One Clear Call I

by Upton Sinclair

  Göring herded them all up to watch him run the elaborate system of electric trains which he had installed upstairs, a thing which would have given delight to any company of small children. Then he took them to the Karin shrine, where candles burned day and night, and where they were expected to stand with bowed heads and in silence for at least a minute. There stood the hostess, Göring’s present wife, the large and impassive stage queen, Emmy Sonnemann; Lanny watched out of the corner of his eye for any sign of her emotions, but she gave none. Emmy had never known the Swedish countess who had died of tuberculosis in the days when her husband was an inmate of an institution for drug addicts. Apparently Karin had been a sort of Patient Griselda and had earned the refugee officer’s undying devotion. The second wife had the same need of patience, Lanny felt sure.

  Next day, which was Sunday, the P.A. was standing in front of a Rubens, a group of those immense fleshy ladies reclining nude upon a bed of grass and ferns. Red Erickson came up behind and remarked, “There are seldom any ants or mosquitoes in paintings.” When Lanny had stopped chuckling over that novel bit of art criticism, the oil man said in a low tone, “I haven’t been able to get anything yet, but I may be able to. I’ll be at the Hotel Eden for a couple of days.” Lanny said, “Thanks,” and that was all. They didn’t take a drive together this time; they had both decided that it would not be the part of wisdom to call their friendship to the attention of the Nazis.

  XIII

  That Sunday evening was a memorable one in an art expert’s life: he had a chance to get rich!

  The son of Budd-Erling had been offered a lot of rewards in the course of his extensive travels. Prior to America’s entrance into the war both Hitler and Göring had offered to pay him for his services, an amount never specified because he had not let discussion get that far. Mr. Hearst had offered him fifty thousand a year to enter his service as a collector of confidential information. F.D.R., too, had offered payment for what Lanny preferred to do freely. Even Pierre Laval, the butcher’s son, had tried to buy him! And now the chief of the Luftwaffe, Reichsminister and Governor-General of Prussia, put on his sky-blue uniform with broad dark-blue stripes on the trousers and not less than two-score medals and decorations on his bosom; with all that magnificence he summoned a Franco-American art expert into his study and made him an offer of a million dollars. One million dollars in paintings, to be chosen from the ten thousand masterpieces to which Göring possessed a clear title—and Lanny himself would be permitted to put the price upon them. Göring’s old and valued friend would be put upon his professional honor and would state the true value of the works he wanted, and he could have them up to a total of one million dollars!

  And what did he have to do for that? Just to bring to the Luftwaffe chief the specifications and blueprints of whatever jet pursuit planes the Budd-Erling Aircraft Corporation might have in process at the present time. When Lanny looked staggered and said he had no idea how he could get such documents, Der Dicke replied, “Don’t tell me that, Lanny! They are there, and you have access to the place and must know people there who feel as you do. With your father taking the position that he does, might it not be that he would help you?”

  Lanny was stuck, for here he had been telling all the leading Nazis that his father was to all intents and purposes a prisoner of the Jewish-pluto-democratic government, compelled to serve it against his will; and if so, why shouldn’t he choose to help the German people whom he so greatly admired?

  Lanny said, “Hermann, my father is a man who has never learned to keep his mouth shut. For a matter of twelve years now his hatred of the Roosevelt administration has been known to everybody in the plant. His every move is watched, not only by spies, but by government agents who are all over the place. Moreover, he is a businessman by his life’s training. If it came to a showdown, I doubt if he could bring himself to do anything against the interests of his stockholders. If anything is done, it will have to be by me.”

  “All right then, Lanny, you do it!” The fat man’s eagerness made him seem like a greedy child.

  “I think I know a man who might be approached. You know, when your own men were working in the plant before the war they made a few friends. I might have to spend some money on them.”

  “All right; I have money in New York and can put it at your disposal.”

  “No hurry about that. I’ll see what I can do for you.”

  “There must be no delay, Lanny. My information is that the project is far advanced; and you know it takes time to get a new type of plane into production.”

