“Why are they doing so well?” I asked, and every head, including Paul’s, swiveled to look at me. “The PCI, I mean.”
“It’s the damn divorce referendum,” Jenkins said. “The DC refuses to acknowledge that it’s 1974 and Italians want to be able to get divorced.”
“They can’t?” I asked.
Angela chuckled, but Jenkins didn’t seem to mind that I’d asked what must have been a rudimentary question. “Until four years ago, they couldn’t. But then there was a big referendum, and now they can.”
“So what’s the problem?” I said.
“The Catholic Church doesn’t like divorce,” said Angela. “And the Christian Democrats are the political arm of the Catholic Church. They’ve gone to great lengths to campaign for the law’s repeal.”
“It’s taken them four years,” said Jenkins, “but they’ve finally got it back on the ballot.”
I had seen the phraseReferendum sul divorziosplashed across the front pages of the local papers for weeks but hadn’t stopped to consider what it meant. “Everyone’s got to vote again?”
“Technically, they’re voting on whether to repeal the referendum. But that’s semantics,” said Angela.
“What does this have to do with the PCI?” I asked, and Jenkins turned to Paul and told him he’d married a smart cookie.
“They’re campaigning to keep divorce legal, which is an intelligent position to take because it’s the only sane one,” he said. “It’s going to give them a huge leg up in the regional elections next month.”
I wanted to know more, but Mary Lou had arrived with her husband’s drink. She handed it to him, and in exchange, he offered her his cigarette. She gave him a private smile, took a long drag, handed the cigarette back to him, then looked directly at me. “There you are, Eileen. Care to help me with the fondue?”
In fact, I did not want to help her with the fondue. But I understood that I was being told, in so many words, that I did not belong on the veranda with Angela and the men, talking politics. I looked at Paul, hoping he’d save me, but I should have known better. He was studying the bottom of his glass intently and didn’t so much as look up when I stood to follow Mary Lou into the house.
52.
OVER DINNER, THE TALK TURNEDto the kidnapping of Mario Sossi.
Sossi was a prosecutor in Genoa who had gone after a left-wing terrorist group called Gruppo XXII Ottobre. He’d put several of its highest-ranking members behind bars, which had earned him lots of accolades and a ton of press coverage but had also put a giant target on his back. The month prior, he’d been bundled into a waiting car by members of another left-wing terrorist group called the Red Brigades, or Brigate Rosse.
As I’ve mentioned, kidnappings were not a new phenomenon in Italy, but they were a relatively new tactic for the Red Brigades, who had gotten their start sabotaging factory equipment, robbing banks, and—in a few cases—kneecapping industrialists, all in the name of protecting the working class. Two years before Sossi was kidnapped, the group had kidnapped a SIT-Siemens factory foreman whom they’d held for twenty minutes—just long enough to photograph him holding a placard that readFASCISTA—before releasing him unharmed. The story had garnered the Red Brigades a lot of attention, and since then there’d been other kidnappings, all of which had followed the same basic format.
With Mario Sossi’s kidnapping, the concern was that the Red Brigades were no longer sticking to their own script. For one thing, they’d already held Sossi for three weeks. For another, they were demanding the release of eight prisoners—all members of Gruppo XXII Ottobre—in exchange for his life.
“This business with Sossi has gone on long enough,” said Roberta Stearns as she dipped a piece of bread into a pot of cheese fondue. “Why not just make a deal?”
“The Italians are not going to negotiate,” said Angela from the other end of the table. “They think it makes them look weak. Not to mention it sets a bad precedent.”
“Hasn’t that precedent already been set?” asked a guy who I believed was heading up Electronics. “Look at the Fiumicino attack.”
“What about it?” Angela asked.
“They sure as hell negotiated then.”
“That wasn’t the Italians,” said Jenkins.
Angela nodded emphatically. “Anyone who walked off that plane alive can thank Kuwait for brokering the deal.”
“Time to call the emir, I guess,” said Joe good-naturedly, and everyone laughed except Angela. “Can someone pass me the gherkins?”
I was sitting between Paul and Daniel Bornemann, so as the conversation splintered, I found myself talking to Daniel for the first time all evening. He had placed a piece of beef on a skewer, and as he dipped it into a pot of hot oil, he gave me a helpless expression. “I never know how to do this.”
“Do you like your meat rare?” I asked.
“I’m not an animal,” he said with a sly smile, which made me laugh.
Daniel Bornemann was cute. Tall and lanky, with a long nose and thick eyebrows that made you think he was really concentrating when, in actuality, he was the least attentive person I’d ever met. Like a magpie, attracted to shiny objects but unable to carry them all back to his nest. Daniel might ask you about your haircut or a scar on your neck or the fact that you walked with a limp, but he wouldn’t wait for the answer, so he never learned anything new. The rapid-fire questions were fun at first, but when I realized it was impossible to go deep on anything, I grew a little bored and spent the rest of dinner wondering how in the world he had ended up with someone as serious and self-important as his wife.
