The Laughter of Carthage (40 page)

At this, suddenly I slumped. I had spent months avoiding the only person willing to give me money (and that at great cost to myself). I could think of no one else in the whole of Paris who would for a second go out of their way for me. I was once more in a weak position. In some ways weaker than ever before. The Cheka can sniff out weakness. My alarm came flooding back. I had sworn never to suffer prison again. The Bolsheviks had accused me as a swindler once, in Kiev, and now swindlers themselves threatened to send me to prison, accused as a Bolshevik! Yet my faith in the value of my airship persisted. It was a good design. A reality. That and the truth must surely save me! ‘The British have been investing in commercial aeroplane services. So have the Dutch. Couldn’t we appeal to them for funds?’

‘It’s politically impossible.’ Kolya spoke very quietly. ‘We need private money. And private money hates scandal.’

‘Most of the frame’s already built. We have firm costings for gas, fabric and engines. Quotations for the gondola are arriving now. It will work Kolya!’

My friend’s expression grew sadder. He had tears in his eyes. ‘My advice, Dimka, is to abandon any hope of completing her. Design another airship. Find a new backer abroad. Use that passport as soon as you can!’

‘Must I go to Constantinople?’

‘To America, of course. They have real money. They’re genuinely interested in new notions. Well, if it were my choice, I would head for New York.’

‘It’s impossible, Kolya. Esmé’s papers aren’t through.’

‘They’ll arrive any day. You can’t help her if they arrest you.’

‘I haven’t enough money for the fare.’

‘I could just about find you the price of a first-class passage.’ He was begging me, with every part of him, to save myself and I loved him all the more, but I remained confused. My life had seemed so secure, my prospects perfect, and now it was falling to pieces by the moment. ‘I must have time,’ I told him. ‘I can’t abandon Esmé. You know what she means to me.’

‘There’s no suggestion you abandon her, Dimka. She’ll follow almost immediately. I’ll make myself responsible for her. She can live at our house.’

I knew he was right. I should go before there were charges. Then, at least, I would not seem a wanted criminal. ‘Thank God I have one trustworthy friend. But suppose you, too, are indicted?’

‘I shan’t be. My family connections, my title, guarantees that. I’m afraid it’s you alone will directly suffer, Dimka. I can’t swear to it, but it looks almost as if they deliberately arranged for you to take the whole onus.’

How could ordinary people be capable of such complex perfidy? I had gone through so many dangers, risked so much, abandoned more to reach what I believed a safe, just and decently ordered world, only to be betrayed more subtly, more coldly, than ever I had been in Russia. France, the Mother of Modern Justice, was about to sacrifice me to satisfy the greed, guarantee the social standing of her great men. An idealist, a person of intellect is helpless against the forces of the Fifth Dimension, the Dimension of Secret Power. The ungodly delight to bring down the poets and the scientists; to lay them upon the altars of Gog-Magog and with bloody knives cut out their innocent hearts. The Fifth Dimension is the Land of Zion, a place beyond the ordinary limits of geography; a dark world of dark men and women determined to infiltrate and inhabit our own, to replace every one of us with a doppelgänger whose spirit once belonged to a dead Carthaginian. This is how Carthage conquers. Through money and human folly. Gone are the elephants and the bronze gongs, the clashing of bright metal and the cries of red-lipped bearded soldiers. Their slaves no longer drag themselves in chained convoys, bowed beneath the whip and the throbbing sun; instead they move from desk to desk in hygienic offices; they crawl up to coalfaces wearing modern safety lamps, they work as bunnygirls in gambling clubs, and most never have the dimmest understanding that they are owned, body and soul, by invisible creatures, powerful rulers of the Fifth Dimension. Zion is Carthage and Carthage shall not die. She adopts a thousand guises and her victims are the honest, the sane, the innocent and the holy. This war continues, but we are few. I can hear their laughter, distant and merciless, mocking and rapacious, echoing across the dissipating barrier dividing one dimension from the other. This laughter of Carthage gives me strength to resist. They cannot understand. They have beaten me with their rods. They have forced me to my knees. And yet I walk still.
Im darf men keyn finger in moyl nit araynleygen!
The armies of Turkey and Israel combine against me, but I shall continue to fight. My friends are few, but they are strong. I wish they had been with me in Paris, in those dreadful hours of my betrayal. But there will come a time for vengeance. We shall trample down death by death and upon those in the tombs bestow life.

