The Liberation

by Kate Furnivall

  His black eyes didn’t flicker, and she could see a dark thrill in them. Fear clawed at Caterina’s heart, raw and red-blooded because she knew this was why he’d come alone and unarmed. Unafraid. He had Luca.

  ‘Where is my brother?’

  ‘Somewhere safe.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  He wasn’t lying. They both knew it.

  ‘You are not a person who does what you are told, Signorina Lombardi. I saw that. There is steel in you. I decided to take no chances, so this morning I persuaded your brother to step aboard a boat bound for Naples.’

  Persuaded.

  No, no. She knew what Vincelli’s persuasion involved and horror hit her. She prepared to pull the trigger but she caught the flash of his grin.

  ‘If you shoot me,’ he said flatly, ‘you will never see your brother again. He will not die pleasantly, I warn you. Find that table for me and all will be well.’

  ‘Where is he? Where is Luca?’

  He chuckled, a thick slimy sound. ‘He’s with Aldo.’

  The market in Via Verrazzano was crowded and crushed as shoppers fought to find the cheapest bargains. Caterina elbowed her way through the stalls, blind to all but the ones selling clothes. Some were on hangers, fur coats and beaded dresses, but no one wanted those. Food was what the hands grasped for. Bread. Flour. Potatoes. The stubby end of a salami.

  Caterina’s hand was clamped on her bag, aware that thieves stalked the shoppers. They pushed shoulder to shoulder, fingers trailing into pockets. She slapped away a hand that thought her attention was on a pair of sandals. It thought wrong. She moved fast, eyes darting from stall to stall until she spied what she was after. It was a bundle of work shirts thrown in a heap on an army blanket spread out on the cobbled ground. She crouched and dug out a shabby one, grey and threadbare. A patch of a different fabric had been sewn over a hole in the front of it, as if its previous owner had been shot.

  She snatched it up. ‘How much?’

  The woman selling the clothes was squatting on a three-legged stool, past sixty judging by the lines of effort on her face, but with a tiny baby asleep and swaddled on her lap. She looked at Caterina quizzically.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. The babe on her lap cheeped in its sleep like a bird. ‘You don’t look so good.’ Her smile was laced with real warmth. ‘Sit down a minute. Your skin is as grey as the shirt.’

  ‘You are kind,’ Caterina replied. ‘But I am in a hurry. How much?’

  ‘Take it. It is worthless. It is yours for nothing.’

  In the midst of the vociferous noise of voices haggling over prices, the amorous cooing of pigeons on the rooftops, the shout of a barber offering his services in the street, and her own cry of despair echoing inside her head. In the midst of it all, when life seemed as black as it could get, she was being offered this brief moment of kindness. It gave her hope.

  Caterina ran all the way across the vast Piazza Nazionale and down Via Casanova. When she reached the jeweller’s shop, she pushed open the door and entered its gleaming interior. She was carrying a loaf of bread, still warm against her chest, and thrust it as an offering to Signora Bartoli who was polishing the glass of the cabinets as feverishly as if trying to polish the marks off her own soul.

  ‘Caterina,’ she declared with surprise. ‘What are you doing here, my child?’

  Caterina allowed herself to be swept into an embrace, folded into the warmth of the plentiful bosom, patted and fussed over. When she finally came up for air, she stepped backwards out of the jeweller’s wife’s circle of affection; she knew she was going to have to hurt this woman.

  ‘Signora Bartoli,’ she said, aware of the risk she was taking. ‘I need your help.’

  The scissors sliced off the trouser-leg just below the knee.

  ‘It will look absurd,’ Signora Bartoli declared. She huffed a grunt of displeasure. ‘You should not be doing this.’

  Caterina shook her head. She continued to attack the bundle of old clothes that she had brought with her and which now lay spread on the bed in the apartment above the shop. She hacked off the lower third of the second leg to match the first, followed by the cuffs of the shirt. They had been too long. Her fingers pinched out the cut threads, so that the ends of the garments were frayed and wouldn’t look recently worked on. The trousers were dark and shapeless, and she had threaded a length of Signora Bartoli’s string through the loops at the waist to act as a belt. Without it they would fall down on her. Five minutes later she stood in front of the dressing table and wasn’t sure if it was her or her brother she was looking at.

