Every Picture Tells a Story

by Gregory Dowling

  “Well, it was obvious to me afterward that Padoan must have been taken in by the arrest of Chiara. He must have thought that I was a possible new recruit—or perhaps I was already part of the movement. You see there were so many subversive groups that nobody could keep track of all of them. Anyway, I think the general idea was to sound me out, if that is the expression. To test my reactions. Of course at the time, as I say, I just tried to convince myself it was mere academic chatchit, with nothing behind it. After all, the real terrorists, I told myself, were in clandestinità and did nothing that might expose themselves. Well, a little later I said I had to go, and just before leaving I went to the—the john?”

  “Yes.”

  “When I came out Padoan was showing Toni something in a cupboard. I caught a glimpse of what looked like a machine gun. Well, now I wonder if I wasn’t in fact deliberately supposed to see this, but at the time this didn’t strike me. They closed the cupboard and I said nothing, and I left the place alone. When I next saw Toni I never mentioned the gun.”

  “Didn’t you tell anyone about it?”

  “No. This, you see, is the point of the story. If I thought of doing anything at all it was something vague on the lines of, um, have another—another wag chin with Padoan about the whole business, try and, well, persuade him of the foolishness of the whole armed struggle.… I mean, very vague ideas. Stupid ideas in fact. And these didn’t come to anything of course. But as for going to the police, well, it hardly occurred to me. I mean, one might not agree with the terrorists, but one wasn’t an informer either. This was the climate. And particularly I didn’t feel any loyalty or warmth to the system after Chiara’s arrest.”

  “I see.”

  “And then two weeks later there was a raid on an arms depot near Mestre in which two carabinieri were killed. And it was then that Padoan disappeared and evidence was found that showed he was involved. More than involved in fact: he’d probably planned the whole thing. And planned it most—most cold-bloodedly. The two carabinieri were killed deliberately: they were carefully eliminated before the terrorists moved in on the store. As he would have put it, it was una questione di effìcienza.”

  “What?” I said so sharply that Alvise jumped in his chair, spilling more wine.

  “Una questione di effìcienza,” he repeated, in a prissy tone, obviously an imitation of Padoan’s.

  “That’s just what the little bastard who burned my paintings said to me.” I was staring at a bound thesis on “river imagery” in Waverley on the table but I was seeing that obscene unmoving white mask and hearing that quiet uninflected voice come from beneath it.

  “Little, you say?”

  “Yes. I suppose a bit—well, just a big bigger than you. And yes, a quiet, sort of precise voice, like—like the one you just used. And pale eyes that never moved.”

  “Yes—yes. That is Padoan. Well, I can’t say it surprises me. This whole business is exactly Padoan’s style. Particularly since there is no attempt to disguise the fact that the aim behind the killings is to intimidate—to create terror.” He finished his wine. “Which was obviously part of what they intended in killing the two carabinieri in Mestre. And of course I couldn’t get the murder of those two men off my conscience. I kept telling myself that I could have spoken about what I’d seen in Padoan’s flat.”

  I didn’t say anything for a while, and then thought that my silence might seem accusatory, so said, “What about Toni? What did you do about him?”

  “I spoke to him and he swore that he wasn’t involved at all: he’d merely flirted with the idea of getting involved. And I believed him. That innocent ineffectual look of his which you mentioned—well, it convinced me. I was the ingenuous one there, the right sucker.”

  “So this Padoan was never caught,” I said.

  “No. There was a rumor that he had gone to Africa and got involved in some little revolution there, but nothing certain was discovered. He’s collected prison sentences for hundreds of years over here, so, well, he’d have to be pretty crazy to come back. But then he probably is crazy: you should have seen him talking about spreading terror.…”

  “Thank you, I’ve seen him spreading it.”

  “Yes … yes, you probably have. These people…” He shook his head—not a slow sad headshake, more like a dog after a swim.

  Chiara emerged from the bedroom. “Let’s talk just a little more quietly,” she said. She shifted the books from one of the chairs onto the floor and sat down with us.

