Then, on the third day, they took Issa away.
I clung to her. I screamed at them. I thought they were going to kill her.
‘I love you, Isabella!’ I shouted. And as they led her away, even after they had slammed the door, as she went down the hall, I could hear her shouting back.
After that, Mama and I sat without speaking. Mama put her arms around me. From time to time, she smoothed the hair away from my forehead. She looked into my eyes, and I felt it again, The thing that binds us, the new thing that, in this horror, we have found – a love that flows between us without words.
Issa came back perhaps two or three hours later. The door opened, and she just walked in – wasn’t shoved, didn’t stumble.
Mama jumped up, and so did I. We threw our arms around her. We pulled her close to us. We asked her if she was hurt, if she was all right – but the moment I felt her body next to mine, I knew she wasn’t. She held herself stiff, straight and hard, and she would not look me in the eye. I put my mouth close to her ear. I whispered to her that I was a nurse, that if they had done something – something like that, to her – I would understand. I could help her. Mama asked her, too. But Issa wouldn’t say anything. She just shook her head and despite our pleading, said nothing at all.
All that night, she sat beside Mama, holding her hand. From time to time, she smoothed Mama’s hair. She ran her fingers across the back of her wrist. Down her cheek. I watched, and the sight scared me. Because I had held Donata Leone’s hand in much the same way. I had smoothed her hair. And it had done no good at all.
The next day they took Mama away.
The silence after the door closed felt as if it would go on forever. Then, finally, Issa looked at me. She did not cry or even frown. Her face was blank. It was filled with an emptiness I had never seen before. She was alive. She was breathing, she was sitting beside me. But her eyes were dead.
‘What?’ The word came out of my mouth in a breath, in a thought.
Issa nodded.
‘I had to wait until Mama left.’ She was whispering. She looked at the door, then back at me. And then she told me.
They didn’t rape her. Or beat her. Or even question her. In fact, they didn’t talk to her. She said she was demanding, shouting, asking over and over again what was happening. What had happened? Where was Carlo? And Papa? And Rico? What had they done with them? But they didn’t answer. Or even acknowledge that they had heard her. Instead they marched her upstairs, and she thought she was going to be questioned, or see Papa, or Carlo. That they might show her their broken bodies or the broken bodies of the others to try to make her talk. But instead, they took her out and put her in a car, with an officer from the SD – the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS intelligence corps – not one of Carita’s thugs, sitting in the back beside her. The driver was SD, too. Although they said almost nothing, ignored all her questions, both of them were very polite. Very correct. They drove her up into the hills.
They didn’t seem to care that Issa saw where she was – there were no curtains on the windows of the car – and she was sure that meant they were going to kill her. When they stopped and told her to get out, the driver coming around and opening the door as if he were a chauffeur, she thought they would order her to run, then shoot her. She was ready, she said.
But they didn’t do that, either. Instead, they walked her into the woods, down a path.
It was beautiful. Speckled shade. Sun falling through the beech trees. Birds singing and that smell, warm earth and the furred scent of leaves, that means it’s summer. They went for perhaps a mile. Again, very polite, very considerate, not forcing her to hurry. Finally they came to a clearing. The view stretched back to the city. At first she didn’t know why they had stopped. Then she saw the trench.
The SD officer took her arm, almost gently, and led her to the edge.
Papa and Enrico appeared unmarked. She said they looked almost peaceful because they had been shot in the back of the head, given a neat single bullet. But not Carlo. He had a hole in his forehead. She kneeled down, she tried to reach out and touch it, to cover the hole in his face with her fingers. But the SD officer wouldn’t let her. He held her by the shoulders. Then he told her that the others had all done as they were told, but that Carlo had refused to turn around. He had refused to look away when they shot him.
The others were underneath. Issa saw legs, arms, shoes, hands, all in a jumble. They’d been made to dig the trench themselves. The spades were still there, stuck in the earth.
