Presidential Agent (The Lanny Budd Novels)

by Upton Sinclair

  Inside that fabricating plant was order, but outside was chaos. Going and coming, Lanny passed through a string of real-estate subdivisions full of jerrybuilt cottages and shacks of varied ugliness, with gas stations and sodapop stands and “eateries” scattered along the main road. It had grown that way, because that was the way Robbie Budd had willed it; Robbie was not afraid of chaos, but saw danger in any sort of order except his own. Lanny’s heart ached, because in England he had seen garden cities, and in Vienna beautiful blocks of workers’ apartment houses built by the Socialist municipality. Why couldn’t something of that sort have been done in Connecticut?

  But Robbie Budd had his God called Individualism, and this ugly nightmare was His temple. Robbie wanted no government and no workers’ movement of any sort in or near his place; if he could have had his way he would have forbidden all meetings and organizations of any sort whatever. But now the C.I.O., most radical of mass movements, was spreading in his plant, and Robbie was fuming and raging, considering it treason and conspiracy. None the less so because it was backed by the power of the United States government—or as Robbie preferred to put it, by a gang of political shysters who had got hold of the government and were using it to wage a war of vengeance against those who owned property and carried the responsibilities of industry. No doubt whatever of the perfect sincerity of Robbie Budd’s opinion of the “New Deal”!

  IX

  In between tirades Lanny gathered details about the arrangements existing between I. G. Farben, the great German chemical trust, and the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey for the sharing and exchange of patents and technical secrets in the production of artificial rubber from petroleum. He learned about similar deals in other industries, and got the names of various persons who had such secrets locked in their bosoms or their safe-deposit vaults. Lanny would say: “Do you really know that, Robbie?” and his father would reply: “Thyssen told me himself”—or perhaps it would be Krupp von Bohlen, or one of the de Wendels or the du Ponts. Oddly enough Robbie Budd himself had somewhat the same arrangement with Göring; Robbie had his men in Göring’s plants and the fat Exzellenz had his in Newcastle—Lanny could be sure of it, for he met them. But he didn’t intend to mention that in his reports to F.D.R. The President had agreed with his new secret agent that it was all to the good to have an aircraft fabricating plant hidden up one of the navigable rivers of Connecticut, and a force of American technicians and workers acquiring the “know-how” in that vitally important industry.

  Also Lanny collected information as to the present status of the Luftwaffe. Some of it came from Robbie, and some from those Nazi technicians, who knew about the younger Budd’s connections in Hitlerland, and thought of him as a friend of their cause. He spoke a fluent German and could tell them about visits to Karinhall and Berchtesgaden. They were bursting with pride over the achievements of their Third Reich, and what more natural than that some of their bursts should be aimed in Lanny’s direction?

  After listening, the investigator would retire to the room which had been his since his first visit twenty years ago; he would set up his little portable machine and type out the report, not forgetting to make it short. He would seal it in an envelope marked “No. 103,” and put this into another envelope addressed to Gus Gennerich at the ex-policeman’s Washington hotel.

  X

  Duty done, Lanny was free to enjoy himself. Early next morning he bade good-by to his father’s family and drove half-way to New York, stopping at the home of the Hansibesses, as he called his half-sister and her violinist husband. Hansi Robin was giving a concert for a workers’ group in New York that evening, and Lanny’s steamer was sailing at midnight. So everything fitted nicely; Lanny would drive the musicians in, after the concert they would see him off, and Bess would drive the car back to her father’s next morning.

  The Hansibesses had a baby boy, now a year old; they had called him Freddi, in memory of his uncle whom the Nazis had murdered. He was Lanny’s half-Jewish half-nephew, with the lovely dark eyes and hair of his father, whom Lanny had called a shepherd boy out of ancient Judea. He was learning to toddle about and to say new words every day, and kept his parents in a state of constant admiration. His grandmother came over from her home to have lunch and meet her adored Lanny, and point out qualities in the treasure-child which might otherwise not be noticed. Hansi was composing a sonata, and he and Bess played the first movement for their visitor, and Bess indicated features in it which her husband was too diffident to mention.

  In the afternoon the grandfather came out from the city. Johannes Robin, formerly Rabinowich, was making money again, though on a far more modest scale than that which he had known in Germany. Upon him rested some of the responsibility for keeping that great Budd-Erling plant going. He had charge of the sales office in New York, and took flying trips to France or Holland or Turkey, to South or Central America, or Canada—for Budd-Erling was making not merely fighter planes, but also an “all-purpose job” which was carrying supplies to mines in the high Andes and to prospectors in the far northern wilderness. Johannes didn’t sell anything to Nazis or Fascists—he left that to his long-time partner, Robbie, who had a stronger stomach. Johannes was tireless in reading newspapers and technical journals, watching out for large-scale business enterprises which perhaps had never realized how they might speed up their work by the use of airplanes.

