Alan Furst - The Foreign Correspondent

It was not a good meeting.

They’d all had time to brood about Bottini’s murder, about what it might mean to them, to be targets of OVRA-not as giellisti, but as individuals, trying to live their daily lives. In the first flash of anger, they had thought only of counterattack, but now, after a discussion of articles for the next issue of Liberazione, they wanted to talk about changing the location of the meeting, about security. They believed themselves to be skilled amateurs, at newspaper production, but security was not a discipline for skilled amateurs, they knew that, and it frightened them.

When everyone else had left, Salamone said, “Allright, Carlo, I guess we’d better take a look at your drawing.”

Weisz laid it out on the table. “A torpedo,” he said.

Elena studied it for a time, then shrugged. “Someone copied this, from an engineering blueprint, so someone thought it was important. Why? Because it’s different, improved, perhaps experimental, but God only knows how, I don’t. This is meant for an ordnance expert.”

“There are two possibilities,” Salamone said. “It’s an Italian blueprint, so it can only have come from Pola, on the Adriatic, from what used to be the Whitehead Torpedo Company-founded by the British, taken over by Austria-Hungary, then Italian after the war. You’re right, Elena, it must be significant, surely secret, so, by having it, we’re involved in espionage. Which means that the man in the Metro could have been an agent provocateur, and this paper is planted evidence. On that basis, we burn it.”

“And the other possibility,” Weisz said, “is that it’s a gesture. Of resistance.”

“What if it is?” Elena said. “This is of interest only to a navy, likely it’s meant for the British navy, or the French. So, if that idiot in Rome gets us into a war, with France, or Great Britain, God forbid, it would lead to the loss of Italian ships, Italian lives. How? I can’t work out the details, but secret knowledge of a weapon’s capabilities is always an advantage.”

“That’s true,” Salamone said. “And, on that basis, we don’t want anything to do with it. We are a resistance organization, and this is spying, this is treason, not resistance, though there are those on the other side who think it’s the same thing. So, once again, we burn it.”

“There’s more,” Weisz said. “I think I might have been followed, earlier this morning, when I walked to the Metro.” Briefly, he described the behavior of the man in the tweed jacket.

“Were the two of them somehow working together?” Elena said.

“I don’t know,” Weisz said. “Maybe I’m seeing monsters under the bed.”

“Ah yes,” Elena said. “ Those monsters.”

“Under all our beds,” Salamone said tartly. “The way the meeting went today.”

“Is there anything we can do?” Weisz said.

“Not that I know about, short of ceasing publication. We try to be as secretive as we can, but, in the emigre community, people talk, and the OVRA spies are everywhere.”

“On the committee?” Elena said.

“Maybe.”

“What a world,” Weisz said.

“Our very own,” Salamone said. “But the clandestine press has been a fact of life since 1924. In Italy, in Paris, in Belgium, everywhere we ran to. And OVRA can’t stop it. They can slow it down. They arrest a socialist group in Turin, but the giellisti in Florence start a new publication. And the major newspapers have survived for a long time-the socialist Avanti, the Communist Unita. Our older brother, the Giustizia e Liberta paper published in Paris. The emigres who issue Non Mollare! as the name of their journal states, don’t give in, and the Catholic Action people publish Il Corriere degli Italiani. The OVRA can’t kill us all. They might want to, but Mussolini still craves legitimacy in the eyes of the world. And, when they do assassinate-Matteotti in 1924, the Rosselli brothers, in France, in ‘37-they create martyrs; martyrs for the Italian opposition, and martyrs in the world’s newspapers. This is a war, and, in a war, sometimes you lose, sometimes you win, and, sometimes, when you think you’ve lost, you’ve won.”

Elena liked that idea. “Maybe this needs to be said to the committee.”

Weisz agreed. The fascists didn’t always have things their way. When Matteotti, the leader of the Italian Socialist party, disappeared, after making a passionate antifascist speech, the reaction in Italy, even among members of the Fascist party, had been so intense that Mussolini was forced to support an investigation. A month later, Matteotti’s body had been discovered in a shallow grave outside Rome, a carpenter’s file driven into his chest. The following year, a man named Dumini was arrested, tried, and found guilty, more or less. He was guilty, said the court, of “nonpremeditated homicide extenuated by the subnormal physical resistance of Matteotti and by other circumstances.” So, yes, murdered, but not very murdered.

“And Liberazione ?” Weisz said. “Do we, as you say of the major newspapers, survive?”

“Maybe,” Salamone said. “Now, before the cops come rushing in here…” He crumpled the yellow drafting paper into a ball and dropped it in the ashtray. “Who’ll do the honors? Carlo?”

Weisz took out his steel lighter and lit a corner of the paper.

It was a brisk little fire, flaring and smoking, tended by Weisz with the point of a pencil. As the ashes were stirred about, a tap at the door was followed by the appearance of the barman. “Everything allright in here?”

Salamone said it was.

“If you’re going to burn the place down, let me know first, eh?”

4 February.

Weisz sat back in his chair for a moment and watched people in the street below his office window, then forced himself back to work.

“MONSIEUR DE PARIS” DEAD AT 76Anatole Deibler, the Grand High Executioner of France, died of a heart attack yesterday in the Chatelet station of the Paris Metro. Known by the traditional honorific “Monsieur de Paris,” Deibler was on his way to his 401st execution, having attended France’s guillotine for forty years. Deibler was the last male heir to the position held by his family, executioners since 1829, and it is said that he is to be replaced by his assistant, known as “the valet.” Thus Andre Obrecht, Monsieur Deibler’s nephew, will be the new “Monsieur de Paris.”

Would this take a second paragraph? Deibler had been, according to his wife, a passionate bicycliste, and had raced for his bicycle club. He had married into another family of executioners, and his father, Louis, had been the last to wear the traditional top hat as he lopped off heads. Any of that? No, he thought not. What about the invention of Dr. Joseph Guillotin in revolutionary France ? You always saw that when the contraption was mentioned, but did they care in Manchester or Montevideo? He doubted they did. And the rewrite man would likely strike it out anyhow. Still, it was sometimes useful to give him something he could strike out. No, leave it alone. And, with any luck at all, Delahanty would spare him an afternoon at a February funeral.

FRANCE SUPPORTS CVETKOVICH APPOINTMENT

The Quai d’Orsay today announced its support of the new premier of Yugoslavia, Dr. Dragisha Cvetkovich, designated by the Yugoslav ruler, Prince Paul, to replace Dr. Milan Stoyadinovich.

That much they had from the press release-a few colorless diplomatic paragraphs marching after. But of sufficient weight to send Weisz off to see his contact at the Foreign Ministry. Off to the regal headquarters on the quai d’Orsay, next to the Palais Bourbon, back in time to the eighteenth century: vast chandeliers, miles of Aubusson carpet, endless marble stairways, the hush of state.