The Marshal and the Murderer Read online

  'You've seen the well out there? It's dry, has been for years and years, but it came in useful for hiding people during the war. Jews, partisans, and once the parish priest from a village nearby because the SS were looking for him . . . You two are not from these parts I can tell.'

  'No,' answered Niccolini, 'I'm a Roman myself and Guarnaccia's from Syracuse.'

  'And of course you're very young and don't remember. I don't know whether you realize that half the partisans who died in the fight against nazi-fascism were Tuscans. I'm not making out that our boys were any more dedicated or heroic than others. I suppose they might have been but I'd hesitate to say so. It was just the way things went. The trouble was, you see, that the armistice of '43 was drawn up in such a hurry. So many misunderstandings were never ironed out as they might have been with a bit of thought and patience. Of course, it was inevitable that the Allies didn't trust us. They were frightened of being double-crossed and the result was that they drew up an armistice that eliminated Italy from the list of protagonists of the war, leaving us to deal with the Germans as best we could and going about their business in their own way. It was understandable but it was tragic, as much for them as for us. I said then and I still say that if only there had been some coordination, if only the Allies had made their landing between Rome and La Spezia as they could and should have done, the war would have been over in a matter of weeks instead of dragging on for another year and a half with so many Allied soldiers dead and so many Italian towns destroyed. There need have been no Gothic Line, no bombing in the centre of Florence, none of the so-called German reprisals that wiped out the populations of entire villages for no real military reason. It was a mistake, and it's been my experience that mistakes result in worse disasters even than deliberate evil intentions do. Even Kesselring himself was frightened when the armistice was signed. In one of Colonel Dollman's letters - I have it here in one of my books but I'll just give you the gist of it - he said that according to Field Marshal Kesselring, if Badoglio had taken command right away and started a large-scale Allied landing near Rome the German defeat would have been inevitable. Well, that's not the way things went. There was no coordination, no unified command and the psychological situation was terrible. After all, to a soldier an armistice means the war's over, willpower and fighting capacity were bound to sag unless a properly established command and rapid battle orders did something to keep them going. As it was, a lot of units found themselves fighting in a vacuum on their own initiative. There were three thousand dead in the first two days. There's no doubt in my mind that the partisans saved the day — not so much because of their attacks on the enemy but because they boosted the morale of the people, gave them something to hope for and restored the will to fight back. In other words, they did unofficially what should have been done officially, and thirty-five thousand of them died doing it.

  'Now, be patient with me, Niccolini - Marshal Guarnaccia here is too polite to show it, sitting here without moving a muscle - but I can see you're getting restless, thinking you've come across a real war bore. You'll realize in a moment that that's not the case. If you want to understand these letters you have to understand the way people were feeling and thinking then. Most of the letters were directed against Robiglio and the rest against Moretti and you think the writers are divided into two opposing camps perhaps, but you're wrong. The targets may be different but the motive behind the attacks is the same. That's what you have to understand. It all goes back to what happened one night in this town. A night that changed everything in both Robiglio's family and Moretti's. You've seen the statue in the square, of course?'

  Niccolini stopped sorting and resorting the letters in his hand and looked up.

  'The partisan?'

  'That's Moretti, the father.'

  'It is? But the name . . .'

  'Pietro Moro, his nom de guerre - though his real name's there, too, if you'll look more closely. He called himself Pietro, but since there were two of them in the brigade who'd chosen the same name, the other boy who was a northerner and very fair-haired became Pietro Biondo and Moretti, who was dark, Pietro Moro.'

  'So Moretti's father was a war hero. Well, I didn't know that.'

  'For one reason and another it's not talked about, though it's not forgotten. As to the term "war hero", it covers many realities. There were heroes enough of what I call the genuine kind, those who voluntarily sacrificed themselves for others, and Pietro was one of them, or became one of them in the end. But some were just victims of circumstance and others plain fakes - it was amazing how many men declared themselves to have been partisans once the fighting was over, inventing a new past for themselves after having fought in Mussolini's GNR. They just dumped their uniforms after the defeat and found themselves a red neckerchief to come home in. Well, enough of them. Among the genuine partisans there were all sorts, the idealists, the disaffected, the odd character on the run from the law who found it a convenient way to disappear from circulation, and of course the boys who would otherwise have risked being called up to serve Mussolini's new Republic in Said or packed off to Germany to die in work camps. Moretti, Pietro as you know him, was one of the last group but he had good reasons for being glad to leave his family at that point too. He and young Ernesto Robiglio were both twenty years old that year, but their circumstances were as different as their characters. Robiglio's father was an ardent fascist, and mayor - podesta as it was then - of the town. Young Ernesto was living at home and studying law at the University of Florence. Their factory stood where it stands now, though the present buildings are new since the old place was badly damaged by Allied bombings.

  'Moretti - Pietro Moro - was working for his father and uncle in the family business, the same place you know, but in those days they only made field drains and roof tiles. At any rate, young Pietro started work there at age twelve and things went along smoothly enough for a few years until he got involved with his uncle's daughter, Maria, a pretty little thing, small and plump with a mass of curly hair and eyes as large and innocent as a baby's. But she wasn't all there and that's a fact. You could see it in those eyes, pretty and soft but more animal than human . . . You've seen Tina, so you'll understand what I mean. Tina as a child was a replica of her mother, but you've seen how she ended up, and her mother, poor soul, came to an even worse end because of what happened that night.

