by Robert Ryan
She disappeared and returned with a large glass of clear liquid. I took it and smiled. Doctor Grappa would do nicely.
He was waiting for me at breakfast, out on the terrace, sipping an espresso and looking smart in a lightweight grey suit, cut sharp. He had a big square jaw and smile which showed American-style glistening white teeth. I didn’t like him. But then, I didn’t like anyone that morning. My face looked like I’d been sprayed by the DDT fly powder still popular in Italy—all yellow splodges—with one swollen eye Charles Laughton would be proud of and several crusty gashes, including a very nasty one from the track of my gun barrel along my forehead. My ribs ached so much that I was skipping every other breath, which made speaking difficult. I sounded like I’d just gone up against Roger Bannister on the track and then been passed across to Henry Cooper for a couple of rounds in the ring.
He stood up and we shook hands. He told me his name was Giovanni Gronchi and before things got too formal he said: ‘Diamoci del tu’—let’s use the familiar form of address—meaning he wanted to be my friend. I didn’t need any more friends. Then again, I certainly didn’t need any more enemies, so I nodded.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked with what seemed like genuine solicitousness. ‘The lady at the desk warned me that you had had an accident.’
‘I should buy myself a torch.’
‘You didn’t do it flying?’
I would have bristled, but bristling was going to hurt, so I sneered a little. ‘No, I did it walking into a steel-reinforced post.’ Well, best get the practice in early. I was going to spend the whole day denying I’d been beaten up by three guys, one of them Mighty Joe Young’s second cousin, who stole my gun.
‘I hope you don’t mind me coming to see you, but my employers called you at the airfield and we were told you were here, and it’s only a forty-five-minute drive from Milan, so … here I am.’
‘Here you are.’
Maria brought me a coffee, examined her handiwork on my face, shook her head, and left. ‘Your employer being?’ I prompted.
‘Your employer, too. Gennaro.’ The dairy, food and produce conglomerate I flew for.
Forty-five minutes is a long way to come, to tell me I am fired, I thought. ‘I don’t think I have anything on the books with them at the moment,’ I said.
‘No. But we would like you to have—flying to Rome, then Naples. We are doing some business with the farmers. But as you know, down there everything has,’ he wrinkled his nose, ‘odore di mafia.’
‘The smell of mafia,’ I repeated. You don’t work out of Sicily, as I once did, without knowing something about organised crime, even if I’d been too small—and poor—for them to bother with. ‘Someone should bottle it and sell it. They’d make a killing.’
He frowned at the poor attempt at humour, but it was the best he was going to get.
‘I thought it was the Camorra who controlled all the fruit and vegetables down there,’ I said.
‘In Naples itself, yes, but we wish to visit several places in the south. Calabria, for instance.’
I smiled, but didn’t mention that then he would have to deal with La ’Ndrangheta, the most brutal of Italy’s crime organisations. I was sure he knew about those blokes. Many of them had been put back in business in 1944 by the Allies, who figured anyone banged up by Mussolini was a good guy, thus returning power and control to some of the most evil and violent gangsters the country had ever seen.
Of course, as a northerner Gronchi would expect corruption to be endemic down south. Up here, went the reasoning, the Austro-Hungarian Empire at least imposed order and honesty and a decent work ethic that dissipated as you went further south. To men like Gronchi, anywhere beyond Rome was bandit country.
‘So you think you might need a quick getaway?’
‘No, just flexibility of movement,’ Gronchi said. ‘The passengers will be two buyers and myself.’
‘When?’
‘Starting now, for six weeks.’
‘Six weeks?’ I dropped a sugar in my coffee and watched the colour bleed into the cube. ‘How much?’
I am used to the fact that any quantity of lire sounds a lot even when it is only enough to buy a pack of cigarettes, but the figure he named had enough noughts behind it to start the greed centres in my brain tingling. New car, new bike, down payment on a new plane …
‘I am here for a commemoration,’ I said flatly, trying to keep the avarice from my voice. ‘At Domodossola.’
‘Your partner told me. It lasts, what—two days?’
‘Then I have a month’s work up here,’ my mouth said without being told. Must be the blows to the head.
