He had told her quite a good deal about Zaharoff, and his behavior in séance. He had mentioned that the one-time munitions king had put a million dollars into Budd-Erling; but all that business about Otto Kahn—that was entirely new to Lanny, and he speculated about it, deciding that it might be something she had learned from her Uncle Reverdy. It was entirely possible that the owner of the Oriole might have been a Kuhn-Loeb client, or, indeed, that Laurel herself might have met Kahn in New York; he had played Mæcenas to many writers, musicians, and painters whose work caught his fancy. He had lived in accord with the Parisian tradition, having a beautiful opera diva for his amie, and having a son who became a jazzband leader. Lanny promised himself an interesting time asking Laurel Creston about these matters.
He went to sleep on the thought that he must warn her not to be too successful, or they wouldn’t want her to leave!
VIII
There were rules posted on the door of the guest rooms of the Berghof. One was that there was to be no smoking in the public rooms or passageways, or in the presence of the Führer; another was that if you were coming to meals, you must appear within two minutes of the ringing of the bell. So on this morning of the 23rd of August Lanny joined a procession of generals and statesmen, many of them red-eyed and yawning, having had only two or three hours’ sleep. They grumbled a bit, but consoled one another with the statement: “Es ist Krieg.” Soon after they had got seated they learned that it was also Sieg; for Hess came in, snapped to attention, and cried: “Achtung, meine Herren!” Then: “It is my pleasure to inform you that word has just come of the safe arrival in Moscow of two Kondor planes carrying our diplomatic and military mission. Heil Hitler!”
There was a shout, and they leaped to their feet and shot out their arms in front of them. “Heil Hitler! Sieg heil! Sieg heil!” A clamor broke out, of congratulations, of exultation at this greatest of diplomatic coups. This was Der Tag, the day of days, for which they had been preparing, training, all the days of their lives. This was the masterstroke, which would paralyze their foes, and set the Generalstab free from that nightmare of the German military mind, the two-front war.
Lanny Budd heiled with the best of them, and no one wore a broader smile. When he said: “A great day for us,” some might have wondered: “What are you getting out of it?” But they didn’t ask. The Führer must have had a good reason for having a foreigner here at such a time, otherwise he wouldn’t have been here. No one questioned what the Führer did.
After the meal Lanny said to Hess: “What time do you expect Henderson?” The reply was that he was supposed to leave Berlin in an hour or so, and should be here shortly after noon. Lanny said: “I don’t suppose the Führer will have any time for Miss Jones in the meantime. If it’s all right with you I’ll take her for a walk and show her the mountains.”
A woman whose worldly possessions consisted of one blue and white print dress and a borrowed brush and comb, could not be expected to present a very lively appearance in the morning. But Die Miss had been told by Hess that her work had been most interesting, and so she had slept, and with the help of coffee and buttered toast and marmalade—they had got Americans mixed up with English—she was ready for whatever came. They had brought her a morning paper from Munich, and in it she could read about the expected arrival of the British ambassador at the Berghof, and so would know that she was in the midst of great events. Also, she could read about German refugees pouring in from Poland with terrible stories of mistreatment, and thus could be sure that war was not many days off.
A maid came and informed her that Herr Budd invited her to take a walk. She was shown the way to the door by which she had entered; Lanny was there, bright and smiling, and they strolled away without attracting much attention. The guards who were all over the place would keep an eye on them, but at a respectful distance. They would walk on paths strewn with brown and slippery pine needles, and now and then would stop at some spot where the trees had been cleared away. There were vistas of timbered mountains with an infinity of green firs, and behind them still higher peaks gleaming white. Lanny would point out landmarks. In the valley below them lay Salzburg, lovely old city with a mountain stream rushing through it. Here music festivals had been held every summer in the old days; but now Austria had become the Ostmark, and the festivals were over. They had been international affairs, with Jewish artists taking part, and to the Nazi ogre in his mountain lair they had been a personal affront.
IX
Lanny said: “We can talk, but in a low voice, and only while we are moving. It will be better not to speak important names. Now and then we should stop and admire the landscape in a louder voice. You did very well last night; your audience was satisfied.”
“I was afraid maybe I had been too good,” she responded.
“Was that why you decided to bring in Zaharoff?”
Her reply brought him to a stop, in spite of the rules he had just laid down. “Zaharoff?” she said. “What do you mean?”
“I mean the long dialogue between Zaharoff and Otto Kahn.”
“But I gave no such dialogue. I never mentioned either.”
“How extraordinary!” he exclaimed. “What reason could your sitter have for making up such an elaborate tale?”
“I don’t know; but I certainly know that I didn’t have a thought about those two men.”
Lanny persisted: “Your sitter reported a long conversation; and it was a most unlikely thing for him to invent about two dead men. It had nothing of interest to his superior.” Even before he had finished the words, another idea had begun to dawn in his mind, and he became conscious of a sort of shiver traveling up and down his spine. “Tell me! Is there any possibility that you could have lost consciousness during that affair?”
“I never thought of such a thing. How could it have happened?”
“Tell me what you can recall. First, you talked about a guard; and then about a baron and a professor. Then what?”
