Naples '44 (16 page)

The distant bombs came with a whistle that started high up in the sky, but the last one arrived silently, then deafened us. I felt the rise and fall of the building, and the cracking of walls; then hearing returned, first with the tinkle of falling shrapnel all round, and then, after an absolute silence, with a long, slow, deliberate rumble as the house next door collapsed.

That was the end of the raid. The all-clear sounded and we went down into the street. I found we were all chattering loudly in a childish
and pointless fashion. The house next door was flattened into a
double-decker
sandwich of compressed floors, but I believe that no one was living there. Farther along the road in a clearing in the smoke we saw a building tilted like a sinking ship, and farther on still, a jeep blown into the air, hung by its front wheels from a roof rampart. The sight made us laugh.

Normally I detest nightclubs, but this seemed to be one occasion when it was absolutely necessary to go somewhere and dance. We found a place in Piedigrotto where they had a barrel-organ that only played four tunes, but that was enough, and we spent the rest of the evening there.

Today the arrival of summer was announced by the cry of the seller of venetian blinds – sad to the point of anguish in our narrow street –
s'e 'nfucato 'sole
(the sun's turned fiery). Immediately, as if in response to a signal all Naples had awaited, the tempo of life changed and slowed down. As the melancholy howl was heard, first in the distance, then coming closer, people seemed to move cautiously into the shade, and those who hadn't already let down their blinds did so. Fans came out, girls walked about shading their eyes, and the seller of black-market cigarettes immediately under our window unfolded a Communist newspaper and held it over his head. We are told that after today stray dogs are liable to be picked up by the municipal catchers and knocked over the head.

Whitsun draws near – the Easter of the Roses, as they call it in Naples. On Saturday the general hope and expectation is that the blood of San Gennaro will liquefy in a satisfactory manner. It is believed by Neapolitans of all political creeds and degrees of religious conviction that the fortunes of the city depend on this phenomenon, and many advertisements have appeared in the newspapers paid for by commercial firms or political parties wishing the community ‘a good and prosperous miracle'. A good miracle is one in which the blood liquefies quickly. A slow liquefaction is considered an ill omen for the ensuing year, while the complete failure of the miracle, which has rarely happened, is taken as a sign of the Saint's extreme displeasure, and regarded as a catastrophe.

It appears now that the Whitsun pilgrimage to Monte Vergine has definitely been vetoed, and this is a source of great public disappointment, and some criticism. This pilgrimage to the ancient shrine of Cybele, near Avellino, has been going on for six hundred years, since a miraculous picture of the Virgin was presented to the shrine by Catherine of Valois, and it is seen by the 50,000 or more devotees of this cult as dangerous to cancel an institution of this magnitude and spiritual value merely because there's a war on. Normally in these days the pilgrims travel by car to Avellino, after which the most devoted among them trudge the remaining few miles barefoot, up to the shrine. They then crawl on hands and knees from the sanctuary door to the altar. Religious duties at an end, somewhat bacchanalian picnics take place, followed by the singing of improvised songs on topical subjects. These, in an atmosphere of religious and alcoholic frenzy, frequently provoke quarrels, and the offended parties traditionally go behind the church, to settle their grievances, knife in hand, on the spot.

The public frustration over the pilgrimage was made much of by Lattarullo, who said that, among others, his aunt was very upset. Never having seen this aunt, who is supposed to live with him, or noticed the slightest sign of her presence in his flat, I am beginning to suspect she doesn't exist, and that he uses this fictitious personality as a showcase for all these Neapolitan prejudices of which he pretends to be ashamed.

