Chapter One: The Woman on the Hill

On 14 September 2019, seventy-nine-year-old Tonino Ferraiuolo left Cetara harbor at ten o’clock in his fishing boat, the Santa Nunzia. He had fished these waters for sixty-one years. He told his wife he would be home by four. At six the next morning, a ferry found the Santa Nunzia drifting a mile off Capo d’Orso. Her engine was dead. Her lamp still burned. Tonino was gone. Four days later they found his body on the rocks below the cape.

The Coast Guard called it an accidental drowning; the magistrate agreed. His widow buried him on the hill above Cetara, with the sea in sight. She did not believe a word of it. Twenty months later, she sent a postcard to a dog.

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The house Vasnti rented for the summer stood above the old town of Salerno, at the top of a long flight of steps. From its terrace, the whole gulf lay below us. Westward, cliffs fell straight into the sea, little white towns clinging wherever the rock allowed them: Vietri, Cetara, Maiori, Minori. Amalfi and Positano waited beyond the headlands. By evening, lights came on along that dark coastline like a string of beads.

Eastward, the coast flattened past the cranes of Salerno’s port toward Paestum and its Greek temples. Straight ahead, nothing but sea. Blue all the way to the sky. On the terrace stood a lemon tree in a terracotta pot, as tall as me, its glossy leaves crowded with fruit. Some lemons were the size of softballs. After sunset, the white blossoms scented the whole terrace. Vasnti stood on that terrace on the first evening, the first of June, 2021, with a glass of wine in her hand and her straw hat pushed back on her head, and looked at all of it for a long while without saying a word.

Then she reached up into the lemon tree and picked one, a big yellow one, and held it to her nose, and closed her eyes. “Three months,” she said. “Three months.” “With a terrace. And a view. And lemons.” She opened her eyes and looked at me. “And no murders.” I said nothing. She looked at me for a second longer. Then she sighed, and put the lemon down on the table, and sat down in the canvas chair with her wine.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “you go and see that poor woman. And you take Dale. And then you come back and tell me everything, the way you promised. And then the day after tomorrow, Robert Hethcoat, you are taking me to the beach.” “Deal.” “I mean it.” “I know you do, darlin’.” Dale was lying in the shade of the lemon tree with his chin on his paws, watching the sea. He was thirteen that summer.

There was more white in his black face than there had been in Siena, around his eyes and down his muzzle, and he slept more, and he took the steps up to the house slower than he used to. But his ears still went up at every boat that crossed the bay. And when I said his name, his tail still thumped on the tiles.

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We had spent the winter in Tuscany, after Siena. In an old farmhouse in the hills south of the city, with a fire, the way Vasnti had wanted. Zia Pina had come to Sunday lunch twice, in a car Matteo drove very slowly, and told Vasnti all of her mother’s recipes, and none of the measurements. Dale had walked in the frost every morning in the vineyards and come home with his white coat full of burrs.

The postcard had stayed on the mantelpiece the whole winter. Propped against the clock. The picture of the seafront at Salerno, with its palm trees and its lamps, and on the back, in shaky blue capitals: I read about your dog in the newspaper. I am eighty years old. My husband was a fisherman. They say he drowned. He did not drown. I had written back in October. A letter, in my slow Italian, that Matteo had corrected for me.

I had said that I was sorry for her loss. I had said that I did not know if there was anything I could do. And I had said that my wife and I were coming to Salerno in June, for the summer, and that if she would like to tell me about her husband then, I would come and listen. She had written back in November. Two lines, in the same shaky blue capitals. Come in June. Bring the dog.

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Nunzia Ferraiuolo lived in a narrow pink house halfway up the hill in the old part of Salerno, on a lane of steps so steep that the houses on it seemed to be standing on each other’s shoulders. Washing hung across the lane from window to window. A man was sitting on a kitchen chair outside his front door, in his undershirt, with a radio. A cat lay on a step in the sun. Somewhere a woman was shouting at a child, and the child was shouting back, and both of them were laughing.

The door of the pink house was open. A bead curtain hung in it, against the flies. Before I could knock, the beads parted and a woman came through them. She was not what I had imagined. I suppose after Zia Pina I had imagined somebody small and fierce and dressed in black. Nunzia Ferraiuolo was big. Big all over, tall and wide and solid, like a fisherman’s wife ought to be, with strong brown forearms and a great round brown face and a mass of iron-gray curls tied up any old way with a red scarf.

