The Vengeance of Rome

TWENTY-SIX

I hardly noticed she had used my Russian rank and name. I kissed the tips of those well-shaped fingers. I stepped back to admit her to my room. I had anticipated this moment more than once, but now I was only shocked.

‘Good evening, Fräulein von Ruckstühl,’ I replied.

‘Oh, I’m still Kitty to you, Prince Maxim.’ She knew the effect she had and was enjoying my reaction. ‘I nursed a crush on you for years. I used to ask Esmé about you. Don’t worry. I’m not here to propose a liaison.’

I was not at that moment disappointed.

I apologised for the size of my room as I offered her one of my chairs. She shook her head. With swift, impatient grace she moved to the window and opened it slightly.

‘I thought I’d better tip you off,’ she said, taking out a silver case from her slim leather purse and lighting a flat Turkish cigarette. ‘My mother is nuts.’

‘Come,’ I said. ‘I was unable to get in touch with you. I had no intention of abandoning either of you. Her distress is understandable.’

‘That was for the best. She took up with an Armenian fur trader, and he got us both to Leipzig. Then she met Herr Oberhauser, and we moved to Munich. He’s stinking rich — or was the last I heard — and gave her everything she wanted. Except one thing, of course.’

‘A child?’ I thought she had mentioned a son.

‘That brat’s not yours. It was you she wanted. All her frustration turned to hatred. She’s paid detectives, clipping agencies. She’s got a full-sized file on your activities since you left Constance. Scrapbooks and everything. You’d be flattered. The French airship swindle. The American airship swindle. You seemed to specialise for a while.’

She put another cigarette into her holder and I lit it for her. Her gorgeous red lips were arched in a bow, an almost admiring smile.

‘I assure you, Kitty, I am not a swindler. I have, I will admit, been a little gullible on occasions. But that is my idealism.’

‘Believe me, Max, I don’t give a crap about your motives. I really am just here to warn you. My mother’s close to Herr Hitler. He used to come to our house. She’s helped him in all sorts of ways. I think she’s got a crush on him. She used to hold his head in her lap and stroke him. Pretty sickening stuff. Apparently he has lots of older women who like to look after him. A creep, of course. But that’s beside the point. She knows you’re Jewish, and she intends to let everyone else into the secret.’

‘You mean she believes I am Jewish.’ The implications of Kitty’s news were almost too much to take in.

‘Well, whatever you say. The old cow thinks she has proof. She says you were born in Odessa in the Jewish Quarter. She found that out from some relative of yours. A cousin? A girl?’

‘Wanda is dead,’ I said. ‘And so is Esmé. I was born in Kiev of old Russian stock.’

‘Well, she’s got it all down there in black and white. You have a little time. She wants to go to the Brown House and hand it over to the Führer personally. But he’s not likely to be back from Berlin for a while. You can easily clear up any business you might have in Munich. He’s not likely to have time for her just now. That’s it. I just came to do you a favour. She says your real name is Crick.’

‘I have never heard it before. She thinks it is a Jewish name? My name is the one I gave her. I have since Anglicised it to Peters. There is nothing sinister about that. In modern Europe it’s no longer fashionable to be connected with the Russian aristocracy. In fact, it is positively dangerous. I am a Christian of the Greek persuasion. I was born in Kiev and moved to St Petersburg. Certainly I knew people in Odessa. I spent my holidays there as a child! And I would, no doubt, have bumped into some Jews. Indeed, I had a friend —’

‘I don’t give a shit if you’re a wop, a dago, a Yid, a Yank or all four,’ she said suddenly. I was alarmed by the coarseness of the language issuing from that perfect mouth. Her manner was the norm among the young in Germany. A cynicism, an aggression, a hardness was cultivated by these girls. You could not, I suppose, blame them, given the world they had grown up in.

Kitty put out her cigarette and stepped rapidly towards me. Her golden face moved close to mine. I smelled something delicate on her breath. She kissed me lightly on the lips.

‘You don’t want to get in too deep with the Nazis anyway,’ she said. ‘You might find it’s hard to get out again. They have a lot of funny friends.’

She opened the door, paused, shrugged and was gone. Almost immediately I regretted not seizing my opportunity. She was ten times the woman her mother was. She was right. I had made a mistake in returning to Munich. I cursed my own impatience. I had never needed a real friend more.

Mrs Cornelius sits in the corner near the dartboard. Her sons have disappeared. She looks up at the television over the bar and sips a small port and lemon. ‘Egypt was your moment, Ive,’ she tells me. ‘You should ‘ave turned rahnd and gone ‘ome.’ I cannot follow her. They are showing a newsflash. A politician has been shot in Cairo.

