The Villa Triste

by Lucretia Grindle

  It was not long after that, that the Head Sister came and sought me out, and told me to go home. When I said I was happy to volunteer to stay, she looked at me long and hard. I have no idea what colour her hair is, whether it is light or dark or, for that matter, snow white. But her eyes are almost black, and as bright and hard as wet stones.

  ‘Signorina Cammaccio,’ she said. ‘Go home to your parents. It is Christmas Day.’

  And so I went.

  Outside, I felt lost. I have grown used to the walls of the hospital. To my tiny cupboard and my cot. The city feels at once too much like a maze, and too large. I cannot see what is going to happen.

  There has not been much snow just lately, but there is ice. I left my bicycle in the hospital shed and walked. It was near noon, and everyone was at home. I passed a few others, but the only people in the piazzas were German soldiers. Several of the cafes and restaurants were open, and they were coming and going in flocks. Pigeons and crows in their black and grey uniforms, the cackle of their laughter brittle against the cold.

  And then I saw him, in a group of five or six others – Dieter.

  He saw me at the same instant. He turned, as if a string between us had been jerked. His eyes widened. He was already smiling, laughing at some joke, but a different smile came over his face. His hand began to rise, his mouth opened, as if he were going to call out my name.

  I ran.

  I broke every one of Issa’s rules. I bolted as fast as I could into an alley, my feet slipping. I looked back, and saw him staring after me. Then I scrabbled on the ice, grabbed the cold stone of a wall to right myself, and kept running, towards the river, sure I could hear him calling me, shouting my name in German through the city streets.

  Issa appeared that night, after dark and out of nowhere. She had presents – a pipe she had got from somewhere for Papa, a small beaded purse for Mama, and a hair clip for me. I did not ask her where they had come from. For her, I had a brooch – a tiny enamel bumblebee that Papa gave me years ago. She had stolen it once, from my jewellery box, when we were much younger. When I gave it to her, she held it in her palm, then looked at me and asked, ‘Are you sure?’

  I nodded, and she closed her hand over it, smiling.

  We played cards in the sitting room afterwards, pretending we were enjoying ourselves, until we turned the radio on, and heard that both Pisa and Pistoia had been bombed. Finally, I came upstairs, leaving them below and saying I was tired.

  I was sitting at my dressing table, brushing my hair, when the door opened and Issa slipped in. I hadn’t heard her climbing the stairs or walking along the hall. She sat on the end of my bed. I watched her in the glass. She was wearing the bumblebee, pinned on her collar. We have never spoken about that night in Fiesole, she has never asked me why I was not in the ambulance when it pulled into the shed, and I do not know what Il Corvo told her, or what she thought.

  As I sat there, watching her in my mirror, I opened my mouth. I could feel the words rising in my throat, feel them trying to push their way into the room. I was about to tell her – about Dieter, and what I had done, and how I thought I had seen him today and heard him calling me – when she got up from the bed and opened my wardrobe. She stood there for a moment, holding the door, looking at the space inside. Then she said, ‘Where is your dress?’

  I shrugged. ‘I packed it away.’

  She looked at me. Then she closed the wardrobe door.

  Issa crossed the room.

  ‘Budge up.’

  She shoved me a little, and perched on the end of my dressing-table bench. For a moment, we looked at our faces together in the glass. Then Issa reached over and took the brush out of my hand, and began to brush my hair.

  ‘It’s much prettier than mine,’ she said. ‘Like black silk.’

  This was nonsense. No one’s hair is prettier than Issa’s. I started to say so, but I couldn’t. I watched in the mirror as tears began to slide down my face.

  ‘Did you get them out?’ I asked finally. ‘The family? With the little boys and the girl with the baby?’

  Issa nodded. She kept brushing, one stroke after another.

  ‘All of them? Will they be all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Then she laid the hairbrush down and put her arms around my shoulders. ‘He’s alive,’ she whispered. I could feel her lips moving against my ear. ‘Cati, Lodovico’s alive. I know he is. I can feel it.’

