by John Harris
Henry smiled. ‘Only now it can’t, or it would cover Arcuneum with mud.’
Stettner laughed and slapped his shoulder. ‘Or it would cover Arcuneum with mud,’ he agreed. ‘And then we should not have our St Lazzaro, and the Church would lose face and the television would lose its pictures and the newspapers their stories, and the big-business men their money, and the restaurateurs their customers, and the sightseers their sights, and Cadivescovo its ephemeral notoriety, and Alois Stettner his tourists. No?’
Henry laughed again. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Would you like to go higher?’ Stettner asked. ‘So you can look down on the dam. There is no bulge in the wall. The curve is perfect. You can see it from the side of Die Festung. Come and have a look. It’s an easy climb. You don’t need special shoes.’
‘OK’
‘Besides,’ Stettner winked, ‘we’re safe up there from the ministrations of the police. They’ve brought a couple of lorry-loads over from Trepizano and the eight o’clock boat was full of them. There’ll be none up here.’
He was wrong, however, because further up the winding track they were stopped by a couple of uniformed men with rifles who stepped out from among the rocks, materializing from nowhere.
Henry showed his passport and indicated the dam, and Stettner explained their business. They seemed satisfied, nodding at him as though he were an old friend.
‘A customer, Alois?’ one of them asked, not realizing how well Henry spoke Italian. ‘Will he pay all right?’
Stettner laughed and they moved off again.
‘They are so stupid, these Italians,’ he said contemptuously. ‘From the south, most of them.’
Following his directions, Henry drove up the rocky road until they stopped by a wooden refuge hut at the foot of La Fortezza, a low weathered building with rocks on the roof to hold the heavy tiles down in the winter winds, and with a gaunt iron crucifix outside, stark against the sky. They parked the van at the bottom of a bank of dazzling white scree where the meadows finished. At the top was the cliff face. It looked terrifying to Henry as they scrambled across the maze of tumbled rock and up the slope.
Below them the woods fell away from the fringe of dwarf pine and the scraggy rock-hugging shrubs under the mountain which rose, cliff on fantastic cliff, ridge on massive ridge, tower on tremendous tower, until the sharp curving wedge of the summit pierced the sky like a pyramid of granite and limestone, layer on layer of precipices, crags, ledges, rocks and cornices, all of them bare of growth, even the moss gone from the windswept faces.
It was ghostly up there, and terrible in the silence away from the streams. There was no sound, not a tree, not a blade of grass. The translucent bastions of rock seemed to sparkle in the weak sun against the sky, as unreal as a superb stage setting with the approaching storm dragging itself to shreds among the polished limestone pinnacles.
‘Wunderschön,’ Stettner breathed. ‘Incomparable.’
They could see the country spread out like a map below them now. The town was visible again over the curves of the meadows, close-set houses with low pantiled roofs and stuccoed walls and the campaniles of Madonna del Piano and Trepiazze and the old castello gleaming on its crag above the lake like a toy. In the clear air with the rain waiting in the valleys across the lake, it was indescribably beautiful.
‘Our land,’ Stettner said, his voice full of proprietorial pride. ‘Our town. We have more elegance and artistry in our streets than half the villages of Switzerland with their careful commercialism. We avoid all the arrogance of Prussia and all the instability of Italy.’
It was a surprising note to strike because, although Henry had heard him holding forth on the problems of the district, he had never suspected he felt at all deeply about the country itself, and again he had the odd feeling he’d had once before that Stettner was not the buffoon everyone thought he was, and that Caporelli was wrong to dismiss him as nothing but a boaster.
At the top of the scree they stopped and stood there for a while as Stettner pointed out the landmarks, and the rocks covered with bilberry growth, and the pine clumps and the streams and the ranks of trees below the Catena di Saga with its red ochre summits and tall ghostly peaks and pale towers, like a squadron of men-o’-war in line-abreast.
‘They were made to be climbed,’ he said, a tense pride in his voice. ‘They’ve never been glaciated and the rock’s not smooth.’
