“It was before I decided to leave. I thought that war was coming, and that paper might grow scarce.”
“Imagine that I am the Gestapo, dear lady. You have to satisfy me. You have purchased about twelve thousand sheets of typewriter paper; that would hold three or four million words, which it would take you many years to write.”
“You are forgetting carbons.”
“Well, then, one million words.”
“I am a wasteful writer. I spoil many pages. I make a great many trial copies. The people in the pension know that I write, sometimes all day, and at night. I got what paper I thought I would need.” That wasn’t the truth, of course, but he had told her to imagine that he was the Gestapo, and it was what she would tell them.
VII
Lanny, driving his car, kept watching in front of him, and behind with the help of his little mirror. He had left the Tiergarten, and was turning street corners frequently, to make sure no car was following. He was avoiding the main boulevards, but keeping a general westward trend, intending to get out of Berlin. His car was conspicuous, on account of its French make and license, and he had an idea that the police would be looking for it soon—for surely the servants and guests at the Pension Baumgartner would mention a Herr Budd as among the callers upon this dangerous Amerikanerin.
He couldn’t see her; her voice came from behind him, and his voice had to be echoed from the windshield. He knew that she was frightened, and had a right to be. There was no good trying to soothe her. “Let me make it clear to you,” he said; “the fact that we don’t hold the same ideas has nothing to do with the case, nor does the fact that you have been foolish and refused to take my advice. It was just because I foresaw having to help you that I tried so hard to keep you out of trouble. Now that you are in, I will do what I can. You may count upon my keeping your secrets. When I take you for this ride I become your accomplice, and am in as deeply as you.”
“I am ashamed and humiliated, Mr. Budd—”
“Let’s not waste time in apologies and regrets. We face a situation, and I have to make sure how bad it is. It won’t do any good to hide the facts from me, and then have the Gestapo confront me with them before the day is over. Have you been voicing your anti-Nazi ideas to anybody in the pension?”
“I have tried my best to keep my thoughts to myself. I wanted the people to talk to me freely, which they would not have done if I had made them suspicious. What I said was that I was not interested in politics.”
“You did not show them your writings?”
“Only those about America. These pleased them greatly, I found.”
“And you didn’t take anyone in the pension into your confidence?”
“Not a soul. I didn’t know anyone well enough.”
“Did you have any persons outside whom you took into your confidence?”
“There is one man—unfortunately I had to promise never to say anything about him. I met him by accident, in a peculiar way which I cannot discuss.”
“When people get into trouble there is generally some one person whom they trusted. One is enough for the Gestapo.”
“I would be willing to stake my life upon the good faith of this man, Mr. Budd.”
“It may be that you have staked your life,” was Lanny’s not very cheering comment. He had to maintain his role as stern disapprover. “Have you heard anything about this man recently—I mean, where he is, and whether or not the Gestapo may have him in their hands?”
“I have not heard anything from him or about him for several days. I am worried by the fear that he may have got into trouble.”
“Have you made an effort to communicate with him?”
“I have never had any address for him. He has telephoned me, at widely separated intervals.”
“That all sounds very mysterious, and leaves me in the dark. How can I give you advice on such a basis?”
“I am terribly sorry, Mr. Budd. It so happens that I gave my word of honor, and I have to keep it. I realize clearly to what an extent I am imposing on you, and I am afraid I ought to ask you to set me down somewhere before the police discover us and you become involved in my troubles.”
“I have told you that I am already involved, Miss Creston,” replied Lanny, still keeping his voice severe. “I am listed among your callers, and that will be enough for the authorities. It all depends upon what they have learned about you—how serious your offenses may have been. If you are known to have been giving aid to the anti-Nazi underground they will not fail to question every person who has ever spoken to you. They will probably have sent out an alarm for this car; but fortunately I left my forwarding address with the hotel as Munich, so they will be looking for me on that highway. I shall be careful to keep away from it.”
“Really, I have committed a crime against you. I was in a panic, and completely without judgment. Now I want you to set me down somewhere, and if the police stop you, tell them that you have not seen me, and that your acquaintance with me was of the most casual nature.”
“And what will you do when I set you down?”
“I will take a taxi to the American Embassy and ask for their protection.”
“I am afraid, my dear lady, I have to advise you against that course. In the first place, it is an act of fear, and the Embassy will take it as an admission of guilt. You must understand that the Embassy has no power to protect you if you have broken German laws; furthermore, you must understand that most Embassy officials have a strong prejudice against what they call ‘Reds,’ and are always slow to help them. Of course, the fact that you have an uncle who is wealthy and prominent may count.”
“Above all things,” she exclaimed, “I must not drag my uncle into this!”
“I am afraid you will have to forget that idea, Miss Creston. You are in serious trouble, and will have to use what resources you have. Your uncle’s name will mean newspaper publicity, and that may be the one thing that will save you. If you get newspaper space in America, the fact will be at once cabled back to Berlin, and the Gestapo will be much more careful what they do to you.”
