Numero Zero

15 Thursday, May 28

“For issue number 0/2,” Simei announced that morning, “we need to think of an article about honesty. It’s a fact, now, that the political parties are rotten, everyone’s after kickbacks, and we have to make it known that we’re in a position, if we so wish, to initiate a campaign against those parties. We have to come up with a party of honest people, a party of citizens able to talk a different kind of politics.”

“We’d better tread carefully,” I said. “Wasn’t that the idea behind the postwar movement that called itself the Common Man?”

“Ah, the Common Man, that was swallowed up and emasculated by the Christian Democratic Party, which at that time was powerful and extremely cunning. But the Christian Democrats today are on their last legs — no more heroes, they’re a bunch of jerks. In any event, our readers don’t remember a thing about the Common Man,” said Simei. “It’s the stuff of forty-five years ago, and our readers don’t have a clue what happened ten years ago. I’ve just been reading an article celebrating the Resistance in one of the main newspapers, and there are two photographs, one of a truckload of partisans and the other of a group wearing Fascist uniforms and giving the Roman salute, who are described as squadristi. But no, squadristi were the squads of the 1920s, and they didn’t go around dressed like that; those in the photo are Fascist troops of the ’30s or early ’40s, as anyone my age would instantly recognize. I’m not suggesting all journalists have to be people my age who have witnessed such events, but I’m perfectly capable of distinguishing the uniforms of the bersaglieri of La Marmora from the troops of Bava-Beccaris, though both of them died out well before I was born. If our newspaper colleagues have such poor memories, then why count on our readers to remember the Common Man? But let’s go back to my idea: a new party, a party of honest people could trouble a great many.”

“League of the Honest,” said Maia with a smile. “That was the title of an old prewar novel by Giovanni Mosca. It would be interesting to reread it. It’s about the union sacrée of decent people whose task it was to infiltrate the ranks of the dishonest, expose them, and convert them if possible to the path of honesty. But to be accepted by dishonest people, members of the league had to behave dishonestly. You can imagine what happened. The league of honest people gradually turned into a league of crooks.”

“That’s literature, my dear,” snapped Simei, “and Mosca, does anyone still remember him? You read too much. We can forget your Mosca, but if the idea appalls you, you don’t need to worry about it. Dottor Colonna, you’ll give me a hand to write a lead article that’s hard-hitting. And virtuous.”

“Can do,” I said. “Appealing to honest folk is always excellent for sales.”

“The league of honest crooks,” sneered Braggadocio, looking at Maia. The two of them were not made for each other. I felt increasingly sorry for this little walking encyclopedia who was a prisoner in Simei’s den. But I could see no way to help her right now. Her problem was becoming my chief concern (maybe hers too?), and I was losing interest in the rest.

At lunchtime, walking to a bar for a sandwich, I said to her, “Do you want us to put a stop to it? Why not expose this whole pathetic story, and to hell with Simei and company?”

“And who do we go to?” she asked. “First of all, don’t destroy yourself on my account. Second, where do you go to expose this business when every newspaper... I’m just beginning to understand, aren’t they all exactly the same? Each protects the other...”

“Now don’t get like Braggadocio, who sees plots everywhere. Anyway, forgive me, I’m just talking...” I didn’t know how to say it. “I think I love you.”

“Do you realize that’s the first time you’ve told me?”

“Stupid, don’t we think the same way?”

It was true. At least thirty years had gone by since I’d said anything like that. It was May, and after thirty years I was feeling spring in my bones.

Why did I think of bones? It was that same afternoon that Braggadocio told me to meet him in the Verziere district, in front of the Church of San Bernardino alle Ossa, which stood along a passageway at the corner of Piazza Santo Stefano.

“Nice church,” said Braggadocio as we entered. “It’s been here since the Middle Ages, but after destruction, fire, and other mishaps, it wasn’t until the 1700s that it was rebuilt. The original purpose was to house the bones of a leper cemetery not far from here.”

I should have guessed. Having told me about Mussolini’s corpse, which he could hardly dig up again, Braggadocio was seeking other mortuary inspirations. And indeed, along a corridor, we entered the ossuary. The place was deserted, except for an old woman praying in a front pew with her head between her hands. There were death’s heads crammed into high recesses between one pilaster and another, boxes of bones, skulls arranged in the shape of a cross set into a mosaic of whitish stone-like objects that were other bones, perhaps fragments of vertebrae, limb joints, collarbones, breastbones, shoulder blades, coccyges, carpals and metacarpals, kneecaps, tarsal and ankle bones, and suchlike. Bone edifices rose on every side, leading the eye up to a merry, luminous Tiepolesque vault, where angels and souls in glory hovered among billowing, creamy pink clouds.