She was wearing a flowered housecoat in orange and pink, and slippers, and a pair of reading glasses on a cord round her neck, and she had a wooden spoon in one hand. She smelled of garlic and tomatoes and frying fish. She looked at me. Then down at Dale. And then she let out a shout that must have been heard down at the harbor. “Il cane di Siena!” The man on the kitchen chair across the lane turned his radio down.

Two windows opened above us. A small boy came running down the steps and stopped dead and stared. “Madonna mia,” said Nunzia Ferraiuolo, in a voice like a ship’s horn. “Look at him. Look at him! He is old! Nobody told me he is old. In the newspaper he looks like a young dog. Look at his face, all white.” She came down off her doorstep in her slippers, and before I could say a word, she had dropped the wooden spoon on the step and got down on her knees on the hot stone of the lane, a big woman of eighty in a flowered housecoat, and taken Dale’s black and white face between her two big brown hands.

Dale let her. He stood there in the lane with his face in her hands and looked at her with his brown eyes. “You are the one,” she said to him, in Italian, quite quietly now. “You went under the city in Siena, in the dark, and found the silver that the Germans stole. I read it. I read it in the newspaper, and I cut it out, and I put it on my wall.” She looked at him. “My husband would have liked you.

He liked dogs. He had a dog on his boat for twenty years. A little brown one, called Pippo, who barked at the dolphins.” She took one hand off Dale’s face and wiped her eyes with the back of it. “Pippo died before Tonino. Tonino said it was the only time in his life he cried.” She let go of Dale and looked up at me. “And you are the American.” “Robert, signora. Robert Hethcoat.” “The Marine.” She looked me up and down.

“You are old too. Nobody told me that either.” She heaved herself up off her knees, with one hand on the doorframe, and picked up her wooden spoon. “Come in. Both of you. I have made the anchovies. Tonino’s way. You will eat, and then I will tell you how they killed my husband.”

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The house was one room downstairs, a kitchen and a living room together, crowded with furniture and pots and pans and plants and pictures. A big table with an oilcloth on it, in a pattern of lemons. A stove with four pots going. A television in the corner with the sound off, showing a game show. A picture of the Madonna over the door, and a picture of Padre Pio, and a picture of the football team of Salerno, in maroon shirts.

And on the wall above the table, in frames, dozens of photographs. Boats. Men on boats, holding up fish. A young woman in a white wedding dress with a thin dark young man in a suit too big for him, both of them laughing. A little brown dog sitting in the bow of a blue and white wooden boat. And in the middle of all of them, in a cheap gold frame, a cutting from a newspaper. The Corriere della Sera.

A photograph of a black and white dog sitting in a marble fountain at dawn, wet, with three scarves round his neck, and behind him, blurred, a man holding something gold that blazed in the sun. “There,” said Nunzia, pointing at it with the spoon. “You see? Next to Tonino.” She sat us down at the table and put a plate in front of me. Fried anchovies, small and silver and crisp, piled up in a heap, with lemon.

Fresh bread. A plate of tomatoes with oil and basil. A glass of wine from a bottle with no label. And she put a plate on the floor for Dale, too, with three anchovies on it, and looked at me. “He can have them?” “If I tell him he can.” “Tell him.” I told him. He ate them very politely, one at a time, and then licked the plate, and then lay down on the tiles under the table with his chin on my boot.

Nunzia watched him do it. Then she sat down across the table from me, heavily, and folded her big brown arms on the oilcloth, and looked at me. “Eat,” she said. “And listen.”

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Tonino Ferraiuolo had been a fisherman since he was eleven years old. In Cetara, the village along the coast where he was born, which is a fishing village, the last real one left on the Amalfi coast, she said, where the men still go out at night in the old way. His father had been a fisherman, and his grandfather. They fished for anchovies, mostly. In the summer, at night, with lamps.

Lampare. Big bright lamps on the front of the boats, shining down into the dark water, and the anchovies come up to the light in great silver clouds, and the men put the net round them. “Sixty-one years,” said Nunzia. “Every summer night. Even when he was seventy-five, seventy- eight. His sons told him, Papà, stop, you are too old, let us do it. He said, I will stop when the sea tells me to stop.” She shook her head.

