The Vengeance of Rome

by Michael Moorcock

  Excusing myself, I went over to greet Hanfstaengl and be introduced to his slightly distant group of acquaintances. He had been made Foreign Press Attaché but was engaged in some passing rivalry with Goebbels over the best approach to the press. We spoke briefly in German, which the Americans did not understand. Why wasn’t he in Berlin? I asked. Shrugging, Putzi told me he didn’t want any argument. His Mikado had been a disaster, sabotaged, he claimed, by the mockery of Göring and the jealousy of Goebbels, who had quite plainly conspired against him. The Führer had not come to see The Mikado. Only Hess had arrived, which gave one some idea of Hess’s status with the Führer at the moment. Until Hess told him, Hitler had not even realised when it was playing because Himmler and Goebbels had deliberately confused him. When he learned what had happened, it was too late, and Hanfstaengl was chided for being a bad organiser! He had tried to tell Hitler the truth, but the Chief’s mind was on other things and he was too busy to intervene, so for the time being Putzi was home in Munich with his wife and children, who were an increasing comfort to him. He was proud of his boy. He wanted a future for him, he said. He was not wholly happy with the direction the party was taking. He was far too loyal to Hitler to say much to me, but he knew I was sympathetic.

  The Americans rose after one drink and asked for taxis to their hotels. Putzi apologised and organised this for them. When he came hack he seemed pleased to join Kitty and myself. He spoke lugubriously to Kitty, trying to explain how the SA had been overzealous in its wish to ‘clean up’ Berlin, but those activities were now being curbed by Stabschef Röhm himself. Privately I knew Röhm was concerned with discipline and saw no need to alienate potential friends. Many of the units were almost self-ruling, and he was having difficulty re-exerting control. The men felt, in turn, that he had betrayed them.

  Kitty listened to Putzi without much interest. At that moment I realised I was the holder of an appalling secret, one that could easily kill me now Hitler and his men were undisputed controllers of Germany. Certain people, especially Röhm and Strasser, knew what had occurred on that particular night soon after the death of Geli Raubal. Not only did they know who I was, they knew what I had done. And if Hitler began to wonder who in Germany carried his darkest secrets, he would soon begin to make serious enquiries of his friends, and they might be prepared to sacrifice me to save themselves. I don’t believe Strasser knew my name. My life lay in the hands of my closest Nazi ally, the only man who had a dossier on me! I was grateful that Röhm’s loyalty to his friends was famous. But what if his movements and relationships became known to others? Hearing Kitty’s litany of complaints, I began to wonder if perhaps I might be in serious danger. After all, some of those arrested had been quite as well known to the public as myself.

  Even as Hanfstaengl moved away to speak to the Chinese albino in Kitty’s party, I felt a chill. She laid her hand on the back of mine. Her eyes reflected the ice in her glass. Her smile, nonetheless, was rather friendly. We were now alone at that end of the bar. She evidently had something important to say to me. I leaned towards her.

  ‘Max,’ she said suddenly, ‘did you have my mama murdered?’ Pouting, her head to one side, she became alarmingly birdlike.

  My stomach turned over at the very thought. A sharp stabbing pain, like edged metal. ‘How could you consider such a thing? Your mother and I had our differences, but I certainly didn’t hate her enough to kill her!’

  ‘That wasn’t really what I asked you.’ Her smile slick with misery, she lifted her cocktail in a salute.

  ‘Your mother fell out of a window. Why would you believe I pushed her?’ I was almost reeling with the horror of the thought. ‘Why, the presumption was that she — that she was depressed. I read in the paper that she had died in London. Believe me, Kitty, I have never been in London. The only acquaintance I have in London is an actor who appeared briefly in one of my films, and he is no more a murderer than I am. Why would you believe I pushed her?’

  ‘Because it improves the piquancy, I suppose. You know how easily bored I get with the stale plot of life. Anything to put a new twist on it, eh?’

