Right now this reduced fat man had flown back from Italy and was occupied in preparing the German Air Force for action. Not that it needed much preparing; it had practiced over Madrid and Valencia and Barcelona and Guernica and many other cities and towns of Spain. It had practiced getting ready to bomb Vienna, and then Prague, and now it was Prague again; the Oberst was proud because all his chief had to do was to press a few buttons and speak a few words. That was German Gründlichkeit, and the Nazis had brought it to its highest point.
Lanny had had conferences with both Hitler and Hess, and both had told him that what they said was not confidential, they wanted it made known to the world. So Lanny pleased and flattered a faithful aide-de-camp by repeating the words of these almighty personages. In return the aide would talk freely about his own chief, what he said and what he planned to do. It was all along the lines of Herr Budd’s wishes, for he, too, wanted reconcilement between Germany and Western Europe, and giving the Fatherland a free hand in the east. The Reichsmarschall had pleaded with the Führer for the Munich settlement, but this time he would surely not plead, and a thousand bombers were loaded and ready to fly the moment the word was given.
III
Lanny had decided that it was the part of wisdom for him to see Göring once more before going out of Germany. A difficult decision to make, for Monday would be the most likely day for Der Dicke to get the news of the missing supercharger. If he got it, he would be in a fury, and of course one of his first thoughts would be of the Budd father and son; he might even say something about it—and Lanny judged it would be better so, affording him a chance to be horrified and to give the solemn assurance that he knew nothing whatever about the matter; also to point out that Britain, France, and Russia had agents in Germany, all more active and more capable than the Americans. Göring might well believe that.
Paying such a call was, of course, a different matter from going to a public reception where Lanny would have met scores of prominent Nazis, many of whom did not know him except by reputation. Göring was his friend, and in a time of crisis like this it would not have been natural for Lanny to depart without hearing what messages the Reichsmarschall might have to send to Lord Wickthorpe and Gerald Albany and others of Lanny’s highly placed friends in England. Also, there were the paintings; Lanny would say: “I think I’m going to get an offer for that Canaletto; and I may be cabling you about a Sargent before long.” Der Dicke had surprised Lanny by asking him to assemble a collection of representative American paintings, and he didn’t want them shipped to Germany, but to be stored in New York. That was something significant—now, while the Nazi war machine was on its toes and ready to leap, the leaders were preparing for emergencies by stowing things away in safe corners of the world!
Now Lanny asked Furtwaengler if Seine Exzellenz would have time to see him in the midst of his many duties, and the Oberst said that Seine Exzellenz had never failed to take the time; he was the kind of executive who had competent subordinates and saw that they did their jobs and left him free to have a little pleasure now and then. Lanny thanked his two hosts and drove back to his hotel early in the afternoon. In his mind was the picture of the Baltimore lady and her chauffeur approaching the Dutch border, and all the many different things that might be about to happen to them. He turned on the radio set in his room and sat listening to recordings of Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert, interspersed with Nazi orators raving at the Czechs. It was three o’clock—and now the car should be at the border; at any moment the radio might report that a notorious Red saboteur and criminal had been arrested trying to escape from the country, posing as the chauffeur of an American woman writer. There were news periods on one radio and then on another, and Lanny’s palms were moist as he turned the dial.
No such news was given; and then he would think: “The discovery hasn’t been made yet. It will come at seven in the morning, or thereabouts.” Then he would think: “But it may not come at all! They may not have got the gadget!” It was possible that Monck had had to call up Miss Creston and tell her that some trouble had developed in the car and the, trip would have to be postponed. If that had happened, presumably Lanny would get a note in the morning. It could even be that the crime would never be detected. If it was an inside job, there would not necessarily be any marks of breaking in; and if the gadget was being turned out in quantities, there would be a storeroom, and how often would they take an inventory? Somebody might decide that there had been a miscount; or some subordinate might discover the error and keep it quiet for fear of being held to blame. It might even happen that the one who did the counting might be the one who had done the stealing! All sorts of possibilities to occupy the imagination of a man sitting before a radio, listening to Nazi marching songs and war cries and wondering if even now a thousand bombers might be winging their way toward the beautiful and romantic old city on the river Moldau, portrayed in a Smetana tone poem.
IV
On Monday morning Lanny again sat glued to the radio, and in between broadcasts he skimmed through the papers. Apparently all Germany was absorbed in the problem of Prague, and what reply the Führer intended to make to Czech insolence. Father Tiso, Premier of Slovakia, had been interned in a monastery, which seemed a proper abode for a priest; but now the reverend statesman had fled the monastery and was on his way to Hitler to beg for help against his oppressors. German troops were on the way to the border—that new border of Czechoslovakia which the Führer had “guaranteed” less than half a year ago.
