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The Return of Lanny Budd

A Lanny Budd Novel

Upton Sinclair

_To the many 'Lanny Budd' lovers all over_

_the world who have written letters_

_asking me to write this book_
BOOK ONE

Saying, Peace, Peace, When There Is No Peace

1 THE CONSTANT SERVICE

I

A philosopher stood at the microphone of a radio station, a place to which philosophers are not often enough invited. He was a rather small man, slender and spry despite the fact that he was approaching his seventy-fifth birthday; he had a brick-red complexion, an elfish expression, and an abundance of white hair brushed back. He was, by accident, an English earl; he did not believe in aristocracy and preferred to drop the title, but among the Americans who dearly love a lord, he could not escape from it.

He was telling some millions of Americans the ideas which his seventy-five years had brought to him. He said, 'So long as the human race is divided into two halves, each of which thinks the other half wicked, it can be plausibly maintained that it is everybody's duty to cause suffering. If such a view is not to prevail, it will be necessary that our moral outlook should become more kindly than it has hitherto been, and that we should cease to find pleasure in thinking of this world as a vale of tears'.

He went on to explain, 'We live in a moment of strange conflict. The human heart has changed little since the dawn of history, but the human mastery over nature has changed completely. Our passions, our desires, our fears are still those of the cave man, but our power to realise our wishes is something radically new. Man must face the painful truth: that disaster to his neighbour whom he hates is not likely to bring happiness to himself whom he loves. If a man is to live with the new powers that he has acquired he must grow up not only in his mind but in his heart'.

The speaker concluded and stepped aside; another and younger man took his place and spoke into the microphone. 'This concludes the Peace Programme. This programme is conducted by the Peace Group, an endowed institution that aims at the prevention of the next world war. Our speaker was Bertrand Russell, Nobel Prize-winning philosopher and mathematician. Turn to this programme one week from tonight at the same hour. The address of the Peace Group is Box one thousand, Edgemere, New Jersey. This is Lanny Budd speaking. Good night'.

The operator in the control room shut off the microphone, and the middle-aged announcer turned to the elderly guest. 'A most interesting talk, Lord Russell', he began. But that was as far as he got; a secretary came, saying, 'Telephone, Lord Russell', and then, 'Telephone, Mr Budd'. It was always that way the moment a programme ended. There were half a dozen telephones in booths, and they would all begin ringing at once.

But it wasn't a fan this time, at least not on Lanny's call. A voice said, 'Is this Mr Lanning Prescott Budd?' When he answered, the voice said, 'This is John Turner of the U.S. Secret Service, Washington office. Do you recognise the name Braun, spelled B-r-a-u-n?'

Lanny said, 'I know such a man. He has other names'.

'I will give one of them, Vetterl'.

'Yes, that is the man. I know him'.

'We have just received a code cablegram asking us to contact you about a matter of importance. Would it be convenient for you to come to Washington?'

'I have always honoured his requests', Lanny said. 'Will tomorrow afternoon be time enough?'

'We will expect you tomorrow afternoon', was the reply. 'We will, of course, take care of your expense account. I will make a reservation for you at the Shoreham'.

Lanny hung up; and right away there was another call for him, and then another and another. The fans never let up for an hour or two. The announcer was busy, the speaker was busy, the announcer's wife was busy, and so were several of the assistants. People wanted to congratulate, they wanted to ask what they could do, they wanted to order copies of the little weekly paper called _Peace;_ they wanted to ask questions or tell their ideas about how to bring peace to the world and keep it. They were all well meaning, but not all were competent, and you had to be of a patient disposition in order to keep at this crusader's job, as Lanny and Laurel Budd and their friends had been doing for what seemed a long time. They had started in the autumn of 1945, and now it was October of 1946.

Laurel was expecting her second baby in a couple of months, but that had not kept her from sitting most of the day at a desk or lying on a daybed reading mail, dictating replies, and receiving visitors from all over the country and from other parts of the world. An unused factory building had been made over into a radio studio, the publishing and editorial rooms of a weekly paper, and the office of a newspaper syndicate. There was always more work than the staff could do. The harvest was plentiful and the labourers were few.

II

They drove the honoured guest to their home, where he was to spend the night; and only after they had bestowed him did Lanny tell about the special telephone call. Laurel's face fell and she exclaimed, 'Oh dear!' They are going to take you away again!'

'I can't tell', Lanny said, 'until I have talked with the man. Perhaps it's only information he wants'. He said no more, for a confidential agent does not talk about his affairs even to the wife he loves and trusts; the wife spares him the embarrassment of having to refuse. 'I thought of motoring', he added, 'so you can come along. You need a change, and we can talk about our problems'. They were kept so busy with routine jobs that they had little time for the larger planning.

Laurel assented; she would rest and read in the hotel while he went about his errand. She told her secretary, and Lanny told his. They arranged to have their distinguished guest driven back to New York in the morning. There was no end to the details you had to attend to when you were running a radio programme, a small weekly paper, and a newspaper syndicate; but the task had its compensations, for you met the great minds of your time and it helped to sustain your hopes for the human race.

They packed their bags and set their alarm clock for six in the morning. The month being October, the sun would barely be up, but by an early start they would escape some of the traffic on the highway. They delayed only long enough for a glass of orange juice and some bread and fruit, and then they were off, on a road which took them into the highway known as US 1, the main route to the south.

Already at that hour the highway was full of speeding trucks and cars. It passed through a string of cities—Newark, Elizabeth, Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore. There were smaller towns in between, and lines of filling stations and eating places. There were great factories here and there, brick buildings with tall chimneys scattered over the landscape, and all of them discharging their products into the truck route and the railroad which paralleled it. Goods were carried to the ports where the ships came and went incessantly. For five years America had been loading them with the means of destruction and now for more years would be supplying the means of undoing the destruction.

Lanny Budd had been driving a car since his early youth, now more than thirty years in the past, and had never had a serious accident. When he was caught in a line of speeding traffic he left a space between himself and the car in front, so that if he were hit in the back there wouldn't be a double crash. If some too eager driver crowded in front of him he would put out his hand and slow up and let the reckless one have his way. He was more than ever careful now because of that extra freight he was carrying, the second child whom he and Laurel so desired.

On the way they talked about the state of the world; like a pair of Atlases, male and female, they carried it upon their shoulders. In this year of 1946 it was a restless and quaking world, no comfortable burden. The dreadful war in Europe had ended seventeen months ago. The nations of the earth had got together and formed an organisation to establish order and keep the peace, but it appeared that the organisation wasn't working too well. The Kremlin had vetoed three of its proposals in one afternoon, and the Soviet delegate had walked out from the meeting of the Security Council in New York. Did that mean that Russia was going to withdraw altogether? Winston Churchill had travelled to Missouri and under the auspices of President Truman had accused Russia of setting up an 'iron curtain' to shut out the Western world. Stalin had replied by calling Churchill 'a firebrand of war'.

The most alarming development of all had been in the far South Sea island of Bikini, where the United States had given the world a demonstration of what the new atomic power could do. Eleven old war vessels had been destroyed and twenty-five more crippled. A second explosion, this time under water, had sunk a battleship, an aircraft carrier, and eight other vessels of war. The United States had proposed to the United Nations a plan to ban the manufacture of such weapons and provide that all nations should permit inspection to make sure of the keeping of the agreement. But Russia had announced that she would never accept such a plan; and it was hard to think of anything more disconcerting to a husband and wife who were spending all their time talking and writing about world peace.

III

In Washington, Lanny had his car put in the hotel garage, for in large cities there is no use driving your own car—you spend too much time looking for a parking place. He had lunch with Laurel and saw her settled in a comfortable room; then he took a taxi to the immense Treasury Building in which the mysterious John Turner had his office.

Lanny was ushered into the presence of one of those bureaucrats concerning whom one reads so much unfavourable comment in the newspapers. They are supposed to sit with their feet up on their desks, but Lanny had never seen one in that position. This one rose to greet his visitor and invited him to a seat alongside the desk. He was a man in his middle years, serious and quiet in manner; his business suit had been newly pressed, and his necktie was of the proper pattern. The same being true of Lanny, they understood that they belonged in the same social stratum and so knew how to deal with each other. Mr Turner offered him a cigarette, and when he did not take it Mr Turner did not smoke either.

'Mr Budd', he said, 'from the state of our files I gather that you have never had much to do with the Secret Service. One of the tasks laid upon us from the beginning has been the detection and prevention of counterfeiting. We thought we had out hands full in the United States, but now a good part of Europe has been added, and a few thousand Pacific islands'.

'Do they counterfeit cowrie shells?' asked the visitor with a smile.

'They counterfeit anything that they can put off on some poor sucker. Tell me, in the course of your researches among the Nazis did you run into any evidences of counterfeiting?'

'I heard a good deal of talk about it off and on, but it wasn't my job and I didn't ask questions. I know that Adolf Hitler had all his plans made for the invasion of Britain, and a part of this was the printing of great quantities of English money, so that he could take possession of everything in the country without plain outright confiscation. I was told that he had set up a regular engraving establishment at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp'.

'Our information is that at one time he had as prisoners there more than a hundred and forty expert engravers as well as convicted forgers from several countries; they were set to making plates for reproducing the currency of the Allied countries. The neutral nations were refusing to accept Hitler's marks, they demanded sterling or American dollars. And if these dollars were successfully counterfeited the market would be flooded and prices would be forced up for the Allies. The enemy would get the goods and we would be driven into bankruptcy. The forgeries were so good that they went undetected for some time'.

'"Himmler money" we used to call it', Lanny put in.

'Our information is that they printed some two hundred million British pounds, nearly a billion dollars. When the invading armies neared Sachsenhausen the Nazis transferred their machinery and slave labour to the Mauthausen concentration camp, on the Danube. When the final collapse came the stuff was scattered over the German-speaking lands. We have recently found a stock of it in a factory at Freising, and another lot sealed up in metal containers and sunk in a lake near Bad Ischl in Austria. What we want most of all is to find the plates. So long as they exist the floods of phoney money may be continuous. We have not been able to find any trace of them so far, and they may be in the hands of the Neo-Nazis, who are awaiting their time to seize power; or they may have fallen into the hands of gangsters—many of the Nazis have become that, as you doubtless know. Or again, the Communists may have got them. They too have their plans for the future. At least there is good reason to think that they might not be entirely displeased if something were to wreck the economy of the Western world'.

'I can see that you have your hands full, Mr Turner', said Lanny. 'But tell me, where do I come into this?'

'First, I want to ask you about this man who calls himself Braun and Vetterl and sometimes Bernhardt Monck'.

'Monck is his real name'.

'You know him well?'

'I have known him for some thirteen or fourteen years'.

'And you trust him?'

'Completely. I have put him to many tests. He is an old-time sailor and labour leader, a Social Democrat, an active member and onetime official of that party'.

'That means that he is not a Communist?'

'It means he is the kind of man whom the Communists shoot in the back of the neck whenever they get power. I worked with Monck at the time of the Spanish War and all through the Nazi terror. You can count on him.'

IV

From a drawer in his desk Turner took out a roll of white paper which had come off a teletype machine. 'I cannot give you this to read', he said, 'because it is classified; but I will read you a bit from it'. He unrolled to a marked place and explained, 'A code number is given—that is, Monck's number—and the text goes on, "advises that Lanning Prescott Budd of Edgemere, New Jersey, may be of assistance in this matter. He was former President Roosevelt's confidential agent in Europe and may be trusted. If he is not at Edgemere he may be reached through his father, who is Robert Budd, president of Budd-Erling Aircraft Corporation of Newcastle, Connecticut. He knows Stubendorf since boyhood; he knows the Graf, and also Kurt Meissner, the music composer'". Is that true, Mr Budd?'

'That is all true. You mean that you have some clue that leads to Stubendorf?'

'There are important clues leading there. But let me ask you questions first. How well do you know Graf Stubendorf?'

'He is General Graf Stubendorf. I have known him since I was a boy, and I have attended several of his social functions in Berlin. I would not say that I know him intimately, but I know him well'.

'And this other man, Kurt Meissner?'

'I have known Kurt also since boyhood, when we attended the Dalcroze Dancing School at Hellerau in Germany. After the First World War he was a guest at my mother's home on the French Riviera. We provided him with a studio in which he lived for eight years, and that enabled him to become the famous composer he is. But there is nothing left of our friendship now, alas. The last time he saw me he spat in my face'.

'The matter is important', said Turner, 'and if you don't mind telling me the story—'

'Not at all', replied the other. 'Kurt Meissner fell under the influence of nazism early after the First World War. He introduced me to his Führer, and I didn't think much of him. However, about ten years ago when President Roosevelt asked me to help him, I pretended to Kurt that I had begun to understand Hitler better, and I was admitted to the great man's circle of intimates. Kurt didn't find out that I was deceiving him until the American armies were close to the Rhine; and naturally he was furious. I don't know where he is now'.

'Here is what Monck thinks about it', said Turner and read again from the teletype. '"Number so-and-so reports that Meissner was released from an American prison camp and is believed to be in Stubendorf, now Stielszcz, in Poland'". What do you think of the chances?'

'I do not know. I have wondered if he would wish to go back, and if he would be tolerated there. His Nazi philosophy is much closer to the Reds than it is to us, and it may be they would accept him. They make a great pretence of culture, you know—it is a part of their propaganda. They might even subsidise him and set him to composing music for them'.

'Do you suppose that you could make friends with him and get information from him?'

'I can't be sure, Mr Turner. Boyhood friendships make a deep impression upon our minds, and we never get rid of them entirely. Kurt is a couple of years older than I, and as a boy he was much more learned and conscientious. He took a sort of fatherly attitude toward me. He taught me about German idealism, which uses long abstract words, and he probably has a tender spot for me in his heart. He might still be willing to make up with me'.

'Having been a secret agent, Mr Budd, you know that we never talk unnecessarily. If you would be willing to do us this favour, then of course I will tell you what is necessary to the undertaking; you will get more from our agent on the spot who knows all the details. We would, of course, expect to pay all your expenses and a reasonable compensation'.

'I have never accepted any compensation from the government, Mr Turner, and usually I paid my own expenses. You see, before I became a peace propagandist I was an art expert, and I used that as my camouflage all the time I was a P.A., as we called a presidential agent. I once purchased a valuable old master from Graf Stubendorf's aunt. I didn't buy it for myself but for a client. I might be able to do more business in Stubendorf if I could manage to smuggle paintings out'.

'That would, of course, be perfectly agreeable to us; but you really must let us take care of your expenses going and coming. As to Meissner, what are his financial circumstances?'

'He would be poor, I imagine. He has a large family. He was crippled by a war wound and can no longer play the piano. I suppose he can compose, but who could pay him for it now in Germany? His last composition that I know of was a Hitler march modelled on Wagner's "Kaisermarsch."'

'You would be at liberty to offer him money within reason. It might be that he would enter our service—of course after you have made sure he could be trusted. It might occur to him that since you had deceived him for a number of years he would be justified in deceiving you for an equal number'.

'All Nazis believe in deceiving people. The only question would be whether they would rather deceive Communists or Americans. I would have to find out about that before I made any offer of money. But explain this to me. Mr Turner: Stubendorf is now in Poland, and my understanding is that the Poles have an independent government, or supposed to be independent. Aren't they the ones to handle this?'

'We are doing our best to think of Poland as a friendly government, Mr Budd. We understand that the Soviets are still exercising military authority there, and we wish to think of them also as friends. We have reported the matter a number of times, and we expected the co-operation that one gets from civilised governments; but we have met only with evasions and delays. The matter has been hanging fire for a year now, and meantime this queer money, as we call it, continues to be smuggled into Berlin and into Western Germany and to be put into circulation there. We have to face the possibility that the local authorities, whether Polish or Soviet, may be in league with the criminals, and perhaps sharing the profits. If so, that is indeed a serious breach of good faith and of international fair dealing. We have decided that we must get some information for ourselves, and it occurred to us that you, being known as an art expert and an advocate of peace, might be able to get permission to visit Stubendorf—whether to look for some paintings to purchase, or perhaps to meet your old friend, Kurt Meissner, whatever seemed best in your judgment'.

'It would not be easy for me to go. My wife is pregnant, and her time is due in a couple of months. A husband likes to be around at that time; also, we have a considerable business on our hands. It would be a question of making plans ahead and giving instructions to our staff'.

'I don't think this would be a long assignment, Mr Budd, and it is a matter of really top importance. We have reason to think that some of the priceless plates may be hidden in Stubendorf; or at any rate that persons in Stubendorf know about them. Would you think it a possibility that Meissner himself might be concerned in that?'

'You have named three sorts of persons who might be involved, Mr Turner—Nazis, gangsters and Communists. Which do you suspect in this case?'

'It is hard to be sure, Mr Budd, because the three groups shade into one another. Some of the Nazis have turned into gangsters and many have entered the service of the Communists—some of the highest and the most capable have done so. Gangsters, of course, pose as Communists, or as Nazis, whichever suits their purpose at the moment. Would it not be possible for you to approach Meissner on the basis of your old friendship? It hurts you to think of his hating you, and you are anxious to heal the old wound.'

'I could do that, of course. But he will be certain to suspect that I have some hidden motive'.

Said Turner, 'Approach him carefully, discuss the situation of Germany with him, and make sure of his point of view. Then, even if you cannot fool him, at least you can be sure he is not fooling you'.

V

Lanny spent the next couple of hours learning the ABCs of the counterfeiting industry, hitherto unfamiliar to him. He made notes and promised to memorise them and then destroy them. He was shown specimens of British five-pound notes printed on white paper and of American five-dollar notes, known by such affectionate titles as 'the long green' and 'folding money'. He could see nothing wrong with them and would have taken them gladly. Then Turner took him to a microscope near the window and told him what minute errors to look for; even then it was not easy to find them.

Men had died for the commission of those small mistakes. Turner told him how a group of three or four of these engraver-slaves had conspired to hide minute marks in the plates, whereby the notes could subsequently be identified. This was discovered, and the conspirators were sent to the gas chamber—that is, they were poisoned by cyanogen, their bodies burned in the furnace, and their bones ground up for fertiliser. All the engraver-slaves at Sachsenhausen had worked with this menace hanging over them; if they made a mistake it would be taken for granted that they had done it on purpose; mistakes were simply not permitted.

Turner did not go into the details of the case that Lanny was to investigate. All that would be supplied by the Treasury agents he would meet in Berlin—the Secret Service being a branch of the Treasury. Turner said, 'Something might happen so that you couldn't go;' and Lanny understood this without explanation. Agents were told only what they needed to know and only when they needed to know it. Their dealings with the rest of the world were upon that same basis.

Lanny agreed to fly three days from date and was told that his passport and tickets would be brought to his home. He was taken into a photographing room and his face was 'shot'; a pleasant face it was, usually, but somehow people always look solemn for this special occasion. The developing took only a few minutes, and the new agent received a leather folder with his accrediting as an agent of the United States Secret Service.

The official said, 'Credentials can be lost or stolen, so you must have a password which you can speak to the proper man when you meet him. You may choose a word'.

Lanny hadn't the remotest idea why the name Christopher Columbus popped into his head, but he said it, and the other smiled and said, 'Okay'. During the war years Lanny had often wondered how such names as 'Operation Overlord', 'Anvil', and 'Torch' had come to be chosen. Now he could guess.

VI

Lanny left the Treasury Building and went walking along Pennsylvania Avenue, swarming with traffic. He had his notes in hand and was diligently learning them. Suddenly another idea popped into his mind; he went to the first telephone kiosk he could find and called the White House. He asked for the President's first secretary, knowing that he wouldn't get that busy and important individual but one of the assistants. He explained that some three months previously he had been flown to Moscow as a personal representative of President Truman, to interview Marshal Stalin on the President's behalf. Maybe the assistant had not heard of this, but the first secretary had undoubtedly heard of it. Mr Budd was going back to Europe, leaving in three days, and the President had suggested that if he ever was planning such a trip he, the President, should be informed.

The assistant, properly impressed, promised to bring the matter to the first secretary's attention. The impressive Mr Budd said that he was staying at the Shoreham Hotel for this night only and was intending to motor to his home in New Jersey early in the morning, unless he heard that the President desired to see him before he left.

Having thus spoken, Lanny went walking again, and when he came to the hotel he found his wife lying on the bed, working on a portfolio of manuscripts she had brought along. He said to her, 'Darling, I have promised to fly to Berlin to give somebody some advice. There is nothing dangerous about it, and I want you please not to worry. I expect to stay only a few days'.

He said no more, and Laurel asked no more, being a well-trained wife. Worry she would have, knowing that he would be flying over the same route in which he had had both his legs broken in a dreadful accident. It amused him to point out to her that only because of those broken bones had she got a chance to lure him into matrimony. You can say things like that in matrimony, provided that you smile while you say them. Lanny smiled frequently at this alert little woman who had taken charge of his affairs; she was a most conscientious person, with a sharp tongue, but she used it as a rule only on the warmakers.

Hardly had he taken a seat and unfolded the afternoon paper before the telephone rang. There was the assistant secretary, saying that the President requested Mr Budd to be at the White House at nine that evening. Lanny said, 'I will be there'.

It was hard not to tell Laurel that item of news, but he would have to wait until he had made sure whether this also would be a confidential mission. He had promised to take her to a movie that evening, but instead he had to tell her, 'This is part of the job'. All she answered was, 'It will give me a chance to do my homework'.

VII

It is not considered good form to approach the White House except in a vehicle; but Lanny felt like walking on this crisp fall evening. When he came to the gates the naval sentry on duty accepted his statement that he had an appointment with the President; but a man in civilian clothes stepped out from behind the sentry box and followed close behind him. Two other such men stepped forward at the portico, and it amused Lanny greatly to produce the card in a little folder that Turner had given him that afternoon. The three men looked surprised and promised they would know him next time.

Inside an elderly Negro took his hat, and the secretary led him to the elevator. This stately and dignified building was less than a hundred and fifty years old, but it was rapidly giving way to decay. The floor of the President's bathroom was so creaky that he was afraid he was going to fall into the room below. Before long they would have to spend five and a half million dollars to take the building to pieces and put it together more soundly. But none of that showed, and there was nothing to mar the visitor's impressions of these historic rooms.

In the old days Lanny had been taken to the third floor to Franklin Roosevelt's bedroom and had found the Boss in bed, wearing an old crew-neck sweater upon which moths had got in their evil work. Now on the second floor he found Harry Truman sitting at a large desk, looking like one of the ten best-dressed Americans, with a stack of papers before him. He had to sign his name six hundred times every day of his life, and sometimes he got up at half-past five in the morning to finish the previous day's stint.

He was a man of medium size, a couple of inches shorter than Lanny. He was quick in his movements and impulsive in his speech. He got up when he saw the visitor, shook hands cordially, and told him how glad he was to see him again. He signed him to a seat and said, 'Mr Budd, I listen to your programmes whenever I can get a half-hour. I envy you the judgment and taste you show. You have been bringing forward the best minds in our country, and I only wish I could spend my time with such people'.

'The judgment and taste are mostly my wife's', replied the visitor. 'She is the boss of that programme'.

'You must bring her to see me some time. Tell her I envy her the ability to work for peace and to believe in it'.

'She will ask me if you do not believe in it, Mr President', said Lanny, smiling.

But the President did not smile. 'I am truly a man of peace, Mr Budd. I would give my life to be able to prevent another world war. But reports come to me, and I am forced to face the fact that there are people who don't share my feelings. You know the old saying, "It takes two to make a quarrel"; but that is just not true. A drunken man can make a quarrel, a bully can make it, a fanatic can make it. I think it would be more correct to say that it takes two to keep the peace'.

'A wise and careful statement', said Lanny. 'I will tell you frankly, I am coming to share your uneasiness'.

'I understand that you are going abroad, Mr Budd. How long do you plan to stay?'

'I can't be sure about that. It depends upon what I find. I am going on a government errand'. He would not tell even the President unless the President specifically asked—and the President didn't. What he said was, 'I wish you would make it an errand for me also. I know that you have sources of information and I wish you would keep your eyes and ears open and tell me what you think I can do to persuade the Politburo to keep its agreements'.

'I will be glad to do what I can, Mr Truman'.

'I know what you did for President Roosevelt, and truly I need your help'.

VIII

This accidental President of the U.S.A. was a sociable man, and he was often lonely in that great mansion where he couldn't enjoy the company of any man without making a score of others jealous. Just now he was in a mood to pour out his heart, and this visitor was a man whom the newspaper reporters hadn't yet found out about.

Said the President, 'I need not tell you, Mr Budd, that I was not trained for this job. I was surprised that I was invited to become a senator; I was still more surprised when I was made a candidate for vice-president, and when this terrific load was dumped on me I was really in a panic. I knew little about international affairs—I had spent my time as senator trying to keep big business people from cheating the government. But now, it seems, I have the whole world on my shoulders—and so much of it going wrong!

Franklin Roosevelt led me to believe and hope that when we had given the Soviet government eleven billion dollars of lend-lease aid and the help of all our Armed Forces to put Hitler out of his evil business—that then we would have Russia for a friend and an ally; we would be able to work out a friendly solution of all our problems. I felt sure we had no real reason for rivalry or quarrel with that country. I thought that Roosevelt had given every evidence of friendship in the Yalta Agreements, and that I had done the same at Potsdam. But now look! They wouldn't get out of Northern Iran until they had a government there that suited them. They are in Dairen and Port Arthur and are under pledge to evacuate them, but they don't. They are supposed to agree to the setting up of democratic governments in Poland, Hungary, and those other countries, and apparently they just mean to take them over. They are threatening some provinces of Turkey and trying to set up a revolution in Greece. And when I go before Congress and urge military aid to those threatened countries I am blasted before the whole world as a warmonger. Tell me, what am I to make of that? What am I to do?'

Lanny said, 'The way to answer that, Mr Truman, is to tell you my experience with Adolf Hitler. It was just about a quarter of a century ago that I heard him make a speech in a Munich beer-hall. Before long I met him, and then I watched his career year after year until he seized power and began to threaten the rest of the world. When I travelled in France and England people would ask me in dismay the same question that you have asked: What are we to make of him? My answer was always one thing, "Read his book". He had told the whole story in _Mein Kampf_. He portrayed himself, his life, his ideas, his purposes, in detail; yet I doubt if one person out of ten to whom I gave the advice ever took the trouble to look into _Mein Kampf_ —it was hard reading, I admit. But here is the same situation with Stalin. He is a voluminous writer, and any one of his books would do. Unlike you, Mr Truman, he was trained for his job; he spent his whole life training for it—in prison, in hiding, or wherever he was. He has a perfectly definite and precise programme, and he tells you all about it. Of course he is writing for his own kind of people, and he assumes that no other kind will take the trouble to read him—and they don't'.

'Speaking confidentially, Mr Budd', replied the President, 'I asked for the opinion of our embassy on this subject, and our charge in Moscow, George Kennan, has read the books. He sent me an elaborate cablegram in which he agreed pretty much with you. But he ended up with the advice that "face" is all important to Moscow, as it is to the Chinese; so if we expect to get any agreement with them it is essential to put the proposition in such a way as not to humiliate them'.

'That's all very well, Mr President, provided they want an agreement; but suppose they don't want an agreement? Suppose they want what they want?'

'That is the question that keeps me awake at night, Mr Budd. But I am surprised to hear it from you, the conductor of a peace programme'.

'Ah, me, Mr Truman!' said the conductor. 'That keeps me awake at night also. You must understand: an old friend of my mother died and left her fortune to be used for this purpose. The war was just over, and we had won it and were in a fine glow of enthusiasm. Everything was going to be different now; the boys were being brought home on points and the world was going to be made over, with your help. We believed Stalin, because we _had_ to believe him; it was too terrible not to. All sorts of people took fire, and it was wonderful—the beginning of a new world. The United Nations was going to be run on a basis of world friendship. But now come these developments, one after another, and we discover that the United Nations is to be nothing but a platform from which Stalin can pour out his propaganda of hate'.

'What will you do—change the programme?'

'It is a foundation, and we have the problem of keeping faith with the dead. Emily Chattersworth was my friend from my cradle up, and I know that she was no Communist and would have no idea of turning the world over to violent revolutionists. I haven't broached the idea to my associates, but I have the thought to turn the programme and the paper into an open forum and let the questions be argued out. The problem is more difficult because my wife is with child, and I shrink from putting any strain upon her in the next couple of months'.

'I can understand your position', said the President. 'My own wife has no love for politics and would like nothing better than to go back to Independence, Missouri, where she could have some friends without concerning herself with social precedence, and without having to be worried about people trying to make use of her'.

Lanny took the occasion to remark, 'For a matter of eight years I gave FDR what help I could, and I made it a point never to ask the smallest favour of him. You may count upon me to continue that attitude'.

'Come and see me when you come back from Europe, Mr Budd', said the sorely burdened man.

IX

Lanny returned to his hotel and found his wife still absorbed in making notes on the margins of manuscripts and letters. All sorts of people sent her material which they hoped to get on the radio, and she felt a sense of obligation to these earnest souls. So many agreed with her on the subject of peace, it seemed strange indeed that there should be so little peace in the world and so many prospects of wars.

'I was with Truman', he told her. He had a right to tell that because Truman had sent her a message. But he didn't deliver it correctly, because it seemed to imply that the President was losing his hopes for the success of their programme.

'Did you invite him to talk on the programme?' she asked—the insatiable one. He told her he had overlooked doing so; the President had had a confidential request to make. Lanny said no more than that, and she did not ask. He told how the President looked, and about the six hundred documents he had to sign every day. He had said that he was a man of peace, and this was a consolation to Laurel, who had been worried by the speech he had made to Congress, propounding the so-called Truman Doctrine. It had sounded warlike, though it said no more than that the Kremlin would not be allowed to have its way with Greece and Turkey. But obviously there could be no reason for considering it warlike, unless Stalin did mean to do some harm to those two countries. It appeared that persons who were calling the 'doctrine' warlike were persons who didn't mind seeing the harm done.

Lanny reported that he would fly to Berlin by way of London in three days. He could not say just how long he would be gone, but he hoped it would not be more than a week or two. They would have time to discuss matters with the Peace staff and arrange for Laurel not to have too many burdens to carry. She said, 'I won't complain. Do take care of yourself'.

X

Next morning they drove back to Edgemere, and in the evening there was a session of the whole Peace family. It was quite an impressive family, whether you judged it by standards worldly or intellectual. The oldest member was an English baronet with the distinguished name of Sir Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson. He was a year or so older than Lanny, which had meant a great deal when they were boys together. The two, with Kurt Meissner, had been dancing demons in Gluck's _Orpheus_ at the Dalcroze festival away back before World War I. Most of his life he had walked with a limp, having crash-landed as a flier in that war.

Rick had helped to build the Labour party in England and to bring it to power the previous year. He might have gone back and had an important post, but he preferred to stay and feed ideas on the subject of peace and social reconstruction to the American press. He considered these two causes to be one and the same, wars being simply the culmination of unrestricted competition in the world's economic affairs. 'Let there be peace' meant to him 'let there be social planning'. He was a man of exacting literary standards and spent his time wading through manuscripts and looking for hidden talent. Now he sat, taking an occasional puff on his pipe, listening attentively to what the others had to say. When he spoke it was with decision, and they heeded him.

There was his wife, Nina, who had taken care of him as a war nurse and married him soon thereafter. She edited the weekly paper called _Peace_ , made up in part of the radio talks, with comments about the speaker and the audience, and the fan letters, full of ideas and arguments. It also used some of the material which the syndicate sent out to the press. It was not a heavy job, so Nina had time to help with reading manuscripts and interviewing would-be talent.

Then there was the eldest son of this pair, who went by the odd pet name of Scrubbie. He had been a flier in the recent war, and had come to Edgemere partly to be with his parents and partly to be with Frances Barnes Budd, Lanny's daughter by his first marriage. Scrubbie didn't say much, and Frances didn't say anything; they sat close together and listened attentively to the wisdom of their elders. She was going to school, and he was making a regular job of the Peace work. The same was true of Freddi Robin, a Jewish boy whose father had been murdered by the Nazis. His uncle, Hansi Robin, the violinist, came now and then to play over the radio.

Then there was Gerald de Groot, scion of an old New York family; his mother was in the _Social Register_ , but Gerald wasn't apt to make it himself, with the present company he was keeping. It was he who did the radio announcing when Lanny was away. He had a most elegant manner and a cultivated voice, from what he called Havvud. He was proud to be earning his own keep, and he boarded with an elderly family which did and delivered the town's laundry. The woman was an ardent Socialist, while her husband called himself an Anarchist. The scion of the de Groots found them both delightful.

Such was the Peace group. Freddi's mother would come in an emergency, and there were several other persons in New York and nearby suburban towns who would do the same. Also there were secretaries and other paid employees. They had had to get along without Lanny in the past and could do it again. The scheduling of speakers for the radio was always several weeks ahead, so Laurel, who ran the programmes, did not have to worry. They promised to help her out, for the special reason they all understood.

In the studio from which the Peace Programme went out over the air there hung on the wall in front of the microphone a life-size oil painting of a stately grey-haired lady, Mrs Emily Chattersworth, who had lived on the heights above Cannes on the French Riviera and had been the friend and protectress of Beauty Budd when she had borne a man child and had had him christened Lanning Prescott, that having been the name of Emily's father. Emily had been the daughter of a fashionable but impoverished family and had been married off to a New York banker much older than herself. This gentleman moved to France when it was discovered that he had been using life-insurance funds in his private speculations. Emily stood by him, but always thereafter felt guilty about her money; she suffered both in mind and fortune through two world wars, so when she died she left a million dollars to a foundation in the hope of preventing a third calamity.

That was the way the Peace group had come into being. The programme had been very carefully planned with the best expert advice. It had been budgeted to spend two hundred thousand a year for five years; apparently it might be able to run longer and to spend more, for contributions kept coming in. There were so many people wanting peace!
2 KNOW YOUR MONEY

I

The Budds were one of the old families of Connecticut, and their name was known all over the world because of the guns they made. Lanny had known about those guns as soon as he was old enough to know anything, and he had learned to use the smaller ones when he was a young boy. His father, Robbie Budd, had been the European salesman of the company, and in Paris he had loved an artist's model whom he had called Beauty because she deserved the compliment. He hadn't married her because his stern old Puritan father back home had received in an anonymous envelope a photograph of her portrait in the nude, and had told his son that if he married such a woman he would be disinherited.

But Robbie had allowed Beauty to say that she was married, and he had set her up in a lovely estate on the French Riviera, where he came to visit her several times every year. When later on, at his father's urging, he had married the daughter of the president of the First National Bank of Newcastle, Connecticut, he gave it out that he had divorced the painter's model.

It was not until Lanny was seventeen and America entered the First World War that Robbie took him home to meet the family and be made respectable. Esther Budd, Robbie's wife, was a conscientious daughter of the Puritans; she had done her best to win Lanny's affection and respect and had done so. She had three children of her own: two sons, who were by now middle-aged businessmen taking over their father's affairs little by little; and a daughter, Bessie Remsen Budd, who was called Bess by everyone. When she was seventeen her mother had taken her to Europe, and in Paris at the home of Mrs Chattersworth she had listened to the violin playing of Hansi Robin, then a brilliant and ardent youth. Bess had found it the most wonderful music she had ever heard, and she had been fascinated by this young genius.

A year later he had come to America to make his debut in Carnegie Hall, and he had been invited to Esther's home. She had been really shocked by that uproar in her drawing room—she knew it was great art, but it belonged in the concert hall, not in a private home. But the whole town had been in a frenzy of excitement about it. Bess and Hansi had fallen desperately in love, and what was the daughter of the Puritans to do about it? She wouldn't for the world have admitted to anti-Semitic feeling, but she could certainly admit that she hadn't looked forward to such an exuberant husband for her daughter. Bess had pleaded and wept; she had been giving all her time to improving her piano playing, so that she might some day become Hansi's accompanist as well as his wife. There had been nothing for the mother to do but give way and have the marriage in her home.

That had been nearly a quarter of a century ago, and in that time the fates had dealt to the couple their due quota of good fortune and bad. The Nazis had grabbed Hansi's younger brother, Freddi, and tortured him in the Dachau concentration camp, and handed him over to Lanny Budd only when he was near to death. They had grabbed Hansi's father and robbed him of his fortune, so that now he was working as the sales agent for Budd-Erling Aircraft. Hansi and Bess had played together on tour after tour in every civilised country of the world. They had two sons who were hoping to be musicians like their parents. Those were good things and would have made most people happy; but one thing was not so good—the daughter of Robbie Budd and Esther Remsen Budd of Newcastle, Connecticut, had been for many years an active member of the Communist party of America, and was growing more bitter and more outspoken with every year.

II

Hansi Robin was to play with the Philharmonic in Carnegie Hall; and that was a place of memories for the son of Budd-Erling. He had heard Paderewski play here and Chaliapin sing, and seen Isadora Duncan dance on flitting bare feet. To recall them brought melancholy feelings—' _Eheu fugaces!_ ' Lanny had the fancy that the molecules which composed these walls must have been affected by the vibrations, and perhaps these effects endured; some day might come awizard scientist who would devise a way to detect them—and what a time he would have sorting them out!

The name of the hall brought back to Lanny's mind an elderly Scotsman whom he had met somewhere in London in his early youth: a smallish man with twinkling grey eyes and white beard closely trimmed. True to his type, he had been frugal and had saved his pennies; he had become a steel master and had saved his dollars, until he had some three or four hundred million of them. In his old age he had sold out his properties for that amount of cash to the only man in the world who could have paid it—J. P. Morgan, who controlled all the credit in Wall Street and wanted to form a steel trust and fix prices.

Andrew, canny as ever, had looked about him for a way to buy the greatest amount of post mortem publicity. He had built this fine concert hall in New York, thus compelling every music lover to speak his name frequently. He had scattered twenty-five hundred and five libraries over the world, and upon each of them had engraved his name, and inside had hung a portrait of himself. You could say this for Andrew—he was more intelligent than the youth who fired the Ephesian dome or the Egyptian king who set a couple of hundred thousand slaves to dragging huge blocks of stone across the desert to build a pyramid.

It was a decorous audience. They had come to have a gracious inner experience, each one alone. They sat waiting, and if they spoke at all it was in low tones. The musicians came out on the platform, one or two at a time, took their seats, and began making their mysterious little noises, each on his own. That was individualism, and presently there was a hush, and the conductor came out and took his stand on the podium, tapped with his little baton, and after that it was co-operation, a social product known as the 'Oberon Overture', a creation of the purest delight.

When its melodies died away the conductor walked off the stage and presently came back escorting a tall black-clad gentleman, carrying a violin. In this year 1946 Hansi Robin was forty-one years old; his hair, which had been black, now showed touches of grey. Lanny had first known him as a lad lost in the wonders of music, flitting from one composition to the next like a humming bird over a bed of flowers. Hansi's younger brother had played the clarinet, and Lanny had seen them as two shepherd lads out of ancient Judea, chanting the holy psalms of their race: 'Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice: and let men say among the nations, The Lord reigneth. Let the sea roar, and the fullness thereof; let the fields rejoice, and all that is therein. Then shall the trees of the wood sing out at the presence of the Lord, because he cometh to judge the earth. O give thanks unto the Lord; for he is good; for his mercy endureth for ever'.

The mercy of the Lord had been manifested in a strange way to Hansi Robin, German-born Jew. The Lord had turned loose a herd of wild beasts in that civilised land, and they had seized some six million of the Lord's chosen people, poisoned them, and turned their bodies into fertiliser for the fields. They had done this to most of Hansi's relatives and friends, and had almost done it to his brother and his father. The horror of the experience had graven deep lines in the musician's face, never to be removed; it had become a mask of sorrow, and he rarely smiled. There was something priestlike about his aspect as he stood acknowledging the welcome of the audience with slow inclinations of his head.

The hall fell silent, the conductor tapped his desk, and the orchestra swept into the opening notes of the Beethoven concerto. Hansi must have played that masterwork many hundreds of times since his boyhood. Lanny had heard him play it a score of times and knew every note of it. Hansi's execution was perfect, his tone clear. In the slow movement all his grief wailed, and to those who knew him it was a heart-rending utterance.

But sorrow never lasts to the end of a Beethoven composition. He was the defier of fate, the great yea-sayer, and presently the music was like the wind running over a meadow of flowers, superlative happiness infinitely multiplied. 'O youths and maidens, in song delighting, come dance and play and pleasure with me'—Hansi and Lanny had agreed upon these words as conforming to the theme. To listen to it was to be reborn in courage, hope, and joy; to be uplifted to a splendid climax and go out with spirit renewed. Such was the meaning of the applause; people were trying to tell Hansi Robin that they loved both him and Beethoven, and that both were to go on living forever. In these modern days the double miracle was commonplace; there were not merely Beethoven's printed notes, but Hansi Robin's recording, which you could buy in a music store for a few dollars.

III

After the concert was over, Lanny and Laurel and Hansi's nephew Freddi took the musician to a café and tried to get him to eat, because he would never eat anything before a concert, and afterward he was exhausted, depressed from the reaction of the excitement. There had been a time when Bess had done this service for him; she would never have dreamed of letting him go to a concert alone. But now she had some committee meeting, a higher duty. She was on so many committees that her name had become a sort of Red talisman when you saw it you would say to yourself, 'Aha! Another Communist front!'

The four friends sat at a table in the little café, in the portion of New York known as Yorkville. Hansi had before him a wienerschnitzel and a glass of milk. Now and then he sipped the latter absent-mindedly and put a piece of the meat into his mouth. He was very sad and did not try to hide it; if your friends cannot help you any other way, at least they can let you be sad.

'Lanny', he said, 'I am afraid I am going to have to get another accompanist. Bess no longer has the time to practise, and we can't learn anything new. You know, a performer nowadays can't get along on just the Beethoven and the Mendelssohn and the Tchaikovsky'.

'Have you told Bess?' inquired Bess's brother, and the answer was, 'Many times, but it only leads to a quarrel. She has her mission, and it is no longer the same as mine. Don't mind if I talk about it; you are the only people I can be frank with'.

Laurel asked, 'Do you suppose it would do any good if I appealed to her?'

'Not a bit. She is saving the world and no longer has any use for people who aren't. She knows how I dislike her friends, so she doesn't bring them to the house very often. She meets them outside—and that means I'm alone a good part of the time'. Hansi sat brooding, then added as if in haste, 'Understand, I don't mean she is having an affair. I don't think she feels the need of love any more; she is satisfied with hate'.

'The Communists live on hate', Lanny assented.

'In the old days, Lanny, I went to several of their conventions with Bess. They were open to the public then. I had read that the old-time Russian peasants were known as the "dark people", but I decided that those Reds I watched were the ones who really deserved the name. I don't refer to their complexions—I am no blond myself. I mean their souls. They are full of suspicion and couldn't carry on any kind of discussion without attributing base motives to one another. I suppose that is why in Russia they cannot settle any problem except by killing their opponents'.

'Or putting them in a concentration camp', suggested Laurel.

'It comes to the same thing. I am tormented by the thought that we are going to have another war, and that I'm going to have to see my wife in a concentration camp. Do you suppose it is coming, Lanny?'

Said Lanny, 'The Communists are all for peace, of course; but the capitalists and imperialists of the whole world are going to force war upon them'. Irony is a dangerous form of utterance, but Lanny could be sure that none of these three friends would miss his meaning.

IV

The development of this conflict had been slow and had passed through various stages. When Hansi and his younger brother had come to visit Lanny at Bienvenu, his home on the French Riviera, Hansi had been sixteen. He had listened to Lanny's ideas of peace and brotherhood based upon the principles of social justice; a gentle idealist, he had taken fire and thereafter called himself a Socialist. Bessie Budd had met him when she was very young, and she had taken fire in her turn and had carried the ideas to her own extreme. She had made up her mind that the capitalist class would never voluntarily give up its mastery of industry, and so she had become a Communist.

Lanny always said that this was because of her Puritan ancestry and upbringing. She had to be fanatical about what she believed, and she had to force others to agree with her. Hansi loved her and had been willing to be forced. He had never joined the party, but he had played at concerts for it and had been willing for Bess to give a good part of their earnings to the cause. Then had come the Spanish Civil War, and this crisis forced the radicals, of all shades of pink and red, to unite against the horrors of nazi-fascism. But, watching that war, Hansi saw the Communists wrecking the cause by their determination to rule and oust all others. Also, he had learned about the dreadful purges in the Soviet Union.

Then had come the deal between Stalin and Hitler. Lanny had got some information and had foreseen it. He had hinted as much to Bess, and she had flown into a rage with him for even suggesting such a vile idea. 'You talk like a Fascist!' she had exclaimed—and that was the worst thing she could think of to say. So, when the deal was actually announced, Bess had to turn one of those somersaults which the Communists learn in their intellectual gymnasium. She followed the party line and began making excuses for the deal, saying that Stalin had learned that the Allies were about to make one, and he had been smart and jumped the gun on them.

That was where the real quarrel started; for, to Hansi Robin, Hitler was the murderer, the beast, and to compromise with him was unthinkable. The husband and wife argued until they could no longer stand the sound of each other's voices. They could live together only upon the basis of never mentioning the subject which was nearest to the hearts of both. But then had come another sudden development, like a sponge wiping the slate clean before their eyes. Hitler had attacked Stalin, and Stalin had automatically become an ally of the Allies. Once more the Soviet Union was the friend of democracy and peace, and once more it became necessary for all shades of red, pink, and lily-white to get together and give aid, both material and intellectual, to the Russians.

Hansi and Bess in their enthusiasm had gone to Russia to give their kind of help—beautiful music. They had lived in Russia for almost two years, but it hadn't worked out as they expected. Bess, the true party member, could be trusted in part; but Hansi, the Socialist, could not be trusted at all. Patriotism, nationalism, had become the party line. Put none but Russians on guard! A Socialist heretic could not open his mouth without saying something wrong. In the concert hall the crowds would welcome him with tumultuous applause, but the ordinary Russians would not dare invite him into their homes. To have anything to do with a foreigner was to come under suspicion; and then at two or three o'clock in the morning would come the visit of the secret police and the indiscreet person would disappear from sight.

Hansi had learned Russian, and he listened to the conversation of his wife's party friends. He had come back to America convinced that Red communism and Nazi fascism were identical twins, the only difference being in the colour of the shirts they wore. Their doctrines were different, but the techniques, the practices, were the same, and it was these latter which counted in the long run.

'All you have to do', he said to these three trusted friends, 'is to study the goals for which the old-time Tsardom fought its wars. Then in the newspapers you watch Stalin making the very same demands: ports on the Baltic, access to the Adriatic, control of the Dardanelles, possession of the oil in Persia, and warm-water ports on the Pacific—Dairen and Port Arthur. All these the Tsars considered their birthright; and Stalin set Sergei Eisenstein to making a moving picture glorifying Ivan the Terrible, the most murderous of all the old-time Tsars'.

Lanny responded, 'It worries us all'. He was mild about it because he too had a problem in his home. Laurel had become somewhat fanatical on the subject of peace. It was not that she loved the Soviet Union, but that she feared to hate it, or to let anyone else hate it. And Lanny didn't want to say anything to excite her—at least not until that new baby was safely launched into the world. Laurel was thirty-nine and might never be able to have another.

V

Early the next morning Freddi drove Lanny to La Guardia Airport. Laurel wouldn't go along; she couldn't bear to watch a plane take off, knowing that it was carrying the most precious freight in the whole world. The plane was so slow in starting—so agonizingly slow—and it seemed to wait until the last fraction of a second before lifting itself off the ground. Laurel's heart would stop beating, and that wasn't the proper thing for a double-burdened heart to do. She preferred to stay at home and imagine it all.

But with world-traveller Lanny Budd it was an old story. He settled himself in his seat, strapped himself tight, and hardly bothered to look out of the window; he was more concerned to look in the morning paper and see what Stalin was going to do about Turkey and the Dardanelles. When he was through with that he started on a pamphlet Turner had given him; it was issued by the Treasury Department and was called _Know Your Money_. Lanny had torn off the title page so that no one would know what he was reading, and when he had thoroughly digested the contents he would get rid of the pamphlet. The subject was a new one for him, and he fixed all the details in his memory.

The plane's first stop was at Gander on the island of Newfoundland, a place that would always be marked with a red circle on Lanny's mental map. It was from here that he had set out five years ago over the same flying route and had come so near to losing his life. He shivered when he thought of the strange psychic warnings he had received and had chosen to disregard. Then it had been winter, and now it felt like winter in latitude fifty degrees north.

The traveller wandered about to stretch his legs and admire the growth of a great airport and the technique of its operation. Then a bell summoned him, and he got on board, and they were off again. If the weather was bad they would stop at Iceland, but since it was good they headed straight on to Prestwick in Scotland. Once they sighted a thunderstorm ahead, but they made a wide swing around it, and it was fascinating to watch the lightning stabbing into the sea. They reached Prestwick at suppertime, and Lanny took another plane to Croydon Airport near London.

Waiting for him there was Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson, member of Parliament and heir-apparent to a baronetcy. He had been a flier for the Spanish People's Republic during its war for freedom, and Lanny had driven him to his post of duty in Madrid. They had had other adventures together, but the greatest of all, as they both agreed, was the political struggle of the people of Britain. You might say that Alfy had been born a member of the British Labour party, and on the basis of his father's long service and his own record in the Royal Air Force he had shared in the electoral victory of a year ago.

Now Lanny had brought messages from his father and his mother and his younger brother and all the news about their activities. Alfy, in turn, told about the legislative programme now being put through, which would make it possible for every child born in Britain to get enough food to grow into a sound adult, and an opportunity to develop whatever talents he might possess. It would be the first time in the history of that landlord-ridden island, and to the two idealists it would be the beginning of a new stage of civilisation.

Next morning Lanny Budd took off on a plane for Berlin. He had memorised all his notes and torn up the paper into small bits and dropped it down into the sewers of London. The only papers he had in his suitcase were English magazines, and his notebook containing the names and addresses of a number of persons in Germany to whom the U.S. government had returned valuable paintings which the Nazis had stolen. The paintings might be for sale, and Lanny might find time to look at them.

VI

Once more the art expert flew over the green fields and the bombed towns of Germany and came to that ghastly skeleton of a national capital. Once more his plane slid down on the Tempelhoferfeld. When the war had come to an end the American armies had stopped at the River Elbe, desiring to be polite. They might easily have moved on and taken more territory, but they had not wanted to appear to be grabbing something from their Russian Allies. The Russians had moved into Berlin, and at a conference the city had been divided into four sectors, Russian, French, British and American. The Russians had got the eastern portion. They had already grabbed the machinery from the whole city, torn it loose, and carried it away; but unfortunately they had no place to store it, and a good deal of it was left out in the rain and ruined.

The French, American, and British zones of Germany all lay west of the Elbe, so here was this peculiar situation: each country had a sector of Berlin, a little island, as it were, lying seventy miles or so to the east of the Elbe and reached only through Soviet-held territory. It was all right so long as Stalin remained an ally, and in the mood of an ally; but unfortunately he had begun to show an entirely different mood. He had forbidden fraternising between his troops and the Western troops, and he was making more and more difficulties for transport coming by railroad and autobahn.

Lanny had been told that he would be met at the airport, and when he stepped from the plane he was greeted by an alert young American. 'Mr Budd?' said he, and Lanny smiled and answered, 'Christopher Columbus'. The young man gave his name, escorted Lanny to a car, and started briefing him even while they were driving to the office. He was one of several Treasury agents who were on the trail of Himmler money throughout Germany, or those parts of Germany in which they were permitted to work. Where the Russians did not permit them they were working under cover, sometimes through foreign agents whom they might or might not be able to trust.

The man had some melodramatic tales to tell, but Lanny was not surprised by them. He had learned to think of the Nazis as criminals, and among the cleverest and least scrupulous. The fact that they had been operating under the label of a government made no difference in his thoughts. To reproduce the money of an invaded country would appeal to them as the obvious way to get possession of whatever they wanted in that country—and they would want everything of value. As for the neutral lands, well, there was no neutrality in the Nazi psychology; if you weren't one of them, you were against them. In the neutral lands the British pound and the American dollar had become international currency, and to manufacture this currency was the obvious and convenient way to get both raw materials and manufactured goods.

VII

The southwest sector of Berlin, the residential part, had been the least bombed, and the various American services had their headquarters there in fine old mansions. In one of these Lanny was introduced to a couple of the agents, and they got right down to business, knowing that they were dealing with a man who was in a hurry to get back to his affairs. Three different trails—all Polish, they reported—had led them to the village of Stubendorf. Polish nationals who were selling counterfeit money at a large discount—'pushers' they were called—had been patiently trailed by a Polish agent in AMG employ, and they had gone to Stubendorf to replenish their supplies. One of the men was under arrest now, but he wouldn't talk.

'Of course if the N.K.V.D. had him', said Morrison, one of the agents, 'they would torture him and perhaps wring the secret out of him; but we can't do that'. He went on to explain, 'We are obliged to work with foreigners because Americans are too conspicuous for this sort of thing. We do our best to check on our agents, but, of course, we can't help making mistakes. And if the criminals, whoever they are, become too alarmed they will move elsewhere. It is no great job to transport a few bales of paper, and the copper plates are small and can be slipped into the pocket of an overcoat. You can see we have no small problem'.

Lanny asked the crucial question, 'Do you have any clue as to whether these operators are Nazis or Communists, or just individual criminals?'

'We have no clues in this Stubendorf case. We have found all three varieties in other cases, and we learned that it doesn't make much difference; the operations are much the same. The queer money is used to purchase goods, and then the goods are sold on the black market. It doesn't matter whether the profits are spent for Communist propaganda or for women and liquor and nightclub entertainment'.

Lanny replied, 'It makes some difference in the psychology of the operators and the methods of approaching them. It makes a difference in the kind of persons among whom one might expect to pick up clues. From what you tell me it sounds as if there must be a considerable group, and here in Europe such a group usually has an ideology. Have you thought that this crowd might be Vlasovites?'

'You have me there, Mr Budd. I have heard the name, but I don't know about them'.

'Vlasovite is the name for a Russian or Pole who went over to the Nazis and entered their military service. Some did it because they were reactionary; most of them I suppose were just mercenaries. There was a whole division or more of them, commanded by a General Vlasov. Needless to say, to the Reds they are the devil incarnate. Some might have been at Sachsenhausen, as guards or interpreters, even as prisoners if they were engravers or had committed crimes. They might have got away with bales of the money, and the Poles might have fled to Poland; they might have had to change their names and conceal their past, or they might be living as outlaws, hiding in the forest, working as an underground against the Reds. If Kurt Meissner is there, he would be sympathetic to such a group. You can see that the situation is complicated'.

'Our men have been getting quite an education, Mr Budd, and you can help it along if you will. Bernhardt Monck tells me that you know more about these matters than any other American he has met'.

'Monck flatters me, Mr Morrison, because he and I think alike on political and social questions. I know Stubendorf pretty well because I began going there to spend Christmas when I was fourteen years old. I visited Kurt Meissner's family, and later on I came to know the Graf. In 1913, as you know, Stubendorf, in Upper Silesia, was a part of Germany. Then came the First World War, and the Allies turned it over to Poland; Kurt and all the family were bitter against the Allies for that. Germans and Poles have hated each other ever since they existed, I suppose. Then came Hitler, and Stubendorf became German once more. Now it is Polish again—but I suppose that means the same as being Russian'.

'More and more nearly the same, Mr Budd. As you know, the Soviets agreed to the setting up of a democratic government in Poland, but they are making it more and more farcical all the time'.

'Do they still let visitors in?'

'They are making it more and more difficult. They are making Poland over into a satellite state and they don't want any outsiders watching'.

VIII

Morrison gave Lanny a briefing on the political situation as it stood at that moment in Poland. At the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin had agreed that the Polish people were to be permitted to choose their own form of government. All political parties were to be granted equal rights; but the Socialist, Democratic, and Labour parties had all been suppressed, and their leaders were in prison or in the underground or in exile.

'"Free and unfettered elections"—that was the phrase, Mr Budd', said the agent; and Mr Budd answered that he had been at Yalta with President Roosevelt and had read the text of the agreement before it was submitted to Stalin and approved by him.

'Now', said Morrison, 'the government is being run by three Communists. The only party which they allowed to continue was the Peasant party; they hoped to win this over by their programme of re-distributing the land and socialising all industry. They thought they were strong enough to carry a referendum, and it was held. The vote was on the abolition of the senate; and the result, according to the Peasant party leaders, was about eighty-five per cent against the proposal. But the Reds held up the election results for twelve days and then announced that nearly eight million votes had been cast for the abolition of the senate, and fewer than four million votes against it. Such were free and unfettered elections in the Communist understanding of that phrase'.

Lanny was warned that he would find Poland in a pitiable state of disorganisation. Soviet artillery had blasted towns and villages to pieces, and in many of the towns the streets were not yet cleared of rubble sufficiently to drive a vehicle through them. There were unbelievable shifts of population going on. More than eight million Germans had fled from Poland into Germany; to take their places a million and a half Poles had fled from the provinces which the Kremlin had taken over in the East; they had come into the new lands evacuated by the Germans. In addition nearly a million Poles who had fled from the Russians into Germany and Austria and Western Europe were now coming back to their homeland. The population of Warsaw had diminished from a million and a quarter to half a million. All this meant swarms of half-starved people on the roads, riding in oxcarts or trundling handcarts, or plodding along with their few possessions in bundles on their heads or their backs. It was very depressing, and also very insanitary.

Morrison explained that Lanny, of necessity, would be on his own from this time on. They had not arranged hotel accommodations for him, for he must not appear as an official person. Lanny replied that he knew his way about Berlin; he had been here only a few months previously. Although he did not smoke he had brought along packages of American cigarettes and knew how to get favours from hotel clerks, cab drivers, and other persons whose talk might be helpful.

IX

There were two preliminary steps to Lanny's enterprise. The first was to get permission from the Russian military authorities to visit Stubendorf and stay for a few days; the second was to get a visa from the Polish consulate. Lanny had given a good deal of thought to both enterprises, and he told Morrison, 'I will mention that I had two interviews with Stalin, one only last spring. My errand will have to do with buying art works'.

He recalled paintings which had been in Schloss Stubendorf: a Cranach which Göring had wished very much to purchase and a couple of Defreggers, a painter greatly admired by the Führer. Presumably when the days of bombardment had come those paintings had been taken out of the frames, rolled up, and carried to a safe place. Where were they? Kurt Meissner might know, and that would be a good excuse for Lanny to seek him out.

Morrison pointed out that if the paintings were found the government might confiscate them. Lanny said, All right, he would offer to buy them from the government. Anyhow, he would have a reason for visiting Stubendorf. 'Shall I offer the officials a tip?' Lanny asked; and the other said it would be all right to give them a tip if they asked for it, but to be careful.

'The Polish consul', he said, 'is probably a poor devil who secretly hates the Reds. He has difficulty in getting enough to eat; invite him to lunch at a good café and get him a bottle of wine. Don't speak of any Germans to him. You might delicately suggest that you will need to spend some money in Poland, and can he advise you about getting the best rate of exchange. Perhaps he can attend to it for you. The zloty is down to one cent, but let him charge you a cent and a quarter, and that will be a tactful way of giving him a tip. He has been through six years of war, and he'll be overworked and underpaid. You may be the first well-dressed man he has talked to in a long time.'

'If he doesn't hate me for being too well-dressed', said Lanny, smiling.

'Officially he will be supposed to distrust you, but privately he will respect you and be looking out for what he can get. The Communists boast of having done away with graft, but it's all over the place, even among their own officials. Their revolution is almost thirty years old, and it is a very unusual official who can keep within his salary for that length of time'.

Lanny explained that he wanted to talk to several persons before he took this journey. 'I think I might learn Kurt Meissner's whereabouts from his oldest brother, General Emil. Do you have any idea where he is?'

'I can have him looked up for you', said the other.

'The last time I met him was while our armies were still in France. I was working for General Patton's G-2, and I was able to persuade Emil to come over to our side. He gave us priceless information about all the fortifications of Metz. Kurt, of course, regards him as a vile traitor, just as he does me. But Emil understands Kurt's psychology, and he will also know other persons in Stubendorf from whom I might get information. Also, I ought to look up Graf Stubendorf; no doubt his estates have been confiscated'.

'We have already made enquiries about him', replied the other. 'It is reported that he has a small place in the lake district of the Bavarian Alps'.

'It will be a new experience to him to be poor', remarked Lanny.

'They will all be poor. By the way, Washington tells us that you are to have an expense account. You will be free to spend up to two thousand dollars upon other persons, and if you need more you may let me know.'

'It won't be easy to pay them money', said Lanny. 'They will be poor but proud—the way it was with our Southerners after the Civil War'.

'We will rely upon your discretion', replied the official. 'If money will get the information we need, spend it; but be careful, because you will encounter people who will make up stories and keep stringing you along. We have been taken in more than once and have spent a good deal of money following false leads'.

X

Lanny's friend Bernhardt Monck was still with CIC, the Counter-Intelligence Corps of American Military Government. Twelve years had passed since he had shown up in London and made himself known to Lanny Budd as a Socialist underground worker against the Nazis. Since Lanny had known him he had been a _capitán_ in the Spanish People's Army. During World War II he had had charge of American intelligence work in Stockholm, and now he was in the employ of AMG, investigating the records of persons who presented themselves as being free of the Nazi taint and worthy of employment by the victorious Four Powers.

Lanny telephoned, and Monck wanted him to come to his home for dinner. He said he could arrange for a room in a friend's home in the same apartment building.

In the three-room home Lanny met Monck's long-suffering wife, who had taken care of their two children in the Argentine for more than ten years while their father was doing underground work against the bandits who had seized their homeland. The children, now attending a high school under American auspices, spoke fluent Spanish, German, and English and did not feel that they were overcrowding their minds by studying French. They had met Lanny Budd the previous spring and knew that he had been a secret agent against the Nazis and had testified concerning Hermann Göring at the Nürnberg trials. To them Mr Budd was a wonderful person; they listened to all he had to say about that sweet land of liberty across the sea, in which so many people all over the earth were longing somehow to find refuge.

XI

The father of this family came in; a stocky, solidly built man whose muscles had been hardened by conflicts, first with nature and then with humans. His hair was cut short in Prussian fashion and what there was of it was gray. He spoke with a North-German accent, and thought of himself as a working man and nothing else. He and Lanny had been through dangers together, and firmer friends could not have been. Most of what they had done was no longer secret and made wonderful listening for a boy and a girl who were being brought up to think of themselves as working-class children, prepared to devote their lives to the task of building a social order that should be at the same time just and free.

The Americans were free and believed in freedom, but their notions of justice were derived from a previous century—or so at any rate Bernhardt Monck believed. It had been possible for workers to be free so long as industry was primitive and tools were few and simple; but when the tools had become billion-dollar corporations, there could no longer be true freedom for the workers until those tools were socially owned and democratically managed. But you would have a hard time telling that to any American who knew that his country was the richest and most productive in the world, and who read in his newspaper every day that this was due solely to the fact that the tools of production were privately owned and managed.

The Americans had come to Germany and overthrown the Nazis; and now they were engaged in restoring that same system of private ownership, overlooking the fact that it was the private owners of industry in Germany—the great steel-cartel masters—who had subsidised and set up the Nazis in power, in order to keep the German workers from passing laws for the socialisation of German industry. Here was Bernhardt Monck, employed and paid a salary by American Military Government in order to find out whether this man and that had been a Nazi; Monck would go to work and learn that some man had been an active Nazi, and then he would discover that the man was being employed anyhow—the reason being that he was the one who knew the most about how to run that industry.

It was a curious fact about modern war, which the Americans were discovering to their embarrassment, that when you had conquered a people you had to keep them alive, which meant that you had to arrange to have food grown and goods manufactured and distributed. When you had taken the horses and tractors off the farms, you had to get new horses and new tractors to get the crops planted. When you had bombed factories, you had to rebuild them, and the same for railroads and ships and other means of transportation. You had to pay for all this yourself until your conquered enemies were able to pay for it themselves, and naturally the quickest and easiest way to get things going was the way they had been before. You couldn't afford to stop for any Socialist nonsense, and anyhow you didn't want any Socialist nonsense because it would be such bad propaganda for the rest of the world. If the working people in Germany were to get hold of industry and make a success of running it, what excuse could you find to keep the workers of America from wanting to try the same thing? Much better to take the old cartel masters and give them a slap on the wrist and tell them to be good boys now and go ahead and run industry without setting up any more Hitlers.

Here was a German Social Democrat, speaking in the bosom of his family and to a trusted friend. He couldn't say things like that at the office, of course. He would get his facts and make his reports, and what use was made of them was none of his business. If he presumed to criticise the decisions of his superiors they would decide that he was a Red—and that was worse than a Nazi.

Most of these superiors knew in a vague way that here was supposed to be a difference between those they called Reds and those they called Pinks, but they were disposed to be sceptical about that difference. The two colours shaded one into the other, and often pink was used as camouflage for red. American officials might be excused for being uncertain, and especially so because they themselves were open to the same suspicions. Congressmen at home were looking for a chance to jump on their necks and were sending committees over to investigate. It was bad enough to see Britain turn pink. In Britain we couldn't help it, but in Germany we could and we certainly meant to.

XII

Thus Monck, who was very much disturbed by the sight of things going wrong in the world. He had seen them going wrong all his life, he said. He had seen the stupidities and blind greeds of men causing cosmic quantities of human misery and balking those very purposes which the men hoped to achieve. Born into the working classes and having felt the full weight of oppression, Monck could speak for the masses of Europe. He knew that they would not consent to go back to the old system; they would no longer be content with poverty and insecurity. To attempt to force them back would mean simply to drive them into the arms of the Communists. There would be either a Socialist Europe or a Communist Europe—and it was America that would have to make the choice.

Monck had seen one nation after another blundering stupidly and bringing about the opposite result to what it wanted. 'When Hitler invaded Russia', he said, 'the masses of the Russian people were so embittered against the Reds that they would gladly have joined Hitler's armies and helped to win their own freedom. But the Hitler men of hate behaved with such cruelty that they turned the peasants into partisans, hiding in the forests and making war on the German communications. And now we see the Russians in their turn making the same blunder. They have got hold of Central Europe and can't make up their minds whether they are conquerors or comrades. One day they make speeches about working-class solidarity and the next day they behave like barbarians'.

The German Socialist told how the Russians had proceeded to strip Berlin of all its manufacturing machinery; they had also rigged the currency so as to draw most of the products of the country to themselves. Only now were they beginning to realise that by this means they had doomed the East Berliners to perpetual poverty and had sacrificed all chance of winning the West Berliners over to their side. If the East Berliners remained poorly dressed while the West Berliners became well dressed, how could you persuade either side that communism meant prosperity and capitalism meant misery?

Lanny saw no harm in stating that he had just had a talk with President Truman and that the President had commissioned him to find out how to persuade the Kremlin to keep its agreements. Monck smiled sardonically and replied, 'The President might as well send you to India to find out how to persuade tigers to stop eating meat'.

'You think that the Politburo wants war?' Lanny asked.

'No, they don't want war. All they want is the mastery of the world. They have set their programme forth in a whole library of books'.

'That's what I said to Mr Truman, but of course he doesn't have time to read books; he is the most overburdened man in the world'.

'What you should do is to take him one book and mark the passages for him. Get him Stalin's _Marxism and the National and Colonial Question_. That book is the bible for every Russian diplomat and representative abroad. In it Stalin deals with every country of any importance, and he analyses the conditions in that country; he has all the facts and is clear and precise about what he is going to do and how he is going to do it—to undermine the government of that country and place his own kind of people in control. He hasn't the faintest doubt of his ability to do it. It may take a long time, but he has the patience of a cat watching at a rat hole. He bides his time, and when the time comes he pounces. He makes promises, but they don't mean a thing—except that the time for the pounce hasn't yet come. When friendship is to his advantage he can be as charming and warm as a house cat; and he can order the murder of a million human beings without the faintest qualm'.

'I suppose', Lanny ventured, 'he is really more dangerous to the world than Hitler'.

'Hitler was a blusterer and a fool; he was impatient and hysterical. Stalin is quiet and watchful and wise. Also, his camouflage is much better than Hitler's. Hitler was a nationalist and hater of all other peoples—even of the British and the Americans whom he secretly envied. Stalin is an internationalist and a friend of the oppressed workers, all the oppressed races of the world. He loves them all, his heart bleeds for them, and he sets his poets to writing odes to them and his composers to singing songs for them. He tells the oppressed peasants to kill the landlords and take the land; and when they have done this he invites them to form co-operatives under his guidance; he promises them the benefits of machinery and mutual aid and then sets one of his commissars over them and takes away a part of their product—and lo and behold, they are paying more taxes to Stalin than they ever paid to any landlord. He tells the workers to seize the factories, and when they have done so he sets a commissar over them, abolishes the unions, establishes the death penalty for strikes, and pays such wages that it takes a month's labour to buy a pair of poorly made shoes. If any peasant or worker ventures to murmur a complaint he is shipped off to Siberia to labour in the gold mines on a diet of eight hundred calories a day. Such is Marx-Lenin-Stalin in action'.

'Peace, land, and bread' said Lanny—the slogan of the Bolshevik revolution. And Monck commented, 'Peace means the shipping of millions of Russian and non-Russian peoples off to Siberia to make the dictators safe. It means four or five million men impressed into armies. It means the converting of industry into the manufacture of tens of thousands of tanks and guns and planes. It means armed forces at every border, ready to march at the first moment the well-paid and well-trained agitators have succeeded in fanning discontent in a neighbouring country'.

'We have a story in America', said Lanny, 'about a farmer who said he wasn't greedy for land—he wanted only the land adjoining his own'.

'Exactly!' replied the German. 'That ought to enable President Truman to understand Stalin. And make plain to him that when I say Stalin I don't mean an old man who may die any day; I mean a system he has built and that will go on after him. There is the Politburo, and the commissars, and the whole enormous movement. It began as a new religion, like Mohammedanism in its militant days, and now it is like an avalanche in motion. If Stalin were to change or try to stop it, it would sweep him away; they would liquidate him and say he had died of a heart attack, and they would give him the most magnificent funeral in history and build him a monument a hundred stories high. But the movement would go on to take the world'.

'A grim message to carry back to the White House!' remarked the presidential agent.

'It is what I have been watching with my own eyes. There are kidnappings over the border going on all the time. The border is less than half a mile from this house, and I never go out at night without company; I wouldn't go close to the border for a million dollars in perfectly sound American greenbacks. In East Germany they are seizing the workers who show any trace of independence and character and shipping them off to those dreadful slave-labour camps. Men and women of special ability and prominence are being shot in the back of the neck. They are setting the rest to work producing war goods—and of course they control the schools and set out the programmes to educate the children. Give them one generation in any country, and you have a population that doesn't know what freedom means and is absolutely certain that every American is a gangster, a slave-driver, and a warmonger'.

Such was the message; and it surely wouldn't lighten the burdens of an ex-captain of artillery, who to his own great surprise had become President of the United States.

XIII

After the family had gone to bed the two men sat in the little living room—once the home of a Nazi and now commandeered by A.M.G. They talked in low tones about the subject of counterfeit money. It wasn't Monck's specialty, and all that he had done was to recommend Lanny; he said, with a smile, that he had done that because he wanted so much to see his friend once more. But in the course of his years as an underground worker he had picked up odds and ends of information about the Himmler money. He told how during the war a friend of their cause, a pretended Nazi, had turned over to the Social Democrats a bundle of British pound notes that he had stolen. There had been, first, the ethical problem: Did they have the right to use this bogus money? They decided that it would be all right if they put it off on Nazis and no one else. The Nazis had made it, and presumably had made it to be used. But the problem was: How could they put it off on any Nazi or Nazi enterprise or agency without grave danger to themselves? A British pound was a conspicuous thing, and anybody who tried to pass one would be a conspicuous person, and if he was caught he would certainly be shot. The problem had been too much for them, and they had decided to burn that dangerous package of paper.

Also, Monck told about the British ambassador at Ankara, Turkey, whose official papers had been stolen at night by his butler and photographed. News of this had come to Monck in far-off Stockholm, because in the last days of the war an employee of Himmler's intelligence service had fled there and had sold the information to Monck for a few real American dollars. The butler in Ankara had been excessively greedy, demanding as much as fifteen or twenty thousand pounds British money for each of his bundles of photographs. The Nazis had obliged him with Himmler money—large lots of it which apparently he never tried to spend, because they had taken the precaution to give him a few real notes, unpacked, and it was these he had used.

The butler who went under the code name of Cicero, had furnished complete reports of what went on at the Allied conferences at Moscow, Teheran, and Cairo during 1943 and 1944. It was von Papen's organisation which had achieved this coup. The Nazis had several different spy services, all jealous of one another and waging intrigue against one another. The Himmler organisation had refused to believe that the documents were genuine, and von Ribbentrop's organisation had done the same. Before they got through with their squabbling over the matter the war had ended.

Lanny inquired about General Graf Stubendorf and also about General Emil Meissner. Monck reported that his office had investigated both of them and had cleared the latter for a job as a teacher in an _Oberschule_. He was living near Nürnberg, and the Graf was living in Southern Bavaria in a peasant's cottage by one of the mountain lakes. He had, of course, lost his castle and estates, which were now again in Poland and confiscated by the Reds. His town house in Berlin had been smashed beyond repair. What he lived on Monck didn't know, but perhaps he had had some jewels hidden away. He had refrained from having anything to do with the occupation and apparently was content that they let him alone.

Lanny had decided to visit both these men before taking the journey into Poland. Monck advised him to repack his two suitcases, taking only the necessary things and leaving the rest in Monck's care. The effect of war was always demoralising, and now in Germany were many unemployed persons and children running wild. In Poland conditions would be worse, and Lanny might find that his car was being taken to pieces bit by bit unless he watched it. Monck had seen to it that he was provided with an American-occupation civilian licence from the Provost Marshal's office.

'Be careful and don't talk about politics', Monck warned. 'The Poles hate both the Nazis and the Reds; all the parties hate all the other parties, and everybody is suspicious of everybody else, and especially of strangers. You won't find it a holiday jaunt, I can tell you'.
BOOK TWO

A Man's Reach Must Exceed His Grasp

3 TESTAMENT OF BLEEDING WAR

I

On the following morning Lanny Budd got himself a taxicab and was driven into the East sector of Berlin. It was the unlovely part of the city and had been bombed and shelled the worst; but there was a large group of military buildings left standing in the Karlshorst district, and there the Soviet commander, Marshal Sokolovsky, had set up his headquarters. The buildings, some fifteen or twenty, made a quadrangle and were surrounded by a high fence. There was a sort of kiosk at the gate, and soldiers on duty. Lanny learned that he had to go to the Kommandatura for a pass before he could get by the gate; and so it was a couple of hours before he got to talk with an officer of the marshal's staff.

The position of a young Soviet aide-de-camp toward an American visitor was a complex one. He was very apt to like Americans instinctively; most Russians did. When they had met on the River Elbe the American and Russian soldiers had had a fine time celebrating; it had pleased them to hug one another and slap one another on the back; the officers had shaken hands and drunk a toast and said whatever words they had in common. But now everything was changed. The order had gone out: No fraternising. The young Soviet officer looked upon this American visitor with conflicting emotions; he admired his elegant appearance and gracious manners, and at the same time he feared him as a mysterious evil force. Keep a cold, aloof attitude toward him—or else a promising young officer's career might be nipped in the bud!

However, this was changed quickly when the visitor began talking, for he stated that he had had the honour of paying two visits to Marshal Stalin in the Kremlin and had been cordially invited to return at his convenience. He wasn't proposing to go now; all he wanted was to visit a village called Stielszcz in Poland to see if he could trace the whereabouts of some painting which had been in Schloss Stubendorf; he was, so he said, an art expert and was thinking about nothing but paintings in the midst of a world at cold war. A most unlikely tale—that he had ever met Stalin; but suppose it was true? Very certainly a young staff officer could ruin himself _that_ way!

He said that he would have to consult his superior; and presently he came back and escorted the visitor into the office of a colonel. No one in the Soviet Union could be entirely free from anxiety, but a colonel does not show it so readily as a lieutenant and this mature gentleman listened impassively to the American's tale. Unlikely indeed! But when the colonel asked questions the visitor answered promptly and apparently had been well briefed. What he wanted was for the colonel to telephone to the Kremlin and ask for Captain Briansky, who had been his escort during the visit last spring and would confirm his statements. 'I will be glad to pay the cost of the call', he said.

The colonel explained that the Soviet telephone system was state-owned, but the lines were of necessity very crowded. The visitor said he could understand that, but that unfortunately his time was limited, and unless he could make the trip in the next two or three days he would have to return home. He was certain that Marshal Stalin would wish him to have the permit and would be vexed to learn that the favour had not be granted. There was a veiled threat in this, and the officer did not fail to get it. The _Amerikanetz_ went on to say that during his visit in the spring of this year the Marshal had instructed Captain Briansky to escort him to the Moscow Ballet School, where he had had the pleasure of demonstrating to the assembled ballerinas the Dalcroze system of eurythmics. The staff colonel had never heard of that system, but he knew that his country was supposed to have _kultura_ , and that when a cultured person piped he had to dance. He promised the gracious visitor that he would make immediate inquiry, and if the Kremlin wished him to have the permit it would be ready for him in a couple of days.

II

So that was that, Lanny returned to West Berlin and with Monck's advice found a car he could rent for his trip to the South. It was a little vehicle of the kind Americans call a 'coop'; it was large enough for one man and one suitcase and a load of food, and it had quite evidently carried a great many persons to a great many places. It was one of those vehicles of which Henry Ford had said that the customers could have it of any colour they wanted provided it was black.

In order to get from Berlin to Bavaria it was necessary to pass through the Soviet zone. This was a routine matter, and Morrison had obtained the permits. Lanny had driven over this autobahn many times in the past and had clear memories of it; the last was far from pleasant, for he had been escaping from the Gestapo, which had detected his spy activities. The German underground had agreed to transport him, but he had missed connections and walked part of the way in the night. Now there was no more Gestapo, and the ride seemed luxurious in comparison; he had a tank full of petrol and a permit to buy more in the American zone.

The Soviet soldiers inspected his pass and let him into their territory; later on they let him out again, and the Americans lifted their barrier and let him in. It had been rainy and chilly in Berlin, so going south was a pleasure. The sun came out, and the landscape shone. There were few traces of war—only the towns had been bombed, and of course the factories. By the time Patton's armies had got here the enemy had been on the run.

The route passed through Regensburg, one of the worst scenes of destruction in all tormented Germany. The great ball-bearing factory had been one of the prime targets of the American bombers, and the losses of bombing planes here had been among the heaviest in the war. Lanny hardly glanced at the wrecks; his thoughts were occupied with the memory of his own experiences, coming into Regensburg in the night, lying under a heavy tarpaulin on top of a truckload of merchandise. They had come to a roadblock, and the Nazis had stopped the truck and searched it; however, they had not bothered to untie the ropes and lift up the tarpaulin—so the son of Budd-Erling was still alive.

When the traveller came to Landshut he turned off the autobahn and headed toward the point of land that juts into Austria and contains the village of Berchtesgaden. On the heights behind it were the ruins of Adolf Hitler's mountain retreat; Lanny had already inspected them and was no longer interested. But across the valley on the Obersalzberg lived an old friend, Hilde, Fürstin Donnerstein, and he owed her the courtesy of a visit; she had helped Lanny, fleeing from the Gestapo, to make good his escape, and the risk to her had been serious.

She was the widow of a Prussian nobleman and had been a member of that ultra-smart set which flitted from Berlin to Rome to Cannes to Biarritz to Paris to London. She had been the intimate of Lanny's first wife, Irma Barnes, now Lady Wickthorpe, and there were dozens of people she wanted to ask Lanny about—what had become of them, what they were doing, and who was in love with whom. She was a polyglot person, shifting from English to German to French and sprinkling it with the international slang of a much happier decade.

Now she wore black for her only son, who had been killed in Poland. She was living what she called the peasant life. With her were an invalid sister and a young cousin orphaned by the war; they had an elderly manservant and a peasant girl who came in by day. They were occupying three rooms of the chalet and had boarded up most of the windows in anticipation of winter—which showed signs of wishing to come that very night. In one of the empty rooms she showed Lanny piles of rutabagas and potatoes which they had grown and harvested with their own hands. 'Look at then!' she said, meaning the hands, and held them up; they were gnarled and brown and weather-worn. Then suddenly she jerked them down and said, 'Don't look at my face!' He had already done so and knew that it was aged and careworn. He said gallantly, 'It shines with the light of friendship'.

'Lanny darling!' she exclaimed. She had been a little bit in love with him in the past, but now she knew that he was an entirely married man. He had put all his friends on the mailing list of the little Peace paper, and she had been reading it. 'Oh, Lanny, you are so tragically naïve! To imagine you can bring peace to this wretched old Continent!'

'You think the people haven't had enough of war?'

'The people, _mon Dieu!_ When did they ever want a war? It is the leaders! The Soviet madmen! They are Hottentots! Do you imagine they will ever let us have peace?'

'We must at least try to persuade them, Hilde'.

'You cannot even reach them. If one of them was caught with a copy of your paper they would lock him up and make him confess that fifty others were in the conspiracy—fifty who had never heard the name of the paper!'

The 'Soviet madmen' were very real to the conquered people of the Obersalzberg. The Americans held the federal province of Salzburg, but only a few miles away was the part of Upper Austria which the Reds held. Hilde had terrible stories to tell about them; but she had a mind that moved like a butterfly, and presently she was saying, 'Oh, Lanny, what are you Americans going to do with us? You told me to hold on to my stocks and bonds, but what is the use if we don't ever get dividends or interest? Are you going to let our businessmen make money again?'

'I think that is our full intention, Hilde', he was able to assure her.

He led her out to the car and opened up the locked trunk. The first thing she saw was a fair-sized ham. ' _Ach, du lieber Gott! Ein Schinken!_ How on earth did you get it?'

'I happened to have access to the AMG store', he explained. He produced a five-pound box of chocolates and a sack of oranges—things which couldn't be bought anywhere else in post-Hitler Germany.

'Lanny, _vous êtes un ange!_ ' she cried, and he saw that there were tears in her eyes. She had had so much and now had so little; her Berlin palace had been bombed and burned and her mother killed therein. She had inherited an estate in Pomerania, but now the Russians were there, and it had been what they called 'socialized'—which meant that the peasants worked it and the Russians took as much of the produce as they saw fit.

III

They had a feast, and Hilde went on chattering. They were all lucky to be alive, she said, and out of the war. Really the peasant life wasn't so bad; there were friends nearby, and they came to see her, so she got the gossip of the neighbourhood, and indeed of all aristocratic Germany. Her talk was full of that light kind of malice which was considered chic in the fashionable world. You were amused by the weaknesses of human nature, but you didn't really mean any harm, and you certainly weren't trying to change anything. You would invite your friends to share your meal of rutabagas, potatoes, bread and cheese; you would recall the good old days and repeat in elegant French the saying about the staircase of history echoing to the sound of wooden shoes going up and silken slippers coming down.

That was one of the reasons Lanny had stopped off here. Not long ago Hilde had given him valuable tips as to where the Nazis had hidden the art treasures they had stolen. Might it not be that she would know something about Himmler money? The P.A. was like a fisherman working a stream; he would cast into one pool after another, never knowing where he might get a rise. He told her, 'I had a funny experience the other day with an English pound note; I tried to spend it and found that it was counterfeit'.

'And what did you do with it?'

'I tore it up'.

The old sparkle of fun came into her eyes. 'Oh, why didn't you bring it to _me?_ '

'What would you have done with it, spent it?'

'It would have helped to pay my taxes; it might have got by. If it didn't, of course I would have been surprised and innocent'.

'Your morals have deteriorated', he told her; and she said, 'What do I care for the politicians? _Les cochons!_ '

'They tell me there is a lot of that false money around'—another cast with his fishing fly.

'I have heard talk about it', said Hilde. 'The Nazis made it, of course, and I suppose they knew how. We probably spend a lot of it and don't know the difference. I'm sure I wouldn't'.

So, no more of that. He let her talk about the friends they had known. He mentioned Graf Stubendorf, saying that this elderly nobleman might have art works he wanted to dispose of.

'I don't know what he has', said Hilde. 'They tell me he is secretive. He's living somewhere near the Tegernsee, with an old couple who were formerly his servants. I don't know whether he owns the place or not'.

'I was told that he had been cleared by AMG and could have had a worth-while post if he had wanted it'.

'He is a primitive Junker', replied the Fürstin. 'He probably doesn't relish being conquered, and especially not by a democratic country. _Epatant!_ '

IV

In the morning Lanny set out upon a drive through delightful scenery, the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. The sky was bright blue with puffy clouds drifting across it; one of them dropped a few flakes of snow upon Lanny's pathway, as if to warn him to get his driving over with while he could. The air was laden with the scent of pine trees that covered the mountain slopes. The road wound here and there, following the course of a stream.

Hidden away in these foothills were numerous lakes, large and small. The road was well marked, and when the signpost said, 'Tegernsee', Lanny swung off to the left and began to climb. The stream was brawling now, and its winds and turns were sharper, and presently there spread before the traveller's eyes a lake of deep blue bordered with a blanket of perpetual dark green.

He stopped at a little inn and asked if they could tell him where the General Graf Stubendorf resided. _Ja, ja_ , they knew, and were proud to tell him. When he asked for lunch they were pleased to serve him, for they could see that he was a victorious American, driving an American car. To be sure, it was antique, but in those days a German was lucky if he owned a bicycle, or in the country a cart and an old horse to pull it.

There was plenty of country food here: bread which was called black but was sound whole wheat, the kind that Lanny wanted; butter and milk, country greens, and an omelet. He wanted no more. While he ate, the hostess of the inn told him about the _Herrschaft_ who honoured their neighbourhood. Yes, he was well and was not too lonely, for he had his books, and visitors came to see him now and then. Business was good in this lake country now, for persons who had ordinarily stayed only for the summer now lived here the year round. They would rather be snow-bound in the mountains than be back in the city where they would have to hide in a cellar or in a house with half its rooms blown away by bombs. The woman told of one family whose staircase was gone and who climbed to their rooms by ladder. _Ach, ja_ , it was wonderful to know that no more bombs were going to fall. _Ach, ja_ , the Americans had been very polite. Here in the hill country they had removed the Nazis from the local government and left the folk to run things as usual.

V

Lanny followed the directions and turned off into a little valley. There on a slope was one of those carefully tended small farms, terraced with stones and every foot of soil preserved. There was a stone cottage, of what Lanny judged to be three or four rooms. When he knocked on the front door it was opened by a tall, erect man wearing a rough peasant jacket and trousers which had long ago forgotten what it was to be pressed. On his head was a skull cap with faded embroidery, and from under it peeped white hair; the face was long, thin, smooth shaven, deeply lined. Many years had passed since Lanny had seen it, but he knew it well. 'Good afternoon, Graf Stubendorf', he said. 'I do not know if you will remember me—I am Lanny Budd'.

The old face lighted up with a smile. 'Herr Budd! Of course I remember you. Come in'.

Lanny was pleased, because he hadn't been sure of a welcome. His name had become known to the Germans when he had testified at the Nürnberg trial against Hermann Göring, helping to bring about the conviction of the fat Reichsmarschall as a war criminal. He said, 'I happened to be in the neighbourhood, and I thought you might be lonely'.

'Have a seat', said the old man and signed to the one comfortable chair, which was in front of a cast-iron, wood-burning stove. Lanny said, 'Oh no', and took a smaller chair and placed it facing his host. In the course of the visit he found a chance to glance about the room and saw that one corner was curtained off, evidently for a bed. There was a small centre table, where, no doubt, the old man had his meals served.

There was a reading table with several books on it, and one of them was open. The Graf himself mentioned that it was Carlyle's _Life of Frederick the Great_ —Lanny had not read that huge work, but he knew about it and could imagine the old soldier reliving the days of his country's glory. A work of five large volumes, it contains elaborate accounts of each of the battles fought by the Prussian king, with diagrams showing the position of the troops at every stage of the conflict. Military strategy is the art of so manipulating masses of men as to overcome and destroy other masses who happen to belong to some other government and are manipulated by some other general. The General Graf Stubendorf had been doing this up to fifteen months previously, and now that he could no longer do it in reality he would sit and do it in imagination, following the victorious events of the eighteenth century.

Lanny had first come to Stubendorf as a boy, thirty-three years ago. There he had met the 'Old Graf', the present one's father. Lanny had met him only formally, on Christmas morning, when he had greeted all his servants and retainers and made them a speech. _Der Alter_ had died, and his eldest son had taken his place, and Lanny had met this one in Berlin, Lanny being then the husband of Irma Barnes, daughter of the Chicago traction magnate. No doubt this Prussian aristocrat had been more impressed by the rumour of Irma's wealth than by Lanny's social charms. Anyhow, he had invited the young couple to be guests at the Schloss and had given them an elegant if somewhat dull time. This had marked, of course, a change in Lanny's social position in Stubendorf, for on his previous visits he had been the guest of the Graf's business manager, Herr Meissner.

Now it was a pleasure to recall those old happy days—the pleasure mixed with pain, for the magnificent five-storey castle had been shot to ruins by Russian artillery. Many of the children whom the old Graf had welcomed at the Christmas morning celebration were now dead and ploughed under Polish or Russian soil. The Graf said that he had no personal hard feelings; German leadership at the top had been tragically incompetent, and Germany had been defeated in a war which it had foolishly started. 'As you know, Herr Budd, I was never a Nazi'.

It was a formula you heard all over Germany now. You heard it from the great industrialist who was trying to get back control of his plant. You heard it from the proprietor of the café and the waiter, and from the bootblack who sought your patronage outside. You might travel all over Germany and have difficulty in finding a single ex-Nazi. What few there were had gone into retirement; they met in obscure beer cellars and sang the 'Horst Wessel' song in whispers and plotted what they were going to do when the 'Amis' got out.

But so far as Lanny knew, the statement of the General Graf was the truth. He had never been a political figure. He had been an officer of the old German _Armee_. He had studied his profession and had risen in due course. He had been put in command of a division, and had taken that division where it was ordered and fought to the best of his ability. He had survived two serious wounds, and the rest was the fortune of war—misfortune, because his estates had been in the path of the Russian armies. Now he had retired to the American zone and was spending a peaceful old age, studying the five-volume life of Prussia's greatest king, written in the English language by a Scot.

VI

Lanny brought up the subject of Kurt Meissner. The Graf had recognised his genius and had given him a cottage in the forest on the estate. When his family had grown, the Nazi party had supplied the funds to build him a studio nearby. Kurt had fought in the army and had lost the use of his left arm, which was sad indeed for a piano virtuoso. His large family had fled before the Russians, and Kurt had become a prisoner of the American army.

'After his release', said the Graf, 'he wrote me that he wanted to go back to Stubendorf, even though it was again a part of Poland. Permission to reside there had been granted to Gerhart Hauptmann, the poet, and Kurt was hoping for the same favour. Apparently these Reds hope to be taken as civilised; they profess to have respect for artists of all sorts'.

Lanny suggested that perhaps they had not heard about Kurt's friendship with Hitler; or perhaps consented to overlook the 'Führermarsch' and remember only the symphonies and concertos. 'Do you know how he is getting along?' he asked.

'I haven't heard from him for some time', replied the other. 'I fear he must be having a difficult time financially. I wish I could help him, but I am no longer in a position to do so'.

'I mean to ask him', Lanny stated.

This son of good fortune was naturally of a genial disposition and had been trained in what was called social charm since he was a tiny child. He had been raised among older persons, mostly lovely ladies, and when he had said something bright he had observed their pleasure. So now, when he wanted to please people, he knew how to do it. Of this old man who was both a military hero and a count, he enquired concerning various guests and retainers who had been at Stubendorf in the old days, thus giving him the pleasure of talking about his past power and glory. Some of the persons had died, and others had fled and been lost track of. Lanny made mental notes of the few who might still be in the old places.

Also he asked if the Graf knew any Germans who might have paintings they would care to sell to Americans. The old man answered no; his aunt who had sold a painting through Herr Budd was long since dead, and the Graf did not know what had become of her art treasures. People in East Germany had had to flee for their lives and had seldom been able to carry such heavy objects with them. Lanny pointed out that old masters had frequently been cut out of their frames and rolled up and smuggled away. One of the Russian grand dukes had lived the rest of his life on the proceeds of his Rembrandts.

By then it was fitting for the visitor to bring up the subject which was most prominent in his mind. He told once more the story of the English pound note; and the Graf said yes, there was a tremendous lot of that going on. The Nazis had forged the money of all the countries they invaded and those they expected to invade. They had forged passports and other documents, reports and letters. 'I don't believe in that sort of warfare myself', said the host.

Lanny waited to see if he would go on, but he didn't. So Lanny tried again. 'That could be very destructive; it is a way of robbing the public and of bringing on a slow inflation'.

'Exactly. And I am afraid your government will have a hard time rooting it out'.

'Do you suppose the Communists will take it up?'

'I can't imagine that they wouldn't. I have been told that in East Germany they have been printing our own money secretly and are putting it into circulation'.

Lanny had been told that by Morrison. He would have been interested to know how the Graf knew it. He said, 'I have been told there's a regular black market in Berlin, and you can buy many kinds of irregular money at a part of its face value'.

'I don't doubt it', was the Graf's reply. 'Your government will have to put its best intelligence people to work on the problem'. And that was all. Lanny could not afford to push the subject. The old nobleman would be suspicious of all Americans.

VII

When the 'primitive Junker' resumed it was to express his concern over the way the Americans were disbanding their armies and sending them home. 'Stalin is not disbanding his', he said, 'and presently you will be at his mercy'.

'I suppose it's the way of democracies', Lanny replied. 'Our people don't like war; they want to get rid of the very thought of it. The mothers are clamouring for their boys, and the boys are clamouring for their mothers or their girls'

'What will you do if Stalin should suddenly decide to take the rest of Germany?'

'I really don't know. I suppose we'd get ready again, the way we did for Hitler and Hirohito. Meantime, no doubt, we are counting upon the atomic bomb'.

'You mustn't count upon it too long, for Stalin will surely get it in the end. He has some of our best scientists, as you doubtless know'.

'It is a disturbing problem, _lieber Graf_ —especially for a man who is conducting a radio programme on behalf of world peace. I grow less sure of my ground every day'.

'If you will take your Bible, Herr Budd, and read old Jeremiah, you will find that he talks about "saying, Peace, peace, when there is no peace".' Perhaps the day will come when you will repeat the experience of the old prophet. "Then said I, Ah, Lord God! surely thou hast greatly deceived this people and Jerusalem, saying, Ye shall have peace; whereas the sword reacheth unto the soul".'

When Lanny thought it over afterwards it seemed to him rather quaint to have heard a commander of Hitler's Armed Forces quoting the ancient scriptures of the Jews. But he didn't say that; instead he remarked, 'I had the privilege of making purchases at one of our government stores. I know that a country diet grows monotonous, and I tried to think of something that might be especially good for your health. I brought along a sack of oranges'.

'Oh, I cannot let you do that!' exclaimed the proud old count. 'Really—'

'Just think, _lieber Graf_ , how much of your hospitality I accepted in the happy old days. Think of the things you fed to me, the venison and pheasants, the hares and trout. Surely I have the right to make a return'.

'Well, since you put it that way, Herr Budd—'

'Let me help you on with your overcoat and come out and see what else I have in my rolling grocery'.

The old Junker stalked out; Lanny followed and opened the locked trunk of his little car. He held up a sack of oranges in one hand, and in the other the spectacle that had so thrilled the Fürstin Donnerstein. The count spoke the same words. ' _Ach, du lieber Gott! Ein Schinken!_ ' He started to protest again, but Lanny silenced him as before. The Graf let his visitor carry the ham into the house, while he carried the oranges. They shook hands, and Lanny promised to send the little Peace paper every week. The engine of the 'coop' started, and the little black box rolled down the slope and away.

VIII

The roads to Nürnberg were good, and after Lanny got out of the foothills he drove fast. He had not seen Emil Meissner since that fateful week two years ago when he had persuaded a high Wehrmacht officer to abandon the Hitler cause and give General Patton's army help in the taking of the Metz fortress. Lanny could understand that Emil must have had a hard time since then, for he was a traitor, and such a man is loved neither by those he has deserted nor by those he has aided. Emil might have asked for a position with the AMG, and his offer could hardly have been declined. But he had gone off quietly and got himself a civilian job and was living like a hermit—a hermit in a boarding house, keeping his thoughts to himself.

Lanny had first met Emil Meissner when the latter had come home to Stubendorf for Christmas, a tall, magnificent young cadet. Emil had made his career by hard work and faithfulness. He had fought, first against the Russians and then against the Americans, and had been captured in one of Patton's slashing advances. Lanny Budd, knowing him thoroughly, had been sent to work on him. Lanny hadn't had to convince him that his Führer was at once a scoundrel and a madman, for he had already come to that conclusion. What Lanny did was to persuade him that the war could end only one way, and the quicker it was over the more lives, both American and German, would be saved. So Emil had consented to sit in at a session of American staff officers and tell them all he knew about the fortifications of Germany's greatest stronghold. Later on Emil had been released on parole, and that was all Lanny knew.

Soon he found out the rest. Emil was living in an upstairs bedroom without any heat; he went to school in the morning and taught his classes, and then he walked home and spent the evenings correcting his students' work. He was alone, his wife having died during the war, and his sons had no understanding of their father's action. He discussed the subject with no one and kept himself aloof and serene. There came to Lanny's mind an ode of the poet Horace, which he had learned as a student in Newcastle, Connecticut, telling of the man who is just and firm in his opinion, and whom neither the cruel tyrant nor the shouting mob can awe; if the whole earth should be shattered in fragments about him they would leave him undismayed. _Impavidum ferient ruinae!_

IX

Lanny picked the old man up and drove him into the city, that place of ruins and melancholy, full of memories for the secret agent of a democratic President. Here Lanny had attended what the Nazis called a Parteitag, or party day, though it lasted a week, in which something like a million howling fanatics poured into the town. They lived in tents on the outskirts and marched about, singing and yelling, and gathered in an immense open field to listen to their party orators through a hundred microphones. It had been the old city, the city of Hans Sachs and of Wagner's Meistersinger. When Lanny had come back the last time all that ancient part had been blasted to dust and rubble, and it had become the city of the great international trial of the war criminals. To the outside world Nürnberg would always be that.

There was a café unblasted, and Lanny stood his old friend to a good meal. Meanwhile he explained that he was here looking for art treasures and was going to take the chance to motor to Stubendorf and perhaps see Kurt and find out if it was not possible to patch up the differences between them. They had been the closest of friends, and now Kurt's bitterness of spirit troubled Lanny. What did Kurt's brother think about the prospect?

Emil replied that he really couldn't guess; he had had no communication from Kurt for two years. He didn't know when Kurt had been freed from the prisoner-of-war camp, and he had only learned by accident that Kurt was seeking to return to Stubendorf. As to the matter of Kurt's bitterness against Lanny, it might be possible that time had done something toward the healing of the wound. Emil said that Kurt had staked his whole being upon the Hitler adventure; he had poured out the fervour of his genius in its service, and he had failed. Lanny Budd had helped to cause his failure, and Kurt could probably not forgive that.

'What I am thinking', said Lanny, 'is that he doesn't like the Poles, and by now he must have realised that something worse than Poles has got possession of Stubendorf. How is he going to bring up his children in a Communist land? He may try to make good Germans of them, but the Communists will teach them to spy upon their father and report him. How is he going to meet that?'

'I don't know', Emil admitted. 'It won't be easy for him, whatever he does and whatever he believes. I happen to know that his oldest boy, Fritz, has reacted strongly against the Nazis. He is in an _Oberschule_ in East Berlin, where a friend of mine teaches. Kurt may try ever so hard to control his children's minds, but the environment may be too strong for him. For all I know, he may even have decided to turn Red himself—if only with the idea of punishing the Americans. Thousands of the Nazis have done that'.

' _Gott bewahre!_ ' exclaimed Lanny. 'That would be a hard thing for me to imagine about Kurt'.

'Many things have happened in this old Europe that we could not have imagined, and I am afraid there will be many more'. Thus spoke Emil Meissner, in a slow, sad voice. He was saying that he had given this old Europe up. He was only a little over fifty, but his face was careworn and his expression grim. His hair had been straw-coloured when he was young, but now it was grey; it was cut short in Prussian fashion, and Lanny might guess that he had done the job himself. He was wearing a black suit which might have been bought for his father's funeral more than twenty years ago. It had been carefully brushed but was worn green at the elbows and in the trouser seat. Few indeed were the Germans who wore good clothes in this year of 1946.

X

Lanny brought up the subject of the Himmler money. 'Why certainly', said Emil, 'there is a black market in that stuff here in Nürnberg. My pupils have told me about it. They have been approached and invited to help in passing such money. It is a temptation to German youths seeking education and finding it difficult to get enough to eat in the meantime'.

Lanny ventured to say that he had a friend in the American government who was interested in tracing down these tempters of youth. Could Emil think of any young person who had sufficient strength of character to be trusted in identifying such evil ones and bringing them to punishment? That might be an honourable way for students to earn their food. The retired general thought for a while and decided to give Lanny the names of a couple of his students. It wasn't the purpose for which Lanny had come, but there was no harm in picking up what small change might be offered. The Christmas holidays were not far off, and it might be possible for such a youth to make a trip to Stubendorf. It might even happen that the 'pushers' he met would send him to Stubendorf.

Lanny was interested in Emil's observations of the new generation of Germans. What was their attitude toward the present abnormal situation? Every one of them, of course, would be determined upon the reuniting of the severed Fatherland. Which way would they have it—for the East to join the West or the West to join the East? The general-become-teacher reported that they were confused and divided in their opinion; the Reds had behaved like Huns, but their propaganda was tireless and very clever.

'You must understand', he explained, 'for a dozen years the German people heard almost no truth about the Western world. This generation which I am teaching has never known what it is to live in a free society, where all facts are reported and all arguments are invited. They hardly know what to make of the idea of hearing both sides; it contradicts the basic principle of their training—to believe that what they are told must be true. The Americans and British have the better case, but the Reds are more expert in presenting theirs. They are tireless propagandists; they have nothing else to do but to spread the faith. The Americans can't even seem to get started'.

Lanny explained, 'It is against our traditions for the government to make propaganda or even to spread news. We take it for granted that that is a job for private interests'.

'They will have to change their ideas if they hope to save East Germany from being dyed completely red. They seem to be making a start now; they have a little radio which they call D.I.A.S— _Drahtfunk im amerikanischen Sektor_ , I believe it is'.

'I have been told about it', Lanny said. 'It is a wired-radio system, using telephone lines. But they now have a thousand-watt transmitter mounted on an army truck; it will be RIAS, R for _Rundfunk_ '.

'It is beamed toward East Germany', said Emil, 'but we get it here, and people listen to it with an interest you can hardly imagine. They cannot afford books or even magazines from America, but any little radio set will do, and they get facts. That is what they want above anything else in the world, facts about what is going on'.

They talked a while about Kurt and what were Lanny's chances with him. Emil said that his brother had a choice to make, a veritable Herculean choice: whether to join the free world or to become a Communist. 'You know the old-time saying, "Extremes meet." It was never more true than at present. Kurt hates the British and the Americans; the Reds have the same hate, and so they are drawn together. I see it here among my young people'.

'But Kurt is a mature man, Emil. Surely he cannot help seeing that the Reds do not act according to their propaganda'.

'Neither do the Christians, many of them, yet they make converts. Kurt's home is in Poland, and he can hardly live there and go on hating the Communists. On the other hand, if he yields to their wiles, or pretends to, he can no doubt have honour and fame again. They will invite him to Moscow and welcome him as a distinguished artist. His name would have propaganda value among the Germans. I feel uneasy when I pick up a newspaper, fearing that I may find such an item of news'.

Lanny promised to do his best to avert that calamity, and to let the elder brother know what success he had. He persuaded Emil to accept the rest of his supply of food, and in the morning he motored back to Berlin, to report and prepare for the second and more difficult stage of his enterprise.
4 HOIST WITH HIS OWN PETARD

I

The son of Budd-Erling returned to the headquarters of Marshal Sokolovsky, where his permit was awaiting him. He could feel the awe in the tone of the young staff officer. He had to sign a receipt in three places; it was worthy of ceremony, being a large sheet of paper with many spaces filled in, and in the lower left corner a red ink stamp with spaces full of squiggles, and at the bottom a flowing signature. Apparently the signer had been in such a hurry that there were only three or four up-and-down marks and a flourish, but the name was typed underneath. For all Lanny knew it might have been an order for his immediate execution; but he took it on faith and guessed that the Soviet military would do the same, and they did.

Back in West territory, he drove to the P.X. and laid in another lot of food—for himself this time, since he could not be sure what he would find in war-stricken Poland. Then to the Polish consulate, which was in the West sector—for espionage purposes, he was told. An elderly clerk, shabbily dressed and undernourished, looked at him hungrily, and Lanny took out a package of cigarettes, offered him one, and forgot to take the rest off the counter. The Poles are a proud people.

Lanny explained amiably that he was an American art expert who wished to travel in Poland to make enquiries concerning some paintings which had been carried into Germany and been lost. He wanted a visa on his passport, to travel to a town which had been called Stubendorf and was now called Stielszcz. When the document had been signed, stamped, paid for, and delivered, Lanny asked where there was a good place to get some Polish money, and the man told him of the nearest black market. Lanny thanked him cordially and in his absent-minded way left a good-sized chocolate bar lying near the cigarettes.

In the black market Lanny asked for Polish zloty. When the price was quoted he said it was too high and turned away, and thereby got ten per cent taken off the price. He didn't change all his money by any means, for he knew that American dollars would be accepted on transactions of any size. It might be against the law, but that would only make them more valuable.

Lanny took some of his precious food to the Moncks and had dinner with them. He did not want to drive at night, and he meant to drive straight through to Stubendorf—he still called it that in his mind, refusing to recognise the Polish occupation. Lanny told Monck about those two German generals who had backed the wrong horse—one of them had changed horses near the end of the race, but it hadn't done him much good, except in his own mind and conscience. They discussed the psychology of Kurt Meissner, whom Monck had never met but whom he had been hearing about for a long time. Monck said that the battle for the heart and mind of Kurt would be in substance the same as that for a hundred million hearts and minds in Central Europe.

II

In the postwar agreements free movement was permitted among all four sectors of Berlin. Thousands of workers lived in the West sectors and worked in the East, or vice versa. They came by the underground, or on bicycles, or just walked. Inspection and questioning came only when you were leaving Berlin and entering the Soviet zone proper. Lanny had his magnificent permit, also his agreeable manner, and a number of Russian phrases he had picked up during visits to the Soviet Union.

His route faced straight eastward to the new Polish border, which was at Frankfurt-an-der-Oder. It was a German-built autobahn, badly worn by war traffic, and repairs were being made by women labourers. Everything in sight had been blasted by Russian artillery—the most powerful in the world, for Stalin had laid down the dictum 'The artillery is the god of war'. The peasants were living in hovels they had put up out of the wreckage. There had been few horses left, and men who had ploughs had hitched their families to them, or else had dug up the land with spades and planted enough to keep themselves alive. For centuries they had been building up this land, over and over again, getting it ready for the next war; but now the wars were getting so much worse it seemed that the human spirit might break completely. Such, at any rate, were the reflections of a peace-loving _Amerikanetz_.

At the Polish border Lanny presented his passport with the visa; also his cigarettes and his pleasant smile. Again he had no trouble, and presently he was driving southeastward, following the course up the River Oder. He had before him something like a hundred and fifty miles to the battered city which had been Breslau and now had gone back to its old Polish name of Wroclaw. A chill wind blew over these flat plains, all the way from the Baltic, and rain had begun to fall—it was the season for it. Lanny had a warm overcoat, and would not take it off very often during this trip. He watched the desolate landscape and the pitiful ragged people trudging on the roads, most of them bound west; his heart ached for them, and he was more than ever a peace fanatic—but not a hopeful one.

When his mind was not occupied with the problem of Kurt Meissner it was occupied with the problem of where he was going to get more petrol. Morrison had warned him that the hunt might be long, therefore he should never let his tank get more than half empty. It would be black-market petrol and the price would be high; but this was Uncle Sam's errand, and Uncle Sam had lots of money to pour out over Europe. First, you laid down the terms of unconditional surrender to your enemy; then you discovered that what you had done was to get your enemy on to your back and that you had to carry him for an indefinite period—and that he would hate you all the time you were doing it. But you had to do it, otherwise he would go Communist on you!

III

Breslau was the large city where Lanny had been accustomed to change to a branch line for Stubendorf. Now large sections of it had been wiped out; beyond it lay the mining country, with the mines blasted and dead. Climbing to high ground, he came upon that pitiful sight, familiar to all archaeologists, a great stone structure where pride and glory had once reigned and where now there was only a jumble of large blocks of stone. Schloss Stubendorf it had been, and to Lanny at the age of fourteen it had been a place of splendour, beauty, and magic. He had first seen it at Christmas time, with snow upon all its steep roofs and high pinnacles. He had seen it in the morning shine and in the sunset glow. He had eaten wonderful foods here, and played delightful games, and found courtesy and affection unlimited. Now three men with crowbars and shovels were loading the stones on to a truck and carrying them away to become other buildings—that too a practice familiar to archaeologists.

Stubendorf had once been a prosperous and delightful village, and now there was hardly a structure left intact. People were living in rooms that were half-roofed, having covered the other half with canvas. They had built themselves shelters in cellars, with a board cover over the entrance to run off the rain.

Kurt's cottage was a mile or so away, in a forest that had belonged to the Graf's estate. Lanny knew the way and did not stop to ask questions. The rain had ceased, but the road was full of puddles and slippery, so it was necessary to drive slowly. There had evidently been fighting in this forest, and many of the trees were blasted, but the debris had been carried away for firewood. Lanny found his heart beating faster as he neared the site of the house; he feared the worst, and he found it. Both the larger building and the smaller were fire-blackened ruins, with hardly one stone left upon another. Evidently they had been looted—even the building material having been carted away, and every scrap of metal. A two-year crop of weeds veiled the tragic sight.

Lanny got out and walked to the studio. It was the place of memories, of hours full of pure delight. He stood on what had been a broad stone step in front of the building and looked down into the weeds—and there he saw something that set his memories to aching: one twisted strand of thin wire, all that was left of the music master's piano that had once brought the thundering chords of Beethoven's 'Appassionata' to Lanny's ears. 'The harp that once through Tara's halls/ The soul of music shed!'

Tears came to the visitor's eyes, and he turned away. He put his mind on the practical problem of how he could find Kurt Meissner, or any other persons who might be left from the old days. While he thought, he heard the sound of an axe in the forest. He got in his car and drove toward it; he knew the forest roads, for he and Kurt had hunted hares here as boys. When he found the woodman he recognised him as a Polish labourer on the estate; he was old now—war takes the young and the middle-aged and leaves the children and the aged.

The man spoke a crude German and was pleased when Lanny recalled himself as a visitor from of old. He was glad to stop his work and chat about those better days. Lanny asked who was left, and among those named was a Polish school teacher, a cultivated man whom he had met at Kurt's home on one of his more recent trips. The woodcutter said he might be somewhere in the village; he told Lanny where he could get information, and Lanny took his departure, not forgetting to pay the old fellow with a package of cigarettes.

IV

It was late when the traveller got back to the village, and he didn't know where he would spend the night. He drove through what had been the main street and remembered a small café and found what was left of it; the back half was gone. The sign _Gastwirtschaft_ had been badly painted over with the Polish equivalent. He got out to see what it was like.

They were still in business. The back had a makeshift roof held up by poles out of the forest, with the bark not trimmed off—picturesque if you appreciated that sort of thing. The hostess was a worn, sad-faced Polish woman, probably a widow. She was so excited by the entrance of a prosperous gentleman that she started chattering in bad German. _Ach ja_ , she had bread, the very best home-baked bread. She had no butter, alas, only lard; but she had cheese and she had _schöne frische Eier_ —she would make him an omelet out of three beautiful fresh eggs. Lanny said, ' _Bitte sehr_ ', and took a seat at the one table of the establishment.

He had been warned not to drink the water in this war-torn land, so he had a little bottle of Vichy water with him. The dry bread and cheese were brought, and he started to eat with pleasure. While he waited for the omelet his mind was busy with the next steps. He was planning to ask this loquacious hostess if she knew the schoolteacher and where he could be found. He was thinking. This teacher is an honest fellow, and if I tell him I have been offered a counterfeit American or British banknote he will understand that I am indignant about it and would like to punish the miscreant. He will talk about Himmler money, and who in the neighbourhood may be mixed up in such evil activities. It was Lanny's business to be prepared for every contingency, and his active mind was occupied with an imaginary conversation, the different turns it might take, and his own responses to it.

V

There is a school of philosophy known as metaphysical idealism, which began with Plato in ancient Greece and has come down through Hegel in Germany and Bishop Berkeley in Britain and reached as far as Emerson and the other Transcendentalists of New England. These philosophers teach that mind is the ultimate reality, and that the thought or the idea precedes the thing or the event. Some carry the doctrine to its extremes, and a New England lady named Mary Baker Eddy would have told Lanny quite positively that it was his own vigorous mental processes which brought into being the series of events that next befell him. If this is true, it is certainly a most convenient way for the universe to be organised and to behave.

Anyhow, this is what happened. The door of the restaurant opened and a man came in. Lanny took a glance and saw that he was a smallish fellow, fairly young, shabbily dressed like everybody else in the village, and damp as only one can be who has been walking without an umbrella on a rainy day. There were half a dozen seats at the table, and the fellow might have taken any one of them. He came to the seat beside Lanny and stood by it hesitantly.

First the man spoke in Polish, then, when Lanny shook his head, he asked politely, ' _Ist's gestattet?_ ' Lanny answered, ' _Natürlich'_. And the man took the seat.

The American visitor was glad to chat with him. He liked people and was curious about this town which had been through such startling transformations. Lanny said the weather was bad and asked how business was; the man said it was as bad as the weather. His German had a strong foreign accent, but Lanny wasn't sure where that accent came from.

