John Milton 00 - Tarantula (Novella) by Mark Dawson

Author:Mark Dawson [Dawson, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Goodreads: 23308671
Publisher: Unputdownable
Published: 2014-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

IT TOOK another two hours to reach the outskirts of Naples. Milton followed Antonietta’s instructions, tracing his way around the perimeter of the city towards the sea. He found the Corso San Giovanni and kept turning towards the sea until he found the Calata Porta di Massa and the port.

Milton drove onto the dock. He parked the bike and walked the rest of the way to the address he had been given. It was a rough and edgy place, with an atmosphere of incipient violence that put him on edge. He passed little groups of men, workers on their breaks, smoking, glaring at him with unmasked enmity. He followed the line of the wharf, counting down the various piers. The water down below looked diseased: ships emptied their bilge tanks and hosed down their holds, spraying out the detritus from whatever it was that they had carried. Yellow foam dripped into the water like poison. Diesel and petrol glistened on the surface, refracting the light in tiny rainbows. Pleasure craft tossed their trash overboard, and it was swept into the bay. The mess of garbage and pollution congealed into a hard scum that crusted up against the pilings and slid to and fro on the listless tide, all along the coastline. The water, in places, looked more like slime.

He kept walking. The wharf held thousands of multicoloured containers, avenues of crates and boxes like a tiny metallic city. Milton had imagined that the port would be noisy and full of life, but it was eerily quite. There were only a handful of longshoremen, slouching in the cabs of the cranes and trucks that ferried the freight around. The efficient quiet of a mechanised factory was everywhere.

The restaurant was very different to the one where he had met Ernesto the night before. That had been clean and tidy, cynically imbued with character to appeal to the tourists that passed up and down the coast. This place, though, was something else. It was a small room that had been filled with tables, their Formica tops stained and chipped, the chairs around them old and damaged so that the stuffing peeked out of rents in the leather, black grids of gaffer tape holding them together. It was the kind of place where the produce really was straight from the sea, just hours away from capture, and served with the lackadaisical attitude towards hygiene that guaranteed that the flavour would be good but that eating it was a game of Russian roulette, a guarantee of infection if you ate enough and your stomach was untrained. Milton liked the look of it. In a day when seafood always tasted the same, bland and boring, it was a risk he would have been prepared to take.

The other tables were full. There were tattooed longshoremen and stevedores, drinking beer and smoking roll-up cigarettes. The atmosphere was heavy with smoke and the smell of sweat and, as Milton pushed the glass door aside, they looked up at him with suspicious, unfriendly eyes.

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