  I found it hard to believe she was still so young and had become so cynical. But the world was a very hard place, as Kitty knew. It could be as cruel to jazz babies as to war veterans. The whole idea of death and destruction had become almost modish among certain young Berliners. She told me Prince Freddy had been asking after me. He missed my entertaining company, he said. He had to be content like everyone else with watching me on his screen. Did he have personal copies of my movies? I was flattered. Were they perhaps the films Mr Mix and I had saved in Morocco?

  ‘One or two. Well, did you? She was getting afraid of you, you know. Someone had threatened her. She was sure the threats came from you. That’s one of the reasons she went to London. She left a box of papers with me in case something happened.’

  ‘My only concern is for the child,’ I told her. ‘For the little boy. Is he safe?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Freddie was very kind. Alfred has relatives in Palestine who took him in. Some of those papers mentioned you . . .’

  This, of course, alarmed me. I asked casually what she had done with the box. She shrugged her narrow little shoulders. She hadn’t had time to look through it much. Just the usual papers. Mementoes. Memories of former lovers. She had never been that interested in her mother’s private life.

  I thought this disingenuous. Since she had shown considerable curiosity when we first spent time together in Corneliusstrasse! I reassured her. My opinion was that her mother had become hysterical, perhaps a little paranoid, and had fixed her attention on me, who intended her no harm at all. If I had wanted her dead, I could have killed her myself when I was in Berlin or have had one of my friends hire somebody. I knew it was still a lot easier to find an assassin in Germany than in England!

  Kitty had grown bored with the subject. ‘Let’s go back to this new flat of yours,’ she said. ’It sounds as if you’ve found somewhere comfortable at last.’

  We said goodnight to poor Hanfstaengl and the others and collected our coats. In the taxi Kitty agreed that her mother’s hatred of me was probably simply because I had severed my relationship with her, a familiar but nonetheless terrible form of thwarted passion or insane jealousy. I would not have put it past her to have killed herself and then to have let people think I had murdered her!

  When we reached my Wurzerstrasse apartment, I opened the heavy oaken door with the odd feeling someone had just left the place. Once again my sixth sense came into play. Had Brodmann found me? Had someone been searching the apartment? Was it Hitler’s people? Mussolini’s?! Was I growing paranoid, inventing enemies for myself? Probably. After all, I was an internationally celebrated film star. In Berlin they might be common currency, but in Munich people would notice if I came to any harm. I saw no real evidence of intrusion and was quickly distracted by Kitty She had grown suddenly passionate.

  Almost as soon as we had closed my front door, Kitty was unbuttoning her blue silk wisp of a dress and stepping out of it. She wore a matching camisole and pantolettes with flesh-coloured silk stockings and little blue shoes that matched her dress. With a turquoise torque in her hair, she was irresistible as she trotted swiftly with her purse to the kitchen and prepared herself a syringe. Morphine, she said with a slightly apologetic shrug. Her nerves had been bad lately She thought it was to do with her mother. ‘You know,’ she said, as she inserted the silver needle into her thigh, ‘you always wonder if there was something you could have done. I’m over it now, though. I won’t need this much longer.’

  I had always loathed narcotics and feared their habit-forming effect. Unlike the benign stimulant, the narcotics are deadly. Opium, morphine and heroin are all of such high toxicity they immediately alter the nature of the body and make it dependent upon what Prince Freddy called ‘the bloom of paradise’. Of course, anything she told me about ending her use of morphine was self-deception at best. I have known few to stop the habit vol
untarily. To say anything to her would have been useless. She might have agreed with me, might have sworn never to stick another needle into her veins, but within a few hours those promises would have been forgotten.

  Once I had thought her Prince Freddy’s mistress, then his camouflage. Now I saw that she was his slave. Morphine was never free. All I could do was suggest that she try a little of my ‘cocoa’. She was happy to comply, but clearly the cocaine was merely a side dish. The expression and manner which had puzzled me in the hotel bar were the effects of her morphine use.

