There had come a postcard from Albacete to Bienvenu, signed “Romney,” and saying: “We have found highly interesting subjects for sketches, but good paints seem to be unobtainable here now. If you can manage to get some, it will be appreciated.” That was code, of course; it meant that Alfy wanted a Budd-Erling P9. Lanny had forwarded the message, with his interpretation, to the dispenser of these favors. Now he told his amie about it, and said: “I’ve no idea it will influence Robbie, but at least it will trouble his conscience. I plan to do some inquiring here in Paris, and see if I cannot get on the track of a plane of some sort.”
VI
Lanny went to see his Red uncle, who had helped to get the young aviators to their goal and therefore was entitled to a report. Lanny told his story, but not mentioning what he had paid for the pictures or that he had already sold them. He knew that Uncle Jesse’s propaganda was a bottomless pit, and he preferred to give his money to the Socialists.
The Communist deputy revealed a curious development. The mass meetings of the workers and their incessant chanting of “Airplanes for Spain” had not been without effect; it couldn’t be otherwise in a democracy, where the politicians are at the mercy of the voters every few years. The continuing exposure of German and Italian aid to Franco had made the word “non-intervention” a stench in the world’s nostrils, with the result that Blum was beginning to weaken in his “neutrality.” Weakening was all that was required, for there was incessant effort on the part of Loyalist sympathizers to smuggle arms across the border, and a great part of the rank and file of the French Army, as well as many of the petty officials, were in sympathy with the attempts.
Leon Blum couldn’t come out frankly and say, as did the Russians: “We intend to supply arms to the Loyalists so long as Germany and Italy supply them to the Rebels.” That would have meant a break with the British government, and would have left France a “Red” nation. In a world of hypocrites, who can be honest? There are men with cash trying to buy arms, and there are other men who live by selling arms, and it’s not easy to keep them apart. If the arms are stopped at the border, there is always the possibility that somebody is expecting a pourboire—and, the world being what it is, maybe he has a right to it. The salaries of French civil servants are notoriously small, and if a poor fellow can pocket a few francs and at the same time help a cause—sapristi! In the morning the arms have disappeared, and if any complaint is registered, there are capacious pigeon-holes in the office of every bureaucrat in France.
Uncle Jesse revealed that Andre Malraux, French novelist and heart-and-soul sympathizer with the Loyalists, was buying arms for the Spanish government. He had an apartment in Paris, full of art treasures, and he was selling these, and spending the funds and perhaps other funds for planes—of which, being an aviator himself, he was a judge. Lanny had an impulse to go to him; but at once he was confronted by the same difficulty which had tied him hand and foot in New York. Such a man as Malraux would live surrounded by Fascist spies; and how could an American with rich connections go to him and give him money without having it known? To say nothing of earmarking the purchase, saying: “I have two aviator friends at the Albacete airport and I want to make certain that this plane goes to them!” A man might as well imagine that he could drive up to the Arc de Triomphe, dig a hole under it and blow it up with dynamite, and not have anybody ask his name and address!
So Lanny would go on doing what he had done for years, giving a little here and a little there. Some to Trudi, as she called for it; some for the school in Cannes, which had a new director; some to Longuet for the paper; some to Rick for the job of waking up labor in England; some to Hansi and Bess for the same purpose in New York. And always: “Put this in as your contribution, and don’t mention me!”
VII
Zaharoff had moved to the hotel which he owned in Monte Carlo; earlier than usual, because his old bones craved the sunshine and dreaded the November chill. Madame had been lent to Olive Hellstein, who had once been Emily’s guess as a proper wife for her foster-son. Now Olivie had a French husband and half a dozen children; but one of them had “passed over,” and the mother had learned about the Polish medium and now enjoyed every day a harmless exchange of nothings with the alleged spirit of her little one. Also, there was Olivie’s uncle Solomon, who had died of mistreatment by the Nazis, and this stoutish elderly banker “came through” at intervals, showing a most astonishing knowledge of the family banking-business in all the capitals of Europe, and discoursing freely on the problem of anti-Semitism in the spirit world. There were no Nazis in that world, he declared, because nobody would have anything to do with them; where they went he had never been told.
