The Villa Triste (40 page)
Issa moved mostly at night. I could never tell when she was going to arrive or go. A few nights ago, it was very late when I heard footsteps on the stairs, then the rasp of the key in the door. I did not realize until the next morning that she had brought another letter from Lodovico. By the time I opened it, she was gone. Which was a good thing, given what it said.
Lodo said the assault was coming and everyone knew it. The Germans had their backs to the wall, the Fascisti, too. They would fight like cornered dogs. As for the Allies, they would throw everything they have at this effort in order to stop the enemy getting to the Alps. We would be in the middle of both a devastating attack and an equally devastating retreat.
But Lodo had a plan. He could get me out. There was a fishing boat called the Santa Maria leaving Genoa. The captain would be looking for me and would take me aboard. Lodovico had already paid him one half of the fee. The Captain would receive the other half when I landed safe in Naples.
I stared at the words. They swam in front of me, refused to stay still, as if they were slipping off the page. The date Lodo named was three days away.
I folded the letter and hid it.
What I did not count on, of course, was Issa.
The next day when I came in, she was sitting at the kitchen table, the single sheet of paper smoothed in front of her. She held it down with both hands, as if it might fly away.
‘What is this?’
I stopped dead. Then I closed the door behind me.
‘You know what it is,’ I said, trying to keep my voice as even as possible. ‘You’ve read it.’
I was kicking myself. I should have kept the wretched thing on me. I should have destroyed it when I had the chance. I should never have fooled myself that I could hide anything from Issa.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
I set my few pathetic parcels down, then turned and looked at her.
‘I won’t leave you,’ I said. ‘I’m not going. I won’t leave you,’ I said again, trying to reassure her that I would never betray her.
‘What do you mean?’
I shrugged and laughed.
‘Exactly what I said. I’m not going,’ I repeated. ‘I don’t want to. And I couldn’t get there if I did want to. And, in any case, I don’t. I won’t leave you.’
‘But you must. You must!’
It took me a moment to realize she was angry.
‘You can’t stay for me.’ She shook her head. ‘I won’t let you. I don’t need you,’ Issa said. ‘I’m fine on my own.’
Not believing what I was hearing, I stared at her, and saw again that cold, hard thing in her eyes. That thing I had seen that afternoon on the terrace – in another lifetime. Nemesis.
‘I wouldn’t do it for you,’ she said.
The words hit me like a slap. They took my breath away. I stared at her, as if she had suddenly become someone I didn’t know.
‘If Carlo was alive,’ she said quite calmly, ‘and I could be with him, I would. I’d run. I’d crawl, if I had to. I’d leave you in a minute.’
I could feel myself shaking. My eyes were blurring.
‘Well, I,’ I said, gasping for breath, ‘I, thank God, am not you!’
I pushed past her and stormed into the other room. I slammed the door. The baby began to cry. I heard Issa go to him, heard her singing to him. I stood for a moment, feeling the walls slip and slide around me. Then I sat on the bed and rocked – back and forth, back and forth, in time to her voice coming through the thin wood of the door. Then I cried. I cried until my throat was sore and my eyes were swollen, until I finally fell asleep.
There was an old armchair in the kitchen, next to the bassinet. Issa must have slept there, because she did not come near me. The next morning, I heard her moving around very early. I fell asleep again, hoping, I think, that she would simply go. Disappear into the mountains and leave the baby and me in peace; return in a few days, another person. But when I finally opened the door, I saw that both of them had gone. I stood there in the kitchen, alone. She had stuck to her word, I thought, but the other way round. She had abandoned me so I would have no choice but to leave.
I sat down at the table. I had no idea what to do. Without her, I was adrift. Even if I had wanted to go to Genoa, I had no idea how I would begin to get there. I could hardly go to the station and get on a train. The day was brighter than it had been. Sun was spilling through the single window in the kitchen. I sat watching it play on the sill, and thinking of what my life would be like without her, of how the years would echo into emptiness. I was still thinking that when I heard her footsteps on the stairs.
She walked in, carrying the baby, and set him down in the bassinet without speaking to me. When she turned around, she had that look – the one I remembered from when she was going into the mountains or came to the hospital in Florence and wanted something. She was not angry any more, but very calm. She had made up her mind.
