“Decidedly not hard,” said Lanny. “They are scared to death of provoking Hitler to fresh rage.”
“He is making further demands upon the Czechs, and negotiations have been going on for months, but the outside world has no idea what the demands are. A few days ago Hitler served an ultimatum—‘take it, or I will take Prague.’ I have those terms.”
“That is indeed important, Monck—if you are sure you really have them.”
“I cannot give you the slightest hint as to how I got them—I have taken an oath. But I assure you they are correct, beyond the shadow of a doubt. They amount to making the country into a puppet state, and it seems to me the rest of the world should know what is going on right now behind the curtain.”
“If you care to trust me with this information, I’ll take a trip out of Germany and see that it is published.”
“You can manage it without too much danger to your own work?”
“You remember that Trudi’s documents were published; the same channel is still open.”
“All right. Do you have a good memory?”
“Fairly so. You can give me time, I suppose.”
“All the time you want. I’ll summarize the terms first, and let you get over the shock.” So Monck began to recite: “One: Complete neutralization of the Czech frontiers. Two: Adhesion of Czechoslovakia to the Anti-Comintern pact. Three: Withdrawal from the League of Nations. Four: Drastic reduction of military effectives. Five: Surrender of most of the Czech gold reserves. Six: Czechs to furnish raw materials to redeem Czech currency now in the Sudetenland—that currency is now worthless, you understand. Seven: Sudeten industries to have full access to Czech markets. Eight: No new Czech industries to compete with them. Nine: Czech anti-Semitic legislation conforming to the Nuremberg decrees. Ten: Dismissal of all state employees objectionable to Germany. Eleven: Permission for all Germans in Czechoslovakia to wear Nazi badges and carry the Nazi flag. That’s all.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” said Lanny Budd.
“So will the Czechs, if they yield to this hold-up,” replied the man of the underground.
VIII
The P.A. didn’t have to hesitate over such a decision. He said: “I’ll get that news out,” and then drove slowly about the boulevards of Berlin, learning and reciting a lesson. In the days of his youth he had attended his Grandfather Samuel’s Bible class in Newcastle, and there had learned to recite the Ten Commandments and at least a few of the articles contained in a pamphlet called A Brief Digest of the Boston Confession of Faith. Somewhat later, in course of his duties as a secretary-translator at the Paris Peace Conference, he had learned the Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson; and now in the same way he learned the Eleven Points which were designed as the funeral services of the Czechoslovak Republic. He recited them one by one and then two by two, and when he had gone through them three times over from beginning to end without an error, his mentor said that would do.
“I’ll leave tomorrow morning and get the news started by night,” he said. He didn’t offer to tell where or how, and Monck didn’t ask. “Have you anything else on your mind?”
“Not at the moment, but I may have later, if you come back.”
“I’ll be back in about three days, if all goes well. My mail will be waiting here for me. Do you need some money?”
“I’ll be needing it later.”
“You had better take it now. I have been to some trouble to get it ready for you.” Lanny handed over the large wad of notes, and then said: “Now for something of mine that may or may not be important to you. My father has just been here, and he has about come to the parting of the ways with Göring. He isn’t getting what he wants. It’s a long story, and no use bothering you with the details. The point is, the Luftwaffe has a new type of supercharger for airplanes, and my father is entitled to the use of the drawings, and he hasn’t got them. The last thing he said before he left was that if I could find somebody who could get one of those superchargers out of Germany, he would pay a hundred thousand freimarks for it.”
“Herrschaft!” exclaimed Monck. “He doesn’t want much for his money!”
“Maybe it wouldn’t be easy; but I remember that Trudi once had a man in Göring’s office.”
“I don’t even know if that man is still alive.”
