The Vengeance of Rome - [Between The Wars 04]

by Michael Moorcock

  ‘Lucky,’ I say.

  ‘They was both barmy and that messed it up for everyone else. Jack Profumo should ‘ave known better, but there wasn’t much to the rest of ‘em.’

  We have stopped in the Mountain Grill for a cup of tea and something to eat. George calls a greeting to me from his shrieking, steaming galley at the back. Maria, his wife, calls me a ‘dirty old sod’ and asks me how I am. All affectionate badinage. The chairs are bent chrome and red plastic. The old Brown House style. Two rows of grey formica-topped tables go from front to back with a central aisle. Maria walks up and down the aisle like a wardress, delivering filled plates, picking up empties. She sees to the condiments. She has her favourites. I am one of them. I never go hungry there. Like her husband she wears a stained white overall. They are almost exactly the same height and weight. They come from Cyprus. We get on well. We have similar ideas about the Turks. They would like to see the liberation of Constantinople. Yet they support Queen’s Park and celebrate Christmas. They are not bigots. Everyone comes here, from hippies to police. Black men with impossibly tangled hair openly roll reefers and grin across at the little schoolgirls who have accidentally found this greasy bolthole. Children are in no danger at the Mountain Grill, another of the world’s safe places. The cafe offers greater sanctuary than any church.

  Part of George’s front door, bolted open now, has been smashed. ‘Drunks,’ he says, ‘crazies. You know.’

  ‘Micks was it?’ says Mrs Cornelius. She always blames the Irish. ‘They can’t hold their booze. It’s the same up our way.’

  A long time, I tell her, since we had to be afraid of Micks who are all Labour politicians now. She has no base to her prejudice. She merely voices the accepted wisdom of Whitechapel with its deep-rooted secular tradition. Such stereotyping is unworthy of her, I say. I see good and bad among all races. The English are prejudiced against the Irish because they know in their bones Cromwell created many of their ills. Yet the Irish are just as misguided. They blame all their troubles on the English. The plain fact is that the Catholics lost the struggle. What would they have done if Cromwell had not triumphed? Himmler, a Protestant, had no prejudices against Catholics. They were often, he said, the best for special duties. That’s why he preferred, whenever possible, to recruit Austrians.

  It is a nonsense to say the Christian Churches turned against Hitler. The Lutherans and the Catholics loved him. They fell over themselves to bless the brave SA boys at their rallies. They got up in their pulpits and told their congregations to vote for him. He was a force for stability, they said. Only the Greek Church stood aloof, which was why Hitler wanted to destroy it. He never had any major disagreement with the Pope.

  They were talking on the wireless about the Irish famines in the nineteenth century which the English did so little to alleviate. The survivors all went to America and settled there. Where they lynched Negroes and shot redskins. I once looked at the names of troopers who served in the US frontier regiments and who massacred the natives. The names were all Irish. As they were in India. A naturally belligerent people forced from their bogs and slums by English callousness, they went to America to improve their spirits by shooting unarmed people in remote western valleys. Who is the original victim? Who the aggressor? Many of the Indians expected nothing else. They had dedicated themselves rigorously to the total genocide of rival tribes. Yet tell some American, boasting of his Irish and Cherokee blood, that he survives because his ancestors were successful practitioners of genocide, and feel his fist in your face, his boot in your testicles.

  History is no longer a study of the past, but a series of legalistic arguments. A public trial in which academics vie with one another to establish who is the victim, who the aggressor. An American habit. Americans never feel at ease until they establish who is to blame for something. They took this from the Germans, who gave them so much more of their culture than the British.

  They say Hitler, too, perverted reality, reinvented history. But unsentimental reality moved the Führer. Let us not mention the Israelis, whose rhetoric is identical to the Nazis in almost every respect. They speak of blood, of living space, of ancient rights. With the help of the unwitting Americans, who name themselves Christians but are really Jews, calling on the Old Testament but rejecting the New, they plan a new Carthaginian Empire across the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

  ‘Mind your backs, boys!’

