The Villa Triste (39 page)
‘Tell me something,’ he said. ‘How much do you know about GAP?’
‘
Gruppi di Azione Patriottica
.’ She smiled. ‘What would be called now, I suppose, a terrorist organization. The Red Brigades modelled themselves on them, you know.’
Pallioti didn’t. But when he thought about it, it didn’t surprise him.
‘You must have picked up quite a lot about them, GAP I mean,’ he asked, ‘over the years?’
‘
Certo
,’ she said. ‘Of course. A lot of the people we deal with were members. Those who were working in the cities, in any case. The Garibaldi Brigades were in the countryside, up in the mountains, mainly. GAP dealt with sabotage, assassination. Weapon movements. Printing. And of course, getting people in and out. Jews. POWs. Allied escapees. But all the partisans did that.’
‘Can you tell me—’ Pallioti asked, ‘I mean, how much do you know about their code names?’
She looked at him for a moment, then shook her head.
‘Nothing extraordinary. They were given to them when they joined. You can understand.’
‘Given to them?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Signora Grandolo nodded. ‘At least, that’s what I’ve always heard. They didn’t choose them themselves, if that’s what you’re asking. Oh,’ she added, ‘I suppose the famous leaders might have, the legendary men like Il Lupo. But the rank and file, as far as I know, those were assigned. Just pulled out of thin air or made up.’ She smiled. ‘A lot of the survivors I’ve talked to, they weren’t very happy with what they got. Hedgehog. Goat.’
‘Why did they do that? Assign the names?’
‘I assume,’ Signora Grandolo said, ‘for security. Wouldn’t you think so?’
‘The fear being that if you made up your own name you might, however unwittingly, give yourself away?’ he said. ‘Yes, probably.’ After all, most people used part of their address as their PIN code.
‘Yes,’ she smiled. ‘Most people aren’t really very imaginative. Besides,’ she added, laughing, ‘they had to be assigned. Otherwise you’d have had sixteen Wolves, twenty Stallions, and thirty-five Thunderbolts in a sector. Which would have got rather confusing.’
Pallioti laughed. She was right.
‘There’s one more thing,’ he said finally. ‘The other date. Would you mind looking for me? Since we’re here. It’s two, actually. Or rather, anything between 12 June 1944 and, say, June 20th.’
Signora Grandolo, who had raised her hands over the keyboard ready to type again, dropped them.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Radio Juliet?’
He nodded.
‘I’m afraid not.’
Pallioti looked at her. An outright refusal was the last thing he had expected. Before he could ask why, she shook her head.
‘I’m afraid,’ she said, ‘I did warn you. The records are not complete for Villa Triste. They don’t go beyond April. April 23rd, to be exact.’
She leaned back, flexing her hands again.
‘It’s very frustrating. I’ve run into this again and again,’ she explained. ‘What they decided to destroy and what they didn’t.’ Signora Grandolo took her glasses off and looked at him. ‘Chance plays more of a role in our affairs than we care to think. I suppose the most recent papers were probably the closest to hand during the final days, when they were leaving, so they went on the fire first. We should just be thankful that they didn’t have time to make a barbecue of all of it.’
As she spoke, tiredness skittered across her face. Hiding his disappointment, Pallioti stood up. What didn’t exist didn’t exist. He had kept her long enough.
‘I’ve taken up enough of your time,’ he said. ‘Again. Thank you.’
‘Not at all. I’m just sorry I couldn’t be of more help.’
‘Not at all, Signora. You have helped immensely.’
‘Well, I’m glad of that.’
She stood up, rubbing her stiff arm again, and moved around her desk to retrieve his coat from the closet. ‘Is it very important?’ she asked. ‘Whatever it is you’re hunting?’
For a moment he was tempted to tell her – to fish the little red book out of his pocket, tell her about Signor Cavicalli and Eleanor Sachs and the papers in the safe, and ask – for what? The balm of her agreement? Her understanding? For her at least not to think he was crazy?
‘To be honest?’ Pallioti said. ‘I don’t know. Probably not. At least not to anyone but me.’
‘Well,’ she smiled. ‘That is no small consideration.’ Opening the closet door, she looked over her shoulder. ‘Will you do me a favour?’ she asked as she retrieved his coat.
‘
Certo
. If it is in my power, of course.’
‘When you decide,’ she said, ‘if it is or if it isn’t terribly important, to you or anyone else – or when it’s over, whichever comes first. Will you tell me about it?’
He took the heavy coat out of her hands.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Of course, Signora Grandolo. I will be delighted.’
‘It’s a date, then.’
