Numero zero

At Germasino, Pedro has an opportunity to exchange a few words with the person under arrest, who asks him to send his greetings to a lady who was in the Spanish consul’s car, and with some hesitation he admits that she is Claretta Petacci. Pedro would then meet Claretta Petacci, who at first pretends she is someone else, then relents and unburdens herself, talking about her life with the Duce and asking as a last request to be reunited with the man she loves. Pedro is now unsure what to do, but having consulted his companions, he is moved by the story and agrees. This is why Claretta Petacci is there during Mussolini’s nighttime transfer to the next place, which in fact they never reach, because news arrives that the Allies have reached Como and are wiping out the last pockets of Fascist opposition; the small convoy of two vehicles therefore heads north once again. The cars stop at Azzano, and after a short distance on foot the fugitives reach the home of the De Maria family—people who can be trusted—and Mussolini and Claretta Petacci are given a small room with a double bed.

  Unbeknown to Pedro, this is the last time he will see Mussolini. He returns to Dongo. A truck arrives in the main piazza, full of soldiers wearing brand-new uniforms, quite different from the torn and shabby dress of his partisans. The soldiers line up in front of the town hall. Their leader presents himself as Colonel Valerio, an officer sent with full authority from the general command of the Volunteer Freedom Corps. He produces impeccable credentials and states he has been sent to shoot the prisoners, all of them. Pedro tries to argue, requesting that the prisoners be handed over to those who can carry out a proper trial, but Valerio pulls rank, calls for the list of those arrested, and marks a black cross beside each name. Pedro sees that Claretta Petacci is also to be sentenced to death, and he objects. He says she is only the dictator’s lover, but Valerio replies that his orders come from headquarters in Milan.

  “And note this point, which emerges clearly from Pedro’s account, because in other versions Valerio would say that Claretta Petacci clung to her man, that he had told her to move away, that she had refused and was therefore killed by mistake, so to speak, or through excessive zeal. The thing is that she had already been condemned, but this isn’t the point. The truth is, Valerio tells different stories and we can’t rely on him.”

  Various confusing incidents follow. Having been told of the alleged presence of the Spanish consul, Valerio wants to see him, talks to him in Spanish, but the man can’t answer, calling into question his Spanish credentials. Valerio gives him a violent slap, identifies him as Vittorio Mussolini, and orders Bill to take him down to the lake and shoot him. But on their way to the lake, someone recognizes him as Marcello Petacci, Claretta’s brother, and Bill retrieves him. To no avail. As Marcello jabbers about the services he has done for the fatherland, about secret arms he had found and hidden from Hitler, Valerio adds his name to the list of those condemned to die.

  Valerio and his men go straight to the house of the De Maria family, take Mussolini and Petacci, drive them to a lane in Giulino di Mezzegra, where he orders them out. It seems that Mussolini first imagines Valerio has come to free him, and only then does he realize what awaits him. Valerio pushes him against the railings and reads the sentence, trying (he would later say) to separate Mussolini from Claretta, who remains desperately clinging to her lover. Valerio tries to shoot, the machine gun jams, he asks Lampredi for another, and fires five bursts. He would later say that Petacci suddenly moved into the line of fire and was killed by mistake. It’s the twenty-eighth of April.

  “We know all this from Valerio’s account. Mussolini, according to him, ended up as a husk of humanity, though legend would subsequently claim he pulled open his greatcoat shouting, ‘Aim for the heart!’ No one really knows what happened in that lane apart from the executioners, who would later be manipulated by the Communist Party.”

  Valerio returns to Dongo and organizes the shooting of all the other Fascist leaders. Barracu asks not to be shot in the back but is shoved into the group. Valerio also puts Marcello Petacci among them, but the other condemned men protest, they regard him as a traitor, and it’s anyone’s guess what that individual had really been up to. It is then decided to shoot him separately. Once the others have been shot, Petacci breaks free and runs off toward the lake. He’s caught but manages to free himself once again, dives into the water, swimming desperately, and is finished off by machine-gun fire and rifle shots. Later Pedro, who refused to let his men take part in the execution, arranges for the corpse to be fished out and put onto the same truck as the others. The truck is dispatched to Giulino to pick up the bodies of the Duce and Claretta. Then off to Milan, where on April 29 they are all dumped in Piazzale Loreto, the same place where the corpses of partisans shot almost a year before had been dumped—the Fascist militia had left them out in the sun for a whole day, preventing the families from collecting the remains.

