After Midnight

by Robert Ryan

  We landed at a helipad the pilot knew in the grounds of a fancy hotel, and from there we caught a cab to Lindy’s lodgings. It was only just after midnight, barely into a new day. Both of us were drained, right down to the marrow. However, united by the nervy satisfaction of surviving the worst day of our lives, we sat and talked, mostly about her father, her future and Furio. She raided the kitchen and we drank strong black coffee and chewed amaretti until the first tentative streaks of morning appeared outside her window.

  Then I kissed her on both cheeks and went back to my own bed, before I passed out on hers. When he saw me walk from the lobby, the taxi driver ostentatiously put a blanket on the back seat of his Alfa, in case any of my grubbiness was contagious. As he drove away after dropping me off, I examined my meagre change and realised he’d charged me some sort of grime supplement. I was too weary to care.

  There were two familiar cars parked outside my hotel, one a sleek silver Mercedes, the other a little Alfa sports. Of course. Furio would have been reported overdue after dark. The search planes were probably warming up even now, at first light. So people had come looking for me, too, in case I’d made it back.

  As I walked past the Merc I saw that there was someone in the driver’s seat. I peered in, then rapped on the glass. The figure sat up and wound down the window. ‘Morning,’ I said. ‘Given the chauffeur the night off?’

  Zopatti blinked away the sleep and smoothed the creases from his jacket. ‘Yes.’

  I indicated the hotel. ‘You’d have been more comfortable inside.’

  ‘I didn’t want to miss you.’

  ‘You were certain I was coming back?’

  ‘Pretty certain, Mr Kirby. You struck me as the sort who always comes back.’ I wasn’t sure if he meant like a bad penny, but I let it pass. ‘What happened out there?’

  ‘Turn the car engine and the heater on and I’ll tell you.’

  He obliged and I climbed into the passenger seat. I rotated the dashboard air vents so that the warmth played onto my face and I told him everything, from Furio’s crash onwards. All I filleted out was the real reason Fausto wanted me dead. It was best to let Zopatti think this was about ancient history. He listened without interrupting until it came to the part where I shot Fausto.

  ‘You’re sure he is dead?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He could fill in some gaps for me.’

  ‘Like what happened to the loot?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Perhaps the wife …?’

  ‘Francesca? Fausto told me she knew nothing about the robbery, the trucks or the stolen artefacts.’

  Zopatti raised a disbelieving eyebrow. ‘She was his wife.’

  ‘Nothing,’ I repeated with some force. ‘He was quite adamant.’

  Zopatti shrugged to indicate he was prepared to let that go.

  ‘It was all Fausto,’ I continued. ‘And his alter-ego, Conti. I think he had been fighting too long, and by forty-four he went under. I saw pilots crack in six months. He fought for eight years—Franco and then Mussolini. Maybe after all that, he thought the coffers owed him a little payback.’

  ‘Perhaps. I think it best we leave all such speculation to the professionals. You will repeat all this formally for me?’

  ‘I killed men up there, Dottore,’ I reminded him wearily. ‘People I thought were my friends.’

  ‘In self-defence. I will send a team to clean it all up this morning. You needn’t worry about the police. This is for internal consumption only.’

  ‘Lang?’

  ‘SISDe will get the body back to the UK.’

  ‘And an obituary in the Telegraph will say he died peacefully at home, a good and faithful servant to the end.’

  ‘I would imagine so, Mr Kirby. Will you be OK?’

  I nodded. The shock of what I had done in those mountains would hit me, but not yet, not until my guard was down. I hoped I was ready for it.

  ‘What good will it do you, Dottore? Knowing what really happened back in forty-four?’ I asked.

  ‘Perhaps I just want to prove that no one side had a monopoly on corruption or ruthlessness back then. It’s time the scores were evened a little.’ He mimed a pair of scales with his hands. ‘I’ll be in touch, Mr Kirby.’

  He turned the car engine off. It was my signal to leave. I held out my hand. ‘Call me Jack.’

  He took it and smiled. ‘I’ll be in touch, Jack.’

  ‘And perhaps we can draw a line under all this.’

  ‘A line?’ He shook his head sadly. ‘It will be a long time before Italy can draw a line under her war. But perhaps, together, we can add a few more dashes to it.’