On April 1st 1921 the city had begun to turn green and luminous. There were early blossoms appearing like blemishes upon the perfectly manicured body of the Luxembourg Gardens and citizens emerging from their winter cocoons walked with a livelier step. Pretty girls put on spring paint and glanced at my handsome car as I drove past but I barely noticed them. I was immersed in my anxieties. I had decided at last, as letters began to arrive from creditors and I was regularly abused by people on the street outside our deserted offices, that I could wait no longer. Either Brodmann and his Chekists would sense I was unprotected and strike, or the French Fraud Police would arrest me. Matters were worsening daily. There was no doubt I was to be sacrificed by de Grion and his high society friends so they could claim to have been duped by a foreign adventurer. Some of the newspaper stories in the conservative press undoubtedly had their source in de Grion. Kolya and I, together with most ordinary shareholders, were the only real dupes, but there was no way to prove it. Everything was on de Grion’s side: more than he knew, in my case. I read the reports: it was suggested I was a Bolshevik agent fraudulently gathering gold for Moscow, that I represented German Zionist interests, that I was a wanted criminal in Italy and Turkey. I knew enough about such campaigns to predict the outcome of this one. I was a perfect scapegoat, as Kolya had told me. I must forget any hope of continuing my fight in France. It would only mean imprisonment. I would go abroad and there clear my name. With my French passport I would have no great trouble getting to England, but I was still too close to the source of danger. Kolya, as always, gave me the best advice. I would spend some time in America, meet Esmé and Kolya there, then enter Britain later, when the publicity was forgotten.

As I drove home that afternoon I made up my mind to tell Esmé my intention of taking the ship from Cherbourg to New York. Kolya would keep her safe until she followed me. I had no choice. In America I would swiftly redeem my name. By the time she arrived I would be well on the way to re-establishing myself. The naïveté and optimism of Americans now looked attractive. Obviously they had money for new ideas. They had not yet realised how successful the War had been for them. They were now, for the first time in their history, a major international creditor, still with no notion of their enormous power in a world where almost every other nation faced bankruptcy. Once in the United States, my earlier press cuttings would prove my credibility. These were the interviews which chiefly mentioned my earlier successes in Kiev and Constantinople.

I arrived at the house to find it completely empty of people. A week before, the servants had left but now Esmé, too, was gone. Since the foundering of the company she had been frequently absent. She had been forced to find a social routine to relieve herself of boredom in my absence, now she used it to help her forget the terror of renewed poverty. I promised myself to make it up to her before I left. We should have a marvellous few days until I boarded the
Mauretania,
the liner I had chosen for my voyage. No longer the greatest ship afloat, she was rarely fully booked, but everyone said she had a pre-war elegance lacking in Cunard’s recent vessels with their emphasis on contemporary decor and pastel colours. At my desk, I wrote a letter to Mrs Cornelius. My last, describing my successes, had not been answered. Now I must tell her of my change of fortune. I would not be visiting England for some time. I had a visa permitting me six months in America and might even renew it if necessary. I would first stay in New York, then travel to Washington. There I intended to contact government officials and show them my patents. I wished her luck with her stage career. I suggested she might find the film medium suitable to her talents. I asked to be remembered to Major Nye.

Esmé was still not home by eight. I left her a note and went to see Kolya. He insisted on visiting the nightclub in the Rue Boissy d’Anglais and eating ‘hot dogs’ - ‘So you know what kind of food they serve in America and will not appear unsophisticated on arrival!’ He seemed in high spirits but was, I am sure, merely presenting a good front, to cheer me up. Leaving him was, in a different way, as painful as leaving Esmé. He said he would probably follow in a couple of months, as soon as the scandal died. For all he knew he would bring Esmé to me himself. I had only this hope. I was in danger of falling back ‘within the nightmare’, scarcely able to think clearly around emotional matters. I had no wish to leave my two dearest friends or to desert Europe. The United States seemed so far away. It might have lain beyond the edge of the world. But that was also its attraction.

