The Secret Messenger

by Mandy Robotham

  I have to endure another day under Cristian’s gaze before I can speak to Arlo, Matteo and Tommaso, find out what Sergio and the commanders have said and discuss how we keep ourselves safe.

  The indecision gnaws at me in the Reich office, and I try to immerse myself in the work. The atmosphere is lighter as Breugal is away for the day, which Marta informs me with noticeable relief as I arrive. Cristian, too, seems a little less beleaguered, and I see him again studying the fiction that has sprouted from inside my mind, his glasses on top of his head and the paper close to his eyes. Yet his face doesn’t sport any anger as he reads one sheet after another – occasionally his brow knits, but he seems genuinely engrossed. Apart from interest, his expression is devoid of anything else, however, and I realise I’m slightly disappointed; after all our conversations over literature, I’d perhaps been relying on Cristian to appreciate a good story, to see some reaction in his mouth or his eyes as Raffiano contemplates risking all for his love – he won’t bow to his family’s demands and give up Gaia, pledges to stand by her, wherever she goes. I want my words to incite some emotion, at least. And then I cut short my own inflated conceit. It’s a story, Stella – written simply to amuse and perhaps prompt a passing comment, a fleeting warm glow. Nothing more. There’s no room for overblown egos in this war.

  On Giudecca, Arlo is at first buoyed by the Germans’ reaction – that we have poked at the wasps’ nest – though he is sensitive to my anxiety. It’s not his fingerprints that are recognisable in the text. Tentatively, he voices what I have already been thinking – that I should get rid of the typewriter, bestow it to the care of the sea bed forever. But as I stare at the familiar keys, feel its idiosyncrasies under my fingers, and hear the sound that has been part of my life’s melody for so long, I know I can’t do it. And that’s before I even begin to think about Popsa. It has to stay – hidden, but here.

  In the next few days, Sergio is quick to reassure me of anonymity, and although he suggests we suspend the instalments, he doesn’t propose stopping forever. I wonder if he’s simply placating me, but I’m secretly a little relieved. No one enjoys being a target.

  ‘If we stop now, the Reich office will simply think we’re scared off,’ Sergio convinces me. ‘It’ll give them a sense of superiority, and that’s always good to nurture. It’s then that they are more likely to make mistakes.’

  He squeezes my arm. ‘You’ll be back,’ he says, ‘and with more imagination, more ways to illustrate our strength, than before. I’m sure of it.’

  For a time, I’m a little relieved at the extra space in my life – I’m told my work within the inner sanctum of the Reich is continuing to be crucial to understanding their plans across the region. Reading between the lines of each report I type and convey, there’s a wealth of information on troop numbers in and out of the Veneto; Breugal’s office is responsible for tracking their movements. We’re learning rapidly which rail lines are vital arteries for supply chains and – in turn – which ones the partisan brigades can sabotage. Sergio tells me it’s all helping the Resistance to construct a map, one key to keeping our Nazi invaders constantly on the back foot. When Sergio grasps my hand and tells me I am a vital cog in the machine, I’m flooded with a sense of worth. And always, always, I think of my beloved Popsa and how he would have smiled like a mischievous little boy to see the enemy scuppered.

  I do miss Gaia and Raffiano, though – the incentive to lay their lives on the page has been because of the people out there wanting to hear. I never write well into a void. So, for the present, they hover in my head, ready to reignite when the call comes.

  My duties as a Staffetta increase and fill the gap a little, meaning I’m never idle, although I do have more time to devote to Mama and Papa. I’d always thought them strong and unbending – isn’t that how most children view their parents, as enduring heroes? Increasingly, though, I see the worry etched on their faces. Papa’s normally sturdy shoulders are becoming thin from the food shortages, bowed under the strain of war’s daily angst, while his muscles recede under his skin. It’s only as I see my parents more frequently – twice a week if I can manage it between my day job, evenings at the paper and occasional night work as a messenger – that I notice the anxiety take its toll on them physically. Each time I visit Mama tells me that I look tired, but there are much deeper grey patches under her own, normally bright, eyes. Papa pushes me for information in the minutes when we’re alone, but I tell him very little. How can I, when they already worry so much about me and Vito?

