by David Hewson
She hadn’t taken her own gun with her. Which was perhaps stupid. Or wise. You never knew till later.
The crone from the bar was in the shadows at the end, pushing open an old door painted glossy red.
‘Move,’ the man ordered, dragging her towards the dark. ‘Move now.’
Hauptscharführer Oberg’s office was crowded for once. Germans in uniform. Ones who outranked his boss judging by the ribbons and metal shining on their chests. Sachs and Sander were on their feet nodding vigorously as they spoke to some of the newcomers, creeps as always.
‘Oh look,’ Sachs cried as Alberti entered. ‘Our little Venetian pet’s arrived. Come. We’re toasting one of your countrymen who does serve a purpose.’
‘Whatever you say,’ he replied with a quick smile.
The visiting Crucchi didn’t even bother to give their names. Only the information that they’d come directly from headquarters in Salò and would soon be travelling on to Trieste.
The old doctor Diamante sat in the corner, grey-faced and miserable, as if he’d just been told of a death. The other stranger Alberti had seen outside, the short Jewish-looking man in the good clothes, stood in the midst of the Germans, guffawing at their jokes, cradling an empty glass in his hand.
‘Fill us up,’ Sander ordered, nodding at the open wine bottles on his desk. ‘You make a good waiter. Have a glass yourself.’
‘Not when I’m working,’ Alberti said and went round the small crowd, doing as he was told. The only one who paid him any attention was the Italian newcomer who looked him up and down and asked, ‘Do I know you?’
‘I don’t think so.’ He held out his hand and introduced himself. ‘Used to be in the Carabinieri. Now I’m liaison with our friends here. Local. Speak Italian and Venetian which I trust makes me useful. You?’
‘Salvatore Bruno. From Turin. You’ve heard of me no doubt.’
‘Read about you too. Busy guy. Caught any Jews lately?’
Bruno tapped the side of his nose.
‘More on the way. I promise.’
‘We can talk about this later,’ Oberg cut in. ‘Not now.’
Alberti knew when he wasn’t wanted. So he wandered over to Diamante who didn’t have a glass at all or seem to want one.
‘Are you alright, doctor?’ he asked. ‘Can I get you something?’
‘Nothing you have to offer.’
It was the only time he’d ever heard the man sound even faintly rude.
‘How do you know? If you don’t ask.’
He said that quietly. The others were too interested in their drink and the kind of self-congratulatory chatter the Germans liked when they got good news.
‘You can judge a man by the company he keeps. I heard you found the soldier who raped and murdered that poor woman the other day.’
‘Not for me to talk about such things,’ Alberti replied with a shrug. He waved the bottle and an empty glass. Diamante shook his head. ‘You can see for yourself. I’m just the waiter here. Local help.’ He bent down to make sure they weren’t overheard. ‘Those things I said. When they fished that woman out of the water. It was for their benefit. You understand that? Truth is …’ Closer, he whispered in his ear. ‘We’re more engaged looking for partisans than Jews right now. If you people keep your heads down maybe you’ll see it through.’
Diamante scowled, got to his feet, pushed him to one side and went and touched Oberg’s sleeve.
‘Do you really need me here?’
The German glanced at Salvatore Bruno who was listening intently and said, ‘You understand what’s required of you? As president of your community?’
‘I understand what you’re asking. I also understand it’s impossible in the time you’ve given me. As I’ve said repeatedly.’
‘Saturday, Diamante.’ The Italian had winked at him then. ‘I know it’s the Sabbath. But you’re no believer. Any more than me. Which is why we’ll survive.’ He tapped his fleshy nose again. A nervous habit, Alberti thought. A tic. This man was nowhere near as confident as he wished others to believe. ‘Best know which side your bread is buttered. Our German friends are practical, not vindictive. They look after those who help them.’
Diamante gazed right at him with a jaded expression of distaste.
‘There are hundreds of families here with some Jewish heritage. It’s impossible to name them all in a week or two.’
Bruno stretched out his arms and grinned for the benefit of his audience.
