The Trespassers

by Laura Z. Hobson

  Dr. Vederle looked at the faces about him. Some were old, wrinkled, with the thin lips tightly indrawn of the aged and toothless; some were young, vital faces, eyes strong and clear; there were the alert faces here of lawyers, doctors, businessmen, the simple, uncomplicated faces of farmers, the fresh, delicate faces of young business girls, the tearstained faces of old women.

  Dr. Vederle looked at them all, trying to guess, trying to fathom in those faces the hundred secret emotions, the thousand fears.

  He started toward one of the clerks who seemed to be looking directly at him, but the clerk called out a name, and an old man, who reminded him of Johann Webber, started eagerly from the bench where he had been huddled.

  A crisp official motioned Vederle to be seated at the back of the crowded benches. There were a hundred people ahead of him. He waited half an hour, saw how slowly the turns came for those before him. It would be hours before he could be taken. Anger nipped at him. Better to come back in the morning before the doors opened.

  He went out again into the sunny afternoon.

  He looked up into the serene sky. It mocked the agitated scene behind him. There should be more propriety in nature—a tortured sky, jagged through by lightning, shocked by thundercracks, should canopy Austria these perilous days. He smiled at his own naïveté. The sky, he thought, was often serene over the bloodiest battlefields human hate could devise.

  “God protect Austria.”

  (At that very moment, half a world away from the untroubled skies above Vienna, a silver Clipper was taking off from the enameled blue waters of the Caribbean, at Kingston, Jamaica. With an exultant crescendo of its own sure power, the plane lifted into the thin light of earliest morning. Its starboard wing spread out toward the low hills and the tall mountain line beyond them to the east; its port wing spread out toward the incessant seas to the west; its four glinting, unseeable propellers cut their sure circles into the north.)

  CHAPTER THREE

  “SURE, ANN. You know I will.”

  “That’s right. I was sure you would want to—even though you don’t know them,” she said. Her gruff voice had a matter-of-factness in it, but there was gratitude, too. So many people wriggled away from the strange responsibility of affidavits. She had been right to bank on Vee. “I think you won’t have much trouble over this one, anyway. This letter from Vederle, you keep it; it has all the dope, names and birthplaces and all.”

  “I didn’t know they could take money out with them.”

  “I don’t know about that part; but he writes here about the forty thousand Swiss francs he’s been piling up; I imagine that’s O.K., anyway, because it was never inside Austria.”

  “You know—when your cable came,” Vee confessed, “I wondered for a minute whom you meant. I’d never seen their name spelled. I guess I expected it to be F-a-y-d-e-r-l-y, the way you say it.”

  Ann had some notes and papers ready. It was the very day Vee had returned from her month’s holiday. Ann had driven out to the airport to meet her, suddenly a little guilty and uneasy at the days already lost. Vederle’s letter, written right after he had cabled, had arrived that morning. He had given it to a trusted friend of his to be mailed in London, so he had written freely. There was immediacy in every line of it. There might even be actual danger to him soon because he had always spoken out against the German Nazis. She hadn’t thought of actual physical danger.

  At the airport, Ann was vaguely disappointed to see Vee descend from the plane, followed by Jasper Crown. They both looked so glowing dark, Vee’s a much deeper-laid tan, Jasper’s redder and newer. She wanted Vee to be alone; she felt a vague disapproval that she was not.

  She drove them both back to town. The talk in the car was strange; Jasper kept pumping her as if she were his secretary.

  “What about CBS and NBC?” he asked almost as soon as they were settled in the front seat. “They do a job on Vienna all week, or did they drop it after last Saturday?”

  “A job on Vienna?” She was startled at the question.

  “I heard some of it down there—but I wanted to get away from the whole thing—”

  “Oh, it’s been terrific here all week, people hanging at their radios all day, news every hour or so, breaking into programs and—”

  “Never mind,” he said brusquely. “I’ll get it all at the office. The day I left, I ordered them to keep a record of every word from Europe.”

