Lanny answered that he had been sure the American scientists would wish to talk with Germany’s most eminent physicist, and it had been his idea to spare an elderly Gelehrte any possible shock and discomfort. He wanted Professor Lenard to know that he had a friend at court, and one who would be glad to mediate for him. The Professor was to know that he would be treated with the respect due to a Nobel Prize winner and true discoverer of the Röntgen rays. (Lenard so considered himself, and blamed a political plot for the fact that he was not given credit for this achievement.)
“They will want your papers and records, of course,” ventured the interrogator, and received the expected answer, that the scientist had burned all his papers, in compliance with strict orders from the Führer himself.
So Lanny had to lay another siege. He had to tell the story that he had told Heinrich Jung and Günther Furtwängler—that the war was lost, and that the best thing for the German people and Kultur was to get it over as quickly and cheaply as possible. That said, Lanny turned himself into Robbie Budd, president of Budd-Erling, who hated the Bolsheviks and considered them the great menace to civilization. Sooner or later the Western world would have to put them down; and the question for a great German physicist to consider at this moment was whether he wished the treasures of German science to come into the possession of the Western world or the Eastern. There would be only two countries, America and Russia, in a position to make use of them.
VIII
Lanny knew exactly the words with which to present this argument to a Nazi zealot. He spent a whole afternoon hammering it into this white-headed one, and he won what he thought was a glorious victory. The great physicist would unload all the treasures of his knowledge to the American scientists—and he did not change his mind even when it was revealed to him that the head of the American mission was a Jew! He would even tell the priceless secrets having to do with uranium, heavy water, and atomic fission!
The old gentleman packed his belongings, and a GI stowed them in the car trunk, and they set out for Heidelberg. When they came out of the hills it occurred to Lanny that it might be a good idea to prepare his friends for what was coming, so he stopped at a near-by Army Post and telephoned. Professor Goudsmit had returned, and Lanny told of his achievement. He was greatly disconcerted when the Professor said, “Thanks, but really we have no use for that old man.”
“But,” protested the art expert, “he has agreed to tell everything he knows.”
“Yes, but he doesn’t know anything worth listening to.”
“How can you be sure of that?”
“I have read his publications, and I know his mind. He hasn’t had a new idea in thirty years. He spends all his time scolding at Einstein’s formulas, which are the basis of all modern physics. How can such a man know anything?”
“That applies to uranium, heavy water, and atomic fission?”
“It applies to everything. The man is crazy. One reason the Germans have lost this war is because Hitler was ignorant enough to be persuaded that Lenard was a great physicist.”
“Then what do you want me to do with him?”
“Do anything you please. Just ignore him.”
Lanny hung up the phone and sat thinking it over. He loathed the Nazi ideas as much as anybody, but when it came to a showdown he lacked the impulse to hurt the feelings of an old man. He went back and told the Nazi avatar that the Americans had decided, in view of his age and past services to knowledge, not to trouble him with questioning. He drove his passenger back to the forester’s cottage and left him with the pious non-Nazi formula: “Gott behüte Euch!”
IX
After that fiasco the art expert decided that he had better confine himself to his own specialty. He became for several days an ardent Monuments man. They had found the cave, and truckloads of paintings and other treasures were being brought down to the depot—a public building of which one-half was wrecked and the other half sound. No pleasanter form of amusement in the world than unwrapping these treasures, inspecting them, checking the signatures, and in many cases the names of owners. A surprising thing how many people would possess a valuable painting all their lives and never bother to put a name and address on the back. A pretty set of problems they had prepared for an organization of American altruism!
Most of the works were Dutch and had come from Holland. The British and Canadians had liberated a part of that country and were working fast on the rest; a group of Dutch art experts had been assigned to co-operate with Monuments, and Lanny renewed his very special liking for this people. He found them honest, kind, and generous, and he asked no more of human beings. How many, many times he had got less!
Word had come in of a “pile” laboratory in a village in the Thuringian forest, to the northeast; also in that region was the Merkers mine, stuffed full of art treasures. Near Stuttgart, toward the southeast, was the laboratory of the great Werner Heisenberg; and here also were castles full of paintings. The Seventh Army was heading for both these places, and it was a question which would be reached first. Both the scientists and art lovers were on tiptoe, ready to start their small caravans at an hour’s notice.
Lanny’s wounded feelings had been soothed, and he was ready to help either group. Laurel was ready to go too; she had written about Heidelberg, old and new, and about the strange phenomenon of bandits and pirates who were passionate lovers of beauty. She didn’t know anything about science, and couldn’t tell a cyclotron from a wind tunnel, but she did know great paintings when she saw them, and she was tempted to stick by Peggy Remsen the rest of the way across Germany. Peggy was now in Heidelberg, in charge of records and the setting up of record systems at all the new depots.
