The Garden of Letters (39 page)

Walking down the Calle del Magazen, Elodie crosses the Ponte dei Greci near the gothic Palazzo Zorzi, with its rose-colored facade and tall windows, before walking through the Campo San Provolo. Her stride is quick and efficient, a form of camouflage in itself. When she finds herself in the Piazza San Marco, always densely populated with German soldiers, she doesn’t linger for a moment. Instead, she slips into the shadow of the Procuratie, where she tries to be invisible and avoid any eyes, Venetian or German.

She continues walking past the Baroque church in Capo San Moisé, quickly memorizing the statue in Capo San Stefano as a landmark to guide her return. She crosses a wooden bridge, the Ponte dell’Accademia, and upon reaching the other side, turns right and passes another small square and bridge until she finally sees the long black and gold sign reading “La Toletta: Libri.”

Dozens of books are in the window. She sees Dante and Bocaccio. She sees Chaucer in translation, as well as the newly popular Pearl S. Buck. She pushes through the door of the shop and pulls down her scarf. Inside, the perfume of pulped wood and tanned leather overpowers her. It is the scent of Luca, his essence captured in the fragrance of paper and ink and in the stacked crates filled with books. She feels her heart breaking, for the scent carries her back to a place where Luca was very much alive.

“May I help you?” A voice emerges from behind a bookshelf.

Then a slender figure with a head full of thick black hair appears. She notices the apron, the rakish grin, and the eyes that are neither hazel nor brown but something in between. At first glance, he could easily have been Luca’s brother.

“Looking for a book, I gather, signorina?”

“Well . . . I . . .” she is stammering. She doesn’t know where to begin. Even deciding how to introduce herself presents a challenge: If this man knew Luca, does she go by Elodie or Anna? Will he even know that Luca is dead?

“A friend told me about this store . . .” Her voice is soft and she can hear her nervousness laced throughout the words. “He had a shop just like this . . . in Verona . . . we were good friends . . .” She feels her voice falling away. “I have just moved here and I . . .”

He has moved closer to her, so that their bodies are only a few feet apart now. He has taken his hands out of his apron, and his eyes scan her. She can see in his squint, in his now-intense gaze, that he is hardly listening to her words, but instead focusing on the other things she is communicating beyond her control: the inflection of her voice, the pauses of her breath, the slight tremor in her movements.

“And I remembered he had mentioned your store . . .”

“Is that so?” he says. He unties his apron and places it on a table of books. “What is the name of your friend, and the name of his store?”

She does not believe there is anything to be lost by being truthful now. Luca is already dead. The bookshop, ransacked by the Germans, is now no doubt shuttered and closed.

“Luca Bianchi, and his bookshop was called Il Gufo. It was on Via Mazzini.”

He takes a kerchief from the pocket of his trousers and wipes his brow. Still, she can feel him studying her. Her face. Her eyes. Even her hands.

“And you?” he asks. “Did you work in the store with him?”

“No,” she says slowly. “I studied music there.”

To this, he smiles, as if the pieces of a puzzle are suddenly making sense.

“Yes, Luca was a friend of mine. One of my best, in fact.” By speaking of his friendship in the past tense, she realizes he knows that Luca is dead.

“He was mine, too.” There is a quiver in her voice, like a finger that has momentarily slipped off its string.

“May I sit down?” she says, gripping the edge of one of the tables in the store. The image of Luca’s limp body suddenly flashes before her. She feels the floor coming out from beneath her.

“Please . . . Yes, of course,” he says, rushing to find her a chair.

When she catches her breath, she looks up and discovers he is offering her a glass of water. His kindness is so heartfelt, she feels it like an embrace.

Under damp timber, the walls lined with books, they share stories of Luca. Pelizzato tells her he had met Luca when he first started selling books from a cart in Milan.

“We traded stock. He always preferred the modern writers, while I was building up my collection of the classics.” He laughs. His teeth are a shade paler than coffee, and his eyes are filled with light. “We were also reading Marx, debating the pros and cons about Communism, smoking too many cigarettes, and trying to flirt with pretty girls like you . . .”

She finds solace in his memories. She can see Luca with his back against his cart of books, a cigarette between his lips. And everything about this store—the scent of paper, the half-uncrated boxes, the crowded shelves—it all reminds her so much of Luca.

After a few moments of silence between them, Pelizzato’s voice reemerges. “May I ask you something?”

“Of course,” she says, shifting slightly in her seat.

“You said you’re a musician?”

