Ric studies a short, round old lady, wearing a single-piece, Greek-style white peplos dress and a necklace of small porcelluze shells. She is shepherding her extended flock to brighter pastures.
“All going to hear about their brave new world?”
Sandro nods and grins in appreciation as Giuliana places the bottle of beer on the table. “Correct, my friend. As I told you before,” he says, a touch of frustration creeping into his tone, “they think their faith will provide their salvation. Bah! I say, become a lamb and a wolf will eat you.” He shakes his head in disgust. “I have no time for these empty promises; they are the cause of so many wars.”
“Didn’t make you out for a philosopher, Sandro.”
“Oh, okay. But you don’t need to be Machiavelli to know that it is only the fraudulent who escape poverty.” He takes another couple of tiny pizzas and chews thoughtfully.
“So,” Sandro carries on as he studies the herd shuffling through the Corta, “what would you like to do this evening, my friend? We can go to the Lunga? There is a very good restaurant. It is owned by a friend of mine. Very good fish! Fresh, eh?”
“Thanks, Sandro, I’ve already eaten and I’m about to go fishing.”
His eyes light up, “Alone? I can show you the best places to fish for occhiata.”
“No, but thank you, some other time. I’m going out with Marcello Maggiore; totani, as far as I know.”
Sandro sits back and smiles, assuming a slightly patronising expression. “I get it. You want to be Lampara, to learn the ways of the lamp fishermen. Okay, this I understand. But, it’s a little touristic for you, eh?”
Ric looks over at the Purgatorio; the sun lights only the very top of the cross on the campanile.
“Tourist or not, Sandro, I must be going.” He stands and slips a note onto the table.
“Okay, Ric. Ciao, buon divertimento, my friend. Have fun.”
“Don’t you mean buona pesca?”
Sandro shakes his head: “No. If I say this it will bring you only bad luck and you will not catch any fish. Ciao, Ric.”
Marcello is waiting in the small bay at Portinente; his barca is pulled up on the shingle beach. A rudimentary masthead and cross-spar bear crude navigation lights and a small outboard hangs over the stern. Lengths of line and a box of fishing tackle lie piled beside a small battery.
“Va bene, Ric,” he greets, grinning. “This time you come at the right time; you are learning. Normally, Salvo comes with me, but tonight he has gone with the rest to listen to Candela.” He chuckles, “Only Salvo and God know why he chooses to listen to a politician; Salvo cannot read and he does not vote.”
They push the barca out into the water and Marcello rows out beyond the buoys before ripping the outboard to life.
“You sit in the front, Ric. Your weight will help keep it down.” They whine their way out eastwards, towards the flat line of the horizon.
Ric watches the shadows chase them across the darkening water. The further out they motor, the more the island of Vulcano, to the south, comes into view. From the flattened summit of the grey cone, trails of yellowish smoke drift up into a cloudless sky, like the lazy tendrils of anemones waiting patiently for some nutrient to stray within their reach. A late Aliscafo drones out from behind the citadel and scurries angrily away towards Sicily. The two men hang on while they ride the roller coaster of its wake.
A mile out, Marcello cuts the motor and they wait for the barca to drift to a halt.
Last light cloaks the shoulders of the island in purple raiment and the harbour beneath the citadel glimmers, a string of pearls gracing the nape of a duchess. The echoes of a fanfare float down from the Piazza Mazzini.
“So,” he says, “we connect the lights to the battery and we are set.” Having done so, he stands up, the boat rocking a little.
“Here,” he passes Ric a thick, elliptical pendant about the length of his palm. “Fai Attenzione con l’ontreto! It is sharp, eh.” From one end of the pendant, an umbrella of vicious hooks curl out and up; the top half of the other end is made up of a domed light.
“A squid-jag,” Ric mutters. “Evil looking things, aren’t they?”