  He fell silent. For the rest of the trip, they fell into vacation talk, people, climate, generalities. Both Vee and Jas were vague about their being together and Ann asked nothing; it was even possible that they had been apart and met only in Miami on the way back. But she was too experienced to believe that, really.

  At last they were alone, dropping Jasper at the hotel. She went along to Vee’s apartment, and over a midmorning breakfast, she explained about the Vederles. She was rewarded by Vee’s readiness—indeed, eagerness—to help, to become involved.

  “Every time I ever heard of anybody doing affidavits,” Vee said, “I’ve thought there’s something I could do. Only I never was asked to do one.”

  “This won’t be one of the maddening ones,” Ann said. “Like the ghastly thing I’m on for a girl named Trudi Bechler. She’s here, pregnant, and her husband is in Sachsenhausen, that’s one of the worst concentration camps, and she wakes up screaming every night, dreaming she’s right there while they torture him…”

  “Oh, God.” Vee gripped her jaws together. “Why did they arrest him?”

  “Nothing except being a Jew, and having a small lumber business they wanted. But the Vederles ought to be easy. They’re not Jews, and they’re not in business or anything the Nazis could steal, except, I suppose, whatever money they have in Austria. It should be easy all around.”

  “Easy.” On the word, Vee’s voice dipped down for its lowest notes. Always when she was moved, her voice deepened so. “Easy. Oh, Ann. Sometimes I try to think how I’d feel if I suddenly had to go off, say, to Brazil or the Argentine, not just to visit, but for the rest of my life. Start all over among people who spoke another language, had different jokes and songs, and newspapers and menus—all those small things. I don’t think it’s easy to become a foreigner, ever.

  Her voice edged off into silence; her eyes looked off into space. She was seeing what it could be like, the strange teeming wharf, the uncaring customs officials, the minutely different colors and gestures and facial expressions of the people in a new land. When one traveled for a short holiday, these new flavors and tones and sounds were caressing. But when one was a refugee, longing for home?

  “I just meant it ought to be easy, officially, for you to get these affidavits,” Ann said after a moment. “It’s so frightfully hard when they’re in prison, or too poor to buy passage, or unknown and ill. The Vederles ought to be a cinch. Easy, that way.”

  She handed over a mimeographed page of legal foolscap, covered on both sides with single-spaced typewriting. It was letterheaded DEPARTMENT OF STATE, WASHINGTON, and bore an official seal, with the admonition to address official communications to The Secretary of State, Washington, D. C.

  Vera glanced quickly down the long, formidably solid text, which was titled GENERAL INFORMATION REGARDING VISAS FOR IMMIGRANTS.

  It seemed to be in eight parts, this general information, starting with the APPLICATION AT AMERICAN CONSULATE, going on to DOCUMENTS TO BE PRESENTED, which were “personal documents” and “evidences of support,” and “other documents,” then proceeding to PRELIMINARY EXAMINATION OF DOCUMENTS, NONQUOTA STATUS FOR CERTAIN RELATIVES OF AN AMERICAN CITIZEN, FIRST PREFERENCE QUOTA STATUS, SECOND PREFERENCE STATUS, INFORMATION REGARDING THE STATUS OF A VISA CASE, and ending with a terse paragraph, headed REFUSAL OF VISA.

  Vera read rapidly. Confusion grew in her mind at all the technicalities of language, of locution; uncertainty grew in her heart at the calm, bald officialdom behind those eight paragraphs.

  She made a motion, asking patience and time from Ann, who s
at watching her, and began again with the first paragraph:

  “APPLICATION AT AMERICAN CONSULATE.

