The Vengeance of Rome

  He told me all this in the interrogation room at Gestapo headquarters. He treated me kindly. I had drunk the promised coffee, eaten a sandwich, smoked a cigarette. He played no games with me. He let me see my massive Gestapo dossier, mostly taken from Prince Freddy’s own records. He explained how it had been compiled and why he could not possibly intercede for me without immediately condemning himself to a concentration camp.

  ‘The evidence is too strong, Dimka dear.’

  ‘But Kolya, I am accused only by a dead woman, her mad daughter and a discredited pervert. What crimes have I committed? What proof is there?’

  ‘Under the old German laws, these accusations would need to be proven beyond a shadow of doubt. Under the new German laws, you have committed several crimes not even listed here. Since the Führer cleansed the stables after the Röhm putsch, the party has become increasingly intolerant of deviance, both moral and racial.’

  ‘Kolya, you know I am not a Jew. You know my origins are purely Russian.’

  And in this, I fear, he did betray me. He turned away into the shadows, out of the circle of light created by the overhead lamp. ‘I do not know that, Dimka,’ he said. ‘The evidence is against you. I have explained how, if I were to deny that evidence, I would also be in jeopardy. However aristocratic my blood, I am still, in the eyes of the racialists, an inferior Slav. What I have had to do to convince them of my family’s Nordic origins! We are descended from the Russ who came from Scandinavia to establish their leadership over the Slavs.’

  ‘But that is also my blood,’ I told him. ‘I am from Kiev. My father counted the blood of the Russ in his veins. Our family is as ancient as any on this continent!’

  ‘I believe you, Dimka. But now, if you cannot prove you are not Jewish, you are guilty. Your recent privations have added to that impression. And then there is your circumcision, your connection with Stavisky and his gang, with Odessa.’ He sighed and poured me another cup of coffee, offering me a chocolate Lebkuchen on a plate. ‘My hands are tied, Dimka dear.’

  I accepted the cake and ate it greedily. Many months had passed since I enjoyed one as good. I washed it down with more coffee.

  ‘They have evidence that you did not merely interfere with Fräulein Kitty, Dimka. They know about that young Italian girl, Hecate Frau. You were often seen with her. Some of my colleagues suspect the Fraus were part of an Italian spy ring as they have vanished. We were hoping you knew where they were. And then you apparently had some sort of association with Röhm. Baldur von Schirach helped us there. He seems to have exonerated you from the worst suspicions. These investigations, of course, were not mine. I came rather late to your case. They gave it to me because of your Russian origins and that’s the only reason we are sitting here together. Otherwise, some unsympathetic stranger might have arrested you.’

  ‘I did nothing with that little girl. She was sweet. She was my friend. We had a common interest in the cinema. The family were supporters of Mussolini. They were not subversive in any sense.’

  ‘Aha. The cinema.’ He raised an elegant eyebrow.

  ‘Kolya! Kolya! How can you think such things? We went to cowboy movies together. I was lonely. She loved the cinema. Prince Freddy blackmailed me into that pornography. I hated it. You know how much I hated such things, Kolya. You yourself saved me from my captivity in Egypt!’

  ‘Well, one or two of my colleagues believe the theory that a victim ultimately becomes a predator. My superiors believe you might have been part of a circle of Jewish pornographers and pimps luring young girls into prostitution and making filthy films. They see you as a rather stereotypical Jew. And I must admit your career, at least superficially, verifies such prejudices —’

  ‘I am not a Jew, Kolya. I am not a pornographer. I am not a seducer of little Christian girls! My God, this is like a comic strip from Der Stürmer. You speak of me as if I was invented whole by Streicher!’

  ‘I know, Dimka. But the evidence is so much against you. Frau Oberhauser’s accumulation of press cuttings — the airship scandal, from which, you’ll recall, I was able to save you. In the Paris newspapers you were already characterised as a Jewish swindler. Much as I would like to speak up for you in that matter, I would not be believed. My bosses have already read the files. Their minds are made up.’

  ‘My letters to Göring offering to help in the rebuilding of the German air force! My one-man airship? What about those? I could still help them build it. The ship would be ideal for spying out enemy territory.’

  ‘I think those letters to Göring might have been a mistake. You know how these people take others’ ideas for their own credit. That’s the whole game these days in Berlin.’

  ‘Then what can you do for me, Kolya?’ I nursed the last inch of coffee in my cup as if I would never taste coffee again. ‘Am I to be returned to Stadelheim? What will my sentence be?’

  ‘There isn’t much I can do, Dimka. But we are having this conversation in the hope that I can find some way of helping you. You will not go to Stadelheim. And you will not be sentenced, as such. Your chances of release are, I will admit, very slim. If you can tell me anything to mitigate whatever fate they plan for you, you must let me know.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘Well, if you have other associates who knew Röhm for instance. You are acquainted with Hanfstaengl, yes? And that traitor, Busch? Perhaps you know where left-wing Jews might be hiding. Any left-wingers, in fact . . .’

