It was like being the captain of a ship in a storm, and being driven toward the rocks. The captain ought to know what to do, but he doesn’t, and everybody from the first mate to the cabin boy shouts into his ears, and whose advice shall he take? Daladier had listened to the appeasers, and had gone to Munich and signed on Hitler’s dotted line. Coming home, he had found a vast throng at Le Bourget airport, and had expected to be mobbed, but they had carried him under the Arc de Triomphe on their shoulders. He had thought everything was fixed to stay; but, alas, four months later these laurels had withered, and everybody was calling him names, and there was war in the Cabinet between the out-and-out, die-hard appeasers, and those who wanted to ride two horses at once: to keep friends with Hitler and at the same time to keep the Russian alliance going, on the chance that it might be needed later.
Nobody expected much loyalty in a French Cabinet, for all the members knew that it was a jerrybuilt affair, and half a dozen were hoping to take their chief’s place. Social life went on just the same; pretended friends swarmed to the home of your amie and ate your food and drank your wine, and took the occasion to undermine you and get ready to cut your political throat. So it was that Robbie and his son met Bonnet, the Foreign Minister, long-nosed and pop-eyed, with his pro-German wife; Herriot with a charming young actress from the Comédie Française; and Paul Reynaud, Minister of Finance and tireless little intriguer against Daladier, his chief. Lanny reported that the last stood a chance to succeed to the premiership, so it was necessary to make themselves agreeable to him and to his amie, Madame de Portes. Nervous, intense, hollow-eyed, she was a busy political woman with a spoon in every kettle, a reactionary and friend of all the appeasers. Robbie would get along better with her by saying, not that he wished to help la patrie, but that he was trying to make money after the fashion proper to businessmen, and that he did not forget to reward those who did him favors.
But there were drawbacks to this role also; for France was poor, and her taxpayers reluctant, so all the politicians reported, and had to report in order to preserve their political necks. It was a dubious matter indeed to be spending large sums abroad, giving to workers in Connecticut jobs which workers in France were able and eager to perform. To buy planes in a hurry was to admit that somebody had been negligent, and who wanted to shoulder that burden? At receptions and dinner parties everybody would be polite to visitors from overseas, but a large percentage would be wishing they would go back where they came from, or to the devil.
This situation called for understanding and tact, and in it Robbie had the tireless help of his son. Lanny didn’t seem to have anything else to do, and was so useful that Robbie insisted on paying his bills and charging it against the company. Lanny knew most of the personalities involved, and when he didn’t, he knew how to find out. He listened attentively to everything that was said, and if he asked questions, it was to help Robbie in getting to the bottom of some important matter. Only now and then, when the father was absorbed in technical matters, plans and specifications and prices, Lanny would shut himself up in his own room and say nothing about what he was doing. One more report would be typed and sent off to the Big Boss in Washington.
4
Portents of Impending Doom
I
“Gay paree” had never been more so. People who had money seemed to have no end of it, and they spent it freely, as if they feared the time for spending might be short. On the fashionable shopping streets just back of the Crillon the elegant ladies stepped out of their limousines and tripped in to inspect jewels, furs, luxury goods which had been brought from every part of the world to tempt their fancy. Men milliners, men dressmakers inspected them, discussed their “points,” and murmured advice as to the enhancing of their charms. In the previous summer the King and Queen of England had paid a visit of state to the city; the Queen had changed her costume three times daily, and everything she wore had been photographed and minutely studied. So now there was an “English trend” to be noticed in costuming; the ladies all asked to be clad à l’anglaise. “But of course,” murmured the couturiers, “the fashions came originally from here; everything is French fundamentally.” Never would it do to have one of the “ten best-dressed ladies” betake herself to London for an ensemble!
In the evenings the shiny limousines lined up in front of mansions where the two hundred families gave sumptuous entertainments to one another; and in the neighborhood of the theaters, the smart restaurants, and night clubs, champagne flowed freely, and on the stage you might see a hundred young females, their skins painted every color of the rainbow, dancing the danse du ventre or whatever might excite the jaded old men who crowded below. The French would tell you that such sights were for the tourists, that Parisians did not care for them; and maybe it was so—newspaper readers might have found it amusing if someone had taken a census.
