Lanny, having previously investigated it, needed only to make sure that it was the same painting. How much did Herr Schlesinger want for it?’
So began an agony of soul. Herr Schlesinger wanted Lanny to make an offer, but Lanny said quietly that he never made offers. He had not come to haggle; the owner set the price, and if Lanny thought it was reasonable the money would be forthcoming in American dollars. If not, he had another Rembrandt in view in Paris and would travel there.
‘Ach, ja’, said Herr Schlesinger. ‘I think I know the one you mean, but that is a painting of the artist as a young man. This one is full of character, of spiritual meaning’.
‘To be sure’, said Lanny, ‘but the general public isn’t spiritual. It is interested in youth and in pretty things’.
Herr Schlesinger became eloquent. He talked of how scarce Rembrandts had come to be—most of them were in museums and couldn’t be purchased for any price. This one was peerless, it was really priceless; it deserved many adjectives and received them. Lanny was patient; he knew this was the bargaining process, and politeness required that he listen to every word. He didn’t attempt to controvert any of the statements, for that would have been haggling, and he was taking an aloof and magnificent position.
Herr Schlesinger said he had expected Lanny to make an offer, and in the effort to strengthen his own nerves, or perhaps to weaken Lanny’s, he ordered Kaffee und Kuchen. But Lanny didn’t weaken, and in the end the ageing man blurted out that he wanted two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars for the painting. He probably expected to hear Lanny say that it was too much, and Lanny said it, and was very polite in regretting that he couldn’t advise his client to pay that sum.
Lanny arose and prepared to take his departure. No sooner had he got up out of his chair than Herr Schlesinger said two hundred and ten thousand, and by the time Lanny got to the door he had come down to two hundred thousand. Then he followed out to the car and pleaded with the expert, almost but not quite with tears. What would he be willing to pay?
But Lanny was firm about it and said he never broke his rule; he said that all Herr Schlesinger had to do was to name the lowest price that he would be willing to accept, and if Lanny thought he could do so in justice to his client he would say yas. The trembling old man, seeing Lanny opening the door of his car, said a hundred and seventy-five thousand; and Lanny said, All right, he could advise his client to pay that.
XII
They went back into the house, and papers were made out and signed. Lanny had had four hundred thousand dollars put at his disposal in a London Bank, and he now made out a draft for a hundred and seventy-five thousand in Herr Schlesinger’s favour; at Lanny’s suggestion Herr Schlesinger went to the telephone and called the London bank and got the assurance that the draft would be honoured. Then the old man rang for one of his servants, and Lanny saw the painting taken down from the wall and put into his car. He bade good-bye to the steel man, and the steel man bade good-bye to his treasure, joy and sorrow mixed in his heart.
The purchaser drove into the city and found a box factory where he could have the treasure wrapped and sewed up in canvas and waterproof cloth and then boxed beyond possibility of damage. It was evening by the time all that was done, and he had the precious box transported to his hotel and carried up to his room. He wouldn’t leave it alone for a minute: he had dinner brought up to him and spent the evening stretched out on the bed, reading the sprightly sad letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle.
In the morning the treasure was carried down and transported to the office of the American Express Company, which was again doing business in Western Germany. He had it shipped to New York, insured for its full value. That cost a lot of money, but the client had it. Lanny sent him a cablegram, and by airmail an accounting of the whole procedure. This having been done, the art expert was entitled to draw seventeen thousand five hundred dollars of the money in London and put it in his personal account. Then he was flown back to Berlin, still with Jane keeping him company. He liked her very much and thought he could have done better than Thomas, her crochety husband. He wondered if the General Graf Stubendorf had got through reading the husband’s five volumes about Frederick the Great.
14 HANGING BREATHLESS
I
When Lanny got back to Berlin he found a note at his hotel to call Braun; that was Monck. He called, and Monck said, ‘I’ll come right over’.
