by David Hewson
His original job was a perilous occupation, one that offered little opportunity for reward and much for retaliation by a public who hated collaborators. Then came September and the German occupation. With it he was offered the opportunity to move entirely into the Nazi’s camp as a liaison officer between occupier and occupied. His new office was in Ca’ Loretti, a palazzo on the Grand Canal at the Rio de San Moisè, a little way along from the shuttered Harry’s Bar. Once an aristocratic home, the four-storey building was a minor sight among the grander palaces of the area, middling Venetian Gothic, a crumbling pile dating from the late sixteenth century. For the previous fifty years it had been used as council offices and was as cold and spare within as any other public building in the city. Now it was nominally under the control of Mussolini’s Italian National Guard. In truth, as everyone in Venice knew, it was home to the SS, a place to be avoided at all costs by guilty and innocent alike.
Anyone brave enough to walk the narrow alley by the side to the Grand Canal might on occasion hear screams from the cells at the back where torturers, local and German, went about their work. It was common knowledge that the garden courtyard where council workers once took their lunch breaks was now used for summary executions, the victims, taken out in rubber sheets to waiting boats by the building’s private jetty.
Alberti, a local who knew the lie of the land, the people, the language, Italian and Veneto, the way the unique city worked, had proved a natural for the tasks the Germans sent his way. The financial rewards were reasonable and came with plenty of opportunities for bribery and extortion among those he caught working the black markets, running brothels, smuggling tobacco and illicit booze across the Adriatic.
As icing on the cake he’d been allotted a place in the Hotel Gioconda around the corner. This was an establishment entirely in the hands of the Germans who required secure accommodation for those working in Ca’ Loretti. Its sixty rooms were luxurious by Venetian standards, once occupied by wealthy Europeans enjoying the Grand Tour. Of an evening the bars and restaurants served as salons where military men on brief breaks from the war paraded their mistresses and the occasional spy went about his or her business. The upstairs ballroom at the canal front was used for military banquets and doubled as a casino at times. On the floors above some of the suites were home to a few of the most beautiful and expensive whores in the city.
For the visiting Nazis, Venice was a welcome break from the muddy, violent, bloody business of warfare. But never one to be taken lightly. There were always partisans to be considered. Two months before, a drunken Austrian officer had been caught lurking in the Strada Nuova and shot dead on the spot.
Alberti had immediately raided the homes of the partisan sympathizers he deemed most weak when it came to pressure. Under the lightest torture names were swiftly revealed, the culprits apprehended and immediately executed in the street. Then, to his dismay, the Germans satisfied their continuing lust for blood with reprisals. A dozen known anti-Fascists came under suspicion, a teacher, a gondolier and a baker among them. They were dragged from their homes, made to kneel on the old cobbles and dispatched with a single bullet to the neck, their bodies left to rot out in the open for three days with the locals under pain of death not to touch them.
He’d hated all this. Their executions seemed unnecessary. Had the Nazis understood the Venetians as well as he did, they might have appreciated they had only increased the dangers they faced, not diminished them. A man could only kick a dog so much until it gave into its own nature and kicked back.
The single page report on the Finzi case was on his desk. That morning they’d picked up the soldier responsible, the lowest form of Nazi grunt, drunk in a bar near the Piazza San Marco, boasting to all and sundry of how he’d raped a Jew the night before and thrown her in the canal. He was now confined to barracks on Giudecca. The man’s fate was in the hands of Ernst Oberg, the SS officer in charge of Alberti’s department, running security operations from an office overlooking the courtyard at the back.
Oberg held the rank of Hauptscharführer, squad leader, a position Alberti understood to be unique to the SS, the highest an enlisted man might gain. Being the boss he’d claimed the place by the window. Midway down the room, to left and right, sat his German underlings: Gustav Sachs and Rudolf Sander, two low grade SS men who relished being away from real fighting, all the more so in a city that allowed them to indulge whatever vices took their fancy. Alberti was given the shadiest, most cramped space of all, near the rear wall. There was a hierarchy in all this, naturally, and as a Venetian, he was at the bottom.
