The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  I was amazed by my passivity. Did I no longer want Corrado to be saved? Was my mother right? Had I reached the point when I was at one with the terrorists, objectively on their side, hoping that they would now get away with it? Certainly I could feel little animus towards them compared to the intensity with which I regarded Gianni Schicchi and the rest of the gang. It seemed to me that the terrorists were acting with a radiant honesty, whereas Gianni … I looked at my watch – a quarter to two. ‘I have an appointment,’ I said.

  They accompanied me down to the street, Ed Mangan still swearing that I was wrong, that he knew, he just knew, Mastagni was going to fix it – we’d have the results of the Party meeting late that night, and then we’d see.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘Ruthie’ll hold off going to the cops. We can’t risk jeopardizing Mastagni’s initiative by starting off police activity of that sort. When your brother’s free…’

  ‘Ah yes,’ I said, and took a taxi to the station to keep my appointment with Enzo Fuscolo, an appointment that promised to be as meaningless as the conversation I had just had.

  Why does one involve oneself in action, save to kill time?

  SEVEN

  Christopher

  IT OUGHT to be more of a puzzle to me how I muck things up time and abloodygain. Thank God, as I’ve said before, for the Italian Labour Laws, which offer journalists like me an absolute security of tenure. Otherwise, even in a profession like mine, I’d have collected a heap of trouble. As it is, despite calamitous lurches from waggon to gutter, I survive.

  Not bad, that, actually, to survive these days.

  More than Dusa managed.

  For all his cleverness, and he was as astute a bugger as you could ever hope to come across, they did for him.

  And they did it with a perfection of timing that you can only call masterly.

  I spent a lot of time reconstructing this scenario that follows, piecing the jigsaw. Some of it is straight personal reportage; the rest imaginative, but hardly anywhere inventive, reconstruction.

  On June 10 there was great activity on numerous levels.

  Level one – I place them in descending order, starting therefore with the Pope.

  Level one, therefore. In the course of an audience with the soon-to-be widow Dusa, His Holiness attempted to avert the catastrophe with a gesture of the utmost sublimity. He offered the terrorists his own Holy Person in exchange for the faithful son of the Church, Corrado Dusa. It was an offer that naturally grabbed a few headlines, but probably didn’t keep the PDP High Command occupied long. I doubt actually if it even raised a giggle from them. What the hell, after all, could they want with the Pope? They couldn’t, as good Italian boys, sons of devout mothers, credibly threaten to shoot him.

  Could they?

  Action on that level therefore fizzled out fast.

  Level two – but after the Pope I find my scheme breaks down. Who is to determine the respective levels of the boys who were holding Dusa, the DC, and myself?

  Take a look at the DC first.

  Mastagni had finally stirred. He was prepared to go a little further. There had been no satisfactory response to his Venice speech, which had of course been as clear as a Thames Valley November afternoon. Nobody had offered him a job of any kind. So he had to push the door a bit harder. He allowed it to be understood – not, you understand, by the plebs, it was hardly time for that yet – but by the people who matter, that he might feel the urgent exigency to push things further, and perhaps come right out into the open and say that grounds for negotiation might be discovered.

  The delicate hint was sufficient.

  He was invited to a Party conclave to discuss his unmentionable suggestion. Of course that wasn’t what they discussed at all. Instead they talked about just what he would have to be granted if he was to be persuaded not to make this foul proposal.

  These things take time, and this for the most obvious and highly respectable reasons.

  All the jobs were already taken. There was nothing free for the old boy. (They couldn’t of course just offer him Dusa’s, since they had still to pretend that efficient police work would any day now result in his liberation and consequent return to the post he held with such distinction, blah, blah, blah.) It was a question therefore of someone being ready to vacate his own seat, or rather being persuaded that someone else, his dear and good friend, the Honourable Y for instance, should be sacrificed. Now of course that might not be too difficult, everyone in the Power Game having his pet X, Y, or Z whom he was reluctantly prepared to place with reverence on the sacrificial altar; but things are never quite so simple. Two obstacles presented themselves.

