Mozzarella Most Murderous

by Nancy Fairbanks

  Then there is the Neapolitan character. The men adore their mamas but pride themselves on their ability to seduce women who are not their mamas. Neapolitan women are guarded by their men in old-fashioned ways. Wives who work as maids for bachelors are accompanied by their husbands, who sit outside scowling. Sisters are chaperoned by their reluctant brothers. Yet there are women of power in the Camorra, in politics, and in the arts. A lawless, schizophrenic society. Do I really want to go to Naples? I asked myself, while trying to repair my hair with the hotel’s hair dryer, away from which the general’s minion had dragged me.

  Then Hank called, and I accepted. After all, it was my civic duty.

  35

  Escape to Naples

  Bianca

  “Thank you, Holy Mother,” I said fervently as I put down the telephone. My children looked up hopefully, astonished to see me looking pleased. “Guess what?” I cried merrily. “You can spend the day with Granny; the general said so.” They both cheered, believing that they had been granted a fine gift, which they had. Any change from being locked up in this room looked good—to them and to me. We gathered up toys, books, and a change of clothes in case of accidents, and I hustled them out into the hall. Of course, the policeman guarding the elevator spotted us since we were heading his way, and told us to stop right there. I paid no attention.

  “Signora, you are not allowed—”

  “The general says we can spend the day with Granny,” Andrea told him. “Ask the general.”

  The policeman looked confused. He wouldn’t let us on the elevator, but he did call the general’s number. Probably terrified he’d get in trouble with Rome if he inadvertently countermanded General Bianconi’s wishes. After some questions and answers, he handed the phone to me.

  “I was told I could go to Naples with the others. No one said the children could go.” My children looked downcast. “Museums and churches,” I whispered to them, and they cheered up. They preferred Granny to museums and churches. “Therefore, I have to leave them with their grandmother.” I was talking to Flavia Vacci, not the general. “Ask your new boss.” She did and then conveyed a message to the Sorrento policeman, who let us on the elevator and told me I had five minutes to drop them off and return before he came after me. Dear God, I prayed silently. Let her be there. Let her want to take the children.

  She was. She did. She thought the general was such a sweet man. I had to agree since he was letting me go to Naples.

  We all congregated in the lobby, and there were two more than I expected. The first was Sergeant Gambardella, our escort, who looked as happy to get out of the hotel as any of us. Probably he resented the addition of Carabinieri officers to the guard force because they had prettier uniforms. And, second, Charles de Gaulle, mooning after Carolyn, who was saying, “I thought he was going into a kennel.”

  “Adrien couldn’t get him a place until tomorrow,” said Albertine angrily. “He won’t bother you; he’ll sit beside me and be a perfect gentleman, although I don’t know why you’re included in this outing. After what you did to our hostess, who is quite innocent of—”

  “Now ladies,” Hank intervened. “We’re out on parole. Let’s make the most of it. We even have our own escort.” He grinned at Sergeant Gambardella, who tipped his hat and smiled happily. “Carolyn, I’m sorry it couldn’t be Capri, but maybe I can talk the general into that tomorrow.”

  “Naples sounds good,” she said, but not with the enthusiasm she had shown for Capri. “How are we all going to fit into the car?”

  “Well, we’re putting a chair in the luggage compartment—it opens out like an old-fashioned rumble seat. The sergeant can sit there and keep an eye on all us suspects. Bianca has to sit in front because she can’t get in back. I’m driving so I’m in front, and I thought you could sit in the middle.”

  “Fine,” Carolyn agreed.

  “I’ll sit in the middle,” I offered.

  “Not at all,” she said. “I don’t mind the middle.”

  “It’s not as if I can get a seatbelt over my stomach, Carolyn. You might as well use it.” Hank agreed to that, but then Carolyn said she wasn’t sitting in front of the dog because he’d drool on her, and she wasn’t sitting beside the dog in back either. Obviously Albertine, the dog, Hank, and I couldn’t all squeeze into the front. So we had to talk Sergeant Gambardella into sitting between Albertine and Eliza, with Charles de Gaulle behind them in the luggage compartment.

