The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  So when he heard this name spoken by a pusher of counterfeit money he betrayed no surprise whatever. In fact he wasn’t really surprised, because he had been thinking about Kurt Meissner in Stubendorf pretty continuously for the past week or two and had not failed to consider the possibility that Kurt might know something about Himmler money, and might even be using it—of course for some high purpose, according to the principles of German philosophical idealism.

  So now he asked with no sign of special interest, ‘What do you know about this man Meissner?’

  ‘I know that he is a musician and his first name is Kurt. They talk a lot about him in Stubendorf. It seems that he is famous, but I don’t know a thing about music.’

  ‘I think I have heard him play at a concert,’ Lanny said, following his principle of never telling an unnecessary falsehood.

  ‘He can’t play any more because he got badly hurt during the war. He lived in a little cottage with his family, but that is in ruins.’

  ‘Do you know where is he now?’

  ‘I heard that he was living in the East zone of Germany, in a village called Wendefurth, in the Harz Mountains. That is all I know’.

  ‘I suppose he lives on some of this Himmler money?’

  ‘He lives on some of what I bring back from pushing it. And he writes “the Word”. It’s supposed to be some sacred and very inspired word that goes out to the Germans once a week; they are supposed to learn it by heart and renew their faith in the Fatherland and in the duty Hitler taught them. I think it’s crazy myself; I don’t think one German in twenty would pay any attention to it’.

  Lanny was using all this as a test to see if Guzman was telling the truth. It sounded exactly like Kurt Meissner’s fanaticism. Doubtless it had been planned in advance, in the days when the Nazi leaders had seen defeat looming up and had organised what they called the Bavarian Redoubt. They were going to retire to the high mountains, where they had a store of ammunition and food, and were going to hold out forever, but Georgie Patton had been too quick for them. Lanny thought that Harry Truman was being too quick for them too; the Germans were getting democracy.

  ‘And has this Meissner turned Communist also?’

  ‘I don’t know that, Herr Budd, but he must have come to some understanding with the Communists, else why would they let him have a place to live, and how could he send his children to school and all the rest?’

  Lanny said, ‘I believe you are telling me the truth, Guzman. I want you to repeat this story, just as you told it to me, to the chief of our Secret Service here in the American sector. You don’t have to be frightened by the name Geheim Dienst—the Nazis had one, but ours is not the same. We will treat you as a decent person and keep you away from anyone who wants to harm you. It ought not to take long to check your story, and meantime you can study some travel folders and make up your mind what part of the world you prefer. Now get up and take a hot bath. Your clothes should be dry’.

  Lanny went to the room telephone, called the desk, and told them that two men were sitting in the lobby waiting for Mr Budd and to send them up to his room. Then he called the hotel porter and told him to send up Guzman’s clothes—and incidentally to give them a shot of D.D.T. What the Savoy Hotel would make of a fashionable American gentleman bringing a water-soaked bum to his room and cleaning him up was something that Lanny did not bother his head with. Many strange things were happening in all four of the sectors of the German Haupstadt in these confused days.

  The two Treasury men came in while Guzman was in the bathtub. Lanny explained the circumstances and told them that his prisoner was to be treated politely, but of course was not to be allowed to get away. They would take him in their car, and Lanny would follow in his.

  He had stowed the five hundred-dollar bills back in his secret pocket. He shaved and dressed and in due course was sitting in Morrison’s office along with the prisoner and his guards. Morrison understood German and had a German stenographer, so Guzman started his story all over again, with Lanny listening attentively and consulting his notes to make sure that the man was not making any slips. His story was the same, and Lanny was convinced that he was telling the truth.

  When the questioning was over the man was taken to an upstairs apartment where he would live with one of the Treasury agents, and be taught to play checkers, and study travel folders with their pretty pictures. Morrison confirmed the agreement that Lanny had made and said that he had done very well. There was nothing improbable about Guzman’s story; G-2, the Intelligence section of the Army, had knowledge of these groups of conspirators meeting and plotting all over Germany. No attention was paid to them unless they took some overt action. ‘Beer-cellar grumblers’, Morrison called them. Lanny said, ‘Watch out—I saw Adolf Hitler starting in a beer cellar’.

