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For Laura
per sempre
The dinner dance at the Rome Golf Club was good fun but Carlo could not help thinking that yesterday the Wehrmacht had invaded Denmark and Norway. No doubt British troops would soon land in Norway—where also, no doubt, they would be defeated.
Trying to put this thought out of his mind, he sat at the table next to Mirta, his cousin Leo della Rovere's wife, and glanced around. Leo was dancing with a charming Hungarian lady in a blue gown topped off with an emerald choker.
Christina, Carlo's lover, was chatting with Eugen Dollmann, Himmler's representative in Italy. For the occasion he was wearing full evening dress, rather than the black uniform of an SS senior officer. Christina's husband, a Swedish diplomat, was with the Italian ambassador to the Holy See.
A sommelier was serving a champagne punch. Mirta shook her head, with a smile. Carlo turned to her.
“I, too, don't care much for curaçao. Curaçao is the second ingredient of this punch. The third is cognac.”
Her smile widened. “Don't you have anything more interesting to say to me?”
He blew her a kiss.
“How's Bobo?” he asked after a moment. Bobo was her two-year-old son.
“He's OK. Doesn't speak, but eats spaghetti. Loves it, like his father.”
“Incidentally, Leo was saying he isn't going to be in the Nations Cup team.”
“Are you surprised? It'll be a bloody two-nation cup this year, didn't you know? Just Italy and Germany. Our team will be drawn from the bloody Blackshirt mounted units. We can only hope the public will show their displeasure.”
She paused before asking, out of the blue, “By the way, are you still in love with Christina?”
“That's quite a blunt question,” he said, chuckling. “Why do you want to know? To find out if I'm free.”
“Idiot.”
He blew her another kiss.
He wondered if she wore a bra. Actually, it occurred to him that this was what he wanted to ask the night they first met four years ago. Well, now was the moment to raise the point.
“You've got a beautiful neck and a seductive décolleté,” he said.
“And timeless, classic breasts like the Venus de Milo,” she put in, straight-faced.
Their host, the foreign secretary Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, laughed out loudly from the other side of the table. “Thank you Mirta. At last a reassuring line.”
“Don't you get your share of reassuring lines from the Duce every morning?” said Mirta, joining in the laughter.
“Reassuring lines from the Duce?” roared out Galeazzo, as though he wanted to be heard by everybody. “The Duce's lines don't dispel your fears; they only confirm your suspicions. Like his genius, they cannot be expressed in words. They are—unspeakable.”
All those around burst out laughing. Even Galeazzo's latest conquest, a girl from Java, wearing a fuchsia dress that left her back uncovered down to the sacrum. Even the minister of information, the most faithful to Mussolini among the so-called Ciano's clan.
Galeazzo moved over to Carlo and Mirta. “Let's dance American tonight,” he invited her. “Shall we do this slow Boston waltz together?”
When they got back to the table, the orchestra's pianist began to ape Jimmy Yancey of Chicago. Carlo was reminded that Christina liked the great Jimmy and his wife, Mama, the singer, and checked whether Christina and Eugen Dollmann were still together. She seemed to have disappeared. Every time he thought of her, it was of her lying naked in bed, enveloped in the smoke of a Camel.
A remark in Mirta's well-modulated tones interrupted his reflections. “A good job they found such a pianist. Otherwise we'd be listening to bloody Lili Marlene.”
Carlo stood up, taking her by the hand. “Which explains why, after waltzing with Galeazzo, you have to make do with a boogie-woogie. Would you care to find out if I still know how to do it?'
They danced in silence. The next rhythm was much slower. They did it cheek to cheek. She placed her left hand on the nape of his neck. The first time they danced together came back to him; the old desire flared up again. Then the orchestra stopped for a brief interval.
He said, “Would you fancy a cocktail? May I suggest a new one—grappa and crème de menthe. It's very good.”
As they headed for the bar, she told him that the week before she had played his dead father's last composition.
“It was a piano concerto, the overture to a new play based on the life of Giovanni Acuto, but somehow on a par with Liszt's symphonic poems.”
Carlo cast his mind back to Giovanni Acuto's portrait by Paolo Uccello, in the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence. Giovanni Acuto—that was what the Italians called John Hawkwood. Sir John, an Englishman, more Italian in spirit than most Italians, who was knighted by Edward III during the Hundred Years' War and then became a captain of fortune in the pay of the Florentines.
As the barman was stirring the cocktails, Carlo looked Mirta in the eyes.
“Do you remember our argument in the gig before both of us got married?”
She smiled
He carried on, “Do you remember what you said when you were already a half-Communist revolutionary and I was still a half-Fascist reactionary like the Duke of Windsor?”
“Oh come on, I've never been Communist, or half-Communist for that matter.”
“Oh yeah! I can tell that.” He pointed at the diamond necklace that she sported with her low-necked violet gown.
“Idiot!”
“Giovanni Acuto used to affirm that the Italians should fight for life, not for death. You were right. Since 1936, since the Abyssinian Campaign, Italian politics have been a statement of death.”
Her face grew grave. “It's turning bad for us; I know without you telling me. This is what Galeazzo meant with his crack about Mussolini, isn't it?”
“Yeah. It's war for us, Mirta. The success of the German action in northern Europe clinched it for Mussolini. He made it clear to Galeazzo this morning.”
“And the people? Save for a few extremists, nobody is for war, still less on the side of the Nazis.”
Carlo gave a heavy sigh. “Want to know what he told Galeazzo? The Italians are bitches. They will go with the strongest.”
“If Hitler the pervert and his Nazis are the strongest, it's Mussolini the bitch who goes with them!”
Carlo paused. “I'm helping Galeazzo. We'll keep the British informed about any new German aggressions. Next time they're going to violate the neutrality of Belgium.”
“Oh dear! Be careful. There's the firing squad for leaking information in Fascist Italy.”
“Who cares? I promise that if we go to war on the Nazi side, I'll work for a separate peace initiative with London at the risk of being shot in the back.”
“Oh dear!”
“Well, it was you who once said that my stance too was a statement of death.”
Mirta raised her pianist's agile hand to stop him speaking, and kissed him on the lips; a kiss a little longer than it should be.
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