There should be a news broadcast on, he realized. Seating himself, he turned on the radio. Maybe the new Reichs Chancellor has been picked. He felt excitement and anticipation. To me, that Seyss-Inquart seems the most dynamic. The most likely to carry out bold programs.
I wish I was there, he thought. Possibly someday I’ll be well enough off to travel to Europe and see all that has been done. Shame to miss out. Stuck here on the West Coast, where nothing is happening. History is passing us by.
EIGHT
At eight o’clock in the morning Freiherr Hugo Reiss, the Reichs Consul in San Francisco, stepped from his Mercedes-Benz 220-E and walked briskly up the steps of the consulate. Behind him came two young male employees of the Foreign Office. The door had been unlocked by Reiss’ staff, and he passed inside, raising his hand in greeting to the two switchboard girls, the vice-Consul—Herr Frank, and then, in the inner office, Reiss’ secretary, Herr Pferdehuf.
“Freiherr,” Pferdehuf said, “there is a coded radiogram coming in just now from Berlin. Preface One.”
That meant removing his overcoat and giving it to Pferdehuf to hang up.
“Ten minutes ago Herr Kreuz vom Meere called. He would like you to return his call.”
“Thank you,” Reiss said. He seated himself at the small table by the window of his office, removed the cover from his breakfast, saw on the plate the roll, scrambled eggs and sausage, poured himself hot black coffee from the silver pot, then unrolled his morning newspaper.
The caller, Kreuz vom Meere, was the chief of the Sicherheitsdienst in the PSA area; his headquarters were located, under a cover name, at the air terminal. Relations between Reiss and Kreuz vom Meere were rather strained. Their jurisdiction overlapped in countless matters, a deliberate policy, no doubt, of the higher-ups in Berlin. Reiss held an honorary commission in the SS, the rank of major, and this made him technically Kreuz vom Meere’s subordinate. The commission had been bestowed several years ago, and at that time Reiss had discerned the purpose. But he could do nothing about it. Nonetheless, he chafed still.
The newspaper, flown in by Lufthansa and arriving at six in the morning, was the
Frankfurter Zeitung
. Reiss read the front page carefully. Von Schirach under house arrest, possibly dead by now. Too bad. Goring residing at a Luftwaffe training base, surrounded by experienced veterans of the war, all loyal to the Fat One. No one would slip up on him. No SD hatchetmen. And what about Doctor Goebbels?
Probably in the heart of Berlin. Depending as always on his own wit, his ability to talk his way out of anything. If Heydrich sends a squad to do him in, Reiss reflected, the Little Doctor will not only argue them out of it, he will probably persuade them to switch over. Make them employees of the Ministry for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment.
He could imagine Doctor Goebbels at this moment, in the apartment of some stunning movie actress, disdaining the Wehrmacht units bumping through the streets below. Nothing frightened that
Kerl
. Goebbels would smile his mocking smile…continue stroking the lovely lady’s bosom with his left hand, while writing his article for the day’s
Angriff
with—
Reiss’ thoughts were interrupted by his secretary’s knock. “I’m sorry. Kreuz vom Meere is on the line again.”
Rising, Reiss went to his desk and took the receiver. “Reiss here.”
The heavy Bavarian accents of the local SD chief. “Any word on the Abwehr character?”
Puzzled, Reiss tried to make out what Kreuz vom Meere was referring to. “Hmmm,” he murmured. “To my knowledge, there are three or four Abwehr ‘characters’ on the Pacific Coast at the moment.”
“The one traveling in by Lufthansa within the last week.”
“Oh,” Reiss said. Holding the receiver between his ear and shoulder, he took out his cigarette case. “He never came in here.”
“What’s he doing?”
“God, I don’t know. Ask Canaris.”
“I’d like you to call the Foreign Office and have them call the Chancery and have whoever’s on hand get hold of the Admiralty and demand that the Abwehr either take its people back out of here or give us an account of why they’re here.”
