by David Hewson
‘You,’ he said to the nearest soldier. ‘Pick six men who can shoot straight and follow me.’
Paolo had to drag him most of the way. Vanni Artom was weeping, spitting pointless curses into the wintry air. Blood drenched the lower half of his trouser leg as the heavy wooden door to the Giardino degli Angeli slammed behind them. Then Paolo locked it and threw the rusty iron security arm across into its clasp.
‘Think that’s going to stop them?’ Vanni asked, leaning against the wall. His face was pale and streaked with snow and tears. ‘Do you?’
‘It’ll give us a little time.’
‘Guns.’ Vanni lumbered off towards the house. ‘I want a weapon. I’ll show you if you want.’ He glanced back and there was a sudden look of guilt on his face. ‘I’m sorry. I never meant …’
Paolo caught up and put his arm around him before he could fall to the freezing ground. They made their awkward way past the looms into the shadows of the house.
Vanni struggled into the kitchen and stood by the table, hands on the top to support himself, and nodded at the back door.
‘There, Paolo. Go now. You don’t need to be here. It’s me they want. The Jew. The partisan. Not you.’ He came and hugged him. ‘Go, brother. You are my brother. I want you to live. Go out that door, steal a boat, or run and just keep running. I’ll make such a noise here, put up such a fight—’
‘This is my home. It’s the only place I know.’
Vanni shook him, hard, eyes wide with anger.
‘Then find another one. Go and live, for God’s sake. It’s not your war. It never was. We never should have brought this to your door.’
He shook his head.
‘Don’t say that. You brought life. You brought … colour. Where there was nothing.’ Paolo kissed him on the cheek, a tender kiss, that of a lover. ‘Until you I was barely alive.’
‘Then …’ There were tears in Vanni’s eyes. ‘Then I murder you too.’
Paolo pulled himself free of their tangle of arms and walked towards the back window.
‘I hid all the guns downstairs in the cellar. It seemed safer.’
‘I never saw you do that. When—?’
‘When you were sleeping. We can use them. Together.’
He rolled back the carpet, lifted the hidden trap door, gave Vanni the torch from the table by the sink.
‘Quick now. You first.’ He was walking worse than ever. ‘If you can manage.’
‘I can get down. You’ll need to help me up. When they come …’
‘When they come we fight.’
There was a long moment of silence, then Vanni nodded and hobbled down the steep and narrow wooden staircase, gripping the banister, shining the torch beam ahead of him.
Paolo stayed where he was and watched every step until he reached the bottom.
There was hardly any light from the tracery window. The beam of the torch flashed round through the dark.
‘Where are they?’ Vanni cried. ‘I see nothing here but the table and your things. Where—’
‘Forgive me,’ Paolo called down the steps.
He slammed the trap door shut and kicked the carpet over the tiles. In his parents’ bedroom he found Vanni’s ID in the drawer next to the bedside table. The picture was old, bleached out, stained by muddy water or maybe old blood. The monochrome face of a young man at a camera, no expression, no life. He could barely recognize it as the Vanni Artom he knew at all.
Paolo tucked it in his pocket, then went to the wardrobe. The weapons were still there. He’d never moved them.
A handgun. The one with the wooden butt. He remembered how quickly Vanni had put it to work. A couple of attempts were needed but pretty soon he had shells in the magazine.
When he returned to the kitchen Vanni was yelling from the cellar, mad as hell, though the floor and the distance muffled the sound a little.
He stamped on the carpet, hard, and called out, ‘Trust me. Be quiet. Wait here. Listen. Do nothing until you hear a friendly voice. It may be a while.’
‘What the hell are you doing, Paolo?’
His voice sounded hurt and troubled, like that of a child.
‘The only thing I can think of. Please. Trust me. Stay quiet.’
There was a grunt and then no noise. He wouldn’t find it easy to climb those steep steps on his own and the trap door was too heavy to open from below. Paolo’s father said the cellar was much used when smuggling was rife in San Pietro. It was somewhere to hide … and stay invisible to the world above.
