The Partisan Heart

by Gordon Kerr

  ‘Signor Mazzini?’

  ‘Sì. I am Ignazio Mazzini. And you are …?’

  ‘Signor Mazzini. I’m Michael Keats and I’m a reporter. I work for the English newspaper, the London Evening Post. I’m very pleased to meet you,’ he stretched out his hand, which was received somewhat unwillingly in the massive, calloused hand of the farmer. ‘I wondered if I could talk to you about Alfio Bonfadini and the events of the last few weeks?’ He had decided that there was little point in beating about the bush with Ignazio and he also counted on the early mention of Bonfadini raising the hackles of the big man.

  ‘Ach!’ Ignazio leaned forward, hawked and spat out a ball of green phlegm, which hit the wall beside the door and began to slowly run down it. ‘Don’t talk to me about this man. He is as good as dead if I ever see him again. He would be dead if only I had had the courage to hit him just once more …’ His eyes were blazing with anger. He seemed so angry he could not talk.

  ‘Perhaps we could go inside and you could tell me about you and Bonfadini? I expect you’ll be happy to see the truth being told about this business, rather than let anyone go on believing Bonfadini’s lies?’

  ‘Sì!’ There clearly was no doubt in his mind. He certainly wanted that. ‘Please, come in.’ He pushed the door open and stepped to one side, ushering Michael into the house with his hands. ‘Please … excuse the …’ He failed to finish the sentence, casting his eyes around the kitchen as he walked in and shaking his head. ‘My wife … you know, she has … gone.’ This last word, ‘fuggita’, was difficult for the big man to say and he said it with such tenderness, such sadness, Michael thought.

  The kitchen, however, was in a terrible state. Food lay all over the place and greasy plates were piled up in the sink. Coffee that had been spilled – goodness knows when – on the work surface had congealed into a shiny stickiness. A faintly rotting smell pervaded the atmosphere and Michael felt as if he did not want to touch anything. Especially the table at which Ignazio beckoned him to sit.

  ‘She left immediately Bonfadini was taken to hospital. She knew it was me who had hit him, knew what a liar and a coward he is, that he didn’t do what he claimed to have done.’ He pushed some plates around the table to clear a space for Michael’s tape recorder.

  ‘You have no objection?’ Michael asked, moving a heavy green ashtray piled high with ash and cigarette ends to one side and gingerly placing the machine on the table’s sticky surface.

  ‘No, none whatsoever. After all, I spent most of yesterday talking into one at the police station. What do you need to know?’

  Michael spent the next forty-five minutes teasing Ignazio’s life story out of him – the poor childhood spent on this farm; the loneliness of his adolescence followed by the humiliation of the times when he was treated like a circus freak and a target for bullies and drunks from both sides of the lake. Then he spoke of the anger he had felt on realising that once again he was being humiliated, how he had been told by a Beldoro man about his wife’s dalliance with Alfio Bonfadini.

  His story told, he slumped back in his chair, his eyes cast downwards, his mind struggling with the idea of living on with so much pain inside.

  Michael took his leave of him, looking back in his rear-view mirror as he pulled away and seeing Ignazio standing staring after him, unmoving, sadness oozing from every pore.

  The next day, Michael would be making the two-hour train journey to Milan and would be calling in at the Post’s Italian sister paper to send the first part of his story through to London. He also wanted to send the photograph that Ignazio had given him, showing him and Silvia on their wedding day, standing awkwardly side by side, he in a dark suit that might even be the one he now wore every day; she, clutching a posy of flowers, wearing a white wedding dress that spilled out from her waist in copious folds; on both their faces an expression of complete incomprehension. And behind them the ever-present mountains rising accusingly towards the blue sky, the last remnants of winter dusting their peaks.

  He was in two minds, however, about Claudio Scatti. It would make a fantastic scoop. But something made him hesitate. He should tell the police, of course. There was a man dead up there in the mountains. But, he knew that as soon as he told them, his story would become public property. The job, therefore, was to write the story, send it to London and then inform the police. There might be a spot of bother about holding the information back for a little while, even a charge of some kind. But it would be worth it. This story would blow the whole kidnapping wide open.

