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lighted. Lanny didn't see his friend, and knowing that he was ahead of time, drove slowly

around the block. When he turned the corner again, he saw his friend not far ahead of him,

walking toward the appointed spot.

There was a taxicab proceeding in the same direction, some thirty or forty feet behind

Hugo, going slowly and without lights. Lanny waited for it to pass on; but the driver

appeared to be looking for a street number. So Lanny went ahead of it and drew up by the

curb, where Hugo saw him and started to join him. Lanny leaned over to open the door on

the right side of the car; and at the same moment the taxicab stopped alongside Lanny's car.

Three men sprang out, wearing the black shirts and trousers and steel helmets of the

Schutzstaffel. One of them stood staring at Lanny, while the other two darted behind Lanny's

car and confronted the young sports director in the act of putting his hand on the car door.

"Are you Hugo Behr?" demanded one of the men.

"I am," was the reply.

Lanny turned to look at the questioner; but the man's next action was faster than any eye

could follow. He must have had a gun in his hand behind his back; he swung it up and fired

straight into the face in front of him, and not more than a foot away. Pieces of the blue eye

of Hugo Behr and a fine spray of his Aryan blood flew out, and some hit Lanny in the face.

The rest of Hugo Behr crumpled and dropped to the sidewalk; whereupon the man turned his

gun into the horrified face of the driver.

"Hande hoch!" he commanded; and that was certainly turning the tables upon Lanny. He

put them high.

"Wer sind Sie?" demanded the S.S. man.

It was a time for the quickest possible answers, and Lanny was fortunate in having thought up

the best possible. "I am an American art expert, and a friend of the Führer."

"Oh! So you're a friend of the Führer!"

"I have visited him several times. I spent a morning with him in the Braune Haus a few

months ago."

"How do you come to know Hugo Behr?"

"I was introduced to him in the home of Heinrich Jung, a high official of the Hitler Jugend

in Berlin. Heinrich is one of the Führer's oldest friends and visited him many times when'he

was in the Landsberg fortress. It was Heinrich who introduced me to the Führer." Lanny

rattled this off as if it were a school exercise; and indeed it was something like that, for he had

imagined interrogations and had learned his Rolle in the very best German. Since the S.S. man

didn't tell him to stop, he went on, as fast as ever: "Also on the visit to the Reichsführer in the

Braune Haus went Kurt Meissner of Schloss Stubendorf, who is a Komponist and author of

several part-songs which you sing at your assemblies. He has known me since we were boys

at Hellerau, and will tell you that I am a friend of the National Socialist movement."

That was the end of the speech, so far as Lanny had planned it. But even as he said the last

words a horrible doubt smote him: Perhaps this was some sort of anti-Nazi revolution, and

he was sealing his own doom! He saw that the point of the gun had come down, and the muzzle

was looking into his navel instead of into his face; but that wasn't enough to satisfy him. He

stared at the S.S. man, who had black eyebrows that met over his nose. It seemed to Lanny

the hardest face he had ever examined.

"What were you doing with this man?"—nodding downward toward what lay on the

pavement.

"I am in Munich buying a painting from Baron von Zinszollern. I saw Hugo Behr walking on

the street and I stopped to say Gruss Gott to him." Lanny was speaking impromptu now.

"Get out of the car," commanded the S.S. man.

Lanny's heart was hitting hard blows underneath his throat; his knees were trembling so

violently he wasn't sure they would hold him up. It appeared that he was being ordered out so

that his blood and brains might not spoil a good car. "I tell you, you will regret it if you shoot

me. I am an intimate friend of Minister-Präsident General Göring. I was on a hunting trip with

him last fall. You can ask Oberleutnant Furtwaengler of Seine Exzellenz's staff. You can ask

Reichsminister Goebbels about me—or his wife, Frau Magda Goebbels—I have visited their home.

You can read articles about me in the Munich newspapers of last November when I conducted

an exhibition of paintings here and took one of them to the Führer. My picture was in all

the papers—"

"I am not going to shoot you," announced the S.S. man. His tone indicated abysmal

contempt of anybody who objected to being shot.

"What are you going to do?"

"Take you to Stadelheim until your story is investigated. Get out of the car."

Stadelheim was a name of terror; one of those dreadful prisons about which the refugees

talked. But it was better than being shot on the sidewalk, so Lanny managed to control his

nerves, and obeyed. The other man passed his hands over him to see if he was armed. Then the

leader commanded him to search the body of Hugo, and he collected a capful of belongings