  I got out of the Mercedes and watched him drive away. He was right. The wounds of what had happened twenty years ago were far from healed and still had the capacity for hurt and might even tear a country like Italy apart if they were allowed to. Which meant that Zopatti and I were destined to be trapped in a war that refused to end. I’d been way off the mark when I said to Lang that all interest in it would fizzle out in a few years. I had to come to terms with the fact that, one way or another, I’d be living my conflict until I died. I just wanted to spend those years with someone who understood that.

  The sound of my boots on the marble floor disturbed the snoozing night porter, who took my bedraggled appearance in his stride and told me that my friend was waiting in my room. She’d been there since early evening. He hoped that was all right. I told him it was just fine, but I had a sudden attack of nausea in my stomach. Would it be all right?

  As I waited for the elevator, I thought about one thing that had emerged from a long night of caffeine with Lindy. In a bizarre way, Bill Carr had saved my life and that of his daughter. Twenty years ago, he had come round for a second run in his Liberator and, despite the signals being all wrong, he had ditched the supply canisters in the hope they fell into the right hands. They had, eventually. Without the weapons we discovered in the fort, Fausto would have killed us for certain.

  I pulled back the well-oiled gates of the lift and stepped in. Next time I had a drink in my hand, I would raise it to Bill Carr. After all, he was hardly the only one who had pulled crazy stunts during the war. File under ‘Reckless Bravery’, and God bless him.

  I let myself into my darkened room. There was enough light filtering through the curtains for me to make out her shape on the bed, still fully dressed except for her shoes. I called her name and she rolled over and swung her legs onto the carpet and was across in three strides, her arms tight around me, her face buried in my shoulder. ‘I heard about the plane. I thought Fausto had killed you. He found out about—’

  ‘I know.’ I kept it simple. ‘He’s dead. I killed him.’

  I felt Francesca go rigid for a second, then slump. I carried her to the bed. She was crying, and my heart went out to her as I laid her down. I took a hand, kissed it, muttered an apology, and turned for the door.

  She sniffed back her tears. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To let you grieve for your husband.’

  ‘You idiot. Come here.’ She pulled me down next to her and threw an arm across my chest. It was a relief to have her perfume cut through the other odours of that night and I inhaled deeply.

  She touched my cheek. Even in the half-light, she could see it was damaged. ‘You’re burned?’

  ‘Not badly.’ Not as much as poor Ragno or Furio.

  ‘We have a lot to talk about,’ she said.

  ‘We do.’ There was much I wanted to know, but a wave of exhaustion swept over me and I lay back on the bed and closed my eyes. ‘But I need to sleep.’

  ‘You need to shower. There is dirt in the cuts.’

  ‘Later.’

  ‘I’m sorry he’s dead,’ she said quietly.

  ‘I know.’ In a strange way, so was I. I wished the story of Gruppo Fausto hadn’t ended so ignominiously. I would have preferred my memory of him to end with a crumpled body on a piazza
, twenty years ago.

  ‘But I’m more glad you are alive,’ she said, and before I could reply, she added: ‘You must think me callous, to say that.’

  ‘No. You always were strong, Francesca.’

  ‘Not strong enough when it came to Fausto. Or Riccardo. I couldn’t break free when I should have.’

  ‘None of us were strong enough, Francesca.’ Ragno, Pavel, Rosario: three others who should have said no, who should have resisted him when he came calling with more demands for old times’ sake.

  ‘There you are being reasonable again. I think you are a good man, Jack Kirby.’

  I snorted my disbelief at that. ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘All this time, you are the only one of us who has been straight and true and honourable. The only one.’

  Francesca stood up and rummaged under the bed for her shoes, then slipped them on. There was the rasp of a zipper being done up.

  ‘You’re going?’

  She nodded. ‘I am going, Jack.’ The weight of purpose in her voice made me tingle. This was a Francesca I hadn’t heard for a long time. ‘I shall be away for a few hours and then, when I return, we shall discuss what we are to do.’

  ‘About what?’ I fought and lost the desire to yawn.

  ‘About you and me. About us. In the cold light of day. It’s better that way. Right now, we might make promises we can’t keep.’

