XI
“Harry the Hop” was in his room, sitting in front of a log fire, slumped down in a chair—he was never content until he had got onto the back of his neck. He was a tall gaunt man, in wretched health, but there was animation and friendship in his eyes. He offered Lanny a drink and a cigarette, and then put him through a grilling as to what he had learned in Germany and Italy.
Lanny found it a pleasure to answer the questions of a man who knew what he wanted and who got the meaning of every sentence before it was finished. “Hurry up!” his mind seemed to say. “We have to get on with this war!”
He told the P.A. a lot about Palestine, the factions he would find there and the problems that had to be solved. He pushed a writing pad across the table and dictated the names of books Lanny should read and people he should meet in New York before he started. Lanny made notes, and by the time that briefing was over he understood what his job was, believed that he could do it, and said so. This pleased the President’s helper, who was that sort of man himself.
By way of reward he favored the son of Budd-Erling with many details of the world-shaping conference in Teheran. He confided the rather horrifying fact that the Soviet government had been carrying on secret negotiations with the Nazis practically all the time since the repulse of the Germans in their first rush at Moscow. The agents had been, first, a Russian emissary in Stockholm, then one in Bulgaria, then the Japanese Ambassadors in Moscow and Berlin. The object of the Russians was to get out of the war with the most territory they could; and when Lanny expressed his dismay, Harry the Hop smiled and said that a man who had lived most of his life in Europe ought not to be so naïve. European diplomacy had always been the same; each for himself and the devil take the hindmost.
“I thought the Soviets represented a revolutionary tradition,” objected the P.A.; and to this the reply was, “That is true to a certain extent, but less so when you get behind the scenes. It appears to be a principle of revolutions that they degenerate, and I fear that Red Russia is no exception. All leaders think about themselves and their own power, and the longer they hold power, the more true that becomes. It is a fact that must be faced, that the aims of the Soviets are identical with those of Peter the Great: an ice-free port on the Baltic and one on the Pacific; access to the Persian Gulf and control of the Dardanelles. All those proposals came up at Teheran.”
“And did we give in to them?”
Harry the Hop smiled his quiet, slow smile. “We gave enough to stop the negotiations with Hitler, at least we hope so. We shall keep track of developments and make sure.”
“I hope you have better agents than I!” remarked the son of Budd-Erling apologetically.
“I wouldn’t say that,” chuckled the other. “We have many in different places, and the whole is always greater than any of its parts. We find amusement in fitting the pieces together; but that isn’t saying that we like the picture when we get it!” A plain-speaking fellow was this former social worker, and he made many enemies that way.
XII
It was after midnight when Lanny was returned to the hotel. He had forewarned his wife, and found her sitting up in bed, reading. When he told her that she was a duly appointed presidential agent, she didn’t want to sleep that night, but to ask questions, not merely about the Palestine job, but about all the last five or six years. The husband didn’t mention Germany or Italy, but revealed that he had been working for Roosevelt, and how their meetings had been arranged and the secret kept. Laurel said, “I was fairly sure what it was; but I never hinted about it to anyone else.”
She plied him with questions about that great man whom he was so fortunate as to know. She exclaimed, “He’s so much better than we deserved!” That was her constant theme: the American people were so ill informed that they would never have elected Franklin Roosevelt if they had known what they were going to get. He had had to use his political arts, and his command of the radio, to keep them in line—and then only by a narrow margin! “What would have happened to us if he hadn’t tricked us into getting ready! And inventing dodges like lend-lease to help our allies!” Lanny told her how “That Man” had put Robbie Budd “on relief,” ordering him to build fighter planes and paying him out of WPA funds, intended for the unemployed. F.D.R.’s argument was unanswerable; were not unemployed airplane builders as deserving of jobs as any other sort?
