The Villa Triste (31 page)

Pallioti wondered why. He had the impression it was an act. But perhaps he was wrong. Perhaps she was like this because it was Sunday. Or because the rain had finally stopped and the sun had been shining. Not that you would have been able to tell. The single window in Marta’s sitting room looked out onto the alley. The opposite wall was so close you could probably reach between the iron bars of the grille and touch it. Even at high noon in the summer, light would barely penetrate. Originally these rooms had probably been used as storage, or possibly stables. And yet, although this was the least desirable apartment in the building by a long shot, tucked as it was behind the fireplace with a charming view of a wall, it would still be hard to come by at a reasonable price. In today’s market it was difficult to buy closet space in a palazzo like this.

‘This is delightful,’ he lied. ‘Have you been here for a long time?’

Marta paused, her teacup halfway to her lips. ‘Forty-five years,’ she said finally. ‘Next week.’

‘Ah.’

She regarded him over the rim of her cup, then answered the question he hadn’t asked.

‘It belonged to my husband’s aunt. She was the building’s caretaker.’ Pallioti nodded, feeling strangely chastened. He sipped his own tea. It tasted roughly the way he imagined rusty water might taste. He suspected it would make his teeth feel strange.

‘I was hoping,’ he said, ‘that you might be able to help me with something.’

The smile again.

Pallioti replaced his cup carefully on its saucer, reached into the pocket of his jacket and produced a recent photograph of Roberto Roblino that Enzo had had copied. He laid it on the table.

‘I was wondering if you’d ever seen this man?’

Marta replaced her cup on its saucer, and leaned forward. She stared for a moment, then shook her head.

‘Are you quite certain?’

No smile. The glance she threw him suggested instead that it had been a stupid question.

‘I am certain, Dottore.’ She picked up her cup again. ‘I have a very good memory for faces.’

Pallioti believed her. Suddenly, he wished he had a picture of Eleanor Sachs.

‘Who is he?’ she asked.

‘Was. He’s dead.’

Marta did not look as if she found this particularly surprising.

‘He was a friend of Signor Trantemento’s,’ Pallioti added. ‘His name was Roberto Roblino. Does that sound familiar to you?’ he asked. ‘Did Signor Trantemento ever, perhaps, mention him? An old friend, from near Brindisi?’

Marta shook her head.

‘Signor Trantemento didn’t mention much. His shopping. Occasionally, the rain.’

‘Old friends?’

‘No.’

‘Roberto Roblino? Please try to remember. Did you ever see it on a letter? A return address? A postcard. From the south?’

Marta put her cup down.

‘Signor Trantemento did not get postcards.’ She studied him for a moment. Then she asked, ‘Does this have to do with the girl? The American?’

‘Doctor Eleanor Sachs?’

Marta shrugged. ‘Dark hair. Coat like a spy. In the movies.
Casablanca
.’

‘Yes, that would be right. Did you speak with her?’

She nodded. ‘The once. I told her he was dead. Questions, questions.’ She looked at him for a moment. ‘I told her to ask you.’

‘To ask me?’

‘I gave her your card.’

‘My card?’ So, that was how Eleanor Sachs had got his direct number.

‘
Certo
,’ Marta said. ‘That’s what it’s for, isn’t it? She was lost,’ she added.

‘Lost?’ Pallioti put his own cup down.

‘Not like that, Dottore.’ Marta smiled. ‘I didn’t tell her anything and I never saw her again,’ she said a moment later. ‘As for him—’ She pushed the photograph of Roberto Roblino back towards him, sliding it with the tip of her thumbnail as if the glossy paper might be toxic. ‘I’ve never seen this man. He never came here. If he put an address on an envelope?’ Marta shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see it. Signor Trantemento didn’t have friends, and I’ve never heard this name before.’

Pallioti took the picture and slid it back into his pocket. For the second time in a week he was being dismissed by an old lady. Grateful to abandon the tea, he got to his feet. She edged past him to open her apartment door, pulling the locks back.

Marta Buonifaccio’s hand was not as elegant as Signora Grandolo’s, but her grip was, if anything, stronger. As he dropped it Pallioti realized with a jolt that the two women, on first glance polar opposites, were in fact rather similar. It was something about their eyes, the directness of their gaze. The way they held themselves.

‘The war,’ he said, stopping suddenly. ‘Were you here? In the city?’

