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The Return of Lanny Budd
A Lanny Budd Novel
Upton Sinclair
To the many ‘Lanny Budd’ lovers all over
the world who have written letters
asking me to write this book
BOOK ONE
Saying, Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace
1 THE CONSTANT SERVICE
I
A philosopher stood at the microphone of a radio station, a place to which philosophers are not often enough invited. He was a rather small man, slender and spry despite the fact that he was approaching his seventy-fifth birthday; he had a brick-red complexion, an elfish expression, and an abundance of white hair brushed back. He was, by accident, an English earl; he did not believe in aristocracy and preferred to drop the title, but among the Americans who dearly love a lord, he could not escape from it.
He was telling some millions of Americans the ideas which his seventy-five years had brought to him. He said, ‘So long as the human race is divided into two halves, each of which thinks the other half wicked, it can be plausibly maintained that it is everybody’s duty to cause suffering. If such a view is not to prevail, it will be necessary that our moral outlook should become more kindly than it has hitherto been, and that we should cease to find pleasure in thinking of this world as a vale of tears’.
He went on to explain, ‘We live in a moment of strange conflict. The human heart has changed little since the dawn of history, but the human mastery over nature has changed completely. Our passions, our desires, our fears are still those of the cave man, but our power to realise our wishes is something radically new. Man must face the painful truth: that disaster to his neighbour whom he hates is not likely to bring happiness to himself whom he loves. If a man is to live with the new powers that he has acquired he must grow up not only in his mind but in his heart’.
The speaker concluded and stepped aside; another and younger man took his place and spoke into the microphone. ‘This concludes the Peace Programme. This programme is conducted by the Peace Group, an endowed institution that aims at the prevention of the next world war. Our speaker was Bertrand Russell, Nobel Prize-winning philosopher and mathematician. Turn to this programme one week from tonight at the same hour. The address of the Peace Group is Box one thousand, Edgemere, New Jersey. This is Lanny Budd speaking. Good night’.
The operator in the control room shut off the microphone, and the middle-aged announcer turned to the elderly guest. ‘A most interesting talk, Lord Russell’, he began. But that was as far as he got; a secretary came, saying, ‘Telephone, Lord Russell’, and then, ‘Telephone, Mr Budd’. It was always that way the moment a programme ended. There were half a dozen telephones in booths, and they would all begin ringing at once.
But it wasn’t a fan this time, at least not on Lanny’s call. A voice said, ‘Is this Mr Lanning Prescott Budd?’ When he answered, the voice said, ‘This is John Turner of the U.S. Secret Service, Washington office. Do you recognise the name Braun, spelled B-r-a-u-n?’
Lanny said, ‘I know such a man. He has other names’.
‘I will give one of them, Vetterl’.
‘Yes, that is the man. I know him’.
‘We have just received a code cablegram asking us to contact you about a matter of importance. Would it be convenient for you to come to Washington?’
‘I have always honoured his requests’, Lanny said. ‘Will tomorrow afternoon be time enough?’
‘We will expect you tomorrow afternoon’, was the reply. ‘We will, of course, take care of your expense account. I will make a reservation for you at the Shoreham’.
Lanny hung up; and right away there was another call for him, and then another and another. The fans never let up for an hour or two. The announcer was busy, the speaker was busy, the announcer’s wife was busy, and so were several of the assistants. People wanted to congratulate, they wanted to ask what they could do, they wanted to order copies of the little weekly paper called Peace; they wanted to ask questions or tell their ideas about how to bring peace to the world and keep it. They were all well meaning, but not all were competent, and you had to be of a patient disposition in order to keep at this crusader’s job, as Lanny and Laurel Budd and their friends had been doing for what seemed a long time. They had started in the autumn of 1945, and now it was October of 1946.
Laurel was expecting her second baby in a couple of months, but that had not kept her from sitting most of the day at a desk or lying on a daybed reading mail, dictating replies, and receiving visitors from all over the country and from other parts of the world. An unused factory building had been made over into a radio studio, the publishing and editorial rooms of a weekly paper, and the office of a newspaper syndicate. There was always more work than the staff could do. The harvest was plentiful and the labourers were few.
II
They drove the honoured guest to their home, where he was to spend the night; and only after they had bestowed him did Lanny tell about the special telephone call. Laurel’s face fell and she exclaimed, ‘Oh dear!’ They are going to take you away again!’
‘I can’t tell’, Lanny said, ‘until I have talked with the man. Perhaps it’s only information he wants’. He said no more, for a confidential agent does not talk about his affairs even to the wife he loves and trusts; the wife spares him the embarrassment of having to refuse. ‘I thought of motoring’, he added, ‘so you can come along. You need a change, and we can talk about our problems’. They were kept so busy with routine jobs that they had little time for the larger planning.
Laurel assented; she would rest and read in the hotel while he went about his errand. She told her secretary, and Lanny told his. They arranged to have their distinguished guest driven back to New York in the morning. There was no end to the details you had to attend to when you were running a radio programme, a small weekly paper, and a newspaper syndicate; but the task had its compensations, for you met the great minds of your time and it helped to sustain your hopes for the human race.
