Dead and Alive Page 11

  “You’ll regret that,” I said. “And remember—beat that girl again and you’ll find yourself in the Regina Ceoli prison.” I turned and walked back with Boyd up the path to the farmstead and through the fields to the road and the waiting car.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  OFF THE VIA ROMA

  WE STAYED the night at Vicovaro, slipping out of the albergo at one in the morning. We let the Italian driver sleep on. We wanted no witnesses. The moon was low over the mountain tops as we drove the Lancia towards Pericele.

  Looking back on it, I suppose it was a pretty crazy thing to do. Kidnapping girls isn’t the healthiest of sports, especially in Italy where the jails have a bad reputation. But I don’t see what else we could have done. After what she had told me I could not leave her at the farm. And how else was I to get her away? A legal wrangle would have lasted years.

  When I broached the matter to Boyd, he said, “Wot the hell! We didn’t conquer this bleedin’ country to have bastards like Mancini chuckin’ their weight about and beating up girls who should by rights be in Blighty.” And he didn’t know the full story of what the girl had been through. “Anyway, it ain’t as dangerous as you make out,” he added. “If we get the kid out orl right, reckon Mancini won’t squawk. And the law ain’t orl that hot in this land of treasures. I found that out pretty nippy like when we was running the coastal trade. An’ I don’t reckon it’ll have changed much in a couple of years. The Carabinieri ain’t paid enough to make it worf their while ter refuse a bribe like wot a London copper is.” And he gave me a sly wink.

  There was a lot in what he said. The difficulty was going to be to get her out of the farm. I found myself wishing that Stuart was with us and that we had those arms that Dugan had found. If they were waiting for us with shotguns, it wasn’t going to be too healthy.

  We reached the spot where we had parked the car the previous morning. I turned and then switched off. “You’ll find the ignition key under the left-hand seat,” I told Boyd.

  Then we went down through the fields to the stream and along the bank towards Pericele. It was nearly two when we reached the Mancini farm, a vague huddle of buildings in the shadow of the trees. The moon had set behind the mountains now, but the pale light of it still lingered in the warm summer sky.

  We entered the yard of the farm stealthily and stood in the shadow of an outhouse that smelt of pigs. The place was very silent. And yet it did not seem asleep. It had the watchful stillness of a wild thing. The air was heavy with the rank odours of the farm. But it was not the smell of an English farm. It was foreign and made me feel jumpy.

  We didn’t speak, but stood quite still until the luminous dial of my watch showed it to be past two.

  There was no sign of the girl.

  “You stay here,” I said to Boyd. “I’ll circle the farm and see if there’s a handkerchief at any of the windows.”

  He said, “Okay,” and I moved off along the wall of the outhouse. My shoes squelched in a morass of wet dung. I felt the warm heavy-smelling liquid top the uppers of my shoes. But I dared not try and avoid it. There was still enough light for me to be seen if I moved out of the shadow of the buildings. The end of the outhouse abutted on to the farmhouse itself. On this side there were two small windows on the upper floor. They were closed and reflected the pale light of the sky like blind eyes.

  Round at the back it was the same. All five windows were closed and there was no sign of a handkerchief. I circled the farm until I was gazing at the front door. This was open. But all the windows on this side too were shut. There was no sign of life.

  I worked my way back to where I had left Boyd.

  He was not there.

  I thought perhaps I had made a mistake in the growing darkness. But a little farther on I found the same morass of liquid dung.

  A cock crowed.

  I felt the menace of the place all round me. One half of my mind was wondering where the hell Boyd could have got to. The other half was detached and thinking about who built the place and what dark scenes the old grey stones had witnessed.

  The silence of the yard was shattered by the crash of an iron bar on stone. It sounded as loud as the gates of Hell being thrown back, and a dog began to bark. A door creaked and Boyd and Monique erupted into the yard from the outhouses on the other side. Some one shouted. And then a man’s figure appeared in the front of the house. He had a gun. But he did not fire. “Aspetti!” he shouted and began to run towards them.