‘You have to go,’ she said. She looked at me. ‘You have to go, Cati. And you have to take him with you.’ Before I could even open my mouth, she added, ‘It’s all arranged. They’ll come for you this afternoon, and take you both to Genoa.’
I stared at her. Then I shook my head.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t. I can’t, Issa. I—’
Before I could stop her, she got down on her knees in front of me and took my hands.
‘Cati,’ she said, studying my face. ‘I’m begging you. I’m begging you, for my son. You can take him out of all this. Out of what’s coming. He’ll be safe in Naples.’
I opened my mouth. I started to speak, and then couldn’t. Because she was right.
‘You take him,’ Issa said. ‘If you love me, Cati. You take him.’ I had always known that she was utterly ruthless. That when she thought something was right, she would stop at nothing. She squeezed my hands. ‘I’ll join you. I’ll come as soon as I can.’
‘No,’ I said quickly. ‘No.’ I saw my opening and took it. ‘We must all go together, the three of us.’
Issa shook her head.
‘There won’t be space on the boat. And, even if there was, rail passes are all but impossible. I could barely get one for you and him. I can’t possibly get another.’
‘You could try. You could—’
She shook her head again.
‘The captain won’t wait. He’ll sail tomorrow night. He has to. He has to get to sea when there is no moon.’
‘Then you go,’ I said. ‘You go in my place, with your son. And I’ll follow. I’ll get there. Lodovico will look after you.’
At that, Issa actually smiled. She rocked back on her heels, still holding my hands.
‘The best way will be to come through the mountains,’ she said. ‘Who do you think is more likely to survive that?’
I looked at her. We both knew that the answer was not me.
‘I can’t bring you and a baby, Cati, through the mountains. And there isn’t room on that boat, not for all of us, and it won’t wait. Besides,’ she added, ‘I have a job to do here. When it’s finished, I’ll come. I promise you.’
I looked at her then, and saw the loss of Carlo in her face, and remembered what I had promised myself. What I had vowed – that I would do anything for her.
Isabella told me to listen to her. She told me she had thought about it all night, and that she had already planned to go to Bologna. She said she would see out the fight there – that they needed her, and that it was close to the mountains. When she was ready, she would disappear, follow the Via degli Dei home, find Mama, then get them both to Naples. She could walk the mountains blindfold. She knew where and who to turn to for help. She studied my face.
‘Could you do that?’ she asked.
I shook my head.
‘Don’t you believe that I can?’
Even as a child, Isabella always understood how to ask the right questions, how to stop me in my tracks. And of course, she was right. She was a legend. If anyone was going to survive, it would be her.
‘You must take the baby and go now,’ she said. ‘As it is, it will be hard enough. Please,’ she added. ‘Please, Cati. I’m asking you to do this for me. To save him. Get him out of here. If you love me.’
I looked down into her face. I felt her hands, gripping mine. ‘If you love me.’ What could I say to that?
So we are going. In an hour. Or two. A man is coming with a set of papers that says I am his wife and we are travelling with our infant son to live with relatives in Genoa. All signed, sealed, and stamped. That is what Isabella was doing this morning. I forget sometimes who and what she is. That there are people who owe her things. Favours. Their lives.
A few minutes ago, she pulled me into the bedroom, as if the baby might overhear us, and said there was something I had to swear to: that if anything happened to her, I would never tell her child that he was not my son.
‘You have to swear,’ she said. This time she did hold her hand up. ‘You have to swear, if I don’t get there, if something happens to me, that you will take him, and keep him, and make him yours and never let him know, never let him guess, that his mother gave him up. That she let him go. Even for a moment. I don’t want him to live with that. Promise me.’
I looked into her eyes. I wanted to tell her it was stupid – that if anything happened to her, he would understand, I would make him understand how much she loved him.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘For me, Cati. Swear.’
And so I raised my hand. I held it against hers.
‘Blood bond, Cati,’ Isabella whispered.
I nodded.
‘Blood bond, Issa.’
