The Puppeteer

by Timothy Williams

  “The last place you’d think Maltese would want to leave anything,” Magagna said. “Who would ever have dreamed that he would have a numbered safe in the heart of the lion’s den?”

  Trotti smiled. “It belonged to Dell’Orto’s wife—to the fat Genoveffa.” He added, “Maltese probably got Guerra to come in her wig and leave the stuff here.”

  The Safes Manager looked at Magagna’s identity and then insisted upon phoning through to Narcotici. Even then he was not satisfied, and it took another phone call and twenty minutes to get a warrant sent from the Questura. Only then did the man’s thin, humorless face break into an anemic smile. “You understand that we can’t be too careful.”

  “Particularly now,” Magagna said and the manager scowled.

  They were taken down two flights of stairs. Red carpet on a highly polished marble floor. Nudes sculpted in bronze on stone pedestals. The basement was brightly lit and a guard knelt down and put keys into a series of locks. The iron grills opened and they stepped into an enclosed chamber.

  Another door—riveted steel with embedded dials. The manager turned two of the dials and there was a short beeping sound. He waited for it to cease, then adjusted the two remaining dials. He raised the handle and slowly the vast steel door swung inwards.

  “Gentlemen, please enter.”

  Overhead, the telecameras revolved ceaselessly.

  64: SIFAR

  TROTTI BEGAN TO read Maltese’s notes. The thin paper smelt of soap.

  At the time of the Italian Miracle, the Army and the Carabinieri were seeing spies and subversives everywhere. As a result of the increased wealth of the working classes and the fear of a communist infiltration, there developed among the military an obsession with information gathering, an obsession that was fostered, no doubt, by the increase of interest that the Americans in general and the CIA in particular were showing in the Mediterranean basin. For Italian counter-espionage electronic eavesdropping became a way of life. There is even reason to believe that the President of the Republic, Antonio Segni, was being monitored by a hidden microphone in his private study.

  Following an article that appeared in Popolo d’Italia—at that time, a highly respected newspaper—a couple of generals were thrown out of SIFAR, the Italian counter-espionage organization, in 1966. One of them, General Saldini, had been using the spy network of SIFAR to build up his own collection of files.

  Faced with the prospect of premature retirement, General Saldini decided to take with him—as a leaving present to himself—all the files he had put together over the previous years. Some dealt with dangerous subversives, but most concerned the major figures in the world of Italian politics and finance.

  Italy is a country ruled not by politics but by parties—political parties jockeying for power. This state of affairs, the result no doubt of proportional representation and a deep-rooted fear of the communists, explains why Italy remains—politically at least—a third-world country. But for the man who seeks power through manipulation, power through the parties is a godsend.

  Through the freemason network, Valerio Luino came to know about the secret files and he immediately understood that such information in his hands would be a useful source of power. General Saldini, on the other hand, was determined to get his revenge on the politicians who had made use of the press to oust him from the army. Luino, at this time little more than a provincial architect, set about making a marriage of convenience between himself and the general. Understandably, it was not particularly difficult for Luino to recruit Saldini into the P-Beta Lodge, which at this time Luino was in the process of restructuring.

  With the information that General Saldini had given him as a dowry, Luino could have created a financial fortune. Files on generals who plotted against the Republic, on politicians who had taken bribes, on industrialists who had paid bribes, on political parties that had facilitated the interests of the capitalists, on members of the Anti-Mafia enquiry that were in the pay of the Mafia—with this kind of knowledge—a data bank for blackmail—Luino could have amassed a fortune comparable to that of Agnelli and Fiat.

  But wealth for its own sake has never interested Luino. Wealth is merely a means to an end. For Luino, the true end is power.

  He simply persuaded the compromised politicians and captains of finance to join his freemason lodge. Thus to the information from Saldini, he was able to add the information that the new recruits brought with them. And in a very short period, the P-Beta Lodge, which originally had been created to recruit among the ruling classes, was transformed into a personal secret society. The members included some of the most powerful and the most influential men in the land. Luino could now count among his allies and fellow freemasons of P-Beta, several ministers and at least eight army generals.

