"Take back America! Take back America! America for Americans!" the crowd screamed.
"I will name those I have selected as my lieutenants. They will stand as I call out their names.
"Goetz, Gunther.
"Schoener, Karl.
"Stahl, Ernst.
"Gans, Ilsa."
"Does this mean I get to run the White Aryan League Hour?" Ilsa whispered in his ear.
Konrad Blutsturz hushed her.
A man jurnped up from the audience. He spoke in a Texas drawl.
"Hey! How come none of us good ol' boys are gettin' to be lieutenants?"
Konrad Blutsturz fixed his bright black eyes upon the protester. This was the moment be had expected. The crucial moment where his leadership would be tested. "Your name?"
"Jimmy-Joe. Jimmy-Joe Bleeker."
"Are you sure?"
"Huh?"
"Are you sure your name is Bleeker, I asked."
"What else would it be']?" Jimmy-Joe Bleeker sneered, shoving his hands into the pockets of his loose-fitting jearis.
"Are you sure your name isn't , . . Smith?"
"Naw, it ain't Smith."
"You sound like a Smith," suggested Konrad Blutsturz.
"He even looks a little like a Smith," chimed in Ilsa. "Around the eyes. A little."
"I ain't no Smith," said Jimmy-Joe Bleeker. "Smiths are poison."
Konrad Blutsturz snaked out his left hand. It glittered under the light, deformed and shining.
"There are Smiths everywhere. They are serpents in our paradise, lying, scheming, twisting facts. You have criticized the White Aryan League of America. I declare you a secret Smith, and ask the crowd to pronounce your sentence."
The crowd hesitated. All knew Jimmy-Joe Bleeker. He was a regular, one of the first members.
"Death," said Ilsa, turning her thumbs down. To Konrad. she added, "Can I kill him?"
"Death!" said the crowd.
"Aryan lieutenants, take this man out to the center of the compound and have him shot. This vile Smith will be an example to all Smiths of what is caming. Vengeance!"
"Aryan vengeance." screamed the crowd, and dragging the man, they broke open the great auditorium doors.
Ilsa ran after them. "I want to watch." she said.
Left alone on the podium, Konrad Blutsturz finished his glass of water greedily. Public speaking always wore his throat raw. He did not understand how Hitler had done it. The water accidentally went down the wrong way and he started choking. When the raw coughing fit subsided, he thought he could again taste the smoke of that night in Japan, almost forty years ago.
When the crack of rifle fire echoed back into the vast hall, he vowed again that Harold Smith would pay for his deeds on that long-ago night.
Konrad Blutsturz lay dreaming.
He dreamed he lay in bed with the hands on the clock across from him reading three minutes to midnight, but that wasn't what brought the panicky sweat to his chest. Caught between the clock hands was a severed gangrenous greenish-blue male organ. It looked familiar. And when he felt the smoothness between his legs, he knew the organ was his own. Konrad Blutsturz fumbled desperately for the clock, but it was out of reach. He tried to climb out of bed, but found he had no legs.
And then, like slicing scissors, the minute hand clicked to two minutes to midnight.
Konrad Blutsturz snapped awake from his nap. A dream, it had been a dream. But looking down at himself, he knew it was not a dream.
Reaching for his wheelchair, he maneuvered himself into a sitting position, and with simian agility, fumbled on the bluntness of his lost legs into the wheelchair, where he buckled himself in.
Konrad Blutsturz sent the wheelchair over to the balcony of his bedroom, which overlooked the grounds of Fortress Purity, and considered how easy it had been.
Below, soldiers of the White Aryan League goosestepped in their brown uniforms. They were soldiers in name only. They were the malcontents of America, the unemployed and unemployable. They were men without hope or direction, who nursed smoldering resentments against life. Boyce Barlow had given them a place to hide from the world, but Boyce Barlow was gone.
Now, under the guidance of good German stock, they were being welded into killing teams to fight the race war they believed would inevitably come. But Konrad Blutsturz believed in no coming race war. He believed even less in the scarlet-and-white flag that flew from every building in Fortress Purity.
The Third Reich was long dead. 3t lived on only in the nostalgic memories of very old men, and the sons of those men, whom he had recruited to the White Aryan League of America. It lived, too, in the muddled thinking of the morbid young, like Ilsa, who even now was commanding a squad of men with the crackle and fire of a seasoned boot-camp instructor.
Good riddance to the Third Reich, thought Konrad Blutsturz. In his youth it had promised him so much, and cost him so dearly.
Konrad Blutsturz had come to the United States in 1937, a young man of nineteen. He had come with a mandate-organize the German element for the coming war. He had believed in it all then, believed in the myth of German superiority, believed in the great Jewish conspiracy, and he had believed in Hitler.
It was Hitler himself who had plucked Konrad Blutsturz from a Hitler Youth group and given him his mission. "Go to America. Succeed, and you will be the Regent of America when their government is overthrown," Hitler had told him.
It had seemed so grandiose, in those days. So possible. Konrad Blutsturz spat over the railing a great greenish glob of expectorate at the memory of his naivete. In America, Konrad Blutsturz formed the Nazi Alliance. He did not build Bund camps or make inflammatary public speeches. He could have duplicated Fritz Kuhn's 1936 Madison Square Garden rally of twenty-two thousand people-if he didn't care about the quality of those people.
But he did care. Konrad Blutsturz did not want quantity. He wanted quality. German-Americans in the days before World War Two were much more American than they were German, which is to say, they were anti-Nazi, but there were those who believed in the New Germany, and Konrad Blutsturz had sought them out and organized them. They existed as a provisional government in waiting, waiting for the fall of Europe.
But Europe never fell. And Konrad Blutsturz' contacts with Berlin, over shoutwave radio relayed from the German Legation in Mexico City, grew less and less frequent.
After Germany was defeated, Konrad Blutsturz fled to Mexico. And after the Allies discovered certain documents in Berlin, they sent OSS agents on his trail. His Nazi Alliance had been quietly rounded up.
Alone, unsupported, Konrad Blutsturz fled into South America, and from there he was spirited to Japan, where he had intended to offer his services to the emperor.
Then came Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was as if the mighty fist of the Allies was following him into hell itself.
And into that hell came Harold Smith.
Konrad Blutsturz blotted out the memory. He remembered it in his dreams often enough. It was too painful to relive in his waking hours. It was enough that he had survived the hell of Tokyo. It was enough that he had returned to America at last.
Konrad Blutsturz had known Hitler himself, personally. It was that brief relationship that seemed to compel those he met. It moved the Germans of Argentina and Paraguay, as if somehow Hitler lived on through this broken wreck of a Nazi dupe. It had moved Ilsa, the American girl who was no more German-really German-than Svlvester Stallone.
And it had moved Boyce Barlow and his White Aryan League of America, who were desperate for the American dream and were willing to accept a nightmare in its place--just as long as they could call that nightmare their own.