The Death of Men

by Allan Massie

  ‘They would rather he was put to death than that they should be compelled to negotiate,’ I replied.

  ‘What will you do with the letter?’

  ‘Publish it. Then perhaps … well, people will write demanding real negotiations. I don’t write that sort of advocate’s piece myself, but I can arrange it. Others will make the demand spontaneously. If the demand is powerful enough, you never know. It’s an outside chance … but if you take the letter to Gianni it will be buried.’

  Nico handed me an envelope. ‘Put it in that,’ he said.

  It should have felt like an important decision. Yet, in all of us, there was this lack of conviction that came from the feeling that the game was being played according to inexorable rules; rules that were fixed. They couldn’t believe that their actions would save their father; I that mine would tear the Compromise apart and destroy the State.

  I worked out this analysis later over a beer in the Apostles. I had never experienced this lassitude in a crisis before, this sense of impotence; and I also brooded on the curiosity that presented itself to my mind, that I, a good and loyal member of the Party, which was committed to amelioration of social conditions and a coherent programme of social and economic reform, should yet feel so strong an affinity with what I might have interpreted as nihilism, if a small voice hadn’t insisted in me that it wasn’t that at all; it was Revolution, the real, betrayed and cheated, but always desirable, Being.

  We hadn’t spoken of their brother, Bernardo, and I hadn’t breathed my suspicions which were actually a certainty. There would be time for that later. And moreover, I just couldn’t connect these two, the Poof and the Pundit, with my sensation of that boy; when you reflected, he had done what others merely dreamed of; killed his father. Or rather, sold him to the knacker’s, which might be still more deeply satisfying.

  Then Kim and Ruthie came into the caffè and straight to my table.

  ‘Have you seen Ed?’

  They sat down, not waiting for an answer; I’d been adopted as one of the gang. She stank, that Ruthie, physically and intellectually. And her talk … but, full of crap though it was, it led me seductively towards my area of interest; she was full of Tomaso and his mysterious friend. And, to do her justice, even she was breeding suspicions. She was suspicious of me too, and edgy. She kept putting her hand on Kim’s and saying things like:

  ‘Honey, I’m tired …

  ‘Honey, not more beer …

  ‘Honey…’

  I said, smiling with a resurrected verve, ‘I’ll take you to a restaurant. A fun place.’

  She looked at Kim to tell her to say no, but of course she leapt at the word fun. Fun was what she lived for; she had no conception beyond it. So she wasn’t going to play the little Dutch boy against a flood of fun. I was amused to have Ruthie tag along. She would have liked to get between us in the taxi, but of course Kim wasn’t having that. I took them to the Baths of Caracalla, where there is a restaurant strictly for the tourists, with waiters dressed as ephebes and a hulking butch gladiator who comes round and bangs a plastic sword on your table and is photographed with blondes and blue-rinsed bitches … I ordered sucking-pig and Barolo and a bottle of champagne to start with and spoke to them in Roman slang so that they would give us something I could eat. The gladiator banged his sword on his greaves; oh Jupiter. Ruthie hated every minute, but Kim’s eyes grew big with life. They were as large as soup-plates to start with. I felt her under the table and she leant over and kissed me and giggled.

  I said to her, ‘And how are you making out with Tom?’

  She pouted.

  I said, ‘I’m really concerned to know. I appreciate one guy won’t be enough for a girl like you. Believe me,’ I said through her giggles, ‘I’m not jealous, there’s enough of that emotion floating around you already. Come on, Ruthie, you tell me, how’s she making out with Tom? Here, this’ll help you.’ I poured her a glass of the muck they called champagne. ‘Come on,’ I said; but she just looked at me. ‘All the same,’ I said, ‘all the same, Kim, I bet Tom doesn’t fuck. I bet he has other interests. In fact I bet he’s a virgin. It’s a funny thing, chastity – you got any thoughts about it, Ruthie? You know how the knights used to value it. To say nothing of the good old English Public School tradition in which I was chastely bred. And why? Theory was, we all have a finite resource of energy. Sex takes it out of you – well, that’s true enough. So if you want to be a big man you have to conserve it. What do you think of that … as a theory …?’

