XIV
This post mortem went on for a long while. There was no further need for secrecy, and Lanny mentioned the proximity fuse, and the radar and Loran devices that had enabled night-fighters to find and hit their enemy in complete darkness. He said, “I don’t suppose you waste any love upon the Japs; and if you have new things, they might be useful to us in that part of the world.” So Göring talked freely about new German war devices, and where they were being made, and who would know about them. That was the thing Lanny had come for, and he did not fail to make careful notes.
Thus there was a V-2 rocket that could be fired from a submarine—and the submarine didn’t have to come to the surface but could fire from three hundred feet under water. “That would have been pretty good off New York harbor, nicht wahr?” said Göring with one of his old-time smiles. Lanny answered, “It may be pretty good off Tokyo harbor.”
Also there was an improved V-2—the “flying telegraph pole”—almost ready for service, and having a range of eighteen hundred miles; and there was the dreaded V-3, which was to fly through the stratosphere from Berlin to New York and even farther. “It’s really too bad we couldn’t have had a try at that!” said the genial Reichsmarschall; but now alles was kaput, and the Americans were free to dig out all these secrets at Peenemünde and at the huge rocket-assembly plant built eight hundred feet deep in the Kohnstein Mountains near Nordhausen.
Then Göring asked a question that startled Lanny, though a practiced intriguer didn’t show it. “Did you ever visit a place called Oak Ridge, Tennessee?”
The other replied, quite truthfully, “No,” and then added a dutiful lie, “I don’t think I ever heard of it.”
“Our Intelligence Service in America hasn’t been anything to brag about, but we were told that at that place you have built a tremendous plant with the idea of making an atomic bomb. Of course it may be just camouflage for some other line of activity.”
Said Lanny, “That is something outside my father’s province, and I wouldn’t know about it. If it comes off, we can be glad it won’t be over Germany.”
“Our physicists tell us it’s a delusion,” said Göring. “They were happy to know that you were wasting your resources on it.”
“It may have been one of Roosevelt’s hunches,” said the ex-P.A. “He had them, you know, and followed them, just like Hitler.”
XV
It was late, and the fat man’s eyelids showed signs of drooping. The visitor remarked tactfully, “I am keeping you too long. You have been generous as always, Hermann. You may rest assured that I shall do everything in my power to see that your precious paintings are kept safe for the benefit of posterity.”
“Thank you,” said the old-time robber baron. Lanny had thought of him thus the first time they had met; later, when Lanny knew him better and became aware of his love of art, he had called him a “Renaissance man,” and this had pleased him greatly—he had even taken up the phrase. Now he remarked, “I had the best of those paintings in my home, Lanny, and never a day passed that I didn’t look at them; they became a part of my being. Now you will send me to Virginia, where there are no paintings except bad ones. It will be like being marooned on a desert island.”
Then it was that tears came into the eyes of this Renaissance man; not for the great German cities that had been blasted to rubble, not for the millions of German youths who had been turned into carrion, but for the Cranachs and the Rembrandts, the Rubenses and the Holbeins and the Van Dycks, that he was never going to see again; for the greatest art collection that had ever been assembled in the whole of history and that had been planned to earn the gratitude of posterity and carry the name of Hermann Wilhelm Göring down through all the ages of mankind! “Lorenzo di Medici would have been a mere footnote to the history of that bright name!”—so he said.
15
Art Is Long
I
Driving back to Berchtesgaden, Lanny thought about the mail he might get there, and one letter in particular that he had been expecting for a year and a half. Now, if ever, was the time when he should get word from his half-sister Marceline. Now she would have come out of her hiding place and be trying to get in touch with her family. She would have no way to find out where Lanny was, but she would write to her mother at Bienvenu; Beauty had come back from Marrakech and was waiting in painful suspense and perhaps joining her husband in prayer. Marceline couldn’t be sure that her mother was still alive, or that the villa at Bienvenu was still in existence; but she could be sure that Budd-Erling Aircraft Corporation was functioning and that a cablegram to Robbie would reach him or, if he had died, some member of his family.
Marceline was a capable person and knew her way about in the world. Lanny had informed her as to her status; she was an American citizen, if she chose to enter that claim, by virtue of her mother’s being of American birth. That she had voluntarily gone to Germany after America was at war with that country, and had taken a position as a dancer in a Berlin night club, would give her a black eye with the American public, but it could hardly interfere with her citizenship status. And in the confusion of the present moment who would remember dates or bother to ask questions on such a point? Marceline would go to the nearest American Army post and report herself as an American citizen who had hidden out during the war. She would request and obtain permission to write through Army channels to her mother on the French Riviera and to cable her half-brother in Newcastle, Connecticut. Somehow or other word would surely come.
But there was no word; Lanny with sorrow made up his mind that there was never going to be such word. Someday, perhaps, in the records of the SS or the Gestapo, the mystery might be solved; some day Heinrich Himmler might be captured—he was reported as having fled to Norway—and Lanny might go to him and get the answer. Meantime there were the living; a letter from Beauty, saying that all three of them were back home, safe and well; a letter from Laurel, reporting that she had been working on the overworked officers of the Seventh in Heidelberg and had extracted from them the promise that in a week—“about a week,” they said—they would consider it safe to let a lady writer travel to Berchtesgaden and report what she found in the haunts of the wild witch and the wild wizard.
