A Dead Man in Naples (6 page)

She hadn’t been reading long when she became aware that she had been joined. A small boy crossed the patio on hands and knees, crawled to the edge and paused beside a tub containing an orange tree. There was a step down into the small garden, a big step for a tiny boy on all-fours, and he paused for a moment to consider it, his back against the tub.

‘Fall,’ he said.

He spoke in Arabic and Chantale replied, without thinking, in Arabic, too.

‘Would you like me to lift you down?’ she asked.

The little boy regarded her unthinkingly for a moment and then said: ‘Backwards.’

He swivelled himself round, and lowered his rear end over the steps.

Chantale watched him in case of accidents.

‘Always go down steps backwards,’ he told her.

‘A good idea!’ agreed Chantale.

The little girl she had met earlier came out on to the patio, scooped up the small boy, and was going to take him inside, but he protested vigorously. She stopped uncertainly, then made up her mind.

‘He does not disturb you, Signora?’ she said politely to Chantale.

‘Not at all,’ replied Chantale.

‘Where do you want to be?’ she asked the small boy. ‘Up there or down here?’

‘Down here,’ said the small boy.

She put him down, but then at once he climbed back up the steps and sat again with his back to the tub. The girl sighed.

‘Does the Signora have a brother?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Chantale, ‘but I know they can be trying sometimes.’

‘Atiya!’ called a voice from inside.

The little girl disappeared.

A moment later the mother came out.

‘He is not being a nuisance?’ she said anxiously. She spoke in Italian. Chantale’s Italian was good enough for her to understand the question but not much more, and she replied in Arabic.

‘No, no, not at all!’ she said.

‘If he is, give me a shout,’ said the Arab woman. ‘I am just in the kitchen, helping Maria.’

She turned to go but then stopped.

‘You do not have any children yourself yet?’ she said.

‘No.’

‘Of course!’ said the woman. ‘I was forgetting. You are still to marry. I find the customs strange here. That you should be with your plighted man on your own. It is not the way they do it in Libya.’

‘Nor in Tangier,’ said Chantale laughing.

‘It is better, I think,’ said the woman. ‘This way you get to know each other away from the family.’

‘That is true,’ said Chantale. ‘But sometimes the family is a great support.’

‘That also is true,’ said the woman. ‘It is true in my case. Without my husband’s family I do not know what I should have done.’

‘But sometimes the family can be overwhelming,’ said Chantale. ‘Especially if it is not entirely your own family.’

‘That is true,’ said the woman seriously. ‘My husband found it so, certainly. Of course, he did not know my family for long. Sometimes I think that that made it easier. He was good with them, but . . . It was difficult and would have become more difficult. It is easier for women to adjust, I think. Because we have our children. So perhaps it was better the way it fell out. That it should be me, not him, that was left. Even though it is hard.’

‘It is always hard, I think,’ said Chantale, ‘in a foreign country. Sometimes better but always hard.’

‘One’s hope is that it will be less hard for them,’ said the woman, gesturing towards her children.

‘You mean to stay?’ asked Chantale.

‘What choice do I have?’ said the woman.

She made as if to go but then stopped again. Chantale guessed that it was a relief for her to be able to talk about her situation in her own language and with a fellow Arab.

‘But sometimes I feel bitter,’ she said. ‘The people here are nice. They have been good to me. But why did they come to my country in the first pace, bringing their killing? But, then, if they had not, I would not have met Tonio. And the little ones wouldn’t have been here.’

She gestured again to the children. Chantale could see that they determined everything for her in a way that she could not herself imagine, having no children of her own. Yet? That was hard to imagine, too. Chantale had always had to fight fiercely but she had fought for herself, to make her own way in a man’s world. Whichever way you defined it, whether it had been the Arab world of her Moroccan mother or the army world of her French father, it had been a man’s world. The French had been good to her. They had opened doors. It was through them that she had learned about this other, this European world in which women seemed to be beginning to play a part. She had sensed that in the end it was the world for her, it had to be, and she had fought hard to belong to it.

But for her mother it must have been different. She had had her own world and after her husband had died she must have been tempted to revert to it. But, like this woman now, she had had something else to fight for beside herself: her child. And that, Chantale suddenly realized, now, made all the difference.

