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 Ober-leutnant 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 naive 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 righting of Moabit, Neukoln, Schoneberg, 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 naive 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-President 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-Prasident’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 Polizei-prasidium; 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-Prasident Goring 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
The car stopped before a great red brick building in the Alexanderplatz, and Lanny was escorted inside. Steel doors clanged behind him—a sound which he had heard in the building of the Sûreté Générale in Paris and found intensely disagreeable. He was escorted down a bare stone-paved corridor, with more doors opening and clanging, until he found himself in a small room with one steel-barred window, a table, and three chairs. "Bitte, setzen Sie sich," said the Oberleutnant. The chair which Lanny took faced the door, and he sat, wondering: "Will they have shaved his head and put him in stripes? Will he have any marks on him?"
He had none; that is, unless you counted spiritual marks. He was wearing the brown business suit in which he had set out for his yacht; but he needed a bath and a shave, and came into the room as if he might be on the way to a firing-squad. When he saw his daughter-in-law’s half-brother sitting quietly in a chair, he started visibly, and then pulled himself together, pressing his lips tightly, as if he didn’t want Lanny to see them trembling. In short, he was a thoroughly cowed Jew; his manner resembled that of an animal which had been mistreated—not a fighting animal, but a tame domestic one.
"Setzen Sie sich, Herr Robin," ordered the Oberleutnant. On Lanny’s account he would be polite, even to a Missgeburt. Johannes took the third chair. "Bitte, sprechen Sie Deutsch" added the officer, to Lanny.
Two S.S. men had followed the prisoner into the room; they closed the door behind them and took post in front of it. As Lanny was placed he couldn’t help seeing them, even while absorbed in conversation. Those two lads in shining black boots and black and silver uniforms with skull and crossbones insignia stood like two monuments of Prussian militarism; their forms rigid, their chests thrust out, their guts sucked in—Lanny had learned the phrase from his ex-sergeant friend Jerry Pendleton. Their hands did not hang by their sides, but were pressed with palms open and fingers close together, tightly against their thighs and held there as if glued. Not the faintest trace of expression on the faces, not the slightest motion of the eyes; apparently each man picked out a spot on the wall and stared at it continuously for a quarter of an hour. Did they do this because they were in the presence of an officer, or in order to impress a foreigner—or just because they had been trained to do it and not think about it?
"Johannes," said Lanny, speaking German, as requested, "Irma and I came as soon as we heard about your trouble. All the members of your family are safe and well."
"Gott set Dank!" murmured the prisoner. He was holding onto the chair in which he had seated himself, and when he had spoken he pressed his lips together again. For the first time in his life Johannes Robin seemed an old man; he was sixty, but had never shown even that much.
"The situation is a serious one, Johannes, but it can be settled for money, and you and your family are to be allowed to go to France with us."
"I don’t mind about the money," said the Jew, quickly. He had fixed his eyes on Lanny’s face and never took them away. He seemed to be asking: "Am I to believe what you tell me?" Lanny kept nodding, as if to say: "Yes, this is real, this is not a dream."
"The charge against you is that you tried to carry money out of the country on your yacht."
"Aber, Lanny!" exclaimed the prisoner, starting forward in his chair. "I had a permit for every mark that I took!"
"Where did you put the permit?"
"It was in my pocket when I was arrested."
"Are you sure of that?"
"Absolutely. I would have been mad to try to carry money out of Germany without it."
Lanny was not too much surprised by this. "We have to assume that some malicious person destroyed the paper, Johannes."
"Yes, but there will be a record of it in the office of the Exchange Control Authority."
"I have been told on the best possible authority that no such record exists. I am afraid we shall have to assume that some mistake has been made, and that you had no valid permit."
Johannes’s eyes darted for the fraction of a second toward the S.S. officer. Then he said, as humbly as any moneylender in a medieval dungeon: "Yes, Lanny, of course. It must be so."