Bell for Adano, A - John Hersey [3]
After all the poverty which had shouted and begged in the streets, this room was stiflingly rich. The furniture was of a heavy black Italian style which seemed to be bursting with some kind of creatures half man and half fruit. The curtains were of rich brocade, and the walls were lined with a silken stuff.
The door where the men came in was near the southwest comer of the room. To the right of it a huge table stood, with some maps and aerial photos on it which had been left behind by the officers of an American regiment, who had used the room as a command post early in the morning. There was an incongruous bundle of Italian brooms in the corner. The south wall had a double white door in the middle, and on either side a huge sofa bound in black leather. Then on the opposite side, facing the street and giving onto the place of speeches, there were two big French doors.
Scattered along the wall and pressed against it, as if frightened, were a heavy table, several throne-like chairs of various sizes, another couch and, in the far corner, a white stone statue of a saint. She, besides being decently swathed in a marble scarf, had a piece of American signal corps telephone wire wound around her neck on its way from the nearest French door to the desk, where a field phone had evidently been set up. To the left of the door there was a tremendous bookcase with a glass front, beyond it an enamel washstand with a big stone pitcher beside it, and then a weirdly ornate upright piano.
Up to the right, over the two sofas, there were huge pictures of Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel and his Queen, facing each other in sympathetic misery. On the outside wall there was a picture of Crown Prince Umberto, smiling at everything that happened in the room. Over the Saint of the Telephone there was a photograph of Princess Marie Jose of Belgium, Umberto’s wife, dressed as a Red Cross nurse. Above the bookcase there was a great dustless square where a picture had been but was not now.
All this, both the heavy furniture and the ironic pictures, seemed placed there merely to press the eye toward the opposite end of the room, toward the biggest picture in the room, a romantic oil of a group of men pointing into the distance, and especially toward the desk.
The scale of everything in that room was so big that hugeness in the desk did not seem unnatural. It was of wood. On either end there were wooden bas-reliefs of fasces and of the phrase Anno XV, for the fifteenth year of Fascism, or 1937, when the desk was presumably made. Under the desk there was a wooden scrollwork footstool.
“Say,” said Major Joppolo, “this is okay.”
“Looks like that office of Mussolini’s,” Borth said. “Come to think of it, you look quite a lot like Mussolini, sir, except the mustache. Will it be okay with you to be a Mussolini?”
“Cut the kidding,” the Major said. “Let’s look around They went out through the white door at the end of the room and walked through several offices, all of which were crowded with desks and files and bookcases. The files had not been emptied or even disturbed. “Good,” said Borth, “lists of names, every one registered and all their records. It’ll be easy for us here.”
The Major said: “What a difference between my office and these others. It is shameful.”
All Borth said was: “Your office?”
When the two went back into the big office there was an Italian there. He had evidently been hiding in the building. He was a small man, with a shiny linen office coat on, with his collar buttoned but no tie.
The small Italian gave the Fascist salute and with an eager face said in Italian: “Welcome to the Americansl Live Roosevelt) How glad I am that you have arrived. For many years I have hated the Fascists.”
The Major said in Italian: “Who are you?”
The little man said: “Zito Giovanni. I have been well known as anti-Fascist.”
Major Joppolo said: “What do you do?” Zito said: “I greet the Americans.”
Borth said in an Italian