Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

“Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,” she whispered back. “Don’t you know anything?”

He recognized Otto von Bismarck from a herring-can in Reuter’s kitchen. The guy in the fancy uniform and trademark moustache was the old Kaiser, no question about that. And then there was the biggest portrait of them all. Der Führer.

Andy Winslow and Rose Palmer drifted from group to group. Rose drew more than her share of male attention and not a few suspicious glances from females. They kept well away from Jacob Maccabee and Lisalotte Schmidt. Jacob’s features might be a little too obvious in this crowd, Winslow mused, but he could handle himself.

Most of the men in the crowd — in fact, Winslow realized with a start, every one of them — wore unobtrusive pins on their lapels. They depicted an angry raptor not unlike the old NRA blue eagle. But, when Winslow got a closer look at one, he realized that instead of holding lightning bolts in one claw and a cogwheel in the other, the pins substituted a swastika for the cogwheel.

The symbol was everywhere. There was even a table near the door where a couple of functionaries proffered sign-up sheets to new arrivals, and sold eagle-and-swastika pins and lavallières . Andy bought a pin for himself and a lavallière for Rose. The insignia stood out against the tasteful lavender of her silk-covered torso. She leaned against Winslow and whispered in his ear as she lovingly attached the pin to his lapel. “If we ever get out of here alive I’m going to have to take twenty showers before I feel clean again.”

The chairman, a thin-faced, thin-haired individual, whose personality matched his slightly shabby grey suit, rapped for attention and asked everyone to take their places. He stood at a speaker’s lectern decorated with the eagle-and-swastika symbol. Andy and Rose found seats at a table far from the centre of action. Jacob Maccabee and Lisalotte Schmidt placed themselves near the head table.

They sang The Star-Spangled Banner and then Deutschland Über Alles. The chairman gave a half-embarrassed-looking Nazi salute and everyone sat down. A beefy individual at their table seemed determined to dominate the conversation. That was fine with Winslow. The beefy guy was an importer. All he could talk about was how great the newest Telefunken and Blaupunkt radios and phonographs were. He could get you a deal, he could get you a great deal on either brand. You’ve never heard anything like it. The music made you believe you were in the Berlin Opernhaus. Ach, Schumann, Von Suppe, Abel, Johann Sebastian Bach and all his sons, Praetorius, Gluck. And opera — why, you would think you were at Bayreuth in person! And did you know what was coming soon? Yes — he wasn’t supposed to tell you about this yet, it was very hush-hush, but … the German engineers under the inspired leadership of the Führer were developing television; yes, television, and soon you would be able to see great drama and important political rallies in your own home. Yes! It was true!

Winslow ate Kavalierspitz mit Sauerkraut und rote Kartoffel and drank a couple of glasses of zweigelt umathum . Rose Palmer nibbled at a frisée salad with a poached egg. The importer kept talking and Andy hung on every word, relieved not to have to say anything except for an occasional Ach, ja? or Nicht wahr , or Wunderschön!

They’d just started on coffee and Schnapps when someone stood up and started singing. Andy Winslow blinked in astonishment. It was Jacob Maccabee. He was swaying drunkenly, leaning on Lisalotte Schmidt’s shoulder, singing “ Es zittern die morschen Knocken ”.

Lisalotte joined in, then a couple of people at Maccabee’s table. The grey-suited chairman stood up and rapped his gavel a couple of times, then realized it wasn’t going to work and started waving the gavel like a conductor’s baton. Now the whole room was singing. When the song ended, Jacob swung into “ Kampflied der Nationalsozialisten ”. The songs came to a roaring conclusion, followed by men jumping up at one table after another giving the stiff-armed salute and Sieg heil -ing.

Jacob sat down to a round of applause.

Rose Palmer leaned over and whispered in Winslow’s ear, “I thought he would try to make himself inconspicuous in the middle of all these Aryans.”

“Leave it to Jacob,” Winslow whispered back. “Right into the lion’s den, and challenge anybody to call him out on it!” He couldn’t help grinning.

Once the singing had died down, the diminutive, grey-suited chairman rapped his gavel again. “Ladies and Gentleman, Damen und Herren, Kameraden — ” a round of applause at the last word. He went on like that, mixing English and German, and all the while it was obvious that he was leading up to the boffo introduction of the special guest of the evening.

“But, first, a special treat!”

He reached under the speaker’s lectern and came up with something the size of a movie poster. He studied it himself. The side turned towards the audience was blank.

“In case any of you missed this recent newspaper, I want you all to see it.”

With a grin, he turned the poster towards the audience. It was a huge enlargement of the Mirror front page with the photo of the Essex Street synagogue, blown up and burning. He made a clucking sound with his tongue, the kind your mother does when you’re just mildly naughty. “Isn’t that a pity.”

The audience howled with laughter and applause.

“And now, Damen und Herren , the noble leader of our movement in Sudetenland, a comrade-in-arms in the great National Socialist revolutionary movement, the man who led our separated brethren from the false and artificial state of Czechoslovakia back into the welcoming embrace of the Fatherland. May I introduce to you — Herr Heinrich Konrad.” He hadn’t bothered to use Konrad’s nom de guerre.

Andy Winslow felt Rose Palmer grab his hand under the table. Her nails were sharp and her fingers were like ice. He returned the squeeze, heard her exhale a held-in breath.

No question, these guys went for drama; and give ’em credit, they did it well. Up to now the room had been filled with so much Gemutlichkeit you could choke on it. Now the atmosphere was completely changed. You’d think that Joe DiMaggio had just been introduced to a room full of rabid Yankee fans.

Where the heck had Konrad been? Maybe in a back-stage room, Winslow decided. Certainly not in the dining room. Now, as the chairman finished his introduction, the houselights snapped off and a spotlight blazed on. Striding from the rear of the room came Heinrich Konrad decked out in full Nazi regalia: swastika armband, jackboots and all. The spotlight followed him to the microphone, then dimmed a little as a second spot hit the oversized portrait of the Führer behind the podium.

Oh, he was good. The flashy uniform, the black hair in its widow’s peak, even the silver-rimmed specs to add just a touch of the intellectual, took away just a bit from the brute in the fancy get-up. The speech was the usual palaver that these gangsters had been peddling. Stuff about the master-race, the New World Order, the brilliance of the Führer, the greatness of the world’s most advanced civilization, the pinnacle of humankind in painting, music, poetry, industry, literature, blah-blah.

And then he got into the really nasty part. The part about the subhuman vermin who needed to be exterminated. Oh, the Jews. Of course he had it in for the Jews. But the Slavs were not far behind. Caligula Foxx would get a kick out of that. Surely he fell into that category.

Come to think of it, didn’t Konrad, too? Wasn’t he some kind of Czech by birth, same as Caligula Foxx? But, no, he was a German, a true Aryan. Too bad he wasn’t a blue-eyed blond, but then neither was the Führer, nicht wahr?