The Fallen (3 page)

“No you don’t,” said Luisa, and hugged her from behind. “You look beautiful, as always.”

It was true. After all the months of hunger and want, when everything around them seemed to fade—even the bright colours of Naples itself—the one thing that seemed not to diminish was Maria’s beauty: her straight-backed, full-hipped, patrician beauty. She had always attracted men, as much for her looks, Luisa often thought, as for her strident wilfulness, which her suitors always took as a challenge, like Shakespeare’s princes come to Venice to select a casket. Older than Luisa by almost eight years, Maria had married against her parents’ wishes: Pietro Bello, a functionary in the Prefettura. He had been chosen to spite them, and then, to spite him, Maria had begun to take lovers before the marriage had reached its first anniversary. When the Americans came, he left her behind and fled north with the other blackshirt loyalists. By then Luisa was the only family she had left in the city, so when the military government confiscated her apartment and belongings, she came to stay with her. It was over five months now that she had lived there, and Luisa could not imagine being without her.

Maria shrugged herself free of Luisa’s embrace. She went into the hallway and put on her coat with the moulting rabbit collar. Then she came back and tied a kerchief over her head so that the rain would not ruin her hair. “Do you think Augusto will have more coffee?” she said.

“He might.”

“Or those chocolate biscuits? I like those.”

“I’ll ask,” Luisa said.

“You won’t forget?”

“I won’t. I promise.”

Luisa waited until she heard the door close and Maria’s footsteps fade down the stairwell, then she picked up the photograph of her family again. Cheerless faces stared back at her. She found it difficult to remember what it had been like with all of them living together in the small apartment. That time seemed now as if it hadn’t really existed; it hovered in her thoughts like scenes from a film watched long ago, vague and disconnected. She let the tip of her finger linger on her mother’s greying image. Luisa wished that she had smiled for the photographer.

In a street running parallel to Piazza Francese, soldiers dug through the rubble of a collapsed apartment block. The American military police had cordoned off the roadway on either side of the bombed-out building and a striped wooden barrier announced the area temporarily off limits. Two MPs in green rubberized rain ponchos that reached down to their knees stood guard at the barricade. A few yards behind them, on the opposite side of the blockade, a row of bodies was laid out on the rain-slicked pavement, covered haphazardly with grey woollen army blankets.

Standing off to the side, Greaves found himself counting the feet that poked out from beneath the rain-splattered blankets: thirteen dead so far. There would be more. The German bombardments were as indiscriminate as the Allied bombardments had been before them, and those unlucky enough to find themselves living in the vicinity of the shipyards, the warehouse district, or the central rail station often paid the dearest price. And recovery operations like the one now under way could go on for days. First the rubble would be searched by hand, electric torches would be shone into crevices and voids, intermittent calls for quiet would go out so that ears could be turned to the ground to listen for movement, for cries of help. When this search was halted, the engineers would be brought in with their heavy machinery to clear the foundation—or perhaps the engineers wouldn’t be called upon, and the site would be left as it was and the stink of the buried corpses would fill the street.

A commotion started at a nearby café, where a small crowd had gathered on the terrace. Women cried and beat their breasts. In the wreckage, another body had been found. There was a glimpse of pale blue through the grime: a nightgown, perhaps, or a housedress. Two soldiers who had been clearing the rubble moved slowly, wary of losing their footing on the slippery debris. They carried the body roughly between them, one with his hands locked around the knees, the other holding tightly to the wrists. The woman’s head, the long dark hair damp and matted with plaster dust, sagged loose and lifeless between them. When the soldiers reached the pavement, they placed the body on a stretcher and carried it along the street, where it was added to the blanketed dead.

“What a fucken mess,” said the MP nearest to Greaves.

Together they looked back to the café. The crowd had begun to shift. It ventured into the street, milling now between the terrace and
the barricade. The sound of their grief, a steady keening, had a peculiar otherworldly quality that unsettled the MP.

Greaves picked out the young man. He stood alone from the crowd, rain-soaked, the singed fabric of his grubby white shirt pasted to his skin.

“Do you think there will be trouble?” Greaves said.

The MP nodded. “I know there will be. Always is when we got something like this.”

