Presidential Agent (The Lanny Budd Novels)

by Upton Sinclair

  Hess reported that the Führer was obliged to leave for Berlin at once. Would Herr Budd care to come and bring Madame, both to be the Führer’s guests? Lanny started making excuses—for he wanted to get off a report to Washington, and couldn’t send it from Berlin. He said, quite truly, that Madame was not happy in a foreign environment; the severe climate in the Alps kept her indoors, and she was yearning for the sunshine and flowers of the Riviera. Lanny had some picture business to attend to at home, and would leave Madame there, and proceed to Paris and possibly London. “In a couple of weeks I’ll join you in Berlin and we’ll try those experiments with Pröfenik, if you’re in the mood.” Hess replied: “O.K.”

  That afternoon the two visitors, plus Tecumseh and the spirits, were bundled up and driven to Munich and put on board the night express for Milan. Snow was falling, but it didn’t matter to great electric locomotives; snowplows went ahead, and they took their heavy loads of passengers and mail and freight up into the Alpine passes, and through the wonderful tunnels, and down the long winding gap known as Der Brenner, or Il Brennero, according to which side you were coming from. The Germans asked if you knew the land where the lemons grew, and sighed to be taken there; the Italians, on the other hand, voiced their fear of invading barbarians who came out of the snow and ice of the north. These barbarians had now taken over the Fascist political creed, but even so, no Latin would ever like them.

  X

  At Bienvenu all was well. Marceline was in the hospice de la maternité in Cannes where Frances Barnes Budd had been born eight years ago; Marceline had a baby boy in her arms, and was proud and happy. As for Vittorio, he was at the bursting point; everything was coming his way—not merely was he a father, but he had won several thousand francs by a new gambling system he had discovered, and the newspapers were reporting a series of victories by his armies, which were pushing down from the north, threatening to reach the sea and cut off Valencia from Barcelona. That dreadful Spanish war had been going on for more than a year and a half, and everything Lanny had hoped for was being crushed and ground into the bloody red dust of the Aragon hills. He found the vauntings of his brother-in-law all but intolerable; but he had to put a grin on his face and keep it there—just as in the Berghof.

  His recourse was to pour out his heart through a typewriter onto sheets of paper. Not too many sheets, for he must remember that the Man in the White House had at least one hundred and three confidential agents, and thousands of other people trying to get his ear every day—but surely not many who had been listening behind the door while the Führer of the Nazis browbeat and mauled the Chancellor of the Austrians. Lanny tried to hold himself to the facts; but one of these facts was that relief map, showing the German-inhabited lands which Adi meant to take into his Third Reich. Austria would be the first bite; the second would be the Sudetenland, and the third the Polish Corridor. Meantime Spain was becoming a Fascist state, and a future flying field and submarine harbor for the new Mohammed. “Get ready to meet that,” wrote “P.A. 103.”

  He told his mother what amount of money he had got from Hitler, about forty thousand dollars, but advised her not to let Marceline know, except by slow stages. The child—Lanny still thought of her as that, although she was twenty—didn’t really need thirteen thousand all in a lump, and Vittorio would get it away from her and lose every cent of it in one night. Better let them think they were poor, and dole it out to them at intervals. So long as Marceline could live at Bienvenu she wouldn’t suffer. Lanny added, with a smile: “I’ll keep your share and dole it out to you.” Beauty’s heart was in a state of deliquescence just now; she was so excited over that marvelous new baby that she couldn’t refuse any request of the young madonna.

  Lanny took the trouble to cultivate his Fascist brother-in-law for professional reasons. There was quite an Italian colony in Cannes and thereabouts, and Vittorio’s friends included several officers recovering from wounds, and several agents promoting Il Duce’s cause in the Midi. They talked freely in the presence of Vittorio’s rich brother-in-law—why not? Thus Lanny was able to learn the number of Italian troops in Spain—about three times what Mussolini admitted; their armaments, their losses, and the reinforcements expected. They were shipped from the harbor of Gaeta, between Rome and Naples; a small town, rarely visited by foreigners and therefore fairly secret. The cost had been terrific, a couple of billion lire so far, but of course Mussolini would never accept defeat; he had put his hand to the plow and must go to the end of the furrow.

  That was what Bernhardt Monck had said nearly half a year ago, sitting under a tree on a hilltop near the doomed town of Belchite. Germany and Italy had to win, and would send whatever men and supplies it took. The Loyalists had men, but no supplies—so now the Italians and Moors had broken through; thousands of those ill-clad and hungry men whom Lanny had seen were dead, and perhaps Monck among them. The presidential agent could have shed tears of grief and rage over these thoughts, but instead he set himself at his typewriter and sent off another report. He permitted himself one sentence of what might have been called propaganda: “Men are dying there in those cold red hills to give us time to wake up and get ready.”

  XI

  On all this Coast of Pleasure, now at the height of a gay and costly season, Lanny Budd knew only one person to whom he could express his feelings. He went in to Cannes, and from there telephoned to Julie Palma, making an appointment to pick her up on the street. He drove her out into the country, and heard all she had to tell about her husband and what he was doing in Valencia. He couldn’t write freely, on account of the censorship; anyhow, he was of an optimistic nature, and would go on believing the best in spite of any defeat.

