Concluding this oration, Lanny remarked: “That may be somewhat exaggerated, but you see what I am driving at.”
The Nazi replied: “For God’s sake, go out to California and try it on him! It might be worth a million dollars!”
X
So much for politics; and there was business, too. Lanny got a stenographer and wrote letters to his various clients, telling what he had and what he had seen and got prices on. He planned a trip to several cities, because in this profession you had to exercise the mysterious attribute called charm; you had to make the wealthy art collector realize that he was performing a public service and was being appreciated by a few discriminating souls. Otherwise he might buy jewels for his wife, or his son might get the money and spend it on chorus girls, or his daughter on a gigolo or night-club band leader! Competition is keen in these modern days, and the world is so full of rackets.
Also, being a man and not a machine, Lanny Budd ate and slept, and went with his colleague Zoltan Kertezsi to look at what the new men were doing with the art of painting. The expressionists, surrealists, and abstractionists were doing their worst to confuse the public, but they left this fastidious pair quite cold. Here and there Lanny ran into some of his old friends, those he had met in the days when he was “Mister Inna Barnes.” There were beautiful women among them, and these too had learned to exercise the mysterious attribute called charm. It was no longer necessary for them to wait to be invited; they had their own money, and they asked for what they wanted. Thus, inevitably, Lanny had to think a great deal about women—no matter how firmly he might resolve to think about saving the world from Nazi-Fascism.
He thought about Lizbeth. He knew that he had made her unhappy, and he was sorry about it, and would have liked to run down to Baltimore and tell her that he wasn’t what she had imagined him to be, and that the grand monde in which she aspired to live was far from being the shining elegant place she imagined it. He thought about Peggy Remsen, and firmly resolved not to make the same mistake with her. More frequently still he thought about Laurel, because she was right here, and all he had to do was to dial her telephone number and say: “Come take a walk.” It was a moral struggle to keep his hand from reaching out and performing that easy operation.
He had told himself that he owed her one day, and he had given it. But why should he limit himself in that arbitrary fashion? Why was one day a duty, and two days a sin? She had had a good time and had showed it; and certainly he had. Was she now waiting in the hope that he would call her again before he set off for unknown parts of the world? Was her hand moving toward the telephone with the idea of calling him? Never once during their friendship had she done that—except in Berlin, when her life was in danger. She was an old-fashioned lady, and if a man didn’t want her she would never want him. The idea that she might be wanting him at this moment set warm currents running all over him.
Then, too, there was the matter of the novel she was planning. He was interested in it, and couldn’t help thinking about it. Ideas would occur to him; wouldn’t it be an act of kindness to put them at her disposal? Wouldn’t it even be unkind not to do so? He knew Germany so much better than she; he knew every sort of German, Nazi and anti-Nazi and pre-Nazi, from long visits since boyhood. Surely he ought to put that knowledge at her service! At just what point does kindness turn a sin into a duty, or a duty into a sin?
Also, at what point does the exercise of the imagination become a sin? Lanny was going on a tour; and what was to prevent his imagination from taking a lady along? He couldn’t introduce her to his exclusive clients; but why couldn’t he leave her in a comfortable hotel while he transacted his art business, and then pick her up and speed away to the next city? He knew so many pleasant places in which to sojourn, and so many interesting things to talk about! If Laurel would go along, he might even go as far as California; he couldn’t take her to San Simeon—but what lovely times they could have at those “motels” along the way and in the rest camps of the wonderful national parks!
Yes, there were many ways to have a vacation, and even without going so far! Lanny had sailed a boat along the Côte d’Azur, and also in the Newcastle River and the Sound. He imagined a cabin catboat in some place where nobody knew either a presidential agent or a magazine writer; say in Barnegat Bay—what a series of picnics they could have! Or they might go camping in the Adirondacks; the weather would soon be warm enough, and he had vivid recollections of visits to the elaborate “camp” owned by the Harry Murchisons there. On one of those lonely lakes whose shores were covered with pine and fir trees, they would paddle a canoe and catch trout and take them ashore and fry them with slices of bacon; they might rent what was called an open camp—a shelter facing the lake, and with a log fire blazing in front to keep it warm at night. Lanny lacked practice in chopping logs, but guessed he could manage it if he tried—and certainly he had no trouble being an expert lumberjack in his imagination.
