Presidential Agent

by Upton Sinclair

  Why had Madame suddenly taken to foreseeing the future? Lanny guessed it was because a sitter had gone to her firmly convinced of the reality of this power, and consciously as well as unconsciously willing that the “spirits” should tell him what lay beyond the dark veil. Lanny had become convinced, not from any slip of the Deputy’s, but from the general tenor of his conversation, that the Führer himself had been stealing into Madame’s room, perhaps imitating Hess’s voice, and anyhow behaving himself discreetly and taking whatever came. And Hitler was a man of driving will, both conscious and subconscious; perhaps a medium himself, perhaps a hypnotist, and certainly a man with a subconscious personality which drove him and guided him and taught him how to drive and guide others. Lanny had proved that it was possible to hypnotize Madame and direct what spirits or constructs should appear; and now Adi had gone in and commanded that the spirit of his old-time astrologer should be produced, and made to behave as he had when he had been so indiscreet as to announce that Adi had only a few years to live.

  What would be the validity of the communications which this fabricated entity would deliver? Would the Hanussen-spirit tell his old-time patron what that patron wanted to hear? Would it have the power to do anything else? The answer depended in part upon whether you accepted the average man’s idea of time as something absolute and real in itself, or whether you could manage to accept the teaching of philosophy and of modern physics that time is a form which our minds impose upon reality. Perhaps there is a level of our subconsciousness which is not limited to that form, and therefore a “spirit” might be no more ignorant of the future than of the past. Again it is a question of fact. Do we, or do we not, have dreams which correspond to future events? Lanny had read the books of J. W. Dunne, who had not merely proved by experiment that we do, but had proved by mathematics that we can.

  This much any student of history must admit: the daimon of Socrates had guided not merely Socrates, but many of the youth of Athens, and later, by the power of the written word, had guided millions of men for a score of centuries. And this daimon had known he was doing just that; it had been a living force, foreseeing the future and helping to make it by its own intelligence and will. The same thing was true of the daimon of Adi Schicklgruber, when he sat with a medium and mingled his subconscious forces with hers and constructed a future which might be the true and real future because Adi was going to make it that. By will and imagination he renewed his spiritual and mental energy, and became the more able to carry out the purpose he was determined upon. Such has been the role of soothsayers through all time, and Lanny guessed that Adi was going to prove Madame right, and then marvel at her supernormal power.

  VI

  A stream of visitors kept arriving all that day: General von Reichenau, commander of the Reichswehr divisions stationed near Munich, together with two of his aides and a secretary; then Joachim von Ribbentrop—he had adopted the “von” of an aunt when he married the heiress of a great wine business; then a limousine full of professors, all of whom clicked their heels and bowed from the waist when an American Kunstsachverständiger was introduced; one was a geographer, one an agronomist, one a specialist in the history of Central Europe. Evidently they were here for the purpose of arguing with Schuschnigg—but Lanny would have been willing to wager his hundred-thousand-mark bank draft that Hitler would never give one of them a chance to get in a word; and Lanny would have won.

  Consultations went on all day and most of the night; Lanny wasn’t invited to attend, and thought it the part of good taste to keep entirely out of the way. There had been a thaw and then a freeze, and the snow was hard, so he took a long walk in those dark forests for possession of which Richard Wagner and the Witch Berchta contended in his heart. Gemsböcke leaped on the heights far above him, and Rebhühner rose with a whir of wings from almost under his feet; he came back tired but exhilarated. Then he looked over the library of the Berghof, and selected from an encyclopedia the volumes “M,” “I,” and “P,” took them to his room, and read all they had to tell him about Mohammed and Mohammedanism, Islam and Pan-Islamism—wishing to know what it was that Hitler so admired, and thus to foresee the future of the world in which he had to live.

  The Austrian Chancellor was scheduled to leave Vienna early next morning, and the drive would take five or six hours. He brought with him his Foreign Minister, Dr. Guido Schmidt, at heart a near-Nazi and a poor support; also a military aide and a secretary. Two cars full of private detectives followed, but Hitler ordered these stopped at the border and their place taken by a squad of SS men under the command of an officer who was a renegade Austrian. The party reached the Berghof about noon, by which time the Führer was pacing about biting his fingernails, and members of his staff were slipping outside onto the terrace to smoke a cigarette now and then.

