After Midnight

by Robert Ryan

  ‘It’s as good a place as any to start,’ Lindy said. Fine. That only left us with about five thousand square miles to cover.

  ‘I didn’t ask you about your face.’

  ‘I thought you were being polite.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘No. It’s my ribs that hurt.’ I pointed to the scabs on my forehead. ‘These just frighten dogs and young children.’

  We had moved on to lunch, both of us exhausted by the emotional effort of attempting to find Bill Carr on that map, and of trying not to relive the last terrifying minutes in that plane. Lost, alone in the sky, buffeted by unpredictable winds, searching for a tear in the cloud cover, or lights on the ground, and the difficult decision made by Carr to come back round again. I thought of that night in my stricken Mozzie, and across twenty years, my heart went out to them all.

  I hadn’t lied about the Alpini attack. As soon as I heard the plane, I rolled out from under Francesca, lit the first flare and waited. What I didn’t know was how long the plane had been up there, hoping for a complete ground signal. It was unforgivable because it only needed one missing light for them to abort the mission: faulty signals often meant enemy decoys. I couldn’t shake the feeling that Carr had come round for a second look because of my tardiness, hoping he would get a full set of the lights.

  It was when I lit the third flare that we were shot at, machine-gun fire; Francesca grabbed my arm and we stumbled down the track in the dark, voices and flashlights behind us, back through the forest to the bicycles. ‘Ah well,’ said Fausto, when we finally gathered back at the house. ‘Look on the bright side—you’re still our BLO.’

  To me, there was no bright side, and the attraction I had felt for Francesca since I first set eyes on her was soured for ever. I had chosen it over my duty. After that night, I never so much as touched her again, until that kiss twenty years later. After all, I was just a little light relief from her relationship with Fausto. The knowledge of what I had caused was the reason I had never returned. It was as simple as that.

  Lindy stared at me as she shovelled big forkfuls of spaghetti into her mouth. No sparrow-like portions for her.

  ‘What?’ I asked after five minutes.

  ‘It kind of suits you, that beaten-about look.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘No, really. You get a decent haircut and shave, you’d shine up quite nicely, for—’

  ‘An old man.’

  ‘A pom, I was about to say.’

  ‘A pom? You know, I’d almost forgotten you were a colonial for a minute.’ I watched her bristle, with some satisfaction. ‘Tell me about Australia.’

  ‘Nothing to tell. Big. Beautiful. Friendly. But a long way from anywhere. Or, at least, it thinks it is. Which is why our young men and women keep coming to miserable old London. My stepfather is not a bad man, but deadly dull.’

  ‘And your mother?’

  ‘Would like to know the truth as much as I would.’

  ‘The truth?’

  ‘About where my real father died.’

  ‘Jack.’

  I looked up and it was Furio, waiting for an introduction to a woman he clearly considered too attractive to be wasted on me. He’d always liked blondes, Furio.

  ‘Ah. Furio Gabbiano, Lindy Carr, our employer. I believe you spoke on the telephone.’

  ‘Yes. How do you do. Pardon my English,’ he said.

  ‘But you know an offer of work when you hear it, eh?’ I said.

  Lindy put her fork down and wiped her mouth. ‘Jack—’

  ‘It’s OK. I wanted to wait until you two were together to sort this one out.’

  ‘Jack—’

  I was ready to let rip. I’d been saving this. ‘Furio, when we are negotiating a contract, it isn’t quite the done thing, old boy, to say you’ll—’

  ‘Jack, I lied.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘About Furio saying he’d fly me. I lied.’

  ‘Oh.’ My sails drooped alarmingly as the wind was taken out of them.

  ‘It was just a cheap ploy. Sorry. I thought you’d take the job if you believed someone else might. I’d spoken to Furio on the phone … Sorry. I meant to tell you it was a bluff. I forgot.’

  Furio smiled like an idiot throughout this exchange, not following a word.

  ‘You brought the plane up to Invorio?’ I asked him.

  ‘Sí.’

