The Vengeance of Rome

TWENTY-FIVE

The rain has lifted and the sky has grown paler, but that is all. Not exactly cause for unbridled optimism. But I do not say anything. It would be cruel to dash her hopes.

We are almost at the train bridge and the flyover. We have two bridges now. The stalls underneath represent a halfway point. They make a miscellaneous collection. White Hindoos in hideous orange nylon offer me garish comic books depicting the mysterious battles of their vast pantheon of gods. They hawk untuned bells and stinking joss sticks. They offer handbills.

‘No thank you,’ I say, ’I have not yet joined the Alternator Society.’ The entire area under the bridges stinks of wet fur, some of it from living dogs and some of it from their ancestors, adorning the lice-ridden bodies of the Love Generation. Through this drift the odours of damp rice, of tea and coffee, of fried fat. We pass perfumed candles and bags of spices, all their ‘gravey booby’ drug materials. Her fingernails a flight of red bees, Mrs Cornelius runs an appreciative hand over the chrome flanks of a massive toaster which looks as if it had once served a significant mechanical function on a Cunarder. ‘They built things to last in them days,’ she says.

‘They were not affordable to most of us.’

‘They’re all right second-hand,’ she assures me. ‘They run for ever.’ But I could see that the elements were destroyed. I picked up a birdcage with some of its bars bent, as if in a sudden fit of strength the occupant had forced its way to freedom.

‘She had a dead canary with her all day,’ said Röhm to me. ‘That was the weird thing. Hess remarked on it. So did Father Stempfle. They were called in by the mother.’

He was talking about Geli Raubal. We were in the middle of the most significant event of 1931, though you would never discover that from any of the history books. The facts were there for all to discover, at least for a while. Of course, they could not interview Father Stempfle. He had confessed her. And passed the information on. They did not make the connection. Röhm, of course, knew exactly what had happened. It is hard for a woman to shoot herself through the heart with a Walther PPK 38 of that model. The weakness, said Röhm, of the case. Nobody thought it worth investigating so they didn’t put many police on it. That gave everyone time to brush over the tracks. Then Hitler became the property of academic authority obsessed with his ‘strategies’, ‘plans’ and war management and his true story faded away. He, however, was never at rest after ‘31. The beginning of his personal decline came just as his public star was rising. Thereafter his public confidence was almost entirely play-acting and pharmaceutical drugs.

After 1934 only two of us still knew the entire sequence of events. I am the last one at liberty. The other is in prison with amnesia, a vegetable. They say he can’t last. I met him during the War, during my internment. British intelligence arranged the meeting. I think they were testing me. He had very little memory left. He knew me and kept trying to warn me, as he had earlier. ‘Those Messerschmitts,’ he whispered, ’are treacherous.’ That, of course, was why he had fled. Unconsciously he had known that he would be his hero’s next victim. The journalists and pseudo-historians make some conventional logic of it, but he was as anxious to escape as I was. His action undoubtedly saved his life. His loyalty to Hitler, however, ensured his silence.

In the end he did what he had advised me to do. He escaped by plane. He knew, though his faith was as powerful as ever, that he was a marked man. His beloved, infallible master intended to murder him. In his rejection of conventional religion and his taking up of occultism, his faith in Hitler was his only stability and he could not afford to let it go. But he naturally did not want to die. Hess reconciled the conflict in his typical way. If he was of no further use to his master, then he would leave. And find a way to be of use again. Hess escaped into a kind of limbo. I did not really envy him. I believe I kept my perspective. I have never denied the real issues that lay at the heart of the Nazi cause. My quarrel was with the application of the principles. Many had the same misgivings as time went on. My own experience, of course, might have prejudiced me, but I always prided myself on my openness both to ideas and to fresh experience.

My experience at the Villa Röhm was, I will admit, dreamlike. As if I was in a perpetually running Hollywood epic. Some of Röhm’s rivals thought it vulgar, but I was reminded of Hearst’s famous Castle of San Simeon and of the Hollywood homes, such as Chaplin’s.

Putzi called Röhmannsvilla ‘De Mille Bon Marche’. Silks and fine cottons hung everywhere. Marble statuary of boys and young men, fountains, tiled baths and erotic mosaics were all drawn from classical models. A perfect setting for the elaborate parties Röhm liked to throw for his top lieutenants who never failed to bring fresh guests, many of them recruited from the Hitler Youth’s finest. The newcomers were always wonderfully impressed. A great morale booster.

I saw something so noble, clean and healthy about those young bodies that only a person with a twisted mind would observe anything perverse in what went on there. True, we tested ourselves and others to certain extremes, but this served to harden us more. Röhm himself explained how we emulated the greatest Greeks and Romans. Whenever heterosexuality was made a faith, he said, civilisations collapsed. Hitler understood that as well as he did. Only homophobes like Himmler and Goebbels feigned disgust. They were addicted to sentimentality and women the way Hitler was addicted to his cream cakes and his dog whips. Their own weakness was why they always railed against him. Göring, with his weight, and Goebbels, with his club foot, had not exactly put the purest sperm into circulation, and as for Hitler, he possessed serious drawbacks, as we said in Kiev, to his stuffing any chicken with his particular pudding.

Röhm had no time for women except as mothers. The rest were sluts and parasites. He found it hard to be polite to most of them. He said they were a distraction, incapable of higher brain functions. They were natural prey to Jews and other vermin. He had loathed Rosa Luxemburg, whom he described as a hermaphrodite and an abomination. He tolerated the army politician von Schleicher precisely because he understood him to have been involved in the execution of Luxemburg and Leibnitz.

