So Lanny, who had never killed anybody in his life and never expected to, learned to consider the killing of thousands and even tens of thousands as a problem of mathematics, a function of trajectories, fire power, the expansion rates of gases, logistics, and other sciences with long technical names. His old friend withheld no secrets from him, for Lanny was Budd-Erling, and Emil knew a lot about the performance of Budd-Erling planes, and didn’t know that Lanny’s father was on the verge of a quarrel with the head of the Luftwaffe. Lanny listened attentively and remembered everything he could, for Rick had been a flyer, and so had Rick’s son, Alfy, and they were intimate with Royal Air Force men who would be glad to have this information. Also, it might be possible for Denis de Bruyne to use it in an effort to frighten the pink-cheeked old General Gamelin into a semblance of mental activity.
XII
Coming back from this quiet evening, Lanny found in his mail one of those inconspicuous letters which made his heart beat faster. This one informed him, in a single sentence, that there was a possibility of getting a good Defregger if he would meet the writer that evening or the following one. It was too late for that evening, so Lanny had to spend a day rather restlessly, trying to occupy himself with picture business and wishing that he hadn’t bunched his dangers so closely. If the most precious secret of the Wilhelmstrasse and that of the Luftwaffe were both stolen in the same week, the Gestapo would just about go crazy!
Promptly on schedule, Bernhardt Monck stepped into Lanny’s car; and, as was his custom, he came straight to the point. “I cannot say positively, but I am assured that there is a good chance of our having what we want. I have not been told any of the details, except that if it can be done, it will be on next Saturday night, the idea being that the discovery will not be made until Monday morning, which will give us time to get the stuff out of the country.”
“Is it the drawings or the actual thing?”
“The thing. I’m guessing it’s a factory job, somebody in the manufacturing plant.”
“Did you find out anything about the size or weight?”
“It’s about the size of two suitcases put side by side, and it weighs about forty pounds. The problem is, how to get it past the border. My connections with ships have been severed, and I am afraid to try to renew them. Trudi had contacts with locomotive engineers who used to carry parcels for her—but most of those comrades are in concentration camps now. Much literature has been smuggled into Germany under loads of hay in peasant carts; but it takes time to arrange a thing like that, and if the alarm were given in this case, they would go through every vehicle leaving the country. I have thought of the possibility of taking the gadget to pieces and getting the parts out separately—or possibly hiding them here and there in a car or under it. The thing consists mostly of pipes, I am told, and I suppose your father’s experts would know how to put it together again.”
“You can reasonably assume that.”
“I have the idea that a fast motor car would be my best bet; one that would get me to the Dutch border in a few hours.”
That sounded like a hint, and Lanny said: “I wish I could help you, Monck, but I have told you my circumstances.”
“All I’m looking for is advice—two heads being better than one. The money you have given me would suffice to buy a good car; the only problem is, if I have the purchase made, and then the gadget is not obtainable, I have wasted a lot of money.”
“The car could be sold again; and anyhow, don’t hesitate to take the chance. When my father wants something, he wants it, and he would wreck a dozen cars to get his way.”
“All right; if that’s the word, I’ll go ahead. I can arrange to have a chauffeur’s uniform bought for me, and if the car is registered in the name of some person who lives abroad, I imagine I could get past the border unless a special alarm had been given.”
“That sounds like a risky project to me, Monck.”
“Of course it would be better if I could have a passenger; someone who would be the owner, and would look as if he was used to being driven by a chauffeur. Can you think of any person of a liberal turn of mind who might enjoy an automobile ride, say to Le Havre?”
Lanny answered: “Even if I knew a liberal-minded person in this country, I would not dare to communicate with him, and he would hardly trust an art expert who has just been wooing Hitler in public.”
“That is true,” assented Monck. “But if I had the name of a trustworthy person, I might approach him myself, or have someone else do it.”
“Wait a moment,” said the art expert. He thought: “Pete Corsatti! He spoke cynically, but he’s a decent fellow at heart—he showed it when he met those wretched Jews.” And then: “Yes, but he’s a newspaperman, and even if he didn’t write anything about the story, he could hardly be expected not to talk about it to his friends.”
Aloud, Lanny said: “I suppose that if I could think of some person who is honest and wouldn’t betray you, it might be possible for you to approach him without his having any idea that I was mixed up in it.”
“Something like that is what I had in mind.”
“The person wouldn’t even have to know about the supercharger. It could be just a proposition to help an underground worker escaping from Germany.”
“Exactly.”
“Even if this plan failed and the police caught you, my guess is it wouldn’t be such a serious matter for a foreigner. He bought a car and engaged a chauffeur to drive him; or you came to him, saying that you had a car for hire and offering to drive him wherever he wished to go. You could have letters of reference, I suppose.”
“Those are easy to prepare; and people seldom check up on them.”
“I am thinking of a friend, a Hungarian, Zoltan Kertezsi; you have perhaps heard me speak of him in Paris. He is an art expert, and taught me most of what I know about the trade. I could telephone him that I have an important painting in view, and he would take a plane and come at once. If he had a painting to take out, and I wasn’t in position to drive him, he would be open to a proposition from a man who was going out in a car and offered to take him for a reasonable price.”
