Naples '44 (9 page)

Anna Consomata, at Caivano, was a beautiful girl, marvellously fair, an angel by Botticelli with tapering lute-playing fingers and coifs of yellow hair in the black South. To save time I mentioned her
fascicolo
in the Questura, and the conversation became frank. Sadly I learned that this golden Venus had been the deplorable Pascarella's mistress and he had obliged her to back up his testimony by agreeing that she had been present on the occasion of Albano's visit. She had now established a
relationship with the Commanding Officer of the local British Tipper Company.

After that it was Marshal Benvenuto's turn to be confronted with the evidence of his perfidy. We faced each other across his desk, the Marshal gaunt and grey, but defiant, seated under a padlocked showcase full of daggers taken from Torrito's desperados. A sawn-off shotgun leaned against the wall ready to hand. It seemed pointless to preach or to harangue in this atmosphere of siege. ‘Why should you want to put Albano away?' I asked him.

‘It had to be done,' he said. ‘You've never lived here, so you don't understand the way things are. This is
Zona di Camorra
– gangster territory. We don't grow partisans in this particular soil. Albano wasn't interested in killing Germans. All he was out for was loot. I want to show you something to give you an idea of the trouble we're in after his famous action.'

He went off into the back of his office, returning with a brown rag which, held up and stretched out, was with some difficulty recognisable as a bloodstained shirt pierced by several holes. This, he explained, was the shirt worn by one of the men killed in the German reprisal.
Twenty-one
more such shirts remained in the possession of the families of the victims – the woman and the monk didn't come into this – and vendettas against Albano had been sworn on each of them. These bloody heirlooms would pass down to the family's eldest son in due course. In the absence of a son they had already been entrusted to the nearest male relative of the dead man. Albano, therefore, had twenty-one blood feuds on his hands; the shirt the Marshal had succeeded in confiscating belonged to a man with no family.

‘This is the way things are done in Torrito,' the Marshal said. ‘My personal inclination would have been to look in the other direction and let them get on with it, but the trouble is it wouldn't stop there. As soon as somebody killed Albano his people would take his shirt and divide it up between them and swear to keep the vendetta going. There'd be no end to the thing. What do you expect me to do? I have two men here. Half the town's starving. We have a dozen burglaries a night; hold-ups every day of
the week; bandits all over the countryside. I haven't got the time or the strength to deal with a vendetta on top of all this. Somehow or other this man has to be got rid of.'

It was a problem one could sympathise with.

We have suffered from a plague of telephone-wire cutting, and there has been a case a day to deal with for the past week. Of all the miscellaneous jobs that are thrown at us, this is the most boring and frustrating. The most thankless, too, because we never produce results. In fact the only people so far to have caught wire-cutters are the Special Investigation Branch of the Military Police, and there have been bitter reflections at Army Headquarters on the subject of our comparative efficiency. The Army insists that these wire-cutting cases are deliberate acts of sabotage, whereas we know full well that lengths of cable are cut out purely for the commercial value of the copper, and that like any other article of Allied ownership the copper is offered openly for sale in the Via Forcella.

How is one supposed to begin to put a stop to this? All we can do is to visit the spot where the cutting has taken place and make enquiries – which are always pointless and profitless – from any Italians who happen to live in the neighbourhood. Last week my first on-the-spot investigation of this kind proved to be a perfect introduction to the conspiratorial silence of the South. About fifty yards of thick main cable had been cut, and at about seven in the evening right in the middle of the busy main street of Casoria. I went from house to house and shop to shop questioning people who in three cases out of four claimed to have had business compelling them to be in other parts of the town on the previous evening. Those who remained had seen or heard nothing. The
brigadiere
(sergeant) in charge of the Carabinieri station was not in the slightest surprised at this lack of success.
Omertà
– manliness, he explained. ‘They side against us, and they always will do. It's a tradition.' I detected pride in his manner.

I reminded him that the Germans shot wire-cutters on the spot. ‘Of course they did,' he agreed. ‘Thank God, you're a civilised and humanitarian people, and you liberated us from those barbarians. You've taught us what democratic justice is all about and we can't thank you enough.' Not a muscle moved in his face to show that he was laughing at me.

Next day there was another case – at Cicciano. This time the man was actually caught red-handed by some British soldiers belonging to a local unit who happened to be passing, and who locked him up in their guardroom. The General, as generals do, wanted an execution. It looked an opportunity to instil terror into the hearts of those damned wogs who were tricking us right left and centre. I saw the prisoner, who looked sincere and produced his plausible story.
Of course
he had heard the noise of someone using a hatchet to chop into the wire, and
naturally
he had run out of his house to do what he could, whereupon the thieves had dropped the wire and dashed off. Our friend had felt it his duty as a responsible citizen to pick up the wire and throw it into his garden, where it would be out of harm's way, while he went off to report the incident to the police. At this point he was picked up.