On a shelf over an old door were skulls with gaping eye sockets, lined up like porcelain jars in a pharmacist’s cabinet. In the recesses at floor level, protected by a grill through which visitors could poke their fingers, the bones and skulls had been polished and smoothed over many centuries from the touch of devotees or necrophiles, like the foot of Saint Peter’s statue in Rome. There were at least a thousand skulls, the smaller bones were beyond count, and on the pilasters were monograms of Christ, along with tibias that looked like they’d been stolen from the Jolly Rogers of the pirates of Tortuga.

“They’re not just the bones of lepers,” explained Braggadocio, as though nothing in the world could be more beautiful. “There are skeletons from other nearby burial grounds, the corpses of convicts, deceased patients from the Brolo hospital, beheaded criminals, prisoners who died in jail, probably also thieves or brigands who came to die in the church because there was no place else they could turn their face to the wall in peace — the Verziere was a district with a terrible reputation. It makes me laugh to see that old woman sitting here praying as if before the tomb of a saint with holy relics, when these are the remains of scoundrels, bandits, damned souls. And yet the old monks were more compassionate than those who buried and then dug up Mussolini. See with what care, with what devotion to art — and yet with what indifference — these skeletal remains were arranged, as if they were Byzantine mosaics. That little old woman is seduced by these images of death, mistaking them for images of sanctity, and yet under the altar, though I can no longer see where, you should be able to see the half-mummified body of a young girl who, they say, comes out on the Night of All Souls to perform her danse macabre with the other skeletons.”

I pictured the young girl leading her bony friends as far as Via Bagnera, but made no comment. I had seen other, equally macabre ossuaries, like the one in the Capuchin church in Rome, and the terrifying catacombs in Palermo, with whole mummified friars dressed in tattered majesty, but Braggadocio was evidently quite content with his Milanese carcasses.

“There’s also the putridarium, which you reach by going down some steps in front of the main altar, but you have to search out the sacristan, and you need to find him in a good mood. The friars used to place their brothers on stone seats to decay and dissolve, and slowly the bodies dehydrated, the humors drained away. And here are the skeletons, picked clean as the teeth in toothpaste ads. A few days ago I was thinking this would have been an ideal place to hide Mussolini’s corpse after Leccisi had stolen it, but unfortunately I’m not writing a novel but reconstructing historical facts, and history tells us the remains of the Duce were placed somewhere else. Shame. That’s why recently I’ve been visiting this place a lot, for a story about last remains. It’s been giving me much food for thought. There are those who find inspiration looking, say, at the Dolomites or Lake Maggiore, but I find inspiration here. I should have been the keeper of a morgue. Perhaps it’s the memory of my grandfather who died so horribly, may he rest in peace.”

“Why have you brought me here?”

“I need to talk, I’ve got to tell someone about these things seething inside me, or else I’ll go mad. It can turn your head being the only person to have found the truth. And there’s never anyone here, except for the occasional tourist, who doesn’t understand a damn thing. And at last I’ve reached stay-behind.”

“Stay what?”

“Remember I still had to work out what they did with the Duce, the living one — not to leave him rotting in Argentina or in the Vatican and ending up like his double. What do we do with the Duce?”

“What do we do with him?”

