The Villa Triste

by Lucretia Grindle

  The bells had stopped, their echo hanging in the silence. Inside the room was so shadowed, lit only by one small lamp, that at first I could barely see at all. Then I picked them out. An older man, perhaps fifty or sixty, stood beside a woman who was clutching his hand. Two children, the boys, sat on the cold floor, their backs to the wall. Beside them, next to a stack of sacks they had obviously been sleeping on, was a young woman, probably younger than me. In her arms she held a little girl of no more than three or four years old.

  I stared. Then I backed out, pulling the door closed. When I turned around, Il Corvo was behind me.

  ‘There are six of them,’ I hissed. ‘Six! Three adults! Three children!’

  He nodded.

  ‘But there’s only room for four.’ I shook my head as if doing so could make two of these people vanish. ‘We only have four stretchers!’

  I was trying to keep my voice at a whisper – I didn’t want to upset the poor family who I knew would be listening, who must have seen the look on my face.

  ‘We can’t take them,’ I said. ‘We can’t—’

  I looked at him. I could feel the air going out of me, tears welling up in my eyes.

  ‘We must,’ Il Corvo said, his eyes dark and fastened on mine. ‘We must.’

  We put the old man and his wife and the two boys in stretchers. The younger woman sat on the floor between them, holding the baby. She said she did not dare let her go, that it was the best way to stop her from making a noise. I bandaged her head, and the little girl’s arm. I wrapped a blanket around them. I told them they would be safe. I knew that, looking into my eyes, the woman did not, for one moment, believe me. But she smiled anyway. She thanked me. The man tried to press money into my palm. I put it in the pocket of his jacket, and told him he would need it in Switzerland. Then I closed the ambulance doors.

  There was no wind. The snow fell straight down, spiralling into the headlamps. Il Corvo did not look at me, but kept his eyes on the road, driving even more slowly than usual. I think he was trying to delay reaching the checkpoint, trying somehow to avoid what we both knew lay ahead of us. No matter that he had remembered my name, no matter that he had given me cigarettes and smiled at me – there had not been one trip we had made when Dieter, or the other soldier who was sometimes on duty, had not opened the ambulance doors and shone his torch inside. I could feel my heart beating. I could feel my hands growing colder and colder as they lay like dead things on the wallet and the four sets of papers in my lap.

  The checkpoint was lit. The barrier was a black line in a circle of white. Beyond, the snow was a gauze curtain. As we slowed, I saw no one at all. An almost giddy sense came over me. They had forgotten about it. The checkpoint was not manned. The barrier would lift magically and we would simply drive under it without even stopping. Then I saw the tall figure step out of the dark, torch in his hand, swinging from side to side. Il Corvo looked at me. We had never spoken of it, but I knew that somewhere he still had the gun, and that if he had to, he would use it.

  My hand shook as I opened the door. The cold hit me in the face like a slap. Snowflakes drifted and swirled. It was not until I began to walk towards the figure in his greatcoat and boots that I looked under the brim of the cap and saw that it was Dieter. I did not know whether to feel relieved, or even more frightened. Dieter knew me a little. Surely he would see something wrong in my face.

  ‘Signorina Caterina.’

  His face lit with genuine pleasure as he stepped towards me. He took my bare hand in his gloved one and made a little bow over it.

  ‘I was thinking you would not come again,’ he said. ‘I have not seen you in the last few weeks.’

  ‘You weren’t on duty.’

  ‘That is true.’ He smiled. ‘But now I am, and we meet again. Ah! I have something for you.’ He reached into the pocket of his greatcoat and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. ‘Nicer ones,’ he said, ‘than before. I chose them for you, specially.’

  I had been weaving a story in my head, grasping for something that might sound reasonable, or that he could at least pretend to believe – that this family had been bombed out and we did not have enough ambulances so were making people sit on the floor. That the little girl was not at the children’s hospital because we did not want to separate her from her mother. That I had lost their papers because I was an idiot.