  The stranger in the mirror was a boy. Short and slight with cropped hair slicked straight back off his face with a handful of oil. It emphasised the cheekbones like blades and the harsh purple smudges under the eyes. The shirt and trousers looked ridiculously big, like on a child who had sneaked into his father’s work-clothes. He shuffled his feet uneasily in boy’s scuffed sandals with thick soles that were good for running. She had chosen them with care.

  It was the eyes that worried her. They were like Vanni’s. A man’s eyes in a boy’s head. She turned away so that she wouldn’t have to look at them and pulled on a peaked cap that hid half her face when she ducked her head.

  ‘This is all wrong,’ Signora Bartoli moaned, but at her side her daughter, Delfina, grinned.

  ‘I’ll come with you if you like,’ she offered.

  ‘No.’

  Signora Bartoli smacked Delfina affectionately on her cheek. ‘You stay out of this, mia bella.’

  Her daughter started to rub smears of black grease and cinders into Caterina’s scugnizzi clothing and over the skin of her arms and legs, rubbing it deep under her toenails, enjoying the task.

  Signora Bartoli stood with arms folded protectively over her bosom, eyeing the way Caterina’s small breasts had been strapped flat under the loose shirt.

  ‘You remind me of the boys in the air-raids,’ she muttered, ‘nervous as hell. During the war they used to come scampering down the stairs into the underground tunnels that were designated as shelters when I was a warden down there and had to keep the little wretches under control.’ She sighed, remembering. ‘Some of the children were scared witless, poor kids.’

  Caterina could imagine this kind and generous woman giving comfort to the terrified lonely children when the skies spat down death on them. She angled her cap, put a narrow-eyed sneer on her face and swaggered across the room towards the door with a careless flick of her hand to clear her path.

  Delfina laughed.

  Signora Bartoli put a hand over her mouth, eyes full of things unsaid.

  ‘I’m taking my bag. But . . .’ Caterina hesitated, ‘. . . I’ll leave my gun here, if I may.’

  It was hard to abandon the Bodeo but any scugnizzo worth his salt would have it off her in seconds.

  ‘Take them bread, cara mia,’ Signora Bartoli said. ‘It will help.’

  ‘Help what?’

  ‘Help you to come back.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Living on the streets. Not walking on the streets. Living on the streets, Caterina saw things differently. Naples and Neapolitans become not a city with people, but a landscape of opportunities, a place where sharp eyes could mean the difference between living and dying.

  Sharp eyes notice the niche that will keep you dry in the rain. The corner out of the wind. The bombed house with the basement where you can squeeze in at night. Sharp eyes spot the hand that carries something too loosely, or foolishly puts it down for half a second.

  And then it becomes yours.

  The something can be anything, it doesn’t matter what because everything is of value. To be eaten. Bartered. Sold. Half an apple, a heel of stale bread. A spanner. A bucket of newborn chicks. A jacket on the back of a chair. A purse in a pocket. Best of all, a wallet from a fat man smoking a fat cigar, because it means the wallet will be fat too.

  All these somethings crossed Caterina’s path that first da
y on the streets. She saw them disappear into small hands and heard the running of feet. She forced herself to take it slowly, to be patient, but it was hard when every second she was imagining Luca in Aldo’s clutches. And Aldo had a score to settle. She tried to tear those images from her mind, as she scoured the streets and the bombsites, head down, cap low over her face.

  No sign of Vanni.

  She loitered on the edge of other gangs of scugnizzi, her manner sullen and uncertain, the way she had seen so many of the homeless boys behave. She handed out chunks of bread from her bag in exchange for answers but the answers were always the same. Yes, we know Vanni and his wolves. No, we haven’t seen him today. No, we don’t know where he hangs out. Clearly, there were rules. There was a brotherhood on the streets. Of a sort. When they heard Vanni’s name their faces tightened.

