The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  12.00: the telephone again.

  ‘Dottore, it’s Enzo Fuscolo speaking.’

  Almost I put the receiver straight down.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘I want to see you. I have information. No, of course not, over the telephone. At two o’clock I shall be in the big bar at the Termini. I can’t get there any quicker …’

  Of course I assented. What else was there to do? It would give me an excuse to leave the apartment. Meanwhile I prowled round, looking at my long line of bookshelves with distaste. Even the wisest, most profound of the philosophers and novelists there couldn’t in any way help me at this moment. The scene Plato recounts in the Phaedo may have been grimmer for Socrates’ friends than for Socrates himself.

  I hoped they would use a gun; they usually did.

  And they would park the body somewhere dramatic.

  I turned on the wireless; its inanity was intolerable.

  The doorbell rang. It came to me, for no reason except hope, that it might be Bella.

  Instead it was a boy whose features and colouring I couldn’t at once make out as he stood in the shadow, and I was at first aware of slimness and curls framing his head like an aureole. He was leaning easily against the wall, and disengaged himself with a movement that was both languorous and graceful. For a moment I wondered if he was miraculously an emissary from Them – how else could I now think of them but as just that, personal and remote – and I fell back a step, and he came forward into the light. His teeth flashed in a confiding and warm smile. I saw my absurdity and also, from the likeness, who he was.

  ‘She’s a silly girl,’ he said, ‘she didn’t recognize your name, but when she showed me your card, I realized at once who you must be. I checked up to make sure of course. Mind if I come in?’

  He didn’t wait for an answer, but slid past me.

  ‘Nice place you’ve got, all these books,’ he said, perching on the arm of a chair. ‘Renata liked you. She went on talking about you at supper, which I gather you stood us, thanks. Then she showed us your card and of course I got excited. You can’t blame me for that now, can you? Of course she’s absolutely ignorant of public affairs – she hardly knows who your brother is. Toni, that’s her boy, was excited too, but I said “hands off”, he’s a bit of a bastard Toni, though he is a mate of mine.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ I said, ‘I understand.’

  ‘That’s a nice piece,’ he said, picking up the old silver cigarette-box and weighing it in his hand. ‘Worth a bit that. I do things in that line from time to time.’

  He smiled at me, a smile that was mischievous, radiant and frank and deceitful all at once. The likeness to Renata was astonishing, until he smiled. There was nothing of her innocence left in him, though he looked like an angel fallen from a cinquecento ceiling.

  ‘Matter of fact, it’s a coincidence, you living here. I’ve just been calling on a friend of mine, an American, who lives in a pensione just across your courtyard, but he’s out. Actually I wasn’t very pleased about that. He owes me some money, you understand. I’m fond of him, but I get touchy when people owe me money, and I was very much hoping he would pay me today, but he’s not there. So I thought I’d drop round and meet you.’

  He sat absolutely still, composed, sure of his youth and his beauty, in a soft cream-coloured sweatshirt with a broad green stripe and pale coloured jeans, and smiled at me again. ‘Do you like boys too?’

  I couldn’t see him as one of the proletariat who was learning to speak the language of the gun, and probably the earnest young men who were going to kill (were killing? had already killed?) Corrado would have found difficulty in so recognizing him either; and yet there could be no doubt, he was an authentic child of the gutter, using such gifts and weapons as he possessed to make his life: his beauty and his body. And was he perhaps for the moment happy? He looked happy. Not that I was ready to sentimentalize him. There could be no doubt that blackmail and extortion were in his mind, as they had been in that of the boy Toni he had so easily disparaged. And I suppose that such thinking revealed him as having some sense of morality at least.

  ‘Oh boys,’ I said, ‘not that way. No.’

  ‘Later maybe. Another day.’

  He leant back and crossed his arms and tensed his legs and then crossed them too, and smiled at me again, quite sure of himself; I couldn’t help smiling back.