  5 WOUNDS OF A FRIEND

  I

  Lanny sat down with the Treasury man to discuss the question of how to follow up the lead. ‘It’s going to be a tough proposition’, Morrison said, ‘because those fellows are suspicious and they are killers. It looks as if we’d have to get at them through Kurt Meissner, and he apparently leads a lonely life. Would you go to see him for us, Mr Budd?’

  ‘I’ll make a try if you wish’, was the answer. ‘But I fear that Kurt is one man I can’t possibly deceive. You know the old saying, “If you fool me once it’s your fault; if you fool me twice it’s mine”. Kurt knows my whole bag of tricks’.

  ‘You must help us to understand his bag, Mr Budd. Tell me about his activities as a secret agent’.

  ‘The first time I discovered his work was just after the First World War. He was in Paris as an agent of the German Army. He had been a captain of artillery and now had come in to try to stir up trouble among French labour so as to get better terms for Germany. If he had been caught he would have been shot, of course. Because he was my friend and I was naïve at that time, I saved him and helped get him out of Paris. A dozen years or more later he was in Paris again, this time with unlimited funds, promoting the movement of the French reactionaries for reconciliation with Hitler. I helped him then because that was my camouflage—I was working for President Roosevelt. When the time came for our Army’s advance on the Rhine, Kurt was in Toul, spying on us. So you can see that he is an experienced intriguer’.

  ‘It would be a favour if you would go to see him’, said the official. ‘Do your best to make friends with him. He can’t do any worse than to order you away. At least you will know what his mood is and also about the place where he is living. It is probable that some of his gang may be nearby. They may have moved the bulk of the money there; they may have the plates and possibly even a printing press. You shouldn’t have any trouble getting a permit this time, since the Russians know you’.

  He reached into a drawer of his desk and took out a Baedeker, essential to his operations. ‘Northern Germany’, he read, and looked in the index, Wendefurth, page 354, and turned to the page. ‘Route Sixty-four; it rates only one line. You learn that there is a Kurhaus where you can stay for from four to five marks’.

  ‘That was before inflation’, Lanny said with a grin.

  ‘We’ll be glad to pay the bill’, said the other. ‘It’s in the Harz Mountains’.

  Lanny became inspired. Said he, ‘Auf die Berge will ich steigen, Wo die hohen Tannen ragen’. When the official looked blank he said, ‘That is from Heine’s Harzreise. When we were young in Germany we learned it by heart’.

  ‘I learned my German from some Berlitz phonograph records’, confessed Morrison. ‘I wish I could take a Harz journey with you and listen to poetry’.

  Instead Lanny drove in his aged ‘coop’ to the Karlshorst district of East Berlin and interviewed once more the young staff officer of Marshal Sokolovsky. This time he was known as an established friend of Stalin, and they readily gave him a permit for his Harzreise. The mountains lie in that Soviet zone of Germany which surrounds Berlin and extends for a hundred miles or more to the West. Lanny explained that he had
found everything in Stubendorf-Stielczsz a wreck and had not been able to get any information concerning the paintings he was seeking; but he had learned that an old friend who would know about them was now living in the Harz.

  Lanny took the autobahn which runs slightly south of west to Magdeburg, which he found laid totally flat. The route was Aschersleben, and then the highway to Halberstadt, another city totally bombed. Everywhere he saw the misery in which these beaten people were living and renewed his hatred of the horrible thing called war. Then came Quedlinburg, a town which had been the first capital of Germany under King Heinrich the First, a little more than a thousand years ago. It was full of ancient legends; the old castle still stood, and the cathedral, a landmark for tourists. Oddly enough Heinrich Himmler had adopted this place for the meetings of his Schutzstaffel and the Hitler Youth. Every year they had a great festival here, and Himmler came and celebrated the birthday of Heinrich the First. He had his own tomb built there in order that he might be buried next to the king; but, alas, he was not able to control the manner of his death. When he chewed his little cyanide capsule the British took the body, carried it out into the forest and dug a deep hole; they didn’t even waste enough wood for a coffin, they just put him in the ground, and the British sergeant said, ‘The worm to the worms’. Let the Germans honour their thousand-year-old kings, but let them honour no Nazi worms!

