The Villa Triste (36 page)

Issa dropped my hand.

‘None of us are the people we used to be,’ she said. ‘Even Lodovico.’

She looked at me. Then she held out the envelope again. That time, I took it.

‘My Love.’ Those were his first words. ‘They tell me you are alive—’

Lodovico did not get to Florence until weeks after the liberation. He had been with the Allies, in field hospitals south of the line, since Salerno. All through May and June, he was just behind the advance. On the day we were arrested, he must have been somewhere just south of Grossetto. As soon as he got to Florence, he went straight to the house – which had miraculously survived – and then, when he found it empty, to the hospital. There he heard the news that we had been arrested. At first, he thought we had been shot with the others. Then he discovered that Issa and I had been transported. Apparently, in their haste to depart, the SS had neglected, or been unable, to take with them the records from the Villa Triste. So it was all there, in black and white. Every scream. Every drop of blood.

Not that that helped Lodo much. He knew that we had been put on a train to Verona, to a transit camp where we would be held until we were sent east. The Red Cross couldn’t help him any further. But the CLN, who had taken over the city, eventually agreed to put him in contact with someone in GAP. Finally, he was given the good news – that we were alive, and still in Italy. And the bad news, that we were behind the German lines. He was not told where, or what names we were using. But he was told that if he wrote a letter, they would do their best to get it through.

He gave me contact information. Letters sometimes get through via the Red Cross. GAP and the CLN here in Milan were also in contact with the south. With the other Italy. The country behind the mountains, where the war is over.

‘By the time you read this,’ he wrote, ‘I will most likely be back in Naples, at the Allied field hospital. I pray nightly that I will hear from you. I imagine you reading these words, and hold you in my arms.’

I sat down at the table. Issa had gone into the other room. I could hear her moving about, the soft shuffle as she took off her coat and shoes, the creak of springs as she lay down on the bed. I don’t know how long I sat there, holding that piece of paper and watching the sunlight play on the windowsill.

Over the next days and weeks, I read it again and again. And each time I did, I felt a strange feeling inside my chest, no longer the flowering of that blossom of fear I had become so used to, but something else. A different kind of flower, as fragile as glass. And so alien, that at first I did not realize it was happiness.

Chapter Twenty-Four

There was no question about it. Bruno Torricci was an unattractive specimen of humanity.

His flat pancake face was probably made paler by the video that had been taped in Cesare D’Aletto’s interview room. But frankly, Pallioti doubted even a fake tan or tropical sun could have made him palatable. His eyes were a watery blue, his skin close to albino. The quarter-inch cut of his hair did not help. Nor did his nose, which looked as if it had been broken more than once. Probably in one of the numerous fights, brawls, and public nuisances for which he had been arrested. Nor was he the brightest light in the firmament. His fingerprints had been found all over all four of what Enzo’s team had come to refer to as ‘the April 28 letters’. A fact that was no great surprise, given that Bruno prided himself on his membership of the Aryan Sons. Their motto was ‘the Halls of Valhalla Will Never Be Empty’.

Pallioti sighed, keeping one eye on the video and the other on the file Enzo had handed him. Cesare D’Aletto had located Bruno earlier that morning, within hours of the time a match for his fingerprints appeared on the database. Not that it was a great feat of detection. Signor Torricci had been sitting in a jail in Pescara where he had been in yet another punch-up at yet another motorway service station.

In the brief interview on the tape Cesare D’Aletto began with Torricci’s name, address – somewhere on the outskirts of Rome, age – twenty-seven, and occupation – builder. Then he’d moved on to the letters, which Bruno cheerfully admitted to having written.

The idea, he insisted, had been all his. It had come to him in a flash of brilliance after he saw a piece on the local news about a group of ‘traitors’ who were going to receive medals on the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation, which was not a liberation at all but the occasion when Italy had finally been sold down the tubes by the Jews, the gypsies, and black Americans. He and some friends had watched the national disgrace on television, and decided that ‘something had to be done about it’. The medal recipients’ names had not been hard to find. His girlfriend had been a big help getting their addresses. She was very good with computers. Very clever in general. She’d also made the stamps, and thought up the idea of using red ink because it looked like blood.

