The Liberation

by Kate Furnivall

  The words came easily to her. All she had to do was picture this man hurling her grandfather down into the gorge, his skull cracking on the rocks, his sight draining away to leave only darkness behind. That’s all it took. This brute was lucky she didn’t pull the trigger again. Finish it. Right now. She could feel the heat of anger, like molten lead in her stomach.

  She fought it down and quietened her breathing. ‘Tell me where he is.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know who.’

  The thick ridge of muscle across his forehead contracted. ‘Signor Vincelli, you mean?’

  ‘Where is he?’

  His dark gaze drifted from her face to her finger on the trigger and back again. He didn’t hurry, but took his time, his eyes slow and speculative. She had thought of him as all muscle and brawn but now she wasn’t so sure. His voice when it came was deep and resonant. It vibrated the wood-scented air.

  ‘I don’t know where he is. Signor Vincelli moves around,’ he said at last. ‘It is safer that way.’

  ‘So how do you communicate?’ She jabbed the gun at the air between them.

  ‘Sometimes by telephone. More often we use gutter-dogs as runners.’

  ‘Gutter-dogs?’

  ‘Scugnizzi.’

  The street kids. Of course. But she didn’t believe he didn’t know where Drago Vincelli had his hide-outs or how would the kids know where to run to? No, he still thought she was stupid enough to fall for his lies. She dipped the angle of the gun till it pointed at his kneecap.

  ‘Have you ever tried running with one knee, Aldo?’

  He moved, no more than a slight shift of his weight as though preparing to attack. He was wearing a black lightweight suit and for the first time Caterina wondered whether he had a gun under there. The thought jolted her into action and she moved half a step forward.

  ‘Take your jacket off.’

  He took it off. His gun was in a neat shoulder holster that crisscrossed his white shirt. There were sweat stains on the shirt.

  He hesitated.

  The Bodeo was aimed at his groin. ‘Unbuckle the holster.’

  He did as she ordered and lowered it to the floor.

  ‘Kick it over.’

  He kicked it towards her. She felt better.

  ‘Now we can talk,’ she said.

  The talk was brief. She accused him of killing the Rocco brothers and the two American soldiers, but he denied it. He would, of course he would. She had no proof. She could get nothing more out of him about Drago Vincelli’s whereabouts but gave him a message to take to his master.

  ‘The jewelled table does not exist,’ she informed him. ‘It was never made. Tell him that from me.’

  The big man’s swarthy face grew wary, not quite certain of himself for the first time. ‘So what was in the cart this morning?’

  ‘Old pieces of wood. Nothing of value.’

  ‘Show me the cart.’

  It was under her worktable, draped in a tarpaulin. She removed the covering. The cart was empty. He stared at it, then back at her with a twisted smile that made his black moustache squirm. ‘If there is no table,’ he said in a voice so quiet it became a threat, ‘Signor Vincelli will want the jewels.’ He held out his hand, a huge muscular platter, as if he expected her to hand them over there and then.

  ‘I don’t know where they are.’

  ‘Then find them.’

  Suddenly he was moving. Not towards her, but towards the far wall where there was a row of storage cupboards. He was fast, despite his bulk. Within seconds their doors were flung open and he was sweeping all the contents on to the floor in a jumble of brushes and sandpaper, files, a torch and jars of varnish. She watched, stunned. He could not seriously believe the jewels were lying around at the back of a pile of pots of fish-glue. This was just for show.

  It was when he opened the cupboard where her finished music boxes were stored, awaiting sale at the next market, that she shouted, ‘No!’ He grinned at her and at the muzzle of her gun, and proceeded to throw them on the floor with indifference, turning his back on her and pounding the wooden boxes with his heavy boot. He ground their fine inlay under his heel.

  ‘Stop now,’ she ordered. ‘You vicious bastard.’

  Could she shoot him? Like this? In the back? He knew her limitations and she hated him for it. She saw her finger shaking on the trigger, desperate to pull it.

  ‘You want to die?’ she demanded. ‘Because I can oblige.’

  He turned and saw something in her face that stopped the carnage underfoot.

