The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  Such reflections were part of the stuff of Lanny Budd’s being; but when he came near to his destination he put them out of his mind. He had in his inside breast pocket something that was burning a hole in it, as the saying is, and he had to think and think hard about that.

  He was no stranger to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for they had shared a curious adventure. In the days when Britain was at war with Hitler but before America came in, Lanny had recognised a Hitler agent in a New York restaurant, an Englishman who had turned traitor to his native land. Lanny had set his wife the task of engaging the man’s attention—something very alarming to a well-bred Southern lady—while he went to the telephone and called F.B.I. agents to the scene. The result had been the digging out of a nest of smugglers who were getting industrial diamonds into Germany. So Lanny could be sure that when he called upon Mr Wilbur C. Post, special agent in charge of the New York office, he would receive a warm welcome.

  Walking slowly, Lanny looked about him at the people coming and going; he was concerned that no one who knew him should see him entering that building or lingering near it. So it came about that when he was within perhaps thirty feet of the entrance he saw a black sedan come quickly to the vacant space in front and stop at the curb. The door was opened quickly, and there stepped out a large, solidly built man, with features somewhat Irish in character, a round forehead, and rather wide mouth. Lanny hadn’t the slightest doubt that it was the man he was about to call on.

  And then at his heels came a second man, and when Lanny saw that man he came as close to losing his breath as ever in his adventurous career. As quick as thought he turned on his heel, as if he had observed some especially interesting sight in the show window of the building. He went to it and appeared to be looking into it, but out of the corners of his eyes he saw those two men go quickly into the building. The instant they disappeared through the revolving door he ran and followed through it. The two men were halfway down the lobby, and there was an elevator waiting; they entered, and Lanny was just in time to get to the elevator and step in before the operator closed the door.

  So there he was, shut in the little box with those two men. He deliberately lowered his head and closed his eyes, like a man saying a prayer. He wasn’t taking any chance of causing them to speak to him, there in the presence of the operator and several other passengers; he just stood and waited, and when the elevator came to the proper floor and the two men stepped out, he stepped close behind them. As they walked down the corridor he stepped up beside Post and murmured, ‘Don’t say anything until we get to your office’.

  They entered the reception room, and the official gave only a nod to the receptionist and walked down a corridor and entered his private office. The other man followed close at his heels, and Lanny followed the other man. When the three were inside and Post had closed the door, then was the time for talking, and Lanny said, ‘I suppose you remember me, Mr Post. I am Lanny Budd’.

  ‘Certainly I remember you, Mr Budd’, was the reply.

  Then Lanny turned to the other man and smiled. ‘Hello, Hansi!’ And he put his arm across Hansi’s shoulder and gave him a little hug. ‘You old rascal!’ he exclaimed. ‘You fooled the life out of me! You pretty nearly broke my heart’.

  XI

  Really Lanny was so shaken in his deepest feelings that he could have cried; and as for Hansi, he was so surprised, so completely bewildered, that he really did have tears in his eyes before this meeting was over. It was something like a resurrection from the dead.

  It was Lanny who collected himself first and turned to the third man. ‘All this must puzzle you, Mr Post. You will understand, I think, if you look at this’. He took the letter out of the breast pocket of his coat and put it in the other’s hands. ‘I got this in the mail this morning and came into town to give it to you’.

  Post took the envelope and looked at it. He took out the sheet of paper and unfolded it; one glance was enough. ‘Oh, I see’, he said.

  Lanny added, ‘I don’t know if you understand that Hansi Robin is my brother-in-law’.

  ‘Yes, Mr Budd, he has told me that’.

  ‘I was just about to enter your building when I saw you two together. So I realised what must be going on here. I want to say, the very first thing, that you can count on me absolutely. I have had some experience with secret work, and I know how it is carried on. I am guessing that Hansi must have had a letter like this some time ago’.

  The experienced Mr Post did not rise to that bait. ‘Do you have any idea as to the writer of this letter, Mr Budd?’

  ‘None whatever’, Lanny said. ‘I suppose you have noticed the mistake with the letter “n”—four times repeated, twice in my name, once in the “N.J.”, and once in “Personal”. That is the printed form of the letter “i” in the Russian alphabet, and it may be some indication’.

  ‘Have you shown this letter to anyone else?’

  ‘I have shown it to two persons. First, my wife; I needed her advice. It was hard for me to make up my mind to take this action against my own sister—half-sister she is, but she has been close to me since her childhood and until the Communist party came between us. It is a dreadful thing for us both’.

  ‘And the other person?’

  ‘My wife thought I should take the question to my father, and I have just come from his office. It was a hard decision for him also, because it may mean shocking publicity for the family; but he agreed that it was a matter of duty. Of course you know as well as I that anonymous letters are not always to be trusted; but if this statement is true and if my sister is betraying our country—well, you are the one to decide what action shall be taken. I am sure you will promise that there will be no publicity unless and until you are able to get evidence that a crime has been committed’.

  ‘Of that you may be certain, Mr Budd’.

