And now came the news about Heinrich Himmler, most sought of all the party survivors. An odd turn of the wheel of fate; this most mild-mannered of fanatics, head of the SS and the Gestapo, had driven Lanny Budd into secret flight with false papers and a disguise, and now the tables were turned and it was Heinrich who was fleeing under the same circumstances. Only two differences between the cases: Lanny had fled southward while Himmler fled westward, and Lanny had succeeded while Himmler failed. Two British soldiers guarding a bridge at Bremerwörde, west of Hamburg, stopped three men in civilian clothing who were trying to pass. The leader was a shortish, smooth-faced man wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses and a patch over one eye; he had perfectly good papers and a pass identifying him as Herr Hitzinger, member of the German Field Security Police.
His papers were too good, for in these days of turmoil few refugees had any papers whatever. The trio were turned over to the British Field Security Police, and after a grilling the gentle Heinrich admitted who he was. He was searched, and protested against the indignity—he who had had so many millions of people searched, all over Europe! The British doctor ordered him to open his mouth, and he did so, and rolled his tongue around his teeth to show that his mouth was empty. But the doctor wasn’t satisfied and put his finger into the mouth, whereupon the man clamped his teeth down and broke a tiny capsule of cyanide which he had hidden there.
He fell, and for a few minutes slobbered into a tin basin, and then was dead. The British put him into what they call a “lorry” and carried him out into the woods. They had no coffin, and didn’t waste even that much wood on him; they dug a deep hole and dropped the body in. “A worm to the worms,” said the British sergeant, and they shoveled in the earth and carefully leveled the ground and scattered leaves over it, so that there would be no martyr’s bones for the SS to cherish.
III
These tidings were important to Lanny for a special reason: they took from his mind one more faint hope that he might find out something regarding his half-sister. The ex-Reichsminister might have been willing to tell him if he remembered the case. The only other chance would be the Gestapo records in Berlin. Millions of displaced persons and other millions of German refugees were all over this tormented land, and who was going to remember anything about a Franco-American night-club dancer who had been the mistress of a Junker officer and had disappeared from public view when places of entertainment had been closed some three years ago?
No, he might as well give it up, write his mother to give it up, and say that Marceline was dead. He had just about decided on this, and composed in his mind a letter to Beauty, when there came to Unterstein a letter for him, forwarded by Monuments in Paris. It was from Bernhardt Monck and had been mailed in Leipzig. It read:
“Dear Lanny: The censor permits me to tell you where I am, and that I have resumed my own name. You can reach me in care of G-2 of First Army Headquarters here. You told me about your sister, and I promised to make inquiries wherever I saw a chance. I have come upon the following case, which I think may be worth reporting to you:
“A woman was found in the women’s hospital of the Leipzig Concentration Camp. She was one of a thousand or so who had been working twelve-hour shifts in a near-by munitions factory. She was wearing a canvas skirt and jacket, nothing else, and no identification marks of any sort. I am guessing that she is young, but it is hard to be sure. She had been through the torture mill; all her teeth have been knocked out, her back and legs are a mass of welts which the doctors say have been there for some time, and her finger ends show scars of fire, probably caused by shoving matches under the nails.
“Apparently she suffers from complete amnesia; she does not know who she is or where she came from. She answers everything about her past with ‘I do not know.’ When let alone, she sits perfectly still, and cowers when she is approached. Her eyes and hair are brown, the hair with some gray. She has a strawberry mark on her left leg; no other peculiarity that I can see. She is about five feet seven, and is fearfully emaciated, but not beyond the point where she can be restored. If these details correspond to your sister, you might come and have a look at her. If you are too far away, or if it is not convenient, I will arrange to get a photo for you. She goes by the name Martha and the number F1147.
“The sights in this place exceed anything that even I imagined, and I had thought I knew the Nazis after almost twenty-five years of keeping out of their clutches. For your sake I am hoping that this is not Marceline; perhaps you have already found her, and if so this letter will not trouble you. If I have to leave here I will give a forwarding address. As ever, Bernhardt Monck.”
IV
Lanny read that letter with a sinking heart. One sentence struck him like a blow: the strawberry mark! He had seen Marceline’s a thousand times, for they had worn bathing suits a good part of the time at Bienvenu. As a toddler she had learned dancing steps from him, wearing nothing but a tiny pair of trunks; the strawberry mark had been there and had grown with her, and he had teased her about it. He had had every opportunity to watch that lovely body growing; she had added to the bathing trunks only a brassière—no more was called for on the Coast of Pleasure. They had practiced dancing steps by the hour; she was tireless, and her vigor and grace had been a marvel to him. After she divorced her Italian capitano and had made up her mind to a professional career, she had worn Lanny out making him rehearse with her. And now the fiends had knocked all the teeth out of her jaws; they had poked burning matches under her finger nails and lashed her back bloody with steel whips.
He took the letter to Laurel, saying, “This is Marceline.” She read it and then sat gazing at him, speechless for a while. “Oh, Lanny, how awful! How awful!” she whispered at last.