  A greatly changed Johannes Robin from the eager and rather egotistical person whom Lanny Budd had happened to meet on a railroad train in Europe nearly a quarter of a century ago. Now he was subdued and humbled, content to be alive and to have got his loved ones away to this safe corner of a deadly dangerous world. It no longer worried him that his surviving son and the son’s wife called themselves out-and-out Reds. Johannes would have turned anarchist if he had thought that was a way to bring justice upon the heads of those Nazi barbarians who had murdered his son and come so near to murdering himself. Lanny didn’t have to use any subterfuges in asking a one-time Schieber for information as to the secrets of European haute finance and its deal with the new masters of Germany. Johannes would pour it out in floods, and would have been greatly pleased if he had known what use was going to be made of it.

  XI

  Lanny drove them all in to the concert, which was held in a hall on the East side, its purpose being to collect funds for the aiding of Jews who had escaped into the countries bordering on Hitlerland. The place was packed to the doors with Jewish men and women, some of them old but most of them young, a few bearded but most smooth-shaven, a few well-to-do, but most poor. Jews of all sorts and sizes, but mostly undersized; Jews with dark curly hair and some with red; Jews with Jewish noses, but many who might have been taken for Russians or Poles or Hungarians or Italians or Spaniards. They had been mixed up with all the European tribes for a thousand years, but alas, it hadn’t done them any good. Once upon a time, long ago, a group of Jewish holy men in a fanatical mood had called for the killing of another Jewish holy man, and by an odd quirk of fate posterity had remembered the executed one, but had forgotten that he was Jewish. He was God, and only those who had called for his death had been Jews; so now in the slums of this crowded Manhattan Island tough little Irish boys and tough little Italian boys would frighten little Jewish boys by yelling: “Christ-killer!”

  In Germany this hatred had become a mental disease, and Jew-baiting a substitute for social progress. So there was grief in the faces of this crowd and they had come as to a synagogue. It was a labor crowd, and most of them had broken with their ancient faith, but the spectacle of wholesale torture and humiliation had brought them back to the Ark of their Covenant. Hansi Robin, tall and dark-haired, might have stepped out of any of the books of the Old Testament; he stood before them, grave and priestlike, playing the Jewish music that he loved: Kol Nidre and Achron’s Hebrew Prayer, and Ernest Bloch’s Nigun, from the Baal Shem suite. The audience listened spellbound, and many sobbed, and the tears ran down their cheeks. This was a people who mad
e no secret of their woes; who in the old days had rent their garments and wailed, put on sackcloth and sat in their backyards sprinkling their ashpiles over their heads. “My confusion is continually before me, and the shame of my face hath covered me,… Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me.… Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation: and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.”

  Hansi’s accompaniments were played by his wife, who was a granddaughter of the Puritans, and thus had derived a great part of her moral being from those ancient Jewish scriptures. As for Lanny, he had lived most of his life in the Midi; he loved to laugh and sing and dance, and it came hard to him to lament and torture his soul. But he had committed himself to the Jews by sanctioning his half-sister’s marriage, thus helping to bring a half-Jewish baby into the world; he had taken Hansi’s brother Freddi Robin as his comrade, and in his efforts to save Freddi had got himself into a Nazi dungeon and seen an elderly Jew beaten close to death. So Lanny was bound in soul to that unhappy race; he had to listen to their music and share their torments, to stand by their Wailing Wall and climb to the summit of their Calvary.

  XII

  There were still parts of the world where the Jews were not tortured and degraded; where they were citizens and free men and women. One of them was America, and another was the Soviet Union, where Hansi and Bess had visited several times. Whenever they played for the workers, which they did frequently, the couple always closed by playing the Internationale. Always the audience would rise and cheer, even those who were not Communists; for, whatever their creed might be, they knew that this hymn meant battle against the oppressors. These New York Jews wanted to fight Hitlerism with any and every weapon they could lay hands upon.

  After Hansi had exchanged greetings with one or two hundred workers, the three went out to their car, and Lanny drove them west to the pier where a great steamer lay waiting for its passengers. They had an hour or so for a final chat; then the deep whistle sounded, and the two musicians went out to the pier and watched the steamer towed out into the river. A great harbor, and, half-way out of it, the Statue of Liberty with her blazing torch. Lanny had first seen her in the midst of World War, and she had been welcoming him to the land of his fathers. Later, departing from New York during the Wall Street panic, he had thought that she was drunk. Now she had reformed, but was sad, because so few looked at her or thought about her any more. She might have liked to send back a message to her native land of France, which was facing such a dark and uncertain future. Her torch was wavering in shreds of fog, and it might have been a signal.

  But Lanny Budd wasn’t on deck to see it. He was down in his cabin, hammering away on his little portable, making notes of statements which Johannes Robin had made and which were to be sealed up and marked “No. 103,” and sent by the little boat which took the pilot back to land.

  3

  Trust in Princes

  I

  Irma Barnes, once Mrs. Lanny Budd and now the Countess of Wickthorpe, had at last found a way to spend some real money. She had been handicapped for years because Lanny hadn’t cared about spending it, but preferred to live in a little old villa on the shore of the Mediterranean. Now Irma was engaged in modernizing one of the most famous of English castles, part of it dating back to Tudor days. She was taking out pretty nearly everything but the walls and floors, and putting in every gadget she could think of, or that was suggested by a lively young architect whom she had met in a New York night club. Wickthorpe Castle was going to show the English upper classes what they had been missing all these years. She went every day to watch the work, and to imagine the sumptuous entertainments she was going to give when it was completed. Meantime the family was living in Wickthorpe Lodge, adjoining the estate. She had rented it years ago and lived there with Lanny; a convenient arrangement, because it had enabled her to get acquainted with her second husband before breaking with her first.

