“That wasn’t very wise, was it?” I said.
He made no reply. He was taking long strides and I had difficulty in keeping up with him.
“And what proof had you that he was running arms? You can’t just accuse——”
He stopped suddenly. “For Christ sake, shut up,” he said. His eyes glared down at me. He was all tensed up. “If you’re prepared to deal with a dirty little Sicilian crook who is making a pile out of his country’s misfortunes, go ahead. But count me out.”
“Don’t be absurd, Stuart,” I said. “I wasn’t suggesting you deal with him. I was——”
“I know what you were suggesting,” he rapped out, and his teeth were clenched. He was fighting for control of himself. “You were suggesting that I should have been more polite, that I shouldn’t have hit him when he went for his gun. You people make me sick. You’d see the whole wretched business start all over again. You’d try to persuade yourself that all the crooks grafting their way to power are innocent until proved guilty. And in the end you’ll shrug your shoulders and say that war is inevitable as you watch another million British war graves planted on the Continent.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “All I am——”
“All right—I’m a fool. I should forget.” He gripped my shoulders and the edge of his nail bit through the cloth of my jacket. “But I can’t forget,” he said. “I can’t forget. Do you understand what that means? I can’t forget that I’ve seen boys who should have been taking girls out, shrieking hideously and holding their guts with their hands, that pieces of flesh have been spattered all over me, and that I’ve watched a company of brave men die one by one. And the bodies of the partigiani horribly mutilated up in the Chianti country. And I can’t forget that my wife and kid were burned to death. And it all started here in this country when a bunch of crooks got control and went berserk. God!” He turned abruptly and started walking again.
Back on the Trevedra, Stuart made tea. He was quite calm again as we sat in the wardroom drinking and smoking, and he told me what he had found out about Del Ricci. “As soon as I talked to Perroni I knew what Del Ricci’s proposition was going to be. Perroni knew what it was, too. I fancy he was going to get command of the ship if we’d sold. Then I talked to a man who was a director on the board of Del Ricci’s transport company. He spoke a little English, and reading between the lines I got an impression of the whole set-up. It’s based on monopoly, of course. Individuals and small private concerns who attempt to compete don’t do so well. One big concern had tried to muscle in, but a series of unfortunate fires had cramped their style and they’d had to sell out. He told me that with a dazzling smile which made it difficult to realise that it was to be taken as a threat. Del Ricci has a finger in all sorts of pies—produce, tobacco, furniture, coal—anything that needs transporting. He is also a director of the new Banco Nazionale di Riconstruzione. And, most significant of all, he is one of the interests behind the Massa del Popolo Party which was started about three months ago with its headquarters here in Naples.
“Well,” he concluded, “that’s Mr. Del Ricci for you. And he’s done all that in less than two years. Clearly a bloke to be reckoned with. I should have been more careful perhaps, but——” he shrugged his shoulders. “I got mad, that was all. If you like to take your share of the proceeds and get out I shan’t blame you.”
“No,” I said. “This is my life now. All I would suggest is that in future we talk things over before acting. I agree with your view of Del Ricci, but beating him up doesn’t get us anywhere.”
He nodded gloomily. “I should have shot him,” he said, and then he began to laugh.
CHAPTER SIX
THE TRAIL ENDS IN TUSCANY
AT THREE O’CLOCK the next day I met Pietro in the Galleria. He had traced the Gallianis up to a point. Their flat in the Via Santa Cecilia was no longer there. It had been in a big block just behind the Metropole on the sea front. The whole block had been destroyed in one of the big raids before the Salerno landing.
“But I find their cook,” Pietro said. “I speak her about them and she say they are in the ricovero and not kilt.” I told him to speak Italian. I was in no mood to have him try his English out on me.
They had apparently moved into rooms in the Vico Tiratoio, one of the squalid little streets on the north side of the Via Roma. Pietro had got the address and had seen the owner of the place just before meeting me. From his description of it, Galliani must have been in a pretty bad way financially. The entrance was up a dark staircase next to a trattoria that sold cheap vino from Ischia. On the first floor had been a tailor’s shop, the Galliani’s had had the second, the third floor had belonged to a journalist on Il Mattino and the top floor had been a bordello.