  “I’ll do my best, alter Freund. I’m expecting to go straight home. I admit that I am tempted by the thought of your paintings.” Hitherto Lanny had proudly refused all bribes; but a million dollars, and in the form of old masters—that was beyond the powers of human nature! To refuse it could not be made to seem plausible.

  Hermann’s last words startled Lanny. “Take my advice,” he said, “and be careful in your dealings with the Führer. He is under a great strain and is not always able to control his emotions. Believe me, I know!”

  When Lanny sank to rest that night on a Rosshaarmatratze in one of the guest rooms of Karinhall, he was saying to himself, “My days in Naziland are about over!”

  12

  Destruction Face to Face

  I

  The Reichsmarschall flew away to his forest-hidden headquarters in the west, and Lanny and Erickson and a couple of the other guests were taken back to Berlin in the swiftly rolling limousine. It was on the evening of this day that Lanny was supposed to visit Professor Schilling, and he spent most of the interim thinking over the situation and how best to handle it. He had been nervous ever since his interview with Heinrich Himmler; he couldn’t believe that things had really gone as well as they had seemed to. Naturally, it would be Himmler’s game to have Lanny think so; but, on the other hand, it was Lanny’s game not to be fooled.

  If the “Austrian coin” was closely watched, as Lanny had been warned, what more likely than that the woman who opened the door was serving as a spy for her Fatherland? Or perhaps there had been another servant listening behind a partly closed door. Or even a member of the family—that was one of the evil devices of the Nazis, to set a child to watching parents, or a sister to watching a brother. If it had happened in this case, there might be SS men waiting in the shrubbery for Lanny’s appearance; or it might be that the frightened old physicist had already been apprehended and put to the torture. It might be that Lanny himself would be having that experience before the night was over. They had a drug called scopolamine, popularly referred to as the “truth serum”; it put the conscious mind to sleep, and the subconscious mind answered questions. When Lanny thought of all the things he might say under the influence of such a drug his bones turned to putty.

  Of course he might telephone the professor and make an appointment somewhere else. To make it for a street meeting would sound suspicious, and to make it for a restaurant wouldn’t help much, for the Gestapo could come there. If they were watching this specialist in one of the crucial subjects, they would surely not fail to tap his telephone. No, the thing to do was to go openly and rely on that bland geniality which had carried him through so far. He had the Führer’s permission, not only to be here in Berlin, but to tell what he knew about those crucial subjects to the scientists who could make use of them. Also, he had just made a deal with Hermann Göring to bring him secrets about the jet-plane program of America; and who was there that could question these orders of the Number One and the Number Two? Lanny asked this rhetorical question and was not pleased with the answer which came promptly: Heinrich Himmler!

  II

  With a mind full of such disturbing thoughts Lanny went to a new hotel in the Dahlem district. He had just got settled in his room with the morning papers and a couple of weeklies when there came the accursed screaming of those sirens. With ruins all about him—one corner of the hotel had been recently caved in—Lanny jumped up and ran dow
nstairs. The shelter was at the next corner, so he went down the street, following a stream of people, mostly women with young children; the men were at work and the older children in school. The shelter was underground, and you trooped down a flight of concrete steps. It was already crowded, and there was nothing for Lanny to do but sit on the floor against a wall. In these neighborhood Bunker, he learned, the people had their own places pre-empted, and many kept bedding here and other necessities.

  There wasn’t light enough to read, and Lanny, desiring to attract no attention, sat hunched with his head in his arms, pretending to be asleep. He listened to the conversation, of which there was a great deal all around him, and discovered quickly that Dr. Goebbels and Reichsminister Himmler had not been able to keep the women of even middle-class Berlin contented with this war; if a poll could have been taken of the one or two hundred persons in this place, the struggle would have come to an end that day. When the crack of the ack-ack began to sound and the walls and floor began to shake, the women lost control of themselves and the block wardens gave more than one of them warning.

