One Clear Call I

by Upton Sinclair

  He wrote, “Bienvenu will be at the Geneva place at twenty.” He addressed the envelope to “Anton Vetted” at the 21 Club, and dropped it into a postbox. If an enemy agent opened and read that, he would hardly know that “Bienvenu” was the name of Beauty Budd’s home on the Cap d’Antibes, which Bernhardt Monck had visited years ago. Nor would he have had an easy time finding a “Geneva place” in Stockholm; but Monck would understand, having been accustomed to meet his American friend at the public library in Geneva.

  II

  This was duty number one. Number two was to get in touch with Eric Erickson, Swedish-American oil man; a simple matter, because Erickson was in business in the near-by city of Norrköping, and all that was necessary was to call him on the phone and say, “This is Lanny Budd.” The big fellow voiced his pleasure, and asked, “Will you come and stay with me?” When Lanny explained that he expected to have only a couple of days in Stockholm, Erickson asked, “Are you free this evening? I’ll come up and take you to dinner. It’s a date!” Having been born in Brooklyn, “Red” Erickson knew American modes of expression. It amused him to remark, “I am the Erl King that Goethe wrote a poem about.”

  There are people you meet whom you like from the first moment; and if they happen to have the same feeling toward you, that adds enrichment to your life. Lanny had not expected to meet such a person in Hermann Göring’s crudely lavish Karinhall; he had been puzzled to find a generous-minded man doing business with the Nazis and on intimate terms with the fat man’s circle of friends. Lanny himself was doing it, but that was only camouflage. Only after coming out of Germany had he learned, through a slip of the American Minister in Stockholm, that the oil man was “one of us.” Later he had inquired from the OSS and learned that “Red” had given help of importance by listing and describing all the synthetic oil plants of Germany.

  Now Lanny would have liked nothing better than to say, “I, too, am one of us.” But that was forbidden. Every agent in this war against Nazi-Fascism worked with the certainty hanging over his head that if he were caught his enemies would do everything in their power to compel him to betray his associates. They would subject him to the most dreadful tortures invented by modern science, tortures which were supposed to be beyond the power of any human organism to withstand. The agent carried a little capsule of cyanide, which he was instructed to chew up and swallow if he was caught. There was a still better precaution, depending upon the fact that what an agent didn’t know he couldn’t be made to tell. So they worked in small teams, and outside of their own team knew only the people in the home office.

  Lanny did not forget that Stockholm rivaled Lisbon as the world’s greatest spy center. No stranger could come in by airplane and register at a de luxe hotel without being noted and inquired about by the agents of several countries. So now, while waiting for his friend to motor a hundred miles, Lanny donned his camouflage and went forth to exhibit it. He was a well-established art expert, and had already made himself known to the leading dealers; now he went to see what they had on their walls, and asked whether they had located any “examples” in which his wealthy clients might be interested. He could talk learnedly about great American collections, what they had and what they lacked, and about prices now being commanded by the works of old masters and modern favorites. It was a high-class and elegant kind of “shop,” and exactly what all dealers enjoy. Word would spread that there was an American millionaire in town, representative of American super-millionaires and son of one of them. The political spies would hear of it; some of them, Americans, would hasten to send word back to Washington, and people in the old brick building by the gasworks would get a mild kick out of the reports.

  III

  Red was a typical oil man, as Lanny had learned to know them when his father had been dabbling in the “black gold” a quarter of a century before: big, husky, full of energy and self-confidence, genial and generous with those they liked. Erickson had begun at the bottom in orthodox American style, having been a “pipe-line walker” all the way between Negley, Ohio, and Bayway, New Jersey—a goodly stroll for the most able-bodied young Swedish-American. He had saved money and gone through college and then become assistant manager of an American oil company in Japan. Now he was buying German synthetic oil and bringing it to Sweden, and telling the world, whether Allied or Nazi, that Sweden had to have this product, otherwise its industry would come to a halt and its workers would starve.

  In return for this oil Germany got Swedish lumber, paper, iron ore, steel. The businessmen concerned got their profits out of the trade and that kept them from starving. Stockholm had become a “boom town” and everyone was getting rich. Lanny guessed that Red had taken Göring in on his deal—that was the way to get action. He had become the fat man’s friend, and was not merely a guest at Karinhall, but had been taken to inspect the Fatherland’s marvelous plants which made oil out of coal and had been so carefully hidden that it was only recently that the Allied bombers had been able to find them. Strange things kept happening in this war!

  Erickson showed up at about dinnertime and took Lanny to his club, where they had a private dining-room. Lanny said he had been “home”; he wouldn’t mention Italy or Quebec of course. He had been looking for paintings for Göring’s collection, and had found one, asserted to be a Giorgione, but more probably an early Titian. “That ought to be worth quite a bit,” remarked the oil man, and Lanny said, “They are asking a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.” When Erickson asked if Göring would pay sums like that, Lanny told the story of the Vermeer, for which Der Dicke had traded other paintings, estimated to be worth a million, six hundred thousand Dutch guilders. The subject was “Christ and the Adulteress,” and some authorities had doubted its genuineness, thus greatly annoying the Reichsmarschall.

