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an unnamed industrialist who wanted Hitler to know that he would “outfit an entire infantry division for Germany personally at my expense if he starts an open battle against Bolshevism.” The idea never went anywhere but it proved to Ritter “what some of the powerful Americans were thinking.” Back in New York, he made contact with the remarkable character later to be misidentified as the ringleader of his spies. He was a master yarn-spinner with an exotic accent and a monocle, a South African–born swashbuckler who had planted bombs for Imperial Germany during the Great War and whose claim to be the greatest covert agent to serve Kaiser Wilhelm had been given wide airing in a recent biography. “My old acquaintance,” Ritter called him.
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    Frederick “Fritz” Joubert Duquesne was the grandest and most peculiar figure in the clique of self-appointed “colonels” and “commanders” who reclined in stodgy haunts such as the University Club on West Fifty-Fourth Street. Now sixty years old, he could go on for hours about how he took up arms on behalf of his people, the Boers, against the British Army during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), becoming a guerrilla fighter with a claim to planting explosives at important junctures of the conflict that is unverified by South African history books. His life was given its great cause, he would tell his listeners, when troops commanded by Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener destroyed the Duquesne farmstead at Nylstroom as part of a scorched-earth campaign that targeted civilian support for the Boer commandos, resulting in a horrible end for his sister, mother, and blind uncle Jan (who was hanged from a telephone pole with a cow rope). “I will wreck that bastard land, that bastard empire, to the last foul inch of its stolen possessions,” he boasted of announcing to a British court that charged him with plotting with several others to set off bombs in Cape Town. He evaded the firing squad by agreeing to turn over (falsified) Boer secret codes and was transported to the penal colony on Burt’s Island in Bermuda. There he escaped with the assistance of a pretty young woman of refinement who resided near the prison (said to be Alice Wortley, who later became his wife), swam across a mile and a half of shark-infested waters while dodging bullets from the guards’ guns, survived in the wild for three weeks on little more than onions, obtained a seaman’s uniform by drugging a tipsy sailor, and stowed away as a crew member on a yacht owned by Isaac Emerson, the “Bromo-Seltzer King,” who was headed back to America. Some of which may even be true. Duquesne had the “superlative gift of oriental storytelling—a form of entertainment where the dividing line between fact and fiction is never confused by the native,” according to an acquaintance.
    Then he hit New York—ah, New York—where he was lavished with attention from newspaper and magazine editors eager to feed the public appetite for tales about the fantastical dangers of the African backcountry. Writing under the byline Captain Fritz Duquesne, he proved to be a hardworking redoubt of the yellow press, spending the next several years on staff at papers such as Joseph Pulitzer’s
New York World
and writing commissioned pieces for an array of travel and adventure magazines. “Tracking the Man-Killer” was one of his contributions to
Everybody’s Magazine
. He was respected enough as a purveyor of Africana to be invited to the White House on January 25, 1909, where he offered President Theodore Roosevelt advice on his upcoming postpresidential safari in east Africa. (“Suppose an elephant charges me, what should I do to distract its attention?” the president asked.) The connection did such wonders for his career—when he expressed fears for Roosevelt’s safety, the story made page 1 of the
Washington Post
—that Duquesne sought to capitalize on the ex-president’s subsequent journey