‘So where are you going?’
‘Naples.’
He jerked his head towards the shed. ‘On a motorbike?’
‘I’m with someone.’
The frown became a scowl. ‘A soldier someone?’
Only soldiers could get hold of petrol these days.
‘Yes.’
Abruptly the scowl vanished and a look of concern replaced it. ‘Take care, Caterina.’
She was touched. The tension in her aching body slipped down a notch. ‘Thank you, Carlo.’ She smiled at him. ‘Don’t get into trouble yourself.’
They both heard the engine slide into gear. She leaned forward and kissed his cheek, then set off back the way she had come. As she turned the corner of the building, Carlo’s voice, urgent and worried, chased after her.
‘Take care, Caterina. Or you’ll turn into your mother.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Naples swallowed them up. It sucked them into the noisy world of blaring trucks and impatient crowds. Stone walls came crashing down as bombed buildings were torn into mountains of masonry that were obscene to the eye, while clouds of dust swirled through the streets. Major Parr was quick and decisive, swinging the bike first one way and then another when the street was blocked or the road was ripped up for repairs to damaged gas and water mains. He knew far better than Caterina the tangled maze of backways and alleys, the narrow crowded vico that would skip around the blockage.
It was as they were riding down Vico Noce that they saw the fight. A British Army sergeant-major was pounding heavy fists into the kidneys of an American GI Joe, a tall gangling youth whose eyes were rolling in his head and whose mouth hung open in shock and pain. Blood zigzagged down his chin.
It was a miserable street. It stank of sewers and unwashed bodies. Water was in short supply because of broken water mains, and the houses were crammed on top of each other, four storeys high, but a splash of coral fuschias still managed to cling to life in one of the window boxes. It struck Caterina as strange that a queue of a dozen soldiers stood outside the door where the fight was taking place and watched the fracas in silence.
The Harley Davidson skidded to a halt on the cobbles and both Caterina and Major Parr leapt off. Major Parr wasted no time in jamming an elbow forcibly into the side of the British soldier’s head and at the same time yanked the GI from his meaty grasp.
‘What the fuck . . .?’ the sergeant started to say, while pulling back a fist to land a blow on his attacker’s face, but he spotted the major’s insignia in the nick of time. They all knew the punishment for striking a senior officer. He pulled himself together and saluted half-heartedly.
‘Sir,’ he snapped out.
‘What the hell is going on here?’ Major Parr demanded.
‘That son of a putrid whore stole my tin of bully beef,’ the sergeant-major growled. His cheeks were puffing, as hard as if he’d been running.
Caterina looked at the soldiers in the queue outside the house, a mix of American and British. Each one carried a can of tinned food in his hand. What was going on here? None of the men in the queue would look her in the eye. They shuffled nearer the open door.
Curious, she left Major Parr to sort out the brawlers and she walked quickly towards the door. She stepped into a dingy passageway with cracked brown paint on the wall. It led into a living room on the left and at the sight of her the five soldiers clustered around the doorway to the room pulled back. Again the awkwardness. Again a tin of bully beef in each soldier’s hand.
‘Caterina Lombardi!’
She heard her name called from outside. Jake Parr was looking for her. But she remained where she was, unable to turn and walk out. Four women, neither old nor young, sat on a row of hard chairs in the room facing the door and beside each one stood a small pile of tinned food. They were ordinary women, all of them thin, in dull worn-out dresses, their cheekbones etched into fleshless ridges, their eyes as blank as a doll’s.
A British Tommy infantryman stepped smartly around Caterina, placed his tin on the floor next to the one with blonde hair and lifeless blue eyes. The woman stood and walked without a word behind a flimsy curtain that was stretched on a string across the back of the room, creating a ripple of murmurs in the waiting soldiers. Another stepped forward. Grinning. He placed his tin on the floor beside a woman with long dark hair and for a split second she closed her eyes tight. Then she too walked with bowed shoulders, as if trying to hide from herself, followed by the soldier.