  Maria brings my usual. One sausage, chips, a slice and tea. On Saturdays I have an egg. Mrs Cornelius has her own usual. A bowl containing two scoops of mashed potato over which thick tomato soup has been poured. A wartime dish, she tells me. It always comforts her.

  Through George’s weeping glass I see a sudden ray of sunshine fall on the needlecraft stall across the road. The reels and spools, hanks and balls of bright silks, wools and cottons come to burning life, a magnificent display of jewels. Ornaments sparkle, clothes become more vivid and heads lift almost in surprise. An angel might have paused here.

  ‘I don’t know what to watch tonight.’ We have finished our meal. It is Mrs Cornelius’s whack. She returns from the counter. ‘Bye-bye, all!’

  For a while the drizzle does not persist. Outside the sun continues to shine on windows and puddles. There is a strong pungent odour, almost of the jungle. I know it to be the soup of half-corrupted fruit and vegetables, paper and animal matter, through which we pick our way, fording the amniotic stream so that Mrs Cornelius can get her fags at her newsagent. This material, pushed into heaps or flushed down sewers, is the breeding ground for new species.

  Scientists come from all over the world to study Portobello Road. Yesterday some bespectacled student informed me that the area now has its own separate ecological system. Such things happen only in cities. Rural environments lack the necessary biological complexity. Marijuana grown in that mixture is known to be almost fifty times stronger. No wonder everyone seems to be in a trance. These days when they come stumbling into my shop I know exactly what is going on.

  When Mrs Cornelius picks up her Embassy Tipped I buy a copy of the Daily Mail, always my favourite British newspaper, as it was Hitler’s. Lord Rothermere was a convinced NSDAP supporter and saw a stronger future in his nation’s close collaboration with Hitler. If they had followed his advice there is no doubt the British Empire would now be greater than ever. She would control vast areas of the world, including China and Arabia. Instead, she cannot effectively rule the Isle of Wight. No wonder the Americans, who have taken over so many old imperial responsibilities, are contemptuous. Americans have deafened themselves. They shout at one another. They shout at me. They shout banalities, destroying thought.

  Lately I find it hardly worth buying a paper or turning on the news. Little changes. Who can you trust? That familiar excited babble, confident-sounding analysis, authoritative predicting of trends while everything continues to go round and round in the usual unresolved chaos. Sometimes I come across old newspapers in boxes or as drawer linings. The issues scarcely change. The arguments remain the same. Year in and year out commentators voice the identical views in the same excited tones. Most people are incapable of original thought. They think an original thought is something they haven’t read before. It bowls them over. They repeat it in the pub or, if they are middle class, at dinner parties.

  Mrs Cornelius refuses to despair. She says you have to laugh.

  ‘What a wonderful actor you are, Max.’ Röhm watches the last reel of Buckaroo’s Gold. I wave to the audience from my mechanical horse. It seems I control a rearing mount. I flourish my hat. My smile is gay. My innocent eyes look back at me from a happier age.

  He pours champagne. ‘I could swear I’d seen you in something else.’

  I can never forget those films taken in Egypt. What if they should turn up some day? The likelihood is not impossible. Röhm, Hitler, Streicher and Rosenberg all have extensive collections of erotica. I cannot remember whether my face was ever visible or not. Röhm, of course, would not need to se
e my face to recognise me.

  Mrs Cornelius and I went to the pictures every Friday afternoon. We had pensioners’ passes. But when the Essoldo in Portobello Road changed to the Electric Cinema it became impossible. We had been able to see three features at the Essoldo for 1/6.The Electric charges you a pound for one foreign film whose photography is out of focus, whose plot is indecipherable and whose subject appears to be the director. Progress, indeed. All that has not changed are the seats and the sound system, which remain as bad.

