In Love and War (22 page)

The third of November, 1942: the day after they burnt
In Love and War
. Esmond is standing in uncertain morning light listening to birdsong rising around the villa. Tatters is at his feet, sniffing the air: damp leaves and woodsmoke. After so long spent in old, familiar clothes, he moves with difficulty in the uniform, which is too small for him. He couldn’t believe, when Bruno showed him the complicated layers of his disguise, that Italian soldiers still wore puttees, and had spent almost half an hour that morning wrapping and re-wrapping them around his calves. On his head is the red fez of the
Bersagliere
. The right sleeve of his tunic has been pinned behind his back. He thinks of his father.

He hasn’t heard from home for over a year now, and he wonders how his parents are getting through the war, if his mother’s still locked up. He wonders about Rudyard, whether he’s alive, or dry bones in a desert, or heaving a pickaxe in some wind-lashed Silesian prison camp. Now Ada comes out to join him. She is wearing the green and white uniform of an ambulance driver. She hands him a cup of
orzo
which he blows on and sips, pulling a face.

‘It’s frightful, isn’t it?’

‘
Parliamo
italiano oggi, carino,
’ she reminds him, smiling. They’ve been in the villa so long that Esmond feels panic in his chest at the thought of leaving. He pats the Beretta in the holster on his hip, remembers he isn’t meant to use his right arm, and takes another sip. It’s the first time since coming to the villa that he has really missed smoking.

‘You should put on your cast,’ she says, and he has to think for a moment about the word –
ingessatura
. She hands him the white plaster – fashioned by the ever-resourceful Maria Luigia – and a sling which he hooks over his head. His arm feels heavy and strange dangling on his chest. ‘We must go,’ she says.

They lock Tatters inside the house with a bone that he begins to gnaw, barely noticing them leave. They go down past the swimming pool into the copse, leaves thick and wet underfoot. Esmond helps Ada over the wall at the bottom of the garden – slipping his arm out from the sling and holding her hand with thickly bandaged fingers – and then they are in the via San Carlo where Bruno is leaning against the bonnet of the ancient Bianchi. He smiles at them, cocking his matchstick.

‘You’re ready?’

Ada nods.

He drives them down through the city and Esmond has to fight an urge not to press his nose to the window. Florence is deserted. A few stray dogs worry bags of rubbish outside the Pitti Palace. Cars sit on their haunches, their wheels removed for the rubber, their owners unable to find or afford petrol. When they come to the via Tornabuoni, Esmond reaches over with his good arm and takes Ada’s hand. He can feel his pulse against her cool flesh. She is made for this, he thinks.

‘Your British Institute, it’s now used for meetings of the Committee of Fascist Youth,’ Bruno says. ‘They’re training the next generation of cannon fodder, teaching range-finding and ordnance in that beautiful library.’ He shakes his head and then brings the car to a halt outside Pretini’s hair salon. ‘I must leave you here,’ he says. ‘I can’t risk anyone seeing me with you. Now, you know what you’re required to do?’ Ada nods. ‘Don’t speak too much,’ he says, looking at Esmond. ‘If you’re caught, give them the information we agreed. Nothing about the Professor,
nothing about supply lines. Good luck.’ They climb out into the cool morning. Esmond finds himself wondering what else he knows that the Fascists could possibly want. Some meaningless code names, a few fuzzily recalled locations in the hills that he’s transmitted over the W/T. The Professor is all he has.

He can see his breath in the air as they walk down the via degli Avelli towards the station. Ada is a few steps ahead, carrying a small case with a red cross on it, which she swings jauntily by her side. They wait for a tram to pass and walk out of the shadow of Santa Maria Novella. The railway station stretches in front of them; from under the brow of its porch beetles a line of commuters; travellers trying to keep up with their porters; soldiers embracing their wives and lovers in the gloomy ticket hall, greetings and farewells. Esmond spots another
Bersagliera
with a rifle across his back. The man salutes when he sees the
caporal maggiore
stripes on his shoulders. Esmond nods down at his arm, mutters
‘Va bene,’
at the soldier and follows Ada into the station.