The woman came, and the man ordered bread and cheese. She brought the omelet of beautiful fresh eggs, and Lanny started to eat it. Perhaps the man was impressed by this evidence of luxury, or more probably by Lanny's overcoat, which he kept on because the place was unheated. He said ' _Sind Sie Amerikaner?_ ' and Lanny admitted that he was. The man took another bite of bread and cheese and asked a question that caused Lanny's heart to give a jump. 'You have use for American money, _mein Herr?_ '

Lanny's face did not betray his excitement. He said, 'Oh yes. Who hasn't use for American money?'

'I have some', the stranger replied, 'and it is hard to spend it in a godforsaken place like this. I would give you a very good discount if you would change it for Polish money'.

'Where did you get the American money?' inquired Lanny—for of course it was his role not to be too much of an easy mark.

'I have a cousin from America', the man said. 'He came here and needed a car in his business. I sold him my car, and he gave me American money. He had got it from the bank in Berlin'.

'Is your cousin an American?' Lanny enquired.

The man answered in the affirmative. 'If I was to let the authorities in this town know that I have it, they would take it away from me. I would have to go into the American zone to spend it, and that would be hard for me because I have a family. So you see I could give you a good discount'.

'Do you have a sample of the money with you?' Lanny asked.

The man answered, ' _Fa mein Herr_ ', and began to fumble in his back trouser pocket under his badly worn coat. He drew out a new unfolded five-dollar American banknote with the portrait of Abraham Lincoln upon it.

Lanny examined it carefully—or pretended to. He knew he couldn't tell the difference without a magnifying glass; he had a little one in his pocket but would not use it, because that was not the game. From the circumstances it was quite clear in his mind that this was Himmler money—created out of the intensity of his desire and the concentration of his thoughts, if you could accept the word of the founder of Christian Science, a remarkable lady.

'It looks all right', Lanny said. 'How much of it have you got?'

'I have a thousand dollars and a little more', said the man cautiously. 'But please don't speak of it to anyone'.

'You have it all in five-dollar notes?'

' _Fa, mein Herr_. It is just as the bank gave it out, still with the paper around every ten notes. My cousin asked for small notes because it is so hard to spend large ones'.

'But I don't have any such sum of Polish money with me. I make it a point to travel with no more than I need for a trip. It is dangerous, as you can easily understand'.

' _Fa, ja, mein Herr, natürlich. Aber_ —how soon could you get Polish money?'

'I don't know, I haven't thought about it'.

'You have credit, perhaps, _mein Herr?_ '

'I did in the old days, but people don't trust Americans now as they used to. Let me think about it'.

VI

Lanny already had a plan in mind but it wouldn't do to reveal it too quickly. They discussed back and forth, and Lanny, who never made a false statement if he could help it, explained that he was an art expert and that he was here to look for paintings for which it might be possible to find a market in the United States. If he found any, the payments would be made in the American sector of Berlin upon the arrival of the shipment. Did Herr Guzman—such was the name the man gave—know of any one who had old masters or other art works of note? Herr Guzman said regretfully that he did not, but he would look and perhaps be able to find some.

Lanny knew that if the man found anything it would be trash, so he wasted no time on that. He said that it was too bad that Herr Guzman did not know him and his reputation, so that he would be willing to turn over the thousand dollars or more to Lanny and let him arrange in Berlin to have the money put to Herr Guzman's credit in a bank, say in Wroclaw. This very idea frightened the man—and that was what Lanny had meant to do.

Guzman explained, 'I am a poor man. I am not supposed to have money. I would not have sold my car except that I was afraid they would take that away from me'.

'They might take it from your cousin', said Lanny with a smile. 'It seems to me that you are in a bad way, and I don't know what I can do for you'. It was all a process of bargaining, such as has gone on through the ages—and the farther eastward you go in the world the longer it takes.

Lanny kept the discussion going while they finished their food. The woman came, and he took out his purse, which contained only a moderate amount of Polish money. He paid the bill for both of them, and Herr Guzman did not protest too strenuously. Then, after the woman had gone, Lanny said, 'I will buy a couple of those American notes from you just to help you out'. He wanted to be magnificent, but not too much so, therefore he haggled properly over the price. Finally he settled by paying seven hundred zloty for the two five-dollar American notes. The zloty stood at that moment somewhat below one cent, depending on what sort of black market you went to.

Then the American visitor had an inspiration. 'Why don't you take a trip to Berlin?' he asked. 'You can enter the American sector without the least trouble, and I will agree to pay you three hundred and fifty zloty for each of the five-dollar notes, as many as you have. Nobody will know about the transaction, and you can do whatever you want with the money, hide it away or put it in a bank where it will be safe'.

' _Aber, mein Herr!_ ' the man exclaimed. 'How would I get to Berlin?'

'You can ride with me. I plan to go back this very night, and I have room in my car'.

' _Aber_ — _aber_ — _!_ ' The man was evidently taken aback. He was wet, he objected, and cold. Lanny answered that he had a blanket, and the man could wrap himself up and be warm. The man said, 'But at night!' Lanny replied that he had driven over the road and it was good enough, and the night would make no difference.

' _Aber_ —I don't have the money with me! I will have to get it'.

Lanny said, 'All right. Get in the car and I'll take you, and you can get it. Then we will drive to Berlin'.

It took the man some time to get used to the wild idea. He was frightened—everybody in this war-torn world was frightened. But at last he gave way and told the American _Herr_ where to drive. He had a room in an old converted shed. He said nothing about the family, so Lanny guessed they were probably mythical. He drove to the place, and the man went in, and when he came back he said he had the money in two packages under his arm.

Lanny said, 'Now, Herr Guzman, this is rather embarrassing, but I have to put it up to you plainly. I don't know you, and I don't know anything about you. I am proposing to take an entire stranger into my car and to drive him in the night. Suppose that stranger were to pull out a gun and hold me up, and perhaps shoot me and make off with my car?'

' _Ach, mein Herr_ , I wouldn't do anything like that. I am an honest man'.

'I hope you are, but I have no means of knowing. The only terms on which I will take you into my car are that you will submit to being searched. If you like you may search me in return, because I am a stranger to you'.

' _Ach, mein Herr_ , I am sure you are a gentleman, an American gentleman, and no robber'.

Lanny said, 'I offer to be searched also, because I don't wish you to take it as an indignity. It is a necessity of the circumstances'.

So the small-sized and anxious stranger gave his consent, and Lanny did a thorough job, searching not merely the pockets of his damp coat and trousers, but under his armpits and in other places where Lanny had been trained to look for weapons. He was unarmed; and as for the packages he carried, they were tied up, and Lanny would see to it that they were not untied during the trip. He was willing for the man to search him, but the man said no, no, he would do the great American _Herr_ the honour to accept his word. So they got in the car, and Lanny gave him a blanket to wrap himself in, and they set out down the road that led to the highway below.

VII

They had a long ride before them, a matter of six or eight hours on war-torn roads. It was nothing for Lanny, who had driven across the United States in a little less than five days. He was glad to drive at night, guessing that it would be more comfortable than sleeping in a bed in this tormented land where men had preyed upon one another through the centuries, and where fleas, bedbugs, and lice preyed upon men. The car was clean and sleep could be postponed. He had bought some petrol in Wroclaw, paying seven hundred and fifty zloty per litre for it, and he would get some more at the same place on the way back.

He meant to spend those hours finding out what he could about this Herr Guzman, who was obviously a pusher of Himmler money, whether for Nazis, Communists, or just plain gangsters. He would begin by telling the man about himself and fill him full of wonder tales of America and the fortunes that could be made there. Thus he would tempt the other to talk about himself—and if he was lying it wouldn't take Lanny long to tie him up in contradictions and learn more than he knew he was telling. It might be that he would come across and talk freely; or it might be that he would have to be arrested. In any case, Lanny's mission would no longer be a failure.

The P.A. had been trained for this sort of understanding. He had studied people's minds and sought to learn what interested them and impressed them. Now he wanted very much to keep this man's mind busy, so that there would be no time for fears or suspicions to lodge in it. He was careful not to suggest anything political, for the man might be either Brown or Red. The man was greedy for money and would be impressed by money, and that was the subject that all the would could agree upon.

Lanny talked about his profession. He told the story of how he had discovered a painting by Goya in an old manion in a remote part of Spain and had brought it to America and sold it for twenty-five thousand dollars. He told how he had purchased a Van Eyck from the aunt of the General Graf Stubendorf, and the ten per cent commission he had been paid upon its very high price. He told how he had had both legs broken in a plane wreck, and had travelled all the way across China with his bride, and had travelled all over Europe in the good old days, looking at beautiful paintings and now and then finding a purchaser for one. He told about travelling in America, in that wonderful south western country where you could keep up a speed of sixty or seventy miles an hour and thought nothing of driving six or seven hundred miles in a day. The road would travel straight as an arrow a hundred miles across the desert, and then it would wind into a canyon and over a pass with rocks red and yellow, brown and grey, black and white, sometimes piled up in masses so that you could hardly believe you were not looking at the ruins of some old cathedral or mighty fortress.

'A wonderful country!' Lanny said. 'Why don't you come to America, Herr Guzman? It is so much easier to earn a living there, and you don't have to be afraid as you are in this unhappy country'.

Herr Guzman said that he would like very much indeed to come to America, but he had been told that it was difficult to get permission. Lanny said it sometimes was, but it might be easy if you had a friend who had influence and knew how to make the right approach. He said that casually, but he didn't mean it so.

Nobody could have been more genial or more considerate than this American art expert. He made sure that Herr Guzman was comfortably warm in his blanket. He told him if he was tired to go to sleep. When they stopped in Wroclaw to refill the tank, he made joking remarks about the black market, and it was a lead for the passenger to tell his experiences with that market. He did so, but his stories were of the harmless kind, and little by little Lanny realised that the man was shrewder than he appeared and that he wasn't going to make any sort of damaging admissions He didn't offer to tell where he had been born or what he had been doing. He didn't say any more about his automobile or about the mysterious cousin who had bought it. No, he just listened to Lanny and chuckled appreciatively over Lanny's stories; he was admiring and grateful, but nothing more.

VIII

The daylight had departed, and rain began again; driving through it was monotonous. Lanny talked to keep himself from getting sleepy. Now and then a great truck would come roaring along, the rain dividing its lights into thousands of tiny sparkles. They were coming to the Oder River, and it was a question of crossing the border from Polish territory into East Germany. Guzman said they might have bad trouble, although both countries were run by the Communists, trade was not free and the search would be thorough. Evidently he had been making the crossing previously, and Lanny did not fail to make note of the point. But he relied upon his wonderful big pass from Marshal Sokolovsky's office. It had got him in and it would get him out.

But doubts tormented the pusher. How was he going to get those packages of money past the strict guard the Soviet authorities maintained? He had been so allured by Lanny's splendid offer and by his entertaining conversation that he had overlooked that detail. The car most certainly would be searched, and this time the search would be thorough. Lanny might convince them that the food was American food purchased in the American store; the worst they could do would be to confiscate the food, and Lanny said he could stand that loss. But what about those precious packages of money, which Herr Guzman now admitted amounted to two thousand dollars? Lanny asked, 'Haven't I, as an American, the right to have American money?' Guzman answered, 'They will want to know why you have so much, and they won't let it get away from them. They will confiscate it, and it is everything I have in the world!'

The worried pusher wanted Lanny to drive more slowly while they discussed that problem in the middle of a rainy night. 'Herr Budd', he said, 'you are a rich American gentleman, and you have the right papers, but I have no papers. I have no right to be riding in a car, and they will drag me out and will make a search of everything. What I have to do is to get out of the car and get myself smuggled past. I have a way to get to Berlin; I have done it more than once'.

Lanny had guessed as much and was not surprised. He knew that Berlin was a big city, with an area of 340 square miles, and that was a lot of territory to guard. He said, 'Okay, I will go to the Savoy Hotel and get a room. You can come there'.

IX

But it wasn't settled for long. Doubts began to assail the pusher, who may have had many offences on his record. His smugglers might rob him, he said, or even kill him. Some robber might hold him up before he got to the border; on dark nights all sorts of crimes were committed. Also, the border was being guarded more and more strictly; swarms of people were trying to escape from the Soviet zone.

'Herr Budd', said the man timidly, 'don't you think it might be safer if you took the money in. You are a rich American gentleman'—it had become a formula. 'They wouldn't dispute your right to have American money'.

'All right', said Lanny, 'if you want me to take it for you'.

'Where would you hide it, Herr Budd? Leave it under the seat?'

'I wouldn't hide it at all. I have a perfect right to have American money. I am an art dealer, and I have frequently carried tens of thousands of dollars in cash to pay for a purchase. I am well known in my profession, and I would have no trouble in establishing my reputation'.

There followed a long silence. Lanny could imagine the process that was going on in Guzman's mind. Did he dare to trust this elegant-seeming and plausible American gentleman? How easy it would be for him to drive into the West sector of Berlin and drive on! Or to take a plane and disappear into the wild blue yonder! His name might be an alias, his tales might be fictitious—in short, he might be just such a man as Guzman himself!

The silence was broken by a faint murmur. 'You wouldn't let me down, Herr Budd!'

Lanny permitted himself to chuckle. 'No, I promise I won't let you down'.

'This money is everything I have in the world, Herr Budd'. The voice was plaintive, and would have been touching—if the money hadn't been fraudulent.

Lanny permitted himself another chuckle. 'Listen, Guzman', he said, leaving off the _Herr_ this time and establishing himself as a social and financial superior. 'This deal means nothing to me. I have often been paid ten times as much money as commission on the sale of an old master. I once bought a painting for a thousand dollars and sold it for twenty-five thousand. I was just making this trade because you asked me, and you looked as if you were hard up. It doesn't make a particle of difference to me what you do about the money. If you want me to take it in for you, I'll take it, and I'll be at the Savoy Hotel in Berlin-Charlottenburg until tomorrow, or you can take it yourself. Make up your mind'.

'I am afraid I might be betrayed. The Reds would search me, Herr Budd, and if they found the money they might shoot me. I am a poor devil, and I have no right to have American money'.

'Couldn't you tell them about having sold your car to your cousin?'

'Yes, but they wouldn't believe me. I am a foreigner, half Spanish and half Roumanian, and they would call me a spy. They might order me to confess something—anything'. It became clear that the man had been in trouble before and didn't want any more of it. At last he said reluctantly, 'All right, Herr Budd, you take the money'.

So it was agreed. Lanny stopped by the roadside, and they took out the packages, which had been hidden under the food; then, while Lanny went on driving, Guzman unwrapped them. There were some four hundred bills and made quite a wad. Guzman would hand Lanny an inch or so of the wad, and Lanny holding the steering wheel with one hand, would stuff the wad into an inside pocket. When the process was completed he was pretty well stuffed, but fortunately his overcoat was ample. He was quite sure the Russians wouldn't search him, and if they did he would be magnificent and ask to telephone to Marshal Sokolovsky, whose document he carried.

This procedure was a moral ordeal for the pusher. When it was over he had scarcely enough voice to speak. 'What if I can't get across the border for some reason, Herr Budd?'

'I don't expect to stay in Berlin more than two or three days', Lanny answered. 'If you don't show up I will seal up the package and put it in the hotel safe in your name; you can call for it'.

So the matter was settled, and when they had got within a half mile or so of the River Oder, Guzman said, 'I had better get out now'. Lanny drew up to the side of the highway. 'You are a good and very wise gentleman, Herr Budd', said the man plaintively, and Lanny said, ' _Auf wiedersehen_ ', and drove on, leaving the pusher standing in the pitiless rain. There is a lot of it in the late autumn in that part of the world; it turns the fields into quagmires, which is why military conquerors have to start their operations as soon as the spring rains have dried up. Hitler had waited until the twenty-second of June, the Kaiser until the end of July, and it had been too late for both of them.

X

Lanny came to the bridge. He got out of his car, having learned that it was more polite to confront 'People's' soldiers on a basis of equality. He produced his permit and his passport, also his few choice Russian phrases. The poorly dressed Russian sergeant spoke no English. He commented on Lanny's few Russian words, and Lanny said he had visited Leningrad in 1921, Odessa two or three years later, and Moscow three times since then. The art expert felt guilty about his overstuffed clothing, but nothing showed through his large overcoat. He produced a couple of packages of American cigarettes, known everywhere as 'camel', and the soldiers grinned with pleasure and waved him on.

Arriving in Berlin, Lanny drove down Unter den Linden past past the palace of Hilde von Donnerstein, in the basement of which he had been bombed, and past the Adlon, where he had stayed so often and would stay no more. He came to the division line between the Russian and American sectors, the great Brandenburg Gate. If he had been walking he could have crossed without question, but being in a car he had to stop and be inspected once more. He got out again and produced his persuasive permit. This time the guardians were Germans—'Soviet Germans' they were called by the non-Soviet Germans—dressed in dark blue uniforms. They were known as Markgraf police, being under the command of a colonel Markgraf, who had been a conspicuous Nazi soldier and had fought the Red armies all the way to Stalingrad. It showed very well how extremes meet and all dictatorships are the same.

There were two policemen carrying on the inspection, each to watch the other. The one who did the talking spoke with a strong Saxon accent, and when the interview was over he congratulated Lanny upon his excellent German. He was impressed by the elaborate permit, of which he probably couldn't read a word. He said very politely, ' _Papiere in Ordnung, Herr Budd_ '.

The traveller drove to the hotel and had his car put away; then he registered and went to his room. It was then half-past four in the morning, a preposterous hour to call anybody, but he had Morrison's home-telephone number, and he knew that Morrison would be glad to be waked up with such news. Anyhow, it was business, not pleasure.

The phone rang for a while, until Lanny heard a sleepy voice. He said, 'Excuse me for waking you—this is Christopher Columbus. Listen carefully. I have brought out an important man. This is what I want you to do: get two men to the lobby of the Savoy Hotel as quickly as possible and have them sit there. I am not sure just how soon my man will come. When I am through with him I will bring him down to the lobby. If he is ours I will introduce him to the men; if he is not ours I will give them a sign. Did you get all that?'

'I got it', said the voice, no longer sleepy. 'Congratulations. Here is one thing: did you buy any of his stuff in the American sector?'

Lanny said, 'No, but I will'.

'Don't fail to, because then we'll have him under our jurisdiction'.

Lanny said, 'I'll have a nap now, because I've been driving all night. The lobby of the Savoy Hotel. Good-bye'. He took off his overstuffed coat and trousers and lay down and slept what the preacher in Ecclesiastes calls 'the sleep of a labouring man'.

XI

It was broad daylight when he was awakened by the ringing of the telephone. When he answered the voice of the hotel clerk said, 'A Guzman to see you'. _Ein_ Guzman—as much as to say, a dubious appearing character. But characters were much mixed in Berlin these days, and Lanny said, 'Send him up'. He ordered breakfast for two, including a pot of hot coffee.

When the poor devil appeared he was soaking wet, his lips were blue, and he was shivering. Lanny said, 'Take off your things and get into bed'. Guzman looked at those clean white sheets as if he had never seen such a thing in his life before; but he did what Lanny told him, and Lanny pulled a couple of blankets over him. The considerate host rang for a bellboy and ordered all the clothes washed and dried and pressed as a rush job. So there was the pusher, as safely a prisoner as if he were handcuffed and in leg irons!

When the waiter brought the breakfast Lanny poured a cup of hot coffee for the man, who sat up and drank it greedily. Meantime Lanny locked the door against intruders and proceeded to unstuff his own coat and trousers. He laid all the money on the table alongside the breakfast tray. 'There is your money. Take your time and count it'.

'Never mind, Herr Budd', said the man, as grateful as a dog. 'I don't need to count it, I trust you. I am ashamed I ever doubted you'.

'That's all right', Lanny said. 'This isn't a very honest world we live in, and there are always people trying to play you for a sucker. Did you have any trouble getting across?'

'Not a bit. It's all right if you don't travel on the highways'. Already the blood was beginning to come back into the man's cheeks, and he was beaming with gratitude. Lanny made the occasion perfect by pushing the little table with the food up close against the bedside and inviting him to help himself. The host sat alongside and they breakfasted—perhaps the best breakfast that poor victim of world calamities had had in many a year. His money was right there on the table beside him and he could see it—all counted out in piles of ten, the way the banks do, each pile with a slip of paper around it. There were supposed to be forty of these bundles, and his eyes wandered to them as if to count them or at least estimate them.

'You'll find it's all there', Lanny said reassuringly. 'I didn't count them when you gave them to me, but you count them when you take them back'. He smiled again, and they were friends; everything was lovely, and it was certainly wonderful to be in a sumptuous hotel room, with plenty of steam heat, and a breakfast of hot coffee with cream, poached eggs, and hot rolls with butter and marmalade. Amazing the way these Americans lived—even right after a war!

Lanny said, 'You can have a hot bath bye and bye—I judge you need it'.

' _Herr Gott!_ ' exclaimed the other. 'Did you ever take a bath in winter in a shed without any heat? Pretty soon the water will be frozen hard every morning'.

XII

When the meal was eaten Lanny got down to business. Said he, 'I have spent those American bills I bought from you. I need another right away for a tip, so I want to buy one at the same price as the others'.

'I will make you a present of one', said Guzman with a burst of gratitude.

Lanny said, 'No, no, I want to buy it'. He counted out another three hundred and fifty zloty and put them into the pusher's hands. Is it all right if I take one of these off the table?' he asked and slipped one out of the topmost little packet. 'That is all right? That is a deal?' he enquired playfully.

'That's a deal', said Guzman with no play in his voice.

Lanny continued, 'Now I want to show you something about how to hide money'. He brought his own pair of trousers and sat by the bed and showed Guzman the hiding place under his belt in front. He took his little pair of nail scissors and severed a thread and pulled it out, and there was an opening into the hidden pocket. Out of that Lanny slipped a smooth, new, shiny greenback—this time not with the sad countenance of Abraham Lincoln but the benevolent grandfatherly features of shrewd old Benjamin Franklin, most appropriate to the present occasion. The figure on the bill was not five but one hundred. Lanny laid that down before the astonished eyes of his new friend and then slipped out another and another. Each time he looked into the eyes of the friend—until there were five of these hundred-dollar bills in a little pile.

'Now, Guzman', he said, 'here is money that will really interest you. This is real money, from a real bank in New York. It is not make-believe money like yours'.

Lanny had his eyes fixed on the other man's face and saw the eyes widen and the jaw fall and the look of utter dismay. ' _Ach, nein, Herr Budd!_ '

Lanny said, 'Don't waste any more time trying to fool me. What you have is Himmler money and you know it, and I knew it from the first moment you told me about it'.

The man tried to speak again, but his voice failed him, and apparently his ideas failed him too.

'Now get it straight, Guzman', said Lanny. 'You sold me three of these notes in Poland, and I could have had you arrested under Polish law; but I didn't want to fool with that. I brought you here into the American sector, and you have just sold me one of those notes in the American sector, so that brings you under American military law'. The man started up on his elbows, as though he were about to leap out of bed and run naked from the room; but he thought better of it and cried, 'Oh, Herr Budd, you wouldn't do a thing like that to me!'

'Think what you were doing to me', said Lanny. 'Doing it as hard as you could. But don't get too excited. I have a proposition to make you. Lie back and take it easy and think it over'.

XIII

Guzman lay back. His head was propped up by the pillows so he did not have to take his terrified eyes off the speaker's face.

'You see these five one-hundred-dollar bills which I put before you; you can have those without too much trouble. All I want you to do is to tell me where you got this money and all you know about the people who made it and are circulating it'.

Lanny's words did not decrease the fear in the man's face—quite otherwise. ' _Mein Gott!_ ' he exclaimed. 'If I did that, Herr Budd, I would be a dead duck. They would not let me live a day'.

'I can arrange to have you taken care of', Lanny replied. 'I can't promise to send you to America, because our immigration laws are strict, but you could go to Mexico or to any country in South America, and you would have money enough to give you a start at an honest life if you wish to'.

'They would follow me to the ends of the earth, Herr Budd. It is a Vehm—a Vehmgericht! Do you know what that is?'

'I know', Lanny said. 'I have read German history. But don't let yourself be fooled; it is just some gangsters trying to frighten you by taking the name of a medieval secret society which had the reputation for cruelty'.

'They are plenty cruel on their own, Herr Budd. They would surely hunt me out and torture me to death'.

'Listen carefully', said Lanny, 'and get clear in your mind what your position is. You stand to get a long term, maybe ten or twenty years, in prison here, and Americans will be running it, not Germans. On the other hand, you can go scot-free; you won't be required to appear in court. I can guarantee that. All we want is the names of the top people, and we will dig out the information for ourselves. You can just disappear, take another name, and nobody need have any idea where you have gone. Surely you can think of some pleasanter part of the world to be in than cold and rainy Poland, where you have to live on cabbage and potatoes and be lived on by fleas, bedbugs, and lice!'

'Yes, Herr Budd', said Guzman in a feeble voice. 'If I could be sure—'

'You can be absolutely sure. I am an agent of the United States Secret Service, and I have authority to tell you. We are not interested in the little fellows, the pushers; we have several of those already. What we want to do is to cut out the brains of this organisation. You will tell us what you know, and we will keep you safe and comfortable while we check on it. Needless to say, we're not going to let you fool us or doublecross us. If you will talk straight and spill it all, we'll get you a ticket to whatever part of the world you name, and we'll put you safely on board a steamer or a plane, and you'll have these five hundred-dollar bills or any other kind of money you prefer. You can take a new name and start a new life, and there is no way on earth that your so-called Vehmgericht can find out about you'.

'Yes, Herr Budd', said Guzman again, 'if I could really—'

'Can't you see that we wouldn't let these criminals get away with murder? That would make it impossible for us to get any more evidence. We will take care of you, and we'll make it worth your while. We don't use the methods of the Nazis and the Reds; we don't torture people, and we don't break our promises. Tell me, do you owe anything to these people at the top? Do you share any of their ideas, or hope to be made into a commissar, or something like that?'

'No, Herr Budd'.

'It was just a living for you?'

'Yes, Herr Budd, and not a good one'.

'All right then, I offer you a better living, and you would be sensible to take it. You can do it with a clear conscience, because surely you know that you are doing harm to society when you put out phony money. To the extent that you are able to put out a quantity, you dilute the value of all the money in circulation; prices go up, and it is harder and harder for the poor to live. If you could put out enough bad money you could buy up everything in the world, and the poor would starve to death. That's common sense, isn't it? Why should you want to go to jail to protect a set of criminals to whom you owe nothing? Think it over and be sensible'.

'You are a smart man, Herr Budd', said the pusher suddenly.

'Don't try to flatter me', Lanny said with his customary smile. 'I have a powerful organisation behind me, and I'm doing what they tell me to do. We are protecting the law, and we obey that same law. If we agree to do something, we do it'.

'I have to take a chance with you, Herr Budd. There is nothing else I can do'.

XIV

Lanny got a writing pad out of his suitcase and a fountain pen out of his pocket. 'Now you are going to tell me all about it; but let me repeat, don't tell me anything that isn't true. If you do I'll surely find it out, and then I'll see that you get a double penalty'.

'All right, Herr Budd. I have nothing to gain by making things up. If I'm going to talk I'll talk straight'.

'Tell me about this secret group, this Vehmgericht as you call them'.

'It is the most secret society in the whole world. They call themselves the Völkischerbund; it is a blood brotherhood, and it is death even to speak the name except to a member.

'Oh, they are Nazis then?'

'They were all high Nazis. Those who founded it all had war wounds. There were six; each of those six was pledged to get three new members, but only one knows the names of those three; each of those three get three more, and so on. It will spread, they say, the way bacteria spread in a broth. It will spread all over Germany, and nobody will know how fast it has gone or how far—until some day it will be like an explosion. _Der Tag_ will come, and it will burst into the open'.

'That's all an old story', Lanny said. 'Do they have a propaganda or ideas?'

'They send out what they call _das Wort_. It is one sentence every week, and all Germans are supposed to learn it and remember it. Each man tells it to his three, and so it spreads'.

'Are you a member of this organisation?'

'No, Herr Budd, I am just a poor devil that puts out their money on commission. I'm supposed to sell a five-dollar bill for not less than three dollars, and I pay them two dollars for it'.

'Then how do you come to know so much about this organisation?'

'It was something that frightened me pretty nearly to death. There's a warehouse in Stubendorf that was wrecked, and in one corner that had a roof was where I came to get the money. I came there one night, cold and wet, just like I was with you. There were some old pieces of carpet that had been dragged out of a burning building and had been put away in the corner. I knew about them, and I crawled in under them to get warm and fell asleep. A couple of the top men came in, and they thought they were alone and were talking in low tones about their affairs. I was scared out of my wits, because I knew they would stick a knife into me if they found me. I was afraid I might sneeze or cough or something, but I kept still until they went away, and that's how I know about it'.

'Who is the head of this organisation?'

'It is a man named Brinkmann, Heinrich Brinkmann. He was high up in Göring's Luftwaffe. He is a big dark fellow. He hides in the forest near Stubendorf'.

'I thought all the Germans had been driven out'.

'There are Germans who speak Polish and pretend to be Poles. They join the party and talk like Communists, but they work secretly to undermine it. They help others who live in hiding. I suppose they are Communists in East Germany too—and maybe here in the West they are democrats. I don't know. It is an underground'.

'Do you know where they keep the money?'

'No, I only know where I went to get it, and a package was handed to me. I wasn't even allowed to count it; I just carried it away. But I always found the count was right. I was strictly forbidden to pass any of it in Poland or East Germany—I just took a chance on you because I saw you were a stranger passing through. I was glad when you offered to take me to Berlin, because here is where I have been working most of the time. You have to work in a big city where people can't find you again. And you have to keep moving'.

'I can understand that', said Lanny with a smile. 'There will be people looking for you. Tell me, do you know anything about the plates?'

'The plates?' asked the other, and Lanny explained that he meant the clichés, the copper plates from which the money was printed.

'I never heard about them', he said. 'It may be that they won't have to do any printing for a long time; they may have lots of the money'.

'This money, I take it, is being used to undermine the Communists, and these men live on it in the meantime. Is that it?'

'I suppose so, Herr Budd. They use it to travel about and spread "the Word" as they call it'.

'This word, what is it?'

'They don't tell me, Herr Budd. I am just a poor guy that wanders about peddling their stuff and coming back for more'.

'This family of yours that you told me about—is that real?'

'That's just something I made up, Herr Budd. I had a wife, but she went off with another fellow. I was thinking I might get a girl, but how can you when you can't stay in one place, and you have to be watching out for the police and for the people you have swindled?'

'You don't know any other people connected with this Völkischerbund but those you have named?'

'There's the man who writes "the Word". I never heard any of his words, but I heard his name. It is Meissner'.

XV

Now Lanny Budd had learned how to conceal his emotions. He had had a beautiful worldly mother who had taught him that nobody ever trusts anybody completely, and just who should be trusted at all, and who not at all. He had learned to watch worldly people dealing with other worldly people on that basis—it was called 'tact'. As a purchaser of art works he had learned to watch the owners of such treasures and to judge shrewdly what portion of the specified price they really expected to get. As the son of the European representative of Budd Gunmakers Corporation he had been taught to watch the purchasers of such wares and all their business subtleties. As the son of Budd-Erling he had helped his father in deals with such large-scale rascals as Hermann Göring; and then as a secret agent on his own he had learned to listen and watch people and to keep his face a mask.

So when he heard this name spoken by a pusher of counterfeit money he betrayed no surprise whatever. In fact he wasn't really surprised, because he had been thinking about Kurt Meissner in Stubendorf pretty continuously for the past week or two and had not failed to consider the possibility that Kurt might know something about Himmler money, and might even be using it—of course for some high purpose, according to the principles of German philosophical idealism.

So now he asked with no sign of special interest, 'What do you know about this man Meissner?'

'I know that he is a musician and his first name is Kurt. They talk a lot about him in Stubendorf. It seems that he is famous, but I don't know a thing about music.'

'I think I have heard him play at a concert,' Lanny said, following his principle of never telling an unnecessary falsehood.

'He can't play any more because he got badly hurt during the war. He lived in a little cottage with his family, but that is in ruins.'

'Do you know where is he now?'

'I heard that he was living in the East zone of Germany, in a village called Wendefurth, in the Harz Mountains. That is all I know'.

'I suppose he lives on some of this Himmler money?'

'He lives on some of what I bring back from pushing it. And he writes "the Word". It's supposed to be some sacred and very inspired word that goes out to the Germans once a week; they are supposed to learn it by heart and renew their faith in the Fatherland and in the duty Hitler taught them. I think it's crazy myself; I don't think one German in twenty would pay any attention to it'.

Lanny was using all this as a test to see if Guzman was telling the truth. It sounded exactly like Kurt Meissner's fanaticism. Doubtless it had been planned in advance, in the days when the Nazi leaders had seen defeat looming up and had organised what they called the Bavarian Redoubt. They were going to retire to the high mountains, where they had a store of ammunition and food, and were going to hold out forever, but Georgie Patton had been too quick for them. Lanny thought that Harry Truman was being too quick for them too; the Germans were getting democracy.

'And has this Meissner turned Communist also?'

'I don't know that, Herr Budd, but he must have come to some understanding with the Communists, else why would they let him have a place to live, and how could he send his children to school and all the rest?'

Lanny said, 'I believe you are telling me the truth, Guzman. I want you to repeat this story, just as you told it to me, to the chief of our Secret Service here in the American sector. You don't have to be frightened by the name _Geheim Dienst_ —the Nazis had one, but ours is not the same. We will treat you as a decent person and keep you away from anyone who wants to harm you. It ought not to take long to check your story, and meantime you can study some travel folders and make up your mind what part of the world you prefer. Now get up and take a hot bath. Your clothes should be dry'.

Lanny went to the room telephone, called the desk, and told them that two men were sitting in the lobby waiting for Mr Budd and to send them up to his room. Then he called the hotel porter and told him to send up Guzman's clothes—and incidentally to give them a shot of D.D.T. What the Savoy Hotel would make of a fashionable American gentleman bringing a water-soaked bum to his room and cleaning him up was something that Lanny did not bother his head with. Many strange things were happening in all four of the sectors of the German _Haupstadt_ in these confused days.

The two Treasury men came in while Guzman was in the bathtub. Lanny explained the circumstances and told them that his prisoner was to be treated politely, but of course was not to be allowed to get away. They would take him in their car, and Lanny would follow in his.

He had stowed the five hundred-dollar bills back in his secret pocket. He shaved and dressed and in due course was sitting in Morrison's office along with the prisoner and his guards. Morrison understood German and had a German stenographer, so Guzman started his story all over again, with Lanny listening attentively and consulting his notes to make sure that the man was not making any slips. His story was the same, and Lanny was convinced that he was telling the truth.

When the questioning was over the man was taken to an upstairs apartment where he would live with one of the Treasury agents, and be taught to play checkers, and study travel folders with their pretty pictures. Morrison confirmed the agreement that Lanny had made and said that he had done very well. There was nothing improbable about Guzman's story; G-2, the Intelligence section of the Army, had knowledge of these groups of conspirators meeting and plotting all over Germany. No attention was paid to them unless they took some overt action. 'Beer-cellar grumblers', Morrison called them. Lanny said, 'Watch out—I saw Adolf Hitler starting in a beer cellar'.
5 WOUNDS OF A FRIEND

I

Lanny sat down with the Treasury man to discuss the question of how to follow up the lead. 'It's going to be a tough proposition', Morrison said, 'because those fellows are suspicious and they are killers. It looks as if we'd have to get at them through Kurt Meissner, and he apparently leads a lonely life. Would you go to see him for us, Mr Budd?'

'I'll make a try if you wish', was the answer. 'But I fear that Kurt is one man I can't possibly deceive. You know the old saying, "If you fool me once it's your fault; if you fool me twice it's mine". Kurt knows my whole bag of tricks'.

'You must help us to understand his bag, Mr Budd. Tell me about his activities as a secret agent'.

'The first time I discovered his work was just after the First World War. He was in Paris as an agent of the German Army. He had been a captain of artillery and now had come in to try to stir up trouble among French labour so as to get better terms for Germany. If he had been caught he would have been shot, of course. Because he was my friend and I was naïve at that time, I saved him and helped get him out of Paris. A dozen years or more later he was in Paris again, this time with unlimited funds, promoting the movement of the French reactionaries for reconciliation with Hitler. I helped him then because that was my camouflage—I was working for President Roosevelt. When the time came for our Army's advance on the Rhine, Kurt was in Toul, spying on us. So you can see that he is an experienced intriguer'.

'It would be a favour if you would go to see him', said the official. 'Do your best to make friends with him. He can't do any worse than to order you away. At least you will know what his mood is and also about the place where he is living. It is probable that some of his gang may be nearby. They may have moved the bulk of the money there; they may have the plates and possibly even a printing press. You shouldn't have any trouble getting a permit this time, since the Russians know you'.

He reached into a drawer of his desk and took out a Baedeker, essential to his operations. 'Northern Germany', he read, and looked in the index, Wendefurth, page 354, and turned to the page. 'Route Sixty-four; it rates only one line. You learn that there is a _Kurhaus_ where you can stay for from four to five marks'.

'That was before inflation', Lanny said with a grin.

'We'll be glad to pay the bill', said the other. 'It's in the Harz Mountains'.

Lanny became inspired. Said he, ' _Auf die Berge will ich steigen, Wo die hohen Tannen ragen_ '. When the official looked blank he said, 'That is from Heine's _Harzreise_. When we were young in Germany we learned it by heart'.

'I learned my German from some Berlitz phonograph records', confessed Morrison. 'I wish I could take a Harz journey with you and listen to poetry'.

Instead Lanny drove in his aged 'coop' to the Karlshorst district of East Berlin and interviewed once more the young staff officer of Marshal Sokolovsky. This time he was known as an established friend of Stalin, and they readily gave him a permit for his _Harzreise_. The mountains lie in that Soviet zone of Germany which surrounds Berlin and extends for a hundred miles or more to the West. Lanny explained that he had found everything in Stubendorf-Stielczsz a wreck and had not been able to get any information concerning the paintings he was seeking; but he had learned that an old friend who would know about them was now living in the Harz.

Lanny took the autobahn which runs slightly south of west to Magdeburg, which he found laid totally flat. The route was Aschersleben, and then the highway to Halberstadt, another city totally bombed. Everywhere he saw the misery in which these beaten people were living and renewed his hatred of the horrible thing called war. Then came Quedlinburg, a town which had been the first capital of Germany under King Heinrich the First, a little more than a thousand years ago. It was full of ancient legends; the old castle still stood, and the cathedral, a landmark for tourists. Oddly enough Heinrich Himmler had adopted this place for the meetings of his Schutzstaffel and the Hitler Youth. Every year they had a great festival here, and Himmler came and celebrated the birthday of Heinrich the First. He had his own tomb built there in order that he might be buried next to the king; but, alas, he was not able to control the manner of his death. When he chewed his little cyanide capsule the British took the body, carried it out into the forest and dug a deep hole; they didn't even waste enough wood for a coffin, they just put him in the ground, and the British sergeant said, 'The worm to the worms'. Let the Germans honour their thousand-year-old kings, but let them honour no Nazi worms!

Up the valley of the little Bode River Lanny re-enacted the declaration of the poet Heine: 'Into the mountains will I ascend, Where the tall fir trees rise'. He passed the Rosstrappe, a great rock on which nature has marked a horseshoe. Here, according to the legend, the knight Bodo followed a princess with whom he had fallen in love. In jumping over the valley in pursuit of her he fell into the river; in its depths his crown is watched by a large dog, and anyone who ventures to dive for it will be killed by the dog. On the opposite side of the valley is the Witches' Dance Place, where on Walpurgis night Lanny might have seen the witches and the goats and the evil spirits dancing. But Lanny's attention at this time was centred upon those evil spirits which were operating in the Kremlin and in the Karlshorst district of Berlin.

II

The traveller drove on up the little valley until he came to the tiny village called Wendefurth, built upon rocky slopes in groves of evergreen trees. He stopped to buy petrol and ask where Kurt Meissner lived, and there was pointed out to him a cottage set back from the road. He drove up to it and saw that it was a comfortable house, half a dozen rooms, he judged, and in a grove some fifty yards away was a one or two-room cottage which he knew would be Kurt's studio. Evidently the court composer of Hitler's Third Reich had not been left destitute.

Lanny found his heart beating faster as he parked his car and got out. He knocked and waited. The door was opened by a woman whom he knew well, and yet he hardly knew her. She was about forty, but he would have taken her for sixty. Her hair, which had been yellow, was grey. She had been buxom, but now she was thin and worn, and her face was lined with care. She had lived through seven of the most dreadful years of human history and had been trying to keep eight children alive. Whether she had succeeded Lanny didn't know.

She saw before her an elegant, foreign-looking gentleman with a little brown moustache, about as tall as her husband, wearing a voluminous overcoat of English tweed and a homburg which might have just come out of a bandbox. She took one look at him and her eyes widened. 'Herr Budd!' She had always called him that, because she had been young when she married Kurt, and Lanny had been a mature man. He smiled and said, ' _Grüss' Gott, Elsa_ '. It was a Bavarian greeting, and he knew that she had come from there.

But her eyes continued to stare. 'He will not see you, Herr Budd!' she half whispered. She did not name his name, there being only one 'he' in the world for her.

Lanny had anticipated the statement and replied firmly, 'Let me come in, Elsa'. He took a step, and she gave way. She had been brought up as an _echt deutsches Mädchen_ , and the man gave the orders.

He entered the little living room, and a glance told him that it was not Kurt's taste; it was cheap stuff, and he was doubtless renting the place. He asked, 'Why is Dorothea afraid of me? It was a playful name that he had conferred upon her; she was ' _die gute verständige Mutter_ ' of Goethe's poem.

'He is bitter against you', she replied.

'I have forgiven him, Dorothea'. He meant that to disconcert her, and it did. 'Where is he?' he asked.

'He is in the little house. He is composing'.

'I will not interrupt him then. I will wait here, if I may'.

'He will not like it, Herr Budd', she said, still in a half whisper. 'He will be angry with me'.

'Oh, then I will not stay. I'll go to the studio, but I won't interrupt him'. He added, 'I have come all the way from America to see him. It is a sad thing when old friends quarrel. It hurts me, and I know it must be hurting him. I want to make up with him'.

'I am afraid, Herr Budd', she declared. 'It is a mistake'.

'At least I must try', he said. 'Tell me, how are the children?'

"All but one are alive. It is all that we could hope for'.

'How do you get along?'

'We survive. It is not easy. The children help'.

'All right', he said, 'I will go'. He went slowly toward the door. 'Pray for me, Elsa'. He knew she was devout and would take this seriously.

III

He walked to the cheap little white-painted cottage. From it came the sounds of a piano, and to Lanny they were infinitely pathetic: a few notes would be played in the treble, and then the corresponding notes in the bass. Kurt could never hear them together, but being an expert musician he could put them together in his mind. Lanny, who had stabbed at the piano in frantic delight all through his boyhood and youth, could also put the sounds together, and he longed to be in there playing them. So many hours he had played with Kurt on one piano, and when possible on two.

There was a tiny porch in front, just enough to shelter the doorway. Lanny stood and listened. It was a kind of eavesdropping, but Kurt would have to forgive that, along with all the rest. It was the soul of Kurt that was being laid bare here, the old Kurt whom Lanny had known, grave and solemn, dignified and austere.

He was experimenting; he would try one chord and then another; you could follow the march of his spirit. He had composed a 'Führermarsch', and that had been full of glory, or of insolence, if you preferred. Now it was a march to the grave, a _Götterdämmerung_. Kurt was trying to tell the story of heroic Germany which had tried to impose order on the world and had been knocked down and trampled by wild cattle. Kurt was trying to tell of sorrow beyond telling; he was mourning the death of a majestic civilisation.

Lanny stood there for what may have been an hour. It was a strange experience; he had come five or six thousand miles to meet Kurt, and now he was meeting him. Even if he went away without exchanging a word, he would still feel that he had renewed their old friendship. So many of their most intimate hours had been spent in playing great music together.

IV

At last the groping chords stopped, and Lanny knocked on the door. He heard footsteps, the door opened, and the two men confronted each other. 'Hello, Kurt', said Lanny; and Kurt, who was not a man to show any surprise, just looked at him. Lanny, knowing that his time might be short, spoke quickly. 'Kurt, I have come all the way from New York to see you'.

'I have no desire to see you', was the reply.

Lanny hurried on, 'I am unhappy because of our broken friendship. You cannot know how much you have meant to me, Kurt. You were my teacher'.

'You have not been a good pupil'.

'We were friends, Kurt, and friendship is not a thing to be broken lightly. I think about you often, and I grieve because of what happened'.

'There is nothing that can be done about it', said Kurt coldly. 'My country is wrecked, and yours is triumphant. You are the masters, and we are the servants. That will have to suffice'.

'It does not suffice at all, Kurt. I have not the slightest desire to be your master. I have never had any claim to that'.

'You chose a strange way to manifest that attitude. I introduced you to the greatest man in the world, and you betrayed me at the same time'.

'There is no use in our fighting the war over again, Kurt. Your country went one way and mine went another. You had to go with yours, and I had to go with mine. But that is over now and we have another world situation'.

'Yes. You want our friendship now! You want to let bygones be bygones'.

'What I want, Kurt, is not to talk politics. I want to tell you that my feeling for you has never changed and that I beg you to put bitterness out of your heart. Won't you let me come in and talk to you?' That was the crucial question, and Kurt opened the door wider and stepped back.

Lanny needed only a glance to see that nothing of the old studio was here. The piano was a small cheap one. At one side was a table with sheets of music on it. Against the wall stood unpainted shelves for music. Upon the wall of the studio at Stubendorf had hung three portraits: Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner; these walls were bare.

Kurt sat on the bench in front of the piano and signed Lanny to the only chair in the room. Making haste to get away from politics and wars, Lanny said, 'Tell me, Kurt, how are you getting along? I have been deeply concerned about it'.

'We are not living in luxury', was the reply, 'but then we have never been used to luxury. We are making out'.

'How are the children?'

'We lost little Adolf; the rest are in school here—all but Fritz our eldest. He is seventeen and is in Berlin'.

'It was my hope that I might be able to help you, Kurt'.

'Thank you, but that is out of the question. We are not objects of charity'.

'It might be possible that you could earn some money. I am still in the business of buying paintings, and it might be that you could put me in touch with some deals'.

'I do not know of any paintings, and I do not want any American money'.

That might bring back the subject of politics, so Lanny made haste to say, 'I am married again, Kurt, and we have one child and are expecting another. My wife and I are conducting a radio programme in New York on behalf of peace. We are making a careful study of the problem and doing everything we can to save the world from another such calamity'.

'I have heard about it', said Kurt, his voice still cold. 'I do not consider that you are competent to express an opinion upon the subject. I consider that you Americans are hopelessly naïve, and that the best thing you could do for Europe would be to retire to your own side of the ocean and attend to your own affairs'.

So there it was: no use trying to avoid politics! Said Lanny, 'You must surely know, Kurt, that if we Americans were to withdraw from Europe tomorrow the Reds would start moving in before the week was out. Surely you cannot want us to turn Europe over to them. I have many times heard you express your opinion of the Russian capacity for world government'.

'I have not changed my opinion of the Russians; and on the other hand I have not changed my opinion of the Americans, I say they should let Europe alone and devote themselves to self-improvement'.

'You are letting your bitterness blind you, Kurt', pleaded Kurt's old admirer. 'There is shaping up a world situation in which you have to make a choice between the Western world and the Eastern, between a democratic system and an autocratic one. We are making in the United Nations a beginning at world government. It is a feeble beginning, I admit, but it will grow if we let it and help it. Surely Germany's true interests lie with that organisation'.

'Germany's true interests are German. All Germans belong together, and we shall never consent to having our country torn apart. What allies we choose is our affair'. Kurt's voice was as cold as ever, and he looked at his old friend as if he were a stranger committing an impertinence.

A feeling of dismay was creeping over Lanny. 'Kurt!' he exclaimed. 'You can't mean that you are going to make friends with this cruel dictatorship!'

'I mean that Germany is the place where I was born, and here I am going to live and die'.

'But, Kurt, your children! They will take them from you! They will make little reactionary fanatics out of them! They will teach them to spy upon you and report every word that you say—and maybe some that you don't say. They will force your children to testify against you'.

'I'm not going to discuss the subject with you, Lanny. All I have to say to you Americans is: Get out of our country and let us alone, and we will solve our problems in our own way. If you had not come here we would have been a free people, and Europe would have had peace for a thousand years, just as the Führer promised us'.

So that was that. Kurt was an unreconstructed Nazi, and he might become a reconstructed Communist, and Lanny and the rest of his 'Amis' might go to the devil.

V

But Lanny couldn't bear to give up. He had come prepared for the worst. 'Listen, Kurt', he pleaded. 'When I was a child I saw a thing called a kaleidoscope; you looked into it and you saw a pretty bright-coloured pattern, then you shook it and it was a different pattern. The world has been shaken, Kurt. Neither you nor I nor anybody else will ever see it the same. We have to make a choice between a democratic world, in which all the peoples have the right to choose their own destiny, and an autocratic world in which they have to conform to the Communist pattern. In Western Germany we people of the Western world are setting up a self-governing state. In the Eastern world all the independent-minded people will be shot or shipped off to work in Siberian mines. The children will be indoctrinated—it will be done regardless of the parents' wishes, at the cost of the parents' lives, if need be. You will be told what music to write—the same as poor Shostakovich has been told. Surely you cannot live in such a world! I beg you to let me make arrangements to bring your family into Western Germany. You can have an enormous influence there; you can go on as a great composer into a new period. You might even become a performer once more'.

'Evidently you have forgotten that I am a cripple'.

'I have not forgotten, Kurt. Not long ago I learned something which you may or may not know about Ravel. He had a pianist friend who had lost an arm in the war, and for that friend he wrote a concerto for one hand with full orchestra. It is an extraordinary work'.

'I have seen the score', Kurt said; 'but to me it brings to the mind the image of a crippled man and holds it there. It is crippled music, and I would not make such an exhibition of myself for anything in the world'.

Lanny said, 'That settles that. But if you would come to Western. Germany I would be so glad to help you. It is dreadful to me to think of you turning into a Communist and standing for all that cruelty, and, above all, the lying they do'.

'I am a German,' Kurt replied. 'To help Germany is my only interest. Beyond that I have nothing more to say. Certainly I am not accountable to anyone.'

'Of course not, Kurt.' He rose. 'I am sorry you will not let me help you. Try at least, to think kindly of me in the future,

'All right,' said Kurt, 'I will do that but I cannot think kindly of your countrymen.'

That would have opened another discussion, and Lanny saw there was nothing to be gained. He said, 'Let me tell you about myself. In my heart I am still that kid you used to know, and to me you are still the one I thought the wisest in the world. Don't you remember how we sat upon the heights by the Church of Nôtre-Dame-de-Bon-Port, and you talked to me about Beethoven and Goethe and the philosophers of German idealism? Let us try to remember those things about each other, and let the recent unhappiness drop into limbo'.

'All right', Kurt said, 'let us leave it that way'. This had the tone of finality. Lanny held out his hand, and Kurt shook it. As they parted the visitor said, 'I am going to send you our little paper, unless it would annoy you'.

VI

Lanny got into his car and drove slowly away. He had failed in his mission, completely. He had not even troubled to bring up the subject of counterfeiting, because he knew that he could get nothing useful out of Kurt in his present mood. He was no longer the same man. He was cherishing his grudges, and he didn't want the same things that Lanny wanted; he wouldn't speak frankly, and even if he appeared to there could be no trusting his words. Very certainly he wasn't going to have any interests in protecting the financial solvency of the American and British nations.

Lanny had become convinced that Kurt had made some kind of deal with the Communists. There was no other way that he could live on here, a German Nazi in the midst of Red revolution. The old Kurt would have spoken boldly against the intruders, who could have been to him no other than bandits. The new Kurt was keeping his mouth shut and looking out for himself and his family.

Lanny drove back to Berlin and made his report to the Treasury man: Kurt Meissner was there, he was bitter, defiant, and shut up as tight as a clam. Guzman's story that he was a leader of the Neo-Nazis was in all probability true; it was also probable that he was dealing with the Reds and pretending to have come over to them.

'It is going to be a hard nut to crack', agreed Morrison. 'We will have to get some man who can pose as a Nazi and who knows the game'.

'Kurt knows who the real Nazis are and he has secret sources of information. It will be hard indeed to find a man who has come over to our side and whom Kurt has not heard about or cannot find out about. This further idea has occurred to me—that we might send a man who can pose as a Communist. I don't know the village, but there'll be some Red in charge, a commissar or whatever they call him Your man might get in touch with him and stay there a while and make himself useful, and at the same time be making inquiries. He might even start a little intrigue against Kurt and his crowd: not enough to get them arrested but enough to give them a scare. They might put their bales of money and even their precious plates into a car and move. They couldn't feel safe after that in any Communist territory, and they might come into West Germany, and you'd have them'.

'Now you are talking!' replied Morrison. 'Not a Nazi but a Communist is what we want'.

'There's another idea I've been turning over in my mind. Emil Meissner spoke of Kurt's having a son in an _Oberschule_ in the East sector, and Kurt confirmed it. I remember Fritz very well. He thinks a lot of me, because when I came to visit them I used to bring the children presents, and I played the piano with his father, also with Fritz. In short, I'm an old friend of the family, as far back as he can remember; and now if he has lost his sympathy with nazism, what has he taken up? Maybe he's a Red, or maybe he is a Pinko like myself. I have the idea to meet him and listen to him talk, and maybe some suggestion might come out of it'.

'By all means try it', said the other. 'We must leave no stone unturned. But you have to be careful not to give the boy any hint as to your purpose.'

'My idea is to sound him out as an old friend of the family. If he is really on our side he can be trusted'.

'Mr Budd', said the other gravely, 'the Nazis used children to report upon their parents, and the Reds are doing it now. But it is not our practice'.

'I know that. But I take it that Kurt Meissner is not the person we are after. What you want is to break up this gang and to get hold of the false money If by any chance Kurt Meissner were to fall into your hands, you might be willing to let him escape and find refuge in Spain or the Argentine'.

'That is true enough. But be careful and don't give the game away—or he might take the money with him, and the printing plates as well'.

VII

It was a question, how to get hold of Fritz Meissner. Lanny might have strolled into the Russian sector and made inquiries for him at the school, but that would certainly have attracted attention and might have been embarrassing to the student. Lanny could have written him a letter; mail was going into the Russian sector uncensored; but a letter addressed in care of the school might be opened by the school authorities. The son of a notorious Nazi was certain to be a person set apart and watched by them. Morrison said he had a young German on his staff, one who dressed poorly so that he could mingle with the Germans. He would carry a letter to the school and have no trouble bringing back a reply.

The son's full name was Emil Friedrich Meissner, after his two uncles, the Uncle Friedrich had been killed on the Eastern front in the recent war. Lanny had known young Fritz as the eldest of a fair-haired brood and had last seen him three years ago, on a visit to Stubendorf by special permission of Hitler. He had then been a tall blue-eyed boy of fourteen; now, of course, he would be still taller.

Lanny wrote a note: 'I have a message from your Uncle Emil. Can you come to dinner with me at the Savoy Hotel at six o'clock this evening?' The messenger was told not to inquire of the school authorities but of the students, and to catch the boy when he was coming out from a class.

Lanny went back to his hotel, made up for some lost sleep, had a bath, and then went for a walk to renew his memories of imperial Berlin. It had been built into a symbol of military glory, of might, majesty, and dominion, and now it was a symbol of what the Episcopalian catechism calls 'the pomps and vanities of this wicked world'. Lanny had been a witness of every stage of the administering of this religious lesson, this scourging by fate, or divinity, or whatever it was. As a dyed-in-the-wool Pink he had his own pat interpretation of the phenomenon.

At six o'clock he was sitting in the lobby of the hotel, reading an evening paper, when the fair-haired, blue-eyed lad came in. It is marvellous how they grow; he had shot up to Lanny's own height of five feet ten. It is marvellous also how they believe in life; the faith and the courage they have in the midst of the worst calamities. It was evident to the first glance that here was a sensitive and eager young soul, at once impressed and troubled at coming into this fashionable place in the very poor clothes that he owned. He was meeting the wonderful Herr Budd whom he had known from babyhood; the wealthy Herr Budd, who had never come to the Stubendorf home without bringing sumptuous gifts. He had come from that land of unlimited possibilities which had shown itself at once magnificent and terrible in the last few years. Incredibly, impossibly, it had given the _coup de grâce_ to Hitler's _Drittes Reich_ , which had been built and officially scheduled to last for a thousand years.

It was plain that Fritz hadn't been having any American food of late; he was thin, and the flush in his cheeks was of excitement only. Lanny meant him to have one meal to remember and took him into the splendid dining room and ordered first soup and then a large slice of roast beef with a baked potato and brussels sprouts, then a salad, then ice cream and coffee. The lad was overwhelmed and insisted it was too much, but he managed to put it away; meantime Lanny told him about his visit to those two great military gentlemen, General Graf Stubendorf and General Uncle Emil, and where and how they were living, and how Lanny had presented each of them with a _Schinken_. Uncle Emil had wanted Lanny to meet Fritz and find out how he was getting along; Fritz said he was doing all right, he was studying hard in order to get ahead and be able to help his family. They were speaking English, so Fritz could reveal what progress he had made.

VIII

They went up to the room and there, locked safely in, they could talk freely. Lanny said he was very much interested to know what conditions were in the schools of the East sector. Fritz reported that the Russians had put a Communist in control of his school, but they had not been able to replace all the teachers, and many were independent-minded men, doing what they could to preserve the old German tradition of academic freedom. They had to be careful, of course; they couldn't say anything against communism without the certainty of being kicked out and arrested, but they could manage to make their point of view clear. The students were a bit more outspoken.

'What are they thinking?' Lanny asked, and Fritz said they were divided into various groups, all highly argumentative. There were a few old-time patriots, but these kept quiet; there were National Socialists, and there were Social Democrats, and, of course, some genuine and sincere Communists—made so because of their embittered lives, and not just kowtowing to the Soviet conquerors. The students spoke freely in their own trusted groups, and many, even Reds, were determined to remain Germans and not be drawn into the Russian orbit.

'I am afraid they will have a hard time before the MVD gets through with them', said Lanny.

'I know that', replied Fritz, 'and they know it. One of my teachers told me to read John Stuart Mill on liberty, and I did. Also, I read Milton's _Areopagitica_. That is the way I feel about freedom of speech and of thinking and writing'.

'If you really mean that, Fritz, I'm afraid you won't be able to stay in the Soviet zone. Things are still disorganised, but you can be sure the Communists will regiment them. They will take books like Mill and Milton out of the school library; they'll turn out the teachers who whisper such ideas and they'll put them in some mine in Siberia'.

'I know, Herr Budd, and I'm prepared for what may come. It may even be that I'll have to walk over into the American sector. But there will have to be some way for me to get work; I can't just sit in a refugee camp the way so many people are doing now'.

'Tell me how you are living', Lanny said.

'Well, you know rooms are scarce in our part of Berlin, because that is where the Reds came in with their heavy artillery. Six of us students live in one room. We managed to select a group that thinks pretty much alike, so we don't fight, and I don't think we report on one another. But, as you say, that may not be allowed to go on'.

'What do you do for money?'

'My father sends me a hundred marks a month. He has a little money saved up, he tells me. I manage to earn a little more running errands'.

'Does your father know about your present state of mind?'

'I am ashamed to say, Herr Budd, that I haven't had the nerve to tell him. It isn't because he would stop sending me money; honestly, it is because I hate to hurt him so. I don't think he would tolerate me in the family. You understand how it is, these are American and English ideas that I have been talking about, and to him they are treason— _Hochverrat_.

'Kurt hasn't changed his ideas at all?'

'I am embarrassed to talk about it, Herr Budd, but you really ought to hear. He has changed his ideas very much for the worse. Really I believe he has become a Communist—a Stalin-type Communist, I mean'.

'Oh, Fritz! It is hard to believe that!'

' _Nun, ja!_ You can understand it from his point of view, Herr Budd. What was he to do, a crippled man with our big family to support? He had to have a home, a place where he could live and work. He must have gone to the _apparatchiks_ , as they called themselves, and made his peace with them. He has not been frank with me—I doubt if he has been frank with anybody. He talks about the wave of the future and the impossibility of unscrambling an omelet and of setting back a clock and all that sort of thing'.

'Have you thought that he might be getting money from the Reds?'

'I have thought of it, and that is one of the reasons I am working so hard to try to get my degree'.

'I don't know', Lanny said, 'whether a degree from a Red-controlled school will carry much weight in American- or British-controlled districts'. He observed the look of concern upon his sensitive young face.

IX

Lanny had given careful thought to the approach to a most difficult subject. 'You must know, Fritz', he began, 'you are not alone in facing this problem. It confronts people all over the world; it is the thing that makes civil wars so terrible. We had one in the United States nearly a century ago, and the people in the border states split wide apart; some members of a family would go north and some would go south. There would be fathers on one side and sons on the other, or perhaps brothers, and then they would meet in battle; or behaps one would be a spy and the other would have to arrest him, or try him, or even execute him'.

'I know, Herr Budd. In my school reader there was a short story about it by a man named Ambrose Bierce'.

'Your problem touches me deeply because I have the same sort of thing in my own life. I have a half-sister named Bess. I have known her since she was a child; a lovely child, sweet and intelligent and full of fine feelings. Through me she met a friend, the violinist Hansi Robin. You have heard of him no doubt. They were married, and she became his accompanist, and for many years they were inseparable and very happy; but now Bess has become a Communist, a party member. She is bitter, aggressive, and determined. I have argued and pleaded with her, and so has Hansi, but it does no good. She is using our freedom to destroy freedom; she is using her rights under our Constitution to take those rights away from everybody else. So far she is just a propagandist; but now things are growing more tense; the Soviets are on the move. They call themselves internationalists, of course, but every trace of internationalism has gone out of their actions. They are just the old Tsarist imperialists, taking what they can get. It is a cold war, and it is growing hot. I ask myself: Suppose the time comes when I know that Bess is taking action against our people; that she is harbouring spies or perhaps helping to steal documents or military secrets—what would I do about it? Would I betray my own sister to the government and have her put in jail or even before a firing squad? What would you do, Fritz?'

'I don't know, Herr Budd. It would be a terrible decision to make. I suppose if it was my duty I would do it'.

'Of course Bess doesn't tell me what she is doing; she takes good care to keep me from knowing. But someday I might decide that it was my duty to find out what she was doing, and then there would be an end to my peace of mind. I can't get the idea out of my head'.

Lanny paused and then resumed, 'I will tell you of another case, a father and son. For many years I had a friend in New York, a German named Forrest Quadratt. In the First World War he was an agent for the Kaiser in New York; after that he became a Hitler propagandist, and during the war he was sent to jail for several years. It happened that he had a son who took the same attitude that you are taking now. The son was a young poet and college teacher and had to take a public stand for freedom and against his father. I don't know that he had anything to do with sending his father to jail, but it must have cost him a terrible heart struggle. I am telling you this so that you may see your problem is not unique. You have to think it out and make up your own mind'.

'I have already thought it out, Herr Budd. I believe in the free world, and I am going to take my stand in it, regardless of what it costs. I have seen Hitler's fanaticism cost the lives of millions of Germans, not to mention the Jews. I know that Stalin's fanaticism has cost the lives of millions of Russians, and of the peoples of the border states. I know he has millions of people in concentration camps and in his slave mines. I am not going to stand for that sort of thing, and if it is necessary to give my life to end it I am willing'.

Lanny gazed into those clear blue eyes and thought he was reading the soul behind them. 'And suppose it hurt members of your own family, Fritz?'

'I can't help it, Herr Budd. If men set out to destroy all the progress that humanity has so far made they have to be prepared to face the consequences. I have made up my mind that the Communists have betrayed the social revolution, and they are destroying every trace of idealism in it'.

'That is exactly the way I see it', replied Lanny. 'It has been a hard decision for me to make because I had given it so much of my faith and my hope. You are more fortunate than I in that you don't have to go through a long process of disillusion—almost thirty years of it'.

X

These two looked at each other with a steady gaze, and Lanny said, 'Now, Fritz, I am going to trust you. I offer to tell you some things that may determine the whole rest of your life. But first you have to give me your word of honour as a German and as a friend that what I tell you will never be breathed by you to any human soul without my consent. May I have that promise?'

'You have it, Herr Budd—my word of honour'.

'I know things about your father which will pain you. You don't have to know them unless you ask to know them. It is for you to decide'.

'I want to know everything I can about my father. I have to live with him, or else I have to break with him, and surely I must have the truth in order to make an intelligent decision'.

'All right, you ask for it, and I give it to you. I was with your father yesterday. I told him I had come because I was troubled in spirit and wanted to make up our quarrel. He was polite to me but cold. He consented at the end to agree that we would not cherish hard feelings against each other. That, of course, was politic for him, it can do him no harm'.

'I am surprised that he would even talk to you, Herr Budd'.

'Your father has changed his tactics, and I fear he has changed his nature; he is no longer the man I knew and loved. I got some information concerning him, which I feel quite certain is correct. Your father is not a Communist and does not intend to become a Communist; that is only camouflage. He remains a Nazi fanatic. He is the leading spirit of a group of conspirators after the fashion of the old Vehmgericht; you know about that no doubt'.

Fritz nodded.

'It is an organisation of desperate men pledged to secrecy under penalty of death. They call themselves the Völkischerbund. Have you by any chance heard of it?'

'No, Herr Budd. But I am not surprised by the news'.

'This is something that may surprise you. The money upon which this group is operating is the so-called Himmler money that was printed by the Nazis—English pound notes which they intended to use when they conquered England, and American notes which they used in the portions of the world taken by the American Army, beginning with North Africa. Your father's friends got away with a large quantity of it, we don't know how much. They may be printing more—it is easy to print it if you have the plates and the right paper. They sell the stuff to so-called pushers at a part of its face value, and these men go out into the Western world and get rid of it as best they can. In that way they rob and defraud a great many entirely innocent people. The long-run effect of the procedure is, of course, to dilute the currency and create inflation. Everybody in the Western world is robbed of a portion of his earnings and his wealth.'

Sober indeed was the face of this pink-cheeked German lad. 'So this is where my allowance has been coming from!' he exclaimed. 'I can no longer take it, Herr Budd!'

'If you refuse to take it', Lanny said, 'you will be practically telling your father that you have discovered what he is doing. You must understand that he has become a very suspicious man. He knows that you are living among the enemy—all sorts of enemies—exposed to what he would call contagion. He will be watching every word you speak, every gesture, every expression on your face'.

'It seems as if he were no longer my father!'

'That is the way I felt', Lanny told him. 'I came away saying, the Kurt Meissner I knew is no more; this is a strange man, and a most dangerous one. He is a blind fanatic, a Samson who would pull down the pillars of the temple upon himself in order to punish those whom he hates. Nationalism is the great enemy, in this day when we are trying to build an international order. Surely there is no possibility of bringing the old Hitler nationalism back to life—any more than there is the possibility of bringing Hitler back. What will happen is this: Your father will put on Red communism as a camouflage. He will repeat the phrases, he will tie himself up in the nets of their intrigue. He will become more and more cynical, and more and more convinced that they offer him the only means to power. He will be doing what they do, or what they tell him to do. What real difference does it make whether he becomes a Communist or merely a stooge, a dummy, a puppet obeying when they pull the strings?'

'No difference, Herr Budd. I agree'.

'He is heading for certain tragedy; for the Reds will be suspicious of him, they will watch him and never really trust him. If the time comes that he makes the tiniest move on behalf of his secret creed—if ever he acts as a German nationalist instead of a Stalin nationalist—they will take him and shoot him in the back of the neck. They are perfectly ruthless in stamping out every trace of independence in subject peoples. They took millions of what they called "kulaks"—peasants who had worked hard and saved enough to buy a cow and a horse—and shipped them off to Siberia to become slaves in labour camps. They are starting the same thing now with Poles and Czechs and Hungarians—yes, and Germans'.

'I know it, Herr Budd, I know it! I have often said to myself that my father is mad'.

XI

So Lanny decided that it was safe to put the proposition he had in mind. He explained the grave opposition of the American Army to the idea of setting a son to reporting upon his father; but in this case the object of the Army's enquiry was a gang of counterfeiters, and if it could find a way to break them up it would be quite willing to grant immunity to Kurt—to let him escape if by any chance it might happen to get him in its power. 'You wouldn't have to feel that you were spying upon your father', Lanny said. 'You might feel that you were doing him a favour in getting him separated from those so-called Neo-Nazis. He wouldn't thank you for it now, but he might live to do so when he comes to his senses'.

Lanny had made up his mind that he would put no pressure on this youth and that the decision must be the youth's own. Now, very carefully, he said, 'Get this clear, Fritz. I am not asking you to take the burden upon yourself; I am just putting the situation before you. I tried to think of someone who might stay in Wendefurth and uncover that conspiracy and possibly find out where the fraudulent money is hidden, and the plates. I myself could not hope to do it, because Kurt knows me too well. You, on the other hand, could go to him and tell him you had been listening to the clash of opinions in your school, you have been hearing the arguments of all sides and have made up your mind to stand by the sacred principles of the Third Reich—" _Wir werden weiter marschieren_ ", and all the rest. You could convince him quickly; but how much he would be willing to tell you I do not know.

'You must, of course, never mention that you have met me. I could put you in touch with someone here in the American sector who would guide you and to whom you might report. I doubt if your father himself has ever committed any crime—but you may find that he is the brain and soul of the conspiracy. He would probably start all over again, and that we wouldn't mind, because we know that these little conspiracies are going on in many beer cellars. The point is to get the stock of counterfeit money and the plates'.

'Would the American authorities keep their word with you, Herr Budd?'

'That I can guarantee absolutely. What I cannot guarantee is how you yourself would stand the strain of such an undertaking. I did it myself for about ten years, and I know how difficult it is, and how trying. It was something utterly contrary to my nature, and I often wondered whether I was becoming corrupted; I hope I wasn't. I lied and cheated and stole, all in the interest of the Allied world in which I believed. Franklin Roosevelt was my chief, and I knew that he believed in freedom and democracy and would stand by those principles to the death. I know the same thing about President Truman, and I can give you that same guarantee. I know that he will do everything in his power to bring about an intact, free, and democratic republic in Germany. That is what you want, or ought to want'.

'That is what I _do_ want, Herr Budd, with all my heart and soul'.

'If you undertake this service you will lead a lonely life. You will have to go among your enemies and put on their camouflage and do what they tell you. You will have to watch every step you take, every word you speak, every expression of your face. You will have to imagine yourself a different man, and you will have to become that man, and live the life of that man, except in one small corner of your soul where you remain your true self. You will be lonely because your true friends will despise you, and the new friends you make will be persons with whom no real friendship is possible; they will be evil men whom you despise. It was easier for me because I lived on two continents, and at home in America I had several old friends who guessed what I was doing and very tactfully did not mention their guesses. Also, I had a wife who helped me. You won't have any of those things because in the confused state of people's minds here in Germany you won't be able to trust anyone.

'I'm not asking you to make a decision now. I'm going to spend a few days here in Berlin asking questions of people who know about the situation. If you want to see me again you can do so. Go away and think it over—and don't feel under any compulsion except that of your own conscience, your sense of social duty. If you are not sure you can do it, don't try. If you think you know of any way you can render more service to the cause of human freedom and solidarity, that is the task for you to work at. The decision is yours and yours alone; but once you start, you must go through with it. Also, if you decide against it you must never forget that you are bound by your promise to me and will never give the slightest hint of what I have told you to any person in this world'.

'I agree', said the lad.

After this interview Lanny had only one thing more to do. He went to see Monck and told him the story. If Fritz decided to take the job, Monck would be both his go-between and his instructor. Lanny had been a spy on his own, but Monck had been the director of many spies; he had been the head of the Office of Strategic Services in Sweden during the last year or two of the war. Monck was a German and a Socialist; he spoke the boy's language—and not merely in the literal sense, but in the wider, symbolical sense of the phrase. They would make a team.
6 A TIME TO BREAK DOWN

I

Lanny went to call on the family of Johann Seidl, the old watchmaker who had helped to keep him hidden when the Gestapo was seeking him in Berlin. Johann lived in the Moabit district, a working-class quarter of the city. The upper storeys of the tenement had been bombed, and what was left of the occupants had moved down into the lower storeys; there were two families, seven persons living in an apartment consisting of a kitchen and two small bedrooms. The bomb damage had been repaired, at least enough to keep out the rain.

The families considered this elegant American gentleman the most wonderful person who had ever come into their lives; again he came with a bundle of food under his arm, containing things not otherwise available to the working classes of Berlin. What he wanted was to sit and ask questions about their lives and their ideas. He had been commissioned, he told them, by the semi-divine President Truman to find out what the common people of Germany were thinking and planning and hoping. This remarkable President did actually care about the common people and wanted to do for the Germans what would help them to become independent and truly democratic.

He was, alas, no longer all-powerful, for that day there had come over the cables and the wireless a report of returns from the November 1946 elections. It appeared that the Republican party had gained a majority of the House of Representatives, which meant that President Truman's opponents would control legislation. Lanny had to explain to these Germans this peculiar situation; the Republicans weren't really opposed to the German workers, they were only opposed to President Truman and might do the opposite of whatever he asked them to do.

Johann Seidl did most of the talking, he being a self-educated man, an old-time Social-Democratic party member— _Genosse_ he was called, the word for comrade. He reported that the Socialists in Germany were in the uncomfortable situation of being in no-man's land between two warring groups: the Communists in the East and the great cartel-masters in the West, the owners of steel and chemicals and electrical industries. The Social Democrats were all life-and-death opponents of the Communists; but the rank and file of the party would waver, tempted by the promises and the skilled propaganda of the so-called Soviets.

American propaganda, alas, was not so skilled, and every time the American government did something to help the cartel-masters the Communists shrieked and put it on the front page of their papers, and some Germans wobbled toward the East. But so long as President Truman was really working for a democratic Germany he could count upon the support of all true Socialists. That, alas, might mean the separation of Germany into two parts for a long time; it was hard indeed to believe that the Soviets would ever permit really free elections—at least until they had managed to raise up a new generation, trained so that it could be counted upon to vote Red.

Lanny took seriously his promise to President Truman. He talked with some of the cartel-masters also—he had met many of them in the old days. Knowing that he was the son of Budd-Erling Aircraft, they talked to him freely about their problems. The trouble with Germany as they saw it, was the determination of the workers to vote Socialist. That was how Hitler had got into power—they didn't mention that it had been with their money and arms. The problem was to get the German workers to vote for democracy as it was understood in America: that was to say, capitalism in industry and democracy only in government. How did the Americans manage to do it? Lanny said it was partly by education and partly by paying high wages. 'But', said the cartel-masters, 'we cannot afford to pay what you pay; we haven't the huge domestic market, and we have the competition of England, France, Italy, even of India, and soon of Japan'. But they all agreed that democracy had to be tried, if only because America was in control. If America withdrew her support now, millions of Germans would starve to death and the rest would go over to Stalin.

Lanny talked with the proverbial man in the street: the porter in the hotel, the waiter in the restaurant, the attendant at the filling station, the old woman who sold him newspapers at the kiosk. All agreed that the Americans had behaved well and the Reds had behaved badly; all hoped that the Americans would stay but were not sure the Reds would let them. The old woman compared the position of Germany with the wishbone of a chicken with two hands pulling it apart. Each of the pullers was thinking about his own fate and was not interested in the wishbone.

II

Lanny was expecting a telephone call, and it came. A voice said, 'I have decided. I wish to do it'. Lanny said, 'Can you come to lunch?'

The seventeen-year-old conspirator looked serious and a bit pale, as if he had been losing sleep. In the hotel dining room they did not mention the crucial subject but talked about the American elections. Lanny explained the peculiar system of American government, in which it could happen that the President and Congress were fighting each other, and everything they said or did was for its political effect. Meantime the bureaucrats would go on running the country as best they could. Congress would try to handicap them by denying them funds and would set up investigating committees which would subject them to hostile questionings.

It was going to be that way in America for the next two years at least; it might continue even longer, because the Southern wing of President Trumen's party was fully as conservative as the Republicans and would vote with the Republicans on all economic questions. Indeed, both parties were split down the middle on such questions, and the only thing that distinguished Democrat from Republican was the name he chose.

Fritz said, 'One would think that people with the same programmes would get together in the same party'. But Lanny explained that there was in America what he called the 'grandfather vote'; people voted a certain way because their grandfathers voted that way, and whether a man was to be a Democrat or a Republican was determined long before he was born.

Up in the room with the door locked they talked in low tones. The boy said, 'I wrote my father that I had been listening to the various opinions expressed at the school and had made up my mind that I agreed with him entirely. I dared not say more, because the letter might be opened. He will understand, and it will make him happy; when I go home at Christmas time he will take me to his heart. I will tell him that I think the education at the school is being perverted, and I would rather stay at home and study by myself. That way I may be able to find out something'. Lanny could approve, having got most of his own education by reading books.

Fritz had told his closest friends in the school of his change of mind. 'They were bitter against me, of course, and said a lot of hateful things. The tears came into my eyes, and I suppose that was a good thing, because it made them say that I was a softy'.

'Are there Hitlerites among your classmates?' Lanny asked, and Fritz said there were a few, but under cover; he had sought refuge with these and of course had been welcomed. They had no difficulty in believing him, he being known to them as the son of the 'Führermarsch'.

III

Lanny had already talked the matter over with Morrison, who agreed that it would be better to have Fritz report to Monck. The youth might find out a lot of matters other than queer money. So Lanny gave the new pupil an account of this friend of German freedom. Not merely had he risked his life in battle for the people's republic in Spain; he had risked it again and again in Germany in a battle of wits with the Gestapo. Lanny told how Monck had obtained a position as butler to the eminent physicist, Professor Doktor Plötzen, and had photographed many of that famous gentleman's papers at night. It was the same thing that had been done by 'Cicero' to the British ambassador in Ankara—the difference being that where Cicero had demanded and obtained one or two hundred thousand pounds of bogus money, Monck had been working for the small salary which the American government paid its secret agents to risk their lives.

Monck came; and it did not take him long to penetrate into the soul of this young idealist, trembling at once with eagerness, with fear, and with conscientious scruples. Monck himself had been like that thirty or forty years ago, and he proceeded to establish himself as a substitute for that father whom Fritz was giving up. 'For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household'.

It was a concentrated lesson in the arts of espionage that Emil Friedrich Meissner received that afternoon and evening. Monck gave him a code name and a letter drop, showed him how to open letters and reseal them, how to make sure that he was not being trailed, how to trail persons without being observed, how to escape from a person who was trailing him, by entering a crowded building and coming out by another door; how to lead people to reveal their secrets without their realising that they were being led; and so on through a regular technique. Fritz made notes and later would take them off and study them while walking on the street, and then tear them into small pieces and lose one piece at a time. Monck told stories of his own work and of the coups his agents had pulled off in various parts of Europe.

The neophyte was going to cultivate the acquaintance not merely of his Neo-Nazi fellow students and teachers; these would have parents and older friends who would be interested in recruiting a new and promising worker, and the tasks they would set him might reveal what they were up to. Not only was there counterfeit money to be traced down, but the Nazis had huge stores of gold and jewels and other valuables which in the last days they had put away in hiding places. There were still many art works that had not been recovered—and so on through a list. The smallest clue might lead to a big discovery, and the wise agent would keep his eyes and ears open all the time.

Lanny's heart ached as he saw this earnest youth go off to his harsh assignment. Lanny hated lying above everything in the world. He had observed the systematic lying of the Nazis for a matter of twenty-five years. Now he was observing the systematic lying of the Communists, and he hated both alike. He hated a world in which men were forced to lie to one another; but he could see no escape from it. The Nazis had declared war upon the rest of the civilised world, and they had had to be beaten. Now the Communists were doing the same thing, but doing it more cleverly, profiting by the many blunders of Hitler, Goebbels and the rest. Of course one could refuse to have anything to do with this poisoned and poisonous world; having plenty of money, Lanny Budd could have looked at beautiful paintings, listened to great music, and read poetry about the processes of his own soul; but he wasn't built that way.

IV

Morrison told Lanny he was satisfied that Guzman had given all the information he possessed and so was to be paid the price agreed upon. He was going to Guatemala; he had picked that place because Poland was cold and he thought he would rather be warm. He had his five hundred dollars safely hidden and declared his intentions to get a job and lead a respectable life. Whether he would do it, or whether he would lose his money gambling with sailors on the ship, no one could guess. He was taken to Bremen and put on board a British freighter.

Lanny had a parting talk with Morrison and received the thanks of that bureaucrat. Lanny had chosen to fly home by the way of Marseille in order to stop off and see his mother. To have skipped over her would have hurt her feelings, and there could be no excuse for it now when planes were flying all over Europe; you bought a magazine or two and settled down in a comfortable seat, and in a couple of hours you were put down at any airport you had chosen.

Beauty Budd, for many years now Mrs Parsifal Dingle, was at the airport to meet her darling son in a shiny new American automobile, a treasure difficult to acquire in America and impossible in Europe at that time. One person who could acquire anything was the president of Budd-Erling Aircraft; he had shipped this car to Beauty, and it had arrived only that week. Beauty herself was blooming, with the help of the tiniest bit of rouge. She was in her mid-sixties, though she did not mention it; her hair had turned grey but had acquired an ethereal bluish tinge. With her was Marceline, her daughter by her marriage to the French painter Marcel Detaze, and the daughter's little seven-year-old son. Marceline had been tortured in a concentration camp, and Lanny had found her and helped bring her back to health.

Beauty, as always, was full of curiosity, and Lanny was, as always, what she called a clam. All he said was that he had come to get information for President Truman. But he told her the news about his family and its extension, the Peace group. What they were doing with Emily Chattersworth's money was a personal matter to Beauty, for she had known about that money and watched it ever since the days before Lanny was born.

The shiny new automobile took them a hundred miles or so along the beautiful coast of the French Riviera, to the small estate called Bienvenu with which Robbie Budd had endowed his youthful love. Here Lanny had spent all his boyhood days, except for motor and yacht trips. It was on the heights above this place that he had sat with Kurt Meissner and listened to an exposition of German idealism. It was on those same heights, only two years ago, that he had sat and watched a great American armada bombard German guns on the shore and send in an army upon landing craft. Lanny, then what was called an 'assimilated' colonel, had come down to the shore and joined them, and accompanied them on the march up the Rhone Valley as a translator interviewing war prisoners.

Now there was peace again; and, oh God, was it going to last? Beauty wanted to know that more than all else. She had been driven into luxurious exile in Morocco, but had seen too much of the sufferings of other persons. That included Marceline's, also Marceline's new husband, an American aviator who had lost one arm; on account of other injuries he would walk with a limp the rest of his life. Lanny couldn't give his mother much encouragement; he said that the future of the world rested in the hands of a little group of men in the Kremlin, and they were torn between two contradictory motives of ambition and fear. 'I am afraid we shall have to take steps to increase their fear', he said.

Also in this household was Parsifal Dingle, Beauty's second husband, now a grey-haired man of seventy. He was a teacher of New Thought, as it was called in America, and had a gift of healing which he practised free of charge on all who called upon him. He was the most benevolent soul alive, and Beauty thought him wonderful—which is the basis for a proper marriage. Lanny was interested in both his theories and his practices, and they would sit and talk for hours whenever they met. Beauty would listen, an unusual role for her; she had taken up knitting and made crude garments for the poor people who came to their door. She had turned over the management of the place to Marceline's new husband, who was called Billy. He and Lanny had been to the same places during the war and had reminiscences to exchange. Altogether it was an agreeable family.

V

Lanny couldn't stay in this peaceful household more than a couple of days. Duty called him, and he got a plane to Lisbon, and from there one to New York. He was set down after dark at the La Guardia Airport; it was a Thursday, and that was the day of the Peace Programme. Lanny was wondering if he would arrive in time to hear it. When he stepped out of the plane it lacked just ten minutes to the hour. He walked off the field, got into a taxi, and told the driver to take him to the nearest row of residences. He stepped out, carrying his bags, paid the driver, and went to a house directly in front of him and rang the bell. It was a working-class district, with little stucco houses not more than ten or fifteen feet apart; the occupants were not rich people but it was a safe guess that few of them would be without a radio.

A man in his shirtsleeves came to the door. Lanny said, 'I beg your pardon, I have just stepped off a plane from Europe and I'm very much interested in a radio programme called the Peace Programme on station WYZ. My name is Lanny Budd, and if you have listened to the programme you have heard me announcing it. The programme is about to begin, and I am wondering if you would be kind enough to let me listen to it'.

The answer was, 'Sure, come in'. Very probably this man had never met a radio announcer in his life, nor ever expected to; such a being was to him a voice out of celestial regions. He led the visitor into the little living room, where three children had scattered their toys on the floor. The woman of the house came out from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron and apologising for the state of confusion. Lanny repeated his story for her benefit, and she said she had heard of the programme; she didn't say that she had listened to it, and Lanny was too polite to ask—he could guess that she hadn't because it was the same hour as a mystery thriller.

Lanny set down his bags, and they gave him a chair. They had three or four minutes to wait, and he exercised his well-known charm. He told how he had flown to Newfoundland, London, Berlin, motored into Poland, and then flown back by way of Marseille and Lisbon. 'O wonderful, wonderful, and most wonderful wonderful!'—so Shakespeare had written, without having either aeroplanes or radio.

The moment arrived and the dial was turned, and there was something else that was wonderful—no commercial. A voice said, 'Radio WYZ. This is a paid programme, and this studio has no responsibility for what is said'. Then came the elegant and cultivated voice of Gerald de Groot: 'The Peace Programme. Let us have peace. This programme is conducted by the Peace Foundation, an endowed institution devoted to the promotion of world organisation and world order. Our speaker this evening is Professor James Alverson Philips of the Department of Sociology at Calthorpe University. Professor Philips has a long and distinguished record as a liberal and friend of humanity. He has chosen as the theme of his talk "The Psychological Causes of War". I take pleasure in introducing Professor Philips'.

The professor had evidently done a good deal of speaking. His manner was quiet and restrained but incisive. It was Lanny who had arranged this programme, and he had met the professor, and now had before him the visage of an elderly gentleman, rather short, stoutish and bespectacled. He was talking now about a subject that lay close to his heart.

What he had to say was that the primary cause of war lay in the minds of men. They cultivated bitterness against one another, suspicions which led to fears, and fears multiplied hatreds, and out of this complex nothing could come but physical conflict. The professor had studied history and gave illustrations of what he meant. He said that the first duty of every lover of peace was to adjust his mental and emotional attitudes toward other peoples. He must learn to understand that foreigners were human beings like himself; that they were capable of fear and would respond to moral appeals.

What the professor was advocating was a spiritual change, but he said that the word spiritual had gone out of fashion, and he was trying to put it on a practical, common-sense basis. He said that the country was being launched on a campaign to generate suspicion of the Russians. He enumerated the agencies that were doing it and quoted some of the things they had said; he declared that was not the way to get peace but the way to get war, and war of the deadliest sort, that which had its basis in fanaticism.

He said that the Russian people were launched on a colossal experiment in the economic field and had a right to try that experiment if they wanted to. This experiment had begun near the end of the First World War, and then the Allies—Britain, France, and the United States—had manifested the will to put down that Russian experiment and strangle it in the cradle. Winston Churchill had come to the Paris Peace Conference and used all his influence to persuade the Allies to engage in such a repressive campaign. That was where the Russian fear of the Allies had been generated; and only recently that same Winston Churchill had come all the way to Missouri to denounce the so-called 'iron curtain' and to revive all those Russian fears. So it was we who had the task of changing the psychological state and convincing the Russians that we were willing to live in a world where every nation was free to make its own social experiments and be guaranteed against attack by its neighbours.

In his eloquent peroration the professor pleaded for a change of attitude on the part of all the peoples of the world. He welcomed this Peace Programme because it appeared to be calling for exactly that. A group of people had changed their minds, and were appealing to others to change theirs, and were meeting with a wide response. This movement would spread; it would reach to the nations of Europe; it would even reach behind the iron curtain. People there would discover that they had generous and sincere friends abroad, and the leaders would be forced to recognise it—they would be shamed into recognising it.

Faith was what would do it, not necessarily faith in God, but faith in that moral principle which exists in all of us and which we learn to recognise in others. That was the principle upon which Christianity had been founded, and if all the peoples of the earth had failed to accept Christianity it was because its advocates had come to put their trust in atomic bombs rather than in the spiritual nature of man. Regardless of what creed we professed we must rid our minds of suspicion and fear and reorganise them upon a basis of love. The Bible had given us the correct formula when it had associated together the two phrases, 'Peace on earth, good will toward men'. The professor said that the purpose of his talk was to reverse the order of those two phrases and suggest to his hearers that good will toward men came first and peace on earth would follow.

VI

Such was the talk; the radio was turned off, and the little family discussed with their unexpected guest the free intellectual treat he had given them. Mrs Maple said it was a fine talk and that she was glad Mr Budd had stopped in. Henry Maple explained that his wife had lost one of her kid brothers in France, and Mrs Maple said that the other brother had just come home—'He sure don't want no more war'. Lanny realised that he was now in contact with the American people—the plain people, the man in the street and his wife in their home. He assured them that he was much interested in their opinion and would be obliged if they would speak frankly.

Mrs Maple said that she always said what she thought; it was evident that she wore the pants of this family, and she declared that she didn't see no reason why we had to go meddling in the affairs of all them countries on the other side of the world. There were so many of them that she couldn't even get the names straight, and why couldn't we let them alone and let them run their own affairs the way they wanted to? Maybe if they got into trouble like a famine or something it was our Christian duty to send them some food, but we didn't have to go getting into wars about how they run their own affairs.

Then Mr Maple said that there was a fellow who worked at the bench next to him who was always spouting against the Russians, but he didn't go in for this redbaiting himself; he thought there was plenty of things here in America that could be improved and we had better be giving out thought to them. Mrs Maple said that her brother, the one who had come home, had saw a lot of Germans, and they seemed to him a good people and he thought maybe we had fought the wrong guys.

Lanny asked what they thought about the war with Japan, and Mr Maple said of course that was different when they had attacked us like Pearl Harbour, but maybe what we ought to have done with them was put them down along time ago before they got so many planes. So it could be said that this Lanny-Gallup poll revealed the American people somewhat confused in their attitude toward foreign questions. It would appear that the women wanted to let all other nations alone while the men wanted to fight them while they were young and easy to beat.

Lanny telephoned for a taxi, and when it came he thanked his hosts and shook hands all round, even with the children. He did not attempt to phone to Edgemere because he knew the studio phones would be busy for a long time. He had himself driven to Pennsylvania Station in the city, and there took the night local which stopped at Edgemere. All the way he thought about the discourse to which he had listened, and about the reaction it had caused in an American working-class family. The upshot of his thoughts was that he was going to have a serious talk with his wife, even in that condition which our grandfathers were accustomed to refer to as 'delicate'.

VII

He surprised them all at the office, where they were accustomed to remain after the programme, accepting telephone calls and in moments of leisure, if they had any, discussing the evening's event. The professor, who had come in his own motor car, had departed, so Lanny didn't have to have a serious talk with him. He told Laurel that he had had a pleasant trip and had found all his foreign family well and happy. He told her that he had sent a telegram to President Truman from Pennsylvania Station, offering to make a report, and that he would probably receive a reply in the morning. If so, he would like Laurel to ride with him again.

He said nothing about counterfeit money, nor about Kurt Meissner or Bernhardt Monck; but he was free to say that Truman had asked him to sound out key persons as to the success of Allied Military Government in Germany, and the attitude and intentions of the Kremlin thereto. He promised to tell her all about it during their drive to Washington; meantime he would make up for some lost sleep. He said this on account of Laurel, who was always excited on the night of a programme, and would have been willing to sit up half the night talking about it and about the world problems it had raised.

In the morning Lanny phoned his father in Newcastle to tell of his safe homecoming and then settled down to read his accumulation of mail. He hadn't got more than half through it before he was called to the telephone; the White House reported that the President would be happy to see Mr Budd that evening if it would be convenient. Mr Budd said that it would. He drew the conclusion that this accidental President of the United States was a man who knew what he wanted and wanted it right away.

VIII

The P.A. repacked a bag and got out of his desk a paper he had prepared especially for this visit. He put a warm robe over Laurel's knees and tucked it under, and they set out to repeat that drive on U.S.I. on a crisp morning in late November. 'Now', he said, 'we can really get acquainted. Tell me what you thought of last night's programme'.

Laurel's answer was, 'I thought the professor was a little vague. He didn't get down to cases'.

'Did you notice that all the faults he had to find were with our own country, and that all the moral obligations were ours also?'

'Well, I suppose that is naturally the way with moral obligations. It is up to us to reform ourselves, and let the other fellow reform himself'.

'Yes, but suppose the other fellow doesn't want to reform himself and has no idea of it? Suppose he is glad to be confirmed in the opinion that the faults are all ours?'

'Lanny, you are getting to be suspicious! Are you going to say that nice old gentleman is a fellow traveller?'

'I don't know that the nice old gentleman is a fellow traveller; I only know that if he were a Communist party member wishing to make an impression on a bourgeois audience his talk would have served very well. All the faults were America's, all the obligations were America's, and you'd have thought Stalin was gentle Jesus meek and mild. Let me tell you about how I heard that programme'.

He described the Maple family, their home, and their remarks after they had listened. 'I was talking with one of the mothers of America', he said. 'There are probably ten million of them, and each one of them has no idea but to get her son, or her husband, or her brother out of the Army and keep him out. Stalin can take all those foreign-sounding places, and it won't mean a thing to the "moms"—they can't even remember the names. Why can't we stay at home and mind our own business, and let dear Jimmy, Johnny, or Tommy get a job and raise a family?'

He told her about his trip, as much as he was free to tell; nothing about counterfeiting, but about the Germans and the French. He had talked to scores of people of all social groups, and everywhere a pall of fear was hanging over them. America was deserting them, or preparing to. America was disbanding its armies while the Soviets were keeping theirs and building them up. Stalin was going ahead as methodically, as irresistibly, as the movement of a glacier. He had all of Poland at his mercy, half of Germany and Austria, all of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria. He had solemnly promised to permit the setting up of democratic governments in all those lands; but now he was making his own definition of 'democratic', and what it meant was Communist dictation. They were all going to be turned into satellite states, with governments and armies controlled by Red commissars.

Also, Stalin was going to bring about a Communist revolution in Greece and in the eastern provinces of Turkey. He had got hold of Azerbaijan and its oil; he had been slow to withdraw and had left his stooges there. He had got access to the Adriatic through Albania and would turn the Baltic into a Russian lake. He was going to get China and from there take Tibet and threaten India. He had got those warm-water ports, Dairen and Port Arthur, for which Russia had fought a war and been defeated by the Japanese. Everything that the old-time Tsars had tried to do and failed, Stalin was going to do with no more than a tap on the wrist from us; and in the meantime college professors would be talking over the radio, telling the American people to improve their morals and spiritualise their foreign policy.

'What are we going to do?' demanded this expectant 'mom'. 'Let ourselves be turned into redbaiters?'

'Darling, I am tired of these Communist phrases, and I don't intend to let myself be bluffed by them. If Stalin's actions are such that even to list them is to blame him, then I have to be a redbaiter. I went to Yalta with Roosevelt, and I met Stalin and saw him make a bargain and pledge his solemn word. He was given everything he asked for—even things that we had no right to give. He made fools of us; Roosevelt knew it before he died and told me so. We bought a pig in a poke, and we got—what shall I say?—a wolverine, the most ferocious of medium-sized creatures. I have talked with clear-sighted men, both Germans and Americans in Germany, and they are all absolutely clear on one point: the only thing in this world that has kept Stalin from taking Western Germany has been, not the pitiful little force we are keeping there, but his dread of the atomic bomb, which we have and he hasn't and can't get for a long time. Vishinsky says that we are dangling the atomic bomb as a sword of Damocles over his head, and that is exactly what we are doing; if we didn't have it and didn't dangle it the Red armies would be moving across France today and showering London with a new stock of the V-2 rockets, which the top German scientists are now teaching the Reds to manufacture. It wouldn't be six months more before Stalin would be in Madrid, sitting on the severed head of Franco and thumbing his nose at us'.

'My God!' exclaimed the wife. 'What an imagination you are developing!'

'I am worried, and I can't hide the fact. I didn't intend to say anything to you about it until the baby was born; but that programme last night changed my mind. We simply haven't the right to risk the safety of the American people any longer'.

'You have changed your mind so suddenly, Lanny!'

'No, I have been changing it slowly, but I have delayed to report the change. Two years ago, when we began working over this plan, all our hopes were rosy. Roosevelt said he had a fifty-year plan for making friends with the Soviet Union, and when I told Stalin that he broke into laughter. He made it appear genial laughter, but I know now that it was sardonic. Stalin had his programme, set forth in book after book written by his professors for him—but he knew that Roosevelt had never seen one of those books. Stalin's attitude toward us is one of implacable, deadly hate, and when your nice old professor talks about spiritualising Stalin—well, Bernhardt Monck said to me that he might as well go to India and teach the tigers to stop eating meat'.

'This that you are telling me is what Bernhardt Monck says?'

'It is what everybody in Germany says who has any opportunity to observe and understand the Soviet system. Don't forget, a third of all Germans are now in their hands, and in Berlin they come and go across the border—it is just a question of walking across the street. The Germans have friends in Czechoslovakia and all the other border countries, and they all know what the Red tactics are. As Kipling wrote a half-century ago, "The toad beneath the harrow knows/Exactly where each tooth-point goes". I was warned of all these things more than a year ago, and now every day when I pick up my newspaper I see them coming true, one detail after another'.

'Lanny, what are we going to do with Emily's money?'

'We are going to spend Emily's money the way Emily would want it spent. I know what Emily's thoughts would be—I knew her as intimately as any friend she ever had. She was horrified by what the Kaiser's armies did in Belgium and was ardent for victory; she was a leader in Red Cross work, and no Frenchwoman was more patriotic. And she took the same attitude about Hitler—you know that. She would never accept the idea of Europe's submitting to a Soviet dictatorship. That wasn't her idea of peace, and she wouldn't want us to be sheep led to the slaughter. I'm not calling for war; on the contrary, I think the only hope of preventing war is for us to rearm and do it quickly, to convince Stalin that he cannot take the rest of the world without war. I'm quite sure he doesn't want war, because he has had a demonstration of what American industrial power can do, and he has seen what the atomic bombs have done in Japan'.

IX

Laurel didn't hold out as long as Lanny had anticipated; she had been doing her own thinking while he was doing his. There was grief in her voice but no anger as she asked, 'What are we going to do with the Programme—get military men to come and tell us how to arm?'

He answered, 'It seems to me that we have one definite thing to do, which is to adopt and carry out an open-forum policy. Whenever we get a speaker who takes the fellow-traveller line, get another speaker who takes the opposite line to answer him. For example, let's get John Dewey to answer Philips; there's another nice old man, but one who is clear-sighted and knows a fact when it jumps up and hits him on the head'.

They arrived in Washington in time for dinner, and afterwards he walked to the White House on a pleasant, almost winter evening; this time the Secret Service men knew him and greeted him as a V.I.P. He was escorted to the President's study, where again he found the tired man signing documents. The President was glad to welcome a herald of good tidings—good to this extent at least, that the American Army was behaving itself and winning friends among the Germans; also, that Truman Plan was giving them hope and courage. Lanny felt free to discuss the subject of counterfeiting and to tell how he had been able to bring out a pusher and had found a young German who might be able to penetrate the secrets of the Neo-Nazi underground. But he didn't give any idea who this young man was or who the Bundists were. He told what Monck had said; Monck was the one who really knew, and Lanny would have been pleased to see him at Truman's right hand as adviser on foreign affairs. But alas, no German could hold that position, and especially no German Social Democrat.

Lanny produced the paper he had taken the trouble to prepare some time ago. He said, 'Mr President, you expressed an interest in the writings of Joseph Stalin, so I took the liberty of collecting several extracts, giving his views on the subject of peace with the rest of the world. May I read you one or two of them?'

The other said, 'Surely', and Lanny read from the volume called _Problems of Leninism_ , which had been circulated by the millions in the Soviet Union:

'We are living', Lenin wrote, 'not merely in a state but in a system of states, and it is inconceivable that the Soviet Republic should continue to exist for a long period side by side with imperialist states. Ultimately, one or the other must conquer. Meanwhile, a number of terrible clashes between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois states are inevitable'.

'That is what Lenin taught', said Lanny, 'and this is what Stalin, his faithful pupil, wrote in the _Theses of the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International:_

"The proletariat of the Soviet Union harbours no illusions as to the possibility of a durable peace with the imperialists. The proletariat knows... that, in the process of a proletarian world revolution, wars between proletarian and bourgeois states, wars for liberation of the world from capitalism, are inevitable and necessary".

'Why don't my advisers bring me things like that, Mr Budd?' asked the President.

'I suppose because they know you are too busy to read them. That is why I am taking the chance to read them to you'.

'Go on, Mr Budd'. The President returned the visitor's grin.

So Lanny said, 'This is Lenin again, in an article called 'The United States of Europe Slogan', in his _Selected Works_ , volume five, page one-forty-one. This passage is a favourite of Stalin, quoted on many occasions, including his book _Problems of Leninism_.

Lenin says, 'The victorious proletariat... having expropriated the capitalists and organised its own production, would arise against the remaining capitalist world, attracting to itself the oppressed classes of the other lands, raising revolts in them against the capitalists, and, if necessary, even coming out with armed force against the exploiting classes and their governments'.

'There you have the whole programme, Mr Truman,' said Lanny. 'That was written forty-two years ago, at the beginning of the First World War; and it is like the law of the Medes and Persians, which, the Book of Daniel tells us, "altereth not".'

'Leave that paper with me, Mr Budd', was the reply. 'I will learn those passages by heart and recite them at my next Cabinet meeting'.

Lanny said, 'Tell the newspaper reporters about it, and the word will come to Mr Molotov and Mr Gromyko, and they will know that you won't be so easy to fool—' Lanny stopped, and the other finished the sentence. 'As I was at Potsdam'.

X

The President thought for a space and then added, 'Franklin Roosevelt tried so hard to be friends, and so did I. Tell me, what is the matter with them? What have we done to them?'

'What we have done, Mr Truman, is to be a bourgeois nation, the biggest and richest in the world. Our affairs are run by immensely wealthy capitalists who choose dummy legislators and tell them what to do. The capitalists are automatically driven by the forces of an expanding economy to reach out to every corner of the earth for raw materials and markets. We take these by purchase where possible, but where we encounter resistance we are ready to use force. By this means we reduce all colonial peoples to the status of peons and we keep them there. But now come the heroic Bolsheviks, the followers of the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist line, calling upon the awakening proletariat to arise and expropriate the expropriators. I don't know whether you understand that jargon, Mr Truman, but you have to learn it, because that is what we have to face the balance of our lives'.

'I have heard it, Mr Budd, but it is hard to make it real to myself'.

'It is just the realiest thing going. It is being recited day and night by tens of thousands of inspired fanatics. They are teaching it to millions; they are teaching it to the young, and in one generation more there will be whole countries full of people who have never heard anything else and who take it just as seriously as you take the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John'.

'An amazing development, Mr Budd. What are we going to do about it?'

'The first thing we have to do is to realise it, and that is difficult enough. I have talked to people who are close to the scene and who know what is going on. Even before the war came to an end the Politburo held a meeting, with Stalin present, and threshed out the problems of their policy. There was some opposition, I am told, but Molotov and Malenkov carried the day, and the Bolshevik tempo, as they call it, was ordered to be resumed. What that means is the deadliest kind of war, open and secret, to be pushed on every front and by every device. It means that the whole force of the Communist machine in every country of the world is to be devoted to the spreading of hatred for America. I know that it is hard for a man from Independence, Missouri, to understand this. You have been brought up on a gospel of love; but this is a gospel of hate, pushed with the very same determination as a matter of religious conviction. You would be willing to die to teach men to love one another, and the Communists are willing to die in order to teach men to hate you. In the process they are willing to tell any lies, and they employ the most highly skilled psychologists to invent the lies which are most plausible and most harmful. It was Hitler who said that the bigger the lie the easier to get it believed; it was Mussolini who taught Hitler that maxim, and it was from the Bolsheviks that Mussolini learned it'.

The President was a good listener and never failed to get the point. He replied, 'We're going to have to rearm, Mr Budd. It hurts like the devil, but I have no choice. And you may trust me for this—I'm not going to let it turn me into a reactionary. There is no reason why we can't have an army and at the same time have social progress. I won't be able to accomplish much with this new Congress the people have given me, but at least I'm going to make the demands and keep them before the public mind. I shall keep the flag flying'.

Lanny smiled and said, 'There was a song written about that, Mr. President; it is called "The Star-Spangled Banner'".

It was a satisfactory interview, and Lanny went back to the hotel and told his wife about it. When he got through he saw that there were tears in her eyes. America was going to get ready for another war! After all, in spite of anything she could do, she was a 'mom'; she had a little four-year-old at home, and could figure that it would be only fifteen years before they would be taking him into the Army. By that time the Soviets might have got the atomic bomb, and it would be a new kind of war, with horrors hitherto undreamed of on this unhappy earth.

XI

Back in Edgemere, Lanny studied the mail which came in after that broadcast. He was saddened to notice that most of the listeners had swallowed the generalizations of Professor Philips and found satisfaction in his high-sounding words. Only a critical few wanted to ask exactly what he meant, and whether by any chance Soviet Russia had any of the faults so easily found in America. Lanny was resolved that from this time on no speaker would escape without questioning, to bring out what he meant, or to make sure whether he really knew what he meant.

The first persons to be consulted were, of course, Rick and Nina. These were the old-timers, the elders—Rick being a year older than Lanny, and Nina half-a-dozen years older than Laurel. Lanny knew that they had been thinking along the same lines as himself and was relieved to discover that they had formed the same opinion of the fellow-travelling professor. These were the times which tried men's thinking powers, and Rick was a man who had no pleasure in being fooled or in fooling himself.

It was their practice to hold a staff meeting one evening in the week to discuss programmes and policies, exchange experiences, and report on the state of the enterprise. At the next meeting Lanny brought up his suggestion, and it was threshed out. The only objection came from the elderly philosopher who delivered the town's laundry and called himself an Anarchist. 'We are going to hear that we have taken up red-baiting', said he. His wife, the stout lady who did the town's laundry, replied that they were not to let themselves be frightened by names. Mother Tipton had recently discovered that she had a long line of ancestors and had joined the Daughters of the American Revolution. She had done it partly as a joke, in order to prove that a Socialist could be as patriotic as any other lady of the community; now' perhaps she was taking it seriously, for she said she would like to coin a new word and put it on the air. 'Let us talk about sambaiting, for those people who see everything wrong with Uncle Sam and can't see anything wrong with his opponents'.
BOOK THREE

When First We Practice to Deceive

7 HOSTAGES TO FORTUNE

I

Esther and Robbie Budd always had a Thanksgiving Day dinner for the family; they had the space and the servants for such a function. Lanny and Laurel went, and had been asked to bring Rick and Nina, who were almost a part of Lanny's family—and besides, Rick was a baronet and Nina a baronet's wife. Frances was following behind with Scrubbie in her car. Bess and her husband were also invited, but Bess wouldn't go because she hated families and knew that her presence would put a damper upon them all. Hansi would go to the Robin family dinner.

Lanny saw his wife safely bundled up on the rear seat of his car. Nina rode with her, and Junior between them; Rick sat with Lanny in front. On the previous night there had been the first snowfall of the year, and they drove across the George Washington Bridge and north along the beautiful series of parkways which took them into Connecticut. Tens of thousands of other people were on their way to Thanksgiving dinners, and tens of thousands of youngsters were out with their sleds in the bright sunshine.

The president of Budd-Erling Aircraft had been chained to his desk for five-and-a-half years of terrible war. His features were careworn, and he had lost weight, with the result that he had jowls hanging from the sides of his face. Now he was supposed to be resting—but how could he, with orders for fighting aircraft having absolutely vanished? The company had to exist on its fat, and the workers who had come swarming into Newcastle had to go back to their farms or to the woods of Canada or the plains of Texas. Robbie had made enemies because he wouldn't distribute dividends freely enough, but now everybody saw why he had hung on to his company's funds.

Robbie was a kindhearted old man, and very proud of his family; he shook hands with all the men and kissed all the women and the children. His two sons were now middle-aged men, and their wives were proper ladies of high social station, keeping themselves slender and competent after the modern fashion. Also in that fashion, they did not have large broods of children; three each was a full supply. There were cousins and some old people—the big dining table was extended so far that there was barely room to get around it, and all the young people and two or three of the old ones had to be relegated to the breakfast room.

When Lanny had first come to Newcastle, which was during the First World War, Grandfather Samuel Budd had been alive and had personally carved the twenty-pound turkey in patriarchal style. But now that too was managed in the modern fashion; the butler carried it ceremoniously around on a large silver platter and then carved it in the pantry, and a footman made the rounds and permitted each guest in turn to choose his slices. That footman had just been released from the Army, having fought all the way from Omaha Beach to the River Elbe; he was content to come back to his old job—like the admirable Crichton in Barrie's play. Two maids carried the trimmings and the extras, and the people at the table had nothing to do but eat and laugh and tell about everything that had happened to them during the year. The religious implications of Thanksgiving Day had been pretty well forgotten; the ladies and gentlemen played golf instead of going to church, and they made the holiday an occasion for feasting and forgetting their old grudges.

In the course of the afternoon Lanny had a chat with his father and heard once more the story of how America loved its arms manufacturers whenever it was in trouble and the moment the war was over took to calling them merchants of death. Robbie wanted to know what Lanny had been doing abroad, and Lanny said nothing about counterfeiters, but he was free to tell of his visit to the White House and of the messages he had brought back from Europe. The president of Budd-Erling Aircraft had a supreme contempt for an ex-haberdasher named Harry S. Truman and used him as a sample of American incompetence in self-government. All the same, he was curious about the queer bird and plied Lanny with questions. Lanny could imagine Robbie telling his cronies at the office and the country club about it, and not without pride.

Lanny was able to tell the old man news that cheered him greatly: that the way the wind was blowing it might soon be expected to blow Robbie some orders for new and improved fighter planes. It was all going to be jets now, Robbie said; propeller planes were dead as the dodo, and he was expending a lot of his stored-up surplus upon experiments with sweptback wings; all this at the huge testing plant he had out in the deserts of New Mexico.

II

Toward dark, Frances took Rick and Nina and Junior into her car to drive them home, and Lanny and his wife stopped off at the family nest of the Robins. Here was another large group, this time Jewish; since the Christians had forgotten the religious meaning of their holiday it was proper for the Jews to share it as a day of feasting and family reunion. Here was the elderly Johannes Robin, whom the Nazis had treated so badly; he had been a multimillionaire, and now considered himself a poor man, though as head of the sales department of Budd-Erling he had plenty of money and hadn't failed to invest it carefully.

There was Mama Robin, who was family love and care incarnate. She was Grandmama now, with quite a brood, not restricted by fashion; there were Hansi's two boys, and there was Freddie, Jr., and four children of Rahel, Freddie's widow who had remarried and had a devoted husband. When Lanny and Laurel came that made fourteen, quite a party. They had a light supper since no one was hungry, and then Hansi played for them and Lanny accompanied—not very well, since he was badly out of practice, but he managed to keep up and no one was critical. Mama Robin adored him, for he had once helped them all to get away from the dreadful Nazis, and he was her ideal of what an Anglo-Saxon gentleman ought to be.

Hansi Robin never drove a car; he did nothing that might interfere with the flexibility of his precious fingers—each one of them was insured for a quarter of a million dollars, for obviously if any one of them was lost or injured the others would be of no further use. Lanny drove him to his home, and the three of them sat until after midnight, discussing the state of the world. Lanny was free to tell about his visit to Germany and what Monck and others had said about conditions there. They talked over the changes in the programme, and Hansi's heart was wrung at the thought of having to give way to the warmongers and the redbaiters; but he agreed that there was nothing else to be done and assented to President Truman's dictum that it took two to keep the peace. Hansi's opinion of Truman was strikingly different from Robbie Budd's.

III

Lanny and Laurel were planning to spend the night with the Hansibesses, as they called them. Laurel had her mind made up to have a quiet talk with Bess, but Bess wasn't there; she was attending a meeting of the Agitprop Committee, so Hansi reported. It was the custom of the Communists to use holidays for a series of meetings that working people could attend.

It was about one o'clock in the morning when they heard Bess putting her car in the garage. She came in, looking tired and somewhat drab. She had been a lovely blond child; now she was forty, and the colour had gone out of her cheeks and she made no effort to replace it; she wore her hair tied in a knot on the top of her head and covered with a little hat without ornament. She used no cosmetics; she wasn't trying to win your attention that way. If you had a mind and wanted to use it she would explain to you why all the troubles of the world were due to the capitalist system.

She knew that her half-brother and sister-in-law were in the house; she had seen their car in the drive. She said 'Hello', and they responded in kind. She took off her driving gloves and the long coat which she wore and dropped them into a chair, then dropped herself into another. 'Well', she said, 'I see that you won't let any more people believe in peace'.

It was a challenge, of course. Late as it was, she was ready for an argument. It was the Communist technique: attack, attack again, and then again.

Nobody had an impulse to say anything, so nobody did. Bess continued, 'I take it to mean that you think all the people who really want peace sympathise with the Communists and know that that is the only way to get it; so you have to cut short their talks and use the time to challenge them and bait them. Tell me, Lanny, is that a deliberate policy, or do you expect me to believe it's just an accident?'

To this direct question it was necessary to answer, and Lanny said mildly, 'We thought it would make the programme more interesting if we had questions and answers'.

