The Liberation

by Kate Furnivall

  Her grandfather was seated in his usual armchair, wearing his customary spotless white shirt and polished black shoes, and his head was up, alert and listening hard. The smile on his face made Caterina realise how rarely he had smiled since his son’s death. Beside him a wireless in a scratched oak case was playing big band music at low volume and he was whittling a piece of honey-coloured beechwood in time to the rhythm of it.

  Our wireless was sold two years ago, thought Caterina. She stared open-mouthed at the chair opposite him, at the long khaki legs and the smart buff shirt, the cap on the lap, and the lazy smile that greeted her.

  ‘Signorina Lombardi, a pleasure to see you again.’

  It was Captain Harry Fielding. More importantly, at his side on a low stool sat Luca, his head bent over a military map that he was studying with keen interest.

  ‘Luca!’

  Her brother looked up reluctantly, guilt already woven into his glance, but at the sight of her he uttered a cry and leapt to his feet.

  ‘What?’ his grandfather demanded, his blind eyes scanning the room in vain. ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s Caterina. She’s bleeding.’

  All three of them were on their feet suddenly, fussing and questioning until she swatted them away with her good hand. ‘Stop it. I’m fine. I took a tumble and the dog-bite opened up again. It’s nothing.’

  ‘I’ll fetch water to bathe it,’ Luca offered, but as he tried to scamper from the room she seized his shoulder.

  ‘Why weren’t you at school today?’ Her brother lowered his eyes, his cheeks flushing scarlet.

  ‘I got a lift in a truck going to Naples.’

  ‘An army truck?’

  He nodded.

  Caterina wanted to shake him. To seize both shoulders and shake her brother’s skinny frame until some sense rattled into his head, but it was all she could do to stop herself wrapping her arms around him and smothering his grubby cheeks with kisses. Relief ran like honey in her mouth. He was safe. He was not lying on a bombsite with blood in his eyes.

  She looked at Captain Harry Fielding, remembering his performance in the interrogation room, and wondered if he knew Sal Sardo was dead. ‘And you, Captain Fielding, what are you doing here? Is this your fault?’

  He laughed kindly. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I was about to drive to Sorrento for a meeting with Colonel Quincy and I found this young monkey outside the Palazzo Umberto – that’s our Forces Club in Naples – begging for a lift from anyone going up into the hills. He mentioned you and your music boxes, so,’ the captain opened up his hands in a gesture of appeasement, ‘I brought him here.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She turned to her brother. ‘Luca, what were you thinking? You can’t skip school whenever you feel like it. Education is important. I won’t have you running wild, you hear me? What were you doing in Naples?’

  ‘Swapping my comics, that’s all.’

  ‘For what? More gum to chew? More chocolate to eat? And who did you swap these comics with?’

  ‘Just boys,’ he muttered. He wouldn’t look at her.

  ‘Boys? You mean the street kids, the scugnizzi? Luca, they are thieves and scavengers. They will get you into real trouble.’

  Suddenly her brother was looking at her directly with her father’s eyes. ‘It’s all right, Caterina, don’t worry.’ He said it gently, the way her father would. ‘I can look after myself.’

  This time she did shake him. ‘No, you can’t, Luca.’

  ‘Caterina, stop this at once.’

  Her grandfather’s deep growl was followed by a smack of his cane-tip on the floor and his hand landed squarely on Luca’s other shoulder. As if they would tear him apart between them.

  ‘Leave the boy alone, Caterina. Are you going to keep him on a leash like a dog forever? So he missed a day of school. So what? It’s time he learned about being a man.’ The deep furrows at the sides of his mouth softened. ‘You can’t keep him tied to your apron-strings all his life, Caterina. Look what Luca brought me, look.’

  ‘The wireless? Luca got you the wireless?’

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘Luca, how could you afford it?’ she asked uneasily.

  ‘I didn’t steal it,’ he said before she could accuse him. ‘I asked around on the streets.’ He shrugged. ‘I found a boy who had one to sell and I traded my comics for it.’ He looked up at his grandfather, a smile sneaking to his lips and turning him into a child again. ‘For Nonno.’

