Lisa has great difficulty regaining her composure. She is caught up in the brutality of the absurd, torn between hysteria and despair. As they sit down at their table, Roberto first of all asks after Cristina.
‘You told me she was coming to the Café Pouchkine with you. I looked everywhere for her, but I couldn’t find her.’
‘After our meeting, she left with Filippo, to take him home to bed.’
‘So he came off best in your duel?’
‘I think that now I can admit it, yes, definitely. I didn’t even get off the ground and he was flying in the stratosphere. So, Cristina was on Filippo’s arm when he was shot.’
‘Shit!’
‘She had an epileptic fit and was taken to hospital, I don’t know which one. And right now, I don’t care. I’ll think about it tomorrow.’
She sips a pleasant Loire wine, breathes deeply then takes the plunge.
‘Roberto, I’d never have thought our secret service would assassinate Filippo. I’m thinking it’s more likely to be Bonamico.’
‘Stop fantasising, please. Not now. It’s creepy. And eat.’
‘Why did they kill him? Because they knew we were on Bonamico’s trail, and that we have proof? I don’t see the connection.’
‘That’s absurd. They didn’t know. Who could have told them? Neither you nor I, and no one else knows about your investigation. Satisfied?’
Lisa attacks her food. Delicious lamb, cooked to perfection, the meat melts in her mouth. It’s tricky, cooking leg of lamb. Someone knew. She thought of her telephone conversations with Stefania, the Corriere di Brescia journalist. ‘My boss asked me if I was in contact with you.’ The information had surfaced and quickly. Am I the one who sparked the whole thing off? No way I can tell Roberto. Stefania’s voice continues to ring in her ears.
Suddenly she freezes, fork halfway to her mouth. What had Stefania said? Bonamico, the lover of the Tomasino girl, the Brescia banking family, a photo from 1974, a terrifying face, the eyebrows joined, the scar … Just like Marco in Escape: eyebrows, scar, vicious, brutal … Filippo saw Bonamico with Carlo, he says so in his book. And the moment Prosecutor Sebastiani tried to bring him back to Italy to stand trial – and was likely to succeed – was the moment Filippo was sentenced to death. Lisa closes her eyes. A hollow ache in her chest. Hard to accept. Even the story he told me about his and Carlo’s escape, more than a year ago, was no more reliable than the rest. At the end of the day, maybe he did take part in the hold-up after all. I’ll never know. No choice, I’ll have to live with it. She slowly readjusts to the reality of the restaurant, Roberto, their conversation. It’s no longer a time for passion, but for appraisal.
In a neutral voice, she says, ‘The French police will conduct a lengthy investigation into Filippo’s assassination, but they won’t find the killers. They’ll only be sure of one thing. The modus operandi: a professional hit man, a single bullet shot at point-blank range, an accomplice on a motorbike, speedy getaway, no clues, no witnesses, it’s a professional hit. Then a police officer will recall having read Filippo’s book: Carlo’s double was shot after the Rome gang informed on him. To avenge him, Filippo’s double shoots Marco, the leader of the Rome gang, who take their revenge by having Filippo killed. It all makes sense.’
‘You’re talking nonsense.’
‘You’ll see. I’m willing to bet on it.’
Roberto desperately casts about for a topic of conversation to distract her.
‘It would be better to talk about our own affairs. There’s no reason not to continue with Bonamico. Who shall we contact to publish your report?’
Lisa stops eating, she looks straight through Roberto, and stares into the far distance.
‘I don’t think you realise what’s just happened. We’re not going to publish anything at all. There’s no point. There’s nothing more to be done. Nobody can fight against a death as romantic as Filippo’s. He’s become a sort of legend, that of the hoodlum at a turning point in his life – he steals, he kills, he writes and he dies at the age of twenty-three, shot on the streets of Paris by strangers, with a bullet straight through his heart. Twenty-three years old, just think. The age I was when I met Carlo. Filippo is a comet, and his book will now be sacrosanct. He has taken Carlo off into a world of his own. Nothing more to be done. Adieu, Carlo, bon voyage.’
‘Are you giving up?’
Still gazing into the distance, she says nothing for a while.
‘Yes, I’m giving up. That particular battle’s lost. If I want to try and salvage our past, there’s only one thing left for me to do. Write novels.’
AFTERWORD
Dominique Manotti uses two historical references that may be unfamiliar to readers, the more so since the second is fictitious. Years of Lead and Years of Fire frame the events of Escape. Its author is a former trade unionist and political militant, for many years a professor of nineteenth-century history at the University of Vincennes during its most actively radical period. Manotti’s ten novels all explore unholy alliances forged between crime and politics. Escape is no different but changes context – from Poland to Korea to Turkey in previous works – and looks south to Italy during the years of Red Brigades activism in the 1970s and ’80s.
