The Foreign Correspondent (5 page)

He met Salamone in a deserted bar near the insurance company. They sat in back and ordered coffee. “And how does it go in Spain?” Salamone said.

“Badly. It’s almost finished. What remains is the nobility of a lost cause, but that’s thin stuff in a war. We’re beaten, Arturo, for which we can thank the French and the British and the nonintervention pact. Outgunned, not outfought, end of story. So now it’s up to Hitler, what happens next.”

“Well, my news is no better. I must tell you that Enrico Bottini is dead.”

Weisz looked up sharply, and Salamone handed him a page cut from a newspaper. Weisz flinched when he saw the photograph, read quickly through the tabloid prose, then shook his head and gave it back. “Something happened, poor Bottini, but not this.”

“No, we believe this was done by the OVRA. Staged to look like a murder/suicide.”

Weisz felt it, the sharp little bite that sickened the heart; it wasn’t like being shot at, it was like seeing a snake. “Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

Weisz took a deep breath, and let it out. “Let them burn in hell for doing this,” he said. Only anger cured the fear that had reached him.

Salamone nodded. “In time, they will.” He paused, then said, “But for today, Carlo, the committee wants you to replace him.”

From Weisz, a nod of casual assent, as though he’d been asked the time. “Mmm,” he said.
Of course they do.

Salamone laughed, a bass rumble inside a bear. “We knew you’d be eager to do it.”

“Oh yes,
eager
barely says it. And I can’t wait to tell my girlfriend.”

Salamone almost believed him. “Ahh, I don’t think…”

“And the next time we go to bed, I must remember to shave. For the photograph.”

Salamone nodded, closed his eyes.
Yes, I know, forgive me.

“All that aside,” Weisz said, “I wonder how I can do this and run around Europe for the Reuters.”

“It’s your instinct we need, Carlo. Ideas, insights. We know we’ll have to stand in for you, day to day.”

“But not when it comes to the great moment, Arturo. That’s all mine.”

“That’s all yours,” Salamone said. “But, kidding aside, it’s yes?” Weisz smiled. “Do you suppose they have a Strega here?”

“Let’s ask,” Salamone said.

What they had was cognac, and they settled for that.

Weisz tried for the pleasant day, proving to himself that the change in his life didn’t affect him all that much. The three-course lunch,
céleri rémoulade,
veal
à la Normande, tarte Tatin,
was consumed—some of it, anyhow—and the waiter’s silent query ignored, but for a generous tip inspired by guilt. Brooding, he passed up his regular café and had coffee elsewhere, sitting next to a table of German tourists with cameras and guidebooks. Rather quiet and sober German tourists, it seemed to him. And he did, that evening, see Véronique, at her art-laden apartment in the Seventh. Here he did better; the ritual preliminaries pursued with greater urgency, and at greater length, than usual—he knew what she liked, she knew what he liked, so they had a good time. Afterward, he smoked a Gitane and watched her as she sat at her dressing table, her small breasts rising and falling as she brushed her hair. “Your life goes well?” she said, catching his eye in the mirror. “Right now it does.” This she acknowledged with a warm smile, affectionate and reassured, her Frenchwoman’s soul demanding that he find consolation in making love to her.

Leaving at midnight, he did not go directly home—a fifteen-minute walk—but found a taxi at the Métro rank, went to Salamone’s apartment, in Montparnasse, and had the driver wait. The transfer of the editorial office of
Liberazione
—boxes of five-by-eight index cards, stacks of file folders—required two trips up and down the stairs at Salamone’s, and two more at the Dauphine. Weisz took it all to the office he’d made for himself in his second room; a small desk in front of the window, a 1931 Olivetti typewriter, a handsome oak filing cabinet that had once served in the office of a grain brokerage. When the moving was done, the boxes and folders covered the top of the desk, with one stack on the floor. So, there it was, paper.

