IX
There were two preliminary steps to Lanny’s enterprise. The first was to get permission from the Russian military authorities to visit Stubendorf and stay for a few days; the second was to get a visa from the Polish consulate. Lanny had given a good deal of thought to both enterprises, and he told Morrison, ‘I will mention that I had two interviews with Stalin, one only last spring. My errand will have to do with buying art works’.
He recalled paintings which had been in Schloss Stubendorf: a Cranach which Göring had wished very much to purchase and a couple of Defreggers, a painter greatly admired by the Führer. Presumably when the days of bombardment had come those paintings had been taken out of the frames, rolled up, and carried to a safe place. Where were they? Kurt Meissner might know, and that would be a good excuse for Lanny to seek him out.
Morrison pointed out that if the paintings were found the government might confiscate them. Lanny said, All right, he would offer to buy them from the government. Anyhow, he would have a reason for visiting Stubendorf. ‘Shall I offer the officials a tip?’ Lanny asked; and the other said it would be all right to give them a tip if they asked for it, but to be careful.
‘The Polish consul’, he said, ‘is probably a poor devil who secretly hates the Reds. He has difficulty in getting enough to eat; invite him to lunch at a good café and get him a bottle of wine. Don’t speak of any Germans to him. You might delicately suggest that you will need to spend some money in Poland, and can he advise you about getting the best rate of exchange. Perhaps he can attend to it for you. The zloty is down to one cent, but let him charge you a cent and a quarter, and that will be a tactful way of giving him a tip. He has been through six years of war, and he’ll be overworked and underpaid. You may be the first well-dressed man he has talked to in a long time.’
‘If he doesn’t hate me for being too well-dressed’, said Lanny, smiling.
‘Officially he will be supposed to distrust you, but privately he will respect you and be looking out for what he can get. The Communists boast of having done away with graft, but it’s all over the place, even among their own officials. Their revolution is almost thirty years old, and it is a very unusual official who can keep within his salary for that length of time’.
Lanny explained that he wanted to talk to several persons before he took this journey. ‘I think I might learn Kurt Meissner’s whereabouts from his oldest brother, General Emil. Do you have any idea where he is?’
‘I can have him looked up for you’, said the other.
‘The last time I met him was while our armies were still in France. I was working for General Patton’s G-2, and I was able to persuade Emil to come over to our side. He gave us priceless information about all the fortifications of Metz. Kurt, of course, regards him as a vile traitor, just as he does me. But Emil understands Kurt’s psychology, and he will also know other persons in Stubendorf from whom I might get information. Also, I ought to look up Graf Stubendorf; no doubt his estates have been confiscated’.
‘We have already made enquiries about him’, replied the other. ‘It is reported that he has a small place in the lake district of the Bavarian Alps’.
‘It will be a new experience to him to be poor’, remarked Lanny.
‘They will all be poor. By the way, Washington tells us that you are to have an expense account. You will be free to spend up to two thousand dollars upon other persons, and if you need more you may let me know.’
‘It won’t be easy to pay them money’, said Lanny. ‘They will be poor but proud—the way it was with our Southerners after the Civil War’.
‘We will rely upon your discretion’, replied the official. ‘If money will get the information we need, spend it; but be careful, because you will encounter people who will make up stories and keep stringing you along. We have been taken in more than once and have spent a good deal of money following false leads’.
X
Lanny’s friend Bernhardt Monck was still with CIC, the Counter-Intelligence Corps of American Military Government. Twelve years had passed since he had shown up in London and made himself known to Lanny Budd as a Socialist underground worker against the Nazis. Since Lanny had known him he had been a capitán in the Spanish People’s Army. During World War II he had had charge of American intelligence work in Stockholm, and now he was in the employ of AMG, investigating the records of persons who presented themselves as being free of the Nazi taint and worthy of employment by the victorious Four Powers.
Lanny telephoned, and Monck wanted him to come to his home for dinner. He said he could arrange for a room in a friend’s home in the same apartment building.
In the three-room home Lanny met Monck’s long-suffering wife, who had taken care of their two children in the Argentine for more than ten years while their father was doing underground work against the bandits who had seized their homeland. The children, now attending a high school under American auspices, spoke fluent Spanish, German, and English and did not feel that they were overcrowding their minds by studying French. They had met Lanny Budd the previous spring and knew that he had been a secret agent against the Nazis and had testified concerning Hermann Göring at the Nürnberg trials. To them Mr Budd was a wonderful person; they listened to all he had to say about that sweet land of liberty across the sea, in which so many people all over the earth were longing somehow to find refuge.
XI
The father of this family came in; a stocky, solidly built man whose muscles had been hardened by conflicts, first with nature and then with humans. His hair was cut short in Prussian fashion and what there was of it was gray. He spoke with a North-German accent, and thought of himself as a working man and nothing else. He and Lanny had been through dangers together, and firmer friends could not have been. Most of what they had done was no longer secret and made wonderful listening for a boy and a girl who were being brought up to think of themselves as working-class children, prepared to devote their lives to the task of building a social order that should be at the same time just and free.