  ‘I have no other friends left in Germany. Hanfstaengl would not help me. I did not know Busch was a traitor. What did he do?’

  ‘He was arrested in the early days. When they released him, he tried to go to Vienna, no doubt to broadcast lies about his incarceration. He was arrested again, tried to escape and was shot, it seems. These other friends of yours . . . ?’

  ‘The friends I had were neither Jewish nor left-wingers. They were good Nazis. Even the journalists sympathised with Hitler. I hate socialism and communism, Kolya. You understand that, surely. Look what they have done to our country!’

  ‘Drug dealers, then. Your cocaine habit . . .’

  ‘It wasn’t a habit, Kolya. I have had no cocaine for months. The last I got was from Prince Freddy. He lured me into his confidence. I have been able to buy none since.’

  ‘You had no other contacts in Munich? What about the priest, Father Stempfle? Didn’t you know an SS man called something like Zeuss?’

  ‘I met Stempfle once or twice. In a beer cellar. I never knew any SS men, I swear.’

  ‘No one at Simplicissimus?’

  ‘Nor at the Flashlite.’

  ‘This Gloria Cornish, your co-star, as I understand it —’

  ‘She abhors all drugs. She was a platonic friend of Herr Göring’s. She was forever trying to get me to stop. Do you know where she is now?’

  ‘She might have gone abroad. What can you tell us about her? Her name has been linked with a Major Nye, an English intelligence officer.’

  ‘She hates politics. Nye was infatuated with her, that’s all. I can tell you nothing else. I would rather be shot now than compromise that wonderful woman.’

  ‘Don’t worry. She is in no danger. There was that other Englishman you worked with. Desmond Reid. Was he not a critic of the government?’

  ‘Well, he was no friend of communism. He might even have thought Hitler soft on Röhm. I have had no contact with him since the last picture we made together. I thought he had left the country.’

  ‘He’s in Czechoslovakia. Help yourself, Dimka! Give my superiors something.’

  ‘Have I no right to defend myself against Prince Freddy’s false accusations? Against Kitty’s?’

  ‘Unfortunately Prince Badehoff-Krasnya died in Dachau two weeks ago. He had apparently bribed guards. Sadly he was due to be transferred to better conditions in the Belsen camp. Some relatives had interceded for him. As for Fräulein Kitty, I am told she is no longer in custody. Released from the women’s quarters in Stadelheim, she took a train
immediately for Budapest. I’m afraid they have left you high and dry, Dimka.’

  ‘Contact Mrs Cornelius. Believe me, she is a good friend of Hermann Göring. She will speak for me.’

  ‘I will get in touch with her personally, I promise, assuming she is still in Germany. I am not sure how much good even a well-connected English actress can do for you, however. Have you any other friends?’

  ‘Hanfstaengl is in Berlin, too, isn’t he? Some American journalists.’ I named Morgan and Grisham among them. ‘And Miranda Butter. I don’t know what has happened to her.’

  ‘These are all foreigners and, apart from Miss Butter’s, their words are not worth very much, I fear. She was Mussolini’s mistress for some years and arranged to have many of his articles published in America. Then something happened and she came to Berlin. She was infatuated with Hitler. But Hitler already had people who were buying his articles. She returned to New York last December. Do you know if any of those journalists had reason to oppose the policies of the present government?’

  I could not absorb so much information, if information it was. ‘I have not been in touch with them recently. They were not, I will admit, all entirely enthusiastic about Hitler. But this was ages ago, when I first arrived in Germany. Surely they have long since been replaced by their editors?’

  ‘Anything you can think of will be useful and will in turn let me do what I can to help you. Miss Butter, I think, is beyond reproach. Since returning to America she has written the most laudatory pieces about the Führer. Some have appeared in the New York Times and the Washington Post!

  ‘Then surely she can speak for me,’ I said. ‘I had no idea she was linked with Il Duce, but we were good friends. A word from her would make a difference, wouldn’t it?’

  Kolya lit two cigarettes and handed me one, tapping my dossier with his index finger. ‘We have already interviewed her. She did not speak very well of you at all. She seems to think you a liar and a charlatan who deceived Mussolini with some hare-brained nonsense. She considered you a turncoat, perhaps even an Italian spy. Your behaviour towards her in Rome was apparently not the most gentlemanly.’

  Were all women by nature so treacherous?! ‘It was not I who betrayed her, Kolya. You know how loyal I am to my friends and lovers. I had no choice. That Jewish bitch Sarfatti was forcing me to be her lover. I was being blackmailed.’

  ‘She mentioned your association with that Jewess.’ He flicked through the dossier, pausing now and again to read. ‘You seem to have made yourself rather vulnerable to blackmail, Dimka.’

