by David Hewson
The bell sounded again.
‘Coming,’ Paolo yelled across the garden, then got his coat and the three gilt cardboard boxes.
Standing in front of the locked door, puzzled, a little frightened, Paolo wondered, Maybe he should have carried a gun, not cardboard and rich velvet. One of the weapons that was still in the bag in his parents’ old bedroom.
It couldn’t be that hard to use one. Vanni would show him. Mika certainly. But there wasn’t time and as he stood on the wooden steps and asked who was there he realized there was no need either.
‘Paolo, Paolo. It’s me. Father Filippo.’ The priest sounded breathless and desperate. ‘For pity’s sake let me in. I … I’m on my own. It’s safe.’
He hammered on the door again. Paolo opened it.
Filippo Garzone was one of the most placid men he’d ever met but at that moment he looked quite distraught.
‘We need to speak. It’s vital—’
‘I have to go.’ It was almost three thirty. He’d walk to the Gioconda. It would take a while. ‘I have to see the Germans.’
Garzone took off his priest’s cap and ruffled his grey hair.
‘We’ll talk along the way.’
It was getting dark already. Another thin winter mist had begun to roll in wisps along the street that led back into Castello proper. As always there were gulls, and from somewhere the sound of a boat engine, muffled by the weather, echoing off the terraces that wound down all the way to via Garibaldi. A sewage boat must have emptied a pozzo nero nearby. It was one of those rare moments when Venice stank of shit and piss.
The priest put a hand to his shoulder and stopped him at a corner by the lane back into the city.
‘Aldo Diamante’s dead,’ he said, staring at his feet. ‘My good friend killed himself last night.’
‘Oh lord,’ Paolo said and walked on down the lane, to think, to get away from the stench.
Garzone followed, took his arm, made him stop again.
‘Listen to me, Paolo. I owe you an apology. I should never have involved you in these schemes.’
‘It’s done. I’ve no regrets.’
‘Of course you haven’t!’ Garzone sounded angry for once, not himself at all. ‘You’re young. You can’t imagine any of this will touch you.’
‘I lost my parents, Father. I can imagine that very easily.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean …’
‘You’re upset. Go home. I’ve work to do. I must deliver—’
‘He surely killed himself for fear of what he’d say if they took him in! You understand?’
Diamante seemed a brave and serious man. It was hard to imagine him breaking and Paolo said so.
‘No one knows what they’d do,’ the priest shot back. ‘No one. Not him. Not me. Do … you … understand? You need to get that pair out of there. I thought Diamante would arrange it. They came through him. I’ve no idea how. Or through whom. I have no one to turn to, Paolo. No one. Do you appreciate what I’m saying? You have to get them out of there.’
‘They’ll leave of their own accord.’
He started walking again, mind whirring as Garzone kept up, his priest’s robes flapping wildly like crow wings. It was hard to believe Diamante was gone. The man was a figurehead beyond the ghetto, someone half of Venice had come to know through his work in the hospital. Harder still to believe he could kill himself.
‘I still don’t understand why—’
‘They’re coming for them. The Jews. Then they come for the rest of us. Anyone who disobeys. Who says a wrong word, looks the wrong way. The worst times are ahead. You must get them out of there.’
‘And after that?’
Garzone put a hand to his shoulder and stopped him so abruptly the golden boxes almost tumbled from his arms.
‘I shouldn’t say this. I wouldn’t if it weren’t important. After the Jews they will look for the gypsies. The communists.’ He gazed straight into Paolo’s face. ‘The homosexuals. Anyone who’s different. I’ve known you a while. I’ve watched you. I talked to your mother—’
‘About what?’
‘About … you. There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Whatever people say. Some of my fellow clerics in the church too and they, of all people, should know better. God made us in his own image. Every last one of us.’ He laughed, or tried to. ‘The Vatican would throw me out of San Pietro if they heard that, even though a good number of the men there are made the same way.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’
Garzone threw back his head and uttered the mildest of curses.
