Naples '44 (17 page)

Showing Fortuna the penicillin I told him I was going to arrest him and, still perfectly relaxed and agreeable, he said, ‘This will do you no good. Who are you? You are no one. I was dining with a certain colonel last night. If you are tired of life in Naples, I can have you sent away.'

On the way to Poggio Reale his mood never changed, and he became chatty and affable. Would they cut his hair off and make him wear prison uniform? I told him they wouldn't until he'd been tried, found guilty and sentenced. When was I going to question him? To this I replied, as soon as I could find the time, but that there might be some little delay, owing to pressure of work. And in the meanwhile? he asked. In the meanwhile, I told him, he'd stay in Poggio Reale where he'd be out of harm's way. I handed him over to the half-crazy turnkeys, who fingerprinted him and signed him in, and told him I'd see him in two or three days. He laughed, and said, ‘You won't find me here when you come back.'

To Poggio Reale to see Fortuna, whom I found dapper and imperturbable as ever. He was busy with what looked like an excellent meal specially brought in, and courteously invited me to join him. He gave me the impression of a man buoyed up with secret knowledge of the way his future was likely to go. I told him that I was so hard pressed for time that I could only spare ten minutes, and that if he felt that there was anything he should say, now was his chance, because I was not sure how long it would be before I could get back again. He asked me what I wanted of him and I told him all the details of the racket in penicillin, including the names of those concerned, and in particular those employed by AMG. Any co-operation he could give in this way would be taken into account at his trial. Fortuna said, ‘Whatever I tell you or don't tell you makes no difference. I'll be acquitted.'

This, as I had to agree inwardly, was a strong possibility. We had filled the prison with little men like the half-crazed Antonio Priore who had been sentenced to long terms of imprisonment for petty crimes, but every single one of the big fish, Signorini, De Amicis, Del Blasio, Castronuovo, and the rest of them had got off scot-free. Witnesses had disappeared or they had retracted their evidence. They had perjured themselves in court, and gone cheerfully to prison as a result of their perjury. Repeatedly the prosecution had bungled its case and whether by accident or design essential documents had constantly been lost. We knew through our informants of at least one case in which one of our judges had been offered, at a dinner-party, a huge sum to see to it that a man up for trial was cleared. Whether or not he accepted it we should never know, but the defendant was found not guilty. All such powerful and well-connected defendants were found not guilty, while the cells of Poggio Reale and Procida were crowded with small-time receivers and thieves who would rot away in them for the rest of their useful lives. Justice was never seen to be done; and if ever there was a place where it was on sale, it was Naples. If the defence could afford to employ Lelio Porzio, the finest criminal lawyer in Italy, acquittal was certain. In
defending one client he delivered a speech lasting two and a half days, in which Browning and Shakespeare were quoted, and the proceedings at one point were held up to allow the judge and jury to regain emotional control. It cost a fortune to retain Porzio but in our experience he had never been known to lose a case.

There was no doubt that Porzio would defend Fortuna, too, if the case could ever be brought to court, and that so far I had no firm witnesses, although I hoped to get one. What was needed was a little time, and in the meanwhile it seemed essential to keep Fortuna in a place where he would be at least hampered in his efforts to bend the law to his will, intimidate all possible witnesses, and call his friends in AMG to his aid. To undermine his unshattered belief that he would be rescued in a matter of days, I mentioned in anecdotal fashion, but with perfect truth, that such was the chronic muddle in the administration of the gaol that prisoners actually got lost, and cited a case – through a mix-up over names – where two detainees had been called for in the night, put on a boat in the port and shipped off to Tripoli in the belief that they had escaped from gaol there. This information was intended to convey a hint that it was always possible that something of the kind could happen to him, Fortuna. But I knew it couldn't, and that Fortuna was not the kind of man to allow himself to be victimised by a bureaucratic blunder. I was trying a little bluff, without too much hope of success. Fortuna was accustomed to dealing with men with far-reaching and mysterious powers, and I hoped that he might be encouraged in the fallacy that I possessed them too, and for this reason might be inclined to come to terms. He seemed impressed, but still had nothing useful to say, so I told him I hoped to be back in a week and went off to see Casana again.

