The Vengeance of Rome (96 page)

By 1955 our entire neighbourhood was a festering slum occupied by drug dealers, calypso singers and pimps. Ask poor Perek Rachman! He was destroyed by them and their degenerate allies, the Negrophilic decadent Cliveden set, Jewish aristocrats like John Profumo and whores like Christine Keeler. Her lovers made up half the House of Lords on one side, and an entire steel band on the other. Sports people and film stars like Freddy Fowler and Diana Dors enjoyed nothing better than being seen with Soho gang bosses and their powerful police friends from West End Central.

I knew all this at first hand from Mrs Cornelius. She was still doing film and TV work in 1950, though her rôles became smaller due to American movies attracting a larger public. These, too, contributed to the rot. Richard Widemark and Robert Mitcham had a great deal to answer for. I told Mr Widemark this to his face on the bombsite where they were filming
Knights of the City
, in which Mrs Cornelius played a barmaid.

‘Mr Widemark, do you know that you are held up as a model for our young people?' I asked him. We stood together in the ruins beside the Thames. Six o'clock in the morning. Widemark seemed unmoved. He asked me politely if I knew where you could buy American cigarettes. I was able to get him a couple of cartons of Pall Malls from contacts I had in the USAF PX.

After 1946 there was not a Hollywood sofa unsoaked with blood or a lake which did not contain a dozen corpses wearing concrete overshoes. For every
Singin' in the Rain
there were fifty
Pickups on South Street
. Meanwhile, the US scriptwriters rewrote our history to make Americans the heroes of every wartime encounter. Errol Flynn (admittedly Tasmanian originally) and John Wayne (who had had a secret sex change operation) personally saved Burma and China from the Japanese. Robert Ryan single-handedly defeated the Germans on D-Day. Those of us who suffered through the dark years of the War, who saw the British flyers going up day and night against the superior might of the Luftwaffe, still felt America might have stepped in a little earlier and, instead of supporting Hitler and Mussolini
and Franco, before Hitler declared war on her in 1941, saved us all the trouble of the War and its consequences. No wonder the British public, who suffered so much, became confused by this imported American communist culture. For a while I was quite bitter about it. I watched Hollywood rewriting my history before my eyes.

‘You've lost th' knack of enjoyin' life as it comes, Ivan.' Mrs Cornelius cannot help loving pleasure. Like my Esmé, she is an
Erdgeist
. She will never lose her joy in existence. She cheers me up in my most gloomy moments. She will not accept thanks. She still denies she got me transferred to the Institute and from there to freedom, even though she met me in Majorca, after I had been saved by Major Pujol. A coincidence? Extremely unlikely!

When the submarine picked us up I was able to hang on to my pistols, but my papers were lost, as was the last of my near useless ‘snow'. I told Major Pujol how I had succeeded in escaping Red Barcelona in the boat, only to be attacked by the Fiat floatplane. He and the Italians were full of apologies, especially once they realised that my dead friend had been an Italian. Zoyea was not so forgiving of them, however, and refused to have anything to do with them or any of the other Italians in Palma even after we reached the city. I was the only one who could comfort her, but she became increasingly melancholic. We remained in Palma for the summer. One afternoon I borrowed Major Pujol's car and motored down the winding roads until we arrived at the pretty port of Andratx. The fishing village had lost none of its charm. We stopped for lunch at the Restaurant Fleming, and there by the big window I saw Mrs Cornelius. She had just finished singing and stood by the big, dark Broadwood piano looking out to sea. She was a Vermeer. I spoke her name and she turned.

‘Ivan!' She came over to our table, chortling and winking at me about my delightful little ‘catch', for Zoyea had now become a very pretty young lady.

Leaving Germany, originally she thought for a holiday, Mrs Cornelius had first arrived in the village with Desmond Reid who owned a flat here. Reid, too, found it politic to leave the rather oppressive atmosphere of Hitler's Berlin. Did I know Major Nye was in Palma? I did not, of course.

‘I'm orlways ‘ere of an evenin'.' Before we left, Mrs Cornelius gave me Nye's card. She was planning to go back to England, she said. ‘Dezzie' had long since been persuaded to rejoin UfA and continue to act in German films, but that didn't suit her. ‘Too many of me pals keep disappearin'.' Her new passport had finally come through.

