The crowd kept up its tumult. The band responded with a vast heartbeat of brass and drum.
Darling Adolf passed within twenty feet of the lower stands where the director sat fiddling with the tape-deck dials. The director crouched down. But there was no need. Summoned by the 'Siegffeils' and the fanfare of trumpets and brass, Der Fuhrer was drawn inevitably toward that days where destiny awaited him. He was walking taller now and though his uniform was rumpled and the swastika emblem torn, and his mustache moth-eaten and his hair wild, it was the old Leader all right, it was him.
The old producer sat up straight and watched. He whispered. He pointed.
Far above, at the top of the stadium, three more men had stepped into view.
My God, thought the director, that's the team. The men who grabbed Adolf.
A man with bushy eyebrows, a fat man, and a man like a wounded chimpanzee.
Jesus. The director blinked. Goebbels. Goring. Hess. Three actors at liberty. Three half-ass kidnapers staring down at…
Adolf Hitler climbing up on the small podium by the fake microphones and the real one under the blowing torches which bloomed and blossomed and guttered and smoked on the cold October wind under the sprig of lilyhorns which lifted in four directions.
Adolt lifted his chin. That did it. The crowd went absolutely mad. Which is to say, the director's hand, sensing the hunger, went mad, twitched the volume high so the air was riven and torn and shattered again and again and again with «Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil»!
Above, high on the stadium rim, the three watching figures lifted their arms in salute to their Fuhrer.
Adolf lowered his chin. The sounds of the crowd faded. Only the torch flames whispered.
Adolf made his speech.
He must have yelled and chanted and brayed and sputtered and whispered hoarsely and wrung his hands and beat the podium with his fist and plunged his fist at the sky and shut his eyes and shrieked like a disemboweled trumpet for ten minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour as the sun vanished beyond the earth and the three other men up on the stadium rim watched and listened and the producer and the director waited and watched. He shouted things about the whole world and he yelled things about Germany and he shrieked things about himself and he damned this and blamed that and praised yet a third, until at last he began to repeat, and repeat the same words over and over as if he had reached the end of a record inside himself and the needle was fastened to a circle track which hissed and hiccuped, hiccuped and hissed, and then faded away at last into a silence where you could only hear his heavy breathing, which broke at last into a sob and he stood with his head bent while the others now could not look at him but looked only at their shoes or the sky or the way the wind blew dust across the field. The flags fluttered. The single torch bent and lifted and twisted itself again and talked under its breath.
At last, Adolf raised his head to finish his speech.
«Now I must speak of them.»
He nodded up to the top of the stadium where the three men stood against the sky.
«They are nuts. I am nuts, too. But at least I know I am nuts. I told them: crazy, you are crazy. Mad, you are mad. And now, my own craziness, my own madness, well, it has run itself down. I am tired.»
«So now, what? I give the world back to you. I had it for a small while here today. But now you must keep it and keep it better than I would. To each of you I give the world, but you must promise, each of you to keep your own part and work with it. So there. Take it.»
He made a motion with his free hand to the empty seats, as if all the world were in his fingers and at last he were letting it go.
The crowd murmured, stirred, but said nothing loud.
The flags softly tongued the air. The flames squatted on themselves and smoked.
Adolf pressed his fingers onto his eyeballs as if suddenly seized with a blinding headache. Without looking over at the director or the producer, he said, quietly:
«Time to go?»
The director nodded.
Adolf limped off the podium and came to stand below where the old man and the younger director sat.
«Go ahead, if you want, again, hit me.»
The director sat and looked at him. At last he shook his head.
«Do we finish the film?» asked Adolf.
The director looked at the producer. The old man shrugged and could find nothing to say.
«Ah, well,» said the actor. «Anyway, the madness is over, the fever has dropped. I have made my speech at Nuremberg. God, look at those idiots up there. Idiots!» he called suddenly at the stands. Then back to the director, «Can you think? They wanted to hold me for ransom. I told them what fools they were. Now I'll go tell them again. I had to get away from them. I couldn't stand their stupid talk. I had to come here and be my own fool in my own way for the last time. Well…»
He limped off across the empty field, calling back quietly:
«I'll be in your car outside, waiting. If you want, I am yours for the final scenes. If not, no, and that ends it.»
The director and the producer waited until Adolf had climbed to the top of the stadium. They could hear his voice drift down, cursing those other three, the man with the bushy eyebrows, the fat man, and the ugly chimpanzee, calling them many things, waving his hands. The three backed off and went away, gone.
Adolf stood alone high in the cold October air.
The director gave him a final lift of the sound volume. The crowd, obedient, banged out a last «Sieg Heil.»
Adolf lifted Ms free hand, not into a salute, but some sort of old, easy, half-collapsed mid-Atlantic wave. Then he was gone, too.
The sunlight went with him. The sky was no longer blood-coloured. The wind blew dust and want-ads from a German paper across the stadium floor.
«Son of a bitch,» muttered the old man. «Let's get out of here.»
They left the torches to burn and the flags to blow, but shut off the sound equipment.
«Wish I'd brought a record of Yankee Doodle to march us out of here,» said the director.
«Who needs records. We'll whistle. Why not?»
«Why not!»
He held the old man's elbow going up the stairs in the dusk, but it was only halfway up, they had the guts to try to whistle.
And then it was suddenly so funny they couldn't finish the tune.