Alibi

by Joseph Kanon

  “And what did he do?” I said quietly.

  “We agreed that the first obligation must be to save the man.”

  “Even if he’s a traitor.”

  “But if the government itself is illegal-”

  “And who decides that?”

  “Yes, who? You see how it goes on? He liked these questions. Well, I liked them, so he would ask.”

  “And how did it end, this one? What did he do?”

  “Oh, he said you can make it complicated if you like, but the simple fact is, if you know a man, you can’t give him up. So I know he didn’t.”

  I put down my cup. “What if you gave up someone else instead?”

  “Someone else?”

  “To save the first. Your friend. If you gave up someone in his place.”

  She looked at me for a second, then down at her cup. “What makes you ask this?”

  “It’s a question he once asked me.”

  “And you think,” she said, stirring her cup, still not looking up, “this was his way of telling you something.”

  For a minute we were quiet, still enough to hear the clock.

  “Do you think he did that?” she said finally, sitting up straight, braced.

  I hesitated, then sat back, moving away from it. “I think it was just a question.”

  “It’s a terrible thing.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would he ask that?”

  “As a moral dilemma, maybe. An impossible choice.”

  “But you can’t choose someone’s death.” She was looking at me now, her face longer, more severe, like her mother’s again. “That’s murder.” Sure, admitting no exceptions.

  I said nothing, kept quiet by her stare. Then her face began to change, no longer as properly arranged as the tray, and I saw that she was distressed, waiting for me to say something.

  “He wouldn’t do that,” she said. “You knew him. Do you think he would do that?”

  “I think it was just a question.”

  “Then why-”

  “Something may have put it in his mind. Something that actually happened. The story about the partisan-when did he tell you that?”

  “When? Last year,” she said, composed again, interested.

  “After the war?” I said, confused.

  “No. I mean the year before. Forty-four. When he came to see me. I remember he told me at lunch.”

  “When was this, exactly?”

  “Autumn. October, maybe.”

  “Why did it come up? I mean, why do you think he told you?”

  She smiled a little, shaking her head. “Maybe to make me like him. Always we were arguing then. So maybe this was his way of saying, You see, Papa’s not so bad. I’m on the right side too.”

  “But he never actually said he’d done this.”

  “No, but that wasn’t his way. He never talked about himself. Maybe he thought it wasn’t dignified. He was private, a Maglione. My mother was like that too.”

  “Secretive?”

  “No. Private,” she said, making a distinction to herself. “I never knew what he was thinking. But what does a child know? All those years, here we are in this house, a family, and I never knew-” She leaned forward, placing the cup on the tray. “Maybe a little secretive. A doctor has to be, you learn that. You don’t talk about your patients. I used to ask him things and he’d say, ‘That’s not my secret to tell.’ Always somebody else’s secret. ‘I won’t tell,’ I’d say, and he’d wag his finger, like this,” she said, demonstrating, so that I looked up, seeing Gianni. “You know the old saying.” She lowered her voice, becoming him. “Two people can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.” She paused. “So I didn’t ask. And then it turned out he must have had one of his own.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was murdered. Do you know why? No. So it’s still his secret.”

  I sat back, looking around the room to avoid her gaze. “Well, it’s safe here. There’s nothing else? Files?”

  “At the hospital. His real life was there, I think,” she said, her voice wistful. “Not here.”

  There was an awkward pause.

  “I should go,” I said, getting up. “Maybe there’ll be something in the patient files. That’s next. He seems to have erased himself everywhere else.”

  “Yes, he was good at that. He didn’t like to keep things.”

  I smiled, glancing around the old library, virtually an archive.

  “Oh, this was Paolo. Poor Paolo, Papa erased him too. Threw out his books. You know, he was always writing in those books- appunti for the family history, and Papa said they were rubbish. Well, what did he expect? Mazzini from Paolo? But, you know, now it just stops. Unless I write it, I suppose,” she said, her voice diffident, as if she were talking to herself, suddenly alone.

