Then came the little mouse idea, stealing into Lanny’s mind; poking his tiny nose through a crack and wrinkling it as he smelled. What was the atmosphere in this place like, and should a little mouse take a chance, or should he draw back and scamper into his hole?
The woman spoke first. “I feel more than ever sure that I should not hold you back, Mr. Budd.”
Lanny replied: “Wait a minute; I have something in my head.”
The car rolled on, and several minutes passed before he spoke again. Then he said: “I have been wondering whether it might not interest you to visit Berchtesgaden.”
“You mean the town?”
“I mean Der Berghof, the Führer’s home.”
“You take my breath away!” she exclaimed.
“You saw what we did last night. That was bold, you thought; but we got away with it. I have more than once acted that way, and got away with it so far. There are some verses about the stinging nettle—I don’t recall the exact words, but the idea is that if you take a nettle gently it stings you for your pains, but if you grasp it firmly it remains soft as silk. I think the Nazis are like that.”
“You mean that you would take me there as a guest?”
“I would think up a good pretext.”
“But—with the Gestapo on my trail?”
“The Gestapo does not trouble the Führer with its problems—and especially not in a time like this. The Gestapo works in the dark, and does not let its left hand know what its right is doing. I should say that the Führer’s home is the last place in Germany where it would look for an anti-Nazi writer.”
“You would have me go as Laurel Creston?”
“By no means. You are now Miss Jones. Elvirita Jones, let us say. You are from New York, a large and populous city, and I met you on the Riviera.”
“But what—what am I doing traveling about Germany with you?”
“I am groping my way toward an idea which I find novel and entertaining, though I must admit it frightens me a bit. Hess is always looking for a new and better medium, and I am wondering if you might not be able to oblige him.”
“But, goodness me—I know nothing whatever about the subject!”
“I told you I could teach you to drive a car in an hour or two; I could make a great medium out of you in the time it would take us to drive to Berchtesgaden.”
“You mean—a fraudulent one?”
Lanny couldn’t help laughing. “Would that trouble your moral sense too greatly?” Then, seriously: “I have always been conscientious about matters having to do with psychic phenomena, seeking the facts and trying to understand them; but this is an entirely different matter—this would be a ruse to try to help a friend out of grave trouble. Incidentally, you might help mankind by telling Rudi Hess that the spirit of Paul Ludwig Hans von Beneckendorf und von Hindenburg commands him to keep Germany out of war.”
“I am terrified at the thought of entering that place, Mr. Budd!”
“You were terrified at the thought of the Gestapo, and you had good right to be. This could certainly not be worse than falling into their hands.”
“But I am so ignorant on this subject!”
“Fortunately, I am less so. I have tried hundreds of experiments, and read scores of books. My stepfather, Parsifal Dingle, whom you may have heard of in Juan, has worked tirelessly at the subject for twenty or thirty years, and has filled me with his discoveries. I can tell you what you need to know—and be sure that we shall not approach Berchtesgaden until you can recite your lessons.”
“But—how would all this help me to get out of Germany?”
“That part of it is simple. If you have convinced the Deputy Führer, anything you want in Germany will be yours. You can say that your bags have been stolen, your passport lost, and Hess will furnish you with a document that will take you anywhere in the country and let you out at any exit. Also it will be good in peace or in war.”
IV
Lanny turned the car in a southeasterly direction, saying: “We might as well drive that way as any other. If we drop the plan, I can turn the steering wheel again.”
“Just how does one become a medium?” demanded the passenger.
“Many scientists would be glad to know that. Apparently one does not become, one is. A little boy finds that he knows the answer to the arithmetic problem, not because he has worked it out, but because it is in the teacher’s mind. A girl knows what her mother is going to say before the mother moves her lips; she knows that the telephone is going to ring, and who is calling. Or maybe a group of people in a mood of curiosity try the experiment of sitting in a dark room and holding hands around a table; there come raps, and the table begins to stir. Perhaps it is someone playing a joke, but again, it may be something which has baffled every scientist who has ever investigated it. Messages may be tapped out, dealing with facts that nobody in the room has ever known; the table may rise in the air, or may start to move with a force difficult to overcome. My stepfather, the most honorable of men, tells me that a group of people tried it in his home back in Iowa, and by the process of eliminating one person after another he made certain that the force came from an old woman who had been a family servant most of her life. She had had no idea of it, and was as astounded as he; the two of them laid their hands flat on the top of the table, with a newspaper under the hands so that they could not have pulled the table sideways if they had wished to. Light made no difference, and he and others could watch and see that there was no contact with the table except the four hands flat upon the paper; yet the table slid around the room with such speed that they could hardly keep up with it.”
“Do you expect me to do things like that?”
“Surely not. You wouldn’t know how, and I couldn’t teach you. You will be a trance medium, and produce spirit communications.”
“How do I proceed?”