  I talked on like this, fondling Kim all the time.

  ‘Look at the gladiator, Ruthie,’ I said. ‘You think he’s tough. Not at all. He’s wondering who he’s going to lay tonight. That’s all. He amounts to nothing, all he’s good for is laying. You agree with me, don’t you, about chastity? Do you think Tom’s up to something that he’s so chaste? Do you think the boys who have Dusa are chaste? Do you think that’s why they’re committed?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, pouring us all glasses of Barolo, ‘by rights if we want to dominate, we should keep off this stuff too. Wine is a mocker and all that. But Ruthie, you don’t really want to dominate, do you? You’re like me, politically sentimental. That’s why we’re both taken with this piece Kim, isn’t it? As for the Dusa case and guys like Tom and the real politicals there, you and me we’re nothing but voyeurs. Isn’t that so? That friend of Tom’s you’re interested in, what was his name … did he fuck? Did he drink? Bet he didn’t. Not really. And then he just vanished, yes? You don’t know where. Man of mystery? But not to the brothel, eh? You know I had a thought, I bet you couldn’t recognize him. People like you don’t really look at folk, do they?’

  And then I shuffled a pile of photographs before her, and of course, in a fury, she picked him straight, Bernardo Dusa. I had ninety per cent of a scoop.

  You may well ask – I could even ask myself – why I did it this way. She would have identified him of course if I had just rung her up, arranged to meet, bought her a coffee and laid the photographs before her. All I can say is I did it this way because I wanted to. She set me on edge. They both did. Really I wanted the gladiator to take her and I called him over to the table, but she got up and walked out. Kim stood a minute with her finger to her lips and made to follow her to the powder room, but I put my hand on her wrist and she turned her face tome, lips apart, and with that approach to grace she sometimes had, sank down beside me on the banquette. We didn’t stay there much longer …

  I woke with her beside me, the wrong girl and night and the hollow realization, brought to me straight by the tyres screaming round the corner that, despite everything, I hadn’t drunk enough. I put my hand on her damp skin; no movement; even from her, living for the flesh and in it, in no other way, no response.

  What brought me here to this decaying tenement, and why do I go angrily on?

  I pad out of bed, across the dirty tiles, to the wine bottle, a flask of white, half-full, sour and comforting. I make almost no connection with my past and I sit there in the wicker chair, nursing my glass, nursing myself, and for a moment I would like to be Tom, and know that I was going to kill.

  I could kill the girl in the bed.

  It would be as insignificant as anything I have done. That stops me.

  Another drink …

  ‘The snake,’ wrote Louis MacNeice, ‘is back on the tree.’ I remember once going to Spoleto with my friend, Hugo. A friend of ours was playing Hamlet in a production that promised some excitement; in those days we could still get excitement from the theatre … that dates my story. (Is it a story?) I say a friend of ours though then I had only met him once. Hugo knew him well enough however. Carmelo Bene, of course – how could I have forgotten it was Bene? Well, we arrived. There was also my then wife, Sarah, and Hugo’s lover from schooldays, whose name I forget but who later became a Buddhist monk. We discovered that the production was off. Bene had quarrelled with Menotti and been expelled from the Festival. At least that was the story they told us in
the bar. Consequently we drove round Spoleto with some local boys and then took the night train back to Rome. Sarah and the other boy, whatever his name was, went to sleep and Hugo and I sat up talking Malcolm Lowry and drinking a bottle of brandy all the way back. At some stop a woman got on the train with a chicken on a string, which is of course a figure that recurs to the doomed Consul throughout the book, and especially before his death. Hugo and I were both staggered by the enormous symbolic importance of this coincidence, which was certainly one that would have delighted old Malc himself.

  Another drink, looking at him.

