‘So anyone who fought for it, for the liberation, is a traitor?’
Enzo smiled. ‘Yes,’ he said, dropping the report back on the table. ‘At least, that’s how I’d read it. Traitors get executed and have their mouths stuffed with salt because, if Signora Grandolo was right – and I’m sure she is,’ he added diplomatically, ‘salt was the price of betrayal. It makes sense, in a warped kind of way. Which,’ he added, ‘is how most of their thought processes make sense. At least in my book. We are, after all, talking about people whose idea of a great holiday is a sightseeing trip to Dachau.’
Pallioti sighed. There were days when the sheer evil in the world still amazed him.
‘And what about the others?’ he asked.
Enzo’s unusually buoyant mood was due to the fact that, since Tuesday morning, his team had unearthed seven other members of the partisans who had received both medals at the sixtieth ceremonies, and letters virtually identical to the one sent to Roberto Roblino.
‘Well, they’re all alive and kicking.’
‘That’s a plus.’
‘Especially for them.’ Enzo glanced up. ‘I’ve contacted the local boys, and suggested in the strongest possible terms that they keep as close an eye as they can on any ex-partisans in their area and take any threats seriously, and then some. We’ve put that advice out across the country. And, for that matter, circulated it through Europe.’
‘Any disagreements?’
Enzo shook his head. ‘None. For once it’s something we can all agree on. No one’s happy about thugs threatening old heroes. As for the others, the letter recipients – at least the ones we know about – one had his house broken into, about six months ago. But none of the others have experienced any kind of attack. At least,’ he added, ‘that they’ll admit to.’
‘That doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.’
‘True,’ Enzo agreed. He was sifting through a pile of folders. ‘Point of pride. Refusal to be intimidated. Not giving in to thugs. Not making a fuss. Old people are like that to start with, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s all doubled for ex-freedom fighters. We’re checking it out. Asking them to think again, and going through reports from the local police. After all, they’re not your average octogenarians.’
Perhaps not, Pallioti thought. Although he suspected Signora Grandolo might disagree. What had she called them? Astonishingly ordinary people who did extraordinary things.
He turned towards the copies of the letters that had been put up on a third whiteboard flanked by those dedicated to the two old men. The wording was similar, some of the phrases – most notably the assertions concerning the Halls of Valhalla – were repeated. All had been written in red ink. So far, all of them also featured the same smudged cross. And all of them were dated 28 April, LXXXIII, the Fascist year 83, otherwise known as 2005. In other words, not only the anniversary of Mussolini’s death, but also three days after the liberation celebration, which, as Signora Grandolo had pointed out, had been watched live on TV by most of Italy.
The general consensus was that the targets could have been picked out that way – simply names the letter writer had been quick enough to note down while he watched TV and was able to follow up on. Or, more likely, the broadcast had provided the inspiration and local press had provided the details.
Three of the newly uncovered letter recipients, like Roberto Roblino, currently lived in the south. Another was from Rome. Two were from Milan, and the last from near Ravenna. Three of the seven had thrown their letters out immediately. The lady in Ravenna had turned hers in to her local police after correcting the spelling – having spent the end of the war blowing up bridges, she had become an infant school teacher. Three others had kept them.
The corrected version had been lost by the police station in question, but the remaining letters had already been collected and sent for analysis. No one really doubted that they would be a match. In addition to possible fingerprints, Enzo was counting on getting DNA off the stamps. Even murderous bigoted halfwits often wore gloves. Very few, on the other hand, thought not to lick. The forensics on the bullet that killed Roberto Roblino had also come back. Much to no one’s surprise, it had been fired from the same gun that killed Giovanni Trantemento.
Pallioti accepted that these developments probably rendered his efforts of the morning superfluous, if not completely irrelevant. The fact was, he’d wasted his time chasing his tail. He suspected he’d also embarrassed himself in the process. Signora Grandolo had been charming, but she’d made him feel like a bit of an idiot.
