Presidential Mission

by Upton Sinclair

  Lanny had had a decade to learn about Göring’s taste in paintings. Der Dicke adored the enormous beefy women of Rubens, the more naked the better; they were Nordic, Aryan, Teutonic, and glorious; Der Dicke could imagine himself rioting with them, and the more of them there were, the more German heroes would result. There was an Austrian painter of the last century who had imitated Rubens’ fleshliness; Makart was his name, and Göring wanted everything of his that could be found. He wanted the sixteenth-century works of Cranach, because he, too, was German, and because he painted naked figures, even though they were symbolical and sexless, and even though a great proportion of them were not genuine. How could Göring tell, or how could he find an honest man to tell him? Honesty was a quality they had banished from their Third Reich. Had not their all-powerful Führer declared that the bigger the lie the more easy to get it believed? Der Dicke was surrounded by art experts who were trying out that maxim on him, and one of the best-established among them was the son of Budd-Erling.

  VIII

  The time Lanny had first come to Karinhall, it had been a hunting lodge in a royal forest, elaborate, but in harmony with the surroundings. Now Göring had been working on it—that is, setting other people to work on it—for ten years, and it was a colossal structure of stone and concrete, wandering here, there, and everywhere, all in the clumsy Hitler style of architecture. Whenever Der Dicke acquired a new lot of art works, he needed room for them, and even in wartime his new buildings received priority. Here were row upon row of great rooms, called anything fancy—banquet halls, drawing-rooms, ballrooms, libraries, studios, billiard-rooms, and so on and on. Here were the rows of nude ladies of all ages, climes, and colors. Here were the statues of ancient German heroes with cow’s horns in their helmets, and Nazi athletes, male and female, with or without G-strings. Here were all the presents that had been made to the Nummer Zwei since the first day that he had become Reichsminister without Portfolio: jewels, massive silver plate, war trophies from all the Axis world. Göring had promised to present all this to the nation on his sixtieth birthday, and was planning a special railway to be built from Berlin, so that it might become the greatest showplace and Mecca for tourists in all the world. For the rest of time mankind would say: “Hermann Wilhelm Göring did this!”

  When you entered this unusual building you went through a long corridor that grew narrower, like a funnel. An indirect lighting system revealed rows of art works on each side and the most beautiful rugs underfoot. There were little alcoves with chairs and tables where you might sit with a friend and sip the host’s wine and chat about these treasures. At the end of the corridor was the most spacious drawing-room that Lanny had ever beheld; he didn’t have a chance to pace it, but he guessed it as a hundred feet by a hundred and fifty, with lavish decorations, including paintings in unbroken rows. There were real masterpieces here, hundreds of them, and a lover of the arts might have spent a long time without boredom.

  It was also undeniably pleasant to eat wholesome food without having to hunt for it; to have a warm room, and a bath with hot water, and your laundry done quickly, so that you could dress and feel like a civilized man. Lanny attended to these physical things, but he got only fleeting bursts of pleasure out of the old masters, because he had to be thinking how to impress this Nazi and that, and how to avoid making any of them jealous or suspicious. No easy task for an enemy alien; the fact that he carried a letter from Die Nummer Eins and enjoyed the favor of Die Nummer Zwei was not sufficient, for both these great ones were known to have their weak spots. They were susceptible to flattery, and everybody around them was using it, after the fashion of courtiers from the dawn of history.

  Others of the Reichsmarschall’s art staff were waiting for him at Karinhall. It was quite a convocation. Lanny had met one of them, Baron Kurt von Behr, who was head of the Einsatzstab office in Paris, the engineer who drove the powerful plunder machine. This nobleman was the criminal son of an old and honored family; he had had to give up a diplomatic post when his name became involved in swindles in Italy. Now, an old man, he had become head of the German Red Cross as cover for his collecting operations. He had been one of the swarm of locusts that had descended on Paris following the German armies, and Lanny had met him in Göring’s suite in the Crillon. The Baron’s first action had been to reserve a table at Maxim’s every evening for two years, and there he entertained distinguished French and international personages, giving them the best food and wine in return for hints as to the location of art treasures.

