Picture of Defeat

by John Harris

  ‘What do you think I’ve been doing?’ Pugh snapped.

  ‘We’ve come to Europe as liberators, not conquerors,’ Grafton-Smith went on. ‘So we have to preserve the goodwill and co-operation of the occupied peoples. They need their pride to be restored, and this means their treasures have to be located and returned. The bloody Nazis picked Poland clean in six months. They aren’t the supermen everybody imagined; they’re just predatory hooligans.’

  Neither Pugh nor O’Mara cared for the smooth-faced young officers like Grafton-Smith who were beginning to arrive in numbers in Italy – and doubtless other places, too, now that the front in France had been opened. They were all full of bright ideas about how the world should be run and, following hard on the heels of the fighting troops, succeeded only in making a nuisance of themselves.

  ‘We should slap an order on the pictures,’ Grafton-Smith insisted. ‘The work’s going to be given high priority by us.’

  ‘It’s always had priority with us.’

  ‘Hitler–’

  ‘Who’s he?’ O’Mara asked.

  Pugh grinned. ‘He’s nobody from here.’

  Grafton-Smith glared. ‘Are all FS sergeants as rude as you two?’

  ‘Most of ’em,’ O’Mara said. ‘Though we’re very good at it.’

  ‘You should remember what you’re dealing with. Hitler would steal anything. When he went into Prague in 1939, he left the Hradcåny Castle with a couple of tapestries rolled up and stuffed into his car like a hotel guest pinching a towel.’

  The indignant Grafton-Smith had no sooner left than an American lieutenant in rimless glasses appeared on the same quest.

  ‘Leroy Hatton,’ he introduced himself. ‘Art Looting Investigation Unit of the US Office of Strategic Services. Recruited, commissioned and trained in America. We’re super-detectives,’ he added modestly, ‘Carrying out a unique task in history.’

  He, too, had no direct orders but he’d also heard of the Detto Bantis and was anxious to get hold of them.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe what’s been stolen,’ he said. ‘We’ve picked up photograph albums with the words Gemälderei Linz – Linz Collection – marked on ’em in gold. They show pictures earmarked for this goddam treasure house Hitler wants to build up in his birthplace. They say it’s because he was spurned as an artist in Vienna as a young man.’ Hatton slapped his thigh. ‘Hell, that guy couldn’t paint a front door! They list old masters, Dutch, Flemish, Italian, German – not many English, he didn’t like Limey painters – tapestries, artefacts, marbles, statuary, armour, coins, rare books. They got the Rothschild and Schwartzenberg collections. They’ve got the Czernin Vermeer, Holbeins, Rembrandts, Tintorettos, the Hohenfürth altarpiece from the Sudetenland, Rubenses, Goyas, Watteaus, Fragonards, the goddam lot! There are photographs of them all, and we know now that they’re being taken to Austria. All we have to do is find them.’

  ‘They wouldn’t want Detto Bantis,’ Pugh said.

  ‘Oh, yeah? That’s what you think. What are they worth?’

  Pugh was suspicious of both officers. They seemed to care far more about value than about art, and he wondered how much they were hoping to acquire on the side for themselves.

  In the morning, he went to see a Professor Arco of the Fine Art Department at the university, whom Tassinari had recommended to give an honest opinion on the Detto Bantis. He was a thin little man with a shock of white hair and a white goatee beard and moustache. He had no interest in the Detto Bantis himself because he had never liked the painter.

  ‘He was after Fascist patronage,’ he said sharply. ‘And that isn’t art, not even if the Fascists had known anything about art, which they didn’t. I would not recommend buying him. He had too many periods, most of them bad, interspersed – very occasionally – with a good one when he painted something worthwhile. His best period was in England. When he returned to Italy, he was already past his best. He painted nothing of note here.’

  ‘Would you buy one as a normal collector?’

  ‘I wouldn’t. But there are many who would.’

  ‘At what price?’

  ‘I have no idea. I would place them around a million to two million lire.’