I no longer had a passport, as I explained to Major Nye when I finally saw him. He asked if I had any objection to going to England. They needed
someone with my skills and brains over there. He could not procure for me a British passport, but he had taken charge of a group of English prisoners who had been fighting Franco and had survived being machine-gunned on the beach as they came ashore near Palma after the fall of Barcelona. If I didn't mind mucking in with them, he thought he could get me to London and see about sorting out papers for me once there.

That was how I was reunited with Major Johnny Banks who vouched for me as a member of the International Brigade. I was ‘repatriated' to England in the autumn of 1939, shortly before the outbreak of the Hitler war. Zoyea, I heard, worked in Palma and married after the War. But we were never again to be lovers.

‘I have so much to thank you for,' I tell Mrs Cornelius. ‘I might have died in Dachau.'

‘Y've got yer mate ter fank fer that,' she insists. ‘The bloke who joined the Gestapo and then was in the SS. Wot's his name? Prince Nicky Wotsit, wot got yer inter trouble in France. Killed at Stalingrad.' Irrationally she still believes Kolya framed me for the Paris Airship fraud rather than saved me from the worst of the consequences. But I no longer argue. I am not even sure he died as she thinks. I will mourn him only when I have certain news. As usual my reply is logical.

‘But why should Kolya have arrested me and then freed me?'

‘Maybe ‘cause yer dumped ‘im in the desert that time? Tort yer a lesson, didn't ‘e? Well, ‘e could see yer'd be useful in Spain, wot wiv talkin' the language an' that, so ‘e orlways knew ‘e could get yer art. Didn't they make yer some sort o' spy?'

‘I was supposed to gather intelligence. We were testing my ship. They mentioned your name. They said you were in Belsen. I've told you all this. Kolya was explicit. If I didn't do what they wanted, you wouldn't be freed. I didn't know you had escaped until I got to Majorca.'

She laughs. ‘An' found I'd been livin' the life o' fuckin' Riley in th' ol' port at Dez Reid's. Croonin' in ther local dance band! I woz earnin' a tidy littel livin' for a few months, while the Aye-tayes an' the soldiers woz still comin'. An' everyfink was so cheap, Ive. Bloody paradise. Still, ol' Major Nye got yer ter England, eh, when they demobbed ther International Brigade. Better than going back ter Odessa like some o' them poor buggers, or France, or Germany, yer gotta admit.'

She minimises her part in all that. Even in prison she was my guardian angel. Kolya was powerless to help me. He told me so. And if Kolya was able to get me released in 1937, why couldn't he get me out earlier? Why, as Mrs
C suggests, was it up to the SS? After all, the Spanish conflict began in 1936. By the time I arrived in Barcelona, the war was as good as won. Germany and Italy had thrown their weight behind Franco. True, Major Nye was the intelligence officer attached to the government authorities, but he could not have helped me if she hadn't told me where to find him.

When it was clear Franco had overwhelmed the government forces, Major Nye sent me and a dozen others who had served under Johnny Banks on to Lisbon and from Lisbon home to London. By then the others knew I wasn't American but believed me to be a German anti-Nazi and covered for me. I had actually seen Santucci and his Italians machine-gunning Republicans as they waded ashore in Majorca, thinking they had found at least some brief relief from their demoralising defeats. Whatever my sympathies, this massacre of defeated, tired soldiers disgusted and horrified me. At various times in Palma I had been threatened with hanging, both as a Spanish traitor and as a Russian spy, but I could easily prove the accusations false. Major Pujol had vouched for me all he could without getting court-martialled himself. He even colluded with Major Nye when the time came to get me to England. He took many risks and died, I learned recently, impoverished in Madrid, a minor civil servant.

I know nothing much worse than civil war, which is usually conducted with the worst ferocity. Yet for all the Spanish bloodshed and cruelty, I never witnessed anything as bad as the horrors of Ukraine, nor was Franco, in victory, as vengeful as Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin. Say what you will about the General, he remained a devout supporter of the Opus Dei all his life and was in turn thoroughly supported by that godly society, whose part in the Spanish revolution has never been properly acknowledged.

