The Garden of Angels

by David Hewson

  There were, I saw, only two envelopes left, sliding over each other.

  ‘Read in order. It’s important. Just the one.’

  I didn’t move.

  ‘Dad says we’re selling the company.’

  ‘Merging the company. Putting it on a firm footing for the future. A man of my time always wants to pass on something better than he inherited.’

  ‘You’ve done that ten times over, Grandad.’

  ‘Not on my own. I had good people to help me. Like dear Chiara. I owe them all the chance of some continuity. Things can sometimes fall apart so fast. I’ve witnessed it. I’m sorry if your father’s upset. He knows it’s for the best.’

  ‘You should have told him. About the Artoms. About the Giardini degli Angeli. I know it might have been embarrassing. What with Vanni and—’

  ‘Not again, boy! This is your burden, no one else’s. Now off with you. There’s lots to read.’

  TRAITORS

  Saturday. The banners would be delivered to a man called Ugo Leone in the Hotel Gioconda. Some kind of partisan attack would occur that evening. Then, in a day or two, Vanni and Mika would vanish. This strange week, the most unsettling since he’d lost his parents, would come to some kind of close.

  Paolo Uccello got up early that morning and walked the familiar path to the shop in via Garibaldi, bought bread and pastries, cheese and bottled water. The grocer looked terrified when he arrived but he didn’t put money in the bag any more. The shelves were mostly empty. Everyone needed food but many were fishing for it in the lagoon or living off old stores of flour and pasta while growing yeast for bread out of the air in jars. Gabriele Gallo probably had more need of cash than him at that moment. And soon the commission would be delivered, with it the welcome fee for its completion. Then he’d spend money with the timid old shopkeeper for real.

  ‘In a day or two,’ Paolo said, ‘I’ll only need enough for one. I’ll pay too. If you have a good Prosecco. I’d like to give a friend of mine a gift. She’s call—’

  ‘Don’t tell me names,’ Gallo interrupted. ‘What kind of fool are you?’

  ‘She’s just a friend.’

  ‘These people … they say they’re patriots … they come and ask you these things and you say yes before you’ve even thought about it. Like that with you?’

  He picked up the bag. The cornetti looked pale and underdone. He wasn’t going to complain.

  ‘I’ve been a fool,’ the shopkeeper went on. ‘Next time they come asking you say no. I’m going to. Don’t care how hard they try. I got a daughter. Cripple. Can’t walk. Can’t do anything. A wife who can’t cope on her own. If the Crucchi take me God knows what happens to them. You think they’ll look after the two of them, these so-called patriots? If the Nazis shoot me?’

  ‘I …’ Paolo wished he’d never started the conversation. ‘They’re good people. I’m sure.’

  ‘You’re an infant,’ Gallo snapped and stared at him with the coldest of expressions. ‘What do you know?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Paolo lifted up the bag and tried to smile. ‘I’m grateful.’

  ‘You’re as big a fool as me, boy,’ the grocer told him, then picked up a fatty piece of ham, sniffed it and placed the meat on the slicer.

  It was the smoke that drew them to the door of Diamante’s block. Any number of three-hundred-year-old fireplaces ran to the chimneys on top of his ghetto building. But half the apartments were now empty – the owners interned, vanished, or in hiding. Of the rest a couple couldn’t even afford fuel. The city firemen from the depot near Ca’ Foscari went door to door, sniffing, scared the grey plume emerging from the top of the building might herald something worse than a simple flue where the soot had caught. The prospect of fire among the city’s cramped, narrow houses, many of them half-timber, had terrified Venice for centuries. It was one reason the council demanded the truncated cone pots be used on roofs everywhere in the hope they’d disperse sparks more efficiently.

  Ten minutes after they arrived, Bargato, the senior duty man, hammered on Diamante’s locked door. No answer but there was a smell coming from inside, one every fireman recognized. He told them to break it down. Stumbling through, the men were met with a grey-black haze billowing around the room like the lagoon fog that had enshrouded it the night before. The source was obvious. A lively log fire set in a metal surround, feeding into what had to be a half-blocked chimney. Bargato had trained for this, years and years of practice. Two blasts from the chemical extinguishers and it was nothing but sizzling embers and the men could start to wave their hands around, trying to clear the air enough to take off their masks.

