by Robert Lowry
Nine-thirty on an August night. In the light of the round moon, the American soldier hurrying through the blacked-out streets pointed a shadow like a finger of ill fortune at each of the squat stone houses. Sergeant Carl Deveaux stooped forward as he walked, and though no part of him seemed in motion he still managed to go along quickly and quietly on the heavy rubber-soled GI shoes—appearing nonchalant, even sauntering, but really putting astounding amounts of distance behind him.
He wasn’t fleeing from anything, it had become a habit of his to walk like this. He was pulling at the tuft of hair that grew under his lower lip and thinking of Enrico Dellipaoli, his Italian agent. The wop’s working out, he thought. Even if he’s lying to me about the money, he’s still working out Let’s say he’s taking five extra lire on every flint—over and above his 20 per cent. Or even ten lire. In the long run he can’t hook me. I’ve hooked him. I’ve got his imagination and he has no idea where all this might lead. Maybe millions. He’ll always take more than he’ll tell me, but he’ll be afraid to take too much for fear I’ll catch on and sack him. Then where would he be? None of the other dopes around here would be willing to take the chance. Or even if they were willing, they’re not capable of finding out what the possibilities are. Landshof, for instance. Or Howdy. With all their snooping they haven’t even been able to discover where I go every evening. Those two poor dopes, shaking in their boots just because they sell some of their PX rations once in a while. . . . He felt like laughing, thinking of Landshof and Howdy. The great kidders. They thought they were being pretty funny with their remarks about his exploits—yet for a while they’d even swallowed the idea that he was running a whorehouse across town. In a way Americans were worse dopes than wops. Back on civvy street all these guys would be thinking about was money, yet over here, where lots of big easy money lay under their noses if they only had the sense to grab some of it, all they could concentrate on was sex, and getting back home someday, and the couple of bucks a month higher rating would get them. Going half crazy sitting around the billet every night, or at the club rotting out their guts with that high-octane gas, the wops called liquore or gin or whatever.
He came out of the sidestreet into the great moonlit town square, empty now, with only some rotten tomatoes, cabbage leaves and debris as mementos of the farmers’ stalls set up here every morning. On the right of the square was the ugly pile of ruins that had once been the opera house. A bomb, the only bomb to land near the square during all the Allied raids, a year ago, had hit behind the opera house and collapsed its walls, but the great dome had fallen intact and now sat at an angle, like some giant’s forgotten hat. Deveaux cut round on the other side of the square. Laughing and talking came from the American enlisted men’s club, but he didn’t bother even to glance in. He was on another sidestreet now and his quick narrow eyes took in all the shadows. No MPs around, nobody. Three doors away from the printing shop he stopped and lit a cigarette. For God’s sake, he hoped Dellipaoli had enough sense to be listening for his knock. Last night he’d practically had to break the door down to make him answer.
He went to the door above which a sign read: TIPOGRAFIA DELLIPAOLI and rapped softly. No sound of anyone coming to answer—the damn fool. He was too suspicious to hand over a key, but here he took the chance of bringing every MP in town to his door with all the racket you had to make. . . . He rapped again, louder. Now he could hear the inside door being opened.
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice demanded.
For Christ’s sake, Deveaux thought. “Carl,” he said as quietly as possible.
He heard the key turn and the bolts slide back. The street door opened a crack—it was Rosa.
“Carl,” he said again.
She let him slip through. “Good evening, Signora Dellipaoli.” He waited while she refastened the door, then preceded her through the dark shop, sure of his way between the two ancient presses and the wooden typecase stands. She shuffled along back there in cloth slippers, her pregnant body wrapped in the usual dirty red housecoat. “Enrico’s been expecting you for the past two hours,” she said in Italian.
They went through a door at the rear and up a flight of pitch-black stairs. He pointed his flashlight behind him to show her the way.
“Let me open with the key,” she said.
Enrico’s white-toothed smile greeted them in the foyer. “Ah, Carl,” Enrico exclaimed, gripping his hand, “you late!”
