Wide Is the Gate Page 13

  “A good idea,” said the wholesale killer. “I will take it up with them.”

  Lanny would have been worried if he hadn’t felt certain that Goring had already done it.

  V

  The luncheon table was wheeled out, and the fat General lighted a fat cigar and settled back in an overstuffed chair in a pose of contentment. They were alone, and the time had come for a showdown. “Tell me, Lanny,” said he, “have you given any thought to the idea of helping me now and then?”

  “I have given much thought to it, and I find it troubles me, because I lack a sense of competence. I doubt my ability to be worth my keep.”

  “You might let me be the judge of that, my friend. I have had some experience in judging men.”

  “In this case you are far too generous. When one has been an idler for thirty-five years it is not so easy to change.”

  The judge of men fixed his gaze intently upon his guest. “Do you find yourself under any special strain at this moment?” he inquired.

  Lanny smiled. “Only that I have eaten enough for two.”

  “I would ask you to do nothing but what you are doing now. It is your privilege to meet many persons who are of interest to me. I know that you are curious about them and amused to watch their minds work. Could you not find it worth while to come and tell me what you have observed? Suppose, for example, I should suggest that on your next visit to Paris you should cultivate Pierre Laval, study his temperament, and help me to understand what approach to him will be most effective.”

  “Surely, Hermann, you have plenty of people doing that sort of work for you!”

  “I have not tried to conceal the fact from you; but I do not know one of them I would trust so well as you.”

  Lanny, who hadn’t been born yesterday, but something over twelve thousand yesterdays ago, knew exactly how much weight to give to such a remark. “You honor me,” he said. “And, as I told you, so long as it is play, I can enjoy doing it. But if I accept compensation from you, at once I feel under pressure; I begin to wonder whether I am earning my salt, and decide that I am a complete Taugenichts!”

  “Your New England conscience,” said the fat General. “I have never before had an opportunity to observe it in operation.”

  “It is sometimes inconvenient to its owner,” replied the grandson of the Puritans; “but those who deal with him find it useful.”

  “You must understand that we Prussians also have our code, though perhaps not the same. I should not feel comfortable asking favors of you unless I was in position to make some sort of return. Can you not tell me of anything you would accept?”

  VI

  So Lanny had what he had been angling for, and it was time for him to jerk the hook. Said he, promptly: “When you put the matter to me that way, Hermann, I will make you a straightforward answer. I have what I suppose is a sort of profession; at any rate, it has enabled me to earn more than I need, and spares me the embarrassment of living on my rich wife. For lack of a shorter name I call myself a Kunstsachverstandiger.”

  “I am informed as to your reputation,” replied the Minister-Prasident; and it appeared as if he considered himself the one to jerk the hook. “You may perhaps have heard that I am building a rather good hunting-lodge for my friends. I want to furnish the place adequately, and nothing would please me more than to have your advice on the subject. Would you undertake to buy some art works for me?”

  “What I had in mind was something different from that. I was thinking of the old masters which were in the palace of Johannes Robin. I don’t know whether I ever mentioned it, but my associate and I selected and purchased those paintings.”

  “I have heard many comments upon the excellence of judgment displayed.”

  “We gave a great deal of study to the collection, and I think it really is good. My idea was that possibly your tastes might be different from mine, and you might care to turn some of those works into cash. I have prepared a list of what was paid for them, and would be glad to try to find purchasers at the same prices. It will cost you nothing, let me add.”

  “But I thought you were going to suggest some way by which I could reward you!”

  “The purchasers would pay me ten per cent commission. That is the basis on which I work with them.”

  “But isn’t it fair that I also should pay?”

  “I have a rule which I have never broken, that I do not take commissions from both parties. I represent one or the other, and try to serve his interest.”

  “Aber—why shouldn’t you serve my interest and let me pay the commission?”

  Lanny maintained his winning smile. “You are kind and I am grateful; but it happens that I have a standing arrangement with several clients in America who are building up collections. They expect to add ten per cent to the prices I quote them; so why not let them go on doing so?”

  “Famos!” exclaimed Goring. “But mightn’t I get higher prices with the help of your persuasive skill?”

  “I doubt it, for the reason that Johannes did his buying before the depression, and it will not be such an easy matter to find purchasers now. I am only offering to try, and am telling you in advance that I may have to come and confess failure. Johannes was a man who wanted what he wanted, and more than once he insisted upon paying prices higher than I considered wise from the business point of view. On this list which I have prepared from my records I have stated the actual prices paid, and in a few cases I have penciled in a lower figure, which I fear is the most I could advise any of my clients to pay now. It is, of course, for you to say whether or not you care to accept any of my suggestions.”

  “Tell me how you achieve these feats,” said Goring. “Do your magical millionaires always pay whatever you tell them?”

  “By no means. They have a habit of setting great value upon their money. They will ask: ‘Are you sure it is worth that?’ and I will reply: ‘There is no fixed price for a work of art; it depends on how badly you want it.’ Sometimes I am told to offer a lower figure, and then I take the cash and lay it on the table in front of the picture owner. I have observed that the actual sight of money exercises a kind of hypnotic effect upon many persons, and those who would resist a bank draft collapse in front of a packet of thousand-mark notes.”

