One Clear Call I

by Upton Sinclair

  All these things Lanny said with a grave face, and they both agreed that the Fatherland was in a serious position, and that it would be the part of wisdom to get out at any cost. “Dieses verdammte unconditional surrender!” exclaimed Der Dicke, using the English phrase; and Lanny agreed that it was an uncivilized and indecent formula. But it wouldn’t necessarily mean just that—all kinds of terms and modifications were even now being demanded by the Italians. Lanny had picked up that information in Rome, and he named the people, but of course he was careful to name the wrong ones. If it could lead to the Gestapo’s distrusting their best friends in Italy, that would be all to the good.

  “Leider!” exclaimed the Nummer Zwei. “I have lost my influence by urging reasonableness. The Führer would not hear of such suggestions, no matter who made them. We have to go through to the bitter end, and we are using up our human resources, which cannot be replaced. Stalingrad was our Gettysburg I fear.” The bemedaled commander’s mouth drooped, matching his jowls and the folds under his chin. His complexion had lost its color, he belched frequently and gave other evidences of ill health. Lanny could feel certain that he had gone back to his old habit of taking drugs; there had been a bottle of pills on the table with his food, and now he was restless, looking about as if he needed something. “I wish I could stay and talk about paintings the rest of the day,” he said; “but I have to meet my generals and decide what to do about your increasing bombing. Zum Teufel mit Ihnen!” He said it with a melancholy grin.

  The son of Budd-Erling replied seriously, “I am ashamed to be so helpless, lieber Hermann.”

  XI

  The SS Leutnant was waiting in the car outside the Residenz. He was enormously impressed by an Ausländer who could come from the home of Die Nummer Eins to the home of Die Nummer Zwei. His name was Apfeldorf, and he had gray hair; Lanny took him to be forty, and learned that he was twenty-two. He had fought all the way from the Polish border to the suburbs of Moscow and part of the way back. He walked with a decided limp, and revealed to his guest that he had a wooden leg and it did not fit very well; there were so many who needed this sort of help. When Lanny indicated his interest, the young Nazi devotee told his experiences in this first campaign, when the Army had been hurled into that vast semi-barbarous land—so he described it—and had failed of its main objective; the troops had been caught by the most severe winter in many years, and the government had had to beg for blankets, fur coats, gloves, and woolen scarves from the civil population. “Now I am nothing but a desk man,” sighed Leutnant Apfeldorf.

  Lanny had telephoned to make sure that Marceline was still at the onetime school. She had said, speaking German, since that was required by law, “Oskar ist bier. Vorsicht!” That word of warning meant that she had not told her lover that she had shared his deadly secret with her half-brother. When Lanny arrived at the cottage she was sitting on the porch, waiting for him; Oskar was asleep inside, so she had an excuse for taking Lanny off under the shade tree in the garden. He assured her that he would be careful; he had met Oskar a number of times in Paris, and knew his father still better, and his officer caste better yet.

  The Oberst—he had been promoted recently—was slightly younger than Marceline. His father, the Graf, now had a minor job in the Auswärtige Amt in Berlin, which presumably meant that Ribbentrop didn’t trust him too much. Oskar’s regiment had been sent into the Orel salient, which certainly indicated that nobody cared what happened to him. He had lost his left arm from a shell burst, and had got a splinter in his abdomen, so he had had a narrow squeak; there would be one more desk man in the Reichswehr, which already had more than it could use. He was able to move about, but feebly; Marceline was taking care of him, and she made a little moue and asked, “How could I say no?”

  The young officer hadn’t been able to do anything about the conspiracy; but he hoped soon to be active again, and then a Franco-American dancer would be in the very middle of it. “Should I go elsewhere?” she asked, and Lanny replied, “That is a matter you will have to make up your own mind about. This much is certain, you may be able to render an important service to your country.”

  “But you know how I hate politics!” she exclaimed.

