The Liberation

by Kate Furnivall

  She was on her feet and following him when the man with the well-fed face reached out and gripped her arm, right on the bandage, squeezing hard.

  ‘Wait,’ he snapped.

  She tried to pull away but the softness of his face belied the steel strength in his hands.

  ‘Let go of me,’ she shouted.

  The men in the bar watched with impassive expressions, only pausing in the game of cards, but no one lifted a finger to help. With her free hand she snatched at the canvas bag that hung heavily against her hip and slammed it against the side of the plump man’s head. The skin at his temple split wide open and blood spurted down his nose and over his lips, as his knees buckled. Caterina was out of the door before he hit the floor.

  Fear is like acid. It burns away parts of you and leaves you scarred. Caterina could feel it stripping her raw inside every time her foot hit the pavement as she raced after Sal Sardo. He was some distance ahead of her, hurtling down the bustling street, his limbs whirling in crazy arcs, knocking aside a woman with a child and perambulator as if they had no existence in his world of white-hot panic.

  He was fast and agile, accustomed to fleeing, and quickly widened the gap, but Caterina kept her eyes fixed on the back of his bobbing head. Blindly she pushed past people in her way, afraid to lose him, so she had full view of the moment when he jerked to a halt, stared transfixed at something for no more than two seconds, and then veered off down a side-street.

  Caterina paused, dragging air into her burning lungs, and looked straight ahead where Sal had stared. Searching for the something. Except it wasn’t something, it was somebody. A man. Waiting at the next corner of the narrow street was a man dressed in black, a slight figure with a moustache and dark hair with a blaze of white at the temple. He started moving towards her fast.

  A blaze of white. Like the brand of a knife wound.

  Rage shook her. Rage at this man who in a Sorrento backstreet had threatened to break her arms and hurt her family, rage that drove her to leap forward, gripping the weight of the Bodeo in the bag at her side. This time there was nobody to hold her captive. This time he was alone. This time she would be the one to . . .

  He vanished. The white blaze and the black suit with lapels like elephant’s ears were suddenly nowhere to be seen. Caterina blinked, confused. Her gaze scoured the people ahead of her. It swept over the headscarves and the caps gathered around the makeshift stalls selling lemons and second-hand bootlaces, but there was no sign of the man. It was only when she reached the spot where he had been standing that she found an ancient brick passageway between tumbledown houses, running parallel to the side-street Sal Sardo had taken.

  It wasn’t her he wanted. It was Sal.

  Caterina didn’t find them. She hunted in doorways and under arches, she searched through dismal courtyards and ran under strings of washing that hung over her head like ghosts waiting for release. When finally she was forced to admit defeat, beads of sweat and despair chilled her skin and her hope of finding out more from Sal was abandoned in the gutter along with the garbage and the flies.

  She had to get away from here.

  She had no idea how long she’d been running wildly through these backstreets of Naples. Time felt uncertain. She must leave. If only Jake Parr were here with his Harley Davidson. Calm down. Her chest felt too full of air, as if she were breathing for Sal too and that frightened her. She wanted him breathing for himself. But as she stepped into one of the wider vicos and tried to get her bearings, a sight halted her in her tracks. At the opposite end of the filthy little street with its layers of wretched apartments piled on top of each other stood the figure of a large and powerful man. He was outlined in a shaft of sunlight at the far end.

  Aldo.

  Caterina knew him at once, no need to go a step closer. The image of him was imprinted on her retinas for all time. He wore a black hat that put his eyes in shade, but as he caught sight of her his thick lips stretched into a hard, hostile smile. His muscles seemed to expand, straining the seams of his expensive suit, filling every scrap of space in the noisy street.

  A stillness swept into Caterina’s head. A clarity that outlined each thought as crisply as she would outline a flower that she was inlaying in wood. She could pull out the gun right now and shoot him. That’s what her fingers itched to do. That’s what the Bodeo was here for. To stick in his face, this Aldo who had almost throttled her, this bastard who had tried to push her off a cliff.