  “Wait. Paolo kept notebooks and your father threw them out?”

  “Not all. Just the ones with his activities. ‘What will people think later?’ he said. It was an embarrassment for him.”

  “But where are they?”

  She gestured toward the shelves.

  “Paolo kept them here?”

  She looked at me, puzzled. “It was his house.”

  “Yes, I forgot. But you all lived here?”

  “Of course. The family.”

  “All during the time they-?”

  “Yes. There was an agreement-no political talk at dinner.”

  I imagined them sitting at the starched table, private, talking politely, each one whirling in his own mystery.

  “Can I see them?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said, walking over to the shelf. “I’m sorry. I thought, my father’s papers. It didn’t occur to me. These are Paolo’s.” She ran her hand along a line of leatherbound spines.

  The books weren’t histories so much as diaries, the kind a fourteen-year-old might write, full of underlinings and exclamation marks, the world a theater with himself, luckily, at center stage. Even with my poor Italian, I could understand Gianni’s reluctance to have them fill the family library’s shelves. But here they were, not all of them thrown out. Why not?

  I skimmed through a few, trying to get a sense of why these had survived. Innocuous? But here was Mussolini, a trip to Rome with friends to hear a speech, dinner afterward at the Eden-a time capsule mix. Not embarrassed here, at any rate, by the fascism or Paolo’s comments. The speech had been inspiring, Rome itself a new city. A nightclub after dinner had featured Somalian dancers. Venice now seemed a backwater, dowdy. I flipped pages. Less exalted excursions-a drive to Asolo, dinner in a villa. The Maglione history now mostly idle days. Committee meetings, just as Giulia had said. Recording it all for posterity. The war, somber fourteen-year-old’s thoughts on what it would mean. The Albanian fiasco. The Allies in Sicily. And then it stopped. Gaps here and there before, then nothing after 1943. A war with no Germans at all. But why the earlier gaps? What else had Gianni culled out?

  Giulia had been hovering next to me, reading as I flipped, no doubt taking it all in more quickly. “But what do you see?” she said.

  “I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. Can I borrow these? Just the last few?”

  “You want to read them?”

  “I want to see where the gaps are. Look, here, for instance, he just ripped the pages out. So why here and not there?”

  But before she could answer there was another rap on the door, and this time Maria was carrying an old telephone with a long cord, her eyes wide with apprehension.

  “ Polizia,” she whispered, pointing to me, then plugged the cord into a jack behind the desk.

  Had Cavallini tracked me here? I picked up the phone and then must have registered the stunned dismay I felt as he spoke, because when I hung up, Giulia said, “My god, what is it? What’s happened?”

  “Cavallini,” I said, my own voice an echo, hollow. “They’ve arrested somebody for the murder.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Questura was like Gianni’s
hospital-functional, even ordinary inside. Cavallini’s office could have been anywhere, a room with a desk and a phone and pale green institutional walls. There was a large map of the lagoon along with a few photographs of Cavallini shaking hands with various officials, but it still felt scarcely inhabited, as if he had just moved in, waiting for a new paint job. Today, at least, it was crowded with people-assistants delivering telephone messages, two policemen standing near the door waiting for orders, and a tall man in a suit conferring with Cavallini, stroking his chin in thought. I saw all this in a blur, my mind still numb with dread.

  “Signor Miller,” Cavallini said, smiling. “Good. My superior wants to meet you.” The tall man turned to me. “I have told him how it started with you.”

  We shook hands, with a few polite words in Italian, then he rattled off something to Cavallini.

  “So everyone is very pleased,” Cavallini said. “I thank you for this.” He put his hand on the beige folder, Rosa’s file. “Of course, it’s a question of police work too,” he said, directing this to the tall man, who smiled blankly, clearly not following. “The one helps the other. Una collaborazione.” At this the other man nodded, said something more in Italian, and left, dipping his head toward me, almost a bow, as he went out the door. The two waiting policemen followed him.

