The Laughter of Carthage

Closing Goldberg’s street door and moving carefully across the ragged linoleum in the gloom, I considered this new factor. If Brodmann were working on his own (or with his Chekist comrades) I might have a little time; if he was in league with the Justice Department or the Klan, I would be wise to leave the city immediately. Whichever was the case, I now had relatively little to lose by obtaining the ‘float’ for Mrs Cornelius. I grinned carelessly to myself. I would give them the slip again. I was to become an actor-manager. A Sir William Shakespeare. A miniature Flo Ziegfeld. A travelling player in the footsteps of Dickens and Oscar Wilde! And the wonderful, the eternally feminine Mrs Cornelius was to be Juliet to my Romeo, Frankie to my Johnny!

The following afternoon I went round to Stranoff’s to tell her of my decision. She need no longer feel torn between Skid Row and the Little Sisters of St Francis. A living death in the service of the Pope would never be her lot while I could still draw breath. She was overjoyed, like Lillian Gish saved at the last minute from the clutches of the evil mulatto, and she hugged me, telling me I was ‘a brick’ and ‘a godsend’. She immediately began to make plans and suggest suitable locations for our future performances. I offered her $500, saying she could invest it in whatever she believed was of paramount importance to the continuing existence of Beauties From Blighty. ‘Well,’ she said, almost skipping with delight, ‘number one’s gotta be a decent motor! Don’t worry. Ive. Ya won’t regret this, I promise.’

Next day my new identity had arrived, more detailed and more convincing than any previous one. Still making sure Brodmann had not returned to ‘shadow’ me. I hurried to the Nob Hill branch of my California bank. There I presented a legitimate check for $750 made out to Matt Pallenberg and signed ‘Max Peterson’. At least nobody would automatically guess we were the same man. A check to cash would have made it immediately clear I was in San Francisco. I must admit I was a little clammy as the clerk, learning I had been mailed the check from Milwaukee (a further obfuscation), significantly recruited advice from hushed nether regions, bore the check to invisible arbitration, conferred in pious murmurs with various other officiates, then eventually returned, inspected my identification (even the address was in Albany), found it satisfactory and at last briskly demanded my choice of denominations as if I had handed him the check only a second or two before. I asked for $500 in large bills. This I would hand immediately to Mrs Cornelius for our Company. The rest I had in ones, fives and tens, for various emergencies, including the purchase from a source in Chinatown of high quality cocaine. The money made me substantial again and gave me the feeling of controlling my own fate. I was no longer a foreigner with suspicious Romantic blood but a Nordic descendant of Vikings (like, indeed, all the old families of Kiev), that hardy, adventurous race who, discovering America long before the Spanish Jew Columbus, had carved their runes on the sea-battered cliffs of Long Island and Nantucket, claiming the land for their wholesome, self-sufficient deities Odin, Freya and Thor; far more practical gods to rule a vital subcontinent than that repressive Jehovah of palefaced, constipated puritanism.

I put the Ku Klux Klan behind me. Those fools had missed their chance of greatness by petty internal bickering, by turning on their best friends. They would destroy, through further stupidity and quarrelling, everything they had gained. For a while Indiana might have been the first Klan state, but another scandal ended that dream. Colonel Simmons, Eddy Clarke, even Major Sinclair and myself, were martyrs, destroyed by small-minded, cautious people or by treacherous friends like Mrs Mawgan. My own gifts, so cynically abused by money-grubbing politicians of the kind who destroyed idealists like Roffy and Gilpin, could still make America the world leader of technological innovation. If they wanted me in the future, they would have to crawl and beg. I was determined to renounce the false lures of their world and devote myself to play acting and private scientific speculation. I would not let them hound me. I would choose for myself when and where I left America, when to reveal my true identity. How astonished they would be! How I would laugh at them as my efficient steam-powered airship, my own refinement of the Avitor Hermes Jr which had flown from San Francisco in 1869, swam through the skies above the Golden Gate, outsped the great locomotives of the Southern Pacific. When the fiery cross next burned, a thousand feet high, on Mount Shasta, it would be the signal to all that the Invisible Empire was purified and ready to ride out once more on its holy purpose, to free America from the Orient’s envious chains! But this time I would be at the head.