The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  ‘I know that. But I have no idea that he would give such a word’.

  ‘Neither have we, Mr Budd, but the inquiry could be made’.

  ‘Would that mean that he would go on giving concerts under the auspices of Communist-front organisations and raising funds which support Communist activities?’

  ‘Of course it would not, Mr Budd. The idea is that Hansi Robin would make his appearance only under the auspices of established musical agencies. It may be no one would come to heer him’.

  ‘Who are the persons offering this proposal, Mr Smathers? Are they Communists?’

  ‘Two of them are ministers like myself; two others, I believe, are Communist sympathisers; and two are important and active Communist party people. There would be no use making the proposal unless it had some authority behind it. Mr Robin would be told to make the agreement and keep it’.

  ‘Unfortunately, Mr Smathers, Communists do not have a very good reputation for keeping their agreements. To whom do you expect to make this proposal?’

  ‘It is the F.B.I. which has made the arrests. Presumably they are the ones who would make the decision. It cannot be that they have any real evidence against him. I am told that by people who know’.

  ‘But I don’t know those people, Mr Smathers, and I don’t know the F.B.I. Why should you come to me about it?’

  ‘Because it seems to us that you are the logical person to make the approach. The F.B.I. knows your programme and will not suspect you of having any improper interest in the matter’.

  ‘I am not afraid of being suspected, Mr Smathers. What I am afraid of is putting myself at the service of men who have no respect for their pledged word and are laughing at me behind my back while they make a fool of me’.

  ‘I assure you, Mr Budd—’

  ‘You are wasting your time assuring me of anything, Mr Smathers, except that you yourself are a Christian gentleman. You cannot assure me about anything regarding Communists because I know them and their doctrines. Surely you must be aware that Lenin advised his followers to lie, to use every subterfuge to overcome their enemies; and I do not believe that any truth can be got by lying or that any love can come out of a gospel of hate’.

  ‘I can only assure you, Mr Budd, that this proposition is a sincere one’.

  ‘Will you tell me who the party leaders are who make this proposition?’

  ‘I am sorry, Mr Budd, I am not authorised to do that’.

  ‘You see, they are playing with you, and they are trying to play with me. They are enemies of the government which serves us and in which we believe’.

  ‘Even enemies have to parley, Mr Budd. If there is going to be peace there has to be a truce’.

  ‘Peace, Mr Smathers? The Communists can have peace any day, but they cannot have it while they are followers of Stalin’.

  ‘Then you’re not willing to approach the F.B.I., Mr Budd?’

  ‘I will approach them on one condition, and that is, that you will give me the names of the Communist party leaders who are making the proposition and undertaking to see that Hansi Robin will keep it. You are not a Communist, and you cannot speak for the Communists, so I would just be inviting the F.B.I. on a hunt for a mare’s nest’.

  X

  They parted, and Lanny went and told Laurel of the proposition, but not until they were driving home, where there could be no chance of being overheard. ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked, and he told her, ‘I’ll go and tell Post about it anyhow, but I’ll not let the Communists know that I’m telling him’.

  He telephoned at once to Wilbur Post, saying, ‘I have something to tell you, but I don’t think I ought to come to your office, because I imagine there will be reporters hanging around’.

  ‘A safe guess’, was the reply, and the busy man made an appointment to meet Lanny on a certain corner at a certain hour. Lanny drove there and picked him up and told him about the visit from the Brooklyn preacher.

  ‘Smathers’, said Post. ‘Oh yes, we know him’. There was significence in the special way he said it. He added, ‘It is our practice to be cautious in what we say about individuals, but I suppose I may quote what I read about him in a newspaper: “He has a soft heart and a still softer head. He is a sob-sister who wears pants”.’

  Lanny assented to that description and told what Smathers had proposed. The other had a good laugh over the odd situation; then, becoming serious, he said, ‘I don’t believe the real top Communists would endorse such a proposition. Hansi Robin is too valuable to them, both as moneymaker and headline-maker; of course they don’t care a damn about his art’.

