In World War I the scion of the Stotzlmann clan had enlisted as a private, and later had become an Army Reserve officer. Now he was a Major, and stationed in New York, busy with mysterious matters having to do with docks and shipping and the prevention of sabotage. They had dinner at Jim’s hotel, and Lanny told the story of six months’ misadventures. Jim, for his part, told of goings-on in what had become the busiest port in the world. “You can have no idea of the scale on which we are going into this war, Lanny. It fairly takes one’s breath away.”
“What I want to know about is the junta,” Lanny said. That was their name for the group of powerful persons who for the past year or more had been discussing a plan for putting the New Deal out of business by taking physical possession of its principal exponent and keeping him under their control.
“They are still at it,” Jim said. “I still can’t sleep at night because I can’t get the Governor to take it seriously enough.”
“I had hoped that since we got into the war their patriotism might have come to the fore.”
“Patriotism, heck!” responded the Major. “That gang knows nobody but themselves.”
“Do they expect to make a deal with Hitler?”
“They expect to do anything that will keep them from having to fight for Stalin. I’m not free to go into details, Lanny, but that remark was made by Harrison Dengue to a friend of mine barely a week ago. I personally reported it to the Chief, but he just smiled and said: ‘Well, his money is fighting, and that’s all we care about.’”
“Dengue said he wanted to see me again after I had talked to Hitler and his crowd; but I doubt if I’m ever going into Germany again. This war has been most inconvenient for me.” Lanny said it with a smile, and his friend smiled in return; they had met only two or three times, but their points of view were so nearly the same that they could talk in shorthand, as it were.
“Dengue is in Chicago now, and that is one of the headquarters of sedition. I wish you could go out there and make friends with them, Lanny.”
“I wish I could, but I have to fly overseas in a couple of days. I turn our great Chief over to your keeping.”
“He has promised me to have Hyde Park taken out of the New York Military District and put directly under the care of Washington. That will help, I hope.”
“You know, Jim,” said Lanny, “the story you told me has haunted me; I doubt if I’ll ever get it out of my mind. We’ve read about how the Roman Republic was overthrown, and so many others in history, but we just can’t bring ourselves to realize how easily the same thing might happen in this country. Just imagine that in the next industrial crisis the labor crowd, or what are called the ‘radicals,’ carried an election, and our big business masters wanted to keep them out; suppose there was an Army cabal, and these men backed it with their money and their newspapers and their radios; suppose they were to seize the newly elected President, hold him incommunicado, and issue orders in his name—what could the rest of us do?”
“That is just what I keep hammering into my friends, Lanny. They all say: ‘The people would rise.’ But what can the people with shotguns and pitchforks do against modern weapons of war and modern organization? With bombing planes and poison gas a few men could wipe out a whole city; and I know men who are ready to do it—they have said so in plain words.”
“I could compile a list of a hundred such,” responded Lanny. “It is a danger we shall not be free from so long as capitalism endures; and it is going to die a hard and nasty death.”
VI
There was one other man in New York with whom Lanny wanted to have a talk. That was his friend Forrest Quadratt, who had been head of the Nazi propaganda service in America. Forrest knew what was going on, and when he got going he would spill many hints. Lanny telephoned the ex-poet’s home, and, as usual, the soft silky voice revealed warm pleasure. “Where on earth have you been all this time?”
“I’ve been all the way round the world and had a lot of adventures.”
“Will you come up to dinner? I’ll be alone.”
Lanny had been planning to take Laurel and Agnes out to dinner, but duty came before pleasure. He walked uptown and over to Riverside Drive, to the familiar apartment with the study full of books and photographs and other literary trophies. Forrest Quadratt was in his fifties, and had made it his business to meet many of the writers of his time. In his youth he had been a flaming erotic poet, a self-proclaimed genius, and he had become embittered because his word was not taken by the critics. Now he was a self-registered Nazi agent—because the law required this frankness. He had collected large sums from Germany and expended a part of them to pay for a flood of books, pamphlets, and papers. He had written speeches for congressmen to deliver and put into the Congressional Record, and then he had them mailed out to the extent of hundreds of thousands of copies free of postal charges.
Lanny told the story of his plane smash-up, his sojourn in the hospital, his yacht trip to the South Seas, and his escape from Hongkong. “I couldn’t imagine what had become of you!” exclaimed Quadratt. “So much has been happening in the meantime—the wrecking of all our hopes of peace. Have you heard what has happened to me?”
“I saw no newspapers between Manila and New York, a period of more than four months.”
“I have been indicted and convicted, and am under a jail sentence of from eight months to two years.”
“Good Lord! What for?”
“They framed me on a preposterous charge. I registered myself as in the employ of German magazines, and they undertook to prove that I was in the employ of the government.”
“Herrgott, noch einmal! Don’t they know that German magazines are government institutions?”
“Of course they know it; but they pretended not to, and so did the jury.”
“Well, but you’re not in jail!” Lanny looked about him at the elegant apartment.
