Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  F.D.R. had suggested that Lanny should consult with Colonel Donovan, and so he spent the morning with that outfit. C.O.I. had been their initials, but now they were O.S.S.—Office of Strategic Services. They had a wonderful machine that made a record of what you said on a thin wire which rolled off one spool and onto another; that could be run again and again, without limit. Lanny told them all he had learned in the places he had visited, and answered half a hundred questions. In return he asked a few, and one had to do with that young Dr. Faulkner. In the public library in New York, Lanny had looked in the Chicago University catalogue and had found him there; now the O.S.S. men said that he was all right and a capable fellow. They offered Lanny a letter to him, but Lanny said he didn’t carry letters and was sure that he could arrange what he wanted, or rather, what the President wanted. He told them the ideas he had worked out, and they fell in therewith. They all showed respect for the son of Budd-Erling, for most of them were tyros, whereas Lanny had been on the job for years.

  All the way to Washington he had been making up spy stories, and all the way to New York he was trying them out in his mind. Always the villain of the story was Herr Theodor Auer, and the hero was sometimes Lanny himself, sometimes the director of a travel bureau in Cannes, and sometimes an innocent-appearing archeologist from the Windy City, the Hog Butcher of the World. Many of them were fantastic stories; but, try as he might, their creator would never produce one too fantastic to happen since the rise of Nazi-Fascism. The quarter century between the years 1920 and 1945 would become the reservoir and repository of all melodramas and movie plots, spy stories, murder mysteries, crime-and-punishment fiction, to the end of time. “Cloak and dagger boys,” the wits of New York had dubbed the Donovan outfit, and the outfit took an apologetic attitude toward itself. They had all read and written so many stories that it was hard for them to believe that fiction had suddenly become reality, and that they were in it. Lanny told them: “The first one of you who falls into hands of the Nazis will learn that there is nothing funny about it.”

  They answered gravely: “It has already happened, Budd.”

  VI

  Back in the great crowded city, Lanny told his wife the bad news. He had only two days and a half with her; his plane reservation had been made and his ticket and passport would be delivered to him. He saw Laurel go pale and then clench her hands and set her lips together. She had promised him, and promised herself, that she would never make things harder for him. Over and over again, she repeated it.

  “Darling,” he said, “I truly wanted to be with you at your confinement, but I have no choice in the matter. I have a positive order. Important events are impending.”

  “I can guess it,” she replied. “All I can do is to hope and pray for you.”

  “It will comfort you to know that one of my orders is to live. When the shooting starts, I am to be in the background. I am one of those important persons who are not ‘expendable.’”

  “Well, Lanny”—she tried to force a smile—“do your best to obey that order. If I get a telegram, my heart will stop beating.”

  “You have your job, dear, a double one. Don’t you think you had better go and let Robbie and Esther take care of you while you have the baby?”

  “I have my doctor, and my hospital arrangements are made. Agnes will be here to take care of me when I come home, and the baby will have your room until you come home again. How long will it be?”

  “My orders are to return every two or three months and report. I’ll do my best to make it two. It depends upon events of which nobody in the world can know the outcome. You will read it in the papers.”

  “I have my guesses, Lanny, but I know that it wouldn’t be proper to ask. I want you to know that I haven’t any trace of hurt feelings; I realize fully that if all the wives knew, the enemy would know a lot more quickly. Be sure that I am with you heart and soul. I know that this Nazi horror has to be destroyed, and I would risk my life for the task if it would do any good.”

  “You did risk it, dear,” he told her. “And don’t forget that your stories about the Nazis have been read by hundreds of thousands of people, and they now have a better understanding of the enemy as a result, and are more willing to stand by the government and make the necessary sacrifices. Knowledge has its way of spreading in a free society; the movements of the public mind are slow, but they happen, and we wake up and discover that we are in a new era before we thought possible.”

  “God grant that we get out of this one quickly!” exclaimed the author of The Herrenvolk.

  VII

  She was in her last month and had made up her mind not to go out in public any more except for a stroll with her woman friend in the evening. But now her time with Lanny was so short that she decided to throw out her old-fashioned notions and permit small portions of mankind to see her in what was known as an “interesting condition.” She put a maternity cape about her and went down to the car. She let Lanny drive her to Newcastle, where they had dinner with members of the family. Lanny spent an evening talking with his father and his two half-brothers, telling them things that would be useful to them in the turning out of faster and more deadly fighter planes. Meantime Laurel absorbed the wisdom of the Budd ladies; three had been through it all and told their experiences and conclusions, but unfortunately they did not agree.

  The couple spent the night in the Budd home, and in the morning drove to the estate of Lanny’s client Mr. Vernon. It was always important to have more commissions and keep up his camouflage. When the client learned that the wife was sitting in the car, he of course wanted her to come in, but Lanny explained that her condition was too interesting; so a well-bred gentleman kept away and parted with his art expert inside the house. Thus people of the old school avoided getting uncomfortably close to the facts of life and left it for the younger generation to work out a better technique if it could.

