The Haunted Martyr

by Kenneth Cameron

  On the far side of the square, the market booths would already be opening. The awnings would extend in front like the bills of caps, orange and faded red and the natural near-white of the canvas, stained now with rain and soot but glaring like snow in the sunlight. The handcarts and the donkey carts would be there from the farms beyond Porta Capuana, being unloaded by wiry men and strong women like Assunta. Denton would get up and stroll across the square, the factory girls now gone, and walk among the stalls, admiring the best and greenest produce in Europe, the finest oranges, the blackest olives, the creamiest wheels of the local white cheese—and the highest prices, thanks to the Camorra, which set them. He balanced the stalls against the factory girls, their underfed faces against this abundance of food. The difference was money. Without money, what the working poor got was not the best and the greenest and the whitest, but the overripe and the spoiled and the rotten. He didn’t need Janet’s Wednesday lunch to learn this.

  Walking home, he, too, took the sunny side, always the same route, nodded to by men now opening the shops, the portiere standing smoking by their doorways. He wondered, How many of them pay Scuttini protection and know that I’m a Scuttini protégé, too? Such children as went to school were out now, always apparently late, running, their Scusi, scusi, scusi, signore as much part of the morning chorus as the songs of the birds. Always from somewhere near, an adult voice would be singing ‘Aprile’ or ‘Funiculi, Funiculà’ or the song about the sun. Once, at a distance he had spotted a singer and, coming closer, had realised that he was Michele ’l ubriacon’, recognizable from the presepe figure by Fra Geraldo. Denton had tried to get closer but the man vanished. Reminded, Denton remembered then that he had told Maltby he would go with him to Fra Geraldo’s palazzo. Maybe Maltby had forgotten. Or given up on him. Either was fine with Denton.

  Home every morning from his café by eight o’clock, Denton went immediately to his room to read and make notes. At noon, he stopped and went to the red room; if the door was open, he went in; if it was closed, he knocked. Like a guest, he thought. He felt a stab of resentment, then guilt at feeling it. Today, the door was open. He felt a stab of gratitude, then resentment again at feeling grateful.

  She kissed him. The puppy, who seemed to remember being saved from the Solfatara, wiggled energetically in her arms. ‘I’ve had a note from Lucy Newcombe. She wants to “come by”.’

  Dear God, Lucy Newcombe, the American girl with the awful mother from the pensione! And the awful friend! ‘I thought you were forbidden fruit. With the soubrette?’

  ‘Oh, she’s the duenna, yes. They’ve given Mrs Newcombe their solemn word that they won’t leave the “proper” part of the city, which is to say the few blocks around the pensione. Of course they lied. Lucy wants to try eating pizza.’

  ‘Daring of her.’ Denton was sorting his mail, which had finally begun to reach him at the Casa Gialla. ‘She could do that on her own, couldn’t she?’

  ‘She thinks she’ll be laughed at—the great horror when you’re seventeen.’

  ‘I doubt that the factory girls would think so. Tell Lucy to try going hungry. Or living in one room with a dozen other people.’

  ‘She isn’t like you and me, Denton. And she’s still a child. Not like girls who work. Is that very American, to be still a child at seventeen?’

  ‘If you’ve a rich papa, you can be a child at eighty.’

  ‘Ah, just like England.’

  He threw himself into an upholstered armchair—rusty green, not red, rescued from upstairs—and tore open an envelope.

  ‘I meant to tell you, you’ve a letter from Atkins.’

  ‘Bit late. Ah, “business is booming”. Oh, well. “Two new comic songs recorded this week.” I suppose he’s going to realise his life’s dream and become a music-hall star. Or a millionaire. I’ll have to start calling him “Mr Atkins”.’ He put the letter down. ‘Well, he sounds busy and happy.’

  ‘And you sound heartbroken because of it.’ She patted his shoulder.

  He laughed. ‘You know me too well. Rotten of me, not wishing him well. Selfish.’

  ‘If you’d simply admit he’s your best friend, there’d be no problem.’

  She put her nose into the puppy’s fur and laughed.

  Denton thought, This is where we should live. We’re different people here. If she doesn’t quite love me, she accepts my loving her. We belong here. We will stay here.

