Alibi

by Joseph Kanon

  Gianni stepped back, as if the words were a physical assault, and answered her in Italian, quick and sharp.

  “ Assassino! ” she said, louder, and then “ Assassino! ” almost yelling.

  People nearby turned. My mother, pale, looked at me frantically. But Gianni had started to talk again, so fast that the words went by me in a blur.

  “You thought we were dead,” Claudia said in English. “All of us dead. Who would know? But not all. Not all. Assassino! ” she said again, this time quieter, with contempt.

  I looked at her face-someone else, unrecognizable. Now it was Gianni who raised his voice, upset, caught somewhere between scolding and fighting back. The people around us had begun to look uneasy, the foreigners, not understanding, thinking they’d blundered into a scene of volatile Italians, the Italians embarrassed, shocked by what they were hearing. I tried to follow, helpless.

  “ Assassino,” Claudia said again, then “Murderer,” and for an odd second, hearing both words, I thought of Gianni’s speech, two languages.

  Gianni answered, then stepped forward to grab her elbow, clearly intending to take her out of the room. The touch, just a graze, triggered something in her. She wrenched herself away from his hand and reached up to his face, clawing at it, shouting at him again. He grabbed her wrists and pulled her away, leaving scratch marks on his face. I heard a gasp. He held her for a moment like that, hands up in the air, away from his face, letting her body wriggle but holding her hands still, until finally she spat at him and, shocked, he dropped her hands.

  No one moved. I saw the spittle gleam on his cheek, the stunned faces around us, Claudia heaving, a hysterical intake of breath. She looked at me, her eyes filling with tears, and then around, aware for the first time of the rest of the room, the appalled guests. Gianni hadn’t moved. “ Assassino,” she whispered one last time. Then she let out a sound, a kind of whimper, and turned to the stairs. She started to run, the darting movement like a signal to everyone else to come back to life, out of the stopped moment, the room noisy all at once with talk.

  “What in god’s name-?”

  “But what were they saying?”

  My mother was daubing Gianni’s face with a handkerchief. “Adam, I don’t understand. Your friend-”

  “She’s your friend?” Gianni said to me. “She’s a crazy woman.”

  “My god, look at you,” my mother said. “Does it hurt?”

  “No, no.”

  I looked toward the stairs, but the crowd had swallowed her up, cutting me off.

  “It’s a Jewish matter,” an Italian said, translating for another guest.

  “What Jewish matter? Why Gianni?”

  “Her father. It’s a confusion.”

  “Well, yes, it must be, I suppose.”

  But what confusion? I looked at Gianni, now surrounded, then started pushing through the crowd. “Adam,” I heard my mother say, but I was moving frantically now, down the stairs.

  “Claudia!” I shouted, but when I got to the bottom no one was in the hall except one of the maids, standing in front of the makeshift cloakroom with Claudia’s coat over her arm. She glanced at me, alarmed, then toward the open door. I raced down the hall and grabbed the coat.

  Outside, there was no sign of her, just the dark back calles of Dorsoduro. But she wouldn’t go to Salute, a dead end. I headed toward the Accademia, trying to pick up the sound of heels, anything, going faster at the corners, where there were little pools of light. At Foscarini I looked left, toward the Zattere. Then I saw a figure in the other direction, running past the Accademia to the vaporetto stop.

  “Claudia!” I yelled, but she didn’t even turn around, determined simply to get away. I ran toward the lights of the floating dock, the coat flapping in my arms. The boat was loading, almost done, but it was going in the wrong direction, up the canal, not down to San Marco and home. She’d wait for the right one. But she didn’t. She looked over her shoulder and ran up the gangplank, the last one on before the crew pulled it back and caught the ropes. I could see her take a seat in the glassed-in section, hunching into herself.

  Now what? She’d get off on the other side of the canal and head back. But the next stop was still on this side, not far, just past San Barnaba at Ca’ Rezzonico. Impossible to outrun a boat, but the vaporettos were slow and lumbering, even slower in the dark, and this was the part of Venice I knew best, my sleepwalking streets. And what was the alternative? I ran to the end of the campo.

