Presidential Agent (The Lanny Budd Novels)

by Upton Sinclair

  “You made me get drunk! I told you—hic—I would play the fool.” Lanny shook with sobs.

  “It is nothing, Herr Budd, wirklich—it is all good fun. Bruno will forgive you—won’t you, Bruno?”

  “Of course, I forgive you, Herr Budd—macht gar nichts.”

  Lanny was hard to console. He sank into a chair and would not show his face, in spite of the efforts of his friends. They would never love him, they would never respect him again. He kept up this little comedy because he wanted them to have something else to occupy their minds; something to laugh over, and thus forget the grave admissions they had made. A crazy American millionaire who wanted to see a woman whipped and who then wept like a spoiled kid because nobody loved him! Were they all as verrückt as that? Ein verrücktes Land, full of gangsters and bootleggers and cowboys and wild Indians—you could see it in the cinema, and be sure that such a land would be ripe for taking over when the time came.

  At last the wild man let himself be comforted. Then he wanted to drink another toast. “Der Tag in Frankreich!” he announced, and of course they drank it; the women, too, neither knowing nor caring what the words meant, so long as it was champagne in the glasses. Poor Fifi, who saw her thousand francs vanish like so many champagne bubbles! The host observed her state of melancholy and gave her a hundred-franc note, which she quickly folded up and stuck into her stocking.

  To his friends the son of Budd-Erling pleaded: “Bitte, nicht mehr trinken—hic—don’t let me have any more.” They laughed heartily and said they had learned their lesson—they were scared to death of him. To take his mind off the bottles they started petting the girls, who had been so cruelly neglected. Lanny remarked: “There are rooms upstairs. What do you say?”

  They said “Yes,” with evident satisfaction. As they started to leave the room, Fifi attached herself to the wild American; but he said: “Non, non—ce monsieur,” pointing to Bruno, “he wants two.” He put her on Bruno’s vacant arm, saying to the partly befuddled Nazi: “It’s all right; I’ll get another.” He escorted the five of them to the elevator and saw them inside. Then he stepped back, and the door was closed.

  He returned to the cabinet. The waiter was there, and Lanny said: “Addition, s’il vous plaît,”—and not a single “hic.” He examined the account, making sure that it included the rooms and everything. He paid it, together with a generous tip. “Ces boches sont gentils, n’estce pas?” he remarked. “Those Germans are nice, aren’t they!” He took his hat and walked out—strangely enough, perfectly straight, and when an attendant brought his car and started, he didn’t weave in the traffic or bump into anything, in spite of the fact that the greater part of his mind was in the cellars of the Château de Belcour. He had got what he had come for—the admission that the Nazis had prisoners there, that they tortured them, and that a woman was among them.

  10

  Falsely True

  I

  Waiting for Monck to arrive, Lanny sat in at séances with Hofman and Madame. He sat as still as a mouse, hoping that Tecumseh would ignore him, and for a while this succeeded. Lanny concentrated his mind upon the image of Trudi; he “rooted” as hard as he could for Trudi to come, and this was a worthwhile experiment, whether one chose to believe that there were spirits in the neighborhood or that the subconscious mind of Madame was weaving fantasies. If telepathy was a reality, a medium’s mind might receive suggestions just as if it were under hypnosis.

  No Trudi; but after Lanny’s strenuous mental labor had gone on intermittently for a couple of days, the Indian chieftain said: “There is a man here named Loodveek. That is a German name, is it not? He is young and has blond hair. He has been here before.”

  Hofman had been posted as to what he should do if such a personality appeared; so now he said: “We are trying to get in touch with Trudi.”

  “He says that Trudi is not here. He is worried about her.”

  “Does he know where she is?”

  “He says she is in trouble; he feels that, but does not know where. There is an old man trying to help her, and the old man is suffering, too. The old man is stout and kind; he is some sort of servant who does not like what he has to do; he is in a dangerous position. Loodveek tries to give me his name, but he doesn’t know it very well himself. It is something like Powell.”