  “You see? Very pleased. So again I thank you.”

  “But who did you arrest?” I said.

  “Moretti,” he said, patting the file again. “Rosa shows us where to look and we find him.”

  I leaned forward, holding the desk. “But he’s dead. You mean he didn’t die?”

  “Yes, he died. That’s it-a vengeance killing. The son.”

  “You think Moretti’s son killed Gianni? Why?”

  “But Signor Miller, it’s as you say. The connection is the house, what happened there. I didn’t know this. But once you look.”

  “But Rosa never said-”

  “No, but she’s not a policeman, you know,” he said with a little smile, almost smug. “Still, she suspects. And she’s right. One man in that house was in hospital. His doctor? Maglione.” He held up a light blue folder in illustration. “And Maglione is working with the SS. She makes this connection.”

  “But he was released days before they-”

  “So she goes to see his son. She is an old friend of the father. How long was the father in hospital, when did he leave, did the boy see him-also Carlo, like the father. And of course he wants to know why, and she tells him she suspects Maglione of betraying his father. And what happens? He becomes agitato. ‘It’s my fault,’ he tells her. ‘I killed him.’ Why? Because he went to the house, so maybe they followed him. And Rosa tells him, ‘No, you were there before, people never followed you.’ He was a courier for them, you see. Imagine using a child that way. A Communist, of course, the boy too. No, he tells her, this time he was also bringing medicine for his father, from Maglione. A trap. So now it’s his fault. And Rosa tells him it’s foolishness-he can’t blame himself for this. They already knew somehow. But she’s troubled. She hadn’t known about the medicine, you see.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Some from him, some from her. So she leaves,” he said, picking up the story. “And he’s still agitato. An unstable boy anyway, according to the neighbors.” Police work. Collecting gossip, like a noose. “The father’s dead and he’s to blame. No, somebody else. Somebody still alive. This is a boy who worked with the partisans, someone who acts. What could be more natural?”

  “So he had a motive,” I said. “But that doesn’t-”

  “A strong motive. Very strong. It’s as you predicted-a political crime, but also a personal one.” He walked out from behind the desk, a courtroom gesture, enjoying himself. “Of course, we’re hoping for a confession. And it’s possible. This kind of case-so much remorse. I’ve seen it before. It’s a kind of relief for them.” He glanced at me, amused. “Signor Miller, such a face. We’re police, not SS. We hope for a confession. We don’t torture, we ask questions.”

  “And if he doesn’t confess?”

  Cavallini shrugged. “It’s still a very strong case. He has no alibi.”

  “No?” I said weakly, sitting down to hear the rest.

  “No. The night of the murder, where is he? Out for a walk. In that weather. You remember that evening, the rain? And where did he walk? Around. Along the Riva, then he’s not sure where. Who walks like that in Venice? Tourists.”

  “No one saw him?”

  “No one. Then the cine. Except the ticket girl doesn’t remember.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily-”

  “No, not necessarily,” he said, looking at me. “So, you act the defense? Good. We need to think of everything. But no one sees him, that’s the point. So, his word only. Next, his profession? He works on one of the delivery boats from the Stazione Marittima. Not just to Venice, also the outer islands. So, familiar with the lagoon.” He paused. “Even in fog.” He sat on the edge of the desk. “And after the murder, what does he do? We have witnesses to this, his behavior. Drunk, in the bar he goes to. With the newspaper. He keeps reading it and drinking. ‘For once, justice,’ he says-we have a witness to this. ‘What are you talking about?’ the witness says. ‘He deserved it, he deserved it,’ the boy says, ‘a toast to justice.’ And then what? Tears. Unstable, you see. More than one saw this.”

  “The newspaper,” I said, almost to myself. “So this was after the body was found? Not before?”

  Cavallini looked at me, uncomfortable for a second, weighing this, then decided to ignore it. “Yes, after it was found. Celebrating.”

  “But why would he do that, draw attention that way? Why would he be happy they found the body? Wouldn’t it be better for him if they never found it?”

