VI
“I think you have convinced him, so far as concerns yourself,” the Commendatore whispered; and Lanny went away to await results. They were not long in coming, for that same evening the landowner called on the telephone to ask if his “French” friend—so he was careful to refer to Lanny—could come to his home again in the morning. This time it was a very old gentleman named Luigi Federzoni, who had been fixed in the P.A.’s mind as a former leader of the Nationalist party, a reactionary political group which represented the great latifundia and had favored all the expansionist and imperialist aims of the Italian monarchy. Two years after the Fascists had seized power, this group had come over to them. Federzoni was now chairman of the Italian Academy and a powerful figure. Lanny knew that if he was ready to desert the ship of Fascism it must be close indeed to sinking.
The visitor told his story all over again, a bit more cautiously in this case; but evidently it was good enough, for Federzoni expressed himself as satisfied, and next day the secret agent was invited again. This time it was Count Volpi, who had until recently been Mussolini’s Finance Minister and had negotiated the loan which the Morgan bank in New York had made in the twenties, by which the Fascists had been enabled to retain their control of Italy. Count Volpi was a man who knew the financial world of both London and New York, and it would have been impossible for Lanny to fool him, assuming that Lanny had had such a desire. But Lanny really was the son of Budd-Erling and could tell about the great institution and how it had been founded and run. He knew that he was passing an examination, and he told about his father’s friendship with Zaharoff, and with Schneider of Schneider-Creusot—Lanny had been a guest in his Paris home and had there met the heads of the Comité des Forges, and could name them and tell what they had said. He knew London too, and had been married to Irma Barnes, who was now Lady Wickthorpe—and suddenly the Count Volpi di Nisurata remembered, oh, yes, the Wickthorpe people had been very friendly to Italy and he had heard about Signor Budd—“so you are that Signor Budd!” Then Lanny told about his friendship for Generoso Pope and the other New York Italians, and after that he was established.
It was a dangerous game he was playing, but he had come prepared for it and found it easier than his fears had suggested. The wretched Duce had kicked out the men of real influence and power from his cabinet and got himself a bunch of party hacks. The men of influence were uniting against him; and of course the day-and-night bombing of Italian airports and seaports and shipping was having its effect. The people of Rome were living with something more terrible than a sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. Suppose one of those bombardiers were to slip and miss the railroad yards and hit a palace or a de luxe hotel instead! Refugees by the thousands had been pouring into the Holy City, and now they were getting out again and fleeing to the country. You no longer saw the Fascist insignia worn by anybody on the streets, and people like cab drivers and waiters would say to a foreign visitor, “Il Duce? I spit on him!”
VII
After two or three of these conferences Lanny would stroll and find an available typewriter; he would never go to the same place twice. He would type a report—no carbons—seal it in the usual way, and deliver it to the “post office.” Each time was a fresh danger; but nothing ever happened. Clearly the OVRA, the Italian secret police, had not yet discovered the American spy center. Perhaps they didn’t want to discover it; Italy was so riddled with dissent that you couldn’t be sure of anybody, either way! One thing was certain—and Lanny would put it into his report—the Germans had broken one of the codes used by the OSS head in Switzerland. This agent had sent in a report about the doings of Count Ciano. It had been decoded, and Hitler had had a copy of it laid on Il Duce’s desk. It was a fair guess that that was the reason why Italy’s free-spoken Foreign Minister had retired to the Vatican.
However, the Germans were still pretty sure of themselves, and he had to use the utmost care in dealing with them. He decided that it was time to make a report to the Führer; he didn’t sit down and dash that off, but lay on his bed and thought hard about every sentence. All had to be exactly right, definite-seeming and yet not too definite, true and yet not dangerously so, weighty enough to justify Lanny’s sojourn in Rome and yet not enough to do real harm to the Allied cause. F.D.R. had said that his P.A. would be justified in revealing some secrets to the enemy, provided it was a means of getting more important secrets from the enemy, the question was one of balance.
