Naples '44 (22 page)

All the political speeches of these days seem to be interchangeable, platitudinous stuff. Italian audiences enjoy oratory unrelated to argument, and are attracted to a display of verbal fireworks normally used to conceal absence of original thought. Although the speaker in this case was nominally a subversive, he had nothing whatever new to say, and certainly nothing likely in any way to endanger the security of the Allied forces. He ranted and raved on interminably, and a few of the shepherd audience broke their habit of silence to grunt their approval. I stood there for a while, and took a few notes to base a report on. My feeling was one of extreme isolation. I was also highly conspicuous – and therefore the object of some curiosity – in a village where it was possible that no British soldier had set foot before.

After about an hour I felt that I knew all I wanted to know about the
Forza Italia! movement, and going back to where I had left the Dodge in a patch of shade, I was surprised to find it surrounded by about fifty men, who turned to face me as I walked towards them. Their appearance was hostile. Two men had been looking into the back of the lorry over the tailboard, and going to see what it was all about, I found perhaps half the floor covered with sticky, not quite dried-out blood, which I realised must have been there when I left Sagranella. The implacable neolithic faces were closing in, and I had the feeling that at any moment I might be rushed. I forced my way through the crowd, climbed into the cabin and started up. Edging forward through the rampart of bodies, as the shouts started and fists were raised, the possibility occurred to me that these shepherds had had some encounter with one of the killer squads of the German army, had watched me taking notes, and assumed me to be the equivalent of a Gestapo executioner. Then, seeing the blood in the lorry, they had concluded it had been used to remove the victims of summary killings. I left San Marco followed by howls of execration and a few flying stones.

Back in Sagranella among the continued feasting and revelry in the farmhouse, the mystery was explained almost cheerfully. Late last night the Canadians had run a civilian down, more or less amputating his legs, and had put him in the back of the Dodge, driven him to Campobasso Hospital, and there left him. No one could possibly have been more sincerely apologetic when they heard about my embarrassment in San Marco.

While the war's emergencies continue to absorb the attention, Benevento seems no different from any other ruined town, but in the moments of calm and reflection its atmosphere asserts itself, and one catches a whiff of fear.

A
scugnizzio
appeared at the office at about eleven o'clock to say that a man he didn't know had sent him to tell me that someone had just been shot dead by a
lupara
– the sawn-off shotgun used in ritual killings – and left lying in the street outside the Café Roma. I went there as soon as I
could but found nothing – only little rivulets of blood on the cobbles where a body might have lain. People hurried past, heads turned in the other direction. A waiter was clearing a table in the café, and I went and asked him if he had seen or heard anything unusual. He shook his head. The one behind the bar hadn't either. My friend Alberto in the Vesuvio, a hundred yards away from the Café Roma, had had a completely uneventful morning. So had Don Enrico, the capitalist, who had been drinking coffee substitute in the Vesuvio at about that time. Lina, the maid-of-all-work, thought she might have heard a car backfire but couldn't be sure. All these people had been bred to silence. They were drugged with caution. They had trained themselves to deal with all such questions with a bland smile, to hear or see nothing. The Marshal said, ‘Someone's been pulling your leg. If anything had happened I'd be the first to know.'

Being still unsatisfied I went back to the
scugnizzi
, who don't seem to be afraid of anything, and remain the major source of unsullied truth. I questioned a couple of them and both agreed that there had been a murder and a number of people had seen it. I, too, was sure now that there had. Why should people want to pull the wool over my eyes? A rather spine-chilling start to the day.

The news is that Bernard Durham of our section has been wounded in a drive against bandits in Avellino. His attacker, dressed as an American officer, leaped from a car held up at a checkpoint and drilled him through the shoulder at close-range with a 45 automatic. This is the Section's first casualty. Fortunately Durham was not seriously injured. This could well be the same gang who have been troubling us in Benevento, because Peters, the MP sergeant, reported the presence of an American in the lorry on the occasion when the hand-grenade was thrown into his jeep.