“The girl was with them?” I asked.
He nodded. “Si, signore, the girl was with them. They were there three months.”
“And then?”
“They could not pay so they went to the farm of his cousin which is at Itri.”
“What was the name of the cousin?” I asked.
“This is the address.” He handed me a slip of paper. On it was written, “Furigo Ciprio, Santa Brigida, Itri.”
From where I sat I looked down the finely-paved expanse of the Galleria across the traffic of the Via Roma to the narrow entrance of a street of tall, dirty buildings, that ran straight up the hill to the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. In one of those streets up there Mrs. Dupont’s daughter had lived for three months. It wasn’t difficult to picture the circumstances of this family as Pietro told me the gossip he had gleaned. Galliani had been a dapper little man, the manager of a small shipping firm. The business had died. A shop that he acquired as a side-line had been looted during the raid in which he had lost his flat. When he came to the Vico Tiratoio he had begun to drink. But he clung to Naples because he thought he could get a job. His wife took in washing and the girl, besides helping with this, did embroidery work. Three months of that and then they had given up and gone to his cousin’s farm.
I thanked Pietro for his help. “I’ll go up to the farm to-morrow,” I said. “Will you arrange for a car to pick me up at the docks at nine o’clock.” I paid him off then.
I wandered slowly down the Galleria with its café tables full of dark-haired girls and men in open-necked shirts and suits of fantastically brilliant colours. It was very hot and the Via Roma thrust itself upon me with a dull roar of traffic. I crossed the hot soft-tarred thoroughfare and forced my way through the crowds into the Via Buoncompagni.
The tall houses closed in on me—cool, quiet and squalid. The sound of traffic was dulled and its place taken by individual sounds of children’s voices and people calling to each other. The streets were cleaner than when I had last seen them. The squatters from the bombed-out areas of the docks were gone. There was no sign of garbage or outdoor cooking on improvised wood or charcoal fires. New shops were open and some of the houses had been repainted. I noticed these things automatically for my mind was engrossed in the picture of the life of a half-English, half-French girl in an Italian family who were in difficulties at the time when the Germans still occupied Naples.
I found the house without difficulty. It was No. 29, just on the corner where the Vico Tiratoio meets the Via Sergente Maggiore. It was just as Pietro had described it. There was the little trattoria. The sour smell of vino seeped out into the street. As I stood there the bead curtains parted and a seaman staggered out. He stood for a moment blinking in the sunlight and swaying slightly back on to his heels. He gazed round and then lurched into the doorway next to the trattoria. His boots sounded hesitantly as he climbed the dark, bare-boarded stairs that Monique must have used. Over the entranceway was a gaudily-painted image of the Virgin set in a weather-worn wooden frame with two tinsel-covered electric light bulbs and a posy of artificial white flowers. I took out the photograph of Monique that Pietro had returned to me. The innocence of the girl in that faded picture was appalling when considered agai
nst the background of her life. I was determined to find out what had happened to her.
I told Stuart this when I got back to the ship and he was quite agreeable. He said it would take him two more days to complete the purchase of our cargo. I arranged to take Boyd with me for company.
Itri is a little town beyond the Garigliano on the coast road from Naples to Rome. This road is Highway Seven, the route the American Fifth Army took. We came down to it by way of Caserta. Boyd wanted to see the palace, not because it was the second largest and quite the ugliest in Europe, but because he wanted to take “a decco at the Bras ’Ats’ Palis”—it had been the Headquarters of the Allied Armies in Italy all through the bitter fighting of the winter of 1943-44. The great square red-brick structure, with the railway line which had been built to pass within a hundred yards of the windows for the amusement of the Royal Family, looked useless. The gardens were still as unkempt as they had been when they were a park for Army trucks. Only the long artificial lake, where Field-Marshall Alexander had kept his own wizzer seaplanes, seemed pleasant, and that was violently unreal against the natural setting of the hills.
