The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

‘Kurt, as you know, we had a terrible civil war in America, and when that war was lost by the South there were many proud Southerners who wouldn’t give up. They called themselves “unreconstructed rebels”, and they went on plotting and scheming; but their efforts came to nothing, and today we have peace in our country; the states that rebelled are back in the Union, and the old struggle is just an occasion for reunions and picnics. It will be so in the new democratic Germany, I hope, and I came here with the idea of making one last effort to get you to see that and join us in bringing real peace to the country. I see that I have failed, and there is nothing for me to do but go back and inform the Army. You have always patronised me, Kurt, and taken an attitude of superiority; I didn’t object because I knew you were older and I thought you were wiser. But now I don’t think so any more. I think you are very foolish. I am sorry for you but I can’t help you, so I now give up and promise never to trouble you again’.

  IV

  That was a plain enough invitation for Kurt to get out of the car, but he didn’t. He sat there, frowning and silent. Lanny waited.

  ‘I have told you that I really want to quit’, said this unreconstructed Nazi. ‘I said it and I mean it—I have to. I cannot give you the names of other men because it would cost me my life. That is a small matter, but it would leave my children disgraced and helpless. Your offer to protect me means nothing, because your people are slack and mine are active and determined’.

  ‘Our people are not so slack as to take that proposition from you, Kurt. If you have no more to offer the deal is off’.

  ‘One thing more I can offer—that is, money. I gather that is what your A.M.G. wants most’.

  ‘My A.M.G. is spending several hundred million dollars to feed the German people. If it were possible for any part of this to be covered by Nazi-stolen treasure I don’t think any reasonable person could call us mercenary. Certainly I don’t think any Nazi could set up such a claim’.

  ‘What amount of money do you suppose A.M.G. would consider a proper ransom for me?’

  ‘Ransom is an offensive word, Kurt. You have not been kidnapped. You came here as a refugee under false pretences and under conditions you never intended to keep. We’re not Nazis and we’re not Reds. We’re not proposing to imprison you or torture you, but merely to send you back where you came from’.

  ‘All right, Lanny, let us not dispute about words. Have you an idea what amount of money surrendered would cause A.M.G. to continue to let me reside in this home I have built, on the condition that I withdraw from all political affairs and devote myself to my music?’

  ‘You would publicly announce your withdrawal?’

  ‘I would announce it both publicly and privately, and I would agree to let your Army shoot me if I did not keep the agreement’.

  ‘I cannot answer the question, Kurt, because I do not know the Army and have no authority to speak for it. I am only a messenger boy. If you care to make an offer I will take it to those who have authority’.

  ‘All right, I will make the offer. I’ll turn over to your Army something between six and eight million dollars’ worth of gold bullion’.

  ‘And whose gold is this?’

  ‘It belongs to the Neo-Nazi movement. It is “outlaw treasure”, as you would call it. It has been turned over to me to keep, and I’m honour-bound to do so. But it appears that there are traitors in our movement and that I have been betrayed by at least one person’.

  ‘I don’t know all the details, Kurt, but I am quite sure you have been betrayed by several persons’.

  ‘Our movement is shot through with betrayal, and I can no longer refuse to recognise the fact. People whom we trusted—whom we had to trust—have taken millions of dollars to Spain and Brazil and the Argentine, to Egypt and Morocco and I know not how many other places. They are living lives of luxury and refusing to contribute a single pfennig to the cause that lifted them out of the gutter. I have been ordered to hold this treasure, and sooner or later I will be told to give it up to somebody, and that person may take it abroad and do what the others have done. I have spent the night pacing the floor, asking myself if it is my duty to sacrifice my surviving children in the interest of such persons. I might also think of my art, but I have no assurance that I will ever again be able to compose anything worth while’.

  He stopped, and Lanny said, ‘You might give yourself a chance, Kurt. Your present activities must take a great deal of your mental and emotional energy’.

  ‘I have been able to think of nothing else for a long time. I have now made up my mind. I will surrender this treasure; but it must be done in such a way that the world will think that the Army has made the discovery by its own cleverness’.

