Atlantis and Other Places (46 page)

“Hello, Sergeant,” Brigadier Engelhardt replied in the forthright, manly way that made him so much admired—so much loved, it would not go too far to say—by his soldiers during the Great War. I still tried to think well of him, you see, even though he had thwarted my will before. He returned my salute with grave military courtesy, and then inquired, “But what is all this in aid of?”

Having only just arrived, he would not yet have seen whatever denunciation that swine-fat fool of a sergeant had written out against me. I had to strike while the sun was hot. “I believe I have run this polecat of a Doriot to earth, sir,” I said, “and now I need the Feldgendarmerie to help me make the pinch.”

“Well, well,” he said. “This is news indeed, Ade. Why don’t you come into my office and tell me all about it?”

“Yes, sir!” I said. Everything was right with the world again. Far from being corrupt, the brigadier, as I have known since my days at the fighting front, is a man of honor and integrity. Once I explained the undoubted facts to him, how could he possibly fail to draw the same conclusions from them as I had myself? He could not. I was certain of it.

And, again without a doubt, he would at once have drawn those proper conclusions had he not chosen to look at the papers he found on his desk. I stood to attention while he flipped through them—and found, at the very top, the false, lying, and moronic accusations that that jackass of a local Feldgendarmerie sergeant had lodged against me. As he read this fantastic farrago of falsehoods, his eyebrows rose higher and higher. He clicked his tongue between his teeth—tch, tch, tch—the way a mother will when confronting a wayward child.

“Well, well, Ade,” he said when at last he had gone through the whole sordid pack of lies—for such it had to be, when it was aimed against me and against the manifest truth. Brigadier Engelhardt sadly shook his head. “Well, well,” he repeated. “You have been a busy boy, haven’t you?”

“Sir, I have been doing my duty, as is expected and required of a soldier of the Kaiserreich,” I said stiffly.

“Do you think abusing your fellow soldiers for no good cause is part of this duty?” he asked, doing his best to sound severe.

“Sir, I do, when they refuse to do their duty,” I said, and the entire story of the previous evening poured from my lips. I utterly confuted and exploded and made into nothingness the absurd slanders that villain of a Feldwebel, that wolf in sheep’s clothing, that hidden enemy of the German Empire, spewed forth against me.

Brigadier Engelhardt seemed more than a little surprised at my vehemence. “You are very sure,” he remarks.

“As sure as of my hope of heaven, sir,” I reply.

“And yet,” says he, “your evidence for what you believe strikes me as being on the flimsy side. Why should we lay on so many men for what looks likely to prove a false alarm? Answer me that, if you please.”

“Sir,” I say, “why did the Feldgendarmerie bring me here to Lille, if not to solve a problem the local men had proved themselves incapable of dealing with? Here now I have the answer, I have the problem as good as solved, and what do I find? That no one—no one, not even you, sir!—will take me seriously. I might as well have stayed in Munich, where I could have visited my lovely and charming niece.” You see, my darling, even in my service to the kingdom you are always uppermost in my mind.

Brigadier Engelhardt frowns like a schoolmaster when you give him an answer he does not expect. It may be a right answer—if you are clever enough to think of an answer the schoolmaster does not expect, it probably will be a right answer, as mine was obviously right here—but he has to pause to take it in. Sometimes he will beat you merely for having the nerve to think better and more quickly than he can. Brigadier Engelhardt, I will say, has not been one of that sort.

At last, he says, “But Ade, do you not see? No one has spoken Doriot’s name. You do not know that he will be at Madame Léa’s.”

“I know there will be some sort of subversion there,” I say. “And with Doriot in the city to spread his Red filth, what else could it be?”

“Practically anything,” he replies. “Lille is not a town that loves the German Empire. It never has been. It never will be.”

“It is Doriot!” I say—loudly. “It must be Doriot!” I lean forward. I pound my fist on the desk. His papers jump. So does a vase holding a single red rose.

Brigadier Engelhardt catches it before it tips over. He looks at me for a long time. Then he says, “You go too far, Sergeant. You go much too far, as a matter of fact.”

I say nothing. He wants me to say I am sorry. I am not sorry. I am right. I know I am right. My spirit is full of certainty.

He drums his fingers on the desktop. Another pause follows. He sighs. “All right, Ade,” he says. “I will give you exactly what you say you want.”

I spring to my feet! I salute! “Thank you, Brigadier! Hail victory!”

“Wait.” He is dark, brooding. He might almost be a Frenchman, all so-called intellect, and not a proper German, a man of will, of action, of deed, at all. He points a finger at me. “I will give you exactly what you say you want,” he repeats. “You can take these men to this fortune-teller’s place. If you bring back Jacques Doriot, well and good. If you do not bring back Jacques Doriot . . . If you do not bring him back, I will make you very, very sorry for the trouble you have caused here. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir!” This is it! Victory or death! With my shield or on it!

“Do you wish to change your mind?”

“No, sir! Not in the slightest!” I fear nothing. My heart is firm. It pounds only with eagerness to vanquish the foes of the Reich, the foes of the Kaiser. Not a trace of fear. Nowhere at all a trace of fear, I swear it. Into battle I shall go.

He sighs again. “Very well. Dismissed, Feldwebel.”

Now I have merely to wait until the evening, to prepare the Feldgendarmerie men who shall surround Madame Léa’s establishment, and then to—to net my fish! You shall see. By this time tomorrow, Doriot will be in my pocket and I will be a famous man, or as famous as a man whose work must necessarily for the most part be done in secret can become.

