Picture of Defeat

by John Harris

  ‘The last of Bocco’s stock,’ he said.

  There was a shortage of glasses but they made do with cups and toasted the success of the venture. By this time, old Tassinari was almost out on his feet.

  ‘I think it’s time we got some sleep,’ Pugh said. ‘We’re going to be up most of tomorrow night.’

  As the other three headed for the comfortless store room, Tamara was in a cheerful mood, delighted that they had found a means of cheating the Germans of their loot.

  ‘It isn’t that the paintings mean much to me, Piu,’ she said happily. ‘I didn’t have much and it wouldn’t matter if I went on not having much. But I don’t like to see that monster in Germany taking what belongs to Italy.’

  As she closed the door and took off her coat, she suddenly realised she was alone in the room with Pugh and a large double bed. It didn’t seem to be a very comfortable-looking bed, and old Enrichetta had clearly not been very fussy because they had found a mouse’s nest in a pair of old shoes in the cupboard; but Tamara stared in alarm first at the bed, then at Pugh, then she turned back to the door.

  ‘I can’t stay here, Piu,’ she said quickly. ‘They think I’m your wife. They expect me to sleep in your bed.’

  She stood gazing at him over the coat she clutched to her chest. There was no sound from the floor above and only a subdued muttering from the room next door.

  ‘Take it easy,’ Pugh said gently, doing his best to avoid touching her and setting off a show of hysterics.

  ‘I am all right!’ She held up her hand to indicate she was calm but her voice was unsteady and a little higher than normal. ‘I’m not afraid. I have been fighting off men half my life. But’ – she repeated the words flatly and firmly – ‘I cannot sleep in here with you, Sergeant Piu. Not even if the Germans think I should.’

  As she moved towards the door, Pugh stepped forward and put his hand on it. They were face to face, close enough for their shoulders to be brushing.

  ‘Steady on,’ he said gently. ‘Even if you can’t sleep in here with me, you can hardly sleep next door with the other three, and you certainly can’t sleep upstairs with the Germans.’

  She slowly released the door handle and stood back, suddenly close to breakdown.

  ‘And if you leave,’ he went on, ‘they’ll ask questions. Then what will you tell them? My name and your name? That you’re Tamara Detto Banti and I’m Tom Pugh, of British Field Security, stationed in Naples and about to disappear into the blue with a number of valuable articles which they are at this moment seeking in the ruins of the Palazzo Municipale. If they knew you were Bocco Detto Banti’s daughter, they’d question you. And they have means of making you tell.’

  Her eyes were on his face. ‘What would happen if they found out?’

  ‘I would be whipped into a prisoner of war camp and they’d probably shoot Foscari, old Tassinari, Marco – and probably even you – for harbouring a British soldier.’

  Suddenly the strain they’d been under all day seemed to break inside her and she was wilting quietly from weariness. Before he knew what was happening, she was sobbing with a terrible desperation, chewing at her knuckles to keep the sound from coming out.

  Pugh put his hands on her shoulders, and she let her hands drop to her sides and leaned against him, her distrust forgotten. She was glad he was there, simply glad and grateful. He put his hands gently on her cheeks and lifted her face and held her like that until the shuddering went out of her.

  ‘That’s it. Let it go. You’ll feel better afterwards.’

  ‘Mai! Never!’ She straightened up abruptly, his words a challenge as he intended them to be. As she lifted her head, dry-eyed now, he cuffed her softly on the jaw.

  ‘I’m not going to cry, Piu,’ she said. ‘I haven’t cried since I was a child.’

  She pushed him away angrily, but behind her sharpness was a feeling of gratitude. ‘Very well,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ll sleep on the floor.’

  ‘It’ll be damned uncomfortable,’ Pugh said. ‘I’m sleeping on the bed. Fully clothed,’ he added. ‘You could have half.’

  ‘I’ll sleep on the floor.’

  He shrugged and, dragging the mattress to the floor for her, handed her the blanket and stretched out on the bare springs of the bed.

  She sat on the mattress and studied him. ‘You will be very cold, I think, Piu.’

  ‘I’ll manage.’

  She lay down and tried to sleep but she was overtired and worried, and her nerves were stretched taut. Then she became aware of Pugh tossing uncomfortably on the bed.

