Authors: Giorgio Scerbanenco
So there it was, nobody knew anything. ‘Signorina Pani,’ Duca said, ‘what exactly is it you didn’t know?’
The coffee was probably already stimulating her a bit, and she must have liked the police in Milan, so nice of them to offer cold coffee and cigarettes. ‘I work at the state archives in Phoenix,’ she said. ‘My colleagues say it’s boring work, but I like it a lot, I’m in the criminal records division. When I was hired, seven years ago, they’d only got as far as the year 1905, and I managed to classify all the crimes committed in Arizona from then until 1934, it can be tiring work, there were only three of us, but I liked it a lot. We had to divide all the offences into categories, burglaries, homicides, robberies, even the mistreatment of animals, and every offence has its own file and in the file there’s a full description of the offence and a photograph of the perpetrator.’
They listened in silence, without asking any questions,
they let her go on as if she was a filly they were taming, maybe she’d eventually get round to explaining what she was doing here in Milan, in Police Headquarters: the police have time.
‘Then I got engaged,’ Susanna Pani said, ‘to a friend from work, he also worked in the state archives, but in the war records division.’ As she talked about this friend of hers from work, her voice became, if possible, even more angelic. ‘He’s Irish, don’t ask me his name, please, he mustn’t be mixed up in this business, we were supposed to be getting married this month, but I decided to come here and hand myself in, and he didn’t want me to, but I told him I had no choice and he was sure to find another woman much better than me, and maybe younger.’ With the little finger of her right hand she wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes. ‘Don’t ask me his name, I beg you, leave him out of this.’
‘We’re not interested in your fiancé’s name,’ Duca said, ‘we only want to know what happened.’
‘Don’t call him my fiancé, just say my friend. He works in the state archives in Phoenix, in the war records division, he classifies everything that happened in the war to citizens of the state of Arizona. Every officer, every soldier, every auxiliary, whether he’s alive or dead, has a file with everything in it that he did during the war and all the documents that relate to that. These files are in Washington, but a copy is sent to the home state of the soldier or officer, if a soldier was born in Alabama the copy is sent to Montgomery, if he’s from West Virginia, they send a copy to Charleston, if he’s from Arizona they send a copy to Phoenix.’
For an angel she was very precise, even too much so, but it was better that way. They would know the whole story.
‘Of course it takes time,’ the angel continued. ‘The archives in Washington are a mountain of files, and every
document in every file has to be examined by God knows how many offices, so although my father died in 1945 his documents were only sent to Phoenix this year. My friend from work, Charles,’ the name came out involuntarily, and she immediately said, ‘You mustn’t even say his name, I beg you, he mustn’t be mixed up in this.’
All three of them, even Mascaranti, agreed that the name of this gentleman to whom she was so devoted would never, ever be uttered, and they agreed in perfect bad faith because the police need to know everything, especially names, just like journalists, who then go and tell everyone everything, all the names.
‘And so, as soon as the file arrived, Charles said, “Your father’s file has arrived from Washington, I haven’t looked at it yet, I’ll tell you all about it when I have.” I was so happy. The citation about my father’s death hadn’t said much, only that he sacrificed his life in the service of civilisation, the kind of thing they usually write. He had fallen, they said, on the Italian front, on the Gothic Line, on January 6, 1945. I was happy because I knew that the file contained everything, even his dog tag, and I was only sorry that mother had died without that happiness of knowing all the things father had done during the war.’ She lowered her head and the two sides of her hair fell over her face like curtains, then she raised it again abruptly, she had dismissed the memory of her dead mother, and she smiled again a little. ‘I waited nearly two weeks, then one evening I couldn’t stand it any more and I said to Charles, “Charles, haven’t you looked at my father’s file yet?” And he said, “Oh, I’m sorry, I’ve been really busy, I haven’t had a chance to have a look at it yet.” I thought that was strange, because he knew how much knowing everything about my father meant to me, but I told him it didn’t matter, I’d wait. After four months, and after
asking him lots of times why he never told me anything about the file, I told him one day that if he didn’t show me those documents, I’d leave him, and then put in an official request to the administration of the archives to be allowed to see them, I was the daughter and they couldn’t refuse me. So he took me to his office one evening, and we spent the whole night there and I read all the documents. I fainted twice because of the photographs, and when I came round I carried on reading, and by the time I finished I knew why poor Charles didn’t want me to read those documents.’ She lowered her head again, again hiding her face with her light brown hair, but this time she could not control herself, she began to sob, and said in English, ‘I’m glad mother died before finding out something like that, without reading any of those things.’