Even now, I don’t know if I can bring myself to leave her. I feel as if my stomach is being ripped out. Only looking at the baby makes the pain bearable – I am doing this for him. And for her. Because she has asked me.
But I can’t bear her feeling abandoned, betrayed and alone as she did when she stood by the side of that trench. So this is what I am going to do.
I am going to fight you one last time, Isabella. With guile. And this time, I am going to win. Do you hear me? You have no one to blame but yourself if you do not like it. You taught me to walk slowly, to look in the glass – you taught me courage. And you taught me defiance. So if you are angry with me, you have no one to blame but yourself. You showed me the way.
I am almost at the end of this book now. It will not see out the war, as I planned. I do not have a photo of myself to leave for you, for you to keep next to your heart where you keep Carlo’s. Instead, you will have to make do with these ‘word pictures’. In a moment, I am going to get up and hide this book in the bedroom, somewhere easy. Somewhere, where – tomorrow or the next day – you, being you, will find it. And then you will keep it for me until we meet again, and know that my words are with you, and that you are not alone just because we are gone.
I wish I had something else, something better, but this is all I have to leave you – this piece of me. And this last picture.
We are sitting here, the three of us now, at this little table in a tiny apartment that belongs to strangers that we have made our home. There is sunlight coming through the window and Isabella is singing to the baby. She looks into his eyes and rocks him. Then she gets up and dances with him. She holds her son in her arms while we wait for the knock on the door.
The city was silver. The much-anticipated storm had blown through some time around midnight, taking all the colour with it. It had sucked the red out of the roofs, leached the gold and the soft creamy warmth from the stuccoed palazzos. Runnels of sleet froze in the cracks of the cobbles as Saturday hovered between dawn and sunrise.
Despite lunches at Saffy’s, Pallioti had come to hate the weekends. This was a recent development, and he saw no particular trigger or cause for it other than turning fifty. Previously, he had been as jealous of his time off as anyone else, and quite happy spending time with, and by, himself. Now, if he was not in the office, he was restless. These days, he found it a relief if there was an urgent case, a ‘flap’ on, a drama that required one hundred per cent of his attention. The last two weekends had been ideal. But the fraud case was winding up. And so, apparently, were the murders of the two old men. Enzo did not have his confession yet, but he was still in Brindisi. And if anything, more optimistic. In short, everything was running smoothly. Which left Pallioti at a fidgeting, bored dead end.
He was not even sure how long he had been walking. Eventually, he found himself off the Via dei Renai. Perhaps he had been coming here all along. He really didn’t know. With no more writing in the little red book, with the final few pages dog-eared and slightly grubby, but resolutely empty, he felt bereft. Betrayed, and a little annoyed. As if he had been sucked into an affair and then abandoned. Believed in a story only to find that it had no ending.
The five roses were still in the little glass tube. Now their petals were battered by sleet, tiny crystals of ice hidden in their soft white folds. Taking his glove off, he reached up, and ran his fingers over the words on the plaque. His hand lingered, and began to freeze, dwelling on the icy letters. Putting his gloves back on did not help. Neither did clapping vigorously. Finally, the cold propelled him into a tiny bar where the street sweepers and traffic patrolmen stopped for the earliest coffee of the day.
He did not ask, or pay, for a cognac with his coffee, but the girl behind the counter took one look at him and poured one anyway.
Taking Caterina’s book out of his pocket, he set it on the table he had chosen by the window. He did not care to admit it, but Signor Cavicalli’s revelation that he had bought it in a job lot of unclaimed bits and pieces from the Florentine Red Cross – that it had ended up as one more piece of flotsam and jetsam, one more fragment consigned to the rag-and-bone box of the country’s past, had upset him. He had slept badly the night before, his dreams full of ragged women marching four abreast past silent crowds. Of trains lurching and gathering speed, leaving in their wake a confetti of names and addresses, final messages, falling onto the tracks like snow. A girl had danced with a baby in her arms. Men stood in a clearing, holding shovels.
