King Con Page 25
From Venice, where his train made a brief stop, he wired Milania to let her know he’d be in Trieste late that evening. When he disembarked in this handsome old Austro-Hungarian port city, which had been seized by the Italians toward the close of the Great War, he headed along its grand waterfront. He ended up at the Savoia Palace Hotel. Without question the most expensive hotel in town, it had a wide, bulging stone frontage, corseted by columns. At large Italian hotels like this, he could get away with communicating in only English or French. He registered as Prince Chief White Elk. His concocted title secured him the hotel’s Royal Suite, even though his title was a mismatched hybrid, part European, part Native American. The lyrics to a song from his repertoire, proclaiming “There’s a long, long trail a-winding into the land of my dreams,” might have been written especially for the moment he took possession of his suite.
He was still in residence at the Savoia Palace when Milania came to chauffeur him back to her villa. First, though, she settled his hotel tab and took him to the Trieste branch of her bank. She withdrew a large sum of money—about 12,000 lire. She handed the bulk of it to Edgar and begged him not to tell her stepson, whom he’d be meeting at the villa.
In advance of their departure from the city, she and Edgar also went shopping. They visited a jewelry store, where Milania bought two gold watches. And they called at a tailor’s. Knowing that Edgar didn’t have many clothes with him, Milania arranged to have him fitted for several custom-made suits. These cost her 4,800 lire.
Edgar and his hostess were not through with their shopping spree, however. Milania accompanied him to an automobile dealership, where they admired the new models. Ever since attending the Paris Motor Show almost two decades earlier, she’d been a keen driver. On her visit to the Motor Show, she’d purchased a Mercedes Simplex 28/32, only the second vehicle manufactured by the German company. She had gone on to compete in road races, twice winning the race from Klagenfurt to the Glocknerhaus in Austria. In the second of those victories, she defeated Ferdinand Porsche, founder of the eponymous car company.
While Edgar and Milania were at the automobile dealership, Edgar test-drove an inordinately expensive Lancia. Milania ended up buying it. Her intention was that Edgar would present the vehicle to Georg when they first met, thus currying favor with her stepson and complying with the tradition of gift giving between aristocrats.
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Printed on the visiting card was a crown. Beneath were the words “His Highness, the Prince, Chief White Elk.” Upon arriving at the Khevenhüller-Metsch’s large villa in the town of Fiumicello, nineteen miles to the northwest of Trieste, Edgar handed his card to all the hired help.
At the villa he was introduced to Milania’s twenty-five-year-old stepson, a onetime officer in the Austrian army. Georg had just returned from a hunting trip to Africa. So admiringly had Milania spoken about Chief White Elk that Georg was keen to meet someone he believed to be a “distinguished redskin prince.”
Georg commemorated their meeting by giving Edgar a diamond, emerald, and sapphire ring. Edgar reciprocated with the Lancia, which was a perfectly chosen gift because Georg shared his stepmother’s enthusiasm for cars. The extravagance of this gesture, compounded by Edgar’s antsy entreaties that Milania should permit him to store his jewel-encrusted national costume in her safe, appeared to validate everything he subsequently told Georg about the oil fields he owned and the riches he was destined to receive.
For about the next month, during which Atta got back from a trip to Austria, Edgar wallowed in the hospitality Milania often lavished upon visitors. She treated him as one of the family. He knocked back bottle after bottle of her scotch, which must have tasted a whole lot better than the moonshine served stateside. He took advantage of the doting contessas’ offer to allow him to ride their horses and drive their cars. He tagged along with them on jaunts to local beauty spots. He repeatedly accompanied them to the swimming baths. And he went with Atta to the nearby town of Aquileia, where they joined the army veterans, grieving families, and tourists visiting the military cemetery that lay in the shadow of a Roman basilica. With familiar theatrical solemnity, Edgar laid a wreath at the war memorial.
