by John Harris
‘We could do with a saint, Doctor,’ he concluded sadly. ‘This is an unhappy district with a great deal of political bitterness. There are men and women here who feel they don’t belong to us, and a saint might unite us all.’
Caporelli nodded and for a moment he was at one with the Bishop, the dispute about the dam forgotten in the emergency the terrorists had brought about. The Bishop caught the movement and smiled at him, then he turned to Henry again and went on slowly. ‘You see, Dr Chappell,’ he said, ‘a saint is important to us, and because of that every relic we can unearth is important, too.’
Caporelli was subdued as they brought the interview to an end, and he bowed his head slightly as the Bishop rose and lifted his hand in a blessing.
‘Good day to you,’ he said. ‘Benedicat te Omnipotens Deus.’
‘Claptrap,’ Caporelli said when they were outside. ‘Ecclesiastical claptrap. But he’s right, of course. In Italy a saint is always useful. Especially a new one.’
When they got back, the Stettnerhof was full of the young men from the archaeological group, who had obviously just finished work for the day.
‘A gold altar vase today, Doc,’ Frank Maggs called out to Henry as he passed the entrance to the bar. ‘More pottery, a lead anchor and a statuette.’
‘Up the saboteurs!’ The voice came from the back of the group, and there was a burst of laughter that made Henry go red.
He felt he needed a drink badly, but, unable to face the crowd in the bar, he went through to the dark little wood-and-cushioned lounge at the other side. Maggie Daniells was in there, writing up the notes from her book on to fresh sheets of paper, and Stettner was hanging around her, his hand on her shoulder looking at photographs which were spread on the table in front of her.
‘The Sudtyrol Volkspartei is completely behind your group,’ he was saying earnestly as Henry entered. ‘We will back you to the hilt against any attempt to sabotage your work.’
Henry stood in the entrance watching them and they both became aware of him at the same time, and looked up.
‘Coffee,’ Henry said bluntly as Dittli appeared.
He sat down and picked up the newspaper, then he became aware of Maggie still watching him, and he threw the paper down again.
‘Please,’ he begged. ‘Please don’t say again that you’re sorry.’
There was silence for a while, then she spoke softly. ‘But I am,’ she said. ‘Truly I am.’
‘We went to see the Bishop of Trepizano today,’ Henry went on. ‘You’ll be happy to know he’s completely on your side. Together with the Mayor, the town bureau of information, the Commissione di Turismo and, I’m sure, the railways, the Press and the television authority. Doubtless, also, all the people of the town itself. I expect they’d much rather stuff their pockets full of the money the tourists will bring than make certain their children will be alive next year.’
‘It’s a materialistic world, Herr Doktor,’ Stettner commented.
‘Unfortunately.’
‘I’m doing my best to hurry things,’ Maggie said apologetically.
‘Thank you.’
‘I’m trying to be helpful,’ she went on more sharply. ‘I’m fully aware that you feel we’re being simply obstructive. But we’re not. We simply want to do the work we came here for, and for which we raised funds – not easily either, I might add. This afternoon we came across what can only have been a crude vase from an altar. It’s been identified as being of gold. It’s not fine metal and probably won’t be very beautiful even when it’s cleaned, but it is gold and it’s evidence that we’re on the site of some sacred building.’
‘I hope it’s still there next year,’ Henry said.
Dittli appeared just then with Henry’s coffee, and they sat in silence as he placed it on the table. As he disappeared, Stettner passed the photographs that littered the table-top across to Henry. There was a jeer in the gesture.
‘Have you seen today’s treasures, Herr Doktor?’ he asked as be strolled out.
The pictures seemed to be of rocklike objects, covered with weed and shell-like growth.
‘Ten years from now,’ Henry said, staring at them, ‘there’ll be hotels all round the Punta dei Fiori and probably a grotto with underwater lifts to let the tourists see the remains, and booths of pieties and pictures of the saint’s tomb all along the front. It’s what happened in Apulia. Because Padre Pio had the stigmata, the whole district grew prosperous and there are Vespas in the outhouses now instead of donkeys. They had police to control the crowds, when I was there, and you could even touch his hand if you shoved hard enough. But there were still people starving not far away and the money that comes into Italy for the relief of poverty and the opening up of Calabria and Sicily still finds its way into the pockets of people who don’t need it.’
