Everything that I told you about the case applies even more now. The longer Freddi is missing, the more unhappy the father grows, and the more pressure on me to do something. If the Detaze show should prove a success in Berlin, I may take it to Munich; meantime, if you could get the information, I could be making plans.”

  “Have you any reason to think about Dachau, especially?”

  “I’ll tell you frankly. It may sound foolish, but during the World War I had an English friend who was a flyer in France, and I was at my father’s home in Connecticut, and just at dawn I was awakened by a strange feeling and saw my friend standing at the foot of the bed, a shadowy figure with a gash across his forehead. It turned out that this was just after the man had crashed and was lying wounded in a field.”

  “One hears such stories,” commented the other, “but one never knows whether to believe them.”

  “Naturally, I believed this. I’ve never had another such experience until the other night. I was awakened, I don’t know how, and lying in the dark I distinctly heard a voice saying: ‘Freddi is in Dachau.’ I waited a long time, thinking he might appear, or that I might hear more, but nothing happened. I had no reason to think of Dachau-it seems a very unlikely place—so naturally I am interested to follow it up and see if I am what they call ‘psychic.’”

  Hugo agreed that he, too, would be interested; his interest increased when Lanny slipped several hundred-mark notes into his pocket, saying, with a laugh: “My mother and stepfather have paid much more than this to spiritualist mediums to see if they could get any news of our friend.”