X
Lanny was going where his wife went, or so he thought; but at this juncture came a message which knocked out all his plans. Only ten words, but they were packed with import: “You are wanted immediately OSS Paris will arrange transportation. Baker.” That meant Roosevelt, of course. All the P.A. could say to his wife was, “I am called to Washington.” He saw her cheeks blanch and tried to comfort her; the time of danger was past now, except for the fighting men. Laurel had to pretend to believe it, for no woman of character would sap her husband’s courage by fears.
The trip to Paris took half a day, most of it spent in getting to one airport and from another. He reported to General Donovan’s organization; they were expecting him—all he had to do was to indicate the route he preferred. He would have voted for England if he could have taken the time to see Rick and Nina, but he assumed that the word “immediately” meant just that, and he said, “The quickest way.” They did some telephoning and studying of charts, and gave him a schedule via Lisbon, the Cape Verde Islands, Bermuda, and Savannah, Georgia. This last city was where he was to be delivered, they didn’t know why. Lanny could guess that the President was resting somewhere in the South, a fact that would not be mentioned in the press.
All the way on this trip, very pleasant in early April, the P.A.’s imagination was busy with the problem of what was coming. F.D.R. would never have jerked him away like this unless it was something of top importance. Surely not art works, and hardly any scientific matter—for the Alsos people could do anything that Lanny could, and more. This was a war of infinite variety, and Lanny’s imagination lighted upon a truly exciting idea. At their last meeting the Boss had done a lot of fishing around the subject of Adi Schicklgruber and his hideout in the mountains of the wild witch Berchta. Wasn’t it reasonable to assume that the Führer would retreat to that Alpine Redoubt his troops were preparing for their last stand? What forces would he have in the neighborhood of his Berghof? What was the character of the land? How near were the guardhouses and how strong were the gates?
It must be that! They were going to kidnap Hitler and pay him back for the stunt he had pulled off in snatching Mussolini from the prison of the anti-Nazi Italians! It would be a job for General Donovan’s commandos, the most carefully trained fighting individuals in the wo
rld. They would be dropped by parachutes in the night, protected by bombing planes overhead; they would raid the Berghof and grab its master, while at the same time another bunch would be seizing the airfield at Berchtesgaden. The Führer would be put into a car and rushed to that field, and the Germans would have a hard time deciding whether to shoot at the car. The commandos might be “expendable,” or they might hole up and defend themselves, with planes dropping supplies, and perhaps an armored task force rushing to join them. The Führer’s summer home might be turned into a bridgehead in the Alps, a redoubt within a redoubt!
A marvelous coup de guerre, a legend for the rest of time. They would take Lanny along because of his knowledge of the whole layout. But no; perhaps they just wanted to pump his brains and then leave him behind. He would put up a battle for the right to go. But then he remembered that he was no longer a playboy; he was a married man with a son. Moreover, he had just been willed a million dollars to end war in the world—and here he was planning to go and get himself killed, and all his peace projects along with him!
With such thoughts he beguiled himself while a transport plane carrying convalescent officers set him down near the Portuguese capital by the Tagus River, and then again on a Portuguese island, and again on a British island which had become an immense American air and naval base—a ninety-nine-year lease in exchange for fifty out-of-date four-stack destroyers, desperately needed to hunt submarines. There were beautiful amphibious views at each of these places, and also at warm Savannah, with its great live-oak trees decorated with gray Spanish moss. But Lanny didn’t have much of an eye for natural beauty, being busy imagining himself at Berchtesgaden on some dark night, pouring slugs out of a machine gun into the snappy, green-clad zealots of the Leibstandarte, who had always been so exactly korrekt with him, even though they must have hated him as an interloper.
BOOK FOUR
Tears from the Depth of Some Divine Despair
11
A Living Sacrifice
I
A cub plane came for Lanny, and he asked the pilot where they were going. The reply was “Warm Springs,” and the passenger needed to ask no more. It was the President’s favorite vacation resort; there was a pool of delightfully warm water, heavily mineralized, so that it was as easy to swim and float in as the Great Salt Lake in Utah. This was the best form of exercise for crippled legs, and Roosevelt had built himself a cottage, called “the Little White House.” He had made the resort known, and the public had organized what was called the “March of Dimes” and contributed great sums of money. So now there was an elaborate free treatment place, to which sufferers from polio came from all over the country.
Being known to the Secret Service men, Lanny might have gone to the President’s house, but that wasn’t his way of working. He went to the hotel, called Baker, and was told to be in front of the hotel at eight that evening; the Boss went to bed early, or was supposed to. That gave the visitor time to take a long walk in the pine woods of Western Georgia, and then to come back and bathe and shave, listen to the war news over the radio in the hotel lobby, and eat half a Georgia fried chicken with cornbread and turnip greens. Promptly on the second he strolled in front of the hotel and stepped silently into the car that stopped for him.
