The Liberation

by Kate Furnivall

  ‘Is it Drago Vincelli?’ she asked.

  His eyes widened. The other children stopped chewing, mouths open.

  ‘Take me to him,’ she said and slipped the dress that Meo had provided over her head. It was grey and shapeless and too big for her, but it had a piece of string threaded through the loops at the waist to act as a belt. She slid the silk straps of the white gown off each arm and let it slither down under the cotton dress to the ground. Vanni snatched it up and sniffed it.

  ‘Take me to him,’ Caterina repeated, ‘and I will get you that car you want.’

  ‘Liar,’ he hissed in her face, but in the dim light, his eyes glittered. He wanted to believe her.

  ‘Take me to him,’ she said for the third time.

  It was all he needed.

  They ran through the streets of Naples, three of them in single file: Vanni in the lead with a loping wolf stride, his skeletal legs pounding out a relentless pace, Caterina at his heels while behind her, Meo had breath to whistle as he ran and it occurred to her that these scugnizzi must spend a lot of their day on the run.

  Streets flashed past, streets she didn’t know. Cramped rows of unkempt houses and tall crumbling tenements where police didn’t venture. It was still early, the sun skimming the roof tops, gilding the chimney pots, but the city of Naples was already coming to life and donning its gaudy colours. Street markets, vibrant with fresh-picked oranges, lemons and artichokes, were already crowded and full of noise and bustle. Vanni’s hand snatched an apple without breaking stride as he shot past one stall, but it was Meo who caught the slap on his ear from the irate stallholder.

  How much further?

  Caterina’s lungs were heaving. Beads of sweat clung to her skin, pasting the grey dress to her back, but she concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other, pushing all else from her mind. Yet the name Drago seemed to echo back up at her each time her sacking shoe hit the pavement.

  Drago Vincelli.

  She grieved for the lack of the Bodeo banging against her hip as she ran.

  Each time they passed a church, however mean or however grand, Vanni paused for two seconds, bowed the knee and crossed himself, and it struck Caterina as a gesture of hope on his part, a reaching out for a miracle. She was tempted to join him, but miracles were thin on the ground in Naples, so she kept running instead. At any time she could have stopped, could have thrown herself at a passing Allied soldier on patrol or a police officer directing traffic and begged for help. She could have rid herself of these vagabond scugnizzi who wished her harm.

  But she didn’t. She needed them, these homeless street-rats. Especially their volatile pack leader with his absurd dream of a car. She would use him, just as he was using her. Her hand wanted to slide under his filthy army shirt and snatch his knife, but she stuck to the running, purposeful at his heels.

  When Vanni halted this time she almost crashed into him. It wasn’t just the usual two seconds in front of a church but a full minute, repeatedly crossing himself, lips moving in silent prayer. When he finally turned, he gave her a smile and there was something savage about it.

  ‘Inside,’ he said and took the steps with one bound.

  The church of Santa Maria smelled of God and of damp. The vaulted nave soared above Caterina and rustled with the whispers of forgotten prayers that had lodged there. Naples was riddled with churches and even those in the poorest districts like this one abounded with superb sixteenth-century frescoes and wonders of Renaissance statuary by the likes of Tommaso Malavito and Caccavello. Standing obediently next to a statue of the Virgin Mary, Caterina couldn’t stop her thoughts veering towards her own mother. Was she in some hotel room? Lying among white goose-down pillows? Painting her nails a shimmering poppy red and waiting for breakfast to arrive on a tray.

  The thoughts lunged at her and she parried them by training her eyes on Vanni on the far side of the ancient oak pews beside the confessional box. He looked smaller here, no danger at all. A child in need of a blessing. What on earth had she been afraid of? A shaft of blue light fell on him through the stained-glass window and gave him the ethereal skin of an angel. Caterina looked away. Vanni was no angel.

