The Haunted Martyr

by Kenneth Cameron

  ‘I did, um, get rid of some bad men with a, mm, shotgun. Once upon a time. Long ago. I don’t go around shooting people, Fra Renaldo.’

  ‘Geraldo, my name is Gerald. Renaldo is Spanish.’ For a monk—if that was what he was—he was decidedly testy; or didn’t monasticism necessarily make people nicer? ‘I’ve lived here for donkey’s years, far longer than I ever I lived in England, and people call me Fra Geraldo.’ His voice softened. ‘Fifty years. England is like a child’s dream to me now. Children dream sweet dreams, don’t they. Dreams of innocence. That is my England, innocence and beauty, always summer and always sunshine. I shall never go back.’ His eyes had filled with tears. ‘You live in London, I suppose. Horrible place. It’s hell. If I go to hell, it will be London. Don’t you think?’

  Denton liked London; he skipped the comparison with hell. ‘Are you being haunted by actual ghosts—things you can see and hear, or…? How are they trying to kill you?’

  ‘I hear them. Laughing. Singing. Cruel children. They shouldn’t laugh at me. I try. I’ve tried for fifty years. No, forty-seven years. Atonement. If we atone…’ His voice trailed off, then recovered. ‘They put things in my way. So I shall fall and be hurt. They mean to kill me and send me to hell.’ His left hand, surprisingly strong, gripped Denton’s arm. ‘They mustn’t be let do it! I must not be haunted when I am atoning!’

  Denton felt both disgust and pity. The hand that held him was wrinkled and had a bloom of dirt across the back; the robe or cassock or whatever it was had dribbles of what was probably food down the front; the smell was nasty; and the face, intense now, had creases like knife-cuts down the cheeks and around the mouth, all of them dark with old dirt as if they’d been drawn with a soft pencil.

  People were always asking Denton for help—some residue of the dime novels about his long-ago killings, ‘the man who saved a town’—and he always tried to resist them. And usually failed. He had a hard mind but sometimes a soft heart, at least for the weak and the victimised. If some rotten kids were tormenting this old man, with his foolish fantasies of hell and innocence and redemption, how, Denton thought, could he refuse at least moral support? Atkins, alas, was not there to tell him to use his head, write his book, make money, and tell the old man to hop it. He said, ‘I’m meeting somebody now, but maybe we could get together later. In the afternoon?’

  ‘I have my rounds to make. Then prayers. Then vespers. Why do you think I came to you now? I don’t have all day to swan about like some, you know.’

  Denton reclaimed his arm. ‘This evening?’

  ‘I do my flagellations in the evening. Oh, well, I suppose if it must be, so it must. You’re quite thoughtless, however. Religious devotion is nothing to you, I suppose. Come about eight.’

  Eight would be the middle of the pensione’s evening meal. ‘I suppose we couldn’t make it a little—’

  ‘No we could not!’

  Denton, impatient himself now, said, ‘Where?’

  ‘The Palazzo Minerva, of course! Ask anybody. Next to the little church they call the Vecchio Catedrale, though of course it isn’t. It’s old, very old, but never the cathedral; that’s nonsense. Just walk up any of the streets in Spagnuoli and ask for the Palazzo Minerva; they’ll direct you. I’m very well known. Please don’t be late. I shall have to put off my scourgings until after, and I do dislike going to bed with my wounds fresh.’

  The little man sniffed, then looked around the lounge. ‘This is how your sort of people live when they come to Napoli, is it? It’s terribly vulgar.’ He gathered his skirts about himself and hurried out, his sandals flapping on the terrazzo floor. Denton waited until he was gone and then went out after him, hoping he was far enough behind not to run into him again. He was already regretting having listened to the man. It was always the way. If Atkins were here, he’d say something acid. ‘Going to be made a sap of again, is it?’ Denton sighed. Janet was right: he missed Atkins.

  He pulled on the heavy ulster and put the hood up over his new hat. Without thinking, he patted a pocket to make sure his derringer was there, but of course it wasn’t; this was Italy, and they wouldn’t allow him to have a gun. Even before he’d left London, the Italian consul had said that his ‘history with firearms’ was well known; if he tried to take guns into Italy, he’d be stopped, the guns confiscated. He could of course apply for a permit; approval for a foreigner took about a year. Denton and Janet planned to stay five months.

