The Italian Affair (21 page)

As soon as it had become clear than Dan was no longer waiting where she had left him, Issy had slipped back out into the street to try and find him.

“Why had he left the building? She’d told him to wait for her? Surely he hadn’t just gone home?” Issy thought as she tried desperately hard to remember their exact last words.

But despite the mysterious circumstances of his disappearance, she knew in her heart that Dan would never leave her in a place where a gunshot had recently been fired, because he was the one who had been the most fearful for her safety.

Every single shadow and movement instilled an icy cold fear in Issy’s stomach as she inched her way back round to Pasquale’s pant shop. “Who was out there? Who was watching her?” It definitely felt like someone still was.

All alone back out on the empty streets, Issy felt like she was being strangled by the clammy tendrils of organised crime that had suddenly emerged from the shadows wrapping themselves around her neck as her body now switched up a gear. It was flight or fight, and she was ready to fight. If Dan was not in her palazzo where she had left him, or lurking in the street she would go and look for him whatever the cost.

A kind of automated pilot propelled her defiantly towards Dan’s apartment. Every sinew of Issy’s body was focused on their joint survival. Every second and every minute now counted.

As she started to run, she imagined she was an Olympic athlete from the Ancient games of Greece. Up through Piazza Amadeo and the shuttered up familiar shops and cafes and on through a deserted and empty market square.

As she picked up speed, her feet skidded twice on remnants of old lettuce heads and ripe red tomatoes that were ominously and bloodily splattered across the ancient cobbled stones beneath her.

It was at the market that Issy felt the most scared. It was pitch black and street rats scurried noisily, unseen beneath the detritus of rotting litter. A feral cat stalked and then pounced making her heart skip two or three beats.

“This was the one place that someone could take her if they wanted to,” she thought as she ran. Issy prayed to God and to her father to save them both. To divert thoughts of impending doom she imagined she was the ghost of Cathy Earnshaw racing across the Yorkshire moors to find Heathcliff. It was the most motivating image she could think of.

Her feet pounded the streets and her hair streamed out behind her, one wrong turn and she could come face to face with Linton so she needed to run until she found who she was really looking for. A few more steps across the peaty moors and she would be at Wuthering Heights once again.

This analogy certainly helped as Issy arrived at Dan’s palazzo block in no time. Slumping with exhaustion at his front door, she must have pressed his doorbell hundreds of times with each attempt more desperate. “I can’t stay here long,” she thought as seconds turned into minutes. After it became increasingly obvious that no-one could possibly be in the apartment, she turned to go.

Retracing her steps back home was even more daunting than before. The danger was even greater than she feared now she had proof that Dan was most probably missing.

As she ran, Issy tried to think chronologically. Dan had only been left on his own for a matter of minutes in the foyer of her apartment. She’d only slipped out onto the street to look at the gunshot through Pasquale’s window and was gone momentarily, and had not heard the palazzo door open or close.

So, either Dan had decided to slip out of the building without her noticing, or, someone had taken him with their hands clasped over his mouth as he would have been kicking and screaming otherwise.

There was also a third possibility which was even more sinister – that he’d been taken by someone within her own palazzo block.

“But who would want to take Dan? He hadn’t done anything wrong. All he had seen was a gunshot through a window. He had not fired the shot,” she thought as sweat ran down her body. And yet she somehow could not help thinking that they were both now marked people.

As she got closer to her apartment the finality of not finding Dan hit her in the pit of her stomach. Issy had only felt this alone and frightened once in her life before. On the 5th November 1970 at approximately 9.15am at the time her father had died in front of her.

As Issy opened her front door walked past the Concierge’s empty chair she scowled. “Where the hell was Dan and where was the Concierge?” She wanted to ask him about Dan. He was the only other person in the world who might have any information and be able to help her and he had conveniently gone AWOL.

“If Dan didn’t leave of his own accord,” Issy thought. “The Concierge must have had something to do with it – or at least witnessed what had happened. He was the only other person around.”

Feeling immensely vulnerable and disturbed, Issy went upstairs in the gold plated lift. It suddenly seemed too opulent and far too shiny for her liking. She tried to steady her shaking fingers as she put the key into the front door lock, and gingerly reached her hand inside to the left of the hallway to make sure all the lights were on before she entered.

Just for good measure, Issy also picked up a large Neapolitan umbrella from the hat stand, which she had been assured she would need in November when the rain would unleash itself on the city. Slightly emboldened by the fact she now had a means of self-defence, Issy left nothing to chance.

Just as when she’d been small and dreamt of goblins and ghosts, Issy now methodically checked each room in her apartment to make sure no-one was lurking behind doors or in large cupboards and then looked under the bed.

There was nothing there apart from the precious box of letters and memories from the past. Using the end of the large umbrella, Issy slid the large familiar box out from under her bed.

“Somewhere inside was the answer,” Issy thought as she remained sprawled out on the floor. In her darkest moments when she had felt in most need of inspiration and courage the box had always given her what she needed. It was a magic box, the place where the ghost of her father could always be reached.

But before letting out the genie, she first she needed a thick black shot of caffeine. Issy walked into the kitchen using the umbrella to steady her. “What was she supposed to do now?” she thought. “There were two options. Go to total pieces. Or Keep Calm and Carry On.”

Fuelled by the genes and the memory of her father Issy decided that however tough it got tonight or the day after that she could not give up. Whatever forces existed out there and were trying to destroy her or others they would be stopped even if she ended up dying in the process. Death held no fear in comparison to the need to find Dan and justice for what had been done – although now she had found Bruno she had a reason to want to go on and yet this made her feel guilty for what had happened to Dan.

