The Antipodeans

by Greg McGee

  ‘You’re not just a pretty face,’ said Harry.

  The side door led to the presbytery at the back of the church. They left the bicycles propped in the hallway and the priest ushered them through to a small dining room.

  After introducing himself, lighting the first of many cigarettes and offering one to Harry, Don Claudio thought it safe to reveal himself as an Anglophile, boasting that he knew the streets of Mayfair better than those of Rome. He asked them about the damage to London from German bombs and barely managed to hide his disappointment when Joe and Harry revealed they were New Zealanders and had never been to England. Perhaps as some compensation for not being English, Harry introduced himself as a captain and Joe as a corporal.

  Don Claudio hardly endeared himself to them by insisting that ‘you New Zealanders’ could have had no better ‘imperial masters’ than the English, but by that time he was plying them with red wine brought by his housekeeper, an old woman with bowed legs wrapped in bandages, who also produced a plate of cheese and a loaf of bread.

  ‘Congratulations on your promotion, Captain,’ Joe said, when Don Claudio excused himself to ‘procure’ another bottle of red.

  ‘And to you, Corporal,’ said Harry, grinning, leaning back in his chair with a glass of red in one hand and a real cigarette in the other. ‘God knows, you’re old enough and ugly enough.’

  ‘What do you think of him?’

  ‘He’s got his head so far up his own arse it’s no wonder he talks shit, but at least he’s on the right side.’

  Joe wasn’t so sure, but kept his doubts to himself as, over the second bottle of red, Don Claudio seemed to take some pleasure in spelling out how wrong ‘my friends the peasants’ were in thinking that the armistice was the end of the war for Italy. He told them that everything had changed since 8 September. Italy had gone from being an ally of Germany to being an occupied alien. Ten German divisions had poured down into the country since the armistice. Italian soldiers in their tens of thousands had already been disarmed by their former comrades and put on trains for Germany, along with the Jews, to become slave labour in German farms and factories. The Germans were scouring the countryside not just for escaped prisoners of war — Don Claudio gave Joe and Harry a conspiratorial smile — and for Jews ‘of course’, but also for any able-bodied Italian males, ‘apart from those who have joined the Republican army’.

  ‘We heard about them,’ said Harry. ‘Who are they?’

  Don Claudio smiled like a comedian who realises this audience hasn’t heard his favourite joke, and delivered the punchline. ‘But surely you know?’ he teased them. ‘Mussolini has been liberated from the Gran Sasso by an elite German SS unit. He has already set up a new fascist government on the shores of Lake Garda and launched the Republican Army to fight alongside the Germans.’

  Don Claudio’s delight in their dismay was unsettling.

  ‘Italians,’ he shrugged, reaching forward and refilling Harry’s glass. ‘Things here are never as nicely ordered as in England, or indeed Germany. You mustn’t expect too much of us. Salute.’

  Joe had sat on his first glass. The red wine was vastly more sophisticated than the nero from the taverna in San Pietro, but he could still taste his hangover in it.

  Don Claudio insisted that he and Harry finish the second bottle, and quite a few more cigarettes, before leading them up a long flight of stairs to an attic, where there was a single bed and an upholstered chair. Don Claudio apologised for not having another bed, but Joe reassured him that the chair would be comfortable.

  ‘The benefit of rank, Captain,’ smiled Don Claudio to Harry, wishing them goodnight and closing the door behind himself.

  ‘Toss you for it,’ offered Harry, generously.

  ‘This’ll do me,’ said Joe, slumping into the chair. ‘What’d you make of him?’ he asked again.

  ‘He’s an Eyetie,’ said Harry. ‘What d’you expect? He said so himself.’

  Harry stretched his length on the bed and sighed. ‘Landed on our feet, Corporal,’ he said. ‘Don Claudio’s a strange fish, but, shit, we could have done a lot worse.’

  Joe was trying to work out what it was about Don Claudio that was so unsettling, so that he could frame a sensible question to Harry, but a gentle snore removed any pressure on that front.

