“Unfortunately, Irma has met Hess, and that will look bad. Shall you deny that you met him, Irma?”
“I suppose I shall have to,” said the wife. It was the first time she had opened her mouth. “It’ll be difficult, for I’ve told so many friends about having visited Berchtesgaden and met the Führer. I probably mentioned that Hess was in the room.”
“I don’t see why you should bother to deny anything.” ventured Lanny. “It was long ago, before the war. You were my wife, and I went there on business. I was trying to sell the Führer some Detaze paintings, and shortly afterwards I did so; also I purchased a couple of Defreggers for him in Vienna.”
“I suppose we can get away with that,” said the worried husband. “I hate like all damnation to have that old stuff raked up.”
“I don’t see why it should be. Just lie low and refuse to say a word to the press. See some of your friends in the government and let them present the story officially, in such a way as to protect you. They ought to be glad to do it, for the last thing in the world they want is to give the impression that there is a strong peace movement or appeasement sentiment in this country.”
“I suppose that is so,” assented his lordship, but without any great conviction.
“You’re in position to try a little polite blackmail on them. Make them see that they’re all in the same boat with you and Irma.”
Said Irma: “What I hope is that Hess will fall into the Channel!”
XI
There followed for the three persons a period of suspended animation. Lanny tried hard to interest himself in a best-selling novel, but without success. His lordship would go out to inspect his plantation—the estate had become that—and after half an hour he would come back and find his wife at the radio. “No news yet,” she would say. They would wait five or ten minutes, and then Ceddy would try again. It was like waiting for a thunderbolt to fall.
Their imaginations were occupied with all the possible things that might be happening to Walter Richard Rudolf Hess, on land and in the air and in the sea. These were unlimited in number. At this moment he might be leaving Germany, or trying to and failing; he might be in the act of being shot down, or floating in the sea, or parachuting to the land; he might be ordered away to Yugoslavia or Greece; he might be dead, or quietly eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner at home; he might be the center of the world’s greatest sensation one minute from now, or he might never be heard of again. In short, there was nothing to do but wait until the thunderbolt had fallen, and then you would know where it had hit—unless it happened to hit you!
It would be years before the man in the street knew the whole story, but the Wickthorpes, being insiders, got it more quickly: a few shreds here and a few patches there, over a period of a week or two. When they had fitted them all together, this is what they had:
On May 9, the day Lanny received the four-word note, the Number Three Nazi had gone to Augsburg in Southern Bavaria, to deliver an address to the workers in the great Messcrschmitt plane factory there. He took the occasion to inspect some improvements in the Me-110; he had taken a solo flight in this new fighter, designated “F,” and was so pleased that he had decided to enjoy another flight on the next day. He spent the night with his friend Willi Messerschmitt, and on the following afternoon he appeared wearing the uniform of a captain of the Luftwaffe. He made sure that there was a tankful of gas, and that the guns of the plane were unloaded. Then he took off—and the worried Willi never saw either him or the plane again.
The adventurer must have flown northward, avoiding the Channel, which the German flyers called Niemandswasser—No Man’s Water. He crossed the North Sea and approached Scotland from the east. Was it by accident or design that this same hour was chosen for one of the fiercest bombing attacks upon London? Some five hundred tons were unloaded, and as a result the most intense activity existed in the underground plotting room of the R.A.F. Fighter Command. New waves of bombers were being reported every few minutes, and when an isolated station on the eastern coast of Scotland announced an unidentified plane it was naturally guessed that it must be British. A few minutes later came a second report: the solitary plane had failed to identify itself, and its speed proved it to be a fighter.
