Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  Here he came, and Lanny was shocked by his aspect. His long face was longer than ever, pale and deeply lined; his hair was gray and thinning. He was less than two years older than Lanny, but you would have taken him for a man of sixty. His left arm hung limp at his side, and Lanny was told that it was due to a spinal injury. He could never play the piano again, but fortunately he could write and compose.

  The coming of this guest was like a burst of sunshine in a stormbound land. These two had been united by ties of deep affection, and if Kurt had ever had any doubts of Lanny’s loyalty to the Nazi cause, these doubts must have been dissipated now. Lanny had come from the Führer, whom Kurt had not seen for more than a year. How was he, and what had he said? Lanny made it as cheerful as possible, saying nothing about Rostov and Voroshilovgrad and Kharkov, and surely nothing about the Vienna gutter talk. The Führer was close to the battlefield, and standing firm with heroic courage. The winter was bad, but mighty forces were being built up in the rear, and in another three months the march to victory would begin.

  Did Kurt believe this? Lanny didn’t know, and surely wouldn’t ask. He told about the strange route by which he had come, and that indeed was a winter’s tale, lending color to an afternoon of cold gray clouds. This land lay open to the Baltic winds, and to those from the Arctic beyond. It was frozen hard and blanketed with snow for half the year; and here came a man who said that less than a week ago he had been in a place where there was no drop of water for hundreds of miles, and where the sun’s glare was so terrible that you could not bear to touch your hand to the rocks. The older children came home from school and sat in a circle, drinking in this story, wide-eyed and as still as so many mice.

  VII

  Later, in Kurt’s tiny study, Lanny told the story he had told the Führer, for Kurt had been a secret agent himself and held his great master’s confidence. He wanted to know what was going on in North Africa, and what opinion was in London and Washington and New York. He was deeply moved by the Hess story, and the means by which Lanny had convinced the Führer of its truth. Was he cheered by Lanny’s optimism? Or did he think of his friend as an amiable playboy and dreamer, as in past years? The two-thousand-mile battle line, from the White Sea down to the Black, must have looked pretty grim to an old-time Wehrmacht artillery captain. If the Russians could fight their way into Poland they might be able to fight through it, and Stubendorf was right at the border, indeed, it had been made a part of Poland according to the Versailles Treaty. For twenty years the Graf and his friends and retainers had suffered that indignity. The Führer had won them back—but suppose he were to lose them again!

  Kurt had just completed a composition, he told his friend, and of course Lanny was interested. When the masterpiece was produced, it proved to be a Nazi fighting song, the words written by one of their bellowing verse writers. To this depth had the man fallen, whom Lanny had once compared with Beethoven! But Kurt took the work with complete seriousness—it was a crippled man’s effort to save the Fatherland. Lanny ran his eyes over the composition; he knew Kurt’s music script well and could play it at sight. Of course he had to do so, while Kurt sang in a voice that had never been more than moderately good.

  Lanny burst into praise of the song, but in his heart was the thought: What an insult to art, and what a betrayal of life! Kurt had abandoned all those ideas of brotherhood and humanity which he had taught to Lanny in their boyhood; Kurt, who had repeated the noble saying of Goethe: “Im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren, resolut zu leben.” Now Kurt’s “whole” had become the narrow dogmas of National Socialist racism, his “good” had become the plundering and enslavement of Germany’s neighbor nations, and his “true” had become the product of Doktor “Jüppchen” Goebbels’ lie factory!

  Lanny had to lie to Kurt, to cheat him and thwart him in every way possible; but even while he did it he was sick at heart and wished that he was elsewhere. Here in Stubendorf the P.A.’s soul was torn in halves, because the old affection was still there, and pity for the hardworking devoted wife and the innocent little children. Over and over again Lanny recalled the saying of Trudi, also a German, that he and she and all of them had chosen a bad time to be born.

