Siege at the Villa Lipp

CHAPTER FOUR

Krom said that he intended to write my life story and now has the audacity to claim that he has done so.

What rubbish the man talks! He does not even know where I was born. And why does he not know? Because he did not ask. Because, he, with this fatuous obsession of his, this determined inability to distinguish between a criminal and a businessman, prefers to assume that I must wish to keep such facts about myself secret.

Utter nonsense!

If he had not intervened so energetically when Connell had asked me where I came from, I would almost certainly have answered. There was no reason why I should not have done so.

I was born in Argentina, and my family was, still is, one of the many there of British origin bearing commonplace British names. In our case, as with others like us, intermarriage with and absorption by the Spanish-descended majority has, chiefly for religious reasons, been a slow process. When I was born, even though we had been in the country for well over a century and thought of ourselves as more Argentine than British, our name was still free of Spanish collaterals and my birth was duly registered at a British consulate as well as with the local municipality. All very schizoid. With us, British nannies still supervised the upbringing of children, and we were still sent to England at the age of eight to endure the torments of its boarding schools. My father thought it proper in 1914 to join the Royal Navy. In 1939 I joined the British Army no less matter-of-factly. If I withhold the family name I do so for good reason. I have dual nationality, and the possibility that the protective cover which this could give me might, after all these years, become an asset is one that I cannot now ignore.

Allegations of the, kind Krom has made, consisting of one part fact stirred into nine parts fantasy, are always the hardest to refute; and, in this instance, the task has been made still harder because the fragments of truth embedded in his slab like case-study were supplied by me in what he persists in calling my ‘confidential papers’. He also makes much of their having been supplied in front of witnesses. What effect that could have on the value of the papers as evidence is beyond me. If I had handed him a forged ten-dollar bill, would the presence of Connell and Henson as witnesses have rendered it genuine?

The first paper — how much grander the word ‘paper’ sounds than the more appropriate ‘hand-out’ — dealt with some of the circumstances leading up to Krom’s seeing Oberholzer in Zurich and some of the consequences of the whole incident.

And that was all it was, an incident. Krom’s presentation of it as if he were Zola discovering for an amazed public the iniquities of the Dreyfus case is, no doubt, for anyone who knows the truth, pretty funny. Far from funny is his clear and instantly recognizable picture of me dressed up to look like the super-villain of his imaginings.

Melanie, who helped me concoct the texts of the ‘papers’ and who was responsible for some of the juiciest red herrings in them, thinks that we overestimated him. She says that we relied too much on the scholarly scepticism allied to an ability to evaluate misinformation that ought to have been there, but which were not. In other words, we were too clever.

I say that we underestimated his capacity for self-deception. We gave him a kaleidoscope to play with and he used it as if it were a reading glass.

If there must be a picture, let it be a warts-and-all photograph, not a caricature; and if the world, or that small portion of it inhabited by criminologists and policemen, really wants to know about poor old Oberholzer, let it be one of his own many voices that is heard. My account will be full, reasonably accurate and free from Krom’s distortions. It will not, of course, be free from my distortions. I happen to be one of those who believe that the ability to tell the whole truth about anything at all is so rare that anyone who claims it, especially if he does so with hand on heart, should be regarded with the deepest suspicion.

I can only attempt to be truthful.

I met Carlo Lech for the first time when I almost had to arrest him near Bari. That was in 1943 after our landings on the heel of Italy, when the Eighth Army had moved north to Foggia. I was in the British Field Security Police at the time, and I almost had to arrest him because a corporal in the detachment of which I was in command was an officious bloody idiot.

But what, it may be asked, was an English-Spanish bilingual doing in Field Security in Italy? Was this the British Army once more up to its ancient game of putting square pegs into round holes? No, it was not. During the year after I left school, I learned to speak very good Italian.

Where his children were concerned, my father was generous and, though far from being imaginative, always scrupulously fair. I was the youngest of his three sons, and when, in the summer of 1938, he was notified by my housemaster that my year in the sixth form had ended less disastrously than had been feared, I was offered the same choice of rewards as my brothers before me. I could go to a university before going into the family business; I could spend a year and two thousand dollars travelling in Europe before going into the family business; or I could have the sports car of my choice and go into the family business right away.

My brothers had both taken sports cars. I chose the year in Europe.

