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  But what sometimes seemed an inexhaustible supply of good luck came to his rescue. His wife’s letter never reached the contessas. It was either lost in transit or else he had the chance to intercept it surreptitiously when he spied its Manchester postmark.

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  The customs official at the frontier between Italy and Austria examined Edgar’s Document of Identity. Edgar and the contessas were at the checkpoint in the village of Rosenbach, to which they’d traveled after a brief visit to the Khevenhüller-Metsch family’s villa in Fiumicello. Probably because Edgar was in such august company, the customs official stamped his invalid Document of Identity and let him through. Edgar and his friends then sailed through waves of rich farmland bounded by a distant mountain range. Hochosterwitz Castle, built in the sixteenth century by an ancestor of Atta’s father, was their destination. Rumored to be the inspiration for the castle in Sleeping Beauty, it draped itself over a rocky spur that made it visible from almost twenty miles. To get inside, Edgar and his companions had to drive up a zigzagging road that took them through more than a dozen fortified gates, the first of these bearing the family coat of arms.

  At Milania’s insistence, Edgar slept in her late husband’s bedroom. Further symbolic clarification of Edgar’s role was provided by her willingness to let him ring the bell in the family’s private chapel—something that, as she readily conceded, no other man had done since her husband passed away. So besotted was Milania that she took to leaving valuable gifts on Edgar’s pillow. He played along with her by going for regular walks through the castle grounds, picking flowers and placing them in her bedroom. These gestures may have helped to offset the displeasure she felt with him for his failure to keep his promise to abstain from alcohol.

  Edgar and the contessas had only been at the castle for a few days before Atta’s brother Georg arrived. Later that week, Edgar, Milania, and Georg took a trip to Klagenfurt, a pretty old town ten miles to the southwest. In the middle of its main plaza, a verdured bronze statue stood atop a bulky marble plinth. When Edgar spotted the statue, he hesitated beside it and stared at it with contemplative intensity. The voluminously gowned statue, which depicted Maria Theresa, eighteenth-century archduchess of Austria and queen of Hungary and Bohemia, had a crown on its head and a scepter in its hand. Affecting a quavering voice, Edgar said she was a kinswoman of his.

  While they were in Klagenfurt, Milania purchased some white deerskins, which could be used to make Edgar a new Cherokee outfit. Resigned to his drinking, she also stocked up on the better part of ten pints of scotch for him. Its exorbitant cost provoked an argument between Milania and her stepson.

  By the end of her weeklong visit to the castle, her hard-drinking guest had accumulated so many new possessions they wouldn’t fit in the trunk that had previously held all his luggage. Miscellaneous family heirlooms he’d purloined from the castle, not least an ornate silver tea service carrying the Khevenhüller-Metsch crest, seem to have been among his acquisitions. Two additional trunks were now required to transport Edgar’s things when he returned to the villa in Fiumicello with Milania and her stepchildren.

  About that time, he entertained them with mind-reading and hypnotism routines, which he must have picked up during his days on the vaudeville and medicine show circuits. Yet he didn’t let on that these were only tricks, mere variants of the mind games he used on his victims. Instead, he presented his tricks as “occult experiments” of the type “popular in India.”

  * * *

  —

  Ready for the resumption of his Italian tour, Edgar decamped to Trieste in early October. He moved back into the Savoia Palace Hotel, where stacks of mail awaited him, thanks to press coverage of his previous sojourn there. Mainly consisting of several hundred charity-seeking letters, the mail also included three telegrams inviting him to Venice. Before taking up the invitation, he finessed Milania into lending him another 157,000 lire. She also paid for his chief’s costume to be repaired, for some imitation jewels to be transferred onto it from her wedding dress, and for some ermine fur to be added to the black cloak he wore these days.

  All of her loans to him would, he pledged, be repaid on Sunday, December 28, 1924. That was, he explained, the date on which his Canadian fortune would be released by the British government. With those words, his impulse to keep upping the ante had brought him to the moment when he was impetuous enough to stake everything on a losing hand.

  Coinciding with his return to Trieste was a visit by the USS Pittsburgh, whose officers he’d come to know while the vessel had docked on the French Riviera. He threw a large party for the ship’s diminutive, silver-haired commander, Admiral Philip Andrews, and the other officers. They returned the favor by arranging a reception in his honor aboard their ship.

  But Edgar’s time in Trieste was blighted by protracted bouts of fatigue. These were diagnosed as a symptom of alcohol-related cirrhosis of the liver.

  Were he able to peruse the French press, he’d have had something else to worry about. He’d just made front-page news, having been indicted on a charge of theft. The charge pertained to the valuable feathered headdress he’d stolen from Dr. Perry Chance, the American dentist he had befriended in Nice. Despite the failure of the French authorities to track him down and compel him to appear in court, he’d been sentenced to one year in jail.

  * * *

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  A welcoming committee for Edgar had already gathered around the entrance to the deluxe 310-room Venetian palazzo that housed the Hotel Royal Danieli. He was walking toward there, autumnal sunlight bathing his ermine-trimmed costume, which included an ebony cane, topped by what purported to be hippopotamus horn. When he was sighted by the fascists outside the hotel, they started cheering. Obviously they hadn’t heard about the recent French newspaper coverage of his sentencing.