II
Lanny wrote a report for Professor Goudsmit and one for Monuments, of which he sent carbon copies to the chiefs in the various collecting points, Munich, Frankfurt, Marburg, and one to the headquarters in Versailles.
That duty done, he was free to ride in a Monuments car to Alt Aussee, some seventy miles southeast of Berchtesgaden—the distance being made greater by winding through mountain passes and down into valleys. Beautiful scenery, with snow still in the high places, but melting fast and turning small rivulets into rushing torrents. Endless vistas of evergreen forests, and in the valleys lovely little villages with irregular streets and brightly painted houses with many gables—“gingerbread houses,” the Americans called them. This was not a strategic area, and war hadn’t come here, except in the last hours.
The GI who drove him had been going back and forth and knew the landmarks. Soon after leaving Salzburg, there was Lake Fuschl, with the castle that Ribbentrop had stolen. Then came the Wolfgangsee, with the Weisse Rössel, the inn famed in musical comedies. Would Doc like to get out and see the old church, with the Pacher altar? And then Bad Ischl, where the old Emperor Franz Joseph had had his summer home. There he had bought a villa for an actress. Then a steep pass, and Bad Aussee, and after it Alt Aussee, on a deep dark lake, where the world seemed to come to an end, lost in mountains. The Third Army, Lucky Forward, had got here first, and its 11th Armored Division was guarding the mine. Lanny had no business being here without a permit; he had to go at once and explain himself and get one, and be warned not to travel anywhere in Third territory without getting a permit first. Georgie Patton was rigid on the subject of regulations: wearing your cap, keeping your coat collar buttoned, saluting snappily—all those Army things which the doughs contemptuously called ?
??chicken.” You couldn’t have more than five gallons of gas at a time, and the rule against officers driving cars was rigidly enforced.
The mine was high up, in the Salzberg—the salt mountain. It was the steepest road Lanny had ever traveled. Near it was “House 71,” as it was called, a villa with a heavy iron fence and padlocked gates. Here two OSS men had taken up their abode, and they welcomed Lanny as a colleague. They had brought with them for questioning no less a personage than Herr Walther Andreas Hofer, the Berlin art dealer whom Göring had chosen as his number-one expert and supervisor of plundering. The OSS had discovered him in Berchtesgaden and had brought him to this remote region to keep him away from evil influences. Lanny, who had known him at Karinhall, was greeted as an intimate friend. A stocky little redhead, dressed in gray tweeds, Hofer was to all appearances perfectly happy; he was loquacious, a show-off, and here were important persons who were willing to devote all their time to listening to him.
This was the man who was credited with having invented the ingenious scheme of inviting wealthy Germans to give art presents to the Reichsmarschall on his birthday. Hofer had a most extraordinary memory; he knew the name of every such donor, what he had given, and the price he had paid for it. He could remember every art transaction he had carried on since the coming of the Nazis; the name of the painting, the price asked and the price paid, the size of the work, and sometimes even the kind of frame it was in. There were some things that he professed to have forgotten; but when Lanny told him how he had visited Göring only the night before last and obtained the great man’s approval of the American program, Herr Hofer suddenly remembered a lot more.
Lanny spent the night at House 71, and the agents told him the exciting story of the last few days. The balked and frenzied SS, seeing the Americans drawing near, had brought large cases containing dynamite, preparing to blow up and flood the mine and destroy all the art works in one grand bust. But the miners had risen and had blown up the mine entrances, making it impossible for the Nazis to get in. The American Army had arrived in the nick of time—“ten, twenty, thirty,” said one of the OSS men; there was so much melodrama in this war that the movies would be telling about it for a thousand years. In this case it was not a virtuous maiden who was saved but a hundred thousand objets d’art, many of which were quite literally priceless.
III
A space had been chopped into the mountainside to make level ground, and a group of clean white two-story buildings had been erected, buildings with steep roofs to run the snow off, and with many gables and chimneys. These were the administration buildings of the salt mine, called “Steinbergwerke.” Lanny wondered just where the mine was, and the guide opened a back door in the lower floor of the building, and it was the main entrance to the mine.
Lanny had been through a salt mine of the same kind, escaping from Germany, so it was no novelty to him. The salt is not mined in the usual sense of that word; enormous basins are dug inside the mine and water is pumped into them; the water absorbs the salt out of the heavy clay and then the water is pumped out and evaporated outside. That process has been going on for three thousand years, so legend declares; it is definitely known to have been going for six hundred. For that long, at least, imperial Austria had been breeding a race of men who specialized in working a mile inside a mountain and with another mile of mountain over their heads. The men were small but sturdy and had queer wizened faces; it was impossible for the Americans not to call them gnomes, and that didn’t hurt their feelings, for they spoke and understood only a medieval German, difficult even for other Germans. They wore at their work an odd costume of white duck, the jacket having a collar like a cape, and large black buttons up the front. Germany and Old Austria were disciplined countries, and everybody worked cheerfully if he could have a uniform to symbolize his special abilities and obligations.
