A Future Arrived (21 page)

Martin lit a cigar and settled back in the seat as the taxi crawled along Piccadilly in the afternoon traffic. He would be working for his uncle in a manner of speaking. The major stockholder in CBC and not a man to refrain from dipping his paddle in the stream whenever he felt like it—not that Martin had any qualms about that. Paul's advice had always been sound. He had not become one of the ten richest men in the United States because of poor judgment.

One of the ten richest men
. He drew idly on his cigar, thinking of Paul's success over the years. Luck, astuteness, and the ability to grasp opportunities when presented seemed to sum up the man's secret. They were, he thought, the very qualities his father had lacked. Not that he could recall his father with any great clarity. He had just turned eight when he had killed himself. There had been a faded tintype his father had kept in his Montmartre studio to remind him of Chicago. It had been taken some time in the early 1880s and had shown him with his brother and sister in front of their home on Prairie Avenue. Their lives were in their faces. Hanna doll pretty, a future fairy-tale countess even then. Paul tight lipped and heavy lidded, a young man who seemed to be weighing the contents of his purse, thinking of profit and loss, the Rilke breweries, and the rise and fall of the Chicago exchange. And there was his father, apart from the others, lounging against the porch steps with his indolent bohemian manners and mocking smile, looking as though he already knew he would be disowned one day, would fail as an artist and end in a pauper's grave—knowing it and not giving a hoot in hell.

T
HE GIANT BIPLANE
, an Armstrong Whitworth Argosy of Imperial Airways, lumbered down the runway at Croydon, gathered speed, and then, all three engines howling, rose smoothly into the still morning air—to the incredulous relief of at least one of its passengers.

“Oh, I say, sir,” Albert said in a choked voice. “We're off the ground.”

Martin, relaxed in the wicker chair beside him, lowered his newspaper. “We'll be at five thousand feet in a few minutes.”

“Five thousand? Crikey!” He pressed his face to the window's cool glass and looked down. The lower wing obscured some of his view, but he could see the Lilliputian roofs and roadways of southeast London and the emerging fields of Surrey. “How fast are we going, sir?”

“Fast enough. We'll be in Paris in two and a half hours.”

“Good Lord.” His breath left a patch of fog on the glass which he wiped away with the palm of his hand. An engine, suspended between the two wings, belched a brown stream of exhaust and occasional spurts of yellow flame. “Safe … I imagine.”

Martin smiled at him and raised his paper again. “Safe as a London bus. Settle back, Albert. The steward will be serving tea in a few minutes.”

Settle back!
Easy enough for him to say. Probably been up in an aeroplane dozens of times. Old hat. He stared down. A train was a toy so far below, trailing a painted plume of smoke. It was soon lost to view, sliding away behind them. A cathedral underneath now, the soaring spires puny and insignificant from this height. A cloud swept into the whirling blades of the propeller and obscured the window with gray vapor. He had always imagined clouds to be of greater substance.

Special assistant to Mr. Martin Rilke, CBC Radio (Europe)

When they arrived in Paris, Albert wrote that heading on the first page of a new notebook he purchased in a shop on the rue St. Lazare. He still could not quite believe it.
“Two pounds a week and found,”
Martin had said.
“And if that be nepotism, make the most of it.”

His duties were unclear. General errand boy and all around dogsbody. Every morning he picked up Martin's favorite cigars at the tobacconist across the street from the Opéra … sent messages through the
pneumatiques
… answered the telephone in their suite at the hotel … and traveled around Paris as Martin worked to hire a staff and find office space for the news bureau. Two hectic, exciting weeks and then, at the beginning of September, they went on to Berlin. Again by air, Le Bourget to Tempelhof in a Junkers trimotor. He was more blasé about it now and no longer awed by the misty fragility of clouds.

There were squads of police milling about outside the passenger terminal building at Tempelhof. From across the road flanking the airport greasy plumes of smoke rose above the flat roofs of dingy tenements. Albert was wide eyed.

