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government issued a daily communiqué on the radio, and anyone within hearing had to stand up during the broadcast. That was the law. So, if you were in a café, or at work, or even in your own home, you stood, and woe betide those who didn’t.
    Now, what did he have for January. The lawyer from Rome was writing the obituary for Bottini. That had to be, who would murder an honorable man? Weisz anticipated that Salamone would do a revision, and so would he. There was always a digest of world news—news which was withheld or slanted in Italy, where journalism had been defined, by law, as a supportive adjunct to national policy. The digest, taken from French and British papers, and particularly from the BBC, was the preserve of the chemist from Milan, and was always factual and precise. They had also, always tried to have, a cartoon, usually drawn by an émigré employed by the Parisian Le Journal. For January, here was baby Mussolini, in a particularly frilly baby hat, seated on Hitler’s knee, and being fed a heaping spoonful of swastikas. “More, more!” cries baby Mussolini.
    The giellisti wanted, more than anything, to drive a wedge between Hitler and Mussolini, because Hitler meant to bring Italy into the coming war, on his side, despite the fact that Mussolini himself had declared that Italy would not be prepared to go to war until 1943.
    Fine, what else?
    Salamone had told him that the professor from Siena was working on a piece, based on a smuggled letter, that described the behavior of a police chief and a fascist gang in a town in the Abruzzi. The point of the article was to name the police chief, who would quickly hear of his new fame once the paper reached Italy. We know who you are, and we know what you’re doing, and you will be held accountable when the time comes. Also, when you’re out in the street, watch your back. This exposure would make him angry, but might serve to make him think twice about what he was doing.
    So then: Bottini, digest, cartoon, police chief, a few odds and ends, maybe a political-theory piece—Weisz would make sure it was brief—and an editorial, always passionate and operatic, which pretty much always said the same thing: resist in small ways, this can’t go on, the tables will turn. The great Italian liberal heroes, Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour, to be quoted. And always, in boldface across the top of the front page: “Please don’t destroy this newspaper, give it to a trusted friend, or leave it where others may read it.”
    Weisz had four pages to fill, the paper printed on a single folded sheet. Too bad, he thought, they couldn’t run advertisements. After a long, hard day of political dissent, discriminating giellisti like to dine at Lorenzo’s. No, that was not to be, the remaining space was his, and the subject was obvious, Colonel Ferrara, but…But what? He wasn’t sure. Somewhere in this idea he sensed a ticking bomb. Where? He couldn’t find it. The Colonel Ferrara story was not new, he’d been written about, in Italian and French newspapers, in 1935, and the story had no doubt been picked up by the wire services. He would appear in the Reuters story, which would likely be rewritten as human interest—the wire services, and the British press in general, did not take sides in the Spanish war.
    His story in Liberazione would be nothing like that. Written under his pseudonym, Palestrina—they all used composers as pen names—it would be heroic, inspiring, emotional. The infantryman’s hat, the pistol on a belt, the shouting across the river. Mussolini had sent seventy-five thousand Italian troops to Spain, a hundred Caproni bombers, Whippet tanks, field guns, ammunition, ships—everything. A national shame; they’d said it before, they would say it again. But here was one officer, and a hundred and twenty-two men, who had the courage to fight for their ideals. And the distributors would make sure to leave copies in the towns by the military bases.
    So this had