Picture of Defeat

by John Harris

  ‘What I’ve got in the hearse is the business of the British Government.’

  ‘As high as that? Who is it? Mussolini?’

  ‘It’s not a who. It’s a what.’

  The sergeant was intrigued and suddenly more friendly, suspecting it was some sort of secret weapon they’d stolen from behind the German lines.

  ‘They reckon they’ve got pilotless planes ready,’ he said. ‘Or radio-controlled bombs. They hit some of our ships at Anzio. Is it one of them?’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ Pugh said, ‘they’re Italian paintings wanted by the Government.’

  ‘In a hearse?’

  ‘A hearse was the only way of getting them away from the Germans and the odd Italians, British and Americans who have an eye on them and probably have a great deal more power than I have.’

  The sergeant’s face was disbelieving.

  ‘Okay.’ He gestured at the other four. ‘So where do this lot come in?’

  ‘My assistants. One of them, in fact, is an Italian soldier who’s decided he’s had enough of fighting for the reds.’

  The sergeant frowned. ‘Italian soldiers are supposed to report at once – complete with name, rank and number, so they can be properly directed to where they ought to go. What’s his name?’

  ‘Enzio Foscari. He’s been a great help, and he stays with me.’

  The sergeant listened with some scepticism. ‘He’d better see the personnel officer all the same,’ he said. ‘He’s got a room in the Velasco Palace down the road.’ He gestured at the other three. ‘And what about them?’

  ‘Also Italians.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Also assisting me in the recovery of Italian art treasures.’

  ‘How?’

  Pugh was growing bored with the sergeant’s insistence. ‘I doubt if you’ve ever heard of him,’ he said. ‘But they’re all relations of Boccaccio Detto Banti.’

  ‘Who’s he when he’s at home?’

  ‘Your education, old boy,’ Pugh said, ‘has been sadly neglected. He’s an Anglo-Italian painter of roughly the same calibre as Dante Gabriel Rossetti.’

  ‘And who might he be?’

  ‘Oh, Christ, man, give it a rest! He was a famous poet and painter of a similar Anglo-Italian background. The Italian Government decided that Detto Banti was an Italian but the British Government’s decided’ – I hope, he thought – ‘that he’s British. They therefore want the pictures he left, as part of the art heritage of the British nation. I was ordered to collect them. I was stranded behind the German lines by the attack near Vicinamontane.’

  ‘That’ll be why you’re short of a uniform?’

  ‘That’s exactly why I’m short of a uniform.’

  ‘You’d better get one as fast as you can.’ The sergeant wasn’t giving much away in the manner of comradeship. ‘You’d better report to the office over there.’

  ‘What office?’

  ‘The provost marshal’s office. You’ll want to contact someone, won’t you, to take the pictures off your hands.’

  It had been in Pugh’s mind to do exactly that, but now he decided abruptly that he was going to hang on to the canvasses until he got them to Naples. If he got rid of them at this stage, word would inevitably get back to Tasker, who had his finger in a lot of pies and his ear very close to the ground. If he tried to contact Jones, some officer who would doubtless be an agent for Tasker would be sent to claim them and he’d never see them again – and neither would Tamara. It seemed safer to hide them, and then contact Jones.

  ‘I’ll leave that for the moment,’ Pugh said.

  ‘You ought to report,’ the sergeant snapped.

  ‘You do your job, old son,’ Pugh snapped back. ‘And leave me to do mine.’

  The sergeant scowled. ‘Well, you’d better get a change of clothes as soon as you can or you’ll be arrested. I know your lot. You have officer-type identity documents instead of the ordinary AB64, but they’re not endorsed for you to wear civvies.’

  ‘I’m fully aware of that. But I’d have looked a bloody fool behind the German lines, wouldn’t I, dressed in a khaki battledress?’

  ‘All right, all right,’ the sergeant said sullenly. ‘What are you going to do with ’em?’

  ‘My clothes?’

  ‘That lot. The Italians.’