Paolo went to the kitchen drawer, took out a large knife, his mother’s favourite for cooking, sat down at the chair and breathed deeply. Pain was something he’d always hated. In his heart he felt he’d been a coward all his life, in the doctor’s surgery, at the dentist, at school when one of the other kids was bullying him.
But that was before, when he was young. He felt the sharp edge, steeled himself, then stabbed the point hard into his right leg. The pain was terrible for a moment, and the blood came quick and free. When he felt he could bear trying to walk he got up, lurched over to the sink, washed the knife and placed it back in the drawer. There was a rag there. He wiped away the blood from the wound and examined it in the light from the window. It was fresh and livid, half a finger long and deep. The best he could manage. It would have to do.
By the time he hobbled to the front of the house it was obvious the Germans had worked out where they’d fled. There were distant voices, shouts beyond the wall, sounding over the broken statues.
Paolo struggled to the first loom along, Chiara’s, his father’s before that, and pulled a stool to the side. The template was still set for Salvatore Bruno’s banner. There was silk left to make maybe another ten centimetres or more. He touched the old wood, remembered the lessons he’d had over the years. Made the thing work one last time, then repeated to himself the little refrain he’d learned, from his parents and the summer birds darting across the garden, tiny beads of colour.
Si-dah-si-dah-si-dah-sichi-si-piu.
Shots. He looked outside and they were firing at the wooden door. Then boots kicked a way through. German soldiers. The Venetian cop with them too. The one who shot Mika, now looking for his second trophy.
Past the frosty glass of the conservatory they began advancing through the fruit trees, crouched low, expecting attack, a sight he found amusing. The cop stayed to one side, his face as immobile as the stone features of the shattered statues.
He got up from the Jacquard loom, stroked its threads as if playing the last notes on a lyre, walked to the door and stood there, a ghostly figure behind the murky glass.
Si-dah-si-dah-si-dah-sichi-si-piu.
The whispered words just came.
A second later they started shooting. A couple of bullets flew through the old conservatory windows, ringing around the looms, ricocheting off the back wall. Then more.
Si-dah-si-dah-si-dah-sichi-si-piu.
The sporadic gunfire turned into a volley, getting closer, quicker.
Glass fragments flew all around him as, beyond the windows, dark shapes approached.
He tried to think of a prayer but there was none. There were no words any more. Only a single deed.
Paolo Uccello held the gun away from him, fingers in reverse around the guard, opened his eyes wide, stared straight down the little circle of the barrel and, with a thumb that didn’t shake, pressed the trigger.
PART SIX
There was no way I could sleep after I read that last chapter of Nonno Paolo’s bleak and bloody tale.
To make things worse the camera shop had delivered the prints from my film. All the story’s locations sat in front of me at the breakfast table, sharp, inviting, real. He kept a small library of local history books. I was able to find photos of the city fifty, a hundred years ago too, along with some paintings as far back as Canaletto. It shouldn’t have been a surprise but so many of them were unchanged over the centuries. Little figures, sometimes painted, sometimes black a
nd white in old photos, scurried across the cobbles. Generation upon generation of dead Venetians. I was starting to think my head might soon burst under all the strain.
Chiara turned up to check on the house. Again, I begged her to tell me what had happened in the Giardino degli Angeli during the war. She looked at me alarmed and asked if I was feeling well. Didn’t ask why I wanted to know. Didn’t tell me anything either, just that she needed to speak to my father about my state of mind. I pleaded, I started to cry. So did she and that only made matters worse. She kissed me, hugged me, then went for her bag and jacket. Nonno Paolo was, she said, a good man and that was all there was to know. Before I could blurt out another question she announced she was going to stay with a relative on Burano for a while, just as she had a lifetime before.
