Presidential Agent (The Lanny Budd Novels)

by Upton Sinclair

  “Not many can say that they came to see him in prison, Heinrich.”

  “That is true, and he doesn’t forget. But I do my job, and he knows that I am doing it, and that is enough.”

  “Would you like to take me to see him again?”

  The official’s face lighted up, but then quickly became shadowed again. “Do you think it would be wise, Lanny? He is in the midst of heavy labors and has to make difficult decisions.”

  “Well, I don’t want to intrude, but it happens that I have met a number of important persons in England and have listened to a lot of talk. Also, I have been on the inside of efforts in France to set up a government that would break off the Russian alliance. General Göring found my story interesting, and the Führer might do the same.”

  Lanny told of his dealings with the Cagoulards, and of his flight to the country home of Graf Herzenberg. It pleased Heinrich greatly, because it showed Lanny definitely on their side, something which Heinrich had been trying to bring about for sixteen years. He said that, and added: “You see why we Germans can never trust a nation like France, whose governments are so unstable that we never know what to expect.”

  “I suppose you are right. It is a real tragedy that our coup d’état failed.”

  “You couldn’t help it, Lanny. Nobody could do in France what we have done in Germany. Our revolution stems from the people; it is a general movement, with a Führer who is of the people and understands their soul. The French are incapable of producing such a leader, or of recognizing and following him if he appeared. All you could get there was a subsidized conspiracy, a pitiful sort of Putsch; it was fundamentally reactionary, and if it had succeeded, you would soon have made that discovery.”

  “I am afraid you are right,” replied Lanny, meekly. He was interested to observe that what Heinrich said about the Cagoule was almost identical with what Leutnant Rörich had said in the château. Had Dr. Josef Goebbels discussed this pitiful French Putsch over the radio, and had they both been listening? Or had they been taught out of the same Nazi textbook?

  Anyhow, Lanny got what he wanted out of this meeting. Heinrich said: “I’m sure the Führer would be interested in that story. I’ll call up and see if an appointment can be made.”

  III

  Another of the messages at Lanny’s hotel was from the Fürstin Donnerstein; she was having an Abend, and would be happy if Lanny and his father would come. Lanny said: “You will meet important people.” So Robbie put aside some calculations which he had promised to General Göring, and they were driven to the white marble palace on the swanky Königin Augustastrasse, belonging to a Prussian landowner and diplomat of the Kaiserzeit. The princess was some thirty years younger than her husband, a nervous, high-strung woman who smoked a great many cigarettes and was bored by her life without knowing why. She had met Irma on the Riviera years ago and they had become pals; now she hadn’t heard from the heiress for a long time, and wanted Lanny to tell her why. Lanny knew that she was a tireless tattletale, and what she really wanted was to probe the mystery of a divorce which had intrigued smart society in half a dozen capitals.

  But now, with many guests to welcome and entertain, was not the time to approach this subject. The tall blond Hilde said: “Oh, Lanny, you must come to see me—and soon! Do promise.” Then, in a whisper: “I have the most delightful lot of gossip—wirklich prima!” Lanny said promptly that he would call up without fail.

  He and Irma had been about in Berlin society, and a lifetime in Europe had trained him to remember faces, names, and titles. Also Robbie had met many of the leading businessmen, and had the same sort of training; his German was shaky, but he rarely had to use it, for practically all these people knew English. Presently father and son were engaged in conversation with a dark somber-appearing man who knew the steel industry of Germany to the last ingot, and who was greatly concerned to know the meaning of the present business slump in America; what was the government going to do about it, and was there any chance of the steel men in America cutting their prices on the world market? This was Fritz Thyssen, pronounced Tissen, one of Germany’s great industrial masters, and, by his appearance, one of the saddest and most badly worried men in Naziland.