Beyond Capua we forked left, away from Highway Six, the road to Cassino. We had crossed the Volturno by a Bailey bridge that had been built by our own engineers to replace the blown Roman bridge. It was the same at the Gariglino. The temporary Bailey structure still spanned the road that crossed the river. “Sono bravi ingegneri, gli Inglesi,” was our driver’s comment. At Formia the buildings shattered by the naval bombardment had been cleared so that there was a good view of Gaeta across the blue of the bay. But the town was still bedraggled with the marks of war in the side streets. All sorts of temporary buildings had been erected on the shattered foundations of the original houses. And Itri, set on a hill beneath the sprawling bulk of the Monti Aurunci, was even worse. It was a little town of flies and dust and rubble pulsing lazily in the midday heat. At the post office they told us how to find the farm. “But Signor Furigo does not live there now,” they said. It was burned and he was killed. Of the Galliani’s they knew nothing.
“This is getting to be like a bleedin’ treasure hunt,” Boyd said as we got into the car again.
The farm was at the end of a dusty track. The wreck of a burned-out building stood among the olive trees and the ground shimmered in the sun’s heat trapped in the bowl of the hills. The remains of a barn had been made into a shack and nearby on a patch of brick-hard earth two women with kerchiefs tied around their heads were beating at a pile of wheat stalks. They were threshing in the old way. It was from them that I learned what had happened when the Germans were in Itri and the Fifth Army was across the river where the bridge had been blown.
It had been late in May. A German 88 mm. battery had established itself among the olive groves of Santa Brigida. They were tired and desperate. The Garigliano had been crossed by the Americans little more than a week ago and there were reports of rapid progress by the Eighth beyond Cassino. They had lost two guns and over thirty men. The Commandant ordered Furigo to hand over all livestock, wine and grain. He took over the farmhouse as his headquarters. The barn and outhouses were occupied by his men. Furigo and his wife with their two daughters, the Gallianis with the “French” girl and these two women who were born in Itri and had worked on the farm since their husbands had been killed in the desert, were forced to sleep in the open.
The Germans fired their 88’s steadily until the following afternoon in an attempt to stem the crossing of the fosse. The two women described the scene volubly with many gesticulations. Repeatedly they pointed to the ruined bulk of Itri, the thick fortress walls of which towered above the valley farm, cracked and broken.
It had been blasted by bombers and ground to rubble by the artillery. From the shelter of a stone wall they had watched their little town gradually disintegrate and wilt away in great spouting billows of dust and debris. Then the roar of the guns had slackened and the chatter of machine guns and thud of mortars had taken up the symphony of death. The German battery brought their guns out of action, hitched up and began to move off. But before they went two soldiers began to throw petrol on to the straw in the barn and on to the door posts of the outhouses, and even the farmhouse itself. They set fire to the barn first and then one by one the outhouses.
But when they went to the house Furigo, who had built it with his own hands, rushed up to them, pleading. Galliani was with him. The soldiers thrust him aside and went to the little wooden porch of the house, one carrying a tin of petrol and the other a torch made of petrol-soaked rag tied to the end of a stick.
As the soldier with the can splashed the petrol on to the wood of the porch Furigo seized his arm. He was crying, pleading, on his knees. The soldier brought his boot up sharply, catching the farmer on the chin. And as he fell back he tipped the rest of the petrol on to him. Without hesitation the other thrust the flaming brand against the wretched man’s clothing. Furigo rose with a terrible shriek—he was a sheet of flame. The women said that for a moment they saw him, running, lit up by the flames, his eyes wide, his mouth open, shrieking terribly. Then his flesh had blackened and suddenly he had seemed to shrivel and collapse.
