The Mafia Emblem

by Michael Hillier

- 57 –

  As he staggered up the road with Papa on his back Ben noticed that the sky ahead seemed dark and heavy. Now they were higher up they could hear the sound of the blustery, teasing wind high above them as it rolled the forbidding clouds off the sea. It was the only sound that came to them, making a strange, unworldly noise.

  “I think we’re going to have some rain soon,” he suggested.

  Francesca only nodded.

  Within a hundred yards Ben found he was gasping from the effort of plodding along with the extra weight on his back. But he forced his body to push on. They had to get to safety before the Vitelli found them. With his eyes misting from the effort, he set himself the target of reaching the next junction before he rested. It was about a hundred and fifty yards away and he was gasping by the time he got there and lowered Papa to the ground.

  They seemed to have reached what used to be a main traffic street – broader than anything they had seen before and with larger, more modern buildings. Here also the devastation seemed less serious although all the openings were still boarded up and there were some signs of structural movement. Ben looked to right and left, hoping to see a barrier across the road and guard post near it, but there was nothing in sight. Surely if they followed this road to the right they would find someone soon.

  The old man said something to Francesca and she translated. “Papa says you are to let him walk now to give you a rest.”

  Ben didn’t argue. It was blessed relief to be able to stand upright instead of being doubled up under the old man’s weight. In addition the slope was less steep and Papa could probably walk further here before his body tired.

  They carried on at a steady pace. They passed a side road and Ben looked down. At the far end of the street was a man who Ben instantly recognized as Dino Vitelli even though he was three hundred yards away.

  “Quick! Get out of sight,” he hissed at the others.

  But they were too late. At that moment Dino looked up the street and his high-pitched shout told them that they had been spotted. They set off again at a shambling run, he and Francesca each hanging on to one of Papa’s arm to help him along. After thirty yards or so the road opened out into a large dusty piazza. They turned left along the hidden side of the square. Ahead of them was a large building which looked as though it had once been a hotel. Now the sign was missing, the stucco was cracked and had spalled away in places, and the paint was peeling. In the middle of the building was a large archway with an unmanned barricade in front of it.

  “Ah! At last!” said Ben. “We’ve only just reached the police in time.”

  “No! No!” Francesca held him back. “That is not a police barricade. I think that is the entrance to the Solfatara.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It is the way in to the volcano. We should not go in there.”

  He looked through the arch into the gardens beyond – a landscape of great palms and exotic shrubs, bright greens and vivid coloured flowers. It looked more like a colourful jungle.

  “It doesn’t look much like a volcano.”

  “Oh,” she said, “the Solfatara is not like Vesuvio. It is not a great mountain. The crater is at the same level as the ground. On this side there is not even a – how do you say? – a rim to the crater. That is why the plants are so green. It is caused by the warmth and the steam from the volcano. But I have heard that it is very dangerous to go into the volcano at the moment. It is trying to erupt. Nobody is allowed near the place.”

  As they hesitated in front of the hotel there came a shout from the road to their left. Turning to look, Ben saw one of the Vitelli gangsters coming towards them. The man was no more than two hundred yards away. When he looked the other way he saw Guido run into the square. His knife was already in his right hand.

  “We’ve got no choice,” said Ben. “I’d rather risk the volcano than those characters.”

  “The volcano is very hot,” warned Francesca. “Everyone within a kilometre has moved away. The crater has cracks and fumaroles and hot mud pools.”

  “Well, I’m not waiting to be knifed.” Ben lifted Papa over the barrier and hurdled it himself. Possessed of a new urgency, he hoisted the old man over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift and ran with him through the archway, leaving Francesca to follow.

  The garden behind the hotel was very overgrown. To the right was a single storey building with a peeling sign above the door which said “Entrata 10,000 lire”. But the turnstiles were open. There had obviously been nobody here to collect the entrance money for many years.

  At the end of the building they turned sharp right along one of several overgrown paths into the dense jungle. Francesca explained that most of the west side of the volcano was filled with this luxuriant vegetation. The only difference now was that some of it seemed to be turning brown, drooping and dying. Ben became aware that the smell of death was all around them.

  Ben carried Papa about thirty yards into this undergrowth before he set him down again on his feet. But they didn’t pause. He led the way through the thick tangle of forest away from their pursuers. He kept glancing over his shoulder but they were already well out of sight of the buildings. Hopefully the Vitelli wouldn’t know which path to follow through the dense vegetation.