  I saw the work of the transvestite adman Warthole there. Naked boys pretending to be cowboys and vampires. What is so original about it? I asked. They were not so long ago, those wonderful parties. Some SA wag called it the ‘Kaligulahof. ‘Mr Handy Andy’ should make a film about that villa, its luxuries and elaborate fantasies. I could help him. I could write the script. I am not ashamed. Nobody was forced. Those Hitler Youth lads had as much fun as anyone. Besides, I had no choice. Kind-hearted as he was, Captain Röhm was used to being obeyed. He became my only source of income after Mussolini’s money stopped arriving. I had enemies in Rome, but I could not investigate, of course.

  Mrs Cornelius was quite aware of my circumstances. She never blamed me. She thinks perhaps I should have anticipated the problems. But how could I anticipate what happened? How could anyone? People judge you too readily. They think you deliberately choose your fate. They do not understand how you gradually slide into situations from which escape becomes impossible. What seems a temporary diversion on your life’s road looks, in the perspective of history, like a culmination, an example of your inner evil! But I had absolutely nothing to do with any murder. I still could not swear who killed her. Those who knew were shot or fled into exile. Father Stempfle was killed in Dachau, but I never saw him there. Stempfle was one of the keys. Who has heard of him today? The past disappears without record. History becomes a means by which we escape from shame or promote our special interests. We invent whatever we need and forget whatever is inconvenient. Such is life in this sordid Disneyland where wealthy tourists bring in the only money.

  Walt Disney was inspired by Mussolini’s idealism. He wanted to build a benign corporate state where every American was happy and nothing ever happened to anyone. He died before he could realise this Utopia, but they froze his head so that he can return at any time to redeem us. He made so many dreams seem real. I am forced to face the fact that all my dreams came to nothing.

  ‘Up like the rocket and down like the stick,’ says Mrs Cornelius, guiding me from the newsagent and back into the crowd. ‘That’s you all over, Ivan.’ A pack of miniature mongrels runs past, under one stall and out of another. A cyclist swerves to avoid them and falls against a display of tomatoes. We move expertly away from the conflict. We have reached the old core of the market, where fruit and veg are still sold, where frustrated locals make every effort to hold their own against the foreign influx. They sell the boojies the rotten tomatoes and the bruised fruit. Friday it is mostly hippies and scalp-heads, dealers of every description. They bring no money in. Whatever they make they take away again.

  Here the shops are cleaner and sell recognisable things. We pass both rival fishmongers’ slabs, the cheap butcher’s, the chain baker’s, the white goods shop, the draper’s, the hardware shop, the electrician’s, the Venicia Café and the baby shop. As we approach the pawnshop, the black bulk of Bishop Beesley, not at first recognisable as human, blocks our way. He is considerably fatter than Göring and, of course, is not a real bishop. His real name is Billy the Mouth and he is again released from prison. Like his daughter he is a confidence trickster. Mitzi is currently in Holloway. They rarely meet. Beesley is wearing his familiar dark suit and pullover, a white shirt just visible. It gives him the ecclesiastical look he feels comfortable with. He wipes his hand on a blue handkerchief. ‘My dear Colonel! And the lovely Mrs C!’

  He is meeting a mutual friend in the Blenheim Arms, he says. He insists we have a quick one on him. His ship recently came in. ‘In a small way, you know.’

  Mrs Cornelius accepts, and I cannot be rude. We leave Portobello Road and enter the pub’s graveolent interior. Quintessentially English, the smell of fried pies and cigarillos blend with bitter beer and harsh spirits. Dark shoulders press together. Little women, holding their own like defiant fowl, slip in and out with glasses of wine. Shifty boys pass miniature paper envelopes back and forth and argue over money. They glance at well-groomed office girls who sit at the bar grinning and smoking or rummaging through their purses. On the other side of the counter the glowering features of little Mo Collier glare with contempt on all and everything. The world is not up to standard. He smoothes his carefully cut moustache. His neat, dark head sports another idiosyncratic haircut, doubtless the current fashion. ‘Near-mutton dressed as almost-lamb,’ says Mrs Cornelius spitefully. She was never prepared to like him. He stands with his eyes avoiding his customers, flexing his muscles and catching glimpses of himself in the polished copper. A pocket Hercules in his fashionable sports vest. The Bishop insists on his attention. ‘Two halves please, Mo, and a small, dry sherry. Ah, there she is!’

