Authors: Hammond Innes
The prospect was not good.
“I just don’t believe a bloke like McCrae would walk out on ’is pals,” said Boyd. “Hit ain’t in the nature of the man. Stands ter reason like that if a bloke’s bin an orficer in the Army as long as ’e was, ’e don’t walk out on ’is pals. Dugan wouldn’t neither. Jack’s as straight as they come.”
That’s what I thought. But the fact remained that two days ago, whilst we were at Pericele, Stuart had drawn out all our capital and sailed with the
Trevedra
, leaving no message. “Clearly,” I said, “since we’ve no choice, we must work on the assumption that he’s left us flat. We need money. And we want to get back to England.”
“Reckon it won’t be difficult for us to work our passage back,” Boyd said.
I glanced quickly at the girl. Her grey eyes met mine and I knew that she had understood. Also I knew that she wasn’t afraid. I suppose she was now accustomed to expecting the worst—poverty and uncertainty had been her life for so long.
I said, “There’s nothing to stop you working your passage back, Boyd. But I’m not moving from Naples unless I can take Monique back with me.”
“Strewf, guvner, you don’t think I was suggesting going without her, do you? But I reckoned wiv her knowledge of lingos she might get a job as a stewardess.”
We must have talked it over for nearly an hour. “The upshot of the whole thing is,” I said finally, “that we
must find a cheap place to live and some means of getting hold of some money. Clearly the three of us can’t go down to the docks this afternoon and expect to be offered jobs at once in a ship sailing to England.”
And this was where Monique suddenly spoke for the first time.
“There is a little place at the top of a house in the Vico Tiratoio where I lived for a time with my aunt. It’s not a very nice place. It’s a—sort of
pensione.
But the Signora was kind to me and I am sure she would let us have rooms for a time without wanting immediate payment. She often helps people. Sometimes they repay her. Many strange people come there. And there is a Scotch man in the next house—perhaps he is still there. He would help. He is an artist, but not very good. He makes papers for people. And he knows
le monde des apaches.
Many people come to see him for his papers.”
We both stared at her in astonishment.
It was difficult to remember that this kid from a mountain farm had lived for three months in one of the worst quarters of the city.
There was nothing else to be done. We paid our bill and followed Monique. After a quarter of an hour’s walking I found myself standing outside the
trattoria
in the narrow street above the Via Roma where I had stood only a few days ago, wondering about Monique and the strange life she must have led there.
We climbed the dark narrow stairway which the drunk had climbed, our footsteps sounding loud on the hollow wooden stairs.
And so we found rooms—little cubicle affairs, flimsily partitioned with stained matchboarding and clearly designed for one purpose only. The Signora, a big raddled motherly Neapolitan, welcomed Monique like a long lost child and seemed surprised when we insisted on a separate room for her. I did not like the idea of living in such a place. But we were little better than beggars and could hardly assume the right to be choosers. The Signora did not look impressed at our promises of ultimate payment—she
smiled indulgently, her eyes on Monique with what I thought to be a covetous gleam.
Boyd and I shared a double bed in one cubicle and Monique had the next cubicle to herself. I understood now why she had never even considered trying to get to Naples. If she had come to this house, the Signora would have looked after her for a time. But kindly disposed though she might be to the strange cases that found their way to the top of those wooden stairs, sooner or later she would have insisted on her working for a living. And I could well imagine what hell that would have been to a fastidious girl who did not like being touched.
The
trattoria
down below had an upstairs room for regular clients that was reached by a door at the top of the first flight of stairs. Here you could get food as cheap as anywhere in Naples. The three of us lunched there in the stuffy fly-ridden half-light provided by a grimy window. We lunched well off
pasta asciutta
and red wine for the price of a few lire each.
After lunch I left Monique in Boyd’s care and went to the office of the British Consul. With some difficulty I obtained admission to the Consul himself. He eyed me without enthusiasm and did not offer me a seat. If you want a sympathetic Consul, avoid big ports. He listened to my story attentively, but without surprise. When I had finished, he said, “There’ll be a little delay, but I can fix you up with a temporary passport. The girl is going to be more difficult. I can get her an Italian passport, but if her guardian notifies the police there may be trouble. Anyway, how do you propose to get her to England if you have no money?”
