by David Hewson
He pushed the glass away. It was half-decent so he’d won a small victory there. Then he barged his way through the bunch at the counter and got right up to Trevisan.
‘I’m not asking you to like me, Rocco. Just understand this. If I don’t do this job someone else will. And it’d probably be some vicious Black Brigades hoodlum from Milan who’d be ten times worse. I’m here to stand between you and them. To try and keep the peace until times get better. If you don’t like that, then follow me home one night and we’ll argue this out in a dark alley between us. When you want to rise up and take these bastards on yourself’ – he punched Trevisan in the shoulder – ‘you let me know. Maybe we can talk about it. But we will lose. We will all die. And when we’re dead they’ll rape your wives and kids and kill them too. Every German that goes down they want a dozen Venetians in their place and they don’t give a shit who that might be. Understood?’
‘You said your piece,’ Trevisan replied.
‘Not quite finished. There are two partisans on their way here. Jews from Turin. They screwed up trying to place a bomb in the mountains. The rest of their team’s dead. Bunch of Germans with them too. The SS have got a bead on the pair. Won’t be good when they’re caught. Won’t be good for anyone who hides them either. Or knows where they’re hiding and doesn’t say a word.’
He opened his jacket so they could see the pistol in the shiny leather holster.
‘I came here because I wanted you all to know this. I want you to understand the risks. These are not our people. They’re terrorists. Communists or worse. They will bring down anyone who falls for their lies. Not just you. Your families too. If—’
‘We’re not informers,’ the woman butted in. ‘You’ve a nerve.’
‘I’m not asking for that. If they turn up here just send them on their way. Don’t hide them. Don’t listen to their lies.’ He turned to each of them in the bar. ‘I’m trying to make sure as many of you live through this. You and your families. I want this city back the way it was before the war. That’s all. Now …’ He pushed out his chest and waved a finger at the gun. ‘If you think that’s all bullshit and I’m just one more piece of Nazi slime feel free to use it. Huh?’
The redhead was on the weapon in a flash, seizing it from the holster, pointing the barrel in his face.
‘You two-faced shit …’
‘Do what you like, lady. I’m just a product of the time.’ He shrugged. ‘I doubt they’d want as many dead for me as one of their own. But to be honest with you, I really don’t know.’
‘Give him back the gun,’ Trevisan ordered.
‘No …’
‘Dammit.’ He took the Walther off her. ‘Here.’
Alberti shrugged, smiled at the woman first, then Trevisan, and placed the gun back in his holster. They weren’t to know it wasn’t loaded and he had another weapon, a smaller pistol, tucked in his waistband.
‘Thanks, Rocco. I was breaking into a sweat there.’
‘We heard what you got to say.’ Trevisan nodded at the door. ‘Leave it there. Stay away from here. I might not be around next time.’
He went out into the street, watched every step of the way.
Maybe, he thought, he ought to wander round to Giardini. He’d heard film crews had decamped there from Rome and were aiming to make the kind of gung-ho movies Il Duce loved. He could cut it as an actor. He already had.
Paolo Uccello sat at the kitchen table, reading up on the commission placed by a man called Ugo Leone. The windows were all shuttered. Nothing could be seen from the outside at all. The simple box file his father used for orders sat in front of him. The order was the most recent so naturally it sat at the top. Chiara’s worries about getting the job done on time had rattled him. She knew weaving so much better. He’d been a fool to treat the job, so closely associated with his parents’ deaths, as nothing important.
The letter was typed as if from an office and demanded three identical small banners, all to be delivered to the Gioconda by Tuesday December the seventh, a week away. The velvet was to be made up of two patterns, rampant lions with a pile of scarlet silk along with leaves and decorative emblems in dark blue with a fawn silk background. The pattern would repeat every fifty centimetres and the fabric was to be finished in soprarizzo, an ancient technique used only for the most expensive commissions such as those for the Doge or highest ranks in the Church. This gave the final fabric an extraordinary texture, the base soft and curly for the borders, the top hand cut to emphasize the pattern, here, the lions. The results were beautiful. It bestowed a kind of life to the fabric, an extra dimension, delightful to touch. No customer could resist running their fingers over the brush-like master and the soft, subtle background. They usually stopped when they heard the price.
He’d initially believed the payment was generous but now he was thinking more clearly it was obvious how desperate his father had been for the work, any work. Such an order in soprarizzo should have cost far more, perhaps double. The technique was time-consuming and demanded careful labour with a blade and a variety of needles alongside all the usual, tedious weaving. He was glad they’d started when they did.
‘We can do this, Chiara,’ he muttered to himself.
He hadn’t looked in the file for weeks. There seemed no need. Now he saw there was an unopened envelope among the correspondence. A scribbled message from Chiara on the front said the postman had handed it over while Paolo was out shopping. She must have forgotten to mention it, as he had forgotten to look. It bore a Turin postmark from ten days before.
Heart in mouth, he ripped open the envelope. Maybe they’d cancelled the whole thing and they’d be asking for their money back. Almost all of it spent.
But no, it was worse. A brief note from Leone, handwritten.
