The Haunted Martyr

by Kenneth Cameron

  The lawyer’s face was wooden, the eyes seemingly almost closed. With his head tipped a little back, he seemed to be studying Denton but was perhaps studying his situation. A shrug suggested that he had found the situation not worth fighting. ‘I will have papers made for the notary. The limit on your occupation to be one year.’

  Denton put out his hand. ‘That’s a deal.’

  ‘And now if you will forgive me—’ Spinoso held out his left arm towards the door. ‘I am desolated, but it is the time to lead my family in evening prayer.’

  Inspector Gianaculo was, to Denton’s and the Signora’s disgust—a response shared for different reasons—waiting for him at the pensione. Denton had no idea why he was waiting; to be sure, Denton had sent the note about the whisky in the Casa Gialla’s cellar, but that was hardly worth a visit. Nonetheless, the Inspector looked calm, patient, as if he could easily wait all night. Again, he needed a translator and said, through the same austere woman, ‘I am pursuing the matter of Fra Geraldo.’

  Denton remembered, as if it had been years ago, that Gianaculo had been one of those who had been at Fra Geraldo’s house—the second wave, as it were, after the neighbours and the policeman. In fact, Gianaculo had been there with the doctor and the magistrate. Denton said, ‘I thought the magistrato was pursuing it now.’ He wanted to say that Gianaculo should team up with Ronald Fanning and talk to Fra Geraldo’s ghost. What he really wanted was to get rid of him and talk to Janet about his visit to Avocato Spinoso.

  Gianaculo said through the translator, ‘You have doubts about the manner of the death, Signore Denton. You visited the corpse in the morgue.’

  ‘Not because I wanted to.’ Why did he have to go through it again? The blood, the ghosts, the apparent accident. He wondered why Gianaculo was bothering him, then remembered that the local police and the Carabinieri were different creatures, perhaps rivals; Donati had probably gone back to Rome without even speaking to him. Maybe Gianaculo wanted to know what Donati had said. ‘Fra Geraldo was certainly frightened when he talked to me. Did he have enemies?’

  ‘Basically, he was a man of God. He took food and medicine to the poor. During the cholera in eighty-four, he was down in the Old City before the White Cross got there. The people in the bassi believe he was a saint. They’re already praying to him. Why would he have enemies?’

  ‘He was—’ Denton told the woman to step into the corridor and wait until he called her. She was offended but went, anyway. Denton said, trying to dredge up the Italian he had once known, ‘He was castrato.’

  Gianaculo rapped out something, added, ‘E il suo cazzo anche. So?’

  Denton tried to say in Italian, You don’t think some enemy did that to him? but it came out as You think not maybe enemy how do you say did for it—? He was unable to fit the pronoun in and so couldn’t refer back to the castration. He called the woman back and she translated in a frosty voice. ‘I thought maybe somebody had done that to him. There’s something called the Camorra. They do that kind of thing, don’t they?’

  Gianaculo grunted. ‘The Camorra would have stuck—’ He looked at the woman, hesitated, and said, ‘—them in his mouth and strangled him. Why would the Camorra care about Fra Geraldo?’

  Denton shrugged. ‘They’re bad actors, aren’t they?’ The woman looked bewildered; it was the word ‘actors,’ an Americanism. He corrected himself, ‘Bad people.’

  ‘Yes, but—no… Yes, he told people not to waste their money on the Piccolo Giocco, the illegal lottery. And the Camorra take a slice of that, but nobody listened to him. And he told the people not to borrow money from the usurie but to come to him, and the Camorra take their slice from the usury business. And he preached against the Risanamento, the urban renewal after the cholera, and the Camorra had a slice of that. But who listened to him? A couple of city councillors who might as well have shouted down a drainpipe as make the speeches they made. Nobody else listened. Of course, they were right—all that the Risanamento did was move money from the treasury to some Northern bankers and the landlords and the builders—from which the Camorra got its slice—and the poor got nothing, but what’s that got to do with Fra Geraldo?’

  ‘Well, he thought somebody was trying to kill him.’

