Alibi: A Novel (16 page)

The next day Claudia’s landlady asked her to leave. An official from the housing authority had come to inspect. There had been reports of immoral behavior.

“That’s you,” Claudia said with a wry, fatalistic smile. “You’re the immoral behavior.”

“He can’t do this.”

She shrugged. “Venice is famous for denunciations. You can still see some of the boxes where they put the notes. For the doges.”

“Five hundred years ago.”

“Well, for me, this week.”

“She can’t just put you out.”

“She was frightened—an official coming here. So I have till the end of the week. At least it’s better than the Accademia, not the same day. He asked if she’d seen my residency permit. So they’re going to make trouble about that.”

“Don’t you have one?”

“Everything was taken at Fossoli.”

“So get another. You were born here. They’ll have records.”

“Yes. In the end, I’ll get it. But meanwhile—” She opened her hand to show the weeks drifting by.

“He’s not going to get away with this. Stay here. I’ll be back.”

She touched my arm. “I’ll go with you.”

“Not this time. My mother wants us to talk, so we’ll talk.”

I zigzagged my way past the Arsenale and through the back-streets of Castello toward the hospital. Over the bridge at San Lorenzo to the Questura side, where a few policemen were loitering in the sun with cigarettes, not yet ready for their desks inside. Did it only take one call here too? Maybe the policeman we’d met at Harry’s, ready to do a favor. San Zanipolo and its dull red brick, then the vaulted reception room of the hospital, following the guard’s directions down the stone corridor to the doctors’ offices. Not running, but walking so fast that people noticed, thought maybe I was
hurrying to a deathbed. I brushed past the nurse in the outer office and opened the door without knocking. Gianni was sitting behind the desk in a white coat, his pen stopping halfway across a form when he saw me.

“I want you to leave her alone,” I said.

The nurse rushed up behind, flustered. “
Dottore
—” she started, but Gianni waved her away, gesturing for me to sit.

“What have I done now?” he said.

“Scaring the landlady. Is that your idea of a joke? Charging Claudia with immoral behavior.”

“I don’t doubt it,” he said. “A woman like that doesn’t change. I made inquiries about her, after the party. When she made such a spectacle of herself. I thought maybe she was deranged.”

“She’s not deranged.”

“No, a whore. Do you know what she was at Fossoli?”

“Where you sent her.”

“Do you know what she was? Did she tell you?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, the camp mistress. This is the woman you bring to your mother’s house.”

“She was forced.”

“No one forces a woman to be a whore. A man like that, at the camp, do you think he would have kept her if she didn’t please him? No one had to force her.”

“You really are a sonofabitch, aren’t you?” I said quietly.

“Oh, now names. I try to help you, show you what she is, and you call me names.”

“Just call off the dogs, Gianni. The police or the housing authority or whoever the hell you called this time.”

“For your information, I didn’t call anyone. Another of her fantasies.”

“Who else would have done it, Gianni? Who else?”

“A landlord finds a new tenant, he gets rid of the old one. It happens all the time.”

“Leave her alone.”

“I see. She scratches my face in public. Waits outside the hospital, like a beggar. Makes scenes in restaurants. But I am bothering her.”

“Just call them off. She’s not leaving Venice.”

“She has no permit.”

I smiled grimly at the slip. “Something you just happened to know?”

He glanced away. “I told you, I made inquiries. It’s not for me to decide. It’s a legal matter.”

“Not if I marry her,” I said, not even thinking, just returning the ball.

He looked up at me, genuinely shocked. “You can’t marry her.”

“Why not? My mother’s marrying you.”

“A woman like that? It would be a disgrace. Think of your mother. It’s impossible.”

“What a piece of work you are,” I said slowly. “You send her father to die. She ends up in the camp, raped, and now she’s a disgrace, not fit to enter your house. You did it and she pays? Not anymore. I don’t know how you live with yourself.”

He stared down at the papers, not saying anything.

“Always her father with you. Over and over. You think you know,” he finally said.

“What don’t I know?”

He pursed his lips, then turned and stopped, turning back, a kind of physical indecision.

“You still see his room on your rounds?”

