The Haunted Martyr

by Kenneth Cameron

  The compare turned to Denton. ‘Morto?’

  Denton nodded. ‘Morto.’

  ‘Bravo. Bravo-bravo.’ He rattled off something that Denton couldn’t follow. DiNapoli said, ‘He says it’s the best t’ing to kill your enemies right away.’

  ‘And take care of your friends.’

  DiNapoli translated that and Scuttini nodded and smiled like a big toy, slapped his huge hands on the stuffed thighs of his trousers and made an expansive gesture with his arms that seemed to be meant to include all of Italy, at least all that they could see. All of this will take care of you, it meant. Then he said it in so many words, said it in several ways, a particular warmth given to Janet. He seemed to mean it, seemed almost to mean a familial embrace, as if he were something far more primitive than he was (although Denton privately thought him primitive enough), an aborigine making them members of his family, perhaps, to replace ones who had died. He would be, Denton thought, a good companion if he liked you. For so long as he liked you.

  When their carriage had been called and they were standing below the terrace by a mounting block that must have been useful to the now supplanted, horse-borne aristocrats, Denton started to say something about the second man who had run into the cellar but had got away.

  ‘He will be taken care of.’

  ‘You know who it was?’

  ‘My grandson is a stupid kid. He thinks he will be a guappo, a tough guy, his own way, and not coming to me like he should have. He ran with the wrong people. This guy was one of those.’

  Denton had wondered how he would handle the business of the street fight and the pocket-picking. He said, ‘I had a little wrangle with them on the Via Toledo. I didn’t know he was your grandson.’

  The compare’s look was cold, ungiving; it might have been meant to say, Under other circumstances, I would feel disrespected, and that would be the worse for you. He said only, ‘I heard of such things from other people. He was misbehaving.’

  But Denton wanted it to be entirely clear. ‘That was the second time. The first time, they picked my pocket. They took my purse. I owed them a beating.’

  Scuttini’s expression did not change. He said only, ‘Now he owes you his life. We will take care of the other one.’

  The carriage came. Denton saw Janet in and climbed in beside her. Scuttini removed his hat and kissed her hand. He said to her—not to Denton—‘Anything you need, signora… anything…’

  They rattled away. The sun was warm now. In the fields, men and women worked.

  CHAPTER

  9

  They went back to the pensione and slept, but Denton was woken, groaning, after an hour because he had a visitor. The Signora herself came to their door with one of the maids and told him he was causing scandal and she wanted him out, and although the latest caller was a milord and a gentleman, she was fed up with Denton’s visitors. He dressed, groggy and out of sorts, and dragged himself to the smoking room and found Ronald Fanning of the International Society for Super-Normal Investigations. Denton, who wanted only to sleep, had to apologise for rushing away yesterday: he had had to go to the morgue with the police. He even found it expedient to crawl a bit, remembering that Fanning was one of the important people he had thought he wanted to see when he had got the idea for a book on Naples and its ghosts.

  Fanning had a handsome, sensitive face marred only by the near-absence of a chin, for which he’d compensated with an iron-grey moustache and terrific eyebrows. He was perhaps sixty, thin, tall, bespoke-dressed in a morning coat and striped trousers, in general a stylishness spoiled only by rather dirty-looking grey hair left long and combed straight back so that it lay against his skull. He waved away Denton’s apologies with ‘Of course, of course’ and again clutched Denton’s arm and said, ‘Have you heard from him? Has he come through? No? No, of course.’ He was breathing heavily, almost panting. ‘Are you going with me to the medium or are you not? Much as I dislike being forthright with someone I hardly know, Mr Denton, but I must say it: it seems to me that my rigorous scientific interest in Fra Geraldo’s attempt to reach us from the Other Side is to you…’ He searched for a metaphor and spluttered, ‘It is caviar to the general! You are writing a book about things that say “Boo”, and I am doing a scientific investigation!’ He broke away to stride up and down the rather small room.

  Denton decided to ignore the insult, if that was what it was, and said, ‘I didn’t know we were talking about science.’

  ‘Exactly what I mean! You are a…a writer of romances. I suppose that is what drew you to Naples. Romances are so without rigour!’

