The Garden of Angels

by David Hewson

  Paolo finished his coffee, then raised the little cup in a toast.

  ‘Deal,’ he said.

  Twenty minutes it took him to get to Chiara’s apartment. She argued when he forced half Bruno’s paltry cash on her, swore at the man for cheating them out of what they were owed.

  He didn’t listen. Nor did he mention he’d spoken to Father Garzone. And certainly not the cop, Alberti.

  Her face was puffy, her eyes red. It took him a moment to realize she’d been crying; it seemed such a strange thing for Chiara to do.

  Putting that thought out of his head Paolo said, ‘Please. Go home to Burano for a while. I’ll be fine here. Honest. There’s no work. We can both use a little time to ourselves.’

  ‘And what will you do?’

  He shook his head at that.

  ‘Go back to being a recluse, I imagine.’

  ‘You have that pair with you.’

  ‘Not for long.’

  She kissed him on both cheeks. The clammy salt dampness of her tears smeared against his skin.

  ‘The man, Paolo. He’s nice. Nice is dangerous sometimes.’

  ‘I delivered the banners. It’s all fine. My visitors will be gone tomorrow or the day after. They have to be. The priest says the Crucchi are coming for all the Jews.’

  ‘They were coming for your friends anyway. They’re partisans. Not just Jews. Oh …’

  She tore herself away from him, screwed her eyes tight shut, balled her fists in sudden fury. Her first-floor apartment was too hot. The atmosphere was wrong. The place was small but it had the hallmark of a couple about it. There were photos of her husband on the mantelpiece, in uniform, smiling for the camera, ready to go to war.

  ‘The poor doctor’s dead. The Jew,’ she said. ‘He killed himself.’

  ‘I know. I met Garzone. The priest told me.’

  ‘Why do you think a man like Aldo Diamante did that?’

  He had an idea. He didn’t want to say it. So she did.

  ‘Because he feared being seized, Paolo. Because he was afraid that if they took him into that place of theirs and began torturing him, he’d give them all the names he knew. The partisans. The cells. The priest.’ She paused, then added, ‘You.’

  ‘He would never have done that.’

  Chiara glared at him.

  ‘No? You really think that? If they were to take me in, Garzone, you … which one of us could promise our lips would stay sealed?’

  ‘It’s a question of courage,’ he suggested and heard the doubt in his own voice.

  ‘That’s the child in you talking. He’s still there, whatever you think.’ She let go and glanced at the photo of her husband over the fireplace. ‘I’ve had enough of death. I’ve lost my own and so have you. Maybe I’ll go to Burano in a day or two. There’s a little hut we have on the marsh for hunting the ducks. Just me. It will do till times change.’

  He didn’t say a word.

  ‘Paolo. I know you. The way your mother knew you. I know the kind of boy you are. We all do—’

  ‘I’m not a boy …’

  She gripped him again and her pale face shone in the weak electric light.

  ‘I know you. This isn’t your fight. Keep out of this, I beg you. Stay inside your little home. Be invisible. Be safe. Do what the rest of us will. We didn’t start this war. Let others end it.’

  He took her in his arms and kissed her damp cheeks.

  She begged him then, ‘Promise me! No more partisans. In a week or two I’ll come back. We’ll find some work. Here’ – she held out the money – ‘you’ve more need of this than me. I’ve got family. You … you …’

  Chiara didn’t want to go on.

  ‘I’ve nothing, you mean? No one?’

  ‘You’ve always got me. One day this nightmare will end. The two of us will walk round Venice and never have to look behind us. We’ll sit behind those looms and listen to the birds sing.’

  ‘It’s winter,’ he pointed out. ‘There are no birds now.’

  He didn’t take the money, hard as she pressed him.

  Outside the night mist was getting thicker, snaking down the narrow streets, rolling over the leaden, sluggish ribbons of water that ran between them.

  Ten minutes and he was home.

