The Laughter of Carthage: The Second Volume of the Colonel Pyat Quartet (Colonel Pyat Quartet Series Book 2)

by Michael Moorcock

  ‘Only until I can make a phone call. This man trusts me. I was able to assist the State on a matter of grave national importance.’

  ‘Wot ther fuck’ve ya bin up ter, nar, Ive!’ She gave the wheel an exasperated wrench. ‘Ya little bleedin’ judas!’ She laughed heartily. ‘Nar, don’ tell me! I didn’t arsk!’ I laughed with her. I could now almost always tell when she was joking.

  I sent Esmé another telegram from Hollister and phoned my new friend Callahan. He was not in the office. I was given another number to call. It was long-distance to New York. He had not yet arrived. I would remember, in a day or so, to telephone again and ensure Mrs Cornelius’s legality. Der Hund verfolgte der Hase. Already he was on the trail. We played the Berberich Theater that evening and my performance, while less abstracted than the earlier one, was again poor. The audience was noticeably restless. Mrs Cornelius kicked me twice, surreptitiously. As we came off she hissed, ‘If yore gonna keep changing me name from Rosa to Esmé I don’t care. But bleedin’ make it one or the uvver. They were beginnin’ ter fink it wos a bleedin’ comedy tonight.’ I apologised. I said she must understand how I was feeling. ‘Too well, Ivan,’ she said savagely. ‘Too bloody well!’

  Soon I was spending all my free time studying specialist magazines, looking for likely investors. Callahan’s guarantees, when I considered them, were not watertight. It would still be foolish of me to reveal myself as Max Peterson. The Klan, I remembered, had powerful financial support from the great farming alliances of the West Coast. Doubtless industry had similar links. I made a considerable effort to play my parts with full attention, but I was growing increasingly abstracted. Every day I failed at raising the money was a betrayal of my little girl’s hopes. In Fresno Mrs Cornelius suddenly refused to continue the play and sang her songs instead. She would not speak to me for a whole day afterwards. Time was running out. I did not have a single reply to my circulars. Esmé would believe I no longer loved her. From Mojave, where we did three shows of White Knight and Red Queen a day, I sent my rose a cable assuring her all problems were being overcome. Under the benevolent sun of Southern California, I drove our little truck along the white highway, beside the sea. I saw only her. Already I imagined how delighted my beautiful child-wife would be. She would sit beside me, holding my arm, marvelling at undreamed-of natural luxury. I would again be doing my work as a scientist. We should be respected all over America, hobnobbing with the great and the famous. But this image only served to bring me closer to panic. I could lose it all. I had to find financial support. Sooner or later, when Callahan caught up with Mrs Mawgan, I would be in danger of my life. I had to act with reasonable speed. The one thing I had not told Callahan was where I guessed Mrs Mawgan to be hiding. That information was too valuable to throw in with the rest. She would have changed her name. She might be running a fresh operation. I knew therefore it could be a few months before Callahan would run my ex-mistress to earth. In those months I planned to make some money, bring Esmé to America, marry her and then escape to Buenos Aires, where engineers were in short supply, but where wealthy people willingly invested in schemes likely to add to the Argentine’s prestige. Moreover, many Russian émigrés were already there, supplying their military experience and skills to the government. Nothing of this could come true, I reminded myself, unless I quickly found what we in the theatrical profession called ‘an angel’.

  We stopped for a late lunch at a little mobile hot-dog stand alone on the beach. Mrs Cornelius drew me aside. ‘Yore lookin’ orl dizzy, Ivan. I’m gonna say it once more an’ thass that. Ferget ‘er!’

  I smiled graciously at my old friend. ‘Can you forget perfection, my dear, good Mrs Cornelius? When the girl you’ve longed for all your life, who you thought forever lost, is by a miracle returned to you, not once but twice, it’s hardly a casual affair. I mourned my Esmé for five years. I have sworn I shall never mourn her again.’

  To her eternal shame (she apologised only three weeks ago in The Elgin), Mrs Cornelius answered this with one of her many new American expletives. It did not touch me, then. I knew in my heart she, whose instincts were normally so good, feared she must soon be parted from me. I could have reassured her, if she had listened. I loved her, as I would always love her. But Esmé possessed me. I looked up as a motor launch, shrieking like a bleeding sow, came in close to the shore, then swerved hard against the surf to squeal out towards the horizon again. There were two men standing upright in the launch. One had the wheel. The other was studying the beach through a pair of binoculars. I wondered again how much of the truth Callahan had told me. I had forgotten to question his links with Brodmann. Certainly, he had never contradicted my contention that the Cheka remained on my trail. I was sure the man with the glasses was Brodmann. Mrs Cornelius thought I was merely exhibiting pique as I hurried her and the others, who as usual giggled like children, back to the van.

