The Villa Triste (37 page)

Signor Cavicalli glanced at the credentials he held out and nodded.

‘Ah, yes. I believe your assistant said you wished to speak to us about a client? A Signor Trantemento?’

‘Yes,’ Pallioti said. ‘Yes, that’s correct. We are making enquiries, as you have probably gathered, into his death.’

Severino Cavicalli gave a little bow that either did or did not indicate that Giovanni Trantemento’s passing was a cause for regret.

‘Then perhaps,’ he said, gesturing towards a door that he moved to open, ‘I think you will be more comfortable in our back room.’ The back room was large and windowless, its centre almost filled by a very large table. Unlike the front of the shop, it was very well lit.

‘We hold private sales and auctions,’ Signor Cavicalli explained as he ushered Pallioti in. ‘Now and again. Please. I won’t be a moment while I fetch my father. He always dealt with Signor Tran-temento, you see. Exclusively.’

He left the door open. Pallioti heard the creak of stairs as he climbed to the apartment above.

The old man who stepped into the room a few moments later was barely more than a wisp. Beyond frail, he appeared so light that he almost hovered above the floor. He wore a bow tie, a tweed jacket, dark trousers and green velvet bedroom slippers. His face was almost identical to his son’s except for the fact that the fuzz rising above his unlined forehead was snow white.

His hand, when Pallioti shook it, was feather-like. But his eyes were sharp and his voice louder than his appearance might have suggested.

‘A visit from the police. I’m honoured.’

‘I’m sorry to take up your time.’ Pallioti moved towards the chair he was offered. ‘But I was hoping you might tell me about Giovanni Trantemento?’

The old man nodded. His son had seated him at the head of the table, in what Pallioti suspected was his habitual place.

‘And what was it, exactly,’ he asked, ‘that you were hoping I might tell you?’

‘Well, I am trying to find out anything, anything at all, about his activities in the partisans. Were you a member of GAP or—’

Before the old man could answer, his son said, ‘My father was not in the partisans, Dottore. My family is Jewish. They didn’t return to Florence until the 1950s.’

‘We owed them our lives.’

Severino Cavicalli’s father allowed his eyes to rest on Pallioti’s face.

‘I would say,’ he added, ‘that we were among the blessed. But the truth is, God had little to do with it – it was the partisans who got us out. This shop,’ he said, ‘was my enthusiasm. My way of saying thank you. Keeping the flame alive, if you like. But no, I was not one of them. I know only what I read about Signor Trantemento in the newspapers, after he had received his medal.’

‘So, he never spoke of the war to you? Of what he’d done? He didn’t talk about that when he was a client?’

The old man made a gesture, his hand wobbling, as if in the wind.

‘Professionally,’ he said. ‘Of course Signor Trantemento spoke of the war. That’s why he came to me. But personally, no. He was a client, Dottore.’

Pallioti heard the rest of the sentence,
Not a friend
. He waited for a moment for the old man to voice it, but the words didn’t come. Finally he asked, ‘Why? Why did Giovanni Trantemento come to you, Signor Cavicalli?’

The green eyes glittered in the bright overhead light.

‘Because I am a specialist.’

‘And what he was looking for required specialization?’

Signor Cavicalli nodded. ‘That is correct.’

‘And what was that?’

The hands gestured again, then rested on the table, fingers splayed. For a moment Pallioti thought he was going to push himself out of the chair, state politely but firmly that there were questions he could not, or would not, answer. But it didn’t happen. Instead, the old man looked him squarely in the face.

‘Signor Trantemento,’ he said, ‘was interested in only two things. As I said, highly specialized.’

Pallioti felt the stillness in the room, deep and abiding, as if somehow it reached back through time.

‘And what would those be? Those two things?’

‘February 1944 and June 1944.’

‘When did this begin?’

The old man nodded.

‘1965. I believe he had only recently arrived, or perhaps I should say returned, to the city. Signor Trantemento sought me out. I had something of a reputation then, as a researcher. A collector. I bought up private collections, the contents of people’s attics. It was around that time that a great deal of unclaimed property that had sat about in municipal cellars gathering dust since 1945 was finally auctioned off. The odds and ends of the dead. Mail. Unclaimed personal property. From the hospitals. From bomb sites. Photographs. Things that had been turned in to the Red Cross. Eventually, they needed the space. They were tearing buildings down, building new libraries. New museums. They kept what they thought might be interesting, and virtually gave away the rest. Dealers, collectors, auctioneers, acquired quite a lot of it.’

