Oddly, it was Il Corvo who seemed to sense what I felt. I don’t know what he knew, or what he didn’t, but there was something similar in us – a natural fugitive. As if we both had at our core a secret and undrainable little pond of fear that all the time we struggled not to slip into.
It was this sense that we could see inside one another, and recognize familiar territory, that made me ask him, one May night, about his sister. He had never mentioned them again, his sister and his mother, but I wondered if perhaps she also was younger, more beautiful, more blessed – if that was something else we had in common. And so I asked him. I asked first if they were safe, and he nodded. Then, emboldened, I asked if she was precious. I meant, like a treasure, or a jewel, that must be safeguarded. It was a stupid question, probably, and for a moment he didn’t speak, and I didn’t think he was going to. Then he said something very strange and probably true.
He said, ‘It doesn’t matter, because they are my family.’
He turned and looked at me, sitting in the front seat of the ambulance, and his face, his long strange face with his little round glasses, was different. What I saw in it was not fear, or love, but sadness. Which I suppose may be the same thing.
‘They are my family,’ he said again, as if that answered everything.
Later, I thought I would have liked to have asked him if that was what he meant – that in times like this the bond of blood reaches beyond love, beyond notions of sacrifice, or choice. But I never got the chance, because those were the last words Il Corvo and I ever spoke.
In late May, Issa came back into the city with the news that heavy fighting had broken out on the northern slopes of the mountains. The partisan group she and Carlo handed their ‘parcels’ on to, who call themselves the Stella Rossa, had heard that there was going to be a rastrellamento – that German and Fascist troops were preparing to sweep down on them and wipe them out. This time, however, instead of fading away, they chose to turn and attack. The Nazi-Fascists lost 240 men before they retreated. The Stella Rossa lost one.
The news was electrifying – and more so the next day when we heard that after four months, almost overnight the Allies had broken out of Anzio and were pushing the Germans north towards Rome. Even I was excited. Suddenly it seemed everything was splintering around us, like a great ice block breaking up. For the first time it seemed a real possibility that the Allies might be in Florence in a matter of weeks. No one thought any more about ambulance runs or smuggling POWs in coffins – which I knew Issa had been doing – or even using German uniforms to demand the ‘transfer’ of prisoners. Now, all anyone thought about was JULIET. Any piece of information, any titbit about a gun emplacement or the movement of a column, could be crucial.
In the days that followed, the German troops began to buzz like hornets. The Banda Carita seemed to be everywhere, and the bombing got worse. Finding places to transmit from, which was already difficult, became close to impossible. Then, on 5 June, Rome was liberated. The first European capital to fall to the Allies. The next morning, on Swiss radio, we heard of the invasion of France. That night, ROMEO asked us for anything and everything we could send.
Mama, Papa, Issa, Carlo, Enrico and I met at home. The men and Issa came one by one, after dark, slipping onto the terrace like shadows. The night was warm, but we did not dare to open the windows or the shutters. We sat in the kitchen, with the pantry and the cellar doors open, in case anyone came and they needed to hide, burrow themselves away like animals in their own home.
No one wanted to stay together for longer than necessary, and there was not much time for niceties. I did not even have a chance to whisper to Issa, to ask her how she is – although I saw Mama’s eyes roving over her, deft as fingers, and I am sure she guessed. When Mama looked at me, I saw the question in her eyes, and had to look away. I was spared being Issa’s Judas by Papa’s hushed voice.
He pointed out that, despite my best efforts, it is getting harder and harder to find anywhere safe for JULIET. Using the same place twice is not possible, but every time we move, we take a risk. Papa paused and looked around the table. Then he suggested that we gather everything we can – on the city, on the fortifications, on the railways and the mines and the power stations, and send it all at once. Make one final transmission before the Allies arrive. One final love letter from JULIET to ROMEO.
