Vengeance of Rome

Book excerpt: Byzantium Endures, the first volume of Michael Moorcock’s legendary Pyat Quartet, appeared in 1981. The Laughter of Carthage (1984) and Jerusalem Commands (1992) followed. Now the quartet is complete. Pyat keeps his appointment with the age’s worst nightmare. Born in Ukraine on the first day of the century, a Jewish antisemite, Pyat careered through three decades like a runaway train. Bisexual, cocaine-loving engineer/inventor/spy, he enthusiastically embraces Fascism. Hero-worshipping Mussolini, he enters the dictator’s circle, enjoys a close friendship with Mussolini’s wife and is sent by the Duce on a secret mission to Munich, becoming intimate with Ernst Röhm, the homosexual stormtrooper leader. His crucial role in the Nazi Party’s struggle for power has him performing perverted sex acts with “Alf,” as the Führer’s friends call him. Pyat’s extraordinary luck leaves him after he witnesses Hitler’s massacre of Röhm and the SA. At last he is swallowed up in Dachau concentration camp. Thirty years later, having survived the Spanish Civil War, he is living in Portobello Road and telling his tale to a writer called Moorcock. This authoritative edition presents this work for the first time in the United States, along with a new introduction by Alan Wall.