Presidential Agent

by Upton Sinclair

  The building was of gray granite, four stories in height and quite extensive; it had been built by a cousin of Louis Seize for his favorite mistress, and had to be big enough so that royal personages could be entertained there. It had towers and crenelations suitable to a castle, but its windows were wide for comfort; at that time artillery had made stone walls hopelessly vulnerable, and noble gentlemen and ladies had learned to rely for their security upon the majesty of the kings of France. Now the driveway was paved with asphalt, and motorcars instead of gilded coaches waited in the wide curving spaces.

  II

  Promptly on the hour Lanny ascended the steps, and the door was opened before he knocked. A German in livery took his name and led him to a high-ceilinged French drawing-room with elaborate frescos and gilding. In front of Lanny’s eyes was a Largillière, and he didn’t wait for any invitation to begin his art-experting. One eye surveyed a lady of two hundred years ago, having a tower of hair on her head like a Chinese pagoda, her bosom and arms smooth-shining and white, while voluminous folds of cerise silk encased the rest of her. Lanny’s other eye was on the door, through which he expected a more modern costume to appear.

  It came; a young Schutzstaffel officer, all in shiny black boots and belt, and with the death’s head insignia on his sleeve. The instant he appeared Lanny swung about, clicked his heels, threw up his arm with fingers of the hand extended, and snapped out: “Heil Hitler!” The young officer could hardly have expected this, but his response was obligatory and automatic: he halted and returned the salute. Then he said: “Herr Budd?”

  Lanny replied: “Lanning Prescott Budd, Kunstsachverständiger seiner Exzellenz des Herrn Minister-Präsident General Hermann Göring.”

  The Germans love to string titles like beads on a necklace, and they like to put long words together to make what small boys in frivolous America call “jawbreakers.” The title which Lanny had conferred upon himself was no more than “art expert”—but how much more honorific and impressive it sounded! It took all the starch out of the young Nazi’s collar, and he said, lamely: “Leutnant Rörich gestattet sich vorzustellen.”

  “Sehr erfreut, Herr Leutnant,” replied Lanny. The man appeared to be in his early twenties, and had a round, rather naïve face and closely clipped yellow hair. Lanny’s heart cried: “You have been beating Trudi!” His head advised: “No, he wouldn’t do menial work; he would direct the rank and file and make sure they did a thorough job.”

  Employing his very best Berlinese, Lanny explained that he was an old friend of the second-in-command of Germany, and for years had been aiding in the disposition of certain of the General’s paintings and the acquisition of others more suited to a great man’s increasing honors. At present Lanny had in mind a project to be put before the General for the setting up of a museum of art works illustrating the development of the various European cultures; he was preparing a list of examples suitable for such a grandiose undertaking. Had the Herr Leutnant himself made any study of the subject of historical painting? The Herr Leutnant modestly confessed that he knew very little about it, and Lanny set out to remedy his deficiencies. Each time they stopped before a new work the expert would give his appropriate Spruch. Zoltan had given him the names of the painters, and he had refreshed his memory by the reference works in his suite; the same for the château, which was in the guidebooks, with all the dates and information about the Belcour family.

  Lanny really looked at the paintings, and formed opinions about them, and expressed competent judgments; but every now and then a part of his brain would be swept by a storm. He would be thinking: “You had her in a dungeon, perhaps under this very spot; and did you violate her yourself or is that also something you delegate to your Gemeinen?” Heart said: “Nazi Schweinehwnd!” Head said: “Perhaps he has taken a fancy to her and is keeping her here indefinitely.”

  Now and then the lecturer would find some modern simile or allusion and thus lead his discourse away from historic times. Was it a battle scene, with artillery thundering? He would remark: “How startlingly fashions in war have changed! Nowadays you wouldn’t stand much chance with a cannon like that.” The young officer assented, and Lanny began foretelling that the fighting would be forced into the air; this gave him a chance to mention that his father was Budd-Erling Aircraft, and had leased many of his patents to General Göring, being favored in return with the secrets of the newest Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs. Lanny himself had shot stags with the General, and had visited Karinhall, and met the Frau Minister-Präsident General, who was Emmy Sonnemann, the stage star, whom no doubt the Herr Leutnant had seen many times.