“Yes . . .”

“What instrument do you play?”

“The cello.” She is studying him now as intensely as he is studying her.

“Luca told me about a cellist with an extraordinary mind. I can put all the pieces together now. Your eyes, your hands, even the way you move.” He takes another breath and scans her again.

“It’s an honor to meet you, Dragonfly,” he says extending his hand.

Given all of Pelizzato’s similarities to Luca, it does not surprise Elodie that he, too, has been running supplies for the Resistance through his bookstore with the assistance of the Wolf.

“There are several booksellers involved in the Resistance, Dragonfly. But it was Luca who really emphasized to all of us how much could be hidden within a book.”

She nods. “Yes, I saw him demonstrate it with a Beretta.”

“Ahh, the gun tucked within its pages is not such a new idea . . .” He laughs. “That one is an eighteenth-century invention. But using the pages to conceal messages is rather genius. It almost always got past the controls . . .”

“I remember he used Tolstoy when he demonstrated the codes . . .”

“
War and Peace
?” He laughs.

“Yes,” she says. She was happy he knew Luca so well.

“There were certain things that the Wolf insisted he didn’t want written down at all. Even if hidden in books. That’s why Luca was so excited by your ability to transmit codes and information through your music.”

She looks down and bites her lip. “Until I blundered it all.”

He doesn’t acknowledge her remark, but rather focuses solely on the facts of the bungled mission. “Yes, we were hoping to coordinate our intelligence information with Zampieri’s contacts within the French Resistance . . .”

He clears his throat and fumbles into his shirt pocket to find a cigarette. Between their two faces, blue rings of smoke waft into the air. “The Wolf had his hand in many operations. He was intrigued by you because there was no way anyone would know there was a code locked inside your music.” He takes another puff.

“You were an asset. An original one. And he appreciated it.”

She feels shame creep over her, like a daughter who has disappointed her father and knows it. “I had every intention of transmitting the code that night. For some reason, I lost control of my mind as I was playing . . .”

“Mistakes happen. It’s unfortunate when they do, but the Wolf is a resourceful man. He takes risks and sometimes they pay off and sometimes they don’t. He’s the best type of man to have in the Resistance. He moves like smoke . . . and he’s not afraid to die.”

Elodie felt herself shiver.

“You mean because they took his wife?”

“Yes . . . Isn’t it a fact that when you lose the person you love most in the world, you no longer fear death?”

She looks at him, her confidence returning. The discovery of this store and its owner, a man to whom she can talk freely, is a relief. It is like a rope tethering her to her old life.

“Yes,” she says. “I know this feeling well.”

He withdraws the cigarette from his lips and twists it into the ashtray.

“I know you do, Dragonfly. That’s why I said it.” He smiles at her. “But maybe in your case, you can still try and stay alive a bit longer.”

Over the next few days, Elodie watched her mother and Valentina settle into each other like sisters who had not been particularly close as children, but had found each other late in life. Each of them happy to have each other and to share many of the same memories.

To Elodie’s surprise, Orsina came alive working with all the scraps of material cluttering the apartment. Although it was far from the abundance of exotic and luxurious materials that she remembered from her mother’s studio, Orsina enjoyed the challenge, much like Valentina, in creating something beautiful out of another person’s castaways.

Valentina had found an old handbag and was unstitching the leather and pulling at the pieces to see if she had enough material to make a pair of children’s shoes.

She stood up to search for a stiffer needle and stronger thread.

“The two of you are amazing,” Elodie said, looking at the workshop the women had made of the living room. “I could never imagine making a pair of shoes out of an old leather handbag.”

“When you get to be our age, you learn the art of reinvention,” Valentina said with a small laugh. “It helps to keep you young.”

“Actually, I think I need a little of that myself,” Elodie said, as she found herself needing to sit down in one of Valentina’s old velvet chairs. Her fatigue was so suddenly intense, she wondered if she might be ill.

She was desperate to sleep. A long, deep slumber that she hoped would cure her of her recent constant exhaustion, of her stomach feeling queasy all day. But her sleep was always restless and fitful. She missed her old bed, its smell of starched linen and the adjacent living room, where for years she and her father would get up in the middle of the night and play.

And her dreams were more like hauntings, fitful ones that depleted her energy instead of restoring it. She would see Luca behind her eyes, dressed not as a bookseller, but as a partisan. The bandanna wrapped around his neck, the gun in his arms. She would wake up with her hand balled into a fist, as though his amulet was still placed between her fingers.