  Next to Lanny sat an old gentleman, with straggly whiskers and a threadbare overcoat, playing with a pack of cards. When he discovered Lanny watching him, he invited the stranger to a game of bezique. Lanny had learned this game in childhood, so they played, and while the American airmen were missing a railroad station and bringing down several blocks of apartment houses, Lanny managed to lose one-mark-twenty to this sad-faced emaciated old man, who doubtless needed it. When they parted the winner said hopefully, “Auf Wiedersehen,” and Lanny replied, “Grüss Gott,” which was meant to suggest that he was a Bavarian.

  The P.A. went out and stood watching the people from this shelter filing into a barracks built for the bombed-out—long sheds with small rooms and common toilets, most miserable. Then he returned to his hotel and resumed his reading of the Völkischer Beobachter. He did not read that the Americans had been driven into the Bay of Salerno, so he could assume that reinforcements had been landed on that bloody beach. Two more Russian towns had been given up, so he knew that the meat-grinder was still working in the Ukraine. The Americans had taken a place on the coast of New Guinea. That seemed a strange place to be fighting, but Lanny assumed that the General Staff knew its business and that there must be an airbase near.

  Leaving Karinhall, Lanny had thought that he would never want another meal; but nature doesn’t work that way. By evening he was hungry; he tried another café, and discovered that Kartoffelsuppe was the same potato soup no matter what fancy name was printed on the menu. He sat for a while reading Dr. Goebbels’ afternoon budget of news, then got up and strolled toward the home of Professor Ernst Schilling, world-famous authority on the nucleus of the atom. The P.A.’s knees showed signs of not wanting to take him, but he gave them orders and they obeyed:

  When Duty whispers low, Thou must,

  The youth replies, I can.

  III

  The house was an old-fashioned one, a compromise between a villa and a cottage. There was a small garden in front, and some shrubbery; a breeze was blowing, and every time it moved the shrubbery, Lanny Budd’s heart gave a jump. There was a porch with pillars—and who might be standing behind them? Who might be sitting in that big armchair in the shadowy corner? The wicked flee when no man pursueth!

  Lanny rang the bell, and the same elderly servant opened the door. What would she make of this well-dressed gentleman who came and took the Herr Professor for a walk in the moonlight? The Herr Professor was an elderly man, and perhaps did not enjoy long walks, and might be exhausted after them. Lanny’s fears had this woman all fixed up as an agent of Himmler. And what would she make of the un-German name of Budd? Had he made a mistake in giving his real name? But no, he was supposed to be there at the Führer’s orders, and to have given a false name would have been wholly out of key. Take it easy and bluff it out!

  “Jawohl, der Herr Professor ist zuhause.” Lanny sat in the little old-fashioned parlor, prim and spotless; he wondered if this old gentleman was a widower, and how many years he had lived in this home, presumably once in the suburbs and now in the city. Did the household all run to the nearest air-raid shelter, or had they stayed here and just shut their eyes? Every day, when the scientist went to his laboratory, he couldn’t be sure if he would find his home standing when he returned; every night, when he went to sleep, he wouldn’t know if he would wake again. Such was the gift which Adi Schicklgruber had brought to his most-loved people, his Herrenvolk. Blut und Boden—now the Blut was scattered all over the Boden and the Boden was shaken day and night by TNT.

  The Gelehrte came, saying, “Guten Abend.” Without another word he put on his worn overcoat and his faded black hat, took his walking stick, and showed his caller out of the door. Were his old knees likewise trembling, and not merely from age? Had it occurred to him that his servant might be an agent of the Gestapo? Did he have children or grandchildren, and have to wonder whether one of them might be a Hitler fanatic, spying on the rest of the family? When he glanced about at the shrubbery, was he thinking what Lanny had thought? And had it occurred to him that this stranger who had pronounced the key word “Raffaelli” might have got that word by torturing a captured American spy?