“What will you do?”

“The usual,” the MP said, the resignation in his voice heightened by a Texan drawl. “Crack a few of ’em on the head and hope for the best.”

Greaves shrugged. “Can you blame them? For being so angry, I mean.”

The American looked at him. He was slimly built, with the wide-open face of a boy fresh from the farm, soft and slightly bemused. “Mister,” he said, “I don’t blame nobody for nothing. Not anymore. Not after the things I seen.”

Greaves turned again to the fallen building. Watching the soldiers pulling away the wreckage, climbing the hills of rain-darkened rubble, passing buckets of debris along a procession of outstretched arms, was like watching an assembly of ants swarm a carcass. Then a shout went up behind him as the young man who had been standing on his own rushed the barricade. He knocked the MP to the ground and then threw himself onto the pavement beside the dead woman in the blue dress. He pulled back the blanket and clutched her body to his chest. From where he stood, Greaves saw the horrible disfigurement of her face: the brow pushed in so that there was a deep hollow in the centre of her forehead, her left cheek smashed, flattened in such a way that it pulled her pale lips into a ghoulish smile, the vacant stare of her bulbous eyes. Then the second MP descended upon the young man, hooking
his baton under his chin and crushing it against his windpipe so that his cries strangled in his throat. The first MP got to his feet again and unholstered his pistol and brandished it at the crowd to keep them at bay. Greaves looked on, as if what he was watching was no more than a performance of unfortunate street theatre. Only after the young man had been choked into unconsciousness did he release his grip on the dead woman, who fell back onto the pavement with a soft thud.

“If you steal anything, I will catch you.”

The bed of the cart was piled with tins: tins of frankfurters and beans, tins of pork and beans, tins of ham and beans, tins of almost anything imaginable and beans. Aldo Cioffi looked from the tins to the stallkeeper, a tall, thin man with a close-cropped beard that framed his pointed chin; with his tubercular complexion, he did not seem the sort who could run very far or very fast.

“And when I catch you, I will beat you.”

Cioffi took stock of himself. Another night spent on the floor of Lello’s
salotto
without a pillow or blanket had left him with an ache in his side that might be a cold in the kidneys; and thanks to a crack in the leather of his left shoe, the ulcer on his ankle had opened again; and then there was the fact that he hadn’t eaten a proper meal in nearly a week. The results of this cursory examination were not encouraging: it didn’t seem likely that he was the sort who could run very far or very fast either.

Cioffi smiled at the merchant. “My friend, I would not think of it,” he said, and turned away.

Piazza Garibaldi was teeming. The great square, as well as the surrounding streets that ran between it and the Castel Capuana, home to the law courts, was the heart of the city’s black market. Here the
spoils of the marketeers were laid out for all to see: sugar and salt, powdered milk, powdered eggs, chocolate bars, and cigarettes; the divested contents of field ration kits—bully beef and hardtack biscuits, haricot and oxtail, treacle cake soaked in molasses; socks and watches, boots and blankets, woollen helmet liners, and undergarments stitched from remnants of parachute silk.

On the far side of the square, near the statue of the great liberator, Marcello Maggio hawked his wares: old clothes and kitchenware, picture frames, lamps, religious figurines, an old commode—items looted from bombed-out apartment houses and deserted villas.

When Cioffi reached his stall, Maggio was arguing with a boy of perhaps fifteen who stood before the heavy-set merchant, his arms piled high with fine china—a serving tray and dish, plates and saucers. Before Cioffi was able to discern the crux of the disagreement, the second-hand dealer swept a weighty hand out at the boy and sent the crockery smashing to the ground. Broken china littered the pavement, and when the boy bent to pick up those few pieces left undamaged, Maggio shoved him hard in the back so that he fell to the ground. Then he looked over at Cioffi.

“
Dottore
,” he sneered. “I thought maybe you weren’t going to come.”

“I told you I would, Marcello,” Cioffi replied, and watched the boy pick himself up and begin to gather together the mess of smashed dinner plates.