“Well, if it can’t be done, that’s all there is to it. I must make this plain at the outset—I can’t give any help myself. This is my father’s affair, and you must judge it on that basis. My father is a businessman, and his purpose is to make money for himself and his stockholders. He wants the Budd-Erling pursuit plane to be the deadliest in the world, and of course Göring wants to cheat him if he can. I warned him that this would happen, but he’s pretty sure of himself, and thought he could match Der Dicke’s moves. At the present moment it’s Robbie’s move, and Der Dicke is grinning over the situation.”
“Did you tell your father about me?”
“Not the faintest hint. I’m supposed to have broken all contact with the Reds, as my father calls them. He hates them, but he wouldn’t mind making use of them. He asked if I could find one and I said I’d try. He wants to keep me out of it, and suggested that I send the man to Newcastle, pretending that I didn’t know what it was for. But of course that would be a waste of time. If you can get the supercharger, all you have to do is to take it to my father. He is a man of his word, and will pay the money on the spot.”
“Just what is a supercharger?”
“A device to take rarefied air and condense it and force it into an airplane engine. The purpose is to enable the plane to maintain its speed in high altitudes.”
“What would it weigh?”
“That’s hard to guess. The effort of every airplane manufacturer is to reduce the weight of everything, and the merit of this new apparatus will lie in the fact that it will do more work per pound of weight. How much Göring’s technicians have achieved is what my father wants to find out. My best guess would be seventy-five or a hundred pounds. You understand, of course, the blueprints or drawings would do as well.”
“That would depend on where I could make a connection—with the office, or the shop, or one of the airfields. Do you know where the thing is made?”
“One of our men has become convinced that it is being made by Siemens, here in Berlin.”
“Well, of course I’d like to earn that lump of money for the cause. I’ll make inquiries, and let you know.”
“One thing has to be got clear—nothing is any good but the newest model. If there’s any uncertainty, my father will show you what he has already, and what the performances are.”
“I catch myself fooling around your father’s plant and then going back to Germany!” laughed the ex-sailor. “No, indeed, this is a job to be done on a moonless night. If either the gadget or the drawings were missing, the Gestapo would go to work all over the world, and you can be sure your father’s place would be one of the first.”
“That’s true enough; and you understand that my father must never be named to anyone. That would be practically the same as naming me. You’ll have to say that it’s the British or the French who want the device; that’s perfectly plausible, and no doubt they’d pay a good price for it. I don’t suppose your comrades would care very much who was going to get hold of it.”
“We would take the position that anything that hurt the Nazis would help us. They are a gang of criminals in our eyes, and there’s no question of patriotism involved.”
“All right then. How soon shall I expect to hear as to the prospects?”
“That’s hard to guess. I have to consult someone who knows the situation better than I, and he has to start a chain of inquiries. It might be a day or two and it might be a week before I’ll have anything worth reporting.”
“I’m not sure just how long I can stay in Germany; but you can write me to the Adlon or to Juan. Let’s call it a Defregger; you can say that you can get the Defregger, or whatever you have to tell me about
the Defregger. If you manage to get it to England, or to Canada, you can cable or telephone to my father from there. The keyword for him is Tiergarten. All you have to do is to say that word and he’ll send someone with the money.”
“Just as simple as that!” said Monck.
IX
Lanny deposited his friend on the street at a place requested, and then drove back to his hotel, his mind buzzing with the new job he had taken. Ordinarily, when he had “P.A.” letters to mail he drove into Holland or Switzerland; but this time he had been planning a trip to the Polish Corridor—for a reason having to do with his last talk with Adolf Hitler. Trying to find out the Führer’s intentions regarding Poland, Lanny had invented on the spur of the moment a tale to the effect that he was thinking of purchasing a property in the Corridor and making it his home. Real-estate values would of course be affected by any action the Nazis took; if they moved in, many Poles would move out. Hitler had smiled and said that a little later Herr Budd might be able to drive a better bargain.
