The Cross of Lazzaro

by John Harris

  ‘I didn’t ask him to come here,’ she said shortly.

  ‘No, I don’t suppose so.’ Although Henry hadn’t intended it to, it sounded as though he didn’t believe her.

  ‘Truly I didn’t.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  She glanced round and indicated her bag on the floor, its contents spilled out in a heap.

  ‘He dropped that,’ she pointed out. ‘I think he had it in his hand.’

  ‘Perhaps he was short of cash,’ Henry said. ‘Though I wouldn’t have thought that even Alois would have descended to that.’

  Again it seemed to indicate that he didn’t believe her and they were stiff and awkward with each other, both of them faintly embarrassed by the situation, and Henry turned towards the door, suddenly wishing he could get back to his own room, but panic flared unexpectedly in her eyes.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she begged. ‘He might come back.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’

  ‘All the same – just for a moment.’

  Henry hesitated, and it was her turn to be uncomfortable.

  ‘Of course, if it’s a nuisance–’

  ‘It isn’t a nuisance.

  She didn’t seem to believe him and she suddenly grew angry. ‘You can go if you wish,’ she said. ‘I’ll be all right. I’m sure you don’t want to stay.’

  She looked up at him and he saw to his surprise that there were tears in her eyes. ‘Why do we spend all the time quarrelling?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve no quarrel with you,’ Henry pointed out quietly, trying to sound as friendly as he could. ‘Quite the contrary, in fact.’

  She looked happier. ‘I suppose I ought to offer you a drink or something,’ she said. She managed a smile. ‘This is an odd situation, isn’t it, asking a man into your room at this time of the night for a drink?’

  She was fiddling with the dark glasses and seemed about to put them on.

  ‘No,’ Henry said impulsively. ‘Don’t!’

  She looked up, startled, then she seemed embarrassed and suddenly very young. ‘It saves having to look at people,’ she explained quietly. ‘I find them useful sometimes to hide behind.’

  She picked up her bag and began to replace the contents.

  ‘Why are you so insistent about the dam?’ she asked unexpectedly, her back to him.

  She seemed to be trying to push aside their habitual antagonism and he answered gently with another question. ‘Why are you so insistent about Arcuneum?’

  ‘Because that’s what I believe.’

  ‘That’s my answer, too.’

  She looked serious. ‘Is it really unsafe?’

  ‘You asked me that once before but you didn’t believe me when I said it was.’

  She gazed up at him, her eyes frank and friendly. ‘Perhaps I ought to look at it,’ she said impulsively.

  ‘Would you like to?’

  ‘You came to look at my works,’ she pointed out. ‘I ought in all fairness to have a look at yours.’ She paused and he saw she was smiling. ‘I can’t guarantee to agree, though. You didn’t. I know you didn’t. I can’t promise to, either.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ Henry said. ‘I’ll take you. Tomorrow. As a matter of fact, I was leaving tomorrow but I don’t suppose another day will matter.’ She hesitated and Henry was afraid for a moment that he was going too fast. ‘Wear stout shoes,’ he suggested. ‘There’s a lot of water around up there.’

  She opened the front door for him.

  ‘Lock it after me,’ he said. ‘And the window. In case of trouble, bang on the wall. I don’t know whether I’d be strong enough to hold him off if he were really determined, but I’ll have a go.’

  Back in his own room, Henry sat on the bed, staring at himself in the mirror. He heard a car move off across the gravel of the courtyard and realized from the engine tone that it was Caporelli’s Alfa Romeo, and he wondered where he was going with it. To get rid of what he’d got in the boot, he decided, and he hoped he knew somewhere safe.

  Then he forgot Caporelli because he was feeling vaguely elated and disturbed. He had the feeling of having won a major victory somehow. He’d never in his life found it easy to make contact with people. He’d always found it simpler to pronounce sentence on a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of shoddy workmanship than ask a girl for a date, but now somehow he seemed to have broken through. They’d both let their defences down a fraction and things seemed a little easier.

  He stood up quickly and kicked his slippers across the bedroom with a gesture of wild indifference to where they landed that was completely unlike him, and vaulted into bed.

