Traitors to All (25 page)

He was woken abruptly by two things: the light being switched on suddenly and a violent punch in the mouth.

It was Adele and Turiddu, completely out of their heads on drugs, their eyes fixed and glassy, more fixed than those of a toy dog, stark naked and in a state of sadistic sexual frenzy. Anthony Pani realised it immediately, it was worse than finding himself in a cage with two wild tigers, they were maddened with drugs, and that was an uncontrollable kind of madness.

‘You were planning to screw us, you turncoat,’ Turiddu said, punching him again, less violently this time, ‘we take you to Rome and as soon as you’re in Rome you have us arrested, that’s what you have in mind, isn’t it?’

‘But you’re my friends, why should I have you arrested?’ the captain said, extremely calm and resolute, just as it said he was in his character notes, despite the two punches he had received and his awareness of what might happen.

‘You thought we hadn’t realised, but we had,’ Turiddu said, but without punching him again, ‘I was studying you tonight and I saw that you are our enemy and as soon as we cross the lines you’ll have us shot,’ and he laughed, but it sounded more like a compulsive coughing fit. So they weren’t so stupid, they had realised that he had realised. What did they intend to do now?

‘I’m cold,’ Adele said, ‘let’s go down in front of the fireplace,’ because the little Castle of Miramare had a living room with a ridiculous fireplace, and he knew immediately what they wanted.

‘Get up and come downstairs,’ Turiddu said.

His mouth edged with blood, Captain Pani immediately stood up, you have to obey mad people promptly.

‘Get undressed!’ she screamed. ‘It’s very hot down there.’ She was even uglier than her unashamed nakedness, the drugs had altered her gestures and her voice. Captain Pani was wearing nothing but a woollen vest and old-fashioned longjohns. He took them off.

They took him down to the ground floor, wood had been heaped on the wretched fireplace and it was really hot, not only that, but if they continued like this, they’d soon burn the house down.

‘Sit down and drink.’

He sat down and drank the half glass of kirsch that she poured for him, her lips cracked in a kind of rictus.

‘Drink all of it.’

He drank it all. They stood there in all their foul nakedness, which might have been what disgusted Captain Pani the most, because that nakedness was worse than the most repugnant thing he could imagine, especially hers: her skin was blotchy, perhaps with dirt, her breasts slack and lined, like an old woman’s, her blackish red hair lubriciously agitated by convulsive shakes of the head.

‘Drink some more.’

He drank some more, it was good genuine German kirsch, probably supplied by the Gestapo, and he was a good drinker: if he had to die anyway, he might as well die drinking excellent kirsch.

‘Now you have to tell us where the money is, tell us where the money is and we’ll let you go,’ Turiddu Sompani said, the Breton Jean Saintpouan, who had surfaced in Europe in the worst years of the war. ‘You were going to let us take you to Rome and then betray us. We realise that, but we forgive you. It doesn’t matter: we’re not going to Rome
anymore, but you must tell us where you’ve hidden the money, we spent a whole night looking for it but couldn’t find it, if you tell us where it is, we’ll let you go, otherwise, it’s going to be bad for you.’

‘Let him go like that,’ she said, her body burning all over with drugs. ‘Don’t even give him his clothes.’

‘Where’s the money?’ Sompani, or Saintpouan, said.

‘I don’t have any more money,’ Captain Pani said. ‘I used it all up a long time ago.’

Sompani, a big man, already fat, broke the neck of the kirsch bottle and the captain instinctively lowered his head, and then the woman kicked him in the face with her bare foot. A barefoot kick has its own particular efficacy, it may even have more of an effect than a kick with a shoe, and blood ran down Captain Pani’s: Adele la Speranza’s big toe had hit his right eye, along with a splash of kirsch.

‘Don’t break the bottle!’ she screamed. ‘You just have to hit him, otherwise he’ll faint, and he mustn’t faint.’

Unfortunately Captain Pani was very strong (
unusually robust physique, extreme resistance and muscular agility,
said the notes from his army doctor) and he had not fainted, he was stunned but he had not fainted, and he could see what Adele was doing.