  I looked at the wallet in my hand, and then at the cigarette packet. Dieter would not believe any of that. No one would. Il Corvo’s gun flashed into my head as if I could see it. If the back doors of the ambulance were opened, he would have to use it. After that, we might survive. And we might not. All or any of us. I thought of Issa and Carlo, waiting. And of the young woman, probably no older than I was, who was sitting merely feet from me, holding her baby in her arms. Then I looked up, and smiled, and handed Dieter the wallet.

  As he opened it, I dropped the cigarettes into the pocket of my uniform. I leaned towards him, shivering. He was in the process of slipping the papers out, getting ready to look at them, when I said, ‘Thank you for the cigarettes. It’s so kind of you to think of me.’

  Dieter smiled. He looked at me for a moment, then he said, ‘It’s not difficult for me to think of you, Signorina Caterina.’

  His tongue lingered over my name. His eyes were blue. There was a faint flush in his cheeks. The collar of his greatcoat came up to his chin. Insignia I did not recognize shone silver on the heavy dark wool. I reached up, watching my own hand as if it was not mine, and touched them.

  ‘I think of you, too,’ I murmured. Then I moved my fingertips slowly to the warm, slightly bristled skin of his jaw.

  For a moment, he froze. I could feel the thudding of my heart, and his breath on my face. Then he slipped the wallet into his pocket, and his gloved hand came up and covered mine.

  ‘Schön,’ he whispered. Beautiful. His lips were warm and hard. As his hand moved down to my waist, I glanced over my shoulder at the ambulance.

  Dieter smiled. Then he stepped across the bright white circle and raised the barrier.

  Il Corvo picked me up. I was walking on the side of the road like a tramp. I didn’t want to get in, but it was too cold and too far to walk. Finally, I slid onto the seat and sat as far from him as I could. Neither of us spoke. Instead we watched the steady splat of the snowflakes as they fell on the windscreen, and were brushed aside, and fell again. Near San Frediano he stopped, pulling into a dark corner to let me out, so I could collect my bicycle and push it back through the snow as if nothing had happened. I had started to open the door when I felt his hand on my arm.

  ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Please.’

  But he didn’t take it away. The headlamps bounced off a wall ahead of us, making the shadows strange and long. Il Corvo’s hand was pale and narrow. Elegant, like the hand of a pianist or a conductor. Before I could protest, he reached up and laid the cold tips of his fingers on my lips.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said.

  I shook my head. I did not want him to ask me what I felt, or see me cry. I reached behind me for the door handle, but he stopped me.

  ‘Caterina,’ he said. ‘My sister – my sister and my mother are Jews.’

  Chapter Nine

  The house was large, and lost in shadow. From where Pallioti stood across the street, it seemed swallowed by the tall drooping shapes of cedar trees. They whispered against the gabled roof, fingering the weathered tiles and the black lines of the gutters.

  He had not meant to come here, at least not tonight. He had been on his way home and had stopped for a drink, had taken his glass to a side table and pulled out the little red book. Afterwards, he had sat for some time. Then he had taken out his mobile, and called the switchboard and cited his rank and made quite a fuss until he had got what he wanted.

  There were no Cammaccios in the city database. But the Banduccis had been there. Only one family. Of course, they might not be the same – might be completely different, and the name a coincidence. But Pallioti doubte
d it. Their property was down the hill from the house he was looking at. The family had owned it since 1940. Whether or not they had got to Ravenna, they had survived, at least some of them, in their borrowed clothes, and returned. Found their way home after April 1945 to claim the ruins of what had been their home.

  The villa that had been set alight and burned to the ground had not, perhaps understandably, been rebuilt. Instead, the Banducci family had taken advantage of the need for post-war housing. According to the police database, the building that now sat on their lot – a Le Corbusier-inspired remnant of its time, which to Pallioti’s eye looked like nothing so much as a shoebox tipped on its side – housed three apartments. One up, one down, and a penthouse occupied by the Banducci. Probably, Pallioti thought, the son whom Caterina had not liked, and who now was likely to be a retired banker or a lawyer or small businessman with children of his own, who had children of their own, all of whom were waiting for him to die – if he had not already – so that they could move in and update the kitchen, and raise the rents on the flats below.

