Ontreto

by Peter Crawley

  The path bends sharply and the drop beside it is precipitous. Deep, ridged gullies cut down the lava face and across the path, and in places the track has been washed clean away. A second sharp bend reveals an open flank up to the rim of the crater.

  He can’t see Ciccio because he is concealed by the bend and the slope, but Ric knows he will be helplessly exposed once he starts the final climb. His pace has slowed to little more than a jog as he tries to conserve both his breath and his energy for the final climb. He looks back down. There is no choice but to carry on. He breathes deep and attacks the slope in short, regular steps.

  Ten minutes later, he reaches the rim of the crater. Expecting to find some relief in the form of cover, Ric is disappointed. What faces him is a barren landscape of brown shale broken only by lumps of yellow and white magma. The crater of the volcano is vast, almost a kilometre across and the steep sides descend into a lagoon of pale grey lava overlaid with wisps of steam. The path splits into two; one tracing a southerly ridge up to the summit, the other a slight descent round to a concrete hut, beyond which clouds of yellow and white gas issue from the slopes either side.

  Ric glances back down and watches Ciccio making his way up towards him. Not knowing whether the path upwards to the summit will leave him at a dead end, he jogs away down the slope towards the hut.

  The pungent odour of sulphur dries his throat and forces him to gag and spit as he shambles along the path. The sun is clear above the eastern sea now and the ground beneath his feet begins to heat through his shoes.

  Sadly, though the hut is solid and square, its metal door is locked shut.

  Ciccio clears the rim; he has reached the fork in the path. He hesitates and seeing that Ric has not opted for the route up to the summit, he starts over towards the hut.

  Ric looks around for some place to hide, but there is nothing that will afford him any kind of shelter. His only hope is that the clouds of yellow and white sulphur gas seeping from the fissures around the rim will obscure his flight. But the gas that swirls around them is noxious and when he jogs through it, it blinds him. He loses his footing and falls, and in putting his hands out to soften his landing, he burns his palms. He gets to his feet, but finds he is criminally dizzy. The acrid stench coats his lungs and sears his nostrils. His eyes water, he begins to cough uncontrollably. He retches.

  Ric staggers away, not realising he is moving closer to the centre of the field of fumaroles. How long he is wandering around in a daze for, he doesn’t know. He can hear a voice. Someone is calling him and he can’t think who it might be. Knowing he will suffocate if he stays where he is, he starts to walk in the direction of the voice.

  “It is difficult to imagine what could be worse,” Ciccio says from no more than ten paces in front of him, “drowning in the fluid that is filling your lungs or being shot. Personally I would prefer a quick end; pulmonary oedema, so people say, is very painful and really makes no sense.”

  Even if he possessed the wherewithal to reply, Ric isn’t sure he would choose to. All he can think of to say is, “You killed Claudio, Ciccio. You killed him, stole his lucky charm and buried him in an unmarked grave. You have no heart.”

  Ciccio grins, his demonic expression wreathed in the vapours of the underworld. In his sober suit and suntan, he looks the perfect executioner; the Mafioso stepped out for an early morning murder.

  “You are right, Ric. I killed the poor young man. He was such a delicate flower, so sensitive; too sensitive for his ambition. But, you are absolutely wrong when you say I stole this?” He puts his hand in his pocket and pulls out the cuorniceddu.

  “This worthless piece of shit?” He throws it at Ric’s feet. “I gave it to him for his birthday ten years ago; it was mine in the first place. And what would be the profit in him taking it to the next world? There is no room for superstition in the afterlife, Ric. It is a shame though; he would have needed his cuorniceddu in the company of a man like you; a man who wears the malocchio. It’s a shame you never got to meet him. Perhaps you will soon.”

  Ric rubs his eyes in an attempt to gain some focus. He reaches into his pocket for his handkerchief, but all he finds is the ontreto he picked up off the floor of Marcello’s boat; he grips it, nervously, pricking his fingers on the sharp spines. Ric is now way beyond angry that he should find himself in such a desolate place, standing before a man with murder in his heart. He is tired and frustrated that his search for his roots should lead him to such an end. But most of all he regrets doubting Marcello, even if the burly Liparotan has set him up to flush Francesco Ferro from his hiding place.

