The Fallen (26 page)

“You think they will put me in prison, do you?”

“It’s not a question of thinking—they will.”

“So, I will go to Poggio Reale, maybe even to Procida. Of course, you might be right. They might lock me up. But have you asked yourself,
tenente
, what happens when the armies leave? Do you think they will keep people like me inside when that happens? Or do you think maybe they will throw the doors to the jails wide open? Now you won’t be around for that, will you. But what about your friends? They aren’t going anywhere, are they?”

Greaves shifted on his chair.

“No,” Varone said, “you hadn’t thought of that, had you?”

The
tenente
looked down at the cigarette burning between his fingers. “I don’t imagine you’ll do anything.”

“You don’t know me very well, do you,
tenente
?”

“I don’t need to.”

“And why is that?”

“Because you gave me your word.”

“And that’s worth something, is it?”

“I think so.”

“It didn’t have to be this way.”

Greaves looked at him. “Yes, it did. It always had to be this way.”

“From the beginning?”

“From the beginning.”

Varone shook his head. “Then you are a martyr,” he said. He glanced up at the sliver of a window; the leaded pane was cracked in the middle. “Maybe they will build you a statue.” He got up from the bed and walked back towards the door. “I suppose that, in an odd way, I can admire you for what you’re doing. But really, would it have been so bad to do business with me? Are your scruples so strong?”

“It has nothing to do with you,” Greaves said. “It never did.”

“I see. Then it’s penance for something else.” Varone opened the door. “Someone will come soon.”

Paolo was waiting for him out in the corridor.

“This has become too messy,” Varone said to him. “Nothing good can come of it now.”

“What should we do?”

“There are too many loose ends. They need to be tied up.”

“And what about Ospedale del Santo Sepolcro?” Paolo asked. “Do you want me to send the boys back with the truck?”

“No. Leave it be. He’s earned that much.” He looked back at the door. “When you do it, Paolo, be quick about it. And then go and find our American friend and tell him that it’s time for him to do us a favour.”

Aldo Cioffi lay curled up on the floor. There was a wrinkle in the thin mat he used for a bed. It was late, well past midnight, and Lello had just come home. He had been out with his comrades, celebrating the
eruption: a sure sign that the revolution was at hand. From the sound of his fumbling in the hallway, he was quite drunk. Cioffi wondered if he had been at the Gambrinus.

He feigned sleep when Lello came to the doorway of the
salotto
and looked in at him before moving on down the hallway to the toilet. Cioffi heard whispered voices and wondered if Lello had brought company back with him. Then he realized that the voices weren’t coming from within the apartment but from outside, in the corridor. After a moment they stopped. Cioffi sat up so as to listen more closely, but the only sound now was the noise of Lello making water.

Then the apartment door splintered open and the flat filled with yelling. There was the thumping of heavy boots scrabbling down the hallway towards the toilet. There was more shouting. Cioffi felt a cold terror and looked about the darkened
salotto
for somewhere to hide himself. He quickly gathered his bedroll and slipped out the shuttered doors onto the balcony.

There was a scuffle inside the apartment. The raised voices were American. He could hear Lello pleading with them. The light went on in the
salotto
. Cioffi could see the shadow of his friend through the half-open shutters. Lello was pushed and then punched in the stomach. He sank to the floor.

A gruff voice said: “Your name’s Cioffi, isn’t it?
Il tuo nome è Aldo Cioffi
.”

Lello protested, “
No non è il mio nome. Non sono lui. Sono Lello Conforti
.”

“What’s he jabbering about?”

Through the slats, Cioffi could see the American who’d just spoken. He was tall, lean—he wore a band on his arm. They were military policemen, and they were looking for him. Perhaps the
tenente
had turned him in after all.

“This ginzo says we got the wrong guy. What do you think?”

The tall American stepped close to Lello, who was on his knees now, his hands pressed together before him. “I figured you’d say something like that. Well, let me tell you something, fella, you got yourself into some pretty hot water. Seems you upset some pretty important people.”

“
Per favore
,” Lello begged. “
Non sono lui
.”