  ‘Do you know what I hate?’ he sneered. ‘I hate small spaces like this one.’ His glance flicked around the workshop that was too small for his bulk. ‘I hate tunnels and I hate mouthy women. Puttana.’ He flashed his chunky gold ring through the air in a mimed version of a slap.

  She was almost distracted.

  Almost.

  But fear does strange things to you. It alters your senses. You see the small things. The hardening of the lips, the flare of a nostril, the expanding black pupils. The sudden small intake of breath and the tightening of the skin at the eyes. It all came together in Aldo at that moment, all registered in her senses. So she was ready for the attack when it came.

  He charged. She fired the gun.

  But when a bull elephant stampedes towards you, you are not human if you are not afraid. Her heart reared up into her throat and her hand jerked. The shot went wide. In the fraction of a second before he reached her, she saw the bullet rip the edge of the collar off his shirt and skin a strip of flesh from the side of his neck. A fine spray of blood arced like a crimson rainbow through the air. A finger’s width to the left and he would be dead, but it didn’t even slow his charge.

  He lunged at the gun and the impact almost broke her arm. His massive fist slammed her hand, still clutching the Bodeo, down on to the worktable. A scream ripped out of her and she heard a bellow of rage that she thought came from him but it came from her. He was silent. The gun fell from her numb fingers on to the table and he reached for it.

  Time ceased. Each heartbeat slowed. Her other hand dived into her pocket, pulled out the scorper hidden there with its long thin blade, and plunged it with all her strength into the back of his hand. Through muscle. Through tendons. Through flesh. Pinning it to the worktable.

  A roar broke from him and she jumped back out of reach, the Bodeo safe in her hand once more. He yanked the scorper free, dark blood spilling from the wound, and as soon as the tool was in his good hand, he hunched his huge shoulders and lowered his head, on the verge of coming at her. She could see it in every nerve of his body but they both knew she would not miss her aim a second time. Not this close.

  ‘Get out,’ she hissed at him. ‘Get out and don’t ever dare come near me again. Tell that boss of yours that if he ever threatens me or my family again, I will put a bullet in his brain.’

  Aldo said nothing but he was breathing hard. He pushed his bleeding hand into his pocket, tossed the scorper to the floor and lumbered over to the door. He threw it open so violently it slammed against the wall behind. He looked back at her, eyes narrow slits of hatred.

  ‘You should have killed me when you had the chance, you stupid bitch.’ His heavy lips spread in a warning snarl. ‘Don’t ever leave a job half done.’

  Next time.

  She would have to finish the job.

  The stench of blood still hung in Jake’s nostrils when he walked away from the Rocco brothers’ backyard and it took five minutes on Sorrento’s narrow stretch of beach to drag clean air into his lungs.

  Corporal Hardwick.

  Sergeant Whitely.

  Two names he would never forget. Two letters he must now write to their mothers. The wretched war was over and those same mothers would be celebrating their sons’ safe survival. How do you tell a mother that her son’s throat has been slit by the people he came to help?

  Where are the words for that?

  He walked fast, back up the steep ro
ad, the heat clinging to his shirt. When he arrived at Caterina’s workshop, thankful for the shade, he found Caterina scrubbing her worktable. She opened the door to him with a wet brush in one hand, dripping on to the floor, and he noticed that the soapsuds on it foamed pink.

  ‘I’m sorry I was delayed.’

  But she had turned from him, back into the room, her face shut down and unresponsive. Inside the workshop he could now see that behind her on the floor lay a pile of smashed fragments of wood. He stepped closer. It was her music boxes. Or what remained of them. They were crushed, hinges snapped. Her painstakingly exquisite inlay work was destroyed, scattered in twisted scraps on the stone floor.

  ‘Caterina, you had a visitor?’

  Immediately she abandoned the brush and came over to him, wiping her hands on the folds of her navy skirt. She wrapped her arms around him without a word and he knew she’d seen things in him that no one was meant to see. She held him close, one hand gently stroking the purple bruise on his neck, soft sounds rising from her, her lips brushing his cheek.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she murmured, ‘sorry about earlier. I didn’t mean to make things awkward for you in front of the soldiers.’

