Then, of course, the Kurt Meissner story, the treasure of the Tegernsee. They would be sure to know about that and they would be anxious for hints as to the location of other treasure. Unfortunately Lanny had already told all that he knew; but how could he get them to believe this? It was quite possible that he might be tortured for weeks and months for the purpose of forcing him to reveal facts about treasure of which he had no knowledge whatever. Yes, he had assumed a grave risk when he had mixed himself up in the uncovering of six or eight million dollars! He wished that he had taken his wife’s advice and stayed away not from Munich but from the whole of Germany.
IV
He began to think about America. What was there in America they might want to question him about? Would they want to ask about Robbie? Hardly; they would know about him, all there was to know; but they might think there was more! Would they want Lanny to report that Robbie was one of the principal financial supporters, the power behind the throne, of the fascistic Truman government? Would they want to know how much money he put up, and who carried his orders to Washington? Or would they by chance want to ask about the case of Bess? They would know all about that, or would think they knew. Would they want Lanny to confess that he was the one who had betrayed his sister to the F.B.I.? They would be coming uncomfortably close to the truth in that, and if they were to put a lie detector on him the consequences might be embarrassing. Would they have any reason to suspect Hansi, and would they try to get Lanny to admit that Hansi had been the betrayer?
In the course of his talks with refugees from East Germany, Lanny had heard over and over again the statement that the M.V.D. cared nothing about the truth but required their victims to confess to anything the M.V.D. desired to prove. Lanny tried to imagine what they might desire to prove about him; he would have to decide whether he would be willing to admit this or that. Which way would he be apt to fare the worse, to anger them by refusing to give them what they wanted or by obliging them and making himself guilty? Which would mean more to them having their own way or protecting their Soviet regime?
He tried to think steadily in spite of his aching body and brain. He might have only a short time to make up his mind; he must choose the best course of action and stick to it resolutely through whatever ordeal might be coming. He must fix in his mind certain things that he would be willing to say, and certain others that he would refuse to say under any circumstances. He would refuse to implicate any innocent person. That seemed elementary; but then he bethought himself, What harm could it do to implicate anybody unless it was someone who was in the power of the Reds? So far as he knew, there were only three persons of his acquaintance who were in that power, or might be: Fritz Meissner, Anna Surden and Graf Einsiedel.
Suppose they had heard about his having lunch with Einsiedel in the West Berlin restaurant. All he could say was that he had helped to get Einsiedel out of an American jail and Einsiedel had come to thank him. But suppose they wanted him to say that Einseidel was a traitor, a fascist spy, a Trotskyist diversionist, a left-wing deviationist, a Bukharinist counter revolutionary—would he say that? Of course he wouldn’t!
V
Lanny had learned that these ordeals were usually protracted; time was a commodity of which the Soviet Union had an abundant supply. Lanny had talked with a man at R.I.A.S. who had been through the mill, had been exiled to Siberia and escaped from there. He had been put in the Butyrka Prison in Moscow, in a huge cell so crowded with a horde of other prisoners that frequently it was impossible to find a space in which to lie down. In that place and under those conditions he had been held for eight months before he had his first examination. Lanny had talked with another man who had been an official concerned with the production of tanks. He had fallen under suspicion and had been held in Lubyanka Prison; he had been questioned off and on for three years before a compromise confession had been worked out, and then they had turned him loose. He said there were eight great jails in Moscow alone, and all of them crowded. In Lubyanka there had been thirty thousand prisoners. It was a kind of delirium, an epidemic of suspicion and fear; it spread by what the mathematicians call an arithmetical progression. One person was browbeaten into implicating half-a-dozen others, then these half-dozen were arrested, and each in turn implicated another half-dozen.
Lanny could guess that his case might be different, first, because he was a foreigner, and second, because he was well known. He had met General Clay, he had many friends in R.I.A.S. and in Monck’s C.I.C. All these persons would be active in his behalf; there would be something of an uproar when he was discovered missing. Even if his kidnapping had not been reported, the truth would be surmised. The Reds who had dragged Lanny into a car and sped away with him to East Berlin would have no means of knowing whether any of the spectators had taken the trouble to report the kidnapping; but if R.I.A.S. went into action the Reds would know it. Lanny could guess that these facts explained his present situation; they were figuring that they might not be able to hold him for long, so they were going to work on him without delay.
He realised that the cell in which he was confined was becoming chilly. He reached over to the vent near the floor and found that colder air was coming in; not a blast of it, just a gentle, quiet flow. He moved to the opposite corner, but that was not far away, and it took the colder air only a few seconds to reach him. He found that he was beginning to shiver, and he could not control it; he had a tendency to nausea as a result of the chloroform, and he was thirsty. His head ached, and his shoulder and elbow; all that combined to frighten him and weaken him, which was the way they planned it.
He did not want them to have their way and got up and moved about to keep warm; but he knew that wouldn’t help him for long; he would grow weaker. He must use his will power, his moral force, not to let himself be overcome. No matter what they did to him, he must not say anything that would injure any other person or violate his sense of honour. If he erred in that he would never afterward be able to endure himself.
