Presidential Agent

by Upton Sinclair

  A limousine came rolling up the drive and halted before the châlet. An officer in SS uniform got out and opened the car door for a woman passenger, tall, elegant, bundled in a heavy fur coat. Recognizing her, Lanny gave a start. Magda Goebbels!

  Something new to wonder about! Was this a coincidence, a kindness that chance was doing an overwrought Führer? Or was it a royal command? Had Adi, unable to sleep in spite of his drugs, telephoned to Berlin and ordered consolation brought without delay? Magda would have left Berlin by plane early in the morning, and arrived in Munich an hour or so later.

  Lanny rose as she entered the room, this being his duty. When she saw him her sad face revealed dismay for just a fraction of a second. Then, recovering herself quickly, as a woman of the great world learns to do, she greeted him: “Grüss’ Gott, Herr Budd.” He replied: “Welche Uberraschung, Frau Magda!”

  She shook hands with him, which she needn’t have done. He saw that she was delaying, to let the SS officer and the man carrying her bags pass on. Then she leaned toward him and whispered, in a voice of tragedy: “Ich konnt’ mir nicht mehr helfen!”—I couldn’t help it—and then swiftly passed on out of the room.

  21

  Der Führer Hat Immer Recht

  I

  The Detazes arrived, and a busy Führer found time for a one-man show. He ordered one wall of the main room cleared and the six French works hung in a row. There they were, land and seascapes, transporting the beholder from the white snowstorms of the Alps to the sun-drenched colors of the Riviera. Everybody was invited to inspect them, even the servants. It took Lanny back to the good old days of German Gemütlichkeit which had so impressed him as a boy, when the old Graf Stubendorf had assembled his Diener and Knechte and made them a speech on Christmas morning. Lanny wondered about this sudden geniality. Was the Führer saying to his household: “You see, this American visitor did not come just bringing an old witchwoman and a bagful of spirits; he is the stepson of a famous painter, and you can observe for yourselves and have something worth while to talk about”?

  Lanny had taken the liberty of including one of the paintings which derived from the cruise of the Bluebird to the Isles of Greece: an old peasant standing in front of the hut which he had made out of brush, and holding under one arm a baby lamb. The Führer was much taken with this and wanted it. In fact, he wanted them all; a Detaze collection in his Bechsteinhaus, the châlet he had built on the estate for the use of official guests, would tend to show the world how sincere he was in his admiration of French culture, and how desirous of promoting the unity of Europe.

  “I want you to understand, Exzellenz,” said Lanny, “I didn’t bring six paintings here with the idea of selling them all.”

  “Are they for sale, Herr Budd?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Very well; I Want to buy them. What is the price of the six?”

  They had one of those bargainings in reverse; the Führer making an offer, and Lanny insisting that it was too much. They finally compromised on a price of a hundred thousand marks, a handsome enough figure. Lanny wondered more than ever. Had the great man some errand in mind, or was this just a retaining fee for a high-class agent? Lanny was familiar from childhood with aristocratic methods of hiring; he had listened to innumerable conversations between his mother and his father, and had watched Robbie’s devices, such as playing a very poor game of poker, or making a wager on some preposterous thing, such as that the day was Thursday when he knew it was Friday. Adi’s method was dignified and honorable in comparison, and perhaps Lanny was oversuspicious; but he could not believe that the Führer of all the Germans would ever do anything that did not contribute in one way or another to his world purpose.

  The steward was instructed to obtain a draft on a Paris bank to the honor of Herr Budd, and Lanny was invited to go over to the Bechsteinhaus and see to the proper hanging of the masterpieces. Paintings considered to be inferior were taken up to the bedrooms—a custom prevailing among wealthy art collectors. In his bedroom in the Berghof Lanny had three very commonplace specimens of contemporary German painting, and he wondered if Hitler had been personally responsible for their choice.

