The Garden of Angels

by David Hewson

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Part One

  The Woman in the Lagoon

  Part Two

  The Visitors

  Part Three

  Tangles in the Loom

  Part Four

  Traitors

  Part Five

  Blood on the Streets

  Part Six

  Ordinary Monsters

  Author’s Note

  THE GARDEN OF ANGELS

  David Hewson

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2021 by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.

  Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2021 by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  This eBook edition first published in 2021 by Severn House,

  an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.

  severnhouse.com

  Copyright © David Hewson, 2021

  All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of David Hewson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-5011-9 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78029-756-9 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0473-8 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This eBook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  Wenn die Generation die den Krieg überlebt hat nicht mehr da ist, wird sich zeigen ob wir aus der Geschichte gelernt haben.

  When the generation that survived the war is no longer with us, then we’ll find out whether we’ve learned from history.

  Angela Merkel, July 20, 2018

  PART ONE

  I must have been four or five. Nonno Paolo was reading a night-time story, the two of us alone in my little room on the third floor at the front. It was a history book. Something real, true, in which a man, an ancient king or an emperor, was at the end of his reign, assessing his achievements and his failures too, wondering what came next as he lay on his death bed.

  Was that a special kind of bed? the child me asked. One they kept for the occasion? Could you avoid dying altogether if you never slipped beneath its sheets?

  He used to read to me out of guilt I think. Usually Dad was on the road, in America or Japan, Russia, France, there to sell the famous velvet of the House of Uccello. That was what we, among the last of the traditional weavers of Venice, did. Mum had packed her bags and gone back to live with her parents in England. Venice, it seemed, was not to her taste. Any more than us. Before long she had a new husband and a new family too.

  No, Grandpa said. A death bed wasn’t something special. Just the place you found yourself when the time came. Any bed would do.

  Even now, so much later, I can summon up the brief world of childhood. The sounds beyond the windows of my neat little bedroom in the Palazzo Colombina. Vaporetti and motorboats, the gentle lapping of idle waves against crumbling brick and the rotting woodwork of our private jetty. Gulls squawked, pigeons swooped and flapped their airy wings. Sometimes I’d hear a gondolier sing a snatch of opera for the tourists. There was the familiar smell of the canal: diesel and chemical, the faintest whiff of decay behind. That last was always there.

  ‘Did someone die in my bed?’

  ‘It’s brand new, Nico!’

  ‘Will I die in it?’

  He laughed, reached out and stroked my hair. Nonno Paolo’s face was narrow and grey, marked by angular cheekbones that made me think he looked like a genial statue come to life. He had a kindly smile, though he often seemed exhausted from working seven days a week, tending to the affairs of our company and busy weaving outlets.

  ‘Of course not. This is a child’s bed. Soon you’ll grow and we’ll buy you another. There are lots of beds ahead of you in this life. Lots of excitement. Growing up in this busy world of ours will be such an adventure. You want an adventure don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘All boys want adventures.’

  ‘But I will die? One day?’

  He waved his hands in exasperation.

  ‘That moment’s so far off you needn’t worry about it. Just think of … now. This week. Saturday when Chiara will take you to the Lido. You can play on the sand. Go paddle. There’ll be ice cream. Other kids to play with.’

  Chiara Vecchi was a large and bustling woman who’d once worked for us as a weaver, then later, after my mother left, became an essential helpmate, fetching, cooking, ferrying me to school when no one else was around.

  ‘I don’t want you to die. Ever.’

  Grandpa closed the book.

  ‘You’re too tired for this.’

  ‘No … I want a story. Another one.’

  He bent down, kissed my forehead and ran his fingers through my hair.

  ‘All in good time, little boy.’ His genial face clouded over with an expression even a child like me could read. Doubt and perhaps regret. ‘Though whether you’ll thank me for the one I have in mind …’

  Before I could say another word he bent down and kissed me again. Then he went to the end of the bed, turned on the TV and flicked through the channels until he found a cartoon.

  June 1999. I was now a nervous, gangly fifteen-year-old, walking into a private room in the hospital of Giovanni e Paolo. It was my turn to sit by the bed. I so wanted to be elsewhere. On the beach at the Lido, listening to music, trying to keep up with my peers. Chasing girls if I could only work out how. My father was so good at that. He didn’t seem to have passed on the talent.

  More likely I’d be out with my cameras somewhere, taking pictures of the wild marshes by Torcello or the dunes of San Nicolò. Photography was my one hobby, an obsession almost. Grandpa had set me up with an account at the camera shop near San Giacomo dell’Orio. They loved me since I spent a fortune there on SLR bodies, lenses, film and developing. Not a cent of it down to me of course.

