Luisa underestimates the orange cocktail – the alcohol marries with the fatigue from her early morning flight and she finds herself stumbling a little on getting up, head woozy rather than spinning, a heavy feeling in her limbs. She needs to eat, clearly. She’s too tired to search for long and settles herself in a small restaurant at the smaller end of the campo, noting there are Italian speakers in its midst as well as tourists, and orders a bowl of pasta. Whether it’s the holiday feeling or not, it tastes amazing – the flavour is ‘pomodoro’ and the pesto almost certainly fresh. It wakes her taste buds and feeds into her limbs a little. No wonder Italians rarely eat anything other than their own cuisine, she thinks.
The food is restorative but not magical. It’s only eight o’clock, but Luisa is beyond even the twinkle of the Grand Canal – it’s been there a long time, she says to herself, and it’s not going anywhere. While she is loath to waste even a minute in the city she’s already smitten with, common sense wins out and she heads back to her apartment. She needs to be fresh for the real fact-finding in the morning.
21
The City Cauldron
Venice, July 1944
Early July beats down its consistent Mediterranean heat on Venice and the swell in population, sporadic water shortages and increase in squadrons of aircraft over the lagoon create a cauldron in the city, pressed and heated from all sides. Unrest is inevitable. And it comes.
I wake to a hum of noise through my open window, along with a slight breeze. It’s nothing specific, just general unease, but it’s certainly not the light clipping of feet I’m used to hearing below my window as people make their way to work or the market. A slight increase in pace, maybe, and the sound of murmurings designed not to be heard. From my window, the little square looks the same, cut by a shaft of bright sunlight that signals we’re in for another day when the city’s buildings will be baked and the water warmed to ooze its sulphurous smell. But the feeling carried on the air makes me get up and dress earlier than normal. I walk the few steps to Paolo’s for coffee – and gossip.
Paolo knows what’s happening, of course he does, but waits until my coffee is poured and I’m sitting at one of the back tables before he dips his voice to a whisper. There’s been a fascist raid in the Cannaregio, the ghetto district, and five locals have been killed – butchered – as a reprisal for the shooting of an officer and one, maybe two, fascist guards.
My heart stops a second for Vito, but Paolo would know already if he were involved. Instead, my head and heart starts to pound for those sacrificed innocents, possibly someone I’ve had contact with in these past months. It’s likely they had nothing to do with the shootings, merely happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the eyeline of angry fascists with a score to settle. How will their families feel, knowing the victims were not even true casualties of war, but unfortunate bystanders? Your aunt, or brother or mother – real people with love and laughter and a history – classed as collateral damage?
I make my way to work feeling utterly winded and depressed. I wonder how many episodes like this one there will be before we in the Resistance finally make real ground against the evil. True victory. When I arrive, Cristian only glances at me, wearing a slight frown as he rushes by.
It’s a week or so later when the heat of war and summer combines to create a real furnace of the city. I wake that morning to a definite scent in my nose – the acrid smell of burning. I see the plume of smoke above the orange roofs before I reach Paolo and his font of knowledge. The fire is in the Luce Institute, a branch of the fascists’ revered propaganda machine, which churns out endless films of smiling generals strutting alongside bronzed and proud Italians. Visiting dignitaries to Venice are a particular focus for their cameras. The building, it seems, has been razed to the ground, a vast spiral of black smoke rising into the clear sky near San Marco.
As I make my way to work, the Military Police are out in force, audible several streets away as their boots clomp in rhythm on the flagstones. Aware of the recent reprisals, Venetians will be holding a collective breath: if this is a partisan act of arson, will it ignite another dangerous game of tit-for-tat? Fascist and Nazi guards will be ferreting for the partisan culprits, raiding any suspected homes hiding them. And again, only one word comes to my mind: Vito. After our last conversation, and the rumours I’ve been hearing since, this type of attack is something Vito would relish.
