Wide Is the Gate: (World's End Lanny Budd #4); by Upton Sinclair.

The title of this, the fourth volume in the World's End series, is from the quote in the the page of dedication,

"“Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction.”"

The book begins in 1934, slightly after the end of Dragon's Teeth, where Lanny was in tears after he had brought Freddi to his hotel and intended to take him to Paris in an ambulance with Rahel, Freddi's wife, to the doctor who had treated Marcel. Here the author skips over the pain of it all to the funeral conducted at Bienvenu, and as per the wishes of Leah Robin, the mother, in the orthodox way. Lanny arrived and was a pall bearer, and spoke after the formal words by the rabbi found by Mama Robin.

"In all those years Lanny had never known him to speak an unkind word or perform a dishonorable action. “He was as near to being perfectly good as one could ask of a human being; and I do not say that just because he is dead—I said it many times and to many people while he was living. He was an artist and a scholar. He knew the best literature of the land which he had made his own. He earned a doctoral degree at the University of Berlin, and he did this not for the honor nor yet for a livelihood, but because he wanted to know what the wisest men had learned about the causes and the cure of poverty.”"

Freddi represents the decent, educated, gentle humans of artistic bent and working for human fraternity, in this story, and represents all those that were similar in any of the qualities, that were killed by the regime in Germany beginning in early thirties.

Almost immediately the author introduces Spain, at this time a new republic, via Raoul Palma who has been running the worker's school in Cannes and is helped by Lanny.

"Lanny didn’t know Spain very well—only from stops on a yachting-cruise and a plane trip. But he knew the Spaniards here on the Riviera; they came to play golf and polo, to dance and gamble and flirt in the casinos, or to shoot pigeons, their idea of manly sport. They read no books, they knew nothing, but considered themselves far above the rest of mankind. Alfonso of the jimber-jaw and the unpleasant diseases liked to be amused, and when on holiday he had unbent with the rich Americans of this Coast of Pleasure. Lanny had played tennis with him, and wasn’t supposed to beat him, but had disregarded this convention. Now the ex-monarch was in Rome, intriguing with Mussolini to be restored to his throne."

Lanny and Raoul spoke about French government - the premier Demergue was in cahoots with Croix De Feu, but Louis Barthou the foreign minister was quite aware of reality of hitler.

"Lanny reminded his friend of the “grand tour” which Barthou had recently made in the Balkans, to rally Yugoslavia and other states to an alliance against the new German counter-revolution. His success had been made plain by the effort the Nazis had made to bomb his train in Austria. “That’s the way you tell your friends nowadays,” added the American, and went on to point out that the determined little lawyer had been willing to drop his antagonism to the Soviet Union in the face of a greater peril; he had helped to bring Russia into the League of Nations last month and was working hard to prepare public opinion for a military alliance between that country and France."

Lanny told Raoul about Freddi and his last year.

"Dreadful, unspeakably wicked men the Nazi chieftains were, and Lanny was haunted by the idea that it was his duty to give up all pleasures and all other duties and try to awaken the people of Western Europe to a realization of the peril in which they stood."

At the train station before departing for Paris, he bought a newspaper and glanced at the headlines.

"Glancing at its banner headlines he gave a cry. “LE ROI ALEXANDRE ET BARTHOU ASSASSINES!”

"Quickly Lanny’s eyes ran over the story, and he read the salient details to his friend. The King of Yugoslavia had come for a visit of state to France, to celebrate the signing of their treaty of alliance; he had landed at Marseille, and the Foreign Minister had met him at the dock. They had been driven in an open car into the city, through cheering throngs. In front of the stock exchange a man had run out from the crowd, shouting a greeting to the king, and before the police could stop him he had leaped upon the running-board and opened fire with an automatic gun, killing the king and fatally wounding Barthou, who tried to shield his guest.

"The crowd had beaten the assassin to death, in spite of the efforts of the police to save him. He had been identified as one of a Croatian terrorist organization; but Lanny said: “You’ll find the Nazis were behind him!” So it proved, in due course. The reactionary conspirators had been publishing a paper in Berlin, with funds obtained from the head of the foreign policy department of the Hitler party. The assassin had been traveling on a forged passport, obtained in Munich, and the weapon he had used bore the trademark of Mauser, the German munitions firm."

"It was the third Nazi murder of foreign statesmen within a year. First, Premier Duca of Rumania had been shot to death. Then a band of gangsters had broken into the office of Chancellor Dollfuss of Austria, the Catholic statesman who had been responsible for the slaughter of the Socialist workers in Vienna and the bombardment of those blocks of model apartments which Lanny had so greatly admired. And now both signers of the Yugoslav-French agreement had been wiped out."

Anyone else notice the germs of WWII here are an echo - or a kaleidoscopic reflection - of the beginning of WWI, involving Yugoslavia, royalty on drive in public assassinated by a lone assassin who is Croatian instead of Serb,..... And Germany in wings?
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Robbie planning an airplane factory in Newcastle, above the Budd plant now taken over by Wall Street, a very attractive and admirable picture. He was meeting Zaharoff and denis de Bruyne as intended investors, and Lanny suggested Irma ought to be asked too to invest in Budd--Erling, the new concern.

"The killing of Barthou had thrown French affairs into turmoil. The Foreign Minister had been one of the few real patriots left in the country ... It was a time of real peril for France—the mad Hitler was rearming his country rapidly, and his agents were busy intriguing and stirring up revolts in every nation, big and little. Meanwhile France was torn by domestic strife, and where among politicians would she find a friend and protector?"

"Alas, Marianne, la douce, la belle, no longer seemed to Lanny the shining, romantic creature he had imagined in his happy boyhood; then he had loved her, and all her children, rich and poor, on that lovely Azure Coast where stood his home. But now Marianne was taking on an aspect somewhat drab; her honor was sold in the market-place, and the clamor of the traffickers spoiled the day and the night."

" ... the talk was of Pierre Laval as Barthou’s successor, ... the innkeeper’s son had started far to the left, and as soon as he got power had set out to line his pockets. ... so eager to preserve his property that he was an easy mark for the Nazi blackmailers."

" ... de Bruyne added: “I have to excuse myself now; I have an appointment with that fripon mongol.”"

Robbie spoke to Zaharoff. "“Airplane factories have been scratch affairs so far, and their techniques are based on small-scale operations. What I have in mind is to apply the principles of mass production to this new job; I want to put airplanes on a belt.” 
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Lanny got a letter from someone called Bernhardt Monck enclosing a sketch of Freddi done by Trudi Schultz with a black line around, asking him to contact, sent from London and forwarded from Bienvenu. He wrote back enclosing a pound and saying he'd be there in a couple of days, and on the way stopped at Les Forets, home of Emily Chattersworth. They exchanged notes, so she became interested in Robbie's project and asked if he'd come see her. 

Lanny went home first, to the villa rented near Wickthorpe castle, and had the delight of seeing his daughter, now four and a half. Irma and he were very much in love, but aware of their differences, and tried to keep from mentioning them. She insisted she should be asked to invest in Robbie's project. They were invited at Wickthorpe for dinner and met the English diplomatic set. 

They drove to London the next day, and after seeing paintings Irma needed to do other things, so Lanny went and met Bernhardt Monck. He satisfied himself that the person was true albeit the name was assumed, and that Trudi Schultz had really sent him. Monck said what Lanny expected, need of money for cause, which now was urgent in Germany. 

Lanny gave money and promised to give more, with the proviso that at a time and date set by her Trudi should meet him, and even if it were unwise for her to acknowledge Lanny, she should clearly say "trust Monck", for which he was willing to come to Germany as the art expert, and expected the regime to welcome the person who brought foreign exchange. After their return to his villa, he visited Rick next and talked over his plan. He met young Alfy who was ready for college, and planned to follow in his father's footsteps as aviator. He drove with Alfy to the school where Marceline Detaze was boarding, to bring her home. Unlike serious and silent Alfy, Marceline was a budding dancer, wilful and spirited, not content with the match but expecting courtship. 

Lanny went home and settled to enjoy time with his wife and daughter, but was waiting to hear from Trudi. The letter arrived, with two sketches - one of lanny and other of Hansi - that were unmistakably by her and not made under duress. Lanny couldn't tell Irma, so he made business arrangements with Zoltan Kertezsi wiring him from Paris inquiring about some paintings in Germany. He managed to convince Irma to go with him and she was wary, but willing, saying

"“Let’s go”; but then, frowning, she added: “Listen to me, Lanny. I mean it—if you do anything to make me miserable the way you did, I’ll never forgive you as long as I live!”"

"They waited only to see Robbie, who was due in London. He arrived, outwardly calm, inwardly exultant over his successes. Zaharoff had agreed to take a million dollars’ worth of Budd-Erling shares and had given Robbie permission to mention this to several of his former English associates. Denis de Bruyne had taken three million francs’ worth and was getting up a syndicate of his friends. Also Emily Chattersworth was coming in; and now Robbie, at request, sat down with Irma and laid the proposal before her. ... Joseph Barnes was ordered to select half a million dollars’ worth of those which had brought in the smallest returns during the present year; he was to sell them at the market and replace them with Budd-Erling preferred plus common as a bonus. ... Of course, Robbie’s capable ex-mistress saw to it that the news of Irma’s action was spread among her fashionable friends, and Margy, Dowager Lady Eversham-Watson, and Sophie, former Baroness de la Tourette, and all the other ladies with large incomes and still larger appetites were eager to hear about this opportunity of enrichment."

Irma and Robbie had a talk, he reassured her and suggested she might turn Lanny into making use of his contacts that would be of use to Robbie, so the father's dream of having his firstborn work with him might come true.

"“I can’t argue with Lanny,” said the young wife, sadly. “He’s read so much more than I have, and he thinks I’m just a dumb cluck.”

"“You have a lot more influence than you know, and between us we may get him interested in airplanes.” Robbie said that, and then after a moment added: “Give him time. There are no perfect husbands, you know.”

"Irma nodded. There were unspoken thoughts between them. She had been taught the value of her money and understood why Robbie valued her so highly as a wife. But they were both of them well-bred persons, who would act on what they called “common sense” but wouldn’t put it into words."
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"In Germany the highways are smooth and straight and lined with well-kept trees, many of them fruit-bearing. ... Lanny said these were military roads, intended for the invasion of the bordering countries; he added that they were built with American money, borrowed by the German Republic and by its member states and cities." 

Still so, except invasion now is not by military marching. 

"What she saw in this country was clean, well-kept streets and houses, and the people in them the same." 

Still so, except for those of the migrants that are not threatening, who consequently are looked down on, regardless of their worth, and spied on, with attempted indoctrination to bring them into line to worship Germany and realise they are unworthy of ever being part thereof; if, however, they have no such wish or have been around and remark about anything anywhere being better, they are solicitously asked if they are homesick, for the assumption is, you must be crazy to think everything German is not best in the world, and crazier to not wish to become German,  however forbidden. Lack of a total admiration drives them into a denial, unless of course it's accompanied by a culture that's far more ferocious and uncompromising, and they then knuckle under, telling themselves and other Germans that they must tolerate and even comply, as in the neighbourhoods where high schools have large numbers of migrants, so female students and even teachers are asked to not provoke them. 

Irma's reaction to the events seen and suffered by Lanny is what most people have in most cases of injustice or violence suffered by anyone not close, and often even then. It's always easier to blame a victim, and side with power that can trample you down if you do not compromise and invert truth to suit interests of brute force. 
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Lanny and Irma visited Stubendorf after arriving in Berlin, and having visited the Graf and Kurt, stopped at the home of the Baroness, aunt of the Graf, whose art collection Lannyinspected. Irma asked as they drove away if she'd sell any, and he said it depended on "state of her mortgages.” 

"He explained that most of these estates had been loaded down with debts in wartime; many of them had come under the shadow of the Osthilfe scandal, which had had so much to do with the Nazis’ getting into power.

"Lanny told how the government of the Republic had paid vast sums to the great Prussian landlords to help them in reconstruction, and most of the money had been wasted. Hindenburg’s son had been involved, and that had helped to break down the old President and force him into a deal with the “Bohemian corporal,” as he had been accustomed to call the founder and Fuhrer of National Socialism."

Lanny went and met Trudi in Berlin as Irma was invited to lunch by Furstin Donnerstein, and took her for a drive. Trudi validated Monck, and tried to tell Lanny about what was going on. 

"“They seize men and women, old and young—they respect nobody. They carry them off to the woods outside the city and beat them to death and bury them where they lie or leave them for others to find and bury. They drag them into dungeons which they have in the cellars of police stations and party headquarters, where they torture people to make them confess and name their friends and comrades. Things happen, so hideous that you cannot bring yourself to talk about them; nothing worse was ever done by the Spanish Inquisition, or by Chinese torturers, or ...

"“Germany has become a land of spies and betrayers; you never know whom you can trust. They teach the children in the schools to spy upon their parents and denounce them; they torture perfectly innocent people because of something some relative has done. No servant can be trusted, no employee, hardly a friend. It is impossible for half a dozen persons to meet, even in a private home; one dares not express an opinion or even ask for news. You never know at what moment of the day or night will come a banging on the door, and it’s a band of Stormtroopers, or the Gestapo with one of their vans to carry you away. You live in the shadow of this awful thing and can never get it out of your mind. Because I am a woman, and because they have so many sadists and degenerates among them, I carry a vial of poison, ready to swallow it before they can lay hands upon me.”"

Lanny offered of take Trudi out of Germany, but she couldn't abandon Ludi if he were alive. In any case, work they did in Germany was important. 

"We have told them the truth about the Reichstag fire, and about the number of those murdered last June and July. The Nazis admit less than one hundred, but we have listed more than twelve hundred and our lists have been circulated. The Nazis know that, and of course they are hunting us day and night; so far I do not think they have any clue. Even if they get some group it will be small; we have built ourselves like the worm, which can be cut into sections and each will go on growing by itself." 

This chapter is titled "“Wir sind all des Todes Eigen”—we are all death’s own." Lanny assured Trudi his support for the cause by promising occasional sums of money, and assuring her that bringing it won't be a problem. 

"“Lanny, you are an angel! If I believed in such, I would be certain that you had been sent from heaven.”"

They arranged how they would meet. Lanny explained his real role to her and she promised not to doubt him. 

""My father is going in for the manufacture of airplanes, and he will be expecting me to be useful to him; in return I may feel justified in making him useful to me. I don’t want to say any more about this, except to be sure that whatever happens, you will not mention your connection with me or your knowledge of my role.” 

"“I’ll die before I do it, Lanny.” 

"“I have an idea which may be worth while and about which I would like your advice. You know that the fat General seized the palace of my Jewish friends, and you know the fine paintings which were a part of his loot. It happens that Zoltan Kertezsi and I selected nearly all those paintings, and it would be easy to find a market for them in America; they might bring several million dollars, and there would be a commission of ten per cent. That is one way by which I could get large sums of money for you, and it would amuse me to persuade an old-style Teutonic robber-baron to contribute to his own undoing.” 

"“Knorke!” exclaimed the woman. 

"“There is this drawback, that Goring would be getting nine marks for every one that I got. Thus I might be strengthening the Nazi cause far more than I was hurting it. What if he used the money to buy my father’s airplanes?” 

"Trudi thought before answering. “He will buy the planes with the money of the German people, never with his own. For himself he is building a grand estate on a peninsula up in the North Sea. He is a greedy hog, and I do not believe he would give a pfennig to the government, but rather take away all that he dares.” 

"“Then it wouldn’t be a mistake to offer to sell his pictures?” “If he wishes to sell them he could do it without your help—isn’t that true?” 

"“Yes, no doubt.” 

"“Well, then, let him spend what he pleases upon his own glory, and we will use our share to tell the German people what lives their false leaders are living.”"
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Lanny invited Furtwaengler with his wife for dinner at Adlon.

" ...  the young S.S. man knew that his American host had penetrated to the very heart of the party’s treachery and cruelty, had witnessed soul-shaking sights and lost one of his dearest friends to the Nazi terror; but the fat General, Furtwaengler’s boss, had seen fit to take it all as a joke, and the staff officer had apparently decided that it had been a joke to Lanny as well. A curious quirk in their psychology, which an outsider had to try hard to understand: their collective egotism was such that they were rendered incapable of understanding other people’s minds, and in spite of their utmost cunning they remained naive and vulnerable; ...  what is mere wealth compared with titles and honors, fame and glory vision and Geist? Wealth is an incidental, one of the rewards of courage and daring; all the wealth of the world lay exposed before the Nazis, as Pizarro had found it in Peru and Clive in India."

Lanny ordered the most expensive champagne at dinner, and plied him post dinner with brandy and liqueurs while drinking lightly himself. Furtwaengler revealed freely.

" ... Germany was going to win the Saar plebiscite; the matter had been arranged with German thoroughness and everything would go through planmassig. He didn’t go so far as to say that the murder of Barthou had been arranged, but he remarked with a smile that it was certainly most convenient, and that in future French politicians would be more cautious in their policy of Einkreisung."

Lanny indicated he had information, and Furtwaengler arranged the meeting next morning with Goring. Lanny addressed him by first name following his lead, and was surprised by him remarking "“You are on the way to becoming a crown prince of the air lanes!”" And suggesting Robbie should come see him. 

"“Na, na!” smiled Lanny. “You are not financing any airplane factories outside the Reich.” 

"“Aber,” countered the Air Minister, “we buy planes, and would buy more if they were good.” 

"“One for a sample?” retorted the other. He knew he was supposed to be impudent; he was the court jester. 

"“How can you say such a thing? Who could ever say that I took anything without paying for it?” 

"“Who could say it if I couldn’t?” 

"At this the stout General turned into a Kris Kringle, whose round belly shook when he laughed like a bowl full of jelly. It was to be doubted if anyone had had the nerve to address him in that fashion for many a long day. “Setze dich, Lanny,” he said, in fatherly fashion. “Seriously, tell Robert Budd that if he gets that thousand-horsepower engine, I will lease his patents and he won’t have to argue about the price.” 

"It was quite disconcerting. Lanny felt himself enveloped in a net of espionage, and shuddered inwardly, thinking of Trudi. But then he realized that Robbie had been talking his project all over Paris and London, and of course Goring’s agents would have sent him word. But what a contrast in efficiency! Robbie had been to consult the authorities both in England and in his own country, and both had high-hatted him; but here this old German Raubtier sent for him and invited him to name his own figure! It boded ill—and especially since Lanny knew that Robbie would be apt to accept the invitation!"

Lanny talked about French politics, his policy being never mention anything Goring didn't know. 

"“Their own wealth concerns them so deeply that they have no time to think about their country. It would not trouble them too greatly if you were to bomb the rest of it, provided you would agree to spare their mines and steel mills and other valuable properties.” 

"“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."

Goring asked him again if he'd work for him informally bringing him information, for instance meeting Pierre Laval and reporting, and Lanny declined working for payment. Goring asked if he wanted anything, and Lanny responded saying he had a profession; Goring offered him the job of purchasing art for his hunting lodge, but Lanny stuck to his idea and mentioned selling the artworks he'd provided Johannes Robin with, all now taken by Goring for a mark. Goring agreed, after he'd tried suggesting a commission and Lanny said he preferred charging his buyers in this instance. 

So Lanny and Irma waited, and had various social engagements, with high society. They were serious about titles, but younger set was more like Irma.

"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 ..."

"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?”"

Lanny went to concerts, but the audience had large numbers of nazis in uniform. 

"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 ... 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."

The baroness wrote that she'd consider a price of hundred and twenty fine thousand marks; Lanny wrote to ask if she'd definitely sell at the price. Meanwhile he received a list of seventeen paintings with prices from Goring. 

" ... 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!”"

Lanny picked up Trudi after making sure he wasn't being followed, and told her about Goring.

"“Mostly you listen to him talk. You find that it has to do with himself and his prowess, and of course with the army and especially with the air force he is building. He has a strong ego, and his aim in life is to compel other persons to submit to his will. He is much better company than some of the other Nazis, because he does not bore you with their jargon; he talks like a man of the world who is interested in power and assumes that you are sensible enough to understand that.” 

"“It does not disturb his sleep that he has killed tens of thousands of persons and is having a hundred thousand tortured in prisons?” 

"“I am sure he sleeps as soundly as any other fat man. You must understand that he does not have our conception of human brotherhood. He is a professional killer of other men; he has been trained for it since youth, and during the World War it became the most exciting of games, in which he staked his life upon his skill. Frau Magda Goebbels called my attention to the fact that so many of the Nazi leaders have been airmen. It was a school for the making of initiative and daring, and for the eliminating of the scrupulous. I am sure that Goring would hesitate no more over eliminating you than you would over a bedbug.”
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Trudi asked what Lanny would say to German workers; he thought, and said

"“I believe I would point out to them that the increase in employment of which the Nazis boast is based entirely upon the manufacture of armaments; also, it depends upon the piling up of debts, and so it cannot go on indefinitely. It can have but one end, another slaughtering of the workers.” 

"“Suppose you had a chance to bring them some sort of message from the outside world, what would it be?” 