That sounded all right. But then, after thinking more about it, Lanny began throwing cold water on his own project. “The trouble is, Zoltan is a grasshopper. He was in London the last time he wrote me, and he might be in New York by now. Then, too, telephone calls are a matter of record, and telegrams are open to the Gestapo. It’ll have to be someone who is already here, and whom you can deal with direct.”
XIII
They were rolling along on a wide boulevard, with the lights of many cars flashing past. Wealthy Berliners were going to their pleasures, or coming from them; in great cities, night was the same as day. So long as Lanny obeyed the traffic regulations, nobody would stop his car; he could drive here and there, all night if he wished; and Monck said he was in no hurry.
At last another idea, a promising one. “There is an American lady visiting in this town: a writer, and a clever one. She is sympathetic, and I am certain that she is honest—I mean, even if she refused to help you, she would keep your secret. I only know her slightly, and she must never have the slightest hint that I am connected with the matter.”
“How would I meet her?”
“She is staying at a pension, and I’m afraid you’d have to take the chance of going there and calling on her. The risk of one visit wouldn’t be great, for the maid who opens the door would hardly have access to the files of the Gestapo.”
“No, but. I couldn’t talk to anybody in the public reception room of a pension.”
“It would be up to you to choose your words carefully, convince her that you are an honest man, and persuade her to take a walk with you—on some street not too lonely and yet not too frequented.”
“How could I explain that I heard of her?”
“One of the servants of the pension has observed a look on her face, or noted some words that she spoke. That caused you to go to the State
Library, where you consulted the Reader’s Guide indexes, and found several of her short stories listed; you read them, and drew the conclusion that she was a person to be trusted. You are being hunted by the Gestapo and it is necessary for you to get out of Germany; your supporters have put up the money for a car, and she is to buy it and let you act as chauffeur. Once you are outside of Germany, the car will be hers.”
“Donnerwetter!”
“That will be a small price to pay, in my father’s view. From the lady’s point of view, it would be an experience, and might be good for her writing career. So far, her observation has been confined to one small class; and you could teach her more about Germany in one day than she would learn in the Pension Baumgartner in a year.”
“That all seems reasonable enough,” declared the man of the underground. “Of course you’d have to tell me about her writings; I couldn’t go into the State Library.”
“Surely not. I’d tell you all I know about her. But I can’t take a decision like this without more thought. I should have to go over every detail of the program, from the point of view of the chances of my connection with it being traced. If the woman got into trouble, the police would question everybody at the pension, and it would be known that I have called on her there. I am at a disadvantage, because I don’t know how you would conceal the supercharger in the car, and so what the risks would amount to. I can think of a score of emergencies for which you would have to be mentally prepared. Give me until tomorrow night and I’ll let you know.”
XIV
Lanny went back to his hotel room, undressed and got into bed, but didn’t go to sleep. He lay there scolding himself, because once more he was breaking his promises to himself; he was doing those things which he ought not to have done and he was leaving undone those things which he ought to have done and there was no health in him. So runs the Episcopal Church formula, which he had learned at St. Thomas’s Academy long, long ago. But Thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us—and let us have our own way this one more time, and we’ll promise to be good forever after!
The point was, Lanny’s presidential agent job ought to have sufficed;, he ought to have put it first, and the rest nowhere; he ought to have left the stealing of superchargers to Bub Smith, ex-cowboy who had been Robbie’s confidential agent for thirty years and was now the head of the private police force at the Budd-Erling plant. Instead, he was yielding to the temptation to help earn a hundred thousand marks for the anti-Nazi underground, and incidentally help to bring the airplanes; of his own country to a parity with those of Der Dicke. These were definite and tangible things, whereas the reports to F.D.R. seemed like shooting arrows into the dark. Was this overworked man really reading them, and remembering what he read? And would he ever do anything about them—would the course of human events be altered by the millionth part of a degree by all Lanny Budd’s wandering over the earth, intriguing and questioning and typing and mailing?
Lanny always told himself that he didn’t believe in worrying. But this time, he argued, it wasn’t worrying, it was foresight; it was anticipating possible events and making the necessary provisions. He imagined a dozen different ways of packing a double-sized suitcase into an automobile and keeping it from looking like what it was; and then as many different ways of persuading border guards that a supercharger was really a lady’s vanity case—or what was it? There were so many things he must tell Monck; he didn’t dare to make written notes, but he ticked them off on his fingers and learned them by heart, as he had done with the eleven points of Hitler’s demands on Czechoslovakia. He went through the whole routine of Monck’s visit to the pension, and his whispered speech which would persuade a properly brought-up society lady of Baltimore to come for a walk with an ex-sailor whom she had never laid eyes on before and who would appear to her as something of a rough customer.
