A Dead Man in Naples

by Michael Pearce

  ‘Not enough money, though, to buy a bicycle. But Father Pepe wasn’t daunted. Arguing that God had pointed the way, he reckoned that all that was necessary was to persevere. So he placed another bet. And, bless me, that one came good, too. After that there was no stopping him and he soon had enough money to buy a bicycle.

  ‘Unfortunately, he didn’t stop there. Reasoning again – he was a bit over-given to reasoning, was Father Pepe – that God had not shown him the way for nothing, he placed more bets and won more money, all of which he gave to charity. Until the lottery office complained and the bishop stopped him.’

  ‘I think I’ve heard part of this story before.’

  ‘You may well have. Father Pepe is now famous throughout Naples. He has fulfilled every Neopolitan’s dream – he has devised a system for winning the lottery. And then the Church made him stop, and swore him to secrecy, and took away all his money. As, in their experience, the Church always does.’

  Neither Seymour nor Chantale was a great one for taking a siesta but that day it was so hot that after lunch they went back to the pensione. There was a tiny patio at the back and Chantale took a book out there. There was no wind on the patio – there was no wind anywhere in Naples, except, possibly, up on the heights overlooking the bay – but the high walls surrounding the garden made it shady and therefore cool.

  She hadn’t been reading long when she became aware that she had been joined. A small boy crossed the patio on hands and knees, crawled to the edge and paused beside a tub containing an orange tree. There was a step down into the small garden, a big step for a tiny boy on all-fours, and he paused for a moment to consider it, his back against the tub.

  ‘Fall,’ he said.

  He spoke in Arabic and Chantale replied, without thinking, in Arabic, too.

  ‘Would you like me to lift you down?’ she asked.

  The little boy regarded her unthinkingly for a moment and then said: ‘Backwards.’

  He swivelled himself round, and lowered his rear end over the steps.

  Chantale watched him in case of accidents.

  ‘Always go down steps backwards,’ he told her.

  ‘A good idea!’ agreed Chantale.

  The little girl she had met earlier came out on to the patio, scooped up the small boy, and was going to take him inside, but he protested vigorously. She stopped uncertainly, then made up her mind.

  ‘He does not disturb you, Signora?’ she said politely to Chantale.

  ‘Not at all,’ replied Chantale.

  ‘Where do you want to be?’ she asked the small boy. ‘Up there or down here?’

  ‘Down here,’ said the small boy.

  She put him down, but then at once he climbed back up the steps and sat again with his back to the tub. The girl sighed.

  ‘Does the Signora have a brother?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ said Chantale, ‘but I know they can be trying sometimes.’

  ‘Atiya!’ called a voice from inside.

  The little girl disappeared.

  A moment later the mother came out.

  ‘He is not being a nuisance?’ she said anxiously. She spoke in Italian. Chantale’s Italian was good enough for her to understand the question but not much more, and she replied in Arabic.

  ‘No, no, not at all!’ she said.

  ‘If he is, give me a shout,’ said the Arab woman. ‘I am just in the kitchen, helping Maria.’

  She turned to go but then stopped.

  ‘You do not have any children yourself yet?’ she said.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Of course!’ said the woman. ‘I was forgetting. You are still to marry. I find the customs strange here. That you should be with your plighted man on your own. It is not the way they do it in Libya.’

  ‘Nor in Tangier,’ said Chantale laughing.

  ‘It is better, I think,’ said the woman. ‘This way you get to know each other away from the family.’

  ‘That is true,’ said Chantale. ‘But sometimes the family is a great support.’

  ‘That also is true,’ said the woman. ‘It is true in my case. Without my husband’s family I do not know what I should have done.’

  ‘But sometimes the family can be overwhelming,’ said Chantale. ‘Especially if it is not entirely your own family.’

