Presidential Agent (The Lanny Budd Novels)

by Upton Sinclair

  Of course there were limits to what could be done in a supposedly free republic. If refugees of prominence were molested, it made a scandal; the Reds and the Pinks had their newspapers with large circulations and they loved nothing so much as having martyrs. Just a month or two ago Mussolini had arranged the murder of his two leading opponents among the refugees, Carlo and Nello Rosselli, editors of the Italian-language anti-Fascist newspaper in Paris; they had been kidnaped and beaten to death in the woods—the same method which had been used in Rome to get rid of the Socialist editor Matteotti, soon after Il Duce had seized power. Lanny had been there at the time, and his efforts to tell the outside world about it had caused his expulsion from the new Roman Empire. Now the newspapers of Paris had been full of the Rosselli story and it had even reached Connecticut. It was bad publicity for both Fascism and France; it served to alarm the outside world, and the police certainly wouldn’t want any more of it.

  Lanny was in a position to make another Rosselli case by the simple operation of telephoning any one of the American newspapermen whom he knew in Paris. The story would be flashed to the ends of the earth and would make the front page wherever there was a grand monde and a proletariat which loved to read about it. AMERICAN SOCIALITE IN PARIS REVEALS SECRET WIFE DISAPPEARANCE, CHARGES NAZI KIDNAPING. Nothing less than a local murder or the outbreak of a world war would take precedence of that. They would bring in Budd Gunmakers and Budd-Erling, J. Paramount Barnes and Irma and Frances and the fourteenth Earl of Wickthorpe. Under the glare of such a searchlight, the French police might conceivably get busy and find what was left of Trudi Schultz, alias Mueller, alias Kornmahler, alias Corning, alias Weill, pronounced Vay. But what would it do to the picture business, and to Lanny’s access to the topflight personalities of two continents? What would it do to his new job as Presidential Agent 103? Obviously, all that would be fini, kaput, knocked into a cocked hat. For the Nazis it would be a major victory—for of course what they really wanted was not to get Trudi, but to find out where she was getting the money.

  If they had her, that was why they had her, and they would be working right now to draw the secret from her. She had said many times that she would die with it in her heart; that was the first duty of every conspirator, the first pledge they all made. But who could tell what any person would do under the most cruel tortures that modern science could contrive? Who could say that in some delirium she might not cry out the name of Lanny? Who could be sure that she might not be hypnotized and told that she was speaking to her lover? Many things might happen, and Lanny Budd had plenty of time to imagine them. If the torturers managed to break the secret, they wouldn’t be apt to kidnap the son of Budd-Erling, but they might slug him on some dark night and it would be an ordinary case of robbery; they might force his speeding car off the road and it would be a lesson to other reckless drivers.

  III

  The unhappy husband went to his hotel and inquired if there had been any call for him. Then he went to his room and sat there; when he got tired of sitting, he got up and paced the floor for a while. He didn’t want to go out, because there was the possibility that Trudi might call on the telephone. She had done that once, to this very hotel; the time when strange men had been following her on the street, and Lanny had had to think quickly and tell her how to evade them.

  Waiting; just waiting. Like a man deprived of all his senses, and of all powers, but who still retains his consciousness; who knows that something terrible is happening, but cannot find out what it is and cannot do anything about it. He didn’t want to eat, he didn’t want to read, he didn’t want to see anybody; his thoughts were altogether occupied with Trudi. Her image floated before him; those fine, exquisitely chiseled features, expressive of intelligence, of sensitiveness, of moral fervor. She was a saint; he had often told her that, half teasingly, for she didn’t like the word with its ecclesiastical connotations. But religion takes different forms; new faiths are born, spurning the outworn faiths of the past. Trudi was a saint of the new religion of humanity, of solidarity, co-operation, and justice. Her image was that of an early Christian martyr, with trembling eyelids and the sweat of anguish upon the forehead; a Nordic blond martyr with fair hair and blue eyes. He had no photograph of her; the only one she had let him have made had been put in a sealed envelope along with their wedding certificate and sent to Robbie Budd, to be put in his safe and opened only in the event of Lanny’s death.