  With a movement that was heavy and cumbersome to begin with, he started towards her, picking up speed fast, massive arms swinging dangerously at his sides. Caterina’s fingers plunged into the bag and seized the gun. She stood her ground for all of ten seconds, visualising the gory mess a bullet would make of his face, seeing blood on the black flagstones and hearing people screaming. Then she whipped round and ran.

  He came after her. She didn’t think he would be fast but she was wrong. The man moved like a tank and just kept coming. He knew this maze of streets better than she did and took shortcuts to head her off, but she doubled back time and again to evade him, startling inhabitants as she scampered over walls and dodged through backyards.

  Twice she hid in deep-set doorways, breathing hard, and twice she was betrayed by gaunt-faced locals for the toss of a coin. Poverty makes people cruel. She didn’t hate them for it. But she hated him and hated the sound of his running feet, thumping on the basalt slabs like an ugly echo of her own heartbeat. And she hated the raw cough that exploded from him each time he stopped to draw breath, but she never looked back, never turned to face her pursuer, because she knew that if she did, she would take out the gun and shoot him.

  She hated him for that too. For turning her into a killer inside her head. So she kept running and dodging and darting and swerving, but it was like having a bloodhound on her heels, and gradually as her brain grew starved of oxygen, she began to think that one of them would have to die. It was the only way to make this stop. When she ducked into a shoe shop in the hope that he would keep running past, his shadow came to the door and she was forced to make her escape through a back entrance.

  Her lungs burned. Her bruised muscles ached. But the only thought that rose to the surface of her mind again and again was: Where was Sal?

  Sal Sardo could move faster than a jackrabbit. He’d be tucked away by now, hiding somewhere safe. She crashed deliberately into a man pushing a wheelbarrow of baby chicks under netting. They scattered everywhere, spilling out speckled fluff balls that brought hungry hands swooping down on them from all directions. The street filled with noise and chaos.

  Now. She dived under a dim archway. A series of courtyards opened up behind it, gloomy and stifling with heat. Even the flies were too heavy to take wing in the airless yards and spread like smears of oil over the windowsills. Tenements five storeys high towered over them and metal stairways zigzagged up the walls. Caterina shot through to the furthest yard, deep in shadow, and clambered behind a huge overflowing garbage bin jammed against a wall. She squeezed herself into the narrow gap between the protruding metal lip of the bin and the cracked stucco.

  The stench was appalling. A rat squatted on its haunches and regarded her with interest, while cockroaches marched in formation along the base of the wall. She didn’t move. But she listened hard. The muscles of her face were taut and adrenaline was pumping fiercely in her chest as she heard feet come pounding into the courtyard.

  ‘Bitch! Where are you, bitch?’

  High up on one of the metal staircases a woman’s lascivious voice shouted something that Caterina didn’t hear and then laughed insultingly when he growled something back at her.

  ‘You’re here, bitch. I know you’re here!’

  Caterina closed her eyes, so tight she felt a tiny blood vessel burst under her eyelid. She pictured the sea as she’d seen it today from the motorcycle, a lapis lazuli sheet of blue that seemed to swallow the sky. She conjured it up and let it wash away the dirt and the filth and heard its gentle wave
s replace the roaring inside her own head.

  She opened her eyes. How long had they been closed? She didn’t know. What she did know was that there was total silence in the courtyard and a cockroach was sitting immobile on her shin, waving its antennae at her. She remained there until the sound of voices of two women entering the yard made her jump, and the cockroach leapt to the ground. She waited till she heard their footsteps climb the metal stairs and a door bang, then she moved crab-wise and emerged from her hiding place. The gun was in her hand.

  No one.

  The yard was empty. She set off for the street. This time she didn’t run.

  The body lay on a bombsite. Caterina would have missed it if she had stuck to her plan of following Via dei Tribunali up towards Garibaldi Station. There were crowds of Neapolitans going about their business and no one chasing anybody else. But a wedding parade crowded the pavement, the young bride relishing her dazzling moment in the sun among her friends and flowers, and Caterina could not bear all the laughter, so she veered off down Vico dei Panettieri.

