“What are you doing?”
“Evening the score. If you make pastry like that, I’m never going to measure up. Plus, I’ve never seen you drunk.”
“I don’t like to lose control.”
“I noticed. Maybe you should, once.”
“Why?”
She poured a hefty splash of liquor into his coffee as well. He made a face, but downed the coffee. “What about you?”
“One of us should stay alert,” she said. “To defend us in case of invasion. And I think it should be the pregnant lady.” She struck a karate-chop pose.
“That is terrifying.”
He showed her how to roll out sheets of fresh pasta as she poured him champagne, and then he demonstrated how to sear a steak while she poured him red wine.
“Hey, the meat’s not gray inside,” she said. “And so tender. Who knew?” She pushed her plate back. “Why should I learn all this if you’re already so good at it?”
“Everyone should know how to cook.”
“Well, I think everyone should know how to dance.” She put on a Duke Ellington record and they danced in their bare feet. He was drunk, loose, laughing in a way she hadn’t seen before. His face was finally relaxed. She taught him to Lindy hop, swing, jitterbug and boogie-woogie. They whirled around the room until they fell onto the sofa, dizzy and panting.
“You’re good. The first man who didn’t crush my toes,” she said.
“It’s because of my feet. Are these not the loveliest feet you’ve ever seen?” He lifted his feet for her to admire.
“They look like feet to me.”
“No, no. Look closer. Look at the curve of the arch, the shape of that toe.”
She was laughing. “I’m sorry, but feet are pretty much feet. They keep us upright, but they’re not really much to look at.”
“Are you kidding me?” he said, weaving over to the bookcase and returning, mock serious, with a volume on Michelangelo. He opened to the Pietà. “Do you not see the resemblance?”
She made a show of studying the photo of the marble statue and then his feet, using a cocktail stirrer as a lorgnette. “I suppose they are a little Christlike, now that you point it out.”
“Right?!”
“Quite possibly your feet are prettier than Miss America.”
“Let’s not exaggerate,” he said. “Let’s just agree they’re perfect.”
* * *
“Hey, want to go see the new Sophia Loren tonight?” she asked the next morning as he was getting dressed. “La fortuna di essere donna. The luck to be a woman? Lucky woman?”
“Actually, I have to go to Rome.” He had been feeling slightly hungover as he attempted to tie his tie in the mirror on the door of the armoire, but now he was suddenly sober. He went over and sat on the bed next to her. He had been putting it off, but there were reports he had to deliver. He wasn’t even sure if Duncan was free that night, but he knew what the word “Rome” would mean to Scottie. He was anxious, unsure of what she would say.
She stared at him for a long beat, her face frozen, then forced a smile. “Have fun,” she said.
“You don’t … mind?”
“It’s not what I expected when I said ‘I do.’ But at least I know.” She got out of the bed. “I’ll miss you. But I mean it, have fun.”
He felt terrible. “What will you do tonight? Go to the movies without me?”
She stopped in the doorway, the emerald green silk pajamas he had bought her glowing in the morning sun.
“I might call Ugo Rosini.”
Alarm shot through him, and yes, jealousy. “We’re trying to defeat him in the election, remember?”
“All the more reason to get close to him.”
Michael was silent.
“This isn’t easy,” she said at last.
“No,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Wear the blue suit. You look really handsome in that one.”
She padded away, the dog trailing behind her.
TWENTY-THREE
LA SPADAFORTE, THE SWORD
RED SHIELD WITH A BLACK AND WHITE LADDER FLANKED BY TWO SWORDS
NOVEMBER 1956
1.
It rained on Election Day. In the Ford office Michael had one of the new TVs now on sale in Siena tuned to the RAI news, and a radio on as well, also tuned to the RAI, and another radio tuned to Voice of America. Scottie came in, closing her umbrella. She slipped out of her raincoat. Her belly was growing large. She sat down and put her feet up on the desk, and Ecco curled up beneath her.
“Any election results yet?” she asked.
