Presidential Agent (The Lanny Budd Novels)

by Upton Sinclair

  Also, Monck told about the British ambassador at Ankara, Turkey, whose official papers had been stolen at night by his butler and photographed. News of this had come to Monck in far-off Stockholm, because in the last days of the war an employee of Himmler’s intelligence service had fled there and had sold the information to Monck for a few real American dollars. The butler in Ankara had been excessively greedy, demanding as much as fifteen or twenty thousand pounds British money for each of his bundles of photographs. The Nazis had obliged him with Himmler money—large lots of it which apparently he never tried to spend, because they had taken the precaution to give him a few real notes, unpacked, and it was these he had used.

  The butler who went under the code name of Cicero, had furnished complete reports of what went on at the Allied conferences at Moscow, Teheran, and Cairo during 1943 and 1944. It was von Papen’s organisation which had achieved this coup. The Nazis had several different spy services, all jealous of one another and waging intrigue against one another. The Himmler organisation had refused to believe that the documents were genuine, and von Ribbentrop’s organisation had done the same. Before they got through with their squabbling over the matter the war had ended.

  Lanny inquired about General Graf Stubendorf and also about General Emil Meissner. Monck reported that his office had investigated both of them and had cleared the latter for a job as a teacher in an Oberschule. He was living near Nürnberg, and the Graf was living in Southern Bavaria in a peasant’s cottage by one of the mountain lakes. He had, of course, lost his castle and estates, which were now again in Poland and confiscated by the Reds. His town house in Berlin had been smashed beyond repair. What he lived on Monck didn’t know, but perhaps he had had some jewels hidden away. He had refrained from having anything to do with the occupation and apparently was content that they let him alone.

  Lanny had decided to visit both these men before taking the journey into Poland. Monck advised him to repack his two suitcases, taking only the necessary things and leaving the rest in Monck’s care. The effect of war was always demoralising, and now in Germany were many unemployed persons and children running wild. In Poland conditions would be worse, and Lanny might find that his car was being taken to pieces bit by bit unless he watched it. Monck had seen to it that he was provided with an American-occupation civilian licence from the Provost Marshal’s office.

  ‘Be careful and don’t talk about politics’, Monck warned. ‘The Poles hate both the Nazis and the Reds; all the parties hate all the other parties, and everybody is suspicious of everybody else, and especially of strangers. You won’t find it a holiday jaunt, I can tell you’.

  BOOK TWO

  A Man’s Reach Must Exceed His Grasp

  3 TESTAMENT OF BLEEDING WAR

  I

  On the following morning Lanny Budd got himself a taxicab and was driven into the East sector of Berlin. It was the unlovely part of the city and had been bombed and shelled the worst; but there was a large group of military buildings left standing in the Karlshorst district, and there the Soviet commander, Marshal Sokolovsky, had set up his headquarters. The buildings, some fifteen or twenty, made a quadrangle and were surrounded by a high fence. There was a sort of kiosk at the gate, and soldiers on duty. Lanny learned that he had to go to the Kommandatura for a pass before he could get by the gate; and so it was a couple of hours before he got to talk with an officer of the marshal’s staff.

  The position of a young Soviet aide-de-camp toward an American visitor was a complex one. He was very apt to like Americans instinctively; most Russians did. When they had met on the River Elbe the American and Russian soldiers had had a fine time celebrating; it had pleased them to hug one another and slap one another on the back; the officers had shaken hands and drunk a toast and said whatever words they had in common. But now everything was changed. The order had gone out: No fraternising. The young Soviet officer looked upon this American visitor with conflicting emotions; he admired his elegant appearance and gracious manners, and at the same time he feared him as a mysterious evil force. Keep a cold, aloof attitude toward him—or else a promising young officer’s career might be nipped in the bud!