  A dealer Pugh saw had different ideas. ‘Four million,’ he said at once. ‘If they’re good, five million. Perhaps even six. It depends on the quality.’

  ‘Would there be any difficulty selling one?’

  Bright black eyes gleamed. ‘Have you got one?’

  Well, Pugh thought, that was all right. Tamara was not going to come out of things too badly in the end. And he was suddenly concerned that she shouldn’t. She had been remarkably brave about the losses they had sustained, her only unhappiness that part of her had gone.

  ‘Would you be prepared to look at the pictures?’ he asked.

  ‘If necessary.’

  ‘What do you need?’

  The dealer smiled. ‘Just my eyes,’ he said. ‘It would be different if Detto Banti had painted 200 years ago because hand-ground colours are coarse by comparison with modern ones and artificial craquelure can’t stand examination. Even the dirt isn’t the same as centuries of dust. The old master racket’s finished.’ The bright black eyes suddenly looked anxious. ‘I trust you have your paintings safe, Sergeant. There are a lot of people in Naples who are aware that paintings are valuable. Prices are going up and they’re going up more all the time. I hope they’re nowhere anyone can steal them.’

  Early the following day there was a tremendous explosion in the Via Bontinani. It brought down a house in a torrent of bricks and blew in windows for a hundred yards around. Pugh felt the shock in his room in the Casa Calafati and immediately set off to see what he could do to help. The street was full of rubble, with fragments of stone and marble scattered everywhere. There wasn’t a window with any glass in it, not a shutter left on any wall in the street. The explosion had occurred near a queue of shoppers, and thinking he could see a body, he moved towards it only to find it was one of the statues from a public garden nearby. British, American, Canadian, French and Polish soldiers were struggling with the Italian police to pull wounded people from under the rubble. The air was filled with wailings, and they were laying a row of dead children in the roadway like dusty broken dolls. A woman, beheaded by the blast, lay in the gutter. The body of another had been thrown on to the sagging telegraph wires.

  It was thought it was a German device, because during the liberation of the city, when the Germans had wrecked harbour installations, sewers, water conduits, gas, light and water works, delayed-action mines had been left behind to go off at intervals. One had gone off in the post office, killing a hundred civilians, and another had been found in the only undamaged hotel in the city, which the United States general commanding the 5th Army had inevitably selected for his headquarters.

  Men, women and children, their clothes half-stripped from them by the blast, their faces covered with blood and white plaster dust, were picking their way dazedly through the ruins. There was a lot of panic talk that more mines would go off in the evening after dark, when the peak period for the electricity works was reached. Although in the end it was discovered that the disaster had been caused not by a mine but by an unexploded bomb disturbed by workmen digging their way to a damaged water main, an exodus from the city was already taking place. By the time the panic had died down and loud hailers were being used to damp down the excitement, Pugh was as filthy as everybody else, his uniform covered with blood and torn where he had caught it on splintered wood or twisted steel.

  He returned to his room, bathed in tepid water, changed and handed his dirty uniform to the Contessa to be washed. When he reached his office, a letter was waiting for him from the Mother Superior of the Orphanage of the Virgin of Manimora. Her delight seemed to sparkle out of the page.

  ‘We have sold the picture,’ she announced. ‘A man came who called himself Signor Sangalla and brought with him an expert whom I noticed he addressed as De Castro. They asked to s
ee the picture. The man De Castro examined the paint – he seemed very concerned with the green of the clothing – and finally pronounced that it was Detto Banti green and that the painting was genuine. They offered a derisory sum of money, which, as you advised, I refused. There was a lot of argument but I produced the documents you had provided and put my trust in honesty and righteousness and refused to budge. Then – may the Holy Father forgive me! – I told them there was an American who wanted the picture and was prepared to pay the sum we were asking. There was a lot more talk and eventually they offered us 100,000 lire less than we asked, and this was so little a difference I accepted. I called in a priest and a notary and had everything signed and witnessed. They weren’t pleased, but I insisted. Now that the picture is no longer my responsibility I am a great deal happier.’

