“It’s going to be tough. He’s very popular,” said Michael cautiously.
Mustache sighed impatiently, as if Michael were a tiresome child. Just in case their man didn’t win, he said, and things degenerated on a national level, an arms cache would be delivered soon.
“Guns?” He was glad Robertino hadn’t given him the list. What would they do to the people on it? Jail them? Kill them? Poor old Banchi.
The man was still talking, saying something about Operation Gladio. Michael must generate a “friends list” of those who could be counted on to take power by force if the Communists took over the government. He would be in charge of arming them.
“You must connect with a network of those friendly to our cause. Create a stay-behind net.”
War. Michael felt slightly faint. The safe house must have been a mill at some point. Suddenly rushing water was all that Michael could hear, the voices diminishing beneath the roar.
“It could come any day.”
“What?” Frogs were bellowing somewhere, and a flurry of moths circled the lightbulb. His heart was racing erratically.
“The coup. The Soviets have tanks in Yugoslavia. They could be here in a day. We have to be ready to fight at the ground level.” Mustache was growing more impatient with him, and swatted angrily at a mosquito. The other guy, large and muscled, had no expression.
“It’s a matter of loyalties,” said Mustache.
Mussolini drained the saltwater swamps and eradicated malaria in Italy, Michael remembered. But now the disease was back again. Couldn’t America just help with that? Send some DDT, build some highways, buy a ton of olive oil and shoes, and stop pushing Coca-Cola down their throats? Trust that true friendship would win them over?
Mustache told him what he had to do in the wake of Manganelli’s death, what would ensure a Catholic victory in the next election.
Blame the left.
A whisper campaign. These were the “Dark Arts” from his training at the Farm. He was to start the rumor that Manganelli’s accident was no accident. That he had been taken down by a bitter left angry at the results of last month’s elections. That the left—headed by Ugo Rosini—intended instability, fear, the end of democracy. Everything, in other words, that was the opposite of Wonder Bread, and I Love Lucy, and Perry Como. He was, in short, to create in others the fear and anxiety he already felt. He was to foment a right-wing revolution.
He thought of that green-lawned boarding school where he would, right now, be teaching wide-eyed adolescents about long-dead artists like Duccio di Buoninsegna and Simone Martini. Instead he had chosen this. The reasons why were suddenly rather obscure to him. To impress Duncan? To prove to the people who made it illegal to be gay that they were wrong? That he was just as good an American as anyone? He had come to Italy to promote American ideals. And, yes, okay, to sway an election by bribery. But it was all in the service of good. Now he had to arrange a pro-American resistance movement? Maintain an arms cache? Run a psy-ops campaign single-handed? Start a war?
If he didn’t, they made it clear, Michael would be transferred not to Rome or Paris, but to some distant snake-infested jungle nation or the front lines of a South American civil war.
3.
She watched the prova through binoculars, but it was not Robertino who had led the bay mare Ondina into the piazza the evening they brought Ecco home, or the next morning. She was trying not to think about Robertino’s disappearance, telling herself he would turn up, that it had nothing to do with her, that he was fine. She took the dog out for a walk and passed Gina’s corner, but there was no one there. Perhaps the police had swept the street of prostitutes before the tourists arrived for the Palio. She bought a nice new collar and leash for the dog, and bathed him. Michael had come in late, tossed and turned all night, and then this morning packed and left for Rome again.
They were both exhausted and preoccupied, she thought. She couldn’t share with him, and it was useless to ask what was bothering him. Other than his outburst at the farm about Communists, he never talked about what was upsetting him. Tractors must not be selling well, but because of male pride he couldn’t talk about it. She tried to think of something she could do for him. She had discovered a book on dating and marriage on his shelf, which she found charming. If he was studying, she could, too. Make your husband’s life better every day! That was how a good wife thought. What can I iron? What can I cook? How can I make our home more comfortable? Why couldn’t she be more like that? Despite Michael’s reassurances, she was a terrible wife, and who knew what kind of a mother she would make.