  'By the time she was fifteen Maria was already running after men twice her age and more. Then she took up with Pietro. She was sixteen and he was just seventeen. What made matters worse was their being cousins. I tried to talk him out of it because of that. Too much intermarrying goes on in this town and it's not healthy. I had him in here at the request of his parents and tried to talk some sense into him, basing my arguments on the fact that they were blood relations. I didn't know how much he knew about Maria's behaviour and I was afraid he'd run out on me if I tried to tell him. There's no doubt that he was in love with the girl. In any case, before I could get very far he interrupted me to tell me that I was wasting my breath. The reason he'd let himself be talked into coming to see me was so that he could tell me what Maria had been afraid to come and tell me herself. She was pregnant. Well, you can imagine how things would have gone between the two fathers if they hadn't married. The business was already in severe difficulties because of the war -this was in '41 - and a big family quarrel would have meant the end. So Pietro got his own way and married his little Maria. He certainly seemed to have no doubts about the child's being his and I think it probably was. I hadn't seen her hanging around the town since she'd been with Pietro. So they married and moved in with his parents who were living in a corner of the factory. Conditions were cramped and his mother, who had been against the marriage and had been forced to accept it by the men to protect the business, couldn't get on with her daughter-in-law at any price. Things started badly and soon got worse. As their family doctor, I knew a great deal about what was going on but there was little I could do to help, though the mother fre
quently turned to me for advice - they were communists and so would have nothing to do with the priest - he once went round there claiming that the young people's future was cursed because they hadn't married in church. He was out on his ear within minutes. I tried talking to Maria but it was hopeless. How can you talk about the responsibilities of motherhood to a child? I doubt if her mental'age was much above twelve. She was wayward and lazy and did nothing to help her mother-in-law in the house, but what was worse was that within a month of moving in there she began hanging around the men in the factory. Nothing happened, of course. Apart from the presence of the men in the family, including her husband, she was already showing her pregnancy. But it caused violent quarrels, especially between Pietro and his mother, and with all their efforts they couldn't keep Maria under control. Pietro was deeply unhappy and it goes without saying that his mother lost no opportunity of saying "I told you so", as is the way with mothers. When the time came I delivered the baby.'

  The doctor paused. Perhaps he was aware of little signs of Niccolini's restlessness. At any rate he smiled and got up from his chair to offer them a glass of vinsanto which he took from a hanging cupboard that had probably once held medicines.

  'Have a drop of this, it's particularly good. I no longer drink any myself. One's needs get fewer and fewer with time. No doubt I'll eventually give up eating, too, and then my time will have come.' He chuckled, filling the tiny glasses with care. In the meantime I'm very glad to be alive.' He watched them drink, settling down again and refilling his pipe thoughtfully.

  'Tina . . . Maria Cristina they christened her, and no brighter than her mother as it turned out -though whatever you may think of the life she leads it's still preferable to being shut in an institution.

  'Once relieved of the burden of baby Tina, Maria went back to her old ways and before long Pietro couldn't hold his head up in the town. Up to then the problem had been kept pretty much in the family, as it were, since all she did was hang around ogling the men in the factory. But once the child was born she virtually ignored its existence and started going out. Little Tina was left to the mercies of her grandmother, much to the latter's fury. It even got to the stage where they tried locking her in at nights but night or day made little difference to Maria. Once, on the way back from my rounds on foot, I took a short cut through that orchard down there and found her plumped down in the grass with old Gino Masi, a peasant farmer who was sixty if he was a day. There was no wickedness in the child, she was completely amoral. By '43 there were the German soldiers. You can imagine perhaps why Pietro was eager to join the partisans and escape from what was an impossible situation. He was also in danger of being called up to fight for Mussolini's new Republic. Maria was pregnant again when he left in '44, and for a long time nothing was heard of him. As for Maria . . . well, by that time we had a detachment of twenty or so men of the Wehrmacht stationed up at the villa, most of which they'd taken over for their purpose and, needless to say, Maria found her way up there as often as she could escape the vigilance of her mother-in-law. She understood nothing of the war except that she was often hungry and that her husband had abandoned her. I saw her up at the villa myself many a time.

  'The place is a criminal asylum now but in those days it was a mixture of barracks and hospital. We had no hospital here and there was no possibility of transporting the sick in '44. Apart from curfew and restrictions of movement, the Germans had requisitioned everything on wheels. I went up there late mornings and evenings after my rounds. Some of the patients were local emergency cases, but as the Germans retreated towards us from Pisa and from the south the place filled up with their wounded. The villa has seen a lot since the Medici built it. In many ways it's the focal point of the town - you might even say the town wouldn't have come into existence in its present form if the villa hadn't been built. It was the Medici who first brought a group of Spanish monks over here to make Majolica for them - a misnomer that, since it was really Spanish pottery but always imported via Majorca and the name stuck. If it hadn't been for the Medici and that handful of monks who started production up at the villa there wouldn't be the pottery industry that keeps the town going to this day. At any rate, it was from the villa that the Germans held the town under control - though I must say that, apart from their requisitioning, we had less trouble from them than from our local fascists, as vicious a bunch of hooligans as were ever let loose on the world. They cultivated the Germans up at the villa but they got little enough encouragement. The Germans could never quite understand the very personal and parochial nature of Italian fascism. Our local thugs enjoyed strutting about in uniform and contributed little or nothing to the war effort. For the most part the Germans kept out of local disputes and occupied themselves with controlling the town, requisitioning food and trying to defend the railway line and road along the Arno to Pisa.