  Lanny inquired, ‘I take it that your having Hansi arrested means that you expect to go on using him?’

  ‘Yes, surely’.

  ‘Well, suppose that Smathers were permitted to see Hansi and make that proposition to him. You could post Hansi in advance, and he could turn down the proposition flatly. He could make a speech declaring his undying loyalty to the party, his willingness to make any sacrifices, his determination to stick. That should make him solid with them and incline them to give him information. It would have that effect with Bess, I know’.

  Post thought that over. ‘Mightn’t be a bad idea’, he said. ‘They are all to be taken before the U.S. Commissioner and bail will be set. No doubt the Commies will be on hand with the cash, so we’ll have to work quickly on your proposition’.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about it’, Lanny said. ‘We mustn’t do anything to suggest that you know me or that I know you. Perhaps the quickest way would be for you to call Smathers up and ask if he knows a man named Lanny Budd. When he says yes, you say, “He telephoned saying you had a proposition for me. Why don’t you come in and make it direct?”’

  ‘All right, I’ll do that’, replied Post. ‘It can’t do any harm, and it might do some good. There are one or two strands missing in the net we have woven around those people. They will all be as busy as bees getting things hidden and establishing new lines of communication’.

  ‘That finding of the boilerplate papers sounds like something big’, said Lanny, who was not above human curiousity.

  ‘I don’t mind telling you it’s a stroke of luck. We are working day and night on the papers, sorting them out and indexing them. It may be weeks before we know everything we’ve got. It may surprise you to know that Hansi Robin had nothing to do with that discovery’.

  Lanny dropped the official a block or two from his office and drove on about the affairs of the Peace Programme. Every now and then his mind would come back to that fascinating mystery: who could be the other spy in Bessie Budd’s life? Somebody had written two anonymous letters, and it was likely that this same person might be the one who had betrayed the secret of the buried boiler. There were two women servants in the Robin household, and Lanny and Laurel had discussed them both; there was a gardener, and he was a likely prospect. He was a Finn and seemed a stupid fellow—but then he might be a government agent pretending to be a stupid fellow.

  The burying of a boiler three feet in diameter requires a lot of digging; it could have been done at night, of course, or on a Sunday; but could the signs of such digging be hidden from a gardener? If there had been a grass sod, that could have been replaced with care; and if the gardener had been got out of the way on some pretext, the job might have been done in daylight without attracting any other person’s attention. If Hansi didn’t know about it the job must have been done while he was away on one of his many trips. Lanny had planned such schemes himself and knew that Bess was no less capable and certainly no less determined. But she had two opponents working against her and apparently suspected neither of them. She must now be suspecting at least one of them. What a lot she had had to think about, shut up in durance vile with nobody but a marshal’s matron for company!

  XI

  It was a trying situation for the newspaper reporters. The whole country was on tiptoe with curiosity about this case, but what could the reporters get? The prisoners were kep
t incommunicado, except for their lawyers, and the F.B.I. had no more information to give out. The Communist party, of course, was willing to talk without limit, but all they had to say was propaganda. They were shocked by this persecution of innocent persons; it was a shameless violation of fundamental civil rights.

  It was known that the president of Budd-Erling Aircraft and the head of its foreign sales department had been to interview the two prisoners in whom they were interested, but neither would say a word about what had occurred. The director of the Peace Programme would say only that he disagreed with his sister’s ideas but was sure that she held them sincerely. Photographs of the various parties were, of course, available; and the newspapers could send photographers to take pictures of the hole in the ground under the seckel pear tree and of the stationery shop on Delancey Street. One of the papers even published a photograph of a Soviet ship at one of the docks in Brooklyn; and that was all.

  So it was both figuratively and literally a godsend when a gentleman known to his flock as the Reverend Smathers came forward with the information that he had been permitted to interview Hansi Robin. Certain of the New York Communists, moved by the love of art and respect for a great artist, had volunteered the assertion that whatever Bessie Budd Robin had been doing, very certainly her husband had known nothing about it, and he had been arrested only because he lived in the same house with a well-known and active party member. This statement had been made to the F.B.I., and the suggestion had been offered to Hansi Robin that he might agree to remain what he had always been, a strictly nonpolitical person, and to confine his future appearances to strictly nonpolitical assemblages.

