‘You do not understand me. You said you owe me a life. I want the marriage stopped.’
Scuttini folded his arms and looked at his brilliantly polished shoes. ‘The marchese has no other woman to marry. He is not much, between the two of us—very little to him.’ He waggled his fingers: the marchese was a butterfly. ‘He is not going to find another rich woman in time.’ He breathed heavily. ‘The Rocca-Scutares are about done. They need new blood, new strength—new money. If they do not get those things, then I will have to—the moneylenders will have to—take their palazzo. They will be on the street.’
‘That is not my business.’
‘But it is mine! I respect these old families. I respect their titles. They are a tie to our glorious past. However, they cannot be allowed to cost me money.’ He sighed. ‘You insist the marriage must be stopped.’
Denton nodded.
‘You understand that I disapprove?’
Denton nodded again.
‘You understand that if I do the thing, you and I are even?’
‘I will be happy, signore, not to have you indebted to me.’
Scuttini narrowed his eyes and gave Denton what must have been intended as a hard look. Denton knew hard looks, had seen them before, and he gave back an expressionless face as reply. He hoped, nonetheless, that Scuttini’s idea of obligation wouldn’t end before Denton got to the street; he didn’t want to be beaten up on the stairs as a parting reminder of a new status.
Scuttini’s hoarse breathing was the only sound for some seconds, and then he said, ‘Even seizing their palazzo, I will lose money.’ He sounded more plaintive than angry. ‘You are a hard man, signore. I saw it when you were at my farm. I knew it from that fine woman’s story of your shooting four men. You know, I had thought maybe you and she would join my family. But you are too hard. Eh?’
‘I have a family, signore.’
‘You have yourself.’ Scuttini nodded rapidly, held up a finger. ‘In Naples, one is not enough. This is not the Wild West. But I will not turn against you. For that fine woman’s sake, I will not think my honour has been challenged by what you say.’ He stood, went to a small tambour table and opened it. Stooping, he said, ‘Even though you are costing me money.’ He took out a bottle and two tiny glasses. ‘If I was young, maybe I would be angry. But I am not.’ He poured a small amount of clear liquid into each glass. ‘You do not like me, signore. Maybe I do not like you, either, but I respect you. Or maybe I do like you.’ He gave Denton one of the glasses. ‘We drink to tell each other that we understand. I will stop the marriage; you will ask me for no more.’ He tipped his glass into his mouth. Denton did the same; it was like fire. The compare looked at one of the men by the door and moved his head to the side. Moments later, Denton was headed down the stairs.
It was, he thought, as satisfactory as he could have hoped. He felt emptied, rather humiliated, as he supposed he was meant to; however, none of the tough types tried to beat him up. He resisted feeling dirtied, as it was a dirty world and he was hardly virginally clean himself. He would have felt better if Janet had been at home to talk to about it; her gratitude—would it have been gratitude, or relief, or mere acceptance?—would have been an antidote to Scuttini’s ‘honour’.
All that waited for him at home, however, were the dog and the afternoon mail. Nothing from Janet: she had been gone long enough for a letter to reach him—a dozen letters, in fact—but he knew now she would not write. If Ruth Castle was really dying, was really in the final stages of life, she would be completely absorbed. Naples would have been left behind like a cloak she had dropped at the railway station.
Among the bills and trivial letters and circulars, however, was another from Atkins, this one full of the latest successes of the recording business. Also included was a clipping from one of the nob magazines Atkins affected, usually passed on from some butler friend in a high-class house. Atkins, a declared leveller, nonetheless maintained a contradictory fascination for what he called ‘our betters’, especially the titled ones, and usually knew which lord had married which lady and who was third cousin to both of them: he could have had mutually profitable conversations with Sir Martin Gort.
The clipping was on shiny paper and included a photograph of a vapid-looking, long-haired boy, under the heading ‘Lord Easleigh to Give Maiden Speech in Autumn’.
Denton had kept Atkins abreast of the events that had rolled out from Fra Geraldo’s visit to the pensione. Atkins was now responding in kind. The text with the photo was drivel, except the fact that the young lord—he was seventeen, as Gort had said—had taken a flat at the Albany ‘after having lived previously with his parents, Mr and Mrs Arthur Murie, in Birmingham’.