Madame was lent about like that in Paris and London fashionable society. It never seemed to make any difference what house she stayed in, provided that people were kind to her. She could always entertain herself with two packs of cards; and every day, for exercise, she strolled to the nearest kiosk and bought a cheap popular magazine or newspaper, her criterion being that it had an abundance of pictures. The strange gift by which she earned her living played but a small part in her personal life, and she got a little tired of having to assure people that she didn’t know how it had come or when it would go, if ever.
Trudi had been thinking a lot about this problem in Lanny’s absence. He had lent her Osty’s Supernormal Faculties in Man, and it had been dawning upon her mind that this universe is far more extensive and complicated than Karl Marx had dreamed. She said: “Lanny, I wonder if I could try Madame again and see if Ludi has anything more to say.”
Lanny replied: “Sure thing,” for he and his mother ranked as the Polish medium’s discoverers and therefore had the first call.
He phoned to Olivie and went for the old woman, and got the same room in the hotel just around the corner from Trudi. He had decided to try being present, sitting off in a corner and hoping that Tecumseh wouldn’t notice him. Trudi came in and seated herself in the chair which had been placed in front of Madame; the latter went into her trance at once, and there was a silence, while Trudi tried the experiment of concentrating upon the thought of her former husband and wishing him to appear.
But this was not Ludi’s afternoon. Suddenly Tecumseh said: “There is an old man here, a stranger. He wanders around looking frightened. He seems to want to talk but he can’t.”
“What does he look like?” asked Trudi, to be polite.
“He is very, very old. I believe he has just come over. He has a funny little white beard at the point of his chin and it waggles. I believe he is looking for you, Lanny.” There was no use trying to fool the Amerindian chieftain by sitting off in a corner. If you were there, you were there, and you had better behave yourself.
Lanny obediently brought up his chair; and when Tecumseh asked: “Do you know any such person?” he answered at once: “I know one, but he is not in the spirit world.”
“You can never know who is in the spirit world,” declared the deep voice with a Polish accent. “It takes but a flash to carry you across, so do not be so cocky. This old man—I know him, too. Years ago you brought him to me, and he was frightened and ran away. Don’t you remember, the Unknown Soldier came and talked to him, and the men who had been killed at Verdun yelled at him, and there was a terrible racket of guns—he said that he made guns and then he ran away from the sound of them!”
“I remember very well, indeed,” replied the grandson of Budd Gunmakers. “If that old gentleman is here I would be more than glad to talk with him.” He looked at Trudi and she at him, for here might be a real phenomenon.
“He says he is looking for his wife. He doesn’t want to talk to anybody else. He calls her Maria. Is that correct?”
“That is one of her names.”
“I thought maybe he was calling upon the Virgin. There is a very strong Catholic influence here. Is he a Catholic?”
“I don’t think so; but she is.”
“The old man is weeping, and tears are running
down his cheeks. He seems quite distracted and I don’t think he knows what I say to him.”
“Tell him that Lanny Budd is here. He knows me very well and you gave me many messages for him in the past.”
There came a pause, and then a feeble voice: “Mon garcon!”
Was it delusion on Lanny’s part that it bore some trace of the voice of Zaharoff? Certainly it had traces of the voice which Tecumseh had made out of the voice of Madame Zyszynski. The explanation commonly given was that the spirits were using the vocal cords of the medium. That sounded silly, until you stopped to ask yourself: “How does any person use his own vocal cords?” An idea forms in your mind, and instantly it becomes a vibration of your vocal cords. Air causes cords to vibrate, you say; but how does an idea cause a current of air to move? Somewhere in the process, non-material idea creates material motion; but how that can happen is something beyond the power of the wisest scientist to explain or conceive. Lanny could argue: “The same process that made it possible for Zaharoff to use the vocal cords of Zaharoff might make it possible for him to use the vocal cords of Zyszynski.”