During a trip to Trieste, he visited a bank to which he pretended that some of his wealth was being transferred. Presumably with at least one of the contessas present, he complained vocally about the failure of his money to materialize.
He must also have mentioned to his hostess that Ethel and Leslie were short of cash, because she wired no less than fifty thousand lire—almost the amount she’d spent on the Lancia—to a bank in Manchester. Surreptitiously, Edgar then channeled the money to an Italian account he’d opened—money that would have allowed him to maintain his twin drug habits. (Despite the regime’s efforts to stamp out the drug trade, which fascist propaganda depicted as a communist plot to erode the nation’s moral fiber, cocaine and morphine were available to him.)
Around that time he received a letter from Ethel, urging him to come back to her. She floated the idea of opening a small hotel together and added, “Everyone at home thinks this is a wonderful idea, because you would have the chance to sing and attract lots of people to the hotel.” She suggested they name the place “the Hotel Indian Chief.”
Edgar didn’t bother answering his wife’s letter. Next to the deluxe life furnished for him by Milania, Ethel’s pipe dreams clearly held no appeal.
Cognizant of the threat Georg posed to this hedonistic existence, Edgar began cultivating Milania’s stepson. In that regard, Edgar was so successful that he left Georg in no doubt as to his status as “a semi-royal relation.” Georg even felt comfortable enough in his presence to talk him through the photographic souvenirs of his recent safari. From Africa, Georg had brought back a young elephant and donated her to Schönbrunn Zoo in Vienna.
Another time, Edgar held forth to Georg about the invention of radio, how it had revived the venerable art of storytelling, how English radios were the finest in Europe. Georg asked Edgar to choose one for him. Edgar was handed eight thousand lire to buy the latest model, though he spent only half the money and pocketed the balance.
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With a view to undertaking an Italian tour, ostensibly aimed at increasing awareness of the parlous conditions under which his people lived, Edgar went on to wring another 65,000 lire or thereabouts out of Milania. She joined him in Trieste, where she chartered the Cimarosa—a small, late-nineteenth-century steamship—to take him around the Italian coast.
Before his ship motored out of Trieste harbor on Saturday, July 12, 1924, Edgar spoke to an Italian news agency reporter, who wired ahead to the many places on his itinerary. Big crowds were consequently waiting for him at the quayside when, over the next seventeen days, the Cimarosa made hasty stops at the lovely Adriatic ports of Venice, Fiume, and Ancona.
Often as not Edgar’s disembarkation was marked by music from a brass band. Sometimes they played the Italian national anthem. Sometimes they played the “Giovinezza”—a military march that doubled as the Italian fascist anthem. And sometimes they played a tune mistakenly held to be “the Red Indian national anthem.”
Stepping ashore, Edgar would be greeted by an excited crowd, its excitement symptomatic of the same vulnerability to outsize personalities, charisma, mythmaking, and ostentatious theatricality that lay behind Mussolini’s success. Many of the people on the quayside had likely grown up reading about Native Americans in Italian writer Emilio Salgari’s popular Wild West novels. Also there to greet him would be members of the municipal fascist hierarchy. Being a talented linguist, he soon picked up a smattering of Italian, deployed in combination with French and English phrases.
On the first three stops of his tour, he was lionized at official receptions. He received honorary membership in the local PNF. He was introduced to regional dignitaries, one of whom appears to have been Gabrie
le D’Annunzio, the eccentric poet and libertine who had led a fascist coup in Fiume. Edgar was taken on visits to places such as the shrine at the Basilica della Santa Casa, just south of Ancona. And he played the role of a wealthy royal benefactor by distributing gifts, be it money to the PNF, photographs of himself, banknotes to the poor, or objects he had himself been given by Milania, among them a platinum ring with a small pearl inset.