Pine Mountain was the name of the site, and a graveled road led up to it. Two Secret Service men stood at the door, and no doubt there were others in the shrubbery. Lanny was taken into a cluttered study—all sorts of people sent the President gifts, and he was amused and tried to make room for them. From there into a small anteroom, and then into the bedroom, with its maplewood bed, large mahogany desk, and a ship’s chronometer. The crippled man spent his evenings in bed, where he had room for papers and books, and his fountain pen and cigarette holder and what not. Nearly always Lanny had seen him thus, wearing a striped pajama coat, and sweater or blue cape if it was chilly. But this was a warm spring night, and the thin pajama coat was open at the throat. The little Scottie, Fala, lay at the foot of the bed and wagged his tail as if to tell the visitor he was welcome.
Lanny had become used to the fact that his Boss was haggard and gray, his face thin and lined with care. Always he had picked up when he came to this resort; but perhaps he hadn’t been here very long, for he looked terrible. The sight of him filled the P.A. with mingled grief and fear, but he put a grin of welcome on his face, and the tired President did the same. “Hello, old Geiger counter!” he exclaimed. Lanny chuckled at this reference to a forbidden subject.
“The Germans are clean out of that race, Governor,” he replied. “They stumbled at the start.”
There was only one chair in the room, a large one by the bed. Lanny took it, and told the story of Hitler’s greatest physicist and how he had been spurned by the Jewish head of Alsos. Roosevelt, who had a Jew in his cabinet and another helping to write his speeches, did not miss the racial angle of this episode. Also, it was a joke on Lanny, and we can always enjoy a joke on our friends more easily than one on ourselves. The story was in the nature of a gold medal awarded to Franklin D. Roosevelt—the man who had gambled two billion dollars of his country’s money on atomic fission, while Hitler had put his money on rockets. Rockets were good all right, but now the British and Canadians were plunging northward into Holland, seeking out the launching sites, and a Wuwa hadn’t fallen on London in a fortnight.
Lanny had the idea that talk about Hitler might lead to the subject of how to kidnap him. But no, it wasn’t that at all. Suddenly the Boss looked grave and said, “The reason I sent for you: I am worried about Stalin.”
“Oh!” exclaimed the P.A. and couldn’t keep the disappointment out of his face. He explained the reason, and the other replied, “We made elaborate preparations for that; but the trouble is, Hitler stays in Berlin and apparently intends to direct the war from there.”
“He has an elaborate bunker there, and I can tell the OSS all about it. I was in it, you know.”
“Yes, but it’s this way—the Russians are so close to Berlin, and if we went in there with parachutes or any other way, they would get the idea we were trying to snatch the prize away from them. It really doesn’t make any difference to us who gets Hitler; and above all things we have to avoid giving offense to Stalin.”
II
So they were back at the Red Marshal again, and stayed there. “We are all very much puzzled about it,” explained F.D.R. “We made what we thought were clear and explicit agreements at Yalta; but apparently it is as you said, words don’t mean the same thing to the Russians as they mean to us. There has been a series of actions over a period of two months which seems to us to indicate that they are paying no attention to what was supposed to be settled at Yalta. I thought I had won Stalin’s trust, but now it appears that I’m mistaken.”
“It is hard for Stalin to trust anybody in the world, Governor. You must realize that he has been a conspirator from his youth. He grew up in a movement that was outlawed, and he always knew that the Tsarist police were sending spies and provocateurs to burrow into his party and betray it. He had a few friends that he trusted, but even some of these turned traitor—or changed their minds, which was the same thing from Stalin’s point of view. The moment they came in sight of power the internal struggle began, and the only way he has been able to hold power has been by liquidating everybody who set up ideas contrary to his own. It is hard for an American to comprehend the suspiciousness which has been molded into the Russian character by ages and ages of despotism—so far back that I guess there never was anything else.”
“And yet we have to live in the world with them, and have to come to some sort of understanding.”
“Of course, Governor. I have the belief that you can do more with Stalin than anybody else in what he calls the capitalist world.”
“Our agents in Italy have been carrying on discussions with some of the German military men who are sick of their Führer and want to surrender. Of course those discussions have to be secret, or these Germans would be
taken out and filled with lead. What possible harm can it do to Stalin if we save some thousands of American lives and release our troops to come north and go at the Germans? But he got wind of the procedure and sent me a red-hot telegram impugning the good faith of my advisers. I sent him an equally hot reply; but I realize that what is needed in this situation is not heat but light; a cool head and a clear vision.”
“Yes, Governor; you need somebody in Moscow who understands Stalin and his language—I don’t mean his Russian language but his revolutionary language. Also, somebody who understands the New Deal and can explain to Stalin what that means to the future of the world. You may have to do it yourself.”
“I can’t possibly go to meet him again at present. I came here to rest and accumulate a little strength for the San Francisco Conference that I hope will establish the United Nations. That is to be the keystone of the arch I am building, and without it all the rest will be rubble. That meeting is just two weeks off, and it is important that the Russians should come there in a mood of co-operation and not of suspicion and fear. We are not setting any trap for them; we are trying to build a world in which all the nations, great and small, can be left in freedom, each to work out its destiny in its own way.”
“Yes indeed; but suppose that isn’t what Stalin wants. Maybe he wants to compel the other nations, at least those near him, to abolish capitalism and capitalists and come into a Communist system.”