  Up the hill from the apartment building was a small park, gated and locked. Then the darkened villa Pallioti had come to find – the home that, according to the address in Caterina’s little red book, had once belonged to the Cammaccio family. It was owned now by the University of Wisconsin, and housed something called the Renaissance Foundation. He dug his hands into his pockets and stood in the empty street, thinking about ambulances. And a frightened young nurse with a red cross on her armband. And a tall thin young man called Il Corvo, whose sister and mother were Jews.

  Had they been lovers? Had she given it to him as a gift? For safe keeping? Was that why he had her little red book? Why he had kept it all these years, locked away in his safe? In the last hour the weather had shifted. Rain had blown down from the mountains, not heavy, as it had been on the day Giovanni Trantemento had died, but a thin pinging drizzle. Pallioti wondered – if he was correct, and Giovanni Trantemento and Il Corvo were one and the same – would he still know this house? Had he, perhaps as an old man, come and stood here, in the very place Pallioti was now standing, and remembered?

  The iron railings that ran between the road and the strip of front garden were backed by a diseased laurel hedge. Through the dead and leafless gaps, Pallioti could see the pale stuccoed facade. A front door with two steps and unlit lamps stood at the head of the short, curved drive. Shuttered windows lined up on either side of it. If he stepped downhill, he could just make out the stone balustrade of a terrace that appeared to run along the back of the house, looking out over the city. The upstairs windows were not shuttered. Their panes peered out from behind the cedar trees. The wind kicked and the boughs waved, making it look as if they were blinking.

  The road was very quiet. Street lamps were lit. On a Sunday in neighbourhoods like this everyone who was coming home was home. Lights glowed from behind pulled shades in the Banducci’s apartment building. Two Smart Cars, a Fiat and an Alpha were pulled neatly into designated parking spaces. Three bikes were padlocked into a rack. On the flat rooftop, the steel railing of a terrace was a silver criss-cross against the darkening sky.

  The Banducci apartment building was not beautiful or romantic, but behind the plate-glass windows children squabbled, and went to school, and came back and ate dinner and watched television. Parents squabbled, and went to work, and came back and made dinner and had angry, or happy, or disinterested sex. Football was watched. Newspapers were read. Dogs were walked. Life, in short, went on. People lived there. Unlike the Cammaccio villa, where no one lived.

  Pallioti stepped off the pavement, and crossed the empty street. He peered through the railings. The garden stretched steeply up the hill to the side of the house. What looked to be a garage huddled at the base of another huge drooping cedar. A street lamp shed enough light to see a new concrete apron that had been poured around it to provide parking spaces for several cars, and a patch of lawn, overgrown and tufted with winter. The cedar trees shivered. They scraped the stucco and flicked the empty glass.

  The gate was closed, but there was no chain. No padlock. It was all he could do not to pull his hand out of his warm pocket and finger the cold, wet iron latch. See if it would lift, and if it did, push it aside and walk straight in as Caterina must have done herself a thousand times, exhausted after her stays at the hospital. Or cold and tired, but too frightened – or relieved – to sleep after the ambulance had driven down the hill from Fiesole and dropped her off, allowed her to slip back into the life of the city, hiding in her uniform. He wondered about her walk home that night, in the snow – the imprint of Il Corvo’s cold fingers on her lips. His absolution, if that’s what it was, for what she had done, what she had given, ringing in her ears.

  A car went by, its headlamps bright as searchlights. For a moment, the gravel drive glittered in the rain. Pallioti looked up and wondered which window had been Caterina’s. Then he remembered. Of course, it had been on the other side of the house. From her window, she had looked out across the garden and the city, and seen the mountains, and imagined her sister walking through them under the stars.

  He would say he was from the police. Say he was conducting an investigation. His fingers crept out of his pocket, loosening themselves from the dense folds of cashmere. The rain was cold on the back of his hand, the iron latch colder, and flaked with rust. The gate was locked.

  Pallioti turned and walked quickly away, his feet making a hollow sound on the pavement.