This fact was notable, that on all these tours it was Laurel Creston he took with him. The reason was that he knew so much to talk to her about, whereas when he was with Lizbeth the imaginary conversation died quickly. He could be interested in the daughter of the Holdenhursts only so long as he was in the presence of her young fresh beauty, and his blood told him to take her in his arms. He was interested in Peggy Remsen only so long as he was in an art gallery, or in the home of his stepmother, who wanted him to be “nice” to her. But with Laurel there were always fireworks going off, intellectual skyrockets and verbal Roman candles. His choice of her companionship was a part of that process of natural selection and the survival of of the fittest, according to which in the course of some hundreds of millions of years mind has won out over body, brain over brawn.
XI
All this in the realm of the dream; but when it came to reality, what Lanny took was his customary chaste and solitary tour. He spent several days with his friends the Murchisons, and inspected a new streamlined plant for the swift production of a hundred different kinds of glass; he had not dreamed there were so many. He visited also a plant where alloy steels were turned out; he had learned from his father how many new kinds had been invented, and how many strange purposes they served. He walked the length, about three-quarters of a mile, where an endless sheet of steel was swept along at a speed of some forty miles an hour, but so smoothly on roller bearings that you hardly realized it was moving at all. Everywhere in this vast Allegheny inferno the mills were pouring out products, working in three shifts. Of the depression which had caused such panic among the New Dealers barely three years ago, there was no longer a trace.
And it was the same all over America; the god of war had waved his magic wand over the land. In Cincinnati Lanny’s friends the Timmonses proudly showed him a huge hardware plant which was still making hammers and saws, but had been extended overnight to include metal parts for warships and planes and artillery. In Louisville his friends the Petries of “Petries’ Peerless” were now distilling alcohol by the tens of thousands of gallons for war purposes. A marvelous sensation to any sort of producer to be turned loose to make all he could; it was a new sort of game, and he played at it as he had played football at college. The money was a matter of no consequence, he would say—though Lanny didn’t meet anybody who was refusing it.
So it was in Detroit, and in Chicago, and even in Reubens, Indiana, where old Ezra Hackabury’s sons were enlarging a soap plant, for it appeared that the British people had to keep clean, even under the bombs; the Tommies had to shave every morning, even amid the sandstorms of North Africa. Also there were new buildings going up far out in the farmlands, and this was supposed to be the most closely guarded of secrets; but old Ezra said it appeared that if you could make kitchen soap you could also make kinds that went off with a loud bang—preferably not in your kitchen.
You might have thought that all this material activity made a poor time to sell works of art; but Lanny found it otherwise. All these people were feeling good; they were sitting
on the top of the world, and without any of the discomfort and danger. Old masters? Sure thing! If they are really good, they belong over here. Lanny had only to mention the fact that a Corot, superior to any in the Taft collection, or great examples by Constable and Bonington were now available in England. If you knew several millionaires, you played one against another. Alonzo Timmons, one of good old Sophie’s many nephews, had built a wing of his country home just to hang paintings in, and he took his aunt’s word that Lanny Budd was the fellow to fill the blank spaces. Lanny told him about Ezra Hackabury, thus playing the state of Indiana against the state of Ohio.
The old soapman, to whom Lanny was still the gay and eager little boy who had sailed on the Bluebird, had decided that he wanted all the paintings that Marcel had made on board the yacht and all that he had painted later as a result of the trip. That was a way to bring back old times, and to leave something for people to remember you by. Much better than a lot of jealous and quarreling inlaws! The soapman wanted to spend the money quickly, before the inlaws got wind of it.
