Presidential Mission

by Sinclair, Upton;

  VII

  The sweet interlude was broken by a buzzer on the desk. The Führer took up a telephone receiver, listened, then said, “Put him on.” He listened again for a few seconds. Lanny could not hear the voice at the other end and dared not appear to be trying. But he could not help seeing Hitler and the transformation which the few seconds produced in the listener’s face and manner; he frowned, gritted his teeth, clenched his free hand, and when he spoke again it was the bellow of a bull. “Der gottverdammte Schurke! Was für ein Betrug! Take the Schweinehund out and shoot him! No, you don’t need any written order. Shoot him first and get the order afterward.” There followed a string of epithets which Adi had learned in the Innviertel, some of them filthy words of which Lanny had to guess the meaning.

  The Führer of the Germans slammed down the receiver and sat glaring at his imaginary foes in empty space. Lanny shrank inwardly, not wishing to divert that Stygian wrath upon himself. But there was no escaping; an auditor was required, and there was only one at hand.

  “There is your Prussian Adel, your Junkertum!” he burst out. “These proud gentry think they are the masters, they are the rulers of Germany for the past hundred years and they dare to set themselves against my will, they disobey my explicit orders, they plot together like so many Bolsheviks. Aber, Gott sei mein Zeuge, I will teach them their mistake! Ich bin es, ich, whom the German people have chosen as their guide, and those who oppose me I shall crush to the last scoundrel, the last traitor!”

  That was the start. Every time Lanny had been in the Führer’s home he had witnessed one or more of these outbursts, and wondered in Gottes Namen, when they would stop, and how could a human organism endure the expenditure of such quantities of energy. Here was a man who might speak to fifty million people anytime he chose—indeed he might speak to the whole world with the certainty of being heard or read by all the thinking portion; yet again and again he was willing to expend the same amount of effort in addressing one or two persons—could it even be no person? Lanny wondered if he had these frenzies when he was all alone in that eagle’s eyrie which he had had built for him on the top of the Kehlstein? Did he there make orations to God, or to posterity, or to that German Geist who was his dream companion?

  Now he was talking to his American agent, and he wasn’t content to denounce the Prussian nobility, the arrogant caste whom he was breaking to his will; he must go on and tell why they were wrong and why he, the divinely appointed Führer of the Aryan world, was eternally and everlastingly right. Lanny never did find out who it was that was being shot at this moment; but apparently the victim had spoken or written something about having the Führer shot. It didn’t occur to Adi that he himself had just been planning to have Roosevelt shot, and if he had been reminded of this he would have seen no resemblance between the two cases. The Jewish-descended Rosenfeld was the representative of democratic license and Bolshevik depravity, whereas Adolf Hitler was the white knight of Aryan purity and virtue. His cause was holy, and those who opposed it were devils or disciples of devils.

  All this the onetime wastrel from the home for the shelterless in Vienna explained to the son of Budd-Erling Aircraft in detail. A note of frenzy came into his voice, almost of despair; he was surrounded by these diabolical foes, and they were crowding in upon him, he was being forced to face the fact that they might bring him to complete collapse and ruin. It was too awful, too wicked, too far beyond belief. This marvelous Third Reich that he had built, this thing of power and goodness beyond compare, this structure that was guaranteed to last a thousand years and that had triumphed over one foe after another—Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, Belgium, Norway, France, and then Rumania, Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, and at least half of Russia—wonderful, wonderful beyond all the tales of history! And all this was to fail, all this was to collapse into ruin, because of two despised rotten democratic lands and one obscene ghoulish Asiatic land ruled by its Lumpenproletariat! No, it was beyond belief, it was the victory of Satan over God. Adi, who had so far relied upon himself alone, became religious in his language when he contemplated this cosmic calamity.

  Apparently he had the idea that this grown-up playboy from overseas was the god out of a machine who could save the situation; he implored the divine messenger to go at once and have Roosevelt carried down to Hell—to do it himself if necessary! And Lanny, scared white in the presence of this foaming tirade, could only keep murmuring, “Ja, ja, mein Führer! Wie recht haben Sie! Die reine Wahrheit aus Ihren Worten! Wie klar ist Ihre Voraussicht!” and so on, anything that would indicate his lack of opposition to this genius-madman, this wretched gutter rat whose inferiority complex had evolved into a Messiah compulsion beyond anything that any psychiatrist could have conceived. One man’s mental disorder had knocked down a dozen nations of Europe and had forced the rest of the world to assemble twenty or thirty million men in arms, and to convert their economies from the production of useful goods to the means of wholesale killing. The son of Budd-Erling thought, Dear God, all I want is to get out of this place alive!

  VIII

  The tirade ended as Lanny had seen others end; for the Führer was only half mad, and the other half watched what he was doing and did not permit him to wreck himself. One moment he was pacing the room and slapping his thighs violently; the next moment he stopped, wiped the perspiration from his forehead and the spittle gathered in the corners of his mouth, and said quietly, “You know all that, Herr Budd.” He did not apologize, for that was contrary to the principle upon which he ran Germany: “Hitler hat immer recht.” He was always right and his critics always wrong.