  In the first place, for A to sacrifice X was to risk weakening his own position vis-à-vis B; and so on.

  Secondly, how could it be fixed that the demoted X or Y should not himself come out into the open and advocate negotiations, or, as it was already being put, play the Mastagni card.

  Predictably, bargaining was tough. (Fortunately the DC is as leaky as my shoe.) These boys are limpets though. Still, by ten o’clock in the evening of June 10 they believed that a satisfactory agreement had been reached.

  K would vacate his place, move three steps sideways to take over from M, who had nobly agreed to accept demotion, provided he was simultaneously granted the land concession he had been seeking for his wife’s cousin. He would therefore supplant S, who would move sideways to dislodge V, who would then move one step down and replace Y. (Y was very young, and there was little fear that he would throw a tantrum; instead he would accept his new position philosophically, in the assurance that his noble self-sacrifice would gain him credit for devotion to Party and the Public Service, credit which would stand him in good stead in the years of office to come.) Anyway, Y would be compensated with an embassy. It didn’t matter what the supplanted ambassador felt; he was too distant from power for his views to be of the least importance, and, besides, it was remembered that Corrado had been his patron. He was the only one of Corrado’s protégés to suffer in this reshuffle; it was necessary for the moment to bind the others to the Party; they could, if desired, be disposed of later.

  So that was settled; and then Mastagni, feeling power surge back into his geriatric veins, said it wasn’t good enough. If K’s job was the best they could offer he would have to go ahead with the public proposal of negotiations.

  All to start again.

  Such is the devotion to duty of our public men that they were ready to embark on new discussions straight away. But Gianni Schicchi consulted his watch and announced that it was late, they weren’t likely to think straight at that hour of the night, and proposed that they resume in the morning.

  That was a card Mastagni didn’t dare to trump, but he began to wonder whether he had over-called his own hand. He had forgotten the time element in the excitement of returning power. Gianni Schicchi hadn’t. Gianni alone, it seems, had taken note of the last communiqué from the PDP, or rather hadn’t allowed it to be driven from his mind by the excitements of real politics, and Gianni reckoned that it was just possible the terrorists would indeed have acted on their word. If they had… well then it was pointless to make elaborate concessions to an old incompetent like Mastagni …

  You may think this is all ironical, jaundiced stuff. Of course it’s true I don’t actually know what was going on in Gianni Schicchi’s mind any more than I know the precise contents of a sewer, but in both cases, my guesses are what they call informed… It’s certain that at around ten o’clock the word was that Mastagni wasn’t satisfied with the goods on offer, and that a new round of customary discussion was being embarked on. The waiting journalists (Antonio among them) sent out to the bars for salami sandwiches and beer, and then, just as these arrived, the doors were flung open, and the chiefs were being escorted to their cars. The journalists flocked after them, and three waiters were left stranded, with trays outstretched …

  As for me, at about that hour, I was getting up from a bed into which I had col
lapsed sometime in the afternoon. The other occupant, a black American actress of little talent, had been urging the move for some time.

  How had I got there, and in that state, in the middle of the most exciting journalistic crisis of my time?

  Two reasons: first, it had got on my nerves. I had decided that it was a bore; like Hamlet, it had all been going on too long.

  Second – level three as it were – I was suffering from emotional irritation too. The previous afternoon, as we saw her dismal old uncle (an unreconstructed sod if ever I saw one) off from the restaurant, Bella had turned to me and said, ‘That’s it, Chris. I have been thinking and I have decided. It’s finished.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said, though of course I knew very well.

  ‘It’s over, understand?’

  ‘No,’ I said; obstinate.

  I stopped the car and looked over at her. Funny, I’d never noticed what a chin she had, maybe she usually ducked out of profile. Anyway she did that now, dropping her head and turning it half-round so that her hair fell over her eyes and softened the line. But it was too late; I’d got the message of that chin.

