Authors: Giorgio Scerbanenco
Adele la Speranza had ably collaborated with Infantry Captain Anthony (Paganica) Pani, according to document A.D., GP, MFR3002 of his file: she had kept him hidden in her apartment in Bologna for a week, and she had provided him with the means to communicate by radio with Rome, she had then taken him to Milan, to a small villa in the Via Monte Rosa where her cousin, Turiddu Sompani, lived. Even Attorney Turiddu Sompani, the document insisted, had ably collaborated with Captain Pani, putting him in contact with the most competent resistance groups in Milan, providing information that, again according to document 3002, had always turned out to be accurate: a true betrayer is clever enough to always supply genuine merchandise, so as to convince the victim of their friendship. The first advantage of this policy of genuineness was that Adele and Turiddu did not even need to steal the money that Anthony Pani had on him, as they had thought of doing at the beginning. Until Christmas 1944 they lived well on the information: they passed on all the Germans and Fascist positions they found out about, they acted as dispatch riders for the Resistance squads – Captain Pani assumed they were risking their lives, whereas in reality they managed to circulate in Milan and the surrounding area thanks to the German and Fascist permits they possessed – and they kept a few rooms on the second floor of the little villa that could be used, depending on circumstances, as a night’s shelter for
the partisans, or else as a place for Germans to come and spend time with gorgeous female companions of twenty or less, and because of this combination of factors, nobody, neither the Germans nor the patriots, suspected a thing. Every piece of information was well paid for, and Pani assumed they must be working very hard to get that information – which wasn’t the case – and, as the proverb says, the greater the effort, the greater the glory.
By just before Christmas the three million that Captain Pani had brought with him had been used up. Following a suggestion from Turiddu Sompani, Adele la Speranza suggested to Anthony that he arrange a drop, and for a few days it looked as though Rome were going to agree to it, a Resistance squad spent three nights in a field near Crema, waiting for a plane to drop cylinders containing arms and money with which to form – as Turiddu had guaranteed he was capable of forming – a new squad of guerillas that would join the other existing squads, thereby covering the whole of Lombardy.
But after those three nights, what came wasn’t a drop but a message – document 3042 –
Destroy the radio, put it somewhere safe, BH and BKA double game, take refuge zone four your sector.
The identity of the miraculous guardian angel in Rome who had informed the Allied command that Adele and Turiddu, otherwise known as BH and BKA, were despicable traitors was unknown: not even the war records department in Washington knew his identity.
Receiving this message, Captain Pani felt nothing but rage: it was absolutely inconceivable to him that Adele could have been playing a double game, he was even wearing a nice sweater knitted by her, he had watched her knit it, had seen it growing day by day in her hands, with a kind of eyelet in the bottom edge in which to hide the two cyanide
capsules he could use to kill himself instantaneously in case he was tortured. A woman who knitted, hour after hour, during all those months, every time she was there, in the little villa in the Via Monte Rosa, couldn’t be a spy for the Germans, but in fact she was a spy for everybody, and he had read very little about psychoanalysis and didn’t know that all that calm, feminine knitting was, for a criminal like her, a compulsion, a tic, rather than evidence of an innocence she had never possessed.
And driven by the rage he felt, he contacted Rome and told them that BH and BKA were absolutely trustworthy people and had given him plenty of evidence of this over the past few months. The message that came in reply was:
Ceasing further communication. Dangerous for you. Hope you can reach zone four.
And they kept their word: however hard he tried, he was unable to re-establish contact with Rome.
Then, after his rage had subsided, Captain Pani felt cold, not cold with fear because he didn’t believe and would never believe that Adele and Turiddu were traitors, but cold with anger. That was why Americans never had real friends, he thought: because when they found people like Adele and Turiddu, they were suspicious of them and treated them like traitors. Of course, he wasn’t so stupid as to say anything to Adele or Turiddu, but the two of them guessed that something had happened and, in order to find out exactly what, Adele made one last attempt to go to bed with him. She did it on Christmas night, hoping to exploit the emotion of the holiday season, she got him to do a lot of talking, first about his wife and little Susanna, who was seven years old that Christmas, she played her part well, she even pretended to stumble and fall so that he would lift her off the floor and hold her in his arms, but all in vain. There were a few things Captain Pani had never told Adele: the four alternative
transmission codes, the signal to begin transmission, without which they couldn’t send messages from Rome, and the fact that he had almost another half a million hidden.
