The Garden of Letters (14 page)

Verona, Italy

J
ULY
1943

It was Luca who assigned her next mission.

“I don’t think I’m qualified to deliver hand grenades,” she said, looking straight into his eyes.

“I would never ask you to do that, Elodie.”

“But you and Beppe asked Lena to do that.”

“That was different. And that was a test mission. We were trying to see how we might be able to get things past the controls. Maffini believes we have to start preparing for a German invasion. Lena was the right person for that job.”

“And me? I’m the wrong person?”

He looked at her and smiled. She thought she saw his fingers inch toward her and then pull back.

“We have other ideas on how to best use your particular skills.”

“How’s that?” she challenged him.

“As you suggested, we’ve been trying to see if we could find a way to use music to hide coded messages. We are now working with someone who is an expert musician. Someone important. We want you to give him a message through a musical code.”

“You want me to memorize it?”

“We’ll actually need you to first help write it into the score—in the cadenza, like you said. You can visit him under the guise that you’re going for a private music lesson, and then play the coded message for him. Then, when you’re finished, he will comment on the cadenza, which you will say you yourself composed, and then you will hand him the encoded score.”

Elodie felt her head rushing with blood.

“I can do this, Luca, and I want to do this. My only limitation is my curfew time. After what happened to my father, I can’t travel too far. My mother would call the police if I didn’t return home on time.”

“I am fully aware of your constraints, Elodie. But only you can do this.”

Luca’s belief in her ignited Elodie’s spirit and her body. Her skin felt so hot, Elodie considered asking him for a glass of water. But the thought of him leaving, even briefly, made her decide against it.

She couldn’t remember the last time she felt so alive outside of a cello performance. She realized that Luca was telling her that she had been selected because of her talents. She heard his voice in the air:

Your gifts have not gone unnoticed here. We want to utilize your memory and your musical skills. We can’t have our messages found or intercepted. The partisans in the mountains are relying on us to get their messages to their contacts in the city.

When she was with Luca, every one of her senses was heightened, as if she were interpreting a new sheet of music. She waited for pauses in their conversation, a moment of breath, when he might lift his head and their eyes might meet.

She wondered what it would be like to stare at his face at the different hours of the day. Would the colors of his eyes shift as the light changed, like in the ocean and sky?

“Elodie . . .” He said her name aloud. And when he said it, she felt her spine soften; her limbs felt almost weightless. His words were slow, as if he were trying to warn her that she would need to exercise caution. In his voice, she sensed concern.

“Yours will be a mission with a high level of danger. Part of me is hesitant to put you in harm’s way.”

“Like Lena?” she said, sounding serious.

“Lena’s mission was different. What she was carrying was itself the danger. She held nothing within her mind. They would have arrested her and had her shot on the spot if she was discovered.” Luca paused. “Your mission is different because
you
are different, Elodie.” He stopped speaking and looked at her. A momentary silence passed, but the air between them ricocheted with its own energy. One single breath held by two sets of lungs. Elodie interpreted it like a pause in the music, a suspension of words instead of notes.

She could sense that he, too, was trying to remain focused. “You will not be physically carrying anything that could incriminate you. But you will possess essential information that we typically wouldn’t entrust to a
staffetta
.”

Staffetta
, the Italian word for messenger. She knew it well by now.

“When you and I sit down to write this piece of original music . . . this cadenza, I will have to tell you things that the Fascist police would torture, even kill you for . . .”

Elodie maintained her composure, interpreting his eyes like a musical score. Yet Luca was caught between his awareness of their need to deliver this message and his concern for her safety.

“If this scares you, no one would blame you. No one expects beautiful, young women to die for their country . . .”

“What about plain women?” She laughed.

Luca smiled. “Elodie, you have a fantastic memory and musical talent. Two necessary things for this mission.”

“You’ve never even heard me play.”

“I will now,” he said. “You and I are going to spend as long as it takes to get this done right. And the reward for me will be your performance.”

Luca placed a “Closed” sign in the shop window so that the two of them could work undisturbed. He confided in her the details of the mission.

“We’re trying to coordinate parachute deliveries of ammunition into the mountains from England. Typically, we’d transmit this information in invisible ink, with lemon juice, that gets heated over a flame. But a few other people have been caught recently, so we need to use a new method.

“You’ll deliver a new cadenza each week, two nights before the scheduled drop so that the partisans will have time to prepare for it.”

