One Clear Call I

by Upton Sinclair

  “I’ve a wild idea in my head,” declared Lanny. “I might cook up some way to make the Nazis believe we’re going to invade through Holland instead of across the Channel. What would you give me if I could do that?”

  “Golly! I’d make you majordomo of all the art museums in the U.S. I’ve recalled pretty nearly every spy story I ever read, trying to figure out how we could do it.”

  “I’ve done the same. But I fear I can never get the Nazis to trust me again. It might be that I could have some secret documents and let their agents steal them.”

  “Go on—you got that out of E. Phillips Oppenheim. Go and talk with Wild Bill; he knows the story and I’ll OK anything he approves.”

  XII

  Lanny drove his wife back to Washington, and put her up in a hotel while he paid a visit to the old brick building by the gasworks. First he met the genial stoutish Irish-American, who disarmed you by his friendly manner—but don’t be fooled, for he had a shrewd lawyer’s mind and didn’t miss anything. He would call in two or three of his top people, also a stenographer, and they would put the visitor through a grilling—every question exactly to the point and nothing overlooked. Lanny spent a couple of hours with men who were experts on Palestine; and after that the Spanish section took the rest of the day, part of the night, and some of the next day.

  The P.A. knew Spain fairly well; he could speak the language enough to get along—especially since educated Spaniards know English and French. He had motored through various parts of the country, inspecting paintings and buying several. During the civil war he had stayed for weeks in a town of Western Spain called Caceres, and hoped that nobody knew he had helped in the escape of an English flyer named Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson from a dungeon in that town. More important yet, he had been sent by the elder de Bruyne to interview Marshal Pétain at the time that quavering old gentleman had been the French Ambassador to Madrid—the period called Sitzkrieg, before the German invasion of France. All the Rightists had been clamoring for France to make terms with Hitler and get out of the war before it was too late. Lanny had had proper credentials, and had met all the “best” people, including General Aguilar, commander of the military district of the capital.

  Wonderful, wonderful! the OSS people agreed; the only question was, had he spoiled it by getting exposed or suspected in Germany? If this had happened, the Spaniards would be sure to know about it; and what would they do? Let the Nazis kidnap the false friend and carry him into France? Or pretend to accept him, watch him, and find out what the Americans wanted to know, who their agents were, and where their “post office” was situated? Lanny would be in danger; he would have to use many precautions. They told him these, one after another, and it made a long list—a stenographer typed them out for him so that he could study them. But he wouldn’t take them into Spain!

  What was he going to find out? That was another list, of which such things as tungsten, alias wolfram, were only a small part. Franco, who owed his job to Hitler and Mussolini, was doing everything he dared to aid his benefactors: shipping critical materials to them; spying on the Allies in every land and turning over their secrets; giving fuel to U-boats, and information about Allied shipping; permitting Nazi sympathizers to attack Allied consulates—in short, everything except getting into the war. Recently he had gone too far, and the Allies had cut off his oil supplies, which would make it hard for Lanny or anybody else to get about in Spain.

  What was this P.A. going to use for camouflage? He told about his acquaintances in Madrid and Seville and Barcelona who were art lovers; also about two of his clients at home who apparently suspected what he was doing, and obliged him with letters ordering objets d’art in any part of the world he desired to visit. He would renew old friendships in Spain and delicately hint to certain officials that they could earn generous fees by helping him get permission to take paintings out of the country. “I may take some,” he said, “and you will have to fix it up so that I don’t get jugged for trading with the enemy.”

  XIII

  There remained the most important subject of all: the possibility that this art expert might be used to give the Germans the wrong idea as to the goal of that colossal expeditionary force which the Americans were preparing in most of the harbors of the Atlantic seaboard. The OSS experts on spy stories were called in for consultation: men who had spent their lives thinking up new wrinkles in “Whodunits” and now saw their imaginings turning into grim reality. Believe it or not, there was a man from Hollywood who claimed to have written a hundred and forty-seven such works of fiction, and to have turned more than half of them into screen treatments. There was an elderly lawyer who asserted that he had put himself to sleep every night for forty years by reading such stories. There was the head of a police department “crime bureau” who had spent a couple of decades probing the minds of criminals and finding out what they believed and what they tried to get other people to believe.

  A strange place, and a strange assortment of occupations! At lunchtime, by way of recreation, the bespectacled young college professor who sat next to Lanny entertained him with accounts of some of the things they were doing. They had little pamphlets, top-secret, of course, on the details of committing most of the crimes known to man: how to open any ordinary lock with little strips of celluloid; how to open safes—they had men who in ten minutes could open a safe that had printed on it the manufacturer’s statement that if you lost the combination there would be nothing you could do but have the safe blown. There were treatises on lifting seals and replacing them, on steaming letters open, or reading them without opening, by means of tiny lights inserted in the corner of the flap. There were teams of men working all over the country, trained in the details of entering an office at night, making photostats of thousands of documents, and leaving everything in perfect order, even to the dust on the desks and the floor. The owner of the place would never know it had been entered, not even if he had set traps, or if he made tests for fingerprints and so on.