  It was Mancini. Even in that dim uncertain light I could not mistake his thick powerful figure.

  “Run for the car,” I called out to Boyd.

  “Okay,” he replied, and he and the girl made for the track along the stream bank.

  I crouched, ready to do something that I hadn’t done in years. Mancini was running across the yard now. Big though he was he ran well, with long powerful strides. As he reached the middle of the yard, I launched myself from the shadow of the outhouse. I made straight for his legs in a flying tackle and caught him nicely at the knees. I felt the solid bone of his leg against my shoulder and then he hit the stone of the yard with a thud that must have shaken him badly.

  I dived for the shotgun which had fallen from his grasp. But his hand reached out and fastened on the collar of my coat. He was winded by his fall. But his hold was firm though I struggled desperately. He was breathing in great gulps of air with a sobbing sound in his throat. A moment and he would be fully recovered. I knew I hadn’t a hope against him at close quarters.

  I kept free of his other hand which was searching for a hold and wriggled out of my jacket. A quick twist and I was free.

  I reached the gun a moment before he did and then ran for the track.

  He started to run after me. But he was too shaken. As I made the bank a confusion of shouts broke out behind me. He was calling for his horse. I settled down to run steadily and carefully.

  I caught up with Boyd and Monique in the fields below the main road. “Thank God, you’re okay, sir,” he panted. “I was a bit worried. ’E ain’t hexactly Tom Fumb’s baby bruvver. Wotjer hit ’im wiv—an atomic bomb?”

  I told him about the tackle. I knew it would please him. He was a great boy for Twickenham. “Where did you find the girl?” I asked as we clambered into the car.

  “She was locked in one of them outhouses,” he replied. “A filthy stinkin’ bloody hole of a Calcutta. There was a little grating winder in it and she’d tied ’er ’anky to it. I caught sight of it across the yard just after you’d left me. The draw-bar on the door was secured by a padlock. But I managed to pick that. Then o’ course I went an’ spoilt it orl by dropping the bleedin’ bar. Still, orl’s well wot ends well, as ol’ Bill would say.” He gave me a nudge with his elbow and speaking out of the side of his mouth, said, “Cor, stone the crows! She don’t ’alf smell a treat though. The floor of the place were just like a ruddy sewer.” His nose wrinkled and he grinned. “Pardon my mentioning it, sir, but you don’t smell so ’ot yourself. I ’eard you walk into the muck as soon as you’d left me. Thort you was going to give the whole game away by swearing bloomin’ orful like wot yer does on the bridge when somefink’s gawn wrong.”

  The car did in fact smell like a dung heap. I thought at first it was my shoes. But now I realised that by far the strongest smell emanated from the back of the car.

  I switched the interior light on and looked round. The girl was sitting close up in the back seat—a tight little bundle of filth that smiled at me apologetically, her teeth showing white in a dirty face.

  “All right?” I asked.

  She didn’t speak. She simply nodded. Her eyes were very wide.

  I switched the light off and the swathe of the headlights seemed to leap out into the darkness of the winding mountain road again.

  As we swung down the mountain road along the valley side to Vicovaro, I tried to figure out how she must be feeling. So far, I realised, I had only been thinking of myself. I had promised to find the girl, and then
when I had discovered the circumstances in which she was living I had to satisfy my conscience and intervene. It had—I realised it now—been a game to me. There’d been a brutal farmer to outwit, a risk to be taken. That was all, as far as I was concerned. And afterwards the trouble of getting her back to England.

  I hadn’t looked at it from her point of view at all.

  Her wide eyes and slightly tremulous smile, and the way she sat tense and small in the corner of the car, were eloquent of her state of mind.

  And as we drove down through the dark mountains I think I came near to understanding her mood.

  However hateful Mancini had been, the farm was at least a home to her. She knew what it was like to be alone and a refugee. The village had given her friends and a background. And then two strangers had come with word of her mother. And now she was alone with them in a car, her dress all covered in filth where she had been flung on to the floor of a dung-strewn outhouse by the furious Mancini—and she was now realising that she did not know these two strangers, did not know whether they could in fact get her back to England, did not know what was to become of her.