  “You know, Ric,” Ciccio continues in a triumphant tone, “this is a fitting place for you to die. People say the Fossa is the gateway to the underworld. They say Vulcan, the God of Fire, makes his furnaces here in the entrance to hell.”

  Ciccio raises the gun, cocks it and aims.

  “You forget, Ciccio, I have met Claudio. Only because of you, I met him too late to save his life.”

  As a cloud of sulphur gas drifts between them, Ric summons all the latent fury his frustrations have put at his disposal, draws the ontreto from his pocket and flings it at Ciccio.

  The squid-jag hits him in the face and the umbrella of hooks stick into the soft flesh at his eyebrow. He screams and reels back beneath the blow. As he does so, a cloud of gas shoots from a fissure at his feet and envelopes him.

  Ric lurches away swiftly to his right, but he stumbles over a rock and falls. The ground burns his hands a he heaves himself upright and starts running. But, he trips again, half-falls and staggers. He is running blind across the slope, hoping beyond hope that he will soon clear the field of fumaroles.

  At last his vision clears and the air thins. He falls, gets back up and gulps in as much of the clean air as he can manage.

  He looks round to see where Ciccio is, but again, he is standing right in front of him.

  The Sicilian is clutching his face, the ontreto still hanging limply from his eyebrow, obscuring his sight. Blood pours down his cheek and he is trying to staunch the flow of it with his left hand whilst at the same time aiming the pistol with his right.

  Ric lunges at him and knocks him down. He grabs Ciccio’s wrist and tries to wrest the gun from his hand. But Ciccio pulls away. He half stands and staggers, and drags Ric back towards the belching fumaroles.

  The ground scalds them as they land struggling, wrestling, punching and kicking.

  Ric grabs at Ciccio’s wrist once more and manages to get a grip on it. His face is inches from Ciccio’s. The terror of knowing only one of them can survive is written large in his eyes.

  “A fitting place, you said, Ciccio,” he shouts. “Well perhaps it’s time for you to go to hell.”

  Instead of trying to pull the gun from his hand, Ric pushes it away, but holds on and forces Ciccio’s hand into the yellow crusted fissure of a fumarole.

  He screams and tries to let go of the gun, but Ric forces his arm further into the crack and, after hanging on for as long as the immense heat allows, he releases his grip. Ric rolls away and stumbles and lurches until he is upright.

  Ciccio is on his knees, clutching his cauterised hand, screaming. His perfect black suit is sullied by the yellow sulphur and his expression suggests he is horrified it could be so.

  Ric steps back, gasps and steps immediately forward again. He kicks Ciccio as hard as he can in the side of his head.

  Francesco Ferro falls back, rolls and collapses onto his front. And as he collapses, so his head drops into the crystalline cleft of a crack in the earth’s surface. A geyser of yellow-white gas, like the ink which shoots from the octopus, spews from the fumarole directly into his face.

  Ciccio jerks, twitches like a demented Sicilian puppet and stills.

  Epilogue

  It is late afternoon and Ric is sitting in the café La Precchia, halfway down the Corso Vittorio. Couples are strolling and watching. Young girls giggle and blush in the presence of boys, and younger girls push pram
s and scold dolls.

  Commissario Tommaso Talaia sits opposite him, his Homburg the centre piece of the table.

  “Did I mention to you the reflections of Giambattista Basile in his novel Il Corvo, The Raven?”

  “Not that I recall,” Ric replies.

  The little cockerel smiles, “Of course. Perhaps I did not; so much water has passed through the Straits of Messina since that time that I…”

  The music of brass instruments, flutes and drums drifts down the cobbled street. The waiter asks, politely of course, if they would mind transferring to a table on the pavement. They do so, immediately if unhurriedly.

  The shopkeepers of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele are closing up, shepherding their staff out into the street, and a boy on a scooter is shooed away down a side alley.

