Mysterious Aviator (27 page)

I had to make a plan of what I was going to do next, and from my experience of the moment before it seemed to me that I could do that more easily sitting down than standing up. I knew that by that time Lenden must be in the Casa Alba, and the Casa Alba must be close at hand—say within two miles. My original plan, if I missed him on the road, had been to find the house and trust to luck and my own strength and resource to get me into touch with Lenden among the Communists. I had only to get two words with him, and I should have done my bit.

Luck I might still have—and I should need it—but I had neither strength left, nor resource. I was getting very tired by that time; the throbbing in my shoulder and the aching pain of my clothes pressing upon it were drowning all my power of action. I could carry on no longer by myself. I sat there by the roadside for a long time as the darkness fell, and in the end I got the rudiments of a plan thought out.

I must have help in this affair. That was the first conclusion that I came to—that I must get allies. I was up against a Bolshevist organisation; the most obvious people in Italy to set against the Bolsheviks were the Fascisti. If I could get the local Fascisti to believe my story, if I could convince them that they had the chief agitators of their country right under their noses, then it might be possible to get them to raid the house. Such a raid would give Lenden a good sporting chance; in the confusion he might be able to escape, or get himself arrested with the plates. It would create a disturbance, perhaps a panic. In a panic a resolute man with his wits about him can do pretty well what he likes. Was Lenden a resolute man? In any case, it seemed to me that to try and create such a diversion was the best thing I could do.

Lanaldo must be the starting point. It was the nearest town, and from what I had seen of it it was a fair-sized place. There was a road leading up to it, not shown on the map, that branched from the main road in the valley and wound in hairpin bends up the hill-side among the olives till it came to an end on an open terrace before the walls of the town. Inside the walls the streets were not more than six feet wide, mere passages for men and donkeys, and cavernously spanned with earthquake arches between the house fronts.

That was Lanaldo as I saw it later; a rabbit warren of a place where every house was more or less in communication with its neighbour, with the stables on the ground floor, the high, vaulted living-rooms above, and the kitchens in little attics opening on to the flat roofs. At that time I knew nothing of it but that it looked to be a moderate-sized town with the buildings crushed together within walls; a solid block of masonry rising above the grey shimmer of the olives. There were other towns dotted about the hill-sides that I had seen in my descent from Monte Verde, but none so large as Lanaldo and none that was approached by a bona-fide road. That seemed to mark it out from the rest as an important place. I came to the conclusion that I should find all the material there for the diversion that I wanted to create, if I could find a means to set things
moving.

I sat there for a minute or two longer, piecing together phrases in my schoolboy French that I hoped would serve me in the town. In the end I got slowly to my feet again and stood there for a minute, trying my balance after the long rest, and shifting the sling and the pad under my shoulder. Then, when the first nausea was over and the world had stopped revolving round me, I moved off up the road towards Lanaldo.

I had to go about three miles, I suppose, for the road that led away up the hill wound interminably in its rise of a few hundred feet. I didn’t have much in the way of sharp pain on that journey, but I was growing infinitely tired. I went plodding up that hill mechanically; I didn’t count the hairpin bends on the road, but from my impression of that night I should say that there were about forty-seven of them between the main road and Lanaldo. It was half-past seven when I arrived on the terrace before the town.

There were people moving about there, strolling up and down and taking the air, for it was a wonderful moonlit night. They stared at me curiously, but I went straight on and up into the town through an old masonry gateway approached by a sort of cobbled ramp. Inside the walls the place was cavernous and badly lit; I went on towards the heart of the town through an acrid, vegetable smell. That street was about six feet wide. I had to stop once and shrink into a doorway while a string of donkeys felt their way carefully past me over the slippery cobbles, their backs piled high with bundles of wood fuel. And once a peal of music from some mechanical instrument streamed out from a brilliantly lit room above my head, and I heard a burst of laughter and paused for a minute wondering.