  Ten

  Henry woke early. The sun was out again and the storm had died away, though there were still dark clouds on the Catena di Saga. He was drowsily thinking about Maggie and wondering if they could take a bottle of wine with them and some bread and sausage and make a day of it on the mountain, when he heard someone walking quickly along the corridor outside. The thump of a fist shook the door.

  The door handle turned and Caporelli’s face appeared. He looked drawn and sick with worry.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know if you’d be here–’

  ‘Where else would I be?’

  ‘Alois said you’d been–’ Caporelli cocked a thumb in the direction of the room next door.

  Henry flushed. ‘That wasn’t me,’ he said. ‘That was him.’

  Caporelli hardly seemed to hear him. He slipped inside and locked the door behind him, secretive and conspiratorial, and Henry began to wish he’d made arrangements for an early start and got himself and Maggie up the mountain before Caporelli could put in an appearance.

  Then Caporelli’s next words knocked all the annoyance out of him.

  ‘It’s gone,’ he said. ‘The box from the car’s gone.’

  Henry felt as though the floor had dropped away from him. He’d had no part in Caporelli’s plot, but he knew he was involved, however slightly.

  ‘Gone?’ he said. ‘Where?’

  Caporelli made a despairing gesture that was completely unlike him and beat on his forehead with a clenched fist.

  ‘Where?’ he said. ‘Who? Why? How? I don’t know, Aynree. It’s gone. That’s all I know. I went this morning to check up. The garage lock had been forced. The car’s gone. When I got there the doors were wide open.

  Henry was sitting up in bed now. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘What can I do? Nothing. Not yet. Suppose I report it to the police? Suppose they find it? They’d search the car with me to make sure nothing’s missing. And suppose nothing is? Suppose they find what’s in the box?’

  Henry’s mind boggled at the possibility. This would look fine in the university newspapers, he thought wildly. Senior lecturer imprisoned for trafficking in explosives. He felt himself going pale at the idea.

  ‘Look,’ he said tensely. ‘You must be able to do something.’

  ‘Tell me what.’

  Henry shrugged hopelessly.

  ‘Best to say nothing,’ Caporelli went on. ‘Probably some youngsters on their way home from the dance downstairs who knew the car was there. Though why bother to open a garage when there are dozens of cars outside the lake hotels every night I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you think it was one of “Hofer’s” people?’

  Caporelli nodded, his face pale.

  ‘God!’ Henry’s jaw dropped. ‘What’ll he do with it?’

  Caporelli shrugged. ‘We’d better wait and see what goes up,’ he said.

  As it happened, they didn’t have to wait long for information. Henry was having his breakfast when Caporelli sat down at his table.

  ‘They’ve found it,’ he said quietly.

  ‘The car?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Everything all right?’

  Caporelli ignored the question. ‘It was on the lakeside,’ he said. ‘Doors open. Boot open.’

  ‘Boot open? It had gone?’

  ‘Yes.’ Capo
relli looked grey and sick and old. ‘The police rang. I pretended I didn’t know – that I hadn’t missed it. I went down and identified it. They asked me if anything was missing. I said some hotel linen and a case of tinned fruit from the boot. They didn’t argue. I had to say something. People don’t break open car boots except to steal something.’

  He lit a cigarette and indicated it with a wry smile. ‘About the four hundredth since I woke,’ he said.

  Henry sipped his coffee. ‘What do we do now?’ he asked slowly.

  Caporelli’s reply startled him. ‘Get some more,’ he said bluntly.

  Henry put the cup down with a bang. ‘Count me out,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough.’

  Caporelli leaned forward and drew on his cigarette. ‘It’s still the only way,’ he said earnestly. ‘Those old fools at the Municipio will never give way. They have too many interests. One of them runs a shop. Another runs a hotel. A third a garage. A fourth has an ambitious wife.’

  ‘Good God, man,’ Henry pointed out indignantly, ‘if you get some more they’ll probably pinch that too. I’m not here to feed Hofer’s boys with plastic.’