Although this story was probably a typically Neapolitan cover-up, there was also a chance that it had happened in just this way, so I decided to give the man the benefit of the doubt and to do what I could to save his life. Once again there was a visit to the Carabinieri, and for a moment it was hard to believe that this wasn't the same
brigadiere
I'd seen the day before at Casoria. This man called me ‘your honour' and within minutes found some excuse to congratulate me as the other had done for being the representative of a justice-loving country.

‘Has the man a criminal record?' I asked.

‘Your honour, his sheet's as clear as the soul of one of the innocents murdered by Herod.'

‘I'm going to the Pubblica Sicurezza after I've done with you. If they give me a different story you're for it.'

‘Your honour, I swear to you on the mourning worn for my sister who died a virgin – '

‘Have you ever heard of
Omertà
?'

‘I've heard of it, but surely you can't imagine it applies in my case? After all, we're both coppers. God knows, I'd sooner lie to my own father.'

The face remained a bland Neapolitan mask. I wrote, ‘Carabinieri report no convictions,' and decided not even to bother to visit the PS, whose report was certain to be the same. What was one to expect? Why should these people sacrifice their countrymen to us any more than they had to the Germans? The verdict, so far as I was concerned, had to be insufficient evidence. If the General still wanted to go ahead with his firing squad, that was his responsibility.

I have been placed in charge of the security of a number of small towns to the north of Naples and within approximately twenty-five miles of the city; of these the largest are Casoria, Afragola, Acerra and Aversa. Although the Army certainly doesn't realise this, they are all located in the notorious Zona di Camorra. The task is a hopeless one, and it would be demoralising to take it too seriously, but most of the last week has been spent in reconnoitring the area, and finding out what I can about these dismal places.

Seen from the outside through the orchards that surround them, all these towns look attractive enough: tiny versions of Naples itself, clustered round their blue-domed churches. On the inside they are the showcases of poverty and misery. There are signs of a vanished prosperity. A few great houses have been built with arcaded fronts and a tower added here and there as an excuse for the rich landlords of the past to use up spare money, but they are falling into ruins, and squatters have built their shacks in the courtyards. The area is one of great natural fertility. It is from these orchards, fields and vineyards that the wealth was extracted to build the ducal palaces of Naples. A handful of families own all the land, and the peasants who work it have always done so in conditions that come very close to slavery. Nowadays the normal, accepted misery of their condition has been aggravated by the war and the loss of manpower. In some of these towns the whole population is
said to be out of work. The new
sindacos
, the mayors who have been appointed by AMG, the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory, to replace the old Fascist
podestàs
, are stated in the main to be members of the criminal Camorra. It is common knowledge that these have been appointed through the influence of Vito Genovese, the American gangster who, having obtained employment as an interpreter, has now manoeuvred himself into a position of unassailable power in the military government. Law and order depend on badly equipped and badly armed Carabinieri and Pubblica Sicurezza, who have two or three men apiece in each town – all of them under constant threat of attack by well-armed criminals. When I called yesterday on the Carabinieri at Acerra, I was shown round the town by a
brigadiere
who walked at my side with pistol drawn and cocked. Last week bandits raided the police station here, killing the NCO on duty, wounding another policeman and taking the few poor obsolete weapons they had. This leaves only two Carabinieri to carry on.

In so far as anyone rules here at all, it is the Camorra. The Brigadiere gave the usual account of it as a secret and permanent resistance that had evolved over the centuries as a system of self-protection against the bullies and the tax-collectors of a succession of foreign governments who had installed themselves in Naples. The people of the Zona di Camorra lived by their own secret laws, recognised only their own secret courts, which imposed only one sentence on the enemy from without or the betrayer from within – death. In the old days, said the Brigadiere, there had been some sort of moral authority, some sort of justice, but now nothing but outright criminality remained. If there was plunder to be taken the Camorrista took it, and shared it out among his friends. The Camorristi were in big-scale organised crime, and they tolerated the police because they kept the small-time criminals in their place. The only man who had ever stood up to them had been Mussolini, who had sent thousands of troops into this area and thrown the Camorristi into gaol after farcical trials, or had simply sent them away for resettlement in other parts of Italy.