  “An alien desiring to immigrate into the United States should communicate with the nearest American consular office…”

  “An alien desiring—” The words brought to mind a news picture she had seen somewhere a few months ago, a picture probably smuggled out of Germany. It was of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin, the old embassy, before the remodeling was begun on the old Blücher Palais on the Brandenburger Tor, and the Hermann Göring Strasse, and the Pariser Platz—“How,” Vera’s mind cross-examined her, “do you know these details of the new embassy and the very names of the streets bounding it? You’ve been paying more attention than you consciously knew—maybe you have realized all along that it was inevitable that you would get caught up in this awful human push…”

  The news picture, though, was one of the old embassy building. There was a queue of people waiting for the doors to open in the morning. It was an orderly enough queue, like the line at a theater’s ticket window, or at the Yankee Stadium, or something happy and ordinary like that. Only, in this queue, the faces were not the same. These—the old woman, clearly weeping, a handkerchief pressed against her lips, the little boy behind her, clutching at her skirt, the young man towering above him, looking out at the world from snarling eyes; the old, the tired, the angry, and the resigned were all there in that extraordinary news picture.

  Only the happy were missing. Not one face was gay, uplifted, expectant, or content.

  Vee shook her head sharply to get the old picture out of the way of the smeary mimeographed writing. Once again she took her attention and pinned it to the instructions facing her.

  “Don’t bother with all that,” Ann said. “It drowns you in technicalities. I’ll phone Larry Meany—he’s the lawyer I always use on affidavits. He’ll do the whole thing—you just sign some papers.”

  Vera looked unbelieving.

  “You mean it’s that simple? People’s lives—”

  “It’s like everything else, Vee.” Ann shrugged. “Him who hath—”

  Jasper Crown stared patiently at the man opposite him.

  The man opposite him was an enemy, Jasper was thinking, though probably an unconscious one. The man opposite him, talking too eagerly, explaining too minutely, had been for some months now Jasper’s most active supporter and ally, had already been instrumental in raising a quarter million toward the new project. Instrumental. Not decisive. Nobody could wind up the thing with a prospective investor except Jasper himself; others could, at most, pave the way, prepare his entrance. Then the rest was up to him, Jasper, who had thought up what would in effect be the first global network.

  Now, Jasper knew that the man opposite, this plump, slightly bald Timothy Grosvenor, was potentially, at least, an enemy. He would have to be destroyed. Jasper sat listening to him, staring at him patiently. Destroyed…

  Destroyed merely in relation to the new project. The project was bigger than any other consideration. There was need, immediate and constantly growing need, for a radio network that wasn’t paralyzed by a lot of polite rules about handling the news. The next years, the next months even, would decide forever that radio and not day-old newspapers would tell the world its major news. The Austrian crisis had been the newest proof that radio was entering a new era. The press of the nation was tired, old, outmoded. The people gave it no heed, paid it no attention—witness the 1936 elections. The new, young, potent means of communication was not the linotype machine, not the printed picture, but the air wave, the radio dial, the human, urging voice.

  But radio, thus far, had been afraid of its own potentiality. The men at the top were such cautious men, always talking about being unbiased, about not editorializing, boasting of giving equal time to both sides of anything—even the side that would destroy free communication the moment it came to power. All the men who now controlled the forty or fifty million radios in the U.S.—controlled them by the simple expedient of running the broadcasting stations that fed them words, music, gags, news—that whole group of men were cautious, timidly maintaining the farce of impersonality.

  His network would be different in every way the law would allow—JCN, the Jasper Crown Network. Every announcer would say, “Jasper Crown reporters have just learned…” or “Jasper Crown’s correspondents in the Far East, in London, in Berlin”—for Jasper Crown representatives would dot the news capitals of the world within a year. Money? Cost? Budget?

  That kind of measuring and weighing was the unimaginative, fearful wariness of little men. It came from insecurity, the impulse to hedge, to take the small risk instead of the great one. Not for him, the small, tight vision.

  For years he had dreamed of the day he would own his own radio chain. The difficulties were prodigious; there were, even, no unused wave lengths that could be licensed; there were official regulations of all kinds. Yet, one by one, he had found ways to get around all the obstacles. Deals with independent owners, short-wave deals with foreign companies, contracts and subcontracts. In spite of everything it could be done.

  Now in a few months, the American part of the dream would materialize. One key station was already his. His own fifty-thousand-watt transmitter pierced the sky. Soon he would have another station, and then the affiliates would sign—he would be well on the way to the ultimate dream: one band of the globe-girdling ether earmarked Jasper Crown.

