But I can’t feel any benevolence towards him after the past few days. After working side by side all these months, the conversations we’ve had, he surely can’t believe I’m without emotion. I look up at him and say: ‘I feel for any mother who loses a son, whatever side they align to.’ I force my lips upwards slightly, as an antidote to the bitterness inside me.
For once I can see beyond the glare of his glasses, into his pupils which are locked on mine. For a second I think they – and he – are somewhere else.
‘Quite,’ he says. ‘The sooner we resolve this the better.’
Resolve what? And what does he mean? For the Allies and the Resistance to capitulate entirely? I think he’s far more intelligent than either Hitler or Mussolini so surely he can’t believe that we true Italians will take all of this … this destruction of our country, lying down. But he’s back to his desk and, once again, Cristian De Luca is like a blank page of a book.
25
A New Hope
Venice, December 2017
Luisa gets to take her cruise down the Grand Canal on leaving the Jewish Museum, this time in daylight. But it’s no less spectacular, lined as it is with buildings whose art resides on the outside with elegant tiling the colour of pale pistachio ice cream or great windows of honeycomb glass, panes so delicately made. As the water washes the lower brickwork, pocked and dappled with wear and tear, it’s hard to imagine how five- and six-storey buildings don’t simply topple into the water. The vaporetto stops frequently, sputtering from one side of the canal to the other at a low speed, allowing a good view inside the beautiful palazzos – more so where the rooms are lit by vast, ornate chandeliers. Luisa’s imagination runs riot at the parties held along this stretch of water over the centuries: the riches and the debauchery, the relationships contained within. She thinks then of the houses along this stretch commandeered by the Nazi elite, and how many frightened refugees or native Venetians were hidden in their bowels or attics while party-goers twittered around them.
The bright winter sun of late morning, though, only reflects happier times and, seeing scores of lovers arm in arm, she wishes Jamie was by her side. His text the night before had been much more relaxed, joking about her finding an Italian beau as a guide and running off into the sunset. Jamie has never been the jealous type, always celebrated their equal independence, so she knows it truly is in good humour. She feels that they are at peace at least.
Luisa travels the entire length of the canal, and then turns tail aboard another vaporetto, this time heading for Giudecca, via the imposing church and tower of San Giorgio Maggiore, and then on towards the island of Giudecca itself. The waterfront at the Zitelle stop is shrouded in shade, and though Luisa can see some colourful café fronts, there’s no doubting its reputation as the main island’s poorer relation. Once Luisa gets out her map and follows the quiet streets behind the imposing Zitelle church, though, she’s pleasantly surprised. It has less splendour, certainly, but more realism. It’s where Venetians live in peace, in a combination of old and new blocks.
The Institute of Resistance, too, is a misnomer. To Luisa the name itself conjures an image of a stout, functional block, dull by Venetian standards. Villa Heriot, home to the Institute, is anything but. Set in green landscaped gardens, which remind her more of a holiday once spent in Verona, it’s a beautiful double-fronted building with a wraparound veranda and elegant white pillars, its windows in a palazzo style. Perhaps the former home of a wealthy merchant in past centuries, she thinks. Certainly, it’s a setting that matches the best of Venetian grandeur across the water.
Signor Volpe is hovering in the lofty entrance hall, amid the scalloped and sumptuous fittings. He spies her immediately, perhaps from the way in which she scans the space, less like a grazing tourist and more like a seeker.
‘Signora Belmont?’ His face quizzes hers for the right reaction, but only for a second. ‘How lovely to meet you!’
Giulio Volpe is almost exactly how she pictured him. Perhaps mid-thirties, middling height and build, thick dark hair and bright eyes – though blue instead of her imagined brown. He has the beard of an academic, short and well groomed, and although he is wearing plain trousers and a round-neck jumper, a pale blue shirt neatly shown at the neck, everything about him oozes Italian style, even down to his shoes, which are polished and elegant. A British man in the same dress could never look as sophisticated, Luisa thinks. The aftershave that is piquant rather than sickly wafts up as he shakes her hand enthusiastically with a bright white smile. He has perfect teeth, and Luisa finds herself already a little bit in love with the man who might provide the answers she’s been looking for.
