The Wedding Officer

6

THE FIELD Security Service had done itself proud; that much was immediately apparent. His new headquarters was an ancient palazzo, somewhat dilapidated in appearance but still bearing signs of its former grandeur. Inside the imposing entrance, a faded fresco showed nymphs and satyrs engaged in some kind of food fight. James wandered into an inner courtyard, which contained a lemon tree and four brand-new jeeps.

“Hello?” he called cautiously.

Through one of the windows that gave onto the courtyard he spotted an orderly in an American uniform scuttling from one room to another, bearing an armful of files. “Excuse me,” James said, leaning through the window. “I’m looking for FSS.”

“Try upstairs,” the orderly said uninterestedly over his shoulder.

So much for information sharing between Allies, James thought. “Any idea where?”

“Third floor, maybe.”

James heaved his kit bag onto his shoulder again and trudged up the huge staircase that filled one corner of the courtyard. His nail-soled boots echoed on the stone—the American’s rubber soles had made barely a sound.

On the third floor he opened a door and stepped into a large, barely furnished salon. It contained an elegantly dressed woman, who was sitting by the window in an equally elegant chair, and an emaciated old goat, which was tethered to the chair by a chain. A child was sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the goat, milking its teats into a bucket. All three looked up at him as he entered, although only the goat looked particularly surprised. “Scusate,” James muttered, withdrawing quickly. He had forgotten that when an American said the third floor, he actually meant the second.

On the floor below, the tapping of a typewriter indicated that he was now in the vicinity of an office, an impression confirmed by a printed sign on the door bearing the words “312 Field Security Service (British Army).” Beneath it a second, typewritten notice said: “Wedding Officer. Appointments only. Office hours 3.00–4.00.” The same information was repeated in Italian. At some point the notice had been torn into several pieces, as if it had been ripped from the door in exasperation, and then stuck back together. James put down his kit bag and knocked.

“Avanti,” a voice said.

He opened the door. It was a large room, and a long table running down the middle of it was piled high with files and papers. A dark-haired man was perched on the side of the table, shuffling papers from one vast pile to the next. He had a colored neckerchief pushed into the collar of his shirt, which gave his uniform a faintly raffish air. “Yes?” he said, looking up.

“Hello. I’m Captain Gould.”

“Oh.” The man seemed surprised. “We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow.”

“I got a lift from Salerno. A supply truck on its way to the front.”

“Ah. Rightio.” The man gestured at the papers. “I was just sorting things out for you, as a matter of fact. I’m Jackson.” He stood up and offered his hand.

James stepped forward to shake it. “Looks like quite a job,” he suggested, eyeing the mounds of paper.

“It is that.” Jackson ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m a bit behind, actually. I was going to write you a note. But since you’re here, shall we do it over dinner?”

James had not had anything that could properly be described as “dinner” for a very long time. “Do you have a mess?” he asked hopefully.

Jackson laughed. “Not exactly. That is, there’s a man called Malloni who cooks our rations for us, but his culinary skills aren’t up to much. We suspect he’s skimming off the corned beef and selling it on the black market—the locals have somehow become convinced it’s an aphrodisiac, I suppose on the principle that anything that tastes so vile must somehow be good for you.” Jackson had a slight twitch, which punctuated every other sentence with the faintest of pauses. “No, I was thinking more of a restaurant. There’s a place called Zi’Teresa’s, down in the harbor. Black market, of course, and priced accordingly, but that needn’t worry us. It’s one of the better perks of the job—just ask the owner to sign the bill, and he’ll knock fifty percent off straightaway.”

“But isn’t that just the sort of thing we’re here to stop?”

“Believe me,” Jackson said with a lopsided grin, “kicking out the Jerries is nothing compared to the job we’d have if we tried to separate the Neapolitans from their grub. And we’ve got bigger headaches to worry about. How about it?”

“Take a look at the pictures, when you get time,” Jackson suggested as they walked back toward the stone staircase. “Some of them are rather racy. If you like that sort of thing.” Now that James looked more closely, it was not only food that the nymphs and satyrs were fighting over in the frescoes. “Your transport.” Jackson pointed to where a Matchless motorbike was propped underneath a statue of Proserpine, her naked buttocks pockmarked with bullet holes. “Whatever you do, don’t keep it in the street. The Yanks have had three jeeps stolen already. Not to mention several trucks, a freight locomotive and a couple of class C warships.”

“How come you’re both in the same HQ?”

“The theory is that their Counter Intelligence Corps and our Field Security do pretty much the same job. Some bright spark thought we should do it together.”

“And do you?”

Outside the palazzo Jackson turned left, marching briskly along the seafront. Automatically, James fell in beside him, their arms and legs swinging in unconscious military unison. “Well, we try not to step on each other’s toes. It’s a marvelous setup they’ve got—twenty-five staff to our three, and a filing system that takes up a whole room. How’s your Italian, by the way?”

