The Fallen (9 page)

He washed in a basin in his room, shaved, put talcum powder under his arms, and then put on a fresh shirt and tie. He wet his comb and ran it through his hair. Then he pulled on his tunic and stood before the dressing table mirror. His cheeks were sunken and he had
dark circles under his eyes; he looked as if he were in the grip of some wasting sickness.

In the foyer downstairs, he found Corporal Philbin at his makeshift desk sorting through a file box that had been sent along from FSHQ the week before. He was working with the help of a translation dictionary and entering suspect profiles into a swollen ledger so that they could be checked against records at the central police station. These new profiles would then be added to the section’s burgeoning archives, which already amounted to three full-sized metal cabinets in a room on the second floor.

The corporal shook his head. “There are more Espositos in Naples than you could wag a bloody stick at.” He had the same uncertain gaze and cheeks flushed with rosacea as the teenaged wireless operator of Greaves’s dream. “This came for you,” he said, and held out an envelope. “Lady dropped it by about an hour ago.”

Greaves opened the envelope and took out the neatly typed list of names. “She didn’t want to speak to me?” he said.

“No. Just wanted me to give that to you.” Philbin nodded at the page in Greaves’s hand. “Will you be checking those names out at the Questura?”

“I will,” said Greaves.

“Would you mind looking into a few more while you’re there? It would save me having to go myself.”

Greaves took a scribbled list from the corporal and put it into his satchel along with the list that Luisa Gennaro had delivered.

He left the palazzo and started across the square. Walking along Via Santa Caterina, he thought about the music box. Maybe it hadn’t been such a wise idea after all. Luisa might have taken it the wrong way. Then again, in what way had it been intended? Greaves wasn’t certain himself. He had joked to Parente about it being a peace offering, and
in a way it was. He had wanted to do something nice for her because she seemed the sort of person in need of a kind gesture. But if she thought there was something more behind it, then that might push her farther away. All of which begged the question: did he want her closer to him? There seemed little sense in beginning something that could not be finished.

Greaves continued to mull this over as he turned into a street leading to the central police station and came upon a delousing operation. It was only one of many that moved like a troupe of travelling players through the poorer quarters of the city.

There was a ragged line of people gathered before a table staffed by two army nurses, who searched their hair for nits. From there they were sent on to one of the three stations, where an orderly waited with a spray canister filled with talc and DDT. A sign posted on a nearby wall showed the figure of a giant louse with a large red X drawn over it and the slogan
Lice=Typhus
written in both English and Italian.

While he watched, two boys were led by one of the nurses to the first delousing station. The younger of them was crying, but the orderly, a sullen private with pale cheeks and a receding chin, took a stick of chewing gum from his pocket and offered it to the child. As the boy unwrapped the foil from the gum, the orderly picked up the spray canister and began to work the plunger. He dusted both of them in a fine white powder that clung to their hair and clothes. The nurse, wearing long surgical gloves, rubbed their heads to make sure the powder reached their scalps. Then the boys, laughing and looking like apparitions of themselves, ran past Greaves. He recoiled slightly as they went by.

“How bad is it?” he asked one of the nurses, who had looked up to see him standing there.

“It’s not an epidemic,” she said. “Not yet, at least.”

At the next station along, an old man had been made to lower his trousers. The skin at the back of his knees was raw and speckled with a rash that roped its way across his naked thighs. The second orderly was shorter than the first, with a thuggish, square-jawed face. He aimed the spray canister at the old man’s thin legs, then made him pull out the waistband of his yellowed underpants and sprayed there too.

Greaves watched the old man wipe a tear from his dusty face, then left the street and the delousing stations behind.

At the Questura, he had to pass through a cordon of military police who were keeping an uninterested eye on a small group of men who had come there on the false rumour of work. The records department was on the top floor of the building. It was a wide, open room with a long wooden counter, behind which were ranged row upon row of file cabinets that reached from the floor very nearly to the ceiling. There were stepladders on rollers in each of the aisles so that the uppermost drawers could be more easily reached. The extent of the archive spoke to the thoroughness of the former fascist authorities.