  Irma had crowned her career by being taken into the English nobility; everybody showed her deference, the servants addressed her as “my lady,” and it was all delightful. She was going to bear an heir to an earldom; at least, she had a fifty-fifty chance of doing so, and was praying for luck. At the same time she was having her portrait painted by Gerald Brockhurst, a painter who was well recommended and who charged accordingly. One hour every morning she sat for him; not being a chatty person, she sat for the most part in silence, considering whether the armor room of the castle should be left in its present gloomy condition, or should be done over in batik or something else cheerful.

  The daughter of J. Paramount Barnes was happy. She had had the responsibility of a great fortune placed upon her shoulders in childhood, and now at last she felt that she was making proper use of it. Her husband had an important post in the Foreign Office—he was a careerman in spite of being an earl, something out of the ordinary. He worked hard and took seriously his duty to protect the future of the British Empire in unusually trying times. His wife would help him by entertaining splendidly but at the same time with dignity; she would spread his influence, and get him promoted. Ceddy couldn’t become Prime Minister, but he might become Viceroy of India. Mary Leiter had made it—why not Irma Barnes? In any case she would help to preserve an ancient and honorable tradition, and hold in check the forces of discontent which were undermining property and religion in England as everywhere else. Irma was only twenty-seven, but had lived a great deal, so she considered; she had come close to those satanic forces, and been shocked to the depths of her otherwise placid being; she hated them, and knew that she was going to devote her influence, social and political as well as financial, to combat them.

  II

  In the midst of these labors and planning came a wireless message from her former husband, on board a ship. “Arriving day after tomorrow will it be convenient for me to see Frances reply Dorchester Hotel regards Lanny.” Brief and to the point; polite beyond criticism, but Irma knew that inside the velvet glove was the mailed fist. Lanny had a fifty per cent interest in Irma’s child; he could claim fifty per cent of the little one’s time, and of the control of her rearing. He could come to see her when he pleased, and everything must be made pleasant for him. If there was any hint of disharmony, he might suggest taking the child away with him, and that filled both Irma and her mother with distress. To be sure, the “twenty-three-million-dollar baby,” as the newspapers called her, was no longer anywhere near that rich, for Irma’s fortune had been reduced by the depression, and she had settled a chunk of the remainder on her new husband and their future offspring. But kidnapers mightn’t know that; and while there was said to be none in England, what was to prevent the child’s father from taking her to France, where she had been born, or to New York, where Irma herself had been born? No law that Irma’s solicitors could find for her!

  Irma really knew her former husband. She knew that he called himself a “Pink,” using the word jestingly. Irma herself declined to recognize shadings; she called him in her heart a “Red,” and generally with the double adjective “out-and-out.” No amount of play-acting on his part, no talk about art for art’s sake or ivory-tower residences, could fool Lanny’s ex-wife. She could be sure that whatever political facts Lanny might pick up from the lips of her highly placed guests he would carry off and repeat to his friend Rick, the bitter and aggressive left-wing playwright and journalist.

  But what could Irma do about it? She had agreed with Lanny in their parting that she would not mention his political opinions as the cause of their break. She had granted this in return for Lanny’s promise not to propagandize the child with his ideas. Irma had taken her mother into her confidence—and Fanny Barnes cared very little about the safety of the British Empire but very much about her prerogatives as grandmother. Fanny was urgent on the subject—her daughter must not do the slightest thing to irritate Lanny and cause him to assert the prerogatives of the other grandmother. Lanny was socially acceptable, wasn’t he? He kn
ew how to make people like him, and most of Irma’s friends did like him. All right then, let him come as a guest and treat him like any other guest.

  In America it was supposed to be “sporting” to take divorce lightly and remain friends; and Irma, as an American, would take that right. Nobody, save perhaps the rector of Wickthorpe parish, would be shocked to meet her ladyship’s first husband at dinner in her home; and Fanny Barnes would take the rector off, explain matters to him, and require him to show a true Christian spirit. If Lanny pretended to be in sympathy with the ideas of the other guests, that was his concession to harmony, his effort to avoid causing embarrassment. For heaven’s sake, let him get away with it, and don’t say a word, don’t even frown, but make him feel that he is the most appreciated of personalities!

  So Lanny would have a cottage on the estate; he would have servants to wait on him and prepare his meals; and if an innocent child wanted him to come to lunch with her and her mother and grandmother, she would have her way. Lanny would entertain them with news about the Budd family, whom Irma knew well, and the Budd-Erling plant, in which Irma owned a million-dollar block of stock. Lanny would play the piano for his daughter, dance with her the farandole which he had taught her in Provence, and take her horseback riding on the estate, of course with a groom to follow them.