VIII
Anyhow, here he was, the old spider, the old wolf, the old devil, calling to Lanny Budd in tones pitiful beyond description. A feeble voice, yet it seemed to represent tremendous effort, and it couldn’t be sustained more than a few words at a time. “Lanny, I cannot find her. Tell him! Tell Tecumseh! I must have help! I am lost here!”
“Do not worry so much, old friend,” said Lanny, trying to soothe him. “Things will be easier in a little while. You are new to this world, I suppose.”
“I have been here before … looking for her. But … I cannot stay. She is gone, Lanny. She is dead!”
“You are confused, my friend. She has been dead a long time.”
“She has died again!”
“But that does not make sense. Can anybody die a second time?”
“Why not? If once, why not twice? She is gone! I cannot find her … never … never again!”
Another silence, and Lanny said: “Talk to him, Tecumseh. You can see that the old man is suffering greatly.”
“People shout at him,” declared the chieftain, “just as they did before. Nobody wants him here, and that frightens him.”
“Are the spirits so unkind, Tecumseh?”
“You do not understand our world. It is their nature, which works in spite of them; he feels it and it shrivels him up. He is trying to talk to you, but he cannot find the energy.”
“You have so much energy; please find out what he is trying to tell me.”
A pause. “He is trying to talk about his will. He thinks it is very important. He is troubled because he did not leave you anything.”
“Tell him I never expected anything from him.”
“He thought you did. He says he never understood you.”
“That is unfortunate, Tecumseh. I was only trying to be kind. I tried to help him find his wife. Tell him that.”
“He says he never knew whether to believe anybody. And now it is too late.”
“Tell him it isn’t. We will help him, you and I and his other friends.”
“He keeps crying and says he has no friends. He used to have a great deal of money, but now he has nothing and nobody pays him honor. He says that he feels naked.”
“Take charge of him. You are such a powerful person yourself.”
“Stop trying to feed me taffy. This old man punishes himself and nobody can stop him. He says something about a deal; papers that he had to sign this morning. He came over very suddenly. He is worried about it. He doesn’t trust his heirs. He doesn’t trust you or me or anybody. What was he? Some great criminal? He wrings his hands and screams that he wasn’t. He says: ‘If you knew what I had to do to get bread when I was young—and it wasn’t good bread, either!’”
IX
Such were the last words, at least for a long while, from Sir Basil Zaharoff, Knight Commander of the Bath of Great Britain and Grand Officier de la Legion d’Honneur de France. Tecumseh fell silent, and presently Madame stirred, and opened her eyes and sighed. “Did anything go wrong?” she inquired, in a dazed way. “I feel strange.”
“One of the spirits was unhappy,” said Lanny.
“Ah, that always upsets me.”
He offered to get her some wine and biscuits. She was a temperate person; she would drink one small glass of wine and nibble a couple of biscuits, and then a delightful thought would begin to stir in her slow mind: the cinema around the corner! She always sought American pictures; she had had a hard time in New York, but America was wonderful and its pictures much the best. Lanny laid a twenty-franc note on her knee and said: “When you have seen the pictures, take a taxi to Madame Olivie’s. And thanks for your help.”
“Bonjour, Monsieur Lanny.” Her cinema-trained mind suspected a romance between these two fine-looking persons, and she would carry their images with her and blend them with the happenings on the screen.
Meanwhile, Trudi and Lanny hurried out. They had the same thought, hardly needing to speak it. Was Zaharoff dead? “If it’s true, Lanny, it’s incredible!” she exclaimed; and he chuckled. It phrased so perfectly the instinctive reaction to these phenomena of the mental underworld. If it wasn’t true it was easy to understand, but if it was true it just couldn’t be!