  Lanny couldn’t do anything to save this family either from the Russians or from the network of lies in which they were enveloped. All that he could do was to get from Kurt what information Kurt possessed. That wasn’t easy, for the Komponist was no free-spoken person like his Führer and the Führer’s steward and clown. When Lanny asked after Emil, Kurt’s oldest brother, the reply was that he had recovered from his wound and now commanded an Army corps; when Lanny asked where he was, the reply was: “On the eastern front.” An inquiry about Seine Hochgeboren brought the reply that Kurt believed him to be in Berlin at present.

  Only once did the older man break loose, and that was when Lanny quoted the Führer concerning the traitors who were plotting to kill him; the Führer hadn’t said this, but Lanny was sure there were such persons, and that the Führer knew it. Now he discovered that Kurt knew it also. Kurt didn’t say “on the authority of Emil,” but Lanny could guess it was so. He remarked that there were dissident generals in the Wehrmacht, men who were embittered because the Führer preferred his own ideas of strategy to theirs, and who blamed Germany’s defeats upon his bad judgment. Those men whispered among themselves and were ready for anything. “You know,” said Kurt, “the Wehrmacht is old and haughty, while National Socialism is new, and its men are looked upon as upstarts. Our Generalstab has been the real ruler of Germany for generations, and they do not easily surrender to newcomers. That is the great danger to our national unity.”

  “You are the man who ought to do something about that,” ventured the art expert. “You could get the confidence of those men, and keep the Führer informed.”

  “I have many times thought of it,” was the reply. “I would be willing to sacrifice my art. But Emil tells me that there are others keeping watch, and he is quite sure the Führer knows who his enemies are.”

  VIII

  The next day Lanny took the local train to Breslau, and from there the night train to Berlin. Germany’s railroad system was run down; the cars needed paint, and the broken windows had been replaced with wooden boards; the trains were irregular and crowded, but a man with a letter from the Führer in his pocket could always get on board. He had changed some of his French money for German at the Führer’s headquarters, so he traveled erste Klasse, and had the good fortune to have a Halb Abteil to himself. He would have been glad to hear the Germans talking, and he might have passed for a citizen of Geneva, or even of Paris; but he was afraid to make such a statement, lest some official might come through and ask to see his papers.

  When the art expert got off at the Friedrichstrasse Station, he was only a few blocks from his old haunt, the Adlon; but he wasn’t going there. The registration of an American would have caused a sensation, and it wouldn’t have been diminished by the presentation of a Führererläubniss-schein—quite the contrary. The hotel had been “the Club” of American correspondents, and now it must be “the Club” of Swedish, Swiss, Spanish, and Balkan correspondents; they would surely send stories about the presence in Berlin of the mysterious son of Budd-Erling. Was he a peace emissary? Was America at last getting ready to shift her position and take the anti-Communist side? For what other conceivable purpose would the son of an American airplane manufacturer be in the capital of his country’s chief enemy? The American State Department would have to say that it knew nothing about him, and the War Department might state that he would be arrested if and when he returned. A P.A. wanted no such publicity.

  Where to go then? Any pension would be a hothouse of gossip, he knew. It must be with some friend, but whom? Heinrich Jung had a large family in a small house; moreover he lived in the suburbs and transportation was difficult. Graf Stubendorf? He was a formal person, and staying with him would be a burden—much deferential conversation, and the impossibility of getting any “clothes,” in th
e meaning of that word used by die grosse Welt. General-Major Furtwaengler of Göring’s staff? He was a bore, and his wife even worse, a Nazi snob and toady. Lanny would want to bite her!

  He bethought himself of the Fürstin Donnerstein; gute alte Hilde; she wasn’t as old as Lanny, but that was the smart way of hailing your women friends. She was the best source of gossip in Berlin, and always good fun. She lived in a white marble palace, but even so she might be glad of a little ready cash, for the taxes were frightful, with Hitler’s financial wizards doing their best to make it impossible for anybody in his Third Reich to get more than the absolute necessities of life.