The idea of getting into the Giardino degli Angeli still nagged, partly because I wasn’t sure I dared. If I waited till the afternoon I could probably get inside our old patch of land by San Pietro. Maybe if I crossed that wooden bridge, stepped through the doors the Germans had broken down with their gunfire and boots, walked through the conservatory, past three dusty Jacquard looms, into the little house … there I’d see a bloodied Mika, Vanni and the man I’d assumed to be my grandfather, Paolo Uccello.
Alive. Dead. I didn’t know.
What was the difference? I was beginning to feel I was part of someone else’s dream. A dark and secret history that was somehow meant to be shared with me alone. Until I was able to sit down with Nonno Paolo and ask him what, exactly, had come to pass I’d never understand.
After Chiara left I called Dad in England. A woman answered the phone and said he wasn’t there. After that I don’t remember how I got to the hospital at all, whether it was on foot or I took a boat. But I made it, wondering if Chiara was right and perhaps I was ill, and went up to the reception desk just before ten as usual.
It was the same woman I’d seen all week. Middle-aged, kindly, a little officious in the way hospital people are.
‘I’ve come to see Grandpa,’ I said and showed her my ID. ‘It’s OK. I know the way by now.’
She put out a hand as if to say stay there, reached for the phone, then started talking to someone so quietly I couldn’t hear.
When she finished, I said again, ‘I can find my own way, thank you.’
‘I’m sorry, Nico,’ the woman said. ‘We all are. He was a lovely man. We called your father in England during the night to tell him. He’s flying back right now.’
Hours vanished, stuck in an overheated waiting room, no one talking to me. Why? Death was for grown-ups and I was just an embarrassed kid waiting to be told what to do, how to feel. At the end of the afternoon my father arrived, bleary-eyed, and asked straight away if I’d gone in to see him.
Of course not. I’d got enough corpses in my head already.
He was soon in tears. So was I. We found ourselves clinging to one another again for the second time that week and I can still, after all these years, feel the mournful sense of agony and loss we shared. Now there was an adult on the premises a doctor came in and offered his condolences and all the kind of talk I guess you get on these occasions. A nurse brought us coffee we barely touched. There were papers my father had to deal with, forms to be signed. Nonno Paolo had suffered a heart attack around midnight. It was so sudden he was gone by the time the medical staff were alerted by the cardiac monitor. They’d done their best to revive him but it was impossible. He’d been very weak in any case. The end wasn’t far away and it seemed he passed away quickly and peacefully, in no pain. Perhaps even in his sleep, not that anyone was to know. So many of the deaths that were still in my head were public, violent, witnessed out in the open. Yet, after a life more eventful than anyone might have guessed, Nonno Paolo had slipped away quietly and no one even noticed until he was gone. Somehow this sounded like the man I was only now coming to know.
Dad left the room and made some calls. To Mum in England, who’d always got on well with him. To Chiara. To a funeral service too, I imagine, since that trip across the water to San Michele, in a shiny black barge, all of us dressed in mourning suits, needed to be arranged. All the practicalities were beyond me. Beyond Dad too, I think. He looked drained by everything. None of this should have been a shock. Still, it was. A dreadful one for us all. A gaping wound had opened in our lives and just then I couldn’t imagine how it might ever possibly heal.
I sat in that waiting room staring out at the silvery lagoon and the cemetery island with its white fortress walls, the boats running along the waterfront from Cannaregio to the left, past Fondamente Nove, the hospital, then on to the Arsenale and San Pietro. Past the Giardini degli Angeli too, of course, a place that now, more than ever, filled me with a bleak kind of dread.
By six in the evening it seemed the calls and the paperwork were done. A more senior doctor came in and repeated much of the detail his younger colleague had given us. Hospitals seemed to like to tell you the same thing over and over again, not that it made any difference.
Then the man looked at me and said, ‘Would you like to see him too?’
‘No,’ I said straight off.
‘It’s alright,’ the doctor said. ‘I understand.’
I doubt that, I thought.
Dad got to his feet.
‘Wait here, Nico. I need to. One more time. Stay here. I won’t be long.’