My travel arrangements have altered. I now wish to pick up the banners on Saturday, the fourth of December. Since this is only a few days earlier than previously agreed I assume, Uccello, this will be met. There will be great and important men in attendance. I must advise you it would be perilous to your reputation if not your person if you were to disappoint them and me.
He stared at the letter, wondering what he could do. Tuesday would be tight. Saturday impossible. Even if he and Chiara tried to work night and day they’d never meet such a deadline. Weaving was hard, tiring work and the soprarizzo something only she knew. He couldn’t possibly give this man from Turin what he wanted when he demanded it. Nor could he return the deposit.
Or run. Where? How?
Paolo Uccello tucked the letter in the folder with the pattern and placed it in the office desk next to the looms. Then he went back into the kitchen.
The priest’s business was his alone. True, Paolo had been outraged by the way the Finzi woman had been treated. But cruelty seemed to be a part of this world and nothing he could do would change that. He was an orphan, eighteen, timid and happy to be that way. The American bombers had killed his parents. Accidentally or not they were still dead.
A couple of rebellious Jews on the run after fighting a reckless guerrilla war against the Crucchi were none of his business. A commission for a piece of soprarizzo velvet, perhaps from a Fascist who might do him and Chiara harm … that most certainly was. There was only one solution. They needed another pair of hands to work the third Jacquard loom.
He got two candles from the cupboard and lit them, then threw aside the carpet, lifted the trap door and walked downstairs into the cellar. There was a small table in the centre of the damp, dark place.
Those flickering lights by a tracery window stood between him and whatever happened next. Let fate decide. There was nothing else he could think of.
Paolo made himself some food. Drank a little more of the grappa his father had left and decided he didn’t like it. He was about to go to bed when he heard the waves beyond the window shift their rhythm, as if there was a boat out there, disturbing the gentle beat of waves against the steps down from the patio.
Footsteps shuf
fled up the stairs and there were voices, a woman first, then a man, low.
Their rapping on the wood was so loud and insistent it made him jump.
Paolo’s heart was in his mouth as he got up. The door was little more than ajar when it slammed back into his face, someone swore on the other side, a woman’s voice, and he found himself flying to the floor.
Two people, the rain, the cold wind all around.
The door slammed shut but not before he could see something outside. A spotlight sweeping through the stormy night, left and right, hunting.
Something sharp and cold pressed against his neck. The point of a knife. It had to be, even though he couldn’t see it.
‘Keep quiet and I won’t cut you,’ the woman said, stamping her knee hard on his chest.
They stayed like that for a minute or more as the sound of a motor launch grew nearer outside. The spotlight was so bright it cast little motes of white through the slats in the shuttered windows.
Over the rattle of the engine there were distant voices, low, hard, male. Foreign. It took him a moment to realize they were speaking German.
The knife point pricked his skin and he couldn’t help but squeal.
‘I said keep quiet,’ the woman whispered so close he could feel her breath warm against his face.
PART TWO
The pages Nonno Paolo gave me were old but they had the letterhead of the House of Uccello on them. A design from years back, paper he used up for everyday notes since he always hated waste. I knew the Palazzo Colombina inside out, every room, every last dusty corner. On the top floor, the mansard overlooking the canal, he kept a private study, a place he retired to from time to time, to read he always said. It was always locked but I knew where he hid the keys. In a cabinet by his bed. A place I’d seen him put them back when I was little.
I went into his room, trying to dismiss the thought he’d never see this again. The keys were where I expected. Feeling like an intruder in my own home, I took them and went upstairs. The place was small with a roof so steeply pitched I had to bend down as it narrowed towards the far wall. More like a cell than a spare bedroom for visitors. Or perhaps, in the old days, somewhere a servant lived.
There was a single window looking down to the Grand Canal. A desk was pushed up against the sill, a portable typewriter on it, a single office chair in front. A blank sheet of paper was in the machine. I’d never used a typewriter. We were all about computers. The pages Grandfather had given me had corrections and scribbles in pencil the kind of which I’d never seen before. I sat down, tapped out a few words on the funny physical keyboard, my fingers quickly falling between the letters. Then I worked out how to turn the page out of the back and looked at the results.
This was where he’d written his story. I could see it from the letters on the page and the fact it was clearly the same old and yellowing paper, a little damp from age. Day after day, week after week, he must have come in here at night. For years. I’d heard him padding round the floors sometimes and thought it was just insomnia. But no. He was writing something. A story about a part of his life, though he set it down as if he was an observer, someone watching all this from afar.
I shouldn’t have been there. But since I was – and I understood in my heart he wasn’t coming back – I thought I’d make the most of the opportunity and went through the drawers. There were three of them but the bottom one was firmly locked and none of the keys I had worked.
In the first were piles of old letters bound together with elastic bands, personal, from people I didn’t know. Some nearly forty years old, to do with the business.
