The Villa Triste

by Lucretia Grindle

  ‘For God’s sake, for God’s sake. You’ll get us all in trouble, stop it!’

  I was shaking. Tears poured down my face. One of the women put her arm around me, she pulled me away. When I looked back, I saw someone else pushing the cup aside and snatching the piece of potato.

  Huddled, turned in on herself, curled like a snail in its shell, Issa cried all that night. But the next morning, when I brought her a piece of bread, handing it to her without speaking, she ate it.

  That night, a woman died. No one knew until the morning, when it was light and she did not move. Did not get to her feet to jostle for water. They took her body away. I didn’t know her name. No one did. And to be honest, no one really cared. Because something was happening.

  In the afternoon, they lined us all up and called out our names. I was terrified that they would begin to split us up, march us away – suddenly that awful place seemed preferable to any number of other awful places. We could at least cower here until the Allies came. Surely, I thought, they must be in Florence by now. Must be about to burst and spill over the mountains. I grasped Issa’s hand. She was standing beside me. Then I felt a flood of relief, because they weren’t splitting us up. Instead they called our names, then pinned little triangles of cloth to our clothes – on our shoulders, like medals. Yellow, red, black. Anyone who took hers off – anyone without one – would be shot.

  When they had gone away again, we compared them all, trying to understand what they meant. Someone said yellow was for the Jews, and that seemed to be right. Red was rumoured to be for political prisoners. No one knew what black stood for. Issa and I were both red.

  They came for us the next day, at around noon. We knew when it was because we could hear the bells. They lined us up, four abreast in our tatty, filthy clothes, like some kind of beggars’ brigade, and told us we were marching to the train station.

  The guards were pleased with themselves, you could tell. They had shined their boots for the occasion and they shouldered their rifles as if they were having a parade – marching about in their idiotic step, barking orders and pointing their guns at a miserable group of half-starved women. I told one, who looked about seventeen, barely old enough to have fur on his chin, that his mother, wherever she was, was ashamed of him. I think he would have hit me if we hadn’t started just then.

  I had Issa by the arm, because although she had begun eating again, she was still not strong on her feet. I was afraid that if she stumbled or fell, she’d be trampled. Or shot.

  ‘Stand up,’ I whispered. ‘Stand up and stay close to me.’

  When we came outside, it was raining a little, not enough to make us clean, but enough to make it cooler than before. They marched us over the Ponte Nuovo, and down the Via Stella towards the forum. Despite the drizzle, on both pavements, either side of the street, there were crowds. They were silent, just staring, so quiet all you could hear was the tramp of feet. I don’t know if they were ordered to be there, or if we were entertainment, like a circus, or animals in the zoo. Perhaps they felt a sense of relief, seeing us. Or perhaps even gratitude, because any one of us could have been one of them, but wasn’t. We marched on past those blank faces, a brigade of Judas goats.

  Then, as we got close to the forum, something happened. There was some kind of disturbance. The street is narrower there, and Issa and I were towards the back, so I couldn’t see, but there was shouting and our little parade slowed, then stopped completely. This upset the guards. Anything that isn’t planned upsets them. An officer started to bark orders, and one of the soldiers near us ran forward. And that was when I heard the sound – the mewing hiss men make in the street – and looked sideways, and saw them.

  They were two men standing in the crowd, at the edge of the pavement. One was rather grubby, in workman’s overalls, and the other was wearing a suit. They beckoned. It wasn’t much, just the tiniest motion of a hand, but I saw it.

  I don’t remember the message getting to my brain. I don’t remember a voice in my head that said, ‘run!’

  But that’s what I did.

  I had Issa by the elbow and the wrist, and with both hands, I dragged her.

  I didn’t think. It was four, five, six steps. And I was waiting for the moment – for the crack and the blackness. But it didn’t come. Instead, I saw shoes, legs, arms. As we reached the pavement, they parted, and surrounded us, and pushed us down and backwards – parcels passed hand over hand, into the crowd.

  When we were upright again, coats had been shoved onto us. The triangles had been ripped off – I saw a tiny scrap of red under my shoe that someone bent down and grabbed.