In three months I had spent the two thousand dollars — having had a very good time doing so, though — and was flat broke in Cannes. A cable would have brought me a steamer ticket home, a sermon on the value of money, and, of course, immediate entry into the family business. I didn’t send the cable because I didn’t want to go home and didn’t want to go into a boring family business which already had more junior executives than it needed anyway. As any good con-man will tell you, it takes most people a long time to spot the fact that a spender has turned into a sponger, and in places like Cannes it can take even longer for a credit-rating to slip. I gave myself a month to get out of the hole I was in before I ran screaming to Daddy or started doing silly things that could get me into trouble with the police. I made it in three weeks. I got a job as steward on a yacht.

The owner was an Italian banker and some of the reasons for my being hired were simple.

The Munich crisis had led in France to a partial mobilization, and the French steward had been one of those called up. It was not known when he would be released or, since he had insisted that local union rules entitled him to a full month’s wages on leaving, whether, when released, he would trouble to return. At that end of the season it would be hopeless to look for an experienced replacement. The rest of the crew, including the cook, were Italians, who did not care who poured the drinks and served the meals and made the beds. I had Argentine papers and, as the yacht was registered in Genoa, there would be no nonsense about labour permits and unions that the owner could not deal with later should he decide to keep me on. Meanwhile the job was strictly temporary.

Among the less simple reasons for my getting the job was the fact that the owner’s wife had picked me up one morning at the Carlton beach. She had done so under the impression that I was a virgin youth seeking reassurance and instruction from the older-yet-still-amazingly-attractive woman she believed herself to be. Both my clothes and the hotel at which I was staying were of the expensive kind, and when I confessed to her that I could no longer afford to tip even the boy who put up the beach umbrellas much less pay my fare home, she had at once blamed the gambling tables for my predicament and easily understood, without my having to tell her of it, my fear of parental retribution. I never tried to disabuse her of any of those notions. She was friendly in bed, only sometimes demanding, and she always smelt nice.

With her husband my credentials were of a different order. The school to which I went has never been considered as better than reasonably good; but he happened to have heard of it, and the idea of having an English public-schoolboy — even one who was Argentine — as a servant seemed to appeal to what I assumed to be the Fascist sense of humour. I think that his original intention may have been to discipline his wife, and at the same time strike a blow for Il Duce and the corporate state, by firing me after a few days, or as soon as I had sufficiently demonstrated my incompetence. If so, I disappointed him. Being a steward on a yacht is not all that different from being a junior boy in the kind of school I had just left. I may also have misjudged the nature of their personal relationship. Possibly it did not include the friendliness with which she treated me. Perhaps, in that marriage, she was the one who had the disciplinary whip hand.

I very much hope so, because, although I have during my life encountered a great many unpleasant men and women, I still after all these years remember him as being one of the nastier.

When the weather broke on the Riviera we cruised south, first to Ischia and Capri, and then on down to Tripoli. There, east of the town, the owner had land, on which he played at citrus-growing, and a tarted-up farmhouse. His wife explained that he owned the place not because he wanted to or because it was profitable, but for some mysterious political reason.

We spent several days doing nothing much while he had meetings with the Governor and other local administrators. Then we started off on a cruise that was supposed to take us to Benghazi. A north-west gale ended that, and within thirty-six hours we were back in Tripoli. There it was announced that the yacht would now be laid up for its annual refit, with just the captain retained to oversee the work. The rest of the crew would be off to their homes in Italy for the winter months. The owner and his wife moved into the house.

Nobody having told me where I stood, I counted my savings, wondered whether I could expect a tip from the lady, and eventually asked the captain if I was entitled to my fare back to Cannes. He mumbled something about my not having a labour permit, and then said he would enquire. Until the boat went into the yard to have its bottom cleaned, I could sleep on board. I was reminded of the end of one of those terms at school when there had been not enough holiday time in which to go home, and nothing much else to do but spend too much pocket-money.

To my surprise, the captain remembered to enquire about me without being reminded. Next day, I was sent for by the owner.

It was the first time I had been to the house. You took a bus to the nearby village and then walked along a dirt road between lemon groves.

His study was a hideous room with a tessellated floor and red, leather-covered walls. The writing table was a Second Empire monster with a matching chair of throne-like proportions. He had a mop of white hair and very black eyes. Sitting in that enormous chair, he looked like an illustration depicting the king greedy for gold in an art-nouveau edition of Grimm’s fairy tales.

‘I understand,’ he said, ‘that you wish to return to France. Why, young man? In order to gamble away all the wages I have been paying you these past weeks?’

His wife had told me of his stuffiness about gambling, but I had forgotten about it, along with the fiction that I was a gambler myself. So, instead of replying that what I did with the money I earned was my own affair, not his, I answered his silly question as if he had been entitled to ask it.