'The questions being always directed to pin the speaker down and force him to admit that all the threats of war at present are coming from the Soviet Union. Don't think you can fool the public, Lanny. They are beginning to wake up and realise who are the true enemies of peace in this world'.

'It would be a waste of time to discuss it, Bess—'

'No, the only place you want to discuss it is over the air where you have all the say and where the fallacies and falsehoods cannot be pointed out'.

'I am sorry you feel that way about it, Bess. We try to get a varied list of speakers—'

'And when you get one who has any trace of understanding for the liberal or democratic view you proceed to bait him and make him ridiculous. I had some hopes that you were going to let both sides be heard, but I suppose the pressure upon you has been too great. Tell me, has the F.B.I. been paying you a visit—or is it the American Legion or the Ku Kluxers?'

They had had rows like this before, and for Hansi's sake Lanny didn't want to have another. He said, 'It's late, Bess—'

'Why don't you give me a straight answer? Tell me what pressure was put upon you'.

'There wasn't any pressure whatever, Bess. It was just that I heard Professor Philips and decided he wasn't very clear in his mind. I talked it over with the others, and we agreed that we would ask the speakers questions and clear up their point of view'.

'In other words, you think that James Alverson Philips is a Red! Is that it?'

'I didn't say that, Bess'.

'I can tell you from the inside—he's as much of a Red as Herbert Hoover. You've got to the point where you can't let a speaker find the slightest thing wrong with the capitalist system or hint at the slightest thing good in the Soviet Union. You taught me to be a Socialist, Lanny, and I thought you were at least a liberal. What has happened to you? Is it that you're afraid of losing Robbie's money? Or have you made so much of your own?

'It has nothing to do with money, Bess. It is just that I have seen too much killing in the Soviet Union'.

'Killing! My God, you talk about killing! You have seen the capitalist powers fly at one anothers' throats—twice you have seen it, in the two greatest slaughters of history. You saw the great capitalists of Germany set up Hitler in power and give him arms, and you saw him burn six million Jews and murder some ten or twenty million Russians in an unprovoked attack—and you talk about killing! You see the Soviet Union putting down traitors and capitalist intriguers—putting most of them in prison—I doubt if they have killed one per cent of the number that were slaughtered in the last holocaust. But you call that killing! You can stand any number of world wars apparently—you're getting ready for another as fast as you know how—but you can't stand the killing of traitors and spies; I suppose because you were one yourself'.

'Oh, Bess!' broke in Laurel. 'How perfectly horrible!'

'You know he was a spy. He was a spy against Göring, and that was all right. What I want to know is, is he going to be a spy against the Soviet Union? I call him a traitor to the cause of the workers, because he espoused it and he taught me to espouse it, and now he can't find enough bitter things to say against it. You are both taking Emily Chattersworth's money and using it for the very opposite of what she wanted. I had hopes when you started; both of you were so eloquent I thought you really meant to plead for peace. But now the whole country has gone crazy against the Soviet Union—that horrid Truman is calling for war and preparing for it—and you have joined the wolf pack and are howling with the rest of them!'

Hansi got up. 'It is late', he said quietly. 'We all ought to have some sleep, and Laurel especially. This is Thanksgiving Day, and we can all count our blessings. We live in a free country where each can think as he pleases and go his own way in the morning and do as he pleases'.

Hansi was the host, and it was possible to take his statement as a command. Lanny got up and took his wife by the arm and they said good night. He helped her upstairs to the guest room, where they had stayed for weeks at a time and felt at home. Hansi and Bess were sleeping apart, and Hansi went to his room. What Bess did they did not know.

Laurel exclaimed, 'Poor Hansi!' and repeated it several times in a voice full of grief. She had come here with the thought that she would take Bess off alone and plead with her gently, both as a sister-in-law and a friend; but she saw there was nothing to be done. She said, 'They ought to part, Lanny. One or the other should get a divorce. Hansi might meet some woman he could love and who would be decent to him. He will just be destroyed if he goes on like this'.

IV

The two peace crusaders drove home next morning, or rather, later the same morning. On the way they talked, not about the two happy families they had visited, only about the one unhappy family. Marital tragedies were growing more common in the world, it seemed; as people developed ideas, they were more apt to develop different ones. Here were two sensitive artists who had played magnificent music together, and now they could hardly speak to each other. Lanny and Laurel agreed that the bitterness was bound to increase, because the conflict between the Soviet Union and the Western world was bound to increase.

Lanny noted a curious fact: they no longer agreed even about their language; with Bess it was always the Soviets and the Soviet Union, and to Hansi it was Russia and the Russians. Hansi insisted that the Soviets no longer had any power; in fact, for all practical purposes they had ceased to exist; it was Russia now, Holy Russia, the Russia of Tsarist imperialism; it was the bear that walked like a man. Now the bear had put on a Red costume and walked waving a Red flag with a hammer and sickle on it—but he still desired the territory of his neighbours and insisted on having warm-water ports all around Europe and Asia. He was a bear who no longer wielded a knout—no, he now had a torture chamber devised by modern scientists, with brilliant lights which the eyes could not escape, and concrete walls and floors so shaped that it was impossible to sit down or lie down without torment.

Highly trained modern psychologists now supervised the most barbarous torturings, and each of the dictators had learned from the last and improved upon his art. Mussolini had learned from Lenin, Hitler had learned from Mussolini, and Stalin had learned from both of them. It was like a virus which increases in virulence every time it is transferred to a new culture medium. So Hansi had talked in the evening before Bess had arrived. Bess hadn't heard him—but she must have heard him many times before.

Laurel asked, 'If they get a divorce, what will they do about the children?'

Lanny answered, 'What will they do about the children anyway? They can't put off the problem for ever'.

They had solved it so far by putting the boys in boarding school. But the boys were at an age where they were beginning to ask questions about what was going on in the world. For how long could they be kept in ignorance of the fact that their mother and father were in a deadly struggle over these questions? Would Bess be willing for them to absorb the current prejudices against the Reds? Of course she wouldn't; she would insist upon telling them that the Reds were heroes and martyrs. And then, if they asked Hansi about it, what would he say? If he told them his opinion, Bess would be in a fury and the battle for the children's souls would be on.

Hansi couldn't stand this tension, they both agreed. Hansi was a sensitive artist, and five minutes of quarrelling was enough to ruin his day. It ruined the day for Lanny and Laurel also, for they could not bear to see the suffering of this loved friend. The wise Francis Bacon wrote: 'He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune'. And it is equally true that he that hath friends hath done the same. Friends represent an extension of one's life, but they extend into sorrow as well as into joy, into failure as well as into success.

V

At home was that delightful little boy named Lanning Creston Budd, now going on five years. He had fair hair and brown eyes like his mother. He was at that most charming of all ages, where his mind was growing fast, like corn in hot midsummer, so fast that you could see the difference in one night. He came home from kindergarten chattering like a magpie, and there had to be someone to listen to every detail of what had happened to him. He had not a trouble in the world, unless it was that he fell and got a bump, and that could be healed by two or three kisses.

But his mother had a trouble, one that never left her; the dreadful thought of the war that was coming, and when would it come? There was a traitor thought: O God, let it come soon and be over before he is drawn into it! But then, suppose it didn't get over; suppose it was a thirty years' war, or a hundred years' war; suppose that in spite of all the dreadful new weapons, or because of them, it went on and on until every vestige of civilisation was wiped out, and men were again hiding in caves and fighting with clubs and spears! Bess was in the mood where she was ready to face that prospect, such was her hatred of the capitalists; and it was easy enough to find capitalists who were willing to meet her in the same spirit. Bess's own father, for example—that bejowled old man who was both affectionate and generous but who turned into a mad rhinoceros when his privileges and prerogatives were threatened.

At least Laurel had the consolation that she and her husband could agree. 'Thanks for that!' she exclaimed. 'We do not have to fight and break up our marriage'. But that seemed a pharisaical attitude, like that of the man who went up on the housetop and thanked God that he was not as other men.

Their conversation came back to poor Hansi and his grief. What could they do for him, how could they help him? They didn't worry about Bess, because they knew that she had found a new religion, which meant more to her than love. Like the Christian who looked forward to a heaven where all problems would be solved and all sorrow would be ended, Bess was looking forward to a utopia where all men would do as she wished them to do, and thus there would be no more need for cruelty and force. Bess had fallen victim to that Marxian dialectic which is so plausible, so overwhelming, having the inevitability of a proposition in Euclid. The contradictions of capitalism would bring about its inevitable collapse, and the awakening proletariat would replace it: thesis, antithesis, and synthesis!

What was wrong with the proposition? Lanny said that it failed to allow for human nature and its weaknesses. The proletariat was just an abstraction; no such thing really existed, it was just men, and in this case it had turned out to be the Politburo—very far from perfect men indeed! Lanny liked to quote the saying of Lord Acton, 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely'. Lenin in his last testament had repudiated Stalin as being 'too rude'; but that hadn't kept Stalin from seizing power and holding it, and killing nearly all the men whom Lenin had favoured. Lanny drew a picture of that lonely despot, guarded by enormously thick stone walls and whole arsenals of machine guns, haunted by fears and suspicions, and ordering the execution of one set after another of his colleagues and protectors. He made it so vivid that Laurel woke up in the middle of the night and composed some verses:

THE STRONG MAN

Ivan, what makes the strong man strong?

The sweat and tears of countless slaves,

The will to power, right or wrong,

A little clique of willing knaves,

These are the sinews of all-power.

To these he gives the law supreme:

While minions cringe, and brave men cower,

Sweet freedom is a madman's dream.

Lanny thought that was good and wanted to put it into the Peace paper, but Laurel wouldn't let him. She was afraid that was really red-baiting.

VI

They were back in their routine, which was automatically guided and determined by the mail that came in twice a day. It was a large mail and very diverse; there were orders for the Peace paper, and that meant stamps, dollar bills, cheques, and sometimes even coins poorly concealed in pieces of cardboard. All had to be counted and accounted for. People wrote from all over the world—the programme was now going out also by shortwave. People wrote advice, they wrote criticism, they wrote their theories about how to end wars; they wrote asking for jobs or offering to come and help without pay; they told all about themselves. They wrote because they were in trouble and wanted advice or financial help.

There were many touching letters, and some that were wise, and some that were hopelessly crazy. There were people who wrote with different-coloured inks or coloured crayons, and who submitted elaborate charts and designs, outlining a philosophy of life or the reorganisation of human society. They wrote about new inventions that would make millions, provided only that the person could get money enough to obtain a patent. They wrote telling about new religions, new scientific discoveries, new schemes to end poverty by printing paper money. They wrote just because they were lonely and felt friendly toward the voices they heard over the air. They wrote offering to speak on the programme or suggesting others to speak. And all these suggestions had to be considered. Laurel would get magazine articles, pamphlets, and books in order to find out about this person or that. Every letter had to be answered, even if it was only with a formula. There was a mighty clicking of typewriters in numerous little cubicles which had been constructed inside the one-time fuse factory.

Such is your life when you set out to change the world; and it is all right so long as you are sure that you know what the change is to be and how it is to be brought about. But when you suddenly begin to have doubts about everything you are doing; when suddenly you find yourself saying, 'Peace, peace, when there is no peace', and you wonder if there is going to be war, or even whether it might not be better to fight than to appease—then indeed your life becomes complicated, and you find yourself lying awake at night and asking questions of whatever God you may believe in.

VII

But meantime life has to go on; you have your personal problems, and all the people you know have them. There was, for example, the problem of Frances Barnes Budd and Scrubham Pomeroy-Nielson, who were in love. Scrubbie had been named for the first baronet, who had made a fortune out of shoe blacking and had happened to be a pal of the prime minister of those days. The name Scrubbie was most unusual, but then the name of the prime minister had been Dizzy, and that was unusual too.

The present-day Scrubbie was young, but he was old enough to have been up in the air over England and Germany, darting here and there like a swallow pursued by a hawk—or sometimes like a hawk pursuing a swallow. As for Frances, she had come over to visit her father and was supposed to go to school; but she found that the education she wanted was to help bring about world peace by sealing up envelopes and writing form letters and pasting up proofs for a little weekly newspaper—in short, doing anything she was told, provided that she was working in the same office as Scrubbie.

They wanted to marry and had heard a rumour to the effect that two could live as cheaply as one. They were willing to live any way they could, provided it was together; so Lanny had the duty of writing to his former wife, now Lady Wickthorpe, explaining the situation. Irma wouldn't like it, of course, for Frances was due to inherit a fortune and was supposed to be educated in a way to prepare her for that state of life—which did not include learning the radio business, the small weekly-newspaper business, or even the business of changing the world.

What Irma did was to send her mother over to look into the matter. Fanny Barnes, that old battle-axe as she was impolitely called, had only a little money herself, because she had quarrelled with her husband and he had left the fortune to their daughter. Lanny had always been considerate of her—he tried to be considerate of everybody—and had joined in innumerable games of bridge with her, in the days after her daughter had run away with him and married him. So Mother Fanny came to New York and put herself up at the Waldorf-Astoria, and Lanny drove in and took her out to Edgemere, getting a scolding all the way and taking it meekly.

There really wasn't any fault to be found with Scrubbie, except that he was a younger son, and in England the younger sons don't have any money and are not too highly thought of. To be sure, he had helped to save England from Hitler; and Mother Fanny, unlike her daughter, had never been an admirer of the Führer. To be sure, Frances was nothing but a child, but then she was a happy child and she was doing what she wanted, and it was something useful—not the same as if she had been dancing in night clubs. 'You know, Mother', said Lanny, 'you didn't have so much money yourself when you started. And you've heard the old saying about three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves'.

'I know', said Fanny Barnes, 'it's this horrid business of income taxes; almost as bad here as they are in England'.

'Yes', answered Lanny, 'but if both the young people have jobs and learn how to take care of themselves, they won't have to worry about taxes anywhere—nor about Irma's fortune or Robbie's. We don't like to raise their salaries here at the Peace Group because it would look like nepotism and set a bad example. They are each getting thirty-five dollars a week and they can live on that if they are careful'.

'Oh fudge!' said Fanny. 'What are they going to do for clothes?'

So when she arrived in Edgemere she gave them a good scolding, and she gave Rick and Nina a good scolding for encouraging such nonsense, and she gave Lanny and Laurel another scolding, and all of them a scolding for wasting their time talking about peace when there couldn't be, and shouldn't be, with the Bolsheviks behaving as they were. The upshot of her visit was that she agreed to airmail Irma that there was no way to keep the foolish creatures from having their own way, and so Irma should settle an income of, say, two hundred dollars a month upon Frances, so that at least they wouldn't starve.

So there was a wedding in the rented home of Nina and Rick; the ceremony being performed by the minister of the Congregational church of Edgemere, who was a member of the Peace Group. The young couple went off for a honeymoon which was to last all Saturday and Sunday—the maximum time they were willing to take from their all-important jobs. They would see a play on Saturday and attend two concerts on Sunday; then they would come back and spend their evenings fixing up the four-room cottage they had rented in a factory town nearby. Houses were almost unobtainable in those post-war days, and in Edgemere the various peace workers had taken everything in sight.

Fanny Barnes went back to Wickthorpe Castle and reported that she had met the queerest lot of cranks ever seen or heard of, and she was certainly glad to be back where somebody played cards. Frances was happy, and parents in these days were supposed to be content with that. After all, Irma had her two boys, one of whom had been born a viscount and the other an honourable. These she would be able to bring up properly, with no danger of interference by Pinkos and peace cranks.

VIII

Christmas came, but Laurel's time was too near and they took no share in parties. Three days after Christmas Lanny took her to a maternity hospital in New York, and she was safely delivered of a baby girl. Lanny duly played his part as an anxious husband; then, after the happy event, he was free to enjoy himself at such times as he was not sitting with his wife and admiring their new joint achievement.

He looked up his old friend Zoltan Kertezsi, art expert, and heard his report on the state of the market. Zoltan had a stock of the paintings of Marcel Detaze in a storeroom in New York, and occasionally he sold one and sent Lanny a handsome cheque, two-thirds of which was transmitted to Beauty and Marcel as their share of the heritage. Zoltan and Lanny took a stroll on East Fifty-seventh Street, visiting the galleries of various dealers. One of these had an exhibition of modern paintings, so-called abstractions, which neither of the two fastidious gentlemen favoured. Standing in front of one of them, Lanny read its title and remarked, 'I can suggest a better one'. Zoltan duly asked 'What?' and Lanny said, '"Palette before Cleaning".' Zoltan thought this was funny and passed it on to a newspaper columnist who specialised in collecting the town's witticisms; he published it, and Lanny became famous again for three or four hours.

Hansi and Bess were playing at a concert, a benefit affair for one of those refugee-relief organisations. Lanny was quite sure it was a Communist-front affair, but he doubted if Hansi knew it. They all went to the Yorkville café after the concert, and, sitting at the table, Lanny tried to discuss harmless subjects such as the new infant.

But it just couldn't last very long; Bess wouldn't have it that way. It happened that at this time there was fighting in Azerbaijan. The Russians had at last evacuated, and the Iranian troops had marched in. Bess considered that an example of what happened when the Soviets let the anti-Soviets have their way; there was disorder and chaos. Lanny couldn't help pointing out that Azerbaijan was the northern part of Iran and that the country was simply imposing order; but Bess insisted that wherever the Soviets were there was order without any fighting. Lanny was mean enough to mention that there was also oil; and so the oil was in the fire.

It happened that the Atomic Energy Commission of United Nations had that day voted in favour of a project to provide for international control; the vote had been ten in favour and two abstaining—the two being the Soviet Union and Poland. That proved among other things that Poland was a stooge of the Communists—an offensive word that Lanny refrained from using; but Bess used it. It had happened that a couple of weeks earlier the General Assembly of the United Nations, meeting at Lake Success on Long Island, had adopted a resolution in favour of world disarmament, and the Soviets had forced the deletion from that resolution of a provision for a world census of armies. The significance of that seemed obvious to Lanny; the Soviet Union was retaining her armed forces while the United States was disbanding hers, and the Soviet Union didn't propose to let the fact be demonstrated and published. To Bess it was obvious that the Soviet Union had to keep its armies, because capitalism owned the world and meant to go on taking possession of more and more of the world. 'America has the money, and all that Americans want is to let the rules of the game stay as they are, and they will buy up everything and keep it'.

'My God, Bess!' exclaimed her brother. 'This after we have given Stalin eleven billion dollars, and with no prospect whatever of getting it back!'

'You paid that money to have the Soviets lick Hitler for you; you hired a few million Russians to die for you'.

Said Lanny with a touch of sarcasm, 'Anybody would think that Hitler had attacked America. It just happens that it was Russia he attacked, and we came to Russia's help'.

'Anybody would think that you had never heard of Pearl Harbour', remarked Bess, no less sarcastic. 'You are evading as usual. Here is American capitalism, and it has the money. If you want anything you have to come to American capitalism to get it. Your financiers and big businessmen are buying up the whole world, the natural resources and the backward countries where the resources exist. There is a gentleman here in New York named Luce who talks about "the American century", and that is what he means. And if anyone tries to change the rules, call him a Red and a warmonger and put him down'.

Hansi sat there, looking tired and depressed and forgetting to taste his food. Lanny's heart ached for him, and he said, 'We aren't giving Hansi a very cheerful evening'. He said 'we', meaning to take part of the blame.

But Bess refused to be placated. 'I never worry Hansi about what he believes', she replied, 'and there is no reason for Hansi to worry about me'.

'It just happens that he loves you, Bess'.

Said Lanny's half-sister, 'It was you who taught me to have a cause. I see another world war preparing, the most terrible of all. In the face of that, individuals do not matter; only the cause matters. Hansi understands that, and sooner or later events will force him to come over to my side'.

These were weighty words, and Lanny remembered them well. 'Individuals do not matter; only the cause matters'. These were practically the words that Lanny had said to Fritz Meissner. They were as true in New York as in Berlin and Poland; and to Lanny they would be like chickens coming home to roost—in his nest.

IX

In the hospital Lanny told his wife about this, and she complained that they were letting Stalin and the Soviets dominate their lives. 'We don't talk about anything else'.

Lanny's answer was, 'When a man sets himself up outside your back fence and starts screaming curses and threats at you day and night, it is a little hard to ignore him. Just when you make up your mind to do so, you hear machine-gun fire and learn that he is practising: he says he is getting ready to defend himself against an attack that you have no idea of making'.

'I know, Lanny. The pacifists who write to me tell me that's the way all the wars come'.

'It seems to me that if this war comes it will be because Stalin has a philosophy and a dogma that compel him to take the world. How could any nation give more proof of peaceful intentions than we have given? I doubt if we have one-fourth as many men in arms as we had a year and a half ago; but all that Stalin wants to abolish is the one weapon that he hasn't got—the atomic bomb'.

'If only he would let us alone!' exclaimed the wife. 'If we got back to full production, it wouldn't be more than two or three years before we'd have another glut and have to set up production for use whether we wanted to or not'.

'But that means nothing to Stalin. The last thing he wants is to see any country get socialism by peaceful means. That would be disproving his thesis, that it can come only by revolution followed by dictatorship. The Russian people and all his captive peoples would find out about it and would insist on freedom too'.

'We are still talking about Stalin', said Laurel with a wry smile.
8 SPIES IN BATTALIONS

I

Doctors don't keep women in childbed as long as they used to. Laurel was soon up and about and then she was ready to go back home. She would stay in bed a part of every day, and her secretary would bring her the mail. Work couldn't hurt her, because she loved it and insisted that she never worried about it. She was going to nurse the new baby, as she had done the first one; she did this on principle and would arrange her work so that it would be done at the proper hours.

So life settled down again and became a matter of routine. They divided their time between home and office and seldom went anywhere else. Emerson's saying about the better mousetrap proved to be true; the world made a path to their door. All sorts of interesting people came. The group chose their speakers carefully, trying to give all points of view a hearing, but they saw to it that every speaker who left anything vague or uncertain was asked questions about it. He was warned in advance, so that he had a fair chance to prepare his mind with answers and was less tempted to try to evade.

General Marshall had just come back from a visit to China, where he had tried to reconcile the warring factions and set up a truly democratic and representative government in that land, so long torn by civil war and foreign invasion. There were people who insisted that the Chinese Reds were not Communists in the Stalinist sense but were agrarian reformers and liberals. All right, if that was true, why were they unwilling to have a government of all classes set up, as the United States was doing in Japan and as Britain was doing in India and the Dutch in Indonesia?

Here in New York the nations were assembled in what was supposed to be a sincere effort to establish world order and peace. Why was it that the Soviets were insisting that the abolition of the atomic bomb must come ahead of all other disarmament proposals? Wasn't it obvious that this would give Stalin with his armies of four or five million a commanding advantage over Western Europe and the democratic world? America had had more than eight million men under arms at the end of the war; now, in less than two years, she had disbanded nearly all of them, and had only five hundred and fifty thousand in foreign lands. Why wasn't Stalin willing to agree to inspection and control of all armed forces, and not merely of the atomic bomb? Why wasn't he willing to have really free and democratic governments chosen by the peoples of the Central European lands he had occupied? Why had he let down that iron curtain, doing everything in his power to keep the rest of the world from knowing what he was doing? Why, above all, had he adopted a programme of hatred and abuse of all the free world, and especially of America, which had come to his help so spontaneously and generously? Those were the questions that puzzled all Americans, and to which they wanted answers and got none.

II

There came a letter from Bernhardt Monck, telling how the Reds were still looting their sector of Berlin, regardless of the fact that they had to feed the people; they were looting the peasants of the surrounding country and using the food for their army in Berlin. Incidentally he wrote, 'Ferdinand is getting along well'. Ferdinand was the code name Lanny had suggested for Fritz Meissner—Lanny being Christopher Columbus and Fritz the king. But there could be no Isabella! Lanny warned Fritz that this stern mission would require giving up love; manifestly he could not love a Nazi girl, and no Socialist girl would look at him.

That sentence was all Monck said about the Völkischerbund. Lanny wouldn't know any more about the matter unless he went back to Berlin; and even then he mightn't learn much, for neither Monck nor Fritz ought to talk freely if there were developments involving other persons. Lanny had launched a balloon into the air, a ship upon the sea, and the wind would carry it he knew not where. The only way to satisfy his curiosity would be to get himself reassigned to the case, and that was something he had no thought of doing. It was his intention to stay in Edgemere, New Jersey, take care of his wife and two children, and continue 'saying, Peace, peace', over the radio.

But there was no peace. The whole world was torn by strife, and every time he picked up a newspaper or turned on the radio in his home he caught new items about that strife. The postman brought a load of it in a wagon twice every week-day. People wrote, scolding or pleading or mocking, because of this or that which had been said on the programme. It was hard to avoid strife even inside the group; whenever they discussed a speaker and what he had said or was about to say, there was likely to be disagreement—and were they exercising too much censorship or not enough?

And then there was the tension inside the Budd family. At the Thanksgiving Day reunion Lanny's stepmother had taken him aside and whispered her anguish of soul over what had happened to her daughter. Esther Remsen Budd considered it her duty to try to understand Bess and had been reading Communist literature; but the more she read the less she could comprehend how it was possible for one of her blood to take up such a creed, to fill her soul with such bitterness, and to consort with people who were telling monstrous falsehoods about Bess's homeland. Esther had tried to talk with her, but she wouldn't listen, and now wouldn't come to the house.

Robbie was unhappy too, so Esther reported. He was a stern man, and grim when he had made up his mind. Bess was incorrigible, and he was through with her and didn't give a damn what anybody else thought about her or her behaviour—that was what he said. But Esther knew it wasn't true; he was bitter, but also he was ashamed and in his secret heart grieved. Esther wanted Lanny to do something about it, but Lanny said he had tried everything he knew.

III

Also, there was Hansi, with a problem equally unsolvable. Lanny loved Hansi as a brother. He had watched Hansi's progress from boyhood and been proud and happy over his success. He had helped to make Hansi's marriage and had shared the happiness of the young couple. Now here was a wreck of all happiness and all hope; Lanny feared it would be a wreck of spiritual power, and even of health.

The violinist had taken a lad as pupil; not for money, for he had all the money he needed and could earn all he wanted. He thought he had found another Jewish genius and was delighted to pass on his secrets. Now suddenly the relationship came to an end; Hansi told the boy he couldn't go on, and the boy in his grief and bewilderment wrote to Lanny, asking if he knew what the reason was and whether he had made any mistake or done any wrong. Lanny could guess that Hansi was too tormented in mind and soul to have any interest in teaching or even in playing. Lanny couldn't write that to the boy, yet he couldn't bear to ignore the letter, so he wrote that he would see Hansi and try to find out about it.

Lanny and his wife discussed the question whether they should advise their friend to get a divorce or to let Bess get a divorce. To go on together was simply to prolong their misery. Laurel was firm in that conviction; but Lanny wasn't so sure. He believed that Bess in her heart still loved Hansi. The granddaughter of the Puritans had the same stubborn pride as her mother and father. She would say over and over that she was perfectly willing for Hansi to believe whatever he pleased and to let him alone; why couldn't he let her alone in the same way? But the fact was she was affronted, knowing that Hansi despised her creed and considered it based upon cruelty and falsehood. Bess would start to defend her creed, and so the wrangle would go on, over and over.

Laurel said, 'What difference does it make what's in her mind? The fact is they fight and will go on fighting. Certainly she isn't going to give up, and Hansi isn't going to give up, and what is there left of a marriage under such circumstances? They should cut themselves cleanly apart with a knife and be done with it'.

Lanny called his brother-in-law on the telephone and asked if he was planning to be in New York, so that they could meet. Hansi said he would come the next day; he specified the train by which he would arrive, and Lanny would meet him at Grand Central Terminal. Since it was impossible to find parking space, Hansi would be at a certain exit at a certain minute, and Lanny would pick him up.

IV

This feat achieved, they went for a drive in Central Park, the only place that was comparatively free of traffic. Lanny told about the letter from the pupil, and the reply was what he expected. 'I've been so depressed, Lanny, I just can't take an interest in teaching anybody, or in fact doing anything'.

'I guessed that was the case, Hansi. Surely you can't go on like this'.

'I know it, and I have made up my mind'. Lanny had expected that, and fully expected the next sentence to contain the word divorce, or at least separation. But it was a different kind of sentence, one that took Lanny so by surprise that he drew the car up by the side of the drive and stopped and stared at his friend. The sentence was, 'I have decided that I'm going to follow Bess and become a Communist'.

'My God, Hansi!' exclaimed the other. 'You can't mean that!'

'I have thought it over from every point of view, and it is the only thing possible for me. I simply can't break up my marriage; I can't live without Bess. I have tried to see myself breaking with her and living alone, and I just can't'.

'But, Hansi, how can you play such a game? You are no actor!'

'I don't have to be an actor, Lanny; I mean it. I have listened to Bess's arguments, and I've decided that she is right—at least she is right so far as I am concerned. I have always been a Communist, and communism is what I truly want. It is a question of how to get it, and what I think is that Bess knows more about such matters than I do. She has been studying the problem for years—all the years that I have been wrapped up in music. I don't think it is unreasonable for me to accept her as an authority'.

Lanny was flabbergasted. He was embarrassed too, because he felt the deep conviction in his old friend's tone and hesitated to resist him—it would be meddling in his most intimate affairs. 'But the boys, Hansi!' he objected.

'I had to make this decision about the boys; either they have to be brought up in a split family, with their mother and father quarrelling all the time, or they have to be brought up in the belief which is so important to their mother. Bess has agreed with me that when they are old enough to judge they will make up their own minds what they believe, and she will not argue with them'.

What Lanny wanted to say was, 'Fiddlesticks! She will force their minds exactly as she has forced yours'. Bess had said that individuals did not matter, but Lanny knew that when the individuals were her sons they would matter greatly, and she would see to it that they were fitted to dwell in the new world which she was engaged in building.

However, he realised that it would be futile to argue. Hansi had wrestled over the question for years and had made his decision. He was going on forty-two, and that was old enough for him to know his own mind. Lanny started the car again; it seemed like a harsh criticism to have stopped it. They drove along slowly, and he asked in as matter-of-fact a tone as he could assume, 'Are you going to join the party, Hansi?'

'I have applied for membership. Of course it will be some time before they accept me. They are naturally suspicious of me'.

'I suppose so. You have been outspoken'.

'Bess was suspicious of me too, but I think I've managed to convince her of my sincerity. Now, of course, she is happy. She has promised to resume practice with me'.

'I suppose you will be giving concerts for the party?' He tried to keep any trace of sarcasm out of his voice.

'Of course,' Hansi said. 'They need the money, and it is the one way I can help'.

'Are you going to tell the family?'

'I shall have to tell them. They won't like it, but they will get used to it'. Then Hansi burst out, 'Lanny, you musn't hate me for this!'

Lanny brought himself to answer quickly, 'Good Lord, no, don't think about that. We can never hate you. We are sorry, of course—it will rather limit our subjects of conversation. You know how it was with Bess'.

'You must understand that I couldn't help it. Bess is a part of me and I can't live without her. We have been married more than twenty years, and that is half my life. My whole being was torn to pieces, and I just couldn't endure it'.

'It's all right, Hansi, I understand. Try not to become as aggressive as Bess is. You know that's not your nature'.

'Bess is absorbed in politics. I could never do that, and she has agreed not to expect it of me. What worries me is that you and Laurel will despise me'.

'Don't harbour any such idea, Hansi. If you take to brooding over that you'll turn us into an obsession, as you did with Bess. We shall let each other alone and avoid arguing about the things on which we can't agree'.

But even as he said this Lanny knew he was being hypocritical. He felt pity, but also contempt, for a man who could give up his principles for the sake of anything, even marital love. Hansi knew all the facts and the arguments and had deliberately decided to suppress his mind for the sake of his sexual happiness. Lanny knew that it was the practice of the Communists to set their young women to seducing desirable men; it didn't make much difference to him that in this case the woman was legally married to the man—the effect upon the man's mind and character was the same.

Lanny's thought was, Hansi will be a bore, and I'll never want to talk to him again. He faced the thought of losing his best friends one by one; first Kurt Meissner, and now Hansi Robin, and the cases were the same in his mind. He was coming to dislike Stalinism as he had formerly disliked Hiterlism; and just as he had said to himself that the old Kurt no longer existed, so now he would have to say that the old Hansi no longer existed. He wondered, Who next?

V

He went in to Laurel and found her propped up in bed, buried in her mail and manuscripts as usual. When he told her the news she dropped everything and stared at him in dismay. 'My God, Lanny, you can't mean it!'

He told her the whole conversation, and when he got through he saw there were tears in her eyes. 'Oh, the poor fellow!' she exclaimed. 'He won't be happy! He'll be perfectly wretched! He'll be ashamed, he'll be burdened with guilt. He'll be more lonely than before he gave up. Lanny, we ought not let him do it!'

'Darling', he said, 'Hansi knows the whole story. He knows everything that we know, and there is no use arguing with him. He has made his choice: he can't live without Bess'.

'He can't live with her, and he can't live with the Communists', she answered. 'I know him better, and I just won't believe it. It's a dreadful thing, Lanny. It's a public calamity'.

Lanny replied, 'The _Daily Worker_ will give him half a page before long, I have no doubt. He'll become America's greatest musician, as Paul Robeson is our greatest singer and Howard Fast our greatest novelist'.

'And Hansi will be calling us Social Fascists! It's the end of our friendship. Lanny, it's one more example of the dreadful power of those Marxist theories'.

'Dialectical materialism', said Lanny. '"Diamat" is what they're calling it now in Europe'.

'It hypnotises people's minds. It's like that hypnotised hen we saw: the man pressed her beak down to a chalk line and she couldn't move from that line'.

'The party line', said Lanny, permitting himself a smile. 'The capitalists build up their power and fight to protect it. The rising proletariat opposes them, seizes the power, and takes it away from them, and out of the struggle the new society is born. Thesis, antithesis, and synthesis!' He said it every now and then.

'And out of it has come the blackest tyranny ever dreamed in modern times', It was strophe and antistrophe with the pair.

'It is too bad that the demonstration had to be made by the Russians', he declared. 'Marx feared Russian autocratic power. Also, he admitted that the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians might be able to get socialism by democratic means and without violence. In his old age he wrote that he was not a Marxist; so now the Soviets are the only simon-pure Marxists, and they are censoring his books and cutting out the unorthodox passages'.

Laurel burst out, 'Here we are—back again with Stalin!' And she added, 'He has stolen our best friend from us!'

'It will be a great victory for him', Lanny assented. 'Let us hope to be like the British, who lose every battle except the last'. Then after a pause he said, 'But remember, dear, you are under doctor's orders not to get excited. Don't forget that you are an internal dairy'.

Laurel glanced at her wristwatch. 'Go and bring me the baby', said she.

VI

Sure enough, there appeared in the Sunday edition of the _Daily Worker_ a half-page article celebrating the fact that Hansi Robin, America's greatest musical genius, had announced himself a convert to the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist cause. There was a photograph of Hansi and an elaborate interview in which he told about the intellectual and moral struggles he had undergone before coming to his present conclusion—which was that the hammer and sickle was the signpost of the pathway to peace and freedom for the workers of the world. Incidentally it was announced that Hansi and his devoted wife Bess, a long-time party leader, would give a concert at Carnegie Hall for the benefit of the Assembly for Russian-American Friendship. Lanny and Laurel read that and said it was the finish; they would have to write the Hansibesses off their list of friends. Of course if one or both of them should propose a meeting, Lanny and Laurel would have to assent; but they would make no advances of their own.

They swallowed their grief and put their minds on the Peace Programme. Laurel, nursing the baby, had put herself on a four-hour schedule. She would go to the office after breakfast and come back to the house at noon—it was only a few minutes' drive. In the afternoon she would lie down and do her work in bed; then late in the afternoon she would receive callers or members of the staff who had ideas to discuss with her. When the weather permitted she and Lanny would walk to the office and back.

Lanny, for his part, had the job of selecting the speakers, by and with the advice and consent of the group. He had the job of getting them to and from the station and discussing with them in advance what they were to say and the questions he would ask them. He had the job of meeting would-be speakers, promoters, and enthusiasts of world peace. Like everybody else, he put in the rest of his time reading mail and answering telephone calls; he learned that the world is full of many kinds of people and that it takes much patience and skill to deal with them.

Was the group accomplishing anything? They were quite sure they were. They were causing some millions of people to listen once a week to a discussion of world problems by the best minds that were available in the country. University professors, diplomats, political figures, well-known writers, men and women, would come on request and say how they thought world peace could be promoted and answer the questions people were asking. The Peace Group knew what these questions were because they were reading hundreds of letters from all over the country and indeed from all over the world. The end result of such activity must be an informed body of opinion, ready to understand and deal with emergencies as they arose.

VII

Joe Stalin kept breaking in on the procedure, of course. Joe Stalin, hidden in his huge fortress called the Kremlin, or in his winter fortress on the Black Sea, had his Politburo, the members of which took his orders and carried them out. He had his enormous _apparat_ spread over the world, to hasten the capitalist system to its inevitable breakdown and arouse the proletariat to its inevitable triumph. 'Arise, ye prisoners of starvation, arise, ye wretched of the earth; for justice thunders condemnation, a newer world's in birth!'

During the war when Stalin had of necessity accepted the aid of capitalist allies the rigidity of the party line had been relaxed; but within a month or two after the war's ending this relaxation had been brought to an abrupt and painful end. All over the world there was ordered an immediate resumption of the class war—that is, war upon the allies who had been helping the Soviets to victory over Hitler's so-called National Socialism. In all the Communist countries new purges were ordered of all those officials who had been so foolish as to believe in the temporary relaxation.

The people of the United States had witnessed a curious phenomenon. The Communist party had a devoted secretary by the name of Earl Browder; and in an obscure Communist monthly in France there appeared an article by a man named Duclos, in which it was set forth that Browder had betrayed the workers and the cause of Marxist-Leninism. The article had been taken up and reprinted in the United States, and every Communist had instantly known that here was the voice of authority, here was the Kremlin speaking. Overnight 'Browderism' became 'factional activity', and Browder 'a deserter to the side of the class enemy, American monopoly capitalism'. He was shoved out of the party and into the doghouse.

And all over the world it was the same; the cold war was on. Vilification and abuse became the order of the day, and former allies became Social Fascists and class enemies. All the languages of the world were turned upside down. Democracy became tyranny and tyranny democracy; slavery became freedom and freedom slavery, and every Communist in the world set himself to the task of creating and repeating falsehoods, no matter how obvious and absurd. The class war being inevitable, every Communist set himself to the task of promoting it in the name of peace and abusing everybody who thought there might be peace before the class war had been won. Every Communist accepted the solemn duty to hate every class enemy; all but a few, who accepted a special duty, to pretend to love their class enemies and gain their friendship and worm out of them secrets that could be of help to the Communist Motherland.

VIII

So there came a peculiar incident in the office of the Peace Group, which had once been a factory for making fuses in wartime. There was a girl whose duty it was to sit all day at a table with a paper knife, slicing envelopes open. In the middle of one morning she came to Lanny's small office and said, 'Mr Budd, this envelope was marked "Personal" but I failed to notice it before I cut it. I did not take out the contents'.

Lanny smiled pleasantly and said, 'It's all right; there's probably nothing personal about it'. When the girl had left the room he took out the contents, a single sheet of paper folded several times. When he opened it he found a missive containing only six words, and those words had been put together by a method familiar to readers of crime stories in the newspapers. Someone had taken a pair of scissors and cut single letters out of advertisements in the papers, and with a mucilage pot had stuck the proper letters in order to make words—words short and to the point in order to save time and trouble.

There were six words, and Lanny read them at a glance; then he continued staring at the paper while his heart gave a series of uncomfortable leaps and the blood mounted into his cheeks and forehead. The words were:

BESS IS COURIER FOR RUSS SPY

There was no signature, and it is a rule of good sense never to pay attention to anonymous letters. But the rule is not always followed, and it was not in this case. The message of six words fitted too closely to ideas that had been haunting Lanny's imagination for many months. Those mysterious trips which Bess had been taking in her car, disappearing from her home without notice or explanation, telling Hansi that she was going on party business, lecturing, organising, and meeting committees! But suppose—just suppose!—that she had become a strand in that spy net which the Soviets had spread all over the United States, gathering secrets which might be of help to them or of harm to America; photographing documents of all sorts, letters, blueprints, diagrams, formulas; maps of bridges, dams, power stations; every kind of information, diplomatic, military, scientific—and shipping it out through Mexico, or through Russian steamships harbouring in various ports, or through nests of spying and intrigue such as Amtorg and the consulates, where the Soviets had hundreds of their own people in Washington and New York.

Lanny studied the document carefully. The envelope was of the sort of which millions are sold in post offices every day. The paper was off a pad which you could buy in any five-and-ten-cent store. The letters were out of any newspaper. The addressing of the envelope had been done in capital letters with a ruler and a pencil, thus avoiding any characteristics of handwriting—'Lanny Budd, Edgemere, N. J.'—and the word 'Personal' in the corner. Evidently the person had wanted to do as little writing as possible. There was only one clue, the letter 'n' had been wrongly, written the diagonal line starting at the bottom of the first vertical stroke instead of at the top. Evidently an ignorant person and probably a foreigner, but a person careful not to give any clue, a person who was afraid. The letter had been mailed at the main post office in New York, so there wasn't much clue in that.

Lanny thought about the different persons who knew Bess. It might be a servant in her home; it might be a member of her own group who hated her or was jealous of her. It would not be a counterspy, for such a person would be reporting to the authorities, not writing anonymous letters.

Lanny went into Laurel's office, dismissed her secretary, and put the letter into her hands. He watched her face as she read it and saw the horror write itself upon her features. Her first words were characteristic, 'Oh, poor Hansi!' Then, 'Do you suppose he knows it?'

'I doubt it,' Lanny answered. 'Of course he will find it out before long if he stays with the party'.

He pointed out to her the features of the letter and the speculations that had come to his mind. 'It may not be true, Lanny!' she exclaimed, and he answered, 'Of course not, but it fits into all the circumstances, and obviously it has to be investigated'.

'What will you do with it?'

'It is my plain duty to take it to the F.B.I.'

'Oh, Lanny, how dreadful! Could you bear to do it?'

'Bess herself has given me the authority. You heard her say, "The individual doesn't matter, only the cause matters". You and I have a cause, darling. Are we going to say it's less worthy than hers—that she can carry on secret war against us, and we have to lie down and take whatever comes to us?'

Laurel was thinking about _him_. 'If you report her, will you ever have any peace of mind again?'

'Will I ever have it if I don't report her? I leave a set of conspirators free to betray our military secrets to our deadly enemy. If it should come to a war, I would know that I had been sacrificing the lives of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of American boys. How would they weigh in the balance against one person who happens to be a member of my family?'

There was no answer to that, and Laurel didn't try to find one. But she couldn't repress her horror. 'It is a terrible thing to have to hate your own sister, Lanny!'

'I don't hate her, I pity her, because she has surrendered her mind to a set of fanatical ideas. They are cruel, and they have made her cruel, a menace to our free world. You know how I have tried to save her, how I have argued and pleaded with her, all in vain. What more could I have done?'

'Couldn't you investigate the matter yourself?'

'What way could you suggest? She knows me, and all her associates know me. I am the last person they would trust—unless it's you. And if they got the faintest hint that I was watching or suspecting them, don't you see that I'd have given the whole thing away? The gang would scatter, and a new set of people would be set to getting the information they want. Bess would go back to playing the piano and making Communist speeches under the protection of the Bill of Rights. No, the F.B.I. are the people who know how to do this job, and it is the plain duty of every citizen to take them every scrap of information he may possess. To say that we must spare our own blood relatives is simply to yield to a superstition and in effect to deny our cause'.

'But if it isn't true, Lanny!'

'Then there will be no harm done. You may be sure that Edgar Hoover's men are not doing any framing. If Bess isn't doing anything they won't find anything'.

'Lanny, it would be a dreadful blow to your father!'

'I know, but he will face it. Trust him for that. He's an old Roman'.

'You ought to give him a chance to say! You ought to take him this letter'.

'All right, I'll do that', he said.

They wasted no more time discussing it. Lanny went to the 'phone and when he got Robbie's secretary in Newcastle he learned that Robbie was in New York. He said, 'I have to see my father about something very urgent. Please do everything in your power to locate him in New York and tell him to call me at once'.

IX

The 'phone rang, and it was Robbie Budd. He was at the New York office, and Lanny said, 'Can you wait for me until I drive in? I have something most important to see you about'.

Robbie said that he would wait, and Lanny hopped into his car and sped away. All the way into the crowded city he thought about Bess. His mind went back to that lovely sweet child whom he had so admired and captivated; to the ardent student of music, doing a world tour with her mother and hearing Hansi Robin for the first time, playing in Emily Chattersworth's drawing room in Paris; to the young bride swept away in an ecstasy of joy. And now this truly grim tragedy was hanging over her head!

Something told Lanny that she was guilty—she was just that sort of person, determined and afraid of nothing; mistress of her own time and having a car, she could drive to factory towns and other places and bring back bundles of microfilm and deliver them to some Soviet agent in New York. Lanny took it as a hard duty, and he wavered more than once on that drive; but the car did not waver.

He came through the Holland Tunnel into New York, put his car into a garage, and stepped into a taxi. At the office of Budd-Erling Aircraft he met Johannes Robin, but he wasn't going to take him into that secret. They chatted for a few moments as old friends, then Robbie sent for Lanny. In the private office of the president Lanny said, 'This came just now', and put the letter into Robbie's hands.

The father studied it with a pained face. Lanny knew what he must be suffering; but neither of them would speak of it. 'Do you know anything more about this?' asked Robbie at last.

'Not a thing', Lanny said.

'What do you intend to do?'

'I came to ask you about it. So far as I am concerned, I think it is my plain duty to take it to Wilbur C. Post at the F.B.I.'

Robbie's reaction was what Lanny had said it would be. 'I'm glad you see it the right way', he declared. 'It is unquestionably your duty. The security of the country comes first.'

'It may mean a nasty scandal', Lanny warned.

'Whatever comes we will have to face it. Bess is incorrigible, and all our friends know what my attitude is. I can do nothing. Have you told Laurel about it?'

'Yes, and she agrees with me. I shan't tell anybody else, and I think it would be a good idea not to tell Esther. The charge may not be true, and she would have a lot of worry all for nothing'.

'I agree', answered Robbie and added, 'I think you should have a promise from this man Post that there will be no publicity unless they get real evidence'.

'I don't think he would have any hesitation in giving that promise, Robbie. They are not in the business of hunting headlines'.

'I wonder if Hansi knows anything about all this'. Robbie knew, of course, about Hansi's conversion to the Reds.

'I doubt it very much', Lanny answered. 'I don't expect to find out, because we are not seeing either of them'.

The long-suffering father couldn't forbear to add, 'You must know, Lanny, you bear a good deal of responsibility for all this. It was you who put these notions into Bess's head'.

'We could have a long argument about that', replied the son. 'If Bess misunderstood my words and misapplied my ideas that was something I could not foresee or avoid'. Then, knowing well that his father once started on an argument would stick to it for a long time, he added hastily, 'I'll come and see you and we'll thresh it out. Right now I want to deliver this letter. I'll 'phone you the results. We must have a code; Bess will be Isabella'. Lanny's mind was a bit prankish even in the midst of this painful entanglement. Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand, and at last an Isabella!

X

It was not far from the New York office of Budd-Erling to the building in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation was housed. Lanny walked, pushing his way through the swarming crowds of this busy city. Everyone was in a hurry, bent upon his own affairs. It might have been compared to a hive full of bees; but bees would all be working for the hive, whereas each of these human bees was working for himself. This was a state of affairs which they glorified, calling it the American way. Learned professors of economics had established the doctrine that if every individual were left absolutely free to seek his own interests it would somehow magically come out that everything would be for the best in the best of all possible worlds. But somehow that magic didn't always work; there would come mass calamities such as panics, depressions, and wars, and it would suddenly be discovered that it was necessary for some bees at least to think about the hive.

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 most 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 capitalists 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'.

II

It was agreed that Professor Alston was to have his say on the programme, and then Laurel was to set forth her idea that in addition to using military arms we should also use the arms of the mind and spirit. Congress should vote hundreds of millions instead of the few thousands it was voting for the Voice of America, to broadcast over the whole world, not merely by short wave but by powerful radio stations in Germany and Japan, the true meaning of democracy and the democratic process; to make plain to the peoples the difference between dictatorship and the noble ideal of Abraham Lincoln, 'government of the people, by the people, and for the people'.

Said Laurel, 'We should explain to the world what free elections are and how we carry them out in our country, and how the British and the Scandinavians and the Swiss all enjoy that system and make it work; how truth can prevail only if speech and press are free, and how these principles of democracy can be made to apply to industry as well as to government'.

Professor Alston said, 'If you will give me ten seconds at the end I'll be glad to state that I agree with every word of that'.

They had a lively time on the programme. This man who had inside information scared his large audience by telling them he had reason to believe that the Soviets, with the German scientists they had pressed into their service and with the secrets they had managed to steal from the Western world, were now making rapid progress in the field of atomic fission. He said, 'You hear talk about it being ten years before they can have the atomic bomb; but I predict that it won't be more than two or three years before they have it, and some day they will set it off, and the physicists with their delicate instruments will know that it has happened. Then, friends of the Peace Programme, what is going to be our situation?'

'We have no means of knowing how fast they can make the bomb, but let us assume that at the end of five or six years they have a hundred bombs while we have a thousand. They have other great advantages over us. They have a very active party in our country while we have no party in their country. We consequently know very little about them, while they know almost everything about us; they subscribe to our newspapers, illustrated magazines, and technical journals, which publish a kind of information they keep hidden. They have flooded our country with spies while we have very few, if any, in their country. More important yet, we have a conscience, while they have none. Therefore we have to wait for them to make the first attack. They make a minute scientific study of our whole set up and decide exactly where to place their hundred atomic bombs so as to paralyse us. You understand that bombs can be brought in by merchant ships or submarines. They can be deposited in harbours where they are most deadly; or a hundred heavy bombers can set out one night from bases in northern Russia and head across the North Pole to New York, Washington, Detroit, Chicago, Seattle; also, of course, Hanford, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee'.

'When I point this out to people they say that by the same means we could paralyse Russian industry. That is true; but what would be the result? When you destroy the factories where tanks and planes and guns are made, when you destroy oil refineries and railroad centres and so on, you reduce industry to primitive conditions and reduce fighting to the same conditions; you return the battle to masses of men armed with swords and spears, or maybe bows and arrows. It is the Soviets who have these masses of men and can produce these primitive weapons, and how can we get to Europe to fight them if the great ports have been ruined with atomic bombs? The victory will be to the primitive mass army that travels on foot and lives off the land it conquers. In that way the Reds will seize the whole of Europe and Asia, and we shall have no way to eject them. They will dig underground, and civilisation will be rebuilt in caves and tunnels—meaning by "civilisation" the ability to build aeroplanes and bombs and to produce poison gases and deadly bacteria. Such a war might well last for a century, indeed it might last forever, becoming the permanent state of life, because men will have reached such a low level morally that it would be impossible to trust one another or even to consider such an idea'.

'You are very pessimistic, Professor Alston', said Laurel in their closing discussion.

'I am trying to be factual', was the reply. 'It is evident that the system of private enterprise, the production of goods for private profit, is breaking down, and we must replace it by a system of production for use. If we are going to war to restore and preserve the capitalist system we shall surely lose, because we cannot retain the support of the masses in any country. Under the stresses and sufferings of war we will be running the risk of revolution in our own country. The only possible chance of defeating Communist dictatorship is by setting up a system of industrial democracy by constitutional methods in which our political freedoms would be retained. That is the one way we can gain and keep the support of the masses and bring the Red dictatorships to defeat'.

Never in the history of the Peace Programme had such a flood of letters poured in as after that broadcast. In one of the early sacks was a letter addressed to Mr and Mrs Lanny Budd, marked 'Personal'. It was brief and to the point. It read: 'This is the limit. I am through with you. Bess'. And underneath were three more words in a German-style handwriting: 'I agree. Hansi'. Those last three words gave the recipients great delight. They could imagine the twinkle in Hansi's eyes as he wrote them—and the care he would use to keep his eyes averted from his wife's!

III

Jan Masaryk, foreign minister of Czechoslovakia, paid a flying visit to New York, and Lanny was invited to meet him at dinner. The host was one of Lanny's oldest art patrons, a man of great wealth. His home was one of those fantastic apartments on Park Avenue, high up in the air and occupying an entire floor of a good-sized building; you could walk from room to room and look out over the whole city, at night a dazzle of lights outshining the Milky Way. By day you had glimpses of two rivers with their traffic, and a maze of buildings striving toward the clouds and sometimes reaching them. It was a dream city, built on a solid rock that had been purchased from the Indians for twenty-four dollars' worth of trade goods; you thought about that and wondered what those Indians would make of their bargain if they could come back now, three hundred years later. What would old Henry Hudson make of it, sailing his tiny pinnace up that broad river now crowded with steamers large and small—they were still called steamers although they all had Diesel or petrol engines.

A doorman in a long blue coat with brass buttons opened the door of your taxi and ceremoniously escorted you into the green marble lobby. A telephone operator sent up your name, and a uniformed operator shot you up in an elevator to the topmost floor. Inside the apartment were sumptuous rooms, quite literally out of old European palaces, but of course with all modern improvements: electric lights, central heating governed by thermostats, and organ music at the pressure of a button. There were bathrooms with tiled floors and marble walls and sunken tubs with fixtures of real gold and silver. (The host would apologise for them and put the blame on his architect.) It was a so-called penthouse apartment, and on all four sides there were porticos with gardens, the north for summer and the south for winter. There were flowers and plants appropriate to the season, and there was a greenhouse in which fresh vegetables were grown by the new hydroponics system, without earth.

Most important of all to Lanny were the paintings on the walls of these rooms. Religion was excluded, because the owner believed in pleasure; he had favoured mostly the French Impressionists, everything bright and gay: Degas and Cézanne, Manet and Monet, nature scenes, sunlight, gardens full of flowers, ponds with lilies, children playing, lovely women smiling. Lanny had been responsible for some of these paintings, finding them, recommending them, and buying them. He remembered their prices—and he had got ten per cent of each price. Now he was welcome to come whenever he liked to renew his memories. 'I am a part of all that I have met!'

To this home of super-elegance came Jan Masaryk, the son of the man who had been the George Washington of Czechoslovakia. Patriot and statesman, the elder Masaryk had sought refuge from the Germans during World War I and had become a professor at the University of Chicago. He had been a friend of Woodrow Wilson, and at the close of that war the republic of Czechoslovakia had been established. The elder Masaryk had become its first president. During the period of exile the son had earned his living first as a steel worker and then as a pianist in a motion-picture theatre. Concerning that period he had amusing stories to tell, including the one about his application for admission to the sweet land of liberty. He had filled out a questionnaire, and in reply to the word 'race' had written 'human'.

He was a man of the _grand monde_ , a professional charmer, as much so as Beauty Budd, though very different. He told stories, laughed heartily, and spiced his comments with wit, even a bit of malice. He did not spare even his host, a great banker, to whom he had come perhaps seeking funds for his country's support. He said, 'Don't let him fool you. You will think many times that he is stupid, but he just puts that on because he doesn't want you to know how much he knows'.

When Lanny asked what he thought of the dictators there was a sudden gleam of fun in his eyes. 'O, I love them!' he said. 'I could be a wonderful dictator myself. Look!' He struck out his lower jaw and set his lips in a grim expression, folded his arms and glared with staring popeyes. He was a man of fifty or more, with a round, half-bald dome. Suddenly the diners realized who he was—Il Duce! The living image of Mussolini! There was general laughter, and the daughter of the host cried, 'Oh, do it again!' So he did it again and gave them time to imprint the image upon their memories.

But that gaiety was his company manner. Catch him off guard, and you saw a face of the profoundest melancholy, even grief. His young country was in deadly danger, and he had come to plead for its life. The Reds had it; and at Yalta they had made the promise that they would leave it in democratic liberty, it would be a republic and the people would rule. But this Yalta promise meant no more than the other Yalta promises, all of which were being broken systematically, by the tested technique of encroachment and terror. In Czechoslovakia there were seven political parties, and the bloc supporting Beneš and Masaryk had a majority, but the Communists would not leave it that way. The propaganda was furious, and secret arrests and torture were frequent. The only hope for the young nation lay in publicity, in appeal to the free world.

Jan Masaryk was in the free world and he might have stayed; he would have been welcomed and given asylum in America. But he was going back; he was going back quietly, without any fuss, any histrionics. All he said was, 'I have to go, of course'. He was going as a sacrifice, a demonstration to the whole world; he was known to the diplomats and the newspapermen, and what happened to him could not be concealed. He didn't say anything about it at the dinner party, but afterward, going down in the elevator, Lanny asked him how long he thought the present situation could endure. He answered, 'Not very long, Mr Budd. When you hear of my death you will know that I was murdered, and you will know the end has come'.

Lanny never forgot those words, and they had something to do with his constantly increasing determination to oppose the Stalin dictatorship. From the time he spoke those words Jan Masaryk had little more than a year to live.

IV

Meeting a man of duty, a hero, even at a dinner party is a disturbing experience, troubling the conscience and the mind. Lanny went home and told his wife about it. He told Rick and Nina and all the Peace Group, and they were troubled. It is a difficult thing to change one's mind, and many people are unable to achieve the feat. It is a truly agonising thing to love somebody and then through a long period of time to watch that loved one's character deteriorating and turning into something you have to despise, even to fear. And if that is true with one person, how much more must it be true with a whole nation, a social system, a dream of social justice and of peace and good will on earth!

Lanny and Laurel had been flown out of China and into Moscow immediately after America's entrance into World War II. They had met Soviet officials and, more important, great numbers of the Russian people. They had found them kind, generous, intelligent, and eager for information of the outside world and the help the democratic nations were going to give in the battle against nazi-fascism and its cruelty and terror. Those people had represented Russia to Lanny and Laurel, and the couple had decided that they loved Russia and trusted Russia and believed in the future of Russia.

But now they had to give all that up; they had to decide, not that the Russian people were evil, not that they were liars and murderers, but simply that they did not exist. They had no eyes; their eyes had been torn out, and they could not see what was going on in the world. They had no ears; their eardrums had been broken, and they could not hear what was going on in the world. Their tongues had been cut out, and they could not speak their thoughts about the world. Their brains had been cut out and pith had been substituted, and they could not think about the world. They had become automata, doing what they were ordered to do and doing nothing of themselves or for themselves.

No, Russia and the Russians had come to have a new meaning; it meant a little group of masters who had seized the country and all its powers. They did the seeing, they did the hearing, they did the speaking, they did the thinking. They told the hundred and eighty millions what to believe, and the hundred and eighty millions believed it; they told the writers what was good writing, and the writers wrote it; they told the musicians what was music, and the musicians composed and played it; they told the scientists what was the truth, and the scientists accepted it; they told the teachers and professors what to teach, and it was taught; they set up a new religion with a new ritual and a new god, whose name was Stalin.

His image was set up in every home; it was painted on screens a hundred feet high in public places. He was the great one, father of all, final authority, giver of all good things. He was God, and there was no other God, and all must bow down and worship him. Only those who bowed and worshipped him daily could live. All those who whispered objection, all those who even looked as if they objected, all those of whom any enemy chose to whisper that he might object—all these were shipped off to slave-labour camps in the far north of Siberia. There they lived and laboured twelve hours a day, half starved and half frozen; they perished in a year or two and were no more, and meanwhile what they did or what they thought or what they hoped or what they feared no longer made any difference. They were no longer Russians, they no longer counted. Ten or twenty millions of them so existed, and how many tens of millions had perished in thirty years no man could make a guess.

V

There came a letter from Monck. He reported, 'Ferdinand is doing well'—that had become a formula. Then he went on to tell Lanny about the struggle that was going on for the minds of the German people. It had become more clear every day that the Soviets were determined to turn their half of Germany into Red territory, to separate it from the rest of Germany and make it into a satellite, as they were in process of doing in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and the other lands they had taken. There was only one way to resist this, and that was by getting the ideas of the free world to the captive Germans. The Soviet techniques of misrepresentation must be countered by the truth; and to do that the Allies had only one weapon, a pitiful little radio station with a one-thousand-watt transmitter located on the back of an Army truck.

Lanny had paid it a visit during his brief stay in Berlin and had met the newspaper people, two men and one woman, who were running it. They had called the station R.I.A.S.—Radio in American Sector. As it happened, the initials were the same in the German language, so the station had the same meaning to both nationalities. It had set itself up in the badly shattered Central Telephone Exchange. It had almost no equipment, no library, no files of clippings; it depended on American newspapers and magazines, and for music on a few gramophone records.

The staff had been greatly interested in Lanny's account of the Peace Programme. He had sent them scripts, and they had translated portions and used them to fill out the seven-hour programme they were giving every night. Monck had been advising them about German psychology and had spoken for them, under a name created for the occasion. He reported that now they had got an increase in funds and a twenty-thousand-watt portable station which had formerly been used by the German Army; they were planning to move into a damaged chemical factory and expand their programme to cover twenty-two hours a day. They had commissioned Monck to try to persuade Lanny to come to Berlin and give them advice and help for at least a short time.

Then came a telephone call from the Information Services Division of the State Department; an official of R.I.A.S. wanted Mr Budd to come and consult with him. That was the way it was nowadays; those bureaucrats sat in Washington and summoned whomever they pleased and for whatever purpose. Lanny could look back upon the old days when the seat of power had been not in Washington but in Wall Street. There was the big money, and if you wanted to do anything on a significant scale you went there and sat with hat in hand in the office of some great banker. You disclosed your project and did your best to persuade him that there was a profit to be made; he would expect not merely security for the return of his money but a cut of the profits, in the form of a block of preferred stock. Now it was he who went to Washington to call on the bureaucrats, and as rumour had it he paid some 'five-percenter' for advice as to the proper ones to approach.

Lanny said that he would come. Laurel wouldn't go this time, because she was keeping that new baby hygienically perfect and wouldn't risk the dust of highways and the infections in hotel rooms. He would motor, because there was little advantage in flying—it took so long to get to the airport in New York that he would be halfway to Washington by the same hour. He took Rick along; it was a chance to thresh out their problems and be sure of the meeting of their minds.

The dread series of phenomena known as the cold war was going on without intermission. It was like two boxers in the first round of their bout: they were making passes at each other, feeling each other out, watching each other's technique; a strange kind of boxing match, in which both contestants insisted that they didn't want to fight but each was compelled to defend himself against the menacing gestures of the other. You would read in your daily paper that Greece had asked the help of the United States against the marauding bands of Reds armed with Russian weapons who came across the borders from Albania, Yugoslavia, and Bulgaria; and then a week or two later you would read that _Izvestia_ was denouncing United States aid to Greece. You would read that the U.N. Security Council had been notified of President Truman's determination to send aid to Turkey in defence of her eastern provinces, and later you would read that Mr Gromyko had notified the Security Council that such action would 'gravely undermine' the authority of the U.N. You would read that the State Department had accused the Soviet Union of 'unjustified interference' in Hungary's internal affairs and had requested a probe by the Allied Control Commission; then you would read that the Soviet Union considered this an 'unjustified interference'. The day of his trip Lanny read that the United States government had announced its intention to proceed 'unilaterally' in setting up an independent government in South Korea; he wondered how many of the auditors of the Peace Programme would recall Professor Alston's warning about that far-off land.

VI

The American chief of R.I.A.S. was extremely cordial to the radio announcer from Edgemere, New Jersey. He said that Mr Budd's outfit had been doing an excellent job and his own outfit considered themselves tyros in comparison. They were facing a grave situation and doing the best they could with a new project, very little appreciated at home. Berlin, described as an island, was an island threatened with an overwhelming flood. It was completely surrounded by East Germany and the East Germans, and militarily and governmentally the East Germans were completely dominated by the Soviets. They were threatened with intellectual and moral domination as well, for they got their news from a Red-controlled press and from Radio Berlin, which the Soviets had held on to, even though it was situated in the British sector of the city.

R.I.A.S. was but a feeble voice in comparison, but it was the voice of truth. The little station was making tremendous headway by the simple programme of giving an intellectually starved people the facts of the outside world day by day. Mr Budd could be of help because he knew the Germans and spoke their language fluently. The power of the station had been increased and the programmes were to be greatly expanded; they must have entertainment features and plenty of music; they wanted Mr Budd to come and advise them, meet the Germans whom they employed and judge them, listen to the programmes and take part in them. His expenses would be paid and a salary—but he must understand that all R.I.A.S. salaries were moderate.

Lanny explained that he had independent means; the income-tax situation was peculiar, and he could charge off all his expenses on his tax return, thus reducing the rate of the tax on his entire income; so really if he took a salary from R.I.A.S. it might cause him a financial loss. What it amounted to was that the taxpayers of the United States would pay the cost, and it would be the same in effect as an increase in the appropriation for R.I.A.S. The chief smiled in his turn and reported that R.I.A.S. could certainly use all such increases.

VII

Lanny went home and talked the matter over with his wife who hated to have him go; she had heard so many stories of kidnappings and mysterious disappearances in that war-ravaged city of Berlin. But Lanny said, 'Masaryk went', and that was a way of settling any question. That is what a courageous and determined man does to those about him; he makes them ashamed to be weak and hesitant; he makes himself an example, a slogan, a call to duty. Masaryk had gone into the very centre of the lion's den, whereas Lanny would be outside the bars.

From the point of view of the welfare of the Peace Programme it was easier for him to be spared. Rick had found a man who could write and was helping them all. Scrubbie was growing up and learning his duties, and Frances was now judged capable of reading letters and sorting out the important ones from those which could have routine answers. Also, Gerald de Groot had got over his mourning over Frances, and his mother had picked out for him a member of last year's graduating class of Vassar College. This young person wanted a career—they all did apparently, and radio was the most fascinating thing in the world. She had come out to Edgemere, and behold, she was competent; she went right to work and was content with a small salary, plus Gerald. So the programme could keep up with its tasks while Lanny Budd flew to the rescue of the eighteen million people of East Germany.

So he had to take once more that long flying trip by way of Newfoundland and Scotland. On an ordinary map it looked round about, but in reality it was a great circle route, the shortest possible. Laurel had her special dread of it because of the dream she had had when Lanny was about to encounter his dreadful accident; but this time she had no dreams. Her psychic gifts appeared to be in abeyance; she was too busy with mundane affairs and with the nursing of an infant. When she tried to go into a trance she was tired and fell asleep.

Lanny packed his bags again and boarded the plane. A book called _Presidential Agent_ had been published not long previously, and its reading had been recommended to agents of the Secret Service and the F.B.I. Lanny read it, and by the time he was through the Army plane had settled gently upon the Tempelhoferfeld. He got his own transportation to the hotel and the next morning was seated in the crowded office of the young and impetuous Rundfunk im Amerikanischen Sektor, hearing its story from the two young men and one young woman who had brought it into the world.

VIII

It was, they told him, a most dreadful task, trying to extract appropriations from either military men or diplomats. Military men believed exclusively in guns and saluting; diplomats believed in business of, by, and for diplomacy; their procedure consisted in exchanging elaborately written protocols with other diplomats who bore similar titles and wore similar costumes, even though they might speak the language of guttersnipes and have the morals of barbarians. Neither military men nor diplomats believed in education, except along their own special lines. Education of the masses they called propaganda and treated with condescension; newspapers had long been a necessary evil and radio was a modern intrusion. As a result of this attitude America was spending tens of thousands where it should have been spending hundreds of millions to make its purposes understood by the peoples of the outside world. How much would it be worth to the American people to keep the Soviets from plunging into a third world war? If war were to come, how much would it be worth to the American people to have the Germans on the side of the free world?

The self-declared new enemy, the Reds, had set out to win over the old enemy, the Germans. Their actions were nationalism but their talk was internationalism; their technique was robbery and violence but their propaganda was working-class solidarity and fraternity. They were pouring out upon the Germans a string of falsehoods and misrepresentations; and to that the people of R.I.A.S. had only one response, the facts. They gathered information about what was going on in the free world, and especially in the American part of that world. They varied the programmes with music and humour, but mostly they gave just plain news. They were forbidden to answer the Soviets directly; they were permitted only to give facts and more facts.

Give the German people the information that had been denied them for fourteen years, ever since Adolf Hitler had seized power. That was the idea, and it was like opening magic casements upon paradise—a wonderful, new, and shining paradise in which people were free to investigate whatever their curiosity might suggest to them! A history of fourteen unknown years of civilisation! New discoveries in science, medicine, and hygiene; new achievements in the arts, in music, in poetry and fiction; new developments in politics, in the processes of democracy; and, above all, freedom, the very idea of freedom, of being able to attend public gatherings of unlimited size and hear discussions by speakers of opposing points of view, and even to ask questions of the speakers—the open-forum technique. R.I.A.S. was telling the Germans about this development, the American town meeting expanded to a colossal scale and carried on under the title of 'Town Meeting of the Air'.

That was what Lanny Budd had been trying to do from Edgemere, New Jersey, and now he told R.I.A.S. about it and the success they were having. Out of his suggestions grew the _Schulfunk_ , a school of the air, and out of that grew the _Schulfunk-Parlament_ , a device to give the young people of Germany practical experience in carrying out the democratic process. There was to be a university of the air, _Funk-Universitat_. All those ideas, theories, and beliefs which the Reds were banning from East Germany, forbidding in its schools, and tearing out of its libraries were here fed to German students who met in their own rooms at night and gathered close to the radio so as to keep the tone low. One of the policies of R.I.A.S. was never to announce itself or to reveal itself by characteristic phrases, slogans, or musical themes. Everybody would know what it was by the content, and it might be heard in whispers, with the ear only an inch or two from the source of the sounds.

These ideas and policies were bringing their prompt rewards. The station had tens of thousands of friends scattered throughout all Germany. They came when they could; they came from the Soviet sector of Berlin, and even from the Soviet zone of Germany, at the risk of their lives, to pour out their gratitude, their sense of friendship with this station and with the magic voices that came to them out of the air.

IX

Lanny entered joyfully into these activities. It was the kind of thing his own programme was doing, though of course under changed circumstances. He was full of ideas and knew the Germans well enough to be able to judge how these ideas would appeal to them. He took a professional name, Herr Frõhlich, which means 'joyful'. He spoke the language well; he told them that he was an old friend of Germany, one who had admired and loved the German people since boyhood. He told stories about the Nazi regime and those monstrous figures who had become the symbol of Germany to the outside world. Many Germans had a tendency to look back upon this regime with yearning. 'We had things better under Hitler', they would say. Lanny would give them details of the plunderings and the murders done by those Nazi 'old companions'.

Then there was the matter of the treasures which those modern pirates—land pirates—had cached. Lanny told what was known about these treasures and promised that those who brought information about the hiding places would be liberally rewarded. As it was, the treasures were being smuggled out to Spain or South America, where the Nazi bigwigs who had escaped would spend the proceeds on their mistresses and their estates.

Also Lanny bethought himself of the many Germans he had met in the course of three and a half decades. He had known all kinds, from servants and Socialist workers up to the top of the old nobility. Some had died, some had fled to foreign lands, others had never returned from Nazi concentration camps or the Russian front; but many were left, and even the Nazis among them might be useful if they had changed their minds and were willing to talk. What they told could be checked, and if they told the truth it would be used.

The growing staff of R.I.A.S. of necessity consisted mostly of Germans, and Herr Fröhlich could render a service by meeting them and judging them and giving his opinions to the American administrators. Red-controlled Radio Berlin was constantly reminding all Germans that R.I.A.S. was financed entirely by the State Department; to counter that, R.I.A.S. had to have a warm German tone, speaking to Germans in their own language about freedom, justice, and, above all, truth-telling, from the German point of view and in the German interest. The men who could do that convincingly were labourers worthy of their hire.
BOOK FOUR

Such Tricks Before High Heaven

10 THE ANGELS WEEP

I

Bernhardt Monck had been away from Berlin, and Lanny did not see him for the first week or so. Then he came, and they had one of their talkfests together. Monck had an interesting story he was free to tell. An American Army officer of Polish descent had got stirred up on the subject of the so-called Katyn massacres and had got permission to work on the problem. When Hitler began his attack on Poland in September of 1939 he had seized the western half of the country, and there had evidently been some kind of deal between him and Stalin, for Stalin had moved into the eastern half without opposition. The Polish armies had surrendered, and the officers had been sorted out from the common soldiers and placed in three immense concentration camps, Katyn, Ostashkov, and Starobielsk.

There were fourteen or fifteen thousand of them, and in April, 1940, all communications from the prisoners in these camps ceased. The Polish government-in-exile, which was in London, was insistent in demanding information about these missing prisoners and sent something like fifty notes on the subject to the Russian government. The matter was taken up orally with Vishinsky and other Soviet officials by both Polish and British diplomats; some Soviet spokesmen, including Molotov and Stalin, made verbal statements—and all their replies were lacking in frankness. The mystery remained.

Almost two years later, when Hitler began his attack on Russia, his armies passed through this Russian-annexed territory and in a heavy forest known as Katyn, west of Smolensk, the Germans discovered a mass grave containing some forty-five hundred closely packed bodies of Polish officers in uniform. The Germans of course were glad to make propaganda against the Russians, and Dr. Goebbels' ministry called for a world investigation of these mass killings. An international commission was invited, and others came, including American war prisoners brought by the Germans and representatives of Polish organisations brought from Katyn. The fact that the Nazis brought these charges tended to discredit them before the court of world opinion. The Nazis themselves had committed so many massacres that it was generally believed they had committed this one.

But now the truth was being dug out, Monck reported. The Polish-American officer had been interviewing witnesses and getting their depositions. He couldn't go into Poland, but there were plenty of refugee Poles in West Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Monck said there could no longer be the slightest doubt that it was a Soviet crime, and sooner or later this would be proved to the world. The burial had taken place in April, 1940, as was proved by newspapers which were buried with the Polish officers. The bodies had been so closely packed and the papers so closely pressed that it was impossible to have put them in later as a plant. Moreover, the heavy winter uniforms, which might have been worn in April, would certainly not have been worn in July when the German armies reached the place.

When the Germans first made the discovery known to the world the Kremlin set up the claim that the Polish officers had been employed on road work at the time of the German invasion and had been abandoned by the retreating Russian forces. It was important to note that they had set up this claim only after the bodies had been discovered; never before had it even been suggested that the missing men had fallen into the hands of the Germans. Stalin's motives in the matter were obvious; he had wanted to keep the common soldiers to make them into slave labourers, but he did not want the aristocratic and educated classes to survive. He meant to take over the country and render it incapable of revolt, or even of independent thinking. He meant to do this with all the Central European countries and would carry out the programme without the slightest consideration for the rights of any human being.

II

Monck reported on Fritz Meissner. The boy was rendering worthwhile service but was unhappy about his father and troubled in conscience because he was deceiving a man whom he had both respected and loved. Said Monck, 'I can understand how he feels, because I went through the same sort of experience. My father was a labouring man, but he was utterly without class consciousness; he thought that Kaiser Wilhelm had been directly appointed as the agent of God to guide the German people. When I expressed the opinion that there was no such God, but that he was an invention of our German tribal arrogance, my father kicked me out of the house—I mean, he physically kicked me. I knew that my mother was grieving, but I never saw her again. I was on my own and had to learn to think for myself'.

Monck added that he had told this to the boy and thought it had done him good; but Lanny could do more good because he had known Kurt intimately and could assure Fritz that he could never make any impression upon his father. Monck revealed that Kurt had refused to permit his son to quit school, at least not until the end of the scholastic year. Fritz had gone home for his Christmas vacation, and again for Easter, and had gleaned some useful facts on these visits.

Monck said that without asking permission from his boss he couldn't tell Lanny what evidence the boy had got; and Lanny said he much preferred not to know. He understood the situation and was not troubled with idle curiosity. If anything were to leak out, he would not want to be upon the list of suspects. Also, it would impress Fritz if Lanny refused to know; he might be tempted someday to confide in a friend and would remember the good example.

The next time Fritz got in touch with Monck he was told of Lanny's presence, and they had a secret meeting, carefully arranged. The boy looked older and more grave; he was free to talk about his father as a human being and he said, 'What troubles me, Herr Budd, is that I see how unhappy he is'.

Lanny told him, 'What you have to do is to get clear in your mind the cause of that unhappiness. Your father tied himself to an evil cause and that cause had been defeated; he wanted to have his own way and he can't, so his pride is hurt. But ask yourself, What did his pride mean to the world? His friends and associates were utterly cynical men, seeking power for its own sake and regarding human beings as vermin to be exterminated whenever they got in the way. Hitler's deal with Stalin was an utterly corrupt thing; they agreed to divide up Poland between them, just as if Poland were a hunk of meat instead of millions of human beings who had to be slaughtered in order to accomplish the purpose. And before two years had passed the Nazis set out to destroy the man with whom they had made that deal; they were going to take the whole of Russia, as if that too were a carcass instead of millions of people. When men take an attitude like that they proclaim themselves outcasts from modern society and its ethical codes'.

'I know all that, Herr Budd. It is just that my heart aches when I see suffering and misery'.

'Your heart can ache for everybody in the world, but when it comes to action you have to realize that you can't help everybody, and you have to choose those who best deserve it. I had the same feelings for your father, and I went to see him with love in my heart, hoping that I might do something to put him on the path to peace of mind. But he wouldn't accept any moral instruction from me, and I am sure he won't accept any from you whom he considers to be a child'.

III

Lanny was the more touched by this youth's problem because it was so close to his own. The arguments he was using were those he had presented to his own conscience and then to Hansi Robin. How many thousands of people must be using them in this old continent rent by civil strife! Fathers against sons, and brothers against sisters, and husbands against wives!

Lanny went on, 'You must ask yourself what chance of happiness your father has in the course he is following. He is absolutely in the hands of the Communists, and they will trust him no more than they trusted Hitler, or than Hitler trusted them. They will know perfectly well that he will never become a sincere Red. They will use him so long as he has something to give them—that is their technique. They intend to murder the political brains, the scientific and literary brains, of East Germany. They do that in every country, using whatever disrupting forces they find. You must surely know they aren't going to be fooled by a former intimate and confidant of Adolf Hitler. They will be watching him—I have no doubt they have a spy among his group right now'.

'They have, Herr Budd, I am sure they have'! exclaimed Fritz half involuntarily.

'Well then, they know about your father. They will use him as a front, a bait for the Germans who are still resisting communism. Then, when they are firmly established and want a propaganda stroke, they arrest him and spread the story of a Hitler underground; they bring him to trial and make him confess, and they hang him or shoot him; if they think he is too popular for that they throw him out of a window and say he committed suicide'.

'I know you are right, Herr Budd, and I am acting on it'.

'You have to realise that you have been born into the time of Stalinism, and it is going to dominate the rest of your life. You must learn to understand its techniques, so that you can explain them to the world. The Commies are devotees of a new secular religion, which calls itself materialist but really is idealist in the strict sense; it is a fantasy cooked up in the brain of the philosopher Hegel and applied to economic affairs by Karl Marx. According to Marx's schedule the great transformation was to come in the most advanced industrial countries. Instead of that it came in a backward peasant country, and its recent developments would have staggered Marx. He feared the Tsars as leaders of reaction; he wrote: "The policy of Russia is changeless. Its methods, its tactics, its manoeuvres may change, but the polar star of its policy—world domination—is a fixed star". Marx lived and worked in England and wrote for the _New York Tribune_ and looked to the Anglo-Saxon people to carry out his theories and set the world free from economic exploitation. Instead it is the men of the Kremlin, the men full of suspicion and fear, the teachers of intrigue and hatred, who are operating in his name and publishing official translations of his works from which most of his expressions concerning Russia and freedom have been cut out. Did you know those facts, Fritz?'

'I didn't know them all, Herr Budd'.

'I could get you the books if it were safe for you to have them. What is really necessary for you is to observe and understand the devices of this new barbarian power. They are all things to all men—whatever will promote their intrigues. They have an elaborate technique, carefully worked out in every detail and highly flexible in its application. Let us say it is a colonial country, a subject colony of "Western capitalist imperialism". The Communists are all for nationalism and patriotism in that country; they are sympathetic to the nationalist cravings of Arabs, Hindus, Chinese, Negroes, whatever race or tribe it may be. They send in highly trained agitators and propagandists—they have an Agitprop Department, provided with unlimited funds. They stir up strikes, they incite student revolts, they promote riots and sabotage, and ultimately that country gets its independence and sets up a government. Instantly the Communists shift: they are against that government; it is a government of landlords and moneylenders, and they point out how it is exploiting and robbing the masses. There are strikes, riots, and sabotage, with the Communist party in charge, openly or secretly, as the case may call for. So comes the second revolution, according to the pattern; the Communists seize power, they incite the peasants to murder the landlords and seize the lands, and the workers to seize the factories and operate them. Communists get into the Cabinet, they get control of the police and the troops, and the revolution is complete. And then what happens'?

'You tell me, Herr Budd'. Fritz's face was earnest, his concern intense, and Lanny repressed the impulse to smile.

'The proletarian revolution is complete; the peasants have the land, the workers have the factories, and the Communists have the government. The peasants are invited into co-operatives so as to have the benefit of tractors and modern techniques. If they don't want to come they are called kulaks and shipped off to Siberia. The enterprises are co-operatively run, perhaps for a few months, then a commissar is put over them and the government takes most of the produce, leaving enough to keep the peasants alive. The peasants are told that this is because the country is on the verge of starvation, caused by the former landlords and moneylenders, who deserved and received death for their crimes. The workers in the factories are told that they must work harder, and they get just enough of the peasants' products to keep them alive. Strikes are forbidden and are punished by exile to slave labour in mines and lumber camps. Sabotage is punished with the death penalty. The commissars who enforce these laws ride around in Cadillacs and Lincolns purchased from the American capitalists. And that is your revolution'.

'They tell us that is only a passing stage, Herr Budd'.

'Yes, of course; and formerly I accepted the promise of Engels and of Lenin that the state would wither away, that freedom under the new order would develop automatically; but now I see that the methods of terror and deception which are used to bring about the revolution change the character of the men in control. The idealists and libertarians are killed off or driven into exile. The men who rise to the top and hold the power are the sort who have no idea of giving up their privileges. They are men obsessed with fears, who dare not give up the tiniest bit of their power; they have to use it to protect their lives, to keep themselves from the vengeance of those they have dispossessed—and I don't mean their class enemies; I mean their former friends and associates, who know them too well and therefore have to be exterminated. "The revolution devours its children"—that was the saying a century and a half ago in France, and we have been watching it happen for thirty years in Russia, and we see it now in all the countries where the Soviets have seized control'.

IV

This earnest German student had observed all that; his friends and associates had observed it, he said, and most of them shrank from it. But what could they do about it? They had been shut off from the rest of the world all their lives; and what was it like, what better did it hold out to the young? 'Is America really a free world, Herr Budd, or is it an American imperialism, as we are told all the time'?

'There has been imperialism in America in past times', Lanny admitted. 'I daresay we seemed very imperialistic to the Indians. I daresay we were imperialistic when we took Texas and California from Mexico. I daresay that we were imperialistic in our war with Spain; but you see what we did with the colonies we took. We educated those peoples in self-government, and we have set the Philippines free, and also Cuba, and we are close to doing it for Puerto Rico. Our nation was founded on the basis of government by popular consent—a government of the people by the people for the people, as Lincoln phrased it, and we have that passionate sentiment deeply ingrained in our hearts. We have our class struggles, but we settle them without wholesale killings; we settle them at the ballot box, and that is what we mean by freedom and self-government'.

'You can't imagine, Herr Budd, how we Germans yearn to believe all that'.

Lanny did his best to reassure him. 'I have lived long enough to see enormous economic changes in America', he said. 'The whole balance of power in the country has been shifted by the New Deal. There has been a great amount of scolding and blustering, but there has been no fighting; the shifting has been done by taxation, and there will be more of it. Enormous public enterprises have been developed, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, which has made over a large section of our country, and the Atomic Energy Commission, which made the atom bomb. We could socialise our big industries by the same methods and without any violence whatever. The only thing that holds us back is the threat of war; and, of course, if the Reds force us into rearming, that will keep our present system going much longer, and nobody can tell what the end may be. If we have another war it will be an appalling one, but it doesn't lie in our power to decide; the Kremlin has seized the initiative. All I can tell them is that we are not going to sit by and let them take Europe and Asia and shut us off from raw materials and intercourse with the rest of the world as they would surely do'.

'If the war comes, Herr Budd, it is going to mean the extinguishment of Germany. We shall be between two steamrollers'.

Lanny answered, 'When I first began to read German I came upon some verses about Andreas Hofer, a patriot who defended the freedom of the Tyrol. I remember what he said to his friends: " _Wir sind all des Todes Eigen_ "—"We all belong to death". We Americans have a story about a Marine sergeant in World War I, leading a charge at Belleau Woods and shouting, "Come on, you sonsabitches—do you want to live forever?" That is the way we have to learn to live in this modern world. We Americans have a heritage of freedom, and you Germans have a heritage of culture, both of which are priceless and must be defended. I don't think either of us has to go to the Bolshies to be told how to solve our economic problems; and I don't think that anything the Bolshies have done in the last thirty years entitles them to set themselves up as an authority on the subject. Certainly I don't want any commissar to tell me how to live, or what to think about politics, or science, or music, or art, or literature, or anything else. I want to think what seems to me to be true, and I want to be able to say it to other men and to hear what they have to answer'.

'Yes, Herr Budd', said Fritz, 'but the governments remain imperialistic'.

'The moral sentiments of the more advanced people bring on a revolt against imperialism. It is recognised as enslavement and exploitation, and it is contrary to all the principles that are embodied and realised in democracy. The same people and the same forces which have brought to pass what Roosevelt called the New Deal and what Truman calls the Fair Deal make it impossible for us to deprive other peoples of their liberties. If you watch what we do with Japan, I am sure you will see that we have no idea but to set up an independent, free, and democratic regime in that country. You see the British now setting India free, and so on all over the world. I can assure you that so far as Germany is concerned the American people are a unit in desiring that it should be a free and united land, governed by the public opinion of its people. It is only the Communists who wish to keep East Germany separate, and that is because they have got it and mean to turn it into a Red dictatorship and a Soviet satellite.'

V

Thus spoke Lanny, striving to banish clouds from the mind of a young German Socialist. Presently Fritz smiled again and exclaimed, 'How I wish you could say those things to my father'!

'They wouldn't impress your father at all', declared the other. 'Your father doesn't believe in the people, in either their right or their ability to control the state. Your father belongs to a superior caste which knows best what is good for the people, and it is the duty of the people to obey him—or else they have to be forced'.

'It's a curious thing', said Fritz. 'I have to learn three different ideologies and keep them straight in my mind. My father has taken me into his confidence; he has explained to me that in order to live in our home it is necessary that we should take on a protective colouration; we are to make friends with the Reds and be sympathetic to their ideas, but at the same time we must hold our inner beings absolutely aloof and intact'.

Lanny told him that the Russians had a phrase in the early days of the revolution, 'political radishes'—red on the outside and white inside.

Fritz explained, 'I am supposed to be red outside and brown inside. I don't know what that could be unless it is a rotten apple'.

'The Nazi creed and the Communist creed are not so different, Fritz. There is a saying, "Extremes meet"'.

'My father explained it to me, and he meant it seriously. He was trying to make it easier for me to pretend to be a Red. He explained that both nazism and sovietism are authoritarian governments; the difference is that one is a government by the best, and the other a government by the worst. The Germans are an orderly and systematic people while the Russians are the opposite. But so far as the abstract principles are concerned the two creeds are alike, and therefore it is possible for me to be sympathetic toward the Red theories and to keep my reservations to myself. The Reds are in power, and we have to submit to them and bide our time. That time may come when Stalin dies and they fall into factional strife and disorder. In the same way the West Germans may get their chance when the Allies fall to disputing among themselves'.

'Has he ever mentioned me'? Lanny asked, and the answer was no. Lanny cautioned him, 'Don't ever make the mistake of speaking of me; and if he does, you have just a vague memory from childhood'.

VI

Lanny came away from that interview deeply moved in his soul. He marvelled at the ingenuity of mother nature, who had managed to fill her living creatures with such hunger for life and determination to hold on to it. No matter how little the creature has, it keeps on wanting more; it is lured by hope and fights against despair. Lanny himself felt guilty, because when he had been at the age of this tall German youth he had had such an easy life. Fritz had almost nothing, and was caught between two deadly warring powers, each having half the earth and determined to wrest the other half from its rival. Fritz was living in the cannon's mouth; yet he was resolved not merely to live, but to live with courage and honour, and not merely for himself but for his people and his ideals.

Lanny would never cease entirely to be troubled in his conscience for having set this gallant lad against his father—even though having the promise that the father would not be harmed. Lanny had gathered from the conversation of Monck that Fritz had been stealing his father's papers, reading them, and transmitting their contents. That was either a very dutiful thing to do, or else a very ignoble thing to do; it couldn't be both, yet somehow it seemed both to Lanny. He had been doing the same kind of thing himself, but, thank God, he had never had to do it against his father. Would he have done it if he had had to, and how would he have felt while doing it? A strange world they had been born into; a world in which colossal forces seized upon human beings and whirled them about as in a cyclone. Sometimes it hurled them to their death, and again it set them down lightly, as on a haystack or a featherbed.

Lanny talked with the older man about it. Bernhardt Monck was a practical man, doing a job and not confusing his mind with ethical complications. Monck said, Either you hate the dictators or you don't; you mean to put them down or to let them put you down. 'I fight them with whatever weapon comes handy', he declared. Lanny told him of the jesting motto he had heard from Johannes Robin, who was living now in the commercial world in New York: 'Do unto others as they would do unto you—but do it first'. But even to say it made Lanny feel like a Nazi-Commie himself!

VII

Monck, a man of many devices, came to his American friend and said, 'I need a little help, and you can give it to me'.

'At your service', Lanny said with a smile.

'A peculiar thing has happened at my office. A German girl came in and asked for a job. She says she's eighteen, but she may be older—I can't be sure. She's very bright, has all her wits about her. She's a refugee from the Soviet zone, and I asked where, and she said from a village called Wendefurth, in the Harz. That might be a piece of blind luck or it might be a plant, and I have to make up my mind which'.

Lanny got the point. 'I suppose our Himmler-money friends would like nothing better than to have someone in your office'.

'Exactly. I questioned her as closely as I dared; I didn't want to let her know that I was suspicious of her. There's no reason, you see, why Wendefurth should be different to me from any other village'.

'How did she get out of our refugee camp'?

'They're not supposed to be let out unless they have a definite job; but of course there are ways of getting favours—she may have been sleeping with an officer. Of course I could trace that down and find out, but that's not the point. It might be possible for us to send her back to her village; she could tell a tale of having been badly treated by the Americans'.

'It would be pretty awkward if you hired a spy of the Völkischerbund'.

'Not necessarily. There have been plenty of double agents and some of them have done good work; you just pay them more. What I have in mind is for you to meet this girl and see what you make of her. You can tell a plausible story about the Harz, you have read Heine'!

'How shall I meet her'?

'I don't want to bring you together deliberately, because then she would be on her guard. But I can invite her to lunch or dinner and you can happen in by accident. Her being from the Harz is reason enough for you to start talking about it, and that will interest her. You can show pleasure in her company and take her to a night club or wherever you please'.

'You know', said the high-minded Lanny, 'there's a limit to how far I'll go along that line'.

'Of course, but you don't have to tell her that. You can let her think you the most gallant gentleman she ever met, and the most fascinating; be deeply interested in her, and she will tell you about herself, and you can judge where truth leaves off and fiction begins'.

'All right', said the gallant gentleman, 'lead me to her'.

'I'll take her to dinner this evening then', said Monck. 'You stroll into the Schultheiss café exactly at seven. You greet me as an old friend that you haven't seen since the war. I'll play up to that, and while we talk you can be taking a glance at Miss Anna Surden now and then, to let her know that you're not indifferent to her good looks'.

VIII

So it came about that the son of Budd-Erling found himself in a popular restaurant on the Kurfürstendamm, seated across a small table from a German girl of lively temperament, a brunette with dark eyes and black hair, and lips and cheeks not too much painted according to the world's standards but too much according to Lanny's. She was slender—a rival would have called her emaciated. Her clothes revealed the sad fact that she was poor and had not been able to help it; but she was doing her best to make up for it by gaiety and by working those eager dark eyes. To Lanny Budd she was pathetic from the first moment—as indeed were all the children of defeated Germany, and especially those in the island of Berlin. Here were more living creatures clinging desperately to their lives, hoping against hope and dreaming impossibilities.

'Wendefurth', said the elegant American gentleman. 'How interesting! I know the village well; I visited there. I was a friend of Kurt Meissner. Do you know him'?

He was prepared to hear her say that she knew him intimately, but no; she said, 'I heard people talk about him, and I saw him on the street. He looked very sad, and I was sorry for him'.

Lanny asked her about herself and was prepared to have her tell him that she was the daughter of an Italian marquis in exile or something glamorous like that. But again no, she said that her father had been a humble storekeeper, and she had lived over the store. She had seen some of the Meissner children at school but couldn't say that she really knew them because they were younger than she was and above her socially.

Lanny asked about her experiences in the war. She said her father had been drafted into the Volkssturm, the last defence line of the desperate Nazis. They had taken the very young, the very old, the cripples, the sick, everyone who was able to walk and carry a gun and had forced them into the line without any training. Anna's father had been a victim of tuberculosis and had had no stomach for fighting. When he tried to retreat he had been shot by one of his officers. When the Reds had taken the village there had been an orgy of pillage and rape. The mother had fallen victim; Anna had managed to hide and keep hidden, almost starving to death. After the division of Berlin had been arranged by the Allies she had fled to the city, and in the American sector had been placed in a camp for refugees. There she had enough food to keep alive, but it was miserable with nothing to do, so she had been trying to get a job. How she had got permission to try she did not say, and Lanny did not ask.

When the meal was eaten Monck excused himself; he had some paper work to do at home, he said. 'Mr Budd, will you take care of Miss Surden for me'? he asked genially, and the gallant Lanny replied that he would be delighted to do so. He added magnificently, 'I'll take care of the check'—and Monck gave way. It was most impressive.

IX

They sat for a while chatting. This rich American gentleman explained that he was an art expert and was travelling in war-torn Germany looking for bargains in old masters. He asked if Miss Surden knew of any that might be worth purchasing, and she said that unfortunately she had never had a chance to learn about such things; she had never even seen great paintings, only reproductions in magazines or school books. He said that the possessors of such paintings had as a rule hidden them away, and it took a detective to find them. He was deliberately giving the young person a chance to offer her services, but she did not, and that was a point in her favour.

Presently they left the restaurant and strolled on a pleasant spring evening along the Kurfürstendamm, a street once famous for its brilliantly illuminated night life and now dark and dim. But the night clubs had reopened and were doing a thriving business. Lanny suggested that they go into one, so they were soon seated at a table for two, with a buzz of conversation about them, and music and dancing on a low platform at the front. The show was sexy and crude, but they didn't pay much attention to it, for this was a serious minded gentleman who was troubled about the state of the world.

Evidently he had a great deal of money and had always had it, but that didn't comfort him. He said he had been out of sympathy with this terrible war. He thought that wiser statesmanship could have avoided it. He said it had unleashed forces of revolt that menaced the whole future of society. It had left a vacuum in the centre of Europe which the Reds planned to fill and they were wholly incompetent to do it, representing as they did a backward part of the human race.

Anna Surden listened attentively; that obviously was the duty of a poor girl who was being entertained by a rich gentleman and lavishly fed for the first time in years. The gentleman revealed that he had known Adolf Hitler well in past years and thought him a great man. To be sure Hitler was obstinate, but he could have been influenced if he had not been humiliated and angered. He had disciplined the German people and established a regime that could have lasted a thousand years, just as he had promised. Mr Budd was of the opinion that wise statesmanship could have arrived at an understanding with him. Prime Minister Chamberlain of Britain had had that purpose and had done his best. It was the headstrong American President who had rendered this impossible.

Mr Budd went on like this for quite a while, and then he asked, 'What do you think, Miss Surden'? The girl said that those were the opinions she had heard from her mother and father and all the Germans she knew, but she was surprised to hear them from an American. Did many Americans feel like that?

Mr Budd said that a great many did, but not all were willing to express themselves; it would be to their disadvantage in a worldly way. But he was an independent man who could say what he thought, and he did. Once more he asked, 'What do you think about it'?

The girl said that she had been only a child when the war started and all she knew was what people had told her. It had been a dreadful thing; it had wrecked her home and wiped out her family, as it had done to millions of other Germans. The Nazis had forced her two older brothers into their Schutzstaffel, and both had been killed. Then they had taken her father and had shot him, so, of course, she had hated them. But evidently Mr Budd was a very well-informed gentleman and perhaps he might be right in his idea that they had been good for Germany.

Then they watched the dancing and listened to the singing for a while, and Mr Budd ordered some more food, in spite of protest. He began asking questions about the life of the refugees in the American sector of Berlin and the American zone of Germany. He explained why it was impossible to find work for them in a land where so much of the machinery had been wrecked and the raw materials used up. He was a well-informed gentleman and could explain many things to a poor girl from the country. He knew all about the political and governmental situation. He explained how Berlin was run by an Allied Control Council and how difficult it was for the four nations to agree upon anything. He said that the Russians had now settled down and were maintaining discipline in their Army. He doubted if the excesses of the invasion days would be repeated. He pointed out that such excesses had occurred in all wars and said that perhaps we had to make up our minds that this was to be the Russian century. He said he would much have preferred a German civilisation—perhaps it was because he knew the German language and barely knew the Russian alphabet.

He said all this with one of his genial smiles and went on to advise Miss Surden to study the Russian ideas and accustom her mind to the fact that the part of Germany in which she had been born was now to be under the Russian system. Russian culture would spread, and particularly their ideas about economic affairs, Maybe it would turn out for the best that the great estates would be socialised so that everybody would get the benefit of their production. Marx and Lenin had promised that when communism was victorious the state would wither away, and so perhaps there would be more freedom, and what the Soviets called democracy might turn out a good thing for the propertyless people, such as Miss Surden.

'The world as it used to be was a very pleasant place for well-to-do persons like me', said the genial Mr Budd. 'But I had imagination enough to realise that it might seem quite different to the propertyless classes'.

This seemed somewhat different from what the rich American gentleman had been saying previously; but again the girl smiled politely and said it sounded reasonable and that she was grateful to Mr Budd for taking the trouble to explain these matters to one who was as ignorant as herself. She had heard these questions discussed continually in the refugee camp, where people were crowded together and had nothing to do but talk. Sometimes they argued and became bitter and split up into groups; they gossiped about one another and accused one another of holding forbidden opinions. She herself was confused in mind and was tempted to despair. She could see no way of escape, and what was to become of her? She was eager and willing to work; she knew she was ignorant but believed she had a good mind, and she would do anything to try to get a start. If only Mr Budd could suggest some way for her to get to America! Could he?

Mr Budd said it was very sad indeed, but he was asked that question by half the Germans he met, and he had nothing to tell them; he had no political influence, and no business in which he could offer them employment. He could only suggest that they have patience and trust in the future of Germany. The Americans fully intended to restore it, he believed, and so did all the Allies.

X

Presently it was late, and Mr Budd suggested that it was time to leave. He paid the bill, which was a terrifying figure, but he tactfully saw to it that Miss Surden was not made aware of the amount. As they went outside she clung tightly to his arm; and when they were out on the street—there they were!

Conveyances were scarce, and Lanny said, 'Do you live far from here, Miss Surden?'

'Oh, I'm so sorry', she said, 'I can't take you there. I am staying in a room with half a dozen other girls, all crowded together'.

'That's too bad—'

'Haven't you got some place where you can take me'? she broke in. She was clinging even more tightly.

'You misunderstand me, Miss Surden', he said. 'I was just offering to escort you to your place. I did not intend to go in'.

He felt her start of surprise. 'Oh, Mr Budd, but what—you mean to leave me'?

'That is what I mean'.

'But you spent all that money on me!'

'I spent it for a very pleasant evening, and I assure you you owe me nothing. I must tell you that I am a married man'.

He felt her shrink, but she still clung tightly. 'Does that have to make so much difference?'

'It does in my case', he answered. 'I know how some American men are behaving in Germany, but I am not one of them'.

He heard a faint sound of sobbing. 'Oh, I'm so disappointed'! she exclaimed.

'I am sorry indeed', he said.

Suddenly she flung her arms about him. 'Oh, Mr Budd, please don't leave me! I could make you so happy! Give me a chance to show you. I would be loyal to you, I would never whisper a word about it to anyone. I've never met a man like you in all my life. I would make myself useful; I would work my fingers to the bone for you; I would do anything you wanted me to do'!

'I am sorry, my dear', he said gently. 'I am not available as a lover, but perhaps I can help you as a friend. I have an idea of a possible job. So let us walk now, and I will see you safely to your room. The streets are dangerous for a woman at night'.

'They are dangerous for everybody, even for an American', she answered.

She released him, and they walked decorously side by side. 'Tell me, Miss Surden, have you thought of asking Bernhardt Monck if he could find you a job'?

'I did ask him, Mr Budd; that is how I came to be with him. He promised to see what he could do, but I doubt if he trusts me. You know how it is, there are so many bad kinds of people here in Berlin. How could I persuade him that I am honest'? She said that, and suddently he realised she was weeping as she walked. 'Oh, you won't think I'm honest'! she exclaimed. 'You won't have any use for me now'!

'You are entirely mistaken, my dear', he said, still more gently. 'I have lived in this world much longer than you, more than twice as long, and have learned a lot about human nature. I perfectly understand the position of women in Germany today. Millions of potential husbands have been killed, and millions of potential jobs are gone too. Women, like all other living creatures, have to eat, and it is a dreadful thing to be hungry all the time. To be honest in my eyes is to want a chance to work'.

'Oh, Mr Budd', she cried, 'if I could only have a job and earn my own money and have a room of my own I would be the happiest woman in the world'!

'I don't happen to know what Monck is doing', he said. 'But I know that he has some kind of position with A.M.G. I will speak to him about you, and I will tell him that I believe you are honest'.

XI

Lanny sat in at a conference of Bernhardt Monck and the large and genial Mr Andrew Morrison of the U.S. Treasury Department. Lanny made his report. 'I really don't feel sure about her; she may have been prompted to appear dumb on political topics, and if so, she is a good actress. I am sure she wasn't acting when she wanted to spend the night with me; she thought she had got hold of a good thing'.

'I thought we had a good opening', Morrison said, 'but I'm afraid we can't use her'.

'Tell me just what you're afraid of', Lanny said. 'Surely the Himmler-money people must know we're after them. When Guzman doesn't show up they will guess what happened to him; and you tell me you got two other pushers previously. Suppose this girl has been sent by them, or suppose she sells you out—she doesn't know anything but what you tell her'.

'But will we be able to rely on anything she tells _us'?_

'We can't rely completely on what anybody tells us', put in Monck. 'We have to judge by the circumstances. The thing to do would be to pay her enough to keep her going and offer her the big prize if she really delivers the goods'.

Lanny wanted to know, 'Even suppose she could locate the plates, would you be able to get them out?'

'Don't worry about that', declared Morrison. 'If she drops us a code note by mail we'll get a man there and get the plates'.

'Supposing she locates the money, would you be able to get transportation for it, and could you get it past the border'?

'We don't want it', answered the Treasury man. 'All our man would have to do would be to get it carted into the forest, build a good brush fire, and set it on top'.

'You fellows know more about all this than I do', said Lanny. 'How are you going to get this girl into the Soviet zone? Are we forging passports'?

'No', replied Morrison, 'she would have to go to their military for an entry permit. They are getting tougher all the time, but I think she has a story that might convince them. She is a native of the place, and she has a notion that members of her family are still alive—her mother, her father, her brothers, anybody. She has been a refugee in one of our camps, and she has been badly treated and regrets having fled. We can teach her a few Red phrases, and she's a comrade, or wants to be; she'd be a good propaganda for them, and I think she'd get by'.

'All right', said Lanny, 'why not try first things first? Tell her you have a job for her in Wendefurth provided that she can get in. Give her a little money and let her go and apply for a permit. If she gets it, then you can tell her what the job is, and if she's afraid of it, or if you decide she doesn't sound right, you can call it off and there's no harm done'.

'What do you say, Monck'? demanded Morrison.

'The girl is bright, she's attractive, and evidently she's a fast worker with the men. It might be that she would connect up with one of those Bund fellows and get us some worth-while information in a week or two. I'd say, give her money to live on, and give her a code so that she can write to us. Promise her a few hundred dollars if she is able to get the money, and twice as much if she can locate the plates for us; and throw in a ticket to South America'.

'You're having a lot of fun spending our money', said Morrison with a grin. 'But I suppose Washington would okay that'.

XII

Lanny, who had been thinking about this problem persistently, brought up aspects that were puzzling him. 'I am wondering if a bunch of Germans can be carrying on a racket like this in Soviet territory without the authorities being in on the graft. And would they be German or Russian'?

'It is hard to be sure', said Morrison. 'The country is still in confusion. The Soviet military would be in charge of major matters, but they probably leave civilian affairs to the Germans, just as we do with them here'.

'The Germans would be Communists'?

'Probably, but that's not certain either, because the Reds are still making a pretence at non-party government. It's wearing thinner all the time'.

'My point is they'd be in on the graft. And would the higher authorities permit that, or would they consider it a shooting offence'?

'They wouldn't be worried about doing any harm to British or American currency values', said Morrison. 'But it might be they'd want to take it over and get the gravy for themselves'.

'Have we made any complaint to the Soviet government about the matter'?

'We've got tired of making complaints to the Reds, Mr Budd. They stall on everything and give us a lot of double talk. They look at you with a perfectly straight face and tell you a lot of lies, and go right on telling the same thing even when they know you have the proof in your hands. So we have developed an impulse to attend to things for ourselves. We're not going to hurt anybody, but if we can burn that paper or melt those plates, we'll think we've been smart'.

'What I'm wondering', said Lanny, 'is whether it might be possible to throw a scare into those Völkischerbund fellows so that they would move into Germany where we could get at them'.

'The trouble is how to apply the scare and to regulate it. We might make some more formal complaints to the Soviet government and force matters into the open; but that might result in their taking over the money, circulating it underground, and blandly telling us they know nothing about it. In the case of these Himmler boys we just decided that we'd try to pull off a stunt by ourselves and let the Reds find out about it after it's over'.

'You mean you would try to smuggle raiders into the Soviet zone'?

'Don't even talk about anything so improper', said Mr. Morrison, but somehow his tone was not convincing. 'All we are trying to do is to find out where that stuff is, and then there will be time enough to consider what comes next. Perhaps you will be back in America and won't have to know anything about it'. He smiled his most friendly smile.
11 HONOUR ROOTED IN DISHONOUR

I

Lanny went back to his work at R.I.A.S., hunting up old acquaintances in Berlin and getting information he could use—always with a double use in mind, the other place being Edgemere, New Jersey. Two or three days passed and there was a telephone call, Monck on the wire, speaking cryptically as always, for the Berlin telephone wires were tapped by the Reds, except for the separate system A.M.G. had set up for itself.

'Ferdinand's father is in town', he announced.

'You don't mean it'! exclaimed Lanny. 'Which sector'?

'His own', said the telephone voice.

'What's he doing'?

'Not sure; but probably it has something to do with his _legitimate_ business'. The word legitimate was heavily emphasised, and Lanny understood that it meant Kurt's music. Perhaps he had come to Berlin seeking a publisher, as he had been accustomed to do in the old days; or perhaps, if he couldn't find a publisher, he was arranging with a printer at his own expense—or at the expense of purchasers of Himmler money.

The voice went on, 'We don't know where he's staying—all he said was with a friend. But he had lunch with Ferdinand in the Strontheim café, and it seems he eats there regularly. You might go to-day'.

'But he won't talk to me'!

'You remember the last conversation we had and the last topic we discussed'?

Lanny thought, then said, 'I remember'.

'Okay, then go to it; don't lose the chance'. That was all over the telephone, and no more was needed. 'Throw a scare into them', Lanny had said. And coming from the office he had discussed with Monck how it could be done. Now Monck said, 'Go to it', and Lanny trusted his judgment.

It was just a matter of taking a stroll through the bomb-wrecked streets of Berlin, past blocks of buildings with great gaps in them like missing teeth in a human face. There were spaces which had been cleared entirely, and there were others with half-wrecked buildings in which people were hiding in cellars or climbing half-wrecked stairs to rooms that had part of a wall missing. There were buildings that had beams sticking up like the piles of a pier that has been swept away by a storm.

And one of these streets, which looked like any other street, was the boundary between the West sector and the East. You just walked across it and nobody paid any attention to you. You didn't get into trouble unless you made trouble, or unless by chance you were someone whom the Soviet authorities especially disliked. Lanny took a chance that they had not found out the identity of the Herr Frolich on that disliked American radio; at any rate the policemen on the street wouldn't know, nor would the Red soldiers; he hadn't been photographed and pasted up on bulletin boards like wanted criminals in American post offices. He was conspicuous because of his good clothes; but even so he could stroll down Unter den Linden.

II

So he came to the popular café where reasonably good meals were still served to those who had the money. It was just before noon, and it was already crowded. Lanny told the head waiter that he was looking for a friend; he strolled about and, seeing no friend, got himself a seat not too far from the door and facing it, and prepared for one of those long repasts which are the custom among the intellectuals and the leisure class in Europe. You order a small meal with a cup of coffee or a bottle of wine, and the waiter brings you the latest edition of the _Tägliche_ , and you sit and eat in leisurely fashion, and read and take a sip now and then, and read some more.

Lanny read, but only a line or two at a time, and then he would look up to see who was coming in. It was a long wait, an hour or so. He made it all right by calling for another paper and giving the waiter a tip. Then at last his heart gave a jump: there was Kurt Meissner coming in at the door, and alone; Kurt Meissner, tall, long-faced, and grave, dressed in a suit well worn and unpressed—the fashion among all Germans, and especially among East Germans. Lanny got up and went toward him with eagerness he didn't have to feign. 'Kurt! What a piece of luck! What are you doing in Berlin? Come, sit with me! Do, please'!

It was a table for two and the request was hard to refuse. Kurt manifested no haste, but he came. Lanny's manner was full of happiness; Kurt's manner was dour.

The waiter came with the menu, and Kurt ordered ravioli. Lanny realised that he would have to take something which could be eaten with a fork alone; doubtless at home the faithful Elsa cut up his meat for him. No comment was to be made about that. When the waiter had departed Lanny said, 'I'm so glad to have run into you, Kurt. I thought I was never going to see you again. Tell me, what are you doing in Berlin'?

'I am here on business connected with my music'.

'Are they going to publish you, Kurt?'

'I'm not sure'. Evidently he was not going to be seduced, not even by the most seductive of topics.

But Lanny's programme was to attack and keep on attacking. 'I think about you so often, Kurt. I wish so that our friendship could be resumed. I wish so that I could help you'.

'I have told you that I am not in need of help'.

'I know, but I cannot believe it, Kurt. How are you able to live? How are you going to get along in the present situation here'?

'This is not the place to discuss it, Lanny'.

'I will lower my voice; no one will hear us. If you see anyone standing behind me you can cough, and I will stop. I will tell you something that has just come to my knowledge. You have heard, I suppose, of the Katyn forest and what happened there'?

'I have heard the story'.

'I won't name any names. You know who was blamed for it, and you know that they had nothing to do with it. You know who actually did that most hideous action. There must be other mass graves which have never been discovered. There were fourteen or fifteen thousand officers who disappeared off the face of the earth; they were put under the earth. And that ought to show you the kind of people you are dealing with'.

'I do not need anybody to point that out to me'.

'You know the pretences they make. They believe in art and culture; they are going to raise civilisation to a higher level; but what they do is force everybody into one mould, their mould. It is the end of all freedom, all initiative—and how can art or culture thrive under such circumstances? You have been a free man, you have written what you believed, and you cannot possibly write what you pretend to believe'.

'You cannot know what I believe'.

'I know your inmost being, and I have the firm conviction that it cannot change. I am speaking to the man I used to know so well and for so many years. Friendship such as ours cannot be put aside, and it cannot be destroyed. We have differed in our ideas of the means, of policy, but our goals have always been the same and always will be. If you are trying to repress that inner being of yours, you may succeed for a time but not forever. I am appealing to that being in the hope of bringing him back to life'.

But Kurt's grim look did not change. 'You are being eloquent', he said, 'but you are mistaken. I know what I am and I know what I am doing'.

'You are deceiving yourself. You are telling yourself that you can deal with these new people, that you can pretend to agree with them and fool them. You believe that you can live a life that you hate, but you cannot; it will wither up your creative powers. The means will become the end, and you will be deceiving yourself instead of others'.

'You know more about me than I know about myself. I do not recognise your portrait'.

'I know exactly what you are thinking about—your family. But you must understand, families here are not let alone to grow up by accident. Children are taken from their parents and are disciplined and propagandised. They sing songs—you know the kind, I don't have to describe them to you. They will come home singing them to you, and how will you like it? They will be taught that their first duty in life is to spy upon you. You may think that you can train them to hate the enemy, but surely you will find out that little minds, which are spontaneous and impulsive, cannot be made into mature intriguers. They will inevitably let out some secret, and that will be the end of you'.

III

Kurt coughed, and Lanny fell silent. The waiter brought the food and put it on the table. He withdrew, but not very far, and obviously was remaining for the purpose of spying—a common purpose at that time. So Lanny inquired whether Kurt knew anyone who had valuable paintings, and he talked about that subject until the waiter had to go to another table. Then he resumed, 'I am pleading with you on behalf of the Western world; it needs your genius and should have it. You are a man of the West, all your thought is of the West. How could Goethe, how could Beethoven, have lived in this world where you are now? Did anyone ever tell those men what to write or how to write it? You know, and I know, that German culture is based upon freedom. German science is based upon the right to speculate and teach—even the most reactionary rulers of German states never dared to interfere with academic freedom. But how is it here? I don't have to go into details, you know it as well as I do. What these people want from German science is only rockets, jet planes, and atomic bombs—that sort of progress. What they want is to get the Ruhr and turn it to the manufacture of such weapons. When they get that they will have France and Britain at their mercy. And what will the Germans be then? Slaves and robots'!

