The Liberation

by Kate Furnivall

  ‘Sore. And you?’

  Caterina laughed grimly. ‘Battered.’ She paused, aware of the muddy bruises under Leonora’s dark eyes. ‘Did you recognise the man in the black Buick?’

  ‘No. Did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come here, please.’

  Caterina took a step forward, while Octavia hovered in the doorway. The dog snarled, soft and sibilant, but still a snarl.

  ‘Give me your hand,’ Leonora said.

  She took Caterina’s hand in hers, raised it to her lips and placed a kiss on the back of it, just as she had done when greeting her grandfather on the terrace. It embarrassed Caterina, but Leonora would not release her hand and pulled it over towards the dog. The animal’s fur had been shaved on its neck where the glass had penetrated and wore a bandage over the area, so that they looked a matching pair, dog and mistress.

  ‘Here, Bianchezza,’ Leonora commanded. ‘Thank Signorina Lombardi.’

  For a fleeting second the pupils of the animal’s blue eyes grew huge as if remembering the taste of Caterina’s blood and she almost snatched her hand away, but then its muzzle pushed forward and nudged the two hands. Its soft sinuous tongue gently licked Caterina’s fingers and it became an oddly emotional and intimate gesture.

  ‘I apologise for the bite,’ Leonora said with sincere regret. ‘But I can’t be cross with her. She’ll never bite you again now.’

  ‘Not if I see her coming first,’ Caterina laughed, and withdrew her hand. Their eyes met and held for a long moment. ‘Don’t worry about it. Just get well.’

  She turned to leave the room and heard Leonora di Marco burst out in an unexpected ripple of laughter. ‘Oh God, you look a horrible mess. The back of your dress is scorched brown and your hair is all singed into a frazzle.’ She waved an imperious hand towards the shadow in the doorway. ‘Octavia, do something about it.’

  Caterina unlocked her front door, stepped quickly inside and locked it again. She had run up through the town, her head spinning, her pulse jumping at every shift of a shadow in a doorway.

  ‘Nonno!’ she called.

  But the house lay quiet and unresponsive around her, dust motes spiralling in a shaft of sunlight from the glass above the door, the only sound the catch of her breath. It was early afternoon already and the heat shrouded the town in a sleepy haze that discouraged activity. Her grandfather would be dozing in his chair in the courtyard, a cup of the Englishman’s coffee at his side, no doubt, his fingers whittling a length of wood even as he dozed.

  Caterina dragged herself upstairs and threw herself on her bed fully clothed. The thickness of the walls barred the worst of the heat from the room and the closed shutters kept it dim and secretive, the way she needed it right now. Her body ached and her mind felt as if it had been flayed. From her pocket she took a small white tablet that the doctor had left for her at the Villa dei Cesari and swallowed it dry.

  She drew her bed cover into her arms, reached out for its vivid blues and yellows and soft amethyst and wrapped it around her shoulders, spread it over her chest like armour against the ice palace. She lay back on her pillow and let her eyes fall shut, but they were scoured by sharp images of a cliff sliding away beneath her to rocks far below, of murder written in a man’s eyes, of death’s beckoning finger.

  But it was sleep that claimed her. Not death.

  When the night rolled in from the mountains, it brought with it the scent of pine forests and the eerie shrieks of bats swooping from the duomo bell tower. As the hours crawled past, Caterina paced in the darkness of her room, heels snapping down on the boards, arms rigid at her sides.

  Today. It was a day she could not take back. Couldn’t change. Couldn’t erase and redraw, even though it was a day that had torn off the doors of her life and let in the storm that was now battering her.

  Someone tried to kill me. Not threatened to kill me. Tried to kill me.

  Terror is a word that doesn’t belong in normal daily life. It is the preserve of frontline battle troops. For most people the word has no real meaning. A terror of spiders. Of rats. Of childbirth. Of heights.

  That isn’t terror. That is fear.

  Caterina knew the difference now. Terror is when someone tries to wrench your life from your grasp. Terror is when a car forces you over a cliff and you know you would be dead instead of pacing on bare feet across the floor of your room, if it weren’t for one small determined umbrella pine tree that decided today was not your day to die.