  Although he was utterly buggered too, Joe sat there for some time, decanting the evening’s events. Was Don Claudio’s insistence on more wine to give himself Dutch courage — for what and why? — or a deliberate ploy to get them both drunk? And, failing that, get Harry drunk, since he was an officer? Again, why? Was he just a boastful bore, eager to speak English? Was he just a drunk? He had that slightly emaciated look about him and had shown no interest in the food.

  From his chair, Joe could see through a small window, back down the alley below to a narrow sliver of piazza. Apart from the unbarred window, the room looked like a cell. Joe took some comfort from that. Nevertheless, when he closed his eyes, his inner ear began listening for sounds in the sky, the low drone of an aircraft, the clanking of armoured tracks on rock, the revving of engines . . .

  17

  When he opened his eyes, he thought he saw a canopied truck slide very slowly across the sliver of piazza and disappear. He was about to close his eyes again, when he saw a black car with a swastika cruise to a halt and a small man in black Gestapo uniform get out. He looked like propaganda photos of Himmler or Goebbels, the one with the rimless glasses — Joe couldn’t remember which. Then Don Claudio walked into view and shook the Gestapo officer’s hand.

  Harry was instantly awake when Joe shook him.

  ‘The fucking cunt,’ said Harry, when he saw the priest turning away from the Gestapo officer. The staff car moved off, but Don Claudio was gesticulating, ‘This way’, to someone else. He disappeared from view, but six soldiers in black uniforms, one carrying a Luger, the rest with sub-machine guns, followed him. They’d be heading across the front of the church and down the side alley to the door of the presbytery, which meant it was already too late to get out the way they’d come in, or to grab their bikes.

  Harry put his shoulder to the window and bust it open without breaking the glass. ‘You first,’ he said to Joe. ‘I might not fit through.’

  There was no time to argue, no time for Joe to explain that he’d prefer to wait for the German soldiers and prison than get shot in the back trying to escape. He levered himself feet first through the window and was looking to suspend himself from the sill to lessen the drop when Harry pushed him too hard and he fell sideways, trying to get his feet underneath him before he struck the cobbles. He didn’t quite manage it and his right foot landed on an angle and slewed sideways. It felt like a skein of rubber bands being stretched and torn. His shoulder hit the cobblestones and he tried not to cry out.

  Above him, Harry had squeezed through the window and was hanging from the sill. As Joe rolled and tried to stand, Harry landed like a cat. Joe took a step on his right foot and fell forward. Harry grabbed him, put one shoulder under Joe’s right arm and they ran down the alley, away from the piazza, like a couple of contestants in the three-legged race at a church fete.

  Joe was expecting to hear the chatter of those sub-machine guns, feel the rip of bullets in his back. Surely the Germans would have made the top of the stairs and burst into the room by now? Perhaps Don Claudio was offering them a red wine and telling them how much he loved German culture and knew the streets of Berlin better than Rome. Nothing happened. They made the first corner and swung around it, out of the line of fire.

  ‘Leave me,’ said Joe, as Harry tried to catch his breath and bearings.

  There was only uphill and downhill.

  ‘We’ll head for the bush,’ he said, as if Joe hadn’t spoken.

  The big moon was a curse, but it cast heavy shadows in the narrow stone canyons, and they made sure to stay on the dark side as they careered
downhill. Within minutes, they were on a wider, less sloping street, with stone-fenced plots on either side. This fed them into a larger country road and they worked their way down that until they heard the sound of a straining engine behind them. Harry helped Joe over the stone wall into a field of shoulder-high maize. Harry led the way and Joe tried to hobble after him.

  From within the maize, they couldn’t see the headlights of the truck, but they could hear its engine. It kept going as they held their breath, faded a little, then stopped, maybe a couple of hundred yards further up the road.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Harry. ‘From their point of view, there’s not too many ways we could have gone.’

  Harry knelt in front of Joe and, supporting his ankle in one hand like a farrier, began gently manoeuvring the foot this way and that with the other hand, as Joe groaned in greater or lesser pain. ‘If you were a horse I might consider a lead pill,’ Harry said when he’d finished, ‘but I don’t reckon there’s anything actually broken.’