James confessed that so far, he had barely understood a word that had been spoken to him.

“That’s probably because what you were hearing was Neapolitan—it’s almost a separate language, and some of the older folk profess not to understand anything else. Don’t worry, you’ll soon pick it up. But CIC are hampered by the fact that not a single one of them even speaks standard Italian.”

“That’s rather odd, surely?”

Jackson gave a bark of laughter. “Not so much odd as fortuitous. There are plenty of Italian Americans in the Fifth Army, but they’ve all wangled positions in the stores. The last thing they want is CIC sticking their noses in.”

“You mean—they’re pinching their own supplies?” James said, appalled.

Jackson stopped. “Do you know, I think we should take a detour. There’s something I ought to show you.”

He took James up the hill into the old quarter, a mass of dark medieval buildings piled on top of one another. Zigzagging erratically through the middle of this labyrinth was an alleyway that seemed to have become the main street by virtue of its length rather than any claim to magnificence. It resembled nothing so much as an African souk, James thought: narrow, chaotic and unbelievably crowded, with both buyers and sellers. Market stalls roughly assembled from a couple of suitcases and a plank of wood were piled high with every item of army equipment conceivable—ration packs, blankets reworked into dresses and coats, boots, cigarettes, vials of penicillin, toilet paper, even rolls of telephone wire. Passersby picked over items of military underwear, or haggled vociferously over candy bars filleted from American K rations. The stallholders eyed the two officers warily as they pushed through the crush, but apart from one shifty-looking gentleman who slid a couple of British bayonets out of sight as they approached, they made no attempt to conceal their wares.

“We used to round them up occasionally,” Jackson was saying, “but a different set of faces simply came and took their places the next day. Penicillin’s where the real money is, of course. So much has gone missing our medics sometimes have to come here and buy it back from the black marketeers, just to keep the field hospitals supplied.”

James nodded. Penicillin: It was the word on everyone’s lips. Before penicillin there had been no effective way to treat the infections caused by bullet wounds or bomb shrapnel, so that even a relatively minor injury could lead to the loss of a limb or death. An American company, Pfizer, had now found a way to manufacture the wonder drug in huge quantities, and was even running advertisements in magazines and newspapers boasting of the difference their product could make to the war.

“Why do the Italians want so much of it?” James asked. “After all, it’s not as if they’re fighting now.”

“It’s not injuries they want it for, it’s venereal disease. It’s rampant here.”

“Oh. Of course.” James remembered the girls who had approached him earlier. Ver’ cleen. Ver’ cleen. “There’s a fair amount of…fraternization, I take it?”

They had turned off the street market now and were walking down through the old town. As if to illustrate his words, a raucous group of GIs rounded the corner. Each had a bottle in one hand and a laughing girl in the other.

Jackson shrugged. “It’s simple economics, I’m afraid. The Jerries conscripted all the able-bodied Italian men and shipped them off to labor camps or to fight in Russia. After that, the economy collapsed—prostitution and black-marketeering are pretty much all that’s left. According to the latest Bureau bulletin, there are over forty thousand prostitutes in Naples. That’s out of a total female population of ninety thousand. If you exclude the very old or the very young, almost any woman you see here is on the game.”

“And there’s nothing we can do about it?”

Jackson shot him a glance. “Well, winning the war would be a start,” he said mildly.

“I meant nothing we can do here, in Naples?”

“We do what we can.” Jackson pointed at a sign above a shop. The original lettering had been painted out and the words PRO STATION daubed on top. “Officially, prostitution is illegal and we don’t tolerate it. But we give out free prophylactics to any soldier who wants them. And there’s a sort of fungicide, too, which the girls can use to clean themselves—blue powder, the men call it. But that’s as far as our interest extends. At the end of the day, all that concerns Allied Military Government is keeping the soldiers on their feet. After a couple of weeks here, most are headed back to the front. So long as they can stand up and fire a rifle, that’s what matters.”

Back on the seafront he ushered James through the doorway of a restaurant. Behind the blackout blinds it was packed with people. Most were officers, but there was a smattering of GIs entertaining local girls, and several tables of surprisingly prosperous-looking Italians, some of whom were eating with American or British staff officers.

“You’d hardly know there was a war on, would you?” Jackson said, enjoying James’s surprise.

“Signor Jackson. How very nice to see you.” The maître d’ was shimmying between the tables toward them.

“A quiet table please, Angelo. My colleague and I have business to discuss.” The Italian smiled and led them to a table at the back.

“The women look pretty good, don’t they?” Jackson commented, looking around him as they sat down. “They call it the Kraut diet—they’re all on the verge of starvation.” A handwritten menu was placed on the table. “Be careful what you order, though. There aren’t many cats on the streets of Naples anymore.”