  Listening for sounds of pursuit, Ben didn’t at first notice a new sound which formed a soft background roar. When he did detect it he had difficulty in working out what it was. Then suddenly the jungle thinned and they came out onto the floor of the crater and the noise was explained.

  All around them was a vision from hell. The majority of the crater was a savage sight of grey-coloured earth without any vegetation. It was like the surface of the moon. Dense clouds of yellow gas and steam issued from a series of massive blowholes. The clouds drifted across the flat surface and climbed the steep cliffs on the north side to the top where they were whipped away by the wind off the sea. It was these blowholes, which seemed to be spurting up wherever the eye rested, that gave rise to the constant roaring noise.

  Across the crater the humped grey earth was criss-crossed with meandering cracks varying in width from a half an inch to more than a foot wide. From these there also issued a variety of gases, sometimes in thin wisps, occasionally in irregular bursts, often in continuous powerful jets. It was like walking across the top of a gigantic cracked pie-crust just after it had been taken out of the oven.

  The edges of the cracks were fringed with yellow sulphur crystals and other strangely coloured minerals. In places the cracks gathered into areas of weakness where the large blowholes occurred. These fumaroles had built up small cones of lapilli and lava fragments which glowed a bright, almost white colour as they danced in the hot escaping gases. They looked like mini-volcanoes. In other areas the surface sank into pools of bubbling mud from which occasional bursts of activity would splatter boiling deposits around their rim.

  “I came here a few years ago. I thought it was horrific then, but now it has got very much worse.” Francesca pointed to a building on the eastern side of the crater. “That was the observatory where they were checking the volcanic activity. But they closed it a year ago because it was becoming too dangerous for the scientists to work there.”

  Ben could see that the small building had tipped over towards one side and the protective boards were hanging out of the windows.

  She pointed to the centre of the area. “This used to be flat right across the bottom of the crater. Now you see it has become domed.”

  “My god. That means the centre must have risen twenty feet or more. It’s like great big balloon.”

  “It is so high in the middle that you can’t see the other side where the hot springs are. That was part of a health spa before it became too dangerous.”

  The smell of rotten eggs was overpowering. It made them all cough and induced a feeling of sickness in the pit of the stomach. Papa had a bout of coughing which brought him to a halt. Ben took out his handkerchief and Francesca tied it round the old man’
s face and told him to breathe through it. As she did so Ben watched the belt of lush vegetation behind them for any sign of their pursuers. He didn’t think the terrors of the volcano would have put the Vitelli off and he knew they didn’t dare to stay here, trapped between the chaos in front of them and the vengeful pursuers behind.

  “We’d better try this way.” He led them off to the right where the volcanic activity seemed less intense.

  They skirted the dense and dying vegetation, making for a point where the rim of the crater climbed out of the jungle and began to rise towards the highest point on the south side, perhaps two hundred feet above the floor. Ben felt he wanted them to gain some height, maybe to escape from the volcano but also reach a point where they could defend themselves if the Vitelli followed them.

  Gradually the vegetation thinned and died away. They pulled Papa up slopes of crumbling soft, grey gravel. Steam was rising through it and they could feel the heat striking through the soles of their shoes. From time to time Ben paused to survey the edge of the jungle, checking for Guido and his friends.

  The visibility was poor. Often they seemed to be cut off by the clouds of steam that were being blown across the crater by the billowing wind. However, looking back, Ben was able to see enough to work out that about two thirds of the crater was surrounded by walls of multi-coloured rock which rose from a few feet high to over three hundred feet in the highest places. To the west these dipped down to disappear behind the dense vegetation through which they had entered. Peeping above the northern rim could be seen blocks of flats which must have once had splendid views but which were now presumably empty and abandoned like so many other buildings in the city.

  Francesca squealed and paused to hastily pull off her shoe. A piece of lapilli had burned a hole clean through her sock and raised a blister on the skin beneath. Ben steadied her as she put it on again.

  “We must try to gain more height,” he said. “It should be cooler further up the slopes where we aren’t so close to the volcanic activity.”

  They struggled up a steep slope and emerged, puffing and panting, onto a rough sloping platform about twenty feet by fifty. To one side were some large, irregular rocks. They were warm but not too hot to touch and Ben decreed that they should rest here again to allow Papa to recover his breath.

  As he turned once again to survey the landscape below them he heard a shout. Nearly half a mile away, across the other side of the crater, their pursuers had come into view.