  “This isn’t politics, Marceline; this is war. Some twelve millions of our best young men are risking their lives for you and me.”

  “Oh, you were always like that, Lanny; imagining that it was your duty to do something for somebody else. I’m not like that, and I never expected to get myself into such a position.”

  “The world right now is full of people who find themselves in positions they never expected. Be sure of this, if you know about the scheme and don’t reveal it, you will be held just as responsible if it should be discovered. Make up your mind one way or the other, because it’s very serious, and if your heart isn’t in it you’ll have a hard time.”

  “Could you take me with you to America?”

  “No, old dear, I couldn’t. Your position is a peculiar one: under American law you have the right to choose the citizenship of your mother, but you would have to be in American territory to have that right recognized. Under both French and German law you are French because your father was. I suppose that if you could get to Sweden, the American Ambassador would have power to recognize your status; but I doubt if he would, because you came into Germany after the war broke out and you have performed here after Germany declared war on your country. You will remember that I warned you at Juan.”

  “Oh, you were always warning me,” said the dancer with another moue. “But I would have had to be a different person to take all that advice.”

  XII

  It had been Lanny who had introduced Oskar von Herzenberg to Marceline; he had invited father and son to a night club in Paris where she was dancing. She had taken a fancy to the handsome stern-faced Junker with the dueling scars on his left cheek. She had danced for him, and then with him, and he had proved a good partner; he could be charming when he chose to forget his exalted social position. In those days he had had rosy cheeks and the glow of health all over him; the dancer, recently divorced, had been looking for something to fill her empty heart, and this had appeared to be it.

  Oskar joined them; and there were no roses in his cheeks. He was deathly pale, and when he got up out of his chair he stood for a minute to see if he was going to be dizzy. His face was set for the continual endurance of pain. Lanny thought, Oh, God, how much needless suffering in this world! He had to remind himself that Oskar hadn’t in the least objected to inflicting suffering upon Poles and Frenchmen and Dutchmen and Norwegians and so on through a long list. Now that this suffering had bounced back upon himself it was a different thing.

  Behind those cold blue eyes there was passion of revolt against the Nazi upstarts who had taken Germany away from its long-time Prussian possessors. By a strange turn of the wheel of fate, Oskar was now on Lanny’s side, and it was up to Lanny to work out a tactful way of making Oskar trust him, without giving any hint that Lanny already knew the dread secret. Lanny had to let Oskar know that Lanny wasn’t what he pretended to be, and then Oskar would let Lanny know that Oskar wasn’t what he pretended to be. It might take more than one visit, and it mightn’t work out at all; but if it did, it might be of importance.

  Lanny began by telling about his visit to Göring, and about Der Dicke’s low state of mind. Der Dicke was a top Nazi, but he came of a “good Prussian family and had been an Armee lieutenant in World War One, so he was a person worth consideration. His remark that Stalingrad had been the Reichswehr’s Gettysburg was an acute one, which any military man would be interested to discuss; when Lanny pointed out that the politicians of the Confederacy had insisted upon fighting the war to the bitter end, but that Lee, if he had been consulted, might have been willing to recognize the inevitable much sooner, Oskar knew that Lanny had read history and had an understanding of the present plight of the Fatherland.

  The visitor said, “I want you to understand, I am in this country
as an art expert. I have known Hermann for a long time and have done a lot of business with him. He is a little bit cracked on the subject of collecting paintings which he doesn’t have time to look at, but he owns them.”

  “How on earth can you get permission from your own country to do business in wartime?” Many persons had asked that question, and Lanny had his answer pat. “My father is a man of influence, and he had important business dealings with Göring before the war. They became friends, and now are able to arrange matters. You know how it was with the Comité des Forges people during World War One.”

  “I suppose I am very naïve,” said the Junker. “I would not have supposed it possible that businessmen would have such power.”

