Naples '44 (20 page)

The departed Canadians have left a bad memory in Benevento. It was the Sergeant-Major's habit to carry a whip with which he flogged people out of his way as he strolled through the streets. The man who controls the town now is Marshal Francesco Altamura of the SIM (Secret Police) who has been ordered by Naples to place himself at my disposal. He is handsome, good-humoured, quite imperturbable and exudes sinister power. Altamura overshadows even the ‘principal citizen', who although certain to have been the local
mafioso
, appointed through Vito Genovese, is strangely ineffectual and old-maidish, and spends much of his time catering to the whims of a demanding old father.

This evening I was taken by Altamura to meet the town's notabilities. These included a prosperous coffin-maker, and the owner of what the Marshal described as the best-kept brothel in Southern Italy. The coffinmaker's business was brisk. The death-rate here would probably equal Britain's in the Middle Ages, and there was some typhus in the area. Our man's products were in exceptional demand for many miles around, being lead-lined, which, it is believed, will keep their contents intact until the Resurrection Day. I learned that the lead is from the Cathedral's roof, and had been stolen from the ruins. The brothel-keeper was first to offer a bribe. He had another establishment in Naples, closed through loss of protection by the AMG officials, who were in the pocket of his competitors. It would be worth 100,000 lire to him if someone (like me) would speak a word in the right place to get it going again.

This overture reminded me of a slip of paper handed over by the member of 418 Section from whom I took over. I read it again:

These were the small customary gifts which changed hands in exchange for any small service that might be performed.

The question of a car came up, this being essential to my work. Only five were registered in the town, but the Marshal believed he could find one. We went to a garage and I was shown a Bianchi standing on wood blocks in a corner. Besides the wheels, a number of engine parts were missing. No one so far, said the Marshal, had been able to requisition this car, but many had tried. He believed that all the missing parts could be found, and it could be made available to a friend. What he was in effect saying was, with me you swim – without me you sink. While these matters were being discussed I strolled round and picked up a tyre on a bench. This was a Dunlop cover from the walls of which the trade-name, number and size had been removed, and nearby was an electrical tool with which this operation had clearly been performed. Another tyre possessed a Dunlop tread, but with Pirelli lettering on the wall. I asked the garage man where these stolen tyres came from, and he told me he bought them. ‘Everybody does.' He was a friend of the Marshal's, and ready to be a friend of mine. And he, and everyone else, knows I depend on the Marshal.

It was dark by the time we returned to the office. On our way back I noticed zigzagging points of light and occasionally small showers of sparks in the sky and pointed these out to the Marshal. He explained that the boys caught bats, tied rags soaked in petrol to them, set light to the rags and then let them go. He was full of praise for the ingenuity with which they made their own small pleasures, but acknowledged with regret that the petrol had probably been stolen out of someone's tank.

Today a begrimed and bedraggled waif calling herself Giuseppina appeared at the office. This alert twelve-year-old would tell me nothing about herself other than her age, that her parents had been killed in the great bombing, and that she lived ‘under a house' down by the river.
There are boy-orphans by the hundred like her, barefooted, ragged and hungry, but somehow managing to survive and fill the gaunt streets with their laughter, but this was the first abandoned girl I had seen. Giuseppina told me she had come for her blanket as usual.

I was astonished. Blankets are one form of currency in this Italy in ruins – but currency of a fairly high denomination, good Australian or Canadian specimens fetching the equivalent of a low-grade
factory-worker's
weekly wage. I told her I had no blankets to give away, and offered her a packet of army biscuits, which she gracefully refused. ‘Isn't this still the police station?' she asked. I agreed that it was, and she told me that the man who had been here before – clearly my Canadian predecessor – had given her a blanket once a week.

