The Foreign Correspondent (18 page)

Not so
Liberazione.

A New Imperial Adventure,
they said. More dead and wounded, more money, all for Mussolini’s frantic competition with Adolf Hitler, who, on
22
March, had taken the port of Memel by sending a registered letter to the Lithuanian government, then sailing into the port, to grinding newsreel cameras and popping flashbulbs, on a German warship.
Very saucy,
as Hitler liked to say, with the sort of panache guaranteed to infuriate Mussolini.

But, just in case it didn’t, the April
Liberazione
surely did—if the palace stooges allowed him to see it. For there was not only the editorial about German agents but also a cartoon. Talk about
saucy.
It’s nighttime, and here’s Mussolini, as usual, on a balcony. This balcony, however, is off a bedroom, the outline of a bed barely visible in the darkness. It’s the familiar
Il Duce;
big jaw thrust out, arms folded, but he’s wearing only a pajama top—with medals, of course—revealing hairy, knobby cartoon legs, while, from behind the French door, a pair of woman’s eyes, very alarmed, are peering out of the gloom, suggesting that all has not gone well in the bedroom. A suggestion confirmed by the old Sicilian proverb used as the caption:
“Potere è meglio di fottere.”
Nice rhyme, there, the sort of thing that made it fun to say, and easy to remember. “Power is better than fucking.”

It had been three weeks since Weisz’s return from Berlin, and he had to call Véronique—casual as the love affair had been, he couldn’t just vanish. So, on a Thursday afternoon, he telephoned and asked her to meet him after work at a café near the gallery. She knew. Somehow she knew. And, Parisian warrior that she was, had never looked so lovely. So soft—her hair soft and simple, eyes barely made up, blouse falling softly over her breasts, with a new perfume, sweet, not sophisticated, clouds of it. Three weeks’ absence and a meeting at a café made words practically pointless, but decency demanded an explanation. “I have met, somebody,” he said. “It is, I think, serious.”

There were no tears, only that she would miss him, and he realized, just at that moment, how much he’d liked her, what good times they’d had together, in bed and out.

“Someone you met in Berlin, Carlo?”

“Someone I met a long time ago.”

“A second chance?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Very rare, the second chance.”
You won’t get one here.

“I will miss you,” he said.

“You’re sweet, to say that.”

“It’s true, I’m not just saying it.”

A melancholy smile, a lift of the eyebrows.

“May I call you, sometime, to see how you’re doing?”

She put a hand, also soft, and warm, on his, by way of telling him what a jackass he’d just been, then stood up and said, “My coat?”

He helped her on with her coat, she turned, shook out her hair so that it fell properly over her collar, rose to give him a dry kiss on the lips, and, hands in pockets, walked out the door. When, later, he left the café, from the woman behind the cash register, another melancholy smile, another lift of the eyebrows.

The following day, he forced himself to deal with the list he’d brought out of Berlin. Leaving the office at lunchtime, he took an endless Métro ride out to the Porte de Clignancourt, wandered through the flea market, and bought a valise. It had been born cheap—cardboard covered with pebbled fabric—then lived a long, hard life; a tag on the handle evidence of a stay at a railway baggage room in Odessa.

That done, he walked and walked, past stalls of prodigious furniture and racks of old clothes, until, at last, he found an old gent with a goatee and a dozen typewriters. He tried them all, even the red Mignon portable, and finally chose a Remington with a French, AZERTY, keyboard, haggled a little, put it in the valise, dropped it off at the hotel, and returned to the office.

Long hours, the spy business. After an evening with Ferrara—the troop transport to Ethiopia, the misgivings of a fellow officer—Weisz walked back to the Dauphine, took the list from its hiding place, beneath the bottom drawer of his armoire, and went to work. The thing was a bear to retype, the old ribbon had barely any ink, and he had to do it twice. Finally, he typed two envelopes, one to the French Foreign Ministry, the other to the British embassy, added stamps, and went to bed. They would know what had been done—French keyboard, umlauts put in by hand, local mailing—but Weisz didn’t so much care, by that point, what anybody did with it. What he did care about was keeping his word to the man in the park, if he was still alive, and especially if he wasn’t.