“No—the news is all about Hungary.” From student protests in July, and the hijacking of a plane, the rebellion in Hungary against communism had swelled into a full-scale revolution. Everyone talked constantly about loyalty—to Hungary, to ideals of communism, to their ancestors and to their unborn children. Ten days ago, government buildings were seized and a new prime minister was declared.
The Soviets, it appeared, were content to let Hungary self-govern. Hungarian independence from Moscow was a reality.
They sat side by side, staring at the blurry black-and-white images.
“Did you talk to Rome?”
He nodded. “I could hear champagne corks popping in the background. Duncan was crowing about the uprising, but also admitted the Agency had been caught by surprise and that they have no one on the ground in Budapest. They’re getting all of their information from the radio, like us.”
“They’ve thrown off the Soviet yoke,” Scottie said, as Michael poured them each a cup of tea. “I guess that’s good.”
“The CIA hired planes to drop leaflets telling Hungarians to rebel,” Michael said, amazed. “And they did.”
Michael and Scottie waited for Siena’s election results, but they were not optimistic. Despite the vicious attack by Minaccia Rossa on Ambassador Luce, Ugo Rosini’s left coalition was poised for victory.
The phone rang. Michael picked it up. “Rosini won,” he heard Pisano say with a heavy sigh. He hung up.
Michael was crushed. He had almost inadvertently killed Scottie, had tried to kill himself to sway the election, and it wasn’t enough. “Are you happy Ugo won?”
“No. But he was never going to lose,” said Scottie. “Vestri was just too corrupt, even for Italians. You know that.” In the weeks before the election Vestri had been caught taking a kickback from Lippincott, though interestingly enough, a judge had let Lippincott’s deals and zoning waivers stand. Having tried Vestri’s capitalism for a summer, Rosini’s brand of “soft” communism was clearly what the working people of Siena wanted. Strong unions, good schools, pensions, health care, minimum wages, mandated vacation time. A humane lifestyle for everyone, employee and boss alike.
Their side had lost the election, and thus Michael had failed at his mission. And the truth was, despite everything, he was frankly not all that sorry about it. Vestri was a hard man to love, and Rosini was smart and had the city’s best interests at heart. If Scottie liked him, he couldn’t be all bad.
Michael took some papers out of the new safe, set a trashcan in the middle of the room, then burned the papers.
“What’s that?”
“The membership rolls of the Communist Party.”
Scottie raised her eyebrows.
“They won. It’s over. A list of names does not tell you people’s stories,” he said. Was this treason? He wondered, watching the pages turn to ash. None of it was as clear as it had seemed when he was growing up, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
Michael was tamping down the ashes when Scottie sat forward and turned up the volume.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Tanks.”
Michael sat next to her. Even Ecco sat up.
For the next few hours, they watched in horrified silence as journalists shouted into the camera, ran and began to film again. Bloody faces passed in front of the screen, and sometimes the transmission was lost and the TV went black.
Then they switched to the radio, and back again.
As the world watched and listened, Soviet tanks moved into Budapest and quickly and viciously crushed the rebellion. People were loaded onto cattle cars to be taken presumably to Siberia. The Hungarians sent out distress call after distress call to the West, begging the U.S. to take action.
“Help us, America!” shouted a frantic woman as gunfire could be heard in the background.
“Why aren’t we sending troops?” demanded Scottie the next day, as the violence continued. “Isn’t Eisenhower seeing this?”
“Britain and France are tied up in the Suez, and Eisenhower is adamant that America will not act alone,” said Michael after talking to Duncan.
They watched as refugees poured across the border into Austria, and communications from the capital went dark.
“Call him again,” said Scottie.
Michael called Duncan on the secure line. “You set them up for this,” he said. “You led them to believe that the West would back them up.”
“I never said that personally to anyone,” said Duncan, though he sounded shaken.
Michael understood then what the mission had been. He hung up, sat down next to Scottie again, took her hand.