The ends of two old mattresses on the floor stuck out beyond the curtain and Caterina could hear a flurry of suppressed sounds, a man’s stifled moan. It was brief. Over in a couple of minutes flat. A wave of sadness for these desperate women flooded through Caterina, and she turned and stared at the men behind her.
‘This ain’t no place for you, love,’ one said, but not unkindly. ‘Clear off.’
‘Leave them,’ she said in stiff English. ‘Leave the women. All of you. Give them food and go.’ She swept her hand towards the street in an attempt to brush them from the room. From the house. From Italy.
‘Look, love,’ a cocky young corporal smiled at her, ‘you don’t understand . . .’
‘Caterina, come out of there at once.’
It was Major Parr, his tone sharp as he shouldered his way to her side, but Caterina swept past him and out into the street, the sadness of it devouring her.
‘Count yourself lucky,’ he said, ‘that your father gave you your skill with wood. Or you could be in that room yourself.’
They climbed on the motorcycle without a word and rode away from that street.
Major Parr had brought her to what he called his headquarters. She looked about her. Only a flat-hearted foreigner could term this a headquarters. It was an ancient Neapolitan palazzo, gently crumbling, but still beautiful. Its rococo plasterwork with elaborate curves and complex scrolls was chipped and broken now, hanging off the walls in places, as tired as Naples itself. In the huge marbled reception hall in which she was standing, she could see tell-tale marks on the walls where paintings had been removed, but the massive mirrors remained in place with their ornate gilded frames and crazed glass. Despite the heat outside, it was pleasantly cool inside and dust motes drifted lazily through the air.
‘This way,’ Major Parr said.
She followed him smartly across the marble mosaic floor and past the two desks of khaki-painted metal that looked ridiculous in the middle of the opulence of the seventeenth-century hall. Behind the desks sat two army officers in uniform, one American, one British. Major Parr came to a halt in front of the US lieutenant.
‘Hi, Forester, anything new?’
‘No, sir. All quiet on the western front.’ He grinned, his blue eyes bright with interest as he took in Caterina nearby. ‘But Captain Fielding has been down there with him.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Yessir.’
‘Okay, get me the keys.’ Jake unhooked a key from a chain on his belt and handed it over.
‘At once, sir.’
The young lieutenant shot to his feet, clearly delighted to have something to do to relieve his boredom. He took a key from his desk drawer and vanished down a corridor at the back of the hall. Two minutes later he returned clutching three heavy iron keys of the kind that opened Venetian prisons.
‘Please follow me, Signorina Lombardi,’ Major Parr said.
The awkwardness still hung between them. She followed. She watched his shiny black boots snap down on the floor, crisp, assured, determined. Why had he brought her here? His earlier words leapt into her mind: To see something that might clarify whether or not your father was involved.
But was it true?
Or was that just the bait?
Her hand slipped to the bag that hung from her shoulder and she fingered the bulk of the weapon inside it.
Using the first key, Major Parr unlocked a door. It seemed innocent enough, painted a pale jade and its panels picked out with richly decorated scrollwork. It
wasn’t the kind of door that hid nightmares, so she didn’t turn and run when he opened it. He looked back to check on her, with quick, intelligent eyes. Caterina liked that about him and yet at the same time didn’t like that about him, because it made her wonder how much he saw.
‘Ready?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Then let’s get those wagons rolling.’
What wagons? What was he talking about?
He stepped through the doorway into a short stubby corridor, but she remained where she was. He looked round, surprised.
‘Major Parr, where are you taking me?’
‘I told you, I have something to show you.’ He smiled. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you trust me?’
‘No.’
He broke into an easy laugh. ‘Well, that’s telling me straight.’
The laugh lingered on his mouth and it was hard not to smile.
‘Make sure you stay in front of me,’ she said, ‘where I can see you.’
‘Signorina Lombardi, I am sorry that my investigations have brought trouble into your life. But I am not the danger.’
