The Vengeance of Rome - [Between The Wars 04] Read online

  When I had finished my breakfast, Maddy cut us some lines of cocaine. ‘There have been phone calls for you from Tom Morgan of United Press, Signora Sarfatti, who sent her best regards, and Signor Merletti who, I believe, is a tailor. Clearly, things are hopping.’ And she paused.

  I laughed. ‘Maddy, my dear, if I were not discreet I would not have been asked to go where I went last night and last night I would not have been asked what I was asked. Be assured, I have been called to a noble task. One for which God has trained and tempered me over the past decade. All that has happened to me has prepared me for my destiny. I shall be able to rise to the occasion.’ I promised that all would soon be revealed.

  ‘Quite,’ she said, in an affected English way. ‘I’m really not being boring, darling. Do you want me to phone anyone back for you? Billy and Ethel have had to go out - taking their kids to see her aunt, who’s French but living in Tivoli. What do you want to do? Go home?’

  At that moment I could take no further reminders of Margherita Sarfatti’s exotic and bizarre tastes. I elected to remain where I was. ‘What did Tom Morgan want?’

  ‘He said to say, “Welcome aboard.” Does that mean anything to you?’

  I remembered Il Duce speaking of the Fascist Inner Council and its international membership. The gathering of the great and the good dedicated to the task of bringing to reality the Fascist dream. I had already heard it rumoured that Morgan, a great womaniser and spendthrift with a string of mistresses as well as a family to maintain, not to mention a drinking problem and a lifestyle spent with the Italian haut monde, earned a good salary advising Il Duce on American and press matters. His critics said he found it expedient to become a card-carrying Fascist. Only then could he, as a foreigner, be completely trusted. A cynical view. Even when it was discovered to be true and his office fired him, nothing was ever made of it. He continues to work in the US, a successful correspondent, to the present day. I saw him a couple of years ago, when he was covering the coronation, and he had no doubts. ‘Mussolini was the best thing that ever happened to Italy,’ he said, ‘and Hitler was the worst.’ His argument was that Mussolini was a great man responding to his nation’s needs but that Hitler was a fanatic, responsive only to his own appetites and mindless lust for power. We have argued this case many times. ‘Mussolini created Hitler,’ claims Morgan, ‘and Hitler destroyed him.’ It is a persuasive point of view.

  By late afternoon I was dressed. I called Morgan first. He was not available, so I left a message with his desk. Then I called the tailor, who told me that he understood I needed an urgent appointment. Mystified, I agreed. I was expected tomorrow at 11 a.m. The tailor gave me a fashionable address near the Ponte Palatina. Not for the first time I began to sense that I was in a carriage being winched rapidly up to the top of a very high roller-coaster. I knew that at any moment I might find myself hurtling forward at a momentum I could not control. Like all men, I am moved by the tides of history. My curse is that I am aware of it. I know what is happening, but I have no means of controlling it. As Margherita Sarfatti herself later said, my curse is to be eternally conscious. She was a ghoul but she was not a fool.

  She was, it emerged, a possessive ghoul. When I arrived at the tailor the next morning I was greeted with as much servile enthusiasm as if I had been the Pope himself. A horde of little boys and girls began helping me off with my clothes, measuring me in every conceivable place. And as I stood before the mirror wearing only my undershirt and boxer shorts, feeling secure, I suppose, in what was after all a traditional male preserve, I caught a sound behind me, a fulsome drone of greeting and a vast wave of odours struck me almost physically, announcing the entrance of the woman who was in more ways than one my mistress.

  ‘My darling,’ she said in her husky English, ‘you are so beautiful in your underwear. Those legs! Ah! Perfection.’ And she sat herself down in a chair, attended by almost as many little tailors as I, to light a Turkish cigarette which she inserted in an iron holder, the latest Fascist fashion. I felt like a whore as she watched, in amused relish, the process. Now cloth was brought — a fine, black wool — and laid upon my person in various places. Chalk marks, further measurements, and Margherita Sarfatti, my patroness, smoked and chatted. ‘I saw Tom Morgan this morning. He said he telephoned you, my darling. But you weren’t up. You cannot be so lazy from now on. Fascists are expected to set a good example. I looked through your cuttings. They were fascinating.’