  Lanny said: “If the Rebels break through to the sea, the people in Valencia will be trapped. Raoul had better come out now while he can.”

  “He won’t,” replied the wife. “He is a Spaniard, and feels that his duty is there.”

  “Tell him I say he is needed to run the school. He can accomplish many times more that way.”

  “It would do no good,” was the answer. “Right or wrong, he thinks he’s needed where he is.”

  This competent little brunette woman, an Arlésienne, told the news of the school, a center of anti-Fascist agitation in the Midi and greatly hated by the reactionaries of all groups. It had been named to Lanny by Vittorio’s friends, and he mentioned this to the woman, warning her again of the importance of keeping his name out of it. Gone were the good old days when Lanny could come to the school and talk to the gang; when the little Red and Pink urchins would greet him on the street. Now he was supposed to have gone the way of the rest of the rotten rich. “The Communists class-angle you,” said Julie Palma, with a smile.

  He put an envelope into her hands, containing enough bank notes to keep the enterprise going until his next visit. She had invented an imaginary rich relative in Paris who was supposed to be the source of these funds, and she told him about the comments of the school on this lucky find. It made Lanny sad, for he was by nature a sociable person, and now there were so few persons he could talk to. He hadn’t told either Raoul or Raoul’s wife about Trudi; and now, for what reason he couldn’t guess, the Trudi-ghost came no more. One of the first things he had done on reaching Bienvenu was to make a try with Madame, but he got only Zaharoff and Grandfather Samuel and his other familiars. Parsifal got Claribel, and the inmates of the monastery of Dodanduwa. The Trudi-ghost had apparently got lost somewhere on the road between Paris and the Cap.

  XII

  Vittorio had been driving Lanny’s car, which meant that it needed repairs; Lanny waited for these, and then set out for Paris. He had a round of social duties there, and pleasures, if he could take them as such. Selling paintings to the Führer of all the Germans was from the professional point of view no small feat, and Zoltan was delighted to hear about it. Being sent by the Führer as an emissary to Vienna was a feat from another point of view, and Lanny would not fail to tell Kurt and his secretary about that
; also Graf Herzenberg and his actress amie. It immensely increased his rating with them to know that he had been allowed to stay as a guest in the Berghof while the negotiations with Schuschnigg were going on; from that time on they would talk freely to him and he could pick up many items.

  The de Bruynes were out of jail. The agitation of the reactionary papers of Paris had been a source of embarrassment to the members of the Cabinet, some of whom agreed with the prisoners’ ideas, and considered them guilty merely of an indiscretion. In other words, the storm had blown over, and so Lanny could visit his old friends without any publicity. All three looked well; they had been allowed every comfort consistent with being in prisons. But all were indignant because they had been compelled to dismantle their lone fortification and agree to purchase no more arms whether at home or abroad, an unprecedented interference with the right of rich men to spend their money as they pleased.

  They, too, were interested in hearing about the visit to Berchtesgaden. Lanny was able to reduce their mental distress by pointing out that Adolf Schicklgruber had bought arms and had attempted a Putsch and had been imprisoned and compelled to agree to a course of “legality.” But that hadn’t kept him from getting power. Denis de Bruyne said that meant going into politics, and might be all right for Germany, but in France the politicians were so hopelessly corrupt; they sold out not merely their country but their employers and even one another. The de Bruynes were so depressed concerning the state of la patrie that Lanny wondered whether they were ready to invite Hitler in to clean it up. Certainly they were not in the least disturbed by the prospect of having him move into Austria. It was plain to all the world that he couldn’t move far to the east or southeast without running into Russia, and that was the development upon which all hearts were set.

  There was a long letter from Robbie, telling the news of the family and the business. This man of constantly expanding affairs stressed the importance of his deal with Schneider, so it became Lanny’s not unpleasant duty to eat a well-prepared luncheon at the Baron’s town house and tell about the various meals he had eaten at the Führer’s country house. There was nothing he wasn’t free to reveal about this visit, except a few things such as the screaming and bellowing at the Austrian Chancellor; the son of Budd-Erling, well-bred and tactful, would tone that down, so that the Baron might not have the idea that he would go out from the Baron’s home and betray secrets.

  XIII

  So important did the master of Schneider-Creusot consider this account of Hitler’s personality and ideas that he asked if Lanny would consent to tell it to a few of the Baron’s friends. So, three days later, Lanny was guest of honor at a formal and most elegant stag dinner, served by half a dozen footmen in pink plush livery, and attended by a dozen of the leading industrialists and financiers of Paris. These were the men who really governed the country, putting up the electoral funds, naming the members of cabinets, and being consulted as to all measures of importance. François de Wendel, Sénateur de France and head of the great mining trust; Max David-Weill, representing the bank of Lazard Frères; René Duchemin of the French chemical trust; Ernest Mercier, the electrical magnate—men like these. Not merely the French empire in Africa and Asia, but their satellite states in Central Europe, where their government had loaned many billions of francs and their banks and industries had made even greater investments—all these treasures and dominions were at stake, and the crisis was such that it rocked the political world, and divided even these masters among themselves.