'This is no place for such a discussion', protested Kurt again, and more sharply.

'I am talking low, and no one can hear us. I am pleading with you to let me help you find a way to get into the Western world. I will take care of you and your family financially until you get on your feet. My father would be delighted to do it if I asked him. I will stand sponsor for you; I will certify that you are not engaged in any political activities. You can become a great artist once more, and not a puppet artist like Shostakovich'.

'I have told you that I am not interested in all this—'

'I'm trying to save you from certain doom. They are letting you live here, but I know, and you must know, that it cannot continue long. They are trying to keep the Germans quiet, they are trying to keep all the people quiet, until they get their grip on the country firmly fixed; then your time will come. You must be aware that they know your record, all your associates, who your friends have been—those whom they hate most, or did hate most in this world, and still fear. And you may be certain they are keeping watch upon you now. I don't know who your friends are, but you can be sure that one of them is a spy. Ask yourself, Which one, man or woman, and what is he informing about you and putting on the record? When the time comes you will be hauled up for questioning; you will be taken to the torture chamber; you will be told what to confess, and you will confess it: any monstrous crimes they have thought up, and you will accuse anybody they want to get rid of. Your children will be sent to a state farm, your wife will go to work in a coal mine, and you will be sent to the gas chamber or stood up against the wall and riddled with bullets'.

' _Hush'!_ whispered Kurt. The waiter had come back to his station, and Kurt raised his finger and beckoned. The man came.

'My cheque', said the guest.

'Is there anything wrong with the food, sir'? inquired the waiter, looking at the plate which had barely been touched.

'Nothing is wrong with the food. I do not feel well. The cheque, please'. He took the cheque, looked at it, and counted out a number of marks, enough to include a tip. He rose and without a word more stalked out of the restaurant.

IV

Lanny went back and reported to Monck, 'I'm pretty sure I scared him, but what will come of it remains to be seen'. Monck, in turn, told him that he had had a talk with the girl, and she was ready for anything. She had gone to the Soviet military authorities to try to get permission to seek the members of her family in Wendefurth. So Lanny went back to work at R.I.A.S.; and three or four days later Monck called him on the A.M.G. 'phone. 'She's gone in', Monck said, using no names; and that was all. He had told Lanny that they would have a code for communicating. She would write letters, innocent in appearance. On the other hand, they might never hear from her again. It was like seeing somebody jump into the crater of a volcano.

Berlin was a great city caught in a fantastic plight. It was half in ruins, especially the important, the 'downtown', sections, in which business and industry were housed. More than three million people still lived in its 340 square miles, and they had to have food every day and work when possible. They lived as best they could in the ruins, and hundreds of new people came daily to join them in their discomfort.

The new arrivals came from countries to the east, many of them walking with no more possessions than they could carry on their backs or their heads. The boundaries of the metropolis measured 144 miles, and all the surrounding territory was Russian. There was no way to keep people from sneaking in, and to send them back to the Reds meant death or imprisonment worse than death. Some could be sent into West Germany, but they would have to pass through Soviet-held territory, so only as many could be sent as could be flown. They were much less than welcome in West Germany, which already had seven million refugees to take care of. So the American Army was kept busy building barracks, and American ships were busy bringing food from home—such were the penalties a civilised country paid for having won a war.

The four sectors of the city were ruled by four different armies. They were supposed to have one civilian government, elected by the population. This population was Socialist and had elected a Social-Democratic mayor, Ernst Reuter; but the four military administrations had squabbled over him—the Reds wouldn't permit him to serve because he was anti-Soviet. They had compromised upon his deputy, and so the once-proud capital of imperial Germany had a woman mayor, Luise Schröder.

The city had been not merely the political but the intellectual and cultural capital of Germany. The Soviets fully intended to take possession of it all; they saw themselves as a Red wave rolling over that populous and important island. They had planned it from a long way back, and an essential part of the plan was to take possession of the minds of the population.

When their troops had swept into the city one of the places they had seized was the splendid, undamaged building of Radio Berlin. Thus they came into possession of a great library of books, files of clippings, and a stock of recorded music; also a highly trained staff who knew Germany and the Germans and could be kept at work and told what to do. When the division of the city was agreed upon, this radio station was in the British sector, but the Russians held on to it, refusing to share control with their polite allies. They continued to hold on to it even after they had put other stations on the air at Potsdam, Leipzig, and Dresden.

The Americans had been slow to realise that they had a new war on their hands, a propaganda war. They had set up a little radio enterprise, using a German device by which you plugged in on your telephone line and got programmes. In the badly damaged telephone exchange they had set up their R.I.A.S., operated by amateurs, anti-Nazis who had been barred from the German radio for a dozen years. They had only three studios, too small for either an orchestra or an audience; but they had given the facts about what was happening in the outside world, and gradually the Germans had found it out and got into the habit of listening. General Clay, scrupulously courteous to his Soviet allies, had forbidden any American publicity under his control to argue with them or to say anything impolite about them. For almost two years the American radio had endured incessant Soviet attacks without making any reply except to tell the news as it happened day by day. The staff chafed under the restriction, but it was a military order and had to be obeyed.

The tone of R.I.A.S. was what the Germans called _menschlich_ , that is, human; it favoured no race, no creed, no party; its music was listened to by all the various kinds of people in Berlin. Russian soldiers were forbidden to listen to it, but even the officers broke that rule. They heard Russian music, including some which had been banned by their government because of its sentimental and unmilitary tone. R.I.A.S. made friends, and its reputation spread—it spread even to Washington, D. C., to the great marble building on the hill where penurious congressmen were persuaded under heavy pressure to give it a little more money.

V

In the days of the military rush through Germany, Lanny had met a Russian-speaking sergeant in the American Army who had been interrogating Russian prisoners in the same way that Lanny had been interrogating German prisoners. Boris Shub was his name, and now he showed up as a civilian in the Information Control Division of Military Government in Berlin. He remembered meeting Lanny, and they enjoyed exchanging reminiscences of those days of glory. Shub had been at the little Prussian town of Kloetze near the River Elbe when the American and the Soviet armies had met and stood at salute while the bands played 'The Star-Spangled Banner' and the 'Internationale.' He had seen the spontaneous friendliness of the two armies, the eager curiosity of the Russians about everything their American Allies had. Even though they could not talk they could smile, and learn the names for things, and swap souvenirs. On Sunday there had been a formal ceremony at the square; the Red Cross girls had served coffee and doughnuts, and the bands had played a truly international programme of music: 'Dixie' and 'Yankee Doodle', the Red Army song called 'Meadowland' and even the German Army song 'Lili Marlene', which had been, as Shub phrased it 'on the international hit parade of World War II'. Even the English were included, for the Russians had learned to sing 'Tipperary'—translated, of course, and it sounded odd with Russian words.

Shub told of the new attitude which the Soviets had revealed. The first signs had been the treatment accorded to the Russian prisoners who had been captured by the Germans in the early days of the war. In the first tremendous sweep of the mechanised Wehrmacht great numbers of Russian troops had been surrounded; some had surrendered because they did not want to fight, but greater numbers had fought gallantly and had given up only when their ammunition was exhausted. They had been liberated by the American Army and came pouring toward the Elbe.

There were three hundred Russian officers who had been in an internment camp. They wanted to rejoin their own army; they waited for permission, but no permission came, and the Soviet officer in command refused to visit them or pay any attention to them. The civilian refugees whom the Germans had put at forced labour wanted to go back to their homeland but were afraid. They inquired anxiously of the Americans and were told that they would have to go. The Americans inquired of the Soviet authorities and were told that everything would be all right and the refugees would be well treated.

So they went, and they were dreadfully treated. Some escaped and fled back to the American zone, where Shub met them and heard their stories. In the four months immediately following V.E. Day more than five million Russians were repatriated from the Axis lands. Many had to walk hundreds of miles under the guard of soldiers with tommyguns. They were packed into freight cars like cattle and nailed up for the journey. The officers were stripped of their insignia and many of their uniforms. They were forced to answer questionnaires containing a hundred and fifty-three questions about every aspect of their lives. Some were taken away and never heard of again.

A greater number were housed in the concentration camps where formerly the German prisoners had been kept; the camps were unspeakably filthy and dilapidated, and semi-starvation and disease were rife. Ultimately these prisoners were distributed to slave labour in mines and forests in northern Russia and far-off Siberia. The average sentence was from three to five years at hard labour, and every prisoner was required to sign an agreement that he would never reveal what had happened to him or her.

Some who escaped showed up in Berlin, in Paris, and other places where Shub interviewed them. From his notebook he gave Lanny stories of half-a-dozen typical cases—and these were brought back in due course to Edgemere, New Jersey. There was the testimony of a Russian soldier who prior to his plight had served as chauffeur to a Soviet major-general named Grachev; he had driven the general from Dresden to Moscow, and on arriving in Moscow on the twenty-seventh of April, 1946, he had witnessed the following scene:

'Near the All-Union Agricultural Exhibit a column of women moved toward us, the flank guarded by soldiers armed with rifles. When we drove alongside the column my heart sank. The women wore skirts made of sacks, canvas blouses, and wooden shoes. Their hair was covered with grey rags. That's the way all of the one hundred and fifty to two hundred women were dressed.

'"Who are they?"' I asked.

'"Traitors to the Motherland",' I was told. '"Repatriates. There are lots of them here. They are doing reconstruction work—building"'.

VI

Lanny had been able to listen to the Peace Programme on a short-wave set in the R.I.A.S. office. He made it a rule to telephone Laurel once a week and learned that all was going well. That new miracle of nature which he had helped to achieve was thriving perfectly; she was actually two weeks ahead of Dr. Gesell's schedule—that professor at Yale University who had devoted many years of study to the progress of the normal human infant and could tell you at what week the creature should roll over, at what week it should begin to crawl, and so on.

Lanny felt a strong pull in the direction of home. He told the R.I.A.S. people he had given them all the advice he had in him. He would go back to Edgemere and tell the people of America what he had learned in Berlin and the urgency of the problem of the 'cold war'. He would visit Washington and do what he could to stir up the officials in the State Department so that R.I.A.S. could have permission to answer directly the day-and-night attacks which Radio Berlin was making upon it. Theoretically, to turn the other cheek to the blows of an assailant was an ethical action, but there ought to be a time limit on such a procedure, and two years seemed enough.

Lanny didn't visit the Riviera this time. He had a telephone chat with Beauty and learned that all was well there. Happy was the family whose annals were brief. He was flown to the London airport in a British plane and stayed over a day in order to have a good evening with Alfy Pomeroy-Nielson. Russians and Germans were important, but British were important too; they were making one of the great social advances in the world's history. They were proving that Marx had been right and that Lenin had been wrong: the Anglo-Saxon peoples could achieve socialism step by step, and without violence or the overthrow of government. 'The inevitability of gradualness' had been one of the slogans of the Fabians, and now in their plodding, undramatic way the British people were making over their world.

Immediately after the war the Labour party had put forward a programme: the socialisation of five basic industries—coal, electricity, transportation, steel, and the Bank of England. They promised socialised medicine, so that no sick person in Britain need go unattended, and they promised to regulate the prices of food so that no person in Britain need go hungry. They had printed that programme in pamphlet form and seen to its public distribution, and they had swept the elections on that basis. Now they were proceeding to carry out their promises, strictly and precisely, one by one.

Alfy, as a newly elected Labour member and son of an old-time supporter of the party, was in the midst of these exciting events, and he told about them with un-British enthusiasm. In less than two years more than half the programme had been carried out, and the rest was going to be carried out to the dotting of the last _i_ and the crossing of the last _t_ , and in spite of all the clamour of Tory opposition. Said the onetime R.A.F. officer, 'It's the first time that this has ever been done in history—I mean, that a political party has kept all its promises to the electorate. Do you know of any other case, Lanny?'

Lanny thought and said, 'The Bolsheviks would claim that they kept Lenin's promises, but they didn't. Lenin promised that the state would wither away, but you see it growing like Jonah's gourd'.

'And besides, they killed millions of people', said the other. 'We haven't killed a single one—unless some Tory peer has died of indignation'.

The British government was a unit; the prime minister was under the control of Parliament. But the United States appeared to have a government at war with itself, and Alfy wanted Lanny to explain this mystery. An odd situation indeed, in which the President was a Democrat and the Congress Republican; and even if the Democratic party carried Congress, the President would still have his hands tied, because the Southern legislators who called themselves Democrats usually voted Republican. The South was a generation behind the rest of the country in its economic development, and therefore in its economic philosophy. Its politicians called themselves Democrats because the Republican party had fought and won the Civil War; but when it came to questions of finance and business they were in the age of Harding and Coolidge, or even of McKinley.

VII

Lanny had a chance to find out what the Tory peers thought about all this. It was his social duty to report to Irma on the welfare of their newly wed daughter. When he called Wickthorpe castle he learned that the couple were in town. Cedric Masterson, Earl of Wickthorpe, took seriously his legislative duties, even though what he said and how he voted no longer made much difference. When Lanny called the town house Irma said, 'Oh, come to lunch, won't you, Lanny'? And he replied, 'Okay'. There were husbands who would feel a certain embarrassment at meeting the former husband of a wife, but in such matters Ceddy prided himself upon being what he called 'mod'n', and Irma was 'mod'n' also, even to the pronunciation of a language which had changed in the course of its journey from London to Chicago.

So Lanny went to the stately town house and had a meal served by a stately butler and a footman whom he knew well and greeted as old friends, for Lanny and Irma had been tenants and intimates of Ceddy for some time before the marital shift had taken place. He had nothing but pleasant news to report about Frances, a blissfully happy bride and busy idealist, certain that she was helping to prevent the next war. His lordship remarked that she would do better working in a munitions factory; he was convinced that the Bolsheviks meant world conquest and would settle for nothing less.

So they talked about politics, and how the British Empire was going to the demnition bow-wows, and how America was going to have to carry the whole world on its shoulders, financially speaking, and would the American people stand for that? Britain was being taxed until it was just about ready for the poorhouse.

Lanny had known the Earl of Wickthorpe since his blooming, pink-cheeked youth. Now he was middle-aged and his fair hair was getting thin on top, but he was still a vigorous Englishman who walked all over his estate every day when he was at home. His conversation, however, was extremely depressing. 'It's what you asked for, Lanny, and I hope you like it', he said. 'I belong with the dinosaurs and the dodos, and I'm getting ready to pack up and join them. If it wasn't for Irma's money I would have been taking in boarders long ago'.

Lanny had a hard time to keep from grinning over the idea of the Earl of Wickthorpe taking in boarders; but he knew it was no joke. He knew that one of Britain's peers was running a 'bus line and doing his own driving, and that another with his wife was selling fish. Irma's income came from street railroads in the American Middle West, and she was supposed to pay about eighty-five per cent. of it in the form of income tax to the Washington government. She had resorted to the device which had become so popular among Americans of her class: the setting up of a foundation which would be tax free and would spend her money for purposes that could be made to wear a humanitarian aspect.

She had two secretaries working at the castle, classifying and editing the papers of her father, the late J. Paramount Barnes, the traction magnate. They were going to compile a life of this historic character, and it wasn't necessary that the book should be good or that anybody should read it when it was published. Lanny didn't have to ask tactless questions in order to understand that these secretaries were running errands for the countess, doing her shopping, attending to her correspondence, and performing other duties proper to social secretaries. Lanny could guess that the tutors of the two sons of Ceddy and Irma might likewise be considered as performing humanitarian services; even the gardeners were keeping up the grounds on which the J. Paramount Barnes Foundation was lodged. There was no law to prevent a foundation spending its money abroad, where the United States Internal Revenue Service might have difficulty in checking up on it.

VIII

Ceddy had some eight hundred peers in Britain, but not all of them took their duties seriously—which was just as well, since the chamber set apart for their use could not have accommodated a third of them. Ceddy would write a speech, study it, revise it a dozen times with painful care, and then deliver it and release it to the newspapers; but, paper being scarce, they would print only a paragraph or two. Ceddy, however, had plenty of paper, because Irma's foundation paid for it, and also for printing. He had accumulated lists of names of important persons all over the world and would send them a pamphlet setting forth his idea that Britain was being led to certain bankruptcy by men who thought of nothing but garnering votes from the discontented classes. To handle all this he had an office on his estate with a manager and a secretary, and Irma's foundation paid for all of it.

In the dear dead days beyond recall Lanny Budd's marriage had been broken up because Irma had become an admirer of Adolf Hitler, taking him for a man who believed in order and the rights of private property, especially in large quantities. To be sure, he had called himself a Socialist—a National Socialist—but he had been like those Southern senators who called themselves Democrats and voted Republican. So all through the late war Irma and her new husband had been pacifists; they had been perfectly willing for Hitler to take Europe and advocated accepting his promise to respect the British Empire and let it alone.

But now the world kaleidoscope had been shaken again, and Irma and Ceddy were declining to trust 'Soso' Stalin and any of his promises. Thus Lanny Budd, much to his surprise and somewhat to his embarrassment, found himself in political agreement with them. In the mail forwarded from Edgemere had been some of the customary letters rebuking him for the stand he had taken on the Peace Programme. One of these was from a grower of avocados and winter vegetables in a place called Pahokee, Florida; it consisted of a list of names: 'MacArthur—Chiang-kai Shek—the French in Indo-China—the Dutch in Java—the oil men in Persia and Arabia—the Turks—the Greek Nazis—de Gaulle—the Pope—Franco—Salazar—Lanny Budd'! Yes, that was the company he was keeping; and now the Earl and Countess of Wickthorpe!

Lanny, of course, might have compiled another list, beginning with Stalin and including all the various torturers whom Stalin had put to work: Dzerjinsky, Yagoda, Yezhov, the various chiefs of the Gaypayoo and the Cheka and the N.K.V.D. and the M.V.D.; the killers of the Katyn forest and the Red Army chiefs who had stood outside Warsaw while the Nazis slaughtered tens of thousands of Jews and a hundred thousand Poles; the men who were holding ten or twenty million prisoners in concentration camps, the map of which made northern Russia and Siberia look like a sprinkling from a pepper box! Oh yes, it would be easy to say, 'You too'! and go on making faces and calling names over the back fence of the world. What was a man to do who desired that the power of America be used to bring freedom and order to the tormented human race? Was he to say, 'A plague on both your houses' and retire to Pahokee, Florida, to grow avocados and winter vegetables? Should he go and join the lotos-eaters of Tennyson?

In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined

On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind...

Where they smile in secret, looking over wasted lands,

Blight and famine, plague and earthquake, roaring deeps and fiery sands,

Clanging fights, and flaming towns, and sinking ships and praying hands.

But they smile, they find a music centred in a doleful song

Steaming up, a lamentation and an ancient tale of wrong.

IX

Lanny was flown the familiar route by way of Iceland and Newfoundland. From Gander Airport he was flown in an Army plane directly to Washington, and in the seat beside him was an assimilated lieutenant colonel, coming home on leave. David Krichevsky was an electrical technician attached to the Signal Corps, and as he had been born in Russia and spoke Russian he was one of a large group assigned to restore and service two cables which ran between Berlin and the American zone of Germany. This was through Soviet territory, so Krichevsky had a day-by-day view of that 'cold war' which the Reds were waging against their recent allies. They wanted to drive the Americans out and shut off those communications, and they were resorting to a system of persecutions, sometimes going as far as kidnapping and murder.

There were seven 'repeater' stations strung out along the line of those cables, and at each of these the Americans had a little compound with a house to live in. The Americans lived in the upper storey of the house and the Russians lived underneath—signal men and M.V.D. agents, the Russian Secret Police. They watched every move the Americans made, and they invaded the American quarters for inspection at any hour of the day or night. They even objected to the bathroom being locked, and when the Americans put on locks the Russians broke them. The house had a fence around it enclosing a yard less than fifteen feet square, and the Americans were not allowed outside the yard unless accompanied by a Soviet guard. If something went wrong with the cable and a man rushed out to fix it in a hurry, that man would be arrested and spirited away, and then an American officer would go to the Soviet authoritities to demand his return and they would profess to know nothing about him, even though he was in the same building at the time. On more than one occasion the Americans had found means to spirit the man away; on other occasions the man had never been seen again.

Krichevsky said, 'They are never going to rest, Mr Budd, until they've shut off those cables. In fact I don't think they'll rest until they have driven us out of Berlin'.

'I doubt if they will go that far', replied Lanny.

But the other wanted to know, What would we do if they were to shut off the roads as well as the cables? 'Do we have the right of access to Berlin in the agreements we made with them'?

Lanny didn't know about that. He said, 'We have a law that the ownership of land carries with it the right of access to it. But of course the Reds may say they have different laws from what we have. Anyhow, I don't think we'll let ourselves be driven out without a fight, and I'm sure we won't let our people be starved there'.

X

Lanny paid a visit to the Treasury Building, where Turner of the Secret Service gathered several of the section heads to hear the art expert tell what he had observed of the doings of Germans and Russians, and his impressions of Monck and Morrison and the others with whom he had been working. When this session was over Turner remarked, 'If you have an hour or two to spare I will show you something interesting'.

Lanny said his time was his own, and the official took him into a separate room where there were a number of small tables, each with a chair, in front of a curious-looking apparatus. It had the appearance of a metal hood with a large opening in the front. A bright light was switched on at the top, and it shone down through a couple of glass plates and on to the sloping floor of the hood. It was an apparatus for the comfortable reading of microfilm. Turner took from his pocket an envelope containing several thin strips of celluloid. There were tiny photographs on the strips, each about the size of a postage stamp; when a strip was slipped on rollers between the glass plates a light passed through it and down to the floor of the hood, and there was a page, bright and clear for reading, the size of a book with large type. You could sit comfortably and read the page, and when you had finished you pushed the little celluloid strip an inch or less to the right and there was page two, and so on.

The strips were labelled 'Himmler money—Sachsenhausen'. Turner explained that it was a confidential report by Scotland Yard, giving the results of a study of material in the records of the Nazi S.D., the secret police of the Hitler regime; also from interviewing prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp who had worked in the enterprise of manufacturing British money. The report filled some thirty pages, and it took Lanny a couple of hours to read it carefully and make notes.

A story the like of which had never been in the world before, and might never be again—unless it should happen that the records of the Soviet secret services should be opened to inspection in the same way. With German foresight and thoroughness the whole country had been searched for expert engravers, printers, and technicians of every sort having to do with the manufacture of paper money. Only Jews had been chosen, the evident intention being to exterminate them when the job was done and thus to bury forever the truth about the enterprise.

These unfortunate experts were not invited, nor were they hired at high salaries; they were arrested and sentenced to the Sachsenhausen camp, north of Berlin. Once inside they were assigned to Block 19, a special enclosure carefully fenced off and kept from all communication with the rest of the place. Compared with the other prisoners they were well treated; there was no torture, they had good food and did not suffer from cold. They were under the charge of the S.S., the Schutzstaffel troopers, who treated them politely and even made friends; they got up a drama, in which some of the S.S. took part, and you might have seen the S.S. commander taking part in table-tennis games. But they were never permitted to speak to anyone from outside or to communicate or receive communications. When one became hopelessly ill with T.B., he was taken outside, shot, and burned in the crematorium; later on in the war, some of those brought in were wounded and crippled men, but all were required to work and were held responsible for doing perfect work. There was only one penalty and one kind of punishment—death.

'Sonderkommando Himmler' was the name of this group. It was continually increased in size, until at the end of the war there were a hundred and forty technicians working. They manufactured not merely paper money, but every kind of forged paper that could be of use in the German struggle: stamps, stamped envelopes, war bonds of Tito-Broz, identity cards for American and British airmen, passes for Russian police units of the N.K.V.D., identity cards for spies in Algiers, Russian and Swiss passports, United States certificates of nationality, Red Cross notepaper, passport stamps for all the European states, rubber stamps for all diplomatic offices, reports on legations from foreign agents, and so on without end. In command of the enterprise was Heydrick, chief of the Security Police, and when he was assassinated in May, 1942, Ernst Kaltenbrunner took his place. R.H.S.A. were the initials of the enterprise, meaning Reichs Headquarters of the Security Amt, or Bureau.

Expert engravers made the plates. The handmade paper was manufactured outside and came in sheets of four. There were four Monopol printing machines; five-, ten-, twenty-, and fifty-pound notes were made. When the printing and drying were done, the sheets were not cut but torn with rulers. This tearing was done in the Reisserei, and then the notes were taken to the Sortierei, where experts with electrical apparatus studied each note, and they were held responsible for this delicate task. First-class product went to the German legations in foreign countries; second-class product went to secret agents; the third was reserved until later, to be used in Britain after Germany had conquered that country.

Several of the notes were pinned together, that being the British practice. If tiny faults were observed in the notes care was taken to put the pins through those faults. One corner was religiously torn off because that was the way the British did. There were processes to soil some of the notes so that they wouldn't look too new. Careful records were kept of everything, and these showed that a total of 134,609,945 British pounds was printed. The records showed also that in the spring of 1944 they had begun the manufacture of United States notes made by a phototype printing process. In all, they tried two hundred and twenty experiments before they got this to their satisfaction, and by that time the war was coming to an end—and not in the way they had planned.

XI

When the invading armies showed signs of bursting through, the whole Sonderkommando Himmler was loaded into a caravan and transported to the concentration camp at Mauthausen, which is on the Danube River. They thought that was safe; but presently Patton's armies were approaching there, so they fled to the little village of Redel-Zipp. They had barely got their machines set up and ready to start work again when the mechanised raiders were reported nearby, so everything split up in confusion. The machines were taken out and dumped into a lake; the bales of money disappeared in this direction and that. The hundred and forty Jewish technicians were loaded into trucks and started on what they knew was to be their last journey.

But as it happened two made their escape, and the others started arguing and pleading with their guards. Since two had escaped the secret was out, and what was the good of killing the rest? The Americans were coming and they didn't approve of wholesale killing of innocent people; it might well be that they would hang all the S.S. men who did the murders. Moreover, there was money involved, and not all of it counterfeit. There had been genuine American and British money used in making imitations and comparing the finished product. The experts had managed to hide a lot of this; one man had a bundle of it wound up in a ball of string. Why shouldn't the guards share in this and scatter to their homes? This was the way the story ended, and this was how it came about that British agents had been able to locate both Jewish workers and S.S. guards and get the detailed stories for their official report.

The most curious thing in the report, at least from the viewpoint of Lanny Budd, was the effort the Germans had made to prepare against exposure of this nefarious enterprise. The office of the Herr Doktor, Lanny's old friend Jüppchen Goebbels, issued a manifesto charging the Allies with the very crime his own gang was committing. In December, 1942, at the time of the American and British invasion of North Africa, the Nazi propaganda bureau gave out a story headlined, 'Algiers Flooded by Forged Banknotes'. The story first appeared in a Rome paper, to the effect that the British had brought forged Algerian banknotes with the expeditionary force; the Bank of England had printed them and high officials of the government had issued them to British soldiers. Five-franc notes, all new in packets, labelled ' _Emis en France, série_ 1944'.

Lanny had heard these reports in North Africa and had wondered if they could be true. Now he called Turner's attention to the matter, and Turner said, 'It was a regular Nazi technique, and the Soviets have taken it over. Any time they give out reports that Americans have been violating the laws of war, using poison gas, germ warfare, or what have you, you may be sure the Soviets are doing it or getting ready to do it'.

XII

Lanny intended to see the President but learned that he was away on a brief vacation. He reported to the White House and waited at his hotel for orders, and the secretary phoned him that the President desired him to talk with Under-Secretary of State Acheson. So Lanny took a taxi to that part of the city derisively known as 'Foggy Bottom', where 'State' had inherited a big building from 'War'. There he was introduced to an elegant and courteous gentleman, a Yale man and Harvard lawyer, wearing a little moustache like Lanny himself. They had never met before, but they accepted each other at the first glance and understood each other after the first sentence; for Dean Acheson was an ardent advocate of the Truman Doctrine, which was in substance that the free world was not going to let itself be gobbled up or even eaten in small nibbles. Dean Acheson took no stock in the notion that the rearming of Turkey and Greece might result in war with the Soviet Union; on the contrary, he was quite certain that failure to rearm them might result in their being eaten—though he was much too well bred a person to be aware of any pun in connection with their names.

Lanny gave an account of what he had learned about Soviet doings in and around Berlin. He told of the incessant stream of abuse which Radio Berlin was pouring out upon its three former allies, especially the most powerful of them, imperialist America. Lanny knew that it was the War Department that had issued the directive forbidding R.I.A.S. to criticise the Soviets; but he was venturing to guess that 'War' would heed the opinion of 'State' on the policy. He made his suggestion that the time had come to reconsider this matter. Rigid correctness was apparent in every detail of the appearance of Dean Gooderham Acheson and in every syllable of his speech; the Soviets were our allies, he said, and the Germans our conquered foes, and the order of the day was courtesy to the former and a dignified reserve to the latter. 'To make a formal change in our attitude toward our former allies is a grave step indeed, and we are bound to hesitate before taking it. We have entered through the proper channels our diplomatic protests to one after another of these Soviet actions. Sooner or later they become known to our people through the press and also to the peoples of our allied countries. It takes time for public opinion to change; and you know that while it is the duty of administrators to lead the public, we cannot go too far in advance of it and so lose contact with it'.

'Yes, Mr Acheson', said Lanny, 'I learned that lesson from a great instructor, Franklin Roosevelt. He said to me, "I cannot go any faster than the people will let me". But sooner orlater we are going to have to make peace with the German people, and they are going to have to make their choice between the East and the West. The Soviets have set out to get possession of the German mind. They have got hold of magnificent radio equipment; they have got the best technical brains that are for sale in Berlin and are doing a first-class job. They feed the Germans music and entertainment with all kinds of propaganda interspersed, including the most vicious and cruel lies about us. All Germany is getting it, both East and West. The world is told that it is the Soviet Union that stands for unity, freedom, democracy, and peace for the German people. Research shows that they have about two-thirds of the Germans as their audience, and we and the British divide the remaining third. We ought to change that, Mr Acheson, and we can do it by letting R.I.A.S. answer the Red arguments and correct the falsehoods day by day as they are told'.

Said the Under-Secretary, 'I assure you, Mr Budd, we have been thinking earnestly about the subject. In strict confidence I will tell you that I have hopes that something may be done about it soon'.

So Lanny went out from the presence, and in the lobby of the building there were young men waiting for him with pads of paper in their hands and eager pencils poised. How they found out about these matters Lanny didn't know, but he said to them, 'I cannot tell you anything about what Mr Acheson said to me, but I will be very glad to tell you what I said to him'.

They settled for that.
12 THE INJUR'D LOVER'S HELL

I

Lanny took a plane to New York, and in order not to disturb the Peace Group he took a taxi from the airport to Edgemere. There was Laurel ready to be locked in his arms; and there was that newly arrived pilgrim from eternity, manifesting its firm intention to stay at this resting place as long as it could. This was Lanny's third child, but he had never got over marvelling at the strangeness of this method of getting life into existence. It seemed to him messy and precarious, altogether unbelievable, yet here it was. It seemed to him that if he had been consulted in advance he could have devised a number of ways that would have been more safe and convenient. He was one of those of whom the old-time Persian had written; he would have liked to grasp this sorry scheme of things entire and remould it nearer to the heart's desire.

Meantime here was this nursling, this bundle of well-rounded flesh, clutching and clamouring, being watched and carefully trained. They had named her after her mother, and she would be known as Baby Laurel; inevitably that would be shortened to Babe, which was not a dignified title, but it would be a long time before she would know it. Among her watchers, now and for the rest of her life, was her little brother, aged five and known as Junior. He was full of delight at the phenomenon and also full of awe; when he asked questions he was not told a story about a stork but about motherhood.

There were all the members and employees of the Peace Group to be greeted. They crowded into the parlour of the old-fashioned house to hear Lanny tell about what he had seen and learned in Germany. Later on they heard him tell some of it over the radio; nothing about counterfeiting and spying, of course, but all about R.I.A.S., a sort of distant cousin of the Peace Programme. He stated plainly his reason for believing that the Soviets were bent upon making world peace impossible; and that, of course, brought the customary crop of letters from the fellow travellers, including the grower of avocados and winter vegetables in Pahokee, Florida.

II

Another letter came, marked 'Personal' and signed 'Rotterdam'—that being the city in which Hansi Robin had been born and raised and from which some thirty years ago he had sent his first letter to Lanny Budd. 'I am twelve', he had written then, 'and I practice now a Beethoven romance for violin'. Now Hansi could play everything that Beethoven had written for the violin, most of it from memory. He wrote to say, 'I want to see you; will telephone at lunchtime'.

That was the hour when Lanny would be at the house, and it was notice to him to answer the 'phone himself. He did so, and when he heard the familiar voice he said promptly, 'Okay, name the time and place'. Hansi replied, 'Lexington Avenue and Thirty-second Street, north-east corner, to-morrow, two o'clock sharp'. Lanny said, 'Okay', and Hansi repeated the directions once more and then without another word hung up. They had agreed to take extreme precautions, and it was understood that Hansi was never to 'phone from his house but to take a walk and call from a pay station where he was not known.

Lanny allowed himself plenty of time; he parked on a side street in the neighbourhood and read a newspaper until a minute or two before the hour. Then he drove around a couple of blocks and exactly on the second arrived at the corner specified. There was Hansi, approaching on a side street, wearing a pair of dark glasses on a hot summer day. The car stopped for a few seconds, he stepped in, and away they went up Lexington Avenue, through the Harlem slums and the wilds of the Bronx, and on out into the country. Hansi sat slumped in his seat, as inconspicuous as possible, and they talked.

'Lanny, I'm in hell', said the violinist, slumped in soul as well as in body.

Lanny knew only too well what Hansi was suffering—having suffered the same things himself. 'What have you found out'?

'Bess drove to a town out on Long Island where there is a factory making proximity fuses. One of the employees of the company gave her a package of microfilm, and she took it to the city and personally delivered it to a Red photographic concern'.

'And what are our authorities going to do about it'?

'They are following it up. They want to get all the gang, and I have to help them. Against my own wife'!

Lanny wasn't too shocked; he had prepared himself for exactly this. Also, he had prepared what he was going to say to his brother-in-law and dear friend. 'I know how you feel, Hansi. You have to do just what the Communists have done, turn yourself to steel. You are rendering an important service to your country and to all the free world'.

Lanny said it, but it sounded hollow. He hadn't been able to turn his own self to steel. His hands were trembling, and he had to grip the steering wheel tighter.

'It's the woman I love'! exclaimed Hansi in the voice of the doomed. 'It's the most awful thing, Lanny. I have to make love to her; a part of me loves her and another part of me hates her, and I'm torn in halves'.

'I know how you feel, old fellow. Don't forget, she's my sister'.

'Oh, but that is not the same as a wife! And a sweetheart! She has always been both. It tortures me all the time. I don't know how I can stand it. I chose the wrong profession. For such a duty I should have been an actor'.

'Every artist is an actor, Hansi. You become what you play. Mozart or Beethoven, Paganini or Kreisler—they are such different persons'.

'That is for the time being, and it is only play; but this is something that goes on all the time and that I can't get away from. I am acting a lie, my whole life becomes a lie, and I can't help despising myself'.

'You know, Hansi, I have been doing exactly that same thing for a dozen years—'

'That's why I came to you, Lanny. You've been through it. But I'm not so firm in mind, so rational as you are. I'm chicken-hearted! My nerve is breaking. Honestly, I don't know how I can stand it'!

III

Yes, Lanny understood what was in the soul of this onetime shepherd boy from ancient Judea. He was suffering the ethical pangs of his people, in whom good and evil had wrestled for some five thousand traditional years. He was that shepherd boy David, who had been 'a cunning player on a harp' and had played before Saul, the great king. The son of Budd-Erling had never been crowned a king, but he had been a prince in the eyes of a Jewish lad of humble parentage; he had been rich and elegant, with all the social graces and the love of all the arts.

So now what Hansi wanted was to pour out his soul to this wonderful Lanny Budd. He wanted to tell the details of the mental and moral struggles of a man who had never lied before and now had to make his whole life a fabric woven of lies. He wanted to have Lanny tell him over and over again that it was his duty to do it, that he _must_ do it, that he must never weaken, that he must match in his soul the grim determination of Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, who had taken for his professional name Stalin, meaning steel.

Hansi had to make love to a woman whom he half loved and half hated. Lanny was able to assure him that that was by no means an uncommon experience, both in the _grand monde_ in which Lanny had lived and in the various small worlds he had visited. Hansi had to lie and lie and be a villain; and Lanny was able to assure him that that too was no extraordinary phenomenon in the world of affairs. Hansi had to learn to be one thing in his secret soul and something quite different when he went out into the world; that was an art practiced not merely on the stage of the theatre but on the stage of business and politics—all the men and women merely players. It was something that every fashionable mother taught to her daughter, preparing her for a career of social charm and the capture of a desirable life partner.

'Look, Hansi', said his worldly friend, 'you told me that Bess had been admitted to study at the Lenin Academy in Moscow, an honour granted to very few Americans. Did she tell you what they taught her'?

'They taught her the economic and political principles of Lenin'.

'Did she tell you they taught her anything about spying'?

'No, she didn't mention that'.

'Of course she wouldn't, because the first thing they taught her was that under no circumstances must she reveal to anyone but those of the party's inner circle what the true economic and political principles of Lenin are. If Bess was going out to be a friend and promoter of communism she would vigorously deny to everybody else in the world that the Communists advocated the violent overthrow of capitalist governments. Communists are always for peace, and it is the capitalist imperialists who threaten and make war. The only place where Communists talk frankly is among trusted party members; and if anyone were to voice pacific ideas there he would be immediately classified as a cosmopolitan deviationist and Social Fascist.

'As it works out in practice, no party member can be sure what any other party member really believes or what he is up to. He may have been sent to tempt you and try you out to make sure that your ideas are true to the party line of the moment. Also, thousands of party members are trained to become what are called "sleepers"; they remain loyal and true in their hearts and they report to some leader, but they go out into the world as non-Communists; they make an intensive study of the ideas and practices of some other party, some creed, some social group. They join that group and live as members and work subtly and secretly to undermine it.

'I had a curious example of that just recently on my trip to Berlin. In a social gathering I met a German gentleman of high position, a scholar and a true liberal, who had made sacrifices for his ideas. Present also was his wife, a charming lady who told me that she had become a Quaker; she had become convinced that the only way to get world peace was to take an out-and-out position and make no compromise under any circumstances. She set forth her Quaker creed, and I was impressed by it and by her; but next day I received a note from the gentleman, saying, "I feel it my duty to inform you that my wife is a Communist"'.

IV

Hansi knew about sleepers, it turned out. He was now trusted enough to learn about techniques and devices; his own duties had been explained to him, and he was being given a sort of trial run. 'Bess has been put in charge of me', he said. 'I am not to be a sleeper but to be publicly known'.

'That is because you have a name. There are many sincere persons who are gullible and let themselves be used by the Communists, who get up all kinds of organisations with high-sounding titles in the name of worthy causes. Or a group of the sleepers will move in upon some old established organisation; one will become a stenographer in the office and will rise to become executive secretary and run the whole affair. There are Civil Liberties sleepers and Racial Equality sleepers and Anti-militarist sleepers and Freedom of Immigration sleepers—to make it easy for Communist agents to come and go and to raise bail for them when they get caught. All these organisations hold mass meetings sponsored by a list of distinguished names, and there they make speeches in which they say, "I am no Communist, _but"_ , and they go on to advocate whatever set of ideas happens to fit the party line at the moment'.

'Oh, I am so sick of them'! broke in the violinist.

'I know, Hansi. Imagine how sick I grew of Adolf Hitler in the course of ten years. He would start spouting and work himself into a frenzy just talking to me, or anybody. He never knew when to stop; he would go on and on until I thought I was getting dizzy; but I couldn't let my mind wander for a moment. I had to be attentive and ready to put in a word or even a nod of agreement. I had to make a psychological study of it, to take it as a game and devote myself to playing it. You, a violinist, learn to play a cadenza; you know it's no good, it doesn't say anything, it's just a showpiece; but it's there, and you learn to do it with a flourish and enjoy the doing'.

'That helps, Lanny', said the man of music gratefully. 'I will try to take it that way'.

'Let me tell you something interesting that I read in an English magazine on my trip home. Some anthropologist was reporting on the practices of a New Guinea tribe called the Marindese. They are head-hunters but not cannibals; they don't eat the bodies of those they slay; they do their killing because of a philosophy. It seems that their children have to have names, and the names are no good unless they are taken from a person who bore them in life. The victim's head, which is shrunk and preserved, is merely a symbol of the name. If a child has to grow up without a name he is miserable and feeble all his life. So the tribe sends out spies to watch carefully the habits of some nearby tribe. They make elaborate ceremonial preparations, and then on a certain night they steal up on the tribe and in a sudden attack slaughter a great many of the men and bring home their heads; they also bring home the children of their victims, in order to make sure of finding out the names of the fathers who have been killed. So the Marindese children get names and grow up happy and strong'.

'The spying part sounds strikingly like Communist practice', commented Hansi.

'Yes, but with a curious reverse twist. The Marindese want to take the names of their victims, but the Reds want to give their names _to_ the victims. When the class struggle is over we shall be just as poor and miserable as they are now, but we shall no longer be American imperialists preaching the Truman Doctrine; we shall be Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist-William-Z.-Fosterites, living under the dictatorship of the proletariat and learning the Diamat and the Proletcult. All great philosophical questions will have been settled, and only details will be left; and we shall be back in the fourth century, when men fought and died for the difference between Homoousianism and Homoiousianism'.

'Oh God'! exclaimed Hansi. 'You should see the things I have to study and the lessons I have to recite! I am trying to please Bess and to convince her that I am seriously interested in this new mumbo-jumbo. I have to learn the dangers of objectism, practicism, opportunism, scholasticism, cosmopolitanism. I have to specify the differences between these deviations, and I have to promise never to fall victim to any of them. I must hold exactly the right and only true doctrine—which some professor of metaphysics in the Kremlin has dreamed up only last week'.

'And next week', said Lanny with a chuckle, 'the Politburo will decide that the professor was a Trotskyite, and he will be shipped off to work in a gold mine in Verkhoyansk, the coldest spot on earth, and you will have a new doctrine to learn'.

V

Hansi said it did him a world of good to have somebody to pour out his troubles to. He would go back into Hades and try his earnest best to acclimatise himself. He had to be told over and over again that it was an honourable thing to be a spy in the cause of human freedom; and Lanny pointed again to those black savages in the wilds of New Guinea. The reason the Marindese tribe had so many heads to hang in their doorways was that their spies were active and determined, while the other tribes had become lazy and their counterspies had failed. Eternal vigilance was still the price of liberty, and not merely in steaming tropical jungles but in the world of jet aeroplanes and atomic bombs.

'Look, Hansi', said Hansi's brother-in-law, 'I was a spy working against Adolf Hitler; I was trying to keep him from starting his world war. I didn't succeed, but I thought I had a chance. I knew that he believed in astrology and spiritualism and all that sort of thing, and I trained Laurel to pretend that she was a wonderful spiritualist medium. I taught her all about the Nazi "old companions", the only people Hitler ever respected and listened to; then I called up Hess and told him about her, and we were invited to the Berghof. We were in that mountain retreat, crowded with diplomats and top military men, all buzzing and seething like bees, and Laurel went into her pretended trance—that was the way she found out that she could really go into a trance—and she made the Führer think he was listening to Haushofer, and Dietrich Eckart, and the other dead heroes of his movement, warning him against going to war. We did actually cause him to put off the movement of those armies for a full week. We gave the free world that much more time to realise the situation. And who can ever know how much difference it made? Laurel and I were spying as hard as we could, and we were lying like the devil, both of us; but can anybody tell us that we weren't doing a moral action'?

Hansi thought it over. 'I suppose that only an out-and-out pacifist could say no'.

'Yes; you can be a Quaker, you can turn the other cheek to the attacker and give him your cloak too. I can't think of any nation that ever tried it, but we could try it to-morrow if we adopted the Sermon on the Mount as our code. We could announce that we would make no resistance to communist philosophy, and the Communists would come by aeroplane loads and shiploads, waving red flags and singing the "Internationale". Our government would step quietly aside and Foster would become chief commissar, and Jack Stachel would become commander-in-chief of the Army. They would last about three months, until the Politburo decided they were devotees of cosmopolitanism or scholasticism, and then they would be replaced by Russians. The workers would take possession of the factories, and in about one month they would all be put in charge of a commissar. The farms would be collectivised, and the same thing would happen there. In another three months the Politburo would have decided that Americans were incorrigible and must all be forbidden to hold public office. All our books on political and economic questions would be burned, and the Russian language would become compulsory in our public schools.

'Some of those things are happening in Central Europe now, and the rest will be happening before long; anybody who is willing to see them happen in the United States will, of course, say that I was wrong to report my sister to the F.B.I. and that you are wrong to spy upon your wife. What I say is that it is not your duty to let your wife go on betraying the military secrets of our country to our furious and embittered enemies. What I say is that you and I were born into a dangerous time, and we have to learn to fight the devil with his own fire. I admit that we have new freedoms to win, economic freedoms, but we can win them without sacrificing the old freedoms which are infinitely precious to us. That has to be our religion, Hansi'.

So they talked, and when they were nearing the city again Hansi said, 'There's no use your going down into that traffic, and besides it's risky. If I'm going to be a spy I had better be a good one, and I don't want anyone to see us together'.

Lanny assented and let his friend off at the nearest subway station, where he could take an express and reach Pennsylvania Station in a third of the driving time. Lanny turned westward across the George Washington Bridge into Jersey and so home. He told Laurel about the talk and about Hansi's state of soul; but he did not mention what Bess was doing, for that was 'classified'.

Laurel said, 'I'm sorry for both of them, but most of all, I think, for those two boys. Adults know what they are doing; but what can children make of it'?

Lanny's answer was, 'I have seen so many children suffering in Europe that I seem to be losing the power to worry about individuals'.

'That is getting to be true of everybody', replied Laurel, 'and it is a form of moral death. It may be the end of our civilisation'.

VI

A few days passed, and Lanny at the office was called to the telephone; it happened often, but this call was unusual—the voice of Bess. 'Lanny, I want to see you', she said.

'Sure thing', he answered. 'Can you come over'?

'I don't want to come to the office, and I don't want to come to your house, because I know I'm not welcome at either, and I'm bored by both'.

'Okay', said Lanny cheerfully. 'Name the place and time'.

'I will drive to your neighbourhood and make it easy for you', she said and named the nearby village of Beverly. 'I'll be in front of the post office at ten to-morrow morning'.

'I'll be on hand', he said. And that was that.

He told Laurel about it, and Laurel said with a smile, 'Don't let her convert you'. If she had had any idea that the effort might be successful she would have gone along. They both took it for granted that what Bess wanted was to enter another protest against the broadcasts, especially those in which Lanny told what he had learned in Berlin, including the determination of the Reds to drive their former allies out of the city.

Lanny drove to the village appointed, parked his car around the corner from the post office, locked it, and went for a stroll. Presently Bess came. She drew up to the side, opened the door, and said, 'Get in'. He took the seat beside her and closed the door, and after that she had him at her mercy; she could drive as long as the petrol in the tank held out, and he would have to listen.

But it wasn't what he had come prepared for. Bess's opening sentence was enough to send a chill all over him. 'Lanny, why can't you let my husband alone'?

He would have had to turn his head to look at her, and he chose to look straight down the road. 'What do you mean, Bess'? he inquired in as toneless a voice as he could manage.

'You know exactly what I mean'.

He might have said, 'No, I don't,' Again, he might have said, 'How did you find out'? But he didn't want to say either of those things; he wanted time to gather his wits; he was like a boxer who rolls with a heavy punch. He said, 'Hansi was my friend a long time before he was yours, Bess'.

'Yes, but he was never your husband. And I want to know whether you have made up your mind that it is your duty to break up our marriage'.

He had got a few moments to think. Could Hansi have told her? Surely not! The telephone call—at his end or at her end? Was there a spy in his home or in hers? These Communists were everywhere! Had they followed Hansi into New York? Or Lanny from Edgemere? He had the feeling of being besieged.

VII

There was a large elm tree growing by the roadside, offering welcome shade. Bess turned off the road and stopped the car, and there they could sit and have their argument out. Passers-by would assume that it was a couple settling their love problems, or possibly a married couple trying to settle their quarrel. They would hardly guess that it was a pro-Soviet secret agent engaged in a duelling match with an American counter-agent.

Bess came right to the point, as was her custom. 'Lanny, you helped to make this marriage, and I was boundlessly grateful, and thought I would be grateful all my life; but now you are trying to break it up, and that is a horrid thing'.

'You are mistaken, Bess', he declared. 'Neither Laurel nor I has the slightest desire to break it up'.

'You know that we have been quarrelling and have been utterly miserable; but now Hansi has come to an understanding of what I am doing, and why should you consider it your duty to ruin it? We have been so happy again—it has been like another honeymoon'.

'I assure you again, Bess, you are mistaken'. He could have added quite truthfully, 'I did not say one word to Hansi against you'. But that would have been admitting that he had met Hansi, and he had made up his mind in a quick flash that he wasn't going to admit anything. He was going to let her talk, and listen carefully, and learn what he could about how much she knew.

'Everything you say to him is an effort to poison his mind against me. You know that the Communist movement has become my whole life, and now you have turned into a fanatical reactionary. Every word that you speak is an attack upon me'.

A sudden hope was dawning in his mind. Maybe it was just the radio she was talking about. Maybe she had caught Hansi listening to the Peace Programme! 'This is a free country, Bess', he said, deliberately platitudinous. 'You say what you believe, and I say what I believe'.

'Yes, but why do you have to say it to my husband? Why do you have to meet him at all'?

So it wasn't the radio!

He did not answer, and she went on, 'What has he to give you now? From your point of view he is a softhead, a slave to a woman. He's a dupe and a dummy; he will go on repeating the Communist formulas, as you say, like a gramophone. Do you have to listen to that gramophone? You've got millions of people listening to you—why can't you be content with that and let my one man alone'?

It was a cogent argument, and he had no answer ready. The idea was forming in his mind that maybe she didn't know anything definite; she just had the suspicion that there had been a meeting—maybe from some word that Hansi had let slip. If she had had definite information that he had taken a long drive with Hansi she could hardly have helped bringing the charge. The temptation to boast of it and to frighten him would have been strong.

But, on the other hand, maybe she was being as careful as he was. She was by now a well-trained spy, and she wouldn't give him any hint that would put him on the track of her sources. She would be listening to his every word as carefully as he was listening to hers. He had an advantage over her in that he knew that she knew about him, but she didn't know that he knew about her. That was a subtle advantage and could be used only with extreme care. It was like a harvest which could not be reaped wholesale but had to be picked out grain by grain.

'Tell me just what you want me to do, Bess', said he. What you want me to do—not what you want me _not_ to do! That would obviously have been fishing for information.

'I have told you more than once what I want you to do, Lanny. I want you to let Hansi alone. He can be of no use to you. He is nothing of a propagandist; he hasn't the sort of mind that can deal with theoretical ideas'.

That wasn't true, of course. Hansi Robin, labelled as a Communist and appearing on public platforms before great crowds of Leftists, was a powerful propagandist, and incidentally a rich source of funds. But Lanny didn't say that, for it would have meant an argument. He might have said, 'I'll make a deal with you; I won't try to persuade him if you will not use him for propaganda'. But she would have rejected that proposal, and Lanny wasn't at all sure that the F.B.I. people would approve it, for the more useful Hansi made himself to the party the more quickly would he be taken into the party's inner circles.

What the half-brother said was, 'I assure you, Bess, I wish Hansi all the happiness in the world, and I wouldn't do anything to interfere with it'.

'Oh, Lanny, what rubbish'! she exclaimed. 'One would think you were talking to a child. Haven't I sat for hours and listened to you pour contempt and abuse upon my cause? Everything you say has been meant to alienate Hansi from me—and for years it has done exactly that'.

'I am sorry, Bess, if you take it that personal way. I have my beliefs, and you have yours, and both of us have expressed them. You yourself said to me the last time we met that individuals do not matter, only the cause matters. Don't you remember saying that'?

'Yes, I remember it, but I have to take it back; I was mistaken. One individual matters to me, and matters terribly. I have been wretchedly unhappy because I saw Hansi being separated from me'.

Her voice was trembling, and for the first time he turned his head and looked at her. There were tears in her eyes. 'I know, Bess', he said gently, because he too was a husband and a lover.

'I love him, Lanny. I love him with all my heart. I was so happy with him that I was in heaven. The cause that I believed in—the cause that you taught both of us—was a bond between us. I thought we could never be parted except by death. But then I saw that you were ceasing to believe in that cause, and then I saw that you were influencing Hansi against it. I was tempted to hate you, but I couldn't bear to hate you. I don't hate you now; I am only heartbroken about it'.

'Where you make your mistake, Bess, is in not realising your cause has changed. It is not the cause I believed in or ever could believe in. I was talking about social justice, brought about by honest means, by free and open discussion, and by the democratic process which we in America know and have practised for centuries'.

'It was a dream, Lanny. It cannot come that way, because the world is not ready for it. The capitalists would never let it happen. You face a situation from which there is no escape. You either have to support the revolutionary proletariat or see the world thrown back once more into complete and utter black reaction'.

VIII

So there they were, ready for their argument all over again. 'Listen for a minute, Bess', he said. 'You want me to face facts. I have just been in Soviet-controlled territory. I thought of you often during that trip because I had your arguments in my mind. I would say to myself, "What would Bess make of this"? Be patient and let me tell you some of the facts that I gathered'.

'All right, Lanny', she said; she had asked him a favour, and she could not refuse one. 'Tell me your facts, but don't be surprised if I call them White lies'. There was a capital letter in that word as Bess used it in her thoughts; it didn't mean what it had meant in her childhood, innocent fibs; it meant monstrous and deadly lies told by the forces of 'feudal reaction'.

'Let me give you just one illustration. Did you ever hear of the Katyn massacre'?

'Oh, my God, Lanny, are you going to tell me that stale old fantasy'?

'It is two years old and it may be stale, but I assure you it is coming back to fresh life'.

'Everybody knows that the crime was committed by the Nazis, and they have been making a frantic effort to pin it on the Soviets'.

'That is what the Kremlin has told the world, Bess; but I assure you it is a case of truth crushed to earth, and it is bound to rise again. Stalin deliberately massacred fourteen or fifteen thousand Polish officers because he wanted to make it impossible for Poland ever to be revived as a nation'.

'Poland is being revived rapidly right now, I assure you—but as a nation of peasants and workers, and not of aristocrats and landlords'.

'It is being done by the same method of killing and exile to slave-labour camps, and it is being done not on Polish soil, because the Kremlin has taken a great part of the Polish soil and put the Poles on the territory of the Germans. That is the way the seeds of new wars are planted, for it should be perfectly evident to you that the Germans are not going to submit to giving up their land forever to the Poles. Some seven million Germans have been driven out of Silesia and Upper Silesia and the other border provinces. And Poland is no longer Poland; it is becoming a Soviet satellite. The Polish peasants will exist by raising potatoes for the Soviets and selling them at a low price, and buying back machinery from the Soviets at a high price. That may be your idea of social justice, but it surely isn't mine'.

So they wrangled, and it was the same as it had been for the past two years, ever since the Politburo had decreed the end of the wartime alliance. Whatever the Politburo ordered Bess to believe, she believed. And if the Politburo told her that something was a White lie, she was sure it _was_ a White lie. As for Red lies, there would, of course, be no such thing.

Lanny said to her, 'I wonder, Bess, do you really believe all these things, or do you only say that you believe them, because that is the party's orders'?

Her answer was, 'There is no use being nasty, Lanny. We don't get anywhere by insulting each other'.

'No—but look. I see you following the party line; I see you shifting your point of view overnight, turning right around in your tracks and saying the opposite of what you said the day before—whenever the party line changes. Can it be possible for any thinking person to do that and not see there is something phony about it, something crazy'?

'You are talking rubbish, Lanny. I never did any such thing'.

'Good Lord, have you forgotten about the time Hitler made his deal with Stalin, in August, 1939? I knew Hitler and I knew that was coming, and I told you so. Don't you remember how you flew into a fury with me; you called it an obscene idea, a consequence of my associating with the rotten ruling classes. Then the deal was announced and all the Communists had to shift overnight. That deal was permission granted Hitler to attack Poland; and it was not merely a deal for that one purpose: it was complete co-operation between German nazism and Russian communism, which lasted to the very day that Hitler attacked Russia. For almost two years they were allies'.

'You will have to prove that to me', said Bess.

'If you do not know it', Lanny answered, 'it's because you did not follow your own party doings. Countless tons of literature attacking Britain and attacking the Jews were printed in Germany and shipped from Hamburg in Russian vessels to Vladivostok, and from there to America, to be distributed by the Nazi Bunds in the United States. Members of the German-American Bund received orders to join the Communists and work with them in the United States—of course for peace, to be brought about by means of agitation and strikes in American industry'.

'You seem to know a great deal about Communist party affairs', remarked the woman sarcastically, and Lanny realised that it mightn't be good to reveal any more.

He answered quietly, 'These things are well known to the public, and if you don't know them it's because you don't want to. It was by that deal with Hitler that Stalin got the eastern third of Poland, and to satisfy the Poles Stalin later gave them the eastern third of Germany. He had to murder millions of human beings to do it and exile ten millions from their homes; but that didn't mean a thing to Joe Stalin. Human beings as such mean no more to him than so many potato bugs to be exterminated with D.D.T.'

That was a mistake, because it set Bess to defending the reputation of the great Soviet father and saved her from having to answer for her party-line shifts. They wrangled all over Europe and Asia, and Lanny said that Bess was a gramophone, and Bess said that Lanny was a puppet of the Truman Doctrine and was trying to buy both Europe and Asia with Marshall Plan money.

At last she broke out, 'We're not getting anywhere! We're just hating each other! I didn't come for this. I can't make any impression on you, and I know that you can't make any on me. What I came for was to beg you just one thing: let my husband alone'!

He answered her very gravely and carefully, 'Bess, I have no present reason for seeing Hansi and I have no present intention of seeing him. I am perfectly willing to promise you that if I do see him again I will carefully avoid saying anything to turn him against you and to interfere with your happiness'. He could say that quite truthfully, for he knew there was no need to argue with or persuade Hansi on the subject of world communism and its determination to 'be the human race'.

IX

So she drove him back to his own car, and they parted. At Shepherdstown, through which he passed, he sought out a telephone pay station, shut himself up in the little booth, and put in a person-to-person call to Hansi Robin at his home. He listened in while the operator got Mr Robin, and then he said, 'Is Mr Rotterdam there'?

'There's no such person here', was the answer. That was Hansi speaking; it was code, arranged between them. There were telephones both on the ground floor and the second floor of Hansi's house, and thus a possibility of someone listening in. Lanny said, 'Call Shepherdstown 1438 immediately'.

'You must have the wrong number', said the voice of Hansi.

'I repeat, Shepherdstown 1438'. And Lanny hung up.

They had taken pains to work out this arrangement. Hansi was to leave the house and go to some pay station where he was not known, or at any rate would not attract attention. He was then to call the number Lanny had given. So Lanny waited, strolling up and down, near enough so that he could hear the sound of the bell, and meantime pondering a mystery. He thought of the people who were in Hansi's house and the people who were in his own house and in the office and what part any one of them could have played in the betrayal. He had been struck by the fact that Bess had not revealed knowledge of the circumstances of the meeting between himself and her husband. It seemed humanly unlikely that she would have failed to boast of her knowledge if she had possessed it. She would have tried to pin him down as to where they had gone and how long they had been together. It seemed the best guess that some party member, knowing Lanny and Hansi by sight, had seen them driving in the car.

A man came to the little booth and used the phone. This meant that Hansi would get a report that the line was busy; but he wouldn't give up. So Lanny waited until at last he heard a ring and stepped to the phone, and there was Hansi. Neither spoke the other's name; they knew each other's voices. Lanny said, 'Did you tell Isabella about our meeting'?

'Certainly not', was the reply in a tone of surprise.

'I was quite sure you hadn't, but I wanted to warn you. We must be more careful. She came to see me and wanted me to promise not to see you. I did promise that I wouldn't try to change your ideas. I can't be sure how it happened, but I am guessing that someone saw us. Anyhow, be warned'.

'There is something important going on', said the other voice, 'but I can't talk about it'.

'Of course not. Good luck, and don't worry too much about this'.
BOOK FIVE

Fate Sits on These Dark Battlements

13 WITH BLUSTER TO CONFOUND

I

There came a letter from Monck. He gave more details of that strange cold war that was going on with Berlin as its focal point. Berlin, the helpless, unwilling city—Monck compared it to the living prey for which two fierce beasts contend, pulling it this way and that and snarling at each other. 'Hate is a blind thing', Monck wrote. 'They are hoping to drive you Americans out, but they are only making you angry'.

Lanny examined his own heart and realised that this was true. Day by day as the news came in he found that he was thinking less about the Russian people, who were as helpless as the Germans, and more about those masters in the Kremlin, those men of hatred and lies who were making the name 'Russian' odious to all decent and honest people in the world. It was all so needless, so utterly senseless; yet here it was, the whole civilised world being kept in torment, torn in half, and perhaps doomed to destruction, by deliberately inculcated hatred, built up by deliberately concocted falsehoods.

Monck never wrote more than a line or two about his own work. 'We are making progress', he said, 'but slowly'. And then he added a puzzling sentence: 'The deaf French girl is at work'. Lanny stopped and searched his memory; he hadn't met any French girl in Germany that he could recall, and certainly no deaf one. He read on: 'She has met Ferdinand, and I think something is developing between them. That indeed would be a complication, and I wouldn't know what to expect from it'.

Suddenly it flashed over Lanny what Monck was doing—making up a code as he wrote. No code name had been assigned Anna Surden, or at any rate it hadn't been told to Lanny. Now Monck was giving him one. Monck had lived in Paris and worked with Lanny there, and both of them knew the language. He was making a pun on the French word _sourde_ , meaning deaf. He was calling her the French girl to give Lanny the clue.

Plainly he was suggesting that Anna and Fritz Meissner were involved in some sort of affair; and that was a curious development indeed. In Lanny's conference with Morrison and Monck the suggestion had been that Anna might get hold of one of the Himmler-money men, but apparently no one of the three had thought of the possibility that Fritz might be the victim. Yet what could be more natural? Fritz was there, home from school; he was at the susceptible age, and to a female spy on the hunt he would present himself as the perfect target.

To Lanny, looking down upon the scene as it were from heaven, this presented a complex set of problems. There was Fritz with his three psychologies—the Social Democrat pretending to be a Nazi pretending to be a Communist. There was the 'deaf French girl', pretending to have no political psychology—or was she pretending? For the purpose of her work she would presumably be a Nazi pretending to be a Communist, and she would be meeting Fritz on that basis; they would be two spies, neither of them knowing that the other was a spy. Would they discover each other, or would one discover the other without telling the other—and which would do the discovering, and which would be discovered? And what would be the result of this combination? It was like a chemist pouring two unknown chemicals into a test tube. They might lie together inertly, or they might blow up the laboratory.

Also, Lanny was concerned about the human aspect of this situation. He had adopted that ardent German lad, to make up for the lad's lost father; and now what was this girl going to do to him? Lanny couldn't be sure, because he didn't know the girl well enough. The fact that she had tried to attach herself to Lanny didn't mean as much as it would have meant in America, for Germany was a war-torn land and its women, especially the young, were frantic. For them the command had been given in an old German song: 'Rejoice in life while yet the little lamp glows; pluck the rose before it fades away'.

II

After the end of World War I the young Lanny Budd, disgusted with the results of the Paris Peace Conference, had announced that he was going to the Riviera and lie on the sand and watch the world come to an end. In those days he had been independent and fancy free and could say such things. Now, twenty-seven years later, he had watched another and still more calamitous world war, and again had suffered disillusionment and been tempted to despair. But he was no longer fancy free; he had a programme and an organisation and some thirty people dependent upon him and his decisions. He had to meet issues, he had to keep appointments, he had to wear a cheerful aspect and be dependable and confident and prompt. He took to taking long walks, to wrestle things out with himself and be sure of what he really believed and really wanted to do.

Thirty years ago the Russian Revolution had come, and, like most of the ardent young spirits of the time, Lanny had hailed it with hope. As Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution, 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven'. Lincoln Steffens had travelled to what was then Petrograd and talked to Lenin, and had come back to Paris and told Lanny, 'I have seen the future and it works'. But now poor old Stef was no more; he had died disillusioned and brokenhearted, as Lanny well knew. But Lanny wasn't ready to die, and he couldn't afford to show weakness; he had to think things out and meet the emergencies of his time.

The true Russian Revolution, the Socialist Revolution of the spring of 1917, was no more; it had become just another despotism, old-style with a new-style camouflage. The Soviets were no more; they were just a pretence, a propaganda device. The constitution was fine on paper and wholly imaginary so far as practice was concerned. Its liberal phrases meant nothing, and all the wonderful dreams were gone with the wind. There was cruelty and terror beyond any imagining of the Western world; there was deadly hate, animal cunning—and age-long patience.

With the help of the Western world Stalin had conquered all the states along his western border, beginning with Esthonia and all the way down to Bulgaria. He had blandly promised free, independent, democratic governments for all those states, and then had proceeded, no less blandly, to make them over in his own image by his tools of terror and fraud. This process Lanny watched in his daily newspapers. The chancelleries of the Allied states watched it also and made their periodic protests, which came to nothing.

Thus on the eleventh of June, 1947, the State Department disclosed that it had sent a note to the Soviet authorities in Budapest, charging that the Russians had taken unilateral action 'in most flagrant interference in Hungarian affairs'. Three days later President Truman, signing peace treaties with Hungary, Bulgaria, and Rumania, rebuked those states for their oppressive measures. Eleven days after that the United States sent a note to Rumania, charging that the arrest of opposition members of the parliament was a deliberate effort to suppress democratic elements by 'terroristic intimidation'. Two days after that the United States delegate to the U.N. Security Council urged the Council to permit the use of force to prevent Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria from aiding armed bands that were violating Greek territory. So it went day after day, week after week, and all the protests were spitting against the wind.

At the beginning of June Secretary of State Marshall put forward his plan for American financial aid to European states, provided that they would adopt a uniform plan for recovery. There was nothing in that proposal to threaten the Soviet Union, unless the U.S.S.R. was bent upon conquest of the other states. But the Reds chose to take it as a hostile action and broke up a conference with France and Britain on the subject. Czechoslovakia had eagerly accepted the offer of Marshall aid, but Masaryk was peremptorily summoned to Moscow and commanded to reverse this decision. He went back to Prague and obeyed the order.

III

So it was that the director of the Peace Programme changed his mind and decided to keep it changed in spite of all the protests of the fellow travellers and the sleepers who wrote him letters. Lanny Budd became a militarist. When President Truman called for universal military training to prepare American youth for resistance, Lanny was for it; the Republicans were against it because Truman proposed it. There was warm discussion inside the Peace Group, and they compromised on the open-forum formula. They would get some supporter of the President to defend U.M.T., and they would get some genuine pacifist—if they could find one—to oppose it.

In August the British set India free, and that was one of history's great acts of statesmanship. It was the action of the British Labour party and the Socialist intellectuals who had been for two generations its leaders and guides. If the Soviet Union had been a real Socialist state, with a real belief in democracy and freedom, this action would have met with thunderous applause; but instead there was thunderous silence. The Reds hated Ernie Bevin even more than they hated Churchill; for Churchill was a foe they felt they could beat in the end, but Bevin was the man they really feared, the man who could win the workers of the world away from Stalinism.

Early in the month of August the State Department issued the charge that the Rumanian government had violated the peace treaty with the United States by suppressing the National Peasant party and arresting its leader. A week or so later the United States introduced into the U.N. Security Council a resolution ordering the governments of the Balkan satellites of the Soviet Union to cease sending military aid to Greek Communist guerrillas; and this resolution was denounced by Soviet delegate Gromyko as 'the crudest interference' in the internal affairs of Greece. Next the United States denounced the death sentence passed on the Bulgarian opposition leader Petkof as 'a gross miscarriage of justice'. The State Department revealed that it had made another protest to the U.S.S.R. against the continued occupation of the Chinese port of Dairen in violation of the treaty agreement to vacate it.

Still more significant was the statement by the American general who headed the U.S.-Russian Joint Commission in Korea, that the Soviet delegation was attempting to 'usurp the functions' of the Joint Commission. It seemed strange to listeners of the Peace Programme that Lanny Budd should trouble to mention what was going on in far-off Korea; and when he explained its significance he discovered that there were letter writers who thought it was imperialistic of the United States to try to keep the Soviets from seizing a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan, but didn't find it at all imperialistic that the Soviets should be trying to seize that dagger. Both sides had solemnly agreed to permit the oppressed people of Korea to choose their own government in free and secret elections. But as usual the Reds were determined that the new government should be set up by the small Communist minority.

IV

Professor Samuel Goudsmit came to speak on the programme. He was a Jewish physicist, born in Holland, who had come to America when he was young. Toward the end of the war he had been appointed head of the Alsos Mission, a team of physicists sent out with a military escort to find out what German scientists had achieved, and incidentally to persuade them to come to America. Either the Americans would get them, or the British, or the French, or the Russians, and there was eager rivalry in this hunt. Lanny Budd had joined Alsos and had had some adventures; now they delighted to talk these over, for Sam Goudsmit was a genial soul, full of fun and stories.

But there wasn't much fun on the subject of the A-bomb. It was the biggest of all the bones of contention being fought over in the U.N. sessions. To every project or suggestion of disarmament the Soviets would reply with one demand: the first step must be the outlawing and destruction of those A-bombs. The meaning, of course, was obvious to everyone with brains in his head. Once the United States ceased to hold that 'sword of Damocles' over the head of the Reds, the balance of power would be shifted, because the Reds had huge armies and a flock of warplanes, whereas the United States had disbanded most of its Army and had put its planes in mothballs. The Reds would have Western Germany at their mercy; they would stage an uprising there and send in arms to enable the oppressed workers to defend themselves; then indeed Berlin would be an 'island'. There were millions of Communists in Italy and France, willing and eager to repeat the same performance. And once the Reds had got the Ruhr and set up the installations for bigger and better V-2 rockets on the Channel coast, what chance would there be of survival for Britain?

Lanny asked what chance there was of the Reds getting the all-important secret, and Goudsmit said they were certain to get it in the end; they had some very good German scientists and also a few good ones of their own. These men were being well treated and given every facility. No doubt they understood that the continuance of their lives depended upon just one thing: the achievement of an atomic chain reaction and its control for use in warfare. Lanny asked how soon this was apt to happen, and Goudsmit said he didn't know, and wouldn't be free to tell if he did know; the estimates of physicists ran from eight to fifteen years. Lanny, who was spy-conscious, pointed to the Soviet spy ring which had been getting atomic secrets in Canada and wondered if that same thing was happening in the U.S.A. Goudsmit, who was employed at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the new atomic plant the government had under construction on Long Island, said that he felt sure there were no traitors or spies in his organisation. It would be an awful thing indeed if there were.

V

Lanny was glad to introduce this learned gentleman to the radio audience; he was the accredited co-discoverer of the so-called "spin of the nucleus'. Lanny said there were so many marvels being revealed in this ultramicroscopic universe that it was hard for a layman to keep track of them—especially when he wasn't allowed even to hear about them.

Goudsmit took that as the text for his address. He said it was the tragedy of scientific life today that every group of specialists was walled off from all other groups. The tremendous discovery of atomic fission had been due to one single fact, the free circulation of ideas throughout the world. There had been little groups of learned people called theoretical physicists, men and a few women who dealt almost entirely with elaborate and complicated mathematical equations. There were others who tested these formulas in the laboratory, and if the tests succeeded the discovery would go out in scientific papers and often by telegraph to the other groups in all the lands. Each new idea was eagerly taken up, and hundreds of other minds worked over it day and night. But now the atomic physicists of every land were walled off as if they had been criminals, and their discoveries were jealously guarded as essential to national safety. No group knew what any other group was working on or what progress it had made.

In his previous broadcast the physicist had warned against permitting Germany to become a pawn to be fought over between East and West. Now he was more than a year wiser and could say that it had happened. Germany was divided into two halves, and the Soviets were setting out to make the eastern half over in their image, while the other three Allies did the same with their half. Goudsmit was sure the Germans would never give up their demand for national unity; but Lanny in the question period ventured to express doubt of this. He said that the modern techniques of propaganda constituted a new and revolutionary force and would do many things that had never been done in the world before. Each side would give its half of Germany what information it wished that half to possess. The newspapers, the radio, the books, and above all the schools, were being made over, and if that process was allowed to continue there would be two new generations of Germans, as different from each other as Germans were from Frenchmen or Poles. There had been a Thirty Years' War in which Germans had fought Germans, and why might not the same thing happen again? The professor agreed that it was important for the Western nations to get Western ideas into the Soviet zone of Germany by radio and any other means that could be devised.

VI

Monck wrote, 'Things are coming to a head. You should be here to see it'. He added incidentally, 'Ferdinand and the deaf French girl are watching each other carefully and making reports on each other; they are accurate, but not exactly what we wanted'. An odd situation indeed! These two young people, falling in love with each other and at the same time religiously keeping the great secret; each believing that the other was a secret member of the Nazi underground—or could it be that each believed the other to be a Red sympathiser? It made Lanny think of the situation described to him as prevailing in the cafés on the Kurfürstendamm, which were full of spies peering over one another's shoulders and trying to sell one another their secrets.

Boris Shub wrote, 'You should see R.I.A.S. now; you would hardly know the place. We are running twenty-two hours and really going places. I think the cold war will really be on soon. The Reds have called a German Writers' Congress, to be held mostly in their sector. Some of us are going to attend, and there may be fun. Why don't you come and help us?—you being a radio writer. The scripts you have sent are very much to the point, and we have translated and used them all. Two of them have been repeated by request'.

As it happened, one of Lanny's wealthy art clients was planning to will his collection to the town in which he lived and make it an art centre bearing his name. He had called Lanny's attention to a gap in this collection; he wanted a good and genuine Rembrandt, and could Lanny find it for him? It was a good time to be picking up such treasures, because the American Army had collected and returned to their former owners some two hundred thousand works of art which had been stolen and put into the collections of Göring, von Ribbentrop, and Rosenberg. Many of the former owners no longer had money to buy themselves food, to say nothing of paying taxes on their homes, and an offer of real American dollars would present them with a sore temptation.

Lanny Budd had been for a quarter of a century what the Germans called a _Kunstsachverständiger_ , which means literally 'an art-affairs understander'; he understood how to find such temptable persons and how to tempt them. He knew of two Rembrandts in Europe that he had once tried to buy, and now he wrote letters and learned that changed circumstances had made them available. He submitted photographs and their histories to his client and was told that either or both would be acceptable, and the price to be offered was left to his judgment. Lanny himself proved to be temptable. He thought, If those great masterpieces were in America he could take Laurel to see them!

All he had to do was to telephone Turner of the Secret Service and his credentials would be mailed to him the same day. He could telephone the airport and a reservation would be made for his seat on the plane. For money he could go to the bank and make out a counter cheque. After that he had only to put his belongings into two light plastic suitcases and ask Freddi Robin to drive him to the airport. So easy had civilisation made everything for its favoured sons!

By now it had come about that a man could step into a plane on a Tuesday morning and pass his time comfortably reading, eating, and sleeping, and step out on to the Tempelhoferfeld on Wednesday afternoon. It was as if in the course of a hundred years the world had shrunk to the twentieth part of its former size. A great many people had been unable to adjust their minds to the fact of that shrinking. In the great marble building on a slight rise of ground in Washington, D. C., were more than five hundred legislators charged with protecting the safety of the country, and a large percentage of these had apparently remained oblivious to the change. Now and then a group would vote themselves funds to take a trip to Europe or Japan, and this would be contemptuously described as a 'junket'; but to Lanny it seemed a worthwhile expenditure of public funds, if only to make these gentlemen realise how quickly an enemy could come the other way.

Settled back in a comfortable seat a mile or two above the earth, Lanny read in one of the highbrow magazines a sentence spoken by an English statesman, Edmund Burke, something like a hundred and fifty years ago: 'The arguments of tyranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful'. Lanny stowed that sentence away in his memory, thinking that it might come in handy at a German Writers' Congress to be held mostly in the Soviet sector of Berlin. And it did.

VII

The Congress was an elaborate propaganda stunt, carefully planned in Moscow and controlled by its military authorities. They were going to assemble the well-known German writers from all the four zones, indoctrinate them with the dogmas of Soviet communism, and convince them that it was destined to dominate the rest of the world. By a propaganda trick the enterprise was taking place under the official patronage of all the Four Powers. The sponsor bore the sober name of 'The Association of German Authors', a respected body founded before World War I, abolished by Hitler, and now brought to life again. The chairman was the honoured woman novelist Ricarda Huch, now eighty-one years of age, and the honorary president was Heinrich Mann. The main sessions were held in the Kammerspiele, in the Russian sector just around the corner from the headquarters of the Security Police on the Luisenstrasse; they were being run by an Army colonel called the cultural commissar. The Americans had no such official and were paying no attention whatever to the enterprise. No American writers had been invited.

The affair was in its second day when Lanny stepped off the aeroplane. He had barely time to arrive at the Savoy Hotel before Boris Shub called him up in a state of excitement. He wanted Lanny to come to his place to have dinner and hear about it, and Lanny did so.

He met several American and German writers, all bubbling over. They had gone quite innocently to the afternoon session, expecting to hear discourses on the announced topics, 'The Author and Spiritual Freedom' and 'The Function of Literary Criticism'. But at that session Colonel Dymschitz had presented a Soviet writer named Vishnevsky, editor of a Moscow magazine and author of a melodramatic Soviet film called _We Are from Kronstadt_. This gentleman, wearing his three rows of ribbons and decorations, had told the writers of Germany that the United States was planning a war of aggression, but the Soviets knew how to deal with warmongers; he had summoned the German writers and the German people to fight shoulder to shoulder with the Soviets against the American imperialists. His discourse continued:

'Reactionary forces in Washington and London are trying to create an "iron curtain", but the Soviet nation is watchful and cannot be frightened, not even by atomic bombs... Brothers, comrades, we know how to answer. If you need us, call for our help and we will fight together'.

There had been thunderous applause from the Communists, watched of course by their wizened little cultural commissar out of uniform. The German and American liberals had sat in stunned silence. They had left the hall debating what to do about it and had consulted with the chairman scheduled for the following morning, a German editor named Birkenfeld who happened to be more liberal than the Reds had realised. He had agreed that if an American writer would prepare a speech answering Vishnevsky, he would introduce that writer and give him a hearing.

VIII

A volunteer had come forward, Melvin J. Lasky; he had come out of New York's intelligentsia, and while writing precocious historical essays had earned his living by running the elevator in the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. He had come to Germany as a soldier and now was back as correspondent for the _New Leader_ and the _Partisan Review_. His age was twenty-seven, and he was entirely unknown to the Germans; it was presumptuous indeed for him to undertake such a task, but there was nobody else. Now, Shub said, he was shut up in his apartment, hammering away on a typewriter. They would have dinner and give him until the middle of the evening, and then go and help him translate his speech into acceptable German.

So it was that Lanny first came to meet Melvin Lasky, who was to become a friend. He was a medium-sized fellow who wore a tiny reddish goatee—something that intensely annoyed the opposition, since Bolshevik propriety required men to be smooth-shaven. He worked the night through on that speech, and Shub and Mrs Birkenfeld and Lanny helped him until the small hours of the morning.

At ten o'clock they were all seated in the second row of the theatre. Leading Soviet novelists and playwrights, all decorated, occupied the front row. There was the embittered Vishnevsky, and there was Kataev, a playwright and novelist who had once written a satire on Russia's crowded housing conditions that had been a hit on Broadway, but who was writing no satires now. There was Gorbatov, a Soviet writer whom Shub had met on the River Elbe, at which time he had tried lamely to apologise for the dreadful treatment being meted out to the millions of Russians who had been seized by the German Army and were now being taken back and put at slave labour by the Kremlin. Also, of course, there was the cultural commissar, setting the pace for their applause.

The correspondent Lasky was introduced, and he started tactfully and seductively. He congratulated the Congress upon 'the spectacle of German authors again meeting freely together, critically exchanging ideas and making plans to defend and extend their newly born liberties'. He waited while the Russian translator rattled off his words, and the Russians all applauded. He told how American writers had been struggling for 'honesty, frankness, and social realism in literature'. The Russians all nodded approval of that; it was the Soviet formula.

He went on like that for a while, and if he had stopped there he would have been hailed as a great writer. But among the examples of American wartime censorship he mentioned that we were 'not allowed to publish Leon Trotsky's biography of Stalin. The edition had already been printed and distributed, but officials in Washington thought it might embarrass relations with Moscow. During that time many honest and independent books which were critical of the Soviet dictatorship, the Communist one-party system, the Soviet apparatus of political concentration camps and slave labour, were postponed and withheld; but I am glad to say only postponed. They have all since been published'.

Those, of course, were awful things to be said in the presence of Russian writers; it was literally the first time such words had been spoken in Berlin, for Americans had been forbidden to criticise their Soviet allies. Looking squarely at the decorated Russians in the front row, Lasky continued, 'We know how soul-crushing it is to work and write when behind us stands a political censor, and behind him stand the police. Think how it must shatter the nerves of a Russian writer to worry constantly whether the new party doctrine of the revised state formula of "social realism", or "formalism" or 'objectivism', or what have you has already become passé and the mark only of a decadent counterrevolutionary tool of the Fascists'.

The cultural commissar arose and stalked out and was followed by Kataev, the satirist who had stopped satirising ten years ago. Other Communists in the audience began to interrupt. 'Warmonger! Throw him out! What about Eisler?' They shouted that again and again—referring to a Soviet secret agent who had been arrested in New York and was soon to jump bail and escape. But Lasky went on to finish his peroration about the function of the writer as a champion of liberty of the mind and spirit, and the opponent of every form of oppression. He included that sentence from Edmund Burke which Lanny had supplied: 'The arguments of tyranny are as contemptible as its force is dreadful'. So it is that the thoughts of great men survive and re-echo down the ages. So it is that, in the words of Shelley, 'Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind'.

IX

The Reds hissed and booed this speech, but the Germans gave the speaker an ovation. As Lasky walked down the aisle people crowded around him and grasped his hand. The aged Ricarda Huch, whose good name the Soviets were trying to exploit, embraced him and thanked him warmly.

Then, in the afternoon, when there was a Soviet chairman, the writer Kataev arose to fight for his cause. Said he, 'I have acquainted myself with the speech of the so-called American writer, Lasky. I am very happy finally to have met a flesh-and-blood warmonger face to face. We have no such specimens in the Soviet Union. This is a very instructive spectacle. I don't know what books Lasky has written. I know other American writers, but Lasky is completely unknown to me. I believe that if Lasky should ever be immortalised through a monument, the grateful Americans will mark it with the inscription: "Tomb of the Unknown Writer".... Today the decency of men is measured by their relation toward democracy and the Soviet Union. What the unknown Lasky has said about the Soviet Union is naturally a lie from beginning to end. Such lies are not new to us. Dr Goebbels also used to resort to similar methods to incite against the Soviet Union. How that ended is known to all'.

For weeks thereafter the reports of that literary duel continued to re-echo throughout the Soviet Union and its captive lands. It was a way by which suppression and oppression defeat themselves. In their fury the oppressors and the defenders of oppression fail to realise how they are making known the very facts they wish to suppress. The widely circulated _Literary Gazette_ of Moscow devoted almost a full column to the affair, describing the scene in these terms:

'The commotion in the hall increased. Outraged by the long speech of the "guest", listeners demanded that the demagogue be removed. Amid outcries of "This is unheard of! He is abusing the privilege of a guest!" the swindler was forced to stop talking, to leave the scene, and soon thereafter to disappear from the auditorium'.

But he did not disappear from the Russian press, and least of all from the Communist press in Berlin. They continued to heap insults upon him. They commented upon his beard, 'a cheap Hollywood imitation of Trotsky'. They called him a warmonger and a Fascist. The cultural commissar published an attack of thirty-five hundred words, longer than Lasky's speech; he found the young man's appearance 'repulsive' and linked him with the atom bomb.

The persons whom Lasky had been trying to impress were the young Berlin intellectuals, and among them there developed a sort of Lasky cult—they even went so far as to adopt his notorious goatee. For, in the words of Boris Shub, he had told young Berlin what young Berlin had been waiting to hear. He had cut through the sham humanitarian pretence of the Communist cultural front. He had spoken the truth, as 'the woman on the pedestal' understood it. Shub was alluding to that odd occupation by which the unknown writer had been earning his living on Bedloe's Island in New York harbour.

There were consequences of that Congress among the Americans also. Less than three weeks after the affair General Clay authorised his director of the Information Control Division 'to attack communism in every form wherever it exists, and to cite each exposed example of its day-to-day work'. So came that change for which Lanny had pleaded with Under Secretary of State Acheson; it became known among the Americans as Operation Back-Talk. One of its developments was the publication of a monthly magazine dignified, cultural, and literary, in the German language. Its title was _Der Monat_ , and the unknown writer Melvin J. Lasky became its editor.

X

Bernhardt Monck had no time to attend congress sessions, but Lanny told him about the affair, and he in turn imparted the latest evidence dug up by the Katyn investigation and the developments in the affairs of the Volkischerbund. Kurt Meissner was still in East Berlin and apparently meant to stay there; he was working actively to keep what he called the German spirit alive. He had insisted that Fritz should go on with his studies.

The deaf French girl—they smiled over this—was still in Wendefurth. She had made the acquaintance of one of the Bund, a man named Hans Schufurt, and was sending information; she didn't say how she was getting it, but so far it agreed with information from other sources. Heinrich Brinkmann, who was the leader of the crowd, had gone to Hungary. They had a printing press there, so probably Brinkmann had taken the plates.

This business of spying was like groping in the dark; every now and then your fingers touched something. You weren't able to feel all around it, you had just a tiny contact and you had to guess what it was, and how to fit it into the rest of the environment which you had touched. It was a dangerous environment; you were apt to touch something with a sharp steel point, or something very hot, perhaps a high-tension wire.

Lanny asked about Fritz and the girl, and Monck said that apparently neither had discovered that the other was a spy. They were separated now, and Monck hadn't questioned Fritz closely about it because he didn't wish to awaken the suspicion in Fritz's mind that Monck had ever known or heard of Anna Surden. Perhaps Fritz might choose to confide in Lanny, and this might be important in throwing light on both of them.

Monck, who had a secret way of communicating with Fritz, made an appointment, and the lad came to Lanny's hotel room, after taking precautions to make sure he was not being followed. His happiness at seeing his admired American friend was touching; he was having a lonely time of it, he said, and was in need of encouragement. Both he and his father were living in the presence of danger. Fritz was posing among his fellow students as a secret Nazi sympathiser, and more than one of these had disappeared from the college; the Communist secret police had come to their lodging in the small hours of the morning and carried them away.

As for Kurt, he was posing as a Communist sympathiser and trying to get the Communists to let his music be published, while at the same time he was whispering Nazi treason to trusted Germans; he was getting funds from sources about which he never spoke, not even to his son. The mother was taking care of six children who were going to a school run by a Communist supervisor. The mother had only one old woman to help her, and she had no idea what either her husband or her oldest son was doing. Lanny listened to the details of this picture and got a new realisation of the state of tension in which these one-time German provinces were caught. Soviet communism, American capitalism, German National Socialism, and old-style Russian and German nationalisms—it was like half a dozen tornadoes tearing a house to pieces.

'What's this I hear about your having a girl?' demanded Lanny.

'Oh, Herr Budd, I am embarrassed about it! My conscience troubles me. I thought I saw a chance of happiness, but, of course, it couldn't be. Nobody can be happy in these times'.

'Who is the girl?'

'Her name is Anna Surden; she lived in Wendefurth but I hardly knew her. She came back looking for her family. They were all gone, not a trace of them! She came to me to ask if I knew what had become of them, and so we had a talk. She was lonely and I was lonely—and you know how it is'.

'I know how it is', Lanny said, helping out. 'Weren't you afraid of getting her into trouble?'

'I took precautions'.

'Weren't you afraid she might find out what you were doing and talk about you?'

'She has no interest in politics, Herr Budd. I made sure about that, I don't think she knows anything about such questions. She was just a lonely, frightened girl and interested only in being loved'.

'Didn't she ask you questions about what you were doing, how you were earning a living, and so on?'

'She did, but I evaded them by saying that my father was taking care of me, and that I was studying hard, even on vacation'.

'Didn't she ask about your father?'

'Sometimes, naturally, because he is a famous man and everybody wants to know about him. But I assure you I didn't say a word that could make any difference'.

'Where is she now?'

'She is staying on in Wendefurth because she has no other place to go, Herr Budd. She wanted somebody to take care of her, and wanted to get some kind of work. She had a little money that she had earned. Then I had to come back to school; my father insisted upon it, and I couldn't refuse to obey. So I left the girl very sad.'

'She writes to you?'

'Yes, but I try not to think about her because I have a job to do. How can I think of marriage in my position? She says she will wait for me, but I can't give her much encouragement'.

Nor could Lanny give encouragement to Fritz. He thought of the man named Hans Schufurt, from whom Anna was getting information. Knowing Nazi men, Lanny was sure she wouldn't get much from him by remaining true to Fritz. There just wasn't any place for either love or marriage within the sweep of those tornadoes. Only one thing Lanny could say to hearten the lad; he could renew that promise he had made to see to it that no punishment should be meted out to Kurt as a result of what Fritz had reported to AMG. It was the gang that the Americans were after and not a crippled musician.

XI

The two Rembrandts which Lanny had come to inspect complemented each other in a curious and dramatic way. They were both portraits of the artist: one representing him as a youth, bright-cheeked and smiling, jaunty and with a feather in his hat; the other showing him as an old man, careworn and infinitely melancholy. The face was somewhat bloated; drink had been responsible for that, and the costume and surroundings told the world that this old man had managed his affairs very ill. His work, which the world now esteemed so highly, had pleased his patrons little; his fame had declined, and failure was written upon his features. To hang those two paintings side by side in an art museum would be to move the soul of every visitor, and preach a sermon concerning a painter's life and times.

The latter of these works was in a _Schloss_ near Hanover, in the British zone. Lanny would have liked to rent a car and travel by the autobahn, but he was told that the Reds had purposely let it deteriorate and it was badly pitted. They made all kinds of delays and trouble about the necessary permits; they were following a policy of pinpricks to discourage British, French, and American travel. So it was cheaper and quicker to be flown, and Lanny would require only British papers, which had already been provided by Washington.

In the bombed-out city of Hanover, now being slowly rebuilt, he hired a car and drove himself out to a country estate to meet a wealthy steel man from whom he had offered to buy the same Rembrandt some twenty years ago, but in vain. Now the world had changed, and the steel man with it. Then he had been a well stuffed as a German _Wurst_ , but now he was thin and frail looking; his hair was white and scanty, his face was lined, and his hands trembled so that he kept them on his knees while he talked. Yes, he was willing to sell the painting, but only for a high price, because it was the last of his treasures. It was a wonderful work, a famous work, and surely it had not deteriorated in value. 'Look at it, Herr Budd, and make sure it is what I claim it to be'.

Lanny, having previously investigated it, needed only to make sure that it was the same painting. How much did Herr Schlesinger want for it?'

So began an agony of soul. Herr Schlesinger wanted Lanny to make an offer, but Lanny said quietly that he never made offers. He had not come to haggle; the owner set the price, and if Lanny thought it was reasonable the money would be forthcoming in American dollars. If not, he had another Rembrandt in view in Paris and would travel there.

' _Ach, ja_ ', said Herr Schlesinger. 'I think I know the one you mean, but that is a painting of the artist as a young man. This one is full of character, of spiritual meaning'.

'To be sure', said Lanny, 'but the general public isn't spiritual. It is interested in youth and in pretty things'.

Herr Schlesinger became eloquent. He talked of how scarce Rembrandts had come to be—most of them were in museums and couldn't be purchased for any price. This one was peerless, it was really priceless; it deserved many adjectives and received them. Lanny was patient; he knew this was the bargaining process, and politeness required that he listen to every word. He didn't attempt to controvert any of the statements, for that would have been haggling, and he was taking an aloof and magnificent position.

Herr Schlesinger said he had expected Lanny to make an offer, and in the effort to strengthen his own nerves, or perhaps to weaken Lanny's, he ordered _Kaffee und Kuchen_. But Lanny didn't weaken, and in the end the ageing man blurted out that he wanted two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars for the painting. He probably expected to hear Lanny say that it was too much, and Lanny said it, and was very polite in regretting that he couldn't advise his client to pay that sum.

Lanny arose and prepared to take his departure. No sooner had he got up out of his chair than Herr Schlesinger said two hundred and ten thousand, and by the time Lanny got to the door he had come down to two hundred thousand. Then he followed out to the car and pleaded with the expert, almost but not quite with tears. What would he be willing to pay?

But Lanny was firm about it and said he never broke his rule; he said that all Herr Schlesinger had to do was to name the lowest price that he would be willing to accept, and if Lanny thought he could do so in justice to his client he would say yas. The trembling old man, seeing Lanny opening the door of his car, said a hundred and seventy-five thousand; and Lanny said, All right, he could advise his client to pay that.

XII

They went back into the house, and papers were made out and signed. Lanny had had four hundred thousand dollars put at his disposal in a London Bank, and he now made out a draft for a hundred and seventy-five thousand in Herr Schlesinger's favour; at Lanny's suggestion Herr Schlesinger went to the telephone and called the London bank and got the assurance that the draft would be honoured. Then the old man rang for one of his servants, and Lanny saw the painting taken down from the wall and put into his car. He bade good-bye to the steel man, and the steel man bade good-bye to his treasure, joy and sorrow mixed in his heart.

The purchaser drove into the city and found a box factory where he could have the treasure wrapped and sewed up in canvas and waterproof cloth and then boxed beyond possibility of damage. It was evening by the time all that was done, and he had the precious box transported to his hotel and carried up to his room. He wouldn't leave it alone for a minute: he had dinner brought up to him and spent the evening stretched out on the bed, reading the sprightly sad letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle.

In the morning the treasure was carried down and transported to the office of the American Express Company, which was again doing business in Western Germany. He had it shipped to New York, insured for its full value. That cost a lot of money, but the client had it. Lanny sent him a cablegram, and by airmail an accounting of the whole procedure. This having been done, the art expert was entitled to draw seventeen thousand five hundred dollars of the money in London and put it in his personal account. Then he was flown back to Berlin, still with Jane keeping him company. He liked her very much and thought he could have done better than Thomas, her crochety husband. He wondered if the General Graf Stubendorf had got through reading the husband's five volumes about Frederick the Great.
14 HANGING BREATHLESS

I

When Lanny got back to Berlin he found a note at his hotel to call Braun; that was Monck. He called, and Monck said, 'I'll come right over'.

In Lanny's room, with the door closed, he stated, 'Bad news for both of us; Ferdinand has been arrested'. Monck didn't trust himself to say the boy's real name even in a hotel room, because servants in hotels can be bribed and rooms can be secretly wired.

'Oh _no!_ ' Lanny exclaimed.

'Three men came to the room he shares with several other fellows. One of them pointed him out, and they put handcuffs on him and took him away without a word'.

'Soviet men?'

'MGB agents undoubtedly. They are the secret police in the East sector'.

'Would that be on our account?'

Monck's answer was, 'Let's take a walk'. So they went downstairs separately and met outside and walked along obscure streets, making sure they were not being followed.

'I've been trying to figure it out', Monck said. 'It's a complicated matter. The boy was supposed to be a Nazi sympathiser posing as a Red. He had confided to some of his friends that he was a Nazi, so the most likely thing is that they took him for that reason. But they will put him through their ordeal and make him tell all he knows'.

'Do you think he will talk about us?'

'They will reduce his mind to such a pulp he will be like a man talking in a trance or in a dream. He won't know what he's saying, and when he gets through he may not know what he said'.

'Oh, Monck, how perfectly horrible! Is there nothing we can do about it?'

'Not a thing in this world. He's a Soviet subject by conquest, and he's in the Soviet Union to all intents and purposes. If we said a word about him we'd simply be revealing that we are interested in him, and they'd set to work to find out why. We couldn't do him a greater disservice'.

'And we don't know how long we'll have to wait!'

'I know men who were arrested by the Nazis, and their families had to wait ten years. The same men were taken by the Reds, and some of the families are still waiting'.

'It makes me sick to think about it', Lanny said. He looked about him. There was a pile of bricks in front of a wrecked building, and he sat on it for a minute or two to get himself together. Monck sat by him, saying nothing. He knew how his friend felt. A man needed a tough hide to live in this new-old Europe. But Lanny Budd had not been able to grow that hide.

II

When they were walking again the German gave his professional view of the situation. 'If they think he is a Nazi it may not be so bad for him. They don't mind that so much now because the Nazis are licked. They may make him a proposition to work for them. If so, we may hear from him soon'.

'He won't sell us out, that I am sure of', declared Lanny.

'He'd become a double agent. It may be they'll set him to work on his father, without knowing that he's already doing it. That would be a new one even to me!'

'Oh, that poor boy!' Lanny exclaimed. 'I'll never be able to forgive myself!'

'Don't start getting neurotic', said the other in a firm voice. 'We are in a war, and you have seen men die. This boy knew what he was getting into, and he's done us a real service in tracing the counterfeiters to Hungary. Even if he had never met you he wasn't going to be safe; he wasn't going to be safe if he followed his father, and he wasn't going to be safe if he turned against his father'.

'I know all that', Lanny said. 'I warned him of the danger'.

'We all warned him, and he went in with his eyes open. It's happening all the time; just a short time ago the Reds took away half a dozen students from the university. It caused an uproar, but the Reds don't mind that—they want to frighten the rest, including the faculty. They come over into our sector and arrest Germans and carry them off at night, and we don't know about it unless somebody hears a disturbance and tips us off. They've kidnapped a dozen Americans that I could name, and in every case they denied that they ever heard of them. We don't get them back unless we are able to get exact information as to who they are, where they are, and who arrested them'.

'I've heard those stories', Lanny said. 'But this is the first time it's been anyone I know.'

'I cautioned you,' Monck went on, 'and now I want to make it emphatic. You have to learn what I've learned, and don't go out on the street at night without company. You're known as a R.I.A.S. man now, and there's nobody they hate more. You went over to that Writers' Congress, you're known to be Lasky's friend, and now comes this business of Ferdinand. The kid may name us, or they may already know about us, and they'll tell him what to say about us and he'll say it, believe me. From now on you must assume that you're a marked man; and I want you to promise that if anyone lays hands on you, you won't have any dignity about it, but scream like a wildcat. Make all the noise you can, and shout your name over and over again. That's your only chance, that somebody may hear your name and take the trouble to go to a telephone and call up AMG. It happens that way often, and then we start raising hell and the Reds have to give up.'

'All right,' Lanny promised. He couldn't help being amused by the image of himself screaming like a wildcat. But his smile died as he thought again of that blue-eyed, pink-cheeked German boy screaming. They would take him into some cellar where his screams would not be heard; they had rooms built especially for that purpose. They had all the torture devices that the Nazis had used, and new ones contrived by their own scientists. Lanny had known about the Nazis' from the earliest days, because Hermann Göring had had him taken to see the sights—just for the hell of it.

'You're too softhearted,' Monck said, knowing Lanny of old. 'A man has no business coming to this part of the world unless he's grown callous. We just have to write that boy off and look for another agent. If he comes back, it's that much to the good—unless his nerves are so shot he can't work any more'.

'I hope you got everything he had,' replied Lanny, trying to take his old colleague's advice.

'I'll never be sure about that. He may have had papers on him, and that would be bad'.

'Poor Kurt!' exclaimed Lanny. 'I suppose he has heard about it.'

'What I'm thinking about,' was the reply, 'is where I can find somebody else that can get next to Kurt Meissner. That surely sets us a problem'.

'That's one place where I can't help you', replied Lanny.

III

He said it and he meant it; but you never could tell in this strange business. He went back to his hotel, and sitting there in the lobby was a tall, long-faced German. Of all the unlikely persons in all the four zones of that conquered land—Kurt Meissner!

He looked older, poorer, and more beaten than Lanny had ever seen him, or ever expected to. His face was almost grey; and Lanny thought in a flash, He knows!

It wouldn't do for Lanny to know, of course, so he said cheerfully, 'Why, Kurt! Hello! What brings you here?'—as if he could have no idea that Kurt had come there to see him.

'I want to speak to you,' said Kurt quietly. 'I have come to tell you—they have taken my oldest boy, Fritz'.

'The Reds?'

'Yes. They came to his room and took him away'.

'How dreadful! What has he done?'

'I cannot find out, I have been to the police, I have been to the military, and they say they know nothing about it. They give me surly looks; it is an impertinence for me to come and ask. I am a German dog'.

'Tell me, what were the boy's activities? What were his ideas?'

'He was a loyal German, naturally. But I warned him that if we were going to live in the East zone we must accommodate ourselves to the regime; we must make it plain that we were non-political, that we were obeying the laws. You understand, a certain amount of camouflage was necessary'.

'I understand well'.

'But the boy was impetuous. He was young and inexperienced. No doubt he told some of his comrades that he was a Nazi sympathiser, as his father had been in the old days; and no doubt the Reds had spies among the students'.

'You remember, I warned you of that very thing, Kurt'.

'I was stubborn when I should have heeded you. I see now that I cannot live in the East zone. I think of how they will torture my boy; they may break him down, and the next time they may come for me. When I went into that M.G.B. building I knew that I might not come out again. I am not thinking of myself—life no longer holds anything for me; I am a wreck, a beaten man. But I have to think of Elsa and the children and what will become of them'.

'Have you told Elsa?' Lanny asked.

'Elsa is in Wendefurth, and I have not written her. I cannot bear to do it. She will go out of her mind. She adores the boy'.

'It's a terrible thing to think of, Kurt'. Lanny could share the grief for the fate of the son, but there were limits to his sympathy for the father. He knew how many persons had had this same anguish inflicted upon them by the Nazis—literally millions of people. Kurt had known about it and had managed to endure it without grief. But now the tables were turned; he was the conquered instead of the conqueror. _Vae victis!_ had been the motto of the ancient Romans; they had been a stern people.

'You remember the boy, Lanny?' demanded Kurt.

'I remember him well, of course; a fair-haired lad with blue eyes. He was tall for his age'.

'He is as tall as you are now. He is sound, and I have trained him to be a decent man. But how he will stand up under the torture I cannot be sure'.

'There is no use torturing yourself, Kurt. It may not turn out to be as bad as you fear. They may let him go after a while'.

'I think it unlikely. They are determined to root out every trace of the Führer's teachings. They will want to know about me and my associates. I have been doing nothing they could object to, but they may choose to believe otherwise; and they have ways of making a man confess'.

Something inside Lanny was saying, 'So you know about those ways!' A curios kind of satisfaction, to watch a Nazi taking a dose of his own medicine and making a face over it. But it was not a generous feeling, and Lanny put it aside. 'You must think about the rest of your family, Kurt'.

'That is why I came to you. You offered to help me get into the American zone. Are you still willing to do it?'

'I will do my best, as I promised. Can Elsa get a permit to bring the children to Berlin?'

'I think so. It would be natural for my family to wish to join me, and once they're in East Berlin they can cross into the American sector. The only question is, would they be permitted to stay here. To go back again would pretty surely mean Siberia'.

'I'd be glad to save those childern from having to be brought up by the Reds,' said Lanny. 'But you must understand, Kurt; when I talk to the military people they will want to know what your attitude is going to be. They don't want to import any more Neo-Nazis into their zone'.

'I pledge my word, Lanny,' said his old friend solemnly. 'I am an absolutely non-political person. I accept the fact that the National-Socialist movement is dead and that Germany is to be a democratic land'.

The German was looking the American straight in the eye as he said this, and it gave Lanny something of a qualm. He knew that the Nazis had lied on principle, exactly as the Communists were doing now; Lanny, as a spy, had lied to Kurt and had taken it for granted that Kurt, as a spy, would lie to him. But this was something more personal and more human—or so it ought to have been.

Lanny showed no doubt. He said quietly. 'All right, Kurt, I will see what can be done. You mustn't be surprised if there is delay, because our Refugee Commission has its hands full. Meantime, if I were you I would keep away from the Reds as much as possible. Have you thought where you wish to live in the American zone?'

The reply was, 'I should like to be near the General Graf Stubendorf.' Kurt always referred to him in that formal manner; never without his titles, as Lanny would do. 'He is living by the Tegernsee, and I have thought of writing to him but was afraid my mail might be opened'.

Lanny saw that he had to tell of his visit to the Graf. Then he added, 'He is living very humbly'.

'I know, but that is because he is an old man and needs attendance and quiet. But I believe he has another cottage nearby, and we might be able to lease it'.

'Are you going to need money?'

'Thank you, Lanny, I have some saved up. You do not have to bother about that'.

Lanny kept his smile to himself. Little did Kurt guess how much worrying Lanny had been doing on the subject of Kurt's money!

IV

They parted, and Lanny went at once to the genial Mr Morrison of the Treasury. That official was professionally grieved over the loss of a good spy, but needless to say he had no grief over the spy's father. 'It is a question of balancing gains against losses,' was his conclusion. 'Kurt and his mob are dangerous characters; on the other hand, if we have them in our zone we can watch them more closely. There are always anti-Nazis who are willing to watch Nazis, especially when they get paid for it. And if Kurt or his fellows bring their phony money to the Tegernsee we'll be in position to grab it, and them'.

'It might be easy to handle them in Bavaria,' Lanny pointed out, 'because it is a Catholic land and a great many people who were forced to call themselves Nazis were really not that at heart'.

'Quite so,' assented the other. 'Tell me about Stubendorf; could we expect anything from him?'

'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 price 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.

This Communist-led strike was nominally for higher wages; it was a protest against the rise in the cost of living—or, viewing it from the other side, against the depreciation of the franc. But it is hard for men to fly into a rage against an abstract thing such as inflation; they have to have an enemy to blame it on, and in this case the enemy was Wall Street, the American imperialists who were trying to harness France to their charlot wheels by a cunning device called the Marshall Plan. General Marshall, in his role as American Secretary of State, was the enemy of the toiling masses of the world.

There were a million members of the Communist party of France, and that meant a million men and women to make speeches in meeting halls and on street corners; to lift their clenched left fists and scream, ' _A bas l'impérialisme américain, à bas le plan Marshall_!' In the national elections, held the previous year, the Communists had polled twenty-nine per cent of the total vote, which meant five million French men and women would gather in crowds and listen to the speakers and repeat the carefully contrived slogans. It meant parades in the streets, with banners and menacing signs. When properly worked up the mobs would get out of hand, and bricks would be thrown through plate-glass windows and the contents of the shops looted. It meant a solid mass of men and women marching across a great bridge of the River Seine and besieging the Palais Bourbon where the National Assembly met, storming the legislative chamber and demanding the repeal of agreements for the Marshall Plan bribery of _la belle France_.

And it meant much more than that; it meant thousands of trained saboteurs, who had learned the arts of destruction in secret war upon the Nazis, turning their efforts against the American imperialists and their dupes and hirelings; it meant the goods on the docks being dumped into the water, and railroad lines being torn up and bridges wrecked to prevent the bringing of Marshall Plan goods into France. It meant munitions being blown up and oil depots set on fire. It meant all these actions, not secretly but as an avowed public programme. It meant women pleading with the police to refuse to disperse the mobs and with soldiers not to fire. As the final goal it meant a Communist revolution in France; the seizure of strategic places, the radio stations and the newspapers, the telephone and telegraph offices, the arsenals, and ultimately the government itself. It meant Moscow in Paris.

Lanny attended one of the _réunions_ , as they were called, on the second night of the strike. It was a somewhat dangerous thing for him to do, for he was obviously an American imperialist, one of Wall Street's minions, perhaps one of its bosses. He had signed a cheque for eleven million francs on the previous day, and that was as much as all the people in this hall might together be able to earn in a month. Many dark looks were cast at him; but he sat quietly, and when the others applauded he clapped his hands, and when the clenched fists were raised his went up too. So they let him alone; he might, for all they could know, be one of those eccentric American members of the _haute bourgeoisie_ who turned Communist and gave of their millions to the cause of the awakening proletariat.

He wanted to hear what was being said and wanted to observe, if not to share, the spirit of the French workers. In two hours he heard more falsehoods about America than he could have answered in as many days. The fact was that America had come and saved France from the Nazis, America had poured out her blood and treasure; she was still pouring out the treasure—and now suddenly this had become bribery, a seduction of the sacred virgin known as Marianne. America was Wall Street, and the Kremlin was the true and only friend of the workers of the world.

XI

Who was there to withstand this hurricane of hate? According to Denis de Bruyne, there was no one; but Lanny knew better, for he spent part of the day in the office of Irving Brown, together with leaders of French labour who had not gone over to Moscow. Brown was there for the express purpose of baulking this Communist _coup d'état_. If it were to succeed it could be repeated in Italy, where the Reds were even more numerous and more powerful; there would be nobody left in Western Europe with any power to resist, and the other countries of the Continent would go down like a row of ninepins.

Who was there to resist? Among them was a leader, six feet tall and big in proportion, with a deceptively round, jolly face and an amiable smile; an elderly blonde giant with light brown eyes and eyebrows, and a little moustache which had been a pale yellow and was now grey. His name was Léon Jouhaux; Lanny heard an American tourist, an elegant fur-clad lady, refer to him as Jewhawks; so in the cable he sent home describing this crisis he took occasion to state, 'The name rhymes with you-oh'.

The great General Confederation of Labour, known as the C.G.T., had two secretary generals, and Jouhaux was one of them; the other was a Communist, and for years they had been fighting the battle of French labour in their office. When the strike was called Jouhaux denounced it—and this was a hard decision for an old man who had given nearly fifty years of his life to building up the organisation. But the Reds had taken over and were running it, and it was no longer a French organisation, but a Soviet one. Jouhaux issued a blast on the French radio, calling the strike anti-French and anti-working class.

And so the fury of the Communists was turned upon him. They called him 'a lackey of the Wall Street imperialists, the Marshall Plan warmongers'—a man who for decades had been known to them as 'the General', who had spent the war years in a Nazi concentration camp because of his loyalty to them. Jouhaux saw this strike for what it was: a foreign invasion of the land. The executive committee had called the strike without even the formality of a ballot, and now the Red terrorists were roaming the countryside, breaking the heads of workers who would not obey them; tearing up railroad sleepers, heaping them in bonfires, then twisting the rails; wrecking trains, flooding mines, putting boards studded with nails on the highways to deflate the tyres of trucks.

The 'General' stuck to his office in the C.G.T., resisting the efforts of the Communists to expel him. His lieutenants came, young fellows whom he had trained and who now were even more determined than he was—pushing the old man on, after the bold way of youth. From his office they directed the civil war, in spite of the Communist threats upon their lives. All over France the C.G.T. workers proceeded to organise a new group of resistance. They called it the _Force Ouvrière_ , the working-class force, and during the two weeks it took to break the strike they acquired eight hundred thousand members. The loyal workers organised armed committees to defend the mines from sabotage; they organised groups to patrol the railroads; they guarded the barges on the canals which spread from France all over the lowlands of Europe and had been used by the Reds as a means of conveying spies and saboteurs.

Lanny watched the battle from the vantage ground of Irving Brown's office. Neither he nor Brown took an active part—for they were Wall Street imperialists. But they could give advice and could help to persuade key labour leaders that President Truman had no designs upon the liberties of the French workers. Lanny had been in Poland and East Germany and had talked with refugees from the Baltic provinces and from Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Everywhere it was the same thing: dictatorship called democracy and forced labour called liberty. France was the birthplace of liberty in the modern world, and French workers above all others knew the real meaning of the word.
15 IF THIS BE TREASON

I

Lanny didn't stay through the whole two weeks of the strike. He made sure what the end would be; then he saw to the packing and shipping of his precious Rembrandt and took a plane to Cannes, to visit his family and tell them the news. Poor Beauty! How she longed for peace in the world, and how little of it she had seen!

Then Lanny flew to Lisbon and New York. He didn't go to Washington, because he had nothing special to report. He went to Edgemere, and over the radio he told the audience of the Peace Programme what the French general strike meant to America and the rest of the free world. If you wanted peace inside your country you had to convince the workers that they could get a steady improvement of their conditions by the method of education, organisation, and political action. If you wanted peace in the outside world you had to build up the strength of the United Nations and convince the Soviet fanatics that they could not get what they wanted without war—nor could they get it _by_ war.

Ideas like this went out over the air, and a stream of discussion and controversy came back, mostly by mail, sometimes by telegraph and by visitation. There was bitter criticism, but there was also agreement and generous praise. The Peace Group would be satisfied if the bulk of their public understood what they were trying to say. The process of changing the mind of a nation, to say nothing of a world, was slow and tedious; it might take many years, and the trouble was, no one could say how many years would be available.

Laurel had much to tell her husband about the things that had happened in his absence: the speakers and the impression they had made, the plans that had been formed for new programmes; a stack of letters had been set aside for him to read, and also business accounts and reports. The group had figured on continuing their work for five years, a schedule that would permit them to lose about four thousand dollars a week; but they weren't losing that much, so they had to decide whether the world might need their advice for a longer period or whether they should spend more money to advertise what they were doing. The experts could not agree in their advice: Rick said he expected the cold war to last ten or twenty years; Bernhardt Monck was afraid it was going to burst into flame in the year 1948, soon to begin.

Lanny got Monck on the telephone and learned that there was no news about Fritz Meissner. Monck said, 'There's not a thing we can do. Stop brooding about it. It has happened to millions and will happen to millions more'.