  “The German name Paul is pronounced Powl. Could it be that?” It was still Hofman asking questions, and Lanny sat there, ready to burst with a dozen others he wanted asked.

  “It might be,” said the control. “I don’t understand these foreign ways of saying things and I don’t see any sense in them.”

  “Can you find out if Trudi is in the spirit world?”

  “This man doesn’t say. He says Trudi was his wife; I ask him why he says ‘was,’ and he doesn’t answer. He looks like an educated man but very unhappy. Maybe he can’t speak but a few words, I don’t know why. He says the old man groans all the time.”

  There was a silence. When that happened, Tecumseh was apt to fade away; it was necessary to keep talking to him. But Hofman had asked everything that Lanny had told him to. So now Lanny ventured a timid question: “Pardon me, Tecumseh, could one of the old man’s names be Adler?”

  “Oh, so it’s you!” exclaimed the Amerindian, dead a couple of hundred years. “I haven’t been having the pleasure of hearing from you. Have you been biting holes in your tongue?”

  “I have been trying to oblige you, Tecumseh.”

  “You are trying to fool me. You sit there thinking that telepathy stuff at me all the time.”

  “Does that bother you?”

  “Of course it does; it is the wrong suggestion; it works backwards. You are one of these smart intellectuals and think you have to understand everything with your mind; but there are things older than the mind, millions of years older. When a bee builds a hexagonal cell, does it have to go to an engineer to find out how?”

  “How does the bee find out, Tecumseh?”

  “He has it already inside him; his intuition. You have it, too, if you would let it work.”

  “How can I learn to do that?”

  “Have you ever heard the saying: ‘Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven’? What does that mean to you? Put yourself in an attitude of faith and you experience the reality of faith; put yourself in the attitude of skepticism and you become as a hollow nut, all shell and no meat inside. Take that off and pray over it, Mister Worldly Wiseman.”

  “Really and truly, I am trying to do that very thing, Tecumseh. I am in trouble and I need help. Can’t you give me another chance?”

  “Just what do you want?”

  “I want that man Ludi to talk to me directly. Can’t you persuade him?”

  “The man is gone. There is something the matter with him that I don’t understand. I think he is the same kind of smart-aleck that you are—he cannot believe that he is a spirit, or that he is still alive and can talk if he believes that he can talk.”

  “Do a man’s doubts follow him into the spirit world?”

  “The sin of intellectual pride is self-punishing; God doesn’t have to do anything to you—you do it to yourself, and this German fellow is doing it, and maybe also that Trudi who was his wife.”

  Lanny said: “You seem to know the Bible, Tecumseh. Do you remember the story of the man who said: ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief’? I say that prayer to you. We have known each other a long time, and you must know there is some reason why I come back again and again, in spite of the bad times you give me.”

  “Well, if you want to get results, stop shooting that telepathy business at me.”

  “Just what shall I shoot?”

  “Tell yourself: ‘There are spirits and I know there are spirits, just as live and real as I am, and I want such and such a spirit to come and talk to me.’ Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”

  “Thanks, Tecumseh. I’ll do
my honest best.”

  “That’s enough now. You tire me out with all these arguments. Remember, I was nothing but a stone-age man born too late, and I never heard any of these long words that you highbrows have made up. Where do you suppose I got them from?”

  “God knows, old friend.”

  “God knows—but He won’t tell!” With that, Madame gave a violent start, and when she came out of her trance, she said: “Did somebody have a quarrel?”

  When the two men had left the séance room, the incorrigible intellectual remarked to his locksmith friend: “It seems to me the stone-age man is taking over the whole mental apparatus of my stepfather.”