Cesare D’Aletto had already established that neither Bruno nor his genius girlfriend had an alibi for Wednesday, 1 November. It was not immediately obvious that they had been in Florence at eleven o’clock that morning, but Enzo’s people were working on it. The following weekend, however, they had been staying with her parents who lived, conveniently, just outside Bari. Bruno claimed they had been ‘sightseeing’ all day on his motorcycle, but so far couldn’t remember exactly where they had gone. Cesare D’Aletto was busily rounding up other members of the Aryan Sons and looking for the girlfriend to see if her memory was any more precise. He planned to continue interviewing Bruno Torricci the next day, by which time Enzo would have joined him in Brindisi. He was flying down late that evening.

The Mayor was delighted. The press office was already drafting statements. Even the investigating magistrate was happy. Pallioti closed the file, wondering why he alone seemed to feel no joy at the prospect of closing this case. Something was niggling at him, stuck like a stone in his shoe. He turned away from the screen where The tape was being watched yet again, and wandered into the side room where Giovanni Trantemento and Roberto Roblino’s papers and address books and bank statements and letters – everything that might be remotely relevant, including their shopping lists – were laid out on two long tables.

The stacks of cash had been removed to a secure evidence locker, but everything else was much as he had seen it last. At the very end of the table were the plastic bags that held the creased and fragile pages of the partisan news-sheets. Pallioti wandered towards them and then, as he picked one up, realized what it was that had been bothering him. He had been waiting, in Caterina’s account, for the moment of intimacy between her and Il Corvo, for something that would explain how and why Giovanni Trantemento had come to have her diary in his safe. But now she was in Milan and he was – who knew where? He had dropped out of her story with the last ambulance run. She had wanted to ask him something, about his family, or his sister.

Pallioti pulled the red book out of its habitual resting place in his pocket and thumbed back through the densely written pages. Yes, there is was, a little smudged, but in black and white –
because those were the last words Il Corvo and I ever spoke
. The entry was dated June 1944.

He returned the book to his pocket, and plucked one of the plastic-covered news-sheets off the table and looked at it again. The date on it was also smudged, but visible, even through the plastic bag. February 1944. When Pallioti had glanced at them previously, that had meant nothing to him. Now he thought of it as the month when Issa had been shot.

Well, he thought, it was hardly unusual, that the old man would want a souvenir. The shooting at the Pergola, Issa’s – or rather Lilia’s – escape, and his own subsequent escape thanks to the wreck on the way to the train station was the reason that Giovanni Trante-mento, otherwise known as Il Corvo, had received his medal. His sister had said so – ‘he ran out into the street and helped a woman who had been shot. He was arrested and beaten and escaped. But it saved her life.’ The same incident had caused him, in turn, to nominate Roberto Roblino, alias Beppe, for his medal. Even if he had never talked about it, it was still one of the major events in his life.

Pallioti picked up another of the bags. Like all the others, it had a number, or a series of numbers and letters, on it. He smoothed the plastic and read the badly printed headline. It was a different news-sheet, but was also dated February 1944. He put it down and selected a third. This one was dated June 1944. Again, that had previously meant nothing to him. Now it was the month when Radio JULIET was blown. When the Cammaccio family was arrested, and shot, and transported. He gave a little mental shrug. Il Corvo had known the women; presumably he had known many, if not all, of the people arrested at the Via dei Renai that day. Why wouldn’t he be interested in accounts of what had happened? He picked up a fourth news-sheet. It was different again, but covered the same month, June 1944. As did the fifth. The sixth and seventh were February 1944 again.

Pallioti stood back from the table. Now he saw something else he had not paid any real attention to before, either. Some of the bags were heat-sealed. Some were taped. Very few had been opened. Only one or two, and the bag that had contained the little red book.

Meaning that Giovanni Trantemento had not spent his evenings reading about his own exploits, or those of his fellow GAP members. He had not read the contents of these sheets at all. At best he had, like Pallioti himself, peered through the plastic. Then he had taken them and locked them up in his safe.

Pallioti spent the next five minutes sorting Giovanni Trante-mento’s collection of partisan newspapers into two piles. There were twenty-seven in total. When he had finished, one pile contained those dated February 1944. The other, June 1944. Twelve in one, fifteen in the other, none left over. He looked at the two piles for a moment. Then he got out his glasses. On closer examination he saw that not all of the flimsy little partisan news bulletins were from Florence. There were a couple from Bologna. One from Genoa. One from as far away as Turin. But all of them were dated one of the two months. Not one covered May, or January, or July. There were none at all from 1943 or 1945.

Pallioti picked up the empty bag that had contained Caterina’s diary. He looked again at the shredded tape, at the letters PJ and numbers 653 that had been written on the bag with what looked like a laundry pen. Suspicion nudged at him. He sorted quickly through the news-sheets until he found what he was looking for. He had been right. In addition to the handwritten numbers, one of the bags had a small, smudged, red sticky label in the upper corner. He peered at it.

