He was right there. The only thing I’d got to lose was my life — or my liberty if we were arrested for attempting to seize by force something that really belonged to us. I had no illusions about what was going to happen. The Little Octopus wasn’t taking an interest in us out of I
kindness. This was gang warfare and the party wasn’t likely to be a picnic.
We were at the Castello Nuovo shortly before midnight. It was almost cool with a slight breeze coming in from the sea. The great square bulk of the castle crouched black against the moonlit waters of Naples Bay, and beyond it the dim outline of Vesuvius was raised towards the sky.
I glanced down at Monique, who was standing beside me, the sweep of her hair stirring gently in the breeze. I was wondering what she thought about it all. She sensed my gaze and smiled up at me. There was no fear in her eyes.
For some reason that annoyed me. ‘We’re going to have trouble on this trip,’ I told her.
‘Do you mean there will be a fight?’ She nodded her head seriously. ‘But you will get the ship back.’ And she smiled up at me happily again as though life were as simple as all that.
Then the truck came snoring up the road from the docks, its headlights flickering yellow in the white light of the moon.
The Little Octopus leaned out of the driver’s tab as it pulled up. ‘Get in the back,’ he said, ‘and make yourselves comfortable. It will be a long drive.’
He was quite right about that. The truck was heavily loaded with sacks of flour and made at best not more than twenty miles an hour. There were two Italians in the back. They had settled down to the boredom of being jolted around throughout the night. They nodded as we climbed aboard. But they did not speak. As we topped the hill out of Naples and the sprawling outline of Capri was lost among the trees that lined the road, I adjusted the sacks on which we were resting so that Monique could sleep comfortably. Then I settled myself beside her.
I lay awake for some time watching the trees sweep past and gazing at the tapering vista of the road behind us running like a white sword across the country. Then gradually my senses dulled to the roar of the engine and I dozed off.
It must have been an hour or so later that I woke with a feeling that one of the sacks had fallen across me. I tried sleepily to push it away. My hand touched warm soft-curving flesh and I woke to find it was Monique and not a sack.
She had slipped over on to me with the jolting of the truck. Her shoulder was pressed into my belly and her face, with eyes serenely closed and lashes black against the pale skin, was on my chest. I didn’t move my hand from the curve of her breast. I just lay quiet for fear that I should disturb her. If she woke she would be scared at the touch of my hand. And I knew in that moment, with the perception one often has when one has just woken up, that I didn’t want her to be scared. I only wanted her to lie there and to feel the warmth of her against my body, to feel the woman of her and pretend that she was lying there because she wanted to.
But some sixth sense must have warned her that I was awake. Suddenly her eyelids flickered open like shutters and her grey eyes, wide and startled, were looking up into mine.
There was no time to take my hand from her breast or to close my eyes and pretend that I was asleep.
She stared up into my face for a moment. Then suddenly she smiled. It was a warm slow luxurious smile — a smile that acknowledged all there has ever been between a man and a woman. She put her hand over mine where it held her breast. Then, still smiling, she closed her eyes and went to sleep again.
I didn’t dare move for a long time after that. I just lay there, my whole body conscious of the shape of her, thinking about her and about the future. For she had suddenly become very important to me.
In the end I fell asleep. And when I woke again the sun was up and she was sitting against the tailboard combing the flour out of her hair with a comb she had borrowed from Boyd.
We stopped for a snack at a trattoria just outside Rome. And then we drove on as the sun climbed the blue bowl of the sky. It was past midday before we turned off the main road and dipped down through Orbetello, with its shattered seaplane base where Balbo had set off on his record-breaking flight, to the causeway that joins Monte Argentario to the mainland.
The sea on either side of the causeway was white like a mirror. A line of telegraph poles strode across it like men on stilts wading to the shore and bamboo fish pens cut the water into sections as hedges separate fields.
The truck bore right along the northern shore of the peninsula. The road deteriorated into a track bull-dozed two years ago through demolition rubble and the interior of the truck became hazy with flour as the sacks rocked and bounced. Then suddenly it was dark. The temporary road had taken to the railway and we were in a tunnel.
In the sunlight again we climbed a headland and below us lay Porto Santo Stefano, a hillside of brown stone ruins crumbling to the brilliant blue of the sea where the astonished masts of a sunken schooner showed bare and white.
The little port was smashed to hell and had never been rebuilt. Yet there was a strange beauty in its ruins, for the empty shells of what had once been houses showed the red and blue and green of painted interiors. Here, against the brown of the broken stone, was every colour of the rainbow. The effect was of an artist’s palette.
We did not go into the port, but dropped down the shoulder of the hill to a broken concrete jetty where an island schooner was moored stern-on to the hard of what had once been the waterfront. Here the truck stopped and we climbed stiffly out. The two men who had been with us in the back lowered a sack of flour over the tailboard. It hit the concrete with a heavy metallic thud.
The Little Octopus shepherded them aboard across the plank that was roped from the hard to the stern of the schooner, and we followed him. He introduced us to a watery-eyed old ruffian. This was the skipper. His breath smelt of garlic and he spat tobacco juice on to the decks that were high with the smell of fish and vino and salt water. Grey hair stood out on the dirt-lined scrawny skin of his neck like stubble and his teeth were black stumps in a framework of cracked lips and brown-stained straggling moustache.
We had a meal in a cabin below decks that was so stiflingly hot that I could feel the sweat trickling down the sides of my body. There were anchovies and olives and tasteless Mediterranean fish with brown bread and a lobster and hard cheese, all washed down with Aleatico from Elba.
When we had finished, the Little Octopus advised us to get some sleep on deck. ‘You’ll be sailing at midnight,’ he said. ‘And you’ll need to be fresh.’
The flour from the lorry was being loaded. The Little Octopus, with his two henchmen, their pockets bulging suspiciously, disappeared with a fishing net in a small boat.
Monique and I stood against the wooden bulwarks of the schooner and watched the boat till the dhow-like sail disappeared beyond the headland.
‘Where is he going?’ Monique asked.
I shrugged my shoulders. I did not know. But I had an uneasy feeling that necessity was getting us mixed up in something pretty unpleasant. We went for’ard and joined Boyd under the shade of a sail that had been roughly rigged as an awning.
It was a long and boring wait, periodically relieved by the skipper insisting on our taking a glass of wine with him.
But at last the light faded out of the sky and he began to stir his crew to action. The ropes were slipped and the diesel engine throbbed into life. No sails were set. We slipped out round the jetty and made for the headland on our auxiliary engines, though there was a cool breeze whipping at the flat surface of the sea.
We hugged the shore very close in, the cliffs, dark above our bare masts, throwing back at us the monotonous chug of our engine. Beyond the headland was a cove and then another rocky spur with a monstrous villa showing a white sprawl on the edge of its cliffs. The slight swell creamed white against the rocks and as we passed we heard the sound of it breaking. The engines slowed and then suddenly ceased. All was quiet as we slid silently through the water into a little bay.