‘Thirty-one …’ repeated the doctor, not understanding why that particular figure was of interest.
‘Thirty-one ducks in the pond: they’re the thirty-one ships in the port! The bastard! And the sun has set on Bari must have referred to the sabotaged radars …’
‘What’s going on?’ Giovanna and the doctor asked at the same time. ‘What are you talking about?’
He didn’t answer. He was staring at a bundle of photos he must have forgotten to put back into his mother’s tin. The first rays of sun streaming through the broken window fell on the image of a nude girl and he went over to look at it. She had the eyes of an angel and a curvaceous body that would have driven the devil himself mad. He looked at her curiously, unaware that he had just met Domenico Palmisano’s girlfriend. When he picked up the card, his smile froze: beneath it was a photo of him and Franco in the palazzo garden, on the day of his confirmation. His cousin was sitting on the bench with his legs dangling, wearing socks up to his knees and dark, very shiny patent-leather shoes; Vitantonio also saw himself, standing beside the bench in his solemn confirmation outfit. Franco was looking at him and saying something.
Vitantonio felt rage burn his throat and redden his cheeks. He tore up the photo and went over to Giovanna. He looked her in the eyes and implored her, ‘You have to take my mother’s body to Bellorotondo to be buried beside my father, in the Palmisano grave. The doctor will help you.’
Ricciardi’s eyes were still wet, but he knew that he had to pull himself together. He nodded. ‘And you?’ he asked.
‘I have to settle a debt with a bastard who is never going to hurt anyone ever again … I’ll catch up with you two later.’
The rage of the past few months churned inside him, as he walked out on to the street. He knew perfectly well what he had to do; his mind was made up. But once outside, instead of heading towards the cathedral and finding the quickest way out of the old quarter, he went to the Via del Carmine and continued in the opposite direction, towards San Nicola and the sea. At the port he saw the seventeen sunken ships and remembered the bodies floating among the flames on the night of the air raid. It had only been three days ago, yet it seemed like an eternity. He relived the desperate howls of the sailors shouting for help from the water. He saw the corpses mangled by debris. He left the port and headed up the Via Venezia, passing the houses that had fallen one after the other, like dominoes. There were kitchen utensils and bits of clothing among the rubble and he again felt the impotence of the rescue teams who were unable to dig out that girl until the surgeon sedated her and amputated her arm. Further on, he passed the shelter that had filled with water, where some twenty-odd people had drowned, and soon after he walked by a house in ruins where a woman and her seven children had been buried alive.
‘God has turned his back on us,’ someone had lamented the night of the bombing as they pulled the dead body of the youngest child out of the rubble.
But this, this was not a matter for the gods. The guilty parties were of flesh and blood, and after reliving the terror of the worst hours of his life, Vitantonio knew that he was finally preparing to do what he’d sworn as he left Matera, as they travelled north in the wake of cruel German repression. Only then did he hasten his step, leave the Borgo Antico near the Corso Vittorio Emmanuele and head decisively towards the Piazza Garibaldi.
Shootout in the Piazza Garibaldi
WHEN HE ENTERED the lobby of the apartment building in the Piazza Garibaldi, he thought for a moment he saw someone slipping out through the back entrance, but it was dark and he didn’t make too much of it. He was in a rush to get this over with and get to Bellorotondo. He took the stairs two at a time and when he reached the third-floor landing he heard some noise and knew that Franco was at home. Continuing up the stairs, he hid in a corner of the stairwell to catch his breath and load his gun. When he felt ready he went back down, kicked in the door and caught the Black Knight by surprise.
Franco screamed. Then, when he recognized Vitantonio, his panic changed to puzzlement.
‘I thought you were still in the mountains.’ He saw Vitantonio’s weapon and asked, ‘What are you doing with a gun? You aren’t planning on shooting your cousin, are you?’
Vitantonio didn’t answer. He went over to the table and swept off all the papers with his arm. Then he picked up the radio transmitter and threw that to the floor as well.
