The Wedding Officer

31

AS YOU know,” Major Heathcote was saying, “it is the responsibility of A-force to come up with initiatives to destabilize the Germans’ hold on northern Italy.”

James nodded. He still wasn’t quite sure why the CO had asked to see him, although he was relieved that for once it seemed not to be to bawl him out.

“And as you are also aware,” the major said slowly, “with penicillin in such short supply, the spread of syphilis has been a big problem for our medical chaps. The Germans, on the other hand, don’t seem to be nearly so troubled by it.”

James nodded again.

“A-force have a plan.” The major sighed. “A sort of two birds, one stone scenario. The idea is that we round up women with syphilis and then ship them up north, behind the lines. Where, one presumes, they will spread their diseases amongst the German soldiers rather than our own. Apparently something similar has already been tried in France.”

James found it hard to believe what he was hearing. Even by the dark standards of A-force this sounded ill-conceived. “But isn’t that rather—well, unethical? Using civilians to do our dirty work for us. And women, at that—sick women?”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” the major said irritably. “Is razing cities to the ground with incendiary bombs ethical? Is flooding each other’s countries with pornography and black propaganda ethical? It’s a total war, Gould. That means we fight with every weapon at our disposal.”

James said nothing.

“No, it probably isn’t ethical,” the major muttered. “Personally, I think it’s a damn poor business. But it’s been approved at the very highest level. Your job is simply to arrange the detention of some suitable women.”

“Rastrellamenti,” James said.

“What’s that?”

“That’s what the Italians called the German roundups—rastrellamenti. They probably never expected to find their liberators doing exactly the same thing.” A further thought struck him. “When we find these girls, presumably we’re not going to give them medical attention for their condition?”

“It would rather defeat the object if we did.”

“Even if they ask for it?”

The major hesitated. Denial of medical attention was a breach of the Geneva Convention. “We’ll just have to hope they don’t ask. And technically, I suppose they aren’t exactly combatants.”

“And how are the women to be selected?”

“From among those with records of prostitution, presumably.”

“But that could mean we include the fiancées of some of our own soldiers. Women who haven’t married only because we won’t allow them to.”

“We can hardly show special favors to those who we’ve already decided are unfit to marry our troops,” the major pointed out. “Really, Gould. I think you’re failing to focus on the big picture.”

“It’s only when one focuses on the small picture,” James said, “that the full horror of this scheme becomes apparent.”

The major looked at him sharply. “I hope you’re not suggesting you won’t carry out your orders?”

“No, sir.”

“I’m very glad to hear it.” The major waved him away. “Dismiss.”

They sat on the roof of the Palazzo Satriano, amongst the chimney stacks and the broken red roof tiles, as the sun set over the bay. Livia was plucking a pigeon. James nestled a tommy gun in his lap. Occasionally, when further pigeons landed on the rooftop, he would fire off a few shots in their direction. If he was successful, the bird got added to the pile at Livia’s feet.

“I vould layk tu seets een dhe frond ro,” she said thoughtfully.

He grunted.

“Can iu tail may, vat time ees dhe intarval, pliss?” She switched to Italian. “What’s the matter, Giacomo?”

“Nothing.”

“You know,” she said, “English must be a very hard language. Because most of the time, Englishmen would rather not speak at all.”

“Sorry,” he muttered. “Tough day.”

She sniffed.

“I’m in a rather difficult situation.”

“So am I,” she said pointedly. “One minute you kiss me, the next minute you won’t talk to me. It’s really very confusing.”

He sighed. “Sometimes my work…there are things I don’t like.”

She put down the pigeon she was working on. “So tell me about it.”

She listened without comment until he had finished. “It’s not the most recent interviews I’m worried about,” he explained. “I’ve been letting those weddings go ahead. It’s the earlier ones, the ones I did when I first came to Naples. Any one of those girls is at risk.”

“But it’s obvious what you have to do.”

“Is it?”

“You have to make sure that none of those girls gets taken.”

“Livia, the roundups will go ahead whether I’m involved or not.”

“But they will ask you whether the girls they have seized are really prostitutes. And then you must lie.”

“But in many cases, the files say that they are. My files, amongst others. I’m partly to blame for this mess.”

“Files can go missing.”

“They’ll ask the girls how they support themselves. It isn’t hard to work out the truth.”

“You must speak to Angelo,” she decided. “He will know what to do.”

“Angelo?”

“The maître d’ at Zi’Teresa’s.”

“What’s he got to do with it?”

“Jims,” she said, “who do you think got me this job?”

“Me?”

“You gave me the job,” she corrected. “Which is not the same thing at all. I’m not meant to tell you this, but it was Angelo who made sure there were no other applicants. Angelo who sees we always have enough to eat. Angelo who supplies everything I can’t get at the market.”