  Lanny smiled most amiably. “It is like the black market; if you operate on a small scale the police pick you up, but if it’s a matter of millons, the police demand what we in American call a ‘cut.’”

  “You Americans have changed the world greatly,” replied the other. “If you have your way, I won’t know how to get along in it.”

  “Let me teach you,” said the P.A., still smiling.

  XIII

  Marceline was pleased with the way her brother was getting along with her lover. They helped Oskar into the house and he lay on the couch where Lanny was to sleep that night—he could stay because his plane for Paris did not leave Berlin till midmorning. The maid-of-all-work prepared a simple evening meal, and while they ate it Lanny told about the Reichsmarschall’s sumptuous ways. He told about life in Italy, with special emphasis upon paintings, of course. He made it amusing, but he also revealed that Italy was not to be counted upon as an ally much longer. He didn’t have to put this forward; the Oberst brought it out by questioning. Several times while Lanny was strolling in the flowery fields of the Muses, Oskar dragged him back into the smoke-blackened smithy of Vulcan. The Junker wanted to hear everything that Lanny knew about the world situation, and Lanny could imagine him retailing it to his associates in the plot to get rid of the Number One usurper.

  In the course of the evening Lanny thought it safe to say, “I want you to understand, Oskar, I have been a friend of Germany since boyhood, and when this present regime came in I accepted it as so many of you Germans did, because I believed what they told me. But the Germany I love and want to help is the old Germany, governed by gentlemen such as I met at Schloss Stubendorf, where I visited Kurt Meissner. I say this in confidence, of course, for if I said it openly I could not continue to come back. But strictly between you and me, I think that Göring has begun to realize that he has got into the wrong galère, and it is only his personal loyalty to Hitler that keeps him where he is. You would be surprised to know how many of the Reichswehr officers have dropped hints to me of the same attitude.”

  That was like dangling a bit of red cloth in front of a frog in a pond; he cannot help jumping. Said Oskar, “I would be very much pleased to have you tell me who they are.”

  “Believe me, I would if I could, in honor,” replied the P.A. with warm friendship in his tone. “Men speak to me in confidence because they know me as an art expert, not involved in political affairs. I could not name them without their consent.”

  He decided that matters were going a bit too fast, and this had better do for the present. He was living in a world of plots and counterplots, and could not exclude from his mind the possibility that some chief of the Gestapo, Herr Güntelen in Rome or Herr Himmler in Berlin, might have decided to check up on this plausible American friend of the Führer. What more obvious than to call upon his half-sister’s lover and instruct him to pose as being in a plot against the Führer’s life to see what would be the reaction of the son of Budd-Erling to this nefarious scheme! And, on the other hand, Oskar von Herzenberg would be turning over in his head the possiblity that a rich American playboy, a friend of the great, might have taken offense because a Prussian aristocrat considered his half-sister good enough for a mistress but not good enough for a wife, and might be thinking up a scheme to lead him on and get him put out of the way! Such things had happened.

  When Oskar slept again, Lanny walked in the garden with this woman whose childhood had been a delight to him. He said, “Tell me, just how long has Oskar had this attitude toward the Regierung?”

  She answered, “He has always hated them in his heart because they have taken his place in the country—I mean, the place of his class. The Junkers will never give up.” She went on to talk about the extraordinary human phenomenon, the Prussian officer-aristocrat, product of discipline impossible for an American to imagine. Their minds had been so drilled that it was easier for them to think of suicide than of disobedience of an order. The aim of their training had been to make them all exactly alike, in ideas as in appearance, in private life as in professional conduct. Marceline told of looking through an album containing souvenirs of her lover’s cadet days, and of coming upon a circular having to do with social behavior. Visiting hours were limited to one specified hour, weekdays only. “On entering the room, carry hat in left hand. On taking a seat, lay the hat down. Length of visit should be about ten minutes. Do not look at your watch. No reason should be given for termination of visit. On leaving, do not turn your back on the company when opening the door.” And so on through a long list of minutiae. White wine was to be drunk from tall glasses and red wine from short. In presenting flowers, the stalks were to be held downward. The whole being of a man so trained was absorbed in the effort to be korrekt, and the idea of rebelling against authority almost unhinged his mind.

