King Con Page 24
Next evening she visited him at the movie theater. She told him that her mother would like the honor of his company for dinner at their hotel the following day. Edgar accepted her invitation, which necessitated a short excursion down the meandering coast to Monte Carlo, where the mountains reared up behind the city’s low-slung casino, extravagant hotels, outsize modern mansions, deluxe stores, jungly gardens, and sea-view terraces. For all the talk of the holiday season being pretty much over, a full cast of visiting merrymakers still crowded the stage of this sunlit amphitheater, gilded youth coexisting with tarnished old age. Not many of the visitors were more recognizable than the ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev, who was there with his Ballets Russes troupe.
In company with a smattering of French, British, and Romanian aristocrats, plus a princess from Diaghilev’s homeland, Atta and her mother, Contessa Milania Khevenhüller-Metsch, were staying at the Grand Hotel des Étrangers. Dinner with them was an impressive affair.
Habitually referred to by Atta as her mother, the older woman was, in reality, her stepmother. Yet the two had a close relationship befitting a mother and daughter. Milania—a onetime lady-in-waiting at the Hapsburg court—was a tall, high-cheekboned sixty-three-year-old Hungarian, widowed by Atta’s father more than a decade earlier. Atta’s stepmother had distinctively Slavic features, a frail voice, and the bearing of someone much older, her independent and adventurous youth but a distant memory. Like many visitors to Monte Carlo, Milania had been wintering there for health reasons. Despite feeling a bit off color, her stylish dress sense was undiminished. That evening she wore an elegant black ensemble, accessorized by a long pearl necklace and two chunky diamond earrings that caught Edgar’s attention.
Though he wasn’t in his Native American getup, Milania addressed him as “Chief.” Much of the subsequent dinner-table talk centered around Edgar, who charmed his somewhat needy hostess. On prominent display were his suitably regal manners. These must have distracted from the oddity of his request to examine one of her earrings. Presumably making a joke of what he did next, he rubbed it against some glass to test whether it was a genuine diamond, in the process confirming that Milania was as wealthy as she appeared.
At the end of their meal, he excused himself. He said he needed to go back to the Mondial Cinema to change into the clothes he’d be wearing for the quarter-to-nine performance. But his hostess wanted to continue their chat. She insisted on him having tea with them after his show, yet there was no sign of Milania when he returned to the Grand Hotel later in the evening. Her sweet-natured stepdaughter explained that she was “indisposed with a severe headache.” Edgar let Atta talk him into remaining there a smidgen longer.
As the time for his eventual departure approached, the young contessa said she could do with some fresh air. She and Edgar then took a protracted and expensive carriage ride to his hotel in Nice. Along the way, Atta presented him with a package from Milania. Inside were five thousand francs, which Milania had won at the casino in Monte Carlo on the night he and Atta first met. The cash was intended as a gift for the Native American children he’d mentioned. Atta regarded this as only “a small payout,” though it would have funded a fourteen-week stay at a top Riviera hotel.
* * *
—
Edgar’s contract with Famous Players–Lasky was due to end about a week later. Until that moment, he lavished most of his free time on Milania and Atta, whose Monte Carlo base offered plenty to keep them amused during the afternoons and late evenings. They could saunter around the city’s upscale stores, eat homemade pastries and candied fruit at the café near the English church, travel down the coast, attend midafternoon classical concerts, or listen to the Black and White Jazz Band playing in the ballroom at the casino.
Overlaying the time Edgar spent with the two contessas was the insistent drone of a single airplane etching the sky immediately overhead. Its daredevil exhibitions of spiraling, looping, and nose-diving aerobatics, which recalled the stunt flying at the Montana State Fair, encouraged everyone to speculate about the pilot’s identity. She was soon named as Adrienne Bolland, already the most celebrated French aviatrix.
When the contessas were with Edgar, they competed to demonstrate which of them could be more attentive toward him. Dazzled by the publicity he’d sparked and by his apparent exotic glamour and regal status, not to say his well-honed powers of persuasion, they swallowed his tall stories. He told them about his “fabulous wealth” deposited in Vancouver bank accounts, which had been frozen by the British government—hence his present dependence upon paychecks from Famous Players–Lasky. He also said the British were preventing him from exploiting the oil fields discovered on his land.
