The Handle by Donald E. Westlake

Author:Donald E. Westlake [Westlake, Donald E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Mystery & Detective
ISBN: 9780380699001
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1972-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

P08 The Handle

2.

Baron Wolfgang Friedrich Kastelbern von Altstein lay on his back on a maroon carpet and raised his bare right leg perpendicular to the floor. He lowered it again and raised the left leg. Then the right leg. Then the left leg. Across the way, Steuber sat morose in a red-upholstered Victorian chair, his watch in one hand and an exercise book in the other. He counted aloud as Baron - he called himself, these days, Wolfgang Baron - raised each leg, and when he reached thirty Baron rolled over on his face and started doing push-ups.

Steuber looked at his watch. ‘Forty-five seconds ahead,’ he said.

Baron grunted and kept on with the push-ups.

He was fifty-seven years old now, but no one would guess he was much over forty. He kept himself in good physical and mental shape at all times. Doing push-ups now, dressed in white T-shirt and black bathing trunks, he looked the picture of health, a man with thirty or forty years of life left in him.

His life had started, in Kiel, Germany, just a few years before the First World War. His father, the fourth Baron, was at that time a major in the German army, a Prussian career officer like his own father and his father’s father. By the time the war had nearly run its course he was a general, and then just a few months later he was a civilian. By 1920, bewildered by a world that seemed to have no use for any of his barbaric arts, he was dead in his own bed and his son Wolfgang had inherited his title, his old uniforms, and his debts.

Baron grew up in a Germany of chaos. He was too young to be part of the Freikorps, battling the undeclared war on the Polish frontier in the early twenties, but he turned eighteen and graduated from the gymnasium just in time to be swept into the maw of National Socialism, the new movement that was already being c ailed by the slang word Nazi. He was living in Danzig then, with an uncle on his mother’s side, and every Sunday he could be found in the big park wearing his brown uniform, singing the marching songs, and listening to the speeches.

The SA was a good place for a young man in the late twenties. Comradeship, good drinking parties, singing and marching, carousing, truck rides in the country, now and then a good brawl with the Poles or with some other political bunch. Baron was pleased to be in the SA, and the SA was just as pleased to have him; some day he might prove useful, what with his hereditary army Connections. The army at that time had not yet been Brought within the Nazi sphere.

After Hitler’s takeover and the capitulation of the army, it was suggested to Baron that he leave the SA and accept an army commission, but he was still youthful at heart and preferred to stay with the crowd he knew.

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