Presidential Agent (The Lanny Budd Novels)

by Upton Sinclair

  There was a corner of the château grounds bordering the highway which Lanny and his fellow conspirators had chosen because it was far from the gatekeeper’s lodge and sheltered by shrubbery. Lanny would come to this spot and then count seven posts, which brought him to the one on which he would tie the handkerchief for a signal. Getting there in pitch darkness wasn’t easy, but now and then he ventured a moment’s flash from his light. The fence was of steel, and he counted the posts by hand, pushing his way past the bushes. Number seven had been chosen because it was plainly visible to anyone passing on the highway, and Lanny took out his tape measure and measured up six feet from the ground, and precisely there he tied the handkerchief, leaving a slipknot so that it could be untied. Six feet from the ground meant: “Everything is clear.” Five feet meant: “Come again half an hour later.” Four feet meant: “An hour later.” Three feet meant: “The plan is off until tomorrow.” Two feet meant: “Off for good.”

  Lanny’s part was done, and it was his job to get back to Max and make sure the man’s slumbers were not disturbed. If by ill chance he should awaken, Lanny would be ready with more brilliant conversation and the rest of the second bottle. The library had been chosen as the place of entrance because it was on the opposite side of the building from the porte-cochere, and it had been agreed that if there was a watchman Lanny would lure him to the latter spot and keep him busy there. If in any extreme emergency it became necessary for Monck or Hofman to call Lanny, they would give a faint imitation of a hoot-owl.

  XI

  The watchman was slumped over and still snoring. Lanny felt pretty sure that he could be counted out for several hours. The conspirator himself had nothing to do but keep still, and try not to let his teeth chatter, whether from cold or the excitement of a desperate adventure. Nothing to do but sit and imagine his friends coming up in their car, their lights dimmed to avoid attracting attention; they were supposed to make a round of the place every fifteen minutes, beginning at a quarter to two o’clock. When they saw the handkerchief, they would park their car a safe distance away.

  They had in the car a light rope ladder, with hooks at the top, and Hofman, the smaller man, would stand on Monck’s back and set the hooks and climb to the top, then pull the ladder over to the other side. Monck would hand up the box of tools and Hofman would take it down to the ground. Then he would climb up again, and keeping his perch on top of the spikes as best he could, let the ladder down on the outside for Monck. Hofman would slide down on the inside, and Monck would come up, drop the ladder inside, and slide down. All this would be done in darkness and silence, and if a car came in sight at the wrong moment, they would both have to hide in the bushes. Everything had been carefully rehearsed, and Lanny didn’t need any telepathy to see it happening. But things might go wrong, and he saw those, too, and telepathy didn’t tell him which was “reality.”

  The amateur burglars would have no trouble in finding their way to the château, for its gray walls stood up well lighted in the darkness. They would have to come into that floodlight and cross the terrace and loggia to the windows of the library. They would walk with dignity and assurance, having a story carefully prepared; Hauptmann Branting—that was to be his name—had come from Berlin with a confidential communication for Seine Hochgeboren. Hofman was his secretary, and they had had a breakdown of their car, and not wishing to disturb anyone so late they were prepared to wait under the porte-cochere. If they were caught inside the building, they would say they had found a window open; if it was a servant who caught them, the Hauptmann would overwhelm him with his authority: Gestapo, Geheimdienst, zu Befehl, Herr Hauptmann, undsoweiter! Only an officer would be able to meet such a charge of Autorität.

  But suppose one of the officers happened to be restless, and to come downstairs as Lanny had done? Suppose the Graf himself happened to arrive inopportunely? These were chances the conspirators had to take, and now they were fears that Lanny had to confront. He had read of people’s hair turning gray under this sort of strain, and he wondered if it was happening to him. He would have liked to have another nip of the cognac, but was afraid he might need it for the Nachtwächter.

  The snoring continued, so loudly that if it had been a still night it might have awakened some of the sleepers in the rooms above. But the wind continued to roar and the trees to sway and creak. Lanny kept saying to himself: “It’s all right now. Stop worrying!” He said: “Trudi! Trudi! We are coming!”

  He didn’t permit himself to stir until he was sure that half an hour must have passed since he had hung up the signal. That was time enough for the two men to have climbed the fence and got inside the château, and Lanny stole away from the stupefied watchman and around the building to the library windows. Softly and carefully he opened number three, and stepped inside; he closed it quickly to stop the draft, and then flashed his tiny beam of light upon the carpet. There on the green velvet carpet lay the coin that he had been seeing in his imagination for weeks. A French franc, with the figure turned up, meaning that his friends were inside the building! Oh God, oh God!

  Lanny slipped out again, shut the window, and stole back to keep watch over the watchman. He sat on the steps of the porte-cochere, resting his chin in his hands to stop both the chattering of his teeth and the shaking of his hands. For the first time in his life he began to pray. “Oh, God, help them! Oh, God, help Trudi! Let them find her! Help me to bear it till they find her! Oh, God, have mercy!”

  And then, after the fashion of modern man, he added: “Oh, God—if there be a God!”