  While I know for sure that my younger brother by three years is a partisan, I think that they have long suspected, even though Mama tries to shield herself from the knowledge as a type of maternal self-protection.

  In Vito’s childhood, she spent years worrying over the deformity that he was born with in his foot – a bone or ligament twisted and set in the womb, cruelly labelled a club foot. Like any mother, she blamed herself. It was operated on when he was a baby, and he grew up to become nothing more than an irritating younger brother who scaled walls with his friends and chased me mercilessly, albeit with a limp.

  Mama crossed herself and thanked the saints when Vito’s so-called disability saved him from the Italian army, or being used as labour fodder for the Nazis – he could emphasise his limp superbly when needed. Perhaps naÏvely, she thought he would be safer here in Venice. But, clearly, Vito sees his role as something other than that of a silent observer in this war.

  ‘He’s barely here, Stella,’ Mama bemoans again. ‘He comes in at all hours. Sometimes, he’s filthy, and I know it’s not just from work. How can he get that dirty day to day?’

  I’m certain he can’t – not from his job as a machine operator at the docks. But in other activities, certainly – scrabbling down railway sidings and crawling through the underbelly of Venice. Papa beckons me with his eyes out in the yard as Mama clears away the dishes.

  ‘Have you any clue as to what Vito is doing?’ he says. Papa is fishing, but even he can’t ask outright – whether, as a fellow partisan, I know what my own brother is up to in the small hours. Even within families, loose talk can have fatal consequences, and it’s often better not to know the details. You can’t betray what you don’t know.

  Papa shoots a plume of smoke into the air – these days I note he smokes out of need, not pleasure as he did before the war. ‘Stella? Your mother is worried sick.’

  ‘I don’t know, Papa,’ I say, but only half in truth. I have heard, on a well-stretched grapevine, that Vito may be part of a group activating raids on the Arsenale, the heavily fortified base for Nazi weaponry. So far, they amount to small acts of sabotage, which are irritating to the Reich rather than disabling. Mimi once alluded to there being a young man I might know involved in Resistance missions, and I’ve sometimes seen Arlo looking at me sideways as we’re compiling the paper. His expression is often strained then, as if he doesn’t want me to put two and two together while I’m typing the reports. I have, but not enough to be certain. It concerns me, though, as it does Papa now – irritation in the Reich will soon turn to anger, and the consequences will be harsh if Vito is caught.

  ‘I’ll talk to him, Papa,’ I promise, if only to appease my parents’ worry – just as they’ve comforted me so many times in my life.

  ‘Thank you, Stella. Thank you, cuore mio.’ His gentle touch on my arm is like the thousand hugs he’s given me over my entire life.

  I leave a note with Mama for Vito, a chirpy, ‘Hello brother, haven’t seen you in a long time, let’s have a drink’ type of message, asking him to meet me in a café next Saturday, when I know he won’t have any excuses about being at work. I’ll leave the same note at Paolo’s, where I know he drinks once or twice a week. That’s all I can do; I hope that his sense outweighs his zest for glory.

  In the Reich office, there’s much to occupy me, but little to get excited about. Copies of Venezia Liberare are stacked in the corner of Cristian’s desk, and it feels odd knowing that some
thing of me is sitting there in front of him. One of his tasks now seems to be to scan the paper as it comes out and he does it diligently, his glasses hovering on his brow, the paper pulled closely to his face. My skin itches each time I see him do it, as if he might be able to smell my collusion, some odour lingering on the pages. This is what paranoia feels like.

  However, as the weeks go by without the inserted sheet of Gaia and Raffiano’s growing love, the fervour surrounding the typewriter subsides. There seem to be no further directives to go out on specific searches, and I detect neither mutterings nor tantrums coming from Breugal’s office, rather that he’s immersing himself further in Venetian good living. Cristian, though, seems to have adopted a more formal air around me, and we’ve lost that brief flash of friendly intimacy. I can’t help feeling some disappointment, though I’m not sure why. I am, however, glad not to be in his sights for any other purpose.