‘No, Sir. I merely wish to regularize my position. As the captain pointed out, I still have no labour permit for Italy or Italian possessions.’

It could have been more happily put. He gave me a long, smouldering stare.

Then he said deliberately: ‘For the work you are paid to do in Italian possessions, the only necessary permission is mine.’

I was very innocent in those days. It took me a moment or two to grasp what he had said. When the penny dropped, though, several things seemed to happen at once. For the only time in my life I felt myself blushing. I had an almost overwhelming desire to hit him and, along with it, an equally compelling determination to get out of the room before I did anything stupid. Good sense won. I turned quickly and walked to the door.

‘Come back here,’ he snapped. ‘I haven’t finished with you.’

I didn’t go back, but I stopped and faced him again. After all, I still had to know what the score was.

‘You had better understand me,’ he continued. ‘I have considerable influence with the authorities both here and in Rome. I could have you in prison within the hour if I chose. I could also have you deported. In that case, you would certainly pay your own travel expenses. The only way that you can, as you put it, regularize your position is to do as you are told, not by that fool of a woman, but by me.’

He let that sink in, a smile hovered. ‘You may even find it less inhibiting to do as you are told here, rather than on the far side of a yacht bulkhead.’

When he was sure from my expression that I had thoroughly understood him, he sat back and seemed to relax. ‘I leave for Rome tomorrow afternoon and shall be away for some weeks. You will place yourself at my wife’s disposal for as long as she continues to find you useful. When she has finished with you, then you may go.’ He paused, savouring the final insult before delivering it. ‘One other word of warning. There are some possessions of value to me in this house. Don’t try to steal them. My servants will know immediately if anything is missing. Now get out.’

I left without seeing her and walked to the bus stop in the village. When I got back to the yacht, however, there was a note from her waiting for me. It said that I must ignore her husband’s bad manners. They were the result of too much association with politicians. She would expect me for lunch on Friday. From then on I would be her guest, not his. In case I had not yet been able to make arrangements for cashing cheques with a local bank, she was enclosing five thousand lire to cover taxi fares and any other incidental expenses I might wish to incur.

At that time five thousand lire would have gone some way towards buying a taxi, the kind of taxi they had in Tripoli anyway. Two days later I moved into the farmhouse; but one thing I had to ask her about before finally deciding to stay. Had she known from the first that he had listened to us?

The question seemed to perplex her. ‘But he didn’t listen to us from the first,’ she said. ‘How could he have listened to us in your hotel?’

‘I mean on the boat.’

‘Oh, walls on boats are always so thin.’ She dismissed them with a shrug. ‘But what does it matter? Who cares what is heard? It is what one feels that counts.’

It did not seem worthwhile trying to challenge that statement.

I stayed there over three months, and by then my Italian, although never altogether free of Spanish intonations, was fluent. By then, too, I had come to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be needing it for very much longer. Hitler had invaded what the French and British governments had left of Czechoslovakia. A few weeks later, and to show that he could be just as bold and bloody if he put his mind to it, Mussolini had ordered the invasion of Albania. From Rome, too, came word that the yacht would that summer be cruising only on the west coast of metropolitan Italy. Her husband added, as if as an afterthought, that an Italian steward had been hired and would report for duty when he himself joined the boat at Naples. The captain would be advising her of his sailing orders.

It was time for me to go. I left, by a ship bound for Marseilles, on my nineteenth birthday, though I didn’t tell her of the coincidence. I don’t think she was all that sorry to see me go — she was one of those who like change — but a birthday would have added unnecessarily to the emotional content of the parting. Perhaps, now I think again about it, she taught me quite a lot.

From Marseilles I went to Paris and lived, within my means this time, at a small hotel in the rue de l’Isly. In spite of the fact that my year of ‘travelling in Europe’ was almost over I was not unduly troubled by the thought that I might soon have to return home. That was probably because it was almost impossible to live that summer in Paris without knowing that there was going to be a major war; and because, as a result, I did not really believe that anything was going to turn out as planned for very much longer. Still, as a precautionary delaying tactic, I wrote to my father suggesting that it might not be a bad idea if I went home by freighter via New York, so that I could visit the World’s Fair and see what our foreign business competitors were doing in the world market. I could, I assured him smugly, easily afford it.

I need not have bothered. Mail travelled slowly in those days, and, by the time my letter reached him, the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact had already been signed. During the last week in August 1939, I cabled him saying that, subject to his blessing, I proposed going to England in order to join either the Royal Navy or, failing that, the RAF.