“Si,” Marcello replies, “ontreto. The flashing light attracts the totani and they impale themselves on the hooks. It is not so much a sport as a harvest, eh? But first we have to find the totani. Tie this to the line and drop it into the water. Give out lengths of line and count them: twenty to start with.” Marcello drops his ontreto over the side and measures off lengths of line between outstretched arms.
Having tied the squid-jag to the line coiled at his feet, Ric too drops his gently over the side. The light at the top flickers and then settles to a regular, pulsing flash. He watches, fascinated, as the blinking light fades into the inky black.
“Now,” Marcello says, sitting back down, “we wait.”
Sinister emerald and ruby eyes watch them from the dark as other small boats whine swiftly to and fro across the sea. Some of the Lampari have opaque lanterns, like upturned bee-keepers’ hats, suspended over the stern and others have no lights at all.
“How long?” asks Ric.
Marcello’s face glows like a lazy lighthouse each time he draws on his cigar. “Patience is the only friend of the fisherman,” he mumbles. “If we have nothing in few minutes, then we let out more line. The totani will be here; what we have to find out is the depth where they are feeding. Ric, hold the line in one hand between your thumb and first finger. When you feel some playing on the line, then you pull it up.”
The silence is punctured every now and then by the clamour from the citadel. There is no breeze and the sound carries so clearly they can make out the voices of the speech-makers.
Marcello instructs Ric to pay out another five stretches of line and says, “So, you are a friend of La Strega, eh. If you have not been to Lipari before, how do you know her?”
“I spent some time in Corsica last year, where I bought the Mara. The owner, Camille, said if I was down this way I should look in on Valeria.”
Marcello’s cigar glows briefly, “Ah, Camille. Yes, of course, the old fox with the white hair. I think maybe him and La Strega… eh? But perhaps it is not right to talk of such things with older people. What about this man, this relative of yours you come to search for. It was a very long time ago, the 1920s. What do you hope to find, if you can find out anything? Are not the dead best left to sleep? You might learn your ancestor was a bad person, what would you do then? You would not be as happy as when you were ignorant.”
“I have thought of that,” Ric replies. “Ignorance can be bliss, but…” And he is about to say, finding out about your forebears can only help you understand what makes you the person you are, when he remembers Corsica and Manou and Gianfranco and the men who died, and he wonders whether what he found there has made his life simpler, so he says, “I have time on my hands and–”
Marcello laughs loudly, “and the devil will find a use for them. Tell me, what do you know about this ghost you are searching for? You think he was from Lipari?”
“Camille looked into it for me. I had a photograph of my great-grandfather standing beneath the gate to the Foreign Legion garrison in Bonifacio. Camille found out he may have returned to Lipari after his service. The next we know is that he turned up in Britain, where he married my great-grandmother.”
“And what was your great-grandfather’s name again?”
“Far as I know, it was Sciacchitano.”
“Mmm,” Marcello murmured. “He was your great-grandfather on you father’s side of the family or your mother’s?”
“My father’s.”
“And what is your surname?”
“Ross.”
“How is it so? Why is it not the same, Sciacchitano?”
Ric pauses, thinking he feels a tug on the end of his line. But when he draws the line up, it falls slack once more and he thinks his imagination is getting the better of him. “We think Rossi was his nom de guerre,
his serving name in the legion. Camille thinks his real name was Sciacchitano.”
“So why did he not keep this name after he left Lipari?”
“Beats me, Marcello, but that’s one of the things I’d like to find out. Got any ideas?”
The wake from a boat unsettles them for a moment and they quiet as the waves slap.
Marcello takes the cigar from his mouth and blows on the end of it; it glows brighter and he puffs on it a couple of times. “At that time,” he suggests, “many people wanted to escape from the Fascists. And, if you escape to another country, the Black Hand – the spies of the Fascists who work in other countries – they could find you and make you disappear. Maybe he changed his name because he lived in fear; to live in such fear was not unusual.”
This time the tugging on Ric’s line is not the product of his imagination and he can feel his companion tense as well.
“Pull it up, but be regular with the line, smooth and slow.”