  In this case it was a question of how they were going to persuade the suspicious Nazis to believe the opposite of the truth. The professor of criminal psychology pointed out that when an American told something to a Nazi, the Nazi would naturally assume that it was false. But the Nazi might be capable of one degree of subtlety and figure that the American might be telling the truth, knowing that the Nazi would assume it to be false. Or the Nazi might be capable of two degrees of subtlety, and assume that the statement might be false, because the American would assume that the Nazi might assume it was the truth. This might go on without limit, like the girl pulling the petals off a daisy and reciting, “He loves me, he loves me not.” The Nazis would always try to be one step ahead of their enemies in subtlety.

  How could a supposedly innocent art expert convey information to the Nazis? If he had it in his suitcase for them to steal, they would assume that he had put it there to be stolen; and in that case, would it be better to put true information or false? It might be that Lanny could receive a letter from his father, a man who would have inside information; but would the father be indiscreet enough to write it to his son in Spain? Or could he write that he was sending important documents to some secret place where the son could get them? Pretty surely the Nazis would be reading the son’s letters, and they would contrive to steal those documents—but even then, might they not suspect a “plant?” Just so, declared the Hollywood writer, did half a dozen men sit up all night in a story conference, thinking up complications to tickle the jaded palates of movie fans!

  Lanny’s guess was that the Nazis would know him for a secret agent, but would pretend not to; and what then? Obviously, they would assume that anything he had was false. But suppose he posed as an agent who had “turned,” one who was serving both sides for the money there was in it? Suppose that a couple of known American agents, say at Cadiz, were to make an attempt to carry Lanny off and put him on board an American ship, and suppose Lanny were to appeal to the Spanish police and get rescue
d—surely that would cause the Franco crowd to think well of him, and the Nazis to come running to him with their hands full of gold! Lanny said, “Yes, but it would be pretty sure to get me into the newspapers, and that is the one thing I’ve always managed to avoid.” The Budd family never got into the newspapers, and especially not as traitors to their native land!

  After hours of pro and con this story conference agreed that the wisest course for a presidential agent would be to proceed to Madrid and feel out the situation. When he had made a choice of the best-seeming plan he would drop a note in code to the American “post office” in Madrid. The word would be radioed to Washington, which would provide all the props required for the most elaborate super-feature film. Code words were agreed upon and stowed away in Lanny’s memory, and a copy sealed tightly and locked up in the super-secret files of the Office of Strategic Services. Let it be hoped there was no Hitler spy among those who kept the files!

  20

  Red Laugh of War

  I

  Baker provided the P.A.’s passport, made out for Portugal, Spain, and North Africa. Lanny got a Portuguese visa in New York, but thought it best to wait and apply for the Spanish visa in Lisbon. He was flown comfortably on a Clipper by way of the Cape Verde Islands, and when he was set down in the harbor of Lisbon, he betook himself to the best hotel, put in his application for permission to enter Spain, and then telephoned to General Aguilar in Madrid. He had come, he said, because he had heard that Spain had excellent modern painters and he wanted to see their work; incidentally, he had interesting news about world affairs. The elderly commander was cordial and promised to see that the visa was granted at once. Lanny thought to himself, The Nazis haven’t told him about me!

  “At once” in the Spanish language meant almost a week, Lanny discovered; he called at the Consulate every day, but the clerks shook their heads. Infelizmente, Señor—but there was a routine which required time. Lanny revealed no impatience; he had all the company he wanted. Here in the greatest spy center of Europe there were people of all sorts, male and female, eager to talk to him in English, French, German, or Spanish. He was polite to them all, and happy to express his opinions of paintings, from those of the Aurignacian caves to Picasso and Dali. When it came to the present state of the world, he said it was very bad, and the only thing that a lover of art could do was to refuse to let the subject gain admission to his thoughts.

  There were some of these persons who remembered him of old, for he had been coming through here since the days of the Spanish Civil War. He recalled well the Japanese, excessively polite little men, wearing the same black frock coats and pin-stripe trousers, bowing like automatons and wearing smiles that showed their large teeth to the gums, both upper and lower. Because of previous acquaintance, they presumed to speak to American gentleman in spite of unfortunate war so greatly regretted. American gentleman replied no less politely; he too greatly regretted, having nothing of personal ill will, most happy to learn concerning new Japanese painters in wartime, perhaps making use of new themes? So went this urbane conversation, Lanny knowing that he couldn’t fool the Japs and guessing that they knew they were not fooling him. He could believe that there was real sincerity in their regrets about this war, for by now the American task forces had got under way among the Pacific islands, and planes from American carriers were shooting down flocks of the best-trained flyers the Japanese had been able to turn out. Their supply was not unlimited.