  A coiffure that was once pure Pre-Raphaelite flame, but now owes something to Mr Sonya in Elgin Crescent, bobs above the mass. Miss Brunner used to run a local girls’ school before the scandal. She is now in private tuition and dresses with the same tempting severity which makes the Bishop her slave. As far as we know, there is no other man in her life. The Cornelius boys tell stories, but neither can ever be trusted to know the truth, let alone tell it. Her uncompromising grey-blue eyes note our presence and are lowered in a brief greeting. She bears herself with a kind of diseased dignity. She is thoroughly groomed but cannot disguise the aura of corruption which surrounds her. She has no power to charm, only to command. She takes a Pernod and makes it clear she has come to meet the Bishop, not chat with us.

  A long head hunched in a corduroy donkey jacket turns from the bar. Frank, Mrs Cornelius’s youngest boy. His features are inclined to sag. I think he is on morphine, like Göring. They say he works for Hoogstraten, the property tycoon, and tends to ape his new boss. He wears a striped Jaeger shirt and an old school tie. He is better groomed than his brother, at least. He smiles at me, says something to a companion and comes over. Tentatively Frank kisses his mother, apparently unsure what he will pick up. He squeezes my arm in an aggressive and unwanted demonstration of camaraderie. ‘How’s tricks, Colonel?’

  They are always here on Fridays. Even Major Nye comes in on occasions but was offered voluntary retirement and can only rarely afford the fare from Kent. Family business is now his only excuse for visiting the city. We see a few others from time to time. We are the survivors, I suppose. Our means of survival might not always bear much discussion, but I name no names. We have no power. Therefore we cultivate tolerance. The acceptance, I suppose, of the inevitable. We huddle together for comfort. We remind one another of our stories and our great days. Most of us have had a few of those, at least.

  I had no plans to spend more than a week with Captain Röhm, but he insisted I stay. Also at his insistence, and with some relief, I shaved off my imperial. He appreciated the action. I was his ideal companion, he said, for this wonderful idyllic place. Then friends turned up. Before I knew it a week had gone and then another. Messengers were sent to the post office, but nothing arrived for me. I had to stay there. Röhm was sometimes absent for a day or two, but there was plenty to do. I spent hours wandering around the vast uncompleted villa. The chief bedrooms and bathrooms were in use and there was a large public room, but most of the rest was only half finished. Röhm never had time to let the builders come back. Somebody was always staying there. But when I was on my own, I might be the last man on Earth.

  The spirits of hunters and woodsmen had inhabited the thick, surrounding wooded hills since the beginning of time. I had rarely experienced such peace. I found a beautiful illustrated set of Karl May and absorbed myself in tales of Old Shatterhand and Winnetou the Ki
owa. Röhm also shared Hitler’s taste for Edgar Wallace who was, he said, the soundest of British writers in their best traditions. Wallace had been a professional soldier, and like Buchan had a pretty clear idea of the Jew question. On Röhm’s recommendation I read The Fellowship of the Frog and one or two others. They had none of the appeal of the best Sexton Blake stories and were interesting only when they described some aspect of London criminal life. Through them I grew to know Limehouse, Soho and even Wapping, which was where Wallace was raised, by a bookie, with Jews on all sides.

  Forgetting the questions which shadowed my mind, I could read in perfect tranquillity. There was never any threat. One was never taken unawares. Röhm had guards posted at every approach. He feared only the communists. Brodmann could not find me.

  According to the rules, Röhm or his aides, but not guests, could make telephone calls. It seemed impolitic to try to contact Mussolini, but I began to wonder what he would think if I had disappeared. Believing me the victim of foreign agents, he might send people to look for me, to rescue me. It would be best if I got in touch with him soon. Why had my money been stopped? I made plans to return to Munich. I neither wished to end my idyll nor offend the great Stabschef, but I have an exaggerated sense of loyalty. I felt it my duty to go, at least for a while. Reluctantly my host agreed, and at the beginning of August on a particularly hot day, I returned to the Königshof.