The Fallen (16 page)

The young man, Varone realized, lacked all sense of proportion; neither could he comprehend the tangible effects of shame. He was unable to appreciate that the punishment Varone exacted was more fitting, because from then on, whenever that priest walked through his parish, everyone would know why it was that he limped, and they
would know the truth about what he was, and that would forever rob him of the esteem and reverence that killing him would not. But the subtlety of this was wasted on Abruzzi, whose train of thought had drifted and who was now admiring the trucks once more.

“You could do a lot with one of these,” he said.

Varone ignored the comment. “So tell me again why I should agree to this.”

Abruzzi smiled. “Because you are a shrewd businessman.”

“You seem shrewd enough yourself.”

“That may be. But I am also a small fish. A small fish that would, one day, like to be a bigger fish—maybe big like you. But I can’t do that without being on your side, and without you being on mine. Big fish eat small fish, and I don’t want to be eaten. And besides, you have the sort of connections to handle this type of thing. I do not.”

Varone nodded. “Like I said, you’re shrewd yourself.” He turned and walked back towards the table at the far end of the warehouse where Paolo sat waiting. “You do know,” he said over his shoulder to Abruzzi, “that Aldo Cioffi is a worthless drunk.”

“I don’t concern myself with the character of the people I deal with,” Abruzzi said. “Just so long as they can do what they say they can do.”

“That’s where we differ, then,” said Varone. When he reached the table, he picked up the lump of white stone. “To me, character is the most important thing. It goes without saying that if you understand a man’s character, then you understand the man. If he is of poor character, then it doesn’t matter if he brings me a brick of gold. In the end, he’ll be more trouble than he is worth.”

“And what if he brings you ten bricks of gold?” Abruzzi said. “Or twenty? Or thirty?”

Varone looked at him and smiled. “If that’s the case, then he might just be worth the trouble.” He held up the carving. “I’ll keep this as
repayment for what you stole from me. And I want to meet the
dottore
myself. Bring him to the Villa Comunale tomorrow morning at six. I will wait for you at the Cassa Armonica.”

“We’ll be there,” said Abruzzi.

“It just didn’t seem right to me, working on wheat and beef and pork quotas when so many others were going overseas. I didn’t think I could live with myself if I’d done it. If I had the choice again, though …”

Luisa was only half listening to him—something about his father and friends he had in government, a position in the Ministry of Agriculture that would have kept him out of the army and that he had turned down. But her attention was divided. She couldn’t stop herself from gazing around. The Caffè Gambrinus—it was not as she remembered it. Her memory was of a shining place: gilt and polish. She had only ever been a few times, with Augusto before the war. Her parents had disapproved—her brother, too. But Luisa, on those few occasions, had revelled in the freedom of it, like an oasis of sorts, a place of liberation, where people did not have to guard themselves, where, for a time, they could speak their minds without fear. It was much shabbier now.

The tables around them were crowded with soldiers and their tarted-up Neapolitan mistresses: wan-faced men trying to impress women who needed no impressing. Sitting there, even in her trousers and shorn hair, she thought how much she must look like one of them.

Then she realized that he had stopped talking. He was looking intently at her.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Can we leave?”

“Yes,” he said. “If that’s what you’d like.”

She went outside and waited just beyond the terrace while he paid the bill. Then they walked across the expanse of Piazza del Plebiscito towards the waterfront, and passed the Palazzo Reale. There was a warm glow to the evening. The moon shone high over the bay and the breeze coming in off the water carried the soft scent of the sea. Luisa was glad that for once Naples did not smell like something unwashed.

They walked the Lungomare and stopped on the pavement outside the Hotel Vesuvio and looked out at the shadowy bulk of the Castel dell’Ovo. He recounted the story that Aldo had told him and asked her what she thought of it.

“Some people believe it is true,” she said.

“And you?”

“There is nothing magical about human misery. It isn’t a sorcerer’s trick. Cruelty is our most banal attribute.”

Then she showed him the place near the Giardini Pubblici where the Germans had shot people in the street and left their bodies to rot.