The Americans were free and believed in freedom, but their notions of justice were derived from a previous century—or so at any rate Bernhardt Monck believed. It had been possible for workers to be free so long as industry was primitive and tools were few and simple; but when the tools had become billion-dollar corporations, there could no longer be true freedom for the workers until those tools were socially owned and democratically managed. But you would have a hard time telling that to any American who knew that his country was the richest and most productive in the world, and who read in his newspaper every day that this was due solely to the fact that the tools of production were privately owned and managed.
The Americans had come to Germany and overthrown the Nazis; and now they were engaged in restoring that same system of private ownership, overlooking the fact that it was the private owners of industry in Germany—the great steel-cartel masters—who had subsidised and set up the Nazis in power, in order to keep the German workers from passing laws for the socialisation of German industry. Here was Bernhardt Monck, employed and paid a salary by American Military Government in order to find out whether this man and that had been a Nazi; Monck would go to work and learn that some man had been an active Nazi, and then he would discover that the man was being employed anyhow—the reason being that he was the one who knew the most about how to run that industry.
It was a curious fact about modern war, which the Americans were discovering to their embarrassment, that when you had conquered a people you had to keep them alive, which meant that you had to arrange to have food grown and goods manufactured and distributed. When you had taken the horses and tractors off the farms, you had to get new horses and new tractors to get the crops planted. When you had bombed factories, you had to rebuild them, and the same for railroads and ships and other means of transportation. You had to pay for all this yourself until your conquered enemies were able to pay for it themselves, and naturally the quickest a
nd easiest way to get things going was the way they had been before. You couldn’t afford to stop for any Socialist nonsense, and anyhow you didn’t want any Socialist nonsense because it would be such bad propaganda for the rest of the world. If the working people in Germany were to get hold of industry and make a success of running it, what excuse could you find to keep the workers of America from wanting to try the same thing? Much better to take the old cartel masters and give them a slap on the wrist and tell them to be good boys now and go ahead and run industry without setting up any more Hitlers.
Here was a German Social Democrat, speaking in the bosom of his family and to a trusted friend. He couldn’t say things like that at the office, of course. He would get his facts and make his reports, and what use was made of them was none of his business. If he presumed to criticise the decisions of his superiors they would decide that he was a Red—and that was worse than a Nazi.
Most of these superiors knew in a vague way that here was supposed to be a difference between those they called Reds and those they called Pinks, but they were disposed to be sceptical about that difference. The two colours shaded one into the other, and often pink was used as camouflage for red. American officials might be excused for being uncertain, and especially so because they themselves were open to the same suspicions. Congressmen at home were looking for a chance to jump on their necks and were sending committees over to investigate. It was bad enough to see Britain turn pink. In Britain we couldn’t help it, but in Germany we could and we certainly meant to.
XII
Thus Monck, who was very much disturbed by the sight of things going wrong in the world. He had seen them going wrong all his life, he said. He had seen the stupidities and blind greeds of men causing cosmic quantities of human misery and balking those very purposes which the men hoped to achieve. Born into the working classes and having felt the full weight of oppression, Monck could speak for the masses of Europe. He knew that they would not consent to go back to the old system; they would no longer be content with poverty and insecurity. To attempt to force them back would mean simply to drive them into the arms of the Communists. There would be either a Socialist Europe or a Communist Europe—and it was America that would have to make the choice.
Monck had seen one nation after another blundering stupidly and bringing about the opposite result to what it wanted. ‘When Hitler invaded Russia’, he said, ‘the masses of the Russian people were so embittered against the Reds that they would gladly have joined Hitler’s armies and helped to win their own freedom. But the Hitler men of hate behaved with such cruelty that they turned the peasants into partisans, hiding in the forests and making war on the German communications. And now we see the Russians in their turn making the same blunder. They have got hold of Central Europe and can’t make up their minds whether they are conquerors or comrades. One day they make speeches about working-class solidarity and the next day they behave like barbarians’.
The German Socialist told how the Russians had proceeded to strip Berlin of all its manufacturing machinery; they had also rigged the currency so as to draw most of the products of the country to themselves. Only now were they beginning to realise that by this means they had doomed the East Berliners to perpetual poverty and had sacrificed all chance of winning the West Berliners over to their side. If the East Berliners remained poorly dressed while the West Berliners became well dressed, how could you persuade either side that communism meant prosperity and capitalism meant misery?
Lanny saw no harm in stating that he had just had a talk with President Truman and that the President had commissioned him to find out how to persuade the Kremlin to keep its agreements. Monck smiled sardonically and replied, ‘The President might as well send you to India to find out how to persuade tigers to stop eating meat’.
‘You think that the Politburo wants war?’ Lanny asked.
‘No, they don’t want war. All they want is the mastery of the world. They have set their programme forth in a whole library of books’.
‘That’s what I said to Mr Truman, but of course he doesn’t have time to read books; he is the most overburdened man in the world’.