  First in the column filing down the Corso are the dozen or so musicians of the band; their blue uniforms pressed, their shoes shined. They are playing a Sicilian funeral march. Ric has heard the solemn and foreboding score before, but cannot recall when or where. It is, he decides, appropriately vainglorious.

  Maso Talaia glances up at the blue sky and sucks his teeth, loudly.

  Ric smiles back. Sure, the march is a shade theatrical, but he reminds himself that in her time La Strega had been something of an actress and, therefore, a little theatre is not to be denied.

  The pavements are not as crowded as they were the day Ric arrived and witnessed the funeral cortège of Onofrio Maggiore, but there are still a healthy number who have gathered to pay their respects to the old lady of La Casa dei Sconosciuti.

  Behind the band comes the old, green three-wheeled Ape, weighed down by a host of brightly-coloured bouquets.

  The clergy precede the shiny black hearse bearing La Strega’s casket. The coffin is plain in design but, like the old Ape, it too is draped in a cascade of many colourful flowers.

  Behind the hearse the mourners are led by the barrel-chested sailmaker, his head held high, his eyes cast down. And immediately behind Marcello file the members of his extended family and friends.

  Marcello had asked Ric to accompany him at the head of the procession, but in reply Ric had demurred, saying that only those who knew her well were entitled to make up the cortège.

  As he passes them, Il Velaccino looks over, bows and nods his head. In turn, Ric and the little Commissario repay the compliment.

  Old Nino leans on the arm of Ariana. His progress is stilted and his black suit, dark glasses, wizened features and thin white hair lend him a godfatherly air. Even Sandro has done his best to smarten up.

  Once the procession has passed down the Corso and the music has faded away, they retake their seats and the street returns to normal.

  Ric is warmed by his memories of Valeria. On his return from his night on Vulcano, he’d gone to La Casa dei Sconosciuti to look for her. When he could not find her, he informed Marcello, who sent a fisherman out to search the shore to the south. The cries of the herring gulls soon led the fisherman to the emerald waters below the cliffs beyond the Punta San Giuseppe.

  “For a funeral march, it is perhaps a little melodramatic, no?” Talaia suggests, sighing.

  Ric smiles again. The perfect irony that Valeria should consign herself to a fate which her mother was believed to have suffered does not escape him. It saddens him, but in that he decides there is also an element of theatre; a tragedy which, just possibly, completes the circle of Valeria’s life.

  Talaia is, evidently, thinking something similar. “Did you know that she was unwell?” he asks.

  “I did,” Ric replies.

  “Such a shame! She was an extraordinary woman, so…”

  “Full of life?”

  The little Commissario raises his eyebrow and pouts, “I was going to say righteous in her beliefs. Citizens of good faith are few and far between these days. Bona fides: a dying breed.”

  Ric sips his coffee. “I hear she left a note.”

  “Oh, yes,” Talaia fiddles with his hat, “very precise instructions regarding her funeral arrangements, which is why we have to sit here and endure La Sollevazione Di Cristo. Most people associate this noise,” he curls his lip, “with the Misteri di Trapani, the Procession of Passion at the end of Holy Week. Trapani, as I am sure you know, lies on the very western tip of Sicily. Your Strega asked for this march to be played as she passed by La Precchia for the last time.” Maso chuckles: “Ah, even in death she is the perfect drama queen!”

  “Much else?”

  “Not so much; a few details. She asked for the house to be sold and the money to be donated to an orphanage in Bagheria. Everything else she handed to Marcello Maggiore. The gossip in the città bassa is that they were related in some way.” Talaia smirks; a patronising expression that suggests he finds the islanders a touch parochial for his taste. “Of course, only you would know the truth in this story.” He shifts in his seat. “But, I have always thought it is better for people to have something to talk about.”

  “Better than what?” Ric asks.

  “Oh,” he shrugs, “nothing or perhaps something less attractive. In Sicily we say Cu è surdu, orbu e taci, campa cent’anni ‘mpaci: he who is deaf, blind and silent will live a hundred years in peace. People say this is the vow of Omertà, but I like to believe there are many things the ears are better not to hear.”