Greaves did not recognize the clerk on duty, who greeted his arrival with an indifferent nod and continued reading the day-old copy of
Risorgimento
spread out on the counter before him.

“
Tu parli inglese?
” he said.

The clerk shook his head. “
Niente inglese
.”

“
Va bene, allora parlo italiano
,” said Greaves, and removed the two lists from his satchel and laid them on the counter. He turned them so that the clerk could see. “I need you to find a few names for me.”

“I’m very busy.”

Greaves looked down at the newspaper. “Yes, I see,” he said, and took out a packet of cigarettes. He offered one to the clerk, who accepted it with a smile and leaned forward for a light. “I really do need to find these names, though,” Greaves said, and pointed again to the lists.

The clerk shrugged. “And I told you that I am very busy.”

“What are you called?” Greaves asked.

“Giovanni Ianiero.”

Greaves repeated the name to himself. “That sounds familiar to me. I think it’s the same as a Communist agitator that we have on our books.”

“I’m no Communist,” the clerk said, his tone flat and undeterred.

“I didn’t say that you were. But it would be too bad if someone were to make a mistake. It happens sometimes, you know.” Greaves pushed the papers towards him.

For a moment the clerk remained where he was, cigarette smoke curling from the corner of his mouth. Then he nodded, picked up the names, and walked away.

Greaves dropped his cigarette onto the floor and ground it out with the heel of his boot. He had learned early on that sometimes the Naples police needed to be coaxed into doing their job.

Cioffi hadn’t given much consideration to his plan not working. In fact, he’d been quite confident. But the doubt Lello had expressed the night before had worked on his thoughts and he wasn’t so certain anymore. What if Tenente Greaves did not even recognize him? They had only met on one occasion, and that was more than a month ago now, when his uncle had caught him skulking around the museum. Cioffi had come upon the two of them as they left the gallery on the mezzanine that housed the bust of Seneca. His uncle hadn’t bothered to ask him what he was doing there, nor had he inquired as to how he’d gotten in past the
carabiniere
guarding the entrance. He’d just given him a disappointed look and then, even though he could probably smell the wine on his breath, had introduced Cioffi to the
tenente
,
because regardless of whatever his nephew had become, Augusto Parente was always a proper gentleman, and proper gentlemen made introductions.

He waited now—and worried—in the shadow of the monument in Piazza dei Martiri. If he could not get the
tenente
on his side, what would he do? He could not go to his uncle himself; he could get past the guard, but he would never get past Luisa.

Across from where he sat was the headquarters of the British security police. It was housed in a palazzo that was made conspicuous not only by its lesser size but also by its pale yellow brickwork and the crumbling state of its top floor, which had been damaged during the naval bombardments of late summer. Strangely, it was the only building on the square that had suffered so.

As he sat there, a sharp pain gripped his bowels. For breakfast that morning he had shared a pot of boiled sea urchins with Lello. They’d come from a fellow that Lello knew who worked in the kitchen of a restaurant on the Lungomare. It was obvious by the pungent, fishy stink that the urchins were spoilt. Not even the last clove of garlic from Lello’s bare pantry could mask their rottenness. And their rancid taste filled his mouth again. He needed a drink to wash it away.

Then he saw the
tenente
coming through the square from Via Santa Caterina. He moved with a loose-limbed stride that Cioffi envied. What it must be like, he thought, to have so few cares.

He stood up and checked his coat, brushed a spot of lint from his lapel. He crossed the square towards the courtyard gate. “Tenente Greaves,” he called out, and then faltered when the man turned and stared at him, as if taking a quick mental inventory in an effort to place him.

“I am
dottore
Aldo Cioffi,
tenente
. My uncle is Augusto Parente.”

“Yes, of course. How are you,
dottore
?”

Cioffi sighed. “Sometimes I am good. Sometimes I am not so good.” He smiled weakly. “At the moment, I am afraid, I am not so good.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Is there anything I can do?”

