Playing With Fire

by Tess Gerritsen

“About the music, you mean?”

  “He doesn’t understand its power. He certainly wouldn’t understand why I’ve come all this way to track down the composer. He’d call this trip crazy.”

  Gerda sighs. “I guess I must be crazy, too, because I’m here looking for the same answers.”

  “Then we should get started.” I pick up my purse and sling it over my shoulder. “Let’s go find Calle del Forno.”

  —

  We soon discover there is more than one Calle del Forno in Venice. The first one we visit is in the sestiere of Santa Croce, where at 4 P.M. the alleys are thronged with tourists browsing the little shops and wine bars near the Rialto Bridge. Even this late in the day the heat is stifling and my head is still fogged from jet lag. We cannot find the address No. 11, so we stop at a gelato shop, where Gerda struggles to communicate in her rudimentary Italian with the middle-aged woman behind the counter. The woman looks at the written address, shakes her head, and calls out to a skinny teenage boy who sits slouched at a corner table.

  Scowling, the boy pulls off his iPod earbuds and says to us in English, “My mother says you are on the wrong street.”

  “But this is Calle del Forno, isn’t it?” Gerda hands the boy the written address. “We can’t find number eleven.”

  “There is no number eleven on this street. You want Calle del Forno in Cannaregio. A different sestiere.”

  “Is that neighborhood very far?”

  He shrugs. “You cross at Ponte degli Scalzi. Walk five, maybe ten minutes.”

  “Could you take us there?”

  The teenager flashes her a why would I do that? look that needs no translation. Only when Gerda offers to pay him twenty euros to take us there does his face brighten. He shoves to his feet and stuffs the iPod in his pocket. “I show you.”

  The boy leads us at a trot through tourist-packed streets, his red T-shirt weaving in and out of sight. Once, after he darts around a corner, we lose sight of him entirely. Then we hear a shout of “Hey! Ladies!” and spot him waving far ahead of us. The boy intends to waste no time collecting those twenty euros, and he keeps urging us forward, impatient with these slow-poke Americans who keep getting hung up in the thronged alleys.

  On the other side of Ponte degli Scalzi, the crowds grow even thicker and we’re helplessly swept along in the river of travelers spilling out of the nearby train station. By now I’ve given up trying to remember our route, and I register only what leaps out at me from the swirl of color and noise. The girl with the sunburned face. A shop window with leering Carnevale masks. A bull-sized man in a tank top, his shoulders bristling with hair. Then the boy veers from the canal, and the crowds thin away to nothing. We are alone as we turn down a gloomy passage where crumbling buildings squeeze ever closer, as if leaning in to crush us.

  The boy points. “Here. This is number eleven.”

  I stare up at flaking paint and sagging walls, at a façade webbed with cracks, like wrinkles on an ancient face. Through the dusty windows, I see empty rooms littered with cardboard boxes and crumpled newspapers.

  “This place looks like it’s been abandoned for some time,” says Gerda. She scans the alley and sees two elderly women watching us from a doorway. “Ask those ladies who owns this building,” she commands the boy.

  “You promised me twenty euros to bring you here.”

  “Okay, okay.” Gerda hands him the money. “Now, could you please just ask them the question?”

  The teenager calls out to the elderly women. This leads to a noisy conversation shouted in Italian. The women leave their doorway and approach us. One has an eye that’s milky from a cataract; the other walks with a cane, grasped in a hand that’s grotesquely deformed by arthritis.

  “They say an American man bought the building last year,” the boy tells us. “He wants to make an art gallery.”

  Both old women snort at the absurdity of yet another gallery in Venice, where the city itself is a living, breathing work of art.

  “Before the American bought it, who lived here?” Gerda asks.

  The boy points to the arthritic woman with the cane. “She says her family owned it for many years. Her father bought it, after the war.”

  I reach into my shoulder bag for the book of Gypsy music. From its pages I pull out the single sheet with Incendio and point to the composer’s name. “Has she ever heard of this person, L. Todesco?”

  The woman with the arthritic hands bends closer and stares at the name. For a long time she says nothing. Reaching out, she gently touches the page and murmurs in Italian.

