The Garden of Angels

by David Hewson

  It took a moment for him to realize the bells had ceased their peals. There was a crowd, three deep along one side of the street, truculent, unruly.

  ‘Bastards! Crucchi bastards!’

  The high, sharp cry from a bunch outside the closed doors of Greta’s door took him out of his reverie.

  ‘She’s an old woman,’ someone else yelled. ‘A simpleton. Is that the best you can do? Kill the sick and the Jews.’

  Oberg, leading the group up front, barked an order to one of his underlings. Boots stomped on the ground as they came to a halt. Greta Morino’s scared, arrhythmic sobbing was for a moment the only sound Garzone heard. Then the officer ordered a couple of soldiers to peel off and seize whoever was yelling at them. As soon as they realized what was happening men and women, young and old, maybe forty or more of them, many he recognized, shuffled together to make it impossible for the Germans to find one voice among so many.

  ‘Last night one of yours murdered a German officer. A man doing his duty,’ Oberg bellowed in rough Italian. ‘You know the consequences. I could shoot you all. Every one of you if I wished.’

  Garzone pushed forward to the front of the group of prisoners.

  ‘Signor,’ he said in his loud, melodious voice, the one he used for sermons from his beloved pulpit. ‘If you need to blame anyone, let it be us. Not them. Take us where you wish. Do what you want. You …’ His voice was breaking. ‘You can’t kill everyone in the world. In my heart I don’t believe any man would wish this.’

  Alberti rushed up to the German and whispered in his ear. Every eye in the crowd was on the Venetian cop then. Garzone thought, If this mob had the chance to tear anyone apart it would be you first. You before the Crucchi. Which might not have been so fair. Though nothing was these days, nor would be till the war was over.

  ‘The officer said you must be quiet, all of you,’ Alberti cried. ‘If you wish to say farewell to these criminals, then you may do so in San Pietro. In silence only. Those who disobey will be taken for questioning.’

  ‘One day we’ll come for traitors like you, Luca Alberti,’ someone bellowed from the back of the mob.

  A soldier moved forward to find him. Alberti put out a hand.

  ‘I know that, friend. And I know what I’ll say.’

  He turned and looked at Garzone.

  ‘Father. They’re your people. Make them see sense. Don’t let this get worse than it is.’

  For a moment the priest was lost for words.

  Then he said, half-amused, ‘They barely listen to me from the pulpit, Alberti. Why ask for a sermon now?’

  The Venetian pushed through the group of prisoners and stood in front of him.

  ‘Because they know you. They’ll listen. They won’t forget you. I’ll make sure of that.’

  ‘I wonder,’ Garzone answered with a sigh. There was a cliché uttered at funerals constantly. One he’d said himself from time to time. We’ll remember you. Never will you be forgotten. It seemed an empty promise in truth but one that had to be made.

  ‘Very well.’ He stepped forward. They let him through to the edge of the platoon where he peered round the grey shoulders of the uniformed troops.

  ‘Let us go, friends,’ he said in the same clear, calm voice he used in the vast empty belly of his basilica. ‘We’re the ones the Lord is calling. Not you. Not now. Just us …’

  Just us …

  Mika Artom stood shivering in the midst of the crowd in via Garibaldi, listening to the last words Filippo Garzone would speak to his flock. It wasn’t just the bitter weather. She’d been bleeding all the way from La Fenice, trying to hide the fact when she found the crowd gathering around the Germans’ marching party of the condemned, holding her side as hard as she could to stem the flow.

  People round her were weeping, with grief, with impotent fury. There had to be eighty or more armed German troops in the squad marching their victims along the street. Almost as many locals watching them, spitting pointless insults and pleas in their direction.

  The German officer’s words stung like acid on the aching wound at her waist.

  The idea that Sander was doing his duty. What? Trying to rape a woman before taking her prisoner.

  Something else hurt too. This condemned party, nine men, one woman in a wheelchair, Greta, were going to die because of her. Had she slipped out of the Gioconda the night before, then tried to escape somehow with Vanni, none of this would be happening.

