Circles of Time (48 page)

W
HEN HE CAME
down to the lobby in the morning, he found that he had become, if not famous, at least better known. A smiling desk clerk presented him with a sheaf of cablegrams.

“The telegraph office says there are more to deliver, Herr Rilke.”

They were addressed care of Radio Berlin, but there was one from Kingsford that had come directly to the Bristol and was in his mail slot.

Wolf von Dix read the cablegram with amusement and then handed it back across his desk to Martin.

“I've seen him get carried away before. I wouldn't write too many checks on that raise or they'll bounce like rubber balls.”

“I think he's sincere this time. Anyway, raise or no raise, I'm inviting you and the staff for dinner tomorrow night—at Resi's.”

“Ah, Resi's. I'll have to sponge and press my dinner jacket.” Dix swung his chair to face the window and rested his feet on the sill. “When are you planning to go back to England?”

“Tuesday.”

“I think it would be better if you went down to Munich.”

“Why?”

“Because I believe, from information received from various sources, that a good story is brewing down there.”

“So? Send Kurt or Emil.”

“Emil's been in Munich for the past ten days. You'll find him at the Sternhotel in Goethestrasse.”

“Come on, Dix, I'm not a backup reporter. What's this about?”

“A contemplated revolt in Bavaria against the Republic. Nothing new in that, I'm sorry to say. Withdrawing from the reich is a Bavarian preoccupation. State Commissioner Kahr is toying with the delicious idea of becoming either a kingmaker and helping the Wittelsbachs regain the throne, or an Oliver Cromwell. He's hardly suited for either role. The point is, he's beginning to act as though a separate Bavaria is a fait accompli, which it isn't. Hitler and the Nazis are about as anxious to see a king on the throne as they would be to see Lenin. A God-awful stew is brewing down there, and your kinsman is salting the pot.”

“Werner?”

Dix popped his monocle out and held it to the light, squinting at the glass. “Herr Hitler and the National Socialists have made big strides since you were here in the spring. Enrollment has shot up to nearly thirty-five thousand and they have a private army of considerable size. The Storm Troops—well equipped with everything from steel helmets and machine guns to trucks. Supplying an army, paying and feeding the men, that takes money; but then, Werner von Rilke has the money, so there is little problem on that score.”

“Is that proven fact, Dix?”

“He's quite open about it.
Recklessly
open, I would say. Friday's edition of the
Munchener Zeitung
is a case in point. He wrote a long article which you will find revealing. You can read it on the train.”

Martin helped himself to one of the editor's cigars and toyed with the ornate band. “There's hardly a state in Germany that doesn't have putsch fever. When the mark's stabilized, most of the intrigues will blow over.”

“Not this one. Emil was able to get through on the telephone this morning. He said that things are heating up, not cooling down. The thinking among all the factions in Munich—the Nazis as well as the royalists—is that they'd better do something before the rentenmark turns from theory to fact. Strike while the iron's hot. The mark slumped a great deal overnight. It reached a
trillion
to the American dollar.”

“They breed in chaos, these people, don't they?”

“Yes, Martin. Turmoil is their life's blood.”

The train rumbled out of Berlin in the dusk on the long run to the south. An old engine and dilapidated carriages, the overhead light so weak that Martin could barely read the newspaper Dix had handed to him. He didn't have to read all of Werner's article. The opening words set a strident, almost hysterical tone:
Deutschland Erwache! …

Germany Awake
had been written on the swastika flags. The article called for the people of Bavaria to throw their loyalty to Herr Hitler, who had the vision—and the will—to lead Germany to greatness and power.

He folded the paper into a ball and shoved it under the seat. Through the frosted window he could see the blistered slums of the city, unlighted windows and broken glass. It would be a harsh winter.

