by David Hewson
‘Well you’d better come in,’ said Aldo Diamante.
His apartment was neat and clean, one room set aside for medical examinations, all white, with instruments and that antiseptic smell a man like Alberti, fearful of all doctors, loathed. He was glad Diamante led him somewhere at the front that looked more domestic. There was an old sofa, a dining table with fresh flowers, windows on to the campo and an ornate iron fireplace where logs burned furiously. At the end of the room was a large portrait in oils, a couple in middle age, probably from the turn of the century, with a young boy standing between them, what looked like a stethoscope in his hands. Next was a framed photo of a skinny fellow in his mid-twenties or so, Diamante he guessed, with a pretty woman posing by a gondola on the Grand Canal.
‘Your family?’
‘My mother and father. And me. I knew I wanted to be a doctor all along.’
‘I never knew you were married.’
‘We weren’t. Natalia died when we were engaged. A boating accident visiting relatives in Rimini. She drowned along with her cousin.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘It was forty years ago. I don’t remember what her voice sounded like. Mostly I keep that photograph so I can still picture her in my head. She was a nurse in the hospital. A lot’s happened since.’
‘A lot to come. May I take a seat?’
Diamante stared at him the way he must have looked at a patient who refused his advice.
‘Why? What do you want?’
‘To talk. Is that a crime? Will your fellow citizens hate you for allowing a creature of the Crucchi through the door?’
‘No. But I may hate myself.’
All the same he pulled a chair out from the dining table and gestured for Alberti to take it. The two of them sat opposite one another. The flowers were roses and had a strong and spicy scent which, with the heat of the fierce wood fire, made Alberti’s head feel worse.
‘What will they do with this list of mine? Tell the truth now. You’re a Venetian. You owe me that.’
Alberti took a deep breath and thought, Sometimes it made no difference.
‘I don’t know. Maybe put it in a filing cabinet and mark it as something to be dealt with in due course. The Crucchi here are idle bastards. If they were real soldiers they’d be elsewhere, wouldn’t they? Trying to kill Russians, the Americans, the British. Struggling to keep Greece under Hitler’s thumb. We get the dregs, doctor. You must have noticed.’
Diamante didn’t believe a word of that. It was obvious.
‘Then why work for them?’
He groaned. So many times he was asked this question. There was only a single answer, not that anyone else appeared to understand it.
‘I told you already.’
‘I know. I’m not soft in the head. Your answer was unsatisfactory.’
He pulled back from the table. The room was far too hot. Perhaps that was a Jewish habit. He wasn’t sure.
‘It’s the only answer I have. Most of them can’t speak Italian let alone Venetian. They don’t know their way around. They’re too arrogant to admit it. There’ll always be someone to help them. If it wasn’t me it might be some murderous lunatic from the Black Brigades.’
Diamante nodded as if he was taking that seriously.
‘So you’re simply a former policeman doing his job.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Then why are you here?’
Alberti leaned forward and rested his elbows on the shiny table. There was a point to be made.
‘To help. The Nazis have word two terrorists are hiding in the city somewhere. Communists from Turin. They’ve murdered many. Crucchi soldiers. Civilians. Brother and sister. Mika and Giovanni Artom.’
The old man grunted something he couldn’t hear, then said, ‘What about the bastard who murdered poor Isabella Finzi? Tell me about him.’
‘Shot in the Arsenale this morning.’
It wasn’t a good or convincing lie.
‘Mika and Vanni Artom,’ Alberti repeated. ‘You’ve heard the names?’
‘I’m a retired physician, now forced to be president of the community here. Why would I associate with people like that?’
‘Because they’re Jews.’
‘Good God, man! I barely thought of myself as Jewish until some bigoted hack of Mussolini’s went through the records and decided to lump me in with everyone else.’
And yet, Alberti said, he lived in the ghetto.
‘I inherited the place from my father. It suits. I—’
There was a knock on the door. Gentle, timid. The two men stopped.