  ‘I am sure the Army will not object to that’, said Lanny. Under other circumstances he would have said it with a smile, but now he was in no mood for subtleties.

  ‘Your Army will have to come and raid my place. They will have to arrest me for a while and hold me; that will be the only way to save my life. In the end they may release me with a statement that they have no evidence. You yourself, being clever, may provide them with some story as to how they came upon this treasure. It is what came in the chests from the Grundlsee, and since the Army already knows that Brinkmann is the man who brought it they can put the blame on him’.

  ‘That sounds easy’, said Lanny. He was excited, as much so as when he had read Treasure Island. ‘But it may be the Army knows about it already’.

  Kurt replied dryly, ‘If they did they would be here instead of sending you’.

  V

  Kurt opened the door of the car. ‘Come’, he said, and they walked together toward the house. They went to one side where there was a clump of bushes; they stood behind it, attracting no attention. ‘You see that cottage’, said Kurt. ‘It has six rooms and is well built. It has a good concrete foundation, walls of hollow tile, and a slate roof. It is fireproof—a permanent home for a family. The studio is the same. The property was purchased and the buildings were erected with the proceeds from the sale on the black market of those gold teeth which your propagandists delight to tell about. That might be a pretty good subject for a musical fantasy, a “Totentanz”, or a “Danse Macabre”, don’t you think, Lanny?’

  ‘Yes’, said Lanny, his voice somewhat faint.

  ‘I am not offering the house or the studio to your A.M.G.’, said Kurt. He always used the word ‘your’, as if he were holding Lanny responsible for the American Army and all the evil it had done to Europe. ‘I need the house for my family and the studio for my art. I am showing it to you so that you can make it a part of the bargain with your A.M.G. that they are to take care of the house and not wreck it’.

  ‘Why should they wish to wreck it?’

  ‘I ask them to agree to bring along with them several competent masons. We have able ones in Germany, and this should be a simple matter. They will go to work on the foundations of the house and studio without doing injury to the buildings. These foundations are built in a very special way. There are portions made of strong concrete blocks that are necessary to the support of the house. These must not be disturbed. In between these, which you might call the real foundations, are interstices of several feet, and these are not necessary to the foundations and may be taken out. They have been covered with plaster, and this may be chipped off, but you must be careful not to chip the bricks. Also, you should guard them carefully; there are supposed to be twenty-one hundred and forty-seven, but, of course, some may have been stolen. They are all of solid gold, refined in the government mint in Munich. When your General Patton made his noisy approach they were put into metal chests and taken to the Grundlsee and dropped in. A buoy was put over them, and a surveyor made exact measurments of the location; then the buoy was removed. Recently, as you know, the chests were taken up and the gold was brought here. Some associates of mine knew that I was going to build a house and a studio, and they made me the proposition that the buildings should have foundations partly of
gold. I have never counted the bricks or weighed them, but I was told they are worth somewhere between six and eight million dollars of your American money. A.M.G. may have them, and I am only asking that they spare my life by keeping the secret’.

  ‘That certainly will be done, Kurt’, his friend assured him in a properly solemn tone. Even the son of Budd-Erling had never handled a sum of money like that.

  ‘I am a traitor to the Neo-Nazi movement’, announced Kurt. ‘I have been a traitor to the memory of my Führer, to my art, and to my philosophy. I am a defeated and ruined man, and the only reason I consent to go on living is that I have a devoted wife and a brood of children whom it is my duty to care for. I hope to teach them to be wiser than their father’.

  There was a break in Kurt’s voice as he said, ‘Now, go’! He turned and walked into the house, and the messenger of A.M.G. made his way to the car, got in, and drove down the sloping road toward Munich.

  VI

  Lanny thought hard as he drove. In the town of Holzkirchen he got out and went hunting for a public telephone. The only one he could find was in a café, and there were a number of people in it. He would speak English, but that wouldn’t help much, because most educated Germans understood it and had had plenty of practice during the occupation. Fortunately it was not the first time he had used doubletalk with Monck. He said ‘I have been reading the motion-picture script by that fellow named Stevenson—you remember?’