  I pulled myself up on one elbow. I could feel her slipping away from me. ‘I won’t change my mind in a few hours,’ I said. ‘I know what I want to do. I lov—’

  She put a finger to my lips. ‘We’ll see.’ She picked up her handbag from the bedside table. ‘You’ll still be here?’

  ‘You’ll be coming back?’

  She bent over and kissed my forehead before she tiptoed away and slipped out of the door, closing it softly behind her. I shivered and wondered if I had just committed a terrible mistake by letting her go. Perhaps it was for the best; after all, we carried more baggage than ever before now.

  Then I realised she would be returning. Francesca was made of tougher stuff than I was. I may have ducked out in the aftermath of 1944, but she had no intention of doing likewise. If there was a way to save us, to reconcile our past and future, she’d find it. At least, that’s what I had to cling to for the next few hours.

  I stripped off my clothes and wrapped myself in a blanket, slipped the Colt under the pillow and flopped down. I was so tired I felt like I was plunging down a massive chasm, into welcome darkness. As I fell, I recalled the pledge I had made to the memory of Bill Carr, the man who had inadvertently saved my skin. It went like this: no matter what the coming weeks or months held, no matter what happened with Francesca, Jack Kirby still had a Consolidated B-24 Liberator to find.

  Author’s Note

  CERTAIN ELEMENTS OF AFTER Midnight are based on fact. The near-suicidal supply drops over Warsaw from Foggia in Southern Italy by the RAF and the SAAF (South African Air Force), the loss of Liberator bombers in the Italian mountains—one of them still missing, sixty years later—Mussolini’s puppet regime at Salò and Villa Feltrinelli, the Red Stocking missions, the sealed trains at Chiasso and the Republic of Ossola, centred on Domodossola near the Swiss border, are all true.

  As is the letter written from Foggia by an Australian airman to the one-year-old daughter he had never seen.

  Acknowledgements

  FIRST AND FOREMOST, MY heartfelt thanks go to Anne Storm, who allowed me to use her father’s letter, and her search for him, as the inspiration of this story. Even though she knew I would play fast and loose with it (she had read Early One Morning, a previous World War Two novel), she gave me permission to go ahead.

  Her father, Bob Millar, was in one of the twenty Liberators (sixteen of 31 Squadron SAAF and four of 34 Squadron SAAF) which took off from Foggia on 12 October 1944 in the late afternoon. Many of the pilots were RAF Flight Sergeants, because some of the SAAF officers were due to attend a party at 34 SAAF. Their mission was to drop supplies to the partisans operating in the Apennine and Maritime mountains of Northern Italy. There were four different drop sites with five planes allotted to each site. Bob was aboard the Liberator KH-158 piloted by Major Urry, SAAF. The crew was composed of five SAAF, two RAF and one RAAF—Flight Officer T. R. Millar, Anne’s dad, who, like most of the crew apart from the pilot and second pilot, had flown a mission to Yugoslavia in KH-158 the previous night.

  The weather turned nasty in the mountains, with many forced to abandon their mission. However, six planes never made it back. Four went down on the peaks (one plane missed crossing safely by just twenty feet, as related here), one came down near Cantalupa but the sixth, KH-158, went missing and has never to date been located. As no wreckage has been found, Anne now wonders if it went into the sea south of Genoa or even exploded in mid-air. Obviously she would like to hear from anyone who has information. See http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.com/~stormrhb and click on The Millar Story.

  Much of the research about the events of 12 October was undertaken by Giuseppe (Beppe) Barbero and others, with Nick and Catherine Madina, in diligent trawls through the Public Records Office (now the National Archives) and Italian and South African sources, and in tracking down survivors and relatives of the various crews. The Madinas, who compiled all the research onto three CD-ROMs, helped Anne develop a detailed picture of the missions.

  Lindy Carr and Bill Carr are total fictions, and the character of Lindy is not based on Anne at all, although they do share a certain tenacity: Anne has tracked down surviving family members of the other crew on board her father’s plane (plus some crew relatives of the five crashed planes).

  Details of the Warsaw run and other missions can be found in The Men Who Went to Warsaw by Lawrence Isemonger and Airlift to Warsaw by Neil Orpen.

