Dead and Alive (10 page)

“What—in your own territory? A hell of a lot of good that would do. You’ve already threatened me. You’ve already said, ‘I can make it difficult for you.’ That threat was not made lightly. You know your own power.”

“And you know yours apparently.”

“What do you mean?” Stuart’s body was tensed—the whole room was electric. I was very conscious of the fact that we were foreigners in a foreign land.

Del Ricci chuckled and the sound was false in that silent room. “When you had the Americans and the Poles and the Indians and the Greeks fighting for you, you didn’t worry about the rights of the Italians to run their own country. But now——”

Stuart crossed the room very slowly and Del Ricci’s words ceased as he saw him approach. He seemed fascinated. “Do you know how many British boys died or were wounded in Italy to free this country from Fascism? They died in their thousands—and all because they believed in the freedom of peoples to govern their own countries. They were just workers and farm labourers, bank clerks and shopkeepers—and they died that their own country, and all the other countries of the world, should be free.” Stuart was towering above Del Ricci. Del Ricci slipped his hand inside his jacket. He was frightened. It was then that Stuart hit him. He hit him between the eyes. And Del Ricci was flung back against a bookcase, his head smashing in the glass, and then his body slowly crumpled, his head bleeding profusely from a cut.

Stuart bent down, slipped his hand inside Del Ricci’s jacket and removed a small revolver from an armpit holster. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.” He opened the door and the silence of the room was invaded by the sound of the band playing
Funicoli, Funicola
amid the murmur of voices and the chink of glass.

Outside, the city was bright in moonlight. The façades of the villas and apartment houses climbing the hill to the Vomero district were white and full of light and beyond Capri the low-hung disc of the moon shone a path of silver across the dark mirror of the sea.

“That wasn’t very wise, was it?” I said.

He made no reply. He was taking long strides and I had difficulty in keeping up with him.

“And what proof had you that he was running arms? You can’t just accuse——”

He stopped suddenly. “For Christ sake, shut up,” he said. His eyes glared down at me. He was all tensed up. “If you’re prepared to deal with a dirty little Sicilian crook who is making a pile out of his country’s misfortunes, go ahead. But count me out.”

“Don’t be absurd, Stuart,” I said. “I wasn’t suggesting you deal with him. I was——”

“I know what you were suggesting,” he rapped out, and his teeth were clenched. He was fighting for control of himself. “You were suggesting that I should have been more polite, that I shouldn’t have hit him when he went for his gun. You people make me sick. You’d see the whole wretched business start all over again. You’d try to persuade yourself that all the crooks grafting their way to power are innocent until proved guilty. And in the end you’ll shrug your shoulders and say that war is inevitable as you watch another million British war graves planted on the Continent.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “All I am——”

“All right—I’m a fool. I should forget.” He gripped my shoulders and the edge of his nail bit through the cloth of my jacket. “But I can’t forget,” he said.
“I can’t forget. Do you understand what that means? I can’t forget that I’ve seen boys who should have been taking girls out, shrieking hideously and holding their guts with their hands, that pieces of flesh have been spattered all over me, and that I’ve watched a company of brave men die one by one. And the bodies of the partigiani horribly mutilated up in the Chianti country. And I can’t forget that my wife and kid were burned to death. And it all started here in this country when a bunch of crooks got control and went berserk. God!” He turned abruptly and started walking again.

Back on the
Trevedra
, Stuart made tea. He was quite calm again as we sat in the wardroom drinking and smoking, and he told me what he had found out about Del Ricci. “As soon as I talked to Perroni I knew what Del Ricci’s proposition was going to be. Perroni knew what it was, too. I fancy he was going to get command of the ship if we’d sold. Then I talked to a man who was a director on the board of Del Ricci’s transport company. He spoke a little English, and reading between the lines I got an impression of the whole set-up. It’s based on monopoly, of course. Individuals and small private concerns who attempt to compete don’t do so well. One big concern had tried to muscle in, but a series of unfortunate fires had cramped their style and they’d had to sell out. He told me that with a dazzling smile which made it difficult to realise that it was to be taken as a threat. Del Ricci has a finger in all sorts of pies—produce, tobacco, furniture, coal—anything that needs transporting. He is also a director of the new Banco Nazionale di Riconstruzione. And, most significant of all, he is one of the interests behind the Massa del Popolo Party which was started about three months ago with its headquarters here in Naples.

