Chapter 10: Butterflies and Storms
Early in the morning, Jörg was dragged from sleep by the chaotic crackle of the radio.
Still half awake, he rubbed his eyes and went to wash his face. As cold water splashed against his skin, the blurred static gradually resolved into a deep, solemn voice.
"...Today... at eight o'clock this morning, France, together with Belgium, invaded our territory, driving hundreds of thousands of residents in the Ruhr to the brink..."
"This is a shameful act of aggression. On behalf of the Weimar Republic, I condemn the actions of France and Belgium. At the same time, I call upon all German citizens in the Ruhr to launch a strike and resist through nonviolent means!"
Click.
Jörg turned off the radio.
In the mirror, a blond, blue eyed man in an immaculate suit repeated the speech he had just heard, adjusting its cadence as he spoke. With his upright bearing and fitted clothes, he looked less like a police minister and more like King Arthur stepping out of an old painting to address the Knights of the Round Table.
But the speaking talent granted by the system was not what pleased Jörg most.
What truly delighted him was something else.
The Ruhr crisis had unfolded exactly as he remembered.
Just as expected.
For ordinary people, inflation, economic collapse, and social chaos were disasters.
For speculators and politicians, however, they were gifts from God.
Jörg had tolerated every Trotskyist conspirator hidden inside Berlin for a reason. He had allowed them to survive, allowed them room to maneuver, all so they could make a proper mess this year, one large enough for him to use their corpses as a stepping stone and collect his reward from their dear President Albert.
Of course, he was not foolish enough to ignore the danger of nursing a tiger at his side.
His arrangement with Vito had always been a safeguard.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
A knock came from the door.
Cardolan entered carrying a thick stack of documents.
The already thin young man had grown even more gaunt from weeks of high intensity management and constant travel. With his glasses and sunken face, he looked as if a strong gust of wind might blow him over.
When Jörg saw the dark circles beneath Cardolan's eyes, even he felt a trace of embarrassment.
He was nominally the master of the investment company, yet Cardolan had done all the real work. He had taken care of the dirtiest tasks, the most exhausting details, and Jörg had not even visited the company headquarters once.
"Master, these are the expenditures from the past few months," Cardolan said respectfully. "The funds in the accounts have already been used to acquire five farms and two wineries. And ever since we followed your instructions to smuggle alcohol into America, those shipments have been generating more than one hundred thousand dollars in revenue every month."
He placed the papers down and continued,
"This has also become the primary financial support for all expenses related to the Progress Party."
At this point, if Jörg had no ambition beyond wealth, his current assets would already have been enough to make countless men envy him. If he fled to America before Hitler's rise, he could live the rest of his life in indulgence, wine, and comfort.
Unfortunately, that was no longer the life he wanted.
Perhaps before transmigration, such a future would have been a dream.
Now, he found it dull.
Only power could satisfy his appetite.
"And how quickly is the Progress Party expanding?" Jörg asked as he opened the documents.
Every expenditure was listed in detail, down to the last mark. It was obvious that, ever since taking over the company, Cardolan had been working without rest, straining with everything he had just to keep pace with Jörg's plans.
"Very quickly," Cardolan replied. "But the food consumption is also enormous. Mr. Joseph calls this strategy 'bread spreading.'"
Jörg's eyes paused on a photograph tucked into one of the pages.
It showed Joseph standing on a Berlin street, distributing bread to children while several adults watched from the side. The angle of the photograph was too deliberate to be accidental. It had clearly been staged with care.
Wilson's work, no doubt.
As expected, genius was genius.
Jörg had only needed to point in the general direction, and Joseph was already constructing the entire propaganda framework by himself.
"Very good, Cardolan," Roman said. "Do you have time?"
"Always at your service," Cardolan answered without hesitation.
"Then go to Munich and watch a man named William Drew for me. If nothing unexpected happens, he should be with the Workers' Party at this time. If necessary, arrange for someone to help him."
