The Cross of Lazzaro

by John Harris

  The Piazza della Citta seemed to be full of police vans and lorries again and from his window Henry could see them standing by the boat-station where the eight o’clock boat to Trepizano was waiting, examining the papers of everyone who wished to go aboard. The whole town seemed to be squeezed into a narrower confine suddenly, as though the road blocks outside were expressly designed to hold its inhabitants within easy reach for questioning. There was also a police car just down the road from the hotel, waiting near the lane that ran up towards the mountains.

  ‘In case anyone tries to escape that way,’ Dittli told Henry as he brought his coffee.

  Henry was feeling depressed, partly because of the brandy he’d drunk and partly because of the tension in the town, and he was sipping his coffee on the veranda, trying not to lean too far forward because of his head, when Maggie Daniells joined him.

  ‘Enjoy yourself with Stettner?’ he asked.

  She blushed and he went on in a disinterested tone. ‘I suppose he’s good looking,’ he said. ‘In an animal sort of way. Pity he’s got so many gold teeth.’

  ‘They go in for them here,’ she pointed out coldly.

  ‘He’d look better without them, all the same.’

  She looked angry and Henry had the sense to stop baiting her. ‘How’s the archaeology?’ he asked.

  ‘We’ve found more ornaments,’ she said, faintly hostile. ‘It’s a treasure trove down there. There’s a lot more to come.’

  Henry moved uneasily. ‘Does all this – well, these politics – do they interfere at all?’

  She shrugged. ‘It’s virtually impossible to make a telephone call,’ she said. ‘There’s a constant delay. Every time we wish to verify something we’re held up somewhere.’

  ‘The price of making a rare archaeological discovery in an area torn by political strife,’ he commented.

  ‘That boy in the hospital’s dying,’ she pointed out, her eyes unexpectedly anxious, so that he knew that she, too, was suffering from the tenseness in the town.

  ‘Perhaps it’s his own fault,’ Henry said realistically. ‘After all, Sergeant Guidotti’s dead. It wasn’t anything to do with him. Or his wife and children.’

  ‘But the boy’s blind!’ She was being feminine and unreasonable. ‘He’s only eighteen.’

  Henry shrugged. ‘I’m going home soon,’ he said. ‘It’ll be nice to get hack to England where there’s nothing to worry about but my income tax.’

  ‘It’s so stodgy in England.’ She sounded very young as she spoke.

  ‘How long is it since you were there?’

  ‘Four months.’

  ‘Perhaps you’ve forgotten what it’s like.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I can remember everything. The weather. The narrowness. The Establishment. All the things I hate.’

  Henry felt very old. He could remember saying the same things himself ten years before and it was like staring at his own reflection in a mirror. He hadn’t realized what a gulf there was between the twenties and the thirties.

  ‘What will you do when your job here’s finished?’ he asked. ‘It can’t last forever.’

  ‘There’ll always he another,’ she said. ‘They’ve found some wall pictures in a cave in Germany.’

  ‘And you’ll go there?’

  ‘Of course.’

  For a moment they seemed to be thrown together in spite of their differences, as though, like all the other outsiders in the town, they formed an island of exclusion among all the shifting tides of feeling.

  ‘Doesn’t it all sometimes seem a little endless? As though you’re pressing ahead all the time without ever getting anywhere?’

  She looked at him as though he were ancient, as though he belonged to some period in time that had existed long before her comprehension, and he wondered if it had always been like this with young people – if he’d been like it himself ten years before. Some time, something would make her grow into a woman – jolting her into adulthood with misery, pain and wretchedness, but until then she’d be impatient with people like himself, a little intolerant and always faintly patronizing.

  ‘Dr Chappell,’ she said cheerfully, ‘you’re an awful square, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Henry managed a smile. ‘I suppose I am.’

  She laughed at his expression and he thought how pretty she was. ‘You should get with it,’ she said. ‘You don’t know what you’re missing.’

  Caporelli appeared as she picked up her coat and the sling-bag she wore. He stared after her as she disappeared, his eyes sad and nostalgic.

  ‘What a pity I was born so long ago,’ he said.