  Here was another creature dominated wholly by vanity and love of display. The Baron was not a military man, but he designed for himself elaborate uniforms. His manners were those of a potentate engaged in impressing his primitive followers. Everything he had was for sale, including his honor, and Lanny found him insufferable, but knew exactly how to deal with him. It was only necessary to hint that the son of Budd-Erling possessed influence that might enable him to take art works out and to deposit money in Argentine banks, and the Baron at once became his flattering friend. He wanted to know what kind of works would have a ready sale, and Lanny suggested those modern French schools which the Führer had declared decadent, and which therefore had no place in Karinhall. Renoirs, Cezannes, van Goghs, these were magical names on Fifty-seventh Street, Manhattan Island.

  Only one trouble, the suave P.A. explained; he could not offer for sale works which might have any flaw in the title. “I would have to be in a position to assure my client that the painting had been voluntarily sold by the owner.”

  “Aber, Herr Budd,” said the equally suave Baron, “I would be the owner in every case.”

  “Ja, Herr Baron, but I mean the owner who preceded you. You know how it is in America, my client might have the idea that the former owner had had some pressure put upon him.”

  “I assure you, Herr Budd, that is never done.”

  “I don’t question your word, my friend; but you know the anti-German propaganda that has been published in my country. In order for a sale to be possible, I would have to interview personally the former owner of the paintings, and perhaps pay him a sum for a quitclaim deed to the work. You will understand, I am sure, that I would not want to go to that trouble unless it was for some works of unquestionable value.”

  “Certainly, Herr Budd, I understand your point of view, and perhaps I shall be able to submit something when you return to Berlin.”

  IX

  There were a number of guests at this overgrown hunting lodge. Several were Göring’s Swedish relatives—he had been married to a Swedish baroness named Karin, and she had stood by him in the bitter days after World War I when he had been a drug addict and she a tubercular patient. He had named this estate in her honor, and had a sort of Nazi shrine to her memory. One of the things he wanted to talk to Lanny about was this adored lady, and where Lanny thought she would be now, and under what conditions. Der Dicke knew, of course, that Hess had been a devotee of spiritualism, astrology, and other occult arts, and that Lanny had experimented with him. What conclusion had Lanny come to? Did he believe that Göring would ever see his beloved Karin again? Could he take seriously any of the innumerable communications that alleged mediums were continually trying to bring to his attention?

  Lanny could only say that he had never been able to make up his own mind on these subjects, and surely wouldn’t dare try to make up his friend’s. Der Dicke seemed disappointed, also very nervous when he talked about it, and Lanny could guess that he had had some experience that had shaken his skepticism. He had always been rather contemptuous of Rudi’s gullibility on this subject, and now it might be hard to admit that he was changing his mind.

  Something was happening to his mind, that was certain. He was erratic, irritable, and restless. He would get up and leave the room frequently, and Lanny would be left to wonder if it was to swallow a pill or get a shot of dope. He wanted to hear all that Lanny had told Hitler about the outside world and its attitude to Germany; but in the middle of the
messenger’s discourse he would start talking about a wonderful Vermeer that he had brought from Holland, and what did the American art expert think about it. “Christ and the Adulteress,” it was called, and Göring had been so anxious to get it that he had traded with a Dutch syndicate and let them have a hundred and fifty paintings of which Göring did not think well, although their estimated market value was one million, six hundred thousand Dutch guilders. Now somebody had infuriated Göring by suggesting that the work was spurious; he wanted Lanny’s opinion, and Lanny said that he could see no reason for holding such an idea.