  The Teutonic Falstaff was amused by this portrayal of human frailty. He called Lanny “ein ganzer Kerl,” and said: “Give me the list and I’ll look it over. A number of the paintings don’t mean much to me, and maybe I’ll turn you loose to plunder those plutocrats of yours.”

  VII

  There was nothing to do now but wait—which wasn’t such an ordeal with a suite in a de luxe hotel and every service at command. Smart Berlin society threw open its doors to an American “glamour girl,” and after a half-dozen wardrobe trunks had arrived by express, she was ready to go day and night.

  The prince consort arrayed himself according to the decrees of the fashion dictators, and accompanied his spouse to luncheons, thes dansants, and elaborate long dinners followed by music and dancing. He shook hands with numerous large gentlemen who seemed to have the bulk of whales and approximately their shape, starting with close-cropped heads and perfectly rounded all the way down, except for two or three deep creases at the back of their pink necks; their ladies were built on the same scale and had voices suited to Wagnerian opera—Lanny’s irreverent imagination saw them in flowing white robes, galloping to the rocking-horse rhythm of the Walkurenritt. Their conversation was serious, and you might give deep affront by mixing a Hochgeborener with a Hochwohlgeborener or addressing a Frau Doktor as an ordinary Frau.

  The younger set was not so heavy, either in body or in mind; they played golf and tennis, danced with spirit, and motored hither and yon; they admired Americans, used American slang, and bore no grudges because of the war. Like the daughter of J. Paramount Barnes, they made their religion out of having a good time. They were not interested in politics—except for repeating some comical story about the leaders of the fantast
ic new Regierung; when they had done that, they had proved themselves enlightened persons and could go on dancing. The Regierung rarely interfered with you if you had money and confined your witticisms to the right sort of people—those who also had money. When Lanny asked the grandson of one of the steel kings what he really thought about it all, the Grunschnabel answered: “Zum Teufel! It’s a problem of getting the votes of millions of morons, and the Nazi way seems to suit them in my country.”

  The larger magnates and their wives had decided ideas. For them the Hitler invention meant no more strikes or labor-union agitation, no more Reds fighting in the streets; it meant wages fixed and permanent, resulting in such prosperity as heavy industry had never before known. In short, the Third Reich was the magnate’s dream, and Lanny was struck by the curious resemblance of their conversation to that of his father. The only difference was that they had it while Robbie longed for it but didn’t know how to get it. The election in his homeland had gone in the opposite direction from what he had predicted, and his hope of putting restraint upon that man in the White House had gone glimmering. Robbie didn’t go so far as to ask for an American Hitler, but he took to predicting that one was coming, and if a likely candidate had presented himself and asked for funds he might not have been sent empty away.

  The masters of Germany’s immense steel, coal, chemical, and electrical industries said a few formal words of regret over the excesses of their new government, but hastened to point out that such things always happen during any social readjustment. They added that all Germany needed now was to have her lost territories restored, and then Europe might be assured of a long period of peace and prosperity. Lanny wanted, to say: “Peace and prosperity based upon the all-out manufacture of armaments?” but those were the things he had to keep locked up in the other half of his personality.

  VIII

  When an American playboy wearied of Berlin fashionable society, there were the art galleries and the concert halls. The Nazis had burned most of the worthwhile modern books and censored the art exhibitions, but collections of old masters stood untouched, and you could still hear Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms—If not Mendelssohn and Mahler and the other Jews. Lanny would turn his wife over to the smart ladies or to one of the eager young dancing men, and lose himself in the contemplation of masterpieces which spoke to him of that Germany he had known and loved as a youth and which, he told himself, survived in a region beyond the range of Nazi “Big Berthas” or the possible flight of General Goring’s planes.

  He went to a concert in the Philharmonie and heard a fine rendition of the Fifth Symphony. He gave up his soul to that of Beethoven, and felt himself lifted into a kind of divinity, endowed with new perceptions and powers; he shared in the struggle of mankind against those forces which have sought to block the upward progress of the race. He dreamed mighty dreams, and when the last notes of the glorious music had died he came back to the real world refreshed and strengthened for new efforts.

  But Lanny was not the same trusting and happy lad who had first heard this classic art work; he had learned more about the world, and his thoughts were more complex. Looking about the concert hall at the men and women, young and old, who had been mystically made one with him, he observed that several of them wore Nazi uniforms, and what could that mean? Was it possible to transform Beethoven’s passionate longings into any sort of Hitler ideology? To Lanny that appeared as the sin against the Holy Ghost; but evidently it had been committed, for the young Nazis looked just as inspired as the dreamiest Madchen or the most reverent Tonkunstler. “So pocht das Schicksal an die Pforte,” Beethoven had said; and what did those hammer blows of fate mean to a Stormtrooper? To what door was admission being demanded? Was it the French armies at the bridgeheads of the Rhine, or the Russians at the forts of East Prussia?

