Picture of Defeat

by John Harris

  Copyright & Information

  Picture of Defeat

  First published in 1988

  Copyright: Juliet Harris; House of Stratus 1988-2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of John Harris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755102495 9780755102495 Print

  075512751X 9780755127511 Mobi/Kindle

  075512779X 9780755127795 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  John Harris, wrote under his own name and also the pen names of Mark Hebden and Max Hennessy.

  He was born in 1916 and educated at Rotherham Grammar School before becoming a journalist on the staff of the local paper. A short period freelancing preceded World War II, during which he served as a corporal attached to the South African Air Force. Moving to the Sheffield Telegraph after the war, he also became known as an accomplished writer and cartoonist. Other ‘part time’ careers followed.

  He started writing novels in 1951 and in 1953 had considerable success when his best-selling The Sea Shall Not Have Them was filmed. He went on to write many more war and modern adventure novels under his own name, and also some authoritative non-fiction, such as Dunkirk. Using the name Max Hennessy, he wrote some very accomplished historical fiction and as Mark Hebden, the ‘Chief Inspector’ Pel novels which feature a quirky Burgundian policeman.

  Harris was a sailor, an airman, a journalist, a travel courier, a cartoonist and a history teacher, who also managed to squeeze in over eighty books. A master of war and crime fiction, his enduring novels are versatile and entertaining.

  Author’s Note

  After its liberation by the Allies in 1943 following the landings at Salerno, Naples was in a very poor state of health. Called the only eastern city in the west and the place where Europe joined Africa, the city had been looted by the Germans, the British, the Americans, the French, the Poles and anyone else who happened to pass by. Italian art treasures disappeared to all corners of the globe and some have still not been found.

  The situation was confounded by the fact that AMGOT, Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory, largely in the hands of the American army, was infiltrated by Italian crooks.

  To confuse matters further, the surrounding countryside contained bands of partisans who included Communists, genuine patriots, escaped prisoners of war, and ex-soldiers of the Italian army who were simply trying to avoid being called up to fight for the Germans. Alongside them, but operating solely for gain, were gangs of bandits – some of them Allied deserters, some crooks who had been too hastily freed from gaol by the opponents of the Fascist régime – who had armed themselves with weapons picked up on the battlefields.

  Unfortunately, also, too many AMGOT officers, chosen for their ability to speak Italian, turned out to be contacts – even relations – of the crooks. Though many attempts were made to break up the rackets, the AMGOT officers closed ranks and those who dug too deeply into the activities of the underworld found they lost promotion. With Naples starving and its people willing to sell both body and soul to obtain a meal for themselves or their families, it was a situation ripe for exploitation, which made it very difficult for anybody to be honest.

  For details I am very much indebted to Naples ’44, by Norman Lewis, and Rome, ’44 by Raleigh Trevelyan.

  Part One

  One

  Naples smelled of burned-out houses and choked sewers. In every restaurant braziers used a form of incense to kill the smell that somehow managed to seep up through the floor.

  There were ruins everywhere. Whole streets were blocked with landslides of masonry, bomb craters and twisted vehicles, and there was no water because the air raids in August had smashed the mains and they had never been properly repaired. Everyone was dependent on the water sellers who brought water round from a well somewhere near Santa Lucia, because, to finish off the damage done by Allied bombers, the departing Germans had sent round demolition squads to destroy anything that worked and might still be of value. With people forced to use dubious sea water for cooking, there was a great sale of distilling devices. Most of them didn’t work and had been put together by crooks quick to seize on the city’s misery to make money.

  Field Security had taken over the Pizzoni Palace, one of the splendid buildings on the Riviera di Chiaia at the Santa Lucia end of the Via Caracciolo. It was a three-storey building looking out over the Castel dell’Ovo and the Porto Santa Lucia, and was decorated in ornate Neapolitan marble. Field Security occupied the main floor at the head of a splendid frescoed staircase.

  Every room seemed to have wall-to-wall mirrors, the painted ceilings were hung with enormous chandeliers, and the gilded furniture made the place look like Versailles. But there was no hot water or heating and the lavatory was in what appeared to be a scullery on the ground floor. There was nothing to indicate who Field Security were and most Neapolitans thought they were the British equivalent of the recently departed SS.

  The view at the front of the Palace was the Bay of Naples, the sea, statues and palm trees – all contrived for the pleasure of the nobility who had once lived there. The rear windows, however, looked down on an ugly little group of narrow courts where most of the rooms had been taken over by people running a variety of small businesses – an old man who made ornaments, brooches and candlesticks from bone, a man whose job was printing pamphlets for the Communists, a tinker, a broom-maker, a tripe seller with her chalked notice, Trippa Assortita, a man who sold vegetables, a macaroni vendor, a basket maker. With their little handcarts parked in front of their premises, the screaming children, the women doing their washing or preparing meals, sometimes it looked like a crowd scene from a provincial opera.

