The reason for this proposal was that Lanny knew the world in which he lived, and was sure that Forrest Quadratt would have more respect for him if he believed him to be engaged in making plenty of money like Quadratt himself, and not just traveling about the world indulging a yen to meet celebrities and put his feet under the dinner tables of the rich. When they parted on board that steamer, they were friends who understood each other thoroughly and were prepared to exchange favors. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours!
VIII
Arriving in New York, Lanny signed an affidavit to the effect that his painting dated from approximately 1645, which meant that he did not have to pay any duty upon it. Then he stepped into a taxicab and was driven to the airport from which a plane left for Chicago almost every hour. He sent a telegram to Mrs. Sophronia Fotheringay, saying that he was coming. Instead of going directly to her home, he went to a picture dealer and had the painting put into an elaborately hand-carved old Spanish frame. When he reached the mansion on Lake Shore Drive he dined with the hostess, and told her the story of his trip into the land of the Reds—the deepest-dyed and bloodiest of all Reds now operating. Manifestly, a painting must be extremely valuable to justify the taking of so many risks as the expert described.
The old master was hung in the drawing-room, with a proper reflector above it. Before they went in to see it Lanny delivered his spiel about a painter who had been the favorite of Spain all his lifetime, and after three centuries was the favorite of all persons everywhere who loved sweetness and light. They entered the room, and the elderly widow was seated in a padded armchair, after which Lanny ceremoniously unveiled the treasure. Of course she was enraptured; she saw in one of those dark-eyed urchins the perfect image of her only son, who had been killed in the Meuse-Argonne and was now waiting for her in heaven. His photograph stood on the piano, and Lanny had to get it and compare them, and admit that the likeness was extraordinary. The coincidence cost the old lady an extra five thousand dollars.
When the visitor mentioned that he was asking thirty thousand for the painting, old Mrs. Fotheringay never turned a hair. When he told her that he would prefer to have her call in some other expert, say from the Art Institute, to pass judgment on the work’s authenticity and the fairness of the price, she waved the idea aside, saying that he had risked his life to get it, and she liked it. She didn’t mention, but Lanny knew, that she had so much money she literally didn’t know what to do with it. Her husband had left her the royalties upon certain basic patents having to do with machine-tools of which she did not even know the names; all she knew was that several million dollars was paid every year into her bank account, and she wrote checks for any amount that came into her head, often without taking the trouble to enter the item in the stub—which made it rather hard for her business manager. Now she wrote a check payable to Lanning Prescott Budd, and he wrote her a bill of sale.
Afterwards he strolled with her about the many rooms of this old-style overdecorated home, and looked at all the painted babies and children, many of which he had bought for her. She told him that she loved them all, and would not part with a single one at any price. She invited him to spend the night, but he said that he was taking a plane back to New York at midnight, so she told her butler to have a car ready for him at the proper hour. He devoted the rest of the evening to telling her about art in Europe and preparing her mind for the next picture he might bring. He had never been mercenary in the past, but now he had become so, on account of Trudi. Gold, “this yellow slave,” was going to perform for him the magic service of getting his wife out of a dungeon cell.
So Lanny told himself. It is an ancient doctrine, and highly danger-out—that the end justifies the means. Looking upon the matter through Marxist eyes, he could see it as the automatic operation of economic force. How could any man on earth see that amiable stout old lady with her pen poised to write checks, and not say: “I might as well have it as the next fellow”? If you had any sort of “cause,” including a Marxist one, you naturally believed it the best of causes—otherwise you would have had some other!
IX
Back in New York, Lanny called Gus Gennerich at his hotel in Washington, and was told to call back in four hours. He telephoned Hansi and Bess to say “Hello,” and then Johannes to invite him to have lunch and a gossip. He called Robbie, and said that he was going to Washington on picture business, and would come to Newcastle on his return. He added that he had “big news,” but didn’t say what, for when he told about Schneider’s “bid,” he wanted to see the expression on Robbie’s face, and if possible lead the conversation into channels of interest to Robbie’s son.
When he called Gus the second time, the man asked if he could take a plane to Washington at once. Lanny said: “You bet!” and Gus replied: “Call me at nine-thirty tonight.”
This so wonderfully comfortable modern world was getting smaller and smaller, and those who had the price of its services were getting them more and more prompt and efficient. The porter in Lanny’s hotel would phone to the airport for his reservation, and meantime a taxi would be speeding the passenger to a newly opened field which was a marvel of administration. Safe traveling “on the beam” would deliver him in his country’s capital in an hour, a journey which had taken the founder of the country at least two weeks.
So it came about that Lanny Budd was again picked up on a street corner and delivered through the “social door” of the White House. The “Governor” was in bed, as before, but this time he had no sniffles; his family and guests were looking at a movie upstairs, while he had begged off on the plea of pressing work. “Hello, Marco Polo!” he exclaimed, when his visitor entered the room; he always had comical names for his intimates, and had been struck by the fact that no two of Lanny’s communications bore the same dateline.