‘Sir, sir! Once you ran a busy hospital. Very efficiently I’m told. Just do your best, man. Give us what you have. On Saturday night we have a little party here. Bring me your list and we can enjoy a drink or two in the Gioconda. There will be entertainment. The ladies there—’
‘I do not mix with whores,’ Diamante snapped. Which was, Alberti thought, exactly what the man from Turin had wanted. ‘A month or so. That’s all I ask. Then I’ll give you as good a list as anyone can provide.’
Oberg stepped between them.
‘You don’t have a month. Neither do I. Salò has issued orders.’
A flush came to Diamante’s grey cheeks.
‘Salò? What do I care of that? I’m no citizen of Mussolini’s phoney republic. There are two Italys at the moment. I don’t believe the one with a legitimate government and our monarch at its head has seen fit to demand a list of anyone.’
There was silence then. Alberti took the old man’s arm.
‘Come, doctor. You’re tired. Upset. It’s understandable. Let me take you home.’
‘I can walk these streets without your help. You’re the ones who need protection.’
Salvatore Bruno laughed in his face.
‘Now that is a sign of impending decrepitude. Excuse my frankness.’ That tap of the nose again. ‘People tell me you seem a decent fellow. With some cooperation on your part, names, places, bank accounts … who knows?’
‘Time to go,’ Alberti said, and almost dragged Diamante to the door before the old man could say another word.
It was dark outside. The German guards were stamping their feet on the cobbles in the alley that led to the Grand Canal one way and the heart of San Marco the other. The water was high, close to flooding, backing up the drains down the alley. Most days the city didn’t stink. This wasn’t one of them.
‘You’re sure you don’t want company? There are fools out there who think everyone that walks out of this building’s their enemy.’
‘I have no enemies.’
Alberti raised an eyebrow and looked back at the guards and the building looming above them.
‘You’re a clever man, Diamante. Much smarter than the likes of me. But there, I fear, you’re wrong.’
‘Plague is a disease. Human beings are infected by it. They are the symptoms, not the illness itself.’
‘That’s an intellectual argument. I’m not an intellectual. You won’t find many among those Crucchi we just left either.’
‘Some of the sick will die. In the end others will survive. Once we find the cure. And we will. That’s what people do. Find another way to live.’
‘Till it all comes round again.’
‘It won’t,’ Diamante insisted. ‘After this horror … it can’t.’
Stubborn old fool, Alberti thought. The Jew hunter had offered him a way out. It might have been a lie but it was an offer all the same, and few of his kind were going to get that. Not when they’d been stripped of every last cent and piece of jewellery and property they owned.
‘If you don’t give them what they want they’ll find it anyway. Then put you in a cattle truck along with the rest of them.’
Diamante’s frown was short and bereft of feeling. A doctor’s look perhaps, the kind they gave when a patient was beyond hope and need to know it.
‘Why do you do this, Alberti?’
‘As I keep telling people. Because someone must. It could be a lot worse than me. What I said when they dragged that woman out of the water … I didn’t mean it.’ He j
abbed a finger at Ca’ Loretti. ‘If this bunch are happy or even halfway so then they’re not out murdering people on the streets. You’ve got to keep them like that. Distracted. Feeling safe. That’s good, isn’t it? That’s something.’
He didn’t know why he was saying this. The old man had no real position in the city any more. He was just another Jew, probably as good as dead anyway. His opinion didn’t matter one jot.
Diamante held out his hand. It was bony, wrinkled, but it was the hand of an artist too, sculpted, careful, controlled and in spite of his age didn’t tremble. Alberti shook his cold fingers and wondered how often they’d delved inside a man or woman, looking for a tumour or some other kind of cancer, seeking a way to remove it, to save a life.
‘That’s for you to decide, Alberti. Your conscience if you have one.’ He turned to head off down the shadows into the warren of streets on his long walk home to the ghetto. ‘If you have a conscience you should listen to it sometimes. Men who don’t will never fare well.’
