The Specialty of the House

by Stanley Ellin

  ‘Rosanna?’ said the Signora. ‘Oh, yes, yes, Italian. But when she was a little one – you know, when the Germans were here – she was sent to people in England. She was there many years. Oh, Italian, but una Ebrea, a Jew, poor sad little thing.’

  The note of pity rankled. ‘So am I,’ Noah said.

  ‘Yes, she has told me,’ the Signora remarked, and he saw that her pity was not at all for the girl’s being una Ebrea. More than that, he was warmed by the knowledge that the beautiful and unapproachable Rosanna had taken note of him after all.

  ‘What makes her sad?’ he asked. ‘The war’s been over a long time.’

  ‘For some, yes. But her people will not let her forget what her father did when the Germans were here. There was the Resistance here, the partisans, you know, and her father sold them to the Germans. So they believe. Now they hate her and her brother because they are the children of a Judas.’

  ‘What do you mean, so they believe? Are they wrong about her father?’

  ‘She says they are. To her, you understand, the father was like a saint. A man of honor and very brave. That might be. But when the Germans were here, even brave men were not so brave sometimes. Yet, who am I to say this about him? He was the doctor who saved my life and the life of my first son when I gave birth to him. That is why when the girl needed work I paid back a little of my debt by helping her this way. A good bargain, too. She’s honest, she works hard, she speaks other languages, so I lose nothing by a little kindness.’

  ‘And what about her brother? Is he still around?’

  ‘You see him every day. Giorgio. You know Giorgio?’

  ‘The cleaning man?’

  ‘He cleans, he carries, he gets drunk whenever he can, that’s Giorgio. Useless, really, but what can I do? For the girl’s sake I make as much use of him as I can. You see the trouble with kindness? I wish to repay a debt, so now the windows are forever dirty. When you need that one he is always drunk somewhere. And always with a bad temper. His father had a bad temper, too, but at least he had great skill. As for the girl, she is an angel. But sad. That loneliness, you know, it can kill you.’ The Signora leaned forward inquiringly, her bosom overflowing the table. ‘Maybe if you would talk to her—’

  ‘I tried to,’ said Noah. ‘She didn’t seem very much interested.’

  ‘Because you are a stranger. But I have seen her watch you when you pass by. If you were a friend, perhaps. If the three of us dined together tonight—’

  Signora Alfiara was someone who had her own way when she wanted to. The three of them dined together that night, but in an atmosphere of constraint, the conversation moving only under the impetus of questions the Signora aimed at Noah, Rosanna sitting silent and withdrawn as he answered.

  When, while they were at their fruit and cheese, the Signora took abrupt and smiling leave of them with transparent motive, Noah said with some resentment to the girl, ‘I’m sorry about all this. I hope you know I wasn’t the one to suggest this little party. It was the lady’s idea.’

  ‘I do know that.’

  ‘Then why take out your mood on me?’

  Rosanna’s lips parted in surprise. ‘Mood? But I had no intention – believe me, it has nothing to do with you.’

  ‘What does it have to do with? Your father?’ And seeing from her reaction that he had hit the mark, he said, ‘Yes, I heard about that.’

  ‘Heard what?’

  ‘A little. Now you can tell me the rest. Or do you enjoy having it stuck in your throat where you can’t swallow it and can’t bring it up, one way or the other?’

  ‘You must have a strange idea of enjoyment. And if you want the story, go to the synagogue, go to the ghetto or Via Catalena. You’ll hear it there quick enough. Everyone knows it.’

  ‘I might do that. First I’d like to hear your side of it.’

  ‘As a policeman? You’re too late, Mr Freeman. The case against Ezechiele Coen was decided long ago without policeman or judges.’

  ‘What case?’

  ‘He was said to have betrayed leaders of the Resistance. That was a lie, but partisans killed him for it. They shot him and left him lying with a sign on him saying Betrayer. Yes, Mr Freeman, Ezechiele Coen who preached honor to his children as the one meaningful thing in life died in dishonor. He lay there in the dirt of the Teatro Marcello a long time that day, because his own people – our people – would not give him burial. When they remember him now, they spit on the ground. I know,’ the girl said in a brittle voice, ‘because when I walk past them, they remember him.’

