It was very cold on the bridge. I peered over the edge and thought of the fish, still there beneath the ice, their world untouched. And then I wondered, when they blow the bridges, when the Allies finally come and destruction is truly loosed upon us, when the Trinita and the Carraia and the Ponte Alle Grazie all come falling down, will the fish even notice? I hoped not. Walking back to the hospital, I hoped the fish, at least, would be untouched.
I thought about them all day. And I was still thinking of them in the evening – about their darkness and their open mouths – as I finally made my way back to my cupboard at the end of my shift. I was carrying a bundle of clothes, that day’s bounty. No sets of keys or useful papers, but several pairs of socks. The decent boots of a seventeen-year-old boy beaten by the Banda Carita who then dumped him here so his death could be on our books, not theirs. A scarf.
Things were unusually quiet, and after the night before when I had not slept at all, I thought I would get an hour or two. I was pulling my keys out, tugging at the ribbon around my neck, when I sensed that something was wrong. My door was closed, but I thought I heard something, or someone, inside, and I was certain, absolutely positive that this was it – that I had finally been found out, that I would come face to face with the Head Sister, tipping up boxes of supplies where just the day before I had hidden two ration cards and a set of papers. My hand was shaking, but I felt something almost like relief as I finally pushed the door open.
I suppose I must have been expecting what I saw for some time, but still it took my breath away. It’s not that I haven’t dealt with the wounded, God knows. It’s just that they have always been anonymous. They haven’t had faces I love.
Issa was huddled on my cot, wrapped in her coat – her best coat, the black one with the fur collar. Which made it look worse, because her skin was so pale against it.
‘Issa! For God’s sake!’
I dropped what I was carrying and darted forward, but she put her finger to her lips and pointed at the door. I shut it behind me, and stared at her.
‘What happened?’ I demanded. ‘What happened to you?’
As I came close, I could see that the sleeve and shoulder of the coat were ruined, ripped and dark, and that blood had seeped through the thick wool and matted the fur.
‘I was knocked down by a car.’
The minute she said it, I knew she was lying. And I knew again the moment I touched her. There was the sticky warmth, the spongy softness. Finally, she let me peel the coat back. I have been doing this for six months now. I know a bullet wound when I see one.
‘What happened?’
It took me a moment to realize that she was wearing some of her best clothes. Her black suede shoes, soaked and ruined. Her black skirt, a silk blouse, the coat.
‘What happened to you?’ I asked again.
But even as I did, I knew it was pointless. ‘I know nothing, I know nothing, I know nothing.’ We hold it to us like a prayer, but in that moment I realized that I no longer know what it is for – who it protects or doesn’t. All I know is that we live in our own little shells of silence and fear.
‘Come on,’ I said, finally. ‘You have to let me get this off.’
I was worried that she was badly hurt, that the arm was broken or the bullet lodged. But she was very lucky. The flesh wound was ugly, and she had lost some blood. But that is all it was, a wound. A few inches towards her back, and things might have been quite different.
‘This is GAP,’ I muttered. ‘Isn’t it?’ But I might as well have been talking to myself. Even when I prised the torn flesh open and cleaned it, she didn’t make a sound.
I gave her some morphine. I tucked a blanket around her, and sitting in the chair at my desk, I watched as she fell asleep on my cot, her fingers fluttering in dreams. I waited until midnight. Then I gathered up all her clothes and took them downstairs to the incinerator.
When Issa woke up the next day, I knew that she was in pain, but again she refused to say anything about what had happened. She had visited me before, and while I did not tell anyone what was the matter with her, I thought it was safer not to deny her presence, either. I went about my business, and planned that, if asked, I would say the flat where she was staying had been hit. But no one did ask. No one asks anything any more. We all avert our eyes and scurry about, hands busy, seeing nothing.
By the afternoon of the third day, there was a little more colour in her cheeks. She did not have a fever and she was hungry. I found her some clothes. She asked for men’s trousers and a jacket. I don’t know if the boy’s boots fit, but she put them on. When I came back that evening after my rounds, I found her sitting up, in my chair, at my desk.
‘Cati,’ she said. ‘You have to cut my hair.’
I don’t know why, but of all the things she had asked or done since last September, I found this – this stupid, trivial thing – The most shocking. She must have seen it in my face, because she laughed. It made her wince, made her eyes water with pain, but she laughed anyway.
‘It won’t change anything,’ she said. ‘It won’t change me.’
I nodded, and muttered that, of course, she was right. I told myself that we were so changed already that it could hardly matter.
She left the next afternoon. Carlo came for her. He was waiting in the bicycle shed. I don’t know how dangerous it must have been for him to be there, probably very. My heart went out to him. I do not trust Issa to take care of herself, and plainly, neither does he. He reached out and put his arms around her. If the sight of her startled him, with her cropped hair and in her men’s clothes, he didn’t let it show. He has changed, too, since I last saw him, what feels like so very long ago now, in the autumn. He is still as beautiful as an archangel, his hair is still gold, and his eyes are still the same tawny cat’s colour. He still smiles. But he is no longer a boy. Something has changed in his face. There is a hardness about him.