  ‘They go with me to the Commission for the Protection of Arts and Monuments, which, in case you don’t know, is a department of the Intelligence Section of the 5th Army, connected with the American Fine Arts and Archives Section, and working in close contact with the Italian Belli Arti e Monumenti.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘Exactly the same. Arts and Monuments.’

  ‘So why do you need the Italians?’

  ‘To provide the provenance for the pictures.’

  ‘What’s provenance?’

  ‘The details that prove they’re genuine.’

  ‘Christ,’ the sergeant said, ‘I’m glad I’m just an ordinary military policeman.’

  They were finally clear of the front line and in what ought to have been friendly territory. That it was not entirely friendly soon became obvious from the number of times they were stopped and their presence questioned. The Allied Military Government had arrived, with its officers – town majors, engineers, garrison troops, claims and hirings offices, military police, pay masters, displaced persons units, even the YMCA. Not being fighting troops, they were far less casual than the men whose chief concern was staying alive, and very quick to be officious.

  They were also now in the Zona di Camorra, and Pugh was uneasy because they were a long way from the main road and the hills seemed empty of life.

  Tamara glanced at him sideways. ‘You are worried, Piu,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You expect trouble?’

  ‘This is bandit country. It’s dangerous.’

  She shrugged. ‘Everything is dangerous in Italy.’

  However, at last, Pugh’s authority was beginning to carry weight. Since the field security people were considered even by a few of the British to be a form of British police, his papers invariably brought a response. Officers and sergeants withdrew their objections to the passage of the hearse, even to the presence of Marco, Foscari, Tassinari and Tamara. And, in the end, an Indian muleteer appeared with a length of rope to put a whipping on the splintered shaft to strengthen it so they could continue.

  By this time the weather had improved a little and the sleety rain had stopped, the clouds had cleared, and there was even a suggestion of blue in the sky. A cookhouse had been established in an old warehouse in the main street of the town of Posticci, and the petrol cookers had settled down to a steady glow that could produce 700 breakfasts in just over an hour. The streets were full of dirty-faced weary men just down from the line, their noses twitching at the smell of bacon that hung in the air.

  Around them, small Italian boys were touting for their sisters, and in odd empty houses soldiers had started scrubbing the floors, doing their best to get rid of the lice and bedbugs before they started to live in them. Outside the town the ditches were filled with all the rubbish of war – cartridge cases, broken weapons, German helmets – but the shops appeared to be functioning after a fashion, to say nothing of a small, indifferent cinema.

  The Via Garibaldi was packed with men in khaki, and there were two restaurants, mostly filled with officers. There was also a false air of gaiety that came from the rapid turnover of money, because the men just down from the line were anxious to spend – on anything, knicknacks, booze, or women, it didn’t matter much – and the people of the town, hungry and desperate for money, were only too willing to sell.

  Nobody looked twice as the hearse moved among the traffic. Fiorello, the black plumes drooping about his ears after the rain, plopped his great splayed feet down in the mud, his expression one of utter contempt. They were a strange-looking cortège, with three people sitting on the box – Pugh defiantly wearin
g Ciasca’s top hat – and two more sitting in the open rear doors, their feet dangling.

  The police sergeant near Bagnano had finally taken pity on their bedraggled state, however, and supplied them with mugs of hot sweet army tea and tins of bully beef, margarine and biscuits, and as they stopped by the roadside to eat, Pugh stretched, feeling they were safe at last.

  ‘Naples tomorrow,’ he said, glancing at Tamara. ‘And then we’ll know how much your pictures are worth.’

  ‘Will you take them to a dealer, Piu?’ she asked.

  Pugh smiled. ‘I’ll take one. We’ll keep the rest out of sight until I’ve got an opinion.’

  She glanced round at Fiorello chomping on the sweet grass, none the worse for his gallop. ‘Won’t someone soon want to know what’s in the coffin? If they realise how long we’ve been on the way I think they will be suspicious. A body kept that long would be in a terrible state.’

