by David Hewson
Diamante shook his head and, just for a second, laughed.
‘Ah, yes. God. You reminded me. I have something I would like you to keep. In your care.’ He shrugged his medical bag off his shoulders. ‘Please.’
The priest shook his head as he watched in the faint light of the doorway. There was more money, in three envelopes, lire, Deutschmark and British pounds. Then, before he could object, Diamante retrieved a leather jewel case and handed it over.
‘You don’t need to open it.’
‘Don’t I?’ Garzone replied and did.
Several necklaces, two with what looked like genuine pearls. Brooches. A man’s wristwatch, a Swiss brand that he believed to be expensive. And two rings, one plain gold, one set with a diamond.
‘This is a wedding ring,’ Garzone said. ‘And perhaps an engagement one too.’
‘My mother’s,’ Diamante told him. ‘Keep them safe. If something should happen to me use all this as you see fit.’
The priest tried to hand it all back.
‘I’m more than happy to help with your children. Don’t make me feel like a pawnbroker too.’
Diamante stepped away and shook his head.
‘For pity’s sake, Aldo, we don’t give up now!’
‘Who said I’m giving up? I have a home full of old junk. Mine. My parents’. Their parents’ too. If the Germans come I’d rather the few precious things among it went to my neighbours, not my enemies. That’s all. Safekeeping, old friend.’ He held out his hand. ‘Safekeeping. There’s duty and bravery in those who take on that task. Not that they often hear our thanks.’
There was, Garzone understood, no point in arguing. He felt tired and terribly depressed.
‘Have you spoken to anyone?’ he asked. ‘One of your priests?’
Diamante seemed amused.
‘Not about spiritual matters, I’m afraid. Those I leave to more intelligent men than me.’
‘Then … may we meet in our usual place tomorrow? It’s my time to buy the coffee and biscotti. I would like that. Perhaps the weather will be better. We can toast our five small friends on their way to new lives in Switzerland.’
Diamante turned and grimaced at the foul night. His mind, it seemed, was elsewhere.
Finally he smiled at Garzone and said, ‘That’s a splendid idea. Ten o’clock would suit?’
‘Ten o’clock.’
‘For once I’ll break my morning rule and have a grappa too. You’re a brave man, Garzone. I’m astonished you don’t seem to realize.’
‘Ha! I’m custodian of a church few visit and a flock who mainly keep themselves to themselves. I do what I can. I had children in my care today. I heard their laughter from time to time. Their young voices. They reminded me of why I’m here. Even a priest needs that from time to time.’
‘Those two other … visitors you kindly placed in the house of your friend. Have you heard from them?’
Garzone sighed.
‘Not a word. You?’
‘No.’ He tapped his cap. ‘It’s late. We must stop thinking we can save everyone.’
‘Perhaps,’ the priest agreed. ‘But we should never stop thinking we must try.’
The old doctor nodded, tipped his hat, then vanished into the shifting, formless night.
Wreathed in the dense swirling cloud that had descended on the city, with only a torch to guide her down streets where lamps were rare and feeble, Mika Artom struggled to find her way home. There was no curfew in force as there was in other cities. It was one more way in which Venice seemed to hope it was above the war. Besides, any control on movement would have been meaningless on an evening such as this. There was no straightforward path anywhere, only winding alleys, low arches that led to dead ends by sluggish canals, tall palazzi and apartment blocks lit by a few candles and the odd electric light.
Along the way she’d somehow found herself passing La Fenice where the last of the concert crowd was making its way out into the cold, damp night, all in fine clothes, chattering, wondering whether to go home or find a late-night bar. As if times were normal and the conflict that created two warring versions of Italy didn’t exist.
Then, lost, trying to guess the way, she’d stumbled across a bridge into the broad open square of Campo Santa Maria Formosa. A group of German soldiers huddled by the church, smoking under a waxy yellow street lamp by the stone face of a hideous monster, eyeing the few locals passing in the night. One spotted her – a woman always attracted attention – and called out.
