The Villa Triste

by Lucretia Grindle

  She told me all this as I was eating at the kitchen table. (I had quite deliberately managed to come home too late to share supper.) After I was finished, I went upstairs to change out of my uniform and found my bedroom door locked. When I went back down to ask Mama for the key, she dug it out of her pocket, and without saying anything, held her hand open to show me she had the keys to Issa’s and Rico’s rooms as well. The girl was watching this little pantomime, looking around the edge of the kitchen door. She backed away as I came through the dining room, moving into the corner by the sideboard, but not before I noticed that the clip she had in her hair was the one I left in my dressing table drawer.

  I was too tired to care. I didn’t look back as I heard her following me up the stairs. The hallway still smelled of gardenia. It was very cold. There is almost no fuel. I sensed the child standing behind me as I opened my door. When I went in, she moved closer, then stopped just outside and stood staring at me, my hair clip hanging in her limp curls, one of my old dresses too tight around her belly, the frill sticking out below her sweater. I stared back at her. Then I closed the door and locked it. I didn’t hear her walk away. A moment later, when I took my uniform off and opened my wardrobe, I saw that all the tiny satin buttons had been pulled off the back of my wedding dress. They lay, scattered across the floor, white as teeth.

  I stood there, staring at them, those little flecks, and suddenly – as one understands all at once when one is very tired – I understood. I had never thought about it much before, none of us had. But now I realize that it does not matter if the Banducci go to Mass. Or if Signor Banducci was a party member, or even if they were photographed with Mussolini. The Fascists may have cared a great deal about such things, but the Germans do not. The Banducci villa did not burn by accident. It burned because they are Jewish.

  I was so ashamed at my own stupidity that at first I put Lodovico’s picture into my night table drawer because I couldn’t bear to have him look at me. Then I heard his voice whispering in the dark, telling me that he understood, that everyone makes mistakes – everyone is afraid and cold and stupid sometimes – and that he loves me and that I am precious. So I took it out again, and curled up, and clasped my pillow, and and closed my eyes. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I will give her all my hair clips. Tomorrow I will make this right.

  But when I woke up in the morning, the Banducci were gone.

  It was about a week after that, that I noticed the holes in the side of the road along the Lungarno. They’re mines. The Germans have mined the bridges. My friend, the nurse who lives near the Campo di Marte, sidled up to me later and whispered that she has heard that the gas and electricity plants and the telephone exchange have also been mined. If the Allies ever get this far, the Germans do not intend to let them have Florence. They mean to destroy the city. To retreat sowing salt in their wake.

  In the meantime, a new law has been passed, declaring that all Jews are now enemy aliens. Their possessions may be confiscated and they are being deported. Trains with sealed carriages leave our stations at night, rattling north. My friend says bits of paper can be found by the tracks, with names written on them. They are pushed through the slats, so someone will know.

  We have several Jewish patients. Yesterday, the Head Sister called all of the ward managers together and told us what we must do – we are to go through their belongings, take any identity papers we find, any photographs or letters, anything at all that could identify them, and bring them to her. She, personally, will take them down to the incinerator and burn them. There are reports that the Germans are searching convents. No one thinks hospitals will be spared. If they come here we are to say we know nothing and send them straight to her. She is not a large woman, but the look in her eyes as she said this was enough to make me step backwards.

  To add to our woes, a few days ago Pontassieve was bombed. Another misguided effort to hit a train station, which, as usual, remains unscathed. Not so a large number of houses in the town. We are all getting sick of making jokes about the Allies’ need for glasses. Some of the survivors were brought here. One, a man who was badly wounded in the chest and stomach, took quite a long time to die. I sat with him into the evening, holding his hand, feeling it grow clammy and then warmer and then clammy again as the light dropped out of the sky. He died just before supper without saying a word. I took his clothes out of his locker – a worn jacket, a pair of shoes, woollen trousers that had been patched. It is my job now to go through pockets and to enter into my ledgers not only the details of blankets and linens, but the names of the dead. Then I must parcel the belongings up, tag them as if they were objects in a cheap sale, and be sure they are returned to the right people when the families come looking for them.