  Soon afterwards, they passed through Cavaltino, the village where the Moroccans had run wild during Pugh’s journey north. There were American military police there, in the white helmets and spats that gave them their nickname, Snowdrops. They seemed worried instead of merely hostile and one of them explained why.

  ‘Another bunch of Moroccans came by,’ he said. ‘Six of the bastards. A different lot altogether, for all we know, but the villagers enticed ’em into one of the houses with promises of booze, food and dames if they’d leave the rest of the village alone. Then they drugged ’em.’ The MP shuddered. ‘They took ’em up to the bell tower of the church and left ’em to the women because they felt they needed vengeance. They tied ’em up and waited until they recovered consciousness, then they cut the balls off two of ’em and blinded ’em with needles. Then they rang the bells until the bastards went off their heads. We’ve got ’em in hospital now, blind, deaf and ball-less and half out of their minds, wondering what hit ’em. They’ll have the rest of their lives to find the answer. Three of ’em they took out into the fields and left with a live grenade tucked between their legs.’

  Pugh stared at the MP with a sick expression. He could never associate the incredible cruelty the Italians sometimes showed with their love of music and children.

  ‘Did you arrest anybody?’

  The MP shook his head. ‘Who? We know it goddam happened because they telephoned and told us. But you know what it’s like round here. Nobody’s talking. It’s vendetta country and if anybody – even a kid or a dame – opened their mouth, that would be that. Another one would be dead. They said they buried ’em’ – the MP pointed at the sloping fields – ‘out there somewhere. That’s all we can find out. You can hear the sonsabitches laughing and congratulating each other on what a good harvest it’ll be, and that’s all you can get out of ’em.’

  ‘You mentioned five Moroccans. What happened to the other one?’

  ‘He got away. So keep a look-out for him. He’s armed and he might be after a bit of vengeance himself.’

  By this time the hearse and the coffin were beginning to be an embarrassment. They were stopped again and again and nobody believed Pugh’s story, so they were constantly delayed by long arguments and protracted visits to officers for a decision. In the end they decided it was time for a change. The coffin Foscari had made was simply a long oblong box with straight sides with handles attached, so they took off the handles to make it look like a single wardrobe and, finding a man painting the front of his house with watery whitewash, they asked him instead to paint the hearse. He looked bewildered but the money Pugh was offering enabled him to overcome his surprise.

  ‘From now on,’ Pugh said, ‘this is simply a horse-drawn van.’

  The painter slapped the whitewash wherever he could, covering the wheels as much as possible and smearing it over the glass panels at the sides and rear of the hearse.

  ‘The horse also, Signore?’ he asked nervously.

  With the glass daubed over, the hearse looked like a crudely painted baker’s cart with unexpected fittings which, they felt, wouldn’t arouse a great deal of interest.

  At midday they found a small trattoria and, while Pugh went inside with Tamara, Foscari remained outside with Tassinari, watching the horse and making sure Marco didn’t run off with the paintings.

  The restaurant was in a cellar and was chilly enough for everybody inside to wear their coats, which, it was obvious from a mile away, were all made out of British army blankets. A waiter brought round several fish in a bucket for them to choose from, but they looked like nothing they’d ever seen before and most were in slices so that it was impossible to identify them anyway. They decided to try the veal.

  ‘It’s probably mule,’ Tamara said.

  As they ate, urchins moved through the tables, begging, and they had to keep one hand on their piece of bread so that it wasn’t spirited away. Then a small girl in an ordinary chair to which wheels had been attached was pushed in. She had neither hands nor feet and they were told she had lost them in a bomb explosion. As her parents pushed food into her mouth, Tamara had to hurry out, the tears running down her face.

  ‘How much longer do we have to suffer so?’ she sobbed.

  While they remained with Fiorello, Foscari went into the trattoria with Tassinari and Marco, and when they’d eaten they climbed back to their places and moved southwards out of the town. On the outskirts, the carabinieri stopped them once more and demanded their papers.

