The Puppeteer (28 page)
Authors: Timothy Williams
“Photograph?”
They had their photograph taken—Signora Magagna standing between the two men, smiling and holding their arms. She insisted upon paying and gave the photograph to Trotti. “A souvenir of Milan,” she said. “In the hope that you’ll come and visit us more often.”
Pisanelli got out of the car in the via Mazzini.
The woman wore a miniskirt of yellow, high heels and platform soles. A large yellow handbag that she held in front of her. A peroxide blonde. She walked beside Pisanelli who crossed the Piazza. She looked about her nervously. When she saw Trotti, she stopped, turned and headed towards the entrance to the Metropolitana on the far side of the square.
Like a faithful dog, Pisanelli changed direction and followed her.
At the top of the stairway she stopped.
Beneath his feet, Trotti could feel the rumble of the underground trains.
Lia Guerra handed something to Pisanelli and then watched him carefully as he made his way through the crowds across the square. With one hand she held the handrail, and watched Trotti, heedless of the flow of people coming out of the Metropolitana entrance.
As he approached, Trotti saw that Pisanelli was grinning foolishly.
“Get that girl, Magagna.”
Pisanelli caught Trotti by the arm and said, “No.” At the same time, on the via dell’Arcivescovado side of the piazza, the girl moved away from the handrail and ran down the stairs into the subway.
“There are questions she’s got to answer, for God’s sake.” He tried to shake off Pisanelli’s hold, but the grip was strong. “She knows what happened.” He turned to Magagna. “What are you waiting for? Stop her, Magagna, stop her.”
Calmly, Pisanelli said, “She’s suffered enough. Let her go.”
“But she can tell me what … Pisanelli, let go of my arm.”
“Commissario, the girl’s told me everything. She’s gone—it’s better that way.” He released his grip.
“Damn you, Pisanelli.”
“You see, she holds you responsible for Maltese’s death and anyway, you’ve got the key—she’s seen that and she knows she’s safe.” Pisanelli glanced at Magagna and his wife. For Signora Magagna, a grin and an apologetic shrug. “She said that she would have given you the key anyway, Commissario,
once she heard that Dell’Orto was dead. There was no need to scare Marco into contacting her. She says that Marco’s a human being but because he’s a homosexual, you treat him like dirt. For her own sake, she had to give you the key—for her own safety and that’s why she took the train down this morning and went to the hospital. But now she wants you to leave her alone—let her get on with her life.” Pisanelli paused and turned to look across the Piazza Duomo. “She says that …” There was a dreaminess in his voice. “She says she wants to leave the country—go to a clinic in Switzerland and throw the drug habit. She says it’d never been her intention to become a junkie—and that with Maltese, things were getting better. Things would have got better—but because of you, Commissario, he’s now dead. That’s what she says and now she’s going to inherit her uncle’s money, she can afford a proper cure in Switzerland.”
“She should have told me the truth.”
Pisanelli shook his head and at that moment, with the sunlight on his face and his high forehead, he had the appearance of a martyr saint in a Renaissance painting.
“Leave her alone, Commissario. Lia has already suffered enough.”
M
AGAGNA WAS CARRYING
a gun and as he passed through the metallic archway, the metal detector started to bleep.
It took Trotti nearly an hour to make his way into the basement.
The Banco Milanese felt like a building under siege and at various strategic points both inside and outside, uniformed guards stood with submachine guns cradled in their arms.
“The last place you’d think Maltese would want to leave anything,” Magagna said. “Who would ever have dreamed that he would have a numbered safe in the heart of the lion’s den?”
Trotti smiled. “It belonged to Dell’Orto’s wife—to the fat Genoveffa.” He added, “Maltese probably got Guerra to come in her wig and leave the stuff here.”
The Safes Manager looked at Magagna’s identity and then insisted upon phoning through to Narcotici. Even then he was not satisfied, and it took another phone call and twenty minutes to get a warrant sent from the Questura. Only then did the man’s thin, humorless face break into an anemic smile. “You understand that we can’t be too careful.”
“Particularly now,” Magagna said and the manager scowled.
They were taken down two flights of stairs. Red carpet on a highly polished marble floor. Nudes sculpted in bronze on stone pedestals. The basement was brightly lit and a guard knelt down and put keys into a series of locks. The iron grills opened and they stepped into an enclosed chamber.
