The Vengeance of Rome - [Between The Wars 04]

by Michael Moorcock

  As an instinctive precaution, I went to the files and removed certain copies, making up a short dossier of my designs, together with photographs of the models lining the walls of our ‘war room’. All this went into a large envelope labelled ‘Manufacturers’ Brochures and Specifications’. This I put in an attaché case. I had no intention of betraying Italy, but these were my livelihood, my passport to immortality. Although my faith in Il Duce was in no way diminished, a misunderstanding might attract his disapproval. By now the poison-tongued gossips could have whispered stories and already be amplifying my innocent associations. From the evidence, Mussolini could form a completely erroneous idea of my behaviour. In the unlikely event of my dismissal, it was wise to take out a little insurance. While Mussolini was altogether a greater and more honourable man, my experiences of El Glaoui were still fresh in my mind.

  Again I telephoned Maddy Butter. Again there was no answer. I had little money and most of my documents were at home. I remained at my desk for an hour or two. My staff were impressed to find me at work so early. I explained how I had been under special orders from Il Duce. Together we had worked into the night. My secretary said she had heard that we had been in. I looked worn out. She was sympathetic. I told her I had better go home for an hour or two and get a little sleep. She ordered my car.

  I took my attaché case with me when I left. A limousine was waiting for me outside. The driver saluted and opened the door for me. His name was Santucci and he was a sergeant in the political police. Not knowing what the OVRA would make of my behaviour, I behaved normally, pretending to work on documents as he drove me through the lunchtime streets.

  After a few miles the car was forced to slow and eventually stop. No amount of official threatening could budge the policemen on duty. They were supervising an increasingly complicated problem. The cause of the traffic jam was a broken-down number 5 tram bound for Piazza San Croce, a Pente Negro-bound number 5a bus, a horse-drawn bakery van, two taxis, several cyclists and a variety of other people and vehicles. The spectacle of Italians in furious debate would have engaged me had I not been otherwise distracted. I grew impatient. The driver could only stick his head out of the window, scream at a few people, make the odd stab at reversing and then sit, tapping his wheel, while the debate between the drivers and others grew more heated.

  Over an hour later I reached the cottage. Telling the driver to wait, I entered the courtyard and put my key in the lock. This time it turned.

  Everything of Maddy’s was gone. Not a stick of make-up or a scrap of clothing remained. All my things were exactly as I had left them. There was no note.

  My mind leapt to the obvious conclusion. La Sarfatti had seduced my girl! I knew she was capable of anything. Had Maddy gone with Margherita to her apartment? Or had they gone back to Venice? I imagined them planning all kinds of terrible female vengeances together.

  My nerves worsened. After I had made arrangements for the locks to be changed and the keys sent round to the office, my driver headed to Margherita’s place on the Via Nomentane. Taking a short cut, we passed the back wall of the Villa Torlonia. I had not realised it was so close. The car pulled in before an ornate entrance. La Sarfatti’s flat. Though this was guarded, everything gave way to my rank. I took the stairs to her door and rang her bell.

  A maid answered. The signora was not at home. She had gone to the country or perhaps Capri. She had not been awake when her mistress made the decision. I asked if another woman had been with Signora Sarfatti and the maid shook her head. I showed her my party book and told her it would go badly for her if she was lying to me. She swore that her mistress had been alone.

  It grew late. If Il Duce needed me, he would find me gone. It would be another mark against me. I returned to the cottage and was relieved to find no one had tried to contact me.

  I now wondered if Maddy Butter was really as innocent as I had assumed.

  Maddy telephoned that afternoon. She had found herself a nice little place near the Ponte Tarantino. We should remain apart for a while. She didn’t want to hear my explanations but needed time to think things over.