  Erickson had been in Germany again and was planning another visit soon. He reported on Göring’s highly irritable state of mind; the German leaders were worried about the progress of the war, and they had cause to be. News had just come over the radio—Erickson had got it while motoring—that the Americans had made a successful crossing of the Strait of Messina. They had been practically unopposed; the Germans had got away with some of their big guns and had destroyed others. The oil man gave it as his guess that the Italians would soon be trying to back out of the mess, and Lanny quoted his father’s opinion that negotiations for an armistice were probably now under way. Lanny always leaned on Robbie whenever he was dealing with businessmen; they would take it for granted that the president of Budd-Erling would have inside knowledge, and also the power to arrange for his son to travel abroad and buy paintings.

  The son of Budd-Erling remarked, “My father is especially interested in jet propulsion at present. He thinks that is the only means by which it might be possible for the Germans to pull themselves out of the hole.”

  “I agree with you,” replied the oil man, and went on to discuss the subject freely. Lanny wondered, did this mean that he had guessed Lanny’s true role and wanted to help him? Or did it mean just that he liked to make his conversation interesting? He reported that the Germans were making real progress with jet-propelled weapons, and the Allies had not been successful in their efforts to stop the experiments at Peenemünde. He said that some projectiles, believed to have been shot from that Baltic island, had fallen in the forest-covered mountains of Sweden. It was a subject the Swedes didn’t like to talk about because of their ticklish position, caught between the two fires. What did the president of Budd-Erling think about the possibility that the British and Americans might be planning an invasion by way of Norway?

  Lanny said he had never heard his father discuss that subject; but he had heard an amusing story in England. A year or so ago, when the Allies were about ready for their landings in North Africa, the authorities in London had advised the press correspondents who were going with the expedition to obtain fur coats and gloves and sleeping bags. The luckless fellows had taken this tip and lugged this stuff on board the ships
. The military people had guessed that German spies would learn of this and would transmit the tip that the invasion was aimed at Norway. The oil man said, “Apparently the plan worked, for we heard here that the Germans were rushing troops to meet an expected attack. They were using our railways, you know.”

  This was a point of vital importance to the Scandinavian world. The Swedes had not felt strong enough to refuse the Nazi demand for transportation to Norway. The Nazis had agreed that the troops would go unarmed, but of course they had made a farce of that agreement, as of every agreement they had made with anybody since their seizure of power over ten years ago. In the previous month the Swedes, seeing Stalingrad and the surrender in Tunisia, had decided that their dangerous neighbor would not be looking for any more enemies; they had summoned courage to refuse military transport through their country, so now the troops went in as “tourists,” in civilian clothing, and their uniforms and arms went by sea to Oslo. Thus an oil man from Brooklyn indulged himself in the luxury of saying what he thought!

  IV

  Lanny was waiting for a chance to bring up his own subject again. Presently his host inquired what Robbie Budd thought about the prospects of a Channel crossing. Lanny quoted his father: it depended upon whether the Allies could keep control of the sea and the air. So far they had held both; but what if the Germans could turn loose showers of rocket bombs against ships being loaded with troops in British ports? What if they could do the same thing against the beaches, and against a thousand or two of ships lined up in front of the beaches? Who was going to win the race for that new weapon?

  The host said that he knew something about oil but not much about jets, and that little was at second hand. He knew the difference between jets and rockets, and that the Germans were working with frantic haste on both types; the Führer was staking his hopes on this method of getting at his foes. Short-range rockets were easier to make and therefore were further advanced, and London was undoubtedly in for a pasting. “I am told that more than a thousand test flights have been made,” said Erickson, “and that the weapon has a range of forty miles. The Germans call it Vergeltungswaffe Eins—reprisal weapon number 1—shortened to V-1. Several of the rockets have fallen in our mountain forests, and the fragments have been carefully gathered up. It’s all very hush-hush of course, but I know one of our government experts who has studied them, and I might find out a few details if it would interest you especially.”

  “It would interest my father very much,” said Lanny, and added, “Needless to say, I won’t mention the source of the information, to him or anyone else.”

  This was pretty nearly telling a shrewd man of affairs that Lanny Budd was more than an art dilettante or even an art authority. But he had to reveal it to someone, and who better than this secret friend of his cause? Following his plan of telling some things in order to get more, he mentioned Professor Wernher von Braun of the University of Berlin and his extraordinary idea of constructing a man-made satellite to fly for all eternity about the earth, balanced at a carefully calculated point between the earth’s force of gravitation and the satellite’s own centrifugal force. If humans expected to live on this unprecedented vehicle, they would have to have fuel in order to keep themselves balanced between the deadly cold of space and the equally deadly heat of the sun. Assuming that the space ship was so launched as to make the circle about the equator in an hour and a half, there would be something less than three-quarters of an hour of sunshine and then something more than three-quarters of an hour of eclipse. To figure this exactly would be a simple matter for the astronomers; but far from easy would be the task of shooting up man-carrying rockets that would connect with the space ship and be clamped fast to it, so that they could deliver their loads and then be released to return to the earth.