  But Naples itself, of course, was like a scene from an opera. Everybody knew everybody else, and the lowly who inhabited the rear of the palace had formed their own little villages and, because most of what they needed was obtainable on the spot, rarely left them. Naples was full of such rookeries, all teeming with people, many of them living as whole families in single windowless rooms and conducting most of their lives on the pavement outside, and the city was like an anthill, always occupied with the activities of petty crime.

  Liberated the previous autumn by the Anglo-American landing at Salerno, Naples had risen against its German occupiers and fought them for three days with great loss of life. Now, struggling to get back on its feet but exhausted by the war, it was starving. People had been trudging miles outside the city to raid farms and dig up anything eatable they could find, impervious to the threats of the furious farmers, even trying to net sparrows and warblers drawn by the fruit in the orchards. Now, after the winter, the land was bare and, near Zi’ Teresa’s at Santa Lucia, the rocks, which were normally covered with limpets, had been stripped bare by children using screwdrivers and old arm
y knives. The winkles had been taken long since. Though the limpets by no means made a meal, if boiled in a broth of odds and ends of chicken intestines, they gave a faint flavour that was better than nothing. The Neapolitans could not afford to be choosy and, since crooks were running the black market, it didn’t pay to enquire too deeply into what was going on.

  But it was beginning to look as if Tom Pugh had, because somebody had tried to toss a hand-grenade into the back of the Jeep he was driving.

  Tom Pugh had arrived in Italy on the first day of the Salerno landing. Some of the men ahead of him were still laid out under blankets awaiting burial, and shooting was still going on. Since Field Security saw fit to arm its members only with Webley pistols and five rounds of ammunition, he wondered what the hell he was there for.

  He was in Field Security because he had spent three years in Italy before the war and spoke excellent Italian. After university he had qualified as a lawyer and got himself married on the strength of it. But, just as he was settling down in the firm of Bannister, Hacker and Lee, his wife had run off with the junior partner and, since he had some ability as a painter – at school he had walked off with every art prize available – he had bitterly decided to give up law and chance his arm as an artist. After three years of existing on a shoestring – easier in Italy because food was cheaper and it was warmer and the Italians liked artists – Hitler had ruined everything by starting the war. Since he was a long way from a recruiting office and Italy was not at first involved, he had stayed where he was; but then Mussolini had shown clear signs that he intended to join Hitler, and Pugh had deposited the few canvasses he considered worth keeping with Signora Foa, the old lady with whom he lodged at Severino Campagna near Frascati, burned the ones he didn’t and caught what turned out to be the last British ship out of Brindisi.

  Safely back in England, he had immediately been called up and, like other men who were found to possess linguistic ability, had been directed into the Intelligence Corps. He had vaguely expected to spend his time interviewing German prisoners and extracting from them, by a variety of devious means, information that would eventually lead to the winning of the war.

  It hadn’t turned out like that.

  Four months of basic training had been followed by two months at the Corps Depot at Winchester which taught him nothing except how to ride a motorcycle and how to turn round on a parade ground in good military fashion without falling over his own feet. Only in the final weeks of his course in the north of England had he received any instruction on how to behave as an Intelligence operator.

  He’d joined Field Security happily enough, however, because Captain Gwyn Griffiths Jones, who was now his commanding officer, had been at school with him and had assured him that, with his knowledge of law, art and the Italian language, he was just the man they wanted. Gwyn Jones had always looked after Pugh, keeping the bullies off him when he’d been small; when Pugh gave up law they’d lost touch until war had brought them together again.

  It was only when he was well and truly part of it that Pugh had begun to wonder if Intelligence was the best job for him. Perhaps, he thought, he might have been better in a bigger unit where he didn’t have to work so much alone. But he’d always worked alone, which was probably why he’d opted out of law for painting, but now he found he had no friends in England and sometimes there seemed to be almost too much emptiness about him.

  He had arrived in North Africa soon after Alamein and the American landings in the west had carried the Allies to French-owned Morocco and Algeria. Since the fighting had appeared to be over there, his job was supposed to be to bridge the gap between the military and the civilian population but, since neither he nor the military knew exactly what that meant, liaison was usually less than satisfactory. His officer had been given the job because he not only spoke Spanish – which, as it had the same Latin base, was considered to be similar to French – but also had spent some years in West Africa and mastered the Temne and Mende tribal languages, with which it was assumed he could talk to Arabs.

