The Italian Affair (10 page)

“Non. No” replied the Adonis shaking his head and using both his hands in a common exasperated local gesture which signalled that this was not possible.

His eyes locked onto hers. It seemed to be the only way he could communicate with her properly.

As Issy stared back at him she could read in his eyes that for some reason he was pleading with her to remain silent. He held on tightly to both of her hands in an attempt to stop her from running back as if he knew that this is what she was planning.

As Issy tried to pull away her hands from his tightening grip, he grabbed her tightly putting his arms around her and brought her body towards his whilst she put up a bit of a feminist struggle.

“Hey,” he said struggling to keep hold of her. “You are a very strong woman. It is….how do you say in English. It is dangerous. You understand?” The Adonis said firmly.

As she wriggled out of his grip Issy felt both saddened at losing her proximity to a body that felt that it was made to fit hers and angry that someone was dying or even dead and she had done nothing to help him.

“Yes I understand it is very dangerous,” Issy said in a high-pitched voice. “But please tell me why that means I can’t to go back to help that dying man – I had no proof he was dead. I need to know what is happening. Why did you stop me from going back I feel so bad about that?”

The Adonis looked downcast at having to continue to explain and replied. “No feel bad. Very dangerous. You understand my English is not so good. No possible go back there ok? It eez not your problem it eez my problem. Silence. This is important.”

Issy noticed for the first time since they’d started talking that the Adonis was now getting agitated. He had fear in his eyes. A fear not of the man dying but of not knowing what she might do next.

Issy had seen REAL fear before. In the eyes of her father as he had fallen, the way he had tried to focus to better understand what had happened and the silent terror when no words had come out of his mouth before his eyes went blank.

She remembered now that desperate look on his face as he tried to save his daughter from the pain that he knew, in the final seconds of life as his time on this earth ebbed away, would follow.

It was this experience, and the fact that for some reason she trusted the man in front of her, that made her hold back and she finally started to calm down.

Silently they both reached out and held onto each other closely. No more words were needed, they had reached a mutual understanding that for whatever reason they could not turn back and that silence was their code word.

The Adonis looked down at the blonde curly head of hair that nestled into his chest. He cupped his hand around the back of Issy’s head and whispered into her ear. “What is your name?”

Issy could smell coffee on his breath as he leant in towards her. The way he spoke to her and held her felt so familiar and secure as if at some time or somewhere in the past they had done this before.

“Issy Mead” she replied. “And you. What is your name? Who are you? And what do you do?”

“I am Bruno. I am …. How do you say in English? I am the underpant salesman from Pompeii.”

Naples
– 8am local time 23 September 1986

Eventually, Issy had insisted on going back to Via Maria Magdala with the underpant salesman from Pompeii to see what could be done.

As they retraced their steps, strangely there was no sign of chaos or death. In the time that it had taken to run from the crime scene to the Garden of Eden, hug the Roman Emperor, talk a bit and walk back the body had gone and the street had returned to normal.

All that remained was a deathly quiet and a pool of blood on the pavement congealing under an increasingly hot mid-September sun. It was the only reminder that a life had been lost and a family somewhere in this city was now in mourning.

Issy looked at the blood and felt sad and fearful. She thought about how the family would feel. Their lives turned upside down forever.

She wondered what the man with the round spectacles had done wrong to deserve a shot to the head. “Where were his parents, his siblings, his girlfriend?” Issy thought mournfully as she continued to stare at the pool of blood,

In death he had looked serene and at peace. He didn’t look like a criminal or a man who had diamonds in the front of his teeth. “Who must have hated him so much to blow his brains out?” Issy wanted to ask the Adonis who stood quietly at her side.

“I am surprised everything is back to normal,” Issy said eventually. She’d only been in the city a short while but long enough to know that nothing happened quickly in Naples apart now seemingly the removal of dead bodies

“Si” Bruno had replied simply in response before adding “It is always like this.”

Issy waited to see if he wanted to expand. “Surely,” she thought as she watched his beautiful face “he had more to say on the matter than that even if it was just outrage?”

But that was it. There seemed nothing more Bruno wanted to add. A man had died and all Bruno could say was “It is always like this.”

“What the hell did that mean?” Issy thought. “Was the random killing of young men on innocuous looking street corners a common occurrence in this place but just one she hadn’t yet encountered?”

Trying to make sense of it all, Issy played back the last hour. She had witnessed a dead man lying on the street shot down by a single bullet. She had also been stopped from intervening by a local called Bruno – whom she’d never met before – who had told her he sold underpants on a stall in Pompeii.

Despite his seemingly simple trade, he seemed to know the reason why the man had died, remained unsurprised at the short length of time it took to remove his body but was not prepared to add further information to his arsenal of knowledge.

“The situation seemed totally unfathomable,” Issy thought as she glanced at her watch. It was eight o’clock and time for school.

“How did this happen?” she said out loud to Bruno not really expecting an answer from him. “How can I switch from being present at a murder scene one minute, and effortlessly and seamlessly move into the classroom and concentrate on the conjugation of English verbs the next? What do I do next? Who do I tell?”

Bruno walked with Issy as she started to make her way to school before answering her questions with a catch all statement about remaining silent.

“Remember the silence, it eez important now to be silent Issy Mead.” And with that he kissed her on both cheeks as Neapolitans do and told her he loved her with watery eyes before jumping onto his Vespa and disappearing in a cloud of thick Neapolitan street dust.

