Cast the First Stone: A stunning wartime story Page 9

  Uneasy, Liana was aware that they were gazing at her with a strange intensity, as if unable to pull their eyes away. Why do they look at me as if they are seeing a ghost, she thought, clearing her throat nervously. Why are they staring so? Her heart thudded against her ribs, her hands felt clammy. Have they seen through my subterfuge? Surely not, it wasn’t possible, and anyway I have not done anything wrong.

  The need to find Raul was imperative. Firmly suppressing the rush of nervousness, she stood her ground. Using Eleanora’s name was not against any law that she knew of, and it had been the logical thing to do. The wishes of a marchesa would carry more weight than those of an ordinary peasant girl, and the need to find Raul overruled all other considerations. Hiding her fear she waited, resolute and dignified. Tall and erect, she gazed unflinchingly at the two men, giving nothing away.

  Nicholas was the first to find his voice. ‘Eleanora,’ he said on a note of incredulous astonishment.

  Startled, Liana gazed at the blond man. It was her turn to stare now. He sounded as if he knew her, as if he was pleased to see her. She was puzzled and more than a little apprehensive but she swallowed her fear. Raul, Raul, the beloved name hammered through her brain – she had to find him.

  The moment the tall, dark girl had walked into the office a door into Nicholas’s memory had swung open. Immediately the night of the bombing flickered back, every detail etched with precise clarity. He realized with surprise that his subconscious had stored the memory away, perfect and intact, ready to emerge at the touch of a trigger. And now here she was, and, even more amazingly, speaking English as if she conversed in the language every day of her life. Surprise registered; but so did a brief flicker of premonition. It seemed to Nicholas that his future flashed before him, a mixture of passionate love, conflict and tragedy, all confusingly mixed together. It unnerved him, and for a long moment he remained silent, uncertain of what to do or say next.

  He repeated her name, ‘Eleanora.’ How could he ever forget it? The single word he had heard her utter that terrible October night the previous year. Another long and awkward silence followed and Liana twisted her handbag nervously, clasping it to her chest. Her palpable nervousness helped Nicholas. He had to say something to put the poor girl at her ease. ‘I’m so glad you speak such good English, my dear,’ he said. ‘It makes life easier for me. My Italian is not as good as it should be.’

  ‘I had an English governess,’ said Liana, feeling some explanation was needed.

  Nicholas saw Charlie staring at him and knew he was thinking they really ought to be getting down to the business of this missing man she had called about. He pulled a sheaf of papers towards him. ‘Now, Eleanora,’ he said, ‘I hope I may call you that, what . . .’

  ‘I am always called Liana.’

  The words escaped from her lips before she could stop them. With a muffled gasp she froze, rigid with fear. Oh God, already she had spoiled everything by a moment of stupid carelessness. Why hadn’t she kept her mouth shut? Her name was supposed to be Eleanora. Now they would find out who she really was, dismiss her as an impostor, and Raul would never be found.

  Lowering her eyes and ostensibly searching in her handbag for a handkerchief, Liana thought rapidly. How could she explain? You can’t, said part of her brain, but I must, said another, for the sake of Raul and his child I must think of something. Swallowing hard, she looked up ready to begin a faltering explanation of the slip, but to her amazement the blond officer was smiling broadly.

  ‘Liana,’ he said thoughtfully, rolling the name experimentally on his tongue. ‘I must say I like it much better than the other mouthful of names you gave us just now. Much easier to remember.’ Liana heaved a sigh of relief. It was all right; she was going to find Raul after all. Or to be more precise, this friendly young officer was going to find him for her. Nicholas patted the chair at his side encouragingly, wanting more than ever to put this beautiful young woman at ease. ‘Why don’t you sit down, Liana? Tell us everything, right from the beginning, and how we can help.’

  Charlie said nothing; he sat and watched, silent and curious. So the beautiful young girl they had rescued had turned up again. Somehow he was not in the least bit surprised, although for the life of him he knew he would never be able to explain why. He looked at her carefully. He had forgotten the full impact of her strangely arresting beauty, although he was pretty certain that his captain had not. Yes, there was definitely something uncanny about her appearance at their office, as if it were meant to be. One thing was quite clear, however: although the two men might remember her extremely vividly, it was obvious from her puzzled expression that she did not recall them at all.