  An old woman swaddled in black garments was moving around, feet shuffling on the moss-coloured tiles, a pannier of potatoes strapped to her bent back. She started stroking the feet of a statue of San Sebastian and holding a quiet conversation with him, but when she saw Caterina, she shambled over. Her face looked like rumpled brown paper.

  ‘You want to buy a potato?’ she whispered and held one out to Caterina.

  ‘In a church?’

  ‘Why not? The good Lord knows we have to eat.’

  ‘No. I have no money.’

  ‘Something to barter?’

  ‘I have nothing.’

  The woman stared at Caterina’s sacking shoes and murmured a Hail Mary. She wrapped her crow’s fingers around Caterina’s hand and forced the potato into it, before lurching away back to her stone-hearted saint.

  The kindness of strangers wasn’t something Caterina was used to in Naples and she took it as a good omen. This church of Santa Maria harboured kindness. Even Drago Vincelli was human. His greed may boil over like the molten lava of Vesuvius, but somewhere under it all must still lie a human heart. With a mother, a sister, a daughter. Why else would he choose this place to meet?

  She was relying on it.

  Her gaze turned back to the confessional.

  As tempting as it was to put a fist through the delicate wooden latticework of the grille, Caterina refrained. She took her seat in the tiny wooden confessional box and waited, but she couldn’t resist running the flat of her hand over the ancient oak of the walls with their dark patina of age and the feel of it soothed her taut nerves. It had a strange odour. It took her a moment to place it. It was guilt, she decided, the currency of confessionals. The coarse-grained wood reeked of it.

  She could hear him breathing. He was there on the other side of the grille in the section where the priest would sit to listen to the whispered words of sinners. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ they would murmur into the grille.

  I have sinned.

  She stared hard at the latticework and wanted to shout through it, ‘You have sinned.’

  Ask Sal Sardo with the scarlet smile across his throat. Ask Sal who has sinned.

  ‘Caterina Lombardi.’

  Drago Vincelli’s voice sparked a fire in her chest, this man who had dared threaten her family. All she could see of him was a shadowy profile, sliced into squares by the lattice. She felt safe inside this gloomy box in the church of Santa Maria, but she knew it was an illusion.

  ‘What is it you want, Caterina Lombardi?’

  ‘I have two questions to ask you.’

  She heard his harsh exhalation, an expression of annoyance. Had he expected her to beg?

  There followed a full minute of silence but she could out-wait him. Out-silence him. Her hands squeezed the potato hard enough to strangle it.

  ‘Understand this, daughter of Antonio Lombardi. I am a busy man,’ he said at last.

  ‘Busy stealing from Italy.’

  Silence again. Longer this time. This man used silences the way other men used words.

  ‘My business is none of your affair,’ he said softly.

  ‘You made it my affair.’

  He continued as though she hadn’t spoken. ‘First, I have two questions for you to answer. In detail. Remember that.’

  She remembered an arm around her throat.

  ‘How much does the Intelligence Officer know?’ His words whispered through the grille, squeezing through the holes, bringing a chill into her box. ‘The big American. He is a thorn in my flesh, that one. He killed one of my brotherhood this week and had to pay for it.’ He uttered a low, sour laugh, swallowed by the shadows. ‘He must learn that retribution is the Italian way.’

  Had to pay for it . . .

  Jake. What has he done to you?

  If
she opened her mouth now, the wrong words were going to come racing out, so she removed her gaze from the grille. She couldn’t bear to look at him, not even his shadow.

  ‘The American does not tell me what he knows,’ she stated.

  ‘Then why does he spend time with you?’ He paused. ‘Dances with you.’

  He knew even that.

  ‘Major Parr asks me questions.’

  ‘And what do you tell him?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘They must be short conversations then.’ He made an odd sound and at first she thought it was some kind of laugh, but decided it was a grunt of frustration.

  ‘Your second question?’ she asked. She could not talk about Jake. A dull kind of panic fluttered inside her. ‘What is it?’

  She saw the profile turn to face her. The heavy black moustache and the blaze of white in his hair drew close to the oak lattice, and instinctively she drew back.