  ‘It must be stolen goods,’ Caterina pointed out angrily. ‘You shouldn’t . . .’

  ‘Signorina Lombardi,’ the English captain interrupted soothingly, ‘the whole of Italy functions on bartered goods right now, no questions asked.’ He laughed easily, and the tension in the room unwound a notch. ‘Let’s all sit down and let me see if I can fix up that arm of yours.’

  He reached out to take her elbow but she backed off.

  ‘I can do it myself. I’ll go and wash.’

  She walked out of the room, away from all the words. But she didn’t enter the bathroom. Instead she made straight for her bedroom, shut the door behind her and lay down on her bed exactly as she was, dirt, blood and all. She forced her eyes closed and wanted the day to end.

  Twilight slipped into the room, robbing it of colour. Caterina lay on her bed, eyes wide, and watched her world slowly lose its sharp edges. Objects blurred. Their greyness was soothing. In her mind she examined each minute of her day and every one of them was as sharp as broken glass. She touched them with care.

  She didn’t recognise her own life any more. It was as if she had fallen into someone else’s and she needed a new map to find her way around it. She was running down blind alleyways and into dead ends. She knew that what she needed was to return to her workshop, to hold on to something solid, something real, something unspoilt. The chisels would steady her hand. A sheet of satinwood under her fingers or the flame curls of a mahogany inlay would slow her heartbeat, and the scent of them would clear the foul stench from her nostrils.

  Her father was corrupt.

  She pressed a hand over her mouth, to stop herself denying it. She had seen the triptych, seen it with her own eyes in the dim Naples basement crammed with the glorious treasures of Italy, the exact same triptych she remembered her father working on only weeks before he died, but he had told her the church had commissioned him to do so. Yet it was not listed in his order book, no mention of it. She had forgotten it until she saw once more the carved figure of Christ bearing the cross, the crown of thorns on His head. It had all come rushing back to her. She had been working at the factory making uniforms for the military, her ears thrumming with the racket of the machines. That day, one of the porterage trolleys had snapped a wheel fixing, spun out of control and slammed into her back.

  She had exaggerated the injury. Of course she did. She wanted the afternoon off so that she could spend it at her father’s workshop, and that was when she caught him. He was at work on the beautiful triptych, repairing damage to one of the three hinged panels. She had managed to see that much but no more, because in an instant he had thrown a length of sacking over it and set her to work on a galleried tray he was inlaying with burr walnut.

  At the time she had thought nothing of it. But when she looked up, the triptych had vanished and her father was instead slicing a strip of white pine veneer into narrow strings. Now that Caterina thought back to that day two years ago, she remembered his unease, his dark round eyes narrowing as he glanced in her direction. She had thought he was concerned about her back injury, but now she realised she had thought wrong.

  She sat upright too fast and the bedroom rolled around her. Is this what the American wanted from her? Her memories? Memories that she didn’t even know she had. A dull ache throbbed in her chest and she rubbed her knuckles over it, as though it could be dislodged, but she knew it wouldn’t move. It was there to stay.

  Her father had deceived her. And the American had trapped her. She slid her legs off the bed and let the floo
r steady beneath her feet, a sibilant moan escaping from her lips. She listened hard. It was one word, over and over.

  Sal, Sal, Sal.

  She knew now she would have to protect her family herself.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what, Nonno?’

  Caterina had entered the room and seen the Englishman’s open packet of Players cigarettes lying on the table, but of Captain Fielding himself there was no sign. She could feel the contentment he had left behind him, her brother stretched out on the floor, nose in a map, while her grandfather was relaxing in his chair, legs outstretched. Their faces swivelled towards her with a crease forming on both their foreheads, as if she had come to take that contentment away from them.

  ‘Well,’ her grandfather repeated, ‘are you going or not, young lady?’

  Giuseppe Lombardi was listening to his wireless, to a discussion about Prime Minister Ivanhoe Bonomi’s latest decision to increase rationing, one hand unconsciously stroking the warm grain of its oak casing the way other people fondled the ears of their dog.

