The Vengeance of Rome (44 page)

In the end he did what he had advised me to do. He escaped by plane. He knew, though his faith was as powerful as ever, that he was a marked man. His beloved, infallible master intended to murder him. In his rejection of conventional religion and his taking up of occultism, his faith in Hitler was his only stability and he could not afford to let it go. But he naturally did not want to die. Hess reconciled the conflict in his typical way. If he was of no further use to his master, then he would leave. And find a way to be of use again. Hess escaped into a kind of limbo. I did not really envy him. I believe I kept my perspective. I have never denied the real issues that lay at the heart of the Nazi cause. My quarrel was with the application of the principles. Many had the same misgivings as time went on. My own experience, of course, might have prejudiced me, but I always prided myself on my openness both to ideas and to fresh experience.

My experience at the Villa Röhm was, I will admit, dreamlike. As if I was in a perpetually running Hollywood epic. Some of Röhm's rivals thought it vulgar, but I was reminded of Hearst's famous Castle of San Simeon and of the Hollywood homes, such as Chaplin's.

Putzi called Röhmannsvilla ‘De Mille Bon Marché'. Silks and fine cottons hung everywhere. Marble statuary of boys and young men, fountains, tiled baths and erotic mosaics were all drawn from classical models. A perfect setting for the elaborate parties Röhm liked to throw for his top lieutenants who never failed to bring fresh guests, many of them recruited from the Hitler Youth's finest. The newcomers were always wonderfully impressed. A great morale booster.

I saw something so noble, clean and healthy about those young bodies that only a person with a twisted mind would observe anything perverse in what went on there. True, we tested ourselves and others to certain extremes, but this served to harden us more. Röhm himself explained how we emulated the greatest Greeks and Romans. Whenever heterosexuality was made a faith, he said, civilisations collapsed. Hitler understood that as well as he did. Only homophobes like Himmler and Goebbels feigned disgust. They were addicted to sentimentality and women the way Hitler was addicted to his cream cakes and his dog whips. Their own weakness was why they always railed against him. Göring, with his weight, and Goebbels, with his club foot, had not exactly put the purest sperm into circulation, and as for Hitler, he possessed serious drawbacks, as we said in Kiev, to his stuffing any chicken with his particular pudding.

Röhm had no time for women except as mothers. The rest were sluts and parasites. He found it hard to be polite to most of them. He said they were a distraction, incapable of higher brain functions. They were natural prey to Jews and other vermin. He had loathed Rosa Luxemburg, whom he described as a hermaphrodite and an abomination. He tolerated the army politician von Schleicher precisely because he understood him to have been involved in the execution of Luxemburg and Leibnitz.

Ultimately, Röhm told me, he saw a time when women would hardly be needed at all, and those we had left could be hardened up like Amazons, as auxiliaries and breeders. Hitler's weakness for Geli Raubal was a sure sign things were going wrong. Röhm had nothing against his Chief having a sentimental interlude, but Raubal had become an unhealthy obsession and was getting them both into trouble. She was likely to destroy Hitler's political career. The party couldn't afford much more scandal around him.

Röhm insisted that the light of his old friend's life was nothing but a whore. ‘She fucks anything that moves. She'd fuck a turd if it was stiff enough. She's had two of his chauffeurs behind his back and half the damned SS. Everyone knows about her and that SS fellow Zeiss. Yet Alf won't hear a word against the bitch. He's broke because of her. She's getting
him to buy her singing lessons and send her to fucking Vienna to become an opera star! No, Mashi, we really don't need young Geli around at the moment. I'm all for her going to Vienna to follow her vocation. I know a nice house on Rosenstrasse. They'll employ her. She can take her pictures with her.'

Röhm, Putzi and Schultz, the Nazi Party treasurer, had been responsible for buying back Hitler's drawings and letters. The go-between was the ubiquitous Hieronymite priest Father Bernhard Stempfle, a sometime contributor to
Völkischer Beobachter
and
Der Stürmer
. The letters, Röhm said, were graphic. The photos were steamy. But the drawings were amazing. Better than his usual doodles. Putzi had wondered what kind of man would make a woman pose like that. And he had come to understand about the dog whips they all carried. He was not grateful for the knowledge, he said. It gave him a rather different idea of the Chief.