  ‘Sergeant Piu,’ she said softly. ‘Can you not sleep?’

  ‘No,’ he growled.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s cold.’

  She sat up, pleased to be able to talk. ‘You must have the blanket.’

  ‘If I have it, you’ll be cold.’

  There was a long silence. ‘You are still wearing your clothes?’

  ‘I’d be cold without them.’

  ‘I also am cold. You had better come and share the blanket with me.’

  ‘Much better to put the mattress on the bed and share it there. It’s softer.’

  There was a long silence then she stood up. ‘I think you are right, Piu,’ she said.

  Tamara woke slowly and unwillingly. As consciousness flooded over her she saw the low stone ceiling and the white-washed walls and for a moment thought she was in a tomb. Until reality came to her with a violent jerk, she lay tense and rigid, her breath held, terrified. Then, as she realised where she was, she felt for Pugh, whose back against hers had helped to dispel the chilliness of the basement room.

  His reassuring presence was not there. There was no sign of him, and she was suddenly scared. But, as she sat up, the door opened and Pugh entered, holding a cracked mug.

  ‘Coffee,’ he said. ‘Good enough, I suspect, to be black market American K rations.’

  She looked at him gratefully, feeling the need to apologise.

  ‘I am sorry, Piu,’ she said. ‘I should not have thought the things I thought.’

  His expression was blank. ‘What things were those?’

  She frowned. ‘I am not sure now. But they were wrong things.’ She grinned suddenly. ‘Perhaps you will now have to investigate me with the other girls you are investigating. Have I not slept with a man?’ The grin came again. ‘Perhaps there is more to it than I thought, in fact. It was certainly warmer than I expected.’

  Nine

  The day dragged. The rain had stopped but there were puddles of water everywhere and the streets were muddy. The temperature had dropped, too, so that, with the damp, it was cheerless and chilly.

  Whenever two of the people in the basement of the Ca’ di Leone came together, they found themselves discussing what was to happen that night.

  ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God,’ Marco said, ‘I’ll be glad when it’s over. Wouldn’t we be better simply to offer the pictures to the Germans?’

  ‘No,’ Tassinari snapped.

  ‘They’d pay.’

  ‘The Germans don’t pay,’ Pugh said. ‘Why should they, when they can just point a gun at you and say “I want”? They’ve already dismantled the altarpiece at Avizano. Della Croce told me. It’s in a crate labelled Beschlagnahmt – confiscated – with the initials AH – Adolph Hitler – on it. It’s going to the collection he’s building up, not for his pleasure but for his own glorification.’

  ‘An irony,’ Tassinari said cheerfully, ‘when you consider he’s started losing the war. It will be recovered.’

  ‘If it arrives,’ Pugh pointed out dryly. ‘It has to pass through a lot of voracious hands first.’

  The bulldozer was still ploughing backwards and forwards in the wreckage of the Palazzo Municipale, but so far it hadn’t made much impression and the Germans didn’t seem a great deal nearer the vaults underneath. Their success in one of their ventures and their lack of success in the other had kept them out of the hair of the people in
the basement of the Ca’ di Leone, but they guessed that it wouldn’t be for long.

  Klemper was a restless man and, with the altarpiece despatched north and the work on the Palazzo Municipale ruins still hampering him in his quest for the Detto Bantis, he had turned his attention to other things. In Crocifisso, further to the west, there was an Adoration of the Lamb, reputed to be by Tintoretto, and he had sent Hoggeimer off to investigate and, if it was genuine, to look into the possibilities of removing it.

  ‘The Führer’s orders are clear,’ he told Pugh gravely. ‘Moveable works of art will be taken from the place where they are at the present, or modified in any way whatsoever, only with the written authority of the military organisation and the district senior officer of the Sonderauftrag.’ He smiled. ‘I have that authority from the military and I am the district senior officer of the Sonderauftrag.’

  They ate well at lunchtime. The meal was cooked by Tamara – assisted by Foscari, who could add cooking to his other skills – and carried to the German orderlies by Pugh, who could hear everything that was being said.