‘Are you still working for the fascists or are you now working directly for the agents of the Germans?’ he asked him, beside himself.
‘I am a patriot and I do my duty,’ Franco said in his defence when he saw that the game was up. ‘The Germans are our allies.’
‘You bastard!’ Vitantonio spat out, looking straight into his eyes. ‘Do you know what you’ve done?’
‘The king and Badoglio are just puppets …’
Vitantonio lost his temper completely. He couldn’t stand his cousin’s false naivety; he couldn’t believe that Franco was really incapable of telling the difference between good and evil. He went over and hit him, hard.
‘They have nothing to do with this. I’m talking about the good people that are dead because of you. All your life you’ve spread pain around you. You and your friend are sick, and you’re going to rot in hell.’
As soon as the words had left his mouth, he realized that Franco’s accomplice wasn’t in the room. In his anger, he had forgotten about him. He turned towards his old bedroom, but it was too late: the door was just opening and the man with the blackened teeth was already firing.
After the first shot, everything happened very fast. Vitantonio felt a burning sensation on one side of his forehead: the bullet had grazed his temple. But he kept his cool and fired back twice; both bullets lodged in the chest of the man with the rotten teeth, and he suddenly crumpled, like a puppet whose strings have been cut. Vitantonio ran his hand over his temple and felt an unpleasant, viscous mass of blood and hair that had been ripped away by the bullet. Warm blood streamed down his cheek, but he didn’t let himself panic.
However, before he had time to react, he saw the main door open and a new character enter the stage. At first he didn’t recognize him, but he soon registered the uniform of an American army officer. Captain Lewis Clark held a revolver in his hand. He fired, and this time Vitantonio felt a burning in his stomach and he had to lean against the table to keep himself from falling.
‘I gave you a chance to keep quiet and save your life but you refused. Now I’m going to have to kill you. I can’t let you spread any more rumours about chemical weapons and endanger many months’ worth of work.’
But just as the American was about to shoot him a second time, another figure emerged from behind the door and hurled himself between them. Two more shots rang out and Vitantonio saw Clark limping out of the apartment with a bullet in one leg. Then, from the back, he recognized the new gunman, now on the point of collapse: it was Salvatore. He ran to hold him up, but didn’t reach him in time. Salvatore keeled over, bleeding profusely from an ugly chest wound. When Vitantonio sat down next to him, their blood pooled together on the floor. He tried to get him talking, to calm him down.
‘You were the one hiding by the back door earlier on …’
‘I was waiting for the man with the black teeth, to settle a score that’s been eating away at me for years. When I saw the American following you up the stairs I knew I had to intervene to make sure you didn’t get caught between two gunmen. Before Roosevelt and the others left for the airport they told me about the fight you’d had …’
Suddenly Salvatore was quiet but a flicker in his eyes showed he was on the alert. Vitantonio turned and saw that Franco was preparing to fire the revolver that his accomplice had dropped. His hand was shaking and he missed. Killing was what Franco liked best, but he was so useless at it that he always needed someone else to do the dirty work for him. Vitantonio stood up. He was just the opposite: he didn’t enjoy shooting, but it came easily to him. He saw that Franco was still shaking
as he tried to pull the trigger again, but his finger froze. Vitantonio watched him with a disgusted expression and took aim.
But something made him hesitate. He remembered Franco pestering Giovanna in the garden of the palazzo, the day that Nonna punished Vitantonio by cancelling his confirmation; he saw him a year later playing with the wooden sword, dressed as the Black Knight; he relived Salvatore’s beating at the hands of the fascists; he thought about little Michele, at the bottom of the gravina, and about how Skinny had been sacked and Dr Ricciardi exiled. In his mind’s eye Vitantonio saw the Matera Milizia barracks blown sky-high; he saw the eighteen men executed in the town square of Rionero, and all the others he had found as he climbed the road to the Maiella. Then he relived all the horror of the bombing of Bari and he knew there was no turning back.
