by David Hewson
Garzone hated the fact but he could see his point.
‘Then what?’
‘I told you. I do nothing. Slowly. I smile and apologize and say I will do better. And all the while I delay, offer excuses, give people the chance to try escape if they wish. More than anything we behave like the craven underlings they think us. One day – one glorious day – release will come. It must.’
‘And how many of you will be left by then?’
It was a harsh question and he wished he’d never asked it. There was real pain on Aldo Diamante’s face at that moment.
The awkward interlude was broken by loud voices at the bar. German, a language neither man understood much at all. Three men in dark suits appeared to be throwing questions at the frightened woman behind the counter. After her faltering answers they stayed silent for a moment. Then one pointed at the best bottle of grappa and bellowed, ‘Drei!’
Her hands shook as she served them brimming glasses, more generous than any paying local would ever get. She didn’t dare ask them for money.
‘One day,’ Diamante repeated, then got up and walked smiling to the door, tipping his hat as he left.
The mist was gone. The sky above the glass roof of their conservatory workshop was wreathed in the cold, hard sun Paolo associated with the depths of winter, a time when Venice looked so beautiful that it might have been a painting. Once, before the war, his mother had taken him to an exhibition at the Accademia of work by an English artist, Turner, vague, shifting watercolours she loved so deeply she kept a print of one in the living room above the dining table. Boats in Front of the Dogana and Santa Maria della Salute. Painted just over a hundred years ago.
Paolo had liked it too but, being a picky child, had argued that there was something wrong with the view. It wasn’t accurate. The buildings featured, the panorama, could never have looked the way Turner had portrayed them.
‘Silly boy,’ she’d scolded him. ‘It’s art. Not a photograph. Something that lives in your head. Not in front of your eyes. Use your imagination for once.’
Thinking back that must have been six or seven years before, just as Mussolini was tightening his grip on Italy, locking up his enemies, placing restrictions on the Jews. His mother and father had recently moved to Castello from Dorsoduro. Money was tight. They were laying off weavers and that wasn’t something they enjoyed. And, it seems, they were Fascists too. That was when they began retreating into themselves, into the Giardino degli Angeli, withdrawing him from school, hiding behind their brick walls, struggling to make ends meet.
Soon they had only Chiara Vecchi to help them.
Imagination was a place he’d usually avoided. Particularly of late. There were corpses there, eyes open, looking at him.
He pushed the beater forward, moving the yarn, delivering the pattern set in the punch.
Si-dah-si-dah-si-dah-sichi-si-piu.
A minute or two in he caught Chiara’s eye. She looked happier now. The newcomer had quickly found that rhythm too. So Paolo bent forward, smiled at him and was warmed by the sudden grin he got in return. Vanni Artom was different, quite unlike the Venetian men he met out in Castello. There was none of the need for money and stature, the battle to be tougher, stronger than anyone else. Vanni possessed something gentle, almost feminine in his soft eyes, lazy grin, the easy way he fell in with what others wanted. His dark hair was so long he looked like one of Caravaggio’s boys, fey and mysterious. Working the loom he had to struggle to push it back from time to time.
I could hold your arms and guide you, Paolo told himself.
Si-dah-si-dah-si-dah-sichi-si-piu.
That was an idea that came out of his imagination. One more reason why he tried to avoid that habit. So often it offered up thoughts and images and desires he didn’t want. The others at school had noticed too, even when he was just eleven or so. It was one more reason he was glad to be out of there. One more reason perhaps why his parents liked to keep him hidden away in the Giardino degli Angeli, away from the harsh, cold world beyond its walls. He didn’t fit.
Three Jacquards working at regular speed made quite a racket. They weren’t to know that Mika Artom had watched them from the cracked-open door of the apartment. Then, when she was sure they were fully occupied with the work, gone to the back door, slunk out, found herself on the patio. There she soon found a way of escape round the brick wall, along the narrow stone edge all the way back into San Pietro.
A group of soldiers in grey German uniforms were gathered by the bridge, backs to her, staring at the white marble campanile of San Pietro, leaning slightly on its own by the side of the basilica.
Her heart started beating the way it always did when the Crucchi were around. Out of fear. Out of pure hate too.
She went the other way, into a web of alleys so winding and tangled she wondered if she’d ever find the other side.
Luca Alberti took a measured risk when he marched into Greta’s grubby bar in Castello. A wasted adventure that hadn’t produced a speck of useful information. So he went back to the old, tried ways of the job. Knocking on the doors of those he suspected were in league with the partisans and cowardly enough to talk. Taking his small band of informers to one side and reminding them that good tip-offs got them double their usual money, maybe even more. And if they came up with nothing useful then maybe he wouldn’t pay. Maybe he’d stop turning a blind eye to their other shady work, smuggling, stealing, extorting money from shopkeepers in return for black market goods they couldn’t get easily elsewhere.
Still it hadn’t worked. If the Artoms were in the city then no one on his books seemed to have any knowledge of them.