  He finished writing the first part of his piece at around nine-thirty. He had sent out for a pizza from the local pizzeria about an hour-and-a-half before and he was now very thirsty and in need of a change of scenery. The paint-splattered receptionist had told him that, even though the rest of the hotel was closed, the bar remained open and so he thought he might as well go downstairs and have a couple of beers. With the intention of taking his mind off the task in hand, he picked up the book he had started reading weeks ago, left his room and negotiated the debris that littered the corridors of the hotel.

  The bar was small but untouched by the refurbishment. The faded grandeur of the hotel was present in all its glory. At one end of the room stood an ornately carved mahogany bar, bottles and glasses glinting in the mirror that lined the wall behind it. Large paintings that were in need of cleaning hung on the cream walls and the ceiling above it all was like the icing on a wedding cake. In the centre hung a large chandelier, which threw light across the room in the same casual way as it had probably done for the last century.

  There was no one behind the bar, but at one end of it, sat on a stool, with a glass and a bottle of whisky in front of him, sat the man who, at breakfast, Michael had thought to be a travelling salesman of some kind, although there was now something about him which suggested otherwise. His suit looked too good for that.

  ‘Buonasera.’ he said, looking up from the newspaper that rested on the bar in front of him. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to help yourself. Paolo, the barman, is trying out his skills as a painter and decorator on the fourth floor this evening. He says we can drink what we want as long as we settle up with him in the morning. So …’ he said, standing up. ‘What will it be? Let me get it for you.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you. I’ll just have a beer, please.’ said Michael slipping onto a bar stool.

  The other man walked around to the other side of the bar, bending to pick a bottle of beer out of the cold shelves at the bottom.

  ‘Now, where is … ah, yes, here it is.’ He reached down below the counter and brought out a bottle opener.

  ‘Not often you get the run of a hotel bar, eh? Like letting a junkie loose in a pharmacy!’ He opened the bottle and handed it to Michael along with a glass. ‘I’m Vito Pedrini, by the way,’ he went on, holding out a hand to Michael.

  ‘Michael Keats,’ said Michael, shaking Pedrini’s hand.

  ‘Ah, you’re English?’ he asked, not quite sure.

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘I wasn’t certain for a moment, there. I thought you might be American. Or Canadian, even. That’s a very different accent, you know, the Canadian accent. I lived there for a couple of years, I should know. But, hey, you speak good Italian.’

  ‘Thanks. I learned it at university and I am … I was married to an Italian.’ Michael took a long drink of the glass of beer in front of him. The pizza he had eaten had given him a thirst.

  ‘So, you are here on business … Michael. I hope you don’t mind if I call you …?’

  ‘No, of course not. Please do. Yes, I am here on business of a kind. I’m a reporter.’ He sat on a stool a few feet from the man.

  ‘Ah,’ Pedrini said, as if understanding a great deal. ‘The Ronconi kidnapping. But, you’re a little late, are you not? The journalistic community was out in force a few weeks ago when the kidnapping took place. I was passing through then as well. If I hadn’t known Paolo here, I wouldn’t have been able to find a room
in all Beldoro!’

  ‘I’ve come to follow up on the case. You know this story about the shop-keeper lying? I’m, as it were, applying some local colour to it.’

  ‘I see. And have you found out anything of interest since you’ve been here?’

  ‘No, not really. I’ve spoken to the farmer who beat up the shop-keeper, though. That was very interesting.’

  ‘Really?’ The other man leaned forward on his stool, his steely blue eyes full of interest. ‘Did he tell you anything new?’ Michael was for some reason suddenly suspicious of this man and immediately reined himself in from saying too much – although why would it be too much? The story was in the public domain, to the extent that it would probably be read by three quarters of a million Londoners tomorrow, or the day after, if the paper was already full.

  ‘Oh, nothing you don’t already know.’