Issa stood up and turned to the officer. She asked him to kill her. She begged him. He smiled at her, almost as if he had expected it. Then he gave a little bow, like a perfect gentleman, and told her that the German Reich did not kill pregnant women. After that, he took her by the arm and marched her back to the car.
After she told me, Issa stopped talking again. She just sat with her back to the wall and said nothing at all. When they came to give us something to eat, I asked where they took Mama. They wouldn’t tell me, but it is San Verdiana, I hope. Mother Ermelinda, who runs the women’s prison, is very kind. She is sympathetic, and a good nurse. Mama left us believing Papa and Enrico were alive. That was what Issa wanted.
The next night Issa and I were put on a train. Now we are in some kind of warehouse in Verona with probably a hundred other women. Some are dying. Some may be dead. Some have been tortured and I have tried to help them, but I have nothing to help them with. We barely have food, and nothing of our own, just the same clothes we have been wearing – which is why I still have this book. They took my watch, but they never checked the hem of my jacket.
In the days that have passed, I have thought and thought of that house near the Via dei Renai. I was the one who chose it, so the mistake must have been mine. I was so careful, or I thought I was. I’ve gone over and over it in my head to see what I did or didn’t do. I know it’s there, the mistake I made, but I can’t find it. When I think back, I see everything. The shutters. The unlocked scullery door. The upturned pot, the spilled earth. I play them over and over again in my head, every step of the visits I made. I was so sure. I thought I was so careful. I was even proud of myself. But I was not careful enough, that’s the only answer. It is my carelessness that killed Papa and Rico and the others. My carelessness that has taken Mama, and cost Carlo his life, and broken Issa’s heart, and brought us here. To this godforsaken human warehouse.
Digging his hands in his pockets, Pallioti thought he had walked down this street a hundred times. Perhaps two hundred. Three. There was a restaurant here where he sometimes ate. A bar where he had been known to have a grappa.
The lower half of Via dei Renai faced the Piazza Demidoff, a small rectangle of greenery where sad-faced old men sat on benches and talked to their dogs. A row of stone palazzos looked out through the winter trees onto the river. Four centuries ago, they had been built by the great and the good. Sixty years ago, they had been lived in by families. Now their lower floors were almost entirely taken up by discreetly fashionable restaurants and trendy cocktail bars. One, facing the park, was a hotel.
It was barely 9 a.m. The morning, which had not been warm to start with, seemed colder. The top of the street closed in on itself, narrowed until the buildings faced each other like dancers in some renaissance ritual, identical and po-faced. There had been a frost overnight. Thin patches rimed the paving stones, turning the shadows white. Pallioti walked slowly. He was nearly at the end of the pavement when he turned abruptly, and found what he was looking for.
Set into the wall, the plaque was not large. He must have walked past it countless times without noticing. There were plaques on walls all over the city. Everyone knew they were there, but no one ever actually stopped to read them. He thought of the machine-gun nests Caterina had counted so carefully, the metallic snouts she had seen everywhere, once she knew how to look. In the towers. In the thickets of the Boboli Gardens. She had learned to see death wound round with vines and flowers. As he would learn to se
e plaques set into walls.
Reaching up, he ran his gloved fingers over the engraving.
12 June 1944
In Memory of the Members of Radio JULIET Who From This Place Carried on the Brave Fight for Freedom and Justice In the Face of Nazi-Fascist Oppression Their Memory and Courage Shall Live Forever
A small iron bracket, similar to the ones often found in graveyards, was mounted next to the stone tablet. It was newly painted, a discreet grey. The glass tube that rested in it held five white roses. A condolence card hung from their raffia cord. Pallioti turned it over and saw the words, Remember The Fallen.
PART FOUR
Chapter Twenty
‘Yes. Yes, Ispettore. You are correct, of course. We are guilty as charged.’
A ripple of laughter came down the phone.
