The Hunt

“How interesting,” von Meister answered. “Neither do I.”

“Christ, you’re an educated man, von Meister. Can’t you see what’s happening to your country? Don’t you have any conscience?”

Von Meister stared at him. “Hitler is my conscience,” he said.

He turned to return to the bar. “Bon soir,” he said without turning back. “Give my regards to Herr Keegan and his deutsche lady friend.” He lifted his glass in a mock toast.

Rudman was deeply disturbed by the conversation. His mind was in a perpetual whirl, trying to sort out all the dichotomies of the German situation. He had spent fifteen years off and on in Germany and he thought he knew the people. But the reaction of Germans to the startling rise of Hitler from jailbird to absolute dictator of the country astounded him.

He turned back to his ledger and wrote:

“How could the Germans let this happen? How could they simply give up freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom from search and seizure?

“The German people are virtually prisoners in their own country. They are choked by censorship and rampant police excesses. Their literacy and taste are controlled by creative illiterates. Goebbels and his henchmen, supported by religious opportunists, have stripped the libraries of the great books—Kipling, Mark Twain, Dante, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Freud, Proust, Thomas Mann, the list is endless—which they have deemed degenerate, and the museums of the depraved paintings of Van Gogh, Picasso, Modigliani, Gauguin, Degas and dozens more.

“How can they abide the destruction of the Constitution by judges who are political henchmen, who make their decisions, not on the basis of morality or justice, but simply to appease Hitler and his mob. Legalize sterilization? Legalize lobotomy? These men are judges! They legalize everything he does. My God, what crimes are justified in the name of Justice!

“How can a whole nation of basically decent people turn its collective face away from the wholesale robbery, assault and murder of Jews and political dissidents? Good God, these things are not subtle! It takes an effort to look the other way!

“How, indeed?

“Perhaps if we learn the answer to that question, we can prevent such a human tragedy from ever happening again.

“But I doubt that we will.

“We never seem to learn.”

A few minutes later Keegan and Jenny came in with their arms wrapped around each other, laughing as usual. He closed the ledger.

“What was it tonight?” Rudman asked, gathering up his papers and putting them in a leather portfolio.

“Le Casino de Paris,” she said, her words rushing together with excitement. “We saw the Dolly Sisters and the Duke of Windsor and Maurice Chevalier and, who was the fighter, Francis?”

“Jack Sharkey,” he answered and rolled his eyes. “He’s only the ex-heavyweight champion of the world.”

“Another memorable night, eh?” Rudman asked.

“Oh yes,” she said, wrapping her arms in Keegan’s. “Every night is memorable.”

The memory of Wilhelm Vierhaus’s first day in school sometimes intruded on his thoughts without warning, subconsciously triggered by some real or imagined look or word. When that happened, Vierhaus was overwhelmed with awesome fury, made more terrifying by his cold control of his emotions. The object of that fury was always David Kravitz.

He had led a rather sheltered life until that day, his deformity accepted and ignored by family and friends. Although he was aware that the ugly lump of muscle on his shoulder made him different from others, he was not yet aware of how cruel children can be.

The initial offender was David Kravitz, whose family was rich and influential, and who was a kind of self- appointed class leader. It became quickly apparent to Kravitz, an excellent student, that Vierhaus represented a threat. The deformed boy was brilliant, quick to raise his hand in class, always prepared. So David Kravitz set out to demean and discredit Vierhaus, whom he called the “new boy with the mountain on his back.” He implied that the deformity was really the result of some dark and horrible genetic secret, carefully guarded 1y the family. He had once spread the story that Vierhaus, actually an only child, had a sister who was so deformed she was kept in a closet. The other children quickly joined in the conspiracy.

Kravitz was the first person Vierhaus had truly hated and that hatred quickly spread to include all Jews. He reveled in the lies and rumors which the racists spread about them and when Vierhaus read Mein Kampf its racial distortions had fired that hatred. It became his Talmud, his Bible, the Psalms that motivated him. Hitler was God, Jews were the Devil and blood was the holy water of life, to be purified, cleansed, Aryanized for the glory of the Third Reich. He was the perfect Nazi, an intelligent, dedicated man whose blind hatred had replaced moral conviction and whose racism was so vile it was akin to a perverted religious fanaticism in which humiliation, treachery, torture and murder were the rituals.

Vierhaus understood the irony of the fact that he depended so completely on Jews to carry out one of his most important assignments. And so he smiled as he watched through a slit in the door to his sitting room, as Herman Adler was ushered into his office. He checked his watch. He would let him wait for ten minutes. Ten minutes alone in that foreboding room with only paranoia for a companion, what a delicious thought.

Herman Adler sat on the edge of his chair with his satchel clutched against his chest as if he were afraid it would fly away. The room was dark except for two overhead lights, one beaming down on the desk, the other on Adler. The top of the oak desk was empty except for a writing blotter, a telephone and an ashtray. The rest of the office was dark but before Adler’s eyes became accustomed to the deep shadows, the door opened and Vierhaus entered the room, walking with a kind of shuffling gait, trying to minimize the hump on his back. He did not look at Adler. He sat down at his desk, slipped on a pair of glasses, opened a drawer and removed a file folder. He took out