Egypt, I will admit, was a watershed. In some ways I still feel as if I am living on borrowed time. I had grown reconciled to death there. I had begun to desire it. If Kolya had not rescued me I would have been blinded, then maimed, then left to die, rotting, in al-Habashiya’s garden, mulch for his cruel roses. I have been in a thousand nightmares in the course of my life, most of them before I was forty. Sometimes they merge together. They know only so many ways, after all, of brutalising a human being. But perhaps God was training me for my task. What I learned in Egypt helped me survive in Dachau.

‘Time!’ cries Collier suddenly, his head below the bar. ‘Time, ladies.’ The Bishop looks at his watch. ‘It’s nowhere near Time, Mo.’

Scowling, Collier straightens up. He tells Beesley he was quoting Eliot.

The crowd in the pub thins out now as the nine-to-fivers go back to their jobs. Soon there are only the customers who do not work regular hours. They consist chiefly of Irish drunkards, Caribbean pimps and drug dealers, cockney scroungers, hippie layabouts, complaining old crones, whining pensioners, unemployed criminals and people like ourselves, who were here when the area was more respectable. Not so long ago it seems you never saw a black face in this pub. And everyone drank out of glasses or mugs. Now you are offered the choice of the bottle or a glass. Another blow for progress and against civilisation.

Almost every evening we saw pretty much the same crowd, reading its papers, playing darts and shove-halfpenny, intermittently chatting. The pub made a profit. Everyone was happy. But now jukeboxes, stand-up nights, stripteasers fill the place with noise. We are all consumers and consumed. They tell us we cannot afford to slow down. In the old days the carpets and curtains might have grown a little threadbare with the years, but the quality was unmistakable. Nowadays we see no such thing as quality. They know only cheap, bad ways of making things. We are soon due for extinction at this rate. We are creating a generation that will not read or write but will spend its time picking consumer goods from a TV catalogue. All it needs is a picture to point at. The Americans lead the field in this, which is probably why the Voice of America seems to grow increasingly less intelligent as the years go by. Once they addressed me as an adult. Now I am a ten-year-old. And as they speak less and less of any substance, their voices grow steadily louder. They substitute volume for content. Is it because they have to yell across those wide spaces?

I came to relish solitude in the desert.

I could not go back to the United States. Yet I still long for Hollywood as it was in its Golden Age, in the years of my fame. Perhaps if I had been content with fantasy, I would still be there, an honoured has-been taking cameo parts on Rawhide and I Love Lucy. But my interest was always in reality. I had vision and skill. I wanted only to put my talents to practical use, for the good of humanity. My cities would fly. The world would be rich with growing things. Disease would be banished. Death would be defeated. There would be no pain. No polluted air. No fear. No hunger. No melancholy. Individuals would all work together for the common good. None among us would be disadvantaged in favour of another. The slavery of interest, of usury, would be abolished.

I think my mistake was to put too much trust in others.

Visionaries like myself and Röhm were inclined in our innocence to believe we should support politicians to fulfil our dreams. But politicians are by nature compromisers. This means that they are forever looking for the middle ground. Therefore they always disappoint us. But what moves societies forward are leaders who disdain the happy mean, who seek the extremes of social experiment. Very rarely are we given a Mussolini or a Hitler, whose ideas match our own, who are not compromisers. Yet even these, as I believe I have shown, are subject to the machinations and petty ambitions of followers who eventually bring them low. Even these fail in the end.

I suppose I am one of the very few people who ever heard Hitler say he was sorry.

Röhmannsvilla became a retreat for me. Nowhere else was I welcome. I got there as soon as I could, taking my luggage. Tom Morgan had been in touch telling me to lie low. He would try to establish my innocence, but I heard nothing. Too many other things were going on. The whole of Europe was growing increasingly agitated. Political assassinations became unremarkable, the order of the day. More and more were out of work. Civil strife increased. First the great Austrian banks went down. Then the German banks were closed. Then the great Allianz insurance company. Every institution that had been rock-solid a few days earlier was now discovered to be a crumbling facade hiding a stinking mountain of unpayable debts. Newspapermen were being moved to new locations. Nazis who had never had their names in the newspaper were giving interviews to the foreign press, which meant that Putzi was kept permanently in Berlin. Only Röhm had any time for me. I was his comfort, he said. His relief.

Röhm was not the swaggering gamecock later journalists made of him when he could no longer defend himself. Time magazine might refer to him as a ‘plug-ugly pederast’, but that was because his enemy Goebbels had taken over the propaganda arm from Strasser, whom he hated. Röhm usually disdained interviews. He was actually a subtle, contemplative human being who had reasons for every position he held. One of the reasons he had never wanted anything to do with women, he said, was because they really did soften a soldier. A man who gives up any of his power to a woman immediately loses a disproportionate amount of his power; useful, directed, positive, aggressive power. The same power in a woman becomes diffused, negative, random, passive.