  Later the trip might seem an adventure to her, for she was young and youth responds to the unknown. But just at the moment she was uncertain and a little scared. With every kilometre the car made down the valley, she was getting farther and farther from the life she knew and nearer and nearer to the outside world. She was intelligent enough to realise that the past few years had not equipped her to cope with that world. It made her very dependent upon us. And dependence upon people you don’t know is not very reassuring, even when you’re young and leaving a person you detest.

  At Vicovaro we stopped just long enough to pick up the Italian driver.

  He was very sleepy and disgruntled at being hauled out of bed at four in the morning. As he climbed into the driving seat and smelt the sickly-sweet farmyard stench of the car, he burst into a stream of furious Italian. He spoke so fast and so volubly that neither Boyd nor I could understand what he was saying. But I got the general idea, and I couldn’t really blame the fellow. It was a nice car and it would need a lot of cleaning and disinfectant before it was even fit to be hired by a Neapolitan tart.

  “You gonna drive or do we dump you here?” Boyd asked threateningly in Italian.

  The stream of words was suddenly damned. He glanced quickly from one to the other of us. “I drive,” he said, and climbed in behind the steering wheel. But as he let in the clutch he started again. “La mia macchina,” he cried, “é rovinata.”

  “If you’re so worried about the way your car smells, why don’t you give up eating garlic?” Boyd suggested. “Yer bref is so bleedin’ orful that it’s a wonder ter me you notice a nice clean smell like dung.”

  And whilst Boyd and the driver embarked in this manner upon an amicable chat in front, I sat with Monique in the back and told her about the ship we had at Naples and how if there was any difficulty with the authorities we’d smuggle her out. I told her about Stuart and how we’d got the L.C.T. off the rocks at Bossiney. By the time we ran into Tivoli familiarity with our background was giving her back some degree of confidence.

  The first pale light of the early summer dawn was showing behind the jagged peaks of the Abruzzi as we swung south on to a side road that led to Valmontone and Route Six.

  The flat plain of Rome stretched ahead in the darkness. But by the time we hit the main Rome-Naples highway, with the city well away to our right, it was light enough to see the outline of the Alban Hills.

  The sun rose behind the line of the mountains to the east and the trees began to slant their shadows across the road. In the valley of the Sacco we found a gush of clear water falling from the rocks through which the road was cut. We stopped the car and washed ourselves. The fresh morning sunlight was already making the rock warm to the touch.

  Until that moment I hadn’t really realised what a disreputable trio we looked. Boyd had only the dirt of the outhouse walls on his blue suit. But I was a wreck, my shirt torn from collar to waist, no jacket and no tie. My trousers were rent at the knee and were caked with filth where I had hit the muck of the farmyard. My shoes were covered with a film of dust that had caked on the liquid dung. Beneath the dust, the muck was still wet.

  But the girl was in a worse state than any of us. It was on her face and neck and hair. Her legs were caked with it and her dress was indescribably filthy.

  Early though it was, the flies swarmed round us, settling on clothes and skin, filling the air with a low hum and driving us nearly frantic with their persistence. The driver watched us nervously. I think he suspected us of being Sicilian gangsters.

  I washed my face and hands, and then I washed my shoes. I could do nothing about my trousers but leave the muck to dry on them. When I had finished, I looked round to find the girl standing disconsolately by the car. The toes of her bare feet were dug into the road edge and she did not look very happy.

  I glanced across the road. Bushes grew there in the shade of some low trees. “If you go over there and throw your clothes out to me, I’ll wash them for you,” I said. “They’ll dry in a few minutes in the sun.”

  I sensed her relief at the suggestion, though she looked as nervous as a young deer. A fractional hesitation, and then she nodded. Her lips started to frame the Italian “Grazie,” but what she said was, “Thank you.”