  ‘This thing has taken me completely by surprise. Hansi was so good an actor that he actually made me believe he had turned into a Communist. My wife and I were terribly shocked and grieved. I don’t suppose he is here as a prisoner’. Lanny said this with a smile, as became one who had been trained in the social arts.

  ‘No, he is not a prisoner, Mr Budd’.

  ‘Let me repeat, you don’t have to worry because I have discovered this situation. I won’t say a word, and my wife is discretion itself; she has helped me to keep important secrets, and she is too busy to wish to gossip with anybody. Let me remind you that I was President Roosevelt’s confidential agent for a matter of eight years, and I was able to fool the Nazis almost until the very end. I have recently been doing some work for a government agency—it is possible they may have made inquiry of you’.

  ‘They may have, Mr Budd’.

  ‘I think also it may be easier for Hansi to work if he has someone to confide in—someone he knows intimately and who will give him moral support. I wouldn’t suggest telling my father about him because he doesn’t know Hansi so well; but I think my wife would have to know, because it would be very hard for me to meet Hansi without her knowing, and it would be hard for me to go on pretending to her that I think Hansi is a Communist. We wouldn’t have to meet him often, and we would be discreet about it—more so than he was in coming to this office’.

  ‘Sit down’, said Mr Post, ‘and we will talk the matter out’.

  XII

  So it was a man greatly relieved who drove back to Edgemere that evening. When he told his wife about it she did cry; she couldn’t control herself. It was, ‘Oh, Lanny, how wonderful!… Oh, thank God!… Oh, Lanny, such a relief! It was preying on my mind—I was eating my heart out over it! I just couldn’t endure to think what had happened to Hansi!’ She had to wipe away her tears.

  He told her that Post had consented to her sharing the secret—of course upon her promise that she would not breathe a hint of it. They would not meet Hansi unless there was some important reason for doing so; Hansi had told his wife that he would break entirely with Lannv and Laurel, they being mos
t dangerous persons to Bess and improper persons for any loyal Red to associate with.

  Lanny had had no chance for a talk with his old friend. The story, as he had gathered it from a few hints, was that Hansi had received an anonymous letter some time ago. He had begun keeping watch to find out if the charge might be true; he had ransacked Bess’s desk in her absence and had listened to her telephone conversations and picked up hints. He had even steamed open several of her letters—enough to make sure there really was a basis to the charge. Then he had had the same mental conflict as Lanny and Laurel; he had made up his mind that it was his duty to take the facts to the F.B.I. Out of that had come the project for him to become a Communist convert, joint the party, and serve as an unpaid secret agent of the government. Now he was to be permitted to communicate with Lanny and Laurel, using the code name of Absalom. Lanny told Laurel that Bess was to be Isabella—but he didn’t tell about Ferdinand or about Christopher Columbus for whom the old-time Isabella had pawned her crown jewels.

  So there was Lanny Budd, tied up in a net of intrigue so complicated that he had to stop and think who was allowed to know what. Laurel knew Monck well and was allowed to read what he wrote about conditions in Germany; but when Monck referred to Ferdinand, Lanny would say casually that this was one of the people Monck was working with, and that was all. Robbie knew that Bess was under investigation by the F.B.I. and that Bess was Isabella, but he was supposed to think that Hansi was also a Communist and also under investigation. Everyone else in the Peace Group was supposed to know that both Hansi and Bess were Communists, but they knew nothing about the investigation. The musical pair were spoken of in a sort of mournful tone, as if they were in jail or had just died and were in a funeral parlour.

  9 THE USES OF ADVERSITY

  I

  Professor Charles T. Alston came to speak over the radio. He was getting on in years—he had been Lanny’s boss at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I, and it was from him that Lanny had learned the ins and outs of world diplomacy. Now he was teaching college classes those same ins and outs, which had not changed much in a quarter of a century. He was a spry little gentleman with a trim grey beard. He looked upon Lanny as the first of his pupils and saw that he got a post-graduate course now and then. It was he who had introduced Lanny to Roosevelt and eight years later to Truman.

  He arrived in the middle of the afternoon, because he said he wanted to know what he should talk about and how far he should go. He came to the house where Laurel was working, and she ’phoned Lanny at the office; Lanny brought Rick, so there were four of them, one to talk and three to listen, for they considered Alston the best-informed man they knew. He had been a presidential ‘fixer’ for a matter of sixteen years; first in Albany when Roosevelt was governor and then in Washington. He knew everybody who was on the inside of affairs.

  He was a much-worried liberal and friend of man. He said that Europe had not been in such peril since the days of Tamerlane in the fourteenth century; or perhaps not since the fifth century when the Huns had got to France. He said that never before had there been such a trap set for the mind and spirit of humanity; that never before had there been such a sudden and frightful degeneration in a mass movement. He said the war-tormented and impoverished workers of Eastern Europe had been promised a heaven on earth and plunged into a hell of cruelty and deception. He said the bosses of the Kremlin were utterly unscrupulous men with no real belief in the ideals they professed; they talked internationalism but they trusted only Russians and were plundering all the other peoples whom they got in their power. They had no thought but to hold power and extend it, and now they believed they had the whole world at their mercy. They were all things to all men—Moslems to the Arabs, Buddhists to the East Indians, pacifists to the Quakers and the Peace Group.