  He sat down alongside Henry and signed to Dittli to bring him a coffee.

  As the waiter went away again, he looked at Henry for a long time in silence.

  ‘Aynree,’ he said at last. ‘Perhaps I wasn’t so drunk last night after all.’

  Henry sat up abruptly, wondering what was coming, and Caporelli gestured vaguely.

  ‘You remember,’ he pointed out. ‘I said someone ought to blow the gate in the stopper wall. There are worse things than flooding the valley and getting a bit of silt over a relic or two.’

  Henry eyed him cautiously. ‘What are you getting at?’ he demanded.

  ‘My father blew up a sewer. Why shouldn’t I blow up a dam?’

  ‘You couldn’t.’

  ‘I could blow the hair off your chest without scorching the skin. I’ve blown bridges and trains and motor cars. I haven’t forgotten how to do it. Sometimes I think I’d like to do it again – just for the sheer joy of destruction.’

  His eyes gleamed and Henry eyed him carefully. ‘You couldn’t get the explosive,’ he said. ‘They’ll keep too careful an account of it. Especially now. If they find you trying to get hold of any they’ll think you’re “Andreas Hofer”.’

  Caporelli paused for a long time, and Henry could see young Dittli trying to hear what they said.

  ‘They have no problems from terrorists and dynamiters in Florence,’ Caporelli pointed out quietly. ‘I have a cousin who’s a quarry manager down there. A little fiddling with the books and what we want won’t be missed. What do you say?’

  Henry stared at him. ‘Signor Caporelli – Ettore,’ he said. ‘Last night I thought you were drunk. I think now you’re mad.’

  Caporelli leaned forward eagerly. ‘They’ll think it’s “Andreas Hofer”,’ he urged. ‘Everything that’s been blown up round here for the last eight months has been “Andreas Hofer”. You’ve seen how it is in the town. They’ll think this was, too. We’ll leave a note to say so.’

  ‘No!’ Henry stood up. ‘Look, Signor Caporelli, I’m a consultant engineer, not an anarchist. I’m not going to have anything to do with it. I’ll put in a report. I’ll give you advice. I’ll even try to persuade people to your view. But if you want to blow the blasted thing up, blow it yourself. Don’t include me.’

  As he stormed out of the room, he saw Caporelli watching him from the table. Dittli was staring from behind the bar, one hand on the handle of the coffee machine. Then Caporelli gave him a glance and followed Henry.

  ‘Why not?’ he said, as he caught him up in the hall. ‘Don’t you feel the rightness of it? Here.’ He placed a hand on his heart and gazed earnestly at Henry.

  There was an urgency in his expression that reminded Henry of the scene in the Edelweiss Bar and the stiff faces of the thrustful young men with their wreath outside the church, the fanatic faces of patriotism gone mad, and he found himself backing away instinctively. Caporelli was too intelligent to suffer from any of the apocalyptic visions of the Montanari, but there was somehow the same tense eagerness about him now as he stared at Henry.

  ‘No,’ Henry said shortly. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Aynree–!’

  ‘No!’ Henry’s face went red with anger. ‘I’ve done what I came to do and now I think I’d better go – tomorrow – before you get me too involved for comfort.’

  Eight

 
Henry was sitting in the hall waiting for information on the trains from Trepizano when Caporelli appeared next morning. His face was gloomy and his shoulders were hunched as he crossed to the veranda and stared out at the weather, his eyes searching and anxious. The sun had gone and the lake’s surface was stirred by the wind into little ripples. The clouds were rising up the mountains opposite in great grey swirls like a charge of cavalry, and, although the valley was bright, to the east the sky was dark and La Fortezza was shut out and thunderheads were building up at the other side of the lake.

  As Caporelli turned back into the Stettnerhof, Henry indicated his baggage standing by the door, labelled and ready for departure.

  ‘I’m off,’ he said.

  ‘So!’ Caporelli seemed indifferent. He shrugged, a small hopeless shrug, different from the one he reserved for customers who complained about the food, then he gestured at the sky.

  ‘Have you seen the forecast?’ he said heavily.