Luckily, his eyesight was not as bad as he sometimes thought it was.

It took Pallioti the better part of an hour of sorting through Giovanni Trantemento’s bank records before he found what he was looking for. He doubted that the old man would have used a credit card for this kind of transaction. According to Enzo he had had one but almost never used it. Cash, on the other hand, of which he had plenty, might have been favoured. And perhaps it had been. Auction houses, especially those that handled the kind of material Giovanni was interested in, often insisted on it. But not always. Which was fortunate, because otherwise Pallioti would have been out of luck. His instincts told him that this collection had been built some time ago. So he’d started in 1960, before Giovanni Tran-temento had even moved to Florence, when he had still been a relatively young man, building his business in Naples. It was not until 1965 that he found the first cheque made out to Patria Memorabilia. After that there were several. They seemed to stop in 1975.

Pallioti took out his telephone and called Guillermo. Then he stood by the table, drumming his fingers and waiting for his secretary to find what he needed.

Patria Memorabilia had probably never been a particularly lucrative business. Pallioti imagined that the trade in bits and pieces relating to the war was probably a crowded field. The selling of news-sheets, train timetables, and old letters, was hardly likely to make anyone a fortune. With the advent of the Internet, he was surprised any actual shops survived at all. But this one did, just. The display in the small and very dusty front window suggested it was as much a bookshop as anything else. The man who had answered Guillermo’s telephone call had described his business as a ‘search agency and auction house’ specializing in ‘material related to the partisan struggle’.

The shopfront itself, such as it was, was buried deep in a warren behind Santa Croce. It wouldn’t have taken Giovanni Trantemento more than twenty minutes to walk there from his apartment. Pallioti himself had covered the distance from the police headquarters in just under half an hour. He was about to reach out and press the tarnished brass bell when the door opened for him as if by magic. A tortoiseshell cat slipped out, looked up at him with wide golden eyes, then slunk into the alley.

‘She’s a hussy,’ a voice said. ‘We feed her and feed her, but still she hunts.’

The comment was followed by laughter. The interior of the shop was so dark that Pallioti could not immediately see where it came from. Then a face presented itself, peering out from behind the door. The owner was probably older than he appeared. His skin had the pallid tightness of someone who looked as if he hadn’t been outside, much less in the sunlight, for at least twenty years.

‘Come in, come in,’ he said.

As his eyes adjusted, Pallioti saw that the front of the shop was more crowded that it had appeared from the outside, and possibly better organized. The back was covered in shelves that held catalogued piles of papers, all in the now-familiar plastic bags. One wall was filled by bookshelves. Posters lined another. Some of them were old-west style ‘wanted’ posters printed by the Germans and featuring blurred photographs that might or might not have been of partisan leaders. Others were announcements made by the CLN, or posted by the partisan governments of the few short-lived ‘liberated republics’ that had flourished briefly in the winters of 1943 and 1944, before sinking without trace into the chaos of the Allied advance and German retreat.

Alongside them were framed photographs, some of individuals, some of the Garibaldi Brigades – their members young and thin-faced and intent, ammunition belts slung over their shoulders. Some of the photos were of women. A group on bicycles carried a placard that read
Gruppi Difesa Della Donna
. Another trio in dark skirts walked in formation, carrying sniper rifles. A woman in a flat cap lay behind a ridge, one hand resting on a Bren gun, her eyes intent on the horizon. Some of the photographs were simply of bodies. Three men hung from a public gibbet, swaying in an unseen breeze as a girl with a bicycle stood looking on. A line of men, hands tied behind their backs, slumped, dead in front of the wooden fence they had been lined up and shot against. Another photograph showed a trench, arms and legs sprawling from it, more bodies filling it than Pallioti could possibly count.

‘Sant’ Anna Stazzema, August 1944, the 35th Panzer Grenadier Regiment. Five hundred and sixty civilians killed.’

The man, who introduced himself as Severino Cavicalli, was standing behind him.

‘Excuse the light,’ he said. ‘Or rather, the lack of it. We like to keep it low because so much of what we have is fragile. But if there is anything that interests you particularly?’ He cocked his head, his strange green eyes blinking.

‘No, no.’ Pallioti turned around. In truth there was much here that interested him, but it would have to wait for another time. ‘I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘that I’m here in an official capacity.’