Cunningly projecting an impression of candor that lent weight to what he’d just said, Edgar confided in the contessas about being married. He then stoked their fast-ripening romantic interest by adding that he wanted a divorce from his British wife. As he admitted to Milania, his disillusionment with his marriage was fueled by his spouse’s nationality. Within the scenario he’d sketched, Britain was, after all, responsible for both his current money problems and the hardships endured by his people.
Probing the full extent of the contessas’ trusting, sensitive, and unworldly natures, he fed them a description of the wonders of his tribal homeland. He claimed there was a cold stream on one side, where you could go fishing. On the other side, he said, was a stream so hot that the water could be used to cook the fish you’d caught in the cold stream. Verification of the contessas’ heaven-sent gullibility came when they fell for this yarn. He went on to obtain a loan from Milania using the bogus collateral of his inherited wealth. She presented him with upward of five thousand francs. Meanwhile, her stepdaughter showered him with gifts.
He started dropping references to how he’d like to travel to Italy, where they lived. By going there, he said, he could extend his campaign to alert the people of Europe to the conditions afflicting his tribe. In response, Milania suggested he should visit her family home near Trieste.
Edgar’s promising relationship with the contessas was, however, truncated by their departure for the island of Corsica, from where they were scheduled to return home.
20
There was nothing to detain him. Following the contessas’ departure, he headed back to Paris—the better part of a day’s train ride away. In the capital, where the nights remained chilly yet the days were bathed in spring warmth, he rejoined Ethel and Leslie, who had endured dire poverty while he was enjoying the high life on the Riviera.
He quickly slipped into his old habit of visiting the Café du Dôme. One of its regulars joked that without his feathered headdress and the rest of his costume, he looked “like any of the other elks.”
Talk at the Dôme and elsewhere in Montparnasse revolved around the Olympic Games. Not around the official event that was opening in Paris in less than two weeks, but around the Latin Quarter’s own facetious version of it. The Montparnasse Olympiad pitted bohemians of numerous nationalities against one another in unconventional athletic events of the sort that probably included a sprint from café to café, a glass of booze gulped down at each of them. Cash had already been staked on the outcome of every contest.
Edgar’s tendency to spend on a scale appropriate to his self-anointed eminence meant that by now he likely retained little of the money he’d been given by Milania. Rather than attempt to tap her for yet another loan, he trained his charm on her stepdaughter, who wired him eight thousand lire—a substantial sum that reached Edgar during the penultimate weekend of April.
Alerted to the susceptibility of the younger of the contessas, that Sunday he sent her another request for money. Since she was in Italy by then, he helpfully translated the desired figure into Italian currency.
JUST RECEIVED THE MONEY, he wrote, BUT SORRY TO SAY I WON’T HAVE ENOUGH. PLEASE ASK YOUR MOTHER. YOU SEE, I HAVE TO PAY FOR MY CAR, WHICH IS LIABL
E TO 2,000 LIRE IN CUSTOMS DUTIES. TELL HER SHE WILL RECOUP THIS FROM THE 20TH OF THIS MONTH. He closed the telegram with a line that tweaked their burgeoning emotional bond: NOW, CONTESSA, YOU ARE JUST LIKE FAMILY TO ME.
* * *
—
Atta seems to have fallen for Edgar’s latest ruse. Yet that didn’t stop him from trying to extract more money from her stepmother just four days later. He asked Milania to wire him an immediate loan of another five thousand francs. In a psychologically deft, confidence-building play, he sought her permission to arrange for the British government to recompense her from the vast sum it owed him.
She urged him to address her as “Aunt Milania” whenever he sent her telegrams or letters. She also cautioned him to sign himself as her nephew. It was a fiction cooked up by her and Atta in case her meddlesome stepson, Count Georg Khevenhüller-Metsch, whom she treated with extreme wariness, discovered their correspondence. To deprive him of ammunition for any xenophobic grousing about the unseemliness of her and Atta’s relationship with an American Indian, she and Atta conspired to tell Georg that Chief White Elk was a distant cousin—that he was the child of an Austrian relative who had run away to Cuba and then North America a generation earlier.