  Was this Adolf Hitler a statesman like all the others, whom you could buy at a price low or high? Or was he a madman, one without any price? Here was an American, young compared with those present, the son of a man whom many of them knew, and he had actually lived in the madman’s house for a week or more and heard his intimate conversation. They wanted him to tell everything about Adi and what to do about him—provided of course that Lanny would tell them to do what they wanted done. The guest explained that he was embarrassed, for he was no politician but an art expert; his errand to Austria had been to purchase a Defregger for the Führer and his errand to Berchtesgaden had been to take the Führer some examples of the work of Lanny’s late stepfather, Marcel Detaze. (Not a bad advertisement for a high-class business, incidentally.)

  The story of this dinner would, of course, go back to Berlin very soon; so Lanny had to be careful what he said. He had no objection to describing Adolf Hitler’s well-appointed home, his agreeable manners, and what he ate and drank. It was all right to say that Hess believed in spiritualism and mental healing; but better not anything about Mohammed! The facts about the ultimatum to Schuschnigg had been in all the newspapers of the world, so they could be discussed freely. The relief map of German population and culture had been reproduced as a poster and was now being circulated by Dr. Goebbels, so there was no harm in that. The Führer had told Lanny to say that he loved France and hated Russia and that both these feelings were undying; so Lanny carried out these instructions. On his own authority he said that Hitler was determined to control and perhaps annex not merely Austria, but all the adjoining lands whose population was predominantly German; those who did business with him would have to do it on that basis.

  After coffee and liqueurs had been consumed, the discussion went on for an hour or two, and even after the guests adjourned to the library they gathered around the guest of honor and wouldn’t let him go. There was another Cabinet crisis impending in France, brought on by the Austrian situation. Chautemps was tottering, and Blum was plotting to come in again; these masters had to find somebody to keep him out—but first they had to make up their minds what they wanted done. They were all worried, and Lanny knew of old that men of this sort are the world’s best worriers. In reality they were helpless, on account of the firm position of the British Cabinet, which had sold them out in favor of Hitler—at least that is how they saw it. Britain was playing Germany against France according to the ancient practice of perfide Albion. Why shouldn’t France play Germany against Britain? But then, wouldn’t that be playing the game of the Soviets?

  They didn’t come to any decision that night; but Lanny thought it a good enough story for Roosevelt that in this crisis the secret rulers of France hadn’t yet been able to make up their minds whom they wanted for their friends and whom for their enemies.

  22

  Foul Deeds Will Rise

  I

  Adolf Hitler summoned his tame Reichstag into session, a device which he used when he wished to address the world. The Reichstag had two things to do: first, to hear him make a long speech, and second, to vote its endorsement of everything he had said. This vote never failed to be unanimous—since any member who presumed to voice disapproval would be sent off to a concentration camp before that afternoon’s sun had set.

  This time Adi told the world pretty much the same things that Lanny had told the guests of Baron Schneider. He set forth at length his undoubtedly genuine loathing for the Soviet Union. “We see in Bolshevism more now than before the incarnation of human destructive forces.” It was not the poor Russian people who were to blame for this world calamity, he said. “We know it is a small Jewish intellectual group which has led a great nation into this position of madness.” And then those Germans on the outside, who had been separated from the Fatherland by the wicked Versailles Diktat. “In the long run it is unbearable for a World Power, conscious of itself, to know there are racial comrades across its border who are constantly being afflicted with the severest suffering for their sympathy or unity with the whole nation, its destiny, and its philosophy.”

  This was a question of philosophy at the moment, for Adi wanted the British Tories to keep quiet while he got Austria into his grip, and then he would take up the next subject with them. But he gave an idea what that was; for when Adi got going, it was hard for him to stop, and when any one of his phobias was mentioned it became impossible for him to control his feelings. He always delivered these tirades extemporaneously and had neve
r yet been known to read a prepared speech. The British press was presuming to criticize his ultimatum to Austria; this was called “freedom of the press” in Britain, and it meant “allowing journalists to insult other countries; their institutions, their public men, and their government.” The Führer gave plain warning that he wasn’t going to stand this. “The damage wrought by such a press campaign was so great that henceforth we shall no longer be able to tolerate it without stern objections. This crime becomes especially evil when it obviously pursues the goal of driving nations into war.”

  The British public might have foreseen the result of such misconduct; but the Führer saw fit to tell them in plain words. “Since this press campaign must be considered as an element of danger to the peace of the people, I have decided to carry through that strengthening of the German army which will give us the assurance that these threats of war against Germany will not some day be translated into bloody force.” So there it was! Germany was being forced to arm by the British press, and nobody could ever again say that Germany had wanted to do it. Nor was there any use talking any more, so long as the press was free to build up a public opinion, and statesmen in democratic lands had to do what public opinion demanded. Said Adi: “Under these circumstances it cannot be seen what use there is in conferences and meetings as long as governments in general are not in a position to take decisive steps irrespective of public opinion.”