  Alvise said, “Martin probably has had the pleasure of meeting Padoan.”

  She gave a melodramatic shiver. “I’ve only heard of him from Alvise, but that was enough.” She spoke in English again. She obviously wasn’t as fluent as Alvise, but she spoke with a natural confidence.

  “But I just don’t get what’s in these people’s minds,” I said. “I mean, who do they think they’re going to win over like this?”

  “It’s useless expecting any idea of rational behavior from them,” Alvise said. “You only have to see the faces of the irreducibili in court to see that they’re obsessed people. Winning people over doesn’t come into their schemes of things.”

  “But they must want some kind of solidarity from the working classes; otherwise—”

  “You’ve obviously got a very old-fashioned view of them: Che Guevara and all that. Power to the people. But these people have stopped looking outward like that completely. This was obvious when they killed Guido Rossa, no?”

  “Was it? I mean, er, who was he?”

  “He worked for Italsider in Genova and he informed the police about a fellow worker who was mixed up with the Red Brigades. Put the finger on him, right? This must have been 1978 or 1979—about the time of the Moro kidnapping. So they killed him. And that was the end of their Robin Hood image. I mean, you’d have thought that, well, a little elementary common sense would tell them that the way to conquer the workers’ hearts was not by assassinating workers.” He did another wet-dog shake. “And in fact there was a big reaction against them, with many more denunciations everywhere—but did they learn? Oh, no, they went right on with their tactics of punishing the informers, even taking it out on people’s relatives when they couldn’t reach the real people. Like the Nazis.”

  “Or the Mafia,” I said.

  “Right,” he said. “Exactly right. And now, since they are completely isolated, with nobody at all believing in communism, they’ve ended up like all secret societies—obsessed with the enemy in their middle—”

  “In their what?”

  “Inside them—”

  “In their midst.”

  “Exactly. So now the few believers left are trying to create and enforce a code of secrecy like that of the Mafia—to suppress the phenomenon of pentitismo which was what broke them.” He took another glass of wine, having scattered half the contents of the one he was holding as he talked.

  “They’re crazy,” Chiara said simply. “Ecco tutto. Would you like some coffee or something?”

  “Oh, er, no, nothing thanks.” I found it difficult to switch from the Red Brigades/Nazis/Mafia to coffee. “Actually what I’d really like if you’ve got it is an aspirin. I’ve got a bit of a headache.”

  Alvise stood up, but Chiara said, “No, I know where they are: you’ll be looking in the fridge or the oven. You get the mattress out—and that’s under our bed.”

  Alvise and I made up a bed in darkness in Federica’s room. He told me that if she were to cry, one of them would come in, since an unknown face probably wouldn’t be much comfort. At that moment she sounded as if nothing would wake her. Chiara gave me the aspirin, which I knocked back with a glass of water. I then went down to the hall for my rucksack. When I came back up, I thanked them both again and said that I would crash out; my head was now feeling as if the drummer of some heavy-metal group were doing his solo inside it. I had a quick wash in their minuscule bathroom and then retired. They went to bed too, and I heard them talking quietly there, Alvise the us
ual babbling torrent, and Chiara’s voice damming him with occasional slow calm comments. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but presumably I came into it.

  I lay there listening to the baby’s rhythmical breathing and finding some kind of illogical sense of security in it. It, and presumably the aspirin too, brought my drummer to the end of his solo and I slept.

  Some hours later, however, he came back for an encore, and he’d brought a support band with him who started up a jam session in my stomach. I lay there, my head throbbing savagely, my stomach queasily playing along, and fans stomping to the beat in every muscle: my throat felt as Rod Stewart’s must after a concert. I threw off the blankets and twisted and turned, then decided I needed them, then threw them off again, sweating and shivering in rhythmic alternation.