  Lanny was invited to take part in the reception. He wondered, did Adi wish to make sure that his guest had been telling the truth about his meetings with Schuschnigg? If so, Lanny would take pains to satisfy him. He would not speak first to the pale and harassed-looking statesman, but would wait to be recognized. Schuschnigg must have been surprised to see an American here, for his face lighted up and he exclaimed: “Grüss’ Gott, Herr Budd.” The art expert replied: “A happy accident, Exzellenz.”

  The Führer apparently meant to proceed on the principle that molasses catches more flies than vinegar. After the fashion of country gentlemen the world over, he took his guests to show them the beauties of his estate. Lanny tagged along; and when they went into the Bechsteinhaus—named for the rich widow of the piano manufacturer who had been Adi’s main financial support in the early days of the Party—the Führer called attention to the new paintings on the walls, and remarked: “This is my new Detaze collection. Perhaps you do not know that Herr Budd is the stepson of this painter. He came here to bring me these fine works.” The Austrian staff would make note of this and perhaps be fooled by it—who can say who believes what in the game of Machtpolitik? Presumably they believed Adi when he said that he was going to build Wolkenkratzer (cloudscrapers) in Hamburg, just to show the Americans that he could do whatever they could. Also he was going to build a great bridge there; a tunnel would have been much cheaper, but he wanted to deprive the Americans of the honor of having the longest bridge in the world.

  They returned to the Berghof, and the world’s greatest Machtpolitiker exhibited the relief map, a revelation of his life’s dream. Perhaps it might have been wiser to use some other color than red; however, all would understand that it was the red of German blood and not of Jüdisch-Bolshewismus. The thin red lines with arrows at their tips ran from Berlin to various centers such as Alsace and Schleswig, Prague and the Sudetens and the Corridor; one of them ran to Vienna, and Adi didn’t have to point it out. He was tactful about it, and didn’t say: “All this is going to be mine.” His formula was: “Unsere gemeinsame deutsche Erbschaft,” our common German heritage.

  And the same with the greatly enlarged photographs on the walls, showing the ruin wrought by General Göring’s Luftwaffe wherever it had had a chance to try itself out. Adi didn’t say: “This is what I am going to do to Vienna if you refuse to obey my will.” No, he said: “This is what modern war is coming to; a terrible thing to have to destroy cities like this.” He didn’t say: “I have had these put up especially for your benefit.” He left it to be assumed that this was the spectacle upon which he fed his soul day and night!

  VII

  The Führer took the Chancellor and his minister up to his study; Ribbentrop accompanied them, but not the Austrian subordinates or the American art expert. These last sat in the great hall, chatting about the trip from Vienna, the obliging weather, and what other polite nothings men hit upon when they are under extreme nervous tension and are anxious not to show it. Every moment the tension increased and the conversation became harder to keep up; for over and under and in between their polite, well-modulated words came a distant rumble as of thunder, irresistibly commanding their att
ention and making it impossible for them to think, to say nothing of formulating thoughts into words. They would fall dumb, and then would realize what extremely bad taste they were showing in seeming to listen to what they were not supposed to hear.

  Adolf Hitler was making a speech. He had shut the door of his study, and had set armed SS men on guard outside the door, but that made little difference to the laws of acoustics. His voice came down the stairway—or perhaps it came through the floor, or both. It seemed to have echoes, which produced a sort of blurred and booming effect—but then that had always been a characteristic of Adi’s oratorical thunder. He had been practicing it for thirty years—yes, fully that, for he had learned to shout down opposition in the shelter for bums, the Obdachlosenheim in Vienna before the World War, and had been more than once thrown out because he wouldn’t or couldn’t keep quiet. After the war he had practiced addressing thousands in the noisy beerhalls which were Munich’s meeting places—since no South German could think or even hear without a stein in front of him. In those days there had been no such things as microphones or loud speakers, and survival in politics had been dependent upon the power of the naked voice.