“Let us take Madame for a model, because I have watched her most frequently. You sit in an easy chair in dim light, lean your head back and close your eyes. You may put a handkerchief over your eyes if you wish. After a minute or two you begin to breathe hard, and presently you sigh and groan as if you were in distress. Then you fall silent, and are in the trance. Nobody knows just what it is; it is like sleep, but different; apparently your consciousness sleeps, but some level of the unconscious is tapped, different from the level of sleep. You speak, but it is not your conscious mind speaking, and after you come out of the trance you have no idea what you have said or what has happened.”
“What does happen?”
“You, as a fiction writer, are accustomed to imagining characters, and having them become real, and living their own lives. Apparently the medium does the same thing, in a different way. Something in the subconscious mind of Madame has created a character who calls himself Tecumseh, and says he was an Indian chieftain, but not the one known to history. He has a vivid personality, something which Madame certainly lacks. He asserts that the spirits of dead persons are appearing, and he reports what they look like and what they say; sometimes, when the séance is very successful, these spirits begin to speak for themselves; but that is something you need not attempt.”
“And you believe I could carry on such a performance?”
“You have an imagination and a quick wit. You do not have to worry, because the whole affair is in your hands; nobody can keep you in a trance if you don’t want to stay, and if you get into a jam you can always break it off. If I press old Tecumseh too hard he gets into a rage with me and tells me to go to the devil and let him alone. He takes offense because I speak of telepathy; he even accuses me of ‘thinking telepathy’ at him. You would be safe in accusing your sitter of having doubts about you, for there are few who don’t, and Hess doubts at the same time that he believes. If you don’t know anything more for a spirit to say, simply describe that spirit as fading out, and let some new spirit come, one you will feel safer with.”
“Shall I have Tecumseh for my control?”
“
By no means. Choose some personality that you know well; anybody, living or dead, whose ideas and manner of speech you understand. Give him any name you please, and let him be of any race or time; an old Negro would be good—something primitive is more impressive than an historical figure.”
“It should be a man?”
“The Nazi world is a man’s world. A woman medium is enough; to have a woman control, also, would be more than they would find acceptable.”
“But I cannot imitate a man’s voice.”
“The theory is that the control uses the vocal cords of the medium. If the voice sounds like you imitating a man’s voice, that suffices. It may be nonsense—I don’t undertake to say—but anyhow, that is the way the game is played. This I can tell you, that America’s leading psychologist of the last generation, Professor William James, gave many years to studying these phenomena; he discovered a trance medium, Mrs. Piper, a lady of high character against whom no suspicion of fraud was ever directed. Many volumes of reports of the Society for Psychical Research were filled with the records of her séances, and James’s conclusion from the whole thing was this: Either you could believe that Mrs. Piper’s trance mind was in communication with the minds of deceased persons, or else that it had access to the mind of any and every living person. There is another alternative, of course—you can be completely ignorant of the subject. Most people prefer that way, but it hasn’t appealed to me.”
V
The car was rolling through the Westerwald; beautiful mountain scenery, and many Feldzüge marching and singing; grown-up walking parties, also, sturdy men and rosy-cheeked women with rucksacks on their backs and staffs in their hands. No one paid any attention to the American motorists, except for a friendly nod. Lanny decided that Germany was big, and the Gestapo not so big after all; he permitted his companion to ride in the seat beside him. When there was no one in sight he rehearsed her in the art of going into a trance and coming out again, and told her how to behave in this emergency and that.
She selected a convincing “control”; in childhood she had known an aged Negro who as a slave had been the bodyservant of her grandfather, Colonel Kennan, throughout the Civil War; had marched with him from the first Manassas to Appomattox, and had told stories of carrying the wounded officer from the field, and sharing with him a dozen grains of parched corn which had constituted a meal in the last days of the Army of Virginia. Laurel remembered this “Uncle Cicero” vividly, and could imitate his speech and his chuckling laughter. “Fine! Fine!” said the son of Budd-Erling. “You make him as real as Tecumseh! The fact that he is ignorant lets you out of anything you don’t know, or that seems dangerous.”
So much for the control; and now for the spirits. Said Lanny: “Your first sitter will be Rudolf Hess, and he is the one you have to convince. He believes in the idea, but is skeptical as to any new medium—naturally, he is a shining mark for pretenders and frauds. He is an intelligent man, within certain limits; he has good manners and speaks perfect English. He was born in Alexandria, where his father was some sort of merchant. He was in the army, and wounded at Verdun. Later he was fighting the Reds in Munich. Then he met Hitler and became his secretary and adoring follower. He was in the so-called Beerhall Putsch with Hitler, and then in prison, where together they composed Mein Kampf; the story is that Hitler talked and Hess wrote. Probably Hess did all the revising, for Hitler was an ignorant man fifteen years ago, and still is, in many ways.”
“What will Hess want to hear about?”