  I reached up and covered her hand with my own. I squeezed it as hard as I could. Then I closed my eyes. Tears seeped under the lids, running down my cheeks, mingling with Issa’s breath, that was as warm and steady as the slow beating of her heart.

  New Year’s Eve came and went without celebration. I tried my best not to notice it, and failed. A year ago, Lodovico asked me to marry him. He took me to the Excelsior. We danced. When he gave me my ring, he bent down on one knee and asked me if I would ‘do him the honour’ of being his wife. The people sitting at the next table and the table beyond clapped when I said ‘yes’.

  What would I say, if I saw him now?

  I have no answer to that. So I spent the evening trying not to remember, and mending sheets – sitting in my little closet patching and darning, and listening to footsteps in the corridor outside – and trying not to ask myself exactly how all of this could have happened. How our world could have been so completely tipped upside down. I go over and over in my head how everything was lost last summer – how we had our opportunity and didn’t take it. How we did not leave and Italy did nothing to keep the Germans out. Just sat, like self-satisfied children, so pleased with ourselves that we had got rid of Fascism that we actually believed peace would follow.

  I became so angry thinking about it that I repeatedly stabbed my thumb, and finally had to give up and go hunting for a thimble.

  Donata Leone is a little better, and sews quite well. When I had finally found a thimble and started over, she sat with me beside the stove at the end of the ward, and we darned quietly, our needles flashing in and out like two old ladies sitting on our stoops. From time to time, she talked about her family in Genoa, all of whom are dead. Which makes my anger and self-pity seem small.

  With that in mind, that we at least are still surviving – that we have a house and a family – I went home for the night of Epiphany. But, like everything else, that turned upside down too. Because Enrico was there, and instead of being overjoyed to see him, I had my first fight with him since we were children. I hadn’t seen him for months – and what did I end up doing? Shrieking at him like a fishwife. I would have hit him, if Papa hadn’t stopped me.

  I do not really want to write it down, but I must. In the midst of my sewing fit, I opened a seam of my jacket and made a little secret pocket for this book – so no one will find it – and so I can keep it with me always, hidden and close to my skin, like a hair shirt. Writing in it has become a sort of penance. Words like the bite of a whip, falling until they bleed.

  When we were children, the Night of The Three Kings was always the night when we gave presents, and received them – the night when we ran out into the garden and looked for the star, which never really was shining straight overhead. So I thought that was why Enrico had come, blessed us with a visitation, like one of the Magi. But it wasn’t. I saw that as soon as I actually looked at their faces, Mama’s, Papa’s, and Rico’s. All three of them were sitting at the kitchen table when I arrived. Issa wasn’t there.

  I hadn’t even kissed him, said hello, or asked how he was. I still had my coat on. My hands stopped on the buttons.

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

  I could feel the floor shifting. I thought they were going to tell me that Issa was dead. Or that finally someone had had news and Lodovico was dead, or had been taken. But that wasn’t it at all.

  Finally, Papa stood up and pulled out a chair.

  ‘Cati, sit down,’ he said. Then he turned around and smiled, and clapped his hands. ‘I have something still
, I’m sure,’ he said, ‘in the cellar. Why don’t we all have a drink? To celebrate?’

  I started to ask, ‘Celebrate what?’ Then, instead, I looked at Rico.

  At first, he would not look back at me. He was studying his hands – which are dirty and chapped now. Finally, when he did, when his eyes came up and met mine, I knew.

  I stood up, almost knocking the chair over.

  ‘Issa promised me.’ I could hear my own voice rising, loud and shrill. ‘She promised,’ I said pointlessly, as if that meant anything. ‘She swore! On the bridge, I made her swear that never again— Not here. Not in this house—’

  I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know if it was more POWs in the cellar or the attic – but I knew when Rico looked at me that that was why he had come. Nothing to do with the Magi. Nothing to do with gifts.

  It was Mama who stood up and took my shoulders.

  ‘Cati,’ she said. ‘Cati, please.’

