The Liberation

by Kate Furnivall

  ‘No, ma’am, it wasn’t me.’

  Of course it wasn’t. A crazy thought. With a wide smile for the airman, she reached into the larger of her canvas bags and drew out a musical box. Its intarsia scene of the bay and Vesuvius gleamed under the layers of varnish that Luca had spent hours perfecting.

  ‘Flight Engineer Chas Lennox,’ Caterina said, ‘you look to me like a man whose mother would like a memento from Sorrento.’

  The slate-grey ridge of cloud and its skirts of mist tried to hide the beauty of the island but failed. After riding the funicular from the marina up to Capri’s busy central Piazzetta, Caterina struck out along the twisting narrow road that climbed Capri’s wooded mountain slopes. At every turn her eyes fixed on the view across the Bay to Naples.

  Except Naples wasn’t there.

  The mist had stolen the city. In its place lay a grey striated blur, the colour of tears. She tried hard to conjure up the city out of the dense murk because she needed Naples. She knew beyond doubt that the answers to whatever her father had been doing were hidden somewhere in that ancient city that had once ruled over its own kingdom.

  Was Major Jake Parr there? Was he laughing to himself now that she had given him what he wanted, now that she had betrayed her father in that crowded basement? Was that why she had not heard from him since?

  She felt a stab of dismay. Had he sent Harry Fielding to her to test her out? Had Harry reported back and told him to steer clear?

  Spied on. Hunted. Trapped.

  She quickened her pace.

  ‘You’re back.’

  ‘Yes, I’m back.’

  The expression on Octavia di Marco’s austere face was not quite a smile but it came close. ‘Are you feeling better, Signorina Lombardi?’

  ‘Yes, grazie.’ Caterina unconsciously ran her fingers along the edge of her chopped hair. ‘Thank you for your help. And for the haircut.’

  ‘You are welcome.’

  The tall woman stood in the grand entrance of the white villa, again a striking figure in her man’s black suit and intricate long jet earrings, vivid against skin that was too pale.

  ‘The Count is engaged at the moment,’ she announced.

  ‘I’m here to see Leonora.’

  She followed Octavia di Marco through a maze of pale marble corridors, but as they approached a closed door at the far end, Caterina lengthened her stride and came alongside the Count’s niece.

  ‘I’m not here to hurt her.’ Caterina spoke softly, ‘I’m here to help her.’

  Octavia di Marco’s eyes raked her from head to foot. ‘Liar,’ she said and knocked on the door.

  A voice inside called, ‘Enter,’ and Caterina walked in.

  The shutters were open, the blinds raised. The French windows stood ajar and a warm wind snaked through the room. It stirred the scent of citrus that hung heavily in the air. A lemon tree grew almost to the ceiling.

  ‘Welcome to my playroom, Caterina.’

  Leonora di Marco’s greeting was warm, despite the fact that she was performing a headstand in the middle of the room. An upside-down smile spread across her face and she lifted one hand briefly off the floor to wave. She was wearing a white tunic and shorts.

  Caterina glanced around the room. Virgin-white, of course; she had come to expect that in this bleached household. At the far end stood a trampoline, and a skipping rope lay abandoned on the floor. Along the length of the room a row of rubber hand-rings hung suspended from the ceiling about three metres from the floor. It took Caterina a moment to realise what they were for and she almost laughed out loud at the mental image of this young slip of a girl swinging from one to the other like Tarzan. It demonstrated a bravery that surprised her.

  Leonora flipped easily on to her feet and Caterina advanced towards her, but before she had taken more than two steps the white dog materialised from nowhere and stood stiff-legged between them.

  ‘Bianchezza,’ Leonora spoke sternly.

  The German Shepherd flattened its ears, silently bared its teeth.

  ‘I thought we were friends,’ Caterina murmured and held out her fingers.

  The dog sniffed at them, its leathery black nostrils flared, and its pale eyes relaxed, but its irises remained huge.

  ‘Bianchezza!’ Leonora scolded. ‘Stop that.’ She ruffled a hand through her dog’s milky white fur and earned a quick flash of its tongue. ‘Behave.’