  Gianaculo shrugged. ‘He was old.’ He asked more questions, got nothing from Denton he hadn’t got the night before. When he stood up to leave, he again sent the woman away, this time for good. He stood in front of Denton, a solid block of a man on strong legs, and said in his bad English, ‘Very good you send me this morning…the message, ummm…to describe the whisky. The…under the house. Smugglering…very bad.’ He tapped Denton’s chest with the brim of his hat. ‘Attenzione, signore. That Scuttini—very bad. You understand?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘Very bad.’ He made a gesture, closing his fist tight. ‘He… break you, like…like… un’ fiammiferro.’

  ‘A wooden match.’

  ‘Eh.’ He tapped his hat again. ‘You have care. You eat his food, he…hope…he drink your blood.’ He put the hat on. ‘Buona note, signore.’

  And that was why he had been waiting.

  CHAPTER

  10

  They moved into the Casa Gialla in a thump and clatter of trunks and boxes and suitcases. Janet was not vain, but she had two sets of clothes for two kinds of lives, one lived out in the world, the other in her own private spaces, for which she had the wardrobe of flowing, colourful gowns that Lucy Newcombe so admired. Nor was Denton a clothes horse, but Atkins, still his servant when he left London, had insisted on clothes formal and informal, on suits for casual wear and for what he had called ‘society’, and on clothes for ‘at home’, which to Denton meant a scabrous smoking jacket and an old pair of ratcatchers; plus he had brought three overcoats and a mackintosh and four hats and six pairs of gloves and sixteen shirts and… They had not travelled light.

  The servants at the pensione had lined up for their departure, the youngest ones looking shamefaced, the more hardened ones brazen. They were waiting for their tips. Janet took charge. She had strict ideas about who had done well and who hadn’t; still, like DiNapoli, she believed that in a city of the poor, everybody deserved something. She parcelled out her lire by individuals, astonishing some of them by how much she gave, angering others by how little. The Signora, overseeing the process, was scandalised all over again and flew into a rage when Janet offered her one centésimo, the smallest bit of money that was made.

  When she had refused it, Janet said, ‘But it is what you deserve, signora,’ and with that they were gone.

  The Casa Gialla was empty. The old woman was gone; her room on the second floor, which they reached in their first cursory sweep through their new house, was empty and clean. ‘You’d never know she’d been here,’ Janet said. ‘I suppose we’ll run into her ghost one night. Sheer hatred that glows in the dark.’

  That afternoon, a woman named Assunta Morello walked in from the Scuttini farm. Janet said that they had become ‘friends’ while she was Scuttini’s guest. Assunta would walk back that day and every day that Janet hired her, she said. Scuttini and her husband would allow her to come three days a week, would that do? Janet embraced her, rather to Denton’s surprise, and put her to work unpacking a trunk. Assunta was an impressive woman, too strongly featured to be pretty—big hooked nose, full mouth, heavy eyebrows—but she had a ferocious attractiveness in her big-breasted, big-hipped body. Black hair tumbled from her head. Denton wondered what sort of husband she must have who could give or withhold permission to come into Naples, and Janet said, ‘He’s a pipsqueak. She could break him in two pieces. But he’s all men. And he’s Scuttini’s tenant, so she’s Scuttini’s, too. She’s a slave to both of them.’ And, Denton thought, perhaps a spy—if Scuttini was as untrustworthy as Gianaculo said, he would want to keep an eye on them.

  DiNapoli came a few minutes later with the scugnizzo they’d seen in the Galleria, who was supposed to find Denton a genuine Fra Geraldo carving
. Denton met them in a little parlour near the stairs. The boy had a different presepe figure; he and DiNapoli had already been to DiNapoli’s friend, who had reported that the piece was in fact genuine—Fra Geraldo had indeed made it. The boy had it wrapped in a smelly cloth; he unwrapped it and, with a strange care that looked almost like reverence, placed it in the centre of a marble-topped table. ‘A l’originale,’ he said. ‘Michele ’l ubriacon’.’ He held out his hand for money.

  DiNapoli gave the hand a light slap. He said to Denton, ‘These kids is greedy. He says he’s starving; I buy him a piece of pizz’ on the way here, he eats like a pig and asks for more. He’d go on eating all day. If you buy it, he takes the money and runs to the nearest pizzaiulo and buys five slices, gets himself a big glass of wine, then buys for all his pals. Tonight, he have nothing left.’ He shrugged.