  However, this was changed quickly when the visitor began talking, for he stated that he had had the honour of paying two visits to Marshal Stalin in the Kremlin and had been cordially invited to return at his convenience. He wasn’t proposing to go now; all he wanted was to visit a village called Stielszcz in Poland to see if he could trace the whereabouts of some painting which had been in Schloss Stubendorf; he was, so he said, an art expert and was thinking about nothing but paintings in the midst of a world at cold war. A most unlikely tale—that he had ever met Stalin; but suppose it was true? Very certainly a young staff officer could ruin himself that way!

  He said that he would have to consult his superior; and presently he came back and escorted the visitor into the office of a colonel. No one in the Soviet Union could be entirely free from anxiety, but a colonel does not show it so readily as a lieutenant and this mature gentleman listened impassively to the American’s tale. Unlikely indeed! But when the colonel asked questions the visitor answered promptly and apparently had been well briefed. What he wanted was for the colonel to telephone to the Kremlin and ask for Captain Briansky, who had been his escort during the visit last spring and would confirm his statements. ‘I will be glad to pay the cost of the call’, he said.

  The colonel explained that the Soviet telephone system was state-owned, but the lines were of necessity very crowded. The visitor said he could understand that, but that unfortunately his time was limited, and unless he could make the trip in the next two or three days he would have to return home. He was certain that Marshal Stalin would wish him to have the permit and would be vexed to learn that the favour had not be granted. There was a veiled threat in this, and the officer did not fail to get it. The Amerikanetz went on to say that during his visit in the spring of this year the Marshal had instructed Captain Briansky to escort him to the Moscow Ballet School, where he had had the pleasure of demonstrating to the assembled ballerinas the Dalcroze system of eurythmics. The staff colonel had never heard of that system, but he knew that his country was supposed to have kultura, and that when a cultured person piped he had to dance. He promised the gracious visitor that he would make immediate inquiry, and if the Kremlin wished him to have the permit it would be ready for him in a couple of days.

  II

  So that was that, Lanny returned to West Berlin and with Monck’s advice found a car he could rent for his trip to the South. It was a little vehicle of the kind Americans call a ‘coop’; it was large enough for one man and one suitcase and a load of food, and it had quite evidently carried a great many persons to a great many places. It was one of those vehicles of which Henry Ford had said that the customers could have it of any colour they wanted provided it was black.

  In order to get from Berlin to Bavaria it was necessary to pass through the Soviet zone. This was a routine matter, and Morrison had obtained the permits. Lanny had driven over this autobahn many times in the past and had clear memories of it; the last was far from pleasant, for he had been escaping from the Gestapo, which had detected his spy activities. The German underground had agreed to transport him, but he had missed connections and walked part of the way in the night. Now there was no more Gestapo, and the ride seemed luxurious in comparison; he had a tank full of petrol and a permit to buy more in the American zone.

  The Soviet soldiers inspected his pass and let him into their territory; later on they let him out again, and the Americans lifted their barrier and let him in. It had been rainy and chilly in Berlin, so going south was a pleasure. The sun came out, and the landscape shone. There were few traces of war—only the towns had been bombed, and of course the factories. By the time Patton’s armies had got here the enemy had been on the run.

  The route passed through Regensburg, one of the worst scenes of destruction in all tormented Germany. The great ball-bear
ing factory had been one of the prime targets of the American bombers, and the losses of bombing planes here had been among the heaviest in the war. Lanny hardly glanced at the wrecks; his thoughts were occupied with the memory of his own experiences, coming into Regensburg in the night, lying under a heavy tarpaulin on top of a truckload of merchandise. They had come to a roadblock, and the Nazis had stopped the truck and searched it; however, they had not bothered to untie the ropes and lift up the tarpaulin—so the son of Budd-Erling was still alive.

  When the traveller came to Landshut he turned off the autobahn and headed toward the point of land that juts into Austria and contains the village of Berchtesgaden. On the heights behind it were the ruins of Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat; Lanny had already inspected them and was no longer interested. But across the valley on the Obersalzberg lived an old friend, Hilde, Fürstin Donnerstein, and he owed her the courtesy of a visit; she had helped Lanny, fleeing from the Gestapo, to make good his escape, and the risk to her had been serious.