Apart from Vittorio Emanuele's salver, the only object in Lattarullo's flat by which he sets any store is a large and dingy-looking piece of rock, which when first showing me he handled with the most reverent care. This was a souvenir from the cave-sanctuary of St Michael at Monte Santangelo, and of course, it belonged not to him, but to his mysterious aunt. Lattarullo is a highly educated man, with a cosmopolitan outlook and a wide grasp of world affairs, who reads everything he can lay his hands on including fifteen or twenty newspapers a day – three or four days out of date when he buys them – which can be picked up at the vegetable market for two or three lire a bundle. It is difficult for a man of his intellectual calibre to admit to me that he believes that San Gennaro can stop the flow of lava from Vesuvius, or that a monk in Pomigliano is flying about like a bird, so he gets
round it by saying, ‘My dear old aunt believes in this kind of thing. I don't want to argue with her. I only report these things to you to give you some idea of the mentality you're dealing with. As in the case of this Monte Vergine affair, I feel you should know. Mass hypnosis? I agree with you. You may well be right. But you have to remember that more people in this town share my aunt's point of view than mine.'

The Robin Hood tradition is strong in the Zona di Camorra, as it probably is in bandit country everywhere, an outstanding example of the breed being Domenico Lupo of Frattamaggiore, whose name, meaning wolf, has probably been an aid to his profession hitherto. Lupo, young, handsome and dashing, robber of the rich and a giver to the poor, was serving a stretch for banditry in a prison south of Rome. From this he was released by the advancing Allied troops, who as a matter of habit always loot the post offices and fling wide the prison gates in the territory they occupy. Lupo immediately headed south to reorganise his following. The officer who released him, greatly moved by his account of the political victimisation he had undergone during the Mussolini regime, gave him a pass allowing him to travel anywhere he liked and a letter of recommendation describing his valued support of the Allied cause. Lupo produced the letter at the Naples headquarters of AMG to obtain more solid accreditation plus an AMG sticker for the windscreen of his stolen car. In the Zona di Camorra, teeming with criminals of every description, he began the recruitment of his new band and, making full use of his AMG pass, journeys were made in convoys of stolen cars to the battle areas, where an assortment of abandoned small arms, machine-guns, mortars, etc., were collected from the battlefield. Somewhere near the front line on the occasion of his last visit, Lupo claimed to have been received by an American divisional general, who listened to the story of his struggle against Fascism, presented him with several bottles of whisky, a pearl-handled pistol, and a religious picture from a ruined church.

Back in the Zona, Lupo settled down to prey on the caravans of the black market that followed the liberating armies in search of such scarce
and sought-after commodities as teats for babies' bottles, cloth, nails and watches, which back in Naples fetched anything from ten to one hundred times their cost price. From this the Lupo band graduated to attacks on trains carrying military supplies northwards through Casoria to Caserta and to the battlefronts. In several cases, trains hijacked in this way, and usually defended by no more than a half-dozen guards, were completely emptied of their contents. In one instance, near Casoria, Lupo's band fought a victorious battle in which machine-guns and hand-grenades were used against a rival team, for the right to loot a train which they had held up.

At this point something obviously had to be done. Lupo's strength lay in the sympathy he had taken care to cultivate among the local peasantry; his well-publicised habit of descending on some poor family or deserving widow with a handful of thousand-lire notes or a sack of stolen food, and the romantic legend of his exploits as a womaniser. His weaknesses stemmed from the fact that he was brash, vain, and foolhardy, without connections in the Camorra, who despise bandits however much they use them; that his men had killed policemen; finally that he had overstepped the mark even with the Allies by his attacks on trains.

His downfall was organised by a temporary combination of all the police forces in the area, and for once the Carabinieri and the Pubblica Sicurezza came together to suspend their mutual detestation, pool their information, and work out a plan of attack. One of the Carabinieri marshals, it was explained to me by Marshal Lo Scalzo of Caivano, had put forward a scheme for exploiting the natural breach opened in Lupo's defences by his pose of the lover of many women. The bandit made a great thing of having a girl in every town in the area, but he also had a regular mistress who was notoriously jealous. Whenever Lupo was in the Caivano district it was believed that this girl slipped away to spend the night with him, but nobody had been able to discover where the couple met. However, the girl had now been approached, and the softening-up process expected to lead to a final betrayal had been begun by showing her photographs taken of Lupo in the company of other females. As the bandit had a passion for being photographed, some of these were
genuine enough. Others were clever fakes, and I was shown one which – through some dexterous photomontage – showed Lupo with his arms and legs twined round a naked prostitute. The Neapolitan police stopped at nothing. I saw a picture of the mistress involved, too, who looked like a glum version of Carmen Miranda, with a sour expression, and a
turned-down,
pouting mouth.