And once I am famous, what shall I do? Why, come home to my family—most especially to my loving and beloved niece!—and celebrate just as I hope. You are the perfect one to give a proper Hail victory! for your proud, your stern, your resolute—

 

 

Hail victory! I kiss you and caress you here in my mind, as I bask in the triumph of my will! Strength and success, as I have always said, lie not in defense but in attack. Just as a hundred fools cannot replace a wise man, a heroic decision like mine will never come from a hundred cowards. If a plan is right in itself, and if thus armed it sets out on struggle in this world, it is invincible. Every persecution will only make it stronger. So it is with me today.

After fifteen years of the work I have accomplished, as a common German soldier and merely with my fanatical willpower, I achieved last night a victory that confounded not only my superiors who summoned me to Lille but also the arrogant little manikins who, because they did not know what I could do or with whom they were dealing, anticipated my failure. All of them are today laughing out of the other side of their mouths, and you had best believe it!

Let me tell you exactly how it happened.

That fat and revolting sergeant had finally reached his post when I came out of Brigadier Engelhardt’s office. Laughing in my face, the swine, he says, “I bet the commandant told you where to head in—and just what you deserve, too.”

“Not me,” I say. “The raid is on for tonight. I am in charge of it. After that, we’ll see who gloats.”

He gaped at me, gross and disgustingly foolish. Such Untermenschen, even though allegedly German, are worse foes to the Kaiserreich than the French, perhaps even worse than the Jews themselves. They show the Volk can also poison itself and drown in a sewer tide of mediocrity. But I will not let that happen. I will not! It must not!

Would you believe it, that lumpen-sergeant had the infernal and damnable gall to ask Brigadier Engelhardt—Brigadier Engelhardt, whom I protected with my own body during the war!—if I was telling the truth. That shameless badger!

He came back looking crestfallen and exultant at the same time. “All right—we’ll play your stupid game,” says he. “We’ll play it—and then you’ll get it in the neck. Don’t come crying to me afterwards, either. It’ll do you no good.”

“Just do your job,” I say. “That’s all I want from you. Just do your job.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he says gruffly. As though he hadn’t given me cause enough for worry, God knows. But I only nodded. I would give him and his men the necessary orders. They had but to obey me. If they did as I commanded, all would be well. I could not be everywhere at once, however much I wanted to. I had discovered the foul Red plot; others would have to help snuff it out.

When the time came that evening, I set out for Madame Léa’s. The Lille Feldgendarmerie would follow, I hoped not too noisily and not too obviously. That stinking sergeant could ruin the game simply by letting the vile Marxist conspirators spot him. I hoped he would not, but he could—and, because he was so disgustingly round, there was a great deal of him to spot.

The church of Sts. Peter and Paul is lackluster architecturally, the house Madame Léa infests even more so. A sign in her window announced her as a LISEUSE DE PEN-SÉE, a thought-reader—and, for the benefit of German troops benighted enough to seek out her services, also as a WAHRSAGERIN, a lady soothsayer. Lies! Foolishness! To say nothing of espionage and treason!

I knocked on the door. A challenge from within: “Who are you? What do you want?”

“I’m here for the lecture,” I answered.

“You sound funny,” said the man behind the door—my accent proved a problem, as it does too often in France.

“I’m from Antwerp,” I said, as I had at the pigeon-fanciers’ clubs.

And then Lady Luck, who watched out for me on the battlefields of the war, reached out to protect me once again. If one’s destiny is to save the beloved Fatherland, one will not be allowed to fail. I was starting to explain how I had heard of the lecture at La Societé colombophile lilloise when one of the men with whom I had spoken there came up and said, “This Koppensteiner fellow’s all right. Knows his pigeons, he does. And if you think the Boches don’t screw over the Flemings, too, you’re daft.”

That got them to open the door for me. I doffed my cap to the man who had vouched for me. “Merci beaucoup,” I said, resolving to thank him as he truly deserved once he was under arrest. But that could—would have to—wait.

To my disappointment, I did not see Madame Léa there. Well, no matter. We can round her up in due course. But let me go on with the story. Her living room, where I suppose she normally spins her web of falsehood and deceit, is quite large. The wages of sin may be death, but the wages of deceit, by all appearances, are very good. Twenty, perhaps even thirty, folding chairs of cheap manufacture—without a doubt produced in factories run by pestilential Jews, who care only for profit, not for quality—had been crammed into it for the evening’s festivities. About half were taken when I came in.

And there, by the far wall, under a dingy print of a painting I suppose intended to be occult, stood Jacques Doriot. I recognized him immediately, from the photographs on file with the Feldgendarmerie. He is a Frenchman of the worst racial type, squat and swarthy, with thick spectacles perched on a pointed nose. His hair is crisp and curly and black, and shines with some strong-smelling grease I noticed from halfway across the room. I was right all along, you see. I had known it, and now I had proof. I wanted to shout for joy, but knew I had to keep silent.

Several men, some of whom I had seen at one pigeon-fanciers’ club or another, went up to chat with him. I marked them in particular: they were likely to be the most dangerous customers in the room. Doriot took no special notice, though, of those who hung back, of whom I was one. Why should he have? Not everyone is a leader. Most men would sooner go behind, like so many sheep. It is true even amongst us Germans—how much more so amongst the mongrelized, degenerate French!

More would-be rebels and traitors continued to come in, until the place was full. We all squeezed together, tight as sardines in a tin. One of the local men did not sit down right away. He said, “Here is Comrade Jacques, who will speak of some ways to get our own back against the Boches.”

“Thank you, my friend,” Doriot said, and his voice startled me. By his looks, he seemed a typical French ball of suet, and I had expected nothing much from him as a speaker. But as soon as he went on, “We can lick these German bastards,” I understood exactly why he has caused the Kaiserreich so much trouble over the years. Not only are his tones deep and resonant, demanding and deserving of attention, but he has the common touch that distinguishes the politician from the theoretician.