  Well, not to go into too many distasteful details, the night was hell from then on. I vomited three times, fortunately each time into the toilet bowl. In between these bouts I got occasional snatches of sleep, but no raveled sleeves were knitted up by it. It played with my cares in fact like a kitten with a ball of wool. Most of the time I was back in jail, at one point trying to paint a Madonna with the face of Lucy, which kept turning into a white mask and mouthing the word efficiency, at another point throwing my slop bucket over a huge bonfire stoked by tongueless aliens who then became an audience of merchant bankers in Adrians’ gallery who wouldn’t let me speak above their public-school chatter, in the midst of which I kept hearing the word gimmick, each time followed by manic giggling.

  Nothing, of course, is more boring than other people’s dreams: the point was I didn’t enjoy the night.

  When Federica finally started up a little plaintive wailing at around half-past seven, Alvise came in and I croaked, “Good morning.”

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “You look a bit behind the weather.”

  “I feel awful,” I said. “Sorry. I must have eaten or drunk something.” I had of course thought of my bath of two days earlier, though wondered whether it could have taken so long to have its effect.

  He picked up Federica, who started gurgling happily, and said, “I think it’ll be the Mongolian—or the Chinese or Russian, whichever it is this year.”

  “You mean flu?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, God, I’ve brought you that, have I?”

  “No.” He smiled. “You’ve caught it off us. We both had it last week. Federica fortunately didn’t get it, but maybe we’d better move her cot into our bedroom.”

  “Well, look, I can’t possibly stay here. You’re not a hospital.” I also knew I couldn’t possibly get up.

  “Don’t worry. No trouble. It won’t even be expensive for us, because if you feel like we felt, I know you won’t want to eat anything.”

  I just made a noise of revulsion by way of answer to this.

  My temperature was taken and discovered to be forty or something: luckily I remembered that thermometers are not put under the tongue in Italy, and so not necessarily washed. Chiara was a great nurse, taking things entirely in her stride, and continuing to reassure me that there was no problem, an assurance I found it convenient to pretend to myself that I believed.

  Thus began four rather surreal days. The first day was particularly so, since I could hardly get my throbbing brain to concentrate on anything for longer than a few seconds. So when Alvise came in to tell me that he’d just heard on the radio of the death of Osgood I was able to present a convincingly bewildered reaction, because it was almost impossible for me to make any connections between yesterday and today. I had a vague feeling that I ought to be asking questions about just what they’d said on the radio, but this got no further than a feeling, and Alvise obviously realized it was useless to attempt any conversation on the matter. So I lay in the darkened room, listening to the pair of them as they talked in the kitchen, listening to the radio that Chiara had on as she did housework, listening to Federica’s intermittent complaints, listening to the occasional boat passing along the canal outside—or rather hearing all these things but taking in none of them. So the day passed, with my throbbing diminishing in intensity, the vomiting bouts stopping altogether, and even a little peckishness coming on toward evening.

  The next day I was able to sit up and read the papers. Alvise had bought La Repubblica and La Nuova Venezia, both of which had front-page headlines on the latest atrocities. NIGHT OF TERROR IN VENICE announced La Repubblica. I glanced quickly down the page, feeling terrorized myself by the possibility of seeing my name. I didn’t, so was able to start again at the top with a touch more calm. “Three deaths in twenty-four hours” was the lower-case headline, which surprised me. The night apparently hadn’t ended with the death of Osgood: to discover what had happened I skipped to the end of the article and read that an hour after the police entered Palazzo Sambon, a police boat had signaled to a boat in the Giudecca Canal to pull up for a check. The boat had at once driven off at top speed, at which point the police had opened fire, killing the man inside. He was carrying false documents, but had nonetheless been identified as Simone Gerosa, a terrorist who till that moment had been thought to be living in France. He was wearing a wig and false beard; another wig was found in the bottom of the boat, sopping wet. No explanation for this last detail had been found; there had been nothing in Palazzo Sambon to indicate that anyone had entered in wet clothes, or had left by the canal, since all the windows and doors onto the canal were shuttered and locked, and in any case the witness the police had talked to had seen them enter by the side alley.

