But Budd-Erling had a few supporters in the air corps, and one of them, a colonel in the reserve army, happened to be in Berlin at this time. Charles Lindbergh was his name, and when he was a youth he had performed an unorthodox and presumptuous action, stepping into a little flivver-plane on Long Island and heading out across the Atlantic. When he landed at Le Bourget airport near Paris some thirty-four hours later, he was the first man to make a solo flight across the ocean, and had become one of the most famous men in the world. He was a shy and retiring person, and didn’t enjoy it; when he found he couldn’t walk on a street anywhere in his native land without being surrounded and mobbed, he grew irritated, and took to being gruff to newspaper reporters, an offense unprecedented in the vast overgrown village called America.
Then came the tragedy of the kidnaping and murder of his little child. The uproar of the trial was a crucifixion for the young airman, and after it he moved to England to live. He had made a lot of money, and had married a banker’s daughter and become conservative in his political views; perhaps he was that anyway, because his father had been a “radical” congressman and his family life had been unhappy as a result. Anyhow, Herr von Ribbentrop, the Nazi champagne salesman who had been made ambassador to England, saw an opportunity to make use of a naïve middle-western American for his propaganda. The Nazis were getting ready to fight, but of course didn’t want to fight if they could frighten the world into giving them what they wanted. It suited them to have the world believe that Germany possessed overwhelming might in the air, and a tall, dignified, and honest young Swedish-American was picked out as the trumpet to blow this news to the world.
“Lindy” was invited to be General Göring’s guest, and apparently he found it possible to enjoy living in the General’s country. He came a number of times, and was received with every honor, and even given a decoration. All doors were open to him and all secrets revealed—or so he was made to believe. He flew his lovely young wife in their small plane over Germany, and saw that all along the Swiss and French borders the Germans had built an airport every twenty miles. He was escorted through giant factories, and estimated that Germany was building twenty thousand planes a year, and could double the number at will. He examined the planes and decided they were better on the whole than those of any other nation. He had not been forbidden to tell these things, and since they seemed important he told them freely, and persons in other countries who didn’t want to face the facts were greatly annoyed.
VII
Colonel Lindbergh was a man after Robbie Budd’s own heart, and one whom he would have chosen to have as a son. They agreed in practically all their ideas; they were interested in mechanical constructions and bored by what they called “sentimentality” of all sorts. They accepted the Nazis at their own valuation, as “conservatives” whose function was to put down Communism. In spite of the fact that one had flown the Atlantic and the other was talking about planes to fly it every day, both belonged to the group which was coming to be called “isolationists.” They desired to see their country settle down within its own borders and arm itself to such an extent that no country or combination would ever dare to attack it.
So now these two sat in the Budd suite and discussed what they had seen and learned in the four great nations of the Western world, the only nations that really counted, in their way of looking at things. They knew each other’s minds, and didn’t have to waste time in preliminaries; they spoke a technical language, and neither had to explain his terms to the other. This applied not merely to the different makes of planes, their performances, and the hundreds of complex gadgets they contained; it applied to the techniques of flying them and the places to which they were flown, the companies which owned them, the stocks and bonds and other financial affairs of these concerns, and the personalities of those who financed and administered them. The only thing the air Colonel had to explain was the term “perfusion pump,” a device which he was trying to perfect for the surgeon Alexis Carrel, a kind of “artificial heart” which would be used in certain emergencies.
Lanny listened to all this, and tried to remember as much as he could of the things which seemed to him most significant. He wondered if he, too, was becoming “conservative” in his middle years; anyhow, he found that he agreed with his father more than he had ever thought possible. Since the last war he had believed himself a pacifist, and had been embarrassed to bear the name of one of the “merchants of death”; but now he was convinced that France, England, and his own country ought to have military planes, as many as they could get in a hurry—yes, even if it allowed Robbie Budd to make a fortune, and to say to his son: “You see, I was right!” Later, when occasion permitted, Lanny would shut himself up in his bedroom and make careful notes of what he had heard, and pin them in his inside coat pocket right over his own “perfusion pump.”
VIII
The great six-wheeled limousine called at the hotel for the Budds—establishing for them, so far as concerned the employees and many of the guests, a status equal to royalty. They were covered with a bearskin robe and driven to the ministerial residence, across the way from the Reichstag building, whose burned-out dome had been left unrepaired as a reminder to the German people never to forget to hate the Reds. Lanny thought of the tunnel which connected the two buildings underground, and through which Göring’s men had come to set the fire. This was a story so melodramatic that nobody but Reds would believe it, and if you had told it to anybody else in Germany you would have been turned over to the Gestapo.
The deviser of this clever political stroke emerged from the palace he had won. He looked more immense than ever in a voluminous blue military cloak, with a black fur collar and hat; the coat reaching to the ankles of the shiny black leather boots. The great man occupied a full half of the wide rear seat, and his two guests the other half. A staff car followed for their protection, and Der Dicke started asking Lanny about the attitude of the British toward Germany’s newly declared resolve to protect her minorities in the lands to the east of her. Lanny told of discussions he had heard.