That Scottish coast was a long way off, and fighter planes didn’t get there—not if they were expecting to get back. In the plotting room of the Fighter Command was a large table that was a map, and when a hostile plane was detected a red pin was stuck in, with a tiny red arrow indicating the direction of the plane. For British fighters to take off in pursuit of such a plane was a matter of seconds, but in this case the defenders received an order never before and perhaps never since given in this war: “Force him down, but under no circumstances shoot at him!” Two Hurricanes were soon on the trail of the plane, and the air was full of radio: “Don’t shoot him down! Don’t fire a shot!” The pursuing pilots could hardly believe their ears.
The stranger got almost all the way across Scotland, to the west coast. The gas supply gave out before it quite reached its goal, and the flyer took to his parachute. Striking the ground, he wrenched one ankle, and by the time he had managed to extricate himself from the parachute cords, there was a farmer standing over him with a pitchfork, demanding to know whether he was British or enemy. His reply was that he was a “friendly German,” and unarmed, so the farmer helped him to the house. He gave the name of Alfred Horn, and said that he wanted to see the Duke of Hamilton, whose great estate was near by; or if the Duke was not at the estate, he wanted to see the Earl of Wickthorpe, whose shooting box must be somewhere in this neighborhood. Home guardsmen of the neighborhood had arrived at the farmhouse, and one of them hurried to telephone the Duke of Hamilton’s estate. This Duke, as it happened, was a Wing Commander of the R.A.F., and was not at home; instead, there was a group of B4 agents at the place, knowing that Hess was coming, and ready to take him in charge. It was they who had set this trap and baited it—and they had caught the biggest prize of the war!
XII
The first word that came to Wickthorpe Castle was from Gerald Albany, Ceddy’s friend in the Foreign Office. It was early in the morning and Gerald was telephoning from his bedroom. “Ceddy, what is this I hear about you and Hess?”
“Me and Hess? What do you mean?” His lordship had had plenty of time to rehearse his role.
“Have you heard that Hess has flown to Scotland in a plane?”
“Good God, man! What are you saying?”
“Came down in a parachute. He says he was looking for you at your shooting box.”
“Gerald, the man must be insane. I never saw him in my life.”
“You haven’t written to him, or sent him any messages?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Somebody has probably told him that you favored an understanding. You are positive you haven’t had anything to do with it?”
“Nothing—unless of course you count the fact that Lanny Budd has talked to him. And you must not mention that.”
“There will probably be somebody out to see you about it before long. The whole thing seems very mysterious, and I suspect there’s more to it than I have been told. I advise you to be extremely careful in talking about it.”
“There is absolutely nothing that I can say, except what I have told you. The Red newspapers have been associating Wickthorpe along with Cliveden, as supposed-to-be appeasers, and maybe Hess’s agents have swallowed that and reported to him that I would be the right person to approach. But it’s the maddest thing I ever heard of in my life.”
So there it was. Ceddy and his wife, who hadn’t slept very much, bilked it over and then called Lanny to the Castle. There was not a word over the radio or in the morning papers; obviously, security was involved, and the Government would wait until they had got all the data and prepared a story to suit them. Lanny was advised to go to his cottage and keep himself inconspicuous, which he did.
In the course of the morning came two men who identified th
emselves as representatives of Intelligence, and they gave his lordship a respectful but thorough grilling. When Ceddy denied that he had ever sent any messages, directly or indirectly, to Rudolf Hess, he was taking a risk, for Hess might have stated that Lanny Budd brought such messages. However, Ceddy would say that Hess was lying, and Lanny, if he was ever put on the griddle, would say that he had merely reported to Hess the opinions he had heard Ceddy expressing to guests at the Castle. Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!
This was Saturday morning, and week-end guests were coming. Lanny said: “Someone will surely have heard the rumors, and they won’t want to talk about anything else. Because they know that I am Rudi’s friend, they will make me a target for questions. So perhaps I had better go back to town.”
Irma said: “I hate to send you back under the bombs, Lanny.” But there wasn’t very much grief in her tone, and Lanny knew it was an au revoir.
He told her: “I have business in New York. I’ll wait in London just long enough so that I won’t seem to be running away.”