  But Lanny didn’t need any picture; he had an art critic’s trained eye and memory. He knew every detail of her features and her form; he knew them as line and color, he knew them as living things, expressions of a mind and character. He had come to Paris with his senses warmed by the thought of her embraces; now he paced the floor of a hotel room like a wild creature caged, tormented by the thought of her torments. He had a vivid imagination, but needed none on this subject. He was back in that dungeon in the basement of the Columbus Haus in Berlin, its floor slimy and stinking with stale blood; he saw the heavy wooden bench with the elderly Jewish banker—“Jewish-Bolshevik plutocrat” was the Nazi phrase—stretched out naked on his fat stomach and being whipped on his flabby white buttocks with thin steel rods. Lanny heard the rods whistling, four of them, like the wind in a chimney on a stormy night; heard the shrieks, the moans, the gabble of the tortured old man.

  Quietly, methodically, mechanically the Nazis did that to people; they did it to long strings of men and women, one after another, until the whippers were dripping with sweat, until they became exhausted and had to be replaced. The victims would fall unconscious and be dragged away and dumped into another room, piled sometimes on top of one another. A wholesale procedure, the mass production of suffering, intended to terrorize all Germany, and then the whole continent of Europe. Heute gehört uns Deutschland, morgen die ganze Welt!

  They had called in their eminent physiologists and psychologists to tell them how to humiliate and degrade human beings, to break their wills and subject them to the National-Socialist will. They built chambers of concrete of a carefully devised crookedness, so that a human being could not stand up or sit down or lie without having sharp corners sticking into various parts of him; they would throw him in there and leave him for days, for weeks. They would bring him to an inquisition chamber and strap him in a chair with a bright light glaring into his eyes, and there they would question him, with relays of inquisitors, giving him not a moment’s rest for days and nights. At intervals they would burn his flesh with cigarettes or stick slivers of wood under his fingernails to liven him up and make him more attentive. They had ascertained scientifically the exact amount of heat and humidity which would reduce the human will to impotence and turn the mind to putty.

  Now they had Trudi Schultz somewhere, and were putting her through that sort of ordeal. Doubtless they would rape her—why not? It was one more way to horrify and shock a woman, one more way to subjugate her, one more way to impress her with the might and majesty of the Neue Ordnung. They made a sort of ceremony out of it; both Freddi and Trudi had described such scenes: the Stormtroopers in their shiny black boots and shiny leather belts lined up awaiting their turn, dancing with amusement, cracking their jokes and roaring with laughter; the women victims, also awaiting their turn, compelled to witness unspeakable obscenities, sometimes fainting with horror and having buckets of water dumped over them so that they might miss nothing.

  If all that didn’t cause them to talk, their loved ones would be brought in and tortured before their eyes; a child one day, an old mother or father the next. “Nun, sag’! Wer ist’s, was ist’s?”—whatever the inquisitor wanted to know. With Trudi it would be just two things: “Who gave you the money?” and “Who got it from you?” Perhaps they already knew the latter; perhaps that was how they had got Trudi. Or perhaps they would pretend to know; they would tell her that her comrades had betrayed her, and why should she continue to spare them? They would have an endless string of devices, psychological as well as physical; they would never give u
p until they found out who had been putting up the money for the hundreds of thousands of anti-Nazi leaflets and pamphlets that had been smuggled into Naziland.

  IV

  Such was the technique in Nazi Germany. Could it be that the same things were being done to German refugees in Paris? Trudi’s comrades had informed her that there was a Prussian nobleman connected with the Embassy, a man of wealth who in the normal course of his life was entitled to reside in a fine château. He had rented in the environs of Paris an historic place with splendid grounds and a high spiked fence around them. No residence of such pretentiousness would be without its wine cellars, and in these places the Nazi agents could carry on their operations under the shelter of diplomatic immunity. Of course they couldn’t do it wholesale, but they could handle a special case—and one was enough for Lanny’s imagination.