‘Thank God you’re all right.’ He clasped Issa to him and buried his lips in her hair. Then he reached out and put his arm around me. He drew me to them until the three of us were standing there as one.
‘Bless you,’ he said. ‘Bless you, for what you have done. And for taking care of her.’
I told him I had not done much, but I was moved again by his kindness, and ashamed that I had ever been jealous. Now I am just glad that Issa has an archangel to watch over her. Before they went, I warned her, and him, that if she did anything stupid the wound to her arm could easily become infected and kill her. Both of them promised she would come back and let me look at it.
But I did not know when that would be. So I didn’t dare leave The hospital in case she came and I was not there. Our telephone occasionally still worked, which was a mercy – not only so that Mama and Papa would not worry, but because, although it’s true that I have become a better liar, when it came to this, I was not sure I could look into their faces and not tell them what had happened. So it was better I stayed away.
I made a point of going out every evening, and sometimes just after dawn as well, to the shed where the bicycles were kept and where the old gardener stored his things. I carried my rucksack, fiddled with my tyres or the basket, giving Issa a chance to see me. For almost a week she didn’t appear. Then, one night, she was there.
She was alone, and at first, I barely recognized her. She had hennaed her hair and was wearing men’s clothes again. But it was not just that – the hair and the clothes. She had changed the way she moved, the way she walked, held her head. She had made herself into someone else. When I think about it now, I realize that I shouldn’t have been so surprised. For once, it was a talent we shared. All of us were good at charades, but especially Issa and I. Papa usually won at cards, and Rico could run faster than either of us, but we excelled at turning ourselves into things we were not.
She laid her hand over mine, and the moment I heard her voice – the one thing she had not changed – I knew something was wrong. At first, I thought it was her arm. I reached
out to touch her cheek, to see if she had a fever, but her skin was cool under my fingers. Then I had a horrible lurch in my stomach. Mama? Papa? JULIET had been discovered? She saw my expression and shook her head.
‘Let’s go to your cupboard,’ she said, smiling at the name for my so-called office.
When we got there, I insisted on changing her dressing. Then she made me sit down beside her, and what she said made me feel ill.
Issa insisted that we had to discuss what would happen if either of us ‘went missing’.
I stared at her. I opened my mouth, trying to suck in enough air to make the ballooning inside me go away.
‘I will come for you,’ she said. ‘No matters what happens. I will come for you.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’ Fear made my voice sharp. ‘You can’t. No one “comes for” anyone in the Villa Triste.’
She nodded. ‘I know that. I know. But they don’t keep you there. They’ll question you, then they’ll send you to the women’s prison at San Verdiana. The Mother Superior is sympathetic.’
She told me that they had bought German uniforms from Austrian deserters, that already ‘German officers’ had gone to San Verdiana and other prisons to ‘remove prisoners’. If that failed, if there was not time, they knew where the trains went. They knew where they stopped on the route to the detention centres and the holding camp at Fossoli.
‘No matter what happens,’ she said. ‘I won’t forget you. I won’t abandon you. Remember that.’
GAP, she said, takes care of its own.
Then she told me that the rules are not equal. That if it is her – if she vanishes – I must do nothing.
I stared at her, but before I could object, she went on.
I must understand. If I go to the Questura, if I throw myself at black uniforms in the Excelsior, or cry, or scream, I could make it worse for her. GAP, she said, would care for her, one way or another. I didn’t like to think about what that meant. If she were dead, Issa said, someone would come and tell me.
‘I haven’t told Mama or Papa.’ She looked at me. ‘This is between us.’
I nodded as she spoke. Not because I agreed, but because a numb feeling had washed over me. The tiny space of the cup-lucretia Board smelled of cabbage and the warmth of our bodies. I stood up, half expecting that I would be shaky on my feet, and pulled out the desk chair.
‘What are you doing?’ Issa asked.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Wait. I have something.’
She watched me, half amused, as I climbed up onto the chair and reached into one of the high cupboards. I couldn’t see above my head, and I was afraid for a moment that I would drop it. Then my fingers found the cool smooth neck of the bottle and lifted down the brandy that I had been secreting away in my rathole.
I stole it out of a suitcase about a month ago, from a fat black-marketeer with appendicitis. He wasn’t even dead – in fact, the operation was a great success, and he was fine – but I didn’t care. He had his good little Fascisti badge displayed prominently on his lapel. I told myself he’d find another bottle where this one came from.
For all that, the brandy was cheap and quite nasty. I climbed down and we sat side by side on the bed, handing the bottle back and forth, drinking it as if it was cough medicine.
‘Issa,’ I said finally, ‘why are you talking like this?’
She was so close I could feel her shoulder against mine. Smell the liquor on her breath when she spoke.
‘You can’t tell anyone.’
I shook my head. Then I remembered when we were children, and held my hand up.
‘I swear.’
Issa smiled. She held her hand up, and pressed her thumb against mine.
