‘Signorina Lombardi!’
‘Hello, Rosamunda. You remember me.’
‘Of course.’ The girl beamed at her. ‘Of course. You and your father were kind to me.’
‘May I come in, please?’ Caterina asked.
The girl jiggled the infant on her skinny hip and blushed. ‘It’s a mess.’
‘Don’t mind that,’ Caterina said cheerfully and handed over a brown paper bag that contained bread, cheese, tomatoes and half a dozen peaches. Instantly the toddler at her side – hard to tell if it was a girl or a boy – stopped its wailing and attached a small paw to the corner of the bag.
‘Grazie,’ young Rosamunda sighed with a mix of relief and embarrassment. ‘Come in.’
Caterina followed her into a one-room apartment at the back of the house. It was dingy, shabby and airless, but clean, with two single metal beds and a nest of threadbare blankets in one corner. A boy of about six years old was curled up on it. He looked sick.
‘Rosamunda, where is your mother?’
‘She died last year. Typhoid fever.’
‘I’m sorry. Really sorry.’
The girl’s father had been killed at the battle of Anzio and the mother had struggled to feed her nine children. Caterina remembered her. Sharp-faced, bone-thin and begging Papà to give her daughter paid work. At that time Caterina used to be incarcerated in the hateful factory all day making uniforms, so Papà had taken on the child to amble around the workshop occasionally with a broom or run a few errands for him. Just to help the family. Caterina hardly ever saw Rosamunda back then, and had certainly seen nothing of her for the last two years. She had forgotten her existence until today when she looked at the photograph.
She reached out, took the infant off Rosamunda’s hip and its solemn eyes with long lashes regarded her with serious interest. She smiled at the emaciated child in her arms and received a contented gurgle in return.
‘Rosamunda, how do you manage? Nine of you in this one room?’
‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘It’s noisy at times. But we get by.’
‘How?’ Caterina asked.
‘We sing. All nine of us. As a choir.’ The young girl grinned. ‘Your father always said I could sing, so I taught my brothers and sisters. We go round the bars, singing for the soldiers. They like to hear us and pay us good money for the songs. They always ask for Torna a Surriento – Come back to Sorrento.’ She ruffled the toddler’s soft hair. ‘You know all the words, don’t you, sweetheart? Thank God for the soldiers. We would be dead without them.’
Caterina broke off a snippet of bread and handed a piece to the two youngest ones. In an instant it had vanished.
‘Rosamunda, did you ever see my father working on antique works of art, statues or icon or—?’
‘Oh yes. Often.’
The air seemed to tighten in Caterina’s lungs. She had not expected that answer. She had seen the triptych with her own eyes in Jake’s basement and had recognised Papà’s work, so she knew her father was corrupt, yes, she knew it, but still . . . There was a small stubborn part of her that refused to believe it. But to hear this girl say so easily, ‘Oh yes. Often,’ was too much. The girl could be mistaken. She was only a child. Surely she could be mistaken.
‘So where did my father keep these items? They were never in the workshop when I came back after my factory shift.’
The girl took out a peach and all of the children’s eyes gleamed in the gloomy room, as she raised a knife.
‘Of course they were there.’ Rosamunda smiled at the peach in anticipation. ‘In the hidden room.’
Hidden room? Caterina wanted to snatch the fruit from her, to make her rethink the words she had just spoken.
‘What room?’
The knife shaved off a juicy slice of flesh from the peach and the air was suddenly thick with the scent of it.
‘The room behind the shelves.’ She flicked a dark glance at Caterina and ran her tongue along a trail of juice on her thumb. ‘Didn’t you know? The whole set of shelves swung forward on a hinge. Behind was . . .’ she took a tiny morsel and popped it in the parched mouth of her sick sibling on the blankets.
‘Was what?’
‘A small storeroom.’
Oh Papà. Another lie. More deceit. More corruption. Did I not know you? It was like a veil in front of her eyes and piece by piece she was tearing it down.