  Said Alston, “They have got the exploited workers of Italy and France marching and singing for them, and they have got America naked of arms and helpless. Who is going to persuade this new Republican Congress to vote a hundred billion dollars to turn America into an armed camp again? Who is going to persuade another ten million American youths to volunteer for another war? Do you want me to ask questions like that on the Peace Programme?’

  Laurel Creston Budd was excited, of course—and on account of the nursing infant she wasn’t supposed to get excited. ‘Look, Professor Alston’, she said, ‘granting all your premises—granting that the Communist leaders are what you say they are and that their intentions are as fixed as their dogmas—isn’t there another and better way to meet them? They are winning the minds of the workers by telling them falsehoods. Can’t we win by telling the truth?’

  ‘But what is truth to the men in the Kremlin, Mrs Budd? I assure you they have taken over Hitler’s dictum: the bigger the lie the easier it is to get it believed. They are extremely clever in their lying; they have set the whole machinery of government at home and in all the conquered lands to repeating ingenious inventions. On the other hand, the whole tradition of our government is to leave the spreading of information to private enterprise. All our sources of information tell the public what the public likes to hear—because that is the way to get sales, and to get sales is the way to get advertising revenue’.

  ‘Yes, Professor Alston, but that is just why we organised the Peace Foundation: to give the people those facts which they don’t get from the capitalist press’.

  ‘But you are telling the people to disarm, and what I have to tell you is that the free people must arm’.

  There followed an argument in which all four took part. What was the real purpose of the Peace Group? Was it to tell the free people to disarm first, or to call for general disarmament by agreement? Was it to tell them to arm but not to use the arms? Was it to tell the Reds that the arms were not to be used? What was the use of arms if you didn’t intend to use them? Arms couldn’t use themselves; they had no meaning unless they were in the hands of resolute people who were willing to use them in case of necessity.

  ‘Look at the Swiss’, said Rick. ‘They stand there in their mountain land, and every man in the country has a gun and knows how to shoot. They are armed to the teeth, but they say, “We intend our arms for defence. Let us alone, stay out of our country, and you have nothing to fear from our arms; but if you cross our borders, then you have plenty to fear’. The result of taking that attitude and making it plain to all the world has been that the Swiss lived through two world wars and were untouched’.

  ‘That’s all right’, said Lanny. ‘The Swiss have their mountain fortress, and they manage by frugality and hard work to prosper there, but we are a huge country with an immensely long coast line. Are we going to say, “Let us alone and we don’t care what happens elsewhere?” What are we going to say about Canada and Mexico? Are we going to say that we don’t care what happens to the Panama Canal?’

  ‘Let me carry on from there’, said Alston. ‘I have just learned from a high Army officer in Washington that the Reds are organising an army of half a million North Koreans. And now face this situation: We have withdrawn our armies from South Korea and have left the pathetic South Korean government a few weapons, just enough for defensive purposes, not for aggressive. The Russian workers are living on a subsistence wage, with prices so high that they have to work for a month to earn a pair of shoes; and meanwhile the Trans-Siberian railroad is crowded with trains carrying tanks, guns, ammunition, and oil to North Korea. Ships laden with supplies are coming by way of the Suez Canal and the Indian Ocean, or perhaps through the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia—who knows where Russian ships go? It will take two years, maybe three, to train the North Korean peasant boys and indoctrinate them with the glorious idea of killing their landlords and moneylenders and setting up a free independent democratic republic in the whole of their native land’.

  ‘Then some day in midsummer, when the ground is dry and everything is ready, border incidents will be provoked, and the Soviet radio will broadcast to the world that the evil South Korean c
apitalists have invaded the free workers’ and peasants’ republic of North Korea, and that the workers’ and peasants’ government is gallantly defending the integrity of its native land. It will take a month or two to conquer the whole country, and then it will take another two or three years to get ready for the next step, which is across the narrow strait to Japan. You understand, there are two or three hundred thousand Japanese who were war prisoners and have been indoctrinated with the hope of killing their landlords and capitalists and seizing the wealth of that country. I am convinced that the Soviets mean to take all Asia, perhaps before they take all Europe; and I ask you, at what stage are the American people going to wake up to that situation? Can you see American boys going cheerfully to Korea to die for what they call “yellow bellies?” Can you see an isolationist Congress cheerfully voting the billions of dollars it would take to save South Korea from the Reds?’

  ‘What would you have us do?’ asked Laurel. ‘Send an army to South Korea now?’

  ‘I would proceed to rearm our country, and then I would make it plain to the Reds that any further expansion of their territory would be resisted by the United Nations. I believe that with wise diplomacy we could persuade the free nations to back us up, and we could make our intentions so clear that even Mr Vishinsky would believe us’.