“Really it makes me quite sick, Mr. Budd, to realize what I have done to you and to others.”
“So far,” replied the art expert, “you have lived under the protection of American law, and have had a sense of security which makes it hard for you to realize the situation here in Naziland. There is really no law here—just the whims of whatever officials you happen to fall into the hands of. At the present time we have no ambassador in Berlin; we recalled him, apparently in the fond hope that it would make some difference to the Nazis. All it has done is to make them hate us more; and now President Roosevelt has been making speeches, calling them aggressors and whatnot—so you can see that an appeal by the Embassy on your behalf might do you more harm than good.”
VIII
Lanny realized that he had got all the information which Laurel Creston had to give him. The gap which she could not fill was: what circumstance or event had brought about the Gestapo raid? Had they caught Monck? Lanny had no idea that the man of the underground would have named his woman helper, but they might have been trailing him and observed his meetings with her. The thought was horrid, and served to make him realize how great the woman’s danger might be, and how serious the risk he himself was carrying in his car.
He did his thinking aloud for her benefit. “In the old days there used to be many ways of getting out of Germany. The country must have three thousand miles of border, including the water, and I have heard many stories about refugees and their devices. A peasant would smuggle you across his fields at night, a guide would take you mountain climbing, a ship captain would stow you away, a locomotive engineer would hide you in his cab. But now the armies have been mobilized, at least in part; I was told a couple of weeks ago that there are a million men on the eastern border and as many on the west. So now when you try to get near the border without proper papers you are a spy, and that is worse even than being the author of ‘Aryan Journey.’ By
the way, what about your passport?”
“It was in my trunk in the pension.”
“Well, the police will take good care of it. And your money?”
“I have only a few marks in my purse. The rest was locked in the trunk.”
“They will take care of that, also. You must not be without some money.” Driving with one hand he used the other to take his billfold from his pocket and extract a couple of notes. “Hide those away somewhere,” he said, reaching back to her.
She answered: “Thank you. It will be a loan.”
“I am afraid of any plan that involves trying to bribe your way out. If you know the right person, it’s all right; but groping in the dark, you may find yourself dealing with a Nazi, or blackmailer, or criminal; I would be reluctant indeed to send a delicate woman out at night with a man I knew nothing about. I could not afford to go with you, for reasons of my own.”
“I would not ask you to do it, Mr. Budd. I have imposed upon you too much as it is.”
“You might swim the river Rhine, at its upper reaches where it is not too wide; but it is cold when it comes out of the mountains, and I don’t suppose you are an especially strong swimmer.”
“I am not.”
“There are many mountain passes where it is possible to get across the border; but you cannot travel in the dark unless you know every foot of the way, and even in daylight you may get lost and fall over a precipice—to say nothing of getting shot if a patrol happens to see you. If you go to one of the ports, you are dealing with a rough class of men, and foreign vessels are pretty closely watched, especially in what is practically wartime. You have to figure that your difficulties are multiplied by ten, just because you chose such an unfortunate time to get into trouble.”
“That was why I got in. I am so horrified at the thought of another great war.”
“Your feelings are understandable, and do you credit; but sooner or later, as we live in this world, we learn the difference between what is possible and what is not. Every living creature discovers that its survival depends upon the learning of that lesson.”
“Evidently I am one of the misfits,” she said. He couldn’t be sure from her tone whether it was irony or despair, but he guessed the latter.
“We are going to find some way to get you out of Germany,” he declared. “Do not be too discouraged when I point out the difficulties. It is a maxim of military men never to underestimate the strength of the enemy; and it is only by knowing the dangers that you can take steps to avoid them. We have to canvass the situation from every point of view and choose the time and place which seem to offer the fewest obstacles.”
IX
They were outside the great city of Berlin and its suburbs, driving on country roads where no one was apt to pay attention to them. Lanny kept heading west, because that was toward home, but he wasn’t sure that he might not decide on some other direction in the end. He told her that this was his car, and did not offer an explanation as to why he had never invited her to drive in it; she was at liberty to think this might be the first time he had brought it to Germany. He said: “We are reasonably safe so long as we keep moving—that is, unless you are suspected of some really serious crime, so that the police of the entire Reich are combing the roads for you. We can buy food, and eat it as we drive. The thing we can never do is stop at any hotel or lodgings, for they would have to register us with the police.”
“You cannot drive forever,” argued the woman.
“I can drive for a longer time than you would imagine. I have driven a full day and night now and then, when I wanted to get somewhere, and I could have kept on if I had had to. Do you know how to drive a car?”
“Unfortunately, no. I am the poorest hand with machinery; I could not use a sewing machine without getting the needle through my finger.”
“You will be surprised to discover how easy it is to drive a car. On these quiet roads I could teach you all you would need to know in an hour, and then you could roll quietly along for a couple of hours while I got some sleep. That may not be necessary—I am just pointing out that we can take our time and discuss the situation in detail, and not have to worry meanwhile.”
