Playing With Fire

by Tess Gerritsen

  “It’s from my grandfather’s library,” Lorenzo quickly explained. “He is a music professor at Ca’ Foscari. It’s his job to collect all manner of—”

  “About music, I choose not to pass judgment,” said the Colonel with a wave of absolution. “I’m not like these Blackshirt thugs who burn books and smash instruments. No, I appreciate music, all music. Even in the midst of this nasty business, we mustn’t lose our appreciation for art, don’t you agree?” Lips pursed, he studied Lorenzo for a moment. He crossed to the sideboard and returned with the meager remains of his supper, which he set in front of Lorenzo.

  “An artist needs fuel before he can create. Eat,” he urged.

  Lorenzo stared down at a crust of bread and congealed gravy cloaked in a white layer of fat. There was no meat left, only a few lumps of carrot and onion, but to a famished man, this was a feast. Yet he did not touch it. He pictured his sister’s thin face. He thought of his mother, weak and unsteady from hunger.

  “My family hasn’t eaten all day,” he said. “No one on the train has eaten. Could you not give them—”

  “Do you want it or not?” the Colonel snapped. “Because if you don’t, I’ll feed it to the dogs.”

  Lorenzo picked up the bread and held it for a moment, haunted by guilt, but too hungry to resist it. He scraped it through the gravy, scooping up a slimy ribbon of grease, and crammed it into his mouth, sighing as the flavors exploded on his tongue. Silky beef fat. The sweetness of carrots. The yeasty bitterness of burned crust. He dredged the remaining fragment through the gravy, and when the bread was gone, he used his fingers to wipe up the last streak of grease and finally licked the plate.

  The Colonel sat in the chair across from him, smoking a cigarette as he watched with an expression that was half amusement, half boredom. “I’ll take that away before you start chewing on the chinaware,” he said and set the plate back on the sideboard. “I can arrange for more.”

  “Please. My family is hungry, too.”

  “You can’t change that.”

  “But you can.” Lorenzo dared to look the man in the eye. “My sister is only fourteen. Her name is Pia and she’s done nothing wrong. She’s a good soul, a kind soul, and she deserves to live. And my mother, she’s not well, but she’ll work hard. They all will.”

  “There is nothing I can do for them. I advise you to stop thinking about them.”

  “Stop thinking about them? This is my family, and it’s not possible for anyone to—”

  “It’s not just possible, it’s necessary if you hope to survive. Tell me. Are you a survivor?”

  Lorenzo looked into crystal blue eyes, and in that instant he knew that this man certainly was a survivor. Drop him in the ocean or throw him into a howling mob and somehow he would find a way to walk away unscathed. Now the Colonel was challenging Lorenzo to do the same, to cast off any and all burdens that could drag him under the waves.

  “I want to be with them,” Lorenzo said. “Don’t separate us. If my family stays together, I know we’ll all work harder here. We’ll be of far more use to you.”

  “Where, exactly, do you think you are?”

  “We were told we were going to Fossoli.”

  The Colonel grunted. “You are not in Fossoli. You are in San Sabba. This is merely a transit camp. From here, most deportees are sent elsewhere, unless they fill a special need. Like you.”

  “Then I must return to the train before it leaves.”

  “Believe me, you don’t want to get back on that train.”

  “Where are they going? Please tell me where they’re going.”

  The Colonel took a long pull on his cigarette and exhaled. Gazing at Lorenzo through a veil of smoke, he said: “The train goes north. To Poland.”

  —

  The Colonel slid a glass of wine in front of Lorenzo. Poured another for himself and took a sip as he regarded the prisoner seated across the table from him. “You’re one of the lucky ones. You should be grateful you’re staying here at San Sabba.”

  “My family—where in Poland are they going?”

  “It hardly matters.”

  “It matters to me.”

  The Colonel shrugged and lit another cigarette. “Whatever camp they end up in, it will be cold there. Colder than you can imagine. That’s all I can guarantee.”

  “My sister has only a thin coat. And she’s frail—she can’t perform hard labor. If she were assigned to women’s work—sewing uniforms or scrubbing pots—she could manage that. Can’t it be arranged?”