‘How did you discover the storeroom was there?’
‘I crept into the workshop one day, so silently Signor Lombardi didn’t know I was there. I was always frightened of disturbing his work, so I tried to be quiet. I watched him open up the secret room behind the shelves. It was there, signorina, honestly it was. I am not lying.’
The overcrowded room felt like a furnace.
‘Did you ever see a table there?’ Caterina asked. ‘One covered in jewels?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was it like?’
‘It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life. Beautiful enough to give to God.’
As Caterina turned into her own street, a figure was leaning against the wall of her house, ankles crossed, cigarette in hand, looking for all the world as if taking a snooze. The sight did not slow Caterina’s pace. She speeded up, approaching fast but up on her toes, her feet silent on the basalt.
‘I thought you’d gone,’ she said.
Her mother rolled her head to face her daughter but otherwise did not shift her position. It was the stance of a prostitute, Caterina realised, and hated herself for the thought.
Lucia Lombardi gave her a slow smile. ‘So did I. But I remembered something and came back.’ She glanced towards the front door. ‘He’s out, your Nonno. Your brother too. No one home.’
‘Nonno will be in a bar. Luca on the boats.’
Caterina noticed she said ‘Your brother.’ Not ‘My son.’
‘What is it you want, Mamma? The rest of the money?’
Her mother had taken half, left half on the table. That was something. Not much, but something. But it seemed now she was regretting it.
‘No, Caterina, that’s not why I’m here, damn you.’
‘What then?’
‘Because I have something to tell you.’
‘It’s too late, Mamma. Far too late. Don’t tell me things I don’t want to hear. About Papà. About Nonno. About that day you left. It’s over, Mamma. Finished.’
Lucia Lombardi studied her in silence for a long moment. In no hurry. Eyes a hard granite blue. ‘Not yet, Caterina.’
Words started to come out of Caterina that were not meant to come out. ‘Sometimes,’ she told her mother, ‘I used to write about that day. The day you left. The cruel things you said to Papà. In the hope that by emptying them on to a page, they would go away. But they didn’t. They stayed. Nailed inside my head.’
Her mother’s stance stiffened. She pushed herself off the rough wall and let the cigarette drop to the ground.
‘I came here now to help you, Caterina. To tell you one thing. I remembered where that bastard Drago Vincelli kept his Rolls-Royce Phantom when I knew him. I came back to give you this.’ She handed over a slip of paper, holding it between the tips of her fingers, so that their hands would not touch. Without another word, she marched away, swinging her hips. Like a prostitute.
Caterina leaned against the warm stone of the wall for a second, sagging under the weight of what had just happened. She unfurled the piece of paper. An address in Naples, 22 Via Adduci. But could she trust it?
If it was genuine, it meant she had somewhere to start, a way to get to him. This was her one chance. To save herself and to save her family.
She must not let it slip.
In the deep shade of the narrow street a sandy-coloured dog slunk along against the wall, then lay down opposite her, panting hard. She found herself panting with it, until she realised that she was leaning against the exact same spot where her mother had leaned
. She pushed herself away from it in case part of her mother crawled under her skin.
Piazza Garibaldi was heaving with heat and noise. Its incessant flow of traffic never ceased. Its people were all in a hurry. Caterina emerged from the grand arches of the station’s colonnade and dodged across to the central island where a dozen lime trees offered shade. She drew breath there while she regarded the pedestrians with a quick assessment. She needed information about the whereabouts of Via Adduci.
In front of her rose the towering monument and statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the great founding father of the Risorgimento, the unification of the Italian states into the Kingdom of Italy in 1870. But even now the city of Naples was rebellious. It had its own rules, did things its own way. The Allied Army had invaded to save the country from Hitler’s forces, but who would save Naples from itself when the soldiers were gone?
