The Fallen

THE
FALLEN

Also by Stephen Finucan

HAPPY PILGRIMS
FOREIGNERS

Stephen Finucan

THE
FALLEN

VIKING CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published 2009

1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  10  (RRD)

Copyright © Stephen Finucan, 2009

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
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Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead,
events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Finucan, Stephen, 1968–
The fallen / Stephen Finucan.

ISBN: 978-0-670-04302-6

I. Title.

PS8561.157F34 2009    C813’.6    C209-902057-2

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To Alcmene

The donkey lay on its side in the middle of the road, flesh quivering, tail beating against bloodied haunches, breath steaming in the cold night air. The pavement around it, littered with bits of broken glass, reflected the colours of the fire that licked the walls of the Stazione Marittima.

Huddled in a nearby doorway, Aldo Cioffi watched the dying animal. He knew that before long someone would come to collect the carcass so that it might be sold off to a
macellaio
, and that by morning it would be butchered, cut into slabs—rib steaks and flank steaks and loin filets and sinewy briskets—and laid out on dampened beds of sawdust in a shop window on Via Roma. There would be shank cuts and shoulder clods and cross ribs, too. Nothing would go to waste, not even the offal: the intestines could be boiled, the brain stewed, the tongue sliced cold, the marrow simmered from the bones, and the kidney, heart, and spleen, and whatever else was left, ground up and made into spiced
salsicce
.

The thought of it focused Cioffi’s hunger and made him aware again of the nagging pain in his belly. He wished he had some way of taking the beast himself. It would fetch a good price, and he might keep some of the meat—a shoulder cut to stew, the liver for his anemia; it had been a simple, textbook diagnosis: shortness of breath and dizziness, headaches and a mild angina.

The air around him was laced still with the sharp smell of gasoline, and Cioffi could imagine the fire burning for days before the last drop of fuel evaporated. Or maybe it would never go out. Maybe it would become like the eternal flames lit at gravesides, always flickering, a constant reminder of loss.

Though loss was not something of which Cioffi needed reminding. He lived with it every day. More often than not, his life seemed to him an incessant pageant of forfeiture—a relentless dissipation, a never-ending giving up of things.

He had made a list once. And sitting with his friend, Lello Conforti, in the Villa Nazionale, on a bench in the shadow of the Stazione Zoologica, sharing a bottle of honey grappa that he’d stolen from a crate left untended at the back door of a taverna in the Spaccanapoli— how his heart had pounded as he fled the alleyway with the bottle tucked into the lining of his jacket—he’d begun to count off on his fingers all that had been taken from him: “My family, my legacy, my career …” Lello had stopped him there. “What do you mean, your career?” he’d asked. “I could have opened a practice,” Cioffi said. “Or maybe I could have been a surgeon.” “You hated the idea of being a doctor,” Lello said. “It was your parents who wanted that for you.” “I might have changed my mind,” said Cioffi. “But you never finished your studies.” “That’s not the point.” Lello shook his head. “It isn’t, eh? Then what is the point?” “It is simply,” Cioffi said, “that opportunity has been denied me by wretched circumstance.” “I see,” said Lello. “Tell me, then, this legacy—are you talking about your inheritance? The allowance that your father left to you?” “I am.” “But you spent that, Aldo. It wasn’t taken from you.” “That may be,” replied Cioffi, “but who’s to say that if I had been able to establish myself in a practice or in a surgery that I wouldn’t still have it today?” “You’re being ridiculous.” At that point a group of German soldiers
came towards them along the cinder path. Seeing the honey grappa, they stopped and demanded the bottle from them. Cioffi gave it up without protest, and once they’d gone, he turned back to his friend and said: “Now do you see what I mean?”

He braced himself against the breeze coming in off the bay; it was wintry with the last chill of January. Tonight he could add a few more items to his list of lost things: a decently forged Roman coin bearing the likeness of the siren Parthenope, two twenty-gallon jerry cans of U.S. Army gasoline, and the three hundred lire that Maggio the second-hand dealer had advanced him as payment. But where another man might have cursed his luck, Cioffi had long given up the notion he’d had any to begin with.