Nothing would induce Casana to change his mind not to give evidence against Fortuna – this much I expected, but he said he had heard of someone who probably would for a consideration, a certain Dr Lanza who was a business rival of Fortuna's. Casana couldn't approve of Lanza, who he mentioned was from the North, and therefore completely indifferent to matters of honour.

I found Dr Lanza in his clinic, which smelt not only of ether but
success. He had a fine Lancia car outside with an AMG sticker on the windscreen, and he showed me affectionate letters and
recommendations
from half a dozen colonels, and passes enabling him to go anywhere within reason. The doctor had an absolutely frank and straightforward proposition to make. In exchange for giving evidence against Fortuna, who had sold him penicillin he only subsequently found out to have been stolen, he asked for a solemn promise that a way would be found of getting him to Rome as soon as it fell. Lanza admitted, as if to an act of Christian charity, that his motive for the trip would be to fill his car with pharmaceutical and other products bought at prices as low as one-fiftieth of those currently paid in Naples. I told him that such a deal might be considered. It seemed a low price to pay for the certainty – because it was unlikely that Lanza could be made to disappear, or retract his evidence – of a victory over the black market.

Back to Poggio Reale in the hope that Fortuna might have weakened. I was by now certain that Lanza would give evidence, and would be an excellent witness, having discovered that there was an additional motive to the commercial one in the form of a long-standing feud between the two men. For all this, optimism was waning. I was reminded of the ominous fact that at our last interview I had found Fortuna in a cell by himself, although such was the prison overcrowding that up to six, even occasionally eight, men were put into a cell together. His cell had looked well kept, which suggested to me that he paid another prisoner to look after it. In fact he was being treated as a privileged person. Anything could happen in a place like Poggio Reale. It was a mysterious world of which we knew nothing with certainty, but of which we heard the most astonishing rumours. One heard of prisoners whose names were on the register spending weekends in Capri, and of the aristocrats of the underworld – of which Fortuna would be one – giving champagne parties in their cells on their saints' days for their cronies and the ladies of the town; of family visits and the usual exchange of gifts at Christmas and the Epiphany and Easter. If it is a fact that in Naples everything is for sale, how much more true must this be in Poggio Reale?

A message waited at the
Ufficio Matricola
to say the Governor wanted
to see me. When I went to his office I saw the American master-sergeant, supposed to have been dismissed as adviser to the Governor for selling prison equipment. He was sitting in the anteroom, and he looked up from the comic book he was reading, waved and smiled, and I went in. It turned out that the Governor himself was away sick. His deputy, a small, dried-out, light-starved functionary, sighed deeply before pushing a doctor's certificate across the desk. This said that Fortuna was suffering from appendicitis with grave complications, and as the facilities for his treatment were not available in the prison, he had had to be moved out to a civilian hospital.

The Deputy Governor's eyes met mine and he cupped the tips of the fingers of his right hand and allowed it to oscillate slowly from the wrist. The gesture meant ‘what do you expect? This is Naples. These are the facts of life.'

What was to be done? I was absolutely certain that I could take a doctor with me to this hospital where we should find Fortuna with an incision in the abdomen. We should be told that he had been operated upon for the removal of the appendix – and he quite possibly had. Ways and means would be found to see to it that he was running a temperature by the time we were admitted. We should be told that recovery would be slow, and convalescence long. After that the ball would be in my court. I could insist on taking him back to Poggio Reale, where the hospital facilities would certainly be primitive, but it would look like victimisation to anyone who did not know the inside facts of the case, and Fortuna would have some justification for an appeal to AMG, who would be certain to refer the matter to No. 3 District.

