Typical of his caste, Major Nye asked me no direct questions. He was never admitted to my inner sanctum, where my models were displayed. Most of our conversation was casual, about sights seen, art admired, food eaten. He might have been any tourist. Did he seek my company because I might be in contact with Mrs Cornelius? I was glad to patch things up between them. We all had tea together at the English Tea Rooms near the Spanish Steps where the English poets used to catch food poisoning. The English will risk almost any danger for an infusion of Typhoo or Twinings. The place smelled of damp wool and digestive biscuits. It reminded the tourists of home.
I remained shocked by Maddy Butter’s extraordinary rudeness. I wanted to confront her, but she avoided me at every turn. She had no proof that I had deceived her, save La Sarfatti’s word! Yet she maintained complete silence. Her telephone was never answered. I saw her twice from the window of my official car. Once she was standing outside a large toyshop in the Piazza di Espagna studying rows of model soldiers in the window. I wound down the window of the car, but a newspaper seller thought I was signalling him and shoved a copy of the Popolo d’ltalia in my face. When the fool was disposed of, suffering a severe telling-off from a policeman on the beat, Maddy had disappeared. The second time I was passing the Palazzo Venezia, where the Head of State traditionally had his offices, and saw her driving through the gates in a brand new red Fiat tourer, saluted by the guards. I guessed she was at last interviewing our Chief. I could only pray he was not also interviewing her. Billy Grisham showed me a cutting from the Houston Examiner that discussed the ‘charlatans and exploiters’ who thronged Mussolini’s court. She did not mention me by name, but it was clear who the ‘certain Russian-American con artist’ was supposed to be. I prayed my leader had not seen this piece, or at least had ignored it as it deserved. Clearly no scandal impressed him. I kept my position.
For the following week there was only silence from my Chief. I did not find this especially significant. He had left Rome for a special tour. The newspapers said Il Duce was inspecting the draining of the Pontine Marshes but Grandi, whom I bumped into at the cafe where he usually took his lunch, winked at me and said, ‘The Chief has a new enthusiasm,’ by which he meant a new paramour. ‘It’s not the marshes he’s draining! And not the Italian delta he’s exploring.’ He whistled a few bars of ’Yankee Doodle Dandy’. He was given to coarse jokes of that kind. Frequently they were as vulgar as they were mysterious. He reassured me, however, that I was probably not out of favour. ‘The boss’s powers of concentration are genuinely remarkable,’ he said, ‘but sometimes he focuses on one thing to the exclusion of everything else. Sometimes weighty affairs of state, sometimes Turkish wrestling holds.’ One of Mussolini’s closest friends and associates, Grandi had been left twiddling his thumbs for months sometimes, waiting for Il Duce to return his attention to whatever pressing matter was at hand.
I spent as little time in the cottage as possible. Seryozha had found my phone number and had called me several times. I told him it was unwise for me in my present position to spend too much time with foreign nationals. The OVRA were suspicious of such liaisons, and I would jeopardise my position. He understood but spoke of passions which had to be released. Could we not meet in secret?
I told him I could see no such possibility. The OVRA knew every movement of every one of the state’s officials. Their duty, after all, as representatives of the people, was to ensure that the people’s servants were behaving with due responsibility. Bureaucrats could no longer secure little nests for themselves in which they could practise any decadence.
Of course I exaggerated the power of the secret police. True they were everywhere, but this was really to their disadvantage. When I met Gilbert Keith Chesterton, the founder of the British Empire Movement, an author and journalist in his own right, who planned to make Notting Hill a Fascist enclave, he described a story in which every character who seemed to be an anarchist was actually a secret service agent. The joke in Rome was that the secret police were watching even more secret policemen who were watching still more secret policemen and so on! To some degree you could avoid them. Frequently, a small tip would secure their discretion, for they were usually very poorly paid, and they were never the unreasonable bullies propaganda made of them. As it was, I do not believe I was watched excessively. Those police people made themselves very obvious.
Maddy Butter had certainly disappeared from Roman society. I must admit I missed feminine company. I took tea several times with Mrs Cornelius and her Baron. On occasions we were joined not only by Major Nye but by Captain Göring, who now travelled frequently between Rome and Berlin. He seemed very sympathetic to me. He understood my predicament with Seryozha. He often remarked how difficult it was to get rid of old but embarrassing friends. One day, by way of reassurance, he told me how ‘Lieutenant Kranz’ was currently a guest of the Ministry of Works and was being taken on a special tour of Rome’s antiquities. ‘It keeps him out of trouble,’ said Göring with a hint of a smile. ‘You must not judge us by our admirers, any more than we would judge you by your relatives.’
Göring and I were almost friends during those weeks. He spoke often of his wife, who was an invalid. He felt very sentimentally towards her. In fact, he had a softness to his character which people used to call Austrian. Franz Stangl had this same characteristic, but it did not stop them hanging him all those years after the event. The thing he cared most for, even before the Führer, was his wife’s approval. He would not make a move before he had that.
Of course Stangl did not tell her everything. The SS were trained in discretion. As they were informed on the first day of their training, their job was to do what ordinary people could not do. Their work was arduous and sometimes difficult, but their sufferings were what made Germany hard and allowed those ordinary, honest citizens to go about their lives in security, comfort and happiness. It took an especially dedicated type to join the SS in the early days. Schnauben himself explained this to me in Dachau. Only later, during the war, did the SS begin to recruit any kind of foreign riff-raff and that, of course, is when their troubles began. I do not defend them. I scarcely have reason to remember them before they received their unfortunate reputation. There are good and bad in every walk of life. I know what the SS was intended to be. Heinrich Himmler, a colourless and humourless individual whom nobody could stand, turned it into the bureaucratic monster it became. Röhm said that his troops had to have shoulders broad enough for the public to lean on and backs broad enough to hide the horror which threatened. Civilians, he said, were inclined to panic at the sight of a spot of blood.
Röhm would have made the SS what it was supposed to be — the epitome of the Nazi ideal, not a glorified butchering corps. Schnauben knew this. Major Nye is inclined to agree with me. He says this century has been a great century of idealism, in which millions of human beings at last began to believe that they could alter their destiny and improve the human condition. That idealism was one of the most wonderful things he ever witnessed. But he also believes it was subverted by Big Business and its servants for the most appalling and banal ends. The faith that once sent missionary youth to Africa now sends selfish boys to Coca-Cola for ‘the real thing’. The country most able to translate human longing for justice and peace into a good sales pitch and pervert the noblest ideals to commercial exploitation is today the most successful. America is living proof of that. Everyone wants to live in America where money and God are inextricably married.