That alley led me straight into the central square of the town, an irregular open space between the tall flat-fronted houses, and paved with stone blocks. One side of this square was occupied by a great church, painted pink and yellow, very bright. Another side gave on to a sort of bowling alley; there were many people there, and a clear view of the hills in the moonlight above
the roofs of the houses. The third side had little shops all along it, and one large one with the branch of a tree hanging over the door and the legend “Ristorante delle Monte” painted with many flourishes across the front.

The fourth side of the square was occupied by a great barrack of a house in a severe style, the ground-floor windows heavily barred. In one of these windows there was a light. In the light of the solitary street-lamp that stood in the middle of the square I saw a great shield above the door of that house, with the Royal Arms of Italy emblazoned on it.

I crossed the square, and went into that house beneath the shield. On my left was the room that had the light in it. I felt for the handle of the door, opened it, and went in.

There was a man in there, a seedy-looking sort of clerk, sitting at a very dirty table and working among a litter of buff forms. The room was thick with the smoke of his cigarettes. He looked up as I went in, and said something sharply that I didn’t understand.

There was a second chair by the wall. I crossed the room to it, moving a little heavily, dragged it forward to the table opposite him, and sat down with a sigh. That annoyed him very much. He got up, leaned across the table, and began shooting off Italian at me nineteen to the dozen.

I raised my head and smiled at him. “D’you speak English?” I inquired.

Evidently he didn’t.

“Parlez français?”

He checked his flow of oratory at that, and took thought. And then he began to speak in a language that I recognised as French, though not the sort of French I was taught at school. I had reckoned that it was pretty safe to assume that all these people could speak French. The border must be within a couple of miles of that town.

I shook my head. “Pas comprends,” I said. “Attendez un moment.” He stopped talking, and stood there watching me curiously as I searched laboriously for my notecase with my one sound hand. I had had the forethought to bring plenty of
money.

I extracted a pound note and tossed it across the table to him. “Ça vaut cent francs, français,” I said. “C’est pour vous.” His eyes became as round as pennies; I had at last succeeded in establishing a means of communication with the people of the country. He began to speak again, but I stopped him.

“Maintenant,” I said, “attention.” He sank down into his chair again and sat there fingering the note, his eyes fixed on me.

Very carefully I laid my left arm on the table in front of me and took the sling off it, shifting my body to get it into a comfortable position. As I did that I took the helmet and goggles from under my arm and tossed them across the table to him. They would help my explanation.

“Suis aviateur anglais,” I said heavily. “Tombé sur la montagne, et un peu blessé. Comprenez?”

He did, and rose quickly to his feet making a little clucking noise of sympathy. I scowled across the table at him. “Assyez-vous, monsieur, un moment,” I said, and he sat down again.

I raised my heavy head and stared at him, leaning forward so far as the strained position of my body would allow. “Je désire reconter—désire voir, ici—le capitaine des Fascisti de Lanaldo. Comprenez?” I couldn’t make out if he did or not. “Vous m’apportez le capitaine des Fascisti. J’ai des nouvelles les plus importanes des communistes dans ce pays-ce Comprenez communistes?”

He began to talk again, and to my intense relief I heard among his blather of words the essential features of the information that I was trying to get through.

“C’est bien,” I said wearily. “Moi, je reste ici pendant que vous m’apportez le capitaine des Fascisti—et quelqu’un qui parle anglais. Toute suite, monsieur, si’il vous plaît. Cet argent-là—c’est pour vous.”

He got up from his seat, went and opened the window, and called to a small boy outside in the square. I stopped him for a moment.

“Et un peu de cognac, monsieur,” I said.

T
HERE WAS A HIATUS THEN
. I sat at the table drowsily examining my injuries. The clerk, having seen the boy away on his errand, came back and began rolling cigarettes. He offered me one, but I didn’t like the look of them and refused. I spoke to him again about the cognac, and he said something that sounded like “subito,” and did nothing about it.

