The Haunted Martyr

by Kenneth Cameron

  Including Denton’s killings and Janet’s four years in prison.

  They were halfway through their feast when there was a knocking at the downstairs door. DiNapoli ran down and almost immediately ran back, his face tense, voice unsteady. ‘It’s the Scuttini! Wit’ guns—I saw one!’

  Denton rushed downstairs, Janet a step behind him. Four large men were staring around the entrance hall. Even in the gaslight, Denton recognised the bulge at one man’s tightly suited waist. All four of them wore trousers and lounge jackets, three of them mismatched, as if they’d taken trousers from one pile and coats from another; only one wore a necktie. All had on soft hats, all stylishly rolled at one side. The one in the matching trousers and coat and the necktie said in Italian, ‘From the compariello.’ He glanced at Denton, then bowed to Janet.

  Denton understood but looked at DiNapoli anyway. DiNapoli said, ‘Compariello’s the same as compare—sort of friendlier.’ The other man spoke; DiNapoli translated. ‘They come to guard the cellar. They t’ink the bad guy coming back.’ The other man said something and DiNapoli said, ‘They know the bad guy’s coming back.’ He spread his hands and looked sheepish. ‘They got spies.’

  ‘What are they going to do in the cellar?’

  ‘He says they going to protect you. When the bad guy comes, they fix him.’

  ‘“Fix?” He said “fix”?’

  ‘More like “deal wit”, maybe.’

  The leader of the four said something more, all the time looking at Denton.

  ‘He says the compariello knows you gave the whisky to the polizia, but he don’t hold it against you. Anyway, he bought it back from them cheap.’

  Denton started to ask how he knew about the whisky, but he remembered the grandson, who must have been put into the wine vault when the whisky was there—maybe put into the vault at the same time as the whisky. And the police? The Camorra had its hands in the questura, too? Of course they did.

  ‘I don’t want any killing here.’

  The leader looked shocked. DiNapoli translated his response as, ‘Not here. The compariello respects you, Mist’ Denton. And he got admiration for the signora. T’ank God.’

  Denton sighed. ‘Indeed.’ He weighed his instinctive lawfulness against the cynical realities of Naples—criminal organisations, corrupt police—and decided to be pragmatic. He led the way to the cellar, opened the wine vault and pointed out the trapdoor into the tunnels. When he left, the four men were finding themselves comfortable places to sit.

  In the darkest hours of the morning, Denton thought he heard noises. Only a minute or two later, the iron doors that the puppeteer had been unable to open clanged somewhere outside. And that was that. It was like hearing a mousetrap snap in the night, but without the discomfort of knowing you would have to remove the mouse in the morning.

  But what was the price of letting the Camorra clean your mousetraps?

  They added two housemaids over the next several days, one fifteen and one who said she was seventeen but looked at least three years younger, both hired by Janet from an agency on the Via Toledo. She chose neophytes because she wanted them to be more employable when they left her. The immediate results were strain and pother: one was, as Denton said, as dumb as a stump; the other was shy and terrified of everything.

  Janet had taken, as she had promised, the red room. Denton took the next two rooms along, one to sleep in and one for work. Rosa and Sirena, the two maids, were put at the farthest corner of the house away from them, meaning that they were in the front of the house and shared a bigger room than either Denton or Janet had. Denton didn’t care; he liked to look into the backs of the houses outside his windows, the now dead gardens, the lives of women who hung from their own windows and gossiped and of children who played under the leafless trees and, seeing him, screamed, ‘Texas Jack! Texas Jack!’

  Fanning came once and left a card, but Denton told Sirena, the stupider of the maids (a major challenge to his Italian), that he wasn’t at home. They spent two days moving furniture out of the piano nobile and up to the second floor and replacing it with much older and better things from up there. Janet found a carved and curtained bed, which they brought down in pieces; reassembled and with new curtains, it became her island, and his when he was invited. In this way, they furnished their own rooms and a sitting room and a small one where they could eat; they abandoned the oversized dining room and the public rooms at the front.

  ‘The place suits me,’ Janet said. ‘It’s very odd, but it suits me. Because I’m very odd.’

