The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  ‘I would hate to promise it’, Lanny said. ‘He was a Wehrmacht general and a Nazis only pro forma. But he regards Kurt as one of his people, a genius of his raising and fostering. The old man is a Prussian aristocrat and looks forward to the return of class to their one-time glory’.

  ‘Tell me’, said Morrison, ‘did Fritz say anything to you about buried treasure?’

  ‘I don’t recall that he did’.

  ‘He told us he believed his father had knowledge of some of the Nazi caches. No doubt you know that they had great stores of gold and jewels. When the time came for them to scatter and flee they carried it off and hid it in places they thought were safe. We have turned up several lots and we’re on the trail of more. That may possibly be where Kurt gets his living expenses’.

  ‘I would doubt that’, Lanny said. ‘He is a man of honour according to his own notions, and he would consider that state treasure. He would feel free to use it to promote the work of the Volkischerbund, but not for his family expenses.’

  ‘Yet he would use the proceeds of the counterfeiting work?

  ‘That would be different from his point of view. That is British and American money, and putting it off on us would be an act of war’.

  ‘Even though it was Germans who bought the money?’

  Lanny laughed. ‘Those Germans would be trading with the enemy, and at their own risk. The ultimate effect would be to dilute the currency of the emeny lands and weaken their economies. Bear in mind that Kurt has never surrendered; he has just gone underground’.

  ‘We will get him under our ground’, said Morrison. ‘I’ll take the matter up with the Refugee Commission at once’.

  ‘They will grant the request?’

  ‘I am sure they will. They haven’t planes enough to fly all the refugees who want to get out of Berlin into West Germany, and they haven’t places enough to put them in; but when we make a request it is for a special reason, and they do us the honour to suppose that we know our business’.

  ‘So I can tell Kurt that the thing will go through?’

  ‘You may. Tell him to get his family out as quickly as possible’.

  ‘I have already done that’, Lanny said. ‘We have arranged a code. I’m to write him that the music scores are available’.

  ‘And don’t sign your name,’ advises Morrison.

  ‘I will sign it ‘Bienvenu’, the name of my mother’s home on the French Riviera where he lived for many years. I keep reminding him of it, with the hope that some day he may come back and be the great musician and decent man I used to know’.

  V

  Lanny didn’t wait to learn the outcome of Operation Meissner; there was nothing more for him to do about it, and Morrison promised to keep him informed. Monck made the same promise: also he gave Lanny a letter to Irving Brown, the representative of the American Federation of Labour in Paris, who would be able to put Lanny in touch with the crucial events going on there.

  Lanny took a plane one morning and was set down on the Orly Airfield. He took a taxi to the elegant Hotel Crillon, which had been the headquarters of his father on business trips, and for Lanny a sort of second home from childhood on. The price of room and bath, he was told, would now be twenty-five hundred francs per day; but this did not alarm him, for he knew that the franc stood at eighty-four one-hundreths of a cent. Lanny could remember a time in his boyhood when the franc had stood five to the dollar; it had begun sliding during World War I, and the end was not yet. Currency inflation is to the government what as anesthetic is to the surgeon; it provides an easy and painless way of separating the rich from their savings and reducing the wages of all employed persons in the community.

  Lanny’s first action was to go to the writing room of the hotel and compose a note on its impressive stationery to the Marquis de la Tour de Brielle, informing that gentleman that Mr Lanning Prescott Budd had the pleasure to announce his arrival in Paris and his readiness to inspect the Rembrandt painting. He addressed that note to the nobleman’s town house in the St. Germain district, where the old aristocracy lived their ineffably dignified lives. Crude Americans were not often admitted to those homes; but it was sometimes a problem to keep the wolf from the door, and an American dollar was worth a hundred and nineteen francs officially and more on the black market.

  Having posted the letter, Lanny knew that he was free for a couple of days. There would be no possibility of a telephone call from the marquis, for that gentleman’s code of etiquette had been established at least two centuries before the telephone was thought of. But Lanny knew some modern-minded Frenchmen; one of them was Captain Denis de Bruyne, who lived in the Seine-et-Oise district outside Paris. Lanny had not seen him for more than a year. When he heard Lanny’s voice he exclaimed in delight, ‘I will come right in for you’.

  The traveller had time to lay out his belongings and get Edgemere, New Jersey, on the telephone. He told Laurel where he was and how he was, and heard that the family was thriving, and what speakers they were getting for the programme, and what there was important and interesting in the mail. ‘Take care of yourself’, pleaded Laurel, and he promised. There was no need for him to make the same request, for she always did.

  VI

  Le capitaine had been Denis fils, or junior, but he was that no longer; he wore a black band around his arm for his father, who had died early in the year. Presumably the old man had found lodgment in some paradise full of virgins, for besides being an efficient businessman he had been the most elegant and cultivated of roués. Thereby he had forfeited the regard of his wife, and his loss had been Lanny’s gain, for Marie de Bruyne had been Lanny’s adored amie for a matter of ten years or so. This, according to French custom, had made him a sort of member of the family; when Marie died the husband and the two sons and the lover all attended the funeral together, and no one found any impropriety in the event.