  Her actions were a little too cold for someone who had represented herself as an innocent virgin only a few months earlier. I was deeply disappointed in her. I told her as much. She simply wasn’t the stuff progressives are made from. Sometimes I was astonished by American conservatism. How had they had been such enthusiasts for Mussolini and, until the Führer let himself down, Hitler? Their own US Nazi Party lasted far longer than the original! Yet most Americans, though supporting Mussolini, did not really have the will to change, as the ballot boxes revealed, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who would have qualified for euthanasia in some countries, was elected. In those first years many called him ‘the American Mussolini’. Their optimism was to be proven utterly unfounded.

  I recently spoke to Mrs Cornelius about this. We sat in the window of the East and West last Friday morning in Westbourne Grove. She was having a cup of the sickly Madras coffee she enjoys and I was sipping a lassi. The owner is Mr Hira, a Hindu. He tells me that most of the people from the Indian subcontinent who work for you are the lowest class of Moslems. It is impossible to find a decent South Indian chef. His eldest son is at university, reading mathematics. They share this ambition in common with the Jews, of course.

  We watched the people coming and going from the Portobello Market. On Fridays they are mostly dealers. They wear old-fashioned country-style suits, stout tweed skirts and shapeless hats woven by mad Orkneymen or else some variant of the current fashion, all black velvet and dirty lace, like Mrs Cornelius’s feckless children. They arrive early. By noon the pubs are crowded with them enjoying the euphoria of dealers everywhere, talking of legendary coups and fabulous profits. I find it impossible to get served.

  On Fridays we usually walk up Kensington Park Road to have a drink at Finch’s. Then we take lunch at the fish restaurant there. Lately it has become too expensive and attracts the wrong sort of clientele. We content ourselves with the Windmill across from the Odeon. Very few dealers ever use the place, which is run by the better type of Greek family. The restaurant does a very good lamb joint. I always have two helpings of their roast potatoes. They remain well priced and friendly. Mrs Cornelius has a soft spot for them because her daughter was almost born there. She reminds me how the young Jerry rushed into the Alhambra, the nearest pub, to call the ambulance on their phone. He returned half an hour later, just as the ambulance was arriving, and he was almost too drunk to climb in. She was in labour. The Irish clientele of the Alhambra, under the impression that his sister was already born, had insisted Jerry help them toast the baby’s good health. Catherine was born, as she put it, in the shadow of Wormwood Scrubs. Actually it was Ducane Road Hospital, one of the best in the kingdom. I have nothing but admiration for the staff there.

  The specialist there asked, for the first time, if I had had my operation on medical or religious grounds. Medical! I cried. At least he did not automatically assume me to be Jewish. I almost kissed his hand. Mrs Cornelius insisted the chips at the Windmill had brought Catherine on. ‘Not many people get ter be Windmill girls at her age, eh, Ivan?’ She was back at home by the next day. She said she never had any trouble conceiving them and hardly any less trouble popping them out. She was an amiable if inattentive mother.

  Mrs Cornelius reminded me that almost any political figure who showed any personality was called someone’s Mussolini. ‘It was amazin’,’ she said, ‘just ‘ow many people go through their entire lives lookin’ for someone to boss ‘em about! Some bastard starts shoutin’ orders at ‘em an’ they brighten up like a brass knocker! Hermann told me Adolf’s war record was amazing. ‘E loved obeying orders, too. Takes one ter know one.’

  Given how widely travelled she was, Mrs Cornelius has a rather simplistic and stereotypical view of foreigners, especially Germans.

  She remains convinced ‘they’ll do it again’. Do what again? I ask her. Defend themselves against their
exploiters? All Hitler wanted was a Polish Corridor, and the French and English used it as an excuse to attack him. They were eager for the chance. He was liberating the Poles from Jewish dominance. She must remember Germany during the Weimar days! No honest person could walk the street in safety. Male and female prostitutes were everywhere. The common people were horribly demoralised. Their intellectuals had become cynical, their teachers hopeless. The only stability left was in institutions like the army. Where were they supposed to turn to avoid the civil war everyone predicted? Would the Allies have stepped in, as they did in Spain, if there had been internal war? No. They were waiting only for Germany to tear herself apart. They hoped any winner would turn on the Soviet Union and rid them of the other threat. They were foolish to expect that particular free lunch. The Americans made the same mistake in Vietnam. There are no free lunches in realpolitik. The Germans themselves found that out to their cost. The British learned that lesson from their centuries of colonialism, which was why they were so reluctant to enter the Common Market. Or the New German Empire as Major Nye insists on calling it. I hardly ever see him these days. He is on his smallholding in Kent. His wife is dead and his daughters are married. He says he’s never been happier.