  He told himself that he couldn’t stand it. But he had to stand it; what else could he do? He would resume the nerve-racking experience of waiting for something to happen. He had begun it when the Nazis had seized the Robin family in Berlin and Lanny and his friends were in Calais, expecting the yacht Bessie Budd to arrive. Then again in Berlin, with endless waiting for Freddie Robin to telephone—and he didn’t. The same with Trudi, in Berlin several times; and now again. He mustn’t see any of his friends, because he couldn’t trust them with his secret and he couldn’t hide his agitation. He wouldn’t attend to business, for what was the sense of making more money if Trudi wasn’t there to put it to use?

  Remorse seized him, because he had let this woman go to her terrible fate. He ought to have stopped her at all hazards. But what could he have done, except to wreck her peace of mind and her health? He had known what she was doing before he had tied his life to hers. And what could he have said to her, except arguments of selfishness which would have shamed them both? Loyal comrades were in the clutches of the enemy; many of them murdered, others suffering the whole gamut of abuse. Freddi Robin and Lanny had helped to maintain a Socialist school in Berlin; in the carefree old days they had pledged their faith to a cause and its supporters. Trudi and her former husband had been among these, and Lanny’s memory was full of names, faces, personalities of scores whom he had met there—students, teachers, guests. Most of them were now paying the price, and Lanny and Trudi owed them what support and assistance it was possible to bring. How could the Nazi monster ever be overthrown, if those who had the weapons were to turn tail and run away from the battlefield?

  The very idea of doing so was a humiliation; it was a bourgeois idea, born of primitive selfishness and nurtured in the system of competitive greed. Dog eat dog! Look out for number one! Each for himself and the devil take the hindmost! Such were the maxims of the business world; a shame to humanity, a denial of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. On what basis could Lanny have said to his wife: “Come off with me and forget our comrades and their needs. I have money, and we can spend it on ourselves and be happy together.”

  Such ideas belonged in that world which called itself the “great world,” the “high world,” the “select world,”—all in French, the language of elegance and corruption. Lanny had come to hate that world, and now he hated himself because he had been born in it and was flesh of its flesh. His conscience tormented him because he hadn’t been good enough for Trudi; because sometimes—frequently, in fact—he had wondered if he hadn’t made an unfortunate marriage; if he wouldn’t have preferred having a wife who knew how to dress and could go to dinner parties in the fashionable world and exchange polite conversation with his elegant friends. Yes, sometimes he had actually been bored with the life of heroism and self-sacrifice! Sometimes he had wanted to make love to his wife, while she had wanted to talk about the comrades and their sufferings and needs! Many times he had been all too human and had had to lie persistently in order to keep his superhuman wife from finding it out.

  Well, now he had no wife; now he was free to slide back into the warm ocean of pleasure. He could forget Trudi Schultz and let Rosemary and his mother find him the right sort of darling, perfectly “finished” in a high-priced school and equipped for the offices of leisure-class wifehood. He sat with his hands clenched and tears running down his cheeks, vowing that he would never commit that act of treason to his ideals. No, he would stick by Trudi, or at any rate the memory of Trudi, and by her cause. He would move heaven and earth to help her. But then, as soon as this grandiloquent phrase came to him, he realized that he had no lever and no fulcrum to move even a small portion of the earth. He sat in a hotel room waiting for a telephone call which was never coming, and he tried in vain to think of a person who could give him real help. Those who were willing wouldn’t be able, and those who might be able couldn’t even be trusted with his secret.

