Costa 08 - City of Fear Read Online Free Page B

he entered at a brisk pace, his face locked in the rictus smile the nation knew from a million photo opportunities. His wavy dark hair was a little too perfect for a man in his late fifties, though the chiseled tanned features, this close, seemed to confirm his frequent claim that he, unlike some of his predecessors, had never taken advantage of the surgeon’s knife. Over the previous fifteen years, as the older grouping collapsed amid scandal and self-recrimination, Campagnolo had quietly built his own party, courting the moneyed classes with promises of fiscal laxity, and the proletariat by outflanking Berlusconi’s naked populism. The previous year, after the collapse of the brief Veltroni regime, Campagnolo had won power through the most slender of margins and some dubious political double-dealing, becoming prime minister only months after the previous center-left administration had placed Sordi in the presidency. The rifts between Campagnolo and Sordi began almost immediately. Scarcely a week went by without some new dispute appearing between the Quirinale and Campagnolo’s parliament. It was an uneasy and embittered standoff between a veteran politician who was widely admired but possessed little in the way of direct power, and a prime ministerwho was seen as a naked opportunist, without a conviction in his body, but with enough influence and cunning to win the popular vote against a fractured opposition.
    Costa watched the prime minister take a chair next to the security man, Palombo, without uttering a word or casting a single glance in the president’s direction. Only days before, the papers had once again been full of the rifts between the two, over domestic and international issues and over Campagnolo’s decision to place the G8 summit in the heart of Rome itself, not in some country estate that might be guarded with ease and minimal disruption to everyday life.
    They were very different men.
    Costa felt he had known Sordi’s long, pale face, and its almost permanent expression of wry bemusement, forever. As a senator, Sordi had been a close friend of his father’s until some unexplained fracture divided them. Even before he moved into the Quirinale, Sordi was a legend in Italy. The man himself made a point of never mentioning his distant past, though it was well mapped out in the papers and the national psyche. As a schoolboy during the Second World War, he had joined the partisans fighting the German occupation. On March 23, 1944, a date engraved upon the memory of many a Roman family, Sordi had taken part in the infamous attack in the Via Rasella, a narrow street by the side of the Quirinale hill. Twenty SS men died and more than sixty were wounded. A truant from school, young Sordi had personally gunned down two Germans, or so the papers said. Somehow he had escaped the terrible vengeance subsequently ordered by the Nazis, in which 335 Italians—Jews, Gypsies, soldiers, police officers, waiters, shop workers, some partisans, a few ordinary Romans who were simply unlucky—were massacred in regulation groups of five. The Germans dumped their bodies in the caves of the Fosse Ardeatine, close to the isolated rural catacombs of Callisto and Domitilla, no more than a ten-minute walk from Costa’s home on the Via Appia Antica.
    Sordi emerged from the war both a hero and an orphan; his father and an uncle were among those executed at the Fosse Ardeatine. Soon, the young partisan became a vocal member of the Communist Party, only to break with it in 1956 over Hungary. Thereafter he remained acommitted deputy of the “soft” left, steadily working his way through the political process, gaining along the way a reputation for blunt honesty and indefatigable integrity, not least for his refusal to use his bravery as a teenage partisan to the slightest advantage in the polling booth.
    The contrast with Campagnolo could hardly be greater. The prime minister exploited the Italian weakness for braggadocio and cheek.