“Well, the Allies, or those among the Allies who wanted him alive, to be brought out at the right moment, to be used against a Communist revolution or a Soviet attack. During the Second World War, the British had coordinated the activities of the resistance movements in the countries occupied by the Axis powers through a network run by a branch of their intelligence services, the Special Operations Executive, which was disbanded at the end of the war. But it was started up again in the early 1950s as the nucleus for a new organization that was to operate in various European countries to stop an invasion by the Red Army, or local Communists who might try to overthrow the state. The coordination was done by the supreme command of the Allied forces in Europe, and led to the creation of ‘stay-behind’ in Belgium, England, France, West Germany, Holland, Luxembourg, Denmark, and Norway. A secret paramilitary structure. In Italy, its beginnings can be traced back to 1949; then, in 1959, the Italian secret services enter as part of a coordination and planning committee, and finally in 1964 the organization called Gladio was officially born, funded by the CIA. Gladio — the word ought to mean something to you, since gladius was a sword used by Roman legionaries, so using the word gladio evoked the imagery of fascism. A name that would attract military veterans, adventurers, and nostalgics. The war was over, but many people had fond memories of heroic days, of attacks with a couple of bombs and a flower in their mouth (as the Fascist song went), of machine-gun fire. They were ex-Fascists, or idealistic sixty-year-old Catholics terrified at the prospect of Cossacks arriving at Saint Peter’s and letting their horses drink from the holy-water stoups, but there were also fanatics loyal to the exiled monarchy. It’s even rumored that they included Edgardo Sogno, who, though once a partisan leader in Piedmont and a hero, was also a monarchist through and through, and therefore linked to the creed of a bygone world. Recruits were sent to a training camp in Sardinia, where they learned (or were reminded) how to blow up bridges, operate machine guns, attack enemy squads at night with daggers between their teeth, carry out acts of sabotage and guerrilla warfare—”

“But they would all have been retired colonels, ailing field marshals, rachitic bank clerks. I can’t see them clambering over piers and pylons like in The Bridge over the River Kwai.”

“Yes, but there were also young neofascists raring for a fight, and all kinds of angry types who had nothing to do with politics.”

“I seem to remember reading something about it a few years ago.”

“Certainly, Gladio remained top secret from the end of the war, the only people to know about it were the intelligence services and the highest military commanders, and it was communicated little by little only to prime ministers, ministers of defense, and presidents of the republic. With the collapse of the Soviet empire, the whole thing lost all practical purpose, and perhaps cost too much. It was President Cossiga who let the cat out of the bag in 1990, and then, the same year, Prime Minister Andreotti officially admitted that, all right, Gladio had existed, but there was no reason to fuss, its existence had been necessary, the story was now over, and the tittle-tattle was to stop. As it turned out, no one was overconcerned, the issue was almost forgotten. Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland were the only countries to launch parliamentary inquiries, but George H. W. Bush refused to comment since he was in the midst of preparations for the Gulf War and didn’t want to unsettle the Atlantic Alliance. The entire affair was hushed up in all the countries that participated in the stay-behind operations, with only a few minor incidents. In France it had been known for some time that the infamous OAS had been created with members of the French stay-behind, but after a failed coup in Algiers, General de Gaulle had brought dissidents back under control. In Germany, it was common knowledge that the Oktoberfest bomb in Munich in 1980 was made with explosives that came from a German stay-behind depot; in Greece, it was the stay-behind army, the Lochos Oreinon Katadromon, that kicked off the military coup, and in Portugal, a mysterious Aginter Press was behind the assassination of Eduardo Mondlane, leader of the Frente de Libertação de Moçambique. In Spain, a year after the death of General Franco, two members of the Carlist Party were killed by far-right terrorists, and the following year, stay-behinds carried out a massacre in Madrid, in the office of a lawyer with links to the Communist Party. In Switzerland, just two years ago, Colonel Alboth, a former local stay-behind commander, declares in a private letter to the Swiss defense department that he is prepared to reveal “the whole truth” and is then found dead at his home, stabbed with his own bayonet. In Turkey, the Grey Wolves, later involved in the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II, are linked to stay-behind. I could go on — and I’ve read you only a few of my notes — but as you see, this is small stuff, a killing here and a killing there, barely enough to reach the front page, and each time all is forgotten. The point is that newspapers are not there for spreading news but for covering it up. X happens, you have to report it, but it causes embarrassment for too many people, so in the same edition you add some shock headlines — mother kills four children, savings at risk of going up in smoke, letter from Garibaldi insulting his lieutenant Nino Bixio discovered, etc. — so news drowns in a great sea of information. I’m interested in what Gladio did in Italy from the 1960s until 1990. Must have been up to all kinds of tricks, would have been mixed up with the far-right terrorist movements, played a part in the bombing at Piazza Fontana in 1969, and from then on — the days of the student revolts of ’68 and the workers’ strikes that autumn — it dawned on someone that he could incite terrorist attacks and put the blame on the Left. And it’s rumored that Licio Gelli’s notorious P2 Masonic lodge was also sticking its nose in. But why is an organization that should have been opposing the Soviets involving itself in terrorist attacks? And here I came across the whole story of Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, and before that, all those rumors of military takeovers planned but never carried out.”