“Can’t you do that?”
“Everything’s in confusion.”
They’ve completely lost the Abwehr man, Reiss decided. They—the local SD—were told by someone on Heydrich’s staff to watch him, and they missed a connection. And now they want me to bail them out.
“If he comes in here,” Reiss said, “I’ll have somebody stay on him. You can rely on that.” Of course, there was little or no chance that the man would come in. And they both knew that.
“He undoubtedly uses a cover name,” Kreuz vom Meere plodded on. “We don’t know it, naturally. He’s an aristocratic-looking fellow. About forty. A captain. Actual name Rudolf Wegener. One of those old monarchist families from East Prussia. Probably supported von Papen in the Systemzeit.” Reiss made himself comfortable at his desk as Kreuz vom Meere droned away. “The only answer as I see it to these monarchist hangers-on is to cut the budget of the Navy so they can’t afford…”
Finally Reiss managed to get off the phone. When he returned to his breakfast he found the roll cold. The coffee however was still hot; he drank it and resumed reading the newspaper.
No end to it, he thought. Those SD people keep a shift on duty all night. Call you at three in the morning.
His secretary, Pferdehuf, stuck his head into the office, saw that he was off the phone, and said, “Sacramento called just now in great agitation. They claim there’s a Jew running around the streets of San Francisco.” Both he and Reiss laughed.
“All right,” Reiss said. “Tell them to calm down and send us the regular papers. Anything else?”
“You read the messages of condolence.”
“Are there more?”
“A few. I’ll keep them on my desk, if you want them. I’ve already sent out answers.”
“I have to address that meeting today,” Reiss said. “At one this afternoon. Those businessmen.”
“I won’t let you forget,” Pferdehuf said.
Reiss leaned back in his chair. “Care to make a bet?”
“Not on the Partei deliberations. If that’s what you mean.”
“It’ll be The Hangman.”
Lingering, Pferdehuf said, “Heydrich has gone as far as he can. Those people never pass over to direct Partei control because everyone is scared of them. The Partei bigwigs would have a fit even at the idea. You’d get a coalition in twenty-five minutes, as soon as the first SS car took off from Prinzalbrechtstrasse. They’d have all those economic big shots like Krupp and Thyssen—” He broke off. One of the cryptographers had come up to him with an envelope.
Reiss held out his hand. His secretary brought the envelope to him.
It was the urgent coded radiogram, decoded and typed out.
When he finished reading it he saw that Pferdehuf was waiting to hear. Reiss crumpled up the message in the big ceramic ashtray on his desk, lit it with his lighter. “There’s a Japanese general supposed to be traveling here incognito. Tedeki. You better go down to the public library and get one of those official Japanese military magazines that would have his picture. Do it discreetly, of course. I don’t think we’d have anything on him here.” He started toward the locked filing cabinet, then changed his mind. “Get what information you can. The statistics. They should all be available at the library.” He added, “This General Tedeki was a chief of staff a few years ago. Do you recall anything about him?”
“Just a little,” Pferdehuf said. “Quite a fire-eater. He should be about eighty, now. Seems to me he advocated some sort of crash program to get Japan into space.”
“On that he failed,” Reiss said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s coming here for medical purposes,” Pferdehuf said. “There’ve been a number of old Japanese military men here to use the big U. C. Hospital. That way they can make use of German surgical techniques they can’t get at home. Naturally they keep it quiet. Patriotic reasons, you know. So perhaps we should have somebody at the U. C. Hospital watching, if Berlin wants to keep their eye on him.”
Reiss nodded. Or the old general might be involved in commercial speculations, a good deal of which went on in San Francisco. Connections he had made while in service would be of use to him now that he was retired. Or was he retired? The message called him
General,
not
Retired General
.
“As soon as you have the picture,” Reiss said, “pass copies right on to our people at the airport and down at the harbor. He may have already come in. You know how long it takes them to get this sort of thing to us.” And of course if the general had already reached San Francisco, Berlin would be angry at the PSA consulate. The consulate should have been able to intercept him—before the order from Berlin had even been sent.