‘Were you expecting someone?’ Alberti asked.
‘No.’ Diamante got to his feet. ‘Excuse me.’
The man moved quickly for his age. In an instant he was at the door, his back to the table, talking in low tones.
Perhaps this was a stupid idea. Alberti was alone, as good as on enemy territory. If they killed him here, inside … who’d know?
He took his gun out of his holster, held it in his lap, then turned to see.
Mika Artom had spent a tedious day in an upstairs bedroom above the bar in via Garibaldi, alone most of the time, the door locked, nothing to read but a week-old copy of the local paper. Lunch was stale bread and equally stale cheese served by a silent Greta. From the window she could see the street: one fish stall, one vegetable stand by the iron gates to the park by Garibaldi’s statue. It was a cold misty day, not many people wandering the broad cobbled thoroughfare. There wasn’t much food on the stalls either. Venice was suffering a mean, spare winter.
She regretted the argument that morning and its source which was, she knew all too well, an odd kind of jealousy. It wasn’t hard to see the young Venetian was attracted to Vanni, even if he wasn’t quite sure of it himself. This wasn’t new. Men could be terribly uncertain of themselves at times. Giulia, the occasional girlfriend, was a quick-witted, pretty kid one year younger, someone Mika could have come to regard as a friend if the war hadn’t intervened. Her parents were hard-line Fascists, wealthy too. The last thing they wanted was their precious daughter in love with a left-wing Jew.
The boys he hung around with were different and there she did feel something was wrong, couldn’t stop herself even when she tried. They always turned quiet, almost sullen if she walked into the conversation. It was never going to be easy striking up a friendship. The university was a place where queers were tolerated. The city outside less so. One of Vanni’s friends had been beaten up for hanging round a park near college, a place they liked to frequent. Now, with Mussolini under Hitler’s thumb, they were on the wanted list too. It wasn’t just Jews who got thrown into cattle trucks and herded off to God knows where and what. Gypsies, queers, political activists, followers of supposedly heretical Christian sects all faced internment as well.
Sex didn’t interest her, except as a means to an end. There were bigger issues to deal with. So perhaps a shapeless, uncomfortable sense of pique had driven her out of the Giardino degli Angeli, just as much as her need to get back into the war. Vanni was better with people than she’d ever be. Perhaps she envied him the ease with which he could fall in and out of bed with anyone he liked.
‘No time for that right now,’ she whispered.
Downstairs a door banged.
Trevisan was with Sara Vitale, both of them shivering, complaining about the bitter cold and the chicory coffee Greta was serving while the Germans got to enjoy the real thing. Venetians were never far from a moan.
‘Your hair looks good,’ Vitale said, throwing her coat on to the bed before pulling a set of documents out of her bag. ‘I should have charged you for that.’
‘I’m going to earn it, aren’t I?’
‘You are,’ Trevisan agreed, then withdrew some documents from his pocket. An entry pass for the Hotel Gioconda with her photo and her fake ID as Giulia Grini. It gave her occupation as waitress.
Mika still hadn’t worked out this pair. Were they a couple? M
aybe. But there was some rivalry there too. Trevisan was a handsome man, probably popular with women. Dark eyes, dark hair, narrow, cunning face and a quick smile when he felt like it. Forty maybe, a few years older than Vitale. Both had the lean and anxious look she’d come to recognize among partisans. It expressed both a need and a fear, and she understood both implicitly. To be an underground fighter required more than simple courage. You needed a reckless disregard for your own welfare, something that meant you never slept well, kept normal hours, normal relationships either. The last man she’d had was a mountain shepherd three months before out in the hills behind Verona. The idiot had thought he could talk himself through a roadblock. The Black Brigades tortured, then shot him by Lake Garda and dumped his body in the water along with the corpses of his two younger brothers, neither of whom knew a thing about his work with the partisans or his affair with a communist Jew from Turin.