Escape’s origins are steeped in the ‘Republic of Salò’, named after the town near Brescia where Mussolini sought to establish his Republican Fascist Party as his army was forced northwards from Rome. It became known as the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, lasting from 1943 to 1945, as a client state of German Nazism, doomed to destruction by the Allies and partisans. Echoes of its politics reverberated down the generations: through the fascist Ordine Nuovo waging a clandestine terror campaign to Alessandra Mussolini’s recent People of Freedom, a revival of her grandfather’s questionable legacy. As Manotti has written elsewhere: ‘To understand Italy, one has to remember the immense and profound support for Mussolini and the proximity of the War to the events in this book. Fascism had only been defeated for twenty-five years in 1968, leaving numerous live fascist cells behind.’
Years of Lead describes a period of political turmoil and flying bullets in Italy, sparked by the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan that killed seventeen and wounded ninety people. It was followed by probably dozens of undisclosed acts of terrorism, including the 1970 bomb that killed six in the southern Gioia Tauro train station; the 1972 car bombing that killed three police officers in Pateano, northern Italy; the 1974 Italicus train bombing that killed twelve in the Apennines between Florence and Bologna; the 1974 massacre in Brescia’s Piazza della Loggia that killed eight anti-fascist protesters and wounded 100; the 1980 plane crash near the Sicilian island of Ustica, the 1980 Bologna train station bombing that killed eighty-five and wounded over 200; and the 1984 Rapido 904 massacre in which sixteen died when a bomb exploded on the Florence-Bologna train line. It was only in April 2014 that Prime Minister Matteo Renzi declassified secret files on a minority of the most notorious cases, confirming the involvement of the neo-fascist Ordine Nuovo and, latterly, of its offshoot the Armed Revolutionary Nucleo (ARN). Terrorism, involving the indiscriminate murder of civilians, was routinely used by the Right in order to blame and discredit the Left, and to foment mass insecurity and unrest. Is Escape, written two years before the disclosures, a case of fiction anticipating political disclosure of historical fact?
The Years of Fire is a term invented by the book’s first protagonist Carlo, a Red Brigades leader. His strategy is to counter the deadening nature of the Years of Lead via propaganda through targeted assassinations and popular insurrection, destined to catch fire and burn brightly. Revealed are the lengths to which the state will go to create a ‘strategy of tension’ to sow disorder, resulting in popular demand for imposed order. In 1969, political parties across the spectrum from neo-fascist to centre-left were panicked at the imminent prospect of the majority Italian Communist Party winning elections with 36 per cent of the votes. No left-wing party was ever allowed to come that close to power a
gain.
At a recent conference (at City University, London, in May 2014), Manotti was asked why she had turned from political activism to writing crime novels. She replied, ‘par désespoir.’ She could as well have quoted herself, speaking as Carlo’s comrade, Lisa, at the close of this stranger-than-fiction history: ‘That particular battle’s lost. If I want to try and salvage our past, there’s only one thing left for me to do. Write novels.’
Amanda Hopkinson
May 2014
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dominique Manotti was born in Paris in 1942, and was a political and union activist from the end of the Algerian War in 1962 until 1968. She was a professor of nineteenth-century economic history in Paris, and is author of many novels, including Rough Trade, Dead Horsemeat (short-listed for the Duncan Lawrie International Dagger Award), Lorraine Connection (which won the International Dagger Award and was nominated for the ITV3 Crime Thriller Awards), and Affairs of State (all published by Arcadia Books). Her gritty, Euro noir novels tell the story of France’s modern social evolution, for better and worse, and Dominique is one of France’s bestselling crime novelists, translated into twelve languages and selling over 200,000 copies worldwide.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS
Amanda Hopkinson is Professor of Literary Translation at City University, London. She translates from Spanish (including Elena Poniatowska and Juan Villoro), Portuguese (Paulo Coelho and José Saramago) and French (Dominique Manotti). She also publishes on Latin American culture, particularly literature (Isabel Allende) and photography (most recently a history of photography in Mexico).
Ros Schwartz has translated over sixty titles from French. Her translation of Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince was shortlisted for the Marsh Award for children’s literature in translation in 2012. She was made a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009.
Copyright
Arcadia Books Ltd
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First published in France as L’Evasion by Éditions Gallimard 2013
First published in the United Kingdom by Arcadia Books 2014
Copyright © Dominique Manotti 2013
Translation copyright © Amanda Hopkinson and Ros Schwartz 2014
Dominique Manotti has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This Ebook edition published in 2014
ISBN 978-1-909807-74-7
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
This book is supported by the Institut Français (Royaume-Uni) as part of the Burgess programme. Arcadia Books would like to thank them for their generous support.
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Escape Page 17