  DiNapoli brought them a cook, an old man who insisted he had worked for ‘gli inglese’ but promised, through DiNapoli, to cook Italian food. He lived somewhere else and came in only in the late afternoon to cook their evening meal.

  On his fourth day, Denton looked down into the weedy garden and saw a line of women curving from a supposedly locked gate into his garden and up to a beehive-shaped brick structure that he had thought was a defunct privy.

  ‘It’s a oven,’ DiNapoli said. ‘That cook, he takes one look at it, he gotta clean it out and build a fire. Next t’ing, he’s charging five soldi a shot to bake in it. He got women coming from all over Spaccanapoli!’

  Janet said, ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s Christmas! They all making pizza ripiena for Christmas.’

  ‘But why don’t they bake at home?’

  DiNapoli laughed. ‘Them peoples, they don’t got ovens at home. They lucky if they got a stove. In Naples, you wanta bake somet’ing, you go to the baker, you pay him ten soldi. This guy’s charging half.’

  Janet thought they should let the women use the oven for free; the cook said it was his perk; the neighbourhood bakers said it was unfair competition, and Janet and Denton were already rich and shouldn’t go into business against them. In the end, Scuttini—to Denton’s dismay—got the complaints from the bakers and decreed that the cook had to charge the same as the bakers, and anyway the cook owed the Scuttini one centésimo in every twenty, just like the bakers, so the cook gave up, and Janet told some of the women whose rooms opened on the courtyard that they could use the oven during holidays if they provided their own wood. This seemed to satisfy everybody and resulted in a regular trickle of pizza ripiena and pannetone to their table until after Epifania, the Feast of the Epiphany. Denton groused that the Scuttini fingers were in every pie, including those baked in his own oven.

  Without asking him, Janet invited DiNapoli to come and live with them. To Denton’s relief, DiNapoli said he couldn’t.

  ‘But why? We’ve lots of room.’

  ‘There’s a lady.’

  ‘Well, bring her to live here too!’

  ‘Yeah, but there’s her husband. You wouldn’t like him.’

  Denton looked at Janet with an expression that said that sometimes it was wise to know when to quit.

  She said, ‘I worry about you, Mr DiNapoli. You don’t eat enough and you have a cough.’

  ‘I eat fine! I’m healt’y as a horse!’

  ‘You don’t have much money.’

  ‘I get along.’ When she looked dubious, he said, ‘Little here, little there, you be surprised how good I do! Peoples in Naples, we do lotsa t’ings, add them together, we get along.’

  ‘What sort of things?’

  ‘I write letters. That’s my main profession.’

  ‘Letters?’

  ‘Mostly for the sailors and the girls at the porto.’ The major European fleets, including the British, made stops in Naples. ‘The girls are putane, sure, but they’re mostly nice girls and they gonna get married and live in the bassi one day, but they can’t read or write mostly, so is it wrong to write letters for them?’

  ‘You write love letters, Mr DiNapoli?’

  ‘Love? You making a joke? Look, a French sailor comes to me, he says, “Hey, Vince, I met this swell girl”—he don’t mention she’s a putana, he don’t have to—“I want you should write a letter, you say for me, ‘I had a great time, I like your charlies. See
you soon.’ And tell her I’m crazy for her.” So I write, “O my darling Gelsomina, As my ship disappears over the horizon, my thoughts are all of you. My heart is sinking into sadness like the sun sinks into the Bay of Naples. I dream of your skin which is like cream, your eyes like wild flowers, your hair like the darkness shaken from the night sky by dawn. Oh, my dear one, how shall I live wit’out you—”’

  ‘Mr DiNapoli, you’re a poet!’

  He grinned. ‘In Naples, you do what you gotta do to live.’

  Fra Geraldo’s death faded, eclipsed by the more immediate and, it seemed, more important. Denton remembered to go back to the morgue two days late because he had forgotten. The doctor had examined Fra Geraldo’s head, as he had promised, and he agreed that there didn’t seem to be enough bleeding, either externally or internally. But the old man’s body had been released for burial because there was, as Donati might have said, ‘no evidence’. Denton supposed that Inspector Gianaculo had agreed, perhaps found it easier, even politic, to agree; he hadn’t come to visit again. Denton didn’t doubt that Gianaculo could have found him if he had wanted to; everybody in Naples seemed to know that Texas Jack had taken the Casa Gialla.