  'At least they fed my patients in the hospital and I could sometimes manage to get a little food or medicine out of them for the more desperate cases on my rounds. That was mostly thanks to the cook, though the sergeant knew well enough that I rarely left the villa empty-handed and turned a blind eye. The cook came of Bavarian peasant stock, built like an ox, Karl his name was. I often wonder what became of him. He always said he wanted to come back here when the war was over but perhaps he didn't even get home alive. Every day, after my hospital round, I used to go to the kitchen and there he'd slam a bowl of soup down in front of me and bellow "Eat!" Then he'd pinch my arm and roar with laughter because I was so thin. While I ate he would point around him at all the objects in the kitchen and demand that I tell him their names in Italian. He'd repeat each one after me^ frowning so much with the effort that his eyebrows met in the middle. His accent was so thick that he could get nowhere near the right pronunciation but he was always pleased with the results himself. "Ja, jal" he'd bellow with a big grin when he'd managed to get the word out, and then he'd point at another object and the frown of concentration would return. He rarely remembered a word from one day to the next and with each bowl of soup we'd start all over again from scratch. He took little or no interest in the progress of the war, just went on with his job as best he could, waiting for it to be over. Only occasionally, when he'd had a glass of wine too many, he'd get maudlin and start showing me photographs of his wife and children with big tears in his eyes. "In Germany," he'd explain, as though I couldn't possibly know where he came from. Certainly he didn't know why he should be here.

  'As for the sergeant, Sergeant Janz his name was, he was always in a temper about something and almost every time I went up there the first thing I'd hear would be his voice howling with rage. The reason could be anything from an Allied bombing raid to a missing button, it was all the same to him, just one more attempt by fate to get at him. He was overweight with blond, almost colourless hair and white skin that burned to a fierce red in the sun. He could work himself up into such a rage that he would swell up like a huge toad and make his eyes pop out. His men were so accustomed to his rages that they never turned a hair, and after a while I got used to him, too. From what I managed to understand, he was a professional soldier and he was furious that a war had come along to disorganize his perfectly orderly life. Only once was there an incident involving him that frightened me. It happened in the summer of '44 when tension was at its highest. Our trouble was that we were right at the outer edge of two fronts, with fighting at Pisa and Leghorn to the west and movement towards Florence to the east and when the Allied advance guard came up to the Val d'Elsa, unfortunately for us and for Empoli, too, they deviated to the south of us on one side and to the north of San Miniato on the other. Between that time and our eventual liberation there were terrible reprisals and the incident involving Sergeant Janz could well have been expected to end in a bloodbath. Goodness knows, the provocation was sufficient.

  "What happened was that, because of severe communications difficulties caused by the Allied bombings, the Germans had set up a telephone wire connecting them with their Praes
idium Command at Signa. It was old Gino Masi - the one I told you I'd surprised in the orchard with Maria - who caused the disaster. I'd seen him that morning, as I often did omny way home, collecting dry brushwood not far from here to store for winter kindling. I remember him pausing and straightening up for a moment to wipe the sweat from under his hat and raise his hand in salute. I'm in an isolated spot up here and it wasn't until the early evening when I set out for the villa that I heard anything. I'd found myself a battered old bicycle by then and as I rode through the central square it was soon obvious that something was up. There wasn't a soul in sight and the silence was so thick it made me think a bomb was about to go off. Every shutter in the square was closed, but when I passed the bar I saw that the metal shutter that rolled down over the doorway was open just a crack at the bottom. I slowed down and got off my bike. I could hear a low murmur of voices inside so I tapped and said who I was, asking what had happened. They Wouldn't open up but a woman's voice answered softly that someone had cut the German telephone wires and that partisan activity was suspected. The soldiers from the villa had ordered everyone to stay indoors and were out searching for the break in the wire and the culprits. I pedalled on for a few yards along the empty street, listening to the rattle of my bicycle chain and thinking. As far as I knew, the partisan brigades were fighting further to the south and west of us and an isolated incident like this seemed unlikely. All of a sudden I put the brakes on, almost fell over, turned my bike and began pedalling as fast as I could. A picture had just flashed into my mind of old Masi as I'd seen him that morning. He'd been binding his kindling with wire! It may well be that the thought had half formed itself at the moment I saw him, the thought that he had wire when you couldn't get hold of it at any price in those days. I went on pedalling furiously and the people who were no doubt watching the street through the slats of their closed shutters must have thought someone was dying or that the Germans were after me.