Presidential Mission

by Sinclair, Upton;

  All that was understandable enough. The man was here to make a business deal of some sort, and perhaps he needed the money and had offered a “rake-off” to Göring’s sister-in-law, and so had been invited to Karinhall. What puzzled Lanny was the lack of a certain atmosphere that went with that kind of activity. The P.A. described it to himself by the world “smell.” Red Erickson didn’t smell Nazi, or Fascist, or pro-either. He didn’t have the cynicism by which men justify such attitudes; he didn’t seem to despise his fellow men, rich or poor; he didn’t have the toady spirit, the power-worshiping spirit. In short, he appeared to be a decent person, and what the devil was he doing in this galère?

  All this meant that Lanny was becoming suspicious of Erickson; and the disturbing thought occurred to him that Erickson might as easily become suspicious of him. Perhaps Lanny also was being too decent; perhaps he didn’t have the “Nazi smell.” Lanny thought it over and decided that he had better explain himself a bit more clearly. “You know, Mr. Erickson, I don’t want you to think that I have taken this trip into Germany just to buy paintings. Ever since this war broke out my father and I have been trying to figure out a way it can end short of the complete ruin of Europe. I find myself in an unusual position, because I have so many friends who happen to be persons of influence in the different countries. I have constituted myself a sort of messenger—not official, but just human. Some may call me a meddler; but I find that Göring likes to hear what important people are saying in Washington and London, and when I go back they are interested to know Göring’s reaction to their thoughts.”

  “It is too bad that more people aren’t in a position to do that,” opined the oil man. “May I ask, why don’t you visit Sweden? We have many of your way of thinking, and some are influential.”

  “I have thought of coming, Mr. Erickson. Perhaps some day I shall.”

  XIII

  The result of that démarche was that Red Erickson invited the peace messenger for a sleigh ride, a pleasure that guests at this hunting lodge might enjoy for the asking. Presently there stood before the door a shining sleigh for two and a pair of eager horses breathing steam into the frosty air. Erickson drove; he loved horses, he said, and rode and hunted much at his home. Lanny sat beside him, sharing a bearskin robe over his knees. They enjoyed the sights of this magnificent forest, which had once belonged to the Prussian State and now belonged to Hermann; he ruled it in two capacities, as Prime Minister of Prussia and as Chief Forester of the Reich. They stopped for a while to watch the stags and their families at the feeding racks; these splendid creatures had long since forgotten how to take care of themselves in the snowbound forests, and behaved exactly like humans who discover that they do not have to work. Lanny remarked about this, and the other smiled; he had seen it often, he said.

  This conversation would have been amusing to an auditor who knew the situation. Both men were “fishing,” both “sparring for points,” trying to get the other fellow’s secrets without imparting his own. Erickson asked what Lanny thought about the war and is prospects; Lanny could say only what he had said to Hitler and to Göring, that Germany would always be the bulwark between Russia and Western Europe. Surely it wasn’t the part of wisdom to tear down that bulwark; the Swedes, of all people in the world, ought to understand it.

  The oil man said yes, but the Scandinavian lands had strong ties with Britain, too; their political systems were alike, and they were lovers of personal liberty. This was a bid for Lanny to say that he was a lover of liberty; but how could he say that while he was being pulled by Göring’s horses, and with a letter from Hitler in his pocket? He had to say, somewhat lamely, that the problem was to appease all the nations, to work out a compromise and make an agreement that would last.

  Then the P.A. took a turn at baiting a hook. He talked about the oil business, and about Zaharoff, whom Erickson had never met; he told about the old spider’s efforts during World War I to keep the Americans from building airplanes to bomb his steel and munitions plants that were in the hands of the Germans. He told about some of the intrigues of this present war; then he remarked, quite casually: “I am wondering how you get along without being blacklisted by the Allies, Mr. Erickson.”

  The other answered promptly. “They have had me blacklisted from the beginning. But it doesn’t worry me because my business is exclusively with Axis customers. How I’ll make out afterward is something it would take a soothsayer to tell.” Then, having answered frankly, he came back: “I have been wondering the same thing about you, Mr. Budd. How can you ship paintings to New York?”

