Earthly Powers (75 page)

       Looking up from the volume as we approached the station, I saw a poster advertising Mercurio light bulbs. The god Mercury, naked, helmeted or battlebowlered, wings on heels, sped through the blue with a flaring light bulb in hang powered, one presumed, from his own body. Had the Christian image of the devil been contrived out of a mixture of Hermes and his hoofed son Pan? The Prince of the Power of the Air—how noble a title. Lucifer, the bringer of light. The rulers of the air could not also be the rulers of darkness. The air was where brightness fell from. (Yes, Toomey, leaving it dark.) It was God who sat in darkness fingering his beard, everybody's unwashed old do' man. (Unworthy, Toomey: a light beyond light striking human souls as darkness.) He could not even look after his first chosen. Come on, Toomey, let's have William Blake: hell as energy and energy as eternal delight; John Milton of the devil's party without knowing it. Anything to empty certain words of meaning—words like, for instance, England, home, duty.

       I was, of course, scared of going home. I had failed in my duty to England.

       I should have watched for the red light's glowing and then cried: God's curse on Germany. Then I would have been taken away and imprisoned for the duration, hero, patriot, best-selling author now to sell even better. I shook myself out of the taxi at the Milan terminus: I was going to my fratello in the episcopal palace at Moneta. The taxi driver had no objection to my taking away a book that was not his property and was, moreover, in an unintelligible language. I clicked open my suitcase and stowed Hobbes. I tipped the driver extravagantly. I bought a ticket to Moneta and, on the train, quietened my shaking by pondering the mystique or metaphysic or theology of war. Was war a natural product of historical wrongs or was it an allegory of some eternal opposition? It seemed to me that good and evil were probably as indefinable as right and wrong, and that the sole reality was the electricity of opposition. Alpha versus omega, and the two at pacific rest in a Creator who said he was both. He was the Creator of the Prince of the Power of the Air, but he must also be the Creator of an opposing prince whom we blasphemously called God. You were doomed to take sides, but did it matter which side you took? And then the words home and duty bellowed from a baby in the next compartment.

       I told my story to Carlo as we sat over a flask of the local wine in his salone. But first I had had to be admitted by snuffling Mario and stand by while Carlo—formidably, nay beautifully hideous in a black gravy-stained cassockdelivered hard words to two middle-aged men in fascist uniform. Carlo seemed to have said something in a sermon displeasing to the local representatives of the regime. Something about the war and Italy's need to stay out of the war and initiate in the Italian soul if not elsewhere a fight for liberty. "There," boomed Carlo, as I came into the great vestibule with its pious pictures, "is an Englishman. He is by way of being my brother. Nevertheless do your duty to the cause of fascism. He represents democracy, a free opposition, a free press and free speech. Fall upon him, tear him to tatters. Or bring your thugs to do it, we shall be ready for them." They glowered at me but at the same time made vague gestures of greeting. Mario held open the door, snuffling. They left mumbling and with salutes that looked more communist than fascist. Carlo said to me, "What are you doing here? I understood that England had locked her doors."

       He listened to my story. "You did what you had to do," he said. "Whatever they do to you your conscience is clear." And then, "In comparison with Domenico you are as pure as snow."

       "What has Domenico done?"

       "Domenico has obtained a civil divorce in Reno or somewhere and has remarried. He has gone through a form of marriage with some film star I have never heard of. It is mere incidental news in a letter I received from our nephew. A fifteen-year-old boy stained and shamed with Domenico's filthy lust and defection. And his sister too. And Hortense having to go through lawyers to obtain what they call alimony. The name Campanati clings to me like the stink of old grease."

       "It will cling to Hortense also."

       "Along with the faith, the faith, faithful unto death." And there it was: the picture of the wide-eyed Roman at attention while Pompeii fell, my father's surgery, my pulling out of a bad tooth on Christmas morning. "The children will themselves be strong in the faith, thank God, but they need a father and they cannot have a father. It is you they need."