  The calles here were fairly direct-no long detours to go around dead ends. I raced across the bridge over the Rio San Trovaso, heading to San Barnaba. No one was out, and my shoes echoed in the empty street, the sound of a chase, desperate, so that when I did pass one old woman she moved to the side, frightened, and I realized that what she saw was a thief running with a stolen coat. My lungs began to hurt a little, gulping in cold air, but it would be only minutes-all the time in the world later to catch my breath. Calle Toletta-shops closed, sealed off with grates. Another bridge, even a few steps now an effort. Finally the open space of San Barnaba, a yellow light slanting out of a bar window.

  I swerved right and down the calle to the landing. The boat was already there, motor idling noisily as passengers got off. One of the ropes was tossed back. I was going to miss it again. No, one more passenger, a woman with a string bag, taking her time. I was running so fast now that if they pulled away I might actually hit the water, unable to stop. But here was the gangplank, clanging under my feet. I grabbed at a pole to break my momentum and took a few deep breaths. One of the uniformed boatmen said something to me in Italian, which I assumed meant there’s always another boat.

  She was huddled at the far end of one of the benches, looking out at the canal, so she didn’t see me come into the passenger area, didn’t even turn until she felt the coat on her shoulders. She started, then hunched back into herself.

  “Go away,” she said.

  “Don’t be silly. You’ll freeze.” I sat next to her, draping the coat around her. The boat moved away from the dock. “What the hell was that?” I said, still breathing heavily. The scene, pushed out of mind during the run, now came back in a blur.

  “Go away,” she said again. “That’s who you want me to meet? People like that?”

  “Like what? Why murderer? Who did he murder?”

  “My father. With a nod of his head. ‘That one.’ A nod.”

  “Gianni?”

  “Gianni,” she repeated, drawing it out. “Yes, Gianni. I saw him do it. Him. You didn’t know? No, how would you know? You don’t know anything, any of you. You come with your money-ah, Venice. Why? To look at pictures. So how would you know? A man like him. That’s who your mother meets? A murderer. But that’s all over, yes? Let’s give a ball, like the old days. Ha. Did I ruin the party? No, have some champagne. Let’s just go on like before. Such a nice man. A doctor. Who cares what he did?” All in a rush, snatching at the air for words, trying to keep up with herself.

  “Stop it,” I said, taking her by the shoulders. Behind us a few passengers looked up, curious. A lovers’ quarrel. A thief with a coat. Nothing was what it was.

  She twisted away. “Leave me alone. Go back to America. Take him. A souvenir of Venice. No one will know him there. Ha. He thought no one would know him here. We’re supposed to be dead. And then one comes back. They say that, you know? When you least expect it. A party. And here comes death, pointing the finger. So that’s me now. Brava. Oh, look at your face. You think I’m crazy. You don’t know anything about it. For you it’s all nice-kisses, La Fenice, Mama and her nice friend. Maybe it’s better not to know. To be so lucky-”

  “Stop it,” I said calmly, holding her still.

  She shook my hand off and gathered her coat. “I’m getting off.”

  We had rounded the lower bend in the canal and were pulling into San Toma, the Rialto lights up ahead in the distance. I took her hand, holding it down.

  “Sit. I want to know.”

  “Wha
t?”

  “What happened. Tell me about the nod.”

  She looked at me, slightly puzzled.

  “You said with a nod of his head. How?”

  “In the hospital.”

  “Your father was sick?”

  “Yes, sick. Dying. But they didn’t want to wait. Why wait for God when you are God? The Jews weren’t dying fast enough for them.”

  “Who?”

  “Who. The Germans, their friends. They searched the hospitals. Sometimes there was an informer. Grini-you’ve heard of him? No. He used to help the SS. In the nursing home, even. They took them out on stretchers. But not this time. This time there was only your friend. He pointed out my father to them. ‘That one,’ he said, with the nod. ‘Over there.’ So the SS took him. You know how he knew? My father told me later. From medical school. They were both at medical school, so he knew him.”

  “And you were there?”

  She nodded.

  “Did he point you out too?”

  “No, I did. Myself. My father told them I was a neighbor, to protect me.” She paused. “Not his daughter. A visitor. Maybe they believed him, I don’t know. Maybe I could have walked out, hidden somewhere. But how could I do that? Just leave him? Sick. And they find you. In the end, always.”