  All the walls were white. The corridors rang to echoing footsteps and quiet voices. The place reeked of an antiseptic medical smell that caught the back of my throat. Or perhaps that was just fear. On one side of the room two long windows looked out over Fondamente Nove and the lagoon. The placid water shone, swimming in the kind of heat you never normally got till late July. Heavy, humid, tiring, filled with buzzing, biting insects.

  The moment I entered, head down, visibly unenthusiastic I imagine, Nonno Paolo gestured at the chair beside the bed. I’d never seen him so frail. That alone – I was a child still even if I didn’t know it – mad
e me want to run from this brightly lit cell with its chemical stink and the insistent, rhythmic whirr of the fan in the ceiling.

  It was hard to imagine a world without him and, being the child I was, anything hard was to be avoided. To tell the truth I couldn’t begin to understand how the Uccello could possibly live without him overseeing the daily running of our palazzo and the small, male household it contained. He was our rock, a fixture I assumed would always be there. Except soon, they all said, my father, the nurses, the doctors and Paolo Uccello, the patriarch of one of Venice’s most famous fabric houses, would be gone.

  ‘I gather,’ he said, his voice frail but not without authority, ‘there’s been trouble at school.’

  The truth was I’d barely been a part of it. My sin was one of omission. I’d been suspended for a week, along with Maurizio Scamozzi, the ringleader, and two other boys. It wasn’t the first time Scamozzi had got us in trouble and frankly it was mostly a mix of curiosity and fear that made me go along with some of his stunts. Getting kicked out of school, even temporarily, was new though.

  ‘Sorry,’ was all I could manage.

  ‘What happened?’

  A boy had been bullied. I’d been there, watching. Not taking part. Not intervening either.

  ‘I know I should be punished,’ I said. ‘One week’s suspension—’

  ‘No matter.’ He swept the air with his right hand. It was such a feeble gesture for a man I’d always regarded as strong and healthy. ‘I wanted you to come and see me anyway. There’s something you need to read.’

  Nonno Paolo seemed the tallest man in the world when I was tiny. Age and illness had bent and greyed him. Now he lay beneath a single white sheet on the hospital bed, propped up by a couple of pillows, a book and a jug of water on the chest of drawers between him and the open window. Outside was the quiet stretch of Fondamente Nove that led eventually to the gigantic, mostly closed and abandoned boatyard of the Arsenale. Since it was Sunday the stretch of lagoon that ran over towards Murano was busy, rowers sculling across the mirrored surface, vaporetti working their way to and fro, back to the city, across to the Lido.

  ‘See that?’ he asked pointing at the window.

  The small cemetery island of San Michele sat between us and Murano, its walls decorated with castellated gothic ornaments. There was a church by the jetty to receive visitors, the living and the dead. The place looked like a cross between a castle and a giant’s tomb.

  ‘You’ve been ill before,’ I told him. ‘You’ll get better. We’ll have you home in a week or so. Dad told me. He—’

  ‘Your father told you no such thing. Soon they’ll be ferrying me in a casket across that water.’

  I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘This boy you were picking on. Who was he?’

  ‘I wasn’t picking on him. I was just there.’

  ‘And did nothing?’

  A vaporetto for the Lido cruised past the window. If it was summer and school was over I might be on it, all my beach things in a bag, joining some of the crowd from school headed for the sea. Enough money in my pocket to buy ice cream and drinks. We’d swim in the flat grey water of the Adriatic, play football, lie on a sunbed, maybe talk to one of the foreign girls staying at the hotels. I could close my eyes, let the sun beat down on my face, listen to the Walkman I got for Christmas. In the evening there were discos and I could usually persuade someone to buy me a beer. The music was so loud everything else went out of your head and I liked that. It seemed a part of being young.

  Or else I’d just stuff a few Nikon bodies and lenses in my camera bag and head off on my own into the wilder parts of the lagoon. Maybe the southern littoral strip this time of year. The wild beach of Ca’ Roman on Pellestrina. Or take the seasonal boat from Zattere, past the Cipriani Hotel across the lagoon to the beach resort at Alberoni.

  I liked being with the other boys. I enjoyed time on my own too. Perhaps that was the way I was brought up. Sometimes I’d wonder what it was like to have a brother or sister, a family around you, women, girls, noise, argument, life. Not just me, Dad and Nonno Paolo who always seemed to be engrossed in business. Our footsteps echoed round the stone floors and staircases of the Palazzo Colombina like the pitter patter of lonely ghosts. It might have been different if Mum had stayed and I’d had a younger brother or sister. I don’t know and Nonno Paolo always told me that it was pointless speculating about anything you couldn’t change. We were the Uccello, three generations of men, trapped together in that dusty palace on the Grand Canal. There was no escape, only the long wait to find out what came next.

  ‘I said I’m sorry. I know I should have stepped in.’

  ‘Who was he? The victim?’