She smiled and held out her hand, and for a moment Pallioti thought he had never seen a face more beautiful.
As he came out of the elevator, Pallioti looked around the empty lobby of the building. The thick glass muffled the storm outside. He took his phone out of his pocket, flipped it open, punched a number, and watched as the rain flung itself against the front of the building, hammering frantically before it scuttled off in the next gust of wind. The ringing echoed in his head.
Six, seven, eight. He was about to hang up when Giovanni Tran-temento’s sister finally picked up the telephone.
‘
Pronto
.’
After he had introduced himself, she paused.
‘Have you—’ she asked. ‘I mean, how nice to hear from you. Is there—’
The words wavered, sounding as if they were coming from farther away than Rome. In an instant, he saw the large gloomy room, overstuffed with furniture, with brocade and needlepoint, the piano groaning under the weight of photographs of the dead.
‘No, no,’ he said quickly. ‘I am sorry, Signora, but I cannot tell you anything definite yet.’
‘Oh.’
He didn’t know whether it was relief or disappointment he heard in her voice. Probably both. The naming of killers to the families of murder victims was always a strange business. Unlike Signora Grandolo, he was not so certain that knowing set anyone free. It was rather more, he thought, a case of exchanging one prison for another. Bartering the blank screen of ignorance for the dreadful pictures of reality.
‘We are making progress.’ Pallioti forged on. ‘And I am sorry to bother you in the evening. But I was hoping that you might be able to help me with something. About your brother.’
‘Yes,’ she said quickly. ‘Oh, yes. Of course.’
‘You told me,’ Pallioti said, ‘I believe, when we met, that when you were a child, after your father died, you weren’t allowed to use his name?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, that’s right. My mother, she was so angry.’
He could almost see Maria Valacci twisting the sapphire ring, rolling it back and forth on her claw of a hand as if it somehow conjured the past.
‘It was fear, really,’ she said. ‘She was afraid, and she had to hate someone for that, so she hated my father. For being dead. For leaving us all alone. Abandoning us, she called it. She was so angry, she stopped using his name. Went to the town hall and changed my name. It was one of the things that made her so angry with Gio, that he wouldn’t.’
‘Wouldn’t change his name?’
‘No. Well,’ she added, ‘not until we went to Switzerland. Then he did. Not that it made her happy,’ Maria Valacci added. ‘She was still horrible to him.’
Given what Antonio Valacci had told him about his grandmother, Pallioti suspected nothing would have made the woman happy. Hate was the Fascist tipple of choice. Clearly, she’d drunk deep.
He did not voice the thought. Instead, he asked, ‘And Trante-mento? Am I correct in thinking, then, that that was your mother’s name?’
‘Yes. Yes,’ Maria Valacci replied. ‘Francesca Trantemento. That’s right.’
‘And Signora—’ Pallioti took a breath, feeling as if he were a gambler throwing a dice. ‘Your father’s name?’ he asked. ‘Could you tell me what that was?’
‘
Certo
,’ she replied. ‘Of course. It was Angelo. God rest his soul. My father’s name was Angelo Mario Rossi.’
She could not see him, but Pallioti nodded.
‘So,’ he asked quietly, ‘if I understand correctly, before you went to Switzerland, your brother Giovanni was known as—’
‘Rossi,’ she said. ‘Giovanni Battiste Rossi, the name he was born with. He changed it, finally, to make my mother happy, when we went to Switzerland. So we could be a proper family. All of us the same.’
Pallioti said nothing.
On the other end of the phone, he heard the slight rasping intake of breath. ‘Actually,’ she said abruptly, ‘it must have been just before.’
‘Just before?’
‘Yes. Now that I think about it. Yes.’
‘Just before what, Signora?’
‘Well, just before we went to Switzerland, that he changed his name. Because, you see—’
He could hear her thinking it out, piecing the past together as she spoke the words.
‘When he came home,’ she said, ‘that day, out of the blue. We had no idea that he was coming. But he had all the papers. The travel passes and train tickets, all ready. And all the names were the same. Trantemento. So he must have done it before, mustn’t he? I never really thought about it,’ she added. ‘I was so excited. But looking back on it, he must have planned it. Quite a long way in advance, I mean. Because, apart from anything else – travel permits. Train tickets. They had to be for a specific day, even a specific train. And they weren’t easy to get. All the trains were being used for – well. Other things. It was such a panic.’
‘A panic?’ Pallioti murmured.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. Anyone who could was desperate to get out, of course. Because of the advance. But it just wasn’t possible. There weren’t any trains. So you can imagine, when Gio just turned up, out of the blue, with everything – all with our names and photos, all correct – and told us we were going to Switzerland. That night. Well, you can imagine.’