  He continued, “You know, Herr Budd, I am by nature a sociable man, and in the old days it would have been my pleasure to spend an evening with you and have you play the piano for me, and have Kannenberg sing some of our old Bavarian songs. But now I have no time for any sort of recreation; I carry the fate of Germany in these two hands”—he showed the hands, clenched into fists. “Now with the barbarous foe pressing close to our gates, I have to make a hundred decisions in a day.”

  “I quite understand, mein Führer,” said the respectful visitor. “I am honored that you have given me this much time.”

  “Is there anything you wish to do in Germany?”

  Lanny replied, “As you may know, I have a half-sister living near Berlin; she is Marceline, the dancer, daughter of Marcel Detaze, the French painter whose works you possess. If I am going back by way of Berlin, I should like to take a few hours to visit her and tell her about her little son, who is with my mother. After that you may send me straight on to Rome, and I’ll report to you as quickly as I can get anything of importance.”

  “Richtig,” said Hitler. “You will report directly to me through Marshal Kesselring.”

  “I trust, mein Führer, that you will let the Marshal know that you have reason to feel sure of my good faith. It must have been surprising to him to have an enemy alien walk into his headquarters.”

  “I will make the situation clear; and you, Herr Budd, may be sure of my gratitude, and my willingness to do anything in my power to repay you.”

  “What I want from you, Exzellenz, is to prove to your opponents, and especially to the people of my own misguided land, that the system you have established is here to stay. You must have some idea what a moral strain it is to me to return to America and listen to the talk I hear there. What a relief when the day comes that I can be free to speak the truth in that land in which Jewish lies are enthroned.”

  “Das kann ich mir vorstellen, Herr Budd. Leben Sie wohl.”

  IX

  Lanny was flown the same evening to Berlin and was met at the airport by an Oberleutnant of the Waffen SS who had been appointed as his escort in order to avoid possible inconveniences. Absolut korrekt, this young officer betrayed no trace of the curiosity he must have felt. He drove the American visitor to a small hotel in the suburbs, where dangers from bombing would be slight. Lanny’s first act on arrival was to telep
hone his old friend Heinrich Jung, who was all but speechless with delight at the sound of Lanny’s voice. He showed up for breakfast in the morning, and it turned out, most agreeably, that Oberleutnant Harz was one of his pupils from a long time back.

  It was a huge educational machine which the Führer and his aides had built for the purpose of training millions of young Germans to take delight in marching, singing, wearing uniforms, carrying banners, and wielding “daggers of honor”: the Hitler Youth, if they happened to be of the male sex, and otherwise the Hitler Maidens. They couldn’t all be made to look exactly alike, but they could be made to think exactly alike, and it interested the visitor from overseas to observe how Heinrich, whom he had known for thirty years come next Christmas, had managed to train a whole generation who looked like Heinrich and thought exactly as Heinrich thought. The SS Oberleutnant regarded the Jugend official as a semi-divine being because he had known the Führer in the early sanctified days and had actually visited him in prison; he was thrilled to be pledged to secrecy on the subject of a secret agent of the Führer—it was the greatest honor of his life, he said, and his blushes backed up his words.

  Heinrich was a desk official and belonged to a favored caste so far as rations were concerned, so he still had an expanding waistline. He hadn’t much news, except that his office had been bombed out, fortunately at night while he was at home. His numerous family were well and his wife sent her regards. He told about Kurt Meissner, who had a crippled arm and could no longer play the piano, but who composed National Socialist music of extraordinary fervor. Kurt’s spirit was undaunted, and so was Heinrich’s, and when Lanny asked the Oberleutnant, he reported that it was the same with himself. Things were going badly at the moment, and the military and party people could not help knowing it, but they had been taught a formula which they recited publicly on all occasions and doubtless said in place of prayers: Frederick the Great had been beaten on more than one occasion, but had refused to know that he was beaten, and in the end he had triumphed gloriously.

  “We must prove that we can endure longer than the enemy,” said Heinrich; and Lanny, who was part of the enemy, replied, “The American people have been used to an easy life and do not yet realize what they are in for.” The Jugend official went on to talk piously about Blood and Soil—Blut und Boden, which in prewar days the busy wits of Berlin had abbreviated to “Blubo.” But nobody talked that way now; all Germans who were not in concentration camps were solidly united in defense of their sacred heritage.

  X

  Marceline Detaze, like the Germans who had money and were free, had removed herself to the country, as far as possible from bombing objectives. Being the daughter of a Frenchman and deriving her citizenship from him, she was not classified as an enemy; being the cherished Freundin of a Prussian nobleman and Wehrmacht officer, she had obtained permission to come and go as she pleased. An hour’s drive from the city she had found what had been a school for young ladies and now was a hospital for wounded officers. The extensive grounds had been turned into potato fields; but one corner had been spared because of big shade trees, and there was a gardener’s cottage which Marceline had leased for a year. She lived with an old woman for a maid, and read fiction from the school library—every afternoon she read aloud to the patients, because it was a bore to be alone. She said this apologetically, not wanting her brother to think that she had turned into a humanitarian or anything of that pretentious sort.