In Lanny’s room, with the door closed, he stated, ‘Bad news for both of us; Ferdinand has been arrested’. Monck didn’t trust himself to say the boy’s real name even in a hotel room, because servants in hotels can be bribed and rooms can be secretly wired.
‘Oh no!’ Lanny exclaimed.
‘Three men came to the room he shares with several other fellows. One of them pointed him out, and they put handcuffs on him and took him away without a word’.
‘Soviet men?’
‘MGB agents undoubtedly. They are the secret police in the East sector’.
‘Would that be on our account?’
Monck’s answer was, ‘Let’s take a walk’. So they went downstairs separately and met outside and walked along obscure streets, making sure they were not being followed.
‘I’ve been trying to figure it out’, Monck said. ‘It’s a complicated matter. The boy was supposed to be a Nazi sympathiser posing as a Red. He had confided to some of his friends that he was a Nazi, so the most likely thing is that they took him for that reason. But they will put him through their ordeal and make him tell all he knows’.
‘Do you think he will talk about us?’
‘They will reduce his mind to such a pulp he will be like a man talking in a trance or in a dream. He won’t know what he’s saying, and when he gets through he may not know what he said’.
‘Oh, Monck, how perfectly horrible! Is there nothing we can do about it?’
‘Not a thing in this world. He’s a Soviet subject by conquest, and he’s in the Soviet Union to all intents and purposes. If we said a word about him we’d simply be revealing that we are interested in him, and they’d set to work to find out why. We couldn’t do him a greater disservice’.
‘And we don’t know how long we’ll have to wait!’
‘I know men who were arrested by the Nazis, and their families had to wait ten years. The same men were taken by the Reds, and some of the families are still waiting’.
‘It makes me sick to think about it’, Lanny said. He looked about him. There was a pile of bricks in front of a wrecked building, and he sat on it for a minute or two to get himself together. Monck sat by him, saying nothing. He knew how his friend felt. A man needed a tough hide to live in this new-old Europe. But Lanny Budd had not been able to grow that hide.
II
When they were walking again the German gave his professional view of the situation. ‘If they think he is a Nazi it may not be so bad for him. They don’t mind that so much now because the Nazis are licked. They may make him a proposition to work for them. If so, we may hear from him soon’.
‘He won’t sell us out, that I am sure of’, declared Lanny.
‘He’d become a double agent. It may be they’ll set him to work on his father, without knowing that he’s already doing it. That would be a new one even to me!’
‘Oh, that poor boy!’ Lanny exclaimed. ‘I’ll never be able to forgive myself!’
‘Don’t start getting neurotic’, said the other in a firm voice. ‘We are in a war, and you have seen men die. This boy knew what he was getting into, and he’s done us a real service in tracing the counterfeiters to Hungary. Even if he had never met you he wasn’t going to be safe; he wasn’t going to be safe if he followed his father, and he wasn’t going to be safe if he turned against his father’.
‘I know all that’, Lanny said. ‘I warned him of the danger’.
‘We all warned him, and he went in with his eyes open. It’s happening all the time; just a short time ago the Reds took away half a dozen students from the univ
ersity. It caused an uproar, but the Reds don’t mind that—they want to frighten the rest, including the faculty. They come over into our sector and arrest Germans and carry them off at night, and we don’t know about it unless somebody hears a disturbance and tips us off. They’ve kidnapped a dozen Americans that I could name, and in every case they denied that they ever heard of them. We don’t get them back unless we are able to get exact information as to who they are, where they are, and who arrested them’.
‘I’ve heard those stories’, Lanny said. ‘But this is the first time it’s been anyone I know.’