These dingy professional secrets came to me in the hope that I would report back favourably on the police's determination and zeal, as a result of which none of the General's terrible threats of demotion or even prosecution could be carried out. Marshal Lo Scalzo said at the time the plot was disclosed, that it was no longer a question whether Lupo would be taken, but when. He was also particularly anxious that I should be in at the kill, and see that, after all, the Carabinieri were a match for the reputedly invincible Lupo. This evening a young policeman from Caivano turned up at the Riviera di Chiaia asking me to be at the police station there by dawn.

I left the HQ at about four this morning, taking the Matchless, and was in Caivano in half an hour, with the sun still not up. It was amazing to see the activity on the roads once outside the limits of the town: peasants in their hundreds, hooded in the half-light, kicking up the dust as they trudged along on the way to their fields. Some of them were singing African-sounding songs, very different from the soft, sugary melodies of the Neapolitans of the city.

At Caivano I found a gathering of both kinds of police, some of them with the faces of men, and some of devils. The Carabinieri station was full of gusty, sinister laughter, and jokes about death, while a distribution was made of obsolete guns, and the fearsome and fickle
diavolo-rosso
hand-grenades
used by the Italian army. We then bundled into two crumpled old Fiats, and were on our way. To avoid the possibility of Lupo's being warned by his spies that we were coming, we left Caivano heading for Afragola in the opposite direction, then swung in an arc through a landscape as flat as Holland towards the farmhouse off the Frattamaggiore road where the final treason had been prepared and the lovers, it was to be hoped, were still peacefully sleeping.

This was a landscape that favoured concealment. Every field was surrounded by tall fruit-trees, and these were linked together by the runners of the enormous and ancient vines to which each tree in local parlance was ‘married'; their branches carried along parallel wires, one above the other, to form a hedge, or enclosure, about fifteen feet in height.

The farmhouse that was our target was in the middle of such a
vineen-closed
field; a grey cube barely visible through the foliage, and here a police spy waited in hiding to assure us that all was well and no one had left the house. We left the cars under the screen of the vines, and set out to the attack. The maize was up to our chests but we were in view of the single window in the grey wall, and the
Commissario
in his city suit, panting and snorting at my side, held a grenade in his hand ready to deal with the window. Half the party had gone off to take the house from the rear. A wolfhound came out, and then ran off when somebody pointed a gun at it. A Carabiniere started to kick in the door, and we heard a single shot and a great shouting from the back of the house.

Here we found Lupo lying on the ground. He was dressed only in a shirt, and had jumped from the bedroom window at the back, breaking a leg, and – from the state of his face – had almost certainly received a swipe from a rifle butt. One eye was closing and the other looked up at us unblinkingly. Blood from mouth and nose had filled in the deep lines of his face, and his expression was impassive.

Moments later a woman was hustled into sight by one of the Carabinieri. She was barefoot, in rumpled clothes, dull and
dazed-looking
and plain to the point of ugliness.

‘The woman in the case,' Lo Scalzo said.

‘They're rather rough with her, aren't they?' I said.

‘She let her man down. They don't like that kind of thing.'

‘But she's been working for you.'

‘It doesn't mean we have to like her.'

‘What will happen to them now?'

‘He'll go down for life, and one of his brothers will kill her. They'll soon find out she threw him in. A knife up through the vagina into the belly. Or a red-hot poker if they have time. She'll be dead within the year.'

