The Big Story

by Morris West

  Orgagna stood very straight and still, hands hanging at his sides, his evening jacket unbuttoned as it had been when he was seated. A pace away from him the old man stopped and held out the photographs. He said sombrely:

  “Your Excellency will tell me whether this is true or not and I will believe him.”

  Orgagna’s face was stony. His eyes looked beyond Carrese, beyond the others, beyond the panelled walls of the room—to what? To the final irony that mocks all achievement? To the final truth that might wash out all the lies that had gone before?

  “It is true,” said Orgagna steadily.

  In that moment, they saw the greatness in him.

  There was a long pause. Not a muscle twitched in the craggy face of the old man. His eyes were steady and he stood rigid as a rock. Then he opened his hand and the photographs fluttered to the floor. Then the grim lips parted and the voice that came from them was low and sad, yet terrible as a trumpet blast. Orgagna stood, eyes half-closed, like a man awaiting sentence.

  “Always, since you were a child, I tried to teach you that it was the house that mattered and the name. Keep the house strong and no wind could blow it down. Keep the name clean and all the dogs in the world could bay against it till they burst. A man should keep his sins outside the house and keep his faith inside. I taught you that—as your father taught me. To preserve the house and to preserve you, I was prepared to kill my wife’s son. I trusted you with my own child. You destroyed her, too, as you destroyed the name and the house.”

  Elena screamed and the others gasped as the knife came up, swift and sure, driving upward into the heart with all the weight of the strong old body behind it. Orgagna made no move to stay it, but took it full in the chest.

  For one suspended moment of shock they sat there, seeing the old man, gaunt and terrible standing over the body of his master. Then they started forward.

  Granforte’s sharp command drove them back.

  “Sit down! Sit down all of you!”

  They sat rigid on the edge of their chairs watching him as he bent over the body, while George Harlequin, unbidden, went to the door and locked it, lest the servants came crowding in, and drew the heavy curtains so that no one could see from outside. Then he switched on all the lights so that the room blazed with the baroque splendour of the ancient name of Orgagna.

  The old man was still standing in the middle of the floor, rigid as a cataleptic. George Harlequin took him by the arm and led him unresisting to a chair. Captain Granforte still knelt over the body of Vittorio Orgagna. After a while, he straightened up. His moon face was grim. His limpid eyes were hard as pebbles. Then he began to speak:

  “I was expecting this—or something like it. I did not know how it would come, or what would lead to it. I could only wait and see. When it came, I let it happen because that was best for everyone, even for him.” He looked down at Vittorio Orgagna with something akin to pity. “You ask me how I knew? From the typescript of your story, Mr. Ashley, I saw the nature of the information you wanted to buy. I understood the violence to which it could lead. Your friend Harlequin—and he is your friend more than you know—told me that the photostats were missing. A check in Sant’Agata revealed the relationship of Enzo Garofano with the Carrese family and with the house of Orgagna. A study of the marital history of His Excellency gave me a dozen motives as well as a clue to the location of the photostats. When I went up to examine the cutting from which Garofano had been thrown, there were signs of a struggle, although the ground had been raked and the leaves scattered to conceal it. I found a shred of cloth from Garofano’s coat and there were leaves in his shoes and the stain of a crushed orange on his soles. The barman gave me the full story, after a little persuasion, and my colleagues in Naples are still looking for a man from Naples who offered Garofano a lift from Sorrento and brought him here to the villa. It was simple enough; and it would have been even simpler if any of you had chosen to be honest with me. Now…!”

  He stuck his thumbs in his belt and faced them, challengingly. There was something strangely sinister about this soft pudgy man who stood, undaunted by all the magnificence of the house of Orgagna, with the dead body of the master of the house at his feet.

  “Now, you will listen to me, all of you! There is not one of you in this room who has not had his part in this death, or in the one which went before. The old one,” he pointed dramatically at Carlo Carrese who sat bolt upright in the chair, his eyes wide and staring, his mouth slack, “who will suffer more than any of you, although I think he is less guilty than most. You, Elena Carrese, who have lied and cheated and connived at murder and extortion to hold a man who was tired of you. You, signora,” his soft finger thrust now at Cosima, “who loved a man who was not your husband and whose afternoon under the olive trees was the reason for the death of Enzo Garofano. You, Mr. Ashley, because in the name of news, you were prepared to lie and bribe and so create the situation out of which all this comes. Even you, Tullio Riccioli, because you come scavenging round the rubbish of other men’s sins in the hope of a profit for yourself. All of you arc involved. Against each one of you I can invoke the law on one charge or another. So…”

  He broke off and looked around at their tense, strained faces. Then he dropped his voice to a whisper and went on in a low, crackling stream of commands.