  ‘What did he say—something about lubricating?’

  ‘Lubricating? Lubricating? Oh, he says, il ubriacone, it means a guy who’s drunk all the time. That’s the statue—he’s Michael the Drunk, Michele ’l ubriacon’.’

  ‘A drunk—for the presepe?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, he’s very famous. Peoples put him close to the manger. It’s good luck. Some years, Fra Geraldo carves him sleeping, they put him in the straw wit’ the cows. Every year, like I tole you, Fra Geraldo makes t’ree figures for the presepe. One is always Michele ’l ubriacon’.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Nobody knows. It’s part of the—what you call it?—the, you know, the sort of holy stuff around Michele ’l ubriacon’. People see him on the street, they touch him for luck. Did I say he’s a real guy? No? Well, he is. You see him in Mercato, Spagnuoli, Porto, he’s always someplace, falling down, singing, acting stupid. Fra Geraldo preaches that if you do it to him, you do it to me, you unnerstand?’

  ‘“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”’

  ‘Yeah, exactly. You got it. So every year, he makes two figures, they’re always different, but they’re real people you see in Napoli—a shepherd, a fisherman, a pizzaiulo, a girl wit’ roses, the guy sells puppies. But he also makes Michele, because he’s the least of them my brothers.’

  Denton picked up the figure. It was not new, the paint a little dark where it had been handled; one finger—both hands completely carved, the fingers separate—broken off. But it was beautiful work. The face was booze-reddened, lined, almost toothless; an expression caught brilliantly between appeal and despair illuminated it. He wore an old overcoat, tattered; trousers that were too tight and too short; a trilby with a drooping gull’s feather stuck in it. His feet were bare. Denton thought, I’d know him from this if I saw him. He said, ‘Fra Geraldo was an artist.’

  ‘The peoples say he was a artist oncet, but he stop to serve the Virgin.’

  The boy made a sound, a kind of wail, the noise a dog makes. His hand was out again. He spat Nnapulitan’ at Denton. Denton glanced at DiNapoli, looked again at the figure, and gave the boy thirty lire in notes. He was going to say something about saving some until tomorrow, but the boy screamed with triumph and shot off. Denton heard his feet on the stairs and then the slam of the downstairs door.

  Denton raised his eyebrows. ‘Does he have a name?’

  ‘He gimme a name, he prolly makes it up just then.’ He shook his head. ‘You give him too much. He’d of taken half.’

  ‘You didn’t tell me.’

  ‘I forgot, you don’ know how they do t’ings here. Everyt’ing, you bargain. A Napolitan’, he gets to Hell, he bargains wit’ the Devil how long he gotta spend in the fire. But you like the figure, eh? It’s good?’

  ‘I like it very much.’

  ‘That’s good, then.’

  ‘What do I owe you?’

  ‘You don’t owe me not’ing.’

  ‘But you—Did you get your finder’s fee from that lawyer?’

  DiNapoli laughed. ‘For putting you in this place? Yeah, he gimme fifty lire, then he tell me he never want to see me again in his life.’ DiNapoli raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m gonna buy a suit. Next time you see me, I look pretty swell.’

  ‘A new suit!’

  ‘Well, new on me. I buy it from the guy sells dead men’s clothes near Santa Chiara. He got a dark suit, little stripe in it, fits me like it was made custom. Beautiful. Maybe a hat, too—I tole him, I buy a whole suit, vest, everyt’ing, he oughta t’row in a hat for not’ing. So we bargain.’

  ‘And a necktie.’

  ‘A necktie, I need a collar; I ain’t got a collar. You know what they say, Rome don’t get built overnight.’

  ‘Buy yourself a new shirt and a necktie and three collars, Mr DiNapoli! You want to look swell, you have to have the whole outfit!’

  DiNapoli scowled. He ran a finger under his nose. He said, ‘I tell you the troot. I been paying money every week to the cravattaro—the what you call the usuraio—I don’t know the English—’

  ‘Usurer?’

  ‘In New York, we called them the sharks. Yeah, “usurer”. So I hand over a few lire every week, all I’m paying is the interest. So today, I go to the woman, I tell her, here’s your money, every soldo, I’m paid, I’m finished, you never see me again! You know what? She laughs. She gives me a glass of wine, she says everybody says that, everybody comes back. Well.’ He shrugged. ‘So I got enough left for the suit and that’s it.’ He laughed. ‘Unless you want I should go back to her and borrow the money for a shirt.’