  13

  My Life on Any Chance

  I

  The hardest of all things to do in a time of danger is to do nothing. If Lanny had been under the necessity of talking to the nightwatchman and keeping that functionary’s mind busy, that would have kept Lanny’s mind busy, too. But just to sit there and listen to the man snore and watch for indications that he might be waking up—that indeed was a strain upon the nerves. Who might be awake inside this château at half past two in the morning? Somebody tending a furnace? Somebody keeping watch over prisoners? And what would they make of a strange Hauptmann Branting and his commission to investigate the contents of the dungeons and interview the prisoners therein? Would they obey orders and help him, or would they turn and run and alarm the household? Such problems offered endless scope to the imagination, and Lanny’s mind hardly waited to complete one alarming episode before it started another.

  Every now and then he would take out his watch and flash the tiny light upon its face for a moment. Never since the invention of clocks had a pair of hands moved so slowly. He had set himself a half hour as the proper time to allow, but he couldn’t stand it; at the end of twenty minutes he got up and stole around to the library windows and slipped inside to look at the coin on the floor. If it had been turned over, it meant that the burglars had completed their errand and gone; it would then be Lanny’s duty to put the coin in his pocket, go out and release the dogs, then re-enter the building, fasten the windows securely, and get back to his room as quickly as possible. But, alas, there was Marianne, or liberty, or the republic, or whoever it might be—still sowing the seeds of revolt, or enlightenment, or prosperity, or whatever that might be. The burglars were still at their work, and Lanny had to go back to his vigil at the porte-cochere and resume the imagining of difficulties.

  He had heard Horace Hofman talking for hours about locks ancient and modern, and the kind one might expect to encounter here. Old ones might have been taken out, of course, and new ones put on. Vaults might have been built, with steel walls and modern safe locks, time locks, anything. These would present difficulties and take time, perhaps more time than could be counted on. The Meister-Schlosser had told many stories of human lives depending upon the speed of fingers which were insured for a hundred thousand dollars; so far, he had never lost out, but this might be where the record was broken. They had set four o’clock as the hour beyond which it would be unsafe to stay. Darkness lingered lo
ng at this time of the year, but the estate was a small farm, and farm workers go by the clock and not by the sun—at least they would do so in a well-ordered German establishment.

  So Lanny went back to his post, crouching out of the wind and drawing his English tweed overcoat tightly about him; his hands were trembling but the palms were moist, so it wasn’t the cold. The snoring began to be broken and replaced by mutterings, and Lanny’s heart began to pound with a new fear. The watchman turned over, he made an effort to lift himself on one elbow. “Ach, wer ist’s?” he groaned.

  Lanny took out the bottle and uncorked it. “Hier! Wollen Sie trinken?”

  “Nein, nein!” The man tried to protest, but Lanny bent over him, held his head, put the bottle to his lips. “Trinken Sie! Er ist gut!” When the man opened his mouth to protest, Lanny pushed the bottle in and lifted it. There was a gurgling sound, and presumably the liquor was going down his throat and not his windpipe. “Gut, gut!” Lanny kept saying, which is soothing to a German; at last the man sank back with a heavy sigh. That would do him for a while.

  II

  There had been a play called Alias Jimmy Valentine, about a safe-cracker who betrayed his identity by opening a safe in which a little girl had been accidentally locked. This man was supposed to have sandpapered the skin of his finger tips until they were raw; but Hofman said that was nonsense, for pain would destroy those delicate sensitivities by which you became aware of the dropping of a tiny tumbler. Ordinary Jocks you could open, as a rule, without too great delay, because you understood the principles on which they were constructed, and the weak points; by delicate probing you could determine exactly the location of the locking bolt and of the tumblers. But it always took a certain amount of time, and you had to refuse to let yourself be hurried or worried. Put your mind on it to the exclusion of everything else, just as if it were a problem in chess. Monck, alias Branting, would mount guard, and Hofman would forget there were such dangerous creatures as Nazis in the world.

  Such, at any rate, was the program. How many locked doors would there be, and how could the invaders be sure which ones to open? Would the Nazis lock the door or doors which led into the cellars? Quite possibly; but again, it might be they would lock the doors of the different rooms in which they stored food, wine, trunks, and other property. If they had a number of dungeon cells, these would probably be in a separate part, and that part would be walled off and have a steel door, or perhaps more than one, to keep the sounds from being heard. Would they have a keeper inside this place at night, or would they just lock their captives up and forget them till morning? The French word oubliette means a place forgotten, or for persons forgotten, and the Nazis presumably would not let their slumber be disturbed by worries over their captives. If one died, it would be no great loss; but there might be one like Trudi Schultz who had vital secrets locked in her mind, and they might take special care of her and keep her guarded day and night.

  Such had been the subjects of Lanny’s thought for several months, and of long discussions among the three conspirators. Now two of them were finding out what they needed to know, while Lanny still could only speculate. No news was good news to this extent, that no alarm had so far been given. If that had happened there would have been lights coming on in the rooms above, and surely someone would have called to the Nachtwächter, or come to look for him. If the two burglars had found a guard in the cellar, they would use their arts to persuade him that they were Gestapo agents and must be obeyed; only as a last resort would they overpower him and tie him up while they worked. Lanny’s busy imagination pictured such a series of events—he pictured many different series, and some of them caused his teeth to chatter so that he held his jaw tightly cupped in his hands.

