The Cross of Lazzaro Read online

  ‘Look,’ Henry said. ‘That dam wasn’t designed. It just grew. Nobody ever provided a proper means of letting the water out of it in case of trouble.’

  ‘It’s got plenty of discharge pipes.’

  ‘Twenty-four inches wide,’ Henry said contemptuously. ‘And at a guess mostly jammed with mud and rubbish. It wants a good spillway to stop it overflowing, or a decent outlet pipe or gate. There should be one in the stopper wall on the east side. At the other side of La Fortezza.’ He gestured towards the fang of rock that towered over Cadivescovo like a rose-pink spire in front of the flat faces of the Catena di Saga. ‘If there were it could be drained then, down the old stream bed, and come out by the Punta dei Fiori where it originally ran into the lake. That’d harm nobody. It could be done. It ought to be done. Now. There are only forty feet of water in it now. If it reaches sixty feet it’s only a question of time before it makes a cut. There was one once before while it was still in use. They had to repair it. I’ve seen the reports.’

  There was another small explosion in the water off Cadivescovo and they both turned and stared down.

  ‘I sometimes wish,’ Caporelli said gloomily, ‘that we had some of that pentolite up here. Then we could simply blow the gate out of the stopper wall altogether and take the weight of the water off the main wall – for good.’

  ‘That’s what you’ll have to do eventually,’ Henry said. He squinted again up at the ugly grey wall peeping round the shoulder of La Fortezza. For years it had mouldered away up there in the mountains, visited only by nature lovers and climbers on their way up to the rock faces of the Catena di Saga. And the years had not been kind to it, and behind it there was a lake two miles long and a mile wide in places, and here and there the water was a hundred feet deep.

  ‘I’m surprised someone hasn’t blown that gate out before,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘There seems to be no shortage of explosives these days round here among these – what are they called?’

  ‘Montanari – mountain men. “Andreas Hofer’s” terrorists.’

  ‘Call ’em what you like,’ Henry said unemotionally, uninterested in the politics of the area. ‘They’ve had a go at more than one hydro-electric plant, I know. I’ve read it in the papers. They even had a go at the Simplon Express. OK, why not this?’

  Caporelli smiled and spread his hands. ‘Because it was built by the Austrians,’ he explained quietly. ‘And the Montanari claim to be Austrians, too. And because it wouldn’t hold up any trains. Nobody would be inconvenienced. It’s better when you’re trying to convince someone that you’re a persecuted minority, to stop the traffic or cut the electric light. Draining a dam that ought to be drained anyway wouldn’t do a scrap of good.’

  There wasn’t much that Henry could say because Caporelli was right. His own train had been held up because someone had blown a span out of a bridge and the railway had had to lay on buses to take the passengers, Henry included, to the next station.

  ‘It wasn’t like this last year,’ he said.

  ‘There was no “Hofer” last year,’ Caporelli pointed out in a flat voice. ‘But it started years ago. In 1919. There were isolated incidents even then. It grew worse when the Fascisti settled the place with Southerners to Italianize it. Then the war gave the young men ideas and the old Tyrolean feeling revived. The signs the Germans had put up were retained and a German press was started. Now Tyrolean irredentism wants self-government.’

  ‘Will they get it?’

  Caporelli shook his head. ‘There’s too much Italian feeling here after all these years,’ he said. ‘So we get “Andreas Hofer” and bombs. Since he started operations, civil war’s come to the lake.’

  Henry nodded. The first thing he’d seen in the papers as he’d sat over his cold meat and salad at the Stettnerhof the night before had been a story of explosives stolen from a quarry on the Via Colleno and pictures of the inevitable note signed in the name of the Austrian patriot. There’d been road blocks outside the town as he’d arrived and queues of cars, and policemen searching boots and suitcases, and pushing through the buses to examine passports, and an atmosphere of tension ever since, as those who knew the methods of the Montanari and the mysterious ‘Andreas Hofer’ who led them waited for the inevitable bang.

  Caporelli was turning up the collar of his coat now, his face twisted in disgust at the weather. ‘Let’s go back to Cadivescovo,’ he suggested. ‘I’m hungry and it’s wet up here.’