  It all happened very fast, and in silence. Lire notes were stuffed into my pocket. A hat was jammed on my head. I was still clutching Issa’s hand when someone shoved me hard from behind and hissed, ‘Go.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Pallioti sat at his desk, the result of enquiries he had set in motion the day before in front of him. In proper secretarial fashion, Guillermo had collated the material and placed it in a neatly labelled file. Pallioti opened it and looked at it again. He drummed his fingers. Then he stood up and walked to the window. It was just past noon. The flower seller’s buckets were bright smears of colour in the grey of the piazza. He could see people eating in the restaurant across from the fountain.

  He thought about the two old men who were dead. Two weeks ago, Giovanni Trantemento had opened the door of his apartment to someone who had apparently walked unchallenged into the building. Several days later, Roberto Roblino had done the same thing – opened the door and let someone into his house. ‘Someone’ who had probably been known to him – had possibly even been expected. ‘Someone’ who appeared so completely unthreatening that he had allowed, possibly even invited, them to walk straight in.

  Pallioti returned to his desk, snapped the file closed and snatched it up.

  Guillermo took one look at his boss’s face and kept his head down as he passed through the outer office. The guard at the cafeteria service entrance started to say something – good afternoon, or a comment on the weather – then thought better of it. The wind kicked as Pallioti stepped out into the alley. It might have been chilly without his overcoat, if he had slowed down long enough to think about it, but he didn’t.

  Pallioti crossed the restaurant’s deck in three strides. He wove through the outer tables, and pushed open the door, feeling the rush of food-scented warmth. Inside, he paused just long enough to take in the fact that she was seated at the far end of the long room, at the last table by the window. Which had a perfect view not only of the police building, but also of the taxi rank. Anger rose in him. Waving away the owner, who had scurried towards him, he strode between the tables.

  Just before he reached her, Eleanor Sachs looked up, her mouth a startled ‘o’.

  He slapped the file down, rattling glass and silver.

  ‘Tell me—’ Pallioti leaned over, bearing down, his voice barely louder than a murmur, ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘exactly why it is that I shouldn’t arrest you this moment, and take you across the street and charge you with the murders of Giovanni Trantemento and Roberto Roblino?’

  She stared up at him, her cheeks paling.

  ‘I suggest you make it good, Doctor Sachs,’ he added. ‘Because I am in a very, very bad mood. You have approximately one minute.’

  She opened her mouth. Then shook her head.

  ‘I didn’t kill them,’ Eleanor Sachs said. ‘I’ve never killed anyone. I told you, I—’ She swallowed, nodding towards the file. ‘What is that?’

  ‘That,’ – Pallioti put his finger on top of the file and pushed it towards her – ‘that, Doctor Sachs,’ he said, ‘is a complete – no, probably not complete – list of the lies you told me.’

  They stared at each other. Then Pallioti sighed.

  ‘Honestly,’ he said, straightening up. ‘Did you honestly think I wouldn’t find out?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I don’t –
I don’t know. I suppose I didn’t think. I just – I needed to—’

  She ran her hand through her hair, causing it to stand up from her forehead, making her look like an unruly teenage boy. ‘I didn’t kill anyone,’ she said again. ‘I didn’t. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t even know how.’ She let out one of her strange little barks of laughter. ‘Please,’ she said, looking up at him, ‘you have to believe that.’

  Pallioti sat down in the chair opposite her.

  ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘should I believe anything you say?’ He reached for the file and opened it. ‘Nothing – not one thing you have told me so far has been true.’ He glanced up at her. ‘Your name,’ he added. ‘That appears to be correct. And you do appear to teach at Exeter University, along with your husband, one Robin Sachs. But that’s about where it ends, isn’t it?’ He pulled out the first page and perused it. ‘Let’s see,’ he went on, ‘let’s start with what you teach. Not history. Not social history. Not Italian or even European History. How about the history of literature? Petrarch is your speciality. With a little Dante thrown in. The only book you’ve ever written concerns rhythm patterns in medieval and Renaissance poetry. No one’s ever heard of any work of yours concerning the partisans.’ He looked up. ‘No folk history, Doctor Sachs. No collecting stories. Apparently the only ones you specialize in are the ones you make up.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘That’s not true. I—’

  Before she could continue, Pallioti cut her off.

