Talaia is studying Ric very closely. “That is particularly interesting.”
“How so?”
“We understand that Signor Candela received a note summoning him to a meeting in a house in Piazza San Bartolo, where he was murdered. The house was unoccupied. We don’t as yet know who he was meeting in this unoccupied property or why, but Piazza San Bartolo lies at the entrance to Via Maddalena and Via Maddalena, as you may by now be aware, leads to Portinente, where you were fishing with Signor Maggiore.”
Ric stifles a chuckle. “And you think this is one too many coincidences?”
“Possibly.”
“The curious irony of the situation you seem to want me to conform to, Commissario, is that Signor Maggiore and I were out fishing when we were run down by a large blue motor-boat seconds after we heard the gunshots from the shore. A boat both he and I believe was a La Polizia launch. I understand you arrived on the scene not long after Candela was murdered, so there is just a chance this is our third meeting, Commissioner, and you may be my best alibi.”
The little man smiles. “That, too, would be something of a coincidence, would it not?”
“It would.”
“And how did you meet this Signor Maggiore? Did you simply look him up in the Pagine Bianche?”
“No, I was introduced to him by a lady I met when I first arrived here.”
“A lady?”
“La Signorina Vaccariello. She has a house on the Punta San Giuseppe.”
“Ah, yes. I have heard of this lady.”
The poliziotto knocks lightly once more.
“Si, sto arrivando,” his boss calls. “Well, Mr Ross, if you don’t mind I am going to retain your passport in order to help with my enquiries. And, if you don’t mind me saying, your passport is in pretty bad shape. The image in this photograph here is so vague it could belong to my father; what did you do to it?”
“Beats me, Commissario, I guess I must have taken that fishing too.”
“If you will forgive me for pointing out, Mr Ross, you need to take more care of your passport.” Talaia takes his time to position his Homburg securely and at just the right angle off centre so that he can look at Ric without having to raise his head. “Oh, Mr Ross, I see your tap is dripping. Ciao.”
32
The escurzionista is down in the Corta rounding up tourists. “Hey, Gallese. How goes it?”
“Okay, Sandro,” Ric lies. “Tell me: what do you call those water taxis that take tourists up to the beaches?”
“Taxi mare?” His eyes light up: at last, he can live up to his expectations and supply Ric with something he needs. “Why? You want to go to see the sights for the day?”
“Figured I would. If I’m to be hostage to Il Velaccino’s labours, I might as well play tourist for the day. Who should I ask?”
“Oh, many places,” he scratches his head, “but cheapest and best is my friend Luciano. He will drive you to Canneto in his pulmino and from there you will take his taxi mare to any one of the Spiaggia della Papesca as far as Porticello.”
“Where do I find him?”
“At the bottom of the Corso Vittorio, near the alimentari, there is a little box, a booth, with the sign Spiaggie Luciano. And–”
“I know how it goes, Sandro.” Ric slaps him gently on his shoulder, “Don’t worry, I’ll tell him you sent me.”
Of course, the girl at the ticket booth knows Sandro. She takes his money and directs him to a battered minibus parked on the down slope to the little harbour. A brace of tourists wait patiently in the shade of a wall.
After a few minutes, a middle-aged man wearing a seasoned tan and designer sunglasses waves them over to a dilapidated minibus. Beach towels cover the seats and the temperature inside the pulmino runs high enough to fry an egg.
They race around the Lunga in the direction of Monte Rosa, dodging and weaving through the pedestrians and scooters, and it is only when they are leaving the tunnel which opens into the bay at Canneto, that Ric thinks to ask the driver to let him out so that he can drop by Marcello’s yard.
A hoist cranes over the stern of the Mara and Marcello and a second man, Salvo, are in the process of shackling the engine to lift it out from beneath the floor of the cockpit.
“Buongiorno,” Marcello calls down. “As you can see, we are making progress.”
Salvo salutes and grins.