The so-called Borghese coup was a fairly grotesque story that someone, I think, turned into a satirical movie. Junio Valerio Borghese, also known as the Black Prince, had been a leader of the Decima Mas commando unit. A man of some courage, it was said, a Fascist through and through, he had inevitably been part of Mussolini’s Republic of Salò, and it was never clear how, in 1945, while people were being shot at random, he managed to survive, and continued to preserve the aura of a thoroughbred fighter, beret at a rakish angle, machine gun slung across his shoulder, typical military garb with trousers gathered at the ankles, turtleneck sweater, though he had a face that no one would have looked at twice if they’d seen him walking in the street dressed as a bank clerk.

Now, in 1970, Borghese felt the moment for a military coup had come. Mussolini would have been approaching eighty-seven by then. They must have realized, Braggadocio thought, that if he was to be brought back from exile, it was better not to wait too much longer — after all, back in 1945 he was already looking worn.

“My heart sometimes goes out to that poor man,” said Braggadocio. “Imagine him still waiting patiently... assuming he was in Argentina, where even if he couldn’t eat the great beefsteaks because of his ulcer, he could at least look out over the boundless pampas (even so, what bliss — just think — for twenty-five years). It would have been worse if he’d been shut up in the Vatican, with no more than an evening walk in a small garden, and vegetable broth served by a nun with hairs on her chin, and the idea of having lost not only Italy but his lover, unable to hug his children, and perhaps going slightly soft in the head, spending day after day in an armchair brooding over past glories, only able to see what was going on in the world through the television, black and white, while he thought back — his mind now clouding with age but roused by syphilis — to triumphant moments on the balcony of Palazzo Venezia, to summers when he harvested the corn bare-chested, smothered children with kisses while their aroused mothers slavered over his hands, or the afternoons in the Sala del Mappamondo, where his manservant, Navarra, would bring women in for him and, unbuttoning his fly in cavalry fashion, he would flip them over on his desk and, wham, inseminate them in seconds while they made simpering groans like bitches in heat, murmuring, ‘Oh, my Duce, my Duce’... And as he thought back, salivating, his cock now flaccid, someone was hammering away in his head about the idea of resurrection close at hand — like the joke about Hitler, who’s also in Argentina, and the neo-Nazis want him to come back and conquer the world, and he hems and haws, since he too is getting old, and finally he says, ‘Okay, but this time as baddies, right?’

“Anyhow,” continued Braggadocio, “in 1970 everything seemed to suggest a military coup might work. The head of the Italian secret services was General Miceli, who was also a member of the P2 Masonic lodge and would later become a politician and member of the Neofascist Party — note that he was suspected and investigated for involvement in the Borghese affair, though he got through it unscathed and died peacefully two years ago. I’ve learned from a reliable source that Miceli, two years after the Borghese coup, still received eight hundred thousand dollars from the American embassy, no one knows why. Borghese could therefore rely on excellent support from the top, and on Gladio, on the Falangist veterans of the Spanish Civil War, on Masonic contacts, and it has been implied that the Mafia played a part — which, as you know, it always does. And in the shadows, the ubiquitous Licio Gelli stirring up the police and the top military command, which already swarmed with Freemasons. Just listen to the story of Licio Gelli, because it’s central to my theory.

“So Gelli, he’s never denied it, fought in the Spanish Civil War with Franco. And he was in the Italian Social Republic and worked as a liaison officer with the SS, but at the same time he had contacts with the partisans, and after the war he links up with the CIA. Someone like that could hardly fail to be mixed up with Gladio. But hear this: in July 1942, as an inspector of the National Fascist Party, he was given the task of transporting the treasury of King Peter II of Yugoslavia into Italy: sixty tons of gold ingots, two tons of old coinage, six million U.S. dollars, and two million pounds sterling that the Military Intelligence Service had requisitioned. The treasury was finally returned in 1947, twenty tons of ingots light, and it is rumored that Gelli had moved them to Argentina. Argentina, you understand? In Argentina, Gelli is on friendly terms with Perón, and not just with Perón but with generals such as Videla, and from Argentina he receives a diplomatic passport. Who else is mixed up with Argentina? His right-hand man, Umberto Ortolani, who is also the link between Gelli and Monsignor Marcinkus. And so? So everything points us to Argentina, where the Duce is living and preparing for his return, and there’s obviously a need for money and good organization and local support. Which is why Gelli is essential to the Borghese plan.”

“It sounds convincing, doesn’t it.”