  P-Beta had always been the most exclusive of the lodges of the Grande Oriente. Indeed it owed its name—Propaganda Beta—to the fact that it was second on the general list of over 450 lodges in Italy. It had always embraced—with vows of the greatest of secrecy—those men who had positions of authority within the public domain. This explains why Dell’Orto—at that time considered one of the best investigating judges in Northern Italy—was himself a member. In the past, important figures such as Crispi and Zanardelli had been enrolled in the lodge. However, since the time of Mussolini, it had fallen on hard times, and if Luino was sent to P-Beta in the first place, it was simply because all the other lodges in Italy were closed to him.

  For the provincial architect carried with him a past that made the name Luino an anathema to most self-respecting freemasons.

  During the period which followed the invasion of Italy in 1943 and the creation of Mussolini’s mock Republic at Salò on Lake Garda, the young Luino had collaborated with the fascists. And for most freemasons, fascism and Mussolini have always been considered as the great enemy of freemasonry. No mason can forget that in l926, the Duce sent Gran Maestro Domizio Torrigiani into internal exile.

  In 1943, although not yet eighteen, Luino was making a name for himself. He led the Repubblichini—and even certain German SS columns—in a bitter fight with the partisans in the Po valley. But as General Alexander’s armies pushed their way north, Luino realized that the fortunes of war were fast changing. After the war, in Rome, he was to maintain that he had collaborated with the GAP partisans and other communist formations. Although several leading ex-partisans were to give their support to Luino’s claims, he failed to shake off the accusations of collaboration. Like most Italians, but with greater cunning, Luino had known how to end up on the winning side. What was harder was rewriting his own history.

  For several years after the war Luino disappeared from circulation. With the money that he had managed to put aside during the last years of the war, he was able to buy himself an education. Foreseeing the boom in housing, he went to Parma University, where in six years, he managed to obtain a degree in architecture. Then in 1951, he went to Rome.

  There he approached the politicians of the ruling Christian Democrat party. Fear was a thing of the past, the communists had been beaten in the elections of 1948, and Italy was in the process of rebuilding. By gravitating toward the center of power, Luino soon came to see that there was a new class of businessmen in Italy and that, because of the inefficiency of the Italian state, these men were now referring their problems to the politicians. Along with their problems, these men also brought limitless sources of wealth.

  The lesson was not lost on Luino. He saw that political power and wealth went together. He suddenly took up an interest in the Church and started to become a practicing Christian. He sought the favor of several powerful prelates and through them found an introduction into the ruling Christian Democrats. The same prelates, however, would no doubt have been upset to learn that in 1960 Luino took his vows in the Lodge of Gian Domenico Romagnosi of the Grande Oriente d’Italia. He was initiated and assumed the grade of “fratello.”

  And it was as a “fratello” that he was to spend the
next few years. He worked with a small consultancy firm in Rome, while at the same time he was trying to build up a circle of contacts. Luino soon found that whenever he tried to move up the hierarchy of the Lodge, his path was automatically blocked. His fascist past had not been forgiven.

  Luino returned to Lombardy, where he remained a humble “fratello” at the bottom of the ladder.

  Within the Romagnosi Lodge, there were many oldschool masons who could not forgive the past of the Venetian upstart. “He has managed to work his way in. He will, however, remain an apprentice,” one member is supposed to have said. Luino tried to cajole, he tried to buy his way up the masonic cursus honorum, but his attempts were all doomed to failure. But by 1965 he had masonic friends upon whom he knew he could count. One of these friends was Tantassi, a Social Democrat and an influential member of parliament. Luino managed to convince Tantassi that he was a victim of a conspiracy—and Tantassi went to see the Gran Maestro himself, the head of all Italian masons, to plead Luino’s case. A physically insignificant man, the Gran Maestro taught physics in Ravenna. Alone among freemasons he had the power to transfer members from one lodge to another. And so, in February 1966, Luino suddenly disappeared from the Romagnosi Lodge and a few weeks later he was promoted to the rank of Maestro—a leap of two grades—in a completely different lodge.