Seymour had been told that Father Pepe could be found most afternoons working in the grounds of a poor church on the outskirts of Naples. Father Pepe was used to poor churches. He had had the care of one himself before the bishop has translated him to the city, where he could keep an eye on him. What he was not used to, however, was the absence of greenery. There had not initially been much greenery at his previous church, which had been up in the mountains, mostly on bare rock; but over the years he had succeeded in changing that by loving cultivation. Now, in his new church in Naples, he found himself on equally stony soil and had had to start all over again.

In some respects, though, his situation was better. There might not be any grass, not many trees, but what astonished him was that there were flowers in abundance. Every balcony – and almost every house had a balcony, they rose one above another in even the shabbiest of streets – was like a miniature garden. Bright red geraniums thrust their heads out of window boxes, pots of carnations bloomed at every corner. Vines softened the glare of the sun against the white stucco of the walls. If they could do it, reasoned Father Pepe, why couldn’t he?

And so soon vines began to creep up the dilapidated walls of the church, the brown, scorched dust which surrounded it became green, and the church was now approached through borders of brightly coloured flowers.

All this required labour, which, the bishop was relieved to see, now occupied most of Father Pepe’s free hours, and water. Water, actually, was Father Pepe’s chief problem for the church was on a slight promontory and any water had to be carried up from a pump in the square below.

There were mutters about this; for was it right that good water should be used in this frivolous way when it might better be spent on softening the lives of those nearer at hand?

Father Pepe had, however, checked on this. There was plenty of water. The pump was fed from a spring which, in the experience of even the oldest square-dweller, had never dried up. And were not the flowers in their own way a tribute to God?

Faced with such tricky theological speculation, the critics backed off. Some bold spirits ventured to say that they liked it. The spirit of the balconies rose in support of Father Pepe and to everyone’s surprise the congregation began to increase. The bishop began to keep an even more anxious eye on what was going on.

So there was no shortage of people ready to tell Seymour where the church and Father Pepe might be found.

‘You go to the Gradini di Chiaia,’ they said, confident that even the strangest of strangers would know where that was. Seymour, going by the name, was thrown for the moment, for
chiaia
meant quay and the street was nowhere near the sea. He soon learned, however, that the street was famous throughout Naples for its flowers. It descended in steps and on every step there were baskets of flowers. Working, as the Neapolitans appeared to do, by association, one bunch of flowers led to another, and they directed Seymour accordingly. Despite this he found the church.

He knew it was the right church when he saw the bicycle. It leaned against the wall of the church. Its owner was at first nowhere to be found but then the small elderly figure of the priest came into view carrying two huge wooden buckets by a yoke over his shoulders. When he saw Seymour he put the buckets down with relief.

‘If only you could carry them on the bicycle!’ said Seymour.

‘I’ve tried it,’ said Father Pepe, ‘but it won’t work. You can only carry one bucket at a time in the basket and by the time you’ve pushed bicycle and bucket up the hill twice, it’s not worth it.’

He sat down on a stone and mopped his brow with the sleeve of his habit.

‘Were you wanting to see me about something?’ he asked.

‘I wanted to talk to you about someone,’ said Seymour.

‘Oh, yes?’

‘An Englishman. Whom I think you knew. His name was Scampion.’

‘I knew Signor Scampion,’ said the priest quietly.

‘You had, of course, interests in common,’ said Seymour, glancing at the bicycle.

‘Many interests in common,’ agreed the priest.

‘My interest,’ said Seymour, ‘is in how he came to die. I am an English police officer.’

‘He was stabbed,’ said Father Pepe. ‘In the street.’

‘I know.’

‘Many people are stabbed in Naples. Life is cheap in poor streets.’

‘I understand that,’ said Seymour. ‘But I don’t think this was quite like that. He was not the man to get involved in brawls. And his money was not taken.’

‘Sometimes an innocent man standing by –’ began Father Pepe.

Seymour shook his head.

‘Scampion was not standing by,’ he said. ‘He was killed deliberately. And for a purpose.’

He took out the betting slip and gave it to Father Pepe.