  Caterina straightened up. But there was a strange atmosphere in the room. The dog could sense it too, its hackles not quite flat. The feeling seemed to rise from an awareness between the two young women, an awareness that what had occurred in the car on the steep mountainside had fused them together in a way that was oddly intimate, despite the fact that they were strangers.

  ‘How are you?’ she asked Leonora.

  ‘Much better.’

  There was a pause. The wind snatched at one of the hanging rings and set it swaying.

  ‘And you?’ Leonora asked. ‘How is the bite?’

  ‘Healing well.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘And Bianchezza?’

  Leonora laughed, that brittle sound, painful on the ear. ‘As you can see, she has recovered.’

  The white fur around the dog’s neck-wound had been shaved away, revealing a vulnerable slash of pink skin around a jagged scab. They both looked at it. Images of the mountainside at an odd angle rose inside Caterina’s head, and to banish them she drew out a brown paper package from her shoulder bag. It was the white dress, laundered and pressed, but Leonora refused it point blank.

  ‘Keep it,’ she said. ‘It looks better on you.’

  Her smile was generous.

  Caterina extracted another brown paper package. She presented it to Leonora who unwrapped it. It was a box. Not a musical box. They were gone. She had sold all six of them to the battle-weary AAF troops on the ferry. No, this was something special for Leonora. It was a jewellery box, lined with pure white parachute silk that she had got hold of on the black market in Via San Antonio for a cupful of the excellent coffee that Captain Fielding had brought her.

  Inlaid on the wooden lid was the profile of the head of a German Shepherd dog. She had devised it in the creamiest of satinwood, with the tufts of fur and its ears picked out in slivers of ivory and mother-of-pearl that she had cannibalised from an old tray she had made as a child for her mother. There was no point keeping that tray under her bed. Not any more.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Leonora declared, astounded. ‘Thank you. I’ve been waiting for you to come. To thank you for saving my life.’

  Caterina held out a hand. She intended to shake hands, to formalise their friendship, but the moment their palms touched, the unstable barrier between them collapsed. She found herself wrapped in Leonora’s embrace, the dark threads of their hair mingling together, and she could not but inhale the scent of loneliness on her new friend’s pale skin.

  ‘Tell me, Leonora,’ she asked in a careful tone, ‘why would anyone want to kill you?’

  Leonora glanced pointedly at the closed door and cupped her hand to her ear to indicate eavesdroppers. ‘Let’s take a walk.’

  Together they slipped out through the French windows.

  Leonora knew the paths, the tracks, the faintest of animal trails through the forested slopes of Capri better than Caterina knew the streets of Sorrento.

  Caterina watched the girl’s bare legs flash in their white shorts, scampering ahead beneath the arching canopy of the umbrella pines whose cones and needles lay under her feet, the undergrowth scented with wild oregano. Fearlessly she leapt on to limestone crags that threatened to tumble her into the sea far below. In the dips and hollows lay drifts of purple bee-orchids and ox-eyed daisies, and always there was the breath of the sea at their shoulder.

  Caterina padded along at Leonora’s heels as silent as the dog, and waited for this onrush of wild energy to end. Finally Leonora clambered to the top of a cliff and ducked under its rocky overhang.

  ‘Welco
me to my castle,’ she grinned.

  It was a castle. Of sorts. A jumble of limestone boulders and weathered rocks carved out by the wind and the rain, a natural fortress with a small knoll at its centre covered in a cushion of moss campion for them to sit on. In front of them stretched a vast unruly grey sky that sucked the warmth from the day. They sat down together and there was an easiness to their companionship that surprised Caterina.

  ‘Guard!’ Leonora commanded her dog with a flick of her hand and the animal immediately picked its way out of the castle on to the slope behind. ‘Bianchezza will warn us,’ she confided, ‘if anyone comes.’

  They talked quietly and frankly, the heartless cry of gulls the only sound to puncture their private world.

  Caterina asked once again the question she had put to Leonora in the villa. ‘Why would anyone want to kill you?’

  Leonora shook her head, bewildered. ‘I have asked myself that a thousand times. Why would anyone want to kill me? There was no reason. It doesn’t make sense.’

