The Laughter of Carthage (46 page)

As I read I become increasingly horrified. The headlines were clear enough. There were pictures of myself, M. de Grion, Kolya, in happier days. A fanciful sketch of my completed airship. The shut down hangars near St-Denis. Our Aviation Company had collapsed completely and fraud was alleged. According to police reports the Chief Engineer (myself) had fled France, taking crucial documents proving the honesty of his partners. M. de Grion’s son-in-law. Prince Nicholas Petroff, was quoted as being baffled. He had been completely duped by me. It seemed the majority of stock was mine. I had sold it at a profit and escaped with my fortune, perhaps back to Constantinople where it seemed I might be wanted by the British for aiding Mustafa Kemal’s rebels. My sister, still in Paris and desolate, had never guessed what I was planning.

‘This is meaningless,’ I told Mortimer. ‘Prince Petroff is my best friend. He’s obviously been misquoted. But it’s damned bad news for me. I had no idea!’

‘I doubt you can be extradited on the evidence they seem to have.’ Mortimer was deeply sympathetic. ‘Presumably you didn’t anticipate this sort of publicity?’

‘Petroff warned me there might be an attempt to make me the scapegoat for the company’s collapse. That’s why I came to America. But I hadn’t guessed how vicious the papers would be. What they say is nonsense. They’re plainly putting words in Kolya’s mouth. He’s my oldest, closest friend. M. de Grion must be giving them all that. He was never over fond of me. Esmé’s due here soon. I hope to God she doesn’t suffer!’

‘She’ll still come?’

‘No question of it. And Petroff, too.’

‘They have your address? Maybe it’s as well you’re going to Washington.’ He frowned at me almost suspiciously, as if he hardly believed I could be so innocent.

I was offended. ‘My dealings have been honest at all times, Major Mortimer. For your information, I’m not a wanted man in Turkey, either. I was instrumental in some arrests of nationalist rebels and spies. I left Constantinople entirely for personal reasons.’

‘By the looks of it, you’ve been poorly treated, colonel. If the scandal broke over here it could have some mighty unwelcome results. You know what the yellow press thinks of foreigners. They’re all anarchists and crooks trying to take over the country.’ He bent his body away from the table as the waiter set out fresh plates. Then Mortimer grinned suddenly. ‘Doesn’t it make you long for a drink?’

For the first time since I had arrived in America I desired a large vodka. I nodded vigorously and he winked at me. ‘We’ll finish here then go visit some friends of mine. They’ll accommodate us. What do you plan to do about this?’ He folded and replaced the cutting.

I was at a loss for an idea. There was no easy means of clearing my name. Only Kolya could help there. Esmé would agree to be a witness. But where and when could a trial be heard? I asked Mortimer.

‘In Paris. I’m damned sure of it. You’re safe enough in the States. The chances of a visa extension, however, might be a shade slim. You need friends in high places, old man!’ He looked critically at the cheeseboard, his knife hovering. Then, with a sigh, he impaled some Boston Blue.

‘There’s Mr Cadwallader in Atlanta.’

‘The lawyer? But it’s your word against theirs. I was thinking along slightly different lines. Who do you know in Washington?’

There was no one. Deep in thought. Major Mortimer abstractedly chewed his cheese. ‘I might be able to help. I know one or two people with good political connections. Would a letter of introduction be of use?’

‘You’re very kind.’ I doubt if I sounded enthusiastic. My future had again become uncertain. I could not go back to Europe. I might have to flee the United States. Was Esmé forever lost to me? I resisted panic. Desperately I tried to keep my mind in balance, but now things seemed blacker than ever before. I remember little of finishing the meal. At some stage Major Mortimer helped me to the sidewalk and hailed a taxi. Within a quarter of an hour we had entered the blue swing doors of one of New York’s many cellar bars. Inside was noisy jazz music, wild dancing, everything I had been glad to leave behind in Paris. Just then it was the last place I wanted to be, but Mortimer steered me through the crowd to a shadowy back room. He ordered drinks. They were not very strong cocktails, but I was glad of them and drank several. The speakeasy was patronised entirely by the well to do. It was no ordinary bohemian café. Lucius Mortimer was acquainted with many of the other clients and was obviously a regular and popular visitor. To them he spoke a patois almost impossible for me to follow. I had heard him and Jimmy Rembrandt using it between themselves on board ship. I grew rapidly drunk. By about one o’clock, as I continued to babble my problems to him, Lucius put a hand on my arm, looking me directly in the eyes. ‘Max,’ he said, ‘I think of myself as your pal and I’m going to try to help. Jimmy’s turning up here soon. We’ll talk to him. What if we went with you to Washington? I could introduce you to my friends. Do you have all your patents with you?’