  ‘Then why do you stay here?’

  ‘Because he is here. Because here is where his blackened memory – his spirit – remains, waiting for the truth to be known.’

  ‘Twenty years after the event?’

  ‘Twenty or a hundred or a thousand. Does time change the truth, Mr Freeman? Isn’t it as important for the dead to get justice as the living?’

  ‘Maybe it is. But how do you know that justice wasn’t done in this case? What evidence is there to disprove the verdict? You were a child when all this happened, weren’t you?’

  ‘And not even in Rome. I was in England then, living with a doctor who knew my father since their school days. Yes, England is far away and I was a child then, but I knew my father.’

  If faith could really move mountains, Noah thought. ‘And what about your brother. Does he feel the way you do?’

  ‘Giorgio tries to feel as little as he can about it. When he was a boy everyone said that some day he would be as fine a man and a doctor as his father. Now he’s a drunkard. A bottle of wine makes it easy not to feel pain.’

  ‘Would he mind if I talked to him about this?’

  ‘Why would you want to? What could Ezechiele Coen mean to you anyhow? Is Rome so boring that you must play detective here to pass the time? I don’t understand you, Mr Freeman.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ Noah said harshly. ‘But you might if you listen to what I’m going to tell you. Do you know where I got the time and money to come on a trip like this, a plain, ordinary, underpaid cop like me? Well, last year there was quite a scandal about some policemen in New York who were charged with taking graft from a gambler. I was one of them under charges. I had no part of that mess, but I was suspended from my job and when they got around to it, I was put on trial. The verdict was not guilty, I got all my back pay in one lump, and I was told to return to duty. Things must have looked fine for me, wouldn’t you think?’

  ‘Because you did get justice,’ Rosanna said.

  ‘From the court. Only from the court. Afterward, I found that no one else really believed I was innocent. No one. Even my own father sometimes wonders about it. And if I went back on the Force, the grafters there would count me as one of them, and the honest men wouldn’t trust me. That’s why I’m here. Because I don’t know whether to go back or not, and I need time to think, I need to get away from them all. So I did get justice, and now you tell me what good it did.’

  The girl shook her head somberly. ‘Then my father isn’t the only one, is he? But you see, Mr Freeman, you can defend your own good name. Tell me, how is he to defend his?’

  That was the question which remained in his mind afterward, angry and challenging. He tried to put it aside, to fix on his own immediate problem, but there it was. It led him the next morning away from proper destinations, the ruins and remains italicized in his guidebook, and on a walk southward along the Tiber.

  Despite gray skies overhead and the dismally brown, turbid river sullenly locked between the stone embankments below, Noah felt a quickening pleasure in the scene. In a few days he had his fill of sightseeing. Brick and marble and Latin inscriptions were not really the stuff of life, and pictures and statuary only dim representations of it. It was people he was hungry to meet, and now that he had an objective in meeting them he felt more alive than he had since his first day in Rome. More alive, in fact, than in all those past months in New York, working alongside his father in the old man�
�s tailor shop. Not that this small effort to investigate the case of Ezechiele Coen would amount to anything, he knew. A matter of dredging up old and bitter memories, that was about what it came to. But the important thing was that he was Noah Freeman again, alive and functioning.

  Along Lungotevere dei Cenci construction work was going on. The shells of new buildings towered over slums battered by centuries of hard wear. Midstream in the Tiber was a long, narrow island with several institutional buildings on it. Then, facing it from the embankment, the synagogue came into view, a huge, Romanesque, marble pile.

  There was a railing before the synagogue. A young man leaned at his ease against the railing. Despite the chill in the air he was in shirtsleeves, his tanned, muscular arms folded on his chest, his penetrating eyes watching Noah’s approach with the light of interest in them. As Noah passed, the man came to attention.

  ‘Shalom.’

  ‘Shalom,’ Noah said, and the young man’s face brightened. In his hand magically appeared a deck of picture postcards.

