The Hunt aka 27 (8 page)

“Wealth, recognition, fame.
. .
all these things are yours,” Hitler continued. “To give all that up for
any
reason is almost
unthinkable.” Hitler stared into the fire. The flames crackled in the now total silence. “There have been many sacrifices made for the glory of
Deutschland
and there will be many, many more. But none will be greater than what I
h
ave proposed to you

. .
Colonel Wolfe.”

Ingersoll barely heard the words.
Th
e glory of
Deutschland

.
none will be greater.
.
almost unthinka
b
le.
Colonel Wolfe.
The world’s greatest acting job.
. .

Ingersoll entered his room and quickly shed his suit jacket, replacing it with a black turtleneck. He and Heinz had devised a simple mask that on superficial inspection looked like the
Nach
t
Hund
makeup. He unpacked the black
cl
oak and shook it out.

Dinner had been electrifying. The air in the dining room seemed to crackle from the combined power of the people around the table, though there had been only subtle references to politics and the problems of state. I
n
gersoll wondered what, if any, significance there was to the seating arrangement. Hitler, Herman Goring, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Eva Braun at the foot of the table, Ingersoll seated between Eva and Albert Speer, then Walter Funk, Vie
r
haus and Rudolf Hess seated at the Führer’s right. It seemed obvious that Hess and Goring, who were sitting on either side of Hitler, were the two most important men in the hierarchy.

They all had listened enrapt as Speer described his plans for the stadium and several other state bu
i
ldings. Speer was different from the rest of them, more concerned with architecture than its political ramifications. When he talked about buildings it was with such passion one could actually envision the towering structures.

Himm
l
er, on the other hand, seemed bored and uncomfortable with the conversation that rambled from architecture to the depravity of the Communist artist Picasso, whose first art exhibit was the talk of Paris, to motion pictures, to Hess’s theories on the occult and numerology, to Wagner’s
Rienzi.

Hitler was fascinated by the story of Cola da Rienzi, who freed the fourteenth-century Romans from the oppression of the noblemen only to be stoned to death because he gave the people freedom they didn’t want. A lugubrious tale at best.

“I was twelve or thirteen when I first heard
Rienzi,”
Hitler said. “I sat up all night thinking about it. About the lessons to be learned from it. Heinrich, what did y
o
u learn from
Rienzi?”

“That he was a fool,” Himm
l
er said in a humorless monotone.

“How so?”

“He should have known there is no such thing as a benevolent leader. The tool of power is terror. Physical..
.
and mental. And the only way to assure victory is through the total annihilation of all enemies within the state. Scare them to death. Or kill them.”

“You mean the Jews?” Hitler said.

“Jews. Dissidents,” Himmler said with a shrug.

“You’re talking about millions of people, Heinrich,” Hess said. “What are you going to do, poison all the matzoh balls in Germany? A difficult thing to do.”

There was a ripple of laughter.

“Oh I don’t know,” Himm
l
er answered. “The Turks disposed of eight hundred thousand Armenians between 1915 and 1917.
Eight hundred thousand,
using only
the
crudest methods. I should think with proper ingenuity and planning, sophisticated techniques He shrugged again, letting their imaginations complete the sentence.

“Rather a dark interpretation of
Rie
nz
i,”
Vierhaus offered.

“Wagner is dark,” Himm
l
er said flatly.

Was he talking about
all
the
Jews
in Germany, Ingersoll had wondered. Impossible.

“And what lesson did you learn, Führer?” Goebbels asked, shifting the conversation back to Hitler.

“Never give anything to the people until you have convinced them they want it,” Hitler answered and laughed. “Nobody should know that better than you, e
h
,
Joseph? It’s your job to convince them.”

They had all laughed and moved on to a lighter subject.

“I understand they are using hypnotism now as a means of interrogation, is that true, Willie?” Goring asked.

“It’s not really that new,” Vierhaus answered. “Psychiatrists have been using hypnotism for years to get inside the mind.”

“I was hypnotized once,” Ingersoll said.

“Really?” Hitler said. “Why?”

“We had a hypnotist in a film I was working on. I was curious, I did it out of curiosity.”

“What happened?” Vierhaus asked.

“I hate oysters. So I asked him to hypnotize me and make me like oysters. He did it! I sat there and ate an entire plate of raw oysters. And relished them. I asked him to do it again, before I started
D
er
- Nach
t
Hund.
I told him to make me feel the pain of being crippled. And then let me recall those feelings at will while I was making the movie.”

“And
...?“
Vierhaus leaned forward slightly.

“I could actually invoke pain when I was in costume.”

“Amazing,” Vierhaus said.

“So it might be possible under hypnosis to ask questions which the subject might normally be reluctant to answer?”
Himmler
asked.

“I should think so,” said Ingersoll
-
“Of course there is a danger.”

“And that is?” Hitler asked.