  Presently he remarked: “I don’t sell much steel abroad these days, but they have to let me sell a little, in order that I may have the money to buy postage stamps and other things that require cash.” What a world of meaning was in that sentence, for anybody who understood the code! Here was the man who, more than any other, was responsible for putting Adolf Hitler in power; who had brought Adi to the Rhineland and got the steel men together at a secret meeting, so that an ex-painter of picture postcards could explain to them that he didn’t really mean his terrifying program of “abolition of interest slavery” and “nationalization of department stores.” Thyssen personally had put more than five million marks into the Nazi treasury at times when the Party had been on the verge of financial collapse.

  And now for a matter of five years he had been making the discovery that Adi was a man who kept no promises and had no conception of loyalty to anything but his own “intuition.” Now this Catholic steelmaster was in the position of a man who has got a mad bull by the tail; he cannot let go, but has to hold on with all his might and be dragged in a bone-breaking career. He had dreamed of making tractors and promoting German agriculture, but instead he was commanded to make cannon and tanks, and for these products he had to take treasury notes, which were promises to pay on the part of the Nazi government, and were good inside Germany for the reason that all other German big businessmen were in the same plight as Fritz. That was the reason he looked as if he wanted to cry, and why he risked his freedom and indeed his life by making snide remarks to an American manufacturer who was still free to produce what he wanted to produce—even though he wasn’t always sure that he could sell it after it was finished!

  IV

  The Donnersteins had engaged a Sängerin from the opera to entertain their guests, and Lanny listened with pleasure to the rendition of a song cycle by Hugo Wolf. It appeared that music was the only thing he still had in common with the Germans. So long as you left out the large section of music which bore the names of Jews, you were free to sing and to listen freely, and to express pleasure or lack of it without fear of the Gestapo. Therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; pipe to the spirit ditties of any tune provided its Aryan!

  Robbie hadn’t much time in Berlin, and preferred to put that little to business uses. When Lanny came out of the concert-room, he found his father seated in an alcove in conference with another Nazi notable: a large powerful man of about Robbie’s age and looking oddly like a cartoonist’s idea of a Prussian Junker; a square, knobby head close shaven and a square bulbous face very red; a small gray mustache and large spectacles, watery blue eyes and a sausage neck with a prominent Adam’s apple, enclosed by a tall and tight old-fashioned stiff collar. Every now and then this gentleman would give a violent swallow, and then a nervous adjustment to his collar, as if he thought his Adam’s apple might have knocked it out of position. His gestures were of violence, even when his voice was a whisper.

  It was the great Herr Doktor Horace Greeley Hjalmar Schacht, a financier with a craving for publicity, who had been on both sides of pretty nearly every political movement which had appeared in the Fatherland since the days of the Kaiser—and what a number of them had cursed that unhappy realm! At present the Herr Doktor was Finance Minister to the Nazi regime, which meant that he was the issuer of those treasury notes which the fear-filled Fritz had to take whether he wanted to or not. The minister was apparently engaged in a confidential talk with Robbie, for when Lanny approached, he fell silent in a rather obvious way, as if to ask: “Who is this Eindringling?”

  Robbie said: “This is my son, Lanny,” and the Herr Doktor rose to his feet, clicked his heels and bowed from the waist. Robbie added: “Bring up a chair, Lanny,” and then, to the other: “My son is to be trusted as I am.”

  So t
he Finance Minister resumed his monologue. It appeared that he was in the same mental state as the steel king; extremely unhappy, and overwhelmed by an impulse to pour out his soul to an influential American. Dr. Schacht’s country was heading straight for bankruptcy, and the highest financial authority in the government was as helpless to prevent it as the humblest German laborer who received paper marks in his pay envelope and hastened to spend them at the nearest Kolonialwarenladen. The Nazis were undertaking a program of military preparation, and at the same time another of public works; making cannon and tanks, and at the same time building swimming pools and monuments! “What do they mean to do?” queried the Herr Doktor, and Lanny couldn’t be sure whether it was tears or just rheum in his eyes. “We go on blindly issuing paper of a dozen different sorts, and even now our short-term paper is at a discount on the market. When the long-term obligations fall due, how can we meet them? How can anybody imagine it will be done? I have figures showing that seventy per cent of our total national income is going into government work of one sort or another at the present time, and what is that going to leave for sound business as you enjoy it in America?”

