‘We already know a great deal about the subject, Mr Budd—’
‘I know, but you don’t know what I know. I can tell you the names of persons in your movement in New York and elsewhere who are secret agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’.
Experienced and carefully trained operatives of the M.V.D. or the M.G.B. do not show their emotions easily, but Lanny could recognise a change in the tone of his persecutor as he said, ‘That might possibly be of interest to us, Mr Budd’.
‘My proposition is this: You will drop your story that I know anything about a conspiracy against Stalin’s life and will accept instead my information just referred to. I will tell you all that I know and will answer all your questions so far as I can. You will accept that as my ransom and will release me and return me to West Berlin. The information I give you will be confidential and for your own use, and you will not make it publicly known that I have given it’.
The inquisitor wrote every word of this on his pad before he answered; so Lanny had time to think and prepare himself for whatever might be coming.
‘You must understand, Mr Budd, you are asking a great deal of us. How are we to know if what you tell us is true?’
‘Citizen Examiner, how were you to know whether what I told you about Stalin was true? I am quite sure that you knew all the time that it was not true; and the fact that I preferred to undergo this suffering rather than tell a colossal lie ought to give you some idea of my attitude toward the truth. It will take you a long time to investigate and verify what I tell you, and certainly I am not going to agree to stay in jail all that period. I feel reasonably certain that when you hear what I have to tell you you will realise that it is, and must be, the truth. I assure you that it will be of much more usefulness to you than any statement I might possibly make about Stalin. If I were to sign the statement that you have asked me to, I cannot see how it would be of much use to you—unless you are looking for a pretext to shoot me. Otherwise I would certainly go out and contradict it, and everybody in the world outside the Communist party would know that my repudiation was the truth. We have learned of too many other persons who have been forced to sign statements which were obviously untrue’.
‘A decision like that is beyond my authority’, said the examiner. ‘I will have to consult my superiors’.
So the warders were called; they helped Lanny up from the floor and half led, half carried him back to his cell. There he lay on the cot once more, and he thought: I don’t believe they will take my word. I don’t believe they will keep their word if they give it. If I tell them the truth they won’t believe me. If I tell them falsehoods they won’t be sure. They will investigate and still they won’t be sure. But they will be in a state of anxiety and will waste a lot of effort. They will acquire distrust for some persons who at present are helpful to them. The usefulness of those persons will be destroyed, and their movement will become that much less efficient—which is what I want. They have used trickery on me, and so I will use trickery on them. They believe in wholesale lying, and I will adopt their code. I will spare none of them—not even the one I love! Not even my own sister!
That was all there was to it. Whatever happened, he had gained a few minutes’ respite. He began to tell himself that God would give him sleep, and he fell asleep.
IX
When they routed him out and took him into the interrogation chamber his friendly enemy was again at the desk. ‘Mr Budd’, he said, ‘I am authorised to accept your proposition. It must be understood that what you tell us will be something of real importance. Otherwise, no deal’.
Said the prisoner, ‘What I have to tell you is important. If your superiors do not recognise its importance it will be because they do not intend to keep their word’.
‘My dear Mr Budd’, said the older man with a pained look, ‘you must not say things like that. Surely you know it is not proper for me to hear them’.
The deadly light was not flashed on, and Lanny was not merely permitted to lie on the floor, he was helped into another room in which there was a couch upon which he could lie. A warder unfolded a little table, and the inquisitor placed his writing pad thereon. He had brought several pads, evidently expecting extensive revelations.
Lanny started to talk. He told about one New York Communist after another, saying that he was an anti-Communist and had been recruited into the party under instructions of the F.B.I. Lanny didn’t choose any of the prominent ones; he knew if he told the examiner that William Z. Foster was a federal stooge he might not be believed. He named those earnest party workers who were Bess’s friends, who had haunted her home and made Hansi so miserable that he had been accustomed to seek refuge in his own study and his music. For a year or two Hansi had been telling Lanny about them, their party names, their occupations, their personal appearances, their services to the cause.
Lanny had plenty of time to assemble the facts and weigh them in his mind, for the elderly inquisitor wrote slowly and set down every single word. Only after Lanny had named half-a-dozen men and women did the other inquire, ‘But, Mr Budd, how does it come about that you know these things?’
Lanny’s answer made the man start, in spite of all the poise he had been able to cultivate in twenty years or so. ‘I know it on the best possible authority’, Lanny said. ‘It is because my sister Bessie Budd Robin, is herself an F.B.I. agent’.
‘But, Mr Budd’, protested the other, ‘how can that be when your sister has been convicted and sent to prison?’
‘How could it be otherwise, Citizen Examiner? Ask yourself what would have happened if she had made known a conspiracy to the F.B.I., and they had arrested all the other conspirators and left her out. Surely your own M.G.B. must have protected its own agents in the same way’.
‘Yes, Mr Budd, of course. But to go to such an extreme—to keep her in jail and sentence her to ten years!’
‘The longer the sentence the more surely she is protected. As to being in jail, she was only in jail for a few days, and they were all well treated. The rest of the time she was out on bail, and she is out on bail now so far as I know and able to go on with her party work’.