“They must have been trying to make her tell about me,” he said.
“And she wouldn’t!”
“She couldn’t even if she had wanted to. She had warned me to get out of Germany, but she had no idea how I would do it. I didn’t know myself until I had time to think it over.”
“You mustn’t torture yourself over this, Lanny. You couldn’t have helped it. And it may not be Marceline.”
“It is hardly possible that there could be such a set of coincidences. Leipzig is not far from Berlin, and she may have sought refuge there. It is even possible that she may have been there when she telephoned me the warning.”
“You must go and make sure about her of course.”
“She may not recognize me. Her amnesia is a retreat from pain and terror.”
“What will you do if it is Marceline?”
“It depends upon her condition. If she is able to be moved I must get her back to Bienvenu. This will be no new story to Beauty.” He didn’t need to explain what he meant, for Laurel knew all the details of the story of Marcel Detaze, how he had had his face burned off in the exploding of an observation balloon, and how Beauty had stuck to him through it all. She had married him, in spite of his having to wear a silk mask over his face. Marceline had been the fruit of that marriage.
“Can you spare me that long, dear?” he asked, keeping the delicate balance between wives and in-laws.
“Of course,” she answered. “I would come with you if I could be of any use. But I am not much more than a name to Marceline, and it is possible that in her subconscious mind she resents my having taken her beloved brother away from her.”
“I don’t think that,” he said. “She had her own affairs and was quite cold-blooded about going after what she wanted. She never asked my advice except in matters of art and how to meet rich people who would take an interest in her dancing.”
“But she stood by you in Germany, Lanny!”
“Of course, and I have to stand by her. It will be painful, and there’s nothing you can do to make it less so. I am guessing that what she needs is psychological care, and the person to give it is Parsifal. He knows her and loves her, and can give her suggestions all day and half the night without ever being bored. You go on getti
ng your material; then come to Juan to do your writing, where you can be warm.”
V
Lanny packed his bag and got himself transported to Munich. At the dusty airport it didn’t take him long to find a pilot who was flying to Berlin and could get permission to drop an assimilated colonel off at Leipzig. The trip was a couple of hundred miles and took only an hour. He looked down on another bombed-out city, and when he got a jeep to run him into town he saw the familiar sight of tall, crowded buildings, which had stood for a couple of hundred years, turned to rubble and, where it blocked the streets, being shoveled into trucks. The British had done what was called “area bombing,” coming by night and hitting anything; the Americans had come by day, and had boasted that they could drop a bomb into a barrel—but many times, aiming at a factory, they had leveled five- and six-story tenements or rows of barrack-like workers’ homes.
Lanny knew nobody in the First Army, but he had his credentials and his pitiful story. Intelligence here knew Bernhardt Monck and valued him; they gave Lanny the requisite permit and a car to take him to the Lager, which was far in the suburbs, so that residents of this ancient and honorable city might not be bothered by the stink. Leipzig had been the center of the German publishing industry, and from it had come the seven million copies of Mein Kampf which so many Germans had taken for their national and racial Bible. Now you would have had a hard time finding any man or woman who would admit having read it through; you would be tempted to believe them, since no book less readable had been published in the modern world.
All the Lagern were alike; they had been brought into being on a mass-production basis, and when you had seen Dachau, the prototype, you had seen them all. At Leipzig the American Army had had about six weeks to clean up; there were no longer cordwood stacks of human skeletons covered with skin, and so the stinks were reduced in intensity. The hospital was clean, and the German doctors no longer tried “scientific” experiments on the patients but worked under American direction to restore blood and tissue to nearly starved bodies. The patients were getting orange juice made from canned powder, and canned milk diluted, and broth and gruel, and when they were able to walk and to digest solid food they were turned loose if they wanted to go. But many had no place to go to and were terrified by the thought of confronting a world in which they no longer had relatives or friends or homes. Millions of the homes had been destroyed, and millions of families had been scattered over the face of Europe, so that parents had no way to find children and children no way to find parents.
VI
Here, in a place that was the same as a barracks except that the bunks were not in tiers, Lanny found his half-sister. It was Marceline beyond question, in spite of the dreadful changes. Only once before had his heart been wrung in the same way—when he stood on the Rhine bridge between Kehl and Strasbourg and took from the hands of Nazi stormtroopers the broken body of Freddi Robin. That had been twelve years ago, but he had never forgotten the pangs, and never would he forget these. Marceline was a woman, twenty-eight years old by the calendar, and something of an artist; Freddi had been two years younger at the time; a scholar, musician, and idealist, almost a saint. For which of them would you feel the greater grief?
This woman was one of the near-skeletons; her jaws were sunken, her hair unkempt and streaked with gray, her eyes full of fear. She didn’t know Lanny, and for a long time she manifested no interest in him. She was well enough to move about, but apparently all she wanted was to sit in a corner and be let alone. She had been working twelve hours every day filling cases of small-caliber artillery shells, and the doctors had thought it unwise to leave her idle, so they had had a woman teach her to knit. That was all right with the patient; they had given her a sock for a model, and now she turned out socks with machine-like regularity. She was afraid of new persons who came near her, and it was some time before she could be convinced that her half-brother was not another torturer.