  “You don’t understand at all, do you? What it means for a Jew to be sent to Poland? A fate you can escape if you work with me.”

  “My sister—”

  “Forget your bloody sister!”

  Lorenzo was shocked by the Colonel’s roar. In his desperation to save Pia, he had lost sight of his own perilous position. This man could order him executed on the spot, and judging by the fury in his eyes, he seemed to be considering that very option. The seconds ticked by as Lorenzo sat on the edge of doom, prepared for the punch of a bullet into his head.

  The Colonel leaned back in his chair and took another sip of wine. “You know, if you cooperate, you just might survive. But only if you cooperate.”

  Lorenzo swallowed, his throat still parched from fear. “What must I do?”

  “Play music, that’s all. As you did for me.” The glow of the lamp cast ominous shadows on the Colonel’s face and his eyes had the cold gleam of ice. What manner of creature was he? An opportunist, clearly, but that spoke to neither good nor evil. What sort of heart was beating beneath the pressed uniform?

  “For whom will I perform?” asked Lorenzo.

  “You will play at any occasion for which the Commandant requires music. Now that Risiera di San Sabba is being expanded, there will be a number of such occasions. Last week, half a dozen officers arrived from Berlin. Next month Herr Lambert himself will come to supervise new construction. There will be receptions, dinners. Guests to entertain.”

  “So I am to play for German officers,” said Lorenzo, unable to hide the note of disgust in his voice.

  “You would prefer to be marched outside and executed in the courtyard? Because I can certainly accommodate you.”

  Lorenzo swallowed. “No, sir.”

  “Then you will perform whenever and wherever Commandant Oberhauser orders it. I’ve been tasked to identify musicians talented enough to be part of an ensemble. Thus far, you are the third to be chosen. With you, we now have two violinists and a cellist, which is a start. Every train brings fresh candidates. Perhaps in the next group of prisoners, I’ll find a clarinet or horn player. We have already amassed enough instruments to furnish a small orchestra.”

  Confiscated was what he really meant, from the countless unfortunates who’d been stripped of their possessions. Was La Dianora bound for the same fate, to be swept up as one more anonymous violin to be lost in a storeroom of orphaned instruments? He looked at his violin, as fearful as any mother afraid of having her child ripped from her arms.

  “Yours is an exquisite instrument,” said the Colonel, exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke. “It’s far better than any violin in our collection.”

  “Please. It was my grandfather’s.”

  “Do you think I’d take it from you? Of course you must be the one to play it, because you know it best.” The Colonel leaned forward, his face pushing through the veil of smoke to gaze at him with startling clarity. “Like you, I’m an artist. I know what it’s like to be surrounded by those who don’t appreciate music or literature. The world’s gone mad and war has brought the barbarians to power. We must simply put up with them and adjust to the new order of things.”

  He speaks of adjustment while I am trying just to stay alive. But the Colonel had offered him a small morsel of hope that staying alive was at least a possibility. This man was a fellow Italian; perhaps he’d be more lenient with his own countryman. Perhaps he’d joined the SS merely to align himself with the powerful
and was not a true Nazi but a pragmatist. To survive, one must at least appear to side with the winner.

  The Colonel rose and picked up a handful of papers from his desk. He placed a sheaf of blank music manuscript paper in front of Lorenzo. “You will be the one to arrange the music for our new ensemble. Since you seem to know your way around a musical score.”

  “What sort of music do you wish us to play?”

  “None of those Gypsy tunes, for God’s sake, or the Commandant will have you shot and I’ll be sent to the front. No, they prefer their old familiars. Mozart, Bach. I have piano music you can use as a reference. You’ll need to arrange parts for whatever musicians we round up.”

  “You said we have only two violins and a cello. It’s hardly an orchestra.”

  “Then make your second violinist play twice as many notes! For now, you’ll have to make do with what we have.” The Colonel tossed a pencil at him. “Prove your worth.”