‘I can see it, Paolo. If I can see it others can too. There’s a reason you hide away behind your little army of stone angels and it’s not just because your parents are gone. You know it too.’ He reached out and touched Paolo Uccello’s cheek. It might have been Vanni at that moment. ‘Don’t think you’re a freak of nature. Or alone. I was young once. A student at the divinity school in Padua, before I was ordained. There was someone there. A young man from outside Vicenza. He was … not destined to be a priest. If I’d followed my own heart and stayed with him neither was I. So I made the choice. Though I didn’t make it in ignorance of both the pleasure and the pain I left behind. You’re not alone. However much it feels that way.’
‘What happened to him?’ Paolo asked. ‘Your friend?’
‘He was the son of a farmer. He married his neighbour’s daughter and the last I heard they had eight children, a sprawling estate and made some of the best illicit grappa a man might ever taste.’
‘He got married?’
‘Happily. We’re complex creatures, son. We reflect a complex world and, I don’t doubt, a complex heaven when we get there. But this present state of affairs is run by those who would simplify things. You. Me. The places we know and love.’ He came closer and his voice grew stern. ‘They will simplify it by removing everything they fail to understand, everyone who doesn’t fit their picture of how this world should be. You must do as I say. Get that pair safely out of there. Stay out of sight as much as you can. Use Chiara Vecchi as your window into the city outside. And wait.’
‘You mean … like a coward?’
‘The ranks of the martyrs are brimming already, son. You’ve no need to add another corpse to the pile.’
He didn’t know what to say. Father Filippo had always been one for stories. He’d listened to a fair few himself back in the days when they first moved to their outpost by San Pietro and his parents went to church for a while to try, in vain it turned out, to become a part of the community there. It was possible this was one more parable to add to the list, a fable meant to reassure, not to be taken literally. Though perhaps, now he thought about it, he was one of the reasons they’d retreated behind the walls of their little fortress home. There’d been a silence in the Uccello family for years, one none of them wished to mention.
I talked to your mother …
‘You did as I asked when you took those two in. Do as I beg you now, please. See them gone, then hide till the day it’s safe to come out.’
‘When will that be, then? When?’
It was a cruel question, an unnecessary and unanswerable one.
‘I fear I made you grow up, young man,’ the priest said in a sad and wavering voice. ‘I fear I dragged you into a world for which you’re not ready.’
Paolo tapped the cardboard boxes.
‘I have business to transact, Father. Goods to deliver. Thank you for your thoughts. Good day.’
A line of German soldiers was checking everyone going into the Gioconda. The name of Uccello was on a list, though it was his father’s, so it took a long explanation to a hatchet-faced officer before he was allowed past, and that only after they’d rifled through the cardboard boxes and patted him down.
The unsmiling receptionist behind the front desk looked at him and shook his head. There was no one staying in the hotel called Ugo Leone.
‘I have an order,’ Paolo insisted, placing the boxes on
the counter. ‘Three ceremonial banners in velvet. I was asked to bring them here.’
A group of singers had begun rehearsing on one side of the cavernous room, going through the music they’d been given. Staff in bellboy uniforms were busily moving tables up the staircase. A gigantic Nazi flag fluttered from the balcony alongside a large portrait of Hitler; next to it a smaller one of Mussolini. The place had the kind of bustle that always made him feel uncomfortable and out of place. Then, alongside the preparations for some kind of event, there was the military. The ground floor was swarming with German soldiers, all in uniform, all armed.
He told the receptionist, ‘They’re for the event. Someone from Turin ordered them.’
‘Turin,’ the man muttered and got on the phone.
Twenty minutes later a tall, gaudy individual, maybe forty, slick suit, pale face, prominent eyes, a small moustache, greasy combed-back hair, marched down the stairs.
‘Signor Leone?’ Paolo asked.