Pallioti nodded. ‘And Signor Trantemento?’

‘He asked me to watch for anything that might be of interest to him. As I said, his field was narrow, but he was willing to pay for what he wanted.’

‘Did he come here?’

‘Sometimes. Sometimes I delivered it for him. He came to trust me. I don’t think he ever turned down anything I found for him.’

‘So he wasn’t discerning?’

‘Oh yes,’ Signor Cavicalli nodded. ‘Yes, don’t mistake me. He was discerning. That was all he was interested in. February 1944. June 1944. Florence only. And in particular, the shooting at the Pergola Theatre. And anything, anything at all, that pertained to Radio Juliet.’

There was a beat, as soft and steady as a pulse. Pallioti could feel Severino’s eyes on him, but he did not look away from the smooth pale skin of his father’s face.

‘Anything concerning the Pergola shooting and Radio Juliet?’

‘Correct. That, if I found it, he bought without question. Often unseen. He took my word for it and never questioned the price. But not secondary material, mind you.’ Signor Cavicalli shook his head. ‘He didn’t care for the speculation of others. He was only interested in original source material.’

‘And why do you think that was?’

The hands rose and fell again. ‘We all have our little enthusiasms.’

Signor Cavicalli watched Pallioti, the bright eyes moving over his features like the fingers of a blind man.

‘If I may, Ispettore,’ he said after a moment. ‘If you would not mind, if I was so bold as to offer my opinion? As a collector?’

‘
Certo
, Signore.’ Pallioti leaned back, watching him. ‘I would be honoured.’

‘Well,’ the old man nodded. ‘I have found,’ he said, ‘that, on the whole, people collect for two reasons. Because there is something they want to show off, something they want people to know. Or because there is something they don’t.’

‘And Signor Trantemento?’

The green eyes blinked. Pallioti could hear himself breathing. It was the only noise in the room.

‘How much did you sell him?’ he asked finally.

‘Over the years?’ The thin shoulders shrugged, jumping like bony wings under the checked tweed. ‘Not much. There wasn’t much. Eventually, it dried up more or less completely. As I said, he was only interested in primary accounts, original material. Perhaps two dozen of the partisan news-sheets? That was the main thing. I kept an eye on letters, of course.’

‘But you never found any?’

‘No.’

‘What about this?’ Pallioti took the small red book out of his pocket and placed it on the polished surface of the table. He had a feeling it had been there before. ‘Did you sell him this?’

The old man did not reach for it. He simply looked at the cover and nodded.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I was very excited when I found it. I telephoned him. He sent me a cheque without even seeing it. He paid handsomely.’

‘Why?’

For the first time, Signor Cavicalli smiled. ‘I imagine,’ he said, ‘that it contained something that interested him.’

‘And did you ever ask him what that might have been?’

‘No.’

‘And where did you get it?’ Pallioti retrieved the little book, oddly comforted to feel its worn cover in his hand again, as if he had exposed it to some danger by laying it out as he had.

‘Shall I look it up, Papa?’

Severino was getting to his feet. The old man waved him down.

‘The Red Cross,’ he said. ‘They were clearing belongings, things that had been handed in and were unclaimed. It was in a job lot. A box I bought. One of the last, in the early seventies.’

‘Here in the city?’

‘Yes.’

Pallioti nodded and got to his feet.

‘Thank you, Signor Cavicalli,’ he said. ‘For your time.’ He paused. ‘May I ask you something else, while I’m here?’

The strange pale face turned up towards his.

‘
Certo
, Dottore. We are at your disposal.’

‘Il Spettro.’

‘Yes.’ The old man nodded.

‘The stories are apparently extraordinary.’

Signor Cavicalli said nothing. Pallioti thought of Eleanor Sachs, saw her small heart-shaped face, its features young and old at once.

‘Do you believe he existed?’ he asked.

The old man smiled. ‘People believe many things,’ he said. ‘But surely I don’t have to tell you that.’