It was as they started up the rock face that Henry noticed the two men below them. They weren’t far away and it was quite possible to recognize young Dittli, the waiter. They’d been hidden by the slope, but now, as he began to climb, they’d become visible over the rocks. They were in a small valley, young Dittli with a scooter, the other man on foot and with a rucksack.
‘That’s Dittli,’ Henry said. ‘The waiter from the hotel.’
Stettner’s face had changed, and the happiness had gone out of it, to be replaced at first by anger and then by the intent withdrawn look of a soldier at the alert.
And there was a strange glassy-eyed withdrawn-ness about him suddenly that made Henry involuntarily think of those stiff faces he’d seen under the square steel helmets before the war, a distant, far-seeking ambitious look that was mixed with secrecy and camouflage and the backstairs freemasonry of the political idealist prepared to go to any limit to achieve his ends.
‘Yes,’ he said abruptly. ‘Come. Let’s go.’
He set off ahead of Henry, making more of the climb than Henry had expected an experienced mountaineer to do, so that dislodged boulders started rolling and rattling down the slope.
‘Come,’ he shouted, so that the words echoed among the crags. ‘Hurry!’
At the sound, Henry saw Dittli’s head turn, the movement abrupt and sudden, his face white against the light, and in that clear air he could see the startled surprise on his face. The other man was squarely built, short, and dark with a black beard.
Dittli stared for a second, then he seemed to half slap, half push the other man’s shoulder, and they broke apart. Henry saw the bearded man break into a run, his head down, among the rocks, then he heard the sound of Dittli’s scooter starting and he, too, vanished, down the rocky track towards Oswino’s farm, trailing a puff of white exhaust smoke. They looked like a couple of criminals.
‘That’s the man I saw up here the other day,’ Henry said. ‘Carlo Wasescha. The police are looking for him.’
‘They’ll never find him,’ Stettner said flatly. ‘Carlo was born in a shepherd’s hut at the foot of the Catena di Saga. He knows the mountains better than he knows his own face.’
‘I wonder what young Dittli was up to?’
Stettner’s face seemed to have shut down. ‘Day off,’ he said abruptly. ‘He’s free to do as he pleases.’
‘They seemed surprised. They disappeared smartly enough when they saw us. As though they were up to something.’
‘Yes.’
Stettner obviously had no intention of volunteering any information and Henry couldn’t help wondering if young Dittli, with his ardent patriotism, was one of the sort who frequented the Edelweiss Bar, and if Stettner knew about it. With his pale face and weak mouth, young Dittli didn’t look tough enough to belong to any subversive organization, but you could never judge a man by his looks, especially where ideals were concerned, and a pasty face was no indication of the tortuous mind that might lie behind it.
Stettner appeared to be waiting for him, his eyes empty and discouraging, and there was a certain amount of defiance about the way Henry persisted in his questioning.
‘Won’t the police catch them?’
Stettner’s laugh was sneering. ‘Romans? Neapolitan slum boys in uniform? No man brought up here from Italy could catch a mountain man. Dittli will get back safely.’
‘What about the scooter?’
‘There are plenty of places I know about to hide it. I expect he knows them too. He’ll walk down. There are plenty of ways down that the police don’t know abo
ut. Dittli will know them. All mountain men know them.’
Suddenly the air seemed as cold as Stettner’s new mood, then a ragged-winged crow, circling near the spires of rock, gave a raucous croak that sounded like a warning and Henry had a sudden uneasy wish to be back by the lakeside.
The saw-toothed edges of La Fortezza were above him now, scraping at the sky, craggy and serrated, stark in a great scoop of bare rock, the savage crests and steeples on every side, and as he looked back be could see the whole shape of the dam, clear and well defined, like a great pear, with the bulge the curve of the ancient wall. There was a distinct sag where he knew the weak saddle to be in the centre, but it didn’t look as bad as he’d expected. Down by the stopper wall that projected like a pimple on the side of the pear, the water was darker, and up towards the stalk of the pear it was darker again because of the shadow thrown by the mountains on either side. The feeder streams, small and narrow, ran like silver ribbons down the mountainsides, and Oswino’s farm, just below the wall, looked like part of a huge model.