It was very late by the time he finished, but he wanted badly to be done with the whole business, so he burned the list, flushed the ashes down the toilet, and set out to dispose of the typewriter. Valise in hand, he walked down the stairs and out into the street. Harder than he thought, to lose a valise—people everywhere, and the last thing he wanted was some Frenchman running after him, waving his arms and crying,
“Monsieur!”
At last he found a deserted alley, set the valise by a wall, and walked away.

14
April,
3:30 A.M
. Weisz stood at the corner where the rue Dauphine met the quay above the Seine and waited for Salamone. And waited.
Now what?
It was the fault of that accursed Renault, old and mean. Why did nobody in his world ever have anything new? Everything in their lives was worn-out, used up, hadn’t really worked right for a long time.
Fuck this,
he thought,
I’ll go to America.
Where he would be poor again, in the midst of wealth. That was the old story, for Italian immigrants—the famous postcard back to Italy saying, “Not only are the streets not paved with gold, they are not paved, and we are expected to pave them.”

The line of thought was interrupted by the coughing engine of Salamone’s car, and darkness pierced by one headlight. Butting the door open with his shoulder, Salamone said, by way of greeting,
“Ché palle!”
What balls! Meaning,
what balls life has to do this to me!
Then, “You have it?”

Yes, he had it, the
10
April
Liberazione,
a sheaf of paper in his briefcase. They drove along the Seine, then turned and took the bridge across the river, working through small streets until they came to the all-night café near the Gare de Lyon. The conductor was waiting for them, drinking an
apéritif
and reading a newspaper. Weisz brought him to the car, where he sat in the backseat and spent a few minutes with them. “Now that
cazzo
”—that prick—“has us in
Albania,
” he said, sliding the
Liberazione
into a trainman’s leather case he wore over his shoulder. “And he’s got my poor nephew there, with the army. A kid, seventeen years old, a very good kid, sweet-natured, and they’ll surely kill him, those fucking goat thieves. Is that in here?” He tapped the leather case.

“Very much in there,” Weisz said.

“I’ll read it on my way down.”

“Tell Matteo we’re thinking about him.” Salamone meant their Linotype operator in Genoa.

“Poor Matteo.”

“What’s gone wrong?” Salamone’s voice was tight.

“It’s his shoulder. He can barely raise his arm.”

“He hurt it?”

“No, he’s getting old, and you know what Genoa’s like. Cold and damp, and the coal is hard to find these days, and it costs an arm and a leg.”

14
April,
10:40 A.M
. On the
7:15
to Genoa, the conductor made his way to the baggage car and sat on a trunk. Finding himself alone, with no stop until Lyons, he lit a panatella and settled in to read
Liberazione.
Some of it he knew already, and the editorial was puzzling. What were the Germans doing? Working for the security? So what? They were no different than the Italians, and they should all burn in hell. But the cartoon made him laugh out loud, and he liked the piece about the Albanian invasion.
Yes,
he thought,
give it to them good.

15
April,
1:20 A.M
. The printing plant of
Il Secolo,
Genoa’s daily newspaper, was not far from the giant refineries, on the road to the port, and tank cars were shunted back and forth all night long on the railway track behind the building.
Il Secolo,
in better days, had been the oldest democratic newspaper in Italy, then, in
1923
, a forced sale had brought it under fascist management, and the editorial policy had changed. But Matteo, and many of the people he worked with, had not changed. As he finished up a run of leaflets for the Genoa association of fascist pharmacists, the production foreman stopped by to say good night. “You almost done?”

“Almost.”

“Well, see you tomorrow.”

“Good night.”

Matteo waited a few minutes, then started the setup for a run of
Liberazione.
What was it this time? Albania, yes, everybody agreed about that. “Why? To grab four rocks?” So the latest line in the
piazza
—in the public square, thus everywhere. You heard it on the bus, you heard it in the cafés. Matteo took great satisfaction in his night printing, even though it was dangerous, because he was one of those people who really
didn’t
like being pushed around, and that was the fascist specialty: making you do what they wanted, then smiling at you.
Well,
he thought, setting the controls, then pulling a lever to print a sample copy,
sit on this. And spin.