  The visitor would have said that in any case, for he would surely have been in hot water if he hadn’t. As it turned out later, he was one of many experts who were “taken in.” It was proved that the work was a forgery, done by a Dutchman named van Meegeren. He had painted half a dozen “Vermeers” that had fooled the entire art world; he had made such good imitations of the old master’s style that the experts refused to accept his own confession, and he had to paint one in jail in order to convince them. And even then they wouldn’t believe!

  A strange mad world that Lanny was in! A palace fit for a Nero, and a prince who served his guests an immense eight-course banquet, knowing all the while that his subjects had every scrap of food doled out to them for tickets. And in the midst of the meal the host took out of his pockets great handfuls of jewels—rubies, sapphires, emeralds, amethysts, pearls, and diamonds—spread them out on the table, held them up to the light for his guests to admire, and poured them back and forth from one hand to the other, just for the joy of showing off such treasures. If any guest had admired one especially, he might have been told to keep it—but apparently no guest thought this a wise thing to do.

  Soon after the meal word came that Allied planes were over Germany. Karinhall might be a mark, for enemy spies provided with radio-sending sets might report when the lord of the estate was at home. The guests were shepherded into an underground shelter, an immense and elegantly furnished drawing-room. At one side was a sort of dais, and on it a great chair, and there sat Der Dicke; his guests came by as at a reception, and he chatted for a few minutes with each. When that was over he clapped his hands and ordered his servants to bring his toy trains. This was a complicated set of contraptions—tracks and switches and trains to run over them and across toy bridges and into toy stations. Göring sat in a chair beside a switchboard and maneuvered all this by pressing buttons, and the trains raced and tooted whistles, and it would have been a delightful amusement for any half-grown boy.

  The mental boy inside this two-hundred-and-eighty-pound man soon tired of the sport, and he disappeared from the room. To the amazement of everybody, he returned clad in black. He asked the guests to accompany him to the “chapel,” and there, before a shrine containing a bust of Karin, everybody was asked to stand with bowed head and maintain silence for one minute in honor of the departed spirit. This while the present wife; Emmy Sonnemann, was in the company. Everyone wondered what she thought, but no one said a word, even after the group dispersed. Lanny was gracious to his hostess, but careful to have no word with her alone. He had decided that her husband was not entirely sane.

  X

  Among the Swedish guests at this strange week end was one who had been born in Brooklyn, so he told Lanny with a smile. His name was Eric Erickson, and he had an oil business in Stockholm, and evidently had some kind of deal on with the host. Lanny could guess that Göring’s sister-in-law, Fru Lily Martin, was also in on it, because these three held more than one conference in the course of the next day and didn’t trouble to retire to a private room. Mr. Erickson was a large man, somewhat older than Lanny, with a ruddy complexion. “My friends call me ‘Red,’” he remarked, and perhaps he meant for Lanny to take it as a hint, but Lanny perferred to stand on formality.

  The grandson of Budd Gunmakers and the son of Budd-Erling had had an interim period of several years during which he had been the scion of New England-Arabian Oil. That had been shortly after World War I, when Robbie had done what was called “dabbling” a bit; he had made what he called a “barrel” of money—representing many millions of barrels of oil. There had been a deal with Zaharoff, the “munitions king,” and Robbie had been one of Sir Basil’s “men” at the San Remo Conference, where the statesmen of Europe and Asia had presented themselves to the eyes of a young “Pink” as so many office boys running the errands of Zaharoff, Deterding, and the other big “oil men.”

  Such men were a special breed, and Lanny had come to know them well. They were big, hardy, and tough; they had fought their way up in a battle of wits and endurance that eliminated the weaklings. Mostly they had started from the bottom—it was no game for second or third generations. They traveled to all parts of the earth and learned to get along with all sorts of people, mostly bad. Many failed for every one who succeeded; and when that one had “struck it rich,” his troubles were only beginning, for then he came into competition with the big fellows, the “majors,” who set out to break him with the deadly weapon of price cutting. If that failed, they would buy him out, and he would move on.

