by David Hewson
One of the tall Germans, a civilian in a dark suit, had taken to the podium and was waving people towards the balcony, laughing as he spoke.
‘Seems to me there’s a show starting,’ Alberti added, finishing half his drink, then throwing the rest over the balustrade. ‘A German show. I doubt it’s my kind of thing.’ One last time he touched her arm. ‘Or yours.’
Trevisan was the first up the greasy, slippery steps, rifle slapping over his shoulder, free hand out to help those who followed. Boatmen knew how treacherous the weed-strewn stones of Venice could be, how easily the unwary slipped on the green steps and found themselves immersed in the noisome city waters.
The door that led up to the ballroom of the Gioconda was maybe twenty metres along the narrow stone ledge. They stood beneath the spreading branches of an orange tree tumbling over from the hotel garden. Rotten fruit spattered the pavement. Pigeons rustled and cooed through the leaves. His mind wasn’t working right. He thought they sounded scared.
‘When’s that damned thing going off?’ Tosi grumbled.
‘When she gets there.’
‘You know this woman, Rocco? I heard she was someone new.’
‘We don’t have anyone else we could put in that room. She’s fine. She’s good.’ He leaned over and whispered in his ear, ‘She’s a beauty too. The Crucchi will be eating out of her hand.’
‘Trying to get into her pants more likely,’ Tosi said and spat in the canal.
Trevisan sighed. He’d known these men most of his life. But they’d never been thieves, never robbed a bank, never fled from the police and hid out until it was safe and they could pretend they were just ordinary Venetians, going about their business. Every one of them lacked his guile, the gift for vanishing into the darkness when danger came your way. He was telling the truth when he said he didn’t have any choice but to put the woman from Turin into the Gioconda. Any more than he had any alternative when it came to picking these three and Sara Vitale for one desperate strike against the Germans.
‘When is that damned bomb going off?’ one of the fishermen asked. ‘What are we waiting for?’
He walked back to the boat. Sara Vitale was at the tiller, ready to start the engine when they needed it.
Along the pavement there was a new light. The side door was open. No one there. Just a way in.
‘Maybe the bomb didn’t work,’ Sara Vitale said. ‘She’s got the door open. Take the grenades. Get up there. Throw them in. Shoot a few of the bastards. Doesn’t matter how many get killed. We’re making a point.’ She tapped the tiller. ‘As soon as I hear the shooting stop I’ll take this thing outside. You come back down. We can be in Campalto before sunrise.’ She reached out and touched his sleeve. ‘If you know the way.’
‘I could lead you there blind,’ he replied.
Maybe they could abandon the whole idea. There should have been a bomb.
No time to think. What was there to debate anyway?
‘Just do it, Rocco, will you?’
‘I will,’ he said and reached over, kissed her cold cheek.
The soldiers by the piano looked bored, as if they’d given up. Mika shoved against the mass of bodies flocking to the balcony. The men there – they were all men – stood around grinning, full of anticipation. No one took any notice of a waitress in a scarlet silk dress. No one saw her put the tray on one of the tables, carefully because the hidden knife from Greta’s kitchen bit into her if she bent over too much.
There was just one German who wasn’t headed for the door. The tall, smirking one who’d tried to persuade her to come to his room.
Herr Sander.
She glanced at the side exit and her fingers automatically stroked the key hidden away beneath her billowing dress.
The door was already open. German soldiers toting rifles lounged at the entrance, blocking it, idle. Waiting.
No chance of warning Trevisan from there.
No way of doing a thing from the balcony.
And the piano.
Alberti was telling the truth. She just knew it. There was no bomb. No signal for the men outside to strike. Just a trap, one that would soon ensnare her if she didn’t find some way to escape.
She strode over to the far side of the room, found the broad double staircase down to the ground floor, didn’t look back, didn’t move quickly or slowly, just walked the way a woman might if she wanted to head to the bathroom.
