A Stranger in the Family (17 page)

In the centre of the room there was a
high-backed
upright chair all on its own. No table, no glass of water – not for the interviewer, nor for
the interviewee – no mod cons. The man seated needed nothing, the meeting seemed designed to suggest.

Kit gestured to the floor and said: ‘Chair.’ His feeble companion shrugged and went to fetch one from downstairs. While he was gone Kit could take in the other figure in the room.

He sat in the imposing chair, his forearms stretched along the arms, clutching a wooden knob on the end of each. He was not small, but he gave the impression of having become shrivelled by his great age. Perhaps his shiny suit had fitted him last year, or the year before that, but it had become baggy as time continued to roll over the old man’s head. The man’s body had at some time been impressive, Kit guessed, but the shoulders seemed to have drooped, the legs contracted, so that it could almost have been a doll sitting there. Kit was looking at the ashes of an impressive and imposing man who was a law unto himself.

But it was the face that intrigued him most. The eyes were alive, as the rest of the man hardly was. They blazed, burning but not warming the observer. Kit was reminded of Frank Novello, whose eyes and mouth announced that conscience and truth were things that had never had any relevance for him, held no meaning for him. But with this man the eyes seemed like
something manufactured, whereas the mouth showed directly contradictory indications: at one moment twisted with a grimace of contempt, at others shifting to a sort of uncertainty – an instinct to be merciful, helpful, companionable. And it was an expression that was almost immediately wiped off and replaced again by the grimaces.

How does one survive in a world gone mad, Kit asked himself? And not just mad, but bad too – a world in which all the advances made over the centuries in compassion, understanding and fellow feeling were thrown aside and replaced by emotions and principles which were atavistic, savage, medieval – or rather from the Dark Ages.

The face was now decked out with the old man’s dominant emotion: this boy will never be anything in my worlds – the worlds I’ve inhabited during my lifetime.

The man from the back seat of the car now came into the room and went and stood by the large chair. He was carrying a big book that looked like a Bible. Kit was glad of his chair, felt it was a concession, but he knew that if he asked for a pen and paper they would not have been given him.

‘Who are you?’ the old man in the chair croaked. His English was workmanlike, and the translator beside him was largely irrelevant,
probably acting as a spy. Suddenly Kit realised that the book he was holding must be a dictionary.

‘I am Christopher Philipson. I am the adoptive son of Jürgen Philipson, who I believe was your son by Elisabeth Greenspan.’

The blazing eyes blinked, then eyebrows were raised. The voice remained harsh.

‘There was no such person. Whether the woman who called herself such was the mother of my children or anybody’s else’s children, I never enquired. What point was there in disputing it? They would never get money from me except by my wish and on my terms. There were many claims from women, but very little money changed hands.’

The translator seemed to nervously condense the words before he began to repeat them to Kit, but Durataverdi silenced him with a wave of the hand. He needed no translator.

‘But you did have connections,’ insisted Kit. ‘Money was provided when Elisabeth’s children were sent to England.’

The hand waved again dismissively.

‘Loose change,’ the old man said. Kit felt there was starting to be a barrier between them.

‘Could we start again?’ he asked. There was the briefest of nods. ‘Who are you? What was your background? What were you doing when my father and Aunt Hilda were born?’

The man’s mouth softened again as memory started moving.

‘My father was an official in the Austrian Imperial Civil Service. He was prosperous under the emperor, much less prosperous after the First War, under the Republic. He and my mother, who was a Catholic, scrimped and saved to send me to university, but when I was fifteen I told them that that was the last thing I wanted. I packed my bags and got out. I never saw them again.’

‘How did you live?’

‘I saw how things were going with the Nazi Party in Germany. I sold the Jews protection. Good protection at a fair price.’

‘But the time came when protection was not much use.’

‘It was not possible,’ he was corrected. ‘It was a totally new world. What was moral and legal on Wednesday was immoral and illegal on Thursday. One had to be a gadfly merely to keep up. I acted as travel agent for the smarter Jews who realised this early on. I got them out of Germany and I got their money out as well, or as much of it as I could. It was dangerous, but it was also lucrative. I enjoyed myself.’