  Just before sunset next day, we arrived in Santa Monica where I again cabled Esmé my whereabouts, swearing a first-class boat ticket would soon be hers. I was becoming so desperate I thought of selling the van until I remembered my promise to Mrs Cornelius. It was not in me to sink to such depths. We planned to establish ourselves at Huntington Beach for at least a week and do our usual circuit of the nearby seaside resorts. It was close enough to Los Angeles for me to plan the area as a base from which to approach potential ‘angels’. By the next morning I had written another two dozen more or less identical letters and would mail them at my first opportunity. I was trying to will Esmé, six thousand miles away in Rome, to trust me and not to lose heart. I checked sailing times, discovering several ships leaving from Genoa in the coming month. My next telegram listed these ships and dates, asking her to choose which she would prefer. That, at least, would assure my child I remained sincere. I would never let her down, mayn shvester, mayn sibe!

  That afternoon we did the first of our matinees at Maddison’s Famous Vaudeville Theater on the noisy, carefree boardwalk. The theatre looked out towards the big concrete fishing mole and the sandy beach. This resort was so characteristically Californian I had grown to love her. In spirit at least she reminded me of old Odessa, of her more vulgar suburbs along the coast, where brass bands played and carousels turned, in Fountain and Arcadia. From her cliffs, crooked wooden stairways wound down to beaches where huge mountains of water flung up their spray and the breakers rolled all the way from the horizon. Here were parties of bathers, older people sunning themselves, picnickers under bright umbrellas, less than a stone’s throw from a score of massive, full-sized oil derricks marching unchecked from cliffs to ocean. This forest flanked Huntington Beach on two sides. Here was the source of wealth and the means of squandering it rolled into one community. Amusement arcades, fun fairs, rickety nickelodeons, cotton candy stalls, magazine stands, ferris wheels, roller coasters, pleasure boats, many in primary colours made even more dazzling by the steady Pacific glare, contrasted with the twinkling blue of the ocean and an infinity of perfect sky. Sometimes an aeroplane flew over, just missing the roller coaster. The plane gave joyrides to excited grandparents, frozen-faced children, terrified oilmen and their happy girls, serious youths. Sometimes speed boats would howl and ululate on the water, reaping a watery furrow, marked by a wound of white foam. And all the while the oil pumps rose and fell, solid old beam-engines like gigantic feasting swamp fowl. Coupled with the towering lattices of the rigs, they made a scene from H.G. Wells, with Martians invading from the ocean depths, looking with baffled curiosity on the careless, festive crowd which simply characterised them as a not very interesting novelty. Alas, unconscious of their doom, the little foxes play, as Mrs Cornelius’s swindler friend, the Bishop, would always remark as he finished his fifth pint in The Blenheim Arms on a Friday night (it was before he was committed to an Old Folks Home near Littlehampton). Unlike Europe, America has never been ashamed of the sources of her prosperity, unless, ironically, they lie in brewing, distilling or cereal crops. Some years ago I met a Mr Schlitz. I b
elieve the young man was attending university over here. He confided to me he did not mind in the least that his ancestral brewmas-ters had made Milwaukee famous; what he objected to was that their beer on his name, as it were, embarrassed him ‘all to hell.’

