The Vengeance of Rome

by Michael Moorcock

  There was some problem with a room. They had been told of my absence and put my trunks in storage. But they had not been told of my return. I was waiting impatiently for the matter to be settled and crossed the lobby to buy a Völkischer Beobachter when suddenly I was on the other side of the revolving newspaper rack staring into the frigid face of the Baroness von Ruckstühl.

  I was too surprised and too exhausted to pretend. I lifted my hat.

  ‘My God!’ she said. ’Where have you been? You smell like a whore.’

  The mistake was a genuine one. Having no time to bathe, I had borrowed some of Röhm’s cologne before leaving the house.

  ‘Good afternoon, Leda,’ I said. ‘You look well. Are you a guest here, too?’

  ‘Why should I be a guest here?’ She spoke belligerently, without affection, but I sensed a quiver of the old spark.

  I must admit I was reluctant to leave her until I had some idea of what she was doing in Munich. Knowing her hatred of me from the incident on the train, I blew, as best I could, upon older embers. I told her how attractive she was, how she had lost none of her sex appeal, her beauty. Could we perhaps have tea together? A woman of that age is always hungry for such praise. She told me, rather urgently, that she was married. She was now Frau Oberhauser. She did not warm to me. I said it would be good to speak to her alone, to go over old times, to tell her what had happened to me, how I had been trying to contact her. Neither of us referred to the meeting on the train. I was now, of course, clean-shaven.

  ‘But you have nothing to tell me,’ she said. ‘I already know all there is to know.’ Her smile was unfriendly.

  ‘I do not understand,’ I said. ‘I have been abroad for so long.’

  ‘Indeed,’ she said. She was lucky enough to be in possession of an entire dossier on my movements since I had left Constantinople and turned up in Paris in the expatriate community. She had some wonderful news cuttings from America, for instance. As she murmured her triumph, I could barely keep my composure. She spoke quietly and we were not overheard, but I suspect she did not care if there were listeners. It appeared, she said, that I had swindled my way across at least two continents before hiding myself in Cairo.

  I told her that I had had no chance of defending myself. I had been protecting others. She knew me. Was I a monster?

  I do not believe I have ever been as wounded by laughter. I begged her to take a glass of tea with me. ‘And now I know where you are,’ she said, and swept into the crowded lobby, leaving through the glass doors to a car. I still did not know where she lived. All I had was a name. I seriously regretted my impatience in leaving Röhmannsvilla.

  It took several hours for a room to be found for me. Some sort of crisis was afoot. The political situation in Germany remained highly volatile. Banks were closing down, and ordinary people were panicking. The radio and newspapers appealed for people to keep their heads. But they had nothing else to lose. There were dozens of rumours about seizures of power, tycoons fleeing the country, a peasant army on its way to Berlin. They grew increasingly fantastic. I had too many other things on my mind. I tried to put a telephone call through to Rome, to Margherita Sarfatti. I could contact no one else without arousing suspicion.

  I barely understood the news. So much had been going on, I suppose, that it was impossible to explain. New names were everywhere. Old ones had vanished. This situation was critical. That one was calm. In the end I decided to wait until I met a party friend who would explain everything to me.

  Luckily the hotel made no fuss about my bill. They had been reassured earlier by Putzi’s involvement with me and had seen me arrive in an SA car flying the Stabschef’s flag. My room was a little small and at the back of the hotel looking down on the garages, but I was lucky to have it.

  I made several more telephone calls. Erna Hanfstaengl, Putzi’s sister, told me her brother was in Berlin. ‘They’re all in Berlin, Max. There’s a different crisis every twenty-four hours. I doubt if anyone will be back in Munich until the weekend at least.’

  It soon became evident, especially after my encounter with the Baroness, that this was the best time to leave. I would offend no one. They were all too involved with their politics. Yet I still had no money and no credit. In the atmosphere of panic, there would be little I could sell which would raise me what I needed. I decided to try my friends in the Roman press corps. Tom Morgan was in Milan. I left a message with his secretary. I put through another call to Billy Grisham, but again the lines were saturated. Eventually someone from his bureau got through to me. They thought I was their Munich stringer. They told me Grisham was already in Berlin. When I asked for his number they said it was the same as always. I had made them suspicious.