Naples
– 8.14am local time 23 September 1986

Stunned by the murder, Bruno’s abduction of her from the crime scene, his vague and unsatisfactory attempts to tell her what had happened and his parting words left Issy struggling to know what to do or say next.

“This is a bad dream,” she thought to herself as she continued walking to her first lesson of the day, first passing the Italian take away – where whole chickens had started to turn on big roasting spits in the window – then on down towards Giovanni’s bar where she stopped to take a double espresso.

One gulp was all that was needed for her eyes to stand out on stalks, and milliseconds later the desired effect kicked in like a mule.

A double-caffeine hit to her brain was what she needed, and it acted like a propeller which forced her into the school and up the stairs, despite her head telling her that she really ought to go to the police or speak to someone about what she’d just witnessed.

And then another weird thing happened. Despite the proximity to the shooting, there was no mention of anything untoward having gone on just around the corner when she got to the reception area of the school nor was it a subject of conversation in the teachers’ staff room.

Gennaro was chain smoking behind his big important desk as per usual, and Mariella was looking beautiful without a hair out of place as per usual whilst looking at the motley English teachers arriving with a not so subtle look of disapproval on her overly made up face. It was as if what had happened in Via Maria Magdala was one life and Issy was living another.

Catching Dan’s eye as he walked in, Issy rushed over to him and caught his arm. “Dan I need to speak to you urgently after this morning’s lessons have finished. Can we have lunch together please I really need some advice?”

Dan noticed the intense smell of coffee beans on her breath and could see she was almost hyperventilating.

“Of course we can talk. Lunch would be great. I tried to call round last night but you were out. Are you alright? You look stressed.”

“Yes I am stressed and sorry I was out last night I was getting a take-away pizza probably, nothing more sinister than that” Issy replied in a low voice.

Dan looked taken back at her words and her pale face which seemed far more drawn now than in the days after she’d just arrived. She looked shell-shocked. He discreetly caught hold of her hands and pulled her to one side.

“What’s the matter Issy?” whispered Dan. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost or something worse. What has happened to make you feel like this?”

“I have just seen a ghost of sorts,” Issy replied. “I can’t even begin to talk about it as, if I start, I won’t be able to stop. For the next few hours I’m just going to concentrate on teaching and keep on going. I desperately need to talk to you, but can’t say anymore now. Can you meet me for lunch as 12pm sharp?”

“Sure I can” said Dan knowing that something very wrong had happened but sensed that to press her to explain everything would spectacularly backfire. But he wanted to check one fact.

“I’ll see you downstairs at 12pm ok?….but just one quick question it‘s not got anything to do with Jeremy has it – he hasn‘t just turned up unannounced?” asked Dan wanting to be at least a bit prepared for what she was going to tell him.

“No, it has absolutely nothing to do with Jeremy. That would be relatively straightforward compared to what happened this morning” Issy said mysteriously before disappearing into her classroom.

As she opened the door there in front of her sat her worst student Giuseppe who was as per usual much larger than life. He was a businessman – of what she had not been able to find out – who told her somewhat furtively that he was learning English for his job.

After only a few days of enrolment, he had seemed bored with the method of learning by rote and was much happier when they talked about life – mainly his life and his city.

Giuseppe also seemed to be a modern day philosopher so liked to spend some of the lesson time as her teacher too. Issy looked surprised as she greeted him. “Good morning Giuseppe I hadn’t expected you to be here so early.”

Giuseppe had been late for every lesson she’d had with him so far so Issy was totally surprised to see him already in the room AND with his book open ready and waiting. As well as a problem with time keeping generally he had a severe nicotine addiction which meant the length of the lesson depended on how long he could hold out for until his next cigarette.

He was also addicted to Neapolitan espresso which he drank at the beginning and at the end of every lesson. “No other coffee was worthy of his palette and certainly not the espresso of Milan which was the worst coffee he had ever tasted,” he’d told Issy the first time they met. He had a huge patriotic love for his city and the word Naples ran through him like a stick of rock.

Issy found the verb “to love” very popular with Neapolitans, so often used it with her students to help them practice their past and present tenses.

They responded well to it as she’d learnt early on that they either loved or hated most things and felt very little if anything in-between. The words luke-warm and a bit indifferent were not really translatable in Neapolitan.

Giuseppe had already told Issy in a previous lesson what he loved the most about life. Like many of her male students it followed a by now familiar pattern.

“I love the love and the passion of a beautiful woman; I love Naples football club and Maradona, I love the Neapolitan espresso and the Neapolitan pizza” which apparently had something to do with the local water supplies and the mozzarella of the buffalo.

Expecting a similar set of questions that morning, Giuseppe looked totally taken by surprise and not at all happy with the impudence of how Issy started questioning him the morning of the murder with a bloody bombshell with absolutely no warning that this is what she intended to do.

“Did you know that someone was shot near here this morning?” asked Issy trying to look as calm as possible whilst laying a number of different language books out on the desk in front of them. Looking up to gauge his response, her eyes bored into his trying to find a route in. All she wanted was a clue as to whether he knew anything.

But Giuseppe most unusually remained impassive and silent.

Issy tried the question again. This time she put two fingers into the side of her head on the word shot. “Did you know that someone was shot near here this morning?” Issy repeated.

“Madonna Mia,” Giuseppe said before cocking his head to one side, “I understand what you say. But the answer to your question is. No. I know nothing” he then added somewhat abruptly. “And sometime Issy, it eez better to say nothing even when you know” and then he used his hands to make the point about silence.