“There was quite an elaborate scene with them; and that was all.”
“Exactly what happened at the end of the scene with them?”
“I remember that I felt very much pleased. I saw that my auditor was satisfied, and I thought: ‘I can do it all right; and so I am safe.’”
“Then you felt relaxed, is that it?”
“Why, yes, I suppose so.”
“You were lying back at ease, with your eyes closed, and the room was semi-dark; you felt peaceful and relieved. Did it occur to you that under those conditions you might drop off to sleep?”
“I never thought of it. I was too frightened at the beginning for such an idea to cross my mind.”
“What is the next thing you remember?”
“Well, I thought: ‘It is time to end this. There’s no use risking any more.’ So I did what you told me to do; I moaned some, and then I opened my eyes, and sighed once or twice, and said: ‘Did you get anything worth while?’”
“Don’t you see what had happened? You had gone into a real trance.”
“You take my breath away, Mr. Budd!”
“You are a medium—a good one, and they are as rare as white blackbirds.”
“For heaven’s sake! What am I supposed to have said?”
“I don’t think there can be any doubt that you said it. Your sitter didn’t know those facts, and there was nothing in them that would have advantaged him. Also, this is one matter that he is honest about; he believes in the spirits, and is perhaps a little afraid of them—more so than he would be of any man. In such matters he becomes a child.”
Lanny told her the story of the scene, and she listened dumfounded; the idea that such words had passed her lips was utterly inconceivable. The name of Zaharoff had meant nothing to her until Lanny had told her about the munitions king’s inconvenient habit of coming to séances and telling his troubles. As for the genial Otto Kahn, she said: “I met him once at Uncle Reverdy’s and was impressed by his kindness and charm. It was some years ago, and I was qu
ite young and romantic; I remember thinking: ‘Now, if a man like that were to ask me to marry him, it would be wonderful.’ But I had no ideas about his business affairs, or that he had ever met Zaharoff, or told any government agent about Zaharoff’s doings.”
“Is it possible that you could ever have heard your uncle speaking about these matters?”
“Well, of course I can’t say what I have forgotten. I have heard reference to business matters that I never paid any attention to. I knew that Mr. Kahn was one of my uncle’s bankers, and that they made important deals, but that’s all I knew. I’m not sure that I ever heard he was dead. How long ago was it?”
“I’ll have to look it up. We’ll try to find more by the spirit route—that is, if you don’t mind trying experiments.”
“I’ll be immensely curious. But first I want to travel—you understand.”
“Surely!” smiled her companion. “I think that courtesy will require us to stay one more night and give one more séance. I suggest that this time you take pains not to repeat the mistake of last night. There have been cases of controls who talked freely about the medium they were using.”
“Dear God!” said this “white blackbird,” in horror. “Never fear—I’ll keep pinching myself!”
X
All that critical day there were visitors coming and going at the Berghof, high officers and other personages who had been summoned on chance that their Führer might wish to consult them. He was a man of sudden moods, and they had to adjust themselves thereto; mostly they sat in the great reception room, conversing in low tones. It was easy to guess that they were anxious men, for they did not know what their country was being let in for, and were not permitted to ask. An American friend of the Führer would not question them, and still less would he intimate that he might know more than they; but when they found out that he knew key persons in London, Paris and elsewhere, they sought opportunities to draw him into their conversations.
The British ambassador was flown to Salzburg, and motored up the mountainside, arriving soon after lunch. He was the perfect type of the English upper-class man, tall, thin, with a long face and a long nose. He wore a somewhat heavier mustache than was customary—much more than Lanny’s tiny one, or the two rather absurd little blobs which were the trademark of Adi Schicklgruber. Sir Nevile was perfectly tailored and just turned out of a bandbox, with a soft silk shirt, a checked tie, and a red carnation as a “buttonhole.” His walking stick and Homburg hat might have been left in the car—but perhaps they were his trademarks. He was followed by Baron von Weizsäcker, old-fashioned diplomat who was now Ribbentrop’s deputy, lending to the Nazis his elegance and worldly cunning; also by an assistant from the Wilhelmstrasse.
Conversation stopped dead in that room, and everybody stared, but nobody rose to honor the guest. Sir Nevile was smiling, as if wishing to convey the fact that there were no hostile feelings on his part; but nobody met him half-way. Weizsäcker led the way to the stairs, and up to the Führer’s study; after which Lanny observed a procedure which had surprised him the first time, but which he now understood to be one of the customs of the Führer’s retreat. Conversation was not resumed. It wouldn’t be correct to say that anybody cocked his ears, but many heads were turned slightly sideways, and nobody tried to conceal the fact that he was waiting. Everybody knew that the door of the Führer’s room would be closed behind the visitors; but also everybody knew that no door would contain the voice of Adolf Hitler very long. Pretty soon you would hear!