  Pugh almost crowed with pleasure and, dragging out a sheet of paper he wrote back, sending his congratulations both on the sale and on the wisdom of getting rid of the canvas.

  ‘Take care to keep all documents locked up,’ he warned. ‘There are some strange people about.’

  That evening, he heard that De Castro had been arrested by the military police and that an order had gone out for the arrest of Da Sangalla. He was satisfied. Things seemed to be working out well, and he pulled the motor bicycle off its stand and rode out to see Mori and Foscari.

  Outside the stable now was an elaborate sign: ‘Funeral Arrangements. Decorous. Dignified. Modest Prices.’ Beneath it was a little workshop where Foscari was building coffins, and arranging wreaths from flowers which Pugh knew he bought cheaply from florists who couldn’t sell them to anyone else. Mori was preparing for a funeral and was dressed in a greasy gold braided coat and cap ready to drive his hearse about his business. They greeted Pugh with wide smiles.

  ‘We still have your goods, Signor Sergente,’ Mori said. ‘They are safe. When do you come to collect them?’

  ‘I don’t. Not yet. I came to make sure they’re safe.’

  Foscari was delighted to be home and Mori, who was a widower, had welcomed him into his business with open arms. They had already conducted two funerals – cheap ones, because they worked from a cheap part of the city – and they felt they were established.

  ‘We are prospering already,’ Mori said. ‘Fiorello is a good stable companion to Urbino, and people have been to look at the hearse to be sure it’s fit to carry their dead.’

  They accepted the bomb explosion with the usual Italian sadness but with barely concealed pleasure that it had brought them work.

  ‘It’s a time for dying in Naples,’ Foscari said. ‘There were three people killed from this area alone, and everyone with a hearse is busy just now. One of the dead was an old man aged seventy-six from the Via Coppi. He served through the last war on the Austrian front. On Wednesday there’s a child. How they die these days! Half the funerals are children.’

  Pugh knew it only too well. Every day, funerals trailed through the shabby streets, white coffins on hand-carts or carried by two men and followed by wailing women tearing with their nails at their cheeks and stumbling in front of a huge wreath which would have set the family heavily in debt. The long strings of mourners, relatives, neighbours and friends, determined not to miss the show of grief, always totally ignored the traffic as they wound in and out of the trams and trolley buses and the army lorries nudging impatiently past to get on with the war.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Mori went on, ‘we have a big order. We are to do a job for Armando Cirri. He has three funerals and has asked us to do one. He will pay well and it may be the beginning of a long association.’

  Pugh remembered Cirri, who tied his horse to the lamp post outside the O Sole Mio. ‘Who’s dead?’ he asked.

  ‘Old man. Name of Gustavo Grei. Not a complete job with flowers. Just to the station. The coffin goes to Rome, where it will be met by the family and the body interred in a family plot there. It’s fortunate that Rome is in our hands again, otherwise he would have had to be buried here.’

  On Thursday evening, Pugh arranged to take Tamara out to a meal by the harbour. She appeared wearing a blue velvet dress, her face radiant.

  ‘The curtains!’

  She nodded, delighted that he had recognised them. ‘I have had them cleaned. They are a little heavy in this weather but they will keep me warm in winter.’

  Pugh grinned. ‘I think having a lot of money will suit you,’ he said.

  The following midday, he was at the station with the Jeep to pick up Jones. He took a driver with him so that nobody would steal the wheels while he went to the platform to meet Jones. Anything was possible in Naples. One officer who had left his vehicle in a back street had returned to find the tyres stolen by children and, while searching for new tyres, had lost the wheels. By the time he had managed to place a guard on the vehicle, the engine had been removed.

  As he moved towards the platform, past the pink painted station buildings, to ask information of the train from the south, a crowd was gathering on the Rome platform and the railway officials were looking worried.