The file was unusually thick for that of an ordinary infantry captain. On the cover it said
Anthony (Paganica) Pani, Cpt. Iftry. (AD, GP, MFR 2961 – b. 1908 d. 1945)
and there really was everything in it, everything about the military career of Anthony Pani. If the file had been about most American officers who had come to fight on the European front, it would have contained a dozen sheets at most. But there was something special about Anthony Pani: he spoke Italian fluently.
The front wasn’t moving, and a captain was wasted on the usual patrols, so the Colonel had the idea of sending Captain Pani across the lines to Bologna, where there was a small intelligence unit, and Captain Anthony Pani went to Bologna, practically on foot, guided by two partisans who after a while, because they had asked for cigarettes from a tobacconist who was a friend of theirs, had been picked up by the Fascists, and he had been left on his own, almost in the middle of Bologna, with a radio transmitter in a suitcase, and two pistols in his jacket as big as those carried by cowboys in parades in San Francisco, Arizona.
And yet he managed to save himself. He knew absolutely nothing about being a secret agent, but as his character notes said:
his extremely calm, objective temperament, his resoluteness and his lively intelligence make him suitable for many tasks,
and with extreme calm and resoluteness and objectivity he stopped a woman of about thirty who struck him as suitable for his purposes and said, ‘I’m an American
officer, I have a radio transmitter and two guns with me. Hide me, not only will you be performing a service for your country, but I’ll make sure you’re rewarded.’ What he didn’t tell her was that he also had three million lire on him: he didn’t like talking to a woman about money.
The woman looked at him and Anthony Pani knew that he was safe. ‘Come with me,’ she said. He followed her, keeping a few paces behind her, and she took him to her rented apartment and gave him something to eat, then as he lay on the bed to rest for a while, she began to work on her knitting and in the meantime told him about herself, she told him her name was Adele Terrini, that she wasn’t married, that she was only in Bologna for a few weeks, because she had come to keep a friend of hers company, a friend whose husband had been killed by the Germans, but then she had to go to Milan, where she had a cousin who had to hide in order not to be deported to Germany.
All this was completely false, as was explained in great detail in various other documents in Anthony Pani’s file. The truth was that Adele Terrini, and the person she called her cousin, that is, Turiddu Sompani, had as their principal activity – but not the only one – the trade in fugitives. They didn’t care if the fugitives were Fascists on the run from the partisans, or partisans on the run from the Fascists, or escaped English and American prisoners of war. She would welcome the partisan pursued by Fascists, feed him, dress him, go to bed with him, give him money and tell him the best escape route, he would escape but after a while – as if by coincidence – two Fascists in civilian clothes would stop him, search him, find a revolver on him, take him in, torture him and kill him. Or else it might be a young man who had been drafted into the army on September 8 and was running away in order to avoid being sent to Germany. She
would welcome him, hide him, even give him a bath, go to bed with him – they were usually good-looking boys – and then – as if by coincidence – two German soldiers led by a sergeant would arrive and take him away.
Adele Terrini, under the direction of her mentor Turiddu Sompani, was trusted by the Wehrmacht, the Gestapo, the Fascists, and the resistance organisations who received warnings of danger from her –
Run, the Germans are coming –
and everybody knew that they could turn to her and her cousin if they were in danger. Even today there must be a few partisans or Jews who remember her with gratitude, maybe even with emotion, who remember how she hid them in her house, offered them her soft flesh, darned their socks, gave them money to escape. If the partisan was later arrested by the Fascists, or the Jew by the Gestapo, and somehow miraculously survived, what connection could there possibly be with Adele?
