She looked pleased. ‘I think perhaps you’re hungry,’ she said. ‘I’ll find you some food. My uncle’s in Derna again. There’s plenty to buy in Derna. Some of it comes from Tunisia and Morocco. He bribed a sergeant to sell him petrol for the car. He’ll be back before dark because the RAF will be over again to drop bombs on the harbour.’
‘Do they scare you?’
She shrugged. ‘È destino. It’s fate. Mostly they just sink the ships they’ve already sunk. Come.’
She led the way into a room at the back alongside the kitchen. On the mantelpiece was a family group photograph – ‘My cousin Ansaldo,’ she said. ‘When he was called to the colours’ – and on the wall a map of the Italian colonies of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica and the western border of Egypt. Small red, white and green flags had been marked on it, rubbed out and put in again.
‘What’s that?’ Caccia asked.
‘My war map,’ Rosalba said proudly. ‘Every unit in the Italian army. Some of them contained my boyfriends. But not many. Italian soldiers don’t make good boyfriends. They have no money. And most of them were captured in 1941, anyway.’
‘How about the Germans? You got them down, too?’
Her finger indicated small swastikas.
‘If they found that, they’d think you were a spy.’
She gestured, quite unperturbed. ‘Nobody comes in here. That German sergeant tried once but he got the floor cloth in his face.’
‘How did you find them all out?’
She shrugged. ‘Zuq’s the dispatching point for supplies, and soldiers talk. And when we have anything to drink they come here to drink it. There are also four brothels in Zuq and I know the girls. You’d be surprised what they’re told. Let’s sit outside. It’s cooler.’
The back of the bar faced a minute dusty patch where she’d planted flowers in small stone-enclosed circles. Red geraniums flared among the spiky leaves of cacti and there was another patch beneath a pergola where a vine gave shade to a rickety table and a long bench. Beyond, Caccia could see the dark shapes of trees and, beyond that still, white houses, the dome of the mosque and a glimpse of the indigo sea.
She poured the wine and a few moments later, he heard her clattering dishes and pans in the kitchen. A ginger cat rubbed against his leg and he lit a cigarette – by kind permission of Corporal Clutterbuck a British Players from Scarlatti’s dump – and sat back to enjoy himself. Almost before he was ready, she slapped a plate in front of him.
‘Spaghetti napolitano,’ she said. ‘There is no meat. But there is cheese.’
She banged a bowl of grated parmesan alongside it and produced another bottle of wine. ‘You’ll enjoy this, Arturo,’ she said. ‘Eat.’
The sun vanished in a flare of crimson and amber, streaking the blue-green sky with fiery sword-strokes. The shadows lengthened and the dusty patch at the back of the bar grew yellow in the lowering sun.
‘You’re not very busy here,’ Caccia said. By this time he had Rosalba on the bench with him and had backed her into the corner, one hand round her waist under her breast. She pushed it away occasionally but she wasn’t defending herself too vigorously.
‘Why not shut the shop?’ he suggested.
‘Now?’
‘Italian soldiers have no money to buy anything and you’ve nothing to sell, anyway. Nobody’ll come and bother us.’
‘My uncle will come. He’ll probably shoot you.’
‘I’m not scared.’
‘I am.’
He pushed her up against the wall. ‘How long will he be?’
‘He usually comes back after dark.’
‘We’ve plenty of time then.’
‘For what?’
‘You know for what.’
‘I think, like the German, Sergeant Schwartzheiss, you’re trying to get into my bed.’
‘Better me than him.’
‘Better nobody at all, I think,’ she said spiritedly. ‘I’ll allow into my bed only the man I’m going to marry.’ She paused. ‘On the other hand,’ she admitted, ‘you’re a handsome man, Arturo Caccia.’ She was studying him shrewdly, her mind working at top speed. ‘Perhaps—’ she said. Then she stopped.
‘Perhaps what?’
‘Perhaps—’ She stopped again and Caccia took it as a strong hint that he wouldn’t be unwelcome despite what she said.
Close to the kitchen there was a stone staircase lined with red tiles for easy cleaning, and he rose and pulled her towards it. She didn’t seem more than normally unwilling and he’d actually got her halfway up when they heard a car stop outside. She pushed him down again at once and into the kitchen.
‘It’s my uncle,’ she said. ‘He’s back.’
Barbieri appeared in the doorway, a sack over his shoulder. ‘Unlock the store shed,’ he said. ‘We’re loaded. Sausage. Pasta. Rice. Wine. Anisette. Dio, always anisette!’
‘Where did you get it?’ Rosalba asked.
‘Where do I always get it? The black market. Always I have to go to the black market. How else am I supposed to get supplies? Walk with them on my head like the Arab women? Perhaps I should wear a robe and a veil and worship Mohammed instead of the Lord Jesus Christ, son of the Virgin Mary.’ Barbieri flung his head back and started to wail in the manner of the muezzins in their high towers, ‘Lah illa Lah Mohammed rassoul Allah. There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His prophet.’ He suddenly noticed Caccia and stopped dead. His head swung to Rosalba. ‘Who’s this?’
‘This is Arturo Caccia, uncle,’ she said. ‘He came for a drink.’
‘And what else?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Then there must be something wrong with him. No young man visits a girl when she’s alone unless he’s after something other than a drink. Why isn’t he fighting the war?’
‘My day off,’ Caccia said.
‘You have days off?’ Barbieri’s eyebrows danced. ‘When Italy totters and the British are preparing to wipe us off the face of the earth?’
‘Oh, shut up,’ Rosalba said sullenly. ‘The British have been driven back.’
‘They’ll come again. The British always come again.’
‘The Germans will stop them.’
‘Always it is the Germans who will stop them!’ Barbieri slapped himself on the forehead. ‘Why don’t the Italians stop them?