  This lamentation went on for quite a while. The great financier placed his hand over his heart, covering the gold swastika which dangled there; he swore that the flood of printing-press money was the work of the radical element in the National Socialist German Workingmen’s Party, and that he, a man who had been backing sound finance all his life, assumed no responsibility for the measures to which he was driven and for the orders his pen was signing. “Leider!” and “Unglücklicherweise!” and “Zu meinem grössten Bedauern!” began or finished nearly every sentence the Nazis’ financial wizard spoke. Robbie Budd wondered: Could he be thinking of forsaking his native land and asking an influential American to help him get a job in one of the great Wall Street banks?

  V

  When the Abend was over, the Americans walked back to their hotel, along Unter den Linden, with its seeming-endless double row of great tall pillars, each with a double eagle on the top. They went on foot, because they wanted to get some fresh air into their lungs and also because they wanted to talk over the evening’s events. Robbie said: “What an amazing thing, that two of this country’s biggest men should blow off steam like that! I thought you told me there was no free speech here!”

  Lanny explained as best he could. “These are two very exceptional men. The first”—he wouldn’t use names, even in a low tone on a nearly deserted boulevard—“I believe was sincere; he is about at the end of his rope, and my guess is he’s due for a fall. As for the second, he is one of the world’s greatest rascals, and all I can say is, if he wasn’t engaged in fooling you, then he certainly managed to fool me.”

  “What could his purpose be?”

  “I’ll wager he has made that same speech to several hundred foreign businessmen in the course of the present year. He wants you to believe that Germany is on the verge of bankruptcy, so that you’ll go home and spread that good news. The Herr Doktor is concerned to have Americans carry on in the good old way, and not imitate the shrewd devices which he has thought up which enable Germany to put seventy per cent of her income into purposes that would scare you to death if you understood them.”

  “You’re giving them credit for a devilish lot of subtlety, Lanny.”

  “For just as much as I would credit the devil himself. They have as good brains as there are in the world, and have put them to the task of blinding your eyes while they get ready to cut your throat.”

  “And yet you say the fat fellow”—Robbie wouldn’t name General Göring—“tells me all about his war preparations in order that I’ll go out and frighten Englishmen and Frenchmen!”

  “The fat fellow is thinking about the immediate situation—the moves which are planned against the border states during the next year. He wants to bluff England and France just as Mr. Big in Italy bluffed them over Abyssinia, and as they are both doing over Spain right now. But our financial Doktor is a long-term man, and his idea is to persuade you that the whole thing is a house of cards and is bound to collapse of its own weight. That being so, the democracies can go on taking things easy, and won’t have to arm, or fight for their lives—until it’s too late.”

  “Well, it’s certainly a new line of talk from a banker,” commented Robbie. “He’d have a hard time getting money in Wall Street with it.”

  “He knows that’s all past and over; he’s got all he ever can. What these people want now is to be let alone for two or three years more, and then they’ll be ready for anything that can happen.”

  “You still hate them like poison, don’t you, Lanny!”

  “I understand that my father is here to get contracts, and I’m helping him. But it’s no good letting you fool yourself, and when you ask me questions, I tell you how I see it. That’s strictly between you and me, now and in future, of course.”

  “Oh, sure,” replied the father; “and I’m grateful for what you are doing. At the same time, of course, I hope you’re mistaken.”

  “Nobody could hope it more than I,” replied the son.

  VI

  All this time, while Lanny was playing about with smart Berlin society, a voice was crying in his soul: “Trudi! Trudi!” He was in the same position as to her that she had been in as to her former husband; she had endured some four years of grief and frustration, with nothing to do but wait and fear the worst. In the end Lanny had been able to persuade her that if Ludi had been alive he would surely have found a way to get word to her. In this case Lanny could be sure that Trudi would make no such attempt; she would never whisper his name, to say nothing of putting it on paper. He must count her among the dead; one of many thousands of casualties in the secret war on Nazism, a part of that age-old war for freedom which has been going on ever since the soul of man awakened and discovered itself in slavery.

