The Liberation

by Kate Furnivall

  That the boy was lying.

  ‘Signora Lombardi.’

  The mother was at the bar, a vodka in her hand and a smug-looking naval officer at her side. Jake didn’t blame the guy for being smug. She looked stunning, arranged gracefully with one elbow casually on the bar, one elegant leg crossed over the other under the scarlet dress. A cigarette holder in her other hand.

  ‘You’re back, soldier.’ She raised one carefully arched eyebrow at him. ‘Didn’t she want to climb on your white horse?’ She laughed teasingly.

  He had no time for her tricks. ‘She has disappeared. I need your help to find her. Right now.’

  She did not take offence at his brusque manner. She put down her glass.

  ‘Push off, buddy,’ the naval officer advanced towards him. ‘This lady is taken.’

  Jake gave him a look that halted him in his tracks.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ Lucia Lombardi asked.

  ‘I want you to go and take a look in the ladies’ powder room for me. Check out that she isn’t in there.’

  ‘And what are you going to be doing?’

  ‘Searching other rooms.’

  ‘You think she’s hiding?’ She batted her long eyelashes at him in mock horror. ‘From me?’

  ‘I wouldn’t blame her,’ he said sternly and taking her arm, steered her across the room.

  That was the moment the explosion hit.

  A massive roar ripped through the room, tearing it apart. It punched the breath out of Jake.

  Debris hurtled at the dancers. Scything through limbs. Shredding skin. A great wall of sound blasted over the screams and the air became a living thing that shuddered and convulsed and sucked the breath from lungs. It battered Jake’s and something hard crashed against his ribs. Most of the lights were out. He was choking on dust and grit, fighting for breath, a zigzag of sparks flashing behind his eyelids.

  A bomb.

  God knows, he’d heard enough of them to recognise the sound.

  Beside him Lucia Lombardi had let loose a high-pitched wail of terror, and she was clinging to him with both hands. Swaying on her feet. He dragged off his jacket and threw it over her bare shoulders to protect them from the sharp edges of masonry flying around.

  People were panicked. Screaming and stampeding to the doors. Bodies lay strewn where they fell, the floor slick with blood. The remaining few lamps flickered like dying heartbeats.

  Jake bent down and hoisted a table off a man in evening dress whose cheek was sliced open and hanging in a crimson flap. An older woman was groping blindly, a torrent of blood streaming down her face. Jake seized her hand and, with the other arm gripping Lucia Lombardi, he forced a path away from that spot towards the door, just as the lights went out and the immense chandelier directly overhead plunged down on those below.

  Shrieks pierced the darkness. The stink of blood and faeces was strong as Jake propelled the two women forward, but only one thought was thudding through his mind: Caterina. Where was she? Had she come back into this room? An image of her lying injured and bleeding leapt into his head. Trampled. Broken. It crushed something inside him.

  In the suffocating darkness he bellowed her name. ‘Caterina!’

  He listened for her voice. But if it was there, it was lost among the cries of pain and fear. He had just reached the door with the women when there was a sudden deafening crack. A shuddering of the room. With a roar the ornate ceiling collapsed. A violent blow to Jake’s shoulders sent him stumbling to his knees, losing his hold on the two women, and he tasted blood and plaster in his mouth. He fought to regain his footing but could see nothing and felt something soft and human under his feet.

  Not this way. Don’t let it end this way.

  A mule kick to the back of his head sent him spinning down to the floor. Screams lodged in his ears and blackness rose from the floor to sink its teeth into him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  How much darkness can there be?

  Caterina could feel the weight of it pressing against her skin. A wild pulse kicked into life in her throat.

  Where was she?

  Twice she forced up her eyelids, but all she saw was more unyielding darkness, solid enough to touch. It crammed itself into her head. Stifling. Shutting down her thoughts. Her heart drummed in her ears.

  Where had all this darkness come from?

  Who had put her here?

  Her mind struggled in vain to make sense of it. Dimly in some distant shadowy world, she recalled the street outside the Pompeii Club. Empty. Vague. Blurred. As though the image was many years old, curling at its edges. Surely that was where she should be, inside that yellowing old picture. Not here. Not hunched on a damp floor in blackness. She was shivering.

