“That is surely what you Germans call Tüchtigkeit.”
Monck wanted to know: “Have you seen anything in the papers about the matter? I have been watching such as I could get.”
“There was nothing in Germany before I left, nor in London. I concluded that it must have been an inside job, and that somebody was interested in keeping it quiet.”
“You can bet on that. It cost quite a sum of money. I had to promise to bring in fifty thousand freimarks. Somebody went bond for me, I imagine.”
“Well, you’ll be able to make good—of course assuming the gadget is the real thing.”
“If it isn’t, I’ll never be able to convince those people that I didn’t get the money.”
“Let us hope for the best. My father knows—and I never knew him to break his word.” Then Lanny added: “Tell me about your trip.”
“There’s nothing much to tell. That lady is a brick—I believe that’s what you Americans say.”
“Not about ladies, as a rule. You had no trouble?”
“She was a well-to-do tourist and her papers were in order. She had a chauffeur, and his were in order. We went through like any other tourists. But she’s different from others—she wouldn’t keep the car.”
“The devil you say!”
“She didn’t know how to drive and didn’t want to fool with it. She took it to a second-hand dealer and got two hundred and seventy pounds; she kept forty to cover her expenses in London and her trip back to Berlin. She said: ‘Use the rest for the cause.’”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” remarked the son of Budd-Erling. “I didn’t suppose she knew anything about the cause.”
“I don’t think she did when she started; aber, Herrschaft!—she surely did when we got to London. She sat in the back seat of that car for about twelve hours altogether and shot questions at me out of a machine gun; first about the underground and how it worked—I couldn’t tell her much, but I told what I could; and then about the Social-Democratic Party, how it grew and what strength it had before Hitler; and the Communists, and why we couldn’t work with them; and then, what the Socialists believe, and how it would work—you know, all the things we learned thirty years ago, and take for granted that everybody knows, but they don’t: who will do the dirty work, and how can there be incentives in a collectivist system, and will there be public ownership of toothbrushes. All that while we were approaching the border, and knew that the Nazis might grab us both!”
“Well, it took your mind off your troubles!” chuckled Lanny.
“It was a pleasure to answer, because she got what you said. She wanted the names of some books to read, and she wanted to write them down, but I wouldn’t let her until we had got out of Germany. I actually believe she intends to get them and read them.”
“Haven’t you known women who get books and read them?”
“Not often; as a rule they just want to be able to say they have read them. But this is a fine girl, and you ought to see more of her.”
“I thought maybe you had that in mind when you gave me her address in London. I asked her to lunch at Simpson’s.”
“What I had in mind,” said the ex-Capitán, bluntly, “was that you might ask her to marry you.”
The ex-playboy chuckled again. “I thought of that, too. But instead, I took her to see the Turners in the Tate Gallery.” After a moment, thinking this might sound snobbish, he added: “What would I do with a wife, old man—jumping about the world as I have to?”
“Well, I don’t see my wife very often; but she knows I’m working for the cause and not fooling with other women, and so she sticks.”
Lanny answered, in a tone that no one could mistake for snobbish: “Trudi sticks by me, Genosse. There isn’t a day that I don’t think about her; and when I have a difficult decision to make, it is just as if she were with me, passing one of her stern judgments. I am sure she will never permit me to weaken in the battle against Fascism.”
“You mean by that that you believe in survival after death?”
“I’ve never been able to make up my mind about that. But memory is a kind of survival, and a very strange thing; we only fool ourselves if we think we understand it. Does memory exist only in our minds, or does the universe have memory, too? The physicists have moved a long way since the days when you learned materialistic monism in a Marxist Sunday school. They tell us now that time may be something which our minds impose upon reality; and if that’s true, it may well be that anything which ever existed exists always in some other form.”
“If I tried to think about things like that,” declared the serious-minded Socialist, “I wouldn’t know if I was standing on my feet or my head.”
Said Lanny, with a smile: “That is exactly what everybody said when Copernicus began telling them that the world was round!”
IX
The son of Budd-Erling meant to stay in New York until the matter of the supercharger had been settled; but he couldn’t be seen with his fellow-conspirator because there were many Nazi agents here, and some knew Lanny and some might know Monck. The P.A. went off by himself, and thought about Laurel Creston, and the extraordinary fact that she had refused to be paid for helping an underground worker to escape from the Gestapo. Lanny did things like that himself, but he didn’t expect others to do them, at least not members of what he called the “bourgeois” world. But here was, apparently, a comrade, a woman Socialist in the process of coming into being—something unexpected and quite astonishing. It was like plucking a tightly closed bud and setting it in a vase of water, then seeing a rose unfold. All the time the rose was locked up in the bud, but you didn’t know it, and couldn’t guess what color it would be, White, or Pink, or Red. Centuries ago there had been the Wars of the Roses in England; now there were wars of these same political colors, all over Europe, and indeed all over the world!