  The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.

  That was what Trevisan had said, some aphorism straight from the bible she’d never read.

  She did know his other maxim though.

  There’s only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.

  Marx. A man who never fought a war. Never put his life on the line. She had, willingly. These people, a priest, a shopkeeper, an elderly woman who ran a bar, and seven others she didn’t recognize, had simply been caught up in the wash of blood rippling out from her fury in the Gioconda.

  Perhaps Paolo Uccello, the curious young man her brother seemed so taken with, would be a victim of her rashness, Vanni too. She could have done as she’d promised: stayed in the Giardino degli Angeli, out of sight, meek and obedient. Waiting on a boat to take them out to safety. Except that was not to her taste and even now, feeling the wound in her side make her weaker by the moment, she knew she didn’t regret a single thing.

  The standoff ended the way it had to. The crowd fell into quiet resentment then, when the Germans began to march towards San Pietro, a good number vanished into the alleys that ran both sides of the broad street, shaking their heads. She couldn’t blame them. Only the hardened few, relatives, friends, partisans too she suspected, would wish to witness a firing squad.

  When she began following, in the middle of the smaller group, she realized the weather had changed once more. The snow was no longer lighter. It was falling like a slow, thick blanket, settling on the cobbles, making them so treacherous a few of the elderly were slipping as they struggled to keep up with the troops.

  By the time they crossed the bridge to the island she was feeling light-headed. It was a strange sensation, half floating, half feeling she might sink down to the ground any moment. The day was a swirl of white, broken by the stamp of feet, the grey uniforms, the moans and cries of the dwindling group of civilians following this miserable party to its end.

  There were bells again. A simple chime, coming from up ahead.

  ‘Piero!’ a woman cried when the stamp of boots came to a halt. ‘I love you.’

  They’d stopped at the modest campo in front of the basilica of San Pietro, the troops assembled in front of the stump of the bell tower, rising on its own from the bare winter ground.

  A voice came back to answer her, a man’s, high-pitched and full of agony. His words were lost in the blizzard sweeping round them.

  Mika nearly fainted. Loss of blood she guessed. It was dripping right through her waistband. When she glanced down she noticed she’d been leaving a faint pink stain on the snowy ground, like the trail of a wounded snail.

  Another party was just visible through the soft white cloud around them. A crowd by the other bridge, the one that led to Uccello’s tiny sanctuary. Maybe twenty or thirty people there.

  The German officer barked something she didn’t understand though she got the idea. The crowd were pushed back. The line of prisoners was made to stand at the foot of the campanile, no blindfolds, no time for that. The priest helped Greta Morino out of her wheelchair, put an arm round her shoulders, kissed her once on the cheek.

  Another barked order and a group of soldiers formed a row in front of the campanile. Garzone crossed himself. Someone behind her was weeping uncontrollably.

  The handgun was deep in Mika’s trouser pocket. Two shells left. One would be enough.

  ‘Please,’ she said, shov
ing, half-falling through the crowd. The officer in charge stood at one end of the squad ready to give the order. ‘Please …’

  There couldn’t have been more than five or six steps to go before she got to her target, when she heard a familiar voice.

  ‘Mika! Mika!’

  Oh Christ, dear brother, she thought. Not now.

  ‘Mika!’

  Vanni was holding on to the parapet of the wooden bridge across to San Pietro, struggling to stay upright, trying to see through the swirling snow, Paolo by his side, supporting him. A small crowd of locals shuffled nervously between them and the soldiers round the campanile. The firing squad line-up was almost ready.

  With the snow and the emotion and the crowd, some silent, some wailing, others muttering curses, it was difficult to see. Still, Vanni had spotted her, a slight figure pushing to the front of the crowd behind the soldiers, head down, stumbling much like her brother. She looked hurt, determined, lost.