  I made love to young Kitty with some sadness, much to her eventual impatience. The evening was not very successful for either of us, but she fell asleep in my arms, a whisper of flesh and soft hair, so slender that I hardly realised she was there. Early the next afternoon when we both awoke, she found a tin of cocaine in her little bag and offered some to me. She could get plenty later, she said. She retired to the bathroom with her syringe case.

  I was due to make a radio broadcast that day, in which I would say how the values of the pagan Red man were those many of us would do well to examine. It was late October 1933, with the festival behind us and that wonderful sense of unity and purpose everywhere. What a shame she could not enjoy it. Could it be true, as Kitty insisted, that life was more dangerous for the nonconformist in Berlin these days? Yet many of the National Socialists were themselves of a bohemian disposition. Surely they would not turn so readily on their own! Unfortunately I was completely misguided. I had not yet realised how these Nietzscheans who boasted of releasing a healthy, unrepressed beast back into the mainstream of German life, were not merely repressing their own earlier urges, but actually repressing those who reminded them of what they had once celebrated. The Spartan’s love for Sparta had made that city state stronger than any other. The idea of a pure mind in a pure body, of the love of brother for brother, had bonded Sparta into a single steel-hard weapon enabling her steadfastly to resist all threats to her territory. Those were Hitler’s ideals, as well as Röhm’s. Röhm had found Hitler an ignorant, frightened corporal and had given him the inspiration, the rhetoric and the focused anger which brought him to his present pinnacle. Röhm remained the true founder of National Socialism. He, along with Strasser, cared more for his ideals than he cared for power. How was I to know in those glorious first weeks of the revolution that this would prove their undoing in the struggle Hitler was already fomenting between his followers as limitless power fell into their wondering hands?

  A day or two after the episode with Kitty, Reid and I were on the Munich sound stage, doing some dialogue scenes for Apache Gold and The Legend of Silverlake which like all the Frisch films were made back to back, thus affording considerable savings. Desmond Reid was no enthusiast for Hitler. A socialist of the nationalist ilk, he was perfectly happy to call himself a Mosleyite. Sir Oswald Mosley, the debonair young star of the Labour Party, disenchanted with that movement’s liberal relativism, had formed his own fascisti. Modelled on Mussolini’s, his party placed stronger emphasis on the Jewish threat, the secret empire of Jewry as he put it. Reid claimed his countryman displayed the usual prudent middle road taken by the United Kingdom since its formation, incorporating the best of the Fascist ideas into their own system.

  Reid was critical of Hitler’s control. He was hobbling Röhm. Reid argued that if Röhm was allowed to incorporate his men into the Reichswehr, as he had planned, the SA would achieve full military status and allow Röhm to rejoin the army, which I knew, and Reid guessed, was his dearest wish. He could then consolidate not only his power but his comrade Adolf Hitler’s power.

  Reid was right. Although in many ways unconventional, Röhm loved the status and meaning which the regular army gave a soldier in Germany. Though an accomplished pianist with a fine singing voice and a good turn of phrase as his rather odd autobiography attests, he trusted none of his gifts. History has taken him at his word. Because he neither served in the Second World War nor took part in the extermination of prisoners, his story is not disputed. The Nazi calumny remains and is believed by all sides. Röhm claimed to be a brute and, of course, sometimes behaved like one. But I knew the brute was a frustrated spirit longing for reconciliation.

  In spite of both Chaney and Seryozha being absent from them, the ‘Western’ films continued to be successful in Germany and achieved some distribution in the British Empire, but the response of American theatre operators was largely negative. For them the real Western was dead. The public was only interested in crooning cowboys from Radio City. We attempted to add music to one of our films, where Mr Mix’s talents on the banjo were utilised for a barn dance scene in which Gloria Cornish joins Desmond Reid in a duet somewhat spoiled by Reid’s inability to remain in key. Apache Love Song was not our most successful picture and the attempt was never made again. My own title number was cut completely. In spite of this setback, which meant the film had to be recalled and the musical scenes removed from it, we continued to produce profitable photoplays for the European market and became particularly popular in Italy where I hoped Il Duce was watching and realising what a mistake he had made in believing my enemies. I cannot help remembering when I hear of the success of the so-called ’Spaghetti Westerns’ how much the Italians owe to our ‘Winnetou’ pictures.