I told him what I had done. My letters had said I should be in Washington shortly and would call to ensure the plans had arrived. I had been sensible, said Mortimer. I should relax and take another drink. Once I knew the right people my troubles would be over. ‘You can rely on me, I need hardly say, not to breathe a word of the airship scandal. But sooner or later it could hit our papers, then you’ll have to be completely prepared. Forewarned is forearmed. The press like nothing better than screaming for foreign blood these days. Only last week, in my hometown - in Ohio of all places - the Ku Klux Klan lynched two Italians. They were either anarchists or Catholics. People are even less fond of Russians, so you’d better make it clear you’re French and go on calling yourself Max Peterson. You could be half English. That should stop suspicion. I’ll cover you. We met during the War when you were flying with the Lafayette Squadron. Everybody loves the Lafayette.’

I was reluctant to involve myself in lies. However, I accepted Mortimer must have a better sense of the situation’s realities, so I agreed he should decide what was to be told to people. I would back him up in anything he said. I remained impressed by the American’s open-hearted generosity. What European near stranger would have done so much? I was almost tearfully grateful by the time Jimmy Rembrandt arrived, with two young women, actresses from a nearby show, and embraced me as warmly as any Russian. He slapped me on the back, announcing how much he had missed my company since the ship. A bottle of outrageously dubious champagne was ordered. This he chiefly fed to the ladies who, clucking and preening in their pink and blue feathers and silks, soon took on the appearance of confounded chickens. ‘Sounds like a great adventure!’ Rembrandt was in an ebulliently reassuring mood. ‘We’ll get the train to Washington tomorrow. Can you leave that soon, Max?’

We toasted our good fortune, our mutual destinies, the happy chance of our Mauretanian meeting. With such splendid companions I should have no difficulties when I came to confront and win over the American capital. Jokingly, they encouraged me to ‘remember’ my English mother, my father, the distinguished French soldier, and his father, who had fought for the South in the Civil War. We even considered an ancestor who had raised a volunteer regiment for the War of Independence. By the time we left the ‘speakeasy’ I was cheerful again, already half believing my new identity. They had struck exactly the right compromise, particularly in view of our destination. Their friends were Southerners to whom the only acceptable foreigners were those who had supported the Confederate cause sixty years before. Jimmy Rembrandt’s own mother, he told me, was from Louisiana and his Pennsylvanian father had been in Democratic politics until a riding accident just before the War. In the small hours we took a taxi back to my hotel while they lifted imaginary glasses to ‘Max Peterson, Gentleman of France’ and attempted to teach me how to whistle
Dixie.
The tune was important, they told me gravely, but the ability to remember all the words would prove crucial if I was to endear myself to their friends. As to my political views, they said, these were hardly in need of improvement at all.

With friendly good humour they helped me to an elevator before continuing on to the Astor, promising to collect me in the lobby next morning. Our association was going to be of enormous mutual benefit. It would make my French aviation schemes, they said, look like a cardboard model of the real thing. I reached my room and tried to pack, but unexpectedly the melancholy returned in full force once I was alone. I lay on my bed and wept for Esmé. How long must it be before I could be reunited with her? What crime had I committed in the eyes of God, to be so severely punished while the cynical rich and ruthlessly powerful went scot-free?

