After Hannibal (13 page)

He saw this register with Lorenzetti, saw the look of incomprehension quickly assumed. The blighter was not going to get away with pretending he had not understood. “You’d better translate,” he said to Cecilia.

She did so, and as she saw the tightness of rage come to the man’s face—the first genuine expression it had shown—she felt a rush of gladness and release. This insolence of Harold’s was far
beyond her own resources but as interpreter she felt she had shared in it. And it was absolutely right. Harold had cut through hypocrisy to the heart of the matter. These people had been answered as they deserved. She barely glanced at the Lorenzetti as they made their offended farewells. Hers was a nature that needed to admire in proportion as she loved. And for quite some time now—longer, in fact, than she liked to think—she had not been finding it very easy to admire Harold. Occasions therefore had to be seized. “Oh, Harold,” she said, “you were really
good
there, with those awful people.”

But Harold’s satisfaction had faded quickly. As he watched their visitors walk away he knew that yet another prop had collapsed in his policy of good neighbor relations.

Ritter worked steadily, with saw and billhook and clippers, clearing the bramble and ivy that lay along the crest of the slope. The work was more difficult, more laborious than he had thought. He wanted to clear the whole of the gully on his side of the stream. But the ground was steep, footing was difficult, there were thickets of thorn and scrub oak which had to be sawn off close to the roots. He had to crouch in awkward positions with his short-bladed saw and the thin branches whipped back sometimes and struck him painfully across the face. He could hear the unchanging voice of the water below him, like a message that would be repeated with endless patience until he could understand it. Coded language this too, like the songs of birds around him, the whirring of insects, the dry rustle of last year’s thistle and chicory.

A passion for order grew in him as he hacked and sawed and sliced, a rage to clear this stupid and barbaric tangle, to reclaim the land, to offer it again to air and light. This feeling grew as he worked, carrying him beyond his strength, beyond the clear message of his body. Only with the fading of the light did he stop the work and by then he was exhausted. The solitude, the dulling effects of labor, were like a drug to him. Each night he slept for nine or ten hours without moving.

As he scrambled and sweated in the May sunshine, memories came to him, unbidden at first, afterward sought for with a slow persistence in keeping with the dogged nature of his work. The memories went back to his earlier childhood, before the days in Rome. But they were scattered and wordless. Words began with his father and the white flashes on the collar of his father’s uniform. Posted to Rome as Intelligence Liaison Officer almost as soon as Italy came into the war, Captain Ritter had brought wife and child to live with him early in 1941. If he had not brought me to Italy, Ritter thought, I would probably not have become an interpreter at all, my life would have taken a different course altogether. It was contact with another language at this early age. If you knew words you could earn approval, make friends. And both his father and his mother had encouraged him to make friends with Giuseppe.

Ritter paused and sat back on his heels. This cramped work and the difficult footing on the slope made him sweat freely and he felt the prickle of it on his brow and neck where the sun touched him. Yes, he thought, my father encouraged it. He wanted me to learn Italian, he had the sincerest respect for Italian art and culture. He hated no one, no race or people. He was an idealist. Not even
the Jews. He simply saw no place for them in the New European Order.

My parents then that gave me this multiple gift—the Italian language, the friendship with Giuseppe, the direction of a career. But the words that poisoned the gift were in German.
A return to the true values of catbolic tradition, German energy and spirituality informing a new begemony
 … A dream long dead—nobody talked like that anymore. But the poison was potent still, the grip of it had accompanied him ever since. It was not a question of hypocrisy, still less of lying—that was the stuff of every day. It was a terrible reclothing of reality, something that seemed like madness now to him. His father had believed himself to be explaining important matters to his son when he said that three hundred and thirty-five had to be taken and shot in the back of the neck in order to safeguard Germany’s high purposes. Not once, not even by implication, had he conveyed any sense that this killing had been done out of panic and revenge.

Which of them, Ritter wondered again, had been the one Giuseppe called uncle? Doctors, lawyers, priests, army officers, a hundred or so Jews, a dozen foreigners, a boy of fourteen. Taken from the German section of Regina Coeli prison or the cellars of the SS command in the Via Tasso, where they had been held for reasons described as racial or political-military. All completely innocent of any involvement in the
attentato
of the day before.

Almost certainly not his real uncle at all. If there had been a family connection the authorities would have known it. Giuseppe would have never been allowed to come up and play, his mother would not have had the place as concierge. A friend who visited discreetly. Perhaps someone who had lived in the building before it
was requisitioned by the military. Someone, in any case, whom Giuseppe loved, who had been kind to him. It had been a well-guarded secret until that afternoon. Ritter himself had had his first knowledge of it from the tears on his friend’s face. “They have killed him,” Giuseppe had said, “
l’banno ammazzato
”—this first announcement of a death ever made to him had kept the cadence of Italian in Ritter’s mind. Then the pause, the tear-stained face, the mouth drawn with weeping and the beginnings of hate. “It was you who killed him,
l’avete ammazzato voi
.”