  Marceline had been born in the middle of World War I, and everything she had heard in later years had caused her to hate it. Now she hated World War II, for one sufficient reason, that it had ruined the career of a girl who had worked hard to have her own way, and now in the midst of her triumph had been knocked out. It was all right to talk to soldiers about Frederick the Great, but that had no meaning to a night-club dancer; the clear-sighted Marceline knew that there would be no more dancing in Germany for a long time, and that by going into Germany she had made herself hated in most of the countries that had money.

  Here she was, compelled to do her practicing in a room about fifteen feet square, and to music that came over the radio; at first she had had the use of a small stage at night, but now it was filled with beds; everything in Germany was being filled with beds for wounded men, and Marceline had to hear their stories and write letters for them. “And of course when they get anywhere near well, they want to sleep with me,” she said, having the European frankness on this subject. Lanny knew as well as she the code of the Hitlerites, that it was every woman’s duty to give sexual comfort to a soldier, and to bear a future soldier or mother of soldiers for the Fatherland whenever and however that might be possible. “I tell them that I have a lover,” she went on, “but that doesn’t mean much to them. I am afraid the doctors of this institution consider me an alien and disturbing influence.”

  It was easy enough for Lanny to believe that she was disturbing. She was twenty-five and at the height of her carefully cultivated charms. She had been fashion’s darling from the age when she had learned to stand in front of a mirror, to turn this way and that and survey herself. At the age of five she had sat at her mother’s dressing table, examining her hair, her skin, her eyes, and applying a variety of substances out of ornate expensive bottles. Later, when all these operations were completed, she went among the right sort of people, those who were wealthy and socially prominent, and when they turned to look at her the purpose of her life was achieved.

  There was no use trying to change her—Lanny had learned that. Perhaps, he reflected, that was what it took to make a successful artiste; that was what she expressed in the dance—pride and worldly glory; that was all she had to express, and all that her audience would have understood. Sex, yes, but not its physical side; that would have been crude and vulgar. Sex idealized, transmuted into pride and worldly glory; the sex of the ruling-class woman, whose price was not a meal but a kingdom—that was what her charms represented.

  She wanted to hear all about her little boy; but Lanny had observed that when she was with the child she quickly became bored. She had been shocked to hear that he had been taken out of the Axis world, but Lanny had persuaded her that it was unavoidable. She wanted to know all about Beauty, and when Lanny mentioned the wrinkles she was politely sympathetic. However, this feeling did not go very deep; it was inconceivable to Marceline that such a calamity could ever befall her own fair skin, which a poet in Paris had once raved about. When Lanny told her about her stepfather and his faith-healing of Moors, that was like a fairy story out of another world.

  Then there was the news of her love affair, which she was prepared to tell in detail, even though it was humiliating to her amour-propre. After her marriage to a Fascist aristocrat who had exploited her, she had sworn off love; but here she was, involved with a Prussian nobleman and Wehrmacht officer, the most arrogant being on earth. She would fly into rages with him, but presently she would be in his arms, shuddering with delight and at the same time calling herself a slave and a fool. When he was wounded, she had nursed him, and she knew that she would do it again; what she half-hoped was that he would be killed in battle and set her free. Then she exclaimed, What a dreadful thing to say! Women were born to misery, and men were born to war, and what was the choice between them?

  XI

  They were sitting under one of the shade trees, and trees do not have ears. The young Oberleutnant was entertaining himself with the village barmaid and there was no one else in sight. “Tell me,” said the P.A., always on the watch to do business, “what does Oskar think about the war?”

  “Until recently the idea never occurred to him that his wonderful Army could meet defeat. But Stalingrad broke his nerve, I think; he was there, and barely got away, and lost three of his toes from frostbite. He was here a month ago, and defeat made him easier to get along with. He is sure that the Americans are going into Italy, and that the Italians will turn traitors. Do you think that will happen?”

  “Anything is possible,”
replied Lanny.

  But that sort of thing doesn’t go down with someone who has lived in the house with you and watched you, especially someone who is of the female sex, observant of details. “Tell me, Lanny,” demanded the half-sister, “how is it possible for you to come into Germany and travel about, with things as they are?”

  “Well, you know,” he began his rigmarole, “I made a lot of friends in Germany before the war, and so did my father. Some of them are high-up Nazis, and they are making money as fast as they can.”

  “You mean that you can buy paintings and take them out of the country now?”

  “Göring is making a huge collection, and those that he discards he sells for cash and buys others that he prefers.” That, too, was not a direct answer, but he hoped it would do.

  The woman lowered her voice, and her brown eyes looked straight into his. “Listen,” she said, “you ought to know that you don’t have to give me any double-talk. I know you haven’t any love in your heart for this set of low-caste fellows who have thrown the world into war.”

  “Marceline, you mustn’t talk like that,” he whispered, and looked all around him and even up into the tree.

  “Mais c’est à toi que je parle,” she said, and after that she spoke French and so did he. “I like gentlemen,” she went on, “and I hate noisy rowdies, and I never had any reason to think that your taste differed from mine. I can tell you something that ought to be of interest to you, and you don’t have to say that you got it from me.”