Chapter Thirty-Five

Giorgio Andretti was not what Isabella expected. He struck her as only a year or two older than Luigi would have been, probably in his midthirties now, but he looked much older. Gray streaked his brown hair and his eyes were sunk deep in a layer of fat as though trying to hide. But his smile was a girl’s smile, soft and uncertain. Isabella wondered how he had ever been a Blackshirt.

“Good morning, Signora Berotti.”

He rose from his red velvet chair in the Caffè Greco with a courtesy that was at odds with his large fleshy figure, his belly as fat and loose as a sow’s.

“Good morning, Signor Andretti. Thank you for taking the time to see me.”

He chuckled, sending a ripple through his numerous chins, and waved her to the chair opposite him at the small oval marble table. “I don’t take the credit, signora. I was given no choice.”

Isabella was startled by his honesty. It made a refreshing change in this maze of lies and deceit that Italians now had to hide behind for their own safety. This wasn’t a man who wanted to pretend that he was something he wasn’t. For the first time she began to believe that here in this elegant café tucked away on the Via dei Condotti at the bottom of the Spanish steps, she might actually find answers.

“Allora,” he said, “you are Luigi’s pretty widow.” The small eyes inspected her as she took a seat and he smiled, a genuine smile that made her respond with one of her own. “A black widow spider with a serious bite, I suspect,” he laughed.

“I can bite,” she said lightly, “when I have to.”

“And are you on the hunt for someone to bite today?”

“Of course not. I’m here just to ask a few questions about the work that my husband did with you before he died.”

“I didn’t think you had come because of my handsome good looks.”

He ran a stubby hand over his lifeless brown hair and laughed at himself, but there was something achingly sad in the gesture.

“Let’s order some cake and coffee,” he added. “We can’t come to Greco’s and not do so, especially when Pietro Luciani is paying.” He waved a hand at a waiter and ordered cake for them both, ignoring her request for just espresso.

The café, a warren of elegant rooms that flowed into each other through arches, had been frequented in the past by the likes of Goethe, Byron, and Liszt. The walls were covered right up to the ceiling with old oil paintings in gilt frames that gave the place an amber sheen that was oddly relaxing. But Isabella could not afford to relax.

They each waited for the other to make the first move. She kept her voice low, aware of other coffee drinkers around them, and asked politely, “What kind of work do you do now?”

“I work in a factory. Not on the factory floor. I wouldn’t last ten minutes there. I work in the office, buried in ledgers. We make ball bearings.”

“Useful.”

For the first time his smile grew thin. “It doesn’t hurt anybody.”

“Is that what you did before? With Luigi. Hurt people?”

“Sometimes.”

“Tell me about it, please. What was it that my husband did that I was too stupid to realize at the time?”

Andretti leaned back in his chair, making it creak dangerously, and took his time lighting a cigarette. When he finally looked at her again, it was through a veil of smoke that turned his skin gray.

“We were Fascisti, Signora Berotti. We were passionate, Luigi and I. We believed.” He exhaled a sigh and whispered, “We were fools.”

“As Blackshirts, what did you do in Milan?”

The coffee arrived and Isabella waited with impatience while Andretti scooped up a mouthful of apple cake on his fork. He paused with it hovering on the verge of his lips, looked at her face, and reluctantly placed it back on the plate.

“I eat,” he said, “to bury the person I was back then.”

“You won’t succeed,” she said quietly.

“I know.”

They both sipped their coffee and his eyelids quivered. When he put down his cup, she could see he was ready. Her mouth was suddenly dry.

“Very well, signora. These are the facts. We all believed in Mussolini. He was going to build a new Italy for us, tossing aside the old decadent ways, ridding us of poverty and corruption, driving out the chaos of nation-states that refused to cooperate with each other. Italy would become great again. We were the laughingstock of Europe and he promised us a way to stand tall again.”

Isabella nodded. “I know this is what Luigi believed.”

“So we set about bringing Benito Mussolini to power.”

“How?”

“By force.”

He looked longingly down at his cake but kept his fingers away from it. Around them the noise and laughter in the café seemed to fade.

“Of course Mussolini held meetings to gather the faithful. He is a great orator. But the background work was done by us, the Blackshirts. We persuaded”—he lingered on the word—“people to sign up to become members of the Fascist Party. We went into factories where Socialists and Communists—the scum of the earth—were stirring up strikes and we persuaded”—again the emphasis on that word—“them to stop.”

“How did you persuade them?”

“How do you think?” He jabbed his cigarette into the onyx ashtray, grinding the life out of it.

“You used force?”

“Yes.”

“Truncheons?”

“Yes. And worse.” His gaze rested on her bandage. “What happened to your hand?”

“It had an argument with a gun butt.”

A flush crept up his ivory white neck and spread from chin to chin. He continued quietly, “We went into people’s houses, into their shops. We beat anyone who stood against us till they whimpered on the ground for mercy.”

She shuddered. Thinking of Luigi in his fine black uniform that she had admired so blindly. Guilt swept over her, hot and liquid in her stomach because she knew she had been complicit in her husband’s sins by not asking what she should have been asking. She hung her head, letting her hair sweep forward to hide her shame. Andretti took the opportunity to attack his cake.

“If you were all persuading like that,” she asked after a pool of silence had flowed across their table, “why was Luigi the one who was killed? Why was he singled out? And why attack me?”

