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“So the Eighteenth is a done deal.” Wally took another shot in the mouth, then handed the flask back to his companion.
“A lady might as well get the spirit while she can, since it won’t matter in a little while.” Sally took another small swig, and then managed to replace the cap on the flask and the flask on the thigh, even as she fell against the side of the barn from wooziness.
“Yes, it won’t matter in a little while,” Wally repeated flatly to a full moon rising quickly over the ridge. He wasn’t looking at the girl, even though she was leaning against the red paint of the barn with wide, dreamy eyes boring up on him. “It’ll matter. This is just the beginning.” The young man’s eyes had acquired the gleam of an inspiration, and he was caught off guard when his companion reached for him beneath the full moonlight.
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Halstead descended a flight of stairs into the Sterneckerbräu beer cellar and entered the “Lieber Room” exactly on time for a late January meeting of the newly formed German Workers’ Party. The giddy newcomer pretended not to recognize the faces turned towards the door, the faces of Anton Drexler, Karl Harrer, and a score of others that included Gottfried Feder, a construction engineer whom Halstead had been told would be the main speaker that night and who sat at the front of the room, next to Harrer the party chairman and behind a massive oak table. Halstead merely took a seat in the back quietly and watched as Harrer rose from his own seat and called the meeting to order.
When it was his turn to speak, Feder the construction engineer rose to give his lecture on “The Breaking of Interest Slavery” to the twenty-five men assembled in the murky taproom. Halstead and the others listened patiently to the speaker’s declarations that all incomes unearned by work should be abolished, that all usurers and profiteers should be executed, and that all land rents and speculation in land should be outlawed. Drexler, the cofounder of the newly formed party and a firm believer in socialism, looked on approvingly as Feder spoke, and he was the one who led the smattering of applause that followed the conclusion of the speech.
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