Couldn’t wait to leave, Denton thought.
He looked at the photograph again. The face was rather feminine, perhaps only as a result of residual little-boy fat in the cheeks and rather full lips. The eyes promised nothing; perhaps that was in the nature of studio photography. The hair was what you saw, in fact, even more than the face; it was all but ringleted, shoulder length. Denton couldn’t avoid a nasty thought about Fra Geraldo and boys and what he might have made of this one at ten years old.
He put the photograph of the young Lord Easleigh on the mantel with the piece of broken plaster he had got from Michele ’l ubriacon’ and the presepe carving of him. He stared for a while, then got out the photos of Fra Geraldo’s chapel and stared at them and wondered what to make of it all.
Two mornings later, he had a note from Harriet Guttmann:
Dear, dear Mr Denton,
You have done it! O thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!! The miracle has come to pass because of you. Lucy is beyond happiness—’twere bliss now to be alive!!! How shall we thank you, good Mr Denton, dear Mr Denton! The marchese has entirely gone off. He came to see Mother Newcombe yesterday with a long face and he wanted to beg off from his proposal because he has found he has a fatal illness, he said, and he begged her not to go to law as it would cause acute pain and he will be dead before the Italian courts can have decided anything. Mrs N. was hacked beyond belief and had a complete fit! She said indeed she would go to law &c. &c., but after the poor young man (for I may call him that now the danger’s past) had fled, and she had spent at least two hours on the war path, she and Lucy had a long talk and for the first time I think that our L spoke her mind, though I am sure in the nicest and sweetest way. The upshot is that they are returning to Rochester at once and my mother and I are going to Baden-Baden, as Mother despises Naples and stayed here only because Mrs N is her friend.
Oh, dear Mr D, I fear I shall not see you again before we go. May I write to you? Will you write to me? Our conversations have meant a great deal to me!!! You cannot understand the effect your experience and wisdom have on a young girl just starting out on life’s journey! I do hope and pray you will agree to correspond and that I may even hope to see you again before I start in September at the University of Rochester.
Ever your friend, Harriet Guttmann
PS. Letters will reach me at Thomas Cook’s, Baden-Baden, until further notice. Letters will always reach me at 19 Genesee Street, Canandaigua, NY, USA. Until we meet again, H. G.
Denton laughed. Whatever else Harriet might be, she was cheerful, and she had the effect right then of cheering him. Gloomy enough already, he had been dropped down a dark well by his meeting with Scuttini. Harriet’s account, besides cheering him up, also made him for the first time a little sorry for the marchese. He thought of the scene that must have taken place in the Rocca-Scutare palazzo, the lot of them sitting or standing in an unfurnished drawing room as the young man explained that the marriage to the rich americana was off and they were all going to be put out into the street. It pleased his American egalitarianism, but then he felt briefly sad and had to tell himself again that they seemed to have brought it on themselves.
And so Lucy was not to suffer, after all. Rather, she would continue to be cosseted and pampered and would become, in an
American fashion, a new kind of Rocca-Scutare, wealthy, snobbish, narrow, smug, perhaps the matriarch of another clan that would in its time, after she was gone and couldn’t know, run through the money and be out on the street with the rest of the world. Had she done anything to deserve such special favour, such happiness? he wondered. Why Lucy and not Harriet? Or why Lucy and not Assunta or the housemaid or any of the thousands of women in Naples who worked and suffered and endured?
He did his morning work and went out because the day was pleasant, clean smelling and bright with a sky overhead that shaded from hard blue to a soft green over the bay. He felt better when he had walked, as if something had been settled—an illusion, of course.
Coming along the corridor towards his rooms, however, he heard a soft scraping sound that he thought was the sliding of a drawer. He went more quietly and turned into the doorway of his workroom, and he found DiNapoli there where he shouldn’t have been; worse, he had the photos of the chapel in his hands.
‘What are you doing in here?’ Denton was honestly surprised, also instantly angry.
‘The girl—Rosa—she said to wait in here—’
‘She can’t have done.’
‘They was cleaning the parlour; she put me in here.’
Denton snatched the photographs from him, his anger rising. ‘Where did you get these?’
‘They was on the desk.’
