The Villa Triste (23 page)

Enzo nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said, pulling a paper out of the file, ‘I know.’

‘You know?’ Pallioti looked at him, aggrieved. He had dutifully summoned the courage to confess, only to be short-changed. Enzo didn’t seem to care about the humble pie he’d been preparing to eat. The apology for his presumption. The assurance that he had not been ‘pulling rank’, and that of course he had intended to report at once if it contained anything even remotely germane to the investigation. ‘You know? How do you know?’ He wondered if Enzo was just being clever.

Enzo smiled.

‘I saw you take it.’

Pallioti sighed. That was the problem with working with ex-Angels. Very little got past them. They were professional watchers, all but state-sanctified peeping toms. Even with his ponytail, it was sometimes too easy to forget that Enzo had led some of the city’s most delicate, and most successful, undercover jobs. And all at Pallioti’s behest. Which more or less added insult to injury.

Enzo put the paper down.

‘It’s a diary, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ Pallioti said. ‘One of Trantemento’s souvenirs. From the war. Written by a woman he knew.’

‘A girlfriend?’

‘Possibly. I’m not sure. I haven’t got there yet.’

‘Is it important?’

Pallioti shrugged. ‘I doubt it.’

Chapter Eleven

8 January 1944

Christmas was so sad and strange, so empty, that I almost forgot about it. I spent most of the day at the hospital, where I am living almost all the time now, lying down to sleep when I can in my little coffin cupboard. With the door closed it does not matter if it is night or day, and sometimes I lose track. The worst thing is that when I dream, I no longer dream of Lodo. Just as I no longer hear his voice. Instead, as if I am damned to relive what I have done night after night, I dream of Dieter’s lips. Of the cold of snow. The pant of breath. And his hands on my body. But in these dreams I do not see his face. Instead I see the face of that young woman, sitting on the floor of the ambulance, holding her little girl, smiling with terror in her eyes.

I have not seen Il Corvo, or had to face the checkpoint again, since that last night. It was, thank God, the last run in the ambulance. At least until the snow melts again in the spring. And who knows where we will all be then. Or if we will even be alive.

Issa is here, in the city. She does not stay at the house, but I know she goes there, to see Mama and Papa. I know not because she has told me, or because they say anything, but because after she has come and gone, our ration cards are missing. And, as often as not, some of my clothes. Even one of my spare uniforms. For whatever she is doing, I am sure it comes in handy. Carlo and Rico are somewhere in the city, too. But I have not seen them at all. I understand the need for this, but I would like to hear Rico’s voice. I wouldn’t even mind him ordering me about, if it made me feel that everything was not so broken. But I know it is not a good idea. There can be no ‘casual visits’. Since 25 November, when the final ‘amnesty’ for Italian troops officially ran out, they are fugitives. From the Germans, from the Fascists, from everyone. They can be shot as deserters or partisans or ‘enemy combatants’. It’s quite a choice.

Issa says they move almost every night, and of course I have not asked her where. We live in closed little worlds now, each of us knowing only what we need to know. No one ever says it, but we all understand that this ignorance of each other is a perverse kind of gift – the only protection we have. That if we are arrested, we will be able to throw our hands in the air, and say, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.’ Deny each other three times before dawn.

It is in the interests of this that I do not even know Issa’s name – the name the others call her in what I have come to think of as ‘her other life’. They have come down from the mountains for the winter, all of them, to work with GAP. The Gruppi di Azione Patriottica. Issa says that the way she says Carlo’s name, as if it is another lover. GAP, she says, will ‘bring the fight to the enemy’. She has not told me, and again, I have not asked her, exactly what she means by this – but I have a fair idea. The head of the Fascist party in Ferrara was assassinated last month. His body was left on a road outside the city.

I am sure that was a triumph. But if we have learned anything in the last few months, it is that everything has its price. Sugar. Tea. Bread, or a human life. Ferrara, it turns out, is a very expensive place. The next day, the Fascistoni chose eleven people at random, arrested them, marched them to the castle walls, and shot them. Their bodies lay uncovered until the Archbishop could no longer bear to look out of his window and finally demanded they be buried.

I dream of that, too – of bodies. They lie in the snow. They look up into the sun with wide dead eyes and clowns’ smiles. Any one of us has already done enough to be among them.

But bullets are not all that kills. The influenza that has been expected has arrived, an unwelcome guest in time for Christmas. It does not seem to be as virulent as we had feared, but it finds plenty to attack, in the old, and the weak, and the hungry. And God knows, there are enough of those. At the hospital we have food, and at home Mama and Papa are saved by the black market. But others are not so fortunate. Ration cards do not go far, especially in this cold, and without fuel there are plenty who may die without any help from pneumonia or the flu. On Christmas Eve, they brought in a girl who reminded me so much of Issa that, for a terrible moment, I thought it was her. Then I looked into her face, and saw Issa but not Issa – Issa with the flame inside of her snuffed out.