Still, setting his ruffled feathers aside, it was good news. Finally they were making some real progress. The investigation had shifted almost exclusively towards the now-promising, and disturbingly large, array of neo-Nazi and neo-Fascist groups that seemed to mutate across the country, and indeed across Europe. In fact, Europol was being most helpful. Already the French had confirmed cases of harassment involving some of their surviving Resistance members. Now, all Enzo needed was the identity of the letter writer and to find something to link him to Giovanni Trantemento. A letter would be useful. Or at least a threat.
In the meantime, the Mayor was delighted. Even the investigating magistrate was happy. Going after neo-Nazis was a little like shooting fish in a barrel – rewarding for everyone, with the notable exception of the fish.
‘By the way,’ Enzo said suddenly, ‘about your Doctor Sachs?’
Pallioti, who had been studying the letters on the whiteboard, looked over his shoulder.
‘I hate to tell you this,’ Enzo said, ‘but I think you may be being a bit hard on her.’
Pallioti raised his eyebrows.
‘Not just about the salt.’ Enzo picked up another sheet of paper, glanced at it and put it down again. ‘About Roblino and Giovanni Trantemento knowing each other, too.’
‘Oh?’
Enzo nodded. ‘A couple of hours ago,’ he said, ‘D’Aletto tracked down the stuff Roberto Roblino’d already given to the local museum. A suitcase full of it. Odds and ends, newspaper clippings, mostly. Apparently, they’d never even bothered to open it. I guess they get piles of crap like this all the time. It all goes down into a store room somewhere until, someday, maybe, if nothing else is going on, they get a summer intern or a student volunteer to go through it.’
Pallioti nodded. Provincial museums were like the nation’s storm drains. Full of Pandora’s boxes no one ever got around to opening.
‘They did have the decency to be sheepish,’ Enzo added. ‘Admitted they took the medal for display, but they never even looked at the rest. Anyway, the citation is here. Or rather a fax of it.’
‘The citation?’
Enzo nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said, rifling through a pile of papers. ‘For the medal. And the nominating letter. Which was written by – voilà!’ He pulled out two stapled pages.
‘Giovanni Trantemento.’ Pallioti did not even have to look.
‘Correct. I’m afraid your Doctor Sachs was right on the money.’
Accepting the flimsy sheets of fax paper, Pallioti felt a jolt of sadness. This letter had almost certainly represented the high point of the old man’s life. He had spent the last year refining his ‘archive’, and sent his most precious papers to a local museum that had never even bothered to look at them.
The letter itself was two pages on Giovanni Trantemento’s letterhead. It appeared to have been written with a fountain pen. The copy was not bad, but the old man’s hand had not been steady.
I, Giovanni Battiste Trantemento, do vouchsafe that I witnessed the following and that this account is true:
In February of 1944, I took part in an assassination attempt carried out by my GAP unit in Firenze. The proposed target was the German consul, Gerhard Wolf, and two high-ranking officers of the SD, the Sicher-heitsdienst, Nazi intelligence police, who were visiting the city and would be attending a concert at the Teatro del Pergola. I was not told their names. I worked with three fellow GAP members from my
own unit – a man known to me as Massimo, a second man known to me as Beppe, and a woman known to me as Lilia. I was known to them as Il Corvo.
In order to minimize civilian casualties, it was decided that the attempt would be made by means of a firearm rather than a grenade. Beppe and I would pose as coal merchants coming along Via Pergola while the man I knew as Massimo and the woman I knew as Lilia would pose as con-certgoers attending the performance. They would arrive late, in order to get close to the consul and officers, who traditionally arrived after the general public was seated. The woman, Lilia, would carry an evening bag in which a firearm suitable for close-range targets would be concealed. Beppe and I would overturn our coal wagon in front of the car in order to make an escape by the consul and officers more difficult, and in order to create confusion, thus allowing Lilia and Massimo to escape after the shooting.