“Why don’t you ask her to marry you?” Lanny had thought of that, and now he thought of it some more. She was going to read the books that he had read and think the thoughts that he had thought; and he might play the little drama that Rick’s wife had suggested, he might ask her questions and let her explain matters to him, and educate him, just as the mysterious Herr Siebert had educated her. She would be happy to do it, and proud; she might experience toward her convert the same warm glow which Lanny now felt at the thought of her own conversion.
But then came the old objections. If he married her, would he tell her about F.D.R.? No doubt he could get the President’s permission to do so. Then she would help in his work—but how? Would she give up her writing, or would she take a pen name and try to keep it secret? Very difficult indeed, for the editors who knew her work would hardly fail to recognize it under a new name. And what would she do about all her relatives and friends, who knew her as a free-spoken critic of them and their institutions? Would she pretend that Lanny had converted her, and that she had become an ardent Nazi-Fascist, an intimate of Nummer Eins, Nurmner Zwei, und Nummer Drei? Very difficult indeed to arrange that, or even to imagine it!
No, no, it was all a dream; a pleasant and heart-warming dream, but far removed from reality. Duty, the stern Daughter of the Voice of God, called Lanny Budd. Trudi, his murdered wife, called him. Trudi wasn’t jealous, and wouldn’t have objected to his marrying again; but she reminded him that his work was something that nobody else could do. Hadn’t he just written a speech which the most important man in the world was going to deliver? F.D. himself had told Lanny how helpful his services were, and that ought to settle the matter once for all.
Very well then, get to work. There was a job to be done right here in New York. A P.A. needed to know what the Nazis were doing in the New World. F.D. had said that he had other men taking care of that, but Lanny knew that the puppetstrings ran back and forth between Berlin and New York, and that connections he made here were useful in Germany, and vice versa. The head of the Nazi propaganda department in the New World had introduced him to men whom he had met subsequently in the
Old; also, what the agents of Hitler were doing now in Mexico and Central and South America revealed what he meant to do after he had finished with Poland and the Ukraine and the Balkans.
X
Lanny consulted the telephone book and called the home of Forrest Quadratt. A year had passed since their last meeting, and Lanny said: “I have met our top friends abroad and have a lot of news.” A soft, seductive voice replied: “Oh, good! Will you come up to dinner. I expect a guest whom you will like to meet—a Senator.”
So Lanny drove once more to the apartment on Riverside Drive, full of books and literary trophies—for this sly little man with the gentle deprecating manner and the thick-lensed eyeglasses had been in his time a decadent poet of no slight talent and had cultivated literary friendships on two continents. He was American born, but boasted of being a left-handed grandson of one of the Kaisers; in his heart he was a Prussian aristocrat, subtle and infinitely corrupt. Having lived most of his life in America, he knew the crude and gullible idealists of this New World, and it delighted him to twist them around his fingers and cause them to do the opposite of what they thought they were doing.
He was trying it now with a United States Senator named “Bob” Reynolds, from the county called Buncombe in the state called No’th Cah’lina, a large genial gentleman in his middle fifties, wearing a black string tie along with his evening clothes. His hair was scant in front and plastered down at the sides; his nose was broad and his plump face wore an amiable grin, slightly suggestive of a circus clown’s. He had been, so Lanny was told, a barker in a sideshow and a patent-medicine vendor, which meant that he had a gift of the gab and knew how to take care of himself in any company—a strange combination of rustic cunning from the “Tarheel state” with childish naïveté, helpless in the hands of the age-old and practiced subtleties of Europe.
He was a professional patriot, and one of the darlings of the Roosevelt-haters; they swarmed to him, and he put their speeches and editorial outpourings into the Congressional Record. He had just started publication of his own weekly, the American Vindicator, and had brought along some copies to show the Nazi agent, whose large mailing lists he wanted. “America for Americans” was his slogan, and his special phobia was “aliens”; he wanted to overcome “alien influence” which was seeking to undermine his native land. Apparently he didn’t think of Quadratt as an alien, and when in his paper he urged members of the German-American Bund to subscribe, he was trying to convert aliens into good Americans. He had made himself the head of a semisecret vigilante society called “the Vindicators,” and provided its members with a red, white, and blue badge, a red, white, and blue feather for their hats, and a “Don’t Tread on Me” rattlesnake banner. Right now he was organizing a youth group which he called “the Border Patrol,” also with red, white, and blue symbols. Lanny wondered, had this bouncing demagogue got all this up out of his own head, or had some Bund members told him about the Hitlerjugend, with their daggers marked Blut und Ehre—blood and honor—and the parallel organization which in America they called their Jugendschaft—also carrying daggers?
The Senator had got himself elected by traveling over his state and shouting from the stump, first, that his rival ate caviar, which was fish eggs, and second, that the aliens and the Reds were trying to drag this country into Europe’s wars. He was planning to run for President and to carry the nation by the same method, and turn out “that madman in the White House.” He was going to Germany, to see for himself; he knew already what he was going to find there—no unemployment, and everything exactly as it ought to be. It was high time that we learned something from these “dictators.” He wanted to know what Lanny thought about this, and about the American Vindicator, with which the Senator was as delighted as a child with a new toy. Its “masthead” showed a rising sun with the American flag on one side and the upper half of the Statue of Liberty on the other.