  This is the part of it I hate the most, this picking over other people’s lives. And yet, I know that if it was Lodovico – if he is dead somewhere – then I hope someone has wrapped his clothes, and written his name on them, and saved them for me.

  I was thinking about this as I walked back to my cupboard, digging in my pocket for my key. But when I got there, I realized I didn’t need it. The knob gave under my hand. The door was open. Even before I pushed it open, I felt myself stiffen in anger. Someone had broken in. Someone had stolen supplies. I heard a noise and, certain I would trap the thief, I shoved the door inward. Isabella was sitting on my cot.

  We stared at each other for a moment, and then I was so happy to see her that I actually started to laugh.

  ‘I thought it was someone stealing supplies,’ I said. ‘I thought you were a thief.’

  She smiled up at me.

  ‘I am.’

  There was barely room for the two of us in the tiny space. Issa had already lit my lamp. Tall shadows shot up the walls, snagging on the boxes of bandages and syringes, wiggling into the folds of the sheets.

  ‘How did you get in?’ I asked.

  She shrugged, still smiling, pleased with herself. I suppose I should know that my flimsy lock would be no challenge to her. She nodded towards the bundle of clothes.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Nothing.’ I shrugged. ‘Clothes. Some poor man who was caught at Pontassieve.’

  At that, Issa hopped off the cot and, before I could stop her, began going through them, shoving her hands into the pockets.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  I started to snatch the jacket away from her, but she stopped me. One shoulder was ripped and the front and a sleeve covered with dried blood, but his papers, somewhat miraculously, had survived. Issa slipped them out of a battered leather wallet and studied them under the lamp.

  ‘Is he dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course. Give me those.’

  ‘We can use them.’

  ‘Issa, no!’ I snatched the document from her. ‘He has a family!’ I said. ‘What would you think? If they were Carlo’s?’

  She looked at me.

  ‘That they were of more use to the living than the dead.’

  My hands were trembling as I slipped the papers back into the wallet.

  ‘Well, that’s your decision,’ I said. ‘And Carlo’s. But I can’t help you. I have a job. And,’ I added rather prissily, ‘a duty.’

  I thought she would argue with me, ask me if my duty was to the living or the dead, which would have put me in something of a quandary, but instead, she sat back down on the cot. Curling her legs underneath her like a cat, she watched as I dropped the wallet into my desk drawer, turned the key and then threaded it onto the ribbon that I wear around my neck. As I tucked it away, Issa patted the cot. I sank down beside her. I could smell the familiar warmth of her sweater and a faintly lavenderish scent of soap. For an hour, the war fell away as we sat there in my tiny cupboard office, talking of Rico, and our parents, and for a few moments of Carlo. And then, for some reason, of our old dog who died last year and is buried under my yellow rose bush.

  Eventually our words dried up. The hospital was quiet at that time of night. Footstep
s passed occasionally, a door creaked. Curled on the cot we were, I thought, like birds in a nest, huddled in our safe place. I felt my eyes begin to close. I think I was almost asleep when Issa said, ‘Cati, there’s something we have to do.’

  Her voice wasn’t very loud, not much more than a whisper, and in Issa’s world there was always something we had to do. But this time something was different. Somehow, I knew that she was not talking about two more downed Allied airmen. My eyes opened reluctantly. When I turned to her, her face was serious.

  ‘A family,’ she said.

  ‘A family?’

  She nodded.

  ‘How many?’ I asked, because I did not want to ask the other question.

  ‘Four.’

  There was a pause, and then finally, I said it. ‘Jews?’