He cocked the revolver. His last thought was of his mother, that very morning, when she was desperately trying to take in a breath. Then he angrily fired two shots into Franco’s forehead. His head jerked back violently, as if yanked by a cord, and his legs folded under him as if they were made of soft butter. Without time even to reflect his incredulity in his face, the Black Knight fell down dead. Vitantonio stood stock-still, his gaze fixed on the blood that splattered the wall. Through that gory mess he saw two holes near the balcony: the bullets had exited the back of Franco’s head and lodged in the wall, making the plaster fly. He lowered his eyes and took a look at his cousin’s lifeless body. He stared at it for a good long while. And he felt nothing.
He then ran to Salvatore’s side, and found he was choking on his own blood. Vitantonio took off his shirt and used it to try to staunch the flow. The blood streaming out of the bullet’s entrance wound was making little bubbles on Salvatore’s chest, as if air was escaping from a bicycle tyre. The bullet must have punctured his right lung. Salvatore coughed and more blood came from his mouth. He opened it as wide as he could, gasping for air, but must not have been taking any in because his face was turning purple. Then, still struggling to sit up, he surprised Vitantonio by speaking in a very clear voice.
‘Your work here is done. Now leave quickly and go to Giovanna.’
‘We need to get you to a hospital …’ protested Vitantonio.
‘We can’t,’ answered Salvatore. This time his voice was much fainter and Vitantonio had to lean in to hear him. ‘We shot an American officer and no one will believe us when we tell them what he did.’
Until that moment, Vitantonio hadn’t grasped the danger he was in. He could be considered a traitor: in just the last few hours he had challenged a captain of the American army twice and had killed two fascists who were most likely passing themselves off as loyal to Marshal Badoglio’s government. He rapidly started assessing the situation and tried to guess what might come next. The fact that his attacker had fled might mean that he was keen not to attract the attention of the military police. A shootout wasn’t something an army expert on chemical weapons wanted to get mixed up in, especially when he was part of a special unit that didn’t officially exist and secrecy was his top priority.
Vitantonio coughed and his stomach wound started to gush more blood.
‘You have to see a doctor and leave Bari, before they start searching for you in all the city’s hospitals,’ Salvatore said. ‘I don’t like the look of that wound.’
‘I’m not leaving without you.’
‘My time has come.’
Vitantonio saw the increasingly bluish tint of his friend’s face and sensed that he was right: Salvatore’s life was slipping away from him. But Vitantonio was still unwilling to abandon him.
‘I won’t leave you. We’ll go to a hospital together.’
‘Don’t try to be a hero! You have obligations now. It’s all over for me.’ Salvatore turned his head and looked at the corpse of the man with the rotten teeth. He grabbed Vitantonio’s arm tightly, looked into his eyes and said, ‘Thank you.’ He gave him an enigmatic smile, put his arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. ‘Give Giovanna a kiss from me,’ he said, kissing him again, this time on the forehead, and added, ‘and the baby too when he’s born; they say he’ll be a boy because her belly is high.’
He laughed, which made him cough and robbed him of the little energy he had left. He kept looking at Vitantonio with a smile on his lips and revealed, ‘The baby is yours, from that morning when Giovanna went up to Matera …’
Vitantonio felt his heart racing. He was about to say something, but Salvatore, still gripping him tightly, lost consciousness. When Vitantonio tried to bring him to, he felt his arms hanging limply and he realized that he had stopped breathing. He hugged Salvatore’s lifeless body, crying, like he had done that morning with his mother’s, wondering aloud, ‘God! What more do you want from us?’
He embraced him tightly once more, breathing in the scent of the black leather jacket that Salvatore had worn since those distant September days when he gave Vitantonio a lift on his motorcycle to school in Martina Franca. In a matter of seconds he relived the entire summer at the farmstead, when he had decided to adopt Skinny’s son as an older brother. And gripped by the memory of a summer haze, Vitantonio too passed out.
