The Ace of Hearts helped him to his feet. “What would you advise me to do, Secondari?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Well, I know what our regime has in mind, of course. I just wonder what you, as a pirate engineer, think Carnaro should do.”
“We lead the way into the Future, of course! With industry, with engineering—and from a real position of strength! Marinetti is entirely right. Out with the old Roman statues. Now we bring in the race cars.”
“That old man, who is our Prophet,” said the Ace of Hearts, “wants us to march to Zagreb at once, to destroy Yugoslavia. He wants to attack and invade the Balkans, as soon as we can.”
“Of course. He’s an audacious hero, he always wants to attack at once! But how? With what artillery, what battle tanks, what aircraft, what lines of supply? We have to build all that.”
“The Prophet plans to use Italian arms. In order to conquer the Balkans, from here in Fiume, we’ll have to march on Rome first. We will dissolve the Parliament, depose the present King, then make the Prophet the Commandant of Italy. That’s the great dream of Carnaro.”
“Oh, stop talking such balls! That’s an epic poem! That’s not a military strategy! Where would we get the gasoline for our trucks, for our tanks? We don’t have one working oil refinery in Fiume! We can’t just ride into Rome on horseback, yelling beautiful speeches!”
“That worked for Garibaldi.”
“No it didn’t! Not at all! Garibaldi became a crippled old man, stuck alone on some tiny island! Do you want that life of exile to happen to our Prophet? This is the Twentieth Century! We’ll never seize the Future by singing poems, with a guitar, from some gondola! Do we want a future Italy that’s some museum of antiquities? Italy, overrun with foreign honeymooners?”
“No, that’s not the future I desire for Italy,” said the Ace of Hearts. “That is a very dark future. I didn’t risk my life a hundred times aloft, for any future like that. Can you save us from that fate, Lieutenant? How?”
Secondari struggled to control himself. He did not care to argue politics with the Ace of Hearts. He knew that he was outmatched.
Secondari deeply respected, and even loved, the Ace of Hearts. He had often tried—and failed—to emulate the Ace’s paradoxical mix of cool, sporting indolence with ruthless revolutionary fervor. Even a Nietzschean Overman could never possess such Milanese suavity as the Ace of Hearts.
The Ace of Hearts was the Fiume Revolution’s true genius. Because the Ace of Hearts was a living bomb of Twentieth Century radicalism. The Ace had shot down six aircraft in mortal combat, and yet he was a Mason, a mystic, a yogi, and a nudist; a forger, a wiretapper, a partaker of cocaine and marijuana; a philosophical anarchist with a superb devotion to music and free love. The Ace of Hearts was the finest man that Secondari had ever encountered.
In the stress of the moment, however, Secondari realized that he and the Ace had to find some way to meet as equal spirits. The Ace was a liberation mystic while Secondari was merely an engineer, but they were also two suffering human beings within the maelstrom of a profound political struggle. They had to transcend the limitations of their roles. They had to find a way to make Futurism work.
“Well,” said Secondari to the Ace, “tell me something. What do you want? You asked me what I wanted. What about yourself?”
“Since you ask me,” said the Ace slowly, “I will open my heart to you. What I want is to go big-game hunting. Maybe a lion in Ethiopia. Or else some sweet-tempered countess in Paris. But my desires are not my duty. After today’s developments, my future is clear to me. I’m to become the Minister of State Security for an Anarcho-Syndicalist government.”
Secondari was silenced by this firm answer. It was dutiful, it was direct, it had the sound of solidity and sense. He didn’t know what to say to it. He, Lorenzo Secondari, was only twenty-four years old, while the Ace of Hearts was all of twenty-seven. The Ace had the advantage of maturity.
“At my tailors’ in Milan, they’re already stitching my new uniform,” said the Ace somberly. “And as for you, my friend, well, you should also join my government. I have a role for you, and a title: the ‘Pirate Engineer.’ No, wait—no, the foreign press will never understand that terminology.... That title doesn’t suit a man like you, it’s not scary enough.... I have it! You will be our ‘Minister of Vengeance Weapons.’”