  Ten million dollars’ capitalization. He had been that bold, setting forth to raise ten million dollars. And that would cover only the first steps—the purchase last month of Grosvenor’s Mid West station, one of the best-known independent stations in the land, the financing of a hundred deals within the U.S., a few deals abroad, the beginnings of the new kinds of programs.

  Ten million dollars. The boldness of his concept, the boldness of his demands from investors, had been the most persuasive element in his success thus far. Nothing could defeat him now. Over half of it was raised. Soon there would be a band-wagon rush to subscribe, again the little minds, the wary minds, afraid now to be left out of a good thing. Nasty, such people. Still, they wanted to be used, so one used them.

  Crown was a powerful-looking man. He was a man just over middle height, yet with so impressive a bulk of shoulder, chest, lean muscularity in every line of him, that he seemed big, commanding, even among much taller men.

  His black hair was thick, defiant, springing impatiently away from his wide, oddly undomed forehead. This flat expanse over his eyes lifted in contour only at the marked protuberance of bone just above each black, finely arched eyebrow. His forehead forced the attention; the perceptive observer compared it to that of a strong, butting animal. It was a vigorous, handsome brow, though every description of it denied that.

  Under it were dark-brown eyes that were as unusual. For they could look as cool, as impassive, as pale-blue eyes; could obliterate their intensity of pigmentation, their warmth and depth of physical color, by some overlay of level-staring coldness. Then his gaze had a quality that was at once dead and cruel.

  Jasper Crown was thirty-five years old. He had a secret vanity about his youth, for his success was out of all proportion to it. He liked to remember that at thirty-four, when he had resigned as vice-president of the biggest radio company in the world, he had a sixty-thousand-a-year salary and stock (in his ex-company as well as in its chief rival) worth a million dollars. Talking to some Wall Street millionaire, old, paunchy, frightened of his own advancing age, Jasper was wise enough to refrain from hammering too hard at the youth equation. But always, inevitably, there came into the conversation the quiet mention of the vigor of idea, of execution, of command that one could expect from a man who had made good, practically and demonstrably made good in a harsh, competitive world, while he was still in his early thirties.

  He would see the old eyes of the Wall Streeter flinch a little, flinch, from the envy of Jasper’s own youngness, flinch from the suddenly evoked contrast with the Wall Street
er’s approaching or arrived oldness. Jasper always veered quickly to a less difficult or painful theme. But the effect was achieved. The Wall Streeter was remembering that he too, as a young man of the mid-thirties, had been at his most daring, his most productive, his most sure-touched. Whether his personal history would check out on that recollection or not, Jasper knew that every one of these rich and powerful old men had some hidden fantasy that that was the way he had been. Envy, mourning over one’s lost youth, might bring a momentary hatred of the young, vital Jasper, but with it was a stronger faith in his project, in his proposals, for there was the nostalgic self-identification through memory with a young and able and bold man.

  And that was all that mattered now to Jasper. Faith, belief from men with money—to be delicately, shrewdly nurtured along toward the investment point during many a talk, many a discussion, first in the formality of their offices, then in the more personal and always reassuring atmosphere of Jasper’s apartment, or at one of his clubs.

  Personal, intimate equations of life mattered too, yes, but on a lesser, remoter plane. Two years ago he had moved into virtual bachelorhood. He dined occasionally with Beth, sent her flowers on anniversaries. But he knew that he would never go back to her, emotionally or physically. He simply could not bond himself to the steady, time-filling demands of the usual marriage. There was the other reason, too.

  He knew she was still resentful that he had moved out. But she was, at least, apparently adjusted to it. She no longer said things about the uselessness of beating against his will. She no longer told him, in her quiet, brownish voice, that she felt an implacable thing in him, and that she knew it was his need for fame and power.

  He knew what she meant. But he himself phrased it differently. He thought of it as a principle of the deepest humanity, the desire to make the world a better, finer, freer place. To be effective in that desire one needed a voice, an audience. The most convincing and brilliant talk to a small group of stragglers around a soapbox would achieve nothing. For him, he had to fight largely, noticeably.