Then he can reveal his identity. He has nothing to be accused of, will get away with a few months in a prison camp at worst. In exchange, a tidy nest egg awaits him in a Swiss bank.”
“But the Fascist leaders who are with him to the last?”
“They have accepted the whole setup to allow their leader to escape, and if he reaches the Allies he’ll try to save them. Or the more fanatical of them are thinking of a resistance to the very end, and they need a credible image to electrify the last desperate supporters prepared to fight. Or Mussolini, right from the start, has traveled in a car with two or three trusty collaborators, and all the other leaders have always seen him from a distance, wearing sunglasses.
I don’t know, but it doesn’t really make that much difference. The fact is that the double is the only way of explaining why the fake Mussolini avoided being seen by his family at Como.
“And Claretta Petacci?”
“That is the most pathetic part of the story. She arrives expecting to find the Duce, the real one, and someone immediately informs her she has to accept the double as the real Mussolini, to make the story more credible. She has to play the part as far as the frontier, then she’ll have her freedom.”
“But the whole final scene, where she clings to him and wants to die with him?”
“That’s what Colonel Valerio tells us. Let’s assume that when the double sees he’s being put up against the wall, he shits himself and cries out that he’s not Mussolini. What a coward, Valerio would have said, he’ll try anything. And he shoots him.
Claretta Petacci had no interest in confirming that this man wasn’t her lover, and would have embraced him to make the scene more believable. She never imagined that Valerio would have shot her as well, but who knows, women are hysterical by nature, perhaps she lost her head, and Valerio had no choice but to stop her with a burst of gunfire.
Or consider this other possibility: Valerio becomes aware it’s a double, yet he had been sent to kill Mussolini—he, the sole appointed, of all Italians. Was he to relinquish the glory that awaited him? And so he goes along with the game. If a double looks like his dictator while he’s alive, he’ll look even more like him once dead. Who could deny it? The Liberation Committee needed a corpse, and they’d have it. If the real Mussolini showed up alive someday, it could always be maintained that he was the double.”
“But the real Mussolini?”
“This is the part of the story I still have to figure out. I have to explain how he managed to escape and who had helped him. Broadly speaking, it goes something like this. The Allies don’t want Mussolini to be captured by the partisans because he holds secrets that could embarrass them, such as the correspondence with Churchill and God knows what else. And this would be reason enough.
But above all, the liberation of Milan marks the beginning of the Cold War. Not only are the Russians approaching Berlin, having conquered half of Europe, but most of the partisans are Communists, heavily armed, and for the Russians they therefore constitute a fifth column ready to hand Italy over to them.
And so the Allies, or at least the Americans, have to prepare a possible resistance to a pro-Soviet revolution. To do this, they also need to make use of Fascist veterans. Besides, didn’t they save Nazi scientists, such as von Braun, shipping them off to America to prepare for the conquest of space? American secret agents aren’t too fussy about such things. Mussolini, once rendered harmless as an enemy, could come in handy tomorrow as a friend. He therefore has to be smuggled out of Italy and, so to speak, put into hibernation for a time.”
“And how?”
“But heavens above, who was it that intervened to stop things going too far? The Archbishop of Milan, who was certainly acting on instructions from the Vatican. And who had helped loads of Nazis and Fascists to escape to Argentina? The Vatican. So try to imagine this: on leaving the Archbishop’s Palace, they put the double into Mussolini’s car, while Mussolini, in another, less conspicuous car, is driven to the Castello Sforzesco.”
“Why the castle?”
“Because from the Archbishop’s Palace to the castle, if a car cuts along past the cathedral, over Piazza Cordusio, and into Via Dante, it’ll reach the castle in five minutes. Easier than going to Como, no? And even today the castle is full of underground passageways. Some are known, and are used for dumping garbage, etc. Others existed for war purposes and became air-raid shelters. Well, many records tell us that in previous centuries there were passageways, actual tunnels, that led from the castle to points in the city. One of these is said to still exist, though the route can no longer be traced due to collapses, and it’s supposed to go from the castle to the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie.
Mussolini is hidden there for several days while everyone searches for him in the North, and then his double is ripped apart in Piazzale Loreto. As soon as things in Milan have calmed down, a vehicle with a Vatican City license plate comes to collect him at night.
The roads at the time are in a poor state, but from church to church, monastery to monastery, one eventually reaches Rome. Mussolini vanishes behind the walls of the Vatican, and I’ll let you choose the best outcome: either he remains there, perhaps disguised as an old decrepit monsignor, or they put him on a boat for Argentina, posing as a sickly, cantankerous hooded friar with a fine beard and a Vatican passport. And there he waits.”
“Waits for what?”
“I’ll tell you that later. For the moment, my theory ends here.”
“But to develop a theory you need evidence.”
“I’ll have that in a few days, once I’ve finished work on various archives and newspapers of the period. Tomorrow is April 25, a fateful date. I’m going to meet someone who knows a great deal about those days. I’ll be able to demonstrate that the corpse in Piazzale Loreto was not that of Mussolini.”
“But aren’t you supposed to be writing the article on the old brothels?”
“Brothels I know from memory, I can dash it off in an hour on Sunday evening. Thanks for listening. I needed to talk to someone.”
Once again he let me pay the bill, though this time he’d earned it. We walked out, and he looked around and set off, sticking close to the walls, as though worried about being tailed.
X, Sunday, May 3
BRAGGADOCIO WAS CRAZY. Perhaps he’d made the whole thing up, though it had a good ring to it. But the best part was still to come and I’d just have to wait.
From one madness to another: I hadn’t forgotten Maia’s alleged autism. I had told myself I wanted to study her mind more closely, but I now knew I wanted something else. That evening I walked her home once again and didn’t stop at the main entrance but crossed the courtyard with her. Under a small shelter was a red Fiat 500 in rather poor condition. “It’s my Jaguar,” said Maia. “It’s nearly twenty years old but still runs, it has to be checked over once a year, and there’s a local mechanic who has spare parts. I’d need a lot of money to do it up properly, but then it becomes a vintage car and sells at collectors’ prices.
I use it just to get to Lake Orta. I haven’t told you—I’m an heiress. My grandmother left me a small house up in the hills, little more than a hut, I wouldn’t get much if I sold it. I’ve furnished it a little at a time, there’s a fireplace, an old black-and-white TV, and from the window you can see the lake and the island of San Giulio. It’s my buen retiro, I’m there almost every weekend. In fact, do you want to come on Sunday? We’ll set off early, I’ll prepare a light lunch at midday—I’m not a bad cook—and we’ll be back in Milan by suppertime.”
On Sunday morning, after we’d been in the car for a while, Maia, who was driving, said, “You see? It’s falling to pieces now, but years ago it used to be beautiful red brick.”
“What?”
“The road repairman’s house, the one we just passed on the left.”
“If it was on the left, then only you could have seen it. All I can see from here is what’s on the right. This sarcophagus would hardly fit a newborn baby, and to see anything on your left I’d have to lean over you and stick my head out the window. Don’t you realize? There’s no way I could see that house.”
“If you say so,” she said, as if I had acted oddly.
At that point I had to explain to her what her problem was.
“Really,” she replied with a laugh. “It’s just that, well, I now see you as my lord protector and assume you’re always thinking what I’m thinking.”
I was taken by surprise. I certainly didn’t want her to think that I was thinking what she was thinking. That was too intimate.
At the same time I was overcome by a sort of tenderness. I could feel Maia’s vulnerability, she took refuge in an inner world of her own, not wanting to see what was going on in the world of other people, the world that had perhaps hurt her. And
