Röhm was not the swaggering gamecock later journalists made of him when he could no longer defend himself. Time magazine might refer to him as a ‘plug-ugly pederast’, but that was because his enemy Goebbels had taken over the propaganda arm from Strasser, whom he hated. Röhm usually disdained interviews. He was actually a subtle, contemplative human being who had reasons for every position he held. One of the reasons he had never wanted anything to do with women, he said, was because they really did soften a soldier. A man who gives up any of his power to a woman immediately loses a disproportionate amount of his power; useful, directed, positive, aggressive power. The same power in a woman becomes diffused, negative, random, passive.
‘They waste every part of a man.’ He knew that I was very fond of women. I think he believed he could persuade me to his viewpoint. Of course, his main concern was Hitler. He was not the only one who continued to worry that Hitler’s obsession with Angela Raubal was seriously weakening him in every way, just at the moment when triumph could have been his. Even Goebbels, the great womaniser, believed that. Himmler, Röhm told me, hated her for her influence over the Führer. Everyone had asked Hitler to give Geli up, but he would rather have lost his chance of greatness than break with her.
‘The bitch is a drag anchor on the entire movement,’ Röhm complained. ‘If she loses us the Chancellorship, she goes in the sack and into the river like any other alley cat that becomes a nuisance.’
His words were often blood-curdling but spoken so casually or so softly that they contradicted themselves. His penchant for extravagant language earned him his reputation for braggadocio. I never, of course, saw him speak to the Reichstag.
Several of our visitors that August grumbled about Geli. All loyal Nazis, mostly ‘old fighters’ who had followed Hitler from the beginning, they did not so much blame the girl as what they called ‘the situation’. From the letters and drawings he had seen, Röhm knew what Geli was prepared to give Hitler, and he knew what a powerful effect this had on him.
‘He’s addicted to her,’ said Röhm, not for the first time. ‘And I suspect she’s addicted to him by now. That’s how it works. Folie à deux. You shouldn’t arouse such huge feelings in a woman. They can’t handle it. They either go to pieces or try for their own power. She’s got her teeth around his cock, and she’s dragging him wherever she wants him to go. God knows what she’s telling people. If any of our opponents get through to her and she blabs, it will ruin him. One statement to Hindenburg, show him one picture, and the old fart will turn completely against Hitler. He’s none too flattering about him now! Alf might as well concede defeat before ever trying to run for the Chancellorship.
‘The public will forgive a lot, Mashi. They’ll turn a blind eye to more. But, well, as you know, we’re not talking about honest fun between boys here, or putting the odd little chicky up the stick. We’re talking piss and shit, to be frank. Whips and shackles! And that goes too far. That stuff’s not likely to endear the big industrialists to him, and that’s who he’s going to bed with these days. The bastard’s sucked more Big Business dicks in the past six months than most whores see in a lifetime.’
That was the most he ever told me about Hitler’s private life at that time. I could easily imagine the rest. At the age of thirty-one I think I can safely say I was familiar with most of life’s diversions. Anything I had not learned from al-Habashiya was not worth knowing, according to Röhm. I did not, of course, tell him the whole story. That was impossible for me then, and it remains impossible. There are some things which no sane human being wishes to relive. My time with Röhm during that unsettling period had more to do with refinement than discovery.
‘I am besotted with you,’ Röhm admitted happily one evening when just the two of us lay upon the thin mattress placed upon the wide marble slab which was his bed. ’I can’t tell you what a comfort you are, Mashi, in these difficult days.’
He would speak to me vaguely about Berlin politics, his conversations with General von Schleicher, I. G. Farben and others. They were all courting him and Strasser now. If he wanted to, he could dine out every night of the week at some aristocrat’s or general’s house. ‘Strasser’s always been able to get on with those people. A few months ago they wouldn’t have let the rest of us be waiters in their clubs. Now the army’s coming round. Half the staff are already on our side. Some are open Nazis. They like the idea of a People’s Army.’