  All this was an old story to Lanny; he knew the lingo, and how to talk to “Red” Erickson. He understood that business is business, and that a man who plays that game has to meet his payroll every week, cover his overhead, and distribute a few dividends to the people who have entrusted their money to him. He understood also that Sweden had to have oil, and the principal source was the synthetic product of Germany. Sweden had to pay for it with the rich iron ore that Germany needed for her blast furnaces, also with all the machine tools and electrical goods she could make. No need to explain such things to a man who was here to purchase the “degenerate” art of France and smuggle it somehow to dealers in New York. These two were pals and spoke the same language, giving it the delightful twist of American humor. “Do unto others as they would do unto you, but do it first.” Lanny could even employ the special dialect that a Swedish boy had heard in grammar school and high school in Brooklyn; in that “City of Churches” it would have been said that Red Erickson was buying “erl,” and that Lanny was buying “pitchers.”

  XI

  This pair took a “shine” to each other and exchanged reminiscences about international conferences and the persons who had been there. Erickson had known some of them, but more recently; his beginnings in the oil business had been of the humblest: he had been a “pipe-line walker,” his job being to clear the right of way and look after leaks, all the way from Negley, Ohio, to Bayway, New Jersey—quite a stroll. He had saved his money and put himself through college, and then had become assistant manager of an American oil concern in Japan. So it had come about that he was in the British-American Club at Yokohama on the first day of September 1923, and the story of what had happened to him there interested not merely Lanny Budd, but a group of the Reichsmarschall’s guests, sitting before a log fire in one of Karinhall’s many drawing-rooms.

  Upon what small details do the fates of man depend! Red Erickson wouldn’t have been here, telling his tale to Germans and Swedes and one American, had it not happened that that day was a holiday, and that one of the men standing at the bar of the Yokohama club had suggested going out to the veranda to watch the Empress of Australia leave the port. The group went out and stood facing the Bund, about thirty-five feet from the waterfront; they watched the tugs pulling the great liner toward the opening in the breakwater, and suddenly they saw one of the tugs sink down five or six feet in what seemed to be the calm waters of the bay. At the same time Erickson noticed a strange rumbling, and said to the man next to him: “Brother, this is no place for me!” He leaped over the railing to the street, and had hardly touched the sidewalk when the entire building of four stories collapsed behind him into a heap of rubble. More than ninety white men were killed and only three escaped.

  The oil man went on to describe the dreadful scene of that Tokyo earthquake. Since cooking in Japan was done with small charcoal stoves, tens of
thousands of collapsed wooden houses burst at once into flame. Erickson ran to the American consulate and tried to persuade the vice-consul and his wife to come to the harbor with him; but they thought that a park would be safe, and subsequently he found their roasted and bloated bodies in this park. He himself stood five hours, holding onto a pier with water up to his neck, obliged to dunk his head every few minutes against the intense heat. At last he had swum out to the Empress of Australia and been taken on board.

  “Something extra in the life of an oil man,” remarked the narrator. “I stayed among those ruins for another year and helped to distribute the relief supplies that America sent.” Lanny would have liked to point out that the Japanese hadn’t shown proper gratitude for this assistance; but of course one didn’t make such a remark in Naziland, where the small sons of Nippon had acquired the status of “honorary Aryans.”

  XII

  In his secret work a P.A. met few persons whom he could like; it was a danger he had to guard against, for if he liked them he might let slip some suspicious remark. Now he had to be especially careful with this Swedish-American, for he was tempted to like him very much. Erickson didn’t seem at all like a Nazi in any of the ways that Lanny had learned to know well. He wasn’t fanatical, he wasn’t mean, he wasn’t especially greedy, at least no more so than a businessman is, compelled to be if he wants to stay in the game. Erickson had lived most of his life in America, and everything he said indicated that he liked that country and shared its free and easy ways. He never said anything about politics unless he had to—that is to say, unless there was a Nazi present.