There were Crucchi Alberti could deal with and Oberg was one of them. He almost admired the chap in a way: intelligent, thoughtful, always willing to talk an action through before embarking upon it. A slight man in his early forties, a teacher before the war, in recent weeks he’d begun to look drawn, ill perhaps. He avoided the bars, the casino and the brothels and mostly read in his suite at night, alone as far as Alberti understood.
In the months since the Germans seized control of Venice, Sachs and Sander had quickly established they couldn’t be more different. The two of them lived on booze and women and relished the job of harassing Venetians, innocent or not, whenever they had the chance. Alberti knew he had to watch his tongue around them. The SS was as riddled with gossip as the city itself. If Oberg displayed any reluctance to carry out the orders he received from command, then his underlings would surely be keen to pass that on to those who might do the man damage.
‘This soldier who murdered the woman last night.’ Alberti tapped his finger on the single-page report in front of him. ‘He’s confessed. What happens now?’
‘She was a Jew,’ Sachs butted in. ‘Give him a medal and a promotion.’
‘No.’ Sander wagged an admonitory finger at him. ‘He must be punished. Tattoo the Iron Cross on his dick. That way he gets a penalty and a reward at the same time.’
The two of them guffawed at that, their belly laughs echoing round the room. Oberg sighed and stared out of the window. The few trees in the courtyard were losing their leaves. Somewhere distant there were shouts and screams. A woman perhaps. When they were being tortured it was always hard to tell from the sounds alone.
Then came a crack, a shot and silence.
‘I just thought—’
‘None of your business,’ Sachs cut in. ‘The fellow’s one of ours.’
Alberti shoved the report to one side.
‘Perhaps I got a copy of the paperwork by accident then.’
Oberg lit a cigarette and he thought, You shouldn’t be smoking, chum. You don’t look up to it.
‘He’ll go back to active service. In the field,’ Oberg said. ‘In Germany. That will be punishment enough. Perhaps as good as a death sentence. Who knows?’ He stared at Sander then Sachs. ‘If you’d like to volunteer to join him I could always ask.’
They glanced at one another.
‘Work to do here, boss,’ Sander said. ‘Lots of it.’
Oberg retrieved a report from the pile on his desk, walked over and placed it on Alberti’s desk.
‘Indeed. Look at that will you?’
He made out he was reading the thing, but he kept listening too. And anyway it was a file he’d got sight of the day before. An interesting one.
Sachs plucked up the courage to speak.
‘Picking out Jews one by one’s a lot of effort for little reward, it seems to me. Why can’t we just grab them all out of the ghetto in one go?’
‘This is Venice, not Warsaw. Tell them again,’ Oberg ordered. ‘Perhaps one day it’ll stick.’
That, Alberti doubted. But he did repeat what he’d said to most of the Germans a million times. Hunting Jews in a city like Venice wasn’t simple. A few lived in the ghetto, for sure. But mostly they were ordinary citizens, ordinary-looking too, indistinguishable from their neighbours. Many ran small businesses and a good number were secular, rarely visiting the ghetto, the synagogue or a rabbi except when some ce
remony called for it. A good few had supported Mussolini in the beginning, being families with commercial interests who saw him as a buffer against the threat of communism. It wasn’t simple to identify people who didn’t wear badges, yellow stars, strange hair styles. The average local Jew saw himself as an Italian first and Hebrew second, and had done ever since Napoleon brought discrimination to an end, only for Mussolini to reintroduce it just before the start of the war with his Racial Laws. There was also the plain fact that they had no legal power to round them up. Not yet. The Germans didn’t feel bound by any laws but Mussolini usually did for some reason. If the seizure of the Jews was to happen in any organized way it would surely be heralded by some announcement of how they were a stain upon the nation, one that needed to be removed, along with legislation to make their detention possible.
The two underlings listened, then Sander said, ‘So how do we find them?’
