The Vengeance of Rome (40 page)

When Röhm saw me he grinned with pleasure. His men knew me by now. We were all regulars. Some whistled greetings. Some had friendly nicknames for me, which I took in good part. They called me ‘the Spanish onion' or ‘Cowboy Joe'. I waved and gave the Fascist salute. Röhm strode over to me and caught me by the arm, steering me towards his usual table, a dark, secluded archway set on the far side of the cellar and offering a view of its length.

I ordered us both large steins of the dark, rich bock beer he enjoyed here, and before we decided on our food he suggested that after we had dined we drive out to see his new house. I could stay overnight and be back in Munich by the next day. I might find it enjoyable. There were a few people he wanted me to meet.

I had earlier suspected that I was again being invited to join an inner circle. I had said little of my intimacy with Mussolini or some of the other leaders of world affairs, but his instinct recognised me. Of course I accepted.

We ate a large and leisurely dinner. Then Röhm's handsome young chauffeur arrived to tell us our car was ready. The Stabschef was already a little tipsy. He sang some sentimental Spanish song he had learned in Bolivia. He opened his window so he could breathe in the rich, scented air of the Bavarian capital. ‘Ah! One has to acknowledge the pleasures of peace. But they are only won through the hardships of war.'

We stopped at my hotel where I packed a small bag containing a change of clothes, a box of cocaine and some papers I preferred to keep with me. Then we were off, driving through the haze of twilight into what seemed to me at that moment an infinitely rosy future.

I was glad of the chance to see a little of the surrounding countryside. The neat, well-ordered Bavarian fields were a symbol of the best of Germany. The German's natural sense of harmony is only occasionally perverted by experiments in social democracy. It is expressed most finely in his music and his mathematics. They are masterly bookkeepers. They exemplify so many of our Christian virtues. They are the Yankees of Europe. Sometimes, of course, they can exercise those virtues a little too fully, as with their generosity towards the Turks.

Röhm, as usual, was stimulating company. He continued to drink a little more than he should, but the stress of his responsibilities was tremendous. The only expression of his insobriety was a somewhat looser and coarser tongue. He loved to relax in manly company, to forget for a few hours the ‘Prussian manners' he was forced to cultivate as an officer, a member of the Reichstag and a senior senator in the Bavarian parliament. He spoke of his frustrations with the bloodless, feeble self-abusers he was forced to keep company with, of the protocol he had to observe so as not to let Hitler down. He would do nothing, he said, to damage Hitler's chances of becoming Chancellor.

Feeling a little abandoned by Il Duce and wondering about my future, I was quietly pleased to have Röhm's friendship. While never wielding power for himself, only for the common people for whom he held it in trust, he was the most powerful man in Germany. Without him, Hitler and Strasser could not move. Without his troops, Hindenburg and the old guard could outlast and, if necessary, outfight Hitler. It crossed my mind more than once that I was becoming close friends with the future Duce of Germany, but at that time I had no intimation of Röhm's real secret.

I relaxed beside him in the staff car's huge back seat while he discussed the work of German painters he admired and asked if they had their American equivalents. I said that the ‘folkish' movement had taken odd forms in America. The favoured art form these days was the cinema. Even great artists worked for Hollywood, designing sets and drawing storyboards. He had visited Los Angeles on his way back from Bolivia and had been impressed by the palm trees and the lovely houses. How surprising things were there! How German! With a touch of North Africa. A friend of his was over there. Did I know Ludecke? He was a good Nazi. I had to tell him that my own political links in America were with the Ku Klux Klan. Sadly, I added, the Klan had been taken over by opportunists, its original ideals forgotten.

Röhm was sympathetic. The National Socialist movement was
threatened with the same kind of takeover. He was uneasy with this searching out of businessmen for bedfellows. If the party needed funds, Hitler should send a bunch of Hitler Youth boys out whoring. ‘There must be plenty of takers for those beautiful, rounded little arses.' It would be a quicker, more honest and no doubt more lucrative way of raising the money they needed. ‘But Hitler hardly cracked a smile at my suggestion. Alf's getting very serious these days. Very straight.'

