The Salamander, page 27
‘I know a worse one,’ said Steffi, sombrely. ‘Leporello for Duce and the bully-boys keeping order with truncheons and castor oil.’
I spent four days at Pedognana, three of them lodged in the attic of the factor’s house. The Carabinieri came once and spent an afternoon prowling the estate. I spent that same afternoon in a barn loft and emerged with a beautiful dose of hay fever. On the fourth day, Manzini arrived with my documents, and a suit-case of ready-to-wear clothes to fit my new identity as one Aldo Camera. Thorough as ever, he had procured me a back-dated employment as a travelling salesman with one of his small off-shoot companies. I would never have to put in an appearance, but, if anyone checked back, my false name and personal details were on file.
He brought discouraging news, too. Ludovisi was in New York at a conference. He was flying from New York to Mexico City and thence to Buenos Aires. He was not expected back for ten days. Manzini was fretful. All his careful plans to introduce me into society, to elevate me to the status of a diplomatic agent, were now in ruins. I was back in the underworld from which he had taken me. I was, by presumption, disreputable and because of me, he, too, had fallen into some discredit with the Movement. He was excluded from its inner councils. The Director had sent him a caustic little note suggesting that, until his credit was restored, he might confine his activities to financial contribution, of which the Movement stood in constant need.
We dined together that night and I tried to coax him back into his anecdotal mood; but he refused to be drawn until I mentioned the two dossiers which Leporello had given to me, but which I had not had an opportunity to read. All I remembered were the names: Hans Helmut Ziegler and Emanuele Salatri. He mused over them for a few moments and then threw up his hands, casting off ill-humour like a cloak.
‘Eh! Why not? What is the past for, if not to renew our hope in the future. Hans Helmut Ziegler… That one goes a long way back. It began, let me see, in nineteen-thirty. I was in Sao Paolo then, spending my first big money, making my first investment in the New World. In those days, my Dante, there were more Italians than Brazilians in Sao Paolo. Most of them were migrants, but some like myself were investors – in sugar and coffee land, in textiles and pharmaceuticals, small companies at first but immensely profitable. Those were wild days. I was coining money and spending it and coining more… And the women, Dio! They dropped into your hands like ripe papayas.
‘One night in a gambling club, I was standing next to a young fellow about my own age. He was Brazilian and he was playing higher than I was on roulette. I was having a run of luck. He was losing and chasing his losses. In the end, about midnight, he was cleaned out. He looked so disconsolate, so utterly despairing, I couldn’t bear it. I put my hand on his sleeve and invited him to stay and share a stake with me – just for luck, my luck if not his. For a moment, I thought he was going to strike me. Then he laughed and said: “Why not? It’s fools’ money.” Well, to cut it short, I put a big green chip on thirty-five. It won. We split the money and walked away from the table, arm in arm, friends for life. His name was Paolo Pereira Pinto and he is now one of the best bankers in Brazil. When he got his first directorship he sent me an emerald, five carats, square-cut, as a souvenir of that night. I had the emerald set in a brooch for Raquela Rabin.
