Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  “I would take you there and vouch for you. I know her well, and she knows I’m a rich man’s son, so she thinks I’m above suspicion. She’ll invite us to dinner, and all you have to do is to get ready your spiel, and make it good and hot, for there’s nothing she won’t swallow. She has a right to spend her money as she pleases, and, thank God, it’s not yet against the law to tell the American people about the dangers of Red Communism. She owns an old brownstone mansion on lower Fifth Avenue, and she bears an old and honored name, so she’s above suspicion and safe from any attack. If you’re under her protection you’ll be absolutely safe. You must understand, I can’t do this alone, because I can’t afford to let Miss van Zandt or any of my other rich friends know that I am broke; that would destroy my prestige. But here comes an Englishman with a load of new ideas, and I’ll introduce you to one person after another and the money will come rolling in. You can insist that you need my guidance, and that I ought to have a salary, and I can reluctantly consent, and Miss van Zandt will agree, and maybe write another check.”

  Hartley alias Branscome hesitated for a while. He had other duties, he said, which he was afraid of jeopardizing. Lanny asked tactfully, might it be that these were dangerous? This plan had the advantage of being perfectly legal, and even honorific. “Don’t forget that you’ll meet tremendously important people who can be of use to you all the rest of your life. I can give you a string of names out of the Social Register, to say nothing of Dun and Bradstreet. And if it’s a question of your time, this plan wouldn’t take very much. All that you and I would have to do is the money-raising; for all the other work—the writing, printing, office management, and so on—we can hire. We don’t have to worry about any of it. Let the others do that.”

  It just wasn’t possible to turn down such an offer. After more hesitation the man of mystery said that he would go at least as far as to dine with the eccentric old lady and tell her his story and see how she reacted. Thereupon Lanny turned the car back to the city, and they arrived late in the evening. All the way he was shivering at the thought: Suppose the F.B.I. had run into trouble and hadn’t finished yet! Or suppose they had left some clue and that Hartley alias Branscome discovered it and told his Nazi associates that the too plausible son of Budd-Erling had played this dirty trick upon him!

  VII

  Next morning Lanny wrote a note to the “angel” of the pro-Nazis, telling her about the remarkable Englishman he desired to introduce. He laid it on thick, for he didn’t in the least mind if Hartley got some of her money—he told himself that if one rascal didn’t get it, another would. He sent the note by messenger and then he went down to the F.B.I. office.

  “I got what I wanted. Did you get yours?” he asked the competent Mr. Post.

  “Indeed, yes,” answered the agent. “If I tell you about it, you’ll keep extra quiet?”

  “I can’t keep any quieter than I am,” Lanny said. “I was learning to keep my father’s secrets when I was four or five years old.”

  “Well, the man’s room is lousy with diamonds. He has them hidden in at least half a dozen places.”

  “What on earth is he doing with diamonds?”

  “He is part of a ring that is shipping them to Sweden, to be smuggled into Germany, we assume.”

  “That would be rather important, wouldn’t it?”

  “The German machine-tool industry depends upon them.”

  “Well, we’ve been lucky. Are you sure you left the place in order?”

  “I went along myself to watch everything, and I was glad I did. We finished in less than the hour you allowed us.”

  Said Lanny: “I’m surprised that the fellow would come in on a scheme like mine if he has such an important matter already in hand.”

  “One thing you learn, no crook ever gets enough money. This one may be playing a minor role, the others getting a larger cut.”

  “I got the impression that he has a bad case of the jitters. So I put my proposition up to him as something within the law, and it may be he’ll be glad to get out of the more dangerous racket. I hope you didn’t take any of those diamonds, Mr. Post.”

  “Surely not. But we ought to get them before they disappear. That is going to be really difficult, because diamonds are so easy to move. We have to find a way to keep track of them without involving you.”

  “I have tried to make things easier,” explained Lanny. “I suggested to Hartley that we might have to find another man, someone to carry the responsibility of our proposed organization. He had no objection, and he won’t have any objection to a business manager and other people to do the work. You can surround him with your agents, both men and women, if you wish.”

  “If you don’t mind,” said Post, “let me introduce you to a chap who is working on this case, and if you approve you might tell your old lady about him and let him put up some of the money.”

  The agent pressed a button and told the secretary to send in “Cartier.” A young man, slightly built, entered the room—Lanny learned later that he was twenty-one, but he might have been taken for a boy. He had a thin, eager face, bright blue eyes, and an expression of alertness, as if he were playing some game which required him to be on his toes every moment. “Mr. Budd,” said the agent, “this is Tom Cartier. He has left the University of Virginia to help us out in this emergency. His conscience is troubled because he isn’t in the Army, so we’ll have to give him something dangerous to do.”

  Lanny shook hands with the youngster and promised to do his best. Cartier had evidently been told about the son of Budd-Erling and had conceived a great awe of him. The youngster knew German and had been “boning up” day and night on the subject of Nazi doctrines and practice. He had been working among the “Christian Mobilizers,” the “Crusader Whiteshirts,” and other fanatics who were trying to introduce the New Order into the sweet land of liberty. It amused Lanny vastly to hear the Nazi language with a Virginia accent.