Ultimately, Röhm told me, he saw a time when women would hardly be needed at all, and those we had left could be hardened up like Amazons, as auxiliaries and breeders. Hitler’s weakness for Geli Raubal was a sure sign things were going wrong. Röhm had nothing against his Chief having a sentimental interlude, but Raubal had become an unhealthy obsession and was getting them both into trouble. She was likely to destroy Hitler’s political career. The party couldn’t afford much more scandal around him.

Röhm insisted that the light of his old friend’s life was nothing but a whore. ‘She fucks anything that moves. She’d fuck a turd if it was stiff enough. She’s had two of his chauffeurs behind his back and half the damned SS. Everyone knows about her and that SS fellow Zeiss. Yet Alf won’t hear a word against the bitch. He’s broke because of her. She’s getting him to buy her singing lessons and send her to fucking Vienna to become an opera star! No, Mashi, we really don’t need young Geli around at the moment. I’m all for her going to Vienna to follow her vocation. I know a nice house on Rosenstrasse. They’ll employ her. She can take her pictures with her.’

Röhm, Putzi and Schultz, the Nazi Party treasurer, had been responsible for buying back Hitler’s drawings and letters. The go-between was the ubiquitous Hieronymite priest Father Bernhard Stempfle, a sometime contributor to Völkischer Beobachter and Der Stunner. The letters, Röhm said, were graphic. The photos were steamy. But the drawings were amazing. Better than his usual doodles. Putzi had wondered what kind of man would make a woman pose like that. And he had come to understand about the dog whips they all carried. He was not grateful for the knowledge, he said. It gave him a rather different idea of the Chief.

‘He’s completely addicted to the bitch,’ Röhm complained. ‘And she’s blackmailing him, believe me. She could well have corrupted that seedy priest, though I know for a fact he’s not interested in grown women. The commies will use her, if they can.’

By coincidence that same evening he presented me with a marvellous costume, a fantasy of lace and silk, and said he would be touched if I would wear it for him. Röhmannsvilla was a kind of Hollywood in itself, and I felt secure there. I was never afraid of make-believe in its place. In this case, of course, I had hardly any choice. I indulged him. I love the sensation of silk. I gave myself up to it and did not really mind the pain at the end. ‘Slut,’ he said. ‘You gorgeous little slut.’

I always believed it pure folly to assume that what a consenting adult does in the privacy of his own apartments has any bearing on his public life. No true historian bothers himself with such questions. A man should be judged by his public actions, not on his taste in suits, sex or soup.

Mrs Cornelius, of course, was involved in the Christine Keeler business, though she never went to Cliveden. Mandy Rice-Davies was her good friend, and they often spent afternoons together. ‘The only problem with all o’ that,’ she says, ‘was Chrissy and that loony Schwarze, whatever his name was . . .’

‘Lucky,’ I say.

‘They was both barmy and that messed it up for everyone else. Jack Profumo should ‘ave known better, but there wasn’t much to the rest of ‘em.’

We have stopped in the Mountain Grill for a cup of tea and something to eat. George calls a greeting to me from his shrieking, steaming galley at the back. Maria, his wife, calls me a ‘dirty old sod’ and asks me how I am. All affectionate badinage. The chairs are bent chrome and red plastic. The old Brown House style. Two rows of grey formica-topped tables go from front to back with a central aisle. Maria walks up and down the aisle like a wardress, delivering filled plates, picking up empties. She sees to the condiments. She has her favourites. I am one of them. I never go hungry there. Like her husband she wears a stained white overall. They are almost exactly the same height and weight. They come from Cyprus. We get on well. We have similar ideas about the Turks. They would like to see the liberation of Constantinople. Yet they support Queen’s Park and celebrate Christmas. They are not bigots. Everyone comes here, from hippies to police. Black men with impossibly tangled hair openly roll reefers and grin across at the little schoolgirls who have accidentally found this greasy bolthole. Children are in no danger at the Mountain Grill, another of the world’s safe places. The cafe offers greater sanctuary than any church.

Part of George’s front door, bolted open now, has been smashed. ‘Drunks,’ he says, ‘crazies. You know.’

‘Micks was it?’ says Mrs Cornelius. She always blames the Irish. ‘They can’t hold their booze. It’s the same up our way.’

A long time, I tell her, since we had to be afraid of Micks who are all Labour politicians now. She has no base to her prejudice. She merely voices the accepted wisdom of Whitechapel with its deep-rooted secular tradition. Such stereotyping is unworthy of her, I say. I see good and bad among all races. The English are prejudiced against the Irish because they know in their bones Cromwell created many of their ills. Yet the Irish are just as misguided. They blame all their troubles on the English. The plain fact is that the Catholics lost the struggle. What would they have done if Cromwell had not triumphed? Himmler, a Protestant, had no prejudices against Catholics. They were often, he said, the best for special duties. That’s why he preferred, whenever possible, to recruit Austrians.

It is a nonsense to say the Christian Churches turned against Hitler. The Lutherans and the Catholics loved him. They fell over themselves to bless the brave SA boys at their rallies. They got up in their pulpits and told their congregations to vote for him. He was a force for stability, they said. Only the Greek Church stood aloof, which was why Hitler wanted to destroy it. He never had any major disagreement with the Pope.

They were talking on the wireless about the Irish famines in the nineteenth century which the English did so little to alleviate. The survivors all went to America and settled there. Where they lynched Negroes and shot redskins. I once looked at the names of troopers who served in the US frontier regiments and who massacred the natives. The names were all Irish. As they were in India. A naturally belligerent people forced from their bogs and slums by English callousness, they went to America to improve their spirits by shooting unarmed people in remote western valleys. Who is the original victim? Who the aggressor? Many of the Indians expected nothing else. They had dedicated themselves rigorously to the total genocide of rival tribes. Yet tell some American, boasting of his Irish and Cherokee blood, that he survives because his ancestors were successful practitioners of genocide, and feel his fist in your face, his boot in your testicles.