Oberg appeared too distracted by other matters to moan much about the lack of progress, though his underlings, Sachs and Sander, made caustic comments from time to time when Alberti returned to Ca’ Loretti empty-handed. He always smiled and said nothing in reply to their taunts. Sometimes he wondered whether it might not be worth staying to watch the fall of the city, whenever that came. He’d enjoy seeing that pair of loutish thugs put up against the wall. One reason he’d made that little speech in front of Trevisan in the dump in via Garibaldi was to push out an option. The idea that maybe he’d be open to playing both sides if the reward was there. In his heart Alberti remained a Venetian. He didn’t mind the Fascists running the city. The Crucchi were a different matter. They were no more welcome than any of the invaders of old, the French and the Austrians.
When the British or the Americans finally crossed the single bridge that connected the city to terraferma, a reckoning was coming. Men like Rocco Trevisan and his comrades might be hailing them as liberators. But pretty soon they’d be after revenge against those they hated. When that came it would take the same form the Crucchi delivered now. A merciless beating, a quick trial if you were lucky, maybe a hanging or a firing squad out in the street.
If he played both sides he might avoid that. Not run off to a distant, foreign country after all. But that was a hell of a risk. A couple of weeks before a report had passed his desk about a wanted partisan near Bolzano. Nineteen years old, a monk until he took up with the fighters, he’d escaped a raid and run off into the hills. Spent days trekking the mountains trying to find friendly territory, only to turn up in some primitive remote village where the locals thought he was a German spy and shot him on the spot.
There wasn’t much point in trying to convince Trevisan he was still a good guy at heart. That boat had sailed.
‘Want another coffee?’ the kid behind the counter in Marino asked.
‘No. You didn’t ask me how things are.’
The lad just blushed and looked scared.
‘That’s good, sonny,’ Alberti said. ‘You’re learning. Keep your mouth shut. Do nothing. That way you just might get out of this shit alive.’
A boat had turned up at the jetty by Ca’ Loretti, packed full of Germans. Uniforms, leather coats, smart caps, lots of medals. They loved their silverware and ribbons.
H
e watched them disembark with the clumsiness of people who hadn’t grown up around boats. They then formed a square around a single individual. Alberti wondered if they’d found someone, a captive, some poor idiot who was going to be taken into the cells the worst of the Crucchi kept out back for torture. But no. This man was short, maybe thirty-five or so, swarthy. Flabby face and a nose that made Alberti think straight away, You’re either a Jew or doing a damned good impersonation of one.
He wore an impeccable black overcoat that must have cost a fortune and a broad matching fedora with a wide brim and a shiny band in grey and silver. Everything about him spoke of money and power as the Germans marched the guy up the alley towards the sentries at the entrance.
Alberti stared as he went past. Faces were part of his job. Remembering them a skill he’d honed over the years. He’d seen that one before. On a report that had been sitting on Oberg’s desk when the Germans were out of the room.
There was the sound of boots on cobbles from up the alley. It was a bunch of German grunts escorting someone into the building who didn’t want to be there. Tall, stooped, dark-coated, long grey face.
Aldo Diamante. The man they’d put in charge of the city Jews.
He thought about the other face and the connection came up straight away. The photo had been on a report from Turin. He was the Jew hunter Oberg said was on his way. Salvatore Bruno.
‘Shit,’ he murmured, finishing his coffee. ‘Something’s up.’
It wasn’t simply boredom that led Mika Artom to slip out of Paolo Uccello’s home. There was something she’d been seeking ever since they nearly died with the rest of their cell as they sabotaged the railway line in the Vallagarina valley outside Rovereto. A cause. A need. A goal. The cold and plain apartment of a weaving family on the edge of Venice seemed a strange place to find it. But there the answer was.
She’d been rummaging through the living room while her brother and Chiara Vecchi worked the looms outside. The rattle and clatter they made along with Vanni’s occasional raucous laughter covered up her rifling through the drawers, the desk and the cupboards.
To begin with, she felt it was nothing more than an idle, maybe shameful attempt to peer behind the shell of their reticent young host. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. A clue to what made him hide away from everything behind high walls, a ruined garden, a conservatory turned into a feeble kind of factory. Almost a small fortress against life outside. It wasn’t the Crucchi he feared so much, she thought. It was the world, whatever it contained. The loss of his parents might explain it. But the Artoms had experienced more deaths than Paolo Uccello could imagine: family, friends, comrades in arms. Their loss fired her anger. The last thing she wanted was to closet herself away in a bare and draughty house at the edge of the lazy, lapping waters of the lagoon.
Money would be useful if they had to flee again suddenly. Not that she could find much of that beyond a few thousand lire stashed away in the desk drawer. A spare weapon? Just the thought made her laugh. So in the end she contented herself with poking around being nosy. A thief who’d no idea what she sought.
The desk was where his father had kept all his business papers, neatly stored in a grey cardboard box file labelled ‘Sales’ in the bottom drawer. There were perhaps forty documents there and the way the dates changed over the six years they covered demonstrated the failing health of the family trade. In the past four months there’d been only one inquiry from a potential customer. The city it came from immediately caught her eye: Turin. Then an address that made her blink and look at it twice to be sure. The Piazza delle Due Fontane. That took her straight back home and she felt her blood rising with all the memories. As a child, she and Vanni used to walk there with her parents until an oppressive block of white Fascist era buildings, all squares and oblongs, not the soft, worn stone of the old monuments she loved, rose from the dust of construction.
