IV
In the old brick building by the gasworks Lanny went through the usual routine: he told his story to General Donovan and his top people, and was plied with questions about the Nazi-Fascists in Spain and about London under the buzzbombs. Everything he said was taken down—they had a marvelous new instrument which recorded what you said on a tiny aluminum wire, and it lasted forever, unless you wiped it off with a magnet. Later they turned him over to the Spanish section, and then to the section which had to do with Operation Anvil, the invasion of the French Riviera.
An interesting experience to the grown-up playboy of Bienvenu! They had detailed air photographs of every foot of the French coast from Mentone on the east to Port Bou on the west; all were numbered and indexed, and you could get any one in a fraction of a minute. Lanny could look down on his mother’s home, and the beach where he had played with the fisherboys, and the rocks from which he had dived; he spent hours with a young Air Force lieutenant, marking these maps and answering questions about winds and waves, the temperature of the water, the depths and visibility, the character of the bottom. Maybe the Commander-in-Chief of Army, Navy, and Air Force didn’t know when this invasion was coming, but it looked as if this young lieutenant did, for he confined his questions to conditions in midsummer—and summer was already here!
Also, the shore: how high were the rocks and how solid, and what were the buildings made of? Especially important, the photographs showed structures which hadn’t existed when Lanny had last visited Bienvenu, two years ago. They might be camouflaged blockhouses, radar stations, anything military. They were studied through a microscope; then an extra set of the photographs was brought and two were placed in a stereoscope. Amazing—the houses, the trees, the rocks rose right up before your eyes!
And then questions about the population: what sorts of people could be trusted and what not? Lanny explained that it was a miscellaneous population, mostly parasitic, and its industries were parasitic. This puzzled the young officer, who had specialized in photography, not sociology. Lanny explained that what they produced on the Riviera was pleasures for the idle rich. He added, “A sort of very old Miami.” That was a satisfactory translation.
He couldn’t say how many of his old friends were still there. The Americans would have been interned. He named some of the French, including Jerry Pendleton’s wife, who was presumably still running the pension, perhaps for the Germans—who could guess? Jerry would, no doubt, welcome an assignment to go in there and help prepare the invasion. Lanny desired especially the collaboration of Raoul Palma, Spanish-born Socialist who had conducted a workers’ school in Cannes for some years and recently had given the OSS important help in Toulon. They told Lanny that Raoul, alias Bruges, was now the head of an active group of Partisans in the Midi, and they would arrange to have him on hand when the time came to put the P.A. ashore at Juan.
And then the affairs of the elder Denis de Bruyne. The OSS couldn’t or wouldn’t say whether or not the Army meant to take Paris, and certainly nobody could say when they would be able to; progress was discouragingly slow at present. But to set a man down among the estates and farms of Seine-et-Oise, and to pick him up one or two nights later would be easy enough. Cub planes were going out every night from England, and now from the Cotentin, carrying arms and supplies and money and instructions to the Partisans; since the invasion it had become a big business. No movie writer could imagine anything more exciting, and it was hard for the young people in this organization to keep from telling about their triumphs. But they were all under oath, and they just grinned and said, “We’re doing it, all right—and we’ll do it for you.”
Everything was planned, and code words agreed upon, and the whole project, with a name of its own, Operation Bienvenu, was sealed up and put on file. Lanny was to call a certain man once a week to find out about the prospects. That ended that; and he was turned over, first to the art section, and then to the most secret of all sections, which had to do with German weapons and scientific discoveries. It bore the odd name of Alsos, which nobody could explain. It was so hush-hush that men in the same department had no idea what the others were doing, and a P.A. was warned that when he talked to a jet-propulsion man he mustn’t mention atomic fission, and vice versa.