“So many have died already,” she said. “And so many more are waiting to die. And when it’s all done, they will just be numbers. Someone will tally them up, someone will do the math, and try to tell us who won and who lost.” She tipped her head back and looked up, the constellations like a swirl of pinpricks in the night sky. “But it will be like trying to count the stars.”

She turned to him. He was standing a short distance away, his hands pushed deep into his pockets. “Have you ever tried to count the stars,
tenente
?”

“I wish you would call me Thomas.”

“All right, Thomas,” she said, and liked the feel of his name on her tongue. “So tell me, Thomas, have you ever tried to count the stars?”

“When I was a boy, yes, I tried a few times.”

“And?”

He shook his head.

“My family,” she said. “My brother, my mother, my father. I am the only one left. There is only myself and Maria. It isn’t going to matter who won and who lost. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“I think so, yes.”

“I go to Ospedale del Santo Sepolcro because that is where my parents died. It is the only place anymore that I can feel close to them. This is what it has come to for me: the only place that I can feel solace is among the sick and the dying.”

He did not seem to know how to take this. For a moment she thought he might try to comfort her. He shifted his feet and glanced, almost shyly, at her. Took his hands from his pockets but then plunged them in again. Then he turned and peered into the street, his stare so intent it was as if he were looking at something in particular, perhaps imagining there the corpses that the Germans had left behind.

“I think, Thomas,” she said, “I would like to go home now.”

Aldo Cioffi’s father had given him the medical bag as a gift upon his graduation from the university. It had come with great expectations, all of which had been disappointed. It was the only thing left to him, his sole possession, aside from a few changes of clothing: a pair of knee-worn trousers, two shirts, a stained vest, three pairs of yellowed underpants. Everything else that he had once owned had been either sold or traded away, sometimes for food, sometimes for shelter, mostly for drink. But he’d always held on to the sturdy leather case with the brass clasps, feeling somehow that one day he would have need of it.

He had kept it tucked away on the top shelf in Lello’s bare pantry. Now he took it down and opened it and was greeted with the smell
of the tanned cowhide. He took it into the
salotto
and began to pack his clothes.

Lello came from the other room carrying a handful of pamphlets. He stopped in the doorway. “What are you doing?” he said.

“I am leaving.”

“What do you mean you are leaving?”

“Just what I said. I am leaving Naples.”

“For where? And with what?”

“I don’t know,” Cioffi said. “I will go south. To Salerno, or maybe to Cosenza. I have some money left. Enough for a train ticket.”

“What’s happened, Aldo?”

Cioffi looked up at him. “You were right. I didn’t know what I was doing. I am in over my head.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Not what,” Cioffi said. “Who.”

“You’re not making any sense.”

“Salvatore Varone.”

“For God’s sake. What have you done?”

“Nothing yet. But his man came today for Abruzzi. And he knows who I am.”

“And your answer is to run away?”

“Yes, as fast as I can.”

Lello came into the room. He dropped the pamphlets and grabbed the bag from Cioffi’s hands and began to unpack his clothes.

“Stop that,” Cioffi shouted.

“I’m not letting you go.”

They began to struggle with one another, pulling the bag between them until it was upset and the clothes spilled onto the floor. Cioffi got down on his hands and knees and began to gather them again.

Lello stood over him. “You can’t leave,” he said.

“Why not?”

Lello grabbed hold of his shoulder and spun him around. “If Salvatore Varone knows about you, that means he also knows that Augusto is your uncle. And if you’re not here, then he will go after him. That’s the way these people work, Aldo.”

Cioffi pushed him away. “Augusto can take care of himself.”

“Whatever you’ve done has nothing to do with him. He’s a helpless old man.”

As he stood up, Lello pushed him to the wall. Cioffi struggled to get free.

“I would like to be an old man too, someday,” he said.

“Listen to yourself, Aldo. This is your uncle you’re talking about. You’ve got to go to him. You’ve got to tell him what’s happened, what you’ve done.”

“It’s out of the question,” Cioffi said. “If I tell Augusto, then he’ll tell the security police. I’m not going to Poggio Reale.”