  Cavallini sat back, a twitch of annoyance in the corner of his mouth. “Nevertheless, that is what he said. A toast to justice. Of course, really to himself. We have witnesses to this,” he said again, then paused. “It’s not always the logic that rules the head in these cases. A boy who blames himself, then who kills-you’re surprised he gives himself away?”

  “It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “But it will. Don’t worry. We will make a case.”

  I looked up at him. Held together by nothing except his will. But convincing, a solution to everything, delivered by Cavallini to a grateful force.

  “You’re troubled?” he said.

  I shrugged, not knowing what to say, swirling again. A case any defense lawyer could pick apart, but would he? Who was the defense? What were trials like here? It wasn’t America. Maybe a different set of priorities, with Carlo Moretti, whoever he was, satisfying all of them. Gianni’s killer.

  “But why?” Cavallini said. “It was you yourself who suggested the motive. You said it would be someone exactly like him. And it is.”

  “It’s just-” I stopped, my heart sinking. Someone exactly like him. You yourself suggested it.

  He waited, frowning a little, surprised now at my reluctance. And why should I be?

  “It’s just-you know, to prove it in court, you’ll have to prove that Gianni did betray them. An informer, all of that. It’ll have to come out.”

  “Ah,” Cavallini said, “I see. But Signor Miller, it’s a case of his murder.”

  “But can you prove it? About Gianni?” What I’d wanted in the first place, just to know.

  “Well, as to that, we only have to prove that Moretti believed it. A doctor prescribes medicine, the boy delivers it, his father is betrayed. Because he is followed? Perhaps not. But he believes it, so he acts.” He paused. “Dr. Maglione’s reputation need not be in question. Only Moretti questioned it.”

  He met my eyes, an explanation that was also a bargain. Perfect in every way. Justice done. A family’s honor held intact. A promotion for him. A kindness to Giulia, to my mother. Gianni a victim, like Paolo.

  “Yes,” I said, thinking, “and what if he was wrong-if we were wrong?”
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  “How do you mean?”

  “For the sake of argument,” I said, getting up, “what if Gianni didn’t do it? It explains the gap. He treats Moretti, he releases Moretti, nothing happens. A week-longer, ten days. He prescribes medicine. Why? If he wanted to betray Moretti, why not do it earlier? Why wait? What if the son is wrong? What if Gianni never meant the father harm?”

  Cavallini got up and walked back behind the desk. “Then he killed him for nothing.” Another pause. “Signor Miller, I am confused. Do you think Dr. Maglione was innocent? After all, it was you-” He let the words drift, his eyes simply curious, the way they’d been at the water entrance, asking about the boat.

  “No, no,” I said quickly. “But if we can’t prove it, then it’s very difficult to prove the motive.”

  “Well, that’s for the lawyers,” he said, dismissing this. “And you forget there is still the confession. Would that satisfy you?” He smiled again, a kind of tease. “It was like this in Germany? Always the proof?”

  “Not always,” I said. “But in capital cases-” I stopped. “What happens in Italy? To the boy, if he’s guilty.”

  “Execution.”

  I looked down, suddenly winded, the air rushing out of me. Execution how? Hanging? Shooting? An innocent boy. Worse than murder. I caught my breath, aware of Cavallini’s stare. “Then we have to be sure.”

  “Don’t worry, Signor Miller. We will be. Ah, again,” he said as the telephone rang. “All morning it’s like this. Excuse me.” A complaint he’d make later to his long-faced wife. A man of importance.

  I picked up Moretti’s blue hospital folder and glanced at the form while Cavallini talked. A fake name, but presumably him. Date of admission, release, address, and personal information, also presumably fake. An attached chart with what looked to be blood pressure and temperature readings. Diagnosis and report, in longhand, Gianni’s familiar signature on the bottom, the attending nurse, blood type, everything except what had happened. Iniezione antitetanica. Injection against tetanus? Well, there would be.