  ‘Good. We can get started tomorrow, weather permitting. Looking good though.’ I made a play of scanning the sky like a great sage of meteorology. I’d already checked with the office at Milan airport and it was going to be fine flying weather, but I wanted Lindy to think she was getting value for money.

  I also wanted to tell her how time-consuming and debilitating an air search can be. We’d be doing a photo run, infra-red and black and white, and visual searches, the sort that make you feel you are going to wear your eyes out before their time. Then we’d have to go over the photographs with magnifying glasses. Come to think of it, she was getting value for money. I still felt sore about her cheap trick with Furio, though—I’d been festering on that all summer. Nothing galls me more than a wasted fester.

  ‘Furio, get a chair, get a fork, get some food inside you.’ I signalled to Maria that we had company for i secondi. ‘And Miss Carr is paying.’

  Invorio airfield looked a little like me—past its best and knocked around. There was a collection of pre-war hangars, a couple of prefabs housing offices and café, and an ugly square concrete block of a tower which still bore the faded markings of the Luftwaffe group that used to operate from it. It was fine for what I wanted, though.

  I had done this by the book—filed flight plans with air-traffic control, although I was going to be well away from any commercial corridors, and double-checked Lindy’s clearance with the military. We had the camera, film, the plane, a line of fuel credit, and a couple of pilots. It was time to begin.

  As with all aircraft, the Beechcraft came with a long preliminary checklist before take-off and, like most pilots, I was sometimes tempted to skip the more mundane parts of it, but I never did. So I sent Furio and Lindy off to rustle up something to drink from the scruffy café and got to work. I had also asked Furio to brief Lindy on the regali that would appear on our expenses—the little gifts to various people at the airstrip that would help lubricate our stay. It was the Italian way.

  I checked the cowl-flaps were open and then the oil-cooler duct for debris and birds’ nests. I had welded a dipstick onto the inside of the filler cap, so it was easy to confirm the oil level in each engine. Then I ran a hand along the leading edges and inspected the condition of the two-bladed props, which had now done 400 hours apiece since their last major overhaul. I did the visuals on the tail fin, rudder and elevators and checked the radio aerials were secure.

  The Beech was a big plane, thirty-eight feet long with a wing-span of forty-seven feet, and you can’t rush the procedure on an aircraft coming up for its twenty-first birthday. Its Perspex was starting to turn milky like a cataract in places, and the aluminium was showing age-blooms of oxidisation but, by the time I was back where I had started, all looked hunky-dory.

  I was ready to move inside and start with the checklist there, making sure we had enough fuel, that the controls were working, the gyros caged, the throttle friction set for take-off. There was no just leaping in, pumping the primers and engaging starters with this baby.

  When I snapped open the fuselage door and poked my head into the gloom of the interior, I came across one preliminary that wasn’t in the Pilot’s Notes. Perhaps it should be. Check behind pilots seat for dead body. Remove if necessary.

  It was Nino Leone the Lawyer, and judging by the congealed mess where his left eye should have been, I guessed he had been shot.

  Part Three

  Twenty

  I KNEW ENOUGH ABOUT the Italian police and justice system to want to avoid all contact with them. I particularly wanted to avoid anything to do with a Pubblico Minist
ero, an examining magistrate, who had the power of arrest, investigation and interrogation as well as deciding on a verdict. They were a one-man legal system, and there were rumours that it had turned some of their heads. I can’t think why.

  The police who came to the airfield were a couple of wary members of La Polizia in borghese—plainclothes—along with three of the uniformed branch. They examined the body, declared the man dead, called for a pathologist and told the three of us we were under arrest. I wanted to ask what the charge was, but kept my mouth shut. You don’t jib the cops here. The new leggi Cossiga, the anti-terrorism laws, allowed detention without charge for forty-eight hours. If they decided to prosecute you, you could wait three years before your number came up at the courthouse. Smile. Be nice. Say ‘sir’ a lot. These were the best options.