Stettner was standing on a ledge just alongside Henry’s shoulder, indicating he should join him.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘Come up.’
His face was still grim and every last vestige of laughter had gone from his eyes. Henry stayed where he was.
‘What was Dittli doing up here?’ he said, looking up. ‘I didn’t know he was a climber.’
‘He’s not.’
‘It’s a funny place to go riding on a scooter. He looked as though he was making a plot to blow up the Questura.’
Stettner managed a smile at last, but it was forced and unnatural. ‘Perhaps he was,’ he said.
‘You get a good view of the dam from here,’ Henry pointed out.
‘Much better higher up.’
Henry started upwards, not sure whether he had the head to climb further.
‘I think this will do me,’ he said.
‘Much better higher up,’ Stettner insisted. ‘There’s an easy route.’
‘Perhaps for you. Not for me.’
Stettner reached down and put his hand on Henry’s shoulder, his fingers gripping it hard, trying to force his will on him. ‘You don’t know what you’re missing,’ he said.
The grip tightened as he tried to pull Henry after him, but there was something now in his manner that worried Henry and he wrenched his shoulder away.
‘No, thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave it at this.’
‘You are afraid, I suppose?’ Stettner’s goading manner had returned, and his smile had changed to one of unpleasantness.
‘If you like. I’m no climber.’
‘You are easily afraid, Englishman.’
He was deliberately taunting Henry now, trying to shame him into going higher.
‘No, thanks.’
‘You are typical of your country. You back out when the going is rough. You have no guts.’
His eyes were hot and his whole manner had become insulting and rude, and Henry had a curious sensation of expectancy that was compounded of fear, excitement and uncertainty.
Good God, he thought, he wants to kill me! The startled realization hit him hard and in the same flash of intuition he realized that somehow it was because he had seen Dittli and the little bearded man with the rucksack, and he remembered again the Edelweiss Bar and all those arrogant faces he’d seen. There hadn’t been one of them with an atom of kindness in them. There hadn’t been one without this same lost, desperate, fanatic gleam in their eyes that Stettner had.
He shivered, aware of coldness and a sickening sense of being caught up in something he could only vaguely understand.
‘I’ll go down,’ he said. ‘I’ll wait for you by the van.’
As he set off back down the crags he realized how right he’d been to go no further. He was already conscious of a swimming in his head and a weakness round his loins, and he knew he could never have stood on the crag where Stettner had stood and looked down below him as Stettner had.
He was just above the slope of the scree when something – a movement of light perhaps – made Henry look up and from the corner of his eye he caught the swift shadow of a falling boulder. Flattening himself against the face of the cliff, he saw it pass over him and bounce on the stub of rock where he’d been standing. Small splinters of stone flew off and arc-ed down the valley, as the boulder bounced again, striking sparks, and went rattling down the scree, finally rolling out into the meadow at the bottom and coming to a stop in the long grass.
Henry looked up and saw Stettner grin at him, but it wasn’t a natural grin, and Henry climbed down the last thirty feet of cliff face so fast that at the bottom he missed his footing, slipped, and fell on to the scree slope.
He rolled down it, turning and twisting, unable to stop himself, and fetched up against a rock half-way down, unhurt, but with a torn trouser knee. Stettner was following him, jumping down the lower crags like a gazelle, completely confident of his footing, and Henry stood up and made his way to the bottom of the slope and waited for him there.
‘You went down in beautiful style, Englishman,’ Stettner said as he jumped off the last rock. ‘As though you were frightened out of your wits.’
‘I was,’ Henry admitted.
‘Accident,’ Stettner said shortly. ‘Loose boulder. You loosened it with your foot. I caught it with mine.’
‘It would have killed me if I hadn’t seen it.’
Stettner shrugged. ‘One of the chances of the game,’ he said.
‘It’s not a game I like playing.’
