The Liberation

by Kate Furnivall

  ‘They are saying it was an unexploded German bomb that went off. That’s the public story anyway.’

  ‘What?’

  Jake considered the possibility. Everyone knew that when the Germans withdrew from Naples in the face of the Allied advance, they had attempted a scorched earth policy. Destroying archives, torching government buildings, ransacking the museum and art galleries with a thoroughness that turned Jake’s stomach. Ships were scuttled in the harbour to foul up access for the Allied fleet and, worst of all, time-bombs were planted in buildings throughout the city, hidden in offices, in palazzos, in factories, in rail stations, with the sole purpose of terrorising the populace. It succeeded.

  ‘Unexploded bombs do detonate with distressing regularity, it’s true,’ he admitted, ‘but it could also be because we are getting too close to someone.’

  ‘Or it could be the work of rival political factions. Or warring clans within the Camorra. Or a revenge attack on the military. We don’t know, Jake. It doesn’t have to be connected with our investigation, you know it doesn’t.’

  But Jake knew no such thing.

  He rose to his feet. Black spots like fingerprints danced in front of his eyes. He downed another mouthful of brandy and held out his hand. ‘Did you bring the list?’

  Harry extracted a sheet of paper from his inner pocket. ‘It took some pulling of strings to get my hands on this, I can tell you.’

  Jake nodded, waited for the spots to settle back into place, then inspected the paper. It was a list of sixty-three names. The letters on the page wouldn’t stand still.

  ‘Is she on it?’ he demanded.

  ‘No.’

  Thank God. Jake offered up a grazie to San Gennaro, the patron saint of Naples. It was a list of the names of those killed or injured in the nightclub last night.

  ‘Get me some clothes, Harry.’

  ‘Jake, I don’t advise it.’

  ‘A uniform, quickly. Any uniform.’

  He tossed the hipflask back to his friend. She was safe. Caterina was safe.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Caterina waited for the pretty young American nurse to finish scanning the list of names of the dead. It struck Caterina as indecent, this nurse so alive, blonde curls fighting to escape from her cap, cheeks pink and well-fed, while the names in her hand were so grey and so dead.

  ‘No Lucia Lombardi,’ the nurse announced. ‘And no Major Jake Parr or Leonora di Marco.’ She beamed, as though personally responsible for the good news.

  Caterina’s grip on the desk slackened and for a moment the blonde’s features blurred, so that she had to blink them back into focus.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said in English.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t look it.’

  Caterina was in the 300th General Hospital, an American military hospital with two thousand beds in a modern six-storey building, two wings of it used as a tuberculosis sanatorium. The place was staffed by army nurses and doctors. Caterina had come here because she trusted their lists.

  ‘Is Major Jake Parr here as a patient?’

  He was an American soldier. This is where he’d be if he was wounded. She couldn’t imagine him swathed in bandages or one of his long limbs in plaster, vulnerable under an army blanket. He wasn’t that kind of man.

  ‘Please,’ she added urgently. ‘Is he here?’

  ‘I’ll check for you, ma’am.’ After opening a new Manila folder and examining its contents with a thoroughness that Caterina appreciated, she shook her head. ‘Yes, Major Parr was here, but he’s not here now. He discharged himself this morning.’

  ‘Thank you. I . . .’ But the words grew foggy in her mind and she couldn’t quite find their shape. She kept seeing Drago Vincelli’s face sliced into shadowy squares.

  ‘Are you all right, ma’am?’

  Caterina nodded, but suddenly a seat was placed behind her, gentle hands eased her down onto it, concerned faces fussed over her in a dim blur. The blonde nurse was kneeling in front of her. How did that happen?

  ‘When did you last eat, ma’am? You don’t look good.’

  Eat? Not today. Did she eat yesterday? She doubted it.

  ‘I am okay.’ She used their American word. ‘Please, don’t . . .’

  ‘Let me look at your wrists.’ So full of concern.

  Her wrists? She looked down at them. The skin was ragged and torn. The rope damage. She hid them behind her back.

