The Fallen (15 page)

“Thomas,” he said. His joints had stiffened and it took him a moment to straighten himself. “Is it time already for another of our visits?”

“No,
professore
,” Greaves said, coming into the room. “This isn’t an official call. I just thought I’d drop by and see how things were with you. When you weren’t in your office, I took a chance that you’d be here.”

“You know me too well, Thomas.” Parente motioned him to the railing. “Come, join me.”

Greaves came and stood beside him.

“Do you know,” Parente said, “that many of the frescoes that are depicted in the model no longer exist? They have been lost forever. The only example of them is here, on these tiny walls, and they are near-perfect replicas. It’s amazing, don’t you think?”

“You miss it, don’t you,
professore
,” said Greaves.

“Yes, very much, Thomas.” Parente stared longingly at the duplicate city. “I spent most of my life in the ruins. I began when I was just a young man, younger even than you. With my own hands I dug out Pompeii. I paid in blood and blisters and broken bones to see what was buried there.” Parente sighed and shook his head. “And you, Thomas,” he said, his tone brightening, “you have not even been there yet, have you?”

“Not yet,
professore
.”

“How can that be?”

“I suppose that I just haven’t gotten around to it.”

“That is not an excuse that I will accept.”

“Perhaps you would take me?”

“Oh, no,” Parente said, and shook his head vigorously. “Not me, Thomas. I don’t think I will go back.”

“You mean you won’t go back ever?”

“Why would I do that to myself? Every step I took there would remind me that I am one more step farther away from the person I used to be. No, Thomas, I would not do that—not even for you.”

They were interrupted then by Luisa, who came into the exhibit room carrying in her arms several inventory ledgers. She acknowledged Greaves with a half smile, then said to Parente, “I’ve been looking all over for you.” She held out the ledgers to him. “You left these behind in the Salone dell’Atlante. One of the workers found them.”

Parente took the books from her. He flipped through the pages of the topmost, then shook his head. “I did not leave them there. Perhaps it was Aldo.”

“Aldo?” Luisa said. “Please don’t tell me that you have him cataloguing pieces, Augusto.”

Parente shrugged. “What was I to do? He couldn’t carry packing straw. Besides, he knows this place almost as well as you and I. We’ll finish sooner with his help.”

“Some help—I haven’t seen him all day.”

“He hasn’t come in?” Parente said, unable to hide his concern.

Luisa scoffed. “He’s probably drunk somewhere.”

“Please don’t talk like that.”

“I’m sorry, Augusto.” She took the ledgers back from him and then said with a frown, “I just wish you had told me.”

He had always enjoyed the fieriness of her temper: it was quick to spark, and almost as quick to burn itself out again. Like a child’s tantrum, he thought. He gently touched her elbow, a conciliatory gesture to show her that he had been in the wrong.

“I was just looking at
il modello
with Thomas,” he said. “Do you know that he has not yet been to the ruins?” Now, with his other hand, he brought Greaves, who had been standing to the side during their brief disagreement, back into the sphere of their conversation. “I thought that since I’m no longer capable, either physically or mentally, perhaps you might take him.”

Luisa hesitated, and a slight flush came into her cheeks. “But there is still so much work that needs to be done here,” she said.

“After we are finished with the inventory, of course,” said Parente.

“Actually,” Greaves said, sounding almost apologetic, as if he were interrupting, “I came here to ask if I could take you somewhere, Signora Gennaro. To the Caffè Gambrinus, for a drink, or maybe for something to eat.”

Luisa’s face was now in full flush.

“Well, there you are,” said Parente, enjoying the moment of awkwardness between the two of them. “You can discuss your trip to Pompeii over a glass of wine and a plate of
struffoli
.”

“I can’t,” said Luisa.

“Why not?” Parente asked.

“I have to go to the
ospedale
.”

“You can miss one night.”

“It’s important, Augusto. You know that.”

“Luisa, really. One night is not going to make a difference.”

“No,” she said, and the note her voice struck was final.

“I’m sorry,” said Greaves, “but I don’t understand. What hospital?”

“The Ospedale del Santo Sepolcro,” Luisa said.

“Is there something wrong? Are you sick?”

