The Liberation

by Kate Furnivall

‘Drago Vincelli.’

  ‘Drago Vincelli,’ she echoed. ‘Is he Camorra? One of the mafia?’

  ‘No, Caterina, Vincelli works only for himself. But I want you to forget his name. Forget you ever heard it.’ He removed her hand from his wrist. ‘Before you have reason to regret it.’

  He made a move to leave.

  ‘Wait, Harry. At least tell me this. If you know so much about Vincelli and his illegal activities, why on earth don’t you arrest him?’

  ‘Hah, I wish we could, but we have no proof to convict him. We were hoping to find a connection through your father, both of them involved in this trade of stolen artefacts, both thieves, but now . . .’

  There was a movement in the shadows close to the house, a rustle. A harsh cry of anger. Caterina and Harry Fielding swung round. Harry’s hand was ready on the Enfield .38 on his hip, but it froze when a pale young face emerged from the darkness. It was Luca.

  ‘My father,’ the boy shouted, ‘was not a thief.’

  He rushed back into the house and slammed the door on them.

  Luca.

  Her brother’s name reverberated in Caterina’s head. She was sitting on the edge of his bed, listening to his breathing, slow and regular. For half an hour she had sat wrapped in the silence of his bedroom, with the rumbling creaks and sighs of the old house for company as it cooled after the heat of the day. The stub of a candle in a pewter holder glowed on the windowsill where she had placed it, but its light scarcely reached as far as the bed. Her brother lay with his back to her, his face firmly to the wall, and only his dark head on the pale pillow had any substance.

  ‘Luca,’ she said, ‘I apologise. I have let you down.’

  His shadowy outline didn’t move a muscle, but not for a moment did she believe he was asleep.

  ‘Luca,’ she continued, her voice soft, ‘I have been treating you like a child when it’s obvious to anyone with eyes in their head that you have grown into a young man. To me, eleven years old seems so young. But I should have recognised that the misery of war and the death of Papà have stripped away your childhood, Luca, I see that now. Forgive me for being so blind.’

  Caterina could feel the heat of the wine in her stomach.

  ‘This isn’t how I wanted it for you, I swear it isn’t,’ she told him. ‘But it’s the way it is and we have to live with it, you and I. What you overheard in the courtyard tonight about Papà is true. I know you’re angry. Oh Luca, so am I. I realise now I should have trusted you.’

  Her hand slid across the bedcover and nestled against his back.

  ‘Now,’ she announced in the gloom, ‘I will give you the facts. So you will be prepared for whatever happens.’

  Caterina told Luca everything. She spared him nothing. Starting with the first visit from Major Parr, then on to the white-blaze man’s threat in the doorway, the finding of the order book and the crash on Capri. The Naples’ basement. Sal Sardo sprawled on the rubble. The chase through the backstreets of Naples. It all came out and it was like lancing a boil. Just the bare bones. Nothing more. No details. No emotions. No mention of pain or fear or blood. She could have jotted the facts down on the back of a cigarette pack, they were so slender.

  ‘That’s it,’ she said matter-of-factly at the end. ‘I’m only telling you now so that knowledge of what is hiding out there will save your skin. If a man steps into your path, you turn and run like your shoes are on fire. Got that?’

  No sound. No breathing.

  ‘In future you stay off the streets. When the school term is finished, you can spend your days helping me in the workshop.’

  Not a flicker of movement from him.

  ‘Or you can try to earn money by going out with the fishermen, or . . .’ she sighed, ‘you can hang around sometimes with the troops, I suppose. But Luca, I need to know where you are at all times and you must stay off the streets. It’s too dangerous.’

  Her head swam gently round the room as the effects of the wine started to blur the edges. ‘I love you, my Luca,’ she murmured, ‘and I intend to keep you safe.’

  She slid down, lying on her back beside her brother, her head sharing his pillow, her arm touching his sharp shoulder blade. The wine lay heavy on her eyelids but they wouldn’t close. Sal Sardo’s pointed face was floating up on the ceiling, staring down at her. If she had not offered him that drink . . .