The girl’s name is Donata Leone. She does not appear to be that ill, but already death has lodged itself in her features. She comes from Genoa. Her family was bombed, all of them killed – she was only saved because she was not at home at the time. She fled to Florence because she was able to get a job here and because she thought it would be safe. And now she will die too, and she knows it. I sat with her on Christmas morning. I held her hand while we listened to the bells.

It was not long after that, that the Head Sister came and sought me out, and told me to go home. When I said I was happy to volunteer to stay, she looked at me long and hard. I have no idea what colour her hair is, whether it is light or dark or, for that matter, snow white. But her eyes are almost black, and as bright and hard as wet stones.

‘Signorina Cammaccio,’ she said. ‘Go home to your parents. It is Christmas Day.’

And so I went.

Outside, I felt lost. I have grown used to the walls of the hospital. To my tiny cupboard and my cot. The city feels at once too much like a maze, and too large. I cannot see what is going to happen.

There has not been much snow just lately, but there is ice. I left my bicycle in the hospital shed and walked. It was near noon, and everyone was at home. I passed a few others, but the only people in the piazzas were German soldiers. Several of the cafes and restaurants were open, and they were coming and going in flocks. Pigeons and crows in their black and grey uniforms, the cackle of their laughter brittle against the cold.

And then I saw him, in a group of five or six others – Dieter.

He saw me at the same instant. He turned, as if a string between us had been jerked. His eyes widened. He was already smiling, laughing at some joke, but a different smile came over his face. His hand began to rise, his mouth opened, as if he were going to call out my name.

I ran.

I broke every one of Issa’s rules. I bolted as fast as I could into an alley, my feet slipping. I looked back, and saw him staring after me. Then I scrabbled on the ice, grabbed the cold stone of a wall to right myself, and kept running, towards the river, sure I could hear him calling me, shouting my name in German through the city streets.

Issa appeared that night, after dark and out of nowhere. She had presents – a pipe she had got from somewhere for Papa, a small beaded purse for Mama, and a hair clip for me. I did not ask her where they had come from. For her, I had a brooch – a tiny enamel bumblebee that Papa gave me years ago. She had stolen it once, from my jewellery box, when we were much younger. When I gave it to her, she held it in her palm, then looked at me and asked, ‘Are you sure?’

I nodded, and she closed her hand over it, smiling.

We played cards in the sitting room afterwards, pretending we were enjoying ourselves, until we turned the radio on, and heard that both Pisa and Pistoia had been bombed. Finally, I came upstairs, leaving them below and saying I was tired.

I was sitting at my dressing table, brushing my hair, when the door opened and Issa slipped in. I hadn’t heard her climbing the stairs or walking along the hall. She sat on the end of my bed. I watched her in the glass. She was wearing the bumblebee, pinned on her collar. We have never spoken about that night in Fiesole, she has never asked me why I was not in the ambulance when it pulled into the shed, and I do not know what Il Corvo told her, or what she thought.

As I sat there, watching her in my mirror, I opened my mouth. I could feel the words rising in my throat, feel them trying to push their way into the room. I was about to tell her – about Dieter, and what I had done, and how I thought I had seen him today and heard him calling me – when she got up from the bed and opened my wardrobe. She stood there for a moment, holding the door, looking at the space inside. Then she said, ‘Where is your dress?’

I shrugged. ‘I packed it away.’

She looked at me. Then she closed the wardrobe door.

Issa crossed the room.

‘Budge up.’

She shoved me a little, and perched on the end of my dressing-table bench. For a moment, we looked at our faces together in the glass. Then Issa reached over and took the brush out of my hand, and began to brush my hair.

‘It’s much prettier than mine,’ she said. ‘Like black silk.’

This was nonsense. No one’s hair is prettier than Issa’s. I started to say so, but I couldn’t. I watched in the mirror as tears began to slide down my face.

‘Did you get them out?’ I asked finally. ‘The family? With the little boys and the girl with the baby?’

Issa nodded. She kept brushing, one stroke after another.

‘All of them? Will they be all right?’

‘Yes,’ she said. Then she laid the hairbrush down and put her arms around my shoulders. ‘He’s alive,’ she whispered. I could feel her lips moving against my ear. ‘Cati, Lodovico’s alive. I know he is. I can feel it.’