  ‘Cuttings?’ I became a little alarmed.

  ‘Tom got them from the Service. We needed to check up on your credentials and make sure you are who you say you are. After all, sweetheart, you now have responsibilities and we have to know if we can trust you.’

  Naively I had not realised that such checks would be made. Not all my press had been positive. I asked, casually, what she had learned from my ‘Press Kit’. She smiled, a teasing travesty of coquetry, and said that what they had learned must have been good, because here I was.

  She had not understood I had played such an important part in politics. I had been far too circumspect. A Klansman! She and Mussolini had seen The Birth of a Nation three times when it first came to Milan. So romantic, so daring. Just the kind of hero for the New Italy.

  I decided that the faint note of mockery in her voice was permanent and not especially directed at me. With it she protected herself in a world which, in the intensity of its vendettas and cruelty of its judgements, was far worse than any political world. The world of the international art scene. The budgets of small nations were spent on art, especially by Americans like Hearst and J. P. Morgan, and the power struggle was intense.

  She had read some of my speeches. And I had told Mussolini he had no American equivalent! The course of United States history might have taken a very different turn if I had been in power. But she could tell I was a dreamer, a poet-engineer, who had no interest in ordinary political power. There was only one D’Annunzio. My combination of experience and innocence was very touching. She came over to where I stood, draped in black cloth, and made a few murmured suggestions to the tailor, touching my figure with a kind of casual, abstracted intimacy I might have found degrading if I did not have so much inner pride.

  By the time the tailoring ordeal was at an end, she took me to lunch in the vast Rolls-Royce which called for us. At least the restaurant was small and there was no one there I knew. She asked why I had given up my political career. I told her that it was chiefly because the Klan had become corrupt. It had lost all its original ideals in its effort to reach accommodation with ordinary bourgeois politics. She was sympathetic. That was the early history of Fascism, she said. But the Klan still survived. I said that I doubted now if it would ever gain real power.

  I was first and foremost, I explained, an engineer. In America, because of my connections with well-known producers and directors, I had been induced to act and design film sets. As soon as I had the chance, however, I returned to my first love, my engineering projects.

  ‘Your airships and your steam-cars,’ she said. ‘Not to mention all your other ideas. I have read the articles.’

  Clearly Tom Morgan had not turned up the more accusatory pieces. This was very comforting to me. At last I was with people prepared to believe the best of their fellow men rather than the worst. She asked me what was happening with my projects. I explained how the independent inventor and entrepreneur was being squeezed out of America by big corporations and a tax structure which favoured Big Business but did nothing for the small man. I told her how my projects had been bought by these powerful interests and then ‘mothballed’ or scrapped. The commercial failure of my steam-car, for instance, was a case in point. The car was a victim of the vastly powerful oil companies like British Petroleum and S&O. In offering certain inventions to the US government, I said, I had again been sabotaged. Washington was so thoroughly corrupt you could no longer trust her institutions, even the Patent Office. Besides, I no longer felt that I wished to give the US any more of my i
nventions, my political wisdom or my theatrical gifts. I was now exclusively at the service of Il Duce.

  ‘Well,’ she said, playing with my thigh under the table, ‘he is delighted. I have not seen him so happy for a long while. Your war machines, independent of oil, are exactly what we need. Il Duce is concerned in the event of war that any military action should be swift and decisive, over within days or weeks. Any other kind of war is uneconomical and far too wasteful for one’s own side. All current strategic thinking says this. Tanks and planes and bombs are what win modern wars. The bigger the plane or the tank or the bomb, the more chance one has of winning. You and Mussolini think on the same scale. That is why you will control the future.’

  I was, as ever, surprised at her grasp of the principles. Such understanding was highly unusual in a woman, especially an Italian woman.