  Abruptly she recalled the stinging pain in her arm and the realisation of what it meant rolled over her. The grey fog in her mind. The blank space in her head where the memory of how she got here should be. They had to be the result of a needle plunged under her skin by hands that would be coming back for her. A low moan seeped out of her mouth.

  Panic threatened to stalk the darkness. Breathe. Breathe. In and out. Slowly, breathe slowly. Her chin slumped on her chest and at last the moaning stopped. The relief from it cleared a small corner at the back of her skull where thoughts could gather.

  Concentrate, she told herself. Concentrate.

  One by one she started to ask herself questions.

  Why are you here?

  Because someone dumped me here in this dark hole.

  Why aren’t you dead?

  That one sent a flicker of hope skimming through her. Because I am more valuable alive.

  Why can’t I move?

  The question cut through the fog in her brain. How could it have taken her so long to work that out? She couldn’t move.

  She couldn’t move.

  With a scream she yanked at her hands but they remained firmly behind her back. Only then did it dawn on her that she was lying on her side on a concrete floor, tethered like a goat to a metal stake in the ground. The scream ripped out into the darkness, tearing it to shreds, but there was no one to hear.

  Don’t, don’t, don’t. Please don’t.

  But the scream kept coming. It stampeded over her.

  To make it stop she jammed her face in the dirt. Her body bucked and shuddered but it stopped the noise. The sudden silence was deafening, but in the brittle emptiness that now lay within the darkness, she started to think.

  To concentrate.

  Thin fingers of dawn slid under the door. Caterina focused her gaze on their approach, faint threads of grey reaching out into the layers of blackness and she felt a quickening within herself. Whoever was responsible for this would come when it was daylight. She was convinced. And when they walked through the door that she could now dimly make out, she stood a chance. Faint perhaps, but still a chance. Tethered alone in a black hole, she stood none.

  She was in a shed. At least she could make out that much. A stone storage shed, it seemed. No windows. Where the darkness edged into greyness around the door, there stood what looked to Caterina like a stack of slatted wooden boxes, fish boxes, judging by the stink. She peered hard through the gloom, blinking away the wisps of fog that kept drifting through her mind, and saw dark humps huddled on the cold floor.

  Her mouth went dry. People. Surely they looked like people. Asleep. In her shed. Soundless and unmoving. Black shapeless humps that changed everything. She froze. Earlier she had examined the stake to which she was tethered, but the ropes on her wrists were knotted as tight as wire. She had pulled and yanked at them, tearing her skin. She’d cursed like a trooper. Yet there had been no movement from the invisible humps on the floor, no answer to her scream.

  Who were they?

  Thoughts came at her in pieces. Guards? Had Drago Vincelli abducted her and placed guards around her? Was that who they were? But why so many? And why the silence? It made no sense. There were six black humps that she could see, some larger, s
ome smaller, all of them terrifying.

  Yet she was still alive.

  That had to mean something.

  But what?

  She narrowed her eyes in an effort to bring the indistinct humps into sharper focus, and tried to think logically, but her mind was skittering all over the place. She needed to ask the right questions. Think like a policeman. Think like Jake Parr.

  Find me, Jake.

  With your stern eyes and your unrelenting mind, come and find me.

  But she knew that if anyone was going to get her out of this filthy hell-hole, it would have to be herself. She turned her head and saw that the thread of dawn was creeping closer, nudging up against one of the black mounds. Who were these people?

  Time to find out.

  As quietly as possible she wriggled her body as far down as she could towards the shapes. Her hip-bone scraped across the concrete as she stretched out, elongating her limbs, wrenching up her arms behind her back. She cursed the rope and the stake, and ignored the twisting of her shoulder sockets. With her head raised a fraction, she took aim and jerked her leg in a savage kick. The tip of her shoe caught the nearest hump, connected with something hard. It felt like a head.

  A shriek rang out. The noise of it rattled through the shed. In the dark the hump reared up and a fist slammed against her offending foot.

