Tycoon (12 page)

He seized her at the door and kissed her before she was inside. The way she yielded to his kiss told him what her decision was.

“I love you, Connie.”

“I love you too, Jack.”

She let him undress her before he poured the Piper-Heidsieck. He was surprised. The body beneath the corset that confined and shaped her was fleshier than he had imagined. Her flesh was lush. Her breasts, belly, hips, and tush were generously rounded. She sat on the red plush couch, naked, and drank champagne from a water glass.

They did not speak. They had nothing to say. He saluted her with his glass. He bent forward to kiss her breasts. She winced when his tongue caressed her nipples. He drew as much of one breast into his mouth as he could and sucked on it gently. She gasped.

With his hands he urged her to spread her legs. He wet his fingers on her juices and stroked her clitoris. Connie shrieked.

He discovered to his surprise that Connie was hesitant about touching his penis. When he led her hand to it, she pulled back. This twenty-seven-year-old woman, mother of three, was acting like a virgin. With calm, quiet insistence he brought her hand to his inner thigh and tried to guide it to touch his penis.

She resisted. “That's a circumcised penis, isn't it? Does that make them bigger, Jack? Dan's is nothing like that. His is the only one I've ever seen, and it doesn't look anything like yours. Don't ask me to touch it.”

“For God's sake, Connie. You must have—”

“No,” she whispered. “Why would I . . . touch it?
He
manipulates
that.”

She was fascinated just the same. Finally she let him guide her hand to his cock, and she ran her fingers over his shaft from root to tip. She lifted his scrotum and discovered his testicles. Her eyes widened. She closed her hand around his penis and tightened her grip gently.

“Connie! Oh, God, Connie!”

He slipped his middle finger up and down inside her wet cleft, stimulating her clitoris.

She began to cry. “We're not supposed to—”

“Connie!”

“Either I'm committing a great sin,” she said hoarsely, “or a greater one has been committed against me.”

“Are you telling me you've never enjoyed it?”

She shook her head. “I'm not supposed to.”

“Bullshit,” said Jack. “Feel this!” He ran his finger around her clitoris.
“Feel it!”

“Oh . . . do it, Jack! Do it! Come inside me!”

He grabbed for a packaged condom and unwrapped it.

“No!”
she blurted. “I'll do it, but not with that! Not with that!”

He put the condom aside.

She turned over on her back, spread her legs, and whispered, “Trump my ace, partner.”

1938

O
N
M
ARCH
12
THE
G
ERMAN ARMY MARCHED INTO
A
USTRIA,
and Hitler proclaimed Austria a new province of the German Reich. On March 14 he was driven on a triumphal progress through the streets of Vienna.

On March 19, Curtis Frederick arrived in Vienna, where he witnessed the persecution of Jews. He saw Jewish businessmen scrubbing sidewalks and sweeping the gutters, and he learned from reliable sources that many Jews had disappeared into what the world had learned to call concentration camps. Curt reported none of this in the wires he sent to Boston. He knew the Germans read every wire that left Vienna, and he kept silent about the atrocities, lest they decide he was an enemy of the Reich. Others were doing that. He had another idea in mind.

He traveled to Berlin. There he contacted Ernst Bauer, a journalist he had known in the past who was now an undersecretary in the Ministry of Propaganda. He suggested to Bauer that Americans were interested in the
Reichskanzler
but knew almost nothing about him. He proposed an interview with the Chancellor, to be broadcast live to the United States.

After a few days Curt got his answer. Because of difficulties in translation and in scheduling, the Führer could not possibly sit down for an interview with Herr Frederick. He would, however,
consent to the broadcast to the United States of an interview he had recently given to a German journalist, for which the ministry would supply a translation.

Curt proposed that the interview be sent out over a powerful shortwave station operated by Norddeutsche Rundfunk. It would be picked up by a sophisticated shortwave receiving station on Cape Cod and sent by leased telephone lines to Boston and the other cities served by Lear Broadcasting.

The Ministry of Propaganda accepted that proposal, and Bauer delivered two big disks to the station. The broadcast began at two in the morning with a brief explanation by Curtis Frederick of how the event had been arranged. Then the interview began. At first the dialogue was in German, followed by the translation. After a while the translation became a voiceover, with the interpreter speaking in the foreground and the voice of Hitler in the background.

Curt suspected that the whole performance had been specifically made for this broadcast. The shortwave transmission distorted the voices slightly, but that served only to lend the broadcast unique drama. Hitler spoke in a quiet, persuasive voice.

The German consulate in New York wired Berlin within minutes after the interview was aired, saying that the program had been clearly heard in America and was a complete success. Fifteen newspapers editorialized to the effect that “When Herr Hitler is heard in person, his comments unfiltered by journalistic prejudices, he makes a case in which Americans can generally believe, though we might not be ready to accept every element of his reasoning.”

Now Curtis Frederick went to Ernst Bauer with another proposition. Why not do a live broadcast of one of the
Reichskanzler's
speeches? Most Americans would not be able to understand it until after it had been translated, but many Americans did understand German, and those who didn't would catch the tone of the oratory. To Curt's amazement, the Ministry of Propaganda agreed. Three weeks after the quiet-and-persuasive interview, Americans heard the German Führer haranguing a crowd in the Sportspalast. This was a very different Hitler, screaming into his microphones. Americans also heard thousands of his followers yelling “Heil!”