  We were taken to the questura at Arona. They decided this was too big a case and we were moved, in separate Fiats with flashing lights—just to let everyone know that dangerous criminals were on board—south to the station at Novara. I was put in a holding room which smelled of fresh paint. It was furnished with a desk and two chairs and a window that only a giraffe could see out of. Someone gave me a lukewarm cup of instant coffee, which I suspect was part of the grinding-down process. Nothing would make a Milanese talk faster than the threat of powdery Nescafe. We English are made of stronger stuff and the guard watched in horror as I drank it without wincing.

  Inside, I was wondering who the hell had bumped off Nino, and why. Furthermore, and rather more importantly, why choose my plane as his next-to-final resting place? Was this connected with three men taking a strong dislike to me down at the lakeshore? I also wondered if anyone had overheard me talking to Nino in the market café. Could anything I said have been misconstrued as a threat? Well, only most of it.

  A Commissario, a man half-excited and half-appalled by having a murder on his patch, came in for the preliminari questions, as he called them, and I went over the same story I was sure Furio and Lindy were trotting out. The previous day we had had lunch, discussed the search until late afternoon, when Furio went off to Turin to visit his mother, dropping Lindy at Bavenno, where she was staying, on the way. Furio was the last to see the plane, having flown it in from Malpensa and secured it. No, I didn’t think Furio or Lindy had met Nino. In fact, I was certain of it.

  The Commissario by now reckoned I had no friends in high places otherwise I would have dropped them into my first three answers and became more aggressive in his line of enquiry, especially when I admitted seeing Nino at the ceremony and to speaking with him afterwards. I figured to hide that would invite trouble later on, but I could tell that my cop scented blood.

  I refrained from asking the obvious question. If I’d killed Nino, wouldn’t I have stashed the body somewhere else, other than my own plane? But I knew what he would answer to that. What better depistaggio, red herring, than discovering the body myself?

  A telephone call deprived me of the Commissario company and they racked up the torture with another cup of dishwater coffee. Again, it hardly touched the sides. People would be coming to watch this crazy bravado soon.

  With a display of great sadness the Commissario told me my caso was being handed over to a ‘higher authority’ and that I would have to wait for two hours or so to be interviewed again. Which meant I might end up facing one of those Pubblico Ministero megalomaniacs. Furio and Lindy, the Commissario added, had been released. I tried to recall if I had met any friendly, and cheap, lawyers recently. It looked like the higher authorities had narrowed their suspects down to me.

  Before he left, I had asked my interrogator about my plane, and was told it was a crime scene and had been impounded by the state. I began to wish I had kissed it goodbye. Not all the claims about the speed of Italian bureaucracy are true, but that is because most of them underestimate just how bad it is. People were still getting call-up papers for World War One, there were still 20,000 pension claims before La Corte dei Conti for that very war, and it took an average of six years to get a tax rebate. So I could reckon on ten before I saw my Beech again. I made a mental note to tell them that you have to turn the prop regularly to stop the bottom cylinders filling with oil.

  I was tired of the coffee, and of having to use the primitive lavatory because of it, by the time the Pubblico Ministero came. He was fifty, with a shock of silver hair, and a suit fashionably cut in what the Italians think is the English style. His brogues were wonderfully shiny, he had long black socks that showed no leg, and beautifully manicured hands. He was no provincial policeman, that was for sure.

  The guard let him into my cell and was told to leave. The newcomer cleverly refused the offer of refreshment, turned and fixed me with clear unblinking blue eyes. He took out a small moleskin notebook and turned over a few pages.

  ‘Mr Jack Kirby,’ he began.

  ‘Well, they got my name right. It’s a start.’ It was, too. Once your name was entered incorrectly on any form, as far as the state was concerned, that was your moniker for life.

  ‘My name is Dottore Giorgio Zopatti.’

  I didn’t ask him what he was a doctor of: I doubted he was there to take my blood pressure. ‘From?’

  He took a slim wallet from his suit—nothing bulky enough to ruin the line of the jacket—flipped it open and slid it across the table. If he had taken my blood pressure the mercury would have popped out of the tube, but I tried to stay calm. ‘The SISDe.’