"“That the workers of France and England and America are of a pacifist disposition; they do not want to rearm their countries and they have succeeded in cutting down military budgets to a great extent. But of course if Germany goes on rearming, that will automatically force the neighboring countries to follow suit. It is obvious that when a nation turns its whole substance into war materials, as Germany is doing now, the time will come when that nation has to go to war—it can do nothing else because it is equipped for nothing else; and it must use its armaments or else be suffocated under their weight.” 

"“We do not get the Socialist papers from abroad any more, Lanny. Can you tell me of some foreign statesman who has said that, and who might be quoted?”

"“Leon Blum has been saying it over and over; both in his speeches and in Le Populaire.” 

"“Very well,” said the woman. “We will attribute it to him. The next time you come into Germany, bring us some clippings like that; they will be useful.” 

"“O.K.,” said Lanny, somewhat offhand and without realizing that he was taking one more step toward trouble. Or maybe he knew but didn’t wish to admit it to himself. Wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and it is a common observation that when you have taken the first step through that gate and along that way, it becomes easier to take the second and the third." ............................................................................... 

An acquaintance of Irma whom Lanny had picked for the painting from the baroness cabled back and Lannydrove to see the baroness, with cash. 

"They drove on a day of rain which turned to light snow before they got to their destination. The potato-fields were a vast magical blanket, suggesting a world where there had never been any suffering; but it was an illusion, for if you had known how many thousands of human bodies had fertilized those fields through the centuries it would have ruined your appetite for “earth-apples,” as the Germans call them."

Lanny managed to make the deal, and next morning gave most of his commission, ten thousand marks, to Trudi. After return to Wickthorpe Lodge which they had rented, around Xmas once when lanny was trying with Madame Zyszynski to communicate with Freddi, instead Ludi came through, and gave a message for Trudi that would identify him. He had been tortured in Oranienburg and killed himself, and said his body was burned by nazis. 

Robbie was busy getting his plant up and Johannes returned from South America to join him in any way he could help; Rahel and Leah packed up from Bienvenu with letter of thanks for their hosts to join him. Irma was relieved. 

"Irma said nothing to her husband, but he knew what a relief she found this; for how could anybody enjoy the pleasures of social life in the atmosphere of grief and fear which those poor Jewish people inevitably spread around them? Irma was glad also on account of her little girl, because she didn’t want those two children to become too fond of each other; she had no mind to find herself some day in the position of Robbie Budd and his wife, with a Jewish son-in-law and the possibility of a half-Jewish grandchild. All right to have Jewish friends, but mixing your blood was something different."

They were going to Bienvenu for winter, but Lanny got a letter, and meanwhile had a client for a painting from the Robin collection stolen by Goring for one mark. So they decided Irma could wait in Paris. 

"Paris was always an agreeable place for waiting. You could do shopping, if you had what it took, and there were plays to be seen and fashionable friends to go about with. This young couple had two cars which they were taking to the Riviera, so they arranged that the chauffeur should drive Frances and her governess and maid direct to Bienvenu; Irma found traveling with children a nuisance and always avoided it if she could. Lanny would drive his wife to Paris and then proceed alone to Berlin."

Irma warned him that she couldn't and won't stand it if he put her through anything like the time he'd disappeared while trying to save Freddi. He drove to Berlin and stayed at Adlon, and in the morning had the appointment at the marble palace that had belonged to the Robin family, and  

"Now it was the home of the fat General’s lady favorite, a darling of the German stage and screen; Lanny’s taste was all over it, and he hoped the statuesque blond beauty appreciated what he had done for her."

Having paid for the paintings and collected them, he drove off and collected Trudi who had something special for him. 

"“I have some documents of a most confidential nature which I thought you might be able to put to use. They are photostatic copies of reports to Goring’s office, showing production of military planes in violation of the Versailles treaty. You perhaps do not know that we are manufacturing certain types of transport planes in Germany, while in Sweden the same types are being made for our government, but having armament; they bear the same type numbers, but the armored ones have the initial K, that is, Krieg. With these documents you can prove that Goring is getting more warplanes than France and Britain combined.” 

"“Holy smoke!” said the art expert. “How do you get such things?” 

"“That is one question you are not permitted to ask. Suffice it to say that all our friends are not yet dead, or even in concentration camps. Old-time party members come to us; some of them have turned Nazi as a camouflage.”"

Lanny didn't know how he could put them to best use. 

"“I haven’t told you everything yet,” said Trudi. “I have photostatic copies of Wehrmacht intelligence reports, sent in by agents in Paris and London, giving data as to the situation of military objectives such as oil-depots, gas-tanks, arsenals, and other bombing-targets.”"

"“Oh, my God!” exclaimed the American. 

"“They are evidently the results of surveyor’s work; that is, they tell you, so many meters north-northwest of some prominent object—things like that.” 

"“Are they in code?” 

"“They consist entirely of names of places, distances, and directions. They are abbreviated, and for place names they give only initials. The person who brought them to us has supplied interpretations which make it all quite clear. One hundred and forty-seven meters due north of such and such a station of the Paris Metro there is an oil-storage depot; so and so many feet southeast of the south entrance to Waterloo Bridge there is a warehouse full of explosives—things like that. Don’t you suppose that might be of importance to the English authorities?” 

"“I’ve no doubt they’d read them with great interest,” replied Lanny, “and doubtless would check them carefully. But would they do anything that made any real difference? You should hear my father talk about the British brass-hats, their dumbness, and their utter, impenetrable complacency. It is beneath their dignity to worry or even to take precautions about anything. They are as solid and as self-satisfied as their own Rock of Gibraltar.”" 

Lanny gave her Ludi's message, and Trudi wanted to meet Madame Zyszynski,  which Lanny thought might be possible so time, but gave her the address of the medium Irma had visited in Berlin. He dropped her and drove to Amsterdam, and called Rick, telling him to come with Nina, and Rick agreed. They arrived, and once they were in Paris Lanny took Rick to another room and showed him what he had. Rick doubted it would be any use giving it to government, and Lanny pointed out

"“These documents have to be published by some paper with which neither of us has ever had anything to do; a paper without any left tendencies, so that Goring will decide that the job was done by respectable government spies.”"

They selected a paper that was right wing but pro empire and armament, and a statesman right wing of the same character who would deliver them, so Gestapo couldn't suspect Lanny.  
...............................................................................


The family settled for the season at Bienvenu and Irma entertained at Sept Chenes, the Riviera home of Emily Chattersworth,  learning from her. 

"The Saarland plebiscite was held in January, and resulted in a nine-to-one vote by the inhabitants in favor of a return to Germany. The district had always been German, and doubtless would have voted that way without the colossal propaganda campaign which the Nazis had put on. But the Nazis liked such campaigns, they were the breath of Nazi being, and they were practice for other campaigns which were scheduled for everywhere along the German borders. They included not merely speeches and music and marching, but also the boycotting of merchants and the terrorizing of opponents by brownshirted rowdies of the Deutsche Front, armed with revolvers, daggers, and hard-rubber truncheons.

"As soon as the election results were announced, the Nazis prepared their “long knives,” and so most of the French population picked up what belongings they could carry and fled. Many came to the Riviera, because it was warmer and therefore a more pleasant place in which to starve." Lanny was guarded by his wife and mother at home, and he gave to Raoul Palma what he could, secretly. 

Rick communicated about the papers in code. 

"A week or so later the documents were published, in installments, day after day, and there was a tremendous sensation; the baronet’s son wrote about it freely, as he would have done if he had known nothing about the matter in advance. There were interpellations in Parliament, and vague answers to the effect that the government were taking cognizance—the English government were always plural, and also they were dignified, imperturbable, and slow to anger when they wanted to be. There was a new term coming into use for statesmen and officials who avoided getting angry with the Nazis; they were called “appeasers,” and the Nazis quickly found out who they were and made the most of their state of mind. Jesse Blackless had pointed out to his nephew the fact that those who were most afraid of displeasing the Nazis appeared to be least afraid of displeasing the Soviets."

Lanny sent clippings to Robbie. 

" “This looks to be genuine,” he wrote, “and ought to help sell your products when you get them ready.” Robbie replied: “Hot stuff, and if I thought it was genuine I’d send Johannes over now! Send me anything more of the sort that you come upon. Also, ask your fat friend about it the next time you see him!”

"Ramsay MacDonald, still holding on as Prime Minister, made a speech protesting against German rearmament. Ramsay made speeches about many evils, and assumed that this was equivalent to abolishing them. Hitler made a speech in reply, telling how pacific were the intentions of his government; and all the appeasers said: “There, now, you see how he is being maligned!” Wickthorpe told Rick that Downing Street—the British Foreign Office—had made strong representations to the Wilhelmstrasse, and the Wilhelmstrasse had promptly denounced the documents as fraudulent. His Lordship added that he was inclined to accept this, and Rick was not in a position to dissent. Among other things Rick sent to Lanny was a clipping from a Left paper of London which said that, if the truth ever became known about these revelations, it would be found that aircraft manufacturers outside of Germany had had a hand in the preparation of them. Rick put some exclamation points in the margin of this, and Lanny Budd, son of an embryo aircraft manufacturer, didn’t fail to appreciate the humor. 

"Also, there came one of those plain-looking missives from Berlin. “Mueller” expressed her gratitude for his wise use of her sketches, and promised to make some more. Lanny knew that the circulation of English newspapers was still permitted in Germany, and while those particularly dangerous issues had doubtless been confiscated, the details would be known to both the Nazis and their foes. In the midst of the darkness of intrigue that covered Europe, you cast your bread upon the waters—such small crumbs of truth as you could collect—and wondered if the Preacher had been right and would you ever find them again, and where, and when, and how."

"Britain and France had been playing as partners, but were greedy and suspicious, each of the other, and Britain was willing to let Germany grow stronger in order to keep France from growing too strong. So France turned to Russia, which she hated, trying to work out a deal for common defense against a greater danger. Hitler and Mussolini, two upstarts jealous of each other, were ready to break all the rules of the game in the effort to grab something for themselves. Pierre Laval, fresh from a visit to Moscow, paid one to Rome, in which he cooked up a deal with Mussolini pledging them both to mutual assistance should Germany take what was called “unilateral action” in the matter of rearming. Meanwhile the British Foreign Secretary was angling for an invitation to Munich in order to negotiate with Hitler the terms on which Britain might grant him permission to rearm. Then, of course, it wouldn’t be “unilateral action”!"

Meanwhile Hitler declared universal conscription and forces increased to half a million in Germany for sake of peace. "He had learned about the British habit of weekends, and so he made it a rule to announce his bold moves on a Saturday. No British statesman could possibly take action on that day, and every British statesman would have all day Sunday to pray over it, to contemplate the horrors of war and work himself into a state of conscientiousness. He would threaten and bluster, of course; he had to do that in order to be re-elected, but he wouldn’t take any action—so Adi figured." 

Lanny got a communication from Berlin but also a card from Pietro Corsatti, and they got ready to drive to Berlin via Stresa in Lego Maggiore. They tried staying low, not wanting attention from fascist regime. 

"Laval and Flandin were representing France; a queer pair, one squat, the other several inches taller than anybody else and that much duller. Pete said they were the calamity twins of France, and MacDonald and Simon were the same for England. Il Duce was here, representing himself; he had just issued decrees doubling his own army, and now France and England were trying to buy him to some program that would at least look like restraining Hitler. What price was Musso demanding, and how much of it was he going to get? These were the questions which tormented the journalists; and the extreme secrecy meant bad luck for somebody. Austria, perhaps? Or was it Abyssinia?

"A few months ago there had been an “incident” at a place called Ual-Ual, which wasn’t in any gazetteer, and which consisted of a well and some mud-huts in the Ogaden Desert near Italian Somaliland. Native troops accompanying a border commission had driven some Italian troops away. This had been an insult to Il Duce’s dignity, and his kept press denounced the intolerable conditions of disorder existing in this backward land. To watchful editors it meant that Mussolini was getting ready to start that empire which he had been promising his young Blackshirts for a matter of twelve or thirteen years. Pete pointed out that the headwaters of the Nile are in that land, and surely Britain wasn’t going to let anybody dam them and divert them from the cotton-fields of the Sudan!" 

They saw Mussolini make a balcony appearance. 

"Now those Socialists were dead, or in exile, or slowly dying on barren rocky islands in the Mediterranean; but this new Caesar was grown so great that he appeared on illuminated balconies, and when Americans wished to say what they thought of him they had to refer to him as “Mister Big.”"

Wickthorpe had them invited to tea at local residence of an English family, where they met other diplomats including the British PM. 

"“Ceddy,” that is, Cedric Masterson, fourteenth Earl of Wickthorpe, introduced her to distinguished persons, including the long and clerical-looking Sir John Simon."

Wickthorpe mentioned that decisions were made to have independence of Austria maintained by all practicable means, which it turned out did not include war; but Wickthorpe cautioned Lanny against giving out information.  

"“Well, you see, some of our leading papers don’t publish on Sunday, so we’re holding the announcement for Monday morning.”"

Lanny conducted some business in Vienna and they drove to Berlin, picking up Kurt on the way. 

" ... on the first level plain they came to, uniformed young Germans were drilling in the yet unmelted snows. None of the travelers commented, but all three were thinking: “It is the big new army the Fuhrer has promised!” Later they passed an airport, and planes flew close overhead, as if inspecting a foreign car and its occupants; all three of them thought: “The new fighter planes of General Goring!”"

They arrived, Lanny called Furtwaengler and mentioned that he'd been at Stressa, and they were promptly invited at Karin hall, where now Emmy Sonneman was the new bride of Goring. Irma met her friend from her Riviera appearance days, who gave her the gossip about the Goring shotgun wedding. 

"Hilde Donnerstein was no conspirator, nor was her husband; they were simply two members of the old nobility who were, as she said, out of fashion; they resented the tough crowd who had seized the power and the glory for themselves, and they took revenge in telling personal scandals and funny stories about the absurdities of the Emporkommlinge."

Lanny meanwhile met Trudi who had more explosive papers that she'd bring next time. 

"“It will not be so easy to make use of them this time, I fear, since they expose the double-dealing of other nations also, and England among them. I cannot imagine any but a Socialist paper being willing to publish them.” 

"“There’s one bourgeois paper, the Manchester Guardian, which has a reputation for publishing the truth regardless of whom it hurts.”"

"“Well, you will have to be the judge. You might give them to different papers, according to what they contain. For example, dispatches from our ambassador in Rome, telling the inside story of the deal between Mussolini and Laval. You know that Laval went to Rome at the beginning of the year and spent several days with Il Duce. Afterwards he gave the Chamber of Deputies the solemn assurance that he had made no concession imperiling the rights of Abyssinia.” ..."“He has made a ‘gentleman’s’ agreement, permitting Il Duce to take the country without the interference of France. What worries Mussolini is that while he’s tied up there, Hitler may take Austria; and so they have a mutual guarantee against this.” ..."“Our ambassador states it categorically. Italy has already shipped thirty thousand troops through the Suez Canal, with complete equipment and supplies for a six months’ campaign. Operations will begin in the autumn, when the rainy season there is over.” ... "“There’s an intrigue going on between Mussolini and the British over the lake called Tsana, the source of the Blue Nile. Some day there will be a big dam, and the question is whether the waters shall flow to the Sudan or eastward to where Mussolini is going to settle his Fascist families. The British are willing to let Abyssinia go, provided they can have the lake and its headwaters; but Mussolini won’t give them enough, and it looks as if there’d be a showdown before the end of the year. The Wilhelmstrasse is happy over that, because it will mean that we can have the Anschluss with Austria, and perhaps close the Polish Corridor also. Goring is planning to travel to the Balkans next month to cement alliances there—our new trade routes lie that way, down the Danube with our machinery and munitions, and returning with wheat and oil and raw materials.”"

"Lanny recalled a remark he had heard the Fuhrer make on the subject of the spiritual nature of man: “The greatest of spirits can be liquidated, if its bearer is beaten to death with a rubber truncheon.”"

After arriving at Karin Hall in Schorfheide forests, Lanny had a talk with Goring, which he had mulled over with care so as to not give a clue about his real role. He mentioned Stressa and indicated that his information was from sources in France known through Robbie. 

"Richard Washburn Child was what his last name implies; he thought he was saving civilization by getting the House of Morgan to lend Mussolini two hundred million dollars to start his empire. Just so Laval now thinks he is saving France by becoming a friend of the man who is teaching the children of his Balilla that Nice and Savoy and Corsica and Tunis are all parts of the new Roman empire.”" 

"Was he telling Hermann Wilhelm Goring anything Goring didn’t know? He hoped not. But everything he said was right, and in each case Lanny provided several different sources from which he might have got the particular item. He didn’t say that he was an intimate friend of Ramsay MacDonald and Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden and the rest; he merely told anecdotes about their personal peculiarities, and quoted them as having said the things which they would and must have said. It was hard to name anybody he hadn’t listened to."

"The upshot of it all was that Goring realized he had a valuable friend, and at an absurdly low price; it occurred to him that it might be the part of wisdom to raise the price at once. He said: “Sagen Sie mal, Lanny; you’re having trouble with the rest of those paintings, I imagine. Are the prices too high?”"

Goring offered to reduce the prices, and finally told him to sell at whatever prices he thought fair. "“Art is not my principal interest in life just now,” replied the fat commander. There was a twinkle in the cold blue eyes, and for the moment he seemed human; Lanny had to keep saying to himself: “Don’t forget, he’s the killer!”"

Back in Berlin, he went to meet Trudi, but she wasn't to be seen. He drove around several times. 

"At last the sickening conviction settled itself in Lanny’s mind: Trudi Schultz wasn’t keeping this appointment, and there was nothing to be gained by waiting any longer. He gave up and drove at random on one of the boulevards, so as to think without interruption. Something had happened to his fellow-conspirator, out in that darkness into which she disappeared; something serious, for nothing less would have stopped her."

Lanny delayed their departure by a couple of days, but couldn't do more, and got a note just as he was about to get in the car, communicating in code that she was in hiding and he should go. 

Lanny and Irma went to stay at Shore Acres and travelled to Newcastle where Irma was the largest of investors in Budd-Erling, now coming up. Lanny would have liked workers provided with houses and schools and more, as was being done in Soviet Russia, but that was left to private enterprise. 

"The workers had come swarming from nobody knew or cared where; they wouldn’t know one another and would have no ties or loyalties. They would be free to vote for political candidates every year or two, and they would assume that these candidates were crooks, and for the most part they would be right. Robbie or one of his agents would appoint a political boss to run the town, and at election time would put up campaign funds to elect the candidates whom the boss had chosen. If anywhere active in opposing the company’s wishes, whether as to policies, unionism, or anything else, those men would be “let out” and would move elsewhere."

"At the beginning of May the French signed a treaty of mutual defense with the Soviet Union, and Denis said that it represented an effort to bluff Germany. But in order to bluff successfully you have to look as if you meant it, and France didn’t mean it. Hitler knew it well, and took the treaty as a basis of propaganda attacks. Pierre Laval meant the treaty so little that it wasn’t even presented to the Chamber for ratification, nor was it implemented by any military arrangements. Marianne wouldn’t trust her new ally with any of her defense secrets—and what sort of ally was that?"

Baldwin was new British PM. 

"The first act of this new “jumped-up blacksmith” was the treaty for naval parity with Germany, which had been so incredible that insiders had laughed at Lanny when he talked about it. Now John Bull kindly gave the Germans permission to build up to thirty-five per cent of his own sea-power and actually included the right to parity in submarine building. The tiger that had been let out of his cage was now invited into the family dining-room—though of course seated near the foot of the table.

"Benito Mussolini, Blessed Little Pouter Pigeon, was bound by no less than nine treaties to respect the independence and territorial integrity of that ancient land called Abyssinia and sometimes Ethiopia; but he was going right ahead with his propaganda against it, and shipping soldiers and supplies to his Red Sea bases. This was an excellent thing for the British, who owned most of the stock of the Suez Canal Company and collected goodly sums for every ton of shipping and every soldier traveling through that long sandy ditch. It was also excellent for the New England-Arabian Oil Company which Robbie Budd had founded and recently sold out to Zaharoff and his associates; they were right there with the fuel which Mussolini couldn’t do without, and in return they would take the food and wine and oil of the Italian people. 

"Lord Wickthorpe went with a British mission to negotiate with “the blighter,” and when he came back he told Rick about it, and Rick wrote it to Lanny on his old battered typewriter. Bit by bit, like careful traders, the British had offered Il Duce everything he could hope to get, asking only that he should proceed under the forms of legality and let the League hand it to him on a golden platter; but no, he was determined to take it by force, for the sake of the effect on his domestic situation. Some forty years ago these black fighting-men—a mysterious race supposed to be descended from wandering Jews—had given invading Italian troops an awful licking, and Il Duce wanted the glory of wiping out that disgrace. He saw himself going out there and receiving the submission of the “Lion of Judah,” then coming home in a triumphal procession and building a monument to himself in the Forum. 