  Nicholas lost no time in reminding her, and gradually Liana relaxed, her initial worries draining away. ‘That is how I knew your name was Eleanora,’ he said finally, then added curiously, ‘but whatever were you doing in that awful part of town at night, and alone? It is not the sort of place for a girl like you. Why weren’t you safely out of harm’s way, up in your castello?’

  A natural question, but one not anticipated by Liana. It threw her into a panic, the muscles in her throat tightening with fright. How could she justify her presence in the slums of Naples? ‘Oh, I . . .’ How foolish she had been to think that just one lie would be enough. Inevitably one untruth led to another. I must be careful and convincing, she reminded herself as she sought for the right words. It was of vital importance that they should believe her. For a moment she hated herself for lying. She didn’t want to lie to this pleasant, fair-haired man before her or to his companion who had helped save her life. But the justification came almost immediately, dispelling all guilt. For Raul’s sake, and for the sake of his child, it was necessary. Hesitating only fractionally, Liana began again, surprised at the ease with which the glib words came to her. ‘I was taking a little food to a bedridden old woman who once worked for us. The poor thing lived there in the slums; she died that night in the bombing raid. Hers was the body next to mine.’

  Compassion showed in the steady gaze of Nicholas’s clear grey eyes, and Liana felt her heart contract with another guilty pang. Would he be so understanding if he knew what she had really been doing? I doubt it, she thought. In fact I know he would not. No-one will ever understand.

  In the next half-hour, Liana skilfully expanded her capacity for skating near the truth without actually revealing it. Instinct told her to stick as near to the facts as possible, that way she was less likely to make a mistake at a later date. Once she had her nervousness under control, she became aware that she held the two men captive in the palm of her hand. It gave her a heady sense of power, a power she didn’t hesitate to make full use of. She gave them a sketchy outline of her fictitious past – most of it, of course, Eleanora’s although she managed to weave in parts of her own, too. Her father, she told them, had been killed in Spain before the war, fighting against the Fascists he hated so much.

  ‘Afterwards my mother and I stayed on at the castello with Miss Rose, my English governess and teacher, until she, too, left for the safety of England. Then we were quite alone.’ She thought it prudent to say nothing at all about Eleanora or Don Luigi, even under the guise of other names. ‘Because of my father we were shunned by everyone, for fear of reprisals by the Black Shirts. They did come to the castello and took away almost everything of value, but after that they left us in peace.’

  ‘You poor things,’ said Nicholas with genuine sympathy. He thought of his mother and her friends. They were safe in the peaceful countryside of southern England. True they had been bombed and there was food rationing, and they grumbled about that. But they had no idea of what it was like to live in a country dominated by a Fascist dictatorship then occupied by a foreign power, and to lose the most basic of freedoms. Please, God, they never would.

  ‘Then in nineteen forty-two my mother was murdered.’ There was no need to act; Liana’s voice broke with genuine emotion as she recalled her mother’s harrowing death. Charlie and Nicholas
listened with growing horror as she recounted the events, then Charlie made some coffee and insisted she drink it.

  After a while, fortified by the coffee, she went on to tell how she survived alone, starving most of the time. She consoled herself that it was almost the truth – of the three of them left at the castello she had survived, and neither Don Luigi nor Eleanora would have lived as long as they had if it had not been for her. Then came the introduction of Raul, the purpose of her visit to the FS office. Raul, she told them, was a distant cousin, and had returned when the tattered remnants of Mussolini’s army had finally broken up. Liana had hastily decided it would be wiser to say that Raul was a cousin. It was a much more convincing reason for being so concerned for him. What could be more natural than trying to find one’s only living relative?