  ‘I remember’, Monck said.

  ‘It’s a wonderful script. It has to do with a man named Old Ferdinand. He’s in the hands of the pirates and he’s afraid of them. There’s an immense amount involved, and if they find out he’s double-crossing them it may be his finish. He might lose his nerve and flee to some foreign country; the pirates are watching him and may have seen him talking to the enemy. It’s a regular melodrama, the kind that used to be called “ten, twenty, thirty” on Broadway—those were the prices of admission. The villains think they have everything in their hands, but the cavalry comes galloping up at the critical moment, waving the stars and stripes. It’s the most promising script I’ve read in a long time’.

  ‘I get you’, said Monck, who had been to New York.

  ‘I’m taking it in to Munich. It ought to go into production without delay. Tell me the man I should take it to’.

  ‘Colonel Armstrong of C.I.C.’, said Monck. He wasn’t in a café and there wasn’t anyone listening at his end.

  ‘Okay’, replied Lanny. ‘Will you telephone him and tell him I’m coming? Tell him I’m a first-rate judge of motion-picture scripts’.

  ‘I’ll tell him’, said Monck. ‘Congratulations’.

  VII

  Lanny hung up and walked out, leaving the café patrons to make what they could of that one-sided conversation. It wouldn’t be the first time that Hollywood had come to Germany, but it was probably the first time for the little town of Holzkirchen.

  It took only about half an hour to drive into the city, and it didn’t take many minutes for Lanny to find the headquarters of Colonel Armstrong. While he was parking his car he was pleased to see two jeeploads of G.I.s with battle equipment draw up in front of the place and settle down to wait.

  So Lanny went in and told the colonel his story. It wasn’t as strange to an Intelligence officer as it had seemed to an art expert; the colonel said it wasn’t the first time the Neo-Nazis had had the bright idea of using gold bricks in the foundations of buildings. Gold being unaffected by the weather, it would always be there—unless someone gave the secret away, as in this case.

  ‘Are you sure it isn’t a hoax?’ asked the officer, and Lanny said he was fairly sure; he knew Kurt Meissner and didn’t believe he would make a successful actor.

  The point was that Kurt had important secrets he might be induced to part with if properly handled. He was really a great man and must be treated with courtesy; it was to be a ‘protective arrest’, but it must be made to look like a real one to the outside world—otherwise Kurt wouldn’t live long enough to get to the border of Italy or Switzerland. The G.I.s must stay and guard those two buildings overnight and be sure that members of the Völkischerbund didn’t come with crowbars and pickaxes. Next day, presumably, the good German masons could be sent up and the digging out of the treasure could proceed. ‘Don’t let them do any harm to the houses’, said Lanny. ‘Kurt would never forgive that’.

  The sergeant who was to head the expedition was called in and given his orders. Then Lanny put in a call for Monck, meaning to tell him the full story from this safe telephone; he learned that Monck had already left the office for the Tempelhoferfeld to take a plane to Munich.

  Many planes were flying between the two cities, and the flight took only an hour or so. By the time Lanny had gone out and got something to eat Monck had arrived, and there was a conference of half-a-dozen officers, in the course of which Lanny told them all he knew about Kurt Meissner. He was a proud citizen of a proud land and both had been humbled. He was to be treated as a distinguished guest, a great artist. ‘Call him “maestro”,’ said Lanny. ‘That is the honourable title for a musician in Europe’.

  VIII

  The sergeant had been ordered to send the distinguished guest out at once; the trip was only an hour or two each way, so here he came. Lanny introduced the officers, and they shook hands with Kurt and offered him a cigarette. The Intelligence chief explained that they were grateful for his help and wished to make everything as agreeable to him as possible. Did he have any choice as to where he should be kept?

