Dead and Alive Page 6

  It sounded a pretty sensible idea. I had never seen any Italian drink other than vermouth displayed in shop windows and yet thousands of men had come back talking of Strega and Marsala, Lacrimo Cristi and Frascati and Aurum. Housewives were bound to fall for it.

  “Another thing,” Stuart said, “I’ve buttoned up our agreement. We’re now a private limited company. Our capital is 10,000 fully paid £1 shares—you own 5,000 and I own 5,000. The entire share capital is represented by one item, the ship. I’ve called ourselves Cunningham and McCrae Ltd. I’ll fix up the wine side of the business as soon as I get back to London. We’ll call it Fosdyk and Coy., Ltd.—that’s my pal’s name—and the shares will be in three equal lots.”

  The next morning he was away again, taking Boyd with him, and Dugan and I got on with the refitting. Within a fortnight we’d nothing to do but paint and build in wardroom and mess fittings and bunks. When the painting was done and I had painted the name Trevedra on her sides and stern, I went down on to the sands at high tide and took her photo with a camera I had acquired. I wanted the picture for Sarah.

  I wired Stuart that we were ready to sail when he gave the word and then had a final orgy of spending, chiefly on bridge equipment—an Aldis signalling lamp, a set of flags, a megaphone, glasses, and, most expensive item of all, radio equipment. The following day I called at the Post Office and found Stuart’s reply waiting for me. It read—“Arrange arrival morning twenty-seventh end coast road Littlestone dash Dungeness Ack.”

  I acknowledged and then returned to the Trevedra. At the flood that afternoon we winched her off on the hook which we’d carried well out several days before. Then we slipped into the Docks and returned all the gear we’d borrowed. We fuelled and watered and then had one last night ashore. Slater had found me two sailors on leave who wanted a lift along the coast and with this temporary addition to our crew we sailed for Dungeness the next morning.

  The sea was calm and we were off Dungeness light as the sun rose over the bows. The Bedfords were ready waiting on the coast road just where it turns inland a few hundred yards short of the Pilot Inn. Through the glasses I saw Stuart coming down on to the beach waving to me and I ran straight in, dropping the hook about half-a-cable’s length from the shore. She beached with a grating crash. I dropped the bow door and we made fast with ground anchors.

  I said good-bye to my temporary crew and within an hour we had four of the Bedfords, loaded to the canopy with crates of cigarettes, stowed and lashed. The fifth was full of spares and had to be backed-in, off-loaded and taken back to the farm for more. She did four trips before the barn was cleared. But at last we had her stowed and I got the bow anchor in and raised the door. We winched her out and when the hook was up I went up on to the bridge and headed the ship down Channel.

  Boyd was at the wheel and Stuart joined me on the bridge. “Just been having a look round,” he said. “Nice job you’ve done.”

  I didn’t say anything and nor did he after that. We just stood and smoked, watching the water slip past and listening to the rhythmic chug of the engines and the slap of the waves against the blunt bows. We were both of us feeling that life was very good. We had achieved something. We had a ship and a cargo. The weather was fair and we were outward bound. We were traders—and I thought back down the long line of British traders and felt a surge of satisfaction that I was one of them.

  We got a holding chain made fast round the bow door and double-lashed the cargo and loose gear. I was taking no chances with the weather in the Bay of Biscay. By sundown the Isle of Wight had disappeared in the gathering dusk from the east and we were out of sight of land, heading for Ushant in a long Atlantic swell.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  TROUBLE IN NAPLES

  THE WEATHER was fair and we made a steady eight knots. Dugan and Boyd split the engine-room duties and Stuart and I the watches and wheel duty. The Bay was placid and by the morning of the third day we were running down the coast of Portugal. It began to get hot.

  That night there occurred something that had a bearing on what happened later. Darkness came out of a cloudless sky. Stuart and I were on the bridge, smoking and watching the stars. The sea was almost glassy and only a slight vibration and the sound of the engines told us that we were moving. The night air was warm with the promise of heat from the desert sands of Africa.

  “We should pick up the light of Cape Vincent soon,” I said. I switched the light on in the covered chart recess and checked our position. According to my reckoning we were due to change course in another half-hour from south to south-east to make the Straits.

  “There’s a ship dead ahead of us,” Stuart said.

  I took my head out of the recess and gazed into the starlit night. At first I could see nothing. But as my eyes became accustomed to the darkness after the glare of the chart table light, I made out the dim shape of a small ship.

  “Looks like a schooner,” Stuart added, passing the glasses across to me. “She’s no sails and she’s without lights.”

  I took the glasses. It was a schooner all right, of the type that do much of the coastal trade round Spain and Italy. As I watched her a froth of white appeared at her stern. She had got her auxiliary going. Sails fluttered up clothing her bare masts and drawing fitfully in the light breeze. She began to move across our bows as we bore down on her.