His blessing I duly received, but soon had to cable for supplementary assistance: more money and some introductions in the right quarters. Of course, at the beginning of the war, none of the British services was prepared to cope with floods of raw recruits, least of all the Navy and the RAF. The best he could do in the way of introductions not only landed me in the Army but also in one of the most boring parts of it — a searchlight battery stationed in East Anglia.

All I remember now about the winter that followed was how cold it was, and that in March we moved to a site farther south which seemed even colder. In May we were moved again, suddenly, to Wales; not because we were needed there, but in order to leave the hutted camp we had occupied free to receive troops evacuated from Dunkirk. In Wales we were told that the artillery regiment to which our battery belonged was to be converted from the searchlight role to that of mobile Ack-Ack with Bofors guns. Older’ officers and men were to be weeded out and transferred to static units. The qualifications of all personnel were re-examined and reassessed. The process happened to coincide with Italy’s entry into the war and the issue of an Army Council Instruction requiring returns from all units listing the names of NCO's and men who could speak Italian. My name was one of three sent in, the other two being those of British-born Italian waiters. In due course, we were summoned to a barracks near Durham where we were interviewed and tested by an officer who spoke phrase-book Italian with a Scottish accent. He said, in the importantly secretive way which was then fashionable, that we were probably needed for guard duty at the new Italian internment camp on the Isle of Man.

I never knew what happened to the waiters, but two months later I was sent to an infantry battalion bound by troopship for Egypt and the Western Desert.

After we arrived, the battalion delivered me to the Intelligence Corps. Theoretically, I was there as an interpreter. In practice, I was used from the start to interrogate the Italian prisoners-of-war who were then pouring in by the thousands. An officer, with an NCO escort, was supposed to deal with each POW separately, but there were just too many of them for that sort of nonsense. So the work was split up. To give me a semblance of authority, I was made an acting-corporal and told to behave like a stage sergeant-major. It was all a great waste of time. During the months before Rommel’s first big counter-attack, I interrogated many hundreds of POWs and wrote an equivalent number of reports on them. Never, during the entire time, did I learn anything of military value that I had not already learned from the intelligence briefings we were given. The only higher-ups who took any real interest in our findings, were the political warfare people. Once or twice I was able to quote in my reports things said by a more-than-usually demoralized prisoner — generally one with wife trouble — or gripes, spotted in the letters from home some of them carried, that could be used in propaganda.

I was confirmed as corporal and there was talk of my being commissioned, but nothing came of it. Instead, I was transferred to Field Security Police and posted to Italian Somaliland as an acting-sergeant. After more than enough of that — why anyone should ever have wanted the place passes all understanding — I was posted to Eighth Army in time for the invasion of Sicily.

To see how it was that I came to arrest Carlo, you have to know what the Field Security Police in Italy were supposed to do. Some who were there at the time may need no reminding, but it may help others to recall that our opposite numbers in the American sector of the front bore a rather more dashing title — Counter-intelligence Corps.

The CIC and ourselves both had the same job and we did it in more or less the same way. While the ordinary military police were concerned briefly with military matters such as convoy traffic control, drunks, deserters, POW cages, stockades and so on, we dealt with the problems arising from the presence all around our forces — and, in the towns and villages, among them — of large numbers of civilians who, until recently, had been actively or passively on the side of our enemies. Some of them, a few but some, still were. Our main task was to see that, in the forward areas where such things mattered, those who were against us and in a position to do something about it were either removed or neutralized.

Of course things were rarely as simple as that.

If a farmer stole a pair of army boots because his own had gone to hell and he had to start ploughing his land again, was that petty theft or sabotage? Was an old whore wounding a soldier by hitting him in an eye with the heel of a shoe merely defending her democratic right to the rate for the job, or was she giving aid and comfort to the Waffen SS division dug in across the river north of us? And then there were the black marketeers who flogged bottles of a turpentine-like liquid they called peach brandy to the troops in exchange for cartons of army rations. How did you cope with that sort of traffic? By telling the troops that they were ruining their lives?

Well, no. What you did was try to catch the black marketeers, and you did this by checking as constantly as you could on the driver and occupants of every civilian vehicle moving in your area. The CIC used jeeps with two men in them. We used one-man motorcycle patrols.

It was one of my patrols who brought in Carlo.