As gullible as ever, Milania probably responded to the telegram from her “nephew” by coming through with the five thousand francs he wanted. The influx of money would have given Edgar a chance to exercise his spendthrift proclivities, with which his wife—who still hadn’t pegged him as a crook and an impostor—was losing patience. He didn’t have time to bankrupt himself, though, before he and his family made the sharp transition from Paris to the Manchester suburb of Levenshulme.
Relative to the life he’d been leading with his two aristocratic admirers, cold, wintry Manchester, where he and Ethel were once again squeezed into her parents’ house, must have felt drab and constrained. No wonder Atta thought he “sounded suicidal” when he next wrote her. And Ethel wasn’t much happier. She got the impression that his only interest in her now was sexual.
* * *
—
Within three weeks of his return to Ethel’s family home in Levenshulme, Edgar wrote to Milania soliciting an additional loan. So hefty was the specified figure that it would’ve covered five years’ rent on a house in London. Edgar made the request on the spurious grounds that he needed to pay £150 to the British government. This was, he explained, being demanded as surety, without which the British refused to return $75,000 worth of Canadian property they’d confiscated from him.
Milania, who was falling in love with Edgar, obliged by transferring the required Italian currency to the London outpost of her bank.
Edgar then jettisoned his wife and stepson and traveled down to the capital, where the cold weather suddenly gave way to unrelenting, sticky heat more commensurate with New York City in high summer. Walking even a few yards in London that day was tiring. Edgar nonetheless schlepped over to the financial district and called on the offices of the Credito Italiano, to which Milania had wired the money. He went over to Whitehall, too. A thoroughfare associated with government ministries and the attendant bustle of men carrying attaché cases and stacked documents, it was lined with elephantine, soot-grimed buildings flying Union Jack flags. Toward the south end of the street, Edgar neared the Cenotaph, London’s equivalent to the Colonne du Congrès, where two months earlier he’d laid a wreath. Whenever men—be it government staff or teenage delivery boys—hurried past, they’d raise their hats in tribute to this cream-colored slab of solidified national grief, the base of which was always moated by flowers.
Through a door opposite the Cenotaph, Edgar went into the Home Office and headed for the Immigration Directorate. He was there to speak with someone from the directorate’s Aliens Branch, the government department charged with keeping track of visiting foreign nationals. Before he could travel to Italy to see Milania and Atta, he had to obtain a Document of Identity, enabling him to enter France without either a passport or his previous (now-redundant) paperwork.
In his application, he cited his wife’s address in Manchester as his current residence. He stated that his name was “Tewanna Ray or Chief White Elk” and that he wanted to go to Italy, France, Switzerland, and what used to be known as Austria-Hungary. With the application, he furnished a black-and-white identity photo of himself. It showed him in three-quarter profile, wearing a suit and necktie, light reflecting off his greased-back hair. Though he remained handsome, the boyishness evident just a few years previously had been eroded not only by age but also by hard living and the unremitting strain under which con men existed. His features were now patinaed by middle-aged toughness.
The chief inspector at the Aliens Branch rubber-stamped Edgar’s application multiple times, further ratifying it with a scribbled signature. Edgar afterward contacted Milania to let her know that he’d be setting off to visit her soon. He also wired a message to his stepson. DEAR LESLIE, he wrote, dripping with what may have been genuine emotion (or, more likely, self-dramatizing theatricality). YOUR FATHER MUST LEAVE AND NEVER COME BACK.
* * *
—
Eleven days after his trip to the Immigration Directorate, he spent part of the weekend composing another telegram to Milania, this time from Paris. CONTESSA, COULD YOU WIRE ME 15,000 FRANCS? his message began. He informed her that he required the loan because A FRIEND OF MINE IS COMING OVER. The loan would, he assured her, be settled when he met her in Italy that Thursday. Paying no heed to her request that he should, if he wrote to her, pretend to be her nephew, he asserted his power over her by signing himself as CHIEF.