  “Ja, gewiss,” said the Herr Leutnant, and found this conversation most exhilarating.

  Or was it a painting by a Spaniard? Lanny had just come from Franco Spain; he had traveled with his brother-in-law, Il Capitano Vittorio di San Girolamo, an officer in the Italian Air Force who had lost an arm in the fighting in Abyssinia. The Italians hadn’t shown up so well in Spain, alas; they were having to call on General Göring for more and more help. In the judgment of Lanny’s father there was no organization in all the world so efficient as the German Air Force. The founder of Budd-Erling had been taken by Seine Exzellenz to visit Kladow, the new secret air-training base, and had raved about the sights he had seen there. The humble Schutzstaffel officer, who had been prepared to be bored by a culture-seeking American tourist, found himself being lifted up from one Nazi heaven to the next. Kolossal!

  III

  Presently they came to a painting of a wounded soldier with his head in a woman’s lap. Said the Kunstsachverständiger: “That reminds me of a work by my former stepfather, who was the famous French painter Marcel Detaze. Do you know his work, by any chance?” When the officer had to confess that he didn’t, Lanny rattled on: “The Führer is a great admirer of his, and asked me to send him an example. I was giving an exhibition of my stepfather’s work in Munich three years ago, and Kurt Meissner, the Komponist—you know Kurt, perhaps?”

  Ja, the Herr Leutnant was glad to be able to say at last that he had met one of the many distinguished Germans whom this extraordinary American knew intimately.

  “Kurt is one of my oldest friends. I visited Schloss Stubendorf the Christmas before the war broke out and ruined Europe. Kurt is the cause of my having met the Führer so early—we went to hear him speak soon after he came out of prison, back in the old days. I didn’t become converted at the outset—I used to think I was something of a Socialist at that time.”

  “We are all Socialists now, Herr Budd,” reminded the other; “National Socialists.”

  “Of course,” assented Lanny; “but I had got hold of the wrong kind. Then I visited the Führer in Berlin and he explained matters to me in that marvelous way he has.—But I was telling you about the painting. It is called Sister of Mercy, and Kurt and I and Heinrich Jung took it to the Führer at the Braune Haus in Munich. You have been in the Braune Haus?”

  “Nein, Herr Budd, ich bin ein Rheinländer.”

  “Ach, so?”—and Lanny talked about that most beautiful country of grapes and old castles, and about Herr Reichsminster Doktor Josef Goebbels, who was from that region, and about the Frau Reichsminster Magda Goebbels and their home and their brilliant conversation. Then he laughed, and reminded himself that he was supposed to be telling about the Braune Haus in Munich; he described the elegant building, which was the Führer’s own design; also the Führer’s study and its decorations, and how the Führer had admired the Sister of Mercy—he had extremely fine taste in art, had been a painter himself and would have liked to be nothing else, so he had assured Lanny; but, alas, the German people had demanded his services and he had been unable to think about his own pleasure.

  The Führer had talked with amazing knowledge about French painting techniques—this wasn’t true, but Lanny was sure it could do no harm to pile it on extra thick. The Führer had spoken feelingly of his respect for French culture, and his desire that this great people should be recon
ciled to Germany. All that was needed was the reorienting of French policy, the breaking off of the atrocious alliance with Jewish-Bolshevism.

  “That was three years ago,” said the art expert, “and you can see the marvelous prescience of the man. Right now the French are beginning to realize the monstrous nature of their blunder. There is a movement under way to change the government of this country suddenly and completely. You can take it from me that it won’t be many months before you see the Russian alliance repudiated and a German alliance formed, one that will last for a thousand years—just as the Führer said to me in Berchtesgaden.”

