The two Ukrainians were in Tangier on business, making their way to keep an appointment at the Banque d’État du Maroc to take care of the paperwork. Shura was delighted to meet me alive in Tangier. Rumour had it, he said, that I had died upriver in Egypt. Before he disappeared into the bank, Stavisky amiably suggested I join him and Shura on his yacht Les Bon’ Temps that evening. ‘We’ll have an Odessa reunion,’ he said. He was leaving for Casa in the morning but Shura would remain with the boat.
Once again Odessa, the location of my transfiguration, was proving central to my fate. In that city of Odysseus my adventures had begun and my destiny had been determined. There Shura had been my mentor, my alter ego, my hero. There I had discovered all the world’s pleasures and not a little of its pain, and there I had met Mrs Cornelius. I have always known that the turning point of my life was in Odessa, but I have never properly been able to understand why. It does me no good to recall those days. Perhaps it was the Jew in Arcadia. But what did he do?
There is a piece of metal in my womb. The Nazi doctor found it. Oh, yes, he said. It is certainly there. It was on the X-ray. In the shape of a Star of David, as you say. He had no reason to humour me.
That is how they did it, I explained. That is how they transformed me. You must tell your superiors immediately. I must be released. I am the victim of a disgusting plot. The Reds are behind it. My father was German. I served the Reich in 1919. I am an engineer. The Führer is a personal friend. I have used my skills in the service of the Fatherland. This is a matter of historical fact.
—My dear chap!
—Those Jews in the shtetl. They put it there. They poisoned me.
—My dear chap! Do not cry, he said. —There, there, there. We will soon have you well. But first you must be clean. You must get rid of all this dirty clothing. You must have a shower and a shave and be deloused. The Fatherland has great work for you.
When later I joined him aboard his magnificent yacht and explained my rather difficult position, Stavisky gave me a name and an address where I could obtain an exit visa in my Spanish passport. Within a day my means of escape was accomplished. When the yacht left port Shura insisted that I go with him. He was heading for Europe, he said, to a particularly nice little spot in the Balearics where their organisation did quite a bit of business. The customs boys knew them well and the system was amiable, as in Tangier.
The luxury and security of the boat, the polished brass and gleaming oak, the wealth of exquisite cocaine and cognac aboard, the sheer relief of not being hunted or suspected, filled me with a sense of well-being I had not experienced for years and soon we were racing away from the African shore into the relatively tranquil waters of Europe. Les Bon’ Temps was a steam-yacht. Under another name she had once served the Russian imperial family. She had been seized by the Reds during the Civil War then changed hands several times to be sold eventually by her mutinying crew in Albania, whereupon she came into Stavisky’s hands. As a tribute, he told me, to our beloved Tsar he had restored her to her full magnificence. It was a privilege to be permitted to sail in her, I replied. He dismissed my thanks. We ‘Moldavians’ should stick together. He referred, of course, to the Moldavanka in Odessa where I had lived for so many happy months under the protection of Shura’s father, who had been killed by anarchists during one of several occupations of the city.
Early one morning, just as Tangier’s cypresses and palms grew black against a powder pink sky and she began to yell her cacophonic dawn chorus, a pale blue Duesenberg tourer pulled up on the quayside. Stavisky stepped elegantly down the gangplank, entered the car and waved farewell to us even as our crew bustled to catch the first tide. Then almost before the Duesenberg was out of sight, swallowed in the surging mass of white cotton and red fezes which swept down to the docks as soon as the prayers were over, we, too, were leaving Morocco. From Spain, Shura assured me, it would be an easy step to Italy. They had no intention of returning to Marseilles or to Cassis for a while. We were bound for the pleasant, unspoiled island of Majorca where many of Spain’s wealthiest nobility summered and where, Shura confided with a happy wink, the customs regulations were extremely relaxed. In 1930 Stavisky had many reasons to prefer the less public coves of the Balearics!
In my cabin I was able to check my films and take some sort of inventory of the reels we had rescued from El Glaoui. They had a projector and screen aboard the yacht, and Shura insisted I use all the facilities. Stavisky, he said, was famous for his generosity, especially towards old friends and countrypeople. I asked if he would care to watch the films with me. He declined. Perhaps later. He had a great deal of paperwork to catch up on. After looking into the little theatre to admire the riding of a Masked Buckaroo who, as it happened, was a stand-in, he left with an apology.
Thus, in solitude, I communed with my former self.
The experience was a mixed one. As I recalled my salad days in Hollywood, watching, sometimes for the first time, the scratched and jerking evidence of my cinema stardom, I had not expected to be filled with quite such a sense of loss and disappointment.
I had rescued a complete serial, Buckaroo’s Secret, both reels of White Aces, several reels of Buckaroo Justice, Ace Among Aces, The Masked Buckaroo and the Devil’s Tramway and The War Hawks. I relabelled and rewound them until they were in the finest possible condition. These and the scientific plans I carried in my bag were the best credentials to present to Signor Mussolini when I was finally granted an audience with him.
In common with many other serious people I saw Mussolini as an effective antidote to Stalin. Until his coming, Christendom’s leading intellectuals feared we must soon descend into a series of bloody tribal wars, which would mark the end of Western civilisation. The Balkans were to be the powder keg and Mussolini the fireman, forever playing his hose upon that volatile zone and periodically stepping in to stamp out the beginnings of an unmanageable conflagration. I think this view did him insufficient credit as the dreamer and sometimes impractical idealist he really was. The Mussolini I knew was a poet. Since the Second World War it has become fashionable to denigrate the Italian dictator, but in my day men of conscience, who saw the whole of Europe slipping into chaos, admired him.
Entering the Straits I enjoyed the distant view of the Rif Mountains and below them, among cypresses and palms, the little white boxes, tall towers and red clay domes of villages, while on the other side lay the blue outline of the Spanish coast which for a while grew more distinctive and then, too, vanished as in open sea I put Africa behind me for ever. A day later our destination, that much disputed island paradise, rose up over a pale grey horizon, her lower slopes shrouded in bright, silvery mist and white, transparent clouds upon her peaks. Sunlight glinted on her limestone terraces, cast deep shadows into her evergreens and butter-coloured settlements, but for me the next sight was even more inspiring!
If you, too, are a believer you will understand the joy and relief I felt at seeing the cross of Christ lifted everywhere, on steeples, walls and banners. Majorca had defended her Christian honour against the Saracen for a thousand years or more. She had fallen long after the whole of Spain had fallen. Better than most, she knew the meaning and the value of Christ’s cross.
Only then did I realise how much I had longed for the security which that cross represented to me. In Majorca I arrived as a respectable Spanish citizen, a Christian gentleman. In Morocco I had been suspected of being a Jew or a French spy, of being all the treacherous, nefarious things a Nazarene can be in the Arab’s mind. For years, since setting foot in Egypt, my life had been under constant threat. No surprise, I thought, that the Jews elected to leave their native Palestine for the enlightened and humane Christian lands across the Mediterranean whose laws protected and even facilitated their natural proclivities. Offering a gentle transition from ancient Carthage, the dark heart of Oriental Africa, to modern Rome, the blazing light of European civilisation and justice, Majorca lay on the border between the two spheres.