The Big Story

by Morris West

  “I’m very interested,” said Ashley carefully.

  “First,” said Orgagna, deliberately, “first you should understand that I am aware of your investigations into my personal life and my political and business negotiations. I have followed them with interest from their beginning. I pay you a compliment when I say you have done a very thorough piece of work.”

  “Thank you.”

  Orgagna waved aside the irony and went on:

  “I know that your principal charges rested finally on a set of letters which you came down here to buy from one Enzo Garofano, since dead. I admit freely that the publication of your story could lose me my seat at the election, and would certainly debar me from accepting a Cabinet appointment. It is, therefore, in my interest to suppress it. You see that I am being quite blunt with you?”

  “I see that, yes.”

  “Your previous association with my wife, her present interest in you, are likewise an embarrassment. Not, you will understand, for reasons of heart, but for reasons of state.”

  Ashley stirred uneasily in his chair and buried his nose in his brandy-bubble. A flicker of amusement showed in Orgagna’s dark eyes.

  “Now, Mr. Ashley, we come to the point. I believe that you have in your possession—or at least available to you—the photostats of my letters. I believe that the only thing that prevents their immediate publication is your unfortunate involvement with the police and your state of semi-imprisonment in my house. Is that right?”

  Ashley shrugged, indifferently.

  “It’s a reasonable assumption.”

  “So…!” Orgagna sat back in his chair and lingered a few moments over the next sip of brandy. “So I find myself in a curious position. I wish to negotiate with you. I know that you are not easily frightened. I do not think you are easily bought. Therefore——” He broke off and waited a few moments, choosing his words with meticulous care. “I propose to do something I have never done in my life before—explain myself! You have interviewed many people on this investigation, Mr. Ashley. You have never questioned me. I think you owe me the right to speak in my own defence, the privilege of a personal explanation. Do you agree?”

  “I agree.”

  “If I convince you, you will withdraw the story?”

  “If you convince me—yes. If you don’t, I’ll publish your explanation in full. Either way you gain something.”

  “You have a nice sense of justice, Ashley,” said Vittorio d’Orgagna, and there was no irony in the words or in his voice. He got up from his chair and began pacing up and down the room, his footsteps making a soft ‘fluff-fluff’ on the heavy pile of the carpet. Ashley watched him curiously. Once again he was touched with admiration for the cool strength of the man, his ruthless clarity of judgment, his passionate belief in himself and his own cause. He was under a big strain now. He was sweating under the fans, as the Eastems say. But his dignity was unimpaired. Love him or hate him, exalt him or crucify him, Vittorio d’Orgagna was very much a man.

  Suddenly, he stopped pacing and stood leaning back against the big buhl desk, legs crossed, arms akimbo, like an advocate at ease with a good brief. Then he began to talk:

  “First, my dear Ashley, I make you a preface—short, simple, without rhetoric or embellishment. This is Italy, not America or England. You must judge me and my actions in my own milieu and with reference to the conditions of my country. It is, I think, an accepted principle. A murder in Chicago is a criminal offence. In Africa it may be a religious act, a ritual of worship. Do I make myself clean”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you accept the principle?”

  “Subject to interpretation.”

  Orgagna smiled at him with grudging approval.

  “Neatly taken, my friend. For the present that is all I ask. Now, I told you I am aware of the charges you make against me. There are three principal ones: first, that I procured a loan from this Government, out of dollar relief funds, to found an industry in the depressed South and that I then diverted these funds to my factories in the North. Second, that being charged with the distribution of American grain-seed to peasant farmers in distressed areas, I made the distribution only to members of my party and also caused them to pay for it. Thirdly, that, in contravention of the laws of Italy, I have exported funds and held them in reserve in American banks. Is that a just summary of your case, Ashley?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you expecting me to do? Deny it?”

  “I don’ t see how you can.”

  “I don’t deny it, Mr. Ashley!” The words came out sharp and clear as a whip-crack. “It is true—all of it! And there is more yet, that even your careful investigation has not uncovered.”

  “At least you’re frank about it,” Ashley grinned at him over the lip of his glass.

  “It is illegal, all of it,” Orgagna went on calmly. “Yet I claim that all of it was necessary and justified. I know what you are saying to yourself. Every criminal justifies his own acts. Even the Devil has scripture on the tip of his tongue. You are wrong, my friend, grievously wrong.”

  “I’ve suspended judgment,” said Ashley calmly. “I am waiting to hear the defence.”

  Orgagna thrust himself forward from the desk and walked slowly across the room to stand looking out to the lights of the siren island and the silver track of the moon across the soft water. He was a man caught up to visions—of mystery and terror and greatness and implacable judgment. The soft light picked out the fine patrician bones of his face and deepened the brooding shadows about his mouth. Slowly he turned back to face Ashley. The lights were at his back now and his face was all in shadow. Ashley could not say whether he smiled or frowned, but his voice was vibrant with conviction.