The German section, too, in which he had made many friends, wanted some of a P.A.’s time. All the Germans he had met in Spain had to be indexed, with everything he could tell about their activities and characters. Sometimes the smallest detail might lead to some important conclusion. What was their mood as to the war’s events? Was the bombing of civilians breaking their nerve or stiffening it? Was the formula of “unconditional surrender” a help or a handicap to the Allied cause? What had the Nazis tried to find out from a well-informed American? Were they still in love with their Führer, and what would be the effect upon them if the effort to kill him were to succeed?
Lanny never asked questions; but he too could learn things from the questions asked of him. Obviously, those Germans who sought peace by the method of eliminating Hitler would be stirred to fresh activity by the Allied landing in France. OSS men revealed that they were keyed up over this subject and were expecting something to happen. They had a code name for it, Operation Breakers; they asked questions about this prominent Reichswehr general and that, and Lanny was astounded, for it seemed to indicate that this one and that were involved in the plot, and he could hardly believe his ears. But no one had heard anything about either Oskar von Herzenberg or Marceline Detaze.
V
The P.A. drove back to New York and from there to Boston, where, just across the Charles River, the famed Fogg Museum is situated. An old Puritan city, very proud of its culture, calling itself the Hub of the Universe, and not much interested in the spokes. Politically speaking, it had been taken over by the Irish; but its wealthy old families didn’t speak politically, they withdrew themselves in cold reserve, and sent their sons to Harvard and their daughters to Radcliffe. When these young people came out, they felt desperately adventurous when they made contacts outside their narrow circle. There were stories such as the one about the New York banker who wanted an employee and made inquiry of a friend in Boston. The Bostonian recommended a young man and gave full details as to his ancestry: to which the crude New Yorker replied, “I want a man for business, not for breeding purposes.” The New York wits also delighted to tell about President Lowell of Harvard in the days when William Howard Taft was President of the United States. A visitor came to Lowell’s office, and the prim secretary informed him, “The President has gone to Washington to see Mr. Taft.”
Franklin Roosevelt was a Harvard man; Robbie Budd had got his more hard-boiled education at Yale, which was perhaps one more reason for disliking the New Deal. As it happened, Esther Budd’s family were Harvard, and she had a niece who was a graduate of the School of Art, connected with Harvard and the Fogg Museum. This well-brought-up and delightfully rich young lady had been put on the carpet before Lanny some three years before, when his stepmother had been hoping to find him the right sort of wife. Lanny had dutifully taken her to dinner and a show, but then he had disappeared on his business of trying to save the world from Nazi-Fascism, and Peggy Remsen had become a memory.
He knew that she had completed her course and was a perfectly educated museum director, looking for a museum to direct. In spite of being rich, she must have a job, that being the correct thing for a modern young lady in wartime. That she would get one was certain, for all museums have to raise funds, and none in New England would overlook a chance to gain the favor of two families such as the Remsens and the Budds. Lanny had thought of her the moment that F.D.R. had mentioned the Fogg; it was natural for Roosevelt to turn to Harvard, and it was natural for Lanny to wonder if Peggy Remsen would be one of the experts selected to take temporary control of the museum industry in the Axis lands.
There was nothing especially secret about the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section of the Office of Military Govern
ment, United States Army; so when Lanny stopped off to visit his father’s family in Newcastle, he mentioned where he was bound and what he had been asked to do. Sure enough, Esther remarked, “Peggy is working with that and expects to go overseas. She is greatly excited and considers it as the opportunity of her life.” A curious thing about war, Lanny had observed, it provides opportunities for everybody, even more than there are people to take them. His mind was led to wonder, why couldn’t this be arranged in peacetime also? But he didn’t say that to his very serious and conservative stepmother, for it might have been taken for a Red remark, or at any rate Pinkish. He said, “I’ll look her up and give her any help I can. I’ve managed to pick up quite a lot of information.” He had never given his family a hint of having been in the Axis lands, but it could be that Robbie had guessed, and if so, he might have told his wife.