The lobby was empty save for a couple of uniformed guards lounging by the long mirrors, looking annoyed as hell that they couldn’t take part in the show. Behind the front desk a man and woman in black stood stiff and scared. They knew something was happening.
There was a pair of double doors to the canal side of the building. She opened them and slid through. Tables ran across the room in a geometric pattern. In the dim lights of the ceiling she could see cups and plates and cutlery laid out on every one.
On the right-hand wall was another long portrait of Hitler. On the left the same of Mussolini.
She walked towards the windows and peered out. Trevisan’s boat was to the left of the terrace jetty, bobbing on the dark water. At the helm, standing, was a figure she recognized: Sara Vitale, her face illuminated by the light falling from above. No one else on board.
Mika stared at the woman beyond the windows. Vitale noticed her the way people sometimes did when they were being watched. She turned, stared back, wide-eyed, scared. Something else there too and for an instant it looked like shame. To the right, there were men on the terrace too, a group of them approaching the door she was supposed to open but couldn’t get near.
‘Trevisan!’ she yelled and hammered on the glass. ‘Go back, man! The Crucchi know! They know—’
They must have been too far away to hear. She pushed through the tables to get closer, was about to hammer on the glass again when footsteps sounded from behind and a hard punch sent Mika Artom sprawling to the floor. The stink of booze and bad breath all around her. Sander. The German who’d been watching her all along.
‘First,’ he said, tearing at her flimsy dress, ‘we fight. And then we fuck.’
His hands were strong and grasping at her thighs, his Italian rough and hard to grasp. She reached for the knife in her belt, got her fingers on the hilt.
Another punch. She cried out in pain. Then again and the blade spilled from her fingers, vanished rattling across the polished wooden floor.
Trevisan led, that was his way. Grenade in left hand, rifle in the right, breath short, eyes sharp, thinking about the stairs ahead and what might lie beyond them. His three comrades followed behind in silence. They were just a few short steps from the side entrance when they heard doors open and a sudden burst of sound coming from above.
Maybe something else too. A shout. A fist banging on glass. He wasn’t sure so he held up a hand and made the men wait on the damp stone terrace.
It wasn’t hard to picture what had happened. Someone had opened the doors to the ballroom terrace above them and people had flooded through. There was a surge of jovial chatter, the clink of glasses, a few bursts of laughter. German. He couldn’t understand a word. It sounded like a party.
‘Those bastards won’t be so happy when they see us,’ Tosi said nudging his elbow.
‘Shut up, for God’s sake,’ Trevisan hissed at him. ‘We get in. We get out. We do it quick. Don’t matter how many we kill. Just a few …’
‘Didn’t come here for a few,’ Tosi spat back at them.
But Trevisan wasn’t even thinking of the brief and bloody attack on the banquet. His mind was on what came after.
Campalto. Across the water. He barely knew the place. Didn’t much like terraferma. Didn’t enjoy the thought he’d be leaving others to suffer the consequences of their actions. The ones the Crucchi were bound to pick on would doubtless be small people. Someone who’d offered to store a few weapons. Passed on titbits of information. Maybe even just muttered an imprecation against Mussolini and his Nazi masters in a bar. But
his little team were warriors and warriors were needed. It was one of the ironies of partisan warfare that the paucity of their numbers meant that their lives were more precious to the cause than those of the innocent.
He never liked that idea though he accepted its logic.
‘Are we going to do this or what?’ Tosi asked with another nudge of his elbow.
Two things happened then, both unexpected.
He heard the familiar sound of his boat engine coming to life behind them and when he turned he saw Sara Vitale, reversing the craft back into the city.
Then, before he could speak, he was holding up his eyes to try to shield them against a series of bright blinding white lights that burst into life across the water, aimed straight at them.
It took a moment for his sight to adjust. When they did his heart froze just like the breath inside him. A line of soldiers, four or five machine guns on mounts, floodlights by their sides, ranged along the opposite bank, picking them out like wild geese against a bright summer sky.