He was very off-hand about the whole thing. I could see that he did not believe my story in full. He thought I was entangled with the girl. He was willing to get me a passport, but not anxious to have anything to do with her.
It was useless to protest. I told him not to worry about the girl, but to go ahead with obtaining a temporary passport for myself. I asked him whether there was any
British organisation in Naples through which I could obtain a loan. His reply was, “I am afraid not. But you can work your passage back. I’ll give you a note to one of the shipping lines.” And he scribbled a line or two on a sheet of paper, slipped it into an envelope and handed it to me.
From the Consul’s office I went to see the Naval Liaison Officer. I told him the story and his reaction was the same as the Consul’s. “I can probably arrange for you both to work your passage home. But to do anything for the girl is quite out of the question.” There were several other naval officers there, but none that I knew. I was too embarrassed even to raise the question of a loan.
Though the sun was now dipping behind the heights of the Vomero, the streets were still stiflingly hot as I made my way up into the city. I felt dispirited and exhausted by the time I reached the Vico Tiratoio. We were in a bad fix and I didn’t see how the devil I was going to get the girl back to England. And I was definitely not going to leave her alone here in Naples.
The sweat rolled off me as I climbed the dark stairs, and I began to swear obscenely and childishly at Stuart.
Boyd and Monique were not in the
pensione.
I went down to the
trattoria
, thinking they might have decided to eat. But they were not there either.
I began to walk through the deepening shadows of the narrow streets. I had a sense of frustration. I was nearly thirty. And it irked me that at that age I could be stranded in a foreign city with literally no one to turn to. It made me realise what a hell of a gap the war had torn in our lives.
My sense of loneliness made the throng of life in the drab back-streets more vivid. The film of dirt on the hairy legs of the girl who shuffled ahead of me in wooden-soled sandals, the urgent shrill cries of the ageless women behind the street stands, the beggars, the boys who wandered barefooted through the streets pimping for their sisters who were still in their teens, the tawdry
make-up of a woman standing hopefully beneath the tinsel-decorated lamp-lit shrine of the Madonna at the street corner, the poverty and the dirt, and the sour smell of streets that had no proper sanitation—it was all imprinted on my mind as the background to which I was doomed until I could fix a passage for the three of us.
And when we reached England, the prospect would not be very much brighter unless we could get hold of Stuart. Neither Boyd nor I had a job. I had no money—no one to whom I could turn for money. And Monique’s mother could hardly support herself, let alone her daughter.
I felt as depressed as I have ever felt.
The shadows deepened and lights appeared in the street-level hovels where people not only worked, but lived. It was the end of the day when the poor of Italy come out of their shops and their stuffy rooms to sit on chairs in the street, smoke their last cigarette and gossip.
I walked through street after street where the doors of the ground-level rooms were open to show the sordid intimacy of a one-room home with its iron bed and dirty sheets, a torn stained table-cloth laid with a frugal meal of
pasta
or
noci
or just
pane
, with the inevitable carafe of
vino.
And the strange thing was that anybody might be born to this life. It was just the luck of the draw. Only a man of character could rise out of this cesspool of filth if he were born to it—and then he would have to be either a crook or very lucky.
Without thinking about it I eventually arrived back in the Vico Tiratoio. I went up to the
trattoria
and found Boyd and Monique already settled down to plates heaped with steaming tomato-flavoured
pasta.
“Strewf! I thort you was lost,” Boyd said as he pulled a chair up for me and shouted for another plate of
pasta.
“You weren’t in when I got back so I went for a walk,” I told him. “Where have you two been—sight-seeing?”
Boyd grinned and glanced across at the girl. “Show him,” he said.
She slipped her hand inside her dress and brought out a bulky envelope. She handed it to me almost shyly like a child that has done something that it fears is wrong but hopes will be approved.
