“Just a minute! Did Ferning tell you this?”
He shook his head impatiently. “I never even spoke to Ferning.”
“But you said…”
“… that I knew him. I did. The same as I know the President of the United States.”
“Then how do you know what Vagas said?”
“It doesn’t matter how I know,” he retorted pugnaciously. “I just do know. Listen.”
“All right.”
“Vagas put the same proposition to Ferning as he put to you. It was all wrapped up in sugar in just the same way. Now, I don’t know what you said to Vagas. We’ll come to that later. But Ferning, the poor sucker, jumped at it. There are some guys who can never seem to learn that a something-for-nothing proposition always has a string to it somewhere. Ferning was one of them; and, unluckily for him, the string in this case happened to be more like a steel hawser. The point was that Vagas wanted a good deal more for his two thousand a month than a precis of the Spartacus correspondence files. Mind you, the story about Spartacus activities in Italy being of military interest to a foreign power was true enough as far as it went; that sort of information has to be collected somehow. But with Vagas it was only a sprat to catch a whale.” He paused. “Do you realise, Mr. Marlow, just how valuable a man in your position could be to a man like Vagas?”
“I don’t know what sort of man that is.”
“Ho hum! I’m coming to that. What I mean is this. You spend half your time here snooping round the big Italian armament factories and you have a legitimate reason for doing so. To a foreign agent you would be a gold mine.”
“Aren’t you exaggerating a little?”
“Not a bit. Look at it this way. Imagine a bunch of poker players sitting round a table. You are wandering about the room smoking and wondering, let’s say, what you’re going to have for dinner. You’ve no interest in poker and still less in the players. Right. Now supposing one of the players puts a proposition to you. Supposing he says: ‘Look here, Mr. Marlow, while you’re just wandering about the room, supposing you take an occasional peek at these other guys’ hands, tell me what you see and let me make it worth your while? It’s quite easy. I’ll tell you what I want to know. You just give me the dope.’ You get the idea? Vagas is that player.”
“Yes, but he hasn’t asked me to do that.”
“Wait a minute. Let’s go back to the poker players. Supposing you’re already taking graft from one of these birds. One day this man will say, ‘Now look here, Marlow, if you don’t tell me what those other boys have got in their hands I’ll tell your boss that you’re on my pay-roll.’ What then? What are you going to do?”
“But he can’t say that.”
“Can’t he? That’s what he said to Ferning. A month or six weeks after Ferning started taking money from Vagas, Vagas got tough. They had a showdown. Mr. Ferning had got to make use of his entree into the factories to supply Vagas with the vital information that he, Vagas, needed. If Mr. Ferning didn’t toe the line, then General Vagas would spill the beans to Mr. Pelcher in Wolverhampton. The net result was that Ferning gave in. He still drew his two thousand a month, but he had to do a darn sight more for it.”
“You mean he let himself be blackmailed? I should have called Vagas’ bluff. After all, it would only have been his word against Ferning’s. Pelcher’s no fool.”
“No, but then neither is Vagas. It wasn’t just his word against Ferning’s. Vagas had proof. If Pelcher hadn’t believed him, all Vagas had to do was to send him the results of Ferning’s first month’s work. Pelcher would only have to compare Vagas’ version of Spartacus dealings for the month with his own records to see that Vagas had the goods. Get me?”
“Ye-es. I see that. But what’s this got to do with what you said about Ferning’s being murdered?”
“Ah!” He wagged a finger at me. “That comes next. Have another whisky first?”
“Thanks. I think I need it.”
“Vichy or water?” said the girl.
“Vichy, please.”
We drank solemnly. Zaleshoff put his glass down with a bang.
“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