  “What is she saying?” I ask the boy.

  “She says they went away and never came back.”

  “Who?”

  “The people who lived in this building. Before the war.”

  Gnarled fingers suddenly grasp my arm and tug, urging me to follow. Down the alley the woman leads us, her cane thunking against the pavement. Despite her age and infirmity, she moves at a determined pace around the corner, into a busier street. I realize the boy’s taken off and abandoned us, so we can’t ask the woman where we’re going. Perhaps she’s misunderstood our request and we’ll end up in her family’s trinket shop. She takes us over a bridge, across a town square, and points a crooked finger at a wall.

  Engraved on wood panels is a continuous series of names and numbers: …GILMO PERLMUTTER 45 BRUNO PERLMUTTER 9 LINA PRANI CORINALDI 71…

  “Qui,” the woman says softly. “Lorenzo.”

  It’s Gerda who spots it first. “Oh my God, Julia,” she gasps. “There he is!” She points to the name, engraved among the others: LORENZO TODESCO 24.

  The old woman looks at me with haunted eyes and whispers: “L’ultimo treno.”

  “Julia, this is some sort of memorial plaque,” Gerda says. “If I understand it correctly, it explains what happened here, in this square.”

  Although the words are Italian, their meaning is clear even to me. Ebraica. Deportati. Fascisti dai nazisti. Two hundred and forty-six Italian Jews, deported from this city. Among them was a young man named Lorenzo Todesco.

  I glance around the square and spot the words Campo Ghetto Nuovo. Now I know where we are: the Jewish quarter. I cross the square to a different building, where there are bronze plaques showing scenes of deportation and concentration camps, and I focus on the image of a train spilling out its cargo of doomed human beings. L’ultimo treno, the old woman told us. The last train, which took away the family that once lived at No. 11, Calle del Forno.

  My head throbs in the heat and I feel dizzy. “I need to sit down,” I tell Gerda. I make my way to the shade of an enormous tree and sink onto the public bench. There I sit massaging my scalp, thinking about Lorenzo Todesco, only twenty-four years old. So young. His home in that now-derelict building on Calle del Forno stands only a few hundred paces from where I now sit. Perhaps he once rested under this same tree, walked across these same paving stones. Perhaps I’m now sitting in the very same spot where the melody of Incendio came to him as he contemplated his grim future.

  “The Jewish Museum is right over there,” Gerda says, pointing to a nearby building. “Someone in there must speak English. Let me ask them if they know anything about the Todesco family.”

  While Gerda heads into the museum, I remain on the bench, my head buzzing as if a million bees are swarming in my brain. Tourists wander past, but it’s only the bees I hear, drowning out the voices and footfalls. I cannot stop thinking about Lorenzo, who was nine years younger than I am now. I think about where I was nine years ago. A newlywed with a whole life ahead of me. I had a comfortable home, a career I loved, and no dark clouds on my horizon. But for Lorenzo, a Jew in a world gone mad, dark clouds were rapidly closing in.

  “Julia?” Gerda has returned. Beside her stands a pretty, dark-haired young woman. “This is Francesca, a curator from the Jewish Museum. I told her why we’re here. She’d like to see Incendio.”

  I pull the music from my shoulder bag and give it to the young woman, wh
o frowns at the name of the composer. “You bought this in Rome?” she asks me.

  “I found it in an antiques shop. I paid a hundred euros for it,” I add sheepishly.

  “This paper does appear to be old,” Francesca concedes. “But I doubt this composer was from the same Todesco family who lived here in Cannaregio.”

  “So you’ve heard of that Todesco family?”

  She nods. “We have files on all the Jewish deportees in our archives. Bruno Todesco was a well-known luthier in Venice. I believe he had two sons and a daughter. I’ll have to review the files, but they may have lived on Calle del Forno.”

  “Couldn’t this composer L. Todesco be one of his sons? That waltz was tucked into an old music book with the Calle del Forno address written on it.”