‘Sara,’ he murmured, puzzled, as he glanced again up the narrow waterway. The old blue boat he’d bought for his father through robbing and crookery, was vanishing beneath the bridge on the corner.
A gull squawked somewhere and a small flock of pigeons clattered up towards the velvet sky.
The crowd on the balcony above them had gone quiet.
An expectant silence had fallen upon the little canal by the side of the Hotel Gioconda. Even Tosi couldn’t think of a thing to say.
Trevisan flipped the pin on the grenade and lifted his arm to lob it skywards, somewhere in the direction of the Crucchi across the channel.
But then the night was torn apart by fire and the deafening mechanical rattle of machine guns.
Overhead distant cheers. Behind the shattering of glass.
The first shell took him in the chest. The second the throat.
His fingers lost their grip on the grenade which tumbled down towards the black canal and exploded there with a deadly roar.
Dank water rose like a filthy fountain under the explosion’s power, fell all around. The four men shook and danced like the rag dolls of an angry child as the gunfire bit.
The lagoon was in his mouth and so was blood. The taste of Venice, acrid salt and human waste, choking Rocco Trevisan as he fell gagging into the black mirror of the water that closed around him like an icy shroud.
Lights flared outside through the hotel breakfast room, piercing the dark with darting, incandescent beams. After the sudden burst of engine noise – Vitale reversing to safety she felt sure – the laughter and the sound of the crowd above had subsided. The tumult that followed was so loud and violent it seemed an unseen monster had torn apart the world. It took Mika a moment to realize what it was: the metal chatter of automatic gunfire ringing out in an insane chorus, followed by the screams and cries of dying men. As she scrambled on the floor, fighting the German’s arms around her, stray shots tore through the windows of the downstairs room sending shards of glass everywhere, chinking off the tidy plates and cups and cutlery across the tables.
The man called Sander was undeterred. He was drunk, determined, but strong. Stronger than she could ever be.
Mika rolled beneath a table to face him. He hadn’t seen the knife. She felt sure of that. But the thing had scuttled across the polished wooden floor. She didn’t know where. Couldn’t guess.
His hands went out, dragged her back into the space between the tables, slid between her legs and forced them open. Desperate fingers grappled at her stockings, tore them to shreds, fought to work on her pants.
Outside the shooting had stopped. There was that strange silence again. Then cheering from above, a roar, a toast. The performance was over. That one anyway.
The German had the shiny military belt they all wore. One side a pistol in its holster. On the other a brown leather hanger with a dagger held there by a buckle.
He was drunk. He was desperate for her so she reached out for his groin and touched the stump through the prickly military fabric of his trousers.
A laugh, a smile, a groan and he tried to push her head down, said something that sounded like ‘mund’.
Mouth, she thought. That must have been it.
‘Ja,’ she said and bent forward, just enough to put her right hand on his waist.
He made a happy sound.
The blade came out of the leather easily. Straight away she got both hands on the haft, held the bright length of sharp steel inches away from his throat, waiting for the moment, wanting him to see.
Sander opened his eyes and gasped. His right hand drew back for a punch. Before he could get there she jabbed the point hard above his Adam’s apple, jabbed again, worked it side by side. Blood, warm and sticky joined them. An animal sound, half gurgle, half surprise, came out of his throat. Another strike, stabbing, carving sideways ended that.
Mika clambered to her feet, pulled off her torn stockings. Stripped him of his uniform jacket, trying to keep the blood off her, not that it was easy. She was a mess, covered in gore, scarlet dress ripped from the waist down. Sander lay face down on the wooden floor, not moving.
She reversed the German’s jacket until it looked like an ordinary men’s coat. Then stuffed the gun into the pocket, put on the jacket and headed for the door.
The glittering foyer of the Gioconda was empty save for the receptionists, the same man and woman behind the front desk. Drink and happy chatter drifted down the broad staircase from upstairs. The Crucchi had made their kill. It was party time and there, perhaps, lay her only opportunity.