  Caterina laid it out clearly and simply. If the big man called Aldo had been trying to kill her, rather than Leonora, then he must have followed her from the mainland. In which case he would not have had a car. So where had the big bull-nosed Buick come from? The fact that he had access to the car, which then disappeared, indicated that someone on the island was helping him.

  Or employing him.

  ‘No.’ Leonora was adamant. ‘I know what you’re thinking and you are wrong. Totally wrong. My grandfather would never try to kill me. I am the only one to carry our name on to the next generation. No, Nonno is no killer, I swear to you. It’s not him.’ Her small fingers clung to each other in her lap. ‘Maybe the driver was just a drunk who was playing a game, pushing us off the road, and has now gone back under the rock he crawled out from.’

  ‘No, Leonora. He hasn’t disappeared.’

  Caterina told her about the chase, the one through the old city of Naples, the one that made her skin sweat and her limbs tremble even now. She turned her face away from Leonora and fixed her eyes on three black shearwaters that were circling on thermals like burnt scraps of paper. She let the wind scythe across her face, scouring away any trace of fear. But she was glad of the solid rock at her back.

  Leonora was happy to talk about her family. Count di Marco had made his fortune as a dealer in South African gold and diamonds, but now never left the villa, and his niece rarely left the island, though Leonora didn’t know why. Neither was keen on communication, it seemed. The Count and his niece had frequent rows and liked to outmanoeuvre each other at chess, and though they occasionally entertained visitors, Leonora had never seen any guests who looked remotely like the massive Aldo or had a white blaze in his hair.

  There was nothing of use to Caterina, despite all the prodding and pushing and teasing out of answers. She thought of Jake Parr, the soldier with a police officer’s eyes. He would know what questions she should ask to find answers. She thought for a moment and started to question Leonora about her life.

  ‘My parents died on Vesuvius in August 1928 when I was two,’ the girl told her.

  That made her nineteen. She looked younger.

  ‘There was an eruption that summer,’ Leonora elaborated. ‘My father was taking photographs of the lava spouts and he and my mother got caught by one.’ A forlorn smile pulled her mouth out of shape. ‘My father was a crazy risk-taker apparently.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I was brought up by Nonno and Octavia.’

  No wonder she needed the dog. Something to love her.

  ‘I’m also sorry about the loss of your fiancé two years ago,’ Caterina added, ‘it must have been—’

  ‘Don’t go feeling sorry for me about that.’ Leonora clicked her fingers and within half a second there was a flash of white and the dog was at her side. She pressed her small dark head against the animal’s flank. ‘Because I’m not.’

  ‘Didn’t you love him? Your fiancé?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then why on earth did you agree to marry him?’

  Leonora grinned at her. ‘Because I want to be a racing driver.’

  Caterina’s jaw dropped open. ‘What?’

  The girl laughed, and this time it was that joyous unfettered sound that only seemed to exist away from the house. ‘That’s why I keep myself fit. I’ve always wanted to be a racing driver. To drive the Mille Miglia for Alfa Romeo, like Tazio Nuvolari. But they won’t take women. Bastardi! But there’s a circuit in England called Brooklands, that’s where I intend to go. They hold women’s races all the time, but I need a car of my own. Caterina, can you imagine it?’

  Her hands were spinning an imaginary steering wheel with excitement and Caterina remembered the drive down the mountainside. Fast and furious. Brakes squealing. Dust flying. The thrill on Leonora’s face. Her dark eyes were shining now. Yes, she could imagine it all right.

  Leonora scooted forward on her bottom to the cliff edge, dangling her feet over the sheer drop and proceeded to tell Caterina that as her grandfather had refused to give her money for a car, she had decided to marry instead.

  ‘For your husband’s money?’ Caterina’s fingers itched to seize the girl’s hair and drag her back to the safety of the knoll.

  ‘Holy Mother, no. I just wanted my wedding gift from Nonno.’ She glanced over her shoulder at Caterina, her eyes mischievous, her full lips open, showing hungry white teeth. ‘The fabled jewelled table that your father was making! I never saw it but I would have sold it to finance a racing car.’ She held out a hand to Caterina. ‘Help me, help me find it.’

  ‘I have already told your grandfather that I’m not interested.’