Signor Cavicalli held out his hand. Pallioti took it. The fingers quivered.

‘There is one thing’ – he looked up at Pallioti and smiled again – ‘that I do find extraordinary. In fact, Dottore,’ he said, ‘it never ceases to amaze me.’

Pallioti could feel Severino watching them. Under the lights, his father’s hair was hazy, as white and floating as a halo.

‘And what is that?’ Pallioti asked.

The old man shook his head again.

‘That even in this day and age,’ he said, ‘in any day and age, that people always insist on believing their heroes are men.’

Chapter Twenty-Five

February 1945

In late November, I had another letter.

Every summer, when we went to Viareggio as children, I would worry that I had forgotten how to swim. I would stand on the beach, watching Issa and Rico running and leaping into the waves, and be afraid that if I followed them, I would sink. That the cold slap of a wave would rise up, and that in the face of it, my body would desert me. My legs and arms would flail, my mouth would open, and I would be pulled under. Washed away. Rolled along the ocean floor like a shell.

That is how I felt when I held the flimsy sheet of paper in my hand and thought of Lodovico, alive and in Naples – as if my past was a great ocean I had turned my back on. I did not know, if I faced it again, whether I would remember how to swim or be pulled under by it.

By that time, I wanted to write back. And I thought it would be easy to lie to Lodovico. I felt I had lied so much, and committed so many sins – stolen and whored myself – that lying to him should be something I would not even think about. But instead, when I finally sat down and picked up a pen, I found that the truth between us seemed one last tiny thing I had hoarded to myself, and could not give away. So, I found I did not know what to say. Or how to say it. In the end, I told him we are safe. I described our apartment – the piazza at the top of the street. The rattle of the tram. The cat that sits in the open window of the apartment opposite. The bells from the church next door and the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

That was what I wrote. But there was a part of me that wanted to say instead, ‘Go and be happy and find someone else. Because I am not who you think I am. Go. Because you can no longer know me. I no longer know myself.’

I did not sign it – because if it falls into the wrong hands it must not give us away. I just made an X. Then, after I folded the paper and sealed the envelope, I lay on the bed, and thought of my ring, wrapped in oilskin and buried deep in the frozen ground.

I gave the letter to Issa, who promised that it would reach him. It took me three days to do that, because I barely saw her. Sometimes we could pass a week, coming and going and not seeing one another. Finding only clues – a washed plate, a cup left in the sink or the indent of a head on the pillow, as if each of us were living with a ghost.

For Issa that time was particularly difficult. A few weeks earlier, the British general, Alexander, had issued a directive to the partisans, instructing them on how to behave and when to act. They had no intention of obeying these particular orders, but it did nothing for their morale to realize that they were not trusted. I think though that the thing that hurt her most was not being able to guide through the mountains. There, she felt most alive. And there, too, she was closer to Carlo. If she was going to find his ghost, it would be in the high passes, on the worn steps and ancient stones of the Via degli Dei, the Way of the Gods. And, she railed at me, they needed her. In a reversal, downed airmen were now being taken south through the Gothic Line and delivered back to the Allies. Reports were filtering back of accidents, of guides who did not know what they were doing, while Issa, who knew those mountains so well she claimed she could walk them blindfold, was left out.

Pregnant as she was, however, she could not go climbing through ice and snow. And in any case, she was more valuable as a courier. The more her stomach swelled, the less likely she was to be stopped or questioned, so the information she carried became more important. That, at least, was some consolation to her. Bologna, Ferrara, Ravenna, Modena, Piacenza, even Genoa and Turin – she went back and forth to all of them. Everyone knew the final fight was coming in the spring; plans were being laid, and Issa carried them from one CLN command to the next. She and the baby. Each time I saw her, her belly had grown larger. Sometimes the kicking was so fierce it made her gasp, her blue eyes widening in surprise.

In the meantime, as the Allies bombed us from the air, another war was being fought on the streets. Mario Carita was in Padua, not Milan, but he had soulmates here, and I daresay in other cities, too. At the clinic, we saw the results of their handiwork. In daylight we treated good society ladies, the upright Fascisti matrons of Milan. But after dark it was different. They came three, sometimes four, a night. Shot, bleeding, limbs and jaws broken. Sometimes I was so tired I felt I could barely walk home. I didn’t even realize that it was Christmas Eve until someone in the street, with half a smile, wished me
Buon Natale
.

