The Villa Triste (52 page)

Enzo tried to say it gently, but the words still stung.

‘Dottore,’ Enzo said. He pulled his ponytail. ‘What do I look like? A kid. A bum. You?’

‘What’s wrong with me?’

‘Nothing,’ Enzo said. ‘Nothing. The Sexiest Cop In Europe.’

‘Italy,’ Pallioti snapped.

‘Whatever.’ Enzo smiled. ‘The point is, there’s nothing wrong with you. With the way you look. Nothing. Unless you worked in the Excelsior in 1943. As a maid. The lowest of the low. Someone completely powerless. And then were accused of stealing.’

Pallioti stared at him.

‘Think about it,’ Enzo said gently. ‘They didn’t call that winter the Terror for nothing. What do you think the Gestapo looked like? Me?’

Pallioti looked down at his black cashmere overcoat, his impeccable black suit. Being, at least in theory, undercover police, the Gestapo had not worn uniforms. Nonetheless, they had prided themselves on their appearance. Accused of being a dandy, Himmler had had his clothes tailored at great expense. His officers had been known for their manners. Their politeness. They were not mere thugs. It had been a point of honour that they never raised their voices.

‘She can’t help it,’ Enzo said quietly. ‘It’s not her fault. Or yours.’

Pallioti shook his head. He didn’t know what to say.

‘Dinner.’ Enzo slapped the steering wheel. ‘What we need is dinner.’

He turned the engine over and put the car into gear. As they slid out onto the street, the city sucked them in, moving and shifting around them. In the beams of the headlights, Pallioti saw shadows – of other black cars. Of men in black suits. Of uniforms, grey as dust, and flags with a tilted and broken-armed cross. It had been over six decades ago. Sometimes that didn’t seem very long.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Winter unfurled slowly into spring. At Easter, Saffy launched a new show and announced that, for the first time next August, the Benvoglio family, who usually preferred to take their holidays in the mountains during September, would indeed be going to the seaside. They had rented a villa in Sardinia, something far bigger than they needed. She planned on photographing in the mountains, and thought it would be a good idea if Pallioti joined them. For at least a whole week. If not the month. When he objected that he didn’t think he’d be ‘much good’ at the seaside, she told him not to be ridiculous. When he said that he thought he might have forgotten what to do, exactly, on a holiday, she pointed out gently that that was the point.

They finally declared a truce. But he did find himself, as the days grew warmer, stopping at windows filled with especially beguiling things to be used by little boys at the beach.

He had just finished one such browsing session and was on his way into the office when he passed a newspaper kiosk and came to a dead halt. Containing, along with football schedules and movie reviews, both celebrity gossip and a running commentary on who was last seen wearing what, the city weekly had been published the night before. A stack of the papers lay in bundles on the pavement. Donata Grandolo’s face stared up at him. There was a black rim around the photograph. Above it, in bold letters, the headline read,
Philanthropist in Her Own Right, Beloved Widow of City Banker Dies Peacefully at Home
.

The street stopped around him. It fell away, disintegrating like a picture made of iced sugar. In its place was the beautiful room, the crack and snap of flames, the shimmer of a shawl the colour of a dragonfly’s wing. Around it all, the scent of flowers, warm and sharp at once, rose in a cloud of whispers.

Pallioti swallowed. He took some coins out of his pocket, watched while the paper seller snapped the string and handed him a copy. Then he walked on, clutching the sheets of newsprint. But he did not read, or even look at them. He was too busy following the figure of a girl as she vanished ahead of him, weaving through the crowd in her men’s clothes and heavy sweater, or hurrying around the corner, coat open over her nurse’s uniform, white band with a red cross stitched around her arm.

In his office, he read the piece. It didn’t say much. Her family had announced her death yesterday. Her heart had stopped beating sometime during the previous night. She was eighty-two years old, survived by two daughters, two sons-in-law, three grandchildren and many great-nieces and great-nephews. The funeral would be held at San Miniato.

Pallioti folded the paper and put it in the bottom drawer of his desk. He had two meetings that morning. Enzo was investigating what looked to be a major new fraud case. And he was scheduled to have lunch with the Mayor.

It wasn’t until he came back, stepped into his office at just past three o’clock, that he found the letter. It was lying squarely in the centre of his blotter. The envelope bore simply his name, no address. He did not recognize the handwriting, but he knew immediately who it was from.

Picking up the thick, creamy envelope, Pallioti stood, weighing it in his hand. He looked out of the window. It was a clear, perfect May afternoon. Small white clouds formed, then puffed away. When he was a child, he had been told that clouds like that were moved by the beating of angels’ wings.