  How easy it would have been to say yes. What, after all, is the difference between a boy and a girl when all you seek is the reassurance of life, the reinvigoration old age like mine cries out for? Indeed, that tortuous Jesuit inside me could make a better case for saying ‘yes, come with me’ to Mario than to Renata. There was less to spoil. If one is using another person for their body, giving nothing back in exchange except money, then it would perhaps be less wrong to exploit Mario, who was, I was so sure, without any innocence, who had indeed by Renata’s account been the agent of her corruption. And Renata, on the other hand, I could feel sentimental about; oh yes, oh yes.

  But do such questions of right and wrong ever in fact enter such relations?

  Mario said, ‘You know, it’s funny. I mean it’s funny the way life links people together. Because I’ve watched you from over there, from my friend’s room. He’s watched you too and been curious about you.’

  He knitted his brows, suddenly looking vulnerable.

  ‘He’s in a bad way, my friend,’ he said. ‘I think he would like to kill himself. You know, that’s something I don’t understand. He’s got money, you know. He drinks all the time, bourbon whiskey, and then he cries. He goes with boys and then drinks himself into stupidity because of it, and when he wakes up he is bad-tempered and often very sick. I don’t understand though I’m fond of him too, you see. Sometimes he gives a whole lot of money, and other times he tries to get out of paying, and wants to make-believe all sorts of things. He’s always laying little traps and tests for me. It’s very difficult, you understand.’

  I was not sorry to have him there, graceful and empty and alive. He had his own knowledge and wisdom too, acquired by something more than theory. He knew men at their most lonely, the inhabitants of mean rooms in cheap hotels, where the walls were dirty, the ceiling stained and the wise went drunk to bed rather than examine the sheets. He knew the cry of despair, the moaning that can sound through the cat’s hours of the night, the desperate clutching that tries to cheat emptiness, the self-contempt that lurks in the abashed morning eye. He might not understand the springs of motive, but at least he knew something of the twisted complications of our natures; knew it from experience. Of course he lied, cheated and stole, all with a smile, and the love he offered was merely counterfeit; and his roses would soon wither in a nipping autumn, but still, when I looked at him perched there, golden, confident and mocking Cupid, I could only see the beauty of a boy who believed in nothing but himself, and who would never kill for some high -sounding idea, for the best of reasons, for some noble abstraction. There was something to be said for a lack of interest in the Rights of Man.

  ‘Still, Renata’s a nice girl,’ he said. ‘You’d like to see her again? An arrangement of some kind maybe. And me? You said no, but perhaps another day?’

  He flashed a radiant smile that dimpled his cheeks.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘why not?’

  ‘I’m an old man, among other things.’

  ‘You’re not so old. Besides, I’m a … I’ve forgotten the word. Someone once told it me. A boy who likes old men.’

  ‘You could say a gerontophile; you’re too pretty for that.’

  ‘Oh yes, I’m pretty. That’s maybe why. Old men are gentler, they love me the way I love myself. The younger ones are angry and resentful. Understand?’

  ‘And your American friend? How does he love you?’

  ‘Poor Max, he has no light in him. You mustn’t think,’ he said, his lips pouting in seriousness, ‘that because I laugh and talk of things like this I am simply frivolous. I know what it must be like for you now, with you
r brother held as he is. I’ve suffered myself; my family … but there’s no point talking about that. These people, the terrorists who are holding him, what do they know about anything? Do you know – what they are like? They are just ignorant. I’ve thought about these matters myself, and I’m sure of my judgement. They don’t know anything except big words and ideas. But you’re helpless against them nevertheless…’

  In a little the telephone rang. Ed. Excited. Calling from a bar. He would be round soon as a taxi could bring him. Say ten minutes. Good. I made apologies to Mario, and took some money from the drawer of my desk…

  ‘Compensation,’ I said, ‘and you missed your American.’

  He took it with a smile but no thanks. I hadn’t expected them; it was Fortune had won him the money.

  ‘And I’ll come again. Yes?’

  ‘If you like…’

  ‘You need a friend. When they have killed your brother, you will need one more…’

  ‘I have other family.’