‘I cautioned you,’ Monck went on, ‘and now I want to make it emphatic. You have to learn what I’ve learned, and don’t go out on the street at night without company. You’re known as a R.I.A.S. man now, and there’s nobody they hate more. You went over to that Writers’ Congress, you’re known to be Lasky’s friend, and now comes this business of Ferdinand. The kid may name us, or they may already know about us, and they’ll tell him what to say about us and he’ll say it, believe me. From now on you must assume that you’re a marked man; and I want you to promise that if anyone lays hands on you, you won’t have any dignity about it, but scream like a wildcat. Make all the noise you can, and shout your name over and over again. That’s your only chance, that somebody may hear your name and take the trouble to go to a telephone and call up AMG. It happens that way often, and then we start raising hell and the Reds have to give up.’
‘All right,’ Lanny promised. He couldn’t help being amused by the image of himself screaming like a wildcat. But his smile died as he thought again of that blue-eyed, pink-cheeked German boy screaming. They would take him into some cellar where his screams would not be heard; they had rooms built especially for that purpose. They had all the torture devices that the Nazis had used, and new ones contrived by their own scientists. Lanny had known about the Nazis’ from the earliest days, because Hermann Göring had had him taken to see the sights—just for the hell of it.
‘You’re too softhearted,’ Monck said, knowing Lanny of old. ‘A man has no business coming to this part of the world unless he’s grown callous. We just have to write that boy off and look for another agent. If he comes back, it’s that much to the good—unless his nerves are so shot he can’t work any more’.
‘I hope you got everything he had,’ replied Lanny, trying to take his old colleague’s advice.
‘I’ll never be sure about that. He may have had papers on him, and that would be bad’.
‘Poor Kurt!’ exclaimed Lanny. ‘I suppose he has heard about it.’
‘What I’m thinking about,’ was the reply, ‘is where I can find somebody else that can get next to Kurt Meissner. That surely sets us a problem’.
‘That’s one place where I can’t help you’, replied Lanny.
III
He said it and he meant it; but you never could tell in this strange business. He went back to his hotel, and sitting there in the lobby was a tall, long-faced German. Of all the unlikely persons in all the four zones of that conquered land—Kurt Meissner!
He looked older, poorer, and more beaten than Lanny had ever seen him, or ever expected to. His face was almost grey; and Lanny thought in a flash, He knows!
It wouldn’t do for Lanny to know, of course, so he said cheerfully, ‘Why, Kurt! Hello! What brings you here?’—as if he could have no idea that Kurt had come there to see him.
‘I want to speak to you,’ said Kurt quietly. ‘I have come to tell you—they have taken my oldest boy, Fritz’.
‘The Reds?’
‘Yes. They came to his room and took him away’.
‘How dreadful! What has he done?’
‘I cannot find out, I have been to the police, I have been to the military, and they say they know nothing about it. They give me surly looks; it is an impertinence for me to come and ask. I am a German dog’.
‘Tell me, what were the boy’s activities? What were his ideas?’
‘He was a loyal German, naturally. But I warned him that if we were going to live in the East zone we must accommodate ourselves to the regime; we must make it plain that we were non-political, that we were obeying the laws. You understand, a certain amount of camouflage was necessary’.
‘I understand well’.
‘But the boy was impetuous. He was young and inexperienced. No doubt he told some of his comrades that he was a Nazi sympathiser, as his father had been in the old days; and no doubt the Reds had spies among the students’.
‘You remember, I warned you of that very thing, Kurt’.
‘I was stubborn when I should have heeded you. I see now that I cannot live in the East zone. I think of how they will torture my boy; they may break him down, and the next time they may come for me. When I went into that M.G.B. building I knew that I might not come out again. I am not thinking of myself—life no longer holds anything for me; I am a wreck, a beaten man. But I have to think of Elsa and the children and what will become of them’.
‘Have you told Elsa?’ Lanny asked.
‘Elsa is in Wendefurth, and I have not written her. I cannot bear to do it. She will go out of her mind. She adores the boy’.
‘It’s a terrible thing to think of, Kurt’. Lanny could share the grief for the fate of the son, but there were limits to his sympathy for the father. He knew how many persons had had this same anguish inflicted upon them by the Nazis—literally millions of people. Kurt had known about it and had managed to endure it without grief. But now the tables were turned; he was the conquered instead of the conqueror. Vae victis! had been the motto of the ancient Romans; they had been a stern people.