‘They weren’t on the desk! They were put away.’
‘They were on the desk, I’m telling you! What you t’ink, I’m gonna steal them?’ DiNapoli looked like a child about to be scolded.
Denton threw the photos into a drawer. ‘Don’t lie to me. What were you going to do, take them to your pal Scuttini? Or the questura?’
‘Mist’ Denton, what’re you saying?’
‘You spy on us for Scuttini; you spy on us for Gianaculo; what should I believe? I heard you open the drawer as I came down the corridor! You’re a snitch and a sneak!’
DiNapoli made a sound as if he had been physically hurt, and he said, ‘I didn’t sneak,’ in a strangled voice, and in an instant he was out the door. Denton ran after him, telling him to wait, Denton as abruptly remorseful as he had been enraged.
DiNapoli looked up at him from the foot of the stairs. ‘I don’t come here no more. I come for her, and she ain’t here. I don’t come no more for you.’
The front door slammed.
Denton told himself he had done the right thing and knew he had not. DiNapoli was a petty crook; DiNapoli had opened the desk drawer; DiNapoli had spied. But Denton knew he had done a shameful thing worse than anything DiNapoli had done. He, a man with everything, had been deliberately cruel, and maybe deliberately unjust, to a man who had nothing and who couldn’t fight back. Perhaps DiNapoli wasn’t Janet’s ‘innocent’, but if he was guilty, it was of something petty and venal. DiNapoli had been earning a few soldi to stay alive; Denton had been a bully.
He roamed the rooms, tried to read, was grateful when Rosa said that somebody wanted to see him. He hoped it was DiNapoli and ran to the head of the stairs, but to his surprise it was Spina, the photographer from the Via Santa Lucia. Over his shoulder, Denton saw the huge camera in the lower hall, the tripod folded, a crude wooden dolly under it to move it through the streets.
‘I tell DiNapoli I got something for you but he wouldn’ bring it.’ Spina held out a photograph. ‘The inglese I said I remembered.’
‘What inglese?’
‘He was wit’ you and the other inglese but he went away. I never forget a face. Remember?’
Denton didn’t remember, then recalled something about Cherry, the detective. Maltby had been there, too. Cherry had had to leave them for some reason—his wallet. Did Spina mean the English detective?
He turned the photo so he could see it right side up. It was the usual Spina scene—the Via Santa Lucia, a bit of the Pizzofalcone, the Castel dell’Ovo in the background. In the foreground, a man in rather too-formal clothes was standing awkwardly, held in place by a smaller man whom Denton took to be a guide. His left arm was raised partway, as if he were gesturing at Spina and saying something like ‘Smile’. But the subject wasn’t smiling; he looked thoroughly angry, in fact. In the next instant, Denton thought, he might have shaken the guide off and perhaps turned and marched the other way. But no matter, Denton didn’t know him. It certainly wasn’t Cherry.
‘I don’t get it,’ Denton said. ‘I don’t know—’
Spina pointed to two figures in the background. ‘I don’t mean them ones in front! These two—the guy from Sardegna and his boy.’
Denton saw a face that might have been familiar. But not one he could put a name to; his impulse was to tell Spina that it had nothing to do with him.
Before he could speak, Spina said, ‘The guy that run off that day, that’s him there.’ He jabbed at the photograph. He seemed to mean another figure, one with the face blurred by motion.
Denton and Spina were still standing at the top of the stairs; the light was bad there, the air cold. Denton tried to see the figure Spina meant, couldn’t make it out in the poor light without his reading glasses. He led Spina along the corridors to his workroom, where he slid open a drawer and took out the magnifying glass. He leaned close and saw blurred figures swim up towards him like fish rising to a crumb. Behind the shoulder of the photo’s real subject were several people who hadn’t had any idea they were being photographed. One, the one a little smeared by movement, was thick and dark, a middle-aged man in a soft hat and dark lounge suit, the face not quite clear but recalling one Denton knew.
He remembered. He and Maltby and the English detective had been walking along the Via Santa Lucia and Cherry had had to leave them. And then Denton had had the conversation with Spina; yes, he remembered now. Spina had said something about having photographed Cherry before.