VI
Lanny found these people in Boston very nice indeed; they were intelligent, conscientious, and completely absorbed in their jobs. They were all in the Army, and wore uniforms, but that was more or less a formality; the Army had recognized them as specialists of a special kind and had put them off in a corner by themselves, so to speak. Family influence might have had something to do with this, but mostly it was the Army’s awe of a subject as remote as the other side of the moon. What would a West Pointer know about telling a Titian from a Tintoretto, or how to repair a torn canvas, or how to prevent mildew in an old tapestry, or even how to pack an Aphrodite Anadyomene for shipment in a truck? Obviously, if a young man or woman had spent years acquiring such knowledge and had a diploma to prove it, you wouldn’t send him to basic training camp or set her to pounding the keys of a typewriter.
Not when you had to discover, rescue, and protect property which had a money value of hundreds of millions of dollars, possibly of billions! There were single old masters which had been sold for half a million dollars, and others which were literally priceless, because the owners wouldn’t have thought of parting with them. No one could guess how many tens of thousands of art treasures there might be, or what condition they might be in, or what difficulties might arise in locating and possessing them. People of the utmost integrity were needed for this job, and President Roosevelt had appointed Justice Roberts of the United States Supreme Court as the head of a commission, and he had turned to the leading museums of the country for the people who were equipped and whose character was such that when they found the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire they wouldn’t steal them.
Lanny discovered that these young people had a great respect for him. They knew that he came from an old New England family, and that he had made purchases for the Winstead collection, the Taft collection, and others. He had lived abroad, whereas they had merely paid visits; he spoke the languages freely, whereas they were self-conscious and classroomy. Most impressive of all was his acquaintance with the top people in the various countries. He actually knew the Nazis; he was reticent about it, but evidently he had done business with them prior to the war. It was a bit suspicious, but he showed them a card from the President, and after that they guessed he must have been a secret agent—which put them still more in awe of him.
He was there to answer questions, and they gathered round in long sessions. For the first time they met a man who knew at first hand their opposite number, the German organization which they were to check and outwit. The ERR, the Einsatzstab Reichsminister Rosenberg, was named for the Baltic-born racial fanatic who was one of the chief Nazi propagandists. The word Einsatz means an enterprise or undertaking, and the whole word is equivalent to our naval phrase “task force.” Theirs was a task force for looting, very certainly the most colossal of its sort ever known in the world. The young Americans had read about it, and now listened to the details which Lanny had observed in Paris and Berlin and especially Karinhall.
The looters had taken the Musée du Jeu de Paume, the former handball court of the Bourbon kings, as a sort of clearing house for French art. Everything was brought here, and the best was exhibited to the insiders, and they took their pick. Hitler, of course, had first choice, but of late he had been too busy to exercise it. Göring had second choice, and he was the world’s greatest exerciser; he had his men on hand all the time. In various storage places which Lanny could tell about he had more than ten thousand of the greatest paintings of all schools. The best examples decorated the great rooms of Karinhall, which was intended to become a museum, and really was that now, only the public was not invited.
The son of Budd-Erling, who had been invited many times, told about the old-time robber baron’s henchmen. The head of the Einsatzstab in Paris was Baron Kurt von Behr, an elderly aristocrat who had once lost his diplomatic post because of swindling. But that didn’t matter in these days; he was now head of the German Red Cross, which gave him a pretext for being in Paris, and for having a permanently reserved table at Maxim’s for the entertainment of his friends. He was as vain as his chief, and designed himself as many uniforms. He had the most elegant manners, and Lanny told these young people that if they captured him he would chat with them most charmingly and do his best to pull the wool over their eyes—and he would probably succeed, because it would be impossible for anyone who had been born and raised on Beacon Street to imagine such age-old corruption as this Baron represented.
Also there was Dr. Bunjes, head of the Franco-German Art Historical Society, Göring’s own special looting group. He had published a pamphlet defending the procedure on the ground that the French might exchange the art works for planes and tanks. And there was Hofer, Göring’s “curator,” who was doing a good business on the side and might be a good person for the Army to catch. Even better might be Dr. Friedländer, who had been the director of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin. He had been arrested and brought before Göring, and Der Dicke had given him a choice of destinies, either to go into a concentration camp or to become one of Göring’s art experts. The director exclaimed, “But I am a Jew!” To that the reply was, “Wer Jude ist bestimme ich.” Who is a Jew is for me to decide!