  ‘It’ll be a riot,’ one of them said. ‘Now that Rome’s been liberated, everybody wants to go. It’s amazing how many people have discovered they have business or relatives there.’ He gestured at a group of policemen standing near the waiting room, their faces expressionless, their caps over their eyes in the way all Italian police seemed to wear their caps. ‘Everybody in Rome wants to come to Naples and everybody in Naples wants to go to Rome. And as we’re still only running a shuttle service, it’ll be the same train, so there’ll be a million people trying to get on a train that will have a million people trying to get off.’

  Even as Pugh turned away the train arrived with a howl like a banshee and the uproar started at once. Packed with people wanting to go north to the capital, the platform became a madhouse of screaming, pushing, fighting figures, and Pugh was swept aside at once. Remembering to keep one hand on his wallet and one on his revolver, he was spun round, barged from side to side, and finally ejected like a pip from an orange to the rear of the platform alongside the policemen. As the train slowed, people on the platform determined to find a seat began to scramble aboard even before the train had stopped, and the corridors became jammed with shrieking passengers trying to get into compartments which were still crowded with passengers trying to get out. Suitcases were pushed, even thrown, through windows, and a fight between two men in a third-class corridor turned into a screeching bedlam that emptied compartments all round and sent a couple of policemen running down the platform.

  Outside a first-class compartment, there was a shoving match between two stout men and around them another riot was building up. Someone pushed someone else and a fist flew, and in no time two men were on the floor and a woman was trying to beat a youth’s head down between his shoulders with an umbrella. People were pushing wives through windows, shrieking at them to find a place before they were all taken, and screaming children clutching parcels were in danger of being trampled on.

  Then suddenly the yelling inside the train stopped. The silence spread and the crowd parted. A man held the door open and another moved officiously between the crowd, pushing them back. More men stood with their arms out to hold the crowd so that there was a clear pathway between them, and there was a reverent quiet as a young woman clutching a baby in her arms stepped from the train. Hats came off and everyone became silent. Bad temper vanished and there were smiles all round. Even the baby seemed to be smiling but, then, you never heard babies crying in Italy, because when an Italian baby showed signs of bursting into tears, there was always the mother, a big sister, an aunt, a cousin, a grandmother, to pick it up and comfort it.

  Gradually the uproar died, leaving only a few dazed people and a scattering of belongings. A man, jammed into a compartment he daren’t leave for fear of losing his place, stuck his head through the window to appeal for someone to pass him his hat, which lay, battered and trodden on, on the platform, where there were parcels, items
of clothing, even one or two shoes. Heading for the exit, Pugh handed the hat to the frantic owner. It was received with effusive thanks, and Pugh had just reached the exit when he saw a procession crossing the pavement to the station entrance.

  It consisted of a coffin carried by Foscari, old Mori and four attendants, all dressed in threadbare black coats and ties, and frayed white shirts. The coffin was of good wood and decorated with chrome fittings and, even with six people to carry it, seemed heavy enough to make them struggle.

  Behind the hearse a large black car had drawn up and from it three men were climbing. Pugh, standing among a group of carabinieri, drew back into a doorway as the men strode forward, their faces blank and expressionless. They were all dressed in well-pressed suits with broad black bands on their arms. They carried their hats against their chests and their leader had a medal ribbon on his lapel which Pugh immediately recognised as the first essential of the uncle from Rome. The number plate of the car was a Roman one but, with the difficulties of obtaining petrol and the fact that Rome had only recently been liberated, he guessed it was a false one on a local vehicle.

  The platform had not yet emptied of people and, as the coffin passed, families or their people engaged in gathering their belongings straightened up. Hats tumbled and women crossed themselves. There was a general drawing back, partly out of respect, partly from superstition.

  Reaching the guard’s van, Mori and his helpers backed away as the coffin disappeared inside, then, standing by the open door, Foscari began to gesture with his arms as if he were a semaphore signaller, sending the four helpers off for the flowers. The guard and a whole army of porters were standing alongside a nearby first-class compartment, determined to keep it empty. The well-dressed men with the armbands moved forward and one of them handed over a large denomination note to the guard, who received it with a smile and a bow as they entered the compartment and pulled down the blinds.