  The chair placed behind for the sergeant was collapsed and returned to the hotel. I wondered whether they had realized that Hank commandeered it. Hank lifted the dog into the back, and the rest of us squeezed onto the two bench seats. I really felt bad for the sergeant because the happy dog, when he wasn’t sticking his head over the side, ears streaming in the wind, which upset Albertine, laid his head on the sergeant’s shoulder, drooling on his uniform and gazing wistfully at Carolyn, who was sitting in front of Albertine. Still, I enjoyed myself to no end on the drive to Naples, although Carolyn didn’t have very much to say. I talked to Hank until just when we were getting to wherever he was taking us. Then there was a clap of thunder—I’d hardly noticed that the sunshine with which we’d started had disappeared—and rain began to fall.

  “There are restaurants over there,” Hank shouted at us. “See the plastic tents? Run for it.”

  We piled out after he pulled the car up onto a curb. He stayed to get the top up before his convertible became a catch basin for an inch or two of rain. Carolyn grabbed my arm and assisted me safely across the cobblestones. The other two and the dog ran off and left us with Sergeant Gambardella, who seemed unnerved when the people he was guarding split up without his permission. Eliza did hold the plastic flap open for us when we got to what had been a sidewalk café before its owners spotted the imminent deluge and raised a square canvas and plastic room beyond the sidewalk that fronted their restaurant. In fact, the whole street was now half covered with these rooms. We just took the first one we came to and fell into uncomfortable iron chairs that wobbled on the rounded stones. When Hank and the sergeant arrived several minutes later, pretty well soaked, they pulled two tables together, seated us all, and we breathed in the lovely aromas of pizza and pasta and other good Neapolitan dishes cooking inside.

  A nice lady in a red, green, and white apron dashed out of the restaurant and across the sidewalk to offer us menus and napkins to dry ourselves off as best we could. “You’re parked on the curb,” Carolyn pointed out to Hank, who had taken a seat at the head of the table with Albertine and Eliza between us and him. The sergeant sat at our end.

  I hated to think where the dog was. If under the table, there was going to be trouble. No, there he was at the corner between Albertine and Hank. He was staring at Carolyn, but he couldn’t get to her as long as Albertine held his leash. We all ordered hot coffee and hot dishes. No salads on a day like this, except for Carolyn, who said she just had to have one more insalata Caprese, in case the general wouldn’t let us go to Capri. She also ordered pizza Margherita because it was the favorite of Neapolitans, according to Hank and the waitress.

  Her salad arrived, and she had just taken the first bite when suddenly Charles de Gaulle popped up beside her and thrust his long nose into her plate. Tomatoes and mozzarella disappeared before her eyes. The dog licked his chops and slurped down the rest of her salad. Then he licked up the olive oil. Coming out of shock, Carolyn whacked him on the nose with her fork, and Albertine, scolding in French, leapt up and rescued him from his weapon-wielding true love. The dog whimpered sadly while being dragged away, and Hank, ever the diplomat, rose with his plate of fritti, insisted on changing places with the sergeant in order to share with Carolyn, and explained to her that Neapolitans were always ready to feast on little, fried antipasti as they waited for the main course.

  He then fed her delicious bits of fried dough dotted with seaweed, tasty tidbits of battered, fried vegetables—asparagus, zucchini, eggplant, artichokes, and not the least, crocche de patate�
�potato croquettes, which are about the size of the first joint of my finger, coated with breadcrumbs and fried. I’d have sacrificed my soup to the dog if it meant sharing Hank’s fritti. So interested in the lecture and the tidbit tasting did Carolyn become that she stopped glaring at Albertine and her salad-thieving dog and gave herself over to tasting and note taking.

  When her pizza Margherita arrived, that simplest of Neapolitan pizzas—dough, mozzarella, tomatoes, a few basil leaves, and olive oil—Carolyn wasn’t all that impressed. She said that actually she thought the sun-dried tomato and pesto pizza at Ardovino’s in El Paso was much tastier. Of course, she was stuffed with fritti before she ever tasted the favorite pizza of Naples. Both Hank and I agreed that her comments constituted sacrilege, but I’m not sure she heard us. The rain was falling so heavily during our meal that conversation was almost impossible.

