She started to move away down the road, drawing him away from the workshop, knowing he would follow. She had not answered his question and he was not a man to let that pass. He fell into step beside her and they walked in silence for a while, keeping their cigarettes and their thoughts to themselves.
‘Have you seen enough?’ she asked.
They were walking past a section of the ancient town wall, built in the sixteenth century on top of the original Roman one that kept the Saracens at bay. The towering dark rows of tufo stones captured Major Parr’s attention.
‘I’ve seen enough of your father’s workshop, if that’s what you mean.’
‘He’s dead,’ she said sharply. ‘It’s over. Leave him in peace.’
‘It is only over for him, Signorina Lombardi. Not for me. Not for Naples.’ He glanced sideways at her. ‘And not for you.’
He paused in the street. A young woman in black was sitting on a chair in the doorway of her house that opened on to the road and on her lap lolled two babies, blond-haired and blue-eyed, and Caterina wondered if their father was German. In front of the woman’s feet lay a basket of five oranges. She was selling them. The American bent over, tossed a handful of coins into the basket and took one orange. As he walked on, a torrent of blessings from the woman pursued him up the road.
‘I was working that day,’ she said abruptly.
‘When the bomb fell?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the workshop?’
‘No. I was put to work in a factory when the war started. I was sixteen. I made army uniforms.’
He looked at her, surprised. ‘Quite a change from making boxes.’
‘It wasn’t so bad.’
She’d hated it. Hated the noise of the machines and the constant chatter of the women and the shouts of the foreman, the quick slap of his hand if he was displeased with the speed of her work.
‘The foreman summoned me to his office and told me what had happened to my father. I ran to the workshop. It was destroyed and on fire. That’s all.’
So few words. To describe the worst day of her life. The acrid smoke. His flesh in flames.
‘I am sorry, Signorina Lombardi. It must have been terrible.’
Caterina halted and turned to face him, the muscles of her face awkward and stiff. She could smell the orange in his hand. ‘Sorry means nothing. What matters is that you must stop this. If you are sorry, leave my father his good name, don’t drag him into your investigation. What is the point now he is dead?’
‘The point is that it is my job.’
His words were quiet but had the sting of a slap. The sun was behind him, his face in shade, his shoulders pulled back as if he expected a slap in return.
‘Are you the kind of person,’ she demanded, ‘who puts finding old cabinets ahead of all the good that a man has done in his life? Ahead of the beauty he has given to the world with his hands? Ahead of his reputation, ahead of my reputation as I carry the Lombardi name?’
He didn’t move, not a muscle, but she felt him move back from her. The street was silent, no traffic, no children, no women on stools shelling peas in the sunshine. Just a breeze in a plane tree stirring its leaves, the way Major Parr was stirring her emotions. Just for the hell of it.
‘Stay away from me, Major Parr. Stay away from me and stay away from my father. He is dead. Respect his name.’
She turned on her heel to march away but his voice, stripped of its professional politeness, pinned her to the spot.
‘What about justice, Signorina Lombardi? Justice. What about men in this racket being knifed to death and others walking away with pockets packed with money while corruption warps people’s minds? People are starving in Naples while these assets are being leeched from the city’s coffers. Justice has to be brought back to Italy and corruption stamped out if this country is ever to climb back on its feet.’
She turned to face him. ‘My father was not corrupt.’
But he had not finished. ‘We’re not talking a few bucks here or “a few old cabinets” as you put it. We’re talking thousands of artefacts stolen and sold for millions of lire. Big, big money. And I believe your father was involved.’
‘No.’
‘Yes. He repaired the ones damaged by bombing.’
‘No.’
‘It’s true.’
‘No. Where is your proof?’
A woman stopped in the street and stared at them. Only then did Caterina realise she was shouting.
‘There’s a set of inlaid panels,’ the American said in a harsh voice. ‘Sixteenth century. Very valuable. Three different people have sworn your father worked on them.’
‘They are lying. Do you hear me?’ Half the street could hear her. ‘They are lying to save their own skins.’
‘You told me you were working at the factory all day.’ Suddenly he reined himself in. He sounded reasonable. She was the one who sounded unreasonable. ‘So you wouldn’t have known,’ he pointed out, ‘what he was doing all day.’
‘No, that’s not true. Every evening I worked there. I knew every piece that passed through my father’s workshop, I swear to you.’ She struggled to keep her hands from snatching the orange from him and ramming it in his mouth to crush his words.
‘Did he keep a list of the work he did, an order book?’
‘Yes. But it was in the workshop. It burnt in the fire.’
‘What was he making that day?’
‘I have forgotten.’
‘I’ve heard rumours about a table. A very special table that . . .’
‘Enough of your lies!’
‘Signorina Lombardi,’ his hand touched hers, as reasonable as his voice, ‘don’t say . . .’
‘Stay away from me.’ She snatched her hand from his and scraped it down her skirt to rid it of his touch. ‘And stay away from Sorrento.’
She turned her back on him and walked away, leaving him standing there.