  ‘No?’ he snapped. ‘Well, how about this, for being true? You didn’t arrive in Italy a week ago, as you told me. You arrived over three weeks ago. You flew from Bristol via Charles De Gaulle to Naples, on Air France. You landed at approximately three o’clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, 18 October. After which, you collected a rental car.’ He closed the file and put it down. ‘I don’t know where you went immediately after that, but I presume you drove south. Because I do know, Dottoressa Sachs, that on the night of 21 October, the following Tuesday, you checked into the Locanda Azzura in the town of Ostuni where you stayed for approximately three nights. Ostuni,’ he added, ‘is what? A twenty-minute, thirty-minute drive from Roberto Roblino’s house?’

  Eleanor Sachs reached for her water glass, but didn’t pick it up.

  ‘Are you,’ Pallioti said, ‘honestly asking me to believe that you didn’t go and see him again?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Yes. No.’

  ‘Which is it, Doctor Sachs? I suggest,’ he added, ‘that you think very carefully before you answer.’

  ‘Both.’ Eleanor Sachs looked at him. ‘It’s both,’ she said. ‘You’re right. I tried to go see him. I did. But I couldn’t reach him on the phone. So, finally, I drove to the house. He wasn’t there. I saw Maria Grazia, the housekeeper, instead. She told me he’d gone away, to Taormina, that he wouldn’t be back until the following week. I couldn’t wait that long. I – I’d arranged to meet my husband in Positano for a long weekend, that Friday. Then I was going to Rome, and then coming here. I thought—’ – she ran her hand through her hair again – ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that I’d just go back and see him. Later, before I finally left.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘What?’ She looked up at him.

  ‘Why?’ Pallioti asked again. ‘Why did you want to see Roberto Roblino again?’

  ‘Oh.’ Eleanor Sachs nodded, as if she was having trouble following what he was asking. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘The birth certificate.’

  Pallioti looked at her. What was it Saffy had said? That Eleanor looked like Audrey Hepburn? Who was also Holly Golightly. Who’d been a liar, too.

  ‘His birth certificate,’ she said. ‘I wanted to ask him about it.

  About where I could find a copy of it. About where he’d grown up.’

  ‘Why?’

  Eleanor Sachs didn’t reply.

  ‘Why?’ Pallioti asked again. ‘Why do you care, about Roberto Roblino’s birth certificate?’

  ‘Because,’ she said finally, ‘I don’t think he is who he says he is.’

  Pallioti leaned back in his chair.

  ‘Maria Grazia—’ She looked at him. ‘The housekeeper, she says – I got to be friends with her – she says he never, ever talks about his past. Signor Roblino. Nothing specific, anyway. Just vague stories about the partisans. She says he has never once mentioned his parents, or where he grew up or if he had brothers and sisters. And there’s no evidence of him,’ she added, ‘nothing that I can find, before he returned to Italy in 1957. Roberto Roblino just doesn’t exist. It’s like he fell to earth, aged twenty-something, in Madrid. That’s why I was so surprised—’ – she looked at Pallioti and shook her head – ‘by what you told me in the restaurant, on Sunday. It was the first evidence I’d heard that he was really here.’

  ‘Did you follow me there? To the restaurant?’

  It was not the question he meant to ask, but it came out anyway. She looked down at her plate, ran her finger over the tines of her fork. A waiter approached and hovered. Pallioti waved him away.

  ‘Did you follow me?’ he asked again. ‘To the restaurant, and yesterday?’

  ‘Sort of.’ She looked up. ‘I’m renting a cottage. I told you. It’s near the restaurant. I walk around there, a lot. Up near San Miniato and down the hill. I saw you. I saw your group go in. I wasn’t going to. I walked on. Then I turned around and came back and, yes. I guess I followed you.’

  Pallioti leaned back in his chair, watching her.

  ‘And yesterday?’

  ‘Yesterday, yes.’ She looked up. ‘Yes. I saw you get in a taxi, out there, in the piazza. And I got in a taxi, and I followed you, and that woman. Up to the monument for Radio Juliet.’

  ‘Why?’ Pallioti asked. He leaned forward. ‘I don’t understand, Dottoressa Sachs. Why would you follow me?’

