Alan Furst - The Foreign Correspondent

“It’s his shoulder. He can barely raise his arm.”

“He hurt it?”

“No, he’s getting old, and you know what Genoa’s like. Cold and damp, and the coal is hard to find these days, and it costs an arm and a leg.”

14 April, 10:40 A.M. On the 7:15 to Genoa, the conductor made his way to the baggage car and sat on a trunk. Finding himself alone, with no stop until Lyons, he lit a panatella and settled in to read Liberazione. Some of it he knew already, and the editorial was puzzling. What were the Germans doing? Working for the security? So what? They were no different than the Italians, and they should all burn in hell. But the cartoon made him laugh out loud, and he liked the piece about the Albanian invasion. Yes, he thought, give it to them good.

15 April, 1:20 A.M. The printing plant of Il Secolo, Genoa’s daily newspaper, was not far from the giant refineries, on the road to the port, and tank cars were shunted back and forth all night long on the railway track behind the building. Il Secolo, in better days, had been the oldest democratic newspaper in Italy, then, in 1923, a forced sale had brought it under fascist management, and the editorial policy had changed. But Matteo, and many of the people he worked with, had not changed. As he finished up a run of leaflets for the Genoa association of fascist pharmacists, the production foreman stopped by to say good night. “You almost done?”

“Almost.”

“Well, see you tomorrow.”

“Good night.”

Matteo waited a few minutes, then started the setup for a run of Liberazione. What was it this time? Albania, yes, everybody agreed about that. “Why? To grab four rocks?” So the latest line in the piazza -in the public square, thus everywhere. You heard it on the bus, you heard it in the cafes. Matteo took great satisfaction in his night printing, even though it was dangerous, because he was one of those people who really didn’t like being pushed around, and that was the fascist specialty: making you do what they wanted, then smiling at you. Well, he thought, setting the controls, then pulling a lever to print a sample copy, sit on this. And spin.

16 April, 2:15 P.M. Antonio, who drove his coal-delivery truck from Genoa down to Rapallo, didn’t read Liberazione, because he couldn’t read. Well, not exactly, but anything written took him a long time to figure out, and there were a lot of words in this newspaper that he didn’t know. The delivery of these bundles was his wife’s idea-her sister lived in Rapallo and was married to a Jewish man who used to own a small hotel-and it had, without question, increased his stature in her eyes. Maybe she’d had some doubts when she’d faced the fact, two months pregnant, that it was definitely time to get married, but not so much these days. Nothing was said, in the house, but he could feel the change. Women had ways of letting you know something without actually saying it.

The road to Rapallo ran straight, past the town of Santa Margherita, but Antonio slowed down and hauled the wheel around to turn onto a dirt road that ran up into the hills, to the village of Torriglia. Just outside the village was a big, fancy house, the country villa of a Genoese lawyer, whose daughter, Gabriella, went to school in Genoa. One of these bundles was hers to distribute. All of sixteen years old, she was, and something to look at. Not that he, a married man and the mere owner of a coal truck, had any notion of trying anything, but he liked her just the same, and she had a very appealing way about her when she looked at him. You are a hero, something like that. For a man like Antonio, pretty rare, very nice. He hoped she was careful, fooling around with this smuggling business, because the police in Genoa were pretty tough customers. Well, maybe not all of them, but many.

17 April, 3:30 P.M.

At the Sacred Heart Academy for Girls, in the best neighborhood of Genoa, field hockey was compulsory. So Gabriella spent the late afternoon running about in bloomers, waving at a ball with a stick, and calling out instructions to her teammates, which they rarely followed. After twenty minutes, the girls were red-faced and damp, and Sister Perpetua told them to sit down and cool off. Gabriella sat on the grass, next to her friend Lucia, and informed her that the new Liberazione had arrived, hidden at her country house, but she had, in her locker, ten copies for Lucia and her secret boyfriend, a young policeman.

“I’ll get them later,” Lucia said.

“Give them out quickly,” Gabriella said. Lucia could be lazy, and required an occasional prod.

“Yes, yes. I know, I will.” Nothing to be done with Gabriella, a force of nature, best not to resist.

Gabriella was the saint-in-training of the Sacred Heart Academy. She knew what was right, and, when you knew what was right, you had to do it. This was the most important thing in life, and always would be. The fascists, as she’d seen, were brutal men, and wicked. And wickedness had always to be overcome, otherwise the lovely things in the world, beauty, truth, and romance, would all be ruined, and nobody would want to live in it. After school, she rode her bicycle the long way home, newspapers folded beneath her schoolbooks in the basket, stopping at a trattoria, a grocery, and a telephone booth at the post office.

19 April, 7:10 A.M. Lieutenant DeFranco, a detective in the rough waterfront district of Genoa, visited the WC at the precinct house at this time every morning, the high wooden stall an island in the general bustle that accompanied the arrival of the day shift. The station had been renovated two years earlier-the fascist government cared for the comforts of its policemen-and new, sit-down toilets had been installed, to replace the old porcelain squares. Lieutenant DeFranco lit a cigarette and reached behind the bowl to see if there was anything to read today and, luck was with him, there was, a copy of Liberazione.

As always, he wondered idly who’d put it there, but that was hard to figure out. Some of the policemen were Communists, so maybe one of them, or it might be anybody, against the regime for whatever reason, idealism or revenge, because these days, people were quiet about such feelings. On the first page, Albania, cartoon, editorial. They weren’t so wrong, he thought, not that there was much to be done about it. In time, Mussolini would falter, and the other wolves would be on him. That was, had always been, the way in this part of the world. One simply had to wait, but, while you waited, something to read with your morning ritual.

At ten-thirty that morning, he visited a dockside bar that catered to the stevedores of the port, to have a chat with a petty thief, who now and again passed along a few bits of local gossip. No longer young, the thief believed that when he was eventually caught, climbing in a window somewhere, the law might go a little easier on him, maybe a year instead of two, and that was well worth the occasional chat with the neighborhood cop.

“I was over at the vegetable market yesterday,” he said, leaning across the table. “The Cuozzo brothers’ place, you know?”

“Yes,” DeFranco said. “I know it.”

“I notice they’re still around.”

“I believe they are.”

“Because, well, you remember what I told you, right?”

“That you sold them a rifle, a carbine, that you stole.”

“I did, too. I wasn’t lying.”

“And so?”

“Well, they’re still there. Selling vegetables.”

“We’re investigating. You wouldn’t be telling me how to do my job, would you?”

“Lieutenant! Never! I just, you know, wondered.”

“Don’t wonder, my friend, it isn’t good for you.”