  He proceeded to butter up the welcoming committee by speaking enthusiastically about the PNF and hinting that he’d be making a donation to it. Once he’d settled into the Danieli, which offered views of the lagoon, he rejoined the little troop of fascists, who were set to escort him to their party headquarters. At his slightly petulant request, they’d be presenting him with a fascist pennant of the sort he had been awarded elsewhere in Italy.

  Marching alongside him to the beat of an accompanying drummer, the fascists guided him away from the Danieli. Their route took them into the Piazza San Marco, always dense with a mix of tourists and pigeons, the cooing, murmurous sound from these frequently pierced by the shouts of the birdseed vendors—“Grani, grani, grani, pei piccioni!” (“Grain, grain, grain, for the pigeons!”). As he and his escort bisected the crowd, he would’ve had a chance to snatch glimpses of the peripheral braiding of arches, the brick clock tower, the shadowy arcades, the pavement cafés, and the little souvenir stores, as well as the cathedral’s tan, mosaic-gilded façade.

  Through a labyrinth of tight streets and diminutive bridges, Edgar and the fascists wove their way from the piazza to the Casa Farsetti, a large building where the Venetian chapter of the PNF was headquartered. Banners carrying fascist insignia decked its exterior. A similarly unambiguous display could be seen inside the building, where the walls were hung with framed photographs of Mussolini.

  Edgar marked his visit by donating a large amount of money to the PNF. At a formal ceremony afterward, he gave a fascist salute and was handed the promised pennant. Unable to resist indulging in ham theatricality, he planted a solemn kiss on the pennant. Then he began a speech in his usual collage of English, French, and broken Italian, praising Il Duce and the fascist movement. Reference to the press, which had been fanning persistent speculation about Mussolini’s role in the assassination of Matteotti, prompted him to affect a show of anger. He raised his voice and waved his cane emphatically in support of Mussolini. Such backing must have been doubly welcome to his hosts, because their party remained vulnerable. All that was keepi
ng it in power was King Vittorio Emanuele III’s current unwillingness to demand its leader’s resignation.

  * * *

  —

  Running a high fever, Edgar returned to his hotel for a siesta before reemerging in time to keep an afternoon appointment with the fascists who’d welcomed him to the city. He went with them to a mooring place near the Casa D’Oro, a busily decorated Gothic building located toward the north end of the Grand Canal, which functioned as Venice’s principal thoroughfare. On that segment of its serpentine route, it was approximately two hundred feet wide. Regularly crisscrossing it were fast motorboats, slower steam-powered water-buses, and even slower gondolas, the latter almost noiseless bar the soft plash of the gondoliers’ oars.

  Edgar hired several gondolas for his guests. Sharing his boat were a leading city official and three prominent fascists, including Angelo Birenzi, an army officer–turned–journalist.

  With the other boats following, their gondola glided south, Edgar’s improbable outfit rendering it conspicuous. They hadn’t gone far, though, before their boat collided with one of the regular ferries traversing the canal. Edgar’s gondola capsized, pitching him and the others into the deep water.

  The group that had gone overboard swam across to the ferry and scrambled up its flank. Initial consternation among its passengers was caused by the sight of Edgar boarding it in his sodden regalia.

  Safely returned to the quayside, Edgar and his companions were found a fresh gondola. As a replacement for his now-soggy headdress, someone also found him a red fez. He and his convoy then continued their journey. They passed a series of palazzi that gondoliers routinely commented upon, the water’s edge pincushioned by clusters of colorfully striped wooden mooring posts. Edgar’s purring verdict on the city was “Venice exceeds all dreams.”

  From his wobbling but thus far upright gondola, he pointed at people walking along the canal-side streets and tried to impress his companions with his powers of observation. Sometimes he declared, “That must be a communist.” Other times he said, “That must be a fascist.” He did the same with the pedestrians on the covered bridge that gradually came into sight.

  His convoy moored close to the bridge—the famous Ponte di Rialto. Gesturing toward the bar opposite, which was called the Birreria Sport, he said it looked like a hotbed of communism. He then turned to his companions and suggested they should go in and spread fascist propaganda.

  Inside the teeming bar, he revealed his idea of propaganda. It merely consisted of handing out money and offering to purchase beer for other customers, many of them dirt-poor. Soon he was the focus of much shouting and excitement, which he acknowledged with a sequence of regal bows and smiles. He was offered some celebratory champagne, but he asked the bartender for a bottle of scotch instead. To pay for it, he proffered a large banknote, the change from which he distributed among the people flocking around him.

  A still larger throng had gathered outside by the time he and his companions, full of food and liquor, came out of the bar. Chorused shouts of “Viva Italia!” greeted them as they headed back to their gondolas and resumed their progress down the Grand Canal, balconied and soft-hued façades sliding past like stage scenery.