History is no longer a study of the past, but a series of legalistic arguments. A public trial in which academics vie with one another to establish who is the victim, who the aggressor. An American habit. Americans never feel at ease until they establish who is to blame for something. They took this from the Germans, who gave them so much more of their culture than the British.

They say Hitler, too, perverted reality, reinvented history. But unsentimental reality moved the Führer. Let us not mention the Israelis, whose rhetoric is identical to the Nazis in almost every respect. They speak of blood, of living space, of ancient rights. With the help of the unwitting Americans, who name themselves Christians but are really Jews, calling on the Old Testament but rejecting the New, they plan a new Carthaginian Empire across the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

‘Mind your backs, boys!’

Maria brings my usual. One sausage, chips, a slice and tea. On Saturdays I have an egg. Mrs Cornelius has her own usual. A bowl containing two scoops of mashed potato over which thick tomato soup has been poured. A wartime dish, she tells me. It always comforts her.

Through George’s weeping glass I see a sudden ray of sunshine fall on the needlecraft stall across the road. The reels and spools, hanks and balls of bright silks, wools and cottons come to burning life, a magnificent display of jewels. Ornaments sparkle, clothes become more vivid and heads lift almost in surprise. An angel might have paused here.

‘I don’t know what to watch tonight.’ We have finished our meal. It is Mrs Cornelius’s whack. She returns from the counter. ‘Bye-bye, all!’

For a while the drizzle does not persist. Outside the sun continues to shine on windows and puddles. There is a strong pungent odour, almost of the jungle. I know it to be the soup of half-corrupted fruit and vegetables, paper and animal matter, through which we pick our way, fording the amniotic stream so that Mrs Cornelius can get her fags at her newsagent. This material, pushed into heaps or flushed down sewers, is the breeding ground for new species.

Scientists come from all over the world to study Portobello Road. Yesterday some bespectacled student informed me that the area now has its own separate ecological system. Such things happen only in cities. Rural environments lack the necessary biological complexity. Marijuana grown in that mixture is known to be almost fifty times stronger. No wonder everyone seems to be in a trance. These days when they come stumbling into my shop I know exactly what is going on.

When Mrs Cornelius picks up her Embassy Tipped I buy a copy of the Daily Mail, always my favourite British newspaper, as it was Hitler’s. Lord Rothermere was a convinced NSDAP supporter and saw a stronger future in his nation’s close collaboration with Hitler. If they had followed his advice there is no doubt the British Empire would now be greater than ever. She would control vast areas of the world, including China and Arabia. Instead, she cannot effectively rule the Isle of Wight. No wonder the Americans, who have taken over so many old imperial responsibilities, are contemptuous. Americans have deafened themselves. They shout at one another. They shout at me. They shout banalities, destroying thought.

Lately I find it hardly worth buying a paper or turning on the news. Little changes. Who can you trust? That familiar excited babble, confident-sounding analysis, authoritative predicting of trends while everything continues to go round and round in the usual unresolved chaos. Sometimes I come across old newspapers in boxes or as drawer linings. The issues scarcely change. The arguments remain the same. Year in and year out commentators voice the identical views in the same excited tones. Most people are incapable of original thought. They think an original thought is something they haven’t read before. It bowls them over. They repeat it in the pub or, if they are middle class, at dinner parties.

Mrs Cornelius refuses to despair. She says you have to laugh.

‘What a wonderful actor you are, Max.’ Röhm watches the last reel of Buckaroo’s Gold. I wave to the audience from my mechanical horse. It seems I control a rearing mount. I flourish my hat. My smile is gay. My innocent eyes look back at me from a happier age.

He pours champagne. ‘I could swear I’d seen you in something else.’

I can never forget those films taken in Egypt. What if they should turn up some day? The likelihood is not impossible. Röhm, Hitler, Streicher and Rosenberg all have extensive collections of erotica. I cannot remember whether my face was ever visible or not. Röhm, of course, would not need to see my face to recognise me.

Mrs Cornelius and I went to the pictures every Friday afternoon. We had pensioners’ passes. But when the Essoldo in Portobello Road changed to the Electric Cinema it became impossible. We had been able to see three features at the Essoldo for 1/6.The Electric charges you a pound for one foreign film whose photography is out of focus, whose plot is indecipherable and whose subject appears to be the director. Progress, indeed. All that has not changed are the seats and the sound system, which remain as bad.

I saw the work of the transvestite adman Warthole there. Naked boys pretending to be cowboys and vampires. What is so original about it? I asked. They were not so long ago, those wonderful parties. Some SA wag called it the ‘Kaligulahof. ‘Mr Handy Andy’ should make a film about that villa, its luxuries and elaborate fantasies. I could help him. I could write the script. I am not ashamed. Nobody was forced. Those Hitler Youth lads had as much fun as anyone. Besides, I had no choice. Kind-hearted as he was, Captain Röhm was used to being obeyed. He became my only source of income after Mussolini’s money stopped arriving. I had enemies in Rome, but I could not investigate, of course.

Mrs Cornelius was quite aware of my circumstances. She never blamed me. She thinks perhaps I should have anticipated the problems. But how could I anticipate what happened? How could anyone? People judge you too readily. They think you deliberately choose your fate. They do not understand how you gradually slide into situations from which escape becomes impossible. What seems a temporary diversion on your life’s road looks, in the perspective of history, like a culmination, an example of your inner evil! But I had absolutely nothing to do with any murder. I still could not swear who killed her. Those who knew were shot or fled into exile. Father Stempfle was killed in Dachau, but I never saw him there. Stempfle was one of the keys. Who has heard of him today? The past disappears without record. History becomes a means by which we escape from shame or promote our special interests. We invent whatever we need and forget whatever is inconvenient. Such is life in this sordid Disneyland where wealthy tourists bring in the only money.