  They had lunch in a roadside tavern, and afterward the wife had a nap in the car while the husband read. Then they drove to Mr. Winstead’s place, and Lanny reported to him on art works he had come upon. They saw beautiful country estates, which gave the impression that America was a most delightful place to live in. Great numbers of persons all over the world had that impression from the cinema screen, and dreamed of some day coming to this land of peace and plenty. The couple knew that there was another side to the picture, but on this brief holiday they were content to feast their eyes upon the colors of October landscapes, and the hedgerows and beautifully tended lawns of “show places.”

  Laurel had been hoping to finish her novel before the baby’s arrival, but the work had grown beyond her original conception. She was telling the story of an American girl, daughter of a college professor who had received his Ph.D. in Germany, and the daughter went there to follow in his footsteps. She became a boarder in the home of a German professor whose son and daughter had been brought up in the Hitler Youth movement. The drama of the story lay in the contrast between the old Germany and the new, as it was revealed bit by bit to an American girl.

  The German lad fell in love with her and expected her to behave according to the code of the Hitler Mädchen, but she didn’t; instead she argued with him, and not merely about sex, but about the true meaning of freedom and about the dignity of the individual soul. The Nazi had never heard of such ideas, but was tempted by them, and the result was a split personality; he was no longer sure what he believed, or what he wished to do with his life. His sister, a Hitler fanatic, raged at the American, and the father looked upon this domestic strife with only one thought in his mind, that if he were to speak some indiscreet word, his daughter might betray him and he would lose his position, to say nothing of being shipped to a concentration camp.

  The end of all this would be the tragic breakdown and suicide of the German lad. It would be a grueling thing to write, and Lanny, who was no artist himself but had watched Rick in the throes of creation, tried to persuade his wife that the baby came first, not merely chron
ologically but morally. Let the story rest until she had fully recovered, and by that time she might find that she had a clearer vision of it and new forces to record it. Meanwhile they spent their spare time going over the manuscript. There was nobody Laurel could find who knew the Nazi system—body, soul, and mind—better than her husband, and he answered her questions and gave her the little details which are revealing and are not always easy to find in the books. It was going to be a real novel when it was done.

  VIII

  The holiday was over, and the P.A. boarded another Clipper. Men were flying back and forth across all the oceans and the continents, and no longer thought anything of it; they read the papers, played pinochle, or swapped stories. Lanny looked out of the window, to where the wrinkled sea beneath him crawled; he thought again what a great quantity there was of it, and how in this war crisis men were beginning to take the mineral treasures out of it. He thought about the wonders of flying, and about Professor Langley of the Smithsonian Institution, who a half century ago had worked out the mathematical problems of flight and had constructed a machine in conformity therewith; something had gone wrong with the launching, and the machine had plunged into the Potomac River amid the laughter of the world. Some six years ago Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson had been learning to fly, and had mentioned how monotonous it was, going round and round in the air to make up his required number of hours; his father had been moved to construct a couplet addressed to Samuel Langley:

  A mighty dream you dreamed, your hopes were mocked by a swinish crew;

  And now young men of fashion are bored, aloft with nothing to do.

  There came a cry from one of the passengers who was looking down toward the sea and pointing. Everybody rushed to the windows of the plane, and there on the wrinkled sunlit sea was a long thin shape, longer and thinner than any cigar ever made. Great excitement, for it was bound to be an enemy vessel. The Clipper carried no weapons, but the U-boat was taking no chances on that; already it was diving, and in a fraction of a minute there was nothing but a streak of foam on the water. The apparition caused much excitement, and the passengers talked subs, the damage they were doing and the remedies against them, for hours thereafter. The Clipper would radio the position of the sub, but no one on board would know the outcome.

  Most of the time Lanny Budd sat with his eyes shut, pretending to be sleeping, but thinking spy stories as hard as he could. There were so many, and each might succeed, but again it might fail, and to estimate the chances of them all would have required the services of Samuel Langley or perhaps of Albert Einstein. Lanny wanted help, and when he arrived at “Casa” by train from Tangier, he got a hotel room and set out without an hour’s delay to find the dependable Pendleton.

  IX

  They took a walk into the suburbs, and sat on a beach where before the passage of a month the G.I.’s would be swarming. Lanny said: “I promised to keep you busy, Jerry, and here it is.” He told the story from beginning to end, because the time was short and somebody had to be trusted. “This comes straight from the President, and he told me it would be the most important thing he had ever put up to me. I don’t want to appear in connection with it, because I have an idea of getting permission to go into Germany later on, and I don’t want the Germans here to spot me as an agent. I was told to find somebody, and tag, you’re it!”

  Lanny began telling one of the spy stories he had thought up all the way from Shangri-La to Washington to New York to Casablanca. In the first place, Jerry was to go to Dr. Faulkner and speak the word “Tutor.” Lanny had fixed it up with the right man in O.S.S. that Faulkner was to get a radio message through the vice-consul in Casablanca, telling him that when “Tutor” appeared, he was to drop his other work and follow orders. The next thing, Faulkner was to arrange with the vice-consul to fire him, Faulkner, in disgrace; the vice-consul would tell his friends that the Chicago doctor was no better than a Nazi, that he had spoken with contempt of the New Deal and its founder, and had declared that the American agents in North Africa were a bunch of Communists and Jews. Faulkner would make such statements to the people he knew, and would move into a cheap lodging, saying that he was broke and that he had been shamefully mistreated.