Röhm believed that the public’s eyes were at last opening to the dangers facing Germany and the solutions that he and his friends presented. ‘They’re getting nervous, these big boys. Funk, Cuno, Wolf, von Schroeder, Diehn, Thyssen, Bechstein and the rest are falling over themselves to meet Hitler in the Alps, at Berchtesgaden, in railway sidings, abandoned warehouses, old factories. Anywhere the press can’t catch them. They don’t want to be seen with Hitler any more than he wants to be seen with them. The party rank and file wouldn’t understand how we’re exploiting Big Business, and we couldn’t afford to explain. But it makes me uncomfortable. My only consolation is what I’ll do to the bastards when the power’s in my hands. They fear a threat to their comfortable lives. They’re afraid Germany will fall to the Bolsheviks. They can’t see she can as easily fall to us and that we are no better friends of Big Business than the Bolshies. They’re all beginning to shit their pants. That’s why they began courting us, giving us money as a kind of insurance, thinking it will buy them their liberty when the revolution comes! They offer compromises before we even state our terms. It always amazes me, Mashi, how eager most people are to give up an advantage when they have almost nothing to be afraid of. Frequently, fearing no more than some minor social embarrassment, they will kill themselves, rather than face the disapproval of their fellows. Those bastards lust after approval the same way I lust after you! It makes them tame and easy to deal with.’ Such thoughts reassured him. He sipped his champagne and smoked his cigar. He stroked my hair, confiding in me as another man might share his thoughts with a wife. ‘You’d be surprised how many sheep one good dog can herd. No disease travels faster and infects more thoroughly than fear. Fear’s a wonderful instrument which you only have to use for a while. Soon people develop a habit of obedience, which becomes in time self-regulation, if not self-discipline.’ This amused him. ‘That’s when we shall have our German Utopia, Mashi. We’ll do it in less than one generation.’
‘Do you wish to die?’ God asked.
‘Yes, God,’ I said. ‘I wish to die.’
‘Do you wish to die painfully?’ God asked.
‘Yes, God,’ I said. ‘I wish to die painfully.’
Only through obedience that is automatic and absolute can one find a centre. I think of it as a core of calmness which is all but inviolate, perhaps the soul. A rare being, a god indeed, can find its way to the soul to torture and even destroy that. The true artists of their kind. The true geniuses. Had I the disposition, I could myself have been such a genius.
A wonderful dream. I was so relieved to be back within it. Life at the villa somehow redeemed my Egyptian captivity with al-Habashiya. Röhm would have given me anything I wanted. He called me by pet names. He called me El Vaquero Enmascarado, and indeed I often wore a mask. He loved the mystery of a mask. He was in love with my eyes. They were reflective pools, he said, in which to drown all his cares. The hardness of his hands, gentle as his touch could often be, made my own skin feel a thousand times softer to me. I became deliriously pliable. I had never willingly succumbed to such a force, even with Kolya, my spiritual partner.
I had been anxious, thinking I could be wasting time with Röhm, but I came to realise this interlude was exactly what we both needed. We were cut off from all modern communication, guarded by the gigantic dark green spears of a Teutonic pine forest, enjoying the gentle music of a broad, mountain river, one warm, glorious day following another. Returning from Munich or Berlin, Röhm brought me gramophone records of all the latest jazz tunes, as well as the French chanteuses he enjoyed. Röhm pos
sessed a large sentimental streak that he never revealed to any but his closest friends. He also brought me books and magazines. These helped me catch up on all the latest topics. He even found me some issues of the Sexton Blake Library dealing with matters of the moment, such as striking miners, Arab slavers, the machinations of Big Business and the mysterious death of a man on a London tram. They were in English, so Röhm could not read them. He did not mind. He also brought films back with him. Berlin, he said, was a positive treasure house of erotica. He enthused endlessly over repetitive scenes in which one comely set of buttocks followed another set of massive genitalia into a perpetually pumping, forever ejaculating, future. I could not enjoy them, fearing that the next film he brought home would be one of those I had been lured into making in Egypt. I was always relieved when the scenes began to run, and I was not presented with moving pictures of my own poor sore organs inserted over and over again between Esmé’s ever-yearning orifices. I summoned little enthusiasm for even the most artistic of films and rather hoped that my apparent boredom would discourage him. The films also reminded me of my worries concerning the Baroness. Was she still in Munich? Did she still intend to turn me in?
