I have here put into narrative form a number of astonishing facts taken
from information read and testimony given at the court-martial
subsequently held upon the guilty parties. The facts which I assisted
in establishing will, I believe, be found of considerable interest to
readers as further revealing the subtle methods of the enemy.
For obvious reasons I have been compelled to disguise certain names so
as not to bring eternal dishonour upon a great and noble family.
"And if I revealed the truth to your dear affectionate husband?"
whispered the soft-voiced, well-dressed Italian. "What then--eh,
Elena?"
"_Madonna mia_! No," cried the dark-haired, handsome young woman, who
sat at her tea-table in a great, elegantly furnished salon in one of
those old fourteenth-century _palazzi_ close to the port of Sarzana, the
Italian naval station on the Adriatic.
It was a bright afternoon in the summer of 1916; Sarzana, the old city
in Ferrara, to which I had gone with Madame Gabrielle, a lazy,
sun-blanched place, with its white houses and green sun-shutters, had of
late been electrified into naval activity against those hated Tedeschi,
those Austrians which every Italian had been taught to hate at his
mother's knee.
Things were going well with Italy. On that day the _Corriere_ had
published a long dispatch from General Cadorna, reporting a smashing
defeat of the Austrians in the Alps, and an advance in the direction of
Trieste. The whole kingdom of Italy, from Ravenna to Reggio, was in a
state of highest enthusiasm, and in Sarzana the excited populace were
agog in the cafes and in the narrow, old-world streets.
That most elegant fourteenth-century salon, with its faded tapestries
and fine old portraits, in which the woman was seated with her visitor,
was the same great room in which the Doge Francesco Bissolo, of Venice,
assembled the famous Council of Ten, when they consulted with Malatesta
after the Battle of Padua in 1405. The Bissolo Palace, the dark, almost
prison-like walls of which rose sheer from the canal within a stone's
throw of the great naval dockyard, had little changed through five
centuries. Its exterior was grim and forbidding, with windows barred
with iron, its massive doors, which opened upon the narrow mediaeval
street, heavily studded with nails and strengthened with iron.
Within, however, while most of its antique charm had been preserved, it
was the acme of luxury and taste, containing many priceless works of
art, magnificent tapestries, and the famous collection of ancient arms
belonging to its present owner, the Marchese Guilio Michelozzo-Alfani,
whose pretty young wife was that afternoon giving tea to a visitor.
"No!" the woman exclaimed, in a low, intense whisper. "No, Carlo, you
would never do that. I know that once I treated you badly, and I was
your enemy then. But that is long ago. To-day I am your friend.
Guilio must never know the truth. In his position as Admiral of the
Port it would mean ruin for him if the truth were revealed that I am an
Austrian, and hence an enemy."
"Yes. I agree that it would be very awkward for you, my dear Elena, if
the truth ever leaked out," remarked the thin, sallow-faced, middle-aged
man, as he sipped the cup of tea, in English fashion, which she had
handed him. About his lips was a strange hardness, even though his
friendship was so apparent.
"But you alone know, my dear Carlo, and you will never give me away. We
were old friends in Budapest--ah! I wish to forget those days--before I
married Guilio," she remarked softly, with a bitter smile.
"My dear Elena, don't think that I've called to threaten you," exclaimed
Carlo Corradini, the well-dressed Italian, who lived such a gay
existence in Rome, and who was so well known in the cosmopolitan life of
the Corso and the Pincio. "Why should I? I am here, in Sarzana, upon a
secret mission--in order to speak with you."
"Why?"
"Well,"--as he paused he looked the young wife of the Italian Admiral
full in the face--"well, because, though your country is at war with
Italy to-day, Austria has still friends in Italy, just as Germany has."
"Ah! This war is all so horrible," declared the Marchesa, with a slight
shudder. "You Italians hate every Austrian with a fierce and deadly
hatred."
"Pardon me, my dear Elena, but you Austrians hate us just as fiercely,"
he laughed. "Where is Guilio?"
"At his office. He will not be back until seven. He always goes to the
Club to take his vermouth there."
Corradini glanced at the door to make certain it was closed; then,
bending across the little table with its splendid silver service, he
whispered:
"I have a secret message for you--from somebody you know."
"A secret message--what?" asked the young Marchesa, opening her fine
eyes widely.
"From the Herrengasse, number seven."
"From Vienna?" she asked, in surprise, for the address he had given her
was the bureau of the Austro-Hungarian Council of Ministers.
He nodded mysteriously, and with a grin said:
"From your old friend Schreyer."
She drew a long breath and went pale for a second. Mention of that name
recalled to her a remembrance of the past--of the days when she was a
dancer at the Raimund Theatre in Vienna, and when Count Schreyer had,
after a brief acquaintance, offered her his hand. But she had disliked
him because he was such a cold, harsh bureaucrat, who had at that time
occupied a high position at the Ministry of the Interior, and who
possessed, as she once told a friend, "a heart of granite."