  ‘I don’t need to. I’m leaving.’

  Caporelli didn’t seem to hear him this time even. ‘Rain,’ he said. ‘Rain. All rain. There’s a storm coming.’

  ‘I don’t need a forecast to see that.’

  ‘I have a friend in Bolzano,’ Caporelli went on, still ignoring him. ‘He works in the weather bureau. They’ve traced it. It started in Switzerland – where all the bad weather starts – and it’s moving east. It’s now broken into two fronts, one heading north towards Vienna, the other south towards Italy. There’ll be severe local thunderstorms for the next few days.’

  ‘What time’s the train?’ Henry prompted.

  Caporelli shrugged again and turned at last to look at him.

  ‘The line is still blocked,’ he said, a suggestion of triumph in his voice, as though he’d been holding the information back deliberately until it was most likely to shock and annoy. ‘There’ll be no trains through Trepizano until tomorrow. In any case, there are such queues waiting for the boats you’d never get there in time. It’s the police,’ he explained. ‘They’re examining everyone.’

  ‘I’ve got a British passport,’ Henry pointed out.

  Caporelli’s shoulders lifted and there was a hint of amusement in his eyes. ‘That won’t hurry them. They’re being very thorough. It’s causing them great distress at the Church of Lazzaro di Colleno. The crowds are falling off and the offertory box doesn’t rattle as much as it did.’

  He managed to smile at last, as though he considered anything a joke that could wreck the sanctification of Bishop Lazzaro.

  ‘They’ve just let it out how Sergeant Guidotti was killed,’ he went on, the smile fading. ‘It seems there was a fight and they both got blown up. The boy’s from Bolzano. He’s not likely to live. They’ve had young Dittli in for questioning. It seems they knew each other.’

  ‘Have they kept him?’

  ‘No. They let him go. But I’ll have to get rid of him as soon as I can get a replacement. It looks so goddam’ bad. Fortunately it’s his day off, so nobody noticed.’

  ‘What about Stettner?’

  ‘Oh, him, too, of course. They always ask him. But he’d just left here and he was drinking in the Stöckli Bar with Elena Oswino at the time. Oswino was in Trepizano for the night. It’s students, of course. Not even students from this area, I expect. From the North Tyrol. People who aren’t even affected by the frontier.’ Caporelli picked up Henry’s bags and signed for the porter. ‘I think you’d better stay another couple of nights till it’s all blown over.’

  Henry sighed. There was something about Caporelli that swept people off their feet.

  ‘Just another few days,’ he was suggesting. ‘Enjoy yourself.’

  ‘Here? Enjoy myself?’

  Caporelli grinned. ‘There are no bombs in the Stettnerhof,’ he pointed out. ‘Have a holiday. Till all this has finished and things are normal again. On me. I don’t mind.’ He looked quizzically at Henry, and Henry nodded.

  ‘Till the end of the week,’ he agreed. ‘No longer.’

  Caporelli smiled and slapped his shoulder. ‘OK, Aynree. End of the week.’

  Henry watched silently as the cases were sent back upstairs, curiously unmoved by the change of plans. There was something that held him in Cadivescovo against his wishes – a sense of impending drama. All the time he’d been packing he hadn’t really been anxious to go because, somehow, he knew there was more to come.

  He rose slowly and lit a cigarette, his mind oddly empty like a man waiting for a sentence to be passed on him, then, as he had decided to stay, he suggested that they might as well go up the mountain and take another look at the dam from above before the storm broke against the ramparts of rock. He was surprised when Caporelli raised his hands in negation.

  ‘Not me,’ he smiled. ‘I’m away on business today. Urgent business.’

  ‘I thought the dam was urgent.’

  ‘It is. It is.’ Caporelli had a bland secretive look on his face and Henry found himself wondering what he was up to. ‘But so is my business. I’ll tell you about it when I return. I’ll arrange for Alois to go with you. He’s free this morning. There’s no diving.’

  ‘I’m not so sure I want Alois,’ Henry observed slowly.

