The Laughter of Carthage (19 page)

Soon I was spending all my free time studying specialist magazines, looking for likely investors. Callahan’s guarantees, when I considered them, were not watertight. It would still be foolish of me to reveal myself as Max Peterson. The Klan, I remembered, had powerful financial support from the great farming alliances of the West Coast. Doubtless industry had similar links. I made a considerable effort to play my parts with full attention, but I was growing increasingly abstracted. Every day I failed at raising the money was a betrayal of my little girl’s hopes. In Fresno Mrs Cornelius suddenly refused to continue the play and sang her songs instead. She would not speak to me for a whole day afterwards. Time was running out. I did not have a single reply to my circulars. Esmé would believe I no longer loved her. From Mojave, where we did three shows of
White Knight and Red Queen
a day, I sent my rose a cable assuring her all problems were being overcome. Under the benevolent sun of Southern California, I drove our little truck along the white highway, beside the sea. I saw only her. Already I imagined how delighted my beautiful child-wife would be. She would sit beside me, holding my arm, marvelling at undreamed-of natural luxury. I would again be doing my work as a scientist. We should be respected all over America, hobnobbing with the great and the famous. But this image only served to bring me closer to panic. I could lose it all. I had to find financial support. Sooner or later, when Callahan caught up with Mrs Mawgan, I would be in danger of my life. I had to act with reasonable speed. The one thing I had not told Callahan was where I guessed Mrs Mawgan to be hiding. That information was too valuable to throw in with the rest. She would have changed her name. She might be running a fresh operation. I knew therefore it could be a few months before Callahan would run my ex-mistress to earth. In those months I planned to make some money, bring Esmé to America, marry her and then escape to Buenos Aires, where engineers were in short supply, but where wealthy people willingly invested in schemes likely to add to the Argentine’s prestige. Moreover, many Russian émigrés were already there, supplying their military experience and skills to the government. Nothing of this could come true, I reminded myself, unless I quickly found what we in the theatrical profession called ‘an angel’.

We stopped for a late lunch at a little mobile hot-dog stand alone on the beach. Mrs Cornelius drew me aside. ‘Yore lookin’ orl dizzy, Ivan. I’m gonna say it once more an’ thass that. Ferget ‘er!’

I smiled graciously at my old friend. ‘Can you forget perfection, my dear, good Mrs Cornelius? When the girl you’ve longed for all your life, who you thought forever lost, is by a miracle returned to you, not once but twice, it’s hardly a casual affair. I mourned my Esmé for five years. I have sworn I shall never mourn her again.’

To her eternal shame (she apologised only three weeks ago in
The Elgin),
Mrs Cornelius answered this with one of her many new American expletives. It did not touch me, then. I knew in my heart she, whose instincts were normally so good, feared she must soon be parted from me. I could have reassured her, if she had listened. I loved her, as I would always love her. But Esmé possessed me. I looked up as a motor launch, shrieking like a bleeding sow, came in close to the shore, then swerved hard against the surf to squeal out towards the horizon again. There were two men standing upright in the launch. One had the wheel. The other was studying the beach through a pair of binoculars. I wondered again how much of the truth Callahan had told me. I had forgotten to question his links with Brodmann. Certainly, he had never contradicted my contention that the Cheka remained on my trail. I was sure the man with the glasses was Brodmann. Mrs Cornelius thought I was merely exhibiting pique as I hurried her and the others, who as usual giggled like children, back to the van.

Just before sunset next day, we arrived in Santa Monica where I again cabled Esmé my whereabouts, swearing a first-class boat ticket would soon be hers. I was becoming so desperate I thought of selling the van until I remembered my promise to Mrs Cornelius. It was not in me to sink to such depths. We planned to establish ourselves at Huntington Beach for at least a week and do our usual circuit of the nearby seaside resorts. It was close enough to Los Angeles for me to plan the area as a base from which to approach potential ‘angels’. By the next morning I had written another two dozen more or less identical letters and would mail them at my first opportunity. I was trying to will Esmé, six thousand miles away in Rome, to trust me and not to lose heart. I checked sailing times, discovering several ships leaving from Genoa in the coming month. My next telegram listed these ships and dates, asking her to choose which she would prefer. That, at least, would assure my child I remained sincere. I would never let her down,
mayn shvester, mayn sibe!