  She sighed and looked down again. The dark top of her head was tousled. For a moment, she reminded him powerfully of his sister. When Saffy was thirteen, on the anniversary of their parents’ death, she had run off from school and been picked up by the police in a bar in Genoa. It was the only naughty thing she had ever done. The conversation he was having with Eleanor Sachs reminded him painfully of the conversation he had had that night with Seraphina.

  ‘Because,’ Eleanor Sachs said.

  Even the answers were the same.

  ‘Because? Because what? I don’t understand, Dottoressa. Why would you want to follow me?’

  Today she was wearing no make-up, no lipstick or mascara. Under the tousled hair, her pale heart-shaped face looked both very young and very old at once.

  ‘For the same reason that I made contact with you in the first place,’ she said. ‘Because I thought that maybe, if I could get close to you – if I could follow you, maybe you would lead me to—’

  She looked at him, her eyes pleading.

  ‘Il Spettro,’ Pallioti said. ‘You thought that I would lead you to Il Spettro. Is that it?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Because you think Il Spettro killed these two old men? In what? Some sort of partisan revenge vendetta? And that if you told me about him, I would go off like a hound on the scent, and lead you to him?’

  Eleanor Sachs didn’t answer.

  ‘Dottoressa,’ Pallioti wanted to reach out and take her hand, but didn’t. ‘Il Spettro does not exist.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. ‘He doesn’t exist. He never did.’

  ‘He does,’ she said. ‘I know he does. He has to.’

  ‘Why?’

  She swallowed.

  ‘Because,’ she said, ‘because I think he’s my grandfather.’

  Eleanor Sachs had taken a tissue out of the large black bag looped across the back of her chair and was wiping her eyes and blowing her nose. Pallioti gestured to the hovering waiter. He ordered two grappas. He waited until the small glasses had been placed in front of them, then he said,

  ‘All
right. Now. Why don’t you start at the beginning and tell me?’

  Eleanor Sachs picked up her glass. Today, her fingernails were painted a pearl colour. They reminded Pallioti of the milky shells of baby whelks. Or of kitten claws – translucent, and unexpectedly sharp.

  ‘I grew up in Cleveland. In case you don’t know, that’s nowhere.’

  ‘It has a very good symphony orchestra.’

  She smiled.

  ‘I guess. We didn’t go. Anyway, my parents – well no, my Dad was Italian. My Mom left us when I was little. She remarried, and I stayed with Dad. And he used to tell me – he used to talk about Italy. And about the war, and what happened. And the partisans. He used to talk a lot about the partisans. All these stories. About the stuff they did. About the Garibaldi Brigades, and how they fought the Germans, and the Fascists, and ran escape routes. All that stuff. But mostly about the escape routes. He talked about that a lot. About what happened here, in Florence – and how there was this one famous guy, the Ghost – Il Spettro – who got lots and lots of people out and who the Germans could never catch.’

  She shrugged and sipped the grappa.

  ‘I didn’t think about it when I was a kid. You know, you don’t. My Mom left us when I was little. I grew up with my Dad. He still spoke some Italian at home, and when I got to college, that’s what I majored in – Italian literature and language. Then I remembered all this stuff, so I asked him again, and he told me his mother told him. I never knew my grandparents, they died when I was really small. But he told me his mother told him all these stories, about the partisans, and Florence, and Il Spettro.’

  ‘His mother?’

  She nodded.

  ‘That’s right. You see, his Dad wasn’t his Dad. I mean, he was, but not really. My father always knew that. My grandmother married my grandfather here, in Italy. My grandfather – well, the man she married, her husband – was working with the Allies in the south, and she married him and he brought them out to America. A lot of people who worked with the Allies were given the right to re-patriate. But the man she married wasn’t the father of her baby. Do you understand?’ Eleanor Sachs looked up. ‘She had the baby, my Dad, before they were married. He was someone else’s. My Dad found out sort of by mistake. An old army friend of his father’s let it slip, after his father died. His parents never told him. I asked him once why he thought that was.’ She smiled. ‘He said, he guessed they didn’t think it mattered. He always thought of his Dad as his real Dad. He adored him.’