The apple cake vanished. Just crumbs on a plate.

“May I?” he asked, and pointed at her chocolate truffle torte, which she hadn’t touched.

She nodded.

“I don’t know why he was killed,” he said quickly, reaching for her plate.

“You’re lying, Signor Andretti.”

He shoveled torte into his mouth, its dark brown crumbs tumbling down the black waistcoat stretched to bursting point across his chest. He didn’t meet her eyes, his mouth too full to speak. Isabella knew there was more he was keeping from her.

“Tell me, signore”—she pushed him harder—“did you ever talk with Luigi about what you were both doing? About the savagery of it? The immorality of it?”

Andretti laughed, a quick flash of unpleasant sound that turned Isabella’s stomach.

“Of course we didn’t talk about it.”

“Why not?”

Abruptly he leaned as far forward as his belly would allow. “Because, Signora Berotti, your husband loved what he was doing. His eyes would light up when he swung that truncheon and he never wanted it to stop. It made him come alive.” He blinked slowly, remembering. “To hurt someone.”

Isabella remembered the blows. When the grappa got the better of him. The bolt of pain. The degradation. The kisses and apologies and promises the next morning. She remembered only too well, but never had she let a word of it pass her lips. She finished her coffee, a shot of something to drown the memory.

“What is it that Luigi did?” she asked.

He stared at her. So lost. She could see it in his eyes. She stretched out her fingers and laid them on his hand where it lay on the table, soft and fleshy and impotent. She couldn’t imagine it wielding a truncheon, breaking bones or cracking skulls.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry for you. And for Italy. And for all those people that my husband terrorized.” A tear slipped down her cheek and she brushed it away angrily with her bandaged hand, but the gesture didn’t brush away the ache that scorched a path down her flesh. “I’m so sorry.”

Andretti spread his bulky arms in a futile gesture of despair. “It is too late to be sorry.”

“So please help me. It’s not too late for that. Tell me what Luigi did to get himself killed. Something that you and the other Blackshirts didn’t do. It can’t hurt him now, but it will help me. And maybe it will help you too.”

“It wasn’t his fault,” he insisted suddenly. “Don’t think badly of him. He didn’t mean to . . .” He hesitated.

“To what?”

Andretti gripped her hand. “One night we had a purge on known Communists. A large unit of us marched from house to house, knocking on doors, dragging people out into the street so that others could see what would happen to anyone who stood against the Fascisti.”

He tried to light another cigarette, but his hand was shaking so badly that Isabella had to hold his lighter steady for him. Whatever horrors he had taken part in she couldn’t find it in her heart to hate a man so racked with guilt for the wrongs he’d committed. But atonement was beyond her power to grant him. She waited until he had smoked half the cigarette and then asked again.

“What did Luigi do that no one else did?”

“Signora, you are a lovely lady. You are free of him. Don’t ask for more.”

“I am not free of him. I can’t forget—”

She stopped. Gently, this man who was trying to hide himself inside his layers of fat breathed out a soft sugary breath.

“Very well. I’ll tell you because you were his wife and you, of all people, deserve to know, but I warn you that you are your own worst enemy.”

“I very much doubt that, Signor Andretti.”

He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Luigi was all fired up after our purge of the Communists. He was like a rat catcher who couldn’t get enough rats to satisfy his thirst for their blood, eyes wild with it. So when one of the poor bastards screamed that he would betray a whole nest of Communists if Luigi would leave him alone, your husband listened.”

There was sweat on Andretti’s brow, and he wiped his palms jerkily on his knees, at the same time signaling for a waiter.

“Two cognacs, per favore,” he barked.

“Si, signore.”

Neither spoke. They sat in silence until the glasses were placed in front of them, the amber liquid gleaming under the lights. Andretti drank his straight down and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand with a grunt of satisfaction.

“Go on,” Isabella murmured.

“There was a nest of them. Of Communist scum gathered in a meeting house to escape our purge. Your Luigi went over there and set fire to it. Most of them fled under cover of the smoke, but two were burned to death.”

Isabella picked up her drink, swallowed a slug of cognac, and felt it hit her stomach with a punch.

“That’s not all,” he told her.

Her breath escaped in a thin fragile thread. “What happened?”

“Afterward. When the building was nothing but ash and stone, that was when we learned that upstairs in the attic were hiding twelve wives and four children.”

A cry tore from Isabella. Heads turned but she didn’t see them. “Did they live?”

“What do you think?”

“Did any survive?”

“None.”

She seized her cognac and drank it down.

“But he was never charged, was he?”

“No. It was called an accident. A fallen candle. Communists proving to be their own destroyers. No one can trust a Communist, that’s what we said to each other.”

“But it was Luigi.”

“Yes.”

She lowered her head in her hand so that he would not see her face, but her shoulders trembled. He put a hand on her bowed head. “From that moment on, the men who escaped the smoke that night formed a tight group that became fanatical about the need to destroy Mussolini’s regime. They fought violence with violence and their leader became a man to be feared. He stood out because of his blond hair and so should have been easy to capture. But he wasn’t. He was quick and cunning and melted through our fingers. Like trying to catch a ghost. He eluded us every time.”

Isabella lifted her head from her hand. “What was his name?”

For a second the words could not push past Andretti’s lips, but finally they trickled onto the table between them.

“Carlo Olivera.”