Signor Volpe – ‘Please, call me Giulio’ – leads her not up the sweeping, Cinderella-style central staircase, but out into the garden and through to what must have been a smaller guest cottage, with the same, ornate shell. Inside, it’s cosier and functional in appearance, but still retains more elegance than any office she’s ever worked in back home. The walls are hung with old posters, turned sepia with age, bearing words now familiar to Luisa: ‘FASCISMO!’ in bold, black type. The furnishings are strictly twenty-first-century office vogue though, and on top of a photocopier there lies a grey, tiger-striped cat basking in the window sunshine, who mews at Giulio upon entry.
‘Meet Melodie,’ he says, fussing at her ears. ‘She’s our self-invited guest, but she’s good company when there’s no one else here. And she clearly loves books.’
She would have to, Luisa thinks. There are wall-to-ceiling bookcases, texts vying for every bit of space, with small tabs of notepaper sticking out from between the pages. A truly used library.
He offers coffee – a decent cup from a small machine in the corner of the office – and seems keen to get started. Luisa opens up Daisy and shows Giulio what she has: a combination of carefully photographed documents, and a selection of the original precious photographs she’s chanced bringing across. The sealed file and her bag never left her side the entire journey from Bristol.
Giulio’s face lights up at handling the fibrous edges of the photographs, as if there’s treasure under his fingers. He dons a pair of reading glasses – smart, modish frames – and then reaches for a magnifying glass. He’s clearly looking at, but then beyond, the faces for clues of time and place, where the moment was frozen in time.
‘So the only name you have is Stella?’ he confirms. ‘No Italian surname?’
‘No, unfortunately,’ Luisa says. ‘I’ve looked at my mother’s birth certificate, but it only states her mother’s former name was Hawthorn. I don’t think that can be right, but I suppose it’s possible she was married before my grandfather. She wrote under the name of Hawthorn and his name was Benetto. Giovanni Benetto.’
Luisa sees a fire stoking in Giulio Volpe’s eyes. This is his domain – the subject of his doctoral thesis – and she gets the feeling that what he doesn’t know about the Venetian Resistance can’t be told. He’s clearly delighted to be playing the role of detective.
‘Well, let’s get about finding her,’ he says, with another bright flash of his teeth.
Giulio leads Luisa into the basement, trailed by Melodie and her mewing, and immediately she is hit by a familiar feeling; the same musty odour of lives stamped onto paper, the dry yet damp smell of her mother’s attic on her first discovery of the hidden typewriter. Her nose twitches all over again.
Giulio pulls out large, flat drawers from the freestanding cabinets that fill the basement and takes out his own files of photographs. Luisa’s heart rises and then sinks at the hundreds, possibly thousands, of photographs they will need to comb through to find just one image. Is her grandmother hiding among them? She feels excited and apprehensive all at once.
Wordlessly, Giulio hands her a second magnifying glass, and they begin scouring the sea of faces, Luisa’s own clutch of photographs between them as they scrutinise. She’s brought the original of ‘S and C’ in San Marco, but Giulio concentrates on an earlier picture, w
here Stella’s face is younger, her hair loose and of a more free style. She’s in a group of friends standing on some steps, her arms casually around two men on either side. Without falling into stereotypes, they look like partisans – their dress suggesting non-conformity. To the right, you can just see the edge of some military hardware, a gun base perhaps.
Luisa and Giulio scrutinise for a good half an hour, his eyes scanning to and fro and his measured, concentrated breathing evident. She only issues warning growls of hunger from her stomach, regretting not grabbing some lunch before the meeting.
‘Ah ha!’ Giulio cries suddenly. ‘There she is!’
‘You’ve found her?’ Luisa’s heart bounds with surprise and relief.
Giulio looks up, almost apologetic. ‘No, not her, but someone else in the photograph,’ and Luisa’s hope sinks back into her chest.
‘One of the women here’ – and he points to a figure with a wide, engaging smile in the group picture – ‘she’s also here in our stock image.’