The gun was in her bag. She had no idea how to get back to San Pietro. No choice but to obey.
Shivering, looking scared, in part because it was expected, she walked over, took out her papers, explained, in slow, clear Italian, that she’d just come from working for the crowd at the Gioconda and had the staff ID to prove it.
He raised his eyebrows at that and asked, ‘You’re one of the girls?’
‘I’m a waitress,’ she said as severely as she dared. ‘My mother’s ill. I have to work. I got called back to look after her. I don’t know my way. This place … It’s so easy to get lost.’
He handed back the papers and said with a sneer, ‘All those bastards in the Gioconda. They think they’re on holiday. They think they can whore and booze and eat themselves stupid while the likes of us go fight their war for them.’
‘Hey, Günther!’ one of soldiers called. ‘We’re not fighting here either.’
‘Soon enough,’ he replied. ‘Where are you trying to go?’
Don’t tell him exactly, she thought.
‘Castello. Via Garibaldi.’
He pointed across the campo. She could just make out a bridge.
‘Cross over there and keep going that way. In the end you get to the water. Turn left past the Arsenale and keep on walking.’
‘I know it from there. Thanks. You’re very kind.’
He smiled and there was a glint in his eye.
‘Maybe they’ll let the underlings into the Gioconda one day. I’ll see you there. You can be grateful.’
‘I serve drinks. That’s all.’
A few minutes later she found the broad waterfront of the Riva degli Schiavoni, then crossed the bridge by the Arsenale canal. There were soldiers everywhere near the military base inside the old naval compound. Twice more she had to show her papers and once got propositioned by a slovenly drunk in uniform. But the ID card for the Gioconda worked a kind of magic and none of them asked to see in her bag. It seemed a woman who mixed with officers and high-ranking Fascists in that place carried a little weight.
Free of the last man, she turned into the wide mouth of via Garibaldi, hurried up the street, past Greta’s closed bar, found her way into the warren of lanes that led towards San Pietro.
It was almost midnight by the time she wandered across the green by the basilica, the campanile looking strange and yet more crooked in the dim, strange light of a single lamp burning through the fog.
The hidden path into the apartment of the Giardino degli Angeli was precarious enough when she could see clearly. In the grey shroud that had fallen on the city she had to take care with every footstep as she edged along the wall of the garden, out to the platform by the lagoon, then worked her way to the stairs and finally, breathless, chilled to the bone, rapped lightly on the door. Twice rapidly, three times slowly. The signal she and Vanni had agreed when they first began to run with the partisans.
A while she waited, then the door opened. Vanni, still in his day clothes, his face cold and furious.
‘Thanks,’ she said and slipped in, went straight for the bottle of grappa by the sink, poured herself a sizeable shot, gulped it down.
There was an atmosphere in the place. She could feel it. Paolo Uccello was sitting at the table, staring at her. The bedroom door was open. She saw what was on the bed, swore, marched in there.
On the sheets the bag was open. They’d rifled through the canvas holdall that Trevisan had given her, with strict orders not to look inside. She ha
d, of course; not that she’d let on to Vanni. Now the contents were spread out over the thin cotton coverlet.
Two handguns, four packs of shells. Three stick grenades. All German in origin, all capable of putting anyone caught with them in front of a firing squad. She could understand why Trevisan would leap at the opportunity to hide them elsewhere even if he’d no intention of asking her to use them. A safe house for weapons was always useful.
The two men came in behind her.
‘Vanni. I asked you not to look.’
‘He didn’t,’ Paolo said. ‘It was me.’
She glanced at the two of them, a knowing smile on her face.
‘What were you doing in here?’
‘I live here.’ The Venetian finally seemed to have found his spine. ‘This is my parents’ bedroom. I was told you’d stay inside. Keep out of sight.’
She tucked the weapons back into the holdall, then hid the bag back in the wardrobe where she’d left it.
‘Mika. Are you listening?’