  ‘That is true,’ said the woman seriously. ‘My husband found it so, certainly. Of course, he did not know my family for long. Sometimes I think that that made it easier. He was good with them, but . . . It was difficult and would have become more difficult. It is easier for women to adjust, I think. Because we have our children. So perhaps it was better the way it fell out. That it should be me, not him, that was left. Even though it is hard.’

  ‘It is always hard, I think,’ said Chantale, ‘in a foreign country. Sometimes better but always hard.’

  ‘One’s hope is that it will be less hard for them,’ said the woman, gesturing towards her children.

  ‘You mean to stay?’ asked Chantale.

  ‘What choice do I have?’ said the woman.

  She made as if to go but then stopped again. Chantale guessed that it was a relief for her to be able to talk about her situation in her own language and with a fellow Arab.

  ‘But sometimes I feel bitter,’ she said. ‘The people here are nice. They have been good to me. But why did they come to my country in the first pace, bringing their killing? But, then, if they had not, I would not have met Tonio. And the little ones wouldn’t have been here.’

  She gestured again to the children. Chantale could see that they determined everything for her in a way that she could not herself imagine, having no children of her own. Yet? That was hard to imagine, too. Chantale had always had to fight fiercely but she had fought for herself, to make her own way in a man’s world. Whichever way you defined it, whether it had been the Arab world of her Moroccan mother or the army world of her French father, it had been a man’s world. The French had been good to her. They had opened doors. It was through them that she had learned about this other, this European world in which women seemed to be beginning to play a part. She had sensed that in the end it was the world for her, it had to be, and she had fought hard to belong to it.

  But for her mother it must have been different. She had had her own world and after her husband had died she must have been tempted to revert to it. But, like this woman now, she had had something else to fight for beside herself: her child. And that, Chantale suddenly realized, now, made all the difference.

  Seymour had been told that Father Pepe could be found most afternoons working in the grounds of a poor church on the outskirts of Naples. Father Pepe was used to poor churches. He had had the care of one himself before the bishop has translated him to the city, where he could keep an eye on him. What he was not used to, however, was the absence of greenery. There had not initially been much greenery at his previous church, which had been up in the mountains, mostly on bare rock; but over the years he had succeeded in changing that by loving cultivation. Now, in his new church in Naples, he found himself on equally stony soil and had had to start all over again.

  In some respects, though, his situation was better. There might not be any grass, not many trees, but what astonished him was that there were flowers in abundance. Every balcony – and almost every house had a balcony, they rose one above another in even the shabbiest of streets – was like a miniature garden. Bright red geraniums thrust their heads out of window boxes, pots of carnations bloomed at every corner. Vines softened the glare of the sun against the white stucco of the walls. If they could do it, reasoned Father Pepe, why couldn’t he?

  And so soon vines began to creep up the dilapidated walls of the church, the brown, scorched dust which surrounded it became green, and the church was now approached through borders of brightly coloured flowers.

  All this required labour, which, the bishop was relieved to see, now occupied most of Father Pepe’s free hours, and water. Water, actually, was Father Pepe’s chief problem fo
r the church was on a slight promontory and any water had to be carried up from a pump in the square below.

  There were mutters about this; for was it right that good water should be used in this frivolous way when it might better be spent on softening the lives of those nearer at hand?

  Father Pepe had, however, checked on this. There was plenty of water. The pump was fed from a spring which, in the experience of even the oldest square-dweller, had never dried up. And were not the flowers in their own way a tribute to God?

  Faced with such tricky theological speculation, the critics backed off. Some bold spirits ventured to say that they liked it. The spirit of the balconies rose in support of Father Pepe and to everyone’s surprise the congregation began to increase. The bishop began to keep an even more anxious eye on what was going on.

  So there was no shortage of people ready to tell Seymour where the church and Father Pepe might be found.

  ‘You go to the Gradini di Chiaia,’ they said, confident that even the strangest of strangers would know where that was. Seymour, going by the name, was thrown for the moment, for chiaia meant quay and the street was nowhere near the sea. He soon learned, however, that the street was famous throughout Naples for its flowers. It descended in steps and on every step there were baskets of flowers. Working, as the Neapolitans appeared to do, by association, one bunch of flowers led to another, and they directed Seymour accordingly. Despite this he found the church.