  The Servizio Informazioni per la Sicurezza Democratica is roughly the equivalent of MI5. Except the SISDe, like its foreign espionage counterpart SISMI, was well known to be the old fascist Intelligence Service, re-branded and re-launched, but with the same personnel. I had spent part of the war trying to kill these blokes.

  ‘I don’t see there is anything to do with national security here. It’s a murder case.’

  ‘Your face is quite damaged.’ Clearly he wasn’t going to discuss jurisdiction with the likes of me.

  ‘You should see the other fella.’ He leaned forward and I raised my palms and said quickly, ‘I’m joking. I went stumbling around in the dark by Lake Maggiore, near my hotel. Walked into a concrete piling. Accident.’ I turned my head to show him the marks on my temple. ‘Look, they are several days old.’

  He examined my wounds for a couple of seconds. ‘How many times did you walk into this piling, Mr Kirby?’

  ‘I fell over. I was concussed.’

  ‘And you saw a doctor?’

  ‘No. But the hotel will confirm what happened.’

  He looked up at the ceiling, just a glance, but I knew then we were being taped, possibly filmed. I tried to keep calm, but my hands felt clammy. La Polizia occasionally bent the rules; the security services didn’t have a rulebook to bend.

  ‘How well did you know the victim?’

  ‘Not well enough to let him in my plane without permission.’

  ‘He could fly?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I realised I had to keep the answers straight. It wouldn’t pay to be clever. ‘He was a lawyer.’

  ‘A lawyer? What gave you that idea?’

  I shrugged. ‘When I met him in 1944 he said he was a lawyer.’

  ‘He was faccendiere, perhaps, but no lawyer.’

  A Mr Fixit, not always a complimentary term. ‘Well, it doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘Officially, according to his documents, he was a Treuhänder.’

  I shook my head at the German term to show he would have to explain.

  ‘A fiduciary agent. A trustee. A go-between, you might say. A cog in financial transactions.’

  ‘I never had any dealings with him.’

  ‘You met him in 1944?’

  ‘In Domodossola.’

  ‘Ah.’ His mouth twitched, but he managed to refrain from spitting on the floor. Old fascists didn’t like to be reminded about any of the free republics they helped put down. ‘How did you meet?’

  I gave him the short version, which was much the same as the long version
. Nino dealt directly with Fausto, not the minions and certainly not with the BLOs. We British, in particular, were kept out of discussions with the Swiss, because we had failed the Republic.

  ‘Leone was supplying materiel to the partisan forces from Switzerland?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A violation of their neutrality, surely.’

  What, I almost said—like Switzerland buying four hundred million pounds’ worth of Nazi gold to help finance the war, much of it looted from the vaults of conquered states? The complicity between the two nations went all the way down to one of its big coffee and confectionery companies supplying the Wehrmacht with chocolate. I didn’t think I should start down that road, so I said, ‘No, since Bern had recognised the Republic.’

  ‘So he supplied arms?’

  ‘I think he arranged for their purchase. And for food and medicine.’

  ‘In exchange for?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Time off in Purgatory? ‘Maybe he wanted to see Domodossola succeed.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He said it as if I had told him that a squadron of airborne pigs were circling Mount Rosa. ‘You have been involved with guns.’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Sicily?’

  ‘You can’t pull Sicily on me. The most lethal thing I flew was bad red wine.’ Most of us freelancers had been chucked off the island when it emerged that it was a major supply route for weapons used in the Algerian insurrection against the French: down to Palermo, across to Tunis, then either overland or by boat to the rebels. I kept well clear of it, not least because the French had put an SDECE team onto it, and they weren’t fussy about how they stopped the trade. Eventually, worried that de Gaulle’s secret service might start assassinating pilots, Italy had stepped in and imposed flying restrictions from the island, which put us all out of business. Which was how I ended up at Malpensa flinging skydivers at wide-bodied jets. I told him this, as forcefully as I could. I didn’t want him to think Nino and I had fallen out over a shipment of carbines to Algiers.