A waiter was passing through the tables with some fish on a platter, showing them to the diners to attract their admiration. Jackson stopped him. “And take a look at these,” he said to James. “Notice anything strange about them?”

“They seem all right to me.”

“The heads don’t match the bodies.”

Now that James looked more closely, he saw that each fish did indeed consist of two separate pieces, carefully fitted together at the neck. The join was almost invisible. “Dogfish, probably,” Jackson said dismissively. “Edible, but hardly a delicacy.” He spoke sharply to the waiter in very fast Italian. The waiter shrugged and said something back—once again James found himself quite unable to make out most of the words. Jackson nodded. “It seems they have sea urchins today, though I’d advise you against those as well.”

“Why’s that?”

“They have a rather inconvenient effect.” Seeing James’s incomprehension, he lowered his voice. “On the libido. Unless you intend to visit one of the rooms upstairs later, I’d steer clear.”

“So this is a—well, a brothel?”

The other man shrugged. “Not as such. But every black market restaurant has a few girls hanging around. There’s a rather notorious beauty at this establishment, as it happens, with a glass eye and a famously supple throat. If you like that sort of thing.” He sat back and regarded James anxiously for a moment. “You married, Gould?”

“Um,” James said, taken off guard. “Not exactly.”

“But you’ve got a girl? Back home, I mean?”

“Absolutely.” Jackson seemed to be waiting for more details, so he added, “Her name’s Jane. Jane Ellis. She’s a land girl.”

“Engaged to her?”

“Pretty much.”

“Good. You’ll find that comes in useful. In the wedding interviews.”

“Yes, I was going to ask you—”

“My advice to you, Gould,” Jackson said with sudden urgency, leaning toward him, “is to steer clear of seafood, stay out of the sun, and think of your girl.”

“Well, of course. But what I don’t quite understand—”

“At the first sign of trouble, just tell them you’re fidanzato. Engaged.”

“I’ll bear it in mind,” James said, completely mystified.

“Got to set the right example. You’re the wedding officer now, you see.” Jackson appeared to give a kind of shudder.

“Actually, I don’t see,” James said. “The first I knew of it was that sign on your door—”

“Not my door, old thing. Your door, now.” Suddenly, Jackson’s mood seemed to brighten. “Do you know, I think I might have those sea urchins after all. Since it’s my last night.” He gestured to the waiter. “What about you? They do a perfectly acceptable sausage and egg.”

“That sounds wonderful.” When the waiter had taken their orders, James persisted, “Tell me, though—what is a wedding officer, exactly? There wasn’t anything in the briefing notes.”

“Ah.” Jackson seemed unsure where to begin. “Well, it’s rather an odd one. Ever since the Allies arrived, there have been a number of soldiers wanting to marry local girls. Quite a large number—in fact, it looked as if it might be starting to get quite out of hand. Of course, any serviceman who wants to marry has to get the CO’s permission. So, in an attempt to stem the tide, the CO decided that every potential fiancée has to be vetted to confirm that she’s suitable and of good character.”

“But what on earth does ‘good character’ mean?”

“Basically, that she isn’t a whore.” Jackson shrugged. “The fact of the matter is that she’s bound to be, given what we were saying earlier. Your job is simply to gather the evidence. If she’s got enough food, or if there’s any furniture left in her apartment, she’s a tart. If she can afford soap rather than cleaning herself with charcoal, she’s a tart. If she can afford olive oil, or white bread, or lipstick, she’s a tart. Just ask her what she’s living on. Nine times out of ten she’ll tell you there’s an uncle somewhere, but that story never stands up to much scrutiny.”

“Doesn’t sound too difficult.”

Jackson stared at him. For a moment his eyes had the vacant, dispossessed look James had seen on the faces of Blitz victims and battlefield casualties. Then he passed his hand over his face, and seemed to recollect where he was. “No, I suppose it doesn’t.” A jug of red wine arrived, and Jackson poured them both large glasses, splashing some over the tablecloth in the process. “Per cent’ anni.”

“Cheers.”

As he set his glass down James noticed that a man at a nearby table was watching them with an amused expression on his face. From his expensive suit James deduced that he was both a civilian and someone of importance. He was dining with a group of American staff officers. The man caught James’s eye, and raised his hand in ironic greeting.

“Who’s that?” he asked.

“Who? Oh, him. His name’s Zagarella. He’s a pharmacist, though his real occupation is professional cockroach. He’s the man behind most of the stolen penicillin.”

“Can’t you arrest him?”

Jackson smiled mirthlessly. “I did, once. It didn’t get me anywhere. As you can see, he has some rather well-connected friends.”

Their food came. The sausage and egg was, as Jackson had promised, perfectly acceptable, and seemed to be made with real eggs, not dried, and genuine meat instead of bully. After months of tinned rations James devoured it eagerly.