  He knew it was the right church when he saw the bicycle. It leaned against the wall of the church. Its owner was at first nowhere to be found but then the small elderly figure of the priest came into view carrying two huge wooden buckets by a yoke over his shoulders. When he saw Seymour he put the buckets down with relief.

  ‘If only you could carry them on the bicycle!’ said Seymour.

  ‘I’ve tried it,’ said Father Pepe, ‘but it won’t work. You can only carry one bucket at a time in the basket and by the time you’ve pushed bicycle and bucket up the hill twice, it’s not worth it.’

  He sat down on a stone and mopped his brow with the sleeve of his habit.

  ‘Were you wanting to see me about something?’ he asked.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about someone,’ said Seymour.

  ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘An Englishman. Whom I think you knew. His name was Scampion.’

  ‘I knew Signor Scampion,’ said the priest quietly.

  ‘You had, of course, interests in common,’ said Seymour, glancing at the bicycle.

  ‘Many interests in common,’ agreed the priest.

  ‘My interest,’ said Seymour, ‘is in how he came to die. I am an English police officer.’

  ‘He was stabbed,’ said Father Pepe. ‘In the street.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Many people are stabbed in Naples. Life is cheap in poor streets.’

  ‘I understand that,’ said Seymour. ‘But I don’t think this was quite like that. He was not the man to get involved in brawls. And his money was not taken.’

  ‘Sometimes an innocent man standing by –’ began Father Pepe.

  Seymour shook his head.

  ‘Scampion was not standing by,’ he said. ‘He was killed deliberately. And for a purpose.’

  He took out the betting slip and gave it to Father Pepe.

  ‘I wondered if this could be something to do with the purpose,’ he said.

  Father Pepe looked at the slip. ‘It is, of course, an ordinary ticket for the National Lottery.’

  ‘Did Scampion buy tickets in the lottery? This was found in his pocket.’

  The priest looked puzzled.

  ‘I did not know he betted,’ he said. ‘It surprises me. I was under the impression that he didn’t. We talked about betting once. I was explaining to him how I came to own a bicycle – I used the money I won by betting,’ he said apologetically. ‘Signor Scampion said that was all right. I was putting the money to good use. He had no objection to betting from that point of view, he said. Although he thought that poor people shouldn’t bet. They would only lose their money.

  ‘He said that was the reason why he never betted himself. He knew he would never win anything. I said it wasn’t quite like that. I tried to explain about odds.’

  He shook his head, smiling. ‘But Signor Scampion was no mathematician. He just laughed and said he had learned he was not a lucky person. He never won raffles or things like that. I said to him that there was no such thing as a lucky person. It was just a matter of odds. The personal qualities of people did not come into it. I am a mathematician, you see,’ he explained. ‘I studied mathem- atics before I became a priest. And I believe it is just a matter of arithmetic. But I couldn’t persuade him. He insisted it was luck and some people had luck and others didn’t. I said, that’s what they all believe. But it’s just superstition. Ignorant superstition.’

  ‘And yet he had the ticket in his pocket,’ said Seymour.

  ‘That is what puzzles me.’

  ‘Someone suggested to me that he might have been given it. And that he might have intended to pass it on.’

  ‘It is possible.’

  ‘They suggested that he might possibly have been going to pass it on to you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Because you were a friend who might be able to put it to better use.’

  Father Pepe shook his head.

  ‘I – I don’t have anything to do with betting now,’ he said.

  ‘This, of course, would have been for charity.’

  ‘Even for charity,’ said the priest quickly. ‘I try to have nothing to do with it nowadays.’

  He looked at the lottery ticket again.

  ‘Is there anything special about it? Anything unusual?’

  Father Pepe gazed at the ticket.