Despite gloomy forecasts, the blood of San Gennaro liquefied successfully yesterday evening. The miracle took place in a slow and reluctant manner. By tradition this is seen as a poor omen for the coming year, with the result that the Neapolitans are left with a feeling hardly better than gloomy relief. It is fantastic to realise that outright failure could have produced a security crisis, and that we should certainly have had large-scale civil commotions on our hands.

Crowds had been beginning to form in the neighbourhood of the Duomo since Friday evening, and one immediately noticed their heavy silence. By Saturday afternoon some agitation and local pockets of hysteria were evident. The popular feeling was one of nervous listlessness coupled with apprehension. All the fishing-boats were in port and the shops and cafés were empty. People simply mooched about the streets, waiting. It was like a weird parody of a public holiday. The two women who work for us got through their chores as fast as they could and went off to light candles in our local shrine in the Vico Freddo. Lattarullo put the feelings of educated middle-class Neapolitans into words: ‘Much as I deplore the fact that living in the twentieth century we should be so obsessed by these relics of medievalism, I'm afraid that even I am not immune to mass suggestion.'

At about five o'clock a disturbance started in the narrow streets at the rear of the Duomo, a few shop-windows were broken, and MPs moved into the area in strength. An hour later I found it impossible to get through the Strada di Tribunali. People were running hither and thither, entranced and ecstatic, frothing at the mouth and prophesying doom. It was like being caught up in a wild football crowd, frenzied by the prospect of their side's impending defeat. A hubbub was said to have started in the Cathedral because a number of British and American officers had been allotted seats close to the altar, and the crowd suspected that their presence might be holding up the miracle. There were cries of ‘Out with the heretics,' which may not have been understood by the military guests, although some of them must have noticed the fists waved in their direction.

Soon after this the
Parenti di San Gennaro
were led in to take up their position round the altar. These aged women are popularly credited with being actual descendants of the Saint, and they form a mysterious and spiritually potent clique, who have inherited power and the responsibility of browbeating their ancestor into submission with threats and curses, when all else fails.

At about eight o'clock the Saint gave way to this new pressure and the miracle took place. Some public jubilation followed, but on a muted scale, and most people just went home to bed. A poorish liquefaction but better than none at all, was the general verdict. We shall have to go through this all over again in September.

A shameful example of the perfidiousness and injustices of this war we conduct behind the scenes. The General has not been able to get over the episode of the two rival bands fighting a battle for the right to pillage one of our trains, nor has he been mollified by the news of the capture of the bandit Lupo. One man is not enough. He wants mass arrests, and yesterday all the Italian chiefs of police were called before him and threatened with every kind of sanction including charges of sabotage if they failed to produce immediate results. The police chiefs are said to have replied that their forces were grossly under-manned, and their hands tied by excessive scruples shown by the Allies in the matter of repression. Only if given a free hand to solve this problem in their own way could results be guaranteed. Thus today I took part as an observer in one of the new-style operations: a raid on a bandit hideout carried out by a mixed force of Carabinieri and Pubblica Sicurezza, under orders to get results at all costs.

This time the combined force numbered about fifty men, but included the same Carabinieri as at Frattamaggiore and the same
hyena-faced
Pubblica Sicurezza Commissario, with his pin-striped suit, red-devil hand-grenades and squeaking shoes. The fields we moved into in a wide then gradually tightening circle were as before, fenced in by their enormous vines, with little grey cubes of houses, and occasional
straw-shelters where the peasants kept their tools and took a nap in the shade in the worst of the noonday sun. In one of these four armed men were discovered. They immediately surrendered, were handcuffed, chained together and led away. But now a problem presented itself. Only four prisoners had been taken, and a man could be charged with banditry only if he was a member of a criminal association of not less than five persons. As it was, the four captured men, who by legal definition were not bandits, could have applied for bail, with the near-certainty of getting it. In this country there are fifty lawyers to every one policeman, and the lawyers expect to win. But a bandit gets no bail and faces a sentence of from five to thirty years.