  I could see why, in her youth, she had been so attractive to Mussolini, so helpful to him. She had been married to a businessman, some socialist from her early years. Mussolini, too, had been a socialist, but, for obvious reasons, no mention was made of that these days.

  Il Duce’s journey to political maturity had been swifter than most, but it had been a journey nonetheless.

  Margherita was eager for any Hollywood gossip. I explained to her that I had been in Africa on my own particular expedition into the heart of darkness. I had eschewed most things Western and had lost touch with many old friends. I had seen the latest films, of course. Indeed, one of my main preoccupations while forced to stay so long in Tangier, was visiting the cinemas. But I had not seen a talkie until I came to Italy and I must admit I had not been overly impressed. They were full of stilted dialogue uttered by men in spats and women in evening dresses before a static camera. They were all about darkies or people who dressed up as darkies. The Jazz Singer was a combination of both. My own preference, so far, was for Steamboat Willie. There would come a time when the talking film approached the artistic perfection of its silent predecessor. I had seen no proof as yet.

  She was inclined to agree. She was watching an art form turn itself into a sensational novelty to please an increasingly crass public. Was I never depressed that this progress towards tosh seemed endemic in the American arts? She spoke of certain painters and composers I did not know. We were, I told her, dependent on the tastes of the petite bourgeoisie for our livings. We moved towards the common denominator as if it were a cause. I was sure there could be a combination of popular and fine art to meet all the criteria.

  ‘That’s what we’re producing in Italy,’ she said, ‘especially in architecture.’ She was helping commission some important public buildings but was meeting resistance among certain Fascist ministers. She claimed they hated her simply because she was a woman. ‘If a man had done what I have done for Italian prestige around the world,’ she said, waving her arm in a panoramic arc, ‘he would be weighed down with honours and rewards. Meanwhile I have to make a living as best I can. I have no one but myself.’

  A melodramatic statement from someone who had as her protector the greatest man in the history of modern Italy, the natural successor to Garibaldi! I had no clear idea, then, how insecure she felt. Mussolini’s wife was no illiterate. Rachele Mussolini became deeply unhappy if she saw Margherita’s name in the press. Margherita depended upon the newspapers for her living and her fame. Without them, much of her power was threatened.

  Of course, I did not understand this then. I was beginning to slip into that extraordinary sense of security and comfort that comes from finding one’s natural place among the powerful. I had never been so thoroughly accepted as I was by Il Duce and his people. I had never felt so safe. Yet that feeling of acceptance and well-being was not complete. I was still keenly aware that Margherita Sarfatti was my chief’s long-time paramour. I had a horror of being caught between the two of them. I was still wondering, for instance, what had happened to my friend da Bazzanno, Sarfatti’s earlier lover.

  In the private dining room, as the uncrowned Queen of Italy took her singular pleasures with me, I guessed it would be some time before she tired of me. I had no choice but to comply. I let my mind drift towards other things. I was astonished that Il Duce could ever have found this rutting harpy attractive. I did not know then, of course, why she should be so repellent to me.

  Back at the Grishams’ my hosts had returned and were laughing heartily over drinks. Handing my coat to the maid, I asked the reason for their amusement. Billy said they had had at least ten different telephone engineers round that day. ‘It shows you’re much more important than me, Max!’ and he lifted his glass in a toast as Ethel handed me my champagne cocktail. I did not follow his reasoning. Then he told me that a visit from a telephone engineer was considered to be identical to a visit from the secret police. His phone, he said, was thoroughly tapped. He didn’t mind, since the office’s phone wasn’t tapped and he could always use that. This seemed childish stuff to me and I ignored it. It pleased people to pretend they were constantly under Il Duce’s personal surveillance. It gave their escapades an added thrill, I suppose. The whole rather cynical tenor of the conversation depressed me. I had had an exhausting day and needed to relax. Billy and Ethel did not ‘coke’ and I felt a need for some more of the nourishing powder. Politely I wondered if they would mind if Maddy and I returned to the Villa Borghese. Of course they understood. Billy drove us back in his own car. He was in a merry mood and kept beginning sentences which he did not finish. I thanked him warmly for his hospitality and help. I regarded him as my best journalist friend in Rome. I would let him know the story as soon as I could, even if it were the middle of the night. He was grateful for that.