  Her fingers were picking at each other, but when she spoke her voice was firm enough.

  ‘I wasn’t a virgin, you know that, when we met. Still, I hadn’t had as many boys as I let you believe. Just two. On ski-ing holidays, which I always felt didn’t really count, you understand. And I won’t pretend I don’t enjoy it with you. You wouldn’t believe me if I did. But the fact that I like it is maybe part of the reason I’m calling it off.’

  ‘Mortification of the flesh, Bella? In this year of grace?’

  ‘If you like. Self-restraint. You see I know it wouldn’t last with you, nobody ever has, have they? But, after you, there would be somebody else, and another, and so on. It’s all no good.’

  ‘None of that means anything to me, I don’t see that it matters,’ I said, taking my hand off the steering-wheel and putting it between her legs.

  ‘I am sorry you can’t, but it does,’ she said, and very precisely removed my hand from where she had often been happy enough to let it rest and explore.

  ‘You’re upset,’ I said, ‘because of our visit to the asylum. Meeting your uncle too. That’s all. And of course your Uncle Corrado? It’s all set you thinking of your father.’

  ‘Not really my father, the others, yes. Uncle Corrado most of all. You see, I can’t help thinking that if we all of us didn’t go in for this permissiveness, well you might not have terrorism either. It’s a matter of respect.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said, ‘people have always fucked. And will. You’re talking balls. I can’t listen to it. You’ll come round though.’

  ‘No, I won’t. I’ve made up my mind.’

  And her chin tilted again, and this time she left it up there, as if she didn’t mind me seeing her in profile at all.

  I said, ‘Are you really trying to tell me, Bella, that because you and I fuck, that’s got something to do with urban terrorism? Are you really saying something that half-witted?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘of course I’m not. Not directly. And you know I’m not, and that my reasons aren’t as silly as you are pretending. What I’m saying is very general, and I’m not falling into any sociological mess, saying we are all guilty, just as if we were taking part in a television chat show. Only it’s like this. We don’t love each other. And where there is no love, there is only self-indulgence, the desire for sensation, nothing more.’

  ‘Giving pleasure to your partner. That’s something more.’

  ‘You know it isn’t. The whole act becomes an end in itself. Action for the sake of action. Tout court. And that sort of thing is sterile, you understand, sterile. Nothing can come from it. So, I’ve decided. It’s a small step from living for sensation to living for violence and destruction. Even love-making can become cruel when there are no consequences.’

  ‘Christ,’ I said, ‘are you coming out against birth control now?’

  And she fucking was.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’ve gone crazy. You’ll soon be up there with Uncle Guido.’

  ‘I knew you would try to make a joke of it,’ she said; but there was no smile in her response, and the chin was still tilted.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘this affair has changed my whole way of thinking, my philosophy. And I’ve been talking to my cousin, Nico. You don’t like Nico, I think?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I thought he was a young prick actually.’

  ‘He didn’t like you either. We started talking about particulars, about what might make people behave like these terrorists. And remember, Nico and I both know a bit about them. We know Bernardo. No secrets – yes? We all believe Bernardo is one of them. So it’s like this. There’s a problem. What could have made Bernardo do what he did?’

  ‘Fucked around, did he?’

  ‘What is the point? What is the point? Listen, Christopher, I give you one last chance, or I get out of the car.’

  ‘No point in that anyway. It’s your car.’

  ‘All right, listen. And stop being clever and cynical, understand. Bernardo talks a lot but he is not clever, I think. He believes he has ideals. Truth, Justice, Liberation, et cetera, et cetera. He believes people are exploited. Maybe it’s true. Maybe they are exploited. Maybe they are deprived. Maybe capitalism is wrong. I don’t know. My father’s a capitalist. Maybe he exploits people. He doesn’t exploit me, not his family. He loves us. But maybe it’s all wrong. So? So? How do we make it better? Do we smash the system and say, start again from nothing, or do we just try to make it more moral, to behave well ourselves? Bernardo says smash it. And then? I think deep down Christopher says smash it too. Maybe that is part of the reason I can’t go on with you. I’m afraid of that.’