In the Crypt
HE WAS WOKEN by the voices of children running in the square outside, oblivious to the city’s tragedies. Vitantonio wanted to get up, but his side was hurting badly. He was dizzy. He stayed still for a little while, waiting for everything to stop spinning. Closing his eyes, he focused on his breathing. When it seemed the world was no longer spinning, he opened them and saw two red and white candles. He took a deep breath, looked around him and found that he was in the crypt of the church of San Nicola. He had no idea how he had got there.
When he heard the distant voices from the square he recognized the strange feeling he knew from his childhood – when he lay in bed ill, and heard children playing in the Piazza Sant’Anna, while he read or looked through the window at the shadows the afternoon sun drew on the grain lofts that topped the homes in Bellorotondo. It had always made him feel that there were two worlds: the real world was the one those children in the square inhabited, but his imaginary universe began and ended in his room. They were worlds that almost touched but were actually so distant that they never overlapped. This often made him feel that he was on the other side, far from the others: that sensation was sometimes comforting and made him feel special, but other times it was unnerving. Like now.
He wanted to stand up but again he felt light-headed and he decided to take it in stages: first he sat on the nearest pew, then he leaned against the wall and finally he walked from pew to pew until he reached the wall of the crypt that gave on to the square. He got up on a pew and watched the children playing from one of the windows at ground level. He was surprised at the amount of rubble on the Largo Urbano II, as if the Germans and the Allies had moved the trenches right into town.
It had been three and a half years since he’d seen children running and playing beside San Nicola in Bari. After an afternoon of exams he had left the law college happy because he was feeling sure he was well on his way to becoming a lawyer. He recalled that on that June day, almost evening, it was incredibly hot and everyone in Bari had brought chairs out on to the street to wait for the wind to come in off the sea. He could have written an essay on the art of catching a breeze in the Borgo Antico. He never tired of watching them: some people took their chairs right out into the middle of the street; others stayed in their doorways; and there were even those who preferred to remain discreetly in their halls, with the door wide open. But if you looked closely you’d find that they had all positioned themselves precisely in the airiest spot, and they all maintained eye contact with their neighbours to keep up a lively conversation. They were like actors on a stage, but actually those cooling off were the audience, enjoying the spectacle of the passersby walking through the city.
When Vitantonio gingerly got down from the pew and moved away from the window, he lost his balance, just as a man entered the crypt. He re
cognized Father Cataldo, Father Felice’s favourite student. His appearance was quite a surprise because Vitantonio didn’t know that he’d been named prior of San Nicola. The priest rushed over to catch him just as he was falling to the ground.
‘You shouldn’t move. You’ve lost a lot of blood.’
‘What am I doing here, Father? How did I get here?’
‘You were brought here by a giant with a kind face. When I saw that you were wounded, I wanted to take you to a hospital, but he asked me to hide you in the crypt. Then he went to find a doctor and some transport. I couldn’t refuse to help you when you needed it, so I didn’t ask any questions.’
Vitantonio wondered how in the world Primo Carnera had known that he was in Franco’s apartment in the Piazza Garibaldi, wounded, and needed help urgently. And he also wondered how Primo must have looked, a gentle giant lugging a dying man on his back through the streets of Bari to San Nicola. The image made him laugh and he thought that the city must be hard to shock these days. They had seen much worse things.
He dropped down, exhausted, on the pew, unable to stop himself sinking back into sleep. He dreamt that he was being chased by the Black Knight and the man with the rotten teeth, and when he stood up to them and defeated them, they reappeared somewhere else and attacked him all over again. He woke up and heard voices he couldn’t identify; they spoke very slowly and seemed very far away. When he woke up for the second time it was pitch black and someone had bandaged his wound. Primo Carnera was once again lugging him over his shoulder like a big sack. It didn’t seem to be an effort for him.
‘Where are we going?’ asked Vitantonio.
‘I have to take you to Bellorotondo. Giovanna will know what to do. You’ve lost a lot of blood.’
‘How did you know I was in Franco’s apartment?’
‘I followed you. Giovanna asked me to keep an eye on you.’
The Last Son’s Secret Page 25