“What do you think is happening, sir?”

“Street fighting, probably. Communists and Nazis.” He placed a reassuring hand on the boy's shoulder as they walked toward the terminal. “But you won't find it happening everywhere in Berlin. The street gangs stick close to certain districts, I understand—Neukölln, Wedding, Lichtenberg—places to stay away from. Some things never seem to change in this town.”

Wolf von Dix, a gray-haired, courtly man, was waiting for them when they cleared customs. A renowned correspondent for the
Frankfurter Zeitung
during the war, he had been for the past ten years Berlin bureau chief of Kingsford's INA.

“Welcome to the city of brotherly love,” he said with a wry smile. “Herr Goebbels printed an item in
Der Angriff
yesterday saying that Trotsky was flying in today from Norway to help the reds steal the election. Only an idiot would believe it … and a few hundred did. The Brownshirts went berserk.”

“Burning the buildings?” Martin asked.

“No … automobile tires. The clashes always look worse than they are.” He smiled at Albert. “And you, of course, are young Thaxton. Martin wrote me and said you wish to become a journalist. Is that so?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And that you speak German quite well—probably with a Chicago accent if he has been helping you. Kindly tell me about yourself … in German.”

Albert talked as they walked to Dix's car. The story of his life—dull as it was. He hoped he wasn't boring the man with tales of Morborne and its long history, of his successes there as captain of the eleven and of winning the Montaigne prize the past term for excellence in French.

“Your German is excellent, too,” Dix said as they drove from the airport. “It's obvious you have an ear for languages. I recall Morborne. Several of my students had gone there. I was a teacher of German at the University of London before the war … nineteen ten to nineteen fourteen. Ah, those were lovely years. I had a flat in Regent Square and I would sit in the garden on Sunday mornings and write my weekly articles for the
Frankfurter Zeitung
and the
Berliner Tageblatt
. I was a stringer for those papers. Do you know what a stringer is, young man?”

“A person who writes for a paper without actually being on salary?”

“That is correct. They paid enough for my articles to keep me in good English beer and roast beef with Yorkshire pudding!”

They drove toward the center of the city, through Neukölln and Kreuzberg, past endless rows of ugly brick tenement houses that had been designed, Dix explained to Albert, not by an architect but by Berlin's police chief in the middle of the nineteenth century. Dark, gloomy, fetid warrens. From windows overlooking the alleyways and sunless courtyards hung flags, red banners with hammer-and-sickle emblems or red flags with a white circle containing a black swastika.

“Enemies to the death,” Dix said, “but companions in misery.”

No misery was apparent on Wilhelmstrasse or Unter den Linden. The trees shimmered in the afternoon sun and the crowded cafés with their outdoor terraces were in dappled shadows. Dix pulled up his Benz touring car to the Adlon Hotel and a uniformed attendant hurried to open the doors.

“I'll just check in, Dix, and then we can go on to the office and have a talk. Would you like to come with us, Albert, or stay here? I won't be too long.”

“The INA office, sir?”

“Yes.” Martin smiled. “Your answer is in your face.”

T
HE
INA
OFFICES
occupied the entire second floor of a modern building in Neu Königstrasse. It was everything that Albert had imagined a newspaper office to be—not that INA was a newspaper, but it did supply news to papers all over the world. And not just from Germany. Outside of London, the Berlin bureau was the largest in Europe and drew its sources from Austria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Balkans, and Russia through its desk in Moscow. Banks of teletype machines chattered constantly, keeping two copyboys busy tearing off the sheets and rushing them to editors, reporters, and rewrite men. A dozen typewriters hammered away; men yelled over telephones or across the room at each other. Noise … a haze of tobacco smoke … shouts for a messenger to deliver copy to “Auntie Voss”—the
Vossische Zeitung
—the
Berliner Morgenpost
, or
Tageblatt
as the local deadline crept closer. Teletype operators tapped out the day's news onto the wires, sending it on to London, New York, Rio de Janeiro. It was a heady atmosphere to Albert. He stood out of the way as the chaos swirled around him. He wondered what momentous event had taken place in the world for there to be such frenzied activity. He could see Wolf von Dix through the glass walls of his office slouched in a chair, feet on desk, talking to Martin. No sense of excitement or urgency there. He took a deep breath for courage and tried out his German on a copyboy of about his own age who paused for a moment at a nearby water cooler.