As an official Minister within the government of the Regency of Carnaro, Secondari had to bid a farewell to his beloved Torpedo Factory. State politics required him to move into the Hotel Europa, the den of the Carnaro elite. Secondari soon discovered that the Hotel Europa was a seething Futurist orgy. The elite of Carnaro were loyal disciples of their Prophet, a poet who kept a harem.
By his previous, decadent standards—for he was an Italian poet who had known the intimate favors of a thousand women—the Prophet’s harem in Fiume was quitesmall and efficient. He had only five women available.
The Pianist was the Prophet’s titular mistress. She was a Venetian musician one-third his age. He was also visited by the Art Witch, a rich Milanese aristocrat who entertained the Prophet with her black masses and spiritual séances.
His female secretary, and his female housekeeper, waited on the Prophet by day, and also by night. The Prophet’s legal wife sometimes appeared in Fiume, for form’s sake.
Taking their cue from these habits of their supremo, the soldiers of Carnaro freed themselves from the strictures of pre-war propriety. They were love warriors and love revolutionaries: nudists, kama-yogis, and homosexuals. In the Hotel Europa, suites were reserved for the free-love soirees of multiple partners.
Oddly, very few of the women of Fiume seemed at all upset or surprised by this aspect of their Revolution. The women of Fiume simply drank in the Prophet’s honeyed words, much like the thousand women he had already seduced. The women of Fiume even seemed flattered by the trust he put in them. He had given them the vote, equal legal rights, and equal pay for equal work.
So the women of Fiume started businesses. They attended book clubs for women, and studied law and medicine, and even engineering. They ran for political offices, and became aviatrixes and radio talk-show hostesses. They were proud to be pioneering free women of the Twentieth Century.
As a regime administrator, Secondari came to understand the doctrines of Constitutional Anarcho-Syndicalism. Under Anarcho-Syndicalism, financial ownership was banned by state decree. Private property could only be owned by syndicates of laborers. In short, Syndicalism meant taking everything from the rich, and giving everything to the technocrats and their work-forces.
As a Carnaro Corporate Syndicalist, Lorenzo Secondari remained a Pirate Engineer. But he no longer stole from the poorly guarded military depots of the Great War. Instead, his new task as a government official was to steal the country from the legal control of the rich, and give it to the labor force.
This radical act of social revolution was a dirty job. Secondari did his duty with gusto. He did not hesitate to bring the war straight to the doors of the rich. He and his men came in pre-dawn squadron attacks. They had trucks, pistols, clubs, and rifles. They cut wire fences, they shattered locks, they broke bones, they burned doors. They seized booty and abducted prisoners. They attacked with fierce, committed violence. They attacked like combat engineers attacking trenchworks.
Lorenzo Secondari was the most feared and hated man in the entire Fiume regime. The rich were mauled by him, scarified, laid waste.
Of course the rich tried to save themselves from his persecutions. At first, they appeared at his new office, using any and every pretext. Then they eloquently begged him to stop his misdeeds.
When he blandly told the rich that they were welcome to work as laborers within their own factories, they gazed at him in utter horror. They despaired and ran away. Then they plotted reprisals.
When the persecuted wealthy of Fiume realized that Secondari could not be bribed, or corrupted, or persuaded, or reasoned with, they tried to kil
l him.
Copying his own methods (for they had quickly learned all about piracy), the Fiuman opposition bombed his staff car. Then they shot at him with pistols in a café. Finally, they tried to run him over with a cargo truck.
But Lorenzo Secondari proved unkillable. Since he had already been killed once, he knew that he was an Overman of Destiny. He went entirely unscathed. He was even happy to win the public reputation of a man who was bulletproof. The notoriety saved him a lot of work.
Frau Piffer, however, was enraged by the attacks on him. Always mild and timid for her own sake, Frau Piffer became a vengeful dragon when Secondari was imperilled.
Frau Piffer conceived the furious idea that Gigante, Grossich, Maylander, and Zanella—the grandees of Fiume—should all be arrested and publicly tried as Communists.
The wealthy elite of Fiume were certainly not Communists. But they were, in stark fact, a conspiratorial cell of anti-government subversives. So, once they were treated as Communists: jailed, ceaselessly interrogated, with all their papers seized, and denied any effective legal counsel; then Gigante, Grossich, Maylander, and Zanella simply crumbled in the dock.