       I groaned in my stomach, remembering that Heinz was awaiting me back in London, his Pflegevater. I began to curse the Nazis, softly but without inhibition. Carlo listened sympathetically and nodded. He said, "This, I think, will be the last time we will see each other for some years. The sooner you return to England the better. Make your peace. Use your talents in propaganda. There are bigger ruffians at large now than ever there were in Chicago. I will tell you what I think is going to happen. The French will give in to the Germans and the Germans will overrun Europe. Mussolini will enter the war and gain such scraps from Hitler's table as he can. And then Italy will collapse and Britain invade Italy and Germany take over this poor benighted country. America will come in at the end as she came in in the last war. But before that we are going to have a terrible time." Carlo's prophecies were always pretty accurate. "I may not survive. I am not by nature a discreet man, though I have tried to practice discretion. You remember that time in the Garden of Allah, ridiculous blasphemy of a name, when we got drunk together? We shall get drunk together tonight, though on wine. Tomorrow you will need time to recover, though I shall not. Then the following day you may take the train from Milan to Ventimiglia and then the train from Ventimiglia to Paris. And then cross the Channel. The amenities of peace are still with us, but they will not be so much longer. It will be a long long time before we see each other again. If we ever do."

CHAPTER 54

The body of grim men who faced me in the bare room on Ebury Street were not quite a tribunal, not quite a court of enquiry. They all wore civilian clothes, but they had military manners, except for one man who had police manners. There were represented, I supposed, Scotland Yard's Special Branch, one of the numerals of MI, and probably the Home Office. The chairman was named Major de la Warr and he had small features set in wide margins of flesh, two chins also, also a fat voice. There was a canned ham called Plumrose, and I tend, when I recall him, to catch an image of the coffin-shaped tin with a pink porker on it. A voice, in other words, both plummy and porky. All the men had what I took to be copies of my dossier, or rather a reduced version of it, since one of the policemen, whose rank I gathered was that of superintendent, seemed to have the definitive unabridged version before him. This, I noted, contained newspaper clippings and even photographs. Major de la Warr said, "You took your time getting back."

       "I was lucky to get back at all."

       "We'll come to that later. What were you doing in Italy?"

       "Visiting Monsignor Campanati, the Bishop of Moneta. He's related to me by marriage." Everybody already knew this, or should have known it, but nobody liked it. A thin man with a stiff collar and black tie pencilled rapid notes.

       "Yes," Major de la Warr said. "All this Latin. Some nonsense about casting out devils."

       "You know it's nonsense apparently," I said. "Certain prelates of the Church think differently."

       "The Church of Rome."

       "To which I belong." This only became true when I confronted the Church of England.

       Major de la Warr said, "And what were you doing in Paris?"

       "Seeing James Joyce. The Irish writer." I gave it them all. "A confirmed neutral in the last war, despite his British passport. Trained by Jesuits. Author of Ulysses, long banned for dirtiness. He'd promised me a copy of Finnegans Wake. Signed. A great experimental masterpiece. Confiscated by HM Customs for investigation. I assured them it was not in code. Damn it all, the publishers are Faber and Faber." Everybody made notes.

       "What," the thin man asked, "were you doing in Austria in the first place?"

       "I've already made it perfectly clear in writing that I was trying to arrange for the exodus of Jakob Strehler. The author. The Nobel prizewinner." Nobody seemed to have heard of him. I was angry and said, "I realise that literature doesn't come into the piovince of you gentlemen, but I submit that the name Jakob Strehler should not he altogether unknown to you. I was trying to perform a duty to international literature."

       "Why," quacked a small man who kept spinning his spectacles round in a left fist that loosely grasped an earpiece, "did you not try to get him out earlier? After all, we were on the brink of war."

       "His son had been sent to me. I decided that the son needed his father."

       "So," still twirling, "it was not altogether a devotion to what you call international literature." Very shrewd, very nasty. "How were you proposing to get this Strehler fellow out?"

       "I had a forged passport ready for him."

       "British?" Major de la Warr asked.

       "I'm afraid so. I mean, it was the only way."