  ‘It’s one of the things I like about them.’

  ‘We, on the other hand—we of the Society—are trying to bring to the investigation of the super-normal the sort of rigour that a chemist would bring to the study of a gas, or a physicist to a particle. We’ve no more tolerance for popular superstition than a chap at the Clarendon Laboratory would have for the belief in phlogiston.’

  ‘You don’t believe in ghosts and things.’

  ‘It isn’t a question of belief. Science doesn’t operate in the realm of belief. It’s a matter of acceptance of the demonstrably true. Only if a phenomenon can be scientifically verified do we accept it. Of course, there’s something in the popular idea of ghosts and all that, but it isn’t scientifically proven. It isn’t analysed. It’s gossip and myth and…and…superstition. Now, we grant, of course, that there is a dimension beyond our own, else from where would the mediums be receiving their spirit emanations? And what is death? One must accept the existence of the Other Side.’

  Denton, wanting revenge for having been woken, said, ‘And the “Other Side” is scientifically verified?’

  Fanning put a hand on his arm. ‘No, no, of course not. It’s an assumption. Rather like the geometry, you know—there must be a few assumptions, as, were we in a laboratory, we would assume the existence of the atom, although we have never seen one and never could. Because of logic. Do you understand?’

  Denton backed away from the hand and took a turn to a window. ‘But even though atoms aren’t proven, aren’t they sort of accepted notions that work because they meet the requirements, but they’re nonetheless hypothetical and are really waiting to be disproven?’

  ‘Just so.’

  ‘So the Other Side is also hypothetical and waiting to be disproven?’

  ‘No, no, that isn’t quite right. We have a body of evidence. Plus, of course, the logical argument that it must exist.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, because if it did not, what would death be but—oblivion?’

  Denton couldn’t help smiling. ‘And?’

  ‘Not possible. We have far too many indications of its existence. Instances of contacts, of strivings to reach us, of—’

  ‘Ghosts?’

  Fanning looked severe. ‘Do you believe in God?’

  Denton folded his arms. ‘Why does it matter?’

  ‘My dear fellow! How can one be a Christian and not believe in the hereafter?’

  ‘You said it wasn’t a matter of belief.’

  Fanning stared at him. He looked severe again, even more so. ‘We were discussing something altogether different.’ He frowned and pursed his lips. ‘Let me go at it another way. If we had never seen an elephant but we had proven accounts of people touching, smelling, hearing, and seeing elephants, we would accept the hypothesis of the elephant—eh?’

  ‘Sounds right.’

  ‘Well, you see, we have verified instances of messages and returns from the Other Side—scientifically—and so we accept its existence as we accept the atom and the elephant. You see?’

  Denton had his doubts about how well verified such messages might be, but all he said was ‘Mmm,’ and he nodded and stayed silent, hoping Fanning would go away. When he didn’t, Denton tried to move him along, by saying, ‘You mentioned that you want to make an appointment with a medium. To let the old man come through. From the Other Side.’

  �
�The sooner the better, yes.’

  The fact was, Fanning would be useful when his book did get to the subject of the city’s mediums. Mediums were popular stuff, both here and in England; readers would want to read about them. Reluctantly, he said, ‘How about in a couple of weeks?’

  ‘Time is of the essence!’

  ‘They keep time on the Other Side?’

  Fanning said it was too technical to explain, and then he grumbled that he supposed he could accept two weeks’ delay. Denton realised that the urgency was really in Fanning’s character, something childish that wanted things while the desire was hot. He said gently, ‘I’m sure that Fra Geraldo will still be over there in a couple of weeks.’

  Fanning looked pained. But he did go away. Denton saw the outer door close on the thin figure with exhausted relief, and he tottered back to bed.

  Janet woke him at two to eat. He stared at her over the cold lunch and said, ‘The world is full of fools, and I’m one of them. My idea for a book on ghosts was a mistake. I didn’t see what was involved.’

  ‘But you’ll do it anyway, because you need the money, and it will be quite good. Are you too exhausted to make love?’

  ‘What a question.’

  In the bed, he said, ‘DiNapoli’s coming by at five,’ and she said she didn’t expect to be that long, and in fact they were both asleep when DiNapoli rang the pensione’s bell.

