A Stranger in the Family

by Robert Barnard

  He raised his hand and dismissed Kit by turning over to sleep. Kit scuttled out of the bedroom-cum-sitting room and scrambled down the ill-lit wooden staircase. At the door he met Heidi coming in, and thanked her for her hospitality. ‘Lecture cancelled?’ he asked.

  ‘No, I am between lectures. In my preparations to receive you I forgot a book I need this afternoon.’

  ‘Why should you make preparations to receive me? I’m nobody.’

  ‘You were unusual. You were asking about Mr Greenspan, and nobody’s ever done that since I came to live with Grandad.’

  ‘He just commented on that, and added it was surprising since he had so many illegitimate children.’

  ‘Perhaps they are all dead, and their mothers too. If so, he did not help them escape, when he could have done that more easily than most. But he is one who comes into many of the stories that Grandad often tells. Mostly people come to see him because they admire his wonderful work to get Jews out of Nazi Austria. And Greenspan had his part in that, that I have heard often. Grandad has been awarded the Austria Medal for all he did. He likes to talk to people about it, and he’s always very modest. He was one of many, he says, but I’m not sure he was. He never mentions any particular people. Maybe he was almost alone. His life proves that the individual can make a great difference, don’t you agree?’

  ‘An individual can certainly change history,’ said Kit, trying hard not to sound too careful, but unwilling to agree to the first part of her last sentence.

  As he walked back to his hotel, he tried to put his thoughts in order. He wondered whether Erheim’s association with Greenspan was as virtuous as he, in the early part of the talk, tried to portray it. Would Greenspan have chosen such a scruple-ridden assistant, even if his function was no more than to be the messenger boy? It was surely much more likely that Erheim knew he was on to a good thing financially, and was employed by Greenspan on terms that gave him a proportion of the profits.

  Erheim the man seemed to take delight in giving glancing hints at the true nature of the personality and actions of the national hero he had become. He seemed underneath to be the archetypal ‘wide boy’, with his eye on the main chance.

  Austria had hidden its complicity with its Nazi masters by papering over Erheim’s true motives and transforming him into a hero fit to be worshipped by the international liberal intelligentsia.

  No one had ever done a similar service for Walter Greenspan. Kit was desperately keen to find out why.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Progenitor

  The Mafia, it seemed, was a growth industry. When Kit got back to Glasgow he investigated the public libraries and then the chain bookshops; many books, some of them fat, confidently awaited borrowers and buyers. He conjectured that it was the burgeoning of offshoots of organised crime on the parent tree in Bulgaria and several ex-Soviet states that had renewed interest. Or perhaps the endless Godfather film sequence back in the last century still fetched in aficionados who could not get enough assassinations and double-crossings. The books divided themselves into tomes written by academics (sometimes so opaque in style as to need a translator) and tomes written by journalists (whose English style suggested a continual state of hysteria or apoplexy). He borrowed the academic tome that seemed most approachable and the journalistic tome that seemed to state its sources when it was safe to do so. He snatched a quick and safe meal from the freezer and settled down to a good, if lengthy, read.

  Surprisingly, he had got into the habit of ringing Isla in Pudsey every two or three evenings. He found it difficult to define why he was doing this because the relationship remained, for the moment, a tense one. He decided he must have retreated to that atavistic feeling: after all, she is … and so on. He felt rather surprised that he did react this way at all, with all the accompanying burden of feeling traitorous to Genevieve. It was now three days since he had rung Leeds, but he failed to remember that he should.

  There was no mention in either of his books of anyone called Durataverdi.

  He did not feel that this was in any way a disproof of Erheim’s conviction that Greenspan had ended up as a top Mafia boss. Authors had to be careful. Erheim had mentioned that at the time of the trial Durataverdi was still alive, and could therefore bring libel actions if he was found not guilty. In both books the handling of the anti-Mafia drive was sketchy, presumably for the same reasons.

  The author of the more academic of the two books, Richard Marston, was a senior lecturer in the Department of Italian Studies at London’s City University. Kit rang the university six times before he got on to his man, so busy was he spreading news of Italian culture to the young of the capital.

  ‘Could I have five minutes of your time?’ Kit began.

  ‘I could maybe manage seven,’ came the reply. He sounded young, even if, with such a massive volume to his name, he probably wasn’t.

  ‘My name is, or rather was, Peter Novello. I was abducted as a child while my family was on holiday in Sicily—’

  ‘Ah. I have a vague memory of the case.’

  ‘Really? I’m surprised. It never played big in either country. Anyway, I was subsequently adopted by a couple in Glasgow called Philipson, and I became Christopher or Kit Philipson. My dad was German-born, and got out of the country just before the war.’

  ‘One of the Jewish children?’

  ‘Yes. His father was a man called Greenspan. Probably a pretty disreputable individual, possibly eventually fairly high up in the Mafia or Camorra in Sicily or Naples. It may be that he called himself Durataverdi.’

  ‘Ah! Greenspan … You know, I never found Durataverdi a very convincing name, and I never found anybody else with the same name, though of course, families are an important factor in the Mafia’s membership.’

