market-baskets traveled no farther than they had to, and watched with furtive glances as they
went.
Lanny parked his car around the corner and walked to the house.
He looked for the name Schultz and did not find it, so he began knocking on doors and
inquiring. He couldn't find a single person who would admit having heard of Ludi and Trudi
Schultz. He was quite sure from their manner that this wasn't so; but they were afraid of him.
Whether he was a Socialist or a spy, he was dangerous, and
Doubtless there were "comrades" in the building, but they had "gone underground," and you
had to know where to dig in order to find them. It was no job for "parlor Pinks," and nobody
wanted one to meddle with it.
V
Lanny went back to the hotel and continued his vigil. Sooner or later a note or a telephone
message was bound to come, and this painful business of guessing and imagining would end. He
went downstairs for a haircut, and when he came back he found his wife in a state of
excitement. "Mama called!" she whispered. "She has to buy some gloves at Wertheim's, and I'm to
meet her there in half an hour."
Irma had already ordered the car, so they went down, and while they were driving they
planned their tactics. Irma would go in alone, because the meeting of two women would be less
conspicuous. "Better not speak to her," suggested Lanny. "Let her see you and follow you out.
I'll drive round the block and pick you up."
The wife of Johannes Robin didn't need any warning as to danger; she was back in old
Russia, where fear had been bred into her bones. When Irma strolled down the aisle of the
great department store, Mama was asking prices, a natural occupation for an elderly Jewish
lady. She followed at a distance, and when Irma went out onto the street and Lanny came
along they both stepped into the car. "Where is Freddi?" she whispered with her first breath.
"We have not heard from him," said Lanny, and she cried:
her face in her hands and began to sob.
Lanny hastened to say: "We have got things fixed up about Papa. He's all right, and is to be
allowed to leave Germany, with you and the others." That comforted her, but only for a
minute. She was like the man who has an hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray,
and he leaves the ninety and nine and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is
gone astray. "Oh, my poor lamb, what have they done to him?"
The mother hadn't heard a word from her son since he had called Lanny, and then written
her a comforting note. She had been doing just what Lanny had been doing, waiting, numb
with fear, imagining calamities. Freddi had forbidden her to call the Budds or to go near them,
and she had obeyed for as long as she could stand it. "Oh, my poor darling, my poor baby!"
It was a painful hour they spent. The good soul, usually so sensible, so well adjusted to her
routine of caring for those she loved, was now in a state of near distraction; her mind was as if in
a nightmare, obsessed by all the horror stories which were being whispered among the Jews in
the holes where they were hiding, apart from the rest of Germany. Stories of bodies found every
day in the woods or dragged out of the lakes and canals of Berlin; suicides or murdered people
whose fates would never be known, whose names were not mentioned in the press. Stories of the
abandoned factory in the Friedrichstrasse which the Nazis had taken over, and where they now
brought their victims to beat and torture them. The walls inside that building were soaked
with human blood; you could walk by it and hear the screams—but you had best walk quickly!
Stories of the concentration camps, where Jews, Communists, and Socialists were being made to
dig their own graves in preparation for pretended executions; where they underwent every
form of degradation which brutes and degenerates were able to devise—forced to roll about in
the mud, to stick their faces into their own excrement, to lash and beat one another insensible,
thus saving labor for the guards.
let her son be dead.
Only one thing restrained her, and that was consideration for her kind friends. "I have no
right to behave like this!" she would say. "It is so good of you to come and try to help us poor
wretches. And of course Freddi would want us to go away, and to live the best we can without
him. Do you really believe the Nazis will turn Papa loose?"
Lanny didn't tell her the story; he just said: "It will cost a lot of money"—he guessed that
would help to make it real to her mind. She couldn't expect any kindness of these persecutors,
but she would understand that they wanted money.
"Oh, Lanny, it was a mistake that we ever had so much! I never thought it could last. Let it all
go—if only we can get out of this terrible country."
"I want to get you out, Mama, and then I'll see what can be done about Freddi. I haven't