  But not one of them doubted she was a street urchin. In her dirt and skinniness. She withstood their scalpel-sharp scrutiny each time, hardening her mouth, hunching her thin shoulders, lowering her voice. Each time they were more interested in her bag than in her, but they saw something in her face, something feral, something defiant that made them accept her as one of their own. And that scared her.

  She hitched herself to a group of four at first. She found them roasting the carcass of a seagull over an open fire on a deserted bombsite off Via Amerigo Vespucci down by the harbour, where British and American troopships were already loading up military equipment to ship home. She crouched down in the heat and the dust and handed out cigarettes. It was only then that she ventured to ask for the hundredth time that day, ‘You know Vanni?’

  The same answer. Yes, we know Vanni. No, we have no idea where he is.

  In her head she could hear the clock ticking, the minutes running out on Luca’s life. She tossed the whole pack of cigarettes at the feet of the youths sitting around the fire in the dirt.

  ‘I’m asking again,’ she said, more insistent this time.

  Their eyes flicked to her face and down to the white packet with its red bull’s eye. They were clearly family. All had the same narrow pointed face and heavy nose. The oldest, who wore the dried-out pelt of a black cat around his neck, gave the others a glare, to silence them, but the youngest, skinnier and slighter than the rest, spoke out.

  ‘Vanni hangs out up at the Galleria Umberto on Corso Umberto. That’s his pitch.’

  ‘Pia, shut your mouth.’ The oldest one’s hand swung out and clipped an ear, but the cigarette packet was already pocketed.

  Pia? Caterina stared. The youngest was a girl?

  Caterina tore off another chunk of bread and gave it to the girl.

  ‘Thank you. Grazie,’ Caterina said.

  She set off at a run.

  Vanni was there. Outside the Galleria Umberto Primo. Caterina spotted his rangy restless figure at once. She leaned against a palm tree and dragged in a lungful of fumes, as traffic streamed down the wide boulevard of Corso Umberto, one of the main commercial arteries of the city, its tall elegant buildings pock-marked by bomb damage.

  He seemed to be alone.

  The Galleria Umberto had become the heart of Naples. Everybody came there since the liberation. All sorts, those with money and those without. Indolent women in black lace stockings and businessmen looking to fix a deal, all averting their gaze from the squalid beggars outside. It was an arcade in one of the finest buildings in Naples, but down at heel and seedy these days.

  Caterina didn’t move. Not till Vanni did. He ducked his head, reducing himself to little more than an oversized shirt, and shuffled through the towering archway of the entrance. Caterina gave him ten seconds, then scurried after him in what she hoped was a scugnizzi scuttle.

  There used to be a magnificent glass domed roof over the building, but the Allied bombing had put an end to that. Yet Caterina could not help but be impressed by the nineteenth-century grandeur of its vast columns and its archangels, but it was fighting a losing battle against the shops specialising in stolen goods, in restaurants that served black market food, and in bars that were the dimly lit haunts of mobsters and whores and thieves. It was a cross between a cathedral and a brothel. Caterina regarded it warily with interest.

  A sudden slap on the back of her head made her spin round.

  ‘What the fuck you doing here? Get off my patch.’

  It was Vanni. How had he got behind her? She had followed him in.

  He was jumpy, hands twitching. The crowd had swallowed him, but he must have circled back without her realising and now stood between her and the entrance, pale-eyed and aggressive.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ she muttered. Eyes on her feet. Head hanging.

  Don’t let him see you as a threat.

  ‘Fuck off then,’ he snarled. He didn’t recognise her – not in her dirt and her rags. It was the elegant white evening gown he’d seen before, not her.

  He punched her, a fist hard in the stomach. Never before had she been hit. Before she could stop it her hand had lashed out and smacked him across the mouth.

  Right then, before he could knock her to the ground, there was a roar from behind him and a shout.

  ‘That’s him.’

  A muscular arm wound around Vanni’s neck, who kicked and screamed but was pinned in a vice.

  ‘Where’s my wallet, you stinking piece of sewer-shit?’

  It was a workman in navy dungarees, face puce with anger. Caterina saw the outcome at once. Vanni would be carted off to the police station, thrown in a cell overnight to teach him better manners and Luca would die. Calmly Caterina took a pair of heavy metal shears that lay on a nearby stall and slammed them into the side of the workman’s head. He dropped like a stone.