After ten lengths of line, whatever it is that is caught on the ontreto is beginning to object to being dragged upwards. The line feels heavy and aggravated.
Kneeling over the side, Ric sees the light blinking brighter with every metre of line he draws up, and eventually he pulls the ontreto out of the water and into the bottom of the boat. The moon now gifts enough light for him to make out, wrapped around and impaled on the hooks of the jag, a flying squid about the length of his forearm.
“Bene,” says Marcello. He switches on his torch and shines it on the limp pink sleeve of sinewy muscle which lies staring up at them. In one movement, Marcello wrenches the totani off the ontreto and tosses it into one of the buckets by the mast. “Not so big, but now we know how deep they are. Put the line back in and give another metre.”
For the next half an hour, the two fishermen are oblivious to all but dropping lines and hauling up totani. Some are as long as Ric’s shin and others as thick as his arm, but they all stare helplessly back at him as he unhooks them. Soon enough, the buckets are full to overflowing and Marcello is muttering his approval.
“It is good, Ric. You bring me luck. And it is better to be a lucky fisherman than a good one. Here,” he says, reaching forward from his seat in the stern, “I have a bottle of Fichera. We will drink for a minute and enjoy the peace. This mark you have on your forehead?” he asks.
Ric drinks from the bottle of brandy. He is not used to people questioning him so frankly about the coin-sized, strawberry birthmark above his right eye. “What about it?”
“Excuse me, Ric; I am too forward on occasion. But it is unusual, yes?”
“Guess so,” he replies. “What’s there to know?”
“I only ask, because we call this the voglie, which in English I think is translated as a yearning or a craving.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“No, please, Ric,” Marcello clearly understands he is speaking out of turn. “I have heard people talk about this mark in the past. Doctors say this comes to a baby when still in the womb. They say it occurs because the mother is not eating enough food or vitamins to feed the baby; food like the wild strawberries which grow here. This need shows on the child when he or she is born in the way of the voglie.”
“I wouldn’t know if my mother went without strawberries during her pregnancy, Marcello. Guess you’d have to ask her.”
The cigar glows for a few seconds. “Do you know if such a mark is passed from father to son, or mother to daughter?”
“Doubt it. Why do you ask?”
Marcello does not reply at first, he simply lounges in the back of the barca and puffs on his cigar. “No matter,” he concludes. “It is just that I have seen such a mark before, on other people, and–”
A gunshot rings out from the shore: then a second and quickly a third.
Ric straightens up, immediately alert.
“It comes from the Maddalena,” Marcello says.
They listen hard for a fourth, but… nothing.
Marcello turns and grabs the starter cord of the outboard. He pulls frantically on it, but the little engine refuses to fire. He pulls again and again, but the motor only threatens to start. It stutters and coughs, until eventually Marcello swears and hits it with his fist.
Other boats start up and move towards the shore.
Marcello is beside himself. He swears and punches and dares the motor to get going. And, like a child who knows he cannot put up with such a beating, eventually the outboard clears its throat and whines into life.
But as Marcello swings the little boat around towards the shore, another much larger boat appears from behind them.
Ric watches it come at them out of the darkness. It shows no navigation lights and its prow is at least two metres higher than the stern of their barca.
“Marcello, look out!” Ric shouts and points astern.
Marcello glances over his shoulder and pushes the handle hard over to steer away from the bow coming on behind him. But instead of steering away, Marcello turns directly into the path of the boat. In an attempt to avoid being broadsided, he turns again, this time towards it.
The barca pitches on the bow-wave of the bigger boat and slides down its hull. Ric hangs on to his seat and the mast, but the boat is in danger of being overturned. And, once it is thrown up almost beyond the vertical, the dark blue hull strikes Ric’s head a glancing blow and he has no alternative but to half-dive, half jump into the water.
Below the surface, the engine of the larger boat shrieks in his ears. He dives straight down, as deep and as fast as his arms and legs will propel him; as far and as fast as he can to get away from the thrashing screws screaming their approach.