  Trevisan had picked three volunteers from the brigade. Two fishermen and Tosi, a welder from the Arsenale yards. Tosi had a limp and one eye. Not ideal but there hadn’t been many takers for the job. Mostly the partisans worked on guerrilla tactics. Hit and run on individual targets. Sabotage on transport lines. The theft of guns and ammunition. Stealing into some grand Nazi and Black Brigade banquet and letting loose with automatic weapons was the most ambitious attack they’d ever attempted. The risks matched the potential rewards. They knew the backwaters of Venice as well as most men could map the roads around their home. If they managed to escape the Gioconda alive, they could find their way back to the boat, speed down the little channels, pick up fuel from a drop point near Sant’Alvise in Cannaregio and be across the water, to terraferma and safety before dawn. After that they’d head north and try to find the partisan cells around San Donà and safety.

  There’d be repercussions. Terrible reprisals. Depending on the officer in charge, and how personally offended he felt by any partisan attack, the Germans might kill ten locals for every one of theirs who died. Sometimes fifty. On occasion in France, he’d heard they’d wiped out entire villages, all the kids, women, men, didn’t matter how old they were, then razed their homes, their shops, their farms, their church down to the ground. He couldn’t imagine what they might do in Venice. Wipe out an entire community maybe? Pick out civilians in the street and mow them down?

  He doubted that. Since they’d occupied the city the previous September he’d come to think the local Crucchi were the weaker sort. Officers not thought fit for the hard and dangerous graft of fighting on the lines to the south. The city had become a kind of playground for them, a place they could retreat to recuperate and build their strength afresh. Oberg, the head of the Gestapo unit chasing partisans and Jews, was reputed to be a former school master, intellectual, quiet, unwilling to visit the bars and brothels most of his fellow countrymen seemed to love so much. The man had been wounded in action south of Rome so maybe wasn’t a coward unlike some of the weaklings around him. All the same he would respond and, as Trevisan had said to Mika Artom, this was all for the good. A revolution could not be won without the spilling of blood. That of the innocent was the most precious of all. The men of Venice were hardy creatures, used to the cold winter lagoon and the fierce heat of summer. Kill their loved ones and you dug your own grave.

  ‘Hey Rocco,’ Tosi, cried. ‘We got enough fuel?’

  They were moored in the Rio San Francesco della Vigna, close to the colonnade of the convent attached to the church of the same name. It was as quiet a part of Castello as he could find. A friendly local who worked in the convent had agreed to hide four automatic rifles, three German stick grenades and a case of ammunition in one of the garden outbuildings. Tosi and the fishermen had picked them up that afternoon and ferried them to the steps by the canal in canvas bags. Now they sat in the back of the blue commercial boat Trevisan used for ferrying goods around the city.

  ‘Yes. We have.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  Tosi was a good welder. He knew nothing about the lagoon and the craft that plied it.

  ‘He’s sure,’ one of the fishermen cried.

  The weapons were at the back, under a grey tarpaulin, covered by old fish boxes from the Rialto. If anyone saw them they’d assume they were one more transport craft delivering around the city. Or that was the plan.

  ‘This old wreck’s going to take us all the way to Campalto afterwards?’ Tosi asked.

  There must have been a service in the convent. An organ was playing and with it the slow, haunting chorus of a hymn.

  ‘It is,’ Trevisan said. ‘We can get there. Crossing the water’s the last thing we’ve got to worr
y about. You know how to use the rifle? How to throw a grenade?’

  The welder laughed.

  ‘No problem there, mate. I been watching these bastards on the range in the Arsenale. A couple of them let me have a pop at the targets.’

  ‘You two are fine with this?’

  The fishermen nodded. Like all their kind they didn’t say much. Just got on with the job. The pair were frequent hunters out in the northern marshes in winter. They both knew firearms well. In truth he had a lot more faith in them than the mouthy Tosi with his limp and one good eye.

  It was a twenty-minute walk to the Gioconda. The way by boat was far more circuitous, through a winding thread of narrow canals, most of them chosen so they went nowhere near the Crucchi guard posts and, for a large part of the journey, were overlooked by houses, not streets or open campi. Forty minutes to an hour it would take. Then, close to the hotel, they’d stop by the cover of a dead end ramo, edge slowly out so that Mika Artom might see the familiar hull from the bright lights of the terraces where the Germans and the Fascists drank and ate and planned their evening’s whoring.

  ‘What are we waiting for?’ Tosi asked.

