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foresight? Since Munich? Since Austria? Since the Rhineland? Weren’t you surprised every time?”
    Byron listened with interest to this exchange. The others seemed to have forgotten he was at the table.
    “Hitler has been making irrational moves with catastrophic possibilities,” Slote retorted. “Anybody can pull a gun in the street and shoot four people down before the cops come and stop him. Until now that’s been Hitler’s so-called foreign policy brilliance in a nutshell. The surprise of an outlaw running wild. That game’s played out. The others are aroused now. They’ll stop him in Poland.”
    Jastrow ate a piece of pear, and began to talk in a rhythmic mellifluous way, something between meditating aloud and lecturing in a classroom. “Leslie, if Hitler were the Kaiser, or a man like the Charles the Twelfth, I admit I’d be worried. But he’s far more competent than you think. Fortunately the old ruling class is destroyed. They unleashed the World War with their dry-rotted incompetence, those preening, posturing, sleek royalties and politicians of 1914, those bemedalled womanizers and sodomites out of Proust. They never dreamed that the old manners, the old paperwork, the old protocol, were done for, and that industrialized warfare would shatter the old system like a boot kicked through a dollhouse. So they went to the trash heap, and new leadership came up out of the sewers, where realism runs and change often starts. The early Christians haunted the sewers and catacombs of Rome, you know,” Jastrow said to Byron Henry, clearly relishing a fresh audience.
    “Yes, sir, I learned about that.”
    “Of course you did. Well, Hitler’s a vagabond, Mussolini’s a vagabond, and Stalin’s a jailbird. These are new, tough, able, and clever men, straight up from the sewers. Lenin, another jailbird, was the great originator. He made it all up, Leslie, you realize - the Jesuitical secret party, the coarse slogans for the masses and the contempt for their intelligence and memory, the fanatic language, the strident dogmas, the Moslem religiosity in politics, the crude pageantry, the total cynicism of tactics, it’s all Leninism. Hitler is a Leninist, Mussolini is a Leninist. The talk of anti-communism and pro-communism is for fools and children.”
    “Oh, for Pete’s sake , Aaron –”
    “Just a moment, now! Lenin was all prudence and caution in foreign affairs, and that is my whole point. Glory, and honor, and all those tinselly illusions of the old system that led to wars, were to Lenin the merest eyewash. So it is to Hitler. He has never moved when he couldn’t get away with it. The outlaw running wild with a gun is the exact effect he wishes to create. I’m surprised that you’re taken in. He is really a very, very prudent man. If he can make it in Poland without war, he’ll do it. Otherwise he’ll not move. Not now. Perhaps in ten years, when he’s built Germany up enough. I shall be very content to live another ten years.”
    Slote pulled at his moustache with lean nervous fingers. “You really lose me, Aaron. Can you be serious? Hitler a Leninist! That’s a coffeehouse paradox, and you know it. The Russian Revolution is a radical change in history. The abolition of private property has created a new world. You may like it or detest it, but it’s new. Hitler’s socialism was a sham to get a mob of gangsters into power. He’s frozen the German economy just as it was, smashed the labor unions, lengthened the working hours, cut the pay, and kept all the old rich crowd on top, the Krupps and Thyssens, the men who gave him the money to run for office. The big Nazis live like barons, like sultans. The concentration camps are for anybody who still wants the socialist part of National Socialism. Don’t you know that? The 1934 purge was nothing but a showdown between the socialist element of the Nazi Party, and the army generals and rich conservatives. Hitler shot his old Party friends like partridges.