Paging through a few back copies, he found the last article he’d written, a piece about Spain, for the first of the two November issues. The story was based on an editorial in the International Brigade’s weekly paper,
Our Fight.
With so many Communists and anarchists in the ranks of the brigade, the conventions of military discipline were often viewed as contrary to egalitarian ideals. For instance, saluting. Weisz’s story had a nice ironic flair to it—we must find a way, he told his readers in Italy, to cooperate, to work together against
fascismo.
But this was not always so easy, just have a look at what goes on in the Spanish war, even amidst the ferocious combat. The writer in
Our Fight
justified saluting as “the military way of saying hello.” Pointed out that the salute was not undemocratic, that, after all, two officers of equal rank would salute each other, that “a salute is a sign that a comrade who was an egocentric individualist in private life has adjusted himself to the collective way of getting things done.” Weisz’s article was also a gentle dig at one of
Liberazione
’s competitors, the Communist
L’Unità,
printed in Lugano and widely distributed. Our crowd, he implied, we democratic liberals, social democrats, humanist centrists, is not, thank heaven, afflicted with all that doctrinal agony over symbols.

His article had been, he hoped, entertaining, and that was crucial. It was meant to offer a respite from daily fascist life—a much-needed respite. For instance, the Mussolini government issued a daily communiqué on the radio, and anyone within hearing had to stand up during the broadcast. That was the law. So, if you were in a café, or at work, or even in your own home, you stood, and woe betide those who didn’t.

Now, what did he have for January. The lawyer from Rome was writing the obituary for Bottini. That had to be,
who would murder an honorable man?
Weisz anticipated that Salamone would do a revision, and so would he. There was always a digest of world news—news which was withheld or slanted in Italy, where journalism had been defined, by law, as a supportive adjunct to national policy. The digest, taken from French and British papers, and particularly from the BBC, was the preserve of the chemist from Milan, and was always factual and precise. They had also, always tried to have, a cartoon, usually drawn by an émigré employed by the Parisian
Le Journal.
For January, here was baby Mussolini, in a particularly frilly baby hat, seated on Hitler’s knee, and being fed a heaping spoonful of swastikas. “More, more!” cries baby Mussolini.

The
giellisti
wanted, more than anything, to drive a wedge between Hitler and Mussolini, because Hitler meant to bring Italy into the coming war, on his side, despite the fact that Mussolini himself had declared that Italy would not be prepared to go to war until 1943.

Fine, what else?

Salamone had told him that the professor from Siena was working on a piece, based on a smuggled letter, that described the behavior of a police chief and a fascist gang in a town in the Abruzzi. The point of the article was to name the police chief, who would quickly hear of his new fame once the paper reached Italy.
We know who you are, and we know what you’re doing, and you will be held accountable when the time comes.
Also, when you’re out in the street, watch your back. This exposure would make him angry, but might serve to make him think twice about what he was doing.

So then: Bottini, digest, cartoon, police chief, a few odds and ends, maybe a political-theory piece—Weisz would make sure it was brief—and an editorial, always passionate and operatic, which pretty much always said the same thing: resist in small ways, this can’t go on, the tables will turn. The great Italian liberal heroes, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour, to be quoted. And always, in boldface across the top of the front page: “Please don’t destroy this newspaper, give it to a trusted friend, or leave it where others may read it.”

Weisz had four pages to fill, the paper printed on a single folded sheet. Too bad, he thought, they couldn’t run advertisements.
After a long, hard day of political dissent, discriminating giellisti like to dine at Lorenzo’s.
No, that was not to be, the remaining space was his, and the subject was obvious, Colonel Ferrara, but…But what? He wasn’t sure. Somewhere in this idea he sensed a ticking bomb. Where? He couldn’t find it. The Colonel Ferrara story was not new, he’d been written about, in Italian and French newspapers, in 1935, and the story had no doubt been picked up by the wire services. He would appear in the Reuters story, which would likely be rewritten as human interest—the wire services, and the British press in general, did not take sides in the Spanish war.

His story in
Liberazione
would be nothing like that. Written under his pseudonym, Palestrina—they all used composers as pen names—it would be heroic, inspiring, emotional. The infantryman’s hat, the pistol on a belt, the shouting across the river. Mussolini had sent seventy-five thousand Italian troops to Spain, a hundred Caproni bombers, Whippet tanks, field guns, ammunition, ships—everything. A national shame; they’d said it before, they would say it again. But here was one officer, and a hundred and twenty-two men, who had the courage to fight for their ideals. And the distributors would make sure to leave copies in the towns by the military bases.