  At this mention of a witness the paper almost dropped from my hands. I jumped back to the middle section of the article, which dealt with the second murder, that of the English art dealer Harry Osgood.

  Marina Berton, a housewife, lives on the first floor of a building that is separated from Palazzo Sambon by a narrow alley. On the evening in question she had opened the window onto the alley in order to close the shutters when she saw what she describes as “a very fat man” in the act of climbing into Palazzo Sambon. Her husband, Giuseppe Berton, was in the room with her, and when she told him what she had seen he suggested she keep watching. Signora Berton remained at the window, watching the alley, with the lights turned off in their flat in order to escape observation. The husband and wife had not forgotten the palazzo’s links with terrorism. Only one minute later Signora Berton saw a younger man come down the alley and enter by the same window. Unfortunately the alley has no lighting and she was not able to distinguish any features of the man, beyond the fact that he had a long coat. To her immense surprise only two or three minutes later a man and a woman came down the alley and entered the palazzo. Again she could distinguish nothing beyond the fact that the woman had hair of average length and was wearing trousers. It was at this point that Signor Berton decided to call the police. A minute or so later the first young man came out by the window and ran off down the alley, to be followed after another minute or so by the couple.

  The police, though commending i Signori Berton for their action, regret that they did not think to contact them earlier, since greater promptness might not only have helped to prevent the latest atrocious murder but also resulted in the capture of the three assassins. Nonetheless the police claim they have elements in their possession now that may lead to arrests very soon.

  This was probably the usual police line, I thought hopefully. Osgood was simply described as an art dealer, in Venice on business. Mention was made of past investigations into his activity and of a possible connection with the antique dealer Busetto, although no definite link had been established as yet. The identity of the two victims had induced the police to toy with the idea that the murderers might in fact have nothing to do with terrorism at all, but simply have used the outward trappings of the recent crimes by way of confusion; however this line had been conclusively disproved, not only by the fact that the terrorists themselves had not disclaimed the murders, but also by the discovery that the gun left at the scene of the crime
had been definitely identified as one stolen by terrorists in a raid on an arms store in Mestre in the 1970s.

  There was much theorizing in both newspapers over the possible motives: the link was made between the two men and the paintings that had disappeared some ten years’ before, and question marks were scattered liberally at the end of the articles. What had happened to Antonio Sambon? How was it that this ex-terrorist had been allowed to leave the country so easily, without any supervision? Could he have anything to do with the death in the building where he had once hidden himself? Why had Osgood been entering the building in the first place? Did he have an appointment with Toni Sambon? Was it possible, despite the denials of the police, that the paintings were still hidden there somewhere?

  I was even induced to ask Alvise, “Could we all be totally wrong about Toni, and in fact he’s behind the whole thing?”

  “What, the murders?”

  “Yes. I mean, everyone keeps telling me how good he was at taking people in—”

  “Yes, this is true, but are you saying that perhaps he’s working with Padoan?”

  “Well, perhaps.”

  “Padoan, whom he put the finger on, who must hate him as a complete traitor to the cause…”

  “Well, perhaps it was a bluff.”

  “And when Padoan came asking you about Toni, was that a bluff?”

  “All right, I’ll think it through a little more carefully.”

  I read with interest the full background to the Busetto murder. The police had been summoned by an anonymous phone call from the terrorists themselves; a disguised but northern voice had simply said something about the people’s justice having been carried out on the pig Busetto, and the address had been given. Later a communiqué had been left, as was customary, in a rubbish bin near the offices of Il Gazzettino. The explanation in the communiqué was rather confused, referring to Busetto’s involvement in the world of international art dealing, a parasitical world of class enemies and thieves from the people. However, the newspaper said, medical evidence had revealed that it was possible that Busetto’s death had been an accident; his weak heart might have given way under the stress of interrogation (or whatever it was the terrorists had been doing with him), and the subsequent shooting had thus been a disguise. The communiqué’s confusion merely showed the terrorists’ embarrassment at having to concoct a reasonable-sounding excuse for his “execution” by the tribunal of the people.