It had been very cold. On 14 February, the day in question, there was ice on the road and pavement, making it very slippery. Beppe and I entered Via Pergola from Via degli Alfani as planned just before four o’clock in the afternoon. A few minutes later, the consul’s car approached from the opposite direction and stopped in front of the theatre. We saw the woman, Lilia, and the man, Massimo, approaching from the direction of Via M Bufalini. As we pulled the cart close, the consul and two German officers emerged from the car.
The cart was heavy and not easy to handle on the ice. As we began to pull it across the road, I heard three shots and shouting. As planned, Beppe and I tipped the cart, abandoning it in front of the car and spilling the coal into the road. At that time I saw the woman, Lilia, running towards me. A shot was fired. She was hit, and fell. I helped her up and told her to run. Lilia ran towards Via Alfani, as planned. The German consul and one officer were unharmed. The second officer appeared to have been shot. Soldiers ran out of the theatre. I saw Massimo struggling with them.
It had previously been decided that after the shooting all of us should run in different directions. Since Lilia would have been seen firing the weapon, it was paramount that we do everything we could to facilitate her escape. We had previously agreed that, if arrested, Massimo would claim that he did not know Lilia, and had only met her walking to the theatre. Beppe and I would claim that we were merely delivering coal when our cart overturned on the ice.
In the event, although Lilia did escape, all three of us were arrested.
Massimo, Beppe, and myself were taken immediately to the Intelligence Headquarters, known as Villa Triste, at 67 Via Bolognese.
That night, we were interrogated separately. I saw Beppe and Massimo the next morning as I was taken out of my cell. I saw that they had been badly beaten, but they were able to communicate to me that they had stuck to their story. We were all interrogated again the next day. Then we were put in a cell together. The next day, we were told that we would be spared execution, and instead sent to a labour camp. We took this to mean that our stories had been believed.
By this time, I could not see because of the very bright lights that had been shone into my eyes during my interrogation and because of the beating.
Sometime after dark the next night, we were taken out of the Villa Triste and put into a truck. We guessed that we were being driven to the train depot. There was one guard in the back with us and one guard in the front with the driver. We had been driving for perhaps twenty minutes when the truck accelerated suddenly, then skidded on the ice and slammed into a wall.
At that moment, although he was severely injured from the beating he had received the night before, Beppe helped me to escape. The driver was stunned and the guard in the front was injured. Beppe got the tailgate open and helped me out of the truck. Normally we would have split up, all running in different directions. But I could not see. At considerable risk to himself, Beppe helped me to run down the street and into a park where we hid for several hours. Later that night, Beppe helped me through the city to a safe house. Without him, I would not have survived.
For verification, an account of this incident can be found in the records of the Villa Triste, and also in the later record that appeared in the Firenze CLN newspaper, Patria.
I hereby certify that the man whom I knew then only as the member of my GAP unit Beppe, is Signor Roberto Roblino and is currently known to me under that name.
Pallioti took his glasses off. For a moment he stood staring at nothing. He felt as if the past and the present had suddenly collided, mixed like the currents of two great rivers that sucked flotsam and jetsam under and bore it along – polishing it, hiding it, until it was ready to let it go, swirling it back to the surface six decades later.
Chapter Seventeen
10 June 1944
Spring came suddenly. But not before we endured a darkness that, in my worst moments, I thought would never end. I survived, I think, oddly enough, because of JULIET.
Her transmissions became an obsession. Or less the transmissions themselves, than the collecting for them. The counting. It became – as it is – an illness, a fever of the brain, akin to only turning left, or having to say good morning to magpies. Thirteen jeeps heading south. Fifteen tanks moving west. Twenty cans of fuel under the tarpaulin behind the church. Once the mania began, I could not stop.
Wheeling my bicycle along the Lungarno, I saw between the silver spin of spokes the rough patches in the road which meant that there were mines. I studied sandbags. I climbed to high places as the weather warmed, and, pretending to admire the view, picked out the snouts of guns. With my new eyes, I saw a city primed for death. Machine guns nested in the towers. Munitions were stacked in the thickets of the Boboli Gardens. I saw and counted them all. At night when I lay down, I mapped them in my head. I repeated the quantities – twenty-five of these, seven of those – until I was letter perfect. Until I could feed them to JULIET piece by piece.
