As Gioia Tauro was to cocaine, so Naples was to arms. A vast proportion of Europe’s illicit weaponry flooded in daily through the city’s ports. It was here that Islamist jihadis sourced guns and explosives for their city slaughters, here that separatist groups armed themselves for their struggles, here that organised crime tooled up for its gang wars. The Camorra didn’t care who you were, just that you had cash and the right contacts – and Cesco was lucky enough to have both.
The only downside was that his contacts were the exact same people he’d fled Naples to get away from.
He had no number for Rosaria, so he headed for her apartment – a three-bed Vomero penthouse overlooking the Bay of Naples. The hill was so steep here that the block’s back entrance was actually on its third floor, reached across a short stub of footbridge from the road as it doubled back behind. He parked the Harley, rang the bell. An asthmatic woman answered. Rosaria had moved on the year before, she told him between her gasps. But she’d left a forwarding address in Secondigliano. Did he want it? He did not. He knew it all too well already.
He wound back down the hairpin hill to Chiaia then cut through the noisy tight alleys of the Spanish quarter, weaving between tourists and the weary traders pushing carts of bling. He passed Università then cut east to Piazza Nolana, named for the pair of medieval turrets that squatted like a pair of buttocks either side of the arsehole street behind. He rumbled along it then down the familiar ramp of the private parking garage. He parked in his old spot then nodded to an open-mouthed Fernando in his glass booth and made his way back up onto the street. The hookers were out as ever. He walked towards them. One of the older ones put on a smile and came to meet him. She recognised him and stopped dead. Her eyes went wide with alarm; she made a shooing motion with her hand to warn him to get out. He shook his head. ‘Call her,’ he said. ‘Tell her I’m back.’ Then he turned and made his way between the turrets out onto the piazza.
His old bar was open for business, he saw, but he had no desire to explain himself to his old boss and colleagues, or indeed to bring trouble down upon their heads, so he found himself a cold stone bench instead, and settled down to wait.
Carmen gazed deep into the grotto, trying to penetrate its darkness with her old childhood imagination, to see it as might a Visigoth king whose pagan childhood had only partly been trammelled by Christian doctrine. Alaric had most likely died of malaria, the Roman fever. If so, his court physicians might well have had him brought here, both for its fresh clean water and for the sanctuary it offered from the hot afternoon sun. And it was all too easy for her to see him choosing it as his last resting place, both for its beauty and tranquillity. ‘I think this is it,’ she said softly. ‘Heaven help me, but I do.’
‘On what evidence?’ asked Zara.
‘Scopece’s artefacts. Where else could they have come from?’
‘We need more than that to go on. Anyway, the Visigoths diverted the river, didn’t they? How on earth could anyone divert this?’
Carmen looked down again. ‘You couldn’t,’ she admitted. ‘Not once it was inside the mountain. But perhaps before. What was that place again? Caselle in Pittari? We need to go see it.’
Zara nodded. ‘I’ll call Dov.’
There was no signal inside or even outside the grotto. Instead, they found another rock staircase that zigzagged up the gorge to the town of Morigerati directly above. Zara texted Dov when they arrived. He replied that he was still tied up but that they should go have lunch. He’d come and collect them in an hour or so.
Morigerati was a little larger than Sicilì. But only a little. They wandered it for a while, looking for somewhere to eat. A cobbled alley was cordoned off as workmen laid a jigsaw of new stones, pounding them level in their wet cement with a sledgehammer and a wooden plank. They found a cafe with a pergola terrace where they lunched on chickpea and goat’s cheese tagliatelle, bowls of pistachio ice cream and coffees that arrived even as Dov texted to say he was five minutes out.
They settled up and went to meet him. Zara told him of their morning’s discoveries as they set off up a mountain pass to Caselle in Pittari. Carmen sat in the back and gazed out over forested hillsides down to the startling blue Tyrrhenian Sea. They were high enough here that the vineyards still wore their orange winter netting, the peaks their caps of ice. Low timber barriers protected the road from landslides, while from all sides came the growl and screech of chainsaws replenishing stocks of household fuel. They turned right at a junction along a road that lay across a narrow valley from Caselle in Pittari, a town of tall thin houses huddled tightly on a hilltop, like too many commuters crammed into a carriage. A sign alerted them to where the Bussento entered the mountain. They parked on the verge and took a moment to admire the view out over the countryside, including a lake shaped like the lid of a grand piano, penned behind a grey dam wall.