Then Turiddu Sompani realised that something had changed: Tony had stopped transmitting, he seemed a little tired and didn’t speak much, he still liked sitting on the sofa next to Adele, watching her knit, but something had changed, and Turiddu Sompani, the mastermind, guessed what it was: someone in Rome must have aroused his suspicions about them.
If that was the case, the goldmine that Anthony Pani had been for them was completely exhausted. At least, as far as one side went. But he could still be exploited on the other side.
On the morning of 30 December 1944, Turiddu Sompani went to the Via Santa Margherita, in the file there was a photograph of the hotel he entered, whose most important guests were German officers and members of the Gestapo.
On the afternoon of 30 December, a German van stopped in front of the little villa in the Via Monte Rosa, there was a photograph of the little villa, even though it had only eight rooms on its two floors it was trying to imitate the Castle of Miramare in Trieste, and this was a very mild winter, at least as far as the temperature went: even in the middle of winter it was sunny and the trees had not yet lost all their leaves, it seemed more like the middle of October than the end of December.
Two soldiers, two men in civilian clothes and a uniformed officer jumped out of the van, burst into the villa – very strangely, the gate was ajar, as was the front door, even though in those days even dogs locked the doors of their kennels – and arrested Adele Terrini, Turiddu Sompani and, obviously, Captain Anthony Pani.
As even the most intelligent traitors are stupid, precisely because they are traitors, something happened – apart from the arrest – which shone a sea of light into the rosetinted darkness of Captain Pani’s illusions: one of the two Germans in civilian clothes, as soon he entered the room where Pani was sitting with Adele, immediately rushed to him and searched the edge of his sweater, the one worked on with such feminine devotion by Adele la Speranza, found the two cyanide capsules hidden in that little eyelet and confiscated them.
Only three people knew that the two capsules were
in the sweater, himself, Adele and Turiddu. True, the thin young man from the Gestapo had pretended to search and to find the capsules as if by chance but, however stupid he might have been, the American had not been fooled by such a coarse piece of playacting.
Then all three of them were taken to the hotel in the Via Santa Margherita, following the script of the comedy dreamed up by Turiddu, the mastermind, and here they were separated. The interrogation of Captain Pani was quite mild, the two men in civilian clothes who interrogated him were intelligent and weary, they probably didn’t believe much in secret armies and were more likely thinking more about how to get to a quieter continent, like South America for example, than of how to extract now pointless information from an insignificant infantry captain hurriedly transformed into a secret agent.
At first Captain Pani, who was suffering more from disappointment than from fears for his own fate, pretended to resist – first the flattery, then the punches, then a few kicks to his knees – then, when he realised that these idiots would believe him, he confessed the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth: the four alternative codes, the transmission signal and the whereabouts of the other intelligence units and partisan squads. If he had said it immediately he wouldn’t have been believed, and he was able to talk now without feeling any remorse because nobody would be hurt: having informed him of the betrayal, Rome must have informed everybody he knew, and the Germans would not find anybody and would not be able to make any false transmissions with his codes because Rome was no longer dealing with Captain Pani’s intelligence unit.
Then Captain Pani was locked up in the cellar of the hotel, where he spent the end of 1944 and New Year’s Day
1945, mentally toasting the health and happiness of his wife Monica and his daughter Susanna to whom he had written every now and again, keeping the letters, as spies don’t generally use the mail for their family communications. Susanna and Monica were safe and well, that was the most important thing.
On 2 January 1945 two German soldiers came for him and bundled him into a small lorry, Adele and Turiddu were already in the back of the lorry, their faces, like his, bore a few marks, but not very many: it was possible the marks had been applied with charcoal, he would have been curious to find out. After about twenty minutes the lorry stopped, Turiddu winked at Captain Pani, one of the two German soldiers guarding them lifted his arm and motioned them to get out, and Adele took the captain’s hand and jumped down from the lorry with him. They were in the Piazza Buonarroti, at the end of the Via Monte Rosa, just five minutes from the little villa that looked like the Castle of Miramare. The lorry left. Turiddu said that with a good bribe you can get anything you want in life, and he was convinced that Captain Pani would believe that he had bribed the Germans, and maybe the captain replied, yes, of course – this wasn’t written in any document in the file, but could be deduced.