‘It’s one of the little chores we take upon ourselves – to keep the flowers fresh. On the memorials. It’s an irrelevance, I suppose. But then again, one finds that most of the important things in life are, don’t you think? And of course it’s nicer, for the city. There’s nothing worse than dead things, all dried up. Or, God forbid, plastic.’
‘Certo,’ Pallioti murmured.
He held Signora Grandolo’s card in his hand, turning it over and over. She was as polite as ever, but was probably wondering why the city paid his salary. He looked out of the window. He had taken her at her word, called on a whim. Perhaps, he thought, simply to hear the sound of her voice – the sound of a voice of someone who cared. Or simply knew what had happened.
The bright weather of the day before had held, although it was distinctly colder. Sun lit the piazza below. Pallioti blinked.
‘Of course,’ Signora Grandolo added, ‘it’s a particularly horrible story. Radio Juliet. Then again, I suppose the stories behind all of the plaques are horrible. Or else they wouldn’t be there.’
‘No,’ Pallioti murmured.
He was watching the fountain. The arch of water sparkled and glistened. Beyond it, outside the restaurant, a few people sat determinedly huddled in overcoats at the outside tables, sipping coffee and trying to read the newspaper in gloves.
‘I don’t suppose you know—’ he heard himself asking, ‘or rather, if you have any information on any of them? Or their families—’
‘From Radio Juliet?’
Pallioti sensed as much as heard the shift of tone in her voice. The laughter was gone now, replaced by a sober quietness.
‘No, I’m sorry,’ Signora Grandolo said. ‘None of them survived. That was one of the things about it that made it so awful. Of course,’ she added, ‘it was a hazard with the radios. That the signals would be traced.’
‘Yes,’ Pallioti said. ‘Yes, of course.’
He realized that he could have blurted out that this was not, in fact, what had happened. That the transmission had not even begun, that they had only just gone up into the attic – Enrico and his father and Carlo – that they probably did not even have the set turned on before there was the screech of brakes in the street, running footsteps on the stairs.
‘I understand,’ he added, ‘that there is another monument?’
He did not bother to explain that it had taken him the better part of a frustrating half-hour online to find the very obscure municipal website that mapped Florence’s monuments and plaques to its dead.
‘That’s right,’ Signora Grandolo said after a moment. ‘There is. Another monument to Radio Juliet. Up in the hills.’ She paused. ‘You see,’ she added, ‘after they were taken to the Villa Triste, they were shot. Executed.’
In the piazza, the three flags snapped and danced. The tablecloths at the restaurant fluttered and jumped, trying to escape the clips that held them down. As Pallioti watched, a waiter came out. One of the people lowered a newspaper and spoke to him. It was a woman. Her short dark hair ruffled in the wind.
‘Ispettore?’ Signora Grandolo said. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to pry—’
With a start, Pallioti realized that she had asked him something, and he had no idea what.
‘No, no,’ he murmured. ‘Not at all.’
Holding her paper down with one hand as she spoke to the waiter, the woman sitting outside the restaurant turned up the collar of her coat. Pallioti squinted. He was sure it was Dr Eleanor Sachs.
‘You hadn’t mentioned it,’ Signora Grandolo said. ‘When we met before. So, I didn’t realize you were interested in Radio Juliet?’
‘Some research.’ Pallioti turned away from the window. ‘Just something I came across. The story is, so, well—’
Signora Grandolo sighed, rescuing him.
‘Horrible,’ she said. ‘Yes, it is horrible. I suppose that’s why the flowers matter – at least to me.’
‘This other monument—’ Pallioti was looking at his desk, but instead he saw Issa and Caterina’s father – a university professor, a man of dignity – his face naked without his glasses, his son beside him. Below them, a tangle of arms and legs. Beside them, Carlo, Issa’s archangel, the father of her unborn child with a bullet hole in his forehead because he would not turn around. ‘I don’t suppose you could tell me where it is, exactly?’
