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 Rohm 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 naive, 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? Fraulein 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."