  Marceline promised, “I will take more interest in what he is doing and he will tell me more. If he asks about you, I will assure him he can trust you.”

  “You mean to stay then?”

  “Stay? Where can I go?”

  XIV

  In the good old days Lanny would have taken from dawn to midnight motoring from Berlin to Paris, and his friends would have thought he had done a remarkable stunt. Now a passenger plane carried him in less than three hours and set him down at Le Bourget airport. There was another SS Leutnant to meet him. The Führer’s staff had done everything to make matters easy for him; they had changed his Italian money into German, French, and Spanish, and he didn’t have to have his French passport examined, nor to expose the meager contents of his little bag to the customs authorities.

  He was motored to the office of Denis de Bruyne père. He had phoned to make sure the old man would be in town; the secretary had undertaken to arrange it, since Lanny wouldn’t have time to drive out to the château, some distance away in Seine-et-Oise. He didn’t want to meet people and have to explain his presence in Paris; he just wanted to keep his promise to the younger Denis and find out how the family was. If there was anything of significance going on in the political world the father would know about it and would tell.

  This man of money came of a distinguished family which had fallen upon bad times and had to part with its ancestral home. Denis had made a new start and bought the home back. When Lanny had first met him he had owned a good part of the taxicabs of Paris; later he had branched out into other activities, including banking, and now was counted among the “two hundred families” so hated by the sansculottes. Lanny’s own relationship to the family, as faithful lover of the mother up to the time of her death, was one difficult to explain outside of France, a land which has no Reno, and whose social elite have worked out a substitute called la vie à trois, dignified and decent in their eyes. Lanny had walked side by side with the père de famille in the funeral procession of Marie de Bruyne; he had been constituted a sort of lay godfather to the boys, and had been a friend and political confidant of the old man ever since.

  Three years had passed since their last meeting; years of trial and strain, and Lanny had half expected to learn that Denis had gone under. But here he was, his face wizened and looking like a mask of what it had been, his little goatee white and somewhat wispy. He got up on trembly legs to welcome his visitor—he was somewhere in his eighties. He
asked the usual question with the usual bewilderment. “Nom de Dieu, comment?”—how, how, how did an American manage to visit Paris? Lanny gave the stock explanation, the relations between Robbie Budd and Hermann Göring, and the amazing potency of this combination. Denis at once proceeded to make a businessman’s application of the matter. He was a stockholder in Budd-Erling, and there must be great sums due him. Wasn’t there some way for matters to be arranged so that the money could be got into France?

  Business before pleasure! Lanny described the miracles that were being wrought in Newcastle, Connecticut, and in the Middle West and the Far West. Everything was being put back into the Budd-Erling business, and Denis no doubt was becoming the owner of more stock, which would compound his interest in the end. “Take care of yourself until the war is over,” Lanny said with a smile; to which the old man answered wryly, “What the Germans leave the Reds will take.”

  Lanny changed the subject. “I have had several meetings with Denis fils.” The Frenchman, who adored his sons, forgot everything else and plied the guest with questions. Lanny related how he had been commissioned to purchase examples of Moorish art and had made several trips to North Africa; he had met the elder son, first in Algiers, and the last time in Bizerte. He was recuperating, he was doing his duty as he conceived it, and he had besought Lanny to obtain news of all the members of his family.

  The father said he had had no word from this elder son, except in the previous year the postcards which the Germans had printed for use between Vichy France and the portions which they held. These cards contained statements such as “I am well,” and a tiny square in which you made a check to indicate that it was true. If you wrote anything else the card was thrown out and you might get a visit from the police. That system had applied to French North Africa until the Americans had taken it; now there was no communication whatever.