Carabinieri
stand in their kepis by the ticket gates, asking for documents only from the young girls as they board trains for the coast. Ada, whose hair is up beneath a peaked cap, passes the
carabinieri
and walks forward to the platform where the train to Livorno is beginning to puff. Esmond starts to follow her when one of the policemen holds out an arm.

‘
Documenti, per favore,
’ the policeman says, scowling at Esmond’s bandaged arm. Esmond reaches awkwardly inside his jacket and fumbles for his military identification card and notification of disability. He fights not to look towards Ada on the platform. The policeman stares at the documents and then at Esmond.

‘
Dove andate?
’

Esmond clears his throat and hesitates. Now he does see Ada,
fumbling in her case, glancing at him. He stares back at the policeman and, in barely more than a whisper, says,
‘Vado a una clinica ortopedica a Livorno. Ho un appuntamento con un dottore Hartmann lì.’
He holds his breath as the policeman looks again at his papers, finally handing them back with a
‘Grazie’
. Esmond walks through the gates and, without looking at Ada, boards the train for Livorno, his pulse visible in the corners of his eyes.

They get off at Empoli. The weather has turned for the worse, thunderclouds rolling across the sky from the west. Esmond makes sure Ada has seen him and crosses the road into the park opposite the station. He waits on a bench beneath a plane tree, where she joins him, at the far end, opening her case on her lap.

‘Was it close?’ she asks.

‘I don’t think so. He just wanted to get some sweat out of a soldier. If my Italian isn’t good enough by now––’

‘Your Italian is fine.’

They leave the park and walk past a group of cafés and down a road of blank-faced houses. After a few hundred yards, they stop in front of a building with a faded sign: ‘Hotel Superiore’. There is the sound of singing. Ada rings the bell. They wait for several minutes and finally the bolts are drawn back. A hunched old woman in black opens the door and leads them silently into a courtyard and up a staircase. On the
piano nobile
they make their way into a gloomy apartment. The old lady leaves them, shutting the door behind her. The singing gets louder. Esmond follows Ada into the bedroom where, against the open windows, an enormous man is performing
‘E Lucevan le Stelle’
from
Tosca
for the assorted pigeons and sparrows on the rooftops. His back to the room, he quivers at the highest notes, his voice breaking. Finally, after a sudden pause, he turns towards them.

‘Welcome,’ he says in an accent Esmond cannot place. He kisses Ada and shakes Esmond vigorously by his plaster cast, letting out a burbling laugh. He sits down on the bed, motions to two armchairs opposite and pours them out a glass of wine each from the bottle beside his bed.

‘
Bene,
’ he says, letting out another laugh and raising his glass. ‘I am Oreste Ristori. To your health, young ones – it’s never too early for a sip, heh?’ His face shines as if recently polished. He’s older than Esmond had thought, his vastness hiding wrinkles that only reveal themselves in repose. Above the fireplace on one side of the room are several photographs of a woman who, for a moment, reminds Esmond of Wallis Simpson. In some of the pictures she is in battle fatigues, in another she stands at a waterfall holding a rifle in one hand, her face streaked with mud or blood.

Ristori goes to stand beside the pictures, picking one from the mantel and passing it to Esmond. The silver frame is cold to the touch. She is beautiful. A string of black pearls hangs from her throat.

‘My Mercedes,’ the man says. ‘My star in the dark night. I write to her every day, not knowing even if she receives my letters. She was in gaol in São Paulo. Now she is fighting Vargas’s government in the jungle, with the anarchists, the guerrillas. In Brazil. You see how remarkable she is?’ He beams at Esmond. ‘You see how a man might spend his life for a woman like this?’ He knocks back his wine and sits down on the bed, pouring another. He hums a few more bars of
Tosca
as he sips. It is cold in the room and Ada gives a shiver.