Lanny wrote this letter by hand, and since it was to pass only through German hands, he wrote in German:
Mein Führer:
This is the first of the reports I promised you. I wish that I could send good news, but I know nothing but the truth would be of any help to you. I find the situation in Rome very bad. The main factor is the fear of bombs. As you know, these people do not have the stamina of the Germans; they think of saving their own skins. They are cynical and have discovered all the weaknesses of their Duce, so that he is no longer able to inspire them. Peace at any price is the sentiment I hear everywhere, from the ignorant poor to the frivolous rich. I dare not try to counteract it, because in that case no one would talk to me.
You cannot imagine a more disgusting spectacle than I witnessed at a golf club in the suburbs of this city at war. Rich men, it appears, still have nothing more important to do than to knock little balls about a field; and meantime the elegantly dressed ladies sit and gossip about their amours. The center of attention is Ciano. I am told that you called him to his face an ass and the son of an ass, and I thought of that as I listened. He did not hesitate openly to sneer at his father-in-law and to wash his hands of Italy’s troubles.
This appears to be the general mood and prevails even among members of the Ducé’s new cabinet; I am told that Pavolini, Bottai, Galbiati and Renato Ricci are far from dependable. [This was not true, and was meant to sow confusion.] I am planning to cultivate these men and see if I can win their confidence. I had a private meeting with Marshal Badoglio, and that shrewd old fellow tried his best to get information from me without giving any in return. He professes to have withdrawn entirely from political activity, and that may be true, but I will not guarantee him. I plan to meet him again and hope to gain his confidence.
There is general agreement here that the Allies are about to invade Sicily. It is expected in Vatican circles that the Americans will attempt to bomb the railroad yards of Rome. The Pope, of course, protests against this, wishing to save his eardrums.
The one bit of good news I can tell you has to do with your own troops, whose conduct is magnificent. I see them everywhere, and they are correct, dignified, and more polite than this light-minded population deserves. This is particularly true of the SS men. With such loyalty your cause cannot but prevail in the end. I fear that this report will not be of much use to you. I hope to do better with more time. It is difficult for a stranger to gain the confidence of persons in important positions, especially when they are by nature as suspicious as the Italians. They do not trust one another and tell a different story to each person they meet.
With assurances of my devotion,
Lanny Budd.
This letter, of course, was meant not merely for Hitler’s eyes but for those of Herr Güntelen and others. Lanny addressed the envelope to “Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler, by courtesy of Marshal Kesselring,” and did not mark it “personal,” lest that should seem discourteous to the Wehrmacht commander. He could be sure that in any case the letter would be steamed open, read, and perhaps photographed. The Führer wouldn’t want his Army and his Gestapo to take any chances; and even if he did, they wouldn’t. Lanny took the letter to the Hotel de Russie and laid it on the desk before the red-faced Feldwebel, saying, “Ein Bericht.” Then he walked out, not wishing to meet any of the Reichswehr officers. He had nothing to get from them and no desire to be questioned by them. His report would be judged a poor one, but harmless; and as an amateur, he was not obliged to be efficient.
VIII
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The Marchesa di Caporini had come to think highly of her Franco-American friend. He had been to many parts of the world, met the right people, and told interesting stories. There could be no questioning the fact that he was having a social success in Rome; he was meeting the right people here, looking at paintings, and expressing opinions that carried weight. This reflected glamour upon the lady who had introduced him, and she wanted more of it. She suggested that he might leave his hotel and become her guest; there were many vacant rooms in her palace, and while it would have been a problem to heat them in winter, this would not apply in the month of July. She was one of those fortunate ones who had food and could offer hospitality, and it would save a conoscitore d’arte a good deal of money. The great lady did not suggest that he should pay board, but possibly she expected that he would insist upon doing so.
