The Wedding Officer

13

JAMES WAS still in a buoyant mood next morning as he set off with Eric to interrogate the prisoners rounded up in the raid on the Via Forcella.

On their way they dropped in on Zagarella in the Poggio Reale prison, where they found him as imperturbable as ever, and working his way through an excellent breakfast. He had been given a cell, or rather a suite of cells, which was larger than Algisa Fiore’s apartment. One of the warders was busy making up his bed with fresh linen. James noticed that the prisoner also appeared to be wearing a freshly laundered shirt.

“Have you come to release me?” he wanted to know.

“Our inquiries are not yet complete,” James said. “You’ll stay here until they are.”

Zagarella dabbed at his lips with a napkin. “I doubt that very much,” he assured them. “I must say, I am surprised that you are still here yourselves. I imagined that you would have been transferred out of Naples by now.”

“You’ll find the Allied Military Government rather different from anything you’re used to dealing with.”

“You are referring, I take it, to your famous incorruptibility,” Zagarella said, “which, to be sure, has already cost me a great deal of money.” The warder, having finished making up the bed, produced a bowl of water, a shaving brush and some soap, with which he began energetically lathering the prisoner’s cheeks. “You should remember,” the pharmacist continued, “that we Neapolitans have been occupied before. The Aragonese, the Austrians, the Bourbons, the Italians—yes, even the Italians—the Germans…and now, of course, the Allies. So you see, we have had plenty of practice at it.” The warder applied his blade to the side of Zagarella’s cheek. The pharmacist closed his eyes with a grunt of pleasure, and made a little gesture of dismissal at James and Eric.

“It will give me great pleasure,” James said as they left the prison, “to put that man behind bars.”

“He already is behind bars,” Eric pointed out, “and to be honest, it doesn’t seem to be inconveniencing him that much.”

“They’re only treating him so well because he’s convinced them he’ll be out soon. If we get a conviction, he’ll be just another prisoner.”

“James,” Eric said, “do you know how many mobsters we’ve actually managed to convict since we came to Naples?”

“How many?”

“Three.” Eric frowned. “Papers go missing. Witnesses don’t turn up, or change their stories at the last minute. One had an epileptic fit in the middle of giving evidence and had to be excused. Then there are the accused who turn out to have such astounding war records working for the resistance that we have to give them a medal instead of a prison sentence. And that’s even before you get to the judges who appear to have selectively misheard the evidence, or the prisons which turn out to have faulty locks. And yes, there have been guys from CIC who have been transferred after a word in the right ear. This man Vito Genovese who runs it all, he’s in with AMG at the highest level—I mean the very highest level. They say that when General Clark first arrived in Naples, he expressed a wish to eat some seafood. Well, all the fishing boats were grounded, because of the mines. Vito organized a great feast to celebrate the general’s arrival, by the simple expedient of stealing all the fish from the Naples aquarium. Shortly afterward, he was given the post of official advisor to the high command. If someone like Zagarella is really under his protection, there won’t be much we can do about it.”

At the Questura, the main police station, James explained that they wished to interview the suspects rounded up in the raid on the Via Forcella. After much paperwork they were taken to the cells, where they were shown a very old man who was sitting in the holding pen, completely alone.

“What’s going on?” James demanded. “Where are the others?”

The policeman who had brought them down to the cells shrugged. “What others?”

“There must have been dozens of people trading on the Via Forcella yesterday. Where are they all?” Seeing that he would get nothing out of the policeman, he spoke to the old man. “When you came in here, how many were with you?”

“Oh, twenty or thirty.”

“Where are they now?”

“They all went in the night,” the old man said sadly. “I would have gone too, but I couldn’t afford the fine.”

“What fine?”

“Fifty lire.” The old man spread his arms. “I’m just a scrap metal dealer. I don’t have fifty lire.”

Expressionless, the policeman said, “He is mistaken. No one has been fined. You can inspect the books if you wish.”

James sighed. “What’s this man charged with?” he asked the policeman.

“Selling copper telephone wire.”

“Nothing to do with penicillin?”

“It would seem not.”

“If you please,” the old man said, “I’m very anxious to get out of here. My wife, you see, is getting on, and we have no neighbors. I’m afraid that if I don’t get home, there’ll be no one to cook her a meal.”

The policeman brought them a roll of telephone wire. “This was found on him.”

“I cut the German wire,” the old man said proudly. “That’s what I’m meant to do, isn’t it? We don’t like the Germans.”

James translated what the old man had said to Eric, who scratched his head. “That was before the Allies arrived. We dropped leaflets telling the Italians to do as much damage as they could. But after we arrived, we obviously wanted the wires left alone so we could use them ourselves.”

“Here,” the old man said, producing a dog-eared leaflet from an inside pocket and unfolding it proudly. “See? It says to cut the wires. Will I get a medal?”

“You can’t cut telephone wires anymore,” James explained. “They’re ours now.”

“But it’s German wire.”

“Yes, but…” James sighed. “Oh, never mind.”

They all looked at the old man, who seemed completely unaware of what was going on.

“Can’t we just kick him out?” Eric suggested.

“That won’t be possible,” the policeman said sternly. “He has been charged with destruction of Allied military property. The penalty is up to ten years in jail.”