  DiNapoli was his for two hours in the afternoon, when they mostly walked the city—Denton’s way of learning a new place. He was a voracious walker, long legged and indefatigable; DiNapoli sometimes had to trot to keep up, but he had great stamina and could walk as far, if not as fast, as Denton. They talked. DiNapoli pointed things out, gave their Italian names; Denton asked, What is that, what is this, how do you say go, stay, come, listen, wait, send? The expression come se dice?, roughly ‘how do you say?’, was used a lot. They walked as far to the west as Piedigrotta, the entrance to the now closed tunnel that the Romans had cut through the Posillipo hill; they walked east past Piazza del Mercato and the old railway station; they climbed to the hills that circled the lower city; they visited the churches, where Denton saw his first frescoes by Giotto and was captivated by this different vision of reality with its green flesh and its skewed perspective. At Denton’s insistence, they dawdled in shops that sold old prints and older books and paintings and sculptures that DiNapoli insisted were fakes, and Denton bought himself a sword-cane because he couldn’t have his derringer.

  Letters piled up in answer to his newspaper advertisements. DiNapoli translated them, often laughing as he did so because the letters were barely literate. ‘These are fake ghosts, not the real ghosts. Naples peoples, they do anyt’ing for a few soldi. I t’ink you got peoples all over town inventing ghosts for you. Here’s one, they got the ghost of a cat comes in at night to kill ghost mice. There’s another says the walls go knock-knock all night long and they let you listen for ten lire. Then one, they live over the old catacombs, they can hear the dead bodies scratching their fingernails on the walls. You can listen for twenty lire.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound too bad. Good local feel to it.’

  ‘What d’you t’ink of a guy says he saw a ghost ship sail up to the porto and the whole crew is skeletons in Spanish clothes and they come ashore for a good time?’ DiNapoli frowned at the letter. ‘He says he seen ghost putane giving them the eye. This guy oughta be writing for the scenegiatta.’

  They sorted the letters into useless, possible and worth pursuing. Denton found only a dozen that seemed as if they might give him usable material. He was disappointed that all the apparitions were post-medieval Italians—no Romans, no Greeks—and they all seemed to be from a period that started in a hazy, undefined Renaissance and ended in the eighteenth century, the dating always done by the clothes the ghost wore—except for one woman (he assumed it was a woman) who said that she had had ‘love encounters’ with a naked spectre who was ‘very pleasurable, but cold’. She said she was using a false name and would communicate only through a third party to protect her reputation, and she wanted a hundred lire for her story.

  ‘It’s a pretty good story,’ he said to Janet. ‘I’m not sure I can use it in a book that my editor would agree to publish, though.’

  ‘Some old maid having fantasies.’

  ‘But interesting ones. Maybe I could do a chapter on ghost stories people have made up. The ghost ship, for example.’

  ‘But then it wouldn’t be your book.’

  ‘What must it be like to have sex with a spectre? Kind of a contradiction in terms, isn’t it? Maybe there’s a new genre there—ghost pornography.’

  ‘A man came to Ruth Castle’s house while I was there who wanted a girl to spend the day in an icehouse and then pretend to be dead while he rogered her. Ruth drew the line at that.’

  ‘But at least she would have had substance. I mean, the essence of sex is physical feeling, isn’t it? And how do you feel a spectre?’


  ‘I always thought the essence of sex was mental. In which case a spectre would do fine.’

  ‘Not for me.’

  One afternoon DiNapoli took him to see the six-hundred-year-old mummies in the Castel Nuovo. He led Denton by way of the port, which Denton complained wasn’t the shortest way. Then Denton saw ahead of them on the pavement a large device on legs, behind it a wiry, small man of DiNapoli’s sort. He remembered that he had seen him that first day when DiNapoli had led him out of the Galleria. ‘The photographer,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, Spina.’ DiNapoli stopped him with a hand. ‘Smile. He takes your pitcher.’ Denton scowled as he realised that this was why DiNapoli had brought him this way—the tourist as pigeon to be plucked. Some seconds later, DiNapoli let Denton walk forward. They reached the camera, a box as big as an armchair on splayed, squat legs. A lens in an ancient brass tube jutted out the front. At the rear, Spina’s legs connected the pavement to a black cloth, under which he was making slow, arcane movements. Two minutes after he had taken their picture, he emerged with a wet photograph of an unsmiling Denton and a debonair DiNapoli, who grinned as if he were the tourist and Denton the guide.

