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"Watch what we do to the Czechs," said Heydrich. "We killed 82 of them the first four days after I got hurt. And we'll kill hundreds more. We'll kill them or they'll kill us. There must be no Czecho-Slovakia left, no one left in Europe who opposes the German Reich. You might have thought it was an old-fashioned idea to round up hostages and shoot them by the hundreds when one of the conquerors is killed. It isn't. It's effective, and after a while it becomes pleasant, too, whether the hostages are Jews or not." "That reminds me," said the Devil.
"What about that man, Jesus Christ? I offered Him the whole world from a moun tain top one time and he turned me down.
I've never quite gotten over that. Do they still talk about Him?" "Democrats, Christians, fools, they do," said Heydrich. "We don't believe in Him.
Priests and preachers told us we'd end up in hell, but we didn't believe that either." "And how do you like hell?" asked the Devil. "I still remember when those two poets, Vergil and Dante, came through.
Dante wrote a wonderful account of it." Devil Bedeviled. "Well," said Heydrich, and a crafty look appeared in his lizard-green eyes, "I would like to make a few suggestions. That old fool, Charon, at the river Acheron. He batted me one with his oar when I protested that he should have a special boat reserved for members of the Master Race. What democratic weaknesses are these! And your centaurs with bows & arrows, and your beds of hot sand and serpents and wasps! What you need here are tanks and flamethrowers and soft-nosed bullets. And why do you maim heretics, and bury gluttons in mud and traitors up to their necks in ice? Why, every man in the Party would be caught in your tortures — and they are your own best disciples. They steal and lie and become traitors if need be, but only because they are strong and others are weak." "Enough," cried the Devil, losing his temper. "You fool. Heydrich! I am old and I know sin. It is punishable and some times it is an art. But you are not even subtle. You and the men like you are only nasty little boys who like to pull the wings off birds. You wouldn't understand my hell. Not even in the seventh circle, where I might send you to struggle everlastingly against drowning in the river of blood.
You have created your own rivers of blood and your own hell." Flames spurted from the Devil's nostrils and lightning crackled from his horns.
"Beelzebub!" he roared at his right-hand man. "Get this unsufferable nitwit out of here. Put a few adders and a serpent or two into his belly to gnaw where the bullets shattered his spine. Then send him back to his hell on earth. . . ." And that is the reason why the conquered people of Europe, the "silent people" who suffer and wait and hope for liberation, first heard last week that Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi hangman, had been killed in Czecho-Slovakia; then, later, that he was not dead but would be hopelessly crippled. Heydrich might still die, but the reason he kept on living for awhile was simply that hell would not have him.