Now Herr Budd was uneasy in mind, because he knew that the Führer never forgot any detail, even the smallest; he would bring the matter up and ask questions, and you had better be sure you had your story straight. “Where is the property?” and “How big is it?” and “What are they asking for it?” To Lanny it appeared the part of wisdom to go and look at properties, and pick out one that seemed plausible; so he would be able to answer questions, and would have a pretext for bringing up the all-important subject of the Corridor once more. “Adi” would take up the conversation and blaze away at the Poles, and at their British and French and Jewish supporters; he would shout what he was going to do to them, and perhaps even set a date for the doing!
This Polish Corridor ran between Germany on the west and Danzig and East Prussia on the east; it gave Poland access to the Baltic, and represented one of the bright ideas of the Peace Conference of Paris, in which Lanny had played his small part as a youth. Twenty years ago, perhaps to a day, he had taken Lincoln Steffens and Colonel House to the apartment of his Red uncle, where they had met three representatives of the dreaded Bolsheviks, this being a part of President Wilson’s effort to bring about a conference between the Russians and the western Allies. How Lanny and his liberal friends had agonized over the blunders being made by those elder statesmen, so hopelessly diverse in their points of view! The young liberals had clamored, foreseeing many calamities—but nothing so bad as the realities which now confronted the world.
Hitler had appeared in Europe; and by fraud and force, cunningly combined, he had got the German people behind him, as blindly fanatical as himself. Whenever he wanted some territory, his Nazis would begin singing, yelling, and beating up their opponents in that place; when the government put the disturbances down, that was an outrage against the Herrenrasse, one of a series of atrocities. Dr. Goebbels would spread them across the front pages of the newspapers he controlled—which was all the papers inside Germany, and others in the border countries, and in many of the great cities of the world, including New York and Chicago.
One of the earliest victims of this technique had been the “free city” of Danzig, supposed to be under the supervision of the League of Nations. The Danzig Nazis had seized the government, and the League had given up the struggle. Hitler was now demanding that both Danzig and the Corridor be turned over to him, and negotiations with Poland were going on, as secret as those with Czechoslovakia. Lanny’s program was to travel to the Corridor and put the Czech terms into the airmail; then return to Berlin and begin a campaign to find out the terms for Poland.
X
There was a swarm of American journalists in Naziland, and the son of Budd-Erling took a lot of trouble to keep away from them; the last thing he wanted was publicity—except, of course, as an art expert. So as a rule he walked fast through the lobby of the Adlon, and never went into the bar or the lounge which these visiting journalists called their “Club.” But that evening he made a slip; he ran into Pietro Corsatti in the lobby, face to face, and couldn’t cut him dead. Pete was an old friend, dating back to the days soon after Mussolini had taken power and had had the Socialist Matteotti beaten to death by his gangsters; Lanny, visiting in Rome, had got word about it, had tipped Pete off, and then been bounced from Il Duce’s New Roman Empire.
A long time ago, and it had been forgotten, and should have stayed so. Lanny should have made some quick excuse and ducked into the elevator; but it was his weakness that he liked people, and here was somebody he hadn’t seen for several years. Pete had helped to get Lanny married to Irma Barnes, and naturally he wanted to ask how Irma was, and how Lanny was getting along, and what he was doing in Berlin. This Brooklyn-born Italian-American, who referred to the natives of his fatherland as “wops,” now had a job as roving correspondent, picking up interesting stories wherever he could find them. Lanny had seen his stuff occasionally in New York papers which were to be bought at hotel newsstands in the capitals he visited.
They chatted for a bit, and it was self-indulgence on Lanny’s part, because Pete was one of those journalists who had a lack of admiration for the Nazi-Fascists; and of course the spies in the Adlon would make note of everyone he talked to. Presently he remarked: “I’m on my way to the Polish border; there’s a story I’ve got wind of.”
Lanny then did something still more injudicious, saying: “I’m leaving for the Corridor, first thing in the morning. Why not let me take you in my car?”
“The place I have to visit is farther to the south, across the border from Schneidemühl.”
“I could go that way just as well,” said Lanny. “I’ll be delighted to have your company.”