The question is how to deal with this business of the bandits, because the problem instantly arises as to what extent I am personally involved – or should be involved. However vague my function may be in practice, basically I am in Benevento in the interests of the security of British
troops. Bandits – so long as the bandits are not bothering us – seem to me a problem for the Italian police. The Canadians don't agree, and I am supposed to advise them but not give them orders. They are longing for a scrap with anyone, and are a law unto themselves. Sergeant Peters, still angry over the grenade attack, says his orders cover any action he decides to take, and he sides with the Canadians. Marshal Altamura, eyes a-glitter with schemes, pleads for assistance in maintaining law and order. The more I see of him the more unhappy I feel about my enforced alliance with this man. One of my daily crop of anonymous letters has accused him of involvement with one of the bands. Should there be any truth in this, it is on the cards that he is out to arrange for the elimination of a rival organisation – possibly the one said to be controlled by the principal citizen. A labyrinth of intrigue.

A meeting was held today to decide what is to be done. The Marshal said he had received information that bandits will come into the town tomorrow night by the direct road from Foggia, with the intention of picking up arms and equipment. He argued that Field Security must be involved because enemy agents and saboteurs used the travel facilities offered by the bandits to move about the country. It was agreed to set up a checkpoint on the Foggia road, and it was also agreed that FS would limit its interest to problems arising out of unauthorised travel. Any other action would be the responsibility of the Italian police.

Spent most of the day reconnoitring the outskirts of Benevento and the roads leading into and out of the town, as well as collecting wildly conflicting advice from contacts as to the possible movements of the bandits. It was decided to set up the checkpoint about three miles out of town just across the Ufita river, where the bridge was down. This lonely second-class road was the natural choice of all clandestine traffic from the South, and from the Adriatic coast.

By about ten o'clock we were in position. A brilliant night, with every house and tree clear-cut under a warm, reddish moon. High summer, burning away all traces of green vegetation by day, had brought out small
fragrant night flowers all round us, and fireflies were winking everywhere in the scrub. The Canadians, laden with weaponry and Strega, were jubilantly excited, the Carabinieri nervously resigned, the British MPs inscrutably correct. A heterogeneous force, but alas with no one in control.

There was no shortage of clandestine travellers. A Carabiniere with a lamp waved the cars and lorries into the roadside, and the passengers tumbled out of them, their faces whitened like clowns by the dust. About one in ten was authorised to be making the journey. Those who were not produced a miscellany of scraps of paper wheedled out of Allied officers who were not entitled to issue passes, or passes that were out of date, or not valid for this particular journey, or that were straightforward forgeries. Every vehicle was stocked with contraband of one kind or another, and this was joyfully off-loaded by the Marshal, in theory to be taken according to the regulations to the municipal depot. Since a drum of olive oil was worth about 50,000 lire on the black market, one wondered how much of this treasure would really finds its way to the
ammasso
. There were pleadings, offers of bribes, tears – and almost certainly whispered deals. I was alarmed at one moment to realise that the Marshal was no longer with us, then to see him come into view from behind some bushes with a young lady who then quietly and complacently took her seat again in the lorry she'd been travelling in.

The Canadians had discovered that most cars were travelling on stolen tyres. These they ordered to be removed on the spot, although I feared less out of zeal for the protection of Allied property than from the knowledge that every serviceable tyre would fetch 30,000 lire, and no questions asked.

By great good luck the routine travellers had been dealt with and cleared off the scene before the bandits arrived. It could have been two or three in the morning in the flat, dead moonlight when we were beginning to yawn at each other, and in my case hallucination had crept into the fatigue brought on by three sleepless nights. The familiar cocoon of dust of an approaching lorry failed this time to alert us. The lorry, going fast, slowed as it approached the barrier, switched off its lights, then accelerated again to sweep the Carabiniere with the lamp aside, and go
crashing through. It passed us in a sprinkling of shots, and a disorderly rush to take up firing positions. Reaching the end of the demolished bridge, it swung aside, lowered itself carefully down the river bank, trundled through the stones and the thin current of the river bed, and began to climb the opposite bank, already safe from the fusillades of the Carabinieri's toy weapons, and out of accurate range of the Thompson sub-machine-gun fired by Peters, the MP sergeant.