Lanny and his wife were going to have another honeymoon, this time in the Holy Land. As a writer, Laurel began thinking about local color, and the sort of stories in which she could make use of it. “When the war is over, you must tell me many stories, Lanny!” And he promised her an “exclusive.” Then he persuaded her to go to sleep, saying that he was tired from the long drive, and had another before him in the course of this new day.
But even after he had put his head on the pillow and closed his eyes she wanted to know, “How shall we fly, Lanny?” When he told her that they would have a choice of routes, she wanted to know on which one she would see the most. He realized how much this meant to her, this new status, this new vista opening before her. It was like being married all over again. “So far I have had less than half a husband. Your work is the most important part of you.”
He chuckled and told her, “You’re in the Army now!”
XIII
In New York they had much to do. Lanny ordered the books which Hopkins had recommended and packed them to be taken on the trip. More important at the moment was to find out what art there was in Jerusalem, and especially in private hands, so that it might be purchased, or at least negotiated for. For that the best authority was Zoltan Kertezsi, whose mind was a world catalogue of painting and sculpture. He must have observed long ago that his friend developed these sudden curiosities only as to parts of the world where the American armies were about to penetrate; but he never asked any questions. He was at once a wise and a kind man, and he disliked the unwise and unkind Nazis as much as Lanny did.
He informed his associate that there was under way a movement to establish a Jewish Museum of Art in New York; it would contain not only Jewish ritual instruments, Torah, candelabra, ancient coins, and so on, but mosaics and architectural fragments, and modern Jewish paintings as well. Lanny could be looking for such things, and Zoltan offered to take the burden of arrangements off his friend’s shoulders. He went to the libraries and also to the dealers, and after two or three days he came back with a small dossier on the subject, enough to provide a P.A. with perfect camouflage in both Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv.
The next person Lanny wanted to talk to was Johannes Robin, wise man of the world, who knew the Jews in the only way it was possible really to know them—by being one. For the past few years he had managed the New York office of Budd-Erling, and had received a very good salary. That was far different from being the great financier that he had been in Germany; but Johannes said that he would rather work for a day laborer’s wage in America than be the richest man in Naziland. He had bought a comfortable old house about halfway between New York and Newcastle, and there he had assembled his family: his devoted old wife, whom they all called Mama; the son of the murdered Freddi, who bore his father’s name; the mother of that son, who had remarried and had a husband and three children; and, for the past two years, the two children of Hansi and Bess. They all stayed together, because they had learned so dreadful a lesson of the world’s cruelty; they had been taught love by their fear of hatred.
Lanny and Laurel went out to spend a Sunday with this household. He had known them since his boyhood and had been a sort of Prince Charming to them, being so elegant and rich, whereas Johannes had then just begun to accumulate his fortune. Lanny, Hansi, and Freddi had made a musical trio, piano, violin, and clarinet, and they had been enraptured—each with the others. The part which the grandson of Budd Gunmakers had played in trying to get Freddi out of the clutches of the Nazis had made him forever the adored hero of the family and there was nothing they wouldn’t have tried to do for him. When he came to visi
t, Mama prepared an elaborate Jewish meal and did her best to make him eat more than was good for him. The children had been taught to hang upon his every word, and sat gazing at him with their beautiful dark eyes.
Now Lanny was going to visit Palestine with his wife. He said it was to collect art works, and the children no doubt believed it. The grandfather, a hard man to fool, must have had his guesses, but he wouldn’t say anything, even to Lanny when they were alone. However, he would talk about politics, and the dreadful problem of Arabs versus Jews, and what could be done about it. The Jewish race, or people, or whatever name you chose to give them, had been scattered over the earth, and it was their fate to be used as footballs, to be kicked here and there in other people’s games or battles. The British had the job of defending Palestine, so the Nazi-Fascists incited the Arabs against the Jews as a means of making trouble for the British and interfering with the functioning of oil pipe-lines from Mesopotamia. Johannes said sadly, “Wherever we go we are in somebody’s way.” And he added, “There are several pure Anglo-Saxon country-club members who think they could manage the New York office better than I do.”