They packed their bags and set their alarm clock for six in the morning. The month being October, the sun would barely be up, but by an early start they would escape some of the traffic on the highway. They delayed only long enough for a glass of orange juice and some bread and fruit, and then they were off, on a road which took them into the highway known as US 1, the main route to the south.
Already at that hour the highway was full of speeding trucks and cars. It passed through a string of cities—Newark, Elizabeth, Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore. There were smaller towns in between, and lines of filling stations and eating places. There were great factories here and there, brick buildings with tall chimneys scattered over the landscape, and all of them discharging their products into the truck route and the railroad which paralleled it. Goods were carried to the ports where the ships came and went incessantly. For five years America had been loading them with the means of destruction and now for more years would be supplying the means of undoing the destruction.
Lanny Budd had been driving a car since his early youth, now more than thirty years in the past, and had never had a serious accident. When he was caught in a line of speeding traffic he left a space between himself and the car in front, so that if he were hit in the back there wouldn’t be a double crash. If some too eager driver crowded in front of him he would put out his hand and slow up and let the reckless one have his way. He was more than ever careful now because of that extra freight he was carrying, the second child whom he and Laurel so desired.
On the
way they talked about the state of the world; like a pair of Atlases, male and female, they carried it upon their shoulders. In this year of 1946 it was a restless and quaking world, no comfortable burden. The dreadful war in Europe had ended seventeen months ago. The nations of the earth had got together and formed an organisation to establish order and keep the peace, but it appeared that the organisation wasn’t working too well. The Kremlin had vetoed three of its proposals in one afternoon, and the Soviet delegate had walked out from the meeting of the Security Council in New York. Did that mean that Russia was going to withdraw altogether? Winston Churchill had travelled to Missouri and under the auspices of President Truman had accused Russia of setting up an ‘iron curtain’ to shut out the Western world. Stalin had replied by calling Churchill ‘a firebrand of war’.
The most alarming development of all had been in the far South Sea island of Bikini, where the United States had given the world a demonstration of what the new atomic power could do. Eleven old war vessels had been destroyed and twenty-five more crippled. A second explosion, this time under water, had sunk a battleship, an aircraft carrier, and eight other vessels of war. The United States had proposed to the United Nations a plan to ban the manufacture of such weapons and provide that all nations should permit inspection to make sure of the keeping of the agreement. But Russia had announced that she would never accept such a plan; and it was hard to think of anything more disconcerting to a husband and wife who were spending all their time talking and writing about world peace.
III
In Washington, Lanny had his car put in the hotel garage, for in large cities there is no use driving your own car—you spend too much time looking for a parking place. He had lunch with Laurel and saw her settled in a comfortable room; then he took a taxi to the immense Treasury Building in which the mysterious John Turner had his office.
Lanny was ushered into the presence of one of those bureaucrats concerning whom one reads so much unfavourable comment in the newspapers. They are supposed to sit with their feet up on their desks, but Lanny had never seen one in that position. This one rose to greet his visitor and invited him to a seat alongside the desk. He was a man in his middle years, serious and quiet in manner; his business suit had been newly pressed, and his necktie was of the proper pattern. The same being true of Lanny, they understood that they belonged in the same social stratum and so knew how to deal with each other. Mr Turner offered him a cigarette, and when he did not take it Mr Turner did not smoke either.
‘Mr Budd’, he said, ‘from the state of our files I gather that you have never had much to do with the Secret Service. One of the tasks laid upon us from the beginning has been the detection and prevention of counterfeiting. We thought we had out hands full in the United States, but now a good part of Europe has been added, and a few thousand Pacific islands’.
‘Do they counterfeit cowrie shells?’ asked the visitor with a smile.
‘They counterfeit anything that they can put off on some poor sucker. Tell me, in the course of your researches among the Nazis did you run into any evidences of counterfeiting?’
‘I heard a good deal of talk about it off and on, but it wasn’t my job and I didn’t ask questions. I know that Adolf Hitler had all his plans made for the invasion of Britain, and a part of this was the printing of great quantities of English money, so that he could take possession of everything in the country without plain outright confiscation. I was told that he had set up a regular engraving establishment at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp’.
‘Our information is that at one time he had as prisoners there more than a hundred and forty expert engravers as well as convicted forgers from several countries; they were set to making plates for reproducing the currency of the Allied countries. The neutral nations were refusing to accept Hitler’s marks, they demanded sterling or American dollars. And if these dollars were successfully counterfeited the market would be flooded and prices would be forced up for the Allies. The enemy would get the goods and we would be driven into bankruptcy. The forgeries were so good that they went undetected for some time’.
‘“Himmler money” we used to call it’, Lanny put in.