Walt Disney was inspired by Mussolini’s idealism. He wanted to build a benign corporate state where every American was happy and nothing ever happened to anyone. He died before he could realise this Utopia, but they froze his head so that he can return at any time to redeem us. He made so many dreams seem real. I am forced to face the fact that all my dreams came to nothing.

‘Up like the rocket and down like the stick,’ says Mrs Cornelius, guiding me from the newsagent and back into the crowd. ‘That’s you all over, Ivan.’ A pack of miniature mongrels runs past, under one stall and out of another. A cyclist swerves to avoid them and falls against a display of tomatoes. We move expertly away from the conflict. We have reached the old core of the market, where fruit and veg are still sold, where frustrated locals make every effort to hold their own against the foreign influx. They sell the boojies the rotten tomatoes and the bruised fruit. Friday it is mostly hippies and scalp-heads, dealers of every description. They bring no money in. Whatever they make they take away again.

Here the shops are cleaner and sell recognisable things. We pass both rival fishmongers’ slabs, the cheap butcher’s, the chain baker’s, the white goods shop, the draper’s, the hardware shop, the electrician’s, the Venicia Café and the baby shop. As we approach the pawnshop, the black bulk of Bishop Beesley, not at first recognisable as human, blocks our way. He is considerably fatter than Göring and, of course, is not a real bishop. His real name is Billy the Mouth and he is again released from prison. Like his daughter he is a confidence trickster. Mitzi is currently in Holloway. They rarely meet. Beesley is wearing his familiar dark suit and pullover, a white shirt just visible. It gives him the ecclesiastical look he feels comfortable with. He wipes his hand on a blue handkerchief. ‘My dear Colonel! And the lovely Mrs C!’

He is meeting a mutual friend in the Blenheim Arms, he says. He insists we have a quick one on him. His ship recently came in. ‘In a small way, you know.’

Mrs Cornelius accepts, and I cannot be rude. We leave Portobello Road and enter the pub’s graveolent interior. Quintessentially English, the smell of fried pies and cigarillos blend with bitter beer and harsh spirits. Dark shoulders press together. Little women, holding their own like defiant fowl, slip in and out with glasses of wine. Shifty boys pass miniature paper envelopes back and forth and argue over money. They glance at well-groomed office girls who sit at the bar grinning and smoking or rummaging through their purses. On the other side of the counter the glowering features of little Mo Collier glare with contempt on all and everything. The world is not up to standard. He smoothes his carefully cut moustache. His neat, dark head sports another idiosyncratic haircut, doubtless the current fashion. ‘Near-mutton dressed as almost-lamb,’ says Mrs Cornelius spitefully. She was never prepared to like him. He stands with his eyes avoiding his customers, flexing his muscles and catching glimpses of himself in the polished copper. A pocket Hercules in his fashionable sports vest. The Bishop insists on his attention. ‘Two halves please, Mo, and a small, dry sherry. Ah, there she is!’

A coiffure that was once pure Pre-Raphaelite flame, but now owes something to Mr Sonya in Elgin Crescent, bobs above the mass. Miss Brunner used to run a local girls’ school before the scandal. She is now in private tuition and dresses with the same tempting severity which makes the Bishop her slave. As far as we know, there is no other man in her life. The Cornelius boys tell stories, but neither can ever be trusted to know the truth, let alone tell it. Her uncompromising grey-blue eyes note our presence and are lowered in a brief greeting. She bears herself with a kind of diseased dignity. She is thoroughly groomed but cannot disguise the aura of corruption which surrounds her. She has no power to charm, only to command. She takes a Pernod and makes it clear she has come to meet the Bishop, not chat with us.

A long head hunched in a corduroy donkey jacket turns from the bar. Frank, Mrs Cornelius’s youngest boy. His features are inclined to sag. I think he is on morphine, like Göring. They say he works for Hoogstraten, the property tycoon, and tends to ape his new boss. He wears a striped Jaeger shirt and an old school tie. He is better groomed than his brother, at least. He smiles at me, says something to a companion and comes over. Tentatively Frank kisses his mother, apparently unsure what he will pick up. He squeezes my arm in an aggressive and unwanted demonstration of camaraderie. ‘How’s tricks, Colonel?’

They are always here on Fridays. Even Major Nye comes in on occasions but was offered voluntary retirement and can only rarely afford the fare from Kent. Family business is now his only excuse for visiting the city. We see a few others from time to time. We are the survivors, I suppose. Our means of survival might not always bear much discussion, but I name no names. We have no power. Therefore we cultivate tolerance. The acceptance, I suppose, of the inevitable. We huddle together for comfort. We remind one another of our stories and our great days. Most of us have had a few of those, at least.

I had no plans to spend more than a week with Captain Röhm, but he insisted I stay. Also at his insistence, and with some relief, I shaved off my imperial. He appreciated the action. I was his ideal companion, he said, for this wonderful idyllic place. Then friends turned up. Before I knew it a week had gone and then another. Messengers were sent to the post office, but nothing arrived for me. I had to stay there. Röhm was sometimes absent for a day or two, but there was plenty to do. I spent hours wandering around the vast uncompleted villa. The chief bedrooms and bathrooms were in use and there was a large public room, but most of the rest was only half finished. Röhm never had time to let the builders come back. Somebody was always staying there. But when I was on my own, I might be the last man on Earth.

The spirits of hunters and woodsmen had inhabited the thick, surrounding wooded hills since the beginning of time. I had rarely experienced such peace. I found a beautiful illustrated set of Karl May and absorbed myself in tales of Old Shatterhand and Winnetou the Kiowa. Röhm also shared Hitler’s taste for Edgar Wallace who was, he said, the soundest of British writers in their best traditions. Wallace had been a professional soldier, and like Buchan had a pretty clear idea of the Jew question. On Röhm’s recommendation I read The Fellowship of the Frog and one or two others. They had none of the appeal of the best Sexton Blake stories and were interesting only when they described some aspect of London criminal life. Through them I grew to know Limehouse, Soho and even Wapping, which was where Wallace was raised, by a bookie, with Jews on all sides.

