by John Harris
He picked up the ice-axe and, jumping into the sluice, began to hack at the gate near the hinges, striking sparks as the steel clanged on the ironwork. For a second Henry thought he’d gone mad, then he swung round and, scrambling out of the sluice, his clothes dripping water, dragged Dittli to his feet.
Dittli’s eyes stared at the axe in his hand. ‘What are you going to do to me?’ he yelled.
Caporelli suddenly became calm again. ‘I’d like to shoot you,’ he said bitterly, and began to push the waiter towards the sluice gate.
Dittli seemed to shrink, resisting against Caporelli’s shoves as though he were being placed against a wall for a firing squad.
‘You can’t,’ he yelled. ‘You can’t shoot me!’
‘No.’ Caporelli’s eyes flashed. ‘No, I can’t, because I didn’t come up here to destroy such Tedesco scum as you. I’ve better things to do. Here’ – he thrust the ice-axe at Dittli – ‘get going! Break that gate down!’
Dittli stared at him as though he were crazy.
‘Get going!’
Dittli turned and stared at the gate, obviously knowing that if he succeeded, and the gate gave, he’d be washed out of the tunnel himself by the pressure of water behind it, smashed by the heavy baulks of rotten timber and iron. He turned again and stared wildly at Caporelli who, quite calmly, once more brought back his arm and smashed his fist into his face.
‘Get going!’
Dittli heaved himself to his feet, staggered, and Caporelli went for him again with both hands, hitting out viciously until Dittli pushed him off and, jumping into the gully, began to hack frantically at the gate. Caporelli stared at him for a second, then he picked up the crowbar and began to attack the gate alongside him like a madman.
‘Why didn’t you hit me with the axe?’ he sneered at Dittli between blows. ‘When I had nothing in my hand? Because you’re a jackal who can only fight round corners in the dark.’
Dittli stopped hacking at the gate and Caporelli gestured at him with the crowbar. ‘If you move away,’ he said, ‘I’ll smash your skull in with this.’
He turned to Henry and nodded at Stettner, who was just coming round.
‘Get him outside,’ he said.
As Henry grabbed Stettner’s shoulders and pulled him out of the gully, he screamed, a rasping shriek of pain as the broken bones moved. Even in his anger it seemed to shrivel Henry and he saw Giovanni go ashen and clap his hands, half hidden by the two jackets, against his ears. But Caporelli seemed unmoved.
‘Get him outside,’ he repeated, and Henry realized just how hard a core partisan warfare had put in him. Caporelli had seen and done things Henry couldn’t even imagine and it had left an agate centre inside him that eighteen years of comfortable living had not even touched. He could have shed his urbanity overnight and gone back without effort to the hard living of the war years.
Stettner went on screaming all the time Henry was dragging him out of the tunnel, alternatively crying out in rage and begging him in a whimper to leave him alone. Shutting his ears to the appeals, Henry jammed him upright against the stone wall, round the corner from the tunnel, and he sat there, half fainting, the rain running off his face. As he turned to re-enter the tunnel, Henry heard the whimpering moaning sound again, and this time it seemed still louder. His eyes swung upwards to the curve of that huge grey mass of stone and mud and rubbish.
‘Ettore,’ he called. ‘It’s too late!’
Caporelli came to the entrance to the tunnel and stared across the valley towards the wall. Among the trees in the dip they caught a brief glimpse of the green cape Wasescha wore as it moved towards the other side and the Oswino farm.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We might still do it.’
As he went back inside the tunnel, Stettner’s eyes followed him. He had recovered a little now and was sitting hunched against the wall, one hand across his chest gripping his smashed elbow, one foot straight out, the other twisted in an ugly fashion to his left, the water streaming down his grey cheeks.
The moaning sound came again, then an enormous creaking sound like a door moving on its hinges.
‘For God’s sake, Ettore,’ Henry yelled.
The hacking sound in the tunnel stopped and Caporelli appeared again as he pointed.
‘It’s going,’ Henry said.