  Issa nodded. I felt a queasy shift in my stomach. Even since the Banducci had fled, things had changed. Convents were being searched. Hospitals were being searched. Perfectly ordinary people were hiding like rats and being hunted down like rats, simply because of the blood that ran in their veins. I knew it, of course. We all knew it. But now it was here, in our city, and Issa was going to ask me to reach out – to shove my hand, up to the elbow, into the cold filthy sewage the Germans, with their idiotic obsessions with ‘purity’, were determined to drown us all in.

  ‘They’ve already come from Rome,’ she said. ‘They walked, Cati. We’ve been hiding them. But now, we have to get them out.’ She looked at me for a moment. ‘Do you know where those trains are going?’ she asked.

  I shook my head. I knew, and didn’t know. I didn’t know if I could know. But I understood that Issa wasn’t going to give me any choice.

  ‘To camps,’ she said.

  ‘Camps.’ The word sounded so harmless on my tongue. Like something healthy children did in the summer.

  ‘Not labour camps, Cati,’ Issa said. ‘Not like our soldiers. The Jews go to death camps. In Germany. They’re killing them. As many as they can. As fast as they can. Old men, women, children. They don’t care.’

  I shut my eyes and saw the red lipstick – the clown’s smile on that child’s face. When I opened them again, I felt as if the walls were constricting, pressing Issa and me closer and closer together.

  ‘Are you going to take them over the mountains?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Will they survive?’

  The POWs she had guided before had been soldiers, all of them young men. The mountains, in November, with the snow – I looked at her and saw the answer on her face. That they would have less chance of surviving if they stayed here.

  ‘When?’ I asked.

  I could feel Issa’s eyes on me like a touch.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ she said finally. ‘Tomorrow night.’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘A Doctor Eleanor Sachs.’ Guillermo slapped the message slips into Pallioti’s outstretched hand as if they were tickets from a bet. ‘Three times in the last hour and a half.’

  It was past four o’clock on Sunday afternoon. The day had been warmer than usual. Outside, the city was meandering towards sunset, making its leisurely way towards a drink, an early supper. Pallioti’s office had no such luxury. A lengthy and not entirely satisfactory meeting with the team prosecuting the fraud case had just wound down. He looked at the small pieces of paper his secretary had handed him and wondered what new set of problems they represented.

  ‘Who is she?’

  Guillermo shrugged and fussed with his computer.

  ‘She refused to elaborate. She has the direct number,’ he added. ‘So I assumed you would know.’

  Pallioti sighed. He started to point out that if he had known, he wouldn’t have asked. Then he thought better of it. Working through the weekend put most people in a bad mood, and in addition, Dottoressa Sachs, whoever she was, had clearly rubbed Guillermo up the wrong way. Or, Pallioti thought, perhaps it was just the end of that kind of week.

  Very few people had his direct office number. One of them, of course, was Saffy. He searched his memory to see if she had mentioned someone, some friend or business contact, she had given his number to. And came up blank. Doctor Eleanor Sachs meant nothing to him.

  ‘Do you know where she was from, which organization?’ he asked. ‘Hospital?’

  Even as he said it, a cold hand landed on him. He told himself it was stupid. If anything was wrong with Saffy or Tommaso, Leonardo would have called himself. On Pallioti’s mobile. Besides, he’d seen Saffy less than forty-eight hours ago and she’d been in rude good health. Not that that meant anything. One phone call in Genoa had cured him of that idea forever.

  ‘She would not say.’

  Guillermo glanced up, his look suggesting this was somehow Pallioti’s fault.

  ‘Well, did she say anything at all?’

  ‘Nothing. Not a word.’ Guillermo shrugged. ‘She insisted that she could only talk to you. I am minced beef.’

  ‘She had my name?’

  ‘Dottore.’ Guillermo looked up at him. ‘You are on television. And when you are not on television, the newspapers are complaining about you. Usually beside a picture, with a caption. The entire universe has your name.’

  True enough. Pallioti nodded.