  No sooner had Luino joined P-Beta than he was recruiting new faces to the Lodge. It was his avowed intention to restore P-Beta to all its ancient glory. Between 1966 and 1967, he enrolled over one hundred new members. “If he continues like this,” the Gran Maestro (who was the de facto Maestro Venerabile of the secret P-Beta lodge) declared, “soon he’ll be recruiting the Pope.”

  The following year, Luino recruited the ex-general Saldini. Undoubtedly powerful, Luino now sought to improve his personal situation.

  From 1972 onwards, he embarked upon a series of actions that were intended to make him more acceptable to the old stalwarts of Italian freemasonry. He changed his name to Baldassare, he married a young student more than twenty years his junior, the niece of one of his major critics within P-Beta, Judge Dell’Orto. More important, she was the daughter of the city architect. And so Luino—or Baldassare as he now called himself—managed to obtain a teaching post within the Department of Urbanistica at the university. It gave him new opportunities in consultancy work—well-paid jobs for Arab and African governments, wanting to build airports and hospitals. The job—with its four teaching hours a week—suited him ideally. It gave him respectability—and it gave him the free time to look after his masonic affairs. At the same time, he deliberately tried to disassociate his public persona of academic and respected architect from his activities as Venerabile Maestro of what was fast becoming one of the most powerful lodges in Italy.

  65: Apron

  SIGNORA MAGAGNA WAS in the kitchen preparing the midday meal.

  Pisanelli had picked up a magazine.

  “Well?”

  Trotti looked up.

  “Can I have a look?” Magagna sat forward on the chair. He held out his hand.

  “I haven’t finished yet.”

  The dossier was on the settee beside Trotti. Twenty or so typewritten pages that had been stapled together.

  “What does Maltese say?”

  Trotti shrugged and continued to read:

  By his marriage to the niece of Dell’Orto, Luino had achieved two major goals. On the one hand, thanks to his father-in-law’s position as city architect, he found a back entrance to the communist run administration of the city; on the other, he silenced—for the time being, at least—Dell’Orto’s criticism of him within P-Beta.

  During the mid-Seventies, Luino was able to recruit 850 new members to his Lodge. Luca Pergola, a local banker and a man of considerable ambition, recounts how he took his vows of loyalty in 1979.

  “I went to a small office in the Upim building in Corso Cavour. After knocking three times, I was let in by the Venerable Master himself. He was wearing a silk apron and white gloves. With him were two other men, one of whom I recognized as a general of the Carabinieri. My jacket was removed and I was told to roll the cuffs of my trousers up to mid-calf. Then I knelt down. The Venerable Master placed the tip of his sword on my shoulder while muttering something in a foreign language. I then went round a make-shift altar three times holding a Bible in one hand and taking my oath in a loud voice: ‘In the presence of the Great Architect of the Universe, and in the name of my dearest and closest friends, I solemnly swear on my honor and conscience, that I shall never reveal the secrets of my masonic initiation, that I shall respect the honor of all my brothers, that I shall succor, comfort and defend them, even at the cost of my own life, and should I at any time or for any reason fail to keep this most sacred of oaths, may I become the object of contempt for the Order and for all humanity.’ After having taken the oath, I was embraced three times by each brother present. I was then given an apron and a pair of white gloves wrapped in cellophane. Before leaving the apartment, I was asked to make a gift. No sum was mentioned and I left a check for five hundred thousand lire. I later discovered, much to my chagrin, that other new members sometimes would leave as little as twenty thousand lire in cash.”

  Because of the massive recruitment, Luino came under attack from the old traditionalists still within P-Beta. Luino was accused of not respecting Masonic rites. At the instigation of Dell’Orto, the Gran Maestro allowed himself to get involved in the squabbling.

