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Dead and Alive

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An ex-Lt. Commander, home from the war and in a nostalgic mood, yet feeling a foreigner in his own land, and the beached hulk of a landing craft, wrecked in a Cornish cove - these are the two basic ingredients of a book that takes the reader back into the seamy side of Italy in the aftermath of World War II.

But there is something else - a letter from the mother of a girl who has disappeared into the chaos of post-war Europe. Tracing her leads David Cunningham into the haunts of Naples racketeers, from the garish villas of the blackmarket kings to the filthy squalor of the water-front cafes, and tehnce to the islands of the Tyrrhenian Sea, haunt of men whose boats are armed and who deal in death.

"Find out what happened to Monique," the letter said. Pinned to it was the worn and faded photograph of a long legged girl with an oval face and eyes and mouth that had a suggestion of laughter. I stared at it for some time, seated on the half-completed bridge as the slanting rays of the dying sun threw the shadows of the ship onto the wet sands.

I was thinking of the dock at Naples, of the narrow dirty streets below the Castello San Elmo, of Terracina, Cassino, Formia, and all the other towns where the rubble had been ground fine in the jaws of war. This photograph might be the likeness of a beautiful girl - or the memory of a skeleton buried beneath a shattered building.