I reached up and covered her hand with my own. I squeezed it as hard as I could. Then I closed my eyes. Tears seeped under the lids, running down my cheeks, mingling with Issa’s breath, that was as warm and steady as the slow beating of her heart.

New Year’s Eve came and went without celebration. I tried my best not to notice it, and failed. A year ago, Lodovico asked me to marry him. He took me to the Excelsior. We danced. When he gave me my ring, he bent down on one knee and asked me if I would ‘do him the honour’ of being his wife. The people sitting at the next table and the table beyond clapped when I said ‘yes’.

What would I say, if I saw him now?

I have no answer to that. So I spent the evening trying not to remember, and mending sheets – sitting in my little closet patching and darning, and listening to footsteps in the corridor outside – and trying not to ask myself exactly how all of this could have happened. How our world could have been so completely tipped upside down. I go over and over in my head how everything was lost last summer – how we had our opportunity and didn’t take it. How we did not leave and Italy did nothing to keep the Germans out. Just sat, like self-satisfied children, so pleased with ourselves that we had got rid of Fascism that we actually believed peace would follow.

I became so angry thinking about it that I repeatedly stabbed my thumb, and finally had to give up and go hunting for a thimble.

Donata Leone is a little better, and sews quite well. When I had finally found a thimble and started over, she sat with me beside the stove at the end of the ward, and we darned quietly, our needles flashing in and out like two old ladies sitting on our stoops. From time to time, she talked about her family in Genoa, all of whom are dead. Which makes my anger and self-pity seem small.

With that in mind, that we at least are still surviving – that we have a house and a family – I went home for the night of Epiphany. But, like everything else, that turned upside down too. Because Enrico was there, and instead of being overjoyed to see him, I had my first fight with him since we were children. I hadn’t seen him for months – and what did I end up doing? Shrieking at him like a fishwife. I would have hit him, if Papa hadn’t stopped me.

I do not really want to write it down, but I must. In the midst of my sewing fit, I opened a seam of my jacket and made a little secret pocket for this book – so no one will find it – and so I can keep it with me always, hidden and close to my skin, like a hair shirt. Writing in it has become a sort of penance. Words like the bite of a whip, falling until they bleed.

When we were children, the Night of The Three Kings was always the night when we gave presents, and received them – the night when we ran out into the garden and looked for the star, which never really was shining straight overhead. So I thought that was why Enrico had come, blessed us with a visitation, like one of the Magi. But it wasn’t. I saw that as soon as I actually looked at their faces, Mama’s, Papa’s, and Rico’s. All three of them were sitting at the kitchen table when I arrived. Issa wasn’t there.

I hadn’t even kissed him, said hello, or asked how he was. I still had my coat on. My hands stopped on the buttons.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

I could feel the floor shifting. I thought they were going to tell me that Issa was dead. Or that finally someone had had news and Lodovico was dead, or had been taken. But that wasn’t it at all.

Finally, Papa stood up and pulled out a chair.

‘Cati, sit down,’ he said. Then he turned around and smiled, and clapped his hands. ‘I have something still, I’m sure,’ he said, ‘in the cellar. Why don’t we all have a drink? To celebrate?’

I started to ask, ‘Celebrate what?’ Then, instead, I looked at Rico.

At first, he would not look back at me. He was studying his hands – which are dirty and chapped now. Finally, when he did, when his eyes came up and met mine, I knew.

I stood up, almost knocking the chair over.

‘Issa promised me.’ I could hear my own voice rising, loud and shrill. ‘She promised,’ I said pointlessly, as if that meant anything. ‘She swore! On the bridge, I made her swear that never again— Not here. Not in this house—’

I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t know if it was more POWs in the cellar or the attic – but I knew when Rico looked at me that that was why he had come. Nothing to do with the Magi. Nothing to do with gifts.

It was Mama who stood up and took my shoulders.

‘Cati,’ she said. ‘Cati, please.’

The look in her eyes forced me back to my chair. I sat there, numb, while glasses were fetched and Papa opened a bottle and we all raised it and said ‘Salute’. I even drank it, straight back in one gulp, although I don’t remember what it was. Then they told me.

It isn’t POWs or refugees. It’s a radio. Not just any radio. A special American radio. The Americans are dropping them by parachute to the partisans. The transmissions from England are not reliable and they do not come fast enough to be of much help to the Allied command in the south. The armies are stuck now, still in the Liri valley at Cassino, but the spring is coming and they will break out, and then they will need information. On the Germans – anything we can find – troop numbers, mainly. And the location of ammunition dumps. Numbers of soldiers and tanks, how many there are, of what division, and in what direction they are moving. Most important, they need to know where the city is armed and mined. It is crucial for ‘the liberation’.