Her mood slid downhill like an avalanche. Thanks to her stupidity, she couldn’t call Carlo, couldn’t tell him that Robertino had disappeared or ask what he thought. She wandered around the tumultuous, noisy city with the dog, tossed on a turbulent sea of emotions. She stopped again at the place where Gina usually stood, but she wasn’t there.
She dared to go across the street into the ferramenta—hardware store—and ask the thin man at the counter if he had seen Gina lately. He frowned, and she said quickly, “In America we try to find these women other forms of employment—I thought I might help her.” Her lie did not erase his frown, but he said, “She has moved her business elsewhere.” So her suspicions about a pre-Palio sweep were correct. Scottie waited as he served a man who came in to buy one three-centimeter nail, and another who wanted his scythe sharpened. Finally the hardware store owner, clearly eager to get her out of his store, told her that when the police harassed Gina in Siena, she often moved to a pullout on the road from Siena to Grosseto. He described the place not far from there where she took her clients. Scottie was careful not to ask how he had come by this information.
“Better than threatening her, I suggest you tell your husband to stay away from her,” he said. “She’s trouble.”
4.
Michael sat on the train to Rome, trying to keep his hands from shaking as he pretended to be just another man in a hat reading a newspaper. The smoke-filled car was choking him, but the windows wouldn’t open. He had slept badly. The safe house adventure had angered and terrified him. And where was the damn kid?
This was a disaster.
He popped another Benzedrine and tried to focus on the newspaper as the train clicked along.
Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe elope, U.S. revokes his passport.
Red Cross will distribute food in Poland if it carries a label that says “Gift of the American people.”
At the Excelsior: James Stewart in “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”
He had sent a telegram last night after the CIA thugs had dropped him off, asking to meet his CIA contact in person. This sort of sticky situation could not be handled remotely. He needed face-to-face contact, whether it was protocol or not. He had received a message to meet his handler today at the bottom of the Spanish Steps. Someone would ask him if he could recommend a restaurant with a view of the Tiber. That was the code.
He made his way from the train station on foot, passing Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri. People were streaming in and out, women with their heads covered, all of whom reminded him of his mother. He went to mass regularly, but didn’t get comfort from faith the way she did. He felt trapped by sin and guilt. It had begun when he was a child, with the idea that as soon as you received communion and were pure again, the sins began accumulating immediately. He had tried to talk to a priest once about it, but the man’s brows had knitted into one glaring pelt and he had said that Michael was not trying hard enough to be good. “God loathes weakness,” he said.
Michael checked his watch and trotted through Piazza Barberini and down Via Sistina toward the Spanish Steps. It was a sunny afternoon, and the piazza was crowded with tourists snapping photos with their Kodaks and Leicas. Michael was facing the Via Condotti when he heard a voice behind him. “Excuse me, I don’t suppose you could recommend a restaurant with a really excellent view of the Tiber?”
It was Duncan.
* * *
“Wars are waged on many levels,” Duncan said. “Isn’t this better than tanks and bombs?”
They stood in the Borghese Gardens. All around them children were playing, dogs frolicking and people eating gelato. A little girl in a blue dress passed them carrying a red balloon. She smelled like poop. Michael had a sense that none of it was real, that Duncan had hired these people to play these roles, like extras in a film.
“You’re not just a USIS librarian,” Michael said. He had thought he was impressing Duncan by being a big man in the CIA, a veritable James Bond, when in reality Duncan was his superior. Always his superior.
“Could have knocked me over with a feather when you signed up with the Agency. I was delighted, of course.”
“You lied to me. Now I don’t know who to trust.”
“No one, of course.”
He had planned to ask for his superior’s help in extricating himself from the CIA. He needed to confess how he had recruited a fourteen-year-old, how the kid had gone to get the Communist membership rolls, how he had disappeared. How he might have been involved in the disappearance of a prostitute. How Michael was now in way over his head and wanted out before the Italians unmasked him.