When he had finished speaking, there was a silence. Mama and Papa were at either end of the table. I was sitting next to Enrico. Carlo and Issa were across from us. We had not lit a lamp, and none of us were much more than familiar shapes, outlines in the half-dark of the summer night that crept through the slats in the shutters. I was looking at my own hands, folded on the familiar wooden slab where I had sat every day after school with Emmelina, and more recently, on nights when I came home, with Mama. Where I had given the poor Banducci child sweet tea and a biscuit. Where we had sat with those first POWs barely six months earlier and described to them a plan to save their lives with some gauze and an ambulance.
‘We should vote,’ Papa said.
I knew Issa was watching me. I could feel her eyes in the dark. Papa raised his hand. Then Enrico raised his. Then Carlo, and Mama, and finally me.
We sat there in the dark like good children in a school class. No one spoke. We waited, and waited. But Issa did not raise her hand.
Finally, Papa stood up and said, ‘Well then, we have a majority. That’s decided.’
And so it is. The date is set. Two days from now, on Monday, 12 June, ROMEO will be waiting. It was left to me to find the place, and I have.
The old lady who owned the house died a week ago. I have been watching it for the last four days. There is no question, it is empty. I’ve even been there myself – it’s just off the Via dei Renai – in the morning, the evening, the afternoon. I let myself in. I walked through the rooms, looked in her closets and climbed her stairs.
It is an old house, with the servants’ quarters downstairs and the family living rooms above: dining room, sitting room, and parlours. On the next floor there are bedrooms, and above that, an attic. I was prepared, if anyone challenged me, to tell all sorts of lies. ‘She told me to find letters she had left for her family.’ ‘She gave me the china cat on the mantelpiece.’ But the place is deserted. I have seen almost no one in the street. People are packing and fleeing. Going north, trying to get out of the line of the Allied advance.
I have not told anyone, even Mama and Papa, where we are meeting. I will give the address to Issa the night before. She will, in turn, tell those who need to know. It is because of the baby, I think, that she is wary as a fox. To me she mutters that meetings are dangerous. That all of us being together in one place is too risky. I know she is remembering last February. But I have pointed out to her that even she said there were too many groups, too many people who did not owe each other enough, involved in that. This is different. I have tried to reassure her. There will be nine people, yes – but five of them are us, Carlo is the sixth, and the others are GAP members she has worked with through all of this. They have a bond of trust. And they are risking as much as we are.
I tell Issa this, and still she is not happy, but finally she has agreed that we have no choice. It is too dangerous to attempt several transmissions. Impossible, even. This will be our last. Afterwards, Enrico wants Mama and Papa to leave the city. I am trying to convince Issa that she must go with them. I will stay at the hospital, but she has more to think of now than herself.
I have been going home. Suddenly I want to sleep in my own bed. I walk through the rooms of our house at night. I memorize the shadows and the shapes of the trees in the garden. Yesterday, I arrived just at sunset and found Mama and Papa in the garden, digging beneath the cherry trees. When I asked what they were doing, they replied that they are getting the house ready, in case the Allied soldiers move into it. The glass and silver have been packed away in the attic. Papa has taken his favourite books and hidden them in the cellar. But Mama did not want to risk
her jewellery that way, in case the house is bombed, so they decided to wrap it in oilskin and bury it. When I looked down, I saw that their hands were naked. No wedding rings. No aquamarine. Mama said it took a precious tablespoon of oil and almost an hour to prise it off her finger. A white band ran around Papa’s wrist. The watch his father gave him when he turned twenty-one was gone. Mama looked up at me.
‘What about you?’ she asked.
I looked down at my own hand. Despite everything, I have continued to wear the engagement ring Lodo gave me.
‘It will be safer here,’ Mama said.
I nodded. Standing there in the warm honey light, I slipped it off and handed it to her. She wrapped it in an oilskin envelope, stuck her trowel into the dark earth and began to dig.
Chapter Eighteen
Two days of meetings in Genoa caused the week to slip by almost before Pallioti noticed. Sunday dawned hard and bright. The rain that had dogged the early days of the month had retreated, leaving the air crystalline and cold. Deciding to book a table instead of cooking herself, Saffy had chosen a restaurant on the hill above the Boboli Gardens for lunch. Tucked behind one of the old villas, it looked out over the olive groves towards the fortezza and the pale sugar cube of the Medici villa. By 1 p.m. it was crowded; their group alone was made up of more than a dozen people.
