The Fallen (2 page)

Maggio left Cioffi standing in the doorway and went into the street. He found a loose paving stone and picked it up. As he approached, the donkey brayed, its flesh sticky with blood. Maggio looked down at the animal, then he lifted the paving stone above his head.

The sound that Cioffi heard was like the soft thud of something being dropped onto wet earth. The animal trembled once and then was still.

Maggio came back to the doorway. “I didn’t come for horsemeat,” he said, and slapped Cioffi hard across the face.

The iron taste of blood filled Cioffi’s mouth, and his eyes began to water.

“Where is my money?”

When Cioffi did not answer, Maggio slapped him again. When he raised his hand a third time, Cioffi cowered. “Please, Marcello,” he said, pressing his palms together. “It’s gone.”

“You mean you drank it.”

Cioffi nodded. “Yes. And a girl …”

Maggio lowered his hand. “A girl?”

“It was only twenty lire,” Cioffi said. “We could get it back, I’m sure of it. I know where she is.”

“What kind of a
puttana
spreads her legs for twenty lire?”

“It was more. It was fifty. But I lied to her, you see.”

Maggio shook his head. He stared at him. Then, after a moment, he reached out and smoothed the lapels of Cioffi’s jacket. “I should have known better than to do business with a drunk like you,
dottore
.” The title was offered in mockery. Maggio delighted in the reversal of fortunes. There was a time when the Cioffi name was important in the city’s garment business, but left in the care of a dissolute only son, its shine had quickly tarnished. “I should never have taken pity on you,”
Maggio said. “You are more trouble than you are worth.”

“Yes, Marcello. I am sorry.”

“Now I have to tell don Abruzzi that I was wrong about you—and he held out such high hopes, what with your connections.”

“What can I do?” Cioffi said.

Maggio smiled. “What can you do?” he said, and patted him gently on the cheek. “You can come and see me tomorrow at the market, that’s what you can do. We’ll go, the two of us, to see Abruzzi and you can tell him yourself what happened.”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes, tomorrow. What? Have you already got plans,
dottore?
Other business engagements to keep maybe?”

“No, Marcello.”

“Good. Tomorrow at eleven o’clock, then. You come and see me. Maybe you can even get my money back.”

After Maggio had gone, Cioffi sat down on the pavement. He leaned his back against the cold brick wall of the building. For a time he had difficulty catching his breath and he spat onto the ground beside him. He thought how nice it would be to leave Marcello Maggio with a bloody mouth. The fat
bancarello
—before the war Cioffi wouldn’t have noticed him in the street, let alone spoken to him; yet now he grovelled for his favour, let himself be beat for the chance at a few extra lire.

He lifted his head and looked down the street. A young man and a boy had appeared, pushing a low-slung handcart with wooden-rimmed wheels. They came from the direction of the port, like two devils from out of the fires.

It was difficult work loading the donkey; the carcass was uncooperative. Twice the animal, drenched with its own gore, slipped from their grasp and landed, with a wet slap, on the pavement.

Cioffi wondered, if he offered to help them, would they share the profit with him, but the young man, who had noticed him sitting in the doorway, kept an eye. There was something in his look that convinced Cioffi he had no claim on the animal; the young man would fight him for it.

Finally, after rigging a makeshift pulley with bits of rope and using the tilt of the cart as leverage, the young man and the boy were able to shift the donkey into place. Its head hung over the side and the thick pink tongue dangled from between its slack lips.

Cioffi watched them as they started on their way back towards the port and the fire brigades and the flames. Then he lifted himself up and went into the road. He went to where the donkey had lain and looked down at the paving stone that Maggio had used to kill it. He pushed it with the toe of his boot. It was much heavier than he’d imagined.

An American jeep sped into the square. The severed beams of its blacked-out headlamps sliced across the stone lions that stood guard over the Monument of the Martyrs. In the trick of the light it appeared as if the marble beasts had moved, and Thomas Greaves could imagine them lifting themselves from their pedestals and stepping down into the street. Then the jeep was gone and the square was dark again and the lions settled on their plinths.