The receptionist came out from behind the counter. Mika took out her gun, waved it at him, couldn’t think of a word to say.
‘Get out of here quick,’ he said. ‘They’re all upstairs getting drunk. If—’
‘Guards,’ she demanded. ‘Where are they?’
‘At the end of the street. There’s an alley before on the left. Take that.’
‘And then?’
‘For God’s sake go,’ the woman behind the counter screamed. ‘They’ll kill us all.’
‘Here,’ the man said and handed her a small torch.
It was pitch black outside. In her head she could see Trevisan and the others dead on the hotel terrace, their bloodied, shattered corpses getting kicked around by gleeful Nazi soldiers.
The cell had been broken all along. She knew that the moment she saw Sara Vitale’s guilty face through the window. Aldo Diamante, the man whose contacts had brought them to Venice, was dead. There was no good news, no salvation anywhere that she could think of. She needed Vanni, his calm and common sense to balance out her own impetuous nature.
More than anything though she wanted to be back behind the safety of the shattered statues in the Giardino degli Angeli.
The alley was where the hotel man said. It was barely wide enough for one person. In her haste and panic she kept bumping off the grubby walls, damp with wisps of lagoon mist.
Mika Artom lurched ahead, hand on the gun in Sander’s jacket always, trying to find her way through the endless night.
It took the best part of two hours. Time spent dodging down narrow lanes, hiding under any sotoportego she could find. There weren’t so many soldiers about and the ones that were on duty hung around the usual places. The campi, the bars and cafes they felt comfortable, the approaches to their barracks in the Arsenale.
Somehow she managed to align herself with the waterfront, avoiding the broad waterside terrace that led from San Marco out to Giardini, mirroring its path along the spider’s web of streets behind.
Head down she walked through the shadows on the dark side of via Garibaldi. Greta’s bar was closed for once, four German troops standing outside smoking, chatting. There was no light on and Mika wondered what the old woman there had to tell. Very little she imagined. Not that it would stop the Crucchi trying.
Soon she was in the warren of streets at the end, aiming towards San Pietro. One more bridge to the island
with its basilica, another to the left, that slippery walk along the rock ledge and then she could rap on the door.
Close to that final bridge she nearly faltered. Across the bare grass, beyond the crooked bell tower of the basilica leaning on its own, a squad of troops was busy beating down the door of a small terraced house. If they hadn’t been so focused on causing mayhem there, yelling in harsh German for someone to come out, they might have seen her slipping across the last narrow waterway before home. Even as she edged along the wall she was surely visible if they cast a torch that way. All she could do was try her best to keep a footing under the silver moonlight seeping through the winter mist.
Then she turned the corner, exhausted, damp with sweat and blood. Out of sight at last.
She tapped out the pattern they’d agreed. It took a minute or so, then Vanni was there.
Paolo sat at the kitchen table in striped pyjamas that looked as if they belonged on a kid. Vanni was in pants and a vest, all he normally wore at night.
They stared at her, horrified.
‘My God?’ her brother asked. ‘What the hell have you done?’
She walked up to the mirror by the bedroom they used and looked at herself. Took out Sander’s pistol and slung the grey uniform jacket on the floor.
Her dress was little more than scarlet strips from the waist down. She was covered in blood, from her throat to her legs, and some of it, she knew, was hers. A bruised eye. A cut cheek.
‘What have you done?’ Vanni asked again, then came and put his arms around her.
Mika started to shake. To choke down a sob. To try to force herself to think.
‘They were waiting for us. They knew.’
Paolo’s face turned white.
‘Someone might have followed you here.’
‘No one followed me here,’ she barked back at him. ‘Do I look like an idiot?’
‘Mika …’ Vanni kept his arms around her. ‘You’re bleeding.’
‘Not my blood. Not much of it. I killed one of them.’ She held up a finger and glared at him. ‘One.’