"The only real obstacle in his path was British public opinion. Four years previously the Tories had got into power in a snap election, in which, polling fifty-five per cent of the vote, they had got ninety-one per cent of the House of Commons. Now the British people had proceeded to organize independently and take a poll of eleven and a half millions of themselves, and they had voted something like thirty to one in favor of staying in the League. They had voted thirteen to one in favor of prohibiting the manufacture and sale of armaments for private profit—imagine the feelings of Robbie Budd when he opened his paper and read that item of news! With Mussolini’s African adventure before them, these amateur voters had been asked if a nation which insisted upon attacking another nation should be stopped by economic and non-military measures, and they had answered Yes by fifteen to one. Asked whether such an aggressor nation should be stopped by military measures, they had answered Yes by nearly three to one. In the face of such a vote Mussolini brought to completion his plans to march into Abyssinia; and what was the League of Nations going to do about it? What was the Tory government of Britain going to do about it?"
...............................................................................


A letter from Trudi told him in code that she was hiding from Gestapo and Bernhardt Monck was caught but not talking. Lanny could have decided to do no more, or stay safe out of Germany, except his conscience and his sense of self worth. 

"Lanny didn’t have to guess what was going on, for the underground movement against Hitler had been pretty well written up in the neighboring lands; even the capitalist press had now and then printed news of it. There was a “flash-sender,” as the Germans call it, a secret radio transmitter, hidden somewhere in the country, and every now and then it would start up, revealing forbidden news, exposing official falsehoods, tormenting the Nazis with jeering comments. If it had stayed in one place, it could have been quickly located, but it kept moving; it must be carried in a van or covered car, and the powers of the Gestapo had been set to hunting it—so far without success."

Also there were pamphlets distributed to workers, who found them at odd times. If Lanny stopped sending funds to help, they had no way of knowing it, and might wait, or he'd never hear again. 

"He had managed to find purchasers for a couple more of Goring’s paintings;" so he talked to Irma, and she'd been invited with Lanny and the rest by Margy, the friend of Beauty, who now had a yacht, to visit the Cowess regatta.  They planned to return, having accepted an invitation to South Carolina, so Irma was taking only her maid but not baby Frances. Lanny called Robbie and Johannes, the Robin family having settled halfway between N.Y. and Newcastle, and learned of Hansi and Bess having finished the tour of South America were in Japan and intended to travel to Moscow via Vladivostok, to take in the Comintern conference. A united left front against nazi-fascism was proposed and lanny would have liked to be there. "But, alas, nobody could go from the Kremlin to Karinhall, or from Karinhall to the Kremlin!"

They drove to set off in the Cunard liner, "only little Frances shed any tears. She liked steamships and wanted to go along. When the call came: “All ashore that’s going ashore!” she wanted violently to remain, and it wasn’t complimentary to her grandmother and her great-uncle. Irma had to promise to throw her a red paper ribbon, and for that she went eagerly."

"Pressing against Lanny’s chest on his right side was a wad which he had wrapped in a handkerchief and kept pinned in his inside coat pocket. It contained a large number of hundred-mark notes, which he had acquired by visiting different money-changing agencies in New York, using care to attract no attention. One of the results of his meditations on the problem of what might be happening in Berlin: he had decided that he had taken a serious chance by going to his regular bank, drawing out a large sum, and passing it on to Trudi Schultz. Doubtless the bank had kept a record of the serial numbers of those notes. In Naziland, a record was kept of everything; the hairs of your head were numbered, and if too many sparrows fell to the ground in your garden the fact would be reported to the Polizei. Suppose one or more of those notes had been found on Comrade Monck or some other arrested person and the source of the funds had been traced! This was just one of a great number of imaginations which were trying to ruin a yachting-regatta for Lanny Budd."

They were in Cowess. "Irma was so impressed that she said: “Lanny, don’t you think it would be fun to build one of these yachts and learn to sail it?” She was always thinking about some gadget that might capture her husband’s fancy, and the more expensive it was the better, because, after all, if you could do things that nobody else could, weren’t they the things to do?"

Margy had invited Rick amongst others of their set, so Lanny and Rick spent evenings together. "Mussolini was admitting having sent more than a quarter of a million troops to Eritrea, his jumping-off place into the land of the Negus, .... The League was continuing the farce of pretending to mediate between the black whiskers and the prognathous jaw, but they couldn’t get anywhere because the two Italian members of the arbitration board refused to join the two Abyssinian members in naming a fifth. It was plain to all the world that Mussolini was merely stalling until the end of the rainy season, a couple of months off. 

"In the Geneva debates the Italians were having the ardent support of their friend the innkeeper’s son from Auvergne who was now Premier of France. In that land of revolutionary traditions the class war was being waged merrily; there were strikes in the arsenals, accompanied by violence; with the secret backing of Pierre Laval the Croix de Feu was practicing what it called “lightning mobilizations,” also the conversion to military purposes of the airplanes owned by its wealthy members. “I no longer care a hang for legality,” said Colonel de la Roque, its founder, and Lanny had been to their meetings and could imagine the yells with which his followers would greet this declaration. 

"The American could tell about conditions in New York; how rapidly the Nazis were organizing, with many large camps where they drilled. Just before his sailing they had held a meeting in Yorkville, the German quarter of the city, in which their uniformed guards had worn revolvers. The steamers of the German lines which came to the port brought loads of Nazi propaganda which was mailed out to their “Bund” headquarters all over the land. This had provoked a fury of indignation among the anti-Nazis, and they had mobbed the steamer Bremen at its sailing a week before Lanny’s own departure.

"Over in Moscow the sessions of the Comintern were under way, and on the third day of the Cowes regatta, while the wind was light and the Enterprise was winning the forty-mile race for the big Class J yachts, the Bulgarian delegate Dimitroff made a fiery speech announcing plans for the “united front” against Fascism all over the world. This was the man whom Lanny had heard defending his life against the fat General Goring at the Reichstag fire trials less than two years ago. He had sought refuge in the Soviet Union, and now the Nazis agreed that they had made a mistake, and that in future such men would be silenced at once and forever.

" ... On the last day of the regatta the American Earl Browder called upon the Communists to broaden their appeal, so as to win the farmers and workers and middle-class elements of his country. From the American press came indignant protests to the effect that Moscow was breaking the promise it had made as the price of American recognition, not to make Communist propaganda in the United States. To this Moscow had its answer: Moscow had nothing to do with what the Comintern did, the Comintern was an independent assemblage of delegates from all the countries of the world."

Wickthorpe had invited them and they visited before leaving for Berlin, which was good for Lanny so he could tell Goring what they said, except confidential stuff. He told them what Goring said. "Alas, this didn’t do much harm to Goring, because Ceddy and his friends were serenely certain that the fat General was bluffing, trying to plant fear in their hearts against the day when Hitler would be ready to militarize the Rhineland, or whatever his next move might be."
...............................................................................


"There came a letter from Irma’s friend the Furstin Donnerstein, who was spending the hot season in a chalet on the Obersalzberg, near the Austrian border. She called it “little,” but you could be sure there would be a number of guest rooms. “Do come and see it,” she pleaded. “Berlin is absolutely impossible in August. From our upstairs veranda you can see the Berghof, the eagle’s eyrie where our great Fuhrer hides, and perhaps Lanny will take you to visit him.” She had heard of the playboy’s having had this great honor, one which neither she nor her husband had ever enjoyed. 

"“How about it?” asked Irma; and Lanny responded: “Would you really like to meet Hitler?” She said it might be amusing, and certainly it would be an adventure to tell her friends about. Lanny thought: “Whatever I can get Adi to reveal about his plans will be of use to Rick, and to Blum and Longuet, and Raoul Palma, perhaps even to Trudi. Certainly they’ll take it more seriously if I get it from the horse’s mouth.” 

"To his wife he said: “I’ll ask Heinrich Jung about it when we get to Berlin.”"

They arrived, and he drove Irma to a forest lake for a swim and lunch out. He got Trudi's note asking him to come at ten at night. Irma was invited by a friend, so he told her he'd dine with Heinrich Jung and she could be dropped by her friend. Heinrich was only too pleased to arrange the visit to Berghof by calling from Adlon, and Lannywith Irma were expected next evening at ten. He sent off heinrich and collected Trudi and drove. She was being hunted by Gestapo. 

"“We were getting out an underground paper—fifty thousand copies of a tiny four-page weekly, with the real news. They got our press and our printer, and two of our key men who were doing the distributing.”" 

He offered to help her get out, and she declined, but preferred to drop her closer to where she stayed, and there were Gestapo cars there with SS men, so Lanny drove on. Trudi was upset about the family being tortured on her account, but she had nowhere to go, and Lanny suggested he take her out. That had to involve Irma's help by agreeing, and this snapped the final tie when she immediately realised that he'd been doing all along what she'd asked him not to. She agreed to help take Trudi out by using her maid's papers and having the maid take another train later when she had been mailed the papers, but then she left Lanny. 

Meanwhile there was still the meeting at Berghof and they drove right up with Trudi in the car. Irma told Hitler she was impressed with everything he said, and not only agreed but intended to tell everyone as much. 
...............................................................................


Irma came late after Lanny had taken Trudi to the hotel and had her change into Irma's clothes in the car, throwing everything she had in the river. 

"“Oh, Lanny, I’m sorry to be late, but I had such a curious adventure! Did you ever see a Thingspiel?” 

"“I have heard of them,” he said. 

"“Fiebewitz’s cousin came and took us out into the country somewhere, and we saw one, in a big open-air theater. There must have been a thousand people, peasants and villagers, and really I felt I was in Germany for the first time in my life. ... Hitler took up the cross—really it was quite blasphemous, because it showed him instead of Christ being crucified by the Jews, and then he had a resurrection and ascended to heaven, and got instructions from an angel, and came back to earth in shining armor to save a lovely blue-eyed maiden with two long braids of flaxen hair; she was Germany, of course, and it sounds silly to tell it, but you can’t imagine how deeply moved the audience was. I’m sure those country women all really believed the Fuhrer had had exactly those experiences.”"

He told her about Trudi, expecting to get away with Trudi being an artist he helped, but Irma knew immediately that this wasn't so. 

"What is that woman to you that you have to wreck our happiness for her sake?” 

"“Darling,” he said, “let me make one thing clear at the start—there hasn’t been the faintest hint of love between Trudi Schultz and me. I haven’t so much as touched her hand. She is all wrapped up in the fate of her husband. She clings to the faith that he is still alive in some concentration camp, and that she is helping him by the work she is doing. Please be sure of that, Irma.” 

"There were tears in her eyes. “How little you understand me, Lanny! If you came to me and said you loved this woman, I’d be heart-broken, of course, but I wouldn’t stand in the way of your happiness. If you told me that you had been making love to her, and that you realized it was a mistake and that you really loved me, I’d forgive you and try again to make you happy. That would be something I could understand, and if you said you were sorry I could believe you. But this Socialism business is something you aren’t sorry about; you consider that it’s right, and you mean to go on with it!” She paused; and when he was silent, she insisted: “Isn’t that true?” 

"“Yes,” he admitted, in a voice which implied that he was sorry about that. He was surprised by her point of view; impressed by its logic and at the same time shocked by the fierceness of prejudice it revealed."

"“That’s why I know I can never be happy with you again!” exclaimed the outraged wife." 

He made it clear he'd help Trudi get out even if Irma refused to help and took the car. "Finally she said: “You have done something quite horrible to me, and something I can never forgive. But I don’t want to see you killed, and I’m put in the position where I have to help this woman or run the risk of causing your death. If you can show me any chance of getting her out, I will do my part; but don’t for a moment take it to mean that I am condoning what you have done.”

"“There is no way you can ever make it up to me, so don’t deceive yourself with the idea. I have deceived myself long enough, and this time it’s never again. I want to have it understood—I’m going to help, and publicly I’ll do and say whatever is necessary; but apart from that I don’t want to hear one word from her, and as few from you as possible. I don’t mean to be disagreeable—I just want to avoid arguments, and to keep my thoughts to myself, and solve my own problems while you solve hers.”"

Lanny explained his plan after they brought Trudi in, and they carried it out, beginning in the morning. Celeste was dispatched to get a gift for Mrs Barnes, Lanny called Furtwaengler to bring him the selected paintings and exit permits, he got Austrian visas, they set off to drive via Leipzig-Regensburg-Munich. 

"The level plains of Prussia, now green with potatoes and sugar-beets—unless they had been taken over by higher authority and were dusty with the tramp of drilling recruits or with great tanks thundering like herds of stampeding elephants. Lanny thought he had seen military preparations before, but never anything like this. There was hardly a large field without a group of youths wearing sandals and khaki shorts and shirts open at the throat, launching one of their number into the air on a glider. Great planes curved and swooped overhead, and time and again the travelers heard sounds of gunfire. Tourists were free to come into the Fatherland and witness these spectacles, and so for that matter were the agents of Britain, France, and other nations which had signed the Versailles treaty; but apparently no statesman of any nation could think of anything to do but make fussy speeches about it."

They drove to Salzburg after visiting Berghof, but there was a music festival and no rooms, and in any case Trudi thought it unwise for her to stay; she took a train to Paris, but Lanny insisted she write to him and give her address, and gave her the money he'd brought for her. Irma declared her intention to separate. She said she couldn't let the marriage continue unless he broke off every tie with left, and this he couldn't, all the more so with relatives and friends who were leftists. 

"“I hope we do not have to quarrel, Lanny. I have had times of bitterness, when I hated what you believed and was tempted to hate you for believing it. But I am prepared to respect your right to your own opinions, and I hope you will do the same.” 

"“Certainly,” he replied. “I still love you, you know.” 

"“I have thought about it a great deal. I do not believe there can be love where there is a fundamental disagreement in ideas; certainly, at any rate, there cannot be any happiness in such love. I do not believe in being unhappy, and I know you don’t, either.” 

"“No,” he assented. One half of him grieved to say it, while the other half was glad. 

"“There are matters to be settled about Frances. If we can keep bitterness out of our hearts, we won’t have to pull her this way and that, or teach her to distrust either of her parents.” 

"“Oh, surely we mustn’t do that, Irma!” “Before we left the Adlon, I was tempted to make it my condition for helping that woman, that I was to have the right to keep Frances at Shore Acres. But I decided to rely upon your good sense in the matter. You will always be free to come there and to be with her. If you will try not to force your ideas upon her, I will not have to teach her to fear those ideas.”

"“Beauty has always been kind to me, and all this is not her fault. I will do everything in my power to keep from making her unhappy. She can come to Shore Acres whenever she pleases; I will give her a house on my estate, just as she gave me one on hers. And that goes for you, too—anything, so long as we don’t quarrel, or intrigue against each other for the child’s affections. You have seen cases like that, and it is the worst thing that can happen to a young mind; it can wreck her entire life.” 

"“We must permit nothing of that sort,” he replied. “As a matter of fact, Beauty is going to blame me for this mess.” 

"“She will tell you that,” said Irma; “but of course it won’t be true.” The utility king’s daughter had acquired considerable understanding of psychology during six years’ association with a munition salesman’s ex-mistress!" 

They took separate connecting rooms in Hallein, and in the morning Irma said she intended to take a train. She decided to go via Berlin to Bremen catching a German steamer to N.Y., and promised she would never mention the real reason they separated, or his reality. They were still in love, and had tears as the train left. 

"He wished he had insisted that Trudi Schultz should wait for him. It would have been fun to motor her to Paris, a polite brother-and-sister jaunt. He thought of looking up the trains, and perhaps meeting her at the station. But no, he realized that they must not be seen together; if he was to go on helping her work, it would have to be in secret. Easy enough to arrange that in Paris, but not on the road, for one who had as many friends as Lanny Budd. Gossips would get busy quickly—he must prepare his mind for that, among other unpleasantness. Beauty would hear about it soon—and, oh, God, what tears, what agonies of soul! Lanny decided hurriedly that wherever he went for a while, it would be some place where his mother wasn’t!"
...............................................................................


Lanny made a friend who insisted he share his rented accommodation in a family home, and between the close quarters of the family, the teen daughter who fell in love with him, and the music festival, he wasn't as lonely as might have been. 

"What chuckles when the tempestuous Toscanini was scheduled to open a concert with the overture to Rossini’s Ladder of Silk, but the score and parts had been lost; he had taken them home to mark certain nuances, and they had vanished. He played all the other numbers on the program while a frantic search was made—two separate trips to his villa, and finally the missing papers were found in the bottom of his laundry-basket; his chauffeur had carried them into the kitchen, and the maid had found what she thought was a safe resting-place. 

"Even upon the shrine of the Muses rude politics forced its way. Salzburg stood for the freedom of art, which meant that without intending it, indeed while terrified by it, the town had come in contact with the Nazi steam-roller. First of all, the Jewish question. This was the twelfth season in which Max Reinhardt had produced those spectacles which had won fame throughout the world and brought visitors by the thousands. One of the favorite conductors, Bruno Walter, was a Jew; also, Toscanini had refused to conduct at Bayreuth as a protest against Nazi interference in the affairs of art. Since the music of Mendelssohn was banned from Germany, the maestro revived a long-neglected symphony, the Reformation, and gave it here several times with eclat. As a result, Hitler had imposed a thousand-mark fee for visas, making it impossible for German artists and tourists to attend the festival. The rest of Europe had responded by making it impossible to find hotel accommodations in the town. 

"It was war, and the Salzburgers shivered with dread every time they thought about it. Up there in the mountains dwelt the ogre, glaring down upon them. Last summer he had murdered their Chancellor Dollfuss, and what would he do this summer? There had been serious talk of calling off the festival; but, In Gottes Namen, how would the Perglers and thousands of other families have had anything to eat during the winter? And without art, what would they have had to live for? Every time the thunder rumbled they shivered in their beds, wondering if the ogre had hauled guns up the new road he had built and was starting to pound their tiny historic city into rubble and ashes." 

Hansi and Bess arrived, and they were relieved at him being free. After a day spent at Salzkammergut, they took leave of Lanny's pensions host family and drove through Brenner pass home, spending nights in wayside inns. 

At Bienvenu they talked, Bess having become hard core tried to convert Lanny, which after a while didn't work. Lanny met Raoul Palma. 

"Lanny went for a walk with his friend, enjoying the opportunity to exchange ideas with somebody who didn’t consider him an idler and a weakling. What was this about Spain? he asked, knowing that refugees were coming and going and that Raoul was in touch with most of them. A terrible situation, the school director replied; in a so-called republic the workers and peasants were being ground under the heel of the army and the church forces, and thirty thousand were starving and dying in the foul prisons of that unhappy land. Elections were to take place early in the new year, and already the campaign was under way. All the workers’ groups throughout France were being asked to contribute funds. If Comrade Lanny could make a donation—and Comrade Lanny of course said that he would. 

"Conditions were disturbing here in the Midi, also. The Fascist groups were becoming more and more active, and were resorting to gangsterism, as in all the countries bordering on Italy and Germany. They were provided with funds not only from French capitalist sources, but also from abroad. Italian agents were working openly, boasting that they meant to bring all the Mediterranean shores under their system. Some fourteen years ago Lanny had heard Mussolini declare: “Fascismo is not for export.” He had accepted the statement then, but now he understood that what Fascismo said and what Fascismo did bore no necessary relationship."

Lanny let his parents know about Irma going to Shore Acres and Beauty was upset, demanding to know more, but Lanny kept up his end and told her little. 

"She wrote: “Lanny, for God’s sake tell me, is there another man, or is it another woman?” To this her forever incomprehensible son replied: “There is neither man nor woman—unless you count Hitler as a man or the Statue of Liberty as a woman!” What was a tormented mother to make out of a remark like that?"

"One morning while Hansi had been practicing in one studio and Lanny and Bess in the other, the British home fleet had been steaming past the Cap d’Antibes on its way to the Suez Canal. .... Mussolini had begun his glory raid upon Abyssinia .... All that was needed was for Britain to take a stand; to close the Suez Canal to the usurper, bar him from getting oil, and he was helpless, his blatherings would die in his throat. 

"That would mean war, Il Duce declared; he stuck out his jaw and his bemedaled chest—the Blessed Little Pouter Pigeon, Lanny had named him—defying all the world to come and stop him. He boasted of his thousands of planes, whereby he could and would overwhelm the British fleet. ... The air weapons were new, and who could be sure what they could do? Sooner or later the trial would be made and the answer given—but each nation rather preferred that some other should afford the test.

"On the third of October the invasion began. And so there was one question answered; Il Duce meant it. And now, what did Britain mean? What did Geneva mean? The latter gave its reply four days later; the League Council unanimously denounced Italy as the aggressor."

Lanny took off for Paris. Press was bought, Italian embassy was said to have sixty million Frank's for the purpose. Zoltan Kertezsi kept his opinions to himself, but Lanny had to learn. 

"He went out to Les Forets, as always when he came to Paris, and in discussing the existing crisis he made the remark that these two dictators were raising up ten million little demons all of whom would have to be killed. His old friend Emily was horrified, and begged him never to let such words pass his lips again. Lanny thought it over and decided that his words were scientifically exact, but that their utterance was hardly compatible with the role of secret agent."
...............................................................................