‘They waste every part of a man.’ He knew that I was very fond of women. I think he believed he could persuade me to his viewpoint. Of course, his main concern was Hitler. He was not the only one who continued to worry that Hitler’s obsession with Angela Raubal was seriously weakening him in every way, just at the moment when triumph could have been his. Even Goebbels, the great womaniser, believed that. Himmler, Röhm told me, hated her for her influence over the Führer. Everyone had asked Hitler to give Geli up, but he would rather have lost his chance of greatness than break with her.

‘The bitch is a drag anchor on the entire movement,’ Röhm complained. ‘If she loses us the Chancellorship, she goes in the sack and into the river like any other alley cat that becomes a nuisance.’

His words were often blood-curdling but spoken so casually or so softly that they contradicted themselves. His penchant for extravagant language earned him his reputation for braggadocio. I never, of course, saw him speak to the Reichstag.

Several of our visitors that August grumbled about Geli. All loyal Nazis, mostly ‘old fighters’ who had followed Hitler from the beginning, they did not so much blame the girl as what they called ‘the situation’. From the letters and drawings he had seen, Röhm knew what Geli was prepared to give Hitler, and he knew what a powerful effect this had on him.

‘He’s addicted to her,’ said Röhm, not for the first time. ‘And I suspect she’s addicted to him by now. That’s how it works. Folie à deux. You shouldn’t arouse such huge feelings in a woman. They can’t handle it. They either go to pieces or try for their own power. She’s got her teeth around his cock, and she’s dragging him wherever she wants him to go. God knows what she’s telling people. If any of our opponents get through to her and she blabs, it will ruin him. One statement to Hindenburg, show him one picture, and the old fart will turn completely against Hitler. He’s none too flattering about him now! Alf might as well concede defeat before ever trying to run for the Chancellorship.

‘The public will forgive a lot, Mashi. They’ll turn a blind eye to more. But, well, as you know, we’re not talking about honest fun between boys here, or putting the odd little chicky up the stick. We’re talking piss and shit, to be frank. Whips and shackles! And that goes too far. That stuff’s not likely to endear the big industrialists to him, and that’s who he’s going to bed with these days. The bastard’s sucked more Big Business dicks in the past six months than most whores see in a lifetime.’

That was the most he ever told me about Hitler’s private life at that time. I could easily imagine the rest. At the age of thirty-one I think I can safely say I was familiar with most of life’s diversions. Anything I had not learned from al-Habashiya was not worth knowing, according to Röhm. I did not, of course, tell him the whole story. That was impossible for me then, and it remains impossible. There are some things which no sane human being wishes to relive. My time with Röhm during that unsettling period had more to do with refinement than discovery.

‘I am besotted with you,’ Röhm admitted happily one evening when just the two of us lay upon the thin mattress placed upon the wide marble slab which was his bed. ’I can’t tell you what a comfort you are, Mashi, in these difficult days.’

He would speak to me vaguely about Berlin politics, his conversations with General von Schleicher, I. G. Farben and others. They were all courting him and Strasser now. If he wanted to, he could dine out every night of the week at some aristocrat’s or general’s house. ‘Strasser’s always been able to get on with those people. A few months ago they wouldn’t have let the rest of us be waiters in their clubs. Now the army’s coming round. Half the staff are already on our side. Some are open Nazis. They like the idea of a People’s Army.’

Röhm believed that the public’s eyes were at last opening to the dangers facing Germany and the solutions that he and his friends presented. ‘They’re getting nervous, these big boys. Funk, Cuno, Wolf, von Schroeder, Diehn, Thyssen, Bechstein and the rest are falling over themselves to meet Hitler in the Alps, at Berchtesgaden, in railway sidings, abandoned warehouses, old factories. Anywhere the press can’t catch them. They don’t want to be seen with Hitler any more than he wants to be seen with them. The party rank and file wouldn’t understand how we’re exploiting Big Business, and we couldn’t afford to explain. But it makes me uncomfortable. My only consolation is what I’ll do to the bastards when the power’s in my hands. They fear a threat to their comfortable lives. They’re afraid Germany will fall to the Bolsheviks. They can’t see she can as easily fall to us and that we are no better friends of Big Business than the Bolshies. They’re all beginning to shit their pants. That’s why they began courting us, giving us money as a kind of insurance, thinking it will buy them their liberty when the revolution comes! They offer compromises before we even state our terms. It always amazes me, Mashi, how eager most people are to give up an advantage when they have almost nothing to be afraid of. Frequently, fearing no more than some minor social embarrassment, they will kill themselves, rather than face the disapproval of their fellows. Those bastards lust after approval the same way I lust after you! It makes them tame and easy to deal with.’ Such thoughts reassured him. He sipped his champagne and smoked his cigar. He stroked my hair, confiding in me as another man might share his thoughts with a wife. ‘You’d be surprised how many sheep one good dog can herd. No disease travels faster and infects more thoroughly than fear. Fear’s a wonderful instrument which you only have to use for a while. Soon people develop a habit of obedience, which becomes in time self-regulation, if not self-discipline.’ This amused him. ‘That’s when we shall have our German Utopia, Mashi. We’ll do it in less than one generation.’