He thought of Werner as the train rattled and swayed across Brandenburg toward Leipzig and the mountains beyond. Was he going to Munich because Dix had assured him it was a good story, or was he going with some notion that he could stop Werner from plunging any deeper into the politics of discord? A combination of both, he decided, thinking not only of Werner but of Carin and the two little boys. Blood was thicker than water. And yet he knew in his heart there was nothing he could say to Werner that would alter his fervid beliefs. Drawing his overcoat tighter around his body, he curled up on the seat and closed his eyes.

E
MIL
Z
EITZLER HAD
received a telegram from the Berlin office and was waiting at the station when Martin arrived. He had been waiting for hours and looked drawn and cold, but he could still manage a smile as he watched Martin walk wearily through the frigid station toward him.

“A terrible trip, Herr Rilke?”

Martin gave the young man a baleful look. “Grim is the word, Emil. I never thought we'd get here. It was nice of you to meet me, but I could have found my way to the hotel.”

He took Martin's suitcase and led him toward a side exit into a narrow street choked with wagons and trucks. It was bitterly cold with a fine sleet swirling in the wind.

“I left the Sternhotel quickly this morning, Herr Rilke. I believe I was being watched.”

“By whom?”

“I can't say for sure. Two men. I think they were possibly separatists from Dr. Kahr's faction. The rumor I heard was that—but let's find a taxi and go someplace warm. I know a quiet little restaurant in Schwabing where we can talk in peace. A Chinese artist owns the place and the customers have no interest in politics.”

They ate rice and tiny rolls of chicken wrapped in paper and dipped in a sauce of soy and sherry. There were only a few other people in the restaurant, a group of artists arguing loudly over the merits of Dadaism.

“Kahr, General Lossow, and Hans Seisser of the Bavarian State Police have called a mass meeting for tomorrow night at the Bürgerbräukeller, on the other side of the river. I'm sure they intend to declare Bavarian independence—or at least the need for independence. Whether they'll propose restoring the monarchy is anyone's guess. Anyway, they're so touchy about it that there's talk of them placing foreign journalists under house arrest until after the meeting. And by ‘foreign' I mean any journalist not on a Munich paper.”

“Does Hitler go along with this plan?”

Emil shook his head and lifted a chopstick of rice. “God, no. He has more ambition than that. If Kahr succeeds, the Nazis are finished here. And the one thing Hitler would hate to see is an idiot like Crown Prince Rupprecht mounting the throne. He wants Bavaria to move forward, not backward. That's one of the things the Storm Troops have been shouting in the streets for the past week: Forward! Forward! The great example of boldness they keep referring to is Mussolini's march on Rome last October.”

“Do you get the impression Hitler's thinking of stealing a page from the fascists and marching on Berlin?”

“I do—crazy as it sounds.”

“The army would have to fall into line behind him in order for that to succeed. What can you tell me about that possibility?”

“Remote to impossible. General Lossow can't even guarantee army support for Kahr, let alone for Hitler. He doesn't even have command of the army in Bavaria any longer. Another general's been sent down. I don't know his name. It's almost impossible to get any confirmed information in this city, Herr Rilke.”

“Well, Emil, we'll just have to use our own eyes. Do you know of a place we can spend the night? I don't want to risk missing that meeting tomorrow night.”

“I met a girl, Herr Rilke. She has a large apartment on the Shellingstrasse. Her parents are in Stuttgart and she can find plenty of room for us.”

Before going there, Martin placed a call from a kiosk to Bad Isar and finally, after many delays, was connected to Werner's villa. The servant who answered said, no, Herr Rilke was not at home. And, no, Frau Rilke was not at home either—she had left with the children for Salzburg.

He was grateful for that.

November 8 was a cold, wet day. Looking down from the apartment at the avenue below, Martin could sense nothing out of the ordinary. People went about their business. Traffic moved in a normal fashion in spite of the slippery streets. There were no demonstrations of any kind in view. Later in the afternoon, walking through the Odeonplatz, he was struck by the same sense of calm, unhurried behavior that was the stamp of this southern city. He saw no more than the usual number of police and none of Hitler's khaki-clad storm troopers with their swastika brassards.