  I now had my own car, a little Renault tourer in sporty red and cream. I would drive out to the lakes and mountains at weekends, almost always with a different girl. Sometimes Kitty would come with me. Sometimes she would join whomever I was with. The Bavarian resorts were looking prosperous again. I was able to stay at the best lodges and hotels, with magnificent views of crags and water. I was recognised wherever I went, and no comment was made about my friends, who always had separate rooms. I felt something optimistic and positive in the air which even Kitty had to admit was real. Germany had taken a deep breath, got her house in order and settled down again into familiar life. Poverty lay behind her. Prosperity lay ahead. Now we know it was perhaps a fool’s paradise, but was it Germany’s fault that Hitler broke his promise to her?

  While I enjoyed my new lifestyle, I continued to feel uneasy, even guilty, sometimes convinced I was being watched and my apartment being secretly searched while I was away filming. I wrote several notes to Ministerpräsident Göring, mentioning our meetings in Rome, dropping Mrs Cornelius’s name until I realised this was probably not sensible. I heard nothing. I even risked a note to Röhm. I knew it was stupid and expected no response. Doubtless for my sake as well as his own, he had stopped seeing me altogether since I moved to Wurzerstrasse. I was still no further forward in fulfilling my life plan. Certainly the career of a film star was a good one, and there were harder ways to earn a living, but I have always been driven by my genius, my need to bring my dreams to life, enriching the world with a thousand solutions to its problems.

  The only high-ranking Nazi I saw apart from poor Putzi was Baldur von Schirach. He remained a good friend, though he, too, was constantly whisking around the country these days. He had made photostats of all my plans, which I still kept in my carpet bag at Corneliusstrasse together with my Cossack pistols. Most of my things remained there hidden in a false wall within a cupboard. Although I had a superb new apartment, I realised I felt safer in that ordinary environment near the food market, so familiar from my youth. I was convinced my treasures would be more secure there. Somehow I had hung on to them through all my ups and downs and was even a little superstitious about the pistols.

  I now felt foolish for having trusted Mussolini with so many ideas and leaving him with copies of my designs. Was my decision to trust Göring equally misguided? I have grown tired of the sound of my own voice complaining of the inventions Mussolini either claimed for himself or claimed to have inspired. I was stupid to have left them with him.

  Von Schirach had been talking to some of General Petlyura’s old colleagues. They confirmed, of course, that the Violet Ray had worked and would have driven the Reds back were it not for the power failure. Without my e
ven asking he had offered this information to Göring, who might soon be getting in touch with me, he hoped. Meanwhile, I sped about Bavaria’s twisting lanes in my smart roadster with a bevy of neurasthenic jazz babies on my arms and respectful recognition wherever I stopped. Little Zoyea would also accompany us sometimes since she loved riding in motor cars. Occasionally Kitty and I were mistaken for a married couple and Zoyea a daughter by a previous marriage. Often the easiest thing was simply to allow such a harmless deception. When, however, I discovered that Kitty had been tempting Zoyea to try her drugs, I was not amused. Kitty refused to believe that our relationship was innocent. She expressed an attraction for the little Italian dancer and told me she knew what I had planned. After that I did my best to keep them apart.

  For some reason The Legend of Silverlake was accepted by the American distributors, which meant that I had even more work. UfA told me I might branch out from my make-up roles and get a starring part as an airship commander in a planned movie called Raid on London. I longed to play a white man again. Doctor Hugenberg was completely absorbed in political life. Mrs Cornelius guessed there was some sort of power struggle between the former Nationalist Monarchists and the NSDAP. Goebbels was greedy for control of UfA, whose media had so successfully helped the Nazis to power. Hugenberg, of course, was resisting him. Meanwhile, in our own little backwater, we continued to show a profit and were never interfered with.