  Official Portugal was carefully neutral in the whole conflict. The newspapers published the communiqués of both sides, and both were permitted to lease store windows and mount their propaganda for passers-by to read; the Nazis won out in this, because their propaganda included photographs of blond Aryan females exhibiting everything with which nature had endowed them. Big-business Portugal was likewise impartial, taking in dollars, marks, and pounds sterling in the process of preclusive buying. On the Avenida da Liberdade—which meant in practice Avenue de Laissez-Faire—you saw fine shops with jewels, furs, and every sort of luxury goods; you would also see barefooted peasant women carrying huge loads of farm produce on their heads.

  Wages had gone up slightly—from fifty cents per day; this being another Catholic land, where birth control was banned or unknown, the population pressed inexorably upon the limits of subsistence. The well-to-do had the poor always with them and found it most convenient, because one could always get servants. Pleasure resorts were being developed, and all you had to do in order to enjoy them was to harden your heart to the starving refugees who sought you out and told you their tragic stories, imploring you for small loans or for help in getting passports to some part of the world where they might find conditions less difficult.

  II

  At last, a smile upon the face of the clerk in the Spanish Consulate; it took but a few hours to pay the fees and have all the various documents properly signed, sealed, and delivered. Customs papers, passport controls, money controls, ration card, hotel triptych—these and several other papers you must carry and be prepared to show at any time.

  Lanny took the first plane on which he could get a seat, and a couple of hours later came down upon that Cuatro Vientos airfield, which he knew so well. Rick’s oldest son, Alfy, had been flying a fighter plane from it in the days when Madrid had been the capital of Republican Spain. Now it was the capital of Falangist Spain, and it still had the marks of war upon its face; the ruins had been cleared out of the streets but not from the rest of the ground. Franco and his men were practiced killers but very poor builders; they had no idea how to proceed to restore the land they had seized.

  Lanny put up at the Ritz Hotel, home of elegance, with a gleaming white front facing the great square of the Cibeles. Here everything was as if there had never been any trouble in Europe. The waiters all had long-tailed coats and the small busboys wore white spats. Lanny got a comfortable room and bath fronting on the court for only a hundred pesetas a day; the peseta was worth ten cents officially and five cents on the black market. You’d have no trouble in finding the latter; it would follow you down the street and give you for your American dollars large wads of Franco’s paper money, very thin, black, and greasy, making you think of wilted lettuce out of a garbage can.

  Prices were high, and many common things were unobtainable except on the black market; all you had to do was tip the porter, and he would show up with whatever you wanted. Spain had been under economic siege for a couple of months; the Allies were trying to break her will by depriving her of la gasolina. This meant the slowing up of traffic and, still worse, scarcity of goods, and the newspapers were filled with enraged protests, blaming Yankee imperialism for this insult to the dignity of a great nation. Lanny took refuge in a formula which had served him in past times: he had been born in Europe and had lived most of his life there; he was a Frenchman in his tastes and a Fascist in his sympathies, and he was humiliated to contemplate the role which the land of his forefathers was playing in world affairs.

  He called up General Aguilar and invited the old martinet to dine at the hotel. This was the test. What, if anything, had the military commander of the Madrid district been told by his German friends concerning the son of Budd-Erling? Apparently he hadn’t been told anything; or perhaps he couldn’t resist the temptation of an elegant dinner, vin compris. Anyhow he showed up, in full regalia, with all his medals and decorations, and white whiskers flowing both sideways and down. He hadn’t grown any younger since Lanny had seen him a year ago; his hands trembled and his memory was less keen. It didn’t really matter, for he had competent subordinates, and he lived in glory upon his reputation as head of an army corps of Moors, Italians, and a few Spaniards, which had marched all the way from Cadiz, northward along the Portuguese border and then across to the east, through the Guadarrama Mountains to the rear of Madrid.

  At the least sign of interest the old boy would tell you tales of those heroic days—and be sure that a visiting art expert did not fail to indicate such interest. The din
ner cost him some six hundred pesetas—about fifty dollars—but was well worth that to him just to be seen in this dining-room in such eminent company. The wealthy and highly placed guests would notice it, the hotel staff would do the same, and all the hangers-on, the spies and agents of the Spanish government, the German, and the other interested lands.

  Who was this good-looking and elegant stranger, and what was he after? He gave the General his carefully prepared story, that he had heard Spain had some important living painters. There was no law against the export of contemporary art works, and it was a part of the Franco propaganda that the new Spain had cultural activities of the very highest quality. Painters? Those of Spain had always been the greatest in the world, and never more so than now. General Aguilar didn’t know their names, but Lanny did, and told them. He wanted to inspect their works and perhaps obtain examples for the National Gallery of Art in Washington and other great institutions. Had the General ever had his portrait painted? Had El Caudillo done so? And would it be possible for Lanny to inspect the work and perhaps arrange for the painter to make a copy for one of Lanny’s clients?