She’d gone with him because it made sense. It bound the man to her and the physical satisfaction they got from grappling with one another in his barn was a diversion she’d appreciated at the time. He’d talked though, as she knew he would, so by the time they shot him she was fifty miles away trying to find shelter with a new cell, new comrades.
That was another reason every partisan had to be anxious. You could trust the man or woman next to you with your life so long as they were free. Once they were in the hands of the Crucchi or the Black Brigades anything might happen.
‘We’ve got a porter at the back who’ll let you in with these,’ Trevisan said. ‘Go there tonight. Work. Serve them drinks. Smile. Don’t talk. Don’t act too friendly. If you do one of them’s going to make you go to his room and we don’t want that.’
‘I thought I was a waitress, not a whore.’
Vitale sniggered, a nervous, childish sound.
‘You’re Italian, love. Pretty now I’ve done something with your hair. We’re all whores to them.’
‘And if I needed you to be a whore for real,’ Trevisan added, ‘you would be.’ He folded his arms. ‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘For the cause,’ she said, even though it sounded weak.
‘The cause,’ the woman repeated. ‘We heard what happened in the mountains. One of those guys was cousin to someone we know from Murano. They said it was your fault.’
‘It was,’ she agreed. ‘I fouled up.’
‘Get scared?’ Trevisan wondered.
‘No. I don’t. I thought I could rely on everyone to do what I asked. Ballarin? The Venetian was Ballarin?’
Vitale frowned.
‘Maybe. Does it matter?’
‘He was a good guy. Didn’t follow orders. I’m sorry he got killed. Tell them that.’
‘Women don’t run operations when I’m around,’ Trevisan said.
She wasn’t going to rise to that bait.
‘This is your game, friend. What do you want of me?’
‘First, a dry run.’ He pointed to the floor plan for the Hotel Gioconda that Vitale had unrolled. ‘This is the ballroom the Crucchi use. Sometimes it’s a casino. Tonight it’s just a drinking den. Tomorrow … party time.’
He drew a finger across the map. She followed. The room seemed huge, with a balcony over a small canal described by hand-drawn wavy lines.
‘What floor’s it on?’
‘First one up,’ Vitale told her. ‘You could spit at someone in a boat down there.’
Trevisan scowled.
‘Yeah. Sometimes they do just that. Bastards. There’s an old trade entrance through a water gate. Back from when the place was a private palace. They never use it. The Nazis probably don’t even realize it’s there.’
Tomorrow she was to watch through the balcony windows for a small boat to emerge from the city side, not the Grand Canal, around six in the evening. Once that stopped close to the back of the hotel she was to go to a service door at the edge of the room, unlock it and get out of there.
‘Here,’ he said and gave her a key. ‘Let us in. We’ll do the rest.’
She knew she was blushing, angry and struggling to keep it in.
‘That’s it? I unlock a door? That’s all? I want a weapon. The bag you gave me …’
‘I told you not to look inside.’
‘I didn’t. I just took out the dress like you asked. I assumed—’
‘It’s not all,’ Vitale broke in. ‘We haven’t finished.’
She walked over to a drawer in the room and came back with something Mika recognized. An explosives timer.
‘There’s a grand piano at the left side of the room. Hardly ever used. They don’t do music. Before you unlock the door, you’re going to look under the cover of the piano. We’re placing a little present for them in there. You’ll see this. Set it for five minutes. Unlock the door and get out of there. When we hear this thing go off we come in. If we hear nothing …’
‘We know you fouled up,’ Trevisan added.
‘I could come with you.’
Vitale shook her head.
‘Impossible. We only fight with people we know.’
So much didn’t make sense. If they had someone who could plant a bomb surely they possessed the means to prime it? Someone who could unlock the door too?
‘I don’t get it. Why do you need me to do this?’