  Lanny had to pretend to be no less frank. “Before America got into the mess, I was all right. Now I’m not sure just what I’ll do. Perhaps I’ll store them in Sweden till the war is over. I’ve been wondering if I had the right to ask you for advice.”

  “I’ll tell you anything I can, Mr. Budd. Why don’t you come with me to Stockholm? I am one of those fortunate persons who will be furnished with a car to Stettin, and I’ll be glad to take you along.”

  “How kind to a comparative stranger! Unfortunately I have to go back to Berlin for at least a day or two.”

  “I have to go there for several days. Let us meet there. I am deeply interested in your ideas about the war and the peace. I should like to introduce you to some of my friends in Sweden. Prince Carl, junior, of Belgium, is a good friend of mine; he is the Swedish King’s nephew.”

  “I have heard of him,” Lanny said. “I have played tennis with your King on the Riviera. I’ll think the matter over and let you know. Unfortunately my passport doesn’t cover Sweden, but that, I suppose, could be fixed up.”

  XIV

  Lanny looked over the list of his achievements on this trip to Germany, and it seemed to him that it was pretty poor pickings. The things he had hoped to get had already been sent in by Monck; and while this was good to know, it didn’t help Lanny’s score. His talks with Hitler and Göring—the terms of peace, the guaranteeing of the British Empire and the presenting of Latin America to the United States—all that was just so much wind. The only real things he had learned were that Hitler was more nervous and hysterical than ever, and that Göring was an advancing case of paranoia. He might have stayed at home and guessed as much with less trouble.

  He just hadn’t had any luck. To be sure, Göring had taken his guests into the map room, a wonderful place with detail maps covering whole wall surfaces. The guests had stood and looked at a map of the eastern front, with little red pins showing the Russian troop units and green pins for the German. Lanny might have tried to memorize some of that; but would it have been worth the trouble? The front was shifting continually, and the Russians had their observation planes taking photographs and their swarms of spies all over that snow-covered land. What chance would there be for a guest of Karinhall to bring anything that was still valid?

  If he had been superstitious he would have knocked on wood or carried a rabbit’s foot. If he had been religious, he would have prayed. As it was, all he did was to think continuously and to wish mightily; perhaps that had something to do with it—we should have to know a lot more about the subconscious mind and its infinitudes before we could be sure. Be that as it may, there arrived at Der Dicke’s hunting lodge another art plunderer, Bruno Lohse by name, Baron von Behr’s assistant and deputy on the Einsatzstab. He was introduced to Herr Budd by Göring’s competent and devoted secretary, Fräulein Gisela Limberger, and at first he was rather standoffish, wondering what the devil an American was doing in this Nazi shrine. But, as it turned out, he knew Kurt Meissner well; and then he recollected that Kurt had told him about having an American friend who had known and appreciated the Führer from a long way back. Lanny showed his magic letter, and all was well.

  The P.A. liked Bruno Lohse as much as it was possible to like any Nazi. To put it another way, Bruno Lohse was as good as it was possible for any Nazi to be. He was a sincere believer in his creed; he made Lanny think of Heinrich Jung, in the days of Heinrich’s
youth, when he had been inspired, and before he had become a cog in a Party machine. Lohse, unlike so many Nazis, was a physical examplar of his faith; he was tall, blond, and handsome, and if he was a cruel looter, it was because he was convinced that he was preparing a master cultural instrument for the master race of the world. He was a genuine lover of art, and a genuine student in the systematic, hard-working Prussian manner.

  So he was interested in Lanny Budd’s stories about art adventures, such as his finding of “The Comendador,” a well-known Goya, in a decrepit mansion in a lonely part of the Spanish province of Aragon. Lanny did not forget to mention how he had found a couple of representative Defreggers for the Führer, and how the Führer had ordered half a dozen Detazes and put them in the Bechstein house at Berchtesgaden. Lohse had never been to Berchtesgaden, and knew the Führer only as most Nazis did, as a figure on a platform and a voice over the radio. He decided that this American was a very important person indeed, and a true authority on his specialty.

