Guido Pagliarino - The Rage Of The Reviled

If the substantial order of recruitment had come from Colonel Scholl, the formal one had been signed for Italy by the prefect Domenico Soprano who in August, appointed by the Badoglio Government, had taken the place of the dismissed fascist prefect Vaccari. Soprano was a man of order, anti-communist and anti-socialist and opponent of conceivable violent actions by the population, even if he was not fascist but liberal: certainly not a demoliberal Gobetti-style, but an old-fashioned aristocrat. More because of his hatred towards the popular masses than because he was in awe of the Germans, he had signed the decree of conscription to work: playing for time had been his immediate goal to maintain calm.

A few days before that September 26, after there had been contacts between US Army intelligence and the leaders of the Neapolitan anti-fascist parties, precisely in view of a hoped-for uprising in Naples, the prefect Soprano had been approached by representatives of the newborn National Liberation Front – later the National Liberation Committee – which had recently been founded with headquarters in Rome. It was composed of the Action Party, the Liberal Party, the Christian Democratic Centre, Labor Democracy, the Socialist Party of Proletarian Unity and the Communist Party. They had put pressure on him to cooperate with the nascent opposition through the police forces he directed, offering him all possible support. The prefect, however, had preferred the path of prudence because, as always, he opposed social communism and feared any revolutionary movement; thus he had limited himself to converse politically, in secret, with the moderate liberal leaders Enrico De Nicola and Benedetto Croce: without exposing himself.

Both Domenico Soprano and Walter Scholl had miscalculated. Since only one hundred and fifty people had presented themselves to the Germans before the date indicated in the notice, during the afternoon of Sunday September 26 and the early hours of the evening the Germans had started brutally combing Naples and had rounded up 8000 helpless citizens, including elderly men and thirteen-year-old boys. The Germans had fanned the flame of the rebellion igniting the souls of family members and relatives of those rounded up, who were eager to release them. In the early morning of Monday, September 27, there had been the first clashes, started not only by Italian soldiers who had remained in hiding until then in the basement of the Sannazaro high school and in private homes, but also by a number of civilians, although the real popular uprising in Naples would explode the following day, as droves of armed Neapolitans of all social classes spread through the streets and squares, from ultra-commoners to intellectuals, as well as twelve-year-old boys and young women.

Chapter 3

The young Deputy Commissioner, executioner of Germans and in charge of investigating the man in overalls, was a twenty-four-year-old Neapolitan by birth and maternal descent. He had thick, naturally curly black hair, kept short in military fashion according to the regulations of those years. He was not tall, five feet four, but well proportioned and robust. He had graduated in law at the Federico II of Naples with honors and recommended for pubblication and, if he was brilliant in mind, in spirit he was clean, forged in the family and in college on the basis of classic ethical principles, in essence the precepts of the ten Judeo-Christian commandments.

But because of his young age, however, which had made him suffer a few disillusions for the moment, Vittorio D'Aiazzo was a little immodest. He lived with his father, Amilcare D'Aiazzo lieutenant colonel of the Regi Carabinieri, and with his mother, Mrs Luigia-Antonia a graduated primary school teacher but housewife, in the apartment they owned. It was not located in a prestigious area as the family would have liked, not in Via Caracciolo or on the Riviera di Chiaia, for example, but in the popular Sanità district, in Via San Gregorio Armeno where there were lodgings within the reach of the not generous salaries, at that time, and the meagre savings of a high-ranking officer of the Carabinieri. Vittorio lived alone in the accommodation at the time, apart from a part-time cleaning lady, because his mother had been evacuated to the countryside at the beginning of the war. His father, had crossed the lines at night a couple of weeks earlier, even though he was sixty-one, fifteen years older than his wife, and he had done this because, in reality, he did not want to answer to the occupying Germans and to join his sovereign.

Until then he had served in the 7th Provincial Carabinieri Group of Naples, as head of the Provincial Investigative Coordination Section. The D'Aiazzo couple had two sons. While they were proud of Vittorio, they did not think highly of the other, Emanuele, who had been a lazy person since he was a child. After several failures, he had received the elementary school diploma at fourteen and with the lowest of grades. He had then abandoned his not hard-earned studies at the beginning of the first year of complementary school for introduction to the work-force. His father had resigned himself to enrolling him because, unlike high school 13, it did not require an entrance examination. At sixteen years old, he had run away from home, and could not be traced. He sent news of himself only years later, once he came of age 14, with a single postcard addressed to the mother, sent from Switzerland in May 1940, with a few words of greeting. Since Emanule had not presented himself for the call-up visit, he had been considered a draft dodger and sentenced in absentia to prison by the Military Court of Naples; and when war broke out, he had been considered a deserter.

That son had damaged the image of Lieutenant Colonel D'Aiazzo and he feared that, because of him, he would nor rise through the ranks, despite his many personal merits. Vittorio what’s more, because of his brother, had not been able to follow in his father's footsteps and enter the Carabinieri, as he and his parents would have liked. In those days, in fact, not only those who were personally dishonest, but also those who had ancestors or relatives not absolutely unblemished, could not apply for the Benemerita 15. Disappointed but not completely resigned, Vittorio had graduated and had participated in the public contest for Deputy Commissioner in the Public Security Guards Corps, an entity that required only the personal integrity of the aspirant and not his relatives as well. He had passed the test brilliantly and, at the end of the vocational graduate school which followed, he was the first in the standings with every hope, therefore, of being granted the chosen destination, his Naples, and had been assigned precisely to his home city.

After reading warrant officer Branduardi’s brief report, Deputy Commissioner D'Aiazzo had headed to the holding cells on the ground floor to take a look at the self-styled Gennaro Esposito. He had then gone down into the damp underground archive and had checked if anyone with those personal details had a police record and if his photos, from the front and in profile, corresponded to the physiognomy of the prisoner. He had found several criminal records with the same name and surname, but all of them concerned people who did not look like the alleged murderer. Back in his office, he had the arrested man brought to him.

He had interrogated him with the help of his assistant brigadier Marino Bordin who, sitting at his table, had typed his superior’s questions and the answers from the man being questioned on the office typewriter, an obsolete black Olivetti M1, 1911 model.

Bordin was a sturdy blond Venetian, five feet nine tall. He was forty-five years old, had served in Public Security for a quarter of a century, and had a wife and two children that he had evacuated to a farmhouse in the Neapolitan countryside, sacrificing two thirds of his salary to the farmer hosting them and resigning himself to eat and sleep in the barracks with what was left.