by Allan Massie
No conversation in the front of the car either; but then Kim didn’t need to talk. Though she often did, it wasn’t her way. She put her hand on Tomaso’s collar; he shifted uneasily.
‘It disturbs me,’ he said. ‘Please, I have to concentrate to drive.’
It was dark when they reached a town. The girls were quite lost; Bernardo too probably, for he kept rubbing the window and trying to read the signs. Neither he nor Tomaso spoke except to answer questions.
They got out of the car and went into a big caffè. Bernardo and the girls sat down while Tomaso made a telephone call. Then the waiter came to their table. They ordered beers. Bernardo kept drumming his fingers on the table. He fingered his moustache and ran his hand over his face which was sweating, even though the caffè was cool and cavernous.
‘It’s my head,’ he said, and put on a pair of dark glasses.
Tomaso found his fingers tingling. All his life he had been waiting for this sort of action. He recognized this now. Everything else had been simply inadequate. Now he felt good.
He could smile at the memory of Bernardo’s nervous reluctance. He hadn’t wanted to hear the news, to shift ground. Tomaso explained this to himself; Bernardo was essentially an intellectual, with the intellectual’s characteristic hesitation at the point of crisis.
‘Don’t you feel good now?’
Bernardo gave a small tight shake of his head.
‘Act natural.’
Bernardo brushed little beads of sweat away with a dirty brown handkerchief. Tomaso glanced about the bar. It wasn’t necessary. Nobody was interested in them and it wasn’t their responsibility to make contact. Besides, Kim was a distracting focus. In her tight-bottomed white jeans there was certainly no girl in town as sexily dressed, but at least she wasn’t flaunting nakedness. Something, if not much, was left to the imagination. But actually her presence was working to their advantage. It made Bernardo and him invisible.
Time passed. They all drank another bottle of beer and Ruthie had a sandwich. In a bar like this Tomaso knew that everything they were doing, every sacrifice they made, was necessary. These people around them, especially the young men, were deprived of any real life. They were, in the purest sense, victims.
Carlo was late. It might have been better just to have taken Bernardo to the railway station and put him on a train. Only – the Professor had been clear about this – he couldn’t now be trusted alone. He was, in every way, too dangerous.
Kim said, ‘Maybe we could go to a movie. Your friend’s not coming. Or is there any dancing?’
He had only been tempted to disobey the Professor once. He would have liked to tell Bernardo everything that he had spoken to his father about, arguing with him, letting him know of Bernardo’s involvement. It was just after he had dictated the letter to him. Corrado Dusa had opened one eye – it was the first day they’d let him have the bandage off, and he’d known of course what that release meant; Tomaso was almost sure he had known it – and when Tomaso spoke of Bernardo, all he’d said was, ‘Does that sign both our warrants?’
Tomaso had pretended not to understand, but it was that shaft of penetration made it impossible to tell Bernardo more of the meeting than he had already done.
Kim said, ‘That man over there in uniform. He keeps looking at us. Is he a policeman or what?’
‘I guess he just fancies you, honey. Most every man in the room does.’
Tomaso looked at the policeman. He saw a big, swarthy, blue-jowled man, wholly unremarkable, except perhaps as being a perfect realization of the type. The man got heavily to his feet and crossed the room to their table, kicking his legs out as he moved. He sat down without waiting for an invitation and picked up Tomaso’s beer-glass and swallowed the quarter-litre that remained in it.
‘Well, boys,’ he said, ‘nobody told me you had girls like this in tow.’
Tomaso shrugged. ‘They’re new. My American cousin.’
Kim said, ‘You’re a policeman, aren’t you?’
The big man nodded.
‘Wowee.’ She gave him a long under-the-lashes look.
His only response was a fat satisfied smile and then he began to talk rapidly to Tomaso in what Ruthie was sure was dialect.
‘Least I couldn’t make out a word of it,’ she said later.