  DiNapoli introduced them. In fact, DiNapoli explained, when he guided tourists, he always came this way and Spina paid him ten soldi per subject, assuming they bought a photograph. Most did—the photograph was remarkably clear and showed the Castel del Ovo in the background, proof that you had visited Naples. ‘Still,’ Denton said, his better mood restored by DiNapoli’s candour, ‘it’s a risky business, isn’t it? Spina takes the picture on spec?’ DiNapoli translated. Spina shrugged. He gestured at the boards behind him, on which he had pinned a couple of dozen of the photographs that tourists hadn’t bought. Why did he keep them? Spina shrugged again. ‘Maybe somebody buys, who knows?’

  As they walked on, Denton holding his damp photo, he said, ‘You have many ways of earning money, DiNapoli.’

  ‘Little here, little there.’

  They had reached the Castel Nuovo, an enormous stone structure that had been new six hundred years before.

  ‘Why do you call it nuovo if it isn’t new any more?’ Denton said.

  ‘Well, the peoples, they call it the Maschio Angioino. “Angioino”, that’s the Angevins, they took over here a long time ago. Back then, it was new.’

  ‘What’s Maschio? “Mask”?’

  ‘No, maschio, you know—like men and boys.’ He cupped his hand over his crotch.

  ‘Oh—like “masculine”.’ Denton looked up at the assertive, looming stone bulk. The rounded tower that bulged from the middle of one wall did, indeed, remind him of things masculine. ‘It probably made more sense when men wore codpieces,’ he said.

  They went inside and for a few soldi were led down to the dank room where four of the Angevins’ enemies lay in their coffins, mummies long since rendered unrecognisable by time but still datable by their clothes, like the local ghosts.

  ‘Strange, keeping your enemies’ corpses downstairs. Do they come back as ghosts and say “Boo” to the watchmen?’

  ‘Don’ make jokes. It’s bad luck.’ DiNapoli, who never went to church, crossed himself.

  Denton bent close to the mummified faces. ‘I suppose I’ll describe them in the book. Readers like a good shudder.’

  DiNapoli shuddered.

  One day Denton, fresh from the shouting of a Wednesday lunch, the arguments translated for him by a sympathetic anarcho-syndicalist, asked DiNapoli to show him the wretched streets of the Mercato district—according to the socialists, Naples’ worst.

  ‘You don’ wanna go there.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Tourist peoples don’ go there.’

  ‘I’m trying to get out of the tourist parts of town.’

  ‘We get robbed down there.’

  Denton brandished the sword cane. ‘You’re safe with me, DiNapoli.’ DiNapoli sighed and gave in.

  The terrible tenements called fondaci rose six storeys and more along alleys so narrow that vehicles couldn’t penetrate them. The buildings, DiNapoli said, were without running water or gas or heat or electricity. The occupants lived six or eight to a windowless room—lived out their lives there, called ‘cave-dwellers’ by the better off. DiNapoli’s tone was both patronising and pitying: even at his worst, he meant, he hadn’t had to live like this.

  One of the Wednesday guests, had told Denton that forty per cent of the city were unemployed; down here, the figure was higher. Even if he could find a job, a labourer made only three or four lire a day. Bread alone cost a family four or five lire a week.

  ‘How do they survive?’

  DiNapoli shrugged. ‘It’s Naples.’

  Denton heard singing. At his insistence, they turned towards it, followed it down towards the shore, then left up a vico so narrow he and DiNapoli could hardly walk side by side. There was no paving. The earth underfoot had turned to slimy mud from the water and worse that always ran down it. The smell of urine was strong: men, women and children used the alley as a latrine, men standing by the dark walls; women squatting with their skirts slightly hoisted, as a puddle formed at their feet. Children, held by both hands, pissed into air.

  Overhead, the buildings almost met; the sky was a narrow gash. The sun never penetrated to the bottom.