The Stabschef had a hamper for the journey. As it grew dark and the car rushed on through quaint little villages and rolling fields, he took out a bottle of champagne and popped the cork. His strange, battered face had an almost melancholy quality to it, and I saw a hint of sadness in his eyes which he tried to disguise. I did not know what had happened to put him in this mood. He was doing his best to rid himself of it. I wanted to tell him he did not need to pretend anything, that he was with an equal, one who would respect all his secrets.

When he laid a large line of cocaine upon his beefy wrist and took it like snuff I knew for certain that I had found a kindred soul. I accepted his line, holding his wrist with my fingertips as I bent my nose to some of the purest South American snow I had enjoyed in years. In Bolivia the Stabschef had developed a refined taste.

At my prompting Röhm spoke of his youth, of his exile to Bolivia after the Munich putsch. He laughed. ‘Before I arrived in Bolivia, buggery was unknown there!' He had met only one ‘schitzy' to his taste, just towards the end of his stay. He had admired those ‘dark-eyed Latin beauties' from afar, had groaned for them, far preferring them to blonds. Yet no one understood. He would rather have been in prison. He had exercised great discipline, he confessed. As a lieutenant colonel with considerable responsibilities, he could probably have ordered one of those luscious creatures into his bed. And now, he added almost under his breath, here he was, tête-à-tête with just such a beauty!

He was a little slurred in his speech. I was not entirely following his thickly accented Bavarian. He switched off the interior lamps. We travelled in complete darkness, with no light save the reflection of our own glaring headlamps. I, too, had known the pain of exile and the terrors of captivity. In sympathy I reached towards his arm.

A little to my surprise, he turned on the light to look at me briefly. His eyes filled with tears. I murmured a question. There came a pause, a silence as the car's great engine continued to pound and the wheels carried us deep into the German heartland. Then, suddenly, that noblest of all Nazis doused
the light once more and seized my hand in his. His deep, thrilling whisper declared his most profound passion for me.

That love, he said, was the purest he had ever known. It was driving him mad.

I take Mrs Cornelius to the canal. The council have now paved parts of the towpath, and it is a little easier to avoid the dog muck. Nothing wholesome grows in that sparse manure. They never clean it up. Once every six months some swarthy municipal playboy minces down and dabs a fastidious broom at the stuff. What a privilege to see you, I say. Sarcasm is wasted on him. He would probably understand Turkish if I was willing to compromise with him.

He whines that they are understaffed. Certainly you are, I sympathise. I often see you hiding in the cemetery pretending to work. Occasionally you lack a fourth for poker. But you carry on. You play with cards so faded and damp you depend on complicity and instinct to identify the suits. Sometimes I hear you disputing a flush.

The rain is a filthy drizzle. The grey grass exudes a kind of phlegm. The canal gives off vapours that hang like poisoned ectoplasm in endless valleys of vandalised warehouses. As the pedestrian underclass we have no alternative but to pass through these desolate canyons. The miasma is particularly bad under the bridges and is no good for my chest. Mrs Cornelius complains that it gets in her muscles and arteries ‘like freezin' slush'. The troglodytes living in the nearby storm drains and sewers have painted warning challenges on the walls. I am reminded of Germany in the early thirties. Advertisements for concerts and lectures are sprayed with gibberish. Some letters have been misremembered or are upside down. Their only coherence is in what they symbolise. Which these days could be anything. William Blake, the famous British lunatic, is their most popular hero. Like all their predecessors they proclaim the triumph of blind faith over reason. The written word becomes a formal image and loses all meaning, no more than a growl or a reassuring croon, a badge. Nowadays more and more of these subterraneans write in Arabic or Persian. Carthage never sleeps.

‘We witness the end of language,' I say. ‘The destruction of memory. The death of culture. This is what your Harold Wilson has done for the country. So much for Labour's golden promises!'

‘Nobody misses culture much, Ive, love.' Mrs Cornelius believes she comforts me. ‘Or language.' With a slender scarlet nail she dabs delicately at the corner of her crimson mouth. ‘Just the people ‘oo've got time for it. Which isn't many. If the op'ra went tomorrer most people wouldn't notice. When was you last at Covent Garden anyway?'

