Authors: Stephen Finucan
“No,
dottore
,” Abruzzi said. “You and I have more important business than sour oranges. Tell me about this coin you gave to the American.”
“The coin?” said Cioffi.
“Yes. You showed it to Marcello.”
Cioffi shrugged. “But it was a fake. Very poor quality. There was sand in the casting.”
“Where did you get it?” Abruzzi said.
“Where did I get the coin?”
“Do not play with me,
dottore
. I do not like games.” Abruzzi’s cold blue eyes scrutinized him.
“From the Museo Archeologico,” said Cioffi.
“And how did you get it from there?”
Cioffi ducked his head slightly. “I took it.”
Abruzzi glanced at Maggio, and then said: “The museum is off
limits to civilians. The grounds are guarded. There are Carabinieri posted at the entrances. You must know someone.”
Cioffi nodded. “
Il professore
. He is my uncle.”
Abruzzi nodded slowly. “And he doesn’t mind that you help yourself to his little treasures?”
“He doesn’t know.”
“Really? And how is that?”
“I sneak in. When the
carabiniere
goes on his morning break. I know my way around quite well.”
“How convenient,” Abruzzi said. “For both of us.” He put his hand into his pocket. “How long since you have had a proper meal,
dottore
?”
“I can’t really remember,” answered Cioffi, and let his gaze fall once again onto the crate of unripe oranges.
“And your last drink?”
Cioffi sighed. He looked at Abruzzi. “Last night. A few bottles of cheap Chianti at the Caffè Gambrinus.”
The flicker of a grin passed across the young man’s face. He withdrew a thick roll of military scrip from his pocket. “Best you should have both food and drink, then,” he said. He peeled off several notes and handed them to Cioffi, who counted the money: fifteen hundred lire. It was more than he had seen in months. He glanced sideways at the second-hand dealer.
“Don’t worry,” Abruzzi said. “Your debt with the fat man is settled. You work for me now.”
Augusto Parente, curator of the Archaeological Museum, paused on the middle step. He leaned heavily on his cane: the pace of their walking had aggravated his sciatica. The pain came in electric tremors
that coursed along the back of his thigh and on down behind his knee, ending in the knotted muscle of his calf, where it felt as if someone were sticking him with a burning poker. He massaged his throbbing left buttock and looked at Colonel Romney. The man from the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section was still scribbling away in his notebook as he carried on down the staircase. He had a small, womanly build, with the narrow wrists and soft fingers of an accountant. Parente had decided that he was the sort of man who supposed that history could be understood by tallying numbers, as if it were no more than sums on a spreadsheet.
Romney—who before the war had been an assistant curator of the Renaissance collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City—had arrived unannounced two hours earlier with an order signed by General Clark himself. It was the general’s directive that all sites of historic and cultural import within the city were to be secured and inventoried, so that a proper catalogue of looted artifacts, specifically those taken by retreating German troops, could be compiled. The idea behind the general’s order was that, once the items were retrieved, they could be restored to the rightful collections. The general, Colonel Romney explained without hint of irony, intended himself to be the saviour of the national heritage of Italy herself.
Having noticed now that the curator was no longer by his side, Colonel Romney stopped and looked about. For a moment he seemed unsettled by the prospect of the sandbagged statues that lined the shadowy main gallery.
“Are you all right, colonel?” Parente asked.
Romney turned and looked back up the staircase. “Yes,
professore
. I’m fine. Thanks.”
“Good,” Parente said, smiling his way through his discomfort as he joined the American at the foot of the staircase.
Earlier, when he had been admiring the works of Titian and Caravaggio that crowded the darkened walls of the smaller galleries on the mezzanine, the colonel had boasted about how he’d been in charge of compiling the aerial photographs and surveillance maps that the B-24 pilots had used during the raids prior to the landings at Salerno; he and his staff had worked hard to identify all the sites of historical value that the bombardiers were to avoid. It was, Colonel Romney assured him, an unqualified success. Parente didn’t bother to tell him of the three labourers and site manager who were lost when a wayward bomb intended for the shipyards at Torre del Greco destroyed instead the excavation headquarters at Herculaneum. There seemed nothing to be gained in spoiling the colonel’s illusions.