“Well,” he concluded, “that’s Mr. Del Ricci for you. And he’s done all that in less than two years. Clearly a bloke to be reckoned with. I should have been more careful perhaps, but——” he shrugged his shoulders.
“I got mad, that was all. If you like to take your share of the proceeds and get out I shan’t blame you.”

“No,” I said. “This is my life now. All I would suggest is that in future we talk things over before acting. I agree with your view of Del Ricci, but beating him up doesn’t get us anywhere.”

He nodded gloomily. “I should have shot him,” he said, and then he began to laugh.

A
T THREE O’CLOCK
the next day I met Pietro in the Galleria. He had traced the Gallianis up to a point. Their flat in the Via Santa Cecilia was no longer there. It had been in a big block just behind the Metropole on the sea front. The whole block had been destroyed in one of the big raids before the Salerno landing.

“But I find their cook,” Pietro said. “I speak her about them and she say they are in the ricovero and not kilt.” I told him to speak Italian. I was in no mood to have him try his English out on me.

They had apparently moved into rooms in the Vico Tiratoio, one of the squalid little streets on the north side of the Via Roma. Pietro had got the address and had seen the owner of the place just before meeting me. From his description of it, Galliani must have been in a pretty bad way financially. The entrance was up a dark staircase next to a
trattoria
that sold cheap vino from Ischia. On the first floor had been a tailor’s shop, the Galliani’s had had the second, the third floor had belonged to a journalist on
Il Mattino
and the top floor had been a
bordello.

“The girl was with them?” I asked.

He nodded. “
Si, signore
, the girl was with them. They were there three months.”

“And then?”

“They could not pay so they went to the farm of his cousin which is at Itri.”

“What was the name of the cousin?” I asked.

“This is the address.” He handed me a slip of paper. On it was written, “Furigo Ciprio, Santa Brigida, Itri.”

From where I sat I looked down the finely-paved expanse of the Galleria across the traffic of the Via Roma to the narrow entrance of a street of tall, dirty buildings, that
ran straight up the hill to the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. In one of those streets up there Mrs. Dupont’s daughter had lived for three months. It wasn’t difficult to picture the circumstances of this family as Pietro told me the gossip he had gleaned. Galliani had been a dapper little man, the manager of a small shipping firm. The business had died. A shop that he acquired as a side-line had been looted during the raid in which he had lost his flat. When he came to the Vico Tiratoio he had begun to drink. But he clung to Naples because he thought he could get a job. His wife took in washing and the girl, besides helping with this, did embroidery work. Three months of that and then they had given up and gone to his cousin’s farm.

I thanked Pietro for his help. “I’ll go up to the farm to-morrow,” I said. “Will you arrange for a car to pick me up at the docks at nine o’clock.” I paid him off then.

I wandered slowly down the Galleria with its café tables full of dark-haired girls and men in open-necked shirts and suits of fantastically brilliant colours. It was very hot and the Via Roma thrust itself upon me with a dull roar of traffic. I crossed the hot soft-tarred thoroughfare and forced my way through the crowds into the Via Buoncompagni.

The tall houses closed in on me—cool, quiet and squalid. The sound of traffic was dulled and its place taken by individual sounds of children’s voices and people calling to each other. The streets were cleaner than when I had last seen them. The squatters from the bombed-out areas of the docks were gone. There was no sign of garbage or outdoor cooking on improvised wood or charcoal fires. New shops were open and some of the houses had been repainted. I noticed these things automatically for my mind was engrossed in the picture of the life of a half-English, half-French girl in an Italian family who were in difficulties at the time when the Germans still occupied Naples.

I found the house without difficulty. It was No. 29, just on the corner where the Vico Tiratoio meets the Via
Sergente Maggiore. It was just as Pietro had described it. There was the little
trattoria.
The sour smell of vino seeped out into the street. As I stood there the bead curtains parted and a seaman staggered out. He stood for a moment blinking in the sunlight and swaying slightly back on to his heels. He gazed round and then lurched into the doorway next to the
trattoria.
His boots sounded hesitantly as he climbed the dark, bare-boarded stairs that Monique must have used. Over the entranceway was a gaudily-painted image of the Virgin set in a weather-worn wooden frame with two tinsel-covered electric light bulbs and a posy of artificial white flowers. I took out the photograph of Monique that Pietro had returned to me. The innocence of the girl in that faded picture was appalling when considered against the background of her life. I was determined to find out what had happened to her.