  She tipped her head back, looking up at him with her intense blue eyes and he knew that all his defences were useless against this young Italian who was never fooled by his police officer face. She lifted her hand to run a finger over his cheek, across the dark scabs on his forehead, down his nose, touching his lips. Finding life in each part of him.

  ‘I thought you were dead,’ she whispered. ‘I thought you were dead.’

  Her voice reached right through him to the hidden corner that lay in the dense shadow of guilt. She had known it was there. He didn’t know how, but she did.

  He kissed her pale forehead and felt her skin hot.

  ‘What happened here?’ he asked.

  Her answer was silence. A silence in which he could feel the beat of her heart against his chest and her breath coming slow and steady on to his cheek.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘who killed those men.’

  Quiet words, yet they seemed loud in the room. So he told her about the soldiers. He let their names pass his lips. Sergeant Tom Whitely. Corporal Jonathan Hardwick. He told her how he had woken up this morning feeling so damaged from his injuries that he’d made the decision not to go to Sorrento himself as it was only to run some routine questioning. That’s all. Interviewing the neighbours around her father’s bombed-out workshop again. Often a second round of questions produced different answers, forgotten memories rising to the surface, but instead of going himself, he sent Sergeant Whitely and Corporal Hardwick to do the task. They were young and eager. They wanted the job. If he’d gone himself, they would still be alive.

  ‘But you’d be dead,’ Caterina said quickly.

  ‘I’d have been more careful.’

  ‘You are in no state to be careful. You should be in hospital. Even Harry said so.’

  She drew him over to the two wooden chairs, sat him down and fetched a glass of water for him. He needed something a hell of a lot stronger than water but he drank it down without complaint and kept the rest of his account brief while she sat on the other chair close beside him. ‘The Rocco brothers were found in their backyard with their dog. All with their throats cut.’

  ‘The dog as well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The soldiers?’

  ‘Throats sliced from ear to ear. No one saw anything. It was done quietly. One person heard the dog howl.’

  ‘Whoever did it must have been strong,’ she pointed out, ‘to overcome two well-trained men.’

  He stared at a bullet slug embedded in the door and then at the carnage of broken music boxes. ‘You have someone in mind?’

  ‘Drago Vincelli’s strong-arm sidekick, Aldo. That bastard was here in Sorrento today.’

  The thought of such a creature even breathing the same air as Caterina ripped open something inside him.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  ‘I let him in.’

  ‘Why the hell would you do that?’

  ‘Don’t, Jake,’ she murmured, and took his hand between hers, stroking it firmly over and over until their skin seemed to melt together. ‘I found out that they use the street urchins to carry messages and I found out that I cannot shoot straight.’

  He laughed at that, an unexpected sound that surprised them both, but it loosened something that had been too tight, and he leaned forward and kissed her. Not just a brush of lips. Not this time. He kissed her full on the mouth, a hard hungry kiss that tore away whatever lay between them. She uttered a moan of pleasure and cupped her hand round the back of his neck, her fingernails digging into the short thick hairs of his Uncle Sam army haircut in a way that set his skin on fire.

  He stroked her silky throat, her naked arms, the immaculate neat hollow of her collar bones, and he committed to memory the softness of her, her smell of coal tar soap and some kind of fragrant oil that she used in her work. They sank deep into him and he knew he could never remove them, nor would he ever want to. He would remember whole pieces of her.

  She slid from her chair to his lap, her small frame lighter than he had imagined, no heavier than the thistledown at home that blew in the wind off Lake Michigan. Her fingers undid his tie and the buttons of his shirt, her breath coming fast from her full lips as she sank them on to his chest. It felt like being branded. Imprinting something of herself on to his skin. His hands caressed the soft curves and sharp angles of her slender body, taut and aching with need, and he knew that the only way he could make himself stop was by letting his mind step again into that rough yard of the Rocco brothers in Via Caldoni. Letting the stink of blood in the air crawl up into his nostrils once more.

  He closed his eyes. ‘No.’