There was no one in Edgemere with whom Lanny was free to discuss the subject, so he locked the secret in his heart. But he couldn't help brooding. He had read and heard so much about the torturing of prisoners, first by the Nazis and now by the Reds. He pictured that tall fair-haired German youth being questioned day and night by relays of tormentors; having bright lights shining continuously in his eyes, being hung up by his thumbs, have splinters driven under his fingernails, having his testicles crushed, or his food drugged, or being shut up in a space so constructed with sharp projecting points that he couldn't stand erect or sit down or lie down. All the time he would be told that there were worse things to come, and that they would be continued until he told what he was ordered to tell and signed what was put before him.

What would they try to get from him? The names of his friends and fellow students in the school who were Nazis or Nazi sympathisers? And would he be unwilling to tell about such? Or would it be about his father and the Völkischerbund? Or would they want to know about his mysterious visits to the American sector, and to a mysterious personage who had talked over R.I.A.S. under the name of Herr Fröhlich? Would Fritz assume that Lanny was back in America and beyond reach of the M.G.B. and its torturers in Berlin?

II

This brooding led to a strange incident and brought back to Lanny's mind a set of questions to which he had long sought an answer. Staying in his father's home in Connecticut during World War I, he had opened his eyes one early dawn and had seen standing at the foot of his bed the figure of Rick, who then was a flier in the Royal Air Force. The figure had not spoken, but it had looked so mournful that Lanny had been terrified, taking it to mean that his best-loved friend was dead. Later he had learned that this was the time of Rick's crash and serious injury. Some twelve years later Lanny had come into touch with an old Polish woman in New York who had the strange gift of mediumship, and he and Irma Barnes, then his wife, had taken her to Bienvenu and made her a part of their establishment. Another ten years, and he had divorced Irma and met Laurel Creston, and they had discovered by accident that she too possessed this 'psychic' gift.

She had not been using it of late, being wrapped up in the affairs of the outside world. Her thoughts had to do with the morning's mail and what had come in it, and what she was going to answer to this letter and that; with the problem of who was to be the next speaker and how he was to be approached; with visitors and employees, and a household to run, and two children to care for. As the poet Wordsworth had written, 'The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers'.

Laurel was lying on her daybed one evening with some letters and manuscripts beside her; Lanny was in his own room reading, and he heard her voice. It was a murmuring tone, and he assumed that she was dictating; but he hadn't heard the secretary enter, and there was something about the voice that caught his attention. He got up and went softly to the door and saw that her eyes were closed. He might have assumed that she had dozed off and was talking in her sleep, but he had never known her to do that. He took it that she was in one of her trances, and he went to her side and stood listening.

'... this place', she was saying. 'There are many people here. I do not like it. They seem to be unhappy. They are sick people. They lie about. It is a bad place. I cannot see very well, I think it is the darkness; it is not my fault. I do not know what they want or why I am here'.

There came a pause, and Lanny said very gently, 'Is that you, Madame?' That was how the old Polish woman had been addressed in the household of Beauty Budd.

'Oh, Lanny, I am glad you are here', said the voice. It was Laurel's, and yet it seemed different, though he could never be sure whether the difference was in his own imagination. 'I have not heard from you for a long time, Lanny'.

'I have been away and very busy'.

'Your old friends need you. They come to me and ask about you'.

Lanny hastily took a pencil from his pocket and a writing pad from the table by Laurel's bedside. There was no time to bring up a chair, so he sat on the floor, making notes according to his long-time custom. 'Where are you now, Madame?'

'I do not know. It is a strange thing. There are people here from Germany, but they do not tell me why they are here. There is a young man—wait a minute, he wants to speak. He has yellow hair and blue eyes. He is tall. He wants to speak to you, but it is not easy for him. He is unconscious'.

'How can he want to speak if he is unconscious?'

'It is his human part that is unconscious. His spirit wishes to speak. He says his name is Ferdinand; he says you will know'.

'Yes, I know. What is the matter with him?'

'He has suffered terribly. I don't think he will stay here'.

'You mean he has not passed away, Madame?'

'I mean he is unconscious, but his consciousness will return. He wants me to tell you—wait, he is speaking English, but he has a foreign accent. I think he is German'.

'Yes, Madame, he is German'.

'He is trying hard to tell you. He wants me to tell you that he has told nothing that he should not tell. He wants you to give him courage, Lanny. He is in terrible trouble'.

'Tell him I love him, Madame. Tell him I trust him. Tell him he has the power. No one can take it from him'.

'He hears you. He is trying to tell you something. It is a poem, he says. Something in English. It begins, "Hush" and it is—what is that?—yes, a lullaby. Do you know such a poem?'

'I know it: "Hush—'tis the lullaby time is singing—/ Hush, and heed not, for all things pass."'

'He thinks it is a beautiful poem'.

'Tell him there is a limit to what any man can suffer, and then he will come to join you, in a place where there is peace. Tell him to stand firm'.

'He will go now. I think he has gone back to his world—to his enemies. Lanny, talk to me a little, I miss you'.

Surely that seemed to be the utterance of the old woman who had been alone in the world and who had adopted Lanny as a son in her heart.

'I have been working very hard', he told her. 'There is another war threatened, and Laurel and I are doing what we can to prevent it'.

'Do not forget me, Lanny. I need to be remembered. All of us do'.

III

The voice died away, and that was the end. Lanny sat waiting; presently Laurel sighed once or twice, gave a couple of feeble groans, and at last opened her eyes. She looked at him with a touch of wonder. 'I fell asleep', she said.

'No', he told her, 'you were in a trance. Madame came'.

She sat up at once, wide awake, always curious about this fascinating experience. 'Tell me what happened?'

'The strangest thing you could imagine', he answered. 'I can't tell you all because it has to do with things I must not talk about. It is a man who is in the hands of the Reds. He gave his name and made it plain that he is suffering. It's mixed up in a curious way. He said I had quoted a poem to him'.

This was the problem that had been haunting Lanny's mind for just about thirty years. He didn't know the answer and feared that he was never going to know it. He found in his mind a strong resistance to the idea of 'spirits'; he didn't want to believe that it was the voice of Madame Zyszynski to which he had been listening. He didn't want to believe that any of the details had come from her mind. In this particular case it was obvious that there was nothing in the communication which had not been in Lanny's mind. There were his memories of Madame herself; there was the substance of his brooding over the fate of Fritz Meissner, and, of course, the boy's code name; finally, there was the poem called 'Scythe Song' by Andrew Lang, which Lanny had come upon reprinted in an English magazine and had cut out because he liked it.

Hush—'tis the lullaby time is singing—

Hush, and heed not, for all things pass;

Hush, ah hush! and the scythes are swinging

Over the clover, over the grass!

That song had something to convey on the subject of man's destiny and his attitude toward what he was powerless to change. There was nothing new about it; nearly three thousand years earlier the prophet Isaiah had stated, 'All flesh is grass'; the Psalmist had sung, 'As for man his days are as grass; as a flower of the field so he flourisheth'.

And when the human grass was mown, did it dry up and turn to dust and disappear? Comman sense declared it so; but common sense was faring badly in the modern world. Two centuries ago the philosopher Immanuel Kant had announced that time was not an ultimate reality but merely a form of human thought; and recently the formulas of Albert Einstein had confirmed this. Einstein had announced that space is curved; and what could common sense make of that? To say that time was a mode of thought appeared to imply that all things which had ever existed, and that things which were going to exist already existed.

Common sense apparently found it easier to believe in telepathy; but what was it, and how did it work? Apparently there was some method by which Laurel in a state of trance and without knowing it could dip into her husband's mind and take from it things of which he was not consciously thinking at the moment and of which she would have no memory when she came out of the trance. Lanny had never mentioned the poem to her and very certainly he had never spoken the name Ferdinand.

He told her now that he knew a German who had been arrested by the Reds and that Madame had talked about him. Laurel said, 'Our minds are one'; and she didn't mean just her mind and Lanny's, she meant the mind of the German and perhaps also the mind of Madame, which might still be existing under some mode other than that of time. Lanny referred to a statement of America's most honoured psychologist, William James, who had spent years investigating the case of a Boston lady, Mrs Piper, a trance medium who was never exposed or accused of fraud. He had written that the case left you a choice between two alternatives: you could believe that Mrs Piper had communications from the dead, or that she had access to the minds and memories of every person living upon earth.

Lanny went off by himself and thought about the problem from his own special point of view. Had he learned anything about Fritz Meissner? If any part of the communication had come out of the young fellow's mind, it meant that he had been tortured into unconsciousness. What an odd idea, that when he had lost consciousness his subconsciousness could communicate with a medium! And then, perhaps, when he came back to what we call life, he could no longer do it! Common sense might call that fantastic; but after all, wasn't the very idea of a subconscious mind fantastic? All the psychologists agreed that such a mind existed; but wasn't consciousness the very essence of mind as we conceive it?

The psychologists of materialism conceived of mind as electrons or electrical forces composing the atoms of brain cells. Something set off a spark, something caused a change in the position of those electrons, and a new idea popped into your head. And you yourself, investigating the phenomenon, you with your hopes and fears, intellectual curiosities and moral purposes, you were nothing but trillions of electrons which happened to form accidental combinations; and so you founded an empire, or wrote a book, or composed a symphony. That was common sense.

IV

Now and then when Lanny was in New York he would pick up a copy of the _Daily Worker_ on a news stand, because he wanted to know what the Communists were doing and saying. He read that Hansi Robin was giving a concert in one of the large halls on the East side, and when he told Laurel about it she said, 'Let's go and hear him'. She was free now, for the baby was weaned and had a dependable nurse.

They said nothing to anyone about this project, for they were supposed to be cool toward the Hansibesses. They didn't have any Communists on their Peace staff, and Laurel wanted to make it plain that they had no tolerance for them. But when they were alone they talked a great deal about Hansi and wondered how he was getting along. He must be a lonely man indeed, but Lanny hesitated to try to see him again.

They motored into the city, had dinner at one of the hotels, and then drove to the neighbourhood of the hall. Their car was not conspicuous, for a number of people came from uptown to hear this violin virtuoso. Lanny bought seats in the balcony, where they would be less apt to be seen by anyone who knew them. About them was a crowd, mostly young people, and nearly all foreigners or of foreign descent. They were, as they proclaimed themselves, 'the wretched of the earth'. That was nothing to their discredit in the eyes of two ardent friends of social justice. They become objects of distaste only when they espoused a programme of hatred and cruelty.

Many, of course, were there for music and that alone, music having no class divisions and knowing no class enemies. When the tall, blackclad figure of Hansi Robin appeared upon the stage they greeted him with vigorous applause and kept it up; there was no way to tell how many were applauding a musical magician who would lead them into a land of dreams, and how many were hailing the new, the real, the very imminent social revolution.

Hansi had got himself a young man as accompanist. He had done this at the party's orders, so he had told Lanny. Hansi was a 'name character', as the jargon had it; he was to be exploited for his fame and his earning capacity.

Bess, on the other hand, had become a secret worker. She had given up her party card and was no longer listed as a member. Such persons never appear in public and are never mentioned in the party press. The party didn't go so far as to order her to divorce her husband, but they were not permitted to appear in public together. She would never again enter any party headquarters or be seen with a known party official. For her to enter the Russian Consulate or the Amtorg office would have been unthinkable.

Hansi Robin never spoke from the platform; he let the music speak, and if there was any 'class angling' it was supplied by the imagination of the audience. Hansi seldom played Bach or other music in which the element of structure was important; he played tumultuous music, music of passion, and whether it was Paganini or Tchaikovsky, Berlioz or Prokofiev, the hearers made their own interpretations of it; they marched to battle with it, they stormed the barricades with it, they shouted with its rage or its triumph. And when Hansi reached the climax they rose and gave him such an ovation as only a conquering commissar receives. The mob spirit flamed so high that it frightened Laurel, and she whispered to her husband, 'He should not go on with it! He is doing more harm than good!'

The crowd clamoured for encore after encore, and at last when Hansi was tired he played 'Home, Sweet Home', and the show broke up with laughter. They crowded to the platform before he could make his escape. Women were in the forefront. It was always that way; they went crazy over him. He stood with the fiddle in his left hand and the bow in his right hand, holding them in front of him defensively. 'They cannot storm the breastworks', he had said to Lanny and Laurel with his quiet humour. By holding the instruments he made sure that nobody could get to shake his hands and ruin them.

The two friends did not try to approach him. Bess might be there, or she would have a party representative to take care of him and watch him. So precious a piece of freight would never be left alone. One or more of them would drive him out to his home. They would be proud of the opportunity and afterward would boast of the intimacy. They would plaster him with flattery on the way, and he would not enjoy it.

V

Driving back to Jersey, Laurel said, 'You ought to see him, Lanny, and cheer him up. He is having such a miserable life'.

So late the next morning, the time when Bess was apt to be gone about her business and Hansi either practising or composing, Lanny drove to a nearby town and dropped some coins into the box of a pay station. He disguised his voice and asked, 'Who is that?' If it had been anyone but Hansi he was prepared to say, 'Wrong number', and hang up.

But it was Hansi, and Lanny said quickly, 'North end of the Mall in Central Park, ten o'clock tomorrow morning'. Hansi said, 'Right', and that was all. It had been done so quickly that Lanny felt sure no spy could have heard it.

He had picked out that spot because only nursemaids and children were likely to be there; the Communists would be busy with their jobs on a weekday morning and not apt to be strolling in the middle of Central Park. He got there a bit ahead of time and sat buried in the reading of his newspaper. He did not look up when a taxicab came along the other side of the drive and a man got out, paid the driver, and took a little stroll until the taxi had disappeared. Then he came over and hopped in beside Lanny and away they went. There really seemed no chance that they could be caught this time.

Lanny drove rapidly north, out of the park and up to the George Washington Bridge. On the other side was the drive that went up the Hudson River; beautiful scenery, but they wouldn't think about it for long. They would have lunch in some obscure café and make a day of it, if Hansi could spare the time, which he did. 'I'll have to say I've been to a movie', he explained. 'Have you seen one recently?' As it happened, Lanny had read about one, so he told the plot and the names of the stars, enough detail so that Hansi would be able to answer his wife's questions.

'You've no idea how closely she watches me', he said. 'We live in a state of siege, and she doesn't let the enemy get near me'.

'You haven't managed to convince her yet?'

'It's a case of off-again, on-again; one day she is satisfied and very affectionate and happy; the next day she is assailed by doubts and watches me like a hawk. She is more afraid of you than of anybody else'.

They talked about the mysterious betrayal of their previous assignation. Hansi said that the two servants in their home were both comrades, and it was entirely possible that Bess had had them keep watch over a wayward husband; but he didn't think they had overheard that telephone conversation. It was easier for him to believe that someone who knew Bess had observed the meeting at the Lexington Avenue corner. 'The Mall is a much better place', he said. 'Let's meet there in the future'. So they agreed.

Lanny told of having been to the concert and of his reaction and Laurel's. Hansi said, 'For the comrades it is "comes the revolution"; but there are always some music lovers, and I play for them. Of course, when Bess asks me to play something, that is a command, and I obey; she is the one I have to please. I don't know whether she has been officially appointed my party boss, but she has taken that role and controls my affairs'.

'Have you managed to toughen your skin, Hansi?'

'It is a terrible life. I haven't a single human being I can talk to frankly—I mean, excepting you, and I am afraid to see you. Post won't let me come to the office any more; you gave him a scare. He says I'm too well known and too important; so I have to meet a man in a car as I meet you. I give him what material I have, and he gives me orders, and that does for another week unless I strike something urgent'.

'How long do they expect you to go on with this?'

'They don't know, Lanny; at any rate they don't tell me. It depends on circumstances. They are on the trail of a network of spies. I have been able to guide them to a place in New York where the microfilm is developed, and you can imagine how important that is. The trail leads right up to one of the principal Consulate people'.

'What will they do to him?'

'They can't do anything but put him out; he has diplomatic immunity. But there are others who can be jailed. I suppose the government people are playing them along until they make out a perfect case'.

'Isn't it possible the Reds may be getting vitally important evidence in the meantime?'

'They don't tell me much about it, but I gather they are playing the Reds for suckers. They are supplying them with information that looks good but isn't. You can see how it must be in some big industry, carrying on research to perfect a new invention or a technique. They try various schemes that don't work out. Sometimes they go a long way; they get formulas, blueprints, working models, all kinds of things that cost a lot of money and then don't pay off. They are getting a lot of those things together and making it possible for the spies to steal them; the Soviet people are just gobbling them up, paying money for them and flying them to Moscow by special couriers. It means they will waste a lot of time and money and get nowhere. Then maybe they will shoot the spies and save us the trouble'.

'This world gets more like a melodrama every day I live in it', said Lanny. 'We must learn to take it as a show, Hansi'.

'I'm trying to', was the reply, 'but it's not my temperament. I guess I'm too emotional. I'm trying to discipline myself; but what it will do to my music I don't know'.

Said Lanny. 'Your fiddle wouldn't be of much use to you if you were shipped off to Siberia and put to work in a coal mine'.

VI

Lanny told a little about the case of Fritz Meissner, not naming or describing him, simply saying that he was a German who had been doing espionage work for the Americans and had disappeared without a trace. 'Here in New York', Lanny said, 'it is just a class war, but there it's both class war and national war. It's so close and so hot that you can feel the enemy's breath in your face'.

He described the events of the Writers' Congress and told of the new decision, that R.I.A.S. was to fight back against the Red slanders. He told about his visit to Paris and the scenes he had witnessed there. Thorez, the leader of the Communists, had remarked, 'This is not a strike, it is a battle'.

These stories were of vital importance to Hansi; they gave him fresh courage and made him realise that he was not alone in the world; that he was right in what he was doing; and especially that he was right in deceiving his wife and bringing her efforts to failure. Lanny knew Bess; he had known her from her childhood, close to a decade before Hansi had entered her life.

'Can you bear to have me talk frankly about her?' asked the musician.

Lanny said, 'The last time I talked to her I could have boxed her ears'.

'She regards me as her trophy, Lanny. She wears me as a military man wears his decorations. She is proud of me and exhibits me, but at the same time I am her property, and if I were to change my mind I would be a robber. She takes care of me the same way she would take care of a diamond tiara; she watches everybody who comes near me. If she sees a woman showing too great interest in me she wants to tear her hair out, or her eyes'.

'The Communist women, I imagine, are not much troubled by timidity'.

'Oh, my God! The Communist women are trained from girlhood to go after men and bring them in; to seduce them; indoctrinate them, compromise them—anything to get them into the movement. The Communist boss will point out a target, a man who has something the party wants—a lawyer who will defend them, a legislator who will vote for a bill, a reporter who will write up their stories, a labour leader who will call a strike, or just an ordinary rich man who will put up the funds for their fellow-traveller organisations, their papers, their Workers' Aid, or whatever it may be'.

'Has Bess become like that, Hansi?'

'How can I know? Bess goes off for an hour, a day, or a week, and when she comes back she doesn't say where she has been; the words "party work" are supposed to cover everything. But she questions me on where I've been and what I've been doing, and I have to answer her. I have to keep her satisfied at all hazards; my progress and usefulness in the party depend upon her support. The party bigwigs ask her if I can be trusted, and if she doesn't say yes, then I am out'.

'They are terrible people, Hansi!'

'There are some good people among them; people who come in believing the propaganda that they love the workers, that they believe in peace, and that all they seek is the abolition of poverty and exploitation. Sometimes it takes a year or two, but in the end the good people find out what the party really is and get out. But meantime they have joined some of the front organisations, they have let their names be used, they have even taken out party cards—and so they are ruined for life. They have the fear hanging over them that they will be exposed and will lose their jobs, their influence, their careers'.

'It's the dogma that brings out the worst in them, Hansi. At least that's the conclusion I've come to'.

'It's the teaching and the practice of hatred. I have watched it—I have become an expert in this study of hatred. It ruins the minds of both men and women. They say they hate only their class enemies, but it doesn't work that way. They get into a dispute over party doctrine and in no time at all they are hating the persons who hold the wrong ideas. They seek power and are jealous of those who get it. They can't have the smallest conference or party meeting without hurling accusations at each other, calling each other abusive names—deviationist, Social Fascist, Trotskyite, traitor to the working class, lackey of Wall Street, renegade, betrayer, and so on without end. They are full of suspicion, they attribute bad motives to everybody. They cultivate bad manners, which they consider the proper proletarian signature. I listen to them in amazement and wonder where all this comes from; I never heard it in Holland, where I was brought up, nor in Germany, and surely not in America. Where does it come from?'

Lanny answered with some reluctance, 'I have made up my mind that it is something out of Russia. It is a product of age-old despotism and terror. It is the way of life where people are suspicious because their lives depend upon it; they are in danger of being poisoned or stabbed every hour. We in the free world cannot understand it, can't even believe it'.

'That is it!' exclaimed Hansi. 'I shudder sometimes when I see it. I say to myself, My God, I'm back in the Dark Ages! I am no longer a civilised man!'

VII

They had come to the country below West Point, where the Hudson River narrows between mountains. They stopped at a little café by the roadside, where it seemed unlikely that anyone would recognise them—and nobody did. After lunch they rode again and stopped at a lonely place and got out to admire the view. Snow had fallen up here, and the hills were beautiful with a fresh white coat glistening in the sun. They locked the car and climbed a little knoll from which the view of the river was magnificent. 'How much like the Rhine!' Hansi exclaimed, and Lanny agreed. But there were no castles. It was the country Washington Irving had made famous by his tales. They could have imagined the little men who caused the thunder by their playing ninepins; they could have imagined Rip Van Winkle waking in the meadow from his twenty-year sleep. But no such thoughts occurred to them; they were not romancing about things past, they were helping to make the events of the future.

They brushed the snow from a flat boulder and sat on it, looking up and down the river. The New York Central Railroad ran along the opposite shore, and there were houses here and there, but the hills above were mostly forest-clad and as nature made them. Nature was beautiful—at least it appeared so on a mild and bright winter day; but man tormented himself and his fellows, and this fact made nature-love seem like idleness and futility.

Hansi took the occasion to become confidential about the strange love-life he was having. He had been rapturously in love with Bess and had all these old impulses, these memories of happiness; but they were in conflict with everthing that was now in his mind—his ideas, his judgment, his intellectual being. 'It's a terrible thing to say, Lanny, but the plain truth is that I don't like Bess any more. Can you imagine that?'

'I can imagine it very easily, Hansi. I have the same feeling toward her'.

'She is dogmatic. She has taken up a set of notions and clings to them and will not face any facts that seem to oppose them. Russia is everything right and America is everything wrong. If you try to show her something that is wrong in Russia she evades the issue by showing you something that is wrong with America. It is a question of proportion, and she has lost that sense. She talks about how happy we were during our two years there; but that was in the early days of the war, and the Soviet leaders were frightened and needed help and were grateful. We were there to help them, and they idolised us'.

'I imagine you met mostly the people of the art world, the cultured classes'.

'Yes, of course. And if Bess went back there today as a political person she would find it entirely different. The men who rule the Soviet Union don't trust Americans any more, and they might give her orders she wouldn't like. But there's no use trying to tell her anything like that'.

Lanny chuckled. 'Not when you're trying to be a help to the F.B.I.'.

'I believe everthing she tells me, I do everything she tells me to do. I make a success—like giving that concert and making money for her group—and then she is radiantly happy. She comes to me and I have to take her in my arms—and it seems like a sort of prostitution'.

Lanny answered, 'Tell yourself you're taking a leaf out of the party book'. Then, after a little thought, he added, 'I'm afraid, Hansi, you're going to have to make up your mind to break with Bess'.

'I am forcing myself to face that fact'.

'You'll find it a relief in the end'.

'Sometimes I think so. I think it will be safer to be alone. Then I think about you and Laurel, and I realise how pleasant it might be to have a wife I could agree with. Tell me, Lanny, are you as happy as you appear?'

Lanny smiled. 'There was a German philosopher, Count Keyserling, who came over here before the war and lectured to us. I didn't like him, but I remember one thing. He said, "Marriage is a tension". Laurel is a person of very decided views, and she sometimes tells me things I already know, and it wouldn't be polite to interrupt her. She sometimes has an idea for the Peace Programme that I don't agree with; and if it turns out that she was right, that makes it no easier. I have decided that the two most important things in marriage are kindness and loyalty'. Lanny thought for a bit and then said, 'Tell me, are they going to arrest Bess?'

'They have promised to the best they can for her, but you can see it would make a bad smell if they were to arrest half-a-dozen poor devils who are implicated and let off the daughter of a great capitalist. They don't tell me any more than they have to, but I know enough to be sure it's going to make a sensational case. It has some of those picturesque features that the newspapers delight in'.

'And you don't know when it's going to break?'

'I haven't an idea in the world, Lanny. For all I know they may be arresting the people at this very moment. They have a number of men working on the case, I know, and they will act when they are satisfied they have enough evidence'.

'And what about you? Are you going to have to testify?'

'That is one of the things that have to be decided. They want me to go on with the work, but I don't know whether I can stand it. If they put Bess out of business, what could I do in the party? Certainly I don't propose to pick up some Communist girl and do that kind of spying. I'm too well known to go underground, and what else is there except to play music and raise money for the cause?'

VIII

The sun was sinking behind the tops of the fir trees, and they got up and went down to the car and drove toward the city.

On the way Hansi said, 'I have an idea how to cover my absence. There's a young fellow named Benny Stultz whom I taught for a while, and this season he has found a place with the Philharmonic. The last time I saw him he told me he had a composition he wanted very much for me to hear, and I promised I'd try to make an appointment. I'll phone him, and if he's at home I'll go there; then I can phone my home, and if Bess is there I have a perfect explanation of my absence. If she isn't home yet I'll have a convincing story to tell her when she comes. She might take the trouble to check on it, you know; she might call Benny and congratulate him on his composition, or ask if I left my umbrella there, or something of that sort. You understand, I am married to the party line'.

When they got near the city Hansi got out at a drugstore and telephoned and came back and reported that his friend was at home and would be delighted to see him. So when they got near a subway entrance the car stopped. Hansi said, 'Thanks for the pleasantest day in a long time. It has done me a world of good'.

He stepped out and walked away—and not toward the subway entrance until the car had passed on. No wandering comrade must see him and spoil his perfect alibi! When you have had your picture featured in the _Daily Worker_ every month or so, and when only two nights ago you have stood for a couple of hours before an audience of a thousand, you can't expect to go wandering around the streets of New York and not have somebody turn and look at you and then go home and say, 'What do you think? I saw Hansi Robin going into the subway! I wanted to speak to him but I didn't have the nerve'.

IX

The twenty-fifth of December came; it had been Christmas day precisely sixteen hundred and two times, ever since the Church decided that it was a mistake to celebrate it in the spring, when it coincided with the birthday of Mithras, the god of a rival religion. Once more the important Budd clan would assemble at the home of its oldest male member; once more they would smile and exchange friendly greetings, no matter how much envy, hatred, malice, and uncharitableness they might have in their hearts; once more they would eat too much and afterward wish they hadn't.

The left-wing branch of the family in New Jersey would be packed in the car and transported round by the way of the George Washington Bridge and the parkways. All four of them would have to go, for it was unthinkable that the clan should not have an opportunity to see and greet the almost-year-old baby. It would be the first time that precious mite had been taken outside the fence that enclosed the grounds of its Edgemere shelter. It was the most hygienically brought up baby to be found inside the populous state of New Jersey. It had been perfectly fed, perfectly trained, perfectly guarded, and if it had ever been kissed or dandled it had been without the knowledge of its mother. It was still slightly ahead of the Gesell schedule and was toddling around on tottery legs. Now it was going where there were people who might have colds or might have just had 'flu, and at the cost of whatever unpopularity, its mother and its conscientious nurse were going to see that nobody implanted any germs upon its lips, cheeks, or forehead.

Lanny drove, and Laurel sat beside him and once in a while made suggestions. The nurse and the baby sat in the back seat in one corner, and Junior had the rest of the car to himself and a whole window to look out through. He couldn't keep still for a moment and was beside himself with delight at the wonders of the American highway. In truth there had been nothing like it since the start of the world; cars of all sizes and colours and shapes went flying by in an endless string, and every time one passed close, the youngster would cry. 'Woosh!' It was a white Christmas, and children were out with their sleds and skating on the ponds; you could see your breath in the cold, but inside the magical car it was warm. The world was endlessly mysterious and delightful. The only way you could find out about it was by asking questions. Junior did.

And then at the end of the journey was that magnificent big house and a crowd of people, old and young, many of whom Junior remembered. There was a tree and there were presents, and a dinner, at a separate table and in a separate room for the children. They were all dressed up, and they all had names, and they chattered about their families and the schools they went to and the games they played. Lanny Junior was going to kindergarten, but soon he would be ready for school, and he listened and learned about it with eager curiosity.

X

Frances and Scrubbie had followed in their car. Lanny's daughter of course rated as a member of the tribe, and the younger son of an English titled family rated not so low in America as at home. Frances had been the guest of Robbie and Esther in the past, and now she would renew her acquaintance with the younger members of the family, exchange news with them and play table tennis.

Meantime Laurel heard what the ladies thought about the Peace Programme, and the gentlemen heard about what Lanny had seen in Germany and France. They all knew that Robbie's son had been born out of wedlock, and they also knew that he had been a Pinko; but he had made good, and they gathered round to ask what he thought about the prospects of our being driven out of Berlin, and about the Red strike which had come so near to taking possession of France. Was there any hope whatever for Europe, or were we just pouring our money into a bottomless hole? They thought Lanny wasn't much different from a Red himself, but somehow he had managed to meet all the important people and to know the inside of affairs. Lanny was probably the only Democrat in this mansion, unless perhaps there were some among the servants. But the world was going his way, and there seemed to be nothing you could do about it any more.

Lanny had been planning to drive his family home that night; but Robbie said the roads would be full of drunks and anyhow he wanted to have a quiet talk with his son. So the little family stayed over, and in the morning Lanny was closeted in his father's study, which was full of books the old man had been intending to read all his life. First of all he wanted to know about Bess and the awful thing that was hanging over the family. Lanny had to tell him that he didn't know anything new.

Robbie had, of course, not been told of Hansi's dealing with the F.B.I., and Lanny had to be very careful not to drop an inadvertent hint. He said that he had not seen Mr Post of the F.B.I. and had no knowledge of what the organisation might have learned or might be intending to do. From his general knowledge of their techniques he could guess that they were giving the conspirators rope to hang themselves with. One thing could be taken as certain, the government would not drop the matter, so Robbie must be prepared for something serious. He hadn't said a word about it to his wife.

Then there was Paris and Lanny's visit to the de Bruyne family. Robbie knew that his old-time business associate Denis _pére_ had died, but he was interested to hear about the son and heir and his attitude toward Budd-Erling and toward his country's politics and prospects. It would be a terrible thing indeed if the Reds were to get France; the rest of Europe would fall like a house of cards. It amused Lanny to tell his father about Irving Brown and his efforts to aid the Marshall Plan all over the Continent. Robbie had no enthusiasm for the Marshall Plan and certainly not for the A.F.L. He had always taken it for granted that the labour unionists were more or less camouflaged Reds; to learn that they were spending their good money to fight the Cocos in France opened up new vistas in the mind of a staunch Republican industrialist.

XI

The family was stowed in the car and they set out westward. Lanny had telephoned Johannes Robin and agreed to stop by for a visit; it would have been a cruelty to neglect those friends. They too had had a Christmas party, because it was the custom of the country; it gave delight to the children and did no harm. A sad party for Mama Robin, because of the great gap in the family. Hansi and Bess hadn't come; they were off on some of their party affairs.

Hansi came to see her very seldom now, she said; it was because she couldn't keep the tears from her eyes in his presence; she had them in her eyes now when she told Lanny and Laurel about it. She adored Lanny and wouldn't for the world have said anything to hurt his feelings, but he knew that she blamed the Budd family in her heart. They were _goyim_ , and Hansi should have married some good Jewish girl; she might even have been willing to employ a _shadchen_ , a marriage broker. Lanny might have pointed out to her that it was not unknown for Jewish girls to turn into Reds; but he did not pursue that painful subject.

The two Hansibess boys, as Lanny called them, were spending the holidays here. They were very nice boys, ten and twelve, and were outside happily building a snowman; inside, their grandmother lamented their sad lot. They were practically orphans. Their parents were engaged in activities about which they wouldn't tell anyone. The boys were half Jewish and half Christian, but they were really neither—they hardly knew what the word God meant. Every night Mama told them tales out of the old Jewish holy books, to arm them against the day when the wicked Communist party would try to get possession of their minds.

Laurel showed off her two children and kept them from being kissed, while Lanny talked with old Johannes, now failing in health, and told him what he had seen in Berlin and Paris. _Gott sei Dank_ that the family was living on the peaceful shore of Long Island Sound! The more you watched affairs in the old world the more glad you were to be living in the new. Johannes declared that half the people in Europe and Asia would come to the United States if they were able to gain admission.

He gave it as his expert opinion that Western Europe was through; it would be on the downgrade from this time on. A shrewd and intelligent man who had made a great fortune in Germany and lost it to the Nazis, Johannes knew how things had been in the old days, and refugees kept him informed as to how things were now. He had been reading about the downfall of ancient Greek civilisation; those little states had destroyed one another and themselves by incessant wars, and in the end the more primitive Macedonians from the north had taken them over. In the case of Western Europe it would be the more primitive Russians from the north. There was no possibility of saving the border states; country after country was being devoured, and you could hear the crunching of the bones.

On the previous evening Lanny had listened to his half-brother Percy Budd, who had just returned from big-game hunting in Africa. He had described how it felt to be sitting in a seat built in the crutch of a tree, waiting at night for the approach of a great lion. A goat blatting with fear had been staked out under the tree in a clear spot, and the lion had leaped upon it and broken its neck with a single stroke of his paw. Percy had given a vivid account of the sounds as the lion tore the creature to pieces, snarling in the meantime at the hyenas, or jackals, or whatever lesser creatures were waiting at a distance for the remnants of the feast. Johannes said that was a good image, only in this case it was not a lion but a bear. Listen over the radio and you could hear the crunching of the bones of Czechoslovakia and Poland, Hungary and Rumania. Pretty soon it would be Greece and Iran—and at the opposite end of of the heartland the small far-off pensilsula of Korea.

XII

Lanny went home and did as Johannes had suggested; his job required him to listen to news broadcasts and to read several newspapers and magazines. Rick, having a lame knee, did even more reading; he would mark passages for Lanny, and once or twice a week they would get together for a conference on the state of the world and what the Peace Programme should say about it. During the month of January _Pravda_ announced that the Soviet government had forbidden Dimitrov to carry out his plan for a Balkan Federation. This Dimitrov had been one of the revolutionary heroes; he had been accused by the Nazis of starting the Reichstag fire and had defied them in a sensational public trial in Leipzig. But now the Soviet sat down on him hard. Nations that were to be devoured separately must not be permitted to get together.

And in that same month the Communist party of France served the demand that their parliamentary deputy Jacques Duclos should be permitted to become the first vice-president of that nation. It was this Duclos whose pronouncement in a French magazine had turned the American Communist party upside down and put Foster in the place of Browder. His request now meant that France was to consent to her own slow death. In that same month the value of the franc in relation to the dollar was officially reduced from a hundred and nineteen to two hundred and fourteen. Lanny should have waited to pay for that Rembrandt!

In the month of February the Soviet government protested to the government of Iran against its receiving aid from the United States; and in the same month the Czech government brought on a crisis by protesting against Communist infiltration of the police. Four days later a so-called Communist Action Committee took over all the public offices of Czechoslovakia, all departments, newspapers, and radio stations. In vain did the United States, Britain, and France denounce this setting up of a new dictatorship. If the big-game hunter in the tree had denounced the lion he might have frightened it away from its prey, but not so with the Russian bear—he would only snarl more loudly.

And from the other side of the great heartland came the sound of yet other bones being crunched. The Soviet government informed the United Nations that it would not permit a United Nations commission to investigate conditions in North Korea; and a couple of weeks later Soviet headquarters in North Korea announced the setting up in that land of a Democratic People's Republic and the organising and training of a Democratic People's Army. All the world knew by now what those adjectives meant. 'Democratic' meant that there would be an election with only one ticket, and people who wanted to stay out of slave-labour camps would go to the polls and vote for it by something like 99.8 per cent. A 'people's government' meant that the people would be governed by it, and a 'people's army' meant that the people would be drafted into it and taken into battle whenever their Kremlin masters were ready. Bones, bones!
BOOK SIX

They That Sow in Tears

16 BEST DRAW MY SWORD

I

Lanny and Laurel had a special and particular reason for listening to the radio and for looking at headlines whenever they walked past a news-stand. But they couldn't do these things all the time—especially not when they had waited for many weeks and might have to wait for more. They had to go to the office and read their mail and dictate answers; when they were at home they had to put their minds on editing a manuscript or reading a book.

And so it came about that somebody else got the news ahead of them. Lanny was in his little office, busy dictating letters to his secretary, when there came a tap on the door. It was a girl, one of those who opened the mail; she was half breathless with excitement. 'Oh, Mr Budd—excuse me for interrupting—something terrible has happened'.

'What is it?' Lanny asked. He could pretty nearly guess and had prepared himself for a first-class job of play acting.

'Oh, Mr Budd, my sister lives in New York and works on the _Daily Mirror_ , and she just telephoned me they have a headline coming out—'

'Yes, yes', said Lanny. 'What?'

'A big headline on the front page that says, "Hansi Robin Jugged".'

'Good heavens!' exclaimed Lanny. 'What does that mean?'

'It means arrested, sir. And—and—'

'And what?'

'And Mrs Robin!' Presumably the girl had been trying to say 'and your sister', but she hadn't been able to get out the awful words.

Lanny did his first-class job. 'But what for?' he asked.

'It says they are Communist spies!'

So Lanny did no more dictating that morning. He jumped up and went into the radio room and turned on the receiving set. He knew by heart where to look for news at any particular period. The girl had followed him, and his secretary and others in the office came streaming in. He might have closed the door and kept the radio low, but that would have been cruel. They were all bound to know it before long, and might as well get it here as anywhere. He turned it up, and the whole office came to listen. They heard:

'.... arrests continuing. The F.B.I. refused any further comment on the matter. They would not state the location of the photographic studio, but rumour has it located on Delancey Street. A pickup truck was loaded with photographic material and papers at the place. Several of the alleged conspirators were arrested there and others at their homes. It is said that one of the Russians involved enjoys diplomatic immunity, but this is uncertain, and the F.B.I. refused to discuss the question. They have been watching the spy ring for months and have obtained a great deal of evidence, both at the spy centre and at the homes of those spies who are employed in the factory.

'It is not known whether or not the home of Mr and Mrs Robin has been searched. Both he and his wife have been active in the Communist party and have made no secret of their beliefs. The arrest will cause a sensation in the musical world, as Hansi Robin is considered one of the greatest living violinists, and his wife has been his accompanist for most of their married years. They have made extensive tours in Europe. They lived for nearly two years in Russia and have expressed their satisfaction with what they found there.

'Bessie Budd Robin comes from one of the oldest and wealthiest families in Connecticut. Her father is Robert Budd, president of Budd-Erling Aircraft in Newcastle, Connecticut, and her mother is Mrs Esther Remsen Budd, daughter of the president of the First National Bank of Newcastle. Hansi Robin's father is Johannes Robin, who was reputed one of the wealthiest capitalists of Germany and was jailed by the Nazis and lost his fortune there. He is now head of the sales department of Budd-Erling Aircraft in New York.

'More news in just a moment, but first here is an important word from our sponsor. If you use Babyskin Soap you can be sure of having a complexion as beautiful and fair as any baby's. Babyskin Soap is made from the purest olive oil from Italy and coconut oil from the glamorous isles of the South Seas. We guarantee if you will use Babyskin Soap for just one week you will discover'—and so on for sixty seconds, and after that the scores of a golf tournament in Florida, and then intercollegiate basketball matches that might or might not have been 'fixed.'

II

It was permissible for Lanny to be disturbed by that news and to jump into his car to drive to the house to tell his wife. That left the members of the staff in their different rooms to chatter excitedly. There wouldn't be much work done for an hour or two; that too was excusable.

At home Lanny discovered that Laurel had just been told the news by a neighbour and friend of the programme who had called up. Alone by themselves, husband and wife didn't have to do any play-acting. They could shut their door and discuss quietly the course of events. Lanny said, 'Evidently the F.B.I. means for Hansi to go on. If they hadn't arrested him it would have been a giveaway.'

'How long do you suppose they will hold him?' Laurel asked.

'I don't know what the federal procedure is. No doubt they will be admitted to bail.'

'Poor Hansi! It will give him a dreadful black eye.'

'Yes, but on the other hand it may take him into the very heart of the Communist underground., That, I am guessing, is what the government is figuring on.'

The telephone began ringing. It would ring all day. One friend after another called up to commiserate, and some, of course out of curiosity, in order to be able to tell _their_ friends how the couple were taking the dreadful news.

Presently there was a call from New York, a woman's voice. 'Mr Budd? This is Mercy Colfax. I don't know if you will remember me; you had tea in my studio in Greenwich Village many, many years ago.'

'Oh yes,' Lanny said politely. 'I remember you very well, Miss Colfax.'

'I am the secretary of the Liberal Defence League. I would like very much to see you, Mr. Budd—as soon as possible.'

'Could you come out to Edgemere?'

'With pleasure, Mr. Budd.'

'Very well then. Come to my house, please. I expect to be at home the rest of the day.'

'I will come by the first train.'

Lanny hung up. 'Mercy Colfax,' he said to Laurel, who was in the room. 'She is Bryn Mawr and Boston Back Bay. I met her several times in the old days when I was knocking about in Greenwich Village. She's been in all the radical groups. Someone said she was Communist, but I didn't worry about that in those days. We were all practising what we called the "united front." We found the Communists useful because they were hard workers; we called them "good radicals."'

'What do you suppose she wants?'

'She announced herself as secretary of the Liberal Defence League; that will be a Commie front, no doubt. They have taken up all the good words and poisoned them. You can't say "liberal," you can't say "democratic," you can't say "people's" you can't say "workers" any more. She is coming to ask me to put up bail for Bess and to help pay her lawyers.'

'What will you say to her?'

'I'll say plenty. It will be a show you won't want to miss, but I want her to think we're alone, so you can listen at a crack in the door. She might become confidential, or she might get angry and say more than she means.'

'Mercy?' said Laurel. 'What an unusual name for a Red.'

'She's old Puritan, of course,' he answered. 'Probably some of her forefathers came on the Mayflower. In her bones she is still proud of them, you can wager.'

III

It took Miss Mercy Colfax a couple of hours to make connections and reach Lanny's home; she arrived in a taxi and may have come all the way in it. He remembered her as a sturdily built, round-faced woman with flaxen hair cut short, in the fashion of the flappers. Now her hair was longer and snow white, but her face was still unlined, and she held herself with dignity. Seated in the living room of the Budd home she stopped for no preliminaries. 'I suppose, Mr Budd, you have heard the terrible news.'

'I have heard it three times over the radio and about a dozen times over the telephone, Miss Colfax. It is a blow to me, and a worse blow to the family. We all knew that Hansi and Bess were Communists, but we had no idea they were engaged in underground activities.'

'I am shocked to hear you say such a thing, Mr Budd. Surely you will not prejudge this case! I assure you most earnestly that Hansi and Bess are perfectly innocent, the victims of a wretched conspiracy inspired by the redbaiters.'

'I hope you are correct, Miss Colfax,' said Lanny mildly. 'Before we go any further, let me ask you one question. Are you a Communist?'

The lady's tone became precise and puritanical. 'I am, as I told you, Mr Budd, the secretary of the Liberal Defence League, and I have come to see you in that capacity.'

'Yes, but I do not know about the League, Miss Colfax, and I can only judge it by its secretary. Are you a Communist?'

'What my personal beliefs are surely have nothing to do with the question, Mr Budd.'

'From my point of view they have everything to do with it, so I hope you will answer my question.'

'Please let me tell you what I have come for—'

'You understand of course that if you refuse to answer the question I have to assume that you are a Communist.'

'I cannot help what conclusions you draw, Mr Budd, I beg you to hear what I have to say.'

'Certainly I will hear you, Miss Colfax, but I wish you to know in advance that I know I'm listening to a Communist.'

'I assure you, Mr Budd, that this series of arrests is an act of provocation on the part of the reactionary forces in our government. It is an effort to intimidate those few intellectuals who have had the courage to speak on behalf of peace and against the frenzy of red-baiting that has seized our public.'

Lanny's tone was no less precise. 'You have refused to admit that you are a Communist, Miss Colfax. I will tell you that I have known many Communists, and I know all their phrases, and when a Communist talks about peace and freedom I am not fooled for a single instant. I am not going to argue with you; I am just telling you that your generalised words are meaningless to me."

'It can't be meaningless to you, Mr Budd, that your sister and your brother-in-law have been thrown into jail—Hansi Robin, one of the great musical artists of our time!"

'Yes, Miss Colfax; but I did my suffering a long time ago, when I saw that they were becoming Communists. I warned them what would happen, and now I have a clear conscience in the matter.'

'And you mean that you would let your own sister rot in jail?'

'I mean that I know perfectly well my own sister will not be in jail more than a few hours. I know that my own sister belongs to an organisation which has immense resources, collected in part from our enemies abroad and in part from wealthy dupes at home. Let them put up the bail and pay the Red lawyers. I certainly will not.'

'I have never been more shocked, Mr Budd—'

'I'm truly sorry to shock you, Miss Colfax, and I am not speaking sarcastically. From your first name alone I would know who your forefathers were and what your heritage is. Bess has the same heritage, and so have I. I say to you what I said to her years ago: I know that you joined the Communist party from the noblest of motives, a real sense of mercy, of pity for the poor and oppressed. It is terrible indeed to see such idealism betrayed. I beg you to open your eyes to the facts and realise that your cause has been taken over by gangsters. It has become a counterfeit revolution. It has broken all its promises and forsaken all its dreams and blasted all the hopes of its followers. It has become history's horror. You and I who were good radicals back in the old Greenwich Village days have no place in the programme of such men. They use us so long as we still have power and can be of use to them; but the moment they have the power and need us no longer, we become a mockery to them. We become nuisances and pests, and they throw us into jail, they subject us to hideous tortures, they send us to slave-labour camps where we exist on eight hundred calories a day and fade away in two or three years of the diseases of malnutrition; or more mercifully they take us into a dark cellar and shoot us in the back of the neck and then carry us out and dump us into a crematory.'

This granddaughter of the Puritans was sitting rigidly, her fists tightly clenched and the blood mounting into her well-rounded cheeks. 'I see, Mr Budd, that you have fallen a hopeless victim to the redbaiters!'

'Redbaiting, Miss Colfax? Redbaiting is the crime of telling the historical facts about the Communist party, that it has taken up lock, stock, and barrel the programme of Tsarist imperialism. It has taken the tactics also and has multiplied them in horror. Don't you know how Engels promised that the state would wither away and how Lenin endorsed this? How much withering have you seen? Don't you know that all the old Bolsheviks, the old idealists who were Lenin's comrades and friends, have every one of them been foully murdered?

'I have been in the Soviet Union, Miss Colfax; and before that I knew some of those men in Europe. My own uncle Jesse Blackless was one of them; he was a painter and a fairly good one, and he gave his whole life to the cause. When I was at the Yalta Conference I met him secretly and found him a wretched disillusioned, heartbroken old man. I knew Lincoln Steffens, who died in the same state of mind. Don't you know the list of old Bolsheviks whom Stalin and his minions of the Gaypayoo have had shot or poisoned? I will call the roll to you'—and Lanny began, like a drill sergeant calling off the names of his squad: 'Zinoviev, Rykov, Rakovsky, Kamenev, Bukharin, Krylenko, Smirnov, Tukashevsky, Piatakov, Karakhan—'

The list was too long for the woman's patience. 'That will do, Mr Budd,' she said. 'I was told that you were a liberal man, but I see I have wasted my time.'

'I hope that _I_ have not wasted _my_ time, Miss Colfax,' he said very gently. 'I have planted a seed; and sometimes a seed may lie dormant for years before it begins to sprout and take root. I have told you the truth, and it will lie in your mind, and someday you may begin to relate your observations to it, and your mind will change. If ever the time comes that you really believe in democracy and understand freedom as your forefathers and mine understood it, you may come to me with a cause that is honest, and I will not refuse help.'

That was the last affront to her New England conscience. She got up and stalked out without another word, and Laurel, who had been standing behind the door, came forward, wreathed in smiles. 'I am relieved,' she said, 'I was afraid she might consider it her duty to shoot you.'

Lanny replied, 'The combination of perfect Boston and Bolshevik is horribly strange. I am sure that in her heart she looks down upon the "kumrads" from a great height.'

IV

Lanny called up his father to see how he was taking it, and more especially how Esther was taking it. Robbie said, 'I was worried because I couldn't prepare her, but I found that she had prepared herself.'

Lanny wasn't surprised, for he knew that Esther Remsen Budd, another daughter of the Puritans, had intelligence enough to look at the world about her and observe where it was going. 'She had it out with Bess a long time ago,' said her husband, 'and she guessed what Bess was up to. What she insists now is that I must go to the jail and put it up to Bess once and for all. If she will promise to quit the Communists for good we will put the bail and get the right man to defend her.'

'Of course she won't do that,' Lanny said.

'I know,' replied the father. 'But we must give her the chance, and then our consciences will be clear. Esther says if I don't go she will. I just talked with Johannes about it, and he says he will do the same thing for Hansi. It won't do any good, of course, but we will go together.'

'How is Mamma Robin taking it?'

'He's terribly worried about her. The poor old creature—he says she hasn't stopped crying for a moment since she heard the news. He's afraid it will kill her. You had better call her up and say something kind.'

Lanny made a sudden resolution. 'I'll do more than that,' he said. 'I'll go see her and let her weep on my shoulder.'

That would be no new thing, for Lanny Budd had met Leah Robin in Berlin when she was in the utmost despair and terror. Her husband was in the hands of the Nazis, who were forcing him to part with everything he owned in the world. Her youngest son, Freddi, had disappeared, and she was a fugitive, hiding like a terrified rabbit. Lanny had been able to get the husband, wife, and the older son out of Germany. He had tried to help Freddi, but in vain; Freddi, her baby, her gentle and kind one, who had played the clarinet so charmingly and had never done harm to any living soul! After the Nazis had brought him close to death with their tortures—because he was a Socialist as well as a Jew—they had turned him over to Lanny at the border. He had died in France and been buried according to Jewish ritual on the Riviera near Lanny's home. Some thirteen years had passed since then, and Leah had found a safe home in America; she was no longer rich, but then she had never wanted to be rich, so she had insisted to Lanny. All she wanted was enough so that they could live in peace.

V

Lanny got into his car; there was nothing more important that he could think of at the moment. He took the familiar drive across the great bridge over the Hudson, and in due course came to the comfortable home on the shore of the Sound. A Jewish maid opened the door and told him that Mr Robin had left for the city. She called Rahel, who was living in this home, along with her new husband and new family. Rahel said that Mamma was upstairs in her bedroom; she wouldn't eat, she wouldn't see a doctor, wouldn't do anything but sob her heart out.

'Maybe she will see you', Rahel said, and Lanny replied, 'I'll go up and see her. Don't say anything about it'.

He was an old friend of that family and went upstairs and didn't even knock on the door, just opened it softly. He saw the old woman lying on the bed with her face down, making the sounds of an animal that has been stricken to death. She really wasn't an old woman, not yet sixty, but she felt old and acted old, because she was a Jewish woman and was afraid of the Lord her God, whose name she would not pronounce; she knew He had stricken her, and it could only be because of her sins. She had dressed in black ever since Freddi's death and had no thought of or interest in this world except to take care of the people she loved and save them from the afflictions that had cursed her own life.

She had known pogroms as a child and had fled first from Russia and then from Germany, and now— _Oi! Oi!_ —her afflictions had followed her here! 'Terrors are turned upon me: they pursue my soul as the wind: and my welfare passeth away as a cloud. And now my soul is poured out upon me; the days of affliction have taken hold upon me. My bones are pierced in me in the night season: and my sinews take no rest'.

Lanny closed the door and came quietly to the bedside; she had not heard him. He said in a low voice, 'Mamma'.

The old woman raised her head and stared at him. He had never seen such a face of misery, of utter despair. He came at once to the point. 'Mamma, I came to see you as soon as I heard the news. I'm going to tell you a secret. It is a important secret, and you must promise me, you must give me your solemn word, you will not speak a word about it to anybody on this earth'.

She went on staring, as if her thoughts were confused and she was not quite sure that he was there. 'Yes, Lanny', she managed to whisper.

'Not to Johannes, not to Rahel, not to anybody— _any_ body! You will make me that promise?'

'Yes, Lanny'.

He sat on the bed beside her and lowered his voice, almost to a whisper. 'Hansi is not a Communist'.

' _Aber_ —what? He is in jail!'

'Hansi is working for the government, for the F.B.I. He is pretending to be a Communist and getting their secrets'.

The old woman's eyes widened and her jaw fell; her voice was a faint murmur. ' _Ach, Gott der Gerechte_! _Aber_ —why is he in jail?"

'They had to put him there with the others. If they had left him free it would have let the others know that he is against them'.

' _Um Gottes Willen_ , Lanny! You are _gewiss?_ '

'I know all about it. He has been pretending to agree with Bess, but he does not agree with her'.

' _Ach_ , that woman! She is your sister, Lanny—I must not say anything bad about her!'

'You must be sorry for her, Mamma, as we are for all blundering human souls. She became a Communist because she believed they meant justice and freedom for the poor. She has been betrayed; the movement has fallen into the hands of evil men, but she cannot see it. She will suffer terribly for her blunders; but have no cause to worry about Hansi'.

'How long will they keep him, Lanny?'

'I have no doubt that the Communists will raise the bail and get them out in a day or two. Then they will make a hero out of Hansi; they will trust him with their secrets. It is very important work that he is doing'.

'Oh, Lanny, he is such a _good_ man!'

'None better, Mamma. I was forbidden to tell you this, but I could not bear to see you suffer; and now you must keep the secret'.

'Oh, I will keep it! _Gott sei Lob!_ '

'You will have to be a bit of an actress. You must not look happy. You do not have to weep so much, but you must look sad and worried. You must cry a little'.

'Oh, I could cry for joy, Lanny—if you are sure, really sure!'

'You can take my word for it, I am sure. Laurel knows it, but nobody else, not even my father. You must not tell Johannes'.

' _Oi_ , the poor man!'

'He is a man, and he will be able to stand it. Hansi will not let him put up bail. He will not make any promises, he will have to play the game according to orders, and you must play your game. Just tell the family that I have assured you that it will be all right, that Hansi will be bailed out, and that they do not beat prisoners in jail in New York—at least not if they behave themselves and do what they are told. You can say that I have assured you, that I don't believe Hansi has done any harm to anybody and has merely spoken what he believes. He is a good man and you are going to stand by him'.

VI

So the old Jewish grandmother got up and wiped the tears from her eyes and straightened her hair a little, and they went downstairs. Rahel and the servants were not too much surprised, for they knew that Lanny Budd was a magician and his power over Mamma was great. He could not quite call spirits from the vasty deep, but he had been able to go into Nazi Germany and buy the father of the family out of prison, and no doubt he would do the same thing for one of the world's top violin virtuosos.

So Lanny turned on the radio and got a station that was giving news. No war had broken out that day, no aeroplane had hit a mountain, no streamliner had gone off the track, so the broadcasters had plenty of time for the uncovering of a spy plot and the arrest of half-a-dozen Red conspirators, including a famous musician and the daughter of a millionaire industrialist. And now— _Ach, Gott der Gerechte!_ what was this? The man was telling how the federal agents had been to the suburban residence of the notorious couple and had ransacked their home and carried off boxes full of papers; they had dug in the garden underneath a seckel pear tree and had come upon a large family washboiler, a metal cylinder three feet wide and almost as high, covered with a top and carefully sealed with tar. It had been there no one knew how long, and it was packed solid with papers and documents; the load was so heavy that it took three men to lift it into a truck. What was in those papers the F.B.I. wouldn't tell, but they had carted it off and no doubt were studying all the secrets of the Communist party.

' _Oh, mein lieber Hansi!_ ' exclaimed Mamma and wiped her eyes with her handkerchief. Lanny didn't see any tears, but it was a proper gesture. It was such a serious matter he couldn't think that a pious grandmother was exactly enjoying herself; but, he reflected, there must be a certain amount of actress in every woman. Such had been the testimony of that long-suffering ancient called Job: 'They conceive mischief, and bring forth vanity, and their belly prepareth deceit!'

VII

Lanny drove back to New York in a more cheerful frame of mind. He was as excited as a boy over this spy story, the mystery of which had been building up in his mind for a long time. He drove through the city on purpose to pick up the afternoon papers, and when he had got an assortment of them he found a vacant space by a curb and parked his car and glanced through them.

The story made the front page in every case; it had everything the public wanted: crime and detection, high life and low life, glamour and wealth. Bessie Remsen Budd undoubtedly belonged in what the newspapers call 'the highest social circles'. If she wasn't beautiful any longer, she certainly had been, and the newspapers had her early pictures. Hansi Robin undoubtedly belonged high in the world of music, both in America and in countries abroad. The Jones Electrical Works had a most commonplace name, but it undoubtedly manufactured great quantities of proximity fuses for the Armed Forces and had made improvements in the device which were the very ultimate in secrecy.

All newspapers have what they call 'the morgue', a huge file of envelopes containing everything they or other papers have published about any individual. The larger and more well-to-do have the person's story all written up to the moment, so that when he dies, marries, or gets arrested, all they have to do is to put the new developments at the top of the story and they are ready to go to press. So in these newspapers Lanny could read all about Hansi Robin's career and the career of Bessie Remsen Budd. Nobody was quite sure whether her name was really Bess or Bessie; her friends called her whichever happened to be easier in the sentence.

The papers told who her father was and who her half-brother was and gave something about the careers of both. They told how she had accompanied Hansi at his concerts, and now he was accompanying her as secret Red agent. They told about the obscure accountant in the office of a fuse factory who had managed to get access to confidential papers, correspondence, orders, blueprints, and technical specifications. He had taken them on Saturday night and turned them over to Bessie Budd, who had taken them to New York, where a photographic studio disguised as a stationery store had photographed them, and then they had been taken back to the accountant on Sunday. The F.B.I. had gathered in both the Robins, the accountant, the two operatives of the photographic studio, and the two Russians who had been delivering the material to ships in the harbour. It was a cleansweep and a perfect job, and the F.B.I. was sure it had the goods on all the parties who had been caught.

Lanny read these accounts, and by that time there were new editions on the stands, with new headlines. He bought those and learned about the family washboiler which had been dug up from under the seckel pear tree in the garden of a sumptuous villa in a fashionable Connecticut shore town. Such are the adjectives upon which newspapers thrive; and it was inevitable that some bright lad in the office of a tabloid, seeking for the alliteration which makes for picturesqueness, should dub the find the 'boilerplate papers'.

'Boilerplate' to a newspaper means the material which is sent out from some syndicate or central agency to hundreds of newspapers all over the country. It is put into type and papiermâché 'mats' made of it. For the fast rotary presses on which big newspapers are printed this material is curved exactly in the shape of boilerplate—and when in the newspaper office the metal stereotype is made it looks still more like its name. So inevitably a mass of documents buried in a family washboiler became 'boilerplate papers'—and the name would stick. The Federal Bureau of Investigation would say no more than this: they had come into possession of highly secret papers of the Communist underground, and these might be the means of landing some conspicuous persons in a federal penitentiary.

VIII

Lanny drove home and told Laurel what he had done. She was startled to hear that he had revealed the secret, and he told her, 'If Post had given me the secret I would have felt bound; but I got it myself, and so I felt free to use my own judgment. I am sure Mamma will keep it.'

The telephone had been ringing all day. It had become a nuisance, but they had to answer, because there might be something important. Robbie called to report on his visit. He and Johannes had obtained permission from the U.S. Marshal to interview the prisoners, who were in the Federal Detention Headquarters. Bess was alone, with a matron in charge. At first she hadn't wanted to see her father but had consented when he insisted.

She was quiet and apparently serene; she was sorry to hurt him and especially sorry to hurt her mother, but there was nothing she could do about it. She had her convictions and was standing by them. She was not interested in being bailed out; of course if the comrades arranged it she would be pleased, but she certainly didn't want to be bailed out with Budd-Erling money or on Budd-Erling terms. She was a Red and meant to live and die a Red.

'So that's that,' said Robbie. 'When someone is bent on martyrdom there is nothing you can do but oblige them'.

Lanny asked, 'How is Esther taking it?' and the answer was, 'Esther is the quiet sort. She sheds her tears inside. We can't change that either'.

Robbie went on to add that Johannes had had no better success than he. Hansi wouldn't listen to any compromise and didn't want to talk about it.

A little while later the elderly Jew was on the telephone, asking, 'Lanny, what on earth have you done to my wife?'

'No harm, I hope'.

'You have made her all over. What magic pills do you carry?'

It was the Johannes of old, a shrewd, experienced man of affairs, hard-driving but generous outside business hours, and always with a touch of humour. Nothing was ever going to get him down—not old age, not the Communist movement.

Lanny answered, 'I told her that Hansi loved her and he was doing what he thought was right. Also, that the U.S. Marshal doesn't torture his prisoners and that Hansi would soon be out on bail'.

'I told her all that, but it did no good'.

Lanny was about to add, 'I told her that I had been arrested several times, and it wasn't fatal'. But he realised that Johannes had been arrested too, so that was no argument. He said, 'How did you find Hansi?' And the reply was, 'Stubborn as a mule. He says he knows what he's doing, and we are not to worry about him'.

'How are they treating him?'

'He has no complaint. They've put him in the room with that accountant, the fellow who stole the documents, so they say. Hansi says he is a good comrade and they are friends, so it's all right'.

'Maybe they will let Hansi play the violin for him', suggested Lanny, and they chuckled.

When Lanny told his wife about this he said, 'You see, the government people have put Hansi in with that other fellow, and in the night they will whisper secrets'.

'Too bad they can't find a woman friend for Bess!' remarked Laurel. She had a bit more of acid in her make-up than her husband.

IX

Next morning the telephone began to ring early; Lanny was shaving and hurriedly wiped his chin. A voice asked, 'Is this Mr Lanning Prescott Budd?' When he answered that it was, 'I wonder', said the voice, 'if the name Virgil Smathers means anything to you?'

'The name sounds familiar, but you must excuse me—'

'It was more than thirty years ago. Don't you remember when you were a student at St. Thomas's Academy you met a young Methodist minister who told you about how badly Budd Gunmakers had treated their strikers?'

'Oh yes!' Lanny exclaimed. 'I remember well. You were the first one who opened my eyes to what was going on in America'.

'I hope your eyes are still open, Mr Budd. I am now the minister of the Wesley Methodist Church of Brooklyn. I called up because I want very much to come to see you'.

'A good many people are asking to see me just now, Mr Smathers, and I don't want to be disobliging but I must ask one question. Are you going to ask me to put up any bail?'

The voice smiled audibly. 'No, Mr Budd, I promise; and I won't take but a few minutes of your time. If you cut me off and tell me you're not interested I'll not have my feelings hurt'.

'All right', Lanny said. 'I'll be in Edgemere all day. Come to the office of the Peace Programme'.

Toward noon the visitor showed up and presented his card. Lanny had recalled a slender blonde young man of ascetic appearance, wearing spectacles. He still had the spectacles but the hair had turned grey. Evidently his salary had not been large enough to permit him to accumulate that comfortable rotundity which comes with middle age in America. He was still the earnest ascetic, the professional man of good will.

'It is a pleasure to meet you after all these years,' said Lanny. 'What can I do for you?'

The visitor came to the point at once, as he had promised. 'Mr Budd, I wish to tell you first that I am not a Communist; I am a servant of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. But I am one in peace and good will and try to practice what I preach'.

'I appreciate the distinction, Mr Smathers. What is it you want to tell me?'

'Last night I was called to a conference of half-a-dozen persons to discuss the situation which has arisen involving your sister and brother-in-law. I never met Mrs Robin in Newcastle, she was only a child when I was there, but I have met her more recently. I have never met Mr Robin, but I have heard him play, of course. At the conference last night it was agreed that Mrs Robin is a class-conscious and thoroughly disciplined Communist and will know how to take what comes; there is no need to worry about her. But so far as Mr Robin is concerned there was general agreement that he is not really a Communist; he came into the movement because of his love for his wife and his inability to live without her. He is a great artist, and therefore an especially sensitive man. We are quite sure that he knows nothing about espionage and has no idea that such activities are possible; He is an idealist and an entirely nonpolitical person; he surely does not belong in the arena of political strife. I hope you agree with that'.

'Assuming that I do, Mr Smathers, what is your idea?'

'Our idea is that this should be pointed out to the government authorities. A man is not legally responsible for what his wife does; it cannot be legally assumed that he knows what she is doing. It is our idea that an arrangement be worked out whereby charges against Mr Robin would be dropped upon the agreement that he will give up every form of Communist activity. You surely know that he is a man who would keep his word'.

'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 kept 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'.

The prisoners were taken to the Tombs. 'I don't know about the others', Hansi said, 'but they fixed us up comfortably, Johanssen, the accountant, and me—I suppose you read about him in the paper. He is a Dane, a blonde fellow, very quiet and determined, bitter when he talks frankly. It was my business to make friends with him, so I told him about my trips to the Soviet Union and all the wonders I had seen there and how I loved the Russian people I had known—which is true enough. He had every reason to trust me, and he did. He told me the story of his hard life. He got his head cracked in a strike, and that made him into a Communist. He dropped out of party work several years ago, took a new name, and joined the underground. He studied to be an accountant on purpose and then got a job in the Jones plant. He stole the combination to the safe where the classified papers were kept. He was introduced to Bess—he didn't know who she was. He just knew her as Mary, and she knew him as Jim'.

'He told you all that in the cell?' demanded Lanny.

'They had caught him with the safe open, so he figured the jig was up; but he talked in a low tone. They told him they had got me nailed down too, so we were comrades in misery. He wasn't worried over the prospect of several years in jail—he said he could keep busy educating some of the men in there, and they would make as good workers as anyone else once they became class-conscious'.

Lanny brought up the subject he had discussed with Laurel. 'Tell me, Hansi, are you going to live alone in that house?'

'I'll get along all right, Lanny. I will lose myself in my work'.

'Shall we be able to see something of you?'

'After Bess goes on her trip next week. She is terribly afraid of you, and I mustn't have any quarrel with her—surely not until the trial comes off. If the Communists got the faintest idea of what I'm going to do they would come down on me like a ton of bricks. They might shoot me'.

'If you want to hide we will hide you', Lanny said. 'You can tell Bess the newspaper reporters are hounding you'.

'I wouldn't have to lie about that; they've been trying to bribe the servants'.

IV

Lanny went home and told his wife about Hansi's idea of living alone, but she didn't think much of it. 'Who's going to see to getting out his laundry every week?' she demanded. 'Who's going to manage the servants? And those two boys at vacation times? Above all, who's going to keep the other women away from him?'

'It is not good that the man should be alone'—so Hansi's Yahweh had declared, and Laurel agreed with Him. If Hansi were left alone he would be surrounded and besieged by adoring females. It was absolutely necessary that he should get the right wife otherwise the wrong one would get him and a second failure would ruin his life.

'For heaven's sake, don't let him know you're thinking about it!' said Lanny. 'He'd run away to China'.

'He doesn't have to know', was the reply. 'Men never know. The women attend to it'.

Laurel set aside her stack of letters and manuscripts, and made Lanny do the same, and they canvassed the field: the ladies who worked in the office, those who came as volunteer helpers, those who wrote letters, those who had been met socially in New York and Baltimore and Hollywood, in London and Paris and Berlin. It wasn't going to be an easy problem; some were too old and some too young; some were talkative and some not good-looking enough. When Lanny suggested that this last might not matter so much to Hansi, Laurel replied, 'Hansi is a man!'

It ought to be somebody who was musical, not necessarily a performer, but somebody who loved music, else how could she stand the racket? It would have to be somebody who was clever, else how could Hansi stand her? It would have to be somebody who was honest and dependable, and Laurel feared that these were growing more scarce. They canvassed possible advisers, and Laurel said they must not leave it to Mamma Robin; kind good soul, she was orthodox and would pick out some submissive girl who would be horrified if Hansi ate a pork chop, would never consent to have butter on the table when meat was served. And suppose she took to wearing a wig! Lanny's mother knew great numbers of women, young and old, but they were worldly women, otherwise Beauty would have no interest in them. So she was out!

Lanny, taking the matter lightly, pointed out that Europe would be a favourable hunting ground; Europe was full of women who would like nothing better than to marry an American and be brought to his utopia. But Laurel said that the women of Europe were neurotic; they were at loose ends and would require a lot of sorting out. He assured her that, unfortunately, he had met very few of late. His acquaintances had been mostly middle-aged or elderly men who had been battered by the war and were staggering to their feet again; or middle-aged Americans who were trying to help them and being blamed for all their troubles.

Then the facetious one remarked, 'We may have to put an advertisement in the newspapers'. To which Laurel answered, 'All you'd have to do would be to throw a net over Hansi after one of his concerts; you'd catch a score of candidates; but how would you pick one? Women don't follow him home because they know he's married and they've heard that his wife watches him; but when the fact is published that he is unattached he'll have to get double locks on his doors'.

All this might seem a trifle premature, since Hansi was living in supposed connubial bliss with his lawful wedded wife, and both of them were under indictment for a felony and liable to ten or twenty years in a federal penitentiary. But women have their ways of doing things that men say cannot be done. Laurel was going to keep her eyes open for a likely candidate, and when she met one she would invite her to lunch and probe her character. If Laurel, in her role of gentile _shadchen_ , or marriage broker, should decide that the woman was right, she would arrange a dinner party. Later on Lanny would say to Hansi, 'What do you think of Miss Smith?' and Laurel would say to Miss Smith, 'What do you think of Hansi Robin? Too bad he is under indictment, isn't it?' If it should turn out that the two parties thought well of each other, Laurel would remark to the lady, 'You know, Hansi isn't as much of a Communist as he thinks. It was Bess who got him into this, and there's quite a possibility that they might break up over the situation. But you mustn't say a word about it to anybody, not even to him!'

That's the way people who know the world get what they want in it; and if what they want is something good it's not so bad.

V

It was the month of March, which is fabled to come in like a lion and go out like a lamb. It was in its roaring stage; there was snow at night and then in the morning the weather turned warm and there was slush on the ground. Lanny had had a touch of 'flu, so he didn't go to the office. When he saw that the sun was shining on the front porch he went out in his dressing gown and sat for a while; at that undependable season every ray of sunlight was precious. He was there when Laurel came home with the mail, and she handed him a bundle of unopened letters.

There were always some addressed to him personally, and he had become expert in picking out those that were important. Business letters had the imprint of the firm in the corner, whereas fan letters were usually handwritten and many of them crude in appearance. Airmail letters took precedence, and especially any with German postage stamps. One was in Monck's familiar script and started off with the sentence, 'The deaf girl cannot be found; we sent a man to look for her, but no luck'.

That was all on that subject, and Lanny was left to speculate. Had Ferdinand betrayed Anna Surden, or was it she who had betrayed him? Of course there was a possibility that she had found herself a man and had gone off with him; but that was unlikely, she being in a land with many more women than men. It was far more likely that she had been caught; and if so, how much had she told? There was no reason to believe that she would protect either Monck or Lanny; certainly no reason to think that she would stand torture for either of them. It was no crime to be trying to catch counterfeiters, but in this ease it seemed likely that the counterfeiters were in league with some government authorities, whether German or Russian. Betrayal would make further efforts more difficult, if not impossible.

Lanny could reflect upon the near impossibility of achieving anything against a police state. He had just witnessed the arrest of a Soviet spy in New York, one who had been caught red-handed, together with his American abettors. The law had required that he be arraigned in court immediately—a public procedure. The law required that he should be admitted to bail and that the bail should not be 'excessive'. Now the man had disappeared, and the newspapers were reporting that he had been put on board a Soviet steamer in Baltimore and was gone. The Soviet government had been able to get back its spy and all his secrets by the payment of thirty thousand dollars, which figured out less than one-thirtieth of a kopeck per capita of the Russian population—certainly a moderate charge.

On the other hand, when an American spy was caught in Sovietland, the silence of the grave followed. You couldn't find anybody who had ever heard of the person; if you inquired of the authorities they would say they had never heard of the person and what business was it of yours anyway? Instead of making an appearance in open court the person was buried in a dungeon and subjected to elaborate processes of torture until he told everything he knew, or everything that the police state wanted him to say that he knew.

Yes, that was one of the many differences between a free society and a dictatorship over the proletariat. Lanny had been for all his thinking life a strong civil-liberties man; but now his mind was troubled by the question whether civil liberties should be extended to the enemies of civil liberties; to persons who were cynically and implacably determined to destroy the civil liberties of everybody in the world but the members of the Politburo.

VI

Monck's letter went on to discuss the situation in Berlin, concerning which he was as pessimistic as always. He reported that the cold war was growing warmer, and he was sure the Soviets intended some drastic action. Their propaganda was incessant, and very effective with the Germans, especially in the East. The American efforts were pitiful in comparison. The R.I.A.S. people meant well, but they had almost no funds and hadn't yet been able to get a promised building entirely repaired. 'Can't you do something with the authorities in Washington?' Monck pleaded.

He concluded, 'Your old friend is living in the mountains with his family. We have been able to make his acquaintance'. Lanny knew that meant Kurt Meissner and that Monck was again in contact with the Völkischerbund. Lanny had had no idea that Kurt would keep his promise to abstain from anti-American activities, and he had been afraid that Monck would have a hard time penetrating the difficult shell of that conspiracy. Here was another group of men who didn't believe in civil liberties and who were not troubled with any moral scruples whatsoever.

Thinking these troublesome thoughts, Lanny went into the house and turned on the radio and heard a horrifying story—the death of Jan Masaryk. He had jumped, or fallen, or been thrown from the third-storey window of his official residence and smashed upon the pavement of the courtyard below. The news came, of course, from the Communist government, which had seized power in Czechoslovakia, and naturally they said it was a suicide; but Lanny never believed it for an instant. He knew Masaryk too well to think that he would run away from the fight; he hated the Communists too much to be willing to oblige them. It was no surprise when later the story came out that he had been attacked in his bedroom and beaten to death with a piece of furniture and then thrown from the window. 'When you hear of my death you will know it is the end', so he had said—meaning, of course, the end of his country.

There were civil liberties for you! There were the Reds who in America were praising civil liberties and claiming the privileges of them! Lanny paced the room, cursing them in his heart—and the fools in America who swallowed their poisonous propaganda. Lanny had had many qualms over the idea of helping to send his own sister to prison and of advising Hansi Robin to divorce her; but the last trace of doubt faded from his mind as he stood in imagination by the broken body of that genial gentleman who had gone back deliberately to his homeland, offering himself as a sacrifice, a protest, an appeal to the free world. To Lanny's mind came the lines which Byron had written on the prisoner of Chillon:

Chillon, thy prison is a holy place

And thy sad floor an altar, for 'twas trod....

By Bonnivard! May none those marks efface!

For they appeal from tyranny to God.

VII

A few days later came another letter from Monck. He had promised to keep Lanny in touch with deveploments, and now he stated, 'Ferdinand's father is as active as ever. I enclose a sample, so you may see that the old fires are still smouldering'. He added, 'I am reading a story called _Treasure Island_ by Stevenson and finding it extremely interesting. You should read it'.

Lanny pondered that last. He was sure it was code; Monck didn't have any time to be reading adventure stories generally taken as suitable for boys. Always cautious, he would seldom put things in plain words and trust them to the mails. There were too many spies where he worked, and it was too easy to steam open a letter. The word 'treasure' told Lanny that Monck was on the trail of some of the jewels and gold the Nazi fanatics had buried. Lanny didn't know whether there was an island in the Tegernsee, but he knew there were islands in some of those mountain lakes, and it might well be that the Völkischerbund knew of treasure hidden on one of these.

There was a bit of paper enclosed, and Lanny opened it. Like the letter, it was in German, and done on the same typewriter. Obviously Monck had typed the copy:

'We have a right to salvation, the right of the believers. Our salvation must be won by ourselves. We hold our heads high. Our way was straight and without blame. We ask no man to give us back our honour; we possess it! We have made no terms with the enemy; we are ourselves'.

There was the voice of the unregenerate Nazi! There was _das Wort_ —'the Word!' Guzman had told Lanny that Kurt's prophetic utterances consisted of only one sentence at a time. But apparently Kurt's daimon was becoming importunate; or had Monck put several of 'the Words' together?

Anyhow, it meant that Kurt, who had made Lanny a pledge of honour, was not keeping it. He had taken the Nazi will-to-rule and made it into a _Mystik_ , a thing superior to manmade laws and to merely human rights. It was the old notion that the end justified the means. In German it was even more fanatical: _Der Zweck heiligt die Mittel_. The verb means more than justifies, it means hallows, sanctifies. The German determination to take the mastery of the world became a holy thing; moved by this divinely inspired impulse, they had made three attempts in a period of less than seventy years, and now Kurt was telling them to cherish the impulse in their hearts and get ready for a fourth try.

But meantime had come the Stalin Communists, repudiating the old gods and setting up a new one. Oddly enough he too was of Jewish origin; he was the Diamat, the Marxian dialectic! In the realm of this new divinity everything was automatic and inevitable; it was materialistic determinism. His followers were fated to seize the world and rule it whether they wanted to or not—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they were fated to want to. They were fated to hate capitalism, and to hate it so bitterly that they would rise up and abolish it and set up a dictatorship of the proletariat. Presumably those individuals who seized the power and became the rulers were fated to believe that they were the ones who were worthy to do so. The end was that they got the power, and this sanctified whatever hideous means were required to keep it.

So there were the Reds, facing their conquered Nazi foes, both sides with fanatical hatred blazing in their hearts. And in between them stood a third set of men with a wholly different set of notions in their heads, men from thousands of miles overseas, wedged in between the old antagonisms, separated from them by no more than an imaginary line drawn down the middle of a city's streets. What whim of an ancient malicious god or of a dialectical synthesis had brought it about that Americans should be in _that_ situation?

Certainly the Power, whatever it was, had not brought it about that the Americans _wanted_ to be there. Lanny Budd had met hundreds of 'Amis' on the scene, all the way from the lowliest GI to the five-star general at the top, and he had not met a single man who was not yearning in his heart to be back in Abilene, Kansas, or Dead Man's Gulch, Montana. But here they were, bound by some notion of duty; by an idea, inherited from their forefathers, that men should be free and that no nation should be permitted to conquer and enslave another. They didn't know how to dress it up in metaphysical language, they just said in their stubborn, matter-of-fact way that they believed in the free world and were saving it; so they stayed. And Lanny, reading this letter from his friend in Berlin, thought that if there had ever been a more explosive situation in history it was recorded in some book he had not read.

VIII

A few days after the death of Jan Masaryk, Lanny attended a session of the United Nations at Lake Success. He heard the discussion of a resolution that the U.N. should investigate the situation in Czechoslovakia. He heard a speech by the Soviet delegate, denouncing this motion as an insult to and an outrage upon the Democratic Peoples Republic of Czechoslovakia. This Soviet representative was still Gromyko. He was young, and so had never known anything but the Soviet system; he was one of those robots which the system was now turning out by the million. He had a perfectly expressionless face and spoke with a perfectly expressionless voice. Every evening he telephoned Moscow, reported the situation, and got his instructions; the next day he rose up and said what he had been told to say. He knew, of course, that very few people in the audience understood what he was saying; it all had to be translated. He voted against the resolution, and when it was carried he walked out; that too was automatic.

A few days later Lanny listened over the radio and heard General Marshall, the American Secretary of State, announce that we would stay in Berlin regardless of all protests and at all hazards. Also Lanny heard that the United Nations Commission on Atomic Energy had announced that it had reached an impasse in its efforts to arrange for atomic control. The Soviets would never agree to inspection of the atomic plants in their country, and they persisted in their demand that the U.N. must first forbid the use of atomic weapons and require their destruction before there could be any steps toward general disarmament. It was obvious to all the world that the only thing which had so far kept the Soviet Union from taking possession of Western Europe was that supply of atomic bombs which the United States kept dangling over the Kremlin; the Soviet demand was equivalent to a statement that they would not give up the intention to march.

IX

Under State Department auspices there had been set up in New York a radio organisation known as the Voice of America, whose purpose was to make known the country's ideas and ideals to the rest of the world. A Congress dominated by isolationists wouldn't give it much money, and the great news associations wouldn't sell it any of their product. To Lanny this was an illustration of the incredible length to which the profit system would go in the effort to protect itself against government competition; but so matters stood, and the Voice didn't go to law about it. It was free to use the news once it had been published, and to people listening in Siam, Tasmania, and Chile a few hours' delay didn't make much difference.

The Voice was forbidden to broadcast in America; it used short wave only, and as time passed it would be able to get more money and set up short-wave stations at strategic points surrounding the great Communist empire. This, of course, would be taken as a hostile action by the rulers of that empire. The Voice gave the facts, and there was nothing the rulers feared more. They would expend a large part of their radio funds to make clattering noises that would drown out the sounds of V.O.A. They would spend more of their radio energy in denouncing those statements which their own people were not supposed to have heard.

This was a new form of the cold war, and, like all the other forms, it would grow less cold as time passed. Thomas Jefferson had written that truth had nothing to fear from error where reason was left free to combat it; but reason was not left free inside the Communist empire, so the only way for reason to have a chance was for the news of the day to be translated into forty or fifty different languages and beamed in the direction of the lands where those languages were spoken. Many of those lands were poor and not many persons in them had short-wave radio sets; but the hope was that a few persons would get it and would be moved to go out and spread it by other means and at whatever risk, even of life. That had always happened so far in history, and the assumption was that it would continue to happen. A long time before Thomas Jefferson one of the old Hebrew prophets had stated that 'truth is mighty, and it prevails'.

V.O.A. hadn't the money to hire the top men away from private industry. It had to find men who were willing to take small salaries in return for the privilege of saying what they believed. There were many of these, and some were competent; others made mistakes. Always they worked under a sniping fire from both sides, the left and the right. The Communists, who had penetrated everywhere into newspapers, magazines, and radio, were quick to find fault with anything that was done in the name of the free world; and they could count upon the support of reactionary congressmen, isolationists who wanted nothing to do with foreign nations except to sell them a bill of goods. V.O.A. had to have a large staff of translators, people who could read and write and speak the most unlikely languages; and it wasn't always possible to be sure that their translations were correct. The most elementary ideas had to be explained; and sometimes it would be discovered that the American brand of humour was different from that of the Singhalese or the Egyptians.

People working under such pressure were glad to have the help of a volunteer group such as the Peace Programme. The little Peace paper was full of quotable extracts, and tape recordings were made of the programmes and supplied to both V.O.A. and R.I.A.S., thus increasing manyfold the effectiveness of the effort. It was casting bread upon the waters, and it came back in the form of a constant stream of letters from all over the world. Great numbers of people were listening and getting the facts; and in his own way each was labouring to spread knowledge and understanding. The outcome of all that effort lay upon the lap of the gods.
18 LOVE GILDS THE SCENE

I

Lanny was worried about his wife. He was certain that she was overworking. She was so conscientious that she considered it her duty to see every visitor and to answer every letter personally. She was keeping two secretaries busy; she would lie in bed with a stack of letters, reading them and marking them with instructions. She hadn't had a vacation in a long time, and Lanny set himself to lure her away. Let the well-trained subordinates take over the work, under the supervision of Rick and Nina, and then by and by this pair too could have a rest and a change.

There was Hansi, left alone in that big house, except for the servants. The boys had gone back to school after their Easter vacation, and Bess had gone off on a speaking tour. She had quarrelled with him before she left, accusing him of cowardice, or at any rate of moral slackness, because he was dropping his Communist activities. What was the good of saying you believed in a cause if you didn't work for it? And what was the value of a concerto compared with saving the proletarian state?

The trial was nearly two months off, and Lanny said, 'Why not kidnap Hansi and give him a little fun?' He called up Wilbur Post of the F.B.I. and asked about it. With Bess away, there was no possibility of Hansi getting any more information from the Reds. He was brooding over the dreadful publicity that was coming, the problem of what his friends would think about his conduct in spying upon his wife—an awful thing. Why not take him away and keep him cheerful? Post arranged the matter with the United States Commissioner, and Hansi agreed to keep in touch with that official.

Lanny had another meeting with his friend and put the proposition to him. They wouldn't let Bess know where he had gone or whom he had gone with. He would just write her a note, saying that he was taking a trip to get away from his troubles. If she guessed that her ideological enemies had something to do with it, that could do no great harm. The three of them would take things easy and see the sights on the way. They would stop in auto courts, and Hansi would take along his fiddle and some music paper and could write when he felt like it. He could ride in the back seat and think his own thoughts—provided only that they were cheerful.

The violinist was agreeable, and they arranged a completely secret getaway. Hansi went back and gave his instructions to the servants, wrote his letter to Bess, and packed up his belongings. Next morning he called a taxi and had himself driven to a nearby town, and in front of the post office he piled his belongings on the curb. He paid off the taxi driver and saw him depart, and stood there until Lanny's car showed up. Nobody had noticed him, and his belongings were safely stowed, and they set out for New Jersey and the South.

II

By late afternoon they were just above Washington, and they stopped at one of those comfortable hotels which by now had spread all over the country. They hired two little cabins, with a shelter in between for the car. Then they drove and found a café and had dinner and came back to the cabins. They had a radio in the car, and another set they could take inside, so they could always get the news, and afterward they would sit and solve all the problems of the world. They were three old friends who understood one another's minds; they could disagree without displeasure, and it was pleasure enough just to be near one another.

In the morning they drove into the city and rolled around like all the other tourists. It was amazing the way the place grew; there were always new buildings and new projects. Lanny didn't go to the Treasury Building, or to the Pentagon, or to the State Department; this was a pleasure trip, and they went to the National Gallery and spent the day looking at great art. The basis of this display had been the Mellon collection, and Lanny, an ardent young radical, had greatly disliked that shrewd banker named Andy, who had dominated the financial affairs of the nation and helped to bring on the great panic of 1929. Less than nineteen years had passed since that time, but what a lot of history had happened, and how the world had changed! Hitler had changed it, then Roosevelt, and now Stalin was having his try.

One of those who bore the praise or blame for the collection had been the English art dealer Duveen, a fabulous personage whose art had been the hypnotising of multimillionaires and persuading them that he was the world's supreme authority on 'old masters'. He had understood that the way to make art works valuable was to put high prices on them, and he had put prices in the hundreds of thousands, and the multimillionaires had been enraptured. He had made so much money that he had become an English lord. Hansi said that some day there might be a Lord Lanny, and they had a laugh over that.

Anyhow, there were the paintings, and many of them were really grand. To look at them one after another was to be transported through the ages; to have the pageant of history made real to you, the continuity of human life and of civilisations in their endless variety. It was to have the imagination stimulated and the understanding extended. It was to be taken out of your narrow self, to be freed from your petty cares, to visit past ages and strange climes, and to be impressed with the infinite mystery of being.

Lanny, who for a quarter of a century had been earning his living as an art expert, knew these painters and their life stories and the ages in which they had lived. He knew the costumes they had worn and the homes in which they had been housed and the rulers or prelates who had patronised them and supplied them with their subjects. He could point out how the painter had balanced his design, how he had harmonised his colours, and the technique of his brush strokes—also where modern work had been done on his masterpiece. They found all this so fascinating that they decided to spend another night in the auto court and another day in the National Gallery.

III

Then the great bridge across the Potomac, and they were on their way southward through Virginia, past some of the battlefields of the Civil War. The effects of that war were still felt. It was still 'the Wilderness'; the fields were barren and the cabins unpainted. But they went past speedily, and the warm sunshine was a delight.

U.S. I, the thousand-mile highway was called, and that at least showed no signs of dilapidation. You could make good time, and Lanny was a fast but careful driver. He watched the cars in front, and those behind in the little mirror. When one of those "bumper-chasers" settled on behind him he would move a foot or two over to the right and slow up and let the lunatic go on by himself. He had a precious cargo—including Hansi's violin—and he took the best care of it.

They spent a night in Savannah and drove about admiring magnolias and live oaks bedecked like Christmas trees with Spanish moss. They went on to Florida and drove about in old St. Augustine, the most ancient of American towns, with horse-drawn hacks which might have come down from the time of the Negro slaves who had driven them.

Here in Florida American millionaires had sought for profitable and sometimes agreeable things to do with their money. One had built a railroad all the way down the East Coast, with a chain of luxury hotels. Now the motor highway paralleled the railway and the broad white-sand beaches. Along the way was the world's most elaborate aquarium, with all the creatures of the subtropical seas. You could look below the surface through plate-glass windows and imagine yourself swimming there; you could look from above and watch the huge dolphins jump out of the water to take fish from their keeper's hands.

They drove all the way down to Miami with its gambling palaces, which they did not patronise. They crossed by a highway to the west and went up Florida's west coast with its sponge and tarpon fisheries. It is a tremendous state and has become all America's playground, to say nothing of its winter-vegetable garden. In the flat interior lands it was raising great herds of cattle about which the tourists knew nothing. If you drove through its boundless pine forests at twilight you would see deer crossing the road and would have to watch out for them. The highway was hot, but they dressed accordingly, and the motion of the car provided a breeze; they found it delightful.

No one knew them or paid any attention to them, except to render the services for which they paid, and that was always done with courtesy. For Hansi it was wonderful; he had never been here before and could look at new scenes and discuss them with his friends and really forget the problems and horrors and griefs of his life. He was travelling incog, and since his name had to be entered in the registers of motels they had an amusing time discussing a suitable name. It had to be Jewish, of course, and they wanted it to sound as much so as possible. So he had become Mr Moishe Zinsenheimer.

In the evenings he would shut himself up in his little cabin and play for dear life, for never must his fingers be allowed to lose their flexibility. The effect upon the neighbourhood was electric. Americans were used to hearing such performances over the radio, but few of them had ever heard it 'live', and somehow they had not actually realised that human fingers could perform such miracles of agility. They would come out of their cabins and stand near Hansi's cabin, listening. Sometimes they would stand through the whole performance and never make a sound and speak in whispers when it stopped.

They were people from all over the land, and invariably they were polite and respectful. They would ask Lanny and Laurel who this was, and always the answer would be that Mr Moishe Zinsenheimer was a refugee from the Nazis in Rumania. 'Is he famous?' they would ask, and the answer would be that he had been famous in Europe. These little fictions did not harm anybody; and of course it would have done no good to say that he was the notorious Red who was under indictment for espionage and stood to get ten or twenty years in a federal prison.

IV

St. Petersburg, Florida, was the city which boasted that the sun shone every day of the year, or almost; it was the place to which the old people of America who had saved up a little money came to die. In the meantime they went fishing, pitched horseshoes, and on Saturday nights had square dances. Hansi Robin had never caught a fish in his life, and he never did anything with his hands that he could possibly avoid doing; but it amused him greatly to let an old lady from Iowa teach him to dance the Virginia reel, and he went through the capers with spirit. He learned the meaning of 'dosy-doe' and 'sashay your partner'. French words underwent a strange transmogrification when they travelled to Florida by way of Ioway.

Yes, it was fun. Hansi had played the peasant dances of all the countries of Europe, but this was the first time he had ever been on the receiving end. When the dance was over he went up to the country fiddler, who played with the instrument held to his chest, and said politely, 'May I borrow your violin for a moment?' The man looked perplexed but handed over the violin and the bow. Hansi took his stance, struck three loud chords, and plunged into the playing of one of those frenzied Hungarian gypsy dances which he had made one of his specialities. The audience stood amazed; no one moved from the spot. Their eyes opened wide, and their mouths too, the better to take in the sounds, perhaps. And when the music ended with a wild flourish they broke into a storm of applause.

This was an American audience and no one shouted, 'Bravo'; they shouted, 'More' and, 'Give us another'. Hansi might have stopped the dancing and turned it into a concert, but he bowed once or twice politely, handed back the fiddle and the bow with a word of thanks, and literally fled from the place. Let them remember it the rest of their lives, and let it be a mystery to them! He had taken a chance, for somebody might have heard him play at a concert, and the story might get around and reach a newspaper.

V

They continued northward, trending toward the west and came to a steel bridge with a sign on it reading 'Suwannee River'. They stopped the car and got out and walked on the bridge. So this was the stream made famous the world over by a song! The poet had misspelled the name, leaving out the _u_ , and people looked it up in the gazetteers and encyclopedias and couldn't find it and drew the conclusion that the river was fictitious. But it was very real. It didn't in any way suggest 'the old plantation'; on the contrary it suggested the jungles of the Congo. The water was dark, the river narrow and deep and overshadowed with thick, almost black trees. It had come two hundred miles from a swamp in Georgia, and they would have liked to get out and hire a power boat and be taken as far up it as they could go. But they remembered that it was the mosquito season, and they got into the car and went on, singing the song while Lanny drove.

The coast swung to the west, and the highway followed. They came to Pensacola but did not ask to inspect the great naval airbase—having with them a notorious Communist under indictment in New York. They came to Mobile, an old Southern city on a great bay, and they drove through streets lined by old houses with tall white pillars and double balconies, enclosed in gardens with walls covered by honeysuckle and trumpet vines. And presently it was the Mississippi Sound, a long shell road lined with stately old homes. They stopped in Biloxi, and in a Creole café they ate what was called a gumbo, a kind of fish chowder much like what Lanny had eaten in Marseille and known as bouillabaisse; it contained a variety of the edible creatures that swam in that sea, in addition to tomatoes, rice, okra, and peppers, and when you had eaten a large bowl of it you were through for the day.

They did not go on to New Orleans but westward to Baton Rouge. This was Louisiana, the stamping ground of Huey Long, who had promised to make every man a king and had made himself their emperor. He had built a political machine not so different from that of Hitler, but he had not gone to war. He had left himself an elaborate set of monuments in the shape of beautiful highways and steel bridges, everyone of them with his name on it. The tourists spent the night in a motor court outside the capital, and in the morning crossed the broad Mississippi on a ferry loaded with cars. They drove slowly up the Red River, full of mist, following its planless windings and turnings until they came to Texas.

Then they would drive four or five hundred miles straight westward with hardly a turn. First there were farms and then there were oilfields, black with derricks and crowded with traffic. After that were the endless grazing plains, hundreds of miles of them, with mesquite trees so big and so regular you could hardly persuade yourself it was not an orchard. But the only fruit was mistletoe—enough of it to have served for all the Christmas kissing of the ages.

It was monotonous driving, but Lanny never got tired of it. Hansi could sit in the back seat and compose his musical themes in his mind, and Laurel could read the stack of mail which she had got in Dallas. She telephoned every single day to make sure the precious little ones were getting all they needed; also to the office to make sure the speakers were keeping their engagements and everything going on schedule.

VI

So they came to El Paso, the Pass. They would have liked to have a glimpse of Mexico, but Wilbur Post had specified that Hansi was forbidden to leave United States territory. They crossed the Rio Grande where its course turned northward; the highway wound up through the pass, between mountains strangely white—not snow but rocks. From then it was all mountains, one range after another, with rocks piled in endless strange forms—towers, temples, fortresses, monuments; it was hard to believe that nature had made them. They were of every colour you could name—red, yellow, black, green, grey, and blue or purple in the distance. It was desert country; the streams ran madly in the spring and dried up in summer. There was agriculture only where dams had been built and the water was tamed.

First New Mexico, then Arizona. The days were hot and the nights were cold, but the cabins in the motels were air-conditioned and every comfort had been provided for the tourists. A century ago the emigrant trains of covered wagons had toiled through these passes, hauled by horses and oxen, and many of the venturesome had perished of thirst or had been killed by the fiercest of Indians. Now there was an endless ribbon of smooth concrete, and every few miles a filling station where you could get not merely petrol but cold soft drinks and candy bars. You could not drive for half an hour without coming upon a café with a quaint name or a hamburger stand labelled 'Eats'. It was migration made easy, and people had found out about it; there were thousands of cars that went westward and didn't come back. The population of California was growing at something like a quarter of a million a year.

Somewhere to the north in that wide state of New Mexico Budd-Erling had an airfield where it tested jet engines and planes; Lanny and Laurel had visited it twice during the war. Immediately after the war it had been closed down, but now it was starting up again. But the trio didn't visit it; you just couldn't take an indicted Red into such a place, and you couldn't explain that he wasn't what he was supposed to be. Not even to the president of the company could you explain it!

They went on across Arizona and down the valley of the dry Gila River to Yuma, the hottest place in the United States. They crossed the Colorado River and into a city where the temperature was something like a hundred and ten degrees. They got themselves an air-conditioned cabin and stayed in it until the sun went down, and then the steering wheel of the car was so hot that it burned Lanny's hands and he held a newspaper in between.

They made the trip through the California desert at night. Thousands of tons of dates were ripening in the great orchards, and there were miles and miles of melon vines which they could not see in the dark. It was the wonderful Coachella Valley. The highway ran almost straight for forty miles and then climbed up through a straight pass between mountains two miles high. Alongside the highway moved a line of freight cars that seemed to be half a mile long; two or three Diesel engines pulled it; and two more pushed it from behind, and up it went and up. Lanny could go faster, and they passed the whole line and came over the ridge, first into the cherry country and then down into the orange groves—a hundred miles or so of these.

VII

So they came to Hollywood, land of all the world's dreams, with almost as many stars as the Milky Way. Lanny and Laurel wanted to stay here for a while and meet some friends. But Hansi had friends here too and certainly couldn't go about without being recognised and getting into the newspapers. He said not to worry about him, he was perfectly comfortable in a little cabin and had some musical ideas that he wanted to get down on paper. He had been impressed by the landscape of America and by the people of the highway who had been so genial and courteous. He might some day shock the musical world by introducing a composition based on the folk tunes he had heard in Florida. Also, he had a couple of books to read, and he would get the news with the radio set; when he was hungry he would go to an obscure little grocery and buy what he needed.

The last time Lanny and Laurel had been here they had been seeing the world in a trailer and had parked it on the estate of their wealthy and fashionable friends, the De Lyle Armbrusters. These socially ambitious persons maintained a combination of salon and swimming pool for the Hollywood great, and so they were the front door to paradise. Lanny telephoned, and they exclaimed with delight and said to come right away. Lanny explained that they were taking a motor trip and had 'no clothes'; but De Lyle said that didn't matter a bit, his affairs were never formal, and besides there was a new style known as 'California casual'. Men wore flannels and light blouses with huge tropical flowers on them, and no hats; presently they took off everything and put on trunks and lounged by the swimming pool and got tanned. 'Come to lunch, come to dinner, come any time'. Then De Lyle added, 'Genie is calling, she says come right now. Rose Pippin is here, and you will be crazy about her'.

Lanny said, 'Okay', and of his wife he asked, 'Who is Rose Pippin?' Since they had been busy saving the world from war they hadn't paid much attention to Hollywood doings. Lanny knew of pippin as a kind of apple and wondered if any parents who had that name could be so unkind as to name a child Rose. But Laurel said it was probably a stage name. Hollywood characters who came from Brooklyn chose for themselves names that were supposed to be glamorous. Maybe Rose Pippin thought she would be called 'a pippin', and maybe she was.

The last time they had visited the Armbrusters, Laurel had been actively collecting material for stories and had made a bit of money out of her visit. She always hugged the idea that when she had completed the ending of wars she would go back to the writing game; and now the old impulse stirred in her blood. 'Let's go', she said.

So they put on their most completely 'casual' costumes—really expensive, of course—and went up Benedict Canyon Drive until they came to an Italian Renaissance villa of twenty or so rooms built on the side of a mountain. It was in just such villas on the hills above Cannes and in a place called Californie above Nice that Lanny had first met the Armbrusters, who were spending their money and acquiring culture by entertaining all the celebrities they could get hold of. Later they had realised that most of the celebrities were assembling in Hollyweed, many of them driven there by the war. This was the only place left where genius could make 'real' money, so the couple had brought their millions to Beverly Hills.

Genie, short for Eugenia, came out with both hands extended. 'Oh, how perfectly ducky! Where in the world have you dropped from?' She kissed Laurel on both cheeks and hugged Lanny—she had known him since they were children, dancing together at parties.

She called both 'Darling'—she called everybody that, and so did everybody else. She bubbled over with delight and said they must come and stay at the villa and they would have such such a lovely time 'chewing the fat'. Then she asked quickly, 'Have you read _The Rabbit Race_?' When they looked blank she exclaimed, 'Good heavens, haven't you even _heard_ of it? Where have you been keeping yourselves?' She informed them that _The Rabbit Race_ was the best-selling novel of the day. It had been selected by a book club, and besides that it had sold a quarter of a million copies. Hollywood had bought it for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars and was making it into the funniest movie ever heard of.

Genie, lowering her voice as if to conceal the fact of their ignorance, told them that Rose Pippin—that was her real name—had been born and raised on a ranch in a little place called Le Mesa down near San Diego, and the family had lived, or almost failed to live, by raising rabbits. 'You know how rabbits multiply', she said. 'She has made the most hilarious fun out of the habits of rabbits, and, of course, all the neighbours and their habits too. Everyone has been laughing their heads off over it'.

'Will her feelings be hurt because we haven't read it'? asked Laurel.

'Heavens, no! She will make jokes about you. She's the gayest thing you ever met, and the fact that she has made several fortunes hasn't spoiled her a bit'.

VIII

So they went into Genie's large and sumptuous drawing room—the first time Lanny had been in it he had counted fifty Hollywood 'personalities', or so he averred. At present there were only two persons in the room, one being De Lyle and the other a women of thirty or so, rather tall, solidly built, obviously an outdoor person. When she gave you her hand you perceived that it was a hand of honest toil, and her feet were firmly planted on De Lyle's enormous Khotan rug with its 'five blossoms' pattern. When you looked into her eyes you discovered their sparkle; the fun bubbled up in her like the water in the mudpots of the Coachella Valley. When she laughed at her own fun she shook like the little earthquakes of that same region.

She had grown up on a ranch on the outskirts of La Mesa and had never been anywhere else. A ranch in the Far West, as she explained in the book, could be anything from a couple of town lots to a couple of million acres. This had been a small family ranch and had been planted to alfalfa, which had to be cut by hand and fed to rabbits. When you had a thousand rabbits in pens it was absolutely incredible how much green stuff they would eat and how heavy it was for a small child to carry.

The phrase Genie had used, 'the habits of rabbits', was one of the chapter titles of the book. The habits of rabbits, Rose explained, were three: first they nibbled, second they cohabited, and third they produced litters. After the multiplication of rabbits came the subtraction, when the buyer carried away the mature males. There was never any addition, and no division, said Rose, because when all the children of the family had been fed there was nothing left. 'We were so poor', she said, 'we lived on cornmeal and the milk from one cow, and we worried for months where the money was coming from for the taxes'.

'Genie has been telling me about the wonderful life you two have been having', she said. 'Me, I have never been outside of Southern California. So you see what an ignoramus I am. I had never even heard of your Peace Programme'.

'We hadn't heard of your book', said Laurel, 'so we can be honest with each other'.

'What a relief!' said Rose. 'I am so tired of people who tell me they have read it, and I find out they haven't; or if they have read it they say the same things I've heard and heard'.

'And', put in De Lyle, 'she doesn't like Hollywood!' De Lyle himself adored the place and thrived in it; he had added a couple of inches to his waistline since Lanny and Laurel had last seen him. His round, rosy cheeks beamed satisfaction with the social success he was having. He possessed the private telephone number of practically everybody of importance in 'the industry', and when he invited them to a party they came. The reason was they knew they would meet everybody else who was important. He was the steward of a country club that had no dues or charges of any sort.

'Why don't you like Hollywood, Miss Pippin?' inquired Laurel, pursuing her literary purpose.

'At home on the ranch I had the wild idea of writing a book. I wrote it with a stubby pencil on any old scraps of paper I could find. I wrote it exactly the way I wanted it, and I thought it was fun. Then, to my surprise, other people thought it was fun too. Now Hollywood has bought it and brought me up here and is paying me five thousand dollars a week to pretend to be a script writer. There are three other writers, all of them anxious to get something into the picture so as to justify their salaries. There is a director, a producer, a supervisor, a head of the production department—a whole hierarchy. They all sit in conferences and discuss every scene and every line of dialogue. Their test of whether a thing will go over is whether it has gone over before, and whether that was long enough ago for the public to have forgotten it. My book has only one virtue, that it is different; and the picture is going to have only one virtue, that it isn't different from anything'.

'And aren't you enjoying Hollywood society?' It was still Laurel, hot on a trail.

'Enjoying it, Mrs Budd? Enjoyment is for those who see the pictures, not for those who make them. What I'm going to do is to go home and write another book, this time about the habits of Hollywood, and it won't be so funny. Hollywood is a lot of people clinging to a raft in a storm, all trying to avoid being pulled off by somebody else; a lot of people worrying themselves sick about prestige and measuring it in money. I could tell you funny stories about Hollywood, but you are a writer too, and I have to save them for my book.'

'And what are you going to do with all your money, Miss Pippin?'

'I'm tucking it away in my stocking, and I'm going back home and buy me a women-size ranch, a tractor to drive, and a horse to ride, and maybe a couple of hired men that I'll manage'.

'And a husband?'...

'No, indeed. I've watched the rabbits too long!'

IX

They chatted for a while about Hollywood pictures and their costs and Hollywood personalities and their salaries. Rose told funny stories—it didn't mean a thing that she had said she wouldn't; the impulse to share them was compelling. Laurel must have liked her, for presently she asked, 'Do you care for music, Miss Pippin?'

The answer was that the family had got a radio set, but the little brothers and sisters made too much noise. (There had been multiplication of Pippins as well as of rabbits, it appeared.) Then she added, 'The first thing I did when I sold a story to a magazine was to go to San Diego to hear several concerts—the first really good music I ever heard'.

Laurel said, 'The reason I ask is that we have a friend with us, a very extraordinary violinist. He is a refugee from Rumania and hasn't yet been introduced in America, so you probably never heard his name—Moishe Zinsenheimer'.

Rose said she hadn't heard it and was pleased when Laurel suggested that she might like to meet this man of genius. Laurel said, 'To sit in the room and hear him play is quite an overwhelming experience', and the reply was, 'Oh, don't let me miss it!' She gave Laurel her telephone number—a secret celebrities quickly learn to guard.

Driving home, Lanny said, 'Well, what do you think of her?'

'She's a sensible woman and very good company, but I'm afraid she wouldn't appeal to Hansi'.

'Why not?'

'She's not very feminine, and she's too positive'.

'Bess was positive'.

'Yes, indeed—and their marriage is breaking up'.

'Hansi gets his head up into the clouds', Lanny said. 'He needs a woman whose feet are firmly planted on the earth'.

'Well, she can qualify in that respect. Did you notice the size of her feet?'

'I noticed she had on sensible shoes, the kind you advocate, so you oughtn't be too mean to her. A husband and wife ought to be different, otherwise the marriage adds nothing to either of them'.

'Yes, but not too different', was the answer. 'Anyhow, we'll let them meet and see'.

They were taking a copy of _The Rabbit Race_ along with them. It had been presented by De Lyle and autographed by the author. Most persons when they know they are to receive a visit from a celebrity are satisfied to get one copy of the new book and place it on the centre table in the drawing room. But De Lyle's middle name was sumptuous, and his idea was to order a dozen copies from his bookseller and have them autographed and then distribute them to his friends; in that way the whole world would know that he had snared another lioness.

They read some of the book aloud that evening. Mr Zinsenheimer—who was staying in another motel for security reasons—came over and listened. They had a good time, for it was really a humorous book. The habits of rabbits served merely as a theme song, a pretext for a study of the habits of humans. The determination of rabbits to perpetuate their race was entirely shared by humans and was equally alarming in both, for neither would have left any standing room upon the earth if they had had their way. Likewise the humans would eat all day if they could, and many of them did, with disastrous consequences. The book was a study of the misadventures of a large ranch family and its neighbours, their morals or the lack of them, their quirks, their delusions, their comical misadventures. The humour was earthy and explicit; that was perhaps why it had delighted Hollywood—and also why the picture would have to be different.

'I'll be glad to play for her', Hansi said. 'But what a funny name. It's hard to believe that it's real'.

'It would be funnier yet if you should marry her', said Lanny. 'Mrs Rose Pippin Robin—you would have to go and live in an orchard'.

'Oh dear!' said Hansi. 'Let me get rid of my old wife before you get me a new one. I'm trying so hard to get over my heartaches about Bess'.

They phoned to the potential Mrs Rose Pippin Robin and said they were not sure how long they would stay in Hollywood, so could she come in the morning? She said she had an engagement at the studio, but they didn't really need her, and anyhow they never got started until eleven. Could she come early in the morning? They settled upon nine o'clock.

X

It was an odd encounter, as odd as anything in _The Rabbit Race_. Hansi had brought his fiddle and played for Lanny and Laurel a new theme he had been elaborating. They were talking about it when there came a tap on the door; they opened it, and there was Rose, with her feet firmly planted upon the one concrete step before the cabin. She came in, and Lanny, the host, said, 'This is our friend, Mr Moishe Zinsenheimer'.

Rose suddenly stopped and stared. 'Oh, but—' she said, and hesitated—'but I heard you play. I heard you in San Diego'. What could Hansi reply? He didn't know and just stood there. 'But', persisted the woman, 'you are Hansi Robin!' It was a truly embarrassing moment. Lanny, who had faced many emergencies in his life, had the quickest wit. 'Hansi Robin is his professional name', he said.

'Oh, I see!' was the reply, and then, 'But—but I thought—I read in the papers—'

'He has been released on bail', said the ever ready Lanny. 'We have taken him away from it all'.

'But'—she seemed to have a hard time thinking of any other word—'why didn't you tell me, Mr Budd?'

'I didn't suppose that that would have any special interest, Miss Pippin'.

'It just happens that it does, Mr Budd. I have rather positive convictions on the subject of Communist spies. I have convictions on the subject of all Communists and what they are doing to our country. I don't tolerate them if I know it'.

'I ought not have to tell you, Miss Pippin, that under our law a man is not assumed to be guilty until he has been proved guilty'.

'Am I to understand then that you think the F.B.I. has had a man arrested without having the evidence?'

'I don't want to prejudge the case, Miss Pippin, but I can assure you that Mr Zinsenheimer is an idealist and a man of high principles—'

'I know all those fine words, Mr Budd. We hear them all the time here. This place is full of Communists and Communist agents, and when you find it out and say so you are called a redbaiter. I made up my mind that I was going to speak out, and speak out clearly, whenever the occasion arose. Let me make it plain, I'm not any sort of reactionary. I know poverty, I was brought up in it, and I've known all the bitterness of defeat. I believe that social changes were needed and that many are still needed, and I am willing to work for them and help; but I want it done in the American way, by educating the people and by using the political remedies we have in our hands. I tell that to the world, and I'm telling it to you and Mr Zinsenheimer'.

It was a very good speech and was delivered not without eloquence. To Lanny it was one of the funniest situations he had encountered in a long time, and it was hard to keep himself from chuckling. He said, 'Miss Pippin, do me a favour to sit down and let me tell you a little story. We spent a good part of last evening reading your book, so we know a lot about your life. I would like to tell you just one anecdote out of mine. Do please hear me'.

She complied; but she sat on the edge of the chair, very stiff and straight, as if she were saying that she might get up at any moment and go.

Said Lanny, 'When I was young I too objected to poverty, and I made speeches that shocked the wealthy friends of my mother and father. Then later I made the discovery that Adolf Hitler was preparing to seize Europe and that he stood a good chance of success. It happened that through a German friend I had met him, and I decided I would cultivate his acquaintance and learn all I could about his movement. I did so, and for years I was working as what you call a spy on Hitler and the other top Nazis—Goring, Goebbels, Hess, and so on. In order to carry on that dangerous task I had to make everybody in the world think that I had become a Nazi sympathiser; I didn't tell even my own mother or father the truth about myself. And one day in the home of one of our old friends, a baroness who lived near the Cap d'Antibes, I was expressing some of my sentiments to the effect that Hitler was the wave of the future, Europe's best guarantee of security, and so on. Among the company in that room was a woman writer of short stories, a rather small person, but she had a hot fire inside. She spoke up and told me what she thought of me; as the saying is, she took the top of my head off. I went away chuckling over it. Sometime later it happened that the lady found out the truth about me, and then we were married, and here she is. Don't you find that a suggestive story, Miss Pippin?'

She was staring at him hard. 'Mr Budd, if I understand you correctly, you are hinting that Mr Robin—Mr Zinsenheimer—is secretly helping our government'.

Lanny said very gravely, 'Miss Pippin, if by any possibility such a thing were true, it would be a breach of security for even to hint at it. I am sure that if such a bit of information were to come to your knowledge you would understand that you might be doing grave harm to the government by mentioning it to anyone else'.

'Yes, Mr Budd, but—'

'Furthermore, you will understand that a man who possessed information damaging to the Reds and was prepared to appear in court and give testimony—such a man might be in real danger of his life. I could give you a list of persons who were working against the Reds and have been murdered, and not in any remote, half-civilised land but right here in the United States. They have been shot, or beaten to death, or thrown out of windows, or have just never been heard from again. So you can see that a man in that position might be advised to disappear and not show up until the time of the trial. I am sure that if you, as a loyal American, were to meet such a man and recognise him, you would not be so indiscreet as to go off and speak his name; especially not in a place like Hollywood, where there are so many newshounds hunting their prey. How does that seem to you, Miss Pippin?'

'The first thing I would say, Mr Budd, is that such a man ought not to come to a place like Hollywood'.

'It might happen that he was hiding in a place outside, but was tempted into Hollywood in order to meet a young lady whose book had interested him very much. It might be that the young lady had expressed a desire to hear him play the violin, and his impulses of kindness had got the better of his discretion'.

