For the first time since I had arrived in America I desired a large vodka. I nodded vigorously and he winked at me. ‘We’ll finish here then go visit some friends of mine. They’ll accommodate us. What do you plan to do about this?’ He folded and replaced the cutting.
I was at a loss for an idea. There was no easy means of clearing my name. Only Kolya could help there. Esmé would agree to be a witness. But where and when could a trial be heard? I asked Mortimer.
‘In Paris. I’m damned sure of it. You’re safe enough in the States. The chances of a visa extension, however, might be a shade slim. You need friends in high places, old man!’ He looked critically at the cheeseboard, his knife hovering. Then, with a sigh, he impaled some Boston Blue.
‘There’s Mr Cadwallader in Atlanta.’
‘The lawyer? But it’s your word against theirs. I was thinking along slightly different lines. Who do you know in Washington?’
There was no one. Deep in thought, Major Mortimer abstractedly chewed his cheese. ‘I might be able to help. I know one or two people with good political connections. Would a letter of introduction be of use?’
‘You’re very kind.’ I doubt if I sounded enthusiastic. My future had again become uncertain. I could not go back to Europe. I might have to flee the United States. Was Esmé forever lost to me? I resisted panic. Desperately I tried to keep my mind in balance, but now things seemed blacker than ever before. I remember little of finishing the meal. At some stage Major Mortimer helped me to the sidewalk and hailed a taxi. Within a quarter of an hour we had entered the blue swing doors of one of New York’s many cellar bars. Inside was noisy jazz music, wild dancing, everything I had been glad to leave behind in Paris. Just then it was the last place I wanted to be, but Mortimer steered me through the crowd to a shadowy back room. He ordered drinks. They were not very strong cocktails, but I was glad of them and drank several. The speakeasy was patronised entirely by the well to do. It was no ordinary bohemian café. Lucius Mortimer was acquainted with many of the other clients and was obviously a regular and popular visitor. To them he spoke a patois almost impossible for me to follow. I had heard him and Jimmy Rembrandt using it between themselves on board ship. I grew rapidly drunk. By about one o’clock, as I continued to babble my problems to him, Lucius put a hand on my arm, looking me directly in the eyes. ‘Max,’ he said, ‘I think of myself as your pal and I’m going to try to help. Jimmy’s turning up here soon. We’ll talk to him. What if we went with you to Washington? I could introduce you to my friends. Do you have all your patents with you?’
I told him what I had done. My letters had said I should be in Washington shortly and would call to ensure the plans had arrived. I had been sensible, said Mortimer. I should relax and take another drink. Once I knew the right people my troubles would be over. ‘You can rely on me, I need hardly say, not to breathe a word of the airship scandal. But sooner or later it could hit our papers, then you’ll have to be completely prepared. Forewarned is forearmed. The press like nothing better than screaming for foreign blood these days. Only last week, in my hometown—in Ohio of all places—the Ku Klux Klan lynched two Italians. They were either anarchists or Catholics. People are even less fond of Russians, so you’d better make it clear you’re French and go on calling yourself Max Peterson. You could be half English. That should stop suspicion. I’ll cover you. We met during the War when you were flying with the Lafayette Squadron. Everybody loves the Lafayette.’
I was reluctant to involve myself in lies. However, I accepted Mortimer must have a better sense of the situation’s realities, so I agreed he should decide what was to be told to people. I would back him up in anything he said. I remained impressed by the American’s open-hearted generosity. What European near stranger would have done so much? I was almost tearfully grateful by the time Jimmy Rembrandt arrived, with two young women, actresses from a nearby show, and embraced me as warmly as any Russian. He slapped me on the back, announcing how much he had missed my company since the ship. A bottle of outrageously dubious champagne was ordered. This he chiefly fed to the ladies who, clucking and preening in their pink and blue feathers and silks, soon took on the appearance of confounded chickens. ‘Sounds like a great adventure!’ Rembrandt was in an ebulliently reassuring mood. ‘We’ll get the train to Washington tomorrow. Can you leave that soon, Max?’