‘He's completely addicted to the bitch,' Röhm complained. ‘And she's blackmailing him, believe me. She could well have corrupted that seedy priest, though I know for a fact he's not interested in grown women. The commies will use her, if they can.'

By coincidence that same evening he presented me with a marvellous costume, a fantasy of lace and silk, and said he would be touched if I would wear it for him. Röhmannsvilla was a kind of Hollywood in itself, and I felt secure there. I was never afraid of make-believe in its place. In this case, of course, I had hardly any choice. I indulged him. I love the sensation of silk. I gave myself up to it and did not really mind the pain at the end. ‘Slut,' he said. ‘You gorgeous little slut.'

I always believed it pure folly to assume that what a consenting adult does in the privacy of his own apartments has any bearing on his public life. No true historian bothers himself with such questions. A man should be judged by his public actions, not on his taste in suits, sex or soup.

Mrs Cornelius, of course, was involved in the Christine Keeler business, though she never went to Cliveden. Mandy Rice-Davies was her good friend, and they often spent afternoons together. ‘The only problem with all o' that,' she says, ‘was Chrissy and that loony
Schwarze
, whatever his name was …'

‘Lucky,' I say.

‘They was both barmy and that messed it up for everyone else. Jack Profumo should ‘ave known better, but there wasn't much to the rest of ‘em.'

We have stopped in the Mountain Grill for a cup of tea and something to eat. George calls a greeting to me from his shrieking, steaming galley at
the back. Maria, his wife, calls me a ‘dirty old sod' and asks me how I am. All affectionate badinage. The chairs are bent chrome and red plastic. The old Brown House style. Two rows of grey formica-topped tables go from front to back with a central aisle. Maria walks up and down the aisle like a wardress, delivering filled plates, picking up empties. She sees to the condiments. She has her favourites. I am one of them. I never go hungry there. Like her husband she wears a stained white overall. They are almost exactly the same height and weight. They come from Cyprus. We get on well. We have similar ideas about the Turks. They would like to see the liberation of Constantinople. Yet they support Queen's Park and celebrate Christmas. They are not bigots. Everyone comes here, from hippies to police. Black men with impossibly tangled hair openly roll reefers and grin across at the little schoolgirls who have accidentally found this greasy bolthole. Children are in no danger at the Mountain Grill, another of the world's safe places. The café offers greater sanctuary than any church.

Part of George's front door, bolted open now, has been smashed. ‘Drunks,' he says, ‘crazies. You know.'

‘Micks was it?' says Mrs Cornelius. She always blames the Irish. ‘They can't hold their booze. It's the same up our way.'

A long time, I tell her, since we had to be afraid of Micks who are all Labour politicians now. She has no base to her prejudice. She merely voices the accepted wisdom of Whitechapel with its deep-rooted secular tradition. Such stereotyping is unworthy of her, I say. I see good and bad among all races. The English are prejudiced against the Irish because they know in their bones Cromwell created many of their ills. Yet the Irish are just as misguided. They blame all their troubles on the English. The plain fact is that the Catholics lost the struggle. What would they have done if Cromwell had not triumphed? Himmler, a Protestant, had no prejudices against Catholics. They were often, he said, the best for special duties. That's why he preferred, whenever possible, to recruit Austrians.

It is a nonsense to say the Christian Churches turned against Hitler. The Lutherans and the Catholics loved him. They fell over themselves to bless the brave SA boys at their rallies. They got up in their pulpits and told their congregations to vote for him. He was a force for stability, they said. Only the Greek Church stood aloof, which was why Hitler wanted to destroy it. He never had any major disagreement with the Pope.

