‘Darling,’ the milksop observed, straightening his glasses. ‘I take back all I said about the wasted money. While you prepare the dinner, I shall try and make it work.’
The woman placed a traitorous kiss upon his wan cheek and disappeared. Milquetoast loosened his tie, slipped off his jacket, rolled up the sleeves and, feeling like a little Einstein, faced his battle with technology.
Ten minutes later, as the squid simmered in the white wine, Marisa heard the first slaps. By the time she added the peas, he was on to the bloody-hells. Giuliano was not a patient man: his nerves almost always ended up on edge, and afterwards he became intractable, rough and rude. That was certainly the underlying reason why his wife could not bear him and preferred that man Ciro, who at least kept his hands in the right place and, when he lost his temper, didn’t shriek like a fairy.
As the tomato joined the other ingredients in the pot, Marisa heard him calling in an angry voice, ‘Marisa, damn it to hell, you’ve been screwed yet again!’
The woman gave a start. Squid and everything spilled over the stove. How had he found out? Hadn’t the sofa been tucked up nicely? Were there compromising traces? Could it be that the television also worked as a cine camera? Or perhaps Ciro had talked to the wrong people, people who worked in television?
‘Marisa, never mind first prize!’ the voice insisted, getting shriller and shriller. ‘This fucker doesn’t even work!’
‘What did you say? It doesn’t work?’ the woman put a hand to her chest, closed her eyes and sighed deeply. Could be worse.
She stayed like that for a while, before attending quietly to the squid, trying to return it to the pot with a wooden spoon.
Vincenzo Donadio lowered the shutters of the workshop just after seven. He had wasted more than an hour trying to fix a broken telephone, and hadn’t had time to look at that great pachyderm of a television. On the other hand, he couldn’t claim to know a great deal about such machines. They were new, complicated, specially for people like himself who really specialised in motor scooters. But Vespas and Lambrettas had only come out recently, you didn’t see very many of them around, and if a man wanted to work, he had to spread his area of expertise: radios, televisions, record players, pretty much everything as far as Vince was concerned.
He locked the big padlock in its iron ring and set off whistling ‘Viale d’autunno’.
Less than six hours later, in the dark, deserted street, enlivened only by quarrelling cats, a furtive outline bent over that same padlock, armed with a bunch of fake keys. It tried out ten of them, with nerves of steel, until it found the right one. It lifted the shutter just enough to slip inside, as the headlights of a small truck appeared at the end of the street.
McGuffin was on the worktop. It was no coincidence that the break-in occurred that very evening. Its arrival had not gone unobserved.
After sliding a large consignment of small radios into the street, the man poked his head out from under the shutter, checked that everything was quiet, exchanged a couple of words with someone outside and very carefully raised the shutter until it was almost halfway up.
He wheeled the first Lambretta around the corner and helped his mate to load it on. He went back inside to grab a second scooter and loaded that one on too. If you had wrung out his sleeves, you could have filled a glass. When he held out his hands, they were damp with sweat. But there was no point being fussy: this providential intervention saved McGuffin from Donadio’s quixotic attempts at repair, which would have compromised his delicate mechanisms for ever.
‘Bloody hell, an American TV!’ exclaimed the driver the moment he saw him. ‘Maybe it can pick up American programmes, what do you think, Nené?’
‘Don’t talk bollocks, Peppino. Get the blanket, come on now!’
They wrapped it up well and wedged it between the Lambretta and a transistor radio to avoid any damage.
Finally he was being treated in an appropriate manner. Finally someone seemed to have grasped the great value of a McGuffin Electric Deluxe, even one that had been slightly damaged, with fake walnut finish and with a seventeen-inch screen.
The door closed. The truck screeched on the porphyry, terrifying the life out of two cats, then vanished with a murmur into the Naples night.
Chapter 57
Moscow, the Lubyanka, 2 May
General Serov laid the documents out on the desk, the sheets perfectly aligned. The ‘Leach Grant’ file now consisted of a considerable number of typed pages. Zhulianov’s report was meticulous. Just like the internal communications of MI6 that had just come in from London a few moments before.
The British secret services had had their worst quarter of an hour since Hitler’s bombers had flown over Westminster. The kidnap of Cary Grant had been a failure, but they had had their result. Tito had lost face with the British; the British had lost face with Grant and the Americans. Sources revealed that the actor’s conclusive comment, once he had resumed contact with MI6, had been: ‘Gentlemen, fuck off the lot of you.’ The file also reported Dyle’s embarrassed reply: ‘I’m mortified. Is there anything we can do for you, Mr Grant?’ and the retort: ‘Certainly. Call me a taxi for the airport.’
The general chuckled to himself, imagining the scene.
MI6’s film project ended up in the dustbin of history before it even saw the light of day.
He could be satisfied with that.
Perhaps they would go on the attack once again, but if Cary Grant’s character profile was correct, he was willing to bet his colonel’s stripes that the actor would never again be flattered by these bunglers.
It would be important to watch what Grant did next. He made a note on a piece of paper and turned his concentration back to the crucial questions of the day.
The world was facing new threats. The Soviet Union would have to assume its responsibilities. And he was there to do his part.
In Indochina the Vietnamese communists had the French colonialists on the ropes. General Giap put the final squeeze on the siege of Dien Bien Phu: the days of the Foreign Legion contingent, barricaded up on the high plain, were clearly numbered. The Americans were ready to supplant those shreds of fascist arrogance. They would never let Indochina turn red.
On the other hand the Chinese were ready to play the game to become the leading communist country in Asia. They had got used to it and won their stripes in Korea, and now they wanted to have their say.
The Chinese. You had to be careful with the Chinese; he had said as much to Khrushchev as well, when he had asked him his advice about the events of the day. There were so many of them, too many, with a leader no less charismatic than Stalin. But you never knew what they were thinking. When you thought about the Chinese you had to think in a completely different way. The General wasn’t afraid of anything, not after everything he had seen in his life. The French were buffoons. They thought they still had an empire, but they borrowed money from the Americans to keep it on its feet. They reminded him of faded aristocrats in ragged trousers, braying things like, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ The British, good soldiers, certainly, but with all those stupid habits, like taking tea under bombing raids. Without the Americans and the Russians they would have been serving tea to Himmler, while that maniac Goebbels would have been raping their awful princess in the next room. How disgusting.
Then there were the Americans. The Normandy landings had been one of the most costly and absurd actions in history. All to get to Berlin before the Russians did. They had no idea of how to fight a war. Just fire-power. That was their only weapon, sounding the charge, trumpets blaring, atom bombs, helicopters, and now that new invention, napalm. If they went on like that they would end up like Custer, chopped to pieces by people with bows and arrows.