  ‘I think we shall do well out of this in the end,’ Klemper was saying. ‘The Simonetta altarpiece and the Detto Bantis are valuable. And, if we are lucky, perhaps the Tintoretto Adoration from Crocifisso. The Führer will be pleased.’

  During the afternoon, Tamara approached Pugh shyly with a request that he should accompany her to Boccaccio Detto Banti’s grave.

  ‘He was my father,’ she explained. ‘I never knew him but I feel I am abandoning him to the Germans. I would like to kneel there and say a little prayer.’

  ‘I’ll come,’ Pugh said.

  ‘It will not look wrong. After all, you are supposed to be my husband and we shall be paying our last respects.’ She managed a smile. ‘And perhaps a few bad words, too, because we have told the Germans he left us nothing.’

  They walked slowly up the hill in cool spring sunshine, Tamara clutching a handful of wild flowers. At Detto Banti’s grave, she laid down the flowers and knelt for a moment. As she finished, he took her elbow and helped her to her feet. She gave him a puzzled look.

  ‘You are kinder than you look, Piu,’ she murmured.

  It was late in the afternoon when they returned, and the bulldozer by the Palazzo Municipale had stopped. But the vaults in the basement were still uncovered, though the altarpiece from Avizano had already disappeared northwards towards Germany.

  ‘I have noted the address,’ the student-butcher boy, Della Croce, murmured to Pugh. ‘Schloss Thuerntal, near Kremsmuenster. I have looked it up. It is in Austria.’

  Hoggeimer had still not returned from Crocifisso but Klemper seemed to be thinking of the possibility of rewards, and the evening meal was a large one with several bottles of wine. One of the young soldiers sang:

  Nun müss ich gar

  Um dein Aug’ und Haar

  Eventually the conversation grew noisy, boastful, but with an underlying nervousness that to Pugh indicated that none of the Germans felt sure any longer of winning the war. By midnight the house was silent and, sitting on the bed in the basement room alongside Tamara, Pugh gestured. ‘Time we left,’ he said.

  The others were waiting in the store in a fug of smoke from German cigarettes Marco had cadged. All of them were nervous, Avvocato Tassinari looking so tired he seemed to be a walking corpse, devoid of flesh or even of very much life, his eyes glazed, his skin grey.

  They took the ropes of the coffin that Foscari had made and hoisted it up gently.

  ‘Take it easy, Signori,’ Foscari warned. ‘Don’t bang it on anything. It’s not as strong as it ought to be and we don’t want it to collapse.’

  With Pugh and Foscari carrying the front of the coffin, and Marco and old Tassinari the other end, they struggled up the stairs, breathing heavily and all hissing frantic pleas for silence. They were followed by Tamara, who was slung about with bags and old army sidepacks containing food they had saved from the day’s meals and two bottles of the Germans’ wine. Sliding the coffin silently over the rollers in the back of the hearse, all newly greased with German butter to stop them squeaking, they began to lead out the old horse to the shafts. The clatter of its hooves staggered them.

  ‘Back,’ Pugh said in a harsh whisper that was as near to a shriek as it could be. ‘Back in the stables!’

  ‘We’ll never get away with it,’ he said, pushing the startled animal inside. ‘It’ll wake Klemper!’

  They waited with bated breath for the Germans to pour out of the house and arrest them all, but nothing happened and they could only assume that they had not been disturbed.

  ‘They probably thought it was just old Fiorello here, tramping around in his stall,’ Pugh whispered. ‘Driving out of the yard would certainly wake them.’

  ‘The hearse has rubber tyres, sir,’ Foscari pointed out.

  ‘What a pity the horse hasn’t got rubber hooves.’

  ‘The curtains!’ Tamara suggested. ‘What about the velvet curtains? Can’t we use them to muffle its feet? A friend of mine saved their mule when the Germans came, by padding its hooves with sacks and leading it into the hills in the dark.’

  The old blue curtains were brought out in a bundle from the cellar and tied round the horse’s feet with the gold cords which had once held them draped at the windows of the studio. The horse looked startled at the tassels but not particularly offended.

  ‘I expect,’ Tamara whispered, ‘it’s seen a lot of funny things in its time.’

  ‘Mussolini, for instance,’ Pugh suggested.

  She laughed, faintly hysterical. ‘Vittorio Emmanuelo, the King. He was even funnier than Mussolini.’