Surrounding the luxurious city of pleasure were suburbs with factories old and new, and here the workers were crowded into five-story tenements, standard for cities on five continents. Hard times were threatening again; the masses were at the mercy of economic forces which they understood only dimly; they lived in poverty and insecurity, and their discontents were distilled into a hatred of their masters, whose way of life was revealed in shop windows, in newspapers, and on the cinema screen. The great fashion capital of the world was a hell of class antagonisms; to the workers the rich took the form of slavedrivers with whips, while to the rich the workers were wild beasts in cages—the bars being made, not of steel, but of laws and institutions which now seemed on the point of dissolving.
Lanny walked the streets of this ancient city, so magnificent in some places and so depressing in others. It had been one of his homes since childhood. In its buildings and monuments he read the history of a thousand years, while other spots brought to his mind personal adventures since his youth. He knew that Paris had been besieged and taken more than once, that it had been the scene of revolutions and civil wars, yet always it had managed to survive. Doubtless it would survive whatever calamities now lay ahead; but oh, the suffering, the waste of life! The misery of the poor, who had no part in the glory of the conquerors, in the corruption of politicians, the guilt of traitors—but who would pay with their blood and tears for the blunders and the crimes!
This man of fashion, who had been called a playboy in his youth and still dressed and behaved like one, would stop in front of one of the kiosks and survey the reading matter on display. Inside him it would be as if he were shedding tears of blood, grief unutterable for the madness, the folly, the misuse of human effort which was there embodied! He didn’t need to pay a single sou in order to appraise it; he didn’t even need to read the headlines; the names of the papers told him everything. This pair, the most respectable, were controlled by Baron Schneider and his Comité des Forges; they had been the paymasters of the Croix de Feu, and later, more secretly, of the Cagoule. Several were in the pay of the Nazis, and printed whatever the German Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment supplied to them. This one represented the effete and rather silly Royalists, while the next was the organ of the deadly Camelots du Roi. Here was the paper of Pierre Laval, traitor friend of the people, as vile a man as had appeared in French public life. Next to it, the organ of the Communists, following the Party line, not easy to foresee. Pathetic seemed the paper of Léon Blum—old friend whom Lanny no longer dared to visit; he was still Vice-Premier, but with little power, demanding protection for what was left of the Czechoslovak republic and making public confession of his blunder in having failed to protect Spain.
II
Through this dark jungle of French public life roamed the Nazi hunters, armed with the deadliest of all weapons, gold. They seemed to have unlimited quantities. The aristocratic and elegant agents bought the publishers of newspapers, the politicians, the fashionable ladies whose influence counted in drawing-rooms. The less highly placed but no less highly trained agents, assuming a hundred disguises, made the acquaint
ance of clerks in military establishments, workers in munitions plants, anyone who had access to secrets which might be useful to a nation preparing an attack upon its neighbors.
The fact that the Nazis were so getting ready, and that their businessmen, traveling salesmen, scientists, students, artists, tourists, were working for a score of government agencies—these facts were known to everybody who cared to know; but the accusations were drowned out in the general clamor of French journalism, French politics, French intellectual life, in which Fascist and Nazi, Communist and Bolshevik, had become terms of abuse no longer taken literally. When you called your opponent a cochon, you didn’t mean that he grunted and ate out of a trough, and when you called him a chien, you didn’t mean that he ran on four legs and lifted one of them in public. You just meant that he had got in your way somehow and you hated him.