Caterina had no intention of returning to her workshop. She veered off in the opposite direction, walking fast, arms swinging angrily at her sides, and she could feel a small spike of fear, sharp as a stiletto point at her throat.
What if this Major Parr was right?
But she crushed that thought. It was a betrayal of a good and honest man. She turned quickly into the narrow street that led to her house, grateful for its coolness on her burning cheeks, with no thought for the row of high arched doorways inset into the frontage of what had been a fine merchant’s house three hundred years ago. She had to get home. She had to search for . . .
An arm came out of the shadows. Rough, bulky, choking. It wrapped around her throat from behind and jerked her into the blackness of the deep doorway. She fought like an alley cat, punching and kicking, but she was small and her attacker’s other hand seized her wrists, wrenching them up behind her back, tearing her arm-sockets. Brutal and efficient. Panic raged through her and she opened her mouth to scream.
‘Don’t.’
A third hand clamped over her mouth. Stifling her. It belonged to a second man who slid out of the shadows, stinking of hair pomade. A pointed pock-marked face with cold narrow eyes leaned close.
‘Don’t make a sound or I shall hurt you. Show me you understand.’
She blinked.
He removed his hand but let it hover close. ‘If you make a sound I don’t like, my big friend behind you will break your arms. Capisce?’
She blinked.
‘Bene.’
She couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breathe. Terror turned her knees soft and set her heart clamouring to escape.
‘Now, signorina, what did the big American soldier want with you?’
She shook her head. Lights were flashing like forked lightning behind her eyelids. She couldn’t speak. The arm wrapped around her throat was strangling her.
‘Stupido! Don’t kill her . . .’ she saw the other man’s lips tighten. ‘Not yet.’
The arm loosened and air whooped into her starving lungs
. She tried to get a good look at the pock-marked face in the gloom. She could see a blaze of white in his dark hair at his temple like the brand of a knife wound, and a gold tooth was hiding behind a long moustache. Her eyes hurt, bloodshot and throbbing.
‘What did the American want?’
‘To see my father’s workshop.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
The slap came hard and fast. Her head rocked back against the wall of muscle behind her.
‘Don’t lie to me.’
She spat at him, a sharp jet of spittle that slithered in a silvery ribbon down his cheek.
‘It’s true,’ she said. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What did he tell you?’ He ignored the spittle.
‘Nothing.’
He slapped her again. Harder this time, a stinging blow. Her teeth snapped together on her tongue and she tasted blood.
‘It’s true,’ she said again.
‘You argued in the street. What was that about?’
She swallowed painfully and tried to turn her head but it was like being in the grip of a python. She tried to think. Her mind had forgotten how. All she could feel was the terror.
‘Let me go,’ she whispered.
The narrow eyes loomed close to hers, black and cold as the sea at night. ‘I am going to count to three. If you do not tell me what I want, Aldo here will break your neck.’
She dragged in air.
‘One.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Two.’
The arm tightened.
‘Three.’
‘The American wanted to know what my father was working on when he died.’
‘Did you tell him?’
‘No. I didn’t know.’
‘Did he believe you?’
‘Si.’
He nodded to her captor and the arm loosened a fraction.
‘Tell me why he is here.’
His gold tooth flashed in the gloom. Was he smiling? What was so funny? Her pulse throbbed in her ears and she had to concentrate hard to hear his voice. Who was he? This man that the American had brought to her door and left her to fend off alone.
‘He is looking for something,’ she told him. ‘I don’t know what, he didn’t say. I couldn’t help him. That’s why we argued.’
She held her breath. The American’s words whirled through her head. A very special table? How dare this man with the gold tooth value her life as less than a heap of furniture? Because she was quite certain he would kill her if it suited his purpose.
‘Don’t,’ she whispered.
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t be fooled into thinking my father is involved. It’s a smokescreen.’
He seized her chin in his hand and gripped it so hard she thought it would snap off. ‘A smokescreen for what?’
‘For whatever is really going on. Not here. Not in Sorrento. Go and break people’s arms in Naples.’ Her stomach heaved and she fought it down. ‘That’s where . . .’
‘You have family, signorina. You don’t want me to hurt them, do you?’
She vomited over his white shirt.
‘Merda!’ he screamed.
The arm released her. She bent double, shaking so hard she thought she would fall. When she finally stood straight, they were gone.
Caterina slammed her front door behind her, before anyone could even think of following her inside. She leaned her back against it. Breathed hard, and felt her blood trickle like ice through her veins. You have family. The pock-marked bastard was threatening Luca and her grandfather. Did he really know who she was – or was he just guessing that she had family? Was he bluffing?
He wasn’t bluffing.
But his clinical gaze danced inside her eyelids, refusing to let her escape.
Who was he?
What was the American to him?
She stood there for a long time, eyes closed tight, back jammed against the door, ears alert for the slightest sound of a footstep in the street. A pulse was jumping in her throat. She wiped a hand across her mouth and forced herself to think straight.
How do I deal with this? With someone threatening to kill me? To kill me. Her teeth were clamped tight to stop them rattling in her head.
Do I go to the police?