  Before he’d hit the ground, Vanni and Caterina were running.

  He didn’t thank her. That wasn’t his way. Instead he asked her name.

  ‘It’s Bruno,’ she muttered.

  And he let her stay. That was enough. As Bruno, she trailed along behind Vanni and his wolves all day, and with her cap pulled well forward, she ran the streets of Naples. She stuck to his heels and kept her mouth shut. She refused to steal money from people’s pockets but she snatched an apple from a stall and a pair of sunglasses a soldier was foolish enough to put on the bonnet of his army jeep. In Naples anything that was not bolted down vanished.

  Dusk crept up on her before she was ready. It slid through the back alleys and the last rays of the sun gilded the tip of the triangular pinnacle of the Gothic cathedral, so that it looked like a giant arrowhead plunged into the heart of the city.

  Vanni changed when darkness came. He moved like a cat through the velvet blackness, all skin and bone but silent and sure, as he herded his pack of wolves tighter to keep them safe. With the stolen money he bought salami and bread, even a beer and he shared them equally between his pack, including Caterina and little Tino. She was concerned about the smallest boy. Tino had coughed all day, relentlessly until he was grey and exhausted, but he grinned at her as he sank his young teeth into the greasy sausage.

  She had an odd feeling that he recognised her, but she said nothing. And neither did he.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  The carved door closed. The key turned. The meeting began. The chairman was in an ill-temper but allowed no sign of it to show, except that the silences were longer, his sentences shorter. But none of the men around the table was aware of it. Except the one in the uniform. That one had quick eyes.

  For half an hour he let them sharpen their claws on each other. Vent their bile. Settle their scores. He permitted them one cognac, no more. Enough to fan the flames but not enough to burn the house down.

  ‘Mr Chairman, I say we close it down.’

  All eyes turned on the speaker. A lawyer, a cautious man, a man who runs when a rabbit chases him. The chairman stared at him in silence, obliging him to lay his pale white neck plainly on the block for all to see.

  ‘The danger is too great now,’ the lawyer expanded. ‘Too many people are asking too many questio
ns and sniffing around in the right places.’ He fretted at his gold cuff links. ‘That girl. Antonio Lombardi’s brat. She is stirring things up.’

  Brat?

  Caterina Lombardi was worse than a brat. Infinitely worse. Each time he turned round, she was there, a fucking stiletto in his side. One to be plucked out and destroyed.

  She had damaged his Phantom and wrecked his Bugatti. The cause of his ill-humour, the reason for the acid burning his gut. It was not something the chairman liked the taste of.

  The lawyer repeated, ‘I say we close it down.’

  ‘Shut down our network?’ It was the banker, his voice high. ‘Don’t be a fool. We need to do more, not less. I say we expand.’

  ‘Of course you say that. You are a banker. There can never be enough money in the world for you.’

  ‘No, we have to tread more carefully.’

  ‘I agree.’

  ‘Don’t be such an oaf. Now is the time to gather as many artworks as we can get our hands on. The troops are leaving. They don’t care.’

  ‘It’s dangerous.’

  ‘That American major.’

  ‘He’s digging too close.’

  They all piled in. Voicing fear, exposing greed. But it was the wood-craftsman from Sorrento – the thin one who barely shaved and always drank his cognac in the first thirty seconds – who put words to the thoughts in the chairman’s head.

  ‘Get rid of the brat.’

  Silence.

  The chairman smiled. He passed the bottle of cognac down the table. He hadn’t thought the Cavaleri craftsman had the guts. He didn’t usually take after his mother.

  The owner of an export company, a man with ships, leapt to his feet. ‘I will be no part of such a thing. I agree that we should close the operation down. The war is over. We have done all we can. Time to stop.’ He pointed a finger at the man in uniform. ‘Go home, soldier.’

  The shipping man pushed back his chair and strode to the door. He tried the handle but the door didn’t open. He turned and held out his hand imperiously.

  ‘The key, please, Mr Chairman.’