King Con Read online

  With some difficulty, the car nosed through the scrimmage. Once it escaped from the piazza, it took Edgar on a rapid tour of the city’s main landmarks, the majority of them grand Renaissance buildings, their terra-cotta rooftops superimposed over the mountains beyond. Conspicuous among the tourist sights was the Duomo, a cathedral with a lofty, symmetrical façade, inset with varicolored marble and seething with statuary.

  Edgar called on the headquarters of the fascist militia. Like all such buildings, it had what was known as a Sanctuary of the Fallen, where visitors could venerate the concept of national regeneration through violent sacrifice. When Edgar met with the thickset, shaven-headed Tullio Tamburini, whom Atta had earlier contacted on his behalf, he could wheel out his make-believe military reminiscences. One of the principal organizers of the March on Rome, the coup d’état that had installed Mussolini as prime minister, Tamburini presented Edgar with a militia uniform and a fascist armband.

  That afternoon Edgar further flaunted his supposed allegiances by visiting the Fiesole neighborhood’s local fascist headquarters, where he spent enough time to charm the women, voice his admiration for their movement, and pledge to send them a donation. He also joined a collection of senior military men for a wreath-laying at the Porte Sante cemetery, just south of the river that split the city. His companions included Tamburini’s sixty-two-year-old friend and fellow fascist Major General Sante Ceccherini.

  Surpassing even his normal flights of fancy, Edgar enriched his performance as a visiting grandee by telling people that he was descended on his mother’s side from the Bourbons, the former ruling dynasty of France. He backed up this story by adding sufficient detail to distract from the manifest implausibility of it all. In an erudite display of contrivance, he said he was a kinsman of the Duke of Bourbon, who had revolted against King Francis I of France and then fought for Charles V—ruler of the Holy Roman Empire—at the sacking of Rome in 1527. He even dispensed a scholarly footnote about how the duke had been killed by a musket-ball, which the artist, writer, and soldier Benvenuto Cellini boasted about firing.

  Under the gaze of numerous police officers, a small crowd was loitering outside the Baglioni’s austere frontage when Edgar returned that evening. Most of the people in the crowd were relatively young. His long-awaited return prompted cheering. A number of the women standing in the piazza clutched bunches of flowers, yet they didn’t get a chance to present them to him. Smiling, he bustled straight through the police cordon and into the hotel. Then he went up to his suite, which was linked to the lobby via a sweeping staircase.

  From his rooms, he could probably hear the noisy throng that lingered in the piazza despite attempts by the police to disperse it. Several times during what remained of the evening, the crowd looked as if it was about to storm the hotel. And on each occasion the police moved into position, ready to parry the assault that never came.

  The situation nonetheless encouraged the authorities to arrange for Edgar to switch hotels. When he heard about his enforced departure, he let his displeasure show. Compelling him to flee the crowd was akin to dragging an actor offstage during the middle of a sellout performance.

  * * *

  —

  As a preamble to Edgar quitting the Baglioni, the police sealed the building. Not very effectively, though. For the second time in recent days, one of the people in the crowd somehow sneaked into the hotel. A woman had last time found her way up to the fourth floor where Edgar’s suite lay, but she’d been dragged away before she could reach him. In this instance, however, the intruder managed to buttonhole Edgar, who handed over a few hundred lire.

  Outside the hotel, Edgar was picked up by his driver. The police were unable to hold back the raucous crowd, which surged around him. One of the boys in the crowd sparked hollering and applause by climbing onto Edgar’s car for a few moments. Gradually the vehicle accelerated and broke free. A pack of young boys chased it down the street.

  Edgar was driven through the nocturnal city, where his car may have passed one of the torchlit funeral processions so commonplace in Florence, the coffin bearers headed by a crucifix-wielding priest. Someone—likely Edgar himself—must have leaked his destination, a quayside piazza on the other side of the river. When his car got there, a crowd had already convened outside the Grand Hotel de la Ville. Before he could step out of the car, he had to wait for the police to arrive and keep the crowd under control. Only then did he enter his new hotel—a thoroughly modern establishment.

