Upton Sinclair - Dragons’s teeth

However, he didn’t have much time for speculation. "Get into the back seat," commanded the leader and climbed in beside him, still holding the gun on him. The man who had got out on Lanny’s side of the car now slipped into the driver’s seat, and the car sprang to life and sped down the street.

Lanny had seen Stadelheim from the outside; a great mass of buildings on a tree-lined avenue, the Tegernsee road upon which he had driven Hugo Behr. Now the walls of the place loomed enormous and forbidding in the darkness. Lanny was ordered out of the car, and two of his captors escorted him through the doorway, straight past the reception room, and down a stone corridor into a small room. He had expected to be "booked" and fingerprinted; but apparently this was to be dispensed with. They ordered him to take off his coat, trousers, and shoes, and proceeded to search him. "There is considerable money in that wallet," he said, and the leader replied, grimly: "We will take care of it." They took his watch, keys, fountain-pen, necktie, everything but his handkerchief. They searched the linings of his clothing, and looked carefully to see if there were any signs that the heels of his shoes might be removable.

Finally they told him to put his clothes on again. Lanny said: "Would you mind telling me what I am suspected of?" The reply of the leader was: "Maul halten!" Apparently they didn’t believe his wonder-tales about being the intimate friend of the three leading Nazis. Not wishing to get a knock over the head with a revolver butt, Lanny held his mouth, as ordered, and was escorted out of the room and down the corridor to a guarded steel door.

The head S.S. man appeared to have the run of the place; all he had to do was to salute and say: "Heil Hitler!" and all doors were swung open for him. He led the prisoner down a narrow flight of stone stairs, into a passage dimly lighted and lined with steel doors.

Old prisons have such places of darkness and silence, where deeds without a name have been done. A warder who accompanied the trio opened one of these doors, and Lanny was shoved in without a word. The door clanged behind him; and that, as he had learned to say in the land of his fathers, was that.

In the darkness he could only explore the place by groping. The cell was narrow and had an iron cot built into the stone wall. On the cot were two sacks of straw and a blanket. In the far corner was a stinking pail without a cover; and that was all. There was a vile, age-old odor, and no window; ventilation was provided by two openings in the solid door, one high and one low; they could be closed by sliding covers on the outside, but perhaps this would be done only if Lanny misbehaved. He didn’t.

He was permitted to sit on the straw sacks and think, and he did his best to quiet the tumult of his heart and use his reasoning powers. What had happened? It seemed obvious that his plot had been discovered. Had the would-be conspirators been caught, or had they taken the money and then reported the plot to their superiors? And if so, would they shoot Freddi? No use worrying about that now. Lanny couldn’t be of any use to Freddi unless he himself got out, so he had to put his mind on his own plight, and prepare for the examination which was bound sooner or later to come.

Hugo’s part in the jailbreak had evidently been betrayed; but Hugo had never named Lanny, so he had said. Of course this might or might not have been true. They had found a bunch of thousand-mark notes on Hugo, and they had found some on Lanny; suddenly the prisoner realized, with a near collapse of his insides, what a stupid thing he had done. The clue which a criminal always leaves! He had gone to the bank and got thirty new thousand-mark bills, doubtless having consecutive serial numbers, and had given some of these to Hugo and kept some in his own wallet!

So they would be sure that he had tried to buy a prisoner out of Dachau. What would the penalty be for that crime? What it would have been under the old regime was one thing, and under the Nazis something else again. As if to answer his question there came terrifying sounds, muffled yet unmistakable; first, a roll of drums, and then shooting somewhere in those dungeon depths or else outside the walls. Not a single shot, not a series of shots, but a volley, a closely-packed bunch of shots. They were executing somebody, or perhaps several bodies. Lanny, who had started to his feet, had to sit down again because his legs were giving way.

Who would that be? The S.A. man in Dachau with whom Hugo had been dealing? The man higher up who had demanded more money? The plot must have been betrayed early, for it couldn’t be much after ten o’clock, and there had hardly been time for the jailbreak to have been attempted and the guilty parties brought from Dachau to this prison. Of course it might be that this was some execution that had nothing to do with Dachau. Shootings were frequent in Nazi prisons, all refugees agreed. Perhaps they shot people every night at twenty-two o’clock, German time!

After the most careful thought, Lanny decided that the Nazis had him nailed down; no chance of wriggling out. He had come to Germany to get Freddi Robin, and the picture-dealing had been only a blind. He had had a truck brought from France—they would be sure he had meant to take Freddi out in that truck! And there was Jerry—with two one-thousand-mark bills which Lanny had handed him! Also with the passport of Cyprien Santoze, having the picture of Freddi Robin substituted! Would they catch the meaning of that?

Or would Jerry perhaps get away? He would be walking about, passing the appointed spot, waiting for the prisoner and for Lanny to appear. Would the Nazis be watching and arrest anybody who passed? It was an important question, for if Jerry escaped he’d surely go to the American consul and report Lanny as missing. Would he tell the consul the whole truth? He might or he might not; but anyhow the consul would be making inquiries as to the son of Budd Gunmakers.

More drum-rolls and more shooting! Good God, were they killing people all night in German prisons? Apparently so; for that was the way Lanny spent the night, listening to volleys, long or short, loud or dim. He couldn’t tell whether they were inside or out. Did they have a special execution chamber, or did they just shoot you anywhere you happened to be? And what did they do with all the blood? Lanny imagined that he smelled it, and the fumes of gunpowder; but maybe he was mistaken, for the stink of a rusty old slop-pail can be extremely pungent in a small cell. An art expert had seen many pictures of executions, ancient and modern, so he knew what to imagine. Sometimes they blindfolded the victims, sometimes they made them turn their backs, sometimes they just put an, automatic to the base of their skulls, the medulla; that was said to be merciful, and certainly it was quick. The Nazis cared nothing about mercy, but they surely did about speed.

Every now and then a door clanged, and Lanny thought: "They are taking somebody to his doom." Now and then he heard footsteps, and thought: "Are they coming or going?" He wondered about the bodies. Did they have stretchers? Or did they just drag them? He imagined that he heard dragging. Several times there were screams; and once a man going by his door, arguing, shouting protests. What was the matter with them? He was as good a Nazi as anyone in Germany. They were making a mistake. It was eine gottverdammte Schande— and so on. That gave Lanny something new to think about, and he sat for a long time motionless on his straw pallet, with his brain in a whirl.

Maybe all this hadn’t anything to do with Freddi and a jailbreak! Maybe nothing had been discovered at all! It was that "Second Revolution" that Hugo had been so freely predicting! Hugo had been shot, not because he had tried to bribe a Dachau guard, but because he was on the list of those who were actively working on behalf of Ernst Rohm and the other malcontents of the Sturmabteilung! In that case the shootings might be part of the putting down of that movement. It was significant that Lanny’s captors had been men of the Schutzstaffel, the "elite guard," Hitler’s own chosen ones. They were putting their rivals out of business; "liquidating" those who had been demanding more power for the S.A. Chief of Staff!