  She was the widow of a Prussian nobleman and had been a member of that ultra-smart set which flitted from Berlin to Rome to Cannes to Biarritz to Paris to London. She had been the intimate of Lanny’s first wife, Irma Barnes, now Lady Wickthorpe, and there were dozens of people she wanted to ask Lanny about—what had become of them, what they were doing, and who was in love with whom. She was a polyglot person, shifting from English to German to French and sprinkling it with the international slang of a much happier decade.

  Now she wore black for her only son, who had been killed in Poland. She was living what she called the peasant life. With her were an invalid sister and a young cousin orphaned by the war; they had an elderly manservant and a peasant girl who came in by day. They were occupying three rooms of the chalet and had boarded up most of the windows in anticipation of winter—which showed signs of wishing to come that very night. In one of the empty rooms she showed Lanny piles of rutabagas and potatoes which they had grown and harvested with their own hands. ‘Look at then!’ she said, meaning the hands, and held them up; they were gnarled and brown and weather-worn. Then suddenly she jerked them down and said, ‘Don’t look at my face!’ He had already done so and knew that it was aged and careworn. He said gallantly, ‘It shines with the light of friendship’.

  ‘Lanny darling!’ she exclaimed. She had been a little bit in love with him in the past, but now she knew that he was an entirely married man. He had put all his friends on the mailing list of the little Peace paper, and she had been reading it. ‘Oh, Lanny, you are so tragically naïve! To imagine you can bring peace to this wretched old Continent!’

  ‘You think the people haven’t had enough of war?’

  ‘The people, mon Dieu! When did they ever want a war? It is the leaders! The Soviet madmen! They are Hottentots! Do you imagine they will ever let us have peace?’

  ‘We must at least try to persuade them, Hilde’.

  ‘You cannot even reach them. If one of them was caught with a copy of your paper they would lock him up and make him confess that fifty others were in the conspiracy—fifty who had never heard the name of the paper!’

  The ‘Soviet madmen’ were very real to the conquered people of the Obersalzberg. The Americans held the federal province of Salzburg, but only a few miles away was the part of Upper Austria which the Reds held. Hilde had terrible stories to tell about them; but she had a mind that moved like a butterfly, and presently she was saying, ‘Oh, Lanny, what are you Americans going to do with us? You told me to hold on to my stocks and bonds, but what is the use if we don’t ever get dividends or interest? Are you going to let our businessmen make money again?’

  ‘I think that is our full intention, Hilde’, he was able to assure her.

  He led her out to the car and opened up the locked trunk. The first thing she saw was a fair-sized ham. ‘Ach, du lieber Gott! Ein Schinken! How on earth did you get it?’

  ‘I happened to have access to the AMG store’, he explained. He produced a five-pound box of chocolates and a sack of oranges—things which couldn’t be bought anywhere else in post-Hitler Germany.

  ‘Lanny, vous êtes un ange!’ she cried, and he saw that there were tears in her eyes. She had had so much and now had so little; her Berlin palace had been bombed and burned and her mother killed therein. She had inherited an estate in Pomerania, but now the Russians were there, and it had been what they called ‘socialized’—which meant that the peasants worked it and the Russians took as much of the produce as they saw fit.

  III

  They had a feast, and Hilde went on chattering. They were all lucky to be alive, she said, and out of the war. Really the peasant life wasn’t so bad; there were friends nearby, and they came to see her, so she got the gossip of the neighbourhood, and indeed of all aristocratic Germany. Her talk was full of that light kind of malice which was considered chic in the fashionable world. You were amused by the weaknesses of human nature, but you didn’t really mean any harm, and you certainly weren’t trying to change anything. You would invite your friends to share your meal of rutabagas, potatoes, bread and cheese; you would recall the good old days and repeat in elegant French the saying about the staircase of history echoing to the sound of wooden shoes going up and silken slippers coming down.

