None of it was idle to him. Every piece of information you possessed these days could spell opportunity. Especially in high circles like those!

The banker’s daughter was a charmer, it was true. But Korsch was more interested in the money in his bank. In normal times, money spelled influence and power. These days, however, just the reverse could be true, and power could be translated into money!

These were heady days, filled with potential fortune if fate was with you. There were winners and losers in this treacherous game of power.

These days the losers lost their lives. Putsches and purges had characterized the Nazi method since the beginnings of national socialism, morbidly out-of-step with the advance of modernism and the technological twentieth century. The Reichstag fire in ’33 and the bloody purge of June ’34 left no further doubt as to the consequences of finding oneself on the wrong side of the ever-fluid and lethal fence of the Führer’s favor. How could he not be reminded of the cruel czarist regimes from the dark history of his own ancestors?

On the other hand, the winners stood to gain even more! The world would soon be at their fingertips. Power over all of Europe, perhaps over all the world, would proceed from a very select circle. Those who managed to keep their feet would become members of the world’s most exclusive fraternity.

That fraternity of power would sit right here, in Berlin, and he intended to be one of its members!

Without knowing why, Korsch found his thoughts moving away from Otto von Dortmann and to his brother, the country baron. He’d overheard someone mention him at the party and had said to himself that he should meet him.

Suddenly he realized he had forgotten all about it for the rest of the afternoon, and now the opportunity had slipped away.

5 The Estate von Dortmann

5

The Estate von Dortmann

The approach to the Dortmann estate, known as Lebenshaus, wound through a tree-lined drive from the west. The trees were mostly birch, with a few larches between, both of which grew naturally here. They had been planted several generations earlier as a close-set border to the narrow drive and had reached considerable height.

Automobiles now, of course, made the drive, though they had to creep up the hill at barely greater speed than had a team of four pulling an elegant carriage in the last century. The way was extremely narrow, without room for two cars to pass for a distance of about four hundred meters. Yet because of the beauty and tradition of the drive, neither of the last two barons had even thought of widening it.