But Denton’s real attention was not on the dark, blurred man who might have been Cherry. It was focused instead on the young man with him, who was smaller and slender and had abundant, curly light-coloured hair.
It was the new Lord Easleigh.
To make sure, Denton looked up at the clipping on his mantel. ‘When did you take this picture, Spina?’
The photographer stared at his photograph. ‘I got it in a—what’s the word?—credenza—like, to put t’ings in—?’
‘Closet? Cupboard? Does it matter?’
‘If it’s in there, I don’t take it just yesterday, understand?’ He tapped the photograph. ‘This one I don’ take yesterday.’
‘How old? Last year? Five years ago?’
‘No, no—not so old as that. These photograph, they start to—what you say?—fa giallo—’
‘Yellow?’
‘Yeah, pretty quick. You t’ink I can do some kind of permanent work under that cloth, in the back of the camera? No. My photographs is to take home, you show the family, the friends, then you put away. I ain’t Michelangelo, make picture for the ages, signore.’
‘Last year, then?’
Spina looked at the photograph again. ‘There’s a woman got a fur collar. So it was maybe cold. The man who should have bought the picture but didn’t—I think he was German; the Germans are tight—he’s got an overcoat. So it was winter, maybe. And that’s Parillo’s carriage there—see? The one coming towards me? He’s got the feather decorations on his horse. So maybe near Christmas, but I don’t think it’s Christmas yet because I don’t see the lights in the park.’
‘This last Christmas?’
‘Yeah, yeah, this last Christmas, or the picture would be all giallo.’
Denton straightened and looked out over the bay. Absently, he took coins from his coat pocket and gave them to Spina.
The new Lord Easleigh had been in Naples in December. Fra Geraldo had died in December.
Maybe the private detective, Cherry, had been with him.
I have to go to London.
CHAPTER
21
It had been almost spring in Naples; in
London, it was winter. The city seemed dour and strange to him, the people speaking a language that sounded harsh, their movements sluggish and graceless. The streets were crowded with motor cars and motor buses and closed carriages and horse-drawn omnibuses, and the smell was like a gas, manure and urine and motor exhaust.
He had been three full days on the way, one night spent in a sleeping car and one in Paris, then the day getting to Calais and across the Channel and up to London. Fatigue stabbed into his shoulders and pinched the muscles of his back. Looking out of the carriage that took him from Victoria, he wondered what he was doing there. The sky was overcast, the late afternoon light like the absolute end of day. Who were these unsmiling crowds who marched so relentlessly along the pavements? Who were these unhappy souls who rode the omnibuses, staring straight ahead, never moving? He felt like a visitor from another planet. When the cab driver had spoken to him in an East London accent, Denton had stared at him and wondered what to say—In what language?
It was the City of the Dreadful Night, into which he had been thrown as if from another dimension.
Yet he recognised landmarks, streets, shop signs; he knew his own street when they turned into it, recognised the welcoming front of the Lamb. And his own house just before it, set back behind an iron gate that needed painting. And standing there in a short black jacket and striped waistcoat and dark trousers, Atkins, smiling as if he’d just given birth, behind him in the doorway his huge black dog.
‘Well, well.’ Denton got down from the cab rather creakily, stiff from days of travel. ‘Back sooner than we thought, eh?’ He patted Atkins on the shoulder. He felt suddenly embarrassed, unwilling to show emotion. ‘You look well.’
Atkins had been saying at the same time, ‘Welcome home, welcome home!’ in a voice too cheery by far, taking Denton’s one suitcase from the cab driver’s hands and boosting it inside the gate. ‘Go on in, go on in, General, you’re home, I’ll handle this!’ As if he, too, felt embarrassment.
Denton tried to pay the driver as Atkins was doing the same thing; there was confusion, and then Atkins picked up the suitcase and humped it into the house, bending sideways under the weight because he was a small man. Denton came behind him, closing the gate and then the front door, abruptly glad to be back in the familiar downstairs hall with nothing to relieve its drabness but the two horrible paintings of Scottish cows. The dog was sniffing Denton’s trousers. Atkins was dragging and thumping his way up the stairs with the case; Denton hurried behind and lifted some of the weight, to Atkins’ disgust. ‘Who’s the master here and who the man?’ he demanded at the top.
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