Johannes himself was not seriously interested in Judaism as a religion; he took the ceremonials as grownup Christians take Santa Claus, as something that gives pleasure to the children. He had no interest in Zionism for himself, but thought it would be a good thing for those miserable millions of brethren whom he had left behind in the Polish ghetto. When the zealots came to him, he would write a check for them, at the same time explaining that he was no longer the rich man he had been and that he had a large family dependent upon him.
All the grown members of this family took part in the discussions with Lanny, and he was especially interested in the attitude of young Freddi, who had just had his sixteenth birthday, and was the living image of his father as Lanny remembered him when he had first visited Bienvenu and played the clarinet. Tall and slender, with beautiful dark eyes and wavy black hair, young Freddi was making a good record in high school, but all his ambitions were centered upon the day when he would be old enough to volunteer for the Army. He wanted so to be in time, and he hoped that the president of Budd-Erling Aircraft might somehow be able to pull wires and have him assigned to the invasion of Germany.
After that, everything would be simple. He would find a sympathetic officer to hear the tale of what the Nazis had done to his father, and would assign him to the unit which would march or perhaps parachute into Bavaria, so that Freddi might be one of those who would deliver the ten or twenty thousand captives of Dachau. It might be that there were men who had managed to survive ten years of that horror and would remember Freddi’s father and tell about him. Freddi had cross-questioned Lanny Budd, and had studied the maps in the public library, and knew exactly how he would get to the small market town which lies some nine miles from Munich. He dreamed of rolling in a jeep up the well-paved highway, and he had figured out the strategy of taking a concentration camp which occupied more than a square mile and was surrounded by a high concrete wall with electrified wire on top.
Quite solemnly this shepherd boy out of ancient Judea discussed with Lanny his project of storming the castle on the height, and there setting up artillery with which to shatter the power plant and the entrance gates. No less solemnly the well-instructed Lanny explained, “The first military objective is always the enemy’s armed forces. If you defeat and rout them, Dachau will be pretty sure to surrender. A concentration camp is not a fortress; it is built to keep prisoners in, not to keep an army out.”
XIV
Johannes had a friend who was a Zionist and had lived in Palestine; so Lanny and Laurel paid a visit to another Jewish household. Here were people of considerable wealth and high culture—they were interested in Lanny not so much because he was the son of Budd-Erling, but because he was the half-brother of Bessie Budd Robin, whom they had heard in concerts. There were a father and mother, a grown son and three daughters, all people of modern ideas. The father had fallen under the spell of Jewish racialism and had decided that it was his duty to help rebuild the Zion of his ancestors; he had sold his home and taken his family, his furniture, and all his belongings to Palestine.
They had lived for a couple of years in the new city of Tel-Aviv; but the father had had to give up because of the discontent of the young people. All four thought of themselves as Americans before they were Jews, and none of them had the least interest in pioneering. They didn’t want to learn Hebrew, and they had little sense of kinship with the pitiful oppressed people who were being brought from Central Europe, in great part with British and American money. They missed the crowds, the bright lights, and the cultural opportunities of New York, and they had banded themselves together to break down the resistance of their father and shatter his dream.
And yet—a curious thing—now that they were back, they chose to remember the good side of their Zion; they wouldn’t have liked it if Lanny had agreed with them too heartily. It was a pleasant dream to look back on, and they chose to blame themselves rather than the New Jerusalem. They were not tough enough; they were too sophisticated; they had become worshipers of the golden calf. They had been seduced by the lures of New York—the limousines, the fashionable shops, the smart conversation. People who had never known these things could be happy building dams and irrigation ditches and planting orange groves in deserts. Let them do it, and in another generation the university and the libraries would have grown, and there would be more concert halls and theaters, and something to talk about besides the rights and wrongs of Israel.