  ‘Where is the table?’ he demanded.

  ‘What table?’

  He put a hand to the grille and for a moment she thought he would tear it down. ‘I will ask you one more time, Caterina Lombardi, and then I will get Aldo to ask you. He can be very persuasive. Where is the table?’

  ‘I don’t know anything about the table or even whether it ever existed. Only recently did I hear about it. I swear I never saw it in my father’s workshop. Believe me, someone is lying.’

  ‘Is that someone you?’

  ‘No.’

  The word burst out of her too loud and she lowered her voice to a more conciliatory tone. ‘Signor Vincelli, if the table were real and if the jewels were real, they would have been destroyed when the bomb landed on my father’s workshop. But I think it is a myth.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Someone has made up this story of a jewelled table. I don’t know why.’

  She could feel his hesitation, sense the seed of doubt. He ran a hand over the pock-marks on his cheek and pressed his black eyes tight against the wooden grille, so that he was looking straight through the holes directly at her. She kept her gaze on him and thought about slamming the potato in his eyes.

  ‘I do not like,’ he said in a guttural voice, ‘to be taken for a fool.’

  ‘I do not take you for a fool, Signor Vincelli.’

  ‘Look what happened to the di Marco girl when someone else made that mistake. She fell off a cliff.’

  Caterina caught the note of triumph in his voice. Suddenly the shadow of the di Marcos seemed to have slipped between them, and she flicked her head to rid herself of it, but the thought of the man in white robes playing caesar on the clifftop did not vanish so easily.

  Had he taken her for a fool?

  To be duped with lies and beguiled by the sight of her father’s exquisite work on the terrace of his bloodless world of marble. The confessional box abruptly became too small, claustrophobic and clammy. She felt cocooned in a smoky grey web that was binding her to the man on the other side of the grille.

  Did you kill Sal Sardo? she wanted to ask, but now was not the time. Instead she narrowed her eyelids, so that she saw nothing but Drago Vincelli’s pointed face, squeezed into squares by the lattice, and asked, ‘Did my father work for you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did he repair the damage to valuable antique pieces that were stolen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does the Cavaleri family now do this work for you?’

  A pause. It silenced any doubts she had.

  ‘That is not your business.’

  ‘I am better than Stefano Cavaleri. Ask anyone and they will tell you it’s true. My work with wood is as fine as my father’s, so let me work for you instead.’

  This time the pause stretched so long it seemed about to snap and then there came the grating sound of a soft chesty chuckle on the other side of the grille.

  ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘Yes, Caterina Lombardi, you may work for me. Just like your father.’

  ‘One more thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’ His tone was impatient. He was done with questions.

  ‘The boy wants a car.’

  ‘He is not worth a car.’

  ‘But I am.’

  Drago Vincelli leaned back in his seat and became a blur. He frightened her more like that. He let a silence build between them, and Caterina matched it, brick for brick. From inside her dim claustrophobic box she heard footsteps approach and stop outside, Aldo’s heavy footsteps, and she heard a groan from the wood as he leaned against the confessional. The box became a coffin, the silence a shroud.

  He had been fooling her, this Drago Vincelli. And she had been fooling herself into believing that she could sidestep his threats. It was all ending right here. Right now.

  ‘So, Caterina Lombardi, this is my decision. If you go to the police, you will die and your family will die. I promise you that.’

  Drago’s words barely penetrated, but the sound of Aldo’s lumbering breath rumbled in through the cracks.

  ‘You have a week,’ Drago announced. ‘One week. To find the table.’

  A week. One more week of life. Her hand steadied itself by gliding along the surface of the wood.

  ‘Find the table,’ he said, ‘and you can work for me.’

  ‘And if I don’t find the table?’

  ‘You will have to discuss that with Aldo. You and your brother.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ‘Sit down, Major.’

  Feeling underdressed in his dressing gown, Jake perched on the very edge of his military hospital bed in concession to his senior officer. His shoulder felt as if an elephant had him in an armlock.