He stepped out of his office. Guillermo looked up. When he saw the envelope, he frowned.

‘I don’t know how that got here, Dottore. I assume Security cleared it. It was here when I came back from lunch.’

Pallioti nodded.

‘I hope it’s not – perhaps you shouldn’t open it. I’ll take it down and have it scanned. Or call Security. Morons.’

Guillermo was reaching for his phone, but Pallioti shook his head.

‘Don’t worry, Guillermo,’ he said. ‘It’s fine.’

‘Well, how do you know? Dottore, it could be—’

‘It’s nothing,’ Pallioti said. ‘Nothing. Just a letter from a ghost.’

In the piazza, tourists and pigeons flocked. The flower seller had set out a new row of bright tin buckets. Red, yellow, and the deep purple of the first irises splashed against the paving stones. Under the loggia a mime artist, dressed in a white bed sheet and wearing a crown of laurels, stood on a plinth. As Pallioti walked by, he turned, Dante with a hand outstretched.

The bench was in the far corner. People rarely found it, because it was in the shade and almost behind a not-very-good statue of someone from the Middle Ages whose name, if it had ever been known in the first place, was now forgotten. Pallioti brushed a few crumbs away. Then he sat down and opened the envelope. The small red book slid into his hand. He slipped it into his pocket, and extracted the letter. It was several pages. The paper was from Pineider, engraved in discreet grey with her initials. This time the ink was dark blue. The letters were firm, and did not waver.

My Dear Friend
, she had written.

I hope I can still call you that. I believe I can, despite our differences – which were not so much differences really, were they? – as the fact that, in this instance, we were cast as adversaries. I can’t think of a more worthy one. In another time we would have been the best of comrades. Perhaps more. But time deals capricious hands. We play what lies before us.

If you are reading this, it is because I am gone. And you will have guessed by now, I think, who I am. Or rather, who I was.

You were right, of course, about almost everything – and certainly about the important things. I wanted to tell you. Truly, I did. And I wouldn’t have minded, if it was just myself – how much can an old woman mind spending time in jail? And I am sure they are far nicer now than the Villa Triste. But, you see, it isn’t just me. I have my daughters. Sons in law. Grandchildren. My family. They are the jewels of my life. Cosimo left them in my care, and it would not do to have their mother and grandmother behind your bars. Forgive me that.

As for the rest, as I said, you were almost completely right. I thought you would like to know the whole story – something tells me that you don’t negotiate well around the blank spaces – and to be honest, I would like, for once, to tell it. So I’ll start, as all the best storytellers recommend, at the beginning. Or rather, where you left off.

The knock came only a few minutes after Caterina wrote those last words. She was barely in time. She ducked into the bedroom, saying she had forgotten something, and did not do a very good job of hiding her little red book. Not that it mattered. I would have found it anyway. I always did. Caterina was never much good at concealing things. I was the great liar in the family.

You must understand though, and this is important – my sister was wrong. She was not careless or a coward. She was one of the most careful, bravest people I have ever known. Enrico and me, there was something the matter with us. Some sort of genetic flaw. We never felt fear. About anything – whether it was falling out of a tree, or being caught on the loggia roof, or dying of cold in the mountains. Physical danger annoyed us, but it didn’t frighten us.

There’s no courage in that. There’s no courage in facing things that do not scare you.

Cati, on the other hand, was afraid of everything. Of the dark. Of mice. Of Papa driving his car off the road in a rainstorm. Of Mama slipping on the ice in winter. Of breaking her wrist, or ankle. She would never use skates or go skiing when we went to the mountains for Christmas. Mostly, she was afraid of losing things – places, homes, people. I think that’s why she became a nurse, to keep us all in one piece. Fix us if we broke. So her courage – her courage was extraordinary. I never thought twice about entrusting my son to her. I believed in my sister absolutely. I still do.

And that is one of the reasons I had to do what I did. It wasn’t just Mama and Papa and Rico and Carlo and those other boys who died. It was Cati, too – all the years, her whole lifetime, knowing her, that she spent believing it was all her fault. Blaming herself for what happened. But, as you would say, I am getting ahead of myself.

Watching her walk out of that door, running to the window to see Cati and my son getting smaller and smaller and finally turning the corner and vanishing – I have done difficult things, but I believe that was the most difficult. Harder than looking down at dead faces in a trench, no matter how beloved, because they were dead. I could join them, but I could not get them back. Cati, on the other hand – I could have knocked on the glass, leaned out and shouted. I could have run after her. I could have just lifted a hand, breathed a word, and she would have stayed. So, finding her book. You can imagine. And how can I ever thank you, my dearest friend, for returning it to me?