They had been numbered serially, and he had read every word, so he declared. “It is better than a Cook’s tour; you should have them made into a movie some day.” Then, his expression and tone changing as suddenly as any movie actor’s, he demanded: “What is going to be the outcome in Spain?”
“The Belchite drive has come to an end,” replied the visitor; “just as I wrote you it would. Franco has taken most of the north, with its iron ore that Hitler wants so badly. The rest depends upon the British and French Cabinets. If they continue the farce of ‘Non-Intervention’ while Hitler and Mussolini send in all the supplies needed, the end is certain. It may take another year, but no people, no matter how brave and determined, can fight airplanes and artillery with sticks and stones. Neither side has the manufacturing resources to fight a modern war, and it’s purely a question of how much each can get from outside.”
Lanny had been told, definitely and flatly, that the “Governor” wouldn’t do anything about that. But he couldn’t give up; nobody could give up who had been to the battlefront and seen the bloodshed and agony. He was too tactful to say “Please,” or “You must,” or anything of that sort; he just told what he had seen with his eyes and heard with his ears, and it was better than any movie which F.D. could have enjoyed upstairs. First Trudi and the visit to the Château de Belcour; then the trip to Spain, and what El Capitán had reported under the sound of the guns. Said Lanny: “This raid is the beginning of a war on civilization, and it won’t stop until the last bastion has been knocked out. The best military brains in Europe are planning it and this time they aren’t overlooking anything.”
This Cassandra in trousers was in a strong position, because only a few weeks previously he had warned his hearer that France was to be the next victim, and now he was able to bring the blueprints of this future operation. He told what he had heard from the lips of the de Bruynes and Baron Schneider in two long talks. When Lanny was speaking to the Nazis he lied carefully, but to the President of his country he would bring the precise truth, and wouldn’t hide any name, unless perhaps that of his own father. F.D. was the one who had the right to know, and Lanny must count everything else as second
to that service. There were things he couldn’t put on paper, but in the privacy of this bedroom he got them on the record.
“There are reasons, Governor, why you should understand my relationship to the de Bruyne family; no Frenchman would need an explanation, but an American does. Marie de Bruyne made me a sort of godfather to those two boys, and they still think of me in that relationship; they keep no political secrets from either my father or myself, and so it has come about that I am in the center of the coming storm in France. I mention this so that when I tell you I know something, you will be sure that I really do know it. In future, when I write, let the de Bruynes be St. Denis, and Baron Schneider be Mr. Tailor.”
“Have you made a note of these?”
“I have prepared a list of such names. Kurt Meissner is Kaiser; that is where his loyalties began, and may end again. You understand that Kurt was an officer of the old army; it was that army which sent him to Paris at the time of the Peace Conference. His brother Emil is a general, and Kurt is an agent of that same army today. You must know that the Germans have half a dozen organizations doing their secret work in the Ausland; Goebbels has one, and I’m pretty sure that Göring has his own; Rosenberg, the supplier of the official Nazi religion, has his, and so have the SS, and the Gestapo, or Secret State Police. The old army, the Reichswehr, has perhaps the biggest of all. Those officers are exclusive, and they look upon the Nazis as upstarts and intruders; it’s all for the Fatherland, of course, but the old army has its own way of doing things, and keeps its own secrets. I am not sure, but I got hints that Kurt and the Graf Herzenberg are not on the most cordial terms. The fact that it was an SS officer who showed me about the grounds of the Château de Belcour indicates that the Nazis are running the Embassy, while Kurt’s organization is serving the army.”
“Did Kurt admit to you that the Cagoulards are taking his money?”
“No, and I’m sure he never will. Even if friendship prompted him to, he is under a solemn oath. But you know how it is; you can smell things in the atmosphere. Both Schneider and the de Bruynes made it plain that they want all the money they can get and they don’t care who puts it up; also, it goes without saying that Hitler would rather take France by a revolution than by a costly war. You have only to ask yourself—what else would Kurt be doing in Paris? When he left my home on the Riviera and went back to Germany to live, he was a musician devoted to his art and living a most austere life; I doubt if he had five hundred dollars a year to keep himself and his family. But now he lives in a fashionable apartment with a blond secretary and an ex-soldier to wait on him and drive him in a limousine. What is all that for? Manifestly, to find out what high-placed Frenchmen are for sale, and to buy them.”
“The Frenchmen know what they are selling?”
“Some do and some don’t; Hitler is as cunning as the devil when he wants to be. He is holding out an olive branch with one hand, and keeping his dagger behind his back in the other. Perhaps—who knows?—if the Frenchmen take the olive branch he will not use the dagger. Many of them choose to believe so, and not all have been bought for cash; they want to break the alliance with the Reds, and put down the labor unions and the sit-downs, and Hitler is the one who knows how. It is one ideology and one technique all over the world, and it is spreading fast. The dictators are all blood brothers under their skins.”
