Esmé became especially seductive around the subject of the Egyptian film. ‘Let me be the beautiful slave girl, Max! Imagine me in those wonderful costumes!’
I admitted that while this did indeed excite me, I had emotional difficulties about sharing that excitement with several million other men.
She made a face and hugged me and told me that in her heart I would always be her only real audience, no matter how she appeared on screen. I often attracted this kind of loyalty in women - in men, too, less frequently - but it is a great burden. I felt powerful responsibilities for my strange little family and was naturally honour-bound to fulfil them. They were my chief considerations when I left Hever’s office. I was not impoverished, of course, and as far as the moving-picture world was concerned I remained a man of creative energy and genius to rival the greater actor-painters of the Renaissance, a man of wealth, reputation and substance, but I was in no doubt how swiftly I could lose my power and reputation if Hever began to publish his distortions in the Los Angeles press. There was a lesson in the rapid fall of Fatty Arbuckle. The comedian had been completely exonerated by a jury which demanded it be made clear that Arbuckle was not guilty of the death of the girl and that he was the victim of a particularly vicious blackmail plot to rival the worst ever committed in a country where the arts of blackmail and kidnapping were brought to unprecedented heights, thanks to the expertise of certain Sicilians whom a tolerant nation allowed to prosper in the New York, San Francisco and Chicago slums. Expose a Catholic or a Jew to the liberties of a Protestant community and you can always be sure he will abuse, then threaten, the very institutions designed to benefit the abused and threatened. It is the same with Islam. There would be no chance for me in this new Hollywood determined to present herself as the very quintessence of middle-class respectability. Arbuckle had been a world star with a massive income and tremendous personal power. He had been destroyed in a matter of hours. If Hever did as he threatened there would be precious little chance for me. Mrs Cornelius and I would have plenty of time later to clear ourselves of any charges, especially if we meanwhile arranged visas and fresh passports abroad. Reconciled to a temporary strategic exile, I closed up my house and put dust-sheets on the furniture, explaining to my bank that I would be in Europe and the Middle East for a while. Fees due to me would be paid directly into my account. I certainly had no sense of committing myself to any permanent change, but I was grateful for the time I would gain. When Hever and I next came face to face it would be Major Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski of the Don Cossacks who would confront him. In my triumphant hand would be a sheaf of documents, all proving my innocence and the truth of everything I claimed. Hever would scowl, chew his lip, shrink away, defeated, and I would leave his office, opening a door into sunlight where my Esmé and my Mrs Cornelius awaited me, to embrace me as their hero and their saviour. I would be completely vindicated! Redeemed!
So thoroughly could I now create realities from my imagination that I was supremely confident of the situation’s ultimate outcome. While away from the country I would contact various friends, have them make testaments as to my character. I would find Kolya Petroff. We would vouch for each other. I had my diplomas, my Georgian pistols, my blueprints. I had funds and family in England. England ruled Egypt. Perhaps I could at last visit the country I most admired after my own. I began to see the many advantages. Fate had not dealt me an unfriendly blow. She had decided to rouse me from my pointless euphoria so that I might continue my mission. I thanked gratefully those Gods whom I substituted then for direct acknowledgement of God Himself. I know better now, but that cannot change the errors and follies of youth. Ir tut mir vey! Ma yelzim an te’mal da Uskut! Uskut! Ighsilu ayadikum . . . Still, it is generally bearable.
This was no cowardly flight away from my Promised Land, der Heim, but an expedition into new territory, to expand and deepen my wisdom. When we returned in triumph with enormous publicity, we should all be world-famous. We would be lauded as the makers of the first Egyptian picture actually filmed in Egypt. The enormity of such a venture, considering the equipment and people needing transport alone, was considerable, but Goldfish had a ready answer to that problem. He owned a steamship. The ship had been part of a bad debt, I gathered, incurred by Goldfish during an earlier period of independence. It represented security on a large number of movies taken to South America by some now-deposed president who had planned to grow rich as Goldfish’s main distributor in Latin America. Goldfish had owned the ship for some time and I had heard that his new gentile wife was embarrassed by the amount of scandal still attached to the vessel. Even I knew of the Hope Dempsey and her legendary rum-running exploits. Celebrated in rhyme and story, she was always barely a length ahead of the customs men, loaded to capacity with bootleg whiskey, Bacardi and gin from Panama, Cuba and Bermuda. I had heard famous film-stars apologising for the paucity of their bars and cellars because ‘The Hope Dempsey’s a day late in docking.’ Reputedly, Goldfish had been visited more than once by federal agents and his wife, knowing the cash-value of presenting a clean, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant image to an attentive world, was helping him to catch on at last to the real nature of their beast, the world’s most profitable industry. So while the old guard quarrelled over the reparations and disposition of battleships, the new immigrants, schooled in the subtle methods of the East, took hold of the real means to power. I have never failed to credit them with cunning and far-sightedness. They also knew, as Goldfish did, when to abandon a venture. My opinion would be confirmed by the ship’s skipper, Captain Quelch, who had commanded ironclads in the Great War, had taken part in the Battle of Jutland, came from a very well-known English family, and still bore the stamp of a gentleman.
I met him first at Wolfy Seaman’s where the lugubrious Swede had invited him for professional reasons. Seaman had to assure himself of our captain’s familiarity with the East. And it was important to him, he said, that we had a captain sensitive to our specific artistic needs. Delayed by Esmé, too ill to come but not wishing to say anything until the last minute, I arrived in time to hear the weathered tar talking with some nostalgia of Tangier and Port Said. He had captained vessels in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf before trying his luck in Rio de Janeiro, where he had cousins. In Rio he had found himself in command of the Hope Dempsey, ostensibly the property of a Panamian company but actually owned by Presidenti Bertorelli, whose brief rule of, I think, Paraguay, had earned him enough to retire to the South of France and take a villa next door to a number of his fellow advocates. ‘His mistake was going into the movie business,’ Quelch was saying, ‘it isn’t a traditional line of work for a South American dictator. But he was so enamoured of the screen he saw it, I think, as the new ultium ratio regum. But we were his only loss. Ultra vires, you know.’ He gave a slight insouciant shrug.