The Fallen (25 page)

“There you are, lieutenant,” Major Woodard shouted up to him.

“We thought you’d run off. Come back down and have another drink, will you?”

“Of course, sir,” said Greaves. “I’ll be right there.”

Back inside the room, he said to Cioffi: “You’d better get going.”

He put a hand on his shoulder and ushered him towards the corridor.

“I’ll take you down the back stairs.”

Maria held a damp cloth to her forehead.

“If you’re not well, I can stay with you.”

“No,” Luisa said. “You go. I’ll be fine.”

“Well, at least you haven’t got a fever. We can be thankful for that.”

She felt awful about worrying Maria. The prospect of illness frightened her cousin, who knew how quickly even the simplest of sicknesses could become much worse—the common cold pneumonia in waiting, a slight rash the first suggestion of dreaded typhus.

“Are you absolutely sure?”

“Yes,” Luisa said, “I’m sure. Just telephone Augusto when you get to the club so that he doesn’t fret.”

“All right, then.”

She watched Maria as she pinned her hair and tied on her pale blue kerchief. She looked more beautiful, Luisa thought, in her dark brown uniform—a simple A-line dress with an emblem identifying the American officers’ club sewn over the left breast—than she had in her finest gowns. Her face was delicately powdered. The only other makeup was a light tracing of kohl around her eyes. The colour in her cheeks was her own.

“I don’t like leaving you like this.”

“Please,” said Luisa. “Now go, or you will be late.”

Once she’d left, Luisa went to the window. In the small courtyard six floors below, two boys gathered together the rubbish that had been dropped there from the windows facing onto the yard, while another searched through the growing pile, separating out anything that might be reused or sold on to a
bancarellaro
.

Luisa stood there until she saw Maria appear. The boys stopped what they were doing and watched her as she passed. One of them whistled at her, and Maria blew him a kiss.

Luisa closed the shutters. She stood in the middle of the dim
salotto
. She hated lying to Maria, but it was the only thing she could think of to keep her from becoming suspicious.

Late the night before, there had been a knock on the door. When she answered it, she found Aldo standing there. “What do you want?” she’d demanded.

“I’ve a message from the
tenente
.”

“From Thomas?”

“Yes,” he’d said. “You are not to go to the museum tomorrow. You’re not to go to the
ospedale
either. And he wanted me to give you this.” He handed her the envelope.

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. I did not read it.”

She wasn’t sure if she believed him. “Is he coming here?” she asked.

“I don’t think so,” Aldo said. He waited in the doorway.

“Was there something else?” she said.

“No. Only I wanted …” He hesitated. “I wanted to tell you that I am sorry.”

She stared at him for a moment, then said: “I don’t ever want to see you again. Ever.” Then she closed the door on him.

She took the envelope now from her pocket. She opened it and took out the two sheets of paper from inside. On the first was his short, handwritten note to her:
Luisa, I know how to make things right—right for you and Augusto and Aldo, too. And perhaps even for myself. I will come to you if I can, but if you have not heard from me by tomorrow at noon, then take the letter I’ve enclosed to Major Woodard at the section office. He’ll know what to do.—Thomas.

The letter she was to give to the major was a list of charges. The suspect named: Salvatore Varone. Included was the address of an apartment house on Via Cimarosa, as well as that of the Caffè Diplomatico on Piazza Amedeo.

Luisa put the letter and the note back into the envelope. She felt as if she were a prisoner in her own home, and already she wished she’d let Maria stay with her. The apartment was such a lonely place with her gone.

She went to the sideboard crowded with photographs. Looking up at her out of their gilt frames were the faces of her dead parents, her dead brother. And Luisa thought how she would give anything to have them back again.

Paolo drove the truck to the abbey to collect the supplies, while Varone and three others followed in the battered Lancia Ardea, in case anything went wrong. Varone was prepared for a double-cross; perhaps the young
tenente
was already working with someone else. There were so many crews operating in the city—deserter gangs, corrupt military police, other
camorristi
—it was foolish to trust anyone. So they were prepared if the truck was hijacked: in the Lancia they had a Sten gun and two carbines loaded and ready.