‘That's scarcely the point.' I am remembering those great pre-war performances. Those wonderful, gay Viennese.

Yesterday as we came out of the tunnel we found a dead dog lying on the towpath almost in the water, twisted so that its hindquarters were open revealing its genitals, a red erection. Its short black fur had dried into symmetrical muddy spikes. Its eyes and muzzle were half open, releasing the tongue. It stared over the canal with a resigned and melancholy grin.

‘Someone's fallen out with the Mafia.'

I uttered my first thought. In my circumstances, I am reasonably nervous, never sure if that particular vendetta against me still continues.

She tells me I am loony. ‘Barkin',' she says.

But I was once threatened in that way, I insist. In Rome. Nineteen thirty-two, I think. You were there when it happened to me. I told you about it on the train to Vienna.

I now know of course who was actually stalking me. She refuses to believe me. Some people live their whole lives in a permanent state of denial. Half of what I say she dismisses or derides, revealing an unconscious defence mechanism against unpalatable truth. I at least shall not be surprised when Brodmann walks through the door with a gun in one hand and a KGB badge in the other.

I have noticed how a threatened man or woman will unconsciously try to turn into the creature they most fear rather than be destroyed by it. We are so eager to conspire with our masters. We have few alternatives and almost no choices any longer. So it was in Dachau. I have been stripped of my rank, humiliated and abused. Never once have I complained.

Of course, in most circumstances complaint meant an immediate and painful death. Even when you have had the science of the method explained to you (in my case by Himmler and Schnauben themselves) it does not make your response any more rational. You know that any escape plans you make are fantasies. Any hope you entertain is a nonsense. I learned that already in Egypt. Those of you who have never experienced this kind of fear have
no business judging us. By denying your own vulnerability, you make yourself further vulnerable to whatever threatens you.

Mrs Cornelius says Brodmann would be eighty at least. She says I live too much in the past. And where else should I live? I ask. How good does the future look to you? And has the future provided you with experience? Why should the present suit you better than the past? Is there something wrong with the past? You can forget. You can. What you must lose is the memory of desire, the sensation of innocence, the inability to tolerate what is disgusting. All these will become virtues enabling you to forget desire, innocence, intolerance, love. You will forget and yet memory will persist as a cold sense of loss, a yearning for something better and sweeter which you have forbidden yourself. For with memory comes loss, with desire comes pain, with hope comes despair. Hell offers an absence of virtue. It offers an eternity when all you yearn for is time.

I am an old man. My only consolations are my memories. I cultivate my past like a favourite garden; I order it like a beloved library. I go back to the years of my youth and my power when my good looks were favourably compared to Rudolph Valentino's and Cesar Romero's and my future was golden. I was à la mode.

Until you think back you do not understand how much your physical appearance determined your destiny. I hardly realised at the time what I had in common with the early Nazis. More than any other people, Germans celebrated youth as healthy, untainted by the poisons of the past, unburdened with the compromises and struggles of the ‘Men of War'. The Nazis were young. Most of the men who came to run the Third Reich were in their thirties. Their youth, inexperience and idealism were part of their great appeal. Ordinary Germans accepted the Nazis as the vital force to channel that youthful energy back into constructive action. Their idealism united the nation, forming ranks against the common enemy. If their youthful rhetoric was a little fiery, people tolerated it. Watch
Things to Come
if you want to know how we felt about putting the old ways behind us and building a rational world where technology assured our enduring security. H.G. Wells was not above borrowing the odd idea or two from the despised little corporal!

Most Germans had known only war, disintegration and violent struggle. Perpetual uncertainty is anathema to that honest, amiable German soul yearning to translate its experience of comradeship into a greater community to include all Germans, rich or poor, noble and commoner. They had been told so many lies for so long, they refused to listen. They equated
education with the manipulations of the ruling class. They had lost faith in conventional politics. They wanted not a state in the old sense, but a national community of equals: a mighty German family practising the old German family virtues. These sentiments were repeated over and over again. Jews wanted it, too. Those idealists were not brutes.