  A foolhardy brown lizard with eyes as yellow as a celandine scuttled across the stones of their fortress, and the dog snatched it up with a loud click of its jaws. The updraft from the cliff swept into Leonora’s tunic, puffing it out at the back, making her look bigger.

  ‘Come here, Caterina. I have something to show you.’

  Caterina took two steps forward. Enough. No more.

  ‘Look down there.’ The girl pointed down to the foot of the cliff far below where there was a tiny cove and a few metres of bleached sand.

  ‘See?’ Leonora pressed her. ‘The grey smears at the cliff base. They are caves. All around Capri. Most people don’t know about them. Few tourists go beyond the Azura Grotto cave, the Blue Pool.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I walk the cliffs all the time. I see things. Boats pull in. At dawn. At dusk.’

  Was this girl offering her an exchange?

  ‘One evening I watched four men dismantle an army Jeep on the beach,’ Leonora continued casually, giving Caterina time to consider. ‘At the end they loaded the parts on to a fishing boat and shipped them back to the mainland to sell.’ She chuckled.

  ‘And crates?’

  ‘Sometimes. Yes, I’ve seen crates come in.’

  Caterina was trying to make sense of this. Her mind was sluggish, the back of her neck ached. What was it about this family that could wrong-foot her so readily? Did Leonora really believe that the dowry table was hidden somewhere on the island? Or was that just her way of holding out a carrot to the donkey? It was obvious that Leonora was a crazy risk-taker too, like her father. What other risks did she seize blindly with both hands, other than balancing on a limestone cliff edge, that is? The wind was picking up. One good puff and the girl would be gone.

  Caterina took another step forward and the precipice jumped closer. She rested a hand on the girl’s shoulder with a steadying grip, aware of the muscles underneath the white silk tensing and un-tensing.

  ‘Leonora.’ She kept her tone light. ‘Have you ever heard of the Caesar Club?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  Caterina inhaled a quick breath. Tasted the salt air on her tongue. She had asked on impulse and expected nothing.

  Yes, of course.

  ‘Why do you say ‘of course’?’ she asked.


  ‘Because my ex-fiancé’s brother is a member. Giulio Macchione.’

  Everything entwined. Strings that wound in and out of each other. Caterina couldn’t make sense of it, but she could feel the strings tightening.

  ‘I’d like to meet this Giulio Macchione.’

  Leonora shrugged, irritated by the change of subject from racing cars, and she plucked a tiny golden beetle from the front of her tunic. A green stain remained to mar the pristine whiteness of the silk.

  ‘That’s no problem. He’s always at Pompeii’s.’ She rolled her eyes skywards when she saw Caterina’s blank expression. ‘For heaven’s sake, that’s a nightclub in Naples. On Via Toledo.’

  ‘Will he be there tonight?’

  ‘Probably. You want to go to Pompeii’s tonight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  An amused smile spread across the girl’s delicate features as her gaze skimmed over Caterina from head to toe. ‘You wouldn’t get in even as a kitchen skivvy in that dress, but . . .’

  The dog’s head whipped round. Its ice-blue stare fixed on the overhanging rock at the entrance to the castle and it stood still, legs rigid, but uttered no growl. Caterina grasped Leonora’s tunic and yanked her to her feet on safe ground. An expression of excitement crossed Leonora’s face, but Caterina gestured to her to remain silent. Her hand slid into the canvas bag still on her shoulder, felt for the gun, and flicked off the safety catch. She had practised this.

  She rounded the shoulder of rock first. A figure stood there, tall and clad in a suit and Caterina’s trigger finger tightened ready to shoot right through the bag. Except there was no white blaze. No arms of solid muscle, nor gold glinting on knuckles. Instead a jacket was slung over a shoulder and a coal-black shirt was stuck with sweat to narrow ribs.

  It was Octavia di Marco.

  Caterina exhaled sharply.

  ‘Octavia,’ Leonora laughed with relief behind Caterina, ‘what are you doing up here? You scared us.’

  The woman’s intent gaze shifted from Caterina to her niece and back again. ‘I came to watch over you, bella,’ she said to Leonora in her usual quiet voice, though her eyes were fixed firmly on Caterina. ‘To make sure you were safe.’