Caterina waited for him to move further down the corridor before she walked forward.
The second key, as large as a meat fork, unlocked the second door. This one possessed no scrollwork or colourful paint. It was bare oak, as ancient as the palazzo itself, knotted and cracked, and the lock was a massive clunky iron contraption. Immediately her nervousness turned to curiosity.
What lay behind it?
The American hauled open the door. It should have creaked on its great metal hinges, but it didn’t, so Caterina knew instantly that it was well-oiled and well-used, but when she caught site of what lay on the other side she blinked with surprise. It was yet another door. But this one was made of heavy black metal and it looked brand new.
As he reached for the third key, Caterina muttered, ‘This had better be good, Major.’
His smile softened the tense line of his jaw. ‘I think you’ll like it.’
She didn’t like it. Not one bit. She positively disliked it. The metal door swung open to reveal a bare flight of stone steps leading down into the blackness of an unlit basement. Caterina’s heart took a leap into her throat and the fine hairs rose on her forearm.
‘No,’ she said.
He took her wrist. She yanked it away.
‘I am not your captive. You cannot lock me away.’
‘What? Don’t be . . .’ He flicked a switch. ‘Look.’
Some days when Caterina was intent on creating her intarsia designs in wood within her workshop, it was as if a crack opened up in her mind and she fell into it. Her hands and her eyes no longer belonged to her body; they belonged to the wood. When that happened, she seemed to be no longer part of a world peopled with human flesh but instead constructed of burr-walnut, finely polished maple and purpleheart, the silky sheen of creamy white basswood, and the intense fires in the heartwood of teak and butternut. When she looked at her arms, they would have the glowing grain of red oak and she would lift them to her nose to inhale the scent of them.
It was like that now.
She descended the stone steps into a world of wood.
Caterina stood in front of a Madonna whose cloak-folds were so skilfully conceived they enraptured her, while three life-size mahogany saints stood beside her in a row, regarding her with expressions of grief. Slowly she released her breath. In silence she started to prowl among the objects heaped in the basement, touching, caressing, feeling the rich life of them.
‘So many,’ she murmured. ‘All stolen?’
‘Every one of them. We have recovered these. But there are still many more out there that we are tracking.’
Caterina could see nicks and scratches in a number of the artefacts, damage to the wood, as though they had at some time been crammed together in a truck, no better than oranges in a crate. She could see where the lid of a mahogany box had cracked open. It sent a shudder through her. Yet even in the dim light she could admire the cross-framed Dante chairs and carved strapwork chests. In the centre, four tall ornate candle-holders stood sentinel around a cardinal’s magnificent gilded throne and Caterina recognised the ancient lion of Venice carved into its clawed feet.
There was so much here that her hands yearned to touch, but a hot anger rose within her at the realisation of how close all this had come to being lost to Italy forever. But when she turned to voice her thanks to this American who was helping Italy, her eye fell on a cedarwood triptych that was propped up on a cabinet and the words grew silent in her throat.
She had seen it before. It came from the church of San Giuseppe dei Ruffi in Naples. Carved with the finest inlay-work after the style of Raphael, it depicted three of the Stations of the Cross and had been ripped from an altar. It dated back to the early sixteenth century at a time when Michelangelo was painting the Sistine Chapel. Her eyes struggled to find the repair she knew was there, but it was so skilfully done, she couldn’t detect it.
‘That is beautiful,’ the major commented.
Caterina had forgotten he was there. She nodded and moved deeper into the basement, inspecting a giltwood curule seat, scanning the hundreds of objects but trying not to betray her aim – to seek out anything familiar. The second time she saw a piece she recognised, a delicate marquetry screen, she felt the same jolt of shock, but the third time was not as fierce.
Oh, Papà. What were you doing?
The next time she didn’t even blink. She just kept weaving her way between the narrow aisles, but her mouth was dry, her tongue unwieldy. She took her time circling back to the door where Major Parr awaited her.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘For bringing me here.’