  ‘Going where?’ Caterina asked.

  ‘To meet the English captain.’

  ‘What?’

  Luca was grinning up at her. ‘Captain Fielding said he has a date with you this evening. At Georgio’s pizzeria at seven o’clock. You should go, Caterina. He’s nice.’

  She had forgotten.

  ‘So?’ her grandfather asked.

  ‘No,’ she said flatly.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I feel . . .’

  Battered. Battered and bruised.

  ‘I feel tired,’ she said.

  She had washed the dirt off herself and the stains off the white dress, torn strips off a clean sheet to rebind her arm and changed into her cinnamon work-dress. But no amount of scrubbing was going to wash away the dirt inside her head.

  ‘Luca,’ she said, crouching down on the floor beside him. ‘What are you doing with Captain Fielding’s map?’

  Her brother’s eyes shone. He bore no ill-will for her earlier sharpness. ‘He was showing me where the Allied Forces landed. Here, at Salerno.’ His finger traced a trail from Sicily. ‘They got stuck on the beachhead at Anzio.’ He peered closely at the spot as if he could conjure up a glimpse of the soldiers on the beach. ‘Captain Fielding said it was because the terrain is too difficult for tanks. Look at these mountains, Caterina.’

  ‘The Apennines.’

  ‘Captain Fielding calls them the spine of Italy.’ He dragged his finger down the map, gazing transfixed at the long peninsula that was his country. ‘A hundred and eighty thousand.’ He whistled softly through his pearly white teeth. ‘That’s how many Allied troops landed on our mainland, Captain Fielding says.’

  ‘Luca, I don’t want to hear any more of . . .’

  But Caterina could see he was alight with the excitement of it now that he had a map. ‘Look at this. This is the Gustav Line. It’s where Field Marshall Kesselring built Germany’s line of defence right across Italy.’ His finger landed on a point halfway between Naples and Rome, and she was sure his young ears were hearing the guns and the bombs. ‘And then the Gothic Line was . . .’

  ‘Enough, Luca,’ Caterina broke in. ‘The war is over.’

  A rumble of disagreement came from the old man’s chair. ‘The war is never over.’

  Caterina looked across at him. What did he mean?

  ‘It’s seven o’clock,’ her grandfather announced. ‘Isn’t it time for you to meet Captain Fielding?’

  But she shook her head. Talking to one soldier in public in a Sorrento street had brought catastrophe galloping into her life and she wasn’t going to risk it a second time.

  ‘Luca,’ she said, ‘leave your map for a minute, please, and run down to the pizzeria to tell Captain Fielding that I can’t come tonight. But if he wishes to talk, he can come and sit in our courtyard with me instead. It’s cool there now.’

  And private.

  Luca leapt for the door and it dawned on her that he wanted to see his sister happy.

  ‘And tell him,’ she called after him, ‘to bring wine.’

  The wine seeped into Caterina’s blood and she felt her limbs grow loose and pain-free. Captain Fielding was describing a polo match played on camels in the deserts of Egypt, a game so crazy it set her laughing and the sound surprised her. She emptied her glass and smiled at him.

  ‘You miss England, don’t you?’ she murmured in the darkness that lay warm on her skin.

  ‘Yes, I admit I miss England, I miss Marlow, my home town, but,’ he spread his long arms expansively, ‘I have all the glories of Italy to enjoy instead.’

  They were sitting in the courtyard with their chairs propped against a wall, away from the ears in the other houses that backed on to it. They had been there for over an hour, moths darting blindly at the lantern, but neither had mentioned Naples or Sal Sardo or anything concerning stolen works of art, and she liked it that way.

  But that wasn’t why she’d asked him here.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘for giving Luca the map. He is loving re-enacting the campaign that your armies waged through Italy.’

  ‘It’s important he should know. It’s his country.’

  ‘Of course, but it’s too . . .’

  ‘Too soon?’

  She nodded. ‘It’s all still so raw.’ She lifted her glass for him to refill and said, ‘Tell me about the jeweller who was pulled out of the harbour.’