  ‘You’re not walking out of here yet, so don’t even think about it,’ Colonel Quincy rapped. ‘That’s an order.’

  ‘Sir, there is work that needs to be done. I have to . . .’

  ‘Captain Fielding will deal with it. You say yourself he’s a good man.’

  ‘He is. A first-class investigator. But after last night’s explosion, we will need every man we have on the ground to . . .’

  ‘I mean it, Major. You remain here for the next forty-eight hours.’

  ‘Really, sir. That is not necessary.’

  The colonel’s ginger eyebrows rose dangerously and he released a snort of irritation. ‘Are you defying my orders, Major?’

  ‘No, sir.’ Jake looked down the ward at the regimented rows of metal beds with their grey blankets and their grey-faced occupants in need of serious care. ‘I feel a fraud here. Some other poor bastard can have my bed.’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense, man. Get well first. Don’t want you keeling over on me.’ Quincy glanced uneasily at the other patients. Earlier he had walked the ward, exchanging a few words with each man. ‘I was one of the lucky ones,’ he muttered and his jaw clicked audibly. ‘I had left for my appointment by the time . . .’ He exhaled heavily and left the sentence incomplete.

  Jake prised himself off the bed. It hurt more to sit there doing nothing about the carnage of last night than it did to force his battered limbs into action. As he straightened up, the floor tilted wildly and the walls did a dance, but he wrestled them back into position and attempted something close to a correct military stance. The dressing gown did not help.

  ‘Have they confirmed that it was a bomb, sir?’

  Colonel Quincy gave a curt nod. ‘They have.’ He ran a hand over his head, slowly, as if the thoughts inside it hurt. ‘The perpetrators of this atrocity will be found and punished.’

  ‘Have they any clue who laid the bomb?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Sir, this could be connected to our investigation into . . .’

  ‘Major Parr, not everything that goes on in Naples is centred on your investigations. I suggest you remember that.’

  He spoke sharply and Jake wondered what toes he had just stepped on to set his senior officer off like that. But Colonel Quincy did not hang about any longer. He gathered himself together, replaced his cap on his
head, adjusted it to the desired angle and prepared to leave.

  ‘Sir,’ Jake stripped his voice of the frustration that threatened to boil over, ‘I am requesting permission to discharge myself from hospital immediately.’

  ‘Request denied, Major.’

  A pretty army nurse came bustling over in her brown and white striped seersucker uniform and cap. She was smiling brightly but her eyes looked tired. ‘Back into bed with you at once, Major Parr. We don’t want you taking a turn for the worse, do we?’ She flapped her hands at him with a dainty laugh.

  ‘Indeed we don’t,’ Quincy mumbled and took the opportunity to depart. ‘Get well, Parr,’ he threw out gruffly, already heading for the swing door.

  The moment the colonel was out of sight, Jake shooed away the nurse and her thermometer, and persuaded his legs to take him to the office of the Ward Sister. It was woefully slow progress and the wall became his new friend each time he leaned on it for support, fighting off the grey mist behind his eyes, but he made it to the office and requested use of the telephone.

  ‘Harry?’ he said into the mouthpiece. ‘Get over here. Fast.’

  ‘Good God, old chap, you look like death warmed up. Shouldn’t you be in bed or something?’

  ‘Don’t you start, Harry. I’ve had a gutful of Florence Nightingales today.’

  Harry Fielding chuckled, reached into his pocket with a careful glance around and extracted a slim silver hip-flask.

  ‘Here,’ Harry passed it across, ‘this will buck you up.’

  Jake took a swig and felt a shot of vintage brandy glide its way to where it was needed, but there was a touch of awkwardness between them as they sat down on the edge of the bed. Maybe it was the dressing gown. It made a man vulnerable. A uniform gave you power and right now Jake needed all the power he could get, but his own uniform had been reduced to tatters last night. He took another swig of brandy and hung on to the flask.

  ‘What are they saying, Harry? Who are they dumping the blame on?’