Lanny’s half-sister was just nineteen, the loveliest creature you could imagine, dressed at the peak of the autumn fashions. She had been brought up to elegance, and now she was going to have a hard time doing without it. Lanny observed the effect of only a few months of being on her own; it seemed to have hardened her visibly. Her needs were urgent, and she went after what she wanted with slight consideration for decorum. She knew that Lanny made a great deal of money, and what did he do with it? Why couldn’t he give part of it to a sister who was burdened with a crippled husband? Lanny told her that he had incurred many obligations; but he couldn’t or wouldn’t tell what they were, and the pretext seemed lame. Surely those paintings in the vault at home could be sold, and surely she, the painter’s daughter, had something to say about them! Couldn’t he make more of an effort to get rid of some?
Lanny explained patiently that the making of the Detaze reputation was a labor to which he and Zoltan Kertezsi had applied their knowledge and skill over a period of some fifteen years. It was with paintings as with other commodities—if you proceeded to dump them you destroyed the market; perhaps forever; whereas, by releasing them carefully, one by one at high prices, you increased the value of what you had left. By this method Marceline would be able to live in comfort the rest of her life on her share of her father’s works.
“But I need money now, Lanny!” she exclaimed. “How are Vittorio and I to live?”
He answered: “Go down to Bienvenu and stay, and adjust your expenditures to your income.” But he knew that the words were wasted, for Marceline had had a bad teacher. Beauty Budd had rarely lived that way, and wasn’t doing it now, in spite of adjurations of husband and son. As to Marceline, Beauty would consider that a girl was entitled to have her “fling” while she was young, beautiful, and popular; she had to take part in what was called “the social whirl,” and it meant going with fast-spending people and keeping up with their standards. To be poor was like being dead.
Lanny knew that Beauty would give Marceline money, and that pretty soon both would be in debt. He had made up his mind to get tough, and to be horrid, right from the start, and he did so. The result was a one-sided quarrel, Marceline doing it; Lanny wouldn’t get angry, even when she scolded him for his folly in throwing away the most generous of wives, who had been willing to take care not merely of him but of all his family. They parted, with Marceline in tears and few signs of that sisterly affection which had marked their relationship through the years.
XI
After coming to an agreement with Joseph Barnes, Lanny had written a letter to the lawyers who were to represent him in Reno, specifying the terms of the divorce settlement. He had sent a check covering their fee, also the cost of two cablegrams, the first to acknowledge receipt of his instructions and the second to inform him when the divorce was granted. Early in the month of December he received the second cablegram, and next day he read the news in several of the Paris papers. So that episode in his life was closed, and he was a free man after seven years and a half.
Doctor Samuel Johnson once remarked that a second marriage is a triumph of hope over experience; and Lanny quoted this saying to Trudi when he took her the news. “I think we ought to get married,” he declared.
“What good will it do, Lanny?”
“In the first place, I could help you better if you should ever get into trouble. You could gain American citizenship after only one year’s residence, and that might be important to you.”
“I didn’t know about that,” she admitted.
“Also, it would give you economic security. As it stands now, if anything should happen to me, you would be stranded.”
“I could go back to work, Lanny, and would expect to.”
“It’s not so easy for a refugee to get work, and it wouldn’t leave you much strength to give to the cause. I have my share in Marcel’s paintings, and some stocks and bonds in my father’s keeping, and. I should want you to have these and use the money for our fight. It would be absurd to leave it to my daughter, for it would be only a drop in a bucket, and she wouldn’t even see the splash.”
“Wouldn’t your mother want it?”
“My mother is provided for, and would know nothing to do with more money but to spend it for fashionable clothes. The same is true of Marceline; and with the world ready to burst into flames, I can think of more important things to do than to fit exquisite silk fabrics upon pampered female flesh.”
“Lanny, they would hate me horribly!”
“For a while, perhaps; but neither of them is malicious, and my mother, at least, has learned in the course of years that she has an erratic son. In her heart she blames herself, because she brought me into the world a bastard, and she was reared in the strict Fundamentalist faith that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children. Whatever goes wrong, an inner voice tells her that God is punishing her, and however hard she fights against this notion she cannot escape it.”
“Lanny, how can we possibly get married without publicity that would make my work impossible?”
“I believe there are ways it can be arranged. You know you can be married under another name.”
“And still have it valid?”
“The only question in the case of a marriage is whether or not you are the person who was married.”
“Would you tell your mother and father?”
“That would depend upon what you wished. I could write my father a letter, explaining the circumstances and enclosing a photograph of you; I would seal the letter and mark it to be opened only in the event of my death. He is an honorable person and would put it away in his safe-deposit box.”
“It all sounds very formal and forbidding, Lanny; but I suppose that is the way when you own property. Let me think it over.”
XII
A couple of days passed; and one morning, while Lanny was indulging in the luxury of reading the papers and a couple of English weeklies before he got up, his telephone rang, and it was the voice of Trudi, speaking English, quickly and sharply. “Listen carefully, and don’t use any names. I am being followed. I can’t go into details, but I think it’s something bad. Don’t go near my place.”