“No, Thomas,” said Parente. “Luisa goes to the
ospedale
to help.”

“Really?” Greaves said. “What exactly do you do?”

Luisa took a breath and let it out slowly. “I help with the patients,”she said, her gaze turned slightly to the side. “The older ones. I try to make them comfortable. I change their bedding, give them water. Sometimes I clean them when they mess themselves.”

For a moment Greaves did not speak. He seemed to be considering what Luisa had told him. Then he nodded his head slowly. “May I come with you?” he said.

“I beg your pardon?” said Luisa, looking straight at him now.

“If it’s all right, I would like to go with you to the hospital. I would like to see what you do there. And then, afterwards, if you feel like it, we can go to the Gambrinus. And if you don’t feel like it, that’s fine too.”

She turned to Parente, her expression slightly panicked, and at that moment she seemed so very young to him.

“I think it might be good for Thomas to join you,” Parente said.

“Yes, then,” said Luisa. “All right.”

“How much did you pay the interpreter to lose the paperwork?”

“That’s the beauty of it,” said Abruzzi. “It didn’t cost me a thing. It’s funny sometimes what one man will do for another, what he will risk, out of respect.”

“Is that what you call it?”

Cioffi stood off to the side, unable to take his eyes from the thin pink line of the scar that rose like the sliver of a crescent moon from the left corner of the man’s mouth. When they’d come out onto the steps of Castel Capuano, he had recognized at once the face he’d seen reflected in the window of the butcher’s shop near the Ponte di Chiaia. This was Salvatore Varone’s man.

He seemed to Cioffi the sort of fellow who enjoyed intimidation and violence—the sort who, when he beat a man, or cut him, or shot a bullet into his knee or his heart or his head, took pleasure in a job well done.

Now Varone’s man looked at him. “It is good to see you again,
dottore
.”

Cioffi felt his knees weaken and his bowels loosen.

The man smiled, and then turned back to Abruzzi. “My boss wants to speak with you. He extends an invitation.”

“Really? An invitation?” Abruzzi glanced at Cioffi. “What do you say,
dottore
? Would you like to meet the infamous Salvatore Varone?”

“Not him,” said Varone’s man. “Just you.”

Abruzzi brushed the front of his jacket then plucked an invisible piece of lint from his lapel. “When did he have in mind for this meeting?”

“What’s wrong with right now?”

Abruzzi nodded. “Right now will be fine.”

In the nearest bed was an old woman. She lay on her side, her thin grey hair damp from fever and matted to her scalp. She moaned softly as the doctor pulled the blanket away. The stink came like a wave of heat from an opened oven.

“You see, she is shitting herself to death.” Benedetto Serao pointed then to her naked thigh, to the purple inflammation that clouded her skin like an awful birthmark. “After the rash, the fever worsens, the heart rate is weak and rapid. Then comes the diarrhea. Sometimes there is blood. We give her fluids, as best we can, but the reality is that the dehydration will likely kill her.”

The shock of what he had said registered on Greaves’s face.

“Don’t worry,
tenente
. She can’t hear me. She is delirious. She spends her days in fluctuating states of consciousness. This morning she had brief moments of lucidity, but right now she is not with us.”

Greaves moved the candle on the side table to see the woman better. Then he bent down and put his hand to her cheek. “She’s so hot.”

“There have been cases,” Serao said, “where the fever has not broken for six weeks.”

Greaves glanced up at him. “What does she need? What will help her?”

Serao let the blanket down. He smoothed it over the edge of the mattress. “She needs what we do not have. Antibiotics. Saline. A steady supply of fresh water. But we cannot even give her that. Our water supply is wholly unreliable, and what we are able to get is hardly potable. It must all be boiled.”

“But what about the Red Cross?” Greaves asked.

“They give us what they can. But it is not enough.”

“And the army? The Medical Corps?”

“They came once,” Serao said, and laughed disdainfully. “Doctors in gowns and masks. They wore caps on their heads. The wards were sprayed for lice and then they took pictures with the children. They have not been back since.”

“I don’t understand.”