The first thing I heard of Carlo was the sound of his car, a clapped-out Opel that made more noise than the patrol’s motor-bike. When both engines had been switched off, I heard the corporal telling the owner of the car to stay exactly where he was. The corporal then came down to report.

‘Highly suspicious, this one, sir,’ he said. He called me ‘sir’ because I was by then a Warrant Officer 2nd Class, a sergeant-major. He also handed me a gasoline permit and laissez-passer issued in Naples by AMGOT.

I drew a deep breath and counted silently to ten.

AMGOT — Allied Military Government Occupied Territories — was one of the crosses the army had to bear at that stage of the campaign. AMGOT, it seemed to us, had been recruited by a committee of highly-placed saboteurs from the dregs of those ghastly pools, which both the American and British armies were obliged to maintain, of officers who had been commissioned in haste or ignorance and later rejected by unit after unit as unfit for any sort of responsible duty. Some were just stupid, some were alcoholics, a few were failed crooks and more remarkable, and from our point of view the more dangerous of these, were those amiable, personally charming and often cultivated eccentrics who, having served honourably in peace-time regular armies had, over the years, quietly become gaga without anyone ever having noticed the change. They were more dangerous not only because they were often of quite senior rank, but because many of them tended to hold political views which even Gabriele d’Annunzio might have found reactionary. Their tendency to form warm personal friendships with the former Fascist bosses they had been sent to replace, and also to confirm them in office, caused much resentment in the Allied armies.

Naturally, some of the AMGOT scandals were successfully hushed up. The Town Major in Sicily who used his authority to buy up all the best buildings, including the hotel, at cut prices for his own post-war account, was quietly court-martialled and sent home to serve a short prison term. Only a few ever heard about that. The gasoline-permit racket and the shenanigans that went with it were less easily covered up.

They reached their full absurdity when a CIC patrol on the outskirts of Naples stopped an Italian civilian driver whose car looked unusually well cared for and asked for his permit. The driver responded sullenly. He slowly produced a wallet from his pocket and was about to extract the permit when the CIC man reached in impatiently and took the whole thing. Inside, he found not only the AMGOT permit and a considerable sum of money, but also a Gestapo permit to operate the car issued less than three months previously. The driver was later identified as a senior Fascist Party official who had denounced Badoglio as a traitor for arresting Mussolini, urged his countrymen to stay loyal to the Nazi alliance and, when possible or convenient, stab the invaders in the back. He was on the Allied wanted list. The CIC put him in jail. Twelve hours later he was out, released on the orders of a senior AMGOT official.

This was too much for the CIC, who promptly leaked the story to war correspondents. Questioned by them, the AMGOT spokesman began, not too badly, by admitting the facts and agreeing that the whole affair was absolutely deplorable. But, he continued, they were all men of the world who knew that, in occupied territories where states of emergency existed, occasional compromises, distasteful though some might consider them, had to be made. AMGOT had been given the responsibility of governing the country pro tem, but no one had explained how it was to be governed without the aid of experienced local administrators accustomed to giving orders and seeing that they were obeyed. Where, might we ask, were the democratic administrators willing and able to take over the duties of those he was being urged to discard? We had had serious outbreaks of typhus. Was he now being asked to permit outbreaks of typhoid and cholera because the senior city sanitary department engineer had once been a member of the Fascist Party?

The spokesman had chosen that moment to pause for breath. Unfortunately for him, there had been one correspondent there who particularly disliked rhetorical questions. He was on his feet instantly. But what, he asked, about this man who had been arrested and then released? Was he a senior sanitary engineer? ‘Colonel, is he any kind of a sanitary engineer?’

That was when the spokesman had made his mistake. Instead of continuing to conceal his contempt for the newsmen, he had suddenly let it show.

He had smiled at the questioner. ‘No, my dear sir,’ he had replied sweetly, ‘the gentleman is not a sanitary engineer, but — ‘ a slight pause — ‘I happen to know that he plays an excellent game of bridge.’

Naturally, the whole story was at once censored, but the censors could not stop it spreading by word of mouth. It was at this time that some wag thought up the bitter little joke motto, Amgot mit Uns.

So, all that interested me about Carlo’s gasoline permit and laissez-passer was the name of the officer who had signed it. As the name was unfamiliar, I was unable to tell how much weight the permit-holder might have behind him. Accordingly, I rang signals and asked if they could put me through to CIC Venafro. Signals said that they would try. Venafro was then on the right flank of Fifth Army on the other side of the mountains from us, but signals could sometimes patch me in through HQ Caserta.

I called the corporal to come back down. There was still a faint possibility that he hadn’t made a complete fool of himself.