‘What you should do is to take him one book and mark the passages for him. Get him Stalin’s Marxism and the National and Colonial Question. That book is the bible for every Russian diplomat and representative abroad. In it Stalin deals with every country of any importance, and he analyses the conditions in that country; he has all the facts and is clear and precise about what he is going to do and how he is going to do it—to undermine the government of that country and place his own kind of people in control. He hasn’t the faintest doubt of his ability to do it. It may take a long time, but he has the patience of a cat watching at a rat hole. He bides his time, and when the time comes he pounces. He makes promises, but they don’t mean a thing—except that the time for the pounce hasn’t yet come. When friendship is to his advantage he can be as charming and warm as a house cat; and he can order the murder of a million human beings without the faintest qualm’.
‘I suppose’, Lanny ventured, ‘he is really more dangerous to the world than Hitler’.
‘Hitler was a blusterer and a fool; he was impatient and hysterical. Stalin is quiet and watchful and wise. Also, his camouflage is much better than Hitler’s. Hitler was a nationalist and hater of all other peoples—even of the British and the Americans whom he secretly envied. Stalin is an internationalist and a friend of the oppressed workers, all the oppressed races of the world. He loves them all, his heart bleeds for them, and he sets his poets to writing odes to them and his composers to singing songs for them. He tells the oppressed peasants to kill the landlords and take the land; and when they have done this he invites them to form co-operatives under his guidance; he promises them the benefits of machinery and mutual aid and then sets one of his commissars over them and takes away a part of their product—and lo and behold, they are paying more taxes to Stalin than they ever paid to any landlord. He tells the workers to seize the factories, and when they have done so he sets a commissar over them, abolishes the unions, establishes the death penalty for strikes, and pays such wages that it takes a month’s labour to buy a pair of poorly made shoes. If any peasant or worker ventures to murmur a complaint he is shipped off to Siberia to labour in the gold mines on a diet of eight hundred calories a day. Such is Marx-Lenin-Stalin in action’.
‘Peace, land, and bread’ said Lanny—the slogan of the Bolshevik revolution. And Monck commented, ‘Peace means the shipping of millions of Russian and non-Russian peoples off to Siberia to make the dictators safe. It means four or five million men impressed into armies. It means the converting of industry into the manufacture of tens of thousands of tanks and guns and planes. It means armed forces at every border, ready to march at the first moment the well-paid and well-trained agitators have succeeded in fanning discontent in a neighbouring country’.
‘We have a story in America’, said Lanny, ‘about a farmer who said he wasn’t greedy for land—he wanted only the land adjoining his own’.
‘Exactly!’ replied the German. ‘That ought to enable President Truman to understand Stalin. And make plain to him that when I say Stalin I don’t mean an old man who may die any day; I mean a system he has built and that will go on after him. There is the Politburo, and the commissars, and the whole enormous movement. It began as a new religion, like Mohammedanism in its militant days, and now it is like an avalanche in motion. If Stalin were to change or try to stop it, it would sweep him away; they would liquidate him and say he had died of a heart attack, and they would give him the most magnificent funeral in history and build him a monument a hundred stories high. But the movement would go on to take the world’.
‘A grim message to carry back to the White House!’ remarked the presidential agent.
‘It is what I have been watching with my own eyes. There are kidnappings over the border going on all the time. The border is less than half a mile from this house, and I ne
ver go out at night without company; I wouldn’t go close to the border for a million dollars in perfectly sound American greenbacks. In East Germany they are seizing the workers who show any trace of independence and character and shipping them off to those dreadful slave-labour camps. Men and women of special ability and prominence are being shot in the back of the neck. They are setting the rest to work producing war goods—and of course they control the schools and set out the programmes to educate the children. Give them one generation in any country, and you have a population that doesn’t know what freedom means and is absolutely certain that every American is a gangster, a slave-driver, and a warmonger’.
Such was the message; and it surely wouldn’t lighten the burdens of an ex-captain of artillery, who to his own great surprise had become President of the United States.
XIII
After the family had gone to bed the two men sat in the little living room—once the home of a Nazi and now commandeered by A.M.G. They talked in low tones about the subject of counterfeit money. It wasn’t Monck’s specialty, and all that he had done was to recommend Lanny; he said, with a smile, that he had done that because he wanted so much to see his friend once more. But in the course of his years as an underground worker he had picked up odds and ends of information about the Himmler money. He told how during the war a friend of their cause, a pretended Nazi, had turned over to the Social Democrats a bundle of British pound notes that he had stolen. There had been, first, the ethical problem: Did they have the right to use this bogus money? They decided that it would be all right if they put it off on Nazis and no one else. The Nazis had made it, and presumably had made it to be used. But the problem was: How could they put it off on any Nazi or Nazi enterprise or agency without grave danger to themselves? A British pound was a conspicuous thing, and anybody who tried to pass one would be a conspicuous person, and if he was caught he would certainly be shot. The problem had been too much for them, and they had decided to burn that dangerous package of paper.
Presidential Agent (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 89