  ‘If you’re afraid of it, maybe it’s because you’re refusing to admit how it attracts you.’

  ‘No, that is silly. Nico says you can’t create out of destruction. Good can’t grow out of evil, peace out of violence. I believe him. He is a poet, he makes things.’

  ‘He’s a banker too,’ I said.

  Well, that was a last line. It was a last line of sorts. What she was doing was just retreating. She had put her head out of the attico di gran lusso and taken a look at the real world and didn’t like it there where you can get hurt; so she was taking this excuse to creep back into her fur coat. I was angry. Naturally I was angry. It wasn’t just that she was a good lay – a marvellous lay and a girl I liked too – there was more to it than that. I’d made my break from that world, the softer English version, of the Surrey pine-trees, the Saturday golf at Walton Heath or Worplesdon, the Rover purring on the gravel under the copper beech, the gin-and-tonics, the loud pink laughter; it was a world that was less obviously exploitive than this cruder, gaudier Italian one, where money was even flasher. But I’d got out. I wasn’t happier; you can be really happy with The Daily Telegraph – my father was – but at least I was no longer living a lie, battening on others, one of Them, the exploiting class. And now to see Bella running away from the one thing by which she had expressed her revolt, sexual freedom, made me want to puke. It’s been the only great subversive force of the last thirty years, sexual freedom, and she was turning it in. She wasn’t running away so much as locking the door.

  That was it. I took the keys out of the keyhole, and pressed them hard down on her crotch, hurting her a bit, I hope. She squealed anyhow.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘You should get some of these made for the chastity belt. And you’d better marry your cousin, Nico. He’ll keep you in the style that’ll let you forget how most people live. And I hope you fucking well choke on it.’

  So much for that. Back to the scrubbers. Back to the Stock solution; all night. Sometime the next day I thought me of fat Bertha, went off to explore her deep fatness, and then passed out to wake to her tongue in my ear urging departure. Fair enough.

  All that of course is fact, hard true reporter’s fact, even thoug
h the dialogue may not be absolutely verbatim. Old skills dying hard, it’s actually pretty well verbatim.

  Level four has to be speculation, but it’s the speculation that has resulted from a lot of hard digging. Conversations with Antonio, interviews with contacts, even (through one of these contacts, whom of course I can’t name) a long telephone interview with the PDP’s spokesman who called himself Joe; as good a name as any.

  So you can take it that this is as authentic an account as is likely to emerge of this affair which, looked at one way, was a joke: a gob of spit on the walls of that grotty white sepulchre, the Republic.

  They’d decided to kill Dusa a long time back. The hard ones, the Professor (who I think actually is a professor), a bearded bloke calling himself Angelo and a trim-suited lawyer called Dr Marco Schiavetti (whom I can name since he was killed in a car-crash last week – what sort of crash?) had always regarded the negotiations as a blind. In fact they were almost knocked off their stride by Dusa himself – there seemed to be a moment when the pathos of the letters might have so strong an appeal that they would be faced by the unwelcome fact of an offer they could hardly refuse. Still they had a fall-back position; they were ready to shout treachery and ill-faith.

  Dusa let them down of course. He let everybody down, refusing to play the part that had been written for him. That only steeled their resolve. They had hoped, and expected, that he would crack – their psychological expert had assured them, that, deprived of the authority in which he was accustomed to dress himself, he would really crack and spill whatever beans they demanded; merely to make some sort of human contact. It didn’t work out like that; and, for this failure, they blamed Tomaso. They were quite right to do so. The interest he aroused in Dusa kept the politician sane. Of course it was Tomaso who had ensured his co-operation in the first place, but this meant less to the Professor than the certainty he came to acquire that Tomaso had helped Dusa preserve his dignity; Dusa, he felt, would have cooperated anyway.