Pallioti looked around him. There were several couples with children. A university professor, and a curator from a museum out of town. His sister sat across from him, Tommaso beside her in a high chair. Several other children, buoyed by cushions and phone books, peered across the table making faces and trading secrets. His brother-in-law was deep in conversation with a business partner, his greying curly hair bobbing as he nodded at whatever the other man was saying. Pallioti did not know any of these people well, and some of them not at all, but on Sunday, for a few hours, they were his family. Out of his suit and his habitual dark overcoat, he slipped in among whatever group Saffy had convened all but unnoticed, no one but her brother.
The antipasto had been devoured. In the lull between courses the conversation had shifted from the funding crisis in the arts to a general discussion on the merits of Sardinia as a vacation spot. Pallioti accepted another glass of wine and drifted, bobbing along on the waves of voices and laughter. He was half listening to a comment concerning something to do with a block of new flats when he looked up and saw Eleanor Sachs.
She was alone at a table in the far corner of the big room, her head bowed intently over a menu. The lack of a bottle on the table and the way the waiter was hovering suggested she had only just arrived. Today, she had forsaken her black polo neck for one of a russet colour. Her trench coat was hung on a coat hook at her shoulder. Her short dark hair had been ruffled by the wind.
As Eleanor Sachs put the menu down and spoke to the waiter, Pallioti felt a pang of guilt. In the big busy room filled with conversation and families, she looked very small and very alone. ‘Excuse me,’ he murmured to the woman beside him, and got to his feet. He could feel Saffy’s eyes following him as he wound his way through the tables and crossed the room.
‘Signora?’
She looked up, so startled that Pallioti almost felt the need to apologize as he extended his hand. Eleanor Sachs shook it gingerly, then smiled.
‘Posso? May I?’ he asked, indicating the chair across the table from her. ‘Just for a moment?’
‘Certo. Of course. I’d be delighted.’
She glanced across the room, her eyes darting to the big table by the window.
‘Is that your family?’
He nodded. ‘More or less.’
‘How lucky.’ She looked back at him. ‘I mean, it must be nice. All of you being here together.’
Pallioti looked at the table, and saw for himself what it must look like. A large, affluent, happy group of people, talking and eating together on a Sunday afternoon in early winter. He’d never really thought of it that way before, but she was right. He was lucky.
Before he could think of how to phrase that, or whether he ought to at all, the waiter appeared with a bottle. He looked in confusion at the table. He had already removed the second place setting.
‘I’m visiting. Just for a moment.’
‘But you’ll have a glass?’ Eleanor Sachs smiled. ‘I think you’ll like this rather better than the grape cordial the other night.’
The waiter brought a second glass and pulled the cork. She was right about that, too. Pallioti put his glass down.
‘Dottoressa Sachs,’ he said. ‘I owe you an apology.’
Eleanor Sachs had the good grace to appear surprised.
‘You were right,’ Pallioti said. ‘About the salt—’
She smiled. ‘So you didn’t believe that?’
‘And about Roberto Roblino and Giovanni Trantemento.’
The smile vanished.
‘They did know each other,’ Pallioti said. ‘In fact, Giovanni Tran-temento wrote the nominating letter for the awarding of Roberto Roblino’s medal.’
‘What?’
Pallioti nodded.
‘They were in the same GAP unit. They worked together here, in Florence, in 1944.’
She shook her head, as if it was she who now didn’t believe him.
‘It’s so strange,’ she said.
Eleanor Sachs picked up her glass. Pallioti had not been sure, in the cafe the other night, what colour her eyes were. He had only noticed their shape. Now, in the daylight, they almost glittered, bright and vivid, caught between lashes as dark as her hair.
‘It’s just that – well, I told you.’ She took a sip of the wine. ‘He was kind of a windbag, poor old guy. You know, a boaster. I don’t know why he wouldn’t have just told me.’