“Well, supposing I was hypnotized and told I was a pig and then the hypnotist suddenly dropped dead of a heart attack. Would I think I was a pig forever?”

There was a moment of silence. Then Eva began to laugh.

“That’s a very funny notion,” she giggled. Everyone else began to laugh, too, except for Himm
l
er. He smiled, but only for the briefest moment. Ingersoll watched his eyes and knew that, from the way they darted, Himmler was thinking,
Would it work?

For the most part, Ingersoll sat through the meal entranced. These were the elite of Hitler’s elite. Men who had simply been names and faces before tonight now were his peers, handpicked by Hitler to mold his ideas into the new German order.

Each of them was different, each had a specific objective. Him
m
ler, head of the SS, a little no-nonsense man with no sense of humor and a mind as cold as a crypt, seemed incapable of frivolous conversation. The perfect man to lead the SS.

Goring, bulky head of the
Luftwaffe,
the state police, and Reich Master of the Hunt, the World War ace who had shot down twenty-two British and American flyers. He had been Hitler’s closest friend and confidant since they had marched side- by-side at the Burgerbraukeller Beer
H
a
l
l Putsch of ‘23 and Goring had taken two bullets in the thigh. Goring was the court jester, constantly making jokes, many times on himself.

Goebbels. The midget with a club foot. Cadaverous, pushy and cynical, with a nervous laugh, he had written, after first hearing Hitler speak at the Zirkus Krone in Munich in 1926, “I am reborn.” As the master propagandist he seemed the perfect man to spread the Gospel of the Third Reich.

Walther Funk, the mousy little man with dodgy eyes and very little to say. The party’s money genius. It didn’t seem possible that this quiet, involuted, self-deprecating man had whipped Thyssen, the steel magnate, Schnitzler, leader of the chemical cartel, and von Schroeder, head of the banking trust, into line and kept them and the other industrialists there. His promise that Hitler would get rid of both the Communists and the labor unions had lured the industrial power of Germany into the Nazi party. A schemer, Ingersoll decided, probably best at executing the ideas of others.

Speer the architect, young, handsome, with the bright-eyed look of the idealist, the youthful genius seemed a bit awed at being in such powerful company. Speer, who had little to say except when he was talking about buildings, was the dreamer who would create a phoenix from the ashes of Germany’s defeat.

Eva Braun, the vivacious little girl from the village who appeared to be Hitler’s current girlfriend. Frivolous, pretty in a common way, but empty-headed, she was apparently an innocuous diversion for the leader.

Vierhaus. Deformed, persuasive, an enigma who apparently had no title but held an autonomous position within the Gestapo and reported to no one but the Führer. Could he be the
I
ago to Hitler’s Othello?

And Hess. Dark, handsome, quick-witted and sarcastic, Hess was the mystery man. He had transcribed much of
Mein Kampf
from the Führer’s notes while Hitler was still in prison and was probably closer to Hitler than anyone except Hermann Goring. His role in the hierarchy was vague to Ingersoll, although as Deputy Führer he was next in line of succession, the crown prince of the Nazi party.

Was he, like Vierhaus, a back-room planner, an unheralded advisor working in the shadows? Or was he simply a confidant whose opinion Hitler respected and whom Hitler trusted to carry on the dream if something happened to him?

Hess had another bond with th
e
Führer, an uncommon interest in witchcraft and the occult. After dinner, assisted by Hess, Hitler told the future using an old-fashioned divining process. In the eerie light of candles, Hitler held a spoon of lead over one candle, dripping the molten lead into a bowl of cold water, then Hess read the misshapen blobs, predicting an amazing and successful year for the Führer, much to the Führer’s delight.

Ingersoll reluctantly had excused himself on the pretense of making sure the film was properly prepared for the screening. But he had other things to do. He ha
d
conceived a crazy stunt, daring and dangerous, but one his showman instincts could not resist.

Dressed all in black, he slipped a pair of ice spikes over his shoes, put on a pair of thick work gloves and took a long length of coiled rope from the case. Wrappi
n
g his black cloak around his shoulders, he stepped out on the icy balcony.

He had studied the front wall of the chalet earlier in the day. The screening room was on the same level as his room but two balconies away. Normally it would have been a simple stunt to climb up to the roof and down to th
e
screening room but the building was encrusted with ice. Even though the wind had died away, snow flurries drifted down, making it difficult to see up to the roof and making the stunt doubly dangerous. And then, of course, there were the guards constantly patrolling the grounds. But Ingersoll was determined to go through with it.

He swung the loop of coiled rope around, letting it out as he did in a widening circle, and tried to hook it over the cornice on the roof. It missed and fell over the side of the balcony, sending a cascade of broken ice to t
h
e ground. Ingersoll flattened himself against the wall as one of the guards peered up. But the guard could see nothing, his vision impaired by hundreds of twinkling snowflakes, and he walked around the corner. On the third try, the rope slipped over the cornice and caught.