  This was certain: if any violence was used, Lanny’s position with the Nazis would be pretty certainly destroyed, for he could never persuade them that he had not admitted the intruders to the place. The same might be true if the occupants of the château discovered in the morning that their woman prisoner had disappeared without a trace. Lanny might protest ever so earnestly that he had been asleep in his room and knew nothing about it, but they would be sure to trail him for the rest of his days, or until they solved the mystery. He could certainly not live with Trudi again, whether in Paris or London or New York. He could hear Trudi saying: “Oh, Lanny, you shouldn’t have done it!” and his only plea could be that he had loved her more than duty. What would be her attitude to this form of constancy?—or would she call it inconstancy?

  Lanny would listen for a few moments to the snoring of the watchman, and then he would go off on another train of speculations, few of them happy, many of them melodramatic. If there were untoward events of any sort, the Nazis would be sure to question the watchman, and it was hardly conceivable that poor Max could withhold the fact that he had been drunk, or refuse to reveal that it was the American guest who had got him drunk. The guest saw himself being summoned before a board of inquiry consisting of Seine Hochgeboren and his staff. Just how had he spent the night, and how had it happened that he had got the watchman drunk while keeping himself sober—especially since he had given Rörich and Fiedler to understand that he got drunk with extraordinary ease? Was he accustomed to carry, bottles of cognac around in his overcoat pockets? And just where had he been on the estate, and would he be so kind as to let them examine his shoes? Just when Lanny had got through assuring them that he had not been anywhere but on the loggia and the drive, he would find himself confronted with the fact that his footprints had been discovered at a corner of the estate close to the highway!

  III

  From scenes such as this Lanny’s overstimulated imagination would return to the immediate present. He saw a vision of Hofman on his knees before a dungeon door, fiddling with the lock, putting in one skeleton key after another, shaking his head and muttering: “It is too much for me.” Was that a case of telepathy, or just his fears taking form? Did he really see Monck standing with his lips to an opening in a cell door, whispering: “Is that you, Trudi?” Perhaps that was Lanny’s own painfully acquired knowledge of how dungeons are constructed.

  They have to have airholes, unless it is intended to suffocate the prisoner. There is always an opening at the level of the keeper’s eyes, so that he can look in, and a larger one at the bottom, through which he can shove food and water. These are closed by sliding covers which cannot be opened from the inside, but only from the outside; they would have to be left open at night, and even if they were closed, they couldn’t be locked. Monck would open them, and if Trudi was there, and was conscious, the would-be rescuers would tell her what they were doing. They wouldn’t speak the name of Lanny Budd, but they might say: “Ça ira”; also the Latin phrase, “Bella gerant alii,” which was the password Lanny had used in his effort to get Alfred Pomeroy-Neilson out of the Franco dungeon. He had told Trudi this story and explained the meaning of the phrase; also he had told Monck.

  Another half hour had passed. Max was still in his stupor, and Lanny made another trip to the library windows. He held his breath as he turned his flashlight on the carpet inside, and something seemed to give way in the pit of his stomach when he saw that the coin had not been turned over. It was nearly half past three, and they were still down in those cellars—doing what? Lanny was free to go back to the porte-cochere, crouch out of the wind, and do all the guessing he pleased.

  “Give me time, and don’t worry”—so Hofman had said; but now Trudi’s husband discovered that this was beyond the possibilities of his mind. He was so worried that it seemed to him he just couldn’t stand it. Had the two men been overpowered? Or had somebody locked them in? A curious fate that would be for a locksmith! Or had they got lost! That was a new idea which hit the waiting conspirator with painful violence. The plans of the building which they had obtained did not show what was underground. Certainly the passages must be extensive, and there might even be difficulties deliberately constructed; there might be trapdoors, or trick doors which cl
osed when you passed through them. What more likely than that the Nazis had protected themselves by some modern device of the photoelectric cell, to keep their prisoners secure and to trap any unauthorized person who ventured into forbidden premises?

  A nasty idea, and the longer Lanny held it, the more havoc it made in his mind. He thought: “When they pass a certain spot or touch a certain door, it may ring an alarm bell in Hauptmann Bohlen’s room!” Lanny hadn’t heard any bell, but he wouldn’t have heard it in the midst of this windstorm. Even at that moment the Nazis might have pistols at the heads of the two would-be burglars and be saying: “Hände hoch!”

  IV

  The time came when Lanny couldn’t stand it any more. If the men were lost, he had to find them; if they were trapped he had to free them. He had to put an end to the suspense which had been tormenting him for the past three months, and know if Trudi was there, and if she was herself, able to speak and to know what was happening. He had become obsessed by the vision of her behind a steel door, whispering through the aperture, and Hofman on the other side, unable to solve the secret of the lock. If that was the case, Lanny would get her out if he died for it; he would get Jean to hire half a dozen of the leftists among the village men, arm them with Budd automatics, and have them raid the château the following night, sever the telephone wires, hold up the inmates, and cut out the lock of the dungeon door with an electric torch!