The Girl From Venice Read online

  “And you, the Lion of Tripoli, are part of it?” Cenzo asked Giorgio.

  “We needed a spokesman that people would recognize,” Steiner said.

  “Then you don’t need me.”

  “We do,” Steiner said. “For the same reason as before: to find Giulia. You’re the only person she’ll trust. The question is, can we trust you? Your brother doesn’t think so. He thinks you don’t want to get involved.”

  “He’s right.”

  “Even to save lives?”

  “Whose lives?” Cenzo asked. “You told me yourself that this war is as good as over, to sit down and wait it out.”

  “So you won’t help us anymore?” Steiner said.

  “In some last-second scheme to save the world? The world is lost.”

  “You sanctimonious shit.” Giorgio grabbed Cenzo by the sleeve. “I’ve been saving you all my life.”

  “You’ve been saving me?”

  “How do you think you could pull that stunt about poison gas in Africa without being court-martialed and shot? Or running your mouth off at Nido’s bar without the Blackshirts pulling you off the street and busting your head?” He put his forearm under Cenzo’s chin and pushed him against the tunnel wall. “Do something for a change. Do more than complain.”

  Cenzo pushed back. “You mean here is my chance to help my brother the Fascist? You think you can switch sides like an actor changing costume? It may work for women. It doesn’t with me.”

  “So it’s all about Gina again. Here we are on a battlefield and all you can talk about is her and your morality. So tell me, is Maria Paz married or not?”

  Cenzo found himself unhorsed, a knight knocked out of his saddle. In a second, his moral high ground was lost.

  “It would be a good thing if my boys had a chance to have a life,” Steiner said. “To waste their young lives now, at the end of this war, would be obscene. Not to mention the lives of all the young men on your side.”

  “Who is part of this scheme of yours?” Cenzo asked. “I should know that much.”

  The colonel said, “I can’t tell you. It’s better, for everyone’s safety, that you don’t know.”

  “In case I talk?”

  “That’s right. The only one who knew all the pieces to the puzzle was Vittorio Silber.”

  “Did he know General Kassel?”

  “Before the war, the general was often Silber’s guest at the opera, it’s true.”

  “Let me guess. There would be someone from American intelligence involved? And a Swiss if they’re meeting in Switzerland.”

  “Naturally.”

  “And there would be a respectable Italian for ballast, like a bishop or cardinal?”

  “I leave that to your brother,” Steiner said. “There should be an Italian spokesman, a single voice. Giorgio is well-known and respected by both sides.”

  “It was felt that a familiar voice would reassure people,” Giorgio said.

  This was getting ridiculous, Cenzo thought. Mussolini’s golden boy was going to end up a winner once again.

  “Partisans included?” Cenzo asked.

  “Absolutely,” Steiner said. “It could be the first time you and Giorgio worked together since the two of you were boys on a fishing boat.”

  “There were three of us once,” Cenzo said. “I’ll tell you what I’m willing to do. I’ll keep looking for Giulia, but I won’t just hand her over to you. That has to be her decision.”

  “You want to make us play hide-and-seek?” Giorgio said.

  “No, that’s fair,” Steiner said. “I think she will want to help us identify the man who betrayed her father’s cause. He’s a war criminal.”

  “She knows who he is. Have you ever heard of a lawyer named DaCosta?” Cenzo asked.

  “Why?”

  “His name was not called out during the raid at the hospital. She thinks it’s because he was the one calling out the names.”

  “It would be nice if Silber had left Giulia a message,” Giorgio said.

  It would be, Cenzo thought. But people failed to leave messages all the time. Maps went unread and confessions went unheard. Between the intention and the act, life was often a tale told to the deaf.

  • • •

  The drive back to Salò was hostile and silent, as if Cenzo and Giorgio were so full of bile, they dared not open their mouths.

  “The phone service still works,” Giorgio said when they pulled up at the Hotel Golfo. “Call me as soon as you find the girl.”

  “And if I don’t find her?”

  “If you don’t find her, go back to Pellestrina. You can keep the clothes.”

  “I need money and a car.”

  “So now you’re showing initiative?” said Giorgio. “Too little, too late, as usual.”