She had jumped, literally jumped, onto the sofa, where her knitting bag was, and now, like some big sex-crazed monkey, she was hopping with joy on the sofa, around the bag, her quivering flesh illuminated by the flames of the fire. Finally, she bent down, her gestures still those of a monkey, searched in the bag and took out a handful of knitting needles, and the captain started to understand.

The monkey jumped down from the sofa. On the little table in front of the fireplace there were slices of bread that were very soft, and she smeared this soft bread on the back
end of one of the needles, not on the tip, thus forming a kind of handle, then held out her arm and put the needle into the fire, and as it was heating up she said, ‘Now you’re going to have to tell us where the money is.’

The Breton looked at her admiringly. ‘Where are you going to put it? In his eye?’ He laughed, in that hysterical way of his that sounded like coughing.

‘No, because then he’ll faint, or die.’

‘In his …?’ Jean Saintpouan, Turiddu Sompani, coughed again.

‘No,’ she also coughed, like a crazed animal, showing the captain the red needle. ‘In the liver, if you don’t tell us where the money is.’

‘Why in the liver?’ the Breton said, and perhaps he wasn’t even Breton.

‘Because it’ll hurt, but he won’t faint, they did it to some German officers in Yugoslavia. Hold him.’ And as he held him, she said, bringing the red needle closer, ‘Where’s the money?’

Of course he could tell them, if he thought it would be any use, but he knew that even if he told them, these people would kill him afterwards anyway and spit on his letters to his family. The only thing that was any use was to show contempt for them and think how angry they’d be when they couldn’t get a lira out of him.

‘I don’t have any money,’ he said laconically. He sat there watching the knitting needle start to darken and he saw it disappear into his right side, he no longer even had the strength either to cry out or to move, he only gasped, ‘Susanna.’

‘Susanna, oh Susanna,’ she sang, moving jerkily like a jammed machine. ‘With the next needle you’ll tell us where the money is.’

‘Wonderful,’ the Breton said, even more admiringly, still holding firmly to this man who couldn’t or wouldn’t fight back.

‘Where’s the money?’ she said. With another little bit of soft bread, she made a handle around another needle, and held the needle in the flames.

Captain Pani did not reply. He did not faint, but he could not do anything, just look, with only one eye now, and suffer.

‘He won’t die, is that right?’ Turiddu said: he wouldn’t like it if he died.

‘No,’ she said, ‘and he won’t even faint, as long as the needle doesn’t burst a vein, because then there’ll be an internal haemorrhage. If that doesn’t happen he won’t die, he can hold on for another two or three days.’ She aimed the red needle at the captain’s right side. ‘Where’s the money?’

‘I don’t have any money.’ The more the pain increased, the more alert he felt.

She inserted the whole of the needle and coughed, and the Breton held the captain tight as he gave a violent start.

‘Where’s the money?’

The pain was making him ever more lucid, and ever stronger in a way. ‘I don’t have any money,’ he said, looking at the repulsive monkey who was again fabricating a handle of soft bread around a third needle, and to die more quickly he threatened her: ‘If you don’t hurry up and get out of this house, it’ll be over for the two of you, my friends are looking for me, they could be here at any moment.’

It wasn’t a fantasy threat, Rome could well have alerted the other intelligence units and partisan squads to try and save him, and his friends might well come here looking for him.

They did in fact come, but not until the next day: he
was still naked, there in the armchair, in front of the extinguished fireplace, beside the little table on which there still lay the plates with the soft black market bread on it, a bit of German caviar, half a squeezed lemon, a bottle of kirsch still to be uncorked, a syringe stuck in a two-hectogram chunk of cow’s-milk cheese and, on another plate, a little bottle of alcohol with some cotton wool.

The squad found the captain still alive because Signorina Adele Terrini from Ca’ Tarino had told her friend to leave him like that, and not to kill him: that way he would suffer more.

The squad took him to a safe house where there was a doctor, the doctor took out the three knitting needles, praying that doing so would not cause a haemorrhage. It didn’t. He gave him morphine injections and drip-fed him glucose, thanks to which Captain Pani was able to remain alive until Epiphany and while the good children of all the liberated countries were receiving a few little gifts, he was dying, and, knowing he was dying, he mentally said goodbye to his wife Monica and his daughter Susanna.

