“We are sitting in at a poker game,” responded the General, “and playing for very high stakes.”
“Your hand is not a strong one; but the same is true of your opponents. It happens that this game is different from poker in that nerve counts for even more. Also, it is possible to change the rules in the middle of the game—which cannot be done at cards.”
The General smiled; he was continually being impressed by the intelligence of this seeming-idle young man, and that was why he desired so greatly to put him to work. “Then you don’t believe our opponents will try to put ‘sanctions’ on us?”
“What I believe, Hermann, would be of no use to you. What I am telling you is the general impression among insiders, both the diplomats and the newspaper men, of whom I happen to know a number. On Isola Bella most of the time was spent figuring out how they could appear to do something while really doing nothing. Large elements of the public in both France and Britain clamor for action, and so it is necessary to appear determined, even menacing; but no one of the countries is willing to move, because no one can trust any other. Take Britain and Italy—what agreement can there be between them, now that Mussolini has definitely committed himself to the raid on Abyssinia? Is Britain going to let him have Lake Tsana and get his foot into the door of Suez? Of course not!”
“You think he has really committed himself?”
“With all those troops in Eritrea and more on the way? Are they going for that hellish climate? And why does Mussolini go to such trouble to make a bargain with Laval? Il Duce was staggered by what he was able to get—he hadn’t believed there was a man in all France who was fool enough to make such a deal.”
“What deal do you mean?”
“Na, na, Hermann! You know much more about it than I!”
“I have heard rumors, naturally; but I am interested to see if your information confirms mine.”
“Well, they have a hard and fast understanding that France will not interfere with Mussolini’s adventure and that Laval will cooperate with Mussolini in making sure that you do not move into any of your lost territories.”
“Is that generally known in the diplomatic world?”
“It is known to those who have a right to know. I got all the details in Paris as soon as the deal was made. It happens that my father and I know men who were Laval’s paymasters before he made so much money of his own. He still consults them.”
“Precisely what does Laval think he is getting out of such an arrangement?”
“He is fool enough to imagine that he is getting an ally. I could tell him otherwise, because it happens that I have known Mussolini from of old; I heard him orating when I was a youth, and my father was a friend of the American ambassador to Italy at the time that Mussolini made his famous march to the Eternal City in a Pullman car. Richard Washburn Child was what his last name implies; he thought he was saving civilization by getting the House of Morgan to lend Mussolini two hundred million dollars to start his empire. Just so Laval now thinks he is saving France by becoming a friend of the man who is teaching the children of his Balilla that Nice and Savoy and Corsica and Tunis are all parts of the new Roman empire.”
“How long will the French public be content with that course?”
“It does not depend upon the public, but upon the Comite des Forges. My father and I visited Zaharoff not long ago and I listened while they canvassed the situation thoroughly; the attitude of these men is precisely that which you know in Germany—I have heard Thyssen and Hugenberg explain it in the days when they were backing you: they want law and order, and the putting down of the Communists. In France now there is a strong movement for a Front Populaire among Reds of all shades, and the big business men are looking for any leader, any movement, any alliance that will counteract it. They would be perfectly willing to do business with you if you would allow them their share of Eastern European markets.”
“Would you be willing to take a message to these men from me?”
“It would not be to your advantage if I did so. I would be putting a label on myself, and from then on they would be careful what they said in my hearing. As it is, I am an American, and therefore a neutral; a gentleman idler, and my questions are naive. They talk even more freely to my father, since he is one of their sort, and in return he tells them what they wish to know about America. You should understand my relation to my father. He expected me to become his assistant; he educated me for that from boyhood and taught me to, keep all his business secrets. As a munitions salesman he dealt with persons high up in the different countries; to me a general was somebody to take sailing and an ambassador was somebody I could beat at tennis because he was apt to be out of condition.”
VII
So an American playboy prattled away, tossing the names of the world’s greatest as if they had been so many brightly colored balls for a juggler. Was he telling Hermann Wilhelm Goring anything Goring didn’t know? He hoped not. But everything he said was right, and in each case Lanny provided several different sources from which he might have got the particular item. He didn’t say that he was an intimate friend of Ramsay MacDonald and Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden and the rest; he merely told anecdotes about their personal peculiarities, and quoted them as having said the things which they would and must have said. It was hard to name anybody he hadn’t listened to.
He talked about the negotiations over naval limitations between England and Germany, which were supposed to be the most precious of state secrets at the moment; he mentioned offhand and as a matter of course the twelve sea-going submarines which Germany was building at Wilhelmshaven—in spite of the Versailles prohibition and the dementis of the Wilhelmstrasse; also the tonnage of the battleships in process. Of course Germany was building against Russia and not against France—at least that was what Laval and his friends wanted to believe. “It may be different when you are ready to move into the Rhineland,” said the playboy, with a smile, and the fat General didn’t attempt to deny or to contradict any of these brash and undiplomatic assumptions. The General must have been wondering whether he himself had been talking in his sleep; or perhaps whether the American had been consulting that Polish medium whom they kept in their home and about whom Lanny’s wife had been telling Hermann’s wife!
