The Liberation, Page 2

  The smell of old clothes and empty stomachs filled the crowded carriage. The heat turned the air solid and sweat slithered between the shoulder-blades of the passengers crammed inside, grimly seeking a change of fortune in the big city. That hope lured them from their villages for a chance to make a few lire. Just as it lured her. They were desperate to sell a tired pair of shoes or to barter a few cabbages for a chicken head which they could sell for three lire, or a sliver of soap if they struck lucky.

  Caterina was well aware that some would even beg, because they had nothing to sell except their gaunt face. She had seen them. They would stand hour after hour outside one of the palatial hotels where the military were billeted, where foreign soldiers smoked real American cigarettes and stuffed their mouths with real meat. The villagers would stand out there in the burning sun with expressions as empty as graven images. And beg.

  It wasn’t what Italians had expected, this shame. Not now the war was over. Shame made eyes furtive. It silenced tongues. The journey was oddly quiet.

  Outside, the silvery green of olive groves rippled past the windows, drawing lustful eyes to their ripening fruit and Caterina heard her stomach growl. It was a rattle-bucket train that skirted the fertile volcanic plain at the base of Mount Vesuvius and clanked its way into Garibaldi Station in the centre of Naples. The tranquil pearly beauty of the morning was flipped into a buzzing hive of activity the moment Caterina stepped out into Piazza Garibaldi. Instantly she became more alert and looked around sharply. A young woman alone in this city was fair game, but a young woman clutching a bulging sack was a honey-pot. Shoulders jostled her. Hands grasped. One man with heavy dark pouches beneath his eyes and a patched khaki shirt leaned so close he breathed garlic in her face.

  ‘Benvenuto a Napoli, signorina,’ he said in honeyed tones and uttered a rasp of laughter. ‘Let me be your guide to our beautiful city.’ He gestured towards the roofless ruins of the houses nearby and tweaked a corner of her sack.

  ‘Va via!’ Caterina hissed.

  She elbowed him aside and strode away through the city’s shattered streets, past grey landslides of rubble from bombed buildings. She headed purposefully westward, aiming for the port. That’s where she’d find them – the loud, strange-smelling foreign soldiers and sailors with money in their pockets and a ready eye for a young woman’s smile.

  She turned down Corso Umberto in the centre of Naples, but the traffic was jammed. Horse-drawn carts battled for space with the hefty Bedford trucks of the British army that belched out smoke, and everywhere the more nimble American jeeps swerved and blared their horns. Hawkers dodged back and forth through the dust between them, thrusting chunks of pagnotta bread through drivers’ windows in exchange for a few lire. Or, with a sly smile, dangling strings of nude photographs to tempt a sale.

  Much of Naples was made up of elegant boulevards and wide avenues that before the war used to rival Rome, but at the city’s heart lay the old quarter, an ancient maze of lanes so narrow you could spit from one side to the other.

  Caterina hurried down one of the side roads into Via Vicaria Vecchia, and from there she ducked into the tangled lanes that were miraculously untouched by bombs. The mediaeval stone buildings towered four or five storeys above her and seemed to lean towards each other, sharing ancient secrets. Wooden shutters rattled in the breeze, paint peeling, and a forest of washing flapped noisily above her head between balconies, blocking out the sun, while a big-busted woman was leaning out of an upstairs window singing a Neapolitan song in a full rich voice.

  So much of modern Italy felt disjointed to Caterina. Dislocated. An alien landscape that they all had to relearn. But here in the deep shade of old Italy, she could hear the ancient pulse of Naples, feel it vibrating in the smooth black lava slabs beneath her feet. Bombs. Gunfire. Death and starvation. Blood in the streets. Defeat and destruction. Italy had had a gutful of them all. Caterina found it hard at times to control her anger and her despair, but the end of the war in Europe had finally been declared last month, the country liberated with great fanfare and wild tossing of flowers in the air – May 1945, a date branded into history. As she hurried with her sack along Spaccanapoli she felt a kick of excitement, an odd clenching of her heart.

  She glanced up at the crumbling baroque façades of the old buildings, up past the blood-red geraniums and the gaudy purple zinnias that splashed and curled over iron balconies. She looked up to the pencil-thin strip of blue sky above. Today would be her own new beginning.