I hold no brief for Catholics or their leaders, but while Mussolini and Hitler sought rapprochement with the Pope to further their own political ends, Franco received genuine blessing for his efforts. America, too, remained a great friend to Spain throughout the War and long afterwards. The Generalissimo was permanently grateful for that. He believed it stupid to persecute Jews just for being Jews. He felt the same about Negroes. The last letter I ever received from Mr Mix, after he wrote from Washington many years later, made it clear how he owed his life to Franco's pro-Americanism. Only when the Nationalists discovered Mix was an American, and not a Moroccan, did they spare his life. He, of course, continued to work in Europe until the early fifties, when he was recalled to the home bureau and became some kind of civil rights expert at CIA headquarters. I heard this from Major Nye. I never did understand why Mr Mix stopped writing to
me. I am not, I hope, one to exploit a relationship, but that man owed me something. Americans have short attention spans. No doubt he forgot. US intelligence people are inclined to abstractions at the best of times. They are not people to remember favours.

Soon after I reached London in 1939 I made for Mr Green's Whitechapel office. I quickly found 22 Leman Street. A worn brass plate announced the name of his firm, Green, Green & Collins (Import/Export) Ltd. Mounting the stone steps to the door, I hesitated before it just as I imagined an old Knight of Chivalry might have paused outside the Temple of the Grail. For many years I had dreamed of climbing those steps, knocking on the door and being received by the kindly old man. Mr Green would usher me into a mahogany and oak office lit by yellow gas casting warmth through the shadows. My Uncle Semyon's old partner would sit me in a big leather armchair and send for a brass-bound box in which my financial papers and scientific patents were stored. My money would have made me considerable interest. Mr Green would congratulate me on my wealth. He would give me avuncular advice on how to invest it. Perhaps I would be offered a position with the company. He might suggest the firm back my scientific inventions. None of this pipe dream was unrealistic but based on promises Uncle Semyon and his people had made.

Yet when I was admitted into a shabby, unpainted reception room, I was told by a girl telephonist that the Greens had, in her words, gone down the drain after the old man's death. The ‘old man' was presumably the Mr Green my uncle had originally dealt with. She was the only person I was allowed to see. She was thoroughly ignorant. I was convinced her employers knew more, but even when I lost my temper, they refused to come out and meet me. The place was now a shipping office. Only the name had been retained, she said. She knew of no other connection. Eventually, when she offered to call the police from the nearby station, I left.

Later I tracked down Mr Green's great-nephew, Lionel Shapiro, in Temple Fortune, beyond Hampstead, and put the question to him.
Where
is my inheritance?
Shapiro claimed to know little of his uncle's affairs. ‘He was persuaded to back Lenin's New Economic Policy. Then Lenin died and Stalin cancelled all deals. Between them, Stalin and the General Strike ruined him.'

As you might expect, Lionel Shapiro denied any knowledge of me or my money. He took me into his little house and introduced me to his grandmother, Mr Green's sister-in-law, a wizened old thing, wearing black. When she heard where I was from and what I had escaped, she was kind enough. Her English was thickly accented, but she spoke good German. She made her grandson go up into the attic and bring down some old ledgers, which recorded details of transactions between my Uncle Semyon's firm in Odessa and Mr Green's in London. But they only listed details of goods and money. I was mentioned nowhere. The pathetic pair apologised. They wished they could help, they said, but so many needed help these days. I was convinced they were innocent. Clearly they were not living in salubrious surroundings. I put the sorry story together: out of desperation Mr Green had probably defrauded me of my inheritance and his family of their birthright. But what was the point of pursuing a dead man?

I refused to let Mr Green's death be the end of my dreams. When the Ministry of War refused even to grant me an interview, when they sent back my plans unopened, I accepted that God had abandoned me. He did not want me to fly. And He did not want me to have money.

He knows I have done my best for my fellow creatures. I have shown prejudice to no man. I never attacked those Jews. Why should I? I am not an ingrate. A Jew saved my life in Arcadia.
Stadt der schlafenden Ziegen; Stadt des Verbrechens; Stadt der meckernden Krähen; die kleinen Vögel singen trügerische Lieder. Die Synagogen brennen!
He said he was a journalist. He was a poet. He made me tea. He gave me bread. I have no proof that he put the metal in my stomach. If he did he might have meant it kindly. Perhaps it was a charm. Perhaps it kept me alive. Those
shtetls
were no worse than the camps. I received only kindness there. I almost died in that burning synagogue. Who did I betray? What else have I done? What have I said?