  He took a great shine to the youngster, and Post sent them off into a room where they could talk about the details of their scheme. Lanny was to tell both Hartley and Miss van Zandt about a capable young man who had some money and was eager to put it into the anti-Bolshevik cause. “I expect to find a note from the old lady when I get home,” Lanny said. “She is always in a hurry, because she has visions of the Reds coming round the corner from Union Square and seizing her mansion.”

  “They would if they could,” said the F.B.I. man, with a grin. “Some day she’ll be asking us for help, and we’ll have to give it to her.”

  VIII

  Returning to the apartment, Lanny found the letter, as he had predicted. “Miss van Zandt requests the pleasure of Mr. Lanny Budd’s company at dinner this evening. Seven o’clock. Black tie.” There was a similar note which Lanny was supposed to deliver to Mr. Trescott Hartley, but he had no way to do that, for Mr. Hartley had not entrusted him with an address. He had said that he would telephone Lanny at four in the afternoon, so all Lanny could do was wait.

  Meantime he went to call on his old friend and employer, Professor Alston, who had just arrived in New York from the Middle West. The presidential “fixer” had been trying to resolve what he called “an interdepartmental jurisdictional dispute.” He didn’t name names, or even departments, for he was the most discreet of counselors; but he was also a tired and overstrained old gentleman, who was glad to have a friendly ear into which to pour the story of human inadequacy in the giant crisis which was threatening the nation’s existence.

  Lanny drove him so that they could be alone, and took him to a roadside café where a “headliner” wasn’t apt to meet a reporter and be asked for the name of his luncheon companion. So this ex-professor of geography with the little white beard and the gold pince-nez set forth his idea that the development of man’s mechanical devices and economic organizations had outrun that of his moral codes. You could find men who were “big” enough to build colossal enterprises, but it was hard indeed to find those who were “big” en
ough not to quarrel with their associates and let personal antagonisms paralyze their usefulness in the public service.

  “Here I am,” said Charles T. Alston, “close to seventy and by no means a Hercules, and I have to spend my time being flown about the country and sitting in hotel rooms in stifling hot weather, administering paternal scoldings to schoolboys of anywhere between forty and eighty years. I have to get them together and plead and pray with them, threaten them with the Nazis, find slogans to inspire them, make them swear oaths of loyalty to their duty which they ought to have learned in school. I have to make them kiss and make up—”

  “Actually kiss?” inquired Lanny, ready for a good laugh.

  “No, that would be in France. Here they shake hands and get a soulful look in the eyes, or at any rate they refrain from punching each other in the nose. That may last for the duration, or it may not last till I get out of town.”

  “You should write a book called The Memoirs of a Bureaucrat, Professor.”

  “Don’t fool yourself, my boy. Power is power, whether it is political or financial. It goes to men’s heads and you see them swell up like bullfrogs, and it’s just the same whether they are heads of alphabetical departments in the government or of coal or oil or steel combines. I go through the same ritual in Wall Street as in Washington, or out in the field, wherever jealousy and greed and self-will have taken root in the hearts of men.”

  “And women?” inquired the other.

  “Women don’t do so much, but they talk more, and oh, it’s dreadful! Women take my suggestions more readily, I suppose, because I am a man. Sometimes when I’m dealing with the men I wish I could be a woman.”

  “A young one, perhaps?”

  “Better a motherly one. I once had to call in the mother of one of our great big masterful men and tell her the situation. She gave her son a scolding that he wouldn’t take from anybody else; and afterward he told me I had taken an unfair advantage of him! I said in his palatial office: ‘Listen, man, you think that I enjoy giving you orders, as you call it? Let me try to set you straight. I am a geographer, and right now at my little place in the country I have on my table half a dozen books on exploration, and I’m counting the days till this damned war will be over and I can go home and lie in a hammock and read.’”

  “And what did he say to that?”

  “He said: ‘I’ve got a trout stream on my place, Alston, and when it’s over, come and we’ll go fishing.’”

  IX

  Lanny underwent a thorough interrogation as to his recent trip. Vichy, Toulon, the Riviera, Switzerland, Algeria, and Morocco—Alston wanted to know about them all: what were the living conditions, what the people were saying about the war and about the Allies and the Germans. He explained: “The decision has not yet been taken where the first landing is to be made; and, of course, it makes a lot of difference whether we shall find ourselves among a friendly or an indifferent population.”

  “I should think,” ventured the other, “that a decision will have to be taken soon if anything is to be done this year.” When his friend nodded, Lanny went on: “Not meaning to fish, but just to guess, the longer they put it off, the more likely it is that it will be the Mediterranean rather than the Channel.”

  “It is hardly likely that the Germans will fail to make the same guess,” smiled Alston. “Between you and me, the decision is to be taken at a conference of the military men in London very shortly. The President has indicated that he wishes me to attend.”

  “We may meet there, Professor. Churchill has promised to fix matters so that I can return to England. That is important to me because I haven’t seen my little daughter for more than a year.”

