The Girl from the Paradise Ballroom

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2014 by Alison Love

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

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Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Quartet Books, in 2014.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 9781101904510

eBook ISBN 9781101904527

Cover design by: Tal Goretsky

Cover photography: (London skyline) Popperfoto/GettyImages; (Hawker Hurricanes) Print Collector/Getty Images; (ballroom dancers) ullstein bild/Getty Images

Title page photography: © Collage Photography/Veer

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For Barry, with love

From the nineteenth century there was a well-established Italian community in Britain, working in many different professions: as glassblowers, knife grinders, artists' models, street musicians, ice-cream sellers, restaurateurs. When Mussolini came to power in 1922, the first of Europe's fascist dictators, he set out to gain the loyalty of these Italians abroad, who had been ignored by previous governments. His regime established new leisure and welfare programs, and local fascist headquarters became social and cultural centers for the Italian community. For many Italians, fascism restored a sense of pride in their own nationality: belonging to the Fascist Party was a simple gesture of patriotism.

With the rise of Hitler, tensions across Europe reached fever pitch, and British mistrust of foreign residents increased. The situation worsened in 1935 when Mussolini invaded Abyssinia—now Ethiopia—claiming it for his new Roman empire. As war approached, there were fears that Italy would forge a military alliance with Nazi Germany, and hostility toward Italians in Britain grew ever more intense.

They came for him at first light, as he had known they would. There were two of them. They walked briskly but not hurriedly along the pavement, glancing up from time to time to check the house numbers.

Antonio stood at the bedroom window. The June morning was mild, almost milky. It seemed to him that if he stayed perfectly silent, perfectly still, they would pass the house and leave him be. And yet he knew that they would not. At any moment—in thirty seconds, in twenty, in ten—they would knock at the door. The knock would be loud and hollow: a drumbeat, a summons. There would be no anger in it, no private hatred. The men were doing their job, that's all.

In the street below, an errand boy was on his way to work, late and scowling. He kicked a fallen bottle from last night's riots. Someone in the crowd had tried to throw a bicycle through the window of Fortuna's, the Italian pharmacy, but it had bounced off the wall, the mudguard twisted.

I am calm, thought Antonio, I am prepared. I will not weep or tremble when they come for me. Even as he thought it, though, he watched the errand boy hurrying toward the lime trees of Soho Square, free to begin his ordinary day, and despair seized his throat. My life, he thought, my sweet promising life. What will become of it? The memories hurtled in a landslide through his mind, unstoppable: the dazzle of spotlights, the sway of the tango, a woman's soft fingers upon his neck, his own voice soaring, soaring.

And then the policemen knocked at the door.