  Caporelli leaned forward again eagerly. ‘They told me you stood up to Nasser himself over that breakwater,’ he said, ‘because you considered it unsafe. They tell me they threatened to put you in prison because you started accusing people of corruption. You can’t risk imprisonment for a belief in one country and back out for the same belief in another.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, leave me alone,’ Henry said bitterly. ‘Find somebody else! Get Stettner! He’ll have a go at anything, so long as there’s cash in it!’

  ‘He’d turn up drunk!’

  Something in Henry’s mind jarred suddenly and he felt he ought to remember it, but he couldn’t. For a moment he struggled with it, then let it go. Caporelli was still waiting, earnest, large-eyed, like some ugly little monkey with a doe’s expression.

  ‘During the war,’ he said slowly, ‘we learned that when things went wrong we had to start all over again, not just sit down and cry over spilt milk.’

  ‘For God’s sake, man, there isn’t a war on now!’

  ‘There is between me and Mornaghini. There’s my hotel. There’s the valley. There’s the orphanage.’

  ‘I’m not interested.’

  Caporelli placed both his hands on the table and stood up. ‘Perhaps you’re afraid,’ he said coldly. ‘Perhaps what I heard of you in Egypt was wrong.’

  Henry looked up at him and said nothing, and he slapped his hand down on the table.

  ‘Doesn’t anything ever rouse you to rage?’ he demanded furiously.

  Henry stared at his coffee, coldly angry but unmoved.

  ‘No?’ Caporelli went on, calm again. ‘Nothing?’ He sighed. ‘God help you,’ he said. ‘I’m glad I’m not an Englishman. You can’t feel. Here.’ He patted his chest. ‘Because you can’t be roused you’ve lost an empire. You’ve let the world walk all over you.’

  He stared at his fingers for a moment, then he turned away. ‘You are a good engineer, Aynree,’ he said. ‘But you could be a better one if you could feel enough to act some-times instead of just believing.’

  After breakfast Henry went to the garage at the back of the hotel and took out Caporelli’s Fiat van. The Alfa Romeo was standing nearby with the boot open, and Caporelli was staring into it as though he hoped the missing box would suddenly materialize from nowhere.

  He looked at Henry, his face expressionless, neither friendly nor hostile.

  ‘I thought you were going home,’ he said.

  ‘I am,’ Henry said shortly. ‘I’m going up to the dam first, though, to have another look.’

  ‘Take a pick-axe with you and dig a little hole in the side while you’re up there,’ Caporelli suggested bitterly. His expression softened. ‘Will it, perhaps, change your mind?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  While they were talking, Maggie arrived and Henry noticed that for once she was wearing a dress and had left her dark glasses behind. Caporelli noticed it, too, and as Henry clumsily opened the door of the Fiat for her, Caporelli gave him a hard look so that he had to fight to hold back the flush on his neck.

  ‘To have another look at the dam, eh?’ Caporelli said quietly.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You won’t need a pick-axe, though, after all.’ He touched Henry’s arm. ‘Why the opposition?’ he asked, indicating Maggie.

  Henry felt a little stupid. ‘Might convince them,’ he muttered, knowing perfectly well that Caporelli would never believe him.

  Caporelli gave him an accusing, unfriendly look, as though he were recovering his nerve a little and considered Henry had gone over to the enemy. ‘L’amore, eh?’ he said. ‘Le piccole solite scappatelle – always the little escapades. There’s a good spot right under the dam face. Lots of bushes. Nobody can see.’

  Henry climbed into the van, blushing furiously and confused enough to scrape the gears fiercely as he set off. He was so busy apologizing he almost knocked a man down as they left the courtyard, and he realized it was Stettner. He grinned and bowed ironically, and they shot past him, both staring furiously ahead, awkward still with each other and embarrassed at being caught together.

  The car shot on to the road with screeching tyres, setting a man with a mule shouting angrily after them, and Maggie shifted nervously in her seat.

  ‘Dr Chappell,’ she said gently, ‘if you want to get us both up to the dam I suggest you go more slowly. The road’s pretty twisty.’

  Henry slowed down abruptly. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  The look about the mountains of ruined masonry seemed more realistic than usual. They looked somehow less like rock formations than the bleached skeletons of some vast animal that had long ago died, ghostly and terrible in their size and silence.