‘… That’s the first part of the story. The second part is much later. Hans Helmut Ziegler was the Gestapo man who worked me over in prison. He loved his job and he was expert at it. A dialogue with him, in the interrogation cell, was like a confrontation with the evil one himself. Even now, old as I am, I remember him with terror and loathing. After the war, he disappeared, swallowed up in the chaos. In 1965 the daughter of my old friend, Pinto, was left a widow with two young children. A year later, she remarried and Pinto sent me the wedding photograph. The man she had married was Hans Helmut Ziegler… It took two years’ work and twenty-thousand dollars to build a dossier on him. I sent it to him with a Salamander card. He couldn’t even manage a clean exit. He drove himself over a cliff at one hundred and fifty kilometres an hour. Old Pinto read the dossier and thought the Israelis had killed him. He was glad to be rid of Ziegler. He didn’t want the Zionists operating in his bailiwick. He called in the police who sent the dossier to Interpol. Eventually, they found their way to me, by way of the Italian authorities – which is, I suppose, how the dossier came into Leporello’s hands. You may not believe it, but Pinto and I are still friends…
‘That ought to be the end of the story, my Dante, but it isn’t. In the days before the Black Sabbath, the Jews of Rome believed they had a deal with the Germans to ransom themselves. A fund was set up to which everyone contributed in gold and jewellery. Women even gave their wedding rings. All to no avail. The Germans took the gold and took the people as well… However, one of the collectors was a man called Emanuele Salatri. It was to him that Raquela gave the emerald brooch. Salatri never delivered what he had collected. He simply vanished with the loot. In 1969, there was an important auction of jewelry in Zurich. Among the pieces advertised in the catalogue, was that brooch. I was, therefore, in a position to trace its provenance. I traced it through two other owners to Emanuele Salatri, who was then a prosperous gem-dealer in Hatton Garden in London. I sent him a dossier and a card. He blew his brains out. Once again, the dossier was traced back to me. Once again, nothing could be done about it because I had committed no crime. I gave the brooch back to Raquela. She would not accept it. There was blood on it, she said, and it would bring no joy to anyone. I sold it to Bulgari who broke it up and reset the stone.
‘… Old history! Am I wrong to dig it up? I have thought so, many times, but always I have come back to the same question: why should the villains flourish while the victims still suffer the effects of their villainies ? This is your question now, Matucci. It is one of the ironies of history that Leporello could wade through a whole ocean of crimes and still prove a potent and even a good ruler. But even if he did, should we still suffer him? Even if he came now in sackcloth with a halter round his neck, should we, in the same breath, forgive him and consecrate him to power? I cannot see it. I cannot…
‘There’s one more story, my Dante; and then we must go to bed. Come over to the window. You see those far hills and the cluster of light at the top?… That’s Vincolata. It’s nothing much of anything, a little hill town with maybe five hundred people inside its old walls. In the Partisan days, I used it as an observation point, and sometimes I slept there in the house of a widow woman called Bassi.
‘One day we ambushed a small German detachment a kilometre from the town, and killed two men. There were immediate reprisals. The Germans arrested twenty men, young and old, as hostages, and ordered them to be shot in the square of Vincolata. The officer in charge of the firing squad was a young Austrian Oberleutnant named Loeffler… You can imagine the horror of such an event in a small place like Vincolata. Twenty men… It is a loss and a trauma that can never be repaired. They were my people. They had suffered because of orders I had given. So, I promised, one day justice would be done.
‘… Loeffler survived the war, went back to Austria and entered the pastoral priesthood. It takes us different ways you see. Me, it made an instrument of vengeance, him, it turned into an apostle. I had lost Loeffler by then and the more I came back here and saw the peace of this place, the less I wanted to disturb it.
‘… Late in the sixties, I was in Austria, negotiating a contract for iron-ore. In the local press I read the news that the Right Reverend Franziskus Loeffler, parish priest of Oberalp, had been nominated to a Bishopric and would be consecrated in Rome by the Holy Father. I wasn’t sure if it was the same man; so I went to see him. It was the same Franziskus Loeffler, and I didn’t like him. I found him shallow, stubborn, vain, the kind of churchman I have always resented, half tyrant, half father-figure. I told him why I had come. I asked him whether he did not consider his elevation to a Bishopric an affront to his co-religionists in Vincolata.
‘I could not come within a hand’s touch of him. He was so secure in his conversion, it was as if he carried a private brief from the Almighty. I went away angry and bitter. I wrote to the Vatican. I incited a press campaign against the nomination, and suggested that Loeffler could and should be extradited to Italy to stand trial as a war criminal. Loeffler declined his nomination, resigned his parish and retired into obscurity.