Lanny didn’t worry especially about Laurel Creston, because, after all, she didn’t have to go for a walk if she didn’t want to, nor did she have to be taken for a ride. If she consented—well, Lanny thought of the remark of Franz Liszt concerning a certain woman who had voice but no temperament, that he would like to marry her and break her heart so that she could really sing. If Laurel Creston got a real scare from the Nazis, it would serve to put the shivers into her writing, and if they arrested her and it got into the newspapers it would quadruple the prices she could charge magazine editors.
But then right away Lanny thought: “Gosh! She’d write about this episode! She’d make it into a short story!” So he ticked off on his fingers one more caution which he must pass on to Monck: he must extract from the honorable lady the solemn promise that she would never write anything which could give the Gestapo any hint as to the methods by which the underground got its emissaries into Naziland and out!
It must have been nearly morning when Lanny fell into a troubled sleep. After that, he couldn’t remember what happened, but it must have been terrible, because at the end he found himself tied down on some sort of chopping block, and over him stood Der Dicke, having regained his full size and muscular power. He was dressed in evening clothes with tails such as the Nazi executioner wore on state occasions, but also his chest was covered with a mass of decorations, including the great gold eight-pointed star. His face was contorted with rage, and he was waving over Lanny’s head a huge bloody battleax, and yelling: “Dummer Narr! Mit solcher Stümperei wollst du mich hinters Licht führen?”—and Lanny, struggling frantically against his bonds, opened his eyes and discovered that he had forgotten to turn off the steam heat in his room, and he had over the lower half of him one of those extraordinary feather quilts called plumeau which they have in Germany, as thick as bolsters but only half long enough, so that one half of you perspires while the other half freezes.
8
Face of Danger
I
Lanny had planned to spend the next morning taking a long walk in the Tiergarten. He hadn’t yet decided whether he would say the word Yes or the word No—two short words which have decided the fate of men and of empires. He wanted to go over all those difficulties again, and check off on his fingers the things that Monck had to learn by heart. But no sooner had he bathed and shaved and dressed and eaten a late breakfast than the telephone rang and there was announced the Herr SS Oberleutnant Jaeckel of the Führer’s personal staff, whom Lanny had met at Berchtesgaden and driven in his car to the last Parteitag at Nuremberg. Lanny went down into the lobby, bowed ceremoniously, and shook the young officer’s hand, for secretaries and aides-de-camp of great men are important personalities—they can arrange appointments, drop subtle hints, and now and then make or break careers. They become aware of their own powers, and suspicious of every sort of approach; so it is necessary to deal with them with exactly the correct amount of dignity, yet with a touch of cordiality and awareness of them as human beings.
Lanny was informed that the Führer would receive him in his New Chancellery office at two o’clock that afternoon. It was, of course, a royal command, and for a P.A. the most important thing in the world. Herr Budd said that he was greatly honored and would be on hand promptly. So then Lanny took his walk in the park, through a light and not unpleasant snowstorm; but he didn’t think much about Monck and Miss Creston. He had to put his mind on Adi Schicklgruber: just what he hoped to get out of him, and just how to approach each topic.
Such an interview is a battle, and a commander who means to win has to study his enemy, also the maps of the terrain, and foresee every move and plan his countermove. In this case the terrain was the soul of Adi, and Lanny knew it thoroughly, having been a guest in his home and studied him under a variety of circumstances. He was a compulsive personality, pathologically so, and his reflexes were as automatic as those of an electrical machine. If you pressed certain buttons, the machine would run smoothly, and for a long time; if you pressed certain others, the machine would blow out a fuse, or perhaps blow up and’ blow you clean off the premises. Achtung, Lanny!
II
There was an Old Chancellery building, which had been good enough for the Kaisers, but was not good enough for the one-time occupant of the refuge for the shelterless in Vienna. There was a frustrated architect in Hitler—he had wanted to follow that profession, and now wanted to show both Austria and Germany that they had rejected and humiliated one of the great constructors of all time. So now stretching along the Wilhelmstrasse was a three-story granite building which looked exactly like a barracks—and this effect was maintained by SS guards of the Führer’s own Leibstandart, armed with submachine guns. Lanny had a card of admission, and was passed into an immense long corridor with red marble floors. Walking down this corridor, he came to double doors with a bronze coat of arms made of the initials AH. Opening one of these doors, precisely on the stroke of two, he encountered a secretary who knew him and escorted him into the inner sanctum.
It would have been lèse majesté to suggest it, but Lanny was quite sure that the Führer had taken his idea of an office from Mussolini—just as he had taken his program, his technique, and a lot of his paraphernalia. The office of a dictator must be immense, so that the visitor will be overwhelmed; the desk must be immense, and the visitor must be compelled to walk a long way to it, all alone and with nothing to sustain his tottering footsteps. Rightly, the dictator himself should have been of superhuman size, like a sculptured Egyptian pharaoh; but unfortunately Il Duce was a stubby fellow, fond of good eating, and Der Führer was barely of medium size, and would have been taken for the proprietor of a Kolonialwarenladen in a small German town—that is to say, a grocery.