After an absence of almost a week, Röhm came bustling back. He had been in Berlin, he said, then Munich. Hitler was driving him crazy. I asked him if there had been any messages for me at either the Königshof or the Brown House. He admitted that he had forgotten to ask. ‘But I did receive a visit from an old friend of yours at the Brown House.’
‘Putzi? Captain Göring?’
Like a kindly uncle attending a favourite nephew’s birthday party, Röhm grinned at my puzzlement. ‘Oh no. A much older friend than that.’ He was still wearing his light travelling cape. As he flung it off he threw a large buff envelope on to the sofa beside me. ‘She brought me a present. She’d been trying to see Hitler for a week. He’s still in Berlin being an arsehole while his girlfriend’s screwing the chauffeur. Your friend’s going to Vienna, she said, with her husband, so asked me to pass this on to the Führer, who hadn’t had time to see her. Naturally I told her it would be in his hands within twenty-four hours. She went to Vienna a happy woman. I think when she gets back next month, she expects me to present her with a wallet made of your delicious skin, Mashi.’
Sipping his champagne cocktail, he watched me as I sat down heavily on the couch. Because of the heat I was virtually naked and felt suddenly vulnerable. He said nothing. He merely went on watching me, loosening his jerkin as I undid the envelope and drew out that dossier of lies and misunderstandings which the former Baroness von Ruckstühl, Frau Oberhauser, claimed was the true story of my life. I felt sick. Here were all the French reports accusing me of deliberately setting out to ruin honest people. Here were stories of my ‘swindling’ the Turks, stories which claimed I was a member of Stavisky’s gang, a Jew from Odessa. The lies were endless, yet all supported by alleged facts and offered in the most authoritative tones.
I began to stammer that I was a victim of a long-standing campaign, that she had manufactured all this material.
‘I’m getting used to this sort of thing,’ said Röhm comfortably. He came and sat down next to me. ‘Let’s have a look at it together, Mashi, shall we? What a naughty little type you seem to have been . . .’
It must have cost a fortune to assemble that dossier. I was astonished at its detail, a careful and clever selection of material designed to show me in the worst light. The praise, for instance, that I had received for my political speeches in the USA was mentioned nowhere, nor was my extensive work with the knights of the Ku Klux Klan. My acting career was all but ignored. Mucker Hever’s version of events was given where my steam-car was concerned. He was quoted extensively, but with no mention of his jealousy. My misfortunes were presented as if I had planned a series of elaborate swindles. Yet I had always earned my living honestly. My own trusting character, which rarely questioned a contract, or indeed demanded one, was what had let me down, not some venal ambition.
‘We couldn’t have done better ourselves,’ said Röhm. ‘This is OGPU quality.’ He spoke with some humour. To my enormous relief he understood the dossier to be a fake. ‘You’ve obviously offended some powerful Bolshies, Max.’
I thought at once of Brodmann. Obviously the new Frau Oberhauser could not have put the dossier together herself. Brodmann and his Chekists had compiled the file and passed it on to her. They intended to ruin my status with the Nazis.
I saw Brodmann recently in the pub. I needed to have words with him, but he was always too quick for me to confront. Passing the Soviet Embassy in Bayswater, I pointed him out to Mrs Cornelius. She said it could be any old Russian Jew. It could be me, she said. She knows how to upset me.
