‘Unless you are attempting to solicit a bribe, which I doubt, why should you even think of stopping it? Tell me, Sergeant-Major, how do you define this new term or phrase you use, this “black marketeer”?’
‘One who has authorized dealings in goods that are rationed or otherwise in short supply.’
‘Is dealing with pre-war French brandy unauthorized? I hope you are not one of those socialists, Sergeant-Major, who object to the law of supply and demand controlling prices merely because persons like me risk their capital in order to make a fair profit.’
‘What is a fair profit?’
‘If I succeed in buying this brandy, I shall add forty per cent to the price I have to pay. Bearing in mind the fact that, in addition to my normal overheads in a transaction of this kind, I must suffer the mental strain of trying to convince a suspicious British Field Security policeman that I am not a crook, is that excessive? I shall be glad to let you have a bottle for the same price as that which I shall charge the General. Is that what you call black-market dealing?’
I had, after all, been warned that he was a lawyer. ‘All right, Mr Lech,’ I said, ‘let’s try a different commodity. Two nights ago, twenty thousand cigarettes were stolen off an American truck somewhere between Caserta and Venafro. How would you describe the acting of selling them?’
‘In civilized countries, Sergeant-Major, and in some uncivilized ones, dealing in stolen property has always been an offence.’
‘But one which you would never commit yourself.’
‘Certainly not. I have no need to commit it.’
‘You wouldn’t know, by any chance, who stole those cigarettes?’
‘No, but I know how they were stolen.’ He waited for me to ask him how.
‘Well?’
‘Would the knowledge be of use to you here in your area, Sergeant-Major, or are you thinking unselfishly more of your colleague in Venafro?’
He could not have made his meaning plainer. If I wanted to hear more, he expected a clear run to Bari and back, with no ‘technical’ obstacles in his path. It wasn’t a bad deal, so I nodded.
‘I’m thinking of both us now, Mr Lech, so your information had better be good.’
On his private island, ten years later, we analysed that part of the conversation as if it had been a game, a form of exercise.
‘I watched you very closely,’ he said. ‘You were throwing away an apparent advantage because you knew that it was essentially worthless. I could have had you in trouble with your own people within hours, and you must have known that too. Yet, you hung on by switching currencies. Sterling was out, but there was still the dollar. Your reply, reminding me of the more lasting penalties to be incurred by arousing American displeasure, could not have been bettered.’
The verdict of a bridge-player enjoying the benefits of hindsight. At the time he had protested vigorously.
‘Of course my information is good, Sergeant-Major. Indeed, it is impeccable. Most petty professional crooks share the same weaknesses. One of them is that they can never refrain from boasting of their successes. In the matter of the cigarettes, it was arranged in advance with the military policeman on the truck that the driver, his accomplice, would stop on the way and leave the load unattended for five minutes in order to deal with a sudden call of nature. The place arranged for the stop was near the village of Galleno. There is no soft shoulder on the road just there, so it would be an easy place for a truck to pull off, and then get back on again, without getting stuck in the mud. I dare say that a very quick search might find some of the cigarettes still in the village.’
‘Thank you, Mr Lech.’
I gave him back his AMGOT papers and then filled in one of the duplicated pro-formas we used for civilian vehicle movement control in the Bari area. While I was doing the filling-in I thought that I might as well see what his reactions would be to the question about anti-Fascists.
To my surprise, he did not laugh.
‘Here in the south,’ he said, ‘you will find only three kinds of person who will claim seriously that they have long been anti-Fascist. First, there are the village priests, or most of them, as you must know well. Then, there are the very few real Communists, getting old by now. They are mostly still underground awaiting their moment. And finally there are the madmen.’
‘Madmen?’
He stood up. ‘Who, unless he was a priest or a Communist or in some other way mad, would have resisted Party pressure to conform for twenty years? And who but madmen, could look around them now at the destruction of what little had been built up in this pitiful country and declare that it is better so or that the punishment was necessary?’ He brushed the thought away as if it were a cobweb across his face. ‘In the north, we shall no doubt find things very different. You will see. We will both see. There are Communists who will be less old and better organized. I am at present cut off from my family in Milan, but even when I last heard from my wife, before the arrest of Mussolini, the situation had already begun to change radically. The partisans had begun to organize themselves instead of talking.’
He took the pro-forma from me, examined my signature and then spelled out my name. ‘Is that right, Sergeant-Major? Good. I have no doubt that we shall be meeting again and I wanted to be sure. May I ask, I wonder, where you learned to speak Italian so well?’
‘If we ever meet again, Mr Lech, I will be glad to tell you.’
‘Oh, we shall certainly meet again, Sergeant-Major.’ The smile had finally broken through. ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’
With a stiff little bow he turned and went up the stairs. By the time the racket of his car had died away and the corporal had been told why his prisoner had been sprung, signals had got me Venafro again.
My colleague was pleased with what I had to tell him and looked forward keenly to passing it on to the MPs commanding officer, whom he disliked. I did not trouble to tell him, though, about Carlo’s views on anti-Fascists. He would not have liked them and might even have considered such talk subversive.
Two days later I returned from a session at Corps to find a package on my table. The orderly on duty said that it had been delivered by an Italian in a car holding a movement permit signed by me. Inside the package was a bottle of Martell V.S.O.P. and a bill for two thousand lire made out on paper with a printed heeding in English. CARLO LECH Doctor of Jurisprudence, followed by a Naples address.
I wasn’t going to pay two thousand lire for a bottle of brandy even though it was certainly worth more than that at the time, and it would have been most inadvisable to keep the bottle without paying at all. The prissy corporal who had arrested Carlo would be sure to hear of it and start telling everyone that I had accepted a bribe. On the other hand, the idea of sending the bottle back seemed offensively high-minded. So, I went to the senior Divisional HQ warrant-officer and asked his advice. He agreed that the price made it look like a bribe but also thought it too good a thing to miss. His suggestion was that the bottle be raffled in the HQ mess with tickets at fifty lire apiece, all monies in excess of two thousand lire to go to the Mess Comforts Fund. The bottle was won by an Ordnance Corps staff-sergeant. We had an air courier service to Naples which I used to send Carlo his two thousand lire, in AMGOT notes, together with a typed receipt for his signature.
The receipt was eventually returned. Under his signature Carlo had written: ‘Many thanks. See you soon.’
CHAPTER FIVE
I have said that I gave Krom and the witnesses a white Provençal wine before dinner. That is quite true. What I failed to mention was that this was no ordinary Provençal white. I mean the kind that may be drunk with, say, a fiercely garlicked bouillabaisse and survive the ordeal.
What I gave them was the very light-bodied, dry white that comes from the immediate vicinity of the small port of Cassis near Marseilles. There is not a lot of it to be had, and it is very good in its unobtrusive way. It is, though, quite delicate — a bouillabaisse would kill it stone dead — and has to be treated gently.