The Laughter of Carthage

Начало книги

IN THE FOUR and a half years since I finished editing the first volume of Colonel Pyat’s memoirs (Byzantium Endures) my own circumstances changed considerably. I became obsessed with discovering verification for some of Pyat’s claims after I received several letters from people who had known him before the War and whose memories of him were radically different. As a result my travels took me in his tracks and at one time it seemed I had condemned myself to continue his wanderings where he had left off in 1940. A retired Turkish bimbashi, one of Kemal’s revolutionary nationalists in 1920, assured me Pyat was an American renegade, a Zionist working for the British. Two vigorous octogenarians in Rome insisted he was a Polish Communist who planned to infiltrate the early fascist movement. In Paris it was generally agreed he was Russian, possibly a Jew, associated more with the criminal world than with the political underground. Not everyone knew him as Pyat (Piat or Pyate are variations). To several Berliners I met he was either Peterson or Pallenberg, but they readily confirmed that he was a scientist, an engineer. One German lady, presently living in Oxford, a Buchenwald survivor, was amused by my asking if she thought Pyat as successful as he claimed. She knew of at least one brilliantly successful invention, she said. Then she laughed and refused to continue. She had periods of mental instability.

Читать дальше →