His question was answered as he was leaving the train. Others were behind him, and he was jostled at the exit. As he passed through the gate something was shoved into his hand, and a voice muttered: “Nehmen Sie’s”—take it. The man walked quickly off, and Lanny stuffed a bit of paper into his pocket.
He knew better than to look at it there; he walked on until he found a small café, where he got his breakfast—a cup of Ersatzkaffee, bread with imitation butter, and a bit of sausage, composed largely of flour, that tasted like sawdust. While eating this he kept his overcoat over the back of his chair, sitting on part of it for safety. He made so bold as to take out the bit of paper, and found it a small six-page folder. On both its outside covers was an advertisement: “Wagon-Lits Cook: World Organization for Tours, 350 Branch Offices, Information and Advice Free of Charge.” There was a map showing the railroads of Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and parts of France, Italy, and England, which, assuredly, no tourists from Berlin were visiting at present. This might have puzzled you, until you turned inside and discovered, neatly sandwiched in between half a dozen little labels of “Wagon-Lits Cook,” an article in small print entitled: “Wehrt Euch, von Heinrich Mann.” Defend yourselves! There followed the text of a speech delivered by the well-known anti-Nazi refugee at an “International Conference for the Defense of Democracy, Peace, and Human Rights, attended by six hundred delegates from thirty-six lands.”
Lanny thought that he didn’t need to read it and knew that he had no business to have it on his person, for he might run into one of those round-ups directed by the General of Anxiety and the General of Whirlwind, and no place more likely than in Moabit, a workers’ district of the Hauptstadt. He called for an ash tray and matches and carefully lighted the leaflet and held it by one corner while it burned. He mashed the black remains with his fingers, lest anybody’s curiosity might have been excited by his behavior. But apparently in these days all Germans were too tired to have any curiosity. No one showed the least interest in his odd performance.
XI
Lanny knew this poverty-stricken district well, for he had come here in the days when he had helped to support a workers’ school in Berlin. It was here that he had met Käthe Kollwitz, artist of the poor, who had devoted her whole life to pleading their cause. It was here that he had discovered Trudi Schultz, also an artist, working in a tailor-shop and hiding from the Nazis; it was from here that he had picked her up in his car and got her out of Hitlerland, just in time. He had no car now, and had to go on foot; he wondered what he would do if Bernardt Monck were to get into trouble and call for help. For all that Lanny knew, he might be in trouble right now!
The P.A. walked around a block a couple of times, to be sure that no one was trailing him. He came to the corner appointed exactly on the second; he didn’t want to have to linger or to come a second time. And sure enough, here came the ex-sailor, ex-capitán, now butler. He saw Lanny and did not come to the corner, but turned on his heel and walked slowly in the opposite direction. Lanny followed, not catching up, and looking over his shoulder now and then to be sure that no one was following. Monck disappeared into a narrow alley between two tenements.
He was out of sight when Lanny got there; but the American entered, and came into a small court having several doors. One was partly open, and as Lanny came near it a hand beckoned him in. Monck whispered: “Follow me,” and they went through a passage in semidarkness, and into what was apparently a storeroom with a small gas taper burning. There were trunks piled against the wall, and some boxes. Monck took a seat on one and signed Lanny to another beside it.
The first time this pair had met, in London almost ten years ago, the man from Germany had said: “Besser wir sprechen Deutsch.” Now, in Berlin, he said: “Better we speak English. There are friends here, but no one can say when there may be an enemy. Speak low; and let us be brief, because both of us are too important to be caught together.”
“Right,” said Lanny.
“Tell me first, are you in any danger?”
“None whatever.”
“You are using your own name?”
“Yes. The Number One has given me a letter.”
“Herrgott!” exclaimed the butler, forgetting that that wasn’t English. He began: “What—” and then remembered that he didn’t ask questions. “I am here under the name of Konrad Kraft, and I’m a real butler, doing my best to make good. It is not so easy getting off this morning, because the master is sick and that is the time he needs attention.”
“He has no idea that you are—different?”
“Not the slightest. He’s an easygoing person and not keen about extra-scientific activities. He had no idea that the friend who recommended me is—well, extra-scientific.”
“I get you, Konrad.”
“There are coming to be more and more such persons. Events are making them. Stalingrad was, I believe, the Gettysburg of this war.”
“I agree with you.”
“It is amazing what one hears people say, quite openly; and the jokes by the night-club entertainers.”
“Perhaps that is why they have shut them up.”
“No doubt of it. But literature gets circulated, and by people we have never heard of.”
“A sample of it was put into my hands on my way here.”
“So it goes. You may say outside that the German people are waking up.”
“Have you anything you want me to take out for you?”
“It is not necessary; there seems to be an excellent courier service. Sometimes it breaks down, but at present it is working. There was, I am told, a cell of opposition in the censorship office; eight people were shot. You wouldn’t find anything about that in the papers, of course. Nor the fact that when Admiral Doenitz took Raeder’s place at the head of the Navy, more than eighty officers were shot for ‘treasonable activities.’”
“And yet there are persons at home who blame the German people for this war!” exclaimed the P.A. Then, remembering that the time was short: “Tell me a little of what you have done, so that I will know what I don’t have to do.”