“Do, for God’s sake, be careful what you say, Lanny!”
“I have got my lessons down pat,” he told her. He didn’t say what a skillful liar he had become, or how he hated it. What a relief when the beast of Nazi-Fascism breathed out its last poisonous breath, and a P.A. could become an honest man again, and say what he really thought! Would he have forgotten how?
XIII
He packed his belongings and went up to town. All the rest of Saturday he stayed in his hotel; he read all the Sunday papers, but still not a hint about a mysterious Alfred Horn who had landed by parachute in Scotland. Wartime secrecy was like a great blanket laid down over this sceptered isle, this precious stone set in the silver sea.
Until Sunday mid-morning. Then the telephone in the room rang, and there were two gentlemen to see Mr. Budd: Mr. Fordyce and Mr. Alderman. The operator didn’t say “from B4,” but many voices said it in Lanny’s brain. He requested that the gentlemen should be brought up, for of course the conversation would have to be private.
Mr. Fordyce was middle-aged, somewhat rotund, well educated, and presumably a university man. Mr. Alderman was younger, and more grim; he did little talking but much watching, and Lanny guessed that he was the athletic member of the team, on chance that the suspicious person might attempt resistance or flight. But Lanny, a charmer from way back, soon convinced them that he enjoyed hearing himself talk. He had the advantage in that he knew more than they knew, or at any rate more than they knew he knew.
They informed him that they were from Intelligence and showed him their badges; he assured them he was happy to meet them, and would answer all their questions to the best of his ability. He realized, he said, that he had laid himself open to suspicion by coming from Germany. Yes, he had left there less than a month ago. He told about his business, which he had carried on for many years; he had a portfolio with correspondence about paintings he had bought for clients in the States; the paintings were in the hotel vault and he would be happy to show them—very lovely, and positively not war loot, having been in Germany for a century or two. Yes, he had met Reichskanzler Hitler; had known him for some fifteen years. Yes, he knew Reichsmarschall Göring, and also Reichsminister Hess; he had sold paintings for Göring, long before the war, and he had carried on psychic experiments with Hess.
Questioned along another line, the art expert explained that he took very little interest in the war; that was not his field. But he had, met important people all over Europe. He happened to be the son of Robert Budd, of Budd-Erling, and had been his father’s assistant for almost thirty years. When World War I had broken out, the father had been caught in Paris without a secretary, and the son at the age of fourteen had answered telephone calls, decoded cablegrams, received visitors, and shared all the secrets of the European representative of Budd Gunmakers. “You understand, gentlemen, my father is now working day and night fabricating fighter planes for Britain, and building immense factories in which to fabricate still more planes. If it should happen that I picked up some information on this subject in Germany and took it back to my father, that is a matter which you will surely not expect me to talk about.”
XIV
This duel of wits went on for a couple of hours. B4 had done a quick job on Lanny Budd—or else they had been watching him for some time. They knew about his visits to Vichy, and to Paris and Madrid and Lisbon. Why had he stayed so long in each place, and whom had he seen there? Lanny had his story, carefully studied and many times rehearsed; but somehow it didn’t altogether satisfy the suspicious Mr. Fordyce. “It would appear, Mr. Budd, that when you go to a city you are more interested to visit the political personalities than the artists and art collectors.”
“I visit both,” replied Lanny. “It is through my father’s lifelong friendship with political personalities that I am able to get introductions and privileges of travel. When I went from Vichy to the Cap d’Antibes to see my mother, I traveled on my own and it cost me nearly ten thousand francs. But the second time, I called on Admiral Darlan, whom my mother and father have known for some twenty years, and the Admiral put me on a government plane to Marseille.”
“And your interests are purely artistic and social? You don’t ever by any chance carry political messages?”
