Long After Midnight (34 page)

 
          
"All
the peanut brittle in
Germany
might put itself in sacks and show up if
they knew that—"

 
          
"
Steihl
,
Grofe
, and Dingle, which
is to say,
Goebbels
, Goring, and Hess, were back in
the saddle with
dumbass
Adolf
?"

 
          
"Crazy,
awful, mad! It couldn't happen!"

 
          
"Nobody
was ever going to clog the
Suez Canal
.
Nobody was ever going to land on the Moon. Nobody."

 
          
"What
do we do? This waiting is horrible. Think of something, Marc, think,
think!"

 
          
"I'm
thinking."

 
          
"And-"

 
          
This
time a hundred-watt bulb flashed on in the director's face. He sucked air and
let out a great braying laugh.

 
          
"I'm
going to help them organize and speak up, Arch! I'm a genius. Shake my
hand!"

 
          
He
seized the old man's hand and pumped it, crying with hilarity, tears running
down his cheeks.

 
          
"You,
Marc, on their side, helping from the Fourth Reich!?"

 
          
The
old man backed away.

 
          
"Don't
hit me, help me. Think, Arch, think. What was it Darling
Adolf
said at lunch, and damn the expense! What, what?"

 
          
The
old man took a breath, held it, exploded it out, with a final light blazing in
his face.

 
          
"Nuremberg?"
he asked.

 
          
"Nuremberg!
What month is this, Arch?"

 
          
"October!"

 
          
"October!
October, forty years ago, October, the big, big Nuremberg Rally. And this
coming Friday, Arch, an Anniversary Rally. We shove an ad in the international
edition of
Variety:
rally at
Nuremberg, torches, bands, flags. Christ, he won't be able to stay away. He'd
shoot his kidnapers to be there and play the greatest role in his life!"

 
          
"Marc,
we can't afford—"

 
          
"Five
hundred and forty-eight bucks? For the ad plus the torches plus a full military
band on a phonograph record? Hell, Arch, hand me that phone."

 
          
The
old man pulled a telephone out of the front seat of his limousine.

 
          
"Son
of a bitch," he whispered.

 
          
"Yeah."
The director grinned, and ticked the phone. "Son of a bitch."

 
          
The
sun was going down beyond the rim of Nuremberg Stadium. The sky was bloodied
all across the western horizon. In another half-hour
At
would be completely dark and you wouldn't be able to see the
small platform down in the center of the arena, or the few dark flags with the
swastikas put up on temporary poles here or there making a path from one side
of the stadium to the other. There was a sound of a crowd gathering, but the
place was empty. There was a faint drum of band music but there was no band.

 
          
Sitting
in the front row on the eastern side of the stadium, the director waited, his
hands on the controls of a sound unit. He had been waiting for two hours and
was getting tired and feeling foolish. He could hear the old man saying:

 
          
"Let’s
go home. Idiotic. He won't come."

 
          
And
himself saying, "He will. He must," but not believing it.

 
          
He
had the records waiting on his lap. Now and again he tested one, quietly, on
the turntable, and then the crowd noises came from
lilyhorns
stuck up at both ends of the arena, murmuring, or the band played, not loudly,
no, that would be later, but very softly. Then he waited again.

 
          
The
sun sank lower. Blood ran crimson in the clouds. The director tried not to
notice. He hated nature's blatant ironies.

 
          
The
old man stirred feebly at last and looked around.

 
          
"So
this was the place. It was really
it,
back
in 1934."

 
          
"This
was it. Yeah."

 
          
"I
remember the films. Yes, yes. Hitler stood—what? Over there?"

 
          
"That
was it."

 
          
"And
all the kids and men down there and the girls there, and fifty cameras."

 
          
"Fifty,
count '
em
, fifty. Jesus, I would have liked to have
been here with the torches and flags and people and cameras."

 
          
"Marc,
Marc, you don't
mean
it?"

 
          
"Yes,
Arch, sure! So I could have run up to Darling
Adolf
and done what I did to that pig-swine half-ass actor. Hit him in the nose, then
hit him in the teeth, then hit him in the
blinis
!
You
got
it,
Leni
? Action!
Swotl
Camera!
Bam!
Here's one for
Izzie
.
Here's one for Ike. Cameras running,
Leni
? Okay.
Zotl
Print!"

 
          
They
stood looking down into the empty stadium where the wind prowled a few
newspapers like ghosts on the vast concrete floor.

 
          
Then,
suddenly, they gasped.

 
          
Far
up at the very top of the stadium a small figure had appeared.

 
          
The
director quickened, half rose, then forced himself to sit back down.

 
          
The
small figure, against the last light of the day, seemed to be having difficulty
walking. It leaned to one side, and held one arm up against its side, like a
wounded bird.

 
          
The
figure hesitated, waited.

 
          
"Come
on," whispered the director.

 
          
The
figure turned and was about to flee.

 
          
"
Adolf
, no!" hissed the director.

 
          
Instinctively,
he snapped one of his hands to the sound-effects tape deck, his other hand to
the music.

 
          
The
military band began to play softly.

 
          
The
"crowd" began to murmur and stir.

 
          
Adolf
, far above, froze.

 
          
The
music played higher. The director touched a control knob. The crowd mumbled
louder.

 
          
Adolf
turned back to squint down into the half-seen
stadium. Now he must be seeing the flags. And now the few torches. And now the
waiting platform with the microphones, two
dozen
of them!
one
of them real.

 
          
The
band came up in full brass.

 
          
Adolf
took one step forward.

 
          
The
crowd roared.

 
          
Christ,
thought the director, looking at his hands, which were now suddenly hard fists
and now again just fingers leaping on the controls, all to themselves. Christ,
what do I do with him when I get him down here? What,
what?

 
          
And
then, just as insanely, the thought came. Crud. You're a director. And that's
him.
And this
is
Nuremberg.

 
          
So
. . . ?

 
          
Adolf
took a second step down. Slowly his hand came up in a
stiff salute.

 
          
The
crowd went wild.

 
          
Adolf
never stopped after that. He limped, he tried to
march with pomp, but the fact was he limped down the hundreds of steps until he
reached the floor of the stadium. There he straightened his cap, brushed his
tunic,
resaluted
the roaring emptiness, and came
gimp-
ing
across two hundred yards of empty ground
toward the waiting platform.

 
          
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
"
Sieg
Heils
"
and the fanfare of trumpets and brass,
Der
Fiihrer
was drawn inevitably toward that dais 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
stepepd
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.

 
          
Adolf
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
Heill
"

 
          
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
miuntes
, 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.