  Denton was one of the few foreigners at the English church for the brief funeral of Gerald Hackby John Edward Sommers, fifth Lord Easleigh. Maltby was there for the consulate. However, if Fra Geraldo had been famous, as the newspaper had said, he had not been so among the English colony; the church was almost empty. On the other hand, the streets of Spagnuoli had been filled as the over-decorated hearse had rolled past. Denton saw women weeping, and at one corner three men were singing a sad song that was some sort of farewell.

  Denton, never pious, passed his time during the service looking at the church’s decorations. Many were plaques set into the walls; one, readable from where he sat, said, ‘Blessed by Our Maker, We Have Heard the Music of the Spheres, Thanks to Those Who Have Led our Choristers in His Praise’. Below was a list of choirmasters, and to his surprise, the dead man had been one of them. Most of them had done their work for twenty years or more, but the late Lord Easleigh for only two: ‘Gerald Sommers, 1857–59’. How long had Fra Geraldo said he had lived in Naples? Fifty years, perhaps an approximation. Meaning that he must have led the choir in his first years there. Denton, idling through the service, stared at the plaque as if it would speak to him. Why had the young Sommers, not yet Fra Geraldo, stayed so short a time? Was it that leading a choir couldn’t satisfy the desire—or madness, or obsession—that had then led him to become an imitation of a monk? Or had it been simply one of those things we try on and give up, a seemingly good idea that turned out to be bad?

  After the ceremony, Denton and Maltby collided at the church door, both rushing to get out. On the steps outside, both paused. It was a brilliant day, not at all a day for a funeral, a slight chill along the edges of the wind but bright with sunshine. Maltby said, ‘I’m representing the consulate. Of course. I’m the resident dogsbody, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.’ Denton could find nothing to say to that. Maltby sniffed and, touching his arm, moved him out of the way of the few people now coming from the church. He lowered his voice. ‘I’m glad that poof from the Carabinieri didn’t show his face. I really took a dislike to him. I shouldn’t say that, but you’re practically British, so it’s all right. I was a bit severe with you about something that happened at the morgue—my apologies. Not my place, you an older man. But we must remember we represent the Crown in this awful city.’ Maltby pulled himself deeper into his black overcoat. ‘I suppose the mutilation done to the old chap is typical of the sorts of things they do to each other here. Degenerate race. But that they should do it to an Englishman! I didn’t tell anybody at the consulate. Too awful. Some things better left unsaid. Didn’t put it in my report, either. Summarised what the police and you and that Italian said—accidental death, you not quite convinced of it. Shot it off to London—intended for the family. Not the worst thing in the world, putting one’s name on a report the new peer is to see.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I rather caught a rocket for not having looked the old man’s house over with a fine-toothed comb. I was thoroughly upset at the time—you’d vouch for that. They don’t appreciate that at the consulate, of course. Some remarkably coarse types there, between you and me. I suppose a few years in this place do that to you. At any rate, I’ve to go back and pore over the entire house. Marching orders from the consul himself, because now the old man’s buried, the heir wants the place put to rights and sold. Of course, it’s my job to do it. New boy at school. Everybody’s fag.’ His eyes forced themselves on Denton. ‘I don’t suppose you’d care to go with me? You’re a bit of a gentleman detective, I understand—an eye for things, and so on. In case there’s something off. Rather leery of going alone, I must admit. It was seeing the old man…that way.’

  Denton said what was true: he had no wish any longer to go into Fra Geraldo’s house; he didn’t say that he had about given up on Fra Geraldo. Pressed by Maltby, however, surprising himself by feeling sorry for the young man, at the same time marvelling at the human ability to dislike somebody and feel sorry for him at the same time, he said he supposed he might go along if he was really needed—but not in the mornings; that was when he worked, the time inviolate, and not in the next week or two, as he had to get to work. And he was still, after all, moving into a new house.

  Maltby shook his hand with what seemed like gratitude and said he’d come by one afternoon very soon. He seemed relieved that it wasn’t going to be right away.

