by John Harris
‘How do you know?’
‘’Ad a look. Me and Anderson. They brought a van down the mole when it started to get dark. They kept it well covered up but they forgot us. We could see from the bridge.’
‘All that way?’
‘Telescopes, Mister,’ Hannay explained blandly. ‘They put it in the main cabin. They was in a proper ‘urry. It ain’t even packed properly.’
‘Have you told anyone?’
‘Only you.’
Patch stared at his cigarette end. ‘Poor bloody little Pelli,’ he said compassionately.
‘Poor Pelli!’ Hannay snorted contemptuously. ‘He’s right in there dodging like the rest, Mister. As for that Forla he ought to be strung up by his thumbs. Standing there trying to make everyone think they’re safe when all he’s come for is to empty his flipping house of everything that’s valuable.’
Twenty-nine
Hannay stayed late with Patch before setting off for his ship, and it was with some surprise that Patch, drinking a last coffee in Emiliano’s before going to bed, saw him burst through the door just as he was about to leave.
‘Now what the hell?’ he asked. ‘Forla taken his crates back? Or has Orlesi thrown a fit?’
‘Cut it out,’ Hannay said brusquely, his expression a mixture of anger and anxiety. ‘It’s none of that. It’s Cristoforo.’
Emiliano leaned over the bar, his large eyes dark with sympathy, his hands clasping the handles of the coffee machine.
‘He’s disappeared,’ Hannay went on. ‘I’ve got him outside. Devoto, I mean. He come to me, wanted to know where I’d hidden him. It took me an hour to convince him I hadn’t got him. And when I found he was serious I started to get the wind-up too. The last time he was seen, he was going up the hill out of town. He’s got an aunt up there or something, but she hasn’t seen him. I think he’s gone up to San Giorgio and I want you to help me find him.’
Patch finished his coffee and hitched up his sagging trousers. ‘What the hell has he gone to San Giorgio for?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe because it’s about as far as he can get from him. I think it’s because the bastard won’t let him come away with me. I told him I was ready to leave, you know, and he’s not been home since. He’s got a pal up there in San Giorgio, hasn’t he? I’ve heard him talk about him. Matteo Lipparini or something. I’ll bet he’s there and I want to be around when that bastard finds him.’ Hannay kept bringing out the word with repetitive explosiveness, as though he drew some pleasure from it. ‘Besides which, in case you ‘aven’t noticed, the kettle’s started singing again.’
‘Oh, Christ, no!’
They went to the door and stared up into the dark sky. The sound that came from behind the town was almost imperceptible but it was clearly the beginning of the whistle again.
Devoto was standing in the square near the statue of Garibaldi, his big body lounging against the plinth, his handsome face dark with suspicion, and Hannay glared at him with undisguised hatred.
‘I don’t trust the bastard,’ he said. ‘He might have a go at the kid when he sees him and I might not be big enough to stop him. He’s a heavyweight. I’m only a bantam.’
‘OK,’ Patch said. ‘I’ll come. Let’s get a taxi. There’ll be no buses at this time of night.’
‘Signor Tom,’ Emiliano said gently from the doorway. ‘Let me take you. My van’s in the square and I have finished now.’
The atmosphere in the little vehicle was tense as Emiliano drove them out of the town. Hannay crouched on a box in the back with Patch, sitting opposite Devoto, a sort of armed truce existing between them. Emiliano sensed the tension too, and talked all the time from the front, gesturing with his hands and laughing nervously, so that the van seemed to drive itself more than be driven.
San Giorgio was almost in darkness when they arrived, only a few lights showing in the village street. As they stopped to ask at a house for directions to the Lipparini small-holding, Patch was aware of a deep sighing noise about him as though a wind had sprung up and was stirring the trees, but the air was still and the leaves were undisturbed against the night sky.
For some reason he began to wish he were down in the Porto. The crowded houses and the narrow streets there suddenly seemed to have a warmth and affection that glowed against the loneliness of the bare mountain.