“I am out on bail, pending an appeal. I have every hope that some court will set aside the conviction. The conduct of the prosecutor was so outrageous that he should be the one to serve the sentence.”
“You know how it is in wartime,” remarked Lanny sympathetically. “The country goes crazy.”
“But this was before Pearl Harbor, Lanny. At any rate, the indictment was. It has been an intensely disagreeable experience.”
“I sympathize with you, Forrest; and certainly I hope you get a reversal of the verdict.” It was hard for Lanny to put the proper amount of feeling into his tone, for he knew what would have happened to a German citizen in Berlin who had made a fortune by serving American magazines or American government agencies in circulating pro-Allied propaganda throughout the Fatherland. That was the advantage which the ruthless men had over the mild and honorable in this world, and how the balance was to be righted was a problem indeed!
Lanny sat watching the rather small man with the round, smooth-shaven face, the thick spectacles, and the hesitating manner. He saw that the convicted agent was a worried man indeed. He spoke with great rapidity, as if he were afraid he would not be allowed to finish; but Lanny let him pour out a stream of troubles. All his German friends in this country were interned and incommunicado, and all activities had come to a stop. Forrest didn’t say what they weren’t able to accomplish, but left the son of Budd-Erling to make queries as to his meaning. The Americans who were in sympathy with his ideas were many of them no longer working, because it was so difficult to get money. The unscrupulous F.B.I. agents were dogging everybody’s footsteps, trying to get something on them. “I have reason to believe they are going to try to frame something else against us; possibly a sedition charge, which carries a much heavier penalty. They are after Father Coughlin now and seem determined to put him out of business.”
In short, the skies over Forrest Quadratt’s head looked black. He had failed in everything he had attempted, and his appetite for an excellent dinner was spoiled. The might of the Western world was going to be thrown against the Fatherland, and the onl
y hope the ex-poet could see was in the forthcoming spring offensive against Russia, which might wipe out that nest of vipers soon enough to save Germany from a two-front war. Lanny tried subtly and carefully to find out if there might not be another hope, that of replacing Franklin D. Roosevelt as Commander-in-Chief of the American Armed Forces. Lanny mentioned that he was getting in touch with that powerful personality, Mr. Harrison Dengue, but Forrest didn’t take the bait; he wasn’t going to discuss the junta, even if he knew anything about it.
Could it possibly have occurred to him that the son of Budd-Erling might have changed his point of view when he discovered himself under the Japanese bombs and shells? Certainly Forrest must have known that Budd-Erling was now turning out a superior type of fighter plane, and he must have been warned that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was employing many sorts of agents and disguises in its secret war on American Nazism. It might be that Berlin had informed him that Lanny had visited Stalin. Lanny waited for some hint on the subject, but none came. He decided at last that he was wasting his evening. He excused himself, went home, and took his two ladies out to a late supper.
VII
Charles T. Alston came up from Washington, and Lanny went to his hotel and took him for a drive in the park, a safe place for a confidential talk. This quiet little gray-haired man was much sought after by reporters, for he had been one of the members of the original “brain trust,” away back in the days when a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy was elected Governor of New York State, and had the unprecedented idea of inviting some college professors to join his cabinet and advise in the management of the most populous and wealthy state of the Union. Later Alston had been taken to Washington, where he became a “fixer,” charged with settling the wrangles of jealous bureaucrats, and later on of statesmen, generals, and admirals who got into one another’s hair.
Earlier in his career this professor of geography had served on the staff of advisers which Woodrow Wilson had taken to the Paris Peace Conference, and there he had become Lanny Budd’s first and only employer. Lanny had been nineteen then, and now he was forty-two, but he still addressed Alston as “Professor” and still looked up to him as an authority on all affairs of government and politics. Alston, for his part, still thought of Lanny as the brilliant and fashionable youth who had chattered in French with generals and duchesses, while Alston had painfully studied the language from textbooks and wondered how to find out whether you pronounced the final “s” in Reims, and what was the difference, if any, between the sounds of dedans and des dents. The geographer from the “sticks” had felt the same secret awe of Lanny that Lanny had felt for him.
First Lanny had to repeat the story of his adventures on the plane trip and in Hongkong and Yenan and Moscow. He had had to tell it to F.D.R., and to Robbie, and Zoltan, and Jim, and the end was not yet. Alston wanted to hear everything that Ching-ling had said, and Mao Tse-tung, and Stalin, and others in the Soviet Union. He asked questions, and incidentally imparted a few secrets. “We have to be sure that what we are sending the Russians actually reaches the front; for we are sustaining grave losses on the route to Murmansk, so great that we may have to discontinue it.”
“Of course I didn’t see anything with my own eyes,” responded the younger man. “I can only tell you what Stalin and the others said. They beg for everything we can spare, and are certain that they will be pushed to the uttermost this summer.”
“Did they give any hint of the possibility of having to quit?”
“All the way through China and Siberia and Russia proper, we never heard any word but of resistance to the last gasp. You can count upon that as a gift from Hitler. He is the most hated man that has appeared upon the stage of history for many centuries.”