'Mr Budd', said the young lady, 'I don't know you very well—'

'If you really want to know me, Miss Pippin, you might go somewhere to a short-wave radio set and hear our Peace Programme tonight. My wife and I started that, and we have been directing it from the beginning. You would discover that we have not been taken in by the Communist or fellow-traveller idea of peace, which consists in sitting still while a boa constrictor prepares to swallow you. What we are calling for is a world order, with a court to which all nations will submit themselves. It will be a free world for all those nations who are willing to let other nations alone; and if there is any nation that sets out upon a course of aggression we will be ready to meet force with force. The way you spoke, I imagine that is according to your ideas'.

'Yes, Mr Budd; but I don't know Mr Robin either—'

'That is even easier. The way to know Hansi Robin is to listen to his music. Since the age of five he has been working day and night to learn to express himself with a violin, and millions of people have learned to know him that way—people all over the world, in Russia, in Australia, in the Argentine. Now here he is, willing to play just for us three. Don't you think it would be nice to hear him?'

XI

So Hansi played. He had guessed that this ranch girl's taste would be simple and that the old favourites would be new to her. He played Raff's 'Cavatina', which has a lovely melody on the G string, enabling Hansi to produce his most heart-warming tone. You can take it as a love song, or you can take it as a prayer; in the middle is a gentle disturbance, a clamour not unknown to either of these varieties of experience; and then the melody climbs to the top of the E string with piercing harmonic notes that are like the opening up of heaven:

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!

Piercing sweet by the river!

The sun on the hills forgot to die,

The lilies revived, and the dragon-fly

Came back to dream on the river.

Hansi Robin did not indulge in any histrionics when he played music. He did not sway and swing to it or make himself into any sort of actor. He stood straight and stiff, closed his eyes, and hoped that you would close yours and have no sense except that of hearing.

When he finished nobody spoke a word. He waited a bit before playing the 'Londonderry Air' in Albert Spalding's transcription. It is gentle and charming and consonant with country life; he was speaking directly to a country girl. And then Lanny said, 'Now show us some of your tricks'; so Hansi launched into the finale of a Vieuxtemps concerto. There was a composer who had set himself to exhaust the possibilities of the violin, everything that men had learned to do with it in the course of centuries of diligent experimenting. The music came faster and faster, madder and madder. It went leaping up a scale through half a dozen octaves and down again; there were double stoppings, triple stoppings, arpeggios and pizzicatos. It was like mounting on a wild horse and galloping over the prairie or over the mountain-tops. The crazy creature bucked and kicked—it was a rodeo conducted on four strips of a cat's intestines. To be in a small room and watch it as well as hear it was a breath-taking experience.

And when Hansi finished, in a hailstorm of notes, you were breathless and expected that he would be breathless also. But he wasn't—only a little warm. He had been learning to do this since childhood, and it was second nature to him. His mind was a storehouse of millions of musical notes, and he never had the slightest trouble sorting them out; he never had a doubt which note came next or what precise movements of the fingers would produce it.

'Marvellous, marvellous!' exclaimed Rose Pippin, and Hansi replied, 'The eye of one of your rabbits is more so'.

The ranch girl was in no hurry to leave. She said that the studio didn't care a thing about her; they would have paid her to stay away and not bother them with her suggestions. She said that meeting new friends was far more important. Real friends were scarce, and every new one was an extension of your life. You learned new things and you shared new experiences. It was evident that that was the way she looked on Hansi Robin; she was completely fascinated by him. He was the whole of the old world to her; he was not merely music but all culture; he was dignity, and at the same time he was fame; he was not merely Paris and Berlin and New York, he was Palestine and the Old Testament. She plied him with questions and listened closely to his answers. Lanny wondered, Is she falling in love with him, or is she planning to put him into a book?

He could have found out by asking, because she was the frankest of creatures; she hadn't a particle of guile that he could discover. She said, 'Look, you people are wonderful to me. I've met a lot of phonies here in Hollywood, people who are acting culture, acting elegance and glamour, and at the same time trying to cut one another's throats. Can you stand a critter just off the ranch with the soil still behind her ears?'

'Indeed we can', said Laurel promptly and added, 'Rose'.

'Oh, I know I'm a character, and I might be picturesque in a book; I've never been anywhere but La Mesa and San Diego, and I don't know anybody that's anybody. When I meet people like you I feel like I was being introduced to Beethoven'.

'You'll get over that soon', said Laurel. 'Remember, kind hearts are more than coronets—or even Hollywood Oscars'.

'Couldn't we go and have lunch somewhere? I mean, as my guests. We could drive away off where nobody would recognise Mr Robin'.

'You must get used to calling him Zinsenheimer', said Laurel with a laugh. 'It would have to be some very obscure place'.

'Some dump if you like', said Rose. 'Believe me, I've eaten in a lot of them and was glad to get a hamburger sandwich or a malted milk'.

XII

Put that way the invitation was hard to refuse; so she took them in her car and drove them right fast out through Cahuenga Pass. Presently they took a side road leading toward the Mojave Desert, and on the way they found a little 'dump' where they were sure that none of the Hollywood glamour people would condescend to stop. There was a table for four in the back corner, and they put Hansi in a seat with his back turned to the rest of the world. There they had ham and eggs and hot cakes with syrup. They were careful not to call one another by name, and when they talked about the evil state of the world none of the three world travellers said anything about possessing inside knowledge. Rose couldn't take her eyes off Hansi and didn't try.

Then they drove some more, and there was Hansi on the front seat with Rose, and Lanny and Laurel in the back seat, very much amused but keeping quiet and listening. Hansi never was much of a talker, but he had to talk now because Rose plied him with questions about everything that had ever happened to him and all the wonderful people he had ever known in the world. She wanted to hear about Rotterdam where he had been brought up, and about his music teachers and what they were like, and about his mother and his father and his dead brother Freddi; and then about Berlin, and the yacht trips to the Mediterranean; and about the Nazis and their cruelties, and how Johannes had lost his fortune and was making another small one in New York; about Paris and the Riviera, and London, and Moscow, and Sydney, and Buenos Aires, and other places where Hansi had made concert tours. One curios thing they noticed—not once did she ask about Bess, and not once did Hansi mention her. Rose must have known, for she had read the stories of the arrest and they had gone into detail about the wife.

All motor rides have to come to an end, and when this end was near Rose said, 'I don't want to be a nuisance, but I hope we can see more of each other'.

Laurel hastened to say, 'Of course we can'. Then with tact and kindness she asked, 'May we give your telephone number to Hansi?'

'Oh, indeed you may!' was the reply. 'And if you'll call up, Mr Zinsenheimer, I'll be delighted to take you for a ride, anywhere you want to go. I promise not to take you where you might be recognised, and I won't breathe a word about you'.

Hansi said, 'I don't want to impose upon you—'

'Please don't look at it that way', she interrupted. 'I'm just so sick of the motion-picture business I don't know what to do. I was making up my mind to run away to New York and see if the book business could be any better'.

So that was the way they parted. She delivered Hansi to the motel where he was staying, and then she delivered Lanny and Laurel, and they made her happy by assuring her that they loved her and would be really truly friends from that time on.

'Well, there you are', said Lanny when they were alone. 'There's Hansi's fate if he wants it'.

'Oh', exclaimed the wife, 'I came near to fainting when I heard you begin to tell the secret'.

'What could I do? She had recognised him, and if we hadn't hushed her up she would have called Genie as soon as she got home, and the story would have been all over town in an hour. The reporters would come, and a lot of people would decide that he was a fugitive from justice and call the F.B.I.'

'I think she's an honest person', ventured Laurel. 'But I'm afraid she's making a mistake throwing herself at Hansi's head'.

'I'm not so sure', replied the sapient husband. 'There's an old saying, catch him on the rebound'.

'Yes, but not before the rebound', said Laurel.

'We'll see', said Lanny, and this is what they saw. Next morning they called the offce of Hansi's motel and asked for him. The clerk reported that he had left a message; he had gone for a drive. They went about their business of looking up several friends. In the evening the Armbrusters were having a party—which was their business. On the way to the party the Budds stopped off to see Hansi, and the report was that he hadn't got back, or if he had he had gone out again.

'He's telling her his whole story', said Lanny,'and it's a long one'.

'God help us if she talks about it', said the wife.

'She talks an awful lot', added the husband.

'That's because she's nervous. She thinks he's the most wonderful man in the world, and she's trying to impress him. If she gets him she'll settle down and write a book about him'.

XIII

The Budds went to the party and met a number of Hollywood celebrities, some of whom they had met on their previous visit. You were used to seeing these people enormously enlarged upon the magic screen; to meet them in a drawing room, walking around and chatting, was, as Rose had said, like 'being introduced to Beethoven'. Lanny and Laurel stayed late, and on the way home they drove by Hansi's motel and found his cabin dark. They had no way of knowing whether he was there or not; they did not knock.

Next morning they telephoned again and got the same reply: Mr Zinsenheimer had left a message that he had gone for a drive. They were about to set out on their own affairs when Rose's car came into the court and stopped in front of their cabin. The couple came in, and after everybody had said 'Hello' and 'How are you?' Hansi, looking very solemn, announced, 'I have asked Rose to marry me'. Promptly Rose put in, 'That's a fib—I asked him'.

'Anyhow', persisted Hansi—it looked as if he were blushing a little—'we want to go and get married'.

'Oh, fine!' said Lanny.

'Congratulations!' said Laurel; and then, always the first to face unpleasant realities, she added, 'But you can't get married, Hansi, until you have divorced Bess'.

'I know that. We're going to Reno. I have to establish residence there, and then I have to wait six weeks'.

'We asked a lawyer about it', added Rose.

Lanny said, 'Sit down'. They had all been standing up. There were two chairs and a couch in the little living room, or whatever it was called. The engaged couple sat in the chairs and the already married couple on the couch. It seemed quite formal.

'Now listen, children', said Lanny. 'You've consulted a lawyer. Did he tell you about the Mann Act?'

'No, what's that?' inquired Rose.

'It's something that all runaway couples have to know about. Don't blame me for it, because I didn't pass it—I think it was passed before I was born. Anyhow, it provided that any person who transports a woman across a state border for immoral purposes is committing a felony and is liable to ten or twenty years, I forget which, in a federal prison'.

'Good God in heaven!' exclaimed the author of _The Rabbit Race_.

'It was intended to put an end to what was called white slavery, the transportation of women for work in brothels. Then presently it was discovered that the law was so worded that it could be applied to any extra-legal affairs. It became a device by which wives could get revenge upon runaway husbands; also blackmailers discovered that it could be used to force guilty husbands to pungle up a lot of money. For that reason the law has been discredited, and I haven't read about its being dug up for a long time. But you never can tell, it might be. Tell me, how are you planning to get to Reno?'

'I am going to drive him', replied Rose.

'Well, you see, when you cross the border into Nevada, that is interstate commerce, and brings you under the federal law. If you're living together in Reno it might be perfectly possible for Bess to dig up the evidence, and if she could prove an act of transportation she could take it to the federal district attorney and could practically force him to prosecute you. The law is the law, and it doesn't leave him any discretion'.

'This man act, does it apply only to a man?'

'It is called the Mann Act because that was the name of the congressman who proposed it. I never saw the text, but I suppose it reads 'any person'. There are plenty of women procuresses'.

'Yes, but it says transporting a woman, doesn't it? Can you transport a man for immoral purposes?'

They couldn't help laughing over that; but it was a serious matter, and Rose continued her cross-questioning. 'I am driving my own car, and Hansi doesn't know how to drive, so they certainly couldn't say he was transporting me'.

'I remember reading about cases in the newspapers', said Lanny. 'It was a long time ago, but I believe the evidence depended upon money put up for the transportation'.

'Money?' said Rose. 'We can fix that. Hansi, how much money have you got?'

It was evident who was going to manage this new family, at least where the practical affairs of life were concerned. Hans took out his little coin purse. 'Put it on the table there', commanded the wife-to-be. 'And have you got a billfold or something?' Hansi took out his billfold. 'Is that all the money you've got with you?'

'That's all'.

'Leave them on the table. Now, in the presence of witnesses, he has no money; he won't have a penny on this trip. If he wants a newspaper I'll buy it for him. I'll feed him, I'll rent the apartment for him—'

'He'll have to rent the apartment', said Lanny; 'as a matter of legal evidence the receipt will have to be in his name'.

'All right then. I'll cash a check for him in Reno, and he can rent the apartment. He's allowed to have money there, when there isn't any interstate commerce, I suppose. The point is he's got no money on the way, and we can prove it. He's just a helpless piece of merchandise being transported. How's that?'

'It sounds all right', answered Lanny, 'but you'd better consult that lawyer again before you start'.

Hansi said very humbly, 'Laurel, I hope you won't feel that I'm running out on you'.

'Good heavens, no', she exclaimed. 'We are happy for both of you'. And she said to Rose, 'Not every great man is a good man, but you have got both in one package'. There is a jingle that runs, 'She kissed her and made her a sister'; and so it was.

XIV

Somehow the fun had gone out of the journey for the Budds. They had been intending to go up and see the big redwoods, the coast sequoias; but now suddenly Laurel began to think about the bundle of letters she had received from home and the problems they had brought up. It was hard to get satisfactory speakers in summertime because so many went on vacation and didn't want to bother to come back; she and Lanny had to fill out. And there were the children; every day she was away from them they seemed more wonderful in her mind. Suddenly she exclaimed, 'Lanny, let's go to Reno!'

'Oh, good!' cried the other couple; and it was no sooner proposed than they began to arrange it. Hansi and Rose already had their belongings in the car, ready for the trip. Now Hansi would go out to a telephone pay station and consult the lawyer and make sure that he could be transported as a bundle of merchandise. Laurel would telephone Genie and say good-bye, and Lanny would load up their car.

They could travel by the interior route, east of the Sierras, but it was desert country and hot; to travel northward by the coast would be longer, but it was a delightful trip over a new highway. It wound along the sides of mountains and had taken a long time to build—not only because of the mountains but because the owners of great estates had fought the project with all the power they possessed. One of these owners was William Randolph Hearst, and Laurel and Lanny had visited his combination of palace, playground, and zoological park. Lanny asked, 'Would you like to see him again?'

'That old reprobate!' Laurel said. 'No!' She was a censorious lady; and oddly enough Hansi had got the same sort.

They bade farewell to Hollywood and its glamour and drove amid scenery that reminded Lanny of those Corniche roads familiar to him since his childhood. He led the way, and Rose followed. They had agreed to take their time and put safety first. For a hundred miles or so they drove along the sands of the Pacific and presently were on the shelves high up above it. All that time there were cool breezes blowing on them. When they came into the interior it was hot, and the peaches and prunes were ripening.

They did not go to San Francisco but around by the east shore of the bay to Oakland, and from there took the great highway up the valley of the Sacramento River and into the High Sierras, the gold country, made famous to all the world by Bret Harte and Mark Twain.

The road climbed through gutted pine forests, and presently they were over the ridge and rolling down through the Donner Pass. Here was a little mountain lake which had been the scene of a dreadful tragedy a century ago; an emigrant train of covered wagons had been caught by premature snows and blocked through the winter; half of the people had died of starvation, and the living had eaten the dead. Now it was nothing but a legend, and tourists rolling along on a ribbon of smooth concrete mentioned it casually as they passed.

They came to the Nevada line, and no one stopped them to ask if they were bent on any immoral purposes. Nevada was mountains and deserts, some of it irrigated. Soon they came to the place that was proud of being the wickedest little city in America, but they had no interest in its gambling palaces. They spent the night in an auto camp on the outskirts.

In the morning they parted. Laurel restored to Hansi his coin purse and billfold, so he could buy a newspaper once again. He had got the name of a lawyer who could be counted upon to charge him a liberal fee for getting him a divorce. Then he was going to find a furnished apartment—and he wouldn't be asked a word about his purposes. Half the persons who came here for six weeks brought along their future new partners, and it was good for the business of lawyers, landlords, and owners of restaurants and gambling palaces. How pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho, how pleasant it is to have money!
BOOK SEVEN

Bright and Yellow, Hard and Cold

19 ROOT OF ALL EVIL

I

Lanny and Laurel continued rolling eastward over the ribbon of smooth concrete, through a land of red and yellow mountains and valleys shining with tame water in ditches. In that high western country when it gets hot it is really hot, but you do not mind because it is dry. The sun was dazzling, and dark glasses were a comfort. They drove fast on roads whose curves were easy and gradual, and presently they were in Wyoming, with vast high plains where cattle grazed, and you could see ten or twenty miles of the road ahead of you. It came down from the Rocky Mountains, and presently the state was Nebraska, where the descent was even more gradual. These were the plains over which the buffalo had roamed in vast herds—some of them stretching fifty miles in one direction and twenty-five in the other. Huge shaggy brutes they had been, the bulls weighing close to a ton, and so powerful that they were known to catch a horse on one horn and carry him for a hundred yards. Now they were all gone, and even the bones had been gathered up and taken to market.

The descent continued, but more slowly, and presently they were on the farmlands which had once been prairie. These extended for a thousand miles, and the highway ran through them with only a few turns. They could look at a thousand miles of farms, all pretty much alike but smaller as you came east. There were always a red barn and a silo and a white house with trees in front of it. It was the corn and hog country, and the corn was three or four feet high already, and when the weather was hot it would grow a foot in a night. There were villages and small towns with tree-shaded streets and white-painted houses. Many of them had a sign informing you that they had a spare bedroom for tourists. You paid your two or three dollars in advance and slept comfortably, and in the morning you could have breakfast if you wanted it, or you could just put your bags in the car and depart without a word.

It was the Middle West, one of the world's breadbaskets. Its perfect roads made a checkerboard pattern, and the rivers all had steel bridges over them. The farmers had their prices guaranteed and they liked that and voted the Democratic ticket, to the dismay of Republican newspapers and politicians. They had fed a world at war and now were feeding the nations that had lost as well as those that had won. It was a new and unexpected development in civilisation: you had to feed them or they would go Communist. The Communists of both Europe and Asia were clamouring for power, and the free world was in a state of bewilderment.

A comfortable land, but monotonous. You wanted to get through it so you drove as fast as you could, but you had to slow up at crossings. The towns grew bigger, and presently there were cities with the usual traffic problems. Millions of new cars were being poured out from the assembly lines, and where were you going to park them, and how were you going to get by them? Speedways were being built to get people out of the cities, but they only made it easier for people to come in. Lanny and Laurel wanted to get home, but they wanted to get there alive, so they took two days to pass through the Middle West. They drove by day on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and got into New Jersey in the evening, reaching Edgemere so late that the children and the servants were asleep.

But what a time they had in the morning!—early, of course, because the little ones wake up. They had to see the baby and marvel how she had grown and how many words she had learned. Junior had a perfect Niagara of them, and they had to tell him of their adventures, and hear his laments because he hadn't been taken along, and promise to take him next time. And then there was the mail, stacks of important letters to be read; there was the office and all the people to be greeted. There had to be conferences in which the state of the enterprise was reviewed and new plans were made. It was at least two days and two nights before they were back in harness again and everything was going as always. They hadn't told a soul they were taking Hansi Robin along, so now they didn't have to tell why they had left him behind or what had happened to him. Let the newspapers tell when they found out!

II

Among the letters was one from R.I.A.S., thanking Lanny for the material he had sent and telling him about the new developments. 'We wish you could pay us another visit', they said. 'You would be pleased to see how fast we are growing, and we could use your help'. But Lanny had said no in his mind. He had all the work he could do here, and he knew his work was worth while.

Then one day he was called to the telephone; it was Bernhardt Monck in Berlin. The frugal German had never done that before, and Lanny could be sure he was not doing it at his own expense. His voice, sounding as clear as if he were in the room, said, 'A very serious situation has arisen in connection with old Ferdinand. You might be able to handle it. I doubt if anyone else could. It is really urgent. Can you possibly come?'

Lanny had never said no to Monck in his life. They had been through so much together, and Lanny trusted him more than any other man he knew—at any rate in secret affairs. He said, 'I'll come if you really need me'.

'I wouldn't be calling otherwise', Monck said. 'I will arrange Army transportation for you'.

'How soon?' Lanny asked.

'As soon as possible; tomorrow morning perhaps'.

Lanny said, 'I'll be ready'. And that was that.

He went and told Laurel about it, and she clutched her heart and sat down suddenly. 'Oh, Lanny, how terrible! I hoped I was through with these emergencies'.

'We are in another war, dear', he said. 'We can't go on advising other people to face it and not be ready to face it ourselves. I'll take good care of myself, and I don't think there is any danger'.

'Danger'? she echoed. 'I never draw a free breath while you are up in the air'.

He smiled and kissed her. 'You oughtn't to tell me', he said. 'You have to do your share of keeping up morale'. He told of the Spartan matron who told her son to come back with his shield or on it.

'Old Ferdinand' of course meant Kurt Meissner; nobody else. Lanny hadn't asked what the trouble was; he knew that if it had been something that could be said over the telephone Monck would have said it. All Lanny could do was to turn his imagination loose on the Völkischerbund, and on _Treasure Island_ , and on young Ferdinand and the Soviets in East Germany. Or would it be the counterfeiting outfit which had been moved to Hungary? They could hardly be expecting Lanny to go there. What he looked forward to was another pleasant trip to the Tegernsee in early summer weather.

III

He packed his bags; he signed a lot of letters and dictated some more and gave instructions to this person and that. Laurel put a smile upon her face and stored up her tears until after he had got into his car. Somebody in Washington must have got busy indeed, for late in the afternoon came a telephone call from a Pentagon official. 'Mr Budd, can you be at Idlewild Airport at nine tomorrow morning?' Lanny said he could, and the voice said, 'Your tickets will be there. Be on time'. Lanny promised.

He allowed himself plenty of time; a flat tyre was always a possibility. Freddi Robin drove him, and on the way he talked about his Uncle Hansi, and how terrible it was, and what had become of him? Lanny, of course, could give no hint that he knew. He said that Uncle Hansi's communism might not last; it was Bess who had prodded him on, and most decent people who got into the Communist party got out again after a year or two. He said that the case would probably drag along for a considerable time; if the accused were convicted they would appeal and use all the legal tricks. If they were sent to prison they would be treated well, especially Hansi; federal prisons weren't so bad nowadays, and they probably would let him give concerts for the inmates.

When they reached the airport Lanny sent his young friend home and sat and read the morning paper. He had been at a hundred airports and the sights were familiar to him; he was more interested in reading about the mounting tension in Berlin. The Reds apparently were trying to make the Allies so uncomfortable that they would vacate the city. It was a policy of pinpricks, and it seemed rather childish, for the Kremlin should have known that the Allies would never get out without a war. The blow to the prestige of all three would have been unendurable.

Lanny would say that in his own mind—it was unendurable to him. But then he would begin to wonder. Would it be unendurable to the State Department and to a half-isolationist Senate? Lanny thought of all those farmers back in the corn and hog country through which he had just driven. What did it mean to them, the 'prestige' of holding Berlin? They wanted their sons back on the farm; and all those 'moms' who rented the bedrooms to tourists, they wanted their boys to mow the lawns in the summer and rake up the leaves in the fall.

The flight was the routine one, by way of Gander and Prestwick. It was pleasant in mid-June. This was the land of the midnight sun—only most of it was sea. The plane was carrying Army personnel and stopped in Scotland only to refuel and then went on to Berlin. Lanny, who had been an assimilated colonel, first having to do with art works and then with atomic scientists, talked with interest to military men who were now seeing service in West Germany and in Greece and Turkey and Iran. Different indeed was their outlook from that of the corn and hog farmers and the 'moms' of Nebraska and Iowa!

IV

This time Lanny was put up at one of the hotels the military had taken over. Monck came to his room. There was no chance of dictaphones or spies in this place, so they did not have to go for a walk.

The intelligence man reported, 'There has been no word from either Fritz or Anna. The reason I have called on you has to do with Kurt Meissner. He made you a pledge that he would give up all anti-American activities. He has been breaking that pledge right along. The fact that he made it gives us a hold over him, and we mean to come down on him and come down hard'.

'You're really sure he's been breaking it, Monck'?

'We know it positively. We have a man who has got into the Bund. Of course you mustn't say a word about that to anyone. The group is active, and they are men who will stop at nothing. It amounts to a conspiracy, and we cannot permit it to go on spreading'.

'The passing of counterfeit is still going on?'

'The outfit has been moved to Hungary, and we have no certainty that Kurt is still connected with it. He has taken up a better-paying line of activity—treasure hunting'.

'I guessed as much from your letter; I had read _Treasure Island_ as a boy'.

'I assumed that you would have. There is quite an extraordinary situation in the Alpine Redoubt, as the Nazis called it—one that will provide material for the writers of adventure stories for the rest of time, I imagine. You know how diligent the Nazis were in accumulating treasure. They confiscated everything the Jews had and everything their political opponents had, and when the Allied armies were advancing they loaded it into trucks, and whole treasure trains came up into the south-eastern mountains. They buried it in caves and in salt mines—you were in the salt mines at Alt Aussee and saw it'.

'I was more interested in the art works', Lanny said. 'That was my business. But I looked into a few chests full of gold vessels and jewels. I remember one chest full of teeth that had gold fillings—you don't forget a sight like that.'

'They knocked the gold teeth from the mouths of millions of Jews', said this man who had been working as a secret agent against the Nazis all through the war and before it. 'They took off the finger rings and tore the earrings from the corpses before they threw them into the crematories. And when they saw that we were coming toward their Alpine Redoubt and realised they couldn't defend it, they took the chests full of treasure and sunk them in the lakes; they buried them in the crypts of churches, and in the forests, and even under the paving in public plazas. No one can state the amount, but I would wager there must be fifty million dollars' worth of treasure of one sort or another hidden in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps'.

'Make it twice that', said Lanny. 'Fifty million might go for Göring alone. He carried a whole trainload that we caught near Berchtesgaden'.

'Well, now they are digging it up, a little here and a little there, and a lot of the top people and their wives are living in luxury on it. Kurt Meissner is in on it'.

'I had the idea he would think it was a matter of honour not to use such wealth for his personal needs'.

'You're mistaken. The way they figure it, they have to live, and if they're working for the cause they are entitled to a living. They dig it up and take it away, hidden in trucks; they get it to the ports and carry it to Spain or the Argentine, and invest it in great estates and business enterprises—there's been a lot of scandal about it and squabbling among the top people. They have accused some of their former chiefs as grafters, but the answer is, What is the use of letting the wealth lie idle? Why not put it to work and make money for the cause? They send back part of the income, and it's being used to print and circulate propaganda—the kind of stuff that Kurt Meissner is writing, and that they believe is inspired'.

'I've heard we are getting a lot of the treasure ourselves', said Lanny, and his friend replied, 'We get tips and send a party and find the stuff, or sometimes we find we are too late. There will be shots up in the hills at night, and we go and find a hole dug in the ground, and the digging tools lying about, and a lot of blood. They carry off the wounded and the dead, but they leave the tools because it wouldn't do to be caught with them. I suppose they tie weights to the bodies and dump them into the lakes'.

'A nice line of activity you've picked out for me', said Lanny with a smile, not altogether of amusement. 'No doubt the government can use the money, but I'd rather pay my share in the form of taxes'.

'It's not just a question of the money', said Monck. 'It's a question of the use the Nazis are putting it to. We'll have to get out of this country sooner or later and leave them behind; they have their plans to win over the new generation and prepare for a comeback. You know what the Germans are saying already, 'We had it better under Hitler"'.

'Yes', Lanny had to admit, 'and they did, before he went to war'.

'All the old gang are in on this thing, the wives and the families of the worst war criminals, those we hanged or have in prison now. The families of these men are enjoying themselves in Bavaria. When the income-tax collectors come along they have no explanation of the sources of their fortunes—just a smile and perhaps a bribe. The Strelitz family—you know that wholesale killer—is running an electrical business in Austria with branches all over. When we go to arrest such criminals we find they have been spirited away to Egypt or Morocco or Brazil or wherever, and we know that the money for the trip came from the sale of gold bars on the black market. There are regular operators who travel to Salzburg or Bregenz and buy up the stuff and smuggle it out by way of Italy. Sometimes we catch them with gold vases or pieces of jewellery which we can identify from photographs provided for us by the Rothschild family in Paris'.

V

'Tell me about Kurt', said Lanny, and his friend went on with the strange tale of an episode that had occured at Grundl Lake near Bad Aussee several months earlier. A convoy of trucks and cars had arrived there. The men hired boats and went out on the lake and began surveying operations. When they found the right spot they anchored the boats. They went down to the bottom of the lake in diving outfits and attached ropes and began hauling up heavy chests. When the local police asked about it they said they were engineers from the French headquarters in Innsbruck, and of course the local police, being Austrians and a conquered people, couldn't interfere with what French engineers were doing. They pulled up twelve large chests and loaded them on the trucks and went away.

'Investigation proved that there were no French engineers. It was a crowd of these Neo-Nazis, and we succeeded in tracing the trucks to the town of Tegernsee. We have an exact description of the man who was in charge of the expedition, and we believe that he was Heinrich Brinkmann, who was Kurt Meissner's top man. We have reason to believe that this is S.S. General Dollmann, one of the heads of Hitler's Youth Ideological Training programme. We haven't a doubt that Kurt Meissner was in on that scheme, and he doubtless had to do with hiding the treasure. The money will be used for carrying on his propaganda here and abroad, and we are going to stop it if we can'.

'You want me to try to get that out of him?'

'We hold over him the fact that his admission to West Germany was conditional, and he has broken his pledge; he knows he has broken it, and we don't have to tell how we know it. It is up to him to tell us where he got the money to build himself a cottage—'

'Oh, he's built a cottage?'

'A six-room stone cottage, fireproof and very comfortable, and he has a studio nearly finished. That money has come from the sale of counterfeit British pounds, or from some of the Nazi treasure. Either Kurt is going to come clean and tell us all he knows about these matters, or he is going back to the East zone of Germany where he came from'.

'Will the Soviets take him?'

'We haven't a doubt that they will, and gladly. They have a part of Austria right close to Salzburg, and no doubt there is plenty of treasure buried there, and they'd like to get hold of it. They have ways of getting secrets out of people—ways that we are not allowed to use. You can point that out to him, and add that his wife and children will go along with him. The Soviets will take that brood and put them in their schools and make little Reds out of them instead of little Nazis. Personally, I don't see anything to choose between, but Kurt may, and that is one of the arguments you'll have to use'.

'That's a pretty rough job, Monck'.

'You don't have to be rough—that's not your line. The reason I'm asking you is because of the prestige you have with him'.

'I doubt if I have the least bit left'.

'You are mistaken, surely. However angry Kurt may be with you, he must respect you in his heart. He knows that you have a faith and are working for it. You believe in social justice, and so did he when he was young. Those things are never entirely erased from a man's mind. What you have to do is to make him realise that he cannot fool us any longer. He has to make a clean break, and publicly, with the Nazis; he has to come over to us, or he goes back to the Reds'.

'He will choose to be a martyr, I'm sure'.

'Maybe so; but there is the question of the children, and that may move him. Either they have to be brought up as free democratic Germans, or they will be little Stalinist monsters. Use your eloquence and try to make him realise it. You can put it up to him that we are doing him a favour because of his friendship with you. You can say you pleaded for it—I think you would have done so if I had told you that we were about to order him and his family turned over to the Soviets'.

'I suppose I would,' Lanny admitted. 'Do I understand that I am free to tell him what we know about his connection with the Völkischerbund?'

'Tell him everything—except, of course, about Fritz. Lay all the cards on the table. You can put it up to him that he has broken his word of honour and hasn't a moral leg to stand on. Knock him down and beat him up'.

Lanny smiled a wry smile. 'A man with only one good arm?' He knew, of course, that it was to be a moral and intellectual beating, and that can be more painful than a physical one.

VI

The Army flew its one-time assimilated colonel to Munich. When he had last been there it was half in ruins and many of its streets impassable with rubble; but now everything had been cleared away and the Germans were working diligently at rebuilding. The men Lanny met in A.M.G. were nearly all new—those who had fought the war had gone home to their reward, and a new outfit was learning to know Germany and the Germans. 'Fraternising' was now the order of the day, and everybody was letting bygones be bygones—or at any rate pretending to. The genial South Germans were making their good beer again and selling it to the Americans for good marks.

Lanny would have liked to stay and meet some of his old friends. Some of their palaces and villas were intact, and they had got back their paintings—to live and stay rich in Nazi Germany you had had to make a gift of a painting to Hermann Göring's collection every now and then, and to do the same thing for Adolf Wagner, the lame Nazi boss of Bavaria.

The Army provided a car and a tank of petrol, and Lanny set out on a drive of forty or fifty miles through the beautifully tended farming country, climbing gradually into the fir-clad foothills of the Alps. The road climbed to the Tegernsee, a lake about four miles long, a favourite summer resort with many hotels and villas. Because of the housing shortage throughout Germany people were living here all the year round; in summer they rented their homes and slept in barns and haylofts or put up tents.

Lanny drove first to the humble dwelling of the General Graf Stubendorf. He knew the high regard in which Kurt held this old-time patron, and he had a faint hope of enlisting this patron's aid. He found the old gentleman in plus-fours and a leather jacket, inspecting the early vegetables in his garden. They sat in the summerhouse, which had been constructed since Lanny's last visit, and there the visitor told the sad story of the plight into which a great musical genius had brought himself by his refusal to recognise a defeat in war. Lanny said, 'I gather that you yourself have recognised it, and it was my hope that Kurt might be willing to take your advice'.

The Graf shook his head. 'No, Herr Budd', he answered, 'I have made up my mind that the future belongs to the young and not to the old. Kurt Meissner must be close to fifty, and that is old enough for him to know his own mind and be responsible for his own choice'.

'As events have shaped themselves', pleaded Lanny, 'Kurt has to make a choice between a democratic Germany and a Red dictatorship. Surely there can be no question as to which he should choose'.

Said the elderly aristocrat, 'I am not at all sure that other choices are excluded. I understand the devotion you Americans feel to your doctrines of democracy, but I am not convinced that you are wise in trying to impose your system upon us Germans. We do not have two great oceans to protect us, nor do we live in a natural fortress like the Swiss; we live out on open plains where through the centuries hordes of wild horsemen have been able to gallop over us; and now come the steel horses, the tanks. Our only defence lies in our technical skill, our diligence, and above all our discipline and solidarity. Twice you Americans have felt it your duty to come and help the British and the French to wear us down and roll over us. Now you have us on your hands, and you have the task of keeping back the Eastern hordes. Before you get through, I believe that you will have a better understanding of our need for solidarity and discipline. Now, apparently, you think that we are as clay which you can mould to whatever shape you please. Your loyalty to your own institutions is perfectly natural and I respect it, but I am not convinced that you can make us over in your image'.

' _Lieber Herr Graf_ ', replied Lanny, 'you pay us too great a compliment when you attribute the discovery and development of democracy to us. It seems to me it is a world-wide movement, an automatic consequence of the spread of education'.

'Many believe that, I know. Education was spread in Germany, and the German people got the ballot and attempted to assert themselves. Surely you know that the Hitler movement was a democratic movement, originating in the lower classes of our society. The National Socialists carried an election, bu somehow that failed to please you'.

Lanny's answer was, 'It is not according to our conception of democracy that a man should climb to power and then kick the ladder from under him. We are hoping that all the world has learned a lesson from the fate of the Third Reich and that the German people will establish a government by popular consent and keep their control over it'.

'As long as I am permitted to stay here', answered the old man 'I will watch your experiment with interest; but you must not expect me to take part in it. It must suffice if I retire and refrain from doing anything to interfere with your efforts'.

So that was that. They chatted a while about common friends and about the art works which the Graf owned and which he had rescued from Stubendorf; he had them in storage—he did not say where, merely that he did not wish to sell any of them. Then he told the visitor how to get to Kurt's place. 'It would be a tragedy indeed if you had to take him away', said the Graf mildly. His tone said, 'Don't expect me to discommode myself'.

VII

They shook hands and Lanny took his departure and drove to the other side of the lake. There was a little valley, and on a slight rise of the land stood a new stone cottage of moderate size. The studio was off to one side in a clump of trees, and Lanny could see at a glance that it also was built of stone and duplicated the one the Graf had provided in Stubendorf for his court musician. Sounds of hammering came from it. Lanny observed that there was a good-sized garden behind the cottage and several children working there. Presumably school had closed, and few indeed were idling or playing in Germany now.

Lanny went to the cottage and knocked on the door, and the mother of the family answered. His reception was different from the last occasion. No doubt Kurt had told her that it was Lanny who had obtained permission for them to come to this place of peace and security; so the prematurely old woman was all smiles and gratitude.

She said that Kurt was at the studio, so Lanny walked over to it and found his old friend superintending a carpenter and two fair-haired lads who were helping. Lanny recognised these as Kurt's second and third sons, and after a brief greeting and a glance around at the work he took Kurt out to his car, where they could be alone and quiet.

It was not a social occasion, and Lanny stopped for no preliminaries. 'I have bad news for you, Kurt', he said. 'The American Army is going to send you back to East Germany'.

' _Herr Gott!_ ' exclaimed the man. 'What does that mean?'

'You know what it means, Kurt. You have been breaking your word to the government, doing it systematically and continually'.

'Lanny, you must not say that!'

'Don't waste your breath, Kurt. The Army has been watching you, as it was their obvious duty to do. They know all about the business of selling counterfeit British pound notes that you and your friends have been carrying on. They know the names of your associates. I have been privileged to read some of the writings which you call _das Wort_. They know about your activity with hidden Nazi treasure and that you have been shipping it out to the underground abroad'.

'Lanny, I swear to you—'

'Don't swear to falsehoods, Kurt, because it's just possible there may be a God, and He wouldn't like it. I know that you have your faith which you believe justifies what you're doing. I only point out to you how you make it impossible for me to help, and you make it necessary for the American Army to take action against you. You're bent on preserving the Hitler legend, you're helping to establish Nazi centres of propaganda in all the countries abroad. You're doing it after warning and with full knowledge of the consequences. I can only tell you that our Army authorities are not altogether fools and dupes. We've sacrificed a hundred thousand American lives and three or four hundred billion dollars of American treasure to destroy that Hitler dream, and we're not going to sit back quietly and give you shelter while you build it up again'.

'Lanny, I can only assure you that I have nothing whatever to do with the Nazi centres abroad'.

'Don't say any more, Kurt. I have examined the dossier dealing with your activities and your associates. I came to Berlin this time because R.I.A.S. wanted my help in broadcasting. It just happens that I have an intimate friend who is in the Intelligence service, and he told me confidentially of the status of your case. I begged for just time enough to come and see you—if my request hadn't been granted the Military Police would have been here now'.

'Lanny, this is monstrous!'

'I think what you've been doing is monstrous, Kurt. You gave me your word of honour that you would do nothing contrary to American interests. I had no right to count upon your friendship, but I thought I had the right to count upon your honour'.

There was nothing Kurt could answer to that, and he didn't try. 'You can't send us back', he declared. 'The Russians wouldn't take us'.

'Don't count on that', advised the other. 'All the Army need do is to tell them what you know, and the Reds will take you and get it out of you. They use methods we can't use'.

'I'll die before I tell them anything, Lanny'.

'I know; but you won't die until they're through with you, and they learned a lot of Hitler's own arts. But what you really ought to be thinking about is your children, who will be put in the Red training schools and turned into perfect little robots, worshipping portraits of Stalin as big as a house. You know what that training is, because Hitler took it over'.

'What is the point, Lanny? Have you come here to gloat over me?'

'That is the last thing on earth that would cross my mind. I came because I still have in me the memory of our old friendship and the pledges we made to each other. I'm still clinging to the idea that I might be able to touch your deeper self and bring back to life the Kurt I used to know'.

'If I have changed, Lanny, it is because I have learned what the world is like—how evil it is, and what harsh measures are necessary to control it'.

'There's no use in our arguing about the National-Socialist movement, Kurt. I know what you think, and you know what I think. The point is, so far as your lifetime is concerned, National Socialism is dead. You have to take your choice between Stalin's measures, which are the harshest of all, and American measures, which are comparatively mild and lamblike. Do you want to go over to the Reds, or do you want to come over to the "Amis"?'

VIII

Such was the proposition. There followed a long silence. Lanny knew that Kurt had a lot to think about and gave him time. It was a last call, and the Neo-Nazi must have realised it. Finally he asked, 'Just what is it you propose for me to do?'

'The last time I made you a proposal it was that you would live in Western Germany and do nothing to oppose our efforts to establish a democratic government here. Now the terms are harder: you are to go to A.M.G. and tell it everything you know about the counterfeiting industry, the methods of marketing Himmler money, where the stocks are, and the plates and the presses'.

'I can tell you right now, Lanny. It has all been moved to Hungary, and there is nothing left in Germany'.

'All those quantities of British pound notes? And the paper stock?'

'Every scrap of it'.

'And those we now find being circulated here?"

'They must be brought in by people I know nothing about. I have had nothing to do with it for some time'.

'And the presses on which your Nazi "Words" are printed?'

'My friends have carefully kept me from knowing anything about it'.

'And the men who are running the enterprise here?'

'You've already told me that you know their names, Lanny. You've told me that you know everything'.

'I mean everything in the sense that we know what you have been doing. I don't mean that we know all the names; and it doesn't mean that we know the location of all the Nazi-buried treasure your friends have been handling'.

'You are seeking that treasure?'

'Of course we are seeking it. Part of it belongs to private individuals, and where we can identify it we return it to them. We have done it with a couple of hundred thousand works of art of various kinds. The gold and the coins and the jewels that cannot be identified belonged presumably to the Nazi government and are to be divided among the occupying governments. Wouldn't your government have sought such treasures if you had won the war?'

'And wouldn't you have tried to keep them hidden if you had lost the war?'

'Certainly, Kurt. But if you are defending the Nazi government you can go back where you came from—to East Germany. My proposition is that you come over to the American government. If you do that you tell us what you know. What became of those twelve cases that were recovered from the Grundlsee?'

'I assure you I know nothing about them'.

'You only poison your chances when you go on telling me falsehoods, Kurt. We know that they were brought here to Tegernsee and that Heinrich Brinkmann had charge of the job. If you don't know where they are you can easily find out, and that is part of the price you have to pay. You have to help us find it, and you have to help us find other stuff that we are looking for'.

'If I did that, Lanny, I wouldn't survive a week'.

'If that's all that's worrying you, it's a simple proposition; the Army will keep you safe. You can be our prisoner, and we'll take the blame for having wrung it out of you'.

IX

Again a long silence, and it was as if Lanny could look into the soul of his boyhood friend and see the duel going on between his pride and his concern for his family.

Lanny resumed, 'You know my ideas, Kurt, and I know yours. I believe that Western civilisation is superior to Stalin's. We are going to defend Western Germany and try to make it a democratic regime in which the Germans will govern their own country and determine how they want to live. If you consent to help us, really help us, all right; on the other hand, if you want to go over to Stalin you can do it. We won't torture you, and we won't brutalise your family; we'll just let you go where you belong. But, of course, once you've chosen you've settled it; you'll certainly never have another chance. What you must get out of your mind is the idea that you can settle down comfortably in our zone of Germany, build yourself a new home and a studio out of stolen funds, and set up a spy centre and propaganda agency to work against us and help Stalin'.

'You know I have no idea of helping Stalin', said Kurt in a low, bitter voice.

'You are older than I am and you are a highly educated man—you have one of the best brains I know. Therefore it must be assumed that you are capable of realising the consequences of your actions. You know just as well as I that the only thing that keeps Stalin out of Western Germany today is the American Army, pitiful though it is. But it's enough to make Stalin realise that he'll have an atom bomb over the Kremlin if he moves against us. That's the basic fact of this hour, and it's because we're civilised people, because we are decent and don't torture prisoners to wring secrets out of them—because of that you're sitting here chatting with me on a basis of friendship instead of hanging by your thumbs in a dungeon. That's the situation, Kurt, and the one question is, Are you willing to help us keep Stalin out of West Germany or are you not? Are you going to reward our decency with lies and treachery, or are you going to give us the loyalty one civilised man has the right to expect from another?'

Lanny waited, and as Kurt did not answer he added, 'That's all I have to say. I'm going away to visit a friend and I'll be back some time tomorrow for your answer, And don't think it will do you any good to run away to Italy, because we can certainly find you and arrest you on a criminal charge of profiting from the sale of counterfeit bills. You can't possibly take the remaining six children, so you'll know they're going back to East Germany'.

'Don't worry', said the German coldly. 'I'll not run away from them'.

Lanny experienced one of those waves of feeling which interfered with his sense of duty. 'I don't want to be hateful about this, Kurt', he said earnestly. 'I came here to appeal to you in the name of friendship. I want you to be a Western man. That is where you belong, and all our old-time memories are calling to you'.

'Let's not be sentimental about it', was the reply. 'This is a harsh decision I have to make'. He got out of the car and said, 'I'll have an answer when you come back'. Then he stalked away.
20 IN FRAGRANTE DELICTO

I

Lanny drove to the outlet of the lake and followed the course of the little River Mangfall; he turned eastward, meaning to pay a visit to the Obersalzberg. Hilde von Donnerstein was a good source of gossip, and—who could say?—she might have heard rumours about buried treasure. Also, she had promised to keep a lookout for worthwhile paintings. In return, he had got some groceries from the P.X. in Munich; he would never eat a meal with Germans without taking something along, for they were all living close to the margin.

He came to her like a breeze blowing from the gardens of Grasse, so she told him; that was where they made the perfumes. He had been visiting the places where she had been happy in the past, Berlin and Paris, London and New York, even Hollywood! He could tell her news of her old friends who had forgotten her and never wrote to her any more. She was living here like a peasant—in the wintertime like an Eskimo, she told him.

But now it was summer, and they could sit in the sunshine, looking out across a valley to the ruins of Hitler's Berghof, where only four years ago he had summoned his counsellors and planned the future of his thousand-year Reich. Now he had died and been burned to ashes, leaving only a bad smell behind. But over there a little farther to the east was another set of fanatics and plunderers, the Soviets in their part of Austria, and they showed not the slightest trace of any intention to get out. What did Lanny think? Did they mean war? Were they going to take the rest of Berlin, as everybody said?

Lanny couldn't tell her, alas. He said he didn't think they wanted war, but they wanted a lot of things they surely couldn't get without war, and it was a question of how badly they wanted them. The decision lay with a little group in the Kremlin, and he had no connections there.

But he had been to Bienvenu and could tell about the friends on the Riviera—about Beauty's grey hair with a bluish tinge, and about Marceline's new baby, and the gout of Sophie, Baroness de la Tourette. He could tell about London and Irma's devices for not paying income taxes. He could tell about Paris and the strike he had seen and the Rembrandt he had bought. He could tell about Edgemere and the Peace Programme—he was still sending her the little paper. He could tell about Genie and De Lyle and the marvellous fashionable life they were living. All their elegance had been transported to Hollywood. Hilde said, 'Poor old Europe is a mortuary'.

Lanny brought in his groceries, and they had a feast. Then they listened to the news over Radio Munich. Presently there was a recording of the 'Tales of the Vienna Woods', and they became inspired and waltzed in that large, almost bare drawing room, with Hilde's invalid sister looking on and laughing with delight. Lanny didn't ask, but guessed the bareness of the room was due to the fact that they had sold off furniture to get money for food, or perhaps to pay taxes.

II

There were elegant villas scattered on these mountain slopes, and in the morning Lanny went to look at some paintings. He made notes about them and the prices asked; then in the afternoon he set out on his melancholy errand to the Tegernsee.

He parked his car a short distance from the house, and Kurt came out. He was abrupt and businesslike. 'I have decided that it is necessary for me to yield to _force majeure_. I will agree to abandon all connections with the Neo-Nazi movement from this day forth, and I will keep the agreement'.

'You understand, Kurt, you made that agreement once and broke it. This time you will be on probation. You will have the deportation sentence hanging over you, and if at any time you break the agreement there will be no more parleying and no preliminaries'.

'I understand that'.

Lanny continued, 'You must realise that I have no authority to make an agreement with you; I am not an official of A.M.G. I am simply a friend who begged permission to come and put the situation before you. I was told the requirements: that you would come over to our side and give the government all the information you possess about the activities of your movement. A.M.G. will be the judge as to whether you have done that in good faith'.

'I understand', said Kurt. 'I am ready to start talking now and tell you what I'm able to'.

Lanny had brought along a notebook, without much hope of using it. Now he took it out and with his fountain pen made notes while Kurt told about the treasures that had been buried in the Alt Aussee district. They had been put under the care of S.S. Generals Stefan Fröhlich and Arthur Schidler. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the, S.S. who later was convicted at the Nürnberg trials and hanged, had delivered gold bullion, coins, banknotes, and jewels to a value of over ten million dollars. The total amount of the hoards collected and buried amounted to somewhere between forty and fifty million. On the second of May in 1945 the so-called 'gold transport Strelitz' had arrived at Alt Aussee, including twenty-two cases of gold teeth collected by the chief of the death camps. There were the cash boxes of Nazi secret agents in several of the Balkan states, and there was a 'special action fund' handled by Otto Skorzeny, the man who had been charged with the task of delivering Mussolini from his captors. There were also great quantities of narcotics, worth more than their weight in gold.

What had become of all these treasures? They had been dug up in small lots and transported by Nazis escaping into the Tyrol, and from there into Switzerland, and from Switzerland by air to points in the Middle East. That route had been used by Strelitz, and also by those high Nazi officials who had been in charge of the wholesale killings of Jews. These men were now serving on the staff of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was living in the Villa Aida in Cairo.

Other fugitives had gone by the way of the Brenner Pass to Milan; they had had cars with diplomatic licence plates, and these the Austrian police could not check. Most of them had joined a group known as the 'Black Hunter', which had its headquarters in Madrid. This group was under the control of a countess, the former secretary of the German Embassy in Madrid. Lanny said, 'I met her there'. Otto Skorzeny was prominent in this group, and a relative of Himmler had belonged to it for a time but had gone to the Argentine and set himself up in business.

This Madrid group was the strongest propaganda agency, and Kurt named a number of its members: a Frenchman, Jean André, who had formerly been a volunteer officer in the Waffen S.S.; also the Belgian Nazi, Leon Degrelle. It was from there that the great mass of propaganda went out all over Europe and South America.

'I know', said Lanny. 'I have seen the leaflet containing the letter that General Alfred Jodl wrote to his wife from the Nürnberg prison before he was hanged'.

III

Kurt went on to tell about underground cells that were operating in various parts of Germany and Austria and the code names they used; but he did not name any of those men and said he did not know them. Lanny asked, 'Where is Walter Scheider?' When Kurt said he did not know, Lanny said, 'He is reported to be hiding somewhere near Munich, and it seems rather likely that you would know'.

Kurt replied, 'I don't'; and when Lanny asked about Eugen Dollmann, and then about Emil Herzig, Kurt declared that he didn't know about these either. So Lanny declared, 'All this is very interesting, and if I were getting up a story for a magazine I might be glad to have it; but when you offer it to our C.I.C. you are just being childish. You name the groups abroad and the men who are in them; all these men are safe from our clutches, and you know it. Our Intelligence people in Madrid and Buenos Aires probably know ten times as much about all this as you do. Even I know that Otto Skorzeny has taken the name of Steinberger and is living in Madrid as a darling of fashionable society. But when it comes to the groups who are operating right here in Bavaria you don't know _who_ they are, and when I name the head men you don't know _where_ they are. And yet you have been actively directing one of these groups!'

'That is not correct, Lanny. I have been doing some writing for it. I have been what you might call its intellectual head, but I've had nothing to do with its practical affairs'.

'When you have written what you have to say, what do you do with it?'

'I used to turn it over to a man named Johann Josef Schultz, but he took alarm a month or two ago; he departed, and I don't know where he has gone'.

'And you don't know where any of the treasure is buried?'

'I really do not. I am told that it has nearly all been taken out of the country'.

'Including the twelve chests Brinkmann took out of the Grundlsee and brought here to Tegernsee?'

'If he did that, Lanny, he did it without telling me'.

'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. Lanny 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?

Stalin had no critics in Russia, at least none who was ever heard or heard of. But his military people who had to administer the Potsdam Agreement found it highly inconvenient to have the American, French, and British occupation forces stationed in the middle of their new East German satellite and having access to it by highways, railroads, and canals. The agreement had provided for free access of all residents of Berlin to all portions of the city, and that meant continual misunderstanding and clashes. It meant that the people of East Berlin had the opportunity to see how much better the people of West Berlin were being treated. It meant that freedom and slavery were allowed to mix—something which they never in history have been able to do.

X

Now, at the end of June, 1948, the Reds had apparently made up their minds to put an end to this annoying situation; they suddenly announced a land and water blockade of Berlin. The last railroad freight line, that by way of Helmstedt, was closed down—they said on account of technical difficulties, an entirely fraudulent statement. If the Soviets couldn't keep a railroad marshalling yard in order the Americans would have been glad to do it for them—but they were not asked.

Lanny Budd talked with officials, both military and civilian, about the curious Soviet practice of telling the most barefaced and obvious lies and maintaining them in spite of any facts offered in rebuttal. Was it an assertion of their ego, that truth was whatever they chose to make it? Was it a consequence of their denial of the existence of any moral law? Or was it just an expression of their contempt for their opponents? They would tell you a lie and then laugh in your face—not because they thought you believed it but because you were foolish enough not to understand that they were superior to both the truth and you. Because you were foolish enough to believe that there was actually any such thing as truth in the world! Because you were inferiors, doomed to early extinction, and it didn't matter in the least what you believed about anything! That was really the way they felt, and lying to you was part of the process of your extermination. They, the new master class, the future possessors and rulers of the world, yielded to nothing—not even the truth!

So now there were 'technical difficulties', and freight trains couldn't be brought into Berlin. The two million people of the city would be slowly starved. They couldn't grow potatoes on their concrete pavements, nor on lots from which the rubble of bombed buildings had not yet been cleared away. A modern city has to have electric light and power, and in Berlin this was made with coal; in the days before the war this coal had been brought from Silesia and recently it was being brought from Belgium and the Ruhr, from England and even from America. Now there would be no more of it, and the factories of Berlin would stop working and the people of Berlin would sit in darkness at night. This would make the 'Amis' unpopular with all West Germans, and soon the Allies would have to give up and get out.

There was much discussion among the 'Amis' as to how to meet this problem. There were military men who were for accepting the gage thrown down; they would supply armed forces to convoy the trucks and freight trains, and announce to the Reds that these convoys were going through at any cost. In all probability the Reds would back down, as they had many times before when force was shown. But they might not back down, and that would mean war. If war came there could be no question but that the Allied troops in Berlin could be surrounded, cut off, and forced to surrender. They would put up a fight, and the city would be wrecked all over again, but in the end they would have to yield. The 'moms' had had their way, and the boys had gone home 'on points', and A.M.G. could do very little to keep the Russian steamroller from rolling at least as far as the Pyrennees.

To be sure, we had the atom bomb, and we might destroy Moscow and Leningrad and the Soviet oil fields and installations; but in the meantime the Reds would be in Brussels, Amsterdam, Paris, and the other great factory cities and ports of the West—and would we atom-bomb those? No, the Reds would turn them into slave-labour camps; and what would be the process of liberating them?

Such were the questions being asked in the council chambers in Washington where the decision had to be made by the General Staff, the Cabinet, and ultimately the President. Two days after the blockade was begun the C-47s, the two-engine planes of the Army, began hauling supplies to the Tempelhoferfeld. It was announced that this 'shuttle service' would be continued and increased. The Communists chuckled, because they were sure the Americans meant to feed and supply themselves and let the Berliners starve.

The Soviet military withdrew from the Allied Kommandatura in Berlin—the last of the Four Power arrangements. Marshal Sokolovsky refused to lift the blockade, and the city administration of Berlin began cutting down the electrical supply to two or three hours a day. Such was the beginning of a battle of industrial and propaganda power that would continue through the summer and the following winter and that for eleven months would be a dominating factor in all Lanny Budd's thinking.

He didn't wait that long. He figured that the events could just as well be watched from his home village in New Jersey, where the mail and the newspapers were delivered twice a day and where over the radio he could get the news once or twice every hour if he was that anxious. He finished his series of talks and then flew home by way of that northern route on which the sun never set at this time of the year.
21 IN THE TOILS OF LAW

I

At home Lanny found letters from Hansi and his wild Rose. The pair had not taken an apartment in Reno—this on account of the newspaper reporters. On the advice of their high-priced lawyer they had settled in a small mining town in the northern part of the state; it was high there and cool. The lawyer, familiar with the problem of well-to-do clients who wanted a divorce without publicity, gave them the name of a landlady who owned several apartments suitable for occupancy by fastidious persons. They could live there as Mr and Mrs Zinsenheimer, and when the six-week period was up Hansi could give this landlady his real name for the first time, and she would make out a receipt for the rent in that name. In this way there could be no publicity until the divorce suit was actually filed.

So here was a victim, first of Hitlerism and then of Stalinism, starting a new life and really happy for the first time in many years. He loved this wonderful dry climate where the air was so clear that mountains twenty miles away appeared to be within walking distance. It was the wild and woolly West, and he was learning to ride a horse, something which had never in his life occurred to him as a possibility. Hansi played his music, and Rose never tired of listening. They read books and discussed them, they listened to the radio, including the Peace Programme, and they had dinner in a little café where no one asked them any questions. They were agreed that they never again wanted to live in a big city, and perhaps not even to enter one.

To Edgemere, New Jersey, late one evening came a telephone call, and a familiar voice said, 'This is Moishe'. He hadn't expected to get Lanny and was glad to hear that he was safe at home. He said, 'The devil has been lifted off my back. I don't have to testify'.

'Glory, hallelujah'! exclaimed Lanny, and Hansi went on to explain that the authorities had decided they had a sufficiently good case and feared the possibility that a man testifying against his wife might awaken antagonism in some woman juror. Only in the event that the jury disagreed and a second trial was required would they call upon the husband. The case against him would be dismissed for lack of evidence. Lanny asked, 'Is that satisfactory to the rabbit lady?' and her voice broke in, 'I'm going to see to it that he breaks no more laws!'

The case was coming up soon; the lawyers for the accused had asked for an extension of time, and it had been granted; but when they asked for another extension the federal judge said no. The date was a week off, and Lanny telephoned Hansi to make sure he was informed. Hansi would have to make an appearance and be discharged before the bonding company could get the bail money back. Lanny warned, 'Don't travel together; it's too risky'. Hansi replied that they had talked it over and decided; he would come by train and Rose would drive the car.

II

Next morning Lanny received a telephone call from a lawyer in New York who gave his name as Everett and said he was counsel for Mrs Bess Robin and wished to see her brother. Lanny gave his consent, and the man came to the Edgemere home.

There was a peculiar situation. When Hansi had departed for his runaway vacation he had left a note for Bess, saying that the publicity and excitement had been too much for him; that he was going away to hide and let no one know where he was. He would show up on the day of the trial. Then he had gone to his local post office and left an order that mail for him was to be forwarded to Edgemere. Lanny or his wife had been putting the letters into new envelopes and addressing them to Mr Moishe Zinsenheimer in Nevada, Post offices are forbidden to give information about anybody's address; but criminal lawyers have a way of getting what they want, and now Mr Everett came to ask where Lanny's brother-in-law was hiding.

Lanny didn't need anybody to tell him what this state of affairs would mean to the defendants and their attorneys. That Hansi should have gone to a known anti-Communist suggested that he had lost sympathy with the movement and might even be intending to turn state's witness. Lanny said promptly that it had been a regular practice for him to take care of Hansi's mail while Hansi was away. He said that Hansi had told him nothing of his plans except that he would be back for the trial. It was evident that the lawyer had not been informed that the government planned to drop the case against Hansi, and surely it wasn't Lanny's business to tell him.

A criminal lawyer acquires a view of human nature which makes it difficult for him to believe that anyone is telling the truth, and it was apparent that Mr Everett had doubts as to Lanny's good faith. He said that for a man who stood charged with a grave crime to absent himself and not give his lawyers a chance to talk to him, or even be sure that they were his lawyers, was utterly preposterous. Lanny replied that Hansi was an artist, and artists were frequently preposterous. It was possible that he didn't care if he was convicted or not, that he wanted to be a martyr.

Mr Everett replied that if he was going to be a martyr he ought to be a good martyr, and he needed a good lawyer to help him. Lanny could only shrug his shoulders and make a little gesture with his hands, after the manner of a man raised in France. He said he had been out of sympathy with Hansi for some time, because he despised the Communists and Hansi knew it. But he couldn't refuse Hansi's request to forward his mail and to keep the address confidential.

III

After the lawyer had gone Lanny talked the matter over with his wife and then called Wilbur Post at the F.B.I., asking if it would be safe for him to come to the office; presumably it was no longer haunted by newspaper reporters. Post said to come, and Lanny went and told him about Everett's visit. Post naturally was amused to hear about the troubles of 'that friend of the oppressed', as he called him. It seldom happens that a man who is engaged in pursuing criminals has admiration for one who is engaged in protecting them.

Lanny said, 'I have an idea. It seems to me a bright one, but of course it may not be'.

'Shoot'! said the other, and Lanny went on, 'You found it convenient to have a man among the Reds to tell you their plans. Has it occurred to you that it might be possible to have a man among the defence to tell you what their plans are? Everett is ready and eager to take Hansi into camp and give him a course of training, and it's possible he might tell him to say some things that aren't true'.

'More than possible—probable'! declared the F.B.I. man and added, 'We certainly should give them the chance. I'll get hold of Frank Stuyvesant right away'. That was the Assistant U.S. Attorney who was to prosecute the case.

Post said that if the prosecutor approved the programme he would phone Hansi Robin to come by the first plane. Lanny thought it the part of wisdom to mention that Hansi was establishing residence in Nevada with the intention of obtaining a divorce and that the lady whom he intended to marry was there also. They would probably both come, and Post said promptly, 'For God's sake, see that they travel separately and that the lady stays in a different hotel'.

'I can do better than that', Lanny said. 'The lady may stay in our home'.

The official's reply was, 'A friend in need is a friend indeed'.

IV

When Hansi arrived he did not go to the F.B.I. office but kept an appointment at a fashionable uptown club where Communists were not looked for. Lanny, who knew Hansi better than anyone else in the world, stepped into his car and drove to the place. Present also were Wilbur Post and Frank Stuyvesant, the latter an ex-basketball player from City College with a mind and a tongue as springy as his feet.

These two brought Hansi up to date on the case and told him what he was to do. He was to go to the office of Mr Everett and present himself as ready for trial. He was to say that he had had a breakdown and felt he couldn't face the publicity; but he had gone away and lived quietly and got himself together and now was ready for the ordeal. The fact that he had had his mail forwarded by Lanny Budd meant nothing except that Lanny was an old friend and relative who had done the same service in the past.

Hansi would have to see Bess and convince her that he was still a loyal party member. The defence might continue to be suspicious of him and might reveal little to him; they might even tell him to get another lawyer, in which case he would announce that he would defend himself. They wouldn't like that and would try to dissuade him. Sooner or later he would learn something of their plans, and if and when he did he was to report. At that time he must make certain that he had shaken off all pursuers—even if he had to drive around in taxicabs for an hour or two or hurry through a crowded department store and out by another door. He was not to come near either the F.B.I. office or that of the federal attorney; instead he was to go to a secret address which they gave him and telephone from there.

So Hansi went, and played his part carefully, and after some hesitations and difficulties he was taken into the conferences of those able high-priced lawyers, who, of course, were not Communists or even fellow travellers, but who believed ardently in civil liberties and in the right of every accused man to have a fair trial in court. In so believing and so doing they were upholding the high traditions of their honourable profession, and by a happy coincidence they were being paid high fees.

It is a painful but obvious fact that criminal lawyers are sometimes tempted to become criminals. Successful lawbreakers often have a lot of money, and if the lawyers they employ are unwilling to suborn witnesses and frame testimony the criminals will look for some other lawyer who will. So it had come about that in the great metropolis there were men who had the reputation for being willing to do such things and knowing how to do them, and this reputation and knowledge was worth millions of dollars to them. The underworld has a name for such attorneys—they are 'mouthpieces'.

So after a while Hansi Robin came to the secret address and reported that the Dane, Johanssen, who had been caught red-handed opening the safe, was going to admit his guilt. Bess, on the contrary, was going to deny that she had ever transported any film or documents to be photographed and that she had ever had anything to do with any form of espionage. She was going to explain her visits to the neighbourhood of the Jones Electrical Works by saying that she had old friends there and had attended Saturday evening parties, and she was going to produce half-a-dozen witnesses who had been present at those parties; some of them she had picked up on her way and brought back to their homes, and some she had taken to her own home to spend the night.

And Hansi? He was instructed to say that he had driven with his wife on many of these expeditions. They had gone to social gatherings and never anywhere near the Jones Electrical Works for secret meetings with Johanssen, a man he had never heard of. They had been purely social gatherings with a number of friends, some of them comrades and some not. He was to be taken and shown the house where these parties had taken place so that he would be perfectly familiar with it.

The two government men found all this quite according to the rules of the game as it was played; they expected it and would know how to counter it. They told Hansi that he must go back to his home; no matter how repugnant it was, it was absolutely essential to convince Bess that he was standing by her and her cause. He might explain his absence by a nervous breakdown, a panic, anything he could make plausible. He could say that he wasn't well enough to resume their marital relations.

V

Lanny went home and reported to his wife. Rose Pippin had showed up; she had driven across the continent as fast as the law would permit. Lanny and Laurel explained the strange situation to her, and she didn't like it a bit, but there was nothing she could do about it. There were a lot of things in the world that she didn't like, she admitted. In order to keep her from brooding over the situation they put her to work on the Peace Programme; they introduced her to the staff, gave her recent copies of the little paper to read, and set her to preparing a programme of her own. It wouldn't be her first radio appearance, because Hollywood had been exploiting her. But this would be the first time she would be serious, and she meant it to be for keeps. No jokes about the habits of rabbits!

The announcement appeared in the papers that the government was intending to ask for the dismissal of the case against Hansi Robin on the ground of insufficient evidence. Lanny waited to learn what was going to happen after that, but nothing happened that he heard of. He was afraid to 'phone Hansi and didn't want to force himself upon either of the government officials. If they needed him they knew where to reach him.

Lanny wasn't attending the trial. As brother of the principal defendant he would attract attention, and the newspaper reporters would besiege him for comment. He and Laurel would get the news over the radio and from the newspapers twice a day. Rose was going; so far as anybody knew she had nothing to do with the case, and there wasn't any reason why she shouldn't satisfy her curiosity. She had been to see her publishers, and they, of course, had grabbed her and were proceeding to use her for publicity purposes. She was to have a luncheon to which the prominent critics would be invited; she was to have a literary tea party for the smaller fry. As soon as the publishers learned that she meant to follow the boilerplate-papers case in court, they got busy with the newspapers, and Rose found herself signing a contract to report the case for one of the tabloids at five hundred dollars a day as long as the trial lasted, or as long as Rose lasted.

So she had a perfect excuse to be present and had a seat right up in front and a table on which to scribble notes. She could study the faces of the four defendants: the poor little rich girl who had been born with a gold spoon in her mouth and had spit it out; the Danish working man who had been embittered by being beaten in a strike; and the couple who kept a stationery shop and had not been able to make money as fast as they wanted to.

The time came when she interviewed Hansi Robin, and that was one of the oddest comedy-dramas that Lanny and Laurel had ever come upon. Rose wrote seriously, because Hansi was a great artist; she said she knew because she had both heard him and watched him in a concert hall in San Diego. She reported him now as repeating the tricky Commie phrases about peace and brotherhood and civil liberties; but she believed that, unlike most of the Commies, he really meant them. What had happened to him was that he was being led by a mistaken sense of loyalty to his wife—and Rose wondered, Would that loyalty still hold him in the event that the wife was given a long term in a federal penitentiary? Lanny and Laurel commented upon one especially amusing aspect of this case: that after the Nevada divorce was granted and Hansi and Rose were married, the readers of newspapers would take it for granted that the 'romance', as they would call it, had been the consequence of this interview.

VI

The government proceeded to unfold its case, and Lanny's curiosity about it was gradually satisfied. The beginning was peculiar. Of the two women servants in Bess's home one was a middle-aged woman, who, while not a party member, sympathised with communism and had been employed for that reason. She was loyal, but at home she had a niece, a high-school girl, who disliked the strange people who came to the aunt's home and talked politics all the time; she disliked them especially because food had to be prepared for them, and she had to wash the dishes when she wanted to go to a movie. The girl's name was Lindy, and she was thinking her own thoughts. When her aunt fell ill she took up the aunt's duties in the Robin home, and there she heard arguments going on between husband and wife.

They were prominent, and in her eyes very wealthy people and objects of intense curiosity. She listened through door cracks and behind curtains and remembered everything. Presently she heard the husband warning the wife that the things she was doing would get her into serious trouble with the government. The girl's curiosity was thoroughly aroused. In her high-school class on current events she had been assigned to write a paper on the Canadian case in which a prominent atomic physicist had been accused and convicted of furnishing data to a Soviet spy. The importance of this had been impressed upon her, and here she found herself in the midst of such a case in actuality. She took to opening Bess's handbag, taking out papers and carrying them off and copying their contents. In that way she got the name of Dumbrowsky, the Russian, to whom the microfilm was being delivered. She listened to Bess's telephone conversations, all carefully guarded but containing mysterious hints.

One thing she learned was that Bess was crossing on the ferry to Long Island and going to a place called Jonesville. Knowing her own ignorance, Lindy went to the woman librarian of the town and asked about Jonesville and learned that it was the site of the Jones Electrical Works; that it was a carefully guarded place surrounded by a high steel fence and reportedly doing secret government work. Little by little she put things together and made up her mind that Bess was lying to Hansi and that he didn't realise the seriousness of what she was doing; she thought the proper thing to do was to warn him. From the reading of a paper-backed detective story she had learned how to prepare a communication without handwriting, by cutting out letters from a newspaper or magazine and pasting them on to a sheet. So she had composed the message 'Bess is courier for Russ spy'. On the envelope she had cleverly written the letter 'n' wrong, to make it appear the work of a foreigner. She had mailed it in New York for safety.

She waited several weeks but nothing happened that she knew of, so she mailed a similar letter to Lanny Budd, whom she had seen in the home and had heard over the radio. In her testimony in court she did not mention this second letter; the F.B.I. had taken up from the first.

They had put skilled agents on Bess's trail and also in Jonesville to hunt up the Communists and watch for spy work going on. Having permeated the Communist party, they had no trouble in getting the names of members and sympathisers in the town and also in locating a Russian Communist named Dumbrowsky in New York. One of the first things they did was to have the Jones people take away from their plant all documents concerning the proximity fuse that were really important and put in their place a mass of others having to do with their groping and abortive attempts. On this basis they let the spying go on for a considerable time. They didn't tell this in court because they wanted the Soviet authorities to go on working from these false leads. Suffice it that they caught Johanssen in the act of taking documents from the safe, and they had taken his fingerprints from the safe on previous occasions; they arrested him in the act of leaving the photograph studio, having in his possession microfilm of material which had come from the Jones plant. Also, they investigated the families and friends of the Hansibess servants and came upon Lindy and quickly got acquainted with her.

VII

And then there was presented the evidence concerning Bess's automobile. It came out in court that the F.B.I. had got impressions of the tyres of Bess's car; they had also found, by chemical analysis of the earth in the tyre treads, material which they had spread at the place where Bess was accustomed to keep her rendezvous with Johanssen. They had taken photographs and impressions of the markings in the earth after Bess's car had left, so they didn't have to depend upon the testimony of agents who had observed her car at the place.

More important yet was the fact that in their search of the car they had found a single piece of microfilm, not much bigger than a postage stamp, which had slipped down into the crevice between the seat and the back. This material had not come from the Jones Electrical Works. The government produced a leading physicist who testified that it was a formula concerning the production of plutonium; and the F.B.I. agents testified that Bess had refused to say a word about how it had got into her car. She just said it was a frame-up.

And then the boilerplate papers! That had been easy, because the gardener was a Finn, and the Soviets had attacked Finland and seized part of its territory. Another Finnish working man had shown up in the neighbourhood and made friends with the gardener; he had pointed out to him the fact that he was in the employ of a notorious Communist and that it might be worth while to keep his eyes open and see what those people were doing. The gardener promised, and, coming back from a week-end holiday, he noticed that somebody had been digging under the seckel pear tree. You can take up sod and put it back ever so carefully, but you cannot conceal the traces from a gardener. If you leave the earth in the cracks the earth will show, and if you wash it out the hollows will show. The gardener had only to take hold of the grass with his two hands and lift out the squares of sod. He was sure that something had been buried there—possibly a dismembered human body. He had told his friend, and that was the news which had brought the half-dozen F.B.I. agents with court warrants to search the house and grounds.

The government produced a list of the papers that had been found in that capacious washboiler. They were membership records of the Communist party, accounts of its receipts and expenditures. The government introduced samples of the papers as evidence, but it did not claim that any of the papers had anything to do with the spying. It was just evidence that Bess was a trusted party member.

VIII

Such was the government's case, and the public in general agreed that it was a good one. Nobody could imagine what the defence would be; but one of the highly paid mouthpieces told them at the next session of the court. This gentleman made a speech to the jury in which he informed them that this whole thing was a dastardly frame-up by the F.B.I. It was part of an effort to discredit the Communist party, which was a legal party and had the right to exist under our free and glorious American system. It was an effort to intimidate Americans who ventured to defend the rights of that party, and at the same time to awaken prejudice against a friendly foreign power, the Soviet Union, our gallant ally in the recent war against nazism and fascism. This conspiracy of the redbaiters would be exposed to the jury and ultimately to the American public.

The first witness for the defence was the accountant Johanssen. He admitted that he was guilty of stealing, but not of spying. A man whom he had never met before had come to him and said that he wanted the papers for the benefit of a rival corporation. He had offered Johanssen five hundred dollars, and Johanssen had got the papers. Subsequently the man had come again, and Johanssen had attempted to get more papers and had been caught. He said he had never had anything to do with Communists or with Russians in the Consulate; he had never met either Bess or Hansi Robin, had never even heard of them. He stuck to his story through the cross-examination. He couldn't describe the man very well because the man had come to him at night and they had talked while walking in the dark.

And then the two people of the photographing studio testified. That was their business, the way they earned their living, or part of it. It was their practice to do any developing work that was brought to them, and they had no interest whatever in what they handled; they looked at it only to see that it was clear and perfect work. In the case of microfilm, they magnified one page and examined it for flaws; that was all that was necessary, because it was all developed together. They saw that it was some kind of technical material, but it was far over their heads and they didn't try to understand it. They knew that the man who brought it to them and took it away again was a foreigner, but they didn't know he was a Russian, and it didn't make any difference to them. They were not Communists and had no interest in communism. And that was that.

IX

Bessie Budd Robin was saved until the last, she being a person of prestige, both musical and social. Her lawyers brought out the facts about her family, her upbringing, her education, her musical career; about her husband and where she had met and married him. They asked about her political ideas, her belief in civil liberties and true democracy, in social justice, in peace. She was there to make political speeches, as many as she was allowed to, and they were all upon this noble and exalted plane. The judge stopped her many times, but she went on trying. Above all things it must be got over to the jury that she was an idealist, a person who had sacrificed a great deal and was ready to sacrifice more for a cause in which she ardently believed. Was she a member of the Communist party? Yes, and proud of it, because peace and democracy were the things for which the party stood.

Then they got down to business. Had she ever done any spying for the Communist party? Absolutely never. Had she ever carried any stolen documents? Absolutely never. Had she ever engaged in any secret work? Never! Everything that she had done had been open and aboveboard; she had studied and thought and expressed her opinions about the course on which the country was being led, a course of aggression and ultimate war. So there came another Communist speech.

Had she ever handled any documents belonging to the Jones Electrical Works? She insisted that she had not. She said that her trips to Jonesville had been on party business and also on social pleasure. She had friends among the workers there, and they had had friendly gatherings on Saturday evenings and she had attended them. Had she ever got any documents of any sort in Jonesville? She had not. Had she ever driven on Second Street? She said she couldn't be sure because she didn't know the names of the streets; she only knew the way to her friend's house. She said she had never met Johanssen and never heard of him. She looked at him now and said she had never seen a man in any way resembling him until he had been brought into court with her. She gave the names of the friends she had visited and of several persons she had met there.

Then she was asked about the boilerplate papers. She said of course she had consented to their being buried in her garden. The Communist party was a legal political party and had a perfect right to have membership lists and records and accounts. The party was being slandered and persecuted, and it had a right to protect these papers from being seized and misused. That started Bess off on another speech and then another. It was rather hard to stop her—she was so much in earnest and so firmly convinced of her own rightness. She was dignified and ladylike about it, and no one could find any fault with her manner of speaking. She was looking at the jury all the time and trying to convince them of the fact that this was her form of religion—not the same as theirs but held with the same conviction.

And through the cross-examination she kept the same firm and serene manner. Mr. Stuyvesant didn't ask anything about her political ideas; he asked about that bit of microfilm that had been found in her car, and she answered that she hadn't even known what microfilm was and had never seen a bit of it in her life. Obviously if it had been found in her car it had been planted there by someone trying to get her into trouble. She said the same thing about the trace of chemicals which had been found on the tyres of her car; it would obviously be very easy for her enemy to have fixed that up. She was not in the habit of making chemical analyses of the dirt in the streets over which she drove. As to the government agents who had traced her from these excursions and had seen her receive packages and carry them to New York, she said they were simply not telling the truth. She had driven from Jonesville to New York on party business; she often met friends of her cause in the city late at night.

She was questioned in great detail about the parties and the social affairs she had attended in Jonesville. She described the house and everything in it, the members of the Berger family who had entertained her and the guests who had been there. She said she had been there on a number of Saturday evenings because they were old friends and she enjoyed their company. Her husband did not go because he preferred to practice his art, at which he worked tirelessly.

Then came the witnesses to her story. The persons she had named told about their old-time friendship and their pride in knowing a great musical artist like Bessie Budd Robin. They described the entertainments they had given for her and the guests who had been present; they were ready with the details, even of the conversations they remembered and the food they had eaten. Yes, they were Communists, they all said, and were proud of it; it was no crime to be a Communist; it meant that you believed in peace, social justice, and freedom of speech—they all got in their little free speeches.

One by one these persons were cross-examined, and they stuck to their stories. They told what they remembered, and when they were asked if they remembered other things they usually said they didn't. When they were asked if they had compared their stories they all said they had been tremendously interested in the case and naturally had talked about it among themselves. They were quite sure that Mrs Robin was innocent because they knew her so well and knew she was a great idealist and teacher and no spy or secret agent.

X

So then it was time for rebuttal. About ten days had passed since Post and Stuyvesant had got the tip as to what the defence was to be. They had gone right to work on the proposition and they now produced the neighbours who lived on each side of the Berger family and across the street. They testified that the Bergers were people who went out frequently but very seldom had company at home and then not more than two or three persons at a time. No such parties were held as had been described; it was impossible that such a number of cars could have been parked, or such a lot of piano playing done, or such a number of persons assembled in the house without attracting the attention and curiosity of the neighbourhood. One such Saturday evening party might have been forgotten, but a series of parties every week-end would certainly have changed everybody's ideas about the Bergers, who were known to be Communists and distrusted by their neighbours. One woman said, 'If I had seen such parties I would have reported them to the police'. Such gatherings had taken place during the last few days and it had been assumed that they had to do with the coming trial.

Then came a government witness, a youngish woman who gave her name as Mary Huggins, and the moment she stepped to the stand you could see dismay in the faces of the Communist witnesses, and whispering went on among them and their lawyers. Mary Huggins testified that she had been a Communist party member for three years and had been in the service of the F.B.I. all that time. She had been sent by the party to interview Communists and sympathisers in Jonesville and to put to them very tactfully and carefully the idea of their appearing and testifying to the effect that they had attended parties and met Bessie Budd at the Bergers'. She named those who had just testified as persons who had agreed to do so and who had been assembled at the Bergers and been taught from a written list of statements exactly what they were to say. They had all spent an hour or two together rehearsing these statements. Furthermore she named two persons whom she had approached and who had refused her request. When she was through the government put these two persons on the stand, and they testified how they had been approached by Mary Huggins and had turned down the request.

The defence lawyers tried their best to break down those three witnesses and to imply that they had been trained as part of the frame-up. All the Jonesville residents who had testified for the defence took the stand and denied that they had ever been approached by Mary Huggins or had ever seen her or heard of her. So it was a square issue of veracity, and great indeed was the excitement among the newspaper reporters—including Rose Pippin. All over town and indeed all over the country the issue was debated, and sums of money were wagered on the outcome. After twenty-four hours of discussion and after twice coming back and asking questions of the judge, the twelve good men and true women brought in a verdict of guilty against all four of the accused.

XI

Lanny got that news over the radio; he was in the room alone, and he sat motionless and let the tears run down his cheeks without any effort to wipe them away. It was one of the saddest moments of his life. His imagination swept back over the years; he was in his father's home in Newcastle, a smaller home then, meeting Bess for the first time. He was seventeen and she was nine. He seemed wonderful to her because he had lived in Europe and had seen so many sights and met with adventures thrilling to a child. She had been tall for her age, with thin features like her mother's, but differing from her mother in being eager and demonstrative. Lanny had no other sister at that time and the relationship was new and delightful to him. She asked questions about everything he had seen and experienced; she listened to him play the piano, and he was the cause of her own eager determination to learn to play well. He had taken her with him upon a visit to their great-uncle Eli Budd, a Congregational minister who went back to Emerson and Bronson Alcott, and who played a part in Lanny's future development by willing him his library.

It was perfectly true, as Robbie had said, that Lanny was in good part responsible for the development of Bess's thought. They had been utopian idealists, all three of them, dreaming about a world of equality and justice, and never for a moment imagining the violence and terror which would turn that dream into a nightmare. They had come to a fork in their ideological road, and those two roads would never meet again; it would not be belabouring a metaphor to say that they might curve gradually and meet head on—upon a battlefield.

Lanny got up and went to Laurel and told her what had happened. She was firmly prepared for it in her own mind and thought only of him. He had wiped his tears away, but she knew there were more inside. She put her arms around him and told him there was nothing he could do about it, and there was no emotion in the world more wasteful than grief. Bess had chosen a bed of martyrdom, and in her own Puritan way she would enjoy lying in it; her fanatical pride would sustain her. Anyhow, it would be a long time before she had to go to jail; those shrewd lawyers would use all the delaying tactics and would carry the case right up to the United States Supreme Court. It was all good propaganda, and the Communists had plenty of money for that. Meantime Bess would go on working for her cause; she would appear on public platforms, wearing her martyr's crown of thorns. Laurel had never known the young Bess as Lanny had, so she could not be blamed if there was a touch of acid in her comments.

They put their minds upon the problem of Hansi. His difficult task was done; he would no longer have to take orders from the F.B.I. or from the United States Attorney for the New York district. But it put him in a rather awkward position regarding his wife. He had espoused her doctrines and had publicly painted himself a bright red. And now that she was a convicted felon was he going to desert her? Of course he could say that he had been an informer, and no doubt the F.B.I. would back him up; but many people would find it hard to forgive him for having denounced his wife.

Lanny said he hoped that Hansi wouldn't take to brooding over that problem; and Laurel said, 'Rubbish! He's been miserable with Bess for years, and now he's got a woman he can love. My guess is she'll take charge'.

XII

Lanny considered it his duty to drive out at once to Newcastle and see his father and stepmother. He did not take Laurel along, because this was a family matter. They were proud people and would not wish to discuss their disgrace in the presence of an in-law.

Poor old Robbie! He would not say it now, but Lanny knew he had not given up his idea that his oldest son was responsible for this calamity; it was the son who had taught strange notions to the young Bess, notions the father had fought with all the energy he possessed. The distinction between revolutionary communism and truly democratic socialism was entirely metaphysical in Robbie's eyes; to him both doctrines threatened the American way of life—which meant his control of Budd-Erling Aircraft. He suspected that Socialists were merely Communists who thought it bad tactics to announce their true aims; if ever they got a chance they would revolt and seize the great plant and turn it over to the control of the labour union, which Robbie now had in his place and had to deal with politely but which in his secret heart he both hated and feared.

This much concession he would make; he would say, 'I am old and tired and the future belongs to the young'. There were his other two sons, Robert, Jr., and Percy, who had learned to run the plant, and he was gradually turning over authority to them. He observed that they got along amiably with the labour leaders, took them for granted, and didn't seem to be afraid of them. Robbie would shrug his heavy shoulders and say, 'All right, all right, maybe there can be such a thing as industrial democracy; maybe they can work it out, even if it means squabbling and corruption. I judge by the politicians I have known'.

Lanny would grin and say, 'Yes, Robbie; you used to buy politicians, but now the price is getting too high'.

They had been having arguments like that for just about thirty years. Lanny would point out that the workingman's sons had been to high school and the politician's sons had been to college and there was a new generation with different ideas; they couldn't all be boss and they couldn't be held down, but they could be reasoned with and programmes could be worked out. Percy once told Lanny that one of the young labour men had said, 'If only we could keep the old man out of it'! Lanny mentioned the fact that over in England he had met one of the young Tories who had spoken the very same words—meaning Winston Churchill.

They did not talk about such matters now. They talked about Bess, and the chances of an appeal, and would the Communists be able to raise the money. Lanny said, 'Sure thing—and let them'! They talked about the sentence she was likely to get and could she stand it. Lanny said she wouldn't mind it too much; she was too certain of her own rightness. She would be conscious of her role and sure that she would be more useful in jail than out. 'She has learned to find her happiness in hatred', he said—a hard saying to her parents.

Seeking to comfort his stepmother, Lanny pointed out that Bess was just one more of the stern old Puritans, clinging stubbornly to what her conscience told her and lacking only in sound judgment. How many, many Puritans had been like that! But driving home and thinking the matter over, he was more strict with himself. He told himself that he was being sentimental about his sister and that he had to put sympathy out of his mind. She had her own world. Sooner or later she would find some man who agreed with her ideas and so her personal problem would be solved. If she had to go to jail she would busy herself making converts among her fellow prisoners and changing them from individual to collective crime. Instead of breaking into houses they would break into nations; instead of stealing purses and jewellery they would steal a world.

XIII

Back in Edgemere the telephone rang, and Lanny heard a familiar voice, this time not disguised. 'This is Moishe Zinsenheimer. We want to see you'.

Lanny replied, 'I am glad to hear the word "we". Will you drive out here?'

'Yes, but we don't want to come to the house. We'll meet you in front of the post office at Shepherdstown at six o'clock, and we'll go somewhere for dinner'.

'Fine', said Lanny and repeated the message to Laurel.

'I told you that Rose would see to it', said she, who was so often right. 'My guess is they're on their way to Nevada'.

When the Budds reached the spot the Zinsenheimers were already there, and a single glance at their car told the story; the back seat was piled with belongings, and doubtless there were more in the trunk. The runaway couple got into the Budd car and told their story. Hansi had been at home, waiting for the verdict, and Rose had phoned it to him. He had a note for Bess already written, telling her that he had tried his best to adjust himself to her way of life and had failed. He was going away and would not return. He had put that on her dressing table, together with a cheque for a thousand dollars. She had money, but he thought it proper for him to pay a share of the cost of closing up their domestic affairs.

He had packed his suitcases, piled his clothes and his music scores and other papers into boxes. He had called a taxicab and been driven into New York to meet Rose. She had dictated her last article to a stenographer, collected her fat cheque, which she said was now burning a hole in her handbag, and made certain that no newspaper reporters were trailing her.

Here they were, she said, footloose and fancy free as any pair of wild rabbits. They were setting out that night for Nevada, delaying only long enough to dine with their two best friends on earth. Rose said that Hansi had promised to wipe his memory free of everything in the past except musical notes. She added, 'I have told him if I catch him brooding I'll break his fiddle over his noodle'.

That was the robust way of looking at it, and Laurel hastened to back it up. She spoke first because she did not trust Lanny to be sufficiently emphatic. She said that Hansi had done everything in the world a man could do to restrain Bess from a course which was a peril to the entire free world. Laurel could testify to that, because she had been present at their arguments and had taken part in them. All three, Laurel, Lanny, and Hansi, had pleaded with Bess and used every argument they knew. Long before they had any idea of espionage they had tried to make it clear that Stalinism was a betrayal of socialism; really it was fascism using a more clever camouflage.

The deal that Stalin had made with Hitler in the late summer of 1939 had proved it, and Bess had almost been convinced. But of course when Hitler attacked Russia the face of the problem had changed and Russia had perforce become an ally; millions of Socialists and other liberals all over the world had decided that this ally must be trusted. Three years of cold war should have been enough to open their eyes; yet many of them chose to shut their eyes to the evidence, and surely they had no right to expect their friends to walk into the trap with them.

Lanny backed this up, and not merely because he knew that otherwise Laurel would have broken a fiddle over _his_ noodle. He did it because his reason told him it was right, and it was Hansi's only chance at happiness. He was lucky to have such a chance; the breaking up of a marriage has wrecked the lives of many a man less sensitive than a musical genius.

XIV

They drove to a town where nobody knew them and had dinner, talking in the meantime in low tones about the extraordinary trial and the efficiency with which the government had gathered the evidence and presented it. Too bad they couldn't have started earlier, and before the atom-bomb secrets had been stolen. But during the war everybody from Franklin Roosevelt down had been deluded by Stalin's cunning—and that had included Lanny and Laurel as well as Hansi and Bess.

Rose explained that Hansi had telephoned the lawyer in Reno, instructing him to airmail a letter that had been prepared in advance, notifying Bess of Hansi's intention to file suit for divorce and to claim the custody of the two children. Her conviction for a felony had destroyed any claim she might have had. Hansi wasn't going to mention the conviction in his complaint, but of course the judge would know about it. It would suffice to allege that Bess was a member of the Communist party and that her activities were a source of humiliation and distress to her husband. Almost any grounds would do in Reno, for the prosperity of the town depended upon its reputation, and to have refused a divorce to a prominent person might have caused the loss of hundreds of other customers. If people wanted their freedom enough to be willing to travel two or three thousand miles to get it, they ought to get it with certainty and without delay.

For a fortnight more there would be Mr and Mrs Zinsenheimer in retirement; then there would be the Hansiroses instead of the Hansibesses. This humour was in Rose's style, and she proceeded to joke about the Laurelbudds and marvel that nobody had thought of that before. They all had another laugh when she stated that she had already ordered Hansi to shell out the contents of his coin purse and billfold; for it had been interstate commerce when she had brought him into New Jersey. Once more he wouldn't be able to buy a newspaper until they got into the state of Nevada. She was serious about it—she had been getting lessons on the subject of legal evidence, and she wanted two witnesses to the fact that she was transporting Hansi and paying the bills. She could afford to do it, having received eleven thousand dollars for her services during the twenty-two working days of the trial. 'Easy come, easy go', she said but vowed it wasn't going to be that way much longer. She was going to buy a real ranch and put Hansi on it and put a fence around it to keep out both the Reds and the rabbits!

XV

The talk came back more than once to the problem of Bess. Both Hansi and Lanny were inclined to be sentimental about her, while the two women were firmly in opposition. They insisted that Bess had chosen her bed, and if it proved to be a bed of spikes that was her hard luck. Laurel said that her means had become the end and the means were evil; so she had become an evil woman, and they all had to harden their hearts in dealing with her.

Most important, of course, was the problem of those two boys. Laurel said to Hansi, 'You have to make up your mind to just one thing: Do you want them to grow up into Communist conspirators? If you don't, you have to take a firm stand; you have to separate them from Bess. You'll have to tell them the truth about her, no matter how much it may hurt their feelings, or yours'. And Rose supported this, though more tactfully. Of course she didn't want to have to raise two Communist stepsons or to have her life involved in such a problem. Hansi had promised that this was not to be.

And then there was question of the property settlement. Hansi had always been generous with Bess, and as a result she had money. They had gone on concert tours together and she had been his piano accompanist. There could be no question that he had been the drawing card, and from the business point of view she was entitled to only a small share of the proceeds. But since it had been a matter of love he had gone fifty-fifty with her.

Now he had the idea of giving her the house, and both Lanny and Laurel said this was preposterous. 'What you have to ask yourself', declared Laurel, 'is whether you want to contribute fifty thousand dollars to the Communist party's war chest. She will put the house on the market, and that is where the money will go. From her point of view that's inevitable; from the point of view of a fellow traveller it's very noble. If you feel under compulsion to be noble, give the house to the Peace Programme, and let us sell it and use the money to expose the fraudulent nature of Communist peace talk'.

They had a laugh over that, and then Hansi, the sentimental one, expressed the idea that Bess might not want either the house or alimony; she would spurn the idea of taking a renegade's money. Laurel replied, 'Would she spurn it if the party ordered her to take it?' When Hansi said he hadn't thought of that, Laurel went on, 'I have met some of their top intellectuals, and I assure you they don't lead ascetic lives. They live in penthouses and enjoy luxuries which in the old days in Russia were reserved for the grand dukes'.

Lanny's sharp-tongued lady added one thing more. 'Take my advice and keep Rose hidden until after the divorce has been granted. If there's one thing that would provoke her to fight, Rose would be it'.

Lanny took little part in this discussion. He sat listening, and every sentence they spoke increased the ache in his heart. It was his sister they were talking about; and while Hansi had found another wife, Lanny could never have another sister to take the place of Bess. There was Marceline, but she lived a long way off and hadn't the intellectual qualities to bring her as close as Bess had been. It was part of himself he had to cut away and bury in the cold ground. He had to do it, because he had no answer to his wife's arguments.
BOOK EIGHT

Whom the Truth Makes Free

22 AND BACK RESOUNDED, DEATH

I

In June and July the two major political parties held their presidential nominating conventions. To each of these quadrennial jamborees came more than two thousand delegates and alternates from places all over the country and as far away as Hawaii and Alaska. Twice as many newspaper reporters and photographers and radio men came, and so many spectators that the vast auditorium could hold but a small part of them. Standards bearing the names of states were set up on the floor, and the delegates were seated around them. Nominating orators invoked the American eagle and ego and the spirits of Washington and Lincoln; thunderous cheering echoed through the hall, bands crashed, and the heads of delegations seized the standards and began marching through the aisles. The popularity of a candidate was based upon whether the marching and the cheering continued for three minutes or thirty. The proceedings continued day and night, and during that time a million hotdogs would be eaten and several million soda-pop bottles emptied.

In this year of 1948 both conventions were held in Philadelphia. The Republicans met first and nominated Governor Dewey of New York; all the political fortune tellers were certain that he was destined to become the next President of the United States. The Republicans were in a glow of exultation, for Franklin Roosevelt was dead and his elegance and charm were a devastating memory—devastating to the Democrats, who had learned to live upon them and couldn't live without them.

What they had got in place of the Squire of Krum Elbow was a man who seemed small by comparison, and who looked like anybody you knew in any town of the Middle West. He didn't know how to stick a cigarette in a long holder and cock it in his mouth at a jaunty angle; he had no golden voice over the radio, but on the contrary a Missouri twang with a slight rasp. He didn't know how to emphasise his points but had a tendency to finish every sentence in a sudden gallop. In short, he was just plain Harry Truman, an every-day American, and people who were kindhearted were sorry for him and people who were malicious found him a shining mark.

Two years ago the country had given him a reactionary Congress, and he had been fighting it with tongue and pen. The Eightieth Congress it was, and he said it was the worst of the lot. He was standing for the New Deal, inherited from his great predecessor, and this Congress had turned down one New Deal measure after another, and on several occasions had passed reactionary measures over the presidential veto. The American government was designed as a government of cheques and balances, but the Founding Fathers could hardly have contemplated the cat-and-dog fight it was being turned into by all the agencies of publicity in the land. Now the Republicans were going to take over, and there was going to be harmony at last and the end to what they called the 'drift into socialism'.

The Democrats met, and they had to nominate Truman; they had nobody else, and it had been a long time since a President had been unable to force his own renomination. The machine politicians had so little enthusiasm for Harry that when he went out to Los Angeles to make a speech they couldn't find a hall for him—or maybe they didn't try very hard. When he was nominated the convention was so busy with its routine affairs that it kept him waiting for several hours before hearing his acceptance speech. He had to sit outside with three friends on a fire escape, waiting for a summons which did not come until two o'clock in the morning.

Everybody was bored and exhausted by then, but he gave them the surprise of their lives. He was full of fury against the combination of Republicans and reactionary Democrats from the South, and he leaped into them after the fashion of a wildcat. He made a fighting speech that took the convention by storm; everybody woke up, and there was a new birth of hope. The delegates went out with new determination, and later in the morning when the people read that speech the excitement spread throughout the land.

Such was the beginning of a political campaign that lasted for three months and a half, through hot summer and cool and pleasant autumn. Lanny and Laurel and their staff read about it and heard about it continually; they tried hard not to take part in it, at least not over the air or in the paper. Their programme had to be non partisan; they had to confine themselves to one problem, which seemed enough for one small group—keeping peace in a world where an irresistible force called communism was meeting an immovable body called capitalism.

II

There came an airmail letter from Rose, telling them that Mr and Mrs Zinsenheimer were no more. The lawyer had insisted that they must live apart until the divorce was actually granted. It was a question of protecting the future of the two boys, for it was quite possible that Bess might hire detectives to watch Hansi. So they had rented separate apartments, quite expensive. Rose sat in hers all day and worked on her book about the movie industry; Hansi sat in his and fiddled and worked on a composition. The extent of their immorality was to have dinner together and go to a show. But it wasn't to be long; the six-week period would be up in a few days.

Lanny had no communication with Bess or her lawyers; he followed the case in the newspapers. The lawyers made their customary demand for a new trial, and the judge turned it down. The prisoners were brought up for sentence, and the judge read them a severe lecture, pointing out the gravity of the crime they had committed. He gave the accountant and the photographers eight years. He said that Bess's case was even more serious, because she was an educated person and had had an upbringing which should have saved her from going astray; on this account he gave her ten years and hoped it would be a lesson to other Communist 'intellectuals'; if it had been wartime he could have sentenced them all to death.

The lawyers, of course, appealed the case, and the prisoners came out on bail—this time fifty thousand dollars. The lawyers pleaded that the sum was excessive, but the judge said no, for convicted Communists had established a reputation for disappearing. The lawyers appealed again, and the various front organisations of the Communist party proceeded to get out eloquent circulars denouncing the frame-up and requesting funds to carry on the expensive legal case. The money they would raise would be several times as much as needed, and the rest would go to party work.

In an afternoon paper Lanny read the news that Hansi Robin, violin concert artist, had filed suit in Reno for divorce from his wife, Bessie Budd Robin, recently convicted of espionage on behalf of Russia. After the fashion of newspapers, the details of the case were repeated, and would be repeated again every time either of the persons was named. When Lanny got home he learned that Rose had telephoned, saying that Bess had consented to the divorce and to be represented by the lawyer whom Hansi's lawyer had suggested. She consented to his receiving the custody of the children and would ask for no money.

So once more the conscientious Lanny had to revise his judgments and realise that he hadn't been accurate when he identified a Communist with a criminal. Bessie Remsen Budd was in truth what he had been calling her since long ago, a granddaughter of the Puritans. She was acting from what to her appeared to be the highest motives; she had convinced herself that the way to end poverty and war forever was for all the peoples of the earth to submit themselves to the dictatorship of the Politburo in the Kremlin. In exactly the same way Torquemada, chief of the Spanish Inquisition, had convinced himself that the way to save millions of souls from burning in the eternal fires of hell was to seize all teachers of heresy and torture them until they confessed and named their fellows, and then to hand all the lot over to the 'secular arm', to be burned at the stake with a fire that was soon over.

III

The Reno divorce mill grinds promptly. Those who can afford to travel across a continent to get free from a marriage are important people accustomed to having their own way. Lanny and Laurel listened frequently to the radio these days, because they never knew but that a world war might be starting in Berlin; instead of that they learned that Hansi Robin had got his divorce. Later in the newspapers they read how the judge had questioned the violinist on the subject of the custody of his children. The judge was hesitant to grant such custody to a Communist; but Hansi explained that he had been persuaded by his wife that communism was an American movement, democratic and constitutional; when he had discovered that the party was engaged in espionage on behalf of a foreign government he had broken with her.

Already there had come a second call from the Hansiroses, both laughing and both trying to talk over the telephone at the same time. They had stepped around the corner to a justice of the peace and been married. The fee was five dollars, but Hansi had given the J.P. a twenty-dollar bill and told him to keep the change. Hansi was allowed to have money now and to transport Rose across state borders. They were heading for California and planning to spend the rest of the summer driving around, looking for the most beautiful ranch in the whole state. They said in chorus, 'We are so happy'! Then, 'Thank you, thank you'! to Lanny and Laurel, listening at the same telephone receiver.

Next morning all the papers had the story; and of course they didn't fail to put two and two together and surmise that the romance had started in the New York courtroom where Rose Pippin, author of _The Rabbit Race_ , had reported the conviction of the former Mrs Hansi Robin for espionage. 'Romance' was the polite term the newspapers used for what Rose had called 'the habits of rabbits'. But Rose said she didn't care what they called it, or what they called her: she had the man she wanted and she had the certificate of ownership in the glove compartment of her car. They were going to stay away from New York for a while and let the excitement die down. Hansi wasn't going to undertake another tour until the public had had time to forget that he had been a member of the Communist party.

That same evening Lanny heard the voice of his half-sister on the telephone. 'Lanny, I want to see you'.

He had rather expected it and couldn't say no. He couldn't think of anything to do that would soften the series of blows which had rained down upon her; but if it would help her to talk about them, all right. 'Where shall it be?' he asked.

'Will you come to New York?'

He answered, 'If it's easier for you I can just as well come to your house as to drive down into the city traffic'.

'It is no longer my house', she countered and could not keep the bitterness out of her tone. 'I am getting out. But if you will come here I'll wait'. She added, 'I wish you would come alone'.

He knew what that meant; Laurel was the enemy. He said, 'I'll come alone'.

He told Laurel about it, and she cautioned him, 'Don't let her worm anything out of you about Rose; and don't waste your time getting emotional. Remember, you are part of the world she is trying to destroy'.

'I can't help being sad about her', he replied. 'I doubt if talking to her will make me any more so'.

He drove the roundabout route, across the great bridge and over to the Connecticut shore of the Sound. He turned into the familiar garden, which forever after would be known to the neighbourhood as the site of the boilerplate papers; he stopped in front of the villa which had been the scene of so many happy hours. Bess's car stood in front of the door, and he could see that it was loaded up with her belongings.

IV

She was waiting for him, and there were no tears; if she had shed any she had wiped away the traces. He noticed that she kept her hands tightly clenched while she talked to him, and several times he thought she was near to losing her self-control, but she didn't. She said, 'I have been ordered out, and you can see I'm getting out. I'm in no position to contest it'.

'Better so', he said quietly. 'There has been publicity enough. Where are you going?'

'I have rented an apartment in the city'. She gave him the street address and the telephone number and then went on, 'I was stunned by Hansi's change of heart, and I don't know what to make of it'.

She waited for him to answer, but he had nothing to say; he had thought it over and decided that he would say as little as he could. Arguing for years had got them nowhere.

'You have won, Lanny', she said, 'and I'm sure you enjoy your victory'.

'You are mistaken, Bess. Hansi is a grown man. He knows his own mind and makes his own decisions'.

'And I'm supposed to be satisfied with that? When you have loved a man as I have loved Hansi, you can take yourself out of his house but you can't take him out of your mind so easily. Tell me what has happened to _his_ mind?'

'You must know what has happened, Bess. It has happened to tens of thousands of people who have joined the Communist party. They find that it isn't what they hoped, they decide that they don't like it, and they get out. I doubt if there is any other organisation in the country with so large a casualty rate'.

'I was prepared to have all my non-party friends desert me when this hateful frame-up was successful, but I surely didn't think Hansi would. Tell me, who is this woman who has got hold of him?'

'She is the author of a book, and you can find out about her by reading it. The important thing is that she agrees with his ideas, Bess, and so he will not have to spend his time arguing'.

'And that means you don't want to tell me about her. You don't have to worry, because I know I am helpless, and anyway I am much too proud to want a man who casts me off. I certainly don't want a cent of his money, and I have no desire to punish him. But I am tormented by the thought that he may have been one of those who betrayed me'.

Lanny knew that the more quickly he passed over that question the better it would be for all of them. 'You have heard the old saying, Bess, that a man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still. That is the way it was with Hansi. I listened to you arguing and I knew what tremendous pressure you were putting on him. He is a sensitive man, as every artist must be, and such a man is at the mercy of the woman with whom he lives; she can destroy that serenity which is necessary to his work. She can bring him to a state of frenzy where he says, "Anything for peace! Anything to be let alone"! He says, "Oh, all right, have it your way"! He says with Matthew Arnold, "Let the long contention cease! Geese are swans, and swans are geese"! That's the way it was in Hansi's life. So long as it was a question merely of opinions, he could stand to join the party; but when he discovered that it was a question of espionage and possible destruction of our government, then naturally he couldn't stand it'.

'So you believe I'm guilty, Lanny'!

'I understand your position and why you have to talk as you do; but there's no use expecting me to take part in it. I have read the _Communist Manifesto;_ I have read one or two books by Lenin and one or two by Stalin. I know that communism is war and that it calls itself peace in order to be more effective. I played a game against Hitler and his National Socialism, and I know that you're doing it against American capitalism. There is no reason for you to be frank with me, and on the other hand there is no reason why you should expect me to be a fool; so let's just leave that out of our conversation'.

That was one of the times Bess had to bite her lips and clench her hands until the knuckles showed white. 'You are being cruel, Lanny', she said.

'I'm being honest with you, and, of course, under the circumstances honesty means cruelty; but I cannot forgo my convictions, any more than you can forgo yours. I did my best to keep you out of this trouble, and now there is nothing I can do except to tell you that I'm truly grieved and sorry. Any time you're ready to tell me that you are through with a programme of force and fraud I'm ready to do my best to help you. I don't suppose that time has come yet'.

V

She told him that it surely had not—and that was enough conversation along that line. 'I don't suppose you have invited me out here to make me into a Stalinist', he said, 'so tell me what I can do for you'.

Her answer was, 'I want to see my sons. I called up Mamma and she wouldn't tell me where they are'.

'I will tell you this much: they are in a summer camp and are happy with their companions, living an outdoor life and getting instruction half the day and play the other half. That is the ideal thing for boys; and surely you don't want to go there and blast their happiness by pouring out your troubles'.

'No, I don't want that, Lanny. But I think I have the right to see them. Have they been told about my conviction?'

'Of course they have been told, Bess. How could you imagine otherwise? Everyone of their playmates has heard about it in one way or another, and the boys have to know how to face the problem. They have to face it all the rest of their lives; and it's you who have put that burden upon them'.

'That means they have been told I'm a wicked woman'!

'I don't think anyone wants to tell them that, for it would make them unhappy. I have talked with both Mamma and Johannes about it—with the whole family. I was asked, and I agreed that they should be told that their mother helped the Soviet government because she believed it was a good government; the rest of us believed she was mistaken and that it was an evil and cruel government. Obviously they have to be told that; there is a war going on, and although it is called a cold war it is plenty hot enough to burn up the peace of mind of two sensitive lads. It is a war for the minds and the souls of every human being on this earth, and more especially for the minds of the young. The Communists specialise in that; you know it, and you know that I know it. I can only tell you frankly that if ever Hansi asks my advice I'll tell him that you should not be permitted to see the boys. You can do nothing but destroy their peace of mind and turn them into little bundles of neuroses'.

'Even if I promise not to mention the subject to them?'

'What other subject could you mention, Bess? You are an incarnation of the problem. Also, we know that promises mean nothing to a Communist. That is a matter of policy, which Lenin advised and which Stalin had made into a first principle for every Communist in the world. It is a terrible thing, because it destroys all honour between human beings, and it destroys all family life; it makes it impossible for a brother to trust a sister and compels him to tell her so frankly'.

'Lanny, you have become absolutely implacable'!

'I am facing an implacable man who has declared implacable war upon me and my country. Three years ago I was sent to call upon him by Franklin Roosevelt, and a year later I was sent by Harry Truman, both hoping to divert him from his implacable course. Both times he was breaking solemn agreements he had made in writing; he was breaking them systematically, whenever he thought it was to his advantage and that he could get away with it. I pointed out that our country wanted nothing but peace and that we had proved it in good faith by disbanding the greater part of our armies and decommissioning our airplanes and war vessels. He heard that news gladly, and renewed his promises blandly, and then went on breaking them, because that is his policy, his creed, his religion. He is a religious fanatic of a new sort. I certainly don't want to fall into his power, and I don't want my country to be enslaved by him'.

'Lanny, you're talking nonsense—'

'Yes, old dear, we're back in our old argument. Let me tell you that I met Jan Masaryk shortly before his death; he went back deliberately, a martyr to human freedom if there was ever one in history. So let's not waste time trying to change my mind about Stalinism'.

'So you are going to advise the Robin family to keep me from seeing my sons'!

'I won't go that far. I will say that if the Robins ask me—as they have done and are apt to do again—I shall advise them that you should not see your sons until they are mature, until they understand exactly what communism means and what it is doing to the world. Then they may see you and tell you what I'm telling you—that you're a pitiful victim of a set of delusions and that you are sacrificing your happiness and your life to a new form of fascism, subtly camouflaged to deceive all the poor and backward races of the earth'.

'Who _keeps_ them poor? Who _keeps_ them backward'? Bess started from her chair and almost screamed the words; she thrust her finger at Lanny's face so that it seemed almost like a pistol. 'You, with your privileges and your comforts, you tell the poor and backward peoples to stay peacefully in the chains of wage slavery! You tell them to go on toiling twelve or sixteen hours a day while the great capitalist powers drain the lifeblood out of their veins! You taught me rebellion! You took me as a child and opened my eyes to the cruelty and oppression that exist all over this earth. You taught me sympathy for the poor and oppressed, both at home and abroad! And now you have turned traitor to your cause, to _their_ cause. Now you can't find words bitter enough to denounce the men and women who are devoting their lives to ending capitalist exploitation and war! Now you are working against them—for all I know, you may be one of those who betrayed me to the government'!

'No, Bess', he said quietly, 'you have never misunderstood what I taught you. You know perfectly well at this minute that you never heard me advocate force and violence, nor did you ever hear me advocate a programme of deception. What I talked about was democratic action, and education for it. The distinction between democratic action and dictatorship is fundamental. When you get something by democratic action you can keep it; but when you get it by dictatorship you have a dynasty. You have one cruel tyrant ousted by a still more cruel tyrant; you have a succession of murders; you have a whole plague of concentration camps for slave labourers whom the tyrants fear. You have horror piled upon horror until the world is sick of it, until the very word communism becomes a stench in the nostrils of thinking people'.

The finger was again trembling in front of Lanny's face, and he saw that his sister's face was convulsed with emotion—anger or fear or grief, or all of them mingled. He saw there was no use going on, so he got up. Then he saw that tears had begun to come into her eyes, and she sank into her chair and covered her face and wept hysterically. He waited, because he wasn't sure what was in her mind. In her heart she must know that what he had said about the Stalinist terror was the truth; every Communist, at least in America, must know it and be fighting against a realisation too awful to be faced.

But she wasn't going to give up her dream. She got herself together, wiped her tears away, and stood up, facing him. 'I am ashamed of myself', she said. 'It is weak of me. I have a great cause and it is an agony to hear it abused. There is nothing more for us to talk about, Lanny. I'm sorry'.

'I'm sorry too', he said. 'The time may come when events will force you to think it over and change your mind. If that happens you may count upon me to help in any way I can'.

And so he left.

VI

All this time the strange new kind of aerial war was continuing in Berlin. The Americans had taken up the challenge of the Soviets. They were not going to be driven out of the city, and the people of West Berlin were not going to be starved. If the Reds blocked off the railroads, the canals, and the highways, all right; there remained the air and the cargo planes; there was the great Tempelhoferfeld, and in the American zone a field at Frankfurt and in the British zone one at Hanover and one at Hamburg. America would put its great cargo planes to flying food in to Berlin; it would bring new planes from overseas, depleting its own domestic services in order to call the Communist bluff and give the world a demonstration of American might.

At home there had been discovered an ingenious process of preserving war materials for which there was no storage room available but for which there might be future need. The process was popularly known as 'putting them in mothballs'. Guns, tanks, planes, and even the vital parts of great battleships were covered with a thin transparent plastic impervious to weather; it lasted forever, and the costly objects could stay outdoors without the slightest damage.

And now there was another process—taking them _out_ of mothballs. So once more, as in the days of the hot war, the big C-47s and the bigger C-49s would fly from American airfields to Newfoundland and from there to Scotland and on to Berlin. From East Coast ports, from Boston down to New Orleans, the cargo ships brought wheat and other foodstuffs to Antwerp, Bremen and Hamburg, and from there the stuff came by railroad and canals and trucks to the airports. Coal came from Britain and Belgium and the Ruhr and was put into sacks; oil came from Texas and Venezuela and Arabia and was put into tins.

It was a shuttle service to Berlin, with a plane flying every few minutes. The moment a plane landed at the Tempelhoferfeld it would be run off the field and unloaded into the waiting trucks; then it would be wheeled back to the field and take off for the return trip. At the height of the enterprise each plane was making as many as three trips a day and being serviced while the pilots were getting their meals. On holidays and after working hours the population of Berlin would turn out and watch the sight. All day long through the summer the children of the city would perch on the roofs of buildings and on the fences and the rubble heaps to enjoy that marvellous free show, waving their caps and cheering each plane as it came down with its load of food for them.

Bernhardt Monck wrote about these matters and sent clippings from the _Neue Zeitung_ , the newspaper A.M.G. was publishing in both Berlin and Munich. Now and then for comic relief he would send clippings from papers the Reds published in their sector. They were raging furiously against the blockade; they were indignant because the Americans were violating the most elementary rules of air safety—so concerned they were for American safety, and for the safety of Germans who lived in the houses around the Tempelhoferfeld! They were saying that the Americans might keep Berlin fed and provided during the summer but could not possibly do it in the winter, when the ground would be deep with snow and when furious storms would last for days and nights. Then the West Berliners would require not merely electric light and power, but also heat for their houses and factories, which took immense quantities of coal. But Monck said the Americans were making their plans to do it and were accumulating stocks. He said that West Berlin had become a symbol to the whole of Europe; it was like a flag flying over a fortress, proclaiming the fact that it was still holding out. The free world was surely not meaning to capitulate!