The British, like the French, had to make the difficult choice between Nazis and Reds, and the fat General grinned as he listened to Lanny’s account of their perplexity. Their Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax, former Viceroy of India, had visited Berlin in the previous month, ostensibly to attend a sportsman’s exhibition which the General and his staff had got up. Göring was Master of the Hunt and Game Warden of Germany, while Halifax was Joint Master of the Middleton Hunt, so they had been two buddies. They had wandered around in a vast hall looking at the stuffed heads of slaughtered game from all parts of the earth, and his Lordship had received on behalf of his government the first prize for a display of overseas trophies.
Two men more incongruous it would have been hard for any cartoonist to imagine: the English nobleman, tall and drooping, with a pale, cadaverous face; stiff and solemn, deeply pious and praying both publicly and privately over everything he did; Göring, on the other hand, a throwback to the ancient Teutons, a tub of guts and a pair of bloody hands, a bellowing laugh and a restless will unchecked by the smallest scruple. He permitted himself the pleasure of telling his American guests about this visit. The noble Lord had done his best to pin Germany down to an agreement to be content with practically nothing. That was the “appeasement” idea of the new Prime Minister, Chamberlain, who kept offering it, and wondering why it was not welcomed. There had been a time in the world’s history when the British had wanted things and had taken them; but now they had persuaded themselves that nobody was ever again going to take anything.
Said Robbie: “I believe they will let you have a few things, provided you can convince them that nothing British is involved.”
“We have given them that assurance many times,” replied the host. “There are Belgian and Dutch and Portuguese colonies of which we might reasonably claim a share. As for the people of German speech and blood who have been cut off from us by the Versailles treaty—we si
mply do not understand why the British are so determined to keep them in exile. If the British cannot endure to see Germany grow strong again, they will have to enforce their idea with some something more powerful than Anglican High Church prayers.”
IX
The horn of the car moaned its long blasts while they sped over the low flat land of Brandenburg and came to the Schorfheide with its forests and the well-fenced game preserve. It belonged to the German government, but the old-style robber baron had calmly taken over the use of it—and who was there to say him Nay? A hunting lodge had been good enough for the Kaiser, but not for Göring, who had turned it into a palace and named it Karinhall. A long graveled driveway brought the baby-blue limousine in front of a wide-spreading two-story building of stucco or concrete, having a doorway like an ancient castle narrowing to a sort of stone tunnel as if for defense—one of those vestigial architectural features which Lanny had explained to Leutnant Rörich at the Château de Belcour. There were elk’s antlers over this entrance, and many sorts of hunting trophies on the walls of the great hall inside; for of course a military man has to keep in practice, and when he can’t have men he uses animals, which are cheaper, but not too cheap to be good form, in Germany as in England.
Lanny had visited this place with Irma, but that had been three or four years ago, and many trophies had been added and many gifts received since then. The Führer had had printed a special edition of Mein Kampf, as big as an atlas and with the most elegant binding imaginable. This had been set up on a table of corresponding magnificence, with a candle on each side always burning, just as in a church. Behind it, on the wall, was a Madonna and Child, and this seemed to Lanny the oddest combination an interior decorator had ever thought up. Had the General and his associates overlooked the fact that the subject of this work of art had been a Jewess?
Also there was a ceremonial Japanese sword which Robbie and his son were invited to inspect and wield—at a proper distance. There was an album containing photographs of the Air Force Commander’s “first seventy airfields,” and Robbie, of course, didn’t have to pretend his interest in this. There was the shrine to Karin, the Swedish baroness who had been Hermann’s first wife, and for whom the place was named; candles burned before it, and outside was a marble mausoleum holding her remains, brought from Sweden with ceremonies at which Hermann and Adolf had marched reverently side by side.
Also there was the lion cub—always a new one wandering about the house, despite the fact that one of its predecessors in favor had mistaken the General’s white trouser leg for a birch tree. Upstairs the visitors inspected the most elaborate playroom they had ever seen, a floor made into a toy village with trees and all accessories, and running around it and through it a triple railroad track with toy trains. The great man sat at a desk and pressed buttons, and the trains shot here and there, through tunnels and over bridges. “My child will play with these some day,” he said; the pregnancy of Emmy was soon to be made known to the German nation.
They dined in the long hall, at a table seating twenty-four guests. Only half the seats were occupied, mostly by officers of the General’s staff, including Lanny’s old friend Furtwaengler. After the meal the great man excused himself for a while, saying that he had reports to read. Robbie sat down to study the album of the first seventy airfields, and Lanny wandered about looking at art treasures and wondering from whom they had been expropriated. They included immensely valuable Flemish tapestries, portraying naked ladies of the Rubens style of architecture. As the great man’s Kunstsachverständiger, Lanny knew that his patron’s taste fluctuated between the two extremes of the most magnificent costumes and none at all. At the foot of the table in the dining hall, facing the General and his wife as they sat, was a marble Aphrodite Anadyomene, and elsewhere in painting and statuary you observed naked Greeks and helmeted and bemedaled Germans, about fifty-fifty.