Lanny had brought a complete set of photographs, with the prices on the backs; Ezra marked those he wanted, and it figured up to something like two hundred thousand dollars. Without batting an eyelid he wrote a check for the amount, dating it three days ahead so he could have time to market some securities and have the money in the bank. Lanny was to employ Zoltan Kertezsi to travel to Baltimore and get the right paintings out of the vault and have them shipped; meantime Ezra would start the building of a proper fireproof gallery in the center of the town. “Imagine putting Reubens, Indiana, on the map!” chuckled the old codger. Lanny thought he got more fun out of disappointing his sons’ wives than he did out of looking at Marcel’s paintings of Greek and North African ruins.
XII
So passed very pleasantly the early weeks of June. Morning and afternoon Lanny read the newspapers of the town in which he found himself; they were pretty much alike, for their foreign news came from central agencies, and the only difference was in what the local editors chose to headline. Also there was the radio, the same in its main features all over the country. Day and night he turned the dials, and held his breath as the news period began.
On the evening of Saturday the 21st of June, he attended a dinner-dance at the mansion of old Mrs. Fotheringay on the North Shore Drive of Chicago. The affair was in honor of a visiting niece; dinner was at eighty-thirty and dancing began two hours later. At one in the morning Lanny strolled into one of the rooms where a large group of the older people were gathered about a radio “console.” They were getting the news which Lanny had been expecting for the past three months. The German Armies were invading Russia, all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
Interesting indeed to see and hear the reaction of this fashionable company! Here was the stronghold of isolationism, within the very shadow of the Tribune tower, where for more than two decades there had been a veritable arsenal of machine guns, awaiting an expected attack by the Reds. Now these gloating ladies and gentlemen seemed to have but one thought—that the news would destroy at one blow the wicked cause of their enemies, the “interventionists.” Now everybody would believe in Hitler, and help him! Now even Britain would have to make peace with him! Now it was unthinkable that any American would wish to send arms to the Führer’s enemies!
Later that same morning Lanny was motoring eastward, and over the radio in his car he listened to the rolling periods which “good old Winnie” had been rehearsing before his friends for the past couple of months. A speech in which he pledged full and complete solidarity with Stalin! Lanny would have given a lot to see the faces of the Chicago ladies and gentlemen. He would have liked to be with Hansi and Bess, with Rick, with Raoul, with Bernhardt Monck; but not with the Führer, not with fat Hermann, not with the grim Rudi, wherever the British were putting him up!
To himself Lanny said: “The Nazis have committed suicide!”
XIII
On these tours the P.A. made it a practice to keep in touch with Newcastle. His mail came to Robbie’s office, and Robbie would forward it by air. It was while Lanny was in Cleveland, finishing up a deal, that the father phoned him and said: “There was a call for you from Washington. The man said ‘government business,’ but wouldn’t give his name. I promised to tell you to be in your hotel at two this afternoon.” Robbie asked no questions, having long ago learned to keep his own secrets and let others keep theirs.
At the hour appointed Lanny was in his hotel room, and there came a voice which he had not heard for quite a while. “This is your old employer from Paris. No names, please.”
“Well, I’ll be switched!” said Lanny. “How is the world treating you?”
“Keeping me much too busy. It is a cause of stomach ulcers. I want to see you about a matter of number-one importance. How soon could you meet me in New York?”
“I could fly, if necessary. I have a car belonging to my father, but he could send a man for it.”
“How soon if you drive?”
Lanny figured quickly. “I could do it in a little less then twelve hours, starting in five or ten minutes.”
“Drive until midnight, then get your sleep, and finish in the morning. You remember the hotel in New York where I met you and your father?”
“I do.”
“I’ll expect you there tomorrow forenoon. When you are an hour or two from New York, phone and leave word for me.”
“O.K.,” said Lanny.