His confidence in the emotional grip he already had on her was such that he was willing to risk not showing up that Thursday at the planned rendezvous. He even had the self-assurance to go one stage further in his quest to subdue her. I’M LEAVING TONIGHT FROM PARIS TO MILAN, he wrote. THERE TELEGRAPH MY ARRIVAL. WITH ALL RESPECTS. CHIEF. He sent the wire to Venice, where Milania was staying. Despite finagling a British Emergency Certificate that would, in lieu of a passport, get him into Italy, he failed to board the train that night. Instead, he carried on enjoying himself in gray, showery Paris, where he had the opportunity to look up friends at the Café du Dôme. Nothing much had changed there, save for the industrious presence behind the bar of the owner’s son, just back from military service.
Edgar soon received a telegram from Milania. She wanted to know why he’d been delayed.
PLEASE SEND ME MONEY BECAUSE I AM SICK IN BED, he fired back.
For once Milania didn’t accede to his request. Virtuoso manipulator though he was, he’d plainly misjudged the situation. He’d gone too fast. And now he’d blown his shot at pocketing more of the Khevenhüller-Metsch dynasty’s riches.
* * *
—
But Edgar was in no mood to quit. Five days after sending his request to Milania, he tried a different angle. His new approach involved wiring a brief message to her stepdaughter. It reiterated his story about falling sick. He also used the telegram to ask Atta to persuade her stepmother to send him the money he required.
Under the impression that he was seriously ill and in need of costly medical attention, Milania dispatched eighty thousand francs to him via a French bank. The money corresponded to a full year’s wages for a leading French civil servant. Even by Edgar’s profligate standards, he now had more than enough to make the most of his remaining time in Paris.
Somewhat over 150 miles away, the Brussels police had meanwhile indicted him for fraud and sent warnings about him to their counterparts in numerous countries. News of the hunt for Chief White Elk thus spread to the press in Australia, Britain, New Zealand, Belgium, and Switzerland. According to one such newspaper, the wanted man was “sufficiently distinctive” for the manhunt “to yield immediate results.” In a waggish conclusion, it added, “You can’t travel with impunity when you have feathers on your head.”
/> Traveling with impunity was, however, what he was about to do. One morning around the start of June, he went over to the Gare de Lyon and joined the people filing onto the Simplon-Orient-Express. Its passengers, many of them accompanied by cosseted pooches, were largely drawn from the ranks of aristocrats, stockbrokers, Greek shipping magnates, famous opera singers, Viennese bankers, drug smugglers, Balkan landowners, and Middle Eastern businessmen, as well as pairs of diplomatic couriers, a valise always chained to the wrist of one of them. Staff in old-fashioned, high-collared military-style uniforms looked after Edgar and the other passengers, each of whom had a separate compartment. Punctuating these were washrooms, accessible only from the two adjacent compartments, thus offering privacy for aficionados of casual sex like him.
As his train left Paris and sped through France, farmhands usually glancing up from their labors in time to gape at this flickering emblem of wealth and glamour, Edgar was surely ignorant of the danger awaiting him at the Swiss border. Customs officers stationed there had been instructed by the Brussels police to detain him. The officers would have boarded the train when it drew up at the frontier, but they always treated passengers on the Simplon-Orient-Express with negligent deference. Their examination of passports, visas, and identity papers was cursory at best, so Edgar didn’t find himself being escorted off the train before it resumed its journey.
It stopped in Lausanne, then wove its way through mountainous scenery that may have reminded Edgar of Colorado. His train entered Italy via the Simplon Tunnel. Peering out of the window at the fields, villages, and towns between there and Milan, he would probably have seen little evidence of the seismic political change that had occurred there. Just over eighteen months earlier, Mussolini and his Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) had formed Europe’s first fascist government. Yet black shirts, the prime component of the PNF uniform, were an infrequent sight, as they were regarded as too sacred for everyday use. Members reserved them for parades and other official events. In place of uniforms, fascists communicated their allegiances by wearing discreet metal badges. Edgar was at the outset unlikely to have understood the significance of these depictions of an axe protruding from a bundle of tightly bound sticks, known collectively as the “fasces.”