They were talking on the wireless about the Irish famines in the nineteenth century which the English did so little to alleviate. The survivors all went to America and settled there. Where they lynched Negroes and shot
redskins. I once looked at the names of troopers who served in the US frontier regiments and who massacred the natives. The names were all Irish. As they were in India. A naturally belligerent people forced from their bogs and slums by English callousness, they went to America to improve their spirits by shooting unarmed people in remote western valleys. Who is the original victim? Who the aggressor? Many of the Indians expected nothing else. They had dedicated themselves rigorously to the total genocide of rival tribes. Yet tell some American, boasting of his Irish and Cherokee blood, that he survives because his ancestors were successful practitioners of genocide, and feel his fist in your face, his boot in your testicles.

History is no longer a study of the past, but a series of legalistic arguments. A public trial in which academics vie with one another to establish who is the victim, who the aggressor. An American habit. Americans never feel at ease until they establish who is to blame for something. They took this from the Germans, who gave them so much more of their culture than the British.

They say Hitler, too, perverted reality, reinvented history. But unsentimental reality moved the Führer. Let us not mention the Israelis, whose rhetoric is identical to the Nazis in almost every respect. They speak of blood, of living space, of ancient rights. With the help of the unwitting Americans, who name themselves Christians but are really Jews, calling on the Old Testament but rejecting the New, they plan a new Carthaginian Empire across the Middle East and the Mediterranean.

‘Mind your backs, boys!'

Maria brings my usual. One sausage, chips, a slice and tea. On Saturdays I have an egg. Mrs Cornelius has her own usual. A bowl containing two scoops of mashed potato over which thick tomato soup has been poured. A wartime dish, she tells me. It always comforts her.

Through George's weeping glass I see a sudden ray of sunshine fall on the needlecraft stall across the road. The reels and spools, hanks and balls of bright silks, wools and cottons come to burning life, a magnificent display of jewels. Ornaments sparkle, clothes become more vivid and heads lift almost in surprise. An angel might have paused here.

‘I don't know what to watch tonight.' We have finished our meal. It is Mrs Cornelius's whack. She returns from the counter. ‘Bye-bye, all!'

For a while the drizzle does not persist. Outside the sun continues to shine on windows and puddles. There is a strong pungent odour, almost of the jungle. I know it to be the soup of half-corrupted fruit and vegetables, paper and animal matter, through which we pick our way, fording the
amniotic stream so that Mrs Cornelius can get her fags at her newsagent. This material, pushed into heaps or flushed down sewers, is the breeding ground for new species.

Scientists come from all over the world to study Portobello Road. Yesterday some bespectacled student informed me that the area now has its own separate ecological system. Such things happen only in cities. Rural environments lack the necessary biological complexity. Marijuana grown in that mixture is known to be almost fifty times stronger. No wonder everyone seems to be in a trance. These days when they come stumbling into my shop I know exactly what is going on.

When Mrs Cornelius picks up her Embassy Tipped I buy a copy of the
Daily Mail
, always my favourite British newspaper, as it was Hitler's. Lord Rothermere was a convinced NSDAP supporter and saw a stronger future in his nation's close collaboration with Hitler. If they had followed his advice there is no doubt the British Empire would now be greater than ever. She would control vast areas of the world, including China and Arabia. Instead, she cannot effectively rule the Isle of Wight. No wonder the Americans, who have taken over so many old imperial responsibilities, are contemptuous. Americans have deafened themselves. They shout at one another. They shout at me. They shout banalities, destroying thought.

Lately I find it hardly worth buying a paper or turning on the news. Little changes. Who can you trust? That familiar excited babble, confident-sounding analysis, authoritative predicting of trends while everything continues to go round and round in the usual unresolved chaos. Sometimes I come across old newspapers in boxes or as drawer linings. The issues scarcely change. The arguments remain the same. Year in and year out commentators voice the identical views in the same excited tones. Most people are incapable of original thought. They think an original thought is something they haven't read before. It bowls them over. They repeat it in the pub or, if they are middle class, at dinner parties.

Mrs Cornelius refuses to despair. She says you have to laugh.

‘What a wonderful actor you are, Max.' Röhm watches the last reel of
Buckaroo's Gold
. I wave to the audience from my mechanical horse. It seems I control a rearing mount. I flourish my hat. My smile is gay. My innocent eyes look back at me from a happier age.

He pours champagne. ‘I could swear I'd seen you in something else.'