Standing in her doorway, Marta looked down at her feet. Today she was wearing lace-up sneakers. They were pink and had small green dots on them. She considered them for a moment. Then she shrugged.

‘Where else was there to go?’

‘But you didn’t—’ The question suddenly seemed ridiculous. ‘You didn’t know Signor Trantemento, back then?’

There was a pause. Somewhere on a landing above a door closed. The smell of onions drifted down the stairs. Marta glanced up. Then she said, ‘No, Dottore. I did not know Signor Trantemento then. I never laid eyes on him until he moved into this building.’

‘But did he talk about it?’ Pallioti asked. ‘Did he ever say anything at all, to you? Or to anyone else you know of, about his experience in the war?’

Marta Buonifaccio looked at him for a long moment. She appeared to be studying his face. Finally she said, ‘No. No, Dot-tore. Even when he got his medal, Signor Trantemento never said a word.’

Chapter Nineteen

June 1944

The morning began with a silver sky. I left the house early, coasting on my bicycle down the hill, feeling my hair blow back and listening to the morning sounds of the city that seemed almost normal around me. The high cheeping of swallows, the clack of shutters being thrown back. The roll of wheels in the street. It is strange to say now, but I was happy. More than that, I felt almost a sort of elation, the kind of excitement that makes you feel as if fireworks are going off inside you – makes the world vivid and beautiful, every detail standing out clearer than you have ever seen it before.

Rome had been liberated. The Allies were coming. For the first time since September, I actually believed that the war was nearly over.

As I neared the old woman’s house, I slowed down. I turned and rode along the empty street, checking that the shutters were as I had left them the day before, that the overturned geranium pot was still on the doorstep, soil spilled as if by accident, so anyone coming to the front door, anyone standing on the step to open it, would have to leave footprints.

Nothing moved as I rode by, and nothing appeared to have changed. I went on nonetheless, careful not to pause – not to look as if I was looking – and left my bike two streets away as I had planned, then walked back, cut down the alley, and let myself in by the scullery door. For the next hour, I walked through the rooms. I had already cleared the dining-room table so we could lay maps out. I found a broom and swept the front step. I went up into the attic and checked the window again. When Papa arrived in mid morning, strolling, a newspaper tucked under his arm, I opened the front door to him with a little curtsey, as if the house were truly mine. The maps were rolled in his paper. We laid them out, smoothed them on the polished mahogany, so we would not get anything confused. When we were all assembled, there would be nine of us. Nine reports of roads, munition dumps, power lines, railway switching boxes. The city had been divided into sectors, as had the areas beyond, especially the roads running south and west that the Allies would use. We were each responsible for a different area, so it was important not to get muddled, not to get confused. The maps would be marked before the transmission so that when we finally made it, it could be kept as short as possible. Mama arrived next, carrying JULIET, bearing her along in a suitcase as if she were just another once-fashionable lady who had been bombed out and was dragging her belongings from place to place across the city.

The others came one by one over the next few hours, mostly through the scullery, which I had told Issa would be open. As each person arrived, Papa took their information, and marked it onto the maps. Issa appeared after lunch. I saw her out of the window, walking down the street in a skirt and blouse, her short chestnut hair glinting in the sun. She made a point of smiling, idling slowly, as if she were just another pretty girl on a summer day. Carlo was with her. She held his arm. They came to the front door, a young couple paying a call. As they reached the step, Carlo leaned down and said something to her and she laughed.

Enrico was last. Then we were ready. We all stood in the dining room, clustered around the table as if we were having an odd sort of party, checking that everything we had was marked – that nothing that might help ROMEO had been forgotten, that no mistakes had been made. JULIET had already been taken up into the attic. Finally, Rico and Papa went up to turn her on. It sometimes took a moment to tune her, for her to find a signal. I was listening to them, to the creak of the floorboards and the sound of their footsteps on the attic stairs, when I heard the growl of engines and the screech of brakes.

We were still in the dining room. I was looking at Issa. She knew at once what it was. I saw it in her face before I understood it myself.

There was the sound of running feet on the pavement outside, and shouting. A shot was fired. Issa ran to the table. She grabbed the maps, darted to the window, and threw them out, while the men scrambled for the attic, or for the back stairs to the scullery.

Then they burst in, screaming.

Mama was magnificent. She demanded to know what they were doing breaking into our house. But it didn’t work. They pushed her aside without even looking at her. By this time, Issa was shouting, and I was shouting too. I don’t remember what I said – something stupid, something about private houses and thugs. None of which made any difference. It took them only moments to find the attic stairs.