  “So, when you leave this room tonight, you will forget everything that has happened, except that the old one has been in failing health for some time. He has been erratic and subject to fits of anger. Tonight, for no reason at all, he attacked the master with this knife, and before any of us realised what happened, His Excellency was dead.” He gave them no time to question or protest, but hurried on. “And if you ask me why I tell you this, I will explain very simply. A week from now there is an election. An election on which the stability of this country depends and her hope of progress over the next ten years. On the result of that election depend employment for the workless, food for the hungry, education for the children, schools, hospitals, all that peace and stable government can bring to us. You will remember that. You will remember that a lie cannot alter what has been done and that the indiscreet truth may wreck everything of good that is still possible to be done. Do you understand?”

  “No!” said Richard Ashley.

  Granforte whirled on him.

  “Why not?”

  Wearily Ashley tried to explain it to him:

  “Because you can never bury the truth so deep that it can’t be dug up. Because you can never hide it so long that someone doesn’t remember it. Because it’s safer to get it out, over and done with, before it festers into a lie and corrupts more and more people. That’s the trouble with this country. That’s the trouble with Europe. Everybody knows the truth but not enough people try to tell it, except fools like me who get their heads beaten for their pains.”

  “Are you prepared to tell the whole truth, Ashley?” It was the flat precise voice of George Harlequin cutting across the rising flow of his argument.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “About yourself and Cosima and Carlo Carrese and Tullio here, and me and Granforte, all the tangled relationships and still more tangled motives.”

  “I’m prepared for that—yes.”

  “But can you guarantee that it will be printed?”

  Ashley looked up at him in surprise.

  “You know I can’t guarantee that. No one can. A newspaper works on limited space and caters for the daily reader interest. It’s impossible to…”

  “It’s impossible to tell the whole truth, and you know it,” said Harlequin bluntly. “It’s the thing we’re all up against, my dear fellow. Even if you could tell it, most people haven’t the patience to read it or the courage to listen to it. They want headlines and they get headlines, because the headlines make life look nice and simple and uncomplicated—black and white, good and evil, farce and tragedy. But you can’t run a country like that. You can’t govern a nation like that. It’s not a machine, it’s people. A
nd the only one who knows the truth about people is God Almighty. I’m not sure that He’s very happy with the knowledge either. Why not be reasonable about it? Let the dead bury their dead. And if you don’t want to bury the truth, why not let it sleep a while? Who’s the loser? Not you. Not…”

  Abrupt and nerve-shattering the telephone rang. Ashley leapt up to answer it. Captain Granforte barred his way.

  “Let him go, Captain,” said George Harlequin. “Let him do what he wants.”

  Granforte stepped aside and Ashley stood with the receiver in his hands, listening to the crackling, impersonal voices saying “Pronto! Pronto! Pronto!” all the way up to Rome, and looking down at the dead face of Vittorio d’Orgagna and the blood that spread out over his white shirt-front. The ‘prontos’ started again in descending scale—Rome, Terracina, Naples, Castellammare, Sorrento—and finally, Hansen came on.

  “Pronto! Hansen speaking.”

  “This is Ashley… Sorrento.”

  “Great to hear you, Ashley boy! Great, great! What’s news?”

  “I’ve got the Orgagna story. All of it, beginning to end.”

  “You have?”

  “Yeah. At this moment I’m standing in…”

  “Kill it,” said Hansen succinctly.

  “What?” He stared stupidly at the receiver.

  “Kill it. Take a week off and enjoy yourself. Then come back here.”

  “But… but I don’t understand. This is big news, Hansen. Orgagna’s dead. He…”

  “The biggest news at this end, sonny boy, is that Harold P. Halsted, President of the Monitor chain, has been appointed U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Italy. Therefore, all Italian scare news from this source is out. O-u-t! Out! He’s Ambassador now, but he still underwrites the pay-cheques. Didn’t you get the note I sent you with the money? Don’t you read the papers? Where’ve you been all this time?”

  “On a story, remember? The Orgagna story.”

  “Yeah. I remember. Seems you missed some of the angles, doesn’t it?”

  He heard Hansen chuckle boisterously and the line went dead in his ear. The others watching him saw his face crumple and shrink like that of a child about to burst into tears. The receiver was still in his hand when he turned round and said stupidly:

  “They—they killed the story.”

  “I would have told you,” said George Harlequin, “if only you’d given me time. I’ve had a watching brief on it for months—as I’ve had on you.”

  “When a man is dead,” asked Granforte of no one in particular, “why is a story so important?”

  But Ashley did not hear him. He stood there, with the receiver in his hand, staring into the black mouthpiece until Cosima came and took him by the hand and led him to a chair beside her own.