  For an hour or two the young Schutzstaffel officer had listened to a foreigner ask him if he knew this and that, and most of the time he had had to answer a humiliating No. But here was something about which he was informed, and he said: “I think I know what you mean, Herr Budd. I suppose that you are actively interested in that movement.”

  “Indeed, yes,” replied Lanny; “with everything I have, heart and mind and purse.” Then, as if he had committed an indiscretion, he came back to a painting on the wall. “Here we have a David, a later and quite different style from Boucher and Fragonard. He painted charming ladies, as you see; but he became a revolutionist, and did revolutionary scenes, terrible pictures—but no doubt General Göring would wish to have samples, if only as a warning to your German people. All the miseries and corruptions from which France suffers now date from that blind upsurgence of the rabble, which was able to overthrow its rulers by means of pikes and pitchforks, but was not able to keep the control from passing into the hands of Jewish moneylenders and speculators. You agree with that interpretation of French history, Herr Leutnant?”

  “Absolut, Herr Budd.”

  “I am talking too much, I fear—”

  “Oh, not at all, I assure you; I have never listened to more instructive conversation.”

  “I always find myself moved when I come into one of these old buildings. This château, you know, fell into the hands of the revolutionists. Very often they burned the buildings; but somebody had the more sensible idea of turning this one into a revolutionary headquarters. You can imagine the scenes which went on here; the mob of peasants and village people marching in, singing their furious songs, with the bloody heads of their victims on pikes. Probably they broke into the winecellars and got royally drunk—you have winecellars in this château, Herr Leutnant?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I suppose you have dungeons, also?”

  “There are small rooms in the cellar which may have been used for that purpose.”

  “With rings set in the masonry, to which prisoners could be chained?”

  “I have never looked for them, Herr Budd.”

  “One sometimes makes gruesome discoveries in these old places. Perhaps it might interest you to go down there with me some day, and see what we could find.” The lecturer dropped a hint like that, and then skipped quickly away from what might have been a dangerous subject. He would come back to it later.

  IV

  They came to the music room, and in one corner was a tiny instrument of French walnut, elaborately carved and inlaid. “Ah, look—une épinette!” exclaimed Lanny. “We wouldn’t get much music out of it, but doubtless it is priceless as an antique. We have seen in music the same evolution as in war, Herr Leutnant.” There was a stool before the instrument, and Lanny said: “Shall I try it?”

  He seated himself, raised the cover, and lightly touched the keys. Little tinny tinkling sounds came forth, and Lanny said: “That is what our great-grandfathers’ grandfathers considered music. Yet a good many of Mozart’s finest works were composed for such—I have seen the little clavichord on which he learned to play, in the humble apartment in Salzburg where he was born.”

  Lanny played a snatch from a Mozart piano sonata; then he rose and walked across the room to a fine modern French instrument, a grand piano, and seated himself there. He put on the loud pedal and struck the chords, and thunder rolled forth. He played the Horst Wessel Lied, the marching song of the Nazis, written by a Berlin Stormtrooper, said to have been a pimp. It has a fine stirring rhythm, and Lanny could be sure that Herr Leutnant Rörich had been brought up on it. Judging by his looks, he had been a youth when his party took power, and his present confidential position indicated that he must have come into the Hitlerjugend as a boy. Die Strasse frei den braunen Bataillonen—it was a prophecy which had come true, for when the song was written it was the Reds who had possession of the German streets, and now the last one of them was dead or in a concentration camp. It was a marching tune that would stir anybody’s blood, regardless of what he might think of the words.

  Lanny stopped and turned to his escort. “Das klingt besser, nicht wahr, Herr Leutnant?”—and the other replied: “Viel besser, gewiss.”

  “Am I taking too much of your time?” inquired the visitor, graciously.

  “Oh, by no means.”

  Lanny turned again to the piano, saying: “Let me play you one of the tunes which once rang out in these elegant rooms.” Again he pressed the loud pedal and played with vigor another marching tune that would stir anybody’s blood, regardless of what he thought of the words. “Ah, ça ira, ça ira, ça ira!”—meaning three times over that it is going to go, or to be gone through with, the job is going to be done. In this case the job was to cart the aristocrats “to the lanterns” and hang them from the chains stretched across the streets of French towns. The accent falls on the “a” of ira, and when a French revolutionist sang it he hissed and spit it out with hatred to be matched only by the Nazis proclaiming that Jewish blood would spurt from the knife. Alas for the many times the threats of both songs had been made good!