I left Milan only days after Cati left. There was no point in my staying. They had some use for my special skills in Bologna, and I wanted to be in place when the storm hit. We all knew the fight would be coming over the mountains, and I felt closer to home there. Or at least, I knew I could get home. Cati was right. Back then, I could walk the Via degli Dei blind-
lucretia
fold. Perhaps I could still do it now. It saddens me that I’ll never have the chance to try again.

If you’ve seen the Red Cross and the CLN reports, you’ve probably sorted out what happened that April. They were right in so far as they went. I was on a sabotage unit – I just didn’t die. And Cati’s book was turned in to a field hospital – she just wasn’t with it. Word had been passed to me by then that she was safely in Naples. This is how it happened.

We had been sent to Anzola, six of us. I did not know the people I was working with very well, not like Florence – for all the good that did me. Units had formed and re-formed, so many were getting killed. Our job that week was to make absolutely certain that the railway line to Modena was destroyed. The Allies had finally broken through the Gothic Line. But for all their bombing, it was not going quite as planned. They didn’t just roll down to the Po sweeping the Germans before them. The fighting was hard. You back rabid dogs against a wall and they have nothing left to do but bite. Our job was to be certain that the train line could not be used either to evacuate or to reinforce the Germans. Of course there was air support. Like you cannot imagine. That, my friend, is hell. But still someone had to be certain the targets were actually hit – and that they were beyond repair. And to do something about it if they weren’t.

There were a lot of abandoned farms and houses by then; anyone who could had run. In any case, we had found a house not far from the railway line – which looking back on it was stupid, but we were so tired. We had been working flat out for five days. There were still Fascisti around, a few, enough to be dangerous. And Germans, of course. A whole retreating army of them. And deserters. They were all angry, and defeated, and terrified. They’d shoot anything that moved.

The house we found was locked. Pathetic. And human. The key was outside in the barn, under the edge of a trough, wrapped in oilskin. We used it instead of breaking a window.

We got there just after daybreak. We intended to wait until dusk, then make our way west, destroying signal points, sabotaging track, bridges, anything we could find. There was no cellar. We stayed downstairs, and fell asleep immediately.

It must have been just after noon when I woke up. It was very still, but I could hear something. I thought at first it was a baby crying – perhaps in my dreams it had been – then I realized it was a dog, whining. It’s amazing how universal that sound is – the sound of fear and loneliness. I thought it had to be the family’s and that it had been left behind. I got up and went into the kitchen, and I saw it at the window. It had jumped up on an old trough that was against the wall in the yard, and was looking through the glass. It had white front paws and they were very dirty. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that.

I couldn’t get the window open, so I went through the pantry, and out into the yard, and I had just picked it up. I was standing there, holding this little dog, petting it, trying to make it stop shaking, when I heard it – the noise of the first plane. I looked up, but I couldn’t see anything. And then it was there, all of a sudden, right above me.

I didn’t run, I dived. Afterwards, I thought I was dead.

My head was ringing. I couldn’t hear, and I couldn’t really see. There was rubble everywhere: stones, beams, earth. Plates – I remember a blue tin plate. And the dog. The dog was there. It was huddled against my stomach, as close as it could get, as if feeling me could somehow keep it alive. Then there was nothing. I must have blacked out. I’m sure I did, because the next thing I knew it was night.

The stillness was exquisite. There were stars. The dog was still next to me. It’s amazing how comforting the presence of another living creature can be, how much you want to know there’s any other heart that beats.

I lay there, feeling almost happy. I know that sounds strange, but I was watching the stars. I could hear Papa pointing them out to me, showing me Orion’s Belt. The Pleiades. Making me spot the Pole Star, so I would never be lost. Then the dog licked my face, and began to whine again. The noise was like a reel, pulling me in – and in that moment, I knew that if I did not do something, I would die.

I knew I was hurt, but I did not know how. I could hear Caterina’s voice quite clearly, telling me not to move until I knew what was wrong.
So I began testing myself, every bit – asking it if it still existed. Hand.
Finger. Foot. Toes. Knee. Then, one arm – but not the other. I tried to roll over. It felt as if my left arm was being ripped off. I must have screamed.
I’m sure I did. It probably terrified the dog. Thank God, there was no one else to hear. After that it took me a while to understand. Then I did. My arm was pinned under what had been, I suppose, a beam from the pantry ceiling. I couldn’t move it at all, and I knew quite quickly – my brain knew – that I had to. My brain understood that if I lay there, either someone would find me – someone who would kill me – or I would die slowly and very horribly of thirst and exhaustion and gangrene.