‘Well,’ he concluded, ‘that’s Mr Del Ricci for you. And he’s done all that in less than two years. Clearly a bloke to be reckoned with. I should have been more careful perhaps, but — ‘ he shrugged his shoulders. ‘I got mad, that was all. If you like to take your share of the proceeds and get out I shan’t blame you.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘This is my life now. All I would suggest is that in future we talk things over before acting. I agree with your view of Del Ricci, but beating him up doesn’t get us anywhere.’
He nodded gloomily. ‘I should have shot him,’ he said, and then he began to laugh.
CHAPTER SIX
At three o’clock the next day I met Pietro in the Galleria. He had traced the Gallianis up to a point. Their flat in the Via Santa Cecilia was no longer there. It had been in a big block just behind the Metropole on the sea front. The whole block had been destroyed in one of the big raids before the Salerno landing.
‘But I find their cook,’ Pietro said. ‘I speak her about them and she say they are in the ricovero and not kilt.’ I told him to speak Italian. I was in no mood to have him try his English out on me.
They had apparently moved into rooms in the Vico Tiratoio, one of the squalid little streets on the north side of the Via Roma. Pietro had got the address and had seen the owner of the place just before meeting me. From his description of it, Galliani must have been in a pretty bad way financially. The entrance was up a dark staircase next to a trattoria that sold cheap vino from Ischia. On the first floor had been a tailor’s shop, the Gallianis had had the second, the third floor had belonged to a journalist on Il Mattino and the top floor had been a bordello. ‘The girl was with them?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Si, signore, the girl was with them. They were there three months.’
‘And then?’
‘They could not pay so they went to the farm of his cousin which is at Itri.’
‘What was the name of the cousin?’ I asked.
‘This is his address.’ He handed me a slip of paper. On it was written, ‘Furigo Ciprio, Santa Brigida, Itri.’
From where I sat I looked down the finely-paved expanse of the Galleria across the traffic of the Via Roma to the narrow entrance of a street of tall, dirty buildings, that ran straight up the hill to the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. In one of these streets up there Mrs Dupont’s daughter had lived for three months. It wasn’t difficult to picture the circumstances of this family as Pietro told me the gossip he had gleaned. Galliani had been a dapper little man, the manager of a small shipping firm. The business had died. A shop that he acquired as a side-line had been looted during the raid in which he had lost his flat. When he came to the Vico Tiratoio he had begun to drink. But he clung to Naples because he thought he could get a job. His wife took in washing and the girl, besides helping with this, did embroidery work. Three months of that and then they had given up and gone to his cousin’s farm.
I thanked Pietro for his help. ‘I’ll go up to the farm tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Will you arrange for a car to pick me up at the docks at nine o’clock.’ I paid him off then.
I wandered slowly down the Galleria with its cafe tables full of dark-haired girls and men in open-necked shirts and suits of fantastically brilliant colours. It was very hot and the Via Roma thrust itself upon me with a dull roar of traffic. I crossed the hot soft-tarred thoroughfare and forced my way through the crowds into the Via Buoncompagni.
The tall houses closed in on me — cool, quiet and squalid. The sound of traffic was dulled and its place taken by individual sounds of children’s voices and people calling to each other. The streets were cleaner than when I had seen them. The squatters from the bombed-out area of the docks were gone. There was no sign of garbage or outdoor cooking on improvised wood or charcoal fires. New shops were open and some of the houses had been repainted. I noticed these things automatically for my mind was engrossed in the picture of the life of a half-English, half-French girl in an Italian family who were in difficulties at the time when the Germans still occupied Naples.
I found the house without difficulty. It was No. 29, just on the corner where the Vico Tiratoio meets the Via Sergente Maggiore. It was just as Pietro had described it. There was the little trattoria. The sour smell of vino seeped out into the street. As I stood there the bead curtains parted and a seaman staggered out. He stood for a moment blinking in the sunlight and swaying slightly back on his heels. He gazed round and then lurched into the doorway next to the trattoria. His boots sounded hesitantly as he climbed the dark, bare-boarded stairs that Monique must have used. Over the entranceway was a gaudily-painted image of the Virgin set in a weatherworn wooden frame with two tinsel-covered electric light bulbs and a posy of artificial white flowers. I took out the photograph of Monique that Pietro had returned to me. The innocence of the girl in that faded picture was appealing when considered against the background of her life. I was determined to find out what had happened to her.
I told Stuart this when I got back to the ship and he was quite agreeable. He said it would take him two more days to complete the purchase of our cargo. I arranged to take Boyd with me for company.
Itri is a little town beyond the Garigliano on the coast road from Naples to Rome. This road is Highway Seven, the route the American Fifth Army took. We came down to it by way of Caserta. Boyd wanted to see the palace, not because it was the second largest and quite the ugliest in Europe, but because he wanted to take ‘a decco at the Brass ‘Ats’ Palis’ — it had been the Headquarters of the Allied Armies in Italy all through the bitter fighting of the winter of 1943-44. The great square red-brick structure, with the railway line which had been built to pass within a hundred yards of the windows for the amusement of the Royal Family, looked useless. The gardens were still as unkempt as they had been when they were a park for Army trucks. Only the long artificial lake, where Field-Marshal Alexander had kept his own wizzer seaplanes, seemed pleasant, and that was violently unreal against the natural setting of the hills.
Beyond Capua we forked left, away from Highway Six, the road to Cassino. We had crossed the Volturno by a Bailey bridge that had been built by our own engineers to replace the blown Roman bridge. It was the same at the Garigliano. The temporary Bailey structure still spanned the road that crossed the river. ‘Sono bravi ingegneri, gli Inglesi,’ was our driver’s comment. At Formia the buildings shattered by the naval bombardment had been cleared so that there was a good view of Gaeta across the blue of the bay. But the town was still bedraggled with the marks of war in the side streets. All sorts of temporary buildings had been erected on the shattered foundations of the original houses. And Itri, set on a hill beneath the sprawling bulk of the Monti Aurunci, was even worse. It was a little town of flies and dust and rubble pulsing lazily in the midday heat. At the post office they told us how to find the farm. ‘But Signor Furigo does not live there now,’ they said. It was burned and he was killed. Of the Gallianis they knew nothing.
‘This is getting to be like a bleedin’ treasure hunt,’ Boyd said as we got into the car again.
The farm was at the end of a dusty track. The wreck of a burned-out building stood among the olive trees and the ground shimmered in the sun’s heat trapped in the bowl of the hills. The remains of a barn had been made into a shack and nearby on a patch of brick-hard earth two women with kerchiefs tied around their heads were beating at a pile of wheat stalks. They were threshing in the old way. It was from them that I learned what had happened when the Germans were in Itri and the Fifth Army was across the river where the bridge had been blown.