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!
III
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?
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.
IV
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.
V
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.
VI
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