They peer again to check the likeness. It’s definitely her, and the label on the back of Giulio’s picture names her as ‘Mimi Brusato, partisan member’. Frustratingly, no one else in the picture is named, so her grandmother remains unidentified. Still, it is something. It also confirms to Luisa what she already strongly suspected – that her grandmother was far more than a sweet old woman who gave out the best hugs.
They continue surveying for another hour or so, and while Giulio pulls aside several photographs as possibly connected with Mimi Brusato, she remains their sole lead. Stella Hawthorn is still, for now, a ghost of sorts.
The array of new pictures, however, are a joy to Luisa – all in black and white, and she paints them with her own palette, imagining the colours of war in Venice as anything but ashen. Even amid the tragedies she’s read of, they clearly tried to enjoy life, relish the bonds of friends and family, which could not be broken by Nazi rule. Despite rationing, the women were fashionable and vibrant; the men too in their shabby-chic of the partisan ‘uniform’. The fuzziness of the photographs may well have disguised a good deal of darning, the make-do-and-mend of wartime Britain, but Venetians clearly worked hard at maintaining their ingrained elegance.
Giulio puts down his glass and stretches his back into an upright position, rubbing at his eyes behind his glasses.
‘I think perhaps we’ve exhausted these for today,’ he says, and Luisa is both disappointed and relieved – her spine and stomach are complaining in equal measure. Yet it’s the closest she’s been so far in plucking at one edge of her grandmother’s other life. She feels it as tantalisingly close.
‘I’ll do some searching of our computer archives this afternoon,’ Giulio says. ‘In the meantime, I can give you a few locations to visit. Sadly, there are no survivors still living that I know of. We have some testimonies of Venetians before they passed away, but they’re all in Italian. And there are some memoirs of children, but there’s little about the workings of the Resistance in those.’
He notes Luisa’s slight disappointment. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll find her,’ he reassures. ‘She is in here somewhere. I can feel it.’
It’s not been a wasted afternoon, although Luisa still feels she is relying whole-heartedly on Giulio and not her own dogged skills in research. She’s desperate to play detective in her own way. Still, he seems more than happy to help, the persistence of a proverbial dog with a bone that denotes a true historian.
She walks a little on the small streets around Giudecca – it’s quiet, the odd man or woman hobbling with a shopping bag, and she can hear the faint chatter of a school playground somewhere. But it’s peaceful and she tries to picture herself on a satellite map – on a tiny island in the middle of a lagoon in the midst of a vast sea. It all feels quite bizarre.
She’s pulled back from space by the beeping of her mobile – a text from Jamie: Hi Sherlock, how are you doing? Any news or progress? Ring me later. Love you xx. Texts are generally poor emotional conduits but this is clear – he’s in a good mood. Perhaps he’s had a callback or the promise of a part. A food stop in a small café on the waterfront cements Luisa’s fondness for Giudecca even more; the best minestrone and arancini rice balls she’s ever tasted, coating her taste buds and comforting her stomach.
With what light is left, she visits several of the memorials on the main island that Giulio has pointed her towards. She stares for an age at the poignant bronze figure cast on the Riva dei Sette Martiri – Monument to the Martyrs – a lone woman lying prostrate, half in and half out of the approaching tide, her feet limp, not serene but cruelly left for dead. As with the names at the Jewish Museum, Luisa tries to imagine the woman as anything other than stagnant – the sons and daughters or grandchildren she might have had, the lives that would have been fulfilled, were it not for the struggle. With the day’s emotions and frustrations, Luisa can’t help the tears streaming and finds herself scrabbling for a tissue.
Yet she is lucky. One thing she’s certain of – something her own memory, her very existence in fact, can confirm – is that Grandma Stella survived the maelstrom of war. Even if she is lost for now, she was not forever, and that thought replaces the ache in Luisa’s heart with warmth.
She is sitting on a bench, documenting the Venetian atmosphere with Daisy for company – this time in a beautiful square she simply happens upon – when her mobile rings. A number from within Italy: it can only be one person.