‘I wondered if this could be something to do with the purpose,’ he said.

Father Pepe looked at the slip. ‘It is, of course, an ordinary ticket for the National Lottery.’

‘Did Scampion buy tickets in the lottery? This was found in his pocket.’

The priest looked puzzled.

‘I did not know he betted,’ he said. ‘It surprises me. I was under the impression that he didn’t. We talked about betting once. I was explaining to him how I came to own a bicycle – I used the money I won by betting,’ he said apologetically. ‘Signor Scampion said that was all right. I was putting the money to good use. He had no objection to betting from that point of view, he said. Although he thought that poor people shouldn’t bet. They would only lose their money.

‘He said that was the reason why he never betted himself. He knew he would never win anything. I said it wasn’t quite like that. I tried to explain about odds.’

He shook his head, smiling. ‘But Signor Scampion was no mathematician. He just laughed and said he had learned he was not a lucky person. He never won raffles or things like that. I said to him that there was no such thing as a lucky person. It was just a matter of odds. The personal qualities of people did not come into it. I am a mathematician, you see,’ he explained. ‘I studied mathem- atics before I became a priest. And I believe it is just a matter of arithmetic. But I couldn’t persuade him. He insisted it was luck and some people had luck and others didn’t. I said, that’s what they all believe. But it’s just superstition. Ignorant superstition.’

‘And yet he had the ticket in his pocket,’ said Seymour.

‘That is what puzzles me.’

‘Someone suggested to me that he might have been given it. And that he might have intended to pass it on.’

‘It is possible.’

‘They suggested that he might possibly have been going to pass it on to you.’

‘Me?’

‘Because you were a friend who might be able to put it to better use.’

Father Pepe shook his head.

‘I – I don’t have anything to do with betting now,’ he said.

‘This, of course, would have been for charity.’

‘Even for charity,’ said the priest quickly. ‘I try to have nothing to do with it nowadays.’

He looked at the lottery ticket again.

‘Is there anything special about it? Anything unusual?’

Father Pepe gazed at the ticket.

‘It looks as if the number has come straight from the Smorfia,’ he said. ‘In which case it might give you a clue to the identity of the person who bought it.’

‘A person, anyway,’ agreed Seymour. ‘The address is that of the Foundling Hospital. And part of the number is the number of a person who was admitted to it.’

‘The personal number, yes,’ said Father Pepe. ‘Then I can see why it might have been special to them and why they might have wished to use it in the lottery. But why would the ticket have been given away?’

‘Perhaps because the date had passed?’ suggested Seymour.

‘And why was it in Signor Scampion’s pocket?’ said Father Pepe, thinking.

Suddenly his brow cleared.

‘Could it be,’ he said, ‘that the ticket was passed on, or thrown away, precisely because it was out of date? The time limit had expired. It no longer mattered. But somehow it came into the possession of Signor Scampion for whom it
did
matter. Not because of the possibility of winning the lottery but because of the person. He kept the ticket because it spoke to him of the person.’

Chapter Six

When Seymour came out of the
pensione
the next morning he found Giuseppi talking to a young man in the street.

‘You can’t do this, Bruno!’ he was saying.

‘She needs it!’ said the young man. ‘The money’s not come through yet.’

‘I spoke to them yesterday. I went down to the office with her. And Rinaldo and Pietro, too. And they promised they would do something about it.’

‘Yes, but when?’ said the young man. ‘When? And meanwhile she’s got to live.’

‘The family will look after her.’

‘The family
is
looking after her, I know. But, Giuseppi, your brother is a sick man. Not much money goes into that house. And there are others to be thought of, too. It’s too much!’

He put his hand on Giuseppi’s arm.

‘Don’t get me wrong,’ he said. ‘I know the family’s doing what it can. And I know you do your bit, too, Giuseppi. But, hell, you’ve got others to think of as well. With your son living out there, too, and you having to look after Julia and Francesca. All I’m saying is I want to do my bit, too. I’m in a job. The money comes in regularly. Tonio was a mate of mine, right? I promised him I would help if need be. All I’m doing is keeping that promise.’

‘Yes, but Bruno, you have other people to think of too. Your mother.’