‘Remember?’ I asked. ‘We’d pilfer Emmelina’s sewing box, steal her needles, prick our skin? Blood bond?’
Issa nodded. ‘Blood bond,’ she said. Then she told me.
Thanks to us, or rather to JULIET, there was an air drop on the night of Valentine’s Day. The first to Tuscany. They had not trusted us before, or hadn’t thought us important enough. But with the spring coming, and with the advent of JULIET, all of that has changed.
The drop was in the early hours of the morning, probably about the same time as Issa’s hands were dancing to morphine dreams. It was somewhere near Greve, and it very nearly went wrong. There were nineteen parachutes in all. They saw them come down, but the snow was so deep that the canisters fell and sank. In the dark it was impossible to see them. They thought they had lost everything. But GAP had gathered a lot of people, several groups, and they fanned out. Dug them out of the snow. Every single one. Thirty-six canisters in all. Fifty-one Sten guns, ammunition, grenades, incendiary bombs and explosives. All of it for the liberation, which, despite the stalemate at Cassino and Anzio, everyone believes will come in the spring. The Germans cannot hold out forever. When the Allies finally break through and Rome falls, Kesselring will fall back. They believe he will retreat as far as the mountains, to the fortifications they call the Gothic Line that Issa has been watching them build. They also believe that as the Germans go, they will try to destroy the city. That’s the lesson of Naples. But, Issa insisted, it will not happen here, because we will be ready. We will drive them out before they can cause utter destruction. This is what the weapons in the air drop were for.
‘By some miracle,’ Issa said, ‘they got it back into the city. All of it. Over three days, they brought it to an apartment in a safe house, somewhere near the Pitti. From there it was to be divided up and moved again.’
‘Was?’
I looked at her. The lamp in my tiny room does not give much light, and with the high walls and strange shadows and her newly short hair, she looked both familiar and strange, like a relative I had forgotten. Only her voice and her eyes were the same.
‘It was all going to be moved last night,’ she said. ‘But yesterday, in the afternoon, Carita came.’
I felt my mouth go dry. I understood now why she had told me what she told me.
‘But—’ I murmured. I could barely say it.
She shook her head.
‘We didn’t have anything to do with this, our group,’ she said. ‘But Carita must have known. It wasn’t luck.’ She looked at me. ‘If they had come today, they would have found nothing.’
‘And they got it all?’
She nodded.
‘Everything. And more. There were other things. A printing press. Supplies.’ She stood up, wincing at her arm. ‘Too many people,’ she said. ‘Too many people knew.’
‘Do they have any idea who it was? Who—?’
She shook her head.
‘How would we know? We all knew this could happen. But we didn’t believe it. Someone slipped. Someone made a mistake. Or – ’ she ran her hand through her hair, not saying what we were both thinking – ‘or someone betrayed us. Someone did this, not by mistake. But because they chose to slip through the shadows to Carita.’
‘There are all sorts of rumours,’ Issa said. ‘Of arrests. But no one knows. If GAP finds out who it was – well.’ She shrugged. ‘They’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again. But it doesn’t change it. About the weapons. We’ve lost it all.’ She looked at me. ‘The Americans are furious. They won’t trust us again. They might as well drop guns straight to the Germans.’
‘How bad is it?’
I had no idea about grenades or ammunition or explosives. I’d never even held a gun. Until that moment, I had never thought much about where things like the pistol Il Corvo carried had come from.
‘They won’t drop more,’ Issa said. ‘We can raid and steal,’ she shrugged. ‘But we can’t make up for this. So, when it comes, the glorious day, we’ll be left to fight with one hand tied behind our back.’
She looked at me as she said this, and for the first time I saw something I had never seen before in her face. It was just a moment, as fast as a dab of wind on the water. But it was so naked – so hard and bright in her eyes, that I felt as if the floor had shif
ted. She was afraid.
Chapter Sixteen
‘Did you believe her?’
‘Signora Grandolo? Of course.’
Enzo Saenz said nothing, but his expression suggested he found this mildly surprising. As if, having heard his account of being ambushed by Eleanor Sachs, he thought Pallioti might never again believe a single word uttered by a female.
Pallioti glanced up. They were standing on either side of the table on which Roberto Roblino’s life, or what they understood of it so far, had been laid out. He picked up one of the photographs of the old man and put it down again. The idea of Signora Grandolo lying was ridiculous.
‘Of course,’ he added rather waspishly, ‘if you care to waste the time, you can have one of your people confirm it. I shouldn’t think it would be too difficult.’
Enzo shrugged, suggesting he’d do just that.
‘Well,’ he said, picking up a copy of Roberto Roblino’s autopsy report and thumbing through it, ‘if the salt fits—’
Pallioti assumed that was supposed to be funny, but had no idea why.
Glancing at him, Enzo elaborated.
‘Most of these neo-Nazi, neo-Fascist – whatever you want to call them – groups don’t think the liberation should be celebrated. They see it as a betrayal. Of the true Italy.’
The Villa Triste Page 24