‘Is it a priority?’ Alberti asked. He’d made those threats that morning when they fished out the Finzi woman to make sure Aldo Diamante knew his place. But they were empty and the old man probably knew it. There were much bigger fish to fry than the timid community of Jews spread across Venice, Murano and the Lido.
‘I’ve asked their president to compile a list,’ Oberg said. ‘He’s working on it. Slowly, I imagine, though to be fair I doubt it’s a simple task. Venice, not Warsaw. How many times do I have to repeat this?’
‘Well.’ Sachs banged his fist on the desk. ‘When we’ve got it we’ll round the buggers up.’
‘Then what?’ Alberti asked.
Sachs grinned, pulled out his lighter, sparked a flame, grinned even wider while Sander opposite laughed.
‘That’s what I hear anyways.’
‘And how do you propose we get them out of here?’ Oberg asked.
‘On the railroad,’ Sander said, and sounded a little puzzled.
‘They’re principally occupied with military traffic.’ Oberg stood up and went to a map of the north of Italy, stretching from Genoa to Venice and into Austria. He ran his finger along the train line running across the country to Milan and the alternative north to Munich through Verona and Bolzano. ‘There’s no capacity east to west. The mountain route keeps getting shut by damned partisans and their bombs. Only last week …’ He glared at the men. ‘You don’t even know what I’m talking about, do you? You don’t even read the daily reports?’
Sachs and Sander shuffled awkwardly in their seats.
‘There was an attack in the Vallagarina valley near Rovereto,’ Alberti said, tapping a finger on the papers on his desk. ‘They blew up the track.’
‘They did.’ Oberg got up and deposited another report directly to Alberti, quite deliberately. ‘It’s going to take us a week or more to clear. God knows they were prepared.’
When he looked at the new report, Alberti realized the intelligence had been updated. At first it was claimed the entire partisan team, six men and two women, had been cornered, five of them killed during the shootout, two committing suicide, one taken into custody though seriously wounded. The latest news came from interrogation of the survivor. It seemed two of the gang had evaded capture, one, a woman, the leader. Regional headquarters wanted their heads, an order Oberg could not ignore.
There were two photographs with the report, a man and a woman. A name for each written at the foot along with a one-page report. Giovanni and Micaela Artom, aged twenty-one and twenty-three respectively. Brother and sister from a middle-class, Jewish family in Turin. They looked too young to be trouble and scarcely Hebrew at all. Just everyday, dark-haired Italians staring at a police camera with the belligerent hatred most people wore, guilty or not.
They were both at university in Padua, the brother studying literature, the sister medicine. Earlier in the year they’d been picked up as suspected partisans, then released for some reason. Only later was it discovered they were part of the local cell, a unit they’d formed after the capture and execution of their parents. Micaela Artom, Mika to her comrades, was the ringleader.
‘Diamante’s list will go to a Jew hunter Milan is sending us,’ Oberg said. ‘One of their own who’s decided to help us. He can work out what’s true, what’s bogus, who the old man’s trying to hide from us.’
Sachs chuckled.
‘Why the hell would a Jew want to do that?’
‘He probably thinks he’ll live,’ Alberti said.
Oberg carried on.
‘Till we have specific orders I have no interest in Jews. Except for this pair. They were behind that attack. Their fellow terrorist began to talk before we shot him. He said the woman was as ruthless as anyone he’d ever met and familiar with explosives and weaponry. The brother was the propagandist. He was wounded escaping. It seems they’re on their way here.’
Alberti found it hard to suppress a groan. Hunting anyone on the run was never easy. In normal cities there was a network of informers to work with. Streets and squares and communities that could be mined for information. Nothing was so simple in Venice. The locals regarded themselves as a race apart. They had long memories of occupation, by the Austrians and, earlier, the French who had brought to an end an independent republic that had lasted a millennium. People rarely talked easily and never to strangers. Which was why the Germans tolerated him.