Forgetting the questions which shadowed my mind, I could read in perfect tranquillity. There was never any threat. One was never taken unawares. Röhm had guards posted at every approach. He feared only the communists. Brodmann could not find me.

According to the rules, Röhm or his aides, but not guests, could make telephone calls. It seemed impolitic to try to contact Mussolini, but I began to wonder what he would think if I had disappeared. Believing me the victim of foreign agents, he might send people to look for me, to rescue me. It would be best if I got in touch with him soon. Why had my money been stopped? I made plans to return to Munich. I neither wished to end my idyll nor offend the great Stabschef, but I have an exaggerated sense of loyalty. I felt it my duty to go, at least for a while. Reluctantly my host agreed, and at the beginning of August on a particularly hot day, I returned to the Königshof.

There was some problem with a room. They had been told of my absence and put my trunks in storage. But they had not been told of my return. I was waiting impatiently for the matter to be settled and crossed the lobby to buy a Völkischer Beobachter when suddenly I was on the other side of the revolving newspaper rack staring into the frigid face of the Baroness von Ruckstühl.

I was too surprised and too exhausted to pretend. I lifted my hat.

‘My God!’ she said. ’Where have you been? You smell like a whore.’

The mistake was a genuine one. Having no time to bathe, I had borrowed some of Röhm’s cologne before leaving the house.

‘Good afternoon, Leda,’ I said. ‘You look well. Are you a guest here, too?’

‘Why should I be a guest here?’ She spoke belligerently, without affection, but I sensed a quiver of the old spark.

I must admit I was reluctant to leave her until I had some idea of what she was doing in Munich. Knowing her hatred of me from the incident on the train, I blew, as best I could, upon older embers. I told her how attractive she was, how she had lost none of her sex appeal, her beauty. Could we perhaps have tea together? A woman of that age is always hungry for such praise. She told me, rather urgently, that she was married. She was now Frau Oberhauser. She did not warm to me. I said it would be good to speak to her alone, to go over old times, to tell her what had happened to me, how I had been trying to contact her. Neither of us referred to the meeting on the train. I was now, of course, clean-shaven.

‘But you have nothing to tell me,’ she said. ‘I already know all there is to know.’ Her smile was unfriendly.

‘I do not understand,’ I said. ‘I have been abroad for so long.’

‘Indeed,’ she said. She was lucky enough to be in possession of an entire dossier on my movements since I had left Constantinople and turned up in Paris in the expatriate community. She had some wonderful news cuttings from America, for instance. As she murmured her triumph, I could barely keep my composure. She spoke quietly and we were not overheard, but I suspect she did not care if there were listeners. It appeared, she said, that I had swindled my way across at least two continents before hiding myself in Cairo.

I told her that I had had no chance of defending myself. I had been protecting others. She knew me. Was I a monster?

I do not believe I have ever been as wounded by laughter. I begged her to take a glass of tea with me. ‘And now I know where you are,’ she said, and swept into the crowded lobby, leaving through the glass doors to a car. I still did not know where she lived. All I had was a name. I seriously regretted my impatience in leaving Röhmannsvilla.

It took several hours for a room to be found for me. Some sort of crisis was afoot. The political situation in Germany remained highly volatile. Banks were closing down, and ordinary people were panicking. The radio and newspapers appealed for people to keep their heads. But they had nothing else to lose. There were dozens of rumours about seizures of power, tycoons fleeing the country, a peasant army on its way to Berlin. They grew increasingly fantastic. I had too many other things on my mind. I tried to put a telephone call through to Rome, to Margherita Sarfatti. I could contact no one else without arousing suspicion.

I barely understood the news. So much had been going on, I suppose, that it was impossible to explain. New names were everywhere. Old ones had vanished. This situation was critical. That one was calm. In the end I decided to wait until I met a party friend who would explain everything to me.

Luckily the hotel made no fuss about my bill. They had been reassured earlier by Putzi’s involvement with me and had seen me arrive in an SA car flying the Stabschef’s flag. My room was a little small and at the back of the hotel looking down on the garages, but I was lucky to have it.

I made several more telephone calls. Erna Hanfstaengl, Putzi’s sister, told me her brother was in Berlin. ‘They’re all in Berlin, Max. There’s a different crisis every twenty-four hours. I doubt if anyone will be back in Munich until the weekend at least.’

It soon became evident, especially after my encounter with the Baroness, that this was the best time to leave. I would offend no one. They were all too involved with their politics. Yet I still had no money and no credit. In the atmosphere of panic, there would be little I could sell which would raise me what I needed. I decided to try my friends in the Roman press corps. Tom Morgan was in Milan. I left a message with his secretary. I put through another call to Billy Grisham, but again the lines were saturated. Eventually someone from his bureau got through to me. They thought I was their Munich stringer. They told me Grisham was already in Berlin. When I asked for his number they said it was the same as always. I had made them suspicious.

None of the other numbers I tried were of any use. Some had been changed while I was away. I felt totally isolated in the middle of so much urgent activity. I did not, of course, wish to call Röhm, for I knew he would object to my leaving. Göring, my other important acquaintance, was still, I understood, with his dying wife. That newborn Bait Seryozha was as likely to want to borrow from me as lend me the money for my ticket, and I had other reasons for not wishing to resume contact with him. He had clearly been dropped by Röhm.