Elena's life-story had been a rather curious one, but, after all, not
much out of the commonplace. The daughter of a poor Austrian musician
in the orchestra at the Weiner Burger Theatre, in Vienna, and of an
Italian mother, she had learned Italian from her birth, and on going to
Italy to fulfil an engagement at the Politeama, at Livorno, she had
posed as an Italian, though hitherto she had lived all her life in
Austria, and had been taught to hate her dead mother's race.
As an Italian, she had met, and afterwards married, the middle-aged
Marchese Michelozzo-Alfani, at that time a Vice-Admiral of the Fleet.
For three years prior to the war her life had been quiet and uneventful.
The summer she spent out at Antignano, on the seashore, three miles
from Livorno--or Leghorn, as the English call it--where they rented a
big white villa amid the vines and olives; in spring, on the Lake of
Garda; in autumn, in Florence; and winter, in Rome.
From his early days the Marchese had been a most popular naval officer,
who had fought in Abyssinia and in Tripoli, and, being a favourite at
the Court of the Quirinale, promotion had come to him rapidly. Before
his marriage he had endeavoured to practise economy, in order to redeem
the fortunes of his ancient family; but now that his wife Elena proved
so extravagant, he found himself getting deeper into debt each day.
His appointment to Sarzana at the outbreak of the war had enabled him to
return to the ancestral palace, which had passed from the Bissolo family
to that of the Michelozzo in the sixteenth century, but which had for a
good number of years been closed and in the hands of caretakers. His
was one of the most important naval commands in Italy, and the Austrians
were viewing that naval base with increased anxiety, it being so very
close to both Trieste and Fiume. Admiral Michelozzo-Alfani was one of
the youngest of the officers of his grade in the Italian Navy.
Many raids he had made upon Austrian ports on the Adriatic, and Ragusa,
Zara, Sebenico and other places had suffered severe bombardment by his
"mosquito" fleet; therefore, at the Admiralty in Vienna his great
activity was being frequently discussed.
"I see, my dear Elena, you have not forgotten your friend the Count,"
laughed the sallow-faced Italian across the table presently. "Neither
has he forgotten you."
"How do you know?"
"Well, because he spoke to me about you only three weeks ago."
"Three weeks ago!" echoed the Marchesa. "How could you have met?"
Carlo Corradini grinned very mysteriously.
"Well--I was in Vienna three weeks ago--that is all."
"You in Vienna!" she gasped. "Are you, then, a friend of my country?"
she asked, in a low, hoarse whisper.
"Why, of course," he replied. "You are Austrian in all but name. I am
a born Italian, but--well, I am a friend of Austria."
"A well-paid friend--eh?"
"Yes, just as you may be--if you will. The Count is still your friend,
and he greatly admires you. It is his one regret that you preferred the
Marchese Guilio. He is a good fellow is the Count. He is now prime
favourite with the Emperor, and he still remains unmarried. Elena, he
thinks always of you, and only you."
The handsome Elena shrugged her shoulders. The man who had called upon
her quite unexpectedly she had first met five years ago in Budapest. He
was then a poor Italian composer of music. Yet now, in mysterious
circumstances, he was, she knew, in possession of ample funds, and lived
in an elegant flat close to the Piazza Colonna in Rome. They exchanged
glances, whereupon he settled himself to speak more openly to her, and
to give her a verbal message from her old admirer at the Herrengasse.
Carlo Corradini began by laughing at her patriotic devotion to her
husband's country.
"Of course Guilio is a most excellent fellow," he said. "But, alas! he
is merely fighting a lost cause. The Central Powers are bound to win,
and it is now for you to assist your own country. Schreyer appeals to
you. He knows of your difficulty in meeting that last loan which old
Levitski, the Jew, in Milan, made to you a year ago, and--"
"How does he know that?" she inquired, in quick surprise.
"My dear Elena, how does Austria know so many secrets of her enemies?"
he laughed. "Schreyer is now head of that department of the Secret
Service which deals with affairs here in Italy, and--"
"And you, an Italian, are one of his agents," she interrupted, in a low,
meaning voice.
He bowed in the affirmative in silence. Then, after a few moments, he
remarked, in a strange, meaning tone, his black, penetrating eyes fixed
upon her: "I know the secret of your nationality, and your friendship
with Count Schreyer--and you know mine. So, my dear Elena, we have
nothing to fear from each other. Do you understand?"
"I don't understand. You surely are not hinting that I should betray my
husband's secrets--the naval secrets of Italy?"
The dark, smooth-tongued man from Rome smiled quietly, as he answered:
"That, my dear Elena, is exactly the message I bear to you from
Schreyer. It is known that your husband tells you a good deal. You
have whispered secrets to your friends, the Comtesse Landrini, and also
the Renata Pozzi. If to them, then why not to me--eh?"