‘Mr Ristori, we must be on the next train. May we have the documents?’

‘Let me get them. I’m sorry.’ He kneels down and begins to root beneath the bed. ‘It’s rare I have visitors now,’ he says. ‘I attend a literary gathering that is cover for a Marxist discussion group, but still – we are in Empoli, you understand? Revolutions were never made in Empoli. I am back where I began, the Tuscany of my birth. Defeated! Ah, here we go.’ He draws out some sheets of paper covered in dense typewritten text. Ada takes them from him and looks at them closely.

‘I think this is the sort of thing we were after. Thank you.’

‘My pleasure,’ he says, smiling broadly again. ‘You’re sure you won’t stay for another drink?’

‘We must make our train.’

She stands above Esmond, helps him ease the cast off his wrist, rolls the papers around his arm, and closes it over them. They bid farewell to Ristori, and make their way down the narrow stairs of the hotel, through its silent courtyard. As they walk down the broad street towards the station, the sound of Ristori’s singing comes to them again, high and sweet, finally lost in the traffic and the wind.

On the train to Pisa, they sit together in an empty compartment. It has begun to rain and the drops are pulled along the window as they gather speed through the Tuscan hills.

‘I’ve no idea if these codes are any good,’ she says, looking out.

‘But he’s dependable. Bruno said so.’

‘He’s a lunatic.’ An inspector comes into the compartment, nods at them both as he checks their tickets and pulls the door shut behind him.

‘In some ways he’s amazing, obviously, a modern Bakunin.
He fought for the rights of Italian immigrant labourers in South America. They think he’s a hero down there. No one knew how badly Italians were being exploited. He wrote long articles about the conditions for workers and kept being put on boats back to Italy, but he’d throw himself overboard and swim back to land.’

‘When did he meet––?’

‘Mercedes Gomez. She was another anarchist. They created the labour movement in Brazil, unions for plantation workers. When the police started rounding everyone up, Ristori was put on a prison boat back to Genoa. If he ever goes back he’ll be shot. He’s almost seventy, you know. This isn’t the first time he’s helped us.’

At Pisa there are gangs of Blackshirts on the platforms, police guarding the exits. He waits for Ada to get off the train and follows some distance behind. He makes his way down into the underpass and boards another train, this time for Genoa. Ada is sitting by herself in a crowded compartment. He stands, holding onto the luggage rack, aware suddenly that his cast is itching, that the papers are dampening against his skin.

They are only on the train for two stops, until Forte dei Marmi. He goes first and, without looking back, crosses the road and boards a bus to the seafront. He walks along the promenade, sheltering from the worst of the rain under the umbrella pines. Then an open stretch past shuttered restaurants and hotels until he comes to the Bagno Dalmazia bathing club; a single waiter stands outside on the sand, down towards the beach. Deckchairs sag under a tattered awning.

‘A drink, sir?’ he says, as Esmond walks down onto the damp sand.

‘I’m waiting for a friend. She’s always late,’ Esmond says, the carefully remembered code words sounding sham to his ears. He eases himself down into one of the deckchairs. The waiter
disappears inside and Esmond can hear him speaking. He sits and watches the sea, a deep and melancholy grey, pocked with rain. Rocks prod up like fins twenty feet out. After fifteen minutes or so, he is aware of a buzzing noise from where the coast curves round for La Spezia. He thinks of Shelley floating in these choppy waters, his skin the grey-green deadness of the sea. Ada arrives and sinks down into the other deckchair.

‘You weren’t followed?’ Esmond asks in English.

‘No.’

‘I can’t think why I asked that. I suppose it sounded like the sort of thing I should say. Of course you weren’t.’

‘You’re a very convincing spy.’

The waiter brings them both a coffee. It is nearing three and they haven’t eaten yet.