“Yes,” Cioffi said, and ran a smoothing hand down the front of his jacket. He did his best to sound solemn. “I must talk with you. It is a delicate matter,
tenente
.”

“Is that right?”

Cioffi nodded, and then glanced about. “We can go somewhere, maybe? Perhaps we will have a drink?”

Greaves watched as the
dottore
finished off his third glass of
limoncello
in a single, swift gulp, then motioned to the barman to pour him another.

From the side, Aldo Cioffi looked a young man. With his high cheekbones and patrician nose, his dark hair and gently sloping forehead, he was very nearly handsome. But the handsomeness quickly faded and he appeared very much older when seen straight on: his cheeks were drawn and sagged into jowls; grey speckled his stubbly beard; and his eyes, jaundiced, were set deep in darkened sockets. His actual age, Greaves recalled from his police file, was only thirty-one, but anyone would be hard pressed to guess it.

Cioffi held up his fresh glass and in a maudlin tone pronounced: “‘
Soltanto i morti vedranno la fine della guerra
.’”

“‘Only the dead will see the end of war,’” Greaves said. “Plato. I see that you are as fond of quotations as your uncle.”

“Yes,” said Cioffi. “My grandfather was the same. It is a weakness, I suppose. Always speaking the words of great men, in the hope of sounding great ourselves.”

A bout of laughter rose from the far end of the bar and Greaves glanced over his shoulder. There were three men, two old and bent-backed, the third younger, short, and broad-shouldered, with a thick, squarish head, close-cropped hair, and a pale pink scar curving from the corner of his mouth like an extended smile. He had noticed him come in a short while earlier. He’d stood the other two a round of drinks. Greaves caught his eye and nodded and the young man acknowledged the greeting.

“Do you see that,
tenente
?” Cioffi was pointing across the square towards the bay.

“You mean Castel dell’Ovo?” Greaves said.

“Yes, that’s right. Castel dell’Ovo. It means the Castle of the Egg. Now of course,
tenente
, you also know the poet Virgil.”

“Yes,
dottore
. I know Virgil.”

“Ah.” Cioffi raised a finger. “But did you know that Virgil was also a sorcerer? He practised
la magia bianca
—the white magic. You see …” Cioffi held out his hand, cupped like a bowl. “He put a spell upon an egg. And this egg he placed into the foundation of the castle. Now, we are told that if this egg is ever broken”—here Cioffi snapped his hand closed—“then Napoli will be destroyed.” He laughed and shook his head. “I think,
tenente
, maybe it is broken already, no?”

The conversation so far had touched not only on Virgil but also on the Caffè Gambrinus, a place that seemed very dear to the
dottore’s
heart, as well as the Rinascente, the San Carlo opera house, and the proliferation of brothels in the traditionally middle-class quarters of the city, a sign, Cioffi had remarked with a grin, of a socialist shift in Neapolitan society. Because Greaves found the
dottore
amusing, he didn’t mind so much being played for drinks. Judging from the sorry state of the man, Greaves thought he could do with a little charity. But even charity had its limits.

“Perhaps,
dottore
,” he said, “we should talk about your situation.”

“Yes, of course,
tenente
. I am taking up your valuable time.”

“Well, I do have other things to attend to.”

Cioffi nodded. “I understand. I will get to my point, then.” He took another sip of his drink and set the glass down on the bar. “You must understand,
tenente
,” he began, “that for some time now my relationship with my uncle has been not so very good. He does not approve of the way I have chosen to live my life. He believes that I have squandered my talents, and this may be true. And my mother, his sister—I broke her heart, you see. She wanted a son that would make her proud, but instead she ended up with me. I was not even there when she died, and I don’t think Augusto has ever forgiven me for that.” The
dottore
hesitated.

“Go on,” said Greaves.

Cioffi fiddled with his glass. Then he said, “I want you to speak to my uncle for me,
tenente
.”

“You want me to talk to the
professore
? About what?”

“I know that he is hiring men to work at the
museo
. You must understand,
tenente
, I know the place better than anyone. I know it almost as well as Augusto does himself.”

“You’re asking me to help you get a job at the museum?”