  Hardly the best of thoughts to take into a concert hall! The alien rebel appealed to the soul of Beethoven on behalf of his cause, and the father of modern music told him that the knocking on the door was that of the Stormtroopers raiding the home of the Schultzes and dragging away Ludi and Feddi to torture and death. The second theme, gently pleading, was the soul of Freddi, which would live on in Lanny Budd’s soul for as long as he had one or was one.

  The rebel’s thoughts wandered and came to rest upon an anecdote which had been told him by a Dutchman with whom he had chatted on the packet-boat from Harwich to the Hook of Holland. A Nazi friend had been extolling to this Dutchman the conditions within the Hitler realm; there was such perfect order, and the streets were so clean; everybody had work and enough to eat; everybody knew his duty and did it gladly—and so on. “Ah, yes,” the Dutchman had countered; “but when I hear a step on my front porch at four o’clock in the morning, I know it’s the milkman!”

  What was this strange duality in the soul of the German which made it possible for him to dream the noblest and holiest of dreams, and then go out and perpetrate the most hideous atrocities? What was it which had made Germany the land of Beethoven, Goethe, and Schiller, and at the same time the land of Bismarck, Hindenburg, and Schicklgruber alias Hitler? Evidently the German did not know how to harness his aspirations and make them work in his everyday life, especially political. He delighted in lofty abstractions expressed in the longest words and used like counters in a game, but without ever turning them into cash. His ideas were like the screws of a steamship during a violent storm; they race frequently in the air, failing to come into contact with the water and produce any motion in the vessel.

  IX

  One morning the mail brought a letter on old-fashioned stationery, bearing the crest of the Baron von Wiesenschmetterling. It informed Herr Lanning Budd that the Baroninwitwe would be pleased to consider an offer of one hundred and twenty-five thousand marks for the Hubert van Eyck painting. She wouldn’t quote in dollars, of course, but at the then rate of exchange it was about fifty thousand. Irma thought it monstrous for such a tiny piece of canvas; but this was a real old master, two centuries older than Rembrandt. Lanny said it might call for dickering; to begin with he wrote a carefully studied note calling the old lady’s attention to her phrasing and stating that he could not undertake the negotiations upon the basis of a promise to “consider.” Might he have her assurance that if within the next thirty days he brought her the sum of one hundred and twenty-five thousand marks in cash the painting would be his?

  While, waiting for a reply, he escorted Irma to more entertainments; until one morning he received a ceremonious visit from the Oberleutnant bringing him a note on the impressive stationery of the Minister-Prasident of Prussia, authorizing him to sell a list of paintings at various specified prices. A total of seventeen were listed, and the expert was amused to observe that they included all the Italians; most of the French, and several of the English, but none of the German, Dutch, or Flemish. There were conclusions of a political nature to be drawn from this. The Nazis were hoping to make friends with Holland and Belgium, but were in a state of intense irritation with Mussolini, who was busily intriguing with the Austrian government, seeking control of that near-bankrupt country. The fat Kommandant of the German Air Force had made a couple of trips to Rome, but with ill success according to all reports.

  Irma, who knew the paintings, looked over the list and commented from another point of view: “He is keeping all the nudes!” Yes, a psychoanalyst could have told a lot about an old-style robber-baron from that list of rejects. He didn’t care anything about the Blessed Virgin or any such neglected females; he didn’t care for old people of either sex or for the proletariat of any tribe or color. What he cherished was beautiful young women in scanty garments, and especially when they had large ruddy limbs, after the style of Rubens; also princes, statesmen, and soldiers in gorgeous costumes, with jewels and lace and orders of whatever design. Did he intend putting these to use as fashion-plates?

  Anyhow, it was a job, though not an easy one, for all Lanny’s suggestions of reduction in price had been overlooked, and a couple o
f the prices had been hiked. But Lanny had explained that he sometimes came back with counterproposals, and presumably the Minister-Prasident was taking precautions. It could do no harm to bring him a lower offer; his official executioner couldn’t chop off the head of a Kunstsachverstandiger who happened to be an American citizen. The total sum which Lanny was invited to contribute to the great man’s exchequer was slightly more than a million marks, and even if he took Zoltan Kertezsi in on some of the deals, he would earn enough money to keep Trudi Schultz and her fellow-conspirators in funds for a year or two.

  X

  Lanny and his wife had a luncheon engagement, but he begged off in order to write letters and cablegrams. After Irma had departed, he decided upon a respite, and went for a drive into the Moabit district. As his chariot rolled, his thoughts were busy with the second-in-command of the Nazis, trying to probe the mystery of this unusual acquaintanceship. Did Goring really believe that Lanny was friendly to his cause and would be willing to help him? It was hard to imagine. A wholesale murderer, with the guilt of the blood purge and the Reichstag fire and other crimes beyond the reckoning of history, would hardly be apt to take up casual friendships or fall victim to the charms of a dilettante of all the arts, including conversation. Having at command the greatest spying-organization in the world, he will hardly admit any person to his intimacy without knowing that person’s record and connections. Could he fail to have learned about the Red uncle and the Pink school in Cannes, and that Lanny had got kicked out of Rome ten years ago; that he was a friend of Blum and Longuet and Steffens and others, and that his best chum was an anti-Nazi playwright? What could Goring be trying to get out of such a person?