Pferdehuf said, “I’ll stamp-date the coded radiogram from Berlin, so if any question comes up later on, we can show exactly when we received it. Right to the hour.”
“Thank you,” Reiss said. The people in Berlin were past masters at transferring responsibility, and he was weary of being stuck. It had happened too many times. “Just to be on the safe side,” he said, “I think I’d better have you answer that message. Say, ‘Your instructions abysmally tardy. Person already reported in area. Possibility of successful intercept remote at this stage.’ Put something along those lines into shape and send it. Keep it good and vague. You understand.”
Pferdehuf nodded. “I’ll send it right off. And keep a record of the exact date and moment it was sent.” He shut the door after him.
You have to watch out, Reiss reflected, or all at once you find yourself consul to a bunch of niggers on an island off the coast of South Africa. And the next you know, you have a black mammy for a mistress, and ten or eleven little pickaninnies calling you daddy.
Reseating himself at his breakfast table he lit an Egyptian Simon Arzt Cigarette Number 70, carefully reclosing the metal tin.
It did not appear that he would be interrupted for a little while now, so from his briefcase he took the book he had been reading, opened to his placemark, made himself comfortable, and resumed where he had last been forced to stop.
…Had he actually walked streets of quiet cars, Sunday morning peace of the Tiergarten, so far away? Another life. Ice cream, a taste that could never have existed. Now they boiled nettles and were glad to get them. God, he cried out. Won’t they stop? The huge British tanks came on. Another building, it might have been an apartment house or a store, a school or office; he could not tell—the ruins toppled, slid into fragments. Below in the rubble another handful of survivors buried, without even the sound of death. Death had spread out everywhere equally, over the living, the hurt, the corpses layer after layer that already had begun to smell. The stinking, quivering corpse of Berlin, the eyeless turrets still upraised, disappearing without protest like this one, this nameless edifice that man had once put up with pride.
His arms, the boy noticed, were covered with the film of gray, the ash, partly inorganic, partly the burned sifting final produce of life. All mixed now, the boy knew, and wiped it from him. He did not think much further; he had another thought that captured his mind if there was thinking to be done over the screams and the
hump hump
of the shells. Hunger. For six days he had eaten nothing but the nettles, and now they were gone. The pasture of weeds had disappeared into a single vast crater of earth. Other dim, gaunt figures had appeared at the rim, like the boy, had stood silent and then drifted away. An old mother with a
babushka
tied about her gray head, basket—empty—under her arm. A one-armed man, his eyes empty as the basket. A girl. Faded now back into the litter of slashed trees in which the boy Eric hid.
And still the snake came on.
Would it ever end? the boy asked, addressing no one. And if it did, what then? Would they fill their bellies, these—
“Freiherr,” Pferdehuf’s voice came. “Sorry to interrupt you. Just one word.”
Reiss jumped, shut his book. “Certainly.”
How that man can write, he thought. Completely carried me away. Real. Fall of Berlin to the British, as vivid as if it had actually taken place. Brrr. He shivered.
Amazing, the power of fiction, even cheap popular fiction, to evoke. No wonder it’s banned within Reich territory; I’d ban it myself. Sorry I started it. But too late; must finish, now.
His secretary said, “Some seamen from a German ship. They’re required to report to you.”
“Yes,” Reiss said. He hopped to the door and out to the front office. There the three seamen wearing heavy gray sweaters, all with thick blond hair, strong faces, a trifle nervous. Reiss raised his right hand. “Heil Hitler.” He gave them a brief friendly smile.
“Heil Hitler,” they mumbled. They began showing him their papers.
As soon as he had certified their visit to the consulate, he hurried back into his private office.
Once more, alone, he reopened
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy
.
His eyes fell on a scene involving—Hitler. Now he found himself unable to stop; he began to read the scene out of sequence, the back of his neck burning.