That afternoon we did the first of our matinees at
Maddison’s Famous Vaudeville Theater
on the noisy, carefree boardwalk. The theatre looked out towards the big concrete fishing mole and the sandy beach. This resort was so characteristically Californian I had grown to love her. In spirit at least she reminded me of old Odessa, of her more vulgar suburbs along the coast, where brass bands played and carousels turned, in Fountain and Arcadia. From her cliffs, crooked wooden stairways wound down to beaches where huge mountains of water flung up their spray and the breakers rolled all the way from the horizon. Here were parties of bathers, older people sunning themselves, picnickers under bright umbrellas, less than a stone’s throw from a score of massive, full-sized oil derricks marching unchecked from cliffs to ocean. This forest flanked Huntington Beach on two sides. Here was the source of wealth and the means of squandering it rolled into one community. Amusement arcades, fun fairs, rickety nickelodeons, cotton candy stalls, magazine stands, ferris wheels, roller coasters, pleasure boats, many in primary colours made even more dazzling by the steady Pacific glare, contrasted with the twinkling blue of the ocean and an infinity of perfect sky. Sometimes an aeroplane flew over, just missing the roller coaster. The plane gave joyrides to excited grandparents, frozen-faced children, terrified oilmen and their happy girls, serious youths. Sometimes speed boats would howl and ululate on the water, reaping a watery furrow, marked by a wound of white foam. And all the while the oil pumps rose and fell, solid old beam-engines like gigantic feasting swamp fowl. Coupled with the towering lattices of the rigs, they made a scene from H. G. Wells, with Martians invading from the ocean depths, looking with baffled curiosity on the careless, festive crowd which simply characterised them as a not very interesting novelty.
Alas, unconscious of their doom, the little foxes play
, as Mrs Cornelius’s swindler friend, the Bishop, would always remark as he finished his fifth pint in
The Blenheim Arms
on a Friday night (it was before he was committed to an Old Folks Home near Littlehampton). Unlike Europe, America has never been ashamed of the sources of her prosperity, unless, ironically, they lie in brewing, distilling or cereal crops. Some years ago I met a Mr Schlitz. I believe the young man was attending university over here. He confided to me he did not mind in the least that his ancestral brewmasters had made Milwaukee famous; what he objected to was that their beer on his name, as it were, embarrassed him ‘all to hell’.

Greater Los Angeles, her earlier adobe and wooden Gothic now overshadowed by skyscrapers modelled on sixteenth-century haciendas, her blazing stucco flanked by enormous imported palms, from Africa and Australia, shading the parameters of implacable boulevards, now fills four thousand square miles. She is truly the
Zukunft Kaiserstadt Imperye Yishov fun tsukunft!
The Emperor City of the Future. And at her core history converges, coalesces, transmutes, reforms; not in the cool serenity of her City Hall, twenty-five storeys of splendid white Sumerian cement, not on the site of Yang-Na,
mestizo
Carthaginian outpost destroyed by internecine wars of her Catholic soldier-priests; not in her tar pits or observatories, her museums and universities; not even in her fantastic cults which have made of reality a globe filled with quicksilver. The core of Greater L.A. is where Vine Street crosses Hollywood Boulevard, that unremarkable collection of office blocks, shops and cinemas. Daily, when I was young, this intersection and the surrounding area, might fill with Roman Centurions, Spanish religious processions, convoys of Indian elephants bearing great howdahs from which drifted clouds of multicoloured silk; the armies of Norman France and Anglo-Saxon England, of Catherine the Great and Bismarck and Napoleon; the mob of the Paris streets in 1793 and the fighting Cossacks of Stenka Razin; the Royal Progress of the first Ming Emperor: Cowboys, Indians. Comic Police; the very failure of ‘authenticity’ is a sign that here was America’s true melting-pot. It was a melting-pot of Time. Of cultures. A million points of view like the infinite facets of some unstable gem. The Yellow and Red Cars come and go in their electric confidence; lines of power and communication strengthen Hollywood’s already complicated aesthetic. Etiolated Tahitian palms wave in an unlikely breeze next to the cypresses of ancient Jordan, the oaks of England and the poplars of the Rhone; all washed to pastels by her misty light. This same light lends shivering magic to her hills, as if, when we step beyond a certain
unbakant
frontier, we will find ourselves elsewhere in Time, possibly Space, too, and Hollywood vanished behind us: a whisper in the distant skies, a faint scent of coffee, paint and freshly sawn wood. She, above all, is still free. She is the perfect model of my
flitshtot,
my promise of hope. To her majesty, those beach towns were boisterous tumblers, summoned for her entertainment; save for Long Beach, a resentful, hard-working
boyar,
forever predicting the capital’s unrealised doom.