VI
It seemed to him that he could feel the temperature dropping minute by minute. He did not put his hand to the vent, because that frightened him. It seemed to him that his very bones were freezing, and the time came when he no longer had the strength to stand up; he had to give up and lie still regardless of consequences. Perhaps they were actually going to freeze him to death as a cheap and convenient way to get rid of him. If that was the case there was nothing he could do about it, and he would die an honest man.
He knew about the freezing experiments the Nazis had tried at Dachau; they were called ‘scientific’ experiments, and he had studied the reports of them. The heart beat slowed up, the pulse weakened, the temperature of the body declined. The Nazis had found it most interesting to see how near to death a man could come, and how quickly or slowly he could be revived, and what his condition would be at the end of the ordeal. But there was nobody here to take Lanny’s temperature or pulse, and he himself was not a competent observer.
What he thought about was Laurel; he was bidding her goodbye and was sharing the anguish of soul he knew she would experience. She would never know the details, but she would guess the worst. She would never cease to blame herself for having let him come. She had a hard problem, loving a man who considered it his duty to go and risk his life every so often. She could suggest that the time had come when he might let younger men take up these duties; but she saw where his heart was, and she dreaded to put obstacles in his path and weaken his will.
It was not so unpleasant a way to fade out; to lie still and contemplate his love for Laurel and remember what their life had been. A strange courtship they had had, on board the yacht Oriole on its way across the Pacific to China. Lizbeth Holdenhurst, daughter of the owner, had wanted Lanny very much, and Laurel had decided in her quiet way that her own claims were superior. Later the yacht had gone down somewhere off the harbour of Hong Kong; Lizbeth had gone with it, and of her bones were coral made—if you could believe Shakespeare’s so
ng. Laurel had been the busy and protective wife, and she had two children to care for, so she would not let her spirit be broken. Vaguely her spirit floated before him; everything was vague, as if seen through a mist.
In the midst of that dimness, that pleasant fading away into nothingness, he became aware that the door of his cell was opened and a flashlight was turned upon his face. He closed his eyes, because even that small amount of light hurt him. The next thing he was aware of was that his arm was being lifted, that someone was feeling the pulse in his wrist. Then his arm was laid down again, and that was all. The man did not speak a word, and neither did Lanny. The door was closed again.
Evidently there was to be a decision; either he had been frozen enough or not enough; but Lanny’s consciousness was too feeble to care. He lay there and only gradually became aware that his consciousness was coming back to him, he was thinking once more; he was wondering what was happening to him and what was going to happen. Again he had the same speculation: Was this life or was it death? Was he coming back to the world of tormented men or was he coming back to that dim world of the spirits, or ‘psychic entities’, a world which appeared to be inhabited by an odd assortment of beings.
He was able to put out his hand and feel the concrete floor, hard, smooth, and still cold; but the air was warm, and he drew delicious breaths of it. His strength returned, and with it curiosity; first he sat up, and then moved a few inches over and stretched out his hand to the vent; yes, warm air was coming in. They had decided that he was near enough to freezing and so they were giving him warmth again; but he knew from what he had been told that this was only temporary. They were going to give him a baking, and that would be still more unpleasant. So his mind told him; but that did not keep his stubborn body from enjoying the moment’s respite. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die!
VII
But it didn’t take until tomorrow; it took only a few minutes. The delightful warmth changed to unpleasant hotness and then to what seemed unbearable furnace temperature. Lanny’s heart began to pound and he gasped for breath. He had been thirsty before, and now the heat drew the moisture out of his body and his thirst became agonizing. It wasn’t so pleasant to die this way; Lanny could have told the scientists that it was a fiery anguish.
He searched desperately in his consciousness for some way to bear it, and there came back to him words and ideas that had been taught him, first by his great-uncle Eli Budd in Connecticut, and later by his stepfather, Parsifal Dingle, New Thought advocate out of the Middle West of America.
Thirty years ago his great-uncle, a Congregational minister, had explained the Transcendentalist philosophy, the concept of the immanence of God; He was in us, and we were in Him; as St. Paul had set it forth, disputing with the Epicureans and the Stoics of ancient Athens, ‘In Him we live, and move, and have our being’. We did not have to speak to Him, we only had to think of Him; He knew our thought, He was our thought. Lanny had accepted the idea as a likely guess. It seemed to him impossible to believe that this universe was the product of accident, or that mind was simply a momentary product of chemical and electrical activities going on in brain cells. He wanted to believe that mind was basic to the universe; impossible as it was to realise it, there must be a universal Mind of which we were a part.
To Lanny in his day-by-day life it had been enough to repeat the formula of the Benedictine order, ‘To labour is to pray’; it seemed to him that efforts to end poverty and war upon this earth could not fail to be pleasing to God. But to Lanny’s elderly stepfather that did not seem enough. To Parsifal Dingle, God was not a metaphysical theory, a reasonable hypothesis; he insisted that God was in your mind all the time; that God was alive, God was real, and you were a part of Him and could appeal to Him and make use of Him at all times. It was Parsiful’s firm conviction that you had only to hold before your mind the idea that God was helping you; and when Lanny said that that sounded to him like autosuggestion, Parsifal had asked quietly, ‘What is autosuggestion?’ When Lanny had to admit, with a smile, that he didn’t really know, Parsifal answered, ‘Maybe autosuggestion is God’. He went on to try to analyse the process that goes on in our minds when we apply autosuggestion or any other kind of suggestion. Some suggestions were stronger than others, and maybe God was a stronger suggestion than suggestion.