  I saw him several times in Rome during that uncertain period. I know now that he worked for intelligence, keeping an eye on the Nazis as well as the Fascists. He took the Nazis seriously, though he was not entirely uncritical of them. He admitted to finding Göring, for all his corpulence and vulgarity, charming. ‘It was impossible,’ he says, ‘to believe that a man who looked and dressed like a lovesick baron in a Viennese operetta could be capable of evil.’

  ‘Perhaps he was not capable of evil.’ I have always been able to take the broad view.

  Sometimes Major Nye is a little too judgemental. After all, look at the British record of genocide. I find it ironic that the survivors of the Irish famines and clearances were the same men who lynched Negroes in New York and joined the American Army to fire into unarmed Indian villages, a rather more direct and efficient act of genocide than any their own families ever suffered.

  History and God alone put us in a position to be aggressors or victims. It is not unusual these days for a person to know both roles in a lifetime. I cannot find it in me to judge all those now branded as ‘war criminals’. Were all Germans villains? All Jews heroes? Surely it is time to forgive and forget? You who never knew the all-pervading stink of fear filling your guts, eating your bones, taking control of your brain and bowels, should not judge us who have had such experiences. Believe me. I am not excusing anything. The death camps went too far. But remember, there were only four of them built. The rest were concentration camps.

  In Rome Major Nye made an appointment to visit my office. I received very few people there and was glad to welcome him. He took my mind off so many other matters. Of course, I had no hint of his real reason for seeing me. He was interested in my inventions. Years later he told me how part of his brief was to check up on my Land Leviathan. By 1931 rumours of my great moving battle tower were rife in Europe.

  Since Mussolini’s territory bordered their own, the British were chiefly interested in learning his African ambitions. They were inclined to think of him as an ally. Most British politicians admired Mussolini. Chamberlain, Eden and Churchill spoke warmly of his intelligence and acumen. David Lloyd George, who invented the National Health Service, saw him as a fellow ‘wizard’. Sir Oswald Mosley, under the influence of his wife and sister-in-law, left the British Labour Party to form the British Union of Fascists. All these people believed Hitler a parvenu, a coarse interpreter of Mussolini’s genius. Certainly, without Mussolini a Hitler would probably not have emerged in Germany. And without Hitler, of course, Mussolini might still be keeping a steady hand on Italy’s tiller. Like us all, he fell under a madman’s spell.

  Typical of his caste, Major Nye asked me no direct questions. He was never admitted to my inner sanctum, where my models were displayed. Most of our conversation was casual, about sights seen, art admired, food eaten. He might have been any tourist. Did he seek my company because I might be in contact with Mrs Cornelius? I was glad to patch things up between them. We all had tea together at the English Tea Rooms near the Spanish Steps where the English poets used to catch food poisoning. The English will risk almost any danger for an infusion of Typhoo or Twinings. The place smelled of damp wool and digestive biscuits. It reminded the tourists of home.