“But why should Angelo care what I eat?”

“I think,” she said vaguely, “he was just a bit concerned that when you first came to Naples you weren’t eating properly. And it’s well-known that a man who isn’t eating properly can’t do his job properly either. Panza contenti, cori clementi: panza dijuna, nenti priduna. These days, apparently, you’re much more—well, reasonable.”

“I see.”

“Although now you’re angry.”

“No,” he said. And it was true, he wasn’t. He was starting to see a possible way out of this mess, and Livia was right: Angelo might be just the person to help him do it. “I’ll go and talk to him,” he promised.

There was a ripple of vibration under their feet. The building shook itself with a rattle of doors and windows, the way it sometimes did when a heavy truck or a tank was passing. The throb rose to a crescendo, passed through them, and then was gone, a wave in search of a shore.

“Earthquake,” he said softly.

“It’s the beginning of the summer,” she said. “We get them when it’s hot.”

“I wish I knew what to do.”

“Whatever you decide,” she said, “it will be the right thing.”

He walked down the hill to the darkened restaurant. The notice announcing its closure was still displayed in the window, which in turn was draped in blackout blinds. He went around the back and knocked on the kitchen door.

Angelo opened it with a slight smile. “Signor Gould.”

James had the feeling that he was expected. “Captain Gould,” he corrected.

Angelo bowed. “As you wish. Will you take a glass of wine with me?”

“I’d be delighted, Angelo.”

They sat either side of the empty bar, a bottle of Brunello between them. “The last of my prewar stock,” Angelo said as he filled their glasses. “I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”

“Is this a special occasion?”

“Oh, I think so.” Angelo held his glass up to the light. The wine was almost brown in color, and when he swirled the liquid with a gentle tip of his hand, it clung to the sides of the glass. He put it to his nose and inhaled deeply. “They call this vintage ‘the women’s wine,’” he said. “When it was picked, in 1918, all the men had been killed in the Great War. So the women harvested the grapes themselves. The vines hadn’t been irrigated, or pruned properly, or given any insecticides to help them grow. But sometimes a vine needs adversity to flourish. It was one of the best years Brunello ever had.” He touched the glass gently to James’s. “To peace.”

“To peace.” They drank.

“Now then. How can I help you?”

“I think I can persuade my superiors to reopen the restaurants.”

Angelo raised an eyebrow. “That would be very welcome.”

“It shouldn’t be too difficult. The food shortages aren’t so bad now, and they’ll believe me if I tell them that there’s no longer a risk to public order or security.”

Angelo nodded. “But of course you want something in return.”

“Two things, actually.”

“And they are?”

“First, I need you to spread the word that every restaurant has to employ at least one girl. Big places like this can employ half a dozen. They can work as waitresses, cooks, maître d’s, whatever.”

Angelo considered this for a moment. “It’s an excellent idea,” he said. “The girls will have jobs, so they’ll be able to show that they have a source of income when the rastrellamenti start.” He caught James’s look. “News travels quickly in Naples,” he said apologetically. “Does this mean that the girls who are engaged to soldiers will be able to marry?”

“I don’t see why not. After all, a girl who works in Zi’Teresa’s can hardly be said to be of bad character.”

“And the files? The reports that already name them as whores?”

“I think you’ll find,” James said, “that there was a German air raid a few weeks ago which caused extensive damage to my headquarters. Unfortunately, a large number of files appear to have been destroyed.”

“Ah,” Angelo said. He raised his glass to James. “Now you are furbo, my friend,” he said admiringly. “You have become a true Neapolitan.”

“Give priority to the girls who already have fiancés. There’s a backlog of weddings we’ll need to get through. But we’ll have to be ruthless—once a girl is married, she has to give up her job and let another girl take her place. I’ll employ Gina Tesalli, the one who’s pregnant, myself. She can help Livia in the kitchen.”

At the mention of Livia’s name Angelo smiled. “So you’ll be keeping your own arrangements as they are? I can always arrange for Malloni to come back if you’d prefer.”

“I don’t prefer,” James said crisply. “Mrs. Pertini stays with me.”

Angelo inclined his head. “And the second thing?”

“I want to know where Zagarella keeps his stolen penicillin.”

Angelo drew in his breath sharply. “My friend, that is an altogether more dangerous undertaking. Why not leave him alone?”

“He screwed me over. Now it’s my turn to screw him.”

Angelo shook his head. “I’m not sure I can help you.”

“Of course you can. It isn’t only Allied officers who eat in your restaurant, Angelo. The camorristi come here as well. And you hear things—you hear everything.”

“It is more difficult, and more complicated, than even you can imagine,” Angelo said.