  So. It was true. The rumours.

  Caterina stood in what was left of the port of Naples and stared at the devastation. It was as bad as they said. How many had died here? And how in God’s name would they ever shift the mountains of smashed masonry or the ships beached like dead whales in the glittering blue waters of the bay. She’d heard rumours, but rumours could always be lies. Italians were good at lying. But not this time.

  The American B24 Liberator and the British Bristol-Blenheim bombers had done their worst, day after day, night after night, and their worst had been more than good enough. By bombing Naples they cut off the German supply route across the Mediterranean from Naples to troops in North Africa and shortened the war. That’s what they said. More than two hundred bombing raids on the city. No one, not even Ivanhoe Bonomi, head of the new caretaker Italian government, saw fit to argue, but it was hard to take, an invader’s boots crushing the life out of you. The docks were hectic with activity now as fresh vessels anchored in the bay, troop ships and supply ships that had the quayside swarming with uniforms of every hue – green, khaki, buff, navy and white. Stick a pin in them, her grandfather said, and they all bleed the same colour of arrogance.

  Caterina turned her back on the wide sweep of the bay with its startlingly blue waters and the islands of Ischia and Capri floating in the distance, just as a truck piled with rubble roared towards her, its wheels jarring in the pot-holed road. It sent a whirlwind of stone-dust skimming over her and to escape it she stepped behind a jagged shoulder of wall. It was all that remained standing of what had once been a run-down block of apartments.

  Immediately she felt uneasy. Yet there was no reason to fear. Nothing here but broken stones and weeds, a playground for rats. Maybe it was the long shadows that stretched like dead dogs between the shattered doorways, or maybe the smell – the stench of damaged drains was bad. Or the crows circling overhead, watching her, flecks of soot against the bare blue sky. Or maybe it was just hunger.

  She was always hungry. The kind of hunger that sucked the marrow from her bones, but she was used to that. When she spotted a snail, fat and luscious, hiding away between broken slabs, she reached out to snatch its shell. Nothing, absolutely nothing that could be devoured by the human stomach was ever wasted in Naples. It was only in recent years that Caterina had learned that you don’t know what food means until you have none. Until you hear your young brother crying in his sleep, until you see your grandfather reduced to fragile skin and bone. Until you are ready to stick a knife into a man for a loaf of bread. You change. You become a different person, and she didn’t always like the person she had become. But she felt a flutter of black wings at her cheek and a crow stole the snail, rising through the bright shimmering air with a caw of triumph.

  ‘What’s in your sack?’

  Caterina swung round to see who had crept up behind her on silent feet. To her surprise it was a small boy with filthy black hair sticking out like a hedgehog’s spikes. He wore a torn scrap of material that must once have been a shirt, a pair of ragged shorts and he had bare feet. He was so thin, his arms and legs looked like pins stuck in him, but on his face beamed a wide grin.

  She could not resist returning the smile. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked.

  ‘Tino.’

  ‘Hello, Tino. Looking for food?’

  ‘Si. You?’

  She shrugged. ‘All of Naples is looking for food.’

  ‘You have food in your sack?’

  ‘No.’ With he
r foot she nudged the bulges that deformed the hessian. ‘Just some things I want to sell.’

  He spread his spindly arms out wide. ‘No one to buy things here.’

  Caterina glanced around. It was true. Only weeds lived here now.

  ‘So, young Tino, what are you up to?’

  His bright eyes shifted to her sack. ‘I find things. I sell them.’

  ‘Not here, you don’t.’

  Her smile remained in place, but the little urchin must have heard something in her voice because his attention shot back to her face. His grin crept back.

  ‘You got a sigaretta in your sack, signorina?’

  ‘No, no cigarettes. You’re too young to smoke.’

  He puffed out his chest. She could see his ribs. ‘I’m nine.’

  She laughed. ‘More like six.’

  He looked at her sideways, as if squeezing past the lie. ‘How old are you, signorina?’

  ‘Twenty-one.’

  ‘You smoke?’ He mimed puffing on a cigarette with grubby fingers.