  IX

  Lanny went to the telephone in the station, and presently heard her eager voice. Usually Hilde spoke all the cultured languages mixed up in a potpourri, but now it was “polizeilich verboten” to speak anything but German over the phone. “Ach, Lanny!” she cried. “Wie schön! Wie wunderschön!” And then, apparently realizing all at once that it was an enemy alien she was talking to: “Aber, was—?”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I want to see you.”

  “Can you come for coffee this afternoon? That is, it is called coffee.”

  “I’d like to see you now. It’s rather important.”

  “Lanny! You are not in any trouble?”

  “Not at all. Quite otherwise. I’ll explain.”

  “Well, come by all means.”

  Outside the station—it was snowing again—he found a back that must have been forty years old and a horse of about half that age, with a driver older than the two put together. Lanny put in his two bags and was driven down Unter den Linden and through the Tiergarten, a park full of so many memories—of plottings against the Nazi regime, with Trudi, with Monck, with Laurel, but alas, he couldn’t see that he had accomplished very much so far. He looked for the signs of bombing destruction, and he saw some buildings missing, but not much debris, for the Nazis considered the sight bad for morale and they cleaned up quickly. He realized with sinking heart that an empire’s capital is a big place and takes a lot of destroying.

  X

  Inside the palace, here was the princess, very thin, pale, nervous, and dressed entirely in black. “What is this, Hilde?” he asked, for he knew that nearly two years had passed since her son had been killed in Poland. She told him that her husband had died of a heart attack a couple of months ago. “Oh, I am so sorry!” he said. He knew that the Fürst had been an old man, and it had been a mariage de convenance, but he spoke the proper words even so.

  “We are a sad family,” she told him. “My older sister is here, and she has lost her husband and her two sons. My mother, also here, is a widow, and has lost all her grandsons as well as her two sons-in-law. We are three lonely and hopeless old women, so you must not expect the good conversation you used to hear in this house.”

  “Oh, my dear, you have my sympathy! Perhaps you do not want to see visitors now?”

  “On the contrary, it is a relief. There are so few Germans who are not sad in these cruel days. But how is it possible that you, an American, can come to Berlin?”

  “It’s a long story, and unfortunately I’m not free to tell it. What I can tell is confidential to the utmost degree—you must swear to me that you will not talk about it even to your family. I am here on an errand having to do with peace.”

  “Oh, Lanny! How amazing! But do the authorities—?”

  “I have in my pocket a letter from Hitler, authorizing me to be in Germany for three weeks. I have just come from his headquarters.”

  “Épatant! Lanny, you do the most extraordinary things! I have always had the certainty that you were not just a collector of paintings.”

  “Whatever you think, keep it locked in your heart. Sooner or later, you know, this war has to come to an end.”

  “It is too late for me and mine, but I can think of the other women of Germany. I will keep the secret.” And then, with a trace of the old Hilde: “It is not the first time that I have made such a promise, but it may be the first time I have kept it.”

  “I have just stepped off the train, and I came to you at once. If an American should go to a hotel it would surely attract attention. I have to stay with some friend, and I thought of you because you have so many rooms.”

  “I have the rooms, but no way to heat them. We live as if in a tenement.”

  “I can get along in a cold room. It will be a matter only of ten days or so, and you will not have to be bothered with meals, because I’ll pretty surely be dining with others, or in restaurants. All I want is a bed to crawl into, and an address to give to the police.”

  “That would be all right, Lanny; But I must have your word that there is nothing illegal about it, because I haven’t the right to involve my mother and sister in any trouble of that sort. We are, as you know, a class of people liable to fall under suspicion with this Regierung.”

  “You may have more than my word, Hilde. You may see with your own eyes.” He took out the Hitler letter and handed it to her.

  After she had studied it she said: “It is the first time I have ever seen his handwriting. You will have to register at the Polizeiamt within twenty-four hours, you know; it will be better if you go at once, so then I shall be able to tell two frightened women that they are not harboring an enemy spy. You understand how it is, I am sure.”