They left Rosa to herself and retired to the dining-room table, which was stained everywhere and smelled strongly of the hundreds of plates of oily foods which had rested on it. Enrico poured two glasses of wine from the bottle on the table and shoved one to Deveaux. He touched Deveaux’s glass with his own and said, “To fleent!”
Deveaux smiled and sipped the sour wine. “Where did you go yesterday?”
Enrico’s large mouth showed the brilliant teeth again. He is a handsome bastard, Deveaux thought. Large intelligent eyes with long lashes. A straight nose. High forehead with that blue vein slanted across it. He’d been an officer in the Italian Army, but for some reason now he was discharged. . . . Behind all that grin, though, he’s wondering whether he should tell me where he went on his selling tour.
“A very little town,” Enrico said finally. “On a mountain.”
“Where?”
“You wouldn’t know,” Enrico said. “The name is Tocini. No Americans have ever been there—not even AMGOT!” He laughed, for some reason considering this a pretty good joke. “And I sold plenty.”
“How many?”
“Two thousand.”
“For how much?”
“Thirty lire each.”
“Buono.” Deveaux brought six cigarette lighters from his pocket.
“Beautiful.” Enrico picked up one of the lighters and examined it with interest. A blade of fire jumped up under his finger; he snuffed it. “I sold three. . . . Buono, I need these. More flints too?”
“A thousand more.” From the pocket of his overseas jacket he brought a small box wrapped in brown paper. Opening it, he displayed the tiny bits of flint cut to fit the lighters.
Enrico examined these with interest too, poking about in the box with his long finger. “Not many,” he said. “These last one day.”
“Tomorrow I’ll get more.”
Enrico put the lid on the box. “Oh, the money.” From the buttoned pocket of his dark blue shirt he drew a wallet and began counting out notes. “Sixty thousand lire. Forty-eight thousand for you.”
Deveaux didn’t bother to count them, he shuffled the notes into a neat pile and put them in his wallet, then sipped his wine, running his slender fingers through his thinning hair. When Enrico was in one of his gayer moods he called Deveaux “Il diavolo.” As he sat here now in the dim light from the single lamp on the table he did look like a devil. His face was narrow and long, with hundreds of tiny wrinkles around the long shrewd eyes. His nose came out like an ax blade, sharp and beaked. His mouth was thin, not unhumorous, with heavy lines running down from the corners of his nose. He cultivated a sandy mustache on his upper lip, and a triangular patch of hair, with which he was always fiddling, directly below his underlip. He wore sizes of army clothes slightly too large for him, so that he never really gave the impression of a soldier at all.
Enrico was laughing again. “These people in this town,” he said. “They were interested in one thing only—you’d never guess what.”
“What?”
“The Mayor of New York, LaGuardia.”
“LaGuardia?”
“Yes. You see, they have a big radio up there on that mountain, just one for the whole town to listen to, and they hear on the radio that Fiorello LaGuardia comes to rule Italy. They think he’s going to give each of them an automobile or something—I don’t know. That’s all they talked about.”
“The whole town talking about that?”
“Yes,” Enrico laughed. “The whole town. If they didn’t need flints and matches and clothes they wouldn’
t even know there’s a war going on—but they certainly know that Fiorello LaGuardia’s coming!” He laughed still harder, almost choked on his wine, and finally had to reach over and grasp Deveaux’s hand to steady himself. “You, Carl—you ought to dress up like LaGuardia and go up there. Charge them fifty lire each just to look at you!” His youthful face was completely contorted in laughter. “You’d be rich!”
Deveaux smiled. It wasn’t that much of a joke—he’d pulled crazier stunts. But he didn’t like the hysterical familiarity the wop was falling into, so he got up to go. “I’ll come tomorrow night if I get more flint,” he said in Italian.
“Good, good.” Quickly shoving the lighters and the box of flints into his pants pocket, Enrico stood up too. He was very serious now, too serious—these people went to extremes in everything. “I’ll be here. I won’t have to go very far to sell a thousand.”