“All right; it’s a date!”
Belatedly the P.A.’s caution asserted itself. “One thing, Pete; you mustn’t put me into any story. I have my reasons.”
“Oh, sure thing,” replied the newsman. “Never forget, I kept the secret of you and Irma—and that wasn’t easy, believe me!”
XI
They had an early breakfast and by gray winter daylight were rolling across the flat plains of Prussia, deeply buried in snow. The soil which lay beneath was sandy and poor, and when the snow had melted, Polish workers would be imported to begin planting it with potatoes, the main staple of the German workers’ diet. The land was cut by many small streams, but you hardly knew you were passing them, for the road was one of those four-lane Autobahnen which the engineer Dr. Todt had built for his Führer’s wars. Fruit trees had been planted on both sides of the road, according to a custom in this frugal country; by the size of the trees you could tell when the road had been built. The snow was kept cleared from it, and you could drive as fast as you thought safe.
On the way, the journalist told about the errand which was bringing him. Somebody had given him a tip as to where he might find the father of Herschel Grynspan. The name sounded familiar, but Lanny couldn’t place it until his friend reminded him—the Jewish youth who had shot and killed Edouard vom Rath, of the Nazi embassy in Paris. Oh, yes, Lanny remembered; he didn’t say that he had met this Prussian diplomat in Paris, a year or so before his death. The Jewish boy, only seventeen years of age, had emptied a revolver into him, and was now a prisoner of the French, awaiting trial for his life. Pete had got a tip that the boy’s family were among the tens of thousands of Polish Jews who had been driven out of Germany only a week or two prior to the killing. Very probably that cruelty to his parents had had something to do with the mad act; anyhow, a man with a nose for news had decided that the world would be interested in learning about that family, and what its members had to say concerning the son, and his crime, and the tragic consequences it had brought upon the helpless Jews still in Naziland.
They talked about these dreadful events, Lanny, of course, being watchful of every word. Gone were the days when he was a young rebel full of dreams of a happier society and ready to take risks in the cause of the underdog. Here, instead, was a placid man of the world, who had learned that the unhappy
planet wasn’t going to be changed overnight, and that the old continent of Europe was especially set in its wicked ways. Lanny explained that his profession of art expert obliged him to meet all sorts of persons, and his father’s activities as a manufacturer of military airplanes made it necessary for him to do business with the Nazis; the son had found that he was antagonizing everybody he knew, and had made up his mind that his only course was to forget the evil subject of politics.
A secret agent had used this camouflage many times; but it always hurt him, and he wasn’t comforted by Pete’s reply, that he could understand how Lanny felt, for he had a problem of much the same sort. He was a reporter, and wasn’t supposed to express opinions, but merely to tell what he had seen and heard; his job depended upon his ability and willingness to “take policy,” as newspapermen phrased it. Lanny was left to guess whether his old friend really meant this, or was just trying to comfort the son of Budd-Erling. In the former case it meant that Pete was corrupted, and in the latter it meant that Lanny was now helping to corrupt him by a bad example. In either case it was painful, and made Lanny wish he hadn’t come on this trip. He resolved all over again that he mustn’t permit himself the luxury of meeting the friends of his Pink days. Also, he dropped the idea which had crossed his mind, that Pete might be the man to make known to the world the Führer’s demands upon the government of Czechoslovakia!
XII
The drive to Schneidemühl, capital of the province of Grenzmark, took about three hours. The border was near, and they obtained their visas and soon were in Poland; you knew it at once because the roads were of a poorer class, and likewise the houses. They were looking for a village with a superfluity of consonants in its name, and the track they followed had had only enough snow cleared away for a single vehicle; if you met another, you had to back up to a passing place. Presently they came to the village, and then began a strange experience; they were looking for a Jew named David Grynspan, and who knew where any Jew lived? They were scattered along the border, more than ten thousand of them, and nobody knew their names, or if they had any.