“I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Baron,” said Korsch quickly. “Otto tells me you live just across the way,” he added, cocking his head slightly.

“That is correct, Herr Korsch,” said Heinrich, in a friendly tone. He didn’t need Otto’s perspiration and jitters to tell him this was a dangerous man. But his trusting nature always assumed the best about every man or woman he met. Although he saw through the veneer of social situations, he tried to give each individual the benefit of the doubt—even those whose motives he had reason to suspect.

“Was yours the estate I passed as I came along the road?”

“Yes.”

“The one with the empty flagpole?”

The baron nodded.

“Are you unsupportive of our Nazi cause,” asked Korsch, with a hint of bite in his tone, “that you do not display the black and red of the swastika, Baron?”

Off to the side, Otto was doing his best—with winks and facial gestures—to signal his brother to walk warily and guard his words. Unfortunately he only managed to appear as though something had become stuck in his eye.

“I’m afraid I do have other allegiances, Herr Korsch,” replied the baron candidly.

The Gestapo agent did not even attempt to mask his surprise, or the meaning of the knowing look which spread across his face and the deliberate nod which followed it. Otto was beside himself at Heinrich’s foolhardy words, terrified that he would say still more, but constrained by fear for his own skin not to interrupt. He stood by, listening in mute horror at the grounds his idiot of a brother was giving the Gestapo to throw them all in prison at will!

“Other allegiances?” he repeated with quiet incredulity. “Higher allegiances than to your Reich and your Führer?”

“I’m sorry, Herr Korsch,” said Baron von Dortmann, smiling. “I love my country and I am a loyal German. But he is not my Führer. I have but one master.”

“And who might that be?” queried Korsch with a smile, astonished at the baron’s open and frank sedition against the Reich.

“My master is Jesus Christ, Herr Korsch.”

Korsch smiled again, this time with the superior air of one speaking condescendingly to a child.

“Come now, Baron,” he said, doing his best to swallow his revulsion at the small-minded superiority fanatics such as this espoused, “we are all good Christians here. But we are also good citizens, good Germans. Surely you agree with this one you refer to—I will use the term myself, just for the sake of discussion—this one you call your master, who himself said we are to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s.”

“I do not merely call him my master, Herr Korsch. Jesus Christ is my master.”