Lanny got a note from Trudi, wrote to her and met her in Paris just as they did in Berlin, and she showed him a very cleverly written article by her about Abraham Lincoln and his cause betrayed by various political parties, connecting it to Germany without naming nazis. It went on for a couple of pages ending with "She sat in silence while he read a detailed and well documented indictment of the Nazi program of ending unemployment by the piling up of national debt and spending of national surplus upon rearmament. Germany no longer made public its military budget; but other nations had ways of finding out how it had grown, and automatically they were driven to increase their armaments proportionately. So in the end you had a whole continent, in fact a whole world, engaged in a mad race, whose end must be the most frightful explosion of war in history. Abraham Lincoln had denounced militarism; and what a loss to human culture that his party should have been betrayed and should be serving as an agency of the North American plutocracy! What a tragedy that this great man of the people, this great cause to which the Germans had contributed their labor and their blood, should not be recognized as a German achievement and thus serve the glory of the Teutonic-Aryan race!"

Lanny discussed the distribution of this, and further plans. He told her about Irma and himself, and assured her Irma would not mention her. They walked the grounds of Versailles and he spoke about psychic phenomena, and said she could avail herself of a seance with Madame Zyszynski. 

Beauty arrived next day and questioned him about Irma leaving, and asked if it was the woman artist whose sketches he was interested in, surprising him. She reproached him about spoiling Marceline's chances, and he suggested she ask irma to give her a debutante party at Shore Acres. Beauty said Alfy wasn't right for her since he was going to college and Marceline needed to marry soon someone older with an income. Having ascertained Lanny wasn't cheating on Irma, Beauty pronounced harsh judgement about her. 

"“You’re not going to ask her to come back to you?” 

"“Not on her terms. How can I?” “Remember her pride, Lanny, and give her a little the best of it. Women nearly always get the worst, you know.” 

"“I’ll tell her I’m sorry, of course. I said it in a cable, but she didn’t see fit to take note of it.” 

"“Don’t wait too long, dear. Remember what swarms of men will be after her money!”" 

Robbie was coming over, his factory was going and doing well, and whik e Lanny waited for him he arranged Trudi to have a session with Madame Zyszynski by bringing her over and arranging a room in a hotel. Trudi came to his car afterwards, and said Ludi hadn't appeared but her mother did, and Gregor had a message for Otto,  and Lanny's grandfather was angry and commanded him to return to Irma and have children. Also, there was Birdie, Lady Caillard, who said Duquesa was waiting and Zaharoffwas going to join her soon. Lanny discussed psychic phenomena and experiments. 

"“The records of the British Society for Psychical Research are full of all kinds of experiments along that line; but the trouble is, nobody except members of the society ever reads them. The average scientist just knows it couldn’t happen, and therefore it didn’t, and that settles it. If you find that it does happen, right away you become a crank like the others, and your testimony has no value.”"

"The march into Abyssinia continued .... The British tried to lay the blame on the French refusal to support a policy of action; this infuriated the French, who had known as early as September that the British were unwilling to close the Suez Canal or to shut off the oil supplies, the only two measures which might have been effective. So Denis de-Bruyne told Lanny, having got it direct from Pierre Laval."

Robbie conducted his business with help of Beauty, and they saw an air show, and Robbie spoke to Lanny about Irma, advising him to make up without taking too long, and assured him Irma wasn't going to insist he break up with leftists including family and friends. They drove to London, and lanny met Rick who advised him the opposite, to stay away until he or she met someone. 

"Lanny’s mind told him that this was wise advice; but there was something in him that winced when his friend added: “I wouldn’t be surprised if she hit it off with Ceddy Wickthorpe. It would be an admirable match from the point of view of both of them.” 

"The code of the smart intellectuals required Lanny to take this lightly. “My mother has been trying to hint that to me for a year or two,” he remarked. “Have you seen any signs of it?” 

"“They wouldn’t let you see any signs,” declared Rick; “but you can trust Beauty’s insight in matters of that sort. Ceddy is having the devil’s own time to keep going in the face of rising taxes, and the Barnes fortune would be a windfall to him. Irma would modernize the castle and make the grandest countess in the realm. Your job might be to persuade Augustus John or Gerald Brockhurst to paint her portrait.” 

"“I have thought of both,” said Lanny, with a smile. “But are they quite up to it?” 

"“They might rise to the occasion. And as for her ennoblement, just keep out of the way and leave it to economic determinism!” 

"The anti-Nazi conspirator wasn’t at liberty to give any hint concerning his associate in Paris. All he said was: “I am doing something for the cause which I’m pledged not to mention; but I want you to know that I’m not just playing round.” 

"“Good for you, old top!” replied the Englishman. He put his arm about Lanny and gave him a squeeze, a form of demonstration he did not often permit himself."

"There was going to be a grand evening reception and dance at the town house of Margy Petries, to mark the coming out of Marceline Detaze, just eighteen, and one of the loveliest young creatures your eyes ever fell upon. Her mother had decided that a London debut would be distinguished, and it had better come before the scandal broke."

The party was a success, Marceline and Lanny danced and were applauded and had to give an encore. Lanny's old friend Rosemary, Countess of Sandhaven, was there, and hinted about being available, but he spoke to her about Abyssinia and tested her inclinations, and said he wasn't free. Alfy was there, and he asked Lanny if Marceline really loved him. Lanny advised him that intellectual parity, comfort and compatibility were more important. 
...............................................................................


"Lanny thought he had never seen such a show of public anger as resulted from the publication of the Hoare-Laval Pact to surrender Abyssinia to Mussolini. Rick spoke at a huge mass meeting in Trafalgar Square and at another in Albert Hall, and at both places the audience roared its indignation over this betrayal of a public trust." Lanny felt useful, and Rick agreed, but that amounted to keeping up his dual life. He drove his parents and Marceline to Paris.  Zaharoff advised Robbie to sell to Goring. Goring had already invited Robbie to visit him and lanny had business too in Berlin, so Lanny offered to drive, but Robbie suggested they fly.

"Father and son had an early breakfast in Paris and a late lunch in Berlin, after which a staff car called for Robbie to bring him to the fat General, while Lanny went to see his client, inspected his art works, and agreed upon a list of prices."

Lanny invited Kurt and Heinrich, to dinner and they talked, Lanny about his visit to Berghof and about his father being there about Budd-Erling planes,

"Heinrich told of the elaborate program whereby hundreds of thousands of the youths of Germany were being taught to soar in glider planes, so that their future training as aviators would be easy ..."

"Kurt revealed that he was planning to come to Paris before the winter was over. He didn’t want to become provincial in his tastes, and had decided to make a study of French music, also to give recitals in Paris; that might be a way of building up friendship between the two peoples, as the Fuhrer so greatly desired."

"Lanny described his visit to Salzburg, which seemed to him another Hellerau; but he found his two friends unwilling to accept this festival as a manifestation of the German Geist. To them it was a somewhat pathetic effort of dissident elements to maintain a resistance to German solidarity. Kurt and Heinrich wanted, not merely political and economic Anschluss with Austria, but intellectual and artistic as well, and they heard without joy about the crowds which had made it impossible for Lanny and his wife to find hotel accommodations in the town."

"Lanny wasn’t going to forget how Kurt had come to Paris as a German agent and had exploited Emily’s interest in music. Was he coming now as an agent of the Nazis? Of course he must know that Lanny would be thinking of this; their relationship would be complicated."

Robbie came and talked freely of his visit with Goring. 

"The American of large affairs thought that he had seen some big things in the course of his life, but he admitted that he had learned something when he was escorted through the new building in Berlin which was to house the offices of the German Air Force. Three thousand rooms, if you could imagine such a thing—and instantaneous connection with every airport and military establishment in Germany. Imagine the size of the force which was going to require all that administering! Robbie talked technicalities, and the German pair listened with a glow in their cheeks, even while they didn’t understand the details. Lanny watched and thought to himself: “No, Kurt, you’re not going to Paris to learn about French music, or yet because you want to help the spread of an all-European culture!”"

"After the guests had left, Robbie talked about his business affairs ... the fat General had wanted to lease his patents; if the Budd-Erling stood up to the tests which were scheduled for tomorrow morning, the General would offer him an annual cash subsidy, with a twenty per cent increase year after year for as long as the patents were used. That was to take the place of a royalty on each plane—since the number of planes manufactured would have to be a military secret. Robbie said that this cash payment would be velvet for the company, the investors having taken stock for their rights.

"“Strictly between you and me,” remarked the manufacturer, “I believe that Goring is making a serious mistake; what he really needs is bombing-planes, for how else will he be able to get at Britain? It’s the British who will need the fighters for defense. But you see, Goring was a flier in the last war and his mind is obsessed by those memories. He talked for an hour or more about his own exploits, and made plain that what he expects is a series of individual dogfights. He has visions of swarms of young Germans winning glory like himself, and the qualities he wants in his planes are speed and maneuverability. He doesn’t foresee the coming of heavier planes, with armor and doubled firepower. But of course it’s not up to me to teach him his business; I haven’t any bombers to sell!”"

Lanny didn't accompany his father for the air show, he

" ... made an appointment with Oberleutnant Furtwaengler—now promoted to be Hauptmann—to meet him and get the painting; he would have it crated and turn it over to the care of the American Express Company."

"He was sorry he hadn’t gone along with his father, who came back late in the day with a wonderful story. The plane had stood the most exacting tests, and the fat General had been so pleased that he had shown the plane’s creator some of the closely guarded secrets of the new German Air Force. Robbie had been taken to Kladow, a village near Berlin which had been turned into a center of aviation research. It was now a tract eight miles in circumference, with four thousand men at work day and night on the buildings and grounds. It was like an immense university, in fact two of them, an Academy of Air War and a Technical School of Aviation. There were models of every airplane known—to Robbie’s consternation the fat General had shown him copies of all the seven Budd-Erling models, and stood shaking with laughter as he watched the American’s face. 

"Also there were models of every sort of military target, and students practicing at bombing them. There was one of the most powerful radio stations in the world, and even a yacht club on a lakeshore. The goggle-eyed visitor had been escorted into one of the underground hangars, so deep that no bomb could reach them and with the entrances so camouflaged with nets and other devices that no air photographs would reveal them. Everything complete under there, including living-quarters for the operating and maintenance staffs; a reading-room with the latest technical magazines, and writing pads so that the men could make notes of anything important. “By God!” added the awe-stricken business man. “They even had a freshly sharpened pencil alongside each pad!” 

"What was it that caused the master of this magic thus to reveal his secrets to a stranger? What had induced him to boast that Germany was now spending upon military preparations five times as much as Britain and more than two and a half times as much as Britain and France together? Was it the sudden impulse of a braggart? Robbie guessed that it was a considered policy; the Nazis wished to frighten their opponents and to spread a legend of invincibility, against the time when the Fuhrer might be ready to make his next move. “You can see it working in the case of Italy,” he remarked. “The British are afraid to fire a gun at Suez, because they can’t really be sure that Il Duce is lying about his new air force.” 

"“Is he?” asked Lanny; and the father replied: “How can I be sure?”"

"Robbie had turned down the offer to lease his patents; he was here to sell planes, he said, and the next day he sold twenty of them, at $21,500 each. A contract was prepared, with Lanny helping his father as translator, a service which entitled him to have his Berlin expenses charged against the company. It was Robbie’s first big deal in his new field, and there were many traps to be watched out for; the long document had to be studied phrase by phrase, and several times in a day Robbie had a telephone conference with Johannes, who knew the German language, and contracts, and the Nazis.

"“You see how it is,” said the father. “Goring knows what he wants, and he puts down the cash and gets it. But what a difference in Washington! Our army men have seen just what Goring has seen, and they know that no plane can equal ours, yet they have to go through the farce of advertising specifications and inviting bids!”

"“I admit that the Nazis’ is the right way to get things done,” replied the stubborn son. “But suppose it’s the wrong things?” 

"“You can be sure it’s the right thing in this case,” replied the patient father. “You notice the General insists upon getting his planes ahead of any other customers. I take it that something is going to happen this spring.”" 

Lanny visited Heinrich's office and saw Trudi's article about Abraham Lincoln, and having asked Heinrich about it, learned that gestapo was aware it originated abroad. He offered to find out about it from his sources. 

"So Lanny had an interesting story to tell Trudi when he flew back to Paris. He had his ten per cent on two picture sales to put into her hands, and she had the proofs of a new pamphlet celebrating Bismarck as the founder of the modern German state. At least, it celebrated him for the first page and a half, and after that it turned into a carefully documented indictment of force as the basis of a state’s progress in the modern world. Why was the Nazi regime keeping secret its budget of military expenditures? Was it hoping to deceive Germany’s neighbor states, or was it the German people themselves who were not allowed to know that their government was now spending three times as much on armaments as Britain? 

"Lanny stopped his reading, and said: “You can make it stronger. It is five times as much as Britain and more than two and a half times as much as Britain and France combined. So Goring told my father a few days ago.”"
...............................................................................


Marceline was to have a party at Sept Chenes and Beauty along with Emily Chattersworth were busy, Robbie had been generous and lanny must be involved. 

"Having already been launched under the best auspices in London, she was invited everywhere, and had to be advised which invitations to accept and which to evade. ... It was the duty of a girl just turned eighteen to know how to deal with these different sorts of males: which it was safe to flirt with, which must be treated with reserve, and which must be “frozen.” The Riviera was full of all kinds of pretenders and parasites, impecunious noblemen and refugees from revolutions which might or might not be permanent, so that marrying off a daughter became a political as well as an economic problem. 

"Among many candidates was a nephew of the Marchesa di San Girolamo, who lived very modestly in an unfashionable part of Cannes. The marchesa belonged to one of the oldest Tuscan families, but there had been some scandal which nobody seemed to know about, and she had been a resident of the Cote d’Azur since before Mussolini. Just recently had come this nephew, a Fascist aviator with the rank of captain; he had led the first attack by an Italian squadron in Abyssinia, and after gloriously bombarding native troops and villages and being decorated for it he had been grounded in rough mountain country by engine trouble. He had come near to death, having crawled into hiding and been saved from the savage enemy only by the advance of Il Duce’s army. As a reward for all this he had several medals, a badly scarred body, a bloodless pale face, and an empty left sleeve. From the happy days before his accident he had brought aristocratic features and a tiny sharp-pointed black mustache; also pride, romantic charm, and a devil-may-care spirit. 

"A dangerous person, as any competent mother would instantly perceive; and it did not escape Beauty Budd’s mother eagle eye that this elegantissimo was strongly attracted to her incomparable daughter. Vittorio di San Girolamo couldn’t dance like the other suitors, but he could stroll on a terrace in the moonlight or sit by a gleaming fireside and tell hair-raising stories about solo flights along the sides of mountain precipices, dropping bombs upon fortresses never before seen by a white man, so close to the targets that the explosions would throw the plane into the air; plunging down into canyons so narrow that the wingtips had brushed the foliage, machine gunning savage enemies who were accustomed to inflict dreadful mutilations upon prisoners of war. 

"When Marceline came home and repeated these tales, the anxious mother replied: “Don’t forget, my darling, he probably has a pension of a couple of hundred lire a month—about sixteen dollars—and his aunt has to collect her income from a score of peasant families who scratch a bare living out of terraces on a mountainside.”"

"Marceline Detaze, half French and half American, had been reared in one country and got her ideas from another. She desired to live like an American girl on the Coast of Pleasure: to have her own car and drive where she pleased, to make her own dates, and above all to choose her husband without tiresome consultations with her elders. She was of an affectionate nature, but apparently that was on the surface and did not reach down to the level from which her actions were derived. She had in her an odd stubborn streak: she would listen amiably to all the warnings and exhortations—and then go quietly ahead and do what she pleased. She liked the company of Vittorio di San Girolamo.

"To Lanny this was an unpleasant development, and Il Capitano di San Girolamo a most unpleasant personality. He was only twenty-four, and hadn’t read much, but there were few things he thought he didn’t know. He had been filled to the brim with the Fascist ideology and his assurance that it comprehended all truth was the more annoying because it was expressed with such suavity and quiet dignity of manner. He knew that Fascismo was destined to rule Mare Nostrum—Our Sea—and the lands all about it, and he was sorry for any persons who hadn’t adjusted their minds to the fact. As to his personal future he was clear: his wounds, decorations, and family position entitled him to a diplomatic career, and to become governor of a province in that new Roman Empire which Il Duce was engaged in establishing. 

"Sacro egoismo was the phrase; you made yourself holy by the force with which you asserted your own Godhead. The Italians were the coming race, and Fascismo the creation of their genius. By the right of their newly discovered power and under the guidance of their great leader they would take what they pleased, as other races had done in the past, as their own race had done more than two thousand years ago, building an empire which had endured for centuries and had been revived for yet more centuries. Vittorio had got his history out of some Fascist textbook, and apparently it hadn’t informed him that the Holy Roman Empire had been pretty much a dream, and that while it existed it had been governed by Franks and Teutons, never by Italians."

"... Marceline had heard ever since her childhood that her half-brother was a victim of the subtle Red propaganda—and now he was trying to pass the disease on to her! No, Vittorio was a real hero, and his cause was proving itself in action. In the battle for Marceline’s mind Lanny was licked before he began."

Lanny departed to N.Y. after the party via Marseille, but his last minute warnings to Marceline were of no use.  He went to Shore Acres, played with Frances and they did music and dance. He visited his father in Newcastle.

"They were working on the planes for General Goring, also on trainer planes for the United States Army and on sport planes for the rich. Aviation was spreading everywhere and the tireless Johannes was searching out new business; flying to Canada, where freight was being ferried to prospectors in the northern wilderness; to Central America, where planes were hopping over jungles and up into precipitous mountains. Robbie Budd was completely absorbed in his grand new job. Esther, taking Lanny for a confidant, reported that her husband was no longer going downhill; he still had his whisky, but wasn’t increasing the quantity, and his substitute for the stock market was a night of poker once a week with his cronies.

"Lanny moved to the home which Hansi and Bess had bought on a point of the Connecticut shore." He met someone he knew from his days at the post war peace Conference, Terry Hammersmith, who asked him to join in his work for the government , but Lanny couldn't have supported Trudi and others if he did, so he declined for present, saying he already did have a job.

"Back at Shore Acres the young lord of the manor found a cablegram just being delivered; a message that was like a blow over his heart. It was from his mother, and read:

"“Marceline eloped with Vittorio left farewell note not stating destination am prostrated what shall I do?”"

"He hesitated only a few minutes over his reply. He had done some investigating into the marriage laws of the Continent while trying to get married to Irma, and he knew that Marceline couldn’t get married in Western Europe without her mother’s consent; also a birth certificate was requisite, and a period of delay which varied in the different countries, This ill-assorted couple would be conspicuous wherever they went and it should be possible to find them. He cabled:

"“Advise you notify police endeavor intercept prevent calamity disregard scandal absolutely necessary avert wreck of child’s life you alone can act.”"

He talked to Robbie, and Beauty cabled to say she had done that. Irma advised him to accept it if they were married, and he realised she didnt object to fascists.

"In the course of the day came another message from Bienvenu, reading:

"“Couple sailed from Marseille steamer Firenze bound New York married at sea do meet them probably penniless.”"

Irma planned to welcome them, of course, so Lanny felt he was ousted from where he had sought escape from fascism to play with his daughter. Meanwhile Irma had invited a German American to dinner.

"Forrest Quadratt took it for granted that he was among sympathizers. He explained that he had once been a poet, perhaps the greatest of his time, but the flame had burned out and he knew better than to try to rekindle it. Now he was what the world disparagingly called a “propagandist”; as the heir of two cultures, he was trying to interpret his own land to the land of his forefathers, and vice versa. He wanted to introduce Emerson to Goethe and Goethe to Emerson. Two master-peoples, each fitted to organize and guide a hemisphere; two nations which ought to be not rivals, but cooperators—and would be when they understood each other’s ideals and destinies.

"So it went: the old Nazi guff, but embodied in beautifully chosen words, spoken in a refined voice with no trace of accent. Lanny thought: “Goebbels has made a good choice! I wonder what he is paying for it.” Lanny thought: “He’ll get Irma’s money, and be the guiding spirit of the salon she is dreaming about. Will he win her love, too? He’ll try, of course. Wife and children won’t stand in his way.” From that was only a short leap of the mind to the question: “Is it my business to stay and interfere? Shall I try—or will it only mean another quarrel?”"

Marceline and Vittorio were held at Ellis island and Irma got them off with a bond, so Marceline had limelight in press and everywhere she went.

"Meanwhile here was the wounded Fascist hero, dignified, aristocratic, taking his honors not for himself but for the cause which he served. His talk was much like that of Quadratt, except that he had a different prospectus of the world’s future. There were to be not two great empires, but three. While the Germans moved eastward to destroy Bolshevism, that would leave the Balkans and the Mediterranean area for the newly awakened Italian race. Ultimately Germany would have Asia and Italy would have Africa. This would leave for the United States not merely Canada and Mexico, but the whole of Central and South America, and what more could any reasonable people want? It seemed entirely satisfactory to the ladies and gentlemen to whom the Capitano explained it, and this included the heiress of the Barnes fortune, which he had as good as married."