  ‘Zona di Camorra,’ one of them said, pointing south as he handed the papers back. ‘Bandit country. No partisans. Just bandits. They murdered one of our men last week. Caught him on his own and shot him to ribbons.’ He paused. ‘We gave him a good funeral, though. They’re all over. Corneliano Romandi’s one of them.’

  The Robin Hood of the area had been in prison at the time of the Allied landings but, claiming to be a political prisoner, was released, and had celebrated his freedom by immediately murdering an American soldier for his rifle.

  ‘He thinks Italy should become part of the United States,’ the policeman explained, indicating a smudged drawing on a wall showing a crude America and a crude Italy attached by a chain. ‘He’s planning a coup d’état, they say, to force the Government to do what he wants.’

  It wasn’t unusual. Half the population of Italy seemed to want to go to America, and Corneliano was gathering his forces round him and arming them with weapons picked up on the battlefields, where there were still plenty for anyone who was interested. He had so many now he was said to be preying on black market operators as they followed the armies northwards, and had hijacked convoys of military supplies, and once even fought a pitched battle with machine guns and grenades with another gang who had had the same idea.

  By nightfall they were well into the country again, clinging to the side roads to avoid the military traffic that roared ceaselessly northwards on Highway 6, the main route of the armies in the west. Pugh was frowning, wondering if he’d told the police sergeant near Bagnano too much. He’d probably make a report which would be seen by his officer and passed down the line through the usual channels, eventually to reach Tasker. On the other hands, the sergeant hadn’t seemed very bright, and knew nothing about art, so the name Detto Banti probably wouldn’t stick in his mind and, if it did, he probably wouldn’t do much about it.

  They had removed another picture from the coffin – this time one of a man fondling a girl through an open doorway, called The Stolen Embrace. It was in the best style of the English story-telling Victorian artists.

  ‘He has his hand on her breast,’ Tamara said bluntly. ‘And she has a look in her eye that suggests she is encouraging him. It is obscene.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s a good reason to have it handy,’ Pugh decided. ‘Anybody demanding a bribe will jump at it.’

  Excluding the three small framed paintings, they were now down to nine canvasses and had reached the better ones lower down so that it was becoming difficult to decide which, if necessary, to offer next.

  That night they slept in a
barn belonging to a farmer, Tamara being given a bed in the house. The farmer’s wife obviously suspected her husband’s intentions because he had the same look in his eye as the man in The Stolen Embrace and, sure enough, just as Pugh was settling down to sleep in the barn, wrapped in the velvet curtain, he found Tamara standing by his side.

  ‘He tried to get into bed with me,’ she announced. ‘I think it is safer to sleep with you, Piu.’

  He moved over and offered half the curtain and she lay down in the straw, her back to him.

  ‘I think there will be many insects in the straw,’ she said.

  ‘Scots Greys,’ Pugh said.

  She lifted her head.

  ‘That’s what soldiers call them. They say they carry out manoeuvres up and down their chests.’

  She seemed to find it funny. She sat up and looked at Pugh. ‘I think you are a good man, Piu,’ she said. ‘Many times now I have slept alongside you and you have always been the perfect gentleman.’

  ‘You ought to see me shaved and with my hair cut.’

  It was a standard army reply and she didn’t understand it. ‘I think you would be well behaved even with your hair cut. I think you are a man of high principles.’

  ‘Wait till we get to Naples. It’ll be different then. It’ll be an all-in, knock-down, drag-out affair and you’ll have to take your chances.’

  ‘Che?’

  He explained. ‘If I meet you in Naples I shan’t be responsible for your safety. I shall be an ordinary soldier full of an ordinary soldier’s lusts.’

  ‘You are going to see me when we get to Naples?’

  ‘Any objection?’

  ‘I think I would be pleased. I have a small apartment. Two rooms and a kitchen. It will be enough, I think.’

  ‘Enough for what?’

  She looked at him with a frown, then the old grin broke through. ‘I think, Piu,’ she said, ‘that we had better go to sleep.’

  Two

  The following morning, they pushed off early. The farmer’s wife was obviously glad to see the back of them, and the farmer, who had probably had a bad night with her, remained in the background, glowering.