The Foreign Correspondent

Delahanty was happy to see him that afternoon, he’d scored a beat on the opposition with the resistance in Prague story, though the London Times had run a version of it the following day. From Delahanty, the old saw, “Nothing quite like being shot at, if they miss.”

Salamone was also happy to see him, though not for long, when they met at the bar near his office. Raindrops, lit red by the neon sign, ran slowly down the window, and the bar dog shook off a great spray of water when she was let in the door. “Welcome back,” Salamone said. “I assume you’re glad to be out of there.”

“A nightmare,” Weisz said. “And no surprise. But, no matter how much you read the papers, you don’t know about the little things, not unless you go there-what people say when they can’t say what they want to, how they look at you, how they look away. And then, after two weeks of that, I went to Prague, where they’ve been occupied, and they know what it will mean for them.”

“Suicides,” Salamone said. “So it’s reported in the newspapers here. Hundreds of them, Jews, others. The ones who didn’t get out in time.”

“It was very bad,” Weisz said.

“Well, it’s not much better back home. And I have to tell you that we’ve lost two runners.”

He meant distributors-bus drivers, barmen, storekeepers, janitors, anybody who had contact with the public. Thus it was said that if you wanted to know what was really going on in the world, best to visit the second-floor lavatory at the National Gallery of Antique Art, in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Always something to read, there.

But distribution was mostly managed by teenaged girls from the fascist student organizations. They had to join, just as their fathers joined the Partito Nazionale Fascista, the PNF. Per Necessita Familiare, the joke went, for family necessity. But a lot of the girls hated what they had to do-march, sing, collect money-and signed up to distribute newspapers, getting away with it because people thought that girls would never do such a thing, would never dare. The fascisti had it a little wrong there, but still, now and again most often by betrayal, the police caught them.

“Two of them,” Weisz said. “Arrested?”

“Yes, in Bologna. Fifteen-year-old girls, cousins.”

“Do we know what happened?”

“We don’t. They went out with papers, in their school satchels, to leave them at the railroad station, but they never came back. Then, the following day, the police notified the parents.”

“And now they’ll go before the Special Tribunals.”

“Yes, as always. They’ll get two or three years.”

Weisz wondered, for a moment, whether the whole thing was worth it; girls in jail while the giellisti conspired in Paris, but he knew it for a question that couldn’t be answered. “Perhaps,” he said, “they can be pried loose.”

“Not in this case,” Salamone said. “The families are poor.”

They were silent for a time, the bar was quiet, only the sound of the rain in the street. Weisz unbuckled his briefcase and put the lists of German agents on the table. “I’ve brought you a present,” he said. “From Berlin.”

Salamone worked away at it; leaned on his elbows, soon enough pressed his fingers against his temples, then moved his head slowly from side to side. When he looked up, he said, “What is it with you? First that fucking torpedo, now this. Are you, some kind of, magnet?”

“It would seem so,” Weisz said.

“How’d you get it?”

“From a man in a park. It comes from the Foreign Ministry.”

“A man in a park.”

“Leave it at that, Arturo.”

“Fine, but at least tell me what it means.”

Weisz explained-German penetration throughout the Italian security system.

“Mannaggia,” Salamone said quietly, still reading through the list. “What a gift, it’s a death sentence. Next time, maybe a little stuffed bear, eh?”

“What do we do?”

Weisz watched Salamone as he tried to work it out. Yes, he was called a giellisti, but so what. The man on the other side of the table was in late middle age, a former shipping broker, his career destroyed by the government, and now a clerk. Nothing in life had prepared him for conspiracy, he had to figure it out as he went along.

“I’m not sure,” Salamone said. “We can’t just print it, that I do know, it would bring them down on us like-I don’t know, like hellfire, or think up something worse. And we’d have the Germans as well, the local Gestapo, with their pals in Berlin tearing the Foreign Ministry apart until they find out who went to the park.”

“But we can’t burn it, not this time.”

“No, Carlo, this hurts them. Remember the rule, anything that forces Germany and Italy apart, we want. And this does, this will make some of the fascisti mad-our people are mad already, which doesn’t mean shit to a snail, but, get them, the fearful them, mad, and we’ve done something worthwhile.”

“It’s how we do it.”

“Yes, I think so. We can’t be cowards and slip this to the Communists, though I admit it crossed my mind.”

“That’s where it comes from, I suspect. I was told as much.”

Salamone shrugged. “I’m not surprised. To do such a thing as this, in Germany, under the Nazi regime, would take somebody very strong, very committed, somebody with real ideology.”

“Maybe,” Weisz said, “maybe we can just say we know, that we’ve heard this is going on. The fascists will know how to find out the rest, since it’s in the heart of their machine. It’s disloyalty, to Italy, to allow another country to prepare for an occupation. Thus, even if you don’t like us, when we print this, we’re patriots.”

“How would you put it?”

“Just as I’ve said. A concerned official in an Italian bureau has informed Liberazione…Or an anonymous letter, which we believe.”

“Not bad,” Salamone said.

“But then, we have the real thing to deal with.”

“Give it to somebody who can use it.”

“The French? The British? Both? Hand it to a diplomat?”

“Don’t do that!”

“Why not?”

“Because they’ll be back in a week, wanting more. And they won’t say please.”

“In the mail, then. Mail it to the Foreign Ministry and the British embassy. Let them deal with the OVRA.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Salamone said, sliding the list toward his side of the table.

Weisz took it back. “No, I’m responsible for it, I’ll do it. Should I, maybe, retype it?”

“Then it’s from your typewriter,” Salamone said. “They can figure these things out. In the crime novels, they can, and I think that’s true.”

“But it would be on the man in the park’s typewriter. What if somebody figured that out?”

“So, find another typewriter.”

Weisz grinned. “I think this game is called hot potato. Where in hell will I find another typewriter?”

“Buy it, my friend. Out at Clignancourt, in the flea market. Then get rid of it. Pawn it, throw it out, or leave it in the street somewhere. And do it before the mail is delivered.”

Weisz refolded the list and put it back in its envelope.

At eight that evening, Weisz went looking for dinner. Mere this? Chez that? He’d read that day’s Le Journal, so he stopped at a newsstand and bought a Petit Parisien as a dinner companion. It was a terrible rag, but he secretly enjoyed it, all that lust and greed in high places somehow went well with dinner, especially dinner