A rock staircase slashed the wooded hillside like a Zorro blade. The trees sang with wildlife as they set off down. An eagle perched on a bare branch squirted out an imperious jet of bright white shit in their direction. They crossed a footbridge over a deep sinkhole then emerged from the trees to be confronted by a toe-tingling wall of rock, as though a mountain had simply sheared in two to leave behind this vast and craggy cliff face, turned by the afternoon sunlight into a Cilento Rushmore.
Downwards they went, ever downwards. They heard rushing water ahead. A sign warned them of surges from the Lake Sabetta dam. Then they were beside the Bussento itself, gushing along the narrow valley floor before being swallowed by the ogreish mouth of a vast cavern, around which shrubs grew like misshapen teeth from every ledge and crevice. There were no helpful walkways here. They had to make their own way along the bank then across the river by leaping from boulder to boulder. They were almost there before Carmen realised Dov wasn’t with them. She glanced around and saw him wandering off upstream instead. A last look up. The cliff rose so sheer above her that she almost toppled over backwards. Three tiny black specks circled high in the sky above them – birds of prey waiting patiently for lunch. They entered the cave. It lacked the Gothic splendour of the grotto, far wider but not so tall. It bent away from the afternoon sunlight too, swiftly leaving them in such darkness that Zara took out her phone for its torch. Declarations of young love had been scratched into the rock, with other graffiti so worn by damp and time that it was hard to make them out at all.
The way grew too difficult for Zara, but Carmen borrowed her phone and pressed on, shimmying along a wall, leaping athletically from boulder to boulder. She spotted what looked like markings in the ceiling, but it was impossible to make them out from the cavern floor. The limestone was gaunt with clefts and fissures. Though cold and slippery, the wall was an easier climb than the one in her university gym. Lack of light was the greater problem. She kept pausing to map out her next section. She anchored herself to the wall with one hand then reached out Zara’s camera phone in the other, tapping out photographs with her finger, the flashes dazzling in the darkness.
‘What have you found?’ asked Zara.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Carmen. She flipped through the pictures she’d taken. It looked like a pair of outspread wings. ‘Maybe a bird of some kind.’
Dov appeared at the cavern mouth. He cupped his hands around his eyes as he peered into the darkness. ‘Hey!’ he called out. ‘Are you guys still in here?’
‘Yes,’ said Zara. ‘Why?’
‘I just got a text from the damned airline. A fuck-up with our flights. We need to deal with it right now. Just you, Zara. But out here, where there’s a signal.’
Zara looked up at Carmen. ‘Will you be okay?’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Carmen assured her.
‘Okay. I’ll only be a moment.’
Carmen watched her pick her way back along the bank to the cavern mouth. Then she and Dov vanished out of sight. Such a clumsy lie about their flights. Yet Zara had played along. All Carmen’s separate threads of doubt at once wove themselves into a single cloth. It had been Dov rather than some doppelgänger in the cafe that first morning, which surely meant that their later meeting at the gelateria had been planned, not chance. The way Zara had recoiled from Dov last night, implying they weren’t even lovers. And the Calabrian car-hire map beneath the seat that meant they’d flown in to Lamezia, making a lie of their story about a Sorrento wedding.
No. They were here for a different reason. They were here for the temple treasures.
And she was helping them.
One thing to realise; another to respond. Making unsupported accusations against Zara would only invite indignant denials that might ruin her own career before it had even started. She had no friends to turn to, no reputation, no qualifications of note. No place to stay except the cottage, no transport except the car. She couldn’t even speak the damned language. Baldassare was visiting tomorrow, yes, and would be disposed both to trust her and to help. But it was hardly his area and he was already carrying more than enough burdens for any one man.
For a moment, she resolved to put it from her mind, to pretend she hadn’t noticed anything amiss. But then, perversely, she remembered Cesco sitting beside her hospital bed spouting his pious bullshit about the duty they owed archaeology. It had meant nothing to him, of course, but it had to her. And it was a duty she owed still.
She climbed carefully back down from her ledge and picked her way along the wall then headed for the cavern mouth, holding Zara’s phone out in front of her, searching for a signal.