  He went to the windows over the campo and threw them open. The wind caught and swirled the smoke around, sending it outside into the bright, chilly day.

  Down in the square a woman stood holding the hands of two children, staring up at the window.

  ‘Is the doctor in?’ she cried and sounded desperate.

  ‘Not now, signora,’ he answered.

  ‘I need to see him, sir.’

  He took off his mask. Most of the men had too. His eyes stung from the smoke but he could breathe.

  ‘I said … not now.’

  There was a commotion behind him and someone swore.

  Bargato left the window and went to look. They were all Venetians. Working for the fire service was a good job. Posts handed down from generation to generation, reliable, well-paid. Some of the time they didn’t even get to smell smoke but dealt with sunken boats or elderly people too sick to get out of their attic homes.

  The rest of the team had gathered at the far end of the room, grouped around what looked like a large armchair set beneath a painting that covered most of the wall. He walked over and found himself for a moment caught by the people depicted on the canvas, so well they might have been alive even through a thin film of soot. At the back stood a distinguished man in his fifties or sixties, silver hair, silver beard. He wore a severe dark suit, a watch chain in his waistcoat and had his left arm around the shoulders of a shorter woman, dark-haired, younger, smiling, in a rich purple velvet dress. Between them, their hands on his shoulders, was a young and very serious-looking boy of twelve or thirteen, eyes wide and intelligent, staring straight out of the painting, in his hands a stethoscope.

  The oldest man in the fire department, Moro, a part-timer from Giudecca, was weeping.

  ‘Cut that out,’ Bargato ordered.

  ‘Diamante,’ Moro cried, pointing at the picture. ‘His old man. His mother. The boy. He was always going to be a doctor. I remember him coming to school with his little medical bag and listening to our chests back when I was little. When the Jews could go to the same class as us. Twenty years later he was treating my little Marta when she had the scarlet fever. Maybe saved her life.’ Moro took one step forward and pointed at the child in the painting. ‘He always looked like he was examining you. Aldo. Poor Aldo.’

  He reached out and touched something Bargato hadn’t noticed. The sight of it made him jump back and, for a moment, he thought he might throw up. His fingers had found the dry and sooty hair of a man seated in the winged armchair. It must have been dragged in front of the picture. No one would sit with their face up to the wall like that. He didn’t seem to be looking at the painting, more at an old photograph of a young man and a pretty woman posing by a gondola.

  Aldo Diamante had died in his customary pinstripe suit, head back, mouth open, eyes too. He looked like people did when they were asphyxiated by fire but untouched by the flames. A layer of grey soot sat on his narrow, intelligent face which seemed fixed in an expression of surprise. Something was in the dead man’s lap. Bargato reached down and took it from his stiff fingers. A photo album. Life in the ghetto from the looks of it. Decades and decades. Photos of the hospital too, pretty nurses, doctors, all lined up in white uniforms, standing by the waterfront on the Fondamente Nove, ambulance boats in the background, a large cross in a white circle on each.

  ‘Dead Jew,’ one of th
e men grunted. ‘That didn’t happen by accident. Important Jew too. Someone had better tell the Crucchi.’ He laughed and said, ‘Know a funny fact my dad once told me?’

  ‘Show some respect,’ Moro spat at him.

  ‘Dead Jews don’t get no respect. My old man said in the old days they used to take them out in coffins same way as us. Out by the canal at San Pietro. Locals there … if they knew it was a Jew they’d stand on the bridge and spit as the boat went past.’ He looked down at the stiff corpse in the chair and chuckled. ‘He reckoned the ebrei had to pay for their own little canal round the Arsenale just so’s they could get their dead out without us gobbing on them. Maybe this bloke—’

  Moro felled the man with a single blow and left him sprawling on the floor.

  ‘Enough of that,’ Bargato barked. ‘We make this place safe. I’ll call them. There’s got to be a telephone here.’