As the nights shortened, the air raid sirens howled more frequently. Rifredi was hit again and again. Campo di Marte, Porta al Prato, and the theatre – our beautiful theatre. And then, one morning, the Allies changed. Instead of factories and stations and railway lines, they decided to have a day of bombing villas. I assume they intended to hit only those that had been sequestered by the Germans. Unfortunately, however, they lost their glasses again and made a mistake.
The villa that had been taken over as an evacuation centre for the children’s hospital they bombed last autumn suffered a direct hit. I saw the Head Sister in the ward that night. The Red Cross had been informed, she said. The German consul swears that the Allies had been informed, as they are informed of the sites of all hospitals. To think of it now still makes me so angry I can barely write. I have to stop and twist my hands to keep my fists from clenching.
There were tiny bodies. Rubble, and fire. In the middle of it all, an old man grabbed my arm. He told me he was looking for his granddaughter. Then he burst into tears and told me his cat had run away and that all he wanted was to die.
Then, at the end of March, GAP attacked a column of German soldiers in Rome. Thirty-two were killed, and more wounded. The next night an announcement was made by the German high command. From now on, for every German killed, ten civilians will be executed.
My life, Issa’s life, Mama’s and Papa’s lives, any man or woman you see in the street – it is official now. We are each worth one-tenth of a German.
It was about a month after this that we resumed the ambulance runs and I saw Issa again for the first time since February. Our ‘parcels’ were once more Allied POWs. I understood that we had to do what we were doing, that a choice is not possible, but looking into their faces as I bandaged them, turned them into victims of their own bombs, I felt laughter rising in my chest. Not happy laughter, but the laughter of insanity. Of madness – that we should rescue these men, so they may return and bomb us, in the name of freedom.
Il Corvo must have seen my face. He must have read something in my eyes. I had not seen him since the horrible night in December, since he watched me step into Dieter’s arms. H
e was as quiet as ever, even more withdrawn, as if the winter had driven him back inside himself. When I looked into his face, behind his glasses I could not see his eyes at all. But when he placed his hand on my shoulder, it was oddly comforting, and caused the laughter to die in my throat.
He touched me again as we came to the checkpoint for the first time; a slight, steadying pressure on my elbow. I was prepared. I thought Dieter would be there. I thought I would have to look into his face. I thought I would have to smile and say his name. But in the end, I didn’t. The soldier manning the checkpoint was a stranger, and he didn’t seem to care much. He barely listened to my explanation about the monastery at Fiesole, about casualties and beds, glanced at the papers, and waved us through. Just before we drove under the raised barrier, he leaned down to the window. For a moment, my heart skipped. But all he wanted to do was warn us to douse our lights because of Allied bombs.
The shed was the same. Everything was the same, except it was spring and instead of bare branches and fallen leaves, the woods above the monastery were furred with green. It was twilight, and there was no need for a lamp, even inside. Issa and Carlo were waiting for us, as usual, and the moment I got out, took her shoulders, kissed her and came face to face with her, I knew. She saw it in my eyes, and nodded. Then she pulled me close and whispered, ‘Don’t tell anyone.’
‘Does Carlo know?’
She smiled. ‘Of course. But that’s enough for now.’
I knew why she wanted it that way – she thought that if they knew she was pregnant they might try to stop her going over the mountains, try to prevent her from doing the thing she loved best.
We ran several more trips in May, and I saw Issa frequently. But with the men’s clothes she had taken to wearing all the time by then it was impossible to guess, if you did not know, that Carlo’s baby was growing inside her. They were rarely without one another. I almost never saw her alone. Every time we met, she seemed to me more radiant, more glossy and whole, and I felt again that we were like an hourglass. As my life diminished, as I felt myself wither and grow mean with fear and emptiness, Issa blossomed. She turned, like a beautiful flower, towards the sun.
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