VIII
After Alston was through asking questions, it was Lanny’s turn, and he had accumulated quite a list. “Professor,” he began, “there is something that has been troubling my mind for nearly half a year. You telephoned me at the hospital in Halifax that you had received the information you wanted from Germany. Did you mean that, or were you just putting my mind at rest?”
“I meant most of it, Lanny. We got some information and expect to get more.”
“Are you free to tell me anything about it?”
“The rule still holds, that we never speak the words atomic fission except when it is absolutely necessary. But I can say this: we are ahead of the Germans and expect to keep ahead.”
“But you can’t be absolutely sure?”
“Nothing can be absolutely sure in matters of scientific research. We know what the signs are at the moment, but nobody can know what some German physicist may have hit upon last night.”
“I keep thinking there may still be something I can do about it.”
“The Chief was quite positive that he didn’t want to send you into Germany again, Lanny.”
“He told me that. But I told him about my German contact in Geneva, and he was willing for me to go there.”
“It would be foolhardy for us to risk taking any German into our confidence in this matter. The outcome of the war might depend upon it, and the whole future of humanity.”
“Let me tell you a little about this man. I have known him since before Hitler. He was vouched for by the woman who later became my second wife. I have never told you about her; not even my mother or my father knows about her. She was a devoted Socialist Party member, and her first husband was murdered by the Nazis; she became a worker in the underground, and died in Dachau concentration camp, in spite of my best efforts to save her. The man I am talking about helped me in trying to rescue her; before that he was in Spain and proved his loyalty in the fires of that civil war; he rose to be a capitán. That surely ought to be enough evidence of his trustworthiness.”
“I grant you that, Lanny. But what can he do now?”
“He had quite an extraordinary contact in Germany, apparently someone in Göring’s own headquarters. He was able to give me the date of the invasion of Holland and Belgium, and later that of Norway, and I sent this information to the President. The last time I saw this man, about a year ago, he told me he had lost that contact but hoped to get another. He might have it now.”
“That is just where the trouble comes in, Lanny. He may have a new contact that he trusts, and it may turn out to be a Gestapo agent playing with him. We simply cannot take such chances with the atomic bomb.”
“I grant you that, Professor. But let us consider whether there might not be some information my man could get without having to know what it is for.”
“That would be difficult, for the reason that the information is so highly technical that any scientist would know at once what the man was after and could infer what stage we had reached in our research.”
“Let me make a suggestion or two. If we could find out whether the Germans have increased their production of graphite, wouldn’t that tell us something?”
“In the first place, the fact that we are using graphite to moderate the speed of neutrons is one of the most priceless of our secrets; and second, German production wouldn’t tell us much, because graphite is used for many war purposes and comparatively little of it is needed as a moderator.”
“Well, then, how about heavy water? That, as I understand it, is difficult to produce and not much of it exists.”
“That is true. If your man could find out if and where the Germans are making heavy water in large quantities, we should have a number-one bombing target.”
“And how about Professor Schilling? Can his name be mentioned?”
“I fear we have to say no to that. Schilling is a nuclear physicist and nothing else, and we know that the Nazis have him at that job. We cannot risk having anybody know that he is on our side.”
“If I could find out where a number of such physicists are employed, wouldn’t that be important?”
“We already have that information, I believe; but I do not know what use is being made of it. I am only admitte
d to the fringes of these ultra-secret matters.”
“This is true, is it not, that the quantity production of fissionable material would require a large plant; and if my man could find out where such a plant is located, wouldn’t that be worth while?”
“I have to admit that that would be a major achievement.”
“This is the way it appears to me: the Germans must know that we know the possibility of atom splitting, and they would certainly expect us to try to find out about what they are doing. I don’t have to give my man any hint that we are working on the project. Can’t I just tell him what has been in the scientific journals prior to the war, and ask if he can find out any more on this subject?”
“I should say there would be no harm in that; but it would be an exceedingly dangerous matter for your man and for his contacts.”
“That is up to him. I will tell him the facts, as I have always done, and leave it to him to use his judgment. I suppose the same thing goes for jet propulsion, which Robbie tells me he is working on very secretly; and for rocket projectiles, and so on. The Germans are known to be working on these, and it surely wouldn’t be any news, to them that we are trying to catch up.”
“If your man were able to get us real news about these matters, we’d award him a D.S.M. when the war is over.”
“To award him American citizenship might be more to the point,” opined Lanny. “We shall see.”
IX
They talked about the presidential agent’s own job, what information he might get in Vichy territory, and what use was likely to be made of it. Alston said that he agreed with the Chief in thinking that they ought to open a second front across the Channel in the summer of 1942, if only for the sake of its effect upon the Russians. “Even if we could do no more than establish a bridgehead, it would pay us in the long run, however costly. But between you and me, Lanny, I don’t think we are going to be able to budge Churchill on this issue. I appreciate him as a propagandist, but he fancies himself also as a military strategist, and I fear he is somewhat vain on the subject. Certainly I have found him hard to argue with; he does all the talking.”