Lanny said: “If you will permit me to make a suggestion, sir—”
“Certainly, Mr. Budd.”
“The Führer owes his tremendous political success to the fact that he had an economic program which offered hope to the ‘little fellow’ in the Fatherland. He promised the abolition of ‘interest slavery,’ the nationalization of department stores—a whole set of such measures. It seems to me that in America our friends are depending too much on a purely negative approach. They are against Roosevelt and against war; but the people want to know what they are for.”
“You may be right,” the great man admitted, slightly crestfallen. “I had such a program for my state; but how can anyone beat Roosevelt at his own game?”
“I don’t know,” Lanny said; “I am not an economist or a political promoter. But if you look at California you see what the people will vote for—Ham and Eggs, and other good things to eat; ‘thirty every Thursday’ and ‘sixty at sixty’—those slogans refer to dollars, Senator, and it is an old American saying that ‘money talks.’”
So for a while they discussed the possibility of outdealing the New Deal; but they couldn’t figure how to do it, since the “madman in the White House” had the United States Treasury at his back. When the statesman took his departure the host remarked, with a smile: “You spoiled his evening, Budd. He has become conservative, and can’t bear to say or hear anything impolite about money. He is a friend of Mrs. Evalyn Walsh McLean, of Washington, who owns the biggest diamond in the world and wears it on her bosom at cocktail parties.”
XI
The two friends of Germany sat in consultation until late in the evening. Lanny told what he had learned about the Führer’s purposes, and about the attitudes of Göring and Hess and others. He was certain that Quadratt had a right to know these things, or at any rate would consider that he had. In return the one-time poet told about his work in America, its progress and prospects. They were persons of similar tastes and had many friends in common; they liked each other and foresaw the possibility of mutual helpfulness. Having revealed many valuable secrets, the son of Budd-Erling remarked: “You may do me a favor, if you will, Quadratt.” He thought it was good tactics to let this man have a claim upon him.
“If I can,” was the reply.
“I should like to meet Henry Ford. I understand that his wife is interested in paintings and it would be a valuable connection for me.”
“He is not an easy man to meet, but I am sure that you would interest him greatly. I’ll be glad to try to arrange it.”
“I have’ other business that will take me to Detroit and I plan to motor there shortly.”
The poet considered for a moment. “I, too, have business there. How would it do if you took me along? You could see Ford alone, of course.”
“Oh, by no means! I have nothing confidential to talk to him about. If you wouldn’t mind hearing me tell him about my visits to Berchtesgaden and my talks with the Führer——”
“No friend of the Führer would ever tire of that, Budd.”
“Well then, by all means come along. I was planning to start in the next three or four days, depending upon a matter which I have to close up here. Would that be agreeable to you?”
“I’ll make it agreeable. Let me know as soon as you are sure of the day.”
So they parted; and Lanny drove back to his hotel, patting himself on the back and reflecting that the life of a presidential agent was just about tops for variety and unexpectedness!
XII
Lanny got together with his friend Zoltan and they passed the time very pleasantly, looking at exhibitions. This huge city had been having a wave of interest in painting; one of the big department stores was preparing to handle guaranteed old masters, and in Washington Square independent artists were showing their works and selling them at any price from a dollar up. Something worth while might come out of all that—and anyhow, it was better than getting drunk and dancing to jungle music.
Two days later there came a note from Monck, and Lanny picked him up that evening. The first thing he said was: “I’ve
never been so scared in all my life.” That scared Lanny—until the man of the underground added: “I’ve got a bundle of one-thousand-dollar banknotes pinned up over my heart—forty of them—and I’ve no idea what to do with them.”
“So the old gentleman was satisfied!” exclaimed the old gentleman’s son.
“All he said was: ‘There you are, Herr Tiergarten, thanks, and good luck.’ He didn’t even say: ‘Count them and make sure.’ Is he used to handing out wads of dough like that?”
“He began life as a salesman of munitions, and for forty years he’s been handing out all sorts of money to all sorts of people. He always knows what he wants and what he’s willing to pay for it.”
“I have been making my first acquaintance with what you Americans call private enterprise.”
“It is a severe test of character,” said the P.A. “You have pinned over your heart a bunch of capitalistic ‘incentive.’ In what direction is it going to lead you?”
“First, to Germany. I have to put twenty of these notes into the hands of a certain man.”
“Can you get in without too much danger?”
“The country has a couple of thousand miles of border, and there are gaps between the patrols.”
“Will your man be able to get rid of large American banknotes?”
“That is his problem. My promise was that I would bring them. I want to stop in Paris and give a couple of them to my wife; that will take care of her and the children for a year or two. I suppose that is fair.”
“No one could object if you took it all, Monck.”
“The problem is, what to do with the rest. It would be dangerous for me to carry it about, for if I have any sort of encounter with the police I couldn’t explain it. My wife has no experience in handling large sums of money, and it would attract attention to her and might be the means of putting the Gestapo on my trail. If I put it in a bank under an assumed name I might have trouble in identifying myself later on.”