I would be wise to leave New York. Those same forces were lying in wait for me there, though I hardly guessed it then. In my wanderings I had seen the dark emissaries of Carthage scurrying about their destructive work. Here and there the signs were still up, but they would not stay there for long. In those parts of Harlem occupied by decent German families, threatened on all sides by blacks and orientals, I had seen the placards in the windows:
Keine Juden, und keine Hunde.
But it would be no more than a year or two before they were removed. Then the families themselves would be driven from the city and grinning negroes would turn those comfortable houses into squalid slums. New York would try to accept them: it was a question of pride. But New York was wrong to let it go so far. It tolerated monumental heresies: these black messiahs and philosemitic quasi-prophets abounding there today. Christians are taught to tolerate everything and so we do - but we cannot and should not tolerate evil, nor should hypocrisy and theft go unpunished. Those Sephardic Jews, they claimed to be Dons of Spain, as if that were something to boast of. The Spanish Empire was financed by Carthaginian gold, advanced by Catholic ruthlessness, informed by a pagan lust for destruction. Americans had already driven them back in a series of heroic wars. Now they are returning in a thousand guises. They cannot be stopped. And their
Einiklach
gloat in their massive towers, their steel and concrete fortresses, riding in Rolls Royces up and down Wall Street, controlling the destinies of all the world’s nations, while the Dons of Little Italy, of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Spanish Harlem, are richer than any Morgan or Carnegie, yet leave no charities, no foundations, no libraries behind them: only ruin.

I cannot blame myself for what became of New York. The rot, if I had chosen to look, was already there. I was blinded by the fabulous potential of the city, its grandiosity, its beauty. And for me it remains the most beautiful city on Earth. When the warm morning sun shone on those grey and yellow towers, or when it set, brilliant scarlet over Brooklyn Bridge, I would gasp in wonder, no matter how many times I had seen it before. I have heard they are demolishing more and more of it, replacing the old skyscrapers with things of black glass and featureless stone, that they have torn down almost everything and what they have not torn down they have gutted and spoiled. The Pennsylvania Hotel is now a grey, uncomfortable warren, without style or taste, taken over by the Hilton firm: a machine for processing travellers when they step out of those flying cylinders. And all done in the noble cause of democracy. This is egalitarianism corrupted. The dreams of New York’s great builders, of the murdered architect Stanford White, become wretched nightmares. The ghost of the old city hovers over the new. White was murdered in the roof garden of Madison Square, across the street from where my hotel stood. He built the set for his own destruction. And now that is demolished, too. He brought the best of Europe to America and he created architecture which was purely, confidently American in style and proportions. They mock all that now. Everywhere in the world the forces of Carthage are dynamiting our culture, our memories, our aesthetic monuments, replacing them with buildings indistinguishable one from the other, or from one country to another. They are wiping out our heritage; they are driving away our memories. Our very identities are therefore threatened. In 1906 White’s enemies conspired to kill him. The assassin was a Jew named Thaw who alleged White had seduced his wife. It was significant, however, that Thaw was eventually found ‘not guilty because insane’ and so avoided the consequences of his crime. Another shot fired for Carthage which went unpunished.
Ich vil geyn mayn aveyres shiteln,
indeed!

By eight the next morning, having pulled myself together with the help of cocaine and packed my trunks, I called for a porter, following him down to the echoing lobby. As I paid the balance of my bill (which took an alarming bite from my remaining funds) Jimmy Rembrandt approached me. He was smiling and full of energy, shaking my hand and saying I looked one hundred percent. Mortimer, he said, felt ill and could hardly speak, but would be with us on the train. We began to cross from the entrance hall to the Pennsylvania Station, immediately over the street, my bags on a trolley behind us. ‘Luce is afraid he has the ‘flu. But we know what’s caused his symptoms, don’t we, Max.’ Entering the Doric arcade with its rows of elegant shops and shafts of dusty sunlight, we saw Mortimer waiting for us near the Grand Stairway. He was as smartly dressed as Rembrandt, but did look pale and sorry for himself. He tried to smile at me. ‘Ah, Colonel Peterson, the famous French aviator.’