I had unlatched all the windows, made sure the shutters would open, and although the attic window was very small, I think a couple of the boys almost got out and onto the roofs. But ‘almost’ doesn’t count.

They marched them down and past us. Papa’s glasses were crooked, falling off. He looked at me, and at Mama, who was holding Issa by the shoulders. Enrico was behind him, and then some of the others. Carlo was last. Until that moment, there had been hope in Issa’s eyes. As they marched Carlo through the dining room, he shouted her name, and they hit him.

The others, the ones who had run for the scullery door, they trapped like rats in the alley. Then they took us, me and Mama and Issa. Finally it was our turn to live the story we had heard repeated so often in the last months.

There were two guards with us. As I climbed into the truck one of them took my hand to help me up. I looked at his fingers, and the scrape on his knuckles, and then up into his face with the mad idea that it would be Dieter. That somehow I would be able to talk to him, tell him this was all a mistake, offer him something that would make him let us go. But of course it wasn’t Dieter. The boy was tall and skinny and a stranger. And despite his gun, despite his uniform, when I looked into his eyes they were as terrified as mine.

We drove through the city. The men were not with us, it was just Issa, Mama, and me. We said nothing. Just clung to the rough wooden planks, pressed our faces to them and saw people who looked up, or looked away, or hung their heads and hurried on, their bodies bowed with fear. Once, Issa looked at me.

‘Where will they take us?’ I whispered. I knew the answer, but I wanted her to say something, anything, else. To the train depot. To the women’s prison at San Verdiana. But she didn’t. Instead, she mouthed the two words, ‘Villa Triste.’

That first night, Issa and Mama and Papa and I were kept together in a room upstairs. We could hear noises, footsteps, all night long. From time to time, someone looked in on us, but no one would tell us what was happening. They didn’t seem to care about us, and for a few hours I thought they might just forget us, might open the door and let us go. I knew Mama was thinking the same thing, and Papa, too. The only person who was not thinking it was Issa, and so I tried not to look at her, not to read what I saw in her face. It was not cold, but we huddled very close together, as if we could make ourselves disappear, or somehow become one and never be separated. Then, in the morning, they took Papa away.

He was taller than both of the guards who came for him. In his rumpled summer jacket, still wearing his tie, he stopped and looked back. I saw his long face, the lock of greying hair he was not free to push away. Behind the lenses of his glasses, the blue of his eyes. He smiled at us. Then the door closed, and he was gone.

Issa and Mama and I were put in a cell in the basement. As soon as we got there, Issa changed. She was sure the others were close to us. She took off a shoe, and kept tapping on the wall with the heel. And for the whole day, and most of that night, and some of the next day, taps came back. Then they stopped. And that – that terrible silence – was more frightening than anything.

I thought Issa was going crazy. When the tapping stopped, she became like an animal, pacing and prowling. She screamed and banged on the door, demanding to know what was happening. But despite the fact that they had brought us down and locked us up, no one seemed very interested. They came in once or twice, and asked us some questions – stupid things we pretended not to know – then left. But they wouldn’t tell us anything, and I don’t think they cared what we said. They had already decided that we were just stupid women who did not matter.

Then, on the third day, they took Issa away.

I clung to her. I screamed at them. I thought they were going to kill her.

‘I love you, Isabella!’ I shouted. And as they led her away, even after they had slammed the door, as she went down the hall, I could hear her shouting back.

After that, Mama and I sat without speaking. Mama put her arms around me. From time to time, she smoothed the hair away from my forehead. She looked into my eyes, and I felt it again, The thing that binds us, the new thing that, in this horror, we have found – a love that flows between us without words.

Issa came back perhaps two or three hours later. The door opened, and she just walked in – wasn’t shoved, didn’t stumble.

Mama jumped up, and so did I. We threw our arms around her. We pulled her close to us. We asked her if she was hurt, if she was all right – but the moment I felt her body next to mine, I knew she wasn’t. She held herself stiff, straight and hard, and she would not look me in the eye. I put my mouth close to her ear. I whispered to her that I was a nurse, that if they had done something – something like that, to her – I would understand. I could help her. Mama asked her, too. But Issa wouldn’t say anything. She just shook her head and despite our pleading, said nothing at all.

