What Price Brutus?

Italy's Communist Party last week introduced to history one of its heroes: the man who shot Benito Mussolini. The tyrannicide turned out to be a tall (6 ft.), sallow, jowly bookkeeper called Walter Audisio. As he mounted the platform before a Communist mass meeting in the ruins of Rome's Basilica of Constantine, clutching a bunch of red carnations, he bit his lips to keep them from trembling.

"I did not have the impression that I was shooting a human being," said Audisio, as he launched into his story, which added little to previous reports of the killing (TIME, May 7, 1945). "When a man faces death, he should have the dignity to meet it. Mussolini only trembled." He answered the charge that he and his fellow Partisans had refused confession and last rites to the Duce: "Was I to worry about Mussolini's soul after all I knew of his life?"

Then Audisio turned to the present: "I've spoken as one whose only desire is to be a good soldier. . . . We Communists, we Partisans should be ashamed that there are still persons in Italy who question the purity of the people's sacrifices. . . . We have no fear of civil war!"

Audisio's career began in the dirty northern industrial town of Alessandria, where he grew up in a squalor he swore to escape. He rose to the top of his class in school, got a job making Borsalino hats (which are to Stetsons what Isotta Fraschinis are to Oldsmobiles); during the depression he lived squalidly in a tiny apartment with his wife, a seamstress. He was arrested for Communist agitation and when he got out of jail after five years, things were even worse ("We lived on boiled milk and boiled potatoes").

He went to the president of the local Fascist Agrarian Workers' Federation and said: "You're a Fascist and I'm a Communist, but you must remember I used to do your lessons in school for you." This approach won him a series of comfortable civil service jobs in the Fascist administration, which he held till the party told him to become a Partisan. Today, at 37, he lives like a petty bourgeois in a one-room apartment, is interested in the film-producing business, loves Dante's Divine Comedy, especially Canto V ("Love led us down to death together: Cain awaits the soul of him who laid us dead").

What heroic luster this story had was tarnished by the party's attempts to peddle it to the newspapers. The Communists first charged $100 for one of Audisio's photographs, then went down to $35, still found no takers. Both A.P. and U.P. refused to bid for "exclusives," but Overseas News Agency came through with 50,000 lire ($133) for a special bylined article--which did not turn out to be very special. When an Overseas man asked Audisio for more information, the bookkeeper answered: "I can't sell all my secrets at once."

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