  ‘So you know of him?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Or did.’

  ‘Did? He’s dead, then?’

  ‘Possibly, but not so far as I know. He would be very old if he is still alive.’

  ‘Why did you put him in the past tense, then?’

  ‘Because the Mafia is a thing of the past for me. The idea of keeping up with it so I could bring the book up to date every ten years or so was repulsive to me. I wanted to wash my hands of them – wash the smell off. I’m now studying the later members of the Medici family.’

  ‘Same difference.’

  The scholar took over. ‘Well, some points of resemblance, certainly.’

  ‘It’s a pity it’s been so long since the publication of the book, but you still might have some information of interest to me.’

  ‘Quite likely. I’m called on often by people who are engaged on the new and up-to-date definitive study of the Mafia. It seems like an obligation: if I give up on the subject, I ought to help my successors in the field.’

  ‘I would be very grateful if you could add me to the list of those you could help. I’m not writing a book – would it be possible to get all the information you have on Durataverdi?’

  ‘Yes, no problem. But you’re assuming I have a lot.’

  ‘Well, I hoped—’

  ‘And I do have a lot in quantity. It’s the quality of it that’s suspect. There’s very little of substance there. Details of court appearances, conjectures about crimes he was involved in, some conjectures about his past – it all amounts to what has been called “a bucket of warm spit”.’

  ‘The American vice-presidency. And I don’t think the man said “spit”.’

  ‘Right. But this man – your man – has been a figure of genuine importance in a widely publicised organisation, and yet he leaves behind almost nothing. He must have been, or be, a man with a marvellous capacity for covering his tracks. And of course, he was brilliant at getting himself accepted by the Mafia in the first place. He had a unique ability to reinvent himself. I have just scraps about him where there should be meaty chunks. Do you get me?’

  ‘I think so. You’re saying you’re not what I need.’

  ‘Yes. I haven’t got
what you need.’

  ‘But someone else has?’

  ‘Yes. He knows everything there is to know about the Mafia. He can’t use it. Quite apart from legal actions, libel and so on, there is the possibility that they’d cut the cackle and have him killed. In fact, I’d say there’s a certainty of that. So he has all the stories – some well authenticated, some the sort of story that goes round in criminal organisations and gets blown up, exaggerated.’

  ‘I can guess. But would he be willing to help me?’

  ‘He might be. In confidence I can tell you that there is probably a degree of collusion and collaboration between him and the Mafia high-ups. If he has something the Mafia wants to know about, then things might be arranged, maybe a meeting.’

  ‘And the thing the Mafia might want to know about?’

  ‘It’s possible it might be you. The Mafia, as I say, is hot on family.’

  ‘I don’t get the impression that Walter Greenspan is, or was, hot on family.’

  ‘That may have changed with age. It often does. Alternatively he may feel bound to pretend to some family pride to fit in with the pattern of the organisation he now belongs to.’

  ‘Alternatively he may be dead.’

  ‘Oh yes, certainly. What you do in that case I don’t know. Talk to Pietro, I suppose. That’s Pietro Conti, the man I’m referring to. He uses my archives, by the way, so I’ll only be calling in several favours. I’m sure he’ll try to help, but whether he can or not depends on the Mafia, or simply on Greenspan perhaps.’

  ‘I’ll cross my fingers.’

  ‘Look, your seven minutes is well up. I’ll send you all I have and I’ll include Conti’s Palermo address and other details. I’ll email him in advance, so you have some kind of introduction. I’m off – I’ve got a seminar now. Good luck.’

  I’ll need it, thought Kit.

  The material when it arrived was as slight as Marston had suggested it would be. Kit picked up the date of the trial at which Greenspan had become, in a limited way, a public figure, and there were one or two meagre items of information – a birth date (1916 – surely untrue, a number plucked from the air like an actress’s birth date), a school in Vienna, a graduation date from the university of Frankfurt. Kit decided to keep an open mind about all the information he got about Greenspan from an Italian source. He himself calculated a birth date from the background information he had. Hilde Greenspan (so called) was eight when she took the Kindertransport train to London. Her birthdate, then, was circa 1931. It was unlikely that her father was less than twenty when she was born, and he was probably older, so he would be approaching his centenary if he was alive. Perfectly possible. Lots of people became centenarians. The last British man alive to have fought in the First World War trenches had just died, aged 113.

  Then he thought again. Greenspan could have become a father at seventeen – or fifteen come to that. Plenty of people, male and female, did that today. The Weimar Republic was a hotbed of sexual varieties, each mingling and mixing, each with its own bars and clubs where like could meet like. Walter Greenspan could have been born in 1914. He could even have been born in 1916 as he had claimed. Kit tore up the paper with his mathematical calculations.

  His adoptive grandfather was very old. Kit needed no more than that.

  He could, obviously, be senile. He could have delusions, and they could very likely be delusions about his past. He could be passing through life barely conscious of what was going on around him. Kit had, so far, no grounds for optimism, except for the fact that nobody apparently had hard evidence of his death.

  He left it five days before he rang Pietro Conti. He preferred the telephone to email, and to the inadequacies of the Italian postal service.