‘Perhaps you could sub-contract that to others?’
‘Nobody that I know of.’
‘Your partner?’
‘We only have one plane.’
‘You could hire one, perhaps.’
‘Difficult.’ There weren’t dozens of planes for hire by the day in Northern Italy. You had to lease them, which meant tying yourself in for a twelve-month contract. And, anyway, you mostly hired pilots, not their aircraft. They just got thrown in with the bargain.
I stirred my coffee and looked at the crowd waiting for the steamer to take them across to the market at Luino. A ripple of expectation went through them as they spotted the boat leaving the far shore, and the crush at the gate tightened.
‘I appreciate Gennaro’s offer. I really do.’
‘A generous offer.’ Too much for scum like me, suggested his new tone. I was clearly supposed to be grateful.
‘Can’t argue with that, Signor Gronchi. Nor can I accept a job then cut and run as soon as a better offer comes along, especially as I have spent my client’s money on cameras and film. I mean, what would that do to my standing in the industry?’
At least he was polite enough not to burst out laughing at the thought of me having any standing. Instead he grimaced. ‘You know, turning this trip down will not reflect well on your suitability for future assignments.’
‘Big stick?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I’ve had the carrot, fat and juicy, now here comes the big stick. “You’ll never work in this town again.” Is that it?’
‘I’m sorry you see it that way.’
‘What way am I meant to see it?’ I realised I was shouting, trying to drown out the racket in my skull, so I switched to soft and serious. ‘I am already contracted until the first week of October. So, much as I would like to fly you between meetings with the fruit and veg branch of the mafia, I can’t oblige. Give my apologies to your employer.’
Gronchi stood so quickly it took me by surprise. He didn’t offer his hand, or wait for me to get up. He simply said, ‘I will report your decision,’ and left. He didn’t even pay for his coffee.
I asked the kitchen to rustle me up a four-egg omelette—the Italian habit of skimping on breakfast has never appealed to me—then went back to the room to tackle the vagaries of SIP, the phone system. It and the PTT, the post office, were two of the big downsides to living in the country. That and a chaotic political system which had never recovered from the factionism of World War Two.
I managed to contact Furio, told him I had just declined the chance of us getting rich, and that the economic situation was so dire that people were trying to rob the likes of me now. He laughed at the futility of that before remembering to ask how I was. I requested he get his beautiful, talented and endlessly kind mother to pull a few strings for me at her newspaper, although maybe he could skip telling her about the company’s missing mafia payday. Then, tomorrow, to get his arse and the Beech up to the airfield at Invorio.
Involving Furio’s mother was probably pointless, but the more I thought about being worked over by the three guys, the less I was convinced it was a straightforward robbery. They were too old for casual street crime and, if not the best that money could buy, they’d used their fists before. Furthermore, how did they know to ignore my wallet, which only had a few th
ousand lire in it? No, I wasn’t some simple crime statistic. I had a hunch I might be dealing with a jealous husband.
Fifteen
I DON’T KNOW WHAT I expected when I arrived at the piazza in front of Domodossola’s grandiose railway station. It was mostly car park now, and I left the MV in front of the soulless cafeteria selling what they called ‘hamburglars’ where formerly there had been two bars and the Casa del Fascio, destroyed in the fighting.
I examined the walls and pavements, thinking there might be some sort of plaque or memorial stone where Fausto fell. There was nothing. Perhaps it wasn’t a sufficiently heroic death. Strange, he’d come close to going out in a blaze of both glory and gunfire several times but, in the end, in the dying moments of his great adventure, some slimy little nobody got to murder him.
I looked back at the station forecourt, where it was once shrouded by the sandbag barricade we’d put up as the Germans got closer and closer to us. Two sets of rail tracks left the town, one heading north for the Simplon Tunnel, the awesome engineering feat that put this nondescript town on the map the first time round, and a second which crawled along the valley floor before rising into the mountains and switchbacking its way up, then down, into Locarno.
It was along the former route that Major Archibald Lang had come, from Special Forces HQ Number 2 in Bern; it was the latter route I had reluctantly taken to freedom. Back then, in 1944, you could see the whole square from the blue, narrow-gauge tramlike Locarno trains as they pulled out of the station. Now the line had been sunk and covered over, with access to the tracks down a subway to the side of the main building.