The Nazis seemed to have no idea they had been gulled. When Betsy arrived in Berlin to spend two weeks with Curt, Ernst Bauer invited the couple to a candlelight dinner in a private dining room at the Ministry of Propaganda. After the dinner, Bauer presented them with two autographed photographs of Adolf Hitler, one addressed to Curtis Frederick and one to Jack Lear. Apparently no one in Berlin guessed that Jack Lear was a Jew.

I
N
J
ULY
J
ACK RECEIVED WORD THAT A
L
OS
A
NGELES RADIO
station was for sale. He made his second flight to the West Coast, this time in a DC-3, and was so comfortable with the experience that he decided to fly back as well.

He could not buy the station because his brother, who had never before expressed any interest in radio, had bought it while Jack was en route. Robert's motive was all too obvious: over lunch with Jack and their father, Bob offered to sell him the station. Jack told him he'd paid far too much for it. For that reason as well as because he knew nothing about running a radio station, he would lose a lot of money on it.

Erich just shook his head as he watched Jack eat a shrimp cocktail and said he obviously didn't care
what
he ate.

Dinner that evening was far more pleasant. Jack had arranged a room-service dinner in his suite and had invited Mo Morris and his client Connie Lane—the Consetta Lazzara who had danced nude for him four years before. She was twenty now and was modestly successful in pictures. After dinner she told Jack she'd stay if he wanted her. He did.

On the return flight the airliner made an unscheduled landing at Omaha. The pilot explained that just to the east a line of thunderstorms extending hundreds of miles north and south had stalled instead of continuing to move east as expected. As the passengers waited uncomfortably in the airport terminal
building, from time to time the pilot visited them and explained what the storms were doing.

Jack was fascinated. He caught up with the pilot before he left the room and asked if he could talk to him.

“About what, sir?”

“About the weather. About how you know so much about the weather.”

“Well, sir, we have to know. We don't want to fly into dangerous conditions.”

“But how do you get the information? You seem to know exactly where the storms are and what they are doing. I own a string of radio stations, and I'd like to be able to give my listeners that kind of detailed weather information. All we get from the Weather Bureau is that it's going to be warmer or cooler and that it might rain or snow.”

“We couldn't fly with information no better than that,” the pilot replied. “Come with me, and I'll show you the operations room where we get our weather briefings.”

For the first time in his life, Jack saw a weather map. The young pilot explained to him the nature and significance of highs and lows, cold fronts and warm fronts. He pointed out isobars and isotherms and explained the other symbols on the map. A Teletype chattered, bringing in detailed weather reports from all over the nation.

“What's the
source
of all this information?”

“We do use the Weather Bureau reports. That's what's coming in on the Teletype. But the Bureau does not make complete forecasts, and a lot of their information is not current. There are weather instruments on every airport—barometers, thermometers, wind gauges—so we know what conditions are on every airport. Pilots and airlines share the information. If I hit turbulence I didn't expect or see a thunderstorm building where none was reported, I radio that information. Other pilots hear it. Of course, the boys here assemble as much information as they can get and draw these weather maps. If you know how to read them, you can pretty much figure out what the weather is going to do.”

Back in Boston, Jack checked with the newspapers. Not all of them bothered to publish weather information. Those that did ran only the general information that the Weather Bureau
provided. He went to the airport. There he found a weather station with even more detailed information than they'd had in Omaha.

He sent a memo ordering each of his station directors to visit his local airport, make a deal to get detailed weather information regularly, and broadcast the forecasts several times a day—in fact, every hour.

On September 20, the day before the century's most destructive hurricane struck New England and killed seven hundred people, the newspaper weather forecasts read, “Cooler, rainy tomorrow.” Only the Lear stations broadcast a warning of the powerful storm racing toward Connecticut and Massachusetts.

The Lear stations were the first to broadcast weather forecasts that predicted the temperature, the amount of rain that would fall, and the time of day it was most likely to occur. The forecasts often proved wrong and became the butt of jokes. Even so, other stations followed suit, and shortly the newspapers began to publish the same kind of forecasts.

J
ACK MET WITH
S
OLOMON
W
EISMAN IN A SMALL RESTAURANT
in Cambridge, a place frequented by members of the Harvard faculty. They sat in a booth of heavy dark wood with seats upholstered in red leather.

The owner of six shoe stores in the Boston area, Weisman was an active member of B'nai B'rith and was often its spokesman, He was a big, solidly built man, perhaps ten years older than Jack, whose black curly hair was beginning to thin out.

After they had saluted each other with their glasses and taken their first swallows of Scotch, Weisman spoke gravely to Jack. “Your grandfather Johann Lehrer was a professor of rational and revealed religion at the University of Berlin. He left Germany in 1888 because he didn't want to serve in the German army.”

“I know all that,” said Jack.

“Something you did not know, maybe, is that he had three brothers and a sister. None of them left Germany. You have an extended family of great-uncles, second cousins, and so on.”

“I do know, in part. My grandfather exchanged letters with some of them. I recall his saying he urged them to leave Germany. But they wouldn't. It was where they had their homes and businesses. Anyway, what are you driving at?”

Solomon Weisman smiled and nodded. “Let me come to that point by point,” he said. “Did you know that a second-cousin of yours was murdered on
Kristallnacht?”

“The Night of the Broken Glass. No—”

“Three other second cousins were arrested. We talk about people ‘disappearing.' Your three cousins have disappeared.”