  But, said the Reverend Mr Smathers, Hansi Robin had firmly turned down this offer. He had insisted that his motive was loyalty not merely to his wife but to the cause of freedom of opinion and expression. He refused to make any compromise with the frenzy of redbaiting which had seized the country. He was innocent, and his wife also was innocent, and he believed that the others were innocent.

  The ‘sob sister in pants’ took occasion to add that he believed it also. When the reporters asked him about the boilerplate papers he said the Communist party was a legal organisation, a part of the American political system, and they had a perfect right to take care of their records. When they knew that their motives were being misrepresented and their financial accounts and membership lists used for purposes of persecution, it was natural that they should take precautions to conceal these. This was a free country, wasn’t it? And a minister of the Gospel was supposed to preach peace and good will toward men, wasn’t he? ‘If that be fellow travelling, come and join me!’ said the Reverend Mr Smathers.

  17 THE EVIL THAT MEN DO

  I

  Six of the seven accused persons were brought before the U.S. Commissioner. The seventh, a Soviet official, claimed diplomatic immunity, and all that could be done in his case was for the State Department to request his recall to his own country. The other six were Oskar Johanssen, the accountant; Bessie Budd Robin and Hansi Robin; Carl and Lucille Sedin, alias Carpenter, the photographers; and J. Dumbrowsky, the Russian messenger.

  The Commissioner said this was a very serious case, and inasmuch as accused Communists had sometimes been known to turn up missing he felt it his duty to set the bail high. He set it at twenty thousand dollars for five of the defendants and thirty thousand for the Russian, for he, not being an American citizen, might be assumed more likely to disappear. The bail was promptly put up by a surety company. Undoubtedly that company had required guarantees; but that was a private transaction and did not appear in the court records or the newspapers.

  In the case of the Russian this meant charging the Soviet government thirty thousand dollars for its spy. That government didn’t mind, having plenty of gold mines in Siberia, to say nothing of those it had in the penthouses on Manhattan Island. To that government it was, of course, not desirable that one of its agents should be convicted in an American court. Whatever the price, they would pay it. The man would disappear from sight the moment he left the courtroom and would never again be seen.

  What would happen to him when he reached his own country was a matter for guesswork. The known facts were, first, he had failed, which is something absolutely forbidden by his government; and, second, he had lived in America and learned what clothes Americans wore, what food they ate, and in general how many more privileges they enjoyed than any Russian except a commissar. He might be tempted to mention what he had seen to some other Russians, and therefore the only safe thing was to ship him off to one of the gold mines. What he said there wouldn’t matter, because he wouldn’t live more than a year or two, and neither would the persons to whom he said it.

  After that matters settled down again; if it hadn’t been for jokes about boilerplate papers the public would have dismissed the subject from its mind altogether. Lanny and Laurel were left to speculate about the Hansibesses. They would go back to their home; and what would they be doing? Hansi had shown himself a hero, a brave and determined friend of a great cause. Bess would love him—and how would Hansi like it? Laurel said he would stand it; men didn’t feel about sex as women did. Lanny answered that there was a good deal of the woman in Hansi.

  And what would Bess be doing? Lanny ventured the guess that she was through as an underground operative. Her lawyers would forbid it, and the party bosses would agree. They had a strict rule that the party and the underground were to be kept entirely separate—so much so that many party members didn’t even know there was an underground and would ridicule the idea, calling it redbaiting.

  And, of course, when any underground worker got arrested and got his pictures in the newspapers, that person could no longer be in the underground. He would repudiate it, and it would repudiate him. So now the daughter of Budd-Erling would become a ‘name character’. She would cash in on her publicity and become a champion of her cause, one of its martyrs. Quite possibly she might take up again her role as Hansi’s piano accompanist. But perhaps only Communists would want to hear them now.