Only through obedience that is automatic and absolute can one find a centre. I think of it as a core of calmness which is all but inviolate, perhaps the soul. A rare being, a god indeed, can find its way to the soul to torture and even destroy that. The true artists of their kind. The true geniuses. Had I the disposition, I could myself have been such a genius.

A wonderful dream. I was so relieved to be back within it. Life at the villa somehow redeemed my Egyptian captivity with al-Habashiya. Röhm would have given me anything I wanted. He called me by pet names. He called me El Vaquero Enmascarado, and indeed I often wore a mask. He loved the mystery of a mask. He was in love with my eyes. They were reflective pools, he said, in which to drown all his cares. The hardness of his hands, gentle as his touch could often be, made my own skin feel a thousand times softer to me. I became deliriously pliable. I had never willingly succumbed to such a force, even with Kolya, my spiritual partner.

I had been anxious, thinking I could be wasting time with Röhm, but I came to realise this interlude was exactly what we both needed. We were cut off from all modern communication, guarded by the gigantic dark green spears of a Teutonic pine forest, enjoying the gentle music of a broad, mountain river, one warm, glorious day following another. Returning from Munich or Berlin, Röhm brought me gramophone records of all the latest jazz tunes, as well as the French chanteuses he enjoyed. Röhm possessed a large sentimental streak that he never revealed to any but his closest friends. He also brought me books and magazines. These helped me catch up on all the latest topics. He even found me some issues of the Sexton Blake Library dealing with matters of the moment, such as striking miners, Arab slavers, the machinations of Big Business and the mysterious death of a man on a London tram. They were in English, so Röhm could not read them. He did not mind. He also brought films back with him. Berlin, he said, was a positive treasure house of erotica. He enthused endlessly over repetitive scenes in which one comely set of buttocks followed another set of massive genitalia into a perpetually pumping, forever ejaculating, future. I could not enjoy them, fearing that the next film he brought home would be one of those I had been lured into making in Egypt. I was always relieved when the scenes began to run, and I was not presented with moving pictures of my own poor sore organs inserted over and over again between Esmé’s ever-yearning orifices. I summoned little enthusiasm for even the most artistic of films and rather hoped that my apparent boredom would discourage him. The films also reminded me of my worries concerning the Baroness. Was she still in Munich? Did she still intend to turn me in?

After an absence of almost a week, Röhm came bustling back. He had been in Berlin, he said, then Munich. Hitler was driving him crazy. I asked him if there had been any messages for me at either the Königshof or the Brown House. He admitted that he had forgotten to ask. ‘But I did receive a visit from an old friend of yours at the Brown House.’

‘Putzi? Captain Göring?’

Like a kindly uncle attending a favourite nephew’s birthday party, Röhm grinned at my puzzlement. ‘Oh no. A much older friend than that.’ He was still wearing his light travelling cape. As he flung it off he threw a large buff envelope on to the sofa beside me. ‘She brought me a present. She’d been trying to see Hitler for a week. He’s still in Berlin being an arsehole while his girlfriend’s screwing the chauffeur. Your friend’s going to Vienna, she said, with her husband, so asked me to pass this on to the Führer, who hadn’t had time to see her. Naturally I told her it would be in his hands within twenty-four hours. She went to Vienna a happy woman. I think when she gets back next month, she expects me to present her with a wallet made of your delicious skin, Mashi.’

Sipping his champagne cocktail, he watched me as I sat down heavily on the couch. Because of the heat I was virtually naked and felt suddenly vulnerable. He said nothing. He merely went on watching me, loosening his jerkin as I undid the envelope and drew out that dossier of lies and misunderstandings which the former Baroness von Ruckstühl, Frau Oberhauser, claimed was the true story of my life. I felt sick. Here were all the French reports accusing me of deliberately setting out to ruin honest people. Here were stories of my ‘swindling’ the Turks, stories which claimed I was a member of Stavisky’s gang, a Jew from Odessa. The lies were endless, yet all supported by alleged facts and offered in the most authoritative tones.

I began to stammer that I was a victim of a long-standing campaign, that she had manufactured all this material.

‘I’m getting used to this sort of thing,’ said Röhm comfortably. He came and sat down next to me. ‘Let’s have a look at it together, Mashi, shall we? What a naughty little type you seem to have been . . .’