“And it is. This doesn’t alter the fact that Borghese was putting together a comic Brancaleone army, where alongside diehard Fascist granddads (Borghese himself was over sixty) were representatives of the state and even divisions of the Forestry Rangers — don’t ask why the Forestry Rangers, perhaps with all the deforestation that had gone on after the war, they had nothing better to do. But this motley crew was capable of some nasty things. From later judicial proceedings it emerges that Licio Gelli’s role was to capture the president of the republic, at that time Giuseppe Saragat. A ship owner from Civitavecchia had offered the use of his merchant ships to transport those captured by the conspirators to the Lipari Islands. You won’t believe who else was involved in the operation. Otto Skorzeny, the man who had freed Mussolini from his brief imprisonment on the Gran Sasso mountain in 1943! He was still around, someone else who had survived the bloody postwar purges unscathed, with links to the CIA. He could ensure that the United States would not oppose the coup so long as a ‘moderate democratic’ military regime took power. Just think of the hypocrisy there. But what the later investigations never brought to light was that Skorzeny had evidently remained in contact with Mussolini, who owed him a lot — perhaps he would take care of the Duce’s return from exile to provide the heroic vision the conspirators needed. In short, the coup depended entirely on Mussolini’s triumphal return.

“Just listen to this. The coup had been carefully planned since 1969, the year of the bombing in Piazza Fontana, which was arranged so all suspicion would fall on the Left and to psychologically prepare public opinion for a return to law and order. Borghese planned to occupy the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Defense, the state television studios, and the communication networks (radio and telephone), and to deport all parliamentary opponents. This isn’t some fantasy on my part: a proclamation was later found that Borghese was going to read out on the radio, and which said more or less that the long-awaited time for political change had arrived, that the clique that had governed for twenty-five years had brought Italy to the brink of economic and moral disaster, and that the army and police supported the takeover of political power. Borghese would have ended by saying, ‘Italians, in delivering the glorious tricolor back into your hands, we urge you to cry out proudly our hymn of love, Viva l’Italia.’ Language typical of Mussolini.”

On December 7 and 8, 1970, Braggadocio reminded me, several hundred conspirators assembled in Rome, arms and ammunition were distributed, two generals had taken up position at the Ministry of Defense, a group of armed Forestry Rangers were posted at the state television headquarters, and preparations were made in Milan for the occupation of the Sesto San Giovanni quarter, a traditional Communist stronghold.

“Then, all of a sudden, what happens? While the plan seemed to be proceeding smoothly, and we might say the conspirators had Rome within their grasp, Borghese announced that the operation had been called off. Later it was implied that forces loyal to the state were opposed to the conspiracy, but then why not arrest Borghese the day before, rather than wait for uniformed lumberjacks to make their way to Rome? In any event, the whole business is more or less hushed up, those behind the coup slip discreetly away, Borghese takes refuge in Spain, a few idiots get themselves arrested, all of them ‘detained’ in private clinics, and some visited by General Miceli in their new quarters and promised protection in exchange for silence. Parliamentary inquiries are hardly mentioned by the press, in fact the public is fed vague news about it only three months later. I’m not interested in what actually happened, what I want to know is why a coup so carefully prepared was called off in a matter of a few hours, transforming an extremely serious business into a farce. Why?”

“You tell me.”

“I think I’m the only person to have asked the question and certainly the only one to have worked out the answer, which is as plain as day: that very night, news arrives that Mussolini, who is now in Italy ready to resurface, has suddenly died — which, at his age, and having been shuttled around, is hardly improbable. The coup is called off because its charismatic symbol is gone, and this time for real, twenty-five years after his supposed death.”

Braggadocio’s eyes gleamed, appearing to illuminate the lines of skulls that surrounded us, his hands shook, his lips were covered with whitish saliva. He grasped me by the shoulders: “You understand, Colonna, this is my reconstruction of the facts!”

“But if I remember correctly, there was also a trial—”

“A charade, with Andreotti, the then prime minister, helping to cover it all up, and those who ended in jail were minor players. The point is, everything we heard was false or distorted, and for twenty years we’ve been living a lie. I’ve always said: never believe what they tell you...”

“And your story ends there...”

“Eh, no, this is the beginning of another one, and perhaps I only became interested through what happened next, which was the direct consequence of Mussolini’s death. Without the figure of the Duce, Gladio could no longer hope to seize power, and meanwhile the prospect of Soviet invasion seemed increasingly remote, since there was now a gradual move toward détente. But Gladio was not disbanded. On the contrary, it became truly active from then on.”