  Because North Africa was the first of the Allied victories, nobody knew what the duties of Field Security consisted of but it was laid down that its men were not to be used merely as interpreters, who were considered to be two-a-penny types of a much lesser breed. Nobody had any idea of the political situation they were facing or that the Arabs were even then considering ways and means of getting rid of their French overlords, and most of their activities were based on trial and error. Almost the first thing they did was to release from gaol a man who had convinced them he was an ardent patriot who had been imprisoned for his stand against the Germans. By the time they discovered he was a leader of an Algerian gang under sentence of death for murder it was too late and he had vanished.

  It was as they were trying to work out how they might recapture him that Field Security was reorganised for the invasion of Italy. Pugh ended up attached to the American Fifth Army and four days later sailed for the landing at Salerno. A month later Jones heard of him and he found himself in Naples.

  They were now well established. Only Captain Jones lived in the Pizzoni Palace. The sergeants had small apartments in the Casa Calafati, a large house nearby, which had been turned into a sort of residential hotel without catering, and took their meals in an army canteen. Pugh occupied an apartment on the top landing. It had a parquet floor and, as you entered, the door of the wardrobe at the other side of the room automatically swung open and the loose parquet blocks leapt and danced all the way to the window. The light switch was a turntable type that had to be twisted completely about four times before contact could he made, and the lavatory was at least a kilometre away, at the end of a blocked-off passage long enough to bowl bumpers down, and not without hazards: the lock didn’t work and the door was too far away to jam a foot against. Nevertheless, the Casa Calafati, though like an icebox during the winter, was comfortable enough by Neapolitan standards. Pugh had a bedroom and a small sitting room with a sofa, and a gas ring to make coffee.

  To give the place a lived-in atmosphere, other residents had been allowed to remain. Two prostitutes occupied rooms on the floor below, so that customers tramped regularly up the stairs. But the prostitutes were cheerful souls who sometimes sent up plates of spaghetti to the soldiers in exchange for cigarettes. The other sergeants in the place were often away, occupied on some task in the outer spaces of their area, but Sergeant Patrick O’Mara – who displayed all the contrariness of the Southern Irish by electing to fight for the nation he insisted had oppressed his homeland – was usually around, often sharing his room with a small plump Italian girl he intended to marry when the regulations were slackened.

  ‘’Twill work out,’ he said. ‘I’m Irish. She’s Italian. And the Irish and the Italians have always been nearest to God’s heart. You’ve only to look at the number of Celts an’ Latins in the calendar of saints to see that.’

  Another sergeant, Plummer, had a girl who merely turned up from time to time, while Sergeant Waddilove preferred to take advantage of the proximity of the prostitutes, because he always seemed to be too busy for any other dalliance. Pugh, who suspected that Waddilove had his finger in a few other pies, had so far lived a lonely celibate life, not entirely through choice but because he hadn’t yet met someone whose chatter he could stand for long. He had always been a self-reliant man, but he had become even more of a loner after his marriage had broken up. Moreover, a loner with a quick temper which had not helped to win him a lot of friends.

  The owner of the house, Maria Calafati, claimed to be a countess, but there were so many women in Italy claiming to be contessas it was hard to tell. She was tall and gaunt, with purple sacs under her eyes and greying hair pulled back from her face. Normally she wore black and always smoked too much – the cigarettes gifts or bought on the black market – and she was an insomniac, so they could always hear her at night as she lay on her bed smoking, reading and coughing.

  The work was not arduous, but it became appa
rent at once that the man who had imagined that a few British and American Security agents could put Naples to rights must have been out of his mind. It had been a thieves’ kitchen as long ago as the days when Tiberius had his villa at Capri, and Neapolitans had been learning new tricks ever since. The Field Security Sections – usually an officer and a dozen sergeants who were located in all the principal cities or ports where there were British troops – had taken their measure within a matter of days, though it hadn’t done either side a lot of good. The Neapolitans continued exactly as before and the Field Security Section, having come to the conclusion that never in a million years would they change the Neapolitans, had simply nibbled at the edges and hoped for the best.

  They had captured a carload of Fascist police archives and documents from the German Consulate, including a black file containing a mass of denunciations of Italians by other Italians – most of them useless because they were the work of malicious or envious neighbours and consisted of nothing but vague descriptions, as if a guilt complex had prevented the accusers from being too exact. No one was very certain of the future, anyway. The Neapolitans were just beginning to draw breath after the liberation and wonder how they were going to live, because the Allies, concerned with fighting the Germans, had never given enough attention to making sure Naples was fed. As one of the men Pugh arrested told him, they had been buggered about by the Germans and now they were being buggered about by the Allies. ‘When the Germans were here,’ he said, ‘we ate occasionally. Now we eat very occasionally.’

  To the hungry Neapolitans food had become all-important. The one thing in the mind of every one of them was how to produce enough food for themselves and their families. They would eat anything, and go to any lengths to obtain it, though they had never been unused to hunger because, in the south, Italians had often eaten little more than bread dipped in olive oil; but now, at the end of the winter, hunger had become starvation.