“Are you really the Agency’s top man in Rome?” Michael asked.
“Let’s say I have more of an oversight role.”
Duncan must have sent the two men who had grabbed Michael at the Fortezza. What kind of power did Duncan have in the Agency? Michael had heard rumors in training that counterintelligence chief James Angleton often put in place individual, hand-picked agents, who reported only to him, to shadow the CIA’s own agents. Moles to ferret out moles. Whatever Duncan was up to certainly seemed to go beyond clandestine officer, or even station chief. There was something he wasn’t telling him, a connection he had (Someone from Yale? His family? Some sailing school buddy from summers on Nantucket?) that would probably boggle Michael’s mind.
It was like back at Yale, when Duncan hadn’t told him he had joined a secret society. Duncan was always drawn to the elite of the elite, the more secret the better.
“I don’t want to arm a militia,” Michael said.
Duncan slapped his back and whispered, “We can’t stop now. You’ve exceeded our expectations. You have a man inside the Communist Party!” It was the kind of approval Michael had longed for, but now it made him nervous.
“I don’t understand what we’re really doing here,” he said.
“You’re living in the Red center of the entire country,” said Duncan in the tones one would use to explain the mechanics of a seesaw to a child. “It just makes sense to have a resistance movement in place should the Communists seize power or the Soviets invade.”
Michael stared at a plane passing overhead.
“Eisenhower’s not entirely happy about counterintelligence, either,” Duncan admitted. “David K. E. Bruce just sent in his report on Operation Mockingbird. I managed to take a peek.” He giggled like a naughty schoolboy, then rattled on, while for Michael all the ramifications of the truth spread out like a stain. He had not kept secrets from Duncan, but Duncan had kept them from him. What he had taken for love was a power game.
He would not give in, not show weakness. “When you say things like that, ‘managed to take a peek,’ what do you mean, exactly? Did you steal a copy? Did you use your invisible ink decoder? Did you pretend to be dusting someone’s office and read it while wearing a French maid’s outfit?”
“Why are you in such a mood?”
“Because you act like this is all a game. We’re planning a coup in case of a democratically elected Communist government.”
Duncan gave a superior smile. “Want to know a secret? We’ve already done it in Iran.” To Michael’s shock, Duncan told him how the CIA had spread anti-Mossadegh propaganda, including outright lies about Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, and had toppled that regime in 1953 so that the pro-American shah could be installed. “And then we did it again in Guatemala. Really, the same tactic could work anywhere,” Duncan said gleefully.
“Does Eisenhower know about this?”
Duncan shrugged. “We tell him what he needs to know.”
“But … that just seems so wrong,” Michael said. “We say we want democracies and then we overthrow them?”
“Look, they think they’re voting for a better way of life, but we know they’re safer if they stay tied to the U.S. The way I see it, the ends justify the means. Would you rather have World War III?”
“By saying that, you could justify almost anything.”
Duncan was quiet as they passed a bench of nuns eating ice cream cones.
“It’s not like the Soviets aren’t doing the same thing,” he said at last. “We’re just keeping up. Can’t back down now. Can’t blink. Let’s go visit Pauline.”
The statue of Pauline Borghese in the Borghese Gallery was Michael’s favorite. Life-size in snow-white marble, she lay on one hip, topless, a drapery discreetly covering her from the waist down. As tourists milled around them in the still summer air, Michael stared at Pauline, taking in her bold but emotionless stare, the casual way she hefted an apple in her hand, as if she might throw it at a servant who was slow with her coffee. She had been so poor as a child she’d been forced to work as a laundress, but eventually her brother, Napoleon, had married her off to a general, and she had traveled to Haiti, where her husband suppressed a slave rebellion. There both of them came down with yellow fever, which killed him but didn’t stop her from sleeping with anything that breathed. She returned to Europe and married a member of the noble Borghese family and continued her wild and wanton ways until her death at forty-four. She was, Michael thought, utterly disloyal, amoral and without any merit beyond beauty.