       "Where is the passport?" That was the man with the stiff collar.

       "Hidden, I think, in the middle of a pile of old copies of Punch that Strehier used to read in his lavatory."

       "Left there for some Nazi agent to use. I see." The same man. "How was the passport obtained in the first place?"

       "Stolen. By the son of Strehler. He stole. He badly needed parental guidance." There was much pencilling.

       A man who smiled with the left side of his mouth and had made a cage of his fingers said, "Where is this Herr Strehler the younger now?"

       "Interned, I gather. I left him in a hotel when I went to get his father. He got himself into some trouble undefined. The two men who came to tell me were not very communicative. But thank God I'm free of him."

       "We have," Major de la Warr said, "copies of the transcript of your ah interview. It was picked up on what is insolently termed the Free British Radio. From Berlin. And yet you say you were in Vienna."

       "I was most certainly in Vienna. Landline landline." Why I made a song of it I did not and do not know. Further notes were scribbled.

       "You realise the gravity of giving comfort to the enemy?" Major de la Warr said. "You gave a lot of comfort. All very chummy. Old friend of the regime. You ah reviled the Prime Minister. You regretted the war. You spoke of the need for ah ah love."

       "Your scrutinizers evidently failed to spot two cunningly prepared acrostics," I said. "Look at your transcripts. One of them, which I fitted into an alleged aphorism of Marcus Aurelius, says FUCK THE BLOODY NAZIS. The other is contained in my final statement. The one beginning 'May all your hearts' and ending 'Learn love.' I leave it to you gentlemen to work it out." They worked it out. The policeman with the fat dossier got it first: "May Hitler rot in hell."

       "Amen," I said. The board or tribunal or court, probably all men who started the day with The Times crossword, had to smile faintly at my ingenuity. "I should think the Nazis have probably worked it out too. They are no stupider than you gentlemen." I should not have said that. "And you talk about my giving comfort to the enemy."

       "In effect," a bald brutal-looking man with an exquisite voice said, "you were uttering obscenities. You could have expressed your ah ah ah ah arcane detestation of the Nazis without using the language of the gutter."

       "It has only become apparent to you now," I said, "that it was the language of the gutter. It is, however, the only language appropriate to the Nazis."

       "I was thinking," the bald man said, "of some decent Englishwoman listening to your broadcast and detecting your coded message and having a sense of outraged modesty." He was serious, totally, totally serious.

       The police officer said, "This was not your first visit to Nazi Germany."

       "I was, as you will undoubtedly know, in Berlin for a film festival at which a film based on a novel of mine was presented."

       "You saved the life of Heinrich Himmler according to one of our reports." There was a stir of grudging respect not horror. "From the bullet of a would-be assassin"

       "My sister's mother-in-law in fact. She was suffering from terminal cancer and wished to die. She wished to take Heinrich Himmler with her. My salvatory act was instinctive, and I do not think I have to apologise for it. We then considered Germany a friendly power."

       "What is this about your mother-in-law?" the thin man with the stiff collar asked incredulously.

       "The mother in fact of Monsignor Campanati, Bishop of Moneta." They all sat back and had a good look at me. "She did much good and dangerous work on behalf of the German Jews."

       "This Ezra Pound," the policeman said, "broadcasts from Rome radio on behalf of Mussolini. He has a lot to say about the badness of Great Britain. You quoted from him."

       "He's considered a great poet. He wrote the poem I quoted just after the Great War."

       "You consider," Major de la Warr asked, "that Great Britain is an ah old bitch gone in the teeth? That this is a ah ah botched civilization?"

       "To some extent, yes. If Britain had had teeth to show against Hitler she would have shown them earlier. And, yes, our civilization is nothing to be proud of. Black and brown helots, an unbridgeable gap between the governing and the governed. Shall we say that some civilizations are more botched than others. Ours is botched, but there are some more botched. Take our ally France, for instance—"

       "We don't want to hear about France," the bald man said. "Indeed," glancing along the line of his colleagues, "I don't think we want to hear any more about anything." Some grunted.