The Vengeance of Rome

by Michael Moorcock

  Some of the defiance left the newcomer’s manner. ‘I’m French, but I’ve lived in Berlin and Munich since the end of the War. You probably know my name. Bernhardt LeBrun?’

  The others did not recognise him, but I did. ‘You’re the cabaret comedian! We have colleagues in common. I saw you last at the Simplicissimus here in Munich.’

  He turned in some surprise. ’Colleagues in common?’ He appeared to find the notion disagreeable.

  ‘I myself have acted in a number of films here,’ I told him, ‘and I have friends in show business. You no doubt know Miss Gloria Cornish?’

  LeBrun snorted with disgust and turned away from me. ‘Know that slag! I suppose I do. She got out while the going was good. Went back to Berlin. I wouldn’t be surprised if she wasn’t the bitch who libelled me and had me arrested by the Gestapo!’

  With a shout of rage, I flung myself at him, only to be restrained by my companions. LeBrun seemed taken aback. He preened in front of me, his hands before his face in mock fear.

  ‘What are you,’ he asked, his voice squeaking with aggression, ‘her pimp?’

  I stared fiercely into his nasty little brown eyes, my words forced through clenched teeth.

  ‘Count Pottendorf, Herr Helander,’ I said with as much dignity as I could muster, ’I would be obliged if you would release me. This man has just insulted my wife.’

  * * * *

  FORTY-SIX

  That disgusting little Frenchman believed my beloved had betrayed him to Hermann Göring. Months ago he and she had been on the same bill at the Flashlite — he was the resident comedian — and they had not got on well. LeBrun did not know why he was arrested but was certain it was because ‘Gloria Cornish’ had said something to Göring. ‘I was too outspoken,’ he said. But he had always been careful not to attack the Nazis. No doubt ‘La Cornish’ had convinced her lover otherwise.

  I told him that this was complete nonsense. Mrs Cornelius was simply Göring’s friend; she was not his mistress. Whatever else they said about him, nobody ever accused Göring of infidelity. But LeBrun claimed Gloria Cornish was an adventuress, ruthless in her jealousy, whom he had first encountered in France, where she had been involved in a famous scandal. ‘She slept her way into the movies.’ He recognised me, too, he said. He had seen me in Paris. Perhaps with her. He had worked as a waiter at Lipp’s, a restaurant I had favoured. I, of course, denied this. I thought it best to say I had never been there at all. I was still worried about Kitty’s inherited collection of press cuttings and Röhm’s ‘dossier’.

  LeBrun knew he had alarmed me and pressed his advantage. After some thought he swore he had seen me at Lipp’s with Gloria Cornish. This was a complete nonsense. We were never together in Paris. Mrs Cornelius was in the United Kingdom at that time. LeBrun was doubtless terrified, flailing about for any advantage. Anything that might ingratiate him with the authorities. It was disgusting. I refused to be intimidated. I told him he was a madman and a slanderer. He was lucky I did not tear him limb from limb.

  LeBrun was in his own nightmare. In his babbling panic he accused all and everyone. He could not understand the reasons for his arrest. His accusations became wilder and wilder. They were so clearly his own transference, as Helander suggested, that my anger eventually dissipated. I came to treat him with disgusted contempt. He was not, it emerged, a French citizen, but was from the Alsatian border. My cellmates disliked him as much as I did. He was a poisonous little homosexual, a natural gossip and troublemaker. We could easily imagine how he had come to be arrested. I could not bear to be in the same cell with him.

  In spite of his attempts to engage them in conversation, Pottendorf and Helander did their best to ignore him. At my first opportunity I complained bitterly to the guard. We found LeBrun repellent, I said. When not moaning and groaning about his situation, he was accusing each and every one of us of some imagined crime. None of us wanted to risk going to bed. It was not fair that we should be forced to share quarters with an obvious pervert. The guard was sympathetic. As soon as a single cell was available, LeBrun would go there.