  Greater Los Angeles, her earlier adobe and wooden Gothic now overshadowed by skyscrapers modelled on sixteenth-century haciendas, her blazing stucco flanked by enormous imported palms, from Africa and Australia, shading the parameters of implacable boulevards, now fills four thousand square miles. She is truly the Zukunft Kaiserstadt Imperye Yishov fun tsukunft! The Emperor City of the Future. And at her core history converges, coalesces, transmutes, reforms; not in the cool serenity of her City Hall, twenty-five storeys of splendid white Sumerian cement, not on the site of Yang-Na, mestizo Carthaginian outpost destroyed by internecine wars of her Catholic soldier-priests; not in her tar pits or observatories, her museums and universities; not even in her fantastic cults which have made of reality a globe filled with quicksilver. The core of Greater L.A. is where Vine Street crosses Hollywood Boulevard, that unremarkable collection of office blocks, shops and cinemas. Daily, when I was young, this intersection and the surrounding area, might fill with Roman Centurions, Spanish religious processions, convoys of Indian elephants bearing great howdahs from which drifted clouds of multicoloured silk; the armies of Norman France and Anglo-Saxon England, of Catherine the Great and Bismarck and Napoleon; the mob of the Paris streets in 1793 and the fighting Cossacks of Stenka Razin; the Royal Progress of the first Ming Emperor; Cowboys, Indians, Comic Police; the very failure of ‘authenticity’ is a sign that here was America’s true melting-pot. It was a melting-pot of Time. Of cultures. A million points of view like the infinite facets of some unstable gem. The Yellow and Red Cars come and go in their electric confidence; lines of power and communication strengthen Hollywood’s already complicated aesthetic. Etiolated Tahitian palms wave in an unlikely breeze next to the cypresses of ancient Jordan, the oaks of England and the poplars of the Rhone; all washed to pastels by her misty light. This same light lends shivering magic to her hills, as if, when we step beyond a certain unbakant frontier, we will find ourselves elsewhere in Time, possibly Space, too, and Hollywood vanished behind us: a whisper in the distant skies, a faint scent of coffee, paint and freshly sawn wood. She, above all, is still free. She is the perfect model of myflitshtot, my promise of hope. To her majesty, those beach towns were boisterous tumblers, summoned for her entertainment; save for Long Beach, a resentful, hard-working boyar, forever predicting the capital’s unrealised doom.

  Mrs Cornelius, Mabel, Ethel, Mr Harry Hope and myself (our Brooklyn Indian had been lost to some nameless drunk tank) were now in direct competition with the chugging pumps and rattling rigs, the calliopes of a dozen whirling rides, with barkers’ shouts and the noisy excitement of the crowd itself; but we did not care. Here were the easy landscapes of childhood interludes and we felt, as always, that we had come home. I was now determined not to let Mrs Cornelius down. I put everything I had into my part. Never had a Cossack officer spoken in such thrilling fury, with such meaningful gestures, as I cried to the unseen hordes of Bolshevism encircling me: ‘Back, you cowards! Before God, the Tsar and Holy Russia I swear I shall be revenged on some of you and send you to that Last Tribunal where a greater power than I shall judge and condemn you for your crimes!’ (I was then saved by Mrs Cornelius, in her khaki tunic and tights, who had been convinced by my earlier arguments that the cause she had served was evil, cruel and destructive.) She responded marvellously; acting with boldness and flare. If Cecil B. DeMille had actually been in the audience he might have offered us contracts on the spot. From habit, I looked to see if John ‘Mucker’ Hever was in his usual place. He had deserted us. No flowers appeared backstage.

  That evening, before we went on for our final performance, Mrs Cornelius remained in high spirits. She appreciated the effort I had made. She told me I could be a wonder when I wanted to be. She hoped I would stop making a fool of myself and maybe have a try at the East Coast theatres again. We could start in Atlantic City. I reminded her I might soon be sitting behind an engineer’s desk but I promised not to leave the company without fair notice. We heard our music beginning and virtually danced out onto the stage with our opening number (The Devil Came To Russia And The Devil Waved A Flag to the tune of The Animals Went In Two By Two). Again we had the audience captivated. We knew we were, as they say, ‘flying’. It was not until Ethel at the piano struck up our finale The Hammer And The Sickle Can’t Crush Or Tear Our Hearts to Marching Through Georgia) that I looked for ‘Mucker’ Hever and saw instead, with arms folded across their chests, five hooded Klansmen at the back of the hall. My mouth became instantly dry. I could scarcely croak out the remaining verse. My legs were weak; my stomach felt as if a knife had pierced it. Mrs Cornelius was alarmed. ‘Wot ther bloody ‘ell’s ther matter?’ she whispered. Then, as the audience whistled, stamped and applauded, the five Klansmen began to clap. They clapped regularly, at a slightly slower beat than the rest of the crowd and they continued to clap, increasing the beat slightly, until one of them raised a clenched gauntlet above his head. ‘Death to the Three Jays! Death to Jew, Jap and Jesuit! Death to the Alien Creed!’ I had expected them to rush the stage and attempt to carry me off. My first thought was that Callahan had betrayed me. Now, unless they were playing a cat-and-mouse game with me, I believed those five sincere. Klansmen of the Alte Kdmpfer who still clung to the original ideals of the Umzikhtbar Imperye. We took two curtain calls, which we had never done before. We bowed and waved. I grinned like a puppeteer’s idiot doll. When we came to take the third call, the Knights of the Invisible Empire had vanished and the audience was filing from the little hall. ‘I ‘ope them bastards don’t make a reg’lar fing o’ this.’ Mrs Cornelius released my hand. ‘They could bleedin’ lose us ‘arf the ‘ouse.’ I had my own reasons for wishing them gone. In the dressing-room she made me drink a tumbler of noxious Mexican brandy. ‘Yore sweatin’ like a pig! Wot scared ya this time? Them silly buggers in their nighties? Jes’ a bunch o’ overgrown kids muckin’ abart.’ She chuckled. ‘Didn’t fink they wos real ghosts, did yer?’ She poured me another dark brown slug.