We toasted our good fortune, our mutual destinies, the happy chance of our Mauretanian meeting. With such splendid companions I should have no difficulties when I came to confront and win over the American capital. Jokingly, they encouraged me to ‘remember’ my English mother, my father, the distinguished French soldier, and his father, who had fought for the South in the Civil War. We even considered an ancestor who had raised a volunteer regiment for the War of Independence. By the time we left the ‘speakeasy’ I was cheerful again, already half believing my new identity. They had struck exactly the right compromise, particularly in view of our destination. Their friends were Southerners to whom the only acceptable foreigners were those who had supported the Confederate cause sixty years before. Jimmy Rembrandt’s own mother, he told me, was from Louisiana and his Pennsylvanian father had been in Democratic politics until a riding accident just before the War. In the small hours we took a taxi back to my hotel while they lifted imaginary glasses to ‘Max Peterson, Gentleman of France’ and attempted to teach me how to whistle Dixie. The tune was important, they told me gravely, but the ability to remember all the words would prove crucial if I was to endear myself to their friends. As to my political views, they said, these were hardly in need of improvement at all.
With friendly good humour they helped me to an elevator before continuing on to the Astor, promising to collect me in the lobby next morning. Our association was going to be of enormous mutual benefit. It would make my French aviation schemes, they said, look like a cardboard model of the real thing. I reached my room and tried to pack, but unexpectedly the melancholy returned in full force once I was alone. I lay on my bed and wept for Esmé. How long must it be before I could be reunited with her? What crime had I committed in the eyes of God, to be so severely punished while the cynical rich and ruthlessly powerful went scot-free?
I would be wise to leave New York. Those same forces were lying in wait for me there, though I hardly guessed it then. In my wanderings I had seen the dark emissaries of Carthage scurrying about their destructive work. Here and there the signs were still up, but they would not stay there for long. In those parts of Harlem occupied by decent German families, threatened on all sides by blacks and orientals, I had seen the placards in the windows: Keine Juden, und keine Hunde. But it would be no more than a year or two before they were removed. Then the families themselves would be driven from the city and grinning negroes would turn those comfortable houses into squalid slums. New York would try to accept them, it was a question of pride. But New York was wrong to let it go so far. It tolerated monumental heresies: these black messiahs and philosemitic quasi-prophets abounding there today. Christians are taught to tolerate everything and so we do—but we cannot and should not tolerate evil, nor should hypocrisy and theft go unpunished. Those Sephardic Jews, they claimed to be Dons of Spain, as if that were something to boast of. The Spanish Empire was financed by Carthaginian gold, advanced by Catholic ruthlessness, informed by a pagan lust for destruction. Americans had already driven them back in a series of heroic wars. Now they are returning in a thousand guises. They cannot be stopped. And their Einiklach gloat in their massive towers, their steel and concrete fortresses, riding in Rolls-Royces up and down Wall Street, controlling the destinies of all the world’s nations, while the Dons of Little Italy, of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Spanish Harlem, are richer than any Morgan or Carnegie, yet leave no charities, no foundations, no libraries behind them: only ruin.
I cannot blame myself for what became of New York. The rot, if I had chosen to look, was already there. I was blinded by the fabulous potential of the city, its grandiosity, its beauty. And for me
it remains the most beautiful city on Earth. When the warm morning sun shone on those grey and yellow towers, or when it set, brilliant scarlet over Brooklyn Bridge, I would gasp in wonder, no matter how many times I had seen it before. I have heard they are demolishing more and more of it, replacing the old skyscrapers with things of black glass and featureless stone, that they have torn down almost everything and what they have not torn down they have gutted and spoiled. The Pennsylvania Hotel is now a grey, uncomfortable warren, without style or taste, taken over by the Hilton firm: a machine for processing travellers when they step out of those flying cylinders. And all done in the noble cause of democracy. This is egalitarianism corrupted. The dreams of New York’s great builders, of the murdered architect Stanford White, become wretched nightmares. The ghost of the old city hovers over the new. White was murdered in the roof garden of Madison Square, across the street from where my hotel stood. He built the set for his own destruction. And now that is demolished, too. He brought the best of Europe to America and he created architecture which was purely, confidently American in style and proportions. They mock all that now. Everywhere in the world the forces of Carthage are dynamiting our culture, our memories, our aesthetic monuments, replacing them with buildings indistinguishable one from the other, or from one country to another. They are wiping out our heritage; they are driving away our memories. Our very identities are therefore threatened. In 1906 White’s enemies conspired to kill him. The assassin was a Jew named Thaw who alleged White had seduced his wife. It was significant, however, that Thaw was eventually found ‘not guilty because insane’ and so avoided the consequences of his crime. Another shot fired for Carthage which went unpunished. Ich vil geyn mayn aveyres shiteln, indeed!