  He stood up and listened. ‘They’ll sweep from where they’ve stopped back to town, maybe bring in reinforcements. We’ve got to try and get beyond their starting point, otherwise we’re buggered.’

  Once again, Harry seemed to have a grid in his head as they worked their way through the maize. Joe took strength from Harry’s diagnosis of his ankle: if it was just sprained, he couldn’t really do much damage by continuing to use it. But the pain and swelling got worse. It felt like a tube of scalding blood around the joint, and he was in agony every time he tried to put weight on it.

  When they arrived at the edge of the maize field, it seemed to fit with Harry’s internal map, and they crossed a drain and immediately dived into another field of maize on the other side. Periodically, Harry would stop and they would listen. Shortly after they entered the second field they heard more engines whining their way up the same road, the noise reverberating off the hills to their left. Harry waited until the trucks stopped.

  ‘Roughly parallel to us,’ he said. ‘We’re on the right track.’

  That moment of optimism was quickly dashed by another sound that carried clearly on the night air. Barking dogs.

  ‘Bugger,’ said Harry. It might have been the first time Joe had seen him slump, but it was only for a moment. ‘They’ll have to track back to pick up our scent,’ he said. ‘We might have time.’

  For what? thought Joe. Maybe it was his half-heartedness that had buggered his ankle when he dropped. He implored Harry to go on without him, said he’d work his way back towards the trucks and muddle the scent, delay them.

  ‘Like hell,’ said Harry, and put his shoulder back under Joe’s armpit.

  When they reached the edge of the second field of maize, there was a stretch of more open land, rows of grapes and, fifty yards beyond, a cluster of buildings. The barking dogs didn’t seem any closer or further away, but certainly sounded more excited.

  ‘We need animals,’ said Harry. ‘Horses, cattle.’

  In his pain, Joe thought that Harry meant to ride the animals rather than walk, and it wasn’t until they’d unlatched the big wooden door at one end of the nearest building that Joe understood: the dogs wouldn’t be let in among the animals. Harry was leaving him here embalmed in shit, while he went out to take on the SS and their dogs.

  Treviso, 2014

  18

  Treviso seemed so normal after Venice, even if nothing else about her life was. There were streets, cars, trucks, buses, pedestrian crossings. And the kind of shopping that took her breath away, along with any resolve to be moderate. Clare had bought two pairs of Church’s brogues, one white and one light tan because she couldn’t decide between them. Then she’d worried about spoiling the exposed stitching if she got caught in Auckland’s rain so she got a pair of conventional black brogues just in case. That was the best part of a thousand euros right there. She’d already spent another grand in a little shop called Adriana, where the woman who served her told her all the shoes were handmade and that she had an interest in their manufacture and that’s why they were so incredibly cheap and well produced. And they were so cheap — 100 euros on average and every one of them would have been 300 New Zealand dollars at least so she was saving big money the more she spent, which is why she’d bought so many: knee-length leather boots with dorsal zigzag laces that hugged the calf, and apple-green woven leather flat lace-ups, and red straight-back patent stilettos with platforms, faux jewel-encrusted gladiator sandals with ankle straps, cream sandals with wedges, and maroon nubuck ankle boots with stacked heels, not to mention gold lamé mules with fluffy pom-poms which could be slippers or evening wear, and blue court shoes that went with a fuck-off pin-striped business suit which she’d definitely need if she ever had to walk through the front door of the agency to sort Nicholas out. The Hush Puppies were from another shoe store just across the cobbled street from Adriana, because you couldn’t go past Hush Puppies for kick-about comfort, so she’d got the red and white kid leather slip-ons and the tan and white ones too because the woman there agreed that they definitely lasted longer if you rotated them.

