TWENTY-THREE

LA SPADAFORTE, THE SWORD

RED SHIELD WITH A BLACK AND WHITE LADDER FLANKED BY TWO SWORDS

NOVEMBER 1956

1.

It rained on Election Day. In the Ford office Michael had one of the new TVs now on sale in Siena tuned to the RAI news, and a radio on as well, also tuned to the RAI, and another radio tuned to Voice of America. Scottie came in, closing her umbrella. She slipped out of her raincoat. Her belly was growing large. She sat down and put her feet up on the desk, and Ecco curled up beneath her.

“Any election results yet?” she asked.

“No—the news is all about Hungary.” From student protests in July, and the hijacking of a plane, the rebellion in Hungary against communism had swelled into a full-scale revolution. Everyone talked constantly about loyalty—to Hungary, to ideals of communism, to their ancestors and to their unborn children. Ten days ago, government buildings were seized and a new prime minister was declared.

The Soviets, it appeared, were content to let Hungary self-govern. Hungarian independence from Moscow was a reality.

They sat side by side, staring at the blurry black-and-white images.

“Did you talk to Rome?”

He nodded. “I could hear champagne corks popping in the background. Duncan was crowing about the uprising, but also admitted the Agency had been caught by surprise and that they have no one on the ground in Budapest. They’re getting all of their information from the radio, like us.”

“They’ve thrown off the Soviet yoke,” Scottie said, as Michael poured them each a cup of tea. “I guess that’s good.”

“The CIA hired planes to drop leaflets telling Hungarians to rebel,” Michael said, amazed. “And they did.”

Michael and Scottie waited for Siena’s election results, but they were not optimistic. Despite the vicious attack by Minaccia Rossa on Ambassador Luce, Ugo Rosini’s left coalition was poised for victory.

The phone rang. Michael picked it up. “Rosini won,” he heard Pisano say with a heavy sigh. He hung up.

Michael was crushed. He had almost inadvertently killed Scottie, had tried to kill himself to sway the election, and it wasn’t enough. “Are you happy Ugo won?”

“No. But he was never going to lose,” said Scottie. “Vestri was just too corrupt, even for Italians. You know that.” In the weeks before the election Vestri had been caught taking a kickback from Lippincott, though interestingly enough, a judge had let Lippincott’s deals and zoning waivers stand. Having tried Vestri’s capitalism for a summer, Rosini’s brand of “soft” communism was clearly what the working people of Siena wanted. Strong unions, good schools, pensions, health care, minimum wages, mandated vacation time. A humane lifestyle for everyone, employee and boss alike.

Their side had lost the election, and thus Michael had failed at his mission. And the truth was, despite everything, he was frankly not all that sorry about it. Vestri was a hard man to love, and Rosini was smart and had the city’s best interests at heart. If Scottie liked him, he couldn’t be all bad.

Michael took some papers out of the new safe, set a trashcan in the middle of the room, then burned the papers.

“What’s that?”

“The membership rolls of the Communist Party.”

Scottie raised her eyebrows.

“They won. It’s over. A list of names does not tell you people’s stories,” he said. Was this treason? He wondered, watching the pages turn to ash. None of it was as clear as it had seemed when he was growing up, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.

Michael was tamping down the ashes when Scottie sat forward and turned up the volume.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Tanks.”

Michael sat next to her. Even Ecco sat up.

For the next few hours, they watched in horrified silence as journalists shouted into the camera, ran and began to film again. Bloody faces passed in front of the screen, and sometimes the transmission was lost and the TV went black. Then they switched to the radio, and back again.

As the world watched and listened, Soviet tanks moved into Budapest and quickly and viciously crushed the rebellion. People were loaded onto cattle cars to be taken presumably to Siberia. The Hungarians sent out distress call after distress call to the West, begging the U.S. to take action.

“Help us, America!” shouted a frantic woman as gunfire could be heard in the background.

“Why aren’t we sending troops?” demanded Scottie the next day, as the violence continued. “Isn’t Eisenhower seeing this?”

“Britain and France are tied up in the Suez, and Eisenhower is adamant that America will not act alone,” said Michael after talking to Duncan.

They watched as refugees poured across the border into Austria, and communications from the capital went dark.

“Call him again,” said Scottie.

Michael called Duncan on the secure line. “You set them up for this,” he said. “You led them to believe that the West would back them up.”

“I never said that personally to anyone,” said Duncan, though he sounded shaken.

Michael understood then what the mission had been. He hung up, sat down next to Scottie again, took her hand.

“They knew this would happen,” he said. On TV there were images of the Soviets lining up protesters and shooting them. Scottie flinched, turned away.

“That,” Michael said, pointing a shaky finger at the TV. “That—what we’re all seeing—this is the best argument for American-style democracy that can be made.”

Scottie turned to him. “What are you saying?”

“When they dropped those leaflets. This was the mission. This.” He pointed to the screen again. “Either the revolution would succeed, or it wouldn’t. But it would be on television, so it was a win-win for America either way.”