“We haven’t got time for this,” said the other MP.

“Now hold on a second. We got time.”

“Not for this we don’t.”

“If you say so,” said the tall MP. He drew his pistol and pointed it at Lello’s face.

It was the same whip-crack sound that Cioffi had heard that day outside the university. And then complete silence. Lello’s body lay on the floor. It had fallen without a sound.

“Jesus Christ. What a fucken mess.”

The tall MP shook his head. “I was hoping we coulda had a little fun with him first.”

“We got better things to do.”

“Sure, sure. But still.” The tall MP holstered his pistol and squatted down. He cocked his head, then reached out and pushed Lello’s hair away from his shattered face. “What’d this guy do, anyway?”

“Who knows? Somebody welched on a deal with one of the Camorra heavies. That’s what the captain said, anyhow. Could’ve been this guy, I guess, though he don’t look like much.”

“Should we clean the place up, you think?”

“Leave it. Nobody’s gonna give a shit about him.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Let’s get outta here.”

With the windows covered, the apartment sank further into darkness. Luisa and Maria had gathered linens from the cupboards and beds and put them into place with upholstery tacks they’d pried from the sofa and chair in the
salotto
, but nothing, it seemed, could keep out the ash. It spread like a fine, slippery dust across the floors and settled on every flat surface. It tainted the air and made it difficult to breathe.

Finally, they went into the kitchen. They wet strips of cloth and wedged them beneath the door and around the frame. They lit candles and got out bread and cheese, and then, even though it was still morning, they opened a bottle of wine that Maria had brought home from the American officers’ club.

“Are you frightened?”

“No,” Luisa said. “Are you?”

“A little, yes.”

When the eruption had started the previous afternoon, she had been frightened. She had gone down into the street. But her fear was soon replaced by a powerful sense of guilt. She thought of Augusto alone at the museum. For a time she considered going to him, but then she went back upstairs to the apartment.

“Luisa,” Maria said.

“Yes.”

“I have something I want to tell you.”

Luisa suspected what her cousin had to say, but she let her speak.

“I’ve met someone.”

“Is that right?” said Luisa.

“You know him. Captain Roth.”

“I know him?”

“Yes. From the interviews—he was the man with the clipboard. He runs the club.”

“I see,” said Luisa.

“No, it’s not like that. He’s not like that. He is good, like your Thomas.”

To hear Maria say his name made him sound somehow unreal to Luisa. And suddenly she felt as if he were no more than a figment of her imagination, a brief fantasy. She thought now of his letter, tucked away in the trunk at the foot of her bed. That was where it would stay. Luisa knew that he wasn’t coming back. She’d known when Aldo had come knocking on the door. She’d known when she had read his note. He wouldn’t have written it had he thought otherwise—the letter for the major he’d given her as insurance. It was a guarantee of her safety, but what he’d never understood was that her safety was not something he could ensure—nobody could. A piece of paper in the hands of a British officer, regardless of what was written on it, was just that—a piece of paper. It wouldn’t stop anyone from getting to her or to Augusto. The only reason she’d kept it at all was that she knew, except for a cheap music box, it would be the only piece of him left to her.

“How do you know,” she said, “that Thomas is so good?”

“By the way your face looks whenever you mention his name,” said Maria.

Luisa smiled. “We shouldn’t always trust our faces.”

She sipped her wine. Then she broke off a piece of bread and put it in her mouth: it tasted of ash.

“Will you go to the museum today?” Maria asked.

“Perhaps later,” said Luisa. “I am going to go to the hospital first.”

“May I come with you?”

“To the hospital?”

“Yes. Do you think it would be all right?”

Luisa reached out and took her cousin’s hand. “Of course it would be all right,” she said.

Cioffi had sat with Lello’s body through the night, until the early morning hours when the ash began to blow in through the open window. He watched as it slowly covered everything: the floor, the chair, the table—his friend’s distorted face.