In reality, the success of this trade in fugitives was due only to the fact that the mastermind of it all, Attorney Sompani, organised everything in such a way as to wipe out the connection between the fact that the fugitive knew Adele Terrini and the fact that sooner or later this fugitive was slaughtered or spent the most wretched hours of his life. At the time, there were a number of idiots practising the same trade in betraying fugitives, but after a few months the incompetent betrayer would end up lying in a gutter, riddled with bullets like a panettone, and a weary priest would give him a
post mortem
absolution for all his sins. But Adele Terrini and the mastermind, no, they weren’t incompetent betrayers, they were born to betray, they betrayed with passion, with genuine warmth, it was a mission for them, and they knew how to betray.
So the reason Adele Terrini was in Bologna was not to
console her friend whose husband had been killed by the Fascists – such a humane task was alien to her mentality – she was there because an ex-schoolfriend, with whom, obviously, she had slept, and who was a big Fascist official in Emilio Romagna, had asked for her help in escaping to Switzerland, because he didn’t feel like being seen in Bologna in his uniform any more, not with so many bullets flying around, and so she had come running, in her sisterly, even motherly way, she had talked to the official, the ex-school-friend, and had assured him that she would be able to take him to Switzerland herself. In reality, her intentions were quite otherwise, and a few metres from the Swiss border the trusting official would be picked up by a small Fascist squad. Maybe she sold them by weight.
That day, Tony Pani didn’t know any of this. Lying on the bed, feeling rested, safe – or so he imagined – he saw something he had never seen in the vulgar, industrial United States: a woman sitting by the window, calmly knitting. There was something so warm about it, it gave him a sense of home, of family, it aroused sweet, obscure ancestral feelings from the Abruzzi, it took him back to his homeland, the homeland of his father, near Mount Paganica, from which the village took its name, as did they. So, from that very first day perhaps, she actually personified the hope that these dark days would soon be over, the hope of a serene world where women like her lived and still knitted, with ersatz wool right now, but some day soon with real wool, and her face, and that knitting, inspired him to give her the nickname Adele la Speranza: Adele Hope. All this was explained in one sheet in the file, document AD, GP, MFR2959, which consisted of a letter that Anthony Pani had written to his wife Monica, but never sent because of the difficulties of getting mail out.
But on that grey day at the end of September 1944, as Adele Terrini, whom he called Adele la Speranza but who in Ca’ Tarino and in Romano Banco was known, obviously, as Adele the whore, knitted and talked about herself – making most of it up – to that stupid American lying on the bed, she was thinking much more pragmatically than he was. Having found, without even looking, an American officer with guns and a radio transmitter, and obviously a lot of money in a belt somewhere on his body – the Americans who parachuted in were millionaires, she knew that – was a big thing, this wasn’t merchandise to be sold to just anybody. If she gave him to the Gestapo, all she’d get would be a book of petrol vouchers and not much more: the Germans were stingy that way. The Fascists wouldn’t give her anything, because they had nothing and wouldn’t even know what to do with such an awkward consignment and would either sell him to the Germans or make friends with him so that they could cross the Gothic Line and escape punishment when the war was over. There was something better she could do: put him to work. Infantry Captain Anthony (Paganica) Pani was an exceptional seam of riches of every kind, material and moral. She had to take him to Milan, where Turiddu would see to everything.
Sweetly, she stopped knitting and went and sat down, sweetly, on the bed where Anthony lay, fully dressed, but she had forgotten two things: that the man was a romantic, and that he had been born and had always lived in a puritan Anglo-Saxon environment, maybe he didn’t know the proverb
an opportunity missed is an opportunity lost,
he loved his wife and even if he wanted a woman so much he could scream, he wouldn’t go with another woman, and so Anthony Pani was the only man in the world who had been within a radius of ten metres of Adele Terrini and hadn’t
gone to bed with her. In this connection, there was a note in the file from Adele to Turiddu, a note that a whole team of investigators and historians connected with the Allied army, had found, recorded, and sent to Washington, and the note said – it was only a fragment
– forget about it, Tony’s an idiot, he’s always talking about his wife and his daughter, oh Susanna, oh Susanna, and even though we sleep in the same room at night I haven’t yet managed to
… and there followed a verb that indicated the sexual act in a very explicit way.