“They knew this would happen,” he said. On TV there were images of the Soviets lining up protesters and shooting them. Scottie flinched, turned away.
“That,” Michael said, pointing a shaky finger at the TV. “That—what we’re all seeing—this is the best argument for American-style democracy that can be made.”
Scottie turned to him. “What are you saying?”
“When they dropped those leaflets. This was the mission. This.” He pointed to the screen again. “Either the revolution would succeed, or it wouldn’t. But it would be on television, so it was a win-win for America either way.”
2.
He felt sympathy when, in the days that followed the Soviet crackdown, the Italian Communists tried to cope with and eventually split over the brutality unleashed on the unarmed Hungarians. This was not the happy workers’ paradise they had been sold on those visits to Moscow. This was an oligarchy. An occupation. A nightmare. Totalitarianism. They did not want to be next.
The Italian Communist Party’s national leader, Togliatti, caught between a hard place and Moscow, expressed support for the invasion. This provoked Ugo Rosini, along with a hundred other leading Italian Communists, to sign the Manifesto of 101, which called for discussion within the Party about its ties to the Soviets. As a result he was publicly branded a traitor by Togliatti. Rosini called a press conference and, weeping, tore up his membership card and resigned from the Party. “I can no longer see in the actions of the Soviet Union a desire for the common good,” he said, “only for a familiar kind of oppressive empire.”
On a national level, the Socialists dissolved their alliance with the Communists, and joined the centrist bloc of the Catholics in support of NATO and American bases on Italian soil.
“It’s Duncan’s dream come true,” Michael told Scottie. “And Luce is learning to love it, too. She now says a center-left alliance was what she wanted all along.”
Luce resigned her post and left Italy in triumph. At her last press conference, in a white mink stole and long white evening gloves, diamonds glittering around her neck, she waved good-bye from the Trevi Fountain.
“Arrivederci, Italia!” she called to the crowds. “Grazie!”
3.
By mid-November, the election was behind them and the power of the Communists in Italy deeply diminished. On a cool evening with hints of winter in the air, Michael and Scottie walked across Piazza del Campo. Scottie stopped before they got to the front door, the huge oak arch under which their life in Siena had begun.
“What happens next?” she asked, standing beside the Fontana Gaia in a pair of gray flannel trousers and a houndstooth jacket. She had that “swallowed a basketball” look now—she would deliver for New Year’s. 1957. What would that year bring, other than a new baby? He could not see in her the girl he had met at a party at Vassar seven months earlier. He had so vastly misunderstood and underestimated her, and every other force in his life. He had always seen her as a burden, but she was a friend, the best friend he had ever had. He really did love her.
“I don’t know,” he said, cautious. The two of them had not talked about the future.
“Will Duncan let you stay here, or send you somewhere else?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you still believe in all of it?”
Though he had much time to think, Michael did not waste time debating the ethics of the double lives he led, as a gay man and as a spy. Like Scottie, with her Vassar-dance entrapment of him, he had simply done what he needed to survive.
He thought for a moment. “I do. Hungary proved we can’t stop, because they’re not going to stop. I don’t want to see a world run by Moscow.” He paused, then said, “They’re talking about making Luce the ambassador to Brazil. But it could just as easily be Bangkok, or Bali, or Beirut.”
“Will Duncan go, too?”
“I think he might. Scottie—” He paused. “Maybe you want to go back to America and never see me again. I’ll give you a divorce, support you and the child.”
She had thought a lot about what it would be like to be divorced and raising a child alone. She didn’t have family to help. She knew if she had to, she could do it, but the idea sounded terribly lonely to her, at least right now.
Michael continued, searching her face with his eyes. “But if you need—if you want me to still be your husband, and a father, I will be a good one.”
