The Laughter of Carthage: Pyat Quartet

  He shook his head adamantly. ‘Only the Justice Department could investigate your bank accounts. You should bear in mind it’s our job to protect people, as well. Why didn’t you come to me? I had a notion you were innocent. I gave you my card.’

  ‘I thought you had finished your enquiry. I could not believe I had done anything criminal. But Bessy said you’d jail me.’

  ‘Mr Whiskers wasn’t interested in you. He wanted to get the dope on Bessy Mawgan, enough to send her down for a long stretch. We’re pretty sure she was the Klan fronter for half a dozen side rackets.’ He paused, including narcotics,’ he said. ‘Prostitution. You name it. She and Clarke and that other woman, Tyler, moved in on a fairly small-time gyp. They turned the Klan into big bucks. But Mawgan had the weight as well as the pedigree. Her old man went to the chair for a double burn down in Toledo. We were pretty certain he was her fall guy. Did you have any idea of that?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘That was my hunch. You, I could get through to. You were an amateur. But she was an old campaigner. She was spreading the slush money. She was delivering the chippies and practically anything else, from gazoonies to moonshine, to darned near every official and politician in the country willing to take a squeeze. So, we need to have the goods on her if we want her to sing.’ He paused. That’s why I’m willing to do a deal with you, Mr Pallenberg.’

  ‘You want information from me?’ I had none worth the name. Mrs Mawgan had always kept her other business affairs secret. He took my hesitation for fear, or possibly loyalty.

  ‘She put you on the spot. Why shouldn’t you tip her up? It you’re worried about recriminations, I’ll guarantee you’ll never have to take the stand. We’ll cover you all ways. And you can go on doing whatever it is you’re doing now. Anything you like, once you’ve whistled the whole tune and put your signature at the bottom.’

  I saw a chance of immediately saving Esmé. ‘What about the money in my banks?’ I asked. ‘Will you release that?’

  ‘Can’t. On account of the order we used. It’s recorded as suspected criminal profits. When Mrs Mawgan takes a fall, or better still when all the crooks she was slipping the squeeze to are in the slammer, we’ll be able to do something about that. Meanwhile we prefer to know where you are. As our secret witness, we don’t want you leaving the country. You get an automatic “indefinite stay”. All you have to do is finger the floozy who put the spot on you. If you won’t, it’s hello Russia.’

  I was convinced. It seemed I could gain my freedom, but disappointingly still had to find money for Esmé’s fare. I decided, in the interests of justice and for the sake of those I loved, to make a statement. I felt like a rat, but I had no choice. I talked into the night, dearly wishing I could get to my cocaine to keep my thoughts in order. I mentioned every name which came back to me. I made it clear that Major Sinclair was an idealist. Prompted by my Confessor I invented orgies, murders, perversion and pay-offs. Some I did not know by name, I said, but I gathered they were big wheels in Washington. I excelled myself as an inventor. George Callahan was almost crooning with joy by the time I took the fountain pen from his hand and signed myself Max Peterson on the last page. ‘That’s peachy,’ he murmured in his strange Irish accent. ‘That’s peachy, Mr Peterson.’ He closed the book. ‘Now, so long as you haven’t pattered me, we’re in business. All we have to do is locate Mrs Mawgan, get her lagged and tagged on the strength of this little brief and we can start going against the politicians we’re really after. I’m much obliged. You might not understand, or care, but you’ve performed an important public service this night.’ He was virtually rubbing his hands.

  ‘I do realise it, Mr Callahan. I’ve no desire to associate with criminals. Had I been a degree more au fait with your country I should not be in this position.’

  ‘For my part, Mr Peterson, I’m mighty grateful.’ There was a gleeful smirk on his thin, monkish face which he could not quite erase. As he left, he handed me a fresh card. ‘If you’re in any sort of a scrape, call that number and ask for George Callahan.’

  ‘Will the Klan be out for blood now, Mr Callahan?’ I knew I had sacrificed a great deal in order to be united with my Esmé. The beating outside Walker would be nothing to the ferocious tortures for which the Klan were famous. A good friend, but an implacable enemy, as Eddy Clarke had said. At least he was in jail, though he did not deserve to be. He would have understood my position. Indeed, if he had not been betrayed, I should not have been troubled by the Justice Department, Brodmann or this urgent need to raise money for Esmé’s ticket. Mrs Mawgan, on the other hand, had earned whatever came to her. No one would ever accuse me of betraying her. She had fled Walker, leaving me to the renegade Klansmen. Even then, given a choice, I would not have brought witness against her. But any rational person would agree that if a woman had to be sacrificed it should rightly be Mrs Mawgan. Esmé was in need of help. My innocent sister, my daughter, my love! Oh, how I would pile roses on her bed. Schönen roten rosen for meyn freydik froy! Moja siostra rózy. Meyn gelihte! She will save me from this groylik gadles! She will restore the truth. With her beside me, my cities shall take to the air again. No enemies shall I fear. Die Freunde sink gekommen und die Feinde entkommen!

  Mrs Cornelius sitzt am Steuer. She could see I had not slept. Though she hated driving, feeling she somehow lost face by doing so, she took over when we left town next morning, bound for Hollister. She was an inexpert, if lordly, motorist, with her fringed green satin up to her thighs and her powerful muscles flexing as she manipulated the van towards the highway, cursing continuously. She paused long enough to ask me, almost sympathetically, if I had been frightened by something. Then I told her of my visit from the Federal officer. ‘Blimey,’ she said, ‘we c’d orl be in jug. Me an’ the free girls’re illegal too, ain’t we?’

  ‘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 bleeding 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 th
e 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 believe the young man was attending university over here. He confided to me he did not mind in the least that his ancestral brewmasters 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 my flitshtot, 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.