No reply. The man just picked up the boxes and unwrapped the banners from the tissue inside. Then he walked back to examine them beneath the glaring light of a sprawling Murano chandelier.
‘Who are you?’ the fellow demanded.
‘My name is Paolo Uccello. Someone, I don’t know who, contracted with my father to produce these banners. I was asked to bring them here. For Leone.’
‘Leone’s not around. I’ll take them.’
He didn’t move.
‘The contract stipulated a final payment on delivery. Today, sir. Twenty thousand lire.’
The man stared at him.
‘Do you have a signed contract with you?’
That had never occurred to him.
‘My father had a letter of commission. He was killed on the way back from agreeing it in Verona. Along with my mother. An American air raid.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ He didn’t sound concerned at all. ‘A letter means nothing. Was there a contract, signed by both parties?’
‘I … I assumed Signor Leone was a man of his word. We make fine velvet. By hand. It’s time-consuming. Expensive by its nature. The price agreed was a very fair one. To be frank we did this at a loss.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘Though the Uccello are true patriots so we make no complaint about that.’
The fellow held the banners up to the light again. They were beautifully made but all the same Paolo wished them gone. There were too many connections, to his late parents, to Vanni and his sister. The scarlet looked like blood in the bright chandelier lights and the lions cut ever more violent, aggressive figures.
‘If we could settle up, sir …’
‘Lot of money for three little bath towels.’
He didn’t rise to the bait. It was obvious where this was going. His father had always dealt with business. He knew how to haggle, how to argue, how to handle someone who tried to get out of a deal. That happened all the time in Venice. Life seemed to be one long act of bargaining. But it was a talent he never allowed Paolo to share. Weaving, the ways of the Jacquard, the goldcrest rhythm, the art of the loom. That was what his parents pushed at him. Never the practical ways of commerce.
‘I can fetch the letter. It’s a document that would stand up in court. The law—’
The man laughed. He had sharp, wolfish teeth, very white.
‘The law? What kind of fool are you? We are the law. The Germans. The Black Brigades.’ He tapped his chest. ‘Me.’
‘The law says I’m owed.’ Paolo reached out for the pieces of velvet. ‘Pay me and they’re yours. If not …’
The fellow threw the banners into one of the open boxes on the floor.
‘You haven’t got two cents to rub together, have you? Still, you walk in here. Try to screw the likes of me—’
‘It’s honest work. No one else in the city could make these things for you. No one. We need to be paid.’
The man called over one of the bellboys and told him to pack the banners back into their three boxes and take two upstairs to the guest rooms of a pair of visitors. Paolo barely caught their names. One sounded German and came with a long military title. The second was Italian, a count by the sound of it, aristocracy.
‘This …’ He pointed to the last box. ‘Put in the cloakroom. I’ll pick it up later.’
‘Si, Signor Bruno,’ the man replied and walked off with all three.
Paolo looked straight at him and said, ‘Bruno … I’ve heard of you. The Jew who hunts Jews.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘I read it in the paper.’
‘I’m a servant of the state. I love my country.’ Bruno reached into his wallet and took out some notes. ‘There you go.’
‘That’s not enough.’
‘Five thousand, sonny. All you’re going to get. Take it or leave it.’
‘My parents died working to get you those banners.’
He laughed and Paolo realized that, while he’d never in his life hit someone, maybe that could change.
‘What’s that got to do with me, you little idiot? I didn’t kill them. Your old man knew we were never going to pay his stupid price. Guess you never got his business nous, huh?’ He brandished the money in Paolo’s face. ‘Take it and crawl back into your hole. We’ – he tapped his chest – ‘run this city. Little people need to learn to do as you’re told.’
Don’t get mad, he thought. At least not too much. And don’t be a fool either.
‘Grazie,’ he said and slowly took the notes. ‘I wish you well, sir, and your celebrations.’
There was a bar across the way. It was probably somewhere else the Crucchi hung out. Just then he didn’t care.
