Reggio di Calabria

Reggio di Calabria is a pivotal transit point in the novel: police records place Creasy’s departure from the city after his hospital recovery, while the Aero Club there provides the aircraft and pilot for his later approach to Sicily. The city thus connects the effort to trace him with the operation he undertakes in secret.

A trace in the investigation

Satta’s inquiries establish that Creasy left Reggio di Calabria by ferry for Malta six days after leaving the hospital. Immigration records contain no information that he returned to Italy. Satta then contacts his Maltese counterpart, George Zammit, who confirms Creasy’s arrival in Malta and reports that he departed by sea for Marseilles three weeks earlier. Reggio is therefore a documented stage in Creasy’s movements, but the records do not resolve his subsequent route back toward Italy.

The airfield and the flight

Later, Creasy directs Wally Wightman to the small airfield that is the headquarters of the Aero Club of Reggio di Calabria. Wally is to charter an aircraft to Trapani, on Sicily’s west coast; Paddy Collins understands that Creasy intends to fly in. The city’s airfield turns the earlier place-name in the police inquiry into a practical point of departure for the operation.

The charter pilot, Cesare Neri, is a conscientious former Air Force trainee who follows procedure. He has been on six-hour standby for two days and looks forward to staying in Trapani for a night out with friends. Once airborne, he notices that his Australian passenger seems nervous. Ten minutes later, the plane is climbing through 4,000 feet over the Strait of Messina, with Sicily ahead. Reggio di Calabria’s role in the episode is not as a destination but as the threshold from which Creasy’s passage toward the island begins.

Narrative significance

The city joins two forms of movement: the ferry departure that gives Satta a concrete lead, and the charter flight that carries Creasy toward the next stage of his plan. Its airfield makes the geography operational, linking the mainland to Sicily by a small aircraft rather than by the more visible routes followed in the investigation. Reggio di Calabria is consequently both a clue in the pursuit and a concealed point of entry into the action.