Ric climbs the ladder up to the deck. “I came to see if I could lend a hand, but you look to have all the help you need.”
The wiry Salvo, although he never says much if anything, grins again. He seems to understand what Ric is saying without, supposedly, speaking any English.
“Yes,” Marcello replies, “with Salvo’s assistance we will have the motor out by this afternoon and then we can begin to take it apart. I have ordered the new bearings and seal. Of course we will have to check the crankshaft; if it needs to be rebalanced, we can do this also. But,” Marcello says, chewing on his cigar stub, “let us hope this will not be necessary.”
They sit and discuss the likelihood of the extra work for a while.
Ric wonders how best to bring up the subject of the missing Beretta, but is again not sure how to do so without implying Marcello has taken it.
“You need something from me?” Marcello asks.
Apart from producing the Beretta and a certificate of seaworthiness for the Mara, there isn’t much anyone can do for Ric. “No, just something I’ve mislaid.” He looks long and hard at Salvo, but the wiry individual simply grins back.
“What thing is this? You said this to me yesterday; that you were looking for something you have lost.” Again Marcello’s expression is deadpan.
Ric thinks to come clean and tell him about how he tied up to an old pier near the pumice mines and heard what sounded to him like a man being strangled, about how the Beretta he had stowed in the Mara has mysteriously disappeared and about how he has just been questioned by a Commissario of Police, a man who doesn’t like coincidences. But, he decides not to. He is concerned that if he opens the can of worms he has been delivered, he will never get the lid back on.
Marcello smiles and says, “We are all looking for something, eh, my friend? Perhaps this is why you sail the Mara? Perhaps you are like Odisseo, looking for the way home? Well, we will soon have the Mara back in the water for you to continue your journey.”
And at the mention of the way home, Ric is taken with the notion that, like Odisseo, disaster seems to be following him around and that just possibly he is trying to get away from home, not to it.
“No, Marcello, just something I left on the Mara which I can’t seem to locate, that’s all.”
But in thinking of the events of the past few days and what his best course would be, Ric recalls again and all too clearly the screams from the shore the first morning he arrived in Lipari.
“Forget it, Marcello. I’m sure it’ll turn up sooner or later. Are you sure you don’t need a hand?”
“No, it is as I said: Salvo and I will have the engine out by this afternoon. Why don’t you come back tomorrow; we will have had a chance to examine the motor more closely by then.”
33
He walks along the dusty seafront into Canneto, passing the café he sat at the previous day with Marcello.
At the far end of the crescent beach, he locates a desk beneath an awning signed Spiaggie Luciano. The tanned individual who drove the bus recognises him, takes his ticket and they walk over to a white barca, beached at the breakwater. The hull of the barca is decorated with a succession of blue, curling wave crests. At the man’s bidding, Ric climbs the stepped prow and sits on a bench by the helm.
The driver backs the water taxi noisily off the shingle breakwater, swings the boat round and steers it away up the coast. The aquamarine water shimmers under the sun and the breeze fostered by the boat’s progress is a welcome relief from the heat of the village. Behind the slender strip of Canneto, Monte Sant’Angelo towers green and steep, and soon the pale pumice
slopes of Monte Pilato come into view. Dotted in along the shoreline, old drying houses stand vacant, their slender brick chimneys pointing up at the sky like accusing fingers.
Five minutes later, the driver grins and points, “Pietra Liscia?”
Ric nods, recognising the gnarled iron stanchions of the dilapidated pier he tied up to the first night.
The taxi mare swings round, makes for the beach and the driver eases it onto the pumice breakwater, whereupon Ric alights, waving his thanks.
The driver points to his watch.
“Due ore,” Ric shouts, and the man nods, grins and reverses the little boat back out into the open water.
The dilapidated pier, a matchstick mess of twisted girders and stanchions, lies a hundred metres or so up the beach. A handful of sun-worshippers are gathered around a line of sunbeds in front of a beach bar fashioned out of blocks pilfered from the old buildings. The area at the far end around the warehouses seems deserted.