  Caterina felt movement next to her, nervous and hesitant. Luca turned slowly to face her, the expression in his eyes obscured by the folds of night, but she could feel the heat of his breath, sense the speed of his young heart.

  ‘What about Nonno?’ he whispered.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll take care of him too, you and I. The Lombardis together.’

  For a long time after that neither spoke. The night air seemed to stretch taut in the room and somewhere an accordion was playing Italian love songs.

  ‘What now?’ Luca asked uncertainly. ‘I want to help, Caterina. I don’t want you to be alone. I can do things with you.’

  She kissed his hair. Held him close.

  ‘We find the person who can put a stop to this,’ she said.

  ‘Captain Fielding?’

  ‘No. I wish it were that easy. It seems to me that the military are no match for these men.’

  ‘The police?’

  ‘No. That would get us killed.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘Drago Vincelli, the man who murdered Sal Sardo. We will find him.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The heavy carved doors of the great banqueting chamber within Palazzo Rudolfo swung shut and the ancient iron key was inserted into the lock and turned. It was the signal that the meeting could begin.

  The chairman, Drago Vincelli, raised a hand for silence and the ten men seated around the eighteenth century table that once had belonged to King Ferdinand IV of Naples turned to him respectfully. Each one was wearing evening dress, each one was nursing a glass of fifty-year old cognac in his hand and each one had a silent fear gnawing at his guts.

  They stood, pushing back their chairs, and raised their glasses in unison.

  ‘To King Victor Emmanuel,’ the chairman declared. ‘King of all Italy.’

  They drank together, wetting their lips in the amber liquid with satisfaction, and resumed their seats. The chairman observed each man through narrowed eyes, assessing where the danger lay tonight. Which one had already drunk too much? Who had fucked his mistress this evening and so believed he had balls of iron? Whose bank manager was threatening to foreclose? Whose wife was demanding a grander apartment? Who had been to confession and felt his conscience was clear as driven snow?

  It was the chairman’s job to know these things. To have eyes that saw into the hearts that gathered around the table here tonight and to recognise the ones who would cut each other’s throats given half a chance. He smiled to himself and let them settle. Made them wait.

  His carefully manicured hands smoothed the papers laid out on the finely polished walnut surface in front of him and he knew their eyes watched his movements, wondering what was in these papers. What accusations? What lies? What secrets?

  Let them wonder.

  Let them wonder and piss themselves.

  He smiled benignly and saw them relax. Saw the tendons in their necks loosen and their well-filled bellies grow slack. Their first mistake.

  There would be others.

  ‘Good evening, gentlemen,’ he began smoothly. ‘Tonight we will discuss the fact that one of our number is missing.’

  He paused. Someone would fill the gap. They always did.

  ‘It’s Orlando Bartoli, poor bastard,’ muttered the bald man on his right, the one who thought no one knew he was fucking his young wife’s mother.

  ‘Hauled out of the harbour,’ added another. ‘God rest his soul.’

  Three of them crossed themselves. The chairman noted which ones.

  ‘So,’ he said quietly, ‘let us discuss the reason why Signor Bartoli, the jeweller, ended up as
fish food.’

  He could smell the fear then. Sweeter than cognac.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  For four days Caterina did nothing, nothing out of the ordinary. She stuck to a strict routine. Early each morning she walked Luca to school, except on Sunday, exchanged a few words with her friend Albertina at the school gate and then hurried to her workshop. If anyone was watching, she didn’t spot them. Though God knows, she tried.

  She worked on her music boxes all morning, replenishing her stock and relishing the contact with the wood again. She had missed it. In the afternoon she picked up Luca from school and checked on her grandfather at home, before continuing to work in her workshop with Luca at her side until the evening. He didn’t complain. Not once. Didn’t ask to run down to the boats or kick a ball in the street with his friends. He remained as close to her side as her shadow and learned the technique of using a router plane and how to master sand-shading by scorching the edge of a veneer to create a shadow. He was trying to please her.