He doesn’t stop until his ears begin to pain him and the noise of the boat fades. His lungs are ready to burst; he knows he cannot stay down any longer.
When he bursts back through the surface, he treads water, gasping and gulping in the cool night air. Ric is surrounded by the totani from the bucket in their boat; some floating dead, others waking up and thrashing about at his shoulders. He brushes them away and shakes the water out of his eyes.
Not unnaturally, he is expecting Marcello to be ready with a rope and some pithy comment about how other Lampari don’t respect the laws of navigation.
But the little barca is nowhere in sight.
23
“Marcello?” Ric yells into the darkness. “Marcello? Where the hell are you?” The salt water stings in the wound to his temple and when he wipes the water from his face, his vision is obscured and the thin metallic taste of blood infects his mouth.
The last Aliscafo of the day drones out of the Lunga close to his right and other, smaller barche are crisscrossing the water between him and the shore; the whine of their engines drowns out his shouting.
Ric treads water and tries to pick out the shape of Marcello’s boat against the shore lights, whilst wiping the blood away from his eyes.
“Marcello? Where the hell are you?” he shouts again, as loud as he can. But again, his words are absorbed by the noise of the other boats.
Slowly, it dawns on him that if he was thrown into the sea, then there’s every chance the very same has happened to Marcello. The outboard had no dead-man’s cord, so it’s all too possible the boat has motored off, abandoning them both to the dark waters of the Mare Siculum.
Ric swims around, calling out, but receives no response. He realises that neither of them were wearing life vests, so either Marcello is lying unconscious, drowning slowly, somewhere nearby or the man is out in the darkness looking for him.
He continues to swim around in ever larger circles, hoping he might find him. But, after a good few minutes, Ric begins to tire and his head pains him.
Reason, eventually, gets the better of him and he decides it is time for him to start making for shore. He remembers they were the better part of a mile or more from the beach when Marcello turned off the motor and Ric knows he is a stranger to the current. If it should run north to south, he needs to start swimm
ing hard to avoid being dragged out where the currents converge in the straights between the islands; there, he knows, the sea will not treat him kindly.
So Ric strikes out towards the lights of the harbour, figuring that if he heads that way and the current pushes him south, he should make it ashore somewhere near Valeria’s house at Punta San Giuseppe. He tries the mental maths to work out how long he will be swimming: at a mile or more out and swimming at a speed easy enough to conserve some energy, he knows he’s going to be in the water for at least half an hour and that’s if the current isn’t too strong and he can avoid being run down by a fishing boat.
That he has not found any sign of Marcello or his boat worries him, and whichever way he looks at it, whether Marcello has drowned or has left him out in the open sea, he knows there will be questions to answer when he gets ashore.
Fortunately, the current is not as strong as he fears and the water is neither too cold nor too warm to make life uncomfortable. The idea of drowning spurs him on, but if Ric needs any extra encouragement to reach the island in as short a time as possible, it is provided by the jellyfish. Their stings provoke a vicious and near paralysing tingling, like a second degree burn or the score from a sharp knife. And as he sweeps them out of the way with his breaststroke, he can feel the welts swelling on his fingers and forearms. The better part of an hour later, Ric drags himself up onto the beach at Punta San Giuseppe and lies, like a beached whale, gasping for air.
There are no lights on in La Casa dei Sconosciuti and Valeria does not answer the door when he raps loudly on it. So he sets off for the Marina Corta, drying as he hurries. He has to alert someone to what has happened to Marcello, but hasn’t the first idea who to report to.
In the Maddalena there are lights, and more. A police car, its blue light playing ghostly shadows against the flank of the Hotel Rocce Azzure, bars the way at the bottom of the rise and Ric remembers the sound of the gunshots as though they’d happened in another life.
When the two uniformed Carabinieri give him the once over, Ric hides his stinging hands behind his back and turns his head to one side to conceal the wound on his face. The policeman shrugs and waves him away towards the longer, steeper route into town.
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