It was in the same terms that he had blurted the accusation later, in the room his father used as a study. The desk had papers on it and a vase with a spray of almond blossom; some of the petals had fallen on the polished surface of the desk. White walls, white petals, the white flashes on the collar of the uniform …

“Giuseppe says we have killed his uncle.” With the words his eyes had filled with tears, Giuseppe’s tears, because he had felt no loss or sorrow himself, only the shock of being accused and the wish to hear his father laugh the thing away and say it was nonsense. Instead there had come this rhetoric of high aspirations and noble aims, this first dim sense of words somehow slithering and twisting away.

Ritter sighed and leaned forward to grasp with gloved hand at the stem of a bramble. Where the earth was loose he was able sometimes to pull old brambles out by the roots and he had made it a habit to try this before cutting them. This one resisted and he searched around for the clippers, which he was constantly mislaying. It had taken him years to realize that his father had known nothing whatever about this uncle. It had not been possible to understand
this at the time because his father had made no sign; not a syllable, not a flicker of expression, at least none that a child could recognize. His father’s combination of speech and silence that afternoon had been Ritter’s first experience of betrayal but the hurt of it had been long delayed. It had seemed then that the only treachery was his own: if he had not spoken, Giuseppe and his mother would not have been sent away.

He had never seen either of them again. That same afternoon they had disappeared from the building. He was told they had gone away—it was all the explanation he ever had. The basement remained empty and the glass cubicle was occupied by a uniformed orderly, who had little to do because all visitors were checked by the armed guard at the door. Kurt was this orderly’s name. He was very clever with his hands. Kurt had made him a model Stuka bomber out of matchsticks.

With the passing of the years the interest Mancini took in the psychology of his clients had increased as his belief in the wisdom of the law had declined. As he regarded Harold and Cecilia Chapman, who were sitting on the other side of his large and opulent desk, he thought that he had rarely seen a couple so contrasting in temperament and style. There was the tenacious, terrier-like man, with his stretched smile and his occasional dry laugh, like a cough, and his conflicting appetites for victory and virtue; and the faint-voiced, sensitive woman, with her manner of shrinking kindness and her mouth set in an expression of slight repugnance or distaste. There
was a coolness in her gaze, a quality of perception. If I were the husband, Mancini thought, I would be wary of that. But of course he thinks it only exists to support him. “So they are threatening to narrow the road to two meters,” he said, “and to mark the width by using
picchetti
, stakes.”

“That is correct,” Chapman said. “That is what this Bruno, the son-in-law, said at any rate.”

“Well, well.” Mancini joined the fingers of his hands to form a bridge and looked benignly over it at the Chapmans. “Let us hope they do it.”

For some moments Harold Chapman could not believe that he had heard this properly. He looked at the lawyer’s pale broad face with its luxuriant eyebrows and wide-open, curiously impassive eyes. “What on earth do you mean?”

Mancini sat forward and lowered his hands to the desk. “Mr. and Mrs. Chapman,” he said, “I will confess to you that at the beginning I was not so much interested in your problem with these Checchetti. A little story of a wall that falls down, an offer of compensation in proper form … You are my clients, I serve your interests, all the same it is boring, no? But when they refused to sign for the money, everything changes.” He paused, looking from one to the other of the Chapmans. “From that moment they are in another category. They become criminals, Mrs. Chapman.”

As usual when he looked directly at her, Cecilia felt obliged to respond. “They must always have been like that; they could not have changed overnight.”

“No, of course, you are right, they are the same always, but I did not understand it before. After all, a little blackmail, what is
that? People see a prospect of gain, they use what means they can. That is the way of the world. But these Checchetti had already succeeded, they had the offer of a reasonable sum. All they had to do was sign for the money, agree to make no further claim. This they have refused to do. I can only conclude that they are intending to use you as a milk-cow.”

With his eyes still upon her, Cecilia felt—ridiculously—that she was beginning to blush. “Such a mean thing,” she said.

“Yes,” Chapman said, “they are hardly big-timers.”

Mancini shrugged. “The scale is not so important, the mentality is always the same. These are not usual country people; they risk something for the sake of something more.”

“What is to be done then?” Chapman said. “Get the police onto them?”

Mancini sighed. “Always this haste for police in the Anglo-Saxon people. The Checchetti are ignorant and they have got two things wrong. The first of these concerns the width of the road. The daughter, I have learned, she works as a cleaning woman in the offices of the town hall; she will have seen something, perhaps some old regulations governing the width of the road.”

“That is what Bruno meant by their important contacts in the Comune,” Cecilia said.

“The width of the road is established by usage. The law accepts the argument of
de facto
and the present width is two and a half meters. The second thing they seem not to know is that while it is legal to put markers on the road under certain circumstances, these must not be raised above the level of the road itself, so these
picchetti
they are threatening you with are entirely contrary to regulations.”

To Chapman’s face there had come a broad grin, a thing fortunately rare, as it was not attractive. “By Jove,” he said, “hoist with their own petard. It is true what the Bard says, ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’ ”

“ ‘Learning,’ ” Mancini said.

“I beg your pardon?”