  ‘Postcards, hey? See, all different of Rome. Also, the synagogue, showing the inside and the outside. You an Americano Ebreo, no? A landsman?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Noah, wondering if only Americano Ebreos came this way. ‘But you can put away the pictures. I don’t want any.’

  ‘Maybe a guidebook? The best. Or you want a guide? The ghetto, Isola Tiberina, Teatro Marcello? Anywhere you want to go, I can show you. Two thousand lire. Ask anybody. For two thousand lire nobody is a better guide than Carlo Piperno. That’s me.’

  ‘Noah Freeman, that’s me. And the only place I want to go to is the rabbi’s. Can I find him in the synagogue?’

  ‘No, but I will take you to his house. Afterwards we see the ghetto, Tiberina—’

  The rabbi proved to be a man of good will, of understanding, but, he explained in precise English, perhaps he could afford to be objective about the case of Ezechiele Coen because he himself was not a Roman. He had come to this congregation from Milan, an outsider. Yet, even as an outsider he could appreciate the depth of his congregation’s hatred for their betrayer. A sad situation, but could they be blamed for that? Could it not be the sternest warning to all such betrayers if evil times ever came again?

  ‘He’s been dead a long time,’ said Noah.

  ‘So are those whose lives he sold. Worse than that.’ The rabbi gestured at the shuttered window beyond which lay the Tiber. ‘He sold the lives of friends who were not of our faith. Those who lived in Trastevere across the river, working people, priests, who gave some of us hiding places when we needed them. Did the daughter of Ezechiele Coen tell you how, when she was a child, they helped remove her from the city at night in a cart of wine barrels, risking their lives to do it? Does she think it is easy to forget how her father rewarded them for that?’

  ‘But why her?’ Noah protested. ‘Why should your congregation make her an outcast? She and her brother aren’t the guilty ones. Do you really believe that the sins of the fathers must be visited on the children?’

  The rabbi shook his head. ‘There are sins, Signor Freeman, which make a horror that takes generations to wipe away. I welcome the girl and her brother to the synagogue, but I cannot wipe away the horror in the people they would meet here. If I wished to, I could not work such a miracle.

  ‘Only a little while ago there was a great and flourishing congregation here, signore, a congregation almost as ancient as Rome itself. Do you know what is left of it now? A handful. A handful who cannot forget. The Jews of Rome do not forget easily. To this day they curse the name of Titus who destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem as they remember kindly the name of Julius Caesar who was their friend, and for whose body they mourned seven days in the Forum. And the day they forgive Titus will be the same day they forgive Ezechiele Coen and his children and their children to come. Do you know what I mean, Signor Freeman?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Noah. ‘I know what you mean.’

  He went out into the bleak, cobblestoned street, oppressed by a sense of antiquity weighing him down, of two thousand years of unrelenting history heavy on his shoulders, and not even the racketing of motor traffic along the river embankment, the spectacle of the living present, could dispel it. Carlo Piperno, the postcard vender, was waiting there.’

  ‘You have seen the rabbi? Good. Now I show you Isola Tiberina.’

  ‘Forget Isola Tiberina. There’s something else I want you to show me.’

  ‘For two thousand lire, anything.’

  ‘All right.’ Noah extracted the banknotes from his wallet. ‘Does the name Ezechiele Coen mean anything to you?’

  Carlo Piperno had the hard, capable look of a man impervious to surprise. Nevertheless, he was visibly surprised. Then he recovered himself. ‘That one? Mi dispiace, signore. Sorry, but he is dead, that one.’ He pointed to the ground at his feet. ‘You want him, you have to look there for him.’

  ‘I don’t want him. I want someone who knew him well. Someone who can tell me what he did and what happened to him.’

  ‘Everybody knows that. I can tell you.’

  ‘No, it must be someone who wasn’t a child when it happened. Capisce?

  ‘Capisco. But why?’

  ‘If I answer that, it will cost you these two thousand lire. Shall I answer?’

  ‘No, no.’ Carlo reached out and dexterously took possession of the money. He shrugged. ‘But first the rabbi, now Ezechiele Coen who is in hell long ago. Well, I am a guide, no? So now I am your guide.’