‘Hello Giulio,’ Luisa says, slightly guardedly. Is he ringing to say he’s reached the end of the road, that Stella Hawthorn exists nowhere in his records?
‘Luisa,’ he says urgently, unable to hide the excitement in his voice. ‘I think I’ve found her. I think I know who your grandmother was.’
26
Revenge
Venice, early August 1944
The city is still reeling from the explosion when its hackles are raised again, and this time the consequences threaten to radiate across the entire city. A German sentry has gone missing from the waterside, the Nazi command claiming he’s been murdered. I get wind of the news on my way to work, seeing Paolo gesturing wildly at me from the café’s entrance.
‘The Nazis are saying there will be retributions – worse than last time – that they will teach the partisans and any collaborators a lesson.’ His young face rarely adopts a worried look but today it does. ‘Watch yourself, Stella. Keep your eyes and ears open.’
Both San Marco and the Reich office are strangely subdued, and for once I would rather tolerate Breugal’s overt anger than hear nothing at all.
‘Is something going on?’ I ask Marta innocently, as Captain Klaus strides in and then out of Breugal’s office within minutes, clutching a file he’s collected from the inner sanctum.
‘I don’t know,’ Marta replies. ‘There’s talk of something being planned, but nothing has come out of his majesty’s office. He left some time ago.’
I’m more worried that Cristian is also absent. He’s difficult to read, but there are times I can at least assess something from his manner towards me. What’s the point in being here, in the lion’s den, when I can’t glean any information, enough to prevent at least some of the horror about to happen?
In the end, the entire Resistance is caught off guard by the malice of the Nazis’ actions. They are intent on teaching Venetians a lesson, and ‘an eye for an eye’ is no longer enough. In another of the mass culls the Nazis and fascists have become practised at, they trespass into people’s homes and round up a group of innocents, well over a hundred in total, with a further three hundred and fifty as witnesses – including women and children. The next morning, they are all marched in a great swathe to the Riva dell’Impero. It’s a stone’s throw from where I grew up and I can picture them all crowded on the waterfront, unaware of what horror they will soon be witnessing. They might be looking out for a large vessel to draw up alongside the wharf and transport them away from everything they know and love – families, fiancés, pare
nts – quaking at the thought of travelling east to the camps.
Instead, their penance for being Italian is to spectate on cold-blooded murder; in the early morning glare, seven young prisoners are brought out, tied together in a line by ropes, their faces sporting the purple, swollen marks of torture from either the Black Brigade or the Gestapo. The stronger and less beaten ones hold up the weakened, determined to keep their heads high, despite the fear doubtless coursing through their bodies. Children of all ages are forced to view these men’s fates as the consequence of defying the Nazi regime – a swift, certain death. There’s no trial or evidence, or even pretence from the Nazis that they have captured anyone truly responsible for the dead sentry. These seven men in a line carry their guilt simply by being Italian.
They are executed one by one, each fatal bullet echoing in the near silence, each body falling and pulling on the rope to yank the others towards their eventual place in the earth. Men, some still young enough to be called boys, slump as their bodies are pitted with bullets, the witnesses scarred by being forced to watch the wasteful snuffing out of lives. This is when no one can accuse Venetians of having a ‘soft war’.
It’s likely I’m just waking in my comfortable bed, contemplating the day ahead, when the volley of bullets rips through the air and the bodies fall. I hear later that Breugal addressed the assembled crowd, warning of increased reprisals if the killing of his personnel continued. No doubt he puffed out his ample chest, his buttons almost popping from the intense pressure, and felt proud of his actions. Worse still, the onlookers are taken to the Santa Maggiore jail as hostages, and every male aged six to sixty they come across is also rounded up and taken, as Breugal sees good his threat to punish anyone who defies him.
I’m shocked to hear the gruesome details later from an eyewitness who saw it all from her rooftop. She is red-eyed and still shaking – with disbelief and sorrow, but with sheer rage too. She wants to talk, make sense of it, and paints a graphic description of the horror.
The Secret Messenger Page 19