When they arrived in the farmyard, lights were glowing in the Lipparini house, a tiny low-roofed building lit with oil lamps, that seemed full of people from Lipparini himself and his wife, through two or three generations. From the doorway, beyond the barking dogs, they saw Cristoforo immediatedly, still wide awake and big-eyed at the far side of the room, hugging Masaniello. He said nothing, sitting silently with two or three older children as he listened to Hannay and Devoto arguing with Lipparini in a growling undertone.
Then Lipparini shook his head. ‘He’s not going,’ he insisted. ‘The boy is afraid. No boy should be afraid like that.’
‘I’m his guardian.’ Devoto brushed past Hannay. ‘I say he must come home.’
‘Mamma–’ Lipparini called over his shoulder, ‘–we must get advice. Go and fetch the priest. He’ll tell us what to do.’
His wife hesitated, not certain whether the instruction was meant to be a bluff or not, and it seemed to Patch that the whole affair had a tinge of melodrama about it – with the scared faces of Cristoforo and the women caught by the light of the oil lamps, and the angry figures of Hannay and Devoto in the doorway, both of them quite obviously ready to start another quarrel.
Then, while they were still waiting for Lipparini’s wife to move, the sighing noise about them changed until it became a low grumbling sound, like an ominous hollow growl at the back of a dog’s throat, and immediately, everyone’s eyes left Cristoforo’s face and swung up into the darkness above them.
‘Holy Mother of Jesus!’ Lipparini’s wife crossed herself quickly, and for the first time Patch caught a glimpse of the doubt that existed up there in San Giorgio, and the fear that the Givannos had spoken about after the death of their father.
The breathy grumbling grew louder and louder and Patch felt the ground tremble, almost as though it were one of the distant thunderstorms that sent the lightning flashing across the Tyrrhenian like the sweeping beam of a search-light, rattling and rumbling over the curve of the sea, as sullen as distant gunfire.
As it died, a violent crack shuddered the mountain and brought everyone inside the smoky little room to their feet. At once, they heard the restless noise of animals behind the house and the dogs which stood behind Lipparini began to bark again.
Cristoforo was completely forgotten as the whole lot of them tumbled out of the house and stood in the farmyard, staring at the sky. Through the clouds along the ridge of the slope, they could see the moon and the brilliant stars. Then one of the dogs stopped barking and started to howl, throwing its head back and letting out a series of melancholy cries that echoed round the house. Immediately all the others started to howl too.
‘Quiet, Aldo! Quiet, Asa!’ Lipparini snapped, and in the silence that followed Patch felt the hair at the back of his neck standing on end.
Over the thick silence, they heard shouts from farther down the slope, nearer to the village, and the howling of more dogs among the huddled houses.
‘Listen,’ Hannay said. Over the increased rumbling above them they heard the noise of rattling stones, and the first thing that occurred to Patch was that one of Lipparini’s goats had knocked down a wall. The same thought appeared to occur to Lipparini and he stepped forward, but everything had become still again and silent, and he turned, at a loss, and stared at the others. Below them the village seemed to have awakened abruptly, and they could hear more shouts now over the fold of rocky soil where the farm stood.
‘It’s stopped again,’ Emiliano said, pointing.
The whole group of them, the four of them who had arrived in the van, Lipparini, the womenfolk and the old people, and the scared-looking children, were s
taring up the slope. Above them the yard led out into the fork of two deep narrow lanes, almost like sunken roads that headed higher up the slopes to the Lipparinis’ scrubby fields and threadbare vineyards. Farther up, they could see two spots of light where another farm stood.
Then the mountain started its racket again and the dogs began to back away, growling deep in their throats, the hair along their backs bristling
‘Aldo! Asa!’ Lipparini called them but the dogs refused to return to his side.
‘Look! Look!’ His wife shot out a hand and they saw the lights above them disappear abruptly.
‘That’s the Givannos’ farm,’ Lipparini said. ‘Young Marco’s up there alone. Something’s happened. We ought to go and see.’