“I take the master’s papers in the night and copy essential parts. Twice he has entrusted me with secret documents to be delivered, and these have been photographed. Also, I have had chances to listen to conversations, but that is not so easy because I don’t know the technical terms.”
“What you have sent has to do with your employer’s subject entirely?”
“For the most part, yes; but other chances are coming into sight now. Day before yesterday I got hold of one of Salzmann’s reports. The Germans have more than a hundred types of guided missiles in or near production, using every type of remote control—radar, radio, continuous wave, infra-red, light beams, magnetics.”
“I congratulate you. An extraordinary feat!”
“Another matter: I don’t want to use names, but you remember the learned Austrian coin?”
“I remember it.”
“That party has been visited. Everything he can furnish has been sent out.”
“I am relieved to hear it. I have been giving a lot of thought to the problem of meeting him. I was afraid it might be dangerous even to mention him—dangerous for me, or for him.”
“He has escaped suspicion, so far as we know, or as he knows.”
Ever since the summer of 1941, Lanny’s mind had been obsessed with Professor Schilling, the “Austrian coin”; Lanny had come near to death several times in the effort to get to him. It had been in the hope of hearing his name that he visited Plötzen; and now to be told that he could forget him was like coughing up the traditional alligator.
“One thing more,” said Konrad Kraft. “You remember that you asked about the location of a place where very important experiments were being tried?”
“I remember.” The reference, of course, was to Peenemünde.
“That name has been sent out, also.”
“It may interest you to know, Konrad, that I learned that
name and gave it to our Number One about a month ago. Has anything happened to the place that you know of?”
“Nothing. If it had, I would surely have known about it.”
“I can guess that somebody is waiting for developments to occur, for processes to be completed and so on. There is a precise hour to strike; before that would be premature, and after it might be too late.”
“I will try to learn more on the subject and send it out. You talked with a very important man yesterday afternoon, and one difficult to reach. I don’t ask what luck you had. How long do you plan to be here?”
“A week or ten days more. I am expecting to keep an important engagement in a day or two. Then I will return to this city. I am staying at the palace of Fürstin Donnerstein, on Bismarckstrasse in Charlottenburg. You telephone me there if you should have anything important. Use my name.”
“I cannot give mine.”
“Surely not. Choose another.”
In the course of ten years Lanny had learned half a dozen names for this man of many roles. Now Monck said: “I’ll be Vetterl.” And Lanny replied in the best American: “Okeydoky.”
There was nothing more to be said. He rose, and they shook hands. The German said: “I’ll go out first and have a look. If I don’t come back, it means trouble, and you find your way upstairs in this house and go out by the front door if you can.” Such was the life of an O.S.S. man in the Nazi Hauptstadt.
But it was all right. Monck returned and whispered: “The coast seems to be clear.” Lanny went out into the court, and from there to the street. No one paid any heed to him, but he decided that Roosevelt had been right, and that he ought to get out of this dangerous position without delay. He wasn’t needed here any longer.
BOOK EIGHT
The Devil Is Diligent
24
In Fair Round Belly
I
On a morning of feeble sunshine in late February, the P.A. enjoyed a walk to the official Residenz of the Nazi Nummer Zwei, Der Dicke, who had so many titles that his own secretaries couldn’t remember them, and so many decorations that he had no room for them on his vast expanse of chest. The traveler inquired for General-Major Furtwaengler, and this aide-de-camp, whose career Lanny had followed from Oberleutnant up, came out with a mixture of delight and amazement. How in the devil’s name could it be that an American art expert was traveling about Germany?
Lanny said: “I came to see Seine Exzellenz. I hope he won’t mind.” This by way of diversion, for of course the dear friend had to reply that Seine Exzellenz would be delighted. “Aber, wie? Aber, wie?” he persisted; and Lanny said that the Führer had arranged matters for him. This wasn’t very satisfactory, but a mere staff officer knew that he had no right to ask questions about the doings and motives of exalted personages and their intimates.
Lanny asked about Furtwaengler’s own family, as he was in friendship bound to do. He listened to a recital, name by name, for there were a lot of them, as with all good Nazi families; Furtwaengler, like his Chief, was a blond Aryan, and it was his duty to provide for the Fatherland’s future. When that subject was exhausted, he reported that the Chief was arriving by air that morning—he didn’t say from where, of course—and he would surely want Lanny to lunch. The tactful caller replied that he had some work to do in the Staatsbibliothek, and he would phone just before noon, because it might well be that so busy a man had other engagements and plans.
So Lanny went over and read more about jet propulsion, in the light of what Professor Salzmann had revealed. When he phoned Furtwaengler, he was told that he was wanted at the Residenz at once. He came; and there was that bundle of avoirdupois and energy, clad in a uniform of pale blue broadcloth with white stripes down the sides of the trousers. He was only five-foot-five, but even so it took a lot of cloth to cover that frame; he had tried reducing, but it had weakened his heart and almost killed him, he said, and from now on he would be the way nature intended him and the way he liked himself. So he weighed some two hundred and eighty pounds, and bellowed like a bull, and roared with laughter over his own jokes; if he was the least bit worried about the thousands of his best-trained young flyers who had gone down over Germany and the North Sea and the British Isles, he kept that fact hidden until he was alone, or at least until he thought that nobody was looking at him.