  II

  Franz von Papen showed up from Vienna and was closeted in his Führer’s study. Other personages kept arriving, generals three or four at a time, and no effort was made to keep an American visitor from learning that the screws were being tightened on the Austrian government; Lanny even heard the designations of various Panzer units which were being moved to the border. He took the precaution to ask Hess if he was by any chance in the way, and the answer was, not in the least; the Führer esteemed it a great favor to have the two guests in his home.

  The Deputy himself was having a sitting with the medium every evening, and was reporting results to his chief. He was telling Lanny some of the things, but not the most important, Lanny guessed. Hess’s doubts had been completely dissipated; he was having secret conferences with the spirits of old-time Parteigenossen, those martyrs whose names he called at every Parteitag. Lanny wouldn’t have been surprised if some day either the Führer or the Deputy had invited him to put a price on Madame Zyszynski; if he had done so, and agreed to say nothing about it, no doubt Madame would have stayed right there, regardless of whether she wanted to or not!

  Lanny tried to imagine what was going on in the mind of the new Mohammed. For seventeen or eighteen years, ever since Adolf Hitler had taken control of a political party with seven members, he had been engaged in a guessing game with fate. He had tried violence once and failed abjectly. Since that time he had acquired a passion for “legality,” and all the violence he had used had been in putting down those individuals and groups inside his party who rebelled against his determination to preserve the forms of Gesetzmässigkeit. Every crime he had committed had been in the name of law, and any aggression he would ever commit would be in the cause of peace.

  Each decision was a step in the dark, a gamble for life or death. Can I trust this man, or must I have him killed? (No use to put men in jail, for when they come out, they are more dangerous than ever; but dead men tell no tales, nor do they undertake any coups d’état.) Every move on the chessboard of diplomacy meant a risking of Adi’s future; for after all, his new Reich was a have-not nation, its resources were limited, and its Führer could not afford the luxury of a single blunder. And if there was any way to lift the veil of the future, or to poke even the tiniest hole in it, how foolish not to make use of that method! If there were people who possessed that gift, why not hire them—especially when their price was absurdly small. Whatever it had been in the past, divination was now the poor man’s way.

  This ex-painter of picture postcards and possibly of houses believed in astrology, in fortune-telling, in spirits, in the whole kit and caboodle of occult tricks—for he had no means of sorting out the true from the false. His closest friend, his publicly announced Deputy, believed even more implicitly, and right now the pair of them were at a crisis, perhaps the gravest of their common career. Adi was in a struggle with practically his entire military entourage; all the trained intellectual power of the Wehrmacht, which he was making into the greatest army in the world. These were the heirs of Germany’s greatest tradition; they had spent their lives preparing themselves to carry it on—and now came this upstart, this Gefreite, a sort of sub-corporal, or private first class, setting his authority against theirs, and bidding them commit an action which they considered dangerous to the point of madness.

  But—it had happened before! They had advised against militarizing the Rhineland; they had advised against the Führer’s bold announcement that he was going to double the size of the Reichswehr, and again that he was going to introduce conscription. But each time the inspired leader had had his way, and Britain and France had done nothing but enter protests.

  And now, here it was again, over the question of the Anschluss. Adi was going ahead; his daimon told him to, and was not to be restrained. Just prior to this trip to B
erchtesgaden he had shaken up his Cabinet and his army command, in order to get men who would obey him without hesitation. He had taken Ribbentrop, one-time champagne salesman, away from his job as Minister to Britain and made him Foreign Minister—because Ribbentrop was so sure that he had succeeded in bemuddling the British ruling class and that they would take no action to save Austria. He had deposed his oldest and most competent generals and given the command to others who were pure Nazis. He had made Göring a Field Marshal, giving him the right to carry a jeweled baton—all because Göring agreed with him and would back him in this contemplated gamble.