At an ultra-fashionable sorée Lanny and his father ran into Kurt Meissner. Robbie hadn’t seen him for quite a while, and now was pleased, and showed it. Highbrow music didn’t mean a thing to a manufacturer of airplanes, but other people admired it, and Robbie admired Kurt as a man who had chosen his job and made a success of it; a dignified and self-contained man, no long-haired and greasy genius. The fact that Kurt had been a secret agent of the German General Staff in Paris at the time of the Peace Conference didn’t worry Robbie; he hadn’t known it until it was all over, and then he had thought it a good joke. The fact that Kurt was now playing the same role, and had been for several years, was a matter for the French to worry over if they saw fit. Robbie knew that all the nations of Europe were spying on one another, and he had hired many a secret agent himself.
Did Kurt know that Robbie was now making a deal to supply the French with airplanes? Certainly it was his business to know, and he was an efficient worker. He would understand that a Yankee businessman was out to make money, Robbie didn’t pretend to be anything else, and wished to be dealt with on that basis. If Reichsmarschall Göring wanted the planes, he would offer a higher price, and if he didn’t, it meant that he was making enough planes at home, and better. As for Lanny, he would be trailing along with his father, taking things easy, as always. Kurt would be cordial to father and son, because they were sources of information and had important connections. Both the Reichsmarschall and the Führer professed to like Lanny, and that was unusual; it must mean that they were getting something out of him, probably information about Britain and France.
So Kurt’s long and solemn Prussian face lighted up with a smile of welcome. He asked about Bienvenu, and about Beauty Budd, whose lover he had been for many years; he took a dignified attitude to this fact—he was endlessly grateful to a woman who had taught him much, and indeed saved his life. He asked about Marceline, whom he had helped to raise; yes, he had heard about her success as a dancer, but his many duties had left him no leisure to see her. He had been home for Christmas, and told the news from Stubendorf; there were six little ones in his family now; the older ones still remembered Lanny Budd and asked about him, though he hadn’t been to see them for a long time. Kurt’s oldest brother, the General, was now stationed near Berlin, and the Budds must not fail to see him on their trip.
III
In the course of the evening the hostess requested Kurt to play for them, and he did so. He played, with dignity and repressed passion, his own compositions, which in past years Lanny had admired extravagantly. Now Lanny had decided that they were largely “derivative”; they were echoes of the German classics which the two of them had known by heart. But you had to know German music well in order to pass this judgment, and few in this fashionable audience did so. Kurt had made several of his compositions popular, and had played them with more than one of the Paris symphony orchestras, an unusual honor. For his friends he made no charge, and that was in the nature of a polite bribe to hostesses and caused him to be invited constantly.
So he knew all the key people, not merely in the musical and stage worlds, but those who governed France: the elegant rich ladies, the haughty ones who set the social tone and could change the course of events by expressing opinions to their husbands or lovers. A celebrated German Kompoinst would teach these ladies to respect German music; and then he would say, in his grave, pontifical manner: “Our two nations are the wellsprings of European culture, and its guardians; why can we not unite and protect our common heritage? That is the message I have been charged to give to our friends here in France. Our Führer has said to me a hundred times: ‘Tell them that I respect French culture as I do our own, and that I desire nothing in the world so much as peace and friendship, complete and permanent, with France.’”
Nothing could be more impressive. If it happened that Lanny Budd was in hearing, Kurt would turn to him and say: “You, too, have heard him say it. Tell us, is it not so?”
Lanny would reply: “It is something he says continually.” Lanny hated to say anything that would further the Nazi cause, but it was his role and he had to play it. He had voiced his uneasiness on this subject to the President of the United States, and had been told: “The information you bring is worth the price you have to pay.”
IV
Uncle Jesse Blackless, New England born but now a citizen of the French Republic and member of its Chamber of Deputies, did not put his feet under the dinner tables of the rich and was not to be met at their soirées. He still lived in a humble tenement on Montmartre, and had no elegant amie, but a wife who was a devoted Party worker. In the old days Lanny had eaten their bread and cheese and drunk their vin ordinaire, but of late years he had had to be cautious; he couldn’t afford to have his reactionary friends know that he associated with one of the most rabid “Reds” in France. Also, it would have worried his father. Robbie wouldn’t have gone so far as to forbid a grown man to visit his mother’s elder brother, but the idea would have disturbed him, and perhaps have started a swarm of bees to buzzing in his hat; so let sleeping bees lie, or whatever it is they do.