In about ten minutes’ time we began to have visitors. One or two men came into the room together, and amongst them a short, fat little man with curly black hair. I liked the look of that one from the first. He was a man of about fifty, and I discovered later that he answered to the name of Luigi Ribotto.

He spoke for a little to the clerk, and then they turned to me. He addressed me a little hesitantly, but in quite good English. “Good evening, saire,” he said. “I am ver’ sorry to see—that you have hurt yourself.”

He told me that he had had a little place of his own at one time in Greek Street, Soho, where he had served a one-and-sixpenny dinner of four courses in the happy days before the war. I told him that I remembered the place and had often dined there—and that might possibly have been true, because I often used to dine in Soho before the war. He nearly fell on my neck when he heard that—I quite thought that he was going to kiss me, but it didn’t come to that, thank God—and I spoke about the cognac, and he sent the small boy flying to his Ristorante delle Monte across the square.

His big idea then was to send for a doctor at once, but I managed to put him off that. With the shoulder in the state it was I was afraid of what a doctor might do to me; I had work to do, and so long as I remained sitting in the position at that table I was pretty comfortable. Plenty of time for the doctor later, and I began to talk to Ribotto about the Fascisti. He
said that the man I wanted to see was Il Capitano Fazzini, and he packed off another boy to look for him.

The brandy came then, and with it a plate of biscuits. I had eaten practically nothing since the early morning, and ate a couple of biscuits from a sense of duty. I did better by the brandy, though.

There was a stir by the door at last, and a man came in. Ribotto beamed at me. “This will be—the Captain Fazzini,” he said, and shot off a string of Italian at the newcomer.

I sat and studied the chap in the yellow lamplight while Ribotto was speaking, and liked the look of him. He was a man of about my own age, very tall and straight, and with a tanned, unshaven face. He had a very high forehead, and in some peculiar way he had the look of a leader about him in spite of his three-days’ beard. He was wearing rather a dirty civilian coat over a black shirt; his breeches and gaiters were covered with white stains and dust, and his hands were rough and tanned. I discovered later that his father was mayor of the place, and that he himself was manager of a vermouth distillery somewhere down the river.

The clerk broke in upon their conversation, and I thought I heard the word communist. Then the three of them turned and stared at me.

“You have—ah, something that you want tell him?” asked Ribotto. He thought for a minute, and corrected himself. “That you want telling him?”

I raised my head. “This is a confidential matter,” I said. Ribotto translated, and Fazzini said something to me in Italian.

“All of us,” said Ribotto, “in this room, we are Fascist. All the town is Fascist. That is, in your country … Volunteers.” He considered for a minute. “The party, not Socialist. You can understand me, what I say?”

I nodded slowly. “I understand,” I replied. “You’d better sit down. My story will take a little time to tell.”

I told them a much shortened version of what had happened. I made Lenden out to be a flying officer who was responsible for certain confidential photographs which had been stolen from
his office. It sounded a thin tale to me as I was telling it, but it went down all right. I told them how he had come out after them. I dwelt for some time on the danger that he must be in, and urged the necessity of an immediate raid upon the Casa Alba. I pressed these points for all I was worth.

The impression that I made was very puzzling to me. They were quite prepared to believe all I said; for one thing they had seen the Breguet flying over and had marked it as it disappeared behind Monte Verde. They were genuinely shocked and horrified at the presence of Communists in their district, being all good Fascists. They were willing to believe that the Casa Alba was full of Russians, and they seemed to think that it might not be a bad thing to have an unofficial pogrom there. Yet they were very difficult to move.

I could make nothing of their attitude. They drew a little way apart when they had heard all I had to say, and began talking in low tones among themselves. I remained sitting at the table with my arm stretched painfully upon it, puzzled and anxious.

Once I got impatient. “There’s no time to be lost,” I said. “It’s urgent. For all you know, they may be getting across the border while you’re talking. What’s the trouble?”

Ribotto raised his hand. “Presently,” he said. “We believe what you have said to us. Yes. But this is a difficult decision that you do not know about. Presently.” And they went on talking in the corner.