  The Einsatzstab man had just come back from a trip to Norway. Some wealthy collector had spirited his art treasures out of Oslo and hidden them in a hut on a mountainside. The secret had been betrayed, and Lohse had gone to see if the works were any good, and if so, to bring them to Karinhall. The best of them, including a Rembrandt, were on their way now, and the deputy told about them, and hoped they might arrive in time for Herr Budd to inspect them. It was near a town called Rjukan, he mentioned, and Lanny said he had never heard of it. Lohse described it as being in the southern part of the country, not far from the coast; a really lovely spot, on a little river, between two mountain lakes. Then he added one sentence: “They have lots of hydroelectric power, and it’s where we are making heavy water.”

  Lanny almost ruined himself by betraying his excitement. Only many years of practice enabled him to keep from catching his breath. “Heavy water?” he said. “What is that?”

  “I don’t know,” replied the young Nazi. “It’s something they do to water that makes it weigh more.”

  “Funny thing,” commented the American. “Modern physics and chemistry have gone so far these days that we laymen don’t even know the language. The Führer sent me to meet Professor Doktor Salzmann, at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, and honestly, it was as if I were listening to a man from another planet.”

  The P.A. went away from that casual chat, saying to himself: “Rjukan! Rjukan!” It became a little tune to which he wanted to dance!

  25

  Farewell the Tranquil Mind

  I

  Hermann Göring was a dominating and blustering host. His unresting ego did not permit him to permit his guests to do what they pleased; he told them how to entertain themselves, and he told them what to think. When he was with them, he took charge of the conversation; when he chose to be funny, they all laughed, and he laughed loudest. In the map room he delivered a lecture on the state of the war. When he received a telegram informing him that the Russians had taken Krasnograd and Pavlograd, he read the news to the guests and made it all right by explaining that these were strategic withdrawals, that the Germans were allowing the Reds to exhaust themselves, and meantime were accumulating and training a million and a half new troops for the final spring offensive.

  Lanny understood this application of the “Führerprinzip” and accommodated himself to it. Alone with his host, he would joke and be saucy, but never when there was any other person present. Jokes à deux were intimacy, but jokes à trois would have looked like rivalry and caused hatred and mistrust to be generated in the depths of a tormented soul. Der Dicke had too good a mind and too sound a military education not to know that his country had fought and lost its “Gettysburg.” Alone in the night, he must have shuddered at the prospect of defeat, of the Red hordes sweeping onward into Poland and through Poland into Germany. The ideas and images must have been madness to him, and the secret agent in his household kept saying to himself: “Achtung! Achtung!” Look out!

  The master of men summoned the guest into his private office. The guest went, and spent a couple of hours, one in listening to Göring, and the other answering his closely pressed questions. Here the Reichsmarschall made little effort to conceal his anxiety; but Lanny didn’t make the mistake of agreeing with him. Lanny wasn’t supposed to be a military expert, and it was possible for him to pretend to believe that the scrapings of the German manpower barrel, the lame, the halt, and the wounded, the too young and the too old, the tubercular and the syphilitic, the criminals released from jail and the foreigners impressed into service—that all this miscellany could be trained in three months and sent out to halt and overcome double their numbers of fresh and sound Russian peasants armed with British and American weapons. Lanny pretended, and the other was so mentally weakened that he was glad of the pretense.

  What Göring wanted at this stage of the war was the same thing that Rudolf Hess had been wanting since way back. “Our diplomacy has blundered criminally,” he confessed. “It is that malevolent jackass, that Grobian Ribbentrop who is to blame. He went to England and made a fool of himself before the King, and because the King behaved as English gentlemen do in the presence of a fool, our champagne-salesman diplomat decided to punish the whole Anglo-Saxon race. I tell you truly, Lanny, there is nothing on this earth I would not give, including my life, to see Britain and America helping in this war against Bolshevism.”

  “You are absolutely right, Hermann,” said the P.A. “I have done everything in my power, including the risking of my life. I am ready to go on, with my last breath.”