The upshot of it all was that Goring realized he had a valuable friend, and at an absurdly low price; it occurred to him that it might be the part of wisdom to raise the price at once. He said: “Sagen Sie mal, Lanny; you’re having trouble with the rest of those paintings, I imagine. Are the prices too high?”
“I’m rather afraid they are. You will remember I warned you; nobody has as much money as they had ten years ago—save only yourself, Hermann.”
The fat man tossed back his head. It was really impudent, and tickled him greatly. He was experiencing that which caused the kings of old days to have a court jester: boredom with sycophancy, the cloying effect of flattery, the need of the human system for some new flavor, some pungency or tang in social intercourse.
“I have offered to divide with you,” said the master of all Prussia, “and I put no limit on your demands.”
“I am an art expert,” replied the American, “and I like to find purchasers for beautiful masterpieces.”
“Well, since you must have it that way, I’ll reduce the price of mine. Would that help?”
“It might, if you wish to dispose of them.”
“Jawohl, suppose I make a cut of ten per cent all along the line. Or would twenty be better?”
“It would be wiser not to ask me about that, since I am representing my clients, and it is my duty to get them the lowest prices I can.”
“I’m willing to take my chances. You sell the rest of the paintings for what you think fair. I want to show my confidence in you.”
“That is very kind,” said Lanny. “I can’t recall that any owner of a painting has ever taken that attitude to me.”
“Art is not my principal interest in life just now,” replie
d the fat commander. There was a twinkle in the cold blue eyes, and for the moment he seemed human; Lanny had to keep saying to himself: “Don’t forget, he’s the killer!”
VIII
Late in the afternoon one of the staff cars took the guests back to Berlin, and in the morning Lanny went to the former Johannes Robin palace and presented his bank draft, inspected the three paintings, and saw them carried to his car. He received another of the invaluable bills of sale, also the exit permits for himself and wife. Irma had proposed that they start at once, but Lanny had pleaded that there were art shows he really should take in. Irma had made a luncheon engagement, to be followed by a session of a game called bridge, whose rules are international and are not changed while the game is in progress.
So, at a quarter to three o’clock Lanny was driving in the Moabit district, turning many corners and watching in his little front mirror to make certain that no other car followed the same eccentric course. He rolled through one stone canyon after another, endless vistas of those six-story tenements which have become standard for wage-slaves in Megalopolis throughout the world. Here they were cleaner and less dingy than in any other city Lanny had visited, and now in bright spring weather the flowers in window boxes made the scene almost cheerful. Nobody except a few children paid any attention to a car rolling quietly, and there was no need to come through the same block twice, for there was an oversupply of blocks, and except for the names at the corners a stranger could not have told one from another. It was the same with the people of the neighborhood; subdued and standardized creatures, prisoners of the machine, cliff-dwellers of capitalism.
With his watch on the seat beside him Lanny came to the familiar corner on the stroke of fifteen o’clock, as they called it on the Continent. He looked for the figure in the gray print dress and the little black hat, but he did not see it, and slowed up his car to look down the intersecting street from which on previous occasions she had appeared. But she wasn’t there, nor was she on the street down which he drove. They had set their watches together, but of course one of them might have got wrong, so after driving a couple of blocks he made a right turn, coming around two blocks and back to the appointed corner. Again he watched in every direction; but no Trudi.
He was beginning to be worried. She had always been prompt on the minute, and he knew that nothing would keep her from this appointment except sheer physical disability. They had repeated the details of their understanding so carefully as to preclude the possibility of mistake. If she had come too early, she would surely not have gone away without waiting or coming back on her tracks to look for him. Perhaps she had done so while he was making his encirclement; so he drove down the street again, this time making a left turn, so as to take him around two different blocks and avoid making his car conspicuous. He studied the street signs to make sure there was no mistake; this was the corner, and the time was now fifteen minutes past the hour.
He kept up this procedure for quite a while, driving this way and that, circling all the four blocks which made the intersection and coming back again and again. He decided that one of them must have misunderstood; Trudi must be at the other corner agreed upon, the one where he was to have received the documents. He drove to that corner, and repeated his procedure of driving around one block and then another; but in vain. He came back to the first place, and did more circling, keeping a look-out in every direction—not merely for. Trudi, but for Stormtrooper or other Nazi uniforms, policemen, or loiterers who might betray interest in a de luxe motor-car.
IX
At last the sickening conviction settled itself in Lanny’s mind: Trudi Schultz wasn’t keeping this appointment, and there was nothing to be gained by waiting any longer. He gave up and drove at random on one of the boulevards, so as to think without interruption. Something had happened to his fellow-conspirator, out in that darkness into which she disappeared; something serious, for nothing less would have stopped her. She might have been struck in the traffic, or have met with some other serious accident; but far more probable was the thing from which Lanny’s mind shrank in agonized dread—that the Gestapo had got her!