This courtesy caused Lanny embarrassment. He could not tell her that his presence in her home might be a cause of danger to her; and still less could he tell her that he feared she might be coming to take too great an interest in him. This was a free-spoken world, and Julie had talked about the peccadillos of the ladies he was meeting and had warned him in a playful way against some of the more designing and the more brash. She had even gone so far as to tell him of her own unhappiness; her husband was under the necessity, or at any rate thought he was under the necessity, of having boys. They could be purchased very cheaply, it appeared, and Lanny knew it from approaches on the streets. That left Julie with an empty heart; and what more likely than that she should be thinking of him as eligible to fill it?
There was a peculiar set of circumstances which drew this pair together. Just as Galeazzo Ciano had “widows,” and as his wife, Edda Mussolini, had a pack of “widowers,” so Lanny might be thought of as the “widower” of Julie’s cousin, Marie de Bruyne. He had loved her devotedly for seven years, and this constituted romance according to all the French novels that Julie had ever read. She was several years younger than Marie had been; and what more likely than that she should dream of taking Marie’s place and of enjoying seven more years of honorable fidelity? Not even her worst enemy would have censured her, and the priest would have given her absolution upon request.
She had asked him if he was married, and he had had to lie to her. He dared not take even the faintest chance of causing inquiries to be made that might lead to Mary Morrow; and besides, he had learned that it didn’t do any good to say that he had a wife. Visiting the Fürstin Donnerstein in Berlin only six months ago, he had thought to solve the problem by inventing a wife for the occasion, young, beautiful, and rich; but that hadn’t kept an unhappy widow from crawling into his bed on a cold winter night. Hilde, an old friend, had taken his refusal in good part, but he surely mustn’t take such a chance with a comparative stranger.
The strains of war had driven the women crazy, he told himself. Here in Rome there were probably two or three grown women for every grown man; and that competition put a strain upon female virtue which it had not been equipped to withstand. The P.A. was afraid to go to the golf club any more, because the young women there made such efforts to carry him off; and he suspected that their efforts would have been still more violent had not most of them taken it for granted that he already belonged to the Marchesa.
Lanny took a long walk amid the weather-beaten temples of ancient Rome and the new and gleaming monuments which Il Duce had erected to his own glory. He gave his best thought to the problem and realized that it might seem a strange thing—it would have seemed a hilarious thing to all the smart people of the world—that a man should be willing to risk his life for his country but should be unwilling to risk his virtue. Surely when men were dying or about to die by the thousands it was not too much to ask that a secret agent should permit himself to be seduced by an aristocratic lady. Surely it was attributing too much importance to the sexual act, and especially in these days when methods of contraception were so well understood!
There could be no question that the noble lady had helped Lanny in his work and would be able to help him more. And hadn’t he said that this work would come first? Hadn’t he promised that to F.D.R.? But the image of Laurel stood in his way; he had made a promise to her too. Should he go back and tell her that he had broken it, and why, and ask her to forgive him? Or should he just say nothing about it, on the principle that what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her? Great numbers of men in the Army were doing that, and what difference would one more make?
But he couldn’t do it. The image of Laurel just wouldn’t ler him. He went back to his friend and employed a device which he had used after World War I, another time when the ladies of the fashionable world had been importunate. He confided to Julie Caporini the fact that he was a victim of a strange malady, the nature of which none of the doctors had been able to discover, which made it impossible for him to be satisfactory as a lover. It was because of this that he had parted from his wife, Irma Barnes, half a dozen years ago. He didn’t say that as concerning Julie directly; he asked her to communicate it tactfully to a couple of ladies who had invited him to their apartments. Julie was sympathetic—she was really a kind person—but she could not fail to realize that he had provided her with an extraordinary tidbit of gossip. She no longer pressed him to become a guest in her home, and once more it became safe for him to use his guest card at the Holy Water Golf Club. He had always been an amiable person and did not mind it in the least when the Galeazzo widows made playful allusions to his affliction and dubbed him “Il Monaco,” the Monk.