  Up the valley of the little Bode River Lanny re-enacted the declaration of the poet Heine: ‘Into the mountains will I ascend, Where the tall fir trees rise’. He passed the Rosstrappe, a great rock on which nature has marked a horseshoe. Here, according to the legend, the knight Bodo followed a princess with whom he had fallen in love. In jumping over the valley in pursuit of her he fell into the river; in its depths his crown is watched by a large dog, and anyone who ventures to dive for it will be killed by the dog. On the opposite side of the valley is the Witches’ Dance Place, where on Walpurgis night Lanny might have seen the witches and the goats and the evil spirits dancing. But Lanny’s attention at this time was centred upon those evil spirits which were operating in the Kremlin and in the Karlshorst district of Berlin.

  II

  The traveller drove on up the little valley until he came to the tiny village called Wendefurth, built upon rocky slopes in groves of evergreen trees. He stopped to buy petrol and ask where Kurt Meissner lived, and there was pointed out to him a cottage set back from the road. He drove up to it and saw that it was a comfortable house, half a dozen rooms, he judged, and in a grove some fifty yards away was a one or two-room cottage which he knew would be Kurt’s studio. Evidently the court composer of Hitler’s Third Reich had not been left destitute.

  Lanny found his heart beating faster as he parked his car and got out. He knocked and waited. The door was opened by a woman whom he knew well, and yet he hardly knew her. She was about forty, but he would have taken her for sixty. Her hair, which had been yellow, was grey. She had been buxom, but now she was thin and worn, and her face was lined with care. She had lived through seven of the most dreadful years of human history and had been trying to keep eight children alive. Whether she had succeeded Lanny didn’t know.

  She saw before her an elegant, foreign-looking gentleman with a little brown moustache, about as tall as her husband, wearing a voluminous overcoat of English tweed and a homburg which might have just come out of a bandbox. She took one look at him and her eyes widened. ‘Herr Budd!’ She had always called him that, because she had been young when she married Kurt, and Lanny had been a mature man. He smiled and said, ‘Grüss’ Gott, Elsa’. It was a Bavarian greeting, and he knew that she had come from there.

  But her eyes continued to stare. ‘He will not see you, Herr Budd!’ she half whispered. She did not name his name, there being only one ‘he’ in the world for her.

  Lanny had anticipated the statement and replied firmly, ‘Let me come in, Elsa’. He took a step, and she gave way. She had been brought up as an echt deutsches Mädchen, and the man gave the orders.

  He entered the little living room, and a glance told him that it was not Kurt’s taste; it was cheap stuff, and he was doubtless renting the place. He asked, ‘Why is Dorothea afraid of me? It was a playful name that he had conferred upon her; she was ‘die gute verständige Mutter’ of Goethe’s poem.

  ‘He is bitter against you’, she replied.

  ‘I have forgiven him, Dorothea’. He meant that to disconcert her, and it did. ‘Where is he?’ he asked.

  ‘He is in the little house. He is composing’.

  ‘I will not interrupt him then. I will wait here, if I may’.

  ‘He will not like it, Herr Budd’, she said, still in a half whisper. ‘He will be angry with me’.

  ‘Oh, then I will not stay. I’ll go to the studio, but I won’t interrupt him’. He added, ‘I have come all the way from America to see him. It is a sad thing when old friends quarrel. It hurts me, and I know it must be hurting him. I want to make up with him’.

  ‘I am afraid, Herr Budd’, she declared. ‘It is a mistake’.