“It is a question of phraseology, Mr. Fordyce. Admiral Darlan and Marshal Pétain tell me what they think; and when I come to visit my little daughter at Wickthorpe Castle, I find that visitors there are interested to learn what these important Frenchmen have told me. Naturally I do not refuse to talk. I believe in peace and mutual understanding, and say so wherever I go. If you have the idea that I am a paid agent, let me inform you that I have never received one farthing, one sou, or one pfennig, for the carrying of what you call ‘political messages.’”
“But you sell art works for political personalities, and receive large fees from them?”
“I receive the customary ten per cent commission on sales, mostly from the purchaser, and never from both sides. As a rule my clients are wealthy Americans, and they pay the commission. When Herr Hitler asked me to find him a couple of Defreggers in Vienna, he paid the commission. That was prior to the war.”
“You spoke of selling the paintings of Marcel Detaze.”
“Marcel was my mother’s second husband, and died in battle for France twenty-three years ago. He left a couple of hundred paintings, which are the joint property of my mother, of my half-sister Marceline, and of myself. I have been selling them as occasions arise.”
“Our information is that Marceline Detaze is dancing in a night club in Berlin. Is that so?”
“She was dancing there. What she is doing at the moment I am not sure.”
“Did you see her when you were in Berlin?”
“I was told that she was somewhere near the eastern front, with her friend Captain Oskar von Herzenberg. I am not pleased by that friendship and made no attempt to see her.”
“But you saw her in Paris, where that friendship began?”
“Oskar is the son of Graf von Herzenberg, who was connected with the German Embassy in Paris, and whom I have known for some time.”
XV
Yes, indeed, they had done a thorough job on this son of Budd-Erling, and it was evident that they were extremely suspicious of him. Lanny wondered where they had got their data. From Ceddy and Irma? From Hess? From Lord Beaverbrook? From some of the many guests at Wickthorpe over the previous week-end? It was to be assumed that at least one of them would be an informer, reporting to B4 on the doings of the appeasement clique. Also, many socially prominent persons had fled from Paris to England, and these, too, might be useful in affording information to the British authorities.
Mr. Fordyce had so far avoided showing any special interest in Lanny’s dealings with Rudolf Hess. But Lanny could be sure that this was the occasion for the inquest; so he told about the Deputy Führer’s interest in psychic matters, and how they had
together consulted the famed Professor Pröfenik in Berlin, and how Lanny had brought the Polish medium, Madame Zyszynski, to Berchtesgaden to try some séances. That made quite a story, involving many of the departed Nazis and pre-Nazis: Bismarck and Hindenburg; Gregor Strasser, murdered in the Blood Purge; Dietrich Eckart, the Führer’s old crony whose bust was in the Braune Haus in Munich.
“So the basis of your friendship with Hess is the spirits, Mr. Budd?” Was there a slight touch of irony in the question?
“I don’t say that they are spirits, Mr. Fordyce. They call themselves spirits, but I am always careful to state that I don’t know what they ate. They make their appearance, and they say things that the medium cannot normally know; to me they are a psychological mystery, and I wish some scientist would find out what they are and tell me.”
“You think that Hess is such a scientist?”
“Alas, no, I am afraid he is a dupe most of the time. My interest in him has been due in part to the fact that he so ardently desires an understanding with Britain. You know, doubtless, that he was born in Alexandria and received an English education.”
“Yes, we have a dossier on him.”
“I have no means of knowing how much you know. Hess told me that the Führer has made up his mind to attack Russia next month, and he, that is Hess, was frantic to get a settlement with England before that time. He even went so far as to say that he might fly here in an effort to contact friends who were sympathetic to his ideas.”
“What did you tell him on that subject?”
“I told him that the idea was fantastic, and that I was afraid he would be shot. He answered that he would come in uniform and in an unarmed plane.”
“Did you tell anybody in England about this?”
“I had been told it under a pledge of secrecy. I never took the idea seriously—I mean, I didn’t think he would do it. If he was unarmed, he couldn’t do any harm except to himself. I am wondering now, has he by any chance come?”
A World to Win Page 42
