244
W1LLIAM PHILLIPS
What do you say?"
"Well," said Hastings, leaning back in his chair and £lopping his legs
on the desk, "what do we know now?"
"He sure was a screwball," said Robins. "The world is full of screw–
balls. There's probably not enough doctors for them. You think they
ever get better? How many, you think, are born like him?"
"What do we do now?" said Hastings.
"Lets go back to talk to Toni," said Robins. "1 don't think she'll
tell us much, maybe she doesn't know any more than we do. She was his
wife for two days."
Robins and Hastings phoned Toni and dropped in to see her the
next day.
"Well," said Robins, "we've read your story, which reads like a story
in True Confessions. But we still don't know what Gianelli was doing
with explosives that night in Connecticut."
Toni was less hostile but not more cooperative.
"What else can I tell you?" she said. "Algie was not made for his life.
He should have stuck to the life he was born into. He could have been a
respectable publisher. He should have stayed out of politics . He might
not have been happier, but he would have been alive. But who knows,
I'm not a psychologist."
"Neither are we," said Hastings, "I guess we'll never know," as they
left World Wide Books.
It was said that Hoover himself was interested in the case, But
Robins and Hastings did not discuss it with him. And three months after
the explosion that disrupted the peaceful Connecticut town the case was
declared closed.
Though the FBI knew less about Gianelli than the Italian police, it
made the fraternal gesture of sending its file to Rome, marked "case un–
solved, probably psychological, not political."
In the meantime, Toni and Arbuto arranged to have Gianelli's sev–
ered body flown to Moscow. According to a will made out by Gianelli
shortly before he died, in addition to leaving the publishing house and a
considerable sum of money to Toni, he specified that he wanted to be
buried in the Soviet Union, the land where one was given a glimpse of
the future, next to the body of John Reed. Sufficient funds were
pro–
vided for the £light to Moscow by a chartered plane.
An obscure Russian paper, that was said to reflect the opinions of
the KGB, briefly reported the burial of Gianelli, and a prominent
KGB
official was quoted as saying that Gianelli lived and died for the Revolu–
tion.