It must have cost a fortune to assemble that dossier. I was astonished at its detail, a careful and clever selection of material designed to show me in the worst light. The praise, for instance, that I had received for my political speeches in the USA was mentioned nowhere, nor was my extensive work with the knights of the Ku Klux Klan. My acting career was all but ignored. Mucker Hever’s version of events was given where my steam-car was concerned. He was quoted extensively, but with no mention of his jealousy. My misfortunes were presented as if I had planned a series of elaborate swindles. Yet I had always earned my living honestly. My own trusting character, which rarely questioned a contract, or indeed demanded one, was what had let me down, not some venal ambition.

‘We couldn’t have done better ourselves,’ said Röhm. ‘This is OGPU quality.’ He spoke with some humour. To my enormous relief he understood the dossier to be a fake. ‘You’ve obviously offended some powerful Bolshies, Max.’

I thought at once of Brodmann. Obviously the new Frau Oberhauser could not have put the dossier together herself. Brodmann and his Chekists had compiled the file and passed it on to her. They intended to ruin my status with the Nazis.

I saw Brodmann recently in the pub. I needed to have words with him, but he was always too quick for me to confront. Passing the Soviet Embassy in Bayswater, I pointed him out to Mrs Cornelius. She said it could be any old Russian Jew. It could be me, she said. She knows how to upset me.

Generous as ever, she begins to distribute her son’s largesse. ‘Double vodka, Ivan?’ she says, waving a fiver. ‘Same again all round.’ I take the money and go up to the bar. Mo Collier is glancing at a book while he pretends to wash glasses. It is called The Anarchist’s Guide to Applied Terrorism. These untried young men think revolutionary politics is a romantic game. One cudgel landing a few times across his narrow little bottom and he would soon discover what kind of game it is. Personality disappears under punishment. The Communists and the National Socialists did not believe in babying their political opponents. It was the nature of the age. Only the flyers had time for chivalry. On the ground and in the streets it was total war. But what the history books will not admit is that we were often defending ourselves. We were forced to fight fire with fire.

Collier ignores me and my proffered note. Suddenly he picks up a brass handbell and begins to ring it. ‘Time!’ he yells furiously. ‘Time!’

I put the money in my pocket.

‘There’s one thing I am sure of,’ said Röhm after we had looked at the file. ‘You’re not Jewish. I can smell a Jew at a hundred paces, and you don’t smell like a Jew. You smell like an Italian-American. Believe me, it’s absolutely distinctive. But it would be bad news for you if Hitler, or worse Himmler, saw this. They’re like Father Stempfle. Anyone who isn’t pale as a corpse and with a shock of blond hair is potentially a Jew. This, I’ll admit, makes most of us potential Jews. We’re going to have to start offering more precise definitions if we’re going to deal seriously with the problem of separating citizens from non-citizens.’

‘They would believe me Jewish just because a crazy woman has accused me? Just because I have Mediterranean looks?’

‘Some of them will believe you’re a Jew if you can walk and talk and count up to ten.’ Röhm laughed heartily and gave me a friendly punch. ‘And if they thought you’d been inside the Brown House! Oy vey! They’d be looking for a Jerusalem colonel to cashier on the spot.’ He made as if to flick a cigarette lighter. That was SA code for a gun. ‘No, Mashi, I’ve no intention of losing you just yet.’

By this I understood that he was not going to pass the file on. ‘Oh, I’ll do what I’ve done before in situations like this. Usually, when someone’s discovered to their horror that some local SA boss is of the Spartan persuasion, I pass on a page or two of the more innocuous “evidence”. Just looking at that makes it clear the person is exaggerating. They seem to be the lunatics and nit-pickers. That way if she asks Hitler about it, he’ll say he’s seen it and dismissed it. She won’t be able to pursue it, and everything will be fine. There’s nothing to it.’

I told him I would be for ever in his debt.

He smiled that shy little smile of his. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘repayment shouldn’t be too arduous for you.’

My relief was enormous. Our celebration was extensive. The cocaine consumption alone was staggering! That same night, a couple of hours before dawn, a car called for Röhm. He had to go back to Berlin. I was rather pleased. I would need time to recover from his somewhat excessive demands.

‘Time!’ cries Collier. The sound of his bell would cut through even the happiest ambience. Here it sounds as if it tolls for the end of salvation. Grey heads rise up. Bottles are lowered or hastily lifted.

‘Your glasses, gentlemen, please. Look to your glasses!’

This English ‘closing time’ is a nuisance. Mrs Cornelius offers Collier some incoherent insult. ‘An’ they say the Nazis was tyrants!’ She takes my arm. ‘Come on, Ivan. We’ll ‘ave a drink at ‘ome.’