IX
D-day of Operation Husky was July 9. At carefully calculated hours there set out from the ports of North Africa the greatest armada in the history of the world; and other fleets from Gibraltar, Britain, and the United States joined it precisely on time. The island of Sicily has a triangular shape, a hundred miles or more on each side, and the Americans approached the southern side and the British the eastern. There happened to be a high wind that night, and the commanders suffered agonies of worry; but it was too late to change the plan, and fortunately the storm abated toward morning. The newly devised landing craft of all sizes approached the beaches in the darkness, and desperately seasick young fighting men staggered ashore with their heavy packs, too weak to be frightened, they afterward reported.
Lanny Budd got the news in the hotel when he came down to breakfast. There was a radio set in the lobby and a crowd of people about it. The official government station was reporting that the Americans were attempting a landing in Sicily in bad weather and that many of their craft were being wrecked; many thousands of parachutists had been dropped on land, and these had been scattered by the wind and were being captured in large numbers. People listened to this without comment, apparently afraid to trust one another. Lanny went into breakfast without being worried, for he knew the Nazi-Fascist radio and could have dictated what it would say. He knew the Mediterranean from boyhood and reflected that its waves were deep and steep, not too bad for landing craft; also, he had met some of the GI paratroopers, and he was quite sure they were not of the surrendering kind.
He betook himself to Julie’s home, where there was a radio set that he could run for himself. First he heard the official radio admit that the Americans had got ashore at Gela; they were being attacked and driven back by an armored division, but still he didn’t let himself be troubled. He had seen the big hulks called LST’s—landing-ship tanks—and knew that they followed right behind the LCI’s—landing-craft infantry. The first men who got ashore were sharpshooters, and they spread into the town, or the hills, or whatever was in front of them, and took shelter. Some were double teams and carried a wondrous object that looked like a piece of stove pipe and was called a bazooka; it was a sort of rocket gun, and it liked nothing better than to see a tank approaching. All these matters had been provided for, and Lanny had the firm conviction that Americans had never lost a war and seldom a battle, except when they were fighting one another.
Patience was necessary,
for the Axis radios made the situation worse and worse, and the American radio in Tunisia didn’t tell very much, not wishing to give information to the enemy. In Axis lands you had to learn to read the news backward, so to speak; you were told that the Allies had been repulsed, and you made note of the place where the repulse occurred and observed that it was farther in Axis territory than the last place of repulse. First Lanny heard that the Americans had been repulsed at Gela and Licata and Scoglitti, and that the British had been repulsed at Avola and Pachino; then he read that both had been repulsed at Ragusa, which was inland and between these points, so he knew that the two armies were coming together and pinching off a chunk of Sicily, doubtless with airfields in it. Airfields were all-important, because North Africa was so far away that fighter planes coming to protect the landing forces had only a few minutes to stay overhead. But let the paratroopers take a landing field, and planes would swoop down, and the big DC-4’s would bring fuel, and Operation Husky would begin to justify its name.
X
The invasion was what Lanny had been promising his new friends, and now he could say “I told you so,” but he didn’t. A tactful person, he remembered that it was Italians who were being made prisoners of war; he must never show satisfaction, but use the opportunity to point out that the Italian officers would soon be residing in American summer-resort hotels, while the soldato semplice would be working on an American farm for a wage, and some of the food would be coming back to feed the starving Italians.
General Eisenhower helped the secret agent by delivering over the radio a proclamation in which he told the people of Italy and Sicily the same things that Lanny had been telling Signor d’Angelo and Marshal Badoglio and other leading citizens. The document was signed by Roosevelt and Churchill, and Eisenhower read it in English and then had it repeated in Italian. The General’s voice was friendly and persuasive, and he told the people that Fascism was their real enemy, and that as soon as they had thrown it off they could be friends and allies of the Americans and English. The Axis radio did not repeat this message and their newspapers did not print it, but they undertook to answer its arguments, and as it happens you cannot effectively answer arguments without revealing what they are. So was vindicated once more the ancient Hebrew saying that truth is mighty and it prevails.