After Hannibal (25 page)

Mildred wiped her hands on her apron. “Never you mind, dearest,” she said. “Don’t fret about the money. You are so clever and you always try so hard to make a beautiful home for us. I never had much of an opinion of those Greens, not from the moment you first mentioned them.” Mildred smiled and brushed wisps of hair from her forehead. The hairs on her sturdy arms were lightly flecked with some glistening substance like melted butter or egg yolk. “Someone else will come along,” she said.

“That’s true.” Blemish was cheered, as always, by this thought. “Foreigners buying houses all over Umbria. Especially Brits and
Americanos. What with Tuscany being so expensive these days and the coast getting so fouled up, people are coming here in droves. The green heart of Italy, home of history and art. The competition is growing, of course. Well, naturally it grows at the same rate as the volume of profit. That is the law of progression, Milly; we are very familiar with it in business. I am not the only one in the field, far from it. Just in our neck of the woods, between here and Castiglione del Lago, on the western side of the lake, that’s a region about fifty square miles, I know of three other English-speaking project managers operating. It’s a hard life out there, Milly. I sometimes wonder whether we couldn’t all do a merger and pool our resources, but at the end of the day I am a lone wolf at heart.”

He watched the companion of his life brush her sheets of strudel pastry with beaten egg white and cut them into strips. “I won’t work with Esposito again,” he said. “He has no finesse, none at all, he doesn’t know the difference between deliberate and accidental wreckage. If he had played his cards properly we could have kept these people going for quite a while yet.”

“Well, that is human nature.” Mildred began to make the pastries, wrapping her rich mix of minced fig, spices, saffron and egg yolk into the strips and nipping the ends with a neat pinch of finger and thumb to seal in the mixture. “I’ve had an idea for our medieval restaurant,” she said. “I think it would enhance things if we had a minstrel.”

They discussed this new idea while they ate the pastries. Mildred fried these a few at a time in deep fat, afterward basting them with warm honey and pressing them flat with her long-handled wooden spoon. “It would have to be someone with a good voice, of
course,” she said, glancing to see how her man was liking the sweetmeats. In their discussions Mildred generally provided the flights of fancy and Blemish struck a more practical, business-like note and this seemed to them both to be perfectly in keeping with their true selves.

“He could accompany himself on a lute or mandolin,” Mildred said.

“It would cost quite a bit.”

“True, my love, but think how it would add to the atmosphere.”

“It would bring the punters in, there is no doubt about that.” Blemish was liking the idea more and more. “We’d have to find someone we could trust not to dip his fingers into the till.” He blinked softly and his mouth shone innocently with honey. Milly was a real trump. Financial and sexual excitement possessed him in equal measure as he looked at her. “Shall we dress up tonight?”

Ritter reached the stream in the afternoon of the following day. The weather had turned cloudy, with a milky haze lying over things and the sun occasionally striking through, dazzling the eyes. Before him he saw the running water, dark against the earth of the banks, with shifting glints where it fell in a series of small plunges to lower levels in the bed. Beyond these glinting splashes the far slope of the gully, thickly overgrown, rose to a line of oaks along the crest. That side he had no intention of clearing—he had wanted only to reach the water. He turned and looked behind him at the canes he had
freed, stiff and motionless now in this milky light, at the dark mouth of the cave and the hacked and devastated slope beyond it, the raw wounds of his clearance. Time would be needed to heal this passage of his.

As he stood there looking upward, feelings of loneliness and bewilderment came to him. Why had he spent this time, why had it mattered? The mystery of neglect, perhaps it had been that, the sense that on a holding of five acres, among people clinging to the margins of subsistence, even the earth of this ravine might have been used to some productive purpose, and in fact had once been so used, as witnessed by the canes, the willows, the straggling vines.

But it hadn’t been this that set him off; it had merely provided him with a motive he could accept as reasonable. A screened-off place, overgrown and steep-sided, a place where the traces of something had been covered over …

That was why, he knew it now. He had felt the need to clear the place, restore it to the generality of nature, remove its secretness, its difference. One element in the complex legacy of that March afternoon fifty years ago had been this, a picture in his mind of the quarried excavations where the hostages had been taken to be killed. Imagination and memory had worked together, translating that talk of Nordic Spirit and Civilizing Mission into a moving mouth, the crack of pistol shots and the sprawl of bodies, a picture of banks, deep-sided, a place where such things could happen, parallel somehow with the normal, acceptable life of humanity.

It had been as if by giving back this little gully to the rest of the land he could cancel out his father’s words, or make them somehow true, undo what had been done to those unknown people and what
might have been done to Giuseppe and his mother. All his life he had been troubled by not knowing the fate of these two people whom he had betrayed. No one had come after them to live in the basement. There had only been Kurt, the orderly in the glass cubicle, making model airplanes out of matchsticks.

Words have terrible power—he had learned it then. A few stumbling words of his and these two had vanished as though they had never been. The worst had always seemed to him the most probable. They had fallen into the hands of the SS and been taken to the cellars in the Via Tasso for interrogation. They had been shot in the back of the neck like the other hostages and the earth exploded over them to cover the traces.

It was possible of course that they had lived on, in the chaos following the German withdrawal from Rome. He sometimes imagined them as part of the vengeful crowd that hunted out fascists after the occupying troops had gone. The main culprits had already decamped, or most of them. Trials there were, however. In September of 1944 Carlo Sforza, newly appointed Commissioner of Sanctions Against Fascism, reported that two thousand persons accused of fascist crimes were in prison and that seven hundred and fifty trials were scheduled.