After a little they all got to their feet, Kim and Ruthie not knowing at all what the next move was to be. It proved not in any way dramatic, no further than the restaurant next door, where the big policeman ordered for all of them.
‘If I order they know it’s got to be good,’ he said. He patted his huge belly. ‘Food and I are good friends.’
The restaurant was a dull, bleak sort of place with dark varnished wooden panels covering the walls and plain white table-cloths, not too clean. There was only one waiter, an old man, with the flat feet of his trade. He sighed when the policeman tried to be jocular and shook his head. They were the only customers in the place.
Ruthie again tried to engage Bernardo in the sort of political discussion they had had the previous night. But he was unable to respond and she soon desisted. The only conversation was a laboured flirtation between Kim and the policeman, whose approach would have seemed old-fashioned in her grandfather’s day. Ruthie sulked. It annoyed her to see Kim letting herself down like this.
Tomaso crumbled his bread and only took a few forkfuls of the maccheroni which was all the policeman had promised. He made an equally half-hearted attack on the lamb which followed.
‘Do they really kill lambs this young?’ said Kim. ‘I’ve never seen lamb like this before.’
‘Is a baby,’ said the policeman. ‘Very succulent. Like you.’
At last the meal was over. Tomaso leant across the table to the girls.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘we’ve a little business to do, part of what we came to town for. You girls would be best to wait for us here. We’ll order some coffee for you as we go out.’
His tone gave them little choice. Kim half-rose to her feet in protest, but the policeman’s heavy hand was on her shoulder.
‘No, no, please, I insist,’ he said. ‘We won’t be long and then we’ll go dancing.’
‘We will?’
‘I promise.’
The three went out into the street.
‘There’s something funny going on,’ said Ruthie. ‘I don’t know what it is, but it’s something weird. Don’t you sense it?’
‘No.’
‘Oh Kim, you’re hopeless, you’re so innocent.’
‘She’s pretty dumb, your cousin,’ said the policeman to Tomaso as they re-emerged in the street from the restaurant’s swing doors. ‘She’s lovely but she’s dumb.’
‘If she wasn’t so dumb she might be dangerous.’
‘Lucky for her then she’s so dumb.’ He put his hand on Bernardo’s shoulder and squeezed. ‘Hey, Professor,’ he said, ‘you’re pretty low. It’s only a little trip you’re taking, you know.’
Bernardo nodded. Tomaso thought, he thinks this is the definitive step, that’s what it is. Doesn’t he realize that we stepped into the cold night air weeks ago? We’re a long way on this side of the Rubicon.
They walked out of the piazza and through two or three twisting narrow streets of the old town and into a big avenue lined with chestnut trees behind which stood large and often clumsy concrete buildings, blocks of flats, shops and offices, all built in the 1950s, as evidence of the town’s development, all now looking shabby. Cars lined the street which had a dead sort of look. The policeman stopped at the corner just in front of a grocer’s shop and held his hand up. A big car parked in the shadow of the side street started its engine and drew up beside them. A young man’s curly head was poked out of the driver’s window.
‘This the boy?’ he said. ‘Into the back.’
For a moment Bernardo hesitated. Tomaso caught the light from the street-lamp shining greenly on his face, which was sweating. The policeman put his hand on Bernardo’s shoulder and pre
ssed hard. ‘Think of where you’re going,’ he said. ‘Count your luck, son.’ Tomaso held out his hand. ‘Good luck,’ he said. ‘We couldn’t have got this far without you. But it’s the next stage you’ve got to concentrate on now. I don’t know when we’ll meet again. Just remember, the work is more than the individual.’
‘Vlad,’ Bernardo managed to say, his voice breaking. He climbed into the back of the car, without help.
At once the car drove off, accelerating at the end of the avenue. They could hear it roar for some time in the evening stillness. Then they turned back to the town.
‘We say Bernardo met some old friends and decided to spend the night with them. Then tomorrow he telephones to say he’s going on a trip with them. That’ll do for the American bints.’
‘Yes,’ Tomaso said. ‘I suppose we have to make some explanation. Do we really have to go dancing?’