“And take care of yourself on the way. I have something that will interest you very much, I am guessing.”
“O.K.,” repeated Lanny, and hung up.
He phoned the hotel desk to have his car at the door; he phoned a client to say that he had to leave unexpectedly; he put his belongings into his bags, paid his hotel bill, stepped into the car, and sped away eastward on Euclid Avenue, which had once been the fashionable boulevard of the city, and now, like Fifth Avenue in New York, had been encroached upon by business. He drove as fast as the law allowed; and while he drove he thought about what lay ahead of him.
A call from Charlie Alston, the one-time “barb” in Robbie Budd’s class at Yale, was the same thing as a call from F.D.R.—even more so, because F.D. liked to gossip and tell stories, whereas Professor Alston, as Lanny called him, never summoned anybody unless it was in very truth a “number-one matter.” Lanny’s “old employer in Paris” had been at that time a humble geographer on President Wilson’s large staff at the Peace Conference; but in the past twenty-two years he had become, first a close friend and adviser to the Governor of New York State, then a member of the “brain trust” which that Governor brought with him to Washington.
In short, he was one of those New Deal college professors whom Robbie Budd had so abhorred, and feared, until a couple of years ago, when Charlie had summoned him to New York and “put him on the dole,” as Robbie phrased it. All the way on that drive, the son of Budd-Erling was wondering: Was he, too, going to be ordered to take a job? And would he be paid out of the Fish Hatcheries Fund, or the Tennessee Valley Authority, or would it be by the Librarian of Congress?
18
A Furnace for Your Foe
I
No more than two years had passed since Lanny had last seen Professor Alston, but they had been hard and wearing years for this political man. It is no job to be taken lightly—one in which you have a hundred million masters, and a large percentage of them hating you actively, watching day and night to find something wrong that you are doing. The hair of this slender little man had grown grayer and thinner, and there were many more lines in his face. Yet the eyes behind the gold spectacles still had their twinkle of fun, and the kindness in the voice never failed, except when he was talking about the Nazis and their American abettors.
Of Lanny Budd he had only the most agreeable memories. The grandson of Budd Gunmakers had been the perfect model of a secretary-translator at a world Peace Conference. He had been completely wrapped up in his job, and had
never once had to be rebuked for neglect of duties. He had been entrusted with many secrets of state, and though he had met reporters frequently, no one ever wormed anything out of him, unless it was something that Alston wanted wormed out at that precise hour. In fact, this socially trained secretary had become so expert that he had known when his employer wanted a “leak” to occur, and could spare the employer the embarrassment of having to say so. The only blunder Lanny had committed was one of which the geographer had never got a hint—his helping Kurt Meissner in Paris to escape from the French police. In view of what Kurt had since become and what he was now doing, Lanny knew that this had been a serious blunder; however, Alston would have excused it, because he, too, believed in friendship, and had known what it was to trust a friend too long.
Here they were, after exactly twenty-two years, and they were still master and loyal servant; or so Lanny felt in his heart, and so he guessed it was going to be in action. The New Deal “fixer,” as was his custom, wasted little time on preliminaries. He said: “You got some sleep?” and then: “You feel fit?” Lanny, smiling, replied: “Go to it!” and the other said:
“What I am about to entrust to you is beyond any question the most important secret in the modern world. The fate of the war and of the whole future may depend upon it. You know that I don’t use words lightly; I will add that the President agrees with me and that the words are his as well as mine. I was with him yesterday morning, and suggested you as the man to receive the offer. If you accept, you will still be working for F.D. It is a proposition for you to go into Germany again and bring out certain information. You will need considerable training before you go, in order to understand the information and to be able to remember it, since not a word of it may be put on paper. The man in Germany from whom you will get the information is one whom we have every reason to trust, and I do not think you will run any greater risk than you have been running in the past; but there is always the chance of a slip, and nobody can guarantee safety in such work. That you will understand without my telling you.”