His politics as fluid as his sexuality and so much else about him, Edgar professed—whenever the occasion required—a hatred of “anarchists and reds.” For deferential fascist grandees, whose quasi-religious ideology glorified wartime bloodshed, Edgar’s visit afforded a valuable opportunity. It gave them the chance not only to associate with a representative of what tended to be portrayed as a warrior culture, but also to distract public attention from what promised to be a terminal scandal enmeshing the PNF.
That scandal had its roots in a parliamentary speech made the previous month by Giacomo Matteotti, one of the country’s socialist leaders. Ceaselessly vocal in his opposition to Mussolini’s would-be dictatorship, Matteotti lambasted the voter intimidation tactics perpetrated by the PNF during its recent election victory, achieved while Edgar was still in Nice. Ten days after the speech, Matteotti was assaulted in the street by a gang of thugs. Other political opponents of Mussolini’s had suffered the same fate, but this was different: Matteotti’s five assailants dumped him in a car and drove him away at high speed.
Inside forty-eight hours, the police had identified the perpetrators and found the vehicle used in the kidnapping. Enough blood was spattered over its upholstery to suggest that Matteotti must have been murdered. Its license plates had meanwhile been traced to the editor of a fascist newspaper controlled by Mussolini.
Correctly reading the incident as an assault on constitutional government, both the Italian press and public opinion turned sharply against Mussolini. So, too, did some of the non-fascist politicians who had previously supported him. If his involvement in the kidnapping and suspected murder could be verified, then he faced the prospect of being put on trial.
More immediately, he had to deal with a political crisis that threatened to unseat him. A coalition of 150 Italian parliamentarians—everyone from communists to right-wing Catholics—were striving to bring down his government. In protest at what had happened to Matteotti, they boycotted parliament, their gesture attracting immense popular support. Edgar now had cause to wonder whether he’d staked Milania’s money on the wrong horse.
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A platoon of soldiers marched down the quayside toward Edgar. He could have been forgiven for assuming that his devotees from the PNF had been ousted from government, and that the soldiers were coming to take him away. On Tuesday, July 29, 1924, at 4:00 p.m., the platoon marched aboard the Cimarosa, which had docked at the sun-bleached southern city of Bari four hours previously. But they weren’t there to arrest him. They were escorting two of the city’s most prominent fascists—a politician and one of the leaders of the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (MVSN), the fascist militia.
Other fascist notables soon joined “Prince Chief White Elk Tewanna, son of Chief Yellow Robe” aboard the Cimarosa. His face had over recent weeks become quite bronzed, which chimed conveniently with his chosen identity. Bolstering this were his current clothes—white suede pants, brightly hued appurtenances, an orange shirt, and a cloak embellished by a thick mink tail. His practice of wearing a feathered headdress, tucking a dagger into his belt, and puffing on a traditional, long-stemmed ceremonial pipe in between cigarettes also boosted his credibility. So, too, did his frequent talk of the land he owned.
In what remained of the afternoon, his newly acquired entourage went with him on a drive around Bari, the sights of which included a castle and a cathedral. Edgar and his retinue stopped at the opera house and the Barion Canoe Club, where he signed the visitors’ books. At the Barion, a young woman presented him with a bouquet. He responded by gallantly ripping the mink tail from his cloak and handing it to her.
Continuing to foster the illusion of fabulous wealth, Edgar wired two thousand lire to the PNF’s offices in Fiume. And he gave a generous donation when he dropped by the headquarters of its provincial federation. He was rewarded with membership, together with the title of honorary corporal in the militia, a title about which he was inordinately proud. Only Mussolini, who had been granted the rank of first honorary corporal, trumped it.
After a swift pit stop at a crowded restaurant where he bought hard liquor for the other customers, Edgar went for a stroll through the Old Town’s narrow and mazelike medieval streets. These sheathed the uneven contours of a spit of land that projected into the sea. He pandered to his hosts by expressing admiration for the fascist movement. He also dispensed more money to the poor, mainly to children and the elderly.