“Did something important take place today?”

The lanky, red-haired boy shrugged. “Not that I know of. Just the usual stuff.”

“You mean it's always like this? Everyone in such a rush?”

“Sure … most of the time.” He was eyeing Albert curiously. “You talk funny. Do you come from East Prussia or some place like that?”

“I'm English.” He could feel his cheeks starting to burn. “I … I've only been studying German for a year.”

“A year! You have the gift then. I'm trying to learn English. I go to the English flicks once a month. How about this …
Tip top, old sport! Time for tea! Oh, rawther!
”

A man in shirtsleeves glanced up from his desk. “Get your thumb out of your butt, Kessler!”

“I'm Rudy,” he whispered before hurrying back to work.

Martin lit one of Dix's cigars, blew a stream of smoke, and scowled at the ceiling. “I was hoping you'd be my top man, Dix.”

“Sorry, Martin … old dogs and new tricks. Emil Zeitzler is the one for you. You remember him, don't you?”

“Of course. Helped me cover the Beer Hall Putsch. A damn good reporter. Is he still with INA?”

“He joined the
Stuttgart Tageblatt
a couple of years ago. He also does a news-and-interview show over Radio Stuttgart once a week that's become quite influential.”

“Influential in what way?”

“For moderation and political sanity. Emil hasn't changed. A good Social Democrat. He's the man you need to put a staff together. No doubt of it.”

“I'll go and see him.”

“Yes, do that. I have his address.” He turned his head and glanced at Albert standing beyond the glass partition. “Your brother-in-law is a fine boy. Is he serious about his choice of career?”

“Seems to be.”

“Is he learning much with you?”

“At the moment, no. How to buy cigars and answer the phone.”

“Well, that's something. When does he go back to school?”

“End of the month. Why?”

“Because I could use him. Copyboy, general flunky. A few weeks in this office might alter his view of journalism.”

“No, Dix. Working for you would set it forever.”

E
MIL
Z
EITZLER HAD
changed little since Martin had last seen him in 1923. He was a thin, intense man of thirty and he peered thoughtfully at him through his thick glasses. “A most interesting proposal, but I must decline.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Dix may not have told you, but I am managing the reelection campaign of Otto Haushofer. Both the Communists and the Nazis would like his seat in the Reichstag so we are, as you Americans say, in a dogfight at the moment. I think he'll win, but it will be close. If it came out, only two weeks before the election, that I had taken a job with an American company … well, you know they would make hay out of it. Especially the Nazis. Goebbels would say that American money was pouring into the Haushofer campaign, that he was a tool of the Wall Street Jews.”

Martin laughed and poured himself another small glass of schnapps from the bottle on the table. “That's crazy.”

“Many things are crazy today, Martin. Ominous times.”

There was nothing ominous about where they were; a bright, sunny apartment in Stuttgart overlooking the Schillerplatz with a fine view of the castle. Emil's pretty wife, heavy with pregnancy, sat knitting in the parlor, keeping one eye on their two-year-old son who was playing with a wooden train on the carpet.

Martin sipped at his drink. “I'm a bit out of touch, I'm afraid. How do you view the election?”

“With dread. Bruening was foolish to talk the president into dissolving the Reichstag. He opened the door to the Nazis and reds. The Nazis only had twelve seats. The reds fifty-four. They're both bound to gain at the expense of the center.”