  Those two sons had grown up with Lanny as a sort of second father, by the mother’s special appointment. The younger, Charlot, had been shot by the Vichy gangsters toward the end of the war. Denis had been twice wounded in fighting the Germans and his health was not so good, he reported. Charlot’s wife had recently remarried and betaken herself and her children to a new home, so Denis and his family had the chateau, as it was called, though it was no more that an old brick villa with a lovely and well-tended garden.

  Denis insisted that Lanny should come out for the night. He had promised Annette, his wife, who knew that Lanny had helped to save their family from the partisans and so would roll out the red carpet for him. Lanny repacked one of his bags and went to Denis’s car, whose chauffeur he greeted as an old friend. They drove in a rainstorm through the traffic of Paris—traffic of which Laurel had remarked that it was carried on by homicidal maniacs. But they escaped alive, and out into the countryside which was beautiful even in November rain.

  They came through the village and along a country road, passing a spot that Lanny remembered from exactly a quarter of a century ago—where Marie de Bruyne had come walking and had stepped into his car and been carried away on a clandestine honeymoon. It was the same country road on which Lanny had walked three years ago, after the Americans had landed in France, but while this countryside was still under German occupation. He had come secretly in the night to warn the father to come over to the Allied side before it was too late.

  The children were at boarding school, so there were only Annette and her elderly mother; a different kind of vie à trois, for the head of this family was a strictly moral man, perhaps in reaction to his father’s ways, which he had known about since boyhood. All three of the family spoke English almost as well as French, and they had been reading the little Peace paper which Lanny sent them. They had occasionally been able to get the broadcasts by short wave, so they knew Lanny’s mind—all but the secret part, and they could make guesses about that. He told them what he had seen and learned in Berlin. He had a plausible reason for having been there, that he was a radio man and R.I.A.S had
invited him.

  VII

  Denis reported that business was bad and picking up but slowly. The rebuilding of France would be a long and painful process. He had inherited a block of Budd-Erling Aircraft stock, and a large amount of dividends had accumulated through the war. There were no dividends coming now, but Lanny made the guess that it wouldn’t be long before the company would be active again. To his surprise Denis declared that he had no interest in this; neither he nor his family wanted America or any other country to do any more fighting or to get ready for it. When Lanny expressed the opinion that this would mean surrendering to the Communists, Denis said he didn’t care; France had shed all the blood she could spare if she was to survive. The French were war-weary, blood-sick; and wanted no more of it.

  This was an Army officer who had fought gallantly and had been promoted for it. He had fought the Germans both in North Africa and in France, and he said he himself would be willing to go out and fight again and die; but he was talking about the French people and was sure they would not fight again. They knew well that in another war the Russian artillery and tanks would roll over them and thousands of planes would knock their fliers out of the sky. They would be beaten again and occupied again, and it was no comfort to hear that the Americans would come once more to deliver them. In a war that would be fought with atomic bombs there would be nothing left to deliver. The French, a practical-minded people, would surrender and take whatever came to them.

  When Lanny expostulated and talked about the soul of Marianne, Denis explained what had happened to that soul. All the courage and idealism that the French possessed had gone into the maquis, which is the French word for the underbrush, the bush. The young men had hidden there and trained themselves and got ready for the day when Eisenhower told them to come out and destroy German communications and supplies. Most ardent among these fighters had been the Communists, and they had propagandised the rest. The Maquis was Communist now, and that was all there was to it. The moment the war ended these men had gone back into the factories and with the same spirit had won over the French workers to their cause. Now all the big French unions were Communist-controlled; they could strike France at any time and have their way.

  They were on the verge of calling such a strike, said Denis; it might come any day, and who could put it down? And even if it were put down, the Reds would only gather new forces and try again. How could France, how could any country, be restored under such circumstances? Foreseeing all this, Denis had left his American dividends in the First National Bank of Newcastle. He had sold a part of the family business and had hidden away the family jewels and other treasures. At a moment’s notice they could be stowed in the car; he was even thinking about taking the boys out of boarding school so as to have them at hand. He had two cars, one for the family and the other for the servants, and all of them would take the highway to Bordeaux and from there to San Sebastian in Spain. They might end up in California or the Argentine, they had not made up their minds which.

  Such was the state of mind of a wealthy French bourgeois; and there sat his wife with grief and fear written on her features. Annette had been through so many perils she wanted no more. She was conservative-minded, as Lanny knew; she favoured ‘Big Charlie’, General de Gaulle, who wanted to come in and really put down the Reds. But what could even he do in face of a general strike? He couldn’t get political power, because the French voted for a dozen different parties; the politicians couldn’t agree and spent their time quarrelling and intriguing. France had a new government every three or four months, but the more it changed the more it was the same thing. In short, ‘La patrie est finie’, said the de Bruyne family.