‘There is, however, an epilogue. About eighteen months ago, the parish priest of Vincolata came to see me, and asked as a special favour that I attend his Sunday Mass. Loeffler was there. He was dressed in clerical grey, with a white collar and a black tie and was kneeling in the front pew, by the nave. After the recitation of the Confiteor, he stood up, faced the congregation and announced very simply : “I am Franziskus Loeffler. I attended the execution of your relatives and friends during the war. I gave the firing order. I am here to beg your pardon if you feel you can give it. If not, I am prepared to offer myself for whatever retribution you may exact. I cannot bring back the dead. I wish I could. Please forgive me.” He knelt down again and the Mass went on. Afterwards, I waited to see what the folk of Vincolata would do… Nothing, my Dante! Absolutely nothing! They ignored him. They walked away and left him in what must have been the cruellest solitude of his life.
‘… What could I do? I invited him home for lunch. I still didn’t like him; but he was a bigger man than I, for whom the simplest apology is like drawing a tooth. Afterwards I thought he would probably have made a very good Bishop… I’m sorry you won’t meet him now. I’d have liked to know your opinion… See you in the morning, my Dante. Sleep well!’
I didn’t sleep. I sat up late, and, desperately lonely, wrote a letter to Lili; not from Uncle Pavel this time, but from Dante Alighieri Matucci, fugitive, who tomorrow must go back to the half-world of those who cannot conform or will not submit to the discipline of the ant-heap.
My dearest Lili,
This letter is from your puppet-man who has discovered, late and painfully, how little he can control his own destiny.
It is very late. The moon is full and high and all the land is silver. It is very still, so still that I can almost hear the mice breathing behind the panelling of my bedroom. The fire is almost dead and I am beginning to be cold; but I do not want to go to bed, because you will not be there and I cannot dream you back. I tore up your last letter because I wanted to put you out of my mind until all this business was finished. It was no use. I cannot forget you. I cannot bear the empty room in my heart. I am jealous that you may have found someone else to take my place in yours.
I love you, Lili. There! Now! It is said. I love you. I have clowned the words before. I have lied them and traded them. This is the first time there has ever been a truth in them. Will you marry me, Lili? If I call you one day, to some tiny place that is hardly a name on a map, will you come and join hands and lips and body with me for always and a day more than always? Don’t answer until you are sure; because when you are sure and I am free, I shall follow you to the last frontiers and home again.
Home? I have no home now, Lili. I am a man on the run. Things have gone badly for us, but there is still hope of a good outcome. Tomorrow I must leave this pleasant refuge and go back into the underworld, where the beggars plot against the tyrants and the tyrants use beggars for spies. I am looking for a legacy, left by a man I think is dead. If I find it, everything will be simple. If not, you may see me in Switzerland sooner than you expect.
I am afraid, but not too afraid; because I am learning slowly, to live with the man who lives in my skin. I haven’t seen him full-face yet. That, too, will come. The Salamander still flourishes; and I am learning from him, too, the arts of survival… You will smile; but I never thought I could survive so long without a woman’s company. Perhaps the truth is that my woman is never so far absent that I am without her utterly.
Strange how the words come back: ‘Quella che ’mparadisa la mia mente!’… she who makes my mind a paradise. My namesake wrote some very good things in his day. A pity he didn’t write more about the body. That’s very lonely just now.
Always yours,
Dante Alighieri…
I have the letter still, because it was returned to me in circumstances which belong later in this record.
I came back to Milan in the early afternoon, and settled myself in a modest pensione near the Ambrosian Library. It was clean, comfortable and economical, the right sort of lodging for a travelling salesman whose only visible possessions were a cardboard valise and a leather attaché case, with a combination lock just to impress the customers.
After I had unpacked, I strolled out to look at the Sforza Castle, the vast fortress of red brick built by Francesco, Fourth Duke of Milan and founder of the Sforza dynasty. He began as a simple condottiere with a horse and a sword and three pieces of advice from his father: never beat a servant, never ride a horse with a hard mouth and never make love to another man’s wife. He made himself the sword-arm of Filippo Visconti, last of the line, fathered twenty-two bastards, married Filippo’s daughter, and, when the Visconti died, rode into a starving city with all his men-at-arms festooned with bread. He died of the dropsy in 1466; but the bastion he built is still the pride of Milan.