My inattention to the newspapers for the past couple of weeks meant that everything I overheard was a mystery. The only familiar names were Hindenburg and Hitler. Chiefly the conversation was about money and business and the failure of the banks. The consensus was that America, with considerable troubles of her own, could no longer keep Germany afloat. Once again the Fatherland faced the appalling inflation of earlier years. Already people were becoming suspicious of cash. I felt that I should buy my ticket before I needed millions just to tip the conductor. I tried the Bürgerbräukeller, the Hofbräuhaus, the Eberlbräuhaus, the Löwenbräuhaus and the Löwenbräukeller, all favourite Nazi beer cellars. The young men in the Thorbräukeller, a regular meeting place for the SA, were positively rude. I found no one I recognised.

At length I decided to take a stroll in the tranquillity of Briennerstrasse. The great houses seemed as tranquil and as inviolable as ever. The Brown House, flanked by trees, had acquired a look of permanence and stability. I waited nearby for a while in the hope of seeing a friend. Instead, I received nothing but insults from the untrained boys, unaware of my standing, who came and went in their battered trucks and delivery vans. At one point I saw a more experienced SA man caution one of these green recruits. I tipped my hat to him as I went by. I bore them no animosity. I recognised in them a vitality which might sometimes express itself crudely but was renewing Germany at last. They did not understand how much we had in common.

Everyone of any importance was in Berlin. I took my supper at the hotel. I had no choice. Because I remained unsure of the Baroness’s intentions, I found it difficult to settle down with a book and wait for something to happen. Did she plan to expose me there and then to the Munich press? I was reluctant to walk out on the streets in the evening, since I had already been the object of mockery. I wondered what the same people would say if I put on my Fascist uniform or told them that I was a captain in the SA.

As I passed the concierge’s desk one of the under-managers saw me and called politely, handing me a large envelope containing a telegram. I opened it up. Tom Morgan had sent it. I was a little baffled by the message.

REPORTS OF YOUR DEATH CLEARLY EXAGGERATED STOP BUT SHOULDNT YOU BE IN ALBANIA QUERY CALL ME SOONEST STOP TOM

The only Albanian I knew was Rose von Bek, and I was convinced by now that she was dead. Was Tom’s query connected with her? And who had reported my own death? It was too late to telephone his office, and he had not left another number. I assumed there had been a simple confusion or that Tom was joking. I would have to be patient and wait until morning to find out. There would be no one at Tom’s office before then.

I had not felt quite so desolate and uneasy for some while. I was confident of my overall security, for I knew some of the most powerful men in Europe, yet I was still nervous. However, if civil war broke out in Germany, as some were predicting, Munich was better for me than Berlin. I could get over the Swiss, Czech or Austrian borders fairly easily. My best bet, I decided, was to concentrate on finding a car I could use.

After the War I ran a small repair business until they closed down the arches. I was next door to a man who specialised in pre-war and American automobiles. He made a fortune. Every so often I was able to help him with a difficult job. When the council decided in its wisdom to move us out, I could not afford the expensive shops they offered me in Bassett Road. Besides, I said, the entire row was condemned. I happened to know that. The council is completely corrupt. All Jews and Yorkshiremen. They notoriously look after their own. It was some years before I could open up in Portobello Road, because of the short lease. Mrs Cornelius told me about the place. Her children were small then.

Frank Cornelius is trying to sell Miss Brunner a Ford Fiesta. Miss Brunner points out to him that she was in the garage when the mechanic told him it was a write-off. He apologises. His memory is not what it was. I would imagine there is hardly a neuron in him unsubjected to a bath in some mind-bending acid or other. He no longer describes his body as ‘speeded-up circuitry’ as he did in the sixties. It seems to me that much of the circuitry is already burned out. His head hangs with superfluous skin as if he wears a larger man’s face. His clothes, intended to disguise his origins and display the authority of a higher class, are growing threadbare and stained. I have more fashionable shmatte in my shop.

Mrs Cornelius has been in the toilet for twenty minutes. I think she could be throwing up. Her other son comes in, looks around and is about to leave. I have nothing better to do. I raise my hand to him. He comes towards me. He is too thin. His long jacket and tight trousers make him look like some kind of Teddy boy in a woman’s black wig. He has on those blue two-tone shoes and a T-shirt with ‘Anarchy’ written on it. What can he know of Anarchy? Makhno would have gobbled him for breakfast. He resembles an overgrown Munchkin from The Wizard of Oz. He is trying to get into the entertainment business, his mother says. He is in touch with that rogue Auchinek. Auchinek is today a rock-and-roll manager. Yesterday he was an immigration specialist. The less said about that the better.

‘Afternoon, Colonel,’ says Jerry. He at least has never addressed me by anything but my full rank. ‘I was looking for Cathy.’

His sister is not here. His mother, I say, is in the toilet. He looks at his watch. ‘Bit early, isn’t it?’

I must admit I was thinking the same.

I have never liked Jerry. At least Frank works for a living. The only one I ever had time for in that family was Catherine, and now she has become a communist! They were not my children, but I had hopes for them. Mrs Cornelius did not. She expected them to survive, nothing else. How they did it was up to them. She was of the old-fashioned cockney persuasion which felt that if you reached the age of thirteen without major illnesses, you were probably going to live until forty.

She comes out of the toilet. ‘It’s filthy in there,’ she says. ‘I had ter clean it up a bit. Someone was caught short before they got their knickers darn. ‘Ello, Jerry. I thought you was at Elstree this week.’

‘We wound it up early,’ he said. ‘Drink, Colonel?’