‘It seems utterly preposterous to us, Mr Budd’.
‘Of course, and it seems preposterous to me; but that is the way it is in America, and you can easily verify it. The case has been appealed, and it will be a long time before the Court of Appeals gets to it. Then it will be carried to the next highest court; it will be carried all the way to the United States Supreme Court. I don’t know how long this will take, a couple of years perhaps. It may be that some court can be told to grant her a retrial; then before the case comes up again the government will discover that the witnesses have disappeared, and it may quietly drop the case’.
‘All this sounds fantastic, Mr Budd. But pray go on. What caused your sister to take up this career?’
‘For a long time she was a sincere party member. But she saw so much corruption among the high party leaders; they were living in penthouses and enjoying all the luxuries of the upper bourgeoisie. They spent their time in night clubs, they spent their time chasing women, they made free with the young party girls; they raised money for various causes, for workers’ defence, for aid to refugees, and so on, and they put that money into their own pockets and had a good time. She saw that the party comrades were not like the devoted ones she had known in Russia. At the same time she was displeased by the foreign policies of the Soviet Union; she considered that the policies of the Cominform were not truly international but were becoming more and more nationalist. She heard stories about the great number of persons in concentration camps—in short, she began to lose her enthusiasm. Also, there was family pressure. I think what broke her down more than anything else was her discovery that Soviet agents had been getting the secrets of our father’s airplane factories. You can understand, I am sure, how that displeased her’.
‘I can understand very easily, Mr Budd. It is a great mistake of the American comr
ades to put their trust in members of the capitalist class. It would never have occurred to me to trust your sister as a party comrade’.
‘Nor to trust me either’, said Lanny. ‘Both of us have had easy lives, and we cannot share your willingness to make sacrifices. Anyhow, Bess came to me and told me what she had learned about what was going on at the Budd-Erling plant. I told my father about it, and he took it to the F.B.I. Because Bess had lived in Moscow and been considered a great artist there, the F.B.I. saw this as an opportunity to penetrate the party organisation. They persuaded her to go on posing as a party member and to work her way as high up in the organisation as possible. This is what she has been doing; she has known practically everybody of importance in the party and has reported their secrets to the American authorities. That is the story, and I am sure you will admit that it is really an important one’.
‘Yes, Mr Budd, I admit that. But, tell me, why are you willing to tell me all this when you refused to admit the truth of the other story?’
‘The reason is that the other isn’t true and this one is. I think my sister has done her share of hard work, and I don’t relish having everybody I know think of her as a jailbird. When this story is known, her usefulness to the government will be ended, and they will have to turn her loose. If I too am released, we can both of us lead our normal bourgeois lives again’.
That sounded completely plausible to the examiner. He spent several hours questioning Lanny about the smallest details of the persons involved, and when Lanny said he had told all he knew he was ordered back to his cell. More food was brought to him, better food, and after he had eaten it he was allowed to lie down and sleep. This time they promised not to come after him in a few minutes; this time he was to be a privileged guest!
BOOK TEN
Thy Friends Are Exultations
28 DEUS EX MACHINA
I
Lanny had no means of knowing how long he was left undisturbed; he knew only that when he was routed out of his slumber he had the feeling that it had been a very short time. It was a torture to be dragged back into a consciousness full of pain. The warders lifted him, saying again and again the word ‘examination’. They led him out into the passageway and by the familiar route; when the door was opened Lanny saw to his dismay that it was the same old room, and behind the desk sat Number Three, the vile, evil-faced person whom he called the Weasel.
His heart sank; it was the worst moment of the entire ordeal when they seated him on the narrow stool of agony and turned that hideous light into his eyes. The warders went out, and the evil one sat glaring at him. ‘So you thought you could make fools out of us!’ he sneered.
Lanny murmured, ‘I don’t know what you mean’. And the other went on to call him a Fascist ape and a counter-revolutionary imbecile and other such conventionalised names. Lanny was genuinely bewildered and asked, ‘Have you read the statement I made to the last examiner?’
‘I have read every word of it’, declared the other. ‘You insult our intelligence when you think that you can palm off on us a lot of old stuff out of your trash basket’.
‘Old stuff?’ echoed Lanny.
‘We knew every bit of that—it is all in our records’.
Lanny had been prepared to be double-crossed. He had had only half a hope that they would keep a promise. He was prepared to have them say that they didn’t believe a word of what he had told them—even while they went on to investigate it and to act upon it. But to have them tell him it was old stuff and they knew it already—that was fantastic, beyond belief. Their subtlety was more subtle than even his imaginings. If he had not been so utterly exhausted he would have burst out laughing. As it was, he could only murmur, ‘I had no means of knowing what you would know’.
That set the man off on a boastful tirade in which he assured his victim how utterly helpless he was before the omniscience and omnipotence of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. All the machinations of the bourgeois enemies were in vain, and the prophecy of the Communist hymn was coming true, the ‘Internationale’ would be the human race. The conclusion of the discourse was that Lanny was going to sign the full confession of his vile plot against the life of Stalin; there would be no respite for him until he did so, and the quicker he made up his mind to it the better chance he would have of saving his sanity and his life.