  II

  Such was Lanny’s guess, deduced from Communist principles as Hansi had explained them; and the guess proved to be correct.

  A week or so after the hearing Lanny was called to the telephone early in the morning. A deep bass voice enunciated, ‘Same place, ten o’clock this morning’. Lanny thought for a moment and then growled back, in a voice that might have come out of the lion’s cage in the zoo, ‘O-o-o-oh-kaay’. He hung up, laughing, and told Laurel about it. Then he called his secretary and told her to postpone a couple of appointments.

  He got in his car and took the roundabout drive to Central Park. He met Hansi in the usual way. The first words the violinist spoke were, ‘I want to thank you for what you did for Mamma’.

  ‘You have seen her?’ Lanny asked.

  ‘I went to her first of all. She caught me in her arms and began to cry, and I thought it was going to be one more painful scene. But she took me upstairs and shut the door and whispered in my ear, ‘Lanny told me! Lanny told me!’ She cried some more, but these were tears of joy, and I was glad you had done it’. Then Hansi added, with joy of his own, ‘I’m to have a vacation. Post says I don’t have to do any more Communist work’.

  ‘You mean you won’t have to testify?’

  ‘Post says my testimony may be needed; but I don’t have to go around playing music and raising money for Communist-front organisations. I’m going to write a concerto’.

  ‘That sounds fine, Hansi. And Bess?’

  ‘She is through with the underground. She will not recognise one of her old associates if she meets one on the street. She is to take a lecture trip and tell comrades all over the country that the redbaiters set a trap for her; that those papers dug up on our place had been stolen from some of the offices of the party; that others were forged and planted with the rest. It is a typical Wall Street plot.’

  Hansi went on to tell how he had sat in at meetings with the party bosses
. As one of the prisoners he had a right to be there. He had helped to plan the defence and had reported to the F.B.I. the details of the programme adopted. Then he had asked Post to let him off from further work. The party wanted him to tour the country with Bess; he would draw the crowds and she would pump Communist doctrine into them and raise money for the defence. He didn’t want to do it and Post had agreed that it would be poor tactics.

  So Hansi had told his wife that he had had all the excitement he could stand; he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and must have a rest. He was just as devoted to the cause as ever, but he wanted to make his contribution in music and not in the field of politics. Bess had been disappointed, but he had brought her to agreement.

  ‘Do you think she suspects you?’ Lanny asked.

  ‘I don’t think so; but it may be that she wouldn’t let me know. She has become very cautious. She is terribly humiliated by her failure and spends a lot of time brooding over it, trying to figure out who can have betrayed her. She put me through a grilling as to what I could possibly have said to you’.

  ‘I tried to have something to do with it’, Lanny remarked, ‘but you got ahead of me’. He said it with a smile, trying to keep down his heartache over this case.

  III

  Hansi told about the arrest, which had been made in the morning while he and Bess were having breakfast. Half-a-dozen men had come, three of them in a limousine and the others in a station wagon. Some had taken posts at the exits of the house, and others had rung the doorbell and pushed their way in past the servant.

  ‘Apparently none of them knew that I was in on the plot’, said Hansi. ‘Anyhow, they made it realistic. They told us we could finish our breakfast, but we didn’t have much appetite. Then they took us into the living room and put us in two chairs, and a man sat in front of us and never took his eyes off us. He forbade us to talk. They had warrants and insisted that we should inspect them. I told Post the servants were Reds, so they were put out of the house with their belongings; I didn’t see it, but no doubt they made sure the people didn’t take anything else. They took us upstairs and let us get together a few odds and ends in two handbags—a toothbrush, a comb, and so on. Then they took us out to the car, three of the men. They didn’t put handcuffs on us, but they watched us every moment, as if they thought we might try to swallow poison. The other three men stayed behind with the station wagon. They had a warrant to search the house—they made me look at that. They did a thorough job of it and took away all the papers that might reveal our doings’.