  But up in that study alone, looking out of the large window over the land of his birth, what agonies of uncertainty must be tormenting the soul of this new Prophet-Führer, this man of destiny without peer in modern times! And in a room under the same roof was an old woman of a nationality whom the Führer despised—but some whim of nature had given her the power to call spirits from the vasty deep. Spirits of friends and of enemies alike—and who could say what they might know, what secret insights they might possess? Even the murdered ones, the former friends, would be Germans before they were enemies; even Röhm, or General Schleicher, or Gregor Strasser who had organized and trained the SA—even such spirits might be appealed to in the name of the holy Fatherland to say what Germany’s fate would be, and what was the wise course for her Führer who dared not be wrong.

  So what more natural than that Rudi Hess should be stealing off night after night to sit in a dark room and listen to what this stout old Polish woman was saying in her trances! Lanny wondered, could it be possible that Hitler himself was sneaking into that room, keeping the secret even from Madame’s patron and paymaster? There was nothing to prevent it; all he would have to do was to make up his mind to endure in silence whatever insults and humiliations the spirits might inflict upon him, for the sake of the secrets they might consent to reveal.

  And Hess sitting by, making notes in the dark, or by a dim light behind a screen; writing shorthand, as he had once written down the words of what had become the new German Bible! Would he now get a New Testament, a Book of Revelations of the NSDAP? “Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.” If anything of the sort should happen, they would surely have to discover that Madame Zyszynski was a changeling, and of pure Aryan blood; or at least that she was illegitimate—the device by which hundreds of Germans with Jewish names had managed to get themselves established as good Nazis!

  III

  Tension was increasing at the Berghof, increasing hour by hour; you felt it in the air, you saw it in the faces of everybody, high and low. Papen had departed in haste for Vienna, and word spread that he had orders to bring Schuschnigg to the Führer at all costs. Would he be able to do it? Everybody speculated, everybody had an opinion, no matter how presumptuous. It meant so much to them—for here they were, right on the very border; all they had to do was to slide downhill, as it were, and they would be in Austria. The people there were of the same race as themselves, speaking the same language, listening to the same music, eating the same sort of food and wearing the same sort of clothes; they came and went across the border—the German workers going every morning to the Austrian salt mines and coming back every evening. How preposterous that they couldn’t be one country!

  Lanny had found it pleasant to sit on the high-backed lounge in front of the fireplace and read the newspapers and magazines. Here he would be joined by someone of the household; young officers who had never visited the outside world were curious about it, and discovered that this American visitor knew the key people and possessed a fund of anecdotes. They didn’t know why he was there, but they could be sure it was for some purpose important to the Führer, and they treated him as a member of the family. So it was no indiscretion when the young doctor remarked that Der Paffenknecht—meaning Schuschnigg—had only three days in which to make up his mind whether he wanted his baroque palace bombed about his ears.

  Lanny could have guessed as much from the copy of the Völkischer Beobachter, the Führer’s newspaper, which lay upon the table at this moment. The newspapers of Hitlerland were like so many searchlights, controlled from a common center and all focused upon the same spot at the same moment. Just now the spot was the Chancellor of Austria. They held this pious lawyer-statesman responsible for all the evils of Europe, and threatened him with dire and dreadful punishments if he did not step out of the pathway of the Nazi chariot of progress—or perhaps in these modern days one might better say the Hermann Göring Panzer Abteilung.

  It was a technique of provocation which the Japanese had inaugurated in China in the previous autumn: commit an act of violence, blame it on the victims, and then set up a nationwide, a worldwide clamor for the punishment of the aggressors. In the case of Vienna, the criminals were the police who had uncovered the conspiracy of the “Committee of Seven.” Dr. Tavs was in jail, with some of his fellow conspirators, and that made them heroes, and their cause was spread over the front pages of all the newspapers of Germany. The demand was that Schuschnigg should reform his Cabinet, putting in an Austrian Nazi as Minister of the Interior, in charge of the police. The conspirators would of course be released, and thereafter the Nazi rowdies would be free to beat up and kill their leading opponents.