  “I don’t suppose you ever heard that tune,” remarked Lanny, as he rose from the piano. “That is what the mob was singing when it took this château. Have you examined the walls and floors to see if there are traces of aristocratic blood?”

  Unspoken in the visitor’s mind were far different thoughts. “What are the floors of this château made of? Surely those loud sounds would go through them. Certainly, if Trudi is there, and heard the Ça ira, she will know I am here, for she will be sure it would never be played by Nazis. She remembers how I sang it, with comical fierceness. She knows the story of Blondel, too, and will understand that I am sending her a message.”

  But strange to say, the Trudi-ghost was failing to appreciate this effort on her behalf. What she was saying now was: “Go to Spain and find Monck, and get in touch with the underground again.”

  V

  To his escort Lanny remarked: “It might be the part of wisdom, Herr Leutnant, not to talk too freely about the possible interest of General Göring in these paintings. You know how the French are, a mercenary people, and whenever I ask for a price on any painting, I always have to keep the name of my client a secret.”

  “I understand, Herr Budd.”

  “Some day, I doubt not, the commander of the German Air Force may be in a position to compel a reduction in the price of French paintings; but that may be several years yet, I imagine.” Glancing at the young officer, Lanny did not do anything so vulgar as to wink; he gave a sly smile, and the other said: “Jawohl, mein Herr!”

  They had completed the round of the rez-de-chaussée, and the escort remarked: “There are paintings in some of the upstairs rooms also, but they are small and I doubt if they are important.”

  “Probably not,” assented the expert. “I am acquainted with an American department-store proprietor in London who has Rembrandts in his bedrooms, but the French are more frugal. However, there is still a favor you may do me, if your patience is not exhausted.”

  “Surely not, Herr Budd.”

  “I am interested in this building, as an example of the development in French architecture. We observe in all architecture a gradual process of departure from reality, very interesting to the student of social customs. Some feature originates in a mechanical or historical necessity, and
then it becomes accepted and conventionalized, and is continued for centuries after its original purpose has been forgotten. Once upon a time, you know, a château was a fortress, built for defense and compelled to be on the alert day and night. Then, in course of time that strain was relaxed, but a château still had to be a château, because it was the dignified, the aristocratic thing. However, defense features are both expensive and uncomfortable and gradually they came to be replaced by imitations, until now a château is like those Hollywood façades they erect with nothing behind them. If you don’t mind strolling with me around the outside of this building, I will show you some of the tricks which the architects of the ancien régime in its decadence used to play upon their clients; or perhaps it was the clients playing tricks upon their friends and guests, including members of the royal family who now and then came to visit them.”

  “Most interesting, Herr Budd. Let us go, by all means.”

  They strolled to the door while Lanny continued his discourse. “You are perhaps living in a château for the first time, Herr Leutnant, and discovering that it is far from commodious. I venture the guess that the staff of Graf Herzenberg is compelled to send its laundry to be done outside, because the facilities of this magnificent building have been found inadequate.”

  “You have guessed correctly,” laughed the Schutzstaffel officer.

  “I recall reading somewhere an old document having to do with the coming of some young princess to marry one of the kings of France. It may have been Marie Antoinette, or possibly Anne of Austria, at an earlier period. Anyhow, the chronicler described the immensity of the princess’s escort, a veritable army, with so many hundreds of coaches and so many four-horse wagons, so many servants of this sort and that, forty cooks, perhaps—and the list ended with one laundress. You could see the reason when you came to the items comprising the young person’s trousseau: hundreds of elaborate costumes, cloth of gold and of silver, velvet brocade, pure silk from China, and so on—and trailing off at the end to an unimportant item of three chemises.”