‘They’ll kill you if you screw with them, old man.’
‘We all die one day.’ Aldo Diamante wrapped his thick coat more tightly around his chest. ‘What matters is that others remember how and why we fell.’ He touched his hat. ‘Goodnight.’
There was another business behind Greta’s bar: a small room used for hairdressing. Rocco Trevisan perched on the ledge by an old, cracked mirror, the grey background poking through the glass. Sara Vitale, the woman with him, sat by his side playing with a pair of sharp scissors.
They’d listened to her story which she told as succinctly and as accurately as she could. It was important to be frank with the details. Partisans were quick to pick up lies and liars didn’t live long.
‘Who brought you here?’ the woman asked.
‘Some men in a boat. Our friends in Padua found them.’
‘Names?’
‘I don’t have them and if I had I wouldn’t tell you.’
‘Fair enough,’ Trevisan said with a nod and offered her a cigarette. He watched as she lit it with shaking fingers. It was odd. She was never that scared when they went out to kill Germans or lay explosives along train lines. But these two strangers had a hardness and a determination about them she didn’t care for. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea at all. Maybe she should have listened to Vanni, stayed in the rundown apartment behind the weaving workshop the way she’d promised.
‘Where are you staying now?’ Vitale asked.
‘That’s another thing you don’t need to know. I can come here and talk to you any time. Or somewhere else. I want to help.’ She lit the cigarette and took a long lungful. ‘I want to fight. To kill Crucchi. That’s enough, isn’t it?’
‘And your brother?’ Trevisan wondered. ‘What about him?’
‘He’s wounded. He’d only slow us down.’
Which was true, up to a point. Vanni’s leg was bad but it would mend in a month or two. All the same his spirit wasn’t quite there. Perhaps it never had been, as much as hers anyway. They’d joined the cell in Padua in fury after hearing of the slaughter of their family back home. They knew they couldn’t return to Turin until the Nazis and the Fascists were gone. They were Jews. The Black Brigades were hunting victims everywhere, Salvatore Bruno helping all he could, across the north from east to west. There seemed no alternative.
The wild, red anger in her head never abated. In truth it only grew, week by week as the fight seemed ever harder. Vanni lacked the same fire. Her younger brother didn’t like the violence, the weapons, the grenades and bombs. He wanted everything to be over, done with, consigned to the past. Only then could he be back with his books, his professors and his arty friends, not hunting Crucchi out on the chill bare slopes of the Dolomites. She could see him hiding out among the looms in the Giardino degli Angeli, with the fey young stranger Paolo Uccello, barely more than a schoolboy, for as long as the war lasted if he had the chance.
‘So it’s just you?’ Vitale asked with a sneer.
‘I can fight. I know weapons. I know bombs. I’m not scared.’
‘Only a fool’s not scared,’ Trevisan told her. ‘You know what they do if they get you in Ca’ Loretti? Pull your fingernails out. Rape you. Tear you to pieces.’
She almost laughed. Venice was a place apart, almost a holiday resort still, perched across a single bridge at the very edge of Italy. In Turin, in Milan, Verona, Padua, there was much worse going on.
‘I’m not scared,’ she repeated very slowly. ‘Are you?’
They looked at one another and said nothing.
‘When you have an operation I want to be part of it.’
‘Nothing planned,’ Trevisan said.
‘What? In Padua they said you were busy here. Dedicated. Courageous—’
‘We are!’ His voice was loud and threatening. ‘We’re just … depleted.’
She waited. Finally the woman explained. One of the cell had gone freelance a few weeks before and murdered a German in an alley in San Marco. It was unplanned, unauthorized. The idiot had simply lost it when he saw the Nazi pestering a local woman. The reprisals had been swift and merciless. Ten local men slaughtered, four of them nothing to do with the partisans at all.
Trevisan scowled.
‘We lost good soldiers because one idiot shot a drunk in the street. We’re not scared. We just want … bigger fish in the net. They don’t come here so much. Unless it’s for the whores and the drink and the gambling in that hotel of theirs. We’ve tried putting people in there but they always get caught. They know the locals.’