At their extensive public show-trial, the wretched conspirators confessed to a weird variety of crimes: sabotage, attempted murder, Freemasonry, an intimate connection to Jewish bankers. Newsreel cameras whirred as the malefactors choked out their broken confessions. Radio microphones spread the drama by short-wave.
Secondari sat through the show-trial, occasionally testifying personally about the attempts on his life. He passed the time by reading back issues of Popular Mechanics and Radio Experimenter.
At length, the newly convicted criminals, in striped pyjamas with their heads shaven, were packed off in leg-irons to the desolate prison island of Isola Calva. This isle was a barren Adriatic slag-heap that the Carnaro regime successfully claimed, because nobody else wanted it.
Having outfoxed its foreign adversaries and liquidated its internal opposition, the Regency of Carnaro had established itself as a modern, Twentieth-Century, European regime.
The Regency of Carnaro was a small but cruel nation, very much like the Balkan states that were its closest neighbors. Economically, the Regency was a free entrepôt. As a functional port, it worked about as well as most port cities within Italy did.
When it was stripped of its gorgeous symbols, its flags, flowers, and revolutionary rhetoric, its radio broadcasts and newsreels, its jackboot marches, its salutes, weird warcries and ceremonial mob scenes—seen very starkly, just as a realpolitik political machine—the Regency of Carnaro was a clique of armed, dissolute poets who robbed bankers, then distributed the means of production to labor unions.
The leaders of Carnaro were hard, even brutal, authoritarians, who pretended to be flowery, musical, poetic anarchists.
Having arrived within the halls of power, Secondari realized all of this. He could never hear it very well, but he saw it perfectly. But he was not disillusioned or upset by what he saw. He was an engineer with power. Such was his powerful machine. His task was to make the machine run. It was a Syndicalist machine, because he owned it. Because he owned it, he was a Syndicalist.
Having seized the factories in town by force of arms, Secondari did his best to put the state industries on a practicable financial footing. Since he was a young engineer, and not a seasoned financier, he was quite bad at this. Instead of distributing utopian rewards to all and sundry, he had to cruelly repress dissent.
The Regency of Carnaro, as a small but nevertheless genuine nation, was no longer a revolutionary’s dream. The labor unions running the factories (renamed as “Syndicates”) were almost as incompetent as the capitalists had once been. Given genuine power over their own workplaces, the workers never worked very hard. They naturally preferred to grant themselves lavish health-care, free cafeterias, and long holidays.
The revolutionary Syndicalist factories—although some of the prettiest factories in the world—barely scraped along financially. Fiume was a modest, palmy river town adorning the sunny Adriatic. Fiume was entirely unsuited to become a natural center of heavy industry, such as Turin, Manchester, or Pittsburg. The Regency of Carnaro had to find other means of subsistence.
Since Carnaro was a regime of writers, much of the state’s income naturally came from readers. The many readers of Popolo d’Italia, the Milanese political daily, had been especially generous to the Cause of Fiume.
Popolo d’Italia was therefore a propaganda organ of critical importance to the Regency of Carnaro. Sadly, the thriving newspaper had lost its founding editor, Benito Mussolini, in a domestic violence scandal. After much debate, though, a new editor was found: a younger man with a lighter and easier touch.
Mussolini’s successor was “Yambo,” or rather Enrico Novelli, the Genoese satirical cartoonist and film director.
Novelli’s broad lampoons and his bright, upbeat editorials (commonly about marvels of science) caught the eye of a fresh Italian audience. Novelli tirelessly promoted the Regency of Carnaro as an offshore art colony and an exotic tourist destination.
Through this softer, kindlier approach, Fiume’s tourist trade quickly boomed. First, Italians arrived, and then some French. Then came hordes of adventurous Americans, all laden with valuable dollars, flocking in to stare in awe at the strange bohemian goings-on.
Many of these Americans were Negro jazz musicians. The Negroes were startled to find themselves entirely welcome in Fiume as political refugees.