“And how was that?”

“Well, since it’s no longer a question of establishing a new power by overthrowing the government, Gladio joins up with all the hidden forces trying to destabilize Italy in an effort to prevent the rise of the Left and to prepare the way for new forms of repression, to be carried out in full accordance with the law. Before the Borghese plot, you realize, don’t you, that there were very few bomb attacks like Piazza Fontana? Only then do the Red Brigades get going. And the bombings start in the years immediately following, one after another: 1973, a bomb at the police headquarters in Milan; 1974, a massacre in Piazza della Loggia in Brescia; that same year, a high-explosive bomb goes off on the train from Rome to Munich, with twelve dead and forty-eight injured. But remember, Aldo Moro, foreign minister at the time and soon to be prime minister, was to have been on board, but had missed the train because some ministry officials had made him get off at the last moment to sign some urgent documents. Ten years later, another bomb on the Naples — Milan express. Not to mention the killing of Moro in 1978, and we still don’t know what really happened. As if that weren’t enough, in that same year, a month after his election, the new pope, John Paul I, died mysteriously. Heart attack or stroke, they said, but why did the pope’s personal effects disappear: his glasses, his slippers, his notes, and the bottle of Effortil he apparently had to take for low blood pressure? Why did these things disappear into thin air? Perhaps because it wasn’t credible that someone with hypotension would have a stroke? Why was Cardinal Villot the first important person to enter the room immediately after? It’s obvious, you’ll say — he was the Vatican secretary of state. But a book by a certain David Yallop exposes a number of facts: the pope is rumored to have been interested in the existence of an ecclesiastical-Masonic cabal that included Cardinal Villot, Monsignor Agostino Casaroli, deputy director of the Osservatore Romano newspaper and director of Vatican Radio, and of course the ever-present Monsignor Marcinkus, who ruled the roost at the Istituto per le Opere di Religione, better known as the Vatican Bank, and who was later discovered to have been involved in tax evasion and money laundering, and who covered up other dark dealings by such characters as Roberto Calvi and Michele Sindona — both of whom, surprise surprise, would come to a sticky end over the next few years, one hanged under Blackfriars Bridge in London, the other poisoned in prison. A copy of the weekly magazine Il Mondo was found on the pope’s desk, open to a report on the operations of the Vatican Bank. Yallop suspects six people of the murder: Villot, Cardinal John Cody of Chicago, Marcinkus, Sindona, Calvi, and once again Licio Gelli, the venerable master of the P2 Masonic lodge. You’ll tell me this has nothing to do with Gladio, but by sheer coincidence, many of these characters play some part in the other conspiracies, and the Vatican was involved in rescuing and sheltering Mussolini. Perhaps this was what the pope had discovered, though several years had passed since the death of the real Duce, and he wanted to get rid of the gang that had been preparing to overthrow the state since the end of the Second World War. And I should add that with Pope John Paul I dead, the business must have ended up in the hands of John Paul II, shot three years later by the Turkish Grey Wolves, the same Grey Wolves, as I’ve said, who were a part of the Turkish stay-behind... The pope then grants a pardon, his contrite attacker repents in prison, but all in all, the pontiff is frightened off and no longer gets involved in that business, not least because he has no overwhelming interest in Italy and seems preoccupied with fighting Protestant sects in the Third World. And so they leave him be. Aren’t all these coincidences proof enough?”

“Or perhaps it’s just your tendency to see conspiracies everywhere, so you put two and two together to make five.”