Outside the sun is still trying to break through. We stand on the concrete pavement near the public toilets while Jerry and Frank reassure their mother they will be visiting her soon. Billy Beesley rolls from the newsagent removing the paper from two Mars bars. He has eaten one before he rejoins us. A little brown stuff, like blood, trickles into his jowls. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I have some parishioners to visit. I’ll say pip-pip for the mo.’ Miss Brunner, it seems, has already left. We watch Beesley’s stately mince as he disappears into the crowd.

“E looks like ‘e’s found himself another mark,’ says Mrs Cornelius without much relish. “E’s only been out a week. Poor cow ‘ooever she is. Anyone deserves better than Billy.’

She and I cross the road and continue down Blenheim Crescent. Half the houses on the other side are boarded up. I hear there is some plan to build a new luxury complex. Who will occupy it? The gypsies? The blacks? The old council houses are no longer good enough for their tenants! It makes me sick. Those people would still be grubbing in the dirt for insects to eat if it were not for the 10 per cent or so of us who are remotely civilised. And they say they have a right to better living conditions! What qualifications have they for these rights? That they were born? In that case the rats and mice have rights. They, too, were born. Let us make sure they are housed in five-star hotels.

‘Well, look ‘oo it isn’t,’ says Mrs Cornelius.

The frail, thin figure of Major Nye is making its way up Blenheim Crescent towards us accompanied by another, slightly bulkier figure. Both wear khaki raincoats belted at the waist. They have bowler hats and umbrellas, pinstriped trousers and well-polished black shoes and wear the same regimental tie. It is all they have left of an empire they once defended with all their finest idealism, courage and discipline.

They raise their hats when they see Mrs Cornelius.

‘Hello, old boy,’ says Major Nye to me. ‘We were rather hoping we might bump into you when we didn’t find Mrs C at home. We knew we were a bit late for the pub. We’ve been having fish and chips in Ladbroke Grove.’ His skin is so thinly stretched over his almost fleshless head that it seems transparent, marking the veins and bones, tracing the progress of his blood. His pale grey eyes are as amiable and as baffled as they have been since Suez, when his entire understanding of his responsibilities changed. Beside him, a little browner, just a touch plumper, but otherwise almost a twin, is his old regimental colonel, Jim Pym. They have been enjoying their monthly reunion. Both men are so fragile these days that I cannot see them continuing this pleasant ceremony for much longer. They will have to speak by telephone, I suppose. And then one will die and the other will die. Their wives are already dead. Their children, I gather, have mostly emigrated. The best they can look forward to is being accepted by the Chelsea Pensioners. At least it will give them the chance to wear a uniform again.

Like myself, Major Nye has been on the sidelines of some monumental events, but I do not believe he ever played the same kind of crucial role as I played in the rising dominance of the Nazi Party. I personally will be very sorry when I can no longer chat with him. We are of a similar age and have had many similar experiences around the world. Also, of course, we were both in love with the same woman. That is why he still comes to Ladbroke Grove.

We return to her basement for tea.

Major Nye always called Hitler ‘that grubby little agitator’. He had no time for Röhm, sadly, or most of the others. ’Göring seemed jolly enough on the surface, but frankly I never had patience for any of them.’ He believed that the best in Germany had been wiped out by the War. Only the cripples, the walking wounded, the exiles were left. The business people were almost as bad. ‘They possessed a very low standard of intelligence,’ he says. ‘The brains had either been killed or had enough sense to stay out of the limelight. German government was in the hands of a few survivors. It wasn’t fair to punish them the way the French did. France just wanted the rest of the Allies to hold the poor bastard down while she kicked him a few times. She’s never recovered from being beaten so often by Bismarck. In French history, Napoleon was a fluke. Not that he and Hitler didn’t make precisely the same mistakes. Men of destiny always do, don’t they, old boy? At least,’ he added, ‘Napoleon had had the sense not to let businessmen or the army make political decisions. They were the absolute worst people at that. Any time business or the army dominate politics, that’s when you might as well pack your bags and leave. The one thing the British Army understands,’ he says, ‘is to stay out of the brawl. Getting into it was the German Army’s greatest mistake. They should have held aloof. But I suppose they were too afraid of Röhm.’

He and Colonel Pym often discuss matters of strategy.

Mrs Cornelius takes down her best teaset. She balances the teapot on a pile of magazines while she clears a space on her coffee table. ‘Sorry about ther smell,’ she says. ‘I think it’s ther cat.’

‘Well, it’s always been a mystery to me,’ says Colonel Pym, ‘why any decent army officer should not have taken one look at Herr Hitler and seen at once what a little turd he was.’

“E was vulnerable,’ says Mrs Cornelius, searching for her biscuits. ‘That’s orlways a plus in a politician. It’s ther same with them pop stars, innit? Women recognise it. Men c’n sense it, but they never know wot it is. ‘Itler could’ve been knocked art at any time, but they all looked after ‘im. Why d’yer fink them rich old ladies loved to mother ther little bugger? They thought ‘e was a sensitive artiste. ‘E was the Liberace of ‘is day.’