‘Was he carrying anything in the car?’ I asked.

‘No, sir, just himself. But he’s way off his permitted route, and out of his area as well.’

‘Did you ask him why?’

‘No, need to, sir. Standing orders. He shouldn’t be here.’

Hopeless. You could never persuade that kind of idiot that, in some circumstances, he might get better results by using standing orders as threats rather than by blindly obeying them.

‘I take it you’ve told him that he’s going to be arrested?’

‘Of course, sir. He already is under arrest really. Clear case. Shall I bring him down now?’

‘Not yet. I’ll let you know. Has he said anything?’

‘Not a word, sir. Shall I question him?’

‘No. You keep your mouth shut too.’

After a while signals came through to say that they had raised CIC Venafro. The man in charge there was an officer — trust the Americans to do things properly — but he never pulled rank on me and we had always managed to co-operate amicably. We had first met in Sicily.

‘Hi, Paul,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you? Or do you want to do something for me?’

‘I’m not quite sure, sir, which it is. One of my lot has brought in a man named Carlo Lech.’

There was a small silence before he said: ‘Paul, I think you may need help, but I don’t think I have the right kind. Lech is a well-known bridge player. You didn’t, by chance, catch him with any of the actual goods on him?’

‘No.’

‘Then you’d better let him go before someone starts reaching for your balls with a pipe-wrench.’

‘He’s out of his permitted area.’

‘You could ask him why and then let him go.’

‘If I’m going to have to let him go, sir, I’d like to ask him more than that. He’s been picked up and my man has logged the fact. I’ve got to have a good reason for letting him go. He’s got to buy his way out and not too cheaply. He’s from your side of the mountains. If you were here what would you like to ask him?’

‘Two nights ago twenty thousand cigarettes went missing off a truck between Caserta and here. There was an MP riding shotgun. His case is that the cigarettes were never loaded. I’d like to know what really happened because it’s happened before and some of the loot has ended up right here. Makes it look as if you’re a jerk who doesn’t know what’s going on in his own back yard. And if Mr Lech knows any good anti-Fascists, men of distinction whom we can persuade to come out of hiding so that we can give them posts as mayors, city councillors and police chiefs where their untainted records and democratic convictions can publicly demonstrate. . ‘

‘Yes, sir. I’ve had that directive too. I’ll see what I can find out about the cigarettes and call you back if I get anything. Funny name for an Italian, Lech. Sounds more like German.’

‘It’s Austrian. He’s one of those Tyrolese Italians, injured in a road accident when a teenager, which kept him out of any of the services. Party member though, and a smart lawyer. Watch yourself, kid.’

I cleared the line, then told the corporal to send the prisoner down but stay upstairs himself.

At that time Carlo was more than twice my age, a short, compact man with greying dark hair, grey-green eyes and one of the kindliest expressions I have ever seen. You felt instantly that he was longing for you to say or do something, anything that would give him an excuse to let the smile that seemed always to be trembling on his lips blossom forth. Except for the leather overcoat he wore, which was too long and had obviously once belonged to someone else, he was neatly dressed. His slight limp, a legacy of the road accident, did not seem to bother him much. He walked down the broken stone stairs as if he were used to them, and he was taking off his greasy grey-felt hat as he did so.

At the foot of the stairs, he stopped, looked carefully at the crown on my battledress sleeve and then said in English: ‘Good afternoon, Sergeant-Major.’

I replied in Italian. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Lech. Please sit down.’

He inspected me again and then, after examining carefully the rickety wicker chair I had offered him, sat down opposite my blanket-covered trestle table.

I was curious. ‘What were you looking for in the chair?’ I asked.

‘Lice, Sergeant-Major. I can’t stand them and, as a civilian, have no access to the military’s new ways of getting rid of them.’

Several years later, he told me that that had been the moment at which he had made up his mind about me. ‘I saw you as a son, the kind of son I would have liked to have, one with whom, and at whose side, I could do business. I saw you, above all, as a potential associate, a friend and partner whom I could trust, under any circumstances, even when his private hubris was involved, not to behave stupidly.’

He may have been telling something of the truth. Carlo had a sentimental streak that few who ever did business with him can have suspected. He also had a son, a handsome, clever but rather vain boy, who later disappointed him profoundly by going into the Church.

Nevertheless, our first meeting was for me more like a family quarrel than the meeting of minds he chose later to recall. The moment he was seated, I perched myself on a corner of the table from which I could look down upon him, and attacked.