  It was some teasing that got out of hand. Maurizio had started it, then his thuggish mate Scacchi had joined in. All I did was step back. I never expected it was going to get physical.

  ‘I’ve apologized.’

  ‘Who … was … he?’

  ‘An annoying little kid. American. Maurizio told him he didn’t belong here. He got mad at that. If he’d just walked away …’

  ‘People do get mad when you tell them they don’t belong.’

  ‘I didn’t touch him. I just watched.’

  ‘You think that absolves you, Nico? Just watching. Not … punching.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.’

  ‘What was he called? This American?’

  ‘Carmine. Maurizio says he’s one of the new Jews. The foreigners. They’re taking over the ghetto like it’s theirs.’

  He shuddered.

  ‘A Scamozzi cares about the ghetto?’

  ‘Maurizio says it’s for us. Italians. Not them.’

  ‘The Scamozzi have been here for centuries, Nico. They think they own everyone. Everything. The ghetto belongs to the Jews, doesn’t it? We made them live there, behind its walls. The first ghetto there ever was. A prison. Somewhere we could keep them, watch them, have them do our bidding, then send them back behind those walls. A yellow star or something on their chests.’

  I mumbled, ‘It’s not like that now.’

  The look I got then was one I don’t believe I’d ever seen before. It was almost as if there was a trace of hatred in it.

  ‘Your punishment—’

  ‘A week’s suspension.’

  ‘Which will include a history lesson.’ He reached over to the bedside cabinet and dragged open the drawer. ‘Look inside, boy. Here’s your homework.’

  There were five envelopes in there, fat, manila ones. Each numbered.

  He took out the first and passed it to me.

  ‘This was finished not long after your grandmother died. I’d written the first part in secret, you see. I never wanted her to know. Oh, and before you blame your Jewish schoolmate for landing you with this burden, best I say. It was coming your way in any case. This is a story I’ve been saving for you ever since you were little.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I wrote this for you. Only you.’

  ‘Why not Dad?’

  He seemed, for a second, bothered by that question. Almost guilty.

  ‘Because that’s the way it is. One day you’ll understand. Or so I hope. Though how long …’ He stopped and thought for a moment. ‘I can’t know everything. There are five parts to this tale. You’ll take this first one away, read it, then come back and we’ll talk about it tomorrow morning. After that you depart with the next. We do the same until the week is over. Don’t worry. We’ll be done with it all by Saturday. You can spend the weekend with your friends, on the beach, swimming, chasing skirt on the Lido, the way you should. I apologize for the interruption.’ Again that awkward look crossed his face. ‘It’s either now or never.’

  When I started to open the envelope, his shaky fingers, skin tight on sinew and bone, closed on mine.

  ‘Not here. Alone in your room back in the Colombina. Your father knows nothing of this. Promise me it stays that way until you’ve heard the whole story and I am go
ne from this world. Then the tale is yours to do with as you wish.’

  Of course I promised.

  ‘This is the untold story of your family. Our recent history. Mine mostly. No dark secret left unrevealed. No cruel deed. No betrayal. No …’ He coughed again and this time it went on and on. ‘No blood spilt without it leaves a stain.’

  History. Of all the subjects they threw at us in school I hated that the most. So dry, so boring, so distant.

  ‘You don’t want to hear it, do you?’

  ‘I think it might be best if Dad …’

  ‘It’s not for him! I said! It’s for you. No one else. I was born to tell this story. And you were born to hear it. Don’t worry. It’s quite an escapade. We start during the last war, which ended just fifty-four years ago. Fifty-four years. The blink of an eye for an old man like me. I can see it like it was yesterday. The people …’ His voice was breaking. ‘Those who won. Those who lost. Those who were trapped in the middle not quite knowing where they belonged.’ He tapped my shoulder. ‘Those who simply waited, watching, thinking the darkness and the pain and the sacrifice would never touch them if only they could stay in the shadows.’

  He was Nonno Paolo. Someone I loved as much as any on this earth. Of course I’d read it if he wanted. I’d do anything he asked.

  ‘If that’s what you want, Grandpa. I’m … flattered.’

  A chuckle again, grim this time.

  ‘You haven’t read it yet. You’ll soon know things that your own father could never guess at.’ He tapped his nose, smiled and I saw again the kindly figure who once sat over me in bed reading fairy tales about Pinocchio and the Befana. ‘Then you’ll have to decide what to do with them. Secrets between us, see. Dark ones, deep ones. Time is short, now, Nico. On your way.’

  As usual the Colombina was empty. Father was away on business again.

  I could have phoned up some school friend and asked them round to play table tennis in the games room. Or wandered round to the Rialto where they’d probably be setting up some music, a DJ, a band even, in the markets for the evening. Or take my camera down to Salute and photograph another sunset, a glorious ball of orange fire falling across the city rooftops.