Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  Beauty Budd knew better than to ask where her son was going, or on what errand. She was one more woman who had to be left behind—not to weep, because that was bad for the complexion, but to fear and if possible learn to pray. She was the daughter of a Baptist preacher, but hadn’t liked his way of praying and had got away from it at the earliest possible moment. Now she had to learn all over again from her husband, who had an entirely different lingo and technique. Parsifal Dingle didn’t believe there was any hell, or that you had to be totally immersed in water to have your sins washed away. He believed that all the religions had one God, even when they didn’t know it; also that that God was in you, even when you didn’t know it. Parsifal occupied himself with loving everybody, even when they didn’t desire it and gave few signs of deserving it. This was an interesting experiment and gave evidence of success, particularly unexpected in a city made up of Moorish fanatics, French soldiers and traders, wealthy idlers, poverty-stricken refugees, and international spies.

  III

  A new plane took the P.A. to Algiers, and no questions asked. This white city on the hilly slopes of a beautiful bay had become one of Lanny Budd’s numerous homes; he had spent months here off and on, helping to prepare the way for the landing of the American troops. He had made many friends, real or pretended; and some of them were now in jail, and some were in the French Army, and others were scattered to new posts of duty. Lanny reported to Robert Murphy, diplomatic representative of the American government to the government of French North Africa—which meant the whole of France, since Hitler had put the Vichy crowd out of business. F.D.R. had said, “You won’t need any word from me. The less there is in writing the better.” Lanny repeated these words to Murphy, and Murphy raised no objection, for the two had worked together and shared their secrets.

  “Italy?” said the genial careerman. “That’s a pretty tough assignment!”

  “I know,” replied Lanny, “but I have some connections there from the old days.” He didn’t hint what they were, and he certainly wasn’t going to tell Bob Murphy or anybody else that he had been into Germany and spent a night in Hitler’s headquarters. The last the diplomat had seen of the P.A., he had sent his car to convey Lanny to the Maison Blanche airfield in Algiers. Lanny had departed in an English “recce” plane for Cairo, and neither the plane nor the pilot had been seen again. How Lanny had escaped and got back to Washington was a mystery, and Murphy would have listened to the story gladly; but Lanny didn’t see fit to tell it, and the tactful diplomat forbore to ask.

  He answered questions about various persons. Lanny’s old-time friend, Raoul Palma, was no doubt working for the OSS. Murphy had no idea where, and Lanny wouldn’t try to find out, because Raoul had no connections in Italy. The same thing was true of Jerry Pendleton, once Lanny’s tutor. Captain Denis de Bruyne was in the new French Army, somewhere in Tunisia, and had taken part in the fighting. Lanny didn’t try to meet any of his other friends in Algiers, for he wished to avoid talk about his destination. As for Murphy, he was up to his ears in the squabbles of the various groups of French politicians. A preposterous situation, with General Giraud running the French Army and General de Gaulle running the government and using the French newsreels to attack his commander-in-chief. Robert Murphy could hardly have helped feeling uncomfortable if a perambulating art expert had been going about asking questions as to the situation, which dated back through several centuries of French history. The son of an Irish-American railroad sectionhand surely had but slight responsibility for it. Lanny asked no questions.

  IV

  From the familiar Maison Blanche airport a bombing plane made room for a mysterious American traveler and the small suitcase in which he carried his toothbrush and comb, handkerchiefs, socks, and a change of underwear. The only papers he carried were the passport in his pocket and a couple of Nazi pamphlets in his suitcase. Lanny wasn’t going co pose as a German in Italy, but he was going to look and talk like one, and let the man in the street, l’uomo qualunque, take him for that. He didn’t know just how the Germans mutilated Italian, but he knew the consonants over which they stumbled in English, and it seemed safe to assume that they would have the same trouble in another language; Lanny would say ja and nein on occasions, sprinkle in a Donnerwetter and an um Gottes Willen, and assume that the average cab driver, café waiter, and policeman in Rome would dislike him heartily but be afraid to express his feelings.