  Beginning in the dressing-room we both got rather drunk, as we had on the Rio Cruz so long ago, singing the Cockney songs which were her real favourites but most of which were never appreciated in America. She revealed she had been ‘almost sorry’ when Lenin died. ‘I wosn’t surprised ‘e croaked so sudden. ‘E wos a maniac fer work.’ She laughed. ‘Anyfink ter stop worryin’ abart real people. I must admit, my Leon’s ther same, but I fink ‘e’ll do a better job, if they give ‘im ther chance. Not likely though, is it, ‘im bein’ a yid?’ Her prediction was surprisingly accurate. Within ten years, Stalin had cleansed his ruling committee of every single Jew. A Georgian returns always to his simple roots. We cannot be seduced as easily as your Moscow intellectual. I reminded Mrs Cornelius I had no personal or sentimental attachments to Bolsheviks. They were all bloody handed mass murderers. Drug-besotted lunatics. She nodded her acquiescence, as if this was a fact everyone took for granted. ‘Yeah.’ She seemed to wait for me to enlarge on my theme, but I had said all there was to say. ‘Oh, they’re that orl right,’ she said.

  She sprawled against her tiny dressing-table, still in khaki and jackboots, nostalgically remembering how she and I first met in an Odessan dentist’s surgery. Because of the drink she could not recall when she had next seen me. She was with Trotski’s Red Army, I said. She had saved my life in Kiev. Put me on the train which, by chance, led me to Esmé. She smiled and patted my cheek. ‘Wot a funny ol’ pair of bedfellows we are, eh?’

  ‘Never quite,’ I said.

  This made her laugh.

  Die Rosen wachsen nicht in den Himmel. Esmé, mayn fli umgenoyen ist. Bu vest komen. Hob nisht moyre. Vifl a zeyger fort op der shif keyn Nyu-York? Vifl is der zeyger? S’iz heys. Ikh red nit keyn Yiddish! IKH RED NIT KEYN YIDDISH! Blaybn lebn … Mayn s
nop likht in beyn-hashmoshes… Es tutmirleyd. Esme! Es tut mir leyd!

  Nekhtn in ovnt … Next day I once again gave my best as a performer. In our own eyes at least we had become a perfect stage union, the kind of romantic duet one now saw regularly on the screen. White Knight and Red Queen was almost real to us. The illusion was shared by our audience (ordinary people can, whatever cynics say, appreciate serious emotional drama) and it also served to decrease my by now habitual worrying about Esmé. I became, as a result, almost addicted to the part: looking forward to our shows as I never had before. A telegram from Tivoli told me the choice of ship was unimportant. The only problem was the fare. She loved me and was eager to see me again. Was I sure I wanted her there? Ikh farshtey nit. Firt mikh tsu, ikh bet aykh, tsu di Heim. Khazart iber, zayt azoy gut. I don’t understand. I replied by return that the fare was on its way and I counted the hours until we were reunited.

  It was at that evening show I noticed with dismay John ‘Mucker’ Hever back in his usual seat close to the stage, all but drooling in his infatuation for Mrs Cornelius. Yet I was in a way comforted to see him. Our performance was perfect. He must have given himself blisters on his palms, he clapped so hard. Like clockwork, Mr Hever arrived at the stage door in time to be blocked by me. Ritually, I accepted his expensive red and white roses and his ivory card. He was an eager, dewy-eyed boy, keener than ever, promising anything for an introduction to my co-star. She had never acted more brilliantly. She was an English Bernhardt. She was perfection itself. ‘Please understand, sir, that I have never done this sort of thing before. I’m no stagedoor johnny. I’m in love, sir.’ A thought came to him (rather late, in my view) ‘My God! You’re not her husband?’