  I finally meet Vito in Paolo’s bar, judging it to be the safest place. Even so, we sit in the corner, away from too many ears. He has a day’s dark growth around his chin, and his eyes betray a tiredness around the edges, but at the same time his pupils are sparkling with mischief. I recognise the look – he is alive with the satisfaction of duplicity.

  ‘So, what have you been up to?’ I begin casually.

  ‘Oh, this and that,’ he says, hiding his expression by sipping at his beer.

  ‘Is it a girl keeping you up and out at night? You look exhausted.’

  ‘Do I? Maybe,’ he beams.

  I lean in closer, this time with an expression that’s much less relaxed. ‘Vito, be careful,’ I half whisper.

  ‘What? I’m not getting married, if that’s what you mean!’ He pushes back, laughing, still trying to keep up the light pretence but I’m already bored of it.

  ‘Vito, this is me you’re talking to. You are dangerously close to getting your fingers burned. Badly. Perhaps the rest of you too.’ I raise my eyebrows in a determined look that says: let’s drop the charade, we need to talk about this.

  He puffs out his cheeks, attempts a half-smile and then abandons both. I can see his brain ticking – there’s no point in this facade with Stella, he’s thinking. I always knew when he was lying as a boy. His eyebrows ripple just slightly. Now, they twitch automatically; no, he won’t tell me of the recent incident in which a weapons store was set on fire, or his part in laying explosives in the docks he knows so well, but his signature is all over them.

  He leans in. ‘But what we are doing is making a difference,’ he urges. ‘I have to help, Stella. I need it.’ And his eyes flick beyond the table top and towards his foot underneath. Still apologising for what wasn’t his fault, was no one’s doing. Proving himself. ‘Anyway, you’re one to talk.’ His black eyes are steely now, full lips pursed.

  For a minute, I’m taken aback. It hadn’t occurred to me he would know the depth of my activity – the battalions are co-ordinated, but we operate under different lieutenants, overseen by Sergio. I see my own facade instantly fall away.

  ‘I don’t know how much closer you can get to the devil’s cauldron than being right next to the fire,’ Vito goes on. His expression invites an answer, but I have little defence.

  ‘Sometimes, it’s actually safer working in plain sight,’ I try. ‘I’m careful. I’m safe – I don’t take chances.’

  With anyone else, Vito might have tried to convince them that he doesn’t either. But he knows our shared history all too well – the times he and his school friends dared to goad the local police into adrenalin-filled chases, hopping over and under bridges, hiding in derelict buildings. It was child’s play, irritating more than illegal, but Vito always did push the boundaries to prove himself.

  ‘Promise me that whatever you take on, you’ll think of Mama and Papa. Think of them not attending your funeral.’

  ‘I will – I do,’ he says earnestly. ‘But if they did have to, they would be proud. Of what I will have done for us, for Venice.’

  ‘They might be proud, Vito, but even more, they will be sad. Very, very sad.’

  We part outside Paolo’s with a hug, much like the ones I’ve shared with my so-called suitors when passing messages. Yet this one lingers: we squeeze tightly and he kisses my cheek.

  ‘Be safe, Vito,’ I whisper.

  ‘Venezia Liberare,’ he whispers back. He’s grinning as he backs away with a wave and an audible ‘Ciao’.

  17

  On Hold

  Bristol, November 2017

  ‘Jesus!’ Luisa feels exasperation again as she checks her emails. More legal hoops to jump through, more papers to sign. It’s the one tether – aside from not wanting to leave Jamie, of course – that’s keeping her from jumping on a plane to Venice, in her search for the key. Thanks to the wonders of the internet and budget airlines, she could be on a plane tomorrow, book a hotel with a click of the finger. Were it not for the endless meanderings of the legal property world. And yet that is also a passport of sorts; property prices are sky high in Bristol and her mother’s inheritance is the only way she and Jamie will ever afford a real home of their own, to put down roots, to perhaps expand their family, as Jamie keeps hinting. Luisa, though, isn’t sure she’s ready to be a mother yet, worries that she won’t have the necessary skills or patience it clearly takes. Genetics can account for a lot, can’t it? Nurturing was never her mother’s strong point, even she knows that.