Caporelli’s face was bleak and dangerous-looking. ‘We’d better get down there,’ he said. ‘And try to warn them. We can do no more up here.’ His voice cracked. ‘We can’t touch the gate without the plastic.’
Henry indicated Dittli, who had appeared in the entrance to the tunnel, his bruised face white, the blood livid round his mouth where Caporelli had punched him. ‘What about him?’ he said. ‘And Stettner. We can’t leave him here.’
Caporelli blew the rain from his mouth and wiped the hair from his eyes. The look on his face was one of savagery.
‘Why not?’ he said.
‘He’ll die.’
‘Dittli will take care of him.’
‘Aren’t we going to hand him over to the police?’
Caporelli gave him a grin that was ugly in its cruelty through the mud and blood on his face.
‘Why?’ he said. ‘Why waste time? He’s finished. He’ll do no more harm. Ever.’
He bent over Stettner, who watched him with dumb-eyed sullen agony.
‘He’ll be a cripple for the rest of his life,’ Caporelli said, his voice harsh with satisfaction. ‘He’ll never climb again or swim again or ski or sleep with girls. Perhaps someone will offer him a job. Sweeping the road or selling newspapers. And at night he’ll sit in the corner of a bar and drink and get fat, and the boys will call him an old soak, and the girls he wants so much will jeer at his twisted limbs. That’ll be worse than death to him. Perhaps it’ll make up for the dead men and the grieving wives and mothers he’s caused.’
He turned to Giovanni and pulled him to his feet. ‘Can you walk, my son?’ he asked.
‘Yes, Signore, I’m all right now.’
‘Soon this nightmare will be over. Fighting and blood were never meant for children’s eyes.’
He never even glanced back at Stettner and Dittli as he took Giovanni’s hand and set off down the valley. For a second Henry hesitated, then he turned and followed him. Stettner watched them go, hatred and bleak courage in his eyes, while Dittli stood behind him, leaning against the ancient stone, staring at the gushing brown water that came out of the tunnel, a worn, aged look on his face.
They dropped quickly into the valley, heading back the way they’d come. Henry felt sick with anxiety. He’d been so certain that they’d succeed, and failure had left him drained and beaten. Ahead of them, on the opposite slope of the valley, he could see the green cape of Wasescha as he climbed the hill towards Oswino’s farm.
The groaning seemed to be growing louder now and, though it was difficult to see through the lashing rain, he felt certain he could see movement in the wall.
‘Ettore,’ he called to Caporelli, who was below and ahead of him with Giovanni. ‘Wait! For God’s sake, wait!’
Caporelli stopped and, turning on the slope, looked up at him. Then he stared up at the dam wall, his brows down. There was nothing up there that Henry could be certain of, but some instinct, some engineer’s sixth sense that sounded a warning through his wretchedness, told him it was unsafe to cross the valley.
Caporelli gestured impatiently, but even as he turned back downhill, Henry saw a crevice the size of a barrel open in the face of the dam. As he stared at it, his eyes horrified, it crumbled into a V-shaped notch, ten feet wide, suddenly gouged out of the saddle-shaped stretch in the centre.
‘Mamma mia!’ Caporelli’s words came in a flat gasp and he grabbed Giovanni’s arm and began to retreat up the hill towards Henry.
As they watched, they saw Wasescha stop dead and stare upwards at the dam, his face white in the gloom, then he whirled and started to scramble frantically up the slope again. Then a jet of water suddenly spurted from t
he wall, unexpected in spite of the crack, leaping thirty feet out into the valley below in a great arc, as though someone had turned on a giant hose pipe. The spray from it leapt up as the wind caught it, and they saw more water welling through the very foundation stones as they watched in dreadful fascination.
Wasescha had stopped once more and they saw him throw the brief-case aside, and start climbing again, his legs pumping like pistons as he struggled to gain height. The awful groaning continued, filling the air as though it came from all sides at once over the hiss and gurgle of the rain and the roar of the wind, as the twenty million tons of water beyond the wall were projected at the weak spot behind the break. Then a second jet spurted from the wall, equally unexpected, and grew thicker and deeper at once. The spray rose higher and they saw solid objects coming away with the water and realized they were lumps of earth and stones. The jets grew steadily bigger as the cracks grew longer, then they saw more jets appear and finally the whole wall seemed to bulge.