  II

  The President of the United States kept his promise and delivered that “quarantine” speech in Chicago. The American Herald Tribune in Paris reported the event and gave several paragraphs, some of which Lanny recognized. The rest was of the same tenor, and the effect of the speech was what F.D. had foretold. In fashionable society everybody argued pro or con, and a week later came the New York papers, full of the same debate. The policy of the State Department, carefully built up for the past decade and a half, had been dumped overboard in half an hour. “Stop Foreign Meddling!” clamored the Wall Street Journal.

  Robbie Budd made it a rule to write his son every month, but this was a special occasion, and the fabricator of airplanes poured out his displeasure in a long screed. Here was definite proof that our national and international affairs were in the hands of a madman. We were going to take all the troubles of the world on our shoulders, and be played for a sucker by every tricky diplomat and his mistress. It was Woodrow Wilson all over again, only worse, because we told the world that we could learn nothing from experience. We would carry this burden all alone; for where in the world was any other nation looking out for any interest but its own? Where was there a foreign statesman who would even pretend to be thinking about any other nation? Even the English, the world’s masters of hypocrisy, had given that up as vieux jeu.

  To Lanny this was playing over an old phonograph record; Robbie had been dinning it into his ears all through the Peace Conference of Paris. Robbie wanted his country to be the best-armed in the world, as its wealth and resources entitled it to be, and then to attend strictly to the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. Let Europe stew in its own juice; let Britain and Germany fight it out—from Robbie’s point of view it mattered little which of them came out on top. Just make it plain to them that they had to keep out of South and Central America! In the days when Lanny had felt like teasing his father he had asked: “Suppose that some day there should come a nice, carefully contrived revolution in Brazil—not a Nazi revolution, but one of pure native Brazilian Fascism—what would you do about it? And suppose the thing spread all over South America, and you woke up some morning and discovered that the Germans had the continent in the bag?”

  But just now Lanny wasn’t teasing anybody. Instead, he wrote: “I had lunch with Baron Tailor again and he asked about you. When do you plan to come?”

  III

  Bernhardt Monck arrived in Paris. He called Lanny’s hotel and spoke one word: “Belchite.” Lanny said: “Where are you?” The answer was: “I’ll be walking on the Rue du Rivoli, where the jewelry shops are.”

  Lanny hardly knew the Capitán at first glance. He had got himself a suit of old clothes and had gone back to his role of sailor enjoying shore leave. Lanny drove him out into the country, so that no one might see the grandson of Budd’s in unfashionable company. They spent the day, having plenty to talk about. This was the man to whom Lanny meant to tell everything, and he found the telling a great relief.

  He set forth the different items of evidence he had collected, tending to show that Trudi was in the château. He told about his Red uncle, and about Jean, and the mill; about the drunken party, and the admissions his Nazi friends had made; about Kurt, and the use Lanny hoped to make of this friendship; about the Führer, and the clipping from the Munich newspaper; about the fat General and his paintings—Monck must have all the details in his mind, for there might come some crisis when there would be no time for explanations.

  Lanny saved Madame and Tecumseh and the spirits until the last, they being a hard pill for a Marxist to swallow. The founder of this Social-Democratic religion had lived at a time when mechanistic theories of the universe had prevailed in Germany, and he had included them among his ten commandments; therefore “dialectical materialism” and “scientific Socialism” were supposed to be inextricably bound together—whereas, so far as Lanny could see, they had no connection whatever. He knew the materialist mind, as dogmatic as any Pope’s, and he became apologetic when he brought up this subject. “You may think it’s all superstition and fraud, but it’s a part of the story, and before I get through you will see how it may help us in our job. So I beg you to listen patiently.”

  “O.K.,” said the sailor. “’Raus damit!”

  Lanny went back to the beginning and told how his stepfather had picked up this old Polish woman in the cheapest sort of medium parlor in a cheap neighborhood in New York, and of the things she had told them which she had no normal way of knowing; how Lanny had brought Zaharoff to her without saying one word about him, and she had revealed among other things the fact that this Greek agent had once pleaded guilty in the Bow Street police court in London to having borrowed money on four hundred and sixty-nine sacks of gall belonging to another man. “As God is my witness,” said Lanny, “I didn’t even know what gall was; but my friend Rick found the record in the Times, of a date more than sixty years ago.”