‘It isn’t my fault that Italy’s what it is,’ she said angrily. ‘I don’t run the Church of Rome either, but I’m quite sure there are enough intelligent people in it who want it different.’
‘There are none round here,’ Henry said bitterly. ‘Your confounded relics are still more important than my dam.’
Seven
For some time it had seemed to Henry that the tension in the town had been slackening a little. The missing explosives had been pushed clean out of the news by Lazzaro’s great cross and like everyone else Henry had tended to forget them in the excitement around the church.
The town had always been as full of police, however, as it had of tourists and newspapermen, a great many of them sent over from Trepizano to reinforce the local men. But there had been so many of them occupied with the crowds who wished to see the cross and the relics that were being brought up from the bottom of the lake that nobody had seemed to notice that there were also others still occupied in searching for the missing explosives.
When Henry stopped to think about it he realized that the air of tension about the place had not really vanished at all but had merely been obscured by the excitement generated by the arrival of the cross. There were still groups of policemen on the corners, and there were still always two or three with a car or a group of motor cyclists on the road to Trepizano, or on the ferry station, examining passports and looking into suitcases and boxes and car boots. They were always there but politely inconspicuous.
It was a warm evening, the sun glowing among the crags above the town, the rocks bright pink in the last of the light. It had been a hot afternoon but, with the lowering of the sun, the veil of heat had lifted and the sky looked calm enough for Henry to have doubts about his insistence on the dam being drained. They seemed at last to be in for a period of fine weather which would take away all the urgency.
There was a lot of singing in the bar, because the hotel was full of excited tourists and the bottles of Lacrimae Vescovi were coming over the counter in dozens. The party had started sedately enough with an accordionist, but the younger element had congregated at the bar, preferring the juke-box and the records of Elvis Presley, and in the end the accordionist gave up trying and began to enjoy himself on brandy.
‘He takes his teeth out in summer and goes round the cafés in Trepizano,’ Stettner was telling Maggie Daniells. ‘He looks so decrepit he makes a fortune from the visitors.
The noise was increasing as the bottles of wine crowded the tables, then suddenly the accordionist came to life again and started to sing. One by one the others joined in, standing round him, their voices blending together, young and strong, their faces glowing with good health. Then young Maggs borrowed a guitar and the archaeologists began to sing all the outrageously partisan songs they could think of – La Bandiera Rossa, La Strada del Bosco and the infuriating Zu Mantua im Banden, which Stettner had obviously taught them, the choruses interspersed with gusts of laughter. Stettner was enjoying the singing and was well to the front with Maggie Daniells, waving a wineglass and shouting the words at the top of his voice, his face flushed, his shirt open – deliberately, Henry decided, so that it was possible
to see the hair on his chest. He had his arm round Maggie’s waist and his hand well up under her breast, and he had a salacious look on his face as he beamed at her.
‘The police were round the boats this afternoon, Herr Doktor,’ he told Henry. ‘They insisted on examining our store of explosives. They insisted that they should be kept locked up and the key deposited at the Questura every evening. Maggie’s taken over the responsibility. She likes to take over responsibilities.’ He dropped his voice and put his mouth close to Henry’s ear. ‘Some even for me.’ He gave Henry a sly look and went on cheerfully: ‘It seems sense, I suppose, or my friends of the Montanari might decide to steal them.’
He seemed to be enjoying himself and went on without any encouragement from Henry. ‘They’re always shooting at the sentries in the mountains, you understand, always taking away the fishplates from the railway and jamming the points. They urinate into the petrol tanks of police lorries, a thing which does no good to a petrol engine, and leave notes outside explosive stores. It’s a pity they don’t tell me more, I might be able to help the police.’ He shrugged, mocking himself. ‘But I am just Alois Stettner, the climber,’ he said. ‘That’s all. They just like me around to give tone to their hysterical little meetings. They don’t tell me what they’re going to do. They know I like life too much. They’re afraid I might talk if I were pressed too hard.’