Jörg spoke lightly, but his mind was already far ahead.
The year 1923 was not only about the Ruhr crisis. The Beer Hall Putsch was also one of the defining events of the time. Roman did not agree with Hitler's ideas, not in the slightest.
But the Workers' Party still had value.
And because it had value, it still had a use.
Cardolan did not ask why. He simply nodded, rose to leave, and prepared to carry out the order.
He understood his place.
As a retainer, he only needed to execute. The Master had his reasons, his arrangements, his hidden calculations. A man who could predict inflation nearly a year in advance and turn it into enormous profit was beyond ordinary understanding anyway.
There was only one word Cardolan could use for him.
Genius.
As for why Master Roman had changed so drastically, Cardolan had long since found an explanation for himself. He instinctively attributed everything to the blessing of the late old master. For that reason, he had even gone so far as to invite a few wizards from the East in private, just in case.
Ding-a-ling.
The telephone rang.
Jörg picked up the receiver, and Vito's slightly hoarse voice came through at once.
"Mr. Jörg, their operation is about to begin."
…
Of course, even with foreknowledge and the advantage of history itself, Jörg could not understand every detail.
For example, he had not known that the Soviet Russian ambassador in Germany, who happened to be residing in Berlin and had just been pushed out by Stalin's faction, was also aligned with Trotsky.
Jörg's own intervention, like a butterfly stirring the surface of water, had linked the two threads together.
In a Berlin tavern, Georgy Nasov pulled up the collar of his overcoat and watched the policemen patrolling outside with wary eyes.
Thanks to the chaos both inside and outside the country, and thanks also to Germany's intelligence system being little short of broken, a dangerous foreign operative like Nasov could walk freely through Berlin's streets without much difficulty.
No one was truly watching him.
Or rather, the Weimar Republic simply had no time to watch men like him.
When a regime's hair is on fire and collapse seems to be standing right outside the door, who has the leisure to monitor the movements of an ambassador?
There were not many people inside the tavern.
Almost no workers or ordinary laborers could be seen.
Because of inflation, anyone who could still afford to drink in a tavern was either a businessman or someone with at least a little liquid cash. Even so, they sat together grumbling bitterly about the state of society.
"This is complete madness," one man said. "Your savings lose a hundred times their value overnight. What the hell is that supposed to mean? A one Papiermark banknote turns into paper not even fit to wipe your ass with. I should've turned every last bit of it into gold bars."
Another, a pot bellied middle aged man in a knitted cap, spoke up.
"By the way, what happened to Natto? I haven't heard a thing from him lately."
"You don't know?" someone replied. "Natto tried to rob a policeman and got his head blown off on the spot."
The man blinked in disbelief.
"He just died like that?"
"Yeah. But honestly, good for him. For a miser like Natto, not having to see this mess is probably a blessing."
The pot bellied man gave a heavy nod and glanced absentmindedly toward the window.
His gaze happened to pass over a plain looking middle aged man in a coat sitting quietly in the corner.
The waiter approached.
"Sir, what would you like?"
"One... no, two beers."
Nasov pulled out his wallet and first offered a banknote.
The waiter gave it one glance and refused politely.
It was one of the latest absurdities of the Weimar Republic: a note once worth a thousand Papiermarks had simply been stamped in red and reissued as one hundred thousand.
Rather than print new currency, the state had resorted to stamping bigger numbers onto old paper, as if ink alone could fight economic collapse.
Nasov put the note away and instead produced a small denomination ruble.
The Soviet currency was far from being internationally mainstream. It had existed only a short time. But even so, it was still more stable than the Papiermarks, whose value seemed to decay by the day.
And it was precisely this spectacle, this grotesque collapse of German finance, that convinced Nasov a Soviet regime in Germany might actually be possible.
Ding-a-ling.
The crisp sound of the wind chimes made him look toward the door.
The person he had been waiting for had arrived.
.....
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