  When he stepped outside the pensione, he found that the sun was shining.

  ‘Oh, dammit.’

  He ran back upstairs and threw the ulster into the concierge’s closet. When he got downstairs again, a light drizzle had started.

  CHAPTER

  2

  He believed that thirty years before, he had killed his wife, and he bore the guilt and had bad dreams. Not killed her with his hands, not held the jug while she swallowed the lye, but killed her with a love that was relentless and a morality that was unforgiving: killed her with too many children too soon, killed her with a refusal to deal gently with her drinking, killed her with his own despair. She had walked out into a field with the lye jug and drunk her belly full and lived for four days with no doctor, and now she was in his dreams and his thoughts, his ghost. He was thinking of her now as he came out of the pensione, thinking that loving Janet might put that old crime to rest, except that things were not quite right between Janet and him, and maybe again his love was relentless and he was doing it all over again.

  His ghosts.

  Despite the drizzle, the streets were bright: puddles lay along the gutters where quick little streams, blocked by trash, had widened; the pavement reflected brightness from above. The air smelled clean and watery. Ahead of him, where the Via Chiaia went through an arch, a patch of sunlight shone on the buildings like gilding. It was December, almost Christmas, but in London this would have been April weather.

  He passed into the sunny stretch, felt the sun’s warmth; beyond, heading down towards Gambrinus’s café, he went again into shadow, but the drizzle stopped. One day, he thought, he would go into Gambrinus’s; he’d avoided it so far only because he’d been told it was where artists and writers and the singers from the San Carlo Opera across the way all went. Denton missed the raffish Café Royal in London, which he’d made a kind of club. Gambrinus’s might be a replacement, but it sounded to him—terrible thought—‘arty’.

  He turned into the Via Toledo and headed towards the Galleria, where he was to meet the house agent. This was Naples’ busiest street, straight as a ruler’s edge for almost a mile: on one side was the original city laid out by the Greeks, on the other Spagnuoli, the quarter of the sixteenth-century Spanish (and the smelly Fra Geraldo). The Via Toledo was where old and new, rich and poor, native and tourist met; it was a street of great dash and colour—wandering food vendors, musicians, thieves, and in this season men and boys hawking carved figures for the presepe, the manger scene; women shopping, some of them from the brothels in Spagnuoli on their hours off; men lounging, talking, smoking, arguing with animated faces and hands that sketched their words in the air. Denton had had his pocket picked on this street two days after they had arrived. Thinking of it still made him grind his teeth—robbed like any hick just in from the country. There had been two of them, one to bump him and the other to use that distraction to remove his wallet from his inside pocket. He could still feel that quick, slim hand going into the buttoned-up jacket. Texas Jack, indeed.

  The Via Toledo was a street that Denton liked—but not today. He had spoiled his own day with stupid responsibilities. Why hadn’t he told Fra Renaldo—no, Geraldo—that he’d go with him now instead of tonight? He could have killed two birds with one stone, satisfied the old man and got rid of Frioni with the excuse. Now he had the worst of both, Frioni to be told to his face and the monk—

  Coming towards him on the same side of the street were the two young men who had stolen his wallet. He had no question who they were; in the instant of the t
heft, he’d seen both faces, now stamped on his brain. Young, insolent, looking for prey and pleased with themselves. One, the shorter, slimmer one who had lifted the wallet, was the better dressed in a dark suit, a rather more aggressive cut than an English tailor or Atkins would have risked, a soft hat with the brim rolled up on one side. The other wore a suit, too, but one somehow less smart, less exuberant, and a white shirt buttoned but without collar or tie, his trilby broader brimmed. Denton saw all this at a glance and turned his eyes away, because the slender one had seen him and nudged his pal.

  They would be laughing now, he thought. There’s the stupid old frocio we took for a hundred lire. And then one of them would say, Let’s hit him again. And they would argue the risk and then love the risk. Denton glanced at them again, now about thirty feet away, and he saw the small one push his shoulders forward and then pull his elbows against his sides and move his hands outward as he raised the elbows, as if he were pulling his trousers up with them. He was getting ready.