  Denton counted out fifty lire on the table. ‘Buy a shirt—that’s for a necktie—that’s for three collars. Don’t say no! The signora wants you to take her around Naples; she wants your help to hire a couple of housemaids; she says we need a cook. You can’t go around without a necktie and a collar. Do it for her!’

  DiNapoli stared down at the money. ‘We didn’t have no arrangement.’

  ‘Now we have.’

  DiNapoli chewed his lower lip. His eyes met Denton’s. ‘Twelve years I been here, living rough. I never took not’ing I hadn’t arranged first, and I never begged. I tell you the troot, I done some bad things, but I earned my way.’

  Denton understood. He’d lived rough, too. He said. ‘A loan, then. No interest.’

  DiNapoli hesitated and then, his lips moving as if he were calculating, he went through the notes that Denton had laid out and began putting most of them in a pile that he pushed towards Denton. He made a further calculation, counted the money he’d kept—Denton thought it was about five lire—and said, ‘I buy a couple dead guys’ shirts and their collars.’ He shook his head. ‘The more money you got, the more you gotta spend.’ But suddenly he smiled. ‘In New York, before I go to prison, I used to say to myself, “How am I gonna know when I make it? I’m always one step from it, and then I make the step, and I’m still one step from it.” And look at me now.’

  Then Janet came in and whisked him off to translate for her, and Denton was left to study the figure of Michael the Drunk and to think about Fra Geraldo, who was now a more complicated character than he had seemed: before the loony old man, there had been a young artist, perhaps one who had renounced art for—what? What had the old man been talking about? Atonement? For what? Not, Denton thought, for the Virgin; there was no sign of the Virgin in the Palazzo Minerva except for the one chipped chromo. A suffering Christ wouldn’t have surprised him, or one of the penitents like Simeon Stylites, icons of whom would have jibed with atonement and flagellation. Although the style would have had to be more forceful than the piety that decked the walls of the famiglia Spinoso.

  Janet and DiNapoli found a kitchen on the ground floor of the Casa Gialla. DiNapoli was like a child, showing it to Denton. It was huge, abysmally dark; across one wall, an enormous fireplace had been closed in with iron to take the smoke from a twelve-foot-long stove that must have been assembled in situ before gas had arrived. It had three separate fireboxes for different heats, plus a place for warming serving dishes and an upper tank for water. DiNapoli said you could
cook for fifty people on it. The challenge would be to cook for two.

  There was no icebox. There were pantries like caves, small rooms with shelves to the ceiling that felt damp and had a light frost of mould. There were cupboards for dishes and racks with hooks for pots and pans and, perhaps, meats and fowl and cheeses.

  ‘I t’ink,’ DiNapoli said, ‘if I was the cook, I could do better wit’ one gas ring and a box o’ matches.’

  Janet demanded that he eat with them that first night in their new house, but Denton said there was no food. DiNapoli asked if they could eat pizza. Janet had heard of pizza, been warned against it by her guidebook; she clapped her hands. DiNapoli went away; it was a little after five, and he didn’t come back until seven, resplendent in a new suit, hat, shirt, collar and tie, followed by a pizzaiulo with an entire tray of that strange dish, pizza, still hot from the oven two streets away. DiNapoli was carrying a basket in which he had wine from an enoteca around the corner, glasses from a used-everything shop near the Duomo, a loaf of crusted bread, and three small plates of baccala—dried cod in tomato sauce.

  ‘I got fruit coming, a scugnizz’, I told him I’d kill him if he din’t come wit’ it. Then there’ll be pastierra, which is a Naples pastry, you buy it on the street but I went to the bakery, they know me, the guy’s gonna bring it on his way home.’

  Janet rarely knew joy, or so Denton feared. That night, he thought, she did. DiNapoli delighted her; the pizza enchanted her; the dried cod tickled her; the wine got her slightly drunk. They ate in a large, dank room with an electric chandelier that cast its feeble, pasty light entirely on the ceiling, until Janet got candles and turned it off and the three of them sat at the great table and ate and drank and told stories.