Another door—riveted steel with embedded dials. The manager turned two of the dials and there was a short beeping sound. He waited for it to cease, then adjusted the two remaining dials. He raised the handle and slowly the vast steel door swung inwards.
“Gentlemen, please enter.”
Overhead, the telecameras revolved ceaselessly.
T
ROTTI BEGAN TO
read Maltese’s notes. The thin paper smelt of soap.
At the time of the Italian Miracle, the Army and the Carabinieri were seeing spies and subversives everywhere. As a result of the increased wealth of the working classes and the fear of a communist infiltration, there developed among the military an obsession with information gathering, an obsession that was fostered, no doubt, by the increase of interest that the Americans in general and the CIA in particular were showing in the Mediterranean basin. For Italian counter-espionage electronic eavesdropping became a way of life. There is even reason to believe that the President of the Republic, Antonio Segni, was being monitored by a hidden microphone in his private study
.
Following an article that appeared in Popolo d’Italia—at that time, a highly respected newspaper—a couple of generals were thrown out of SIFAR, the Italian counter-espionage organization, in 1966. One of them, General
Saldini, had been using the spy network of SIFAR to build up his own collection of files
.
Faced with the prospect of premature retirement, General Saldini decided to take with him—as a leaving present to himself—all the files he had put together over the previous years. Some dealt with dangerous subversives, but most concerned the major figures in the world of Italian politics and finance
.
Italy is a country ruled not by politics but by parties—political parties jockeying for power. This state of affairs, the result no doubt of proportional representation and a deep-rooted fear of the communists, explains why Italy remains—politically at least—a third-world country. But for the man who seeks power through manipulation, power through the parties is a godsend
.
Through the freemason network, Valerio Luino came to know about the secret files and he immediately understood that such information in his hands would be a useful source of power. General Saldini, on the other hand, was determined to get his revenge on the politicians who had made use of the press to oust him from the army. Luino, at this time little more than a provincial architect, set about making a marriage of convenience between himself and the general. Understandably, it was not particularly difficult for Luino to recruit Saldini into the P-Beta Lodge, which at this time Luino was in the process of restructuring
.
With the information that General Saldini had given him as a dowry, Luino could have created a financial fortune. Files on generals who plotted against the Republic, on politicians who had taken bribes, on industrialists who had paid bribes, on political parties that had facilitated the interests of the capitalists, on members of the Anti-Mafia enquiry that were in the pay of the Mafia—with this kind of knowledge—a data bank for blackmail—Luino could have amassed a fortune comparable to that of Agnelli and Fiat
.
But wealth for its own sake has never interested Luino. Wealth is merely a means to an end. For Luino, the true end is power
.
He simply persuaded the compromised politicians and captains of finance to join his freemason lodge. Thus to the information from Saldini, he was able to add the information that the new recruits brought with them. And in a very short period, the P-Beta Lodge, which originally had been created to recruit among the ruling classes, was transformed into a personal secret society. The members included some of the most powerful and the most influential men in the land. Luino could now count among his allies and fellow freemasons of P-Beta, several ministers and at least eight army generals
.
P-Beta had always been the most exclusive of the lodges of the Grande Oriente. Indeed it owed its name—Propaganda Beta—to the fact that it was second on the general list of over 450 lodges in Italy. It had always embraced—with vows of the greatest of secrecy—those men who had positions of authority within the public domain. This explains why Dell’Orto—at that time considered one of the best investigating judges in Northern Italy—was himself a member. In the past, important figures such as Crispi and Zanardelli had been enrolled in the lodge. However, since the time of Mussolini, it had fallen on hard times, and if Luino was sent to P-Beta in the first place, it was simply because all the other lodges in Italy were closed to him
.
For the provincial architect carried with him a past that made the name Luino an anathema to most self-respecting freemasons
.
During the period which followed the invasion of Italy in 1943 and the creation of Mussolini’s mock Republic at Salò on Lake Garda, the young Luino had collaborated with the fascists. And for most freemasons, fascism and Mussolini have always been considered as the great enemy of freemasonry. No mason can forget that in l926, the
Duce sent Gran Maestro Domizio Torrigiani into internal exile
.