He told the doctors who she was, and told them her story as far as he knew it. They said it was a familiar case; they had others here. They used long technical words, as doctors do; the substance of it was that her personality had retreated from unendurable suffering and had sought refuge deep in her subconsciousness. Perhaps it was the last dreadful climax that had caused it. When the American Army had drawn near, the infuriated SS had locked all the doors of the men’s hospital and set fire to it. The building was just across the street from the women’s, and they had heard the screams of the men and smelled the odor of burning flesh. Half a dozen of the half-burned men had managed to crawl out of the building and into the women’s hospital. Marceline had fled into the typhoid ward, where nearly three hundred women were huddled, expecting the same fate as the men; she had been found hidden under a bunk—and perhaps that was where her sense of identity had taken flight.
Lanny sent telegrams to Laurel, to Beauty, and to Robbie, telling what he had found. Then he settled down, patiently and tenderly, to try to bring back his half-sister’s memory. He told her who she was, but the name meant nothing to her. He told her about her mother, her stepfather, her little boy, and the home where she had been raised; she had no trace of recollection and seemed not to want to have any; she resisted the disclosures, as if they were an attack. He thought it the part of wisdom not to mention Oskar von Herzenberg, or her dancing, or anything that had happened in Germany, because that would be bringing back her fears. Better to go back to her childhood, to memories that meant peace and joy. But nothing made any difference that he could observe. Marceline wanted to remain Martha F1147.
They were feeding her every two hours on limited quantities of liquid foods; he arranged that he should perform this service, and while she ate he sat and talked to her gently. She had to be re-educated, as if she were a child. He explained to her that the cruel war was over, that the evil Nazis were gone and had no possibility of returning; she was in the hands of people who loved her and would never do her harm. He tried his best to interest her in the strange idea that she had a mother, and a lovely little dark-eyed half-Italian son, and a beautiful home on the Cap d’Antibes, in a country called France. That country meant nothing to her.
She would sit and knit with her half-crippled fingers—better not to look at them, or you would want to go out and hunt for a few SS men and shoot them. He managed to make friends with her, so that she accepted his statement that he was her half-brother; but he failed to awaken a single memory. She was hungry and ate her food, and that was a sign of life; for the rest, she did what he told her, or what anybody told her. If they said “You should sleep now,” she would lie down and sleep. If they said “Come with me,” she would come, It was the well-known German Ordnung und Zucht!
VII
In the evenings he went out and looked up Bernhardt Monck, who had been away on a mission and now had returned. For the first time since war had come, these two men were able to talk frankly to each other. One of the strictest rules which OSS and other secret agents had to keep was against telling anybody anything that didn’t have to be told. What any agent knew might be wrung out of him by torture, but what he didn’t know was beyond any power of the enemy to get.
This pair had made contacts a dozen times during the war, and each time had strictly obeyed the rule. Monck, stationed in Stockholm, had given Lanny the name of a faithful German Social Democrat, an old watchmaker, and it was he who had put Lanny in touch with the underground which had passed him part of the way to Italy. Now Lanny could tell Monck about Johann Seidl and ask what had become of him. Monck didn’t know, for he hadn’t been to Berlin; it was the “Russkys” who had taken the city, and Americans went there only on official missions. He wanted to know if Lanny thought that Hitler was really dead, and Lanny told about his interview with Göring and what the old-style robber baron had said on the subject. Of course you couldn’t know what Göring really thought.
Two veterans back from the wars, fighting their battles over again! Monck owed his position in the OSS to Lan
ny’s endorsement, and now he felt that he was making a report to a superior. He had reason to be proud of the work he had done. In collaboration with Eric Erickson, Swedish oil man secretly in sympathy with America, Monck had been in charge of collecting information concerning the synthetic oil plants of Germany, their location and condition before and after bombing. The destruction of these plants had had as much to do with bringing the war to an end as any one thing a man could put his finger on. A year ago General Spaatz, Air Force commander, had cabled the order: “Primary strategic aim of U. S. Strategic Air Forces is now to deny oil to enemy air forces.” From then on oil plants were top priority targets and were dealt with under the familiar system: put them out of use, wait until they were repaired, and then smash them again.
Monck, in Stockholm, had had some thirty agents, men and women, working under his command in Germany, and only four of them had been lost. They had reported on eighty-seven vital targets connected with oil, and in the last ten months of the war General Spaatz’s airmen had dropped nearly two hundred thousand tons of bombs on or near those targets. When he had started the war Hitler had had on hand only two or three months’ supply of oil, but he had made tremendous efforts to increase his supply and had succeeded for five years, as all the world knew. Synthetic oil was the answer, and by what was known as the Karinhall Plan he had raised Germany’s oil production to eight million tons per year.