The middle contained nothing but a photograph. It was dated 23rd June 1937. A man and a woman, my dead great-grandparents I assumed, standing stiffly, proudly, next to a loom in an airy glass building much like a large garden conservatory. The Giardino degli Angeli in San Pietro was sold before I was born. It was a piece of our past that didn’t concern me. But this was their workshop before the war when the Uccello were starting to struggle and had moved there from their apartment in Dorsoduro. I shivered as I gazed at it. Those dead faces seemed to be looking right at me. Grandfather, it must have been, stood between his parents, unsmiling, twelve years old, not far off my own age. I thought we had no photographs going back before the war. Nonno Paolo always said they were lost in the chaos. His own parents had died in a bomb raid somewhere. This was the first time I’d laid eyes on them and I wondered: why would he keep this one photograph hidden? Not that I recognized anyone in it, even him.
For the first time ever in the warm, familiar surroundings of the Palazzo Colombina, I felt scared. Shivering, even on that sticky summer night, I put the picture back, carefully, the way I found it, as if he might know. Then I rattled the bottom drawer, the locked one, hard. It still wouldn’t budge and for that I felt quite grateful.
The following morning, before I set off for Zanipolo and the hospital, Chiara turned up, ostensibly to do a little cleaning though I felt sure her principal purpose was to see I hadn’t burned the place down. A maid came to do the real work five times a week.
I’d finished breakfast: coffee and a cornetto from the bakers round the corner. She asked after my grandfather and shook her head when I said he seemed no better.
‘Paolo’s so young. Cancer’s a terrible thing.’
He was seventy-four or so which didn’t seem young at all to me.
I toyed with the cornetto and said, ‘I have to do a project for school. I was thinking of writing something about the war.’
She was looking at me as if I were mad.
‘You’ve been kicked out of school for a week, Nico. Your father told me. You … of all people, getting mixed up with that Scamozzi crowd.’
‘I said I’m sorry. It doesn’t mean I can’t do school work. The war—’
‘Why on earth would you want to write about that?’
‘Because I don’t think anyone else will. No one ever talks about what happened. Not much.’
She picked up the plates and the cups from the table and placed them in the dishwasher. Which was unnecessary. I normally looked after that myself.
‘Some things are best that way.’
‘If we sat down together and you talked to me … I could record it. Just your memories …’
‘Memories?’ Her voice had become hard, her face flushed. ‘In June 1940 that idiot Il Duce made us sign up for Hitler’s madness. It was five years before Venice was free of those monsters. I lost a husband I never could replace even if I wanted to. You want me to sit down and talk to you about it over a coffee and a biscuit like it was a little holiday one summer?’
I’d never seen her angry before. It seemed wrong, and I felt bad for making it happen.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you. I mean … I could always ask my grandfather—’
‘The poor man’s dying, Nico. Let him leave this world in peace. That time’s gone and God willing it’s never coming back. Now is there anything you want me to ask the maid to do when she turns up?’
‘No. Not really—’
‘So let’s not talk of this again.’ She went for her bag of shopping. It was to be a short visit for once. ‘Think of something else. Someone of your age should be looking to the future not the past. Leave that to us. There are things that should be remembered. There are others that should be left to die with the old.’
An hour later I was back at the hospital, watching San Michele, the cemetery island, shift like a mirage in the summer heat across the water.
‘Well?’ He didn’t look any different. The doctors seemed to have no idea how long he might live. Not that they foresaw him leaving the hospital, or that he showed any sign of expecting to return home. ‘Did you read it?’
‘Of course I did.’
‘Did it bore you? Be honest, Nico. If you want to go and mess around with your pals. Chase girls. Take your camera out somewhere. I know how much you love that. I won’t be offended if you’ve no interest in an old ma
n’s memories—’
‘I read it and I want to read the rest.’
I couldn’t work out whether that pleased him or not. So I added that I found it strange he should write about himself as if he was another person.
‘A stylistic objection? Are you my editor now?’
‘No. It sounds odd. That’s all.’
‘Think about it. I’m telling the story of several different people. I’m imagining the conversations they had when they weren’t there.’
‘You mean making it up?’
‘That’s what storytelling entails in case you hadn’t noticed.’
He started coughing and it went on so long I walked out into the corridor and tried to find a nurse. By the time I got back with her he seemed fine again and politely but firmly said she’d be better off serving patients elsewhere.
‘That’s the way I felt I had to tell it, Nico. I’m sorry if it confuses you. What do you know of the war?’
‘Not much.’
‘Don’t they teach these things in school?’
They did, I told him, up to a point. No one said you had to listen. And, as Chiara had shown that morning, there was always a sense of embarrassment when conversations turned to that time, especially among the old. Italy had backed the wrong side. As Mussolini lost the war, the country came to be divided for a while, north and south. Peace only seemed to bring with it more arguments and divisions. Italian politics seemed so endlessly complex no one of my age took the slightest notice. We were too young to waste our time on that.
‘I still think maybe you could show it to Dad. It’s more his—’
‘I said already. It’s for you, not him.’
‘Why?’
He blinked, gasped for air for a moment. I thought, He really is dying here, minute by minute. I can see it now.
‘That,’ he murmured, ‘I can’t tell you. It’s something you need to find yourself.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Perhaps you never will. And that’ll be for the best. Sometimes you hand someone a gift and you never know if it’s right or not. Just that you want them to have it.’