  That was when she saw the body.

  The street was busy. An old soldier, whose legs had been amputated, had abandoned his begging and was scooting along the pavement on a board on wheels to take a closer look. Then Caterina saw the police car, the ambulance and the stern faces of authority keeping back the crowd that had gathered. She elbowed her way through the onlookers, heedless of stares or sharp words. Voices buzzed in her ears and people’s faces came and went at the edge of her vision, but all she could see was the body sprawled like a spider at the very top of a heap of bleached rubble that must once have been an apartment block.

  ‘Stay back, signorina.’

  Polizia. Of course. The policeman’s arm crossed her path. Two men in white medical uniforms were crouched by the body, which lay on its back, eyes wide open and swimming in blood. Flies came, thick and fast. Four crows perched on the broken chimney pots, waiting for their chance. The body was male. Under his chin a gaping wound curved like a smile from one side of his throat to the other and his blue shirt glistened purple as it soaked up the blood.

  It was Sal Sardo.

  Air wouldn’t go into Caterina’s lungs. Noises crackled in her head. Vaguely she was aware of the policeman talking to her but when she stared at his lips she could make no sense of his words. When he started to move away she gripped his arm.

  ‘Is he dead?’ she asked. Her lips stumbled on the words.

  ‘Si.’

  ‘Did you catch the killer?’

  He shook his head. He was a middle-aged police sergeant who looked hot and sad, doing his job as best he could. ‘No. He was gone by the time the body was reported.’ He glanced reluctantly back at the thin limbs that lay lifeless in the sun. ‘Poor dead bastard,’ he muttered.

  ‘Poor dead bastard,’ Caterina echoed in a whisper.

  He would have been a poor live bastard if she had not invited him to have a drink with her.

  The train was full. No empty seats. Caterina found a spot by the door to stand, hemmed in by the crush of passengers, as the Circumvesuviana carriages shook and wheezed their way across the plain of Naples for the half-hour journey up into the mountains.

  From the train the city of Naples looked white and innocent. It shimmered in the sunlight and nestled against the base of Vesuvius. You couldn’t see the blood that ran in the streets. Not from here. No more than you could see the thousands of dead who lay under the rich black soil around the volcano. Caterina fought to curb the emotions that threatened to spiral out of control within her. This was a place of death.

  Not just of death, but of cataclysmic death. This was the bloodland. Vesuvius was one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world, tearing the heart out of communities with a relentless indifference every few years throughout the centuries. Not just in AD 79 when it stole Pompeii’s sixteen thousand lives. Or in 1631 when it took thousands more. But even last year, in 1944, the eruption of lava flow caught everyone by surprise.

  Caterina remembered it vividly, the way the burning basalt lit up the night sky for weeks around the Bay of Naples. Seen as far away as Anzio, they said. It spewed from the vents and engulfed the villages of Massa and San Sebastiano, reaching out its greedy fingers for more than a kilometre. It even snatched Air Force planes from under the noses of the military at Terzigno, east of the mountain.

  Yet no one seemed to learn. They kept coming back to the bloodlands. They kept building new houses, planting new crops after every eruption, like children drawn to play with fire. They were locked into a terrible trade with the volcano. They risked its wrath and in return it covered the land with a precious ash that made the earth fertile and the grapes grow lush and abundant.

  To convince themselves it was a trade worth making, they called the slopes of Vesuvius the Campania felix – the Happy Land. Caterina felt herself sway with disbelief as the flourishing vineyards flicked past the train window. She knew better.

  This was not the happy land. She had seen Sal’s scarlet eyes on the mountain of rubble. She knew this was the bloodland.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Caterina arrived at the school. Hot and sticky, breathing hard. It usually took twenty minutes to walk from Sorrento railway station to her brother’s school but she’d made it in ten. Lessons at Scuola San Giovanni normally ended at one o’clock but today the pupils were working until three o’clock to complete a project before the end of term next week.

  She would take Luca home. Lock the door. Open it to no one. Not let him out. Ever.