  CHAPTER

  11

  The first two weeks in the Casa Gialla were thick with new experiences, new places, new sights. Both the old man and the Scuttini, smuggled whisky and trussed-up young men, lost their immediacy.

  They got through Christmas—no gifts; Janet couldn’t stand to get them. Denton, child of a cheerless household, loved the notion of a Dickensian Christmas but did as she wished—and the sensational Neapolitan New Year’s Eve, raucous with fireworks, dangerous with old furniture and pans and trash being thrown into the street from windows high above. They allowed themselves to be tourists: they had been to see the solidified blood of San Gennaro in the Duomo, which twice a year for centuries had liquefied in answer to fervent prayers; this miracle assured the city of another half-year of the saint’s protection and provided Denton with a metaphor for the new book—the city washed in blood. They had been to a coral factory in Torre del Greco; they had been to the Solfatara and had sniffed the odours of Hell and seen their guide throw a puppy into the pool of invisible gas, from which Denton had saved it—usually, the puppy died within seconds—by rushing in, coughing, snatching up the animal, rushing out, and knocking the guide down. The puppy was now Janet’s, named Sophie after the whore who had taught her to say Va fan’ cula, and much prized because it had been housebroken in three days. The guide, on the other hand, had screamed that he was being murdered; there had been unpleasantness with a local policeman, as throwing puppies to their deaths was respected as honest work. Denton had said, ‘Maybe I should just let them throw me in the hoosegow. I’m a hardened criminal.’

  Then the university started its session and Janet spent three days a week learning Italian from Mr DiNapoli and meeting a tutor to discuss David Ricardi, of whose monetary policy she was already weary. She was now engrossed by the economics of the poor, she had found a gang of socialists and (she said) communists who were more to her liking than the tutor; soon, she was having a dozen of them to lunch every Wednesday.

  Denton wrote every morning in his room, but he was still forced to be a tourist. He visited haunted palaces that were listed in the guidebooks, spent a night in the catacombs, searched in old books for accounts of ghosts and apparitions and miraculous coincidences, sat in on theatrical but clearly fake séances. He envied Janet her communists.

  Every morning, women in black walked two by two with slow steps to the churches, their bodies heavy with age and bad diet. The sun cast their long sh
adows as it gilded the domes and spires and threw the narrow vicoli of the old city into a blue shadow that seemed deeper than the night that had just faded. On the pavements along the bay, fishermen mended nets, the light coming unimpeded across the water from Capri and Sorrento to brighten the colours of their shirts and their caps, their boats. On the rooftops, the cats came home from their nocturnal prowls and curled in pools of light to sleep.

  Denton, up since five, walked behind the women in black, overtaking them with his long stride and going around until he reached his now favourite café in a small piazza. Already, they knew him there: he was greeted, smiled at. He took a table near the front or even outside if Naples was to have one of its warm winter days, which came in threes or fours to separate the days of cloud and wind. Denton drank coffee—he would already have made one pot in his workroom at the Casa Gialla, where he had installed a spirit stove—and ate a pastiera, a chunk of slightly sweet bread, baked only minutes before nearby. The bar would be crowded with working men. At first, they had eyed him, laughed among themselves, but after two weeks his novelty was gone and some of them nodded when he came in.

  He had given up the idea of trying to join the artists and writers of the Caffè Gambrinus. This neighbourhood place in the little piazza had become his local.

  He would sit until the working men had finished their quick gulps of coffee and their morning gossip; the place would empty, the owner standing by the door as if to study the square outside for possible flaws while his wife wiped the bar-top with a wet cloth and piled dirty cups into a vast tin pan to be carried somewhere in the back. Now the girls who worked in the tobacco factories behind Castello Capuana would be crossing the square, seeking the sunny side and pulling their cotton shawls tighter. They were barely into their teens, some of them; they would smell, Denton knew, of tobacco if he walked among them; their hands were stained like heavy smokers’. Many already looked tired, and the day was only starting. They were mostly thin, dark skinned but pasty fleshed, too long indoors, too little fed. DiNapoli had told Denton that as a boy he had been given for breakfast the end of yesterday’s loaf of bread with his father’s coffee grounds on it. Denton wondered what these girls had eaten—nothing? Bread? Janet’s socialists would tell him.