  Trevisan groaned. He wondered how many times he needed to tell the fellow.

  ‘We’re waiting on his woman,’ one of the fishermen said. ‘Don’t you listen?’

  ‘She’s not my woman,’ Trevisan muttered. ‘She’s not anybody’s woman. Only her own.’

  The welder laughed.

  ‘Well, she’s late like a woman, isn’t she? How long are we supposed to hang around here?’

  Almost half an hour. When she turned up she was dressed like a man: black trousers, black seaman’s jacket, shiny red hair almost completely covered up by a dark woollen cap.

  ‘What happened?’ he asked as the others got on the boat.

  ‘Had to talk down Greta. She was getting worried.’ Sara Vitale glanced at one of the fishermen. ‘You know he’s her nephew?’

  ‘No. I didn’t.’

  ‘I had to tell her there was nothing to worry about.’

  He scoffed at that and said, ‘No. Nothing at all.’ Then he took her by the arms and said, ‘You’re sure about this? You’re sure you want to come? We can manage with four …’

  Her eyes flared with a sudden anger.

  ‘I told you I’m coming. And no, you can’t manage without me. If I don’t stay by the boat there’s just three of you to go in and kill the damned Crucchi. Three’s not enough. I wait. You shoot as many as you can. Then you go back down the steps like we said. I meet you on the private jetty. We go. Wherever. We just go.’

  He nodded, then he embraced her, kissed her cheek which was cold and damp in the misty night air. Trevisan was uncomfortable with emotion.

  ‘I never told anyone this before. You’re the only woman who’s ever meant a thing to me.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Jesus Christ. You must have led a boring life.’

  He didn’t know what to say.

  She ran a single finger down his cheek, kissed him quickly on the lips, stroked his groin.

  ‘The thought of killing Crucchi always makes me want you,’ she whispered, amused at the way the others were watching them. ‘When we get to Campalto …’

  The engine of the boat interrupted the night.

  ‘Put your cock away, Rocco, huh?’ Tosi the welder cried. ‘Are we doing this or what?’

  She brushed her fingers against him once again.

  ‘Sure,’ he murmured but by then Sara Vitale was heading towards the boat.

  The event was dubbed a celebration of eternal Italian–German friendship, a slogan repeated on gaudy hangings in the reception of the Gioconda where Nazi flags hung next to the black banner of the Fascists with its wooden rod and bound axe. There were portraits of Hitler everywhere, ones of Mussolini too, always smaller. Some of the visitors were men Alberti had never seen in his life. Italians from Salò. Nazis from as far away as Berlin.

  Alongside the besuited civilians, Gestapo and Black Brigades he guessed, were the uniforms, grey mostly, SS, with a scattering of blue field army soldiers and a handful in brown. The last must have been among the few in the Afrika Korps to escape the shameful surrender across the Mediterranean at the start of the year, now redeployed to Italy to face the enemy once more.

  Then there were the women. All young, all attractive in silk dresses and pearls. Whores every last one of them, he didn’t doubt. Shipped in from Trieste, Milan, Paris maybe since he’d heard a couple talking French. They flitted round the room, smoking, drinking, looking nervous as they were perused by the men with the bored languor of those who knew they could pick and choose as they wished. Bought like cattle they couldn’t say no. By Monday they’d be on the train to the next hotel, another brief interlude in a stranger’s bed. The Jews weren’t the only ones the Crucchi kept captive.

  Some senior Nazi from Berlin had opened proceedings with a long and boring speech in German, his voice so high-pitched and nasal Alberti fought the urge to laugh. His own grasp of the Crucchi’s tongue was good but all the same he struggled at times to follow the fellow’s squeaky accent. Like everyone in the room he got the message. It was the kind of thing the Nazis said all the time. How the campaign to retake the south was progressing splendidly and soon would push the Americans and the British back into the sea, bloody and beaten. Then would come vengeance for the traitors left behind, one so harsh it would seal control of Italy for Mussolini – and by implication the Germans – forever. The Thousand Year Reich would stretch from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, from England to Asia. Those who’d turned against Il Duce in the summer coup in Rome would feel the harshness of its justice, and no one, not king, not his cabinet, would be spared.