  Henry deliberately stopped the van in the shadow of the great stone wall of the dam, just above Oswino’s farm, feeling that there she would sense the danger more. He got out and opened the door for her and she climbed slowly out and stared up at the grey wall that sprouted grass along the cracks and fissures.

  Water was running down the face through the concrete patches after the rain, and the sound of it filled their ears, rushing and noisy over the sound of the wind in the trees. For a while she said nothing, simply staring upwards at the vast stone barrier, awed by its size.

  ‘I’ve never been up here before,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ve always been too busy.’

  ‘You should come more often,’ Henry said, running his hand through his hair. ‘You get the feeling of decay better here.’

  ‘Can’t it be repaired?’ she asked.

  ‘It could. At a cost. But, apart from your excavations, there’s no point. It does nothing. It should be emptied and left empty. It must have started deteriorating the day it was built. They’d already spent a fortune repairing it before it was properly operative. It just grew, you see.’

  She stood beside him, small and silent, listening as he talked.

  ‘It was an inferior piece of work anyway,’ Henry went on. ‘The original dam was all right, but the new one wasn’t. It was too big. It’s been sprouting leaks all its life and all they ever did was stop them up.’

  ‘I never realized it was like this.’

  Henry looked up. ‘It looks like the wall of a bird’s nest,’ he commented. ‘And not a very fussy bird, at that. It’s been a joke for years.’ He jerked a hand upwards. ‘See that crack?’ he said, indicating the water pouring from the dam. ‘They’re all over the face of the wall. It’s like a watering can. The gates are jammed with rubbish. A stone culvert underneath collapsed in 1944 and washed out part of the wall a hundred feet wide and twenty feet deep. The discharge pipes were opened to take the pressure off but no repairs were made. Nobody had time. There was a war on and the Germans were being chased. Everybody wanted to finish the war first. It was repaired with tree-stumps, sand, clay, branches, anything that was at hand. And, as it held, nobody bothere
d to put it right later. There was too much bomb damage to repair first.’

  He offered her a cigarette and they walked slowly back to the van. Inside, she sat staring up at the wall for a while before she spoke.

  ‘What would happen if it were drained?’ she asked. ‘To the Punta dei Fiori, I mean.’ For once, the question wasn’t hostile.

  ‘There’d be mud, of course. You know about that. And sand and gravel from lower down. But the flow could be controlled. And, as you’ve got all the sites marked, it wouldn’t make much difference and you could use pressure hoses to wash it away.’

  A few heavy drops of rain fell, exploding against the windscreen of the van and on the flat surfaces of the rocks.

  ‘I think we’d better go,’ Henry said. ‘Here it comes again.’

  He started the engine and began to reverse. She looked at him curiously. ‘How long do you think it will last?’ she asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to bet on it lasting the winter.’

  ‘As simple as that?’

  ‘As simple as that.’

  She threw her cigarette out of the window. ‘I shan’t be able to sleep at night now,’ she smiled. ‘I shall be listening all the time for the bang.’

  He started the engine and they set off down the hill towards Oswino’s farm. The road was steep, but the feeling that he had won her to his way of thinking at last was so strong that he enjoyed swinging the van round the corners above the drops to the meadows below.

  ‘It would be nice to get down all in one piece, Dr Chappell,’ she said, but he knew she shared his feeling of happiness and was not afraid.

  They were laughing together as they passed Oswino’s farm, dropping swiftly down the mountainside. The fact that Oswino’s car was standing just by the gate registered itself on Henry’s mind, but he thought nothing of it because, briefly, a little higher up, he’d seen Oswino standing in the roadway staring upwards towards them, but as they turned the corner, the car shot abruptly out of the gate across their path and what had been fun suddenly became terrifying.

  With the laughter still frozen on his face, Henry fought with the wheel of the van, seeing the drop swing in front of him, rocketing across his view in a blur of trees and fields, and he felt the vehicle swing violently as he swerved to avoid Oswino. He saw the farmer’s narrow face flash past him, full of concentration, as though he’d been busy and hadn’t noticed them, then the wing of the van hit the fence on the edge of the road and, as he fought it to a standstill, he saw a splintered piece of timber go arcing away ahead of them and drop into the meadow below, bouncing end over end until it came to a stop.