“Where are you?” he asked.
“I am phoning from a public booth. I was afraid you might come to see me.”
“What do you intend to do?”
“I have to shake them off.”
“Listen to me.” He had given some thought to being followed and what to do about it. “Stay where there are crowds. Don’t go into any room alone or onto any lonely street. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“The best place is some department store or public place which has many exits so that they can’t watch them all. Zigzag here and there in the crowd, stoop low, and move fast; dart into an elevator suddenly, or go into the Metro and dart into a train—or out again after your pursuers have entered. If you can’t manage it any other way, appeal to a gendarme. Put it on the basis of sex; the man is a masher—the French word is un suiveur. While the gendarme is reading him a lecture, you step into a taxi.”
“All right.”
“When you have got clear, phone me and tell me some corner to come to. I’ll have transportation ready.”
“All right. Thanks.”
After that Lanny didn’t do any more reading or lolling in bed. He ordered the hotel to get his car, and he put some of his clothes on and more into his suitcases. He called for his addition, and when he got it he sent the boy downstairs with a large check; they had known him and his mother over the years, and would give him the change. He was going on a journey, and wanted enough.
In between these details he-paced the room like a caged tiger. Do these creatures see visions of the jungle and the delights they are missing? What Lanny saw was visions of Trudi Schultz, alias Kornmahler, in the hands of the Gestapo; he lived over again the horrors he had experienced in the case of the Robin family and then in Trudi’s own case. This glorified gangste
r system which had stolen the name of Socialism had reached out from Germany into every one of the border states; it had reached into Spain, and now its slimy tentacles were stealing down into the hiding-places of its escaped victims in France.
Lanny thought about the Nazis in Paris and what they could do. It was a complicated matter, and one had better not count too much upon the French authorities. In every great capital of Europe, indeed of the world, the secret agents of the Right were fighting those of the Left, and there was a strong tendency for the police of every city to work together against what they called “subversive elements,” regardless of the political color of their own government. Thus in Paris, even under the Front Populaire, the Surete Generale and the Deuxieme Bureau tolerated the activities of the Nazi agents; and even gave them information and help—in strict confidence, of course. It was a part of the policy that was coming to be known as “appeasement,” making friends with Hitler on the theory that, being in power, he had become responsible and that it was his mission to put down Bolshevism for the benefit of all the imperiled capitalist states.
Lanny had explained this situation to Trudi. She could go up to a gendarme on the street and say: “I am a decent woman being persecuted by this strange man, and will you kindly instruct him to let me alone?” But she couldn’t say: “I am a German Socialist refugee, being spied upon by a Nazi agent,” for then the poor gendarme would begin to quake in his boots, knowing that he was in the presence of higher powers, a possible scandal, something that might break him. The woman might be an anarchist or a terrorist, and perhaps it was his duty to escort her to the nearest bureau. Those who sit at the desks in such places have been there a long time and are set in their ways; it would be a blunder to imagine that they are going to change just because a Jewish aesthete with a gift for writing feuilletons has pushed himself into the premiership of France for a few weeks or months!
XIII
At last the phone, and Lanny sprang to it. Trudi’s voice, now speaking French with a cheerful society accent. She was having luncheon in a small cafe in the Passy district. She would be happy to have his company, and he said: “Tout de suite, Mademoiselle.”
It wasn’t long before he had her in his car and began turning corners of obscure streets to make sure they were not being followed. Meanwhile she poured out her story. For a couple of days she had noticed that her place was under observation. There was a tobacco store just across the street, a natural place for men to be lingering about; and of course the fact that a man followed a good-looking woman on the street didn’t necessarily mean the Gestapo—especially if the woman made a practice of looking behind her as she walked. But when it was a woman who took to following her, and turned half a dozen successive corners behind her, lingering to look in shop windows whenever Trudi looked in shop windows, then she came to the decision that her enemies had her marked. What caused her alarm this morning was three German-looking men in a motor-car—and she remembered how they had murdered Hugo Behr in Munich and kidnaped Lanny on the same occasion.
She had used Lanny’s suggestion of a department store. She had found a bargain-counter and had bowed her head and forced her way through the crowd, to the great indignation of many shoppers, volubly expressed; emerging from the throng and dodging behind one counter after another she had managed to get out by a side entrance unpursued. “Oh, Lanny, I do hope I haven’t got them onto your trail!” she exclaimed, and went on to reveal that she had recently helped in the purchase of some radio tubes and other equipment for the use of a secret station which was broadcasting from various places in and about Berlin. The Nazis were sparing no effort to locate it. Trudi said: “I am afraid my days of usefulness in Paris are over.”
They were beyond the city and traveling on the St.-Denis road, the main highway northward. She noticed the signs and asked: “Where are you taking me, Lanny?”
“To England, to marry you,” he replied.