  That was one of the reasons Lanny had stopped off here. Not long ago Hilde had given him valuable tips as to where the Nazis had hidden the art treasures they had stolen. Might it not be that she would know something about Himmler money? The P.A. was like a fisherman working a stream; he would cast into one pool after another, never knowing where he might get a rise. He told her, ‘I had a funny experience the other day with an English pound note; I tried to spend it and found that it was counterfeit’.

  ‘And what did you do with it?’

  ‘I tore it up’.

  The old sparkle of fun came into her eyes. ‘Oh, why didn’t you bring it to me?’

  ‘What would you have done with it, spent it?’

  ‘It would have helped to pay my taxes; it might have got by. If it didn’t, of course I would have been surprised and innocent’.

  ‘Your morals have deteriorated’, he told her; and she said, ‘What do I care for the politicians? Les cochons!’

  ‘They tell me there is a lot of that false money around’—another cast with his fishing fly.

  ‘I have heard talk about it’, said Hilde. ‘The Nazis made it, of course, and I suppose they knew how. We probably spend a lot of it and don’t know the difference. I’m sure I wouldn’t’.

  So, no more of that. He let her talk about the friends they had known. He mentioned Graf Stubendorf, saying that this elderly nobleman might have art works he wanted to dispose of.

  ‘I don’t know what he has’, said Hilde. ‘They tell me he is secretive. He’s living somewhere near the Tegernsee, with an old couple who were formerly his servants. I don’t know whether he owns the place or not’.

  ‘I was told that he had been cleared by AMG and could have had a worth-while post if he had wanted it’.

  ‘He is a primitive Junker’, replied the Fürstin. ‘He probably doesn’t relish being conquered, and especially not by a democratic country. Epatant!’

  IV

  In the morning Lanny set out upon a drive through delightful scenery, the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. The sky was bright blue with puffy clouds drifting across it; one of them dropped a few flakes of snow upon Lanny’s pathway, as if to warn him to get his driving over with while he could. The air was laden with the scent of pine trees that covered the mountain slopes. The road wound here and there, following the course of a stream.

  Hidden away in these foothills were numerous lakes, large and small. The road was well marked, and when the signpost said, ‘Tegernsee’, Lanny swung off to the left and began to climb. The stream was brawling now, and its winds and turns were sharper, and presently there spread before the traveller’s eyes a lake of deep blue bordered with a blanket of perpetual dark green.


  He stopped at a little inn and asked if they could tell him where the General Graf Stubendorf resided. Ja, ja, they knew, and were proud to tell him. When he asked for lunch they were pleased to serve him, for they could see that he was a victorious American, driving an American car. To be sure, it was antique, but in those days a German was lucky if he owned a bicycle, or in the country a cart and an old horse to pull it.

  There was plenty of country food here: bread which was called black but was sound whole wheat, the kind that Lanny wanted; butter and milk, country greens, and an omelet. He wanted no more. While he ate, the hostess of the inn told him about the Herrschaft who honoured their neighbourhood. Yes, he was well and was not too lonely, for he had his books, and visitors came to see him now and then. Business was good in this lake country now, for persons who had ordinarily stayed only for the summer now lived here the year round. They would rather be snow-bound in the mountains than be back in the city where they would have to hide in a cellar or in a house with half its rooms blown away by bombs. The woman told of one family whose staircase was gone and who climbed to their rooms by ladder. Ach, ja, it was wonderful to know that no more bombs were going to fall. Ach, ja, the Americans had been very polite. Here in the hill country they had removed the Nazis from the local government and left the folk to run things as usual.

  V

  Lanny followed the directions and turned off into a little valley. There on a slope was one of those carefully tended small farms, terraced with stones and every foot of soil preserved. There was a stone cottage, of what Lanny judged to be three or four rooms. When he knocked on the front door it was opened by a tall, erect man wearing a rough peasant jacket and trousers which had long ago forgotten what it was to be pressed. On his head was a skull cap with faded embroidery, and from under it peeped white hair; the face was long, thin, smooth shaven, deeply lined. Many years had passed since Lanny had seen it, but he knew it well. ‘Good afternoon, Graf Stubendorf’, he said. ‘I do not know if you will remember me—I am Lanny Budd’.