A man in a pinstriped suit and derby hat walked past, a furled umbrella in his gloved hand. He nodded at them as he moved on to Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne.
“Who’s that?” Michael asked.
“Lord Sebastian Gordon. Nothing to worry about. Works in fashion. Friend of Clare’s from her days at Vogue.”
Michael sighed. He thought about Scottie, about the baby that was coming. About the normal side of his life. Maybe he was taking everything too seriously. In the grand scheme of things, he was working for the good guys. Michael popped a Benzedrine and pointed to Pauline’s toes. “Her feet are almost as beautiful as mine.”
It was a joke between them, Michael’s absurd vanity about his feet, his pride in the prominent bones and long toes. Duncan was smiling. He was so handsome, eyes you could swim in. The worst part was that even though Duncan had lied to him, Michael still longed to make him proud, to earn the love of this wonderful creature who had singled him out for notice in this huge, cruel world.
“Let’s go get a drink,” Duncan said. “There’s a new bar across the street from the embassy.”
“What if we run into someone? Aren’t CIA men never supposed to be seen together?”
“You take the rules too seriously. The whole staff of the Rome Daily American will be there, half of whom are CIA. Here.” Duncan passed him the briefcase he had been carrying all day. Michael had wondered what was in it.
“Fifty thousand dollars. That was all I could get for now, but don’t worry, there’s more where that came from.”
“What the hell—what’s this for?” He stared at the plain brown leather case with ridiculously flimsy gold combination locks on top.
“For whatever you need. To organize your stay-behind militia. To buy the articles in the local papers about how great Manganelli’s temporary replacement is and why he should be—what’s his name?”
“Vestri. He’s a corrupt weasel.”
“Yes, well, we didn’t all like Ike, either. If you have a discreet way to funnel the cash directly to the campaign, that’s best, but we can’t be seen buying elections.”
“Of course not,” said Michael. “That would be wrong. And illegal.”
“We usually work through
journalists. Get them to say something about his plans for the city, how he’s going to make everyone rich. And to say something negative about the other guy.”
“Ugo Rosini. Like he ran over Manganelli?”
“Good idea. You can use your man inside the Party to help discredit him from within. Nothing overt, just watercooler rumors. What kind of a civil servant is your man?”
He thought of Robertino dancing on top of the ox. “He’s in the agriculture department. Livestock inspector.” It was giving him pleasure to lie to Duncan, he realized with dismay.
“Perfect. He can gossip with the cattlemen at the stockyards.”
Michael did not know if there were cattlemen or stockyards in Siena, but he nodded.
“You know journalists, right?”
Michael did not want to admit that though he had met a lot of people, he didn’t really know anyone, except his own wife and a fourteen-year-old “livestock inspector” who’d disappeared.
“Yes,” he lied, the Benzedrine giving him courage. “I’m in the process of flipping a journalist named Rodolfo Marchetti.” In truth he had never met the man. “Been very Red, but he’s ripe for a change, I think.”
“Use this to reward him for positive articles. It’s just like they taught you in training. Be positive, discreet and friendly, never insulting. It’s a gift for a job well done, not a bribe. And have someone write something nice about Clare, would you?” Duncan added, slowing as they turned on the Via Veneto, pulling his straw hat down slightly and putting on what Michael thought of as his public face. Affable, but closed.
“The ambassador?”
“She’s feeling very down lately. Turns out it’s arsenic poisoning.”
“She was poisoned?” Michael was alarmed.
“We thought it was the KGB, but it seems it’s from paint flaking off her bedroom ceiling falling on her while she slept. Her gums are bleeding, teeth falling out. She’s a mess. But she’s determined to make it through the embassy Fourth of July party. She will hand a hot dog to every person in line, or die trying. Then the poor lamb will go to her newly painted lead-free room and collapse.”
The Italian Party Page 14