  The word fell like stone into the workroom. The air around them glistened with heat and he could feel a layer of sweat shimmer to the surface of her skin. Her body grew still.

  ‘No,’ he said again. Softly. ‘This is not the time.’

  Her eyes were huge pools of sapphire blue as they locked tight on his, her cheeks flushed, lips parted and moist. He wanted to seize her and roll laughing on to the floor with her in his arms, churning up the dust motes.

  ‘Whose blood is that on the floor?’ he asked instead.

  ‘Aldo’s.’ She paused. Then a second time, ‘Aldo’s.’

  There was a note of triumph in the second statement and Jake loved her for that. Fear must be hiding somewhere underneath, but he couldn’t detect it. He waited for her to tell him what had happened, but she didn’t, and he knew it was something he would have to come back to. She half-lowered her eyelids, the way a cat does in the sun, and rubbed her cheek against his.

  ‘When today is over,’ she murmured.

  ‘When today is over,’ he echoed and kissed her forehead, letting his lips linger there in a silent promise.

  ‘Today,’ she said quietly, ‘Augusta Cavaleri told me that the accident in which my grandfather lost his sight was caused by Drago Vincelli. As revenge on my family because my mother refused him, despite encouraging him earlier. But then Mamma would, wouldn’t she? It’s what she does with men.’ She let her gaze rest on his face for a second before turning it to the photographs on the wall, and he recalled the soft feel of her mother’s arm tucked through his own. ‘I think,’ she continued after a long pause, ‘that she was frightened for her own life. She fled, but of course took a man with her.’

  ‘Roberto Cavaleri.’

  She nodded. Then turned and kissed his lips.

  ‘The Rocco brothers,’ she said in a change of voice. ‘They must have known something. Or at least, someone had reason to believe they might know something damaging.’

  Jake curled an arm around her waist on his lap, keeping her there. ‘I interviewed them myself a week ago. I liked their round jovial faces wearing matching wire-rimmed spectacles. Today the glass in the spectacles was crazed with blood
. But back then they told me they’d seen or heard nothing, except the sudden explosion when the American bomb dropped.’

  She grimaced. ‘Of course they’d tell you that. You’re an outsider. Not Italian.’

  ‘Neither were Sergeant Whitely and Corporal Hardwick. They were just outsiders. Trying to help, goddammit.’

  She jumped off his lap and swung to face him. ‘Italy is grateful, Jake. Italy is grateful to you all for fighting our battles for us, for dying for us in Italian mud.’ Her eyes were intense, but he could see her exhaustion in the way she held her head. As if it were too heavy. ‘We will never forget what we owe you.’

  He stood up. ‘All you owe me,’ he said lightly, ‘is a kiss.’

  Her lips were on his before the words were even out of his mouth and he felt the fire of her reach deep inside him. Abruptly she pulled back and let her gaze study his face, seeking something, though he didn’t know what.

  ‘Go now,’ she said softly, ‘go and do the work you have to do.’

  ‘I will come to you later, I promise,’ he murmured. ‘Caterina, there are greedy and savage men out there, so I’m asking you to be more careful. Don’t make me fear for your life. Don’t ever put me through such agony again.’ He pulled her back into his arms and pinned her there.

  ‘Now I will walk you home,’ he said.

  ‘There is no need.’

  ‘Yes, there is.’

  He walked her home and waited in the street until he heard her shoot the bolt into place inside. Now she was safe.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Caterina knocked on the door. A crack ran down through one panel and its paint was peeling, exposing parched wood underneath. The street smelled unpleasant and the tenements leaned towards each other, seeking support. As she looked around her she spotted two filthy children, each wearing a British Army cap, crouching on the cobbles and playing races with frogs, indifferent to the stifling heat.

  Caterina knocked again. This time she heard the sound of a child crying. The door opened and a young girl of about twelve stood there. She had straight dark hair and the face of a doll, wide-set green eyes and a cupid’s bow mouth that was already curved in a sweet smile. Except a doll does not have an infant clamped on her hip or a toddler wailing as it clung to her fraying skirt. Her limbs were thin and spidery and her head turned with the alert movements of someone always on the lookout.