  Two days passed and LeBrun was still with us. Worse, I still did not get a hearing for my own case. Obviously I had no need of ‘protective custody’. I was an honest American citizen, a taxpayer, a friend of the new Germany. I demanded the Chief of Police be notified. Others might be there for political reasons, but I should not be. I, not LeBrun, was in Ettstrasse as a result of false accusation. It was in Prince Freddy’s interest to get rid of me now that he had what he wanted. If Göring were made aware of my presence in the jail he would immediately have me released. I asked for pen, ink and paper and eventually received a few rough sheets, torn from a schoolbook, and a pencil. Doing my best with these materials, I wrote to Mrs Cornelius and to Aviation Minister Göring, but I despaired. Unless they recognised my handwriting, my notes would look like a thousand others they received every day.

  Along with writing materials, tobacco and food, the only newspaper we were allowed to buy via the guards was the Völkischer Beobachter. Those guards made a handsome profit from us. Even the paper was a few more pfennigs than the published price. On the fourth day of my captivity, I was scanning its pages when I noticed a small news item which referred to foreign Bolshevist elements being rounded up for questioning. Many of these Reds were associated with the arts. Writers and actors were particularly under suspicion. They were responsible for corrupting the minds of Germans through their films and books. I asked Pottendorf if this could refer to us and he said he thought it could. I began to feel less than optimistic.

  Sensing my despair, Count Pottendorf reassured me. Even LeBrun was clearly not a Red. If we were suspected of such affiliations we would be with the other musicians and entertainers in Stadelheim and Dachau. I was a victim of bureaucratic thinking, nothing else. Rather than distinguish between us, the Nazis had decided to arrest all foreign artists and writers on the suspicion that they were communists. Slowly, as they investigated us, they would discover who was and who was not guilty and I would be released. My confidence temporarily restored, I determined to make the best of things. I would soon be back in my flat. I prayed that the carefully hidden documents and personal possessions in Corneliusstrasse had not meanwhile been discovered and stolen.

  I next began to worry what would happen if, just as I was on the point of being released, LeBrun might bear false witness against me. He was spiteful enough to do so. Did he really remember me from Paris? Certainly I did not remember him from Lipp’s. At that time, Mrs Cornelius and myself had moved in different circles. If she had been in Paris at all, she would have been with Trotsky or her mysterious Persian playboy who had brought her to Constantinople. That was before I had driven from Rome to begin my career in Paris. She had been in London. I had received a letter from her, posted from Whitechapel. From there, inspired by my letters, she had gone with an English touring company to the USA. I did not remember the details, but certainly I had not met her again until we were both in the United States where, to our mutual benefit, Mucker Hever had fallen in love with her. We could never have been together in Paris.

  So detached from reality had I become that I even thought of killing LeBrun while he slept. He could ruin me. Of course my instincts would not permit it. I value human life. I would not willingly spill his blood, even though he was loathed by all. Moreover, if he was stifled in his sleep, I was sure to be subject to an inquiry.

  My fears were groundless, as it happened. Within a day LeBrun had lost his flashy suit and was wearing only a striped prison shirt which went down to his knees. The guards were amused by this. They said he looked better in a dress. They even took his shoes. We found a spare pair in Bach’s suitcase that were too big for him, but better than nothing. The guards said he would be issued with some sturdier clothes when he got to Dachau. There he would learn what it was to work like a man.

  Happily, LeBrun soon gave up his accusatory mode and spoke to us less and less, snivelling himself to sle
ep every night. I came close to pitying him. He had bruises all over him where he had been kicked and punched by passing SA. If he had not accused my angel, I would have done more to try to help him. Even when he began to bleed from the nose, I sensed something disgusting about him. Helander, like me, avoided him, but the little pervert became pathetically grateful when Count Pottendorf, a Christian gentleman to the marrow, bathed his face, wiping the dried blood off his nose and lips. Pottendorf spoke in a low tone about Paris, which he had loved, her boulevards, her parks, her quays, calming LeBrun to silence so that we could all sleep.