  She gripped the gate, waiting for the children to emerge. It was a single-storey stuccoed building surrounded by a concrete yard, with a small jaunty bell-turret at one end of its terracotta roof.

  ‘What on earth happened to you, Caterina?’

  Caterina turned to the young woman speaking at her side. ‘Hello, Albertina.’

  ‘You look terrible.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Albertina Donati was a quietly spoken friend and her face was creased with concern. She was working four jobs with fourteen-hour days to keep food on her family’s table since the death of her father at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942.

  She touched Caterina’s elbow. ‘What happened? Look at you.’

  For the first time Caterina looked. Her white silk dress was no longer white. It was covered in dirt and greasy yellow stains, and it smelled bad. Her bandaged arm was weeping blood. She could feel something encrusted on her cheek.

  ‘I was in an accident,’ she said.

  ‘Let me take you home and fix your . . .’

  At that moment the schoolchildren came flooding out with shrieks of pleasure and laughter. The project they’d been working on was about the life of a Roman gladiator and most of them were dressed in costume of some sort. Caterina had sat up at night creating a convincing retiarius costume with cardboard tasset straps and buckles, while her grandfather had whittled a fearsome three-pronged trident for him out of wood and a short dagger called a pugio. Luca himself had made a rete, a weighted net, from a length of old netting that he had begged from one of the fishermen. He had been eager to show it off today.

  The gladiators streamed past her and Albertina’s young brother, Paolo, brandishing a wooden sword, charged over to his sister and ran her through with it.

  ‘Where’s Luca?’ Caterina asked at once. Paola giggled as his sister pretended to die. ‘I walked him to the school gate this morning with his retiarius costume.’

  ‘He wasn’t at school today.’ Paolo shook his shaggy head and vanished into the brawl of swords and shields, now that the long arm of the teacher lay on the other side of the fence.

  ‘Caterina, don’t look like that,’ Albertina said. ‘Paolo was probably mistaken. Luca will be . . .’

  But Caterina was already hurrying into the school.

  Paolo was right. Luca had not been at school. His teacher was adamant. Caterina set off at a run for the small fishing harbour at the base of the cliff on whic
h Sorrento perched.

  He had skipped school.

  That’s all.

  Don’t panic.

  It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last.

  Don’t panic.

  He’d gone out with the fishing boats. That’s what he’d done.

  He loved the sea. More than he loved gladiator costumes.

  He’d be in the marina. Mending nets. Listening to tall stories. Smoking a cigarette.

  Don’t panic.

  Her feet pounded back along the streets and she switched to the shortcut through Piazza Tasso and down the steep staircase with the iron railing that clung to the side of the deep gorge. She plunged downward, shoes drumming on the hundred steps, down to the road that led finally to the narrow grey beach below.

  Brightly coloured boats bobbed on the water, while others had been hauled up on to the beach and fishermen lazed in the shade of the hulls, repairing nets and smoking pipes in companionable groups. A dark-haired boy of around Luca’s age was playing on a penny-whistle and for a moment Caterina willed herself to believe it was her brother. But it wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. She scrambled along the beach to question every single fisherman, but none had seen Luca all day.

  ‘Don’t worry, the lad will turn up,’ a bearded skipper assured her with a chuckle.

  As though Luca were a coin from her pocket that she had misplaced.

  Caterina entered her house and the air struck cool on her skin after the scorching heat outside. She kicked off her dusty sandals and convinced herself that Luca must be with the soldiers again, chewing their gum and riding their jeeps. She clung to that idea. But her thoughts had become jerky and disjointed. She wanted to lie down on the cool tiles and close her eyes.

  ‘Is that you, Caterina?’

  ‘Yes, Nonno, it’s me.’

  ‘Come here.’

  She walked quickly to the living room, preparing to explain to him that his grandson had gone missing, that if Luca were not back soon – very soon – they must inform the police. She did not relish the prospect of the policemen’s laughter – boys of Luca’s age wander off all the time, they’d insist, and she mustn’t worry her pretty head about it. She stood in the doorway of the room.