As international tensions eased, the American Navy ceased their nervous patrols of the Adriatic. The Italian Navy, suffering severe budget cuts, quickly followed.
Then the Italian government fell again. This common event surprised nobody. The snap elections produced results of utter political confusion in Italy. This too was rather predictable. The resulting technical caretaker government of Italy was headed by Senator Marconi.
The irascible, one-eyed radio genius was a poor administrator. However, Marconi was immensely popular in both Britain and America, so the English-speaking Great Powers gave Marconi a free hand in Italian affairs.
Guglielmo Marconi was a close personal friend of the Prophet—since one-eyed Italian geniuses had a natural commonality.
The Marconi parliament granted an amnesty to the Fiume military mutineers. Sensing the change in the wind, the homesick Italian troops began to depart from Fiume. First went the Alpini, welcomed home as heroes. Then the Sardinian grenadiers of the Seven of Ronchi marched off, their decision vindicated. General Valpini’s military police were seen off by hordes of their weeping girlfriends.
Carnaro’s finances quickly improved—for the host of Italian occupation soldiers had been a dead weight on the regime’s budget. Only the “Desperates” remained in Fiume—as pirates turned police.
With the departure of Italian troops, globe-trotting foreign legionaries slunk into the town. These marauders crept in from every corner of the earth, for the news had spread that Carnaro could forge new passports. Carnaro loathed the very idea of world order. Extradition was unheard of.
So the refugee anarchists of the Bavarian Social Republic ventured to Carnaro. And the Hungarian Communists of Bela Kun came, too, and Gandhian mystics from the rebellious Congress of India. The Irish Republican Army were especially fond of Carnaro, now that their Easter Rebellion had become a bloody British civil war.
The people of Carnaro supported the Catalans, the Kurds, and the Flemish of Belgium. They sympathized with irredentist American Negroes in Harlem, especially those poetic souls who sought to return on Black Star ocean liners to Ethiopia.
As a minister of the government, Secondari liked to publicly attend the jazz clubs of Fiume. He went there often, black-clad, bearded, long-haired, and heavily armed. Secondari preferred jazz music to all other forms of music, because jazz was loud.
His sinister presence within the jazz clubs made it clear to all that American Negroes were under a particular protection in Fiume. The jazz clubs were also exc
ellent places to discreetly meet international dealers in arms and narcotics.
Fiume was a wide-open, gun-running port for all the Croatian, Montenegrin, and Bosnian national guerrillas. The rebels against Yugoslavia swarmed in all the hills and isles of the Balkans. The Regency of Carnaro thrived, day by day, as the ramshackle fakery called “Yugoslavia” collapsed, night by night.
It was easy to see the poetic justice in the new world politics. The Serbs, through their own pirates, the “Black Hand” terrorist group, had started the holocaust of the Great War. The Great War of the Titans—reduced at last to its original struggle, among the Balkan pygmies—would end, finally, on Serbia’s own bloodstained soil.
The Great War would end, at last, within Serbia, and not in the Paris Peace Talks. The Great War could only end where the Great War had begun: if, indeed, any war in Europe could ever be said to truly end at all.
Despite the great change in their personal circumstances, Secondari still valued the friendship of Frau Piffer. Frau Piffer’s homespun wisdom, her intimate knowledge of Fiuman customs and habits, was of great use to Secondari. She had often spared him the annoying trouble of shooting people. Secondari knew that he was feared and hated.
After all, this was obviously the basic purpose of a “Minister of Vengeance Weapons.” Frau Piffer, by contrast to everyone else, did not fear him. She was infallibly kind to him. She had looked after him, even nursed him and fed him when he had been at his weakestand his worst. This was more than his own family had ever done for him.
Times had changed. Lorenzo Secondari was no longer a weak, hungry, and wounded ex-soldier. Thanks to the hospitality, the decent food, the balmy weather, and the healing salt air of Fiume, he was healthy and strong.
Although he would never hear well again, he was a powerful, war-hardened, even ferocious, armed revolutionary. So people were right to fear him. Frau Piffer, though, was also a successful revolutionary. Frau Piffer was the only woman he knew who could talk simply and frankly to him about work.
Pirate Utopia Page 6