Only at this point did I realise the tragic significance of the request, and that this skinny, undeveloped little girl was a child prostitute. The
scugnizzi
of Naples and Benevento are intelligent, charming and above all philosophical – notably more so than children from protected homes – and this female version of the breed was in no way different from her male counterparts. Much as she may have been disappointed by my rejection of her services, nothing but good humour showed in her face. She bobbed something like a curtsy. ‘Perhaps I'll take the biscuits after all,' she said. Then, with a wave, she was off.

The Marchesa mentioned on my friend's list turned out to be the last surviving member of one of the great hereditary landowning families in the neighbourhood. She appeared to be between fifty and sixty years of age, was laden with jewellery, yellowed with fever, and smoked a pipe. She had the reputation for nymphomania, and in the files left by my predecessor it was alleged that it was her habit to bribe teenage
scugnizzi
to accompany her on horseback rides to a wood some miles out of town, where they were seduced and rewarded with payments of 50 lire.

I was received in the small habitable portion of her castle. There were pigeons in the rafters over our head, and the floor was thick with their droppings. She lived by supplying pigeons to the local hotel, and let out
the keep and the bell-tower to pig-breeders. The floor of the banqueting hall had been covered with soil, and in this she grew vegetables. She was clearly a woman of great energy.

The Marchesa claimed to be of Swabian ancestry and told me that only French was allowed to be spoken in the castle when she was a child. Her contempt for the Italian peasantry was measureless, and she boasted of the feudal oppressions committed by her family, claiming that their vassals were even taxed (twenty-one nights a month) for sleeping with their wives. She knows everyone in the province and it is valuable to have a point of view differing dramatically from that of the Marshal. One astonishing allegation: that the harmless and effete-looking principal citizen controlled a powerful band of outlaws. These had got their hands on a damaged tank which they were rebuilding. She warned me that I would soon be approached with a request for spare parts ‘for a tractor'.

I have temporarily moved into the Hotel Vesuvio, once pride of the town, and possessing not only ten bedrooms but the only Turkish bath in the province. The hotel has been concentrated and simplified following damage suffered in the great air-raid. Now only one large room remains, a corner of which contains some twenty or thirty hatstands, as many spittoons, and a small grove of potted palms. This room, according to the hour of day, serves as café or restaurant, and punctually at midnight Japanese screens are produced, and four iron beds normally standing on end against the walls are lifted into position. I sleep on one of these, much troubled by the mosquitoes and the heat.

A problem has arisen. Although I handed in my army rations to the cook, with the intention of living on these, nobody has taken me seriously, nor believed that any human being in his right mind and able to eat pasta would refrain from doing so. Consequently at every meal a plateful of spaghetti is placed in front of me. Alberto the proprietor is a kind and generous man, and it seems hard to push this aside untouched without causing hurt feelings. The difficulty is to find some way of reciprocating this hospitality, bearing in mind the Italian belief that any
Allied soldier has access to unlimited supplies of food. Yesterday, while drawing rations as arranged from the South Africans at San Giorgio, it occurred to me to ask the sergeant if there happened to be any tins of meat going begging. He readily produced a half-dozen large cans of bacon, described as terrible stuff which nobody would eat. These I took back to the hotel and handed over to Alberto, suggesting that he should invite all his friends round for supper.

The party proved a huge success. In addition to the social elite of Benevento I already knew: Marshal Altamura, the principal citizen, the Marchesa and the coffin-maker, Don Enrico – the local capitalist – who is Alberto's sleeping partner in the business, came along. He had the sad eyes and the drooping features of a bloodhound, and the nails of his little fingers had been allowed to grow enormously long to prove – in the
old-fashioned
style of the South – that he did no work. Three tables were shoved together, and the potted palms arranged to screen us from the regular guests. We were served by Lina, the maid-of-all-work, scrubbed up, starched and gloved for the occasion, and quite unrecognisable as the slattern who came creeping in behind the Japanese screens most nights to bring solace to some commercial traveller for the reasonable fee of 50 lire. Her mother, a crone in black, kept the wonderful old horned gramophone going with scratched Verdi records. After some experiment it had been decided to eat the bacon raw. No one present had ever tasted bacon before, and all were ecstatic in their praise. Tumblerfuls of the sour but powerful local wine went to most heads. The Marchesa bellowed her laughter across the room, scattered ash everywhere from her pipe, and was taken with a paroxysm of coughing when Alberto went dashing round to spray the palms with Flit. Don Enrico, a copy of whose grovelling letter, written to Hitler in person, had found its way into my hands, held an American flag upside down, and kept up a monotonous cracked-voice chanting
Vivono gli Alleati
. At a late stage a drunken attempt to sing the National Anthem broke down into the Triumphal March from
Aïda
. When it was all over I felt that at least I had broached local reserve, and done something towards putting to rest the spectre of the whip-cracking sergeant-major.