I walked around the piazza, stopping before a poster reminding the inhabitants of Domodossola that it hadn’t been alone. In 1944, the CLN—the Comitato di Liberazione Nationale—an organisation that tried, with varying success, to impose order and discipline on the disparate groups fighting the Germans—had proposed a series of free republics, where partisans would drive out the enemy and wait for the Allies to arrive. Those that were not liberated by winter would be supplied by air drops. The poster listed them all:
Alto Monferrato (Sep–2 Dec), Alto Tortonese4 (Sep–Dec), Bobbio e Torriglia4 (7 Jul–27 Aug), Cansiglio (Jul–Sep), Carnia (Jul–Oct), Friuli Orientale (30 Jun–Sep), Imperia (Aug–Oct), Langhe (Sep–Nov), Montefiorino (17 Jun–1 Aug), Ossola (10 Sep–13 Oct), Val Ceno (10 Jun–11 Jul), Val d’Enza e Val Parma (Jun–Jul), Val Maira e Val Varaita (Jun–21 Aug), Val Taro (15 Jun–24 Jul), Valli di Lanzo (25 Jun–Sep), Valsesia (11 Jun–10 Jul), and Varzi4 (Sep–29 Nov).
Underneath each one was a single word: tradimento. Betrayed.
The Ossola Republic was centred on Domodossola, and it was the only one to receive official recognition from Switzerland. Like the others, it was woefully undersupplied and it waited in vain for the Allied forces to break through. It was probably hopeless optimism to expect the latter to divert divisions from France and Arnhem, but it didn’t feel like that at the time. It felt like abandonment.
This republic lasted just thirty-four days before Germans, supported by Italian fascists of X-Mas, the SS Italienische, parachutists of the Guardia Nazionale Repubblicana, and the Brigate Nere ‘Christina’, overwhelmed it once more. It was that fleeting month of freedom, and the men and women who achieved it, that we were here to celebrate. I locked the bike and began to walk up the street named after Paolo Ferraris, one of the heroes of those few short weeks, wondering why Fausto never got a commemorative road named after him.
The celebration for the twentieth anniversary of the Repubblica dell’Ossola began in the square outside the municipio, the Town Hall, the site of so many ideological battles between Communists and non-Communists, where agendas and proclamations were drawn up and issued. I still remembered finding Fausto sitting beneath the statue in the centre of the piazza, cigarette in his mouth, Spanish machine pistol across his knees.
‘What are you doing?’ I had asked.
‘They’ve been in there six hours,’ he replied wearily, ‘and they’ve finally decided on a name for the Republic. I’m going back to defending the approaches.’
Maybe that was why there was no commemoration of him. Fausto never believed in taking part in the political battles. Spain and Stalin had cured him of that. By 1944, he just wanted to blow the heads off any Germans who came up his road.
By the time I reached the piazza, the crowd was thirty deep surrounding a stage set up outside the municipio. Around the edges were a few groups of vitelloni, Italy’s own brand of disaffected youth, the boys aping Adriano Celentano or James Dean, smoking, laughing, apparently indifferent to the proceedings, but also curious enough not to move on.
As I manoeuvred myself for a decent view, I felt hard arms fly round me and squeeze me so tight that I gave a yell which made the speaker look my way with a frown.
It was Rosario, still small, powerfully built and bald, now with a Zapata-style moustache and an embroidered shirt that made him look like a beatnik. ‘Jack—good to see you! Shit—what happened to your face?’
‘I fell.’
He squinted at me. ‘Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘You see a doctor about this falling?’
‘I don’t make a habit of it. How are you?’
‘Good, good.’
There was a moment’s awkward pause and I asked: ‘What are you doing now?’
‘I play jazz.’ He mimed what I guessed was a saxophone. ‘Rome, Positano, Montreux, Corsica, Nice, all over.’