So Lanny left, taking a steamer to London after cabling Zoltan Kertezsi.

"Two days before leaving Shore Acres, Lanny had run over to Newcastle to say good-by and had learned that the last of the Budd-Erling P7’s had left that day on a fast cargo boat for Bremen. The fat General had been so eager to get them that he had had his men in the plant watching production and begging for speed; they had dispensed with most of the customary tests and had put down the cash and taken into their own hands the job of loading the planes. Robbie Budd hadn’t known what all this was about, but Lanny found out the morning he reached London, for the newspapers had placards with letters a foot high: “HITLER MARCHES!”

"It was the Fuhrer’s move into the Rhineland, long planned and carefully staged; on a Saturday, as usual, so that British statesmen would be paralyzed! He had put his troops on the road at dawn, and made public announcement to his assembled Reichstag at noon. As always, whenever he made a military move, it was in the cause of peace. This time he repeated it: “Peace! Peace!” With a perfectly straight face he declared: “We have no territorial demands to make on Europe.” He called upon the men of the German Reichstag to “unite in two holy inner confessions: First, we swear to yield to no force whatever in the restoration of the honor of our people, and prefer to succumb with honor to the severest hardships rather than capitulate. Second, we confess that now, more than ever, we shall strive for an understanding between European peoples, especially for one with our western neighbor nations.”

"What he was doing was obvious: preparing to fortify this strategic border, so that he would be able to hold the French while attaching Poland and Czechoslovakia. Lanny Budd, along with every thinking person in Europe, knew that the fate of the old Continent was being decided that Saturday. Were Britain and France going to stop him or were they going to surrender to him? Under the Versailles pact, Britain, France, Belgium, and Italy were pledged to prevent this specific action. “The maintenance and the assembly of armed forces, either permanently or temporarily,” was declared to be “a hostile act” against all the powers, and they were obligated to resist it. Hitler knew this so well that he had given his commanders orders to fall back at once if they met with opposition from the French; this while he was proclaiming to the Reichstag: “We swear to yield to no force whatever.”"

Lanny met Rick, but they couldn't do much.

"Lanny found it in London as in Paris: the Right was militant, while the Left was using words. As if Hitler cared about their words! Hitler had thirty-five thousand troops in the Rhineland by Sunday night, and ninety thousand by the middle of the week; he paced the floor of his Chancellery, rubbing his hands with glee while the French statesmen argued in an agony of fear and uncertainty. They were afraid of German bombers over Paris; they were afraid of the several billions it would cost to mobilize the Army—and precisely while they were struggling to save the franc, and losing gold every day!"

Lanny met Trudi in Paris.

"He found her all but in tears over what had happened, and he had no comfort to give her concerning the attitude of Britain. Hard, hard men were in control of that empire; silk-hatted savages, Rick had called them. They thought about their class and their class privileges, their property and their property system, and they thought about little else in the world. Their system was threatened in every country, and they were frightened, and hated what they feared. Class had become more than country, and the enemy at home more to be dreaded than anyone abroad."

Lanny told Trudi to take a studio in the artist quarter and resume her work as artist, calling herself Austrian. Trudi asked what he planned to do.

"We’ve got to wall ourselves in, Trudi, and learn to hibernate like the bears; to live on our own intellectual and spiritual substance. There’s a long winter ahead of us—and it may be an ice age, who can say?”"
...............................................................................


Lanny went back to Bienvenu, so gossip at Cannes and Long Island was on, since the couple said nothing. 

"Rick in one of his letters wrote: “Ceddy has gone to Washington. I suppose we are trying to get some sort of commitment in support of sanctions, just in case. At least that is what the pater hears in the clubs.” 

"When Lanny read that to his mother, she said: “Tommyrot! He’s gone there after Irma!” 

"There had come a cordial letter from Fanny Barnes, inviting the other grandmother to spend the summer at Shore Acres and offering her a cottage. Lanny pointed out: “They would hardly do that if Irma was expecting to be carrying on another courtship.” The mother’s response was: “By summer she’ll be in Reno.” 

"Beauty put this on the record, and so she got a melancholy satisfaction when several friends in England and on the Continent sent her an item from the Tatler, reporting that the fourteenth Earl of Wickthorpe was a guest of Mrs. Irma Barnes Budd on Long Island, New York, while that lady’s husband was sojourning on the estate of his mother at Juan-les-Pins, on the Cap d’Antibes. “You see what I told you!” cried Beauty. “You are losing her, Lanny!” 

"“It’s a load off my mind,” answered the incorrigible one. “I was afraid it might be a German-American poet.” 

"“Oh, Lanny, how crude of you!” 

"“Irma is bound to marry again, I take it; and Ceddy is a gentleman—something of a dub, to be sure, but the same sort that she is. When you take time to think it over, you’ll decide that having Frances the stepdaughter of an earl is not so bad. I don’t know what it will make you, but it ought to be some sort of an Honorable.” 

"Beauty saw fit to ignore this unseemly persiflage. “Your mind is quite made up to losing her, Lanny?” 

"“Her mind is made up, and that’s enough. I can only say that I’d rather see the mother of Frances happy than otherwise, and I’m advising you to go there and exhibit that savoir-faire for which you have become celebrated.”"

Beauty persisted, asking if he planned to do without a wife, and he said he would not again be pushed into a marriage that the world advised. Beauty asked if he was in love with the woman he had helped, and he told her she was married, loved her husband who was in the concentration camp, and he put her on par with Jeanne D'Arc and Barbara Pugliese, while he wasn't sure he was up to it. 

"“I was caught in a jam where I had to help this woman or else be a cad, and so I did what I could. But I ask myself: ‘Do I want to go on doing things like that?’ At once I start making excuses and telling myself it isn’t my war.” 

"“But, Lanny, how can it be?” The frightened mother put her heart into that cry. 

"“It keeps coming nearer and nearer. I shouldn’t wonder if, before we got through, it would be every decent man’s war.”"
...............................................................................


Refugees had been pouring in from Italy along the Riviera for decades and now they were coming from Spain.

"To most people in Lanny’s world this seemed the normal procedure. Savages were meant to be subdued and put to work—what good were they otherwise, to themselves or anybody else? When Il Duce’s sons dropped mustard gas from airplanes among barefooted black soldiers and thus put them to rout, they were proving themselves superior beings, and the swift march of their army into the mountain heights was one more case of the survival of the fittest."

"Great Spanish landlords packed up their families and shipped them to France; here they were, camped in the hotels and villas of Cannes, in a mood receptive to tea-parties, dinner-dances, and other forms of elegant entertainment.

"So it came about that Lanny Budd, without any effort on his part, was in a position to learn about the Spanish governing classes, what they were saying, doing, and planning. They told him they hadn’t the slightest idea of adopting permanent residence abroad or of submitting to the loss of their estates and other privileges. They were going to fight for what they had been brought up to consider their rights. They had left their young and active men at home, and their older and wiser heads had gone on confidential missions to Paris and London, and more especially to Rome and Berlin, from which places they expected the strongest support."

He talked with Raoul Palma.

""Very sadly I’m beginning to wonder if we Socialists aren’t caught between two millstones and destined to be ground up. We think that when we’ve educated the people and got a majority of the votes, the matter is settled. That is supposed to be the rule in the political game.”

"“It wasn’t played that way by Mussolini and Hitler, and they’re just started on their careers. Mussolini has backed the League down on sanctions, so he says: ‘That’s the way to do it; scare the wits out of the dotards and their knees give way.’”

“Do you really believe that England and France would let Mussolini and Hitler overthrow our legally elected government in Spain?”"

"“You can tell your friends that there are relatives of Juan March on the Cap—you’ve heard of the ‘tobacco king’ from Majorca? I’m told that he began as a tobacco smuggler, and now he has put up several million pesetas for the rebellion. They say that General Francisco Franco is the Caudillo he has picked.”

"“But I read that our government has shipped Franco away to the Canary Islands!”

"“Maybe so; but how many hours would it take him to fly from there to Morocco? Ask yourself what Franco would do if he should learn that some of his officers were plotting to overthrow him and kick him out of the army.”"

Lanny's information was published via Raoul Palma, Rick and other contacts in various papers in France, Barcelona, London and N.Y..

"He collected the names of those who were doing the work of the Fascists and the Nazis on the Riviera, and got an idea of the amount of money they were spending to influence the French elections. Much as the two dictators disliked each other, they were drawing together against their common enemies. Ribentrop, the champagne salesman who had become Hitler’s traveling diplomat, had met with Mussolini’s son-in-law, Count Ciano, and agreed to drop all press attacks by one nation upon the other."

Lanny drove to Paris to meet Leon Blum.

"Fascist rowdies had mobbed him in his car, hurling glass at him and cutting him to the jugular vein."

"He was going to nationalize the munitions industry, he declared. Lanny replied: “That is fine, but are you sure it will get you more munitions in a shorter time?”

"The pacifist statesman was rather shocked to discover how much of a militarist his American friend had become. Lanny had to assure him that this wasn’t because his father had gone in for the manufacture of fighter planes; it was because he had learned so much about what airplanes could do and what use the dictators were planning to make of them. Lanny wasn’t violating any confidence in mentioning that General Goring had purchased some of the new Budd-Erlings; he could be sure the French Army intelligence service knew this, even though they had not troubled to mention it to the leader of the Front Populaire and probable next Premier of their country. Perhaps it was a secret that United States oil companies were taking Hitler’s money and constructing huge refineries of aviation gasoline in Hamburg; also that American manufacturers of magnesium were selling it to Hitler to be used for making bombs. But these were Hitler’s secrets, not Lanny Budd’s!"

Lanny visited Trudi in her art studio, where she was now accepted in the artist neighbourhood as an artist student, her sketches hung on walls in cafe and sold too.

"Lanny’s mother had fixed his mind on the question whether he was in love with Trudi."

French elected seventy two leftists, and Leon Blum would be premiere, so Lanny went home to Bienvenu happy. Beauty was travelling to Shore Acres after visiting with Margy.

"When the time came for Beauty to depart she hated to leave her son at Bienvenu alone, and was not to be persuaded that swimming and sailing and fishing with an ex-tutor constituted company enough. She invited him to motor her to London, and he knew what that meant, of course; she would take him to Bluegrass, Margy’s country place, and it wouldn’t be more than a couple of days before charming young ladies would be happening to drop in at mealtimes.

"But it was hard for Lanny to resist an invitation to drive, and so they drove, and spent a couple of nights and a day with Emily at Les Forets. It happened to be the day, early in June, when Leon Blum became Premier of the French Republic, a red-letter day in Lanny’s calendar. He could talk frankly with Emily about it, and he told her, among other things, that he had just had a letter from Kurt Meissner, who was expecting to arrive in Paris in a couple of weeks. Lanny conceived it his duty to warn Emily, in the strictest confidence, of his suspicions concerning Kurt’s purposes. If the salonniere didn’t mind entertaining a Nazi agent, that was her privilege, but Lanny didn’t want her to do it under the impression that she was promoting international understanding or the art of music."

"Beauty had a letter from her daughter, who had settled down cheerfully for an indefinite stay at Shore Acres. Vittorio had become fast friends with Quadratt, and Lanny remarked: “That is, no doubt, according to orders; a consequence of the meeting of Ribbentrop and Ciano.” To Beauty Budd this was a sign of her son’s pathological state of mind. The tactful Emily didn’t say what she thought, but promised to respect her friend’s confidence.

"Lanny delivered his mother to Bluegrass, but ducked on the charming young ladies. He had a deal for a couple of pictures in London, and some money to collect; then he proceeded to The Reaches and spent several days with Rick, punting on the Thames, and agreeing with his friend as to the very bad state of Europe. He told the news he had picked up from different sorts of people ..."

Rick dissuaded him from contacting Rosemary, and a letter came from a client in Midwest so he drove to Geneva after making sure with both sides.

"A jolly way to earn your money, by motoring into the high Alps in the month of June! Lanny crossed the Rhine at Strasbourg, city of dreadful memories for him, for at this bridge the Nazis had turned over to him the broken body of Freddi Robin. Now they didn’t invite him to inspect the fortifications they were rushing to completion; but he arrived at night and saw the arc-lights of the constructions all up and down the river and heard the grinding and roaring of great machines. Only a little more than three months had passed since Hitler had moved in his troops, but he would do in that time as much as the French had done on their side in as many years. That was German efficiency, and what a tragedy that it couldn’t be put to less hateful ends!

"The snow-capped peaks were rose-pink in the dawn and after sunset, and in the twilight they turned to purple. The great lake was garnet-blue, the swans and excursion boats gleaming white, and the plane trees and chestnuts a lively green .."

"The legions of Il Duce had marched into Addis Ababa, and there was nothing for the League to do but bow its head in defeat. As Lanny arrived in the old city of Calvin, the world’s statesmen were gathering for a special meeting of the Assembly, in which they would condone the crime by withdrawing their decree of sanctions. Lanny Budd, who had been present at the birth of the League, might now have witnessed its obsequies, but the very thought of it made him sick. He could imagine the bland hypocrisy of the British Tories, and the feeble plea of poor Blum for disarmament and collective security; crying peace, while down in the valleys the Nazi labor battalions were toiling day and night to get ready for war. In the soul of an amateur publicist there remained no smallest trace of that naive enthusiasm which had taken him to a dozen international gatherings and caused him to run here and there with the crowds, gazing at top-hatted and morning-coated statesmen and listening to their, promises of disarmament and collective security."

He drove to Paris after finishing his business and took Trudi out to dinner, and told her about Geneva and Switzerland.

"Now they were carrying out an elaborate plan for the storage of wheat and other food in enormous caissons which were sunk to the bottom of their lakes, where the food would be preserved at near-freezing temperatures against the day when Nazis or Fascists might seek passage through the mountain passes. The Swiss would make it as hard as possible."

He spoke to her about his mother and her friends matchmaking, about Rosemary and Rick dissipating him; she agreed with Rick. She talked about Ludi and how they met; she was expecting his return like Freddi. Lanny decided to go with Raoul to Spain. It was combined with business, too, since at Bienvenu he got an invitation from a Senora Villereal and she asked him to see the art works at her estate in Spain.
...............................................................................


They drove to Seville via Barcelona and Valencia, inspecting art collections of some contacts along the way, and at the Villarreal estate they did a thorough job with photographs and measurements of the paintings indicated by the Senora as being the ones she might part with. Lanny saw the poverty of the labourers, peasants, serfs and heard the master caste expressing dissatisfaction about workers. The Villereal steward said help would come.

"“If we are going to get any of these paintings out of the country, it might be well to start soon,” suggested Lanny. “Should I not perhaps mention this to the Senora?”

"“She has two or three weeks yet,” replied the steward. “And anyhow, I do not think there will be serious trouble in these parts. Our friends will land at Cadiz, and all this country will be in our hands in a few hours. We have never let the perreira get the better of us here in Seville.”"

They drove on to Madrid via Cordoba and Toledo, and lanny sent a report to Jean Longuet with a coded identification without signing. They saw a shop with a sign "sign: “Arte Popular Espanol.”, and raoul said it must be that of Constancia de la Mora, who belonged to ruling classes but had changed sides and was very different from most people. Lanny bought linen for gifts back home, and asking Raoul to wait in the car, took a chance speaking with her about what he had heard.

"“Most of what I know I learned before I came to Spain, from those who are plotting against your government. Traveling through the south, I have gathered so much confirmation that I feel certain of the details. There is to be an uprising against your government, financed by Juan March, the Duque de Alba, and others of that sort. General Francisco Franco is their chosen leader and he is to fly from the Canaries to Morocco and from there to Cadiz to head the movement. The time is short now.”"

She assured him that this was known, but the government could do nothing. "We of the Left wished to be polite, and moderate, to move gradually and not give provocation; so our government is composed of lawyers and scholars, liberals and old-time democrats—men who have devoted their long lives to the cause of Spanish enlightenment, of a Spanish republic—but now they are tired and must not be too greatly disturbed. They are kindly and trusting, they do not wish to believe too much evil of mankind. We go to them and warn them, we plead, we all but fall down on our knees before them—but we cannot shake their faith in orderly processes, their belief that the decision rendered at the ballot box is sacred, that the will of the Spanish people is and must be inviolate.”"

She would talk to her husband who was in air force, and asked Lanny to give more information whenever he had any. They established a code name. Lanny saw Prado and the university city, both impressive.

"As when a summer thunderstorm is gathering, and black clouds form over the horizon, and rise higher, rolling like giant wheels in the sky, throwing out wisps and streamers and dropping long gray curtains of rain; gradually they spread, and the blue sky is blotted out, the rumble of the thunder grows louder and more menacing, and the lances of lightning stab into the earth; men cease their work and stand gazing upward with troubled thoughts, and the birds are hushed, thinking perhaps that night is coming, or perhaps the end of the bird-world: so it was in the capital city of Spain in that second week of July 1936.

"One of the consequences of paying a hundred and fifty pesetas a day for your hotel suite was that you could have a radio for the asking. Lanny had one, and he and his friend would sit and listen ...

"There came the news that the Falangistos in Valencia had seized the radio station, having got their dates mixed. They proceeded to announce the counter-revolution ahead of time, and then, discovering their error, they were embarrassed, and retired. Raoul said: “Surely that will wake up the government!” But apparently it wasn’t going to.

"Late one night, coming in from a concert, the travelers turned the dial and heard the news that Jose Castillo, commander of a group of police guards who had been selected for their reliability, had been murdered; he had gone for a stroll on the street with his wife, and the Fascist gangsters had shot him in the back. This crime was denounced over the radio, and both the hearers knew what fury it would awaken in the hearts of the workers. Once more Raoul said: “Now they must act!”

"All. Madrid waited for them to act next day. The conspiracy had been proved many times over, and proved by deeds as well as by words. Everybody knew who had murdered Castillo—except those heads of the government who believed in democracy and peace, in civil liberties and freedom of speech, so ardently that they couldn’t make any move against the sworn enemies of these blessings.

"Still graver news that night. Castillo’s guards had gone to the Fascist headquarters and carried away the Fascist leader in Madrid, Calvo Sotelo by name, and shot him to death. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is an old formula, known in Spain long before the Christian religion arrived there. Raoul said that it did not apply to the class struggle. “They have a right to kill us, but we have no right to kill them. You will see what a difference it makes.”

"And it did, in very truth. Sotelo and others of his sort had shot hundreds of workers and peasants all over Spain, and that had not counted with bourgeois newspapers at home or abroad. But here was a man of prominence, a member of the ruling classes, the man who was to have been made Presidente when the coup d’etat succeeded; and so this was murder, “most foul, strange, and unnatural.” Next day in the Cortes the Fascist political leader, Gil Robles, arose and said: “His blood is on the heads of those people who support the Popular Front. The day is not far off when the violence you have unleashed will turn back on you.” After that it was in order for the counter-revolution to be launched."

They visited Calatayud, hometown of Raoul Palma, on the way, and after they left they were stopped by a messenger, riding a mule, from another possible business contact, "Senor Don Pedro Ruiz Bustamente y Bastida" who wished to have them inspect his art collection. They followed the mule, on the track, and it was dark when they entered the dismal place. After what was considered a proper welcome by the Senor Don Pedro Ruiz Bustamente y Bastida, they were shown into a large hall.

"Against a wall near the door was a painting with no frame. Doubtless there had once been a splendid gold frame and it had been carted to town and sold. The canvas was held by four nails, one at each corner, and had a bulge showing that it had been rolled up; the dust, which had only been partly brushed off, suggested that it had been deposited in an attic or perhaps in a corner of this room. Anyhow, here it was, and Lanny advanced upon it, with Don Pedro holding the lamp—which was fortunate, for Lanny might have dropped it. One look, and in his soul there was a shout: A Goya!"

Lanny bargained hard and got it for a fraction of the price he expected, guessing that if he were honest the money would be ill spent but on the other hand the defense of the country against the impending onslaught by Nazi and fascist forces could use help. Since he had only part of the cash, they drove together to town with the painting so he could get the money from the bank. That took another day, and finally Lanny and Raoul were on the way to Saragossa with the painting.

"Raoul, who had the radio in front of him, turned to the Seville station, over which he heard alarming news: General Francisco Franco had flown from the Canary Islands to Melilla and had taken command of twenty thousand troops, Foreign Legion and Moors. The station which gave this news was in the hands of the rebels, who were calling themselves Nationalistos and claimed to speak in the name of the Spanish people. Seville and Cadiz were already in their hands, they said, and in a few minutes came the statement that Madrid had surrendered to the new movement.

"Lanny and Raoul sat speechless while this radio announcer claimed one triumph after another for the forces of General Franco, whom he called El Caudillo, the equivalent of Il Duce and Der Fuhrer.

"“This can be pretty serious for us, Raoul,” said his friend.

"“This whole province may be in the hands of the Fascists by now.”

"“Well, we haven’t done anything against them, have we?”

"“No, but they may commandeer our car. They do that all the time in war; and we’d have one hell of a time getting back to France. We waited a couple of days too long.”