The police, here as elsewhere, are corrupt, and how can they be
otherwise on the salaries they are expected to live on? The chief of police of every town – usually a strutting peacock of a man, uniformed like a general, although only an NCO, gets the equivalent, through the devaluation of the lira, of £3 a week. The Italian State has always encouraged its police force, by grossly underpaying them, to resort to the spoils system, and now with galloping inflation they are in effect receiving pay that buys between one-fifth and one-tenth of what it did before our arrival. My only incorruptible marshal is the old widower Lo Scalzo of Caivano, who is as grey and as starved-looking as my old friend Lattarullo, and whose appearance is a disgrace to the force. Having no family to worry about, he says, he can get by, or as he puts it – ‘keep enough soup flowing'.

Discussing with Major Pecorella, CO of the Naples Carabinieri, this problem of corruption in the force, he put forward the rueful viewpoint that even a corrupt police force was better than no police at all. The main thing was to keep police rapacity within acceptable bounds. This interview was the result of many complaints from Resina, where it would appear that the Carabinieri have settled down to batten on the huge numbers of black-marketeers in the area. Last week they rounded up a band of
contrabandisti
and then freed them on payment of 15,000 lire per head. Another less affluent band got off with a total payment of 30,000 lire. The crunch came when they ‘requisitioned' a lorry-load of leather belonging to the Consiglio di Economia, and held it at their barracks until a ransom of 20,000 lire was paid. Pecorella agreed that this was scandalous. Yet what was to be done? If he sacked the men they couldn't be replaced, and his force is only one-quarter of its regular strength.

The fact is that with all their shortcomings, the police manage to keep the walking corpse of law and order alive and on its feet, and some get themselves killed doing so. They tolerate the big racketeers of the Camorra because there is nothing they can do about them, and they gratefully accept whatever they are given in the way of protection money, but they are relentless in the war they wage on petty thieves, and for this, at least, the public is grateful.

Today I made my first contact in the Zona di Camorra, outside the police, when Lo Scalzo took me up to see Donna Maria Fidora, otherwise known as La Pitonessa (the Pythoness), who lives on her estate near Caivano, and is the richest landowner in this locality. Donna Maria was originally a circus performer who specialised in wrestling with a python, and in this way attracted the fascinated attention of Don Francisco Fidora, an intellectual who was writing a book on the circus, and who immediately proposed marriage and was accepted. A man twenty years her senior, and of delicate constitution, he was said by Lo Scalzo to have died of a heart attack either in the act of the marriage's consummation, or shortly after.

All this happened a decade ago, since which time the Marshal said Donna Maria had run the estate with professional efficiency. I found her a soft, well-rounded woman with a dreaming smile, no longer showing any signs of what must have been the impressive musculature of her youth. We drank fizzy wine from the estate, chewed on hard biscuits, and complained of the times we lived in. Later Lo Scalzo mentioned that Donna Maria employed her own private army to keep order on her land, for which reason it was an oasis of discipline and calm in the general anarchy of its environment. No one could pull the wool over her eyes, he said. She knew just as much about what went on behind the scenes as did the Sindaco himself, but – as the Camorra did not admit women to its membership – she was a far more dependable source of information from my point of view.

The epidemic of wire-cutting continues with the General's threats rumbling in the background and a great drive by the MPs. As usual the small people who cut the wire bear the brunt of the offensive, but no attempt is made to track down the traders who buy and sell the copper.

There is plenty of muddle and tragedy in this tiny corner of our war effort. Yesterday Antonio Priore, scrap-merchant, age unknown but thought to be about seventy, was pushing his hand-cart through the
streets of Afragola when he was stopped by an MP patrol who went through his load of scrap and found severed lengths of wire. Priore seemed at first to be under the impression that they were interested in buying the wire, and explained through the interpreter that there was plenty more where that came from. He was astonished to be arrested, contending that the wire was German; he claimed that Italians had been urged in Allied broadcasts during the German occupation to do just what he had done.

This was clearly the MP's pigeon, but for some reason I was dragged in and sent to see Priore in Poggio Reale, where I found him shivering and shaking in his cell. He was very old and decrepit, and if not positively halfwitted, certainly far from bright. The old man was clearly bewildered to be in Poggio Reale. He had always understood, he said, that the Allies had promised to reward Italians like himself who worked for their cause, and what better proof was there of the patriotic work he had undertaken than the possession of quantities of German wire? So far there had been no talk of rewarding him in any way, and all the thanks he had received was to be hauled off and thrown into prison. ‘So the Allies won, eh? And good luck to them,' he said. ‘I certainly did what little I could.' He clearly thought I had come to take him out. ‘Be nice to get back home to the old woman,' he said. ‘I didn't like to think of her in that house all on her own last night. Can't get about too well any more.' He had old, red, runny eyes that looked as though they were full of tears when I arrived, so it was difficult to decide whether or not he was weeping when I left.