Lanny was amused by a heart-to-heart remark made to him by the son of this family, a newly trained Air Force officer home on a brief leave. This young man took him aside and said, “I’ll tell you the God’s truth, Mr. Budd. I got tired of seeing so many Jews. I found that I liked a variety of faces!”
XV
Lanny might have met some Arabs in New York, but he figured that he would meet enough at his destination. He knew their religion, because he had met so many Moors, and his stepfather had become a sort of lay brother to the Mohammedan scholars and marabouts of Morocco. Lanny would stop in Marrakech to ask questions and get letters of introduction, and pose as being on the verge of becoming a convert to the seventh-century camel driver’s creed.
Baker arranged matters, and the favored couple were flown to Key West, and then to Belém in Brazil and to Dakar in West Africa—a delightful journey in midwinter. In Marrakech they spent a couple of days with Beauty and Parsifal, and Lanny found that his mother was greatly worried over not having heard from Marceline; he, of course, said nor a word. He told all the good news about Frances and the rest in Newcastle; also he improved his education by meeting an Arab propagandist who was stirring up his co-religionists in French Morocco on Nazi funds.
The next stage was Cairo, where they spent a night in the famed Shepheard’s Hotel, favorite resort of British and American officers. Lanny didn’t meet any Mohammedans there, for this would have attracted unfavorable attention. Next morning the couple were packed closely in an Army dispatch plane, and in a few minutes were being flown over that rugged Sinai Desert where Moses had caused the water to flow from the rock. It looked exactly like the desert of Tunis where Lanny had come so near to losing his life, and indeed it was a part of the same vast tract, extending from the Atlantic Ocean deep into Asia Minor.
The journey had taken the children of Israel forty years, and it took a fast airplane less than an hour. Below them were vineyards and orchards, and Lanny leaned to his wife and called above the roar of the engine, “The Holy Land!” Presently they were over a much-crowded old walled city on tumbled hills, and as they swung round to come down to the airport, they passed a hill with stunted trees and a temple with a round dome on top. Once more Lanny leaned over. “The Mount of Olives!” he said.
18
Promised Land
I
As a child, Lanny Budd had been taken all over Europe, and being the near-stepson o
f a painter he had gazed at innumerable stained-glass windows and paintings and statues of blessed virgins and saints. He had listened to technical discussions of these figures as art works, but it hadn’t been until the age of fifteen that he became curious about them as historical characters. He had asked questions of an elderly Swiss diplomat, and so had been told about an ancient work of literature known as the Bible, pretty well forgotten by fashionable society on the French Riviera. Alone and without guidance he had read the story of Jesus, four times over in four varying accounts; tears had come into his eyes because of the mistreatment of that good and kind man, and the figure had lived in his imagination all through the years, making him more concerned to do good and more ashamed to do evil.
As for Laurel, she had been brought up in a proper Episcopalian family, and had learned all the Bible stories as a child. However her view might change as she grew older, they would continue to shine in her memory and to be a vital part of her culture. She had hundreds of names of persons and places in mind, each one connected with scenes and stories; she had sung hymns about them, she had seen pictures of them, and few had been the days when some of them were not brought into her thoughts. The Holy Land! And now here she was, actually treading its soill. The faces, the costumes, the animals, the landscapes—everything was here, and it was like having your childhood come back to life.
They put up at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, for of course you had to have the physical comforts, no matter where you went in your mind. Poverty and primitive life were fascinating to imagine and to employ as art subjects, but you wanted your orange juice cold and your toast hot in the morning and must not forget your waterproof coat when it rained. They engaged a dragoman, or guide, to show them the sights—it wouldn’t do to go out on their own, for there was such a tangle of civilizations here, so many etiquettes and taboos, that they might have made a host of enemies without having the least idea of offending. They wanted to see the country as a preliminary to meeting anybody; and there were dangers, even as there had been nineteen centuries ago.
One Clear Call I Page 50