‘It’s gone,’ Caporelli yelled.
The wall moved slowly, almost like an expanding balloon, then there was a tremendous report like thunder that echoed against the slopes of the valley, and the wall seemed to move away in front of the water as it leapt from its ancient artificial bed and plunged down the valley, pushing a three-hundred-foot segment of stone and earth with it.
They saw the water strike Wasescha, the first wave bouncing off him in a spray like a breaker against a rock on an open beach, then he was gone, engulfed in a brown muddy torrent and a mass of tumbling debris that smashed in a tremendous surf against the wall of the valley where he’d been climbing, then Caporelli, who’d been slowly pushing Giovanni all the time back up the slope, was grabbing at Henry’s arm and shouting in his ear.
‘Run,’ he yelled. ‘Back up to the stopper wall. Run!’
The water was roaring towards them in a solid brown wall topped by foam and tumbling debris as the leading waves fought to get through the gorges to the lake and the following flood built up behind and spread across the narrow valley. They had swung round now and were running as hard as they could, heaving themselves over rocks and undergrowth, their feet slithering on the wet tufty grass. Several times, Henry went flat on his face, his mind filled with horror at the thought of the racing bore of water rolling against the side of the slope, rising higher and higher all the time as the thousands of tons of water poured from the dam. He saw trees go down and huge boulders that had withstood all the ravages of centuries plucked from the valley face, and his mind was numb as though he were in a nightmare, being chased by a monster and unable to make his feet move fast enough.
They had grabbed the sobbing Giovanni by the arms and were dragging him with them, his feet trailing behind as they stumbled over rocks and crashed through the brushwood that beat against their faces with quick stinging blows and left livid marks on their flesh. The breath was rasping in Henry’s throat now and the muscles of his legs seemed like jelly, and his fingernails seemed to be torn out as he scrabbled for a handhold, his eyes bulging, his sight growing blurred, his chest hurting intolerably and the blood pounding in his ears.
‘Run,’ Caporelli kept shouting. ‘Keep going!’
The flood was a brown, seemingly solid wall now in which they could see trees and boulders moving, and it was rushing up towards them like an express train, thundering and roaring higher and higher up the slope as the contents of the dam fell into the valley.
They stumbled head-first into a ditch that had been dug for irrigation, probably by Oswino. The other side seemed too wet and muddy and too steep to climb out and Giovanni was crying out, sobbing for them to help him as he clawed feebly at the bank, all his strength drained away by the run up the hill. Caporelli was dragging himself up by the roots of a tree and he reached back for Giovanni as the first of the brown water came swirling up the ditch, forced along in a roaring, frothing, spouting cataract by the pressure behind it. In a second it was up to Henry’s armpits and he could feel the force of it tearing him away.
He flung the boy to Caporelli, who grabbed him by the shoulders and hurled him bodily higher up the slope in a tangle of arms and legs, then he reached down and grabbed Henry’s arm, leaning back against the pull of the water as his strong fingers closed round Henry’s wrist. A rock hit Henry at the side of the head and the water poured over him, thick and muddy, filling his nose and mouth as he yelled and fought for breath. He could hear the awful roaring, gurgling sound in his ears and feel his heart pounding and the drag of the water at his limbs, but all the time he was conscious of Caporelli’s strong hand still on his wrist. Then the water had gone again as suddenly as it had come, receding as the flood poured down towards the lake, plucking at stones and bushes and soil, and he was spluttering and gasping and half drowned, with Caporelli above him, still holding on to his tree and Giovanni sprawled like a corpse on the line of debris that the water had left behind as it retreated.
His head throbbing, Henry dragged himself slowly to the top of the bank and he lay with Caporelli, flat on his face, both of them drenched to the skin and covered with mud and twigs and gravel, gasping for breath.
‘You saved my life, Ettore,’ Henry said at last.