2.

He felt sympathy when, in the days that followed the Soviet crackdown, the Italian Communists tried to cope with and eventually split over the brutality unleashed on the unarmed Hungarians. This was not the happy workers’ paradise they had been sold on those visits to Moscow. This was an oligarchy. An occupation. A nightmare. Totalitarianism. They did not want to be next.

The Italian Communist Party’s national leader, Togliatti, caught between a hard place and Moscow, expressed support for the invasion. This provoked Ugo Rosini, along with a hundred other leading Italian Communists, to sign the Manifesto of 101, which called for discussion within the Party about its ties to the Soviets. As a result he was publicly branded a traitor by Togliatti. Rosini called a press conference and, weeping, tore up his membership card and resigned from the Party. “I can no longer see in the actions of the Soviet Union a desire for the common good,” he said, “only for a familiar kind of oppressive empire.”

On a national level, the Socialists dissolved their alliance with the Communists, and joined the centrist bloc of the Catholics in support of NATO and American bases on Italian soil.

“It’s Duncan’s dream come true,” Michael told Scottie. “And Luce is learning to love it, too. She now says a center-left alliance was what she wanted all along.”

Luce resigned her post and left Italy in triumph. At her last press conference, in a white mink stole and long white evening gloves, diamonds glittering around her neck, she waved good-bye from the Trevi Fountain.

“Arrivederci, Italia!” she called to the crowds. “Grazie!”

3.

By mid-November, the election was behind them and the power of the Communists in Italy deeply diminished. On a cool evening with hints of winter in the air, Michael and Scottie walked across Piazza del Campo. Scottie stopped before they got to the front door, the huge oak arch under which their life in Siena had begun.

“What happens next?” she asked, standing beside the Fontana Gaia in a pair of gray flannel trousers and a houndstooth jacket. She had that “swallowed a basketball” look now—she would deliver for New Year’s. 1957. What would that year bring, other than a new baby? He could not see in her the girl he had met at a party at Vassar seven months earlier. He had so vastly misunderstood and underestimated her, and every other force in his life. He had always seen her as a burden, but she was a friend, the best friend he had ever had. He really did love her.

“I don’t know,” he said, cautious. The two of them had not talked about the future.

“Will Duncan let you stay here, or send you somewhere else?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you still believe in all of it?”

Though he had much time to think, Michael did not waste time debating the ethics of the double lives he led, as a gay man and as a spy. Like Scottie, with her Vassar-dance entrapment of him, he had simply done what he needed to survive.

He thought for a moment. “I do. Hungary proved we can’t stop, because they’re not going to stop. I don’t want to see a world run by Moscow.” He paused, then said, “They’re talking about making Luce the ambassador to Brazil. But it could just as easily be Bangkok, or Bali, or Beirut.”

“Will Duncan go, too?”

“I think he might. Scottie—” He paused. “Maybe you want to go back to America and never see me again. I’ll give you a divorce, support you and the child.”

She had thought a lot about what it would be like to be divorced and raising a child alone. She didn’t have family to help. She knew if she had to, she could do it, but the idea sounded terribly lonely to her, at least right now.

Michael continued, searching her face with his eyes. “But if you need—if you want me to still be your husband, and a father, I will be a good one.”

It was not the kind of love story she had read about in books or seen in the movies, not the kind of picture that sold cake frosting or cars or lipstick. And yet they were not playing roles, at least not to each other. It was a very different kind of marriage. She did not have to be anything other than herself. They had no secrets from each other, but many from the rest of the world. They liked each other, enjoyed each other’s company. She had to tolerate his lover, and there would probably be more, but there would never be other women. She could have lovers of her own. It was what was politely called a marriage of convenience. But there were so many women trapped in inconvenient marriages to men they couldn’t stand that it seemed exciting to contemplate continuing to be married to someone who genuinely loved her, and always would. And then there was the lasagna.

She thought of Julie. She hoped she would have the courage to leave if she ever felt like that. She was pretty sure she would.

She felt more ambivalent about the work they did. But it was better to be on the inside, she thought, being a voice of reason, than to abandon the Agency to people who saw anyone who didn’t look like them or speak their language as something less than human beings. She thought of what Carlo had said about the cost of being on the wrong side of history. She loved her country, and what it stood for, and because she knew its secrets and did not always trust its leaders to do the right thing, she would keep the promise she had made herself to not just love America, but to know it, to see how others saw it, to recognize its flaws and injustices, and try to make it better.

If the CIA would ship a car around the world, then likely they would ship a horse.

A huge flock of starlings danced and swooped over their heads, forming strange cloudlike patterns. Michael looked up. “A murmuration,” he said as the birds whirled in silent billowing shapes. “No one understands how it works, who’s in charge.”

Together they stared up, awed by the unexpected, inexplicable perfection of it.

“Brazil,” she said, as if it were neither a question nor an answer.