“In what way?”

Even though they were alone, Angelo glanced around before replying. “This trade in goods stolen from the Allies. Your predecessor, Jackson, thought that the Americans were simply too incompetent to stop it.” James nodded. “Well, if I have learnt anything in the past year, it is that your American friends are many things, but they are rarely incompetent.”

“What are you getting at?”

“Suppose you were the Americans and you wanted the camorra to do you a favor—a big favor, something political. How would you persuade them to help you?” Angelo closed his fingers and rotated his wrist, the old Neapolitan gesture for corruption. “Perhaps you would throw open your stores and say, ‘Help yourselves.’”

“But what could the Americans possibly want from the camorra?”

“I don’t know. All I know is, there is a plan.”

James thought back to the document he had found in the Americans’ offices. That, too, had implied that there was some kind of plan. But what?

“As you say, it’s probably political,” he decided. “In which case, it needn’t concern us now. And they won’t break cover to save Zagarella, not if the evidence against him is strong enough.”

Angelo considered. “It will take money. A great deal of money.”

“That can be arranged.”

“There will be no receipts,” Angelo warned him. “The kind of people I will need to pay will not want any record of their involvement.”

“Very well. But I want Zagarella himself. Not some underling.”

“I understand. Let me see what I can do.”

The next day James had to interview some men accused of killing an ex-partisan in the hills above Caserta, a small town to the north of Naples.

He found the police station without difficulty, and the local marshal explained what had happened. The partisan had been little more than a bandit, happy to steal from the Germans just as he had previously stolen from the Italian government, and even happier when the Allies offered to drop arms and explosives to help. Although the bandit had been able to melt away into the hills after his attacks, the townspeople had not, and they became the focus of the Germans’ increasingly punitive reprisals.

Eventually the Germans let it be known that for any one of their men killed in the raids, ten citizens would be shot. This had no effect on the bandit, despite personal appeals from the mayor and the priest. As he now possessed a large arsenal of weapons, and a large retinue of bloodthirsty companions as eager as he to use them, he was soon able to attack an entire German supply convoy, killing four Germans in the process. The Germans, true to their word, then rounded up forty civilians—men, women and children, but principally the latter, as most of the men had already been taken away to work in labor camps—lined them up against the wall of the church and shot them. At the funerals, the weeping mothers kissed and sucked the bloody wounds on their children’s corpses, a sign to the community that they considered this a blood feud, one that every male member of their family was obliged to extract vengeance for, however many generations it might take.

It did not take long. The bandit got lazy, and eventually found his supply of arms curtailed by the Allied invasion. Meanwhile the brothers, uncles and fathers of the victims began drifting back from various prisoner-of-war camps in the north. These men, many of whom were sick of fighting, now found themselves given the responsibility of killing the bandit, which they duly did, and were duly arrested for.

James spoke to the men, who confirmed the marshal’s account. They seemed resigned to their fate, which would undoubtedly be life imprisonment in the Poggio Reale, a place scarcely more pleasant than the prison camps they had recently left behind. He also talked to the priest, who showed James the wall honeycombed with bullet holes where the reprisal had taken place.

“Can I ask you, Father,” James said, “what you would do if these men told you about their crime in the confessional?”

The priest considered. “I would probably say that they had committed a terrible sin, but that if they were truly repentant, God would forgive them.”

“And what would their penance be?”

“I would tell them to help rebuild the houses and farms that have been destroyed by the war.”

It seemed to James that this was a far more useful punishment than any the courts would mete out. “Would they do it?”

“Of course. Nobody here wants to be in a state of sin.”

James went back to the police station in a thoughtful mood.

“Well?” the marshal demanded. “Do you want to take them now, or will you send a truck?”

“Neither,” James said. “This is a waste of time. I’m going to go back to Naples and destroy the paperwork.”

The marshal looked astonished. “Isn’t that rather risky?”

“Perhaps, but by the time anyone untangles what’s really happened here the war will be over and I shall be long gone.”

A crafty look had come into the marshal’s eyes. “I’m afraid, sir, we are a very poor town. We cannot afford to show our appreciation to the extent you are probably expecting.”

“I wasn’t,” James began. He checked himself. “How much could you afford?”

The marshal ummed and erred, his eyes never leaving James’s face. “Eight hundred lire,” he said at last.

“Very well.”

The marshal seemed even more surprised at this than at James’s decision not to charge the men. “Really? You’ll accept eight hundred?”

“So long as you can get it for me straightaway.”

“I’ll ask the priest. He can take it out of the church funds.” The marshal had jumped to his feet and was almost falling over himself in his haste to finish the deal. He returned a little later with the priest, who handed over eight hundred lire without comment.