  He glanced up at the sky. Vast thunderheads of clouds were butting against the mountain walls, rolling along their faces like great armies of grey soldiery.

  ‘It’s going to rain again,’ he said. ‘The forecast was rain. It’s been a bad spring. I expect it’ll be a bad summer. Get into the car, Doctor. I could do with a beer.’

  They walked back towards the big Alfa Romeo Caporelli drove, with the drizzle lifting into their faces as it blew from the northern tip of the lake.

  ‘Austrian rain,’ Caporelli said with a grin. ‘The rain and the tramontana come from Austria.’ He pointed towards the south. ‘The sun comes from there. The sun’s Italian.’

  It was approaching noon now and the larks were singing in the drizzle above the fields and the new wines that were starting in the vineyards towards the villages of Madonna del Piano and Trepiazze, whose yellow-tiled campaniles stuck out of the folds of the valley to the east. The sound of the bells hung in the air, trembling over the tombs of dead priests and forgotten soldiers, as heavy in the damp atmosphere as the boots of the forgotten armies that had tramped past the lake on the way south to Rome or north to Vienna.

  As Caporelli opened the car door for Henry, they noticed that the two boats on the surface of the lake had moved further towards the Punta dei Fiori and as they watched they seemed to up-anchor and move out towards the centre, in the direction of Monte Cano on the other side.

  ‘They’re going to let off another one,’ Caporelli said. ‘Wait a minute. I like to watch them. I like the simplicity of explosives. With explosives you can so easily remove so much that’s dangerous and ugly and make room for something new and graceful and of value.’

  They stood by the wall, staring down, while the thin mountain grass bent and quivered in front of them and the tops of the twisted pines and the acacias and wild laburnum on the slopes above Cadivescovo sprayed the fields with drops of water as the breeze shook the rain out of them. The heavy roofs of Cadivescovo reflected the eerie light that was coming through a break in the clouds as the watery sun appeared.

  The two boats had moved well into the lake away from the town now and seemed to huddle together with a cluster of smaller boats around them.

  ‘Any time now,’ Caporelli said.

  There was a group of people standing on the end of the jetty where the ferry boat came in, watching for the explosion, and a whole line of them along the esplanade. They’d be tourists, Henry knew, because Caporelli had said the locals had long since lost interest in the search for Arcuneum. They’d all be there with their heads down and their cameras focussed across the steely sheet of the lake, waiting for the eruption of the water.

  ‘There’s so much clay off the mountain in the mud,’ Caporelli said. ‘This cracks it. It can’t do much damage. The mud cushions the shock. Several bombs were dropped in the lake during the war. They were after Trepizano and they jettisoned them when they got into trouble so they could get back over the mountains. They never did much harm. Not even the mines. There’s one still in there somewhere. They were flying them from Sicily and dropping them in the Rhine. It was an aircraft that ditched. I hope they don’t set it off.’

  ‘It’d be the end of Bishop Lazzaro’s barge if they did,’ Henry observed.

  Caporelli chuckled. ‘They’ll never touch the barge,’ he said with confidence. ‘It’s under the mud, and mud protects wood. They say when they find it they’ll find Arcuneum. The fishermen used to say that the cross plucked at their nets. But no one ever believed them.’

  There seemed to
be a lot of activity on the boats now, and Caporelli leaned forward eagerly.

  ‘We’re off,’ he said, and as he spoke the water erupted just off Cadivescovo and seconds afterwards they heard the thud of the explosion. The water seemed to lift upwards in a bubble and fall back and Henry could just imagine all the cameras clicking away below. He could hear shouts down there, coming up through the rinsed air towards them, and the faint beat of the brass band still plugging away in the square, and he saw the boats begin to move inshore.

  But as they changed position, something happened that neither he nor Caporelli had expected – nor, judging by their behaviour, anyone else on the boats or the ferry jetty or among the crowd under the chestnuts along the lakeside.