16
April,
2:15 P.M
. Antonio, who drove his coal-delivery truck from Genoa down to Rapallo, didn’t read
Liberazione,
because he couldn’t read. Well, not exactly, but anything written took him a long time to figure out, and there were a lot of words in this newspaper that he didn’t know. The delivery of these bundles was his wife’s idea—her sister lived in Rapallo and was married to a Jewish man who used to own a small hotel—and it had, without question, increased his stature in her eyes. Maybe she’d had some doubts when she’d faced the fact, two months pregnant, that it was definitely time to get married, but not so much these days. Nothing was said, in the house, but he could feel the change. Women had ways of letting you know something without actually saying it.

The road to Rapallo ran straight, past the town of Santa Margherita, but Antonio slowed down and hauled the wheel around to turn onto a dirt road that ran up into the hills, to the village of Torriglia. Just outside the village was a big, fancy house, the country villa of a Genoese lawyer, whose daughter, Gabriella, went to school in Genoa. One of these bundles was hers to distribute. All of sixteen years old, she was, and something to look at. Not that he, a married man and the mere owner of a coal truck, had any notion of trying anything, but he liked her just the same, and she had a very appealing way about her when she looked at him.
You are a hero,
something like that. For a man like Antonio, pretty rare, very nice. He hoped she was careful, fooling around with this smuggling business, because the police in Genoa were pretty tough customers. Well, maybe not all of them, but many.

17
April,
3:30 P.M
. At the Sacred Heart Academy for Girls, in the best neighborhood of Genoa, field hockey was compulsory. So Gabriella spent the late afternoon running about in bloomers, waving at a ball with a stick, and calling out instructions to her teammates, which they rarely followed. After twenty minutes, the girls were red-faced and damp, and Sister Perpetua told them to sit down and cool off. Gabriella sat on the grass, next to her friend Lucia, and informed her that the new
Liberazione
had arrived, hidden at her country house, but she had, in her locker, ten copies for Lucia and her secret boyfriend, a young policeman.

“I’ll get them later,” Lucia said.

“Give them out quickly,” Gabriella said. Lucia could be lazy, and required an occasional prod.

“Yes, yes. I know, I will.” Nothing to be done with Gabriella, a force of nature, best not to resist.

Gabriella was the saint-in-training of the Sacred Heart Academy. She knew what was right, and, when you knew what was right, you had to do it. This was the most important thing in life, and always would be. The fascists, as she’d seen, were brutal men, and wicked. And wickedness had always to be overcome, otherwise the lovely things in the world, beauty, truth, and romance, would all be ruined, and nobody would want to live in it. After school, she rode her bicycle the long way home, newspapers folded beneath her schoolbooks in the basket, stopping at a
trattoria,
a grocery, and a telephone booth at the post office.

19
April,
7:10 A.M
. Lieutenant DeFranco, a detective in the rough waterfront district of Genoa, visited the WC at the precinct house at this time every morning, the high wooden stall an island in the general bustle that accompanied the arrival of the day shift. The station had been renovated two years earlier—the fascist government cared for the comforts of its policemen—and new, sit-down toilets had been installed, to replace the old porcelain squares. Lieutenant De-Franco lit a cigarette and reached behind the bowl to see if there was anything to read today and, luck was with him, there was, a copy of
Liberazione.

As always, he wondered idly who’d put it there, but that was hard to figure out. Some of the policemen were Communists, so maybe one of them, or it might be anybody, against the regime for whatever reason, idealism or revenge, because these days, people were quiet about such feelings. On the first page, Albania, cartoon, editorial. They weren’t so wrong, he thought, not that there was much to be done about it. In time, Mussolini would falter, and the other wolves would be on him. That was, had always been, the way in this part of the world. One simply had to wait, but, while you waited, something to read with your morning ritual.

At ten-thirty that morning, he visited a dockside bar that catered to the stevedores of the port, to have a chat with a petty thief, who now and again passed along a few bits of local gossip. No longer young, the thief believed that when he was eventually caught, climbing in a window somewhere, the law might go a little easier on him, maybe a year instead of two, and that was well worth the occasional chat with the neighborhood cop.