Free Human Cargo by Caroline Moorehead Page B

at last produced by the police; when its beam was cast toward the rock, not only could the boat itself be seen, tipped far over on its side and half underneath the water, but, to the horror of the onlookers, people could be spotted clinging to the rock.
    As Nene watched, first one, and then another, slipped beneath the waves. The thunder had stopped, and in the lulls between the crashing waves, he could hear cries coming from the reef. The Vice Questore from Agrigento appeared, took off his clothes, and swam out in his undershirt and pants to the wreck. When he returned to shore, he was able to tell the crowd that help was needed for at least a hundred people. Boats from the various naval services stationed at Porto Empedocle at last came in sight, and it was not long before other sodden, bedraggled, gasping Liberians were being helped into La Playa and given hot tea and blankets. Almost none of them would take off their sneakers, even though they were full of water, because it was there that they kept their money, saved up with such painful slowness for this one, illegal, dangerous journey to the shores of Europe. Their eyes, Nene remembers, were very red, bloodshot, almost like fire.
    The only one to take off his shoes was a portly, fair-skinned man with a large inflatable life jacket, whose pockets rather than his shoes were found to be bulging with dollar bills. He was assumed to be the
scafisto
, the trafficker, and the police led him to one side, where he sat in silence, refusing to answer any questions. Eventually taken to prison and repeatedly questioned, he began to talk, but then abruptly fell silent again and has remained silent ever since, because, say the police, he had been got at by the Mafia, who are known to run the network
of scafisti
along the shores of Tunisia. Some say he was Egyptian, others Libyan. Early on, he told a policeman that he was Palestinian, from Gaza, but when they questioned him about Gaza, he was vague.
    As for the
extracomunitari
, they were happy to talk, but only about the horrors of the shipwreck, the hours of pitching at sea, the fear, the lack of water and food, the nightmare moment when the boat hit the rock and began to sink; on the question of where they came from, and who owned the boat, and where they were going, they would say nothing at all. By six o’clock on Sunday morning, there was very little left for anyone to see. The boat had by now partly sunk to the bottom of the shallow bay. Realmonte returned to the closing days of its long hot summer.
    Early on Monday, the partly submerged boat was pulled to shore and a body was found on board. The police banged on the Sciortinos’ door and asked whether they had any plastic bags to cover it with. Vera was disgusted. She gave them a sheet, and the Sciortinos were upset to find that the police planned to leave the body there all day, lying in the sand just in front of the terrace, until the proper authorities could be persuaded to come to collect it later in the afternoon.
    But the episode was still not quite all over for Nene and Vera. At ten o’clock on Wednesday morning, a fine calm day when the tourists were all back on the beach, Vera saw a body floating in the water about twenty yards from the shore in front of the house. She called Nene, and together they stood at the water’s edge. A second body bobbed to the surface, not far from the first, and then a third. Over the next two hours, as they stood watching with horrified fascination,nine other bodies, bloated and purple, the skin flayed away by the sharp volcanic rock, shot like corks to the surface of the flat sea. From a distance the Sciortinos thought they looked rather like the tourists peacefully floating in the warm, still water. By then, the shore was once again crowded with onlookers, and the police sent frogmen to bring in the bodies and look for others. This was the worst part of the whole
naufragio
, and for several days neither one of them could sleep for the