  Lorenzo looked down at the manuscript paper, where blank staves waited to be filled with notes. Here, at least, was something familiar, something he understood. Music would anchor him, sustain him. In a world gone insane, it was the one thing that would help him hold on to sanity.

  “While you are here at San Sabba, you may witness certain…unpleasantness. I advise you to see nothing, hear nothing. Say nothing.” The Colonel tapped his fingers on the blank manuscript paper. “Focus only on your music. Do your job well, and you just might survive this place.”

  17

  May 1944

  Late at night, lying in his bunk, Lorenzo could hear the screams from Cell No. 1. He never knew who was being tortured. He never saw the victims. He only knew that from night to night, the voices of the tormented kept changing. Sometimes it was a woman’s shrieks, sometimes a man’s. Sometimes a baritone voice would crack into the girlish sobs of a boy still on the threshold of manhood. If Lorenzo ever dared to peer through the barred door, he might have glimpsed those poor souls as they were dragged into the cell block and led into the first doorway on the left. He had been warned by the Italian Colonel to see nothing, hear nothing, but how could he ignore the shrieks issuing from that interrogation cell? The screams might be in Italian or Slovenian or Croatian, but in every language, the meaning was always the same: I don’t know! I can’t tell you! Please stop, I beg you to stop! Some were partisans; some were Resistance fighters. Some were random unfortunates who had no information to share, and were brutalized merely for the pleasure of their torturers.

  See nothing. Hear nothing. Say nothing. And you just might survive.

  Lorenzo’s five cellmates somehow managed to sleep through the nightly screams. In the bunk beneath his, the drummer was snoring with his usual growls and wet rattles. Did the cries of the tortured ever penetrate his sleep? How did he escape so easily into the sanctuary of dreams? While Lorenzo lay awake, the drummer slept on, as did the others. They slept because they were exhausted and weak and because most human beings can learn to endure almost anything, even the cries of the tormented. It was not that their hearts had hardened; it was because they could do nothing about it, and powerlessness leads to its own form of serenity.

  Vittorio the cellist sighed and rolled over. Did he dream of his wife and daughters, whom he had last glimpsed on the San Sabba train platform? The same platform where they had all been singled out as musicians and ripped from those they loved? Even now, months later, the wound left by that separation felt as painful to Lorenzo as a fresh amputation. While their families had almost certainly perished, music had kept alive this ensemble of six broken men.

  Each had been handpicked by the Italian Colonel. A poor man’s orchestra, the Colonel had dubbed them, but they served his purpose. There was Shlomo, the rheumy-eyed drummer from Milan, who’d been arrested with his family as they’d tried to cross the border into Switzerland. There was Emilio, the second violinist, who’d been dragged from a friend’s farmhouse near Brescia, a friend who had been summarily executed for hiding a Jew. There was Vittorio, the cellist, arrested in Vicenza, whose hair had magically turned white within weeks of arriving at San Sabba. There was Carlo, the French horn player who had once been fat, and whose loose skin now flopped in pale drapes over his belly. And finally there was Aleks, the viola player, a Slovene musician so talented he could have found a position with any symphony in the world. Instead here he was in their orchestra of the damned, a mere husk of a man who performed with mechanical fingers and empty eyes. Aleks never spoke of his family or of how he came to San Sabba. Lorenzo did not ask.

  He had enough nightmares of his own.

  In Cell No. 1, the screams rose to a shriek so piercing that Lorenzo clapped his hands over his ears, desperate to shut out the sound. He pressed them there until the screams faded and all he could hear was the whoosh of his own pulse. When at last he dared to pull his hands away from his ears, he heard the familiar squeal of the cell door and the scrape of the prisoner’s body being dragged out to the courtyard.

  He knew its final destination.

  Three months ago, construction had begun in the building across from their cell block. Though he’d been advised to see nothing, hear nothing, Lorenzo could hardly be blind to all the trucks hauling materials through the gate and into the compound. Nor could he avoid noticing the construction team from Berlin, led by a German architect who ceaselessly paced the compound, issuing orders. At first none of the musicians knew what was being built; the work was taking place inside the opposite building, out of their sight. Lorenzo assumed they were adding another cell block to house the flood of new detainees. Every week, so many men, women, and children arrived by train that they were sometimes herded into an open courtyard and spent days shivering and exposed, waiting to be transported north. Yes, a new cell block made sense.