  “I am powerless to understand it, Lanny, and I ask myself: Are the Anglo-Saxon statesmen mad, or is it just that they are ignorant? Can’t they read one of Lenin’s books, or one of Stalin’s, and see the program of world domination that these Reds have so carefully explained to their followers?”

  “Statesmen seldom read books, lieber Freund; they read newspapers, and the reports of their agents, and sometimes the public-opinion polls. After that, their minds are tired, and they want a murder mystery to put them to sleep.”

  “There has never been murder on such a scale as the Reds are committing now, wherever their power extends. And as for mysteries, I am going to take you into a secret, Lanny. Tell it to some of the Allied statesmen. Take it as my word to Churchill.”

  “It would be rather difficult for me to get to Churchill—coming out of Germany. In fact it may be impossible for me to get into England.”

  “Do what you can. Tell it in America and ask them to send it back. In November of 1940, half a year before we blundered into our attack on Russia, Molotov was in Berlin, discussing with Ribbentrop the subject of a postwar settlement and what Russia expected in it. Here is a transcript of the discussion”—Göring had his hand on a thick and heavy typescript bound in black leather—“and I am going to leave it with you overnight. I cannot let you take it out, but you have my permission to make notes of it, and to take those notes out with you.”

  “That is certainly an extraordinary favor, Hermann.”

  “It is a favor that you will be doing me, if you can convince the Allied statesmen what kind of men they are dealing with. What Molotov demanded of us when he was certain that we had Britain licked is what he will demand of Britain and America, if and when he considers that Germany has been licked. Any Allied statesman who can read it without shivering in his boots must indeed be a mental defective.”

  “Na nu, Hermann: I can only regret that you did not entrust me with this secret earlier in the game.”

  “You were here, Lanny, and you know that the matter was not in my hands. It was Ribbentrop and Goebbels against Hess and myself, competing for the Führer’s mind. The wrong side won out.”

  “Welches Verhängnis!” said the sympathetic guest. He had heard only recently that the champagne salesman had referred to the over-decorated Reichsmarschall as “that Christmas tree,” so he understood the enmity between them.

  “Understand,” said Göring, “I wasn’t
present at these conferences, but both Ribbentrop and the Führer discussed them with me in detail, and these are my notes on what they told me, and also official documents connected with the negotiations.”

  II

  Lanny took that document, more precious than all the handfuls of jewels that Der Dicke carried in his coat pockets and fondled at his dinner table. He took it to his room and locked himself in, and stayed until the small hours of the morning, reading it in bed. He made no notes, for he knew that he could not take any such papers out of Germany without having one of Göring’s men accompany him to the border and see him across; even then, it might become an issue among the various gangs that were competing for the Führer’s favor—and Lanny had heard from the Führer’s own lips that it was not Göring who was “tops” at the moment. Who it was, Lanny didn’t know; probably Himmler, and the P.A. surely didn’t want any encounter with the fanatical head of the Gestapo, the ex-schoolteacher who was, by all accounts, so mild and amiable personally, and had men and women killed by tens of thousands without disturbing his smile or his breakfast.

  There was no need of notes. Lanny knew the world situation, and every word he read now was stamped upon his mind. What Molotov had put forward was the age-old Russian demand for access to warm water—both from the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea. The Skagerrak and the Kattegat must be “open,” and the Dardanelles must be under Soviet control. All during the morning of November 12 the champagne salesman had listened patiently to these demands, and had insisted politely but firmly that the proper way for Russia to reach warm water was by the Persian Gulf. That meant the taking of Iraq and Iran, with all their vast treasures of oil—a very generous offer indeed, except that the oil now belonged to Britain and America, who would hardly give it up without war. During the afternoon of the same day Hitler had joined the conference and had listened, but not so politely. He was quite willing for the Russians to conquer Finland and to keep the Baltic states which they already had; but they must go southeastward, not southwestward into the Balkans, which he had marked for his own. Berlin to Bagdad!—the slogan of the Kaiserzeit.