  None of the other numbers I tried were of any use. Some had been changed while I was away. I felt totally isolated in the middle of so much urgent activity. I did not, of course, wish to call Röhm, for I knew he would object to my leaving. Göring, my other important acquaintance, was still, I understood, with his dying wife. That newborn Bait Seryozha was as likely to want to borrow from me as lend me the money for my ticket, and I had other reasons for not wishing to resume contact with him. He had clearly been dropped by Röhm.

  My inattention to the newspapers for the past couple of weeks meant that everything I overheard was a mystery. The only familiar names were Hindenburg and Hitler. Chiefly the conversation was about money and business and the failure of the banks. The consensus was that America, with considerable troubles of her own, could no longer keep Germany afloat. Once again the Fatherland faced the appalling inflation of earlier years. Already people were becoming suspicious of cash. I felt that I should buy my ticket before I needed millions just to tip the conductor. I tried the Bürgerbräukeller, the Hofbräuhaus, the Eberlbräuhaus, the Löwenbräuhaus and the Löwenbräukeller, all favourite Nazi beer cellars. The young men in the Thorbräukeller, a regular meeting place for the SA, were positively rude. I found no one I recognised.

  At length I decided to take a stroll in the tranquillity of Briennerstrasse. The great houses seemed as tranquil and as inviolable as ever. The Brown House, flanked by trees, had acquired a look of permanence and stability. I waited nearby for a while in the hope of seeing a friend. Instead, I received nothing but insults from the untrained boys, unaware of my standing, who came and went in their battered trucks and delivery vans. At one point I saw a more experienced SA man caution one of these green recruits. I tipped my hat to him as I went by. I bore them no animosity. I recognised in them a vitality which might sometimes express itself crudely but was renewing Germany at last. They did not understand how much we had in common.

  Everyone of any importance was in Berlin. I took my supper at the hotel. I had no choice. Because I remained unsure of the Baroness’s intentions, I found it difficult to settle down with a book and wait for something to happen. Did she plan to expose me there and then to the Munich press? I was reluctant to walk out on the streets in the evening, since I had already been the object of mockery. I wondered what the same people would say if I put on my Fascist uniform or told them that I was a captain in the SA.

  As I passed the concierge’s desk one of the under-managers saw me and called politely, handing me a large envelope containing a telegram. I opened it up. Tom Morgan had sent it. I was a little baffled by the message.

  REPORTS OF YOUR DEATH CLEARLY EXAGGERATED STOP BUT SHOULDNT YOU BE IN ALBANIA QUERY CALL ME SOONEST STOP TOM

  The only Albanian I knew was Rose von Bek, and I was convinced by now that she was dead. Was Tom’s query connected with her? And who had reported my own death? It was too late to telephone his office, and he had not left another number. I assumed there had been a simple confusion or that Tom was joking. I would have to be patient and wait until morning to find out. There would be no one at Tom’s office before then.

  I had not felt quite so desolate and uneasy for some while. I was confident of my overall security, for I knew some of the most powerful men in Europe, yet I w
as still nervous. However, if civil war broke out in Germany, as some were predicting, Munich was better for me than Berlin. I could get over the Swiss, Czech or Austrian borders fairly easily. My best bet, I decided, was to concentrate on finding a car I could use.

  After the War I ran a small repair business until they closed down the arches. I was next door to a man who specialised in pre-war and American automobiles. He made a fortune. Every so often I was able to help him with a difficult job. When the council decided in its wisdom to move us out, I could not afford the expensive shops they offered me in Bassett Road. Besides, I said, the entire row was condemned. I happened to know that. The council is completely corrupt. All Jews and Yorkshiremen. They notoriously look after their own. It was some years before I could open up in Portobello Road, because of the short lease. Mrs Cornelius told me about the place. Her children were small then.