  IV

  They walked side by side, and close together as before. The elderly scientist looked behind him, then turned a corner and looked again. In a low voice he asked, “Are you ready for your lesson?” When Lanny said yes, he spoke as follows:

  “The thing you ask about is a true rocket, liquid-fueled, about fifteen meters long and two meters in diameter, with an almost needle-pointed nose. It has four fins, sweeping back and serving as control surfaces. It has a jet engine which pours a tremendous stream of gases from its tail. One of its most important features is an extremely powerful pump which sprays the fuel into the combustion chamber. The engine burns for a little more than one minute, and in that time it consumes close to five tons of alcohol and more than five tons of liquid oxygen. That gives it an altitude of about twenty miles, and after that it flies of its own momentum. Its speed will be about one mile per second and its range is estimated at two hundred miles. It carries a load of a ton and a half of explosives. All this presents an enormous complexity of problems, literally hundreds of them, and as many different kinds of scientists have been working on them for more than ten years. They believe they have all the problems solved, and the thing is in production; quantities are expected to be flying by next spring. They cost about a hundred thousand marks apiece. That is the story. Do you think you can repeat this?”

  Lanny tried. He left out several important points and made a couple of mistakes which the old gentleman corrected. It took three tries to say it exactly right. Then, “Do you think you can retain it now?”

  Lanny replied, “I’ll spend a lot of time making sure. Do you know where the work is being done?”

  “Most of it at Peenemünde. There is another place, but I was unable to learn its name. I have told you everything I know.”

  “Very well, Herr Professor. I thank you.”

  “It is to save the world from a fate too dreadful to contemplate. And now, under ordinary circumstances I should be happy to make your acquaintance. Perhaps you will come to see me someday when all this is over. But for the present, we should not linger.”

  “Surely not.” They had walked around several blocks and were not far from the old gentleman’s home. Lanny said, “Gute Nacht,” and turned back, then stood in the shadow of a tree and saw the other turn into his place. The P.A. went his way, repeating over to himself that terrible lesson, which spelled certain death for many thousands of British people. The P.A. had learned quite a lot about “wonder weapons,” both at home and abroad, and was sure that nobody had any means of pursuing or stopping a missile that traveled at six or eight times the speed of sound.

  v

  It was a dangerous thing for a well-dressed man to be wandering alone about the streets of Berlin at
night, and Lanny got to his hotel as quickly as possible. Near by was a public telephone, and from it he called his half-sister and asked, “Have you found that Holbein painting for me?” Her reply was, “I expect to have word about it in the course of the morning. Where can I call you?” He gave her the telephone number of the hotel, saying, “I won’t be there later than noon. I may be flying in the afternoon, unless you can be pretty sure of getting me a chance to see that Holbein.” If Herr Himmler’s agents were listening in on telephones they wouldn’t make much out of that.

  Lanny went up to his room and lay on his bed, reciting his rocket lesson over and over until he knew it as well as the multiplication table. Then he fell asleep—for he had trained himself to plan but never to worry, and he had done his planning about these matters in advance. When he awakened, he found that the new multiplication table had not escaped his mind. He recited it again, and then had a breakfast of bread and apple butter and ersatz coffee brought to his room. He read the morning papers: more “straightening” of the eastern line, and more hard fighting at Salerno, but no more “headlong flight.”

  He didn’t wish to leave this room until Marceline called. If she said yes, he would go to see the “painting.” He wanted to see Erickson once more, and that was all, except to call the Führer’s secretary and have arrangements made for his plane trip to Stockholm. All very simple, and nothing to bother a travelers’ head about. It was like being in the still center of a tornado.

  There came a knock on his door, and surely that was nothing to make his heart leap. He was expecting a knock, for this was a third-class hotel, and in order to answer a phone call he had to go downstairs. Yes, it was the young woman who took the place of a bellboy, and who had smiled at this obviously well-to-do man and made it plain that he wouldn’t have to be lonely at night unless he chose to be—and he had chosen to be. Now she said, “Der Fernsprecher, mein Herr,” and Lanny gave her the small piece of paper money he had ready and hurried downstairs, that being quicker than the elevator.