He stops by the bar to pick up a bottle of water. A fresh-faced youth serves him and thanks him enthusiastically when he refuses his change.
Ric trudges off up the beach, pausing every now and then to pick up a pumice pebble or smoothed fragment of obsidian.
The flat-roofed warehouses layer back up into the slope, their crude, grey stone block construction, blackened here and there by fire. They remind Ric of the bombed out homes and apartments he had the unfortunate duty to patrol through in the cities of southern Iraq. The tall, rectangular apertures contain no windows, which he assumes is to allow the breeze in to dry the pumice, and the small pocket-holes which would normally hold the butt-ends of joists are in most places empty.
Ric stands at the breakwater and looks back at the block houses behind him. It is as though the developer has run out of funds halfway through his project and given the place over to the ghosts of yesteryear.
The argument and screaming he heard seemed to come from higher up than beach level and the heavy, wooden door to the ground floor is tight shut. So he begins to climb up the uneven wall to the first level, testing each hand and foothold as he goes. In places, the stones set into the wall come away in his hands and he has to step back down and find an alternative route. As he climbs, Ric wonders whether the floor will be firm enough to support his weight.
Finally he gains enough height to enter through an arch.
Though the walls are as thick as his waist, his suspicions regarding the floors are confirmed when he notices that the wooden boards are holed in places and the exposed beams look unnervingly fragile. One corner of the first room is blackened by fire and rusting cans and broken bottles lie where tossed. However, apart from the detritus of a party long-finished, the room is empty but for a gecko hiding from the sun.
He tries to imagine the heat and dust the men, women and children must have had to endure as they carried lumps of carved pumice in and out and up and down the stairs. And he imagines Old Nino as a lad sliding down the pumice funnels to land with a great splash in the clear waters below.
Ric works his way methodically along the first floor terrace. Some of the windows are shuttered with metal plates and wire grills, and others have wood piled up against them.
When he is satisfied they are all empty, he throws some of the wood into a pile and climbs on top, up to the second stage.
The rooms here are empty too, so he climbs up onto the third and final stage. These rooms are open to the elements; their seaward-facing walls having collapsed many years before, their blocks and stones used to shore up other houses.
At the far end, a wooden door is set into the rock which forms the right-hand wall. The door handle is a single curve of rusted iron, but what catches his eye is that the handle is smooth, not flaked like the others.
Ric treads carefully, making sure to plant his feet on the beams and not the weathered planks between. The door is greyed and substantial, though splintered around the stile. The handle is worn smooth, suggesting it has had more than its fair share of recent use. But what is more unusual is that the door is fitted with a galvanised steel hasp and shackle, and secured with a heavy padlock.
Certain that he has found something which someone is trying to conceal, Ric crouches in the shadow of the wall and surveys the beach below him. The sunbathers down the way are swimming and lounging, and a hundred or so metres out a taxi mare, empty but for the pilot who stands at the helm, is chugging its languid course back to Canneto.
What he needs is some tool to help him prize the hasp off the wall; the padlock, he realises, he hasn’t a chance of breaking open.
Ric picks a length of angle iron from amongst the rubbish in an adjacent room and forces it between the hasp and the door jamb. It loosens the hasp, but he has to lean all of his weight against it to prize it open, each time wedging the sliver of iron further down into the thin breach he has made.
Eventually the breach widens and the frame of the doorjamb starts to splinter. By leaning back and pulling on the fragment of iron he manages to heave the hasp off the jamb. It snaps off with a loud crack and he stumbles backwards onto the lumps of masonry, loose wood and dust.
Ric looks around, aware that the noise may have attracted the attention of the people down the beach. It hasn’t: they are still swimming and busying themselves throwing pebbles and playing games.