At our little table under an archway smeared with bright yellow and crimson grotesques, Kolya and I watched a negro dance band play for ballet girls twisting themselves in parodies of classical movements. My friend had more information for me. ‘Stay at the Hotel Pennsylvania. Everyone insists it’s magnificent. It’s so modern an underground railway leads directly into the basements, just for the convenience of guests. I’ve made reservations for you through Cook’s. Your passport describes you as an engineer, so you’ll have no difficulty. Engineers are national heroes in America. Next time you come to Paris, you’ll be aboard your own air liner. Never fear, Dimka, you’ll prove the lie to the press!’

We drank to my success, but I remained fearful. In Russia I had been swept along by profound historical forces, but in France mere financial trickery had dictated my fate. (Yet the Shadow World of Carthage, the Fifth Dimension, exists on the fringes of our own, preparing to engulf us, and its modern weapon is money, the stock exchange. It lies in the East yet at the same time is everywhere, for it intersects our own dimensions on levels conventional science cannot as yet define.) That night, too, Kolya and I made our private farewells. Having given up the little place at Neuilly, we took a hotel room in Rue Bonaparte. It was a sweet goodbye and we both wept. We were fated to be together, just as Esmé and I were fated. His delicate features in the light from the street was the moon haunted, tragic face of a nineteenth-century pierrot. We were to meet again, of course, before I left for Cherbourg, but this was the true time of our parting.

I arrived home to find Esmé still dressed. Her hair was dishevelled. In her white and silver evening gown she resembled a frantic Christmas fairy fluttering about the empty rooms. She was drunk. She had returned, she said, to find me gone. Believing herself deserted she had taken a taxi to search the streets. I showed her my unopened note where I had left it for her. She looked wildly at it, shaking her head dumbly. For a moment her eyes had the flat glow of a puppet’s, without expression or consciousness, then she lowered her lids while at the same time shrinking into a chair, as if her entire body folded in on itself; as if her mind were being sucked into some unfathomable secret place. I became alarmed that I had caused this condition. When I tried to rouse her she shivered, looking up at me only once with an expression of terrified anticipation. I stepped back from her. ‘What’s happened?’

She could not move. Her lips closed, then remained partly open. Eventually I picked her up and carried her to the bedroom where I undressed her. She lay with the sheets to her chin, her eyes following me as I moved, preparing for bed. She made no response to my questions. I decided I was worrying too much. Drink and the late hour were responsible for her behaviour. I went to sleep, determined to tell her my plans in the morning.

At breakfast she was herself again, unusually bright, happy as a canary. She had arranged to lunch with her friend Agnes in the Champs Elysées. I did not know Agnes. Would she object if I accompanied her? But Agnes had a secret to discuss and a man would not be welcome, ‘I, too, have an important secret, Esmé. Something I wanted to say last night.’

Esmé cocked her head to one side, her blue eyes unblinking, a piece of toast halfway to her mouth. ‘Are you buying a new car? Is the airship out of trouble?’ Careless and light-minded, she had become a true Parisienne, taking nothing seriously save the exact effect on her looks of the latest mascara. While not begrudging her this happiness, I was a little irritated. Yet I could not sustain anger. I laughed. ‘The news is bad, darling. Our Company is worse than dead. The vultures close in and I’m the only meat left for them. Everyone else has run away.’ Her giggle was unexpected, like the trilling of a blackbird at a funeral. ‘They can’t harm you, Maxim. You’re invulnerable. You’ll come up with a plan.’ I had hoped for sympathy or at least concern and was disturbed rather than encouraged by this statement of confidence. ‘It’s a desperate plan, however,’ I said. ‘You must listen to me, Esmé.’