“It will go to a good cause,” James said, folding the money and putting it in his pocket.

“Of course, of course,” the marshal said, clearly not believing him.

But the priest nodded and said, “I’m glad to hear it. And even if it doesn’t, it has already done good work here in Caserta. Thank you.”

Back at headquarters, James rummaged in the cupboard until he found the old biscuit tin he had inherited from his predecessor. Carlo and Enrico looked on, perplexed. Tipping out the pencils, he put the eight hundred lire into the tin without comment, then carefully replaced it in the cupboard.

That evening, when he went back to check, he found that they were already up to nine hundred and fifty. Carlo and Enrico had got the message.

Although the damage from the air raid had been repaired now, somehow the courtyard had remained as the communal dining area. None of the Americans seemed keen to dispense with Livia’s services, and James was beginning to realize the usefulness of a favor owed. It also meant he could eavesdrop on the Americans’conversations. Although he had heard no more about any dealings with the camorra, he had picked up several useful items of gossip.

It worked two ways, however. That night, Eric came to sit next to him as he devoured a bowl of Livia’s spaghetti.

“If I didn’t know different, James, I’d say you’ve been avoiding me,” he said. “How’s tricks?”

James shrugged and waved a hand in the air. Conveniently, his mouth was full of spaghetti, and a shrug seemed to cover the situation better anyway.

“You know, you’ve started to use Italian gestures,” Eric said mildly. “That shrug was not the shrug of an Englishman.”

James swallowed his mouthful. “Eric, it was just a shrug.”

“If you say so. By the way, I hear you’re going after Zagarella again.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“So it’s true?”

“If your sources told you it is,” James said, spinning another ball of pasta expertly onto his fork, “then presumably it must be.”

“Oh, James.” Eric regarded him with amused disappointment. “Such vagueness. Are we going to arrest him again? Only it seems to me that this time, we’re going to need some cast-iron evidence if we don’t want to look like idiots.”

“As it happens,” James said casually, “I was thinking I might take care of this one on my own. No need to tie up more manpower than we have to.”

“But last time,” Eric pointed out, “we did it together, and we still didn’t nail him.” A thought appeared to strike him. “You’re not suggesting that CIC had anything to do with his getting off?”

“I would never dream of suggesting any such thing.”

“But you’re thinking it.”

James hesitated.

“If we weren’t Allies, I’d take offense at that,” Eric said. “I suppose you’ve heard this ridiculous theory that we’re somehow in league with the camorra.”

“I don’t pay any attention to gossip.”

“James, we’re intelligence officers. Gossip is our trade. But that one, I can assure you, has even less foundation than all the rest of the nonsense that gets talked around here.”

Livia was coming out with another bowl of pasta. Involuntarily, James watched her. Eric followed his gaze and said, “Speaking of gossip, there’s been a certain amount of talk about Mrs. Pertini.”

“What sort of talk?”

“They say she’s stepping out with you.” Eric laughed mirthlessly. “I’ll tell you, that one did come as a bit of a surprise to me. Since I assumed from what you’d told me you had a girl back home in England.”

James couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Didn’t believe it at first,” Eric continued. “I don’t like to listen to gossip either, but Livia confirmed it herself. So I reckoned you’d either been lying to her, or lying to me.”

“Sorry about that.”

“That was when I realized that, underneath all that British candor, you’re a lot more devious than you make out. I think we might have underestimated you, James.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“But you’ll be pleased to know that mine is a lone voice,” Eric continued, ignoring the question. “As far as most of CIC is concerned, you’re still just the Brit who writes the wedding reports.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Since that is exactly who I am.”

“Anything you get, James,” Eric said softly, “I strongly advise you to share it with your friends and allies.”

“You brute,” James snapped. A red mist descended, and he leapt to his feet, his fists clenched. “Livia’s no whore.”

Eric raised his own fists. “I never said she was.”

“You were talking about sharing her—”

“I was talking about sharing intelligence, you stupid limey pantywaist.”

“Who are you calling a pantywaist?”

“Why?” Eric sneered. “Are there any other pantywaists hereabouts?”

James had absolutely no idea what a pantywaist was, but that was beside the point. “Take that back,” he spat.

The two of them circled each other furiously, their fists up. A few of the men around them hollered and whooped, sensing entertainment. James swung, and then Eric swung, and soon they were hammering blows at each other.

“Stop it,” Livia screamed, running out of the kitchen. “Stop it, both of you. You’re behaving like children.”

Shamefaced, they stopped. There was blood on both their faces, but it was hard to say which of them had come off worse.

“They say all’s fair in love and war,” Eric said, dabbing at his lip. “Which is another way of saying all’s unfair. Bear it in mind, James.”