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!” Then 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.
Early on the morning after boarding the train in Catania, Edgar and the fascist officials arrived in Rome, its tan skyline fretted with spires and domes. There, Edgar became the houseguest of an Italian aristocrat who had a villa close to the sprawling, sparsely ornamented Palazzo del Quirinale, home of King Vittorio Emanuele III, now the focus of widespread speculation. Mussolini’s opponents, still boycotting parliament, hoped to persuade the king to exercise his constitutional prerogative and fire Mussolini as prime minister.
Newspaper coverage of the ongoing tour by the king’s Cherokee counterpart having already made Edgar famous in Italy, passersby pointed out “the prince” as he swanned around the capital. While he was there, he made an ostentatious display of consulting an attorney about his avowed problems with the British government. And he kept up to date with what had become a regular correspondence with Milania, during which he’d gotten into the habit of mailing her some of the commemorative photos, gifts, and other trophies he was collecting.
Milania’s replies were colored by a maternal tone that sought to protect him from what she regarded as his tendency to be “too generous and a bit disorganized.” Her stepdaughter, who penned fond and admiring letters to him, shared this slight frustration, and even ventured to reprimand him gently about his behavior.
Writing to Milania from Rome, Edgar claimed he’d taken the liberty of speaking on her behalf to members of the fascist government. They were, he informed her, sympathetic toward her family’s long-running struggle to obtain compensation for the damage to their property inflicted during the Great War.
Due to rejoin the Cimarosa following almost a week away, Edgar soon afterward quit Rome. He then made the 117-mile journey along the coast to Naples, a city unlike anyplace he had visited. Its celebrated beauty, backed by the busty silhouette of Mount Vesuvius and fronted by the blue waters of the harbor, was at odds with the teeming squalor of its pungent streets. Many of these, heaped with trash and spanned by clotheslines, echoed with the hooves of goats and cows. Others were haunted by tenacious beggars. Among Edgar’s colleagues in the con game, it was held that giving money to a beggar—“a plinger,” in grifters’ slang—would always be rewarded by good luck. But Edgar couldn’t go on handing out so much cash without getting the ever-pliable Milania to make another bank transfer.
From Naples, he sent a telegram requesting that she wire money to Genoa, three stops further along his itinerary. As bait for Milania, who made no secret of her and her stepdaughter’s desire to see him flourish, he explained that the money would bring him an appointment as a colonel in the Italian military. Secure in her conviction that Edgar was an eminent person who possessed ample finances, Milania needed scant encouragement to lend him however much he requested.
Back on the Cimarosa, he left Naples and traveled to Palermo, then Cagliari, an atmosphere of excitement prevailing ahead of each stop. People even rented windows overlooking streets where they might glimpse Prince Tewanna Ray, whose generosity earned him comparisons to the virtuous heroes from fairy tales. Accounts of him dishing out large sums of money spawned obsequious begging letters, addressing him as “Your Highness.”
Italians sometimes used the phrase la superba when referring to the city of Genoa. As Edgar discovered in late July when he landed there to a familiar tumultuous reception, Genoa merited that label by virtue of its spacious parks, sweeping views, and seaward slopes barnacled with marble palaces and dusty yellow houses. He cabled Milania a request for another loan. The money would, he said, cover newfound expenses, incurred as the upshot of being appointed to a senior position within the PNF. Milania transferred twenty thousand lire—a figure on a par with the annual salary of a top Italian sportsman—to an account in Genoa.
Edgar was, however, penalized for his greed when he called at the bank. Weighed down perhaps by Milania’s cash, he appears to have tripped while collecting it. His ankle was so badly sprained that he had to retreat to the Cimarosa and have his injury examined by a doctor.
Instead of setting off for Milan, as previously planned, Edgar stuck around in Genoa while he waited for his injury to mend. He was visited aboard his ship by both of the contessas, who appear to have consoled him with scotch, a bunch of roses, and a further fifty-five thousand lire. They also probably let slip that Georg had been making inquiries about him.