  I remained shocked by Maddy Butter’s extraordinary rudeness. I wanted to confront her, but she avoided me at every turn. She had no proof that I had deceived her, save La Sarfatti’s word! Yet she maintained complete silence. Her telephone was never answered. I saw her twice from the window of my official car. Once she was standing outside a large toyshop in the Piazza di Espagna studying rows of model soldiers in the window. I wound down the window of the car, but a newspaper seller thought I was signalling him and shoved a copy of the Popolo d’ltalia in my face. When the fool was disposed of, suffering a severe telling-off from a policeman on the beat, Maddy had disappeared. The second time I was passing the Palazzo Venezia, where the Head of State traditionally had his offices, and saw her driving through the gates in a brand new red Fiat tourer, saluted by the guards. I guessed she was at last interviewing our Chief. I could only pray he was not also interviewing her. Billy Grisham showed me a cutting from the Houston Examiner that discussed the ‘charlatans and exploiters’ who thronged Mussolini’s court. She did not mention me by name, but it was clear who the ‘certain Russian-American con artist’ was supposed to be. I prayed my leader had not seen this piece, or at least had ignored it as it deserved. Clearly no scandal impressed him. I kept my position.

  For the following week there was only silence from my Chief. I did not find this especially significant. He had left Rome for a special tour. The newspapers said Il Duce was inspecting the draining of the Pontine Marshes but Grandi, whom I bumped into at the cafe where he usually took his lunch, winked at me and said, ‘The Chief has a new enthusiasm,’ by which he meant a new paramour. ‘It’s not the marshes he’s draining! And not the Italian delta he’s exploring.’ He whistled a few bars of ’Yankee Doodle Dandy’. He was given to coarse jokes of that kind. Frequently they were as vulgar as they were mysterious. He reassured me, however, that I was probably not out of favour. ‘The boss’s powers of concentration are genuinely remarkable,’ he said, ‘but sometimes he focuses on one thing to the exclusion of everything else. Sometimes weighty affairs of state, sometimes Turkish wrestling holds.’ One of Mussolini’s closest friends and associates, Grandi had been left twiddling his thumbs for months sometimes, waiting for Il Duce to return his attention to whatever pressing matter was at hand.

  I spent as little time in the cottage as possible. Seryozha had found my phone number and had called me several times. I told him it was unwise for me in my present position to spend too much time with foreign nationals. The OVRA were suspicious of such liaisons, and I would jeopardise my position. He understood but spoke of passions which had to be released. Could we not meet in secret?

  I told him I could see no such possibility. The OVRA knew every movement of every one of the state’s officials. Their duty, after all, as representatives of the people, was to ensure that the people’s servants were behaving with due responsibility. Bureaucrats could no longer secure little nests for themselves in which they could practise any decadence.

  Of course I exaggerated the power of the secret police. True they were everywhere, but this was really to their disadvantage. When I met Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the founder of the British Empire Movement, an author and journalist in his own right, who planned to make Notting Hill a Fascist enclave, he described a story in which every character who seemed to be an anarchist was actually a secret service agent. The joke in Rome was that the secret police were watching even more secret policemen who were watching still more secret policemen and so on! To some degree you could avoid them. Frequently, a small ti
p would secure their discretion, for they were usually very poorly paid, and they were never the unreasonable bullies propaganda made of them. As it was, I do not believe I was watched excessively. Those police people made themselves very obvious.

  Maddy Butter had certainly disappeared from Roman society. I must admit I missed feminine company. I took tea several times with Mrs Cornelius and her Baron. On occasions we were joined not only by Major Nye but by Captain Göring, who now travelled frequently between Rome and Berlin. He seemed very sympathetic to me. He understood my predicament with Seryozha. He often remarked how difficult it was to get rid of old but embarrassing friends. One day, by way of reassurance, he told me how ‘Lieutenant Kranz’ was currently a guest of the Ministry of Works and was being taken on a special tour of Rome’s antiquities. ‘It keeps him out of trouble,’ said Göring with a hint of a smile. ‘You must not judge us by our admirers, any more than we would judge you by your relatives.’

  Göring and I were almost friends during those weeks. He spoke often of his wife, who was an invalid. He felt very sentimentally towards her. In fact, he had a softness to his character which people used to call Austrian. Franz Stangl had this same characteristic, but it did not stop them hanging him all those years after the event. The thing he cared most for, even before the Führer, was his wife’s approval. He would not make a move before he had that.