The prospect of Jake leaving these shores was unthinkable. She pushed it away. Because if she didn’t, she couldn’t concentrate, and right now she needed her mind to be sharp. She didn’t want to push it away. The feel of his fingers spanning her ribcage, the taut skin of his throat tasting like sunlight on her tongue, the horror of what he’d seen in the Roccos’ backyard still engraved deep on his face. His eyes bloodshot, his shoulder flinching when her weight pressed on it. All these things she had to tuck inside her mind for later, but it was hard to stop herself imagining what would have happened if he hadn’t said ‘No’.
She headed for a newspaper kiosk, the vendor cheerful and flirtatious even when he found out that all she wanted was directions. She hopped on one of the trams rattling to a stop in the piazza and headed for Via Adduci.
It wasn’t what she expected. Caterina thought it would be a row of lock-up garages at the back of a shabby apartment block on the edge of town, somewhere where strangers came and went all the time and no one took a blind bit of notice. That was the kind of man Drago Vincelli was, it seemed to her, one who blended with the crowd, not sticking his head up in case it got blown off. A man no one saw.
But she was wrong.
The garage at 22 Via Adduci was more of a barn, long and well-tended, coral-coloured tiles sunning themselves on the roof above walls of red brick. Smart and expensive looking. Like the street. There were tall wrought-iron gates to the property and a short driveway into a gravelled courtyard. The villa was centuries old and built of yellow tufo stone that gave it a somnolent air, in contrast to the garage that ran at right angles to it and which was clearly much newer.
Trees and flowering shrubs lined the walls, purple bougainvillea was sprawling over the gateposts. The place smelled of money and servants and Caterina knew she couldn’t hang around here without being spotted and reported, so she quickly lifted the latch on the gate, slipped through and moved briskly across to the end wall of the garage. It lay in the shade of a stand of oleander trees and was not visible from the house.
No one challenged her. No one came running across the courtyard. She crept as silently as she could on the gravel around the corner to the back of the garage block where there were bushes and spiky fan-palms. She crouched down under the fronds and studied the brick wall in front of her.
How to get inside?
She sat on her heels on the black loamy soil, her blood thrumming in her ears as she inspected the single-storey building in front of her. The Rolls-Royce Phantom might not even be stored there any more. He might have moved it. Or sold it. Along the top of the building under the guttering ran a line of thin windows to allow access to daylight. There were four of them, each one about a metre wide but no more than half a metre high. One problem. They were three metres off the ground. Never had she regretted her lack of height more.
There must be a way. She eased herself out from under the palms, moved quietly to the far end and peered around the corner. A quick glimpse. There was a lean-to out in the open and it was stacked with large logs for winter fires. She gave it three seconds’ thought, then made a dash to the woodstore. Ten seconds, that’s all it took. She hurled herself back behind the wall, arms full of logs, her mouth so dry she couldn’t swallow.
She stacked the logs under the first window and was about to climb them when she heard something, a rustle in the undergrowth, the swaying of a frond. She plunged her hand into her bag, fingers struggling for a grip, but a high-pitched wail came from a clump of leaves and a cat emerged, a creamy Siamese with a cross-eyed blue gaze.
She was pointing the gun at a cat. The absurdity hit her.
‘Shoo!’ she hissed and the creature vanished but she knew how close she’d come to shooting it.
She clambered up the logs and peered over the edge of the sill. In the gloomy interior she could see that a sleek black beast of a car stood inside the building, with a bonnet long enough to sleep on and huge chrome headlamps. Above them on its giant radiator like an exotic silver nymph sat the Spirit of Ecstasy Flying Lady mascot. It was the Rolls-Royce Phantom.
Caterina worked fast. She rapped the window with the butt of the Bodeo and the glass shattered. Behind it was a layer of metal mesh, but it also caved in after numerous blows from the gun. She plucked out the shards of glass, and ignoring any scrapes and scratches, she scrambled through the opening. With a grunt of relief she dropped down to the cement floor.
She was inside.