Then the couple had taken him back to the little villa and the two of them had told him how they had been beaten by the Germans, but then had managed to fool them all the same and to bribe the
Ober,
and Captain Pani had probably replied every now and again, yes, of course. He was watching them, but without a great deal of curiosity, he more or less guessed why they had saved him, and indeed on the morning of 3 January, Turiddu told him his plan: he would arrange for them to go to Rome, that way the captain
would be in a safe place and they could help the Allies, if the Allies wanted. They explained the plan humbly, like good, devoted, affectionate servants who are making soft food for their old master ill with bronchial catarrh and are ready to do any service for him. When it came to using fugitives, Turiddu Sompani was a genius on the level of Leonardo, he squeezed them like lemons, from all sides. First he had squeezed money out of Anthony Pani, betraying the Germans and the Fascists to help him, then he had given him to the Germans, and now, in agreement with the Germans, he wanted to take him over the Gothic Line to Rome, where he would simultaneously betray both Germans and Americans. Arriving in Rome with an American officer he had saved was a perfect recommendation: the Americans would embrace him gratefully and he would be able to find out many things that he could transmit to the Germans. At the same time he would inform the Americans of everything he knew about the Germans because the Germans had lost the war and he and Adele were never on the losing side.
This wasn’t in any of the documents, but Captain Pani must have laughed inside himself and replied, ‘Yes, very good.’ Let them take him to Rome, let them ‘save’ him, the two of them did not know that Rome was already informed about them, and besides, as soon as they crossed the lines, he would find a way to hand them over to the military police, who would put an end to their activities. In the midst of his bitter disappointment, he must have been a little relieved at the thought that they were the ones who were taking him ‘to safety’ in Rome: all right, take me.
‘It’s best to leave as early as possible,’ Captain Pani said, ‘this house isn’t very safe any more.’ Why had they been so foolish as to try and make him believe, apart from anything else, that in trying to get away from the Gestapo they could
go and hide in the very same house in the Via Monte Rosa where they had been arrested? Didn’t they have any respect for the intelligence of Americans? No, none at all.
‘Tomorrow night,’ Turiddu said, ‘that way we can celebrate Epiphany in Rome.’
That day Captain Pani discovered three things. The first was that Adele, formerly Adele la Speranza, was ugly, really ugly, because of the abnormal swelling on her face, her herpetic colouring, the whites of her eyes which were no longer white, but dirty grey, all of which made her seem ten years older than she really was, which was thirty. The second thing he realised was that her constant knitting, the fact that she was never seen without her box of knitting needles and balls of ersatz wool, wasn’t a sign of feminine passion for domestic chores, but a kind of nervous tic, like people who stamp their feet on the floor or drum their fingers on the table. Because that day, 3 January, it did not arouse any emotion in him, seeing her against the light next to the window, seeing her work on the sweater she had promised she would finish by the next day for him to wear when he went to Rome: all he felt was disgust. And the third thing he realised was that the two of them, Adele and Turiddu, took drugs. Even before this, he had occasionally noticed something odd about their behaviour, but he had thought that perhaps they drank too much. Now he realised that they took narcotics, and he felt even more disgusted.
Even though pretence was not in his nature, Captain Pani pretended he believed them, he drank in everything they told him, all their plans, he treated them as if he was still their trusted friend, just as they had treated him before, and at last, about eleven, he was able to lock himself in his room. He wrote a letter to his wife Monica,
January 3, night, I don’t know when I’ll be able to send you these letters, but I
hope it’ll be soon,
and other tender things, because he was a romantic, and he tenderly told her how much he missed her and Susanna, and when he had finished writing the letter he put it together with the others that he had been writing over the past three months, that is, he tipped over the chair, to the underside of which he had nailed a square of material, open on one side like a pocket, and inside this pocket were all his letters, as well as five hundred thousand lire, in those big thousand-lire notes of the time. However fond he had been of Adele la Speranza, and however friendly with Turiddu, as a good infantry captain he had kept some money in reserve: it’s always useful to have a reserve, in war or in peace. He checked to see if it was still there – it was – then he put the chair back the right way up, undressed and went to bed. It was just after midnight, he turned out the light and, with great difficulty, fell asleep.