  On Via Romano, shop windows were bright behind the criss-cross of their iron grilles. A few were even open. The supermarket. The wine co-op whose streetside blackboard announced that it was having a tasting. In the pharmacy a small Asian man sorted anxiously through a shelf of labelled boxes while a woman in a dark suit holding a dripping umbrella stood at the counter frowning. The man from the upholstery shop was locking his door. Zipping his jacket up, he dropped his keys in his pocket, turned down an alley and hurried away into the darkness. Pallioti walked on. Five minutes later, he realized he was standing in front of San Felice. The heavy door was ajar. Without thinking, he stepped inside.

  The church was a cave lit by flickering candles. Pallioti closed the door and felt the cold drop over him like a cloak. Damp, and smelling faintly of incense, the air felt as if it had not been stirred for a hundred years. His eyes adjusted slowly. There were several people, nothing more than hunched shadows in the pews. Ahead, a dull light lit the altar. Beside him, next to the font, a bank of votives flickered and danced. The coin he dropped into the offering box was as loud as a gunshot. He waited a moment for the sound to settle and die, then, taking a taper, he set a tiny flame dancing in one of the red glass orbs, and looked up to see Giotto’s crucifix hanging above him.

  The gold leaf of the frame shone in the candles’ twilight. It would have been vulgar but for the austere, sharp angles of its lines. The crucifix itself was a deep red-brown, the colour of wood, or blood. Christ’s halo was bright against it, framing his bent head and copper hair, throwing its light on his narrow, naked shoulders and the stretched sinews of his arms. His mother wept at his right hand. One of the disciples, red-cloaked, covered his face in anguish at the left. In the cimasa above, a pelican fed her young. Pallioti had read somewhere that it was a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice to the world.

  He thought of Caterina, not daring to look behind her, pausing at shop windows, and finally coming here, feeling her hands and feet freeze as she sat on one of these damp pews.

  Of course, the crucifix would not have been here then. Giotto’s grey-skinned Christ would have been spirited away, hidden like all the city’s other treasures. Pallioti could not imagine Florence without her Madonnas and saints. Without her cherubim. Her sprites and angels. She must have been as empty as a shell. Abandoned to the wanton malice of man.

  In the second row, a figure moved. For a moment, he thought it was a woman. But it wasn’t. An old man slid out of the pew. Gazing up, he genuflected before the gr
eat gold frame. The eyes of Giotto’s Christ were closed. A lock of hair drifted on his shoulder. The old man turned, and walked slowly down the aisle. He nodded to Pallioti. As he opened the door, the noise of the city darted in. The blare of a horn, a cackle of voices. They fluttered around the crucifix, excited. Then faded, and drifted slowly to the cold stone floor.

  Back outside, Pallioti felt suddenly tired. He would seek refuge at Lupo, get some dinner, and go home. The piazza in front of San Felice might once have been something greater, but now it was little more than a widening of the pavement. A spurt of traffic shot by, feeling close enough to touch. The drizzle had kept up. It would be faster to continue down Via Romano, but after the dark of the church, the lights were too garish, the noise too loud. He didn’t have the energy to shoulder past people, or flatten himself against wet walls to avoid being pushed into the street. He turned down the narrow alley beside San Felice, glad to slip out of the modern world and back into the Middle Ages.

  There was a wall on one side. A few lights spilled from small windows high up on the other, throwing oily shimmers onto the wet cobbles. Pallioti walked in the middle of the alley. Cars could not fit here – a horse could barely have fitted – and Vespas announced themselves well in advance. In the rain, even his own footsteps seemed muffled. He moved in silence, drifting, he thought, like a sleepwalker towards the Borgo Tegolaio. There, he was forced to stop for an electricity van. Then he crossed over, and entered the next alley.

  At first, the sound was faint. Just a clack. Then it was a rat-tat, like a child dragging a stick along a wall. Pallioti stopped and looked back, but there was no one behind him. It must have come from above. Night in the city was deceptive. He walked on, and a moment later heard it again. This time, there was no question about it. It was the sharp click of heels – a woman’s shoes on pavement.