“Me? Look at the court cases, it is all there, provided you’re able to find your way around the archives. The trouble is, facts get lost between one piece of news and another. Take the story about Peteano. In May 1972, near Gorizia, the police are informed that a Fiat Five Hundred with two bullet holes in the windshield has been abandoned on a certain road. Three policemen arrive; they try to open the hood and are blown up. For some time it’s thought to be the work of the Red Brigades, but years later someone by the name of Vincenzo Vinciguerra appears on the scene. And listen to this: after his involvement in other mysterious affairs, he manages to avoid arrest and escapes to Spain, where he is sheltered by the international anticommunist network Aginter Press. Here he makes contact with another right-wing terrorist, Stefano Delle Chiaie, joins the Avanguardia Nazionale, then disappears to Chile and Argentina, but in 1978 he decides, magnanimously, that all this struggle against the state made no sense and he gives himself up in Italy. Note that he didn’t repent, he still thought he’d been right to do what he had done up until then, and so, I ask you, why did he give himself up? I’d say out of a need for publicity. There are murderers who return to the scene of the crime, serial killers who send evidence to the police because they want to be caught, otherwise they will not end up on the front page, and so Vinciguerra starts spewing out confession after confession. He accepts responsibility for the explosion at Peteano and points his finger at the security forces who had protected him. Only in 1984 does an investigating judge, Felice Casson, discover that the explosive used at Peteano came from a Gladio arms depot, and most intriguing of all, the existence of that depot was revealed to him — I’ll give you a thousand guesses — by Andreotti, who therefore knew and had kept his mouth shut. A police expert (who also happened to be a member of the far-right Ordine Nuovo) had reported that the explosive was identical to that used by the Red Brigades, but Casson established that the explosive was C-4 supplied to NATO forces. In short, a fine web of intrigue, but as you can see, regardless of whether it was NATO or the Red Brigades, Gladio was implicated. Except that the investigations also show that Ordine Nuovo had been working with the Italian military secret service. And you understand that if a military secret service has three policemen blown up, it won’t be out of any dislike for the police but to direct the blame at far-left extremists. To make a long story short, after investigations and counterinvestigations, Vinciguerra is sentenced to life in prison, from where he continues to make revelations over the strategy of tension they were conducting. He talks about the bombing of the Bologna railway station (you see how there are links between one bombing and another, it’s not just my imagination), and he says that the massacre at Piazza Fontana in 1969 had been planned to force the then prime minister, Mariano Rumor, to declare a state of emergency. He also adds, and I’ll read it to you: ‘You can’t go into hiding without money. You can’t go into hiding without support. I could choose the path that others followed, of finding support elsewhere, perhaps in Argentina through the secret services. I could also choose the path of crime. But I have no wish to work with the secret services nor to play the criminal. So to regain my freedom I had only one choice. To give myself up. And this is what I’ve done.’ Obviously it’s the logic of an exhibitionist lunatic, but a lunatic who has reliable information. And so this is my story, reconstructed almost in its entirety: the shadow of Mussolini, who is taken for dead, wholly dominates Italian events from 1945 until, I’d say, now. And his real death unleashes the most terrible period in this country’s history, involving stay-behind, the CIA, NATO, Gladio, the P2, the Mafia, the secret services, the military top command, prime ministers such as Andreotti and presidents like Cossiga, and naturally a good part of the far-left terrorist organizations, duly infiltrated and manipulated. Not to mention that Moro was kidnapped and assassinated because he knew something and would have talked. And if you want to, you can add lesser criminal cases that have no apparent political relevance...”

“Yes, the Beast of Via San Gregorio, the Soap Maker of Correggio, the Monster of the Via Salaria...”

“Ah, well, don’t be sarcastic. Perhaps not the cases immediately after the war, but for the rest it’s more convenient, as they say, to see just one story dominated by a single virtual figure who seemed to direct the traffic from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia, even though no one could see him. Skeletons can always appear at night,” he said, pointing to the silent hosts around us, “and perform their danse macabre. You know, there are more things in heaven and earth, etc. etc. But it’s clear, once the Soviet threat was over, that Gladio was officially consigned to the attic, and both Cossiga and Andreotti talked about it to exorcise its ghost, to present it as something normal that happened with the approval of the authorities, of a community made up of patriots, like the Carbonari in bygone times. But is it really all over, or are certain diehard groups still working away in the shadows? I think there is more to come.”

He looked around, frowned: “But we’d better leave now, I don’t like the look of that Japanese group coming in. Oriental spies are everywhere, and now that China’s at it, they can understand all languages.”

As we left, I took a deep breath and asked him, “But you’ve checked it all out?”

“I’ve spoken to well-informed people and I’ve sought the advice of our colleague Lucidi. Perhaps you don’t know he has links with the secret services.”

“I know, I know. But do you trust him?”

“They’re people used to keeping their silence, don’t worry. I need a few more days to gather other cast-iron evidence — cast-iron, I say — then I’ll go to Simei and present him with the results of my investigation. Twelve installments for twelve zero issues.”

That evening, to forget about the bones at San Bernardino, I took Maia out for a candlelight dinner. I didn’t of course mention Gladio, I avoided dishes that involved taking anything off the bone, and was slowly emerging from my afternoon ordeal.