“Yes, you did. You are a man of your word. Who would have guessed it?” Maggio turned to the boy. “And you,” he said, swatting him in the back of the head. “Maybe next time you will listen to me. Now, I have business with the
dottore
, so watch over things until I get back.” Maggio came and put his arm around Cioffi’s shoulder. He smiled. “Come with me. Don Abruzzi is eager to meet you.”

They made their way back across the square towards the central rail station, its expansive edifice pockmarked and scorched, its tall window frames emptied of their leaded glass. The whole while they walked, twisting and turning their way through the crowded piazza, Maggio pinched the thin muscle at the base of Cioffi’s neck and told him how he would be thanking him soon. “You see, it is because I like you,” he said, “that I’m doing you this good turn. And now maybe things will be even between us, eh?”

Past the rail station, on the south side of the square, they turned down a side street, and partway along the side street they turned again, this time into a narrow alleyway.

There were no windows in the buildings that adjoined the alleyway, and the air was close and smelled faintly of urine. Cioffi grew nervous, and Maggio, as if sensing he might flee, tightened his grip so that his thick fingernails dug into Cioffi’s skin. A little farther along, a young man sat on a wooden crate. Until then he had only ever seen Renzo Abruzzi from afar, moving along the crowded pavements of the Spaccanapoli and Pedino with his train of thick-necked cronies. But he had heard the whispers about him and knew enough to be wary. Abruzzi came from the legion of
scugnizzi
, the street boys who haunted Naples’s poorer neighbourhoods, castaway children who grew up rough to become burglars and pickpockets. It was said that he was fond of using a knife, and that he liked to cut smiles into the faces of those who crossed him. And now Cioffi saw the knife, a thin-bladed flick knife that, at the moment, Abruzzi was using to peel the skin from an unripened orange. He did not look up at them until he had removed the last bit of green-tinged rind. Then he bit into the orange. Juice ran from the corners of his mouth and down his chin. He wiped it away with the back of his hand. He chewed for a moment, and then spat the mangled pulp onto the ground.

“Tastes like shit,” he said. He pointed the tip of the knife blade at Cioffi. “You’ve kept me waiting.”

“I’m sorry,” Cioffi said. He stared into the young man’s limpid blue eyes. They had all the emotion of the glass beads in a doll’s head.

“What time do you call this?” Abruzzi said to Maggio.

“Eleven o’clock.”

“It’s a quarter past.”

“I’m sorry, don Abruzzi.”

“Don’t call me that. What am I, a fat old man like you?”

The second-hand dealer fidgeted. He didn’t appear to know what he should do with his fleshy hands, folding them first in front, then in back, and finally plunging them into the pockets of his trousers.

“Never mind.” Abruzzi put the knife away and stood up. He held a hand, still sticky with juice, out to Cioffi. “I know you,
dottore
. Do you know me?”

“Yes, sir. I do.”

There was a sharpness about Abruzzi, his features raw-boned: high cheeks and a narrow chin, lips thinly drawn and nose slightly aquiline. There seemed very little to him physically. His slender frame looked lost inside his clothing, as if his dark jacket, his white shirt, his neatly knotted tie were all made for a body two sizes larger than his own. He was smaller than Cioffi, and there was something foolish about the creme in his hair that held the part so carefully in place.

“And are you frightened,
dottore
?” Abruzzi asked.

Cioffi felt a flush of panic. He glanced back along the alleyway and wondered how far he might be able to run before Maggio or the young man caught up with him. Surely both were in much finer fit than the consumptive stallkeeper.

“Yes,” he said, his voice uncertain. “I am a little frightened.”

“Good,” said Abruzzi. “You should be.” He held out the peeled orange.

Cioffi, despite his uneasiness, took the fruit from him and greedily bit into it. Juice ran from the corners of his mouth and onto his chin just as it had Abruzzi’s, but he did not bother to wipe it away. The flesh was bitter and difficult to chew, and when he swallowed, he felt his throat constrict and for a moment thought he might vomit it up again. He began to cough and tears filled his eyes.

“I told you it tasted like shit,” Abruzzi said. “They came in two days ago on a ship from Jaffa, but I think they should have been left longer on the tree.” He kicked the crate at his feet. “Maybe I will leave them here for the rats.”

Cioffi looked down at the box of unripened fruit. “I could take them for you. If you don’t want them, I mean.”