Now Edgar developed a sudden desire to leave the country. But the Document of Identity that he’d obtained in London didn’t entitle him to do so, meaning he was trapped in Italy, a country well on its way to becoming a dictatorship, a country where anyone who fell foul of the fascist regime was in line for a beating or worse—far worse, as Giacomo Matteotti had discovered.
And you could guarantee the fascists wouldn’t be too happy when they cottoned on to the fact that Edgar had played them for suckers.
Despite his sore ankle, Edgar went to see Britain’s acting consul general on the morning of Saturday, August 9, 1924. Keeping up the fiction that he was a Canadian Cherokee, he took with him the Document of Identity. He filled in the acting consul general about his travel plans, which received the go-ahead.
“No objection to bearer proceeding to Spain,” the British official wrote on the back of the Document of Identity. He also signed and rubberstamped it, leaving Edgar free to instruct the captain of the Cimarosa to plot the envisaged course for Barcelona via Marseilles. In the minutes before departing, he doled out a few hundred lire to the stevedores loading the ship with provisions, to a homeward-bound widow, and to the chief customs officer. But the latter handed back the money, saying that he and his staff weren’t permitted to accept gifts. He was ultimately persuaded by Edgar to keep the five hundred lire and donate it to charity.
Slipping out of the harbor around noon, the Cimarosa headed west along the low, sandy coastline of the Italian Riviera, Edgar’s sprained ankle probably aggravated by the swaying deck. Through the daylight hours, he’d have seen brown-sailed trawlers, wheezy-motored cargo vessels, and—when the wind let up—schooners towed by boats that were powered by swarthy, semi-naked oarsmen, perspiring like the galley slaves who had preceded them hundreds of years earlier. After nightfall Edgar would have seen the tremulous light from acetylene flares. These were used to lure fish toward the trawlers, whose crews then tossed dynamite into the shoals, its dull concussion reminiscent of the depth charges dropped during his wartime voyage to France.
Edgar had the Cimarosa make for Porto Maurizio. From some distance out at sea, the pale dome of the town’s cathedral was visible, protruding from the jumble of buildings that clung to the sloping promontory. On the streets of this bucolic little burg, through which old women carried baskets on their heads, dark-eyed girls in richly colored shawls sauntered, and farmers led donkeys, foreigners of any description—never mind an American attired in his idea of a Cherokee chief’s costume—were a novelty.
He remained there just long enough for his extravagance to yield gossip and for him to elicit a fifty-thousand-lire loan that Milania sent to the local branch of the Credito Italiano. Yet the bank was so dubious about Edgar that it declined to release the money. Both Milania and her stepdaughter soon rendezvoused with him in Porto Maurizio, presumably so Milania could vouch for him at the bank. She or Atta may also have mocked Georg’s suspicious nature and talked about his detective work to Edgar.
Georg had, in the meantime, secured an appointment with the head of one of Britain’s consulates. At the meeting, he followed up his inquiry about Prince Tewanna Ray. The consul—who obviously hadn’t troubled to question the relevant officials in Britain or Canada—had soothed Georg’s anxieties by saying, “This man is worth ten million.”
The threat from Georg’s investigation lifted, Edgar gave up on the idea of going to Spain. Once he’d distributed another wad of Milania’s money, some of it in high-denomination bills, he hired a car and was driven a short way down the coast to the adjoining town, where he’d arranged to meet Atta and Milania a day or two later.
Set amid woods and olive groves as characteristic of the region as its azure sea and sky, Diano Marina was a modern seaside resort. Edgar checked in to the highly recommended Hôtel du Paradis, which faced a palm tree–dotted strip of park and the ocean beyond. His recovery monitored by a doctor, he passed the second half of August there with Milania and her stepdaughter. In surreptitious exchange for the money that continued to be given him by Milania, he appears to have assumed a grudging role as her lover.
