Read To Catch a King for Free Online Page B

carefully. “That was an outstanding performance you gave just now in the Reichsführer's office. Quite brilliant. Exactly calculated to please.”
    Reitlinger had moved to a position by the door which placed him out of earshot.
    “And what did you expect me to say—the truth?”
    “Which is?”
    “That this whole thing is a waste of time. I've read that file, I've talked to Canaris, and they've completely miscalculated their man. The reports from Von Stohrer in Madrid about the Duke's sympathetic attitude. Cocktail gossip by Spanish aristocrats with fascist sympathies who want to believe he thinks as they do. That's the whole trouble. Everyone wants to believe he's on our side, and they manufacture the evidence by a kind of wishful thinking. If the Duke of Windsor said Beethoven was his favorite composer, some idiot, even in his own country, would take that to be an endorsement of the Nazi Party.”
    “So, you don't think he'll be interested?”
    “Not in the slightest.”
    “Then you'll have to persuade him, won't you?”
    “And what on earth is that supposed to achieve?”
    Heydrich said, “When we occupy England he would have to do as he's told for the simple reason that it would be the best way he could serve the interests of his people.”
    He looked down toward the targets. “I haven't done very well, have I?”
    “Not really.” Schellenberg rammed in another clip. His arm swung up, he fired twice without apparently taking aim, and shot out the eyes of the center figure.
    “And now you're angry,” Heydrich said. “I wonder why?”
    Schellenberg put down the gun. “We all have our off days. Do you mind if I go now? I've got work to do.”
    “Not at all. You can pick me up at eight-thirty.”
    “What for?”
    “This Winter girl. I'd like to see her in the flesh. The Garden Room, I think you said?”
    “All right.” Schellenberg walked to the door, which Reitlinger opened for him. “I'll want one of the silenced Mausers during the next couple of days. One hundred rounds in ten clips. Make up a pack for me and deliver it to the office.”
    “Jawohl, Brigadeführer.”
    Schellenberg went out, and when Reitlinger turned he found Heydrich examining the center target.
    “Astonishing,” he said. “Both eyes at fifty paces. Could you teach me to do that, Sturmscharführer?”
    “I'm afraid not, General,” Reitlinger said. “It is not a talent which can be taught. You've either got it, or you haven't.”
    “Ah, well,” Heydrich said. “He is on my side.” He opened the door and smiled. “At least, I hope he is.”
    Lina Heydrich was away for the summer at the charming thatched-roof chalet off the Baltic coast on Fehmarn Island which Heydrich had built for her in 1935. He himself continued to live, with the help of a cook and housekeeper, at their Berlin house, which was in the exclusive Zehlendorf quarter bordering on the Grunewald forest.
    Schellenberg picked him up there at eight o'clock in one of the special department Mercedes with two uniformed SS men up front on the other side of the glass partition. One to drive and the other to “ride shotgun,” an expression coined by Heydrich himself, who was fond of a good Western film.
    As they drove down toward the center of the city Heydrich seemed morose and out of sorts.
    “Uncle Heini,” he said, referring to Himmler by the disrespectful nickname by which he was known throughout the SS, “was not exactly being solicitous when he jumped in on my suggestion about providing you with bodyguards. Unless I'm very much mistaken, you'll have a couple of hand-picked Gestapo goons breathing down your neck.”
    “And reporting every move I make three times a day by long-distance telephone to the Reichsführer personally. Yes, I'm well aware of the possibility,” Schellenberg told him.
    “I don't know why, but at a time when things have never looked better, I have a feeling that they are beginning to go wrong for us—for all of us.”
    “And why