  They talked while they worked and a closeness grew between them, an intimacy that they hadn’t shared since the death of their father two years ago, when Caterina had been obliged to step into the role of parent. She made herself talk to him about her mother, and found that once she started she couldn’t stop. The words crept out from some dark place inside her, slow at first, too heavy to rush, but faster and faster as the hours slid past.

  She told him things about Lucia Lombardi that she had made herself forget. How she used to sing as she worked. Kneading dough, scrubbing a floor or changing her son’s nappy, she would let the music flow out of her in a rich contralto voice that used to stop Caterina’s heart with pure joy. Tendrils of her long silky hair, which she dyed a golden blonde, would stray around her face and caress her cheeks in a way that Caterina’s fingers itched to do.

  Caterina told Luca about the white rabbit costume their mother had sewn for him for the Easter flower festival and about her passion for dancing around the kitchen table in a shaft of shimmering sunlight, as if it were a spotlight. But no word passed Caterina’s lips about the stinging slaps from her pale elegant hands or the string of impatient curses that used to burst forth from between her full red lips.

  And especially she made no mention of the time when she disappeared for a whole weekend, no one knowing where she had gone, when Luca was only a couple of months old and sick with croup. His cough was like a dog-bark and scared the ten-year-old Caterina. She had sat up all night laying hot flannels on her brother’s small white chest, while her father waded to the bottom of a bottle of whisky. Lucia Lombardi had breezed in on Monday morning with the black pupils of her eyes as huge as craters and a new softness to her mouth that made Caterina want to hide in her room, though she didn’t know why.

  Luca listened to her stories enraptured and in the small confines of the workshop that smelled of varnish and the sweet scent of olive veneer, time slowed to an easy pace that they could both manage. Whatever danger it was that lay outside these four walls seemed to recede into a distant haze. When he asked, ‘Did she love me?’ Caterina almost choked on tears.

  ‘Of course she loved you, Luca. You were her beautiful boy, always her favourite. I was the one she didn’t like.’

  He looked at her with bewildered eyes. ‘Why didn’t Mamma like you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Papà said it was because I looked like her. She saw too much of herself in me, that’s what he said. But maybe it was because I spent too much time with Papà in his workshop. Or because . . .’ the scorper in her hand sliced a groove far too deep in the piece of satin wood on the worktable and she swore at herself, ‘because I was a girl. She never liked her own sex. You see, Luca, our mother was one of those women who come alive in the company of men.’

  Luca’s mouth hung open and his chest was pumping hard. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She would light up inside.’ Caterina laughed softly. ‘She always said that her favourite smell was the aroma of cigars and brandy.’

  Caterina’s reward was the smile that blossomed on her brother’s young face.

  Caterina reached behind the casseruola, the stewpot, and drew out of the cupboard the package wrapped in old newspaper. Sometimes she just stood and held it. That was enough. To stand in the kitchen and feel her father’s presence inside the package in her hands.

  But not today. Today she needed more. She sat down at the kitchen table, swiftly peeled away the layers of newspaper and smiled as the burgundy and black book-cover spread itself before her. She started at the beginning and turned over each page of the order book, studying in detail yet again every word of her father’s neat script, and when she reached the end she closed it, drew in a deep breath and started again at the first page.

  Nothing had changed. Nothing was different. Still the desk, the galleried tray, the high-backed chairs and the fantastical birdcage for the French dressmaker.

  Patience, my daughter. Have patience with the wood.

  Those words of her father’s had been whispered into her ear a thousand times, but now she was struggling with patience for her father. She had trusted him. Believed in him. But everything shouted that she’d been wrong, been too trusting, too believing.

  When she came to the page with the smeared thumbprint of her blood promise to her father, she skipped over it fast and turned to the final page of writing. She scoured the columns again. Table. Wedding gift. Bird’s eye maple. And jewels. The cost column lay empty. Then the client: Count di Marco, Villa dei Cesari, Capri. She flicked through the final pages. Niente. Nothing. All blank. But something hard and tight inside her wouldn’t let go. She ran the flat of her hand over the last page as if by force of will she could make it give up its secrets, and she felt something under her palm. Something so small it was almost nothing.