  The trip to the port of Bizerte took less than an hour. First the Italians and then the Germans had seized it, and both had built fine airfields and had had no time to wreck them. Now a steady stream of planes was pouring in, the bombers flying all the way from America with only one stop at Marrakech, and the smaller planes being landed from carriers and ships at Casablanca. The field was as busy as the deck of a carrier in action. Each plane circled until it was ordered in, and the moment it came to a stop it was rushed off the field and another came gliding down. There was an incessant hum of high-up fighters guarding the base from German raiders; but these came rarely now, having learned the rate of exchange. “Three for one,” said the field officer of whom Lanny asked this question.

  The arriving passenger was met by an alert young Naval Intelligence man. An order had come through, and he put Lanny into a jeep and proceeded to brief him even while they were driving. What precisely did Mr. Budd want? When Mr. Budd said he wanted to be deposited dry-shod on the black volcanic sands of the beach resort of Ostia, the officer said that would be too risky a journey in a PT (patrol torpedo boat). The PT’s were making such runs, of course, but they got shot up by planes, and the Navy didn’t want to take risks with a VIP (very important person). The job would better be done by a sub. Lanny asked if there was one handy, and he was told they didn’t often come into port; they were refueled at sea, and when one did come in it took time to refit and supply it.

  “My orders are to get to Rome at the earliest possible moment,” said the mysterious civilian. “They allowed me only three days to be briefed in Washington and New York. Couldn’t you put me aboard a sub by seaplane?”

  “The trouble is, the subs never radio their whereabouts except in an emergency. You understand, that would be too helpful to the enemy. I’ll have to consult my superiors and see what can be done for you.”

  V

  The officer drove his guest into the country and parked him in the shade of an acacia tree. He wouldn’t let him be seen in Intelligence headquarters, which were in a commandeered hotel in the city. “There are spies everywhere,” he said, and Lanny was duly grateful.

  This Lieutenant Ferguson was not a regular Navy man, he explained; the reason he knew so much about Italy was that he was a painter and had spent a couple of years in Rome and Florence. That had been up to the time of Mussolini’s declaration of war on America, and Ferguson had been interned with the newspapermen, first in the Regina Coeli prison—what a name for a hellhole, the Queen of Heaven!—and then in the ancient city of Siena. Apparently his father had been a man of means, for he had met many of the “right” people in Rome—“right” in the political as well as the social sense.

  Ferguson didn’t ask questions about whom Lanny knew, or how he expected to get by with both the Italian and the German authorities. He understood that this was somebody special, and he just told what he knew about conditions in a land unwillingly at war. He had heard the Germans speaking what they called Italian and could give an imitation of them, very comical—and there was no harm in laughing heartily under an acacia tree. The young officer had brought a basket of lunch and they made a day of it; Lanny asked questions and the other poured out answers. He liked the Italians but loathed the Germans, and the Italians shared both these attitudes. Lanny had heard the phrase “friendly enemies,” and now he learned a new phrase—“unfriendly allies.” Italy had been at war for three years and hadn’t been able to beat even the Greeks; the Italians were humiliated, hungry—and helpless.

  The Navy had a policy, derived from the State D
epartment or from the Combined Allied General Staffs, Ferguson didn’t know which. We were not asking the Italian people to revolt, because we knew they couldn’t—the Fascists had all the weapons. We didn’t want to throw the country into tumult, for that would make it harder to manage and in the long run wouldn’t help anybody but the Bolsheviks. The program was to knock out the Mussolini gang and make a deal with the higher Army officers and the big business crowd, who would be ready to come over to our side as soon as we were ashore in force. That was the way to take advantage of the anti-German sentiment in Italy; the way to get the fleet and the air bases and save the lives of American soldiers.

  “In other words, just what we did in North Africa,” said the P.A., and the ex-painter said, “It worked there, and all the Italians know it, and the higher-ups aren’t thinking about anything except to be the lucky de Gaulle or Giraud.”