She could picture their snide smiles. They would pick their teeth and look down their long noses. They wouldn’t believe her. She had no proof. ‘Why would anyone want to kill you? You’re nobody.’ Her cheeks flushed scarlet and she pushed herself away from the door. She had to speak to Major Parr.
But first she had to find the book.
Caterina yanked open drawers. Tipped them on the floor. She raked through cupboards, hurling everything in a jumble, to examine what lay at the back of them or stuck on the underside of drawers. She, who lived by order and neatness, created havoc and chaos.
She ransacked the desk that used to be her father’s but which now mainly housed papers and her brother’s collected hoard of bits and pieces. Oh Luca, you are such a magpie. Her hands rummaged through its contents, pushing aside strange-shaped rocks and a tin of glistening coloured stones, a seahorse skeleton, a carabinieri whistle and a gull’s egg, blown and nestling inside one of her father’s old gloves.
‘Where, Papà? Where is it?’
She tore the cushions off her grandfather’s chair. She lifted its upholstered seat and her fingers touched a knife. A knife? She found it jammed down the side, its blade so fine it could whisper between ribs and enter the heart before a man could open his mouth to cry for help.
Why? Why did her grandfather keep a blade at his side?
She hauled the sideboard away from the wall to look behind. She ripped lids from tins. She crouched down to search under the sink and climbed on a high stool to remove the top from the lavatory cistern.
Nothing. Niente.
Her mind was spinning. She forced herself to sit down in the silence and think.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jake Parr liked Via Corso. It was the widest and longest boulevard in Sorrento, so darn elegant in its ornate classical façades that he felt he should be sporting a velvet jacket and gliding along in one of those old barouche things with a lean wolfhound padding at its wheel. That’s the kind of place it was. It put strange thoughts in his head. To be walking where centurions from Ancient Rome once marched up and down made him look at his feet with new respect.
A young woman fell into step beside him and her gaze clung to the orange he was holding. Timidly she held out a cupped hand and he dropped the fruit into it, the aroma of its bruised skin scenting the air. She tried to scuttle off with a gaunt smile before he could ask more of her, but he gripped her wrist. It was like gripping a bunch of twigs.
‘Tell me, per favore, signorina, where the police headquarters are in Sorrento?’
Her eyes grew flat and anxious. ‘No, soldier, I don’t know.’
He released her and she fled. He’d seen it before. That’s what happened when you dropped the word polizia around here. Like pouring water into hot oil. It spat and hissed. Decades of existence under the shadow of Fascist police and the brutal Blackshirts had left this country nervous of strangers and frightened of uniforms.
He dipped into a maze of backstreets – they called them streets, but to Jake they were just ancient back-alleyways no more than the width of a car and some smelled of fish gone bad in the heat. The houses all rubbed shoulders, three or four storeys high, everyone knowing each other’s business, and he eventually found his way to the police station, the questura. He’d been in too many of them since undertaking this work and they made his hackles rise. They were all hostile to him and his smart US officer’s uniform, but he was used to that. Gloomy places, and this one had a distinct smell of its own. The air was thick with the stink of disinfectant, barely masking a lingering under-odour of mouse droppings. A drunk was still in the cells downstairs, judging by the banging noises that drifted through the open door at the back, but some
one had stuck a pot of geraniums on the windowsill and it gave Jake hope. He walked over to the long wooden counter and touched his cap politely.
‘Buongiorno, I am Major Parr,’ he greeted the man in polizia di stato uniform behind the counter.
He was an agenti who had the kind of face that settled into comfortable folds as he took a drag on his cigarette and exhaled a thick smog into the room. Whatever muck he was smoking, it sure wasn’t good old Virginia tobacco. Jake refrained from coughing but it took an effort.
‘What can I do for you, Major Parr?’
‘I’d like to speak to Commissari Balzano.’
‘What about?’
‘Tell him it’s about a death here in Sorrento.’
The police officer raised a thick eyebrow. ‘You killed somebody?’
Jake gave a thin smile. ‘Not yet.’
The agenti chuckled. Jake took a pack of decent cigarettes from his pocket and slid it across the counter.
‘I want to see him now.’
The policeman picked up the cigarettes. ‘Sit down,’ he said and marched out through the rear door.
Jake turned to find a seat. There was a row of hard chairs lined up along a side wall and on one sat a woman with a shiny yellow dress and a greedy smile. She patted the seat beside her and he saw a livid bruise on her arm.
‘Grazie,’ he said courteously but remained where he was.
‘You got any nylons in those pockets of yours, soldier?’
‘No.’ But he drew out his last pack of cigarettes and tossed it to her. ‘Don’t smoke them all. You may need a few to get yourself out of this place.’
She laughed, a big Italian sound that set her bosom shaking and tore apart the gloom. It made Jake smile.
Commissari Balzano was like his office. Neat and sharp-edged. His shirt was starched, his trousers so crisp they looked as though they would snap if he sat down. His dark hair was brilliantined into a rigid quiff to distract from the fact it was receding at the temples, and his eyes were narrow and straight. They grew narrower and straighter as they regarded Jake.
The Liberation Page 6