The solution in this case was to go straight to the nearest village to the house of a man who happened to have a criminal record and arrest him. He became the essential fifth bandit. His resignation was astonishing. He kissed his family goodbye, allowed himself to be chained up without protest and was led off. Solitary confinement in the iron womb of Poggio Reale awaited him. Then a long, slow wasting away of body and mind on the island of Procida, of which little but blood-chilling legends was known. When, if ever, he returned to his village he would find his children gone and his wife grown old. How much better it would have been, how much more humane, simply to have shot all five ‘while attempting to escape'.

The impudence of the black market takes one's breath away. For months now official sources have assured us that the equivalent of the cargo of one Allied ship in three unloaded in the Port of Naples is stolen. The latest story going the rounds is that when a really big-scale coup is planned and it is necessary to clear the port to handle bulky goods, someone arranges for the air-raid sirens to sound and for the mobile smoke-screens to provide their fog, under the cover of which the shock-troops of the black market move in to do their work.

Stolen equipment sold on the Via Forcella, and round the law courts – where one-man-business thieves without protection are tried
and sentenced by the dozen every day for possession of Allied goods – is now on blatant display, tastefully arranged with coloured ribbon, a vase of flowers, neatly-written showcards advertising the quality of the looted goods.
COMPARE OUR PRICES … WARRANTED PURE AUSTRALIAN WOOL
…
MONEY BACK IF FOUND TO SHRINK
…
YOU CAN MARCH TO KINGDOM COME ON THESE BEAUTIFUL IMPORTED BOOTS
…
IF YOU DON'T SEE THE OVERSEAS ARTICLE YOU'RE LOOKING FOR, JUST ASK US AND WE'LL GET IT.
Tailors all over Naples are taking uniforms to pieces, dying the material, and turning them into smart new outfits for civilian wear. I hear that even British Army long-coms, which despite the climate still find their way over here, are accepted with delight, dyed red, and turned into the latest thing in track suits.

In the first days the MPs carried out a few halfhearted raids on the people specialising in these adaptations, but they found too many smart new overcoats made from Canadian blankets awaiting collection by Italian friends of General this and Colonel that to be able to put a stop to the thing. Last week the Papal Legate's car, held up by pure accident in some routine road-check, was found to be fitted with a set of stolen tyres. Many apologies and smiles and His Reverence was waved on. Other than commando daggers and bayonets, they don't display looted weapons in the stalls, but the advice from my contacts is that there is no problem except the cash in arranging to buy anything from a machine-gun to a light tank.

The trouble now is that certain items which can be freely and easily bought on the black market are in short supply in the Army itself. This applies currently to photographic equipment and materials, practically all of which has been stolen to be sold under the counter in shops in the Via Roma, and to certain medical supplies, in particular penicillin. Every sick civilian can go to a pharmacist and get a course of penicillin injections at a time when supplies in the military hospitals are about to run out. At last the time has come when the effect of the black market on the war effort has become evident. It could have been wiped out, but because of the secret involvement in it through their Italian connections of some of our high authorities, it was not. Now, the decision has been reached that something will have to be done. It is too late now to abolish
the black market, but at least an attempt will be made to tidy it up. Probably for this reason I was called on today by the FSO and ordered to investigate the penicillin racket.

The first move was to visit the pharmacist Casana with whom we have been on excellent terms, and to ask him in the strictest confidence where his penicillin came from. Casana a little shocked, but resigned, supplied the name Vittorio Fortuna, living in the Via dei Mille, but warned me that if he was called as a witness against this man he would probably lose his life. I checked this name with other pharmacists, all of whom knew of Fortuna and agreed that he was known to deal in penicillin, although they all denied any connection with him. Fortuna, they agreed, was under the protection of someone in Allied Military Government. Having heard this, I decided that my best course was to go to the American Counter-Intelligence Corps, who are well in with AMG, whereas we are not.