  The slightest indentation.

  A faint ripple in the smooth surface of the paper.

  She lifted the book. Angled it towards the light. More ripples.

  ‘Grazie, Papà,’ she whispered and seized a pencil from the drawer.

  Slowly, carefully, she began to shade in the whole page with light sideways strokes. It was dimpled and uneven, threaded through by lines and curves where the ripples lay. A twist of excitement made her push out a whistle of surprise as the lines came together and coalesced into something.

  That something was the outline of a table. And under it were two words scribbled across the corner, as if as an afterthought. She studied them closely and could just make out what looked like Caesar Club.

  Faint and blurred. But there.

  It seemed that her father had sketched a drawing of a table on the previous page and its imprint had remained on the next one. She ran her finger along the seam of the open book and, sure enough, she could feel the rough edge where one page had been torn out.

  This was it. This was the jewelled table.

  She shut the book with a snap before the grey grainy image could escape. Now she knew what it looked like.

  Caterina knew she could hide no longer. She rose early, but Luca insisted on sitting her down and re-dressing the wretched dog-bite with gentle hands. So she was late. In a rush she threw a grey cardigan over her shoulders, picked up her two canvas bags and ran for the ferry.

  The boat was crowded. Boisterous male laughter and a smog of Lucky Strike cigarette smoke vied with the rumble of the old marine engines and the stink of diesel fumes as the early morning ferry made its way to the Isle of Capri.

  Clouds had rolled in overnight, as grey and relentless as the German army, turning the water of the bay to steel, and the wind off the sea flung spume in her face as she stood at the rails. The United States Army Air Force boys were on board, crowding the deck and flashing their brass buttons and buckles. Their good-natured banter made the deck noisy as Caterina eased her way among them, squeezing between their broad backs till they created a khaki wall around her. It seemed they were a group of pilots and crews from the 780th Squadron taking up their billets f
or rest and recuperation on Capri.

  ‘Hell and damnation,’ a gawky sandy-haired youth in uniform called out as the green mountains of the island of Capri slid gracefully into view. ‘Damn me if that ain’t one shit-hot slice of paradise we got for ourselves, fly-boys.’

  ‘Mason, watch your mouth. Ladies present.’

  The curt reprimand came from a raw-boned airman at Caterina’s side. ‘My apologies for my friend’s language, ma’am.’ He tipped his cap to her. ‘He don’t know no better than to cuss in front of a lady.’

  She smiled, accepting his apology.

  ‘You fly bomb airplanes?’ she asked in halting English.

  ‘We sure do, ma’am.’

  ‘You bomb Naples?’

  ‘We don’t bomb nobody now,’ he pointed out quietly and added, ‘thank the Lord.’

  ‘But you bomb Naples before?’ She pointed back over her own shoulder to indicate the past.

  ‘Yep.’

  That was all. Just ‘Yep’. But she saw his fingers creep up to the silver insignia on his short jacket, a pair of wings with a propeller at its heart, as though to remind himself why he did it.

  ‘Flight Engineer Chas Lennox,’ he said, ‘that’s me. It was my job, ma’am, me and my crew, to bomb Naples. Many times. We were at war.’

  She nodded. ‘I understand.’

  But ‘understand’ was a big word. With many meanings. Too many for a brief boat ride.

  ‘You drop bombs on Sorrento?’ she asked.

  ‘No, Sorrento had no military significance.’

  She didn’t understand the English words. But the ‘No’ and the shake of his head made his meaning clear.

  ‘My father was killed in bomb. In Sorrento,’ she told him.

  The big man’s face crumpled for a second. ‘I’m real sorry to hear that, ma’am. Sorrento was never a designated military target. If it caught a stray, that would be from a crippled kite. They would jettison any remaining bombs to enable the plane to gain height, you see.’ He raised a hand up in the air to demonstrate. ‘To go upward.’

  ‘Was it you?’