  Denton and DiNapoli walked down to Chiaia, the neighbourhood along the seafront west of the Via Toledo. The Piazza dei Martiri was there and the Anglican church, and around it the houses and apartments of English residents and other people with money. There, too, was the apartment of Avocato Spinoso, the owner of the Casa Gialla and its sham ghost.

  ‘He speaks English?’

  ‘Pretty near as good as me.’

  ‘Is he camorristo?’

  ‘More like he gets hired by one of the families.’

  ‘Not the Scuttini.’

  ‘No, I t’ink he’s in wit’ the Mallardi.’ DiNapoli looked around as if they were surrounded by eavesdroppers. ‘They was saying out at the farm that the guy that got away in the cellar was Mallardi. It’s about the whisky—the Mallardi are horning in on Scuttini business.’

  ‘Smuggling—by way of the house I’m going to rent.’

  ‘It don’t pay to know too much.’

  ‘Except I wasn’t supposed to rent it. I was supposed to get scared off.’ He and Janet had talked it over, decided that the house’s owner didn’t want to rent the Casa Gialla at all; he simply wanted to pretend to rent it with a wild tale that would keep it—and its cellar—empty.

  DiNapoli led him to Avocato Spinoso’s building. It was new, very handsome, a style for which Denton had no name but thought of as ‘fancy’. Looking up at the decorated façade, he said, ‘What’s he like?’

  ‘He’s a lawyer.’

  ‘And therefore a crook.’ Denton shook himself, as if he could shake his fatigue away. ‘Did you get your money from him?’ For finding them, he meant, to spend the night in the Casa Gialla and then rent it.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘We’ll see. You stay here.’ Denton crossed the broad street, stepping back for an already out-of-date Panhard that came banging along. A portiere sold him a flat disc for the elevator, then got in with him and operated the elevator to the third floor. It was one of those incomprehensible Neapolitan systems.

  Lawyer Spinoso was gaunt faced, almost cadaverous, his skin pocked with smallpox craters. He was in his forties but made himself look older with an expression of boundless pain. His frock-coated suit, on the other hand, was incomparable, as were his polished boots. He managed a smile for Denton. The smile suggested deep pools of hidden suffering, great forbearance. He introduced Denton to Signora Spinoso, a fat but severe-looking woman who was working on a needlepoint of the Bleeding Heart of Jesus, the reds particularly gaudy. After a curtsy that almost bent her knees, she sailed out, speaking Italian that Denton couldn’t understand.

  ‘My wife is very pious,’ the lawyer said. In fact, his English was far better than DiNapoli’s, accented but fluent, even nuanced. He led Denton to a cluster of hard chairs near a window. The room—presumably a drawing room, certainly too big to be much else—was chock-a-block with furniture, as if it were a showroom. Denton was aware of a lot of carving and dark varnish. The walls, like Signora Spinoso, were very pious: huge canvases of martyrdoms and miracles in a feeble style that suggested that the saints and apostles were maidens in disguise, the beards all rented somewhere.

  The lawyer offered refreshment—his word—and Denton declined. A silence followed; at last the lawyer said, ‘You have come about the Casa Gialla.’ He sighed. ‘I am desolated. You have shown courage and fortitude and have, I understand, spent the night there. All Naples talks of it.’ He sighed again. ‘Unhappily, the house is not ready to be occupied.’

  ‘We have to move out of our pensione tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh, there are other pensione. I can find you a place at one quite close by. This is the English quarter. Very nice.’

  ‘We’ve set our hearts on moving into the Casa Gialla tomorrow.’

  ‘Ah, it desolates me to say it, but such cannot be.’

  ‘As I was saying this morning to my friend Doro Scuttini, we will move in tomorrow.’ Denton smiled. The smile was not a good one, involved no teeth. ‘My friend Signore Scuttini was thanking me for bringing his grandson to him, after I had found the boy tied up and strangling in the cellar of the Casa Gialla. The boy would have been dead in another hour. What an embarrassment for you, Avocato! If not worse.’

  ‘I am shocked.’