‘Our information is that they printed some two hundred million British pounds, nearly a billion dollars. When the invading armies neared Sachsenhausen the Nazis transferred their machinery and slave labour to the Mauthausen concentration camp, on the Danube. When the final collapse came the stuff was scattered over the German-speaking lands. We have recently found a stock of it in a factory at Freising, and another lot sealed up in metal containers and sunk in a lake near Bad Ischl in Austria. What we want most of all is to find the plates. So long as they exist the floods of phoney money may be continuous. We have not been able to find any trace of them so far, and they may be in the hands of the Neo-Nazis, who are awaiting their time to seize power; or they may have fallen into the hands of gangsters—many of the Nazis have become that, as you doubtless know. Or again, the Communists may have got them. They too have their plans for the future. At least there is good reason to think that they might not be entirely displeased if something were to wreck the economy of the Western world’.
‘I can see that you have your hands full, Mr Turner’, said Lanny. ‘But tell me, where do I come into this?’
‘First, I want to ask you about this man who calls himself Braun and Vetterl and sometimes Bernhardt Monck’.
‘Monck is his real name’.
‘You know him well?’
‘I have known him for some thirteen or fourteen years’.
‘And you trust him?’
‘Completely. I have put him to many tests. He is an old-time sailor and labour leader, a Social Democrat, an active member and onetime official of that party’.
‘That means that he is not a Communist?’
‘It means he is the kind of man whom the Communists shoot in the back of the neck whenever they get power. I worked with Monck at the time of the Spanish War and all through the Nazi terror. You can count on him.’
IV
From a drawer in his desk Turner took out a roll of white paper which had come off a teletype machine. ‘I cannot give you this to read’, he said, ‘because it is classified; but I will read you a bit from it’. He unrolled to a marked place and explained, ‘A code number is given—that is, Monck’s number—and the text goes on, “advises that Lanning Prescott Budd of Edgemere, New Jersey, may be of assistance in this matter. He was former President Roosevelt’s confidential agent in Europe and may be trusted. If he is not at Edgemere he may be reached through his father, who is Robert Budd, president of Budd-Erling Aircraft Corporation of Newcastle, Connecticut. He knows Stubendorf since boyhood; he knows the Graf, and also Kurt Meissner, the music composer’”. Is that true, Mr Budd?’
‘That is all true. You mean that you have some clue that leads to Stubendorf?’
‘There are important clues leading there. But let me ask you questions first. How well do you know Graf Stubendorf?’
‘He is General Graf Stubendorf. I have known him since I was a boy, and I have attended several of his social functions in Berlin. I would not say that I know him intimately, but I know him well’.
‘And this other man, Kurt Meissner?’
‘I have known Kurt also since boyhood, when we attended the Dalcroze Dancing School at Hellerau in Germany. After the First World War he was a guest at my mother’s home on the French Riviera. We provided him with a studio in which he lived for eight years, and that enabled him to become the famous composer he is. But there is nothing left of our friendship now, alas. The last time he saw me he spat in my face’.
‘The matter is important’, said Turner, ‘and if you don’t mind telling me the story—’
‘Not at all’, replied the other. ‘Kurt Meissner fell under the influence of nazism early after the First World War. He introduced me to his Führer, and I didn’t think much of him. However, about ten years ago when President Roosevelt asked me to h
elp him, I pretended to Kurt that I had begun to understand Hitler better, and I was admitted to the great man’s circle of intimates. Kurt didn’t find out that I was deceiving him until the American armies were close to the Rhine; and naturally he was furious. I don’t know where he is now’.
‘Here is what Monck thinks about it’, said Turner and read again from the teletype. ‘“Number so-and-so reports that Meissner was released from an American prison camp and is believed to be in Stubendorf, now Stielszcz, in Poland’”. What do you think of the chances?’
‘I do not know. I have wondered if he would wish to go back, and if he would be tolerated there. His Nazi philosophy is much closer to the Reds than it is to us, and it may be they would accept him. They make a great pretence of culture, you know—it is a part of their propaganda. They might even subsidise him and set him to composing music for them’.
‘Do you suppose that you could make friends with him and get information from him?’
‘I can’t be sure, Mr Turner. Boyhood friendships make a deep impression upon our minds, and we never get rid of them entirely. Kurt is a couple of years older than I, and as a boy he was much more learned and conscientious. He took a sort of fatherly attitude toward me. He taught me about German idealism, which uses long abstract words, and he probably has a tender spot for me in his heart. He might still be willing to make up with me’.
‘Having been a secret agent, Mr Budd, you know that we never talk unnecessarily. If you would be willing to do us this favour, then of course I will tell you what is necessary to the undertaking; you will get more from our agent on the spot who knows all the details. We would, of course, expect to pay all your expenses and a reasonable compensation’.
‘I have never accepted any compensation from the government, Mr Turner, and usually I paid my own expenses. You see, before I became a peace propagandist I was an art expert, and I used that as my camouflage all the time I was a P.A., as we called a presidential agent. I once purchased a valuable old master from Graf Stubendorf’s aunt. I didn’t buy it for myself but for a client. I might be able to do more business in Stubendorf if I could manage to smuggle paintings out’.