VII

Now and then Monck would put in a sentence or two about secret matters. He would say, 'No word from Ferdinand or the deaf girl'; he would say, 'Old Ferdinand is going straight this time; he is useful'. Once Monck enclosed a clipping from a Munich newspaper, telling how the German government of Bavaria had arrested Heinrich Brinkmann on a charge of attempting to transport state-owned treasure out of the country. At the top of this item Monck had put in red pencil the initials 'O.F.', which of course meant that the information had been given by Old Ferdinand.

Lanny didn't show such things to Laurel, but he did tell her of the statement that Kurt was 'going straight this time'. She knew about the treasure, because the story had been published in the American press while Lanny was still in Germany. Lanny hadn't been mentioned—which was the way he wanted it—but Laurel had had no trouble in guessing that this was the important errand which had taken him overseas. She had never met Kurt Meissner but had been hearing about him for many years, so he was vivid in her mind; and now Monck's letter caused her to talk about him again and to think about him. That, no doubt, was the cause of the strange event which now took place, one of a series of events which she and her husband had experienced together and about which they speculated in vain.

All our thoughts and impressions sink down into that underground repository we call memory. Millions of facts and thoughts and impressions, names and places and dates, are there, and there is some kind of mysterious elevator; we press a button and a messenger goes down and picks out from the million of shelves and compartments a single detail we have called for—the name of a man we met fifty years ago, a line of poetry we read, a fish we caught, a bird we saw flying—and brings it up to the surface and delivers it to our consciousness. Sometimes the messenger cannot find it; but it is always there, the psychologists tell us. Perhaps under hypnosis we can get it; or if we just wait and repeat the order now and then, suddenly it comes popping to the surface, like a bubble of gas in a stagnant pond. How these things happen the most learned psychologist in the world cannot tell us. But they do happen, we know, and we take them for granted.

What goes on in the bottom of that stagnant pond when we send no messengers down and give no conscious thought to it? Do the memories just lie there awaiting the summons, or do they by any possibility have a life or energy of their own? Are there by any chance strange psychic entities that writhe and wriggle about and perhaps get into one another's way? Are there personalities there, other modes of life? Lanny had read more than once a book by a learned psychologist of Boston, Dr. Morton Prince, called _The Dissociation of a Personality_ , the case record of a young lady of good family who developed five different personalities in her subconscious mind; these personalities would dispute the possession of her conscious mind, and now and then a different one would come to the surface and be the young lady whom Dr. Prince called Miss Beauchamp. He took the two of those personalities he considered the best and put them together while his patient was hypnotised, and made a new Miss Beauchamp; the other three personalities he psychically murdered, or at any rate put them permanently to sleep; he hypnotised them and told them they would no longer be Miss Beauchamp or have anything to do with her, and they obeyed him.

All through the ages men have been aware of the existence of this mysterious pond or well or mine or whatever metaphor one chooses to use for it; all the metaphors are misleading, because it doesn't exist in space, and it may not exist in time. But we who do exist in space and time have to imagine it that way. We become aware of things going on there, and sometimes we call it God and sometimes we call it the devil; if we are materialists we invent strange names such as the ego and the id. Men have a way of giving a thing a name and then assuming that they know all about it. They will say, 'Oh, that's just hypnotism', overlooking the fact that they don't know what hypnotism is or how it works. They will say, 'I believe in telepathy', overlooking the the fact that if they could really find out what telepathy is and make it work they would completely put an end to the separation of our individual lives and bring about a state of being in which we would either have to love our neighbours or else destroy ourselves.

VIII

The bubbles continue to rise now and then from this stagnant pond, and sometimes there is an explosion of them. Laurel Creston Budd had been hearing about Kurt Meissner; he meant much to her because he meant even more to her husband, who went abroad on dangerous errands, and always when she tried to guess what her husband might be doing Kurt Meissner was one of the personalities of whom she thought. Recently she had learned that her guesses had been right, and that had made Kurt still more active in her consciousness, and presumably had made him active in her sub-consciousness as well.

Anyhow, this is what happened. Laurel was lying on her day-bed, reading some letters, and Lanny was in the next room. She laid the letters down and spoke to him, and when he came to the door she said, 'Lanny, we are forgetting our psychic powers'.

' _Your_ psychic powers, you mean', he answered with a smile.

She said, 'I have a strange feeling. I suppose it is what people call a hunch. Let's try a séance'.

'Okay', he replied and made the preparations, which were simple. All that Laurel had to do was to lie back and close her eyes; Lanny pulled down the window shades to diminish the light and then got a pad of paper and a pencil and sat in a chair by the bedside.

Laurel closed her eyes and began to breathe deeply. Two or three times she sighed, and then the room became perfectly still. After a minute or two Lanny asked in a soft voice, 'Is anybody here'?

'Is that you, Lanny?' answered a voice; it came from Laurel's lips and yet wasn't entirely like her voice. Lanny didn't believe in spirits—at least he didn't want to believe in spirits, but he had learned that in these séances the entities, whatever they were, took themselves to be living beings and were to be addressed politely, precisely as if they were alive on earth. So Lanny said, 'Is that you, Madame? I am glad to see you'. He didn't see her, but that was part of the game.

'I have missed you for a long time', replied the voice, speaking quietly and slowly.

'I've been very busy, Madame. Laurel and I are trying to prevent another war, and that calls for a lot of time'.

'I am afraid you will not succeed, Lanny. The world has come upon evil days. There is a young man here, the one who was here before, the German. He has suffered terribly'.

'What is his name, Madame?'

'He says Ferdinand. He says you know him'.

'Yes, I know him. He is with you'?

'He is here. He wants me to tell you that he is happy, he is at peace'.

'I know him well. Has he anything else to tell me'?

'He wishes to tell you that his father is here'.

'Ferdinand's father?' Lanny's fingers trembled as he wrote his notes. When he looked at them afterward he saw he had given a violent start. 'I didn't know that he had come over, Madame'.

'He has just come. He is a sad old man; not so old, but he looks old. He knew you well. He quarrelled with you. He wishes to say that you were right'.

'What happened to him, Madame?'

'He says it was the—he uses a word I do not know—the Vehm-Vehmgericht'.

'I know that word'.

'They tried him and hanged him by the neck. It was a terrible thing. It frightens me, but he says not to worry. He talks about his family; he wants you to advise them'.

'Tell him I will help them, Madame'.

'There are other men here. They are all in uniform. They are Germans. There is a fat man who laughs all the time. He wears a lot of medals. There is a lady with him. He calls her Karin. He says you sold him paintings, and now you can have them all. There is a pale young man here; he is talking. They are both talking at the same time. He was an officer; he was killed in battle. He says you know his mother. Her name is Hilde. You are to tell her that he is happy—they are all talking and it disturbs me. They are all Germans, and you know I never liked Germans, they destroyed my country. I will talk to you some other time, Lanny. The power is failing now'.

IX

So the voice faded away and there was silence in the room for a minute or two. Lanny said again, 'Is there anyone present?' but there was no reply. Laurel began to sigh and then to moan as if in distress. Then her eyes opened. She always appeared perplexed for a few moments, as if not quite sure where she was. Then she asked, 'What happened?'

Lanny said, 'Madame came, and she said that Kurt is there'.

'Oh _no!_ ' exclaimed Laurel. She sat up. 'What happened to him?'

'She says he has been hanged. I suppose by his associates. She quotes him as saying it was the Vehmgericht'.

'What is that?'

'It is a name they have taken over from the Middle Ages in Germany; a secret court, a sort of lynch-law affair. Kurt himself told me that if it became known that he went over to the Americans he would not be allowed to live for a week'.

'Oh, Lanny, how awful!' exclaimed the wife. 'Do you suppose it is really true?'

'We can only try to find out', he replied. 'It may be only an expression of your anxieties'.

He described the rest of the séance but didn't mention Kurt's son; he just said, 'Madame referred to a young German who had appeared previously'. But so far as Kurt was concerned the facts were no longer 'classified'. A leading Nazi propagandist had come out on the Allied side, and if he had been murdered it was obviously because he had been giving information to the Americans.

Lanny said he would telephone Monck and find out. It was then the small hours in the morning in Germany, and he waited until early next morning. Then he put in a call for Monck's office and had the good fortune to find him. Lanny asked, 'Have you any news about Old Ferdinand?' The answer was, 'The Army turned him loose at his request. I wrote you about it a few days ago'.

'The letter hasn't come', Lanny said. 'Is he all right?'

'So far as I know. Why do you ask?'

Lanny said, 'Laurel had a message in a séance to the effect that he had been hanged'.

He knew this wouldn't make much of a hit with his old friend. German Social Democracy is Marxist and bases its theories upon old-fashioned German materialism. The universe and everything in it consists of little round solid lumps called atoms, and the behaviour of these atoms is fixed in a chain of causations that nothing can ever break. The Germans knew that, because a philosopher named Ludwig Büchner had proved it a century ago in a book called _Kraft und Stoff_ , and Karl Marx had read it. So now a German named Bernhardt Monck tolerated with patronising kindness the fact that an old friend believed in 'spooks'. It seemed to him a characteristically American thing that a wealthy playboy should spend ten dollars or so on a telephone call because one spook had given his wife some messages from another spook.

The ex-sailor said politely, 'I'll inquire and let you know'. Then he added, 'The airlift is flying. You should come and see it, Lanny. It's the finest piece of propaganda ever devised. All Europe is watching it'.

X

Lanny went about his business for the day and did not let himself worry about Kurt Meissner. The report might not be true. He had received many psychic communications, and some had been veridical, and many more had had no relationship to reality. Those which were true produced a deep impression, while those which were not were apt to be forgotten quickly.

In the evening he was listening to a radio programme, as they always did; it was a world in which cold war might change to hot at any moment, and if it did there might be an A-bomb over your head. So it came about that Lanny and Laurel, sitting on their front porch with Rick and Nina and listening through an open window, heard the following words: 'A dispatch from Munich reports that Kurt Meissner, well-known German musician and onetime intimate of Hitler, was found hanged in a forest near his home on Lake Tegern. It is believed that he was murdered by Nazi fellow conspirators because he had given information to the American authorities concerning the treasure concealed in the foundations of his home'.

So there it was, first a murder and then a miracle, for most people would call it that. Rick and Nina were witnesses, for Lanny had called them on the previous evening and told them about Laurel's message. Rick, like most moderns, was inclined to materialism but wasn't dogmatic about it; he couldn't doubt the reality of psychic experiences, because Lanny's first, at the age of seventeen, had had to do with Rick's flying accident.

It was a perfect demonstration of a mysterious power that lies hidden in the human psyche. There were thousands of such cases recorded in the books; Lanny had read many cases and had witnessed a few and had told other people about them, but without much result. The average person was interested, as he would have been interested in an account of a visit to the moon or to Mars; but he didn't know what to make of the phenomena and let them slip from his mind.

Lanny was prepared for the airmail letter he received from Monck a few days later. 'It is really an extraordinary thing', he said, 'and I don't know how to explain it; but if I believed what you believe about it, I would have to change my whole way of thinking. That is too much to expect of a man nearing sixty'. So, go on believing Büchner and Marx, and leave the facts lying unread in the libraries!

What Lanny had to do was one concrete thing, to send off a letter to Elsa Meissner expressing his sympathy and asking what resources Kurt had left and what help she would need from Lanny. Kurt Meissner had become in fact, if not in name, an American secret agent, and his family might have a proper claim to a pension; but that would have meant cutting a lot of red tape and persuading a whole row of bureaucrats, and Lanny decided that it would be better to devote the same amount of time to selling another painting.
23 THE NATIONS' AIRY NAVIES

I

All through these weeks the Berlin airlift was constantly in Lanny's thoughts. There came a letter from Boris Shub, saying, 'This is the crucial struggle. It is a question of holding the people of Berlin to our side. They will stick it out, but only if they are sure we are standing by them. You ought to come over here, Lanny, and help. This is R.I.A.S.'s great hour; this is what we exist for. Can't you help make Washington understand the importance of winning the German mind? We are willing to spend billions for guns but only a few tens of thousands for ideas'.

Then came a letter from Monck, saying much the same thing but from his special point of view. 'The Russians are coming over to us', he said; 'more of them every day, risking their lives. And still more of the East Germans—they have extraordinary stories, and you ought to be here to listen and put them on your radio. We all have such a feeling of impotence; the American people do not understand our problem, they do not understand the importance of education. In America, yes, but not here; they do not realise that this is a world struggle and that your country cannot win it alone'.

Also, there was Lanny's private business, which he could not neglect entirely; he expected to live for some years yet and he wanted to earn what he was spending. There would come a letter from one of his clients, and he would have to set aside his concern about saving the world and devote himself to thinking where he could find a good Renoir, or an Ingres, or whatever. He had to keep his files up to date, and his information about prices, which varied like waves on the ocean; some painter would rise to the top, and then before you realised it he would be on his way down again. For a while you wouldn't buy his work because the prices were too high, and presently you wouldn't buy his work because nobody wanted him any more. To keep in touch with these things Lanny would go into town and meet his friend Zoltan Kertezsi; they would go wandering on East Fifty-seventh Street, strolling into the dealers' galleries, looking at what they had and listening to the gossip which dealers dispense as freely as housewives over the back fence.

One of Lanny's most important clients was old Mr. Harlan Winstead, who lived in once-fashionable and rich Tuxedo Park. He had been disappointed in his family life and was distrustful of nearly everybody; most of his old friends were dead, and he was afraid to make new ones. The darling of his affections was his art collection, to which Lanny had contributed scores of items. That collection would never betray him, never deceive him; its charms would never fade nor its financial values diminish. It was his intention to set it up in an absolutely fireproof building that would bear his name through the centuries. Lovers of beauty would come from all over the land to wander through the Winstead Museum, and at least a few of them would read in the catalogue the full name and career of its founder.

Old Mr. Winstead read a great deal, especially about art. He would read about new painters and new appraisals of old painters. He would wander through his rooms and look at his collection and decide that the French Impressionists were not completely represented, or perhaps the Florentine School, or the English portraitists. He would call Lanny up and invite him to lunch, and Lanny never failed to go. The old gentleman liked him and trusted him and would follow his advice.

From that luncheon Lanny would go back to Edgemere and consult his card file in which were listed all the paintings he had ever dealt in, or inspected and priced, or even heard rumours about. He had been collecting it for a quarter of a century, and it was precious indeed; there was a duplicate in a vault of the First National Bank of Newcastle. It had increased immediately after the war, when he had served in the operation known as 'Monuments', engaged in recovering a couple of hundred thousand works of art which had been stolen by the Nazis and were to be returned to their proper owners. Lanny had made notes on many of these and knew where to find the records of others; so when Mr. Winstead took up a notion to expand his collection in this line or that Lanny would say, 'I will find out for you'.

That meant that he had to visit Washington, or send someone, and write to dealers and private parties in Europe. He had to get photographs and prices and send or take them to his client. And when the client said, 'I want this one', Lanny would go and inspect it and make sure it was genuine and worth the price. If he could save a little money by scaring the other fellow, all right, but the important thing was to get Mr. Winstead what he wanted before the owner found another customer. Lanny's clients seldom talked about their incomes, but from watching through the years he could figure that Mr. Winstead had about half a million dollars a year to spend on paintings. Like Irma, Lady Wickthorpe, he had turned his money over to a foundation so as to avoid ruinous income taxes. Being a conscientious New England gentleman, he would never spend this money for anything but art, the foundation's duly established purpose.

II

So it came about that Lanny was required to take another trip to Germany, to inspect some fragments of that Hermann Göring collection which was to have astounded posterity through the thousand years of the Hitler Reich. Laurel didn't want him to go, and before she gave her consent she extracted from him a pledge that he would not visit Munich or that deadly Alpine Redoubt over which the Vehmgericht kept guard. He telephoned Monck that he would come and speak for R.I.A.S. and do whatever else he could for the cause of free Europe. Monck, a trusted man in the Counter-intelligence Corps, could arrange for things like passports without delay.

So for the second time Lanny got his seat in an Army plane. He stepped off in London, and after telephoning Laurel to let her know that he was safe he called Wickthorpe castle and learned that Irma and Ceddy were in Scotland for the salmon fishing. He wrote them a note explaining that Frances and Scrubbie had postponed a visit to England until Lanny's return. Then he called up Alfred Pomeroy-Nielson, M.P., and spent an evening with him. Paper was scarce in Britain, and news from across the Atlantic was meagre. Alfy wanted to hear the whole story of Bess, and how the Pater and Mater were, and all that they were doing. In return he gave an inside view of the British Labour government, which was having a hard time because money was so scarce. Next morning, on the plane flying to Nürnberg, Lanny made this into a little article, which he airmailed to Edgemere.

The _Kunstsachverständiger_ attended first to his business affairs. In a mansion far outside the bombed city he found an excellent collection of French Impressionist paintings. At the beginning of the century the Germans had taken much interest in this movement, and several of its own painters had become imitators. So here were Menzels and Liebermanns, and also works by Monet, Degas, and Renoir. They were what Lanny's client wanted and their prices seemed reasonable, so he bought half-a-dozen examples and saw to their careful packing and shipment.

Then he was free to think about his personal friends, and he had the sad duty of calling upon Emil Meissner. The one-time Wehrmacht general said that Kurt had definitely gone over to the Allied cause and had definitely expected to pay for it with his life. So far as Emil had heard, neither the American Army nor the Bavarian government had been able to find any of the conspirators; they had just faded away and quite possibly had escaped abroad. He said that the Vehmgericht was an effort to carry Germany back to the Middle Ages. 'You can read a picture of its activities in Goethe's _Goetz von Berlichingen_. They hold a formal trial in the forest at night and pass the sentence and execute it on the spot'. Then Kurt's older brother added, 'You do not have to trouble your conscience about it. I would far rather he died opposing nazism than have him live supporting it. There is a new Germany being born, and I believe it will survive—that is, if the Reds do not roll over us'.

Lanny asked about Elsa. Emil had been to see the family and had given them advice. The older boys had agreed to heed their uncle's warning and keep away from the Nazi intriguers. Elsa had enough money to get along—Kurt had been able to save some. Lanny divined that Emil didn't know anything about the counterfeiting activities; possibly Elsa didn't know about them either. Emil agreed that it would be wiser for him to keep away from that part of the country. He said that Lanny's part in the discovering of the hidden gold was known and that the Neo-Nazi fanatics were really dangerous. The ex-general himself was a marked man, a traitor to Hitler. He never went out at night if he could avoid it; he slept with his Luger under his pillow and kept it in the drawer of his desk while he worked.

III

They talked for a while about the airlift, which Emil said was the most prominent subject in the mind of every German. A strange turn of the wheel of fortune that the Germans now rejoiced to see that they were remaining 'occupied'. Emil said that Stalin, an Asiatic, set great store by what was called 'face', and now he was losing it rapidly.

Lanny mentioned the paintings he had bought and found that his old friend knew the owner and had visited the house. When Lanny mentioned that he had a similar commission to carry out in Frankfurt the other said, 'You may do me a favour there if you will'. He explained, 'There is a young Luftwaffe officer, son of an old friend of mine, a classmate from my cadet days. The family belongs to the old nobility—this officer is a great-grandson of Prince Bismarck. He made a flying record in the war, shooting down thirty-five Russian fliers, and then he himself was shot down over Stalingrad and captured. You know how the Communists try to make converts of everybody, and I'm told they succeeded with many of our officers. Now this young fellow is in jail in Frankfurt. It appears that the American Army thinks he is a Soviet spy. It doesn't seem likely, but I can't say because I haven't seen him for seven years. I imagine that a large percentage of those who come in from East Germany have been told to spy, whether they do it or not. Anyhow, I can't imagine that Heinrich would be working very hard at it, his family connections being what they are'.

'It may have been just an excuse to get loose', Lanny suggested.

'Quite so; but again it may be that a young idealist has been won over to the Soviet point of view. You know how it is, they say they are for peace and democracy, and it is possible to believe their words until you see their actions. It occurs to me that you might visit him and explain the American point of view. One of the last things Kurt said to me was, "Lanny is a powerful persuader"'.

'I am glad to hear that', Lanny said. 'I laid myself out to persuade him, because I esteemed him'.

'I think you will like Heinrich', said the other. 'Heinrich Graf Einsiedel is his name. When I knew him he was a charming and genial lad. He was taken into the Luftwaffe at the age of eighteen, and he was only twenty-one when he was shot down, so you can see that he probably doesn't know very much about world affairs. The Russians have had him ever since Stalingrad which means six years. You Americans have had him only three or four months, and I doubt if you are anywhere near as active propagandists as the Reds'.

'Alas, no'! agreed Lanny.

IV

The art expert had himself flown to Frankfurt-am-Main, a city of West Germany which had been his headquarters at the war's end, when he was helping to capture German atomic secrets; it had now become the headquarters of A.M.G. In the home of a well-to-do wine merchant, a villa on the Bockenheimer Landstrasse in the hills behind the city, he found a couple of Manets, which he knew well because they had been in Göring's hunting lodge at Karinhall. Now they had been restored to their former owner, and Lanny bought them at a reasonable price and sent off a cablegram announcing them.

Then he inquired concerning the Luftwaffe officer, Count Einsiedel, and learned that he was in the investigation prison in Frankfurt. Lanny then telephoned to Berlin, asking Monck to fix it up so that he could have a confidential interview with this great-grandson of Prinz von Bismarck. Monck said okay. No doubt he reminded the authorities that Lanny had been responsible for the finding of the Nazi gold, and that made him a V.I.P. Anyhow, they didn't take him to the cell, but seated him in a comfortable room and brought the young Graf to him and left them alone. Of course there might have been a dictaphone but Lanny wouldn't have minded; he had nothing to conceal—quite otherwise.

Heinrich Graf Einsiedel proved to be a tallish, slender young man, pale from his confinement. He was, as the general had said, a cheerful, even a gay person, in spite of his troubles. He said he wasn't angry with the Americans; he was inclined to take the whole affair as a joke. They had been decent to him, except that they had kept him two or three months in solitary confinement without an explanation; he was sure they didn't have any evidence against him and were just holding him while they tried to get some. He said he had declared a hunger strike by way of protest, but nobody had paid any attention to that, so after eighteen days he had decided to give up. He said he had come into West Germany to see his mother and some old friends; he had been visiting his mother in Wiesbaden when a couple of Army agents had picked him up. They said there was something wrong with his pass, but it was a perfectly good pass, signed by the proper authority in the American sector of Berlin.

'They say you are a spy', remarked Lanny. 'I have been one myself, so I know all about it. Tell me'.

Heinrich grinned. 'You know how it is, Herr Budd. Any time anybody plans to come from the Russian zone into the Western zones he is interviewed by the M.V.D. for his pass and ordered—not invited but ordered—to send in information or to bring it. I was ordered and I said to myself with a smile, "I will write you a few inconsequentialities"— _einige Belangslosigkeiten_. It is silly so far as I am concerned, because I don't know anything that they don't know already. I am an editor—perhaps you don't know, I am one of the editors of the _Tägliche Rundschau_ , the newspaper in East Berlin'.

'General Meissner didn't tell me that', Lanny said. 'Perhaps he didn't know it'.

'Being an editor in the East sector is very different from in the West. Perhaps you can't imagine it. You do not print the news; you follow policy, and all the news has to be made over to fit the policy. You are told that the party is monolithic, and so is the policy; it is a most impressive word, but, alas, when you come to watch the proceedings you discover that what exists is one clique fighting another clique for power. Whichever side is out is watching eagerly to catch the other in some action or some phraseology that isn't "monolithic". It is hard for me because I am naturally an outspoken person, and I have never belonged to any clique'.

'Why don't you come over to the West and stay'? inquired Lanny.

'I don't know whether they would have me; and anyhow it's rather hard for me to make up my mind. I have a great many friends among the officer corps—the German officers who have gone over to the Soviets. You must understand, I am deputy president of the Bund Deutscher Offiziere, and we think we are important, and I hate to hurt their feelings. It is a strange life that I've lived. I was brought up as a German officer and was taught that my first duty was to defend the Fatherland. I despised democracy precisely because I had seen the German people vote Hitler into power; that was why it was possible for me to go over to the Soviets. If I should change again I wouldn't know quite what to make of myself; it would be too much for anybody to believe. You must realise, I have lived six years among the Russians, and they have taught me most of what I know—or think I know'.

'I can understand easily', Lanny said.

V

He didn't want to put pressure on the man or to seem to, so he chatted for a while about old times. He told of buying paintings that had once been in Karinhall. 'Did you ever meet Hermann Göring?' he asked.

'Never, thank God'! exclaimed Einsiedel. He called his air commander 'a vain, overstuffed peacock' and added, 'He knew as much about air strategy as an ox knows about skiing'.

'I visited his Luftwaffe headquarters once', Lanny said. 'I helped him with his art collection—not those paintings he stole but some he bought'.

'I have been through the Tretyakov Museum in Moscow, and that is all I know about painting. You must understand that for a good part of those six years I was a prisoner of war. They gave me their propaganda to study, and I studied it, and when they saw that I was a diligent student they sent me to an _antifaschule_ —you know how they make up words—that is, an anti-Fascist school. There they trained German officers to be Communists, and I learned the whole ritual and Bible. It seemed to me quite wonderful, you know; they are going to end poverty and war, the proletariat has arisen and is going to build a new state, and when it is all done the state will wither away and every man will be free. I took it all just as I had taken the Bible from my mother and _Mein Kampf_ from Hitler. Each time there was a complete programme of salvation and a ritual that you had to go through if you wanted to be saved'.

'I know all about it', Lanny said. 'I never was a Communist myself, but some of my friends were, including a sister. What you have to learn is that revolutions may degenerate. The state doesn't wither away; on the contrary, it becomes the prey of power-loving men, and they hold on to it and proceed to murder everybody who might by any possibility disagree with them and try to get rid of them. The utopian state turns into a police state, and differences of opinion become the occasion for secret arrests, tortures, and other horrors. The basis of American social thinking is the right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; but in the Soviet Union the individual is nothing and the regime is everything'.

'The theory, Herr Budd, is that the regime is delivering the individual from exploitation'.

'It is a plausible theory and has seduced many minds. But after watching it for thirty years I have concluded that the regime is a small group of individuals protecting their own power and exploiting everybody else. To me the Stalinist regime is as evil and treacherous as those of ancient Rome in the days of its decline and fall. Did you by any chance see the picture that Sergei Eisenstein made about the life of Ivan the Terrible'?

The other had seen it, and Lanny went on, 'Ivan was a perfect monster of cruelty, syphilitic and a veritable maniac, yet he represents success to the Soviets. He survived, he put down his enemies and expanded his empire, so they glorified him, they spent millions of roubles, even in the midst of their poverty, and set their creative genius to making a magnificent film about him. I can assure you that such a thing would be inconceivable in America. In the first place we have no such figures in our history. Our folk heroes are men like Columbus, who sailed out in three little ships and discovered a new world; Daniel Boone, who went out into the wilderness and survived so many hardships; Paul Revere, who rode out to rouse the farmers of the countryside when the British soldiers were coming; Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence; John Brown, who tried to awaken the slaves; and Abraham Lincoln, who actually did emancipate them. Someday we shall add Franklin Roosevelt, a crippled man in the White House who broke the power of Wall Street and forced it to come to Washington for its orders. From such things you can know the soul of our people; and you will see how different it is from a land of blood and terror, building up military might by the labour of millions of starvelings in concentration camps'.

'I am very ignorant, Herr Budd', said the great-grandson of Prinz von Bismarck. 'I have never even heard many of these names you mention'.

VI

So Lanny set to work to complete the education of this young Prussian aristocrat, whom he liked because he had a keen intelligence and a genial smile. He had been buffeted by fate but had taken it in a mood of gaiety. The Americans had locked him up, but they had no way of knowing about him, so he couldn't blame them very much. Speaking as an aviator, he said that when you were up in the air and the winds pushed you this way and that you didn't blame them, you learned to ride them.

Lanny tried again that eloquence which he had wasted upon his sister during the years since she had come back from the Soviet Union. He answered those arguments Einsiedel had been taught in the _antifaschule_. Yes, there had been lynchings of Negroes in America; there might still be as many as one in the course of a year. But the millions of Negroes who had been slaves a century ago were getting education, they were earning money and putting it by, they were gaining their rights in one court decision after another. They were on their way up in America, and for that reason the Communists were not able to make much headway among them.

And again, yes, there had been oppression of labour. Unions had been fought and sometimes broken up, and working men had been beaten and shot in riots during strikes. Such conditions had been portrayed in books—books written thirty or forty years ago and now circulated in Stalinist Russia with nothing said about the dates. The Russian masses were being taught that these conditions prevailed in America today; but that was not so. In America today there were some twenty million workers organised into unions that were wealthy and powerful and that were accustomed to negotiate with bosses upon equal terms; they were free to strike and did so—something they would never dare to do in Stalin's empire. During the past sixteen years of the New Deal these unions had had their full say in the affairs of government and had helped to bring about numerous social reforms. In England this was called Fabian socialism and in America its enemies called it 'creeping socialism'; but bad words hadn't stopped it. It had all been brought about by the democratic process; very few persons had been killed, very few had been sent to jail, and while many lies had been told, the lovers of truth had been left free to refute them.

VII

In short, Lanny conducted an anti-Commie school, all in one session. The pupil was apt and attentive, and at the end of the session Lanny waited to hear him say that he would stay in the American sector if permitted. But no, he said he couldn't do that; in the first place it would look cowardly; the Americans would think he had done it in order to get out of jail, and they would never really respect him or trust him. He would wait until they turned him out, which they would surely have to do, because they could prove nothing against him. Then he wished to go back to his job on the _Tagliche_. He had his friends to whom he owed loyalty, and he wanted to tell them what new thoughts he had got into his head.

Lanny warned him that this was a dangerous thing to do. 'You do not look to me as if you'd be a very successful intriguer. What you're thinking shows in your face'.

Said he, 'I believe I have a few friends I can trust, Herr Budd'.

Lanny warned him, 'It is difficult to have friends in a police state. The moment you change your mind fear begins, and suspicion. You wonder who will be the Judas to betray you with a kiss. It is to every man's advantage to betray you and to no man's advantage to keep your secret. You will never have a moment's peace of mind, for you have to remember that the slightest suspicion is enough to bring about your ruin. In the free world we would rather let a hundred guilty men go free than kill one innocent man; but in Stalin's realm it is just the other way: he would rather kill a hundred innocent men than have one guilty man survive—because that guilty one might bring about the end of Stalin. That is the way with despotism; it automatically breeds fear and suspicion; it thrives upon it and cannot survive without it. In the free world a human being is a soul and his rights are sacred; but in Stalin's realm human beings are beetles and bugs; if they bite, or even look as if they might bite, they are exterminated'.

The young Prussian chuckled. 'Tell your friends who have got this beetle in a box that if they turn him loose he will not bite, and he will not tell any lies about them. He will go back and tell his friends what he is thinking. Perhaps he will have another change of mind; but he is making no promises and giving no pledges. He is very much confused in his mind and troubled in his conscience just now'.

Lanny went out and made that report to the anxious officers of C.I.C. in Frankfurt. Evidently they had arrested Einsiedel because they suspected he was a spy and hoped to get the evidence; apparently they hadn't been able to. Lanny said he didn't think the man was a spy, but of course he couldn't guarantee it. He took the man to be a proof of the cunning and efficiency of Stalin's propaganda machine. They had taken a young German prisoner, miseducated by Hitler and very naïve about the world. Always they had the advantage that so long as he didn't agree with them he remained a prisoner, but when he did agree with them he became a favoured pupil and then an honoured collaborator. Naturally Lanny couldn't undertake to counteract the work of six years in a couple of hours' conversation; but he felt sure that Einsiedel was thinking new thoughts, and it was to his credit that he wasn't willing to change his mind suddenly in order to get out of jail.

'Why don't you give him books to read'? demanded Lanny, and it turned out that the officers didn't know what books to give him. They didn't know anything about propaganda; it hadn't been taught in West Point or in the Army training camps. It was a new idea to Americans, and uncomfortable, because up to then propaganda had been left to newspapers and magazines and radio—in short, to private enterprise. The average American officer didn't very well understand the difference between communism and socialism—if he had been reading the Hearst newspapers he was quite sure they were the same. Lanny had to admit that it was confusing, because Hitler had called himself a National Socialist, with the idea of fooling the Germans and taking over the Socialist vote; now in the same way Stalin announced that he was building socialism, when in fact he was expanding the old-style Tsarist empire and making it more efficient and deadly. The Americans were building socialism actually, but they didn't want it and wouldn't admit it; they insisted upon walking into the future backwards and not knowing where they were going. The Democrats called it the New Deal and the Fair Deal, and only the Republicans had discovered what it really was!

VIII

Lanny got himself flown to Berlin. In these days you were lucky to get a ride at all; high-ranking officers sat on bucket seats, and others spread a newspaper on a sack of coal or a tin of petrol. The coal had to be wetted down, in order to avoid spontaneous combustion, so you trod carefully in black slime. Every plane was loaded to capacity; there were rings in the wall, and ropes were passed through these to bind the cargo tight; when the air was bumpy this was important and was done with care. There came to Lanny's mind a scene by Victor Hugo which he had read in his youth, describing the behaviour of a cannon on board a warship; it broke loose during a storm and went hurtling from one end of the deck to the other, smashing everything in its path. Nothing of that sort happened during the Berlin airlift.

Here at the Frankfurt airfield was a sight to be remembered. Along one side of the field was a row of the C-47s, cargo planes, many of them war-worn and far from elegant, but they could carry two-and-a-half tons a trip. Beside each plane was a truck, and the cargo was being shifted into the planes by a swarm of German workers with wheelbarrows and dollies. The moment a plane was ready and the cargo made fast, the engines were started slowly, and the plane proceeded under its own power across the field; it was a great bird that rolled instead of hopped to its place at the end of the runway. The signals were given from the radio tower, so you heard nothing; suddenly the pilot gunned his engine, the propellers began to roar, and a cloud of dust shot out from behind the plane; it began to roll faster and faster down the runway. When it got near the end you were worried for fear it was overloaded and wouldn't rise in time; but the men who were handling this operation knew just how much weight the plane could carry and how many feet of runway were required. It always rose at exactly the right instant and passed over the trees and the houses and away.

Lanny was free to stand and watch the sight as long as he pleased, and to ask questions. He was told that there were a few more than a hundred planes on this run, and they were kept working day and night. Some of the big fellows were coming, the C-54s, which could carry ten tons; they were flying from Hawaii and Alaska. When his curiosity was satisfied Lanny entered one of the planes and took his uncomfortable seat. The distance was less than two hundred miles and the flight took less than an hour. He couldn't see outside, and had no one to talk to, because the plane carried no crew and no superfluous weight. He had only his thoughts for company, and his thoughts were that every flight of these planes was ringing an alarm bell in the Kremlin, telling the men of the Politburo that the free world was not going to give up without a fight.

IX

Lanny had telephoned Monck and a hotel room had been engaged for him. They soon got together and had much to talk about. First, the tragic fate of Kurt. Monck said he was fairly sure who had committed the murder, but he had no evidence. The men had disappeared. Perhaps they were hiding in the forest, which was pleasant enough in the summer time; or perhaps they had changed their names and got away to a foreign land. The Bavarian government was conducting a search, but Monck said it was hard to be sure how genuine their efforts would be. It was impossible to keep any German government from being infiltrated by Nazis; frequently you had to employ ex-Nazis because you could find no one else who was competent. Men of violence who had held power and glory for a dozen years were not going to give up, and Monck was of the opinion that the American occupation would have to continue for a long time.

'But is Stalin going to give us a long time?' asked Lanny, and Monck said, ' _Ach, leider!_ '

This Marxist friend did not bring up the subject of Laurel's extraordinary psychic experience. Lanny understood that he wasn't going to 'change his thinking of a lifetime'. He was a man full of purpose and courage, but he had no theory as to how these qualities had come into existence, or why they seemed so important. So he and his American friend would go on dealing with the world of material things, which included both nazism and communism, the two extremes on the social scale. Now the extremes were meeting.

The American expressed the opinion that young Einsiedel was an exceptional man and was seriously thinking of coming over to the Allied side. Monck said that was possible. Great numbers of Germans and Russians were becoming aware of the chasm that had opened between Communist theory and practice. He said, 'Stalin tries to make converts among them but he has treated them too badly. Nearly half a million German soldiers and officers have died in Russia of exhaustion and hunger-typhus'.

Monck said that no information had come about Fritz Meissner or Anna Surden, and he doubted if he would hear from either of them again. Lanny told about General Meissner, and Monck said that sturdy old gentleman ought to be brought to Berlin to be heard over R.I.A.S.; he would have influence with the Germans. For the first time since the war had ended Monck was really hopeful of winning the minds of his own people. He said the airlift was producing a tremendous impression; for the first time the Germans realised that the 'Amis' meant business. It was a blow to Soviet prestige, and the refugees all agreed that the Reds were in a state of vexation.

Lanny went to see Boris Shub, who had become the political adviser of R.I.A.S. That genial gentleman welcomed him with outstretched hands. He was in a state of exaltation because a poll just completed showed that R.I.A.S. now had eighty per cent, of the Berlin listeners, whereas the far more powerful Red station had only fifteen per cent. Such had been the effect of the airlift! America was waking up, and the Reds were being told in language they could understand that they were not going to have the world for the taking.

Shub sat right down with Lanny to decide what he was to say over the air. He was pleased with Lanny's suggestions and had only one thing to urge: that when the visitor had any fault to find it should not be with the Russians or the Russian people. They were exactly what the Germans had been under Hitler, the helpless victims of despotism; the worst that could be said of them was that they were dupes. We were trying to open the eyes of the Russians and win them to our cause, and we should always distinguish between them and their masters.

Lanny agreed. 'But I don't like to say the Soviets either', he added, 'because there are no more Soviets; they have become a farce'.

'Say the Stalinists or the Communists or the Reds', replied Shub. 'There are perhaps five million of these in Russia, and there are a hundred and seventy-five million of the common people. Say that we are the friends of those common people and are trying to help them. Nothing frightens the Reds so much or makes them so angry; they are sitting on a volcano, and they know it'.

Very certainly they were not winning the Germans; the free world was winning them! They came day and night from the East sector to visit R.I.A.S. and thank its staff; they telephoned or wrote—a hundred letters a day. Out of that came a spy service which could not have been equalled for a million dollars. People would tell what was going on in the departments of which they had knowledge. They would expose the plans of the self-appointed cold-war enemy; and so the gleeful announcers of R.I.A.S. would be able to warn their public in advance, 'Be careful if you are travelling on the express from Dresden. The trains are being thoroughly searched, and all passengers must have the proper papers'. Or they would say, 'There are three spies working for the Communists in the Brehn Chemical Works. We will give their names, listen carefully now', and they would give the names. This had become a regular department, known as the Spitzeldienst, the spy service.

X

So Herr Fröhlich gave his first broadcast along that line. He said that he was speaking for the American people to the people of Germany and to those of Russia as well. He had been travelling back and forth among these people and those of France and England all his life, and he could testify that none of them wanted war, and few of them ever had, even while being forced to live through and fight the two most terrible wars of history. He told of his visits to Germany as a boy, how he had danced in the Dalcroze School at Hellerau, and had visited in a castle in Upper Silesia, and had met kind people, happy people, who wanted only peace.

To be sure, the German workers had wanted social changes, but they were prepared to bring these about by democratic means, and they were on the verge of winning an election and carrying out their programme in an orderly way. But the Kaiser, the War Lord, had not been willing for these changes to come, and it was he who had sounded the war drums and led Germany into an attack upon her neighbours. Always it was the dictators, the men of violence, the men who could not let other people be free but were determined to force them to live their way, to take their orders, to give up their territories and their freedoms—these were the people who made the wars.

And then had come Hitler, the man of fanatical nationalism, who had taught a whole generation of German youth to hate and fear other peoples and to find their glory in forcing other peoples to submit to his will. First he had seized a part of Czechoslovakia, and then he had made a deal with Stalin to divide up Poland, and so had come another world war. And before that had been going on very long Hitler had turned upon his ally and proceeded to conquer and seize the Russian land.

'Did the German people want to conquer the Russian people?' asked Herr Fröhlich. 'Or did the Russian people want to conquer the Germans? Of course not; they were bewildered by the events, they were as helpless as people caught in a whirlwind. These dictators led them, they told them lies about the other peoples and filled them with fear. In a few months the Japanese had attacked the United States at Pearl Harbour, and so the Americans were in the war. I can testify because I was there: the American people do not want war and did not want to be in that war; they were forced into it because they were attacked. Hitler had made some kind of deal with Japan, and so when Japan attacked us he declared war upon us also.

'It happened that during that war I was flown into Russia and spent some time in Kuibyshev and Moscow. I had a chance to meet and know hundreds of Russians. They became my friends. They were warm-hearted people, generous and kind. They did not hate me, they did not fear me. We were Allies and we were friends—spontaneous, natural friends. But now six years have passed, and see what has happened! A dictator has changed his mind again. He got eleven billion dollars' worth of help from America and together we put down Hitler. We were still willing to give him help; we offered him Marshall Plan aid, we offered it to Czechoslovakia and the other conquered states which he holds; but the dictator says no, we are enemies now, and he shuts down the iron curtain between us and declares cold war upon us'.

Herr Fröhlich went on to discuss this strange modern invention. The Kremlin master ordered all his propaganda machinery to tell lies about the Americans, to make the Russian people hate them. Here in the British sector he had the great Radio Berlin, and from it, day and night, he poured out a stream of falsehoods about Americans and what they were doing at home and here in Germany.

'It seems like a tale out of a madhouse, but it is a true tale. We have had to set up our own radio station to tell both the German people and the Russian people that we are not lackeys of Wall Street and warmongers, but believers in democracy and defenders of the right of all the peoples of the earth to have their own ideas and their own way of life, to be free to think their own thoughts and teach their own ideas, political, economic, and religious, and govern themselves according to the will of the majority, and not to be invaded—so long as they do not invade their neighbours but help to keep the peace of the world.

'The free peoples of the world have set up the United Nations and pledged themselves to come to it and settle their problems democratically and co-operatively. The big nations and the little nations, the rich nations and the poor nations, all are equal in the sight of the law. But the Soviets come to the meetings of the United Nations only to make their false propaganda and to obstruct the proceedings. By the power of the veto they are able to forbid anything the other nations want to do, and so far they have used that veto some twenty-five times. We Americans would like nothing better than to see a united and democratic Germany a member of that international parliament and forum; but you who hear me know that the Soviets will never permit that, for they are determined to make a slave Germany under their system of dictatorship, and if they cannot make a completely united Germany of that sort, then they will make a half-Germany of that sort, and will proceed to blockade and starve the other half into submission if they can'.

Such was the substance of Lanny's talk, and when he finished a male quartet sang 'Lili Marlene', the favourite song of the German troops in the recent war. It was a song of love and longing, and the British had taken it up; before the war was over it had become the favourite of all the armies. It meant to them all that they were tired of war and wanted to get back home to their girls.

XI

Two evenings later the Soviet station, Radio Berlin, presented an answer, by none other than the great propagandist of the Soviet Union, Ilya Ehrenburg. For years he had fought Hitler with fury, and now he was fighting Truman and all Truman's agents.

'Who is this crocodile?' he demanded. 'This crocodile who pours his tears over the German people and spits his venom in the direction of our Soviet Fatherland! I will tell you exactly who he is. His name is Lanny Budd, and he is the son of one of the greatest merchants of death in capitalistic America. Before and during the First World War this Robert Budd was the European representative of Budd Gunmakers, and he sold tens of millions and perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of guns and cannons to Germany and Britain and France, all with perfect impartiality. During the Second World War he was the president of Budd-Erling Aircraft, and he made and sold I know not how many billions of dollars' worth of murderous aeroplanes to the American government. Before the war he sold them to the German and the Japanese governments. His hands are stained impartially with the blood of Europeans and Asiatics. To this international slaughterer all human cattle look alike.

'And now comes the son of this capitalistic exploiter, this Wall Street cannibal. The son was born with a gold spoon in his mouth and the taste of blood. During the war he came to Russia, and he admits that he was received with hospitality. He came posing as a friend and an ally—and how does he treat his host? A rich American woman left him a million dollars to be spent in the cause of establishing and maintaining world peace. He has set up a radio station near New York, and by cunning dissimulation, by pretence of genuine love of humanity, he wins a large audience—and then what does he do to that audience? He does the same thing that he is doing to the German and the Russian people. He is the Judas goat who leads the helpless sheep into the slaughter pen. He reveals himself as the true son of his father, doing everything in his power to bring on a third world war in order that his father may be able to gather in more millions of filthy dollars. He comes here to Berlin, and the bloodthirsty warmonger of R.I.A.S. spread his insolent provocations over all Germany'.

So it was that the cold war was waged. It made Lanny sad, and he thought it over and learned several things from it. One was the futility of calling names; he decided that when he came to answer Comrade Ehrenburg he would be calm and would deal with facts. The Germans had had the very foundation of their thinking blasted from under them; they didn't know what had been going on in the world during the years of Hitlerism and war, and they had a hard time finding out what was going on now. Lanny went to the Information office of A.M.G. and got the figures as to the number of troops the American Army had had in Germany at the close of the war and the number they had sent home when it ended. That showed whether or not America wanted another war in Europe. Would Mr. Ehrenburg give the same figures with regard to the disbandment of Russian armies? Of course Mr. Ehrenburg couldn't and wouldn't; he would have been shot if he had tried.

And then those twenty-five vetoes in the Security Council of the United Nations. They had all been vetoes of proposals made or approved by the government of the United States. And what were the proposals? They were for real disarmament, guaranteed by international inspection; they were for free elections and the democratic process in one small nation after another; and in each case Mr. Gromyko or Mr. Malik or Mr. Molotov or Mr. Vishinsky had ridiculed and refused the proposal. With the Reds it was rule or ruin—everywhere, all over the world.

That was the way to answer the Red propagandists—with facts, facts, facts!
24 MAN'S UNCONQUERABLE MIND

I

While lanny was busy with these matters there came the Kasenkina case in New York. Oksana Kasenkina was a teacher in the school maintained for the children of officials in the Soviet Consulate-General. This school was housed in a brownstone mansion in one of the fashionable residential districts. The teacher couldn't very well be kept indoors all the time, so she went out and walked on the streets and observed the sights of a great capitalist city. She discovered that she could buy for a few dollars a pair of shoes which would have taken a Russian worker a month's labour to earn. She saw many things that pleased her, but she could not come back to the Consulate and chat about them with anybody—that is unless she said the opposite of what she thought.

The school was a miniature Soviet—which is to say, it was a petty despotism ruled by a dictator, with frightened people spying upon one another and full of malice and suspicion. Oksana had lost track of her husband and her son and was a pitiful neurotic person. Outside the school she met an elderly, white-haired Russian named Zenzinov, who had been one of the old-time fighters against Tsardom. He had belonged to the Social Revolutionary party and had been exiled three times to Siberia; three times he had escaped, once by way of Japan.

Each time he came back to his native land, and he was one of those who made the revolution. They made Russia free—but only for a few months. The Bolsheviks seized power, put down the revolution, made themselves the masters—and Russia was in servitude again. Zenzinov fled once more and wandered first over Europe and then over America. He was one of those men to whom revolution had become a basic instinct; he lived in one furnished room in New York, and whenever he could earn enough money he printed a few copies of a little paper which he called _For Freedom_.

This old man explained to the teacher in the Soviet Consulate how the revolution had been betrayed and destroyed. But she had to hide this secret in her heart and go on telling the children that their country was free and that Stalin was the great hero and emancipator. Soon she could not endure it any more, and she accepted Zenzinov's suggestion to seek refuge on a farm up the Hudson River near Nyack, which belonged to a daughter of the great Leo Tolstoy and sheltered a group called the Tolstoy Foundation. Alexandra Tolstoy had been the count's favourite daughter; she had stood by him through all his tribulations and now was trying to preserve and promote his Christian-pacifist ideas.

The news of this flight to freedom was at once cabled to Moscow, and Foreign Minister Molotov, that iron-faced man who apparently never had an emotion, suddenly lost his head and handed to the American ambassador for transmission to Washington a note in which he charged that Kasenkina had been 'kidnapped by the White Guard Zenzinov and taken to a farm which belongs to a White Guard gangster organisation masquerading under the name of the Tolstoy Foundation'. The gangsters on this farm had 'attempted by force to prevent Kasenkina from leaving'. Molotov went on to demand her immediate return to the Consulate-General in New York, 'as well as the punishment of all persons who have taken part in the kidnapping of Soviet citizens.'

Kasenkina, alas, wasn't happy in the new home. A hundred refugees, lonely and idle, were not the best of company, and she was tormented by the idea that her husband and son might still be living and would be punished for her desertion. She wrote to the Consulate, begging forgiveness, and the consul drove up in haste; he promised her forgiveness for the mistake she had made. Finally she yielded and let him take her back to the Consulate.

Once there, of course, she found that she was a prisoner and was going to be sent back to Russia. It would mean torture; she would be forced to reveal the names of everyone she had met and who had influenced her, and after that they would shoot her in the back of the neck or send her to a worse fate in a slave-labour camp. In her frenzy the woman threw herself out of a third-storey window of the Consulate and crashed upon the concrete area in front of the building. The case had become known to the newspapers, and court proceedings had been started to set the woman free; so there was a crowd in front of the Consulate. When the area gate was opened and servants started to drag the woman inside, the crowd interfered, police and an ambulance were summoned, and the badly injured Oksana was carried to a hospital.

That, of course, made a tremendous sensation. Most Americans realised by now that the Communists used torture and that people do not throw themselves from third-storey windows for fun. Certainly all newspaper reporters realised it, and the story took the front pages. The consul gave out the statement that the woman was deranged, and he rushed to the hospital to try to interview her, but the hospital authorities would not let him in.

II

So here was an international scandal, and it made the front page of important newspapers all over the world. Needless to say, it took the front page of the _Neue Zeitung_ , which A.M.G. was publishing in West Germany, and R.I.A.S. took it up. As it happened, Boris Shub knew Zenzinov, and in West Berlin there were Russian refugees who knew him even better. Molotov called him a 'White Guard gangster'—the term White Guard being the name for those Army officers who had fought in various parts of Russia against the revolution and on behalf of Tsardom. The Bolsheviks had taken it up as a term of abuse for anyone who opposed them, and so it became as meaningless as when they called Robbie Budd a 'crocodile' and Lanny a 'cannibal'.

'Molotov is seeing ghosts!' exclaimed one of the refugee Russians. A group of them went to work and overnight produced a dramatic dialogue in which four 'Voices' discussed the case and brought out its significant points. So the Germans, and many Russians also, listened to a 'thriller' that happened to be exactly true. One of these voices asked the question, 'When a Soviet citizen in Moscow or anywhere else falls or jumps out of a window, do you suppose that the whole machinery of state from the smallest vice-consul to the protesting Foreign Minister is immediately set in motion?'

'I cannot believe it', replied the second voice. 'They are cool materialists with a precise scientific method, deciding everything through clear objective laws'.

Third voice: 'And all of a sudden the Kremlin hums like a beehive. What can have impelled the cold Molotov to act so differently? You all know too little of the Russian Revolution. There was once a time when every man in Russia could speak and think as he pleased. The Soviet wasn't in Bolshevik hands then—that was still in the springtime of the revolution, when every simple worker or sailor could talk to his fellow man. Students, officers, workers, women, stream through the streets of Petrograd, singing the "Marseillaise" in Russian. The headquarters of the Tsarist secret police is in flames! The prison doors spring open, people like Zenzinov and Molotov breathe the air of the Petrograd spring. In these days, Zenzinov and Molotov are elected to the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. Both of them sit there, one a Socialist, the other a Bolshevik, together with other revolutionists'.

Fourth voice: 'And where are these men today?'

Third voice: 'Yes, where are these men today? With the exception of Molotov and Zenzinov, probably all dead. Molotov lives in the Kremlin, Zenzinov in a small room in New York, and behind them lies a past which to this day conceals the martyrdom of honest Socialists who will one day be resurrected—Socialists of the spring of 1917, the only time the Russian people experienced the intoxication of liberation and freedom. All the goals for which revolutions are made seemed to be attained. In those days Lenin himself wrote, "Russia is now the freest country in the world". Yes, that was the time, from March to November, 1917. And the men in Soviet Russia who remain silent about it are as little able to forget that time as the few abroad who fight that it shall not be forgotten'.

Fourth voice: 'Now I begin to feel what must have taken place when Kasenkina suddenly decided to jump out of the window. At last I understand why they are so agitated in the Kemlin'.

Third voice: 'Yes, my friend, now everything becomes as clear as the history of peoples and rulers in general. Limitless power breeds limitless fear of one's own people, the fear of the jailer. And history knows no cure for this fear. It is easier to deal with fugitive party functionaries and M.V.D. men by trying to make them ridiculous in the eyes of the people; but the little Russian teacher, she spoke to Zenzinov, to Tolstoy's beloved daughter. She retraced the road and became more dangerous. And there are millions of Kasenkinas, for millions would come to understand just as she did, if they had the opportunity to see, to speak. You see, all this still lives in the Russian people, and as long as it lives there is fear among the men in power and hope for all mankind'.

III

Through all these events the airlift was going on, with no sign of ending. Berlin, which had called itself 'the magnificent city' and now had its magnificence blasted, was the epicentre of a hurricane, the coldest spot in a cold war or the hottest in a hot war—whichever simile you preferred. Berlin's freedom, its very existence, depended upon this struggle; and what were the plain people making of it? Lanny wanted to know, and he went to call upon the family of Johann Seidl, in the Moabit district. They were Socialists and would talk to him frankly and would pass him on to others, as many as he wished. They had once saved his life, and he would make return by taking some of those American foods which were otherwise not to be thought of by them.

The tenement in which they lived had been only partially repaired, and now there was little hope of more work on it because there were no materials; the airlift was bringing only absolute necessities, food and coal and oil, medicines and a little clothing. The Seidls were more crowded than ever, having had to curtain off a part of their kitchen to make a sleeping place for a nephew of Johann, with his wife and child. This young man, Karl, was a refugee from the East sector; he was haggard, undernourished, and obviously honest. Lanny was interested in hearing his story and then asked him questions while the family and some of the neighbours who had been summoned stood around and listened. The curtain had been drawn aside, and several of the people sat on the single bed. Lanny had one of the two chairs which the family possessed; they would have been uncomfortable if he had not sat on it.

Karl Seidl had been a worker in a tin shop in that dreary industrial part of the 'magnificent city'. The shop had been half wrecked by artillery shells, and anyhow there was no more tin. For weeks he had hunted a job and had almost perished; then at one of the Russian barracks he was taken on as what was called a 'fireman' but really was a handyman and slavey. He cleaned up the filth, he carried the heavy burdens, he did whatever anybody told him to do. In return he got a few marks and was able to buy bread to keep his family alive from day to day.

Karl had been a Socialist since childhood, and when the Soviets formed what they called the Socialist Unity party, S.E.D., he had thought it was the proper thing for him to join. He explained that the Reds seldom used the word 'Communist', at least not in East Germany; he had hardly ever heard it. They were planning socialism, they were building socialism, they were organising socialism. There had been only a few Communists in Berlin; the Social Democrats had been the majority party, and now they were taken into the Unity party—the Socialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands. The party bosses told the members what to do, and they did it, just as Karl did at the barracks.

For a while everything went all right, but then he made the mistake of attracting attention to himself by being too conscientious and diligent. One of the party bosses came to him and told him that part of his duty was to keep watch and make sure there were no traitors in the organisation. He must listen to what his comrades said and report on them. Karl said he had never done anything like that and didn't know how to do it; but it was carefully explained to him: he would express 'diversionist' sentiments, 'Social-Fascist' sentiments, see what the others replied, and report if anyone agreed with him.

This had worried Karl terribly. It meant being a _Spitzel_ , and that was a word of shame. He found every possible excuse to avoid this duty; he became sick and couldn't work. But the party leader kept after him and began to use threats, saying that he was under suspicion of being a Social Democrat himself, and he would get into serious trouble if he refused to carry out his party duties.

While he was in this state of terror Karl visited the home of a friend who had a little radio set, and they sat listening to R.I.A.S. turned low. They heard what R.I.A.S. called the 'Spitzeldienst'. The radio speaker named spies who were known in this factory and that and warned the hearers to avoid these vile persons. 'More names will be given at this hour every evening. Listen and make note of them and beware'. So there was the last straw on poor Karl's moral back; he decided that he would never have his name called on that dreadful list; he would make his escape to the Western sector.

IV

It was just a matter of walking across the street, but it wasn't as simple as it sounded. The little family had a few belongings which they knew they could never replace, and if you were carrying a large bundle that opened you to suspicion. Moreover, Karl was already under suspicion, and some spy might be following him. So they waited for a stormy night, and then in rain and darkness they crossed. They did not make the mistake, which some refugees in their helpless ignorance had made, of going to one of the various offices the Reds still had in the West sector—for example, Radio Berlin, which many got confused with R.I.A.S. There were sad stories of people who had gone there and naïvely told their purpose, and had been kept until night and then whisked back and turned over to the S.S.D., the Eastern secret police. The end of it was conviction for treason and sentence to ten or fifteen years in a slave-labour camp. Karl had come to his uncle's home, and in the morning when his clothes had been dried out he had gone to what was called 'Refugee Row' in the Kuno-Fischer-Strasse.

Here the fugitives were screened. If they could convince the investigators that they had come in peril of life and limb, they were granted the status of 'political refugees'; they were entitled to shelter and an allowance of sixty marks a month, which would buy just about half the quantity of food it took to keep them alive. If they were not able to convince the investigators they were advised to go back; but of course if they went most of them would pay with their lives, for they were now considered traitors. So they couldn't be forced to go; they just stayed on, in the condition of stateless persons having no papers and exposed to many dangers. They went about begging for work and beating down wages, so they were not popular in the labour market.

Lanny gave Karl a little money to keep him and his family alive and promised to plead his case with the authorities. So the art expert paid a visit to that drab and depressing building on Kuno-Fischer-Strasse, once a trade-union hall, bombed and then repaired. Inside were many rooms, and against the wall in each were rows of chairs occupied by sad, depressed-appearing humans, old and young. They sat patiently; for wars are great developers of patience in the poor. There were a dozen teams of three Germans, each doing the interviewing and then consulting with regard to each case. They had to do their best to sort out the worthy from the deadbeats, and also from the well-trained spies whom the Reds were continually sending over.

Lanny traced down the team which had the Karl Seidl case in its care, and they heard his story and made notes and promised to expedite the decision. Incidentally, they gave him some idea of the problems which had fallen upon their shoulders. The refugees were pouring in, not merely from East Germany but from all the border states; the military barracks on the outskirts of the city were jammed, and new shelters were being built. 'But how can we get materials now? And what will happen, Herr Budd, if we have to leave Berlin?'

V

Many people had asked this question of Lanny, and he knew that many more would ask it at home; so he went to call upon General Lucius Clay, the military governor who had the problem in his hands. In the days when Lanny had first begun to observe his country's government and to think about it, the power had rested in a few aggressive men of big business like his father, who had subsidised both political parties and given their orders through a 'boss'. But in the days of Franklin Roosevelt the power had begun to shift, and the process was continuing under Truman; in spite of all cries of protest, the bureaucrats were taking over the power in the name of the public interest. And here was one of these bureaucrats—the fact that he wore an Army uniform with four stars on each shoulder did not keep him from being a member of that new caste. His entire career had been in the Army, but he had never fought a battle; he had been an engineer and instructor of engineering, he had built great dams and airfields, and had been General Eisenhower's deputy in charge of supplying the material needed in the greatest military campaign of history. Now he was in charge of a campaign to take nearly fifty million conquered Germans and make them over into a democratic community. The Soviets had taken seventeen million to be made into Reds, and the three free nations were in process of putting the rest under one government with General Clay in charge.

He came from Georgia and had an accent an American would notice but probably a German wouldn't. He was moderately tall, slender, with a thin face and prominent nose. He gazed at his visitor intently with dark eyes, which heavy eyebrows made to appear cavernous. He was completely absorbed in his tremendous job and eager to have it reported correctly to the American people. A.M.G. was trying to do something new in history, to teach conquered peoples the idea of governing themselves. Lanny said that everybody asked him if we were going to 'stick', and General Clay answered, 'I will show you what I said on the subject over the telecon'.

That was shortening of the words 'telephone conversation'; it was a recently perfected device by which officials in Berlin, London, Paris, and Washington could carry on a conversation among themselves. The words spoken were taken down as if on a teletype; the machine automatically put them into code and transmitted them by wireless; they were received by another machine in each of the other cities and there decoded and typed on wide sheets of paper. Now General Clay pushed one of these sheets toward Lanny. 'This is what I said to the Department of the Army when the blockade began'.

And Lanny read, 'When Berlin falls, Western Europe will be next. If we mean to hold Europe against communism we must not budge. We can take humiliation and pressure short of war without losing face. If we withdraw, our position in Europe is threatened. If America does not understand this now, does not know that the issue is cast, then it never will, and communism will run rampant. I believe the future of democracy requires us to stay. This is not heroic pose, because there will be nothing heroic in having to take humiliation without retaliation'.

'That was approved', said the General, 'and there has been no change. I'm quite sure there will be none'.

'Would it be proper for me to quote that?' Lanny asked, and the answer was, 'It would be helpful'.

VI

From that office Lanny went to call upon Ernst Reuter, Oberbürgermeister of Berlin. Lanny had met him in the old days when he had frequented the labour college which Freddi Robin had helped to establish in the city. After the ending of World War I, Reuter had left the Social-Democratic party and become general secretary of the Communist party; but he had quickly come to realise the dishonesty of that organisation and had returned to his first love. That made him a renegade in the eyes of the Reds, and when he was duly elected mayor of Berlin they refused to let him serve. Now, during the blockade, the three Allied sectors were being merged and Reuter was on the point of taking his office.

Lanny was embraced by a big, shaggy bear of a man, voluble and explosive. Nobody would have any doubt what Ernst Reuter thought or what he intended to do. Yes, the Americans were going to stick, he said, and the Germans were going to stick with them. Of course the Reds could take them at any time, but the Reds knew it would mean a general war, and they didn't want that, because their own social structure was too shaky. All you had to do was to call their bluff, and they would back down every time. The Oberbürgermeister of West Berlin became poetical and declared, 'We have gazed into the face of the Red Medusa and we have not been turned to stone!'

He had only one fault to find with the Allies and with his own countrymen: they did not fight back at the enemy hard enough, they did not spread enough propaganda. Reuter, as elected mayor, was doing all he could, but the Bonn government of Germany was confused and split up among political parties and perhaps afraid that, if war came, the Americans would fall back of the Rhine before they tried to make a stand. 'But we must have the courage of our convictions', declared Reuter. 'We have the truth on our side, and we must speak it boldly and keep speaking it day and night. Everybody in Germany wants a united country and everybody must be made to realise that it is the Reds who have seized a part of Germany and are holding it as a satellite. We can have a united Germany any time the Reds are willing to let us have it on democratic terms. Let the German people decide what kind of united Germany it is to be'.

Reuter had listened to Herr Fröhlich over the radio but hadn't known the speaker's real name. He had never heard the Peace Programme from New Jersey and was enthusiastic when he learned about it; he wanted to send Lanny forth as an evangelist to tell the world that the German people had got their freedom back and were going to keep it this time and not surrender it to any sort of dictator.

VII

Lanny Budd went on the air again. R.I.A.S. gave him a spot early in the evening when the workers of East Berlin would be in their homes, crouching by their cheap radio sets and keeping them turned low. He addressed the East Germans especially, though of course those in the West would be listening in too. He spoke as one who had loved Germany from boyhood; the genial and warmhearted and enlightened Germany, the Germany of Goethe and Schiller, of Beethoven and Heine. Those great masters had been world citizens, men of the free world. They could never have worked and taught, they could never have survived, in a police state, a land full of spies and torturers and concentration camps.

Herr Fröhlich said he had been talking with Germans who had escaped into the Western world and told him their stories. He set forth the differences between democracy and dictatorship, not in abstractions but in the concrete experiences of one man after another, men of all classes—workers, students, college professors, Army officers—who had been through the Russian anti-Fascist schools and could perceive the difference between the ideals the Communists taught and the horrors they practiced. He closed with a plea to the Germans to come back to the Western world—not physically, for their services were needed in the places where they were. They were needed to teach others and help to save the mind of East Germany. He wanted them to come to the Western world in their minds and hearts, in their way of thinking and feeling about the struggle between the two great world forces which had torn Germany into halves.

A few seconds after he finished he was called to the telephone; it happened in Berlin, just as in Edgemere, New Jersey. A voice said, ' _Guten Tag, Herr Fröhlich_. No names, please. That was an excellent talk and a pleasure to hear'.

The voice sounded familiar, but Lanny couldn't place it. 'You must give me a clue', he said, and promptly the voice replied, ' _Das Untersuchungsgefängnis_ ', and again, 'No names, please'.

That overlong German word, which means investigation jail, brought back to Lanny's mind in a flash his visit to Frankfurt. ' _Um Himmels Willen_ ' he exclaimed. 'Where are you?'

'I'm only a few blocks from you, at a friend's house'.

'How did you get here?'

'That is something not to be explained over the telephone. Can you have dinner with me?'

Lanny countered, 'Can you afford it?'

'Oh yes, I have some of the new Westmarks which I must spend before I go back where I came from'.

'I wasn't thinking only of the marks; I mean can you afford the risk?'

'Tell me some quiet place where we can sit and talk', said Einsiedel; and Lanny named a place where he had occasionally gone with Monck.

VIII

The pair met, and after they had ordered the meal and the waiter had gone away the ex-flier reported that he had been released immediately after Lanny's visit to him. 'I'm deeply grateful to you, Herr Budd', he said, 'and I would not fail to thank you personally'.

'But really', protested Lanny, 'I didn't do anything'.

'You mean they didn't ask you about me?'

'They asked me, of course; but all I could say was I didn't think you were a spy'.

'Well, they must have had respect for your thinking. So I am in your debt, and I hope that someday I may be able to return the favour'.

Said Lanny, 'I hope that you will not find me in an _Untersuchungsgefängnis_ '.

'Be careful', said the young Graf, 'it can happen, you know'. So they joked, having no psychic powers and being unable to foresee even a few days into the future.

Lanny asked, 'How did you get here?' And the answer was that he had taken a train to Leipzig and from there to East Berlin. He added, 'I am still editor of the _Tägliche_ so I'm in a position to do you a favour. I will not allow the paper to mention the talks of Herr Fröhlich. If we did so we would have to denounce him as a lackey of Wall Street and hireling of neo-fascism'.

'You are very kind', replied the radio man, 'but you are making a mistake. It would be much better to give me a scolding, because that is the way we become known and get our ideas across to the Germans on your side'.

They joked for a while about this, amusing themselves by assembling a collection of Soviet clichés and abusive formulas. Lanny would be a Wall Street flunkey and a Truman bootlick, a capitalistic parasite, a diversionary mad dog and a counterrevolutionary wrecker. By the time the waiter brought their wienerschnitzel the American had become a cannibal, and they examined the meat with such concern that the waiter inquired if there was anything wrong. Fortunately other customers appeared and he had to go away and leave them.

Einsiedel remarked, 'I noticed that at the end of your broadcast you advised East Germans not to come over but to stay where they were and work for the cause of the free world. But that is not the advice you gave me'.

The answer was, 'It is easy to give that advice in the abstract, to people you do not know. It is not so easy when the person is a friend and you are in his presence. I have done it in more than one case and I have them on my conscience'.

'You must not have me there', replied the other. 'I am an independent person, and I shall do what my own conscience directs. I want you to know, Herr Budd, I am not really so naïve as I must seem to you. My trouble is, I find it so hard to share your faith in democracy. You Americans may have the good luck to choose fit leaders; but for us in old Europe the tyranny of the majority can assume frightful forms'.

Lanny, having watched the rise of Hitler, found it hard to answer that. He said, 'Tell me, how have you been getting along with your friends since your return?'

'They expected me to be more bitter against the Americans. They say, "You have changed. You are not so sharp as you used to be"'.

'Ah, there you have it!' exclaimed Lanny. 'There begins suspicion, and out of that grows fear. _Hab' Acht, mein lieber Graf!_ '

IX

Immediately after this came an interesting development; one of the examiners at the refugee clearing station called Lanny on the telephone at his hotel. He reported that half-a-dozen students from Berlin University had shown up at the station, saying that they were sick of the propaganda fed to them at that institution, which was in the East sector. Might it not be possible for the Americans to set up some kind of embryo college in which truth could be taught instead of propaganda?

Lanny hurried over to Kuno-Fischer-Strasse, and there he met a group of Germans in their early twenties, each of whom had a tale to tell of the boredom and futility of Soviet education. For technical subjects it was all right, they were factual and efficient. But when it came to cultural subjects, to literature, history, philosophy, it was 'the bunk'—the young Germans had learned this term. It was all dogma; independent opinion was absolutely excluded, and one was bored to extinction. There ought to be in the American sector a 'Free University', to which students from all the sectors could come. Lanny took fire at the idea; he telephoned Lasky, and Lasky took fire; he telephoned Shub, and Shub took fire and said that Lanny should come at once and they would give him a spot on the radio to talk about it.

These young Germans groping their way caused the visiting art expert to think of Fritz Meissner; he asked if any of them had known him, but none had. Somehow he felt that the Free University would be a memorial to Fritz—a secret memorial, in Lanny's heart. It would be a way of winning absolution for what he had done to Kurt's eldest son. It would be what the son himself would want, or would have wanted had he been alive. It was a real idea, and Lanny could tell by the fury it aroused in the Communists that it was one which would grow and spread.

He went to see General Clay about it, and that officer agreed. There would be the problem of getting a building, but he would find one. He would set aside funds and get some teachers and some books. Wouldn't Mr. Budd like to become one of the teachers? Lanny was immensely amused by the idea of becoming a university professor—he, with only two years at St. Thomas's Academy by way of formal education. But he told the general that he had a family at home, also a Peace Programme. He would go home and tell the American public about the embryo Free University of Berlin. Radio listeners would send books, and teachers would volunteer; also, some of the foundations might help; many people who didn't want to pay income taxes might be willing to have their money used to set up a rival to the great Berlin University which had fallen prey to the Reds. Lanny counted that a good day's work; he would have been still happier if he had been able to look forward and realise that within three years the Free University of Berlin would have a couple of hundred teachers and five or six thousand students.
BOOK NINE

No Fiend in Hell Can Match

25 INTO THE JAWS OF DEATH

I

Lanny went to R.I.A.S. and gave what he intended to be his last talk. His subject was the embryo Free University. He explained carefully the difference between the teaching of dogma and the free inquiry into truth. He referred to some of the absurdities that were taught as dogma in various parts of the world, not failing to include East Berlin and Moscow. He told of some of the persecutions for efforts at free inquiry, beginning with Socrates being made to drink the cup of hemlock juice, because he taught that the Hellenic gods did not really exist; and then Galileo, who had been shut up in a dungeon for teaching that the earth moved around the sun.

He said that all we called progress in the modern world depended upon the sacred right of free inquiry; the right of every individual to take part in the free competition of ideas, not merely the search for them but the propagation of them. He stated that a university dedicated to this cause was to be started at once, and that his hearers were to talk about it and spread the good news; and very soon they would be informed where qualified students might report for enrolment. Students from East Berlin and East Germany would be welcome, and it was hoped that they would assert their right to attend a university of their own choice.

Then Lanny shook hands with his friends and set out to walk to his hotel. It was a pleasant warm evening at the end of August. He watched the crowds and reflected upon the courage and endurance of civilised people in the midst of the worst adversities. He turned into a side street on the way to his hotel, and at the corner he stopped and waited for a car to pass before he stepped down from the curb; but the car swerved and bumped over the curb, and as he leaped back it struck him a glancing blow on the shoulder, knocking him off his feet.

The car sped on; but another car that was not far behind it stopped with a grinding of brakes. Lanny was a bit dazed and did not realise exactly what was happening; some men ran toward him and helped him to his feet, expressing concern and asking if he was badly hurt. He said no, he didn't think so, and one of them said he ought to be taken to a hospital. 'No, wait,' Lanny said. 'I think I'm all right'. But the man insisted, 'You should not take a chance, you should go to a hospital'. He started to push Lanny toward the car, and the American realised that there were three Germans and that they had him surrounded and were leading him to their car.

Suddenly a stab of fear smote him; they were trying to take him by force, and quickly. There flashed into his mind the words that Monck had spoken to him so solemnly, 'Don't be afraid to make a noise! Don't think about the proprieties, scream! Scream as loud as you can!'

And Lanny screamed. He was amazed at the sound of his own voice when he really turned it loose. ' _Ich bin Lanny Budd! Mein Name ist Lanny Budd!_ ' Monck had said there was no use calling for help, because the kidnappers would be armed; the only thing to cry was your name. Your one chance was that some passer-by might hear it and might be moved to telephone A.M.G. or the German police.

The man who had demanded that Lanny come to the hospital clapped his hand over Lanny's mouth. Lanny bit with all the power of his jaw, and the man jerked his hand loose and struck Lanny a blow on the side of his head which made his head ring and deafened him. But he went on struggling madly and yelling at the top of his lungs, ' _Mein Name ist Lanny Budd!_ ' But then he felt something soft and wet clamped over his face. He smelled a strong, sweetish smell and tried his best not to breathe it in. He fought with all his might, but these two things are incompatible; when you make exertions you have to breathe, and when you are breathing chloroform you do not fight. The three men had him in their grip, and the cloth was clamped tightly against his face, and in a few seconds he had passed out and knew no more.

II

His consciousness came back in a wavy blur. He realised that he was alive, but he wasn't sure where or how, or what it meant to be alive, or what had happened to him. Mostly his sensations were of pain, a headache, a ringing in his ears, an aching in his shoulder. He began to move his hands feebly, in the effort to make sure that he was alive, or whether perhaps this was some state of consciousness in the next world. He opened his eyes and saw nothing; he couldn't be sure about that, and thought that maybe he was blind. Only gradually did he realise that he was in total darkness. There were sounds, and it took time to realise that they were in his own head; only gradually did he become sure that outside was utter and complete stillness, the like of which he had never imagined before. He began to feel himself; yes, he was all here. He moved his shoulder; apparently it was not broken, it was just a bad bruise. One elbow hurt; he had struck it when he fell. He tested it and it seemed to work all right. He tried his voice; he could hear it, so presumably he wasn't deaf. Or could a deaf man hear from inside? He wasn't sure.

He felt beneath him; there was something hard and cold and smooth, and he realised that he was lying on a concrete floor. He began to recall what had happened to him. It was hard to think; the effort hurt, and he shrank from the pain; but the instinct of life drove him to keep at it. Yes, he had been struck by an automobile, and then he was to be taken to a hospital. Could this be a hospital, or was it a tomb? Had he been buried alive? Or was it the future life? Would he meet Madame Zyszynski and presently be talking to Laurel in a trance?

He had lost the sense of time and didn't know how long it took, but in the end his consciousness cleared and he said to himself, I have been kidnapped. I am in the hands of the Reds. This must be a dungeon, and what are they going to do to me?

He remembered what Monck had said, 'If they get you without witnesses you are gone for good. Your only chance is, if somebody has reported your name'. Lanny tried to think. Had there been other people on the street? Yes, he was almost sure there had been several. Some would have seen the accident; they would have stopped and might have approached out of curiosity. But when they realised that it was a kidnapping they would have moved away. They were helpless civilians and knew that the kidnappers were desperate men and to interfere might mean death. But after the kidnappers were gone, to run to a telephone and call the police would involve no risk.

Lanny remembered that he had screamed his name half-a-dozen times. Somebody must surely have heard it. They wouldn't know that it was the man they had listened to on the radio, but they would guess it was an American name, and they would know that the kidnappers would be from the East. There was at least a good chance that the incident had been reported. And in any case he would be missed, and his friends would guess. R.I.A.S. would make a fuss; but would the Reds care?

There had been two cars; one had deliberately struck him, and the other had picked him up and carried him away. No doubt he had been followed from the radio station. The Reds of course had known who he was; they knew everything, it was their business. Probably they had spies in R.I.A.S.; they had them everywhere among the Germans in American employ, among the servants in every department of government and in the homes of officials. So Ilya Ehrenburg had got the information and had broadcast it.

All this thinking took time and caused headache. He was in the hands of the enemy—the cold-war enemy. He had been in danger before and always had managed to escape, but this time he could be sure there would be no escaping. They had him, and they would give him the works, they would put him through the mill. He had talked with many persons who had been through that mill; he had read about scores of others. His first impulse was to panic at the thought, but he checked himself. No, that wouldn't do any good; he must use his wits, he must be better than they were, better in mind and in spirit.

They would torture him; and what would it be for? What would they want? Would they do it for revenge or for the sheer pleasure of making him suffer pain? No—for they were not savages, they were scientists. They were scientists of Marxist materialism; they were practical men, and what they did was for a purpose, for their own clear advantage. What would they want from the son of Budd-Erling, from the cannibal, the son of a crocodile? They would want information; they would want the names of the people who were helping him, his fellow conspirators. They would know a lot about him already; they would have a card file on him, a large dossier. Lanny had studied many such, including one the Nazis had accumulated on him. The Reds would have an even better one; for where the Nazis had had only a dozen years the Reds had had thirty and they had taken over all the Nazis techniques.

III

He felt around him cautiously; the smooth, hard concrete floor. Leaning over to one side, he found that he could touch a concrete wall. Leaning over to the other side, he found that he could touch another. He made certain that he was in a box a little more than six feet square. He wanted to know how high it was, so very cautiously, he tried to get to his feet, leaning against one of the walls. He found that he couldn't stand and had to sit again and wait to get firmer control of himself.

Finally he was able to get up, and he found that by raising his hands he could touch the ceiling; the room, or box, was about seven feet high. Then he groped his way around it and discovered that there was a door, solid, smooth, and hard; it was steel. The idea flashed over him: Was he put in here to be suffocated? Was that the reason for the ringing in his ears and the dizziness? But by feeling every inch of the wall, one side after another, he discovered there was an opening of about four inches square high up in one wall, and that down near the floor on the same wall was another opening of the same size. Obviously these were ventilation ducts. He felt the air coming in, and it was cool. He knew there was no cool air in Berlin on the hot day he had been experiencing, and suddenly a horrible realisation flashed over him; they had put him in one of their temperature chambers.

They had a name for it, but he had forgotten it. First, they subjected you to cold. They brought you to a precise point, scientifically determined, where you did not quite freeze; you did not die but your faculties were paralysed. The Nazis had determined all that by experiment, and the Soviets had taken over both the experimenters and their data. When they had all but frozen you for exactly the right time they warmed you. They turned the heat up to the precise scientifically determined point where you could endure that for a certain length of time without perishing. So, without damaging you permanently, without bruising you or making any marks, they could paralyse your will and break your spirit, bring you to the point where you would tell them anything they wanted to know and confess to anything, true or false. It was something they could do without waste of time or bother; it was something that worked while they slept.

Yes, the air coming in near the floor was getting colder, and Lanny realised that he would have to think fast. What would they want from him? What were the things he could tell them, and what were the things he couldn't tell them? He must make up his muddled mind, and he must manage to hold on to the ideas regardless of whatever might be done to him. Would they ask him about R.I.A.S.? But what could they expect to get? They undoubtedly had spies there and knew everthing. Would they ask about his talk with General Clay? But there was nothing confidential about that, the General had authorised him to quote what he said. Would they ask about Bernhardt Monck? But Monck was an old-timer—they no doubt had people who had been his colleagues away back after World War I. They knew he was a lifelong Social Democrat, an ex-sailor, ex-labour leader, an American agent who had worked against Hitler and now was working against the Reds. His present position was known, his place of residence, his family, all such matters. Monck himself had told Lanny they would know all that; and Lanny knew no more.

Then, Fritz Meissner; undoubtedly they had caught Fritz and had put him through the mill. How much had he told? Lanny could never feel sure that any psychic message was valid; Fritz might still be alive, and if so Lanny could do him great harm by talking about him. No, he would not take that chance.

But then, thinking more about it, he began to wonder if he should say he had set Fritz to trying to catch the men who were circulating Himmler money. He had assumed that it was Neo-Nazis who were doing it, and they were doing harm to the Soviets just as much as to the Americans. Surely it had never crossed his mind that any Soviet officials would be engaged in promoting anything so low, so obviously criminal! But then, if they were doing it, they would take that for an insult; and above all he must say nothing to affront them and their wonderful, their holy Soviet system. Lanny, who had done some interrogation for General Patton's army, remembered how different his attitude had been toward prisoners who had answered freely and cheerfully and those who were surly and insulting. He made up his mind that he would be polite and obliging; his life might depend upon it. The official who questioned him would be a Communist fanatic, but he would be doing his duty as he saw it, and there would be no use in adding personal antagonism to his professional severity.

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 song. 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 seemed 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.

IX

But before he had had more than a few nibbles he heard the door open and the light flashed on him again. It was a flashlight, and painful. He closed his eyes and told himself that these were the torturers and that God would give him strength to withstand them,

For the first time he heard a voice. It spoke in Russian; the word was, ' _Poshol_ ', and Lanny was not sure of its meaning, but he felt a pull at his shoulder and he made an effort and raised himself. Two men supported him, and he stood somewhat waveringly. The light was shining through the doorway, and he was impelled toward it.

One of the things to which he had made up his mind was that he would do exactly as he was told and give no sort of provocation. Whatever evil things were done to him would be without cause so far as he was concerned. So he went with somewhat wobbly steps toward the doorway and was gently helped along. He saw two elderly Russians in military jackets with green epaulets; they wore green caps and were armed. They were doubtless jailers, and Lanny could guess that they had no interest in the procedure other than to do what they were told. Quite possibly they were sorry for their prisoners and what they had to do to them.

They closed the door of the cell and, using the torchlight, led Lanny along a corridor. They came to a stairway, and that was difficult indeed; but apparently the men understood and half carried Lanny step by step up the stairs.

Lanny had a guess as to where he was—the Prenzlauerberg Prison, which was in East Berlin and had been taken over by the Russians. He had seen it from the outside; it covered an entire block, and all the blocks around it were ruins. It was built like a fortress, and he had heard stories about the cruelties that went on inside it. Now he had no recourse but to pray; to give himself the firm suggestion that God would help him to endure whatever was done to him, and that in the end it would fail. Great numbers of modern men have forgotten how to pray, and the idea embarrasses them. They prefer to use the language of psychology which they have learned in college. It is easy for them to believe in suggestion, but hard for them to believe in that antiquated suggestion called God.

Lanny had been told by one of the refugees that the warders and attendants in Soviet prisons were often kind; they had no heart for the cruelties. So now he chose to believe that the men who were helping him up the staircase were kind; he knew how to say ' _spasiba_ '—'thank you', so he said it. He was helped along a corridor; and far down it he saw another group approaching, presumably warders with a prisoner. He heard a strange clucking noise, the sound which in the old days one used to make when driving a horse and buggy, to start the horse and to keep him going when he showed signs of flagging. Many years had passed since Lanny had driven a horse and buggy, but he remembered the sound. He observed that his warders, the moment they heard it, stopped him, took him by the shoulders, turned him with his face to the wall and pressed him close. Lanny could guess the purpose of this: he was not permitted to see the other prisoner. If he had turned his head he might have been struck a blow on the side of it; so he stayed patiently with his nose touching the wall until the others had passed by; then he was again turned and led on.

He was helped up another staircase and along another corridor. Three times he heard the clucking noise, and by that time he had acquired what the Russian scientist Pavlov called a 'conditioned reflex'. He put his nose automatically against the concrete wall.

They stopped at a door, and he noticed on it the number 814. The warders opened the door and led their prisoner into a room about ten feet square with one steel-barred window. In the centre was a medium-sized desk, and behind it sat an official wearing a blouse; the rest of him was hidden behind the desk. He might have been a waxworks figure, so still he was. Directly in front of the desk was a very small stool, and the warders led Lanny to it and placed him upon it, exactly as if he too had been a waxworks figure. Then the green-capped pair turned and without a word left the room and closed the door.

And Lanny knew just what that meant. He had been told about it by refugees and had read the stories of others. He was about to be started upon what the Russians called 'the Conveyor'; a process, a course of treatment, devised by scientists both psychological and physiological and tested by two decades of observation. He was going to be made to confess to something. What would it be?
26 GOD'S OPPORTUNITY

I

Lanny was so exhausted that everything wavered slightly before him; but he made an effort to concentrate his attention and saw that he was looking at a blonde Russian, perhaps thirty years of age; that meant he was a child of the revolution and would know nothing else. He would know only what the regime had told him and would speak in formulas and clichés. He might be personally good or bad, but that would make very little difference in his conditioned reflexes.

He pressed a button beside his desk, and what could only be described as a blast of light smote Lanny in the eyes. It came from several electric bulbs set in a curved reflected. To one who had been in darkness so long it was like a blow, and he clapped his two hands over his eyes. No objection was made, and apparently he was free to keep his hands there until they got tired.

Lanny had heard about this light and knew it would be shining in his face during the entire time of the investigation. He knew also that the ordeal might continue day and night with no respite. There would be a series of examiners. He would be exhausted, but they would be fresh.

The robot spoke: the first words were German, ' _Ihr Name_?' These two German words told Lanny a good deal. He had been wondering in what language he would be addressed. German words suggested that they had connected him with Herr Fröhlich of R.I.A.S., and the cause of his arrest might well be their displeasure at his broadcasts.

He replied, ' _Mein Name ist Lanning Prescott Budd_ '. And when he was asked his age he said, ' _Sieben und tier zig_ '. Very quickly he observed that the young examiner's knowledge of the language was faulty; presumably he had learned it from textbooks, and sometimes Lanny had difficulty in understanding his pronunciation. It was advisable not to offend him by making him aware of his deficiencies. He knew no English words, and Lanny knew only a few Russian ones, but they would manage to make out.

The man first addressed his prisoner as ' _Obvinyaemi Budd_ '—Accused Budd. This was according to the Soviet law, which had been prepared in the early idealistic days of the revolution. Lanny had visited Petrograd in those early days and had been told all of those wonderful things about brotherhood and freedom and justice. He had been told about just laws, wonderful laws; and he understood that while the reality had degenerated the forms had been kept. So he would not be addressed as 'Conspirator Budd' or 'Scoundrel Budd' or 'Fascist Budd'; he would merely be 'Accused Budd'. And he, in turn, would address his tormentor as 'Citizen Examiner'— _Grazdanin Isledovatel_.

II

The questioning continued, and he stated that he was a citizen of the United States of America. He took occasion to enter formal protest against any questioning, since he had been brought into Soviet territory by force and against his will. There was a pause after each statement, and Lanny assumed that the official was writing down the reply; but Lanny could not look to see on account of the blazing light.

The question was asked, 'What were you doing in West Berlin?' Lanny replied very politely, 'Citizen Examiner, I am suffering greatly from this light shining in my face. There is no need of it whatever, because we can both see plainly in this room. I ask that you turn the light off'.

'The light is none of your business, Accused Budd'.

'The light makes it impossible for me to think or to answer your questions properly. I ask that it be turned off'.

'The light will remain'.

'Citizen Examiner, let me inform you that I am familiar with the Soviet law, and I know that you are forbidden to abuse or strike accused persons'.

'Have I struck you, Budd?'

'You are striking me, Citizen Examiner, when you cause this light to shine in my face. What is the difference if you strike me with your fist or strike me with atomic particles? I do not know what physical theory you hold, Citizen Examiner, regarding the nature of light, but all authorities on physics are agreed that light is force, light is energy, and you might as well be striking me with your fist'.

They got into trouble because the examiner apparently did not know the German word ' _Faust_ '. He must have thought that Lanny was talking about a German drama, or perhaps a French opera; and Lanny was afraid to demonstrate the word, because he might seem to be shaking his fist at a Soviet official. He kept insisting that light was force. ' _Licht ist Kraft_!'

'The light will remain', declared the official.

'Then, Citizen Examiner, I regret to tell you that I will answer no further questions so long as the light remains'.

'You will be _made_ to answer the questions', persisted the other.

'Citizen Examiner, I refuse formally to answer the questions until the light is turned off. I am perfectly willing to answer your questions and tell you anything I know. But I will not answer under torture'.

'This is unheard of, Accused Budd'.

'Citizen Examiner, I have studied Soviet law and I know that I am within my rights'.

That was too much for the official, and he raised his voice. ' _Ti sobaka_!' he cried. 'You Fascist dog!'

'Citizen Examiner, you know that you are not permitted to abuse a prisoner; you are not permitted to use abusive language'.

'You counter-revolutionary bandit, I will break every bone in your body!'

'Citizen Examiner', responded Lanny in his very best German, ' _Sie müssen korrekt sein_ '.

These were magic words. 'You must be correct!' The Prussian military caste had taken over an English word and given it a special technical meaning. To be _korrekt_ was to follow the code. The code might be ever so cruel, but you must follow it with calmness, with dignity and propriety. The Soviet official caste knew both the word and the concept; so when Lanny told his questioner that he was not being _korrekt_ he had the man—in vulgar American slang—over a barrel.

The official—Lanny never did learn his name—calmed down. 'Accused Budd', he said almost pleadingly, 'you must understand my position. I have been ordered to keep the light burning, and what can I do?'

'Citizen Examiner, it is obvious that I cannot keep my hands over my eyes all the time, and the light is hurting me even through my hands. It is obvious that I cannot think or answer questions intelligently so long as I am tortured. I cannot believe that the great Soviet government wishes to make it impossible for me to think clearly and speak the truth'.

'Budd, I am in no position to act in this matter. I am obeying orders'.

'But, Citizen Examiner, the person who has given you this order is violating Soviet law'.

'You claim to know more about Soviet law than my superiors?'

'It happens, Citizen Examiner, that I have paid five visits to the Soviet Union, beginning in the early and glorious days of Lenin. I have read your books and studied your instructions, including your laws'.

This was most impressive, and it was not necessary that it should be strictly true. To be sure, Lanny had picked up many items of information in the Soviet Union, but most of his present learning was the result of talking with refugees and with several of the Germans employed in R.I.A.S., who had either been through the Conveyor themselves or had heard about it from others who had been through. Most accused persons were ignorant and terrified and did not know that they had any rights. It might be that you would fall into the hands of some brutal tyrant, who would order you beaten or otherwise physically tortured; but there was always a chance that if you asserted your rights with proper dignity you might make an impression.

III

Deep in Lanny's consciousness he was clinging to the formula, 'God is helping me'; and now what God told him was to be kind to this dumb, bemuddled creature. The creature was doing what he was ordered, and very probably his mind had been so distorted that he thought he was doing right. Anyhow, he was terrified to do otherwise; he had to make a success of this interview, he had to get out of his prisoner whatever he had been told to get. To succeed would be triumph, to fail would be ruin; so make allowances for him and be kind!

'Citizen Examiner', said Lanny gently, 'I feel to you as one man of culture to another. I know you are a man of culture or you could not speak the German language as well as you do'. This was one of the fetishes of the Bolsheviks, _kultura_. All of them wished to be thought cultured persons, and if you yourself were a cultured person and behaved as one, they would have a sneaking respect for you even while they called you a Fascist dog and a Wall-Street bandit, a vile Trotskyite, a bloodthirsty Bukharinist, or just a plain cannibal.

Lanny went on, 'I assure you that we will get along better if we are considerate of each other. I assure you that I have no secrets whatever and nothing to hide from you. I appreciate that you are doing your duty, and I am perfectly willing to co-operate with you. I will tell you the truth; but don't you see that I cannot do it if I am so distressed physically that I am unable to think? Why can we not converse like one friend to another, and let me tell you what you want to know?'

The answer was, 'Because, Budd, I know that you will not want to tell me what I want to know'.

'But don't you see that that is prejudging the case, and prejudging me? Is it not sensible first to give me a chance to tell you what you want to know; then if I refuse to tell you, that will be time enough to subject me to the discomfort of this light? Surely it is common sense to give me a chance to prove my good faith'.

The Divine assistance proved efficacious; the official pressed the button and the light went off. A sudden blessed relief: Lanny took his hands from his eyes and opened his eyes and blinked them two or three times. He studied this blonde, blue-eyed Russian, who probably had some Scandinavian blood; he was broad-shouldered, heavy set, and had a broad face with high cheekbones and wide mouth. He didn't look very intelligent, but again he did not look unkind; so Lanny took heart. 'Thank you, Citizen Examiner', he said with fervour; and to himself he said, 'God is helping me. God is helping me'.

'Accused Budd', said the official, 'you recently took a trip into Poland'.

'That is correct', Lanny said.

'You obtained a permit for that trip from the Soviet government'.

'I did'.

'What was the purpose of that trip?'

'I wished to visit Stubendorf, a town in what used to be Upper Silesia. In the old days I had visited Schloss Stubendorf and had friends there. I was trying to track down some paintings which had been in the castle and which I thought it might be possible to buy'.

'And you expect me to believe that you took that long and dangerous journey only to find out about some paintings?'

'Citizen Examiner, to an American it did not seem at all a long journey. I have driven myself by car across my own country—about three thousand miles each way. I have done that many times, sometimes just for pleasure. As for the danger, I had no thought of that. I was travelling in the land of a friendly people who had been our staunch allies in a terrible war. I expected no danger and I encountered none'.

'And you are so much concerned with paintings!'

'Citizen Examiner, that is the way I make my living. I locate paintings and give my opinion of them, and my clients in America purchase them and pay me a ten-per-cent commission; I have been doing that for just twenty-five years. I have been doing it on this present trip to Germany. I bought some paintings in Nurnberg and some in Frankfurt; I can give you the names of the paintings and the client and the prices that were paid and so on, if you wish'.

This offer met with a cold reception. 'That is not necessary', said the official. 'We quite understand that all spies have to have their camouflage. You do not deny that you are a spy, I presume?

'Citizen Examiner, I deny that I am a spy at the present time. I was a spy against the Nazis and I did my small part to help overthrow them. But I have never been a spy against the Soviet Union, and I have never taken any action against the Soviet Union'.

'Yet you come here to Berlin and abuse the Soviet Union over the radio!'

'We must not let ourselves be drawn into a political discussion, Citizen Examiner. I have my opinions and you have yours. It is our practice in America to express our opinions freely, and I have done that over the radio; but surely you realise that expressing opinions over the radio is exactly the opposite of spying. The two things are incompatible. If I wished to spy upon the Soviet Union I would pretend to approve of everything it does. When I publicly state that I consider the blockade of Berlin unjustified I make it impossible to pose as approving of your course. Knowing what I believe, would you, for example, take me as a friend and trust me with your confidences regarding the affairs of the Soviet Union?'

'I am not here to answer questions but to ask them', replied the Russian grimly. He was not so dumb after all.

IV

This process was a slow one. Every time that Lanny answered the other wrote. He wrote slowly, and meantime Lanny sat and waited and tried to guess what was coming next and to prepare his answer; then he would repeat to himself Parsifal's formula, 'God is helping me'. He didn't ask God _to_ help him; he told himself that God _was_ helping him, and furthermore he told himself that this was not mere autosuggestion but the statement of a fact that was going on in the mysterious deeps of his infinite spirit. Lanny's spirit and God's spirit were mingled and mutually engaged in a creative process. Whether God was also in the spirit of the broad-faced young Russian and on what terms He was operating there was a question with which Lanny had no time to concern himself.

'Did you have any particular person you expected to see in Stubendorf?'

'I had a number of persons, Citizen Examiner. I had visited Stubendorf off and on many times. General Graf Stubendorf had been a friend of mine in the old days, and so had his protégé, the pianist and composer Kurt Meissner. I did not know if I would find them there, but I hoped to get track of them'.

'And did you succeed?'

'I learned that Graf Stubendorf was living by the Tegernsee, and I learned that Kurt Meissner was in the Harz Mountains. I afterward visited them both'.

'That Meissner is the same man who was recently killed in Bavaria?'

'That is the one'.

'And you betrayed him to the American Army?'

'No, Citizen Examiner, I did not betray him. Officers of the American Army told me what they knew about Kurt Meissner's activities to revive nazism. Naturally I was opposed to that—I have considered it my duty to oppose nazism everywhere and in every possible way. So I went to Kurt Meissner and told him what the American Army had learned about him and persuaded him to give up his Nazi activities and come over to the American side. He did that, and some of his Nazi colleagues presumably murdered him—at least that is what I was told'.

'And he told the American Army where a lot of gold was hidden?'

'That is true'.

'And you got a part of that gold—is it not so?'

'No, Citizen Examiner, I did not get any of it, and the idea never crossed my mind. I have told you how I make my living, and it is not by looking for treasure'.

'And did Kurt Meissner tell you where other treasure was buried?'

'He did not. If he had done so I would have immediately told the American Army, and they would have got the treasure. In the case of valuable objects which are recovered and which can be identified, it has been the practice of the Army to return them to their rightful owners. In the case of gold bullion which was Nazi state treasure, it is turned over to the Interallied Reparations Agency and distributed to those nations from which the Nazis had looted gold. I have no doubt that the Soviet Union received its proper share'.

'You understand, Budd, I am writing down what you are telling me, and you have given your word to tell me the truth. If you tell me what is not true, you will pay a severe penalty'.

'Every word that I have told you is the truth, Citizen Examiner. I have been told by persons who are hostile to the Soviet Union in their minds that in these interrogations the examiner does not want to hear the truth, he wants to hear what he himself believes. I am doing you the honour to assume that this is not the case'.

'Budd, I thank you', was the reply.

The watchful Lanny decided that what they were after was more treasure, and he prepared himself for a long and hard siege on that subject. If he had had any such information he would have given it in order to save his life; but he did not have it. He felt that his life might be in grave danger on that account.

V

The next question was, 'Did you know the family of this Kurt Meissner?'

'I knew them all very well', Lanny said. 'I had visited them off and on in their home near Stubendorf. There was Elsa, the mother, and there were eight children; they were well brought-up children, and when I went to see them I always took them presents'.

'Did you meet any of Kurt's family on your last trip to Stubendorf?'

'No, they had all left. They were in the Harz Mountains. I went there, but I did not meet them there. Kurt was very antagonistic to me at that meeting'.

'Did you meet any of them anywhere else?'

'Yes, I met the oldest son, whose name is Fredrich; we called him Fritz. He was a student in East Berlin, and he came to see me in West Berlin. He revealed to me that he had become dissatisfied with his father's Nazi ideas, and he begged me to do what I could to persuade his father to drop his activities. I promised that I would see Kurt and try to dissuade him, and I did so'.

'And what was the result of your efforts?'

'He promised to cease his pro-Nazi activities, but he did not keep that promise'.

'He had that large amount of gold in his keeping at this time?'

'No, I think he got it later'.

'How did you find out about it?'

'The American military authorities decided that he knew about it, and they were about to arrest him. I asked them to let me talk to him and persuade him to renew his promises and keep them. I went to see him, and then he told me how the gold was hidden'.

'You are sure he did not tell you about any gold or other treasure, other than what the American Army found?'

'He did not tell me of any other'.

'Did he tell the American Army?'

'That I am not able to answer. I never asked them or discussed the subject again. You see, I live in the United States, and I come to Berlin only occasionally, and always on my business as an art expert'.

'You are the man who speaks over R.I.A.S. under the name of Herr Fröhlich?'

'That is correct'.

'And you are an enemy of the Soviet Union'.

'I deny most emphatically that I am an enemy of the Soviet Union or of the Russian people. I am opposed to some of the regime's present policies'.

'What are those policies?'

'Citizen Examiner, there would be no advantage in our going into a political discussion. I have no doubt that Radio Berlin has made recordings of my few talks over R.I.A.S. I am an American, and I believe what Americans believe; that is, in democratic government'.

'You have denounced the government of the Soviet Union?'

'I have expressed my disapproval of all governments that are dictatorships and are not based upon the will of the people'.

'Then you presume to say that the people of the Soviet Union do not approve of their government?'

'I am quite sure that the people of the Soviet Union have never had an opportunity to say whether they approve of their government or not. Therefore I do not know, and I do not think that anyone else knows. But, as I have told you, Citizen Examiner, it is futile for us to discuss this subject. You and I were brought up in different worlds, and we have wholly different views of political and economic affairs. The great Karl Marx understood that men's opinions are determined by their economic environment, and you must not expect me to be superior to the laws of social determinism'.

VI

That was a tactful way to put it, and the Citizen Examiner condescended to change the subject. 'You have been permitted to visit our great Stalin, I am informed'.

'That is correct, Citizen Examiner. I have had that honour twice'.

'Will you tell me the circumstances?'

'Gladly. The first occasion was early in ninteen forty-two. I had been in Hong Kong and had fled from the Japanese with my wife. We crossed China and were flown to Moscow. It happened that I was a representative of President Roosevelt, and there was an exchange of cablegrams with Washington. Anyhow, I was received by Marshal Stalin'.

'Where were you received?'

'In some building in the Kremlin'.

'You had an opportunity to visit Marshal Stalin in his home?'

'Citizen Examiner, I was not told whether it was his home or not. I was driven into the Kremlin at night and I saw nothing. I was taken into a building, and all that I saw was a passageway and then an oval-shaped room, all white with gold trimmings. Marshal Stalin came into the room, and we sat at a large table and talked for an hour or two. He was very friendly and frank; and I think that if you could consult him he would express a wish that you should be the same'.

The young subordinate of the great Marshal did not see fit to follow up this lead. 'What were the circumstances of the second interview?'

'The second interview was four years later, about a year after the end of the war. This time I came as a representative of President Truman. I was flown from Washington to Moscow, and I was received in the same oval-shaped room. I remember being struck by the fact that everything in the room appeared to be exactly the same. There were several telephones, each a different colour, and I assumed that this was in order to distinguish one private line from another. I will describe other details if you wish me to. It may be, of course, that you yourself have been in that room'.

'No such honour has been extended to me. What was the character of your second interview?'

'It was courteous and friendly, exactly as in the first case. I got the impression of a man quiet, self-contained, and friendly to meet personally'.

'Yet you went back and carried a report to the warmonger Truman that Marshal Stalin was planning an attack upon your capitalistic country'.

'I carried no such report, Citizen Examiner, and anyone who has told you that has told you falsely. I reported to the President that Marshal Stalin had stated to me positively and in great detail that he intended to carry out to the full all the agreements that had been made at Yalta and Potsdam'.

'But you reported that you did not believe that he would keep those agreements'.

'I reported nothing of the sort, Citizen Examiner. I had no basis for any such statement. When I was asked my opinion, I said that, and added that only time would show'.

'But you reported that Marshal Stalin had been personally friendly to you'.

'He was not only friendly, he was cordial, in a talk that lasted about three hours'.

'And yet you came away from that interview and used your knowledge of Marshal Stalin and his place of residence to help conspirators against his life'.

If the inquisitor had pulled out a gun and taken a shot at Lanny, he could not have been more greatly shocked. ' _Um Gottes Willen_! he exclaimed. 'Where did you get that idea?'

'You intend to deny that you were involved in a conspiracy to take Marshal Stalin's life?'

'I deny it with all the emphasis that is possible. No such idea ever crossed my mind, and I never heard of it until this moment'.

'You deny that your trip to Poland was to meet such conspirators and give them information and money?'

'I deny it most emphatically. I met no one in Poland except in Stubendorf, and there I talked with no one expect persons who might be able to tell me where Kurt Meissner was living and what had become of the paintings which had been in Schloss Strubendorf'.

VII

The investigator wrote with painful slowness, and that gave Lanny plenty of time to think. His mind was in a tumult. So that was what they were going to try to put over on him! He knew that nothing could be of more deadly significance. The preposterousness of the charge had nothing to do with the matter. The preposterousness of any charge never had anything to do with the making of it by the Reds. The preposterousness of a charge no more kept them from making it than it had Adolf Hitler; and Hitler had said that the bigger the lie the easier it was to get it believed.

What counted with Lanny was the revelation of their intentions toward himself. They were going to pin that charge on him and make him confess it to the world; and when he had confessed it there could come only one ending, which was the ending of his life. For lesser charges there might be lesser penalties, even pardon; but for plotting against Stalin's life there could be no forgiveness and only one penalty.

The man continued, 'You intend to maintain that attitude in spite of all the evidence?'

'Citizen Examiner, there can be no evidence as to any such absurdity'.

'We have the evidence, Accused Budd, and you will be confronted with it'.

'If you have any evidence, Citizen Examiner, I assure you in advance that it is fraudulent. It is a frame-up'.

Lanny used the German word _Erfindung_ , and they were delayed for a time because the official was not familiar with that word. Lanny had to invent some other way of saying it, and then the examiner had to figure out a way to put it down in Russian. 'Accused Budd, what will you say when I inform you that Fritz Meissner has confessed fully to his share of the crime?'

'What I say, Citizen Examiner, is that if Fritz Meissner confessed any such thing it was because he was tortured beyond endurance'.

The inquisitor brought his _Faust_ down on the desk with a bang. 'You dare to accuse the government of the Soviet Union of employing torture?'

It was truly funny, but Lanny knew it was no joke, and he had no impulse to laugh. On the contrary, he was praying as hard as he could. At every respite during the writing he was saying to himself over and over again, 'God is helping me. God is helping me'. Now he said, 'Citizen Examiner, when I was brought to this place I was put in a tiny box and frozen almost to death; then the temperature was changed and I was almost roasted to death; then I was brought into this room and had a glaring light turned into my eyes. If that is not considered torture in the Soviet Union you must tell me what it is'.

'I will _show_ you what it is'. The man pushed the button and the light flamed back into Lanny's eyes.

VIII

Too late Lanny realised that he had got in God's way on this occasion. He had talked too much. And he could think of nothing to do now but to clap his hands over his eyes and say, 'Citizen Examiner, I shall answer no more questions until the light is turned off'.

'You will find that we have ways of making you talk', announced the other. And he proceeded at once to prove the truth of this. 'You deny that you have conspired with Hetman Skoropodsky?'

Lanny realised in a flash that if he sat quietly while such questions were asked he would accumulate a mass of guilt against himself. It would be assumed that every silence was an admission, and at all hazards he must not make any such admissions. ' _Herr Gott_! Is he still alive?'

'You know him then?'

'I never knew him. He is merely a name to me. I understood that he was a Ukrainian White Guardist. I have never had anything to do with him'.

'Nor with any of his followers?'

'Never so far as I had any idea'.

'You don't know a man named Lilivitch?'

'I never heard the name. It doesn't sound like a real name to me'.

'You never handed him a large sum of money to be used to bribe a spy inside the Kremlin?'

'I most certainly never did anything of the sort'.

'You deny that you gave him five thousand American dollars?'

'I most certainly deny it'.

'You will maintain that denial in the face of his written confession?'

'I will most certainly maintain it. I will say that he is lying, possibly under torture'.

'You intend to repeat that insult to the Soviet Union?'

'Citizen Examiner, I am being tortured at this moment, and I cannot deny the evidence of my own eyes. If you will come and sit by me, you will have the evidence of _your_ eyes. So let us try to be sensible with each other'.

'It is not for you to give instructions, Accused Budd'.

'Citizen Examiner', said Lanny, 'we are men of culture, and we should treat each other with correctness. I do not know how much you have had to do with the accumulating of this evidence. It may be that it has been handed to you and you have been told that it is the truth. If so, then of course I have no right to blame you; all I can do is to assure you in all sincerity that this is the most preposterous piece of fiction I have ever heard. I do not believe in assassination, I have never believed in it, and I have never knowingly had anything to do with any person who believed in it'.

'We have the evidence, and you will see in the end that it is futile to deny it. You will fare much better if you make a full and frank statement and give us the names of all persons who were your fellow conspirators in this plot'.

'I assure you, Citizen Examiner, that if I knew of such a plot I would consider the men to be evil and I would give you their names. I cannot give you what I have not got, and you are simply wasting your time in asking me questions about this matter'.

'What will you say when we confront you with the signed testimony of Fritz Meissner?'

'I will say what I have already put into this record, that if Fritz Meissner made any such statement he must have been forced to make it. It is not true, and under no circumstances will I say otherwise'.

IX

There was no way to keep track of time or to estimate it. The questioning went on and on, wandering from one subject to another without apparent order or purpose. Names were brought in, Russian names, Polish names, German names. Lanny would say dully, 'I never heard of him'; it became a formula, very irritating to the questioner. He would express his annoyance, and Lanny, anxious to avoid a scolding, would find a different phrase, 'I do not know the man', or 'I have never met any such person'.

All this time the electronic particles, or waves, whichever of these compose light, were being hurled in a tremendous blast at Lanny's eyes. He kept his hands over his eyes as long as he could, and this had the effect of turning the energies of light into those of heat. His hands became hot and then the eyes underneath. When the muscles of his arms became utterly exhausted the hands would drop and the light would smite his eyes. He was not permitted to turn his head away; he would receive a sharp order to look at the inquisitor, and when he protested he could not see anyone, he was told that he was being insolent and that he would make his lot harder if he persisted in that course.

'Citizen Examiner', said Lanny, 'I desire to enter a formal protest against being obliged to submit to examination under this light. I request you to notify the Prosecutor of my protest'.

'The Prosecutor will pay no attention to your protest'.

'Nevertheless I demand that my protest be entered on the record and be presented to him'.

'Very well', replied the man; and he wrote—but he might as well not have written, because Lanny never got any result from that petition.

All this time he was sitting on a very small stool. His buttocks were pressed down over its sides and they began to ache. He had to keep his balance in spite of a tendency to sway, and that meant that the muscles of his buttocks were continually pulling this way and that; and they too became exhausted. His back ached, and his injured shoulder and his injured elbow.

There was only one thing he could do: 'Other refuge have I none,/Hangs my helpless soul on Thee!' Lanny kept saying over and over, 'God is helping me! God is helping me!' He no longer had the least interest in metaphysical theorising about it; he did not care whether it was suggestion or autosuggestion. Man's extremity was proving to be God's opportunity, and God was taking advantage of it. Lanny was saying the words, and he was meaning them with all the power of his being. 'Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord!'

What this meant was that his attention was concentrated upon the idea of help, and his pain receded into the background of his consciousness; when he realised that this was happening he experienced a sense of victory over his tormentors. After all, they were not going to be able to break him down! And with this thought came a new access of determination; he concentrated with yet more intensity upon the idea of help. Jesus had told his disciples: 'And nothing shall by any means hurt you'. He said, 'Be not afraid, only believe'. And the saints and martyrs through the ages had proved the soundness of this formula. Modern psychologists will agree with you, provided that you will put it in their language. Not many are able to practice it, but one of the wisest of them, William James, wrote a book on the subject, entitled, with proper scientific aloofness, _The Varieties of Religious Experience_.

Of course Lanny kept all this in his secret soul. Nothing would have exasperated his tormentor more than to know that his victim was praying. Both Engels and Lenin had declared, 'Religion is the opium of the people.' and that had been graven in huge letters in a public place in Moscow. Lanny could have used some opium right now, and this opium of the spirit was his without price. Apparently the inquisitor realised that something strange was going on, for he would say with exasperation, 'Pay attention to what I am saying!' Lanny would answer humbly, 'I'm very weak, Citizen Examiner'; and to himself he would repeat the words of St. Paul, oft quoted by Parsifal Dingle, 'I will not fear what man shall do to me'.

X

Lanny could not give all his thoughts to prayer; he had to think about what he was answering. He knew that this was a fishing expedition, and the man was a skilled and experienced operator. Lanny didn't want to be hooked, and he would have to collect his confused thoughts and realise what he was saying. The man came back again and again to Fritz Meissner. He had the idea that Fritz had taken a trip into Poland and that Lanny had had something to do with it; or was he fishing to find out? Lanny had the problem, Was Fritz Meissner still alive or was he dead? If the latter, Lanny could say anything about him and put any blame upon him. But because he might still be alive Lanny must admit nothing.

What he had to do was to be the art expert, the _Kunstsachverständiger_ , and he must insist upon that as his only interest and purpose in visiting Europe. On the subject of his profession he would pour out names, dates, and prices. He knew this would annoy the inquisitor and that he would be called a 'profiteer', a 'looter', a 'money hog'. But he could guess that in his secret heart the inquisitor might envy him, not merely his expert knowledge but also the profit he made out of it. This was an apparatchik who doubtless was crowded with his family in one or two rooms in a tenement, and when he had to buy a new pair of shoes the family would have to skimp on their food.

All this tumult of thoughts and feelings went on in Lanny's mind. He fought the good fight until he could fight no longer; his pain was so acute that he could no longer deny it, and he was about to fall off the stool. But then he bethought himself of a new idea. It would hardly be reverent to suggest that it had come as a result of prayer; perhaps it was the devil this time. Anyhow, he suddenly declared, 'Citizen Examiner, I have to go to the toilet'.

Wonderful, wonderful! The man replied immediately, 'Very well, Budd'. He pressed a button, and two warders came—never was a prisoner entrusted to one alone. In Stalin's realm there always had to be somebody to watch everybody. When Lanny tried to rise and found he couldn't stand, the men took him by the arms and supported him and led him out of the door and down the corridor. The act of helping a fellow human to walk is an act of kindness, and William James, the psychologist, has told us that when we perform the actions of an emotion we experience the emotion. It seemed to Lanny that the warders were kind; but Lanny was no longer putting his trust in humans and continued diligently with his prayers. He took his time, as much time as he dared; it was a blessed relief to stand, to walk slowly, to let the blood flow back into the muscles that had been pressed out of shape. ' _Danke schön_ , Citizen Examiner', he said as he tottered back to the torture room; and to himself he said, 'God is helping me. God is helping me'.