  He led the way through a labyrinth of narrow streets to an area not far from the synagogue, a paved area with the remains of a stone wall girdling it. Beyond the wall were tenements worn by time to the color of the clay that had gone into their brick. Yet their tenants seemed to have pride of possession. In almost every window were boxes of flowers and greenery. On steps and in stony courtyards, housewives with brushes and buckets scrubbed the stone and brick. In surrounding alleys were small stores, buzzing with activity.

  With shock Noah suddenly realized that here was the ghetto, that he was standing before a vestige of the past which thus far in his life had been only an ugly word to him. It was the presence of the wall that provided the shock, he knew. It had no gate, there was no one to prevent you from departing through it, but if it were up to him he would have had it torn down on the spot.

  A strange place, Rome. Wherever you turned were the reminders of the cruel past. Memorials to man, the persecuted. This wall, the catacombs, the churches built to martyrs, the Colosseum. There was no escaping their insistent presence.

  Carlo’s destination turned out to be a butcher shop – the shop of Vito Levi, according to the sign over it. The butcher, a burly, gray-haired man, stood behind his chest-high marble counter hacking at a piece of meat, exchanging loud repartee with a shriveled old woman, a shawl over her head, a string bag in her hand, waiting for her order. While Carlo was addressing him he continued to chop away with the cleaver, then suddenly placed it on the counter, and came around to meet Noah in the street, wiping his hands on his apron as he came. The old woman followed, peering at Noah with beady-eyed interest, and in another minute others from the street were gathering around, getting the news from her. Ezechiele Coen may have been dead twenty years, Noah thought, but his name was still very much alive in these quarters.

  He was not sorry that the matter was going to be discussed in public this way. As a young patrolman on the beat he had learned not to be too quick to break up a crowd around an accident or crime; there might be someone in the crowd who had something to say worth hearing. Now he gathered from the heat of discussion around him that everyone here had something to say about Ezechiele Coen.

  With Carlo serving as interpreter, he put his questions first to Levi the butcher, and then to anyone else who volunteered information. Slowly, piece by piece, the picture of Ezechiele Coen and his crime took shape. It was Levi who supplied most of the information – the time, the place, the event.

  The butcher had
known Ezechiele Coen well. Like all others he had trusted him, because no man had a greater reputation for honesty than the doctor. He was a great doctor, a man of science; yet he was a man of God, too, devout, each morning binding on his phylacteries and saying his prayers, each sabbath attending the synagogue. Not that there was any gentleness in him. He was a proud man, an arrogant man, a man who would insult you to your face for the least offense. After all, it was one thing to be honest, but it was something else again to behave as if you were the only honest man in the world. The only one on earth who would never compromise with truth. That was Ezechiele Coen. You might trust him, but you could not like him. He was too good for that.

  Then the trust was betrayed. Over the years one had learned to live with Il Duce, but when the Germans came to Rome, the Resistance of a generation ago reawoke. Sabotage, spying, a hidden press turning out leaflets which told the truth about II Duce and his ally. Many said it was useless, but Vito Levi, the butcher, and a few others continued their secret efforts, knowing they had nothing to lose. Jews were being deported now, were being shipped to the Nazi slaughter pens in carloads. What else to do then but join some of their Gentile neighbors in the Resistance?

  ‘Ask him,’ said Noah to Carlo, ‘if Ezechiele Coen was one of the Resistance,’ and when Carlo translated this, the butcher shook his head.

  Only once was the doctor called on to help. Three leaders of the Resistance had managed to get into Rome from the mountains – to help organize the movement here, to give it leadership. They were hidden in a cellar in Trastevere, across the river, one of them badly wounded. The doctor’s son, only a boy then, no more than fifteen years of age, was a courier for the partisans. He had brought his father to attend the wounded man, and then, soon after, the three men together were captured in their hiding place by the Germans. They had been betrayed by the honest, the noble, the righteous Ezechiele Coen.

  ‘Ask him how he knows this,’ Noah demanded of Carlo. ‘Was there a confession?’

  There was no need for one, as it happened. There was no need for any more evidence than the money case of Major von Grubbner.