  “So you went with him.”

  She nodded. “And all for nothing. When we got there, they looked at him-who wants a sick Jew? Let the Germans take care of him. So, another train. And I said-imagine how foolish-I’ll go too, someone has to take care of him. And they laughed. Don’t worry, you’ll go later. At that time the head would send only the hopeless cases. And the children. The Germans wanted everyone, but he kept the workers back. To save them, maybe to bargain later, I don’t know. Later everyone went. Unless you were special.” She stopped, then looked up. “So you see, it was for nothing. They just put him on another train. I always wondered, did he die on the train? He was so sick. He’s on the list at Auschwitz, but maybe he was dead when he got there, who knows? Nobody can tell me for sure. Nobody came back, not from that train. No one. That’s what he thought, none of us would come back. No one would know. But I know.”

  We were passing under the high bridge, a dark space between the wavy lights on the water.

  “And where do I see him? Meeting Mama. So I ruin her party. Oh, such behavior. Terrible. And she’s with a man like that. My god. She thinks she knows who he is. None of you know. What are you doing here, all of you?”

  I said nothing, letting the words drift off, like vented steam. She lowered her head.

  “You should go home.”

  “No,” I said. “Not now.”

  She looked at me, then turned to the window. “Oh, and that solves everything.”

  “What do you want to solve?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know. Nobody pays, do they? In a few days, it’ll be-gone. Gossip. ‘Poor man. I heard about that girl. She must have been crazy.’ And everything goes on. Nobody pays, not those people.”

  “Yes, they do. In Germany people are starving. Everybody’s paying.”

  “You think it’s the same? Hunger? No, they won’t pay, not the murderers. That’s how it is now. Everybody pays but the murderer. And here? Signora Mimi is planning a ball. And the murderer is going to marry a rich American.”

  “No, he’s not. You think I’d let that happen?”

  “Because of this?” She shook her head. “It won’t make any difference. He’ll explain. Some story. And she’ll believe him. And even if she doesn’t believe him, it’s better to forget, no? Put it in the past. Easier.”

  “You’re not being fair.”

  “I don’t have to be fair. He pointed at my father. At me. You be fair.”

  “He didn’t point at you.”

  “No,” she said quietly, “I did.” She looked out the window, then back at me. “So you can feel better when you see him at dinner. He didn’t point at me. Just the sick old Jew.”

  “I’m not going to see him at dinner,” I said evenly. “Stop.”

  “She’ll thank you for that,” Claudia said, and then she did stop, folding back into herself again, staring out the window. We were almost at San Stae.

  “We should go back. I’ll take you home.”

  “No, one more stop.”

  “What’s there?”

  “My old house. I thought I would never go there again, but tonight I want to see it.” She turned to me. “You want to see Venice? I’ll give you a tour. Not the Accademia. This one.”

  I said nothing, pulled along by her mood, unsure where she was going now. No one else got off at San Marcuola, so we were alone in the empty square, near a dark silent church and a few streetlamps. She asked for a cigarette.

  “You know, my father would never allow it, a woman smoking in the streets. And here, so close.”

  We started walking north into Cannaregio, gloomy long canals and workers’ houses.

  “He would have been ashamed. Imagine. Of this. Think of the rest of it, what it would have done to him.” Talking to the air, to herself.

  We passed a shop with Hebrew lettering.

  “This is the ghetto?”

  “Almost. The edge. In the beginning you had to live on the island, where the campo is. It’s easy in Venice to separate people. One island, three bridges. At night they put chains across, to keep everybody in. Except sometimes they let a doctor out, if a Christian was sick. My father used to say, no wonder the Jews liked medicine. It got them out of the ghetto.”

  “But that was the Middle Ages.”

  “Until Napoleon,” she said, playing tour guide. “Then you could live anywhere. Of course, most people stayed here, nearby. It was what they were used to. You see the buildings at the end, how high? They ran out of space in the ghetto, so they had to build on top. Nowhere else do you see buildings like this-six stories, seven. So many stairs.”

  We turned off the main street into the narrower Calle Farnese, where we were shielded even from moonlight, forced to rely on a corner light and a few slivers coming from the shuttered windows.