  The look in her eyes forced me back to my chair. I sat there, numb, while glasses were fetched and Papa opened a bottle and we all raised it and said ‘Salute’. I even drank it, straight back in one gulp, although I don’t remember what it was. Then they told me.

  It isn’t POWs or refugees. It’s a radio. Not just any radio. A special American radio. The Americans are dropping them by parachute to the partisans. The transmissions from England are not reliable and they do not come fast enough to be of much help to the Allied command in the south. The armies are stuck now, still in the Liri valley at Cassino, but the spring is coming and they will break out, and then they will need information. On the Germans – anything we can find – troop numbers, mainly. And the location of ammunition dumps. Numbers of soldiers and tanks, how many there are, of what division, and in what direction they are moving. Most important, they need to know where the city is armed and mined. It is crucial for ‘the liberation’.

  I looked at Mama, but she would not meet my eyes. She bowed her head and played with the stem of her glass.

  ‘Papa?’ I asked.

  My father’s face looks so tired these days. Sometimes only his eyes seem as they used to, wide and blue behind his glasses.

  ‘They need our help, Cati.’ He reached out and covered my hand with his. ‘We must be glad to give it.’

  But I did not want to be glad. I thought of the trains, of hands waving through slats, of the people who have been dumped in the hospital’s doorway after they have been visited by the Banda Carita.

  Enrico turned to me. ‘Cati,’ he said, ‘it’s our duty.’

  It was those words, it was when he said that – ‘our duty’, that I snapped.

  I leapt out of my chair. I told him I did my duty every day – that down here in the city we ate, drank and slept ‘our duty’, and that he was selfish, and that while he was playing at soldiers in the mountains, we were stuck here – ducks in a shooting gallery – Mama and Papa and me. I asked him if he was stupid – if he understood? That it was us who would be arrested, us who would be dragged off to the Villa Triste. That when the Germans traced his radio, we would be the ones lying in a heap in the snow. I screamed at my brother that he was as bad as Mussolini, as Mario Carita, as the SS, or the Allied bombers – putting us in this much danger.

  Papa had to grab me to stop me from hitting him.

  But, of course, it made no difference.

  That’s what I had seen in Rico’s face. And in Mama’s. That’s what I had felt in Papa’s touch, heard in the clap of his hands.

  Salute!

  Before I even walked into the kitchen, the decision was made. When we raised our glasses, we were drinking to the newest member of our family. Her name is JULIET.

  Chapter Twelve

  By Tuesday evening, Pallioti had all but given up using the front doors of the police building. The press office had managed, in the forty-eight hours since Roberto Roblino’s body had been found, to avoid confirming that his death was in any way linked to Giovanni Trantemento’s. But Pallioti realized, along with everyone else – including, apparently most of the press – that they could not keep up the front indefinitely. Sooner or later, and probably sooner, someone would get hold of something concrete. Then he would have to give another press conference, and answer more questions, most of which would almost certainly contain the magic words ‘serial’ and ‘killer’. Nothing, after all, sold newspapers better. He was just hoping he could delay the inevitable until Enzo came up with a reasonable line of enquiry – something that would make them sound as if they had some clue as to what on earth was going on. Or better yet, an arrest.

  As he came out of the cafeteria service door, Pallioti spoke briefly to the guard on duty. Then he stood in the back alley, buttoning his coat. It had been a long day. He had spent most of it catching up with everything he had missed during the trip to Brindisi. The fraud case was as thorny as it had always been, but he was faintly optimistic that, as far as Roberto Roblino was concerned, they were in fact making progress.