Neither of them spoke on the way down the mountain and Henry was glad to get away from the area of bleak grey crags to the point where the houses started. It had been altogether too silent and still up there. Down below there were people, and his instinct was to get among them. He was bolting like a frightened animal out of its element and faced with a stronger enemy secure in his.
Nine
Cadivescovo was like a disturbed anthill when they reached the lakeside. People were standing in the square in groups and there seemed more police about than normal, watching from the arcades and the steps of the Municipio.
‘The police sergeant’s funeral,’ Stettner explained in a cold diffident way. ‘They have to make sure he is put to his rest in a manner befitting an Italian hero. They like their monuments to be rhetorical and their interments to be dramatic.’
His manner was sarcastic and sneering still, and Henry was glad to pay him the money they’d agreed on for his services and watch him disappear into the Stöckli Bar near the boat-station.
The funeral had not long since passed through the square and it had left a wake of excitement behind it. The crowd moved awkwardly, reluctant to go home, resentful against the police and against each other, their eyes full of suspicion. And Caporelli had been right about the boats. Nobody seemed to be leaving in a hurry. The queues seemed to be miles long – tourists trying to get away and more tourists trying to land, with the black, red and white figures of the carabinieri checking papers and passports and every item of luggage, even the women’s handbags.
They seemed to be everywhere, outside every shop and at every alley-end, watching the faces that passed them, their eyes on the bulges in men’s pockets, their fingers picking briefly at paper parcels, caps over their eyes and blank-faced as men with masks. The only people who seemed to be undisturbed by them were the archaeologists down at the mole.
There were even two or three policemen there, however, watching on Dei Monti’s instructions, but the diving had not stopped and during the afternoon, when the wind dropped and the sun appeared again, Henry went to watch them at work.
Sister Ursula was there, an apron round her waist, supervising the half-dozen orphans sitting in front of cheap plastic bowls, their hands in the water, their fingers working the mud from the crusted objects that lay alongside them. She recognized Henry and smiled.
‘We are enjoying our break from routine,’ she said. ‘Especially Giovan
ni. He is an intelligent boy and needs something intelligent to do, and this is perfect.’
She watched the tall intense-looking youngster for a moment, then she shook her head.
‘I sometimes wish life were not so serious for him,’ she said. ‘I think even the political situation here worries him. Doesn’t it, Giovanni?’
The boy nodded and went on with his work, his arms up to the elbows in muddy water.
‘He is afraid,’ Sister Ursula went on, ‘that there’ll be some move to take all this to Rome.’ She gestured at the articles laid out on the tarpaulin. ‘I suspect he’s heard some of my revolutionary talk.’
Henry’s eyebrows rose. ‘Revolutionary talk? From you?’
She smiled her sweet smile at him. ‘I’ve been saying that all these things belong here in Cadivescovo and shouldn’t be taken away to some museum away from the mountains where they’d be meaningless. The Professor promised that and I know he’s right. Here in Cadivescovo, people could see them in their proper surroundings, where they were found.’
‘Sister’ – Henry gestured behind him impulsively – ‘if you felt that that old dam up there was dangerous and had to be drained and that the only place it could be drained was into the Punta dei Fiori, where it would deposit mud over the ruins they’ve unearthed, what would you feel?’
She considered for a moment then smiled. ‘I suspect, Doctor, that you’ve already asked that of the Bishop and been told that your dam comes a bad second. Is that correct?’
Henry nodded and she laughed.
‘But, Sister–’
Her face became grave as she interrupted him. ‘Nothing has any value when set against human life and happiness,’ she said gently. ‘Not even the Church. I’m sure the Bishop would say the same.’
Henry was just pondering her words when Maggie Daniells appeared. She was in a bathing costume and blue cotton trousers, and after their bitter quarrels it seemed odd to see her put her arm on Giovanni’s shoulder and the smile she gave him – warm and devoid of shyness. Her manner with Sister Ursula was friendly and close, too, as though they’d talked a lot together as they’d worked.