There was no sound in the garage except her own impatient breathing for hour after hour. She counted each minute that passed because they might be the last minutes she could ever count. Time slowed to a crawl. When the door of the garage finally swung open, brilliant afternoon sunlight stumbled into the dim interior, so that Caterina had to narrow her eyes to keep the gun trained on the figure silhouetted against the light.
Only one figure? She had expected two.
It was male, she could see that much, slim and definitely not weighed down by Aldo’s bulk. This man carried himself with a swagger that gave her hope. Drago Vincelli was the one she wanted. Anyone else would get in her way and she didn’t wish that on them.
‘What the fuck are you doing in my car?’
Bull’s eye. She recognised that voice full of malice. Drago Vincelli himself.
‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ she said and her voice sounded calm.
She had been seated in the open-topped Rolls-Royce behind the giant black and chrome steering wheel with its centrally mounted gear shift for two hours. The big cream-faced clock on the walnut dial fascia told her that. In her head she had played out every possible scenario and none of them ended well. But at least they all ended with Luca and Nonno still alive and out of danger, and if she was lucky, who knows, she might be still standing too.
During those two hours she’d thought about hell and she’d thought about Nonno’s milky eyes. And she’d thought about the man in whose shiny black car she was sitting. Its seats were a rich dark red and it was like sitting in a pool of blood.
‘Get out of my car, you fucking bitch! Right now.’
He was carrying nothing in his hands. No gun. No knife. No weapon of any sort. He wore just a white shirt and dark trousers, a heavy-link gold chain at his neck to match the gold tooth that even now he liked to flash. No shoulder holster with a neat little pistol. That frightened her. Drago Vincelli unarmed was even more dangerous than Drago Vincelli armed. It meant he knew something she didn’t.
She slipped out of the car, keeping her eyes fixed on him, the gun lined up with the button at the centre of his white shirt. He didn’t move a muscle. Beside her stood another car. It was a distinctive french-blue, almost the colour of her mother’s eyes, clearly a Bugatti, judging by its trademark horseshoe grille. It looked expensive, one of those luxury cars that men like to pamper more than their wives. Its sweeping bulbous front wings begged for a loving touch and a dorsal seam ran down its spine all the way to its fast-back tail.
For no more than a split second she swung the Bodeo away from Drago Vincelli and pulled the trigger. The explosion in the confined space was deafening as the bullet sma
shed through the bonnet of the Bugatti and screamed as it ploughed into the engine.
Drago Vincelli roared with rage.
She fired again. Into the glossy black coffin-bonnet of the Rolls-Royce Phantom. This time Drago Vincelli greeted the act of vandalism with dead silence. She was reminded of how he had manipulated the stark silences in the confessional box to unnerve her.
‘The next bullet is for you,’ she announced.
He didn’t blink. He didn’t beg. He didn’t do a thing except curve one corner of his mouth into something she might have thought was a smile, if she didn’t know better.
‘You fight better than I anticipated,’ he said.
It sounded amiable. Respectful even. But she knew it was neither.
‘You fight better than some men,’ he grinned, as though trying to distract her with his gold incisor. ‘I’ve seen Aldo’s hand.’
‘He deserved it.’
She could pull the trigger now. Right now. End it all.
Take a man’s life.
She told herself this was no man, this was a devil who had no claim on life. Not after all he’d done. She need show no mercy. But her finger froze on the trigger.
Drago Vincelli saw it.
‘I knew you would be trouble,’ he said. ‘Just like your father was.’
Outside in the road the sound of a car’s engine approached and Caterina felt a stab of dread, but the car drove past.
‘You are only alive, Caterina Lombardi, because I want your father’s table with its jewels and I am certain you are the one to find it.’
‘When you are dead, Drago Vincelli, the table can rot in hell along with you, for all I care.’
She tightened her grip, the metal warm on her palm. She took a breath and slowly released it. Now.
‘No.’ The word leapt from Vincelli’s mouth. ‘If you wish your brother to live, take your finger off that trigger.’
The Liberation Page 33