That had a funny sound, but Parsifal didn’t mean it so. He said that the essence of the process was to awaken your spirit, to apply power to it. When you thought of suggestion you thought of something inferior; you said ‘only’ suggestion or ‘merely’ suggestion, or ‘nothing but’ suggestion; but nobody ever said merely God, or only God, or nothing but God. Parsifal said, ‘We are dealing with the spirit, or the mind, or whatever name you choose to give to your inmost being. It is exactly like the water tap in your bathroom; you have the power to turn it on, but you have that power only if you know you have the power, if you believe it. If you say that you can’t turn it on, then you don’t get the water, and that’s all there is to it’.
Parsifal was fond of a saying by Mary Baker Eddy, that ‘Man’s extremity is God’s opportunity’. And surely, if ever a man was in extremity, Lanny Budd was in it now. He wanted both water of the body and water of the spirit, and he wanted them with desperation. He knew Parsifal’s formulas, and because there was nothing else to do he tried them. He began to say to himself, ‘God will help me’. He said it over and over to himself, concentrating what was left of his mind upon it. And whether you called it autosuggestion or whether you called it God, the fact was that it took his mind off his anguish and his fear. Because that was a form of relief he concentrated with more and more intensity; and so he was no longer afraid, and he no longer was aware of his pain, and in the end he passed quite peacefully into unconsciousness.
VIII
When his consciousness began to come back again he was puzzled for the third time; he wondered if he had died and if this time he was in some other state of being. He opened his eyes, and a bright light was shining in them, and that hurt him so he closed them again. It seemed to him that he was beginning to feel coolness again, and it was pleasant. At first it was a sort of coolness in the abstract, a strange thing that he felt without knowing what it was or what it meant; but then he began to recall what had happened to him, and the thought came that they had shut off the heat.
All the way through this experience the word ‘they’ meant the people who had captured him and were torturing him. The light seemed to move, so he wondered if ‘they’ were in the cell, and if the coolness was because ‘they’ had opened the door. ‘They’ were feeling his pulse again. He became acutely aware of burning, agonising thirst, and he murmured, first, ‘Water’, and then in German, ‘Wasser’. He assumed that they would be Russian and he tried to recall the Russian word but couldn’t.
Either they understood his words or they knew the effect of this treatment. He felt his head being lifted and tilted forward, and a cup was applied to his lips. He drank the water eagerly; it had a sweetish taste, not tea but some other flavour. It was like an answer to his prayers, and he drank to the last drop. Then his head was laid back, and his consciousness revived with suddenness. He thought, Maybe they are giving me a drug; maybe it is some of that ‘truth’ stuff that will make me answer without knowing what I am saying. If so, he couldn’t help it, he had to drink; but he would fight against this as against the other evils.
His memory of Parisfal came back, and he began to concentrate once more upon the thought that God was here and that God would help him. Courage came to him in sudden waves, and he resolved that he would conquer these enemies, he would not give way to them; he would prove that God was superior to them—the God in whom he lived, and moved, and had his being! ‘They’ repudiated God, and surely God would favour the believer over the infidel!
He heard the door closed, and he opened his eyes and discovered that he was again in utter darkness. He had come to like the darkness. The heat had been turned off, and that see
med an answer to his prayer. Anyhow, he would go on with his prayer; he would make that his life from this moment on. Whatever trials might come he would face them; he had no doubt that others were coming, and he would conquer them all. He was going to train himself for that achievement; he would give himself the autosuggestion of God, and it would be God.
Time passed; he did not know how much time, for when you are praying you lose the sense of time; that is one of the purposes of prayer. When you are in the hands of torturers and they have shut you up in a black hole, time does not matter and the world does not matter; nothing exists for you but your own soul and the resources you have in it. If you are alone, then you are helpless; but if you have God in your soul, then you have everything.
So Lanny went on with this inner fight against his physical weakness and also against his own doubts and fears. Moving his hands, he discovered that a plate of bread had been left beside him. It was a slice about an inch thick; he broke off a piece and tasted it and discovered that it was whole-wheat bread; that was what he liked, so he began to nibble it. He wasn’t sure he had the strength to digest it, but immediately he repudiated this countersuggestion.
Jesus had said that with God all things were possible; this had been one of Parsifal’s formulas, by which he had healed many persons who had incurable diseases. That is, they were what the doctors called incurable; and maybe Parsifal hadn’t really healed them, but anyway the persons had got well. Lanny told himself that it was certainly possible for God to cause his digestive juices to flow. After all, what had ever made them flow? What had ever caused them to exist? What had caused Lanny to exist? Courage came back to him, and with it his strength.
The Return of Lanny Budd Page 58