  Not that she has a plan for Venice, but that doesn’t stop Luisa wanting to just get there, step on the mud flats turned to land and feel she’s closer to … well, to something. The tendrils of enquiry she put out into the internet world have ground to a trickle of ‘No, sorry’, and so far all she can pinpoint within the box are some random addresses and key areas within the city. There’s the Jewish Museum to visit, but really she’s pinning her hopes on Giulio Volpe and his archive to set her on some kind of detective trail. But to what end?

  She suspects this is what occupies Jamie’s mind, but he has too much love for her to voice it. If she looks inside herself – something she’s been almost afraid to do in recent months – even she isn’t sure. Inevitably, Luisa has spent an age, usually in the early hours of the morning when Jamie is blissfully asleep beside her, wondering why her mother felt unable to give much of herself to her only child, or her husband when he was alive. Luisa remembers her father as so loving, days out when they would walk and sing, always laughing. In the background was her mother, tight-lipped with a shadow of grey cast across her features, reminding them not to jump in the puddles, or that it might rain very soon and then where would the two of them be without a coat?

  What made her like that, Luisa thinks, when her grandmother always seemed to be laughing, or getting herself into minor scrapes and giggling at being told off by her own daughter? Luisa feels she may never know what caused her mother to be born without a sense of adventure or fun. The nearest she can aspire to is discovering what made her grandmother into the adventurer she is now proving to be. It has become her sole purpose, a driving force that has become all-consuming, but it makes her feel something other than empty and adrift. And for that reason, she has no choice but to go forward.

  Luisa just needs to step onto Venetian soil and float among its islands, to feel she is halfway there.

  18

  Small Talk

  Venice, June 1944

  The first days of June bring a cause for celebration that gradually filters through the airwaves to our Venetian enclave; Rome is liberated by the Allies on 5th June, and just a day later the Allies breach the French coastline with widespread landings on the Normandy beaches. In our basements and with heads bent tightly together in cafés we rejoice at the tide turning in Europe, and the thought of Romans taking to the streets in sheer relief at reclaiming their city. Breugal is, of course, fuming. He struts and stomps his childish fury over the entire building while we put our heads down and type at speed to avoid his backlash, which – given his reputation – could have more serious repe
rcussions.

  Strangely, though, the news sees a renewed civility towards me from Cristian. He is suddenly more open and approachable, and I wonder if perhaps he senses which side of the coin holds most value. It may be that he’s realised being a fascist as the Allied line crawls northwards is becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Except that his manner seems genuine and I’m once again blindsided by the contrast between his general demeanour and my suspicions about his motives.

  In this new mood, he asks me to accompany him for a drink one day after work, on the premise of discussing a particular translation. I’m tempted to say I have a prior engagement, but then I’m torn not only by my loyalties as a collector of information for the Resistance, but also because I feel slightly glad at his asking. Once again, it doesn’t feel right to hold those emotions. In the end, I find myself saying yes, convincing myself I’m simply a loyal partisan.

  I dally awhile so that we leave separately again, me following several minutes behind and meeting under the clock in the corner of San Marco, though I can’t decide whether the location purposely makes it appear like some kind of secret rendezvous. I have enough of those in my life already. My natural suspicion leads me to imagine he has a photographer lurking in the shadows, gathering evidence to use as blackmail at a later date.

  Immediately, though, he seems different. Outside of Breugal’s sphere, away from the confines of our high-ceilinged but oppressive office, he smiles a good deal. A weight is clearly lifted. At our table inside a small trattoria, he pulls out a file, but I quickly sense that he has no intention of opening it. I’m itching to know if it contains the sheets of The Barb of Love, or his promised translation.

  Instead, it becomes clear he wants to talk literature and stories. Part of me suspects he’s simply hungry for conversation – and his eyes light up as we talk of books we’ve both read, those that have influenced us. We steer clear of political tomes, sticking to the historical, romantic or those that shaped our lives as Italian people rather than its complex array of politics. Eventually the time causes him to offer up dinner, and the prospect of a plate of squid-ink pasta is far more appetising than my near-empty cupboard at home.