The Vengeance of Rome

ONE

My achievements are a matter of history. A record. I am the voice and the conscience of civilised Europe. I am one of the great inventors of my age. I am a child of the century and as old as the century. Unlike Göring and Goebbels and those lickspittles of the SA and SS, I was never afraid to be judged by my actions. No court in the civilised world would countenance such allegations. They are absolutely insubstantial. Yet still that Turk, whose filthy fried-meat shop remains a nightmare for those of us forced to live in its ambience, insists I am a Jew he knew in Pera! I would have been five years old! What could he remember? I suspect a familiar hand in this but am allowed to say nothing. These days, even a casual mention of Comrade Brodmann means Mrs Cornelius will mock me until we have a row. My heart is not strong enough. I console myself. At my age I fear only God’s disapproval and there can be precious little of that in store for one who has devoted so much of his life to the service of Christ!

I was always of an evangelical disposition and had meditated a great deal on matters of religion while in service to El Glaoui, so my conversation more readily turned to spiritual matters which was why Mr Mix sometimes likened me to an Old Testament prophet. We had discovered that our cattle truck was not going directly to Casablanca and my normally genial darkie had grown disconsolate. I reassured him that at least our train was bearing us away from the medieval dangers of Marrakech and the sinister whimsicality of her Caïd, and to pass the time I attempted to instil a sense of our Greek faith into my loyal companion. At length the usually easygoing black insisted that Baptist was good enough for him; he always felt uneasy around incense and chanting. ‘That voodoo stuff gives me the willies.’ Had I seen Ben-Hur? Or was he thinking of Intolerance? Confining my answer to the murmured remark that the early Church was scarcely the same as Babylonian paganism, I was content to avoid controversy while we travelled in intimate discomfort and as a result fell into the pleasant habit we had developed in the USA of discussing favourite films. We were both great ‘buffs’.