Mrs Cornelius, Mabel, Ethel, Mr Harry Hope and myself (our Brooklyn Indian had been lost to some nameless drunk tank) were now in direct competition with the chugging pumps and rattling rigs, the calliopes of a dozen whirling rides, with barkers’ shouts and the noisy excitement of the crowd itself; but we did not care. Here were the easy landscapes of childhood interludes and we felt, as always, that we had come home. I was now determined not to let Mrs Cornelius down. I put everything I had into my part. Never had a Cossack officer spoken in such thrilling fury, with such meaningful gestures, as I cried to the unseen hordes of Bolshevism encircling me: ‘Back, you cowards! Before God, the Tsar and Holy Russia, I swear I shall be revenged on some of you and send you to that Last Tribunal where a greater power than I shall judge and condemn you for your crimes!’ (I was then saved by Mrs Cornelius, in her khaki tunic and tights, who had been convinced by my earlier arguments that the cause she had served was evil, cruel and destructive.) She responded marvellously; acting with boldness and flare. If Cecil B. DeMille had actually been in the audience he might have offered us contracts on the spot. From habit, I looked to see if John ‘Mucker’ Hever was in his usual place. He had deserted us. No flowers appeared backstage.

That evening, before we went on for our final performance, Mrs Cornelius remained in high spirits. She appreciated the effort I had made. She told me I could be a wonder when I wanted to be. She hoped I would stop making a fool of myself and maybe have a try at the East Coast theatres again. We could start in Atlantic City. I reminded her I might soon be sitting behind an engineer’s desk but I promised not to leave the company without fair notice. We heard our music beginning and virtually danced out onto the stage with oui opening number (
The Devil Came To Russia And The Devil Waved A Flag
to the tune of
The Animals Went In Two By Two).
Again we had the audience captivated. We knew we were, as they say, ‘flying’. It was not until Ethel at the piano struck up our finale
The Hammer And The Sickle Can’t Crush Or Tear Our Hearts
to
Marching Through Georgia)
that I looked for ‘Mucker’ Hever and saw instead, with arms folded across their chests, five hooded Klansmen at the back of the hall. My mouth became instantly dry. I could scarcely croak out the remaining verse. My legs were weak; my stomach felt as if a knife had pierced it. Mrs Cornelius was alarmed. ‘Wot ther bloody ‘ell’s ther matter?’ she whispered. Then, as the audience whistled, stamped and applauded, the five Klansmen began to clap. They clapped regularly, at a slightly slower beat than the rest of the crowd and they continued to clap, increasing the beat slightly, until one of them raised a clenched gauntlet above his head. ‘Death to the Three Jays! Death to Jew, Jap and Jesuit! Death to the Alien Creed!’ I had expected them to rush the stage and attempt to carry me off. My first thought was that Callahan had betrayed me. Now, unless they were playing a cat-and-mouse game with me, I believed those five sincere, Klansmen of the
Alte Kämpfer
who still clung to the original ideals of the
Umzikhtbar Imperye.
We took two curtain calls, which we had never done before. We bowed and waved. I grinned like a puppeteer’s idiot doll. When we came to take the third call, the Knights of the Invisible Empire had vanished and the audience was filing from the little hall. ‘I ‘ope them bastards don’t make a reg’lar fing o’ this.’ Mrs Cornelius released my hand. ‘They could bleedin’ lose us ‘arf the ‘ouse.’ I had my own reasons for wishing them gone. In the dressing-room she made me drink a tumbler of noxious Mexican brandy. ‘Yore sweatin’ like a pig! Wot scared ya this time? Them silly buggers in their nighties? Jes’ a bunch o’ overgrown kids muckin’ abart.’ She chuckled. ‘Didn’t fink they wos real ghosts, did yer?’ She poured me another dark brown slug.