  A hundred times Trudi had said to him: “It is bound to happen; and when it does, forget me, and go on and do your work.” So here he was, trying to find out what Hitler was going to do about Stubendorf and the Corridor, about Austria and Czechoslovakia; which would come first, and how soon, and would they resist, and what action would England and France take? In the course of this work Lanny had to go about and meet the leading Nazis, eat their rich foods, drink their choice wines, and never fail to wear an agreeable smile; whenever he found this possible, his conscience would begin to gnaw, and he would say: “I am being corrupted!” When he found himself enjoying the goodfellowship of Der Dicke or the rapier wit of Reichsminister Doktor Goebbels, he would have a sick feeling inside, and would punish himself by driving home past the prison on the Alexanderplatz where he had gone to see Johannes Robin, or the Columbus Haus where he himself had once been held under suspicion.

  Would they be keeping Trudi in one of these places? Or would they have brought her to Germany only to kill her? Monck had insisted that the latter must be the case, and had warned Lanny not to waste his energies. Of course, if Lanny seriously believed in spirits, he could go on with those experiments; but no more burglaries! So now, when the husband came home from an Abend, he would prepare himself for sleep, put out the light, and lie for a while in darkness and silence. He would compose his mind and say: “Now, Trudi.” He would wait and watch, concentrating his thoughts upon her, saying without words: “All I want is to know where you are.” But no voice ever spoke and no figure appeared at the foot of his bed. Darkness and silence in his soul as well as in his room.

  VII

  Robbie Budd left for home; he would spend his Christmas on the steamer. Kurt arrived in Berlin on his way to Stubendorf, and called Lanny at the hotel, inviting him to come along. But Lanny said No. He had already met Graf Stubendorf in Berlin, and no longer had any sentimental feelings about the Schloss or the Meissner family either; they were all German, and getting ready for war, and full of Nazi rage and Nazi propaganda shams.

  Heinrich had telephoned, saying: “Our great friend will see you shor
tly; but today is not a good day, because something bad has happened and he is annoyed.” Lanny knew better than to ask questions about such matters over the phone; instead he kept his promise and telephoned Hilde, Fürstin von Donnerstein, who exclaimed: “Grossartig! I am simply bursting with news! Will you come and have tea?”

  He drove to the white marble palace, and found that his hostess had invited no one else. She was the mother of three children, but still young; her colors were fading and she made up for them with more cosmetics than Lanny found attractive. She was tall and thin for a German woman, with a nervous, distracted manner; she would rattle on for a while, and then suddenly stop and start off on a new topic. Her speech was ninety per cent English and ten per cent German, or vice versa, whichever you preferred. Lanny knew that in spite of her high social position she wasn’t happy; he suspected that her marriage to a man a whole generation older than herself had not proved a success. However, she was proud, and talked only about other people’s troubles; that was satisfactory to Lanny, who had met numbers of unhappily married ladies and had learned many stratagems for keeping himself a sufficient distance away.

  Like Rosemary, Hilde had to know about her friend Irma, and why she and Lanny had broken up. He had to give her something in return for what he wanted, so he explained the differences between his temperament and Irma’s, giving the latter the benefit of all doubts. Nothing about politics, of course; it was just that he was bohemian in his tastes, while Irma enjoyed only the most proper people. Hilde would be certain that there must have been another man or another woman, and would be alert for the slightest hint as to which it was. But Lanny insisted that with Americans a divorce could happen without any sexual trespass. Irma had since found the perfect husband, but really and truly, she hadn’t had her eyes on Lord Wickthorpe when she had divorced Lanny. Hilde heard this with lifted eyebrows, and exclaimed: “Ach, mein lieber! If I had ever in my life met a man as trusting as that, I should have fallen in love with him sofort.”