  “You, Ashley, are a man from a new world. Because of your abundant riches, you have reached, quickly, a high stage of technical evolution. Your workers have automobiles and your women have their children in aseptic hospitals instead of being wrenched to parturition by ignorant midwives. Your sons have room to grow and your daughters have men to marry. You have made a new history. You need no longer carry the burdens of the old. We—my people—have not those things. Here in the South, particularly, we have illiteracy, unemployment, poor communications, meagre resources. To change this state of affairs needs vision and enterprise—not the vision of the bureaucrats and the party men, not the enterprise of the place-hunter. It needs men with boldness and vision, prepared, if necessary, to step outside the framework of the law to do what must be done. You ask me why I diverted funds from the South to the North? First, they could only be got by a lie. Second, if I tried to start business here, in the South, without supplies, without communications, without trained operatives, we’d lose the money, pour it down the bottomless sewer, to no profit. In the North it will employ two thousand men. It will return profit to the country as a whole. It will pay taxes to build schools in Naples. It will attract more money—investment money from your country, because you are bankers and not a charitable organisation. And that is how it should be.

  “You say to me, why did I sell the grain which was given as a gift—and then only to party members? I will answer that, too. We are an ignorant people. Our peasants are stubborn, sunk in old superstition, mistrustful, unwilling to organise themselves; so that the land becomes fruitless and trees die and the bloodlines are ruined. To give them a gift is to waste it—or to watch them sell it in their turn, while they laugh at you in their sleeves. Make them buy it, and they value it. Confine it to the party and you teach them the value of co-operation and improvement. It is wrong. It is illegal. But do you justify folly just because it does not contravene the law?

  “Think of it thus, Ashley! Forget me! Forget that I am the husband of a woman you love! Look at the real things, the situation as it exists. Ask yourself, if, sitting in my place, you would have done otherwise.

  “Finally you ask about my funds in America. I will tell you that when I want machinery, machine-tools, raw materials to keep the
factory working and the workers eating, I must go to a bureaucrat in Rome, who cuts my dollar allocation in half with the stroke of a pen. He knows nothing! He sits at his coffee-table on the pavement and puffs out his chest at the pretty girls. He doesn’t see the hunger in the back streets and the children blotched with pellagra. The law is on his side, ancient laws that have never been changed since Justinian. But I say, humanity and wisdom is on mine!” He sat down heavily in his chair and passed a slim hand wearily across his forehead. “There is my defence, Ashley. You know enough to weigh it for yourself. If there is any question you would like to ask me, I shall try to answer it, honestly.”

  “There’s only one,” said. Ashley quietly.

  “Ask it.”

  “Why did you have Garofano murdered?”

  “I didn’t,” said Orgagna bleakly.

  And Ashley was half-convinced that he spoke the truth.

  Then, for a long time, it seemed, they faced each other across a pool of silence—a dark, shadowy pool, stirred by uneasy ripples of doubt and suspicion.

  Finally Ashley spoke and his words were slow stones counted into the silent, stirring water:

  “I’ve heard your defence—with interest and a certain sympathy. I’m still reserving judgment. But I must know this first. Who killed Garofano? Who checked my movements with Cosima and had him flung under the wheels of the car?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  Orgagna’s face was still in shadow and Ashley had the queer impression that his voice was disembodied, separate and remote from the figure in the opposite chair.

  “You mean you won’t.”

  “As you wish.”

  Then Ashley flung it at him, harsh and high-pitched.

  “I’ll tell you then! It was Carlo Carrese, steward of your house!”

  There was no reaction from the shadowy figure opposite. There was a pause, and then the polite, remote voice asked him:

  “What makes you say that, Mr. Ashley?”

  “He tried to kill me this afternoon.”

  Then the reaction came—a long, sighing exhalation of breath ending in a round “Oh” of surprise. Then Orgagna got up from his chair and walked over to the window. Ashley could not see his face but the question came to him clearly.

  “Do you mind telling me how and where?”

  Ashley told him. Orgagna stood staring out the window, a dark, motionless figure against the moonlight and the strung lights of the distant island. When the terse and vivid little narrative was finished, he turned back to Ashley. He was smiling, a little crookedly, and there were lines of weariness on his dark, fine features. He said, simply:

  “Let’s have another brandy, shall we?”

  “Sure.”

  Ashley got up, walked across the room and stood with Orgagna at the polite little ceremony of the drinks.

  “Salute!”

  “Salute!”

  They drank, ritually. Orgagna put down his glass and mopped his face and his hands with a silk handkerchief. Truly, he was sweating under the fans, but his voice was still under control, quiet and reasonable.

  “I think I should tell you about Carlo Carrese.”

  “Yes?”

  “He was, as he told you, my father’s steward. It has always been a family joke that there was Orgagna blood in him, too. Remembering our history…” Orgagna smiled, wearily, “… I think it is quite possible. Be that as it may, there has always been a bond between us. He has always been a good and loyal steward of the estates and when my father died he gave me the love that he might have spent on his own son, if he had had one.”

  “He did have one,” said Ashley bluntly. “Enzo Garofano.”

  Orgagna looked at him sharply. Then his face relaxed into a smile and he shook his head.

  “No! Garofano was not his son. Garofano was the son of his wife by another man. Had you known a little more about us, you would have guessed from the name. It is not a family name at all. It is the name of a flower which in English is called carnation. He was born in the spring-time, you see, in the time of the carnations, and because his father had gone long since his mother gave him that name.”