As with every major upset, Cristian is in and out of Breugal’s office all morning, his face etched with concern. He barely acknowledges me, and I’m glad, because I feel my face is betraying my angst. I’m thinking constantly of my younger brother: I need to find out where he is, what he’s done. I’m only relieved there are no reports of any casualties, and so no immediate spark to the anger that would lead to more innocent deaths.
I make excuses at lunch that I need to take medicine to my mother – Cristian waves away my request in his need to calm Breugal’s fresh fury about incompetent troops. I walk hurriedly, feeling the heat beat down and trying to ally it with the winter smell of cinders in the air. Our glorious lagoon sparkles as if untouched by the events and, once again, I love its ever-changing and yet enduring nature more than ever. Its solidity revives my spirits for a while.
Mama is home, as she always is at lunchtime.
‘Stella! What are you doing here?’ she greets me with real cheer. ‘How lovely. Sit yourself down – I have a little cheese put by.’
I feel the cool echo of the air inside the house; I can hear no one else within its walls.
‘I had an errand nearby,’ I lie guiltily. ‘Thought I’d say hello.’
I sit at the kitchen table while Mama lays out what she has. ‘How’s Papa, and Vito?’ I ask lightly.
‘Papa? He’s fine. Working too hard – taken on some boat-building work in his spare time, but he’s not really fit enough if you ask me—’
‘And Vito?’
She looks up sharply. I’d thought the way I cut in was innocent enough, but maybe I don’t enquire after my brother as often as I think I do. Or with that much fervour.
‘We haven’t seen him the past week,’ Mama says gravely. ‘He sent a message that he’s staying with a friend, but honestly, Stella, we don’t know what he’s doing. I’ve been worried sick.’
What she says almost convinces me Vito is involved – heavily embroiled – in this latest act of Resistance sabotage. One half of me applauds it: fighting for the Venice we love is admirable and it’s what I myself am doing, albeit more subtly. But I know Vito’s impetuous nature and his attraction to the thrill of danger. Add that to the danger of a raid, and he could get himself captured and killed. If he isn’t already in the Santa Maggiore jail.
‘Hasn’t Papa seen him at work, at the docks?’
‘The day before yesterday,’ Mama says, ‘but only across the yard. He didn’t get to talk to him. I worry about the people he hangs around with.’
So do I. Each battalion has tight codes of conduct, overseen by a hierarchy of ranking officers, but a band of patriotic young men with a tendency for rashness … Light the flame underneath them and who knows what it will produce? A firestorm, perhaps?
I try to murmur reassurances to Mama, but even she can see they are without weight. I need to locate Sergio Lombardi and find out what I can. And soon.
Back in the office, the afternoon crawls slowly towards five p.m., and I have to concentrate simply on shutting down my overactive imagination of Vito’s grim future. Several shots are fired, the noise resonating through the open windows – it’s often just warning shots from jumpy patrols, but I flinch with each one, and Cristian looks at me over his glasses, adding to the wrinkles in that furrowed brow. He’s edging towards me as I pack up and leave not a minute after five, and I wonder if he will request my company for a drink after today’s excessive diplomacy with Breugal. But after our last outing together, surely he wouldn’t ask? Quite apart from the awkward end to our evening, I’m in no mood for light co
nversation or to hear his woes about the general’s petulant behaviour. I sweep out with a curt ‘Good evening’, although his isn’t likely to be any better than mine.
I’m due at the newspaper office, but I know I won’t be able to concentrate without at least trying to contact Sergio. I make my way to a safe house I know not far from the Accademia Bridge. Aside from the soot smell, there’s little to say Venice is changed since yesterday – the plume of smoke from the Luce site has dwindled to a grey mist hovering above it. The sun is still fierce and I’m perspiring under my clothes as I walk, assuming a mask of innocence as I paste on smiles for some of the familiar guards who hover in San Marco as I go in and out of work. Sometimes their recognition of me is a bonus, particularly when they give the nod and allow me to swing past the search lines without question, ignorant to the fact that there’s often a Resistance message secreted about my person. I try to ignore the accusing looks of queuing Venetians, sneering under their breath that my familiarity means I’m a collaborator, but it burns into my back. I want to shout at them: ‘I’m one of you!’ But I daren’t, of course. Always the mask is in place.