But the trip passed without incident. It was early still and the roads were empty of traffic. When they reached the Ospedale del Santo Sepolcro, they drove in back to the delivery dock. The
tenente
was there waiting. He helped Paolo to guide the truck into the bay.

Varone got out of the car and told the others to leave their guns behind. The sun was warm on his face, and he thought how lovely the day was promising to be. When they were finished here, he decided that he would go back home and collect his daughters and take them for a walk through Villa Floridiana, and then maybe they would go down to the harbour and look at the boats.

He passed through a side door into the loading bay and climbed the steps up to the dock. It was cooler here, and filled with the smell of damp stonework and motor exhaust. He walked over to the
tenente
, who said: “I won’t ask you where you got the truck.”

Varone smiled. “It is better that you don’t.”

They stood quietly aside and watched as Paolo and the others unloaded the crates from the bed of the truck. They stacked them at the side of the dock.

“You see,” Varone said. “It is everything that you asked for.”

A door opened behind them and a voice said: “Excuse me, Tenente Greaves. May I speak with you, please?” The white-coated doctor glanced nervously at Varone.

“Of course, Dottore Serao.”

Varone watched the two men as they spoke, the doctor talking in urgently hushed tones and every so often casting a wary eye in his direction, and the
tenente
putting a coaxing hand on the doctor’s shoulder as if to reassure him. Finally the doctor sighed, and Varone heard him say: “You cannot make deals with these people.”

Varone approached the man. “Dottore Serao? That is your name, is it?”

“Yes, that’s right.” The
dottore
looked him straight in the eye, unconcerned about who he might be, and Varone admired him for this. Serao was a man certain of himself.

“I wonder,
dottore
,” Varone said, “how is your memory?”

“Very short,” Serao replied.

Varone nodded. “Good. Very good.”

The
dottore
turned and went back inside the building.

After the last of the crates was unloaded, Paolo closed the tailgate of the truck, climbed back into the cab, and started the engine. He drove out of the bay, leaving a blue fog of exhaust hanging in his wake.

“What now?”

“I have a car outside,” said Varone. “We should go somewhere. We have a lot to talk about.”

Parente drew back the curtains and let in the sunshine. He lifted the latch on the window and pushed it wide. Papers on his desk shifted in the light breeze. The office needed a good airing out. He had lived too long in the stuffiness of it.

He went to the field stove and made himself a cup of coffee. Then he went to his desk. He sat down and opened a side drawer. Inside, there was a half-finished bottle of honey grappa. He took it out and poured some into his cup. Coffee in hand, he sat back in his chair.

The workers who had shown up that morning he’d sent home after Luisa’s cousin telephoned to say that she wouldn’t be coming in. She had assured him that there was nothing to worry about, that Luisa was just worn out and needed some rest. Parente decided that he could do with some rest too. The chaos of the preceding weeks had taken its toll on him. And there was Aldo to think about as well. He had seen nothing of him in days now, but before he came back to his office, he’d
told the
carabiniere
at the front entrance to watch for his nephew. If he arrived, Parente wanted to be informed at once.

Now he leaned back and closed his eyes. The pull of sleep was strong, and he thought about a nap.

When the first tremor came, it was insignificant, barely noticeable. Still, it brought him upright in his chair. The second tremor was more pronounced: a quaking that juddered the cup against the saucer and splashed coffee onto his lap. He looked towards the bookshelves: a volume had fallen over onto its side, and one of the figurines, the Farnese Bull, set too close to the edge, toppled to the floor. Next came the roar of thunder, as if a storm had broken just outside the window. The floor continued to tremble.

Parente leapt to his feet. He ignored the stabbing pain in his hip and hurried across the room. The quaking intensified as he grabbed hold of the window jamb, the rumble outside low and constant. He pushed himself away from the window and hurried out the office door. In the corridor, the statues rocked on their plinths. As he crossed the main gallery, he could feel a tightness in his chest, but he kept moving. He scaled the central staircase to the mezzanine level, and from there went up the next flight of steps and into the high-ceilinged Hall of the Sundial. He hurried through the long room, passing the statue of Atlas—the world bearing down on his shoulders—threw open the tall shuttered doors, and went out onto the balcony that overlooked the square.