  ‘Oh yes, but family is different. You’ll see.’

  He darted forward, kissed me lightly on the cheek, like a faint sea-breath on a Capri afternoon, and left.

  At my age one might as well act absurdly as not; one fears nothing of the criticism of others; my own is quite sufficient. And there will be no responsibility, no obligation towards Mario, whereas his sister calls forth protective and quasi-paternal feelings, mingled with the lust. All the same I can see their entry to my life as another step in the process of dismantling my defences which this horror has set in motion; I am continually being forced to admit experience again.

  Ed was breezy, hugely excited, like a policeman, newly appointed to the Vice Squad, entering his first brothel.

  ‘We’re on to it. It’s going to break.’

  He threw himself into a chair, only to leap up again almost at once, as a girl followed him into the room …

  ‘You haven’t met,’ he said. ‘Ruthie, this is Ray Dusa; Ray, Ruthie Landeswitz. Ruthie’s a girl-friend of my kid daughter, Kim. They’ve come to Italy on holiday, but she’s sort of got hooked on your brother’s case. Fact is, Ray, she’s put me on to the scoop of a lifetime, only there are a few problems to clear up. But that’s number two.’

  All the time he was talking he was bounding around the room, as unable to keep still as a baboon in its zoo cage.

  ‘That’s number two,’ he said. ‘That’s right, Ruthie?’

  ‘I don’t figure out how you number things, Ed. I’d have put it first myself.’

  ‘Let me tell you how, let me tell you both. You wouldn’t have a Coke, Ray, would you?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t.’ My apologies however were so disregarded that I couldn’t but feel the request had been automatic, a sort of nervous reaction, hardly consciously expressed. If I had put a glass of anything in his hand, he would have drunk it without noticing that it wasn’t what he had demanded. As it was, he passed over its absence, without comment.

  ‘It’s Mastagni,’ he said. ‘I’ve just had an exclusive with one of his aides. The old boy’s going to turn up trumps. He’s going to demand negotiations, serious ones, and when I say “demand”, I mean just that. Nothing less. I tell you, Ray,’ he hammered his fist into his other palm as if the action could dissipate my scepticism, ‘there’s a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Party going on right now. This instant. The old boy’s going over the top. Right over …’

  The telephone rang. Elena.

  ‘You won’t believe it,’ she said – there were sobs in her voice, ‘His Holiness… it is incredible … His Holiness has told me he is about to announce a personal act of intercession on Corrado’s behalf. He will tell the terrorists that he is willing to offer himself in exchange. Can you imagine that, Raimundo? Can you conceive the magnanimity?’

  It was too much. They were both too much. Little Mario had more sense, being devoid of optimism, and suspicious.

  I said, unforgivably, to Elena, ‘And what makes you think they will accept?’

  Silence.

  ‘I’m sorry, my dear, but to them, let me tell you, this will be simply a Public Relations move, nothing more. Why should they accept? They can’t. Even they wouldn’t be able to kill His Holiness, so they would have thrown away their bargaining power. I quite understand that you are elated, I see that the offer is wonderfully noble, but don’t delude yourself. There is no prospect that they will agree. Ask Nico. You’ll find that he shares my opinion.’

  Silence.

  ‘Listen, Elena. They have taken Corrado for a political purpose. We don’t know exactly what that is, whether it is as they claim or not. That doesn’t matter. They may, even at this last moment, hope to achieve something in negotiations, to force the State to grant them recognition, make certain concrete concessions also. That is our only hope, that there is perhaps a faint, a very faint, chance that even now, when the clock’s hands stand at eleven fifty-nine, negotiations will be offered and will be successful. On the other hand it may well be that they have always, from the very start, intended to kill Corrado and that the offer of negotiations is no more than a piece of propaganda, which they are certain the State will decline … In that case … either way, they will have nothing to say to His Holiness’s offer, except no thank you.’