  Kurt answered that it made no difference to him. If the Völkischerbund got the idea that he had been responsible for the discovery of the gold they would find him sooner or later, and more probably sooner. Colonel Armstrong said A.M.G. would take him to a villa near the city that had been taken over by the Army. It was set in a large garden; they would watch him, but the watch would be with its back turned, to keep his former friends away from him. The Army would make the announcement of the affair as realistic as possible. They would not press him with any more questions at present but give him time to make up his mind how far he was willing to go with them. He would write a note to his wife, assuring her that he was being well treated and that she was not to worry. Lanny undertook to send him some books and music scores he asked for. If there was anything else that Maestro Meissner wanted he would only have to mention it to his guard.

  Lanny had something to say to Kurt privately. There was his brother Emil, the general. Lanny had seen him a year or so ago, and Emil was unhappy because of the attitude Kurt had taken toward him. Would it not be possible for Kurt to see him now? The prisoner thought it over and said, ‘All right’. Lanny realised that it was the first step which had cost him so much, and the others would be easier.

  Lanny explained the situation to Colonel Armstrong and said he would like to be flown to Nürnberg to bring the general back. If Lanny had asked to be flown to the North Pole and back as a reward for the coup he had pulled off the officer would no doubt have granted the favour.

  There were always planes flying to Nürnberg, and Lanny was taken before dark that evening and spent the night at a hotel the Army had taken over. The next morning he told Emil the story, in confidence of course. Over the retired general’s small radio set they listened to the first account of the sensational episode that had occurred at the Tegernsee. The distinguished German pianist and composer had been arrested at his home by the American military, charged with conspiracy to smuggle Nazi-owned gold out of the country. Nothing was said about where the gold was—presumably that would come after the good masons had done their work.

  Emil said he would gladly see Kurt and do everything in his power to keep him on the American side. Emil would get excused from his school duties, and they would fly to Munich the next morning. Lanny didn’t offer to be present at the family reunion; he considered that his work was done. He told Monck the story and left him to take matters up with Kurt after Emil had got through with him. La
nny was flown back to Berlin to keep his promises to R.I.A.S.

  IX

  The new building of R.I.A.S. had just been opened, on the Kufsteinerstrasse in the Schöneberg district of Berlin. The street made a wide turn there, and the building followed it, so that it looked somewhat like the entrance to a stadium. It was five storeys high and had the four letters R.I.A.S. mounted conspicuously on the front. It had been a chemical factory and was all newly repaired and seemed magnificent to a staff that had been operating from three small badly damaged buildings. It was a symbol of the fact that the American people had at last made up their mind to talk back to the rude makers of the cold war.

  Lanny Budd, alias Herr Fröhlich, was by now an experienced radio man. He told his German audience that the American people were ardently desirous of peace and had proved the fact by the disbanding of their armies. But they would never give up their determination to see a free, united, democratic Germany—and they meant the word democratic in its true sense, not in the sense of elections with only one ticket prescribed by a party dictatorship. America was proving its good faith by taking steps to give democratic self-government to West Germany; the Communists were proving their bad faith by proceeding to make East Germany into one more Red satellite.

  Lanny was speaking at a critical time, when the people of West Germany, and particularly of Berlin, needed all the reassurance he could give them. Little by little, upon one pretext or another, the Soviets had been cutting off the roads leading through their zone to Berlin. They would suddenly decree that trucks needed a different kind of permit and would cause blockades extending back for miles and delaying traffic for days. Obviously they were trying to make the situation as uncomfortable for the Allies as possible, in the hope of wearing them out.

  The agreement for the division of Berlin into four sectors had been made at the Potsdam Conference by the heads of the Big Four governments. It was the result of a compromise, and as usual both sides thought they had granted too much. The critics of President Truman at home used the Potsdam Agreement as a stick with which to beat him, overlooking the fact that the resultant difficulties were caused by the Soviets breaking the agreement—and how could President Truman have foreseen that? Was he supposed to assume that an ally to whom we had given eleven billion dollars’ worth of aid was going to turn into our enemy the very day the war was won? How could he guess that the Politburo had already resolved upon that policy even before the winning?