There was nothing about any supercharger having been stolen; and for the hundredth time Lanny asked himself: Would they give a public alarm, or would it be a secret action of the Gestapo, a message to all their agents at the border? Would they be willing to tell the world that they had a secret supercharger for fighter planes? Lanny was still imagining it one way and then the other, when the telephone rang; it was Furtwaengler, saying that Seine Exzellenz would be pleased if Herr Budd would come to lunch. Of course Herr Budd was pleased, likewise; and right away he thought: “He can’t have got any word yet, or he wouldn’t be feeding me!”
This impression was reinforced when Lanny entered the ministerial residence and Der Dicke came to welcome him with both hands. The great man’s rest in the land of sunshine and flowers had done him good and he had forgotten that he had any heart trouble; also he had forgotten his fear of embonpoint, judging by the way he attacked the luncheon of turbot followed by broiled venison which he had ordered for his guest. He was the same fat Hermann that Lanny had known for the past six years, talking about his food at the same time that he gobbled it, telling jokes, many of them sexual, and in general exhibiting his joy at being the incomparable person that he was.
Very quickly he made evident the cause of this exuberance. He had ordered the Air Force to be ready for action on the morrow, and it was going to be ready and was going to act. The dream of Hermann’s life, which he had been cherishing for a quarter century—ever since, as a humble lieutenant in the trenches, he had worked some kind of “pull” and got himself transferred to aviation. For twenty years he had been building the National-Socialist movement and for six years he had been building the Air Force, and now at last he would have a chance to show what it could do! A strictly professional attitude, Lanny perceived; and as grandson of Budd Gunmakers and son of Budd-Erling he shared it with proper geniality. A beautiful and romantic old city would be blown into dust and rubble, some tens of thousands of civilians would be massacred, and the fat Hermann would say to the world: “Knuckle down to your master!”
“The Führer has given me his word,” he declared; “and this time he isn’t going to back down. We have seen that it does no good.” Lanny understood that Göring had decided to swim with the current.
“I have a picture deal which is taking me to England and then to the States,” remarked the art expert. “What do you want me to say to people there?”
So the Air Marshal entered upon a long recital of the inconveniences to which
his government had been subjected ever since the Munich compromise. Lanny had already heard Hitler tell it, and had read it in the papers and listened to it over the radio ad nauseam. A fat man emitting sounds from the same orifice into which he is stuffing food is not a pleasing spectacle, but Lanny had asked for it and he listened politely. At the end he was not surprised when the great man revealed that he was not really so bursting with confidence as he acted. “Do you think that England or France will fight?” he demanded.
“I’m sure it won’t be England or France,” said Lanny, just to tease him. “If anything, it will be England and France.”
“Will it be that?”
“I haven’t had the opportunity to ask, but if you want my guess, they won’t. I know they certainly don’t want war; and how far they will let themselves be pushed is something—well, I doubt if Chamberlain himself knows at this moment. I doubt if he wants to know.”
Lanny would have liked to put a counter-question: “What will you do if they take a stand?” But he was quite sure that Hermann didn’t know the answer to that one. Hermann was doing what Hitler told him, and Hitler himself didn’t know, any more than Chamberlain knew. Chamberlain was muddling through, English fashion, and Hitler was following his intuition, Hitler fashion, and that was the way the world was being run. Hitler was bluffing, and when he saw how his opponents reacted to his bluff he would decide how to react to their bluff.
V
“I don’t suppose you want to talk about paintings in a crisis like this,” the visitor remarked; and the host replied: “Why not? If I had decisions to make at this late hour, I would be a poor executive indeed.”
It would not do to assume anything like that, so Lanny said: “I have my car with me, and it might be worth while to take out the Canaletto, as I feel pretty sure of getting a good offer.”
“Ausgezeichnet!” replied Der Dicke.
Lanny went on to discuss Winslow Homer, whose paintings of waves and sailors and fishermen in action had unexpectedly attracted a military man’s attention; he told about Grant Wood and other Americans whose work was beginning to be recognized. It was better to get the new men before their prices went too high. Lanny understood that when Hermann Göring bought works of art he expected them to pay dividends, exactly like the shares of the Hermann Göring Stahlwerke. If ever the time came that he had to take flight to America by way of Portugal and the Cape Verde Islands, the paintings he had salted away in New York without ever seeing them would be worth enough to buy an estate in the Pocantico hills.
Der Dicke’s thoughts were perhaps on that subject now, for after he had O.K.’d Lanny’s recommendations—to sell old masters which American collectors greatly overvalued and to purchase American painters who were as yet greatly undervalued—the fat commander suddenly burst out: “Tell me, Lanny—can it possibly be that the French air force is as weak as all my reports tell me?”