The emergency had caught the Canadians' Dodge facing in the wrong direction, and for some reason the Bren, mounted on its tripod, couldn't be swivelled through 180 degrees. The bandits' lorry was on the skyline on the farther bank for only a matter of seconds before the Dodge could be started and manoeuvred into a position where the Bren could be used. Jason at the Bren fired an excited half-clip. We saw the sparkle of the bullets' impact on metal, then the lorry dropped down below the skyline, and the Dodge went off in chase. Our attention was now wrenched away by the sudden apparition and stoppage two hundred yards short of the ruined barricade of a second lorry. We saw a number of figures leave it and make for the shelter of an olive grove, and we began to run towards them. I found myself with one of the Carabinieri recruits and tried to keep close to him. Someone had thrust a Thompson into my hands which I knew only vaguely how to operate, and I was filled with a drowsy determination to avoid killing or getting killed. We ran forward in a slow, lumbering fashion into the empty lanes of olives, which repeated themselves like a wallpaper pattern. Roots tripped us up, we slumped into dry irrigation ditches, and the nightjars flapped away from us like enormous moths. Then a tall, thin Negro capered into sight ahead, facing us. I saw a sad, elongated head thrusting from the jacket of an American uniform, a Schmeisser sub-machine-gun held in the crook of the right arm, and the left arm dangling as if damaged. Shots were crackling a long way away. The Negro, his mouth hanging open, and capering and ducking like a boxer, swung his gun from one to the other of us, as if to wave us away. I pointed the Thompson in the direction of his thighs, pressed the trigger, and a single
clunk
announced that it had jammed. The young Carabiniere dropped to one knee to aim his popgun
Carcano. He fired and the Negro flopped over backwards weightlessly, like a hollow figure in a fairground shooting range, and then, to my relief, scrabbling about with arms and legs, began to get up again. We came in on both sides of him. There was a black stripe across the top of his forehead going back through his hair, where the bullet had miraculously grazed his skull without penetrating it. He wobbled about showing the white palms of his hands, and then the young Carabiniere jumped on him, pulled him down, and handcuffed him. The Carabiniere pulled out a length of lightweight chain. He attached this to the handcuffs, pulled the Negro to his feet, then led him away to be chained to a tree-stump, just as if he were chaining up a bicycle. The Negro sat down among the fireflies and put his head in his hands, and a little blood began to ooze through his fingers. Not a word had passed between the three of us.

We heard the Bren distantly, beating a slow, deliberate tattoo, then silence. Another Carabiniere and a Pubblica Sicurezza agent dressed for the city streets in a double-breasted suit materialised quietly from leaves and moonlight to tell us that escaping bandits were hiding in the farmhouses. The walls of one of these gleamed like a paper cutout at the end of the grove. We left the chained-up Negro and ran to it, and an old bearded man, startled and innocent in his long nightshirt, let us in. It was a human byre with beds everywhere, full of the sharp smell of the goats nestling in their urine-soaked straw behind low partition walls. The PS agent scampered about pulling down bed-covers and shining his torch into the faces of men and women who pretended to be asleep, and chickens, disturbed in the rafters above us, flapped about to keep their balance.

‘Who's this fellow?' the agent asked.

‘My nephew, you mean?' the old man asked.

The agent caught him by the throat and smacked his face several times, without much indignation or force.

‘You mother's arsehole! No, I don't mean your nephew. Why's he got all his clothes on? Why's he bleeding?'

‘Bleeding is he, eh?'

‘Yes, he's bleeding. Madonna, there's blood everywhere. God in a shit-house, there's blood all over the floor!'

The agent shone his torch down at our feet, then bent down to dip the tip of his finger in a small black puddle. ‘This,' he said, ‘is blood.'

The old man straightened himself and spoke with dignity. ‘A man comes to my house at night, tells me he's tired and wants a bed. I don't ask questions. We're Christians.'