It was a cruel disillusion, and for a while the victim was tempted to despair; his last hope was gone, and he might as well give up. But deep within him was that hard core of stubbornness; he had made up his mind that he would never give up, that he would conquer these people or die in the attempt. He clenched his hands and began to say, ‘God is helping me. God is helping me’. He really went to it this time, for there was nothing else he could do. This was the final conflict, exactly as the Communist hymn proclaimed it. This time there would be no metaphysical speculations, no dialectical ingenuities, no psychologising about suggestion or autosuggestion. This time it was God, the living God, the God of our fathers, known of old:
Other refuge have I none;
Hangs my helpless soul on Thee;
Leave, ah! leave me not alone,
Still support and comfort me.
So there was a duel of wills, no new thing in the biographies of the martyrs and the saints. The devil as a roaring lion walketh about, and he assails the man of God and threatens him with fire and sword and destruction. The holy one closes his eyes and prays and endures and is justified of his faith. As Heine has written of a very different subject, it is an old story and yet it sounds always new.
This Number Three was well fitted to play the role of the devil as a roaring lion; he was a creature of hate. It might be, of course, that he didn’t really feel hate but cultivated the appearance as a technique. If so, he was a good actor; he stormed, he screamed, he shook his fists in Lanny’s face, and once he struck him in the face. Lanny closed his eyes and endured. He said that God would give him strength to endure; he implored God to give him strength to endure, and somehow he endured.
The man went over the whole imbecile and sickening story of a plot against Stalin’s life. Lanny always answered, because to be silent would be taken as assent. ‘I know nothing about it, I was not present there, I never paid the money, I never met this man, I never heard that name’, and so on, world without end—but there was no amen. Lanny’s eyes became two balls of fire, he swayed on the stool, and when he toppled the man stood over him, jerked him straight and held him.
II
The ordeal was suspended, and they brought him food. He didn’t want it, but he was ordered to eat it. The devil in the form of a roaring lion threatened to ram it down his throat, and so he ate.
And then the battle was resumed. He was exhausted, dazed, and he didn’t know quite what he was doing. He began to murmur aloud, ‘God is helping me. God is helping me’. The man heard him but couldn’t make out what he was saying and told him to speak louder. He didn’t know what the English words meant, and he pressed a button and sent a warder for another man who knew English. This man came in and sat watching the proceedings. Apparently they had the idea that Lanny was breaking down and was about to give way.
The prisoner was too far gone to realise just what was happening. The questioning went on; he murmured his formula again, and the new man translated it for the examiner. It had the effect of driving him into a new frenzy; he had a new set of epithets to hurl at his victim, a new set of challenges and taunts. ‘If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross!’
Poor devil, poor lion!—no doubt he had been reading Krokodil, the supposedly comic publication of the Soviet Union, and perhaps the Godless One, an earlier weekly paper in which the Reds had poured ridicule upon the opium of their people. It was possible that somewhere deep in his soul the man had a sneaking idea that God might possibly exist and was afraid of Him. Anyhow, he had sense enough to realise that it was this idea in Lanny’s mind which was giving him the courage, the determination, to hold out against the quest
ioning. After he had got through calling names he endeavoured to reason with the victim, to persuade him that it was beneath the dignity of a civilised man of the twentieth century to cling to such childish notions. Lanny did not try to answer; he had no strength left for any superfluous words; he just kept his eyes closed against the light and went on pounding his formulas into his own mind. Lanny’s God in this crisis was a practical God, one to be made use of and not to be argued about. Lanny’s God was saving him from feeling pain.
He was a mighty God, and mightier than the holy trinity of Bolshevism: Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. The examiner devil, the roaring lion, roared himself out before he roared Lanny out. The perspiration gathered faster on the man’s brow than he could wipe it away—the light was at his back, but the heat was everywhere. His voice began to crack, and finally he gave up. He gave his victim one last assurance that he would be beaten in the end, that a whole relay of examiners would be put to work if necessary. Then he summoned the warders and ordered the victim back to his cell. The victim was unable to rise from the stool, and the warders had to put strong arms around his waist, hoist him up, and, leaning sideways, carry about two-thirds of his weight along the corridor.
III
This torturing went on for several more times. Lanny lost the power to keep count. Days and nights were all the same, and only pain existed. He had only two thoughts: the first was not to give up; the second, to die, and thus escape. Exhausted, he fell into a deep sleep; and as usual he had no idea whether it was half an hour or several times as long. The two warders dragged him out of that sleep, and it took both of them. They lifted him up and put one of his arms around each of their necks, and walked him down the corridor. They did not say ‘ispitanie’—examination, they just said ‘poshol’—come. They were taking him down a flight of stone stairs, and he wondered if this was to be some new kind of torture or if perchance he was to be mercifully shot in the back of the neck. Presumably they had some quiet place in the cellar where they did that and where they could conveniently wash away the blood. Whatever was coming was bound to be unpleasant, so he would not make the mistake of giving way to hope. He continued saying his prayer and thinking about nothing else. ‘Other refuge have I none!’
The Return of Lanny Budd Page 63