  ‘You bitch! You gutter-whore bitch! Stay away from me.’

  It was the voice of a child.

  A candle flared into life, sending shadows scuttling into the corners of the shed and painting pools of yellow on the silent figures. Six nervous faces. Staring uneasily at Caterina, as if she had two heads. She stared back at them, aghast. They were all children.

  Small and ragged, thin as sticks, hair spiked with dirt. Some were standing, wrapped in filthy sacks, others crouched on their knees. Even in the gloomy shadows she could see they were all boys, three of them little sprats of no more than six or seven. The other three were rangier, all feet and sharp elbows, nearer ten or twelve years old, but all possessed the tense stillness of feral creatures. She could smell the wildness on them.

  They were scugnizzi. A pack of street kids.

  She felt her pulse climb down and the air find its way into her lungs again.

  But why here? And why her?

  Using her elbows, she manoeuvred herself up into a sitting position, arms tight behind her back, and asked, ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘We’re Vanni’s wolves.’

  It was one of the younger ones who piped up with the answer, the kid whose lice-ridden head she had kicked. He puffed out his chest.

  ‘Vanni?’

  Caterina switched to the older boy who lit the candle. He was standing, one hip thrust forward, his scruffy head angled so that it was half turned away from her, ignoring her. An army shirt with its sleeves ripped out hung down to his knees.

  Something clicked in her brain.

  Vanni.

  He was the one on the bombsite. The one with the knife. The boy with the eyes of a man, the boy who’d wanted to snatch her sack of music boxes from her and swap them for a blade in her ribs. That Vanni.

  ‘Hello, Vanni.’

  He didn’t recognise her. Not with her hair cut short and the white gown bestowing a classy opulence. Of course he didn’t. He was too busy working out how much trouble she was going to be to him.

  ‘Well now, Vanni,’ she said calmly, ‘this is a strange situation, isn’t it?’

  His mouth turned down in a sneer that he’d copied from someone a lot older and it didn’t yet sit right on his young features. But he didn’t bother to answer her.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong person,’ Caterina continued. A quick frown puckered the boy’s swarthy forehead. ‘Vanni, my family has no money. They can pay no ransom for me. This is borrowed finery I’m wearing, so there is no point keeping me tied up like this.’

  She even smiled at him, a rocky smile but still a smile. These were kids. It was hard to be afraid of children who were scarcely older than her brother. Suddenly she kicked off her shoes. They were white satin slippers with tiny pearls sewn across the tip.

  ‘Here,’ she said, ‘take these. Go and sell them. Bring me back an ordinary work-dress – it can be an old one, I won’t mind – and you can keep the rest of the shoe money as payment for letting me go.’ She laughed, carefully watching them, and saw the younger boys break into grins. ‘And then you can have this dress too. It is silk. A deal?’

  Vanni crouched down on all fours, his eyes level with hers, and a shiver slid down her aching spine. In the semi-darkness she had the impression of a young wolf, hollow-cheeked and grey skinned. She wondered when he’d last eaten. He smelled of hunger.

  ‘What’s to stop me,’ he whispered menacingly, ‘taking that dress off you anyway? Why should I waste good lire on buying another?’

  Caterina didn’t blink. She recalled his knife flicking from hand to hand, the sunlight dancing on its blade. No gun at her side this time.

  ‘Because I say so,’ she stated. ‘You are not laying a finger on this gown until I am wearing another dress.’

  He moved closer. ‘Maybe I’ll take it now.’

  She stared into his pale eyes. ‘Really? You think so? Just try, Vanni. Try that.’

  One of the others sniggered.

  Vanni snapped his head round and silenced the child with a look. ‘Meo, take the shoes,’ he ordered. The boy, slightly younger but with a stoop to one shoulder and a submissive manner, scooped up the shoes. ‘Sell them,’ Vanni told him, ‘in one of the street markets.’

  ‘It’s too early,’ the boy grumbled, ‘it’s only just getting light and . . .’

  Vanni raised one dark eyebrow. That was all. And the boy was gone. There was a rustle in the dim fish-tainted air as the children settled back to sit on their sacks once more, expectant. Except for Vanni. He chose to remain standing, leaning one shoulder against the wall, and for the first time she glimpsed the outline of the knife under his army shirt.