‘Colonel Quincy is the expert whose job it is to catalogue it all. The guy is a genius at it,’ he added. She heard the admiration in his voice.
‘The atmosphere is dry and cool here. I can see that someone cares. There is no dust.’
They were speaking softly. Respectful. Aware of what they were viewing.
‘There is another basement area for storage of marble and stone statuary. Another for paintings.’
He told her this as though she had a right to know and she wondered why. Was it because she was Lombardi’s daughter? Or was there something else? His gaze was fixed on her, not on the works of art, and she felt an urge to peel off the hard sheen on his eyes, to look behind it and find out how much they had seen.
She gestured to the priceless collection around them. ‘Were these all taken from churches and museums?’
‘Yes. All are stolen items. From the old palazzos too.
‘So many. It’s hard to believe.’
‘This is only the tip of the iceberg. They ship them out at night in trucks, often for export to the highest bidder. Many have been destroyed already, maltreated and defaced. The thieves are . . .’
But he offered no word to describe them.
‘I need your help,’ he told her instead. ‘To identify who did the repairs.’
She took a step back. ‘I’m no expert.’
He took a step forward. ‘But your father was.’
A chill spilled through her veins. The American had tricked her. He had laid a trap and she had walked straight into it. She had betrayed her father.
Without a word she headed for the door and yanked it open.
‘How many pieces did you recognise?’
‘What makes you think,’ Caterina asked coolly, ‘that I recognised any of them?’
He didn’t argue, but she heard his soft sigh. They headed back into the marble hall with the khaki desk and the crazed mirrors that reflected a softer speckled world. Jake Parr pulled out his cigarettes and to her surprise lit one for her and one for himself. It seemed the fact that she had ridden on his motorcycle gave him that right. She accepted the cigarette and exhaled a thick skein of smoke to veil the dismay in her eyes.
‘Signorina Lombardi,’ he said. It wasn’t the police officer’s voice th
is time. It was looser, the American accent seeping more strongly into his Italian words, giving them an odd lilt. ‘I do not have your skill to create art, but nothing is going to keep me from saving this country’s art from men hell-bent on stealing it. I lost my heart to Italy long before I ever stepped on its soil, entranced by my Italian grandmother’s stories of her life here in Napoli. Saving Naples’ treasures and its priceless relics is my personal mission. The sooner you understand that, the better.’ He drew hard on his cigarette. ‘I wish to find the truth,’ he added. ‘Just as you do.’
‘Be careful what you wish for, Americano.’
He regarded her steadily. ‘How many pieces in that basement did you recognise from your father’s workshop?’
Caterina could hear the ghost-whisper of a groove-cutter in her father’s hand as it sliced through the wood of the triptych, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at the soldier. A number slipped uninvited into her mind.
Twelve.
She had counted twelve pieces. But there could be more. She had stopped counting at twelve. How many, Papà? Fifteen? Twenty? More, if she dared look?
‘Three,’ she said softly. ‘Three pieces. The triptych, a screen and an inlaid wood panel.’ She raised her eyes to his. ‘Satisfied?’
But before he could reply there was a flurry of khaki beside them and it was with relief that she saw Captain Harry Fielding’s figure materialise at Major Parr’s elbow.
‘Hello, Jake,’ he said in English. ‘What took you so long?’
The breeziness of his greeting did not quite disguise his impatience. This was not the Harry Fielding who had sat so easily in her courtyard in Sorrento. Here in his headquarters there was a sharper edge to the Englishman. His blond eyebrows were gathered in a tense line, but his eyes took in Caterina’s new hair and her dress, and he smiled.
‘It’s good to see you again, Signorina Lombardi. I didn’t expect to find you here.’
‘She has been viewing some of the beauties in the basement.’
‘Really?’ Fielding frowned. ‘Is that wise?’
‘Don’t you trust me?’ Caterina asked.
The Liberation Page 15