Pulling it taut, Ingersoll worked 1is way up the face of the chalet, his spikes biting into the patches of ice imbedded in the wall. Once he was on the steeply ea
v
ed rooftop, he loosened the rope. Balanced on the edge of the roof with no safety line,
he could feel the ice shifting underfoot. Snow sprinkled into his eyes and mouth.

He bent his knees slightly for added balance and swung the rope around again, this time attempting to hook the cornice over the screening room balcony. It was
difficult
to judge in the dark and the falling snow. Each time the r
o
pe missed, shards of ice clattered down fifty feet to the garden beneath him.

His heart was throbbing with excitement as he continued to try to loop his line over the cornice. Finally it caught. He started to pull it taut but as he did, the icy patch underfoot crumbled and he felt himself slipping over the edge. He reached out with one hand, grabbed the roof, felt his hand slide off and pitched over the side into the darkness.

He plunged downward, grasping the lifeline, wondering for an instant whether it would catch and break his fall. Then he felt the snap of the rope, the shock through his wrists and elbows and felt himself arcing through the air. He smacked against the side of the chalet and his gloved hands began slipping down the length of rope. He let go with one hand, grabbed the rope a foot lower and frantically twisted it around his wrist. It stopped his slide. He was dangling six feet above the balcony.

“Where is
der Schauspieler?”
he heard G
o
ring ask from inside the room. “He is late for his own show.”

“You know these artists,” he heard the woman answer.

He slid down the rest of the rope to the screening room balcony and sighed with relief, a specter in black hunched against the wall.

Inside the dimly lit screening room, Hitler had settled in his usual chair with Goring on one side and E
v
a on the other. The rest of the guests found seats around him. Vierhaus was worried. Hitler had no patience when it came to tardiness. Where was Ingersoll?

Suddenly the French doors leading to the balcony burst open
and
a hideous specter in black whirled dramatically through the doors.

Everyone in the room gasped.

Eva screamed.

Himmler reached for his Luger.

Hitler bolted back against his seat, his
e
yes as wide as a full moon.

“Mein Führer, Damen,
gentlemen,’ Ingersoll said, “may I present
Der Nach
t
Hund.”

He swept the mask off his head
and
leaned over in a deep bow.

Ingersoll sat on the bed in his room.

What a day this had been, a pers
on
al victory for him. The screening had been a triumph. And his little stunt had, once the outrage disappeared, thrilled the Führer with its daring.

The actor stepped out on the balc
o
ny and lit a cigarette. He was exhausted and needed time to think, to plan his future.

One floor below the masters of the Reich were talking business, something both Hitler and Vierhaus had said was usually forbidden.

Somebody opened the doors to the terrace below and he could hear the voices, pick up an occasional word or phrase, although he was not trying to
eavesdrop
. He was intoxicated by the thought that twenty feet below hi
m
, the destiny of Germany was being planned.

“I say do it,” he heard Goring’s boisterous voice say. “And quickly.”

……..
very risky,” somebody said, perhaps Funk. “Of course it’s risky,” Himm
l
er said. “So what

The voice faded away. There was more muffled conversation and he picked up occasional snatches of sentences.

Goebbels:
“. . .
must convince everyone it was a Communist plot.”

Hitler: “That is your problem, Joseph.”

“Goring:
“. . .
worry, I know the perfect scapegoat
. . .
a half-wit who lives
. .

Himmler:
“. . .
five days and I will convince him he is the head of the Communist party for the entire continent,” followed by a chorus of laughter.

More muffled talk and then he heard Goring finish a sentence:
“. . .
to arrange the fire.”

The
fire?

There was more muffled talk. He stepped closer to the edge of the balcony to hear better and heard a snatch of something Goring was saying:
“. . .
a tunnel from and he faded out again. Moments later.

Himm
l
er: “A rat bomb perhaps

A rat bomb
?
Ingersoll wondered. So did Hitler.

“A rat bomb?”

“Simply starve a rat for a day or two. Prepare the fire in the heating ducts in the basement, set a trap so it will ignite the fire when the trap is sprung. Then we let the rat loose in the duct. A hungry rat can smell food for miles. When he takes his meal, poof. The building is old, it will go up like a dry Christmas tree.”

What building,
Ingersoll wondered.
And why?

Someone walked out on the terrace below. Ingersoll snuffed out the cigarette in a drift of snow beside the door and stepped back inside.

Why?
he thought. And what was it Goebbels had said,
blame it on the Communists?

He sat at the writing desk in the corner of the room trying to put his mind back on the film. There were several minor things he wanted to change. But he could not shake the events of the day and Hitler’s outrageous proposal to him.

His decision was sudden and irrevocable.