  Caterina stared into the heart of it and knew that nothing would ever be the same after today. Her life had changed.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Jake Parr was back in Sorrento. He was smoking a cigarette on the terrace of the Hotel Vittoria, his eyes feasting on a view so extravagantly beautiful that it could almost rinse from his mind the images of the squalor of Naples and the naked misery in its street.

  Here in Sorrento lay a world of enchantment. It captured his soul in a way he was not prepared for. Jake didn’t regard himself as a sentimental guy. He left that to the raw young army Joes who sauntered around, hands in pockets, open-mouthed and astonished at the effortless display of elegance and artistry in the towns of Italy, as well as at the hip-swinging stride of the dark-eyed signorinas. No, Jake was a police officer to his core, trained and tested, despite the army major uniform. He liked facts, he liked logic, he liked to take hold of a tangled thread and inch by inch unwind it until he found what the dirty end was looped around. He was here to investigate a crime. Not to be seduced by this stealing of his senses.

  ‘La bella Italia will beguile you, my Jacko,’ his Italian grandmother had whispered to him in the final minutes when he was packing his kitbag to leave behind the windy chill of Milwaukee. ‘It is a country that will break your heart,’ she warned, ‘with its beauty. And with its pain.’

  She tucked a greaseproof package of her home-baked anginetti into his pocket and reached up to cradle his face in her strong hands. Her skin against his cheek was as dry as apple peel that has been left out in the sun too long.

  ‘No, Nonna,’ he had smiled. ‘I have a job to do over there. No sight-seeing or . . .’

  ‘That’s what you think now,’ she had said simply. ‘You wait.’

  He had laughed. He was that stupid. He regretted it now. He should have learned long ago to listen to her words. Here he was sitting in the sun, knocking back a slug of morning coffee with the Bay of Naples stretched out before him like blue silk and that strange volcanic cone of Vesuvius glowering across the water, biding its time. It was like Italy itself – you never knew when the whole damn thing would blow.

  It was Bomber Harris who had lit the touch paper in 1943, the British Air Chief Marshal. A no-holds-barred kind of guy. He believed in area bombing, not the daytime precision bombing that the Americans carried out. Jake had to admit that Winston Churchill was right when he stated that British night-time raids did not lend themselves to accurate bombing and so could not be confined to military targets. But even so.

  It jarred. Grated bone on bone inside Jake. Italians were the enemy at the time, he reminded himself, they had sided with Nazi Germany in fighting the Allies. So destruction of houses and utilities was an acceptable weapon of war. It caused fear. Lowered morale. It broke a nation’s spirit and therefore shortened hostilities. That was the theory. But Italy was not like other countries. It was unique. Because it was the cradle of human civilisation and the riches of that civilisation lay directly in the path of war. The first Allied bombs were dropped in July 1943 on the industrial north of Italy – on Milan and Turin and Genoa. That was just the start.

  Jake had seen Milan. He’d clambered over the blackened rubble and it had choked something in him. Okay, the Breda armaments factory and the train stations were legitimate targets – but the centre of Milan had also been brutally punished by bombs, as well as incendiaries, all manner of hell let loose. And in that hell had burned the paintings in the Breda Gallery and the Ambrosiana Gallery, paintin
gs of breathless beauty that were part of mankind’s heritage. By Leonardo da Vinci. Blackened to ash. By Raphael. By Mantegna. By Caravaggio. All destroyed because of men greedy for power.

  ‘Works of art are not diamonds,’ Jake muttered aloud. ‘They can never be replaced.’

  He lit a cigarette, his anger heavy in his chest. He did not possess an artistic bone in his own body, could not draw a picture to save his life, but he was in awe of those who could and was passionate about restoring to their rightful owners those paintings and artefacts that remained of Italy’s heritage. His grandmother was right. It is a country that will break your heart.

  He glanced at his watch. Not long now. He stubbed out his cigarette.