They were still singing downstairs when Henry went to bed and he was brooding over Caporelli’s reports when the explosion brought him back to life at once. It wasn’t very loud – and muffled as though it were some distance away – but he knew at once what it was. They’d been waiting for it for days.
He sat up abruptly and in the stillness that followed he heard an ass bray and the sweet notes of a nightingale out-side, then the night seemed to break apart into a thousand noisy fragments. There was shouting in the street outside and the singing in the bar stopped as everybody flooded out under the trees, then he heard the telephone bell jarring insistently in the hall.
He got out of bed and dressed, and he was just pulling on his jacket when he heard a couple of police cars go past, horns wailing stridently up and down. He jumped to the window, scattering Caporelli’s papers, and as he flung it open he saw the flashing lights vanishing round the corner by the Church of Lazzaro di Colleno.
When he reached the hall the roadway seemed to be full of gesticulating people and Caporelli was standing by the door, staring upwards towards the mountains over the little valley that lay between the Stettnerhof and the town.
‘The railway again,’ he said as he saw Henry. ‘I just heard. They killed a policeman. Sergeant Guidotti. I know him well.’ His face looked bitter. ‘It’ll stop all the traffic,’ he went on. ‘They’ll search every train and every car and every bus. Everything will be held up. Mail. Telephone calls. Everything.’
There was a lot of chattering about them and some drunk in the bar made a half-hearted attempt to sing The Red Flag. But the gaiety had gone and there was no longer any joy to be found in hearing political songs or speeches, however much in fun.
Someone shut the singer up abruptly and an argument started, bursting immediately into loud voices. Tension was suddenly there again, taut as a wound-up spring, and Caporelli went inside, his eyes blazing, and Henry heard him talking angrily. The argument stopped and he reappeared, his face wooden.
After a while Maggie Daniells came down the stairs. She looked bright-eyed and interested, like the rest of the archaeological group, seeing only the excitement in the explosion, uninvolved, untouched and without the narrow-eyed alertness of the townspeople.
‘Is it the same as last time, Signore Caporelli?’ she asked. Caporelli nodded and her eagerness vanished abruptly before his grimness. ‘It’s always the same as last time,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow there’ll be a picture in the paper of a note left by someone signing himself “Andreas Hofer” and there’ll be requests by the police for people to come forward and identify the writing. And a few crackpots’ll say it’s their mother-in-law or the neighbour they don’t like, and that’s all. They’ll get nowhere.’
A police lorry went past, half a dozen men huddled in the back, and, as it vanished, Stettner appeared round the bushes from the garden. He crossed to Maggie immediately and gently put his arm round her with his hand under her breast in that familiar way of his that irritated Henry so much.
‘Bang,’ he said, and she jumped and turned round, laughing up into his face and trying to indicate Caporelli, who was glaring at them, his eyes glittering and angry.
‘They’re at it again,’ he said, ignoring her. ‘Proving what we Austrians have always said – that Italy’s just a geographical expression. Bang, bang, bang. Always someone. If it’s not at the quarry, then it’s the terrorists. And if it’s not the terrorists, then it’s you people trying to blow the bottom out of the lake.’
She gestured again, quickly, warning him of Caporelli’s mood, but he laughed and cocked a thumb. ‘Somebody left a wreath on the Hoferdenkmal,’ he said. ‘The statue to Andreas Hofer. Decorated in black and yellow. The old colours of Austria. Nobody saw who did it. It just appeared. They’ve impounded it in the Questura for the experts who’ll come from Rome. Let’s go and have a drink.’
Maggie glanced at Caporelli again, but Stettner caught the glance and shook his head, pulling a face at Caporelli’s grimness. ‘Not here,’ he said softly, his voice barely audible. ‘The Stöckli Bar down by the boat-station. We might see something. Besides,’ he added, ‘it’s darker there and there’s an orchestra. Much more fun.’
By the following morning the Press and television people, who had satiated their followers with the cross and vanished, had all returned to Cadivescovo, but the direction of the excitement had changed now, and the effervescent buoyancy that had come with the cross had disappeared again and given way once more to the sullen edginess that had been in the town before, waiting in the corners among the brooding groups of men like a starving dog, never obvious but always definitely there.