‘They’re coming,’ Ada says, nodding at two boats moving steadily from the north.

‘You’re sure it’s them?’

‘I am.’

They sip their coffee.

‘I wonder,’ he begins, ‘the people who do this kind of thing all the time, the Richard Hannay types, how much they’re in it for the thrill? Waiting around for a secret assignations. Being terribly hush-hush. Generally feeling like a Buchan novel.’

She is silent, watching the boats as they approach.

‘Because it seems rather a flimsy thing to build your life upon, this kind of frisson, don’t you—’

‘Shut up, Esmond.’

‘Right-o.’

‘If you have to speak, speak in Italian. But better, don’t speak.’

He looks down the beach, up towards the road, where only the waiter stands, watching them, coolly complicit. A gust of wind showers them with a fine sting of sand.

‘Right-o,’ he says quietly.

The boats pull up on the shoreline a few hundred yards to the north and one man walks briskly along the beach towards them. He’s wearing a dark blue sou’wester and oilskin and puffing on a cigarette, a red glow each time he inhales. When he reaches them he squats down in front of Esmond. He has amused blue eyes, a square jaw peppered with stubble.

‘Shoot out your arm and let’s have a dekko,’ he says, looking swiftly up and down the beach and then peeling apart the plaster cast. He takes out the papers and gives them a brief, frowning glance before slipping them inside his oilskin. ‘Think they’re kosher?’ he asks.

‘They look real enough,’ Ada says, sitting up as straight as her deck chair will allow. ‘Ristori stole them from the Regia Marina headquarters in Livorno. Could be a plant, but I’d bet they were real.’

‘Good work,’ the man says. ‘You know Bailey, don’t you?’ He looks at Esmond again.

‘Yes. Very well.’

‘Bloody good egg. We sprung him from a camp in Sicily in August. He’s in Spain now, on a job, but he’ll be back in the UK before long. Deserves a rest after what he’s been through. More or less ran our game in Italy until they picked him up.’

‘Your game?’

‘Can’t stay, I’m afraid. Eyeties I’m with are awfully skittish. Cheerio.’

He pulls his hat down and sets off back up the beach. The rain has eased and there is sunlight on the sea as the two boats pull out and head northwards. They sit for a while longer and then Ada stands and stretches.

‘Shall we go for a walk?’

They follow the Englishman’s footsteps down to the tide-line.
Ada shucks off her shoes and socks and walks barefoot, stepping over wormcasts and the bubbles of oily seaweed.

‘Aren’t you cold?’ Esmond asks.

‘I love it. I love winter. It’s worth a little pain to feel like this.’

Esmond takes his own shoes off and they walk together, looking up at the dark windows of holiday houses, hotels, restaurants. They herd wading birds ahead of them along the beach; Esmond spots oystercatchers, sanderlings, dunlin.

‘There’s nothing so depressing as a holiday resort in winter,’ he says.

‘But we have it to ourselves.’ She takes his hand and he feels the ridge of the ring on her wedding finger. He remembers slipping Bruno an envelope of cash to take to Bernard Berenson at I Tatti in exchange for the small and ancient gold band. Esmond had given it to Ada one evening, as they’d sat out on the terrace with one of the last bottles of wine from the Keppels’ cellar, and a rich dusk had fallen over the countryside. He’d told her he loved her, that as soon as the war was over, he’d marry her, that he’d never met anyone so admirable.

Now he takes her in his arms on the beach, aware there must be eyes watching them from the slumbering town, but not wanting to miss this, their toes icy in the surf, his cast heavy on her shoulder. Sun ranges across the sea, now blue and sparking green. He kisses her and she pulls him urgently towards her. A spray of sand and salt water covers them, and he is suddenly aware how far from safety they are, how alone. They break apart, pulling their socks and shoes back onto pale blue feet. Esmond hooks his cast back in the sling, and they make their way up to the train station.