‘Yes, Paolo. I am.’ Don’t get mad, she told herself. This was not the time. ‘No one knows we’re here. I wouldn’t tell the people I’m working with where we live. They didn’t follow me. I checked. I know you want to keep out of this. I know you want to hide and pretend nothing bad’s happening outside—’
‘No.’ Vanni went and stood next to him. She wondered what had gone on while she was out. The Uccello kid had hardly set foot in the bedroom since they’d turned up. It was almost as if he was scared of bumping into his parents’ ghosts. ‘You should have told us.’
‘I didn’t know what was inside that bag, honestly. I think this is just somewhere they want to keep them hidden. Don’t worry. I’m not going to use them.’
‘What are you going to do?’ her brother asked.
She thought about the right answer.
‘Tomorrow. There’s some kind of party in that hotel of theirs. A ceremony. I don’t know what or why. Maybe those banners you’re weaving are something to do with it. Maybe …’
The two men glanced at one another.
‘What time are you supposed to hand them over?’ she asked.
Paolo said, ‘I’m going there at four.’
‘Good.’ She nodded. ‘Don’t hang around. They’ve got something planned for later. I’m just lookout. From the inside. That’s all.’
Mika walked up to them, took her brother’s hand, then Paolo Uccello’s. Joined the three of them, fingers linked together.
‘Listen to me. Please. I want us out of here just as much as you. The deal is I work lookout. Then afterwards they’re going to fix us a boat and smuggle us to terraferma. We’ll be gone.’ She turned to Paolo. ‘Well I will anyway. If my brother wants to stay here and do needlework—’
‘Don’t be funny,’ Vanni snapped. ‘When? When do we get out?’
She shrugged and said, ‘Sunday, I guess. They didn’t say. Bigger things on their mind. Look …’ She squeezed their cold hands. ‘All I have to do is be a waitress. I open a door. I let them in. Then I leave. They don’t trust me to do more than that. They won’t help us if I won’t help them. It’s the only way.’
She looked down at Vanni’s leg.
‘I need to change your dressing.’
‘No you don’t,’ Paolo said. ‘I did it. You were late. He needed it.’
A smile, then: ‘What Vanni needs Vanni gets. Don’t worry. I won’t do anything to bring the war over those walls and disturb your peaceful little angels.’
She bit her lip and wondered whether any of this worked. It was hard to believe Paolo would betray them. He surely knew if he did the Germans would still turn on him for hiding them in the first place. If she found out he was trying then …
Then she’d kill him. There’d be no choice.
‘Goodnight,’ he said and left.
Vanni took off his trousers and sat on the bed. The dressing on his leg was clean and fresh. No blood. Paolo Uccello had delicate fingers, she guessed. It was needed for the work he did.
‘You know you’re going to have to keep him sweet, brother, don’t you? Just for one more day.’
‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’
She sat next to him, stroked his long, dark hair. On the run he hadn’t shaved. Soon he’d have a full beard. That would be useful. When they were arrested briefly in Padua the photographs the Crucchi took pictured him clean-shaven.
‘Whatever you like.’ Mika kissed his bristly cheek. ‘He’s sweet on you. Keep him that way and he’ll do anything you ask.’
Vanni glared at her.
‘You can be a real bitch sometimes, you know. Are you telling the truth? About what they want? Us getting out of here?’
‘Yes! For God’s sake … why would I make any of this up?’
Maybe he believed her.
‘Are you going to leave with me?’ Mika asked. ‘Or stay here? With him?’
‘I can’t walk. I can’t fight. I’m sick of the whole thing.’
She laughed and said, ‘And I’m not?’
‘No.’ The look in his eyes was sharp and accusing. ‘I think you like it. The risk. The danger. The idea you might kill someone. Or get killed yourself. I think it makes you forgive yourself for when we screwed up in the mountains. I think it makes you feel alive.’
‘Now there,’ she said and jabbed a finger at his chest, ‘you couldn’t be more wrong.’