  The sun, which had been trying all morning to break through, made it at last and a shaft of watery gold fell on the lake near the Punta dei Fiori, bringing the first sparkles to the water that the town had seen for days. As Henry turned to look at it, he saw the whole surface of the water towards the east heave as some vast underwater eruption forced it upwards. This was no minor detonation set off by the archaeologists in the boats. This was something more, and for a moment, with Caporelli’s words about the earthquake that had destroyed Arcuneum still in his ears, he thought that this was another subterranean upheaval.

  As the water rose slowly in a vast shining inverted bowl, broke apart and fell back in a shower of spray, with the sun picking up the atomized drops and turning them into rainbows, they heard the rumble of the explosion and felt the air shake around them as the shock wave beat back at the mountains.

  ‘The mine,’ Caporelli said. ‘Mamma mia, they’ve set off the mine!’

  The boats in the bay were bobbing and swaying now, their masts swinging backwards and forwards like pendulums as the waves that the explosion had set up flung them about like corks. From where they stood, the vast ripple looked a couple of fathoms high. It would roll right round the lake, tugging at the larches and the willows and the water lilies and the reeds at the Punta dei Fiori, and across to Trepizano on the other side, setting the spade-shaped, hoop-topped boats, that were peculiar to the district, rocking against the piles, and pushing the tourist pedalos higher up the beach towards the waterfront cafés.

  There was a great deal of hither and thither now along the shore and they could see a vast commotion among the tourists and sightseers along the front. Henry took the binoculars that Caporelli held out to him and he could see that the glass had fallen out of the windows of the Wolfhof, one of the hotels on the front, and the Stöckli Bar near the jetty, the first place that all the passengers from the boat visited when they arrived in Cadivescovo; and that there was a waiter standing outside in a white coat and apron with a group of bandsmen from the square in their red trousers and blue jackets staring at the damage. The crowd had suddenly grown more dense along the front and he could see people running like ants from the shops and offices along the shore to see what had happened.

  ‘Look!’

  Caporelli pointed and through the binoculars Henry saw fragments floating on the surface round the turbulent stretch of water where the mine had gone off.

  ‘They’ve found something,’ he said.

  ‘Look! Look!’

  Caporelli’s voice rose higher as he snatched the binoculars. But they didn’t need binoculars now. Right in the middle of the patch of sunlight they saw a few more fragments of what must have been wood break surface just to the east of where the mine had gone off and as they stared, straining to catch what they were, they saw something else bob up, shooting clean out of the water, as though its buoyancy had been increased by its having been held securely in the depths of the lake.

  It leapt up, like some great surging wild animal from the black bottom of the lake and, as it appeared, great gouts of water leapt up with it, so that it seemed to be alive. Then it fell backwards, flat on the surface with a smack they could hear even up the mountain, righted itself and finally floated upright, bobbing gently in the water.

  They heard a sound like a sigh from the people along the front, then Henry saw Caporelli, who, although he was a Catholic, could hardly have been called an ardent church-goer, crossing himself, his eyes wide and bright as he stared down at the lake. Surrounded by fragments of debris and a widening ripple that was fading fast on the calming water, a great blackened cross floated upright, majestic, catching the widening patch of sunlight that was spreading, as the clouds parted, across the surface of the lake.

  ‘Madonna!’ Caporelli said in a whisper. ‘It’s the Cross of Lazzaro! The mine must have broken it free from the barge! The fishermen were right. It was there all the time – just where they said it was.’

  Two

  By the time they reached the town there were already several boats out on the water, their passengers staring at that vast black cross that floated so serenely in the new sunshine, as though they daren’t approach too closely, as though they stood in awe of it and couldn’t summon up enough courage to take it in tow.

  ‘Why don’t they put a rope round it?’ Henry heard someone say as Caporelli stopped the car under the chestnuts on the fringe of the crowd.

  The speaker was an English tourist in a flowered shirt, standing on a seat with his camera, trying to change a spool of film in the mottled shadow under the trees. ‘The damn’ thing’ll sink if they don’t.’