  Some way beyond the low arch of another bridge, Edgar’s convoy navigated into a stopping place for water-buses. Poised to board one of these steam-powered vaporettos was a young woman who waved hello to Angelo Birenzi, part of Edgar’s retinue. The woman turned out to be Birenzi’s sister. When Edgar said he’d like to meet her and buy her tea at his hotel, Birenzi treated this as a royal command. Birenzi’s sister was by then aboard the vaporetto, which had just left the quayside. He shouted, “Stop! Stop!”

  Request stops by a vaporetto were prohibited, so its driver ignored Birenzi. Enraged by what was happening, another of the drunken fascists pulled out a revolver. He then took aim at the receding vaporetto, his gunshot causing pandemonium among the quayside crowd.

  * * *

  —

  By a stroke of luck, the bullet didn’t hit anyone. It didn’t even persuade the driver of the vaporetto to return to the wharf.

  Under Birenzi’s bellicose leadership, Edgar’s gondola and attendant craft took off in pursuit. Their quarry was already puffing its way along the canal. Just beyond a magnificently domed church on the far bank lay its next stop. It was still there when the flotilla of gondolas caught up.

  Over the chugging of its engine, Birenzi screamed insults at its driver for being disrespectful to His Highness, Prince Tewanna Ray. A colleague of Birenzi’s jumped onto the vaporetto, slapped the driver, yanked him away from the steering wheel, and forced him to his knees. In deference to Edgar, the pilot was made to remove his cap. Then he was compelled to beg for the prince’s forgiveness.

  * * *

  —

  It was sundown when Edgar returned to the Grand Hotel Danieli. He was accompanied by Birenzi and three of the fascists. Edgar introduced them to the contessas and made a show of being grateful to them for the way they had “defended him.”

  He persuaded Birenzi to accept a job as his secretary on a weekly wage of 1,000 lire. Reprising an old trick of his, which made him appear to be an exceptional specimen of Native American manhood, he told Birenzi that he was sixty years old, pushing two and a half decades older than he really was.

  After an evening at the Malibran Theater, where Edgar received a standing ovation from both the audience and the cast when he took his seat in one of the private boxes, he returned to Trieste with Birenzi and the contessas. In the space of only about two days there, Milania lent him another 157,000 lire, followed by further loans of 140,000 and 150,000 lire. She remained confident that he’d soon be making good on the entire debt.

  His new secretary meanwhile heard that the police were investigating the assault on the vaporetto driver. Edgar told Birenzi not to be afraid, grandly adding that he’d sort out the problem with the help of the ambassador he’d appointed to represent his tribe in Italy.

  * * *

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  Swapping Trieste for the chic tourist destination of Brioni, a famously attractive island not far down the Adriatic coast, Edgar and his entourage checked in to a large seafront hotel beside its own nine-hole golf course. He took a suite formerly occupied by the abdicated German monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II. For the ensuing week, part of which he spent with a cheerful group of hunters stalking hares and pheasants, he operated on a suitably regal budget.

  The promised date of his debt repayment bearing down on him as inexorably as a Rhode Island winter, he began to think about finding an escape route. In desperation, he wired Ethel, whose last letter to him had been so furious. He ignored that, preferring to reply to her earlier telegram in which she’d urged him to go back to her and open a hotel with her. Now he implied that he’d belatedly come around to the idea. He pleaded with her to travel to London and find a means of getting him back there.

  Even if Ethel forgave him for everything and decided to help, fleeing to London was not a viable option. Unknown to Edgar, his exploits in Brussels had convinced the British government to bar him from reentering its country. “This man is a scoundrel,” warned a letter circulated to immigration officials at all British ports.

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  In the Austrian capital—270 miles from Brioni—Milania’s stepson was poised to clinch a business deal. When he arrived at the Viennese branch of his bank and asked to withdraw 300,000 lire from his family’s current account, he was informed that the account was empty. Certain that he’d been the victim of nothing more than a clerical error, he headed straight back to Trieste, where he planned to discuss the matter with someone at the branch he normally used.

  Edgar meantime blew an additional 70,000 lire or more of Milania’s money on hosting a party to mark his last evening on Brioni. No ordinary cocktail party, this was to be a masked ball, staged in the lounge of
his hotel. He invited the officers from the USS Pittsburgh and an Italian warship, both anchored nearby. Also among the guests was the younger of the contessas, whom he started referring to as his fiancée.

  While everyone was dancing, he rode a horse into the room, his familiar getup making him look as if he’d stepped straight out of the Wild West. Frenzied applause greeted him. The clapping kept on when he dismounted and walked out of the hotel’s lounge. He went down to the sea, where he boarded a waiting seaplane. It accelerated across the water and eventually took off en route to the town of Chioggia, only a short distance south of the Venice Lido.

  Perturbed by his erratic behavior yet seemingly oblivious to the cocaine and morphine consumption that nourished it, Milania penned him a letter, doting attentiveness suffusing her writing. “Dear Chief,” the letter began. “You are lost in the world, bouncing all over the place like a ball.

  “You are too good, and sometimes you lose your head. You’ve never needed money, and your generous manner means you give it all away and are left with nothing. I am very sorry that you are not keeping your promise not to drink.” She later added, “I only wish you peace and happiness, but you have to listen to me at some point, so you can be happy and calm, and then everything will end well.

  “My opinion of Indian honor has never wavered.”