  ‘I am okay,’ she insisted. ‘I had a bad night, that’s all.’

  A biscuit was suddenly in one hand, a cup of sweet tea in the other. She bit into the biscuit, drank the tea, and submitted to the swabbing of her wrists with antiseptic. She thanked the nurse profusely and then she hurried towards the exit, but before leaving she looked back to where the young army nurse was already tending to another. These foreign liberators had brought kindness with them to Italy, as well as chocolate and chewing gum.

  Caterina entered Jake Parr’s office and the grandeur of it took her by surprise. He hadn’t torn down the tattered silk wall-hangings and the crumbling curlicues of the gilt ceiling mouldings, nor had he removed the dishevelled Italianness from the room and reshaped it into a proper office with American efficiency. It touched her that he had chosen not to.

  He was seated behind a sumptuous desk of carved satinwood. A large round scorch-mark marred its surface where someone had placed something hot on it, which offended Caterina, but right now she only had eyes for the man behind it. Jake Parr was studying a large-scale map of southern Italy, but he was holding his head at an odd angle as though something hurt, and his skin was grey. She felt a lurch of alarm. He raised his head. At the sight of her, his mouth opened but no sound came out. He gave her a hard stare, abruptly abandoned the map and came from behind the desk, striding across the room to her. There was no shaking of hands. No ‘Hello, how are you?’. Just anguish on his face.

  Did she look that bad?

  She tried to put on a smile but it seemed to break before it reached her face. She was suddenly conscious of the filthy sacking looped around her feet, trailing grit and blood on his army-polished floor. He gathered her in his arms, drew her to him and held her there. A soft sound came from him, and his cheek was pressed against her hair.

  Caterina started to shake, great wrenching tremors that left her chilled to the bone, as if a poison were working its way through her system. The poison of Drago Vincelli’s words, thick and toxic. And all the time, Jake held her steady until the storm had passed and she was breathing again. Her cheek rested against his shoulder, the wetness of tears on the material of his shirt.

  Was she crying? She should have been embarrassed, but she wasn’t. She had a sense of the layers of skin and of US Army cotton between them ceasing to exist and her blood pulsed in time with his, and she could so easily have let the world stay like that, but she took a deep breath and lifted her head from his shoulder. She wasn’t broken. She didn’t want him to think she was broken.

  She smiled at him. ‘Hello.’

  His gaze was dark with concern, moving from her eyes to her mouth to her chin and up to her brow, tiny shifts of focus, as if putting her face back together in his mind.

  ‘You’re here. In one piece,’ he said. ‘That’s what matters.’ She could hear the relief.

  His forehead had a dozen small nicks across it and a purple bruise spilled from the corner of his jaw, down the side of his neck and crawled under the clean collar of his shirt. Caterina lifted her hands and gently clasped his freshly shaven jaw between them.

  ‘We’re both here, both in one piece,’ she responded and raised herself on her toes within the cradle of his arms. She brushed her lips over his. ‘Both alive,’ she murmured.

  One week. To be alive. She could feel the pulse of her blood strong in her veins. In her ears. At her throat. In her ragged wrists. A sense of being alive, so intense that it bubbled out of her in a laugh, and each breath tasted good.


  ‘Breakfast?’ she queried.

  He smiled and kissed her forehead. The gesture was light, gone in a second, but the intimacy of it lingered on her skin.

  One week. To be alive.

  He sat her down and fed her coffee and almond biscotti, and then a brandy. It set her insides on fire but the grey fog inside her head lifted so she could think clearly.

  ‘Are you all right, Major? Not injured?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing much. The odd knock, that’s all.’ His face grew still, images from last night crowding his eyes, but he blinked them away and said, ‘Call me Jake.’

  ‘At the hospital they told me it was a bomb in the nightclub. My mother’s name wasn’t on the casualty list. Do you have any idea what happened to her? Was she hurt?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know.’

  To her bewilderment he knelt down on the hard marble floor in front of her chair. He lifted one of her feet and rested it on the palm of his hand.

