Wenk was an official who had reached his thirty-eighth year in a peaceful and well-ordered career. During the war he had volunteered for the Flying Corps, because he had a love of sport and remembered the fascination which the element of danger had held for him in early youth. The experience had fired his imagination, and he returned to his career with more impetuous feelings than had been his when he quitted it. The lawsuit against the gamblers, and all he had learned in the course of it, had excited him considerably. He had gone at once to the head of the Police Department, had described what he had seen and experienced, and represented to him that this new disease must be combated if the whole body were not to be destroyed. As money lost its value and the necessities of life increased, the nation could do nothing but seek to augment its mass of paper currency by trying first one speculation and then another. The connection between supply and demand required both time and work before it could become normal again, and so by degrees it had come about that the pulsations of commercial life were regulated merely by chance.
The Minister smiled; he was new to his office. He said, “The nation is sound enough; you are a pessimist!”
But Wenk replied, “It is diseased and rotten! How can it be healthy, after such years and such a life?”
Then the Minister, who felt his position somewhat insecure and was willing to try anything that might lead to stability, yielded the point, and created a new post, which Wenk at once took over.
The erstwhile State Attorney and official was at once caught up in the vortex of his new office. He devoted all his time and energies to it. He did not establish himself in an armchair in a comfortable well-furnished room, but began to build up his position from the very bottom, became a police-spy and a detective, unwearied in his efforts to collect all the evidence he could lay his hands on. He did it all himself, and when he realized, as he soon did, the slight extent of his own powers when pitted against the widespread national vice, he conceived the idea of recruiting a guard and rallying force from the ranks of the victims.
Accordingly, he began with men whose wealth was not displayed in their houses, but who, through their connection with the social order which had come to grief, had been forced into the opposition, both as human beings and as politicians. He knew that none were more responsible for the existing state of affairs than these men, because, at a time when resistance was a necessity, they had been cowardly and kept out of the way. But he knew, too, that in them a new force of decision had come to birth, that they longed to make good where they had failed.
Above all, there were the rich young men without any profession. In the disorganization brought about in the country by the depreciation and disorder of the currency, they were unable to carry on life as before. Their society was permeated by the “new rich,” who made use of them because they allowed themselves to be made use of.
The State Attorney von Wenk had turned to his whilom comrades, from whom the divers duties of his office had long separated him, and the man whom he had first encountered and won over to his side was Karstens. It was from him that he had learned all the circumstances of Hull’s strange and suspicious gambling adventure. He compared Hull’s story with the other material which he had hastily collected. Fresh complaints were constantly being made about swindlers who worked so cleverly that no taint of suspicion could attach to them, yet who won so consistently that it was not conceivable that this could be merely luck. From some similarities in detail in the various stories Wenk was inclined to refer all these cases to a band of swindlers operating in concert, and he even had the idea that it might all be the work of one man. But this was hardly more than an impression. Hull’s experience was the strangest and most mysterious of all these cases, and it was fraught with the greatest danger, but Wenk had a notion that therein lay the solution to all the rest.
After Wenk’s departure, Hull held a long argument with himself. The uncompromising yet thoroughly courteous way in which Wenk had effected an entrance had made an impression upon him. He guessed what the official desired, for he himself was often dissatisfied with his way of living, although his love of ease usually made him drive such thoughts away.
Under ordinary circumstances he would have pursued his usual search for enjoyment without restraint or reflection, either until considerations of health had set a limit to his dissipations or until a marriage, either arranged or entered into voluntarily, had caused him to “range himself.”
Hull by no means approved of the course of affairs in Germany which had led to the Treaty of Versailles. He at once asked himself, “Where were you in 1918, when the retreat began? and earlier still, when it first began to be planned? Are not you, Hull, and all your kind, responsible for it?” … That was what Herr von Wenk’s words had implied.
But Hull found in himself no trace of such individuality as might have saved the situation, and he dismissed these ideas from his mind. He drove to see Cara Carozza and told her of Wenk’s visit.
“For God’s sake, don’t get us mixed up with your State Attorney, dear Eddie,” said she.
“But … but … do we cheat? Are we dishonest? Are we profiteers, or climbers? We merely keep ourselves going. What are you thinking about, darling?”
“Eddie, a game of cards in full swing—someone holding the bank—closed doors, and a State official looking on! That might prove a hanging matter!”
“But I promised him I would bring you!”
“More fool