‘It’s the natural thing to do.’
‘I suppose you know best, Carlo. I wish we didn’t. I hate dancing.’
THREE
Christopher
‘I SHOULDN’T have, Christopher,’ she said, ‘not now. I can’t think how I came to …’
I rolled over on my back, thinking ‘Why do they go on like this?’, and reached out to the bedside table for a cigarette. My hand was still shaking; nausea tightened in my belly. I didn’t light the cigarette.
‘I’m going to take a shower,’ she said.
The room was warm with the heat of afternoon shading into evening. I could hear the traffic and the shouting, all the horns, from Campo dei Fiori just down the alley. And shuddered, needing a drink. I’d got up – making my journey off a rajah bat – and been on my way to the office of the news magazine where I work, and turned back, not feeling up to it, intending to spend the afternoon asleep. But I’d met Bella across in the Corso, and so … Now I just lay there, happily laid, but fragile. Spiritually, or whatever, I felt fine.
She called out from the shower. ‘Haven’t you got a decent towel?’
It had taken me all my time to get the shower fixed.
She came back wrapped in a towel that was certainly a bit lacking, and dirty as well, and sat beside me and lit two cigarettes, one from the other, and put one of them between my lips.
‘It was silly what I said. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t. I always have. In fact there’s more reason than ever to do it. If you look at it one way, Chris.’
Bella glows after sex. She just glows. I’ve never known anyone give off a glow like it. And yet she’s thoroughly bourgeois and groomed, and the sort of girl, if she’d been English, that you’d have found at Lady Margaret Hall. I put my hand on her thigh, just under the ragged fringe of the towel.
‘No,’ she said pushing it away, ‘I’ve no time for another shower, and if I’m late Daddy will go through the roof. He’s terrified of what might happen to me just now. You can’t blame him. We’re all under siege …’
I pushed my hand back and let it rest moving ever so gently on the warm moist flesh. ‘Helpme break through the defences then,’ I said. ‘Fix me an interview with your cousins. The one, Nico, especially.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. It was unlike her to be indefinite, I’d never found her indefinite.
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Buildme up. Remind them of the piece I did on the van Meer case.’
‘Van Meer,’ she said, ‘I don’t remember …’
‘The Dutch industrialist they held in Genoa. I did a long investigation piece on him for Domani Politica. I’m an expert on terrorism.’
‘But you’re of the Left, Chris. They won’t like that. They’ll distrust it.’
‘OK but I know, I can help, I can advise. Give me a build-up.’ I didn’t say I needed to write a big piece.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said. ‘Stay in circulation though.’
‘OK I will. You fix it.’
I listened to her steps going down the stair, precise and rapid, you’d never think it was all worn and pitted to hear her heels rattle down …
I’m not clear which of us picked the other up. Mutual enough I suppose. I didn’t lay her. She didn’t lay me. We laid each other. Perfect. That was three months ago, maybe four. She’s an unusual girl, considering her class anyway. Convenient too.
I didn’t know then she was Corrado Dusa’s niece.
Where to begin? (A problem as true in relationships as in writing a piece.)
I missed the commencement of the Dusa case, being drunk at the time. (I missed the Cuba crisis, years back, for the same reason, emerging from a blacked-out few days to discover that the world had risked arriving in the same condition. I felt a bit cheated for a while.)
Just the same with Dusa. I got the first glimmering of it in a bar up Parioli. Something I overheard. It was that began to pull me round. The customary processes of recovery took their usual course and I only really surfaced to functioning level the day Dusa’s first letter hit the Press. It got me down to the office fast.
Everyone there had their own theory. The strength of my position, apart from the fact that I hadn’t been mulling it over for the past ten days or so, was my possession of an inside line in Bella. Only I kept quiet about that. I could have offered a sob-story piece to the glossy that is our news mag’s stable companion – you know, Sunday Times stuff. But that’s not my style (though I’ve done it of course, being a pro) or interest. Anyway it seemed best to keep quiet about Bella.