  He looked again at the slips of paper. The number given was a mobile. The message said, Call any time, 24 hours. In his experience, people who asked you to call any time and refused to talk to secretaries or give any hint as to why they were calling were invariably journalists.

  ‘Her accent was American,’ Guillermo said, following his train of thought. ‘Her Italian was fluent,’ he added. ‘But I’m sure of it. My cousin married an American.’

  Pallioti grimaced. He had made the mistake, just once, shortly after he had arrived in Florence and solved a rather high-profile case, of giving an interview to the American press. To a lady from the New York Times. She had had a braying voice, asked long and complicated questions, and worn very expensive shoes. The result had been horrifying. A picture of him had appeared in the Sunday magazine, under the caption, In Europe’s Most Beautiful City Is This Italy’s Sexiest Cop?

  Just thinking about it made him shudder. He had not been able to go to the cafeteria for a month. The Mayor had whistled at him. He dropped the slips of paper into Guillermo’s waste-paper basket and turned towards the outer door.

  ‘Are you leaving for the day?’

  Pallioti looked at his watch. It was nearly dark. He could sneak out the back service door into the alley.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and turned up the collar of his coat. ‘Go home, Guillermo. Have a drink and put your feet up.’

  Guillermo raised his eyebrows and turned his computer off with a flourish that suggested he had something else entirely in mind.

  30 November 1943

  I should have known. I should have suspected, somehow, that something was wrong. Mainly, I suppose I should have understood that Issa had not changed. That she might be in love with Carlo, but that made her no less ruthless. She would do anything, including lie to me, in order to achieve what she had to.

  But I didn’t. I didn’t understand any of that. In fact, the thought never occurred to me. So, when I made my by now almost habitual dawn journey to the records office the next morning, I did what I thought was necessary. I stole four sets of papers and filled them out. One for a man in his fifties, two for twelve-year-old boys – twins, apparently – and one for their mother, a woman of thirty-five. I decided that they too were burns victims, the by-product of more Allied bombing. Pontassieve. No, I would tell Dieter, we did not normally send civilians to Fiesole, but there was nothing more we could do for them at the hospital. I would say this with a sad and meaningful look, implying that the wounds of at least two of them, possibly the children, assured that they were unlikely to survive. This, I hoped, would invoke his pity, and cause him to close the ambulance doors quickly. I rehearsed the scene again and again in my head as I pushed my bike through the scrim of snow that was falling over the city.
It was just after dark. Flakes dropped lazily, drifting like petals. In another lifetime, I might have tried to catch them on my tongue.

  Issa had directed me to a convent in San Frediano. Il Corvo would meet me there with the ambulance. The order was closed. We would not see the sisters. Our ‘parcels’ would be waiting for us in an outbuilding. Since our first trip, I had used and reused the bandages I had stolen. I’d added a few more supplies, but thankfully had had to steal nothing more in the last couple of weeks. The contents of my rucksack could easily make invalids of four grown men, so I would have no problem disguising a family with two children.

  It was just after five when I passed through the San Frediano Gate. The bells were ringing. The huge main gates of the convent looked as impregnable as any prison, but when I pushed them, I found they were open, as Issa had promised they would be.

  I slipped through, leaned my bicycle against the wall, and pulled the gigantic wood panels closed behind me. Then I turned and saw the familiar shape of the ambulance and the tall, haunted figure of Il Corvo standing beside it. I raised my hand in greeting, but this time no smile, no matter how unfamiliar, cracked his face. Instead, as I came closer, his black eyes refused to meet mine. His hands were dug deep in his pockets. He seemed unaware of the dusting of snow that was settling on his shoulders, or the flakes that were dropping and melting, running down the high dome of his forehead.

  ‘Il Corvo?’ I spoke his name, wondering if he was ill.

  Finally, he glanced at me. Then he nodded towards a door that opened onto the back courtyard we were standing in. From the bins stacked outside, I guessed it was some sort of storeroom. I looked at him, waiting for him to say something. When he didn’t, I pushed the door open.