  She was still clutching the ancient blue velvet of the deep pelmet and she looked guiltily at Pugh. ‘Can’t I keep this?’ she begged. ‘It is too good to be walked on by a horse. I could make myself a dress out of it.’ She held it up in front of her. ‘I think the colour suits me, no?’

  ‘It matches your eyes,’ he said, and she blushed and stuffed the pelmet into the hearse.

  ‘I’ll drive,’ Pugh said. ‘Avvocato Tassinari can sit with me. You as well. The other two will have to ride in the back somehow.’ He paused. ‘It’s a strange way to go to a funeral, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ve seen stranger funerals recently,’ Tamara said. ‘I doubt if anyone will even look twice.’ She picked up the undertaker’s top hat and placed it on Pugh’s head. ‘You can be the uncle from Rome.’

  With Marco and Foscari walking behind, Pugh led the old horse out of the yard. The padded hooves and the rubber-tyred wheels made no sound. The night was dark and pricked by stars but there was no moon. To the south they could hear the thudding of artillery and occasionally the faint tap-tapping of a machine gun. The trees stood up starkly against the silver of the sky and they could just see the faint outline of the Matese Mountains in the distance. As soon as they were clear of the house, they removed the curtains from the horse’s hooves and began to stuff them into the rear of the hearse with the coffin.

  ‘Folded,’ Pugh insisted. ‘You don’t use a hearse with a coffin in it as a repository for muddy curtains. Put them in so the mud doesn’t show and up at the front where they won’t be seen.’

  They reached the edge of the town without being stopped. Once a soldier with a rifle stepped out of the shadows and Tamara explained, without a tremor in her voice, that they were burying her grandfather in his native village and hoped to be on the way before daylight when aircraft would be over.

  ‘We’re going to Massinicorvo because the churchyard here’s full and there’s no one to dig the grave. His brother lives at Massinicorvo and he has a plot. It’s very difficult for Italians. We can’t always bury our dead where they belong.’

  The German shrugged and smiled. ‘It’s difficult for Germans, too, Signora,’ he said. ‘We would also like to die where we belong. Preferably of old age and in bed. We’d even like to do our living where we belong. Soon though, it will be finished. Domani sono kaputt.’<
br />
  ‘Amen to that, Signor Soldato.’

  They were all tired by the time they were safely into the country, so they drove the hearse off the road and tried to sleep for an hour or two. There were four curtains and, without thinking, Marco, Foscari and old Tassinari took one each, which left one between Pugh and Tamara. The other three seemed to have fallen asleep at once, so they huddled together and wrapped the fourth curtain round them both. By this time neither of them considered it at all odd.

  By full daylight they were well south of Vicinamontane and growing in confidence with every step. Near Pozzi Piano, even, a column of German soldiers resting by the roadside was brought to attention by their officer, who slammed up a tremendous salute as the coffin passed. Pugh acknowledged the salute with a lift of Ciasca’s top hat.

  Ahead of them somewhere was the new front line. The Germans hadn’t had time to strengthen it yet, and they knew that if only they could find somewhere to hide they ought to be able to slip past in the next night or so.

  ‘We might have to bribe our way through,’ Pugh said.

  Marco moaned. ‘You talk of giving pictures away as if they were saint’s day presents.’

  ‘Which would you rather do? Stay here with them and have the Germans take the lot, or bribe your way through with one and keep the rest?’ Pugh’s retort reduced Marco to silence.

  They stopped for breakfast, which consisted of a handful of bread, a slice of German sausage and a swig of German wine. Then they climbed back on the hearse and set off again – Pugh driving, Tamara with him on the box, Foscari and Marco hanging on the back or walking alongside, and old Tassinari stretched out at full length alongside the flower-decked coffin with the black and silver curtains drawn, trying to recover from a night of sitting upright.

  They had entered a range of low hills and were heading now with the sun in their eyes through a strip of wooded country. Large rocks protruded from the poor soil and there were patches of olive grove on either side. The road wound round the shoulder of the hill then began to drop into the valley. Just ahead was a fork with a crude sign painted on the wall – Naples in one direction; Crocifisso in the other, up a narrow stony road.