The Wedding Officer

16

AFTER HIS carpeting by Major Heathcote, James was left in absolutely no doubt what was required of him, and he carried out his orders scrupulously. Troops were brought in each day to clear the Via Forcella of contraband. Miracles of all kind were ruthlessly suppressed, usually by the simple expedient Eric had proposed in the Duomo, namely producing a gun and waving it threateningly at the nearest clergyman. More stubborn manifestations of the miraculous sometimes required an arrest, and it was remarkable how often a statue that had been chatting, winking, sweating and so on became quite docile as soon as its earthly guardians were in jail. Meanwhile, a series of raids closing bars, brothels, restaurants and other unauthorized premises removed the black marketeers’ main outlets, and brought an end to the carnival atmosphere that had become such a feature of occupied Naples.

James himself led the raid that shut down Zi’Teresa’s. He felt a pang of guilt when he saw the reproach in the eyes of Angelo, the maître d’, but he forced himself to be businesslike.

“Here,” he told him, handing over a proclamation in English and Italian. “You must put this on your door.”

Angelo barely glanced at it. “This is a sad day.”

“An unfortunate necessity.”

“May I ask how long we must be closed for?”

“I suppose until the end of the occupation.”

“Then I congratulate you, Captain Gould. In all these years of war, Zi’Teresa’s has never closed, not once. You have done what the fascists, the Germans and the Allied bombers all failed to do. You have made me shut my doors to the people of Naples.”

“I’m sorry if it causes you any hardship,” James said stiffly.

“This isn’t about profit,” Angelo said quietly. “This is about our pride.”

Soldiers with bayonets were hidden in the back of every supply truck, with orders to chop down on the hands of anyone who tried to pilfer Allied goods. For three days the hospital was full of scugnizzi who had lost their fingers, before the urchins cottoned on that truck-robbing was no longer a good idea. Meanwhile, the penalty for prostitution or trading in stolen property was raised to ten years’ imprisonment. Notices on the roads into the city warned of the prevalence of venereal disease, and James personally delivered lectures on the symptoms and dangers of syphilis to audiences of exhausted soldiers just back from the front line. He quickly found that emphasizing the number of syphilitic prostitutes in Naples simply made his audiences cheer approvingly, but that a few horrific slides of diseased male members, provided by a contact in the medical corps, silenced even the most battle-hardened GI.

To a certain extent, all this was effective. The visible signs of decadence and corruption, always so cheerfully on display in Naples, vanished almost overnight. Streets that had been filled with troops on leave, ducking in and out of the bars while they made their choice among the local women, were now drabber, quieter places. Major Heathcote even went so far as to call James and Eric into his office to congratulate them.

“I’m not saying you’ve done a good job, mind you,” he said pointedly. “But at least this time you haven’t fucked up.”

However, the new regime was not actually as successful as it seemed. For one thing, James knew that the black market, although driven underground, had barely been inconvenienced. His informant Dr. Scottera told him with some pleasure that all James had succeeded in doing to the trade in penicillin was to raise the black market price by half. This meant that those who wished to obtain it had to engage in even more illegal activity in order to raise the necessary funds. Now that the brothels were off-limits, frontline troops, instead of peeling off quietly in ones or twos to find women as they had done previously, spent their leave in noisy, drunken groups, often releasing their pent-up testosterone in fights. Nor had there been much effect on the epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases. Despite the lectures, the Allies actually had more soldiers laid up with venereal disease than with battle wounds.

James was still working his way through the backlog of weddings, but the work was made faster now that he had adopted a policy of turning all the applicants down unless there was a glaring reason not to.

“And so far,” he told Eric, “I haven’t found one. Basically, you now have to be a nun to marry a British soldier.”

Eric screwed up his face. “How would that work, exactly?”

“Figuratively speaking.”

Eric sighed. “You know, James, I don’t think I like this.”

“Nor do I. But orders are orders.”

Violetta Cartenza, aged nineteen, was recommended for refusal on the basis of “sloppy housekeeping.” Serena Tivoloni, aged twenty, was “overly pert.” Rosetta Marli, twenty-four, was “incapable of sitting still.” Natalia Monfredo, nineteen, was “far too superstitious.” Martina Fontanelle sat demurely in front of him, answering his questions, but all the time an envelope stuffed with money sat on the table, apparently ignored by both of them. He left it there when he got up, and wrote on her file the single word “corrupt.”

Silvana Settimo, aged twenty, told James calmly and immediately that she was still a virgin. It was a trump card. If true, he could hardly claim that she was of bad character, let alone a prostitute. But something about her wide-eyed innocence rang a warning bell. He told her he would need to make some inquiries and went to see her fiancé, a cheery bombardier from London, who confirmed that they hadn’t slept together.

“We both want to wait until we’re married,” he told James. “Some of the other blokes think I’m mad not to sample the goods before, so to speak, but I know my mum wouldn’t approve. Call me old-fashioned, but that’s the way I am, and Silvana’s just the same.”

Still concerned, James sought out the medical officer who had provided the slides for his troop lectures.

“Is it possible to fake virginity?”

“Well enough to fool a husband on his wedding night, or well enough to fool a doctor?”

“Both.”

