“I report the following actions. It was resolved: One. To fund the film on the life of SS Sturmmann Fritz Christen, one of the heroes of the Totenkopf Division on the Eastern Front. Christen held out for three days by himself after all his comrades were killed, and he personally did for thirteen Soviet tanks and about a hundred enemy infantry. War Films are popular, and we stand to make a great deal of money . Georges Kaletanis will direct. Cost sheets and projections are appended.
“Two. To offer 800,000 U.S. dollars to Columbia University for the establishment of a fellowship fund for students working on modem socio-political history. Three of our people will likely be chosen for the selection committee, and we’ll thus have a very large say in the choice of candidates. Any useful recipients can then be recruited by our cadre there.
“Three. To withhold further support from the Congress of Americans for Personal Freedom They’re attracting unfavorable attention, the FBI is investigating them, and their theories smack too much of discredited Born-Again theology. If their president, William Gardner, were to be replaced by Grant Simmons, the treasurer, we could reconsider.
“Four. To purchase the property of Club Lingahnie on the Micronesian island of Ponape, in the South Pacific. We need a rest and recreation center in that region, and we can ensure privacy. Worthy students will be sent there for seminars and holidays, as will certain well-disposed political leaders. The cost will be in the neighborhood of 1.3 million U.S. dollars. Here’s the prospectus, if anybody’s interested.
“Five. To provide 500,000 German marks through our Austrian branch for legal aid to Franz Ulrich Koch, accused of debunking the ‘Holocaust’ last summer. He’s not a crank, and we’ll get some favorable publicity out of his trial. He’ll have sympathy: a gang of Jewish fanatics, the… ah, ‘Vigilantes for Zion,’ broke into his house to teach him the usual lesson. He wasn’t home, and they raped his daughter instead. The Israelis and the Euro-American Jewish groups disavow any connection with the culprits, but we do have evidence of their financial backing for the Vizzies. Win or lose, the trial should help us.
“Six. To continue support for our regular list of newspapers, television stations, magazines, and other media organs at present levels. We’ll be buying the Cairo Misr al-Yaum and the St. Louis Weekly News within the month. These will fill important gaps in our coverage.
“Seven. To offer private aid to Speaker of the House Jonas Outram in the U.S. Congress. He and his allies are already anti-Black and anti-Zionist. They’re also hostile to our Movement, but then they don’t need… or want… to know who’s behind the curtain, eh?
“Eight. To evaluate and standardize the curricula of our chains of private schools, military academies, and gymnasia across Europe, Australia, and the United States. Offerings have become uneven. Students in the United States are behind those in Germany, England, and other places, due not only to the decline of American education generally, but also to the tangle of local regulations and needs and a lack of coordination on our part. A report and a budget are included.”
He stopped and looked around. “Questions? New business?” Someone asked, “Progress on the book? The revision of Mein Kampf?”
“It’s not really a ‘revision,’ as we’ve said before. Nobody could revise the First Führer’s work. Mein Kampf was written for German readers more than a hundred years ago, and some parts of it are as irrelevant to our present situation as Karl Marx… or the Bible, for that matter. No, our book is a position statement and philosophical-historical foundation for the movement as it exists today. We have a team of good people… publicists, psychologists, journalists… working on it. It’s hard to sell a cause as maligned as ours, and we have to do the best job possible.”
Jennifer Caw raised her hand. Lessing noticed that she was actually a strikingly attractive woman, however brash her manners might be. She had auburn hair, probably natural, and the ruddy complexion that comes from days in the sun. She said, “I still doubt that a committee can write a book that’s worth anything. It needs a single individual, somebody with fire, a cause, a driving compulsion.”
“We need a Führer,” Mr. Abu Talib interposed bluntly. “That’s your point?”
“Yes, but who?” The American woman shot back. “Name one of us!”
“Blast it, madam, you know we haven’t anyone with the talent, the charisma, the bloody balls to rewrite Mein Kampf for the twenty-first century!” He stopped, embarrassed. “A committee is really the only available method, you know.”
Mulder said, “It will take time, and we have time. We’re at the bottom of the popularity barrel. There’s nowhere to go but up.”
“Which makes some of us agree with our street-brethren,” the Arab retorted coolly. “March. Speak. Fight.”
“Break heads and get heads broken in return?” Mulder sounded mildly reproachful. “This isn’t Munich in the 1920’s. Beerhalls and despairing veterans of World War I… inflation and communists, Freikorps and anarchists… in a dying Weimar Republic! Although the basic principles he enunciated remain as valid today as they were then, the First Führer spoke to his own times. We must do the same.”
“Write a book by committee, and you get what you pay for: a Hollywood script!”
Mulder looked uncomfortable but said no more. Jennifer Caw gazed across at Lessing, probably not seeing him at all, and the others stirred restlessly.
Lessing lost interest after that. The conferees discussed further business matters, arrangements for publications, organizational details, and trivia. He managed to make eye contact with Liese, which he counted as a minor triumph. She watched him covertly, and he resolved to speak to her. Goddard was smirking at her too; his macho “Tower of Power” routine worked well with lady executives.
Jameela came unbidden into Lessing’s thoughts. Damn it, he wasn’t seriously planning a night in the sack with this blonde! He was only fantasizing. Yet he knew Jameela would regard even that as infidelity. Indians and Pakistanis were still largely monogamous, a legacy from Queen Victoria and the stuffy, old British Raj, combined with attitudes from their own heritages. He’d had a hard time persuading Jameela to live with him, even within Indoco’s isolated compound. Outside, she never showed him anything beyond impersonal friendliness; to do so, she said, would rouse prejudice and objections no Westerner could imagine. Whatever the starlets of the Indian film industry in Bombay did, Lucknow was still thoroughly provincial and conservative.
American mores were radically different. Queen Victoria would have turned up her patrician nose at what passed for morality in the modem U.S. of A. Currently, just for starters, some fifty-eight percent of all births were out of wedlock, divorce split two couples in three, and many young people opted for “Banger” lifestyles ranging from homosexuality on through polygyny, polyandry, group marriage, and Califomian Dildo-of-the-Month parties! Marriage was increasingly rare among the educated, although small-towners, rural folk, and wealthy “old culture” families still kept up traditional values. Shades of the last days of the Roman Republic!
Lessing’s own family had been virtuously Midwestern and middle class: one previous marriage for his father, no issue, that they never talked about. His mother had been nicknamed “the Ice Princess” in high school — not because she could skate. His father found out too late what her nickname meant but stuck with her anyway for fifty years, a pallid, grey ghost of a man long before he died. Lessing’s mother then continued to live on in respectable, clammy piety, which caused him to flee at the first opportunity. He had never looked back. Even then he feared that he had escaped too late.