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CHAPTER 5

The next to die was a fat Italian named Bertoldi.

He died, paradoxically, at a time of hope – the thaw. Moscow rang to the music of water. Dripping from dwindling icicles, plunging down drainpipes, frothing in the gutters. Listen carefully and you could hear the accompaniment – wet snow falling thickly from rooftops and, in green-blushing parks, tentative bird-song. On the river this April day the ice was on the move and in the streets Muscovites straightened up from winter. A time of hope. But not for Alfredo Bertoldi.

Since he had come to Moscow five years ago, blown, it was said, as financier for the Red Brigade, unsuspected for years because you expected Red Brigadiers to be young and fierce and Bertoldi was neither of these things, he had mourned. For pasta. For girls on the Via Veneto who wore nothing but fur coats and high heels. For Neapolitan songs. For God, Italian style.

Hopeless lamentations when, because you were a gangster rather than a fugitive keeper of secrets however cob-webbed, you were housed in a cramped studio in the foreigners’ complex on Kutuzovsky Prospect, named after the field-marshal who sent packing another intruder, Napoleon.

Despite the lack of pasta Bertoldi perversely grew fatter on Chicken Kiev spurting with butter and black bread and assorti ice-cream which he bought even in minus 20 degrees. But it wasn’t the healthy, baritone fatness of an Italian enjoying his sustinence: it was the bloated corpulence of the compulsive eater, the worrier.

His departure from this life of regret was spectacular. A few tenants were strolling in the courtyard of the barrack-block apartment blocks where foreigners – diplomats and journalists mostly – were housed together in the interests of surveillance. It was 10.35 am. The sun had already melted the temporary skating rink, tyres hissed excitingly on Kutuzovsky, even the two militiamen posted at the gates to check visitors were smiling.

Suddenly the windows of an apartment on the fifth floor were flung open with such force that the glass shattered. And there stood Bertoldi in a scarlet dressing gown. Later some witnesses were to testify, unofficially and without any degree of certainty, that they had observed movements behind the obese Italian; others were equally convinced that Bertoldi had stood alone.

What was undisputed was the manner of his fall. He seemed to float supported by the scarlet wings of his dressing gown. There was, it was asserted, a monstrous grace about his exit. His scream lasted from the window to the ground.

Such was his bulk that when he hit the concrete he spread. Within fifteen minutes the mess was cleaned up by militia and taken away in an ambulance.

A note was found in his cramped apartment. It was written on a picture postcard of his native Turin beside the remains of his last supper.

It said: I can’t stand this fucking life anymore.