  ‘I should have brought a weapon,’ he muttered, trying to take a few steps forward. ‘I should have …’

  ‘Look at the soldiers,’ Paolo whispered in his ear. ‘Look how many. Do you want to die?’

  ‘Maybe. Who cares?’

  Paolo put his arms round him, held him close. The two men stayed in that embrace, briefly stared at by the locals around them.

  ‘I care.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I do,’ was all Paolo could say.

  ‘Then stop caring. I’m not worth it. I’m not going anywhere now. This road ends here.’

  He put his head up and yelled some foul-mouthed abuse at the Germans, so loud, words so vile people looked at him as if he was crazy.

  Across the campo Mika finally pushed through, glanced their way for a second, perhaps hearing her brother’s voice.

  ‘Oh God, Mika. Mika …’ Vanni cried.

  A face among the Germans turned on them and Paolo felt the cold more than ever. The man’s hard and searching eyes fell on him. It was the Venetian he’d first seen when they fished Isabella Finzi out of the water just a few steps away. The cop Alberti, the collaborator who’d questioned him when he saw Mika outside the Gioconda the previous day.

  ‘We need to go.’ He tried to pull Vanni back. ‘There’s nothing you can do. We need to get out of here—’

  The tall, officious-looking German in command of the troops, shouted out an order. With a slap of wood and a stamp of boots the rifles rose up to the men’s shoulders.

  There was a single toll of a bell.

  A cruel whipping wind sent a sudden blast of snow swirling round them.

  ‘I need to see …’ Vanni murmured, dragging his bad leg forward, trying to walk. ‘I need …’

  Oberg looked down the line of men at the foot of the strange, lone bell tower. The priest’s eyes were closed, his lips moving, his right arm round the old woman who leaned against him, face pale and still as stone. The others simply stood against the cold marble, staring glassy-eyed at the line of rifles aimed their way. As the snow accumulated on their bent shoulders and bowed heads they looked more like statues than flesh and blood.

  ‘Can we just get on with this?’ Sachs moaned. ‘I’m freezing my balls off out here.’

  Oberg had signed off many executions but never a mass killing like this. There was a crowd to witness it. Two, he now saw, one behind the troops, a second by the wooden bridge back towards the Arsenale. If they watched and understood this was the price of insurrection, then perhaps there’d be peace in Venice, if only for a little while.

  ‘Allow them a moment to say their prayers,’ Oberg replied. ‘I’ll give the order when I’m ready. Have no—’

  Voices rippled through the crowd as it parted to let someone through.

  ‘If that lot start trouble we need to shoot them too,’ Sachs said and sounded nervous.

  ‘I doubt that will be necessary. I very much …’

  From what he could see it was just one person causing trouble.

  Head down, coming his way.

  It was the cop in him that made Alberti the first to see what was happening. Mika Artom. The same woman he’d warned off in the Gioconda, stumbling through the crowd, gun in hand, lurching towards the firing squad.

  Quick decisions. She was a good way from him, and the idiot Germans behind the squad were too focussed on what was happening in front.

  He yelled at them to turn round, but in his anxious panic it was Venetian, not even Italian. Words they’d never understand.

  The woman was through the crowd by then. Limping. He thought it was her brother who was supposed to be wounded.

  There was a gun in her hand, held low as she shoved her way through the grey uniforms, almost there, close by where Oberg and Sachs stood next to one another to the side of the monument, looking at the forlorn line of figures waiting on the rifles and the call to fire.

  She raised her arm. There was the dull sound of a shot being fired. One of the troops in front of her fell to the ground, shrieking, clutching his side.

  Then she was through, Ernst Oberg turning to face her, shocked, as if he couldn’t believe this.

  ‘Stop,’ Alberti yelled.

  Thinking as he did … too late.

  It was a single dull explosion. Puny. Nothing like a barrage of rifles. At first Oberg felt as if someone had punched him. He looked down at his chest. Saw, to his astonishment a dark stain growing there, leaking through the thick fabric of his grey wool military coat. He put his gloved fingers to it out of curiosity and stared in bemusement at the sticky blood they found.