‘You’re not leaving here,’ his wife said quickly. ‘Not till daylight. The Lord have mercy on us, we don’t know what’s happening–’
Above the sounds of the mountain, they heard a series of shouts from the direction of the Givannos’ farm and then silence, a thick silence that had a sinister quality.
‘I’m off home,’ Devoto said. Swinging round, he stepped forward to grab Cristoforo’s arm but Emiliano moved into his path, his big stomach thrust out. Devoto bounded off it, and Hannay grabbed the boy and swung him aside.
‘Give him to me,’ Devoto shouted furiously, recovering himself.
‘When you’ve calmed down!’ Hannay shouted back.
‘Give him to me!’
The argument developed into a struggle which to Patch looked like one of those sad newspaper pictures of estranged couples fighting for possession of a child, both men pulling at the pathetic figure of Cristoforo cowering between them, and they all forgot the mountain and stepped forward to separate them.
‘Let him go,’ Patch shouted in Hannay’s ear above the babble. ‘You’ve got no authority to do this, you damn’ fool! You’ll only make it worse for him.’
It was while they were still struggling that they heard the clattering of rocks again and a grinding noise as though huge boulders were moving against each other. The quarrelling stopped and Cristoforo was ignored abruptly as they swung round once more, their eyes trying to pierce the mountain blackness.
‘It’s an avalanche,’ Hannay said.
‘Signore,’ Lipparini said. ‘You’ve never heard an avalanche. There’s not enough noise.’
In spite of themselves, they were all beginning to edge backwards towards the road that led to the village.
A donkey came clattering towards them, its dainty feet slithering and stumbling over the rocky path, and they heard the splintering of wood and a crash that sounded like a gate falling.
‘That’s the Givannos’ donkey!’ Lipparini made a grab for the animal and missed, and as the sense of something inexplicable and malevolent about them grew, the lips of the women began to move.
‘Holy Mother of Mercy, have pity on us,’ Lipparini’s wife was muttering. ‘Holy Mother of God, watch over this farm.’
They could now smell a warm humid heat that seemed to be drawing closer, heavy on the clear mountain air, like the smell of boiling vegetables.
‘Get the children together,’ Lipparini said abruptly, and the women began to gather the children into a group, Hannay and Devoto hanging about near Cristoforo.
Patch had begun to move slowly out of the farmyard up the hill, trying to see what was happening, and Lipparini caught up with him by the gate,
‘Do you see anything, signore?’ he asked.
As they stared, the clouds parted and the moon came through briefly and the two of them, their ears assailed by the stony cacophony from the mountain, saw a swiftly moving wall of what looked in the darkness like slimy soil coming towards them. It seemed about ten feet high and they could see it was steaming. Then they realised the roadway was full of water which was warm against their shoes. A big fig tree higher up the road bent over before the hideous moving mass and toppled, and they saw the heavy viscous flow swing round the trunk and sweep on towards them.
‘Holy Mother of God!’ The words broke out of Lipparini’s mouth in a croak, and he turned back into the farmyard at a run, shouting a warning.
‘Get the children out of here, Mamma,’ he yelled.
Emiliano was already stuffing the smallest ones into his van. ‘Run,’ he was shouting to the older children. ‘Run! Run down to the village! It’s mud!’
He slammed the doors and dropped into the driving seat, and the van jerked out of the farmyard, bouncing down the stony road followed by the barking dogs, all the children shrieking and pawing at the windows. The women, the old people, Hannay and Devoto set off after them.
‘Givanno,’ Lipparini said to Patch as they disappeared. ‘We’ve got to get to Givanno! He’s on his own up there.’
He moved forward, seeking a way round the moving mass, but he found himself face to face with a farm cart being pushed sideways down the hill by another horrifying wave that wilted the vegetation in front of it. Then the cart caught its near wheel in a rut, toppled over, and was buried within seconds, and the two of them turned and set off after the tail lights of Emiliano’s van and the shouting family as they streamed down the hill.
