Michael Moorcock
Jerusalem Commands
INTRODUCTION
I MUST APOLOGISE to readers who did not expect to wait some eight years between the second and third volumes of Colonel Pyat’s memoirs and I hope they will forgive me when they understand the difficulties involved in preparing his papers for publication, in transcribing tape-recordings and fitting those into some sort of chronology. Meanwhile my own work had to be done, so it was not until February of 1986 that I found time to travel to Morocco and then to Egypt, taking part of Pyat’s own journey by sea and by land (being lucky enough to rediscover the now dry Zazara Oasis), ultimately to Marrakech. Here the Colonel’s account of the fabulous court of El Glaoui, Pasha of Marrakech, differs somewhat from Gavin Young’s sketch in Lords of the Atlas.
Once again, in Marrakech and the settlements of the Sub-Sahara, I was fortunate, meeting many people willing to help in my research. Several of these remembered the Colonel as ‘Max Peters’. Many older people, I discovered, revered him. They said he was the greatest Hollywood star of all. They were disgusted, they said, by the jealous rumours suggesting he was Jewish. Yet in Egypt scarcely anyone knew of him. I was lucky enough to talk to a retired English policeman in Majorca. He had been in the Egyptian Service under Russell Pasha (whose memoirs also confirm much of Pyat’s account) during the time Colonel Pyat was in that country and remembered many of the facts almost identically, especially in relation to the drug- and slave-trades. Apart from their variant points of view, the facts and names agree in important detail and further research, in The Egyptian Times and other papers of the day, make it clear that ‘al-Habashiya’ was a well-known character, controlling Cairo’s red-light district and with interests in every wicked business from Timbuktoo to Baghdad. Sir Ranalf Steeton and the other Englishmen Pyat mentions are more elusive, although Steeton undoubtedly ran some kind of film-distribution business, and, of course, we have all heard of Quelch’s brother.
My retired policeman vaguely remembered a Max Peters. When I mentioned Jacob Mix, however, he became enthusiastic. ‘The embassy chap. CIA, wasn’t it?’ He had known Mr Mix well, he said, not in Egypt but in Casablanca just at the beginning of the war, and they had kept in touch. The colonel’s old friend was now retired and living in Mexico. I was astonished at this revelation and excited, for here was someone who could, if they had wished, have told Maxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski’s story from a very different perspective.
As soon as I was back in England I wrote to Mr Mix and we corresponded. That correspondence was extremely helpful in assembling the present volume, but it was not until May 1991 that I was able to get to his part of Mexico, and make the journey to the village where Mr Mix lived ‘in heavenly exile’, just outside Chapala, on the shores of the beautiful polluted lake.
Mr Mix had retained the so-called ‘Ashanti’ good looks Pyat had described, though his beard and hair were pure white so that I was unwittingly reminded of the benign Uncle Remus in Disney’s Song of the South. Until he spoke, it was hard to believe he had been an American spy. He was courteous in a delicate, old-fashioned way, typical of Southerners of his generation, and his quiet irony was also familiar. In spite of his advanced years, he was relatively fit. Certainly he was happy to talk as much as he could about his time with Colonel Pyatnitski, of whom, he said, he had fond memories.
Mr Mix admitted that Pyatnitski often made Adolf Hitler seem like Mother Theresa but said he had remained fascinated by him partly because of the contradictions, but the main reason for his staying with the Colonel was, he said, entirely self-interested. ‘The man was plain lucky,’ said Jacob Mix, laughing. ‘I held tight to him the way you hold on to a rabbit’s foot.’ He confirmed that the Colonel had, indeed, won fame as a film-star in B-Westerns and serial ‘programmers’ for several shoe-string independent producers of ‘Gower Gulch’ (the Hollywood location of most such operations) and showed me a box-office placard in full colour, with vivid reds and yellows, solid blacks. It was for a film called Buckaroo’s Code and showed a mounted cowboy, a bandanna veiling the lower half of his face, waving out at the audience. The film starred Ace Peters and was from a studio called DeLuxe. It was clearly from the period of the mid-1920s. Sol Lessor, whom I knew in the late 50s, mentioned his involvement with a fly-by-night outfit making dozens of cheap Westerns and adventure movies for theatres that needed to show at least two features, a serial, a cartoon and a newsreel to remain competitive. Mr Mix also let me see a cigarette card issued in England by Wills and Co. - a cowboy in a tall white Stetson, with a dark bandanna hiding his nose, mouth and chin, with the caption Ace Peters as THE FLYIN’ BUCKAROO (DeLuxe). There had been other memorabilia, said Mr Mix, but most of it had been lost when, shortly after his retirement, his flat in Rome was set on fire.
I had never thought I would associate Colonel Pyat with one of my childhood heroes. Many boys who grew up in postwar Britain read the exploits of The Masked Buckaroo in the weekly and monthly ‘penny dreadfuls’ of the day. Although he originated in America, he survived longer in Britain. Like Buck Jones, The Masked Buckaroo was a potent folk-hero. Jones had been forgotten in America after his death in the famous Coconut Grove fire in 1944, but survived in the UK with his own magazine until about 1960. The Masked Buckaroo magazine itself folded in 1940 due to a shortage of newsprint. Colonel Pyat had a few tattered copies from the 20s and 30s and they are seen rarely, even in specialist catalogues. My own collection was inherited from my uncle, a great Western enthusiast.
I mentioned to Jacob Mix that in his fashion Colonel Pyat had spoken highly of him. This made the old Intelligence agent laugh heartily. He remembered Max’s praise, he said. He was as helpful as he could be and some of his detailed information was invaluable in making sense of parts of Pyat’s manuscript. Sadly, Mr Mix died very soon after we had enjoyed his company and hospitality and is now buried in the ‘Protestant Cemetery’ near Chapala.
With no experience of formal religion I found the colonel’s views often baffling and frequently primitive. He argued that any social stability we had was due to our efforts to make the best of God’s gifts. We were duty bound to maintain and extend that stability. For me Pyat’s argument, that entropy is the natural condition of the firmament and that the physical universe, being in a perpetual state of flux, was not an environment friendly to sentient life, though couched in modern scientific terms, had a somewhat mediaeval ring. ‘Constant change is the paramount rule of the universe,’ he claimed. ‘To reduce the rate of entropy, we must make enormous efforts, using skill, intelligence and morality to create a little justice, a little harmony, from the stuff of Chaos.’ His flying cities represented a kind of clearing in the universal turmoil. He valued the ideals and institutions of democracy, he said, ‘as embodied in the pre-war United States’. The only cause to which he subscribed at his death was, I discovered, Greenpeace. ‘I shared my love of nature with all the real Nazi leaders,’ he told me. ‘We were great conservationists long before it became fashionable.’ He claimed he himself had played an important part in a successful recycling scheme in Germany but when I asked him for details he became oddly elusive and changed the subject entirely, asking me if I knew the German rhyme from The Juniper Tree by Grimm.
This was a typical strategy of his, veering off into an exotic literary byway or contentious political track so that anyone who had come too close to some truth he was in danger of recognising in himself would be carried into fascinating excursions or bound from conscience to respond to some of his more reactionary outbursts. It could also have been that I was not always sensitive to every associative leap he made - from recycling to Grimm, for instance - and it is when I have doubts of this kind that I wonder if I am perhaps the best editor for these memoirs. At such times I am seriously tempted to abandon the whole thing - lock, stock, barrel, papers, tapes, notes, scrapbooks and all the half-festering, crumbling, encrusted bits and pieces of that old man’s extraordinary life, most of which dates from before he was forty. After he settled in England he had few very dramatic adventures.