As he walked back through the dark streets toward his billet, the idea of LaGuardia and the town of Tocini kept working in his mind. It had all kinds of possibilities, these Eye-ties were in such a state now they didn’t know whether they were coming or going. And in a small town completely cut off from the rest of the world . . . By the time he passed the GI on guard at the villa door, he had the idea worked out. These damn greasy excitable wops. (He’d walked through the courtyard and was climbing the stone stairs.) They’d be sorry they ever wanted a war by the time the American Army decided to send him back to the States.
He went into his room, around which were placed fifteen canvas bunks draped with mosquito netting, and saw that four or five guys had already turned in. Weinstein was bent over, polishing his shoes, and Howdy and Landshof were both on their bunks, reading by the feeble light that came from the single bulb in the middle of the ceiling.
“Mr. Howard and Mr. Landshof, I presume,” he said, hanging his coat on the rack he’d built above his bed.
They were both at least ten years younger than he—both kids in their early twenties, and he treated them with an amused contempt which they liked. Howdy was from some small town in northern Pennsylvania; he’d been a clerk in a shoe store before the war and he had one of those freckled snubnosed faces that would look like a ten-year-old’s if he lived to be eighty.
“How about it, Deacon?” he asked. “Were you up looking over your stable again tonight?” The whorehouse idea was still a joke as far as he was concerned.
“Out for a little stroll,” Deveaux said. “You boys both look very comfortable.”
“I’m about as comfortable in this dump as I’d be on an anthill. You hear the latest rumor?”
“How late?” Deveaux stretched out on his bunk.
“They’re talking about giving some of us thirty-day furloughs in the States.”
“Then you have to come back,” Dexeaux said. “I wouldn’t be interested.”
“You don’t have to be interested, Deacon, all the money you’re making.”
Deveaux looked at Howdy sharply to see whether that round innocent pan was any more knowing than usual. But it wasn’t. He guessed he’d never have anything to worry about from these two . . . unless it’d be just their blabbing to other people. But no, they wouldn’t even do that. They were in on it too. He’d had them buy money-orders made out to fabricated names at the Army PO—he’d worry about cashing them when he arrived back home. Getting the money into the States was the hardest nut of all to crack. The lire he was collecting were worthless unless changed into dollars, but the only means of exchange were postal money-orders, which were difficult because they were limited to one hundred dollars each. He’d bought a number here in Cormo under his own name and in relatives’ names, and a good many more in surrounding towns under nonexistent names. He hated to carry all this evidence on his person, but on the other hand he didn’t want to arouse suspicions by sending too much money home in letters. There was also the matter of distributing the money under a lot of names so that the income-tax people wouldn’t ever become interested.
Landshof sat up and brushed his straight black hair off his forehead. He’d never manage to get rid of a certain Iowa corngrower’s look—maybe it was the way his mouth hung open all the time.
“No kiddin, Deacon,” Landshof said very quietly. “How much money have you cleaned up the two years you been in Africa and Italy?”
Deveaux lit a cigarette. “Oh, I don’t know.” He smiled. “Ten or twenty bucks.”
“For Christ’s sake, I bought you eight hundred dollars’ worth of money-orders myself. You can’t get away with that.”
“And I’ve bought him six hundred dollars’ worth,” Howdy chimed in. “God knows how many he’s bought himself and had other people get.”
Deveaux mentally added the four hundred and eighty dollars he’d picked up tonight to the sum total he’d scratched together during the last two years. It made slightly more than thirty-eight thousand dollars, most of it already in good American money-orders. Which wasn’t bad for a man to whom the army paid something less than a hundred bucks a month for being over here typing out passes and payrolls in a bomber-wing orderly room.
“Let’s not be raising our voices, gentlemen,” he said. “There are certain subjects we don’t let the general public in on.”
Howdy sat down on Deveaux’s bed. “Come on, Deacon. Ain’t you even gonna tell us where you went tonight?”
“I went to the movie,” Deveaux said.
“Okay then, what was playing?”
“Caught in the Dark with Betty Grable.”
Both the GIs laughed. “There ain’t any movie by that name,” Howdy said. “Besides, they got a murder mystery tonight.”
