Branduardi had followed the truck, but lost ground because the motorbikes engine was now old and worn out. When he arrived, with the detained man already in the holding cell, the warrant officer had gone up to his office in the Violent Crimes Section on the second floor which he shared with a sergeant and a typist. He had calmly prepared himself a war coffee, a surrogate, with his own Neapolitan coffee maker that he kept in the closet along with an electric incandescent stove. He had sipped it boiling hot after sweetening it with saccharin, not because he was diabetic but because since the start of the war, sugar was unobtainable for ordinary mortals. He had then smoked a Serenissima Zara cigarette with equally heavenly calm, savoring it almost to the end of the butt that, for the last two puffs, he had held by skewering it with a pin. In those times of famine and filterless cigarettes, a lot of smokers used to do that. And finally, at a leisurely pace, he had taken the sheet of paper with the report no more than fifty feet away on the same floor, to one of the deputy commanders of the Violent Crimes Section, a certain chief commissioner Riccardo Calvo who was on duty that night until twenty-four hundred hours. At zero hours and a few seconds Branduardi had gone home to sleep and, shortly after, Calvo did the same after leaving the warrant officers report on the desk of his incoming peer, Dr. Giuliano Boni.
The man in overalls had remain locked in the holding cell.
Finally, following the orders of chief commissioner Boni, the Rosa Demaggi case had been foisted onto an almost beardless Deputy Commissioner who had come on duty at midnight, Dr. Vittorio D'Aiazzo. He had been in Public Safety for just under a year and had been assigned to the difficut Violent Crimes Section from the very first day.
It was about 3 o'clock in the morning of September 27, 1943 and the insurrection that history remembers as The Four Days of Naples was about to begin: the cauldron of the oppressed city was bubbling and the temperature had now risen to such a degree that it would be impossible for the occupying German to prevent its fiery eruption.
Chapter 2
What the Partenope people were feeling had been unclear to the contemptuous Nazi invader and the fear that they had intentionally spread in the city had resulted in hearts at boiling point and in the mood for rebellion. Facimmo 'a uèrra a chilli strunzi zellosi3 was now the feeling of many Neapolitans, under the impression that, San Genna' ajutànno4 ! they would free themselves and, at last, peace would become real, very real and no longer the stillborn illusion of a couple of months before:
On July 25, Italy had rejoiced at the fall of the regime during the night, seemingly definitive with Mussolini defenestrated by the Grand Council of Fascism and the king having him arrested, and with the new Badoglio government which was no longer fascist, even though not democratically elected; but above all it had been the mistaken idea that the conflict had ended that made the nation rejoice. In any case, there were soon laments throughout the entire nation which, in Naples, had presented picturesque overtones in the alleyways and the bassi5 , such as: Chillo capucchióne d'o nuvièllo Càpo 'e Guviérno, 'o maresciallo d'Italia Badoglio Pietro, 'o gran generalone! ha fatto di' a 'a ràdio, tòmo, tòmo: "The war continues": strunz' e mmèrda!6 Then there had been those who had pointed out: Nossignori, strunzi noi ati a penzà che 'nu maresciallone vulisse 'a pace! Ma va ' ffa 'n 'c...7
With the armistice of Cassibile signed between Italy and the Anglo-Americans on September 3 and which should have remained secret until the Italian armed forces had been reorganized to hold back the vindictive former ally, but had been made known on September 8 by vainglorious victorious generals, a worse evil than before had landed on Italy, through the Brenner Pass8 Many new, combative and vindictive Germanic divisions had joined the German units already present in Italy. "Why on earth," wondered the most prepared Italians, "hadnt our rulers and military leaders been able to prepare an emergency plan in time? When surrender to the enemy had been likely for a long time? With the forces of the relentless former ally already here?"
After September 8, the only thing the king and his ministers had done was flee to the south, to Brindisi, taking advantage of the fact that the 1st English Airborne Division was about to take that city which, unlike the others, was almost free of German troops, and counting on the fact that the Anglo-Americans, having conquered Sicily, were invading the rest of the southern regions of the Peninsula9 . Breathless, the Sovereign, his Secretaries of State and General Mario Roatta, failed defender of Rome which had been abandoned to the disorderly and useless initiative of the department commanders, had left the capital to set up throne, government and high commands in Brindisi, under the protection of the former enemies, leaving the Italian troops on various foreign fronts and in Italy without orders, at the mercy of the mighty German army.