  Pietro Conti was openness itself. He had been contacted by Marston, he had started making tentative enquiries, but the Mafia had its own bureaucracy just as legally established political governments did. Could Kit hold himself ready? Yes, he could.

  ‘And could you be prepared to put yourself entirely into my hands – or rather not my hands but the hands of the person nominated by the Mafia hierarchy?’

  ‘Yes, entirely. I’ll wait for your call.’

  Kit waited for six days, keeping his mobile at the ready.

  ‘Mr Philipson?’

  At last it had come. The voice was Pietro’s, heavily accented but not difficult to understand.

  ‘Can you put down everything and come?’

  ‘It’s what I want more than anything.’

  ‘Get a flight to Palermo. I’ve booked you a room in the Hotel Lampedusa. You will be collected either from there or from my flat here. You will be taken to a car, blindfolded, then driven to a location where you will meet Durataverdi as he is always called here, and will be allowed to talk to him. That can be as long as you like for the one day, but he is very old, and must be allowed breaks if he asks for them.’

  ‘Of course. I’m not a slave-driver. Anyway I’m in their power.’

  ‘È vero – totalmente. I’ll speak to you when you arrive at the hotel.’

  ‘I can ring you – I don’t know when I’ll arrive.’

  ‘I will be told when you arrive.’

  Kit threw a change of clothes into a small suitcase, went straight to the airport, then booked an evening flight to Heathrow, and an early morning one next day to Palermo. He had been often to Heathrow with his parents, and he found it was even worse without them – more lonely, more hostile, more faceless. His overnight hotel had pretty much the same profile. It was a relief to get to Palermo, but he stuck to his hotel room, where quite soon a phone call came through from Pietro Conti: tomorrow at nine he would be fetched. He’d better get the best breakfast he could in the hotel, and maybe take a few snacks, because the Mafia did not see themselves as purveyors of fast food to curious outsiders. Kit spent the rest of the day walking around Palermo, acquiring in the process bars of chocolate and packets of nuts.

  There was a knock on his hotel door almost exactly at nine o’clock next morning. When he opened it he saw a man of the utmost insignificance: short and skinny, with a blob for a face. Rather a disappointment, he told himself with a wry smile. Even a mother would find it difficult to love a face like that. The local Mafia, he conjectured, was telling him he had a very low place in their hierarchy of importance. He nodded, shook hands, then let himself be taken to the car.

  He was pushed into the front seat, and as his driver went round the front of the car he felt a blindfold being put round his head from behind. He had an escort of two, then. The blindfold was tied most expertly, then his hands were cuffed in front of him. Nobody worried that the street was crowded with people, almost all of whom could see what was going on. The driver put the car into gear and drove off.

  ‘We do not talk,’ the unappetising driver said.

  That was that, then. Darkness, and silence.

  Kit did not try to keep a mental record of the turns, reverses and variations of speed. He was being taken to somewhere that he was not expected to identify. There was precious little he could do about that, and he did not want to do anything. Identifying where his grandfather now lived out his last years was the least of his imperatives. He presumed the Mafia was afraid of a further charge being made against him. He himself felt that Walter Greenspan was of an age that should put him beyond charges. All he wanted was to be told the truth about the past. Was Greenspan capable of the truth?

  Gradually the artificial blackout of the blindfold began to get to him. He was without the gift of sight, and he was totally at the mercy of these two individuals, the presumed servants of a worldwide crime conspiracy. He began to feel the blood rush to his face, to feel the sweat soaking his shirt in the small of his back. He wanted to yell out, to show himself he existed, and could act independently. He began to contemplate opening his mouth and calling out his name.

  ‘We are here,’ said the voice in heavily accented English. Kit estimated that they had been driving about forty or forty-five
minutes.

  He let himself be taken from the car. He was led a few steps forward, then a door was opened and he was taken through it. There was a fumbling at the back of his head, and suddenly the world was light again. But he was hurried up a staircase in what he reckoned to be a fairly large rural dwelling, furnished and decorated basically, for occasional use. Not, then, his grandfather’s home, but a place he had been brought to. This was confirmed when he was led into a large room, with much more light, but very little furniture. He thought this must be the bedroom floor, with the two rooms put together.

  In the centre of the room there was a high-backed upright chair all on its own. No table, no glass of water – not for the interviewer, nor for the interviewee – no mod cons. The man seated needed nothing, the meeting seemed designed to suggest.

  Kit gestured to the floor and said: ‘Chair.’ His feeble companion shrugged and went to fetch one from downstairs. While he was gone Kit could take in the other figure in the room.

  He sat in the imposing chair, his forearms stretched along the arms, clutching a wooden knob on the end of each. He was not small, but he gave the impression of having become shrivelled by his great age. Perhaps his shiny suit had fitted him last year, or the year before that, but it had become baggy as time continued to roll over the old man’s head. The man’s body had at some time been impressive, Kit guessed, but the shoulders seemed to have drooped, the legs contracted, so that it could almost have been a doll sitting there. Kit was looking at the ashes of an impressive and imposing man who was a law unto himself.