  ‘I have trusted too many people. Oh, Maddy! Maddy!’ Suddenly I found myself breaking down. My body began to shake. The tears started in my eyes. I could not stop weeping. The tiredness, the humiliation and now this awful shock had taken control of me. How could Maddy, whom I had helped see the political light, who had been my pupil in the ways of the world, betray me? Now I knew she had been Mussolini’s lady friend for so long, much was coming clear. At every turn I had been deceived.

  ‘Shoot me here, Kolya,’ I sobbed. ‘My life is meaningless. All I had hoped to do for the world, all my loyalties, all my loves and friendships, are ashes. I am robbed of any future. My future, too, is ashes.’

  ‘Unfortunately, Dimka dear, I have no orders to shoot you.’ Kolya came to put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Let us continue. There must be something we can think of between us.’

  But there was nothing. My mind was numb. A little later Kolya had me escorted to a comfortable cell and gave orders to let me sleep as long as I needed. He said he would return the next day, and we would put our heads together.

  The following afternoon he supplied me with sheets of paper and a pencil. He asked me to write down the names of the journalists I had known and what I thought of their political attitudes, their failings and weaknesses. Then he asked me a little about Mussolini and the work I had been doing with Il Duce. What surprised me was that he did not show a great deal of interest in my association with the Italian leader. Either Maddy had told them everything or Kolya did not wish to compromise me. Even when I mentioned some of my inventions, Kolya did not pursue this avenue. I suspected his masters knew nothing of my real strengths and weaknesses, and he was not going to compromise me any more than I had already compromised myself.

  I filled the sheet as best I could.

  By the following morning Kolya had finished his interrogation. He had been unable to find anything which would stop the inevitable. I asked what was to become of me. He spread his elegant hands. I would soon be taken to Dachau under indefinite arrest. He would do what he could for me. I would be given a violet armband marking me as a privileged prisoner, an Ehrenhäftling, with an individual cell. If he saw any chance of obtaining my early release he would put matters in motion. Meanwhile, he suggested I reconcile myself to my fate. After all, there were worse ones, including that from which he had rescued me several years earlier.

  I wept when he eventually left my cell. I feared in my heart that I was forsaken for ever, and I would never see him or any of my beloved friends again.

  * * * *

  FORTY-NINE

  Surrounded by heretics, I did not become a Mussulman. I know their object was to make me one: to reduce me from so much to so little would have been their ultimate triumph. In their hearts they understood they had sterilised themselves. To ensure a predictable present, they betrayed their future. Because they were incapable of creativity, they hated any true visionary. To order a world too complex for them, they imposed their simplified pattern and then demanded that the rest of us conform to it. We had to substantiate their infantile certainties. If we refused, we died. Died in the Soviet Union. Died in the Third German Reich. Died in Italy and Spain and Hungary. They died because they refused to deny their experience. They died for justice and the truth. The very men and women who elected to record the complex variety of the world, whose very subjectivity provided us with crucial information, were punished until they conformed or, if they refused, were silenced. I had thought the powers wanted information. I was misguided. They wanted only silence. That which refused to confirm and conform to their views was destroyed. But the evidence for the evidence they could not destroy.

  I do not have my own cell, but I do have the violet armband. This means that I do not suffer what some suffer, but many of my fellow prisoners are suspicious of me. They think I might betray them, I know. The truly privileged live in the Ehrenbunker. They are German politicians, businessmen, aristocrats and high-ranking clergymen. You would not be happy in their part of the camp, my anti-Virgil explains to me. Alles in Ordnung, he reassures me. After a while I become a Lagerschreiber, because my German is not so bad. I report directly to the Rapportführer, who is distant but not especially cruel. What I see others suffering makes me thankful, even though I have no business being in this camp. When I came in the new Zugang I was taken to the Gestapo in the Politische Abteilung, the political department. Their offices were near the main gate (Arbeit macht Frei in wrought iron). I was not tortured much, but the screams of the others encouraged me to good behaviour, as one of the Gestapo men, who appeared to be a friend of Kolya’s, joked. I explained that I was a personal friend of Göring’s and they remarked on how many friends he had in Dachau. You should form a club, they said. But, of course, there can only be two of you in the club at any one time. Three or more and you will be severely whipped. I became used to their mysterious laughter. Now I know to fear it.

  1935. Halfway through my alloted span. I pray for——. I search for ——. How can I communicate with ——? Is —— still with us? Or has —— become senile, still clinging to —— power, refusing —— son his true birthright. The Old Testament is a record of vengeance and cruelty, of unearned authority and unchecked ferocity. Here is the singular God, the only God, the reduced God of Zion. He is not the God I worship. I worship the Trinity. God the Father, Christ the Son and the Holy Ghost. Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Michael, Gabriel and Lucifer. I worship the Trinity.
Here, too, there is no complexity. There is only one truth, one answer.

  My sinister anti-Virgil instructs me in this singularity, guides me from a dark forest through an inferno into purgatory. Abandoned in my exile, like Dante, punished though I commit no crime, I am alone, longing for my sweet little Beatrice who has been taken from me not once but three times.