Only then did the burning in his chest become too much to ignore. He was overtaken by a fit of coughing and bent forward, hands on his knees. It was like a hand had reached in and grabbed hold of his heart and was squeezing it dry. Beads of sweat broke out on his brow—he couldn’t catch his breath. He tried to inhale more slowly, to steady himself. He grew faint, and for a moment he was sure that his heart
was going to shrivel up and die. But then the coughing subsided, and so too did the tingling that he felt in his fingertips. Soon the old pain returned, the persistent sciatica, that daily reminder that he was still alive. Slowly he straightened and looked out across the city.

The words of Pliny the Younger in his letter to the historian Tacitus sprang to Parente’s mind: the cloud of ash rising out of the now-gaping maw of the mountain did indeed resemble a pine tree—a pine tree with a very long trunk, its branches spreading out to fill the sky, the small boughs of which trailed earthward, breaking off at their tips into what looked like the mist of distant, menacing rains. Slowly the tree climbed, growing ever larger, while at the same time seeming as if it were not moving at all, seeming as if it were some awful blight fixed upon the landscape. Parente knew well enough the illusion; he had poured plaster into the voids, made the casts, chipped away the stone-hard ash to reveal the death-throe disbelief of those who had been mesmerized by the stillness of just such a cloud.

Come now, he thought to himself. Come now and bury us all.

The abbot scurried along the corridor ahead of him. He stopped before a low wooden door, took a ring of keys from beneath his robe, and began to fumble through them. When he found the one he was looking for, he turned back to Varone.

“I’ve done what I can to make him comfortable,” he said.

“You shouldn’t have bothered, padre.”

The abbot hesitated. “What will you do? I can’t have trouble for the abbey.”

“You should have thought about that before.”

He waited until the old monk had scuttled off again before he opened the door. The room was small and dim; a narrow window
set high in the wall let in a grimy, ashen light. In one corner stood a simple iron bedstead, the mattress neatly made up with a thin woollen blanket. In the other corner were a plain wooden table and the straight-backed chair where the young
tenente
sat.

Varone went to him and took hold of his chin. He tipped his head back and looked at the bruises on his face. His left eye was swollen shut and his bottom lip was split near the corner of his mouth; blood caked one nostril and there was a deep gash in his chin. He had known that beating him wouldn’t do any good, but he at least had to try.

“Has there been a raid? The noise earlier—the shaking.”

“Not a raid,” said Varone. “Worse.” He let go of his chin. “The mountain.”

“It’s erupted.”

“Yes. It has erupted. Vesuvio has awoken and is ready to take its revenge on us.”

“Maybe Virgil’s egg
has
cracked, then.”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing,” said the
tenente
.

Varone took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and offered one to the
tenente
. He leaned forward and struck a match. The flame lit the fear in the young man’s eyes. Varone watched him smoke: he winced when he brought the cigarette to his lips and inhaled. Even the smallest movement of his mouth caused him pain.

“Have you changed your mind?” Varone said.

“I haven’t.”

Varone went and sat down on the edge of the bed. “I don’t understand you. I was ready to give you everything that you asked me for. What am I supposed to do now?”

“You can do whatever you choose,” Greaves said.

“Is that the way you see it,
tenente
? You think there is a choice in the matter, do you?”

“Perhaps you should think of the consequences.”

Varone smiled. “That’s right—you’ve written a letter. Tell me again who this letter of yours will go to?”

“The commanding officer of 803 Field Security Section, British Army Intelligence Corps.”

“That sounds very impressive. And I suppose you think this concerns me—you think it frightens me.”

“I know it does,” Greaves said. “When that letter reaches his desk, you go from being a criminal nuisance to a security threat. And when that happens, whatever friends you have aren’t going to be able to help you.”