  When she spoke, which was after a silence long enough to make me wonder if she was still holding the telephone or if I had been speaking simply to vacancy, it was to say, in a voice that was cold and dead as a crypt, ‘Of course, Raimundo, you have no faith, you are a mocker. And I have wondered whether your mother is right, whether you have not always been jealous of Corrado, and now are not distressed by what may happen.’

  She put down the receiver before I could deny her even once.

  ‘Did you gather the gist of that?’ I asked Ed Mangan.

  ‘Sure I did. It’s great, but it’s not going to be necessary. Mastagni’s the boy’ll fix it.’

  ‘You saw this morning’s communiqué. He may be dead already. What of your Mastagni then?’

  ‘You don’t want to believe that. That communiqué was bluff. I tell you, I know. Foster always used to say Mastagni was the only man in the Mediterranean he could trust not to sell his grandmother to the Commies. Mastagni and Karamanlis …’

  I was back in the awful boredom of receptions, dinner-parties, Press Conferences, briefings in Washington, at the UN, at NATO Headquarters; the dreadful American insistence that the world was theirs, to be read their way. For a moment I felt a shiver of sympathy with Corrado’s captors who were denying that, and the forces of money and materialism, and exploitation, in the sacred name of democracy. Americans have never understood what Vietnam did to the world, how it made democracy a dirty word for the young. Though the young may still use it, they do so with a very different meaning from the one it had on the lips of John Foster Dulles or that soiled hero, John F. Kennedy.

  ‘It’s childish,’ I said, ‘to pretend that a man like Mastagni, corrupt to the core as a result of his half century and much more of egotism, can effect a miracle. Tell me instead, my dear Edward, of your scoop.’

  But he had crumpled. He couldn’t take scepticism; like all his generation who had come from the West to set old Europe and Asia to rights, he depended on admiration and love; an adolescent condition, that I couldn’t help again reflecting little Mario was superior to. So now Ed slumped in his chair, and said only, ‘I wish to hell you had some Coke.’

  The girl took it up. She said, ‘We’ve really got to talk to you, Dr Dusa.’ Her voice was low, quick, and breathy, with an odour of mentholated pastilles, ‘You see, I’ve met two of the kidnappers. I’m quite certain about it. Only there are all sorts of problems, personal ones you could say. You see it’s like this,’ and she began to tell me, circuitously and in unnecessary detail of a visit she and her friend Kim had paid to Kim’s cousin in the Abruzzi, and how he had had another friend there who had disappeared; she now knew that the second boy had been my nephew, Bernardo, and the ot
her was called Tomaso. ‘Look,’ she said, pulling a small book of photographs out from her canvas bag, ‘they didn’t know I was taking this, but that’s Bernardo, isn’t it, and this, you see, is Kim’s cousin, Tom.’

  She pushed the snap towards me.

  ‘Like I said, they didn’t know I was taking this. Or I’m sure they’d have stopped me. That is your nephew, isn’t it? I haven’t known what best to do, not since I began to be suspicious. So I went to Ed here …’

  I had recognized the other too, of course, and had known I would, had known ever since that policeman had shown me the photographs of Bernardo’s acquaintances, that the Caravaggio Christ was the one who mattered. He could have been watched if I had spoken then; he could have been tracked, the right connections made, and Corrado freed. I still didn’t believe it. My decision to do nothing then had been as wise as my distrust of police activity was total. Negotiations had been the only way in which my brother might have been freed, and the failure to embark on them, and consequently, the responsibility for his death, lay with his colleagues in the Christian Democrat Party; and especially with Gianni Schicchi. That was what my reason told me; to alarm the terrorists would have been to write Corrado’s death warrant.

  But now?

  I said, ‘Yes, it’s Bernardo and a friend. Does it prove anything?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it was a good bit after the kidnapping, and Bernardo was kind of hiding out there. Then he disappeared like. Right? And Kim’s cousin, Tomaso, he disappears for a couple of days at a time. It all fits. I know it does. I can’t be fooled any more.’

  ‘So that’s Ed’s scoop?’ I said. ‘It’s too late to save Corrado, but you’ll have to go to the police. You’ll have to, though you won’t get far, I’m certain of that.’