One of the first to come up for trial was Pietro Caruso, Rome’s chief of police during the occupation. He was accused of having turned over to the Germans more than fifty of the hostages subsequently killed at the Fosse Ardeatine. The day before his trial was due to begin, relatives of the victims, joined by an angry mob, tried to wrest him from the authorities and hang him. Foiled in this, they turned upon a man called Caretta, who was not only completely
innocent of any hand in the business but had actually helped Italian political prisoners to escape from Regina Coeli prison, where he had been Vice-Director. In front of the Palace of Justice, in full view of two hundred policemen, they beat him half to death, then took him and drowned him in the Tiber.

Symbolic sacrifice, Ritter thought—there had been many such. Caretta’s only guilt had been his association with a hated prison. Relatives of the victims … Once again he wondered if Giuseppe had been part of that mob, taken part in that senseless murder. The victims making new victims while the guilty enjoyed lawful protection …

At this moment he felt a strange shifting motion, very brief, below his feet. The earth seemed to stagger for a second as if burdened too heavily. He felt an impulse to clutch for balance, then it was over and he was standing still and the sounds of the world came back, but the hush had not been one of peace but of something terrible, casual too, the nature of it receding already from memory like the recognition of an accident narrowly avoided, something that might have killed. He stood quite still for a while, breathing deeply, no longer sure whether the earth had moved or only himself. In this moment of doubt, glancing down, he saw a dull gleam, something metallic bedded in the bankside just above the level of the stream, where the earth and stones were darkened with wet—it was water on the metal that had caught the light. He bent down and prised the object out with his fingers. It was a cigarette lighter, much dented and scratched, made from a cartridge case, of the kind he remembered seeing Italian soldiers use during his time as a child in Rome. Turning with this in his hands, he looked back at the slope, through
the screen of the poplar trunks and the pale foliage of the willows, at the dark opening where the cave went into the bankside. From there one would be able to see the whole course of the stream as it ran between the trees. Something had happened here, Ritter felt suddenly certain of it, with a certainty that made the morning, for these few moments, seem darker and colder. Something had happened here, something had been witnessed.

The letter had reposed in Monti’s pocket all that morning. There was no hint of appeal or apology in it but he knew his wife, knew the importance of dignity for her, knew that in her way and at some considerable cost, she had acknowledged a mistake, even made a kind of offer. Without some response from him she would be slow to do so again. But he could not decide what the response should be. His own sense of dignity, more fitful than his wife’s, was nevertheless strong when there was a sense of injury to support it. To be too accommodating would make light of his wounds. He had suffered her leaving with a passivity that he felt to be shameful; was he to be similarly supine now that she hinted at return? Always to be acted upon, never acting. In this indecision moralism came to his aid: Laura should not be encouraged to think that for forgiveness it was only necessary to dash off a note.

In the stress of these feelings he had not slept well and he felt strained and restless, unable to settle down to work. He decided to drive to Perugia and revisit—yet again—the Rocca Paolina, have another look at the subterranean chambers and passages that were all
that remained now of the vast fortress built by Pope Paul III on the ruins of the Baglioni houses.

He left his car in Piazza Partigiani and went up by the series of internal escalators, a triumph of civic planning, that take one steeply to the summit of the Colle Landone and the historic heart of the city. Piped music sounded faintly as he ascended—Mozart’s clarinet concerto. He always enjoyed the ease and incongruity of it, this effortless passage upward on the moving stairs through the bowels of one of the greatest monuments to tyranny and terror ever constructed.

Looking at the people passing on their way down, he was struck by the mystery of common humanity, the strange composure of the faces, each glimpsed briefly, then gone, sliding away out of sight and memory. His own face too would reveal nothing, in spite of the nagging pain of his indecision. There would be pains far worse behind some of these sleepy-looking faces. And terrible, unavowable thoughts …

He did not take the final flight of stairs, that which emerged on Piazza. Italia and the open air, but turned aside, spent some time walking through the twisting, high-vaulted passages, where the poor remains of the Baglioni houses had lain buried since Paul’s conquest of the city in 1540. There were not many people down here; some few occasional wanderers like himself had passed in the gloom of the place. From somewhere not far he could hear the droning voice of a tourist guide. His steps struck echoes from the stone.

Tracing the arches of bricked-up windows, the line of masonry where the stump of a tower had been left to stand, incorporated in the massive walls, peering into the narrow recesses where gateways
had been blocked off, he wondered again why the Pope had allowed these last traces of the hated family to survive in this limbo beneath the buttresses and battlements of his enormous stronghold. Perhaps he had merely wanted space for dungeons and storerooms. But for Monti the symbolic had always held a strong appeal and he preferred to think that Pope Paul had ordered his architect, Sangallo, to leave these last traces of Baglioni power and wealth as a reminder of his dominion, and of the fate awaiting all who opposed his will.

His wanderings ended where they always ended, before the marble portrait of the Pope himself, the Grand Proprietor, on the wall of the square chamber, perhaps originally a guardroom, which adjoined a steep passage leading down to the lower levels, the fearsome belly of the place, where dungeons were built into the walls, designed so that a man could neither sit nor stand in them.

Paul’s cold profile hung on the wall just above eye level, carved in low relief on a disc of stone. Though life-size, it resembled a face stamped on a coin, austere, imperial, with a kind of harsh sagacity about the lines of the mouth. An official face, not really a portrait. But even a true likeness could hardly offer an answer to the question uppermost in Monti’s mind. Had it been this pontiff’s long-standing plan to destroy the Baglioni or had they themselves, by their own heedlessness and arrogance presented him with an opportunity he was quick to take?