In her pocket Mika had the letter she’d taken from Uccello’s desk. The one that pointed to some kind of heavyweight Nazi and Black Brigades gathering in the Gioconda that coming Saturday. She put it on the table by the mirror.
‘They intercepted this in Verona,’ she said. ‘Passed it on. That’s why they wanted me to come here. To give it you.’
Trevisan snatched at it and the two of them read the commission from Turin.
‘This is that queer kid’s father,’ Vitale said. ‘The weaving family in San Pietro. They always said he was a Fascist.’
‘The father’s dead,’ Mika insisted. ‘Him and the mother got killed in an air raid in Verona. Some friends of ours recovered that from the papers they left behind.’
‘“There will be great and important men in attendance.”’ Trevisan waved the letter and smiled. ‘I know what happened to the Uccello. Do you think we don’t hear things? You’re sure this is real?’
‘I told you. It came from the cell in Verona. They had someone in the morgue who handled what was left of them. He found it. They wanted me to pass it on. They told me about this bar. For the love of God what else am I supposed to offer you?’
He was barely listening.
‘The Gioconda,’ Trevisan muttered. ‘The shit that goes on there. Last time we tried to put a woman inside she wound up tied to a stake outside the back of Ca’ Loretti. They cut her throat.’
‘We all take risks.’
He sniffed.
‘She was my niece.’
Sara Vitale stared at her. Then reached forward and took hold of Mika’s dark, straggly hair.
She shrank back and said, ‘I don’t like being touched.’
‘Best get used to it from now on,’ Trevisan replied. ‘Wait outside. Greta can get you a drink.’
The place was closed, the old woman sweeping up. Via Garibaldi was mostly dark, with only a few dim lights in the windows of apartments above the shuttered shops.
‘Can I get a Negroni?’ she asked, needing something strong. The kind of drink they’d enjoyed in Padua at student parties when someone had the money.
‘A what?’
‘Gin. Vermouth. Bitter.’
Greta slung something together from a bunch of bottles that had no labels. It didn’t taste anything like it should but the heavy, alcoholic buzz was there and that was what she needed.
Twenty minutes or more she waited, struggling to try to
start some conversation, failing. The woman seemed as good as deaf. Either that or she only heard what she wanted.
Maybe this was all a bad idea. Maybe she’d exposed them all, Vanni and the Uccello kid. Not that she’d given away a single clue about where they were hiding. But if these two wanted to follow her, or try to force her to find out more, they surely had the means.
Maybe Vanni was right and they should hide out for a while. Find somewhere in the hills. Live like hermits or peasants. Try to find some kind of equilibrium where they could think things through, talk them through as well, the way they used to. The war and the threat from the Germans and Black Brigades didn’t just make them fugitives. It banished all the things they took for granted: conversation, friendly argument, the need to find some kind of consensus about the road ahead. In a way she and Vanni were both closer to one another than ever. In another, it felt as if they’d never been further apart.
Then the red-painted door opened and she realized the time for second thoughts was over. Trevisan was there, holding a gun.
‘Get back in here,’ he ordered.
Mika did as she was told.
‘Sit down,’ Sara Vitale said.
She couldn’t take her eyes off the weapon.
‘Sit down.’
Mika Artom took the old metal chair in front of the hairdressing mirror.
‘What’s this?’ Trevisan held it sideways.
‘Walther P38, standard issue. Had one of my own once. Took it off a dead German. You?’
He glared at her.
‘None of your business. Best handgun they’ve got. You got a weapon now?’
She reached into her jacket and took out the military knife she’d held to Paolo Uccello’s throat the night they arrived.
‘Some use that is against the Crucchi,’ Trevisan said. He held out the weapon. ‘Tell me if there’s a shell in the chamber.’
‘No. I can’t see a pin.’
Vitale asked, ‘How many rounds?’
‘Eight. And one in the chamber.’
‘Do you know how to take it to pieces?’