  ‘It looks as if the number has come straight from the Smorfia,’ he said. ‘In which case it might give you a clue to the identity of the person who bought it.’

  ‘A person, anyway,’ agreed Seymour. ‘The address is that of the Foundling Hospital. And part of the number is the number of a person who was admitted to it.’

  ‘The personal number, yes,’ said Father Pepe. ‘Then I can see why it might have been special to them and why they might have wished to use it in the lottery. But why would the ticket have been given away?’

  ‘Perhaps because the date had passed?’ suggested Seymour.

  ‘And why was it in Signor Scampion’s pocket?’ said Father Pepe, thinking.

  Suddenly his brow cleared.

  ‘Could it be,’ he said, ‘that the ticket was passed on, or thrown away, precisely because it was out of date? The time limit had expired. It no longer mattered. But somehow it came into the possession of Signor Scampion for whom it did matter. Not because of the possibility of winning the lottery but because of the person. He kept the ticket because it spoke to him of the person.’

  Chapter Six

  When Seymour came out of the pensione the next morning he found Giuseppi talking to a young man in the street.

  ‘You can’t do this, Bruno!’ he was saying.

  ‘She needs it!’ said the young man. ‘The money’s not come through yet.’

  ‘I spoke to them yesterday. I went down to the office with her. And Rinaldo and Pietro, too. And they promised they would do something about it.’

  ‘Yes, but when?’ said the young man. ‘When? And meanwhile she’s got to live.’

  ‘The family will look after her.’

  ‘The family is looking after her, I know. But, Giuseppi, your brother is a sick man. Not much money goes into that house. And there are others to be thought of, too. It’s too much!’

  He put his hand on Giuseppi’s arm.

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said. ‘I know the family’s doing what it can. And I know you do your bit, too, Giuseppi. But, hell, you’ve got others to think of as well. With your son living out there, too, and you having to look after Julia and Francesca. All I’m saying is I want to do my bi
t, too. I’m in a job. The money comes in regularly. Tonio was a mate of mine, right? I promised him I would help if need be. All I’m doing is keeping that promise.’

  ‘Yes, but Bruno, you have other people to think of too. Your mother.’

  ‘She’s no expense. We’ve got the house and she eats like a bird. It costs nothing. Look, I’m only giving what I can spare.’

  ‘You’re very generous, Bruno, but –’

  ‘Come on, take it! Take it!’ said the young man, pushing a bundle of notes into Giuseppi’s hands.

  ‘Why do I have to give it her?’ asked Giuseppi. ‘Why can’t you give it her?’

  ‘It would look better coming from you. You’re Tonio’s uncle. If it came from me, people would talk. They would say, hey, what’s going on? Why is he giving her money?’

  ‘Well, you’ve answered that, haven’t you? Because you were Tonio’s mate.’

  ‘Yes, but you know what people are. They would say: what’s the money for? What is she giving him in exchange? And I couldn’t bear that, I couldn’t bear them thinking . . .It would hurt me, Giuseppi. I would think I had not protected her name. Her name! The widow of my mate! Christ, what would Tonio think! What would he say if he came back? In a dream, perhaps, if he came back to me in a dream – Christ! My mate! His name as well as hers! Jesus!’

  ‘Now, now, Bruno, it’s all right!’ said Maria, coming out of the pensione and putting her arms around him. ‘Everyone knows you’ve been a true friend to Tonio, and we thank you for that.’

  ‘It’s the things people say, Maria! About her being black and all that. They ask where did he pick her up? What was she doing for a living? Was she a – oh, Maria, you can’t believe what people say!’

  ‘And you shouldn’t believe what they say!’ said Giuseppi sharply. ‘Do they think a decent boy like Tonio would pick for a wife a woman of that sort?’

  ‘And anyone who’s talked to her for five minutes,’ said Maria angrily, ‘should know that she’s not like that!’

  ‘But they talk, Maria, they talk! They say: what is she doing here?’