Tonight the Bianchi was delivered to the hotel, for my use while in Benevento – on loan.

The Marshal is, or appears to be, worried. He says the town is surrounded by bandits, and he has heard that they may link up and attack it. What did I propose to do?

Nothing, I said. It's none of my business.

‘We're all in this together,' he said. ‘You could catch it in the neck, too.'

I asked him what he proposed, and his suggestion was that we ought to go out for the baddies before they came after us.

With what? I asked him. What could we produce in the way of men and weapons? I mentioned that I had a 38 Webley with five rounds only of ammunition – the same gun and the same ammunition with which I landed at Salerno a year ago. The Marshal, who packs a Beretta automatic, could call on the support of three Carabinieri, but as they only had two pairs of military boots between them, only two men were available at a time for any active duty. They were armed with Carcano rifles dating from about 1912 – the weapon which helped the Italians to lose this war. There were two Pubblica Sicurezza men who, he says, would run away as soon as the first shot was fired. Finally a detachment of two British Military Police was stationed in the town, and might agree to give a hand.

I objected that the bandits, who in the main were Italians and American army deserters, were known to be armed with Breda heavy machine-guns. Not only that, he agreed, but all the latest American equipment. He understood that this had been secretly supplied by OSS agents. He claimed to know that the ultimate intention was to form these irregulars into a Separatist army in support of the secret movement to detach the whole of the South of Italy from the North. From this it seemed that Lattarullo's Separatist friends, improbable collection as they might be, could be gaining ground here, as we know that they are in Sicily.

‘We have to do something,' he says. ‘The longer we leave it the worse it'll get.' I then remembered that a signal had just come in to say that
reinforcements were on their way, composed of two Canadian
half-sections
, totalling two officers, two sergeant-majors, and eight sergeants. I decided to keep this piece of information to myself.

At this point I brought up the fact that today the principal citizen asked me to get him parts for his tractor. ‘Are these actually for a tank?' I asked.

The Marshal shrugged his shoulders. ‘You shouldn't believe all you hear,' he said. ‘I suppose they could be.'

Discussed the problem of the bandits with Don Ubaldo, the schoolmaster, who said they have always been there in times of trouble. He remembered them in his childhood before and after the 1914 war, and could recall no period of history when Southern Italy and Sicily had been free from this nuisance for any length of time. I told him that although little mention is made of them in the newspapers I have learned through our section in Sicily that up to thirty bands were in operation there at this time, many of them believed to be led by common criminals who had succeeded in escaping from gaol during the fighting.

Don Ubaldo said that by tradition, when law and order had collapsed, many of these attached themselves to the great landowners, who gave them shelter and a little food in exchange for their services in keeping the peasantry in order. At this moment in Sicily they were raiding police stations and Allied dumps for arms, and occasionally they attacked isolated villages. Don Ubaldo had never heard of an attack on a town the size of Benevento; however – as there were no Allied troops in the vicinity – he was afraid they might be tempted. This schoolmaster, who is officially inscribed in one of the innumerable left-wing political parties, said that most people were now beginning to see the era of Fascism as a golden interlude of security and firm government.