  “Certainly, Hilde.”

  “I must tell you,” she added, “that my mother is hopelessly grief-stricken, and I fear is close to the borderline of sanity. She sits in a chair and does not move for hours; sometimes she falls to groaning softly to herself. Now and then she asks: ‘What was I born for?’ And I must confess that I do not know what to answer. She has only one thought, to join her loved ones in the next world, but she is only half assured that that world exists, or will prove to be any kinder.”

  “My dear friend,” he said, “you provide me with one more reason for working at my task. Believe me, America also is having losses, and the British—you can imagine about them.”

  “Tell me, how is Irma?” she inquired, for she was still a Weltdame, and in the happy old days had lived half her life abroad.

  Lanny told her that he had seen Irma the previous summer, and that she was well. He took the occasion to add: “I have married again. My wife is in New York and we have an infant son.”

  “Oh, how nice!” she said. She wanted to know all about this wife, and Lanny said that her name was Ada, and that she was young—just out of finishing school—and very devoted to him. Surely he couldn’t give Laurel’s name, for she had lived in a Berlin pension under that name and the Gestapo were no doubt still looking for her—they never gave up. He couldn’t say she was a writer, for at once Hilde would have exclaimed: “Ach, wie schön! What does she write?” It was as the poet had said: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!”

  One thing more. The scion of a millionaire family remarked: “I know how hellish money conditions must be here in Berlin. I have a bundle of French ten-thousand-franc notes, and, as you see, the Führer has given me permission to exchange them. You must let me be a paying guest, and leave you the proceeds of one of them. I should have to pay more at the Adlon.”

  “You would get much more there, Lanny; but I will be honest and tell you that we have only two servants now, and we have difficulty in getting the money to pay them each month. I receive only half my husband’s pension.”

  “I should have some change left over for them,” he answered with a smile. “I’ll tell them to take good care of you, because it is a great honor to be working for the Donnerstein family.” Lanny always knew exactly what to say.

  XI

  He went to the nearest police station, as the law required, and presented his Hitler letter. They were awe-stricken, and at the same time frightened, for they had never seen such a document before, and a German Beamter is helpless without a precedent. They bowed and begged a thousand pardons, but they must ask the American visitor to
wait while they telephoned headquarters. There being no precedent there either, headquarters had to phone the Führer’s secretary at the Chancellery.

  Meantime Lanny sat on a bench and examined a copy of the small four-page sheet which he had purchased at a kiosk on the way; the Völkischer Beobachter, edited by the Nazi Reichsminister of People’s Enlightenment and Propaganda, Herr Doktor Josef Goebbels. It was the Berliner’s principal newspaper, their source of information about the outside world. Under bold headlines Lanny read that the American forces had sustained a bloody and decisive defeat at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia; also, in smaller headlines, the statement that the German forces had victoriously withdrawn from several more Russian towns, after inflicting heavy losses upon the enemy.

  Lanny wasn’t sure if it was good form to be reading such war news in a Polizeiamt, so he turned to the back page of the paper, which was given up to classified advertisements. This afforded a visiting stranger as it were a mental map of the Nazi capital and its inhabitants. One part consisted of death notices, each with a little black border; only a limited number of such were allowed to be published each day, so you had to wait your turn. He read:

  IN THE BATTLE for Germany’s future, for Führer, people, and Fatherland, in a heroic fight against the Asiatic world enemy, who broke into our quiet fields nefariously, our unforgettable husband and father was killed at Stalingrad: Pg. Hanns Mjoelnir Hartmann, SA-Oberscharführer, Storm-troop “Walhall/IV.” company sergeant-major in an armored grenadier-regiment, decorated with the Iron Cross I and II. Sleep well, dear husband, your boys are already playing soldier. In proud grief: Sieglinde Hartmann née Eder, proprietress of a grocer’s shop, and children Hunebald Ethelwulf, Rautgundis, and Gerhilde.