  The battle between Luino and the Gran Maestro for the control of P-Beta was long and bloody. The Gran Maestro tried to dissolve the Lodge, but as a consequence, all the members—with the exception of the traditionalists—stuck with Luino and the Gran Maestro had to acknowledge the existence of a lodge with Luino at its head. Then, in 1974, at a masonic meeting in Bologna, a move was adopted by the “brothers” present for the dissolution of P-Beta. At this point a “fratello” rose to his feet and started accusing the Gran Maestro himself—the man at the head of all Italian lodges—of having received certain sums from an American aircraft company. He also accused the head of the Italian masonic movement of taking bribes from various political parties. Bitter infighting ensued, followed by the break for lunch. After lunch, the accusations against the Gran Maestro were withdrawn. At the same time, the vow for the abolition of P-Beta was suspended indefinitely.

  Dell’Orto would not forgive such a travesty of the masonic code.

  66: Jacket

  “YOU PHONED ME in the middle of the night.”

  He shrugged. “I hadn’t spoken to you for nearly twenty years.”

  “And that’s why you had to threaten me?”

  “It was for his sake.”

  No longer the woman’s voice. Now Douglas Ramoverde spoke with his slight lisp. The same lisp that Trotti had heard on the telephone.

  “The judge?”

  “I don’t know if you can understand, Commissario, but in his way, he felt ashamed for what he did.”

  Trotti frowned. “When?”

  “Of course he was a mason and as soon as I could get to a telephone without being seen, I phoned him.” He held out his hands. “I had helped kill my father-in-law.”

  “Dell’Orto helped you twenty years ago?”

  Douglas Ramoverde nodded. He was fatter than Trotti remembered him, with a heavy jowl. But there was nothing feminine about his face. The skin was very pale. “My son should have left Italy—and if he’d had any sense, he would have cleared out after he helped Novara. I told him he was risking his life—but he knew that anyway. There are relatives in America, relatives in Argentina, but he wanted to be with the girl. He thought he could help her.” Douglas Ramoverde raised the shoulders of his tweed jacket and sat back on the settee, crossing his legs. “It was obvious that Bastia—or whoever was behind Bastia—was going to have him killed. And that’s what happened. Giovanni was shot dead—murdered professionally. And it just so happened that you were there with him. But it could have been in Milan, it could have b
een in Borgo Genovese. Instead it was on Lake Garda.”

  “Where he went in the hope of meeting me.”

  “You were always very sharp, Commissario.”

  “How many years do you think you’re going to spend in jail, Signor Ramoverde?” Trotti asked and he noticed that Magagna smiled.

  “An old woman?”

  “Old women can go to jail. Some die there.”

  Ramoverde shrugged and stroked one of the cats. The back of his hand was devoid of hairs.

  “What did your son want to see me for?”

  “Dell’Orto knew you were going up to the lake and for some time Giovanni had been saying that he wanted to contact you.”

  Trotti frowned. “You discussed these things with your son?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Then you saw your son regularly?”

  “You could say that.” Ramoverde raised a hand. “After all, he was living here.”

  “And not in Milan—not in viale Lodi?”

  “Sometimes he would go up to Milan to see the girl—to take her some money or to see if she needed help. Of course, he wanted to stay with her, but he realized it was dangerous to live in Milan.”

  “And he lived here?—here in the Villa Laura?”

  Ramoverde nodded. “Would you gentlemen care for something to drink? Some coffee perhaps?”

  “With grappa, if that’s possible.”

  Magagna took out a cigarette and was about to light it.

  “Please.”

  Magagna looked up.

  “My cats don’t like smoke, you know.” Ramoverde turned away and called for the girl, who promptly appeared.

  “Coffee for the gentlemen.”

  She nodded in silence and disappeared into the kitchen. One of the cats followed her at a distance.

  “Traveling between here and Milan was a risk,” Ramoverde said. “I lent him some of my best dresses.”