“I get the feeling that absolutely nothing is taking place,” Martin said as he met Emil for supper in a café near the river.

“Which in itself is out of the ordinary, Herr Rilke. There have been demonstrations of one kind or another almost every day since I've been here.”

“Maybe they've burned themselves out.”

Emil scowled and stirred his coffee. “Or are preparing to pounce, Herr Rilke.”

There were at least three thousand people jammed into the cavernous beer hall by 7:30 that evening, almost all of them men. Emil had made contact with a waiter who had agreed, for three American dollars, to sneak them inside. He led them to a small table in the very back of the room near one of the urinals, a busy place on that night with the beer flowing. The acrid ammonia smell of urine was almost overwhelming.

“You should have given him more money,” Martin said.

“It was the best he could do for us,” Emil said, breathing through his mouth.

Martin noticed several men turning in their seats to look at him. My clothes, he thought, the English cut and cloth. Emil was aware of the attention also.

“We'd best order some beer, Herr Rilke. We'll be too conspicuous if we don't.”

The beer came in heavy stone mugs, and Martin, making sure that everyone in the immediate vicinity could hear him, complained bitterly in faultless German at having to pay two billion marks for two mugs of watery brew.

“You tell him!” a man shouted, leaning across his table toward Martin. “It's an outrage!”

There were speeches, difficult to hear. The clang of beer mugs; muted, rumbling conversation nearby; the very pall of tobacco smoke hanging in wreaths, obscured the droning words. Martin had not brought a notebook, as anyone seen jotting down things in a notebook at a political rally was more likely to be taken for a police spy than a reporter and run the risk of a well-aimed beer stein hurled at his head.

Gustav Ritter von Kahr was standing on the low stage, making a speech. The state commissioner for Bavaria spoke in such a toneless voice and rambled on for so long that his very banality brought a hush to the crowd, his phrases reducing even his most ardent supporters to a semistupor. Waiters scurried between the rows of benches and tables bringing mugs of beer; the smoke thickened below the rafters; and a river of men flowed back and forth between their seats and the urinals. After one hour, Kahr showed no sign of drawing his speech to a close. The atmosphere of boredom deepened. Martin looked at his watch: 8:35. The evening, he felt sure, was a total bust.

He sensed their presence before he saw them—a vague shuffling in the corridor behind him. At first he thought it was a scuffle in the urinal between drunken men, but the sound persisted. A steady thumping. Glancing over his shoulder he saw, through the smoke and haze, men in brown shirts and ski caps, heavy boots, swastika emblems around their left arms, hurrying into the hall in single file and spreading out around the walls.

Commissioner Kahr droned on, oblivious to the rising disturbance coming from the fringes of the huge hall. Martin stared at the storm troopers hurrying past him. A few old soldier faces, but most of them young, grim-faced, and pale. Four men, sweating heavily, carried in a machine gun and clamped it to a tripod in the passageway. A command was shouted and from all points of the Bürgerbräukeller came an ominous chanting, drowning the pathetic words of Gustav Ritter von Kahr forever …

Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Heil Hitler! Heil …

H
IS PRIMARY OBLIGATION
was to INA. To delay meant yesterday's news. He wrote the story quickly in the spacious lobby of the Kaiserhof Hotel, overlooking the Englischer Garten. Six hundred words. The hard core of facts. When he was finished, he handed the pages to Emil who raced off with them to the telegraph office.

And that was that. He felt deathly weary after so many hours without sleep, but was too keyed up to go in search of a bed. He drank some coffee, lit a cigar, and watched the crowd moving in and out of the hotel—mostly officers in the
Reichswehr
in rain-blackened field gray, or high-ranking officials of the state police in green uniforms. A squad of steel-helmeted regular army troops carried dismantled machine guns from the upper floor, their jackbooted progress down the red-carpeted stairway viewed with dismay by a frock-coated desk clerk.