I look at his roll of notes, knowing it will be gone in a day or so, and wonder if I should mention the money I have loaned him over the years. Not once has he paid me back. When he was a boy I used to think he was charging me for his mother’s time. Of course, business was booming in those days, and I was always open-handed. But it was the little girl I liked best. A minx, as her mother said. I still had plans then to return to my old pursuits. I got into the antique clothing line by accident, and it was meant to be a stopgap. At first I just sold military memorabilia on a stall. It did very well. Everyone wants that material. Especially the Nazi daggers. There were so many of them made. Enough for everyone, I used to think. It seemed the whole of Germany was in the SS before the war ended. Of course I had no time for the SS nor for Himmler. He perverted our ideals. He was a criminal. I have never quarrelled with that particular Nuremberg verdict. And it was sheer nonsense for him or Schnauben to suggest I had any hand in his ruthless and entirely indiscriminate killing of unwanted social elements. I was asked some questions. I answered them. Nothing more.

‘A blacksmith makes a shovel,’ I used to say. ‘This does not make him a gravedigger.’ How can what one talks about as a mental exercise have any bearing at all on another’s attempt to make that notion an actuality? My involvement with the Nazi Party, such as it was, was entirely idealistic. Gradually, as the years went on, I began to see the weaknesses and perversions of the system, and eventually it became clear to me that the Nazi cause was lost, long before 1945. By then, of course, there was little I could do about it. I was never a fanatical follower of Hitler and, with the exception of Dachau and elsewhere, most of my connections with the party were purely social. In those heady days of 1931 it was impossible not to meet Nazis!

Jerry passes some notes to his mother. She makes a kissing motion and tucks them away. I am glad to see someone has benefited for once. He has been working as an extra on the set of some science fiction ‘Star Opera’. He becomes the centre of their attention. Mrs Cornelius and I were once genuine stars, with our own series, but we did not talk and we were not in colour. At least in the American pictures. The German ones have disappeared. You never see them. In those days our films concentrated on subtleties of character. The plots had a strong moral content. Now it is all sensation.

Jerry talks about actors and the director as if they are his best friends. He tells anecdotes he could not possibly have witnessed. He inflates the importance of his role. He hints that he has slept with screen temptresses. He throws famous Christian names into the air like baubles. He describes the problems of fame. He blossoms into life on the attention of that seedy crowd. Hitler was the same. Why can no one ever see through these people?

Moorcock, who has already glamourised them in his cheap melodramas, seems as happy to swallow Jerry’s tarnished offerings as anyone. He buys him a drink. He is clearly besotted, totally fooled, just as all his kind were in the thirties. Offer these middle-class thrill-seekers a smooth-talking gangster and they fall over themselves to report his lies. Offer them your experience, your certain knowledge of repressed truths, and they laugh at you and turn what you say into a joke. There is a fashionable way of putting these things which I have never learned. Yet if they would listen to me, they would hear so much! They are ridiculously impatient. The young are incapable of reading. They have a diet of tabloid filth and BBC indoctrination. They are so fond of attacking Mein Kampf (which I do not say is perfect), yet how many of them have read a paragraph, let alone a chapter?

At that time I accidentally met Father Stempfle, who claimed to have written most of Mein Kampf. As I wandered rather aimlessly through the hotel, I suddenly saw Gregor Strasser in the hotel lounge. To be precise, I heard him first, for his great, bluff Bavarian boom was famous. He was talking to an odd-looking individual who was seated in a corner, huddled deep in one of the big armchairs, trying to steady a coffee cup as he craned his mad chameleon head upwards and spoke urgently to the Nazi leader. I had never been introduced to Strasser, but I knew Röhm would vouch for me. Strasser wore a good, conservative tweed suit and looked every inch the solid South German businessman that he was. Yet his tightly cropped and shaven head revealed the other side of him. He clearly modelled his appearance on that of Mussolini.

I saw why so many favoured Strasser over Hitler as leader of the Nazi Party. Strasser’s hearty manner made everyone around him feel better. Röhm had told me how Strasser was the most popular man in the Reichstag these days. Even the socialists respected him. Once he heard my story, he would be bound to help me. Hastily I tried to force a passage through the tightly packed chairs towards him. However, fate intervened. We were not to meet. Even as I called his name and began to cross the lounge, pushing between a press of people taking tea, he turned away, clapping the seated man on the shoulder. ‘Herr Strasser,’ I shouted. But there were too many others creating a babble in the place. He turned, calling out to a top-hatted old gentleman to wait; he was on his way. And then he was gone.

‘He’s avoiding you, too, eh?’ said the strange creature to whom Strasser had been talking. I could guess easily who it was. I had heard of him from Röhm and some of the other SA.

I was brief with him. Clearly Strasser regarded him as a nuisance. Very few visitors to the Königshof wore a rough homespun monk’s habit or, indeed, had quite such filthy fingernails. Obviously the famous Father Bernhard Stempfle who belonged to the old German hermit order of St Hieronymous. His tastes, Röhm had told me, were not always solitary. A contributor to the anti-Jewish and -Catholic press, Stempfle was also employed by Amann, Hitler’s publisher. His work had a similar approach, though was a little narrower. When Amann needed someone to sharpen up Hitler’s rather rambling prose, the priest was the ideal candidate. In those days it was not unusual to be both a trained journalist and a man of the cloth.

Father Stempfle had been very influential in the early days of the movement. He was the one who acted as a middleman for Hitler when he was blackmailed. I think his mistake was to get too close to the Führer. He grew unwholesomely fascinated with Hitler’s private life. At my silent rebuff, he withdrew like some seedy tortoise first into his habit and then into the shadows of his seat so that it seemed someone had merely thrown an old garment down. I have never seen anyone disappear quite so naturally. The somewhat ostentatious wooden cross around his neck bounced on its rope, then his reptile head appeared above it again glaring at me in the most violent manner!

I had read some of his articles in the VB. He was a little fanatical on the question of Jews but basically sound. Like almost every founder member of the Nazi Party (which his vows did not allow him to join openly) he was of below average height, with brown hair and a somewhat unweathered skin. I had heard that he shared a taste for morphine with Göring and Co. His deep-set eyes and shaggy appearance reminded me a little of Lionel Barrymore in his wonderful (if not entirely accurate) rendering of Rasputin the Mad Monk. Father Stempfle had some kind of lair in the woods outside Munich.