The wooden door opens inwards to reveal a half-height chamber carved out of the rock face. Flies buzz at him as he steps inside. The air in the chamber is stale and fetid and reminds him of a similar odour from his past. He steps back outside to give the atmosphere a chance to clear.
He re-enters, crouches and sees the chamber is empty but for a pile of rubble heaped in the centre. And he is just about to turn to leave when he notices a fragment of grey material poking out from the bottom of the pile.
Ric bends down to examine the material and realises it is rounded, like the toecap of a shoe. He scuffs at it and sees that it is a shoe, pointing upwards out of the rubble. But when he picks up a couple of lumps of the rubble and moves them aside, he finds the shoe is still occupied by a foot and the foot is still attached to a leg, which is, he hesitates, attached to a body.
He backs away and stands up, forgetting that the ceiling is only inches above him and banging his head as he retreats out the door.
“Oh, Christ,” he mutters, not so much at the pain as at the discovery.
For a few seconds Ric is stunned and not sure what to do next. Now that he understands what the smell means, he gags.
A cold fear invades his stomach and the sweat at his brow chills unpleasantly.
Ric scolds himself: if he was honest, it was what he had expected to find, not hoped, but expected. And it confirms his worst fear that what he’d heard that first morning was what he’d thought; all of which means, Candela is not the only person to have been murdered in the past few days. It also means that the Commissario Talaia has another coincidence to add to his already lengthening list.
There are two choices open to him: leave and forget he’s found the body, or uncover the body and memorise the face of the man lying buried in the rubble. The second option isn’t simply a case of macabre curiosity; it is more a case of whether it might help him later to know the man’s identity.
Ric crouches again and crawls back into the chamber. Carefully, so as not to wake the dead, he removes the rubble from on top of the body. The work is unpleasant; insects and worms have wasted no time in feasting on the corpse. It is, or rather was, a man, dressed in jeans and a brown t-shirt with the name of the island stitched in yellow thread on the front: a man of medium height and average build, a bald man with a beard and the rictus grin of someone who has been strangled.
As he crouches, wiping the sweat from his eyes and committing the face of the corpse to memory, he hears the sound of a car pull up somewhere on the track just above his head.
Doors open and slam. The men talk in Italian. And they talk so fast Ric cannot understand what they are saying, except that he judges by
their tone they are complaining about something or someone. The voices tail off as the men walk down the slope which winds between the derelict warehouses.
Ric crawls out of the chamber and drops to the floor, watching the beach below.
Two Carabinieri round the bend at the bottom of the track and stand for a moment, hands on hips, surveying the beach.
He can hear their voices; their moaning has developed into debate.
They turn and look directly up at the terrace of drying rooms.
Ric presses his head to the floor. A dark green snake slithers across in front of him not a hand’s length from his eyes, but he cannot move.
The discussion between the two Carabinieri has now developed into a full-blown argument. Whatever it is they are at odds about concerns, in some way, the beach and the warehouses.
Ric risks a glance and realises by their gesticulating and their expressions that they are arguing about just how they are supposed to search the buildings: there are only two of them and, as always, they are dressed to the nines.
They part company and stump about at the base of the terrace until one of them points down the beach and they turn away towards the families at the far end.
Ric waits patiently as they walk off up the pebbled beach, still arguing. And while they are distracted, he slips as quietly as possible down the front of the building. In doing so he disturbs and fails to catch a couple of stones which tumble noisily away. But the Carabinieri are too busy to notice and the noise of their boots crunching on the pebbles probably drowns out any other sound. They continue walking.
He stows his clothes behind a rock and takes to the water to wash the dust from his skin. Ric strikes out down the long line of leaning stanchions and when he gets to the last of them, he clings to it, treading water, drawing breath.
The policemen are talking to the boy from the beach bar, so he waits. The sea is warm and oily and extraordinarily transparent; the bed of the sea a rippled carpet of alabaster and emerald.
Eventually, the policemen stroll back, traipse up the narrow track and drive away.
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