  ‘I’d rather eat.’

  ‘And me.’ He skipped closer to her, as a truck roared past carrying troops, its canvas flapping like the sound of rifle shots. ‘I can help you sell,’ Tino said. ‘I know good bars. Lots of Yankee soldiers there.’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  This close she could see his bones almost jutting through his skin. With a sigh she reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out a handkerchief. It was a square of pristine white cotton, carefully ironed, with fine cobwebs of lace at each corner.

  ‘Here,’ she said and held it out to him. ‘Have this.’ She would regret it later, she knew, but right now it seemed the least she could do for the child. ‘You can sell it.’

  He snatched the dainty square from her hand.

  ‘Grazie, signorina.’ He hopped from foot to foot with pleasure.

  ‘It was my mother’s.’

  His small face adopted a solemn expression. ‘Is she dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  It was easier to say yes.

  Dead to her daughter. Dead to her son. Though no doubt sipping champagne in Rome with a hundred other lace handkerchiefs tucked inside her perfumed drawer.

  He pushed the handkerchief into his filthy pocket quickly for fear she might change her mind.

  ‘I know someone you will like to meet. His name is Vanni. He will help you sell,’ he said. Again the grin. It was his only weapon against the world. ‘Wait here. I fetch him.’

  He pointed a finger at her to make her stay and then scampered off, clambering over the sun-baked rubble with the agility of a weasel. But the moment he was out of sight Caterina knew that she had lingered too long. Tino was clearly one of the scugnizzi. These were the feral packs of children that ran wild on the streets of Naples. They roamed the back alleys, orphaned or abandoned, and lived off their wits, stealing, scavenging, beguiling with their smiles. Where there was one, there would be others. She hoisted the sack on to her shoulder and hurried towards the battered road that skirted the harbour, but she was too late. She heard them behind her. The scratch of stone against stone as they scrambled closer.

  Children, she told herself. That’s all they were, no need to fear them. She swung around to face them.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The sound of the gunshot from Caterina’s Bodeo tore through the bombsite, sending the seagulls tumbling through the clear blue sky like flashes of sunlight. The bullet had gouged a hole the size of a fist in the ground in front of the boy, Vanni. Two centimetres to the left and it would have shattered his foot. Both stared at it in shock. A jeep swerved off the road and ran up on to the edge of the bombsite with a squeal of tyres. Two soldiers leapt out. Instantly the scugnizzi turned and fled, melting into the heaps of rubble like mice by the time the soldiers reached Caterina.

  ‘Put down the gun.’

  The one who gave the order was wearing an American officer’s uniform. He was dark-haired, his eyes watchful, his voice stern. He was around thirty and his skin was deeply tanned, as if he’d been one of those who’d done their fighting against Rommel and the Afrika Korps in the punishing deserts of North Africa. He spoke in fluent Italian.

  ‘I didn’t hurt anyone,’ Caterina explained.

  She gestured at the hole. ‘It was just a warning shot to . . .’

  The American officer calmly drew his pistol and pointed it at her. ‘Put the gun down, lady. On the ground.’

  She put down the gun. On the ground.

  ‘Back away from it.’

  She backed away.

  He picked up her grandfather’s pistol, stuffed it in his belt and inspected her with narrowed eyes.

  ‘They were trying to steal my sack.’ Caterina pointed to it.

  ‘So you were going to shoot him?’

  ‘No, of course not. He pulled a knife on me. I was . . .’

  ‘Look, signorina,’ the other soldier stepped forward with an easy soothing smile, ‘we can’t have people running round waving guns in people’s faces, can we?’

  He was British. Softer at the edges. His hair was fair and short under the peak of his officer’s cap, and his sandy-coloured khaki drill uniform with two pips on the epaulette was crisp and clean. He was of a similar age to his companion and also spoke fluent Italian, but with a stiff English accent.

  ‘I wouldn’t shoot anybody. I have to return the gun to my grandfather.’ Caterina held out her hand for it.

  The tall American shifted his attention to the sack at her side. He indicated it with a nod of his head. ‘Open it.’