There was a change in the mood of the city. I’d sensed it walking across from Campo dei Fiori. It wasn’t only the Police and Army evident all over the shop. It was the sensation of the corrida. Only who was the bull? Dusa? But he was absent. Perhaps the Republic?
I sat on the corner of the desk where my friend Antonio was sitting idle and said, ‘It’s going to dish us this, isn’t it? Objectively, it must be aimed at the Party.’
‘Christopher,’ he said, ‘I would like to believe it is the Americans, the CIA. I really would like to believe that because then we could say, yes it is nothing but the usual stupidity, but I’m afraid that it is not, that it is really what it proclaims itself to be, and that being so, I am totally lost. I find such reality wholly obscure, because the motives are malign and irrational.’
Antonio is an honest man. His father was a trade union leader imprisoned by the Fascists. Neither of them – I met his father several times, he died last year – could be called a victim of illusion. Experience inoculated them against the Millennium. Yet both believed rootedly, in a way I would like to believe, in the decency of man and the nobility of human aspirations, and you could use such phrases of them themselves without a sneer. (It’s the fact that phrases like this are still, despite everything, possible here in Italy, that has kept me living and working in the country. Despite everything, and by any calculations everything must include a hell of a lot, the possibility that such phrases have some meaning is alive here, and that is constantly amazing to a product of the English Public School system, and an Oxford that was focused on being either nostalgic or snide; or frequently both.)
‘The letter is genuine enough though,’ I said. ‘It must be, yes?’
‘Oh, genuine?’ said Antonio. ‘What is genuine?’
‘I’ve missed things,’ I said. ‘I’m picking them up late. What’s the Party’s line?’
‘Solidarity with the Government, condemnation of the outrage. Obvious and inevitable.’
‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I mean, on the letter?’
‘I don’t think they’ve formulated one, but they can hardly dissent from the Government’s view that it doesn’t change the situation, they can’t depart from support for the Government’s refusal to negotiate. They daren’t show themselves weaker than Schicchi.’
‘And Schicchi?’
‘Believes, naturally, that it is expedient that one good man die for the sake of democracy, Christian Democracy of course.’
‘And is only relieved he’s not the good man?’
�
�Precisely.’
‘Not that he was ever in danger of being taken for that?’
‘He may not be so sure on that point. We all have illusions about ourselves.’
‘And where do you think he is? Dusa, I mean.’
‘My dear friend, he is in Rome. There can be no doubt of it. And somewhere in the centre too. They will not have moved him far.’
‘I’ve heard talk of an embassy. An Arab one possibly.’
‘Perhaps, but it is unnecessary. Do you know what is the strange thing about this case? How open it is.’
‘Open?’
‘Yes,’ Antonio lit the pipe he bought when on holiday in England last summer. ‘Yes, there are so many people I find who seem to know a bit about it. And of course it is opaque also. So many people know only a little, and some of them fail perhaps to realize their knowledge.’
That is the sort of formulation Antonio loves. Open and opaque at the same time. You could answer ‘Oh yeah’, or you could take a closer look at it and end up agreeing.
‘You know about the Dusa boy?’ he said. ‘Bernardo, one of the sons. He’s said to have disappeared. Naturally that gives rise to speculation.’
‘I’ve come across him,’ I said. ‘He’s a would-be revolutionary. I shouldn’t have thought he had the guts.’
‘Well, he’s disappeared. They’re keeping it quiet. It would be parricide. Nothing would demonstrate the moral bankruptcy of the system more clearly. You want to dig into the case, don’t you? You know that anything written here will have to be orthodox?’
‘That’s all right,’ I said, ‘basically, I am orthodox. You know that, Antonio. But if I come up with something that doesn’t fit, there’s other magazines I can sell a piece to, other names I can use …’
‘Oh yes, and if you can get something on Bernardo … that would be a coup. I forgot, there was a call for you. Ed Mangan.’