As they started off together across the gallery, their progress scrutinized by the eyeless statues, Colonel Romney picked up the thread of the conversation that Parente’s sciatic spasm had momentarily cut short.
“Of course,” he said, “it is all well and good, and you have done an admirable job of keeping the collection together, which is a testament to your foresight,
professore
—but the truth of the matter is that there are other elements at play of which we need to remain cognizant.”
His manner was officious. Parente detected in it the touch of self-importance that comes to a man who, after having resigned himself to being a subordinate, has finally been given a taste of authority.
“This is Napoli, colonel,” Parente said. “The list of other elements is quite long. To start with, you have the Fascist holdouts—delusional fanatics who believe Il Duce’s Repubblica di Saló is going to rise like a phoenix on the shores of Lake Garda. And then there are the Communists: Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyites, Stalinists, and every combination in between. And let’s not forget the anarchists and the monarchists. There are even some who envision Napoli as a reborn
city-state. And others, so I have been told, who wish to see Italy become part of the United States itself—a far-off Mediterranean satellite.”
“Yes, of course,
professore
,” said the colonel, “but I think you know who I’m talking about.”
Parente nodded. “Of course,” he said. “You mean the Camorra.”
In the vacuum left by Badoglio’s armistice, the city’s old criminal scourge, so long held in check by the Fascists, had resurfaced with a vengeance: potent, like a virus that has lain dormant, or a cancer after a lengthy remission.
“But may I remind you, colonel,” said Parente, “that not all of our troubles are native born. The deserter gangs, for instance. Though it is true that they tend to mostly involve themselves in hijacking and small-scale robberies. And, I’m sorry to say, there has even been some profiteering by your own people—within the military government, I mean.”
“Yes,” said Colonel Romney, his brow furrowed in understanding, “it is an ugly fact, I’m afraid, that there are those who sometimes find it difficult to resist the temptation of power. But really,
professore
, I think we should concern ourselves with a more common sort of criminal. Don’t you?”
“Indeed, colonel,” said Parente. “But I can assure you the Camorra has not been an issue for us.”
What was an issue—what had always been an issue—was the ongoing trade in relics pilfered from the digs. It used to be that it was the labourers that Parente had to worry about, men he’d hired himself and who would return under the cover of dark to sneak off with a drinking jug or shard of mosaic that they could sell to subsidize their income. Now it was more likely to be the soldiers that had been sent by Colonel Romney himself to guard the site who did the pilfering. Regardless of who did the stealing, Parente had long understood that,
like a tithe, it was an unfortunate price to be paid. He doubted though that the expenditure could be reckoned in the colonel’s accounts, so he did not bother to mention it to him.
They were interrupted by the sound of footsteps. Luisa Gennaro came towards them through the shadows of the main gallery. Parente watched her purposeful stride, and seeing her in her loose blouse and baggy men’s trousers, her hair cut short to the line of her jaw with bangs at the front like a boy, he thought how hard she tried to hide her beauty.
He went to meet her.
“I am sorry to bother you,
professore
.”
She was always very formal whenever they were in public, even if, as was the case, that public was a single irritating American officer.
“What is it, Luisa?”
“Tenente Greaves is waiting for you in your office.”
“Has he been there long?”
“About twenty minutes.”
“You were polite to him, I hope.”
Parente liked to tease her about the young
canadese
soldier. He suspected the security policeman harboured a fondness for his assistant—like a schoolboy crush, he often joked with Luisa.
“I am always polite, Augusto,” she said in a hushed tone.
He noticed now that she was carrying her coat. “You are off somewhere, then?”
“Yes. To the hospital. Only for a couple of hours, and then I’ll be back.”
“You will tell Benedetto hello for me,” he said.
“Of course.”
“And don’t forget to ask if he needs anything. I can’t do much, but I am sure there is some way I can help.” Parente turned back
to the American. “Now you will have to excuse me, colonel. I have another appointment. If you don’t mind, Signora Gennaro will show you out.”