When I reported all these facts and these dispiriting probabilities to the FSO and asked if I should go ahead, he said, ‘I simply don't see how you can spare the time,' and that just about summed the matter up.

The French colonial troops are on the rampage again. Whenever they take a town or a village, a wholesale rape of the population takes place. Recently all females in the villages of Patricia, Pofi, Isoletta, Supino, and
Morolo were violated. In Lenola, which fell to the Allies on May 21, fifty women were raped, but – as these were not enough to go round – children and even old men were violated. It is reported to be normal for two Moroccans to assault a woman simultaneously, one having normal intercourse while the other commits sodomy. In many cases severe damage to the genitals, rectum and uterus has been caused. In Castro di Volsci doctors treated three hundred victims of rape, and at Ceccano the British have been forced to build a guarded camp to protect the Italian women. Many Moors have deserted, and are attacking villages far behind the lines, and now they are reported to have appeared in the vicinity of Afragola to add a new dimension of terror to that already produced by the presence of so many marauders.

Today I went to Santa Maria a Vico to see a girl said to have been driven insane as the result of an attack by a large party of Moors. I found her living alone with her mother (who had also been raped a number of times), and in total poverty. Her condition had improved, and she behaved rationally and with a good deal of charm, although she was unable to walk as the result of physical injuries. The Carabinieri and the PS said that she had been certified as insane, and would have been committed to an asylum had a bed been available. She would be unlikely in the circumstances ever to find a husband.

At last one had faced the flesh-and-blood reality of the kind of horror that drove the whole female population of Macedonian villages to throw themselves from cliffs rather than fall into the hands of the advancing Turks. A fate worse than death: it was in fact just that.

Back at the Municipio I was confronted by a group of sindacos from neighbouring towns, and an ultimatum was presented: ‘Either clear the Moroccans out, or we will deal with them in our own way.' All these men looked like the toughest of movie gangsters, and I was convinced they would carry out their threat.

What is it that turns an ordinary decent Moroccan peasant boy into the most terrible of sexual psychopaths as soon as he becomes a soldier? From further enquiries among the communities that have suffered from them I learned that the attackers of the Santa Maria a Vico family were
roaming the countryside in several jeeps, led by a sergeant-chef who fancied himself as a dancer, and dressed up as a female when not in action.

The fragmentation of Italian politics in reaction to the long stagnant acquiescence under Fascism continues. There are now some sixty officially recognised political parties having memberships ranging from a hundred or so to nearly two million. Many of these offer bizarre recipes for national salvation, including a small band of fanatics in the Salerno area who claim to have discovered the solution of the problem of perpetual motion, and to be ready to exploit this in the national interest. In addition to the legally constituted parties there are clandestine Neo-Fascists, and Separatists. To the latter group I believe we have given secret support. The Separatists' latest plan for Italy's regeneration includes the immediate demolition of all factories, the abolition of the motorcar, and the renaming of the months of the calendar after the Roman gods. This is the season and situation when insanity has become almost respectable.

Of all the emergent political forces the most numerous, powerful and rational – outside Naples, in which the urban sub-proletariat is Royalist to a man – are the Christian Democrats, the Social Democrats, and the orthodox Communists; the last being somewhat sapped in strength by the existence of some thirty factional groups, each with its own newssheet, all mutually hostile, and in agreement only in calling on the workers of the world to unite.

The odds are that when the elections come the Christian Democrats will take over power. This is the party of the Church as well as that of the great landlords, and it is supported by all the energy, the political finesse, and the devotion of the religious Establishment. Both the bosses and the Church are already putting on the pressure. Armies of nuns go from house to house in the working-class districts, explaining to wives what political democracy is all about, and why it will be sinful to vote for any party other than that of God and His angels. To support these spiritual pressures, there are other inducements. An unemployed man who is
inscribed with the CD has more chance of finding a job than one who isn't, and the canvassing nuns often make small handouts of
pasta
or flour that necessitous families find it very hard to refuse.