  After he’d taken possession of the suite reserved for him, sundry fascist dignitaries came to pay their respects. This was presumably the occasion when he met one of the party’s rising stars, Roberto Farinacci, a pudgy-faced thirty-two-year-old with dark, lugubrious looks, their lugubriousness invariably accentuated by a fastidious little triangular mustache that belied his taste for violence. Edgar made sure to cultivate Farinacci by offering to pay the funeral costs of two fascists who’d recently been killed when a hand grenade had accidentally exploded.

  Chatter about Edgar’s whereabouts was meanwhile spreading across the city and causing the crowd in front of his hotel to multiply. As the night wore on, the mob grew more unruly. Extra police—reinforced by the carabinieri, their military adjunct—eventually had to be summoned to drive the crowd from the piazza.

  * * *

  —

  The trouble outside Edgar’s hotel presaged trouble of a different nature. First thing the next morning one of the country’s leading newspapers, its overtly anti-fascist stance rendering it unsympathetic to anyone so visibly, if superficially, associated with the regime, Corriere della Sera ran a succinct yet scathing item about “the Canadian Prince Elk.” Rehashing the contents of the piece that had appeared in the London-based Daily Mail all but two years previously, the article queried his self-professed role as an official representative of his tribe. Corriere della Sera also dropped a sly, uncorroborated reference to him being employed at a theater in Vancouver, thus implying the whole thing might be a hoax.

  Such open skepticism seems to have led a reporter from the Florentine newspaper Il Nuovo della Sera to probe him about the reasons behind his Italian tour. He responded by cooking up a story about promising his dying mother that he’d travel to Italy and undertake charitable work.

  Press interest of this sort lent urgency to the moves Edgar was making to secure an Italian passport. He’d already hired an attorney and, to speed up the application process, given him the huge sum of 100,000 lire, a high proportion of which must have been required for kickbacks to government officials. The moment he obtained the passport, he could reactivate his earlier plan to abscond before the Italian newspaper stories blossomed into something more dangerous.

  * * *

  —

  Any cynicism presently felt about Edgar by the people congregating outside his hotel was offset by their desire to obtain some of the cash he regularly distributed with such largesse. Surely encouraged by a report disclosing his whereabouts to the readers of Wednesday’s edition of La Nazione, another Florentine newspaper, the crowd had grown substantial. Emerging from his hotel at ten o’clock that morning, Edgar received a round of applause.

  His pockets were once again stuffed with banknotes. In the few days since his arrival in Florence, he’d sent Milania three requests for loans. The scale of those requests keeping pace with the scale of the lies he was telling, Edgar sought 40,000, 70,000, and then 100,000 lire. Each time he cited delays in releasing his Canadian fortune as the reason for his request. And each time the contessa—who signed her replies with a heartfelt LOVE, MILANIA—sent the bank transfer via José Alli Maccarani. For the Spaniard, the sudden appearance of such large amounts ratified Edgar’s status as a prince, accustomed to playing with vast sums of money.

  Striding across the piazza facing his hotel, Edgar plucked banknotes from his pockets and handed them to people. He beamed with delight as a succession
of women reciprocated with bunches of flowers. Plentiful though his stock of banknotes was, it soon ran out. When that happened, he quickly climbed into the car standing by for him.

  The car drove west out of the city and down the winding roads that led through the rolling, famously attractive Tuscan countryside. At several of the villages dotting his twenty-four-mile journey, Edgar insisted on stopping. Whenever he pulled over, villagers rapidly surrounded him, eager to grab the money he doled out.

  Edgar had been invited to the town of Ponte a Egola, where José Alli Maccarani and his poetry-writing Italian wife had a villa. In Edgar’s honor, they gave a lavish lunch. He remained at their home until late afternoon when he drove back with them to Florence, where they and a select band of friends reconvened. Milania and Atta, who had just arrived in Florence, appear to have been part of their group.