Elodie nodded. “I can do that.”

“Yes. I’m fully confident that you can,” he told her. “Yesterday, another
staffetta
delivered a book to me, which contains the key you will need to create the coded cadenza.” He went back to the main room of the store and returned with the book.

“It’s here somewhere,” he said, leafing through the pages. He seemed to find what he was looking for midway through.

“Here it is,” he said, looking up to her. “It begins on page one hundred ten, and the instructions are written in over the length of every fifteenth page.” He took out a piece of paper and began transcribing instructions for her.

“I obviously don’t understand anything of what this means, but from one musical person to another, here is what it says: ‘When the key signature of the cadenza changes from D major to D minor, that will signal that the coded information is about to begin. The first whole note trill after the key change will indicate where the drop will occur. If it’s on an A, the drop will be in Zevio. If it’s on an F sharp, it will happen at the top of Monte Comune. On a D, it will happen at Vigasio. Next, the number of sixteenth notes in a chromatic scale will indicate the time of the drop. For example, eleven such notes means the drop will occur at eleven
P.M.
Lastly, the amount of a series of triplets will indicate the number of ammunition boxes being delivered. Four triplets in a row will indicate four boxes and so on.”

“Does this make any sense to you, Elodie?”

She was staring at him, wide-eyed. She could hardly speak. The key for the code was sheer brilliance.

“I understand completely,” she said. “Whoever thought of this is a genius.”

“Well, when you meet our contact, don’t swell his head.”

Elodie laughed.

“So we have a great deal of work to do, Elodie. I need you to pick a concerto that typically has room for a cadenza. This will maintain our cover. The selection is up to you, Elodie. You’re the expert.”

She was already ahead of him, trying to think of the next steps. She knew that even though this encoded cadenza would be nothing like composing a whole concerto or even a smaller étude, it would still require a tremendous amount of concentration.

“Give me a few minutes to think about this, Luca.” Elodie closed her eyes and began to contemplate what would be the best choice. There were several she could pick from, but Haydn’s Cello Concerto in D major seemed like the best choice. After all, several famous cadenzas had already been written for it over the years.

“I think we should go with Haydn,” she finally said, and as she articulated the words, she knew it was the right choice.

“Before we start working on the code, will you play part of it for me?” There was a sweetness to his voice that was new to her.

She looked up and wanted to kiss him. There seemed to be invisible threads that were pulling her toward him. She hated being a girl and having to remain demure and without desire.

“Of course,” she said. Although Elodie was feeling anything but shy, she still averted her gaze.

She stood up and went to unlock her cello from its case.

She saw his eyes focus on the instrument, which was shrouded in silk. She smiled, thinking back to the first time her father had revealed the instrument to her. She took her fingers and pulled off the material and reached to lift her cello.

“
Magnifico
,” he whispered. The sight of the burnt red, glimmering cello was breathtaking, even to someone who had no musical background.

“It’s a Venetian cello,” she said, and she again smiled thinking about her father. The men who had beaten him would suffer because she had now found a way to defeat them with the very instrument and bow her father had given her. She loved the poetic justice of that.

Luca remained silent, his gaze fully focused on Elodie and her instrument. She, in turn, directed her energy to tuning her cello and then adjusting its strings. She pulled out her bow and applied her rosin before sliding off the excess with a small cloth from her case.

Now on the edge of her seat, her legs open and her knees supporting the instrument, she looked at Luca one last time before closing her eyes.

In that small fraction of time, from the moment Elodie’s eyelids shuttered closed and the moment she lifted her bow, Luca felt something shift between them. He sensed himself being drawn to her, pulled in by the very sound she created by sliding her bow across the strings.

She played with such feeling and emotion that he felt himself grow dizzy and his mind slip away.

The music, as it came, filled the space between them.

She continued to play with her eyes closed. Deeper and deeper she fell into the music, her bow lifting and then sliding over the strings, as the thought of him flowed through her. The piece was not intended to be played as an
appassionata,
but the passion came to her and she embraced it.

Only toward the end, did she open her eyes to see him. His reaction was of a man transformed. His mouth was open. His hair seemed to stand on end. He appeared to be lifting his arm out to reach her, but the limb was suspended in midair.

She returned to finish the finale. Her own hair had become wild and undone. This was the closest two souls could come to making love without touching. Through her music, this most sacred and intimate act, she had transmitted to Luca her own invisible code.