  The war in Europe had been over less than a month and the Allied military now found itself struggling to fix a country that was well and truly broken. They had come to bring liberation but now they were wielding shovels and pick-axes, and it was their military muscle that was starting to shift the mountains of brick and stone rubble that the bombs had left behind, to fix the telephone wires and the water mains. The Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Italy was General Mark Clark, billeted at this hotel, but it was General Eisenhower who had established the Intelligence Unit on orders from President Roosevelt himself.

  He had pulled together an elite force of American and British officers, each with specialist knowledge and skills to undertake the task of saving Italy’s works of art. Jake was proud to be a part of it under the command of Colonel Royce Quincy. As an ex-cop, he was here to use his policing skills, to help lift Italy up onto its feet again and to move it forward to a future free from the corruption and destruction that was choking it to death. He would not permit thieves to strip Italy of its heritage. Not while it was on its knees, bleeding into the dirt.

  The meeting with Colonel Quincy was at ten. He pushed back his chair and made his way inside the hotel.

  Colonel Royce Quincy was studying the Manila folder on his desk. His forefinger tapped it with disfavour.

  ‘Is this your report?’

  ‘Yessir.’

  ‘Not much to it.’

  Jake couldn’t argue with that. He wasn’t one for paperwork, it got in the way of doing the job, but he couldn’t persuade the army to take the same view.

  ‘I’m working on the new lead I mentioned, sir,’ he assured his senior officer.

  Colonel Quincy was efficient at running the unit but he could be hot-tempered with subordinates, as fiery as his frizzy ginger hair, and he possessed an unswerving belief in his personal superiority over the rest of mankind. As far as Jake could make out, this seemed to be based firstly on the fact that he was English and educated at Eton, secondly on the knowledge that he was taller than the rest of the world and therefore nearer to God. And thirdly because he knew more about Italian Renaissance artworks than was humanly possible.

  The Colonel made a note on a pad in front of him with a sleek black fountain pen and asked without looking up, ‘Do you think the young woman is important?’

  ‘I do, sir.’

  ‘Bring her in then, this Caterina Lombardi. We’ll question her thoroughly.’ He closed his notebook with a snap. ‘If she knows something, you’ll get it out of her.’ His gaze settled once more on Jake with grim satisfaction. ‘After all, that’s what you American policemen are good at, isn’t it? That’s why you’re in my unit.’

  Jake was far too smart to let the comment rile him. He and Colonel Quincy had reached an understanding, a way of working together that suited them both. They tolerated each other, but that was all. The Colonel was an academic. He had been drafted into this unlikely line of work because of his specialist knowledge of art but he didn’t care to dip his fingers into what he regarded as the murky world of criminals that Jake inhabited. And he didn’t like working with Yanks. But right now, they had need of each other’s skills to get the job done.

  Jake shifted his weight on the fragile hotel chair and its spindly legs creaked. The room was all soft blues, fringed tapestry drapes and ornate gilded mirrors, like a goddamn New Orleans brothel. Except classier. It sure as hell didn’t feel like a military debrief office.

  ‘I have locked up a suspect who is kicking his heels in the interrogation room in Naples,’ Jake informed Quincy. ‘His name is Sal Sardo. We picked him up in a raid on the basement of one of the abandoned houses. My information links him to the Giotto painting of St Francis that was stolen from the museum, though at the moment all we’ve got on him is that he seemed to be guarding a bunch of stolen artefacts in the basement.’

  ‘Then why in God’s name aren’t you back there putting the thumbscrews on him?’

  ‘I’m letting him stew, sir. No lawyer. No contact. On his own. Alone with his fear. He’ll be sweating right now. And Captain Fielding is watching him, so everything is under control.’

  ‘How much does this Sardo know?’

  Jake shrugged one shoulder. ‘That’s what I intend to find out, sir.’ He carefully banished all disrespect from the final word.

  ‘Make sure you do.’

  ‘Sir, Captain Keller and Major Gardner have left Naples,’ Jake informed him. ‘They have transferred north to continue identifying and cataloguing the retrieved works of art in Rome and in Florence, alongside Lieutenant Hartt.

  ‘I am aware of that. We are now trying to evaluate all the monuments and art collections throughout every conquered town and city in Italy. It’s a huge task.’

  ‘But here in Naples our team is now dismally small. We are struggling, to be honest, sir. We badly need more personnel.’