Then, a still more curious custom: somebody arose and went very quietly upstairs; then another, and another. Nobody was going to listen at the keyhole of the Führer’s door, nobody was going to stand in the hallway with pretended casualness; what they were going to do was to enter a near-by room, and leave the door slightly ajar, and then stand behind the door, just out of sight of everybody else. Lanny’s room, unfortunately, was in a distant wing, he having come so late; furthermore, being a foreigner, he could not afford to commit an indiscretion at a time such as this. He had to sit quietly where he was, and pretend to be buried in a copy of the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten. But he had seen to it that his seat was not far from the stairs, and he expected to get some news ahead of the newspaper.
XI
The son of Budd-Erling had heard several persons getting their dressing-down from the master of this household: first Gregor Strasser, who had later been murdered in the Blood Purge; then Chancellor Schuschnigg from Vienna, and then Dr. Franck from the Sudetenland. This time it wasn’t going to be personal, for Sir Nevile was the most docile of diplomats, who said what he had been told to say and never presumed to force his own opinion upon anyone. This time he was just a special delivery messenger, bringing an airmail letter which he had received the previous evening. Nobody was going to blame him for the contents of that letter; but somebody was going to blame the British government and the British Empire and the British Jewish-controlled pluto-democratic press and the British money lords who had kept Germany poor and the British shipping and other lords who had robbed Germany of her colonies and refused to let her take any other colonies anywhere in the world.
Yes, somebody was surely going to find fault with these evil forces, and good and plenty! The storm of words was going to mount, and beat upon the door of the room, which would act as a sounding board and carry the storm down the wide stairway. Lanny couldn’t make out every word, for when Adi became excited his syllables tripped over one another’s heels. But he could make out what Adi thought of the beastly and degraded so-called democratic Czech nation, and how Britain had egged them on and encouraged them to make trouble for the Germans, and to compel the Germans to use force which they had been so reluctant to do. And now it was the same thing with the still more beastly and degraded Poles, whose insolent defiance of the Führer’s just demands was based upon nothing whatever but the promise of British support—and what a verdammte Lüge that was, for the British had no way to help the Poles, and they knew it, and the Poles would have known it if they had not been a bunch of pride-maddened maniacs, and all that was happening was an effort of Britain to intimidate the Führer by a threat of war which if it came would be an unprovoked and wanton attack on Britain’s part and would result in a life-and-death struggle—the German Volk would arise to meet it as one man. And so on and on—when the one-time inmate of the Obdachslosenheim really got going he could shout more words without stopping for breath than ever a basso profundo from Bayreuth or La Scala.
“You have given these Polish madmen a blank check!” stormed Adi. “They are torturing my people, they have driven a hundred thousand of them into exile already. They have even castrated some of them!” Lanny couldn’t hear the Englishman’s reply to this, but he heard the Führer: “There were six cases, I tell you! Six cases! I have information and I know what I am talking about. No German official dares lie to me! And it is all because of your encouragement.… The Poles are mobilizing, and it is because you are preparing for war, and you tell the Poles so and make it impossible for me to deal with them.… You British are poisoning the atmosphere of Europe.… You are spreading false rumors, slanders and threats.… Tell your Mr. Chamberlain that I no longer trust him, he is no friend of Germany, no friend of European culture. Tell him that nothing will satisfy me but a complete change of Britain’s attitude. Tell him I have informed Warsaw that if there is any further persecution of my people my troops will cross the border!”
XII
The outcome was that the ambassador was to have a written answer within two hours. He was driven back to Salzburg; and meantime word spread throughout the assembled company what the British Prime Minister’s letter had contained: first, an announcement of his government’s determination to carry out their promises to Poland; second, their readiness to discuss all problems between the two countries; and third, their anxiety to see “immediate direct discussion initiated between Germany and Poland.” Also it became known that King Leopold of the Belgians, speaking in t
he name of the “Oslo States,” then in conference at Brussels, had broadcast an impassioned plea for peace. Lanny could see that this worried the visitors of the Berghof greatly; for they had once seen their country hated and opposed by all the rest of the world, and they dreaded nothing so much as to be maneuvered into that same position again. They dared not say it plainly, but they could hint at it in ways which men who live a long time in the diplomatic world learn to employ and understand.
But all these uncertainties were dissipated by news which came by telephone from Moscow and spread quickly through the summer capital: the Peace Pact between Germany and Russia had been signed! It was to run for ten years, and provided that neither party would commit any act of aggression against the other, and that if either became involved in war with third parties, the other would be neutral. There was no undignified cheering, but army officers and Party officials went around exchanging handshakes and beaming smiles. Even a stranger from overseas was entitled to share in this Gemütlichkeit, and to be taken as a member of the Herrenfamilie.
Lanny never found out how gossip got started in the Führer’s home. Presumably there was no official gossip-starter; presumably some secretary would whisper to her trusted friend, and this one would tell two or three others, and before an hour had passed all members of the household and all guests would be murmuring: “Have you heard?” Lanny had made friends with several young members of the staff, by driving them to the Parteitag and rendering other small services. So now one of them, with a smile, relieved him of the necessity of pretending to keep the secret that he had brought a spiritualist medium to the Berghof and that Hess had had a successful séance with her the previous evening. Höchst interessant! And do you really believe in spirits? And just what took place, Herr Budd?
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