  Ric is faintly amused, “What you’re saying Maso is that whatever Valeria wrote in her last letter, you don’t intend to share it with me.”

  He nods, smiling, but reconsiders. “Oh, in her letter, La Signorina Vaccariello asked for forgiveness; but generally, not for any one particular impropriety.”

  “Not one in particular?”

  Talaia chews his lip.

  “Take all the time you need, Commissario. I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your notice that I now have time to spare. Unless of course you think I should be concerned about the price Candela’s men have put on my head?

  Ric pauses, but when Talaia doesn’t respond, he continues, “When Marcello took me over to Vulcano, he told me that the latest rumour running round the città bassa was that Palermo had sent someone to decommission me.”

  “Oh, you don’t want to believe every little piece of gossip, Ric. Who knows how they start or from where they come?”

  Ric pauses again, thinking, “Officer Paolo?”

  “What about him?”

  “Didn’t Old Nino say his mother lives over at San Calogero?”

  The little Commissario does not look up as he replies, “I believe she does.”

  Ric shakes his head and chuckles, “Who needs the internet when you’ve got the bush telegraph?”

  Talaia still doesn’t look up.

  Ric pats the policeman rather affectionately on his shoulder, “Well, Maso, now that Il Velaccino has repaired the Mara and she is back in the water, you don’t seem too interested in when or where I go next. By which I take it that you no longer have any interest in who may have shot Girolamo Candela or who murdered Claudio Maggiore, or even how Ciccio Ferro met his end?”

  The little Commissario sighs, “Ah, the poor, unfortunate Ferro Francesco. It seems he was asphyxiated by a cloud of sulphur gas. You know there are signs all the way up to the crater of the Fossa di Vulcano warning people not to get too close to the fumarola. He was careless. What more needs to be said?

  “In the case of Signor Maggiore Claudio, we have no corpse therefore there is no crime to investigate. His disappearance will be a matter of conjecture for many years to come. Perhaps it is better for him to be thought of in this fashion. But with regards to Signor Candela?”

  He studies his hat for a moment. “You remember me telling you that our forensic laboratory found a curious, oily substance on the Beretta?”

  “I do.”

  “This substance, they believe, was present on the cloth which the perpetrator used to wipe your gun clean of prints; except of course that whoever wiped it clean was clearly not a professional. We know this because your partial thumbprin
t was near the muzzle–”

  “In your dreams, Maso,” Ric groans.

  Talaia smiles, but again doesn’t lift his gaze from the table, “Mm, perhaps so. But, this substance: our forensic department has now had sufficient time to examine it properly and they have ascertained that it is a form of crema di mani: a hand cream. Perhaps more importantly, the type of hand cream a woman would use. To be more exacting, the name of this cream is Ortigia Lime Di Sicilia.”

  The name is familiar to Ric and he recalls his first meeting with Old Nino. Ortigia was Valeria’s perfume; it was the scent by which Old Nino recognised her.

  “Imagine that,” Talaia says, all too aware Ric is hostage to his thoughts. “A perfume from a company founded by a British woman, named after an island near Syracuse and found on a gun used to commit a murder in Lipari.”

  “Yes,” Ric agrees. “Imagine that!”

  They sit in silence and observe the townsfolk as they go about their business: Alfredo, in his fish-laden Ape, potters down the Corso as Maurizio, with his array of vegetables on his, potters up.

  “I have found, Ric,” Talaia continues, a vague inevitability creeping into his tone, “that when it is possible to avoid forming judgements, it is better not to. As I was beginning to tell you before La Signorina Vaccariello interrupted us, Giambattista Basile, a courtier and soldier of the eighteenth century, wrote a number of fairy tales. Amongst other important works, he was responsible for the original versions of Rapunzel and Cinderella. However, in Il Corvo – The Raven – a story from his collection The Tale of Tales, he observed that all human judgement is false and perverse. There is much truth in this simplicity, don’t you think?”

  Ric is taken with the feeling that the little Commissario is gloating, only a little perhaps, but gloating nevertheless.

  “And what of your ancestor?” Talaia asks. “What judgement have you reached regarding Antonio Sciacchitano and his empty grave?”