  VIII

  Lanny was driven back to the city in the morning; and there he called at the office of the American Federation of Labour and presented his letter of introduction to Irving Brown. At first thought it might seem peculiar that this Federation should have a Paris office; the reactionaries at home charged that what Brown was doing was illegal—he was earring on a branch of international diplomacy supposed to be reserved to the United States government. But so far nobody had arrested this keen-witted labour diplomatist; the Communists had threatened to kill him, but he was still alive and lively. He was young for the job, only thirty-six, and had been a New York University athlete. He had gone in for labour affairs and had become an organiser of the United Automobile Workers. Then the New Deal had taken him up and made him into a labour bureaucrat, and now he was on the payroll of America’s oldest and strongest labour group.

  He had been in Europe for a year or more, working at the job of trying to keep labour from falling completely into the hands of the Communists. It was his business to know the old-time leaders among the Syndicalists, the Socialists, and the non-partisan trade unions; to explain America to them, to convince them that the Marshall Plan was not American imperialism but American friendship as manifested in the recent war. The motto of the French Revolution had been ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité’. Brown pointed out that liberty had been placed first, and that equality and fraternity were impossible without it.

  It was a job that called for tact and patience, to say nothing of courage; for the ‘Cocos’, powerful in France and on the verge of a stroke for mastery, poured out the vials of their fury upon this insolent Yankee intruder. They called him ‘this agent of Wall Street’, ‘this corrupt spy of the Americans’. They called him ‘the grey eminence of the yellow International’. They doctored his photographs and then called him ‘Scarface’. They said he had a million dollars at his disposal and shouted for his expulsion from France.

  He had a friendly and smiling face, with no scars on it. He was glad to see Lanny Budd, having heard some of the Peace programmes. He was glad to sit down and hear the story of the progress of R.I.A.S. and its hopes. He was delighted to hear of Lanny’s talk with Under-secretary Acheson. He himself had been to H.Q. and had had hot arguments with General Clay and other A.M.G. officials. It was a slow process of waking them up from their delusion of friendship, or even the expectation of common decency from the Reds. Our diplomats watched their multiple aggressions, sent them nothing but polite protests, and got nothing back but insults. By their use of the veto the Soviets were reducing the U.N. to futility; there had once been three vetoes on a single day. The Social Democrats of Western Germany, our natural allies, had been reduced almost to impotence by the policy of A.M.G., which had once proposed the policy of threatening Kurt Schumacher with imprisonment because he would not cease his exposure of Communist brutalities.

  Fortunately the British had refused to go along with this. Imagine the British Labour Cabinet consenting to the jailing of a German Socialist leader for criticising Soviet world aggression! Said Irving Brown, ‘I suppose the General’s orders come from Washington. The policy is called “neutrality”; but I tell him there can be no neutrality in the fight between tyranny and freedom. And that’s what we have on our hands’.

  IX

  Lanny arrived in a taxicab at an old mansion in the St. Germain quarter, hidden behind heavy shrubbery and a steel fence. The gates had been opened, and his ring was answered by an elderly black-clad servant. He gave his name, and there came an elderly woman, presumably the secretary, or possibly a poor relation. The marquis himself did not choose to be visible. In the old days Lanny had met some of these very stiff and dull artistocrats, but this was not a social occasion; he had declassed himself by coming as a tradesman, a speculator, buying an illustrious name and turning great art into commerce.

  The elderly person escorted him into a musty drawing room and pulled back the heavy curtains, enough so that Lanny could see the ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, where it had hung on the wall for perhaps a hundred years. Lanny had seen the photograph and knew the history of the work. He had brought along an electric torch and a small magnifying glass so that he could verify the signature and the brush strokes which were so characteristic. When he had satisfied himself he asked the pri
ce of the painting and was told it was eleven million francs. That was high, almost two hundred thousand dollars, but Lanny knew that his client wanted the painting. It was a perfect companion to the one that had just been bought in Germany; and, of course, if he stopped to haggle there was always a chance that some dealer might step in and ask for time to find another customer.

  Lanny said, ‘I will take the painting’. He sat down at a spindly legged gold table of the Louis Quinze era and wrote his cheque for eleven million francs and also a bill of sale for the marquis to sign. In order to spare that elderly gentleman an agony of uncertainty he specified that he would not come for the painting until the cheque had been cleared. He might have suggested that the marquis telephone the London bank, but he wasn’t sure there would be a telephone in this mansion, or that the marquis would consent to spend money so recklessly. It was easier for Lanny to go out and telephone the bank, requesting them to send an airmail letter to the marquis, attesting to the fact that the money was on deposit and the cheque good.

  No coffee and cake were served on this occasion. The elderly woman no doubt was secretly awed by seeing a human being write a cheque for eleven million francs, but she would give no sign of this. She was stiff and proper, sharing in the dignity of an august family, as proud of her marquis as any old-time Negro slave of his ‘old mahster’.

  X

  As it turned out, there was no need of hurry, for Lanny could not have shipped his painting out of France. The general strike was called the following morning; it had been prepared as carefully as a military campaign, and the hour had been kept secret. Now the word went out, and some three million workers in the great industries of France, including railroads and shipping, laid down their tools and walked out to listen to Communist orators in meeting halls or on street corners near the places of work.