  What would that girl in the bed make of an old woman leading a chicken on a string onto a night train through the mountains? I’ll tell you, it would mean nothing to her. That’s right. She would be right. The reason I fuck her is in the hope that what she knows about life is in the end sufficient; all there is to know …

  I wish I could believe any of that.

  We live in a time that must have revolution, some revolution, or it will perish; of vacancy and inanity. That’s it: we are our own Barbarians. Kim turns in the bed, with a soft moan. What pleasure that thought would give me if I loved her. There is a streak of new grey light comes across the piazza, and a scream of tyres again, and doors banging.

  The feet, tipped with metal, come up my stairs. And the knock on the door comes, absolutely correctly, with the dawn.

  After that, it’s not played according to rule. They are polite; threatening in itself, admittedly. Three of them, two uniformed and the other in the grey suit of a serious man. Of the two in uniform, one was an officer, the other a gorilla. They took their time over pretending to establish my identity. I had suggested we go through to the kitchen, explaining that there was a girl in my bed.

  ‘She’s an American girl,’ I said, ‘she would be alarmed …’

  They were civil and understanding, but they didn’t suggest I put on anything more suitable than the towel I had wrapped round me when I heard the knock.

  ‘You saw two of the Dusa brothers yesterday. Why?’

  I lit a cigarette and poured myself another glass of wine. ‘Yes,’ I said, planting the flask on the table beside me. I gestured towards it. They declined.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m a journalist, as you know. They’re news.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have thought you were exactly sympathetic towards them. Yet I understand they sought the interview …’

  ‘I would hardly say that. Unprofessional. And as for any differences, I’m naturally sympathetic towards them in their present position… it’s a very human …’

  ‘But, politically …’

  ‘Politically, as I’ve no doubt you know, Captain, I’m a member of the PCI, and you know what their line is on this question. So, as an individual, of course I sympathize with the Dusa family – which of us doesn’t – but beyond that, I agree with the Central Committee of my Party that we must rely on police enquiries.’

  ‘And you would of course be prepared to help in any way with these?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The man in grey looked atme with mournful brown eyes. The uniformed men shuffled about, as if the action was too slow for their taste. Yet policemen should be accustomed to it. That’s what their life’s like after all; long periods of inertia interrupted by sporadic action.

  He said, ‘A case like this, it is necessary to cast a wide net. You know that. I have read some of your journalism, Signor Burke, with admiration if not always agreement. Your piece on van Meer, for instance, perceptive even if not in the final analysis wholly convincing. To me, that is. So it is like fishing a lake. You cast your net and you don’t at all know what you may come up with. For instance, last night, you will have heard, doubtless, we received a message that Dusa’s body is in fact in a lake up in the Abruzzi mountains. Now, you can take it from me, it is absurd. A lake in the Abruzzi, why would they put him there? And indeed how? And it is unlikely that he is yet dead; you, Signor Burke, may know quite certainly that he isn’t, with your privileged communication with the Dusa family. But of course we must investigate. We will find nothing. Probably the lake is still frozen. Who knows? Why do they do it, you may ask?’

  ‘They do it to make us look silly,’ said the uniformed lieutenant.

  ‘Perhaps. Anything which makes us look silly undermines the State. To be quite honest, that is the basis of my personal dislike of journalists. It’s not the facts which they discover that make me disapprove; it’s their motive. States are fragile. They are too easily destroyed. But a lake in the Abruzzi? It is absurd. Do you know the Abruzzi, Signor Burke?’

  ‘Not well.’

  ‘A wild country. You could of course hide anything there. Tell me, do you know the other Dusa brother, Bernardo?’

  ‘I only met any of the Dusa brothers today, for the first time …’

  ‘A pity. He sounds the most interesting of them. You know he has disappeared?’

  It was transparent. Impossible of course that any policeman, even one so obviously classed as ‘a thinking cop’ as this one, could actually find Bernardo interesting. I stood up.

  ‘I’m going to make some coffee,’ I said, ‘I’ve been drinking wine too long. I woke feeling thirsty. Yes, I had heard something about him. It sounds a foolishness, as though he took fright at a shadow. That’s all.’