We are silent. Not one of us can think of a response.

During the following weeks Röhm had certain rooms in his villa set aside for meetings. He made me stay away from them. People would be driven up to one particular door and admitted. They never saw the rest of the place. Their impression was of an austere military base.

Röhm said the meetings would have bored me. He admitted that most of the time he himself was bored. ‘But if we’re to defeat the Antichrist,’ he said jokingly, ’we must make friends even with swine. At least for the moment.’ He was clear-headed about his political ambitions. I did not agree with all his views, but there was no doubting his integrity.

Röhm shared this with Strasser, whom I met at last. The greathearted chemist came to dinner with two or three of his people. After the others had left, I joined the two friends for drinks. Strasser was charming. He smelled of the most expensive cologne. His clothes were of excellent English cut. Strasser made me feel very comfortable. He had seen my films. He did not, as some of the SA chiefs did, take me for Röhm’s fancy boy. We discussed literature. I told him about the English fiction I read. I mentioned G. H. Teed and Anthony Skene. He himself was a great fan of Schiller. ’He is humane,’ he said, ‘in a way that Goethe is not.’

Strasser was the greatest gentleman who ever led a political party. His terrible mistake was to remain true to his ideals. That, I fear, could be the sad epitaph for many of us.

I will not forget those evenings of camaraderie during the late summer of 1931 when it was still possible to plan for a golden future, to dream, as they say, the impossible dream. I feel I was privileged. The threat of the Baroness laid to rest, the mystery of Mussolini’s behaviour at least partially explained, I felt able to relax.

The talk that evening soon returned to Hitler. Among these people, Hitler’s ups and downs were a constant subject of debate.

‘He’s a bloody Austrian,’ said Röhm. ‘What do you expect? He’s sloppy and easygoing most of the time. He just happens to have this charm, this gift. We can’t switch it on and off whenever we feel like it. We can’t twist the public round our little fingers. And so we’re annoyed! We’re jealous.’

‘I’m annoyed,’ said Strasser, passing a big hand across his head, ‘because he’s compromising every principle we ever stood for. That’s why I’m annoyed, Röhm.’

‘He’s pretending to compromise.’ Röhm poured champagne for us. ‘You know him. He’ll soon bite the hands that feed him. You worry too much about that. After all, you’re prepared to sort out an arrangement with Farben.’

‘That’s to do with my business. And none of us argued against the strategy of taking money, if offered, and doing precisely what we want to do with it. I just wonder what cattle trading Hitler is doing on my behalf!’

‘I don’t mind him putting his tongue up a few arseholes,’ said Röhm. ‘It’s what’s going on in Prinzregentenstrasse that I’m bothered by. Apparently there was another row recently. All the neighbours heard it. Her mother was involved at some stage. She’s on Hitler’s side. She’d have to be. The scandal would be even worse for her, wouldn’t it - Hitler’s sister helping him bonk her own daughter, his niece. And what bonking! She wants him to pay for singing lessons in Vienna. He wants to keep her with him, though he’s never there. He suspects something - and he’s right. He can’t let her go. He’s terrified she’ll tell someone else about their private lives. Geli knows her power all right. She’s already threatening to send his letters to his “new friends”, people who are on the brink of giving us millions. If they see some of the mildest of the pictures I’ve seen, they might offer to buy a few for their own collections, but I don’t think they’ll be the supporters Hitler needs. She’s already picked up the phone and rung Thyssen. He didn’t know who the hell she was, luckily, and put the receiver down on her. That’s what I heard from Hess. Of course, Hess doesn’t take any of it very seriously. He sees everything as a kind of play going on in front of his eyes. He’s a perpetual audience! He never criticises. That’s why Alf loves him so much.’

Strasser found this amusing. ‘Adolf’s in love, Ernst. Give the man a break. Lovers’ tiffs. You’re radiating jealousy! You can’t stand it because he’s taken up with females! You think he’s a pervert, don’t you?’

Röhm took this in good part. He chuckled. ‘I won’t be the only one who thinks it, if she’s as good as her word. Look, I have a very clear idea of what’s going on.’

‘You’ve been hiding under their bed, Ernst!’

‘The bed’s probably the only safe place in that apartment. Believe me, I know precisely what happens. She’s already told half her girlfriends. And I know what she thinks about it. It doesn’t even suit her. I also know what she thinks she’s going to do about it.’

‘You’ve got hold of some of those Soviet microphones and put them in the flower vases. You’ve got a two-way mirror and a film camera. God in heaven, Ernst, these are the spy fantasies of people like Himmler! Are you buggering the SS chauffeur? Is that how you’re finding all this stuff out?’