  Francesca shakes her head. “All the family’s books and papers were burned by the fascists. As far as we know, nothing survived. If the Todescos managed to save anything from the fire, it was later lost in the death camp where they were sent. So this composition…” Francesca holds up Incendio. “Should not even exist.”

  “But it does,” I say. “And I paid a hundred euros for it.”

  She is still studying the music. She holds it up to the sunlight and squints at the penciled notes on the staves. “This antiques store in Rome, did they tell you where they obtained the music?”

  “The dealer bought it from the estate of a man named Capobianco.”

  “Capobianco?”

  “That’s what the shopkeeper’s granddaughter wrote me.” I reach into my shoulder bag again, take out the letters from Anna Maria Padrone, and hand them to Francesca. “Mr. Capobianco lived in the town of Casperia. I believe it’s not far from Rome.”

  She reads the first letter, then unfolds the second. Suddenly I hear her suck in a sharp breath and when she looks at me, something has changed in her eyes. The spark of interest has been lit, a fire started. “This antiques dealer was murdered?”

  “Only a few weeks ago. There was a robbery at his shop.”

  She focuses again on Incendio. She’s now holding it gingerly, as if the paper has transformed into something dangerous. Something too scorching to hold in her bare hands. “May I keep this music for a while? I want my people to examine it. And these letters, too.”

  “Your people?”

  “Our document scholars. I assure you, they will take very good care of it. If this music is as old as it appears, it should not be touched anymore by human hands. Let me know which hotel you’re staying in, and I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “We do have copies of the music at home,” Gerda says to me. “There’s no reason we can’t let her borrow it for a proper examination.”

  I look at Incendio and think of how that lone sheet of paper has brought such misery to my life. How it has fractured my family and poisoned my love for my daughter.

  “Take it,” I say. “I never want to see the bloody thing again.”

  —

  I should feel relieved that Incendio is no longer my burden, that it’s now in the hands of people who will know what to do with it, yet that night I lie awake, fretting about all the unanswered questions. As Gerda sleeps soundly in the next bed, I stare at the darkness, wondering if Francesca will track down the music’s origins as she promised. Or will it end up as just another document stored in the museum’s vault, left for some future scholar to ponder?

  I give up on sleep, get dressed in the dark, and slip out of the room.

  The lobby desk is manned by a night clerk who looks up from the paperback novel she’s reading and gives me a friendly nod. Laughter and loud voices filter in from the street outside; at 1 A.M., the sleepless are still out and about in Venice.

  But wandering the city is not what I have in mind tonight. Instead, I approach the night clerk and ask: “Could you help me? I need to reach some people in another town, but I don’t know the phone number. Do you have a directory where I can look it up?”

  “Of course. Where do they live?”

  “A town called Casperia. I think it’s close to Rome. Their last name is Capobianco.”

  The clerk turns to her computer and searches what I assume is the Italian version of the White Pages. “There are two listings for that surname. Filippo Capobianco and Davide Capobianco. Which one do you want?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She turns to me with a puzzled look. “You don’t know the given name?”

  “I just know the family is in Casperia.”

  “Then I will write down both phone numbers for you.” She jots the information on a scrap of paper and hands it to me.”

  “Could you perhaps…”

  “Yes?”

  “They may not speak English, so I don’t know if I’ll even be able to talk to them. Could you call them for me?”

  “But it is one in the morning, madam.”

  “No, I mean tomorrow. If there are long-distance charges, I’ll pay whatever it costs. Could you give them a message?”

  The woman reaches for a fresh sheet of paper. “What is the message?”

  “Tell them my name is Julia Ansdell. I’m looking for the family of Giovanni Capobianco. It’s about a piece of music he once owned, by a composer named Lorenzo Todesco.”

  She scribbles down the message and glances up. “You wish me to call both of the numbers?”

  “Yes. I want to be sure I find the right family.”

  “And if they wish to speak to you? How long will you be a guest here, so I can give you the message?”

  “I’m staying another two days.” I reach for her pen and write down my cellphone number and email address. “After that, they can reach me in the United States.”

  The clerk tapes the note to the desk beside the telephone. “I will call in the morning, before I leave.”