  ‘There are never enough men for the job, Parr.’ Quincy dragged a despairing hand through his hair and started pacing the room. ‘Barbarism,’ he muttered. ‘Damned barbarism. How could the Germans do such a thing? Stripping Naples like that. What they couldn’t cart away, they set on fire – like the archives of the university. And now, Major, on top of that, our own troops are looting and carving their initials on historic monuments. This vandalism has to be stopped. The worst culprit is that damn Nazi thief, Reichsmarschall Göring – he transported Naples’ masterpieces to his estate at Carinhall in Germany. But we’ve learnt that they are now hidden in a saltmine in Austria, so there is hope for retrieving them, thank God.’

  ‘In the meantime I am still searching for further caches in Naples itself,’ Jake said, ‘but I badly need more men.’

  Colonel Quincy frowned. ‘Very well. I’ll try to assign you more personnel.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Quincy stared thoughtfully at a map of Italy that hung on the wall, its regions speckled with different coloured pens to indicate the distribution of Allied army divisions.

  ‘We’ll be decamping any day now,’ he announced solemnly. ‘It is essential that we get this country into shape before we leave.’ He released an irritated sigh. ‘We’ve liberated Italians from oppression, yet still they want to retain that treacherous old king of theirs. Even Prime Minister Bonomi is committed to keeping King Victor Emmanuel on the throne. Christ Almighty, don’t they ever learn?’

  ‘Sir, you underestimate the Italian people,’ said Jake.

  ‘Meaning?’’ Quincy asked tersely.

  ‘They believe in vengeance. The King will be made to pay, along with his son, Umberto. Italians have long memories. When they’re asked to vote in a referendum next year on whether or not to dump their monarchy, they’ll stick the knife in where it hurts most. They will get rid of him.’

  ‘I hope you’re right, Parr.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Now, that young woman you were talking about. What’s her name?’

  ‘Caterina Lombardi.’

  ‘Make sure you bring her in for questioning. Find out what she knows.’

  ‘With respect, sir, I don’t think that’s the best way to extract information from her.’

  The Colonel sat down with a sigh of displeasure. ‘Bring her in. That’s an order, Major Parr.’

  Jake let ten seconds tick past. ‘Yessir.’ />
  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  As Jake crossed the hotel terrace, a hand descended on his shoulder.

  ‘Jake, where you been hiding yourself, buddy?’ A lazy Texan drawl.

  Jake broke into a smile. ‘Chester!’

  Chester Fowles was a short wiry terrier of a soldier who had fought alongside him in the skin-flaying sands of Egypt, but they had lost touch after the bloody slaughter that followed the landings at Anzio. That was at the start of 1944 when over a hundred thousand Allied troops had scrambled on to the Italian mainland and been pinned down on the beachhead by the panzer divisions of Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring’s Tenth Army for three months.

  Bonds of friendship were too often formed and then broken as divisions were moved around on the chessboard of war, but it was good to see his comrade safe and sound of limb. Allied troops were spread throughout Sorrento, some billeted at the elegant Tremontano Hotel, while the RAF were at the Minerva, but it was the Hotel Vittoria that had the edge, with its frescoed dining room and impressive cliff-top terrace. A bit heavy on the marble statuary for Jake’s liking.

  He steered his friend towards a terrace table and summoned coffee. It came black and thick enough to polish boots. Chester, who was now a Civil Affairs Officer, moaned at the inefficiency of the distribution of food to the starving inhabitants of Italy, despite the issue of ration coupons. But as they sipped their coffee, a waiter with slick brilliantined hair and a slick brilliantined smile appeared at his elbow.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Someone to see you, Major Parr.’

  As far as Jake was aware, no one other than Quincy knew he was here today. ‘Who is it?’

  ‘A young lady.’

  ‘Bring her over.’ To Chester he said, ‘It’ll be another of the prostitutes keen to sell me information. God only knows how they track me down; their jungle drums are second to none. That’s the trouble with being an Intelligence Officer. Everyone reckons they have a secret I’ll want to buy.’

  ‘You lucky bastard. Pursued throughout Italy by ravishing signorinas of the night.’