“Lower your voice,” he said, darting his eyes toward the anteroom.

“I don’t care who hears. You got away with it, you can live with it.”

He put his hands on the desk, as if he were stopping his body from moving, coming to an end.

“Yes, I live with it. You want to know? That day?”

“I thought it never happened.”

“Come.”

He took his coat from the rack and started out, not bothering to see whether I was following. There was some quick Italian to the nurse, who nodded uneasily at me, and we were in the hall.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“Out of here. I will tell you something that never happened.”

Outside, he turned right on the Fondamenta dei Mendicanti and began walking along the canal, then stopped, as if he had changed his mind.

“An ambulance. Wait.”

Orderlies were carrying a stretcher off the boat, stepping carefully from the deck to the receiving room door. Gianni went over and asked them something, presumably whether he was needed. I stood looking at the boat, waiting. Everything by water, even the sick. Claudia’s father must have come this way, on a boat from the Lido. She would have stood here, watching as they carried him in.

“Another one for San Michele,” Gianni said.

“Dead?”

“Almost. Some morphine, that’s all you can do now. Pray, if you believe that. Then San Michele.” He started walking again, shoving his hands into his coat pockets. “Do you know how many dead I’ve seen? When I was young, I thought I would be helping people, making them better. You know, the nice doctor with the cough medicine, the way a child sees it. That’s what I thought it would be, medicine, but no. Death. Seeing it happen, waiting for it. I’ve spent my whole life in this building,” he said, motioning with his head toward the long brick wall. “I know when someone is going to die. What are we supposed to do? We help even when we know it won’t help. We don’t kill them. We don’t make that decision. God does, if you believe that. Maybe it’s just the cells, giving up. But not you, not if you’re a doctor. I never wanted to kill people, I wanted to save them. And then sometimes you have to make a choice.”

“What choice?” I said quietly. We were walking slowly now, almost in time with the waves of the canal hitting the stone walls.

“I said I would tell you something that never happened. Now, this once. And then I didn’t tell you. It never happened, we never talked of it. If you say we did, I will deny it. And by the way, everyone will believe me. You can never prove what happened. But we must make a
truce, you and I. For everyone. Not a peace, you don’t want that, but a truce. Before you ruin your mother’s happiness. And your own life, with that—well, she is what she is. You think I made her that way? No. That I don’t have to live with.”

“Just her father.”

“Yes. I have to live with that. I’m not proud—this thing that never happened. Are you proud of everything you’ve done? Well, at your age it’s still possible. Not at mine. I’m a doctor, not
assassino
. He was dying. I knew he was dying. Nothing in the world was going to change that.”

“That doesn’t mean you had to help. You knew him.”

“Abramo? Yes. He was like her—difficult. Always looking for the slight. But no matter. He was dying. I had to make a choice, so I did. You can’t save the dead—only the living. So was I wrong? I knew what would happen to him. But I’m not ashamed, even now. It was the war. You had to choose the living.”

“Choose how? By reporting Jews?”

“They were not there for the Jews. For someone else. I don’t remember his name—maybe I never knew it. Anyway, it wouldn’t have been real. You know CLN?”

I nodded. “Partisans.”

“So someone fighting for Italy. That meant something, you know. I wanted to help. A man not sick, wounded. Bullet wounds. You couldn’t hide that. How could I lie about bullet wounds? They would have found him. They had a photograph—they knew who he was. And then what? ‘How long has he been here,
dottore
? You never reported this? A partisan?’ They were attacking Germans then. It wasn’t just sabotage, railroad tracks—they were actually killing them, so if you were caught, the Germans would make an example. There was no way to hide him in that hospital. I had to get him out, somewhere else. I had to make them go away, even for a little, get enough time to save him. So I gave them someone else.”

We were at the end of the fondamenta, facing into the wind coming off the lagoon. On the water, a covered funeral gondola bounced
on the waves, heading toward the cypresses. Another one for San Michele.

“That’s some choice,” I said, looking out at the water.

“Yes,” he said, “a terrible choice. But not difficult. He was dying. The other man was living. How else could I save him?”