  ‘When Raul returned, and after the Allies landed, I was lucky enough to sell some jewellery I had managed to hide from the Fascists, and we started to eat a little better.’ She hung her head and looked at the two men from beneath a thick fringe of dark lashes, the tremulous smile on her lips expressly designed to melt their hearts. ‘I suppose I must confess we bought black-market food. You won’t arrest me, will you?’

  It was a shrewdly calculated statement. She knew perfectly well that she already had their sympathy. They would not arrest her. But sympathy was not enough. She needed to appeal to them, to persuade them to help her. Confessing everything abjectly, throwing her vulnerable femininity at their mercy would, she hoped, have the desired effect.

  The ruse worked perfectly. Nicholas and Charlie exchanged knowing smiles at her innocence. ‘If we arrested everyone who bought from the black market, we’d never have enough space in the prisons,’ said Nicholas. ‘Now let me see what we can do.’ He scanned the notes Charlie handed him. Every detail Liana had related was meticulously recorded. ‘From what you tell us, I would say the most likely cause for Raul’s disappearance is mistaken arrest. There is a lot of confusion, and the language barrier is always a problem. I notice Raul does not speak much English.’

  ‘Hardly any,’ said Liana, feeling more hopeful by the minute. The fact that he had echoed her own thoughts was very encouraging. She began to relax; Raul was as good as found.

  ‘We shall check the registers this very afternoon. Come back tomorrow and we should have some news for you.’ Nicholas rose and kissed her hand with old-world gallantry as a now beaming Liana departed.

  ‘Do you really want to find this Raul?’ asked Charlie pointedly. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer her to be all alone in the world so that she turned to lean on you?’

  Nicholas smiled. It was difficult to hide things from Charlie, the knowing old devil. ‘No, I don’t want to find him, not really,’ he answered. ‘I’d much prefer to keep her to myself. However, I can’t let her down so I shall do as I promised.’

  One week later Liana was almost beside herself with despair, although she was careful not to show her escalating fears to the two men. The knowledge of the baby, which she had promised to protect, had endowed her with an extra sense of pragmatic shrewdness, so when she presented herself at the FS office every day, she always presented a calm, hopeful exterior.

  ‘I know you will find him,’ she told Nicholas the last time he had apologized because of the lack of information. ‘I have every confidence in you.’ Then she had smiled her beautiful gentle smile, which made him feel sick to his stomach because he had achieved absolutely nothing, and left.

  Nicholas and Charlie had drawn blanks everywhere. There had been no sign of Raul in the prison register. Nevertheless, they had followed up every lead no matter how insubstantial – all to no avail. There was no sign of Raul Carducci, nor any indication that he had ever existed. Eventually there was no alternative, Nicholas had to decide to call a halt. They both had other work to do and couldn’t go on looking for just one man for ever.

  ‘God, Charlie, what shall I do?’ Nicholas sifted irritably through the mound of papers on his desk, as if he were hoping a clue would miraculously present itself. ‘She has to be told we’re going to give up.’

  ‘Well, sir, there’s no point in beating about the bush,’ said Charlie, practical as usual. ‘You’ll have to be blunt, and she will have to face up to the truth. Her cousin cannot be found, and what is probably more to the point, will never be found.’

  That afternoon Charlie slid out of the office when Liana arrived. He rarely shirked his duty, but that afternoon he decided Nicholas could have all the privileges of rank; besides, he didn’t want to see the pain in her eyes when she heard their verdict.

  ‘Coward,’ muttered Nicholas as Charlie passed Liana in the doorway. She looked more beautiful than ever in a loose-fitting, powder-blue dress which was a little too large for her. Her dark hair was coiled demurely into the nape of her lovely neck. Like a modern madonna, thought Charlie, then cursed himself for letting his thoughts become mawkishly sentimental.

  Nicholas had spent the morning practising different ways of broaching the subject but had not found it easy. Which ever way he put them, the words still sounded bald to the point of cruelty. Eventually he had decided that it would be better to get it over and done with as quickly as possible.