Lello slapped him across the face. “I won’t let you go.”

Cioffi put his hand to his mouth. When he took it away, there was blood on his fingertips. He swung the bag hard and caught Lello in the softness of his belly, knocking the wind from him. Lello gasped and sank to the floor. Cioffi raised the bag over his head, but when he did, he caught sight of something out of the corner of his eye, movement in the doorway to the
salotto
. He looked over and saw Renzo Abruzzi standing there with a smile on his face.

“You really should keep your door locked. You never know who’s just going to come strolling in.” Abruzzi came into the room. He bent down and picked up one of the pamphlets from the floor. “
L’Associazione Comunista Napoletana
,” he read, and shook his head. “Really,
dottore
, you do keep some questionable company.” He looked
around at the clothes strewn across the floor. “I hope you weren’t thinking of going anywhere.”

Cioffi lowered the bag. He felt slightly faint.

Then Abruzzi called to someone in the hall, and there appeared behind him the thick-browed thug from the
ristorante
on Corso Umberto Primo.

“I think it’s better,” Abruzzi said, “that you come with us,
dottore
. We have an early appointment tomorrow.”

Salvatore Varone liked the Villa Nazionale best in the early morning, when the cinder paths were empty and the only sound was the wash of the sea against the stony shore and the soft hum of a gentle breeze passing through the ironwork of the Cassa Armonica.

“Your father owned a garment factory,” he said.

“Yes, that’s right. Women’s underclothes and nightdresses.”

“But you decided to become a doctor. Why is that?”

“My parents wanted me to do something that they could be proud of. They wanted me to become a professional man. A man with a title. Respectable.”

“A professional man with a title, eh? And that’s what makes a person respectable, is it? I’ve met many men with titles, but I don’t remember any of them being respectable. Are you respectable?”

The
dottore
shook his head.

“And your parents, did you make them proud?”

Another shake of the head.

“You know, when I was younger,” Varone went on, “I worked for a man that made part of his living hijacking shipments from warehouses. All sorts of things: building supplies, machine parts, and clothing too—boots, stockings, suits, dresses. We probably hijacked your father’s goods.”

Beside him, Aldo Cioffi shuffled his feet. “I suppose that is the risk of doing business in Napoli.”

Varone laughed. “No,
dottore
. Not the risk. It is the business. Your father would have known that. In his factory he would have made stock to be sold and stock to be stolen. Who knows, he may even have been in on it. Took a cut out of what was taken from him. Some did that, you know. It was a tidy little arrangement in those days, back before that fool Mussolini stuck his nose into things. Now look at the mess we’re in.”

Across the walking path, near the fence that separated the park from Via Riviera di Chiaia, Paolo stood waiting with Abruzzi. Varone had sent them away so that he could talk to Cioffi alone.

“Do you understand what I’m telling you,
dottore
?”

Varone studied him. Cioffi stood gripping one of the iron pillars as if he were afraid the kiosk might start to spin about like a carousel and throw him off. The glass roof of the gazebo cast him in shades of green and yellow. There was the sour smell of fear on him, and he appeared to have slept in his jacket and trousers. And Varone recognized the look on his face: it was that of a man who has come to realize that he is no longer a player in his own fate; whatever happened to him now was for others to decide.

“I want to know about this security policeman who Paolo saw you with,” Varone said. “Who is he?”

“A friend,” said Cioffi.

“Have you told Abruzzi about him?”

“I didn’t think he needed to know.”

“That’s good. You made the right decision. He really isn’t the type that would appreciate that sort of thing. He would probably think that you were setting him up somehow.”

“But I wouldn’t do that,” Cioffi protested.

“Oh, I know,
dottore
. I can tell that you are a man to be trusted.”

A small convoy of military supply trucks came down the roadway that ran along the seafront. Varone watched them through the trees as they passed. When the trucks had gone, he put his hand on the
dottore’s
shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. He could feel Cioffi tremble under his touch. “What kind of man is he?”

“Who? The
tenente
?”