He walked in and asked for a caffè corretto, with sambuca, not grappa, the kind his mother ordered when he was a kid and she’d stop by the pastry shop on the way home from school. There was a first time for everything, he guessed. It was rare for him even to enter a cafe, unknown since they died. He’d always felt people were looking at him, thinking they saw something out of place.
A man in a long winter coat did just that. He walked over and Paolo recognized him: the Venetian with the German soldiers when they fished Isabella Finzi out of the water. Alberti. The cop Chiara had warned him about. The one who’d delivered the little lecture about Jews. Maybe he’d heard fateful Paolo’s outburst too.
‘I know you, kid.’
‘I’m not a kid. I came in here for coffee not a conversation.’
He pulled out a warrant for the National Republican Guard.
Paolo sighed and showed him his ID.
‘I didn’t ask for that, did I?’
‘Saving you the trouble.’
‘Castello. Calle Largo Rosa. Number 3475. Where the hell is that?’
Addresses in Venice confused everyone, including people who lived there. A number meant little.
‘Back of the Arsenale going towards Crosera.’
‘What are you doing here, Paolo?’
‘Delivering something I was asked for. They seem to be having a party.’
‘They’re always having a party. The Crucchi. At our expense.’
Maybe the cop had been drinking. Or he was inviting Paolo to speak out of turn. Something wasn’t right. He was trying to work out some way out of there when Alberti’s attention drifted to the window.
Paolo’s breath caught. Bright blonde hair, lurid lipstick, his father’s old winter coat open so you could see the shiny red dress beneath, Mika was walking towards the entrance of the Gioconda. She had a swagger about her, a common, look-at-me swing, the kind loose women used in the movies.
‘Know that one, do you?’
‘No.’
‘Then why are you staring?’
‘She’s pretty. That’s why you’re looking, isn’t it?’
The cop nodded at the door and grabbed his hat.
‘If you know what’s good for you get out of here. No place for the innocent.’
He was going after Mika. It seemed clear.
‘Wait a
moment,’ Paolo said, grabbing his sleeve, something the man didn’t like.
‘What?’
‘I heard you were looking for someone. Two Jews on the run.’
Alberti nodded.
Mika was at the door of the hotel, talking to the soldiers, showing them some kind of pass.
‘Can’t be anyone in Venice who doesn’t know that.’
‘Is there a reward?’
The cop took off his hat. He wasn’t looking at Mika any more.
‘Maybe. You get to stay alive. That’s some kind of reward, isn’t it?’
‘I’ve done nothing wrong, mister. No need to threaten me. It’s just that … if there’s money in it I could ask around. Castello. People don’t give things away for free.’
He was checking the hotel again. Paolo grabbed his sleeve and said, trying to sound tough, not that it was easy, ‘Are you listening to me or what?’
Alberti batted his hand away.
‘I don’t know what I’m listening to.’
‘I just got ripped off for fifteen thousand lire by one of those bastards over there!’
‘What?’ The cop, at least, sounded interested.
‘They hired us for a job. Twenty thousand lire. When I turn up with the goods some creep gives me five and tells me to get out of there.’
‘Guess you were out of your depth then, sonny.’
Mika had vanished inside the Gioconda. Paolo was sweating hard under his winter clothes. He’d never done anything like this. It felt odd. Both good and bad. Maybe this was the excitement she got from fighting with the partisans. If it was, perhaps he could understand why she couldn’t sit still inside his remote little prison at the edge of the lagoon.
‘Tell me there’s good money finding your Jews and I’ll ask around. If it’s one more free gift to you and your Crucchi friends you can go screw yourself.’
Alberti laughed.
‘My, my, boy. Maybe you do have a spine after all.’ He patted Paolo on the shoulder. ‘Tell me how I can find those terrorists and I’ll see you get back all that money twice over.’ The pat turned into a punch. ‘Screw around with me and we’ll be going into Ca’ Loretti for a little chat.’