  “Where was Carlo all this time?”

  “In Milan with my father, who was then founding our business.”

  “Oh!”

  “When Carlo came home, he followed the custom of our people—which has much to recommend it. He thrashed his wife and then forgave her, and thrashed her periodically to remind her of her folly. The baby was boarded out to a wet-nurse in Sant’Agata, and later adopted. Then, Elena was born, and one day her mother introduced her to her half-brother. As children do, she became attached to him, and in spite of the antagonism of Carlo, the boy used to come here and play. The mother died early. I—I paid for his education. I never liked him, but for Elena’s sake, I was prepared to let him come here to visit her. Carlo, of course, hated him. But…” Orgagna shrugged and made a wry mouth, “… because he is a good servant, he bowed to the wishes of the master.”

  “Is that why he killed Garofano?”

  Orgagna looked at him with blank eyes and shook his head, slowly.

  “I have not said that Carlo killed him. You said it. I have given you this information for a very simple reason.”

  “Which is?”

  “To explain to you that Carlo Carrese is a member of our family. What touches him, touches me. He is an old man, Ashley. The burden of his years is heavy on him, and the family of Orgagna is still in his debt. The only way I can pay the debt is to protect him and give him a comfortable old age. I shall do that, even if…”

  He broke off and the unspoken threat hung like a suspended discord between them.

  “Say it, Orgagna,” said Ashley sharply.

  Orgagna shook his head.

  “No, my friend, no. It would sound too much like a threat and tonight of all nights I must avoid that impression. I am the accused. I am pleading my case. This… this story of Carrese and his wife’s son is an irrelevance, which we may discuss later.”

  It was so subtly and so blandly done that Ashley almost missed it. Orgagna had intrigued him with talk of a bargain. He had flattered him with sympathy and seduced him with heady rhetoric. Now he was explaining the nice balance of forces : ‘you have the photostats and the means to publish them ; I have the power to convict you of murder, which I have planned and which an old retainer has executed. I think you would like to be quit of this story. Now let us see if we can arrange a formula which salves your conscience and shows you a profit.…’

  Ashley remembered the final warning of George Harlequin and waited uneasily while His Excellency explained himself further. He did it with gravity and surprising force.

  “It is an old illusion, Ashley, that good men make good rulers—that human beings can be governed with faith, hope and charity and a set of Papal encyclicals. The function of government is to provide a strong, secure framework within which people may live and evolve slowly to a better way of life. The virtue of the ruler has nothing to do with it. It is his strength which matters, his wisdom and his capacity for turning the corruption and the weakness of his fellows to the profit of the body politic. Progress demands security. Security is founded on strength. I am not a good man—far from it. But I am a strong one. I have skill in politics. I have strong, financial influence. Given the chance, I can hold this country together for five years at least—long enough to strengthen the foundations of public order and set the wheels of progress turning. Without me, the weak alliance of Left and Right is destroyed and we are back to division, discontent and economic chaos. It is strange, very strange, that the power to make or to destroy should rest at this moment in the hands of a man like yourself, a spectator, whose sole financial holding is his monthly pay-cheque, whose only stake in this country is his passion for another man’s wife.”

  Ashley flushed angrily. Orgagna was fighting in earnest now. The buttons were off and the points were probing closer and closer to the bone.

 
Orgagna shifted ground. His voice changed. He questioned softly, with sympathy and a touch of pathos.

  “What do you want, Ashley? What drives you to this? What is it that makes you gamble so wildly to print a story that, three weeks later, will be brushed off the front pages to make room for a film star’s wedding or an aeroplane crash in America? What do you get out of it that matches the misery you will cause? Is it money? I doubt it. Is it satisfaction to your vanity, to your desire for power? Is it the blind zeal of the crusader? Believe me, I want to understand.”

  Ashley looked up.

  “You’re putting me in the witness-box now.”

  Orgagna nodded.

  “The defence, too, has the right to cross-examine.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Ashley took out a cigarette, tapped it, thoughtfully, on his thumb-nail, lit it and watched the first slow spirals of smoke climb upward towards the shadows of the ceiling. He, too, was on trial and he knew it. In a curious sense, his profession was on trial. And he knew that unless he could justify himself to himself, he could never sleep soundly again. He would have to join the cynics who did their job for bread, butter and a bonus, and be damned to the rest of it. Hesitantly at first, but gaining slowly in power and conviction, he, too, began to speak:

  “You ask me my motives, Orgagna. I’d be a liar if I said they were less tangled or more worthy than anyone else’s. Money? Yes. I’ll get paid enough for this story to leave me comfortably fixed for a year or two. I’ll make a reputation that will put me at the top of my profession and enable me to command more money. Vanity? Yes, that too. You can’t adopt a profession if you don’t have a pride. Pride feeds on success. The greed of power? I doubt it—unless there’s a perverted sense of power in the irresponsible detachment of the observer. Jealousy of you and of Cosima? No. I lost her long ago. I was never bitter enough to make a vendetta out of it.”