“Under their shirts,” put in F.D., with a smile.
“It makes the Communists wild for anyone to say so, but the fact is that Mussolini took over his technique from the Bolsheviks; the Agitprop, the Gaypayoo, the youth movement, the whole show. When I first met Mussolini he told me: ‘Fascismo is not for export’—but that was only until he had got firmly set in the saddle. Then he passed on his bag of tricks to Hitler, and now the two of them have loaned it to Franco, and to the little Balkan dictators. I have been watching the Croix de Feu, the Jeunesse Patriote and all the others in France, and it is a standardized product—if you follow the formula you can produce it in any part of the world where you can raise money for shirts and armbands and banners and drums and the salaries of rabble-rousers. In this country, I am told, the shirts are silver, or gold, or white—more appropriate to a country which can afford laundry bills.”
X
That led to Forrest Quadratt and Lanny’s negotiations on board the Bremen. Like Kurt, the ex-poet had never admitted that he was a Nazi agent, but he had shown wide acquaintance with the art of getting the money of the rich, and also with the names and addresses of persons who might like to see a coup d’état against the New Deal. Lanny said: “He knows exactly what he wants, and again it is the standard product. Quadratt talks to Americans and Kurt talks to Frenchmen, so they have different sets of phrases, but the thing they talk about is identical.”
“They really imagine they can make headway in a free country like America?”
“I assure you they are making headway very fast, and are full of confidence. They figure that the New Deal cannot go on piling up public debt indefinitely; and when you have to stop, there will be a smash-up, and that will be their chance. The very freedom we are so proud of is their assurance of success; we are made impotent by it, and cannot imagine taking action against those who use their freedom to destroy ours.”
“It is hard to see just what I can do, until they take some overt action.” F.D. seemed to be thinking out loud, and Lanny put in quickly: “Are you open to a suggestion, Governor?”
“Always, of course.”
“We grant that American citizens who have millions of dollars have a right to use them to poison the public mind; but surely we don’t have to grant the right of foreigners to come in and intrigue against us. Why doesn’t some congressman propose a law requiring all agents of foreign governments to register, say with the State Department, declaring what government they represent, what payment they receive, and the nature of their duties? If American citizens serve on the payroll of foreign governments, why not make them do the same? That would turn the spotlight of publicity upon them; it would frighten some, and might be the means of jailing a few who would try to keep their doings secret.”
“By Jove, Lanny, that’s an idea! I’ll give some thought to it.”
The younger man flushed with pleasure. “You know my position. I can’t make any suggestions to congressmen; but you, no doubt, make them now and then.”
“Indeed, rather often!” replied the President, with one of his broad grins. “They aren’t always accepted, but I keep on trying.”
XI
They came back to the subject of Quadratt, and Lanny said: “I believe I have him on the hook, and could get a lot of information about his doings.” But the President replied that he had abundant sources of information as to the United States. He wanted the son of Budd-Erling to return to Europe where he had so many carefully cultivated entrées. Roosevelt was really frightened by the prospect of waking up some morning and reading that France was in the hands of the Fascists. He complained that the State Department could hardly be ignorant of these intrigues, and wondered what those well-bred young gentlemen did with such information when they got it.
F.D.R. was a free and easy talker, which was one reason he had so many enemies. He described to his visitor that venerable and somewhat musty building, whose inmates had a tendency to take on the color of their environment. Secretary Hull was the most honorable and high-minded lawyer who had ever come out of the mountains of Tennessee, but he was somewhat old-fashioned in his thinking, and devoted to his idea that freedom of trade would solve all the problems of the nations. He was a former senator, and possessed the confidence of those elder statesmen to a greater degree than F.D. himself; so F.D. had been forced to adopt the method of putting in younger men upon one pretext or another. “But the trouble is, they all take to wearing top-hats and spats, and presently I discover that the new state of the State Department is more stately than the old.”
Lanny chuckled. “Perhaps you might like me to investigate them for you.”
This was the opening for which Lanny had been praying, and he stepped into it without hesitation. “May I make another suggestion, Governor?”
“Always, Lanny. Believe me, I am glad to make use of other men’s minds. You have lived among these new movements and seen them grow, while to me they are almost incomprehensible; I hear the stories of what the Nazis are doing, and it seems like somebody’s nightmare.”
“It is primitive barbarism employing all the techniques of modern science. That makes it the most dangerous movement in human history; the last upsurgence of the beast in man against the restraints of civilization. The first step in fighting it is to understand it, and that is where you can help more than any other man. For in addition to being the most powerful executive in the world, you are the greatest educator in the world. And don’t think that is just taffy—you can talk to twenty or thirty million Americans any time you wish, and sooner or later what you say reaches every literate person in the world.”
Presidential Agent (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 22