  Michele ’l ubriacon’ was leaning at a corner, singing ‘O sole mio’ in a roughened voice that might once have been a tenor but had dropped. He was entirely recognisable from Fra Geraldo’s carving, although as Denton got close enough he could see that the real Michele was even older than the carving made him seem. The open mouth had no teeth. Michele’s bare feet were scaly with filth; his overcoat, too big for him, was ragged; he wore a waistcoat but no shirt, filthy trousers, and the crown of a felt hat from which the brim had been cut or torn.

  ‘Soldi, signore—soldi!’ The terrible figure finished singing and rattled a wooden box that held a couple of stones and a coin. ‘Soldi per la musica!’

  Denton dropped in twenty centésimi. ‘Lei è Michele.’

  ‘Eh!’ He gave Denton a horrible grin. His tongue lolled out of his mouth and hung there, then wagged.

  He had to ask DiNapoli how to say it, then said in Italian, ‘Do you remember Fra Geraldo, Michele?’

  ‘Aa-a-h-h-h—morto!’ The tongue waggled and the reddened eyes rolled back. He began to sing something that sounded sad but whose words Denton couldn’t understand. As he sang, Michele seemed to grow agitated; he rattled the box and stamped his feet, almost dancing to the lugubrious tune. He stopped and shouted, ‘Morto! Morto!’ The tongue stuck an inch out of the mouth and seemed to test the air like a snake’s.

  ‘He’s stinking drunk, Mist’ Denton. Don’t waste your time.’ DiNapoli pulled at his arm.

  ‘I want to ask him about the carvings the old man did of him.’

  ‘He’s too drunk. I find him for you another time.’ DiNapoli was trying to drag him along the vico.

  ‘Soldi,’ Michele said. ‘Soldi per la—la—’ The tongue went from side to side of the toothless mouth in the same rhythm as the shaking box. He tried to push away from the building and almost fell.

  Denton was looking back, stopped. ‘He should be in a hospital.’

  ‘So should half the peoples down here.’ DiNapoli dragged him away. ‘He got no brains left in his head. Peoples say his brains is wit’ God—that’s why they touch him for luck. What’s God want wit’ his brains?’

  Denton shook his head. He looked down at his feet. He had stepped in human shit.

  CHAPTER

  12

  To his surprise, Maltby sent a note saying that he had been ordered again to inspect the Palazzo Minerva at once and could Denton please go with him that day, as he had promised. When Maltby showed up at the Casa Gialla, he looked so woebegone that Denton couldn’t refuse him. In fact, it was only a few days longer than two weeks since he had seen Maltby at the funeral.

  They went out and found a carriage and went along the
Corso and cut through to the Via Toledo, then up to Fra Geraldo’s part of Spagnuoli. Maltby was mostly silent, perhaps nursing his many grievances. Denton tried conversation a couple of times, thought it hopeless, but got some interest when he mentioned his return visit to the morgue.

  ‘That corpse!’ Maltby growled. ‘I was physically ill, you know. Not the manliest thing to have done, but I was very upset by the…the—you know.’

  Denton told him about the first policeman’s reaction to the missing cazzo, trying to make it humorous.

  ‘I actually wanted to be a policeman once,’ Maltby said gloomily. ‘And I suppose it would have brought me to the same point—looking at an old man’s mutilations in a morgue. I suppose I’m a prude. It’s ironic, me being so much younger than you.’

  ‘The missing cazzo might actually be relevant. To his death, I mean.’

  ‘I don’t think we should be making insinuations that are really more appropriate to some contemptible form of reading matter.’

  ‘You said you wanted to be a policeman.’

  ‘That was when I was a boy. What’s that to do with it?’

  ‘Policemen have to think of all sorts of possibilities.’

  ‘You know policemen, I suppose.’ He made it seem like an accusation.

  ‘I have a fairly good friend at New Scotland Yard.’

  ‘I’m glad now I’m not a policeman.’ Maltby barked out a single laugh. ‘Like that Italian poof.’

  ‘At least he wasn’t sick.’

  ‘Oh, well, if you’re going to throw that up at me—’ And then they were both laughing at the ‘throw up’, Denton surprised by Maltby’s sudden change, which he guessed was part of his youngness, even boyishness, and the irresistible subject of sicking up. When they were done laughing, Denton said, ‘It’s no disgrace to be sick at seeing a corpse, Maltby. Lots of coppers are, at least at first. And Donati wasn’t as bad as you think. He was intelligent and he had some notion of evidence.’