The light continued, and no pleading or arguing caused the inquisitor to press the button. He was becoming more and more irritated; he realised that he was not getting anywhere, that Lanny was not confessing anything, and he began to bluster and threaten. Again Lanny demanded to see the Prosecutor, or to send him a note immediately. The interview turned into a series of arguments about physical theories on the nature of light and about the legal proprieties, the meaning of the Soviet laws which forbade the abuse of prisoners. Was a man who had been brought into Soviet territory against his will subject to Soviet law, or was he under the protection of American law, or was he an outlaw entitled to no protection? The question became metaphysical and might have taxed the intellectual capacities of the International Court of Justice at The Hague. The climax of the discussions came after what must have been a full day's continuous interrogation. Lanny began to waver on his stool, and then everything faded out and he fell off onto his sore shoulder.
27 MAN'S EXTREMITY

I

When Lanny's wavering consciousness came back again he was lying on an iron cot which had a straw mattress and seemed of heavenly softness. Somebody was lifting him by the shoulders and trying to give him something to drink. Presently he was able to swallow, and that was another blessed relief. Little by little his senses returned, and he realised that he was not back in that concrete box or coffin; so presumably he was not going to be frozen and baked again. He began saying his prayers right away, and this time there was not merely appeal but also thanksgiving. Two men were in the room, and, incredible as it might seem, one of them was feeding him hot cabbage soup with soft bread in it, feeding him with a large spoon and holding up his head and shoulders with one hand and saying politely, ' _Kooshai_ ', to encourage him to swallow it, 'O Lord, how great are Thy works! and Thy thoughts are very deep'.

Under such stimulus Lanny's strength came back, and he was able to sit up and take the bowl of soup into his lap and feed himself. He was not exactly a devotee of cabbage soup, but he knew that the Russians lived on it and were a sturdy people; at the moment he could have thought of nothing that would please him more. He swallowed the last drop, and when the man told him to lie down he did so. When he heard the iron door clang it did not trouble him, because he wanted nothing in the world so much as to be let alone. He closed his tired eyes and put his mind upon renewing his faith in God, and it wasn't more than half a minute before he was in a dead sleep.

How long he slept he had no means of knowing. It seemed to him that it had been only a few minutes before there was someone shaking him and saying, ' _Ispitanie_ '—examination. Lanny knew that he wasn't rested, and it was torture to him to be dragged out of that sleep; but he was shaken again and again and finally dragged to a sitting position. The word ' _poshol_!' was shouted into his deliberately deaf ears; with the help of much pulling he was forced to his feet and was led staggering down the corridor and back into that same room 814.

There was a new man now; they were going to work on him in relays. Each new examiner would have had a night's or a day's sleep; he would have had a meal, he would be freshly spruced and shaved. Lanny had not been shaved and must have looked like a bum out of Skid Row. He was seated on the same stool, and before him was the same desk, and on it was the same dossier, from which passages were read to him now and then. But the light was not turned on!

This one was elderly, with grey hair; he was stoutish and a bit slouchy, but he seemed kind and spoke in a gentle voice. He was speaking English without too heavy an accent; that would make matters easier. Lanny guessed that, having found that severity did not work, they were going to try humanity.

The man explained in some detail that the previous procedure had been due to an unfortunate mistake. It was no part of the programme to starve a prisoner or to let him be overcome by exhaustion. It had been assumed that Lanny had eaten the piece of bread which had been placed in the box with him. Lanny said that he had been given no time to eat it, and the reply was that it had been the jailers' duty to stay and see him eat it, and that the accused should not have been taken to the examination room until it had been eaten. The jailers had been duly disciplined, and if the mistake was repeated it was the prisoner's right to call attention to it. Lanny said with due humility, 'Thank you, Citizen Examiner'.

II

'Mr Budd', began this elderly one, doing his victim special honour, 'I am older than you, and I have seen more of this very sad world. I speak to you in a fatherly way, and I beg you to do me the honour to weigh my words carefully'.

'Certainly, Citizen Examiner', said Lanny, not to be outdone. To himself he said, 'God is helping me'.

'You come from a land far overseas which has never been in peril from enemies; but I live in a land surrounded by deadly foes which seek its destruction, Our country has no natural defences—only the determination of the Soviet people'.

Said Lanny, 'It happens that only a short time ago the same words were spoken to me by Graf Stubendorf, a German, concerning _his_ country'.

'It may be true in both cases. It is a burden which nature or fate has placed upon our shoulders, and we are unable to cast it off. Anyhow, our regime is fighting for its existence, and we assert the elemental right of self-defence. This I assume you will concede'.

'I do, Citizen Examiner'.

'Millions, tens of millions, of deadly enemies seek the destruction of our regime. They are tireless, unsleeping; they work day and night by every kind of subtle device. They work in the dark, they invent clever camouflage to conceal themselves and their purposes. To meet their efforts requires ceaseless vigilance on our part, time and energy which we would gladly give to the building up of our productive powers, but we dare not. You admit that, Mr Budd?'

'I admit it', Lanny conceded. He was prepared to admit anything but his own guilt. 'But may it not possibly be, Citizen Examiner, that you sometimes exaggerate the danger?'

'Sometimes, I grant you. We are only human and we are bound to make mistakes. That is the reason I plead with you. We may be making a mistake in your case. We may be over-suspicious. I personally admit it, but what can I do about it? This case'—the examiner laid his hand upon the large dossier—'this case is handed to me. My superiors say to me, "These are the facts. You will proceed upon this basis. There will be no respite for this man until he admits the truth and names his confederates". And what can I do—I, a humble subordinate? Is it for me to judge my superiors? Is it for me to suspect them? Who am I to go to our great Soviet regime with all its wisdom and power and say that with all its resources for collecting facts and interpreting them—who am I to say, "You are mistaken"? Surely you must see that, Mr Budd'.

'I see it, Citizen Examiner'; and again, 'God is helping me'.

'Very well then, I am here. This is my duty, this is my livelihood. I have a wife and two children dependent upon my labours'.

'I also have a wife and two children, Citizen Examiner'.

'Very well, that makes a total of eight different reasons why we should be considerate of each other and come to an agreement. I am told, "Make this man confess", and my career depends upon my succeeding; if I fail, I lose my standing. I go down, and some other man comes up—the man who will know how to make you give way. It may even be that suspicion will fall upon me and that I will take your place as a prisoner and be ordered to confess what motives have caused me, a trusted agent of the M.G.B., our Berlin organisation, to turn traitor to my native land. It may be my turn to state who were the conspirators who put this evil idea into my mind'.

'I quite understand you point of view', said Lanny, and to himself he said, 'Molasses catches more flies than vinegar'.

III

The inquisitor put a good deal of feeling into this discussion, and if he was not sincere he was a well-trained actor. Lanny was trying hard to think of some role that would carry on the little drama and keep the light from being turned into his eyes.

'So', continued the man, 'I am pleading with you to come to some agreement with me. You are my prisoner. I have not been told how that happened, but here you are. It embarrasses me; I see that you are a gentleman, and I hate to be rude or to cause discomfort. I speak to you as one gentleman to another. I would speak as a friend if you would let me. Why can't we make things easy, each for the other?'

Lanny answered with due humility, 'There is only one obstacle in the way, Citizen Examiner. I feel a moral obligation to tell the truth, and it hurts me to tell falsehoods'.

'Truth is an abstraction, Mr Budd. It is a relative thing. What is true for one person is not true for another. What is true at one time may not be true at another. For me the truth is what is in this dossier; let it be the truth for you today, while you are here in this place. Tomorrow when you go out into your own world you may laugh and say, "It is nonsense, I signed it to fool them"'.

Said Lanny, 'Citizen Examiner, it seems to me highly unlikely that a man who confesses to having conspired to bring about the death of Marshal Stalin will ever go out to his own world again'.

'If that is all that troubles you, Mr Budd, accept my assurance that you are mistaken. To you the charge of having tried to take the life of Stalin seems like a monstrous thing; you cannot understand that to us it is one of the commonplaces. I do not exaggerate when I say that we uncover thousands of such attempts every year. A large part of the civilised world is trying to take the life of Stalin; they are devising ever new and more ingenious measures. Lenin was shot, as you know; and then Kirov, who was Stalin's best friend and closest associate. A large percentage of the executions which you have read about in the Soviet Union have been of persons who have made efforts of one sort or another to take the life of our beloved great _vozhd_ '.

'That is exactly the reason for my fears, Citizen Examiner. I do not wish to be executed'.

'Ah, but Mr Budd, you fail to allow for the difference in the circumstances. For a citizen of the Soviet Union to make such an attempt is the vilest treason; but for a foreigner it is entirely different. For a foreigner, unless he is a party member, it is the most natural thing in the world to desire the death of Stalin. We take it for granted that the whole capitalist world desires that death, and if we catch a foreigner at it we are concerned with only one question: What Soviet citizens or what Communists are involved? When we have that information from him we let him go. We are sure he will not come back, and what he does outside is only what he has always been doing and what all the others are doing. It means nothing to us; we watch our own gates. Ages ago we learned to keep foreigners out, and the few that we let in we watch day and night; we watch everyone who speaks to them. I shall be watched because I have been in a room alone with you and have had hours of conversation'.

'Have you thought of the possibility that this room may have some sort of listening device in it?'

The genial inquisitor shrugged his shoulders. 'My future depends upon just one thing', he said. 'Whether or, not I succeed in persuading you to give way'.

A lifelong training in urbanity made it possible for Lanny to smile even in the midst of the pain of sitting on a tiny stool. 'You have been very persuasive', he remarked. 'If you wish, I will give you a certificate to that effect'.

'There is only one certificate that would be of any use, Mr Budd, and that would be for you to sign the list of charges I shall present to you. I am begging you as one man of the world to another to face the facts of the situation and choose the way that is easiest for both of us. I don't want be to disagreeable or to threaten you, but it is my duty to tell you that you cannot possibly succeed in resistance. I assure you that in my years of experience nobody has ever succeeded in that effort; the possibility has been completely excluded. We have employed some of the world's top scientists in many different departments, both of physiology and psychology. We know how the human body works, we know its chemistry. We know how the mind works, we understand the chemistry of the brain, and we do not fool ourselves with any idealistic notions. We know how to bring you to a state where your brain cells will be in utter confusion, every one working against all the others. You will not know right from wrong, you will not know truth from falsehood, you will not know whether you are standing on your head or your feet. What you have had so far is just a foretaste. It will go on day and night for weeks, for months if necessary. We have had persons who have stood out for as long as six weeks, but in the end, without exception, they have confessed and signed their confessions. In many cases they have come into open court and made those confessions. They have done this because we have persuaded them that the good of the party is transcendent to their own good, or to that abstract nothing which they call the truth. The truth for Soviet citizens is what the party needs and requires. For you, a foreigner and a non-party member, we desire no such public appearance; for you we desire only the names of the Russians who are guilty'.

'Even if they are innocent, Citizen Examiner?'

'Whether they are innocent or guilty is for the party to decide, Mr Budd'.

'In other words', said Lanny, 'there are Russians whom the party intriguers for some reason wish to put out of the way, and they use me as a convenient means of making them appear guilty'.

The elderly M.G.B. man looked grieved. 'I am sorry you persist in putting it that way, Mr Budd. I am trying to save you a dreadful lot of suffering, and you should be grateful to me'.

'I am sorry too', said Lanny. 'I have no appetite for suffering, but I am unwilling to sign my name to charges I know are not true'.

Said the other, 'I will give you time to think this over. Examine your own mind and see whether it is pride, or stubbornness, or the intensity of your hatred of our regime which causes you to give this refusal'.

'I assure you, Citizen Examiner, it is none of those things. It is a phenomenon which your expert psychologists may have overlooked. We call it conscience'.

'We have not overlooked it, Mr Budd', was the reply; 'but we have subordinated our conscience to the interest of a party which has been formed for the purpose of helping the proletariat to break the chains of wage-slavery throughout the world'.

Lanny said, 'I am sorry, sir, to disoblige you; but I have not joined the party, and I must obey my conscience. I might as well give my answer now. I cannot do what you ask'.

The inquisitor pressed a button, and the two warders came in.

IV

Back in his little cell on the straw mattress Lanny could lie and think about this illuminating interview. He could understand without difficulty the technique that was being employed. A few minutes ago he had been keyed up. His spiritual hands, so to speak, had been clenched; his will was determined to resistance. But now he would lie here in uncertainty, thinking things over and beginning to doubt and to dread. He would know that the torturers were coming for him again, but he wouldn't know when they were coming, and he would be in a continual state of suspense. His will would begin to weaken, and they would choose just the right time; they wouldn't give him enough time to sleep and recover his strength; they would come soon enough, but not too soon.

Lanny knew now how he was going to thwart them. He was going on with his prayers, not excitedly, not with tenseness or agitation that would wear him out, but quietly, calmly, firmly. His mind went back a little more than three years, to the time of the dreadful war's ending. He had driven to the Dachau concentration camp, one of the hellholes of history. Some ten thousand men had been held there under conditions of deliberately contrived torment and degradation. Thousands of them had been picked out and used in the most diabolical experiments ever contrived in the name of science. All kinds of men had been there, rich and poor, old and young, of a score of nations and every variety of religious faith. Two had died every hour, and the supply had been constantly renewed.

Lanny had talked with the American Army officers who were in charge of the newly delivered camp and its inmates. There were medical men among both captives and deliverers, and they were interested in the problem of how human beings managed to endure such torments. All, whether they were religious or not, agreed that those who had stood it best had been the religious. And the reason was obvious; if you believed that your body was all, then the weakening of your body meant the weakening of your whole being; you gave way to despair and went to pieces and soon died. But if you believed that your body was merely the dwelling place of your immortal soul, and that by your suffering you were earning a martyr's crown in eternal life, then you no longer feared your tormentors but devoted yourself to helping others to share your faith.

Lanny wasn't sure if he believed in an eternal life, but he did believe that there was a Power in this world greater than himself, and that it was a Power which worked for righteousness. He believed that he could use that Power, and he had made up his mind that he was going to try. 'Lord, I believe, help Thou mine unbelief!' He recalled one after another the stories of martyrs and heroes he had read; he recalled their words of courage and faith. He was going to show these sophisticated and clever disciples of despotism that there was something in this world greater than all their party apparatus and governmental machinery. He would be the first man to overcome them; he would show them that they could not break his spirit.

V

He had only a few minutes' rest before they came for him again. They took him back to the same investigation room; but there was another examiner. Lanny could guess that the last one had been a higher official who had tried a special technique. Now there was to be a change.

This new one was as different as a man could be. He had a long head and a weasel's face; he glared at Lanny, and before he spoke he bared his teeth like an animal. His first words were: 'Sit down, _ti sobaka_! You dirty Fascist dog!' He turned on the light at once, and when Lanny put up his hands over his eyes he shouted, 'Put your hands down'. When Lanny said naïvely, 'The light hurts me', he replied, 'You will keep your hands down; if you put them up again I will have them handcuffed behind your back'.

So it was to be war this time; what William Blake called 'mental fight'. Lanny braced himself to face that dreadful light; he clenched his hands, and set his teeth, and he started a clamour of petition inside himself. The man sensed what was going on, and it made him furious; he raged and stormed; but Lanny went on with his silent cries, 'God is helping me! God is helping me!'

The man went over all the old ground, making fantastic charges and demanding that Lanny admit them. He asked a hundred questions about Fritz Meissner; Fritz, he knew, had been one of Lanny's agents in the plot to take Stalin's life. Where had Fritz Meissner gone, whom had he met, what had he said, what had he done? Lanny had planted firmly in his mind, both the conscious and the unconscious, that he must make no statement whatever about Fritz Meissner, for the lad might still be alive. The only wise thing was to say that Fritz had been trying to locate paintings for Lanny, and nothing else.

That infuriated the man. He seemed to sense that this wasn't true. Or perhaps it was just his technique; he had trained himself to work up these furies; they were his stock-in-trade. He tried his best to frighten Lanny; he threatened him with all kinds of physical torments, with beatings and mutilations; he went into the details about torturing techniques. He became terribly abusive and revealed the fact that his imagination was captured by ideas of filth, of excrements, sexual perversions, and other nastiness. When he didn't know the German words he used the Russian words, and as it happened Lanny didn't know the four-letter words in Russian; he could only observe that they appeared to have many more letters.

The menaces had no effect, because the prisoner had passed beyond the possibility of fear; he no longer cared what they might do to him. His pride had been aroused, or his self-will. He had been like a man clinging to an overturned boat in a raging sea; he had been battered and half smothered, but now the storm had become like something in a dream; he was aloof from it, he could look at it and not fear it. His eyes were like two balls of fire, and every bone in his body ached, but he was above it all, away from it all; he was rapt in a kind of ecstasy, saying to himself that God was here, and God was living, and God was helping him. The more the examiner raged and stormed the greater became Lanny's exaltation. God really was hearing him, God really was helping him! 'Through the greatness of thy power shall thine enemies submit themselves unto thee.... For lo, thine enemies, O Lord, for, lo, thine enemies shall perish!... Yea, the fire of thine enemies shall devour them.... And the souls of thine enemies, them shall he sling out, as out of the middle of a sling'.

This went on for hours; time did not matter, time no longer existed. It went on until the inquisitor's voice began to crack. He showed signs of exhaustion; it was a violent act that he was putting on. He pressed a button, and an attendant came, and he ordered food—food for both himself and his victim—a singular thing, almost comical. He was threatening to kill his victim, but the victim had to be kept alive in order to hear the threats of killing. He must not be allowed to die—not until he had signed the confession they wanted.

So the attendant brought food; he put it on the end of the desk, in front of Lanny, and stood solemnly and watched him eat every morsel of it. Lanny had known of nothing stranger since the days of the suffragettes in England, when they had not been permitted to die on a hunger strike.

He asked to go to the lavatory, and the attendant took him and then brought him back. He was seated again on the torture stool, and the demon man hit the desk with his fist and started on his routine. He went over all the details of Lanny's dastardly conspiracy. The examiner called him all the foul names he could think of, in German, in Russian, and a few English. He told him what a scoundrel and an assassin he was, and what a harlot his mother had been. He described all of his physical organs and how they would be crushed and destroyed; and through all the screaming and the pounding Lanny lifted himself to the high dwelling place of that Power which had made and which sustained him, giving him that 'courage never to submit or yield, and what is else not to be overcome?'

VI

Apparently the torturer had no watch. He went on until the warders came and told him his time was up. Lanny was escorted back to his cell and more food was brought; as before, the warders stood and watched him eat it, and stood for some time afterward, apparently having the idea that Lanny might try to get rid of it.

Lanny lay down and got a blessed rest, but he was sure it wouldn't last for long; and so it was. Almost immediately, it seemed, he was reawakened and led back to the torture chamber. It was Number One again, the man who had been alternately polite and angry.

When the examiner turned on the light again he insisted that he had been ordered to do it and had no alternative. He was very sorry indeed that Accused Budd persisted in subjecting himself to this unpleasant experience. It was all so needless, all so futile; all he had to do was to sign the confession which would be prepared; he was going to have to sign it anyway in the end, so why not sooner? The whole reel was played over again, but this time Lanny was weaker, and several times he came near toppling off the stool. A warder had to come and hold him by the shoulders while the questons were asked. This was a fatherly procedure, but Lanny was hardly aware of it; he had lost the awareness of his own body, which was a bundle of pain and had to be left in a place off by itself.

The questioner had gone back to Moscow, to those days when Lanny and Laurel had been flown there from China. To the inquisitor it seemed inconceivable that a man could have talked with Stalin and failed to be completely converted to the Communist cause. That he had gone away and become an enemy of the Soviet regime could mean only that he had an enemy all the time, that he had had treachery in his heart, and had been using his opportunity to find out everything he could about where Stalin lived, what his habits were, and how it might be possible for a hired assassin to get access to him. That was the thesis that Lanny was being invited to subscribe to, and his refusal could mean only that he was the more stubborn, the more dangerous foe. Hundreds of questions were asked of him, all centred around that one supreme personality, that substitute God who had been set up for the Soviet people to worship.

Whom had he met in Moscow? He could guess, of course, that this question meant trouble and suspicion for any person he named. One person had been his Red uncle, Jesse Blackless; Jesse was dead—Stalin had told Lanny that on Lanny's last visit to Moscow. Maybe it wasn't true, but anyhow the Russians well knew that Jesse was Lanny's uncle, and Lanny could add to his trouble by naming him. Also, he had met Hansi and Bess in Moscow and had attended a concert which they had given there, almost within sound of the guns; but he wasn't going to name them.

He bethought himself of the various Soviet officials he had met. To name them might get them into trouble, but he owed them no particular duty. To have refused to name any of them would have looked suspicious and made more trouble for himself; and surely he had enough already. If he made trouble for Soviet officials, why should he worry? If he helped a little to disorganise their government, that would be so much to the good. So he came down from his heavenly dwelling place and named everybody he could think of with whom he had discussed the political situation in Moscow, everyone with whom he had so much as shaken hands. He saw that this gave great satisfaction to the inquisitor—he was getting something after all! Lanny thought, Let them stew in their own juice. And he went away again to dwell in the secret recesses of his soul.

That continued until he fainted again and toppled off the stool. The polite inquisitor was able to catch him, so he did no more harm to his sore shoulder. The warders were summoned, and the prisoner was taken back to his cell and fed again—more cabbage soup and bread. Then he was allowed to drop down on his cot, while the warders stood outside and watched him through the little window in the steel door. This process of in and out, off and on, continued until the victim lost all sense of time and everything in his memory became a blur.

VII

But his subconscious mind continued to be active; and the subconscious mind of a human being, any human being, is a mysterious and wonderful thing, the least studied and perhaps the most significant of all things in the universe. It performs an infinitude of complicated tasks; it keeps the heart beating, fast or slow according to the body's needs; it keeps the chest expanding and the diaphragm pressing down to draw breath into the lungs; it keeps the blood circulating at unbelievable speed through a multitude of tiny channels; it sorts out the needed food elements and supplies them to exactly the right places; it picks out the waste elements and ejects them through the appointed vents. Above all, it cherishes millions of memories and supplies them on request. Who, for example, could count the millions of musical notes that were stored away in the mind of a musician like Hansi Robin, enabling him to stand before an audience with the certainty of producing tens of thousands of them in precisely the right order and at precisely the right fraction of a second?

Two ideas had been planted in the confused mind of Lanny Budd. These ideas had sunk down into his subconscious; they had taken root there, and after the fashion of living things they had begun to grow and develop a life, a pattern, of their own. The first of these ideas was that it could do no harm to name Communists and to cause them confusion; they were causing him all the confusion they could, having a philosophy of bringing confusion to their opponents. In the old and more robust days of England there had been a stanza in the national anthem which proposed trouble for that island's enemies:

Confound their politics,

Frustrate their knavish tricks,

On Thee our hopes we fix,

God save us all.

That surely described the attitude of the modern Reds, though they had a new Trinity to call upon—Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. And surely it was right for Lanny to turn their techniques against themselves, to hoist them with their own petard! And that applied to all Communists—to every last single one!

The second idea had to do with the Reds in America. The Number Three Examiner, the vile-tempered one whom Lanny had taken to calling 'the Weasel', had brought up this subject for the first time. This Weasel had full information about Bess, her activities, her trial and conviction, and he took it as proof of a special malignance on the part of her brother that he had had such an opportunity to understand the Communist movement and yet spurned it. The torturer had demanded Lanny's explanation of the phenomenon and had suggested that Lanny might have been one of those who betrayed Bess to the class enemy. So he had planted a seed in Lanny's mind, and it had dropped to the place where ideas took on a life of their own and began to combine with other ideas and form projects, solutions, hypotheses, inventions—all those phenomena which are sometimes called proofs of genius and sometimes of insanity.

However this may be, when Lanny was aroused from his slumber and led away to his next torment, he found in his mind a project, complete, mature, perfectly formed, like Athena sprung from the head of Zeus. He didn't have to consider it, to debate it with himself, to change it in any way; it was all ready for him, a free gift, a miracle. And who could blame him if he took it as an answer to his prayers?

VIII

He was led to the examination room. It was the turn of Number Two, the elderly man who was so polite and pretended to be fatherly. Lanny had hoped that it might be this one, and it was another answer to prayer. He was seated on the stool, and the warders went out, and the light was turned into his eyes.

'Citizen Examiner', said Lanny promptly, 'I have to tell you of a change of mind. I have decided that your advice was good. I am no longer able to go on, and I have a proposition to make to you'.

'Ah!' exclaimed the other, beaming. 'That is happy news indeed, Mr Budd. If only you had listened to me earlier!'

'I am sorry, but I had to make the test. I don't know whether you will be willing to accept my proposition. It will take some time to state it, and I would like to ask a favour in the meantime'.

'What is that?'

'I should like to be allowed to lie down on the floor. This stool has become a torment to me, and I am really not able to think while sitting on it'.

'The proposal is somewhat irregular, Mr Budd; but since you have a concession to make I suppose I may make one also'.

So Lanny let himself down gently on his back and lay flat. The light was turned off, and he began, 'Citizen Examiner, I cannot accept your proposition that I plotted to kill Stalin because that is not true, and I cannot bring myself to sign a statement accusing myself of such an infamy. But it has occurred to me what I can do that may have great importance to you: I can tell you what I know about the Communist party in the United States'.

'We already know a great deal about the subject, Mr Budd—'

'I know, but you don't know what I know. I can tell you the names of persons in your movement in New York and elsewhere who are secret agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation'.

Experienced and carefully trained operatives of the M.V.D. or the M.G.B. do not show their emotions easily, but Lanny could recognise a change in the tone of his persecutor as he said, 'That might possibly be of interest to us, Mr Budd'.

'My proposition is this: You will drop your story that I know anything about a conspiracy against Stalin's life and will accept instead my information just referred to. I will tell you all that I know and will answer all your questions so far as I can. You will accept that as my ransom and will release me and return me to West Berlin. The information I give you will be confidential and for your own use, and you will not make it publicly known that I have given it'.

The inquisitor wrote every word of this on his pad before he answered; so Lanny had time to think and prepare himself for whatever might be coming.

'You must understand, Mr Budd, you are asking a great deal of us. How are we to know if what you tell us is true?'

'Citizen Examiner, how were you to know whether what I told you about Stalin was true? I am quite sure that you knew all the time that it was not true; and the fact that I preferred to undergo this suffering rather than tell a colossal lie ought to give you some idea of my attitude toward the truth. It will take you a long time to investigate and verify what I tell you, and certainly I am not going to agree to stay in jail all that period. I feel reasonably certain that when you hear what I have to tell you you will realise that it is, and must be, the truth. I assure you that it will be of much more usefulness to you than any statement I might possibly make about Stalin. If I were to sign the statement that you have asked me to, I cannot see how it would be of much use to you—unless you are looking for a pretext to shoot me. Otherwise I would certainly go out and contradict it, and everybody in the world outside the Communist party would know that my repudiation was the truth. We have learned of too many other persons who have been forced to sign statements which were obviously untrue'.

'A decision like that is beyond my authority', said the examiner. 'I will have to consult my superiors'.

So the warders were called; they helped Lanny up from the floor and half led, half carried him back to his cell. There he lay on the cot once more, and he thought: I don't believe they will take my word. I don't believe they will keep their word if they give it. If I tell them the truth they won't believe me. If I tell them falsehoods they won't be sure. They will investigate and still they won't be sure. But they will be in a state of anxiety and will waste a lot of effort. They will acquire distrust for some persons who at present are helpful to them. The usefulness of those persons will be destroyed, and their movement will become that much less efficient—which is what I want. They have used trickery on me, and so I will use trickery on them. They believe in wholesale lying, and I will adopt their code. I will spare none of them—not even the one I love! Not even my own sister!

That was all there was to it. Whatever happened, he had gained a few minutes' respite. He began to tell himself that God would give him sleep, and he fell asleep.

IX

When they routed him out and took him into the interrogation chamber his friendly enemy was again at the desk. 'Mr Budd', he said, 'I am authorised to accept your proposition. It must be understood that what you tell us will be something of real importance. Otherwise, no deal'.

Said the prisoner, 'What I have to tell you is important. If your superiors do not recognise its importance it will be because they do not intend to keep their word'.

'My dear Mr Budd', said the older man with a pained look, 'you must not say things like that. Surely you know it is not proper for me to hear them'.

The deadly light was not flashed on, and Lanny was not merely permitted to lie on the floor, he was helped into another room in which there was a couch upon which he could lie. A warder unfolded a little table, and the inquisitor placed his writing pad thereon. He had brought several pads, evidently expecting extensive revelations.

Lanny started to talk. He told about one New York Communist after another, saying that he was an anti-Communist and had been recruited into the party under instructions of the F.B.I. Lanny didn't choose any of the prominent ones; he knew if he told the examiner that William Z. Foster was a federal stooge he might not be believed. He named those earnest party workers who were Bess's friends, who had haunted her home and made Hansi so miserable that he had been accustomed to seek refuge in his own study and his music. For a year or two Hansi had been telling Lanny about them, their party names, their occupations, their personal appearances, their services to the cause.

Lanny had plenty of time to assemble the facts and weigh them in his mind, for the elderly inquisitor wrote slowly and set down every single word. Only after Lanny had named half-a-dozen men and women did the other inquire, 'But, Mr Budd, how does it come about that you know these things?'

Lanny's answer made the man start, in spite of all the poise he had been able to cultivate in twenty years or so. 'I know it on the best possible authority', Lanny said. 'It is because my sister Bessie Budd Robin, is herself an F.B.I. agent'.

'But, Mr Budd', protested the other, 'how can that be when your sister has been convicted and sent to prison?'

'How could it be otherwise, Citizen Examiner? Ask yourself what would have happened if she had made known a conspiracy to the F.B.I., and they had arrested all the other conspirators and left her out. Surely your own M.G.B. must have protected its own agents in the same way'.

'Yes, Mr Budd, of course. But to go to such an extreme—to keep her in jail and sentence her to ten years!'

'The longer the sentence the more surely she is protected. As to being in jail, she was only in jail for a few days, and they were all well treated. The rest of the time she was out on bail, and she is out on bail now so far as I know and able to go on with her party work'.

'It seems utterly preposterous to us, Mr Budd'.

'Of course, and it seems preposterous to me; but that is the way it is in America, and you can easily verify it. The case has been appealed, and it will be a long time before the Court of Appeals gets to it. Then it will be carried to the next highest court; it will be carried all the way to the United States Supreme Court. I don't know how long this will take, a couple of years perhaps. It may be that some court can be told to grant her a retrial; then before the case comes up again the government will discover that the witnesses have disappeared, and it may quietly drop the case'.

'All this sounds fantastic, Mr Budd. But pray go on. What caused your sister to take up this career?'

'For a long time she was a sincere party member. But she saw so much corruption among the high party leaders; they were living in penthouses and enjoying all the luxuries of the upper bourgeoisie. They spent their time in night clubs, they spent their time chasing women, they made free with the young party girls; they raised money for various causes, for workers' defence, for aid to refugees, and so on, and they put that money into their own pockets and had a good time. She saw that the party comrades were not like the devoted ones she had known in Russia. At the same time she was displeased by the foreign policies of the Soviet Union; she considered that the policies of the Cominform were not truly international but were becoming more and more nationalist. She heard stories about the great number of persons in concentration camps—in short, she began to lose her enthusiasm. Also, there was family pressure. I think what broke her down more than anything else was her discovery that Soviet agents had been getting the secrets of our father's airplane factories. You can understand, I am sure, how that displeased her'.

'I can understand very easily, Mr Budd. It is a great mistake of the American comrades to put their trust in members of the capitalist class. It would never have occurred to me to trust your sister as a party comrade'.

'Nor to trust me either', said Lanny. 'Both of us have had easy lives, and we cannot share your willingness to make sacrifices. Anyhow, Bess came to me and told me what she had learned about what was going on at the Budd-Erling plant. I told my father about it, and he took it to the F.B.I. Because Bess had lived in Moscow and been considered a great artist there, the F.B.I. saw this as an opportunity to penetrate the party organisation. They persuaded her to go on posing as a party member and to work her way as high up in the organisation as possible. This is what she has been doing; she has known practically everybody of importance in the party and has reported their secrets to the American authorities. That is the story, and I am sure you will admit that it is really an important one'.

'Yes, Mr Budd, I admit that. But, tell me, why are you willing to tell me all this when you refused to admit the truth of the other story?'

'The reason is that the other isn't true and this one is. I think my sister has done her share of hard work, and I don't relish having everybody I know think of her as a jailbird. When this story is known, her usefulness to the government will be ended, and they will have to turn her loose. If I too am released, we can both of us lead our normal bourgeois lives again'.

That sounded completely plausible to the examiner. He spent several hours questioning Lanny about the smallest details of the persons involved, and when Lanny said he had told all he knew he was ordered back to his cell. More food was brought to him, better food, and after he had eaten it he was allowed to lie down and sleep. This time they promised not to come after him in a few minutes; this time he was to be a privileged guest!
BOOK TEN

Thy Friends Are Exultations

28 DEUS EX MACHINA

I

Lanny had no means of knowing how long he was left undisturbed; he knew only that when he was routed out of his slumber he had the feeling that it had been a very short time. It was a torture to be dragged back into a consciousness full of pain. The warders lifted him, saying again and again the word 'examination'. They led him out into the passageway and by the familiar route; when the door was opened Lanny saw to his dismay that it was the same old room, and behind the desk sat Number Three, the vile, evil-faced person whom he called the Weasel.

His heart sank; it was the worst moment of the entire ordeal when they seated him on the narrow stool of agony and turned that hideous light into his eyes. The warders went out, and the evil one sat glaring at him. 'So you thought you could make fools out of us!' he sneered.

Lanny murmured, 'I don't know what you mean'. And the other went on to call him a Fascist ape and a counter-revolutionary imbecile and other such conventionalised names. Lanny was genuinely bewildered and asked, 'Have you read the statement I made to the last examiner?'

'I have read every word of it', declared the other. 'You insult our intelligence when you think that you can palm off on us a lot of old stuff out of your trash basket'.

'Old stuff?' echoed Lanny.

'We knew every bit of that—it is all in our records'.

Lanny had been prepared to be double-crossed. He had had only half a hope that they would keep a promise. He was prepared to have them say that they didn't believe a word of what he had told them—even while they went on to investigate it and to act upon it. But to have them tell him it was old stuff and they knew it already—that was fantastic, beyond belief. Their subtlety was more subtle than even his imaginings. If he had not been so utterly exhausted he would have burst out laughing. As it was, he could only murmur, 'I had no means of knowing what you would know'.

That set the man off on a boastful tirade in which he assured his victim how utterly helpless he was before the omniscience and omnipotence of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. All the machinations of the bourgeois enemies were in vain, and the prophecy of the Communist hymn was coming true, the 'Internationale' would be the human race. The conclusion of the discourse was that Lanny was going to sign the full confession of his vile plot against the life of Stalin; there would be no respite for him until he did so, and the quicker he made up his mind to it the better chance he would have of saving his sanity and his life.

It was a cruel disillusion, and for a while the victim was tempted to despair; his last hope was gone, and he might as well give up. But deep within him was that hard core of stubbornness; he had made up his mind that he would never give up, that he would conquer these people or die in the attempt. He clenched his hands and began to say, 'God is helping me. God is helping me'. He really went to it this time, for there was nothing else he could do. This was the final conflict, exactly as the Communist hymn proclaimed it. This time there would be no metaphysical speculations, no dialectical ingenuities, no psychologising about suggestion or autosuggestion. This time it was God, the living God, the God of our fathers, known of old:

Other refuge have I none;

Hangs my helpless soul on Thee;

Leave, ah! leave me not alone,

Still support and comfort me.

So there was a duel of wills, no new thing in the biographies of the martyrs and the saints. The devil as a roaring lion walketh about, and he assails the man of God and threatens him with fire and sword and destruction. The holy one closes his eyes and prays and endures and is justified of his faith. As Heine has written of a very different subject, it is an old story and yet it sounds always new.

This Number Three was well fitted to play the role of the devil as a roaring lion; he was a creature of hate. It might be, of course, that he didn't really feel hate but cultivated the appearance as a technique. If so, he was a good actor; he stormed, he screamed, he shook his fists in Lanny's face, and once he struck him in the face. Lanny closed his eyes and endured. He said that God would give him strength to endure; he implored God to give him strength to endure, and somehow he endured.

The man went over the whole imbecile and sickening story of a plot against Stalin's life. Lanny always answered, because to be silent would be taken as assent. 'I know nothing about it, I was not present there, I never paid the money, I never met this man, I never heard that name', and so on, world without end—but there was no amen. Lanny's eyes became two balls of fire, he swayed on the stool, and when he toppled the man stood over him, jerked him straight and held him.

II

The ordeal was suspended, and they brought him food. He didn't want it, but he was ordered to eat it. The devil in the form of a roaring lion threatened to ram it down his throat, and so he ate.

And then the battle was resumed. He was exhausted, dazed, and he didn't know quite what he was doing. He began to murmur aloud, 'God is helping me. God is helping me'. The man heard him but couldn't make out what he was saying and told him to speak louder. He didn't know what the English words meant, and he pressed a button and sent a warder for another man who knew English. This man came in and sat watching the proceedings. Apparently they had the idea that Lanny was breaking down and was about to give way.

The prisoner was too far gone to realise just what was happening. The questioning went on; he murmured his formula again, and the new man translated it for the examiner. It had the effect of driving him into a new frenzy; he had a new set of epithets to hurl at his victim, a new set of challenges and taunts. 'If thou be the Son of God, come down from the cross!'

Poor devil, poor lion!—no doubt he had been reading _Krokodil_ , the supposedly comic publication of the Soviet Union, and perhaps the _Godless One_ , an earlier weekly paper in which the Reds had poured ridicule upon the opium of their people. It was possible that somewhere deep in his soul the man had a sneaking idea that God might possibly exist and was afraid of Him. Anyhow, he had sense enough to realise that it was this idea in Lanny's mind which was giving him the courage, the determination, to hold out against the questioning. After he had got through calling names he endeavoured to reason with the victim, to persuade him that it was beneath the dignity of a civilised man of the twentieth century to cling to such childish notions. Lanny did not try to answer; he had no strength left for any superfluous words; he just kept his eyes closed against the light and went on pounding his formulas into his own mind. Lanny's God in this crisis was a practical God, one to be made use of and not to be argued about. Lanny's God was saving him from feeling pain.

He was a mighty God, and mightier than the holy trinity of Bolshevism: Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. The examiner devil, the roaring lion, roared himself out before he roared Lanny out. The perspiration gathered faster on the man's brow than he could wipe it away—the light was at his back, but the heat was everywhere. His voice began to crack, and finally he gave up. He gave his victim one last assurance that he would be beaten in the end, that a whole relay of examiners would be put to work if necessary. Then he summoned the warders and ordered the victim back to his cell. The victim was unable to rise from the stool, and the warders had to put strong arms around his waist, hoist him up, and, leaning sideways, carry about two-thirds of his weight along the corridor.

III

This torturing went on for several more times. Lanny lost the power to keep count. Days and nights were all the same, and only pain existed. He had only two thoughts: the first was not to give up; the second, to die, and thus escape. Exhausted, he fell into a deep sleep; and as usual he had no idea whether it was half an hour or several times as long. The two warders dragged him out of that sleep, and it took both of them. They lifted him up and put one of his arms around each of their necks, and walked him down the corridor. They did not say ' _ispitanie_ '—examination, they just said ' _poshol_ '—come. They were taking him down a flight of stone stairs, and he wondered if this was to be some new kind of torture or if perchance he was to be mercifully shot in the back of the neck. Presumably they had some quiet place in the cellar where they did that and where they could conveniently wash away the blood. Whatever was coming was bound to be unpleasant, so he would not make the mistake of giving way to hope. He continued saying his prayer and thinking about nothing else. 'Other refuge have I none!'

After being helped through several corridors he emerged into a spacious, high-ceilinged place. He saw large double steel gates and an armed guard sitting by them. He saw a large desk or counter; behind it sat a man, and in front of it stood another man in military uniform, a Soviet officer. Lanny was half led, half carried to this counter. To his confused mind came the thought, I'm being taken away! And then the thought, I'm surely going to be shot! He looked at the officer and saw that he was smooth-shaven, good-looking, rather amiable; but he knew from experience that officers could look like that and still order shooting when it was called for.

There was some conversation in Russian, which Lanny could not follow. There was a bit of business to be transacted; the officer signed a paper, presumably a receipt for this prisoner. Then he spoke to the warders who were holding the prisoner, and they walked the prisoner to the double gates of barred steel. The guard rose and drew back one of the gates. There was a heavy wooden door beyond it, and he opened that. The officer spoke again, and the warders put their arms around Lanny's waist, half lifted him off the ground, and without a word walked him through the open doorway and down half-a-dozen steps. There was a high wall with heavy gates, and one of these was swung open before them.

It was night and the street was empty, except for a car waiting at the curb. Lanny was shoved in, half falling. The officer followed at once, and the car started up. All around this prison were ruins, but Lanny didn't see them. All he knew was that the officer leaned over to him and whispered quickly, 'This is a rescue! I am taking you to West Berlin'.

IV

It was a moment before Lanny could take in the meaning of those words. His heart gave a great leap; but at once the scepticism he had learned with so much pain asserted itself. This must be a trick, he told himself. But no—his dizzy mind tried to sort out the thoughts—there could be no need for such a trick, the Soviet Army had plenty of men to transport prisoners, and it would not have such a menial task performed by one officer.

Lanny found sudden strength; he had called for help and he had got it! 'Who are you?' he murmured, and the answer was, 'I am a friend'.

A friend! Lanny guessed that he was not supposed to ask, but he was permitted to think, and the power of thought came back to him. 'Has my arrest become known?' he asked. He used the word arrest deliberately; he was talking to a Russian, a stranger, and he thought the word kidnapping might be offensive.

'The papers in the West have been full of it', was the reply. 'R.I.A.S. has been talking about it day and night'.

The car had swung round a corner, and then another, as if to throw off pursuit. A minute or two later it ground to a halt. They could not have gone more than two or three blocks, Lanny was helped out and saw an entrance to the _Untergrundbahn_ , the Berlin subway. 'Senefelderplatz' read the sign.

He knew that this was the quickest and safest of ways to get into West Berlin. Thousands of workers lived in the East and worked in the West, or vice versa. They came and went for all purposes, and there was as yet no way to inspect them, to sort them out; many might be riding from one station in the East to another station in the East. In the middle of the night there would not be much traffic, but unless the alarm had been given there would be no enemy keeping watch.

They found no enemy; the officer helped Lanny down the stairs, paid the pfennigs of the fare, and they stood on the platform until the train came. The effort and excitement had been too much for Lanny; he found that he was growing dizzy, and his rescuer, who was carrying a suitcase in one hand, had difficulty holding him up. The train came along, the doors were opened, and Lanny was half carried in and let down into a seat. The few passengers in the car showed little interest, and the officer whispered with a smile, 'Don't worry; they will think you are drunk'. Lanny was willing to have it that way; he leaned his head on the other's shoulder and, incredibly, fell sound asleep.

V

He was used to finding it hard to be aroused from slumber and to suffer pain. His thoughts were in a whirl. Which would it be, Number One, Number Two, or Number Three? It took seconds for him to realise that he was no longer in the hands of the torturers; it would be weeks before he could waken from sleep without a throb of terror. The heaven-sent Russian spoke reassuring words, lifted him from his seat, and half walked, half carried him out of the car, on to the platform, and up the steps. 'Cheer up!' he said. 'It's all right now. We're in West Berlin—well inside!'

They stood on the sidewalk and breathed the fresh air, the free air—how different it was, how marvellous! They were safe now; it was conceivable that the enemy might send scout cars to look for them in the West sector; but the chances of being found in this vast city were slim indeed.

Lanny couldn't stand, and the nearest place to sit was the curb. The street was unlighted, and there was no one to observe them. The officer opened his suitcase and became suddenly very active; he explained that he was changing his uniform for a civilian suit. 'If your military police should see a Soviet officer they would ask for my pass, and they might send me back where I came from'.

'Who are you?' Lanny asked. And the answer was, 'My name is Tokaev. I'm a regular officer of the Soviet Army with the rank of engineer lieutenant-colonel'.

'But why have you helped me?'

'You have a friend. It is better not to ask about him. Suffice it that you are here'.

Lanny didn't ask; but he couldn't keep from thinking, and there could be but one answer in his mind: Heinrich Graf Einsiedel! Lanny had helped him, and he had said that if the chance came he would do as much in return. And the chance had come! They had joked about it. The _Untersuchungsgefängnis_!

'But they will arrest you when you go back!' Lanny exclaimed.

'I'm not going back. I had already made up my mind to come across. They suspect me as an enemy of the regime. I have had four warnings from my friends. The government has ordered me to Moscow, and I know what that means. They don't want to arrest me in East Berlin, because I'm too well known'. He went on to explain, 'I'm a colonel of the Soviet Military Administration; I'm employed as an expert on questions of aviation, rockets and reactive technology, and science. There are hundreds of subordinates and students who know me, and if I were arrested here it would make a scandal. but in Moscow it can be done quietly; I will just disappear. So I decided to come across; and it was suggested that I take you with me'.

'You have a family?' Lanny asked.

'I have a wife and a child. They are already across. They went for a stroll yesterday'.

Lanny said, 'I owe my life to you. I will do what I can to repay you'. Then he had to put himself in the young colonel's arms to keep from falling over. 'I'm dizzy', he said. 'I think I need some food. I have had almost nothing'.

They looked around them and saw that the station of the _Untergrundbahn_ was close to one of those 'villages' which are scattered everywhere in great cities. Once these were actual villages, and then they became suburbs; the city grew around them, and they became shopping centres. The two fugitives saw the lighted sign of a little all-night cafe, and Lanny was half carried to it and set down at a table.

'Don't take too much', cautioned Tokaev, and Lanny assented. He thought that a cup of coffee and a bowl of soup would be about right, and when it came he exclaimed with wonder over its flavour. There was a radio set in the little café. R.I.A.S. was playing 'The Beautiful Blue Danube', and Lanny's whole being danced with it. Berlin was beautiful too! Beautiful blasted Berlin!

VI

The escapee's strength came back miraculously; he still had pain, but he forgot it and plied his new-found friend with questions. How long had he, Lanny, been in the clutches of the Reds? He had lost all sense of time.

Tokaev said it had been seven days and nights. Lanny replied, 'I don't know if I could have held out much longer. I had just about lost my wits'.

'What did they want of you?' asked the other.

'They wanted me to confess that I had plotted to kill Stalin'.

'They had prescience!' exclaimed Tokaev. 'It may happen any day; but it will not do any good. Malenkov will supplant him, and Malenkov will be worse. Stalin is old and cautious; Malenkov is younger and brash. He looks like a scullion'.

'You know them?' Lanny asked, thinking it was a polite question; and the reply was, 'I know them both well. I must tell you that I am holder of the Red Banner and Order of Lenin lecturer, and former lecturer at the Military Air Academy in Moscow'.

Evidently they had taught him English; he spoke formally and precisely, as if out of a book. He continued, 'For several years I lived and worked in close contact with the highest representatives of the Soviet Communist party, the Soviet youth movement, the trade unions, and our own military oligarchy. I penetrated the inner sanctum of the Politburo and had frequent meetings with Stalin himself. On many occasions I heard from his own lips and those of his closest collaborators direct and frank pronouncements on internal and world affairs, in unofficial as well as official surroundings'.

'My God!' exclaimed Lanny. 'You will have things to tell our side!'

'I will tell them all that I know. I have a lot of technical stuff, for I was acting professor of the Moscow Institute of Engineers of Geodesy and Aerophotography, with the diploma of Engineer Mechanic. I was also subprofessor of construction, soundness, design, and aerodynamics of aircraft. I will look to you to put me in touch with the proper authorities and help me in getting permission to stay in the West'.

'I will be happy indeed to do that', said Lanny, 'and I am sure I'll be able to'. Then he added, 'Tell me, is our mutual friend determined to stay on?'

'Our friend is a brave man, and he will stay so long as he thinks he can be of service. You must not speak his name to anyone under any circumstances'.

'I will not speak it even to you', said Lanny with a smile. He was able to smile again—something he thought he had forgotten. 'You were a brave man yourself', he added.

The colonel insisted that it was nothing. The group to which he belonged had blanks of various documents, permits, and so on, which had been stolen, and it was a fairly simple matter to imitate the scrawled signature of the Marshal of the Soviet Union, Comrade Vasili Danilovich Sokolovsky. 'Poor Vasili Danilovich, he will feel very much hurt when he finds out about me, because it will give him a black mark that will never be erased from his record. But he has known for some time that I do not approve of his regime; he knows that he himself is no longer a soldier of the people but an executor of the will of tyrants. Mr Budd, I do not have to ask about your experience in that Prenzlauerberg prison. I have been on the Conveyor myself, and I bear on my body the many scars which the N.K.V.D. inflicted. No one in the Soviet Union is safe against their intrigues. If you develop any form of ability and get any position of responsibility there are persons who envy you and spy upon you and tell lies about you. You are not safe if you are inside, because you have rivals in the organisation as well as the enemies you have made outside, and sooner or later you will be pulled down and destroyed. We are both of us out of it and we can count it a good night's work'.

VII

They sat chatting while Lanny let his food digest and its energy be distributed throughout his organism. Presently the music stopped and R.I.A.S. began giving the news—of course in the German language. Tokaev understood it, and both of them listened attentively. Presently Lanny heard in the quiet, routine voice of the broadcaster a statement that gave him a start.

'Mrs Lanning Prescott Budd, wife of the kidnapped American broadcaster, today paid a visit to Marshal Sokolovsky in East Berlin, accompanied by Colonel Slocum of General Clay's staff. She went by appointment, and the marshal received her courteously and gave her the assurance that he knew nothing whatever about the whereabouts of her husband. Returning to the American sector, Mrs Budd stated that she is unable to accept the marshal's assurance. She is certain that her husband has been kidnapped and taken to the Soviet zone, and she cannot believe that the marshal is ignorant of such an action. She stated over R.I.A.S. last evening that to make such an assumption would be to accuse the marshal of gross negligence and incompetence'.

'My wife!' exclaimed Lanny. Somehow in all the confusion of his mind and in all his thinking about Laurel it had not occurred to him that she would take a plane to Berlin. But of course! She would have flown first to Washington, to appeal to the authorities there and to get her passport; then she would have taken the first plane and would have been laying siege to Monck and to General Clay and to R.I.A.S.—to everybody she could get hold of.

Now, of course, his first duty was to get in touch with her and let her know that he was safe. He guessed she would be at his hotel; rooms were scarce, and she would probably have taken his. There was a telephone in the café; it was set on a wall, and he wasn't sure that he could stand up to it. He asked his friend to come and hold him if need be. He called the hotel and asked for Mrs Budd; there was some delay, and he thought that perhaps she was asleep. But she would want to be disturbed. Then he heard her voice: 'Hallo', as they say on the Continent.

'Hello, darling, here I am!'

For the first time in his life he heard her scream. 'Lanny! Lanny! Where are you?'

'I'm in West Berlin. I'm all right'.

'Oh, Lanny! What have they done to you?'

'I'm all right. Don't worry, I'll be with you soon'. There was no reply; he spoke her name, waited, then spoke her name again. Still there was silence, and he could guess that she had fainted; he had never known her to do that, but this was a special occasion. Perhaps she just felt dizzy and had had to settle down on the floor. He had heard no sound of a fall.

He himself had to sit. He told Tokaev, 'I'm afraid she has fainted'. So the officer called the hotel and explained the situation. They must go to Mrs Budd's room and find out what had happened.

The pair sat and waited. The Russian said, 'You ought to notify R.I.A.S. There are a great many people who are anxious about you, and they should spread the news'.

Lanny replied, 'You do it'.

It was three o'clock in the morning, but R.I.A.S. was running all night now. Tokaev called and asked for the programme director or anyone who was in charge. He told the news: 'Lanny Budd has escaped from Prenzlauerberg Prison. He is in West Berlin. He had been questioned for seven days and nights and is exhausted, but after a rest he will come to the station'.

'Who is this calling?' asked the voice. And Tokaev said, 'It is someone who helped him to escape. Nothing is to be said about me now. You will hear Mr Budd's voice'.

So Lanny took the telephone and said, 'This is Lanny Budd. I am all right. You may announce it. No, I can't tell how I escaped, but I will tell later'.

There was no one in the little café but the proprietor. He had been listening to this conversation and was in a dither; he wanted to shake hands with Lanny Budd. 'I have listened to you on the radio', he said. 'You are Herr Fröhlich; they have been telling us about you. All the Germans have been listening. They will be so glad to hear the news'.

Lanny realised that he had again become famous. The first time was when he had testified against Göring at the Nürnberg trial. He didn't like it a bit; it was a nuisance. He would have to shake hands with a lot of people, he would have to tell the same story over and over and listen to the same comments. It was one more trouble the Reds had made for him. But they had given him more power, he realised. Many more people would listen to R.I.A.S. now; he would tell them about the Conveyor, he would make it plain to a mystified world how it could happen that man after man would sign statements confessing to crimes they had never committed. Some men had come into open court and sworn to it; they were men apparently in possession of their faculties, not dazed, not under the influence of drugs. It was an amazing phenomenon, a triumph of perverted science.

VIII

How were they to get to the hotel? There were no taxis in this neighbourhood and at this hour. The proprietor said he knew a man just around the corner who had a little truck and would take them. The proprietor would shut up the café, and they would go.

The Russian officer paid the score. Lanny's change and billfold had been taken from him, his watch, his fountain pen, his notebook—everything. The men helped him along for a distance, and the proprietor rang a bell and banged on the door and presently a sleepy man came to a window. When he was told that he would be well paid he put on his clothes and came down and got out his little truck. All three of them rode on the seat, Lanny squeezed between the other two for support. His buttocks still ached, but the man folded a blanket and put it under him.

So they drove through a city which had great gaps in every block, with half walls and girders sticking up in the moonlight. They came to their destination, the driver was paid, they went into the hotel. Lanny had to shake hands with the clerk and the elevator man and receive their congratulations and tell them that he was all right.

And so to the room and to Laurel. She flew into Lanny's arms—or rather she started to, and then she was afraid that he might fall to pieces; she stared at him in fright, he was so awful. He had a week's growth of brown whiskers and he had lost fifteen or twenty pounds; he looked like the ghost of his usually well-kept self.

'Oh, Lanny, Lanny!' She began to weep; she couldn't help herself. She told him she hadn't fainted at the telephone, she had just grown faint and had to sink down suddenly. 'Oh, what did they do to you?'

He said he would tell her by and by; he was never going to tell her all, but he didn't say that. He said he had a few bruises but nothing serious; the main thing was that he needed sleep, to lie down and forget the whole world for twenty-four hours.

Then he remembered his rescuer. He told Laurel that this officer had saved his life. So Laurel dried her tears; she was ashamed of herself, she said. She thanked the handsome Russian; she never would be able to thank him enough, but she would keep on trying. She too had had almost no sleep for seven days and nights. She too had lost weight and looked like a ghost of herself.

They must both sleep, the colonel said. He took charge of the situation in military fashion. He would get himself a room. Laurel explained, 'You won't be able to, the hotel is packed to the door. I only got this because it was Lanny's'. Tokaev said, 'Perhaps they will let me sit in a chair in the lobby. I will make out. I am a soldier'.

But Laurel wouldn't hear of that; she was a lady, and consideration for others was her deepest instinct. They had only one room and bath, but it was a large room, and there was a couch in it; the officer could sleep on that. They would shut off the telephone and sleep as long as they wanted to.

Lanny was already on the bed. He took off his coat but forgot about his shoes; he was asleep before Laurel got to him. She unlaced his shoes and took them off, but he didn't know it; he was like a log. She went into the bathroom and changed to a dressing gown and then lay down beside her husband. The officer decorously turned off the light and then took off his own coat and shoes and lay down on the couch and went to sleep.

IX

Tokaev was the first to awaken. It was late in the morning, and he saw the others sleeping soundly. He put on his coat and took his shoes in his hand and stole out into the passage. He rode down in the elevator and had a wash and a shave and a shoe-shine and then ate breakfast. There was a radio in the lobby; it was turned on in decorous volume, and several people were listening. Tokaev heard the statement that Lanny Budd had escaped from his captors in East Berlin and was now safe in the West sector. Now he was sleeping; the audience of R.I.A.S. would hear his voice later. One of the bellboys told the Russian that R.I.A.S. had been giving this item of news every half-hour. Everybody in the hotel knew that Lanny Budd was sleeping upstairs, and they were in a state of excitement about it.

Tokaev had left his hat in the room, but he did not go back for it, he was afraid of disturbing the sleepers. He got into a taxicab and gave the address of the place where his wife and child had sought refuge. They had no telephone, so he had not been able to let them know during the night.

Laurel woke up sometime in the afternoon. She was afraid to move for fear of disturbing Lanny, so she just lay still and said her prayers. Lanny had said that God was helping him, and now Laurel repeated all the words of thanksgiving she had learned in her early days. She found it easier to accept the idea of God than Lanny did; the reason was that her psychic experiences had set free her mind. She did not believe that her mind was shut up in a little bone box called a skull; she believed it was part of the universe. Herbert Spencer had said that a man could no more conceive of God than an oyster could conceive of a man.

It was night when Lanny woke up. The room was completely dark, and he had a nightmare moment; but then he felt around him and discovered a soft mattress and a pillow under his head; he remembered, it was all right, he was in his hotel room. He spoke, but no one answered. He could guess that Laurel had gone to get something to eat.

He sat up carefully. He was sore in half-a-dozen places, but he wasn't dizzy. He got to the edge of the bed and put his feet down and ventured to stand up. He could stand; he had had a rest and was all right. He didn't know where the push button was and had to search for it. Then he got the light turned on, and it dazzled his eyes; he discovered that they ached, and it would be some time before he could stand light. There was a lamp with a shade, and he turned it on and turned off the overhead light.

He sat on the bed and took off his clothes and felt himself carefully inch by inch. His shoulder was sore and there was a blue and green bruise, but he could work the shoulder in every direction and he made sure it wasn't broken. Then the same for his elbow; then for his sore behind—there was no way to break that.

He went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. He was a sight; no wonder Laurel had wept. He was dirty and wanted a bath, but he was afraid to get into the tub alone; he would wait until she came. His razor was here, but he was afraid to use it; he would let one of the hotel barbers come and shave him. They would do anything for him now; he was a celebrity!

The only trouble was they would expect him to talk. He would have to tell his story everywhere he went. It was, of course, his patriotic duty to tell it. Monck would impress that upon him, all the Army would impress it upon him. He would tell it once over R.I.A.S.; they could make a recording and then run it as often as they pleased. Yes, that was the solution; he would get a tape recording from R.I.A.S., and he would get one of those little machines, and when anyone wanted to hear his story he would take the person into a separate room, start the machine going, and then go out and shut the door! His sense of humour had come back, so he was not permanently damaged.

X

Laurel came in and took charge. She was going to watch him and make a fuss over him. He was hungry; all right, he could have some food, but only a little at a time. He could have one slice of wholewheat bread and one glass of milk and one glass of orange juice. He said that would do for a start, and she telephoned for it to be sent up. Then he had to let her see his bruises. She shed a few more tears over his emaciated body; she wanted him to go to a hospital and be examined, but he insisted that he was all right and there was nothing a hospital could do for bruises.

He told her a little of what he had been through, the parts which would not shock her too much. The bright light, the lack of sleep, and the insane project of making him confess that he had plotted to take the life of Stalin. She sat staring at him in dismay. So it really was true! She had heard these stories about what they did, but she had been only half able to believe them. They were really a mad people; it was a mad regime, they were trying to make a mad world! He told her about Tokaev, the rescue, and what he had told about himself. He had gone, no doubt, to join his family. He would have to come back because he had left his hat.

'We must do something for him, Lanny', she said—the conscientious one. He answered that he would do everthing possible. Never so long as he lived would he forget the sensations of that moment when he had realised that he was being carried out to freedom.

Laurel helped him to get a bath, keeping watch to make sure that he did not slip or grow faint. She laid out clean clothes, and he put them on. She got the barber up, so that he would no longer look a fright. Then she mentioned that Monck and Shub were waiting in the lobby. She had promised to let them see Lanny as soon as he was able; and of course Lanny wanted to see them.

They came, and he stretched out on the bed. Lanny told how the kidnapping had been accomplished and about the Conveyor—not all of it, not until Laurel was stronger and more self-contained. He told how he had been rescued by a Russian officer who had come over to the West. He didn't name the officer; the Reds would know his name, of course, but whether Tokaev would be willing for the West to hear it was a matter for him to decide.

Shub said that the news of the kidnapping had been telephoned to R.I.A.S. immediately, and R.I.A.S. had been on the air at intervals for the last week, talking about the case and making demands of the Soviet authorities. Monck told of the repeated demands which A.M.G. had made, and of Laurel's coming, and how he had taken her to see General Clay, and how the general had arranged for her to see Marshal Sokolovsky. From first to last the Soviet authorities had denied that they knew anything whatever about Lanny Budd; they hadn't even admitted it now, when R.I.A.S. had been reporting his escape for some twenty hours.

Shub excused himself; he wanted to hurry back to R.I.A.S. and put that story on the air. He said that the whole of Germany was eager for it; it was another Kasenkina case. The reporters of the press associations were clamouring to know where Lanny was, but the secret had been kept. For the first time he learned that the hotel had posted a guard outside his door during all the time he was sleeping; Laurel had ordered it and paid for it.

In one of his suitcases he had a Budd automatic. Laurel had got it out and put it under her pillow—not under his, because he was sleeping too soundly. She was the one who was keeping watch; when he went out on the streets of Berlin she would be with him, and she would have that gun in her handbag. They were back in the days of his Puritan forefathers, who had marched to church with muskets over their shoulders—and had not stacked the muskets at the door.
29 SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY

I

Colonel Tokaev came to get his hat. They made much of him, seated him in a comfortable armchair, and ordered a cold drink for him; then they listened to an extraordinary story. He took them into a place seldom visited by Americans, the holy place of Bolshevism, the conference room of the Politburo in the Kremlin, with Stalin, Molotov, Malenkov, and the rest of the inner circle discussing their policies and the date of the inevitable war— _la lutte finale!_

Tokaev was the son of a peasant in the province of Vladikavkaz, in the North Caucasus. He was five when World War I broke out and eight when the Bolsheviks seized power, so he had known nothing else. When he was nineteen the local trade union had recommended him to the Leningrad Mining Academy, and thereafter he had received an elaborate technical education under a state grant. For this he said he would always be grateful to the revolution; it was one of the good results which had been shared by millions.

But he had got the idea of freedom firmly fixed in his mind and had been revolted by the cruelties practised upon the kulaks, of whom his family was one. He didn't like being 'collectivised', and when he returned to Moscow he spoke frankly about the ruin it was bringing to the peasants; so he got into trouble with his party groups and was severely reprimanded and later on expelled. Then he got into trouble with the N.K.V.D. section in the Military Air Academy. His crime was that he had told a funny story about Stalin; and as the rumour spread it became that he was engaged in a plot against Stalin's life. That was when he was beaten and kicked into insensibility. He said, 'My boxer's physique was reduced to a skeleton, sparsely clothed in flesh and bandages'.

That had been more than ten years ago, and he had succeeded in having his case reconsidered and his record cleared. He was graduated from the Military Air Academy and taken on in their aerodynamics laboratory. Soon he became its head and a professor of the Academy.

Then came World War II. Stalin and Hitler made a deal and divided Poland; and then, in less than two years, Hitler attacked Stalin. When the Hitler forces approached Moscow the Academy was moved to Sverdlovsk, and from there Tokaev had watched what he called the 'fantastic butchery' of the war and Hitler's final defeat by that ancient ally of the Russians, General Winter. At the end of the war the colonel had been sent to Berlin as First Soviet Secretary to the Allied Control Council. He had started work in the Karlshorst mansion, soon to be known as the 'Berlin Kremlin'.

Then for the first time this Soviet officer had got a glimpse of the outside world. All his life he had been told about the 'misery' and 'poverty' of that world as compared with the happiness and prosperity enjoyed by Soviet citizens. He was astounded by what he saw. As he told Lanny and Laurel, 'The average German working-class home was a palace compared with the hovel provided for the Soviet labourer; it was graced by luxuries, such as a radio, which in Russia could have been afforded only by a party boss or a Stakhanovite'.

The Red armies had plundered and raped, and the inhabitants of Berlin fled and hid at the sight of any Russian; this had greatly hurt the feelings of the gentle colonel of aerodynamics. He watched with dismay the contradictory course of his colleagues, who wanted the Germans to love them, even at the time they were being plundered. The Reds had set up a 'House of Soviet Culture' in Unter den Linden; they fed the German population on potatoes and propaganda, while at the same time they took away all the machinery from the factories and left it to rust in the rain on the way to Russia. They had formed the Socialist Unity Party to organise the German people for political purposes; and Lanny remembered the glimpses he had got of this party through the eyes of Karl Seidl.

A presidential agent had watched these events from the American and the German points of view; it was fascinating to him now to see them from the point of view of the new enemy. After a little more than a year of these propaganda activities the Reds had felt secure enough to call a general election in Berlin. 'They had to give a gloss of democracy to what they were doing', said Tokaev. 'They were astounded when they carried less than twenty per cent of the vote, while the despised and persecuted Social Democrats polled nearly fifty per cent. They spent an enormous amount of both labour and money on the campaign, and they got nowhere'.

II

Tokaev continued his story: One day while he was in his East Berlin flat the telephone rang and he was instructed to be flown to Moscow immediately. A few minutes later there was a second call; another high officer in Moscow was ordering his immediate flight; and a few minutes later there was a third call. He was told that it was a summons to appear before the Council of Ministers and that he might see Stalin himself. Nothing must be permitted to interfere with his instant coming.

The reason for all the hullabaloo was a thing called the 'Sänger Report'. Sänger was a famous German scientist who toward the end of the war had presented to Hitler a plan for an enormous piloted rocket plane which would be capable of flying all the way across the Atlantic, dropping a bomb on New York or Washington, and coming back. A copy of this report had fallen into Tokaev's hands, and he had submitted a summary of it to the Council of Ministers. Nothing in the whole world could excite them so much as being able to drop an atomic bomb on New York and another on Washington.

The humble colonel really knew about the subject, and the first thing he knew was its enormous complications. There would have to be a comprehensive research programme, involving prolonged work by experts and the construction of many laboratories and workshops. The Soviet Union was far behind other nations in the sphere of reactive and rocket technology. To examine this Sänger project would be invaluable, because of the experience which such research would give to Soviet scientists. There were German scientists in the Soviet Union, and others in Germany who might be persuaded to come. A commission of four was appointed, and Tokaev was one of them. He began making reports, and so before long he was summoned before Stalin and the leading members of the Politburo, in that same oval conference room with which Lanny was familiar.

'This sudden rise to power was very exciting', said the colonel, 'but it was the beginning of my ruin. When Stalin asked me direct questions about the people who were working in my field, I had to tell him they were incompetent and that he would never get anything accomplished through them. I had to say these things, even in the presence of the persons, and that, of course, made them my furious enemies. The worst of all was Vasili, Stalin's son, whom he had promoted to general in the Air Force. He is an ignoramus and a fool, a man incredibly vicious and with a temper almost maniacal. He got himself appointed as the fifth member of the commission, and then he would make the most preposterous suggestions and demands; I would have to report them to Stalin, and Stalin would sit down on him, but that would only cause him to hate me more than ever.

'It was our job to locate Sänger and other German scientists and persuade them to come to Moscow to work. We were supposed to make the most eleborate promises, which we had no intention of keeping; but they did not trust us and would not come. Vasili's solution of this problem was simple: he proposed to kidnap them. It made no difference where they were, in Berlin, in Amsterdam, in Vienna or Paris, he would take them to Russia by force and make them work.

'I gave my faithful services for more than a year and saw that I was accomplishing very little. Every day I became more aware of the evil consequences of despotism, and in the end I began to associate myself with a group which was determined to end it. I was surrounded by enemies, but I had a few friends, and these began to warn me of the plots against me. I was ordered to Moscow; and you know how it is, if you are arrested in East Berlin the Germans know about it and there is a scandal, but if you are arrested in Moscow you just disappear and not a word is heard about it. So I didn't go to Moscow; I made one excuse after another. I was ordered three times, and then the M.V.D. began making things impossible for me; they took away my private telephone, they sent spies to invade my home, and my friends gave me a final warning'.

'Your story ought to be told', Lanny said, and Tokaev answered 'I will tell it when I get to England. I can say it in three words "Stalin means war!" I am one man in the free world who can say that he has been present at the inside discussions of the Politburo, with the _vozhd_. From first to last the coming of war was taken for granted as you would take for granted an axiom in geometry. The only question was, when would they be ready and sure they could win. I heard one man, Mikoyan, venture to suggest that it might be the wiser policy to improve the condition of the Russian people and spread the ideas of communism by that means. His suggestion was ignored, and I can tell my friend Mikoyan that if he ventures to broach that idea very often he will find himself out of the Politburo and in a slave-labour camp'.

III

'How did you know about me?' asked Lanny, and the answer was, 'I had heard Herr Fröhlich over the radio, and then I was told about your kidnapping. When I had decided to cross over, one of your friends came to me and said, "They've got this man in Prenzlauerberg and undoubtedly they are putting him on the Conveyor. Would you be willing to take him out with you?" I said, "How can I do it?" and the friend said, "We will provide you with the order for his release, signed by Marshal Sokolovsky. It will not be a genuine signature, of course, but it will be so good that the people at the prison will not be able to tell the difference. So I said, "All right, I will try it", and I took the chance. I admit that I was scared; but I am a colonel of the Army and they could not refuse me. They might have telephoned to headquarters and checked, but apparently they didn't, or they were too slow about it. So here we are'.

'We have no words to thank you', said Laurel fervently. 'We will do whatever we can to repay you'.

'What I want', was the reply, 'is to go to England. I have friends there and have promised to join them. It is a question of getting admission'.

'I think that should be easy', Lanny told him. 'I have a close friend who is a Member of Parliament. You will have to go to the British authorities and make application. I will send copies of the documents to my friend by airmail, and he will get busy on the case'.

'I shall call you our _deus ex machina_ ', said Laurel, and she saw the Russian looked puzzled. He knew a lot about the structure of airplane wings and jet pipes, but not so much about Greek classical drama. She explained that when those ancient playwrights had got their hero into such a mess that they could not think up a way to get him out, they brought a machine on to the stage and from it there stepped a god who set everything straight. Tokaev was amused at himself in the role of a Greek god; but he was a handsome fellow and could have served well enough.

'You were born some twenty-four hundred years too late, said Laurel, and he replied, 'Twenty-four hundred years ago I would have been a wild horseman riding the steppes'. The learned Lanny added, 'A Scythian'.

IV

Alone with her husband, Laurel told about her visit to Marshal Sokolovsky. She had laid siege to General Clay, and he had personally phoned the marshal and had sent an aide to accompany her. To obtain the pass they had had to go personally to the Kommandatura in East Berlin, and a Soviet soldier had accompanied them to the H.Q. in Karlshorst, that huge group of buildings Lanny knew so well.

A woman's eyes had noted everything, even when she was torn with anguish. First there was a reception room, where an adjutant checked the pass. Then came a writing room, with beautiful old furniture out of some castle. Then came the marshal's room, enormous, and at the end of it sat the commander before a table almost as big as a billiard table and covered with the same green baize cloth; he sat in a high-backed Queen Anne chair upholstered in red damask; there were two similar chairs on each side of the table. The great man did not rise but invited the guests to be seated.

He asked the lady to state her case, and she did so, doing her best to keep from sobbing. Then he told her, politely but coldly, that he knew nothing about the kidnapping and did not believe that it had taken place. Such rumours were continually being spread, and they were baseless, mere propaganda. He had caused special inquiry to be made in this case and was quite sure that no one in Soviet Germany would dare to conceal from him the holding of such a prisoner. He said it several times in answer to her protests and her statements about what witnesses had telephoned. 'We pay no attention to anonymous reports from malicious persons'.

All the time he was talking there stared down at the visitors from the wall a life-size portrait of a broad-shouldered man with a grim face and heavy dark moustache. He wore a military uniform with a coat somewhat too large for him, and his right hand was thrust in between the buttons at his breast, after the style of Napoleon Bonaparte. There were portraits of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, all bearded, but the _vozhd_ was the biggest and grimmest. He looked down upon his subordinate, admonishing him not to deviate by a single millimetre from the party line.

'Uncle Joe', the Americans called him in their jovial way; but Laurel saw him otherwise. She found herself brooding over him, and presently she brought her husband a poem—and this time she said it might go into paper!

Beyond the Iron Curtain

Lonely eagle, on a peak,

Safe from any rival's hate,

None to argue when you speak,

Loveless master of ill fate:

Are you happy all the day

On your icy, wind-swept throne?

Lonely, lonely bird of prey—

Gangster, with a heart of stone!

V

Lanny's strength came back, and he was taken to R.I.A.S. to tell the story of his experience. He rode in a car sent by the studio, and on the front seat beside the driver sat an armed guard, paid by Laurel. She herself had the Budd automatic in her handbag, the one which Lanny had had in his suitcase and should have been wearing at the time of his kidnapping. For one woman the cold war had turned hot, and she was firmly determined that the Reds were not going to get her husband again, not unless they came with their whole army. She had but one thought, to get him out of Berlin and out of Germany as quickly as possible.

Lanny told his story, and it was effective, they assured him. They made a recording of it and repeated it, as they had done with the Kasenkina drama. A copy would be turned over to the Voice of America and it would go all over the world. Everywhere people would be helped to realise that the Reds had become criminals, with a criminal philosophy.

Surely now Lanny's duty was done, argued the wife. There was the Peace Programme, there were the children at home, and there were all his relatives and friends waiting for him. Let him go to New York and tell the story, and then return to Edgemere and be quiet for a while. She was going to have an armed guard even there, for enemies of the Soviets had been kidnapped and murdered in America.

But Lanny couldn't bear to tear himself away from Berlin just then; there was too much excitement. The cold war seemed about to turn hot, and no one could be sure what was going to happen in the next hour. In Moscow, Stalin had received American representatives and was carrying on negotiations for ending of the blockade; in the meantime his Red hoodlums, the so-called 'action squads', were raiding the City Hall in Berlin and interfering with the newly elected City Council. The City Hall was in the East sector, and these action squads were brought in Soviet Army trucks. Representatives of R.I.A.S. were there, reporting the scene, and its announcers were assaulted, the microphone was torn from their hands, and the cable was cut. American newspapermen who tried to defend the announcers were beaten, and a man and a woman reporter were forcibly detained in the building by the Soviet Military Police. The offices of American Military Government in the City Hall were raided by these police, and government documents were taken away. Western policemen endeavouring to protect the councilmen had been jailed by the Soviet Militray Police.

Lanny had got himself a small radio set, and he would lie on the bed in his hotel room and listen to these events. Then he would call a taxi, and Laurel would go with him to R.I.A.S., to consult with the people there and give what help he could. Lanny Budd had become a symbol of these events in the eyes of all the Germans, and what he said to them about it would be heeded. He pointed out what long experience had proved, that any concession made to the Soviets was invariably taken as a sign of weakness and was followed by fresh demands, fresh aggressions. The Western powers must stand firm in this crisis, and the people of Berlin must stand with them. 'Your legislators need a vote of confidence from you', said Lanny, 'and we Allies need it also'.

How was that vote to be cast? The Social-Democratic party, which had polled almost half of the votes in the recent city election, was the proper group to take the leadership in this struggle. The chairman of that party appeared on R.I.A.S. and called for an assemblage of all Berliners in front of the Reichstag building, to declare their support of the free world and their opposition to Communist violence. The City Council had been driven into the Western sectors and would have to meet there in future; let the whole population of Berlin assemble in front of the Reichstag and declare their support of their duly elected representatives.

R.I.A.S. took up this idea. ' _Berlin ruft die Welt!_ ' was the cry. 'Berlin calls the world'.

'Men and women of Berlin, nothing and nobody can prevent us from calling the world tomorrow afternoon at five o'clock at the Square of the Republic before the Reichstag! Think of Prague, think of Belgrade, think of the Eastern zone! We can still defend ourselves, still speak our minds freely. The eyes of the world are upon us! The oppressed of the world expect all from our stand. Mayor Reuter and other men and women are our speakers. Freedom is the reward, the peace of the world is at stake! Berliners from East and West, from Schöneberg, Wedding, Weissensee, Karlshorst, Charlottenburg, from all over Berlin—to the Reichstag! Tomorrow at five p.m.! Berlin calls the world! Against the blockade, against the Markgraf police, against Communist terror! The decision lies in your hands! Berlin calls the world!'

There was no way to prevent that meeting, for the people were not going to march, they were just going to come. They would come from the Western sectors, and from the Soviet sector as well. They would come by all the streets surrounding that immense square. They would come through the Tiergarten, the great ruined park which had been turned into vegetable plots. They would come by tram and by the underground, pouring out in streams. R.I.A.S. told them how to come, not getting off at the nearest station, which was in the Soviet sector, but at a station safely in the West.

A curious circumstance—the Western sectors which were under blockade were lacking in coal and had electricity only four hours a day; West Berlin could listen to R.I.A.S. only during those hours, but the Soviet sector, which got its coal from Central Germany, could listen all day and night! To make up for that lack in the West, Army jeeps and police cars travelled the streets day and night, stopping at the important intersections and making announcements through loudspeakers. These cars bore the letters R.I.A.S. written large, and everywhere they stopped there were demonstrations. They would telephone back reports to the radio station, and these reports would form material for new broadcasts.

It must have been a wonderful day and night for the Germans in the East sector, which had no free newspapers and no free political meetings. Lanny became so excited over this opportunity that he forgot his lack of sleep; he knew Berlin as well as any German, and he could point out to them that Colonel Markgraf, who commanded the Red police in East Berlin, was the same officer who had been decorated by Adolf Hitler for his exploits at Stalingrad. Thus reaction recognised its friends all over the world. Reaction was international, universal—and let freedom and the love of freedom be the same!

VI

It was a day that made history, in a place full of it. There was that tremendous Brandenburg Gate which the Prussian imperialists had built to celebrate their glory. It stood at the boundary between the Soviet and Western sectors. There was a great square and great avenues leading to it, and the burned-out Reichstag which had never been repaired. Fifteen years ago, when the Social Democrats had been on the verge of taking power in an election, Hitler's thugs had set fire to the building in order to lay the blame upon the Reds and thus have a pretext for seizing power and setting up a dictatorship. Now the place was a symbol of freedom to the Germans, the democratic self-government which they aspired to and meant to win and hold.

Tired as they were from their work and from all the problems of keeping alive under a blockade, they came to the square. They came not marching, just walking; they came until the square was full, and the park beyond it, and all the approaching avenues as far as the eye could see. It was estimated that there were three hundred thousand people at that meeting. Loudspeakers had been scattered all over the place so that everybody could hear what their elected mayor had to say, and the chairman of their party, and the leaders of their trade unions. Until the hour of the meeting these loudspeakers were connected with R.I.A.S., which furnished music, and at two minutes before the hour the vast audience heard these words:

'Here before the burned-out Reichstag stand the people of Berlin. Here before the burned-out Reichstag, at the Square of the Republic, Berlin demonstrates against Communist violence. The citizens of this city have learned a great deal from the past. This city knows only too well that dictatorship, terror, force, and political chicanery ruined us once. Berlin faces the future with toughened courage and purified hearts. Berlin resolutely rejects Communist dictatorship and terror as a political instrument. Berlin fights for its freedom and its future'.

And when the elected Mayor Reuter stepped to the platform the loudspeakers spread his words: 'Today no diplomats and generals address this meeting, but the people of Berlin raise their voice... The people of Berlin have spoken; we have done our duty and will continue to do our duty. Peoples of the world, give us your help... not only by the airlift, but by standing firmly for our common ideals, which alone can secure both our future and yours'.

The last speaker was Franz Neumann, chairman of the Social-Democratic party. Said he, 'Berliners, do not forget that you not only defend your liberty, you also defend the freedom of those who are longing for it in the Soviet sector and the Soviet zone. We are also fighting for them... We greet the Soviet zone, we greet Germany, we greet all the peoples who love freedom with our clarion call, _Freiheit! Freiheit! Freiheit!_ '

That had been the old Socialist battle cry in Germany. It hadn't been heard from such a crowd in many decades. Now it rang through the square, and the meeting was closed by singing an Austrian workers' song, 'Brothers to the sun, to freedom'. The words were German, but the melody was Russian, and old. It was a heart-stirring revolutionary hymn, which for half a century had summoned the Russian people to the fight against tyranny. It had been written by a rebel poet in his prison cell in St. Petersburg, during a student uprising almost a hundred years ago. It had been adopted by the Peoples' Will Party, and its members had defiantly chanted:

We may be tortured by fire,

Banished, in mines we may slave,

We may be killed without mercy,

Always remember, Be brave!

Russian rebels had sung this song during the Revolution of 1905. It had been sung by all Russians in 1917 when the Tsar was overthrown, and it had been sung in the early days of Soviet rule; but now it was heard no more—it was too revolutionary! But all Russians knew the melody, and its words were being circulated by the anti-Stalinists among the Soviet troops in Germany. Here at this enormous mass meeting sat Russian M.V.D. men and political observers in their staff cars, watching the meeting through their binoculars; inside the British sector were Soviet staff cars, lining the middle lane of the Charlottenburger Chaussee, which led to the Brandenburg Gate and to Soviet Berlin. They had come to observe whatever might occur and perhaps to pick out spies and traitors in the crowd. They too knew that melody; what they made of it they kept to themselves.

VII

Lanny carried out his promise to Colonel Tokaev. He had already telephoned to Alfy in London, and now he went with the Russian officer to consult the authorities in the British sector. There were affidavits to be made out and signed, and in due course Tokaev would be granted the status of a political refugee in free England. He would be one more friend whom Lanny would look forward to visiting on his trips.

So then it was time to depart. They said good-bye to the R.I.A.S. staff and to Lasky and his staff at _Der Monat_. Monck came to the hotel; he had been at Laurel's side all through her ordeal, and she could not find words to thank him. She said she was going to mail him a gold watch from London. When she suggested having his name inscribed in it he said he might be using one or more of his aliases. No names, please!

They were to be flown directly to London. Laurel talked over the telephone with the Air Force officer who booked the flight. 'You must give him a good pilot', she said, and he answered that all their pilots were good. He knew what was in her mind. If that plane had to come down while crossing the Russian zone Lanny Budd would be in the enemy's hands again! Laurel said, 'Don't tell anyone you are booking us'. The place was full of spies, and from time to time the Red fighter planes were 'buzzing' the planes of the airlift and threatening them. Laurel wouldn't draw a free breath until they had passed the boundary of the Russian zone.

She was packing their belongings. She wouldn't let Lanny do anything but lie down; she was handling him as if he were made of wet tissue paper. The phone rang and she answered; then she said, 'Mr Budd cannot come to the phone. Who is it?' She turned to Lanny. 'He says his name—it sounds crazy—is _Untersuchungsgefängnis_ '.

Lanny started up from the bed like any well man and stepped to the phone. ' _Hallo, alter Bursche_! he exclaimed.

A laughing voice responded in English, 'One good turn deserves another. I want you to know that I paid my debt'.

'You have paid it a thousand times', said Lanny. 'Where are you?'

'I am in your sector, but I cannot come to the hotel. I have not yet come across, but I am planning to come soon'.

'The sooner the better', said Lanny.

'There are a few friends to be helped yet, then I will come. I just wanted to let you know that we have a report on your examination, and you did very well. Don't talk about this call. _Glück auf den Weg!_ ' And he hung up.

Lanny said to Laurel, 'I have been asked not to talk about this call. Suffice it that we have an underground in East Berlin, and in Moscow too'.

'The Reds have an underground here', replied Lauel; she would not be comforted.

VIII

They boarded the plane, and she was tense while it was rising into the air and for the first half-hour. By that time they had passed out of the Russian zone, and three hours or so later they landed at London. Alfy met them and drove them to The Reaches, the family home on the upper Thames where Lanny had spent so many happy hours from boyhood on.

The M.P. had already talked with the authorities concerning the case of Tokaev and reported that everything could be arranged; so that was one load off Lanny's mind. Alfy had been in prison in Spain, so he knew how it felt; Lanny had got him out, so he would do anything that Lanny asked him to do. Alfy had recently been married to the daughter of a local squire; the father was a staunch Tory, and the daughter a member of the Labour party—something quite common in these times. The young wife was hoping to present Alfy with an heir, and it would be Lanny's pleasure to take back a favourable report upon her to the Pater, who was stuck in New Jersey while Lanny went gallivanting over Europe.

They rested for three days in that peaceful English countryside, which had not been changed either by war or by socialism. They went punting on the river and listened to the young generation singing the old songs and others that would become old in due course. When the time came for them to travel to Prestwick, Alfy proposed that they make a motor tour out of it—three or four hundred miles through eight counties of England and two of Scotland. They would pass through the Lake country that Lanny had read so much about in Wordsworth's poems.

Ordinarily the art expert would have been pleased; but he examined his sitting-down place and decided that being jounced in a car all day would seem too much like the torture chamber in the prison. Sleeping cars were made for sleeping, and that was what he needed still. So Alfy drove them to the station and they boarded the night express.

In the morning they stepped out into what had been a small fishing village on the wild west coast of Scotland and had been magically transformed in wartime into one of the great landing fields of the world. Here the bombing planes had come by the score every day; the cargo planes, taken out of mothballs for the Berlin airlift, were still coming. Lanny and Laurel were bound the other way, and were never coming back again, so Laurel vowed. But it was a difficult time for prophesying.

IX

The newspaper reporters consult passenger lists. Some had met Lanny at London and more met him at La Guardia Field. He had become the man of the hour, and they plied him with questions. He was glad to answer; it was one more chance to wake up the American public and make them realise what the Soviet peril had become.

Freddi Robin was there to meet them and drive them to Edgemere. Lanny rested a couple of days and regained more of his lost weight. Then came a call from the State Department; they wanted to see him and have a full account of his experience for their files. They were building up an elaborate ' _J'accuse_ ' against the cold-war enemy. Lanny had tape recordings of his R.I.A.S. talk, and he turned one over to the Voice of America and took another with him by the night train to Washington. He visited 'State' and talked with the men of the Bureau of German Affairs. He dictated a precise and careful account of his kidnapping and torturing; he signed it and swore to it.

He had been asked to notify the President's office when he was in town, and he did so. As a result he was invited on one of those weekend cruises in peaceful Chesapeake Bay. That meant that he had two days and nights in which to put the fear of Stalin into the heart of Harry Truman and the other guests on board the yacht. He told what Monck had to say, and the other men of C.I.C. He told about Einsiedel and about the refugees, and above all Tokaev. It does not happen often that an American gets a look into the inner circles of the Politburo and listens to Stalin discussing his tactics and policies. Here was a high-ranking officer of Stalin's Army, a highly trained technician in the most abstruse and most dangerous of sciences, and his message was, 'Stalin means war'.

Tokaev was going to write a book and give it that title, and Lanny set out to pound it into the President's mind. 'Stalin means war in the same way that a lion means meat; it is the nature of the creature, it is what he is built for. When Stalin talks peace it means he is not ready for war. When he is ready for war he will wage it. He will wait until he has enough A-bombs to destroy America's war potential and until he has enough planes to fly them over the North Pole. When that time comes, Mr President, he will make you another peace proposal; and while you have your pen in hand, about to sign, the bombs will fall on you'.

Said Harry Truman, 'It is hard for an American to believe there are such men in the world'.
30 SIT THEE DOWN, SORROW

I

Lanny had one other urgent duty; he must talk to Bess. He told Laurel of this, saying that he hoped his experience might have some effect in opening his sister's eyes. He had not told Laurel what he had said about Bess in the East Berlin prison, nor did he intend to tell Bess; he hoped to accomplish his purpose without that.

He called up and made a date and went to her apartment in New York. She would have read about his experience in the papers, of course, and he could guess that her party masters in Moscow would not have failed to take action in the matter of Lanny's accusations. Would they believe them? The best guess was that they wouldn't know what to believe, but would surely be asking questions. Would they have told her who had made the accusations? That would have been contrary to all that Lanny knew of their techniques.

It was a hot September day, and Bess was wearing a light-coloured peignoir. She looked tired and worried and was chain-smoking. She guessed that he had come to make her hear his story, and she didn't relish the ordeal. 'I read about it in the papers,' she said. 'There's no need to go into details'.

'I think you ought to hear them from my own lips', he persisted.

'I know, you want to harrow me. You think you can weaken my faith in my cause; but you can't'.

'I think you ought to hear what happened to me', he said.

'I know that you are fighting the Soviet Union by every means in your power; you have declared war on them, and naturally they were trying to shut you up'.

'And you justify the torturing of prisoners, Bess?'

'I don't justify it, I just know that all armies do it'.

'You are mistaken, I assure you; the American Army does _not_ do it'.

'They wouldn't tell you what they were doing'.

'As it happens, they told me precisely. For weeks I was interrogating prisoners; first, in General Patch's Seventh Army, then in Patton's Third. I was told exactly what to do, and I was forbidden to use any sort of threats or violence'.

'They knew you were a nice fellow, so they gave you the pleasant jobs'.

'That is a foolish thing to say, Bess. Other men were briefed with me. Torture was unknown in our Army. Face the facts: your Soviet crowd had me in their power, and they tried to make me confess to a conspiracy to kill Stalin. They knew perfectly well that it was a complete invention, and they tortured me to make me sign a confession. They told me again and again that they meant to keep on torturing me until they broke me down and made me sign it. When I talked to you about such things you called me a redbaiter; you swore it didn't happen. Now I ask you to face the fact that I was there. I went through it and I _know_. I mean that you shall know about it too'.

'Don't get melodramatic, Lanny', she said, lighting another cigarette. 'There are a great many plots to kill Stalin, and naturally they find out about them. If they become over-suspicious and accuse the wrong person, that is only a human failing. They are not supposed to be superhuman'.

'But neither are they supposed to be subhuman. Don't you see that it is the principle of dictatorship that breeds this over-suspiciousness? Force and terror make it impossible for any human being to have a sense of security. It makes for spying and intrigue, it makes all frankness and sincerity impossible'.

'I see that. But it is a stage of development through which we have to pass'.

'But what becomes of morality in the meantime? What becomes of the common decencies of life if torturers are permitted to compel people to sign their names to a conglomeration of falsehoods? Can a party exist when its members cannot trust one another, when they spy and betray one another to torturers?'

'I know, Lanny, I know', she said. 'We don't have gods to deal with, we have only human beings, with all their weaknesses'.

II

He saw that she was worried, and he knew that she had plenty of things to worry about. He was deliberately leading her along one path; but he must be tactful about it and not wake her suspicions. 'If it hurts you to hear of your brother's being tortured seven days and nights, I won't tell you about it; but at least let me tell you what is going on in East Berlin and East Germany. I have just come from there, and it has been a long time since you've been there'.

He began with the story of Karl Seidl, how he had joined the new Socialist Unity Party and had been forced to start spying upon his comrades, and had fled from it—a decent worker who had been driven out of the Communist party and back to the Social Democrats—who could speak the truth freely. He told about R.I.A.S. and its _Spitzeldienst_ —telling the workers in East Berlin who in the factories were spying and reporting on them. He told about the clearing house for refugees which he had visited and about the various persons he had interviewed and what the officials had told about their experiences. He told about Einsiedel—not naming him or saying anything to identify him, since he was still among the enemy. There was a young German who had been carefully trained in the Antifaschule and had been made a Communist editor and now was in revolt against the job of following the party line regardless of all facts.

He saw that he had got her attention. She was no longer fighting against him, she was listening with curiosity and making questions. It was a fact that he had been there and she had not; he had been among the scenes which were of the greatest importance to her, and she could not question the stories he was telling. She might resent his interpretations, but she accepted the fact that he had met the persons and heard the words he was repeating.

He came to Tokaev. She couldn't fail to be curious about her brother's rescue and how it had been engineered. He told her the story of the Soviet officer's career, every detail that he could recollect; and certainly there was no Communist in the acquaintance of Bessie Remsen Budd who could take her into the Kremlin and let her sit in on the secret councils of Stalin and his trusted lieutenants. He didn't say 'Stalin means war', he just repeated the questions Stalin had asked of Tokaev, and what Molotov had said about the matter, what Malenkov had said, what Mikoyan had said. Every word of this story bore the stamp of truth, and Bess could not doubt that she was there among the high gods of her Olympus.

And this Russian-born and Soviet-trained officer, this highest product of all their techniques, had sickened of them and was now on his way to England to tell the government of that country all the secrets he had learned. He hadn't been bought and he hadn't been accused of any crime, and Bess could find no fault in him; he was a true revolutionary idealist and had suffered moral revulsion and had fled from an odious thing.

'And then Kasenkina', said Lanny. 'You read her story, no doubt'.

'I read it, Lanny'.

'You got it in New York; I got the Berlin angle. I met people there who had known Zenzinov and his record in the Revolution. Do you believe for one moment that Alexandra Tolstoy is what Molotov called her, "a White-Guard bandit"? The Reds had set up a Communist school in New York, a perfect little Soviet, with intriguers, spies, torturers, everything exactly like home. Everywhere the smell is the same, the smell of moral decay'.

III

He had her listening now, and he told her his own story. He spared no details, the freezing and the baking, the glaring light, the deprivation of sleep, the browbeating and threats, the wheedling and pretended sympathy, and, above all, the patent fraudulence. Bess was not the callous person that her creed required, and the recital shook her. He made note of the fact that she no longer got angry. He saw her clenching and unclenching one hand, and with the fingers of the other she was grinding her cigarette absent-mindedly in the tray. He thought that his opportunity was on the way, and he said with tenderness in his voice, 'Tell me, Bess, can it be that you have not noticed the low moral tone of the party?'

'I have noticed it, of course', she answered; 'but as I told you before, I have to work with human beings, and in spite of their defects'.

'You have made heavy sacrifices for them', he said. 'Has it never occurred to you that you yourself might some day be betrayed, that you might fall victim to party intrigue and suspicion?'

He saw that she was biting her lip, and he politely looked away so as not to embarrass her. He waited, and finally she said, 'Lanny, if I take you into my confidence, will you betray me?'

'How could you think of such a thing, Bess?'

'I mean by talking about what I tell you. I don't want anyone else to know, not even Laurel'.

'I understand', he said, 'and you know my position. If you tell me anything against the government I cannot promise secrecy; but anything personal I will keep between us, of course'.

'Something terrible has happened to me', she blurted out, 'and I don't know what to make of it'.

He still did not look at her, because he was afraid his eyes might betray him. 'You can trust me, Bess'.

'Nobody else seems to trust me. The C. I. Rep. has heard some rumour about me and is investigating me'.

Lanny knew that phrase; it meant Cominform Representative, a man sent by Moscow, who took precedence over all American party members and officials. He was Stalin in America, no less. At Yalta, Stalin had promised Roosevelt to abolish the Communist International. What he had done was to change its name from Comintern to Cominform, and the same officials went on doing the same jobs. That was a _vozhd's_ idea of being subtle.

'That is bad news indeed', said Lanny to his sister; 'but you know how it is, old dear, you are a member of the _haute bourgeoisie_. You are the daughter of a crocodile and the sister of a cannibal'.

'Don't be cruel, Lanny. The comrades have known all about me, and they have always trusted me'.

'And what have you done now?'

'I can't find out; that's the painful part about it. I have had three sessions with the C. I. Rep, nearly four hours each time. He questions me about everything in my life, everything I've said, everybody I've known, every place I've ever been—and he won't tell me what the charges are'.

'Did you have a bright light backed by a reflector shining in your eyes all the time?'

'No, I didn't have that'.

'Did you have to sit on a stool that was only half as wide as your buttocks?'

'Oh, Lanny, don't be horrid!'

'I assure you the experience is horrid. You can be thankful that you are in America where they can use only words—except in extreme cases'.

'What am I to make of it, Lanny? What am I to do?'

'Don't you know that you are prominent in the party and that there are half-a-dozen others who would like to take your place? Have you never pointed out anyone's incompetence? Have you never had to suspect a traitor or to shut up a fool? Every time you have done things like that you have made an enemy, someone to suspect you and watch you and make up tales about you; someone who hopes to take your place'.

'What place have I, with a ten-year jail sentence hanging over me?'

'You have a wonderful place. There are plenty of people willing to be martyrs if only they can be talked about, if only they can be important. They see themselves coming out of jail to become rulers of the world. You are in a system which glorifies hatred; they call it "class hatred, class war". But class is an abstraction—classes are made up of human beings, and so are parties. People who hate classes hate human beings, and they learn to hate one another. That is what I've been trying to tell you for years, Bess'.

'You're just taking the occasion to preach at me'.

'You asked me for advice, and I can only tell you what is in my mind. Hate breeds hate, and it brings out all the worst in human beings. Is the C. I. Rep. a Russian?'

'Yes, of course'.

'Well then, how can you expect him to come over to this country, which he hates, and meet class enemies, whom he hates, and think no evil about them? How can it seem possible to him that you can have the father you have and the environment you have and still be a genuine hater of the bourgeoisie? To him it is a contradiction in terms, it is a denial of the whole Diamat, the whole gospel of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinism. The C. I. Rep. has only to take a walk up Fifth Avenue to know that he can never really trust any American. The terms on which a man holds power in Moscow today are that he hates all Americans on principle'.

IV

'Lanny', she said, 'it is a dreadful thing to give everything you have to a cause and then discover that you have no place in it, nobody trusts you'.

'And the man won't tell you what you are accused of?'

'He tried to make me believe that it is other people who are suspected. Everybody I know is being questioned. He must have several others working on the case'.

'And what does he want you to do?'

'He doesn't tell me anything. But he says I may be summoned to Moscow'.

That gave Lanny a severe jolt. 'Oh, Bess!' he exclaimed. ' _Don't_ let them do that to you!'

'How could I go, Lanny? I am under bond. I am forbidden to leave the country. It would cost them fifty thousand dollars if I did'.

'Well, they might be willing to pay that to get you. Bess, you must promise me—don't let that happen to you! They get you in that place of horrors and you will be lost forever. There is nothing they won't do to you. You must realise it—you mean absolutely nothing to them—your services, your record, your honour, your faith in the cause. Death will be the kindest thing, and you will pray for it'.

He had her now where she had to listen. In past times he had talked to her about torturing, about frame-ups and confessions extracted, and she had said it was all nonsense, it was counterrevolutionary propaganda. But now he had been through it himself, and she could not doubt his word. He told her his own feelings under torture; he spared no painful detail. She sat there staring at him, fascinated, shuddering now and then, clenching and unclenching her hands. All that proud resistance, that flaring anger that he had known of old were gone. Her spirit was broken, and he saw it and went to work all the harder.

'Bess', he insisted, 'you must listen to me. For God's sake, don't put yourself in that man's power. Don't meet him again! He is a little Stalin; he owns the world, he is destined to rule it; he will be the Commissar of all America. It sounds crazy, I know, but that is what life means to him, that is his destiny. All this hateful prosperity that he sees—he is going to take it over and possess it. He is going to rule and give out wholesale death to everyone who does not obey. He will take over our newspapers and make them into little _Pravdas_. He will take our radio and pour out Stalinist doctrine varied with the "Internationale". He will take our children and make them into little robots, little tattletales turning their parents over to the M.V.D.'

'Lanny', she protested, 'you don't have to pile it on'.

'I'm telling you what I know, Bess. It is not only my own experience, it's all the people I've talked to over there, people who have been through it, people who have fled from it. They are fleeing from it by the hundreds every day. If the gates were opened half of Eastern Europe would flee into the West. If our gates were opened half of Europe would come to America. Europe is in torment, Bess; they have learned what freedom is by being denied it. It is the most awful thing to live under the terror; to have your lips sealed, to be afraid that your very looks may betray you, to know that somebody may whisper a slander about you—your own child may do it if you punish the child! And to be accused is to be guilty. Someone has accused you, Bess. They don't tell you what—maybe because it's so preposterous it would be absurd to speak it! Something as absurd as the charge that I was plotting to take Stalin's life—and paying out five thousand dollars at a time to have it done!'

V

He saw that tears had come into her eyes, and he believed that she was going to break. 'What am I to do, Lanny?' she whispered.

'The first thing for you to do is to get out of this apartment. You must not live alone. Don't you know the part that murder plays in Stalin's techniques? Have you never seen the list of his victims? I don't mean in Russia, for there they are counted in tens of millions; I mean in Europe and America—the onetime Stalinists who turned against him and were no longer permitted to live. There was Trotsky, and his son Sedov, and his secretary, whose headless body was found floating in the Seine, and his guard, and several others of his followers. There was José Robles, a professor at Johns Hopkins University; there was Kurt Landau, an Austrian editor, kidnapped and killed. Carlo Tresca was shot down on Fifth Avenue, and Walter Krivitsky, former chief of Soviet Military Intelligence in Europe, was murdered in a hotel room in Washington. I can't remember them all, but there are books about it'.

'That's enough, Lanny. I know'.

'What I'm trying to make you realise is that you're only about half an hour from Moscow'.

'I don't know what you mean by that'.

'I mean there are Russian ships here in the harbour; they're always here, and every ship is Moscow and every captain is Stalin. The C. I. Rep. comes here to question you, and all he has to do is to bring a couple of the sailors with him. They grab you and clamp a chloroform rag to your nose, as they did to me; they carry you downstairs in the early hours of the morning, put you into a car, and take you to the ship. They put you down in the hold where your cries cannot be heard, and in three or four weeks you are in Moscow, in the Lubianka. They put you on the Conveyor and tell you what to confess; they torture you until you sign it, and then they ship you off to Siberia in a cattle car, and work you in a mine on half rations, and in a year or two you fade away and are buried in an unmarked grave'.

'You really believe all that, Lanny?'

'Believe it? I know it! People have escaped, people have managed to live through it, and I have talked to them. I can find some here in New York if that is necessary to your salvation. There are people who have disappeared from New York, people who have got in wrong with the party—I can get you their names if you don't know them'.

'Where do you want me to go, Lanny?'

'I want you to get out of this hideous movement which has betrayed the hopes of mankind. I want you to realise that you are finished in it, regardless of what you may do. You have a black mark, and nobody will trust you any more, nobody will dare to. One or two intimate friends may stick by you, but they will do it at the sacrifice of their own party standing. They will be Trotskyites, Browderites, any kind of left or right deviationists. Maybe there will be Buddites'.

'You seem to forget that I have to go to prison, Lanny'.

'Maybe you do and maybe you don't. Maybe if you would break with the Communists Robbie could wangle you a pardon. I don't know if he can, but I know how quickly he'd go to it'.

'Would they take me back, Lanny?'

'Take you back? Oh, my God! If you'd break with the Reds they would be the happiest couple in Connecticut. Your mother is just eating her heart out about you. If you want love instead of hate in your life, that is the place to go. And, incidentally, you would be safe there. Robbie knows how to take care of property and also of persons; there wouldn't be any kidnappers on his grounds. You might take up your piano practice again and recover your skill'.

'Imagine people wanting to hear me play the piano after this!'

'You are missing an important point. In a woman's prison they are pretty sure to have music; they have it even in factories nowadays—they find that it works. Another point, also—you might get to see your children'.

Bess began to sob. He had never seen her do that before, and she was embarrassed and buried her face in her hands. He decided to strike while the iron was hot; he said, 'Listen, old dear, let me go to the phone and call Esther; she will come, I know. You can be as miserable as you please, but it will help some to know that you are making her happier than she has been in many years'.

'All right, Lanny', she whispered, and he stepped quickly to the phone.

VI

It took only a minute or so to get the home in Newcastle, and by good fortune Esther was there. He told her, 'I am at Bess's apartment in the city, and she wants to see you. Don't delay, take the first train. No, she's not ill, but she's at a crisis in her thinking. Don't ask about it, just come'.

He hung up and told Bess, 'She's coming'. Then he thought he had talked enough. 'I have a confession to make, sister dear', he said. 'I can't sit in a chair very long without hurting. Also, I get exhausted easily; so let me lie down and sleep for a while'.

She had only one bedroom, and she put him in that. Before he lay down he made her promise that if the doorbell rang she would call through the door and ask who it was, and if it was the C. I. Rep. she wouldn't let him in. 'You may not be afraid of him', he said, 'but I am. He wants me even more than he wants you'.

So then he slept. A most wonderful thing to sleep—he had never appreciated it until he had come out of the Prenzlauerberg. And always for the rest of his life when he woke up he would have a moment of fear and would think about the Number One, the Number Two, the Number Three.

This time he heard a murmur of voices and knew that Esther had come. When he went into the room he found them sitting on the sofa, and Esther had her child in her arms. Both of them had red eyes, so he knew that everything was all right. Weeping was women's business, and he would leave it to them. He said a few friendly words and took his departure and went back to Edgemere to tell Laurel. It wasn't a secret now.

The only secret was what he had said about Bess in the Prenzlauerberg, and that secret he would keep locked up for a long time. There would be debate in his soul; he would suppress it, but it would bob up now and then and come to life. He had taken the destiny of his sister into his own hands; and had he done her a great wrong, or a great right? It was like the inner duel that Shakespeare tells about: '"Budge," says the fiend. "Budge not", says my conscience'. Lanny's fiend would say, 'You violated her autonomy'. Lanny's conscience would reply, 'I got her out of the Communist party'. Fiend would inquire, 'Have you adopted the doctrine that the end justifies the means?' Conscience would reply, 'Can people who deny truth claim the right to truth? Can people use liberty to destroy liberty?' Fiend would jeer, 'You sound much like a Communist to me!' The debate would go on for the rest of Lanny's life.

One thing Lanny made up his mind to and would never waver about—the right of Hansi and Rose to happiness. He talked it over with Laurel, and she agreed that they would not write or say a word about the change of heart of Hansi's ex-wife; he might take up the notion that he had 'done her wrong', and if he started brooding, that might mean the end of his new marriage. Wherever the blame for the mix-up might lie, it surely wasn't with Rose Pippin. She had met a man distracted and forlorn, a man whose spouse, convicted of a felony, had given him the right to a divorce in more than half of the forty-eight states. Rose had given him her treasure of affection and trust, and she had a right to expect that her marriage should be permitted to thrive and blossom. Laurel said, 'She has the task of raising another woman's children, and that is danger enough for any woman's one life'.

VII

So Lanny Budd was home again and promised most solemnly to stay for a while. He had those two lovely children to get acquainted with all over again. It was astonishing how many new things there were to learn about them. Junior hadn't been told the terrible details about his father's experience; Laurel had said only that some bad men had carried his father off and put him in jail. But that had been enough, astonishingly enough; it had set fire to a young imagination. These 'bad men' were hiding behind every bush, and stick would do to fight them. Any stick became a machine gun to be fired with a rattling noise from ambush. The bad men were mowed down, and Lanny was miraculously delivered. All methods of killing were discovered or invented, and Laurel, a pacifist at heart and hoping to raise a pacifist child, was astounded by the murderous impulses that she saw.

Also, she had the theory that a young mind should not be overstimulated; but Junior had been given a set of alphabet blocks and had taught himself all the letters, and presently he was finding out how to make them into words. He was teaching himself to read—and in the most awful way imaginable, from those funny papers which came on Sundays. He learned all the names of those multicoloured characters and their wild eccentricities. He would spell out the captions, and when he couldn't understand he would go, not to his mother, but to one of the servants for help. The 'funnies' became his wonderland, his mythology. Laurel was horrified; but Lanny said that he was exactly at the mental age of the persons for whom these fantasies were created. He would outgrow them and not be hopelessly corrupted.

The little girl was learning to walk and talk, all according to the Gesell schedule. In short, all was well with the family, if only the father would stay at home and let the world run itself for a while. Rick and Nina had been holding the fort for him, and now they could have the vacation which had been promised them; it would be in the cold and wet season, but they would love it, they had been brought up in it. Irma and Ceddy were coming to New York; they couldn't bring money from England, but Irma had an abundance over here, and she had kept her American citizenship in order to be free to use it here. She and Ceddy were planning to spend the winter in Florida, and Scrubbie and Frances would motor down and pay them a visit.

So Lanny and Laurel would have their hands full with the Peace Programme. They would go on, 'saying, Peace, peace', when there was no peace. It was a real problem, like staying out in no man's land and dodging the shells and the hand grenades from both sides. You knew that the cold war enemy didn't want peace, and every time he said the word he was getting ready to throw another hand grenade. Yet you must go on talking peace in order to meet his propaganda, in order to answer his unceasing charges that you were a warmonger. You must enter every discussion and attend every conference, make precise and careful propositions, show exactly why your efforts failed and why he rejected your offers.

You could never convert him, you could never make the slightest impression upon him; but always you must have in mind the humble people who suffered under his despotism, who heard only his propaganda, who were fed upon a diet of falsehoods. The dictators meant war and slavery, but the humble people craved peace and freedom. You must find ways to reach them with the truth and help them to understand it. You would be called a warmonger a million times a day, but you must go on talking peace, praising peace, pleading for peace—and making plain who it was that was blocking the road to peace.

VIII

Lanny and Laurel had brought back from Europe the dreadful conviction that we were failing in our propaganda against the Reds. We were failing because we did not understand our enemies and did not appreciate the importance of propaganda. They were pouring out treasure to deceive and indoctrinate the peoples of their captive states and all the impoverished and oppressed peoples of Europe, Asia, Africa, as well as of the Western world. They were spending a billion, maybe two billion dollars every year, while all that the Congress of the United States could be persuaded to appropriate was a few tens of millions. We ought to be meeting them dollar for dollar and voice for voice and page for page of the printed word. We ought to be meeting them with brains and moral force; we ought to be making clear to all the oppressed and impoverished peoples of the earth that America was not a country of landlords and moneylenders, it was the sweet land of liberty. It was the land of Washington and Jefferson, the land of Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt, the land of Tom Paine, Patrick Henry, and Eugene Debs, of Whittier, Whitman, and Emerson.

These were the names which would carry meaning to the young people of the old world, to the opening minds which were going to shape the future. The Stalinists had set deadly traps for their feet and would drag them into servitude. We must show them the true paths to freedom, and it must be not merely political freedom but economic as well.

Said Lanny over the radio, 'It is futile to think that the hungry hordes of Asia and Africa can be persuaded to become our debtors and servants. There is no use thinking that we can win either the cold war or the hot war with our organised labour in revolt, or with a great part of our population held in the status of second-class citizens. We have to make our minds flexible and understand that evolution is a process that applies in the field of industry as well as in that of government. We have to study the ideas of other peoples and understand their needs. We have to offer them more than Stalin offers them, and to make plain to them that what we offer is real and not a fraud, as his offers are.

'And we have to act quickly. We have to realise that Stalin is setting the pace. He is watching like a cat at a mousehole for our every move. He knows all our weaknesses and is quick to take advantage of them. A dictatorship has the advantage of secrecy, whereas democracy and freedom of necessity work in the open. That is a weakness if we leave it unexplained, but it is a great strength if we make the world understand it and what it means to them.

'Tom Paine sounded the call to the American Revolution with this statement: "These are the times that try men's souls". We have to be equally clear-sighted and bold. It is not too much to say that our civilisation with all its intellectual and moral values hangs in the balance today. It will certainly go down if Stalin wins the victory, and it may even go down if he loses. It is necessary for us to prepare to give military resistance, but we must prepare with no less energy to give intellectual and moral resistance. We must give to that duty the same fortitude and determination that our forefathers gave at Valley Forge and Gettysburg.

'We must win the minds of the masses all over the world; we must win them away from the false hopes of Red communism and to the ideas of democracy and freedom, both political and economic. We have the truth on our side, but it will be of use to us only if we use it and defend it. We must live and speak in the spirit of those immortal words which Thomas Jefferson wrote and which fifty-five of our forefathers signed: "And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honour".'
_Acknowledgments_

The author expresses his thanks to three fellow writers who have generously permitted him to make use of both their experiences and their personalities in this story: an American, Boris Shub, author of _The Choice_ , published by Duell, Sloan and Pearce; a German, Heinrich Graf Einsiedel, author of _Tagebuch der Versuchung_ , soon to be published in an English translation by Yale University Press; and a Russian, G. A. Tokaev, a former lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Army, author of _Stalin Means War_ , published by George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd, London. Also, thanks to David Krichevsky, formerly liaison officer, O.I.C. of U.S. platoons in the Soviet zone of Germany, who is writing a book about his adventures; and to Melvin J. Lasky, editor of _Der Monat_ , Berlin.

Many officers of the government, both in Washington and Berlin, have been generous in giving information; this includes the Army, the Voice of America, R.I.A.S. in Berlin, the F.B.I., and the International Criminal Police Commission in Paris; also the Library Research Service of the _Encyclopedia Britannica_. The fiction in this book is the writer's own; the facts belong to history and every person in the free world has a right to be proud of them.
About the Author

Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, activist, and politician whose novel _The Jungle_ (1906) led to the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Born into an impoverished family in Baltimore, Maryland, Sinclair entered City College of New York five days before his fourteenth birthday. He wrote dime novels and articles for pulp magazines to pay for his tuition, and continued his writing career as a graduate student at Columbia University. To research _The Jungle_ , he spent seven weeks working undercover in Chicago's meatpacking plants. The book received great critical and commercial success, and Sinclair used the proceeds to start a utopian community in New Jersey. In 1915, he moved to California, where he founded the state's ACLU chapter and became an influential political figure, running for governor as the Democratic nominee in 1934. Sinclair wrote close to one hundred books during his lifetime, including _Oil!_ (1927), the inspiration for the 2007 movie _There Will Be Blood_ ; _Boston_ (1928), a documentary novel revolving around the Sacco and Vanzetti case; _The Brass Check_ , a muckraking exposé of American journalism, and the eleven novels in Pulitzer Prize–winning Lanny Budd series.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1953 by T. Werner Laurie, Ltd.

Cover design by Kat JK Lee

ISBN: 978-1-5040-2655-0

This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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