‘Certo,’ Signora Grandolo said. ‘Of course. It’s—’ she paused, then she said, ‘Well, since you’re interested – I do go up there, to change the flowers. I could— But, well. You would probably rather go alone. Enthusiasts are a bore, I know. And—’
‘No,’ Pallioti replied quickly. ‘No, not at all. I’d be very interested. To come with you. If that’s what you were suggesting, if you would show me.’
‘Oh.’ Signora Grandolo sounded genuinely surprised. So much so, that it occurred to Pallioti that she had not meant to invite him at all.
‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘if you didn’t mean—’
‘No, no,’ she said quickly. ‘Of course I did. I’d be delighted. To have the company.’
‘When,’ he asked, ‘were you thinking of going?’
He heard her flip a page, of a diary or a calendar.
‘I’m free,’ she said, ‘this afternoon. Or, if that—’
‘That would be fine.’
‘Very well,’ she said. ‘Shall we say one o’clock? I find,’ she added, ‘that it’s sometimes easier to get away when everyone is at lunch.’
Signora Grandolo’s car, a large black Mercedes, was significantly more impressive than the police pool vehicles assigned to Pallioti. It was more impressive than anything that transported the Mayor. If Enzo Saenz ever got behind the wheel he’d probably have to be prised out with a lever.
‘I used to have an Alfa.’ She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. ‘But the truth is,’ Signora Grandolo said, ‘it was uncomfortable. Old bones,’ she added. ‘The Germans make very comfortable seats.’
Looking at her, it occurred to Pallioti that he had no idea how old she was. He had heard that you could tell a woman’s age by the backs of her hands, but he had no idea what that meant, and Signora Grandolo was wearing gloves. In dark woollen trousers, a matching roll-neck sweater, and what he thought Saffy might call a ‘car coat’, she looked even more elegant than she had before. There was no doubt about it. Maria was not a fluke. The Grandolos were beautiful women.
She glanced in the rearview mirror. Two long white boxes rested on the back seat of the car.
‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she said, as they slid out into the traffic. ‘But I have one other stop to make, on the way. We go right past a school that was used as a collection point, before loading people on to the trains. It will only take me a minute.’
Pallioti shook his head. ‘Not at all.’
Leaning back in the seat, which was indeed very comfortable, he experienced the unfamiliar, and in no way unpleasant, sensation of letting someone else make the decisions. He realized that he had no real idea where they were going – ‘up into the hills’ could cover a multitude of sins – or how long they would be gone. Nor did he care. He had slid out of his office past Guillermo’s e
mpty desk – Signora Grandolo had been right about lunch – taken the side elevator and escaped again through the service door. Then he’d backtracked into the piazza and caught a cab at the rank, amusing himself, childishly, with the idea that if the loitering reporters had just looked the right way they would have seen him.
But of course they hadn’t. Because people only looked where they expected to see something. The juvenile glee at ‘pulling a fast one’ had lingered as the taxi pulled away. He’d even considered turning off his mobile. He’d settled for vibrate. If Enzo called, it would jump in his pocket like a bed bug.
The school was an ugly brick building ringed by a wrought-iron fence. It was not more than a couple of blocks from the station. As they parked, Signora Grandolo followed his gaze and nodded.
‘They were efficient,’ she said. ‘You have to hand them that. Just a few minutes’ walk. Not much chance to get away between here and the trains.’
She killed the ignition and looked towards the school building.
‘This was bombed, actually,’ she added. ‘Most of this area was. It wasn’t completely full at the time. But over a hundred people were killed.’
She opened her door. Pallioti got out as well. He took the box she indicated from the back seat and followed her as she passed through the iron gate and into the paved school yard. The ugly metal-framed windows were bolted closed against the cold. Even so, they could hear children inside, the rustling and twittering of voices.
A simple marble column no more than a few feet high, the monument was set on a grey stone plinth a few feet from the front door. As they got closer, Pallioti saw that it was engraved.
In Memory of Those Who Were Taken From This Place Never to Return
The Villa Triste Page 28