“You have time to spend on this sort of holiday?”
“My time has always been my own; and certainly I cannot make better use of it than to help a fellow-countryman out of a predicament. I don’t have to share your ideas in order to realize that you got into it through excess of idealism.”
“It is kind of you to say that. At the moment, I cannot find any excuse for myself. I would not have called upon you if I had not completely lost my head.”
“You chose an opportune moment to lose it,” replied the grown-up playboy, with a smile. “In a few seconds more I should have been on my way to Munich—and what would you have done then?”
“I suppose I should have taken a taxi to the American Embassy; and from there called my Uncle Reverdy on the telephone.”
Lanny Budd, who had lived among the rich all his life, remarked, with a grin: “You would have been his servant for the rest of your days. You would have had to travel about on the yacht and play bridge, or bézique, or whatever it is.”
“Worse than that,” replied the woman, with no trace of humor in her voice; “I should have had to promise and write proper respectable sex stories for the women’s magazines.”
X
They drove all that day, stopping only at a filling station, and at a grocery store in a village where they bought crackers and cheese and fruit. Lanny thought it was safe for his passenger to sit up—she could turn her face away when cars were passing. They drove at moderate speed, because they had no special place to go, and because that was the way not to attract attention. In their minds they made a round of all the borders of Germany; Lanny, who had made scores of crossings since his boyhood, could tell what they would find at this place and that—save only for the dread factor of war. That was getting worse and not better; if war actually began, their problem might become insoluble.
Lanny couldn’t afford to know too much about the underground and its devices, but he protected himself by the remark: “In the old days, when the Reds seized power, it was the wealthy and aristocratic who were the refugees, and I heard endless stories of the methods they had used. Some swallowed handfuls of diamonds and pearls before they crossed the border; one of the Russian grand dukes managed to bring out three Rembrandts rolled up together, and he lived on the Riviera for years on the proceeds.”
Fresh as yesterday in Lanny’s mind was the story of how he had once brought a load of Detazes to Munich in a van, and had attempted to get Freddi Robin out of Germany on the return trip. He couldn’t tell that, but he could say: “I have an old friend in Cannes, one of the finest of fellows; he was an army lieutenant in the World War, and he married a French girl and now has a travel bureau while she runs a pension. When wars threaten, the tourist business falls off, so right now Jerry Pendleton will not be busy. I could get him on the telephone and say: ‘Take the first plane to Stuttgart,’ or whatever city seemed best, and he would be here in a few hours. He knows a lot of travel people, agents and so on, and he might know somebody who would do a smuggling job for a proper price. That would be at the French or the Swiss border. Or he might go back to Cannes and have an exit permit forged for you. I have a genuine one, and he could take it and have another made. You understand that a man in his business has printing done from time to time, and he would know some old-time poilu who wouldn’t mind playing a trick on les sales boches.”
“Oh!” exclaimed the woman. “How preposterous that I should be tying you and your friends up in such a string of troubles!”
“It was preposterous that you should have attempted to produce anti-Nazi literature in a Berlin pension. But you did it, and now you are vindicating the poet who said: ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!’ Here we are in Herr Hitler’s empire-sized prison——”
“Mr. Budd, you
can’t really admire that man!” burst out the passenger in the back seat. Since she was sitting up, Lanny could observe her distressed features in his little mirror.
“As a novelist, you would find him the most fascinating study in the world. Some day I will tell you about him; right now I want to tell about a young friend whose home is on the River Thames. He is probably peacefully punting and reciting what he calls modern poetry at this pleasant twilight hour. He is a flyer, and if I were to get him on the telephone, he would take a plane to any city in Germany. You might easily fall in love with him, for he is a charming idealist who has just been graduated from Maudlin college.” Lanny pronounced it that way, and then spelled it “Magdalen,” for the benefit of an American who might not understand what bad spellers the English are. “Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson is his name, and he is a bit of a Red like yourself—or maybe it is only a Pink.”
“I think that is getting to be my shade.”
“Well, Alfy would think it was absolutely delightful to get hold of a flying gnat and drop down into a meadow somewhere just inside the German border and pick up an imperiled damsel of his own political complexion. The only trouble is, this business of war; the border is surely guarded day and night, and an unidentified foreign plane might be shot out of the skies before it got over the North Sea or even afterwards. So perhaps Alfy would prefer to come in a speedboat—among his neighbors on the Thames are several who would bring him, and at a lonely spot on the shore they would come close at night and blink a light, and a Pink lady could wade out, swim a few strokes, perhaps—this is the bathing season, and the water will be fine. You understand, I am just imagining adventures; if we don’t make any of them happen, you can use them for stories some day. The trouble about them is the one I’ve already talked about: if we pick up a paper and read that war has broken out, then we are sunk right there, and you will probably have to sign up for life on the Oriole!”