At the same time a shot rang out. Galliani, who had been struggling to prevent the soldier from setting fire to the wretched man, staggered and fell with blood oozing from a throat wound. Furigo’s wife, who had followed her husband, watched him burn alive and then with a shriek turned on the Germans and attacked them with her bare hands. They shot her too—in the face. Then they threw her body and Galliani’s into the porch and set light to it.
“The smell of burned flesh was in the valley for days,” one of the women said. Her eyes were dilated. She was re-living the ghastly scene as she told it to us.
“And Signora Galliani and the girl?” I asked.
There had been no work, no food but what they could beg from the Americans passing through. The Signora knew of a man who owned a farm at Pericele up in the Abruzzi to the east of Rome. Early in July she and the girl had left Itri, walking north along the dusty road towards Rome.
I looked round the olive groves, so serene and quiet in the hot sun. It seemed incredible that these silvery-leaved trees had once been dumb witnesses to the horrible scene that these two women had described. I thanked them and gave them some money, and we went back down the track leaving a swirling cloud of dust rolling in our tyre tracks.
“Pericele?” Boyd asked as we reached the road.
I nodded.
The driver turned left and we went down the valley to Fondi and Terracina. Round the towering quarry-scarred headland we launched out on the arrow-straight road that runs through the Pontine Marshes to the Alban Hills and the Appian Way into Rome. We stopped once near Terracina to get the dust out of our throats with cocomero, the red country melon of Italy that is full of pips and water, and again at Genzano where we had good vino bianco in a little trattoria perched high above a small lake clutched in the bowl of what had once been a crater.
The map which we had brought with us showed Pericele to the east of Tivoli. “We’d better stay the night in Rome,” I suggested to Boyd.
The Eternal City seemed strange without the mass of khaki that had filled its wide pavements to overflowing when last I had seen it. We came into the city by way of the Colosseum and that monstrous wedding cake of a monument that dominates the Piazza Venezia. The Via del Tritone, once the Broadway of Rome with more GI pick-ups to its credit than Shaftesbury Avenue before D-Day, looked comparatively deserted. There were fewer bicycles and fewer tarts.
I went straight to the Hotel de la Ville where I had stayed a night when it was crowded with British and American war correspondents just after the Fifth Army had entered the city. The Fascist name, Albergo Citta, had been dropped.
After booking a room on the seventh floor with a terrace, I fixed Boyd and the Italian driver up at a Swiss pensione opposite. Back in my room I was suddenly conscious of a sense of loneliness. I went out on to the terrace
and looked across the mellow brickwork of the ancient city to the great crouching bulk of St. Peter’s dome beyond the Tiber. Back in the dim past of the war I had stood on one of these terraces and looked across to the Gianicolo, and I had the same feeling now as then—of a city that was outside the reality of life.
Rome is a city, founded on religion, that has degenerated to a point where its people pay lip-service only to its five hundred churches and to the great sprawling palaces of the Vatican, living a life of pleasure in which any sense of responsibility to the world at large is totally lacking. That was what the war correspondents had told me that first night in the hotel bar. Whilst the guns were thundering at Trasimene and there was starvation in the refugee-crowded back streets, Rome society had talked mostly of parties and how nice it had been the year before when they could go out in their cars to villas at Frascati and Tivoli and Ostia for the hot summer months.
A girl came out on to the terrace of the neighbouring room and shot me a quick glance beneath a mop of dark hair. She wore a white evening gown cut low to disclose the swell of full sun-tanned breasts. She leaned upon the balustrade and looked down on to the roof garden across the street where people were sitting at ease in the evening sun watching two children playing hide-and-seek with shrill voices in and out of the green shrubs.
A thick-set man with an almost bald head came out and joined her on the terrace. They held hands for a minute or two looking out across the warm bricks of the ancient city to that monstrosity of white marble in the Piazza Venezia that looks more like a monument to the fallen pretensions of fascism than a memorial to the dead of the first World War. Then they went back into their room.
That is Rome—old men, rich in corruption, and smart attractive women with no souls, offering their bodies in fee for security with side-kicks on the quiet for pleasure.
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