  “What I am figuring,” explained Lanny, “is that before many hours have passed the Germans will have this story, and somebody will approach Faulkner and sound him out. He will be in the dumps, and will pretend to get drunk with the German—”

  “Look, Lanny,” put in the other. “This is a very moral young man; he comes of an old Methodist family and I doubt if he has ever been drunk in his life. He would pass out cold before one of the Germans got started.”

  “All right, let him do what he can; let him be on the verge of suicide, and some Nazi will come to cheer him up.”

  “They have already made his acquaintance, and he has a couple who try to pump him now and then.”

  “All right then, that is time saved. We have only two or three weeks to work in. But wait for them to come to Faulkner; don’t let him go after them. They give him money and he starts giving them secrets. We’ll have to work this out carefully, because they must be real things he gives, things that won’t do us too much harm, but that will convince the enemy he still has a pipeline into the consulate. He will have an old codebook that he will sell to the Germans, and the vice-consul will send some messages in that code; the Germans will pick them up and decipher them, and they will be in heaven.”

  “For Pete’s sake, Lanny,” said the ex-tutor, “did you dream this, or did you get it out of E. Phillips Oppenheim or Sherlock Holmes?”

  “That’s what the cloak-and-dagger boys are forever asking themselves. They say: ‘Is this Washington, or is it Ruritania?’ The joke of it is, they really are working a number of schemes that came out of spy stories. And why not? The mystery writers spend a lot of brainwork thinking up devices, and they have to be plausible or the editor would say ‘N.G.’ I’ve no doubt that some crime editor will say that this one of mine is an old one. All I know is, I thought it up driving to Washington just after my talk with F.D.R. If you can think of a better one, I’ll be glad. Meantime I told the O.S.S. that if the vice-consul radios the words: ‘Send transfer,’ they will send him a couple of old and well-worn codebooks, and Faulkner will sell one of them to the Germans at a good price. The vice-consul will send some messages in that code, and the O.S.S. will understand that these messages are phony. They will mention things that the Germans already know, and a lot of other things that would do harm, only they will deal with the future and won’t come off. Does this sound too crazy to you, Jerry?”

  “No, but it’s complicated, and will take a gosh-awful lot of planning.”

  “Well, you asked for it. Everything in war takes planning, and we have to do more of it and better than the enemy. The O.S.S. fellows gave it their O.K., but it’s understood that you and Faulkner are to do the job, and you’re to be guided by circumstances always. That’s the way they’re working, each team is an individual unit and has a code name. This is Operation Tutor; I figured that nobody would know that you had once been my tutor, and anyhow, I’m hoping to keep out of it. I’ll probably be in Algiers when the invasion comes off. I told the O.S.S. people what I knew about you, and they are taking my word.”

  “Thanks, Lanny, and I’ll try my best not to let you down. Do I understand that we’re to plant the Dakar idea by means of these radio messages?”

  “I would say that you should be guided by circumstances. You can begin to talk about Dakar, orders for Dakar, secret agents to be sent to Dakar, and so on. Or maybe that would be too obvious, the Germans would think that we would never name the place, even in code. The real name of the operation is Torch; but let us invent an imaginary name, say, Operation Cornucopia. Let’s talk about that in the fake code; keep talking about it, and the Nazis will all be saying: ‘Cornucopia, what is Cornucopia?’ They will come to Faulkner and urge him to find out. He will charge them a good price, so that they’ll think they are get
ting something; and he will come to them in triumph, telling them that Cornucopia is the invasion of Dakar. He will offer to find out the sailing date, and when he gives it to them it will be the correct date. It will have to be, not merely because we couldn’t keep secret the sailing of such an immense convoy, but because we want their U-boats to be gathering near Dakar at the very time that we are making our landings. The distances from our ports are about the same.”

  “Lanny, I believe you have it!” exclaimed the ex-tutor. “I’ll get after Faulkner right away. Do you want to meet him?”

  “Not if I can avoid it. And it will be better if you are not seen in public with Faulkner, because you are known as my man. You may be one of those who tell the world that you are through with the fellow, he is too much of a Nazi for your taste.”

  “If he stands for that he’ll be a game kid,” opined Jerry Pendleton.

  X

  As it turned out, the young archeologist was game. He was, according to the travel-bureau man, a sensitive and romantic soul, scared to death by the job into which he had been dropped, but at the same time thrilled to death by the excitement of it. How he would manage to survive this double death was a problem, said Jerry with a grin: “When I said to him, ‘I am Tutor,’ it was as if I had said, ‘I am Jesus Christ,’ or at the very least ‘General Marshall.’ He listened to the program as if he were four years old and it was the story of the Three Bears. He has a capable mind; I made him recite it all over to me, and he didn’t miss any details. He’s gone to talk it over with the new vice-consul.”

  “Is there a new one?”