  ‘Vanni,’ Caterina said firmly in the kind of tone she used with Luca when he walked filthy footprints through the house, ‘now tell me why I am here.’

  ‘Puttana!’

  Vanni insulted her. But when he’d got that out of his system, he started to talk. Short, sharp sentences. It surprised Caterina at first, but under his flat bald words glowed the hot embers of pride. He wanted her to know. Wanted her to admire him. For kidnapping her. She didn’t laugh in his face but came close.

  He described his wolves as scavengers.

  ‘We feed on people,’ he said. ‘On their scraps.’

  ‘Thieves,’ she said.

  He laughed. Not a childish sound. ‘We use rumours and whispers.’

  A chill lifted the hairs on Caterina’s neck. ‘What whispers?’

  And then it came, the reason for her being hog-tied with a bunch of urchins in a stinking hovel. He’d heard that a certain someone in Naples wanted her, wanted Caterina Lombardi badly. So he reckoned that if he and his wolves could track her down and drag her off to their den, they could do an exchange. Her for a car. A straight swap.

  A car? Was he insane? What use was a car without petrol and everyone knew petrol was as scarce as smiles in Naples. Anyway they were too young. The candlelight gilded the raw bones of their faces, the scabs on their arms, the dirt under their fingernails. Maybe it gilded their dreams too.

  ‘I can get you a bicycle,’ she lied, ‘if you let me go.’

  But Vanni wasn’t having it. No, he didn’t trust her. He spat disdainfully on the floor. Instead he told her of Meo’s skill with a syringe because his father had been a veterinary surgeon before getting himself shot out of the skies in his Centauro aeroplane in the Italian Air Force during the war. They brought her here in a handcart shrouded in fish boxes.

  She listened to each word, trying to find the boy inside them, a boy she could talk to, but he wasn’t there. Only the hard shell of a grown man who enjoyed inflicting pain. Yet all the time whil
e he talked, one of the youngest kids edged closer to her, until he could place his small hand on her leg. It was young Tino, the other child from the bombsite, with the wide shy smile and the hedgehog hair she remembered. He had torn strips off his sacking bed and started to bind up her feet with quick neat movements, creating shoes of a basic kind. She wanted to kiss his grubby cheek. It struck her that if they were giving her shoes, they weren’t going to kill her.

  By the time Vanni had finished his boasting and linked his arms with satisfaction across his chest, a ribbon of bright daylight was sliding on its belly under the door and the candle was down to a stub.

  No name. Vanni had offered no name for the person who would be the recipient of the swap. Her for a car.

  The door burst open. With relief Caterina inhaled the clean air that swept in and caught a glimpse of rubble outside, a scrap of blue sky and the smell of fresh bread, before the door was slammed shut again. The candle flickered and threatened to die. For one brief heartbeat Caterina’s hopes had rocketed but were instantly shattered into broken glass in the pit of her stomach. It wasn’t Jake Parr.

  It was Meo, clutching two loaves of bread under one arm and a bundle of grey cloth under the other. He threw the bundle at Caterina, though she had no hands to catch it, and the children descended on him with the excited cries of gulls as he tore the bread into chunks for them.

  ‘Vanni,’ Caterina said quietly to the youth who stood aloof from the feeding frenzy. He did not have to fight for his lion’s share. It was his by right. ‘Who is the person who you say is interested in me?’

  Vanni stepped up close to her, his thin body leaning over her in the gloom and drew his knife.

  ‘Whoever this person is,’ she said sharply, ‘he won’t want damaged merchandise.’

  She looked away and focused instead on the dirty hands that were cramming bread into moist pink mouths, on the relief painted all over the children’s gaunt faces as food hit their stomachs. The knife swept towards her and Vanni laughed in her ear, a soft indecent sound, relishing the tremor that ran down her neck. With an expert twist of the blade he sliced through the rope behind her. Her wrists parted, her shoulder joints uncramped as she straightened up and pushed herself stiffly to her feet.