“He went alone, at the end. In his own little boat. The Santa Nunzia.” Her mouth twitched. “He named it for me. In 1965. He said, so I will always come home.” She was quiet for a while. On the television in the corner, a man in a shiny suit was shouting silently at a woman who had won something. “In the summer of 2019,” said Nunzia, “he started to go out to Capo d’Orso.” “What’s at Capo d’Orso?” “Nothing,” she said.

“That is the point. Nothing. Rocks, and a lighthouse, and deep water. No fish. Not the kind he wanted. The fishermen of Cetara do not go there, not at night. Because of the ship.” “What ship?” She looked at me. “In the war,” she said, “in 1943, in September, the Americans came. To Salerno. With the English. Thousands of ships. You know this? You are a Marine. You must know this.” “I know it.” I did.

Every Marine knows the landings. Salerno, September 1943. Operation Avalanche. The Allies came ashore on the beaches south of the city, and the Germans were waiting in the hills, and for a week it was very close to a disaster. “Before they came,” said Nunzia, “the American planes came first. Bombing. The port, the railway, the ships in the gulf. And there was an Italian ship, a cargo ship, that was carrying ammunition for the Germans.

Shells, mines, bombs. Everything. It was going to Naples. The planes found it off Capo d’Orso, at night, and sank it.” She spread her hands. “It is still there. On the bottom. Very deep. Fifty, sixty meters. The Orsolina, it was called. My father saw it burn, from Cetara, when he was a boy. He said it burned all night and then it went down, and in the morning there were dead men on the beach.” She crossed herself.

“So the fishermen of Cetara do not fish over the Orsolina. It tears the nets. And they say it is bad luck. They say at night, sometimes, you can see lights on the water above it. The ghosts of the sailors, looking for the way home.” “But Tonino went.” “Tonino went.” She nodded. “All that summer. Three, four times. He would come home and not say where he had been. I smelled it on him.

Not fish. Diesel. Another boat’s diesel. And once there was oil on his hands, black, not from our engine.” She looked at me hard. “Sixty years I am married to him. I know every smell he has.” “Did you ask him?” “Of course I asked him.” She almost laughed. “I am a Salernitana. Of course I asked him. He said, Nunzia, I am an old man, let me have my secrets.” She was quiet. “And then one night, at the end of August, he came home at three in the morning and he sat in that chair, where you are sitting now, and he did not go to bed.

He sat there until it was light. And in the morning he said to me, very quietly, Nunzia, I have seen the ship of the dead men lit up.” The kitchen was very still. “What did he mean?” “That is what I asked him.” She looked at the photographs on the wall. At the young man in the suit too big for him. “He said, there are lights on the water over the Orsolina, at night. Not ghosts. A boat.

A big black rubber boat, with no lights showing, except one, a red one, pointing down into the water. And men in the water. Divers. With lamps. Going down. Coming up.” She turned back to me. “He said, they are bringing something up from the dead ship, Nunzia. Every week. And whatever it is, it is not fish.” “Did he tell anyone? The Coast Guard? The police?” “He told the Coast Guard,” said Nunzia.

“In Salerno. At the beginning of September. He went himself, in his good shirt. He told a man there everything. The black boat. The divers. The red light.” She looked at me steadily. “Ten days later, he was dead.”

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I sat at that table with the anchovies going cold on my plate, and thought about it. “Signora,” I said. “The Coast Guard said he fell overboard.” “The Coast Guard,” said Nunzia, “said he was an old man alone in a boat at night, and he stood up to pee over the side, as old men do, and he lost his balance, and the water was cold, and his heart stopped.” Her face had gone very hard.

“They said it with a straight face. To me. His wife. In my own kitchen.” “Why don’t you believe it?” She looked at me. Then she got up from the table, heavily, and went to a drawer in the dresser by the stove, and took something out of it, and came back, and sat down, and put it on the oilcloth between us. It was a photograph. A new one, printed on cheap paper. Of a pair of hands.