  Rob me once, shame on you. Rob me twice, shame on me.

  He had learned to dissemble from some pretty hard teachers. Now, he made himself the stupid stranger, the tourist, the rube. He made himself seem mindless.

  They came at him ready to do exactly what they had done before—criminals are stupid, an old axiom—ready to separate when two strides away from him, the tall one to bump his shoulder on the left, the slim one to take the wallet on his right. Except that the wallet was not there this time, and Denton was himself ready with all the morning’s irritations—Atkins, Janet, the old man in the robe. He let them take their step apart, let them take the step that would make contact, and as one tried to bump him he swayed slightly towards instead of away from the man and reached down and grabbed the crotch of his trousers, the end of his flies, his testicles, at the same time swinging his right arm out and back to put the elbow into the other one’s right kidney.

  Both men gasped. Then the taller one tried to knock Denton’s hand away. The slim one turned aside and arched his back and put his right hand where the elbow had landed. Denton let him go for the moment, released his hold on the crotch and brought his knee up into it instead, then broke the young man’s nose with his forehead. The man went down on his knees.

  Denton turned back to the other one, grabbed his coat as he was trying to get away—so much for loyalty among thieves—and swung him around, shoving him hard over his own extended foot. The youth went face first into the wall of a building, his head hitting with a wooden sound. Both men started to scream.

  Noise, Denton knew, was an essential of Neapolitan communication. The loudest pig got not only the slops here, but also the whey and the corn and a pat on the head.

  Denton did his own roaring. ‘Ladri! Aiuta-me! Ladri!’ A word surfaced from his long-ago Italian. ‘Sporchezza!’ He snarled it at the two on the pavement. Filth. He remembered loving the word, the spitting feeling of the trilled r’s turning into the explosive che and then the hissed ‘ts’ sound of the double z, and the lengthened, contemptuous final a. It felt so good that he said it again.

  ‘Texas Jack!’ a voice cried behind him. He turned. A fat-faced man was gaping at him. Other people were running towards them. A woman recoiled when she saw the two on the ground, the bloody faces, and she said, shuddering, ‘Crudele!’

  He had expected applause. It was a little much, being called cruel. He tried to think of how to say that his pocket had been picked two weeks before—quindici giornate fa would do for part of it—and realised that nobody had actually picked his pocket today. He saw himself suddenly as they must: a big, loud American who had beaten up two local kids who hadn’t done anything to him.

  He knew what Atkins would say and refused to listen.

  ‘Animale!’

  Denton began to point and shout and stammer. Italian flew out of his head. ‘Le due—due ladri—quelle due sono brigandi—’

  It was no good. Now the crowd was shouting at him. Faces turned ugly. And a voice from the far edge of the crowd was shouting something about the polizia. The police. And how would the police see it?

  Denton moved the fat-faced man out of his way and pushed towards the crowd. A hand came out; he brushed it off. The crowd parted, but more voices were shouting for the polizia.

  Denton began to walk very fast.

  Now you’ve gone and done it, Atkins said inside his head.

  The Galleria was a glorious innovation in the city, a glass-roofed building with wide entrances that seemed to bring the outdoors in rather than shut it out. Galleries rose on all sides, behind them offices and pensiones and, he was told, one rather good whorehouse; the geometrically patterned marble floor made a kind of public plaza where people, mostly men, were smoking and talking and looking about, dressed as if for the street in hats and long coats, outdoors but indoors under the faraway glass ceiling.

  Frioni was sitting at a little table for two, the farthest out into the plaza of those set out by a café. He waved and gave Denton a huge smile, a dapper little man with a very black moustache, a round head, and plump little hands with manicured nails.

  ‘Ah, Signore Den-ton! Come me piace, questa rendezvous…’

  He reached up to embrace Denton, or at least put his hands on his shoulders; two kisses followed, aimed more or less at Denton’s cheeks. ‘What pleasure! What pleasure!’

  Denton looked behind him, half expecting to find that an angry crowd had followed him. ‘I can’t stay,’ he said.