In 1943, although not yet eighteen, Luino was making a name for himself. He led the Repubblichini—and even certain German SS columns—in a bitter fight with the partisans in the Po valley. But as General Alexander’s armies pushed their way north, Luino realized that the fortunes of war were fast changing. After the war, in Rome, he was to maintain that he had collaborated with the GAP partisans and other communist formations. Although several leading ex-partisans were to give their support to Luino’s claims, he failed to shake off the accusations of collaboration. Like most Italians, but with greater cunning, Luino had known how to end up on the winning side. What was harder was rewriting his own history
.
For several years after the war Luino disappeared from circulation. With the money that he had managed to put aside during the last years of the war, he was able to buy himself an education. Foreseeing the boom in housing, he went to Parma University, where in six years, he managed to obtain a degree in architecture. Then in 1951, he went to Rome
.
There he approached the politicians of the ruling Christian Democrat party. Fear was a thing of the past, the communists had been beaten in the elections of 1948, and Italy was in the process of rebuilding. By gravitating toward the center of power, Luino soon came to see that there was a new class of businessmen in Italy and that, because of the inefficiency of the Italian state, these men were now referring their problems to the politicians. Along with their problems, these men also brought limitless sources of wealth
.
The lesson was not lost on Luino. He saw that political power and wealth went together. He suddenly took up an interest in the Church and started to become a practicing Christian. He sought the favor of several powerful
prelates and through them found an introduction into the ruling Christian Democrats. The same prelates, however, would no doubt have been upset to learn that in 1960 Luino took his vows in the Lodge of Gian Domenico Romagnosi of the Grande Oriente d’Italia. He was initiated and assumed the grade of “fratello.”
And it was as a “fratello” that he was to spend the next few years. He worked with a small consultancy firm in Rome, while at the same time he was trying to build up a circle of contacts. Luino soon found that whenever he tried to move up the hierarchy of the Lodge, his path was automatically blocked. His fascist past had not been forgiven
.
Luino returned to Lombardy, where he remained a humble “fratello” at the bottom of the ladder
.
Within the Romagnosi Lodge, there were many oldschool masons who could not forgive the past of the Venetian upstart. “He has managed to work his way in. He will, however, remain an apprentice,” one member is supposed to have said. Luino tried to cajole, he tried to buy his way up the masonic cursus honorum, but his attempts were all doomed to failure. But by 1965 he had masonic friends upon whom he knew he could count. One of these friends was Tantassi, a Social Democrat and an influential member of parliament. Luino managed to convince Tantassi that he was a victim of a conspiracy—and Tantassi went to see the Gran Maestro himself, the head of all Italian masons, to plead Luino’s case. A physically insignificant man, the Gran Maestro taught physics in Ravenna. Alone among freemasons he had the power to transfer members from one lodge to another. And so, in February 1966, Luino suddenly disappeared from the Romagnosi Lodge and a few weeks later he was promoted to the rank of Maestro—a leap of two grades—in a completely different lodge
.
No sooner had Luino joined P-Beta than he was recruiting new faces to the Lodge. It was his avowed
intention to restore P-Beta to all its ancient glory. Between 1966 and 1967, he enrolled over one hundred new members. “If he continues like this,” the Gran Maestro (who was the de facto Maestro Venerabile of the secret P-Beta lodge) declared, “soon he’ll be recruiting the Pope.”
The following year, Luino recruited the ex-general Saldini. Undoubtedly powerful, Luino now sought to improve his personal situation
.
From 1972 onwards, he embarked upon a series of actions that were intended to make him more acceptable to the old stalwarts of Italian freemasonry. He changed his name to Baldassare, he married a young student more than twenty years his junior, the niece of one of his major critics within P-Beta, Judge Dell’Orto. More important, she was the daughter of the city architect. And so Luino—or Baldassare as he now called himself—managed to obtain a teaching post within the Department of Urbanistica at the university. It gave him new opportunities in consultancy work—well-paid jobs for Arab and African governments, wanting to build airports and hospitals. The job—with its four teaching hours a week—suited him ideally. It gave him respectability—and it gave him the free time to look after his masonic affairs. At the same time, he deliberately tried to disassociate his public persona of academic and respected architect from his activities as Venerabile Maestro of what was fast becoming one of the most powerful lodges in Italy
.