  I know it’s a strange request, and I wonder if she’ll actually follow through. I have no chance to ask her, because when I stop at the desk the next morning, a different woman is sitting there and the note is no longer taped beside the telephone. No one has left any messages for me. No one except Rob has tried to call my cellphone.

  I stand there in the lobby, scrolling through Rob’s latest text messages, which were sent at midnight, 2 A.M., and 5 A.M., Boston time. Poor Rob; he is getting no sleep, and it’s my fault. I think of the night I was in labor with Lily, and how Rob sat by my bed the whole time, holding my hand, pressing cool washcloths to my forehead. I remember his bleary eyes and unshaven face, and I imagine that’s how he looks now. I owe him some sort of answer, so I respond with one short message: Please don’t worry. I need to do this, and then I’ll come home. I press Send, and imagine his look of relief when he sees my words pop up on his cellphone. Or will it be a look of irritation? Am I still the woman he loves, or am I merely the problem in his life?

  “There you are, Julia,” says Gerda, who’s just emerged from the breakfast room. She notices the phone in my hand. “Have you spoken to Rob?”

  “I sent him a text.”

  “Good.” She sounds strangely relieved and says again, with a sigh: “Good.”

  “Have you heard from Francesca? About the music?”

  “It’s too soon. Give her some time. Meanwhile, I think we should take a walk around this gorgeous city. What do you want to see?”

  “I’d like to go back to Cannaregio. The Ghetto Nuovo.”

  Gerda hesitates, clearly uninterested in returning to the Jewish quarter. “Why don’t we go to San Marco first?” she suggests. “I want to do a little shopping and sip Bellinis. We are in Venice. Let’s be tourists.”

  And that’s exactly how we spend most of the day. We poke around shops in San Marco, squeeze in among the hordes visiting the Doge’s Palace, and bargain for trinkets I really don’t want on the busy Rialto Bridge.

  By the time we finally cross the footbridge into Cannaregio, it is late afternoon and I’m sick of fighting my way through crowds. We escape into the relative quiet of the Jewish quarter, where the narrow streets are
already cast in evening shadow. I’m so relieved to be away from the throngs that at first, the silence of the neighborhood doesn’t bother me.

  But halfway down an alleyway, I suddenly stop and turn to look behind us. I see no one, only a gloomy passage and laundry fluttering on a line high above. There is nothing alarming, yet my skin prickles and my senses are instantly on high alert.

  “What is it?” Gerda asks.

  “I thought I heard someone behind us.”

  “I don’t see anyone.”

  I can’t stop scanning the alley, searching for a flicker of movement. I see only the laundry swaying overhead, three faded shirts and a towel.

  “No one’s there. Come on,” she says and keeps walking.

  I have no choice but to follow her, because I don’t want to be left alone in that claustrophobic passage. We make our way back to the Campo Ghetto Nuovo, where once again I’m drawn to the plaque with the names of deported Jews. There he is, Lorenzo Todesco. While Francesca has her doubts he is the composer, I feel certain that Incendio is his. Seeing his name carved here is like coming face-to-face with someone I have known for a long time, but only now am able to recognize.

  “It’s late,” says Gerda. “Shall we head back?”

  “Not yet.” I cross the square to the Jewish Museum, which has already closed for the day. Through the window, I spy a man inside, straightening up a stack of pamphlets. I rap on the glass and he shakes his head and points to his watch. When I knock again, he finally unlocks the door and regards me with a go away scowl.

  “Is Francesca here?” I ask.

  “She left this afternoon. To see a journalist.”

  “Will she be here tomorrow?”

  “I don’t know. Come back then.” With that, he shuts the door, and I hear the angry clunk of the bolt sliding home.

  —

  That night Gerda and I dine in a mediocre restaurant that we choose at random, one of the countless pizza and pasta traps near Piazza San Marco that cater to tourists who will never return. Every table is taken and we sit elbow-to-elbow with a family of sunburned midwesterners who laugh too loud and drink too much. I have no appetite, and I have to force myself to eat the tasteless spaghetti Bolognese that sprawls like a bloody thing across my plate.