Generous as ever, she begins to distribute her son’s largesse. ‘Double vodka, Ivan?’ she says, waving a fiver. ‘Same again all round.’ I take the money and go up to the bar. Mo Collier is glancing at a book while he pretends to wash glasses. It is called The Anarchist’s Guide to Applied Terrorism. These untried young men think revolutionary politics is a romantic game. One cudgel landing a few times across his narrow little bottom and he would soon discover what kind of game it is. Personality disappears under punishment. The Communists and the National Socialists did not believe in babying their political opponents. It was the nature of the age. Only the flyers had time for chivalry. On the ground and in the streets it was total war. But what the history books will not admit is that we were often defending ourselves. We were forced to fight fire with fire.
Collier ignores me and my proffered note. Suddenly he picks up a brass handbell and begins to ring it. ‘Time!’ he yells furiously. ‘Time!’
I put the money in my pocket.
‘There’s one thing I am sure of,’ said Röhm after we had looked at the file. ‘You’re not Jewish. I can smell a Jew at a hundred paces, and you don’t smell like a Jew. You smell like an Italian-American. Believe me, it’s absolutely distinctive. But it would be bad news for you if Hitler, or worse Himmler, saw this. They’re like Father Stempfle. Anyone who isn’t pale as a corpse and with a shock of blond hair is potentially a Jew. This, I’ll admit, makes most of us potential Jews. We’re going to have to start offering more precise definitions if we’re going to deal seriously with the problem of separating citizens from non-citizens.’
‘They would believe me Jewish just because a crazy woman has accused me? Just because I have Mediterranean looks?’
‘Some of them will believe you’re a Jew if you can walk and talk and count up to ten.’ Röhm laughed heartily and gave me a friendly punch. ‘And if they thought you’d been inside the Brown House! Oy vey! They’d be looking for a Jerusalem colonel to cashier on the spot.’ He made as if to flick a cigarette lighter. That was SA code for a gun. ‘No, Mashi, I’ve no intention of losing you just yet.’
By this I understood that he was not going to pass the file on. ‘Oh, I’ll do what I’ve done before in situations like this. Usually, when someone’s discovered to their horror that some local SA boss is of the Spartan persuasion, I pass on a page or two of the more innocuous “evidence”. Just looking at that makes it clear the person is exaggerating. They seem to be the lunatics and nit-pickers. That way if she asks Hitler about it, he’ll say he’s seen it and dismissed it. She won’t be able to pursue it, and everything will be fine. There’s nothing to it.’
I told him I would be for ever in his debt.
He smiled that shy little smile of his. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘repayment shouldn’t be too arduous for you.’
My relief was enormous. Our celebration was extensive. The cocaine consumption alone was staggering! That same night, a couple of hours before dawn, a car called for Röhm. He had to go back to Berlin. I was rather pleased. I would need time to recover from his somewhat excessive demands.
‘Time!’ cries Collier. The sound of his bell would cut through even the happiest ambience. Here it sounds as if it tolls for the end of salvation. Grey heads rise up. Bottles are
lowered or hastily lifted.
‘Your glasses, gentlemen, please. Look to your glasses!’
This English ‘closing time’ is a nuisance. Mrs Cornelius offers Collier some incoherent insult. ‘An’ they say the Nazis was tyrants!’ She takes my arm. ‘Come on, Ivan. We’ll ‘ave a drink at ‘ome.’
Outside the sun is still trying to break through. We stand on the concrete pavement near the public toilets while Jerry and Frank reassure their mother they will be visiting her soon. Billy Beesley rolls from the newsagent removing the paper from two Mars bars. He has eaten one before he rejoins us. A little brown stuff, like blood, trickles into his jowls. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘I have some parishioners to visit. I’ll say pip-pip for the mo.’ Miss Brunner, it seems, has already left. We watch Beesley’s stately mince as he disappears into the crowd.
“E looks like ‘e’s found himself another mark,’ says Mrs Cornelius without much relish. “E’s only been out a week. Poor cow ‘ooever she is. Anyone deserves better than Billy.’