  Lanny said, “When Morse made the telegraph his first message was ‘What hath God wrought!’ I doubt very much if the men who complete the first space ship will have that much piety.”

  The other corrected him, “That much modesty.”

  V

  Erickson said that he expected to be in Berlin very shortly. He would be at Karinhall part of the time, and they might meet there. He added, “I’ll see if I can bring some jet-propulsion man for you.” That was practically saying, “I know what you are up to!” But so long as Lanny hadn’t said anything definite, he hadn’t broken the rule. Before they parted the host remarked, “I am staying in town tonight, and I’ll talk to the V-1 expert at lunchtime. He wouldn’t talk frankly to you, but he will to me. We Swedes help the Allies wherever we can without getting caught. We are a free people—and besides that, we all have relatives in America.”

  Lanny agreed to come to the club in midafternoon to see what his friend had found out. At the appointed hour he presented himself, and the oil man put into his hand a legal-sized envelope, well stuffed. “This will tell you what we have been able to learn about the projectiles which have fallen in Sweden. Don’t say where or how you got it; and I advise you to get it out of the country quickly.” Lanny promised to heed this advice.

  Back in his hotel room he went without his dinner in order to study that report. The Vergeltungswaffe Eins was a robot plane, that is, one that flew without a pilot. It was jet-powered, scooping in air at the front, compressing it and heating it and then shooting it out in back. It was estimated to have a speed of about three hundred and fifty miles an hour and a range of about forty miles. The war load it would carry would be about a ton.

  These lessons learned, and the diagrams and drawings impressed upon his mind, Lanny wrote out the additional details which he had got from Erickson. He sealed all these papers in one envelope and pinned the envelope in the inside breast pocket of his coat, where he would be aware of it every moment. He took a taxi to the Royal Library of Stockholm, and in the large reading-room he got a German magazine and placed himself where, by lifting his eyes, he could watch the main entrance. While waiting, he learned what the Nazis were willing to let their countrymen know about their own affairs and about the outside world, a Weltanschauung which grew more out of focus each passing week.

  VI

  Promptly on the stroke of eight o’clock, called twenty in many European countries, Lanny glanced up and saw Bernhardt Monck, alias Anton Vetterl, entering the room. Their eyes met for the fraction of a second, and Monck went to the shelves and consulted a book. Then he went out again, walking slowly, and after a proper interval Lanny followed. They went across the park and through several streets, turning corners according to their custom to make sure they were not being followed. When at last Lanny came up to his friend, the latter said, “Do not let anyone see us together, Lanny. I am a marked man in this city.”

  They strolled on obscure streets, not too well lighted, and Lanny explained that he had the address of the American “post office” but was afraid to use it. The German said, “You are wise. The place is watched.” Lanny asked, “Do you use it?” And the reply was, “Yes.” Lanny took out the envelope with the data and put it into Monck’s hands. “This contains especially important data on the German V-1.” The reply was, “I will put it through at once.” And that was all. Lanny knew that a trusted courier would take it, along with other documents, by plane.

  He continued, “I am working on jet propulsion and am going into Germany. Can you give me any contacts?”

  Monck walked for a bit in silence. “That is a very dangerous job, Lanny.”

  “I know; but I think I can get an invitation again.”

  “To meet top persons, yes. But can you meet ordinary Germans?”

  “I can pass for a German under everyday conditions; I mean, with waiters, taxi drivers, and so on. I can go to some place at night, provided that I know I’ll meet the right person.”

  “That’s the trouble; people change, they lose their nerve, they swallow the propaganda. You know, it is hard for any German to think of letting the Russians into the country. Then, too, spying is universal; people disappear, their homes are watch
ed, and anyone who asks for them disappears also.”

  “We have to take a gamble; it’s very important. Tell me about Professor Schilling.”

  “Schilling is a nuclear-fission man; he wouldn’t know anything about jets.”

  “Yes, but he might be able to send me to someone else.”

  “Schilling is a timid little gentleman, very much wrapped up in his specialty, and horrified to discover that it has become a war issue. He had never dreamed of such a possibility; he keeps saying that he thought only of discovering truth and now he finds himself a servant of the prince of lies. He used to be a free man in his laboratory, but now rough people pull him and haul him and give him orders, they spy on him and clamor for results. ‘I am a goose that they hope will lay a golden egg,’ he said. ‘Then they will kill me.’”

  “There are a lot of scientists who feel just that way, Monck. They have become class-conscious all of a sudden, and when the war’s over, I shouldn’t wonder if they went into politics. Tell me, did you have much talk with Schilling?”

  “Only once. I had a hard time persuading him that it was his duty to give me anything. Finally he wrote out a lot of stuff. I’ve never been told how good it was.”

  “Tell me about Plötzen. Do you think he connected my visit with your presence in his house?”

  “I don’t see how he could; but how can I be sure?”