Thirty
By the time daylight arrived, the muffled rumblings had increased and the high-pitched sigh from the mountain had started again. This time, however, the note of the whistle was higher and more of a shriek and somewhere down in the background, as though it were an ugly orchestration from the bowels of the earth, there was a rattling noise like the roll of iron-bound wheels over the cobbles of the Piazza del Mare. The air was full of the smell of sulphur.
When the Porto awoke, the sun was shining but there seemed to be no brightness anywhere. The pantiles of the roofs had changed overnight from the russets and reds and blues to grey – a dull flat grey that reflected no light and, in fact, seemed to absorb light into itself. The window ledges were grey, too, every horizontal plane the same monotonous colour. The whole town had been changed by a thick film of cinder dust in which the blurred footprints of human beings mingled with the neater round ones of dogs, and the small criss-cross marks where pigeons had landed. Wavering down the middle of the streets through the grey-white covering were the tyre marks of bicycles and the wider marks of cars.
‘Mamma mia! Mamma mia!’ A woman on a balcony was complaining in a high-pitched wail over the clothing she had left out overnight to dry, now covered with a muddy-looking film where the grey dust had stuck to it.
There were people at every window, their hands grimy, the dust sticking to their faces and filling the lines on their foreheads and round their mouths and eyes. The plume of smoke still hung over the mountain, mingling with the obscuring clouds so that they couldn’t see the summit properly, bigger than on the previous day and darker, and directed by the wind over the town in heavy rolls of brown and black which seemed to lift hideous stomach sounds from the mountain’s inside and spill them down among the alleys and courts of the Porto.
The Piazza Martiri was full of people and dogs and mules as the refugees from San Giorgio began to arrive in the town. Gaunt-faced women, some of them with babies at the breast, were squatting on the pavement, their backs against the withered orange trees with their bright fruit. Behind them their menfolk argued above the noise and gesticulated among themselves, their pathetic belongings piled on to barrows. Some of them were only half-dressed and people from the alleys round the piazza, with a full-hearted generosity, brought shabby clothes and old blankets and bowls of pasta for them. There seemed to be hundreds of human beings in the square, and hundreds of scared-looking children and homeless dogs. A couple of nuns, Don Alessandro and Don Gustavo, his curate, and the priests from the Church of Sant’ Antonio on the edge of the town were moving among them muttering prayers that were drowned by the sullen roaring from the mountain that continued to increase as the sun grew weaker and the dust grew worse where it was stirred into clouds by the moving feet.
Patch pushed through the crowd as though in
a dream, stupefied with weariness and lack of sleep, his face and hands grimy, his shoes and clothes smeared with the mud that had overwhelmed San Giorgio.
The police who had arrived with a lorry in response to frantic telephone calls had had to leave their vehicle a mile below the village because of the condition of the road, and climb the rest of the way through the wilting foliage. The mud had flowed straight down the main street and had swept into the church where the sacristan had been pulling the bell in a warning. They had been bringing out his body, unrecognisable under the mud, as the police had arrived. About the fields, the women had sat with their children, collecting their few treasures in little groups as the men struggled down the long street to rescue them. It had been impossible to clean anything as the mud had blocked the streams and stopped up the village wells and covered the water taps in the square; and all they could do was stare with a helpless despair at the slimy blankets and bedding, the stained pictures of the saints and the cheap terra cotta statuettes of the Virgin Mary.
Patch had helped to cram them into lorries as the hopelessness of trying to provide accommodation in San Giorgio became obvious, leaving their belongings for the most part scattered over the scrubby grass and draped on the olive trees at the mercy of the weather. They were taken down the hill, through the gap they’d cleared in the road, and down to the Porto to schoolrooms and the Aragonese castle and the churches of Sant’ Agata and Sant’ Antonio.
Don Dominico had run him up from Fumarola on his return to the town. He had been trying to get hold of Patch all morning, desperate for reassurance.
‘Signor Patch,’ he had said. ‘If anything happens, Fumarola will be swept into the sea. I’m bringing my people round to the Porto.’
The old man’s urgent voice was still in his ears as Mamma Meucci grabbed him, her face grey-white with fear, not quite certain what to be afraid of first.