‘But he didn’t?’
‘Nope.’ She shook her head. ‘Absolutely not. He talked about all sorts of other stuff. You know, general derring-do, killing Nazis. But not that. Nothing specific about GAP. He certainly didn’t tell me that’s how he knew Trantemento.’ She shrugged. ‘I mean, I sort of suspected. But, go figure.’
‘Well, his code name, for what it’s worth, was Beppe. Giovanni Trantemento was known as Il Corvo. I don’t know if that helps you at all.’
Eleanor Sachs put her glass down.
‘Why are you telling me all this?’ she asked. ‘Not that I’m not grateful.’
Pallioti, who had begun to get up, sat down again.
‘Because,’ he said, ‘I thought you’d like to know that you were right.’ He smiled and began to get to his feet again. ‘Perhaps,’ he added, ‘it will help you in your hunt for Il Spettro.’
‘So, you still don’t believe me about that?’ A smile played across her face. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘No one else does, either. Much less thinks he’s alive and kicking and going around knocking off old men. I guess that would be too easy a solution? Death by ghost?’
Pallioti thought of the smudged crosses and the inky red lettering. The misspelt messages of hate.
‘Perhaps,’ he agreed. ‘Now,’ he said, glancing towards the front of the room where the children were being summoned back to their chairs for the next course, ‘I really must return to my table.’
Eleanor Sachs held out her hand as he stood up.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You didn’t have to do this. I appreciate it.’
When she smiled, she looked like a different person. The waif vanished, replaced by a pretty woman. He took her hand. The bones felt as fragile as a bird’s.
‘I hope it helps,’ he said. ‘And you’ll let me know? If you prove me wrong and find Il Spettro?’ Pallioti’s smile transformed his face almost as much as Eleanor Sachs’s transformed hers.
‘Oh,’ she laughed. ‘You bet. You’ll be the first to know. It’s a deal.’
Pallioti had got halfway across the room, in sight of the plate of osso bucco that had been delivered to his empty place, when he turned back. Eleanor Sachs looked up. She didn’t seem particularly surprised to find him standi
ng beside her again.
‘There is one thing.’ He hesitated, feeling slightly foolish. She waited. ‘I don’t suppose,’ he asked finally, ‘in the research you’ve done on the partisans, that you’ve ever come across two sisters?’
‘Two sisters?’
‘Their name was Cammaccio. Caterina and Isabella. I think Isabella’s code name was Lilia. They were here, in Florence.’
‘Cammaccio?’
Eleanor Sachs thought for a moment, then shook her head.
‘It doesn’t ring a bell,’ she said. ‘No. Sorry. But I can check it out, I’m in the archives all the time. If you want?’
Pallioti gave a wave of his hand.
‘Don’t bother,’ he said and smiled again. ‘Really, it’s not important.’
‘Who was she?’ Saffy leaned across the table and dropped her voice, the words coming out as a conspiratorial whisper.
‘Who was who?’ Pallioti smiled.
His sister grinned, plucked a breadstick off the table and broke it in two.
‘No one,’ he said. ‘An American.’
‘A very pretty American.’ She handed the breadstick to Tommaso. ‘Very gamine. Very Audrey Hepburn.’
‘Very married,’ Pallioti replied, and wondered why he’d bothered. Laughter erupted from Leo’s end of the table and rippled towards them. Pallioti smiled at his sister and shook his head. ‘She contacted me,’ he said, ‘because she thought she knew something about Giovanni Trantemento. It was purely business.’
‘Ah.’ Saffy smoothed Tommaso’s hair. ‘And did she? Know anything ?’
Pallioti shook his head. Women, even his sister, were as tenacious as pit bulls once they got an idea in their head. Still smiling, he reached for his glass. ‘No,’ he said. Then he added, ‘Well, that’s not quite true. No and yes. I didn’t believe her. I wasn’t very pleasant. In fact, rather unpleasant. So I went to apologize. You see,’ he shrugged. ‘I told you. Nothing important.’
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