When he was gone a nurse I recognized, one who’d been there a lot around Nonno Paolo, came in and closed the door behind her. She checked through the glass partition to make sure we were alone.
‘How are you doing?’ she asked as she took the chair next to mine.
‘I don’t know.’
She touched my hand and smiled.
‘We never do. I see people pass away here all the time. It doesn’t matter how much you know it’s coming. The end always comes as a shock. If you want I can find a priest—’
‘I don’t need a priest.’
I hoped I hadn’t said that too abruptly. She sounded a kind and thoughtful woman. There was an envelope in her hands.
‘Yesterday, after you left, he asked for me. He wrote this for you. He said I was to pass it on if anything happened. I gather you two were talking. There was something he was worried about. Worried he wouldn’t have the time to tell you. They know sometimes. Doesn’t matter what we see or don’t see on our monitors. They know.’
She waved the envelope. There was his handwriting on the front.
To my beloved grandson, Nico.
Just an ordinary envelope. A single sheet of paper by the looks of it. And something else inside. Small, metal. It felt like a key.
‘Thanks.’
‘He said it was for you alone. Not your father. He wasn’t to know.’ She smiled, then shrugged. ‘He made me promise.’
‘He’s … he was very persuasive when he wanted to be.’
‘He said it was a gift. Not that you might know it for years. Your grandfather was a charming man. I’m sure you miss him.’
I waved the envelope, tried to smile and thanked her. Then stuffed it into my jacket.
An hour later we walked home. Dad talked about the funeral and how now was a time for the family to be together. As we crossed the Rialto, he told me the deal was done in London the previous evening, hours, it seemed, before Nonno Paolo died. The House of Uccello had become part of some giant American corporation. A brand. That was what he’d wanted. We weren’t just rich. We’d never need to worry about money again – not that we had in my lifetime anyway. And we were free, both of us. Free to choose whatever path we felt like in the years to come.
To mark the moment we ate in Grandfather’s favourite restaurant behind the fish market: oysters and turbot and saffron panna cotta. I barely tasted a thing and stuck to Coke while Dad finished his bottle of Pinot Grigio. Angelo, the ancient waiter who’d served us for as long as I could remember, burst into tears when we told him. So did many people over the days to come. Nonno Paolo wasn’t just a fixture f
or me.
Back in my room in the palazzo, Dad downstairs making calls all round the world, about the funeral, about the change in the business too, I opened the letter.
A small, old, silver key fell out. Accompanying it was a short note in a hand so shaky I could feel he was close to death when he wrote it. And that he must have known it too.
Nico
I told you that last chapter was the final piece in the strange jigsaw of my life. I regret to say, for once, I lied. There are more pieces to this tale and you need to see them in order to fully understand it. Use this key and open the locked drawer at the bottom of my desk in the mansard. There you’ll see why I was unable to pass this final part of the story on to you here in hospital.
If you’re reading this rather than have me tell you in person it means I’m gone. Death comes to us all. Weep and mourn a little but not too much. You have a life of your own to make. Look back for a little while and then look resolutely forward.
Know that I love you and your father both, my dear grandson in particular because there’s something in your manner, quiet, thoughtful, curious, sensitive, fragile at times too, that I recognize and admire. It’s because I love and trust you I’ve passed this burden on. Not that you may appreciate this now. Perhaps you resent me for marring your teenage summer with this tale of blood and madness.
If so I apologize, but sometimes pain is necessary. It reminds us we’re alive.
Enough of cryptic mysteries. They will reveal themselves as they see fit.
Farewell, dear Nico. Your bright and affectionate presence has lightened the weight of these recent years. I am only sorry we ran out of time. But then we always do.
Your loving grandfather.
The first thing I thought was: you didn’t sign your name.
Nearly midnight, after more tears and shared memories with Dad, a large grappa for him, a tiny one for me, I went to my room. When the place was silent I sneaked upstairs to Nonno Paolo’s mansard study.
A part of me was desperate to see what was in that drawer.
Another part feared it more than anything.