Salt mines had been chosen as art shelters because the salt absorbs moisture and makes them comparatively dry; also the temperature is uniform, about forty degrees Fahrenheit, and, oddly enough, slightly warmer in winter. The systematic Germans had come, curators, restorers, and a great staff of clerks; for there had to be exact records of everything. There were 6755 paintings, 5350 of them being old masters. More than half bore tags reading “A.H., Linz,” meaning that they were the property of Adolf Hitler, intended for that thousand-year museum that was to end all museums.
IV
A little train run by a gasoline engine took you into the mine. There were tiny flatcars, called Hunde—dogs—with just room enough for two men facing each other. The jagged rock ceiling of the long tunnel was menacingly close, but it would never hit you unless you were taller than the gnomes. The tunnels ran immense distances, and every now and then there was a locked iron door at the side. You unlocked the door and there was a grotto. It might be full of Louis XV chairs and tables, arranged as in a drawing-room; or you might find yourself confronted by Michelangelo’s statue of the Madonna, carved in 1501, and stolen by the Nazis from the Bruges Cathedral; or by the marvelous Van Eyck altarpiece, called “The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,” dating from the fifteenth century, taken from the Ghent Cathedral. There might be mysterious sealed cases; or boxes full of gold and silver Renaissance armor; or stacked-up bales of tapestries; or vegetable baskets piled with all sorts of miscellaneous art objects.
Many of the paintings were carefully wrapped and lay on numbered racks; others had evidently been brought in a hurry and were just stacked against the walls. In the part of the mine called the “Springerwerke” there were no doors to lock, and here stood GIs on duty, wearing the long fleece-lined coats which the Germans had made for use on the Russian front. Inside these places Lanny inspected paintings which he had come to know at the Berghof; they now bore that sacred label: “A.H., Linz.” In other rooms the marking was “ERR,” Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg. There were rooms divided into small compartments, and here the art treasures bore the names of various Jewish families in Vienna; their return would be easy—if there were any members of those families left alive.
There appeared to be no limit to the kind of stuff in this strange repository: Egyptian tombs, Greek and Roman portrait busts, Gothic relics, gold and silver church vessels, manuscripts, books and prints, furniture, rugs, jewels, coins, porcelain. Lanny had seen the like only once before in his life, in the Bronx, New York: the property of an American multimillionaire who had built an enormous warehouse to contain the treasures he never had time to look at. William Randolph Hearst had paid for the stuff with the pennies he had collected from newspaper readers over a period of more than half a century; under the laws of the business game that made it proper, and you could not indict him for the mass of crime, scandal, and political reaction he had fed to the American people through those years.
The Monuments men were at work here, measuring, estimating weights, and figuring how to handle this precious material; how many trucks it would require, and what size. The miners would give willing help, for they wanted to clear the stuff out and get back to their proper business. Whatever had been got in somehow could be got out somehow; it would be carted to those two immense buildings in Munich and there classified and ultimately returned to the land from which it had come. The plan was to put off the job of finding the original owners upon each country; American responsibility would end when the stuff had been turned over to that country and a receipt signed by the proper official.
V
Back in the town of Berchtesgaden, he found a letter from Laurel, saying that she had got permission and was coming. So he waited, indulging himself meanwhile in the pleasure of walking in these foothills and talking with the German people, not in the guise of a Nazi but as he really was. One and all they were polite, even obsequious, and one and all denied ever having had any sympathy with the Nazis. What they really thought was impossible to know. At home were people who talked blithely about the project of making the German people over according to the pattern of democracy; but the ex-Bürgermeister
stellvertreter of Urach had to admit to himself that he would hardly know how to set about it.
The magazine writer in search of copy put in her appearance. Her first question was, “Any news about Marceline?” He told her that he had about given up hope, and that cast a shadow over their meeting. But nothing could take away Laurel’s relief that this most dreadful of wars was over. The whole world took on a different aspect, and she could draw a free breath for the first time in nearly six years. Lanny’s reply was peculiar; he said that he felt let down; the war had kept him in a state of tension, and now he missed it. The wife said, “How like you men! I believe you are all as bad as General Patton!”
For the first time she could ask him questions and he was free to answer. He did not tell her everything at once; there were some painful experiences that he would never tell. But he satisfied her curiosity about his friendship with Hitler, something which had been a mystery to her since she had first come to know him. How had it been possible, and what had Hitler seen in him?
An ancient Roman emperor had made the remark, “Pecunia non olet”—money has no smell; but Adi Schicklgruber had proved that this was an error. He had developed a sharp sense of smell for money, and especially for that which might be obtained for his cause. In the early days he had diligently cultivated Frau Bechstein, widow of the piano manufacturer; and so on up to Stinnes and Thyssen and the other steel kings who had given him both money and arms and set him up in his business of conquering first Germany and then the rest of Europe.