good is a deep-cover espionage agent when there's nothing to penetrate? Where would my lifestyle go? The unlimited expense accounts, the limousines, the extravagant resorts? Remember the Black Sea and Sevastopol? My God, we had fun, and I stole two hundred thousand, American, for the operation!"
"I was talking about the 'cause," Frederik, what about the cause?"
"I've come to believe in it with all my being. In the beginning, others wrote my speeches for the movement.
Now I write them all, compose them all, for they are like short heroic operas, bringing those who see and listen to their feet, their voices ringing with my praises, honoring me, holding me in adoration as I hold them enthralled!"
"How did it start .. . Freddie?"
"Freddie-that's better. Would you really like to know?"
"Didn't I always want to hear about your missions? Remember how we sometimes laughed?"
"Yes, that part of you was all right, not like the bitch whore you were most of the time."
"What .. . ?" Immediately Karin lowered her voice.
"I'm sorry, Freddie, truly sorry. You went to East Berlin, that's the last word we had of you, any of us. Until we read that you'd been executed."
"I wrote that report myself, you know. Rather sensational, wasn't it?"
"It certainly was graphic."
"Fine writing's like great speaking, and great speaking's like fine writing. You've got to create instant images to capture the minds of those reading or listening. Capture them immediately with fire and lightning!"
"East Berlin .. .
"Yes, that's where it began. Certain of the Stasi had ties with Munich, especially with a provisional general of the Nazi movement.
They recognized my abilities, and my God, why not? I'd made fools of them too often! After the official leaders I dealt with retrieved my diamonds in Amsterdam and set me free, several came to me and said they might have work for me. East Germany was collapsing, the entire Soviet Union soon to follow-everyone knew it. They flew me to Munich and I met with this general, von Schnabe. He was an man, even perhaps a visionary but he was basically a martinet, a harsh bureaucrat. He lacked the fire to be a leader. However, he had a concept, a concept he was progressively turning into reality. It could ultimately change the face of Germany."
"Change the face of Germany?" said Karin incredulously.
"How could an obscure, unknown general of a despised radical movement be capable of such a thing?"
"By infiltrating the Bundestag, and infiltration was something I knew a great deal about."
"That doesn't answer my question .. . Freddie."
"Freddie-I like that. We had good times for a number of e 'fe." Gunter j5ger's voice still seemed to y ars, my
WI I
come from nowhere and everywhere in the darkness of the room, the source further obscured by the pounding rain against the shaded windows and the roof.
"To answer your question. To infiltrate the Bundestag, the right people simply have to be elected.
The general, with the help of Hans Traupman, scoured the country for talented but discontented men, placed them in distressed economic districts, fed them 'solutions," and funded their campaigns beyond anything their opponents could match. Would you believe we have over a hundred members in the Bundestag at this moment?"
"You were one of those men .. . my husband?"
"I was the most extraordinary, my wife! I was given a new name, a new biography, a completely new life. I became Gunter jdger, a parish clergyman from a small village in Kuhhorst, moved by the church authorities to Strasslach, outside Munich. I left the church, fighting for what I called the disenfranchised middle class, the burghers who were the backbone of the nation. I won my seat in a landslide, as they say, and while I was campaigning, Hans Traupman watched me, and made his decision. I was the man the movement needed. I tell you, whore-wife, it is fantastic! They've made me emperor, king, the ruler of all we espouse, the Fzihrer of the Fourth Reich!"
"And you accept it, Freddie?"
"Why not? It's the extension of everything I practiced in the past.
The persuasiveness I exhibited while burrowing into the enemy camps, the speeches I gave solidifying my false commitments, all those dinner parties and symposiums-it was all training for my greatest achievements."
"But you once considered these people your enemies."
"No longer. They're right. The world has changed and it's changed for the worse. Even the Communists with their iron fists were better than what we have now. Youtake away the discipline of a strong state and what's left is the