  Frank Cornelius is trying to sell Miss Brunner a Ford Fiesta. Miss Brunner points out to him that she was in the garage when the mechanic told him it was a write-off. He apologises. His memory is not what it was. I would imagine there is hardly a neuron in him unsubjected to a bath in some mind-bending acid or other. He no longer describes his body as ‘speeded-up circuitry’ as he did in the sixties. It seems to me that much of the circuitry is already burned out. His head hangs with superfluous skin as if he wears a larger man’s face. His clothes, intended to disguise his origins and display the authority of a higher class, are growing threadbare and stained. I have more fashionable shmatte in my shop.

  Mrs Cornelius has been in the toilet for twenty minutes. I think she could be throwing up. Her other son comes in, looks around and is about to leave. I have nothing better to do. I raise my hand to him. He comes towards me. He is too thin. His long jacket and tight trousers make him look like some kind of Teddy boy in a woman’s black wig. He has on those blue two-tone shoes and a T-shirt with ‘Anarchy’ written on it. What can he know of Anarchy? Makhno would have gobbled him for breakfast. He resembles an overgrown Munchkin from The Wizard of Oz. He is trying to get into the entertainment business, his mother says. He is in touch with that rogue Auchinek. Auchinek is today a rock-and-roll manager. Yesterday he was an immigration specialist. The less said about that the better.

  ‘Afternoon, Colonel,’ says Jerry. He at least has never addressed me by anything but my full rank. ‘I was looking for Cathy.’

  His sister is not here. His mother, I say, is in the toilet. He looks at his watch. ‘Bit early, isn’t it?’

  I must admit I was thinking the same.

  I have never liked Jerry. At least Frank works for a living. The only one I ever had time for in that family was Catherine, and now she has become a communist! They were not my children, but I had hopes for them. Mrs Cornelius did not. She expected them to survive, nothing else. How they did it was up to them. She was of the old-fashioned cockney persuasion which felt that if you reached the age of thirteen without major illnesses, you were probably going to live until forty.

  She comes out of the toilet. ‘It’s filthy in there,’ she says. ‘I had ter clean it up a bit. Someone was caught short before they got their knickers darn. ‘Ello, Jerry. I thought you was at Elstree this week.’

  ‘We wound it up early,’ he said. ‘Drink, Colonel?’

  I look at his roll of notes, knowing it will be gone in a day or so, and wonder if I should mention the money I have loaned him over the years. Not once has he paid me back. When he was a boy I used to think he was charging me for his mother’s time. Of course, business was booming in those days, and I was always open-handed. But it was the little girl I liked best. A minx, as her mother said. I still had plans then to return to my old pursuits. I got into the antique clothing line by accident, and it was meant to be a stopgap. At first I just sold military memorabilia on a stall. It did very well. Everyone wants that material. Especially the Nazi daggers. There were so many of them made. Enough for everyone, I used to think. It seemed the whole of Germany was in the SS before the war ended. Of course I had no time for the SS nor for Himmler. He perverted our ideals. He was a criminal. I have never quarrelled with that particular Nuremberg verdict. And it was sheer nonsense for him or Schnauben to suggest I had any hand in his ruthless and entirely indiscriminate killing of unwanted social elements. I was asked some questions. I answered them. Nothing more.

  ‘A blacksmith makes a shovel,’ I used to say. ‘This does not make him a gravedigger.’ How can what one talks about as a mental exercise have any bearing at all on another’s attempt to make that notion an actuality? My involvement with the Nazi Party, such as it was, was entirely idealistic. Gradually, as the years went on, I began to see the weaknesses and perversions of the system, and eventually it became clear to me that the Nazi cause was lost, long before 1945. By then, of course, there was little I could do about it. I was never a fanatical follower of Hitler and, with the exception of Dachau and elsewhere, most of my connections with the party were purely social. In those heady days of 1931 it was impossible not to meet Nazis!

  Jerry passes some notes to his mother. She makes a kissing motion and tucks them away. I am glad to see someone has benefited for once. He has been working as an extra on the set of some science fiction ‘Star Opera’. He becomes the centre of their attention. Mrs Cornelius and I were once genuine stars, with our own series, but we did not talk and we were not in colour. At least in the American pictures. The German ones have disappeared. You never see them. In those days our films concentrated on subtleties of character. The plots had a strong moral content. Now it is all sensation.