X
In the library before a fireplace the lovely Emmy Sonnemann had seated herself upon a sofa, and not in the middle. She said: “Come and talk to me, Herr Budd.” Did she intend that he should occupy the other half of the sofa? He thought it the part of wisdom to take a chair three or four feet away.
He could look at her better from that vantage point; and she was meant for looking at. Maternity in its preliminary stages seemed to become her. She was a large woman, but well proportioned; she had played Brunnhilde at the Berlin Staats-Theater, and could have played the Venus de Milo if anybody had written a drama on that theme. She had regular and lovely features, expressive of gentleness and kindness; bright blue eyes, and blond hair which had not required chemical treatment. Of all the Nazis, she was the one who came nearest to their professed Nordic ideal.
She was the first lady of the Fatherland, and one of the best known of its public figures, owing to her long premarital career. All Germans had seen her on stage or screen, and felt that they knew her. Mostly they knew only good; for though she had taken up the duties of a queen, she played it as a stage role, and everybody had the comfortable feeling that she was that kind of queen. In private life she was easygoing, comfortable, a bit naïve. Theatrical folk are supposed to be bohemian, but when they become successful, they are glad to turn bourgeois, and that was Emmy Sonnemann. Millions of people in Germany would have paid half their worldly goods for a ticket of admission to Karinhall and the privilege of sitting on the other half of that sofa; Emmy wouldn’t have minded, but would have chatted amiably with each, and given the money to the Winterhilfe.
She said: “You don’t come to see us very often, Mr. Lanny Budd.”
“I have had to stay at home and help my father,” he apologized. This wasn’t true, but he couldn’t say what he had really been doing.
“Lanny is a very nice name,” she remarked. “May I call you that?”
“All my friends do,” he replied. Doubtless she would have liked to add: “Call me Emmy”; but her husband, Der Dicke, might not have approved.
“You had a wife when you were here before. Then I heard you were divorced. Tell me about it.”
Was that royalty speaking, or the stage world? In one case it would be a command, in the other just normal curiosity. Lanny took it for the latter and said: “It’s a complicated story. Our tastes were too different. Irma had been raised in a huge palace on Long Island, and I in a little villa on the French Riviera. I just couldn’t get used to being so very formal and magnificent.”
“Oh, how well I understand!” exclaimed the first lady. “Sometimes I am so bored, I think I can’t stand it. But then I remind myself how it used to be at rehearsals—doing the same thing over and over, and never getting it quite right.”
“The public seems to have thought you got it pretty right,” remarked Lanny, gallantly.
“Na, na!” exclaimed the one-time star. “Everybody flatters me, but you don’t have to.”
“I assure you quite sincerely that I saw you in several of your roles, and you were always lovely.”
“Ja, vielleicht; I was good to look at, when they fixed me up and got the lighting exactly right. At the end I was beginning to show my age, in spite of anything they could do.”
Lanny exclaimed with all sincerity: “This is an experience unique in my life: an actress admits her age when she doesn’t have to!”
“But you know all about me, Lanny. I was a successful ingénue when you were a little boy.”
“You must have been a very young ingénue; and anyhow, I didn’t know about you then.”
“To tell the honest truth, I was never a very good actress. I tried desperately hard, but I lacked the temperament. The directors wouldn’t give me emotional roles, and my feelings were terribly hurt; but now I have thought it over and realized that they were being kind to me.”
Lanny didn’t know quite how to take such a confession. She was being frank—but would it be safe for him to be? He remarked: “May it not have been that you were too good for some of the roles, Frau Göring?”
“Ach, nun, you are b
eing beautiful. That is the very explanation with which I comfort myself. I have never hated anybody very much that I can recall, and certainly I have never wanted to kill anybody. I like to see people happy, and I do what I can to help them. But nobody seems to want to see people like that on the stage.”
“It is not the fashion of the time,” admitted the art expert, consolingly. “But you have got what you want out of it, and so you can look back philosophically.” He wasn’t sure if that was true, but certainly it was up to him to assume it.
XI
The first lady of Naziland had commanded him to be seated, and had taken charge of the conversation. Presumably she had some purpose, and etiquette required Lanny to give her a chance to reveal it in her own way. There was a lull, and he waited; then suddenly she remarked: “I am still playing a role, Lanny. I have to be a great lady, and the stage and screen directors taught me everything about it. But one thing they never did teach me, and that is to be entirely happy.”
“Ah!” exclaimed Lanny. “Whoever could teach that role would become the greatest director in the world.”
“I don’t like cruelty,” the woman went on. “I don’t like to see people suffer, and I can’t help suffering with them. I am not supposed to say this to anybody in the world; but I have the impression that you have the same sort of feelings. Nicht wahr?”
“Yes, that is true,” admitted Lanny. “I surely don’t like cruelty.” He couldn’t say less about himself.
“Tell me this: How do you feel about the Jews?”
Presidential Agent (The Lanny Budd Novels) Page 41
