Momentarily, von Streck left him alone in an enclave. Schmidt stood transfixed, enthralled at a thought. Von Streck was lighting many small fires in key strategic locations across the Reich. Suddenly that seemed as certain as the shining glass prothesis in his left eye-socket. A nervous smile fluttered on his lips.
The faces of the Dresslers flashed in his mind’s eye. Lilli’s face. It seemed an age since he’d been drawn into her doomed orbit. Now he had to put it behind him. No more slipping of notches! He had to pull himself up and out of that.
He turned, surveying the room. He’d entered the citadel! Gone into its iron heart. Had a convoluted journey begun the evening three years ago when they’d put out his eye? Or, had all of his life been an overture to this crusade? He felt he could quite properly use ‘crusade’. Or was it all absolutely due to chance? One thing he felt surely within himself: Dürer’s knight had ridden back into the mist, and his ruthless Teutonic ancestor, he of the treachery on the Vistula, had ridden out of it to his side.
‘I do not know myself, and God forbid that I should.’ — the immortal Goethe. Time for reflection was needed but wouldn’t be granted. It was on to the next thing. And clearly, the Fuehrer had much in store for the Third Reich.
Outside, Berlin brooded in the winter night. Beyond the voices in the room, the walls, he felt that. He told himself that Helga and Trudi would be safe in Dresden while he undertook the valuable work for which he had the ‘rare talent’. Their safety depended on a sharp and complete separation from him. The danger he’d been in at Wertheims was a pale shadow to that which he could now expect, deep in the heart of the anti-Nazi movement.
He felt a pang of sadness (time flees and he would miss his daughter’s childhood), but also a rare exhilaration. Of course, as one historian had recorded: ‘To be useful, to earn rewards, the trick is to survive.’ That was something Dietrich, and Otto, already mouldering in their unmarked graves, had failed to achieve.
~ * ~
Author’s Note
I
N THE EARLY 1930s, based on certain precepts of the Order of Teutonic Knights, the Nazis established so-called Order Castles as one of three types of school for the training of their élite. Only the most fanatical young National Socialists were selected for the Order Castles, one of which was established within the medieval walls of the Teutonic Knights’ castle at Marienburg in East Prussia.
In 1938 Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was head of the Intelligence Bureau of the German High Command. Colonel Hans Oster was his chief assistant. From the early days of the regime, both men were strong anti-Nazis and two of the key conspirators in a plot to get rid of Hitler in the prelude to the conquest of Czechoslovakia, and in other plots during the war.
The Eye of the Abyss - [Franz Schmidt 01] Page 28