An old man’s hands, lying on a white sheet. Brown, and knotted, and scarred. And around both wrists, a ring of marks. Dark red. Raw. Like rope burns. “I made the undertaker take that,” said Nunzia quietly. “Before they closed the box. I made him. He did not want to.” She put her finger on the photograph, on the marks around the wrists. “Tonino was tied, signore. Before he went in the water.

Somebody tied his hands. With rope. And he fought it.” She took her finger away. “I showed this to the Coast Guard. They said it was from the nets. From his own ropes, on his own boat. When he fell. They said he got tangled.” She shook her head. “Sixty-one years he worked with ropes. He did not get tangled.” “And the boat? The Santa Nunzia?” “They found it drifting off the Capo d’Orso.

With the engine off. With the lamp still burning.” She looked at me. “And the anchor rope cut. With a knife. A clean cut. Not frayed. Cut.” She put her big hands flat on the table. “Tonino never cut an anchor rope in his life. You do not cut your anchor rope, signore. It is your life. It is the only thing between you and the sea.”

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There was one more thing. She saved it for last. I think she had been deciding all through lunch whether to show it to me, the way Zia Pina had decided about the gown. She went upstairs for it. I heard her moving around up there, slow and heavy, opening a cupboard. When she came down she had a biscuit tin, an old one, red, with a picture of the Bay of Naples on the lid. She put it on the table and opened it.

Inside, on a nest of cotton wool, there was a piece of metal. It was about the size of my fist. Brass, gone green and black, encrusted with little white shells and dark rough stuff from the sea. Roughly the shape of a cone, or a cap, with threads cut into the bottom of it for screwing into something. And on the side, under the crust, letters, and a number. Stamped into the brass.

Very small. “He brought this home,” said Nunzia. “The last week. In August. He found it in his net. Off Capo d’Orso, near the dead ship. He was going to give it to the Coast Guard. To show them.” Her mouth went tight. “He forgot. He went without it. He left it on that shelf.” She pointed at the shelf above the stove. “Afterward, I put it in this tin. I did not know what else to do with it.” I did not touch it.

I looked at it. I had seen things like it before. In the Corps. On ranges, in classrooms, in a few places that were not classrooms. The nose fuse from an artillery shell. Old. Very old. And the stamped number on the side was a date. 1942. Under the table, against my boot, I felt Dale move. He had been asleep, or near it. Now he was not. He came out from under the table slowly, past my knees, and stood up beside my chair, and put his nose up to the edge of the oilcloth.

Toward the tin. He breathed. He breathed for a long while, his nostrils working, his black ears up. Then he sat down on the tiles beside my chair, and looked up at the tin on the table, and did not move. Nunzia looked down at him. Then at me. “What is he doing?” “He’s telling me something,” I said. “What?” I looked at the old brass fuse in its nest of cotton wool, with the shells growing on it and the date stamped into its side.

A thing that had lain on the bottom of the Gulf of Salerno since a night in 1943 when the American planes came. “That it’s not just old,” I said slowly. “Old explosive doesn’t smell like much, after eighty years in the sea. It’s wet. It’s dead. A dog like him might not even bother with it.” I looked at Dale, sitting very straight beside my chair, staring at the tin. “But somebody’s touched this.

Recently. Before your husband pulled it out of his net. Somebody’s handled it, with hands that had been handling explosive. Fresh explosive.” I looked at Nunzia. “Somebody who’d been working on those shells, signora. Opening them up. Taking out what’s inside.” She sat very still across the table from me, with her big brown hands flat on the oilcloth with its pattern of lemons. “So it was not ghosts,” she said.

“No, signora. It wasn’t ghosts.” She looked up at the photograph on the wall. The young man in the suit too big for him, laughing, with his bride. “Tonino,” she said softly. “You were right. You old fool. You were right.” Then she looked back at me, and her big round face was not soft at all anymore. “So,” she said. “Now you know. What are you going to do?” I looked at Dale. He had turned his head from the tin, and was looking at me.

Waiting. I thought about Vasnti on the terrace with her lemon. Three months. No murders. “I’m going to go to Cetara,” I said. “And I’m going to need a boat.” Nunzia Ferraiuolo smiled for the first time. It was a big smile, like everything else about her, and it lit up her whole broad face. “My grandson has a boat,” she said. “He is a fool, like his grandfather. He will take you.”