Then there was the geography. The place was mostly a spider’s web of alleys, dead-ends, waterways, abandoned warehouses and teeming tenements. It was a simple task for a fugitive to avoid the handful of large public squares, impossible to police the streets with any great success. If a fugitive was concerned they were closing in, all the rogue had to do was steal a boat at night and sail out to one of the islands, Burano, Torcello, Sant’Erasmo, and vanish into the remote marshes.
If he’d been a Jewish partisan on the run Venice was exactly the place he’d head for. With one proviso. You had to know someone. At a time like this no local would tolerate two dangerous strangers without an introduction.
Castello. Via Garibaldi. The drinkers, the troublemakers, the communists in the warren of terraced streets there. Not far from where he’d been that morning watching a handful of surly men drag the corpse of Isabella Finzi from the water. That was the place to start even if it was a perilous district for him to wander alone.
‘Alberti,’ said Oberg, staring at him.
‘Sir?’
‘These are your people, not ours. If anyone’s going to find them it’s you. Where do we start?’
After a moment he said what was in his head anyway.
‘You take that idiot soldier from his barracks and hang him out in public for all to see. Then invite a response. People here aren’t ungrateful. The Finzi woman was one of theirs. They understand an eye for eye. It might loosen a tongue for me. That’s all I need. One tongue.’
Sachs and Sander banged their desks and swore, a stream of vile epithets about Jews and traitors and enemies.
Oberg waited for them to calm down, then said, ‘You know I won’t do that. I can’t hang one of ours for killing a Jew.’ He laughed, without any humour and lit another cigarette. ‘Imagine the precedent it would set.’
It was the answer he’d expected.
‘Do we believe they’re here already?’
The German exhaled a grey cloud of smoke.
‘We only have the word of a dead terrorist who thought they’d be headed this way. You tell me.’
‘Then,’ the Venetian said, scooping the photos and the reports from the table, ‘I will ask around.’
Outside he bought himself a caffè corretto in the Marino, a safe bar opposite the palazzo entrance, somewhere all the Germans used, watched over by the building guards at the entrance. Double the grappa for free as usual.
Alberti flipped a few lire on the counter.
‘How’s things?’ wondered the young lad behind the counter. ‘Busy?’
Beppe was his name. He’d washed dishes in Harry’s Bar down the way before it got closed. A simpleton.
‘You know better than to ask questions like that.’
The kid blushed, the blood suffusing his pale cheeks. He looked terrified in an instant.
‘Don’t say that to anyone, sonny,’ Alberti told him. ‘They might not be as forgiving as me.’ He picked the coins off the counter. ‘There. You can pay for this one. Be grateful you got off lightly.’
The morning mist was persistent but there was a little more light coming through the haze. Falling through the long conservatory windows, which still had the style of the original garden pavilion, the day cast the workshop in a soft, cold light. The priest smiled at the sight that greeted him. Three looms set for weaving, a small banner partly completed on each one. Paolo and Chiara had taken turns in moving to the spare loom from time to time to keep each piece of fabric roughly at the same stage of production.
‘This is like your own secret Aladdin’s Cave,’ Garzone declared.
Paolo said nothing. They walked past the machines and creels and storage cabinets and reached the door to the living quarters his father had created when money began to run short. A main room which served as both dining room and kitchen. One large bedroom for his parents on the left, now unoccupied since he preferred to stay in his own on the other side. A bathroom took up the space on the right to the rear, feeding waste directly through a drain into the lagoon, which was probably illegal, his father said; they were supposed to put in a pozzo nero, a cesspit to be drained by one of the boats that carried out that foul-smelling task around the city. But hidden away at the very edge of the city, they could probably escape that expense. If the council did find out it might take them years.
A pair of small windows looked out of the back towards the lagoon. In the grey fog the far wall of the Arsenale was just visible with its own hexagonal watchtower, a larger version of the Uccello’s ruined equivalent ten metres beyond the window.
Garzone sat at the table and unbuttoned his cloak. Paolo unplugged the radio and placed it in front of him.