‘You are driving a vehicle in this area without a valid permit and have, I understand, admitted doing so knowing that it was an offence. Am I right?’

‘Knowing that it was a minor, technical offence, yes, Sergeant-Major.’

‘There are no minor, technical offences in this area, Mr Lech. An offence is an offence. Where were you hoping to go and why?’

‘To Bari on business. I explained all this to your corporal.’

‘What business?’

‘Supplying the club for senior officers in Naples with brandy, Sergeant-Major.’

‘Peach brandy?’

He looked shocked. ‘Oh my God, no. The colonels and brigadier-generals would never commission me to supply them with that sort of rubbish.’

I noted that in spite of his shock at the idea of peach brandy entering a senior officers’ club, he had tried to pull rank on me with his colonels and brigadiers and at the same time managed to flourish the word ‘commission’. I had to mangle that line of defence before he could develop it.

‘Are you claiming that you are in this area illegally but justifiably because you have been specifically ordered here by a senior British or American officer? If so, have you some written authority to substantiate your claim?’

‘Oh no, Sergeant-Major, there is nothing like that. It is really quite simple. When persons of consequence ask the person of no consequence for his help, he endeavours, if he is wise, to oblige them. I am sure that if you would care to telephone General Anstruthers — ‘ he had difficulty in pronouncing the name but made a brave try — ‘he would confirm that good brandy was requested. Of course,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘I doubt if the General will take kindly to being questioned formally by a warrant-officer on such a trivial matter.’

I tossed a packet of cigarettes into his lap. ‘Any more,’ I suggested, ‘than the General will take kindly to the knowledge that his name is being used illegally as a black marketeer’s laissez-passer.’

He handed back the cigarettes without taking one, so I went on. ‘Whereabouts in Bari is the brandy?’

He threw up his hands in protest at the question. ‘Sergeant-Major, if I were certain that it even existed, I would not be committing this trivial breach of the regulations which you are now exploiting. I am told that the brandy is there, six cases of it, but I am not told where. For all I know it may by now have been — what is the word? — “liberated” by the British army. Or it may be that the original bottles have been refilled with wood alcohol. I have a contact, yes, but I do not know him personally and so cannot possibly buy sight unseen. But I explained all this to your corporal.’

‘Who is your contact?’

‘The man formerly in charge of what was the bonded warehouse.’

‘If the brandy is there and up to standard, what do you propose to do about it?’

‘If the price is not absurdly high, I shall buy it and then take it back to the General and his club wine committee.’

‘In your car?’

‘Certainly, in my car, and with a bill of sale to prove that the goods are my property.’

‘What makes you think I’ll let it through, Mr Lech?’

‘Unless you are attempting to solicit a bribe, which I doubt, why should you even think of stopping it? Tell me, Sergeant-Major, how do you define this new term or phrase you use, this “black marketeer”?’

‘One who has authorized dealings in goods that are rationed or otherwise in short supply.’

‘Is dealing with pre-war French brandy unauthorized? I hope you are not one of those socialists, Sergeant-Major, who object to the law of supply and demand controlling prices merely because persons like me risk their capital in order to make a fair profit.’

‘What is a fair profit?’

‘If I succeed in buying this brandy, I shall add forty per cent to the price I have to pay. Bearing in mind the fact that, in addition to my normal overheads in a transaction of this kind, I must suffer the mental strain of trying to convince a suspicious British Field Security policeman that I am not a crook, is that excessive? I shall be glad to let you have a bottle for the same price as that which I shall charge the General. Is that what you call black-market dealing?’

I had, after all, been warned that he was a lawyer. ‘All right, Mr Lech,’ I said, ‘let’s try a different commodity. Two nights ago, twenty thousand cigarettes were stolen off an American truck somewhere between Caserta and Venafro. How would you describe the acting of selling them?’

‘In civilized countries, Sergeant-Major, and in some uncivilized ones, dealing in stolen property has always been an offence.’

‘But one which you would never commit yourself.’

‘Certainly not. I have no need to commit it.’

‘You wouldn’t know, by any chance, who stole those cigarettes?’

‘No, but I know how they were stolen.’ He waited for me to ask him how.

‘Well?’

‘Would the knowledge be of use to you here in your area, Sergeant-Major, or are you thinking unselfishly more of your colleague in Venafro?’

He could not have made his meaning plainer. If I wanted to hear more, he expected a clear run to Bari and back, with no ‘technical’ obstacles in his path. It wasn’t a bad deal, so I nodded.

