Free The Foreign Correspondent by Alan Furst Page B

same thing. So, once again, we burn it.”
    “There’s more,” Weisz said. “I think I might have been followed, earlier this morning, when I walked to the Métro.” Briefly, he described the behavior of the man in the tweed jacket.
    “Were the two of them somehow working together?” Elena said.
    “I don’t know,” Weisz said. “Maybe I’m seeing monsters under the bed.”
    “Ah yes,” Elena said. “ Those monsters.”
    “Under all our beds,” Salamone said tartly. “The way the meeting went today.”
    “Is there anything we can do?” Weisz said.
    “Not that I know about, short of ceasing publication. We try to be as secretive as we can, but, in the émigré community, people talk, and the OVRA spies are everywhere.”
    “On the committee?” Elena said.
    “Maybe.”
    “What a world,” Weisz said.
    “Our very own,” Salamone said. “But the clandestine press has been a fact of life since 1924. In Italy, in Paris, in Belgium, everywhere we ran to. And OVRA can’t stop it. They can slow it down. They arrest a socialist group in Turin, but the giellisti in Florence start a new publication. And the major newspapers have survived for a long time—the socialist Avanti, the Communist Unità. Our older brother, the Giustizia e Libertà paper published in Paris. The émigrés who issue Non Mollare!, as the name of their journal states, don’t give in, and the Catholic Action people publish Il Corriere degli Italiani. The OVRA can’t kill us all. They might want to, but Mussolini still craves legitimacy in the eyes of the world. And, when they do assassinate—Matteotti in 1924 , the Rosselli brothers, in France, in ’ 37 —they create martyrs; martyrs for the Italian opposition, and martyrs in the world’s newspapers. This is a war, and, in a war, sometimes you lose, sometimes you win, and, sometimes, when you think you’ve lost, you’ve won.”
    Elena liked that idea. “Maybe this needs to be said to the committee.”
    Weisz agreed. The fascists didn’t always have things their way. When Matteotti, the leader of the Italian Socialist party, disappeared, after making a passionate antifascist speech, the reaction in Italy, even among members of the Fascist party, had been so intense that Mussolini was forced to support an investigation. A month later, Matteotti’s body had been discovered in a shallow grave outside Rome, a carpenter’s file driven into his chest. The following year, a man named Dumini was arrested, tried, and found guilty, more or less. He was guilty, said the court, of “nonpremeditated homicide extenuated by the subnormal physical resistance of Matteotti and by other circumstances.” So, yes, murdered, but not very murdered.
    “And Liberazione ?” Weisz said. “Do we, as you say of the major newspapers, survive?”
    “Maybe,” Salamone said. “Now, before the cops come rushing in here…” He crumpled the yellow drafting paper into a ball and dropped it in the ashtray. “Who’ll do the honors? Carlo?”
    Weisz took out his steel lighter and lit a corner of the paper.
    It was a brisk little fire, flaring and smoking, tended by Weisz with the point of a pencil. As the ashes were stirred about, a tap at the door was followed by the appearance of the barman. “Everything allright in here?”
    Salamone said it was.
    “If you’re going to burn the place down, let me know first, eh?”
      
    4 February. Weisz sat back in his chair for a moment and watched people in the street below his office window, then forced himself back to work.
    “M ONSIEUR DE P ARIS ” D EAD AT 76
    Anatole Deibler, the Grand High Executioner of France, died of a heart attack yesterday in the Châtelet station of the Paris Métro. Known by the traditional honorific “Monsieur de Paris,” Deibler was on his way to his 401 st execution, having attended France’s guillotine for forty years. Deibler was the last male heir to the position held by his family, executioners since 1829 , and it is