‘You had a good time with women?’

‘I have always. Always there were women. Men too. You have talked to Herr Erheim in
Vienna, have you not? I hear things. There are no secrets. I met him first in a homosexual bar. He was a young boy too green to know what it was. There were lots of English went there, and that should have told him. He became one of my best assistants. Today he is a national hero, which I find very funny.’

‘And where did you meet the woman who called herself Elisabeth Greenspan?’ said Kit, unwilling to let her go.

‘What she called herself is irrelevant. There were many Greenspans – at that time. If she had claimed to be my wife she’d soon have learnt what sort of wedding ceremony it was that she’d gone through … Where did I meet her, you ask? I can’t remember. Does it matter? They tell me hardly anyone gets married these days, even in Italy … In the way of business I went to lots of synagogues. Praise the Lord and make good contacts. Her father was a rabbi.’

‘And you and Erheim ran a sort of travel agency for Jews?’

‘I ran it. Erheim was my junior. Very junior.’

‘But in the early 1940s you were forced to leave Austria and Germany?’

‘It was getting too hot for me to stay. My German contact was getting scared, and wanted to end it all. Without his cooperation it was pointless to stay.’

‘But why come to Italy?’

Durataverdi almost assumed the stance of a teacher, even wagging his fingers.

‘Crossing over to an Allied or a neutral country was very difficult. And nobody thought at that time the Allied countries would win. Being a neutral country was no shield against Nazi aggression. Look at Norway, and Belgium. I came to Italy because Mussolini was indifferent on racial matters – and in any case I don’t look Jewish. I was, in fact, half and half, and my appearance was often a splendid protection. Half the people who died in the chambers did so because they looked Jewish. My mother, as I said, was Catholic, which helped after the peace in Italy. I would fit in more easily.’

‘So you came to Italy, and that was the easy bit. What did you do after you settled here?’

‘Travelled around making contacts.’

‘The same sort of business as you were used to?’

‘Some of that, but at that point people weren’t so keen to get out of Italy. Tip a few thousand lire to the right person and life was good. No, most of my work involved making contact with the various Italian criminal fraternities. I enjoyed that. I learnt Italian pretty quickly, and claimed to be the son of an Italian restaurateur in Innsbruck. I made a good Italian, I’m their type.
Things were looking good – they were good.’

‘But you were imprisoned in Ferramonti.’

The old figure in the chair shrugged his shoulders, shrivelled and near powerless. But more powerful was the force of his wicked smile.

‘A mere hiccup. A blip you say today, do you not?’ He looked up at the translator, who spread out his hands in bewilderment.

‘Blip is the word,’ said Kit.

‘I was imprisoned as a member of the Mafia. Nothing was going to happen to me. The Jewish prisoners were in a majority, and all of them were in danger, but I was not. I made more contacts in jail than I ever made out of jail. That’s what I’d come to the south of Italy to do, after all.’

‘And did you intend to defect to the Allies?’

‘I thought of it. That was quite a difficult matter. The British and American troops had landed in Sicily, but when they got to the mainland the fighting was indecisive. Things went this way and that, and it was not easy to decide what to do.’

‘You mean whether to defect to the Allied side or not?’

‘Basically so. Making the wrong decision could prove fatal. You don’t think I’m silly enough to defect to the losing side, do you? For reasons of conscience? A thousand noes! If the Allied troops were chased out of Italy they
wouldn’t be taking any defectors with them. I waited, temporised, until the picture sorted itself out.’

‘But eventually you defected to the Allied side?’

‘Yes.’

‘Because they looked like the winning side?’

‘Of course.’

Kit had wondered whether he could get from his grandfather some trace of conscience or scruple, anything that spoke of a moral choice having been made. So far there was very little trace of one. It was as if his own well-being was the only good he recognised.

‘I think we can jump forward,’ Kit said. ‘I don’t want to tire you.’

‘You won’t tire me,’ the old man said. ‘It doesn’t look as if you are likely to interest me much either.’

‘It all interests me,’ said Kit with an academic’s sharpness. ‘It’s all new to me even if it’s old hat to you. I suppose you could say you found your spiritual home in the Mafia.’

