Naples '44 Read Online Free Page B

destruction, German demolition squads have gone round blowing up anything of value to the city that still worked. Such has been the great public thirst of the past few days that we are told that people have experimented with sea-water in their cooking, and families have been seen squatting along the seashore round weird contraptions with which they hope to distil sea-water for drinking purposes.
    The Section has fallen on its feet. I arrived to find that we had been installed in the Palace of the Princes of Satriano at the end of Naples’s impressive seafront, the Riviera di Chiaia, in the Piazza Vittoria. The four-storey building is in the Neapolitan version of Spanish baroque, and we occupy its principal floor at the head of a sweep of marble staircase, with high ceilings, decorated with mouldings, glittering chandeliers, enormous wall-mirrors, and opulent gilded furniture in vaguely French-Empire style. There are eight majestic rooms, but no bathroom, and the lavatory is in a cupboard in the kitchen. The view across the square is of clustered palms, much statuary, and the Bay of Naples. The FSO has done very well by us.
    At first sight Naples, with the kind of work it is likely to involve, seemed unglamorous compared with North Africa. Gone for ever were the days of forays into the mountains of Kabylie for meetings with the scheming Caïds and the holy men who controlled the tribes, and thesecret discussions in the rose arbour in the Palace Gardens of Tunis. Life here, by comparison, promised to be hard-working, sometimes prosaic, and fraught with routines. There were military units by the dozen all round Naples who wished to employ Italian civilians and all of these had to be vetted by us as security risks. Nothing could have been easier than this operation. The Fascist police state kept close tabs on the activities of all its citizens, and we inherited their extensive archives on the top floor of the Questura – the central police office. Ninety-nine per cent of the information recorded there was numbingly unimportant, and revealed as a whole that most Italians lead political lives of utter neutrality, although prone to sexual adventures. In all, the unending chronicles of empty lives. A little more thought and effort would have to be devoted to the investigation of those few hundreds of persons remaining in the city who had been energetic Fascists, and whom – largely depending on our reports – it might be thought necessary to intern.
    A suspects file had to be started, and this was a job that fell to me. Section members had already cleared out the German Consulate in Naples, removing from it a carload of documents, all of which had to be studied. The work was increased as a deluge of denunciations began to flood in. They were delivered in person by people nourishing every kind of grudge, or even shoved into the hands of the sentry at the gate. Some of them were eccentric, including one relating to a priest who was claimed to have arranged shows of blue movies for the commander of the German garrison. Everything – from the grubbiest scrap of paper on which a name had been scrawled, and the single word ‘murderer’ scribbled beneath, to a scrupulously typed document bearing the seal and signatures of the Comitato di Liberazione – had to be studied and recorded. The labour involved was immense, and exceedingly tedious, and was much complicated by the prevalence in Naples of certain family names – Espositos and Gennaros turn up by the hundred – and by the fact that material supplied by our own authorities for inclusion in the official Black Book was often vague. Quite frequently suspects were not even identified by name, but by such descriptions as ‘of medium height’, ‘age between thirty and forty’, ‘strikingly ugly’, or in one case, ‘known topossess an obsessive fear of cats’. However, the work went on; the filing system expanded, and