  V

  Trudi had forced her husband to anticipate this situation, and to agree upon his course of action. “Some day they will get me,” she had said. “They get all of us in the end.” She had given him the name and address of the middle-aged German teacher of the clarinet who was the medium whereby commissions on picture sales were converted into anti-Nazi literature. Professor Adler was not his real name, but that under which he lived and worked in Paris. He earned meager sums by his teaching, and he lived on those so as to awaken no suspicions. If at any time Trudi were to be missing, Lanny must never go near the garret where this musician lived, but mail him a note enclosing one of Trudi’s sketches by way of password, and appointing a place on the street for a meeting at night. This professor had never been told where or how Trudi got her large sums of money, but he had been told that in the event of anything happening to her, he would receive a letter which would enable him to get into contact with the source of the funds. That was the way the underground was built, in separate units, each having contact with no more than one or two others.

  Lanny had asked: “What if they should get the professor?” and Trudi’s reply had been: “I know another name, but I am not permitted to reveal it. If both Adler and I should be caught at once, it will be up to you to try to make contact through some one of the French comrades whom you can trust; or give your money to them, to be used for the propaganda here.” She added: “God knows they need it! They are at the same stage as we Germans were a year or two before Hitler struck.”

  Lanny spent most of his time in the hotel room, and whenever the phone rang, his heart hit him a blow underneath his throat. Several friends called up, inviting him out, and he made the excuse that business tied him down; when people called on business, he made the excuse of social engagements. Never did he hear the one voice that he wanted; his grief told him that he never would hear it again. For why should she fail to telephone, unless she was in the hands of the enemy? And if she was in their hands, what chance was there of her escaping? He would go out and walk for a while, turning unexpected corners and stopping to look in a shop window to see if anybody was trailing him. But the only persons who paid attention to a well-dressed and young-looking American were the ladies of the trottoir.

  After four days he could wait no longer, and wrote on his typewriter the fateful note which he and Trudi had agreed upon. He asked Professor Adler to be on a certain obscure street corner in Montmartre at ten o’clock on the following evening and to wear a blue flower in his buttonhole. The letter was signed “Toinette,” in the hope that if it fell into the hands of the enemy it might be taken for an assignation. At the hour appointed Lanny walked to the place, taking every precaution to make sure that he was not being followed. He strolled past the spot, looking for a smallish German with prematurely gray hair and a blue flower. There would be, of course, the chance that it might be a Nazi agent taking the musician’s place; but this chance had to be taken.

  However, there was nobody resembling a professor of clarinet playing. Lanny passed the corner several times, and then, thinking that the musician’s knowledge of geography might be defective, he crossed to the other corners—but in vain. He went back to his hotel and wrote another note,
making another appointment for the evening after next; he went again, and walked as before, seeing no blue flowers and no one who looked like either a musician or a Gestapo agent—Lanny had met a number of both. His notes doubtless went to the dead-letter office and were burned, along with thousands of other attempts at assignations.

  VI

  Lanny might have told himself now that he had done all he could; he might have written finis to that chapter of his life and closed the book. But the very fact that he hadn’t loved Trudi as wholeheartedly as he ought to have loved her bound him to her memory. Now that it was too late, he really yearned to live the heroic, the saintly life! The fact that he had held a martyr in his arms poisoned his thoughts of the fashionable world which beckoned him from the Riviera, from Biarritz and Salzburg and Davos, and the other places where his mother’s friends were to be found in late summer.

  Day and night his mind was obsessed by one thought: “How can I save her?” His reason told him that the chance must be slim, and growing more so. What would they do with such a prisoner? Chloroform her and drop her body into the Seine, so that she would pass for one of those unfortunates who every night put an end to themselves in all the great capitals of an unhappy world. Or put her in a closed car and drive her by night to the border—say at Strasbourg, where there was a bridge which Lanny knew well—one half of it France and the other half Germany, the only thing owned in common being a barrier painted with black and white stripes. With the diplomatic immunity which Nazis enjoyed and shamelessly abused, there would be no chance of search; a prisoner well gagged, perhaps unconscious and hidden under a robe, would be safely restored to the land of her origin.