It might be, of course, that they were looking for her; she had received a warning and had fled; she was “sleeping out”—the phrase used by these “underground” people to describe the condition when they did not dare come to their homes or to stay in any one place for two consecutive nights. If that was so with Trudi she would surely drop him a note to the Adlon; she would find some phrase to convey to him the idea of danger. They had talked about this, and she would be careful to write so that the shrewdest police agent would find nothing suspicious.
Of course, if the Gestapo had actually got her, they would be torturing her, trying to wring her secrets out of her. They might have had her for the past two days, and if so, that graceful and active figure would be a cringing and shuddering wreck. The thought of it made cold sweat come out on the forehead of Lanny Budd; made him dizzy, so that he had to stop his car at the side of the Potsdamer Platz and turn his face from the passers-by. He thought only of Trudi, and not of possible danger to himself—for he was certain that this woman would die as many deaths as need be before breathing the name of one of her friends. But then he thought: “They may have Monck, too!” He thought: “Monck may be their agent!” At no time since their first meeting had Trudi mentioned this man, and Lanny had no idea where he was or what he was doing. If he was a spy, or if he gave way and talked, then Lanny himself was in serious danger, and instead of wandering distractedly about the streets of Berlin he ought to be getting his wife and his belongings and streaking it for the border.
X
Once more a lover of die schonen Kunste came face to face with the tragedy which had befallen Germany. One of the world’s most civilized peoples had got into the clutches of this monstrous thing, this lunatic’s dream turned into reality and setting out to uproot and destroy every humane and decent influence among sixty millions of people! If you were a citizen of this land you had to submit and become its slave; to sweat and toil and bleed for it, to share all its vileness and its crimes, to let it take your children and distort their minds and make them into little monsters in its own image. Either that or else sacrifice forever your safety and peace of mind; become a hunted creature, with a hunted soul; know that the evil thing was stalking you, dogging your footsteps day and night, lurking in your home, bribing your servants, teaching your own little ones to report you and bring you to destruction! You had to live in the knowledge that the slightest misstep, a single betraying word or even look—or for that matter the lie of an enemy, a discharged employee, a disgruntled servant, a rival in love or in business—might serve to throw you into an underground dungeon and subject you to such tortures that you would cry out for death!
Lanny was back in the days of Freddi Robin, when he had waited and feared and imagined dreadful things—none of them worse than the reality. Hoping for a telephone call or a message; waiting hour after hour, day after day, for something which wasn’t going to come. Then at least he had had Irma to whisper to; they could go out in the car and indulge in the privilege of normal human beings, to say what they thought. But now he had nobody; he had to carry this burden alone, and have it increased by the necessity of acting a part and keeping his wife from guessing that he had trouble on his mind.
At first he thought he couldn’t stand it. He would take Irma in the car, tell the truth, and throw himself on her mercy. But he knew that she wouldn’t have any mercy; she had told him the state of her mind and given him fair warning. She had suffered the Freddi affair because she had to; because Freddi had been the brother of Lanny’s brother-in-law, and Irma had been a guest in the home and on the yacht of Freddi’s father. Those were ties which you couldn’t refuse to acknowledge, much as you might hate and resent them. But what did Irma owe to Trudi Schultz?
She had met Trudi two or three times, rather casually; once at an evening reception at the school, where she had disliked eve
rybody; again when the young artist couple had been invited to a gathering in the Robin palace, where they had felt out of place and looked it. To Irma all shades of Pink were Red, and if the Schultzes weren’t that, they were dupes like Lanny himself. They had brought on this Nazi terror, they had “asked for it,” in the current American slang; now, if they wanted to overthrow the German government that was their business, and if Lanny wanted to help them it was Lanny’s business, but in neither case was it going to be the business of Irma Barnes.
No, Lanny must go back to the hotel and talk about the pictures he had seen; he must invent some excuse for remaining in Berlin, for he was determined to come once more to the appointed corner both at twelve and at fifteen o’clock. Something might have happened; Trudi might have had a fainting-spell owing to lack of nourishment; she might have fallen and broken her ankle. He must get hold of an afternoon paper, to see if there was any story about an unidentified young woman being knocked senseless by a taxicab or a bandit. Also, he must look in the amusement section for an entertainment that he could persuade Irma to be interested in. When he got back to the hotel he must call up somebody and make a date to see an old master and try to get a price on it.
These activities would help to keep his mind off the idea that the General’s bloodhounds might be hot on his trail; that the General’s torturers might be sharpening their knives and practicing the shrill whistling sounds of their whipping-rods. Lanny Budd, who had made an effort to enjoy the hospitality of Karinhall and had succeeded reasonably well, now thought: “That fat slob may be looking over those stolen reports and Trudi’s confession!” He thought: “I ought to have shot the son-of-a-bitch while I had a chance.” But no, that wouldn’t have changed anything, really. Some other capable Nazi would have carried on, and the system would have become yet more ruthless and determined. What was needed was truth-telling about it, the shouting of its crimes from all the housetops of the world; and after that—Lanny tried to peer into the future, but it was like trying to see to the bottom of a volcano in eruption.
Wide Is the Gate Page 21