Landshof came over and sat down beside Howdy. Deveaux clasped his hands behind his head and looked at the two pairs of curious eyes regarding him—Landshof’s narrow squinted farmer’s eyes, light brown and flecked with green, and Howdy’s round blue eyes that must have been pretty convincing where footwear was concerned. A couple of nice typical American boys, really. Two average GIs whose country had seen fit to jerk them out of their routine two-dimensional lives and send them over here to rot for a few years in a war that had about as much meaning as an idiot beating a stick in a mudpuddle. He felt the weight of his wallet bulging his left shirt pocket, and experienced again the self-satisfaction which his money always created in him. Christ, he wanted to thank the Eye-ties and Nazis for starting this war. He wanted to thank the U. S. Government for thinking it could get away with regarding him as just another dope who could be used for a few years in whatever way it saw fit, then thrown aside with a thank you and a couple of ribbons while the boys in control got fat and rich on the war. . . . He was fixing himself up, that was for sure. He was going to come out of this war with enough jack to take care of him for twenty years—maybe the rest of his life.
He closed his eyes. Howdy was saying something, but he didn’t bother to listen. That citizenship scheme, he thought. Get Enrico to print up some official-looking passports for entry into the U. S., then go himself to small towns and sell them to the wops for a hundred bucks apiece—they’d think they could leave on the first boat. . . . No, wait a minute. Tocini. The LaGuardia stunt. How would he get on top of that mountain? Maybe catch a ride with some Italian. Anyhow he’d get up there one way or another . . . next Monday, his day off.
“Deacon, what you gonna do with all your money when you get back to civilization?”
But Deveaux didn’t even bother to open his eyes. Let them go on griping about the fact that they did all the work while the officers made the big dough and had the privileges. First thing he’d do when he got back to the States would be to build a fifteen-thousand-dollar house on that strip of land he owned on Long Island. A car to get around, but he wouldn’t go into the city very often. He’d have a few people out once in a while, not too many. He was damn well sick of people. Wasn’t that the best reason for having money—to let it pile up around you till it got so high you didn’t have to look at anybody else in the world?
&nbs
p; He thought then of his father, of that brownstone house in Brooklyn Heights he’d lived in as a boy. His father had been an ass with money, had inherited a fortune and thrown it away on any number of crazy schemes—stocks, gambling, other people’s businesses—then started the shirt factory and made more, only to drink it up grandly after he’d reached fifty, killing himself in the process. So his son had had to be a taxi driver, then a bookie, and now, at thirty-two, a soldier—a lousy GI who’d been brought over here to spend what was left of his youth in a broken-down country that didn’t even deserve to be invaded. Well, he was fixing all that, he thought. He was fixing it good. I’ll get the eager beaver busy with that printing press of his tomorrow night. Show those wops up there on that mountain something in print and they’ll believe it without mumbling one single perchè. . . .
When he opened his eyes he saw that Landshof and Howdy were in their respective bunks and under the covers.
“When you gonna take us along and show us the ropes, Deacon?” Howdy asked. “All we want to do is learn.”
“I’ll show you the ropes, all right.” Deveaux was unlacing his shoes. “A couple ropes strong enough to hang yourselves with.”
That Monday broke calm, cool, with a sun that was bright but far off, and a sky clear and blue, innocent of war. No wreath of mist shut out the great stretch of plain below Tocini. Citizens working in the rocky fields outside the town could look down and see, with the eyes of a bored boy watching the activity of insects, the minute life down there. Toy bombers rising one by one from the airfields, army cars racing down roads coiled like rope in the rolling country, a bright flash to the north that meant some munitions truck had blown up.
The town was busy. In the narrow alleys women worked over large wooden boards, beating tomatoes into a stiff paste. Later they’d leave it to dry all day in the sun, unworried by the filth that flew into it. Pietro Spinelli, the baker’s boy, walked from street to street blowing his cowhorn and stopping at houses to collect the enormous cartwheels of dough which he placed in precarious balance on the ten-foot board resting on his right shoulder and carried home to his father’s oven. In the large dark stone building behind Antonio Grossi’s café, men worked in the wine vats, cleaning them for the fall crop.