Jackson picked up his sea urchins, avoiding the violet spikes, and spooned the brightly colored insides into his mouth. James had never seen anything like it. Presumably it was an austerity measure, like the cafés at home that served whale meat pie. “May I taste that?” he asked curiously.

“All right,” Jackson said somewhat unenthusiastically, passing one over. James dipped his knife into the soft yolky innards and touched it to his tongue. There was a taste of seaweed, but also a rich, salty creaminess, strange but not unpleasantly so. He struggled to think of anything in his experience it could be compared with.

“It’s like—like whelks with custard,” he suggested.

“If you say so.” Jackson ate the rest of his sea urchins quickly, without offering to share any more.

As they ate he explained what James’s other duties would involve. Notionally, FSS were responsible for anything that could affect the security of the Allied Military Government. “In theory, that means intelligence gathering. But there isn’t any intelligence in Naples anymore, only wild rumor. Just last week the Americans produced half a dozen so-called reliable reports that a suicide panzer division had holed up in Mount Vesuvius and was waiting to come out and pounce on our rear. It took me three days to verify what I knew all along, which is that it was all a piece of nonsense.”

“You don’t seem very impressed by our Allies,” James said.

“Well, we do have more experience of this sort of thing. Africa and India and so on.” Jackson poured himself some more wine. “We’re just naturally better suited to running an empire.”

James murmured something about the Germans having had a similar notion, but Jackson was disinclined to pick up on any irony.

“Actually, the Krauts ran this place pretty well. They didn’t have any trouble with VD, for example. They simply imprisoned any girl who passed on an infection, and gave the soldier concerned a field punishment for good measure—despoiling the purity of the master race and so on. We’re supposed to be more civilized, which gets us into all sorts of trouble.”

There was a curious incident when Jackson asked for the bill. Before it could be drawn up, Angelo, the maître d’, sidled over to the table and said that there would be no charge “for the British secret policemen.” He bowed to James. “A very warm welcome to you, Captain Gould. I hope we’ll see you here often.”

“How does he know my name?” James asked when Angelo had gone.

Jackson shrugged. “It’s his business to know everyone.”

“I’m not really happy about this,” James said.

“Why not?”

“It’s my first evening in Naples. I don’t see that I can start off by accepting—well, what could be construed as a bribe.”

“That’s the way it’s done here, I’m afraid. You grease my palm, I’ll grease yours. Angelo doesn’t mean any harm.”

“But technically, this place shouldn’t even be open.”

“They’re getting back to normal. It’s just not the same as our normal, that’s all.”

“I still want to pay my half,” James said doggedly. He called to the waiter, who went to fetch a bill.

“Il conto,” he said, putting it on the table with a smile. James looked at it: It came to more than two weeks’ army wages.

“Can I give you one last piece of advice, Gould?” Jackson said when James had finished paying.

“Of course.”

Jackson hesitated. Then he said slowly, “This place isn’t like home. There aren’t any rules here, only orders. Just follow the orders, and you’ll be all right. But if you try to make sense of it—well, you’ll go completely mad.”

As they left the restaurant they came upon a scuffle—two British soldiers beating up a local boy, no older than fifteen. One of the soldiers had him by the arms, while the other was setting about him with a chair leg. Blood was streaming from the boy’s head. A dark, pretty girl not much older than the boy watched helplessly from a few yards away.

“What’s going on?” Jackson called sharply. “Stop that at once.” The soldiers backed off reluctantly, and the two FSS men hurried forward to question them.

It turned out that earlier the boy had pimped his sister to them. A price had been fixed, but the boy had taken the money—or rather, the three packets of cigarettes that had been agreed as payment—and made a dash for it. The soldiers had come across them again later, and had set about teaching them a lesson. James made a show of taking their names and numbers, but it was clearly going to be impossible to do more. He sent them on their way and they left, still muttering threats.

While he was dealing with the men Jackson had been talking in a low voice to the girl and her brother, who then slipped off into the shadows themselves. “Not a happy story,” he said as James rejoined him. “And not as straightforward as it looks. The children are scugnizzi—haven’t seen their parents in over a year. The girl has syphilis, so she was at least partly motivated by a desire not to spread it any further when she ran off. I gave her the address of a hospital that may be able to get her some penicillin, though I doubt she’ll be able to afford it. It’s a classic vicious circle. She’ll have to sleep with a dozen more soldiers to get the funds to clear up her own infection, by which time those men will have infected a dozen more girls.”

“You must be pleased to be going home,” James said. “Nice to get back to England, after all this.”

“I suppose so,” Jackson said. He looked up at the crumbling buildings around them—the bombed-out windows, the balconies strewn with washing and geraniums, the walls pockmarked by the ordnance of three armies—and then at the crush of humanity streaming past in both directions. “It’s strange how it grows on one, though.”