"Are you Hugo Behr?" demanded one of the men.
"I am," was the reply.
Lanny turned to look at the questioner; but the man’s next action was faster than any eye could follow. He must have had a gun in his hand behind his back; he swung it up and fired straight into the face in front of him, and not more than a foot away. Pieces of the blue eye of Hugo Behr and a fine spray of his Aryan blood flew out, and some hit Lanny in the face. The rest of Hugo Behr crumpled and dropped to the sidewalk; whereupon the man turned his gun into the horrified face of the driver.
"Hande hoch!" he commanded; and that was certainly turning the tables upon Lanny. He put them high.
"Wer sind Sie?" demanded the S.S. man.
It was a time for the quickest possible answers, and Lanny was fortunate in having thought up the best possible. "I am an American art expert, and a friend of the Führer."
"Oh! So you’re a friend of the Führer!"
"I have visited him several times. I spent a morning with him in the Braune Haus a few months ago."
"How do you come to know Hugo Behr?"
"I was introduced to him in the home of Heinrich Jung, a high official of the Hitler Jugend in Berlin. Heinrich is one of the Führer’s oldest friends and visited him many times when’he was in the Landsberg fortress. It was Heinrich who introduced me to the Führer." Lanny rattled this off as if it were a school exercise; and indeed it was something like that, for he had imagined interrogations and had learned his Rolle in the very best German. Since the S.S. man didn’t tell him to stop, he went on, as fast as ever: "Also on the visit to the Reichsführer in the Braune Haus went Kurt Meissner of Schloss Stubendorf, who is a Komponist and author of several part-songs which you sing at your assemblies. He has known me since we were boys at Hellerau, and will tell you that I am a friend of the National Socialist movement."
That was the end of the speech, so far as Lanny had planned it. But even as he said the last words a horrible doubt smote him: Perhaps this was some sort of anti-Nazi revolution, and he was sealing his own doom! He saw that the point of the gun had come down, and the muzzle was looking into his navel instead of into his face; but that wasn’t enough to satisfy him. He stared at the S.S. man, who had black eyebrows that met over his nose. It seemed to Lanny the hardest face he had ever examined.
"What were you doing with this man?"—nodding downward toward what lay on the pavement.
"I am in Munich buying a painting from Baron von Zinszollern. I saw Hugo Behr walking on the street and I stopped to say Gruss Gott to him." Lanny was speaking impromptu now.
"Get out of the car," commanded the S.S. man.
Lanny’s heart was hitting hard blows underneath his throat; his knees were trembling so violently he wasn’t sure they would hold him up. It appeared that he was being ordered out so that his blood and brains might not spoil a good car. "I tell you, you will regret it if you shoot me. I am an intimate friend of Minister-Präsident General Göring. I was on a hunting trip with him last fall. You can ask Oberleutnant Furtwaengler of Seine Exzellenz’s staff. You can ask Reichsminister Goebbels about me—or his wife, Frau Magda Goebbels—I have visited their home. You can read articles about me in the Munich newspapers of last November when I conducted an exhibition of paintings here and took one of them to the Führer. My picture was in all the papers—"
"I am not going to shoot you," announced the S.S. man. His tone indicated abysmal contempt of anybody who objected to being shot.
"What are you going to do?"
"Take you to Stadelheim until your story is investigated. Get out of the car."
Stadelheim was a name of terror; one of those dreadful prisons about which the refugees talked. But it was better than being shot on the sidewalk, so Lanny managed to control his nerves, and obeyed. The other man passed his hands over him to see if he was armed. Then the leader commanded him to search the body of Hugo, and he collected a capful of belongings including a wad of bills which Lanny knew amounted to some fifteen thousand marks.
Apparently they meant to leave the corpse right there, and Lanny wondered, did they have a corpse-collecting authority, or did they leave it to the neighborhood?
However, he didn’t have much time for speculation. "Get into the back seat," commanded the leader and climbed in beside him, still holding the gun on him. The man who had got out on Lanny’s side of the car now slipped into the driver’s seat, and the car sprang to life and sped down the street.
IV
Lanny had seen Stadelheim from the outside; a great mass of buildings on a tree-lined avenue, the Tegernsee road upon which he had driven Hugo Behr. Now the walls of the place loomed enormous and forbidding in the darkness. Lanny was ordered out of the car, and two of his captors escorted him through the doorway, straight past the reception room, and down a stone corridor into a small room. He had expected to be "booked" and fingerprinted; but apparently this was to be dispensed with. They ordered him to take off his coat, trousers, and shoes, and proceeded to search him. "There is considerable money in that wallet," he said, and the leader replied, grimly: "We will take care of it." They took his watch, keys, fountain-pen, necktie, everything but his handkerchief. They searched the linings of his clothing, and looked carefully to see if there were any signs that the heels of his shoes might be removable.
Finally they told him to put his clothes on again. Lanny said: "Would you mind telling me what I am suspected of?" The reply of the leader was: "Maul halten!" Apparently they didn’t believe his wonder-tales about being the intimate friend of the three leading Nazis. Not wishing to get a knock over the head with a revolver butt, Lanny held his mouth, as ordered, and was escorted out of the room and down the corridor to a guarded steel door.
The head S.S. man appeared to have the run of the place; all he had to do was to salute and say: "Heil Hitler!" and all doors were swung open for him. He led the prisoner down a narrow flight of stone stairs, into a passage dimly lighted and lined with steel doors.
Old prisons have such places of darkness and silence, where deeds without a name have been done. A warder who accompanied the trio opened one of these doors, and Lanny was shoved in without a word. The door clanged behind him; and that, as he had learned to say in the land of his fathers, was that.
V
In the darkness he could only explore the place by groping. The cell was narrow and had an iron cot built into the stone wall. On the cot were two sacks of straw and a blanket. In the far corner was a stinking pail without a cover; and that was all. There was a vile, age-old odor, and no window; ventilation was provided by two openings in the solid door, one high and one low; they could be closed by sliding covers on the outside, but perhaps this would be done only if Lanny misbehaved. He didn’t.
He was permitted to sit on the straw sacks and think, and he did his best to quiet the tumult of his heart and use his reasoning powers. What had happened? It seemed obvious that his plot had been discovered. Had the would-be conspirators been caught, or had they taken the money and then reported the plot to their superiors? And if so, would they shoot Freddi? No use worrying about that now. Lanny couldn’t be of any use to Freddi unless he himself got out, so he had to put his mind on his own plight, and prepare for the examination which was bound sooner or later to come.