Greaves stood in the gateway to the courtyard. He’d waited out the raid there rather than go into the cellar with the others, because being locked away in the darkness while the bombs fell all around them seemed too much like the nightmares that already robbed him of his sleep. He preferred to take his chances above ground, under the wide open heavens.

To the south there was a false sunrise: the fires burning in the port bloodying the night sky. The fuel depot that shared the quayside with
the ferry docks looked to have taken a direct hit. Twenty minutes earlier, when the terminal exploded, it was as if a great angry fist had slammed into the earth, and the windows in the buildings bordering the square had shuddered and cracked in their frames. And though it was more than a mile away, Greaves had felt the heat of the blast, like the gust from an open furnace, but it was quickly replaced again by the chill of the Mediterranean winter.

He made his way now into the square. He went to the monument and sat down on the plinth of the nearest lion, the one writhing in animated pain from the pike driven deep between its ribs. He took out a cigarette, struck a match, and blew smoke into the cool night air. Then he reached into his pocket and took out the music box he’d purchased the week before from a blind merchant in Piazza Mercato. The lid was inlaid with mother-of-pearl: a likeness of the Sorrentine peninsula—chalky cliffs and fishing boats, white clouds, and the tiny slivers of gulls riding the winds over deep blue waters. He ran his hand over the lid, feeling the smoothness of the lacquer, then glanced back at the palazzo. It looked even shabbier in the pale moonlight—a heap of tumbledown old stones. Even the hand-painted sign on the courtyard gate announcing it as headquarters for 803 Field Security Section had come loose and hung now at a clumsy angle.

Greaves thought it fitting that the place looked as if it were about to fall in on itself. A single detachment of Field Security policemen left to care for military safekeeping of this teeming city: it was a hopeless mission. Before he’d arrived, there had been only one Italian-speaker in the unit, and that was Sergeant Jones, who had such a thick Welsh accent that many of the Neapolitans couldn’t understand him. Not that their own clipped dialect was any easier to decipher. It had taken Greaves almost the entire six weeks he’d been in Naples to finally get a handle on it. And now that he had, most of the drudge work came his
way: civilian liaison, coordinating the transfer of intelligence with the local police, marriage vetting. He didn’t mind so much; he preferred to be on his own. And the other members of the section seemed fine with the arrangement. His secondment hadn’t met with much enthusiasm. It was a battlefield transfer, which immediately drew suspicion: a man wasn’t moved off the line without good reason. Being Canadian hadn’t counted for much, either. King and Country carried little weight with his British colleagues; as far as they were concerned, he was as good as a Yank. The FSO, Major Woodard, had let on as much when he’d arrived, paperwork in hand. It was mid-December and the other members of the section were gathered around a makeshift desk in the foyer, cutting out paper snowflakes to decorate the office for the holidays. The interview was conducted in the large gallery on the main floor of the palazzo that served as the major’s office. After he’d gone through Greaves’s file and his transfer documents, he set the paperwork aside and leaned back in his chair. He offered up a solemn look, as if he were a headmaster faced with a pupil he was certain would cause him grief. He hesitated a moment before he said: “I’ve been told by a fellow I know at GHQ that you were found with your revolver in your mouth. Is that right, lieutenant?” When Greaves didn’t answer, the major became uncomfortable, and sat forward and flipped again through his file. He cleared his throat. “We don’t go in for that sort of melodrama round here,” he said. Greaves replied calmly, “No, sir, I don’t suppose you do.” Officially, he had come to 803 FSS on a training detail; he was listed to assume the Field Security Officer position of a Canadian Section stationed at Campobasso. However, no timetable for the reassignment had been included in his orders. And Greaves understood, as did the major and the others, that his designation to 803 FSS was to be indefinite. Someone at General Headquarters had made up his mind to lose him for a while.

The idea of being lost appealed to Greaves. For the last six months, it was exactly how he’d felt. He had tried to explain as much to the doctors when he was in the field station at Lentini and then later at No. 5 Canadian General Hospital at Catania. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” he’d told them. “I’ve completely lost my bearings.” At No. 5 CGH they had psychiatrists on staff who wanted to hear more about this sense of disconnection; talking, they told him, would offer clarity. But Greaves hadn’t known how to make it any clearer to them. He explained that sometimes, when he looked into the mirror, he didn’t recognize the face looking back at him. “I mean, I know it’s me,” he said. “I can recognize my own features, but at the same time it isn’t me. It’s a complete stranger.” Finally, a course of lithium carbonate was decided upon to calm his nerves. Greaves, though, wasn’t convinced that his nerves were the problem. He wasn’t like those poor souls from the last war who twitched and jerked and wet their pants when someone dropped a spoon on the floor next to them. His problem was that something had gone missing.