  ‘As I was. I also found twenty-two cases of whisky, without the customs stamps. You have been abused, Avocato—your house has been used as storage by smugglers! If not worse.’ Denton gave him the smile again. ‘It could be the Mallardi.’

  ‘The Mallardi.’

  ‘Signore Scuttini is, as I think you know, concerned about the Mallardi. The Casa Gialla is, after all, in a Scuttini neighbourhood. It looks bad to have somebody else using a house there for such purposes. You wouldn’t want your name associated with it.’

  ‘I had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘Just what I told the police. I stopped at the questura earlier; the police should be at the house now, removing the illegal whisky. I told them about the so-called “ghost”. A crude attempt to keep the house from being occupied, don’t you think? I told them that I didn’t see how you could have anything to do with it—after all, you’re the owner and you want the rent. Don’t you?’

  ‘How could I have anything to do with such an outrage?’

  ‘Just what I said. I told them you were eager to rent the place. Couldn’t wait. Just wanted to get over the ghost business and get on with it. I told them that I’d be moving in tomorrow. Of course, it might look awkward for you if I don’t move in tomorrow.’

  ‘I have many friends in the police.’

  ‘Just so. Now, we shall need a set of keys. All the keys. The old woman, by the way—the portiere—she’ll have to go. A question of temperament. I’m sure you’ll understand, a man of the world like you. I’d like her gone today, in fact.’

  ‘She is my wife’s auntie!’

  ‘All the more reason to put her someplace where she’s wanted. Not good for an old woman to be in a hostile atmosphere. Oh, and the WC in the red room—there isn’t one. We’ll want one installed immediately.’

  ‘Impossibile. Impossibile, I mean, with you there. Well, you will not be there! It does not suit me. And the old woman, she stays.’

  Denton looked at him. Denton sighed. ‘I hate to tell that to the police.’ He shook his head. ‘I really hate to tell it to Compare Scuttini.’

  The lawyer pushed his mouth out, lowered his head and stared at Denton as if he were trying to imitate a bull. If he was trying to be terrifically menacing, it didn’t work. He said, ‘I will have the WC installed…in good time. That is exactly what I was thinking of when I
said a month. Maybe six weeks.’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘It is impossibile!’

  Denton shook his head. ‘Let me explain how it looks, Avocato.’ He held up a finger, took its tip in the fingers of the other hand. ‘One, you own a house that you say you want to rent, but there is a tale of a ghost and you require that prospective tenants spend a night there. Two—’ He added another finger. ‘The ghost is a hoax, and it looks bad for you because it is your wife’s auntie who lets the men into the house to frighten off the prospective tenants. Three—’ Another finger. ‘You spread the tale that you have done extensive work on the house, but in fact the work is slapdash and slipshod, and what was really done was done in the cellar and the wine vault, a new door and a new trapdoor into the tunnel underneath.’ Denton leaned forward, putting out his right hand, its three fingers very near the lawyer’s nose. ‘Taken together, it might look like you didn’t want to rent the house at all, but wanted to scare people away. Anybody who heard this might think you were the smuggler and you had almost murdered Scuttini’s grandson.’ He shook his head. ‘Bad.’

  ‘This is a slander! I have a reputation! I have my honour!’

  ‘Mmm. If I were you, I’d bung somebody into that house faster’n you can say Jack Robinson, show people you want the house occupied so the smugglers can’t use it. It’s like I told them at the questura—Avocato Spinoso will prove his innocence by helping me move in today.’

  The lawyer’s thin mouth turned downwards; the eyes narrowed. ‘I am not a sissy boy, signore. I have friends. I have resources.’

  ‘So have I.’

  Spinoso stared at him, but his fingers were moving over the carved heads at the ends of his chair-arms. He licked his narrow lips. ‘Two weeks.’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘I want a ten-year lease.’

  ‘No, month by month. And the first two months free, of course. As you promised.’ Denton stood. ‘Please have the old woman leave the keys at my pensione this evening.’ He glanced out the window. ‘You have a nice view.’ He turned back to the lawyer. ‘This is for the best, signore. The Scuttini are likely to go pretty hard with the Mallardi and anybody connected with abusing the grandson. If we move into the house tomorrow, we’re your bona fides. Mmm?’