‘Yes. And this was,’ Pallioti asked, ‘exactly when, Signora? In March? April?’
‘Oh, no,’ she said quickly. ‘It was the day after my birthday. As if he’d planned it.’ Maria Valacci laughed. ‘I think I thought he had. Or I allowed myself to. As if the whole thing was a present for me. So of course I remember. Gio came in the morning. It was a Friday. He told us we were taking the train that night. Mama was angry, of course. That we didn’t have much time to pack, but I was—’
‘And the date was?’ Pallioti cut her off.
‘Oh, I’m sorry, Ispettore. June. Friday, the 16th of June, 1944.’
Pallioti looked across the empty lobby to the glass doors. The blowing rain had turned to sleet. In the mountains, it would probably be coming down as snow, would be feathering the brown upland fields, coating the ancient stones and paths of the Via degli Dei.
‘Are you certain, Signora Valacci?’
His voice was low, as soft as the flakes that would be fluttering into the chinks of the refuge cabins, and blurring the windows of the huts where the partisans had sheltered all through the autumn and Christmas of 1943 and into the bitter first months of the new year.
‘You were only a girl,’ he added. ‘It was a long time ago. A confusing time. You could have—’
‘No, Ispettore,’ Maria Valacci said, ‘I couldn’t.’ Her voice hardened. ‘I wasn’t that much of a girl, I assure you.’
The steel in her words, Pallioti suspected, had less to do with the perceived insult that she might have mistaken the date of one of the most important events of her life, than with the fact that it was precisely that. A memory of such significance that every detail was etched on her heart. Recited through the watch hours like a prayer. Engraved, as hard and pure as words on stone.
‘I am absolutely certain,’ she said. ‘Giovanni came to Pisa and took us to Switzerland on Friday the 16th of June, 1944.’
It was Friday morning. On the radio, the weather forecaster was making dire predictions. There would be snow. Sleet. Hail. The end of the world! Pallioti stood without moving. He was staring out of his office window onto the piazza, but he wasn’t seeing it. Instead, he was seeing the neat lettering on the ledger pages of the Villa Triste, and, for some reason, the Cavicallis’ cat.
She had been blotched and multicoloured as a jigsaw, her wide golden eyes as round as marbles. Slipping back into the shop, she had moved so fast that she had not been much more than a shadow. If he hadn’t felt the brush against his leg, he might not have noticed she was there at all.
He was missing something, and he couldn’t understand what it was.
He drummed his fingers on the sill, reluctant to admit that it probably didn’t matter. When he had called Enzo on Wednesday night, catching him moments after the plane had landed in the warmer and drier South to give him the names he had dug up, Enzo had been grateful for his efforts, but not particularly interested. Enzo Saenz had made it clear, politely but firmly, that he didn’t actually care what Giovanni Trantemento or Roberto Roblino had called themselves over sixty years ago. What he was interested in was the present.
Cesare D’Aletto had obtained permission to hold the charming Bruno Torricci and his equally charming girlfriend for another forty-eight hours. They had a witness who could place both of them in a bar within ten miles of Roberto Roblino’s house on the Saturday afternoon when he was killed. In addition they had found a receipt from a jeweller in Bari dated November 3rd, for a silver charm bracelet priced at three hundred and twenty euros, and paid for in cash, from Bruno Torricci’s wallet. Even more important, however, they had a lead on the weapon.
A week earlier, when Cesare D’Aletto had received the forensics reports on Roblino’s house, he had noticed something strange. A fragment of a composite plastic that ‘resembled Bakelite’ had been one of the very few things found in the garden. It had struck him as unusual because Bakelite, while common in the thirties and forties, wasn’t used much after 1950. A check had confirmed that nothing in the Masseria Santa Anna was made of Bakelite. Roberto Roblino was not, for instance, an antique wireless enthusiast. Still, something about the fragment had rung a bell with D’Aletto and he had called a colleague in Turin who had reminded him of a case where a vintage pistol had been used. It had had a Bakelite grip. They crumbled with age. That had been enough to prompt D’Aletto to send his bullet to an analyst in Naples who specialized in antique weapons. He had explained that the markings on the casing suggested that it could have been fired by a small sidearm called a Sauer 38H. The gun in question was, apparently, a particularly prized specimen among Nazi enthusiasts. It had been the weapon of choice during the war for the SS, the SD, and the
Fallschirmjäger
, and a certain number of them had been manufactured to fire .22-calibre ammunition.
