Free Dead and Alive by Hammond Innes

arising from the ashes of the old. A responsible section of the people, however, are determined that this shall not happen. But the mob is armed with weapons taken from the battlefields of your Italian campaign. Fortunately for Italy we still have our men of vision. They realise that it is necessary to have arms.The responsible section of the people cannot save the country without arms. You will be doing a great service to Italy and to your own country if you place your ship at our disposal.’
    “‘You say these arms will be profitable as a cargo?’ I said. ‘Who will pay?’
    “He explained hastily that there was not the slightest cause for alarm. Apparently some of the men with vision had also had the forethought to make plenty of money.
    “It was then that I told him what I thought of him. I picked the protesting little bastard up by his collar and hit him. I kept on hitting him, explaining to him about the war we’d fought in Italy and the blood we’d spilt because of Fascism. I was really mad. And then I threw him down the stairs. My landlady was most upset and I had to explain that the man was drunk.”
    “What was his name?” I asked Stuart.
    “That was what was so annoying,” he said. “I couldn’t remember it afterwards. I went for a walk along the Embankment. I tried to remember it then. But I couldn’t. Anyway, it was almost certain to be false. I gave his description to Scotland Yard and they promised to notify the Italian Government of what had occurred.”
    I thought about what Stuart had told me a lot that night as the ship slid across the dark unruffled waters beneath the stars. I was trying to adjust myself to the idea of an Italy controlled by the Italians. When I had last been in Naples, Civetavecchia, Piambino and Livorno, there had always been units of the British Navy, British and American M.P.s—the streets had been crowded with Allied troops. Now, of course, all that would be changed. The troops would have gone either to the Far East or back to Civvy Street or been absorbed by the armies of occupation in Germany.
    I had been in Rome at the opening of the trial of Caruso, the police chief who had handed over the political prisoners to the Germans to be shot in the Ardeatinecaves. I had seen the mob surge forward in the courtroom and tear Carreta, once governor of the Regina Coeli prison and chief witness for the prosecution, from the hands of the Carabinieri, had seen him beaten unconscious, thrown from the Ponte Umberto into the Tiber and beaten to death by oars. And I was suddenly glad of the weapons that Dugan had found in that locker.
    Next morning we were in the Gibraltar Straits and the steel of the deck was burning hot to the touch. There followed four days of blazing sun and calm sea before we raised the heat-hazed outline of the southern tip of Sardinia. Then a breeze sprang up and held until two days later we sighted the sugar loaf bulk of Vesuvius crouched behind the Bay of Naples.
    Boyd was on the bridge with me as we entered the Bay. The sky and sea were very blue. Bermuda rigged yachts heeled their white sails over against the backcloth of the city that climbed from the waterfront to the heights on which the Castello San Elmo stood. He pointed to the great sprawling bulk of Vesuvius. “Ever been up to have a look at the crater, Mr. Cunningham?” he asked.
    “No,” I said. “When I arrived in Naples for the first time the volcano had already been in eruption and it was impossible to go up.”
    He nodded. “I had two months in Naples,” he said. “I was driving for a dock company. We went up Vesuvius one Sunday from the toll road above Torre Annunziata. Cor! What a place! I ain’t ever seen anythink like it in all my life—an’ I bin ara’nd a bit. Get Dante and Michael Angelo to team up on a kid’s idea of Hell an’ it’d be a bleedin’ paradise compared with wot Vesuvius was. The sides was like a giant’s castle and when you’d got up them you was on a