Caporelli managed a weak shrug and blew a wet leaf from his lips. ‘You saved mine,’ he said. ‘But for you we’d have been down there and we’d not have got back. But for you, Giovanni would never have got out of there.’
The ditch had disappeared entirely now under a flood of wreckage. There were trees and planks and twigs in it and a couple of dead goats that had been snatched up from somewhere and were swilling back and forth among the rubbish.
They got to their feet and climbed to a spur of rock and threw themselves down, saturated and mud-covered, watching the brown flood roaring and smashing down the valley. The water seemed to leap, not touching the ground, bounding down the mountain, crashing everything down with it as the dam drained. The flood was literally tree-top-high as it smashed downwards, its speed diminished by the curves of the valley, rolling away rocks weighing tons and carting them with it. They saw all the crucifixes and little bridges go one after the other, snapping like pipe-stems as the water plunged down on them, and the piles of sawed winter logs exploding into the air as though they’d been hit by an artillery shell, and the trees leaning over under the tremendous pressure and disappearing beneath the flood as they were torn up by the roots. They saw the shed where they’d sheltered climb the face of the great wall of water, rolled and tossed about like a twig, and finally dash to splinters against a bluff of the valley, so that there seemed to be not a single fragment left.
As the water plunged down to Oswino’s farm, Henry saw a small figure run out from the trees and head for the hill, driving pigs and cattle in front of it, but the flood caught up with them and they were snatched away, first the man and then the cattle, one after the other, and then the farm itself, vanishing in a tangle of timber and stones and exploding tiles. Then the pylons that carried electricity across the valley became surrounded by the eddying brown swirl and began to sway one after the other, and there were flashes of blue light as the huge cables leapt and twanged and finally snapped, then they too had gone, smashed down by the awful force of the water rolling away towards Cadivescovo in a great solid wall, rolling, lashing, writhing in a hideous frenzy like a great brown monster, smashing great areas of rock face off as it passed and carrying a huge battering-ram of trees and logs and rocks and water.
The dam had literally melted away. At first, there had been a hole big enough for a car to go through, then a few seconds later there had been an opening three hundred feet wide from the top to the bottom of the wall. Now, even as they looked at it, they saw what was left of the wall crumble slowly away and what was left of the lake fall into the valley.
‘Gesu mio misericordia,’ Caporelli said in an awed whisper. ‘God have mercy on the people below.’
Eighteen
By the time they set off down the mountainsid
e every last drop of water had vanished ahead of them, leaving a swathe of destruction half a mile wide so that they had to edge round the soaked debris and plough across the mud and silt that had been brought down.
The whole valley was full of wreckage as far as they could see, and it was impossible to make out where the road had been, let alone the car. There was still a river of thick, gluey water, the dregs of the dam, twenty foot wide in parts where the stream must originally have run, but now there were no banks, no trees, no walls, nothing.
They managed to cross it where the valley narrowed and a new small dam had been thrown up of logs and rocks and debris, and wreckage from the dam, all piled in confusion with the bodies of cows and horses and goats and chickens. All his anger drained away in a hopeless feeling of failure, Henry felt numb and sick and cold as they climbed up the opposite slope, covered with mud to their waists, their faces and hands daubed with it where they had climbed across the splintered timber and rock. They had had to throw away the jackets Giovanni had been wearing as they became weighted with clogged mud and water and too heavy for the boy’s thin shoulders. Henry had lost a shoe and Caporelli’s shirt had been torn to shreds by the branches of the brushwood as they had raced up the slope away from the water.
They picked their way downwards through the pouring rain, skirting the edge of the debris that had been flung aside and left behind, climbing flattened walls that were mere mounds of mud, pushing past wrecked farm cottages and outbuildings and the odd blank-faced farmer who was standing on the fringe of the destruction where the flood had brushed against his property and passed it by undamaged, leaving him shocked and numb and speechlessly thankful.
Here and there they came across survivors crowded round a shattered figure sprawled on the ground, crushed, broken, half naked and covered in mud, and once they saw two or three men carrying a door on which there was a blanket-covered body. After a while Giovanni began to stumble and they had to take turns to carry him.