Cesare had not even got round to telling Enzo about all this when Bruno Torricci had responded to the standard question of whether he had ever owned a firearm by launching into a soliloquy on the beauty of authentic Nazi weapons. The wording he had used had suggested strongly that he had one weapon in mind.
By now, both Cesare and Enzo were convinced that he was teasing them – that Bruno Torricci knew perfectly well that a Sauer 38H had been used to kill Roberto Roblino. They were responding by widening the search for witnesses, seeing not only if they could place him in Florence, but also obtaining warrants to search his flat in Rome and his girlfriend’s parents’ house outside Bari. Enzo was staying on in Brindisi. He hoped to be back, possibly as early as today or tomorrow, with a confession.
The door opened.
‘I’m sorry.’ Guillermo’s head appeared, his bald pate shining in the overhead lights. ‘I did buzz you,’ he said, ‘but you didn’t hear. Doctor Eleanor Sachs is on the phone.’
Pallioti nodded. As he went to his desk, Guillermo handed him a message slip.
‘This came for you.’
Pallioti glanced at it. It was from the London Embassy, a mobile contact number for Lord David Eppsy, the aristocratic and vacationing collector of ‘erotica’ whom Pallioti had, to be honest, forgotten all about. He shoved it into his pocket.
‘I’m sorry,’ Eleanor Sachs said. ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’
On the phone, her voice sounded exactly the same as it did in person. In Pallioti’s experience this was rarer than one thought. For some reason, it made him smile.
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘Actually, I was going to call you.’
‘You were?’
He heard the hesitation, and the excitement underneath it, and felt a pang of guilt.
‘I haven’t found Il Spettro,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. But I do have three names. I was wondering if you might have come across any of them. In your research.’
‘Oh. Sure,’ she said. ‘Of course. Like I said, my memory’s not perfect. But – shoot.’
‘Giancarlo Menucci. Piero Balestro. Giovanni Rossi.’
He could hear her writing them down, the faint scratch of a pen on paper.
‘No,’ she said after a moment. ‘Not right off the bat, anyway. Who are, were, they?’
‘Well, Giovanni Rossi was Giovanni Trantemento.’
‘What?’
‘Rossi was his father’s name. He stopped using it sometime in the spring of 1944 and started using Trantemento. One of the other two was, I believe, Roberto Roblino.’
Eleanor Sachs made a humming noise. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘That would explain the birth certificate. Or lack of it.’
‘Yes.’ Pallioti went on, ‘I’m not sure who the third man is. But I do know that they were in the same GAP unit. I believe his code name was Massimo.’
‘Massimo.’ Pallioti could hear the pen again as she wrote the name down. ‘So. Let me get this straight. Massimo joins Beppe, Roblino. And Trantemento, Il Corvo, who was formerly Giovanni Rossi?’
‘That’s right.’ Pallioti nodded. ‘So I believe Massimo and Beppe-Roblino are Giancarlo Menucci and Piero Balestro, or vice versa. I don’t know which is which, but I do know they were using those names in the spring of 1944.’
‘Interesting. There are lots of reasons people change their names. I wonder what theirs were?’
‘No idea,’ Pallioti said. ‘But all three of them were arrested and taken to the Villa Triste. On Valentine’s Day, 1944. They escaped together, three days later, from a truck on its way to the train station. It skidded and crashed into a wall. On the night of the 17th.’
‘
In bocca al lupo
,’ she muttered, the phrase for ‘good luck’.
In the wolf ’s mouth indeed, Pallioti thought. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘Given that they were on their way to a labour camp.’
‘Well.’ Eleanor Sachs paused. ‘Thank you for this. I’ll – I’ll look into it. See what I can see.’
‘But the names mean nothing to you?’
‘Off the top of my head?’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Do you mean are any of them my family names? My father’s middle name, perhaps? No. But you never know,’ she added, ‘what you find if you keep turning over rocks.’
‘There is something else—’ Pallioti hesitated, not sure if what he was about to do was exactly right, then deciding he could see no harm in it. ‘You might,’ he added, ‘want to talk to a Signor Cavicalli. There are two of them, senior and junior. The father started a business called Patria Memorabilia. I don’t know how active it is any more, but it dealt almost exclusively in partisan memorabilia. Giovanni Trantemento did some business with them,’ he added. ‘It’s in Santa Croce.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard of it. The only time I went, the shop was closed. I’ll try again.’ She hesitated. ‘Thank you,’ she said again, finally. ‘For all of this.’