“What do we do?” Eric asked.

“There’s not a lot we can do,” James said glumly. “Officially, it’s out of our hands.”

The old man had given an address in a village to the south of Naples. When they got back to their HQ, James took the FSS motorbike off its stand, pushed it down the stone staircase, and set off. The main thoroughfares out of the city had been cleared of rubble now, and there were a number of trams working. The rule seemed to be that the driver of any kind of two-wheeled vehicle considered himself entitled to drive alongside them and hold on, getting himself towed along for as long as he felt like it in order to save on either petrol or leg power. James was relieved when he finally left the city and found himself in the countryside. It was a beautiful spring day, and with the sun on his face it was possible to believe himself a thousand miles from any war.

The landscape he was driving through could not have changed much since medieval times. The fields were tiny, and the doubled-up women working in them were dressed in the same shapeless black dresses and headscarves they would have worn in the time of Boccaccio. Occasionally there was a bullock or a mule to help with the labor, but most of the work seemed to be done by hand.

Eventually he found the village the old man had named, and by asking around located his house. It stood on its own in the midst of a few weed-strewn fields: James guessed that he had simply become too old to work them anymore. Small piles of scrap metal—the wreckage of a burnt-out truck, a couple of pieces of twisted metal from a German bomb, an empty American ammunition box—testified to his new profession. The whole place was eerily silent.

The house was barely more than a byre with a couple of rooms attached. James knocked on the door. “Hello?” he called. There was no reply.

He pushed the door open and went inside. When his eyes had got used to the gloom he made out a bed underneath the window, covered in rags. A faint protuberance in the rags resolved itself into the outline of a wizened old face. Sightless eyes, ghostly with cataracts, peered unblinkingly at the ceiling. “Buongiorno, signora,” he said softly. The old lady gave no sign of having heard him. She appeared to James to be very close to death. When he looked in the kitchen, there was absolutely no food in the place.

“You want to do what?” Major Heathcote stared at him, boggle-eyed with disbelief.

“I want to ask the Italians to have him released, sir,” James said. “Even if he has done something wrong, which is debatable, he could be freed on compassionate grounds.”

“Compassionate grounds?” The major had gone red in the face. “Captain, sixty miles away at this very moment there are over five thousand soldiers sitting in foxholes full of freezing water, being shelled night and day by the Germans, unable even to stand up for a piss in case some sniper puts a bullet through their heads. Why don’t you ask them about compassionate grounds?”

“I’m aware the fighting is quite tough at present, sir.” The major grunted incredulously. James pushed on, “All the same, it’s surely the duty of the military government to act fairly. And this man has been locked up for all the wrong reasons.”

“By his fellow Italians.”

“As a result of our operation—”

“Which you now tell me was an abject failure,” snapped the major.

James said nothing.

The major sighed. “And you’ve absolutely nothing to charge this pharmacist Zagarella with?” He looked from one to the other of them.

“No, sir,” Eric muttered.

“Do I take it, then, that he has finally been released from his incarceration?”

“Yes, sir,” James said between gritted teeth.

“So you have at least ended one illegal imprisonment,” the major said pointedly.

“Yes, sir.”

“Whilst in the process making AMG a complete laughingstock.” The major gestured at the door. “Get out of here, Gould. You too, Vincenzo. I don’t want to see either of you again for at least six months.”

“Yes, sir.” James hesitated. “About this wire-cutter, sir.”

The major glared. “I’ll make a phone call, though God knows I’ve got more important things to think about.”

That night, Malloni appeared as usual on the dot of seven. But there was an air of suppressed excitement about him as he ceremoniously struck the gong for dinner. All became clear when he came to put out the crockery: Instead of the usual flat plates on which they ate their “Meat and Vegetables,” the British officers were being given soup bowls.

“I say, Malloni, what’s all this?” Kernick asked.

“Eezer zoop,” Malloni said, with just a touch of pride. “Meet zoop.”

He left the room, and returned with a cracked soup tureen so big he could barely carry it. It was, James thought, the size and shape of a German shipping mine. But sure enough, when Malloni lifted the lid James could see within it a puddle of dark liquid, not unlike a Brown Windsor.

“Makes a change,” Walters commented approvingly. “Well done, that man.”

Malloni staggered from person to person with his tureen. As they served themselves, however, a strange silence fell on the table. Kernick, inspecting the contents of his bowl, muttered, “Ah.”

As James ladled the soup into his own bowl, he became aware that it had an unusual consistency. It seemed to contain parts that were almost jellylike, and others that were remarkably thin. Examining it more closely, he saw that Malloni had created his soup by the simple expedient of taking rather fewer tins of “Meat and Vegetables” than usual, and adding to them a large quantity of warm water.

“Meter zoop—wit veg’balls,” Malloni said proudly when they were all served. “Enjoy.”

Polite to the last, the British officers obediently picked up their soup spoons and dipped them in their bowls.

It soon became apparent that Malloni’s meter zoop tasted quite as vile as it looked. Watering down the tinned slop had not diluted the taste at all, yet if anything it had somehow exacerbated the rancid, greasy texture. It was, James reflected miserably, a perfectly bloody end to a perfectly bloody day.