"We Do Not Have Crime Here"

     "Oh My God," yelled Dee, stumbling into the suitcase she'd left on the floor.  She'd flown
overnight from Miami to Venice, transferred to Naples, and taken a seventy-five-minute ferry ride to the island where she'd taken up residence.  "Where's my TV?"
     She darted like a chicken without a head around the living room/dinette/cooking space.  "It was right on this table when I left for the States.  And where's the cable box?"
     She dived under the tablecloth that hung from the TV table.  "Damn!  He got the computer, too!"
     Dee ventured upstairs to her bedroom.  Everything was still in place, but her clothes hung at odd angles in the closet.  They'd been slashed.
     Of Italian heritage and fluent in the language, Dee refused to be a pushover.  She dialed 1-1-2 for the Carabiniere (state police) on the island.
     "Carabiniere," someone answered.
     "I'd like to report a robbery in my home," Dee said in Italian.
     "Not possible.  There are no robberies on Ischia.  Everyone's door stays open."  The phone went dead.
     Dee came out of her apartment like a boxer out of her corner.  She went down the whitewashed steps to the street beneath her apartment and wound down to the marina.

     "Taxi," she yelled.
     The driver deposited her at the Carabiniere Station.  Dee explained what had happened and filed a report.  "We'll come in the morning," the officer said.  "This is a very serious charge - we do not have crime here."
     "And you've never heard of Mafia in Napoli, either," Dee said under her breath.
     Two twenty-year-olds appeared in uniform the next day.  They stood open-mouthed, staring at the closet where Dee's clothes hung in shreds.
     "There is no crime on Ischia," one said.
     "I know who did it," Dee said.  "I filed a report last winter.  He rents above me and put his cable dish on my terrace while I was in Florida.  I pulled it down when I came back and he told me I'd find my apartment gone this spring.  Check your files, you'll find my report. There was a witness."
     "I'm sorry, Senora, we have no proof."
     After they left, Dee spun on the heels of her Birkenstocks.  This time she told the taxi driver to drop her at the island's newspaper office.  She supplied the reporter with her police report and photos from her closet and TV table.  "I will not be intimidated," she said in her final statement that ran on page one.
     The following week, Dee had the creepy feeling someone was stalking her. She whipped around and snapped a photo with her phone.  The tenant who rented above her was in the photo.  She continued to the fruit stand to test melons.  When the alleged robber began yelling at her across the cherries, she snapped
another photo.  This time he was in snarling position.
     She called a Neapolitan lawyer who worked for the American Embassy.  "What happened next?" I said.
     "Nothing.  Italians talk and talk but they don't do anything.  The landlord's a strong-arm lawyer on the island.  Even the state police are afraid of retaliation.  It's standard practice to cable-poach, but that tenant never offered to pay me a dime and he put the dish up without my permission."
     At our hotel, one of the waiters called Charley a "Neapolitan at heart."  We'd taken it as a compliment till we found out the Neapolitan heart is made of straw.
   
     

A Dispute in Italy

     We left Barcelona overdosed on Spanish history, bizarre structures, tapas, crowds, Gaudi, and Miro. Next stop:  Naples.

     Over the years we have fallen in love with southern Italy.  Life is exuberant and loud.  Neapolitans are brash, grabbing life as it comes and squeezing tight, as evidenced by the antics of twosomes on scooters or in passionate embraces whenever the mood strikes.  Neapolitans have ruled and been ruled, many times. They know in the course of human events, cultures are fleeting.  The sea lies in front of them, with Vesuvius behind.

     Men gather to discuss world events, local problems, and familial disputes.  Their voices rise, as their hands move up and down in prayer position.  Sometimes they squeeze their fingers together, pointing inward, as if they'd burned themselves.  For hours they stand there talking and yelling, yet nothing seems to get resolved.

   
     The three-quarter-mile road to our hotel on the island of Ischia was under construction for eighteen months.  The hotel owner was in a dispute with his neighbor, who shares the driveway, as to who should pay to fix the road.  Meanwhile, guests could either walk up the hairpin turns high over the Bay of Naples or wait at a staging area for the hotel to retrieve them.

     Last year, we noticed stones from the wall along the driveway tumbling down the hillside. Walkers could become ghosts, swallowed by gaping voids that delineated the sides of the promontory. "This is a prestigious hotel and I don't understand why the owners can't negotiate a settlement," I said to Charley.  "They're a member of a chain that must demand inspections."

     "You'd think they'd have paid off the neighbor," Charley, the pragmatist, said.

     "There has been a dispute as to who owns the part that needs fixing," the hotel manager told us.  "They won't accept our offer."

     This year, a new rock wall appeared where the driveway had been disintegrating.  The neighbor constructed a ninety-degree angle where the property divided.  The walls create such a narrow turn that taxis can't make it through.  Unless they're in Lilliputian cars, hotel guests must wait for shuttles to bring them to the hotel.  I could hear the neighbor saying, "Gotcha!"