Another person worthy of their attention was Bruno Lohse, Baron von Behr’s assistant, young, blond, tall, and handsome. They must be warned against him, because he would lie to them. This would not be because he liked it, but because it was his duty. He was a true Nazi, and would remain one. That might be difficult for the Americans to understand unless they had read Mein Kampf; Lanny made them all promise to read it, for what was the use of going into a foreign land and wasting your time learning by costly mistakes when you could find it all clearly set down in a book that you could buy for two dollars?
VII
The P.A. saw a good deal of Margaret Remsen, called Peggy. She was twenty-one or two, fair-haired and fair-minded, and very agreeable company. Like Laurel she was a WAC captain, and looked natty in her new uniform. If Lanny hadn’t been sent off to find out about the atomic bomb in Germany, and if he hadn’t got wrecked in a plane and laid up in a hospital, and if Laurel Creston hadn’t come aboard the yacht Oriole, sailing to the Far East—if all those things hadn’t happened, it might well have been that Lanny would have asked Peggy to marry him. But the other things had happened, and that settled the matter; for whatever modern ideas this granddaughter of the Puritans might hold, Lanny was sure there wouldn’t be any about sex. She was unmarried, and so far as he could find out, unattached; he hoped she hadn’t been cherishing memories of him, and by way of precaution he talked about his wife and what she was doing, and about the little boy who was about to be brought to Newcastle to spend the summer.
Peggy’s parents lived in Boston, in a fine home, and that was a pleasant place to come and meet the other “Monuments” people. (There just had to be some way of abbreviating “Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Section of Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces; so they called themselves the Roberts Commission or Monuments officers or outfit or people.) They would come for tea, or for the evening, and listen to the radio a while, and th
en talk shop. They were full of eagerness, like small children being put to bed on Christmas Eve to wait for Santa Claus. Lanny Budd, one-man “Intelligence,” was asked to explain why it took so long to break through at Saint Lo, and did it mean that the Germans were really invincible, and how far would the Army have to get before they would come upon art objects to be salvaged and stored?
Nobody could have imagined the immensity of this job, and even Lanny was surprised by the thoroughness with which the Army had gone in for it. When the Commander-in-Chief—Cominch in the technical lingo—said “everything,” he meant just that. The libraries and museums of America had been ransacked for catalogues of collections, both public and private, all over Europe. Individuals had sent in data—refugees and plundered owners, not merely at home but throughout the non-Axis world. The OSS had contributed the knowledge its spies and secret agents had brought in. There were photographs of even castle, and sometimes of its rooms; photographs of monasteries, caves, salt mines, and numerous other places where treasures might be hidden.
The young art experts of America were going into the most romantic adventure in the whole long story of art. What were the treasures of Captain Kidd and Sir Francis Drake and even of Aladdin’s Cave compared with the gems of the Rothschild family and the crown jewels of a dozen monarchs ancient and modern, to say nothing of the altar pieces of the cathedrals of Ghent, Louvain, and Cracow, Michelangelo’s statue of the Madonna and Child, and whole rooms full of paintings by Rembrandt, Van Dyke, Rubens, Velasquez, Raphael, Titian, and so on through a list that was like an index to an encyclopedia of the art of painting?
The Monuments people wanted to know, would the Nazis destroy all these treasures, or bury them underground, or carry them up into the last-stand fortress which they were reported to be planning in the Bavarian Alps? And which side would get to them first, the Americans or the Russians? Would the captured Nazis try to buy their freedom with information? And what would be the attitude of the ordinary Germans, would they hinder or help? The young experts thought Lanny was joking when he said, “Take along plenty of cigarettes and chocolates. They will be the currency.”
One Clear Call I Page 63