  They gathered at a midtown restaurant on the Via de’ Tornabuoni, a long and relatively narrow road, synonymous with expensive restaurants and punctuated by palazzi—not palaces, but Renaissance mansions. Seeing them may have been what instigated a conversation Edgar had with a local aristocrat. His casual reference to how he was thinking of buying a Florentine palazzo led the aristocrat to inquire whether he wanted to purchase theirs.

  “How much?” Edgar asked.

  “Eight million.”

  A note of incredulity entering his voice, Edgar replied, “Eight million? It’s too little. I offer you fifteen.”

  Reluctant to exploit Edgar’s ostensible unselfishness, the aristocrat pushed him toward a compromise figure.

  In front of the restaurant where Edgar and friends were dining, another crowd formed. As the dinner progressed, the crowd became rowdier. Soon the carabinieri showed up to maintain order.

  The people in the street were still there when Edgar and his entourage left the restaurant at 11:00 p.m. and went back to his hotel, where they could continue the party. Edgar had by then conned José into getting the Spanish government to release funds to him. These were styled as an “investment,” likely in his mythical Canadian oil fields.

  Playing an increasingly hazardous game, Edgar gave Milania the comforting impression that her loans to him, now totaling somewhere in the region of 780,000 lire, equivalent to twice the annual wage of the U.S. president, were secured by the Spanish government. Additional reassurance was provided when he elaborated on the story of his Bourbon lineage. He told Milania that his father, Chief Yellow Robe, had married the Contessa di Rocca Guglielma, daughter of Prince Ludovic Mario of Bourbon, through whom Edgar claimed to be related to the former empress of Austria-Hungary. The empress had, he mentioned, been extremely short of money after she’d been ousted from the throne, so he had lent her a million lire. If he was prepared to bail out someone with a loan of that magnitude, then he surely merited comparable generosity in his time of need.

  22

  Within a few hours of Edgar’s return to the Grand Hotel in Florence, the consequences of his interview with the reporter from Il Nuovo della Sera became apparent. No sooner had the resulting article been published than his reference to being in Italy for charitable purposes unleashed some three thousand letters pleading for assistance. Penned by a cross section of the population, they provided entire family histories—tales of luck turned sour, of homelessness, poverty, romance, and attempted revenge. Edgar even received a cheeky letter from a racing cyclist who wanted fifty lire to fix his bike.

  Fortunately, Ludovico Barattieri seems to have been on hand to sift through the mail and allocate donations to the most deserving candidates. Edgar, meanwhile, continued to enjoy his regal perks. That day he took up an invitation to visit the famous Richard Ginori porcelain factory in Sesto Fiorentino, not far beyond the city limits. At the factory, he was presented with a specially commissioned three-foot-tall ceramic sculpture portraying him in his full regalia. He also mingled with the workers in the canteen, posed for a photo with them, handed each of them a hundred-lire bill, and splurged another thirty thousand lire on six vases. When he got back to Florence, he gave these away. One of them went to José Alli Maccarani’s wife. Another went to Tullio Tamburini. And he gave another to Tamburini’s friend Major General Sante Ceccherini, who had been organizing a show at the Alhambra Garden Theater in commemoration of Edgar’s visit.

  After the performance that evening, Edgar thanked the major general and his associates by hosting a sumptuous dinner for him—and, it seems, the contessas—at the adjoining restaurant. Edgar wasn’t confronted with the sizable bill until next day. Maybe because he was out of cash, he refused to pay. He said there must be some mistake, as he was merely a guest at the dinner.

  His atypical reluctance to part with Milania’s cash extended to the Florentine palazzo he’d undertaken to purchase. Though he kept making promises to its aristocratic owner, these failed to crystallize into hard currency. For now at least, he was able to elude both his aristocratic acquaintance and the repercussions of his unpaid restaurant bill by departing on a day trip.

  In the company of the contessas, Tullio Tamburini, José Alli Maccarani’s wife, and various other aristocrats—plus several officers from the fascist militia—he took the train to Bagni di Montecatini, a nearby spa resort favored by wealthy Italians. When his party rolled up at the Hotel Locanda Maggiore, they were met by the local big shots. “His Royal Highness” and the rest of his entourage were then shown around the thermal baths, the town hall, and the headquarters of the Montecatini chapter of the PNF. They were also taken out to a neighboring village, where Edgar gave generously to the children of the poor.