So this had to be written, and Ferrara himself had asked only that his future destination not be named. Easy enough to do that.
Better
—the reader might well imagine that he was off to fight somewhere else, wherever brave men and women were standing up against tyranny. Otherwise, Weisz asked himself, what could go wrong? The Italian secret services surely knew that Ferrara was in Spain, knew his real name, knew everything about him. And Weisz would make sure that this article would say nothing that could help them. And, in fact, these days, what
wasn’t
a ticking bomb? Very well then, he had his assignment and, that settled, he returned to the file folders.

Carlo Weisz sat at his desk, his jacket hung over the back of the chair; he wore a pale gray shirt with a thin red stripe, sleeves rolled up, top button undone, tie pulled down. A pack of Gitanes sat next to an ashtray from the San Marco, the artists’ and conspirators’ café in Trieste. His radio was on, its dial glowing amber, tuned to a Duke Ellington performance recorded at a Harlem nightclub, and the room was dark, lit only by a small desk lamp with a green glass shade. He leaned back in the chair for a moment, rubbed his eyes, then ran his fingers back through his hair to get it off his forehead. And if, by chance, he was watched from an apartment across the street—the shutters were open—it would never occur to the watcher that this was a scene for a newsreel, or a page in some
Warriors of the Twentieth Century
picture book.

From Weisz, a quiet sigh as he went back to work. He was, he realized, for the first time since the meeting with Salamone, at peace. Very odd, really, wasn’t it. Because all he was doing was reading.

10 January, 1939. Since midnight, a slow, steady snow had fallen over Paris. At three-thirty in the morning, Weisz stood at the corner of the rue Dauphine and the quay that ran along the left bank of the Seine. He peered into the darkness, took off his gloves, and tried to rub a little warmth into his hands. A windless night; the snow floated down over the white street and the black river. Weisz squinted, looking up the quay, but he couldn’t see a thing, then looked at his watch. 3:34.
Late, not like Salamone, maybe…
But before he could concentrate on the possible catastrophes, he saw a pair of dim headlights, wobbling as the car skidded over the slippery cobbles.

Salamone’s cranky old Renault slid sideways and stopped as Weisz waved. He had to pull hard to open the door as Salamone leaned over and pushed from the other side. “Ohh, fuck this,” Salamone said. The car was cold, its heater had not worked for a long time, and the efforts of its single windshield wiper did little to clear the window. On the backseat, a parcel wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine.

The car bumped and skidded along the quay, past the great dark bulk of Notre Dame, traveling east by the river to the Pont d’Austerlitz, the bridge that crossed to the right bank of the Seine. As the window fogged up, Salamone bent forward over the wheel. “I can see nothing,” he said.

Weisz reached over and cleared a small circle with his glove. “Better?”

“
Mannaggia!
” Salamone said, meaning damn the snow and the car and everything else. “Here, try this.” He fumbled in his overcoat pocket and produced a large white handkerchief. The Renault had waited patiently for this moment, when the driver had one hand on its wheel, and spun slowly in a circle as Salamone swore and stomped on the brake. The Renault ignored this, completed a second pirouette, then came to rest with its back wheels in a mound of snow that had drifted up against the streetlamp at the end of the bridge.

Salamone put his handkerchief away, started the stalled car, and shifted into first gear. The wheels spun as the engine whined; once, twice, again. “Wait, stop, I’ll push it,” Weisz said. He used his shoulder to open the door, took one step outside, then his feet flew up and he landed hard.

“Carlo?”

Weisz fought his way upright, and, taking baby steps, circled the car and put both hands on the trunk. “Try it now.”

The engine raced as the wheels spun themselves deeper into the grooves they’d built. “Not so much gas!”

The window squeaked as Salamone cranked it down. “What?”

“Gently, gently.”

“Allright.”

Weisz pushed again. There would be no
Liberazione
this week.

From a
boulangerie
on the corner, a baker appeared, in white undershirt, white apron, and a white cloth knotted at the corners that covered his head. The wood-burning ovens of the bakeries had to be fired up at three in the morning, Weisz could smell the bread.