They were wild men in those days; but their genius and their vices perpetuate themselves in the Italians of today, and all who deal with us do well to understand it. To the foreigner, we look like characters out of an opera, exaggerated and larger than life. The reverse is true. The opera is only a pale shadow of our history; and our history repeats itself in shorter cycles than theirs. Filippo Visconti, for instance, was just like the Surgeon. He, too, threw people out of windows. He conjured up plots and spies and filled the city with soldiers of fortune to protect him. Galeazzo Maria was murdered in the Church of St Stephen by three young men who went to Mass first to tell St Stephen they were sorry for messing up his Church. Where Leonardo wrote his Atlantic Codex, the Pirelli building stands, as a monument to Leonardo’s successors.
Aimless thoughts, perhaps, from a man too disengaged for safety, in a city where every policeman had his name. And yet not aimless, not so irrelevant. Major-General Leporello was vaulting higher than the Visconti and the Sforza had even dreamed. They were content with duchies and provinces. He wanted all Italy under his fist. He had arms and communications beyond their imagining and he had no Emperor or Pope breathing down his neck.
As I wandered through the galleries and corridors of the fortress, I wondered how I should best approach Elena Leporello. She was my last chance: the last filly in the last race. If I lost her I might just as well head for the Alps. I could write her a note. Her husband or a household spy might intercept it. I could accost her in the street. She might scream for the nearest policeman. I could telephone. She might, and probably would, slam down the receiver in my ear. I decided to telephone. I bribed a custodian to let me use the telephone in his office. A maidservant answered. I asked:
‘May I speak with the General please?’
‘I regret. The General is not at home. I suggest you try headquarters.’
‘This is headquarters. Is the Signora at home?’
I waited a very long moment, and when Elena Leporello came on the line, I talked fast and eloquently:
‘Please, madam, whatever I say, do not hang up until I have finished. This is Dante Alighieri Matucci. There is an order out for my arrest. I have been in hiding for several days. I read the papers. I do not know whether Captain Roditi is alive, dead or going about his normal duties. Can you tell me, please?’
‘I can’t tell you, not at this moment.’
‘The reports give the impression that I either kidnapped him or murdered him. Neither is true. If he is alive, I must find him. Are you willing to talk to me?’
‘Yes.’
‘When?’
‘Any day between ten and six.’
‘Thank you. Now listen, carefully. At ten-thirty tomorrow morning go to the Ambrosian Library. Ask to see Petrarch’s Virgil. The librarian will bring it to you. He will stay with you while you inspect it. A friend of mine will contact you then and bring you to me. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Are you being watched?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If you think you are, don’t keep the appointment. The same arrangement will stand for three days. If we have not made contact in that time, I will telephone again and make other arrangements.’
‘I understand.’
‘My friend will give you a recognition signal. He will ask: “Are you Raquela Rabin?” You will answer, “Yes!” Then do whatever he asks. Expect to be out of town for four or five hours.’
‘I understand that.’
‘I want to ask you some other questions. Just give me yes or no… Can I trust Laura Balestra?’
‘No.’
‘Can you trust your servants?’
‘No.’
‘Will you trust me?’
‘Until we meet – yes.’
‘Thank you. I will now repeat. The Ambrosian Library, ten-thirty for three days. Petrarch’s Virgil. Are you Raquela Rabin?’
‘Yes. Thank you. Goodbye.’
So far, so good; but how far is far when you are dealing with a woman practised in intrigue? I put another slug in the telephone and dialled the number of Steffi’s hotel.
‘Steffi? This is Rabin. Shalom.’
‘And to you, too, old friend. How are you?’
‘Surviving. Are you free for dinner?’
‘When you get to my age, you’re always free for dinner. Where?’
‘Rent yourself a car. Pick me up at six at the entrance to the Sforza Castle.’
‘Who dines at six o’clock?’
‘Nobody. We’re going for a drive first. Do you like redheaded women?’
‘With green hair even.’
‘Any news?’
‘Only that I’m bored.’
‘That’s good news. Sbrigati eh! Move it! There’s a long way to go and the traffic’s heavy.’
