The Mammoth Book of Historical Crime Fiction

Lisalotte joined in, then a couple of people at Maccabee’s table. The grey-suited chairman stood up and rapped his gavel a couple of times, then realized it wasn’t going to work and started waving the gavel like a conductor’s baton. Now the whole room was singing. When the song ended, Jacob swung into “Kampflied der Nationalsozialisten”. The songs came to a roaring conclusion, followed by men jumping up at one table after another giving the stiff-armed salute and Sieg heil-ing.

Jacob sat down to a round of applause.

Rose Palmer leaned over and whispered in Winslow’s ear, “I thought he would try to make himself inconspicuous in the middle of all these Aryans.”

“Leave it to Jacob,” Winslow whispered back. “Right into the lion’s den, and challenge anybody to call him out on it!” He couldn’t help grinning.

Once the singing had died down, the diminutive, grey-suited chairman rapped his gavel again. “Ladies and Gentleman, Damen und Herren, Kameraden — ” a round of applause at the last word. He went on like that, mixing English and German, and all the while it was obvious that he was leading up to the boffo introduction of the special guest of the evening.

“But, first, a special treat!”

He reached under the speaker’s lectern and came up with something the size of a movie poster. He studied it himself. The side turned towards the audience was blank.

“In case any of you missed this recent newspaper, I want you all to see it.”

With a grin, he turned the poster towards the audience. It was a huge enlargement of the Mirror front page with the photo of the Essex Street synagogue, blown up and burning. He made a clucking sound with his tongue, the kind your mother does when you’re just mildly naughty. “Isn’t that a pity.”

The audience howled with laughter and applause.

“And now, Damen und Herren, the noble leader of our movement in Sudetenland, a comrade-in-arms in the great National Socialist revolutionary movement, the man who led our separated brethren from the false and artificial state of Czechoslovakia back into the welcoming embrace of the Fatherland. May I introduce to you — Herr Heinrich Konrad.” He hadn’t bothered to use Konrad’s nom de guerre.

Andy Winslow felt Rose Palmer grab his hand under the table. Her nails were sharp and her fingers were like ice. He returned the squeeze, heard her exhale a held-in breath.

No question, these guys went for drama; and give ’em credit, they did it well. Up to now the room had been filled with so much Gemutlichkeit you could choke on it. Now the atmosphere was completely changed. You’d think that Joe DiMaggio had just been introduced to a room full of rabid Yankee fans.

Where the heck had Konrad been? Maybe in a back-stage room, Winslow decided. Certainly not in the dining room. Now, as the chairman finished his introduction, the houselights snapped off and a spotlight blazed on. Striding from the rear of the room came Heinrich Konrad decked out in full Nazi regalia: swastika armband, jackboots and all. The spotlight followed him to the microphone, then dimmed a little as a second spot hit the oversized portrait of the Führer behind the podium.

Oh, he was good. The flashy uniform, the black hair in its widow’s peak, even the silver-rimmed specs to add just a touch of the intellectual, took away just a bit from the brute in the fancy get-up. The speech was the usual palaver that these gangsters had been peddling. Stuff about the master-race, the New World Order, the brilliance of the Führer, the greatness of the world’s most advanced civilization, the pinnacle of humankind in painting, music, poetry, industry, literature, blah-blah.

And then he got into the really nasty part. The part about the subhuman vermin who needed to be exterminated. Oh, the Jews. Of course he had it in for the Jews. But the Slavs were not far behind. Caligula Foxx would get a kick out of that. Surely he fell into that category.

Come to think of it, didn’t Konrad, too? Wasn’t he some kind of Czech by birth, same as Caligula Foxx? But, no, he was a German, a true Aryan. Too bad he wasn’t a blue-eyed blond, but then neither was the Führer, nicht wahr?

For a few minutes Andy Winslow felt himself caught up in the flow of Konrad’s words. The man’s English was fluent if lightly accented, and he painted pictures of a bright future of towering cities and glittering machines — and then he would leap back to his theme of racial purity, and armies marching like robots across a landscape.

They loved it. Oh, they loved it. Konrad could have been elected Mayor if he’d wanted. As soon as he finished, the boobs in the audience went nuts.

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