‘ Eleanor—’ He tried to keep the urgency out of his voice. ‘If you find anything,’ he said, ‘on the three men—’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Of course. Don’t worry. I’ll let you know right away, I promise.’ Pallioti wondered if she was making an X over her heart. ‘In fact,’ she added, ‘that’s why I was calling you. About those two women, the sisters—’
‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I gave you the wrong name.’
‘Oh. Because I was going to tell you, there was one who died. In San Verdiana, in the winter of 1944.’
Pallioti thought about that for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That would have been their mother. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to send you on a wild goose chase.’
Eleanor Sachs laughed again.
‘No harm done,’ she said. ‘I barely came up with a pinfeather. What was the right name, just out of interest?’
‘Bevanelli. Chiara and Laura. They were active in Milan. In 1944 and 1945.’
‘Oh. OK.’ He could hear the scratch of the pen. ‘Well,’ she said when it stopped. ‘If I find anything. I mean, if I stumble across it – if you’re interested. I don’t suppose,’ she asked, ‘you know what happened to them?’
‘No.’ Pallioti shook his head. He put his own pen down. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have no idea at all.’
March 1945
The bombing got worse.
We all understood that this was in preparation for the ‘final assault’, but that in no way lessened the terror of it. Or the destruction. The main targets were, of course, the railway lines and stations and marshalling yards, but the church near our building was hit early one morning. The sound was deafening, like a volcano. Issa grabbed the baby and we ran downstairs and out into the street, not certain at all that our old building was going to remain standing. It did, but the doctor’s office I worked in was not so fortunate. Two days later it was destroyed completely. I was spared because I had a cold and had gone home early.
The sadness of it when I went to look the next day was like a blow in the stomach. The lovely Liberty building was a pile of rubble and a crater. There were no survivors. There was nothing.
We had been in Milan only a short time, but those months were the first time I had worked, day in and day out, with a group of fellow resistants, all of us in that office knowing what we were doing – where our extra supplies went, what the nights would bring. I could not say that they were my friends – they never knew my real name or where I came from, and perhaps I did not know theirs – but for the first time I had experienced the com-radeship, the bond of trust that Issa must have shared, not only with Carlo and Rico, but with the others in her GAP unit and in the mountains. It brought home to me, as I walked back that evening, the depth of the betrayal over JULIET, the loneliness of it, that she must have felt, that she must still feel every time she thinks of it.
The thought made me ill, and again, that night, I almost told her. Almost confessed that I was sure we had not all been betrayed by someone inside – that the fault was not theirs, it was mine. But once again, I was too much of a coward. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead I vowed, as I have before, that I would do anything, forever, to make it up to her.
The chance came earlier than I thought.
I could not go back to work. I had nowhere to go. I was going to volunteer at a hospital or a clinic, but instead Issa asked me to take care of the baby. In the spring, probably some time in the next month, the Allies will make a final effort to break through the Gothic Line. Everyone believes that this time, they will succeed. But we also understand that, with their backs to the wall, the Germans will fight savagely. They have little left to lose.
Intelligence is crucial, and of course the Allies do not have enough of it. Once more, they needed to know the location of every gun emplacement, every anti-tank trap and mined stretch of track. This is especially difficult in the mountains. Issa told me that in the past month there have been attempts by the troops dug in around Monte Sole to capture German soldiers in order to get information from them. These efforts have met with some success, but spies are more effective – spies who know the mountains and can get in close to the German positions.
As she told me this, my first reaction was to protest. To say ‘no’. To plead with her that it was too dangerous. Beg her not to do it. Then I saw her face. For the first time since the baby was born, there was that other light in her eyes.
And so we fell into a routine. Issa was not gone all the time, but sometimes for several days. I stayed in the apartment, in our two rooms, to care for my nephew.
He is a fine boy. Already I can see Carlo and Issa in his tiny face. He gurgles when I sing to him, though I dare say from the way he waves his hands, he does not always think much of my singing. When his mother comes back, he twists his body towards her. He cannot yet control his little arms and legs, but his eyes look to her voice, widen at the sight of her face.
During all of this, the bombing went on. It seemed crazed, as if the Allies had adopted the same scorched earth policy the Germans favour on their retreats. Perhaps they are competing, to see who can destroy the most first. Issa reported that the corridor to the Brenner was a corridor of death. Anti-aircraft guns firing into the skies and explosions dropping from the heavens. There is heavy bombing on either side of the Po, and anything on the road is in danger of being strafed. There is almost no petrol, and no coal at all. So the Germans have taken to towing two supply trucks behind one that is still running, or to using oxen and carts. People say that a great number of the poor animals lie dead in the ditches.