‘She’s no expense. We’ve got the house and she eats like a bird. It costs nothing. Look, I’m only giving what I can spare.’

‘You’re very generous, Bruno, but –’

‘Come on, take it! Take it!’ said the young man, pushing a bundle of notes into Giuseppi’s hands.

‘Why do
I
have to give it her?’ asked Giuseppi. ‘Why can’t you give it her?’

‘It would look better coming from you. You’re Tonio’s uncle. If it came from me, people would talk. They would say, hey, what’s going on? Why is
he
giving her money?’

‘Well, you’ve answered that, haven’t you? Because you were Tonio’s mate.’

‘Yes, but you know what people are. They would say: what’s the money for? What is she giving him in exchange? And I couldn’t bear that, I couldn’t bear them thinking . . .It would hurt me, Giuseppi. I would think I had not protected her name. Her name! The widow of my mate! Christ, what would Tonio think! What would he say if he came back? In a dream, perhaps, if he came back to me in a dream – Christ! My mate! His name as well as hers! Jesus!’

‘Now, now, Bruno, it’s all right!’ said Maria, coming out of the
pensione
and putting her arms around him. ‘Everyone knows you’ve been a true friend to Tonio, and we thank you for that.’

‘It’s the things people say, Maria! About her being black and all that. They ask where did he pick her up? What was she doing for a living? Was she a – oh, Maria, you can’t believe what people say!’

‘And you shouldn’t believe what they say!’ said Giuseppi sharply. ‘Do they think a decent boy like Tonio would pick for a wife a woman of that sort?’

‘And anyone who’s talked to her for five minutes,’ said Maria angrily, ‘should know that she’s not like that!’

‘But they talk, Maria, they talk! They say: what is she doing here?’

‘Look, she’s here because she married Tonio. And that makes her as much of a Neapolitan as Francesca is –’

‘She certainly is!’ said Francesca, coming out of the
pensione
.

‘Francesca! You keep out of it!’

‘Let them talk, Bruno!’ said Francesca fiercely. ‘There’s plenty I could say about
them
!’

‘You’re not saying anything, Francesca. Get back inside!’

‘She’s pure, Maria, and loyal. Loyal to Tonio. Despite what people say.’

‘Of course she is!’ said Giuseppi indignantly.

‘Sometimes I could stick a knife in them! When they say things about her.’

‘It’s just idle talk –’

‘They say they’ve seen her!’

‘Well, that’s absolute rubbish!’

‘No, no, it’s true. I’ve seen her myself. But it’s not as they suppose. She’s an innocent and doesn’t know our ways, that’s all. And sometimes people lead her on. I tried to warn her. But she just gave me a stubborn look, as if to say it was none of my business. But it
is
my business, Maria, now that Tonio’s gone. Her honour is in my hands. So when I saw her, I tried to tell her.’

He shrugged. ‘But maybe there was no need. The way things turned out. But anyway it wasn’t her fault. She doesn’t know her way around and people take advantage of her. It makes me so angry, Maria, it makes me so angry!’

‘And rightly so,’ said Maria soothingly. ‘But, look, Bruno, perhaps you’re right. We shouldn’t make things worse by doing things which might give rise to such talk. I’ll tell you what: give
me
the money, and
I’ll
give it her.’

‘Would you, Maria?’ said Bruno gratefully. ‘Oh, thank you.’

‘Mind you,’ said Maria, ‘one day I’m going to let her know who the money came from.’

‘There’s no need –’ began Bruno.

‘Oh, but there is, Bruno. There is.’

She gave him a kiss.

‘You’re a good boy, Bruno,’ she said. ‘A good son to your mother, and a true friend to Tonio.’

* * *

‘The things I do for love!’ said the Marchesa glumly.

She was sitting on a pile of rags in front of the Palazzo Reale. Behind her stretched the long façade of the Palazzo with its multiplicity of statues: of Roger of Sicily, Frederick the Second of Hohenstaufen, Charles the First of Anjou, Alonzo the First of Aragon, Charles the Fifth, the Emperor. Charles the Third of Bourbon, Napoleon’s general and Naples’s king. Murat, and so on. The sun glared off the façade and bounced up off the dust of the Piazza del Plebiscito and anyone out in the middle, as the Marchesa pointed out bitterly, caught the full effect. ‘I shall melt away entirely,’ she declared. ‘Into a puddle. And then the dogs will come and lick me up.’