Serao looked across the bed at Luisa. “What have you brought me
here?
L’ultimo uomo innocente
?” He turned back to Greaves. “There is little to understand. The old are of no matter to anyone. It is easier to take pictures with smiling children. Something nice to put into the newspaper so the people at home can feel better about what goes on here.”

Greaves stood up and followed him to the bed where an elderly man shivered uncontrollably beneath his thin blanket. Serao inspected the sores that covered his lips.

As they’d made their way through the wards of Ospedale del Santo Sepolcro, Greaves had felt as if they were descending through Dante’s circles: each brought a horror worse than the last. But this was by far the worst of them. It was like a dying room—for those who were brought here, there seemed little hope of ever leaving.

“Is there nothing that can be done?” he asked.

Serao shrugged. “Without the proper medicines, the best we can do is to try and make them comfortable and hope that they are strong enough to recover on their own.”

“And if they’re not?” said Greaves.

Serao glanced again at Luisa, who remained standing off to the side. Then he said matter-of-factly: “If they are not, then they will die. For some it comes quickly, for others they linger. That is the way it is. If I could do something more for them, I would. But I am a realist,
tenente
.”

“It just isn’t right.”

“Nothing ever is,” said Serao.

A nurse came rushing along the corridor and Serao went to speak to her. They huddled together out of earshot. Then he turned back to Greaves. “You must excuse me,
tenente
, but I am needed for triage.”

“What is it?” asked Greaves.

“There has been an incident at the American naval depot. The cooks set fire to the rubbish heap to keep away the foragers. I have several patients coming in with burns. I do not know how many.”

“Can I help?”

“Thank you, but we’ll manage.”

Serao came and shook Greaves’s hand, then he rushed away with the nurse. There was something in the way Luisa watched him as he hurried down the ward that caused a spark of jealousy in Greaves.

“He’s a good man,” he said.

“He is more than good,” said Luisa.

“You’re fond of him.”

“I admire him very much, yes.”

Greaves nodded, and then glanced about at the crowded cots. What he saw sickened him. He thought of the wards at 21st General Hospital, such clean, antiseptic spaces in comparison. Ospedale del Santo Sepolcro seemed like a place where diseases were born rather than cured.

“I wish there was something I could do,” he said.

“Do you really?” said Luisa.

He noted the doubt in her voice. “Yes, of course I do.”

She walked past him and went to the empty nurses’ station. There she dipped a cloth into a basin of water and brought it back to the bed where the old man lay. She held it to his blistered lips and he sucked, like a baby at his mother’s breast, and all at once Greaves felt like an interloper, an unwanted witness to an intimate act.

She looked back at him over her shoulder. “These people need more than sentiment. If you can give them nothing else, then there is no point in your being here.”

“I heard that you killed a priest when you were sixteen years old. Cut his throat and let him bleed to death on the altar.”

Varone continued to watch the young man as he admired the two-and-a-half-ton supply trucks with their drab paint and stencilled
markings that were parked at the back of the warehouse. Somehow he had expected that Abruzzi would be bigger. He had expected a physical presence. He had expected a wolf. What stood before him was a rabbit. He was small, his movements somewhat jumpy, almost nervous. He imagined that he might start easily and that he could no doubt move quite quickly should the situation call for it. He didn’t wonder that he preferred to use a knife.

“Sometimes,” Varone said, “things get exaggerated.”

“Really?” said Abruzzi, and already there was a hint of disappointment in his voice. “What happened, then?”

“I beat him with a pipe for buggering altar boys.”

Varone recalled how he had cornered the priest in his rectory and how the man begged to be let alone. But Varone dragged him into the middle of the floor and hit him about the arms and chest, swung hard into his stomach so that he lost his wind, levelled blows at his thighs and buttocks—struck all those parts of his body that would be covered by his cassock—and then left him tear-stained, with snot bubbling from his nose and painting his lips, muttering prayers of forgiveness.

“If it was me,” Abruzzi said, “I would have killed him.”

“Is that right?” said Varone.

“I would have cut his throat like a pig. And I’d have done it right on the front steps of the church, for everyone to see.”

“You don’t like priests, then?”

Abruzzi shook his head. “I don’t like showing mercy. It makes people think that you are weak.”