The Vengeance of Rome Read Free Page A

exactly what she was up to, and what she was contemplating? The possibility is explored. We might note here one of the most sinister parallelisms of twentieth century history: exactly one year later, Stalin’s wife would also be found dead in his Kremlin apartment, with a bullet through her chest after a public row. That too was put down to suicide.
    The mystery of Geli’s death has never been resolved. That automatic, a Walther PPK 38, was a difficult one to use. You had to know what you were doing and exert strength and control, holding down the safety catch while pulling the trigger simultaneously. Could Geli have killed herself with this, even if she had wanted to? Someone, evidently troubled by all the inconsistencies, tried to reopen the case, but the documentation was subsequently removed from the archive when the Nazis came to power in Munich. It has never resurfaced. The Nazis were covering their traces; and there were plenty of traces to cover. They were a sordid lot, even before they got into power. And power, as Lord Acton reminded us, does not tend to improve a man’s morals.
    So Pyat, after some emergency coprophiliac training, helps Hitler regain his hideous composure by doing some things with him so disgustingthat they cannot even be repeated in this introduction. The reader will have to be a few hundred pages older before he or she has been fully prepared for the revelations, a chronicle in relation to which those tell-all tales regarding sportsmen and hookers in the popular press will read like prayer meetings in a nunnery. (Yes, folks, it really is that bad.)
    Pyat does his bit to keep the historical motor turning. If there is such a thing as anti-erotic literature, then it must surely be the sex scene acted out here between a cross-dressing Pyat and Adolf Hitler. Oedipal inversion, invited besmirchings, self-loathing as a form of climax. You name it, it’s there. Yeats remarked through his persona Crazy Jane: ‘Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement’, but I doubt he would have expected that maxim to be acted out quite so literally as it is here by our boy Maxim, travelling incognito for the purpose as a posthumous half-niece to the soon-tobe Führer. And that immediately after providing his favours to Ernst Röhm, who had a well-advertised Greek way with fellow officers, women being of use to him merely as breeders, cookers and typists. Whatever else you can say about Pyat, he always was horizontally versatile.
    There is only one excuse for all this: what we make of Hitler is effectively what we make of ourselves, in much the same way that what we make of the devil is what we make of God. We can only understand the light by understanding darkness; that is the principle of complementarity. If we want to understand how high we might go, we first must plumb the depths. And so we worry away at the Holocaust, the gulag, Pol Pot in Cambodia, the internecine savagery of Rwanda, and whatever else is ravaging our blue-veined planet at the moment. Out of the journey through darkness we might just discover the principles of illumination.
    Dickens was at his most redemptive in
Great Expectations
, where it is understood that Pip’s good fortune and education are based on crime, just as all modern nations can trace their own territorial possessions back to crime, expropriation, ingenious belligerence. Something in Dickens’s imagination tells him that crime is at the heart of our history, so there is no point trying to ignore it. You might find the criminals turn out to be as human as you could wish. Not always. Bill Sikes, from
Oliver Twist
, is not worth saving, but Magwitch is. His redemption into love is twinned with Pip’s own; the two become spiritually inseparable; the inheritor and the source of the bequest.
    So what are we to understand we are inheriting? It is still possible to find old men in the East End of London who lament the passing of the Krays.