Rosario had been a musician before he became Fausto’s right-hand man. I had never asked him what kind. It was difficult to equate the hard-as-nails partisan I had known with cabarets and concerts. Rosario had always made me a little nervous. Fausto I think I understood—he was a natural leader—while Pavel was fighting the people who had destroyed his family and country. Ragno was in awe of Fausto, a puppy dog, but Rosario was his own man. I came to the conclusion that Rosario liked nothing more than a scrap; he enjoyed killing Germans.
‘I have my own club, too. You should come.’
‘I will.’ I didn’t like jazz, at least not the modern kind, but even I knew for any jazzman to have his own club was quite a coup. He handed me a card, stylishly embossed with a figure playing saxophone and the name: Rosa’s. The address was in Milan, not far from the Duomo.
‘Rosa’s? Why not Rosario’s?’
‘Don’t worry,’ he laughed. ‘I haven’t gone queer. I don’t know why, but people go to a club named after a woman more than a man. So I shortened my name. Still me up there. In trousers. What about you?’ he asked. ‘What are you up to?’
‘Still flying.’
‘Still crashing?’ He pointed at my scratches.
‘That’s not how I got the face, Rosario.’
He laughed and slapped my back. ‘Dinner, tonight, on the square,’ he said. ‘Will you be there?’
‘Yes. Will you play?’
He nodded. ‘It’s how I started. When the circus or fair came to town, I played clarinet for the acrobats for a few lire. Then weddings, funerals, processions …’ I could see his mind drift to the time before the war, when he was a scruffy kid with a useful talent to entertain. ‘So tonight, I go back to my roots.’
‘Just don’t expect any acrobatics from me.’
‘On that ankle?’ He kicked me playfully. ‘I still remember the football match—’
‘OK, OK, that’s enough. Tonight.’
‘See you then. I have to find Pavel.’ He took my hand and stared into my eyes the way Italians do when they want to convey their absolute sincerity. ‘Good to see you, Jack Kirby.’
As Rosario slipped away, I turned back to pay my attention to the proceedings. The current mayor was reciting a roll call of those who took the time and the trouble to hammer out the fine details of the zona liberata. Filippo Beltrami, Antonio Di Dio, Ettore Tibaldi, Gisella Floreanini, Giacomo Roberti, Giorgio Ballarini—the Communists, lawyers, doctors, priests, teachers, veteran antifascists w
ho, even if they didn’t bury their differences, had managed to come to some agreement. If only the commandanti of the partigiani had managed to do the same.
The list went on, each person receiving a glowing eulogy. Some of them were there to receive them with blushes, others earning a moment’s silence and a mass making of the sign of the cross. I had forgotten how long-winded Italian ceremonies can be and started to skirt the crowd in search of caffeine and a grappa when Francesca spotted me at about the same time I saw her.
She was up on the stage, at the edge of all the suits, sashes and brocaded uniforms, a sheaf of notes held tightly in her hand, dressed in a sombre black suit that made her look like a sexy widow. She was to say a few words about Fausto, following on from similar praise for the Beltrami, Piave, Valtoce, and Perotti partisan divisions.
Even from this distance, she could see my face wasn’t what I like to think of as the worn but handsome visage she had kissed at the house, and I made a complex charade about falling over. She signalled she would see me later at the dinner. I nodded, knowing from the length of the introductory speech that it was going to be much, much later.
As I turned I saw him at the edge of the crowd. Nino: il Giurista. Nino, the lawyer. He was older, of course, and stockier; he had grown a beard and was wearing heavy black sunglasses and the collar on his jacket was turned up. But, hell, I’d know the man who killed Fausto anywhere.
I felt the loss of the Colt doubly now, but I sidled up behind him as quietly as I could. He muttered as I jostled him, figuring it was just another eager member of the crowd. I pushed a knuckle into his back and whispered into his ear, ‘You know that Marshall Industries of Kentucky make the finest silencers in the world. As used by the CIA. There would be a very soft plop and your spine will sever. You’ll collapse in agony. I’ll be gone. Do you believe me, Nino? Nod if you do.’
He nodded. It was rubbish, of course, but I said it with the conviction of a hired assassin. I was banking on him not knowing a silencer from a cigarette. If he did, he’d know I’d forgotten that the pros called them suppressors—there is no such thing as a fully silent pistol, unless you are using one of the big single-shot Welrods or its derivatives.