It was not the kind of love story she had read about in books or seen in the movies, not the kind of picture that sold cake frosting or cars or lipstick. And yet they were not playing roles, at least not to each other. It was a very different kind of marriage. She did not have to be anything other than herself. They had no secrets from each other, but many from the rest of the world. They liked each other, enjoyed each other’s company. She had to tolerate his lover, and there would probably be more, but there would never be other women. She could have lovers of her own. It was what was politely called a marriage of convenience. But there were so many women trapped in inconvenient marriages to men they couldn’t stand that it seemed exciting to contemplate continuing to be married to someone who genuinely loved her, and always would. And then there was the lasagna.
She thought of Julie. She hoped she would have the courage to leave if she ever felt like that. She was pretty sure she would.
She felt more ambivalent about the work they did. But it was better to be on the inside, she thought, being a voice of reason, than to abandon the Agency to people who saw anyone who didn’t look like them or speak their language as something less than human beings. She thought of what Carlo had said about the cost of being on the wrong side of history. She loved her country, and what it stood for, and because she knew its secrets and did not always trust its leaders to do the right thing, she would keep the promise she had made herself to not just love America, but to know it, to see how others saw it, to recognize its flaws and injustices, and try to make it better.
If the CIA would ship a car around the world, then likely they would ship a horse.
A huge flock of starlings danced and swooped over their heads, forming strange cloudlike patterns. Michael looked up. “A murmuration,” he said as the birds whirled in silent billowing shapes. “No one understands how it works, who’s in charge.”
Together they stared up, awed by the unexpected, inexplicable perfection of it.
“Brazil,” she said, as if it were neither a question nor an answer.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people contributed expertise, moral support, feedback and life-sustaining amounts of mortadella to make this novel happen. John and Jennifer Brancato deserve some kind of very large and shiny trophy for listening to me talk endlessly about this book for years on end, for coming along for the research, f
or reading draft after draft, all the while sharing exquisite food and drink. I am deeply grateful to Ranieri Polese and Helene Cadario (Ranieri: I promise I will send your books back now); Sarah, Giugi and Elisa Sesti; Charlotte Sommer; Keri Hardwick; Kathleen McCleary; Lisa Bannon; Art Streiber; Glynis Costin; Lacy Crawford; Lynette Cortez; Joanna Lipari; John Paulett; Eileen Daspin; Logan Robertson; Jessica Marshall; Sandy Schuler; John Ziaukas; Loren Segan—grazie! Elisabeth Dyssegaard: You are wonderful in every way. Claudia Cross: You are a great friend as well as a great agent. My colleagues, my students and especially my fellow writers at College of the Sequoias: Thank you for being so supportive. A special thanks for early kind words from Patricia Hampl, Robert Hellenga, Julia Claiborne Johnson, Chris Pavone, Diane Leslie and John Kwiatkowski. To the real Camelia: I’m toasting you up there in horse heaven, and thanking all of those who put up with you on earth: Andrea, Silvia, Pier Giorgio, Maura. A special thank you to Mark Ganem. Salute!
Every writer stands on the shoulders of many others. I relied upon these and other works to help me ground this novel in actual history: 1956: L’anno spartiacque, by Luciano Canfora; Advertising America: The United States Information Service in Italy (1945–1956), by Simona Tobia; The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and Their Secret World War, by Stephen Kinzer; The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, by Kai Bird; La Ragazza del Palio, directed by Luigi Zampa; Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner; L’Italia in Movimento: Storia Sociale degli Anni Cinquanta, by Luca Gorgolini; Price of Fame: The Honorable Clare Boothe Luce, by Sylvia Jukes Morris.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christina Lynch’s picaresque journey includes chapters in Chicago and at Harvard, where she was an editor on the Harvard Lampoon. She was the Milan correspondent for W magazine and Women’s Wear Daily, and disappeared for four years in Tuscany. In L.A. she was on the writing staffs of Unhappily Ever After; Encore, Encore; The Dead Zone and Wildfire. She now lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. The co-author of two novels under the pen name Magnus Flyte, she teaches at College of the Sequoias. The Italian Party is her debut novel. You can sign up for email updates here.
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