“And yourself.”

He looked at me. “Yes, myself, it’s true. It would have been bad for me if they had known I helped. But you know, at the time I wasn’t thinking about that. Of course you won’t believe that either. You want to judge—one thing or the other. But it wasn’t like that. Good and bad together, how do you judge that? You do things—well, how can you know what it was like? Villa Raspelli, you think I wanted that? How do you think it felt, putting my hands on them? Giving them medicine? Men like that. So you don’t look at the uniform, you don’t see it. Then you can do it, if it’s just a man.”

“So was Grassini.”

“A dying man. So I played God, yes. A sin. That’s what you wanted to know. Now you tell me something—what would you have done?”

I stared at the lagoon, choppy in the wind, and it seemed for an instant, as I watched it move, that everything in Venice was like its water, shifting back and forth.

“Why didn’t you tell her this?” I said finally.

“What difference would it make to her? Her father’s dead. I had a part in that, yes. Do you think she wants to know why? What reason would satisfy her? I’m not making excuses—it happened. But you, it’s different. I want you to know. What happened, happened. Or rather, it didn’t happen. Not now.”

“Why?”

“You think this is a time for explanations? Now it’s revenge, settling scores. I have a position here. These accusations—anti-Semite, collaborator. Always something sticks, however it was. Do you think people want explanations? No, they’re like you, they want black and white.”

“But if you helped a partisan—”

“Not everyone would love me for that, even now. Collaborator. Communist. It’s dangerous to take sides here. This one, that one, and someone is against you no matter what you do. So I do nothing. Nothing happened. I go on with my life. I don’t want the war again.” He looked at me for a minute, then turned toward the fondamenta. “I must go back. Anyway, now it’s said. Maybe it makes a difference to you, maybe not, I don’t know. I thought, a soldier, you’d know how these things were. What happened then, it’s hard to judge now. Do I still live with it? Yes, but shall I tell you something? A little less each day. Maybe that’s how the war ends. A little less each day until it’s over.”

“Not for everybody.”

“No, not everybody,” he said. “It never ends for them.”

“You talk as if it’s her fault.”

“No, but not mine either. I didn’t make the war.”

He said nothing for a few minutes, looking toward the houses across the canal, the same patchy plaster and shutters we’d seen that day going to lunch, before anything had happened.

“You know what ended it for me?” he said suddenly. “When your mother came back. I heard her laugh, and it was a laugh from before the war. And I thought, yes, it’s possible to have that life again. And we do. I won’t let anyone take that away now. Not that girl. Does she think she can bring the father back? I did what I did. There was a reason—at least for me it was a reason. Now you know it. Maybe it’s still not enough for you. But maybe it’s enough for a truce. That’s why I told you. If it’s enough to make a truce.”

“What do you mean by truce?”

“An end. Talk like this, it can make trouble for me. I want her to stop.” He looked directly at me. “I want you to stop.”

“You mean you want me to leave.”

He held my eyes for a second, then nodded. “After the wedding.”

Rosa Soriano was blond and stocky, the weight, I assumed, a matter of inheritance, because she took nothing with her morning tea, not
even glancing at the rolls and jam the Bauer had laid out for breakfast. She had a heavy person’s surprising grace, her thick fingers barely touching the cup, lifting it in a delicate arc. Only her walk was clumsy, an awkward shuffle, still new to her, her body pitching forward but held back by the stiff leg she dragged along. “From the war,” she said when she saw me looking at it. “A German souvenir.” When she sat down she breathed out, a barely audible sigh of relief, and brought the leg under the table. The dining room was warm, despite the rain spattering on the terrace, but she had wrapped a shawl over a heavy jacket, a huddled, almost peasant look in a room walled with damask. Joe had said she’d wanted the trip, so I apologized for the rain, but she looked at me blankly, as if she hadn’t noticed it. She had come ready for business—a folder with papers and a notebook were at the side of the table.

“My mother was German,” she said, when I asked how she knew the language.

“So that explains the hair.”

She shrugged. “Italians are blond too. But not many speak German. So it was useful. My mother said it would be. Maybe not this way, working for the Americans.”