There were pictures of the dead sergeant in the newspapers, a smiling handsome moustached man who looked like Gregory Peck, and of his weeping wife being helped into the Questura, alongside shots of the twisted rails and the hole torn out of the railway embankment by the explosion.
Caporelli was in a gloomy mood because he’d been staring at the blaring headlines all day, his eyes narrow and speculative, his manner irritable. He’d been drinking brandy steadily all the time and pushing them at Henry, too, whenever he’d appeared.
Apparently, Sergeant Guidotti had not been the only man involved in the explosion. A student by the name of Stalder had been gravely injured at the same time and was now in hospital at Trepizano, blinded and burned and not expected to live. Abruptly, all the gaiety that had come to Cadivescovo had vanished again and voices were kept to undertones as though their owners were afraid to express their opinions out loud. It had its effect on the bar that evening, because with nobody laughing, nobody was drinking either, just a silent group of farmers in a corner playing cards and eating sausage with their beer.
Caporelli sat with Henry, his heavy face set, his eyes on the moving shadows outside where the horse chestnuts wavered in the breeze that was getting up. The sun had vanished during the afternoon and the sky had filled with cloud, so that only momentary gleams of starlight came through the fitful breaks in the black banks that hugged the mountains.
Caporelli swallowed his brandy and picked up the bottle, signing to Henry to empty his glass. His mind was obviously busy and he seemed indifferent to the silence in the bar.
‘Dr Cappell,’ he began after a while.
Henry sighed. ‘Chappell,’ he said.
Caporelli looked up, startled, then grinned unexpectedly. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Dr Shappell–’
‘Look, Signore Caporelli,’ Henry suggested. ‘Call me Henry.’
Caporelli laughed. ‘I was wondering when you were going to suggest it,’ he said. ‘OK, Aynree. Call m
e Ettore.’
He fiddled with the bottle and filled the glasses up again, then he stared at his brandy once more, his eyes far away. ‘Did I ever tell you about my father, Aynree?’ he said. ‘He was a doctor. He lived in Cava Catanzaro, south of Naples. He died there as he lived – a poor man. The Fascisti sent him there because he didn’t think the way they did. That’s what they used to do with thinkers and Communists and Socialists before the war. Send them to Calabria and tell them to get on with it. No wages. Nothing. It was worse than prison. They lived only on what the peasants gave them out of gratitude. That’s all. But they didn’t destroy my father. Never.’
He looked fierce as he spoke. ‘He was always in trouble, Aynree. He was always standing up for his new people. There was a drain in Cava Catanzaro. Not a deep one. But a very smelly one. It was cracked. My father decided it was fouling all the water and causing epidemics. He fought for months to get the authorities in Rome to build a new one. But they never did. In the end he stole some explosives from a quarry nearby and with another man he lifted the manhole one night and dropped them down. I can remember the bang to this day.’
He grinned at Henry. ‘They had to build a new drain after that,’ he said.
‘Pity they can’t do the same with the dam,’ Henry commented.
Caporelli placed his glass down carefully and looked up. ‘I could blow that gate out of the stopper wall,’ he said slowly. ‘I could do it easily. I could blow a hundred-lire note off a gravestone without damaging the marble. I did it in the Partisans. All I need is the material.’
Henry stared at him. ‘Ettore,’ he said slowly. ‘I think you’re drunk.’
‘Yes.’ Caporelli rolled his eyes. ‘I guess I am.’
Henry had a headache the next morning after all the brandy he’d drunk, and the papers had screaming headlines a foot deep. The trains to Bolzano had all to be re-routed and there was an express denial from the Volkspartei to say they were in no way responsible for the explosion. But, at the same time, there’d been an outbreak of fighting in Trepizano and several men who’d boasted that they belonged to the Volkspartei had been arrested. The inside pages were devoted to the private life of the dead Sergeant Guidotti and contained pictures of the parents of the blinded student who was fighting for his life in Trepizano hospital.