‘You have some way to go yet,’ said Seymour, taking a positive view.

She patted the rags beside her.

‘Come and sit beside me,’ she said, ‘and melt, too.’

‘I am waiting for my fiancée,’ said Seymour.

‘Come and wait here,’ directed the Marchesa. ‘Then she will see you and become all jealous.’

‘Well . . .’

‘It is good for a woman to become jealous,’ insisted the Marchesa. ‘And men, too, of course. That is one of the things we Italians know. It is good for a person’s love life. I make people jealous all the time. It is my contribution to the general well-being of the planet.’

‘You know, I don’t think I will sit there with you.’

She pouted.

‘Oh, well, be like that,’ she said. ‘Although it is true that two people sitting on this disgusting heap would make one even hotter.’

‘Whose love are you doing it for?’

‘Vincente’s. My cousin.’

‘You’re waiting for him?

‘I’m waiting for him to come and take these filthy things away.’

‘What does he want with a bundle of rags?’ said Seymour, mystified.

‘They’re not rags. They’re skins. Goatskins. Water-bags,’ she explained. ‘For the racers. Vincente’s had to organize it all now that Scampion has gone to teach the angels how to bicycle. I’m just minding them while he finds the man who will handle the distribution on Saturday. And the sooner he does that, the better. Before I disappear entirely.’

Chantale came into view at that point and was immediately hailed by the Marchesa.

‘Hello, my dear! I’ve been looking after your fiancé for you.’

‘How kind of you!’

‘He has remained faithful. So far. But perhaps it is as well you came when you did.’

She patted the goatskins. ‘Come and sit beside me. I am establishing an oasis.’

‘Wouldn’t you do better to do it under a tree?’

‘Undoubtedly. But this was where Vincente left the skins. Right out in the sun!’

‘Couldn’t you keep an eye on them from the shade? There’s an arcade over there.’

‘Where the letter-writers are? Well, yes, I could, couldn’t I? And rush out and squawk if anyone does anything untoward to them. Although I fear no one will. Unless a dog pees on them,’ said the Marchesa hopefully.

She rose up off the pile and dusted herself down.

‘Ugh! The smell!’ she said. ‘I shall never get rid of it. Perhaps I ought to go back to the hotel and change my clothes.’

‘Oh, don’t do that!’ said Seymour hastily, fearing that he and Chantale were going to be required to take over the guardianship of the skins. ‘At least, not until Vincente comes.’

‘Why, he’s coming now,’ said the Marchesa. ‘I can see him over there. What a relief!’

Vincente was coming towards them, accompanied by a man in a dark suit and two men pushing a hand-cart.

‘At last!’ said the Marchesa.

‘I came as quickly as I could,’ said Vincente defensively.

‘I felt I had been left to die in the desert,’ said the Marchesa. ‘Not the least of the army’s atrocities!’

‘Luisa, you mustn’t say things like that! Not where people can hear you.’

‘A human sacrifice!’ said the Marchesa loudly. ‘Burnt at the stake. For the greater satisfaction of the Church and the people.’

‘Don’t make such a fuss, Luisa!’

‘Some dogs came,’ said the Marchesa ‘and did an unmentionable thing. On the goatskins.’

‘Oh, God!’ cried Vincente. ‘Where? Where?’

‘Oh, God!’ cried Vincente.

The Marchesa laughed.

‘Let’s go and have an ice-cream,’ she said to Seymour and Chantale. ‘Under the arches, perhaps? As you suggested?’

There were some tables beneath the arches, where they could eat their ice-creams in the shade, and from them they could see along the arcade to where the public letter-writers were busy at their desks.

‘It’s like it is in Tangier,’ said Chantale, interested.

‘It’s not like it is in Milan,’ said the Marchesa. ‘The south is impossibly backward.’