  He managed to pass the remainder of the half hour or so that he spent in Pedrini’s company in inconsequential talk about Italy and England, and at ten-thirty, after two beers, he made his excuses and left in the direction of his room, where the work of the day engendered a good night’s sleep, preparing him for an early rise in order to catch the train to Milan.

  Mattresses hung drunkenly over the balconies of brightly coloured modern tower blocks as the train slowed on its way into the city.

  Michael shifted uncomfortably on the leather seat and recalled making this journey with Rosa many years ago. They had gone to see Leonardo’s Last Supper at Santa Maria delle Grazie and he remembered how they had been amazed at the simplicity of it. It had seemed to them not at all like one of the greatest pieces of art in the world, but just as it had actually been intended – wallpaper in a refectory, a piece of decorative adoration. They had both been deeply moved by just that simplicity and had left the building, walking in silence for a while before returning to their senses or, rather, having their senses returned to them by the bustle and the oppressive heat of Milan.

  The train took an eternity to arrive at the station. It crawled over points at an achingly slow pace, accompanied by a metallic chorus of shrieks and screams, passing huts in which Michael could see blue-jacketed workmen enjoying their coffee and probably the finer points of the weekend’s football. At last, it pulled into the station and squealed to a grudging halt.

  The station bar was quiet. The waiters lounged at the till, talking to each other, glad of the rest. The gap between breakfast and lunch seemed, to some of the old-timers, at least, to get shorter every year and soon they would again be gliding across the stone floor, trays carrying impossible quantities of drinks, hands dealing out change like lightning and placing receipts on tables, or pulling the tops off bottles, always with their eyes looking in another direction, searching out the next order or the nearest short skirt.

  Michael sat at a table close to the wall with a good view of the entrance to the bar and ordered his usual macchiato. ‘Dirty coffee,’ Rosa used to call it. To make identification possible, he had asked, in his letter to the man who had been with Rosa, that he carry a copy of each of two newspapers – La Gazzetta dello Sport and the London Times. This was a mixture he felt was unlikely to be found very often. The place was so quiet, however, that this fussiness seemed slightly redundant.

  There was a huge clock on the wall behind the bar. The hands moved laboriously, with a loud clunking noise. It was, indeed, as if time had become audible, as if it could be heard passing.

  Ten to twelve … clunk, clunk …

  Seven minutes to twelve … clunk, clunk … The hands moved as if passing through something viscous and heavy. Michael began to sweat, in spite of the fact that it was chilly in the vastness of this huge edifice.

  With four minutes remaining before the appointed time for the meeting, he regretted having sent the letter. He regretted having gone to Rogerson & Gilchrist, he regretted his trip to the Lighthouse Hotel. He began to feel very warm. What was he going to say to this man, anyway? ‘So, you’re the chap who was screwing my wife? Pleased to meet you.’ It was not going to be the easiest conversation. He fought for the right words, but his mind was confused and nothing of any sense was rising to the surface. Most likely, he was going to walk away without saying a word, but, somehow, for some unknown reason, he felt he had at least to see him.

  Three minutes to twelve … he lifted his coffee cup to his lips only to find his mouth filling with the bitter dregs from the bottom of the cup.

  Two minutes to twelve … A man came in carrying La Gazzetta and Michael sat up, but there was no English paper and he turned round and walked out again just as soon as he came in.

  Three minutes past twelve … He checked his watch, but the bar clock was indeed correct.

  Ten minutes past twelve … His eyes darted to his watch again and his heart sank and rose at the same time. He need not find out the truth, need not confront Rosa’s secret life.

  Twenty-three minutes past twelve … Positive joy at the thought of not having to deal with this, of being able to luxuriate in the idea that it might not be true; he may, in fact be wrong about what had been happening in the most important part of his life.

  At half past twelve he stood up and negotiated a path between the tables to the door and out through the main section of the station towards the massive exit.

  He failed to notice the figure leaning on the wall just outside the bar who pulled the collar of his heavy jacket tight around his neck, threw a darting glance to his right and his left and then fell into step about twenty yards behind him.