All that night, she sat beside Mama, holding her hand. From time to time, she smoothed Mama’s hair. She ran her fingers across the back of her wrist. Down her cheek. I watched, and the sight scared me. Because I had held Donata Leone’s hand in much the same way. I had smoothed her hair. And it had done no good at all.

The next day they took Mama away.

The silence after the door closed felt as if it would go on forever. Then, finally, Issa looked at me. She did not cry or even frown. Her face was blank. It was filled with an emptiness I had never seen before. She was alive. She was breathing, she was sitting beside me. But her eyes were dead.

‘What?’ The word came out of my mouth in a breath, in a thought.

Issa nodded.

‘I had to wait until Mama left.’ She was whispering. She looked at the door, then back at me. And then she told me.

They didn’t rape her. Or beat her. Or even question her. In fact, they didn’t talk to her. She said she was demanding, shouting, asking over and over again what was happening. What had happened? Where was Carlo? And Papa? And Rico? What had they done with them? But they didn’t answer. Or even acknowledge that they had heard her. Instead they marched her upstairs, and she thought she was going to be questioned, or see Papa, or Carlo. That they might show her their broken bodies or the broken bodies of the others to try to make her talk. But instead, they took her out and put her in a car, with an officer from the SD – the Sicherheitsdienst, the SS intelligence corps – not one of Carita’s thugs, sitting in the back beside her. The driver was SD, too. Although they said almost nothing, ignored all her questions, both of them were very polite. Very correct. They drove her up into the hills.

They didn’t seem to care that Issa saw where she was – there were no curtains on the windows of the car – and she was sure that meant they were going to kill her. When they stopped and told her to get out, the driver coming around and opening the door as if he were a chauffeur, she thought they would order her to run, then shoot her. She was ready, she said.

But they didn’t do that, either. Instead, they walked her into the woods, down a path.

It was beautiful. Speckled shade. Sun falling through the beech trees. Birds singing and that smell, warm earth and the furred scent of leaves, that means it’s summer. They went for perhaps a mile. Again, very polite, very considerate, not forcing her to hurry. Finally they came to a clearing. The view stretched back to the city. At first she didn’t know why they had stopped. Then she saw the trench.

The SD officer took her arm, almost gently, and led her to the edge.

Papa and Enrico appeared unmarked. She said they looked almost peaceful because they had been shot in the back of the head, given a neat single bullet. But not Carlo. He had a hole in his forehead. She kneeled down, she tried to reach out and touch it, to cover the hole in his face with her fingers. But the SD officer wouldn’t let her. He held her by the shoulders. Then he told her that the others had all done as they were told, but that Carlo had refused to turn around. He had refused to look away when they shot him.

The others were underneath. Issa saw legs, arms, shoes, hands, all in a jumble. They’d been made to dig the trench themselves. The spades were still there, stuck in the earth.

Issa stood up and turned to the officer. She asked him to kill her. She begged him. He smiled at her, almost as if he had expected it. Then he gave a little bow, like a perfect gentleman, and told her that the German Reich did not kill pregnant women. After that, he took her by the arm and marched her back to the car.

After she told me, Issa stopped talking again. She just sat with her back to the wall and said nothing at all. When they came to give us something to eat, I asked where they took Mama. They wouldn’t tell me, but it is San Verdiana, I hope. Mother Ermelinda, who runs the women’s prison, is very kind. She is sympathetic, and a good nurse. Mama left us believing Papa and Enrico were alive. That was what Issa wanted.

The next night Issa and I were put on a train. Now we are in some kind of warehouse in Verona with probably a hundred other women. Some are dying. Some may be dead. Some have been tortured and I have tried to help them, but I have nothing to help them with. We barely have food, and nothing of our own, just the same clothes we have been wearing – which is why I still have this book. They took my watch, but they never checked the hem of my jacket.

In the days that have passed, I have thought and thought of that house near the Via dei Renai. I was the one who chose it, so the mistake must have been mine. I was so careful, or I thought I was. I’ve gone over and over it in my head to see what I did or didn’t do. I know it’s there, the mistake I made, but I can’t find it. When I think back, I see everything. The shutters. The unlocked scullery door. The upturned pot, the spilled earth. I play them over and over again in my head, every step of the visits I made. I was so sure. I thought I was so careful. I was even proud of myself. But I was not careful enough, that’s the only answer. It is my carelessness that killed Papa and Rico and the others. My carelessness that has taken Mama, and cost Carlo his life, and broken Issa’s heart, and brought us here. To this godforsaken human warehouse.