"Lanny said: “He may be worth more than anything else, so if they take our car let’s hang on to him.” They would go walking down the highway, carrying a big roll of canvas on their shoulders—a spectacle hardly less fantastic than Don Pedro on his mulo. If it came to real war, busses and railroad trains might be stopped as well as private cars; gasoline might be unobtainable, and they might have to hoof it all the way to France with the Comendador of the Order of the Golden Fleece! Or perhaps if they could get to the coast, they could get a boat and row him!"

But Franco's broadcasts were from Ceuta, not Seville, and Barcelona was still not with them nor was Madrid, as per their propaganda. They tried skirting town in Saragossa, but we're caught, and told the vehicle would be commandeered.

"It was a squad of the Spanish Army which had barricaded the road, leaving just room for a car to get through. They had a machine gun mounted on a tripod, and Lanny with professional eye noted that it was a Bofors, from Sweden. The officer who commanded wasn’t so well bred as the younger, and declared gruffly that tourists who had chosen a time like this to wander about Spain did so at their own peril. Lanny was about to absolve the officer of responsibility, when he was interrupted by a shout from one of the soldiers, pointing down the road and somewhat into the air. There was a plane, flying low, some distance away, but the sound seemed to be widening and spreading out all at once—the plane was approaching at high speed.

"Friend or foe? There was hardly time to ask one’s self the question. But apparently the soldiers knew that a friend doesn’t dive down upon you and scare the wits out of you in time of war. To do such a thing would be to invite shots—but not from this contingent! Officers and men acted as one, leaping for the shelter of the building which they had taken for their headquarters.

"As for the travelers, there wasn’t time for them to move; they were in the car and stayed. The storm swept on and over them; there was a patter of sounds and spurts of dust from the road, all in a small fraction of a second, and then the plane was gone. It took more time for Lanny even to realize that it had been machine-gun fire. His first thought was: “Am I hit?” and then: “Has Raoul been hit?” He looked, and saw Raoul looking at him. They had both been hit by surprise, but apparently by nothing else; not even fear, because the episode had been over so quickly.

"Another idea crossed Lanny’s mind. The soldiers were gone. He didn’t stop to do any more thinking. One foot pressed the pedal that threw the clutch into neutral and the other foot pressed the starter. The engine started, and Lanny shifted his right foot to the accelerator and it began to roar; he grabbed the shift lever, and threw the clutch into first, lifted his left foot from the pedal, and away leaped the car through the opening in the barricade. Another shift and they were in high, whirling down the road.

"“Watch behind!” Lanny exclaimed, for he didn’t dare to take his eyes off the road even for a glimpse into his mirror. “Anybody following?”

"“Not yet,” said Raoul, and they swung into a curve which took them out of sight of the soldiers."

They drove fast and stopped near the river, hiding from the highway, and Raoul discovered that the painting had holes - the plane's machine gun bullets had hit the car and gone through, three of them.

"“They do wonderful jobs of repairing; but of course I’ll have to tell the buyer, and it will probably knock off half the price.” He thought for a moment and added: “That is, unless somebody wants a souvenir of the very newest European war.”"

After stopping for the night in Lerida, they had to make a choice between  fast but risky route via Barcelona or a safer one via northeast through Pyrenees, and would decided he wanted to stay on in Spain, but Lanny would be of more use going and speaking to Leon Blum, Jean Longuet and so on. So they drove to Barcelona. Lanny stayed at the Ritz and had his bags and the painting safely taken into his room, while Raoul went off to join the war. He made a speech, and was successful.

"Raoul had been introduced to speak for a few minutes, and he tried to stop, but the crowd would not let him. “Mas! Mas!” they shouted. His flowery language was exactly what their ardent temperaments enjoyed; all the grand high-sounding words that he used—libertad, igualdad, fraternidad, humanidad—these were the dreams upon which they fed their souls. They shouted more loudly and their applause spurred the orator to greater fervor. Before he finished, they were completely in his hands, and if he had told them to go out and burn the Iglesia de Santa Ana which stood at one side of the square they would have done it. What he told them was to organize and defend their government to the last man and woman; to gather paving-stones and hurl them from the rooftops upon the Fascist invaders; to fight them with pikes, kitchen knives, and clubs with nails in; to take for their own the slogan of the French at Verdun: “Passeront pas! No pasaran! They shall not pass!”

"The people crowded around the orator, clamoring, shaking his hand, patting him on the back, telling him how they agreed with him, promising to follow his advice. In short, it was a triumph, and the place of Raoul Palma in the Spanish workers’ movement was assured. He was like the eaglet, which does not leave the nest and hop from limb to limb like other birds, but stands on the edge of the nest, exercising his wings day after day until he is fully ready. Then he launches himself, and it is his flight; from that moment he is an eagle."

He woke up early to sound of war at dawn, and before long the hotel had been taken over by the reds and guests turned out. He managed to leave with the painting. But he didn't go far before he had bullets whistling close, and he turned and ran.

"This part of Barcelona had been laid out in recent times; the old city walls had been torn down and the spaces filled with wide boulevards called rondos. There was no place to hide, and everywhere Lanny turned it seemed that there was shooting. The Fascists were using homes and clubs and churches as fortresses, firing from windows and rooftops. The Marxist volunteers were roaming the streets, seeking their enemies wherever they could be found, laying siege to buildings and seizing near-by buildings as counterfortresses. Lanny realized that he had done something very foolish to get himself into the midst of such a free-for-all."

He decided to find a less expensive hotel.

"He obtained a room for about one-tenth of what he had been paying at the fashionable place, and much safer. He examined both the Comendador and himself and made sure that he had no wounds and the Comendador no more; then he got the Sunday newspapers, and with the help of the little pocket dictionary which he was never without, he read the details of events up to the previous midnight. Afterward he went downstairs to the telephone and tried to find the teachers’ syndicate in the book, but he didn’t know the exact name or any way to get enlightenment. Raoul would be worried about him, but there was no use trying to reach him until the firing was over. By that time Raoul might be dead, or in the hands of the Fascists, which would come to the same thing."

"He sent the porter of the hotel around the corner to a radio shop to buy a small instrument, and with that in his room he had plenty of visitors and opportunity to improve his Spanish and even his Catalan. Sailors of the warships had revolted and locked their officers below decks, or thrown the active Fascists overboard. Five such vessels had been bombing the rebels in Ceuta. General Mola, marching against Madrid from Pamplona, had been stopped in the Guadarrama Mountains thirty-five miles from the capital. Heavy fighting was reported in Seville and other cities which Lanny had visited; he thought of the people he had met in them and the parts they would be playing. He listened to the comments of his visitors—people of the middle classes, destined to be ground between the upper and the nether millstones. They kept their hopes and fears to themselves, and Lanny professed to be interested in but one thing—getting out of the war zone alive. He didn’t mention the oil painting of a long-dead-and-forgotten grandee of Aragon, for fear that someone might mention the law against exporting it.

"The fighting went on most of Monday, and every few minutes there would be news; not always reliable, but the general trend was plain. The organized workers of the city were successfully defending their government, with the help of leaders sympathetic to their cause. In Madrid it was different, for there the government leaders were terribly afraid of the label Red or even Pink, and were still trying to make peace with Franco and distressed because he went ahead fighting them. There the people had to force the government to act; the unionists had demanded and obtained arms, and then had swarmed to the Montana barracks, headquarters of one of the revolting regiments, and were laying siege with one old cannon. By noon they had forced the garrison to surrender; and the same at the Getafe barracks on the outskirts. Truckloads of people’s militia were now patrolling the streets of the capital and storming all buildings where there was rebel resistance."

"Late that afternoon Raoul Palma turned up. He had been in distress about his friend, and had sat at a telephone and tried every hotel in the city ...

"He described what had happened on the Paseo de Colon, the broad esplanade of the Barcelona docks, on that Sunday morning while Lanny had been looking out of his hotel window at the burning of the church. Near one end of the Paseo is a military barracks, and the workers of the docks got word that the troops there had joined the rebels and were setting up a barricade. The workers came swarming out of their homes, men, women, and children, many of them half dressed. They had only such weapons as they could grab up, sticks and stones, carving-knives and clubs studded with nails, such as Raoul had told them to prepare. With these they had swarmed against barricades defended by twelve machine guns. In spite of the massacre they had attacked again and again. Some twelve hundred lay dead or wounded, but they had beaten down the troops and captured the machine guns and turned them against the barracks."

"He read in the morning and afternoon papers, now all Red, and heard over the radio, no less Red, how the militia had stormed the Nautical Club and found in it four thousand hand-grenades and a store of dynamite; they had burned the club, and several churches which had also been used as arsenals by the conspirators. He heard that four thousand militiamen were on the way in trucks and busses to put down the rebelling regiment in Saragossa; ..."

Raoul came and advised him to not linger on, although he had work himself to do.

"“There’s a ship just come from France to take the athletes home, and I think you ought to try to get on that.”"

They walked, and Lanny got on the ship, which had taken a large number of such passengers. He had a deck chair for extra charge and spent hours of dark talking to workers union athletes, the painting safe in charge of the captain for extra charge. Next morning in Marseille, Lanny

" ... found himself a taxicab not commandeered. When he told the driver that he wanted to drive to the Cap d’Antibes, that son of the warm south was startled, but said: “Je m’en fiche”—which meant in substance that he didn’t give a hang provided the passenger had the price of a two-hundred-kilometer ride. Lanny assured him that he had plenty.

"But first he would go to the nearest postoffice. There he wrote a cablegram to his father, saying that he was safe and please to notify Irma; one to his mother saying that he was safe and please to notify Rick; and one to Zoltan Kertezsi in Paris:

"“Just arrived with Goya my property twelve bullet holes through Goya none through me want your advice are you coming south if not will come to you proceeding Bienvenu wire me there grand story but revolutions no fun Lanny.”"

At Bienvenu he found a cablegram from uncle Joseph Barnes asking whether he had plans to visit Shore Acres or could uncle Joseph Barnes see him elsewhere, and he gave approximate dates of his plans to visit Paris and London and said he'd see uncle Joseph Barnes at whichever suited him.

"Zoltan Kertezsi had been resting at Spa, in Belgium, and wired that he would come to Paris at once. Lanny got himself a new car, less expensive than the lost one, and some new bags and other belongings. He got a secretary and attended to his accumulated correspondence. He dictated an account of his adventures for his father and mother, with copies to Bess and Rick and Trudi. He paid a visit to the Senora Villareal and told her about her paintings. She had already taken his advice and had the Zuloaga shipped out to her, and Lanny had found a purchaser by cable; now he received the money from his client, paid it over to the Senora, and saw to having the picture shipped. He called on Raoul’s wife and gave her some money. After that he was ready to set out for the north, with the Comendador and his own thoughts for company."

"The most alarming news, which Lanny got from the, left-wing papers, was that in the first week of the outbreak eighteen bomber planes manned by Italian Army pilots had been flown from Italy to Spanish Morocco, apparently to be used for ferrying troops across the Strait. Rather embarrassing for Mussolini when two of them were forced to land in French Morocco, and the French government asked for an explanation. What Il Duce said was that they were “volunteers”; they had flown of their own accord, motivated by intense sympathy for their Fascist brothers imperiled by the wicked Reds. When you tried to imagine eighteen officers of Mussolini’s army stealing his planes and running off with them, you had something to smile over—unless you were made sick by the spectacle of brazen lying in public affairs. Lanny wondered: “Was this going to be the next device of Fascism: to destroy the people’s government of another country by means of volunteers?”"
...............................................................................


Lanny went to the same hotel as before, tacked the Goya onto a frame and invited Zoltan Kertezsi to look. 

"Zoltan took a long look, and little golden bells tinkled inside him when his elder and mentor exclaimed: “Lanny, that’s the real thing! You’ve got a Goya, beyond question.” ... If there had been a hole through one eye, or anywhere in the face, it would have been difficult indeed; but such things as firestones, and the cloth of a uniform, the shine of boots and the dark background of a curtain—expert doctors of paintings could cover these holes, especially when they were no wider than the caliber of a machine-gun bullet.

"Lanny had supposed that little patches of canvas would be put under each hole, but Zoltan said this wouldn’t do, because bubbles of air would get under in places, and the doctored spots would show unevenness in the course of the years. What would have to be done with such a valuable work was “relining” it; a complete new canvas would be added, in back of the old. Zoltan would take him to a clever demoiselle who had done a great deal of nettoyage, the cleaning of old paintings, for the Louvre. She did it directly with her sensitive fingers, lightly rubbing off the dirt and the old varnish. She was an ethical person, and never did any repainting except in cases of actual damage, such as Lanny had in this instance. Neither did she put on a heavy glassy coat of thick new varnish, the favorite device of dealers to delight the unwary and sell them old masters at inflated prices. 

"The first thing to be done, Zoltan urged, was to obtain the best possible photographs of the painting both front and back, so that a future purchaser might be shown exactly what the damage had been and the nature of the repairs. In this case the living Comendador had written on the back his name and titles, his age, and the dates of his sittings, and all this was of the greatest importance as proof of authenticity. Too bad he hadn’t been a woman, Zoltan said; for portraits of women and children always brought more money. But this was all right—it ought to fetch as much as twenty thousand dollars."

He met Trudi, she'd set out supper in the studio so they could talk. She felt deeply involved about Spain. 

"No use fooling one’s self, it was going to be a hard struggle; today there was a report that planes of the German Condor Legion had been flown to General Mola in the north."

Trudi asked if Leon Blum would allow this, a second front by fascists and nazis on another side of France. 

"“Only military men see it that way,” he replied; “and Blum is pledged to peace-making.” He repeated what he had just heard from his friend and mentor. 

"“The business men of France fear Stalin far more than they fear Mussolini and Hitler combined,” he told her. 

"“But they’ve just made an alliance with Stalin!” 

"“The Front Populaire forced that; the business men didn’t want it and don’t mean it. France is split in halves by the class struggle, and if it comes to a showdown between Communism and Fascism, poor Marianne will be one of her peasants with a horse hitched to each end of the cart and pulling opposite ways.”"

They talked about his personal life, at length. 

"“I am telling you the truth as I know it, because the one conviction I have brought out of my misadventures in love and marriage is that there is no happiness except in frankness and understanding. When a man is very much in love he will make all sorts of promises, and afterwards he may keep them but be very unhappy doing so. It is much safer for the women to know what he really is and really wants. Can you go that far with me?” ... “Well, I have just spent a month or so traveling in a foreign country, during which I ran into some discomfort and some danger. I visited strange places, I had amusing adventures, and I would find myself thinking: ‘How Trudi would enjoy this!’ I would see some wistful little waif on the street, some toil-worn worker, or a sturdy brown militiaman with a gun hanging by a strap from his shoulder, and I would think: ‘How Trudi would love to draw him!’ Since that wasn’t possible, I told myself what fun it would be sitting by this window, looking out over the roofs of Paris in the moonlight, and telling Trudi what I had seen. You will realize that that is one of the symptoms of love.”

"There was a long silence, and Trudi’s voice was gentle and sad when she spoke again. “Lanny, you honestly mustn’t get your thoughts centered on me. You know how it is: I can’t stop thinking of Ludi.”"

Lanny argued that if Ludi were alive, he'd have managed to communicate, through Lanny if all other channels were impossible. Having been imprisoned in Germany, he knew prisoners managed to do so. 

"“I admit the force of your argument,” she answered; “but I can’t get away from the thought that he might be alive, and if so, the longer he was in prison, the more he would need me when he came out.” 

"“All right, dear, if that’s the way it is I’ll wait a while longer. I don’t want to put any pressure on you, or give you anything else to be unhappy about. I’m bound for London, and meantime you can think it over.”

"“You are quite sure there is no chance of happiness between you and Irma?” 

"“I have an appointment to meet Irma’s uncle in London, and I don’t think he’s crossing the sea just for a chat or to hear about my travels. It’s been almost a year since Irma and I parted, and I’m guessing that she’s interested in some other man and wishes to arrange a divorce.” 

"“She will be the one to get it, I suppose.” 

"“That is the convention.” 

"“It has occurred to me, Lanny—ought you to be coming here? Nobody would believe that we are just friends.” 

"“I have thought of it,” he said, “and I take the trouble to make sure that I am not being followed. Members of Irma’s family might conceivably take such steps, but I don’t think she herself would. She does not go out of her way to look for trouble or to make it. She will rent a comfortable house in some place like Reno, Nevada, and take some woman friend along for company, and several of her servants to wait on them. She’ll have to stay only a couple of months.” 

"“A most extraordinary arrangement!” said Trudi. 

"“I have never visited the Far West,” replied the grass-widower-to-be. “I have heard a lot about California, and you and I might enjoy a trip there some day.” It was something more than a hint."
...............................................................................


Lanny spoke with Jean Longuet, Blum was in London. Left was divided over aid to Spain, since France going to war would detract from reforms. 

"“Mon dieu!” exclaimed Lanny. “What is the use of social reform, if Hitler and Mussolini succeed in establishing a western front against you? Germany is getting ready for war as no nation ever did in history, and if she builds a Nazi fortress in Northern Spain, what will that mean to France and Britain?” 

"“You’ll have to go to London and ask that. Downing Street is telling Blum that he can expect no British support if he gets into war with Germany and Italy over the question of aid to Spain; and of course both Mussolini and Hitler are telling us that if we sell munitions to Spain it will mean war.” 

"“The same bluff they worked over Abyssinia and then the Rhineland! Any opposition to anything they want will mean war. On that basis they can take the whole of Europe, one slice at a time.”"

Lanny attended a leftist meeting. 

" ... an orator told about the execution squads in the towns which Franco had taken, how they dug great pits in the cemeteries, drove the prisoners out by the truckload, stood them on the edge of the pits, then shot them and tumbled them in. The crowds screamed with horror and fury, and the cry: “Des avions pour l’Espagne!”—airplanes for Spain—sounded loud enough to be heard in the Foreign Office across the Seine."
...............................................................................


Lanny went to see the work being done on his Goya.

"She described to her client the complicated process of relining. The front of the painting would be covered with paper, and the painting then turned over and the back carefully cleaned; it would receive two coats of rabbit-skin glue, then a special kind of gauze with another glue made of fish-glue, rye and wheat flour, and Venetian turpentine. The new canvas of pure linen would be stretched on a special frame larger than the painting, laid flat over it, and ironed down several times with a heavy iron slightly warmed. 

"When this job was thoroughly dry the whole thing would be stretched on a permanent frame, and then would begin the delicate work of filling up and painting the holes in the original canvas. The filling was done with a specially prepared mastic, and the paints were mixed with egg-white, not with oil. All paints change color in the course of time, and such tempera paints change quickly, so that the results can be observed. The demoiselle explained that it was something of a trick to select shades which did not match when they were applied, but would match a week or two later. 

"Lanny sat for hours watching the fascinating work of nettoyage, sharing in the pleasure of new discoveries. One of them was worth a large sum of money to him; the demoiselle with the sensitive fingers was rubbing lightly the gold ornament on the watch-fob of the Comendador, when she gave an exclamation of pleasure and said: “I think we have something important here, Monsieur. You know that it was the practice of this painter to sign his name in strange places.” 

"“Yes,” he replied. “I have seen one on a ring on the sitter’s hand.” 

"“This ornament is a seal, and it has some strange design on it.” 

"After that Lanny followed every stroke of the swift fingers, and little by little there appeared letters on the shining gold. Complete, the inscription read: “F. J. de Goya y L.,” and of course it settled the question of the genuineness of the painting." 

He met uncle Jesse Blackless, and they talked about Spain.

"He told the aging warrior what Raoul had reported, how in the sacristy of the Barcelona Cathedral the government had found a treasure of sixty million pesetas in gold."

Lanny stopped at Les Forets on the way to London and spoke with Emily Chattersworth, who was sad about his impending divorce and told him he should claim a part of the fortune he helped save during seven years of his marriage. She mentioned Kurt visiting her. 

"He had come out to see her and played some of his new compositions, very fine things, she thought. He had offered to play at one of her soirees, and in spite of Lanny’s warnings a salonniere had not known how to decline. “Really, Lanny,” she said, “I find it hard to imagine the German government being able to employ a distinguished musician such as Kurt has become.” 

"“Kurt is a former artillery officer and a former secret agent, and surely you must understand that when a German has once been either of these things he is never thereafter a free man. And now that Germany has gone to war again, of course he is subject to command.” 

"“Germany at war, Lanny?” 

"“Apparently your newspapers haven’t made it clear to you. Hitler and Mussolini have embarked on a war to put down the people’s government of Spain. They have been planning it for the past six months, and already there are German planes in the fight. No doubt the aviators will be in the employ of commercial concerns, and the technicians will be tourists, and so on, but they will be Nazi officers and men, under the orders of the General Staff or the Gestapo.” 

"“But what would Kurt be doing in Paris?” 