Aldo Diamante had always lived in the ghetto. There’d never seemed a reason to be anywhere else. He knew its history, naturally. That was something you learned at school. How the small island known as the Ghetto Novo was instituted in the early sixteenth century as a place where the city’s Ashkenazim were forced to live, confined there at night, the bridges policed by guards, and made to wear red hats or yellow belts if they entered the city at large during the day. How different groups of Jews – Italian, Levantine, Sephardic – formed separate communities there, each with its hidden synagogue built within the high tenement walls.
His own family hailed from Toledo in Spain and arrived in Venice in the 1550s via Amsterdam, or so his father always claimed. Not that the Diamanti deemed this of importance. Jewish they might be but secular too. The young Aldo was shown the Spanish synagogue, naturally, but primarily as a curiosity, an example of a superstitious rite to be respected if not observed. His father had been a professor of political economics at the city university, Ca’ Foscari, under the patronage of Luigi Luzzatti, a wealthy Jewish intellectual who’d travelled from being a revolutionary expelled by the Austrians during their occupation of the city to holding senior political offices after the creation of the new, liberated Italy.
Luzzatti had briefly been prime minister of this reunited country little more than thirty years before. A Jew like him now could not teach, could not work freely with his fellow gentile citizens, could not even have his name in the phone book. Soon, when the Black Brigades began to sweep the cities and the countryside for yet more Jews, he would be confined to a cattle truck and dispatched to a distant camp in a foreign country, probably never to return.
Though it occurred also to Diamante that a wealthy Venetian like Luzzatti would doubtless have departed long before, to Switzerland, England or America. Money gave a man choices denied those of meaner status.
The room was stifling hot thanks to the roaring log fire. He got up from his old armchair and walked over to the desk by the window. Outside a single street lamp cast its waxy yellow beam over the cobbles of the square.
Ghetto.
The name came from the Venetian for foundry, the original purpose of the small island tucked away in the midst of the city.
Growing up the word possessed little in the way of evil connotation, particularly in the Diamante household where science and logic ruled and he was schooled to look to the future, never the past. It was primarily a historical term for the place, a prison once but the world had grown up, begun to understand itself better. History was there to inform the present but never
dictate it. This collection of tall buildings and teeming apartments stood as a monument to a persecution that belonged to different, more primitive times. Venice, freed from Austrian rule and part of a new, energetic, ambitious nation, had learned its lesson.
Until the late Thirties it never occurred to Diamante that the bad old days might return. Then Mussolini began to find it convenient to mimic Hitler’s prejudices, to bring the salute and the jackboot to the fore of national life. Along came the Racial Laws of 1938, but even then life was harsh, not unbearable. The punishment for being Jewish was discrimination, not yet outright persecution. It was only after the dictator’s fall and his ascent to a puppet throne, the strings pulled from Berlin, that the truth began to dawn. The old evil was rising, perhaps to become something more harsh and cruel than anything the Jews of Venice and elsewhere had encountered before.
In this new northern republic of Italy he and his kind were no longer simply to be shunned. They were to be the targets of a virulent form of hatred where logic and plain humanity had no place. As a medical man he always looked for analogies. The one that came to him was that these were all symptoms of a pathological illness that came and went. A pestilence that men hoped science would someday cure, like polio or malaria. Though no one would know if the treatment had truly worked and banished the disease forever, or whether it might return one day, different, changed, more resilient to the treatments and potions than before. There was a depressing thought. Even when Hitler was defeated – and he would be – perhaps the conditions that created him and his kind in the first place were part of the genetic make-up of humanity. A propensity for barbarism that was a flaw in the blood, one that might hide for decades, centuries even, but never be annihilated.
Diamante picked up the folder marked in his spiky doctor’s handwriting ‘Qehillà’. Most of the names he’d had on file for weeks. There were now nearly three hundred there, women, children, men, all with addresses, occupations, ages. Some he’d left off deliberately hoping that might save them, or provide the chance to escape. Though lately he’d come to think this was wishful thinking. If they were still in Venice now there was no opportunity to vanish. The prison doors were slamming shut. In spite of the optimism of his good Christian friend Filippo Garzone, he’d no idea if or when they might open again, and who would be left to emerge from the ruins once that occurred.