When the war came Mussolini’s security men took over the offices, with Germans along for ‘advice’. By now, or so she’d heard, the Gestapo occupied the entire square. It was from here the team that murdered their parents had emerged. She found it impossible to remember those cold, cruel marble blocks without seeing blood running down their façades. No one worked in Due Fontane without some connection to the Nazis.
And here was a letter sent from the place, commissioning work from Paolo Uccello’s father. Three small banners for a presentation, all identical, all ‘to be finished to the finest standards of the Venetian Republic of old and fit to be presented at a meeting of very important officers and citizens of the state’.
The name at the bottom made her shiver too: Salvatore Bruno. The Jew hunter. The man who’d sought out families across northern Italy and handed them over to the Germans to be shot or deported. Her own included.
The next letter, typed like all the others, began by saying the commission was to come from a new man, Ugo Leone. Signed by him too. Though it seemed obvious to her that the signature was the same. Why? Because Bruno was surely aware that his name was becoming well-known in partisan circles and to advertise his presence was only to invite trouble.
The most recent letter was brief and brought forward the deadline for delivery to the Hotel Gioconda by a few days, to the afternoon of December the fourth. The following Saturday. The message ended, too, with a clear and interesting threat.
There will be great and important men in attendance, Uccello. I must advise you it would be perilous to your reputation if not your person if you were to disappoint them and me.
So the hated Bruno and a handful of his Nazi and Black Brigades friends were coming to Venice for some kind of celebration. Probably business too since the capture of his fellow Jews was something the avaricious Bruno never shrank from. The man had made himself wealthy on the blood of others. There’d been at least two attempts on his life already, both failures ending in the vicious murders of the partisans who tried to kill him.
Third time lucky, Mika Artom thought. But for that she’d need new friends. And if it meant betraying the promise they’d made to Paolo Uccello … well, that was war.
It was nearly four. The light was almost gone. She and Vanni had visited Venice twice with her parents in their teens, back when they had money and a semblance of freedom. But that had been to the tourist parts: San Marco, the Rialto, the Basilica and the Doge’s Palace. They’d gone to the top of the campanile of San Giorgio Maggiore and stared out across the entire city and the lagoon. A lost summer’s day, captured in the memory like a coloured postcard filed for another time.
They never came anywhere near this part of Castello. Still she had the vaguest of addresses in her head from talking to a couple of partisans from a Veneto cell who’d joined them in the safe house outside Padua for a while. Via Garibaldi. A long, broad street of shops and cafes, once a canal, running all the way down to the main waterfront and St. Mark’s Basin.
Eventually, after many cul-de-sacs that ended in a stretch of black water, she emerged into something that looked, for the most part, like an ordinary city street. A few shoppers strolled along lugging bags. Back at the top, towards San Pietro, it had to be, a porter was pushing a trolley laden with wooden boxes, grunting as it bounced across the cobbles. A couple of German soldiers stood smoking by the iron gates that led to a small park, watching everyone and everything with an idle curiosity.
Don’t slow down. Always seem busy. Never look back when they stare at you but never look down either. Appear normal, always.
They’d all learned that. You had to if you didn’t want to get picked up and probably never come out alive.
The Venetians who’d spirited them out to the lagoon had talked of a cafe. A dump of a place near a static boat that sold vegetables by the water. Then they’d vanished back into the mountains to carry on fighting.
On a hunch she followed the porter with his boxes. He stopped by a grubby boat with a meagre selection of produce arranged for sale across the deck. Sure enough, there was a cafe to th
e side.
Mika went in and ordered a coffee. A bent old bird in a stained cotton apron stood behind the counter, a huge and battered pan of soup boiling away beside her. At the end of the bar sat a man and a woman, thirties, maybe early forties, both smoking, watching her much the way the Nazi grunts had out in the street. He seemed as hard as nails, gaunt, dark face, suspicious searching eyes. She had the shiniest red hair Mika Artom had ever seen and looked like she just came out of make-up for a movie.
There was a line the partisans in the mountains used when they tried to make contact in strange territory. She’d no idea if it would work here. No clue whether it had been compromised either, which always happened after a while.
‘Signora,’ the woman behind the counter said, putting a cup on the counter. ‘You’re a stranger here. I’ve not seen you before.’
‘True.’
‘Where are you from?’ the man demanded, then screwed out his cigarette butt on the tiled floor.
‘Turin. You?’
The woman with him was staring straight at her.
‘What’s someone from Turin doing here?’ she asked.
‘Sightseeing. Is this the place called Greta’s?’
‘What’s it to you?’ he asked.
‘I thought I might find a friend here. That’s all.’
Come out with it. You’ve got to.
Then the man along the bar got to his feet and what he said almost invited the words.
‘You sound like you’re lying.’
‘No, sir. Meglio una brutta verità che una bella bugia.’
Better an ugly truth than a beautiful lie.
They moved quickly, him and the woman. Before she could say or do a thing he was behind her, blocking the way back to the door, opening his jacket so she could see the pistol on his hip.