"“I don’t know, but I am guessing that he is here to keep the French government from interfering in this war. He is to encourage and activate those reactionaries and native Fascists who are trying to frighten Blum. Kurt will meet members of the Cabinet, politicians and editors, their wives and mistresses, and influential ladies who conduct salons. He will play his music for them, charm them by his distinguished manners, and then, over the teacups, he will point out to them the grave peril involved in letting the Reds get a foothold in Western Europe. He’ll point out that Germany is the only country which is in position to bulwark Europe against the advance of the Bolshevik hordes. He will point out that the Front Populaire in France is identical in all respects with the Frente Popular in Spain, and that the Reds in France plan to do just what the Spanish have done—that is, burn churches and confiscate church property and divide the estates of the rich among the peasants—and how would you like to have your beautiful estate divided up among your tenants?” 

"Mrs. Chattersworth began to laugh; and when Lanny looked inquiringly she said: “It may be just a coincidence, but Kurt said nearly all those things!” 

"“Coincidences do not happen in Nazi affairs. They have taken over the old German bureaucracy, the Army and the scientific laboratories and everything is planned to the minutest detail and carried through with precision.” 

"“And you believe that Kurt is being paid to present such arguments to me?” 

"“I haven’t the slightest doubt that he enjoys a salary and a liberal expense account. He will play at your soiree and meet your friends, and thus be established in the very highest circles. He will play for other ladies, and be passed from group to group, and worm his way into people’s homes and their private affairs. He is not alone, you understand; he is a member of a powerful organization, with hundreds of paid agents in Paris, and they are not all of them musicians and men of genius. Their machine includes spies and burglars and even assassins—do not forget that the Nazis have already murdered three premiers in Europe and a king, also a foreign minister-of France, not to mention great numbers of small and obscure idealists. They have dossiers on you and your friends and thousands of other prominent persons; they will intimidate some and bribe others; they will eat like termites into the center of French public life, and either bring French policy into line with Nazi interests or else destroy France.”"

"Emily Chattersworth had known and loved Lanny Budd since he was a baby, and had watched him grow up and develop a widely inquiring mind. Now she really didn’t know what to make of him. He had gone off by himself into a region as strange and terrifying to her as the swamps of the Amazon filled with crocodiles or the mountains of New Guinea swarming with headhunters. She knew no other traveler in those regions, and she knew that Lanny’s father, his mother, and his wife all agreed that he was a victim of designing and intriguing agitators.

"“Dear Lanny,” she said, “I am old and not very well, and this new world which is developing is too terrible for me to comprehend. What you tell me sounds like a scenario for a horror film.” 

"“I tell you that all the horror writers of Hollywood put together will never be able to imagine anything to equal the reality of Nazism; and precisely because it is real, Hollywood has not dared to attack it. The controls which the Nazis are developing would surely not fail to include anything so powerful as the motion-picture industry; so we have films about wicked and criminal individuals, but none about a world system which offers itself to the capitalist class as a means of putting down the labor movement and keeping it down for a thousand years.”"
...............................................................................


Lanny went to visit The Reaches. They spoke about prime minister Baldwin pleading Britain being not sufficiently armed to help Spain. 

"Lanny could see that it was a confused situation. Great numbers of Britons had signed a pledge that they would never take part in any future war; and now, all of a sudden, here was a war that great numbers of them desired! A war to defend a duly elected people’s government against invaders! Rick said: “We ought to stop speaking of this as a civil war. We might as well call the invasion of Abyssinia a civil war because Mussolini had native Abyssinians trained to fight on his side. Franco has a few Spaniards, but mostly it’s the Foreign Legion and the Moors who are being used to crush the Spanish people.”

"When the company broke up and Lanny went to his room, Alfy came there; it was late, but he asked if he could have a chat, important to him. Lanny said: “Shoot!” 

"First, the youngster wanted to know about Marceline: was she happy and likely to stay so? Lanny thought she was, and would be—certainly so long as she and her husband were guests at Shore Acres. He was sorry if that sounded cynical, but there was no use letting Alfy grieve over a Marceline who had never existed. Alfy said he guessed that was the best way to look at it; he hated to think of the girl having fallen into the hands of a Fascist S.O.B. Lanny said: “It really isn’t that way. Vittorio seems to suit her very well. She looks upon him as a hero, and other people in her world do the same.” 

Alfy told what was troubling him most. He had got some training in the air in the previous summer, and now he wanted to go at once and perfect himself and serve as an aviator for Spain. Several of his friends were all on fire about it; if Mussolini could send “volunteers,” why shouldn’t England match him man for man? How did one set about it? 

"Lanny answered that the subject of volunteers for Spain had been discussed at the reunion in Paris, and the speakers had called for fighting men. All they had to do was to get to the border, just beyond Perpignan, in Southern France. The trains to Portbou weren’t running, but anybody could walk a mile through the tunnel and the militiamen would welcome him with open arms. 

"The only trouble was Alfy’s mother; he wanted Lanny’s help in persuading her. Lanny said: “I rather think she has guessed. I was watching her face while you talked tonight.”

"“I only made up my mind tonight, hearing you talk. I’d like to get several chaps over here tomorrow; if you’ll tell them about it I believe they’ll all go.” 

"“That’ll make me popular with the mothers of this neighborhood!” said Lanny. “They’ll want to know why I don’t go myself.” 

"“No, no,” said Alfy. “You leave it to us youngsters. You have your job and you’re doing it well.” 

"“What is it?” asked Lanny, curious to know how he appeared to the new generation. 

"“You don’t know how much you do for the pater, bringing him first-hand news the way you did last night. He finds it hard to get around, you know; his knee bothers him more than he’ll let anybody know. But when you come along, it gives him new heart and he starts work all over again.” 

"“It seems to me I’m a pretty depressing messenger,” remarked the older man. “It’s been ages since I’ve had any sort of good tidings.” 

"“That’s not your fault. That’s the time we’re living in, and we have to buck up and go to work. We all thought we were going to have things easy, but it’s clear now that we’re not.” 

"“Cheerio, Alfy! I buck the pater up, you buck me up, and when the pater bucks you up, the magic circle will be complete!”"
...............................................................................


Lanny met uncle Joseph Barnes, dressed impeccably as usual, now in cream Shantung. He was interested in Lanny's Spain travails, and lanny guessed he was embarrassed about his mission. 

"“She wants a divorce.” 

“That was my guess,” said the other, amiably. 

"“I am glad you are in accord,” responded the old gentleman, much relieved. “As you know, I have always had the kindest feelings for you, and I hope these will continue.” 

"“Certainly, Uncle Joseph. I have no reason to blame you for any of my troubles. Go ahead, please, and tell me what Irma has in mind.”"

Uncle Joseph explained that Irma planned to go to Reno, but needed to furnish the law with a reason to divorce him. 

"“Don’t worry,” said this cheerful offender. “I am aware that I am not an ideal partner for Irma. Let me say that, for reasons important to me, I don’t want my political opinions brought into the action.” 

"“Irma understands that.”" 

Uncle Joseph said Irma planned to say they were incompatible, that he was unsocial, uncordial and uncooperative. Lanny agreed. 

"The ambassador beamed. “That is all,” he said. “You understand, of course, that Irma is required to cite instances in which these characteristics have been manifested.” 

"“That goes without saying. You have a copy of the proposed complaint with you, Uncle Joseph?” 

"“I have; and we hope you won’t find it necessary to make too many changes, for the allegations represent what the lawyers say is the customary minimum. You understand, it would not do to bring the suit and then have our request denied.”"

"“There is just one more problem,” began the ambassador, hesitatingly. “Irma would like very much for you to consent that the custody of the child be awarded to her.” 

"“I am sorry, Uncle Joseph, but that is out of the question. Irma and I discussed that also in Germany. The custody of the child will have to be shared equally between us.” 

"“Will you tell me why you feel that is so important?” 

"“Because I am the child’s father, and I think that every child needs a father’s influence as well as a mother’s. I have done nothing to forfeit my rights in the matter and I would not.” 

"“Let us talk about it frankly, Lanny.” 

"“Certainly. I have nothing to hide, and Irma gave me every assurance that she respected my rights and trusted me to make a wise and proper use of them.” 

"“Just what use would you expect to make, Lanny?” 

"“I came to see the child recently and spent some time with her. I should expect to do that from time to time, as might be convenient to me. If you find it awkward to have me at Shore Acres, I’ll be entirely willing to take Frances elsewhere.” 

"“No, indeed; that is what Irma fears most of all. She feels that she has made a place where the child is safe. You understand her fear of kidnapers, blackmailers; journalists, and what not.” 

"“Irma knows I did everything to help relieve those fears. But as Frances grows older I might feel that those restrictions were hampering her proper development. A human being has to be something more than a safe-deposit box for bonds.”"

"“Irma desires to inquire whether there is any sum of money within reason which might induce you to let her have full control of Frances.” 

"Lanny replied without hesitation: “There is no such sum. I would not sell my daughter.” And then: “See here, Uncle Joseph, why do we have to be so mealy-mouthed? What is it that is worrying Irma? Is she afraid that Frances might some day come to agree with my ideas instead of with hers? That is a chance that every parent has to take. If our children always thought exactly as we do, how would the world ever make any progress?” 

"This was a field of sociological speculation into which a grown-up messenger-boy had never ventured. He replied: “You must know, Lanny, the Barnes fortune is much more to Irma than just a lot of money. It is the heritage which her father left her and to which she owes a duty.” 

"Lanny decided that the time had come for him to take the aggressive: “Tell me, is Irma thinking of marrying again?”"

Uncle Joseph was instructed not to say, but refuted possibility of Forrest Quadratt and did not deny Wickthorpe,  so Lanny assured him that was fine. 
...............................................................................


Throughout so far, and with rare exceptions later, Irma has been proper in most trying circumstances, but here is the most shocking exception when she attempts to get sole custody of Frances, denying Lanny his daughter, despite there being no fault in his conduct or of treatment of his family, relatives or friends, or indeed anyone. 

This is chiefly due to a fear that he might influence her with his thinking. Which matters because Frances is seen as the heir to the Barnes millions, and Irma so far hasn't intended having more children, or indeed even spent much time with Frances, despite being a rich woman in her own right with no claims to her time, energy or attention other than her child, if it comes to it. Her attempt at getting sole custody is definitely not protective instinct or even love, it's possessive ego and a concern for Barnes property that Frances so far is the sole heir to.  

And that condemns her, as his refusal to grant sole custody without a fight is a redemption of Lanny as a father. Irma has an ace that she hasn't used so far, but could have, in threatening to expose his political stance and activities. But Lanny didn't even stop to think of this possibility, and flatly refused to give up his rights to his daughter. This is quite in accord with his actions in saving the Robin family, Trudi, and so on. 
...............................................................................


"Lanny went for a visit to Margy’s place, where his mother had been resting from the labors of the season before taking a steamer for New York. He told her about the interview, and listened while she raged at the whole Barnes-Vandringham clan; then she said that she and her husband must go at once, so that little Frances might not forget the Budd-Dingle clan."

"It happened that one of the leaders of the so-called Oxford group came for a house-party—so they called their sessions—and it was natural that he should give special attention to a playboy whose heart was presumed to be in a vulnerable condition; everybody hoped that Lanny might be “changed,” and do what the group called “sharing”—that is, reveal what it was that he had done to drive his wife away. But the provoking fellow only listened and then told the story about the sinner who came home from one of these house-parties so changed that his dog bit him. 

"This new wave of religion had been started by an American named Buchman, and was now having some vogue in England. It had held sessions in Oxford and so had taken to calling itself the Oxford group, to the speechless indignation of academic circles in a staid university. But Buchman and his followers went blandly ahead to appropriate a historic name which carried great prestige. They followed a practice called God-guidance, listening to the inner voice and doing what it told them; as a rule the instructions appeared to be that they should go after the richest and most socially prominent persons in every country, and, having won their adherence, exploit their names for publicity purposes. 

"The voice had recently sent their founder to enroll prominent Germans, and he had come home exclaiming: “Thank God for Adolf Hitler!” So now the Oxford and the Munich movements were rapidly assimilating, and noble ladies and gentlemen who met in one another’s drawing-rooms and told publicly about their sexual errors and how God had rearmed them morally—these same titled persons opened their arms to Herr Ribbentrop, the Nazi champagne salesman, and heard him tell how a God-guided Fuhrer had come to bring peace to Europe and a new order to all mankind."

"Madame Zyszynski was at Bluegrass, and some of the guests had become interested in experiments with her; she, too, had acquired prestige, having been lent around to Zaharoff, Lady Caillard, and other wealthy persons. She remained quite unspoiled, having been brought up a servant and desiring nothing beyond that. She had been deeply touched by Parsifal’s kindness, and was always happy to sit with him. Now he told Lanny about a series of revelations which he had been getting for the past month, supposed to come from a long-since deceased inmate of the Buddhist monastery of Dodanduwa in Ceylon. Parsifal had never read or heard anything about Ceylon that he could recall, and had no idea why the Bhikkhu Sinanayeke should have put the finger upon him from the other world. Parsifal was taking steps to find out if there had ever been such a monastery, and if it was still in operation he meant to write and inquire as to the correctness of the details. 

"Very curious, Lanny said. But his mind was on Spain these days, and he didn’t suggest traveling to Ceylon to carry on psychic researches. He listened to elaborate notes concerning the ritual and daily life of very dark-skinned Aryans who wore cotton robes of saffron color and bore long Tamil names; also to the details of various Buddhist hells, in which sinners were burned in roaring fires, dashed about by fierce winds, pierced by javelins, and otherwise bothered according to the gravity of their offenses. 

"But then came a note which caused Lanny to sit up. The Bhikkhu Sinanayeke had inquired if Parsifal Dingle knew a man named Ludi. This man, according to the statement, insisted that he had once met Parsifal, but failed to say where. 

"“I know a Ludi,” declared Lanny; “and what’s more, I’m pretty sure that you have met him. I won’t refresh your memory until you try again and see if your monkish friend can’t bring the person into the light.”" 

The seance were regular, and now the monk took over, and when lanny asked if the monastery still existed he said yes, but there were Germans there, and they neglected spiritual matters. Lanny asked if this was because they were doing something else, and the monk said perhaps. Did Ludi come because of them? Monk didn't know, but he never came again. 
...............................................................................


Lanny went to Paris, saw the restoration coming on, and then took Trudi out on a drive. He spoke to her about the seance. 

"They talked about the victim of the Nazis and his probable fate, and about the victim’s wife or widow and her future. Trudi said again that she couldn’t make up her mind that Ludi was dead, and couldn’t face the grief she would feel if she did so decide. Lanny replied: “You think you can’t face it, but the fact is you are facing it every day. Ordinary grief is something that one gets over in time—I know, because I had it in the case of Marie. I didn’t know how I was ever going to live without her, but I learned to. In your case the uncertainty can last forever; you renew your grief every day and so handicap your whole life. I think you ought to ask yourself whether Ludi would wish you to go on like that.” 

"“Probably he wouldn’t, Lanny, but what am I to do? Suppose I were to decide that he was dead, and then some day he came back?” 

"“It is a well-known narrative poem by Tennyson. Enoch Arden looked in at the window and saw the happiness of his wife, and went away so as not to disturb it.” 

"“Yes, but Ludi will be ill and will need me. He may not be any more able to go away than Freddi Robin was.” 

"“Ludi is no Victorian sailor, but a sensible modern man; he would not expect you to mutilate your life on such a slender chance. He knows that you know about the Nazi fiends, and how many comrades they have tortured to death and thrown into sandpits.” 

"“But, if he came back, what should I do?” 

"“Be sensible, Trudi. You know that if Ludi turned up I’d be just as anxious to help him as you, and I would help him—in whatever way was needed. If that meant stepping aside and leaving you to him, I would do it. You would be the one to decide, and certainly I wouldn’t make a fuss about it, any more than I’m doing in the case of Irma.” 

"He told her the story of his interview with the ambassador uncle, and to Trudi it was a glimpse into another fabulous world. She took the view of the economic determinist. “I suppose that so much money automatically makes people selfish.” 

"Lanny explained: “It has gradually become clear to me what has been going on in Irma’s mind. I believe she has had it for several years, ever since she first met a certain English earl at one of the League of Nations affairs in Geneva. There was the man she wished she had married. When she saw his splendid old castle she became fired by the idea of putting in modern plumbing, with bathtubs built into the floor like swimming-pools, lined with green marble and having little red electric lights to illuminate each step. In Shore Acres Irma’s fixtures are of solid gold and mine are of silver; this gave her father feelings of great splendor, and Irma inherited both fixtures and feelings: Naturally, she finds my mother’s old home on the Riviera a cheap and shoddy place. She has no room to entertain there, and so what is the good of having all that money?” 

"“Lanny, I think that people like that are wicked, wicked!” 

"“Irma is the daughter of a man who saw what he wanted and went and took it. She admires him and is following his example. She will modernize the castle, add a half-million-dollar ballroom, perhaps a million-dollar sports building. She will entertain extensively and acquire standing as an intellectual. For seven years she has been training and equipping herself to preside over a salon, as she has seen an old friend of mine doing here in Paris. Irma will adopt the ideas of her new husband, and make her home the headquarters of that wing of the Tory party which desires peace and hopes to get it by some sort of deal with Hitler. Her goal will be to have her husband retire from the Foreign Office and become Foreign Minister. You can see how much more glorious this is than being the wife of a peddler of old paintings, and why her family and friends all thought she was throwing herself away on a second-rate personality.” 

"Lanny was bitter, in spite of all his smiles!"
...............................................................................


"General Franco’s armies had begun moving northward along the Portuguese border, and on the fourteenth of August, 1936, he took Badajoz, effecting a juncture with the armies of General Mola coming southward. The taking of this small city was celebrated by crowding four thousand prisoners into the bullring, locking the gates, and then blasting them with machine guns."

"Lanny Budd’s most bitter disappointment in this crisis was Leon Blum. The people’s leader failed most tragically. A week after the attack on Spain, the French Cabinet forbade arms shipments to the periled country. That was called a measure of non-intervention, but obviously it was the opposite; it was abrogating international law for the benefit of international gangsters. After hesitating another week Blum called for an agreement among all the interested nations that none of them would supply armaments to either side. So began weeks of dickering, and then months of lying and cheating which took the heart out of every lover of justice. Blum would keep his pledges, while Hitler and Mussolini laughed at theirs. Who stands to gain when an honest man makes a bargain with thieves? 

"It was as Lanny had feared, a bibliophile and aesthete wasn’t the sort for a job like this; he was a polite and gentle victim in the hands of the toughest bullies. They ganged up on him, they browbeat him and raged at him until they broke his nerve. Lanny tried to see him, but he was too busy—and perhaps didn’t want to face any of his old friends of the Left. His own paper repudiated his policy, and those who had fought hardest to elect him were full of bitterness and despair. 

"Lanny, knowing the inside of affairs, could understand his dreadful plight. There he was, a Jew, with his reactionary Cabinet members, some of them hired by the enemy, threatening to resign; his domestic policy, upon which all his hopes were centered, brought near to ruin. The British Tories had told him that he could expect no support from that quarter; the entire French Right was shrieking at him that if he got into that war they would make it a civil war. He couldn’t even depend upon the generals in his own Army; many of them were ready to do what Franco had done, and there might be Fascist armies marching on Paris as on Madrid. He had an ally in the Soviet Union, but that was eight or nine hundred miles away, with Hitler and Mussolini threatening to close the gap. The poor man was so crushed that he didn’t even dare discuss a military convention to implement the Russian alliance."
...............................................................................


Lanny visited the De Bruyne family. Charlot was married too, now. After dinner he listened to them talk politics. Both the sons were right wing, and Charlot was ready to fight if France sent help to Spain. 

"It was Charlot, bearing on his face an honorable scar earned in the class war, who outlined this vision. Lanny smiled rather sadly, and said: “Are you sure you can trust the Fuhrer? You know, he wrote in his book that the safety of Germany requires the annihilation of France.” 

"“He wrote that a long time ago,” replied the younger man. “Politicians often change their minds, and we have the best assurance on this point.” 

"Lanny wanted to ask: “What assurance?” but he thought it the part of wisdom to wait. The subject was changed, and before long the young devotee of the Croix de Feu remarked: 

"“By the way, did you know that your friend Kurt Meissner is in Paris?” “Really?” said Lanny. 

"“Why didn’t he let me know?” 

"“He said he intended to. He asked about you very kindly.” “How did you come to meet him?” 

"“He gave a recital at the home of the Due de Belleaumont.” 

"That was the palace which Irma had rented for a year, in order to launch herself in French society; so Lanny had no difficulty in envisioning a scene of great elegance. “Did Kurt play his own compositions?” he inquired, and they talked about these for a while. Lanny was content to wait for the item of information he wanted. Presently the older brother remarked: “We had a little chat with him. You should ask him to tell you about Hitler and his attitude toward France. He knows the Fuhrer intimately, you know.” 

"“Yes, of course,” replied Lanny, casually. “Kurt would know, if anybody.” 

"So it is that secret agents check up on other secret agents. It is known as “counterespionage.”"

Lanny visited Kurt at the address given by Emily Chattersworth, and asked him out to lunch. Kurt was condescending,  

"Presently Kurt said: “What’s this I hear about you and Irma getting divorced?” 