Although we and the CIC perform roughly the same function in Naples, and they have recently moved into the floor above us in the same building, there has never been any official contact between us. Currently their strength is about twenty-five agents and one officer. Those who have been lucky enough to glimpse it say they have the finest filing system in all Italy, but they are handicapped by the fact that not a single one of them speaks a word of Italian, which makes them wholly dependent upon an interpreter who once featured on our list of suspects. The organisations, often working separately and without any exchange of information on the same cases, constantly overlap and sometimes come into conflict, so that with fair frequency we lock up each other's friends, and spring each other's suspects, treading on each other's toes with what might be described as good-humoured tolerance.

Our only collaboration with the CIC has been the agreement by which we borrow their jeeps for holiday jaunts in return for a bottle of whisky, which inexplicably is the only thing any American soldier could possibly desire for his pleasure or comfort that the PX does not supply. My whisky-for-jeep arrangement is with Special Agent Frank Edwards, and I discussed the matter of Fortuna with him.

Edwards said that it was well known in the CIC that Fortuna was a lieutenant of Vito Genovese, and he gave me a thumbnail sketch of Genovese's history. Genovese, according to Edwards, was not, as described on our files, ex-secretary to Al Capone, nor was he even a Sicilian, but had been born in the village of Ricigliano, near Potenza. He had been second-in-command of a New York Mafia ‘family' headed by Lucky Luciano, Edwards said, and had succeeded to its leadership when Luciano was gaoled, after which he had been acknowledged as the head of all the American Mafia. Shortly before the outbreak of war Genovese had returned to Italy to escape a murder indictment in the US, had become a friend of Mussolini's, and then, with the Duce's fall, transferred his allegiance to Allied Military Government, where he was now seen as the power behind the scenes. Genovese controlled the sindacos in most towns within fifty miles of Naples. He leased out rackets to his followers, took a toll of everything, threw crumbs of favour to those who kept in step with him, and found a way of punishing opposition.

What was to be done? Nothing, Edwards said. The CIC had soon learned to steer clear of any racket in which Genovese had a finger – and his finger was in most. Too many American officers had been chosen to go on the Italian campaign because they were of Italian descent. For this reason it was hoped they might easily adapt to the environment, and this they had done all too well. The American-Italians in AMG reigned supreme and knew how to close their ranks when threatened from without. An American CID agent who had cottoned on to the fact that the notorious Genovese was in virtual control in Naples and set out to investigate his present activities, soon found himself isolated and powerless, and all the reward he had had for his pains was loss of promotion. And would this situation apply in his opinion in the case of any Briton who threatened Genovese's interests? Edwards didn't know, and suggested I might go ahead and try. He would be most interested to see what happened.

The Allied Military Proclamation, in one or another of its many clauses, seems to authorise one to do almost anything to anybody who, to use the proclamation's own words, ‘does any act to the prejudice of the
good order, safety or security of the Allied Forces', and I put a copy of the proclamation into my pocket before going to see Fortuna. He was a calm, handsome man, with a religious medal dangling in the opening of his shirt, a controlled but charming smile, and a strange primness of manner, which came out in the exclamation ‘
Mamma mia!
' when I explained the reason for my call. He irritated me by addressing me as if I were a child, using verbs in the infinitive and speaking with exaggerated slowness and clarity. I showed him the proclamation and told him I was going to search his flat, and he smiled and shrugged his shoulders and invited me to go ahead. The search took a full hour. I worked my way methodically through the rooms, and in doing so discovered nothing more than the normal range of black-market goods that one would expect to find in any flat of this kind. I probed and poked into every corner, examined floorboards, tapped on walls, checked the cistern, dismantled a big
old-fashioned
gas-heater, and at last in a wastepaper basket under the kitchen sink, found an empty carton that had contained penicillin and with it one damaged phial.