The Vengeance of Rome by Michael Moorcock Page B

business know how coincidences occur in life far more than in fiction. Cautious, incurious people after all rarely travel. As in Malory, when one bumps into a fellow knight errant, another Seeker of the Grail, one might well greet him with joy, but with only a modicum of astonishment.
    Thus on that little cobbled street in a Majorcan fishing village I found myself embracing as a brother a friend I had not seen for ten years. ‘Fiorello!’—laughing and shaking his hand as heartily as he shook mine. He was older, of course, but retained the long, comical face of a pantomime horse, his enormous lips drawn back from massive yellow teeth, his huge brown eyes sparkling with the flames of his generous, eternally ebullient soul. He still wore the wide-brimmed white hat, the lilac cape and gloves, the patent-leather shoes with their lavender spats, the perfect linen suit, a cream silk shirt and canary cravat. Flourishing his ivory-headed cane, he indicated his companions. Glancing at us with some curiosity, they remained seated demurely outside the bakery.
    â€˜My dear fellow! I heard you became an actor and made a name for yourself in American politics? You must tell me everything!’
    Remembering his manners, he turned, a graceful grotesque, to introduce us. ‘Sweet ladies! My apologies! Bazzanno is an oaf! Ladies, may I introduce my dear friend, my mentor, my inspiration, His Excellency PrinceMaxim Arturovitch Pyatnitski, late of the Imperial Russian Court, a philosopher and engineer of genius—one of the greatest Russians of modern times!’
    The two beautiful women were Signora Margherita Sarfatti and Miss Miranda Butter. The first was his mistress. La Sarfatti was a brunette in her mid-forties, of aristocratic felinity and an arrogant, comradely disposition, whom I took to at once. The second woman was a young American redhead with a rather prim nose and lips who had travelled from Paris to see the new Italy with which, she said, she was in love. She loved Spain, too, she added, or at least this island. She was a journalist on the staff of the
Houston Chronicle
; she smiled a little uncertainly at me.
    No stranger to genius, as I would discover, Signora Sarfatti had an air of easy power as she lazed across two rattan chairs. Keeping her cool, slitted Atlantic-green gaze on me, she listened with an amused air to the younger woman’s gushing praise of the country she thought was my own. Mrs Sarfatti was delighted to make my acquaintance, she said. I removed my hat and bowed. I kissed their hands.
    My old friend from Rome, Fiorello da Bazzanno, was now the editor of
Il Gruppo
art magazine, distinguished member of the Italian Academy and a leading figure in Mussolini’s court. He and his friends had set off from Naples. On their way to Algiers they had developed engine trouble and put in to Majorca to make repairs. They were enjoying the pleasures of Andratx but had been gone too long already and by the following week must return to Venice where Sarfatti and da Bazzanno were to open an exhibition of new Fascist art.
    â€˜That function is the only justification for my enormous salary, dear comrade.’ He winked. ‘I am rich. But I am no longer my own man!’
    â€˜Surely you haven’t given up your painting?’ I asked him.
    He was, he admitted, not painting much these days.
    â€˜I always argued how politics was the century’s only valid art form and here I am proving it. It’s our millennium, dear Max, the triumph of the human imagination over the mundane world! At last the illusion becomes reality! What keeps you up so late?’ He assumed that I, like himself and his companions, had not yet gone to bed. When I told him the truth he was enormously amused. As we sat down, he continued to sing my praises to the ladies, telling them how I had been a hero of the Russian Civil War, a daring cavalry officer, a flyer and an inventor whose genius, had it not been for