  He fiddled with the winder of his camera, dropping his light-meter to the gravel in his haste, and swore in confusion as though afraid he’d be too late to get his picture. But he needn’t have worried, for the cross showed no signs of sinking. It floated there, serenely and magnificently upright, as though it were a symbol of the coming of the Lord.

  ‘Blast this bloody camera,’ the Englishman was saying, his hands all fingers and thumbs in the urgency of the moment. He looked again at the cross, as though to make sure it hadn’t been snatched away, and went on winding. ‘It must be fastened somehow to the bottom of the lake. An anchor or something.’

  The boats were edging more closely to the cross now, and Henry could see Father Anselmo, the old priest from the Church of Lazzaro di Colleno, on one of them, hanging on to a guy rope with one hand, the other hand outstretched to the cross as though he were blessing it.

  ‘Un miracolo! Un miracolo!’ Henry could hear the word all round him, murmured in an undertone. Women were on their knees by the lakeside, praying, and he kept seeing men crossing themselves. ‘Un miracolo!’

  ‘A miracle be damned,’ Caporelli said shortly, recovered from his surprise now and seemingly unmoved by the drama. ‘Anything as buoyant as wood would always shoot to the surface like that if it were suddenly released. It’s supposed to be about twenty metres deep just there.’

  Now that they were at shore level Henry saw the cross wasn’t as perfect as it had seemed to be through the binoculars when they were up on the mountain. Obviously there had been deterioration and what he had thought had been sharp teak edges now had a blurred look, as though erosion had taken place. But, all the same, the thousand microscopic organisms whose secretions could eat into the hardest granite, and all those worms which could tunnel happily through rock like a rat through cheese, had not had much effect on it. The ends of the cross-member were roughened as though time had taken its toll, but, considering the centuries, it was in a magnificent state, floating upright like a symbol of Christianity come again to a sick world as a warning. For fifteen hundred years it had been preserved under the mud until the shock wave from the mine had torn it loose.

  Nobody doubted that it was anything but the symbol and badge of office of Bishop Lazarro. The story of the drowned cleric and the lost monastery he had come to visit had been told round the shores of Lake Colleno from Trepizano to Cadivescovo and back for fifteen hundred years. Nobody had ever doubted that it was there but nobody had ever believed it would ever be seen again.

  And now, here it was, dramatically re-emerging from the darkness of fifteen centuries. Even as Henry stared at it he half-expe
cted it to melt away.

  He had never been particularly absorbed by archaeology but he knew about Ur and Sutton Hoo and Jericho and Pompeii; and about all the other lost cities that had been dug out; about the Mahdia wreck and Tutankhamen and the shrivelled body of the Tollund man who had been dug out of the peat bogs of Denmark. But, even so, staring at the serene cross out there on the water, rising above the surface of the lake like the sword Excalibur, with hardly a ripple round it now, he found it hard to believe he was looking at something which had so dramatically crossed fifteen centuries in a matter of seconds. Neither he nor anyone else in the crowd lining the shore would have been very surprised if Bishop Lazzaro himself – for all that he was known to be only a pile of mouldering bones safely interred in the crypt of the church that was named after him – had leapt to the surface of the lake alongside it, complete with his episcopal robes and bishop’s crook.

  The bigger of the two boats belonging to the archaeological group was approaching the cross now, edging gently through the fragments of blackened wreckage. They had been staring at the cross for some time now – ever since it had first emerged half an hour before – debating, it seemed, what to do about it.

  There was a big man in a bathing costume standing on the littered deck, his feet among the hose pipes and discarded aqualungs and coloured floats they used, with a heaving line in his hand.

  ‘Alois,’ Caporelli said. ‘Alois Stettner. My brother-in-law. Or he was, until my wife ran off with an American artist from Florence. His family lived in the Stettnerhof for three hundred years. They sold it to me after the war to pay their debts.’

  Henry had met Stettner with the archaeologists the night before in the bar – a big, smiling man he’d not noticed the previous year, full of arrogant self-assurance. Caporelli clearly didn’t like him very much, which wasn’t surprising, because it seemed he’d never had a regular job and only followed seasonal occupations that gave him enough to live on.