That night, on Christmas Eve when I got home, Issa wasn’t here. I saw no trace of her at all, and for a moment, as I came in and turned on the lamp, I felt a terrible pang of fear – convinced myself that what I had dreaded, what I had almost known would one day happen, had finally come to pass. That she had been caught, turned in, spotted by the Abwehr spies who we know exist – Italians who work for the Germans, who speak and look like us, and move among us, undetected and deadly as a virus. Or that she had been killed, trapped finally by an Allied bomb. Or hit by one of the machine guns that strafe everything that moves on the road, firing blindly from the air in the hope that what they kill may be an enemy.

I sat down at the kitchen table, fear and tiredness washing over me in that wave I had dreaded since I was a child. And knew, sitting there in my hat and coat, that if it was true – if she was gone – I wouldn’t have the energy to go on. I wouldn’t even try.

I don’t know how long it was before I got up and walked into the other room. I suppose I must have got cold, and decided that I would get into bed, that I would lie through the night and wait to see what came. I didn’t turn on the light. I just sat down and took off my shoes. So it was not until I turned to pull back the blanket that I saw the little package on the pillow. It was wrapped in tissue paper and tied with a piece of string, and more than anything, it made me happy because it meant at least that she had been there. Picking it up, I felt the touch of her hand.

Issa’s gift to me that Christmas was another little book. On the first page, she had written – ‘For 1945, a New Year and a New Life’.

It was some three weeks after that, that I came home and found her in the kitchen, pacing like a caged cat.

‘They’ve told me,’ she said, furious, ‘told me to stop work. They say it’s no longer safe!’

She glared at me as if this was my fault, that she been sent home to wait for the baby. The order made her livid. She had apparently argued and fought – not just, I think, because of her desire to ‘keep up the fight’, but because, like me, she was trying to outrun the past. Even more than bullets or bombs, I think both of us were afraid of being still – afraid of giving ourselves a chance to look back.

I remembered that day in September, looking in the mirror and seeing Lot’s wife. I had not been so wrong after all.

That night, we sat up and played cards. Issa won, accumulating a large pile of the bits of paper we used as tokens, which cheered her up a little. Then, three days later, in the early hours of the morning, and without much warning, my nephew was born. She screamed only once, for Carlo.

Issa’s baby was perfect. I had to go to work the next day, and left her staring down into his tiny face, watching his hands as they closed around her fingers. Four days later, on Sunday, we baptized him ourselves. We waited until sunset, then bathed and dressed him in one of my white blouses for a christening gown. I assumed that Issa would want to call him after Carlo, but she shook her head.

‘No?’ I asked. ‘Are you sure?’

She nodded.

‘I know who his father is.’ She looked from her son to me and smiled – not her old smile, but a different one, laced in sadness. ‘He’s going to grow up in a different world,’ she said. ‘That’s what I want for him. And Carlo would, too. He should go into his own life with his own name.’

The new book she had given me had an appendix of name days in the back. We found the right one, squinting at the tiny script, and named him for the day he was born.

It was after that, that she began to change. I didn’t notice it much, at first. I was too busy, often working through the night. And Issa, who was still at home with her son, still smiled. She even laughed. But there was a shadow on her. While she was working, while she was waiting for the baby to be born, she had been able to concentrate on those things. On getting to a ren-lucretia Dezvous, on remembering the right information, the right names and faces. On keeping herself alive long enough to give birth to Carlo’s child.

One afternoon, I came in and found her sitting, staring at something in her hand. When I looked, I saw it was a photograph: tiny, the edges dog-eared. Apparently I was not the only one who knew how to hide things in my clothes. She held it up without my asking. From her hair, I guessed that it had been taken the previous spring, somewhere in the mountains, probably at around the time she found she was pregnant. She was standing with Carlo in a meadow. Their arms were wound around one another, and they looked very happy. And very young. She ran her finger across it.

‘I didn’t understand,’ she said. ‘I never understood, when I was with him, how much I loved him.’