  She refused to feel guilty about any of it, except that the shoe boxes had filled the closet of her room at the Continental, so she’d had to stack some of them under the window that opened onto the carpark at the back of the hotel. On the little writing table by the window was the letter she’d discovered in her father’s tatty old briefcase after he’d been taken by water ambulance to Piazzale Roma, then by conventional ambulance to Treviso hospital, which had a specialist oncology and haematology department. It was inside a plain white envelope addressed to ‘Clarebelle’ in his copperplate handwriting. She’d read and reread bits of it from time to time, as much as she could stand in a sitting, so to speak.

  Darling daughter,

  If you’re reading this, the worst has happened.

  It hadn’t. What had happened was worse, if anything.

  I was always hopeful of making it back home, but Geoff made it very clear that things could change fast at any time and the end could come suddenly. I’ve been completely up front with the insurer and the premium has cost me a fortune but you’ll see from the policy attached that everything is covered.

  Geoff Paterson was an old rugby mate from Otago Uni, with a badly broken nose to prove it, who now happened to be the specialist on lymphoblastic leukaemia. She should ring Geoff but couldn’t bring herself to do it: just one more instruction she’d ignored.

  She hated seeing her father lying there in intensive care sprouting tubes. The room looked like a laboratory where plastic slippered, gowned and masked scientists carried out tests on people who already looked like cadavers.

  Treviso hospital was quite the ugliest building in a beautiful town and the separate oncology and haematology building made the Auckland central police station look like an architectural masterpiece. The bile yellow foyer had wheelchairs stacked in a line ready for the patients arriving in the emergency bay just outside. Every time she passed them she swore she’d get her father into one of them and escape.

  There was a room waiting for him if he ever got out of intensive care. It had a view of treetops hiding a carpark. His empty bed there was surrounded by flowers from all those people from San Pietro whom she’d so far managed to avoid by going into the trees opposite the emergency entrance for a fag and checking reception for faces she might recognise. Renzo had somehow fooled her and been in the room yesterday, quietly sitting there when she’d blown in, smelling of fags. She’d been so surprised to see him she’d probably been rude, asked him what he was doing there before she’d even said hello, but he seemed not to mind or even hear. He’d risen and kissed her elaborately on both cheeks, then simply asked her how she was. That surprised her too. When she said she was fine, he’d smiled gently and said, ‘That’s good.’

  He’d asked where she was staying and she was hesitant about telling him. The Continental may not
have been the best hotel in town but it was a perfect refuge for her, comforting old plasterwork with high studs and terrazzo floors and a discreet bar, the Americano, down under the arch by the street. It was close to the railway station where she could buy English newspapers, and a short walk the other way took her along the magic carpet — she’d never seen that before, a red carpet along the middle of the footpath — to Adriana and the Piazza dei Signori. She didn’t want to have to cope with well-intentioned visitors from San Pietro. She couldn’t speak Italian to them and didn’t even know what to say in English to Renzo. She couldn’t not tell him where she was staying, but how to tell him she wanted to be alone without coming across like Greta Garbo? In the end, she just said it. ‘I don’t want visitors.’

  He responded as if that was the most rational thing he’d ever heard, said ‘Of course’ and enquired whether the hotel was okay or if she needed anything. She wanted to tell him that the Continental was her cave and she was filling it up with everything she needed, but that sounded slightly crazy, even to her.

  19

  This morning, she’d gone into Adriana again just for a look. There was a different woman there, who showed her the bags along the top shelf. She was stunned that she’d been in there three times yet there were still treasures she hadn’t seen, particularly a beautiful bag in soft summery yellow leather.

  The thing was, she kept telling herself, she’d never be back here and at home the warm weather would come and she’d need to be prepared. She hadn’t realised how much she’d been depending on her father to sort out the mess. He’d passed her on to a colleague, Tania, who was an expert in matrimonial property, but he had still been patiently working through her options.

  You’ll find a file in my suitcase with notes about your situation. I’ve tried to anticipate everything, but that’s probably impossible. Tania will of course guide you through the matrimonial property options, but the other mess, the business, will be much more fluid and you’ll have some difficult choices to make. I think you should cut your losses and move on. Don’t pursue him for damages. Let the Real Estate Agents Authority sort him out.