  ‘What …’

  The words wouldn’t come. There was no breath inside him, only a damp and painful ache. He found himself falling backwards, staring at the snowy sky.

  ‘Shoot the prisoners!’ Sachs was yelling, high and hysterical. ‘Shoot them now. Kill any in the crowd who turn on you.’

  The staccato rattle of rifle fire filled the air, then screams and shrieks and from somewhere the strangest sound to fill Oberg’s mind.

  A bell it sounded like but that was impossible. He’d ordered them all to be silent after a single toll to mark the moment the squad took up position.

  All the same something was ringing in his ears, getting louder all the time, rising like the wash of the lagoon in angry acqua alta.

  Before he knew it Ernst Oberg was on the ground, blood seeping out of his flapping mouth, watching the polished leather boots and the grubby snow-stained cobbles stamp all round him.

  The firing squad was mowing down the prisoners by the bell tower. The other soldiers had turned to face the milling mob. Alberti stepped straight through, found Mika Artom gasping over Oberg’s stricken body.

  He shot her in the back without a word. She shrieked, the weapon fell from her fingers. Her hat came off, showing the blonde hair underneath as she fell to the icy cobbles and lay there floundering, bleeding, gasping. Sachs rushed up and put a second shot through her skull.

  Garzone and the other prisoners were on the ground, a couple still moving. Sachs muttered a curse, then walked round with a handgun and casually finished each with a bullet to the head.

  ‘Jesus …’ Alberti muttered, looking at the mess. Oberg on the ground, the life going out of his grey eyes. Sachs in a panic, rudderless, not knowing what to do.

  The crowd was torn between panic and some suicidal form of vengeance. So Alberti put his gun in the air, fired two more rounds and yelled at them.

  ‘Go home now! All of you! There’s enough dead here to fill a fucking cemetery. You need more?’ Another shot vanished into the steady white cloud of snow whipping round the bloodstained ground by the campanile. ‘Go home now!’

  There was a long moment of silence and he wondered, If they did turn on the Germans, who’d win? Some battles weren’t so much about the weapons as the emotion. There was plenty of that here.

  ‘He was a priest,’ someone yelled. ‘Greta an old woman.’

  ‘I know,’ Alberti cried back. ‘And now they’re
gone. You want to join them?’

  Sachs barked an order. Half the firing squad turned and faced the crowd, rifles raised.

  Alberti walked off and took hold of his sleeve, snarled in his face, ‘It’s a long way home and they know these streets better than you. Hold them off.’

  The German snatched a glance at Oberg on the ground, blood spilling out of his mouth, his chest, pooling on the snowy cobbles.

  ‘She shot him,’ Alberti said, pointing at the body of Mika Artom. ‘It looks like the woman they saw leaving the Gioconda last night. Now she’s dead. Leave it.’

  Sachs barked at the soldiers to hold their fire. The mob were falling back. Scared, angry, vengeful, but nothing they could do about it. Not then.

  ‘I’m in charge here,’ the German snapped at him. ‘Not you.’

  ‘Sure, boss,’ he said and made a quick salute.

  Then that same voice came over everything again, high and pained and full of grief.

  ‘Mika. Mika …’

  They were still by the bridge back towards the Arsenale. The kid with the delivery for the hotel he’d seen watching the Artom woman as she went inside the Gioconda. Someone with him. Leaning, limping as the other one held him back.

  ‘You deal with this,’ he told the German. ‘Give me some men. I got one of your terrorists dead in front of you. Now I’ll bring you the other.’

  Two more shots sent a couple of unseen birds flapping into the snowy sky. It was a second soldier going through the bodies, making sure they were all dead.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ Alberti demanded.

  ‘Take who you want. I’ll manage things here.’

  The pair were vanishing over the other side of the bridge, the local with his arm round the brother, helping him hobble along. Then they were gone towards the warren of alleys that led west. No great problem, Alberti thought. Wherever they hoped to hide it couldn’t be far.