  ‘At least I must try’, he said. ‘Tell me, how are the children?’

  “All but one are alive. It is all that we could hope for’.

  ‘How do you get along?’

  ‘We survive. It is not easy. The children help’.

  ‘All right’, he said, ‘I will go’. He went slowly toward the door. ‘Pray for me, Elsa’. He knew she was devout and would take this seriously.

  III

  He walked to the cheap little white-painted cottage. From it came the sounds of a piano, and to Lanny they were infinitely pathetic: a few notes would be played in the treble, and then the corresponding notes in the bass. Kurt could never hear them together, but being an expert musician he could put them together in his mind. Lanny, who had stabbed at the piano in frantic delight all through his boyhood and youth, could also put the sounds together, and he longed to be in there playing them. So many hours he had played with Kurt on one piano, and when possible on two.

  There was a tiny porch in front, just enough to shelter the doorway. Lanny stood and listened. It was a kind of eavesdropping, but Kurt would have to forgive that, along with all the rest. It was the soul of Kurt that was being laid bare here, the old Kurt whom Lanny had known, grave and solemn, dignified and austere.

  He was experimenting; he would try one chord and then another; you could follow the march of his spirit. He had composed a ‘Führermarsch’, and that had been full of glory, or of insolence, if you preferred. Now it was a march to the grave, a Götterdämmerung. Kurt was trying to tell the story of heroic Germany which had tried to impose order on the world and had been knocked down and trampled by wild cattle. Kurt was trying to tell of sorrow beyond telling; he was mourning the death of a majestic civilisation.

  Lanny stood there for what may have been an hour. It was a strange experience; he had come five or six thousand miles to meet Kurt, and now he was meeting him. Even if he went away without exchanging a word, he would still feel that he had renewed their old friendship. So many of their most intimate hours had been spent in playing great music together.

  IV

  At last the groping chords stopped, and Lanny knocked on the door. He heard footsteps, the door opened, and the two men confronted each other. ‘Hello, Kurt’, said Lanny; and Kurt, who was not a man to show any surprise, just looked at him. Lanny, knowing that his time might be short, spoke quickly. ‘Kurt, I have come all the way from New York to see you’.

  ‘I have no desire to see you’, was the reply.

  Lanny hurried on, ‘I am unhappy because of our broken friendship. You cannot know how much you have meant to me, Kurt. You were my teacher’.

  ‘You have not been a good pupil’.

  ‘We were friends, Kurt, and friendship is not a thing to be broken lightly. I think about you often, and I grieve because of what happened’.

  ‘There is nothing that can be done about it’, said Kurt coldly. ‘My country is wrecked, an
d yours is triumphant. You are the masters, and we are the servants. That will have to suffice’.

  ‘It does not suffice at all, Kurt. I have not the slightest desire to be your master. I have never had any claim to that’.

  ‘You chose a strange way to manifest that attitude. I introduced you to the greatest man in the world, and you betrayed me at the same time’.

  ‘There is no use in our fighting the war over again, Kurt. Your country went one way and mine went another. You had to go with yours, and I had to go with mine. But that is over now and we have another world situation’.

  ‘Yes. You want our friendship now! You want to let bygones be bygones’.

  ‘What I want, Kurt, is not to talk politics. I want to tell you that my feeling for you has never changed and that I beg you to put bitterness out of your heart. Won’t you let me come in and talk to you?’ That was the crucial question, and Kurt opened the door wider and stepped back.

  Lanny needed only a glance to see that nothing of the old studio was here. The piano was a small cheap one. At one side was a table with sheets of music on it. Against the wall stood unpainted shelves for music. Upon the wall of the studio at Stubendorf had hung three portraits: Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner; these walls were bare.

  Kurt sat on the bench in front of the piano and signed Lanny to the only chair in the room. Making haste to get away from politics and wars, Lanny said, ‘Tell me, Kurt, how are you getting along? I have been deeply concerned about it’.