  “I notice you don’t say ‘the lucky Darlan,’” replied Lanny with a chuckle. He didn’t say how he had been worried by the prospect of having one of the worst of the Vichyites put in charge of the first of our military conquests, and how lucky we had been in having that incubus knocked off our necks by several bullets from an assassin’s pistol. Lanny wasn’t here to carry out his own policies; he was taking the orders of his Boss, and he tried not to worry because they were also the orders of Winston Churchill. During the three years in which Britain had been at war with Italy Lanny hadn’t failed to notice the Prime Minister’s persistent wooing of the Italian monarchy in his speeches; Winnie wanted to make the peninsula into a nice respectable bourgeois kingdom, as much like England as possible, and good for trade. Lanny kept before his mind the idea that the British people, with their common sense, would have something to say about that program after Mussolini and Hitler had been dumped into the ashcan.

  VI

  The P.A. was driven back to the city of Bizerte and left to find himself accommodations in one of the hotels which had not been taken over by the military. Lieutenant Ferguson gave him a pass which would serve if he were stopped by the Military Police. At nine next morning he was to walk past the Hôtel de Ville, the city hall of Bizerte, and Ferguson would be there if he had any news. If not, Lanny was to come again at noon and again at three. All that was an old story to a secret agent who had been posing as an art expert all over Europe for six years.

  He said, “I would like you to do me one favor. I have an old friend who is an officer in General Giraud’s army; his father is an extremely wealthy man, and they may know people in Italy who will be of use to me. Captain Denis de Bruyne is his name, and if he happens to be anywhere near by he will come to see me at once.”

  Lieutenant Ferguson said it should be possible to find him; it was arranged that after getting settled in a hotel Lanny would go outside and call Ferguson on the phone—not mentioning his own name, but merely the name of the hotel where he could be found. If Ferguson was able to find Captain de Bruyne, he would give the code message that “Annette” was in town and where she was staying. Annette was the name of Denis’s wife, and he and Lanny had used it as code in Algiers. There was, alas, no chance that the real Annette could be anywhere within reach, for she was in Seine-et-Oise, in the hands of the Germans, and Denis had not seen her since he had made his escape after being wounded in battle three years ago.

  Lanny found a room, not without some difficulty; then, after eating a rather skimpy dinner in a café, he went back to the room, took off his clothes—for it was not merely hot but muggy—and stretched out on the bed, not to sleep, but to recite to himself the lessons he had learned during the day. Not for anything would he have made notes of them; he must go over them and impress them upon his mind—names, places, dates, and the details which would have been gossip under other circumstances, but which in the near future might be the means of saving or losing his life. Dino Grandi had been popular with the Cliveden set when he had been ambassador in London; Federzoni, chairman of the Italian Academy, was rumored to be getting ready to desert II Duce’s sinking ship; the same for the Count of Turin, cousin to the King; Marshal Cavallero had been involved in a shipbuilding scandal during the war and had been ousted by Mussolini; ex-Premier Orlando—good God, they were even thinking of resurrecting that aged stout souvenir of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919! The grandson of Budd Gunmakers, as Lanny had been then, had met an American lady who had sat next to the then Premier of Italy at a dinner party, and had been struck dumb by his statement that his wife never got out of childbed without having become pregnant again. Now these hastily begotten sons were at an age to be knocked out of the skies by American airmen, or bombed in Taranto and Spezia because they did not dare to bring their ships out to sea. What a world!

  VII

  In the midst of this came a tap on the door and a voice telling Lanny there was a gentleman to see him. He replied that he would come, put on his clothes hurriedly, and went down into the lobby. There was Denis his face worn, and looking not too spruce in his uniform. They did not embrace as they would normally have done; Lanny made a motion with his finger, and they walked out and down the street together until they came to the park near the waterfront. There they found themselves a seat, and the light of a half moon made it possible for them to be sure that no spy was in reach of their low voices.