He covered Lello with a blanket and then wrapped himself in whatever he could find: an old shirt covering his head, a dishcloth tied around his face, covering mouth and nose. He left the apartment house on Piazza Carolina and began to walk. He passed the Gambrinus and headed in the direction of Via Roma. The streets were next to empty. Every so often the headlamps of a passing car or truck would loom up in the sooty haze. He met no one on the pavement; it was as if the city had been forsaken.

He made his way towards the museum. He had to warn Augusto. He had to tell him everything. When he had done that, he would go north. If he could get to Rome, he could lose himself there.

The ash, like a foul grey snow, overflowed the pavement and gathered in small drifts in doorways and in the mouths of alleys. It filled the air: a choking, sulphuric fog. He had to stop often just to clear his throat. It was becoming difficult to breathe. He felt like he was slowly smothering.

In the square in front of the museum, he had to stop again. He removed the cloth from around his face and cleared the claylike crust of ash that had collected in the corners of his mouth. His eyes had begun to sting, as well.

As he was doing this, a car pulled up to the curb at the bottom of the museum steps. The engine idled roughly. Then the doors opened and Salvatore Varone and his man stepped out.

Cioffi watched them climb the steps to the unguarded front entrance, and he knew that there was nothing now that he could do for Augusto. He waited until they disappeared inside, then he turned and walked back towards Via Roma.

The old man’s tears made Varone uncomfortable; they embarrassed him. Normally, people’s weeping did not affect him: it was commonplace in his business. Crying mothers, crying fathers—crying husbands and wives, crying children. There were those who cried out of fear and those who cried out of anguish. But there was something different about this old man’s grief—something more to it than a mother’s, a father’s, a husband’s, or a child’s. It was as if he was mourning more than simply one man, more than simply one life.

And yet, his grief was silent. He sat behind his wide desk in an office lit with oil lanterns and wept without making a sound.

The room, suffused in a dim yellowish radiance, had the air of the candlelit nave of a small country church. And the thin layer of ash that lay over everything—the bookshelves, the statuettes, the open ledgers spread across the top of the cabinets—seemed to have settled on the old man too. He was like a greying spectre of himself.

Varone looked over at Paolo now, who stood near the tall window that had been covered over with a patchwork of tapestries. Slivers of
tainted sunlight leaked through gaps in the fabric. Paolo glanced back at him and shrugged.

Finally, Varone said: “So, he was a friend of yours, then?”

“Yes, he was a friend.”

“I’m sorry.”

The old man looked over towards the shrouded window and nodded at Paolo. “Is he the one who did it?”

“Yes,” said Varone.

“Then tell him to leave. I won’t speak to you if he stays.”

Varone told Paolo to wait for him in the corridor, then he watched as the curator dried his eyes with the backs of his hands. He took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. Then he got up from his chair and went to the small table with the field stove on it. The old man took out a packet of matches and lit the stove. He adjusted the flame, put a battered
caffettiera
on to boil. Soon the smell of brewing coffee filled the office.

“Thomas was a good man,” he said finally.

“So I gathered,” said Varone.

For a time, the old man was quiet. He waited for his coffee to boil and then poured a cup and came back to his desk and sat down. He watched Varone as he brought the cup to his lips. Then he said: “What do we do now?”

“We do nothing,” said Varone.

“What do you mean?”

Varone went to the table and found a cup. He took the
caffettiera
from the stove and poured a coffee for himself.

“It’s over,” he said. “I gave him my word.”

“And it’s good? Your word?”

“It may be the only thing about me that is.”

Varone took a sip of the bitter coffee and let it settle on his tongue before he swallowed it down.

The old man got out of the chair again and came round the desk. Varone could see that he’d once been a sturdy figure. He had broad shoulders and a thick chest. His hands still looked powerful, and Varone thought that there would have been a time when he’d have been a worrisome prospect. But all of his force had left him. He started across the room towards the window but stopped partway. He appeared momentarily lost as if he’d forgotten why it was that he had left his desk. Then he looked at Varone and, with a slightly bemused expression on his face, said, “He told me once that every man, though he knows he is going to die, can never know that he is dead. And that is why, in his mind, every man is immortal.”