Lanny said: “An apparition came to me once, and I knew it was real. I feel the same way this time. The old man was due to die, of course.”
They walked to a corner where there was a kiosk, and there were the papers with the news spread on their front pages: “Zaharoff dies.” The ex-munitions king of Europe had suffered a heart attack in his bathroom early that morning and had died in the arms of his faithful valet. He had been known as “the mystery man of Europe,” but the papers had managed to find out a good deal about him, and after their custom had had it all ready to put into” type for the early afternoon editions. Lanny asked the woman at the kiosk: “How long have you had these papers on sale?”
“About half an hour, Monsieur.”
He said to Trudi: “That disposes of any idea that I might have seen the headlines without noticing them consciously. As a matter of fact, I think they would have caught my attention, for Zaharoff has always been important in my life. I have known him and watched him since I was a small boy; he fascinated me because he had such power, and I wondered what it meant to him and what was really going on inside him. He became to me a sort of Sunday-school sermon on the futility of great riches.”
“Something made him into that at our seance,” she commented.
“Possibly my subconscious mind. But there had to be some flash from outside to tell me he was dead. I certainly wasn’t thinking about him—I had my mind all set on Ludi and was rooting for him to come.”
“That business about his will, could that have been in your mind?”
“The old man was besieged by legacy-hunters, and of course I knew he must be thinking I was one. That was the curse of his great fortune: he couldn’t keep from having the thought about every man or woman who came near him. My guess is the duquesa was the only person he ever trusted in his life. That is why her loss crushed him so and the pursuit of her became an obsession. He punished himself, just as Tecumseh said a while ago.”
“‘Denn alle Schuld racht sich auf Erden,’” said Trudi, quoting Goethe.
The body of the great man was placed in a metal casket, lead inside and silver outside. The hearse which carried it stole out of Monte Carlo at four o’clock in the morning, followed by a guard car, and arrived at the Chateau de Balincourt at midnight. There, for some reason which was never explained, the casket was held for five months, and then one morning there was a funeral service in the chapel of the estate, attended only by members of the family and the servants. Extending from the pond in front of the chateau was an avenue of poplars, and at the far end of this a mausoleum in which lay the body of the duquesa; now her husband was laid beside her. It was as he had ordered, and was
perhaps the best that man can do in the presence of so mysterious and humiliating a phenomenon as death.
A couple of years later it happened that Lanny was strolling in Paris, and curiosity led him to number 53 Avenue Hoche. The mansion, in which he had watched the munitions king of Europe burning his private papers and setting fire to his chimney in the process, now stood empty, with its blinds tightly drawn. A gendarme paced silently back and forth in front of it, and Lanny engaged him in conversation. Who owned the house now? The man did not know. Lanny mentioned Zaharoff, and the man looked blank; he had never heard that strange foreign name. Byron has asked: “What is the end of fame?” and here was the answer!
X
Vittorio di San Girolamo arrived in Paris with his wife and put up at one of the smartest hotels. According to his promise, Lanny went to call on them and found that a year of rest and play had brought the color back into the young Italian’s cheeks. They told about their trip to California, and Lanny told about his to Spain—making it strictly non-political. The Capitano saw the Spanish struggle as the first step in the suppression of a world-wide labor conspiracy which had its source and center in Moscow. The Capitano was obliged to accept Hitler’s help in this task, but, even so, he despised and distrusted the Fuhrer, just as Beauty had declared. Lanny was able to agree, and they got along amiably enough.
Marceline sought an interview with her brother alone, and it turned out that she wanted money. Irma had generously given her a check in Reno—they had stopped there both going and coming, it appeared—but the money was nearly all spent, and how were they to live? Lanny explained that Zoltan had a chance to sell two of the Detaze paintings; if and when he did so, one-third of the price, less the commission, would go to Marceline. She wanted Lanny to advance it to her now, and he had anticipated the request and had made up his mind to say No.
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