Numerous urchins from the Old Town, forming part of a substantial group, were still trailing behind him as he made his way back to the Cimarosa. Some of the crowd even followed him onto the ship. They included an amputee, lots of children, and a sailor who saluted him. Edgar rewarded their determination with bountiful handouts. And when a little ragamuffin showed off to him by diving into the sea, he tossed a fifty-lire bill in his direction.
As the Cimarosa prepared to cast off from the wharf where it was docked, Edgar pledged to return to Bari in forty days and distribute more cash. Lining the wharf were his fascist hosts, along with large numbers of impoverished women and children who waved enthusiastically as the vessel slipped its moorings.
He came away feeling impressed by the “fantastic” reception he’d enjoyed. Surely not unrelated to the warmth with which he’d been welcomed by the people of Bari was the fact he had given away close to fifty thousand lire of Milania’s fortune in the two and a half hours he’d spent there. Beneath headlines such as A REDSKIN PRINCE IN BARI, his grandiose munificence received acclaim from the Italian local and national press. Stories about his generosity then spread to newspapers in countries as distant as Australia, the details often exaggerated, the whole affair accruing the quality of a fable, albeit a fable whose moral had not yet been unveiled.
Rich though Edgar’s benefactress was, she’d had to sell a handsome tract of land in order to bankroll his antics. The revelation that she’d parted with this upset Georg, whose late father had formerly owned it. His resentment comingling with his burgeoning suspicion regarding his stepmother’s beloved Canadian cousin, Georg got in touch with one of the network of British consulates. He asked the consulate for information about Prince Chief White Elk. The countdown to Georg discovering that his so-called relative was an impostor had now begun.
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By all indications oblivious to the impending catastrophe unleashed upon him by Milania’s stepson, Edgar was steaming down the Italian coast aboard the Cimarosa. He went from Bari to Brindisi, a pleasant little town sitting on the rim of a wide bay, where he stopped for only a day before heading to Catania. Just three and a half hours after the Cimarosa reached this crowded Sicilian city, he and a group of fascist officials embarked upon an overnight train journey to Rome, a journey that would have felt even longer because Italy’s trains were notoriously decrepit and dirty.
For the opening leg of the trip, Edgar’s train crossed dramatic vistas strewn with orange groves, jagged mountains, and scorched hillsides. He had abundant time in which to savor how much his life had changed since the days when a vacation meant something entirely different. It used to mean nothing more exotic than Sockanosset School for Boys’s annual day trip, which would begin with him and three hundred other cadets pouring out of their dormitories and lining up outside, their sense of anticipation intensified by the sight of a procession of trucks bumping across the school grounds.
When kindly Superintendent Eastman, who ran the school, would ask Edgar and the others if they were ready, they’d all shout, “Yes, sir!” Th
en they’d give him three rousing cheers. And he would tell them to do the same for the school.
Lungs fresh from this vocal workout, Edgar and the rest of the cadets would pile onto the trucks, which would take them on the slow journey to Gaspee Point, where the shore overlooked the estuary of the Providence River. Under the command of Deputy Superintendent Butterfield, Edgar and his fellow cadets would be ordered to change into their bathing costumes and line up along the beach’s grassy fringe.
Teasingly, the deputy superintendent would keep them waiting before shouting “All in!” Edgar could then show off his athletic skills during the mass sprint toward the sea, where the boys would spend until lunchtime splashing about and hollering. After a meal of sandwiches, ice cream, cake, and coffee, they’d swim some more. They’d also play baseball, collect seashells, and dig for clams, the school band’s rendition of “Yankee Doodle” enhancing the carnival atmosphere.
More than two decades, three thousand miles of ocean, and several lifetimes’ experiences separated Edgar’s current self from those trips to Gaspee Point. They probably felt so remote and intangible that they might as well have happened to someone else. In a sense, they hadn’t happened to him. They’d happened to Edgar Laplante, who was long gone.