He put the car into a garage at Calais, because it would make them too conspicuous. They crossed on the ferry to Dover, and rode on a bus in humble tourist fashion to one of the near-by watering-places, pretty well deserted in December. They strolled along the promenade, Lanny carrying two suitcases. The houses nearly all had signs indicating lodgings for rent, and they selected a clean-looking place, and under the name of Mr. and Mrs. Rudd engaged by the week a bedroom and sitting-room, with use of a bath, for a very small sum. For other small sums the landlady would purchase food according to their order and would prepare it and serve it in the sitting-room. By paying for the “coals” they could have a grate fire all day and most of the night. The rooms were stuffy and loaded with mid-Victorian furniture and gimcracks incredibly ugly; but the art of love made up for the absence of all other arts.
XIV
The longest nights of the year were at hand, and the season of storms and fogs; but young and vigorous people enjoy walking in the rain, especially when they have a warm dry place to return to. Among the things which Lanny had tossed into his suitcases were some books. One was The Most Haunted House in England, by Harry Price, a psychic researcher who went around with all the weapons of modern science and who set down a series of observations in an English rectory which would leave you stumped if you had any idea of the meaning of evidence.
Another was The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, the reading of which was to Lanny Budd like repeating a section of his own life over again. Poor old Stef! He had had a stroke soon after this book had been published, and had died not long ago in a bungalow on the California coast. Lanny read his story aloud to Trudi and told her about those days at the Peace Conference, where Stef had been a friend and guide to a nineteen-year-old secretary; He had gone on a mission to Russia for President Wilson and had come back saying: “I have seen the future and it works.” He had labored to stop the war of the allied nations upon that newly born future; but now, after nearly eighteen years, the war was still going on. “It may be we shan’t live to see the end of it,” said Lanny, sadly.
They read together, and it was a holiday they both had earned. Trudi, of course, worried about the problem of whether her confederates had been discovered by the Gestapo, and what would happen to them, and how she would manage to establish contact with them again. Lanny didn’t worry about anything, because the ravens had always fed him, and he was sure that a flock would come swooping down out of the sky at the proper moment.
They had only one pair of visitors. Lanny persuaded his fiancee that Rick and Nina ought to be entrusted with the secret. In some time of emergency they might help by offering a hideout, forwarding mail, obtaining publication of important news—Lanny revealed for the first time that it was Rick who had handled the documents about Nazi rearmament which Trudi had obtained. Now, with their son committed to the cause in Spain, the loyalty and discretion of this English pair could surely be trusted. Trudi assented, and Lanny dropped a mysterious note to Rick, asking him and Nina to motor to this address without saying anything about it to anybody else.
Rick was used to such notes by now, and the two of them came, and took their friends out in the car so as to talk freely. This was romance, also adventure, and the baronet’s son and daughter-in-law enjoyed the day even more than they permitted themselves to reveal. They had been worried about Lanny, considering him far too trusting and susceptible to feminine wiles; they had feared that Beauty and Emily and Sophie and Margy would succeed in their efforts to trap him into another fashionable marriage. But it was evident that this capable and clear-headed woman would never let him stray into the primrose paths of the leisure class.
Lanny knew about getting married in England, having made detailed inquiries in his elopement with Irma Barnes; the marriage act of 1836 had not been altered since 1929! After he and Trudi had been “in residence” for fifteen days he paid a visit to the marriage registrar of the district and made a declaration concerning himself and his future bride. He gave their names as Landon Preston Rudd of New York, divorced, and Gertie Corning
, a widow of Zurich, Switzerland, desiring to be married according to English law. After a lapse of twenty-four hours he came again to obtain the license, and shortly thereafter, a day or two before Christmas, Trudi became his wife. Lanny took a picture of her, the first time he had done that—for he could never know when his papers might be searched. He had one print made and then destroyed the negative. He wrote a will in her favor, and put the will, the photograph, the marriage certificate, and a letter to his father into an envelope which he sealed and marked: “To be opened in the event of my death.” He put this inside a larger envelope and sent it by registered mail to Robbie. To cheer Trudi up after these testamentary details, he kissed her and quoted: “‘How much the wife is dearer than the bride!’”
28
SO MONEY COMES WITHAL
I
Trudi wanted to go back to Paris; she had to go, in order to find out what had happened to her fellow-conspirators. Even supposing she was going to work in some other city, she couldn’t start except through some contact with the underground organization; It was like a network of mining-tunnels extending under the greater part of Europe; in order to get into them you had to know where to find one of the shaftheads.
Trudi’s shafthead was a middle-aged musician who had been a clarinetist in one of the leading Berlin orchestras. He was a Socialist party member of long standing, and now earned a few francs every day by giving lessons in Paris, mostly to children; he lived in a miserable garret, and handled with the utmost secrecy the large sums of money which Trudi brought to him. She had never told him how she got them, but he had known Freddi Robin and no doubt assumed that the money came from that family. The clarinetist turned Trudi’s manuscript over to a French Socialist printer, who put it into type in his own shop at night; not knowing a word of German, he made many errors, but these were patiently corrected. He purchased the paper, here and there in small lots so as not to attract attention, and his son, also a party member, did the printing, and slept in the shop with a gun under his pillow.
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