The Lights of Alborada. Gianni Riotta

      The young waitress adjusted the belt of her white apron with small, sure, nervous movements and glanced around Restaurant 21 to check that none of the customers required her services. Captain Jim Cheever looked at the girl's hand with the serene greed of young men who have been forced to remain chaste for a long time. Unexpressed desire subsides, and the body is filled instead with a clear and formidable energy. ‘That's why Catholics demand celibacy of their priests,’ mused the Presbyterian Cheever. The mind is clear and clean, it moves with grace and warmth. The body, on the other hand, becomes aware of the erotic atmosphere that bathes it, as though your skin has become the vibrating antennae of a wandering dragonfly. Cheever was thinking about his new military mission, in that final – penultimate? – year of war. General Stan Matthews had summoned him, as a matter of ‘immediate urgency and discretion’, to Restaurant 21 in Manhattan, rather than, as protocol would have decreed, the Pentagon in Washington. Why such secrecy? And yet, as his mind reflected on the mission before him, his skin was aware that the waitress was a beautiful and desirable girl, a slender mulatto with chestnut eyes, happy to have a job, because the war kept the men at the front, giving her a paycheck, a weekly wage. Her hand ran back and forth across the embroidered linen, nervous of her new environment, sure of her feline beauty, and Cheever looked at her. He thought about the war, and his body was drawn to the girl, silent and distant. He tried to concentrate, worrying that the solitude and aridity of his mission in defence and on behalf of the United States of America might lead him into regretful sensuality. On those long afternoons in barracks, or at daybreak in tumbledown motels on the outskirts of town, he had learned to shoo away his erotic fantasies, irritating gadflies that they were. To stay prey to them was to unleash a wave of morbid longing, uncertainty about what to do, doubts about the future. And in wartime, Cheever couldn't afford to have doubts. ‘So,’ he thought, glancing at the mulatto girl who had suddenly moved, ‘the end of the war will let us return to doubt. Love, certainly, I'll go back to my old love, but doubt is more seductive to me than love. Being able to cultivate eccentric notions, without worrying that a mistake might cause the death of good, decent boys, or even the failure of the mission, and lead in a terrible chain of events to the total defeat of the army, the end of democracy. The luxury of uncertainty: that's what distinguishes peace from war.’

      General Matthews came into the restaurant, stroking the revolving door with his gloved hands: such was the power that emanated from his well-trained torso that it appeared as if the magnetism of his body was moving the massive walnut door in a great surge of prestige and energy. He frowned, not noticing Cheever at first, and then recognised him, but his jaw didn't move: everything was as it should be, rendezvous accomplished, Cheever was there, plan obeyed, the strategic operations of the Allied Armed Forces operated according to pre-established protocols.

      Matthews sat down and beckoned the girl over with a wave of his fingers, and Cheever was sorry that the general had sufficient authority to enter even his guileless reverie, summoning the docile mulatto girl whom he had courted in silence. He sat back down and concealed his disappointment even from himself, feeling ashamed, as boys will, of feelings that they will later recognise as the clearest they ever had in their lives, and saw after a moment's delay that a second officer followed in Matthews' wake. He was a major in the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, the arrogant men of American espionage, and he said, ‘Good day, sir’ in a curious accent, neither French nor German, a low, guttural sound that Cheever had never heard before.

      Matthews nodded and the stranger sat down. The general took two large sips from the mint julep he had ordered, holding it as though he were going to snap the glass full of chopped ice, and turned to Cheever. ‘What are the latest missions? Are you aware of the situation of prisoners of war detained in America?’

      ‘I was involved with the U-boat raids, sir, anti-sub missions, particularly after 1942. A specialist in interception, anti-sabotage and code-breaking. I don't know much about prisoners, sir.’

      ‘Have you ever met Major Cafard?’

      ‘No, sir.’

      ‘You'll be working together. The major is part of the antiterrorist section of the OSS. He's just back from Europe. Now he's working at home again. He'll give you details of your mission. Listen to him carefully.’

      Cafard: the name rang a bell with Cheever, but he couldn't remember why.

      The major started listing figures in his gloomy accent, which sounded like the official language of the undercover war, English with a hint of occupied Europe. ‘About half a million Germans, most captured in Africa, are held in prisoner-of-war camps in the USA. The first arrivals are veterans of Rommel's Afrika Korps, convinced that the war was still theirs after the Desert Fox's brilliant campaigns. They still have tans, round sunglasses and tins of Bavarian butter. Tough guys. They thump the other prisoners at the slightest infraction. They've set up a Gestapo network throughout all the camps. All it takes to get on the wrong side of them is an anti-Nazi joke, an expression of resignation or a curse against Hitler. At night they throw a blanket over the unfortunates, and everyone in the room has to join in the punishment beating. Anyone who refuses ends up under the blanket himself. And their families back home are blackmailed, too. For most of the prisoners, a stay in the United States is their best chance of survival. They eat better than their compatriots, and they learn languages and trades in the classes and laboratories that we've set up. Some of them even take courses at American colleges, and receive degrees and diplomas. But a minority hang in there, fighting a pointless undercover campaign, terrorising their comrades.’

      ‘How can we control them?’ Cheever broke in, to lighten the feeling of unease that the man's accent provoked in him.

      ‘With infiltrators,’ Matthews replied. ‘By censoring their mail. Often we receive tip-offs from prisoners who have converted to democracy and want to isolate the Nazis. But the Gestapo are a constant threat. They're trying to organise a mass breakout to cover a unit of saboteurs who are capable of causing slaughter and terrorising our civilian population. It'll be a great propaganda coup in Berlin. We've set up special camps to keep the hardliners in place.’

      A curious sense of menace overlaid Cheever's irritation with Cafard's accent, but he refused to be tempted into doubt. He took a sip of his coffee and listened.

      ‘Not many escapes. A few thousand Germans, just one among the Japanese and more than five hundred Italians. On United States territory –’ Major Cafard glanced at a card that had appeared in his hand as though by magic, checking that he had the precise figure ‘– 371,683 Germans and 50,273 Italians held in total. And it's the Italians who are giving us problems. They've surrendered. They've lost the war. They're fighting under our command in Europe, and yet they're still escaping. Only 0.5 per cent of German prisoners try to escape. Among the Italians the figure is 1.2 per cent, nearly three times more than the Germans.’

      ‘Any of them make it?’

      ‘Very few. They slip away. They try to disappear into the city. One Italian lieutenant, Montalbetti, walked two hundred miles through the desert. He had hidden in the camp for four days, and escaped when the guards gave up looking for him. We caught up with him on the border with Mexico, just because he'd lost his bearings and turned up at customs on the American side. Now lots of them are imitating his technique.’

      Two hundred miles alone in the Texan desert. Cheever had hunted coyote and mountain lions – puma – with his father, in 1938. The hot air fills your mouth, your feet sink with a squeak into the dry turf. The only things that flourish there are scorpions, rattlesnakes and cacti. The coyotes will hunt down a mountain goat, the puma a deer that has come down from the forest; no human being with any common sense would be so presumptuous as to cross such an area. He wanted to request an interview with this guy Montalbetti who had chosen to risk ending up having his bones gnawed by the vultures rather than wait and go home comfortably once the war was over. Curious animals, the Italians. Now the Germans, devils on the battlefield, were biding their time. The other guys were escaping: why?

      ‘At the beginning of the conflict, in 1942, we were afraid of sabotage, by the Japanese in the west and the Germans in the east. Above all, infiltrations by commandos from the submarines. You know about the U-boat hunts, don't you?’ Matthews went on.

      Cheever