"Never!" she cried. "I have married an Italian, and I am now Italian."
"But the money. It will be useful. Levitski must be paid in full in
eight weeks' time. Seventy-two thousand lire. That is the sum, I
think? If you fail him this time, he will take his revenge and tell the
truth."
"He does not know."
"But Schreyer will tell him."
"What?" she gasped, starting from her chair. "Has the Count told you
that?"
"Well, he has not exactly said so in words," was her visitor's reply.
"He only hinted at it, and sent me straight to see you. I had to travel
by way of Holland and London--quite a long journey."
"Then you shall tell him that I refuse," she answered. "I will never
betray Italy, and more especially through Guilio, who believes in my
patriotism, and never dreams that I am anything but an Italian born and
bred."
"That makes it all the easier. He will never suspect you," remarked the
sallow-faced man, with a sinister smile upon his lips.
"I tell you," she cried angrily, "I decline to enter into it at all.
I--"
The door suddenly opened as she spoke, and there entered the Admiral, a
smart, good-looking, middle-aged man in uniform with decorations, whose
appearance was so unexpected that they both started.
"Decline what, my dear?" he asked sharply. "What is the matter?"
"Oh, nothing, Guilio," she laughed lightly. "You recollect Signor
Corradini, who used to come to see us in Livorno?"
"Why, of course," said the Admiral, as the two men bowed to each other.
A lie rose readily to her lips, and she said:
"Well, Signor Corradini has called in order to try and induce me to take
part in the Princess di Paliano's _tableaux vivants_ at Bologna, in aid
of the Croce-Rosso. But I am far too busy with hospital work here in
Sarzana, so I have declined.
"Yes, dearest, you are far too busy. I am always afraid Elena will
overwork herself, my dear Corradini. I am nervous lest she should have
a breakdown."
The woman and her tempter exchanged meaning glances.
"Everyone knows how intensely patriotic is the Marchesa, and we all
admire her for her hard work in the cause of charity. My friend the
Princess, however, asked me to call here and solicit her help, and in
consequence I have done so."
The Admiral thanked him warmly, for the Princess di Paliano's exertions
in war-work were well known throughout Italy.
Elena's husband sipped the tea she handed him, and, after chatting with
their visitor for a further half-hour, the Admiral suddenly asked:
"What are you doing down in Rome nowadays?"
"Oh, of course, we are all working hard. I am secretary in a department
in the Ministry of War, the department which is in touch with France and
England concerning munitions."
He spoke the truth. Carlo Corradini held a very important position in
the Ministry, even though, as we afterwards discovered, he had in secret
long been an enemy agent. This latter fact, Guilio Michelozzo-Alfani
never dreamed. Like all others, he never imagined that Carlo, hating
the Tedeschi so fiercely as he did, could be in secret their ingenious
and unscrupulous friend.
The Marchese himself was a true-born Italian, one of the ancient
aristocracy of the north. Those who know Italy, know quite well the
stern and honest patriotism of her sons from count to contadino, and of
the fierce, relentless hatred of every Austrian.
Presently the well-dressed civilian functionary rose, clicked his heels,
and in the elegant Italian manner raised his hostess's hand, and,
kissing it, wished her _addio_.
The dark eyes of the Admiral's young wife met his in that second, and
they understood.
Five minutes later Carlo Corradini was hurrying along the Via Vittorio
Emanuele, the principal street in Sarzana, in the grey evening light;
then, turning to the left, he gained the Passeggio, which faced the
Adriatic, that long promenade lined with its dusty, wind-swept
tamarisks, where by day the _cicale_, harbinger of heat, chirped their
monotonous chant.
Corradini's visit to Sarzana proved to be a protracted one. His excuse
was that he had been sent from the Ministry upon a special mission, and,
in consequence, he had preferred to rent a little flat on the Passeggio
than to live in the Albergo Stella d'Italia. One day, at six o'clock,
he met, at a very obscure restaurant called The Vapore, a certain
Countess Malipiero, a middle-aged, ugly, but quite wealthy woman, who
lived near the Santa Maria della Salute, and who was a great personal
friend of the Marchesa.
The pair dined together at the popular little establishment, eating a
simple dish of _paste al pomidoro_, for which the _trattoria_ was noted,
a _costoletta_ and a piece of _stracchino_ to follow. But over that
simple meal the pair remained in serious consultation, while not far
from them sat the good-looking but unobtrusive Madame Gabrielle Soyez,
for the pair were already under suspicion, though we had as yet no
reliable evidence to justify interference. Afterwards the pair walked
together as far as the Piazza Grande, and there parted, the spy of
Austria smiling as he went along the noisy street towards the sea.