Note: Contrary to what you may have learned from media reports, we here in the Garden of Eaton don’t spend all of our time cavorting with Eve, munching on forbidden fruit, hobnobbing with disreputable serpents, and writing self-indulgent blog posts. I am delighted to report that today is the release date of the delightful crime novel  A Conspiracy of Talkers (La congiura dei loquaci), by the Italian journalist, screenwriter and novelist Gaetano Savatteri, translated from the Italian by me, and published by Italica Press as part of its Italian Crime series, available in hardcover, paperback, and eBook versions.

Savatteri, though born in Milan, was raised in the small town of Racalmuto, Sicily. He grew up hearing about the murder of its mayor in November 1944, during the Allied occupation of the island. The justice system quickly apprehended and convicted a culprit, but few if anyone in the town believe that justice was actually served. A Conspiracy of Talkers is Savatteri’s novelistic re-creation of what might have happened, both in terms of the mayor’s assassination and the “investigation” that followed. Along the way, it’s a great read.

Here is an excerpt from the book. (Steve Eaton)

From A Conspiracy of Talkers (copyright © 2021 Italica Press, all rights reserved):

“I can’t even think about it, Signor Lieutenant. If we hadn’t been laki, veri laki, we’d be with the souls in purgatory right now.”

The jeep was lurching down the road. Its headlights revealed gaps in the pavement, avoided at the last second with a sudden skid. Lieutenant Adano’s knuckles were white from the effort of hanging onto the vehicle for hours. It was raining. The dust on the windshield had turned into a dark coating of mud.

“Are you sure you can see all right?” the lieutenant asked Semino in Italian.

“Donworri, Lieutenant. Eyes like a cat, Lieutenant.”

Once more Lieutenant Adano leafed through his mental phrasebooks — from the Italian dialect of his grandfather to the Sicilian-American of his aunt Cettina, whom he’d listened to as a child. He came back to Semino’s words, still not trusting in the road. Or the driver.

Sure, veri laki. Extremely laki along a hairpin curve on the mountain road near Vicari, where the jeep had careened sideways on two wheels helplessly skidding, unable to gain traction, spewing rocks and dust. From his side, Adano saw almond trees flying towards him. Semino’s face didn’t change — he had the same silent, focused expression since leaving Palermo. He managed to bring the jeep to a stop, the back half dangling in midair. With the help of some peasants, they’d managed to get back on the road and on their way. But from that moment — he hadn’t said a word before — Semino didn’t stop talking.

He told Lieutenant Adano about his grandfather Calogero Castrenze who emigrated to New York before the Great War, about his years in Brooklyn and then his move to Buffalo, about the fact that he’d been the best shoemaker in his hometown, but there was hunger, not even crustabred to eat, and that’s why he’d left with his wife and four children. Two had died but the girl, his mother, married someone from back home who lived in Buffalo and he, Salvatore, was born in America, but they’d always called him Sam though his mother used to call him Semino, bless her soul, which was surely in heaven, a sainted woman who’d made sacrifices so he and his brother could grow up healthy but she died when Semino was ten, tenny ears, so his father went back home to get married because a man with two kids can’t stay single and even in America there was the Depression so it might’ve been better if his grandfather had emigrated to Americazuela or Argentina cause there you just had to find some piece of open land, build a house on it and say this is mine, maicauntri, but instead his father went back to the old country and married a woman who, with all due respect, Signor Lieutenant, was no good for my father, who’d returned from America and maybe forgot how things worked back home, so she had a son seven months after the wedding, they said he was born premature but even my father knew he was the son of a whore, sonnovibich, he got depressed and didn’t want to go back to America with a son who, realli, wasn’t his son so he stayed in Sicily but Semino and his brother Charlie, his real brother, were always called Americans and then when the war ended and you guys arrived which was the save for la Sicilia, knowing the language, he worked for the Americans in Palermo, so good that once even General Poletti asked for his help on a sensitive matter, a serious thing which he did so well that General Poletti, a true gentleman, told Semino that he was a real american man, it is a great honor to America and to Sicily that we are like brothers, closer, even, duiuandersten, Lieutenant?”

Sure, of course. Adano understood less than half of the speech, that garble of Sicilianized English, of Sicilian in swing americano. But mostly what he understood was that he had misled Semino from the beginning, when he disclosed that he knew Italian. He’d studied at City College, painstakingly sounding out Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio. Nights of reading and rereading, savoring the sonorous language, musical and full, “the gentle hue of oriental sapphire,” so different and so distant from the Italian of his aunt Cettina, gloomy and muddled, mournful and drawling. Now that mournfulness, even more unhinged, was churning, churning in Semino’s words, in this November evening, in the driving rain, in the road that twisted and turned, turning away even from the feeble lights of distant towns and plunging again into the blackness of the countryside, and in the shadows of the men on mules who fled to the side of the road at the sight of headlights.

“How much longer, Semino?”

“Innotime, Signor Lieutenant. Past that rock.”

The rock spur rose before them, white in the dark, wet night. “Chi passa dalla rocca e non è rubato, o il brigante dorme o è malato,” Semino chanted. If you get past the rock with no gun to your chest, then the bandit is sick or taking a rest.

“There were bandits around here?”

“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 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 2^nd 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 missing a hand — a stump stuck out of one sleeve. He stepped forward obsequiously. “Prego, Signor Lieutenant. I speak English.”

“Non si preoccupi, parlo italiano,” Adano replied, and continued in Italian. “Is City Hall nearby? First thing tomorrow morning, I have to see the mayor.”

The man’s eyes opened wide. Surprised and maybe disappointed, thought Adano, by my perfect Italian.

“The mayor?” He tried to catch Semino’s eyes. Then he turned back to Adano. “The mayor, you said?”

“The mayor, Signor Farrauto.” Adano reached for his leather portfolio. He’d read and reread the documents. He was sure. Baldassare Farrauto, appointed in August 1943, was mayor of this town.

The proprietor of the hotel gasped, glancing around at the deserted street. He approached Semino and whispered something incomprehensible, a gesture more than a word.

Semino remained expressionless, with the same blank face he wore while half of the jeep was dangling in midair off a turn on the mountain road near Vicari.

“The mayor had an accident. Two hours ago. They shot him, duiuandersten, Signor Lieutenant? He’s dead.”

(From A Conspiracy of Talkers by Gaetano Savatteri, translated from the Italian by Steve Eaton, 153 pages, Italica Press. Available from Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com and, for our Austin friends who want to go local, bookpeople.com)