  IV

  Such was the program; and Lanny had to watch it being carried out, without showing any trace of the dismay and disgust which boiled in his soul. He would stand in front of the mirror in his simple but elegant bedroom and whisper the Nazi formulas, watching his features in the meantime to see if he was betraying any trace of improper feeling. Really, he would be equipped for a leading role in any theater when he had got through with this assignment! He came down for the “fork breakfast” on the morning of Friday, the eleventh of February, and found the long table in a clamor with the news: “Schuschnigg is coming tomorrow!” He had no trouble in wearing a look of exultation, for he had guessed what the news would be, and had been rehearsing his comments not five minutes earlier. “The Führer is always right!”—so said the American guest to the magnificent Reichswehr officer who sat beside him at the table—General Wilhelm Keitel, newly appointed Adjutant to the Führer, with cabinet rank. “Ja, Exzellenz, hier sehen wir wieder eimnal: der Führer hat immer recht!”

  Unparalleled excitement throughout the household. Most of the furniture was taken from the great hall, including the fireplace settees on which Lanny had been so comfortable. A large table was moved to the center of the room and on this was spread a great relief map of Germany and all the border lands; “The Distribution of German Population and Culture in the States of Europe” it was labeled, and showed Germany and Austria in bright red, and the border states as pink with so many red spots that you would think they had the measles. The masterpieces of painting were taken down from the walls and in their places were hung greatly enlarged photographs of the damage done by the bombing of Guernica, Valencia, Madrid and Barcelona. The visiting lawyer-statesman was going to get a postgraduate course in the new science known as Geopolitik, as well as in the older science known as Schrecklichkeit.

  Lanny thought it was the part of tact to take Hess aside and say: “I fear that an Ausländer will be out of place at this time.” But the Deputy hastened to reply: “Absolut nicht, Herr Budd. The Führer trusts you, and would be sorry to have you take Madame away at present. May I tell you something in the strictest confidence?”

  “Everything you tell me is confidential, Herr Reichsminister.”

  “I had a most extraordinary séance with Madame last night. The spirit of Hanussen came and foretold the outcome of these negotiations.”

  “That is indeed extraordinary!”—and Lanny didn’t have to lie about it. Hitler, launched upon a campaign which had for one of its declared objectives the expulsion or extermination of the Jews of Vienna, was relying for guidance upon the spirit of a Jewish astrologer whom Göri
ng had had murdered as a means of canceling the debts of his dear friend who commanded the Berlin police!

  “I hope the prognosis was favorable,” Lanny ventured.

  “The Führer is greatly encouraged, and I am sure we shall see action before long.”

  V

  Lanny went out for a walk in the forests which had once been the haunts of the witch or evil fairy named Berchta and were now witnessing the birth of a new religion of the sword. He was in the privileged position of those nobles of the ancien régime in France, who were admitted to the queen’s bedroom to witness her accouchement and certify to the genuineness of the event. That would be something to tell to F.D.R., and perhaps to Lanny’s grandchildren in the course of time; but just now he was sick of blood and terror, and permitted his mind to wander off to the subject of precognition, popularly known as fortune-telling. A new development in the mediumship of this Polish woman; the spirits she produced had hitherto been content with the present and the past, and never before had ventured upon what George Eliot described as “the most gratuitous form of error.”

  From the naïve point of view of Hess it was quite simple; the spirit of Hanussen was there, and had been able to foresee the future now as it had while in the flesh. But Lanny was trying to persuade himself that this self-styled “spirit” was in reality some form of subconscious activity, a fabrication or construct of the mind of Madame, combined with that of her sitter and perhaps of others. We speak of “levels” of consciousness because we are unable to think except in terms of space; but in reality the mind occupies no space, and there is no reason for thinking that one subconsciousness must of necessity be partitioned off from all others. It is purely a question of fact: Is it so or is it not? Lanny considered that he had been accumulating evidence disproving the partition hypothesis and proving some sort of commingling.