  Until recently the P.A. had been able to go into Vichy France and to meet Denis’s younger brother, Charlot, who was one of the hated pro-German crowd. But now those days were over, and Lanny had no news of the erring young officer. The Vichyites had set up a mock government somewhere near the German border; their Army men might now be on the Russian front, or they might have been sent into Sicily. Poor Denis was obsessed by the dreadful idea that he might meet his brother on the field of battle. Such things had happened in all civil wars, in France as in America, and the elder imagined himself turning a dead body over and seeing the face which had been dear to him from infancy up to the time of la patrie’s tragic collapse.

  Presently he said, “I heard that you were lost, Lanny. I was dreadfully upset.”

  “I was down in the desert,” the other explained; “but I got out all right. I had the fortune to meet a camel caravan.” He didn’t say that he had been brought into the German lines, or where he had been since parting from his friend. Instead he remarked casually, “I gather that we are going into Sicily.” This, of course, would be no secret to a French officer.

  “You should pay a visit to our troops, Lanny. You would be delighted by what you would see. The honor of France has been saved.”

  “You have seen real fighting, I learned from the radio.”

  “All the way from Kasserine to Cap Bon. We have stood up to the enemy, with weapons as good as his own, or better, and we have driven him back, foot by foot. We had to storm one hill after another, for a hundred miles—positions the enemy had been preparing for half a year.”

  Lanny encouraged his old friend to tell this story. For three years Denis had lived in humiliation, not merely because la patrie was under the conqueror’s jackboot, but because to a clear-sighted Frenchman it was apparent that his own bad judgment, and that of his family and his class, had been responsible for the debacle. But now Denis had helped to wipe out the stain, with his own blood and that of his men. He had got a bullet through the shoulder and had stayed in action for a whole day with merely two chunks of cotton poked into the wound at each opening. He looked like a much older man.

  “Tell me,” said the P.A. as casually as he could, “how do your men feel about the prospect of fighting their way through Italy.”

  “They are dancing with impatience, Lanny. They will consider that they are on their way home. Do you suppose there is any chance of our landing on the Riviera?”

  “Nobody tells me things like that, cher ami. But there seems a good chance of your marching to Rome this year. Do you know anybody there?”

  “I have a cousin in Rome, the Marchesa di Caporini. She visited Paris not long before the war.”

  “I he
ard your mother speak of her, but that was before the Marchesa’s marriage. What sort of person is she?”

  “A very elegant lady, but not very happy, I believe. The Roman aristocracy must be in a bad way by now; as you Americans say, they have got a bull by the tail.”

  “Your cousin’s family is committed to the regime?”

  “She was when we saw her. She did not make a success with us because she thought Italy ought to have Nice and Savoy. We couldn’t see that such an issue was worth fighting about, but we considered it decidedly bad taste. It is painful to realize what fools we were in those days, Lanny. We really believed the dictators were generous men, planning to bring in a new regime of order and prosperity.”

  Lanny replied, “You must keep that in mind when you think about Charlot. Both you and your father taught him to believe in the New Order, as you called it. You must not blame him if he cannot change his mind as fast as you.”

  “Believe me, Lanny, I think of that all the time. If only I could get hold of him, to reason with him, to make him see what satanic actions his Nazi friends have performed!”

  The other smiled. “I am afraid he would reply by citing the satanic actions of the Russians. He would not fail to add what the British Fleet did at Oran, or Mers-el-Kébir, as you call it. I do not know what he would cite against us Americans, because he was too polite to mention that subject to me. He would surely not be pleased by our invasion of the soil of Algiers, which is called a part of Metropolitan France and therefore is sacred.”

  VIII

  In the morning the P.A. strolled past the Hôtel de Ville at the hour specified, and then back again, but there was no sign of the Intelligence lieutenant. Lanny walked and inspected the great naval base of Bizerte, which was now British and American, and which would live in Army history because it rhymed with “dirty Gertie.” (It didn’t, but the GI’s weren’t going to bother their heads or tongues with the correct pronunciation of any foreign name.) These khaki-clad heroes were performing prodigies of labor, restoring docks and cranes, and at the same time unloading mountains of stuff from ships. Six times in the course of a morning stroll Lanny was stopped by MP’s and required to show his papers. These were in order, so he got a respectful “OK, sir.”