‘How do you mean?’ I asked.
‘It was whilst I was up in London that first time — about the fourth day I was there. A little man came to see me in the evening. He had a bald shiny head and square features. He looked what I have no doubt he had been — a Fascist profiteer. His opening gambit was: Would we be interested in a profitable cargo? I said, yes, but it depended on the cargo. He talked for a long time then about the advantages of the type of ship we had. ‘You don’t need to worry about ports,’ he said. ‘A firm beach, your door down and your cargo, if loaded on lorries, is away.’
‘I said the matter had not escaped our notice, and his belly shook with silent laughter. I asked him what he was suggesting. He looked at me out of his little pig eyes as though calculating the best line of approach. Then he said, ‘You realize, Mr McCrae, that there is a lot of unrest in Italy — under the surface. The unruly elements of the population are intent upon destroying the new Italy that is arising from the ashes of the old. A responsible section of the people, however, are determined that this shall not happen. But the mob is armed with weapons taken from the battlefields of your Italian campaign. Fortunately for Italy we still have our men of vision. They realize that it is necessary to have arms. The responsible section of the people cannot save the country without arms. You will be doing a great service to Italy and to your own country if you place your ship at our disposal.’
‘ “You say these arms will be profitable as a cargo?” I said. “Who will pay?”
‘He explained hastily that there was not the slightest cause for alarm. Apparently some of the men with vision had also had the forethought to make plenty of money.
‘It was then that I told him what I thought of him. I picked the protesting little bastard up by his collar and hit him. I kept on hitting him, explaining to him about the war we’d fought in Italy and the blood we’d spilt because of Fascism. I was really mad. And then I threw him down the stairs. My landlady was most upset and I had to explain that the man was drunk.’
‘What was his name?’ I asked Stuart.
‘That was what was so annoying,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t remember it afterwards. I went for a walk along the Embankment. I tried to remember it then. But I couldn’t. Anyway, it was almost certain to be false. I gave his description to Scotland Yard and they promised to notify the Italian Government of what had occurred.’
I thought about what Stuart had told me a lot that night as the ship slid across the dark unruffled waters beneath the stars. I was trying to adjust myself to the idea of an Italy controlled by the Italians. When I had last been in Naples, Civitavecchia, Piambino and Livorno, there had always been units of the British Navy, British and American M.P.s — the streets had been crowded with Allied troops. Now, of course, all that would be changed. The troops would have gone either to the Far East or back to Civvy Street or been absorbed by the armies of occupation in Germany.
I had been in Rome at the opening of the trial of Caruso, the police chief who had handed over the political prisoners to the Germans to be shot in the Ardeatine caves. I had seen the mob surge forward in the courtroom and tear Carreta, once governor of the Regina Coeli prison and chief witness for the prosecution, from the hands of the Carabinieri, had seen him beaten unconscious, thrown from the Ponte Umberto into the Tiber and beaten to death by oars. And I was suddenly glad of the weapons that Dugan had found in that locker.
Next morning we were in the Gibraltar Straits and the steel of the deck was burning hot to the touch. There followed four days of blazing sun and calm sea before we raised the heat-hazed outline of the southern tip of Sardinia. Then a breeze sprang up and held until two days later we sighted the sugar loaf bulk of Vesuvius crouched behind the Bay of Naples.
Boyd was on the bridge with me as we entered the Bay. The sky and sea were very blue. Bermuda rigged yachts heeled their white sails over against the backcloth of the city that climbed from the waterfront to the heights on which the Castello San Elmo stood. He pointed to the great sprawling bulk of Vesuvius. ‘Ever been up to have a look at the crater, Mr Cunningham?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘When I arrived in Naples for the first time the volcano had already been in eruption and it was impossible to go up.’
He nodded. ‘I had two months in Naples,’ he said. ‘I was driving for a dock company. We went up Vesuvius one Sunday from the toll road above ‘For re Annunziata. Cor! What a place! I ain’t ever seen anything like it in all my life — an’ I bin ara’nd a bit. Get Dante and Michael Angelo to team up on a kid’s idea of Hell an’ it’d be a bleedin’ paradise compared with wot Vesuvius was. The sides was like a giant’s castle and when you’d got up them you was on a plateau of black rock like metal, all smoking, and in the middle of it was a great slag heap like a devil’s dunghill. Every thirty seconds or so there’d be a noise like a thousand tons of bombs dropped on your feet, and the whole earth would quiver. I went up to the top of the slag. It was hot and every time the mountain blew off it quivered like a ruddy jelly. Through gaps in the smoke I could see great red gobs of molten rock leaping out of the flames, and solidified rocks spattered the other side of the crater. I reckon she must have been throwing ‘em up to near on a thousand feet. But the funnel of the crater sloped away from us otherwise we’d have ‘ad it.’
‘Were you there when the eruption occurred?’ I asked.
‘Was I there? Cor, stone the crows! There — I was evacuating the women and kids from one end of Monte di Somma whilst the lava stream was swallowing it up from the other. I won’t ever forget that Tuesday. There was a hell of a hailstorm at about four in the afternoon — six inches of hail in ten minutes. And half-an-hour later there was a noise like ten thousand expresses going through a tunnel and a great column of black vapour steamed up to about twenty thousand feet. It was full of ash, that vapour. It rose like a — huge great rolling cauliflower of muck.
‘It wasn’t so bad when the eruption was just a great mass of black clinkers that glowed red at night — except for the blokes whose homes were in the way of it — but when the crater started blowing off in real earnest, then I began thinking of what had happened to Pompeii.
‘After that the Sangro River seemed quite tame, though I got wounded there and was downgraded. That’s when I was drafted to the Water Company.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘Two months in Naples taught me a fing or two aba’t huming-nature. Gor blimy, wot a place. I seen men die in the streets for lack of food. The Ityes didn’t worry. The girls’d sell themselves for a tin of bully and there was gangs of ‘ooligans on the loot. The only people wot was well fed was the boys in the Black Market. They did all right. A lot of the dock boys were in the racket one way and another. They say about a quarter of a million pounds of stuff was disappearing from the docks each month. An’ I wouldn’t doubt it cos I seen drivers wiv my own eyes bring out a roll of thousand lire notes — and army pay didn’t allow you saving that much, the price of vino being wot it was. An’ I bet it ain’t changed much.’
And he was right there. Naples was the same bomb-raddled mean-streeted tart that I had known over a year ago. We berthed at the mole which the navy had used. There was little sign of any reconstruction work. They were still using the improvised quays that we had built over sunken ships at the time of Anzio. They had cleared a few more of the shattered buildings and some wooden sheds had been erected for storage. But the port area looked just what it was — a place that had been blasted to hell from the air.
It had an air of tired lethargy about it. But then, of course, the last time I had seen it the Navy had been in charge, and despite the destruction of so much of its wharfage it had been handling a bigger volume of traffic than ever before in its history.