He looked down at the music box in his hand. He gave the key on the side a half turn. Inside, the spiked drum pricked at the stiff metal teeth of the tuning plate. The first slow notes of “Santa Lucia” chimed, and then the mechanism wound down again and the music stopped. Just then the all-clear was sounded, and Greaves could almost sense the stirring beneath the city of all those who had sought shelter in cellars and vaults and sewers, and in the labyrinthine warren of catacombs that ran like veins beneath the skin of Naples. And he thought to himself: it doesn’t matter how well you hide yourself.

Luisa Gennaro pushed the broom over the tiles and swept away shards of broken windowpane. She moved the bits of glass into a pile and pushed the pile towards the corner of the room; then she set the broom aside. She and her cousin Maria had spent a sleepless night in the cellar with the other tenants, shivering in the dark while the building above them shuddered and groaned. Now, with the light of day, the night before was just another unpleasant memory to add to her growing album of unpleasant memories. They had survived the bombardment, and that was enough. She went about her tidying, humming a song she’d heard played the day before on a phonograph in a taverna at the Galleria. Vera Lynn, she had been told by one of the soldiers drinking at a table, a young
inglese
with big teeth and gingery hair who had tried to put a hand on her breast. She’d slapped his face and hurried away, the laughter of the soldiers like a dog snapping at her heels. Still, she had liked the music, even if she loathed the men who listened to it.

She went now to the sideboard and began to straighten the photographs that had been upset during the raid. The frames had been jostled about, and one lay face down. She picked it up and looked at it: a family portrait—the Gennaros, sombre-faced in fading sepia. Luisa studied it closely: her mother, her father, her brother Gianluca, and
herself. No one smiling, no one showing any emotion at all, it seemed, except perhaps contempt for the photographer. Her father in a severe dark suit, Gianluca the same, high collars and no cuffs showing. Her mother in a mourning dress, her hair pulled so tight that it strained her face. And Luisa herself, just a girl, in a light-coloured cotton frock, patent shoes, doing her best, she remembered, not to giggle, threats from her father and a hard pinch from her mother to blame for the scowl on her face. And now all of them gone but her: Gianluca on a rain-soaked mountain pass in Albania four years earlier, and her parents the previous winter, typhus taking them only weeks apart.

“What are you doing?”

Luisa turned to see Maria standing in the doorway. “I’m cleaning,” she told her.

“Why bother?” her cousin said. “The planes will only come back and mess it up again.”

“That doesn’t mean we have to live with it like this.”

Maria shook her head. “Bombs are falling and you are sweeping the floor. You’re young. You should be out there living your life.” She pointed at Luisa’s clothes. “Why don’t you at least put on a dress? You look like a schoolboy.”

Luisa turned and looked at herself in the cracked wall mirror. She’d taken to wearing one of her father’s favourite wool sweaters, puckered with darning, and a pair of Gianluca’s old trousers, the waist cinched tight with a bit of yarn. She had even cut her hair short rather than be bothered to pin it up.

“We’re reorganizing the exhibits at the museum,” she said. “A dress would be impractical.”

“So the old man has you carrying boxes now, does he?” said Maria.

“You’re welcome to come and help,” Luisa said.

Her cousin laughed. “I am not a pack mule. Besides, I’m meeting someone.”

Luisa wondered who it might be this time: a Free French naval officer, perhaps, or one of the Anzacs. Maybe she had found herself another American. The most recent one had been a captain—he liked to hit her for fun. It had taken more than a week for the bruises to go down the last time, and for the first two days they thought her jaw might be broken.

Maria stepped past her and studied her face in the mirror. Her complexion was sallow. She pinched her cheeks until she managed a faint pink blush. “I look old,” she said.