“Have you ever heard of the Ovra, Mr. Marlow?”
“No. What is it-a vegetable?”
“The question, Mr. Marlow, was rhetorical,” put in Tamara. “You needn’t do anything more than shake your head. He knows perfectly well that you don’t know what the Ovra is. He only puts it that way to be impressive.”
Zaleshoff pounded the table with his first. “Silence, Tamara!” He thrust his head suddenly under my nose. “You see those grey hairs, Mr. Marlow? They are the work of the loving sister you see here.”
I couldn’t see a sign of a grey hair, but I let the fact pass. “We’d got as far as the Ovra,” I reminded him.
“Ah, yes!” He glared at us both and drank a little more from his glass. Then he went on.
“The word ‘Ovra,’ Mr. Marlow, is formed by the initial letters of four Italian words- Organizzazione Vigilanza Repressione Anti-fascismo, vigilant organisation for the repression of anti-fascism. In other words, Mr. Marlow, secret police; the Italian counterpart of the Nazi Gestapo. Its members are as nice a bunch of boys as you could wish to meet. You’ve heard of the Mafia, the Sicilian secret terrorist society? Well, those birds were the inventors of protection racketeering. Anyone who didn’t or couldn’t pay was beaten up or shot. In the province of Palermo alone they bumped off nearly two thousand in one year. Chicago was a kiddies’ play-pen compared with it. But in nineteen-twenty-three, the Fascisti had an idea. They smashed the Mafia. It took them some time, but they did it. It was, they claimed, one of the blessings of Fascismo. But, like some other Fascist blessings, it was mixed. Some of the Mafia hoodlums emigrated to the United States and took their trade with them, which was very nice for the Italians but not so good for the American public. The big majority of the boys, however, were recruited by the Ovra, drafted to different parts of the country, so that they couldn’t get organised again, and set to work on behalf of the Government. That wasn’t so good for the Italian public. The Ovra’s first big job was to liquidate the opposition-the Liberals and the Socialists. That was in nineteen-twenty-four. They did a swell job. The murder of the opposition leader, Matteotti, a few hours before he was due to produce documentary evidence in support of a speech indicting the Fascist Government, was an early success. But it was only a beginning. These were the holy fathers of American gangsterism and they knew their stuff. The ordinary Italian is a nice guy. He’s a bit inclined to dramatise himself and his country, but he’s a nice guy: he’s fond of his wife and kids, he’s a darned hard worker and he’s as independent as they come. But you can’t fight terrorism with indignation. Terrorism always wins. The Government knew that. They consolidated their position by creating the Ovra. Its liquidation of the opposition was as bloody a page of history as you’ll find. Beatings, clubbings, killings-it’s all in the day’s work to the Ovra. The Mafiosi tradition has survived. The Ovra is all-powerful. It has become a regularly constituted secret police force. The Italian Government have even admitted its existence.”
He glanced at me doubtfully. “You’re probably wondering what all this has to do with Ferning, eh? Well, it has a lot to do with him for the simple reason that one of the departments the Ovra took under its wing was the department of counter-espionage. They’ve got a thing they call the Foreign Department which deals with nothing else. And it’s efficient, darned efficient. It didn’t take them long to get wise to friend Ferning.”
“How did they do it?”
“Bellinetti’s the answer to that one.”
“Bellinetti?”
“Sure. He’s an Ovra agent. Someone once estimated that at least one man in every ten in the big Italian cities works directly or indirectly for the Ovra. They conscript their agents and keep them under a sort of interlocking system. Agent A watches Agent B who watches Agent C, and so on. The man next door to you may be an Ovra agent. He thinks that you may be. What’s the result? When you get together over the fence to have a chat about politics, both of you nearly bust yourselves trying to show how hard you’re rooting for the Government. ‘Mussolini is always right’-that’s item eight in the Fascist Decalogue. You’ve got to have a pretty good system working to get folks to swallow that whole and keep it swallowed.”
“But what about Ferning?”
“Ferning, as I’ve said, was marked down for action. The question was-what sort of action? Now this is only my guess, but I reckon it went something like this. Ferning was a danger. He had to be stopped. But he was also a British subject and an employee of a firm that the Government was anxious to keep on good terms with. They needed those S2 machines-as many of them as they could get. To arrest Ferning would have been too noisy. There was only one thing to do-liquidate him. They called in the murder squad.”
“Do you mean to say that he was deliberately run over?”
“I do. They’ve done it that way before. Twice in Naples and once in Cremona. The man at Cremona had been a trade-union official once and he wouldn’t lie down. He was popular with the workers, so they had to make it accidental. It works beautifully. A man’s run over. Too bad! but it’s happening every day. So what?”
He sat back on the divan and finished his drink. I thought for a moment, then extracted Ferning’s page of notes from my wallet.
“I found this in Ferning’s desk. The first two lines refer to Spartacus transactions with the Braganzetta works at Turin. I deciphered that much. Can you tell me what the rest means?”
He took the page and frowned at it for a moment. Then his face cleared.
“Yes. I can tell you what it means. As you say, the first two lines refer to three special S2 machines for anti-aircraft shell production and a standard machine for the Braganzetta works. What comes after…”
“Here, wait a minute!” I put in suspiciously. “ I didn’t say anything about special S2 machines. How did you know?”
He looked blandly surprised. “It’s obvious. You’ve only got to look at these notes to see it.”
I thought both his manner and his explanation singularly unconvincing, but I said nothing. He went on:
“The rest refers to a forty thousand ton battleship building at Spezia and to be completed fourteen months hence. It is reported, he says, that it is to have a six-metre belt of manganese steel armour one point two metres thick. Six fifty-five centimetre naval guns with elevations of thirty degrees are being supplied, presumably by the Braganzetta works. A Genoese firm is supplying the mountings. That’s probably the Grigori-Sforza works.” He handed the page back to me. “It goes on to give further details.”
“And you got all that just by looking at those notes?” I queried sarcastically.
He shrugged. “It’s quite clear when you know what you’re looking for. That is probably the draft of his last report to Vagas.”
“I see.” I didn’t see, but it was obviously useless to argue. “Well, it’s all very upsetting, but I still don’t understand what this has to do with me.”
“You don’t!” He made a gesture of exasperation. “Tamara, he doesn’t…”
“No, I don’t,” I snapped. “You know darn well I don’t.” His calm recital of what seemed to me to be a revolting story had both shocked and irritated me.
“It’s really very simple, Mr. Marlow,” said the girl soothingly. “You see, having found out that Ferning was engaged in espionage and murdered him, the Ovra was bound to regard you, Ferning’s successor, with a certain amount of suspicion. You might try the same game.”
“But why didn’t they kill Vagas? Why kill Ferning? He was only the subordinate.”
“Because,” grunted Zaleshoff, “Vagas is too smart for them. He’s got a new variation on the royal and ancient game of grafting and it’s a honey. He doesn’t confine his activities to espionage. That’s where he’s clever. He safeguards himself by doing a little business on the side. Quite a lot of prominent officials would lose slices of their incomes if Vagas was liquidated. They now he’s a foreign agent, but as long as they can feel that they’re stopping him getting hold of anything useful, they’re happy. That’s their mistake, because he gets the goods. He makes them think they’re fooling him, when all the time he’s laughing up his sleeve at them. The secret of it is, of course, that because their private business deals with Vagas are profitable, they want to think that it’s harmless.”