The safe house is in darkness in the alleyway, shutters closed, and I wonder if it’s been abandoned. There’s no one about so I knock hard on the outer door, surprised when an old man answers. I give the code and he lets me in, signalling for me to follow his slow pace up the stairs and behind a heavy wooden door.
‘I need to get a message to Signor Lombardi,’ I say, once the door is closed. I’m suddenly hot above my collar and he can probably feel the heat of my anxiety. ‘I need information about my brother, Vito. Vito Jilani.’
His eyes remain steadfast, but I detect just a twitch around the old man’s whiskers. He calls to another room and a young boy appears, reedy brown legs extending from his shorts. The man whispers instructions in the conch of the small ear, and the boy’s legs are in motion before I can even guess at what’s been said.
‘Do you know something?’ I ask the old man urgently.
‘Be patient,’ he says. ‘Sit. Have some water. You look hot.’
I am, so I do. He tries to make small talk, about the war, but nothing that could implicate either of us or we could be forced to spill under torture. We talk of the Allies making headway and skirt around the Venice that’s beyond his door. Then suddenly, the boy is back, breathless and mute aside from what he whispers into the old man’s ear this time.
‘It’s best you go with the boy,’ he says at last. ‘Signor Lombardi has approved it.’
‘Where?’ I say. I desperately want news of Vito, but bulletins of a different kind await me in Giudecca and I know that they will worry if I am much longer, wonder what’s happened to me.
‘It’s close by,’ he says. ‘Go now. The patrols are busy elsewhere for a while.’
The small boy looks at me with huge brown eyes and smiles a gappy grin. He’s alive with the subversive activity, bred with partisan blood.
‘Thank you,’ I say to the old man, who waves us away.
The boy trots beside me silently, offering up his hand so we at least look like mother and son, or aunt and nephew. He’s been well trained – almost since the cradle, clearly. We walk down several streets and over bridges, into an area of the Cannaregio I’ve not been to before.
Wordlessly, we take turns in scouting around us for patrols, or even a tail. In a courtyard of houses we climb the outer stairs to a middle floor, and the boy leads me to an indistinct door, making the familiar rapping rhythm of an ally.
He melts away before I’ve even had the chance to say thank you and I’m led into an almost darkened room, shutters closed. A face turns to me, the whites of wide eyes just visible in the gloom, and I have to squint to adjust my eyes before I realise the person in the far corner is my baby brother.
Vito hasn’t the relaxed, charmed face of our last meeting – it’s lined with worry as he turns, drawing hard on a cigarette. His surprise registers all the greater at seeing me.
‘Stella! What are you doing here?’
‘Checking you’re still alive,’ I say with slight irritation. I hug him all the same. His skin is grubby with soot and he smells of ash and old fires, like he’s been working alongside the furnaces of the Murano glass factories. Except he hasn’t.
Whoever owns this safety nest retreats to other rooms and leaves us alone, and I sit.
‘Vito, what’s been going on?’ I look him directly in the eyes, leaving him no room to turn or laugh the question away. This is his sister leading the interrogation and, much like when we were children, he knows I can see through any lie.
‘You don’t want to know,’ he says, ‘really, you don’t – for your own safety.’ Then his mouth breaks into a broad smile. ‘But it’s caused them a real headache, hasn’t it?’
Typical Vito. Masking his genuine fear with humour, except the shake in his hands is a firm betrayal, cigarette ash slipping to the floor.
‘So what are you going to do now?’ I ask. ‘The Black Brigade will be out looking. Do they know names, have they arrested anyone?’
We both know the gravity of just one of his group being captured – other names will be beaten and tortured out of them, Mussolini’s Black Brigade having a specialist skill for both extraction and inhumanity.
‘I don’t know, that’s what my lieutenant is trying to discover,’ he says. ‘Until then, I have to lie low.’ A sudden thought comes into his head. ‘Will you get word to Mama and Papa that I’m safe?’
