Later that night we drove out of the city towards Arlington. Jimmy and Lucius said we should celebrate. Our rented car was one of the better types of Ford, though unremarkable compared to what I was used to. Steering by moonlight we eventually turned off the main road and tolled slowly up a wooded track, into the driveway of a large house. It resembled an old Southern mansion, with a stone verandah and marble pillars, though most of it was of red brick, with white shutters. Here, my two friends said, we would be able to get a decent drink.
The house turned out to be a kind of discreet club, evidently suited to the needs of the wealthy. Save for the foyer, there were no public rooms. We were ushered, by a conservatively dressed middle-aged lady, to a suite of chambers furnished in red velvet and dark pine. ‘It’s on the expenses,’ Jimmy told me mysteriously. ‘You can order whatever you like.’
Once again that evening I found myself embarrassed, having no clear idea of his meaning. The room was beautifully decorated in a style reminiscent of French Empire. There were two or three small anterooms leading off the main one, together with a marble bathroom and toilet. The windows were closed to the world outside so the whole atmosphere was hushed and still. I remained hesitant and baffled. It evidently suited my friends to keep the secret for a while, for I was sure they could tell my state of mind.
‘I think we should have some champagne.’ Lucius loosened his tie. ‘Even if it’s a little premature. What would you say to some peachy female company, Max? Only the best. We’re privileged to be here, you know. Normally you have to be at least sixty and a Senator or an Admiral to get through those doors.’
It dawned on me at last that the house was actually an exclusive bordello. I had heard that they existed in America; places where men of affairs could come without fear of interference or scandal. The discretion and sophistication of modern Americans continued to astonish me. There were subtleties to the culture which could never be guessed at unless one was exposed to them.
I spent my first night in the American capital sniffing excellent ‘snow’ and sharing a bottle of mediocre sparkling wine with a luscious flapper. She was a strawberry blonde in a green satin shift who called me ‘handsome’ and said I was ‘simply cute’. The girls of New York had been nothing more than ordinary harlots one found in any big city. These Washington whores were the playthings of generals and congressmen. They were on a higher level completely. An oysnam fun der velt! I have never enjoyed myself so thoroughly at a brothel. Next morning Jimmy Rembrandt asked me if I had been satisfied with the girls. Sind die Russen und Polen Freunde? I had tasted the rewards awaiting success in America. This helped relieve me of my burden of melancholy. I could scarcely bear to think of Esmé or the difficulties poor Kolya must be encountering in Paris where he must still desperately be working to clear my name. But no good could be served by brooding. The better the distraction the more effective I could be when the time came for our reuniting.
There is a price to be paid for this method of survival.
Ich habe es dreifach bezahlt.
FIFTEEN
THERE IS A WIND from Tatary which blows the spoors of decadence across the world. In palaces ferociously isolated from reality languid Sultans conjure wicked and fantastic abstractions affecting the concrete destinies of millions. Trained houris, forever nibbling and sucking at their masters’ private parts, confirm them in their illusion of absolute authority. Many who inhale this Oriental wind are immediately drugged; its perfumed currents permeate the world’s richest merchant cities, making men believe they have only to speak of fortunes to become immediately wealthy, only to invent fanciful plots to be themselves at once possessed of political power. Hundreds of others can be convinced by these fantasies; thus providing spurious confirmation of authenticity. In Washington I began to walk on air.
Jimmy Rembrandt and Lucius Mortimer were themselves some feet above the ground, so made no attempt to hold me down. Even Charlie Roffy and Dick Gilpin encouraged me to talk first in thousands, then in millions, then in billions. Bills were either ‘on expenses’ or ‘on the house’. My money, they would tell me frequently, was no good. It was in Washington, a place so unreal as to seem hardly a city at all, I learned that the ‘grand’ had become a unit of currency; one always referred to so many ‘grands’ and ‘half grands’. The grand is beyond money. It is used in the purchase of dreams and to impress others with the glory of those dreams. So common was this currency it seemed almost vulgar to think in terms of ordinary dollars and cents. As an official of the Mississippi & Tennessee Cotton Consortium I was given my own bank account, but did not have any immediate use for it: almost everything was done on someone else’s credit.
Washington is more mirage than city. Her dignified monuments are so carefully preserved, her cosmetic appearance so deeply important to her that little else seems to matter. The politicians and the public they are supposed to represent set enormous store by appearances. Sometimes Washington seemed less substantial than Griffith’s Babylon. Here I learned the true meaning of political hypocrisy for while federal agents hounded the makers of homebrewed wine, jailed the farmer unable to pay his taxes, laid siege to houses of ill fame, America’s senators, congressmen, generals and industrialists, her financiers and entrepreneurs, drank themselves stupid on the best quality whisky and fucked a different girl twice a day. To one another they signed over innumerable grands while in public they praised thrift and hard work, common sense, a fair day’s pay. They filled the palaces of government with sonorous rhetoric, giving the vaguest euphemism the ring of reasoned truth. In the evenings they boasted of friendships with madams and bootleggers and sold their votes to the highest bidder. Meanwhile Warren Harding, soon to be murdered for his dawning realisation of their corruption, smiled blindly with innocent pride at the purity and nobility of his country’s institutions.
Washington is white marble and grandiose architecture whose chief function is to impress and overawe those innocents whose money went to build it. It is as much a denial of democracy as it is a testament. For all the richness of her building materials, her weight of granite and alabaster, she is insubstantial. One sometimes felt she would take to her heels, vanishing at any moment.
I was, temporarily at any rate, successfully seduced. The chorus’s rounded calves kicked up in a line from tiny, tossing skirts; bobbed hair bounced above the bright, perfect smiles; the music of saxophones, syncopated, raucous, set the place; and flivvers sped from Montreal and runners cruised off Maine. Americans had learned from Europe there was money in contradiction; a killing could be made in a climate of ambiguity; where there was abstraction, there, too, was credit. Talk was cheap and paid huge dividends. The wind from Tatary had reached the New World. In Germany the mark inflated to the point of disintegration and Washington was dismissive: it was the price a country paid for its own folly. We were watching Rudolph Valentino’s enlarged lips curl around a cigarette; singing Second-Hand Rose in tones of whining sentimentality, pretending to a sorrow and despair most of us had not earned. Nothing had been earned. Hardly aware of the fact herself, America had become a Great Power, yet refused the consequent responsibility. Her exports went abroad and her capital stayed at home, so it was Europe who paid for America’s pleasures while at the same time she was dismissed as feeble and worn out. It would be almost ten years before America’s bill came in. And twenty years or more before it was paid.