But before dying he had been able to give a complete and lucid account of his friends Adele and Turiddu Sompani, and a journalist who was part of the unit took many photographs of him, both alive and dead, and of the knitting needles with the handles of soft bread and anything that might be of interest to history, because there is always someone who believes in history. The letters that Captain Pani had written to his wife did the rounds of all the OSS bureaux throughout Europe and in 1947 arrived in the bureau in Washington, and promptly went to sleep for more than a decade, before being examined, together with the other documents.

Reading those documents, Susanna Pani had fainted twice. The first time was when she read her father’s letters to her mother, but she had immediately recovered and a good long cry in her friend’s arms had given her back her energy. The second time she fainted was on seeing the photographs: the unknown Italian journalist who had taken them might not have been a great photographer, the images were far from perfect, but you could see quite well, even too well, the knitting needles stuck in the right side of that naked, dying man who was Susanna Pani’s father, or Captain Pani’s bandaged face as he lay on a bed in the safe house, only one eye free of the bandages, or the three knitting needles again, photographed lying on a plate, for the use of the historical archives.

The second time she fainted she was unconscious for longer and when she came to she had a fit of nausea that left her quivering and green-faced. She apologised to her friend from work and asked him through her tears what court had sentenced the two torturers, and her friend Charles showed her one of the last papers in the file, one she hadn’t yet read, and told her they hadn’t been sentenced by any court because, thanks to all that was happening at the end of the war, nobody had denounced these murderers in due time. As the matter concerned an American captain, history had followed the route of the American troops and by the time Washington had asked the Italian government to administer
justice, purges had gone out of fashion, the prisons had, in fact, already been emptied of those previously purged, and in the file there was a very polite answer from a department in the Italian Ministry of Justice saying that they were taking note of the denunciation and beginning legal proceedings. But nothing happened. That meant that the couple had not had any trial and therefore had not been sentenced.

And where were they now, she asked Charles, were they still alive? What were they doing? Charles showed her another piece of paper, dated July 1963, in which the war records department in Washington were informed that Adele Terrini and Jean Saintpouan, known as Turiddu Sompani, were still living in Milan – why would they have moved? – at 18 Via Borgospesso, where Jean Saintpouan still had his legal practice.

It did not take long, not even four days, but by the fourth day Susanna Pani had decided to avenge her father. She asked for her summer vacation in advance, withdrew her savings from the bank, and by the sixth day was in Milan, at the Palace Hotel, and was telephoning Attorney Sompani – his number was in the directory: every honest citizen can have a telephone, can’t he? – and telling him that she was the daughter of Captain Anthony Pani, and that a friend of her daddy’s, who had been in the war with her daddy, had told her about all the things he had done for her daddy, all the help he had given him, and how he had saved him in Bologna, and that she would be so pleased to meet him, Attorney Sompani, and Signora Adele Terrini, she had come to Italy on vacation, she was in Milan for the Fair, could she have the pleasure of meeting him and Signora Adele Terrini personally? They must have so many things to tell her about her daddy.

The Breton couldn’t have suspected a thing. If Anthony
Pani’s daughter was so keen to meet him, that must mean she knew nothing about the rotten part of his friendship with the captain, only about the good part. He greeted her tenderly, like an elderly uncle, embraced her, and Adele also embraced her. They had grown older and even more repulsive: Adele was nearly fifty-five years old, but drugs and other abuses don’t make women any younger, and the man was more than sixty but, apart from the wickedness of his mind, everything in him was fading away.

They took her to the Fair, where she showed an interest in the stalls serving typical Italian wines, as did they, and so she let them talk, and they were happy to talk because all the while Sompani was thinking how he could squeeze this orange that had come out of the blue all the way from America – it was important to have an American friend – and they took her several times to the cinema and to lunch or dinner at the Binaschina. Susanna Pani didn’t like the place, that decor that was a mixture of a stable and a luxury restaurant, in fact, she found it repulsive, but she told them she liked it a lot, only she didn’t say why: because she had seen the canal, the Alzaia Naviglio Pavese, and it got her thinking.