  Then he began to hear whispers from the prisoners who’d been conscripted into carrying bricks and mortar into that windowless new structure. They had seen an underground tunnel leading to the chimney stack. No, this was not some new cell block being built, they told him. It was something else. Something whose purpose they could only speculate about.

  One cold morning in April, Lorenzo saw smoke curl from that chimney for the first time.

  A day later, the prisoners who had labored inside the building, who had told Lorenzo what they’d seen inside, were marched from their cell block. They did not return. The next morning, from that chimney billowed a singular stench that could not be escaped. It clung to clothes and hair, swirled up throats and noses, and was inhaled into lungs. Both prisoners and guards alike were forced to breathe in the dead.

  See nothing. Hear nothing. Say nothing. This is how you survive.

  Everyone closed their ears to the screams from Cell No. 1 and to the executioner’s gunshots beyond the walls of the compound. But there was one sound no one could shut out, a sound so horrifying that even the guards would grimace. Some of the executed prisoners delivered to the ovens were not really dead, but merely stunned by what should have been a fatal bullet or blow, and they were thrown into the flames alive. The soldiers would rev their truck engines or goad their dogs into baying, but those distractions were not sufficient to hide the shrieks that occasionally issued from the smoke-belching monster.

  To drown out the noise of the dying, San Sabba’s little orchestra of the damned was ordered to play music in the courtyard.

  And so every morning, Lorenzo and his ensemble dutifully gathered up their instruments and music stands and marched out of the cell block. He’d lost track of how many weeks had passed since his arrival, but over the last month he’d noted the gradual greening of the vines that scrambled up the buildings, and a few weeks ago had seen tiny white flowers pop up in the cracks between the stones. Even at San Sabba, spring had arrived. He imagined wildflowers blooming beyond the walls and barbed wire and hungered for the smell of earth and grass and woods, but here in the compound there was only the stench of truck exhaust and sewage and chimney smoke.

  Since dawn, round
after round of gunshots had been booming outside the walls. Now the first truck rolled into the compound, weighed down with the harvest from that morning’s gunfire. “More logs for the fire,” the Italian colonel announced as the truck pulled into the courtyard to unload its cargo. Fresh rounds of gunfire exploded beyond the walls, and he turned to his orchestra. “Well, what are you waiting for? Begin!”

  They did not choose sedate minuets or quiet airs, for the purpose of this music was not to entertain. It was to disguise and distract, and for that they needed loud marches or dance music, played at maximum volume. The Italian Colonel paced the courtyard as they performed, haranguing his musicians to play louder! Louder! “Not merely forte, but fortissimo! More drums, more brass!”

  The French horn blared and the drum thundered. The four string players sawed away as forcefully as they could, until their bow arms trembled, but it was not loud enough. It could never be loud enough to hide the horrors inside the building with the smokestack.

  The first truck pulled away; a second one rolled through the gate, so overloaded that it sagged low on its axles. As it bounced across the courtyard, part of its cargo tumbled out through the open canvas flap and landed with a sickening thud on the stones.

  Lorenzo stared down at the man’s caved-in skull, the naked limbs, the wasted flesh. More logs for the fire. The French horn suddenly fell silent, but the drum kept pounding, Shlomo’s rhythm unaffected by the sight of the emaciated corpse. Gamely the strings played on as well, but Lorenzo’s bow trembled and his notes slid out of tune as his fingers went numb with the horror of what lay at his feet.

  “Play!” The Colonel gave the French horn player a sharp slap on the back of the head. “I order you, play!”

  After a few tentative honks on his horn, Carlo regained his breath control and now they were all playing again, but not loudly enough to satisfy the Colonel. He paced back and forth, once again chanting “Forte, forte, forte!” Lorenzo dug his bow harder into the strings and tried to stay focused on his music stand, but the corpse was staring up at him, and Lorenzo could see that the eyes were green.