Again Röhm could not help grinning broadly. He shook his head. ‘Oh, better than that, Strass,’ he said. ‘I’m buggering her confessor.’

Strasser said something about preferring to see his Schiller onstage, but it was clear Röhm had made an impression.

The mood of the evening became almost sombre. Röhm suggested I retire. He said that there were important party matters he and Strasser had to discuss, and I shouldn’t be burdened with them.

Major Nye was in Berlin while I was in retreat at Röhmannsvilla. He said that he had never known a city not at war in quite such a dither; it was as if there was nothing to do and everything to do. Political strategies had grown so complex there wasn’t a single individual who could be sure of anything. The best they could hope for was a wiping out of the war debt, a chance to start again. Daily the Communists and Socialists introduced increasingly radical bills into the Reichstag, which Hitler would immediately quash. Strasser, working within the system, consistently attempted, sometimes with Communist connivance, to put his socialistic ideas into law. Röhm was behind him. They were now at constant odds with Frick, Göring and Goebbels. Hitler, as usual, was in the middle, unable to make up his mind whom to support. He seemed incapable of uniting his disparate elements. Nye believed Hitler deliberately fostered this bickering between his lieutenants, but I am inclined to agree with Röhm: Hitler hated making decisions. He asked everyone’s advice and then could not reconcile the opposing ideas. So he did nothing. When he was not standing in some remote forest clearing reassuring one of the captains of industry, he was utterly involved with Geli Raubal. Nye had heard this from both Strasser and Himmler. Neither man was happy with the situation.

‘Strasser was the only one I could talk to. Radical as he was, he was sane and fundamentally decent. Of course, he was obsessed with the Jewish Question, like all of them. I told him there wouldn’t be a Jewish Question if there were not a German Question. That was precisely my view about Ireland and England. I mean, you can’t just chuck people out after they’ve stopped being useful to you, can you? No decent firm would do that, let alone a nation. Well, Strasser saw what I meant, and I think he pretty much agreed with me. He didn’t hate anyone, that man. He just wanted to see a bit of decent justice. I think he’d have been perfectly happy with a constitutional monarchy. Chancellor Brüning was trying for that, you know, before General von Schleicher took over.’

Major Nye shakes his head. ‘Now there was an army man I simply could not get on with. Wrong sort altogether. Dabbled in civilian issues. It just isn’t done. The German Army knew that as well as the British or the Americans. But, like the Americans, the Germans always think a man who can run an army or a corporation can run a country. They are precisely the last people to run a country! Well, almost the last. Most of the Nazis were the sorts of people you find in the Blenheim Arms these days. The dropouts and seedy misfits. Imagine them suddenly put in charge of Britain.’

‘Heaven forbid,’ says Colonel Pym.

‘But not the blacks and Jews,’ I say.

‘Oi!’ calls Mrs Cornelius from her kitchenette. ’Are yer still talkin’ abart ther War?’

‘Just the causes, Mrs C.’ Major Nye is apologetic. He winks at us, but it is her approval he desires most.

‘Their allies thought anti-Semitism was an engine they could discard once it had driven them to power,’ says Colonel Pym. ‘They didn’t realise it was the movement’s raison d’être. What? I think the War was incidental to that.’

I have a soft spot for these old English eccentrics.

Röhm admired the English. They were good soldiers, he said, and about as honourable as you could get in the real world, South Africa aside. The best Englishman, he always said, was what the best German aspired to be. He did not by this intend to denigrate his own people. He was a dedicated patriot. He meant that the English were Germans who had had certain historical and geographical advantages. Needless to say, Cromwell was his great hero. I have noticed how all the Continental radicals admire Cromwell (presumably for his stand against the Catholics) while the British show virtually no interest in him at all. To them the Roundheads and Cavaliers are the stuff of Romance alone. ‘The English are self-disciplined in a way which we must educate the Germans to be,’ Röhm said. ‘But what became second nature to John Bull over the course of centuries must be drummed into our honest Michael in a decade. That’s the only way to get real lasting social change. The Russians have made a mess of the whole thing. They are hysterical. It is their weakness.’

He was a little vague as to the precise means of force-marching an entire nation through five hundred years of social change. The joke used to be that the Nazis got rid of the class system by getting rid of the classes. But it was only after 1931 that the killings began in earnest. And after 1934 Stabschef Ernst Röhm, Father of the SA, patriot and friend, had no further interest in the world.

I often reflect on the irony of a people who so consistently punish the best and advance the worst.

Major Nye has to get back to Kent. Colonel Pym needs to catch a bus to Fulham. They rise and put on their identical raincoats, buttoning and belting in precise, familiar ways, as if they only truly come to life when they are adjusting their uniforms.