  The German was indulging in fantasy. Alberti knew it and perhaps the fellow did too. Whatever lies the fascist press was forced to carry, people had radios. They’d heard another side of the story from foreign stations like the BBC, all heralding the steady progress the Allies were making as they fought their way north and calling on those trapped on the wrong side to be patient and support the partisans. Much of that was propaganda too but it was more muted, spoke of setbacks as well as successes, and carried with it the hard, dull feel of truth.

  More than that there was the word on the street. Italy had been cut in two but that didn’t stop people travelling and speaking across the dangerous divide. Italian soldiers trapped with Mussolini in the north had begun to defect to the Allies and take up arms against the Nazis. Either that or they vanished into the countryside and the mountains to find the resistance fighters, usually taking their weapons with them as a gift. It was a dangerous game. The Crucchi and the Black Brigades shot any deserters they found and their families too at times. Even if those fleeing Mussolini’s side escaped the German patrols, they could still face execution by suspicious partisans, or an accidental ambush on the way to the British or American lines.

  All of this was, for the moment, forgotten in Venice, the louche old lady of the lagoon, where food and drink and liberal sex allowed the men who ran the Republic of Salò to believe they were briefly free of the cares of war.

  Alberti leaned against the wall by the balcony doors, apart, alone, watching them. Oberg was silent and uncomfortable among his superiors; Sachs and Sander sucking up to senior officers who’d turned up from Milan. The German finished his speech, nodded, made the Hitler salute, watched as he got a forest of raised arms in return, and left the stage. There was a brief interlude, then different voices rang through the ballroom of the Gioconda, clear and perfect, Italian and Venetian through and through. The quartet hired for the evening, two men and two women singing in harmony without accompaniment by the unused piano, still covered in a white sheet, now with a candelabra, silver and gilt, placed on top.

  They were local. Alberti knew that from overhearing them talking among themselves in the cloakroom before the event. Not one of them wanted to be in the hotel singing the songs the Fascists had given the
m. Old folk tunes rearranged with new words about patriotism and love of country, war and strength and determination. One song he knew from his school days. It was an old marching rally from the battles that took place to reunite Italy the century before. Strange, he thought, how the sentiments of old seemed to work in the context of now, in the heart of a ballroom bristling with occupying foreigners, Italians who’d become their slaves, of whores and camp followers, men and women who were watching the idea of Italy as an independent nation state vanish before their eyes.

  Perhaps like him, like the singers on the stage, they had no choice. History moved on at its own pace, forced and controlled by others. You swam with the tide or you drowned in it, forgotten, lost. Like the Jews these Crucchi would be picking up over the coming days. Diamante’s sacrifice was in vain, a delaying tactic, nothing more. All he’d done was place a minor obstacle in the path of the Nazi’s squads of bully boys. They possessed an unshakable sense of right and might in the face of anyone foolish enough to oppose them. The wise Jews, the ones with money and contacts, had fled already, like the kids he saw being handed over to the old surgeon the night before, just as Diamante was planning his own death.

  Maybe, Alberti thought, he should have noticed something different in the man’s manner when he accosted him in his apartment. When Diamante had begged him for help. And what had been his reply.

  I’m nothing more than a prison guard in the jail of the Crucchi’s making. Just as much an inmate as you.

  Which was true enough. He’d warned Diamante what would happen if the old man found himself in Ca’ Loretti facing interrogation.

  Then I’ll claim the right to question you myself. They barely speak Italian anyway. Not a word of Venetian among them. You won’t get out of there alive.

  It was all irrelevant now, though the thought that his warning might have tipped the man over the edge into killing himself nagged Luca Alberti all the same.

  The bitter night wind was creeping through the cracks in the glass. Alberti opened the door, stepped outside and lit a cigarette. In this part of San Marco the electricity was good, the lights were mostly on. A vaporetto cruised down the Grand Canal at the end of the little rio on which the Gioconda stood. Back before the war there’d been plenty going on hereabouts. Maybe a party in the piazza outside Florian’s, someone playing jazz on a piano there alongside a trumpeter, a black saxophonist trying to make a living a long way from his American home.