I told Stuart this when I got back to the ship and he was quite agreeable. He said it would take him two more days to complete the purchase of our cargo. I arranged to take Boyd with me for company.

Itri is a little town beyond the Garigliano on the coast road from Naples to Rome. This road is Highway Seven, the route the American Fifth Army took. We came down to it by way of Caserta. Boyd wanted to see the palace, not because it was the second largest and quite the ugliest in Europe, but because he wanted to take “a decco at the Bras ’Ats’ Palis”—it had been the Headquarters of the Allied Armies in Italy all through the bitter fighting of the winter of 1943-44. The great square red-brick structure, with the railway line which had been built to pass within a hundred yards of the windows for the amusement of the Royal Family, looked useless. The gardens were still as unkempt as they had been when they were a park for Army trucks. Only the long artificial lake, where Field-Marshall Alexander had kept his own wizzer seaplanes, seemed pleasant, and that was violently unreal against the natural setting of the hills.

Beyond Capua we forked left, away from Highway
Six, the road to Cassino. We had crossed the Volturno by a Bailey bridge that had been built by our own engineers to replace the blown Roman bridge. It was the same at the Gariglino. The temporary Bailey structure still spanned the road that crossed the river. “
Sono bravi ingegneri, gli Inglesi
,” was our driver’s comment. At Formia the buildings shattered by the naval bombardment had been cleared so that there was a good view of Gaeta across the blue of the bay. But the town was still bedraggled with the marks of war in the side streets. All sorts of temporary buildings had been erected on the shattered foundations of the original houses. And Itri, set on a hill beneath the sprawling bulk of the Monti Aurunci, was even worse. It was a little town of flies and dust and rubble pulsing lazily in the midday heat. At the post office they told us how to find the farm. “But Signor Furigo does not live there now,” they said. It was burned and he was killed. Of the Galliani’s they knew nothing.

“This is getting to be like a bleedin’ treasure hunt,” Boyd said as we got into the car again.

The farm was at the end of a dusty track. The wreck of a burned-out building stood among the olive trees and the ground shimmered in the sun’s heat trapped in the bowl of the hills. The remains of a barn had been made into a shack and nearby on a patch of brick-hard earth two women with kerchiefs tied around their heads were beating at a pile of wheat stalks. They were threshing in the old way. It was from them that I learned what had happened when the Germans were in Itri and the Fifth Army was across the river where the bridge had been blown.

It had been late in May. A German 88 mm. battery had established itself among the olive groves of Santa Brigida. They were tired and desperate. The Garigliano had been crossed by the Americans little more than a week ago and there were reports of rapid progress by the Eighth beyond Cassino. They had lost two guns and over thirty men. The Commandant ordered Furigo to hand over all
livestock, wine and grain. He took over the farmhouse as his headquarters. The barn and outhouses were occupied by his men. Furigo and his wife with their two daughters, the Gallianis with the “French” girl and these two women who were born in Itri and had worked on the farm since their husbands had been killed in the desert, were forced to sleep in the open.

The Germans fired their 88’s steadily until the following afternoon in an attempt to stem the crossing of the fosse. The two women described the scene volubly with many gesticulations. Repeatedly they pointed to the ruined bulk of Itri, the thick fortress walls of which towered above the valley farm, cracked and broken.

It had been blasted by bombers and ground to rubble by the artillery. From the shelter of a stone wall they had watched their little town gradually disintegrate and wilt away in great spouting billows of dust and debris. Then the roar of the guns had slackened and the chatter of machine guns and thud of mortars had taken up the symphony of death. The German battery brought their guns out of action, hitched up and began to move off. But before they went two soldiers began to throw petrol on to the straw in the barn and on to the door posts of the outhouses, and even the farmhouse itself. They set fire to the barn first and then one by one the outhouses.