Upton Sinclair - Dragons’s teeth

Lanny drove his friend out to Dachau to study the lay of the land. He pointed out the spot where the prisoner was to be delivered, and made certain that Jerry knew the street names and landmarks. It was the Kansan’s intention to "scout around," so he said; he would find a place from which he could watch the spot and see that everything went off according to schedule. Hugo would be doing the same thing, and Lanny wasn’t at liberty to tell Jerry about Hugo or Hugo about Jerry. It sufficed to warn his friend that there would be a Nazi officer watching, and -Jerry said: "I’ll watch him, too!"

One serious difficulty, so far as concerned the ex-tutor, and that was, he knew only a few words of German. He said: "Tell me, how do you say: Hands up! ?"

Lanny answered: "What are you thinking about, idiot? Have you got a gun?"

"Who? Me? Who ever heard of me carrying a gun?" This from one who had been all through the Meuse-Argonne in the autumn of 1918!

"You mustn’t try any rough stuff, Jerry. Remember, murder is an extraditable offense."

"Sure, I know," responded the other. "They extradited a couple of million of us. You remember, the A.E.F., the American Extraditable Force!" It was the old doughboy spirit.

Lanny knew that Jerry owned a Budd automatic, and it was likely he had brought it along with him in the truck. But he wouldn’t say any more about it; he just wanted to learn to say: "Hande hoch!"

They studied the map. They would drive north out of Dachau, then make a circle and head south, skirt the city of Munich and streak for the border. When they had got the maps fixed in mind, they went over the streets of Dachau, noting the landmarks, so as to make no mistake in the dark. All this done, they drove back to Munich and had a late supper in a quiet tavern, and then Jerry went to his hotel. There were a few things he didn’t want to leave behind, and one or two letters he wanted to destroy. "I didn’t know I was embarking upon a criminal career," he said, with a grin.

At the proper hour he met his pal on the street and was motored out to Dachau and dropped there. It was dark by then, a lovely summer evening, and the people of this workingclass district were sitting in front of their homes. Lanny said: "You’ll have to keep moving so as not to attract attention. See you later, old scout!" He spoke with assurance, but didn’t feel it inside!

Back in Munich, the playboy drove past the spot where he was accustomed to meet Hugo, in front of a tobacco shop on a well-frequented street. Darkness had fallen, but the street was lighted. Lanny didn’t see his friend, and knowing that he was ahead of time, drove slowly around the block. When he turned the corner again, he saw his friend not far ahead of him, walking toward the appointed spot.

There was a taxicab proceeding in the same direction, some thirty or forty feet behind Hugo, going slowly and without lights. Lanny waited for it to pass on; but the driver appeared to be looking for a street number. So Lanny went ahead of it and drew up by the curb, where Hugo saw him and started to join him. Lanny leaned over to open the door on the right side of the car; and at the same moment the taxicab stopped alongside Lanny’s car. Three men sprang out, wearing the black shirts and trousers and steel helmets of the Schutzstaffel. One of them stood staring at Lanny, while the other two darted behind Lanny’s car and confronted the young sports director in the act of putting his hand on the car door.

"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?