  Caporelli grinned. ‘To go beyond the dam you do,’ he said. ‘You’ll get lost otherwise. He knows the mountains like the back of his hand, and you don’t have to talk to him.’ He slapped Henry’s shoulder and laughed. ‘He won’t try anything on. No swastika badges or salutes. You’ll be quite safe. I’ll leave a message for him.’

  Stettner turned up about an hour later, on a scooter, wearing a heavy jersey and kletteschühe. He grinned at Henry and waved, and they climbed into Caporelli’s van.

  ‘Better than a scooter,’ Stettner said. ‘Especially when it rains. And it will rain. Soon.’

  He indicated the dark masses of clouds in the east. ‘There,’ he said. ‘That means rain.

  He was in good form and, for once, seemed not to be goading Henry. He was an entertaining rogue and, in spite of the fact that Henry didn’t trust him and didn’t like him and couldn’t get out of his mind the memory of the hard-faced young boys in the little inn above the town, he kept him laughing at the outrageous stories of the tourists he dealt with.

  ‘They are obsessed with lavatories,’ he grinned. ‘You can hear them all the time. “It’s all right, Ada”’ – he imitated a woman’s voice – ‘“there’s a seat in this one.” I hear them in every café where I stop for a beer. They don’t know I speak English, so they talk freely. It is a very good job being a courier. I show them the goats and tell them they are chamois, and I have a standard joke for when the bus is coming down the mountain. I tell them if they are frightened they must shut their eyes – like the driver. It makes them laugh and hides the fact that I am charging them ten dollars for a five-dollar trip.’

  As they climbed higher it was possible to see the whole length of Lake Colleno. With the approaching rain, the air was crystal clear and devoid of mist, and Henry could see Trepizano like a brown and white speckled carpet below the slopes of Monte Cano at the other side.

  ‘I love the mountains,’ Stettner said, and for once there was no suggestion of laughter in his voice. ‘They are clean and smell good and the air’s like wine. And, what is more, they are mine. They are something we can’t have taken away from us and sent to Rome. We can’t even share them with anyone else, because you have to live here just to understand them.’

  He pointed out La Spiga, now clear of cloud. ‘Die Eisenspitze,’ he said, using its German name. ‘I climbed that last year. And I was paid to do it, too. By a group of Americans who wanted to go back to Chicago and say they’d been up a mountain. All they’ve got are plains, you see. It is very easy. You should try it.’

  He insisted on calling at Oswino’s farm as they passed and the dramatic blonde woman with the cold eyes gave them a grappa. Oswino came in while they talked, and nodded to Stettner, almost as though he knew what went on between him and his
wife and was powerless to stop it. When they left Stettner stood with Frau Oswino, talking in low secretive tones in German, while Henry started the van, then they drove up the narrowing road towards the dam.

  The dam looked safe and calm, without a ripple on the green surface of the water. Even the wall looked safe, with the level well away from the summit, and Henry began to wonder again if he’d made too much of his fears.

  ‘It’ll last a thousand years,’ Stettner said confidently, and Henry shrugged, somehow unconvinced again in the face of his certainty.

  ‘Not if you have rain like you had last week,’ he said. ‘You can see the crack there. Every time the water runs through that it pulls away the earth. Just a little at a time, but it goes, and the greater the pressure, the faster the water flows and the faster it tears away the earth.’

  Stettner grinned at him. ‘I think you worry too much, Herr Doktor,’ he said. ‘Here in Austria we never worry. We never worried even when we were great and powerful, because we always lost our wars, and we knew we weren’t expected to win. Then when we lost the Empire we didn’t worry because we hadn’t anything to worry about, anyway. A man without money never worries about losing it. I don’t. It’s only the wealthy who worry. Not worrying is as typical of Austria as the waltz.’

  They walked back towards the van and Stettner offered Henry his flask. It contained brandy, too raw for Henry’s taste, but it was an indication of Stettner’s good humour and his willingness to be friendly.

  ‘Higher up,’ he said, ‘you can see the currents in the water. The way it flows, the way it builds up. You can see the depth. Over there by the stopper wall, it’s deepest of all. That’s why the stopper wall was built there, of course. So it could be emptied, if necessary.’