Inside were some papers and a slim book. The papers were civilian identity documents. The book was a passport visa’d for England.
“How the hell did you get this?” I asked. I spoke sharply. I was excited and at the same time angry. The passport photograph had been taken that afternoon, for it showed her in the print dress we had bought her in Frosinone.
Boyd answered for her. “They’re forged,” he said. “But they’ll do in an emergency. The way I look at it is this. The bloke offered ter do it. Why should we refuse? If we did get her a berf as a stewardess we’d be pretty mad if it fell through because she ’adn’t got the necessary papers.”
“Who was this forger?” I asked.
Boyd was about to reply when Monique said, “Please. You remember I told you I knew a Scotch man who——”
“Scotsman,” I corrected her automatically.
“Yes—a Scotsman who was kind to me when I was here before? We went to him this afternoon. He is now very ill—his legs will not walk …”
“He’s paralysed,” Boyd interrupted. “Got a packet in Naples after he deserted. This Goddammed city’s full of disease.”
“He’s a deserter and he forges passports and papers for all the crooks in Naples—is that it?” I asked.
“He is an artist,” Monique said. “I don’t know what is a deserter. He does work for many bad people. He is not a good man. But he has been a friend to me. And when I told him that we had no money and wanted to get to England and that I had no papers or passport, he made them. He is very ill,” she added as though that explained everything.
“We’re going to his studio to-night for a drink,” Boyd said. “He says he thinks he can help us.”
“Well, I’m not,” I said. I felt angry—humiliated. “You say the man is a deserter, a forger, and diseased. Even Monique says he is not a good man. Why did you take her there?”
Boyd looked aggrieved and shrugged his shoulders. “I weren’t in no position to stop ’er. The young lady’s got a mind of ’er own. Anyway, it won’t do no ’arm to look in. He’s friendly—and we ain’t hexactly overburdened wiv friends at the moment. Besides, he said he’d give us some Scotch, an’ speaking for meself I could do wiv a nice drop of Scotch.”
I shrugged my shoulders. I was too depressed to argue. And what Boyd said was true. Any straw was worth clutching at.
T
HE SO-CALLED
artist’s studio was on the top floor of the next house. The door at the head of the dark wooden staircase was opened to our knock by a skinny little urchin of about twelve. As soon as we entered the apartment, it was obvious that, though he lived in a slum, he was not short of money. We were shown into a big room with french windows open on to a terrace where evergreens stood in pots half screening a view that ranged across the moonlit rooftops of Naples to the sugar-loaf bulk of Vesuvius.
The shadows were deep in the room. The cold half-light of the moon filtered in to show it expensively furnished in appalling taste.
“
Alfredo! Accendi la luce per favore
.” The voice was soft and slurred.
The urchin went back to the door and the light switch clicked, flooding the room with a golden glow from a big standard lamp in the far corner.
It showed a room furnished partly in the ornate gilt so beloved by the Neapolitan and partly as an artist’s studio. There was a low easel near the window, a litter of paints and brushes and palettes on a table, and a desk with a glass top and a base of chromium.
The man we had come to see was seated in a rubber-tyred wheel-chair at the far end of the room. He had a gaudy coloured rug wrapped round his legs and his hands plucked nervously at the covering with long white fingers, the nails of which were grimed and stained with acids. His head was small and nearly bald and his features emaciated. The birdlike impression he gave was accentuated by the quick thrust forward of his head as he said,
“Good-evening. I am glad you have come. I do not often get visits from my own countrymen.”
He thrust his wheel-chair towards us with deft movements of his strong hands. A jerk of his head I took to indicate that we should seat ourselves on the uncomfortable gilt chairs. Beads of sweat glistened on his lined forehead. Sharp pale eyes beneath sandy eyebrows suggested that he was no fool and I found difficulty in suppressing a feeling of suspicion.
As though in answer to an unspoken query of mine, he said, “I suppose you are wondering why I have asked you here to-night?” He pushed a box of cigarettes across to us. It was a wooden box, the top inlaid with a picture of Vesuvius. “Help yourselves,” he said, and then called, “Anna!”