Knallt ab den Juden Rathenau,

Die gottverdammte Judensau…

After he was assassinated she sang nothing for weeks, certain that, if the singing hadn’t brought it about, at least it had been a prophecy, a spell… .

There are specific messages tonight. Questions for the former minister. A gentle sorting-out process is under way. Reasons of security. Only certain guests are allowed to go on into Peter’s sitting room. The preterite stay outside, gossiping, showing their gums out of tension, moving their hands… . The big scandal around IG Farben this week is the unlucky subsidiary Spottbilligfilm AG, whose entire management are about to be purged for sending to OKW weapons procurement a design proposal for a new airborne ray which could turn whole populations, inside a ten-kilometer radius, stone blind. An IG review board caught the scheme in time. Poor Spottbilligfilm. It had slipped their collective mind what such a weapon would do to the dye market after the next war. The Götterdämmerung mentality again. The weapon had been known as L-5227, L standing for light, another comical German euphemism, like the A in rocket designations which stands for aggregate, or IG itself, Interessengemeinschaft, a fellowship of interests… and what about the case of catalyst poisoning in Prague—was it true that the VI b Group Staffs at the Chemical Instrumentality for the Abnormal have been flown east on emergency status, and that it’s a complex poisoning, both selenium and tellurium… the names of the poisons sober the conversation, like a mention of cancer… .

The elite who will sit tonight are from the corporate Nazi crowd, among whom Leni recognizes who but Generaldirektor Smaragd, of an IG branch that was interested, for a time, in her husband. But then abruptly there’d been no more contact. It would have been mysterious, a little sinister, except that everything in those days could reasonably be blamed on the economy… .

In the crowd her eyes meet Peter’s. “I’ve left him,” she whispers, nodding, as he shakes hands.

“You can put Ilse to sleep in one of the bedrooms. Can we talk later?” There is to his eyes tonight a definite faunish slant. Will he accept that she is not his, any more than she belonged to Franz?

“Yes, of course. What’s going on?”

He snorts, meaning they haven’t told me. They are using him—have been, various theys, for ten years. But he never knows how, except by rare accident, an allusion, an interception of smiles. A distorting and forever clouded mirror, the smiles of clients… .

Why do they want Rathenau tonight? What did Caesar really whisper to his protégé as he fell? Et tu, Brute, the official lie, is about what you’d expect to get from them—it says exactly nothing. The moment of assassination is the moment when power and the ignorance of power come together, with Death as validator. When one speaks to the other then it is not to pass the time of day with et-tu-Brutes. What passes is a truth so terrible that history—at best a conspiracy, not always among gentlemen, to defraud—will never admit it. The truth will be repressed or in ages of particular elegance be disguised as something else. What will Rathenau, past the moment, years into a new otherside existence, have to say about the old dispensation? Probably nothing as incredible as what he might have said just as the shock flashed his mortal nerves, as the Angel swooped in… .