‘I’m thinking of both us now, Mr Lech, so your information had better be good.’

On his private island, ten years later, we analysed that part of the conversation as if it had been a game, a form of exercise.

‘I watched you very closely,’ he said. ‘You were throwing away an apparent advantage because you knew that it was essentially worthless. I could have had you in trouble with your own people within hours, and you must have known that too. Yet, you hung on by switching currencies. Sterling was out, but there was still the dollar. Your reply, reminding me of the more lasting penalties to be incurred by arousing American displeasure, could not have been bettered.’

The verdict of a bridge-player enjoying the benefits of hindsight. At the time he had protested vigorously.

‘Of course my information is good, Sergeant-Major. Indeed, it is impeccable. Most petty professional crooks share the same weaknesses. One of them is that they can never refrain from boasting of their successes. In the matter of the cigarettes, it was arranged in advance with the military policeman on the truck that the driver, his accomplice, would stop on the way and leave the load unattended for five minutes in order to deal with a sudden call of nature. The place arranged for the stop was near the village of Galleno. There is no soft shoulder on the road just there, so it would be an easy place for a truck to pull off, and then get back on again, without getting stuck in the mud. I dare say that a very quick search might find some of the cigarettes still in the village.’

‘Thank you, Mr Lech.’

I gave him back his AMGOT papers and then filled in one of the duplicated pro-formas we used for civilian vehicle movement control in the Bari area. While I was doing the filling-in I thought that I might as well see what his reactions would be to the question about anti-Fascists.

To my surprise, he did not laugh.

‘Here in the south,’ he said, ‘you will find only three kinds of person who will claim seriously that they have long been anti-Fascist. First, there are the village priests, or most of them, as you must know well. Then, there are the very few real Communists, getting old by now. They are mostly still underground awaiting their moment. And finally there are the madmen.’

‘Madmen?’

He stood up. ‘Who, unless he was a priest or a Communist or in some other way mad, would have resisted Party pressure to conform for twenty years? And who but madmen, could look around them now at the destruction of what little had been built up in this pitiful country and declare that it is better so or that the punishment was necessary?’ He brushed the thought away as if it were a cobweb across his face. ‘In the north, we shall no doubt find things very different. You will see. We will both see. There are Communists who will be less old and better organized. I am at present cut off from my family in Milan, but even when I last heard from my wife, before the arrest of Mussolini, the situation had already begun to change radically. The partisans had begun to organize themselves instead of talking.’

He took the pro-forma from me, examined my signature and then spelled out my name. ‘Is that right, Sergeant-Major? Good. I have no doubt that we shall be meeting again and I wanted to be sure. May I ask, I wonder, where you learned to speak Italian so well?’

‘If we ever meet again, Mr Lech, I will be glad to tell you.’

‘Oh, we shall certainly meet again, Sergeant-Major.’ The smile had finally broken through. ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’

With a stiff little bow he turned and went up the stairs. By the time the racket of his car had died away and the corporal had been told why his prisoner had been sprung, signals had got me Venafro again.

My colleague was pleased with what I had to tell him and looked forward keenly to passing it on to the MPs commanding officer, whom he disliked. I did not trouble to tell him, though, about Carlo’s views on anti-Fascists. He would not have liked them and might even have considered such talk subversive.

Two days later I returned from a session at Corps to find a package on my table. The orderly on duty said that it had been delivered by an Italian in a car holding a movement permit signed by me. Inside the package was a bottle of Martell V.S.O.P. and a bill for two thousand lire made out on paper with a printed heeding in English. CARLO LECH Doctor of Jurisprudence, followed by a Naples address.

I wasn’t going to pay two thousand lire for a bottle of brandy even though it was certainly worth more than that at the time, and it would have been most inadvisable to keep the bottle without paying at all. The prissy corporal who had arrested Carlo would be sure to hear of it and start telling everyone that I had accepted a bribe. On the other hand, the idea of sending the bottle back seemed offensively high-minded. So, I went to the senior Divisional HQ warrant-officer and asked his advice. He agreed that the price made it look like a bribe but also thought it too good a thing to miss. His suggestion was that the bottle be raffled in the HQ mess with tickets at fifty lire apiece, all monies in excess of two thousand lire to go to the Mess Comforts Fund. The bottle was won by an Ordnance Corps staff-sergeant. We had an air courier service to Naples which I used to send Carlo his two thousand lire, in AMGOT notes, together with a typed receipt for his signature.

The receipt was eventually returned. Under his signature Carlo had written: ‘Many thanks. See you soon.’