  They say that in monetary terms a barrel of good human gore is worth infinitely more than a barrel of crude oil. Tens of thousands of pounds are needed to buy a few gallons of blood. Plasma is, of course, worth even more. I heard this on the BBC the other day. Not that I believe everything the BBC tells us. Buggers Broadcasting Communism, as Miss Brunner, the schoolteacher I see at the pub, would have it. Blood is literally the most valuable liquid on the planet. Is it because we spill it so liberally, I wonder? The Americans used albumin first at Pearl Harbor. It had astonishing properties. Yet it is also the most easily contaminated substance. Oil, the most contaminating of liquids, kills anything it touches. Our oceans and beaches are forever ruined by it, yet we value oil far higher than blood.

  The oil had dried on LeBrun’s head and his hair was a spiked mess, giving him an insane, inhuman appearance. Struwwelpeter, indeed! How quickly he had lost his veneer. The rest of us used whatever means we could to keep up our standards, but in a matter of hours the Alsatian went from posturing dandy to slovenly wretch.

  The SA began to call for LeBrun regularly. He was gone for hours. He said they were questioning him about French communists he knew. He did not know any communists, he said, whether French or otherwise. He had never had anything to do with politics. He had been beaten up but he would not tell us details. While he was away, we wondered if he was being persuaded to act as a witness against us. Every time he returned he had a fresh bruise and was weeping. Pottendorf said he thought it unlikely they were asking LeBrun about us. Horrible though it was to contemplate, the SA men were beating him for their own pleasure, out of disgust for his kind. He had encouraged them in their prejudice, almost advertised himself.

  One afternoon Helander proposed that LeBrun was being used by the brutal homosexual element of the SA. After all, Röhm was notorious.

  Naturally I defended my patron. Röhm’s enemies had employed his sensitive letters against him. That Spartan love was a very different thing from LeBrun’s limp-wristed mincing. Helander and Pottendorf seemed surprised by the intensity of my defence, which made me realise it was unwise of me to continue. I could do no good for Röhm or help my own cause.

  Nursing his bruises, LeBrun confined himself to his miserable bunk. The rest of us tried to make conversation. The other two prisoners were interested in my scientific ideas, and it took my mind off my situation to talk about such things. In America I had invented a very successful steam-car, but my interest remained mostly in aeronautics. I described my one-man observation airship and asked if they had ever heard of the giant airship the Americans planned to build. I was about to tell them a little of my involvement with such a ship, which, as far as I knew, was still in its shed outside Akron, when Pottendorf gave a bitter laugh. ‘Don’t tell me about airships. Poor LeBrun has already reminded me too much! I lost half my fortune to that miserable confidence trick that was all over the papers a few years ago. I was living in Paris at the time. I invested heavily. I was an idiot. I thought it was the coming thing. Do you remember that scandal? Some ten years or so ago? They used a Russian nobleman to front it. He was a convincing rogue. What was his name? Count something. He married a Parisian banker’s daughter, I think, then ran off with some little whore from Constantinople. The scheme itself was cooked up by a bunch of Jewish fraudsters. I haven’t a prejudiced bone in my body, but I should have known better than to trust them. They made millions from it, of course, but left the rest of us high and dry. Some Russian charlatan claimed to be the inventor. Another Jew. If you’re involved in aeronautics, you might remember him, Mr Peters. Did that news ever reach America? I heard the chief villains fled there, but America is a large country. It is full of defaulting financiers and fleeing criminals. You must have encountered plenty.’

  I was shocked to hear this version of my wholly idealistic Parisian experiment. I longed to enlighten him but, in the circumstances, could not.

  ‘I would not have had to resort to journalism,’ Pottendorf continued, ‘if it had not been for those rogues. And if I had not become a journalist, I would no doubt not be here at all!’