“About the attack on Poland which they are planning, and what will be the outcome. But before you approach that you have to convince him that the spirits are there and that they are real. He will be suspicious of anything that is generally known, and especially of anything that he has told me; I will have to think up things that I know about his life and that he doesn’t know I know. We had better start with something of his army days, or with the Party battles, for those are the things he is sentimental about. The idea comes to me—Heinrich Jung visited the Führer at Landsberg, and has told me about the place; he never gets tired of talking about that greatest hour of his life, and so I know all the details. Several of those prisoners have since died, and we will select one of them, and his spirit will come, and before he gets through talking Rudi will think he is back in that old castle where he dwelt comfortably for five or six months and helped to prepare the conquest of the world. You will get the atmosphere of glory, you will make him see himself in the pages of history, and he will decide that you are the most wonderful medium ever known.”
“I begin to see it as a story, Mr. Budd!”
“One thing before we go any farther. This may break a writer’s heart, but you must understand that I am acting to save you from what might be a most painful experience, and not to provide you with literary material. When you get out of Germany you and Mary Morrow may write about any of the experiences you have had by yourself, but not about any that I have to do with. You can see that if you were even to hint at these sacred matters—the Führer, his home and his friends, or anything concerning them—no pseudonym or other device would be of any avail; they would remember the mysterious Miss Elvirita Jones who came from nowhere and vanished again, and they would consider that I had committed one of the worst forms of sacrilege. I might not be permitted to enter Germany again, and certainly the connections I have spent twenty-five years in establishing would be severed.”
“I understand your position,” replied the budding trance medium. “I will consider that all this is happening in a trance, and when I wake up I won’t know about it.”
VI
Lanny Budd liked to talk, and here was somebody who had to listen, whether or no. He had given so many tiresome hours to the pursuit of psychic phenomena, and most of his friends regarded the subject as a bore; but this lady from Baltimore had to take it seriously! She had to be prepared for anything that might happen, so he told her of a string of incidents which had happened with Madame, who was to be her model. At the first séance with Zaharoff, not long after the death of the duquesa, there had come spirits of men who blamed him for their suffering and death. It had been more than the munitions king could stand and he had rushed from the room—something very bad for the medium.
Lanny said: “Whatever happens, never forget that you are in a trance, and must never under any circumstances open your eyes during the trance. If your trance is broken violently, you come out of it with groans and other signs of pain. Madame had foam on her lips; a bit of saliva will do, if you blow it. You are ill, you have a headache, and you are entitled to make a fuss, for the sitter has broken the rules. Ordinarily, he sits quietly, and you come out of the trance gently, about as you went in. You ask if the séance was satisfactory, but you do not ask for details. Never under any circumstances will you know what happened.”
And so on, and on. It was not pleasant to prepare this elaborate fraud, but then none of Lanny’s spying activities had been pleasant to him; they were a part of the war he had declared on the Nazis, and which, by all appearances, was going to last a long while.
He discussed the spirits and their behavior. They were, in disposition, very much as they had been on earth, and were generally vague about how they lived now. They were usually optimistic, and fond of saying that all was well with them. They liked to send messages to loved ones, and the messages as a rule were cheerful—but of course there might be warnings of danger. The spirits made a practice of giving little personal details to identify themselves, and their feelings would be hurt if you did not accept these. Lanny always told Madame’s sitters to humor them; now he advised Laurel Creston to humor her sitters.
“At such a time as this,” he surmised, “those who come to you are apt to be believers; once you give them the evidence they crave, they will be in your hands. With others, it may be a duel of wits, and you had best play safe. Let your spirits all be German, and Nazis if they have passed over within fifteen years. They must be educated persons, who woul
d have known English in earthly life. Or you can have some other spirit doing the translating—and you don’t have to identify that spirit. If Hess brings you a sitter who does not understand English, he will doubtless come along and translate. If you get into difficulty, let Uncle Cicero say that he cannot understand the spirit, who is speaking a foreign language, or speaking badly. Take things easy, and let the old Negro evade troubles with a joke—something he no doubt did in real life.”
“All Negroes who live with the white folks learn to do that,” said Laurel Creston.
VII
There are many mountains in Germany and they are covered with forests, which in the course of years have been tended and trained, until now the trees are in rows, like soldiers. It is a land of order and discipline, and even the wild things, animal and vegetable, obey the regulations. Lanny said: “The wild stags come to the feeding racks in winter, and they have names assigned to them, and the dates when they are to die are recorded in a book.” He added, with a smile: “There may be a book somewhere with your name and mine in it!”
They were on the edges of the Oberwald, and he had begun to drive faster, because the more he thought about the plan, the more practical it seemed. If it was going to be done, the sooner it was done the better, and he had in mind to arrive at the Berghof that night. But he did not say this to his companion. He prepared her mind gradually, telling her how she would arrive and how be treated.