  Enzo’s team was happily picking apart what little there was in The file from Brindisi. Pallioti himself had made several calls to Rome and thought that he might, finally, have found the right person to light a fire under whatever poor unfortunate it was who was responsible for the consular archives in Madrid. Enzo had met again with the reporter who had written the neo-Nazi piece. Cesare D’Aletto had dispatched the original letter to their own forensics people. It was true that a second search had revealed nothing similar in Giovanni Trantemento’s papers, or tucked away inside one of his books, or anywhere else in his apartment. But that didn’t mean he hadn’t received a letter like Roblino’s, which had, after all, been sent over a year ago. Hate mail was the sort of thing people threw out. Everyone who knew Trantemento – a relatively short list – was being questioned again to see if anything jogged their memory. In the meantime, partisan groups were being contacted to see if they knew of any other similar missives, and the letter had been circulated on the police databases. It had to be only a matter of time before they got a break. The spelling alone suggested Roblino’s letter hadn’t been written by a criminal mastermind. Which, oddly, was the one thing about it that bothered Pallioti. Enzo disagreed, pointing out that even morons could wear gloves and get lucky enough not to leave evidence behind. The gun had probably been kept as a souvenir.

  Pallioti sniffed the air. It was warmer than it had been. A fog had rolled down from the mountains. Dusk was falling so fast he thought he could actually see it, dropping like a curtain of gauze across the roofs of the city.

  He had been considering simply going to Lupo then crawling home to bed, when he remembered Saffy’s show. He had indeed missed the opening, but a message on his phone had informed him that tonight she had a special late viewing. He glanced at his watch. If he was quick about it, he could still catch the florist and arrive with a conciliatory bouquet in hand.

  Skirting the the piazza, staying well away from the police building and the few lingering reporters, Pallioti stopped at the kiosk and bought a dozen irises. By now there was a proper fog. Puffs of it billowed between the buildings, making the cobbles glisten and the mouths of the alleys dark and empty. Sound came in ripples. The splishing of the fountain was counterpointed by a general tap of feet as figures drifted, or hurried, by.

  As he paid the flower seller, Pallioti thought he heard someone say his name. A coin still in his hand, he looked around. But the only people close by were a pair of carabinieri walking slowly, heads bent, hands behind their backs like priests. Lost in conversation, they passed the kiosk without looking up. Pallioti shrugged, dropped the euros into the old man’s hand, and started towards the alley that led to the river.

  ‘Ispettore?’

  The word seemed to come from nowhere. Pallioti was not even sure he had heard it. His step faltered. He paused by the loggia where a pair of damp backpackers hunched over guidebooks. They did not appear even to notice him.

  ‘Ispettore Pallioti?’

  This time it was
louder. He whirled around, almost dropping the bouquet.

  The hazy light made a silhouette of a woman’s coat. Not more than a few yards in front of him, the shape seemed to be drifting, rising out of the darkness at the mouth of the alley.

  Pallioti felt his breath catch. His heart thumped uncomfortably. From where he stood, he could not make out her face, but he could see that she had dark hair.

  ‘Ispettore Pallioti?’

  Her voice was strange. There was something not quite right about it, a faint flat echo thrown back from the stone walls.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please. I need to speak with you.’

  As she stepped towards him, Pallioti felt himself step backwards. Instinctively, his hand went to his pocket, as if the little red book could summon her up. Or make her go away.

  ‘No!’ she exclaimed, as he began to back towards the open space of the piazza. ‘No, please, don’t!’ Her hand, small and white, almost childish, reached towards him.

  ‘I’ve left messages.’ She stepped closer, the words coming faster. ‘At your office. I left my number with your secretary—’

  Guillermo. There had been two more messages yesterday. What was it he had said? That the woman’s Italian was good, but her accent was American?

  The spell shattered like glass.

  This was no ghost. No wandering shade who had slipped from the twentieth century into the twenty-first, her voice echoing down the decades out of a distant and war-torn past. If this voice was echoing from anywhere it was from the mid-west of the United States. He knew those flat vowels. He had done an exchange year at the University of Chicago.

  This had to be the insistent Doctor Eleanor Sachs.

  Pallioti felt his shoulders drop. A small surge of something like relief turned quickly to irritation. He felt stupid, then angry – embarrassed at having behaved like an idiot, thinking he was seeing phantoms. Squaring his shoulders, he summoned up what remained of his dignity.