In front of each desk there was often a little queue of clients waiting patiently. People who needed a letter-writer’s services were, of course, illiterate and usually poor. Many of them, judging by their clothes, had come in recently from the countryside and were probably writing back to their families. There were some men but most of them were women, elderly ladies dressed in black. But some were young, often barely more than girls, sent in to the city to earn their living as servants and relieve the burden on their families.

In one of the queues was the Arab woman, Jalila. Seymour was surprised because from the way she had spoken he had assumed that she could write. Perhaps she could, but in Arabic, and was wanting to send a letter to an Italian, and was not yet confident enough of her ability in the language to do so unaided.

‘Have you been to the Teatro?’ asked the Marchesa.

‘The Teatro?’

‘The Teatro San Carlo,’ said the Marchesa, indicating a long building next to the Palazzo. ‘It’s one of the largest opera houses in the world. As big, they claim, as the one in Milan. Of course, it’s closed now – they’re between seasons – but they’ll let you put your head in if you ask, and it’s worth a look. It
would
be closed,’ said the Marchesa disgustedly, ‘when I got here.’

‘Here I sit,’ said the Marchesa gloomily, ‘while the world goes on without me.’

She had hardly tasted her ice-cream and was deep in thought looking across the piazza to where Vincente was supervising the transfer of the skins on to the hand-cart.

‘I blame bicycling,’ she said suddenly.

‘Certainly, bicycling has much to answer for,’ said Seymour, ‘but –’

‘I wouldn’t be here,’ said the Marchesa, ‘if it were not for blasted bicycles.’

‘That’s a bit hard, on bicycles,’ said Seymour.

‘No, it’s not. If it had not been for that stupid quarrel –’

‘What quarrel was this?’

‘The one between Dion and Gifford.’ And then, seeing his blankness: ‘Does this mean nothing to you?’

‘Nothing. Except . . .’ Faint bells began to tinkle. ‘Is this not something to do with bicycling?’

‘There you are! Bicycling. As I said.’

‘It does not mean a great deal to me, I’m afraid, Marchesa.’

‘I should think not. It shouldn’t mean anything to anyone. But it appeared to mean a great deal to the idiots in Florence who expelled D’Annunzio. And, consequently, me.’

‘This has, unfortunately, escaped me.’

‘Lucky you. And lucky England, which remains blissfully ignorant of anything that is happening in the world outside its shores. One of these days there is going to be a great war. And England will be the last to hear of it.’

‘Enlighten my ignorance, and I will see what I can do for the rest of my country.’

‘The Prime Minister was there. The Prime Minister of Italy, that was. And some of Count Dion’s supporters went up to him and assaulted him. Insulted him, too, which to Italians is even worse. And then Gifford’s supporters took umbrage and assaulted
them
. And Gabrieli was in the thick of things –’

‘Gabrieli?’

‘D’Annunzio. Well, he would be. If there was limelight going, he was never one to shrink from thrusting himself into it. But this time he had gone too far. This was the Prime Minister, and politicians, for some reason, take that seriously. So D’Annunzio had to go. Out of Italy, I mean. And Alessandro, my husband, had a business interest in the matter and was incensed, and then, for some reason which I do not fully understand, he blamed me and I had to go, too.’

‘And for some reason, which I, too, do not fully understand, you blame bicycling?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t quite see the connection –’

‘
Dion
,
Gifford
.’

‘Oh, wait a minute. The two cycling magazines,
Vélo
and
Auto-Vélo
. One yellow, one green?’

‘
That
’s right. Gifford started the green magazine and then they quarrelled and de Dion started the yellow one.’

‘And for some reason de Dion’s supporters assaulted the Prime Minister?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Over bicycling!’

‘Well, not just over bicycling. This was the time when France was divided over the Dreyfuss case – you know, that poor, daft French officer who was found guilty, quite wrongly, of spying for the Germans. Half the nation said he was guilty, the other half said he was innocent. He was a Jew, you see, and people took sides accordingly. On one side Dreyfuss’s supporters, socialist, republican, anti-Church; on the other, the traditional supporters of the army, conservative,
very
Catholic, imperialist. And anti-Jewish, of course. Count Dion was very much one of the latter. Gifford was one of the former. It gave an extra edge to their bicycling debates.