PICTURES OF VON RINTELEN
In every one of them, von Rintelen looms as the audacious plotter, man of mystery, user of a hundred aliases, supreme egotist, a vaunted aid to the Kaiser and a Teutonic Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In one picture, you see him in exclusive homes on Fifth Avenue, a “mould of form”—scarcely thirty-eight years old, slim and upstanding, with stalwart shoulders, the bearing of an aristocrat, short stubborn hair, a moustache with a like independent twist, and greenish-grey eyes that sparkled defiance. He garbed himself in the cut of London’s most artistic tailors and selected the colours of his ties, his shirts and his socks with a view to perfect harmony. He was the “glass of fashion” on the tip-toe of courtesy, beguiling with his gallant quips and charming his hearers by his fascinating stories and comments.
Other pictures show him under an assumed name, in conference with conspirators. He might meet them secretly in offices, or in hotels, or he might pick them up in an automobile, whizzing along at full speed and handing gold to hirelings who for a price were ready to undertake some criminal job. He might be seen dining in one of Broadway’s most alluring cabarets, ordering the rarest of wines and boasting of his schemes to accomplish in America what would be equivalent to Germany’s capture of Paris.