When the petrol dump exploded, he had been beneath the portico of San Francesco di Paola, forcing his last twenty lire on the girl he had followed there from the Caffè Gambrinus. She was young: sixteen, maybe younger. He had watched her through the café window while he and Lello drank away the
bancarellaro’s
money. She had noticed him, too, and waited in the darkness just beyond the terrace. Lello had tried to warn him away from her, said that it was likely she would take him someplace where others waited to rob him, but by that time Cioffi had drunk enough not to care. Lello reminded him of Maggio and the American military policeman and of all the trouble he had gone through getting the forged coin. A good deal of risk had gone into concocting his little business arrangement, an investment had been made, and not just by himself; it would be foolish to chance it on something so trivial—and besides, he hadn’t enough money left to pay a prostitute. But Cioffi would not be discouraged. He left the café and met the girl in the shadows and then followed her across the darkened expanse of Piazza del Plebiscito to where she lived rough in a small alcove outside the basilica. In the shallow niche she had fashioned a
bed out of sandbags and cloth sacking, and had collected about her sentimental trinkets: a cracked ceramic vase, an empty wooden picture frame, two small figurines—African heads carved of ebony—and a plaster madonna. She told him she wanted fifty lire and said that there were boys who protected her and she would call to them if he didn’t pay. He heard their voices farther along the portico, but when he turned back, she had already lifted her skirts. He stood a moment and stared at her nakedness, then began to fumble with his trousers. He had only just lain down on the sacking when the air-raid sirens began. The girl tried to push him away, but he held her arms. When she cried out, he put a hand over her mouth. She struggled against him, but he was stronger. When her body went limp, he thought that he had smothered her. He looked into her face: her eyes were rolled back, as if she were trying to see something behind her. Then he felt her lips moving against his damp palm. He took his hand away. He realized that she was praying: a whispered appeal to the cheap statuette of the Virgin. He stood up and dressed himself and took the twenty lire from his trouser pocket and held it out to her, but she would not look at him. Then it was as if the gates to the inferno had been thrown open: a great bloom of fire rose from behind the Palazzo Reale, flames curling into the night sky.

It seemed to Cioffi that he was always paying a price for something: a foolish indiscretion, a lapse of judgment. He should have listened to Lello—Lello, his best friend and conscience—and let the girl alone. And he should never have trusted the American MP; he should have given the coin to him after he’d received the gasoline, and not have believed him when he said the canisters would be waiting for him outside the depot fence. He doubted that they had been there at all. And so, once again, he was left empty-handed. It was a familiar refrain.

He looked along the wide boulevard towards the port. The fire brigades had arrived and tanker trucks pumped water. Several warehouses were ablaze, as well as the customs sheds and a number of motor launches moored on the quayside. In the other direction, beyond the Giardini Pubblici and the Marina of Santa Lucia, the searchlights atop the walls of Castel dell’Ovo continued to rummage the night sky.

Then a voice from behind startled him: “Good evening,
dottore
.”

He turned round to see Maggio, the second-hand dealer, standing not more than an arm’s length away.

“Marcello,” Cioffi said. “Where did you come from?”

Maggio grinned. He was a big man, the sort whose body, once muscled, had gone mostly to fat. Heavy jowls that quivered whenever he spoke stretched his round face. His coat was made from stolen U.S. Army blankets that had been sewn together and fixed with large, mismatched buttons. “I’ve been watching you,” he said, and nodded his bulging head in the direction of an alleyway a short distance off. “I thought you had something for me.”

“The gasoline,” said Cioffi.

“Yes. The gasoline. The gasoline that I
paid
you for.”

What Cioffi wanted at that moment, more than anything, was another drink: something to dull his senses. The warm drunkenness from the Gambrinus had drained away and he felt the cold again. “I’m sorry, Marcello, but the bombs … The depot is destroyed.”

Maggio stepped closer and Cioffi could smell his breath: cigarette smoke and mint leaves. “And my money?”

Cioffi pointed into the road. “If you help me, we could take the donkey. We could sell it for the meat. I’m sure you must know someone.”

Maggio looked over at the animal. It had begun to scrape its hooves across the pavement in a hopeless attempt to raise itself: the forelegs
scrabbled, but the hindquarters would not respond—the spine was broken somewhere above the haunches.