  Here today Adi was using that voice upon two persons who were presumably daring to differ with him, to oppose his will. It Could happen even without that, as Lanny knew well, having brought it on himself more than once by mere mention of the Jews or the Versailles Diktat. He had discovered that, once the Führer got started, an audience of one was the same as one thousand or one million. It wasn’t the Führer speaking any more, it was his daimon, which perhaps couldn’t count; or perhaps it took the mystical view that in the eyes of the Creator one soul is as important as one million. Anyhow, here was that Supervoice, exactly as all Germany and indeed all civilized mankind had heard it booming and bellowing over the radio. More than ten years ago Adi had told Lanny Budd that he would make the whole world listen to him; recently, when Lanny had reminded him of that, he had replied: “Mit Gottes Hilfe, ich hab’s getan!”

  The Austrian military aide and the secretary had to give up all pretense of not listening; and so did Lanny. Impossible to hear every word, but whole phrases came clearly. The Führer of the Nazis told Dr. Kurt Schuschnigg and Dr. Guido Schmidt that they were a pair of traitors to their German Blut und Rasse. He informed them that they had made for years a practice of submitting people of their own blood and race to indignities and outrages, for no offense but that of defending their heritage. The Führer had at his tongue’s tip a long list of such outrages, and he brought them up, and with each one his frenzy mounted and his voice became more raucous and more confused by echoes. Now and then would come a pause, in which it might be assumed that the Chancellor or the Foreign Minister was attempting some reply; but it never did any good to reply to Adi—it only made his anger greater and his next speech louder and longer.

  VIII

  This went on for a couple of hours, until a bell rang, and silence fell. Adi had ordered lunch prepared for his guests, and it was one of the laws of this household that when the bell rang, everybody dropped everything and came trooping downstairs as one company. Adi himself would turn off his rage as if it were water from a spigot; which seemed to suggest that it wasn’t something which controlled him, but which he used as a matter of policy. He became once more the gracious host and escorted these blood-and-race traitors to the elevator and thence to the dining hall, where at the long table the Kanzler was seated at the right hand of the Reichskanzler, and the Auslandsminister on his left. Ribbentrop sat at Schuschnigg’s right, and then came Hess, and then the Generals and then those of lesser military rank, with Lanny among them, ars inter arma. It was the Führer’s intention to establish his neue Ordnung by whatever force it took, but never to forget that thereafter would come peace and the greatest flowering of culture in all history—so he had assured his art-loving guest.

  The Führer had his vegetable soup and vegetable plate and near-beer; the rest of the company had Hasenpfeffer followed by Apfelstrudel, a very plain meal, almost insulting. Also—and this was the severest part of the ordeal—poor Schuschnigg was a chain-smoker of cigarettes, and here he had no chance for one over a period of nine hours. Immediately after the meal he and his minister were taken back to the Führer’s study; the discussion began again—and in a few minutes. Hitler was launched upon another tirade. Most of the staff members, the experts and others, retired to their rooms, ostensibly to have a smoke and perhaps a drink; they stayed for another reason—they wanted to hear what was going on without being observed to be listening. When Lanny went to his own room he noted that practically every door in the corridor was open—but just a crack, and heads that were close to the crack disappeared suddenly when his footsteps were heard. All the world knew of this visit to the Berghof, and was waiting to know the outcome; to expect those inside the building not to hear it if they could was to ask more than human nature could achieve.

  What had happened in the study Lanny heard later on from Hess. The lawyer-chancellor had brought along a briefcase full of documents which proved to his legal mind that the Committee of Seven had been conspiring to overthrow his government. Hitler shouted at him: “What have I to do with that committee?”—and Schuschnigg, assuming that he really wanted to know, brought forth documents to show that the committee had been financed and directed from Berlin. Of course Adi flew into one of his worst rages—and after that Hess didn’t need to tell Lanny any more, for he had been able to stand inside the partly open door of his room and hear the Führer of the Germans telling two Austrian statesmen what he really thought of them and their government and their population.