‘Because we don’t have a choice.’ Trevisan shrugged his shoulders. ‘We’re damaged. This cell’s leaky. I can’t risk using anyone else. Only me and Sara here know you exist. And old Greta downstairs and she doesn’t get which day of the week it is. That’s the way it’s going to stay. Set the bomb. Open the door. Run. Then we go in and kill more Nazis and the rest of those scum than anyone’s ever seen round here.’
‘And after?’ she asked.
He hesitated for a moment, then recited, ‘There’s only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.’
Trevisan smiled at her.
‘You’re one of us, aren’t you? Done your reading? My old man used Marx for nursery stories.’
‘I’ve been fighting. Too busy for books. The reprisals … ten Italians for every dead German—’
‘OK. Let me give you a saying from another kind of religion. “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” There will always be blood. There will always be martyrs. The church we raise afterwards will be ours. Even if some of us aren’t there to enjoy it.’
He lit a cigarette, handed it to her.
‘When I said after … I meant what happens to me and my brother?’
‘We’ll find a way to send you to terraferma,’ Trevisan said. ‘We’ve people in Verona who need volunteers. There’ll be hell to pay here. We vanish. We regroup. We fight again. I don’t want to be carrying a stranger when that’s going on.’
‘Here.’ Vitale showed the timer. ‘This is how you set it.’
‘I know how to set it,’ Mika told her. ‘I’ve probably used these things more than anyone you know. I deserve better than this.’
Trevisan sighed and rolled his eyes.
‘Don’t be so stupid. Without you we can’t get in there. I just don’t want you around when the shooting starts. Too messy. Too uncertain.’
He reached out and touched her blonde hair for a moment.
‘We need you, kid. Just for this. We need you to smile, stay anonymous and vanish.’
Sara Vitale waved away some of the cigarette smoke and spread her arms wide.
‘Then … boom.’
Alberti found himself sweating in Aldo Diamante’s tidy, old-fashioned apartment and it wasn’t just the heat from his roaring fire.
His fingers tightened on the weapon on his lap. Then there was light, childish laughter and two kids ran into the room, straight up to the fireplace where they stood giggling, rubbing their hands together, chattering wildly.
‘Do we get sweets, Uncle Aldo?’
A boy about eight and a girl
around ten. Black coat, black trousers, white shirts. Dark hair, shiny. Pale faces and just looking at them Alberti thought to himself, These are the kind they call Orthodox and if it wasn’t for the times they’d be dressed different, wouldn’t mind standing out at all.
A woman followed. Alberti tucked the gun back in his holster.
She looked worried, stared at him, then Diamante and asked, ‘Who is this?’
‘Just a visitor,’ Alberti said getting to his feet with a quick smile. ‘To the doctor. I thought I had something wrong with me.’
‘You do,’ Diamante shot back at him. ‘You know what it is as well.’
The kids kept crying out for sweets. Diamante found a jar by the window and let them dip in their hands. Their mother – it was obvious from the way she looked at them – seemed ready to weep.
Alberti stood his ground.
‘You won’t mind if I seek a second opinion? Especially when the malady is so subtle and easily misdiagnosed.’
Still nervous, the woman said they could come back later.
‘No need,’ Alberti told them. ‘I’m leaving.’
Diamante saw him to the door, then tugged him outside so his visitors couldn’t hear.
‘You’re a Venetian. They’re innocents. Your fellow citizens. A brother and sister. Born here. Don’t …’
‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t do what the Nazis tell you for once.’
Alberti shook his head. He’d expected better than that.
‘Who do you think I am? God?’
‘I think you’re an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances.’
‘I’m nothing more than a prison guard in the jail of the Crucchi’s making. Just as much an inmate as you.’
‘Not quite,’ the old man muttered. Then he reached inside his jacket pocket and took out a fat wad of lire. ‘Here. Take this. It’s only money. I’ve no need of it.’
Alberti hesitated. He was used to getting bribes and, on occasion, bribing others himself. But only when he initiated the bargain.
‘You offend me, Diamante.’