  ‘He’s a Jew, boss,’ someone said. ‘They took their phones away, didn’t they?’

  He left them there and went outside.

  The woman was still out in the campo with her kids. Bargato told her to make herself scarce and quick. Soon there’d be Germans and soldiers. She didn’t move.

  ‘The doctor …’

  ‘The doctor’s dead, love. He won’t be helping you now.’

  She started to cry. The kids, two boys, maybe six and ten, looked embarrassed.

  ‘Please,’ he begged. ‘I’ve got to bring them in.’

  The nearest working telephone he could find was in a cafe by the Cannaregio canal.

  The German he got put through to was called Sachs. He didn’t sound happy at all.

  Forty minutes later they were there, Alberti, head hurting from the worst hangover in ages, lurking in the shadows, trying to still the voices in his head.

  He’d liked Aldo Diamante even if the old Jew seemed to loathe him in return. The man had that stolid Venetian determination about him that came from growing up in a city where everyone lived cheek to jowl, fought for work, battled against the hard lagoon, freezing in winter, steamy in summer. Waiter or vaporetto hand, accountant or cook, the men and women of Venice knew they lived apart from terraferma and were proud of that fact, set on defending it. A quiet, inner stubbornness was the mark of them all and Diamante wore that like a badge.

  Then the Fascists came along and, for a while, lulled people into thinking they were just another bunch of politicians. Slowly, bit by bit, life turned harder. Finally, and perhaps it was inevitable because this was the course unconsciously they’d chosen, the city fell under the thumb of Hitler. So Venice was back to being occupied by foreigners, Austrians and Germans. Diamante, being an intelligent, observant man, must have understood what was happening all along, watched, planned, did his best to think matters through. Alberti, a paid hand for the state, whatever the state might be, was in no such position. His marriage had disintegrated, his kid hated being the son of a turncoat cop. His job kept shifting ever further from simple police work to that of a political enforcer. The change was so subtle he’d never really noticed until the Germans arrived that September and, after checking out his loyalty, Oberg had offered him a room in the Gioconda. One way, perhaps, to keep alive even if it didn’t help him sleep at night.

  The sullen German was there watching as Sander and Sachs went through Diamante’s apartment, pulling out drawers, scattering the contents everywhere. Clothes mostly, more photo albums, some musical documents which seemed to be libretti for operas. A couple of uniform Nazi grunts lurked by the door, rifles over their shoulders, complaining about the smell of smoke.

  And Salvatore Bruno, the slick-dressed Jew from Turin strode around the room, gazing at the pictures on the wall, stepping daintily about the corpse still slumped in a chair in front of the family portrait.

  Alberti had the cop’s habit of judging people very quickly. Bruno wore a smart, well-pressed suit beneath a dark-blue wool coat. His face was always animated, narrow, bloodless, with a toothbrush moustache that wasn’t far off that of Hitler’s though paler in colour and far from full. The rest was shaved so perfectly he must have taken great care himself, or risked his neck with a barber – something Alberti himself would never dream of doing. And then his shoes. They were always a sign, Alberti thought. A working man chose something practical, hard-wearing and rarely polished. Bruno had on black brogues, so shiny they glittered.

  Most of all though, Alberti believed he found the man when he looked in his eyes. They were anxious, forever flicking round the room for encouragement or a sign of suspicion. Then, when he met the gaze of another, glancing quickly away.

  Salvatore Bruno wished the Crucchi to believe him a convert, a Jew who’d seen the light about the perverse and wicked nature of his tribe. But he wasn’t an idiot. He surely knew that a Jew was a Jew and when his usefulness expired, as it must one day, there’d be a reckoning. In that respect the two of them were not so dissimilar. Alberti regarded the inevitability of that fate with a degree of acceptance and no small amount of innate cunning. The Jew from Turin was clearly terrified beneath the shaky outward portrayal of certainty and confidence in the Nazis and the Black Brigades around him. He knew there was no possibility of escape.

  ‘There,’ Bruno said in a hurt, weak voice. ‘There’s your list, Oberg.’