By eight the next morning, having pulled myself together with the help of cocaine and packed my trunks, I called for a porter, following him down to the echoing lobby. As I paid the balance of my bill (which took an alarming bite from my remaining funds) Jimmy Rembrandt approached me. He was smiling and full of energy, shaking my hand and saying I looked one hundred percent. Mortimer, he said, felt ill and could hardly speak, but would be with us on the train. We began to cross from the entrance hall to the Pennsylvania Station, immediately over the street, my bags on a trolley behind us. ‘Luce is afraid he has the ’flu. But we know what’s caused his symptoms, don’t we, Max.’ Entering the Doric arcade with its rows of elegant shops and shafts of dusty sunlight, we saw Mortimer waiting for us near the Grand Stairway. He was as smartly dressed as Rembrandt, but did look pale and sorry for himself. He tried to smile at me. ‘Ah, Colonel Peterson, the famous French aviator.’
Jimmy laughed. ‘I hope you can learn to like the colour red, colonel.’ He was amused by my confusion. ‘They’ll be rolling out the carpet for you in Washington very soon now.’ Everywhere around us vast numbers of New Yorkers came and went about their business. The station actually lay below us and we descended steps forty feet wide (built in ‘Travertine’ stone after a Roman model) to the main waiting room which was also of the same mellow cream tinted stone and was meant, apparently, to resemble a Roman bath. For many years the original New Yorkers had seen themselves as following on from the traditions of Classical Rome. Today, of course, the armies of the Vatican have created on unexpected and unwelcome comparison with a more recent Rome. ‘Rely on us,’ Jimmy went on, ‘and within a week the whole of Washington will be eating out of our hands.’ Our luggage was stowed and we went to have breakfast at one of the station’s many lovely restaurants. By noon we were aboard a magnificent ‘limited’ train, a symphony of dignified steel pulled by a massive articulated locomotive. We slowly moved out of Pennsylvania Station. Only the old Tsarist trains could begin to match American luxury. She, like Russia, had been a country more dependent upon the railroad than any other kind of transport. Like Russia, she had lavished all her pride and creative artistry on these rolling citadels of comfort. We had reservations in the dining-car, but Major Mortimer did not feel like eating. He let Captain Rembrandt and I leave him to his misery and take our seats beside the wide window. Slowly New York’s skyscrapers gave way to single-storeyed suburbs and then to New Jersey’s rolling hills and forests. We crossed wide iron webs of bridges spanning rivers as broad as any I knew in Russia; we steamed along the ocean coast itself, then turned West through fields of corn which might have grown on my native Ukrainian steppe. Soon we passed the occasional factory or power station, flaring and belching against the shimmering summer sky, and I thought suddenly that all this timber, this cultivated farmland, these steel mills and generators, represented not merely enormous wealth, but tremendous optimism, too. The size of the country became apparent to me for the first time. It shared that sense of limitless space with Russia and it also shared the same richness of resources, the same will to expansion. The problems of Europe became as insignificant as their parochial ambitions. There was no need for me to fear little countries with little ideas. Here in America I should be able to grow as I had once hoped to grow in Ukraine. Eating lunch, I looked out at the plains and meadows of America, at her great, grey cities and her golden hills, and I spoke to Jimmy of the technological Utopia I envisioned. It would be fundamentally American, rejecting the old hampering traditions of Europe, concentrating on a future wholly ‘Made in U.S.A.’