  Even in the dim light she saw his frown. ‘Do you really want to know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He poured more red wine into her glass and she noted with surprise that they were well into the second bottle.

  ‘His name was Orlando Bartoli. He owned a jeweller’s shop in Naples.’

  ‘Where in Naples?’ she asked.

  The captain hesitated.

  ‘Where?’ she asked again.

  ‘On Via Medina.’

  ‘Tell me how this Signor Bartoli ended up in the harbour?’

  ‘A chap whom we arrested for trying to sell a Giorgione sketch on an open market stall squealed on Bartoli in exchange for leniency. It seemed that he’d been going around purchasing any artworks he could find on the black market. Paying a fraction of their worth, of course. We marched into Bartoli’s shop at dawn and obliged him to open his safe. He wasn’t keen on the idea.’

  ‘What was in it?’

  ‘A small painting, Madonna and child. By Tintoretto.’

  Caterina whistled softly.

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Fielding regarded her speculatively, ‘he had also had a gun in his safe. He shot and wounded the arresting officer and escaped.’

  ‘He’d have done better to sit it out in one of your cells.’

  ‘You’re right. Bartoli turned up in the harbour three days later with a concrete block chained to his ankles.’

  Caterina sipped her drink and she thought about Orlando Bartoli. And about what it means to be afraid. What damage it does to you.

  ‘Caterina?’

  The Englishman was offering her a cigarette. She shook her head. She studied his face in the flare of his lighter flame as he touched it to the tip of his own cigarette. It was a good face. The kind of face that stays calm when everyone else is screaming.

  ‘Captain Fielding . . .’

  ‘Call me Harry.’

  ‘Harry,’ she leaned closer, ‘are you afraid?’

  He made a sound. But it was not an answer.

  ‘Your work is dangerous, Harry. Do you wake in the night afraid?’

  Somewhat startled, he pulled back, merging with the blackness beyond the lantern’s reach. She could feel his embarrassment.

  ‘No, I am accustomed to it,’ he said. ‘Accustomed to danger, I mean.’

  An Englishman, she realised, does not admit to fear.

  ‘And Major Parr?’ she asked.

  Harry Fielding laughed good-naturedly. ‘He says the whole of Italy scares him shitless – if you’ll excuse the language.�
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  She drank the last of her wine and rose to her feet, walking past the velvety brown moths that fluttered like lost souls around the lantern.

  ‘Harry, do you know a man with a blaze of white in his black hair? At his temple. He also has a moustache and a gold tooth. Involved somehow in this . . .’

  The Englishman jumped from his seat as if she’d kicked him. ‘What the hell do you know about that man?’

  ‘I saw him chase after Sal Sardo in Naples yesterday.’

  ‘Stay away from him. He is evil.’

  ‘What is his name?’

  ‘No, Caterina. This is not for you. Forget all about that man.’

  He reached out to remove his officer’s cap from the table, suddenly eager to leave, but Caterina seized his wrist.

  ‘His name, Harry? I have a right to know.’

  ‘No. He’s dangerous.’

  ‘He tried to have me killed.’ She drew the Englishman closer to her. ‘He threatened my family, all because you and Major Parr came here accusing my father of stealing treasures from Italy.’ She kept her voice reasonable and persuasive. ‘Listen to me, Harry. I need to know that man’s name.’

  But Harry Fielding was having none of it, the line of his mouth unyielding. A light leapt on in a window of one of the upstairs apartments, casting an amber rectangle over them both below, trapping them inside it. The Englishman replaced his cap on his head and tried to move away, but Caterina stood rooted to the spot, her hand holding on.

  ‘His name?’ she persisted.

  He said nothing. She was tempted to stick her hand down his throat and yank out the words he was hiding. The thought must have been written on her face because he uttered a low sound of protest.

  ‘Caterina, your father worked with him. They were partners in crime.’

  His words were as shocking as the sudden taste of blood in her mouth as her teeth clamped down on her tongue.

  ‘His name?’ she demanded relentlessly. ‘Tell me his name.’