As these thoughts raced through her mind Issy watched the little aluminum coffee machine hiss and spit on the stove. “If she hadn’t insisted on seeing Bruno,” Issy thought ruefully “none of this would have happened. It was all her bloody fault. What could she have been thinking of? Despite the softness of his touch and the intensity of his kisses, Bruno was an underpant salesman whom she didn’t know anything about. Was she guilty of sacrificing Dan for a romantic notion that Bruno might be her Heathcliff?”

Angry at herself for putting them both in this situation, Issy opened the lid of the macchinetta, impatient for it to finish the process of percolation. Finally, after a few more minutes, hot black spurts of dark coffee spluttered out from the top of a small metal flute at the centre of the machine. “Come on!” shouted Issy “I need you to finish bloody doing whatever you do in there.”

The coffee was an essential part of Issy’s survival plan. She needed some of the black liquid stuff to keep her adrenalin going until the first rays of white sunlight burst into her apartment.

She had already decided that if Dan was not up and about in his apartment by 7am, she would go to the school and demand answers from Gennaro. “He would have to get involved,” she thought “whether he wanted to or not. The Omerta no longer applied. Her best friend was missing and she needed to find him, whatever that took.”

Issy took a small white coffee cup out of the cupboard and decanted the espresso into it. Spooning in a big sugar, she stirred it in knocking back the intense shot of coffee in one. It tasted bitter, despite the added sweetness and Issy remained motionless, waiting for the full effect to hit her brain and after a few seconds it hit the bulls-eye.

After the double espresso, she now felt much better prepared to make plans and sit things out until sunrise. Without any further delay, she made her way back into the bedroom.

Before opening the box, she closed her eyes and made a wish just like she always did. It had become a kind of ritual from childhood and, as she got older, she had continued to do it out of some self-taught belief that if she didn’t the spell would somehow be broken.

Over the past fifteen years, the box had been opened when she wanted to remember her father and wanted help with something or someone.

In the most recent years at Oxford, it had become her comfort when there was no-one she could turn to. Removing the tissue paper that sat on the top to protect the contents, Issy fished deep into the bottom of the pile of letters, and finally uncovered what she was looking for.

A picture that she had drawn of her father on the day he’d died. He was sitting cross-legged in the sky next to the moon amidst a rich galaxy of stars and meteorites.

It was where her Grandma Bea and mother had told her he‘d gone – up into the night sky, and so Issy had drawn a picture of her beloved father that same evening to help her make sense of everything.

Issy remembered the exact position on the kitchen table where she had sat and drawn the picture. It was the same place her father had sat at only hours earlier to have his last breakfast.

As
she looked now at the picture drawn in those first traumatic hours after his death she studied the wobbly body and face. Memories of drawing it flooded her mind with absolute clarity.

As she looked at the picture now some fifteen years later, she closed her eyes and remembered exactly how she’d felt on the worst evening of her life so far.

Confused, lost, disorientated, frightened and inconsolably sad were some of the adjectives that best described the emotions that had coursed through her body that dark winter night when her father had dropped down dead like a stone in front of her that very morning.

It had felt very strange then, as it did now, how the lives of others around her had gone on as the life she had known had disappeared like melting snow.

She remembered how the neighbours Mr and Mrs Armitage and daughter Janet had come round with some baked potatoes and a toffee apple for Issy on the evening he died.

“We’ve just come round to see if you need anything and hope you don‘t mind the fireworks tonight” Mrs Armitage had said in the most delicate and sombre voice, whilst standing on the doorstep with her husband nodding silently and their daughter nervously playing with her pigtails.

Despite the gaping hole in their lives and raw grief, her mother and Grandma Bea had welcomed the Armitages into their home. It had seemed a kindly act at the time and seemed more so in retrospect.

Issy remembered how English they’d been. Despite how desperate they’d all felt, they’d had enough energy left to arrange themselves on the various bits of furniture in the sitting room.

Her
mother and Grandma Bea with Issy in the middle on the scruffy green sofa and Mr Armitage in Richard’s favourite armchair which he would never EVER sit in again with Mrs Armitage sitting opposite with Janet perched on her lap.

After a few words of condolence along the lines of “We are so sorry about your loss, what a shock it must have been, how very sudden,” they’d gone, leaving the house even emptier than just before they’d arrived.

“WHAT had been the point of that,” Issy had thought at the time. “They didn’t need reminding of their loss, or their shock or the suddenness,” despite the intention the reaffirmation of death had just made them feel a hundred times worse than before.

And then, somewhat bizarrely they had listened with a dull ache in their hearts as the Armitages had set off Catherine Wheels, Squealers and bangers and started up their bonfire just as they always did on Guy Fawkes night their schedules unchanged despite the fact that the life of Issy and her family had spun thousands of miles off course.

Issy and Snoopy the black and white family cat had clung to each other for most of the evening. Snoopy had sought comfort from the big bangs and Issy from anything that was prepared to give love and fill the huge big hole that had only recently appeared in her heart.

Sitting in the darkened apartment in Naples at 4am that morning, Issy stared at the picture that she’d drawn of her father and held it closely to the hole in her chest that had never ever gone away since that fateful day so many years ago.

After a few moments of praying for strength and for a solution to her problem she held the picture in front of her once again. She re-read the spidery writing on the back faded by fifteen years of it being read and re-read and from sitting in a box.

“Dear Daddy,” it said. “I am so unhappy. Please stop being a star and come home. I love you and we need you more than the night sky does. It’s bright enough up there and it is dark and cold here down here without you. I’m not sure if the postman posts letters that far away, but I promise I will ask him tomorrow so we can at least keep in touch if you are not able to come back down as mummy says. Sleep tight daddy, we love you. Issy and Snoopy xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”