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Page 8
I
was taken to the Scala by one of my colleagues, a reporter on the
"Nachtexpress" (a late evening paper) a middle-aged, hard-bitten
journalist. As it happened he was one of the three men whom Hanussen picked
for "subjects" that night. And he told a good many things about my
friend which I certainly hadn't known - that he was two months overdrawn
with his salary, that he spent practically all his money playing the horses,
that eight days previously he almost lost his job because he kissed the
chief sub's fiancée, that originally he wanted to become a lawyer but
failed his finals - and so on. All this, my colleague protested, was
childish stuff, anyone on the staff on the "Nachtexpress" could
have provided the information. "What about the future?" he
demanded. Hanussen told him to come to his office - the future was no joke
but (as he put it somewhat fancifully) "a cold grey spider stretching
its ugly, long tentacles after its victims…" His
second "victim" that night was a rotund little gentleman in a
dinner jacket. And Hanussen, after a brief pause, told the past not of the
man - but of the clothes he wore. He described colourfully and wittily the
history of the dinner jacket - "which has lived through sixteen
weddings and twenty-one funerals" - and disclosed at the very end that
that its present wearer was a tax-inspector having come to control the
entertainment tax which the Scala had to pay on the box-office receipts. He told the
embarrassed civil servant: "Your visit was quite unnecessary, my
friend. The Scala has two thousand seats. It is sold out every night.
You could not have got in tonight if you hadn't come in your official
capacity. Now you'd better go…" All
this was good if not necessarily responsible fun. But the third
"experiment" jolted me, I must confess. Hanussen was a superb
showman - he always built up to a
climax. For
those in the know there was another thrill about his performance - his
assistant, whom he introduced as "Jane, my medium and my helper."
In a brief, close-fitting costume, her long, beautiful legs in net-stockings,
she was strikingly beautiful - but strangely unprofessional and almost
clumsy as she gave the audience a shy, brief smile and a half-hearted bow. I
did not know until my colleague told me at she was the Baroness Prawitz who
had deserted her husband, her family, her home - to become Hanussen's
mistress. His "prophecy" was fulfilled - even though it had taken
two months and not four weeks fore the lovely lady "succumbed to his
will." And now here she was, wing as if in a trance, being exhibited to
the sensation hungry Berliners many of whom knew by now who she was and what
had happened to her. |