  The sun was setting as we let ourselves back in to our little cottage. Orange rays touched the firs and cedars, turning our terracotta to comforting fire. In spite of all the mementoes of Margherita, I was glad to be there. I was sure she would not bother us. Her natural preference for conspiracy would not allow her, I suspected, to bring things out into the open, not when there was an ounce of drama or advantage to be squeezed from the situation.

  Maddy was unsurprised that I went to sleep early. She contented herself with writing in her diary. I read most of it later. It was concerned with banal speculation about my new job and a schoolgirlish enthusiasm for my talents and place in history. Clearly Miss Butter planned to marry me and perhaps even take me back to Texas for a while. I would be the living version of the European trophies with which Hearst filled his overblown palace. I knew she would not be happy if thwarted in her intentions. I therefore decided upon the wisest path: caution. I hoped to divert her from her ambitions. I prayed that Margherita Sarfatti would soon be sent off on one of her cultural missions to some faraway country. My only prayer was that she did not take me with her.

  Next morning there was a knock on the door. Maddy and I were eating breakfast, discussing the best way to get to Ponte Palatina, whether to walk or take the tram. She answered the door while I stepped into some clothes. Tom Morgan entered, his face a map of all the pleasures a pressman was ever tempted to taste, the little blue, red and yellow veins describing his various routes to hell via paradise. His bluff manner edged with the morning’s miseries, he handed me an envelope. He looked forward to seeing me at ten o’clock that evening. The address was on the envelope. He tipped his hat to an enquiring, bright-eyed Maddy, complimented her on her hair and morning robe, and returned to his waiting taxi.

  Miranda frowned when he had gone. She clearly did not like the man. Perhaps she already sensed a rival and thought it might be Tom. In some small agitation, she went off to change. To reassure her, I tossed the message unopened on to the table. By the time we were walking together, her arm in mine, she seemed to have forgotten all about Tom Morgan. When we got back, as if suddenly remembering Tom’s visit, I picked up the envelope he had given me.

  The address was a villa off the Via Aurelia not far from the Vatican City. A salubrious area, where it did not abut the railway lines. The envelope contained two
silver buttons, each one the symbol of a bundle of rods surrounding a double-bladed axe — the fascisti upon which Mussolini’s name and power was based. They were extremely elegant. I had seen something similar worn by the highest members of the Fascist Grand Council, that group of men, largely drawn from the professions of journalism and public relations, who now helped their chief run the country. But I was still not entirely sure of their significance. I did not show them to Maddy, who was almost weeping with curiosity. Smiling, I assured her that as soon as I was relieved of my oath of secrecy, I would explain all.

  That night I stumbled somewhat wearily up the long drive of a run-down villa whose back garden went directly down to the railway tracks. Clearly the place had been picked for its position rather than its visual aspects. I even smelled urine near the gates, as they were opened for me by two smartly uniformed members of the Fascist Militia, now an official arm of the Italian Armed Services.

  More of the blackshirted militia, with their kepis and brightly polished jackboots, were present in the grounds, some controlling eager dogs spoiling for trouble. On the top steps to the entrance portico, Tom Morgan himself was waiting for me. He was in full uniform. I noted that he wore the same studs he had given me that morning. It was clearly the badge of a high-ranking fascisti. I saluted him. He was pleased by my response. ‘Oh, you and I are not the only Americans capable of thinking beyond our domestic boundaries, Max. Our brotherhood embraces the world, wherever the white race is dominant.’ He shook me busily by the hand. ‘I’ve read about your work in America and I don’t blame you for leaving. But you’re among good friends here, Max.’