"“It was no go, Kurt,” replied the other. “We have been unable to agree for years. Irma dislikes Europe intensely; but I have my home here, and nearly all my friends. I can’t stand her fashionable set with their empty minds. Irma’s uncle has been in London to arrange matters with me—and, believe it or not, he collects olf half-dime novels, stories about detectives and cowboys and Indians which he used to read when he was a boy; you can’t imagine what trash it is—there is nothing like it in Germany.” 

"There was something like it in Germany, and Lanny had been on the verge of saying: “Such stuff as Karl May writes.” But something in his quick mind had flashed him a warning. Karl May was the favorite author of Adolf Hitler, and from his enormous output of sensational fiction the Fuhrer had got most of his impressions of life in America. That would have been a “boner,” indeed, and an amateur secret agent thought to himself: “I must learn not to talk so much!”" 

Kurt offered to play, and they went to his apartment .  

"They went to the composer’s apartment, and Lanny listened and admired dutifully, as he had always done. Incidentally he observed the place, and noticed a shaven-headed Prussian man-servant who looked like an S.S. drill sergeant and who watched the American guest with covert attention."

"Kurt had been to see him recently and had been honored by his confidences. Lanny had heard a report that the Fuhrer had called in a facial surgeon and had his somewhat bulbous nose reduced, in order to make him more worthy of that immortality he was planning; but Kurt didn’t mention this and Lanny didn’t ask. He didn’t say anything about the recent decree increasing the term of military training from one year to two, thus at one stroke doubling the size of the future German Army. He didn’t say anything about the rate at which the Siegfried Line was being rushed to completion, so that Germany could count herself impregnable on the west. 

"No, Kurt talked about the magnificent new buildings which Adi was erecting in both Berlin and Munich; he had planned every detail himself. “An extraordinary man,” declared the Kompomist, and the art expert replied: “There has never been one like him.” 

"There might have been a double entendre in this, but Kurt would not suspect it. “The whole aspect of the world has changed for me,” he declared. “You know what a broken man I was at the end of the Peace Conference here in Paris; but now I have hope and courage—and the same thing is true of every man and woman in Germany. The Fuhrer has given me the promise of realizing those dreams which you and I talked about when we were boys. Do you remember?” 

"“Indeed I do, Kurt. We sat up on the height by the Church of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Port, and we were ready to re-mold this sorry scheme of things entire.” 

"“Well, it is going to be done now; there will be a new internationalism, with peace and order to last a thousand years. There is a new religion being born in Germany, and you ought to be one of the first to understand it and help to spread it. You saw so clearly the inequities of the Versailles Diktat—why don’t you see now what the Fuhrer is doing, not merely to rectify them, but to bring all the nations together and prevent another wasteful war?”"

"“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess the world has been too much for me, and I’ve rather run away from the problem of late years. You’ve come out of your ivory tower and I’ve gone back into mine. I’ve persuaded myself that I’m rendering a service to America by collecting examples of the best taste of Europe, so they can some day be the means of starting new art movements in that crude and materialistic nation. I have seen a few signs that my efforts may not be entirely wasted.” 

"Such was the style of conversation which Lanny had adopted, not merely with Kurt, but with most of the fashionable persons he met. He had invented it at the time he was trying to save the Robin family, and he had found it equally satisfactory to the smart worlds of Berlin, Paris, and London. Kurt, more subtle than the rest, would suspect Lanny’s sincerity when he said he was trying to uplift America; Kurt would be sure that what Lanny was doing was making money so that he could live the life of Beauty’s smart friends. Kurt knew this life intimately because he had been in the midst of it for eight years as Beauty’s lover. He would think that Lanny was hopeless, but he would stay on friendly, even intimate, terms with him, in order to use him for the purposes of Kurt’s inspired Fuhrer. 

"Lanny would stay on intimate terms with Kurt, in order to watch the Nazis and know how they worked, what patter they were using. Lanny would make a mockery of friendship, of music and art and all the fine and noble emotions which these were supposed to generate; he would do it because Kurt was doing it, and he had to fight the devil with fire."
...............................................................................


"Zoltan had gone back to Biarritz to consult with one of his clients; now he returned, inspected the Comendador, and pronounced him completely cured. There was a smooth new canvas in back of the picture, and in front the surface was level and the paints so well matched that no one could possibly tell where the holes had been. The older and more experienced man said: “Don’t try to sell this painting by mail, because no one will believe how good it is. Let them see it, and invite them to guess where the holes are before you show them the photographs.” 

"That would mean a trip to New York and perhaps to other places. Lanny had been thinking about it, for now while Irma was in Reno would be a pleasant time to spend with Frances. He said: “I’m thinking of asking twenty-five thousand dollars. I have a reason for wanting that much.” 

"“You may get it,” Zoltan replied; “but perhaps not at the first try. You may find someone who would like to have a painting with a story attached to it.” 

"“I have my victims already picked out; my plateglass friends in Pittsburgh, the Harry Murchisons. I sold them a Goya and a Velasquez, and they have made themselves quite a reputation with those works. Their business is picking up again and they ought to have plenty of cash.” 

"Lanny sent a cablegram to this couple, saying that he had something special to show them, and in due course he received a reply that they were at their camp in the Adirondacks, a pleasant day’s drive from New York. They would welcome him with open arms, they said, and he guessed this meant that they had heard the sad, news about Irma. He engaged steamer passage—it was the time of year when tourists were flocking back to their homeland, but he managed to get a berth in a stateroom with another man. He cabled his mother and father that he was coming, also Fanny Barnes. He bought a handsome old Spanish frame for the large painting and had it carefully packed in a box put together with bolts. He hired a station-wagon to drive him and the treasure to Le Havre, for he wasn’t going to take chances of any more mishaps to that old gentleman with the delicate constitution."

Lanny planned to buy a latest Budd-Erling plane and ship it to Paris to Alfy to fly to Madrid. 

"The Spanish government had plenty of money; not merely gold in its vaults in Madrid, but also in the Banque de France and other capitals. It had standing contracts with arms-manufacturing concerns in France; but these concerns, now nationalized by act of the Blum government, would not be permitted to fulfill their contracts. The British government likewise had forbidden the export of arms to Spain. Meanwhile the Italians and the Germans were sending shiploads, and when the warships of Spain stopped these vessels and searched them, the Nazi and Fascist newspapers raved at what they called acts of piracy!"

Lanny met Trudi before leaving, and they talked about the times. 

"“Every time I go away,” he said, “I wonder if you will be here when I get back, or if you will break under the strain of living like this.” 

"“What else can I do, Lanny?” 

"“You know what I mean, dear.” He tried to think how best to make approaches to a saint. “I cannot see what harm you and I should be doing to any person in the world if we allowed ourselves a little happiness as we go along. It might be that it would take something from the intensity of what you write; but if it caused you to last longer, the sum total of your accomplishment might be greater.”

"He said it with a smile, as was his habit, and she who found it so hard to smile had to get used to that way of taking life. 

"“Lanny, do you really think I am the woman to give you happiness?” 

"“Understand that I have thought it over carefully, and for a long time. Even in Berlin I realized that I wasn’t hitting it off with Irma, and I found myself asking: ‘What sort of woman is this Trudi, and how would she and I make out?’” 

"“What did you answer?” 

"“For one thing, I decided that here was the truest character and the clearest mind that I had come upon in a woman.” 

"“That is very pleasant to hear, and it counts for a lot; but it isn’t everything. Do you realize that you have never once said that you love me?” 

"“What sort of man would I be if I made love to you after you had told me that your heart was pledged and your thoughts were fixed on your husband? I should only be worrying you, imposing upon you, adding to your burdens. I don’t mean to let myself do any of those things.” 

"“I am trying to understand you, Lanny. Have you always had such complete control of your feelings?” 

"“Not always; but now I am old enough to know myself and my needs. You and I have both been married, and we can talk on the basis of facts. I have decided, for my part, that the basis of happiness in love is congeniality and mutual trust. The rest will follow easily enough.” 

"“Just what would you like me to do, Lanny?” 

"“I will say it in the plainest words. I should like you to make up your mind that you are a widow. When you have once said that, I promise to leave you in no doubt whatever about my wishes and feelings.” 

"There was a long silence. Lanny sat looking at Trudi, and she looked over the rooftops. Finally she said: “Give me the time while you are gone. I will think it over and try to settle it in my own mind.” 

"“All right,” he replied, “it’s a date.” He took her hand, held it for a few moments, and kissed it gently. 

"“Tell me,” she said, “about those families in America, so that I can imagine you while you are away.” 

"“Right now I have six of them,” he smiled, “my mother and her husband, my father and his family, my daughter and her grandmother, Bess and her husband, Marceline and hers, and finally the Robin family—I don’t know just what their relationship is, but it must be something. If you ever tie up with me you will have to learn a lot of birth-dates!”"
...............................................................................


"The two grandmothers came to the pier, bringing Frances to meet her father. This was intended to sound a keynote of peace. In spite of all rivalries and jealousies the two ladies were going to play bridge together, and pretend that the tragedy was perfectly normal, respectable, and not especially important. Lanny was being ousted from Irma’s bed, but not from her board; indeed, while she was away he would occupy his accustomed suite with the pedigreed four-poster bed and the massive shiny plumbing-fixtures; he would have the run of the place, the use of cars and horses and playgrounds, and be waited upon with promptness and cordiality by the servants. In short, he was still royalty. He wondered if it would have been the same if he had been so ill advised as to accede to Joseph Barnes’s proposal and let Irma have the sole custody of the child!"

Frances was thrilled to see him. 

"She couldn’t take her eyes off this wonderful, almost legendary father. She had been told that he had been in a strange far-off country where there was a war, and that a bullet from an airplane had passed within an inch of his elbow. It was almost too exciting for six and a half years; he had to tell it at once, and again at every bedtime. Two elderly ladies had to resign themselves to taking two large back seats for the time; for nature begins at the beginning, and sees to it that the female creature admires, adores, and craves the company of the male—even when later on she will eat him up!"

The painting was brought and hung, and Fanny Barnes had people invited to see it. Guessing where the bullets hit became a topic, and several people wanted option to buy it if the Murchisons would pass. 
...............................................................................


He drove to Newcastle and Fanny Barnes insisted he take one of the cars from the estate for his personal use, a station wagon for the painting and another after. 

"At the Budd home in Newcastle they killed the fatted calf. They felt that he hadn’t been fairly treated by his wife, and they wished to cheer him up. A relief to discover that he was already cheered. The Comendador was unbolted once more and properly hung, and then began another and bigger reception: members of the huge Budd tribe, also the Robin family, and Hansi and Bess. The news spread quickly, and the throngs increased, many of them strangers, begging permission on the ground that they were art lovers. 

"Robbie Budd, always a great one for spoofing, remarked: “Look here, Lanny, you’ve got the grandest prize puzzle ever devised. Don’t tell anybody where the bullet holes are and you’ll have the whole town sitting up nights arguing.” Presently he began to see further possibilities, and said to his serious and conscientious wife: “Esther, it’s a gold mine for your church!” 

"The daughter of the Puritans was never sure when her husband was teasing her, and she asked: “How do you mean?” 

"“Have a raffle, and sell guesses at five dollars a shot, and give part of the jackpot to the person who comes nearest to spotting the twelve bullet holes. Get a lot of photographs of the painting and let each person put pinholes through where he thinks the bullets went, and sign his name on the back, and then the judges will award the prize. It’s a dead-ringer for money-making, and absolutely legal—it’s not a game of chance but of skill, and the lottery laws can’t touch it. That’s the way to support the unemployed of this town!” 

"Esther wasn’t sure whether he meant it, and presently Robbie wasn’t sure himself; for when he told it to people they said: “Why not?” They fell to arguing in front of the picture, and when they asked Lanny and he delayed answering, they began backing their opinions with private bets. 

"Robbie’s imagination took flight, for he was a business man and an advertiser, and ways to make money and publicity were his specialty. He saw this painting becoming a nationwide sensation; some great institution would take it up—say, a chain of newspapers—and use it to make money for charity and at the same time to advertise the chain. The newspapers would furnish a color-process reproduction and tell all about Goya, and the Spanish war, and Lanny’s strange adventure. They would exhibit the painting in a string of cities all the way across the continent, and crowds of people would file by, each having five minutes in which to make up his mind and put his pinholes through the newspaper facsimile. When it was all over, the millions of marked copies would be run through a photoelectric machine which would automatically pick out the perfect guesses—if there were any. Thus the prizes would be awarded without any chance of favoritism. 

"“That’s got everything it takes for a knockout!” chuckled this wide-awake promoter. “It’s got art, and history, and adventure; it involves socially prominent people, and it would win a million new readers for the newspaper chain that took it up! Take my advice and let them try it, and afterwards you can sell the painting for half a million dollars!” 

"Lanny said: “Bring on your newspaper owner.”"

"The art expert told his father in confidence what he had paid for this old master, and Robbie said that was about the best deal he had ever heard of; Lanny’s repute rose astronomically. 

"“What are you going to do with all that money?” inquired the father. “Take my advice and put it into Budd-Erling stock.” 

"“I want to put it into Budd-Erling products,” replied the son. “I’m hoping you’ll let me have a couple of Number Nines at cost.” 

"“What on earth do you want with Number Nines?” 

"“Alfy and his chum Laurence are taking a training-course and are going to volunteer in the service of the Spanish government. I want to be sure they have the best planes to fly.”"

Robbie was horrified, and they argued. 

"Lanny told what he knew about Spain, and Robbie told what he had read in the Hearst newspapers, which had launched an all-out campaign against the so-called Red government of Madrid. In the column of Arthur Brisbane, most highly paid newspaper editor in the world, Robbie had read about “nuns soaked in oil and burned,” and he believed it. What was the use of Lanny’s trying to tell him about churches turned into arsenals by a priesthood turned into landlords and bankers? What was the use of trying to explain to the president of Budd-Erling that the Catholic Church of Spain was not quite the same thing as the Congregational Church of Connecticut? No use whatever, for Robbie believed what his business interests taught him must be true."

Robbie refused to sell them to him or for to anyone for use in Spain for the republic. They had a long argument about Robbie's creed from Major Barbara and Robbie said he had learned since and wouldn't grant rights to those who would destroy them. He said they had lost Russia but intended not to lose Spain. Lanny asked if Robbie would still sell to Hitler and Mussolini if it were U.S. they were attacking instead of Spain, and Robbie couldn't see that the difference was only of geography and age of the republic. But Lanny asked point blank if he had been approached by Nazi and fascist agents, Forrest Quadratt and Vittorio, and he couldn't deny having heard them say things but couldn't quite admit they did propose a coup. Nor did he admit selling planes for Franco. 
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Lanny met Hansi and Bess who had a new baby; they had named him Freddi. He drove to Murchison place in Adirondacks and was reminded of Karin Hall, except here the game was wild and people tame, while in Germany it was the the other way around. He told them about Spain, and they said they could earn their living if it came to that. Lanny spoke to them about not buying the painting from feeling pressured as friends, and they said they had made a lot of friends due to having bought the other two paintings through him. They were thrilled with the painting, and with the idea Robbie had, and the stories and details told by Lanny. Adella Murchison asked him to dictate it all to a stenographer, and he suggested they sit and ask questions. 

Having sold it, he visited other clients, and got orders and was doing well. He thought over the problem of getting a plane for Alfy and it wasn't possible without every Nazi and fascist agent finding out through the publicity that would hit him, but even then, it would be impossible to get it to Alfy. In N.Y. he saw Spanish Relief Committee advertised, heard the pastor heading it speak, and sent the money to him anonymously with a request for speaking in church about effect of religion in Spain. He invited Robbie and Esther to attend with him, and they heard the pastor acknowledge the donation before speaking about Spain. They were deeply moved, and thanked him. 
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The author writes here about propaganda war going on in N.Y. with nazis and fascists beating up reds, but the account of Jews being beaten to death by nazi goons hiding iron rods in newspaper rolls, whether later in this volume or another one further, remains in memory after over four decades. 
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Trudi finally accepted that she was a widow, which allowed Lanny to to state his heart and mind to her, and they were able to be together albeit marrying had to wait. Lanny arranged another seance and this time Ludi appeared, telling Trudi he was happy about her and Lanny. Lanny proceeded to take Alfy and his friend Laurence to Madrid via Barcelona, Valencia, Cuenca and Guadalajara. As they got closer, Franco had taken two airports and bombed the university city.

Lanny dropped them close to the airfield and called Raoul Palma after checking in at the Palace hotel. They met in midst of shelling, and saw a dogfight above as they noticed a German junker bombers formation accompanied by fighter planes fly overhead, and Lanny noticed that they looked like Budd-Erling planes but weren't. As they watched, one German bomber burst into flames, to great cheering by onlookers, and another, which looked like a Budd-Erling but wasn't, came down, and they went to look. Lanny photographed every angle he could of various parts, and told Raoul he'd told Robbie Germans would do this, it was unauthorised copy.

International Brigade had arrived, and so had Soviet help. Lanny and Raoul went back into town to see them marching in, and amongst the thousands of volunteers from diverse nations, in one column holding a banner of Thalmann, Lanny saw Bernhardt Monck. Raoul said he was captain Herzog who had escaped from Oranienburg. So there was no reason to doubt him any more.

Lanny carried out his work and collected the paintings he'd come for, and Raoul advised him to drive straight to Valencia and not stop and pick up refugees. But he had to help a poor family stranded between Guadalajara and Cuenca. But he managed to arrive safe across the border and after rest cabled his father about the patent theft. The paintings he had bought, carrying them all the way from Madrid and cabling the money after he crossed the border, to the owner who was in France, were bought by Beauty's friend Sophie just as he was about to cable the client he'd selected first.

Lanny went to Paris and after meeting Trudi, saw uncle Jesse Blackless next day, and learned that the writer Andre Malraux was buying arms for the Spanish government. Lanny couldn't risk meeting him, and gave his money through usual channels including the N.Y. one.

Madame Zyszynski was now with Olivie Hellstein who had children and lost one, and also Solomon Hellstein who had died of Nazi torture, both came through. Solomon said there were no nazis in the spirit world, because nobody would speak with them, and nobody knew where they went. Trudi wanted another try, and Lanny attended this time, but instead of Ludi it was Zaharoff who came through. He was anguished, unable to find his wife. After they went out they saw the headlines, but the papers had not arrived before the seance.

Marceline and Vittorio arrived in Paris and lanny met them. Marceline had spent all the money Irma had given, and now demanded money from Lanny, demanding to know how he expected her to live. She demanded he sell off all the Detaze paintings stored and he explained why he couldn't do so, and she told him off for having divorced his rich and generous wife. He suggested she live at home and save money.

In December Lanny was notified he was divorced, and asked Trudi to marry him, especially because he could help her better. Their hand was forced when Trudi called saying she was being followed, and Lanny instructed her about getting rid of them. He drove her to Calais and they went with another name to a small hotel in England. He called Rick and Nina and introduced them to Trudi, and married her after the requisite fifteen days period of residence in slightly different names from theirs. He sent a photograph of Trudi with the marriage certificate and his will to his father, in an envelope marked to be opened only in case of his demise, and destroyed the negative.
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When he returned to Paris there was a message from Robbie, who was going to Berlin, but Lanny cabled him at Adlon to say he would wait in Paris. Robbie returned soon, he was pleased with Lanny for having discovered the theft and Robbie had dealt with it profitably, so he was planning to get the board to reward Lanny with a moderately sizable quantity of stock. Lanny preferred a plane or two, but he wouldnt get that.

Robbie told about U.S. extending non intervention law to include civil wars, and how the ship Mar Cantabrico was delayed in an anticipation of the law being passed, but there was a scuffle on deck ànd they departed in a hurry, with coast guard in pursuit hoping to stop them if they were in U.S. waters when the law was passed.

They went to see De Bruyne family, and the sons said they had met Kurt, who spoke about culture and so on. He used to say French music was decadent but sang a different tune now. He didn't give political speeches, but appealed in drawing rooms of the rich society to those that had influence. He donated money to right and assured them of of Hitler's support.

Robbie spoke of the German contract and expected France to match it, but Denis, while he'd be glad if happened, was pessimistic, and said French frugality would not allow it. Robbie exclaimed that France wouldn't have defence when needed. Robbie went to England after trying to wake up France, to try waking them up.

Just then Beauty cabled to say Irma had communicated that she had married Wickthorpe and would be living in England, so Beauty would be closer to Frances. Lanny sent his best wishes.
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The author's description of Franco's faith sounds as if it were from a page from any jihadist manual. But of course, inquisition was no different. The connection is  all the more evident, when the author describes the church in spain supporting the wholesale massacre by Franco, and not just with sermons but huge funds too. And the author explicitly describes the factor of using moors to massacre Spanish populace. 
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Lanny and Rick exchanged news about Alfy, and then Rick sent a telegram to say Alfy was missing in action. Rick tried to find out more, and in a few days was told through a correspondent that Alfy was in prison in Caceres. 

Next part is mostly about how Lanny proceeded to attempt to get Alfy out, interesting enough on its own and more so with exposing Marceline and Vittorio as a couple who would accept compromise for money but then reneged after having taken money, and worse. 

The Most delightful part is Alfy identifying himself to Lanny via Bella Gerant Alii. 
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