I was holding the shopping, what scraps I could gather with our ration books, but standing watching Issa I forgot them. All I could think of was what I had done to her. What I had done to Carlo, and Mama, and Papa, and Rico. To all of us. To everyone who came that day, and to the baby, who had woken up and was beginning to fuss, reaching out to his mother – the only parent he would ever know, thanks to my carelessness.

Issa slid the photograph into her pocket and got up to go to him, and I turned away, muttering about supper so she would not see my face.

That night, I dreamed again of the Via dei Renai. I saw the shutters opening and closing, as if of their own free will. The pot tipped itself over and spilled soil across the step. I saw Mama’s face in the window, looking down at me, her hand raised to the glass. She tried to speak. She mouthed words, but I couldn’t hear her. I was deafened by the sound of my own footsteps on the pavement.

I woke with a start and sat up, feeling sweat run down my chest and pool between my breasts, even though it was cold in the room. Then I noticed Issa was not in bed. When I looked up, I saw her, standing in the doorway, barefoot, holding the baby.

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

I thought the baby was sick, that he had a temperature, or there had been a warning for a bomb.

But she shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

Moonlight, cold and silver, stretched in from the window.

Issa came and sat down beside me. Her son stared up into her face and she stared back at him as I had often seen her do before, studying him intently, as if she was looking for Carlo – as if in their child’s eyes, in the tiny mouth, the round of his cheek, she could find the piece of him she had carried inside her.

I watched her, both of them. And when, finally, she stood up and placed him gently back in the bassinet, I thought that in that chilly light she looked like a phantom, looked as if she was wavering, slipping away in front of me.

‘He’s sleeping,’ she said finally. Then she sat on the edge of the bed again. ‘I have to talk to you.’

I pulled the blanket back, and she climbed in. I could feel the warmth of her, her heart beating next to mine as it had when we were children. But there was nothing childish about this. It was as if my dream had travelled through the dark to her.

‘Do you think of it?’ she asked. ‘That day? What happened?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, of course I do.’

‘So do I. I can’t stop.’

‘You must, Issa.’ I turned towards her. ‘You must try.’

‘Someone knew.’ She was staring at the ceiling. Moonlight picked out the lines of her cheek and nose, the curve of her mouth and chin. ‘I go over and over it in my head,’ she said. ‘Everyone who was there – who it could have been. I think about when we arrived. Where we came from. Where we had been the day before. What order we arrived in, and where we were when the noise started outside. And why. Why would any one of us have done that? And how?’ She turned towards me. ‘That’s what I don’t understand, how? How? We knew each other so well. We were bound.’

The GAP code, I thought, the unbreakable honour and trust among comrades that she put so much stock in.

I could have spoken up then. I could have told her that I had walked too fast, that I had been so confident I had not stopped to look for reflections or faces I saw too often. I could have told her about the scullery door, or that I must have made a mistake, with the keys. With the shutters. I could have told her how careless I had been.

But I didn’t. Because the truth was, I was afraid. Of Nemesis. Of what she would say, and what she would do. I was afraid that in my carelessness, I had broken the pact, and that Issa would take the baby and go away. Leave me all alone. Even worse, I was afraid of what she would no longer feel for me.

And so I lay there and let her go on.

‘We were so careful,’ she said. ‘We didn’t tell anyone. No one knew, except us, the people who were there. And it was only us. And we were – after what we’d been through, we would have died for each other. I keep thinking and thinking of them, in that trench. Each one—’

She ticked her fingers then, like she had when she was tiny and learning to count. Lying beside me, she held her hands up in the dark and repeated, as if it was a litany, ‘There was you, and me, and Rico, and Carlo, and Mama, and Papa, and—’

She stopped counting, but her hands still hung above the blanket, fingers outstretched into the moonlight. As if she was reaching for something.

‘All of them killed,’ she said. ‘The silence, Cati. I can’t get it out of my head. When the tapping stopped, on the wall. And I keep seeing them, Papa and Rico and Carlo and the legs and arms . . . They wanted me to know.’

She turned to me in the dark.

‘That’s why they took me up there, Cati, to that place. They wanted me to know. To see for myself, and understand – that one of us betrayed us.’