  The English captain laughed softly. ‘You’ll have to excuse my companion, Major Parr. He left his manners in Milwaukee, it seems.’

  ‘What’s in it?’ the major asked.

  ‘Some things to sell, that’s all.’

  ‘What kind of things? Stolen ones?’

  ‘No.’

  He stepped closer and prodded it with his US army boot. ‘Open it.’

  ‘Please,’ the English officer added with a firm but polite smile.

  With a shrug Caterina bent down and opened the sack.

  ‘Exquisite.’

  The British captain let the small wooden musical box sit on the palm of his hand. On its lid the Amalfi coast was depicted in wood inlay, the towering cliffs picked out in mahogany and olive veneers, the billowing sail of a yacht glistening in white holly wood.

  ‘Utterly exquisite,’ he said with satisfaction.

  Caterina said nothing. She was frightened the soldier would take it from her. She never liked people handling the boxes. Looking, yes. Handling, no. Leaving their heavy fingerprints on the pristine sheen of the polished surfaces. She was tempted to snatch it from him, wrap it back in its straw overcoat, stuff it into the sack with the others and run.

  But there was the cigarette box too. She couldn’t leave it behind. It had taken a lot of work. She glanced at the American. He was holding it at arm’s length, balanced on his fingers, studying it with the same kind of quiet intensity with which she selected her veneers. He still had her gun.

  ‘What wood is it constructed from?’ His thoughtful gaze was on the box.

  ‘Burred walnut.’

  ‘And the figures on it?’

  ‘They are veneers. Maple. Ash. Pear. Yew. Cherry.’ She could go on.

  On the lid of the cigarette box was a wood-inlay picture of three soldiers sneaking a moment of relaxation. They each wore a different army uniform – American, British and Italian. The Italian soldier was leaning on his rifle and smoking a cigarette. Her little joke.

  ‘Bellissima,’ the American major murmured. Not to her. To the box. Caterina liked that.

  ‘Where did you get these?’

  ‘My father made them.’

  There. The lie was told.

  They both laughed, the arrogant American and the Englishman.

  ‘It’s true,’ Caterina insisted.

  ‘Are they stolen?’ the major demanded.

  Caterina lic
ked her dry lips. If he believed the boxes were stolen, he would confiscate them. All of them. He’d sling the sack in the back of his jeep and vanish.

  ‘My father is a master craftsman,’ she said. ‘And he is teaching my brother.’

  ‘So your brother worked on these boxes?’

  Her hesitation was so slight. They wouldn’t notice.

  ‘Yes. He applies layers of varnish and polishes them. It takes a long time. He is good.’

  The American gave a small smile and Caterina thought he was going to say something nice about the boxes.

  ‘So,’ he said quietly, ‘how much of that damned garbage is true?’

  ‘Jake, watch your mouth!’ the Englishman exclaimed. He turned to Caterina. ‘Please excuse my ill-mannered friend.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Harry.’ The major scowled at Caterina. ‘Signorina, we are lied to a hundred times a day. You Italians lie as readily as you drink your wine. Good or bad lies, good or bad wine, it makes no difference.’

  ‘Everything I told you is true,’ she lied. ‘I didn’t steal these boxes. I know everything there is to know about working with wood.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Yes, it is. I can draw you a dovetail or a mitre joint, I know the difference between a scroll saw, a coping saw and a razor saw. I can tell a good quality veneer from a bad one that will buckle, and I have heated up more fish glue than you’ve had cold beers.’

  There was a stunned silence. Only the rumble of machinery from the docks stirred the stone dust at their feet. Then the Englishman slapped his comrade’s shoulder, his blue eyes bright with laughter.

  ‘Who looks a bloody fool now?’ he chuckled, reverting to English. ‘Major Parr, she has you by the short and curlies.’

  The American nodded but offered no smile. ‘So, signorina, it seems you have a talented father. Yet he sends his daughter out on the streets of Naples to sell his boxes? That could be dangerous.’

  ‘That’s why I carry a gun.’

  She reached out and took back the musical box from the Englishman, encased it in straw once more to protect it and replaced it in the sack. But when she moved to reclaim the cigarette box from the American, he lifted it out of her reach.