  Jerry talks about actors and the director as if they are his best friends. He tells anecdotes he could not possibly have witnessed. He inflates the importance of his role. He hints that he has slept with screen temptresses. He throws famous Christian names into the air like baubles. He describes the problems of fame. He blossoms into life on the attention of that seedy crowd. Hitler was the same. Why can no one ever see through these people?

  Moorcock, who has already glamourised them in his cheap melodramas, seems as happy to swallow Jerry’s tarnished offerings as anyone. He buys him a drink. He is clearly besotted, totally fooled, just as all his kind were in the thirties. Offer these middle-class thrill-seekers a smooth-talking gangster and they fall over themselves to report his lies. Offer them your experience, your certain knowledge of repressed truths, and they laugh at you and turn what you say into a joke. There is a fashionable way of putting these things which I have never learned. Yet if they would listen to me, they would hear so much! They are ridiculously impatient. The young are incapable of reading. They have a diet of tabloid filth and BBC indoctrination. They are so fond of attacking Mein Kampf (which I do not say is perfect), yet how many of them have read a paragraph, let alone a chapter?

  At that time I accidentally met Father Stempfle, who claimed to have written most of Mein Kampf. As I wandered rather aimlessly through the hotel, I suddenly saw Gregor Strasser in the hotel lounge. To be precise, I heard him first, for his great, bluff Bavarian boom was famous. He was talking to an odd-looking individual who was seated in a corner, huddled deep in one of the big armchairs, trying to steady a coffee cup as he craned his mad chameleon head upwards and spoke urgently to the Nazi leader. I had never been introduced to Strasser, but I knew Röhm would vouch for me. Strasser wore a good, conservative tweed suit and looked every inch the solid South German businessman that he was. Yet his tightly cropped and shaven head revealed the other side of him. He clearly modelled his appearance on that of Mussolini.

  I saw why so many favoured Strasser over Hitler as leader of the Nazi Party. Strasser’s hearty manner made everyone around him feel better. Röhm had told me how Strasser was the most popular man in the Reichstag these days. Even the socialists respected him. Once he heard my story, he would be bound to help me. Hastily I tried to force a passage through the tightly packed chairs towards him. However, fate intervened. We were not to meet. Even as I called his name and began to cross
the lounge, pushing between a press of people taking tea, he turned away, clapping the seated man on the shoulder. ‘Herr Strasser,’ I shouted. But there were too many others creating a babble in the place. He turned, calling out to a top-hatted old gentleman to wait; he was on his way. And then he was gone.

  ‘He’s avoiding you, too, eh?’ said the strange creature to whom Strasser had been talking. I could guess easily who it was. I had heard of him from Röhm and some of the other SA.

  I was brief with him. Clearly Strasser regarded him as a nuisance. Very few visitors to the Königshof wore a rough homespun monk’s habit or, indeed, had quite such filthy fingernails. Obviously the famous Father Bernhard Stempfle who belonged to the old German hermit order of St Hieronymous. His tastes, Röhm had told me, were not always solitary. A contributor to the anti-Jewish and -Catholic press, Stempfle was also employed by Amann, Hitler’s publisher. His work had a similar approach, though was a little narrower. When Amann needed someone to sharpen up Hitler’s rather rambling prose, the priest was the ideal candidate. In those days it was not unusual to be both a trained journalist and a man of the cloth.

  Father Stempfle had been very influential in the early days of the movement. He was the one who acted as a middleman for Hitler when he was blackmailed. I think his mistake was to get too close to the Führer. He grew unwholesomely fascinated with Hitler’s private life. At my silent rebuff, he withdrew like some seedy tortoise first into his habit and then into the shadows of his seat so that it seemed someone had merely thrown an old garment down. I have never seen anyone disappear quite so naturally. The somewhat ostentatious wooden cross around his neck bounced on its rope, then his reptile head appeared above it again glaring at me in the most violent manner!