His hand reached out to take my sleeve. His eyes betrayed a sort of malicious mirth. ‘Do you have some prejudice, young man, against people of my calling?’

‘Of course not, Father. I was not sure —’

‘That I would have anything to do with the likes of you?’

I shook my head. Rather than draw further attention to myself I let him draw me down to the chair beside him.

As soon as I was seated, he acted as if I were about to attack him, pulling himself back and looking wildly around for help. ‘Who are you? Explain yourself!’ Only when I introduced myself did he grow calmer, but in spite of initiating our meeting he remained strangely uncomfortable. I did not mind his refusal to shake hands. I think he suspected me of being Jewish. Indeed, I think he probably suspected everyone of being Jewish.

He began muttering to me in a nervous manner, and whenever I tried to lean forward to hear him better, he would flap his hands. His general behaviour was eccentric. I supposed it characteristic of hermits that they should not feel particularly at ease in large crowds, but he was by all accounts not the most reclusive of Hieronymites. He had spent time at Röhmannsvilla. I understood from Röhm that he only occasionally acted as a padre, usually when some sensitive party matter was involved.

Röhm and Stempfle, I recalled, did not get on particularly well. I could see why. I sensed something ungenerous and self-referential about the man. He was very brusque. When he did start to speak, he allowed no interruption. Stempfle, too, it emerged, was on the search for money. He had been to the Brown House and found it empty of anyone he knew. Claiming he didn’t have a penny, Strasser had told him to ask Amann. Stempfle had already been to Amann, who was out of town. The monk had been everywhere. They were threatening, he said, to cut off his electricity.

I was trying to think of a way of asking him why he did not move to a cheaper cave when the waiter came over and told me I had a long-distance telephone call. Did I wish to take it in my room? Glad of the opportunity to leave the miserable priest, with a quick apology I wished him luck and went swiftly up the stairs to my room on the first floor.

I picked up my instrument. It was full of static and half-heard conversations in a dozen languages. Somewhere in the background I could hear a woman’s voice, then a man speaking Italian, and then the woman again. I had expected Tom Morgan. But perhaps he had passed my number on.

‘Maddy?’

‘Maddy!’This was a shriek which shredded the static to a barely audible whisper. ‘Why would that double-crossing bitch be calling you? To laugh at you? To tell you that her new boyfriend is a better lover? That he wants to kill you?’

Unmistakably La Sarfatti.

I apologised even as she asked me when I had left Albania. The line faded again, and her voice became the distant shriek of a frustrated eagle. I was astonished to hear Albania mentioned again.

‘I have never been to Albania,’ I told her. I was not sure she could still hear me.

She faded back in. ‘We all thought you were dead,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you know? Il Duce has put a price on your head!’

I was unable to take this seriously. ‘What am I? An enemy of the state? Or does he think there was something between me and Rachele?’

‘Something between you and Rachele? Aha! I always knew the bitch was too good to be true. That might explain it. We were told you’d sold all our military secrets to the Albanians.’

‘I have no sexual involvement with Signora Mussolini! The only military secrets I know are my own. My own inventions. I could scarcely renege on myself.’ I now remembered the missing case. No doubt the thing, containing miscellaneous spare drawings and photographs, had been stolen by Albanian agents when we transferred in Austria. They might well have been following me. I was a fool to be so naive. Now the pictures, which were of no particular use without explanations, were in enemy hands. They might even think the models were real!

I told her that it could all be easily cleared up. She must talk to Mussolini — or get him to talk to me.

‘Why would he talk to you, of all people, darling? He went to such elaborate lengths to get rid of you.’

Her story was becoming increasingly ludicrous. If I had not had the telegram from Tom Morgan I might not have believed a word.

‘That’s nonsense,’ I said. ‘Why would Il Duce want to get rid of one of his key men?’

‘Because he’s taken a fancy to his key man’s woman? You idiot, Max. He got you out of the way so that he could have a clear field with that little American bitch.’

‘Maddy?’

‘It suited her, too. She hates you now. I tried to explain everything, but she wouldn’t listen. Darling, I’m your only friend here!’

It seemed to me that Sarfatti had been intriguing far too much in Rome and that she had been poisoning Maddy’s mind against me. I felt attacked by an entire Amazon army. But why should I believe La Sarfatti? She must have several ulterior motives for calling me.

‘But my projects,’ was all I could think to say before the line grew noisy again. I had the impression she was telling me I had served my turn in some elaborate strategy of Il Duce. I did not for a moment think it likely, yet I had been surprised at Mussolini’s sudden decision for me to go to Germany and at Maddy’s complete refusal to see me.

She began to reply. She spoke of Spain and Greece and Albania, of a way to convince them there was absolutely no point in trying to resist an Italian army. Something about ‘psychological warfare’. It was another of her concoctions. She was addicted to intrigue and gossip.

‘. . . convinced the OVRA had caught up with you . . . Austria . . . the Albanians . . .’ Fewer and fewer words came through. Eventually I broke the connection.

I was cutting myself a line of cocaine from my diminishing store when a knock came at my door. I was expecting no one. I slipped my materials into a drawer and got up to answer.

At any other time I might have received my next visitor with considerable enthusiasm. I had dreamed of her ever since I had seen her on the Munich Express. But now I was alarmed, reluctant to admit her. She stood in the corridor frowning. Her wonderful hair caught the light from the window. She was dressed in layered silks of pale blue, yellow and light green. Her grey eyes held a slightly puzzled amusement. Her perfect skin glowed. Her perfect hand reached towards me.

‘Good afternoon, Colonel Pyat,’ she said.