  When the storm abated, Hank paid the bill before we could order dessert and insisted that we return to the car. “I’ll get you as close as I can to the Archaeological Museum before it starts again,” he said. He did, and it did, so we had to climb the steps in the rain, but Carolyn didn’t seem to mind. She was very excited about the museum and wanted to see everything, but particularly the things from Pompeii that the guide and Constanza had mentioned.

  “I don’t know how you can say that after you got the poor woman arrested,” said Eliza. “She might have been here with us, if you hadn’t—”

  Carolyn pointed to a painting of Medea and said, “Do you see that? Constanza mentioned it to me. She said she’d never understood why Medea killed her children when it was her husband she should have murdered. And furthermore, Constanza approved of the fate Medea arranged for Jason’s bride-to-be.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Eliza resentfully.

  “Medea sent the princess a wedding dress that burned her alive. It makes you wonder whether our hostess didn’t do away with Paolina before she got to Ruggiero.”

  Eliza looked shocked and had no more comments. Hank said, “Now, now, ladies. Let’s try to enjoy the day out.” Albertine had had to stay in the lobby. They wouldn’t let the dog into the exhibition rooms, and she wouldn’t leave him out in the rain by himself. I wondered whether she liked her husband as much as she did Charles de Gaulle. Of the two, I’d pick Adrien. He seemed nice enough—for a Frenchman—while Charles de Gaulle was absolutely intolerable.

  After we left the museum, we walked along a narrow street of butcher shops with dirty water running down the curbs and bloody hunks of meat hanging from hooks. To my encroaching heartburn was added nausea. At the corner, we turned and came upon shop after shop selling crèches in all sizes, full of wonderful shepherds and wise men crowding around brown, mossy mangers. I just had to stop and wanted to buy one for the children, but Hank asked where I thought we’d put it on the way back to Sorrento—in the luggage carrier with the dog? Everyone agreed that there was no taking a crèche, even a small one, back to the hotel.

  “But I have to bring something for the children,” I protested.

  “Maybe we’ll see something small that you can fit in your purse,” Carolyn suggested.

  “No more shopping,” Hank announced, and insisted that we return to the car because it was time to be heading home before the traffic got too bad. So that was the visit to Naples, a lot of rain, a quick meal in a tent, a long visit to the museum, and my shoes were ruined from walking through the dirty water on the butcher and crèche streets. Not as delightful a day out as I’d anticipated, especially since my ankles had swelled again. I blamed it on the marble museum floors and Carolyn’s limitless enthusiasm for every statue, pot, mosaic, and painting she saw.

  36

  Crime in the Streets

  Carolyn

  Of course we ladies wanted to shop, but the sergeant agreed with Hank that it was time to be getting home, so we walked back toward the car, Eliza and I holding Bianca so that she wouldn’t slip on the cobblestone streets. Wet cobblestones make for dreadful walking. It’s a wonder that large portions of medieval populations didn’t die from compound fractures that festered, while the other half slipped once too often and became cripples for life. It was a great relief to get to a large concrete piazza, comfortable and safe underfoot, even though the sun had come out, and the area was very crowded. I don’t know how many times passing pedestrians bumped me, but I certainly remember the last time. We were within ten yards of some tree-shaded benches at the far edge when I took a hard, but not painful jostling. Then, to my astonishment, Hank punched the seedy-looking man who had bumped into me. The poor fellow fell in a puddle, his nose gushing blood.

  “Hank, I’m not hurt,” I assured him. “I’m sure he didn’t mean to—”

  The man made an effort to scramble up, but Hank stepped on his wrist and said, “Give her back the camera.” He said it in Italian, and Bianca translated, quite excited by the confrontation. The rest of us were all wide-eyed with shock, even Sergeant Gambardella.

  The fellow in the puddle then spoke at length in a frantic, wheedling tone. “He says he doesn’t have a camera,” Bianca translated. “Did you notice that he started by calling Hank Dottore and worked his way up to Commendatore ? Hank obviously isn’t impressed by Neapolitan flattery.”