  Lanny told of the interview in the White House, incidentally mentioning the odd detail of having met the Prime Minister of Great Britain freshly out of his bath. The ex-geographer remarked: “I had the same experience. He said to me: ‘You see, Dr. Alston, I have absolutely nothing to conceal.’” They chuckled over this, and the older man added: “Has anybody told you what the Prime Minister’s wife calls him? Her term of endearment is ‘Porky’!”

  Such are the delights of being among the “insiders”; you pick up amusing items of gossip and pass them on and feel proud of your privileged position—while hundreds of your fellow men are dying in agony and your civilization totters on the edge of an abyss. When Lanny’s smile had died the ex-geographer remarked: “War makes strange bedfellows. If, while I was a humble instructor at a freshwater college, someone had told me that I should some day be hobnobbing with the Duke of Marlborough’s seventh lineal descendant, I should have considered it extremely unlikely.”

  “He is good company,” commented the younger man, “and a good ally in battle. But I’m afraid you’ll have a hard time with him when it comes to setting up new governments in Europe.”

  “It is the people who are going to do that, Lanny. The British people will decide the destiny of Britain; and Churchill will submit to their will, I hope.”

  They talked about Lanny’s plans, and he explained his idea of paying a visit to Rudolf Hess in pretended secrecy and getting from him a message to be delivered to Hitler. Alston shook his head. “I don’t believe the Governor will want you to go into Germany again. He told me definitely that he considered it too dangerous.”

  “What does he want me to do?”

  “To go back to Vichy France and North Africa, especially if the London conference decides upon an invasion there. We shall need every scrap of information we can get, and the Governor counts on you because you can meet the top people.”

  “If that’s what he wants,” Lanny said, “of course that’s what I’ll do. Do you know the line of Dante, ‘In la sua volontade è nostra pace’?” When Alston said that he didn’t know Italian, Lanny translated: “In his will is our peace.” It was a good wartime motto.

  X

  The “fixer” had two matters of especial urgency on his mind and proceeded to revéal them to his one-time secretary-translator. The first was the problem of the rocket bomb, the jet-propelled missile reported as capable of traveling as far as one or two hundred miles. If the Germans should use this, they might be able to destroy London and make it impossible for the British to be of any further use in the war. “We know definitely that they have it,” said Alston, “and we have hints as to where and how they are working. The trouble is, we have too many hints, and we strongly suspect that they are being ‘planted’ for the purpose of confusing us. We have become convinced that the Germans have one principal center of activity, and that is where their best and most trusted scientists are to be found. We’d like to get that place, and if possible the scientists, in one of our thousand-plane surprise raids. There is nothing more important in the whole war.”

  “I talked with my man in Geneva about it,” reported the P.A. “He promised to do his best. The arrangement was that Colonel Donovan’s office was to send a man to him, and I do not know what has come out of that.”

  “I talked with the Colonel’s office this morning over the phone—we have a code name for the project, of course. They report that nothing satisfactory has come in so far.”

  “I don’t know what more I could do, Professor, unless it is to go into Germany myself.”

  “Are you free to tell me more about this man of yours?”

  “I think I am free to tell you everything. He has given me permission to trust our Intelligence organization, and you are surely a part that. His name is Bernhardt Monck, and he is an old-time German labor man and Social Democratic Party leader, one of those who did not turn patriotic in either the first World War or the second, so I suppose he should be classed as an Independent, though he sticks to the thesis that the party will arise out of the ashes of this calamity and lead the German people into Socialism. He went under the name of Capitán Herzog in the International Brigade in Spain, and now he calls himself Braun, or Brun when he writes to me in France.”

  “You are certain that he is trustworthy?”<
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  “I trust him as I would trust you in the same circumstances. He was recommended to me by the woman who became my second wife. I told you about that marriage and its tragic end. She was in Paris, and the Nazis kidnaped her; I tried to save her and Monck helped me. He risked his life, and no man can do more; he didn’t even want to let me pay him, although he knew I was what he would call a rich man. Now he is living the life of a student, pretending to be doing some historical work, and keeping his contacts with the anti-Nazi underground. Of course he has never told me what these are; but several times he has given me information as to German plans, which I have sent to the President, who has told me that it was useful.”

  “We cannot ask more than that. I think you should see this man again and impress upon him the urgency of the rocket-bomb matter. Give him whatever money he can use.”

  “I did that, and I assume that the new contact man will do the same. It may be that he will have some new lead that I can follow up. I’ll ask him, of course.”

  “And now for the other matter, which is the problem of atomic fission and what progress the Germans have been making. Did you talk to your man about that?”

  “No, because you didn’t authorize me to. I asked him to find out where the Germans are making heavy water, that is all.”

  “I am quite sure they know we are working on atomic fission, so I don’t see what harm it can do for you to mention the subject to your man. You should be guided by circumstances; if you find he has no contacts with that part of the scientific world, then there’s no use telling him anything. But if he has a contact, tell him, not what we know, but only what we need to know.”

  “You forget, Professor, I am ten months behind the times on that subject, and that may mean ten years of ordinary times.”

  “That is true. Would you like to stop by and see Professor Einstein again?”