  I am indebted to Taigh Ramey of Vintage Aircraft in Stockton, California, who suggested Kirby fly an AT-11 and helped with technical details. A website he runs, www.twinbeech.com, tells you all about these remarkable planes. He was also kind enough to read an early draft of the manuscript.

  The charming Francesca Lombardi lent me her name and her knowledge of Milan and Italian, for which I am very grateful. Her father Franco makes the best olive oil in the world, incidentally.

  The thirty-four days of Domodossola are true but, although I have mentioned real names and some of the political differences (the British and the USA really did advise against the liberation), I have fictionalised the whole episode by inserting Gruppo Fausto into the action. There was no Gruppo Fausto. There were Nello, Fano, Ruggero, Morelli, Mimmo, Piero and Dido groups; there was, I have subsequently discovered, a partisan leader called Fausto, but no resemblance is intended at all. Apologies to such groups and to the Valtoce and Valdossola Formations, the Antonio Di Dio Brigade, 85th Garibaldi Brigade, the Piave division and the other partisan bands, all of whom fought bravely across the whole region for their freedom, and really did set the rest of Italy an example. The fictitious actions of Gruppo Fausto are not meant to impugn them, or their battle, in any way. The whole story is told in the booklet La Repubblica dell’Ossola (Grossi), widely available in Domodossola. I would like to thank Rachel Costa of Tuscany and Hither Green for translation and her above-and-beyond research in Italian sources on the subject.

  Although the fascist republic at Salò existed, Riccardo Conti is a fiction. There were many fascist officers who worked against the regime from within, and several who really did audaciously switch between a role with the partisans and Mussolini’s forces (for instance see p. 225 of Richard Lamb’s War in Italy 1943–45, Da Capo Press).

  As well as the many thousands of men and women in the partisans of all political hues who fought a hard and bitter war against the invaders, there were non-combatant citizens who played their part. Over 12,000 Allied POWs crossed the lines during the chaos of 1943­44; 5,000 of them were helped over the border to Switzerland, sheltered by Italian families along the way and led by brave guides through the mountains to th
e border. At the end of the war 75,000 ‘Alexander certificates’ were issued as thanks to families who had helped escapers and evaders with food, shelter and clothing. Or, sometimes, just their silence.

  The SS 29th ‘Italienische’ division did exist. It didn’t, however, get involved in transporting loot. That part of the story was suggested by an incident related to me by an ex-RAF man, who swore that some French partisans he knew had grown rich attacking German convoys of stolen art and bullion. I could find no corroboration for it, but the idea took hold that there might be other motives at work alongside nationalistic ones. A friend of Anne Storm’s, an ex-SOE man called Bill Pickering, has written about the Italian resistance (The Bandits of Cisterna by William Pickering and Alan Hart, Pen & Sword Books), and he has stories of in-fighting, murder and banditry among the partisans. Equally, however, there are many tales of bravery and hardship.

  The Val Grande is now a national park, and it really is the wildest part of Italy, containing a chain of disused forts from World War One. It isn’t quite as remote as I have suggested here, but it is a fascinating part of the country. If you visit the Lake Maggiore region you can do a lot worse than follow Kirby’s example and stay at the Hotel Cannero in Cannero Riviera on Lake Maggiore. Maria and her family will take good care of you. I am indebted to Yasmin Sethna for pointing me in their direction.

  Mussolini’s prison/home, Villa Feltrinelli on Lake Garda, is these days a rather magnificent hotel. My thanks go to its General Manager Markus Odermatt who showed me around and shared its history with me. The tunnels described here as holding the loot did exist, but were mostly used as air-raid shelters. They now house the hotel’s generators and heavy machinery.

  The ever-helpful Jim Dowdall, a stunt co-ordinator and an ex-movie armourer, came up with Kirby’s dodge with the Sten gun and the washer. It does work, but he suggests you don’t try it at home.

  For the Isle of Man scenes I have to thank Dave Wilson, who introduced me to the writings of Geoff Davison, and Terri and Ray Monks, who moved there from the mainland because of their enthusiasm for the races and to become marshals on the course. They kindly, and gently, pointed out my errors. Any remaining gaffes are mine and mine alone. Some of the musings on the decline of domestic motorbike manufacturing are based on Whatever Happened to the British Motorcycle Industry by Burt Hopwood (Haynes Publishing).