  “Here,” she said, stopping about a block before the bridge. “You see up there? Those windows? My aunt lived on the other side. My mother’s sister. They used to talk across. Like cats, my father said.”

  We stood there for a few minutes, looking at the house and seeing nothing-ordinary windows like all the others, a door flush with the street. Around us, a smell of canal debris and damp plaster. A cat ran past, then disappeared into a shadow. A drab back calle. But Claudia was seeing something else, her eyes fixed on the dark walls as if she were looking through them to the rooms inside, her own past. Family dinners. Homework. Radio. How different could it have been? Then the change-backdoor patients, unofficial. Curfews. Her aunt’s window shut tight.

  “What happened to her?”

  “My mother? She died when I was eight. Oh, my aunt. In the roundup, the first one.”

  “With the air raid sirens.”

  She looked at me. “Yes, with the sirens. You remembered. You can see, in a street like this, how noisy it would be.” An alleyway, every shout an echo. “Come, see the rest.”

  She led me over the bridge onto the island and through a passage so low I had to duck my head. We came out into a larger campo with a well in the center, an enclosed patch of faint moonlight entirely surrounded by the built-up houses, walled in.

  “You see there, those windows, five in a row? That was the synagogue-out of sight, but a visitor could find it by the windows. Five, for the five books.”

  I looked up, involuntarily counting the windows, then turned slowly, taking in the whole campo, dingy and peeling, a tree with spiky winter branches, not a hint of warmth anywhere, the coldest place I’d seen in Venice. It seemed utterly deserted, as if everyone had gone away, leaving a few lights on by accident.

  “When was the roundup?”

  “Oh, dates. All right,” she said, adopting a guide’s voice, “dates. You know Italy surrendered in forty-
three? The king surrenders. September. Mussolini, he goes to Salo, and of course the Germans come in. So now, here, it’s the occupation. New Jewish laws, much worse. Now we are enemy aliens. My family, here since Rome, now we’re aliens. The broadcast was-when? End of November. I remember they came to Jona then for a list. He was head of the community, and the Germans asked him for a list of the Jews living here. Two thousand, I think. Everybody. A good man-my father knew him. What could he do? Yes, tomorrow, he told them, and that night he warned us. Then he killed himself. So he was the first. But now we knew-run, hide if you can. Like rats. You see over there?” She pointed north to a long gray building, prisonlike. “The nursing home. They couldn’t run. Some couldn’t even move. So they were easy to arrest. You see, without the list it was harder, they had to take who they could find.”

  “Like your aunt.”

  “She wouldn’t run. You have to imagine. Midnight, the sirens, people screaming, pounding on doors. She couldn’t move, the fear was too strong.” She shrugged. “So they took her. She scared herself to death.”

  “But you hid from the Germans?”

  “Germans? No, Italians. They used us to do it. Our own. Carabinieri, police, some Fascists. Maybe that’s why they waited till it was dark-maybe they didn’t want to be seen. Later it was SS. More efficient. With the police, it became a farce. They took everyone to Collegio Foscarini, but there were no facilities, nothing. So people came with food, they would throw food through the windows for the children. Ten days like that. A public embarrassment. So to Casa di Ricovero and they release the sick ones. They didn’t understand-no one could be released. So the SS came and arrested them again. A farce. But finally, the train. After that it was mostly SS, with their informers. Grini. He would take them through the hospitals, even the mental hospital. It wasn’t enough for them if you were crazy. You had to be dead.”

  She folded her arms across her chest, hugging herself, rocking a little.

  “You’re cold.”

  “Of course we didn’t know they would go through the hospitals. We thought it was safe there. We were on the Lido then. Hiding, but not hiding. A vacation flat someone found for us, empty, you know. The neighbors pretended no one was there. We still had a little money. How much longer could it go on? It was just a matter of time, if we could wait it out. But then my father became too sick to stay there. He had a friend at the hospital, from the old days. He thought it would be all right. Use another name. Who would look in the critical wards? What for? They were already on their way to San Michele, almost dead.” She lowered her head. “But they did look.” She stretched out one arm. “ That one. Dr. Maglione. You think I would forget that face? Never. And then tonight, one look and I was back in that ward. But this time, champagne. Everyone smiling. And I thought, he got away with it. They all did. They got away with murder.”