Paris was full of paintings, all sorts, new and old, good and bad; and this fact provided Lanny with a pretext. He would say: “There are some paintings I ought to look at.” He would stroll and visit the dealers—the highest priced were near the hotel. After a look he would telephone to his Red uncle, make an appointment, and pick him up on the street. Driving on roads not used by the rich and prominent, they would not be noticed or overheard. Jesse took it for granted that his nephew was getting information for his Spanish friend Raoul and his English friend Rick, both of them Socialists. A Party Communist, Jesse quarreled with the Socialists, but not with Lanny; they kidded each other, and if an argument started, Lanny would turn it aside with a joke. They swapped information, kept each other’s confidences, and enjoyed each other’s company.
Uncle Jesse had been bald ever since Lanny could remember him. Now he was an old man, lean and wrinkled, but still spry and full of ginger and other spices. He hated the rich and all their ways; he loved the poor, and in his leisure hours painted them, following the Party line in art as in politics. In his own revolutionary way he was a saint, and had been responsible for the first impulses toward the Left which his nephew received. That had been a quarter of a century ago, when the Party line had existed only in the heads of a few fanatics in Russia and in exile outside.
Lanny told the news from home: about Raoul Palma’s escape from Spain, and about the new baby, who was Jesse’s grandnephew; also, how Beauty was getting along with her husband and her prayers. The brother’s comment was that she was a good soul, but had always been a little weak in the head. (This, too, was the Party line: Religion is the opium of the people!) Lanny and his father had been to see Marceline dancing; but her Red uncle said he wouldn’t go—it would cost him a lot of votes to be seen in a night club. When Jesse said such things, you had to watch him and catch the twinkle in his eye.
V
What was Robbie doing in Paris, Robbie’s almost-brother-in-law wanted to know, and Lanny reported that he had a big deal on with the government. Robbie hated J
esse’s very name, but Jesse did not return this feeling; Robbie suited Jesse because he fitted so perfectly into the formulas of economic determinism. Robbie, great capitalist, was making money, regardless of whether he wrecked the world in the process. Jesse could point to his near-brother-in-law and say: “You see?”—and everybody would see at once. Jesse “class-angled” Robbie, as the Communists liked to phrase it.
The Red deputy had just delivered a red-hot speech in the Chamber, denouncing the collaboration of the Right with the Hitlerites, declaring that smart society in Paris was swarming with Nazi agents, and naming them. The papers of the extreme Right had raved at him; Gringoire had called him an ape, also a hyena, two creatures it would seem rather difficult to combine, even in a metaphor. The Communists, who preached dictatorship, used the freedom of France to tear down that freedom: so said the capitalist press, and in order to protect freedom they proposed to destroy freedom and set up an anti-dictatorship dictatorship. Look at Daladier and his “governing by decree”!
Lanny gave his Red uncle a number of “tips” which might be useful to him. He mentioned that Baron Schneider was wavering on the subject of Munich and Prague. Jesse replied: “Der Adolf will make him waver till he’s seasick.” Jesse told a curious anecdote of the struggle over the Soviet alliance, which had been the crux of French political life for the past two or three years. The treaty still stood, on paper, but the French generals—most of them in their seventies, several in their eighties, and all reactionary to their swords’ points—wouldn’t let the government implement the bargain by an exchange of plans and information. Schneider-Creusot had been under contract to manufacture big guns for Soviet fortifications, but these guns had not been forthcoming; the Soviet embassy in Paris had pleaded and argued, but without results. This had been a couple of years ago, when the Blum government was in process of nationalizing munitions plants, and Schneider had been fighting it tooth and toenail. One day a director in Le Creusot and member of the Baron’s family had called upon the Soviet ambassador and tactfully suggested a way by which the delivery of the guns might be speeded up—if the Soviet government would intimate to the French government that it did not wish to have Le Creusot nationalized!