  At this point Braggadocio took my arm, grasping it so firmly that I had to pull away. “Sorry,” he said, “but I’m about to reach the core of my problem. Listen carefully. The last time Mussolini was seen in public by people who knew him was the afternoon at the Archbishop’s Palace in Milan. From that point on, he traveled only with his closest followers. And from the moment he was picked up by the Germans, then arrested by the partisans, none of those who had dealings with him had known him personally. They had seen him only in photographs or in propaganda films, and the photographs of the last two years showed him so thin and worn that it was rumored he was no longer himself. I told you about the last interview with Cabella, on April 20, which Mussolini checked and signed on the twenty-second, you remember? Well, Cabella notes in his memoirs: ‘I immediately observed that Mussolini was in excellent health, contrary to rumors circulating. He was in far better health than the last time I’d seen him. That was in December 1944, on the occasion of his speech at Lirico. On the previous occasions he had received me—in February, in March, and in August of ’44—he had never appeared as fit. His complexion was healthy and tanned, his eyes alert, swift in their movements. He had also gained some weight. Or at least he no longer had that leanness that had so struck me in February of the previous year and which gave his face a gaunt, almost emaciated look.’

  “Let’s admit that Cabella was carrying out a propaganda exercise and wanted to present a Duce in full command of his faculties. Now let’s turn to the written account given by Pedro, who describes his first encounter with the Duce after the arrest: ‘He’s sitting to the right of the door, at a large table. I wouldn’t know it’s him, wouldn’t recognize him, perhaps. He is old, emaciated, scared. He stares, is unable to focus. He jerks his head here and there, looking around as though frightened.’ All right, he’d just been arrested, he was bound to be scared, but not a week had passed since the interview, when he was confident he could get across the border. Do you think one man can lose so much weight in seven days? So the man who spoke to Cabella and the man who spoke to Pedro were not one and the same person. Note that not even Valerio knew Mussolini personally. Valerio had gone to execute a legend, an image, to execute the man who harvested corn and proclaimed Italy’s entry into the war—”

  “You’re telling me there were two Mussolinis—”

  “Let’s move on. News spreads around the city that the corpses have arrived, and Piazzale Loreto is invaded by a loud and angry crowd, who trample on the corpses, disfiguring them, insulting them, spitting on them, kicking them. A woman put five gunshots into Mussolini, one for each of her five sons killed in the war, while another pissed on Claretta Petacci. Eventually someone intervened and hung the dead by the feet from the canopy of a gas station to prevent their being torn to pieces. Here are some photographs—I’ve cut these out from newspapers of the time. This is Piazzale Loreto and the bodies of Mussolini and Claretta right after a squad of partisans had taken the bodies down the next day and transported them to the mortuary in Piazzale Gorini. Look carefully at these photos. They are bodies of people disfigured, first by bullets, then by brutal trampling. Besides, have you ever
seen the face of someone photographed upside down, with the eyes where the mouth should be and the mouth where the eyes should be? The face is unrecognizable.”

  “So the man in Piazzale Loreto, the man killed by Valerio, was not Mussolini? But Claretta Petacci, when she joined him, she’d have known him perfectly well—”

  “We’ll come back to Petacci. For now, let me just fill in my theory. A dictator must have a double, who knows how many times he had used him at official parades, seen always from a distance, to avoid assassination attempts. Now imagine that to enable the Duce to escape unhindered, from the moment he leaves for Como, Mussolini is no longer Mussolini but his double.”

  “And where’s Mussolini?”

  “Hold on, I’ll get to him in good time. The double has lived a sheltered life for years, well paid and well fed, and is put on show only on certain occasions. He now thinks he is Mussolini, and is persuaded to take his place once more—even if he’s captured before crossing the frontier, he is told no one would dare harm the Duce. He should play the part without overdoing it, until the arrival of the Allies. 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.

  10

  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’ price
s. 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 yet I was the one in whom she placed her trust, and, unable or unwilling to enter my world, she imagined I could enter hers.