  ‘Your mother was with me when the bomb went off, and unhurt. But I don’t know what happened to her after the ceiling collapsed. I have checked all the hospitals,’ he said. ‘No Lucia Lombardi on any of their lists of patients.’ With crisp military efficiency his fingers worked loose the tangled knot that held the sacking shoe in place and began to unwind the filth-encrusted strips. They stank. ‘I checked hotels too, but there was no trace of her. The owner of the nightclub has no address for her either – he paid her cash for her performance. So I’m afraid I haven’t been able to trace her.’

  He wasn’t looking at her. His attention was on her foot, removing the sacking, layer by layer, so he didn’t have sight of her face. Didn’t see what it meant to her.

  ‘You searched for her? For my mother?’

  His eyes shot to her face and whatever he saw there, it made his voice soften, the military edge peeling off it. ‘Tell me, Caterina,’ he said gently, ‘why are you wearing shreds of old sacks on your feet?’

  She told him, piece by piece, what happened last night. The scugnizzi, the prick in the arm, clawing back to consciousness in the shed. She told him the facts. That was enough, he didn’t need more. She hid the rage. More than anything she concealed the fear, buried it under a detailed description of the leader of the pack and the run through the backstreets of Naples.

  Jake said little, reacting with only an occasional question or an intense look that scoured her face. At times a frown or a long breath. When she told him of her decision to run with the street kids, he gave a tight shake of his head but made no comment and she was grateful to him. All the time she talked, his hands worked on her feet. When her first foot was freed from its rags, he cradled it carefully and studied the state of its chafed sole, running his fingertips over the patches of red and raw skin.

  ‘Jake,’ she murmured, ‘who do you think planted the bomb?’

  ‘They are saying it was one left behind by the Germans.’

  He placed her foot on the floor and started on the second mess of sacking. This one was worse.

  ‘But who do you think it was?’

  ‘I think it was intended as a warning to our Intelligence Unit,’ he replied, ‘to keep our noses out of the business of searching for stolen artefacts.’ He paused, staring down at the dirt under her toenails. Oddly she felt no embarrassment.

  He glanced up and saw her watching his hands. A smile touched his eyes and he added, ‘I have no proof of that, needless to say. It’s my gut feeling.’ He resumed the unwinding of the filthy strips and found them welded to her heel with blood.

  ‘Do you think Drago Vincelli is behind it?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I do. He is a known bomb specialist.’

  ‘Arrest him.’

  ‘On what charge?’

  ‘Any charge. Just throw him in prison and chuck away the key.’ She said it quietly because she wanted him to understand she meant it.

  He looked up at her, eyes serious, while the warmth of his hand was wrapped around her foot. ‘This is no longer Mussolini’s Fascist state, Caterina. There are laws to respect.’

  He took a pristine white handkerchief from his pocket and a carafe of water from his desk. While she told him about entering the church of Santa Maria, he dipped the handkerchief into the water and, one patch at a time, he soaked the sacking so that it peeled away from her heel and she could flex it with relief. Jake proceeded to bathe both her feet, each toe, each bone, each curve, soothing them with the water, removing the grit.

  Caterina didn’t want him to stop.

  His dark head was bowed as he worked, so that she couldn’t see his face, and she knew that was how he wanted it, keeping his emotions from her, letting her talk herself out. Only his hands spoke to her with a gentle eloquence. All she could see of him was his dark hair, thick and wavy. Italian hair. She wanted to sink her fingers into the springy depths of it and to rummage round among his thoughts, but instead she kept her hands wrapped around her brandy glass.

  He left the room, but returned only minutes later with a pair of black canvas plimsolls dangling from one hand and a knife in the other. He fitted the shoes on to her feet. They were far too long, like clown shoes on her, so he removed them, sliced the toe off each, and replaced them, winding the laces under the sole before knotting them on top. They looked odd but were surprisingly comfortable.

  ‘Thank you, Jake,’ she said and touched his khaki shoulder as he sat on his heels in front of her, checking his handiwork. His shirt felt warm, his muscles tense, the bruise breathing out its own heat, and she wondered what he’d say if she undid his buttons and laid her hand on the damaged area, keeping it safe from the day’s slings and arrows.