  I understood her momentary hesitation when I had her clothes in my hands. There was only the roughly patched black dress.

  When I had washed it for her, she didn’t wait for it to dry, but put it on damp and came out into the road again and washed herself, while Boyd and I and the Italian driver smoked a cigarette and tried to fend off the flies. I glanced at her once. She was washing her hair. She noticed me looking at her, shook the hair out of her eyes, wrinkled her nose and began to laugh.

  But I didn’t feel like responding. I had just tried to produce my cigarettes and had suddenly realised that with the loss of my jacket I had also lost not only my cigarette case, but my wallet, my cheque book and my passport.

  The cigarette case was a silver one given me by my mother on my twenty-first birthday. It had been all through the war with me. The wallet and the cheque book I didn’t really mind about, except of course that they handed Mancini complete evidence of my identity if he wished to make trouble. But it was the loss of the passport that was really annoying. It meant hanging around at the British Consul’s office in Naples in order to get it renewed.

  I felt angry and dispirited. Things seemed to be going wrong. And my mood was not improved when we eventually climbed back into the car to find it seething with a million flies and the smell of dung increasingly unpleasant after the cool dampness of the air in the valley.

  Fortunately Boyd had a little money on him and we were able to buy some food in Frosinone and a pair of straw sandals and a cheap cotton dress and underwear for the girl.

  She changed into the new clothes behind a stone wall just outside the town. It was staggering the difference they made. The sandals, which were heeled, made her taller and accentuated her long limbs. The bright colours of the cotton print brought out the golden brown of her arms and face, and her small firm breasts, lifted and pointed by a brassiere, thrust impatiently at the cotton of her frock. She had borrowed a comb from Boyd, and her fair hair, combed back from her head, gave her a boyish look.

  It was then that I first realised that she was an extremely attractive girl.

  She had the black dress in her hand as she came out from behind the wall. She started down the road towards us. But after a few paces she stopped. She looked down for a second at the dress. Then, with a gesture almost of abandonment, she flung it over the wall.

  She came towards us then with long, swinging strides. She looked like a Scots girl—very free and easy in her movements. She was smiling as she came up to us as though she had dropped her past over the wall with the black dress.

  It was getting hot and the glare of the sunlight a
s we drove on and lack of sleep made me drowsy. I woke to find Boyd shaking me. “We’re just coming to Cassino,” he said.

  High on our left the battered fragments of the monastery stood white and dusty against the blue bowl of the sky like jagged remnants of a gargantuan tooth. We skirted Monastery Hill through neat little rows of jerry-built Government houses. Down the hill into Cassino proper, we found that nature had moved in on the ruins. The place was covered in dusty greenery. It was no longer impressive.

  Somehow I felt deeply disappointed. It should have been preserved as a monument to the folly of man. Once the scarred and battered hillside had been terrifying. Now it was just an untidy jumble of weeds. The same thing had happened in France after the previous war. I don’t know why I hadn’t expected it here. Perhaps because there had been so much talk at the time of preserving the ruins as a warning to future generations. But then of course there had been so many other ruins after Cassino—bigger and better ruins. I had only seen Cassino once before—but it had impressed me the same way that the lava of Vesuvius covering Massa di Somma had impressed me. The sun had been setting and I had been in a jeep travelling from Naples to Rome just after the capital had fallen. There had been no living thing in the whole of Cassino then. The crumbled masonry and gaunt fragments of the battered town had stood solitary and lifeless, the stone a warm dull red in the evening light.

  As we slid away from it along the dead straight road of the plain below—the same road that had once been the most heavily shelled stretch in the world and had rightly been called the Mad Mile—the weeds in Cassino seemed fair comment in a world that forgets so quickly the death of its sons.

  We had a snack at Capua and got into Naples shortly after three in the afternoon. I told the driver to go straight to the docks. I wanted to find out whether Stuart had fixed up a cargo and if so when we were sailing. There was Monique to accommodate and I needed some money to pay for the hire of the car.