TE23 Double Feature

A Conspiracy of Talkers

Gaetano Savatteri

or taking a rest. “ There were bandits around here?”

zone of operations a few kilometers from the beaches of Licata and Gela and the confused and deadly landings that Adano had learned about later from accounts of veterans he’d met in Naples. At the time, Adano was in the Pacific, relegated to a base without name or importance, shuffling papers and stamping documents. A Top Priority mission, they’d told him, just as his emergency transfer to Naples four months ago was Top Priority, pulling him out of the Marines and attaching him to the OSS. A promotion: now the papers he shuffled and the documents he stamped were marked “secret.” Top Priority, that’s also what Major Stafford said as he handed Adano the bundle of documents for his mission in Sicily. His orders were to find out what had happened to eight trucks, originally consigned to the 2nd Armored Division of Patton’s Seventh Army, then to AMGOT (the allied occupational government), and then disappearing, stolen or stripped for parts. Eight vanished trucks: Top Priority. The jeep stopped in front of the Hotel Roma. Semino honked. The entrance behind the glass door lit up. The man who came out of the pensione embraced Semino, kissing him on the cheeks. He was 325

“There still are, Lieutenant, but donworri , they don’t do anything to the Americans. You’re American, right?” Semino had asked this question, formulated one way or another, three times now. He just couldn’t believe that Lieutenant Adano was really the American officer whose arrival in Palermo from Naples he’d been informed of five days before, with orders to act as guide and interpreter. This guy here seemed to speak proper mainland Italian, even though he swore that his father and grandfather were Sicilian. “Why don’t they do anything to the Americans, Semino?” “Respect, Signor Lieutenant. They respect the Americans, like we all do.” Beyond the rock, the dim lights of the town came into view — a few lit windows, a row of lights strung along the main road, bobbing in the wind. Semino drove confidently — he knew the area. He’d been there the year before, when it was a 324