‘You remember the boy, Lanny?’ demanded Kurt.
‘I remember him well, of course; a fair-haired lad with blue eyes. He was tall for his age’.
‘He is as tall as you are now. He is sound, and I have trained him to be a decent man. But how he will stand up under the torture I cannot be sure’.
‘There is no use torturing yourself, Kurt. It may not turn out to be as bad as you fear. They may let him go after a while’.
‘I think it unlikely. They are determined to root out every trace of the Führer’s teachings. They will want to know about me and my associates. I have been doing nothing they could object to, but they may choose to believe otherwise; and they have ways of making a man confess’.
Something inside Lanny was saying, ‘So you know about those ways!’ A curios kind of satisfaction, to watch a Nazi taking a dose of his own medicine and making a face over it. But it was not a generous feeling, and Lanny put it aside. ‘You must think about the rest of your family, Kurt’.
‘That is why I came to you. You offered to help me get into the American zone. Are you still willing to do it?’
‘I will do my best, as I promised. Can Elsa get a permit to bring the children to Berlin?’
‘I think so. It would be natural for my family to wish to join me, and once they’re in East Berlin they can cross into the American sector. The only question is, would they be permitted to stay here. To go back again would pretty surely mean Siberia’.
‘I’d be glad to save those childern from having to be brought up by the Reds,’ said Lanny. ‘But you must understand, Kurt; when I talk to the military people they will want to know what your attitude is going to be. They don’t want to import any more Neo-Nazis into their zone’.
‘I pledge my word, Lanny,’ said his old friend solemnly. ‘I am an absolutely non-political person. I accept the fact that the National-Socialist movement is dead and that Germany is to be a democratic land’.
The German was looking the American straight in the eye as he said this, and it gave Lanny something of a qualm. He knew that the Nazis had lied on principle, exactly as the Communists were doing now; Lanny, as a spy, had lied to Kurt and had taken it for granted that Kurt, as a spy, would lie to him. But this was something more personal and more human—or so it ought to have been.
Lanny showed no doubt. He said q
uietly. ‘All right, Kurt, I will see what can be done. You mustn’t be surprised if there is delay, because our Refugee Commission has its hands full. Meantime, if I were you I would keep away from the Reds as much as possible. Have you thought where you wish to live in the American zone?’
The reply was, ‘I should like to be near the General Graf Stubendorf.’ Kurt always referred to him in that formal manner; never without his titles, as Lanny would do. ‘He is living by the Tegernsee, and I have thought of writing to him but was afraid my mail might be opened’.
Lanny saw that he had to tell of his visit to the Graf. Then he added, ‘He is living very humbly’.
‘I know, but that is because he is an old man and needs attendance and quiet. But I believe he has another cottage nearby, and we might be able to lease it’.
‘Are you going to need money?’
‘Thank you, Lanny, I have some saved up. You do not have to bother about that’.
Lanny kept his smile to himself. Little did Kurt guess how much worrying Lanny had been doing on the subject of Kurt’s money!
IV
They parted, and Lanny went at once to the genial Mr Morrison of the Treasury. That official was professionally grieved over the loss of a good spy, but needless to say he had no grief over the spy’s father. ‘It is a question of balancing gains against losses,’ was his conclusion. ‘Kurt and his mob are dangerous characters; on the other hand, if we have them in our zone we can watch them more closely. There are always anti-Nazis who are willing to watch Nazis, especially when they get paid for it. And if Kurt or his fellows bring their phony money to the Tegernsee we’ll be in position to grab it, and them’.
‘It might be easy to handle them in Bavaria,’ Lanny pointed out, ‘because it is a Catholic land and a great many people who were forced to call themselves Nazis were really not that at heart’.
‘Quite so,’ assented the other. ‘Tell me about Stubendorf; could we expect anything from him?’