He received his guest in that sumptuous study with the big black table in the center and the golden curtains at the tall windows—but no lion cub in these more serious days! Lanny told the story of his coming to Germany, the same story that he had told to the Führer. It was received differently here, for this old-time German robber baron was only about half grown up in his mind; he delighted in adventure for adventure’s sake, and this was the sort of thing he would have loved to do, and indeed had tried to do in the days toward the end of World War I when he had been a dashing guerrilla of the air. “Herrlich! Famos!” he cried.
He asked a score of questions about Rudi Hess in England. “Der Mann ist toll!” he declared, but that was meant for a sort of compliment, for Göring was mad also, and his conduct of the air war had been mad, and for that matter the war was mad, too. The Führer was mad, the Party he had created was mad, and they were all trying to drive the world mad—or so thought the son of Budd-Erling.
The visitor was interested to note that the thing which interested Hermann der Dicke most of all to hear was what the Führer had said about Hermann der Dicke. When Lanny said the Führer still loved him and considered his help indispensable, the Reichsmarschall beamed like a schoolboy who had just received a medal. Then he frowned and added: “But his strategy has been wrong, Lanny, tragically wrong! Just think, if only I had been permitted to march through Spain and take Gibraltar, as I could have done in a couple of weeks and at almost no cost—then we should have been able to close the Strait, and to keep Euch verdammte Yankees out of North Africa, and our armies would have bottled up the British instead of theirs threatening to bottle up ours. Nicht wahr, mein Alter?”
Lanny said: “My opinion about military strategy isn’t worth the hole in a doughnut, Hermann; but certainly I should have liked to see it tried. For one thing, it would have saved me a lot of trouble. I could have just walked into your office in Tangier and asked if you had any paintings you wanted me to dispose of, say in the Argentine!”
II
That was a “lead,” of course. Der Dicke talked for a while about the art treasures he was accumulating, and the troubles he was having with other greedy leaders who thought they ought to be allowed to immortalize their names by being associated with Rembrandt and Rubens and Cranach and Holbein, and who could say, perhaps some day Turner and Sir Joshua! There was, for example, Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg, that irresponsible depredator—so Göring called him—who had managed to persuade the Führer to let him set up a so-called Einsatzstab, which had taken possession of no less than two hundred and three French collections, a total of some twenty-one thousand works of art—“cultural goods that appear valuable to him,” was the phrase.
So it had come about that many treasures that otherwise would have been at Karinhall were missing. This had become so intolerable that Göring had been unable to forget it, even while the tragic failure and breakdown of his beloved Luftwaffe had been going on; he had managed to persuade the harassed Führer to give him the right to make selections from the Einsatzstab collections, and had flown to Paris no less than twenty-one times in the past year and a half. He would order the choicest works set up in the Museée du Jeu de Paume, the building that had been the handball court of the old Bourbon kings. Göring would stroll through and select the works he wanted, and his secretaries would make a note of them and check their arrival at Karinhall.
Lanny got exact information about all this, because, when he reached the hunting estate, Der Dicke showed him the lists of these treasures, and there were twenty-one folders, each with the date of the visit on it. Lanny saw that the Chief of the Luftwaffe had made such a visit one week before h
is airmen had raided Coventry; again three days before the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor; again two weeks after the Americans had invaded North Africa; again while Lanny had been in Casablanca, awaiting the beginning of the great Conference. It had always been Göring’s boast that he had so systematized his job that he could take time off for play, and he had proved it even during this calamitous campaign.
A tough old Teutonic plunderer, in very truth; Lanny, a gentle soul by nature and by choice, looked at him with awe. Impossible to understand him, impossible to imagine such a being—yet here he was, a phenomenon, and a menace to the future of mankind. Deep in his own consciousness, what was he? An incarnation of greed, a creature so swept away by its impulses that reason had no power to check him, that facts had no significance for him? One of his lion cubs would be like that; no matter how kindly you treated it, no matter how tame you thought it, the day would come when it was mature; the hunting impulse would possess it and it would leap upon its benefactor. Göring had known that, and so his lion cubs, now grown, were all behind bars. Would Lanny ever live to see the Göring lion himself behind bars?
This explanation only half satisfied the amateur psychologist. Göring was so intelligent, so capable, and he had such a delightful sense of humor! In so many different ways he was a civilized man! His love of art was one such way; his taste was crude and flamboyant, yet he did appreciate true greatness in many cases, and showed it by his comments. His mind was top-grade; he knew not merely military science and the technicalities of airplane construction and operation; he knew the international situation, the personalities of the opposing statesmen, the character of their populations—ten thousand details of which Hitler was ignorant. He knew Hitler, too, and how to manage him—much better than Hitler did! He considered his Führer an erratic genius, yet a real one; with all Göring’s braggadocio, with all his absurd vanity, he knew that the Führer could dominate and inspire the German Volk in a way that Göring never could.