  He was at the fireplace, toe of his shiny brogue poking through the ashes that lay in front of the smouldering logs.

  Alberti had seen the remains of burned paper the moment he walked in but never bothered to mention them. It was obvious what had happened. They could find out for themselves.

  ‘You mean he burnt it?’ the German asked. ‘After going to all that trouble to put those names together? Alberti!’

  He joined them and looked down at the blackened flecks of paper on the hearth.

  ‘Did you have any idea this was in his head? When you spoke to him?’

  Sachs and Sander were watching avidly, waiting for him to make a mistake.

  ‘None at all. I thought he was going to bring them to us today, just like he said. Though if I may speak freely …’

  ‘Do so.’

  He nodded at Bruno.

  ‘This fellow pushed him pretty hard. Diamante was a man of substance here. He ran the hospital. The whole city looked up to him. You treated him like he was one more craven Jew so frightened he’d bend over and show you his Hebrew arse. Well …’ He cast a glance at the figure slumped in the chair in front of the painting. Someone ought to put a sheet over the man at least but it didn’t look as if it was going to happen. ‘How wrong can you get?’

  ‘We can still … we can still round up p-plenty,’ Bruno stuttered. ‘I can do it. I can sniff Jews out anywhere.’

  Sachs and Sander had started rootling through the drawers of Diamante’s desk. One of them had found a fob watch, old, battered, probably worthless, and was dangling it in the light from the window. The place would be plundered before the morning was out. Not that anyone was going to want the painting of the Diamante family in their prime.

  ‘We can start with the old people’s home across the way,’ Bruno added, desperate to offer something.

  ‘There’s only a handful left there,’ Alberti said. ‘Most got cleared out to the infirmary on the Lido weeks ago.’

  ‘It won’t be empty,’ the man from Turin insisted. ‘They’re Jews. They’re not going to turn down a free bed and food. If—’

  ‘I’ve got better things to do than this,’ Oberg interrupted. ‘Enjoy the reception this evening, Signor Bruno.’

  The uniforms had got in on the act of looking for something to steal. One of them was going through Diamante’s old black leather medical bag, holding up instruments and bottles, asking his mate what they were.

  Alberti couldn’t take any more.

  ‘If you want me to check the home across the way, boss …’

  ‘No need,’ Oberg replied.

  ‘They’ll want to bury the old man today if they can. Jews always do it quick. If you let them g
et on with it they’ll be too busy to worry about us.’

  Oberg nodded at the door and told him to wait outside.

  He was glad to get out of the smoky stale air of Diamante’s apartment. In the chilly sunlight of the campo people were watching from doorways. Furtive, hidden, scared. They knew Diamante’s death was the start of something, not the end of it.

  Across the square a familiar figure in black was shuffling out of the sotoportego that led into the ghetto from the east. There was a priest’s zucchetto cap on his head as he bent into the winter wind. Alberti took one look, then hurried over to stop him.

  ‘Garzone. Garzone.’ He grabbed hold of him in the shadows before the man could go further. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  The priest glared at him.

  ‘Am I to seek the permission before I can walk around my own city now?’

  ‘I ask this for your own sake. Things are happening.’

  ‘I was due to meet my friend Diamante. He didn’t show. I’m worried. So I came to see—’

  ‘Too late. He’s dead.’

  Garzone’s mouth fell open and his hand went to his priest’s cap.

  ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘The firemen found him in his apartment, full of smoke, this morning. There’s a syringe on the floor—’

  The man in black’s face flushed and he shook his fist. Alberti looked and wondered if he’d ever done that before.

  ‘No. You bastards killed him. I’ve known Aldo Diamante nearly twenty years. He’d never do such a thing.’

  Alberti groaned. This was going to be hard.

  ‘He was supposed to deliver a list. The names of all the Jews.’ Something flickered in Garzone’s eyes and Alberti thought, I hope the Crucchi never take this fool in because he’d blab everything in an instant. ‘But then, I see, you knew that. He burned the list he’d been preparing, then took some kind of overdose. I imagine he wanted to make sure they couldn’t take him into Ca’ Loretti, to that little room of theirs and …’