  I, however, was impressed by Hank’s fluent Italian. I remembered him saying that he knew all the good restaurants in the area. Obviously he had visited before, but his command of the language—my thoughts were interrupted when Sergeant Gambardella tried to remonstrate with Hank, but to no avail. Hank shifted his considerable weight, and the alleged thief screamed as the bones in his wrist cracked audibly.

  “Why do you think he took my camera?” I cried, letting go of Bianca and reaching into the outside pocket of my purse to prove that the camera was still in my possession. This is dreadful, I thought, for I had spotted a Neapolitan policeman hurrying toward us. Hank would be thrown in jail unless I could find the camera, which didn’t seem to be in the pocket where I thought I remembered putting it. No, that wasn’t right. If I had my camera, Hank would be jailed for assaulting an innocent man. What was I to do? I didn’t want to be the cause of another person in our group being arrested, but on the other hand, I couldn’t lie to the Neapolitan police.

  While I was fretting over this moral dilemma and un-snapping my purse to search inside, Hank leaned down and grasped one of the very large pockets in the man’s pants, ripped it completely off, and handed me my camera, which the Neapolitan policeman immediately confiscated as evidence. Then he hauled the whimpering thief up by his coat collar and marched us all off to a police station.

  What a welter of misunderstandings that was. The police did not speak English. Hank and Bianca had to translate, but the officers were loath to believe their translations. Everybody shouted; nobody got to sit down except Bianca. They were probably afraid that she’d give birth on the spot if they didn’t find her a chair. Charles de Gaulle tried to lick a captain’s hand and was immured in a cell as a “dangerous canine.” Albertine all but attacked the captain—in French, of course. Eliza said the thief was probably a Mafia soldier, which didn’t go over well, since organized crime, and everything else in Naples, is run by the Camorra, not the Mafia.

  Then several unpleasant remarks were made about President Bush, although I had thought that the Italians were our allies. Bianca explained to me that a sergeant’s cousin had been killed in Iraq, so I offered my condolences to the sergeant and said that I, too, disliked the war and feared that my own son might have to go if the draft were reinstated in our country. All the shouting stopped while Bianca translated my remarks, which I followed by saying that I could prove the camera was mine and would swear that I had not given it to the alleged thief.

  The captain demanded to know if I had a sales receipt for the camera on my person, which of course I didn’t, but I did manage to convince them, through Bianca, that I should have the camera returned to me for the time being. Then everyone crowded around to see t
he pictures on my little digital screen. They passed the scenes from hand to hand, identifying the restaurant where we ate—the sergeant knew the lady who ran it; the museum with Albertine and Eliza standing on the steps, Charles de Gaulle pulling at his leash; Bianca at a crèche shop pointing to call attention to a favorite—Hank had taken that picture; and all of us in the lobby of the Grand Hotel Sorrento—the captain had stayed there on his honeymoon.

  There was even a picture of Gwen that came up when someone pressed the wrong button and started the pictures from the back—all the young officers were enchanted with Gwen and asked if she had come to Sorrento with me. One insisted that I zoom in so he could see her face better. Then he sighed rapturously as if he had been afflicted with love at first sight. Such romantics, these Italians. I only agreed to work the zoom feature because my daughter was safely back home in the states.

  The upshot of all this international photo viewing was the arrest of the man who had stolen my camera, the taking of all our names as witnesses—we didn’t bother to tell them that all of us would be going home soon, except Sergeant Gambardella, who had liked my daughter too—and our release. We were even given a ride back to the car, where Hank found, under his windshield wiper, a soggy ticket for parking on the curb. “Fucking vigile!” Hank snarled. I was offended, Bianca said a vigile was a traffic policeman, and our police chauffeur laughed uproariously, clapped Hank on the shoulder, and tore up the ticket. Too bad. I had been about to tell Hank that I’d warned him.

  Since the rain had returned, the luggage compartment could not be opened, and Charles de Gaulle had to sprawl across the laps of Eliza, Sergeant Gambardella, and Albertine. I was left to reflect glumly that I had not and would probably never, during this trip, get a chance to question Hank about his connections, if any, with Ruggiero Ricci. The general was going to be very disappointed. In fact, he might think I had accepted the assignment only for the opportunity of a trip to Naples, which wouldn’t be fair. It hadn’t been that wonderful a trip.