Years of cocaine and morphine dependency had by then left him with a fixed stare that contributed to his vague manner. To exacerbate his problems, he was also drinking heavily enough to unveil a coarse and argumentative disposition that Milania had not hitherto witnessed. She heard him rail against the British authorities, which had, he said, stolen £200 million from him. Probably influenced by the regional leader of the PNF’s decision to grant him a two-soldier escort whenever he wanted, he spoke in support of Mussolini’s beleaguered government. He said it was the only one capable of comprehending the plight of the Italian people. Edgar also dropped hints about how he wanted to sell his oil fields and seek Italian citizenship.
Atta endeavored to pull some strings on his behalf by writing to Tullio Tamburini, the Florentine fascist leader.
“Noble Contessa,” Tamburini replied. “I am trying to obtain what the chief desires—citizenship. Tell him to forward his documents to me right away.”
Edgar’s desire for Italian citizenship was surely less about switching nationality than about posing as an ardent admirer of Mussolini’s regime. The fact was, Edgar never got around to mailing Tamburini his somewhat meager documentation.
Over dinner with the contessas on the terrace of the Hôtel du Paradis, where they’d likely have been able to enjoy such regional specialties as bouillabaisse and zuppa di pesce, Edgar was introduced to Count Ludovico Barattieri di San Pietro. A suave twenty-three-year-old, serving as a senior officer in the fascist militia, he had dark hair atop a face dominated by close-set eyes and an aquiline nose.
Milania presented herself and her stepdaughter as the aunt and cousin of Prince Ray Tewanna, Chief White Elk.
“Don’t call me ‘Prince,’ but simply ‘Ray,’ ” a falsely modest Edgar told the count.
Ludovico quickly demonstrated his exalted connections by introducing Edgar to a series of aristocratic women from his native Turin, who were on vacation there. Promising Ludovico the gift of a villa situated near some hot springs in Canada, Edgar wound up hiring the count as his secretary.
Through Ludovico, Edgar angled to secure a meeting with Mussolini, known by the reverential title of Il Duce—the Leader. PRINCE WHITE ELK WISHES TO DISCUSS SERIOUS MATTERS WITH YOUR EXCELLENCY, announced Ludovico’s initial wire to the Italian prime minister. It precipitated an exchange of telegrams between Edgar and Mussolini—telegrams from one leader to another. Edgar sought to get in Mussolini’s good graces by warning him that he was suffering from a stomach ulcer. “As a medical practitioner, I recognize these ailments,” Edgar wrote. “I can tell from the way you breathe and your eyes and how you hold your hands and how you move.”
Sure enough, Edgar bagged an appointment with Mussolini, whose political position remained precarious. The naked corpse of the abducted socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti had just been found in a shallow grave near Rome, giving the king even greater justification for dismissing Mussolini as prime minister.
Before leaving the contessas and setting out for Rome, where the meeting was due to take place, Edgar told Milania that he’d use his time in the capital to try to persuade the British government to return his confiscated assets. Partnering him for the trip was Ludovico. On the morning of Thursday, August 28, 1924, they headed for the busy Piazza Colonna. Across from the massive Roman column in the center was the Palazzo Chigi, to which Edgar and Ludovico reported. Decorating its interior were Renaissance statuary and painted ceilings. Soon Edgar would be talking with Il Duce, whose pugnacious profile may have been familiar to him from grainy newspaper photos.
But Edgar eventually discovered that Mussolini couldn’t see him. Il Duce had needed to hurry to Tuscany to deal with a miners’ strike. Were Edgar to admit the truth about his futile visit to the Palazzo Chigi, he’d have risked losing credibility with Milania. When he next wrote to the contessa, he made a point of saying how well his Roman trip was going. He added that the British government remained obstructive, so he wondered whether she’d mind lending him some extra money to tide him over. This time he didn’t ask for 50,000 lire. He asked for 110,000.
More convinced than ever about the lofty social and economic realm inhabited by Chief White Elk, Milania transferred the money to him via Ludovico’s bank account. Edgar preyed upon her seemingly unshakable belief in him by swiftly submitting further requests—for 15,000 and then 125,000 lire, which she sent him by the same route.