‘Spirit? Bah! None of that nonsense.’

‘Your natural home, then.’

‘That’s better.’

‘You were recognised as a man of a thousand talents, you were accepted, and you became a wheeler-dealer as we call it.
“
Figaro qua, Figaro 
là.”
You need it done, we can do it for you.’

‘Now you’re not doing so bad for an English boy.’

‘And I suppose you made your way up the hierarchy?’

‘That’s right, but never in the way that some hierarchies work – you rise up in the organisation and you stop doing any of the basic things, the things that you’re good at and those that made you noticed. That’s never been my way, or the Mafia way. That’s why the ridiculous Italian police caught me and put me on trial: I was still getting my hands dirty.’

‘I understand. In Britain if you’re a good teacher they make you into a headmaster, where you don’t teach at all.’

Greenspan smiled a cynical smile.

‘That’s probably so you don’t show up the mediocre teachers, who are the vast majority. Schools – how boring they usually are! I went to life, my best teacher, and it didn’t fail me.’

‘Did life ever take you to Britain?’

A quick glance shot out in Kit’s direction.

‘I suppose you know it did.’

‘I know nothing at all. I guessed you were there.’

‘You guessed right. The visit you are interested in was probably one made in the spring of 1990.’

‘When I was nearly three.’

‘That’s right. And my visit was to Glasgow. I call it a visit but it was not a holiday or a sightseeing trip. Which was lucky because it rained all the time I was there.’

‘Glasgow is not a sunny place,’ said Kit.

‘It made a change after Naples,’ Greenspan said, almost courteously.

‘I presume your visit had something to do with the gang wars.’

‘Exactly. And why should someone who knows the Mafia through and through be called in? Because the Mafia runs all through the ice cream wars and all the other ones. And when we talk about “the Mafia” we have to remember that we are talking not about one organisation, a monolith, but about a hundred organisations, little ones sheltered under an umbrella, usually originating from one of the many small villages in Calabria or Sicily. When you understand that you are dealing with a jigsaw of small pieces, you are taking the first steps on the way to understanding the problems and being able to solve them.’

Kit nodded. Already he was feeling more relaxed, because he felt the old rascal was beginning to trust him.

‘Tell me about this memorable visit to Glasgow.’

Greenspan shifted in his seat, and a wicked expression played on his face.

‘It was a sort of peace conference – like Yalta in 1945 – if not peace, then plotting the dimensions of the Cold War. I was there to keep the real negotiators informed. I sat in on some of the sessions but I seldom spoke. What I often did was talk to the delegates, filling them in on the background, which gave body and history to what seemed like utterly trivial disputes. And, of course, sometimes we just talked.’

Kit leant forward in his chair.

‘And of course, you often “just talked” with my father, or my so-called father.’

‘You’re talking about Mr Novello?’

‘That’s right.’

‘I think he was your father. He more or less admitted it was possible – and if he was prepared to admit that why would anybody else bother themselves with it?’

‘He denied being my father when I visited him in the nursing home where he now lives. I wondered whether he was getting himself into the sort of muddle about people that Alzheimer’s sufferers often get into.’

‘Very likely. Thank God – who does not exist – I’ve never shown any signs of Alzheimer’s or other senile afflictions. Let me tell you why I feel confident that Francesco – Frank you call him? – is your father.’

‘Please do. I’d like to have it clear, and I’d like to know the nature of his marriage.’

‘Oh, I believe that on the surface it was fine, a model marriage. They were both of one mind: she was devoted to him, and he was devoted to him too. So it was a loving, fruitful marriage and he had five or six regular women friends whom he could go to when the fancy took him. Some of them, who were changed regularly, were women he had helped in his job – getting them out of legal fixes and so on.’

‘He told you all this?’

‘Yes, he told me. Over a drink, over meals. I urged him to talk. I like to know about my possible adversaries.’

‘Did you and he click at once?’

‘At once. Across a crowded room, you might say. The click came because I know the type so well. He told me about the six ladies because he knew I’d already guessed. And I knew he knew I’d already guessed. So I could lead the conversation on to the next stage of marriages that seemed to be made in heaven.’