  ‘I went into the confessional,’ she told him.

  He regarded her with surprise. It struck her that he had the face of an expert listener. Inquisitive but receptive. Easy to talk to.

  When had this happened? How had it changed? She had moved from seeing this American soldier as her enemy to viewing him as her friend without being aware of the steps in between. It was about trust, she realised. She trusted this dedicated police officer. So she said it again.

  ‘I went into the confessional.’

  ‘Why was that?’ he asked. ‘What sins were you admitting to?’ His dark eyes smiled at the corners, as if he thought she might have a whole pocketful of sins she wasn’t admitting to.

  ‘To speak to Drago Vincelli.’

  The police officer in him did not allow the shock to show, but he rose to his feet and stood over her, very still.

  ‘He was there? In the confessional box?’

  ‘Nearer to me than you are.’

  She didn’t wait for more questions. She sat there in her cut-down shoes, knowing that the minutes of her life were counting down, and related her conversation with Drago Vincelli. She described the sight of him through the grille, the shadowy squares of his pointed jaw and his dark-etched profile. The flash of gold in his mouth.

  He leaned close. ‘Is that everything?’

  She considered, remembering the satisfied laugh when Drago Vincelli believed he had hooked her to take her father’s place, though she only intended to find incriminating evidence against Vincelli. And then there was the threat at the end.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, returning his gaze. ‘Everything.’

  It was hard to lie to Jake; his scrutiny was so intense. He straightened up and became brisk and professional.

  ‘I’ll order a unit together,’ he said at once. ‘Right away. We’ll move in on the church of Santa Maria before they . . .’

  ‘No. He has gone.’

  ‘We’ll drag the priest in for questioning. And the street kid as well, the one who led you there for the meeting. Vanni, you said his name was.’

  ‘He’ll have vanished.’

  ‘I’ll inform the Italian police that . . .’

  ‘No, Jake, no. He threatened my family if I go to the police.’

  An uncomfortable silence spread through the room. Caterina prodded her wris
t, jabbing at the ragged skin to bring back the rage because she needed rage, not fear, needed to feel it break through her skin.

  ‘Why so many “No’s”, Caterina?’ Jake’s tone was quiet. ‘Why all these “No’s” to stop me going there? What are you keeping from me?’

  She wanted to reach out to him, to make him understand the clarity of her decision to do this without the Naples police, where tongues were loose and money passed from hand to hand. Her brother’s life was at stake. She could take no risks.

  ‘Jake, please don’t go barging in there with heavy military boots. If Vincelli believes you are involved, he could change his mind about doing a deal with me.’

  ‘A deal? You’ve struck a deal with him?’

  She had to tell him.

  ‘Yes. He has given me one week to find the jewelled table.’

  ‘Caterina, are you mad? The table may not even exist any more. Does he realise that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But still you made the deal?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He did not ask her why. He knew. He knew what was at stake. He had seen dead people walking before. He shook himself, ridding himself of some emotion she could only guess at, and moved quickly to his desk where he picked up the telephone. ‘I’ll fetch a car to drive you home.’

  Before she could refuse, a knock sounded on the door.

  ‘Not now,’ Jake shouted.

  But the door opened and into the room walked Harry Fielding.

  ‘I’ve come to inform you, Jake, that Colonel Quincy has ordered me to lead our unit up into the mountains today to do a sweep on the village of Sant’Agata. He thinks you are still in your hospital bed.’ He grinned. ‘I didn’t disabuse him of the notion.’

  Jake nodded. ‘Thank you, Harry.’ He said no more.

  Harry’s gaze travelled from the American to Caterina, taking in her ill-fitting dress and unconventional footwear, before commenting, ‘I’m glad to see you safe, Caterina. But for God’s sake get some rest, both of you. You’re not looking good.’

  ‘Thank you for that advice, Captain,’ Jake said.

  Harry headed for the door, brisk and businesslike, but Jake stopped him.