I’m unsure about ‘safe’ but I promise that I will tell our parents. Then he makes me pledge to stay away from him, not to come back. Vito is suddenly far from his jokey self.
‘Stella, you take enough cha … make enough contribution as it is. Don’t get involved in this. The Resistance will look after me. You have to trust them. I do.’
We say goodbye and this time he hugs me back with a tight need, no throwaway grin as I draw away. We both know that in this stage of the war, it might be the last time we see each other. All the arguments and irritations of our childhood are forgotten as he squeezes my hand, and I can smell the burned residue on my fingers as I wipe away a stray tear on leaving.
There’s still time to get to Giudecca and do my own job within the Resistance – my insides are twisting at Vito’s predicament, but I’m also filled with resolve. I walk the back streets towards the Zattere and arrive just in time for the vaporetto. Midway between the blocks of land, we stop to allow a Nazi patrol boat right of way but the delay is almost a bonus – the lagoon is spectacular, with a late, low, mandarin sun hovering above, basting San Giorgio in a mosaic of pink and orange, painting the lilting water with Picasso-esque blocks of colour. I think I could stay here forever, midway between shores, between one life and another.
But there is business waiting, and it has none of the beauty of a Venetian summer’s evening. News of partisan executions in the north has reached us and Arlo has word from the brigade command to counter it with news of the Luce fire, although I have to couch my language carefully – there’s no direct claim it was a partisan act, only a veiled supposition. It’s what the paper is to lead on.
I take the flimsy cover off my typewriter but, for once, it gives me none of the comfort it has in past years. Each tap of the keys drives Vito’s angst-ridden face in front of me; I pause frequently and even Arlo looks in wonder at my slow progress in completing the story. There are few hard facts, so my usual talent for word embroidery is an advantage, but it’s still a challenge. We have several eyewitness accounts of the blaze and its reach across Venice, as well as permission to imply it was a Resistance operation, but that’s all. Arlo’s nod tells me I’ve done well in enhancing what little we have, in painting a picture of triumph, even though I feel – until Vito is safe – it’s anything but.
‘It’s good,’ adds Tommaso, in an effort to boost my obvious low mood. ‘It makes me want to fight harder.’ I could hug him in that moment for adding much needed cement to the cracks I’m f
eeling inside myself.
My fingers tap automatically for the rest of the night’s work and, once again, I’m thankful for my training and my machine, which seems to run like a smooth engine of its own accord. I’m simply there touching at the keys and playing along with the flowing words. As I pull out the page, the sight of my dropped e gives me a sense of belonging and calm.
Aware of my parents’ distress at Vito’s absence, I head to their house straight from Giudecca, my heels clipping with urgency to beat the curfew.
‘Going somewhere fast?’ a passing fascist patrol asks, though with a smile. Perhaps he’s bored and wants to talk. But I swing by with a jaunty ‘Just don’t want to risk being out after time’ and he nods. He doesn’t see my face switch to a stone veneer the minute I’m ahead.
I don’t, of course, tell Mama and Papa the full truth, that I’ve seen their son with genuine fear etched upon his face – only that I know Vito is safe. And I don’t add: ‘for now’.
Mama fires questions at me: How do you know? Why can’t he come home? Her questions aren’t born of ignorance – enough of her friends at church have sons in the Resistance. It’s simply her form of protection against utter heartbreak. Papa, though, is quieter. The relief in his shoulders and face tells me it’s enough to learn his son is alive and not in jail. But equally he knows that could easily change. I fend off Mama’s quizzing with tales of news on the grapevine – a friend of a friend – and she retreats to bed to sob out her distress.
Underneath the weak light at the kitchen table, Papa extends his gnarled, worker’s hands across the wood and grasps at my own fingers. The twist in his mouth relays his pain.
‘Be careful, Stella,’ he whispers. It’s all he says, the rest is in the lines chipped around his eyes in recent months. One death of a child would break him, they declare, two would send them both to the bottom of the lagoon in despair.
‘I will, Papa,’ I promise, for a second time.
The Secret Messenger Page 16