The visitor replied: “I’ll tell you the story which Denis de Bruyne had from a member of the Cabinet about six months ago. Before Daladier came to Munich to discuss the settlement, he summoned Darlan, Gamelin, and Vuillemin to the ministry and said: ‘Now, gentlemen, tell me frankly, just how well is France prepared if war should come?’ Darlan replied: ‘The navy is completely ready.’ Gamelin replied: ‘The army can be mobilized in three days.’ Then Daladier turned to the head of the air force, who hesitated, until the Premier urged him. Then he said: ‘In two weeks after war starts we shall not have a plane left capable of fighting. It will have to be my policy to put in our second-grade pilots, and save the best until I can get some good planes.’”
Lanny told that story because he knew it was all over Paris, and he was sure that men like Herzenberg and Abetz and Kurt Meissner must have heard it. When Göring added the question: “What have they procured in the past six months?” Lanny replied: “You know how much aviation anybody can procure in six months. I don’t know what they’ve ordered from my father, but I know that he was pretty disgusted when he left Paris. You are familiar with the situation: they are split into a dozen factions that hate each other more than they can ever hate an outside enemy.”
“God knows we don’t want to fight them,” declared Der Dicke. “All we want is to pull them away from Russia, and have our friends somehow manage to get control.”
“It will surely come that way if you give it time,” replied the visitor, and added, with a smile: “But I understand you’re not saying that to the Führer any more!”
VI
Lanny went back to the Adlon, fully convinced that Hermann Göring hadn’t yet missed his supercharger; he just couldn’t be that good an actor! Inquiring for his mail, the guest received a postcard—a plain, open card with a color photograph such as you could buy for five pfennigs at newsstands. This one bore a Netherlands stamp and showed the town hall of the Dutch town of Zutphen, famous on account of Sir Philip Sidney, his wounds and his cup of water. On the card was written: “Aunt Sally is feeling better and I am taking her to London.”
Now Lanny had no Aunt Sally, nor had he agreed upon any such name as code. But the stamp and postmark were all he needed, and Monck, of course, was playing with that fact. Lanny took the card upstairs and burned it; then he wrote a few notes and sent a few cablegrams, and by that time a messenger had come from the ministerial residence bringing the Canaletto, not a very large painting, carefully wrapped in oilcloth and canvas. There was a document authorizing him to take it out of the country; also his exit permit—the Oberst always obliged him with services of that sort.
The traveler had decided to wait till morning, on chance that there might be developments which needed explaining. He went for an after-dinner call on Hilde von Donnerstein, and heard the latest gossip concerning the insides of the Nazi machine. They listened to the radio for a while: Father Tiso had flown to the Führer to beg for help and it had been promised him. Hacha, the defiant Czech, had been summoned to Berlin, and was coming; they were all going to learn to come at the master’s call. Lanny observed the curious fact that this sophisticated lady, who told so many stories poking fun at the Nazis, was nevertheless proud of the fact that it was a German who was giving the commands. Lanny, of course, had to agree with her; the only possible basis of order in Central Europe was for the lesser breeds to do what they were told.
But nothing about any supercharger, or burglary of the Siemens-Halske plant! In the morning, after his usual comfortable routine, Lanny took the precaution to phone Oberst Furtwaengler, to thank him for his many favors and to say good-by. No hint of anything but cordiality; so Lanny had his painting and his bags and his portable radio set carried down and packed in the car, distributed the proper gratuities, and rolled away to the west. He was going to take the ferry at the Hook that night, and his stateroom had been engaged by wire—the hotel porter had seen to it. Other men had oiled and greased the car, and put gas in the tank, water in the radiator, air in the tires. How comfortably everything had been arranged and how smoothly everything went for those who had plenty of money in the spring of the year 1939!
On the way he listened to Berlin, and when he tired of that he could shift to Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, London—that is, whenever the car was out in the open country. Great events were rushing on with hurricane speed. The President of the Czech Republic—so the Nazi radio and press were careful to call it, since they had recognized the independence of Slovakia—Hacha, had arrived in Berlin, along with his Foreign Minister and his daughter, the latter on account of his failing health. They were received with military honors, with flowers and even a box of candy for the daughter—let nobody ever say that the Führer was lacking in gallantry! The poor old man was going to surrender-his country and so it wasn’t going to be bombed—let no one ever say that the Führer was lacking in mercy!
A swarm of newspapermen had rushed to Prague—and now all the world, including Lanny rolling westward at sixty miles an hour, could listen to an American correspondent telling the world how the people of Prague were t
aking the prospect of submission to Hitler’s will. Would they resist or wouldn’t they? Would Britain or France help them? Other Americans in Paris and in London discussed the intentions of those governments. But how could newspaper and radio correspondents foretell the behavior of statesmen who were in the condition of a swarm of bees when someone turns the hive upside down?
VII
The son of Budd-Erling would listen for a while, and then his thoughts would wander off to the supercharger, which ought to be in London by now. It wouldn’t take Monck long to get the pieces of the gadget loose from the car, and after that it would be a question of getting on board the first steamer. Monck surely wouldn’t delay, for what he had was stolen property, and if the Gestapo got on his trail they could appeal to the British authorities and land him in jail.