  He told about Zaharoff’s reporting his own death, and then of his revelation concerning the Hampshire, and the “key-master” whose name was Huff or Huffy or Huffner, and who could tell Lanny about the gold. Lanny said: “I had never had anything to do with locksmiths, and I supposed the only men who knew how to open safes were burglars. But I found this man Hofman, and here he is in Paris, absorbed in trying experiments with Madame. He has already heard communications about Trudi—and of course you can see how useful he could be to us in the château, if we could persuade him to take the risk.”

  “Do you think he would be willing?”

  “I don’t know; I have waited to get your advice before broaching the subject.”

  “Tell me just what you have in mind.”

  “Roughly, this. I shall be a guest at the château. Sooner or later those Nazis will have to invite me, and I’ll find a pretext to stay overnight. Also, I’ll have some way of getting word to you. I will make friends with the dogs—I’ve already begun at that, and I’ll keep them out of the way while you and Hofman either climb the wall, or he picks the lock of one of the gates. I will leave one of the ground-floor windows open, and you and Hofman will go down into the cellars and open the doors of whatever dungeons you find.”

  “Do they have a nightwatchman?”

  “That’s one of the things I have to find out. I may have to stay more than one night.”

  “And suppose we get caught—what happens to us?”

  “There mustn’t be any fighting; if you can’t get away you must give up. My father employs one of the best avocats in Paris, and I will go to him as my father’s son and put the case in his hands; he will of course keep me out of it—my function will be to guarantee him a thumping fee. He will go to the French police, and so you will quickly be turned over to them. The avocat will take up the matter with the German embassy, and I haven’t a doubt that he can bluff them into backing down. You see the situation; you are not burglars but political crusaders, trying to save a refugee who is held in durance in defiance of French law. If you are prosecuted, members of the Embassy staff must appear in open court and face cross-examination as to what was going on in the château. The scandal would be terrific, and I feel certain they would never face it. They would just tell the police that it was all a mistake, and request them kindly to drop the matter.”

  IV

  Such was the program; crazy en
ough, but not so crazy as the ideas Lanny had suggested in Spain. Monck admitted that if Lanny could really manage to spend a night in the château, and if Hofman could be persuaded to do his fancy work, there might be a chance to get Trudi out. The most serious flaw he could find in the plan was that it involved Lanny’s taking the locksmith, a comparative stranger, into the most precious secret of his life. “You will be breaking your promise to Trudi.”

  Lanny said: “I have been worrying over that. It may be that I can get by without telling Hofman anything of the sort. He is not interested in politics, and I don’t have to be either. Suppose you come to me, as a former friend of Trudi’s, and tell me the horrible story of her being tortured by the Nazis, and I introduce you to Hofman and let you tell it to him. My heart is touched and I offer to put up the money to save her, but I can’t be known in connection with the matter, because of my father’s business relations with General Göring, to say nothing of my own. That won’t make me seem very heroic, but there’s no reason why I should, and I surely don’t seem it to myself, with all this lying that I hate so utterly. But it seems to be what the situation calls for; Trudi wanted it, and you want it, and—” Lanny stopped himself; he nearly said: “and the President.”

  “That part of it’s all right,” said Monck. “When you set out to kill people, as I’m doing, you surely don’t mind lying to them, or about them.”

  “I’m talking about lying to Hofman, who is a fine fellow, I am certain.”

  “My guess is, he’d prefer not to know that you’re a Socialist or have any political connections. If he doesn’t know it, then what he does is a purely humanitarian thing. Those Nazis, holding a woman in prison, are criminals, and nobody has to be squeamish in trying to get the better of them.”