He paused to let it all sink in, and to empty his glass again, before he delivered the coup de grâce.
‘The Carlo Lech you described to me,’ he said, ‘never existed.’ And then, perhaps to convince himself as well as his witnesses, he repeated the word that mattered to him most and thumped the table with his fist as he did so.
‘Never!’
In spite of the note I had received after our first meeting saying ‘See you soon’, it was, in fact, nearly two years before I saw Carlo again.
A lot had happened in the interval and, as far as I was concerned, not a moment of it had been pleasant. Crawling up the leg of Italy with an army which had gradually been stripped of its best British divisions so that they could be used in the battles for France would have been, for me, a lowering experience anyway. Specialist units like the one to which I belonged did not go with their divisions. We were part of the Italian front, for eternity it seemed. The succession of east-west defensive lines which it is so easy to build in that country, where the mountains and the rivers lay them out for all the world to see, let alone German generals, ensured that the attackers, no matter how brave they were, no matter how well and skilfully led, had to suffer repeatedly the despair and frustration of having to pay exorbitantly for every minor success. And the reward for a minor success was always the same; your first glimpse of the next obstacle to a major one. I have heard of no campaign in modern war that was accounted enjoyable by any of those engaged in it, but the Italian must, in terms of futility as well as ordinary beastliness, have been among the nastier. In war’s forward areas, the sights of the dead unburied and of the wounded before they have been cleaned up are not always the worst; and the battlefield depression that follows a hard-fought victory is often, no matter what the staged press pictures like to pretend, indistinguishable from that which follows a defeat.
It was just after we reached the Gothic line and I was quartered in yet another wrecked house, north of Ravenna this time, when Carlo came to see me again.
I almost failed to recognize him. Gone were the long leather coat and the greasy felt hat. He was dressed in what would now, I suppose, be described as a para-military uniform. He wore GI ankle boots, the kind that British officers were always trying to get hold of, those made of an inside-out leather that looked a bit like suéde and had rubber soles; and on his head was a black beret. It was his topcoat that impressed me most, though. This was the short turned-sheepksin job that was issued to some of the units operating in the mountains above the snow-line. It was also worn by some of the more dress-conscious senior officers among those of the fourteen nationalities then serving on the Fifth and Eighth Army fronts. On the otherwise badgeless Carlo, the coat bestowed field rank at least.
‘I’ve tracked you down, you see,’ he said by way of greeting, and handed me a bottle wrapped in a copy of the Stars and Stripes. ‘Whisky,’ he added, ‘but there’s no bill this time.’
It was late afternoon and getting dark. I lit a pressure lamp, got two beer glasses out of the mortar-bomb box used for mess stores, and opened the bottle.
We raised our glasses to one another in silence and drank. Then he said: ‘You are looking older, Sergeant-Major.’
‘I am. A year and a half.’
‘I was merely observing, not offering a shoulder to cry on that you neither want nor need.’
‘What can I do for you this time, Mr Lech?’
His near-smile twitched a bit. ‘For the present, thank you, nothing. 3 had meant to visit you again before this, but events and my work made it impossible.’
He went on to give me a rough idea of what had happened to him. He was now based in Rome and working for the reformed Military Government, mostly in his professional capacity as a lawyer.
When war travels slowly and devastatingly from one end of a country to the other, it is obvious that in its wake a multiplicity of legal problems, few simple and many highly complex, are going to have to be solved. Most, of course, will concern damaged property, often, except for the land it once stood on, totally destroyed. Who used to own it? What has happened to him or her, or, if the owner was a corporation, it? If the one-time owner is now defunct does a known successor exist?
He had seen and heard a lot on his travels about the country.
About his wife and family, he said only that he had been in direct touch with his wife, and that she was well. I gathered from other things he said that he had been in some way assisting British and American liaison officers in coordinating partisan activity behind the Gothic line. Questioned about it, though, he at once changed the subject.
‘Last time I saw you,’ he said, ‘I asked you where you had learned to speak Italian. Later, I tried to find out about you from the British Adjutant-General’s department at army headquarters, but they preserved security most ingeniously by pretending not to understand their own filing system.’
‘It was probably no pretence. But yes, I did say I’d tell you all if I saw you again. You mean you’re still curious?’
‘More than just curious. Interested.’
So, I gave him a reasonably full, though in parts censored, curriculum vitae.
I soon found that the censorship had been unnecessary. He was not in the least concerned with my moral character, about which, he told me later, he had already come to a firm conclusion. This was, that I could be counted upon never to do anything which it was not in my own best interests to do, and that my direction as to where those interests lay at any specific moment would always be swiftly, as well as shrewdly, reached. Tripoli, except for the name of the banker on whose yacht I had served, was waved away as of no consequence. He did not want to hear about adventures. It was far more important to learn that I spoke Spanish. How about French?
‘I get along. Schoolboy grammar, plus additions to my vocabulary picked up in Cannes and St-Germain-des-Prés.’
But you learn languages easily, it seems.’
‘Learning Italian when you already speak Spanish isn’t difficult. I think there is a book that makes it easier both ways. Do you want to learn Spanish?’
‘No, no, no. You speak English. You should have little trouble learning German.’
‘Why should I learn German?’
‘Because I think that it is soon going to be a very useful language to have.’
‘Don’t you mean Russian?’
‘No, German.’
I must have looked blank. You have to remember that this was February 1945 and the Western Allies and Russia between them were tearing Germany apart. Anyway, Carlo saw that explanation was needed.
‘As soon as this is over, Sergeant-Major, I intend to go into business. Oh, I shall re-establish my legal practice too. That is necessary to the business as well as important in other respects.’ He looked into his half-empty glass. ‘You see, I intend to go into the business of managing other people’s money.’
This, in itself, did not seem to me to have much to do with German being a useful language for me to learn, so I said nothing. Then, suddenly, he leaned right back in his chair and raising one hand to shade his eyes from the glare of the pressure lamp, stared intently at me for a long time, several seconds.
Finally, he said, ‘Paul, what are your plans for when this is over?’
It was the first time he had called me anything but Sergeant-Major. I remember noting the fact and also being extremely puzzled. It seemed to me that I was about to be offered some sort of job; but what, in God’s name, could an Italian lawyer contemplating going into the arcane business of managing other people’s money want with a man of not quite twenty-five? The young man spoke three languages, true, but was he not totally inexperienced in any business other than that of acting as a security policeman during a war? Obviously, I had been mistaken. He was not about to offer me a job. Therefore, he must want something else from me. Play it straight, then; that is to say, cagily.