  Now she had actually arrived, he motioned Liana to sit on the chair by the desk, which she did, sitting with her back ramrod straight, clasping her handbag to her front as if for moral support. Nicholas looked up, intending to give a reassuring smile, but found he could not. He could not bear to look into her dark, imploring eyes, so he gazed instead at the neat pile of papers in front of him on the desk, and steeled himself. Then he said far more brusquely than he had ever intended. ‘In my opinion, and that of my colleagues, your cousin Raul Carducci is dead.’

  Liana half rose from the chair, her arm raised as if to beat off the words. Dead, dead, DEAD – the words shrieked in her head. She had been worried, she had been afraid, but her fear had been of the endless, time-consuming bureaucracy. Never for one moment had she seriously considered that Raul might be dead. Oh, God! Was the shadow of death really still with her? Liana shuddered, repulsing the thought. No, it could not be – not the Raul she knew, he was always so vital, so alive. He could not be dead; and she would not, could not give up, not now – Raul’s child was growing day by day and needed a father.

  ‘But you said it was possible for people to get lost in the Poggio Reale. It has happened before. Every day people turn up who are not registered. You said that. You told me!’

  The bleak note of desperation in her voice chilled Nicholas. This was going to be worse than he had thought. ‘If he were there, we would have found him by now,’ he said. He carried on quickly before she could interrupt. ‘Liana, I don’t have to explain to you about the Zona di Camorra or the camorristi. You know Naples is a dangerous place.’

  ‘But they are criminals. Raul wasn’t involved in crime,’ she cried. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You don’t have to be involved to get killed,’ said Nicholas sombrely. ‘All it needs is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. To be in the way. We’ve been to the carabinieri, the Pubblica Sicurezza. There is no information.’

  He didn’t mention that they hadn’t pursued the matter too thoroughly from either of those sources. The Allies had no wish to get drawn into the activities of the camorristi, and for his own part Nicholas knew with growing certainty, that if he found Raul, then he would lose Liana. The attraction he had felt at the beginning had become an obsession which he had taken care to hide, even from Charlie. He wanted her now more than he’d ever wanted any other woman. He had struggled to reconcile her needs with his own desires, but knew to his shame, that his judgement was clouded.

  Liana sat silently in front of the big desk. She knew it was true what Nicholas said about the Zona di Camorra. Those people, the camorristi, lived outside the law. Theirs was a secret world with their own warped form of justice and honour. Official enquiries always met a wall of silence because Omerta, the code of silence, reigned supreme. Mu
rders were never reported, and bodies only found when it suited some devious purpose to have them dumped in a conspicuous place. She had to accept the dreadful truth that Raul was dead. Her faith in Nicholas was absolute. If Nicholas had not been able to trace him then no-one would. The unthinkable had happened; Raul was dead. Liana remembered those fleeting nightmares she had sometimes had when she and Raul were together, and how she had thought then that without Raul life would be impossible, not worth living. The terrifying, bleak desolation of the nightmares filled her now. She could almost feel her life’s blood draining away until she was nothing, nothing but an empty shell masquerading as a living woman. Then she remembered the baby, Raul’s child. No, she was not quite dead and neither was he.

  ‘Oh, God, what shall I do now?’ Without thinking she had whispered her thoughts out loud.

  What should she do now? For a fleeting moment she thought of what other girls would do in her situation – have an abortion, get rid of the child while it was still not too late. But it was only a fleeting moment. She was not like other girls; and they did not carry Raul’s child – Raul’s child, a stream of obsessive possessiveness surged through her. Raul might be dead, but she had a part of him no-one else had, no-one else could ever have – his child. For Raul’s sake a solution had to be found. She could have the baby and try to rear it alone. No, that idea was rejected almost immediately. A woman alone, with no money to speak of and a child to rear – the idea was inconceivable; a life of poverty was not for Raul’s child. Briefly she considered returning to prostitution, but dismissed that idea as impracticable on two counts. Who would look after the baby while she worked? Plus the fact that the foreign soldiers, the only ones with any real money, would not be in Italy for ever, and then what? Reluctantly Liana came to the conclusion that only one positive and unpleasant fact was staring her in the face. At the moment, she could see no alternative for the future except a life of abject poverty.