I told him what I had done. My letters had said I should be in Washington shortly and would call to ensure the plans had arrived. I had been sensible, said Mortimer. I should relax and take another drink. Once I knew the right people my troubles would be over. ‘You can rely on me, I need hardly say, not to breathe a word of the airship scandal. But sooner or later it could hit our papers, then you’ll have to be completely prepared. Forewarned is forearmed. The press like nothing better than screaming for foreign blood these days. Only last week, in my hometown - in Ohio of all places - the Ku Klux Klan lynched two Italians. They were either anarchists or Catholics. People are even less fond of Russians, so you’d better make it clear you’re French and go on calling yourself Max Peterson. You could be half English. That should stop suspicion. I’ll cover you. We met during the War when you were flying with the Lafayette Squadron. Everybody loves the Lafayette.’
I was reluctant to involve myself in lies. However, I accepted Mortimer must have a better sense of the situation’s realities, so I agreed he should decide what was to be told to people. I would back him up in anything he said. I remained impressed by the American’s open-hearted generosity. What European near stranger would have done so much? I was almost tearfully grateful by the time Jimmy Rembrandt arrived, with two young women, actresses from a nearby show, and embraced me as warmly as any Russian. He slapped me on the back, announcing how much he had missed my company since the ship. A bottle of outrageously dubious champagne was ordered. This he chiefly fed to the ladies who, clucking and preening in their pink and blue feathers and silks, soon took on the appearance of confounded chickens. ‘Sounds like a great adventure!’ Rembrandt was in an ebulliently reassuring mood. ‘We’ll get the train to Washington tomorrow. Can you leave that soon, Max?’
We toasted our good fortune, our mutual destinies, the happy chance of our Mauretanian meeting. With such splendid companions I should have no difficulties when I came to confront and win over the American capital. Jokingly, they encouraged me to ‘remember’ my English mother, my father, the distinguished French soldier, and his father, who had fought for the South in the Civil War. We even considered an ancestor who had raised a volunteer regiment for the War of Independence. By the time we left the ‘speakeasy’ I was cheerful again, already half believing my new identity. They had struck exactly the right compromise, particularly in view of our destination. Their friends were Southerners to whom the only acceptable foreigners were those who had supported the Confederate cause sixty years before. Jimmy Rembrandt’s own mother, he told me, was from Louisiana and his Pennsylvanian father had been in Democratic politics until a riding accident just before the War. In the small hours we took a taxi back to my hotel while they lifted imaginary glasses to ‘Max Peterson, Gentleman of France’ and attempted to teach me how to whistle Dixie. The tune was important, they told me gravely, but the ability to remember all the words would prove crucial if I was to endear myself to their friends. As to my political views, they said, these were hardly in need of improvement at all.
With friendly good humour they helped me to an elevator before continuing on to the Astor, promising to collect me in the lobby next morning. Our association was going to be of enormous mutual benefit. It would make my French aviation schemes, they said, look like a cardboard model of the real thing. I reached my room and tried to pack, but unexpectedly the melancholy returned in full force once I was alone. I lay on my bed and wept for Esmé. How long must it be before I could be reunited with her? What crime had I committed in the eyes of God, to be so severely punished while the cynical rich and ruthlessly powerful went scot-free?
I would be wise to leave New York. Those same forces were lying in wait for me there, though I hardly guessed it then. In my wanderings I had seen the dark emissaries of Carthage scurrying about their destructive work. Here and there the signs were still up, but they would not stay there for long. In those parts of Harlem occupied by decent German families, threatened on all sides by blacks and orientals, I had seen the placards in the windows: Keine Juden, und keine Hunde. But it would be no more than a year or two before they were removed. Then the families themselves would be driven from the city and grinning negroes would turn those comfortable houses into squalid slums. New York would try to accept them: it was a question of pride. But New York was wrong to let it go so far. It tolerated monumental heresies: these black messiahs and philosemitic quasi-prophets abounding there today. Christians are taught to tolerate everything and so we do - but we cannot and should not tolerate evil, nor should hypocrisy and theft go unpunished. Those Sephardic Jews, they claimed to be Dons of Spain, as if that were something to boast of. The Spanish Empire was financed by Carthaginian gold, advanced by Catholic ruthlessness, informed by a pagan lust for destruction. Americans had already driven them back in a series of heroic wars. Now they are returning in a thousand guises. They cannot be stopped. And their Einiklach gloat in their massive towers, their steel and concrete fortresses, riding in Rolls Royces up and down Wall Street, controlling the destinies of all the world’s nations, while the Dons of Little Italy, of Brooklyn, the Bronx and Spanish Harlem, are richer than any Morgan or Carnegie, yet leave no charities, no foundations, no libraries behind them: only ruin.
I cannot blame myself for what became of New York. The rot, if I had chosen to look, was already there. I was blinded by the fabulous potential of the city, its grandiosity, its beauty. And for me it remains the most beautiful city on Earth. When the warm morning sun shone on those grey and yellow towers, or when it set, brilliant scarlet over Brooklyn Bridge, I would gasp in wonder, no matter how many times I had seen it before. I have heard they are demolishing more and more of it, replacing the old skyscrapers with things of black glass and featureless stone, that they have torn down almost everything and what they have not torn down they have gutted and spoiled. The Pennsylvania Hotel is now a grey, uncomfortable warren, without style or taste, taken over by the Hilton firm: a machine for processing travellers when they step out of those flying cylinders. And all done in the noble cause of democracy. This is egalitarianism corrupted. The dreams of New York’s great builders, of the murdered architect Stanford White, become wretched nightmares. The ghost of the old city hovers over the new. White was murdered in the roof garden of Madison Square, across the street from where my hotel stood. He built the set for his own destruction. And now that is demolished, too. He brought the best of Europe to America and he created architecture which was purely, confidently American in style and proportions. They mock all that now. Everywhere in the world the forces of Carthage are dynamiting our culture, our memories, our aesthetic monuments, replacing them with buildings indistinguishable one from the other, or from one country to another. They are wiping out our heritage; they are driving away our memories. Our very identities are therefore threatened. In 1906 White’s enemies conspired to kill him. The assassin was a Jew named Thaw who alleged White had seduced his wife. It was significant, however, that Thaw was eventually found ‘not guilty because insane’ and so avoided the consequences of his crime. Another shot fired for Carthage which went unpunished. Ich vil geyn mayn aveyres shiteln, indeed!