Irritated, he told himself it was a long time ago, and that none of it mattered, and swallowed the coffee. It met the brandy, and gurgled and burned in his chest. A raucous guffaw came from two workmen. A traffic cop teased the girl behind the counter. Having spent the night in the company of ghosts, it was a pleasure to be again in the world of the living. He got up and returned to the bar and was waiting for his second espresso, actively resisting the compulsion both to order another brandy and to drum his fingers, when his phone vibrated in his pocket. It was a text, from Eleanor Sachs.
Didn’t want to wake you. Call me when you’re up. Found something
.
‘Eleanor?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I hope I didn’t wake you up.’
The table teetered as Pallioti reached for the lemon peel balanced on the saucer and bit it in half.
‘I’ve been up for hours,’ he replied, wondering if this was strictly true. ‘Well, anyway, a couple of hours.’
‘Join the club. I used to go running. Every morning at five. Before I screwed up my knee. No more marathons, but I still wake up.’ He thought for a moment that she was going to ask him what his excuse was, but she didn’t. Instead, she said. ‘Anyway. I wanted to tell you, I found something – about those women.’
He swallowed the lemon peel and began the tricky manoeuvre of opening his sugar packet single-handed.
‘Go on.’
‘Well—’
Pallioti could hear her doing something in a kitchen, the clink of china. He imagined her with the phone clamped between her head and shoulder. Any moment, it would probably clatter to the floor and go dead.
‘Both of them,’ she continued. The clinking had stopped and her voice sounded less muffled. ‘Cammaccio and Bevanelli.’
Before Pallioti could tell her that that couldn’t be, that there was a mistake because they were one and the same, she went on.
‘A Caterina Cammaccio is listed in a field hospital in Bologna. In April 1945. Then she’s listed as dead in the ’45 Red Cross records for Florence.’
Pallioti paused. Caterina must have decided to stay, after all. Or something must have gone wrong. With the trains. Perhaps she couldn’t get to Genoa, in the end. Or perhaps something happened to the baby, and she came back. Perhaps she just couldn’t bring herself to be without Isabella.
Outside the bar’s grubby plate glass window a flowering of paper gelato cups lay in the gutter, their blue and pink polka dots bright in the cold morning.
‘Then there’s an L. Bevanelli,’ Eleanor Sachs said. ‘That’s the right name, right? Bevanelli?’
She spelled it.
‘Right.’
She could not see Pallioti, but he nodded, abandoning the sugar packet.
‘Well, according to the CLN, L. Bevanelli was last seen on 17 April, near a place called Anzola. I looked it up. It’s just west of Bologna. The main rail line runs through there. There was heavy bombing around then. A softening up, before the last Allied advance, trying to finish off the German retreat – force a surrender.’
Pallioti wanted to ask her to stop. But he didn’t.
‘This Bevanelli,’ Eleanor Sachs said. ‘Definitely a woman. She was apparently working on a sabotage unit. They’d moved into a farmhouse to get some rest. It was hit by an Allied bomb. One guy was outside at the time. He reported all the rest of them as dead.’
‘Are you still there?’ Eleanor Sachs asked a moment later. When he didn’t answer, she said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I thought it was just something to do with this case thing. I didn’t realize you knew them. I mean, that you were connected to them.’
‘No.’ Pallioti glanced at the little red book. ‘No. I’m not.’ It wasn’t, strictly speaking, a lie. But it felt like it. ‘Did you say CLN?’ he asked quickly.
‘Yeah,’ Eleanor replied. ‘Their records are great. I made a copy of the guy’s report – there wasn’t any point with the Red Cross. At least I didn’t think so. It was just a couple of sentences. The Bologna field hospital and then the Florence lists. I can tell you right where to find them, though. If you want them.’
‘And the CLN, the Red Cross, they had nothing on the other three, the men?’
‘Not that I saw. But to be honest,’ she added, ‘I didn’t have all that long. They were closing early yesterday, at the archive. Some kind of maintenance, or something. I’m going to take a longer look, first thing Monday morning. I’ll let you know,’ she said. ‘I can drop off the copy of this report too, if you want. I’ll—’
‘Eleanor, do you have it now, with you?’
She hesitated.
‘Yes. Sure. I can read it to you. It’s—’
‘Would you mind,’ Pallioti asked, already standing up, ‘if I came and looked at it?’