There was still time for Edgar to transform his second visit to Rome into more than just a financial success. In hope of getting Edgar an audience with the pope, Ludovico—whose network of connections embraced the Vatican—paid a substantial bribe to a Roman Catholic cardinal. For once, though, Edgar was the chump. His money bought nothing beyond a pair of signed photos of the pope.
To save face, Ludovico appended forged papal inscriptions to both pictures. “The Holy Father,” read one of those inscriptions, “bestows an apostolic blessing to Your Highness, the Prince Tewanna Ray and your Indian brothers.”
While in Rome, Edgar also tried his luck with the Italian queen mother. As a pretext for contacting her, he mailed a beaded necklace to her, accompanied by a request to visit the Pantheon and lay a commemorative crown there. She responded with a dismissive note explaining that nobody but princes and monarchs was entitled to lay crowns in the Pantheon. With her message, she enclosed the necklace and one hundred lire to cover Edgar’s postal expenses.
Together with Ludovico and the Spanish consul, Marquis José Alli Maccarani, Edgar drove from Rome to Florence on Sunday, August 31, 1924. He moved into a top-floor suite at the Grand Hotel Baglioni, a historic mansion that had become one of the city’s costliest hotels. It looked onto the giant obelisk that skewered the broad expanse of the Piazza dell’Unità Italiana, down the side of which streetcars rattled. Local newspaper stories about the arrival of the famously generous “Canadian prince” ensured that a crowd quickly formed there. To prevent the crowd from getting into the Baglioni, police manned every entrance.
Bellhops and miscellaneous flunkies beat a path to Edgar’s door, carrying packages, telegrams, flowers, and letters from Italians who’d heard about him. No matter whether the author of those letters offered the gift of two brand-new motorbikes or pleaded for three thousand lire to avoid disgrace and the consequent necessity to commit suicide, Edgar opened many of them with a contented smile. Geographically and in every other respect, he’d come a long way since the days when he was laboring amid the stifling heat and toxic fumes of a zinc smelting plant in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
Alongside his fan mail, which made it increasingly hard to distinguish the con man from the conned, mounds of pricey gifts accumulated. To safeguard his assorted booty and his jewel-spangled chief’s robes, supposedly of “incalculable value,” the manager of the Baglioni arranged for an extra police officer to be stationed outside Edgar’s suite.
Edgar treated his robes with the offhand carelessness of someone who had grown up with priceless possessions. His jeweled getup drew admiring comments when he donned it for his second evening in Florence. By claiming his birthday was that day, he gave himself an excuse to throw a big dinner party. Dining with “His Royal Highness” at the Baglioni were José Alli Maccarani and wife, plus representatives from the city’s fascist leadership. Edgar found favor with the fascists by toasting Il Duce, who clung to power despite the parliamentary boycott, the threat of intervention by the king, and the flood of adverse comment from press and public.
Sufficient champagne flowed to ensure that the dinner table atmosphere was relaxed and the speeches earned a warm response. Edgar appeared moved by the occasion, his alcohol and drug intake surely contributing to his audacious duplicity, to the escalating scale of the lies he’d been telling. Now it was no longer about the money—if it ever had been. The money was just a means of calibrating the risks he was taking.
Bundles of ten- and fifty-lire bills filled the pockets of his chief’s costume next morning. He wore it as he walked past the police guard and out of the Baglioni’s main entrance.
Waiting for him in the piazza was a parked car. Between him and the car, a crowd had assembled in hope of receiving cash handouts. The crowd surrounded him before he could narrow that gap. He dipped into his pockets and started doling out wads of currency to those closest to him. As he did this, the crowd congealed around him, impeding his progress still more.
He’d exhausted his supply of bundled banknotes by the time he was approached by a man on a buggy, hauled by a skeletal horse. The man begged him for money. Assuming an expression of sympathy, Edgar handed the man a hundred-lire bill and then got into the parked car.
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.