  I edged the wheel up and the bows came round until we were heading straight for her again. “I am closing her to see why she is without lights,” I told Stuart.

  He nodded, but made no comment. He was tapping his teeth with his pipe and gazing for’ard at the rapidly looming shape.

  When we were about a cable’s-length away the schooner suddenly stopped her engine. Her sails dropped limply from her masts leaving them bare as they had been before. “Stop both,” I ordered the engine-room. In the sudden quiet the sound of the water creaming before the thrusting bows was very loud. I switched on the loud-hailer. “Ahoy, there!” I called. “What ship is that?”

  Back came the reply in Spanish. The voice was the voice of a man who was very excited.

  “Perchè non avete luce?” I asked, trying him in simple Italian.

  There was no reply.

  We were close alongside now and I switched on the bridge spotlight. The deck of the schooner was littered with wine barrels below the fallen sails. The captain, short, dark-haired and thin-faced, stood at the rail watching us intently. “Che e vostra—what’s the word for cargo?” Stuart asked me.

  “Cosa portate nella barca?” I called out.

  There followed a stream of Spanish which was quite unintelligible. It ended with the words, “Vino, caballero, solo vino.”

  “Perchè non avete la luce?” I demanded again.

  Another flood of Spanish from which I gathered his dynamo had broken down. But there was a gleam of electric-light from the companion way.

  “Better push on, David,” Stuart said. “He’s up to no good. I’ll bet it’s not wine in those barrels. But it’s none of our business and even if it were we couldn’t do anything about it.”

  “Okay,” I said. I put the microphone of the loud-hailer to my mouth. “Accendete luce,” I said menacingly, and then to the engine-room, “Slow ahead both.”

  As we gathered way the sea creamed at his stern and the little schooner made off in the opposite direction. Obviously he thought we were a naval ship.

  “What do you reckon he was up to?” I asked Stuart. “He was lying about his electric light being out of order. Anyway, he had oil storm lamps which he could have lit.”

  Stuart shrugged his shoulders. “Contraband,” he said. “Possibly arms. There must be a lot of that going on round the Mediterranean. Think of the vast quantities of arms and equipment we lost in North Africa and Italy. Incidentally,” he added. “I didn’t tell you, but we had an offer to go into the arms running racket ourselves.”

  “How do you mean?” I asked.

  “It was whilst I was up in London that first time—about the f
ourth 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 realise, 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 realise 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, Civetavecchia, 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 Torre Annunziata. Cor! What a place! I ain’t ever seen anythink 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 splattered 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—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 wony. The girls’d sell themselves for a tin of bully and there was gangs of hooligans 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.

  It was just after midday when Stuart and I went ashore. After arranging for the refuelling and watering of the ship we walked to the Banco di Napoli in the Via Roma and opened an account there. Then we went to the Zita Teresa for lunch. The long glass windows were open to the little harbour of Santa Lucia under the looming bulk of the Castello dell’Ovo. They were unloading wine casks from Ischia and the sour smell of vino was mingled with the smell of dead
fish and tar. The Capri ferry was in and there was an old M.A.S. boat aground under the castle walls. They were playing O Sole Mio as we entered, and the man with the fiddle was the one who had played to Allied troops before the restaurant had been turned into a Men’s Naafi. We had frutti di mare, ravioli, lobster salad and zabaione with Lacrimo Cristi. And the price was staggeringly cheap in comparison with what we used to pay.

  After lunch we returned to the Via Roma. The firm to whom we were delivering our cargo had their offices in the Galleria Umberto. A girl with raven black hair and large breasts barely concealed by a low cut frock showed us in to Signor Guidici’s office. “Good-afternoon, gentlemen,” he said. “I have been expecting you.” He was small and fat and he was smoking a cigar. He waved us to two chromium-plated chairs with a white pudgy hand. The room was expensively and uncomfortably furnished in the ultra-modern style—all steel and glass.

  But he spoke English well and dealt with the matter of our cargo with dispatch. It was to be landed at Pozzuoli the following day. He had arranged registration of the vehicles and would supply drivers. When he heard that we were also carrying a cargo of five hundred thousand cigarettes he offered to buy them straight away and the price he named was good. Moreover he gave us his cheque for the full amount there and then and agreed to our terms that one truck should be retained by us until we had loaded our return cargo.

  We agreed to run a similar cargo for him as soon as we had obtained the cargo we wanted for the return run. As he was showing us out he said, “There is a friend of mine who is wishing to meet you. He is hoping you will come to a little party he gives at his home to-morrow night.” He went back to his desk and scribbled down the address for us. “There,” he said. “It is the Villa Rosa in Posillipo. Ask for the Villa Emma—that is where Lady Hamilton entertained your Lord Nelson. The Villa Rosa is just close. There will be good wine and nice girls who speak English a little. And I think he wishes to talk about business to you.”