Jimmy was delighted and at the same time seemed almost surprised by my fervour. ‘That’s the stuff,’ he kept saying. ‘That’s exactly the stuff.’ He was as convinced as I that my genius had been wasted on Europe. My talent was too big for them. The United States was large enough and confident enough to welcome what I could offer and pay me what I deserved. America was about to boom bigger than ever before. So much money was being generated there were not enough things to spend it on. He told me I should think of forming a company like Edison’s. I should employ staff, technicians, different experts, and I should have workshops built. ‘Invest in America, Max, and you will win all the hearts and minds you’ll ever need. This is the right time for it.’
The very rhythm of the train, steady, ebullient, increased my notion that Washington must provide me with the funds, prestige, resources I had always known were my due. The Parisian affair had been an unimportant diversion. It had taught me to be careful of those in whom I put my trust. I prayed Kolya would soon escape that dreadful web of greed and intrigue and, bringing Esmé with him, join me in the American capital.
‘France has neither the cash nor the nerve to go for anything really big,’ said Jimmy. We were crossing the Delaware. In the distance an alliance of tall pines, smokestacks, pylons, marched up both the river’s steep banks. ‘That was where you went wrong, Max. It doesn’t matter how good the scheme is. It has to have a true grounding in the realities of time and place.’
I said I still blamed the socialist trade unions, but he disagreed. ‘Unions strike one way or another because it pays them or their leaders to strike. They might have meant to get better wages. More likely someone was slipping them the dough.’ He paused significantly and looked at me, but I had no idea what he wanted to hear. He went on: ‘It could have been anyone. Your own directors. The Germans. The British.’
‘I still find it hard to believe people could be so devious.’
‘You have that in common with Americans, old man. We’re shocked by it. And that’s why we’re determined to have no more truck with Europe. Let them knife each other in the back. They won’t have a chance to get a crack at us.’
Having made sure Lucius was not seriously ill, we continued on to the deep plush chairs, the brass and mahogany fixtures, of the Club Car where we smoked cigars and drank root beer into which Jimmy had somehow introduced strong Scotch. The Limited now moved with stately, unhurried swiftness through wooded hills and valleys. It was supremely comfortable with its padded seats set in spacious carriages served by efficiently trained waiters capable of finding almost anything one desired. I wondered if, when she came to her senses, Russia could one day restore her rail service to the same stan
dard. After all, Russia, like the USA, had an almost limitless supply of suitable raw materials. Here was the model we should seek to emulate. America had learned to deal with the Bolshevik threat. Unlike New York, the rest of the country recognised the danger, pursuing its Reds with a directness Europe should have imitated. The most lazily tolerant of all nations before the War, America, as a result, quickly found out the heavy price of such decency. Now when she closed her doors no one could blame her. She was anxious to quarantine herself from the social and mental diseases rife beyond the Atlantic. She would not discover until 1929, when Carthage struck, that she had acted too late. The whole country tottered and cried desperately for help. And who should turn up with smiling lips and helping hand, as if out of the blue? An apparent Samaritan calling himself by the name of a great American? Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bolshevik sympathiser and Mishling, stepped forward, took the helm and from then on the United States was doomed. She became the greatest single prize that ever fell to Carthage. But when I sat in the Pullman smoking Coronas with Rembrandt, the fight was still undecided. I was more than willing to join the struggle. I did my best along with so many noble Americans, but we were laughed at for our pains; we were hounded from power. And all the while the Orient was patiently biding her time. Nito tsu vemen tsu reydn…
She put a Jew in the White House just as, a half century before, she put one in 10, Downing Street. Another ruled France. A committee of them ruled Germany. Of Spain, we need say nothing. Portugal? Denmark? Who knows? They would say Ver veyst? And the terrible thing is they would probably be right. Oriental fatalism seizes them. They sprawl on the public street, the opium pipes still in their hands. And they call me a fool? They are zombies, drugged by secret masters, then sent in a howling mass against the President. They are not killed. The police are humane. They know what corrupts these shambling, filthy creatures, the sons and daughters of respectable citizens. What can they do?
The Laughter of Carthage: The Second Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet (Colonel Pyat Quartet Series Book 2) Page 48