  There was a constant hum in the room. The murmuring and sometimes shouting voices were accompanied by the sounds of fingers hitting computer keys. Men and women with phones pinned between their ears and their shoulders, talked and typed, occasionally taking their hands off the keys and gesturing with them.

  Increasingly, newsrooms were beginning to look the same all over the world. This one was no different. True, the language was not the same, but close your ears and it could have been the Post’s main news office in London, with black cabs and the ladies of Kensington crawling past outside instead of the luxurious cars and fur-coated women of the capital of northern Italy. Michael felt a stabbing pain of envy for all these journalists in their ranks of desks and cubicles, so comfortable in this, their scheme of things. They fitted where he no longer did. They had a purpose that he no longer did. He felt as if he was here in this country on false pretences, outwardly to write a story, but inwardly he knew very well that he was here to expunge a part of his life that he once held as dear as anything in the world. What kind of purpose could that truly be? It was as if he were about to destroy his own past and, in so doing, perhaps also destroy himself.

  ‘Michael!’

  His train of thought was interrupted by a plump figure making his way between the rows of desks. Bruno Barni and Michael had spent time in each other’s company on several occasions. Most memorably, they had travelled together across America with Bill Clinton’s cavalcade of journalists and hangers-on for the last month of the 1992 American election campaign. They had spent many nights carousing and bemoaning their journalistic fates in small town America and, as is always the case in such circumstances, had, on their last night in each other’s company, sworn eternal friendship. Since then they had exchanged the occasional postcard, but had always failed to meet up whenever Michael had visited Italy or when Bruno had come to London.

  ‘Michael, how are you?’

  ‘All the better for seeing you, my old friend.’ They clasped each other in a bear hug and then Bruno stepped back, holding Michael by the shoulders.

  ‘I was so sorry to hear about your wife, Michael. I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t.’

  ‘Me neither, Bruno. As you can imagine, it’s not been easy.’

  Bruno put an arm around Michael’s shoulder, walking him back the way he had come.

  ‘Come on, let’s get out of this dump and grab some lunch. I’ll just get my jacket.’

  They had almost
finished their first bottle of red wine before the food arrived at the table. Michael had explained everything to Bruno and Bruno now sat shaking his head and running his hand through his thinning black hair.

  ‘You mean you had no idea?’

  ‘None whatsoever, Bruno.’ He smiled at the apparent absurdity of it. Surely you can tell when someone has fallen out of love with you? Surely you know when that someone is dreaming of a life with someone else? ‘Hey, I know what you’re thinking. How come I didn’t realise? Well, Bruno, it seems you just don’t.’ He smiled at Bruno and reached for the bottle, sharing the remnants between both glasses, at the same time indicating to a passing waiter that they were in need of another.

  ‘Ah, Michael.’ Bruno shook his head and stared into Michael’s eyes. ‘But, hey, you remember what we used to say whenever we hit one of those small towns in the States in ninety-two?’

  They said it together, smiling at the memory: ‘It don’t get much worse than this!’

  ‘But look, you say you don’t know who this guy is …?’ Bruno said this between hungry mouthfuls of cotoletta alla Milanese and Michael recalled just how much Bruno had loved his food in America. He would start the morning with a huge pile of pancakes and maple syrup and work his way through whatever food he could get his hands on as the day wore on. Michael, a sparing eater at the best of times and especially when on the road, would look on in wonder and sometimes even disgust, as steaks, ice cream, waffles, and hamburgers would disappear in ever larger quantities into that grinning mouth. ‘You have no idea …?’

  ‘Well, I know he’s Italian. I know he wears a size forty-four jacket. I know he has expensive taste. Oh, and I think I have a name that has some kind of connection to him.’ He put down his knife and fork and searched in his inside pocket for his wallet. From it he fished out the card that he had discovered in the jacket pocket that drunken night at the Lighthouse Inn and handed it to Bruno. ‘Or it could even be him, for all I know. I found that card in the pocket of the jacket I was sent.’