The doctor considered. “The former, possibly. What is it that’s bothering you about her?”

“I’m not sure.” He thought back to his own awkward half-conversations with Jane, and then the sudden frankness of her letter. “I suppose,” he said slowly, “it’s because she wasn’t particularly embarrassed.”

“Well, I’ll happily take a look at her if you’d like me to.”

Silvana agreed to the medical examination with good grace, and for a while James began to think he must have been wrong. But after the examination the doctor called him in.

“There’s her virginity,” he said, handing James a steel dish containing a small blob of waxy material about the size of a chestnut.

“Are you serious?”

“Watch.” The doctor took a scalpel and cut into the object. After a little resistance there was a sudden gush of dark blood.

“Candle wax, most probably,” the doctor suggested. “Mixed with oil to soften it, and then molded into the right shape.”

“Is the blood real?”

“Can’t be, or it would have clotted. I guess it can’t be too hard to fake blood, though.”

“Oh, they’re good at that here,” James assured him, thinking of the priests and their relics. “There’s quite a market for it. I wonder if it bubbles whenever she hears someone read the Bible, like San Gennaro’s?”

“Well, wherever she got it, I’m sure it didn’t come cheap.”

With Zi’Teresa’s and all the other restaurants closed, there was now no respite for James from Malloni’s cooking, which in turn meant there was no respite from tinned “Meat and Vegetables.”

“I say, Malloni, are you quite sure you’re a cook?” Horris asked. He was a recent addition to the section, Major Heathcote having decided that James had earned the right to some assistance.

“Of course. I was born with a knife in my hand,” Malloni said darkly. Which, James reflected later, was not really much of an answer.

The closure of the restaurants had been particularly hard on Jumbo Jeffries. Deprived of his high-fish diet, he was now dependent for his supercharged libido on lucky charms, and each time James saw him he seemed to be bedecked with yet another religious necklace, amulet or brooch, pressed on him by an impatient Elena. He hinted bleakly to James that he was not very keen about some of the demands being made of him of late.

“They do things English girls would never dream of doing,” he confided. “Some of it can be a real eye-opener, I can tell you. But then, dammit if you aren’t expected to turn around and do the same sort of thing back to them.”

James made what he hoped were sympathetic noises.

“The thing is,” Jumbo said wistfully, “Elena seems to have so much more time on her hands now. They’ve shut down the school where she teaches or something. At least when she was working it tired her out. Now she’s positively bursting with vim.”

“If you’ve had enough of it,” James suggested, “you could always give her the push.”

Jumbo stroked his mustache with a faraway look in his eye. “Easier said than done, old man. Easier said than done.”

They reached an understanding that on those rare occasions when Malloni was able to supplement their diet with tins of corned beef, Jumbo was to have extra helpings, since it was now firmly established throughout Naples that this particular dish was an aphrodisiac. On these evenings Jumbo sat alone, eating his food with an expression of fixed determination, hurrying off immediately afterward so as to be with his lover when the full force of the meal took effect.

One night he took James aside on his way out. “Gould. How do I say, ‘I really think that’s gone far enough, now’?”

“Something like—Penso che adesso dovremmo fermarci.”

“And how about, ‘I don’t mind watching, but I’d rather not join in’?”

“Non mi dispiace guardare ma preferisco non partecipare.”

“Thanks.” He nodded, and straightened his shoulders before marching out into the night. It seemed to James that Jumbo could hardly have looked more daunted if he had been entering enemy-occupied territory on one of his secret missions.

Despite the occasional setback, however, James was able to tell himself that he had at last got his district under a semblance of control. The backlog of paperwork he had inherited from his predecessor had been reduced to manageable proportions. The biscuit tin in the cupboard, once stuffed with small-denomination notes for the purposes of bribery and corruption, now contained only a collection of sharpened pencils. There was an appointment book, which Carlo and Enrico still did their best to ignore. He had even managed to obtain a single gray metal filing cabinet, of which he was secretly rather proud. Despite his limited resources, and the difficult conditions in which he had to work, James had been a success.

And yet as each day passed he felt increasingly that what he had been working so hard to achieve had not, in the end, been worth the effort. Like a teacher struggling to control a class of unruly schoolchildren, who managed to get their attention only to discover that he had nothing to say, James found himself at a bit of a loss. Stamping down on the black market had not made the ordinary Italian’s life any worse, but neither had it made it much better. Banning a few servicemen from marrying had not produced any great breakthrough at the front. He was conscious of feeling restless, almost bored. It was crazy: He often worked fourteen hours a day, so he couldn’t be bored, not in the usual sense. But when he passed a lemon tree in blossom, or caught the scent of some unfamiliar, exotic herb wafting through an open window, or heard a snatch of opera being sung behind a door, or even just when a shaft of Neapolitan sunlight suddenly fell across him as he worked, warming up his skin, he was aware of a strange sensation, like a sharp pang of hunger. Perhaps it was just hunger, he thought: Malloni’s unvarying diet of tinned rations was so monotonous that he was often unable to bring himself to eat. Not that he would have dreamt of complaining. Compared with the sacrifices so many others were making just then, his life was ridiculously cushy. It didn’t do to think about what you might be missing, not when there was a war on.