  I was relieved that I had shown forbearance and denied any association with Paris. It seemed impolitic to mention my involvement with the airship company or to try to defend my friend Kolya, for Count Nikolai Feodorovitch Petroff was the man Pottendorf referred to. In reality, of course, I, too, had been a victim of the scheme. Indeed, I had been made the chief scapegoat. My name had not then been Peters, but Pyatnitski. If my friend Kolya had not warned me in time I would even now, no doubt, be in a worse prison on Devil’s Island. Yet the real villains remained at large, still free and respected. Only by a whisker had I had been able to get to America, forced to leave my little Esmé behind in Kolya’s safekeeping. Doubtless she was the ‘little whore from Constantinople’ Pottendorf mentioned.

  Not times I liked to remember. I found it unbearable to think of the vast consequences arising from French Jewry’s betrayal of my best ideals. I, too, had lost much. I wish that I could have told Pottendorf the truth but found myself reminding him I had never been to Paris. I agreed that we lived in terrible times, when Russian charlatans were able to deceive even those of us with considerable common sense. Avoiding the subject of large airships, I spoke instead of my other American ventures, of my great Land Cruiser, my fleet of experimental aircraft built for the Sultan of Marrakech, the various projects I had begun with Signor Mussolini. I had rather expected, I said, to interest the New Germany in my scientific ideas. I had much to offer the Third Reich. But this business had soured me. The sooner I could get back to Italy, the better.

  Helander was surprised I had never visited the City of Light. ‘Such a sophisticated world traveller,’ he said, ‘and yet —’

  Sadly circumstances had never taken me to the French capital. As a race, the French were unattractive, too volatile and unserious. Bismarck had rightly described France as a feminine nation, as compared to masculine Germany. The whole nation had sunk into decadence. One only had to look at M. LeBrun.

  My anxiety was returning. Pottendorf’s bitter outburst had again reminded me of the materials in Röhm’s and Prince Freddy’s possession. If someone like Pottendorf saw those cuttings he would turn against me. I might never be released. The Parisian Airship Company scandal was notorious at the time, especially after my name was linked to that of my fellow Ukrainian Stavisky. Yet this uncomfortable reference also came as a revelation! Again I wondered if Kitty von Ruckstühl was actually responsible for my arrest. Did she really still blame me for her mother’s death? Did she believe me to be the father of her half-brother? In her morphine fever could she have turned on me, deciding to take up her mother’s baton?

  I shuddered at how those films might now affect my fate. Masks could not entirely disguise me. There were the distinctive marks on my buttocks. These, in turn, reminded me of Grishenko and my Ukrainian adventures. My thoughts went again to Brodmann, the only witness of my humiliation. Unless the Bolshevist agent had deceived them completely, it was unlikely the Nazis would take his word for anything. Hanfstaengl had no reason to hate me. My association with Otto Strasser could not be known unless someone had been watching him for a long time. Was that possible? Who else? Göring, perhaps? Out of jealousy of my relationship with Mrs Cornelius? Again unlikely. The Fraus had no reason to take against me. No, the most obvious enemy was Prince Freddy. If I escaped from this trap, I would ask
Röhm to have him killed. I was furious with him and what he had done.

  I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the company, especially, of course, LeBrun. I feared he would remember something more from when I had been in Paris and reveal my association with Kolya and his friends. The next time I had the opportunity, I begged the guard to change my cell. He was especially sympathetic when I said I feared molestation from LeBrun.

  Two days later, while LeBrun was as usual absent, Helander and Pottendorf were playing chess and I was sitting reading the VB. Suddenly there came a loud shout from outside and the door was flung back. ‘Hurry yourself, Peters. Get your things together. At the double, man. We’re leaving.’ It was an SA guard I knew called Fischer.

  ‘Leaving? I’m released?’

  ‘At the double. Quick now.’

  Rapidly I gathered up my few possessions, said a hasty goodbye to my cellmates and stood before Warder Fischer. The massive SA man had never treated me particularly badly.

  ‘Am I free?’

  ‘You wanted to be free of your nancy boy, didn’t you? Come on. Hurry up.’

  I was marched along the corridor to cell 40, which the warder unlocked and opened. Bewildered, I stumbled into it. ‘What’s this?’