‘Well, so much for the idea that nothing happens in Italy before noon.’
The address Eleanor Sachs had given Pallioti was a cottage on an estate up behind San Miniato. Yet again, she had been telling the truth. It really wasn’t far, not more than a ten-minute walk, from the restaurant Saffy had chosen the Sunday before. Backed by a high hedge that shielded it from the main house, the cottage sat just off the drive looking down towards the city. A small Renault of some sort with Roman rental plates was pulled up on the apron outside. There were no curtains. He had seen her moving about inside before he knocked on the door.
‘Come on in,’ she said. ‘Take a pew.’
Eleanor Sachs nodded towards the high stools pulled up at the breakfast bar.
‘Here.’ She ducked around the counter and retrieved a piece of paper from the table, handing it to him as he unzipped his jacket and sat down.
The CLN report didn’t add much to what she had already told him. A Bevanelli, L. had been working with a GAP unit from Bologna that was engaged in sabotaging the main railway line to Modena. They had been a few miles east of the town of Anzola on the afternoon of 17 April 1945, and were waiting for the safe cover of dark in an abandoned farm not far from the tracks when the line was hit by Allied bombs.
I had gone outside to relieve myself and was standing in a shelter of trees when I heard and saw the incoming planes. They were flying very low. There was danger of machine-gun strafing. I threw myself into a thicket of bushes and heard several loud explosions. When I eventually got up, I saw that the house had taken what appeared to be a direct hit. To the best of my knowledge, all five of the comrades listed below, who had been sleeping inside at the time, are dead.
It was signed by someone called Bernardo Fabbro. Pallioti ran his eye down the list of names below the signature. It was not alphabetical. Bevanelli, L., was the second to last. There was a capital
F
beside the name, presumably denoting female, since all the others were marked with an
M
.
He stared at the piece of paper for a moment as if it would tell him something, as if, in looking at it, he could reach out and touch her. Speak to her. Reassure Issa that, although she had missed the liberation by days, it had not been for nothing. There was some consolation, he thought, in the knowledge that four others were with her. That she had not died alone.
As for Caterina, he hoped that she had not lived long enough to know that Isabella had been killed. Hoped that whatever had taken her life – whether it was a piece of shrapnel, a German mine, or an Allied bomb – had done it before she understood that she was the last one. That none of her family had survived. They would never know, he supposed, what had become of the baby. He would almost certainly have been with Caterina which meant he too had probably been killed.
He was aware of Eleanor watching him.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘No, I just thought – it doesn’t matter. May I?’
He held up the paper. She nodded. Pallioti folded it and put it in his pocket.
‘Your grandparents,’ he asked, wanting to change the subject, ‘what were their names, by the way?’
‘Oh.’ Eleanor smiled. ‘Victor and Maria. Fabbionocci. They changed it to Faber. You know, a lot of people did. It was just easier. On forms and stuff. My father was Antonio. Tony Faber. Doesn’t even sound very Italian, does it?’
The kitchen was tucked into the corner of the large front room which made up most of the cottage. Through an open doorway, Pallioti could see a second room, an unmade bed, books piled beside it on the floor. A laptop computer was set up on what was supposed to be the dining-room table. Papers were scattered across the sofa. Eleanor, who had just poured him a mug of coffee from the requisite American-style machine, saw him taking in the mess and laughed.
‘The ruins of my great book.’ She shook her head. ‘I had this fantasy that I would come here and find out who my family really was and write this great, moving memoir. I guess I should have stuck to Petrarch, huh?’ She perched on a stool across from him. ‘I’m obviously not too good at this partisan detective work.’
Pallioti regarded her for a minute, her small heart-shaped face, the dark eyes and the features that pretended to be sharper and harder than he suspected they were. Saffy was right, she did look like Audrey Hepburn. A little more dishevelled. But just as pretty.
‘I don’t know that I’m so good at it, either,’ he said. Then he added, feeling that he wanted to give her something, to thank her, ‘The woman, Laura Bevanelli, as she was known then. Her name was also Isabella Cammaccio. She was in a GAP group in Florence. I think she used the code name Lilia.’