  It was an opinion unprintably low. Adi Schicklgruber called the Viennese a cityful of café loungers and Bummler, drunken dawdlers in the Heurigen and women-chasers all over the town. As a result of their verdammte Geilheit they were a race of mongrels—Czechs, Hungarians, Slavs, Turks and gipsies, niggers, God alone could say what else—all mixed with Jews and dominated by Jew politicians, dancing to Jew music, eating Jew food, sleeping in Jew beds. When Adi got to describing the sexual conduct of the Viennese, he used the language which he had learned as a boy in a village of the Inn valley where they raise cattle, and his similes were such as only a countryman could understand. The louder he shouted, the more raucous his voice became—the effect of a gas injury during the war.

  It appeared that Adi’s spies had brought word to him that Schuschnigg had been making approaches to the labor leaders and Socialists of the city, with the idea of getting their support. Less than four years ago Dollfuss had bombed and shot this Gesindel into submission and now Schuschnigg was proposing to bring them back into power; that was treason to the German Volk, that was Jüdisch-Bolshewismus, no less, and brought the loudest screams yet. Hitler said there would be no Red intrigues going on anywhere on his borders, and before he would permit it he would send three hundred planes and bomb Vienna until not one of its elegant buildings was left with a roof over it.

  What Adi was demanding was to have Seyss-Inquart, Führer of the Austrian Nazis, become Minister of the Interior, in charge of the police. If the demand was refused, the German army would march. Schuschnigg backed and filled, and finally said he would have to phone to President Miklas in Vienna. This he was permitted to do, and came back reporting that nothing could be decided without a full Cabinet meeting. At this Adi’s screams of rage rang through the house; this was eine Ausrede, this was eine Schurkerei, this was eine Frechheit! He shook his fist in the unhappy Chancellor’s face and told him that he and his verdammtes Kabinett had forty-eight hours in which to make up their blödsinnigen—imbecile—minds.

  All this Lanny heard, and shivered a little while Hitler told what he would do to the members of the Austrian government if they compelled him to use force. It bore a startling resemblance to what the son of Budd-Erling had just been reading in the encyclopedia under the title “Islamic Institutions.” Unbelievers were invited to embrace Islam, and if they did so, thei
r lives, their families, and their property were protected. If they refused, they had to fight, and if they were defeated, their lives were forfeit, their families liable to slavery, and all their goods to seizure. Such was the code, enforced this time, not by lightly mailed horsemen armed with javelins and swords, but by technicians driving mechanical monsters which shot steel and spat flame, and by others flying in the sky and dropping heavy packages of death and destruction. “Under which king, Bezonian? speak, or die!”

  IX

  It wasn’t until night that Adi’s near-prisoners were released and allowed to drive home. Then the tension in the Berghof was released, and men emerged from their rooms and admitted that they had heard what they couldn’t have helped hearing—or so they could pretend. Dinner was late, a rare event; it was like a birthday celebration—for everybody considered that victory had been won; that miserable pettifogging lawyer would never dare force his country into a war with the Führer. Or would he? Lanny could sense uneasiness underneath the blustering. How could this story appear to the newspapers of the outside world? Once over the border, the lawyer would be free to tell it as he chose; and what would Britain and France say? What would Mussolini do? Would Czechoslovakia mobilize? And Poland? The military men revealed a tendency to draw off by themselves and talk in low tones.

  These were trying days for the Fatherland, and Lanny was not surprised when the Deputy Führer told him that he desired to try another séance with Madame that evening. Was it the Führer himself who was going? It was no part of Lanny’s duty to spy, and he didn’t; but he heard with interest the report next morning—that the spirit of Paul von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg had talked with Hess, and had reported himself entirely satisfied with what the Führer was doing. That had surely not been the case during the old gentleman’s last days on earth; he had been wont to refer to Adi Schicklgruber as “the Bohemian corporal,” a term of contempt and not according to the facts, for Adi was Austrian and had never got as high as corporal. But now the great Feldmarschall was rested and rejuvenated, and with his intellectual powers restored he realized that the German Volk were in the best possible hands. All this the Deputy Führer said with a perfectly straight face, and the American visitor heard him in the same fashion—but inwardly wondering if they both hadn’t passed through the looking-glass with Alice.