  ‘No, no, we go at once. I have for you today a perfect house. Perfect! Sixteen rooms wit’ all immunities, a view towards Capri and the bay, the beauties of Sorrento and the azura sea—’

  ‘I don’t want it.’ He looked behind himself again.

  ‘—in the most elegantissimo part of the hill of Posillipo, where are already many English, Germans, other races, intelligentsia, people of substance, taste, le bon gout—’

  ‘I don’t want it! You don’t get it. You’re no good to me. What did I say? I want to live in Naples. Not Posillipo. Not the hill of Vomero. Naples! Naples!’

  ‘But, you don’t understand—’

  They were still standing. Denton had moved them a little into the groups of other idlers and talkers. Now, looking over his shoulder again, he saw a policeman—one of the guardie, yellow buttons, white helmet, high-necked coat—come into the Galleria’s entrance and look around. Denton gripped Frioni’s arm. ‘I understand everything! You’re through. Finito. You’re no good. Don’t bother me any more!’ He swung away.

  Now there were two guardie at the entrance; they separated and began to walk around the outside of the vast floor in opposite directions. As if by a thrown switch, the sun came out, flooding the interior with golden light.

  A hand took Denton’s right elbow. He tried to throw it off, thinking it Frioni’s, but the hand slipped through the crook of the elbow and he found himself being steered among the idlers. Looking down, he saw a small grey-haired man, clean shaven two or three days before; he wore a white shirt, collared and buttoned, but no necktie; a frock coat once probably black, long unpressed, made for somebody stouter; on his legs dark blue trousers with a silver stripe, certainly once part of a suit, baggy and fallen into permanent, thick folds like the drapery in a Renaissance painting. On his feet, shoes carefully shined but with one sole separated almost to the arch of the foot. He was carrying a fedora, sweat stains around the band like hightide marks on a beach. Feeling Denton’s look, he glanced up and gave him a glorious grin so abrupt and winning it was like the sun’s appearance over the Galleria. ‘Talk some like we was pals,’ he said in American-accented English. ‘I get you outa here.’

  All Denton could think to say was, ‘Ehhhhh—’

  The man walked them slowly, really an amble, among the chatting, smoking men. He stopped and turned in to Denton and, as if making a point, tapped Denton’s chest with a not quite clean finger and said, ‘You don’t got no idea who I am, which is hokay.’ He began to move them again. ‘I get ne
rvous you maybe getting in a little trouble here.’ He had an assertive accent that was both very American and very Neapolitan: ‘nervous’ was ‘noivous’; the a sounds were flat, even nasal. ‘Now we get the hell outa here,’ the little man said.

  The policemen had met by the far entrance and were now moving again around the perimeter, each retracing the other’s path. Denton’s guide steered him between them, then angled towards the older of the two, off to their right.

  ‘Walk small,’ Denton’s guide said. When Denton didn’t understand, he hissed, ‘Bend your legs, be short!’

  Denton thought, Why am I letting him do this? He’s going to hand me over to that cop! Nonetheless, he tried to bend his knees, thought he must look like a music-hall comedian imitating a duck. At the same time, he felt oddly at peace with what was happening, going arm-in-arm with another man, which he’d never have done in London or America, seeming here right and proper, a kind of admission to the local life. At least he’d got rid of Frioni. What was travel, if not the embrace of the novel, the surprising? And the dangerous?

  Denton felt the hand detach itself from his elbow, and his guide said, as if Denton were a dog, ‘Stay.’ The man waved his hat and approached the policeman. ‘Eh, Ruggieri!’ The cop looked at him with a sad, round, clownish face. He was a middle-aged man who looked as if he hoped he wouldn’t find what he was looking for; any change in his life would surely be for the worse.

  ‘Eh, Vincenzo.’ The cop sounded as if all hope was lost. The man he had called Vincenzo rattled off something Denton couldn’t follow; the cop glanced at Denton; something else was said, in which Denton thought he heard New York.

  The cop looked around the Galleria. Denton heard him say ‘Texas Jack’ in an otherwise incomprehensible gabble of Neapolitan. Denton’s guide bowed his legs and raised his hat and mimed riding a horse. He laughed. The cop muttered something unhappy and Vincenzo said, ‘Arrivaderla, Ruggieri.’