He got up suddenly and cracked the door to his room a couple of inches. He heard the sitting room doors on the first floor open, the muffled voices of men saying their good nights, a ripple of laughter. He left the door ajar and went back to the table.

At the foot of the stairs, Hitler turned to Vierhaus and whispered, “Well, what do you think, Willie? Will our
Schauspieler
accept the challenge?”

“I think there is no question,” Vierhaus answered confidently.

“Well, after tonight, I don’t think his courage could ever be faulted.”

“In fact,” Vierhaus answered, “after his stunt tonight I would say he is a man who
enjoys
taking risks. Perhaps without thought of the consequences.”

“How do you come to that conclusion?”

“He risked his life scaling your icy wall and he was not at all concerned with what your reaction might be. He simply didn’t care.”

“Hmm. Are you implying there m
a
y be some hidden surprises with this fellow?” Hitler pressed on. “That he may have, what do you call them, fatal flaws?”

“Not at all. I think he’s the perfect man for the job.”

Vierhaus was shading the truth a bit. He knew all human beings harbor hidden surprises. Vierha
u
s was a trained psychologist, a conditioned skeptic who impulsively looked beyond the surface. He knew that within that cold cell of the mind there were obsessions, compulsions, dark i
m
pulses, secrets, even imaginary companions, and the line between the neurotic and the psychotic was thin indeed. The neurotic submitted to those passions. The psychotic was a victim of them.

Thus far he had only intelligence reports on Ingersoll on which to base his judgment. Simple facts—Himmler’s people were not interested in interpretation, they were collectors of data—and the data had not permitted a reliable analysis of the man. Now, after a day and night in which to observe Ingersoll, some questions had crept into his mind.

Sitting in the darkened theater, Vierhaus had focused on the actor. His entrance through the F
r
ench doors had been a startling piece of showmanship—but did it indicate something else?

Was Ingersoll an eccentric artist?
O
r was there some dark secret lurking inside his head that could at some crucial moment explode like a volcano and endanger the entire mission?

In short, was this man eccentric, neurotic or psychotic?

Or was he all three?

Vierhaus simply did not know but he had his own megalomania and was confident that if the actor accepted Hitler’s proposal, he could control and master the man. It was a risky assumption but one he had to take. He had convinced the Führer that Ingersoll was perfect for
th
e job, it was too late to back away now.

Five minutes passed before Ingersoll heard the footsteps mounting the stairs and coming dowry the hallway. He leaned over his notes. He heard the footsteps stop and a moment later a tap on the door. He turned, acting startled. Hitler was peering in the doorway.

“Excuse me, Colonel Wolfe, your door was open.”

Ingersoll scrambled to get to his feet but Hitler waved him back down.

“Stay down, please. I didn’t mean t
o
intrude.”

“Please come in,” Ingersoll said. “I
was
just jotting down some notes on the film. Little things, you know. A snip here, a snip there.”

Hitler pushed the door open but di
d
not enter the room. He stood framed in the entrance with his hands behind his back.

“Always the perfectionist, eh?”

“I suppose I am. It drives the technicians crazy.”

“Then you should get better technicians.”

“I keep hoping we have the best.”

“Well, I did not mean to disturb you Thank you again for the film. As you can tell, everyone was thrilled by
i
t. I will watch it many times more, I am sure. And thank you for coming to my home.”

“It is the highlight of my life,
mein
Fü1rer.
It is I who thank you.” He paused for a moment and then said, “I would like to repay the kindness
. . .
in a small way of course, I’m afraid I can’t match the significance of the dagger.”

“Usually a German shepherd puppy goes with the commission. To be a companion during the training period. But in your case, it seemed inappropriate.”

“One of my vices is fine wines,” Ingersoll said. “I have about two hundred bottles of vintage French reds and whites at my country house. I would like you to have them, Führer.”

Hitler was genuinely surprised at the offer. Then the significance of the gift slowly sank in. His expression turned quizzical, then curious, then his eyes widened and he smiled broadly.

“That is a very generous gift, Colonel.”

He paused, his eyebrows rounded in to question marks.

“When Hans Wolfe dies,” said Ingersoll, “the wine will be delivered to you.”

Hitler clenched his fists to his chest. H is expression was one of pure joy.

“So you agree then?”

“Yes,” Ingersoll said, rising to his feet, “I would be honored to become
Siebenundzwanzig.”

“I am sure that was a difficult decision for you.”

“Yes. And there is something else that is difficult.”

“What might that be?” Hitler asked.

“There are two problems we must deal with,” Ingersoll said and calmly explained what they were.

Hitler did not flinch. His expressi
o
n did not change.

“You shall learn,” he said to the actor, “those are the kinds of problems we deal with extremely well.”

Their eyes met and slowly, very slowly, Johann Ingersoll raised his hand in the Nazi salute.

Adolf Hitler saluted back and smiled.