The curator’s office reminded Greaves of his grandfather’s study in the principal’s residence of Wycliffe College on the campus of the University of Toronto, with its heavy crown moulding, bas-relief ceiling, and leaded windowpanes that looked out over Queen’s Park Circle towards the pink-hued sandstone of the Legislative Building. It was within those darkly panelled walls, hung with portraits of the collared deans who had come before and lined with bookcases overflowing with leather-bound volumes of Cicero and Aquinas and Voltaire, that Greaves had first learned to conjugate verbs—in Italian, but also in Asturian and Aragonese, French and Occitan, Sardinian and Spanish.
Augusto Parente’s sanctum, tucked away at the end of a dim corridor in the east wing of the museum, was likewise appointed, and on the sagging bookshelves were some of the very same texts out of which Greaves had first been taught. But more than that, it was a room littered with the scatterings of a historical life. On the wall behind the curator’s wide rosewood desk was a collection of photographs: the digs at Pompeii—a narrative of the old man’s life. From the square-shouldered, handsome youth, scrabbling about the ruins with pick and shovel in hand, to the man of middle years, directing the workers and standing proudly among the unearthed treasures, and finally the elderly figure bundled in a heavy overcoat, propped awkwardly on his cane.
It was this last photograph that always intrigued Greaves:
il professore
in the amphitheatre, wisps of his snow-white hair curling from beneath the battered brim of his Messina hat; in the distance, low
clouds gathering rain, perhaps the storm of things to come brewing on the horizon; and, standing beside him, the familiar uniformed caricature—legs planted wide apart, hands on hips, chin thrust out over an inflated rooster’s chest. But of this portrait with Il Duce, Parente would only say that it was like everything else in his life: a scrap of history—worthless, except as a curiosity.
Greaves moved now to the window, where he fingered the piece of newspaper that had been pasted over the crack at the bottom of the pane: it was a page torn from an old edition of
Il Popolo d’Italia
. Then he studied the menagerie of bronze miniatures gathering dust on the window ledge: replicas of the finest pieces from the museum’s collection—the Farnese Bull and Hercules, Flora and the Head of Isis.
From behind him, a voice said: “‘No man can say with confidence that he will be living tomorrow.’”
Greaves turned to see the old man standing in the doorway, a wide grin on his face. Physically, Augusto Parente was so unlike Greaves’s grandfather as to be almost his complete opposite. Where Parente was compact, the Reverend Philip Greaves was willowy, and yet there was a sameness to them, a certain acuity.
“Euripides,” Greaves said to the curator. Then he offered in return: “‘To himself, every man is immortal. Though he may know that he is going to die, he can never know that he is dead.’”
Parente furrowed his brow. “Is it Epicurus?”
Greaves shook his head. “Samuel Butler.”
“Ah, Samuel Butler. A utopian. Very interesting choice.” Parente made his way slowly to his desk and sat down heavily in the chair.
“You look tired,” said Greaves.
The old man put his cane aside and opened a side drawer, from which he took a short-stemmed pipe. He lifted the bowl of the pipe to his nose and breathed in the faint aroma of the resin.
“You know, if you’d like,
professore
, I could get you more tobacco.”
Parente shook his head. “The memory of it is enough.” He returned the pipe to the drawer. “I am glad you are here, Thomas. I look forward to our visits.”
Of all the tasks assigned to him, it was his biweekly appointments with the curator that Greaves liked best. Officially, he was keeping tabs on Parente. Like all high-ranking fascists who had remained behind after the German withdrawal from the city, Parente was to be kept under surveillance. There was fear of an insurgency. But Greaves had realized early on that there was little to worry about when it came to the curator. Parente had been political not out of fervour but rather of necessity. He was a fascist because the fascists were in power. Before that he had been a liberal, and before that a socialist. Beyond pragmatism, politics did not interest him. Even the importance of his position as head of the Archaeological Museum he made light of, saying that it was not unlike that of the lost luggage clerk at the Stazione Centrale— they both watched over the belongings of others. The only difference, Parente often joked, was that in his case it was very doubtful that any of the owners would be returning to collect their property. The curator preferred to talk about Pompeii and Herculaneum, or bemoan the lack of some delicacy or other that he had enjoyed before the war. Often, it was good coffee, the dark African roasts that accentuated the strong tobacco he liked to smoke.