  Upon returning to the Locanda Maggiore that evening, he and the others were treated to dinner. It functioned as the prologue to a visit to the theater for a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto, starring the world-famous soprano Luisa Tetrazzini. Her singing of the higher notes was a marvel of crisp phrasing ornamented by perfectly executed trills, yet she sang the middle notes in a breathy style that would have been alien—even comical—to an American such as Edgar. Closing his eyes, he might have assumed her singing emanated from a young girl rather than the sixty-three-year-old barrel of flesh to whom he was introduced. He left her under the illusion that she’d just met someone important, someone who had lately received an audience with Il Duce.

  At midnight he and his party returned to Florence, where his problems were about to deepen. Intrigued by the stubborn presence of crowds outside Edgar’s hotel, a foreign correspondent from the Daily Mail had written a piece about him, which was published in Britain the morning after his trip to Montecatini. The correspondent’s distrust of “the man calling himself ‘White Elk’ ” infected the hitherto supportive Florentine press. Its rapid change of heart perhaps also owed something to gossip about him swindling the owner of the restaurant next to the Alhambra Garden Theater. La Nazione soon published an article lamenting the gullibility of the city’s inhabitants and remarking on how “the shining fur of White Elk” had acquired “gray undertones.”

  * * *

  —

  Among the mail addressed to Edgar was another letter from his wife Ethel. Most likely it had been inspired by a British newspaper story that described him wading through the Florentine crowds and dishing out money. The piece quoted his boast that he’d given away a vast amount in just two months.

  “Do you think I want to stay in England while you are in Italy being treated like a god?” Ethel wrote. Her patience with Edgar exhausted, she added, “You treat me like a streetwalker.”

  She was so mad at him that she also mailed a letter to Milania and Atta. This contained documents proving he wasn’t the millionaire he claimed to be. Even allowing for his powers of persuasion, he’d have trouble getting the contessas to disregard these.

  * * *

  —

  His days of prodigal self-indulgence drawing to a close, Edgar left Florence with Milania and Atta. Together, they started out
for the Khevenhüller-Metsch family’s castle in southern Austria. Edgar—now deprived of the services of Ludovico Barattieri—was driven by the contessas to Bologna, a prosperous city sixty-three miles to the north. He and his companions spent nearly a day and a half amid its ubiquitous redbrick, its amalgam of the medieval and the modern, its Gothic-arched arcades and canted towers. Though his chief’s costume was beginning to look suspiciously shabby, he was given an official reception and awarded honorary membership in the local chapter of the fascist militia. He also had time to hand out money to the poor, visit a hospital, and accept another invitation to a theater show, in the wake of which he squandered an astronomical sum on champagne for a café full of freeloaders. But he required more than just a few glasses of bubbly to maintain his precarious equilibrium.

  Horrified by the occasional boorishness brought out in him by heavy alcohol consumption, Milania asked Edgar to quit drinking. For all the liquor in his bloodstream, he remained clear-sighted enough not to rile the woman who was financing his current extravagance. He responded to her pleas by promising to go on the wagon—all too appropriate in view of the covered wagon that had played such a fateful role in bringing the two of them together.

  As if to remind him of what he’d lose if he fell out with Milania or ended up being exposed as a fraud, Italy’s most fashionable and luxurious beach resort provided their next homeward-bound layover. From the Riva degli Schiavoni, a spectacularly beautiful Venetian quayside, the three of them only had to take a short boat trip across the lagoon to get there.

  Beaches, luxury hotels, and villas fringed the sliver of land that comprised the Venice Lido. Even in late September, its tourist season was in full swing, Germans predominating among the wealthy visitors who came to broil themselves on the sand. In these swank surroundings, the contessas could show off their royal guest. Over the next two days, Edgar shelled out another ten thousand lire of Milania’s money on hosting a dance. It threatened to be his final taste of the high life. Any day now Milania and Atta would receive the letter from his wife. He’d need a miracle to avoid winding up in prison for years.