  Out of the windows, across the roof-tops, the East was reddening. Through a gap in the chimney-pots I could see the pine trees of the Palatine. I wished the policemen would go away; their patience is always exhausting.

  ‘We’ve been checking up on his friends. You know how it is. I wondered if I might ask you to look at these photographs.’

  He spread them before me on the table. Young men, mostly with beards; those without them possibly the same young men in unbearded state; the faces of the feeling, self-important young.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Who are these?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. Are there any you recognize?’

  ‘They all look like every third boy in this quarter. You can see them all or their doubles down there at the Farnese Cinema every evening.’

  He sighed.

  ‘No doubt,’ he said. ‘Nevertheless, would you please look at these more carefully? After all, you yourself spoke of the importance of routine police work in this case. This is part of it. I’m being unusually patient, Signor Burke.’

  I didn’t say, ‘You’re being a damn sight more patient than the police who turned up here and slapped me across the face, turned the apartment inside out and locked me up for a couple of nights last October, after I wrote that piece about Moroni, the DC Deputy from Taranto.’

  Instead I sighed in my turn, sat down and, picking up a pencil, pushed the photographs about with it. The boy Tomaso was there, his face shining out from the others. I kept a bored Oxford look on mine.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘nobody.’ Then I hesitated – I pushed at one of a rat-faced boy with a wisp of beard. ‘Maybe him, but I don’t know where.’

  ‘You disappoint me,’ said the Captain. ‘I expected you to be more intelligent.’ With his nail he pushed forward the photograph of Tomaso.

  Through all that followed, the shoulder-shruggings, the smiling denials, the persistent questioning, the ‘if you say so’s’ and so on, I wondered when they were going to wake up Kim and ask her the same question; and when they left, about two hours later, I still couldn’t believe they hadn’t done so. It made no sense to me at all, since it seemed likely that it was through Kim that they had made the connection between me and Tomaso. But did they take the next step and link him to Corrado as well as Bernardo, or did that idea still seem too far-fetched to them?

  Kim woke. Stretched herself like an advertisement and showered, came towelled from the water, her hair clinging to her neck and shoulders, sat in a chair, her eyes heavy, looking like the wrong sort of morning, not beautiful at all. What she would be in time, sullen and fleshy. She babbled of a screen test she should have ha
d, that had been postponed. She complained of this and that, and that and this. I saw in her America, perpetual adolescent, promoting its drugged moribund culture of sensation across the globe; great American word, global.

  I said, ‘Can you find your cousin Tomaso?’

  ‘I told you he’s not on the phone. It’s crazy, not being on the phone.’

  ‘Look, you see him though.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘he said he would be away for five days. Said he would call me when he got back.’

  ‘So he calls you?’

  ‘That’s right. It’s crazy, like I said.’

  ‘And he’s away for five days. Get me in touch with him when he calls you. It’s urgent.’

  ‘OK, sure. I dunno, maybe I should go back to California. What do you think, Kit, I mean at least there when they promise you a screen test, they show up like. Right? Ruthie’s no help either. This guy said he was like a producer too.’

  I went round to the office, past the rows of policemen that still acted as barriers and checkpoints all over the city.

  Antonio said, ‘Ciao, Chris. I’m just sending down to the bar for a coffee and cheese sandwich. What about you?’

  ‘I’ll take the sandwich, but a beer with it.’

  ‘Fine,’ he said, ‘what about the Abruzzi lake then?’

  ‘A joke, quite a good one.’

  He shook his head at me. My reaction was too English, frivolous. Antonio, despite his deep inherited respect for the English – didn’t we help Garibaldi? – still can’t accept our frivolity.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it is not like that, you understand. On the contrary, it’s very serious, a test, don’t you see? They are experimenting with their credibility. The number of troops the Government sends to search the lake, which, by the way, is certainly still snow-bound and under several centimetres of ice, will serve to indicate how unnerved they are. That in turn will help the PDP to determine how far they need be prepared to compromise.’