  When he got back to his room, Cenzo wondered about Giorgio. Did he really believe that he had protected him all through his life? He and Giorgio were at dagger points now but at one time they had been inseparable. Giorgio, being the oldest, was the natural leader. Hugo was the baby, always underfoot. Cenzo remembered the annual celebration of Saint Joseph in Pellestrina. Giorgio had climbed a greased pole and won a pig, which made him a virtual Spartacus in Cenzo’s eyes.

  He thought about the painting of Hugo being strafed in the lagoon. He had painted it as a voto, an illustration of devotion to be hung in the church. Was it an illustration of something else? The pilot’s violation of the rules of war? For the hundredth time, Cenzo remembered the stormy night, its violent bolts of lightning, himself fighting waves, Giorgio trying to rescue Hugo and, floating above it all, an apparition of the Virgin. Like many fishermen, Hugo had never learned how to swim. He desperately hung on to Giorgio’s leg as the older brother beat his way to the surface, although it almost seemed that Hugo was trying to pull Giorgio to the bottom. An illusion, no doubt. An unmistakable fact was that the American fighter plane was doing its best to kill all three brothers. The illusion, however, was the reason Cenzo never hung the painting and why neither his mother nor Celestina could bear the sight of it.

  21

  “Cole Porter said it best. ‘You’re the top, you’re Mussolini. You’re the top, you’re a dry martini.’” Vera danced across the consulate’s veranda and delivered a drink to Cenzo. “Wonderful news! It looks like Rachele is going, leaving the field to Claretta. Isn’t that the best? Rachele wanted to be with Il Duce but he said no.”

  “So true love has prevailed,” Cenzo said.

  “You believe in true love?” Maria leveled her gaze.

  “Don’t answer that,” Otto said. “The only place you’ll find love is in the movies. Which reminds me: Where is Giorgio?” He giggled and poured himself a gin and quinine water. “It always makes me uneasy when I don’t know what Giorgio is up to.”

  “Our Salò social set is dwindling,” Vera said. “It’s like friends huddling together in the path of an oncoming storm. What is going to happen to all of us?”

  “As a movie star,” Otto said, “and a blonde at that, you should draw a very good price. Or at least land in the lap of an American general,” Otto said.

  “He’s just joking.” Vera was embarrassed.

  “He’s a cynic,” Maria agreed.

  “I’m simply not a hypocrite,” Otto said. “An honest man is always called a cynic. You think that the liberation will be like the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace? It won’t be. It will be murderers and grave robbers, a parade of the lowest forms of humanity. You deal with them or end up with your pants down.”

  “Not a pretty picture, any way you look at it,” said Cenzo.

  “Unless you have something to trade,” Otto said. “Isn’t that right, Maria? A smart woman knows how to compromise. By the way, how is the consul doing? The stress can’t be good for him.”

  “He’s holding together.
”

  “It must be frustrating for him to sit in a wheelchair while other men pay court to his wife. Figuratively speaking.” He turned to Cenzo. “So, what would you trade for a girl, theoretically? I agree it all depends on the girl. Physical attributes count. Virginity, of course. I think a degree of resistance would actually be a bonus of sorts.”

  “For some men,” said Cenzo.

  “I’m sure that, when it comes right down to it, Mussolini and Claretta have some sort of escape plan,” Vera said.

  “Do you remember Mussolini’s plan for air raid alarms?” Otto asked. “Shouting. Get on your rooftop and shout, ‘Air raid!’ So, no, I do not have any faith in any escape plan concocted by Benito Mussolini.”

  Vera changed the subject. “Did you finish Dr. Goebbels’s film?”

  “The Titanic? We finished it last week, as a matter of fact,” Otto said. “It’s the greatest epic ever filmed. At least there will be no more amateurish advice from Dr. Goebbels. No more model ships or giant icebergs. We will never see its like again. At least from that director. Goebbels had him hung. From now on, people will want something bright and cheery, with legs kicking and, of course, a pretty face. That’s what gets the heart of a man like Giorgio racing, wouldn’t you say so, Maria? I see the glitter of sequins and hear a Latin tango.”

  “Very amusing,” Maria said.

  “Only saying what everybody knows. Oh, Cenzo didn’t? He does now.”

  Maria went for Otto, tripped over the liquor cart, fell and hit her head on the marble floor. She didn’t bleed or lose consciousness, but she lost her sense of balance when she tried to stand.

  “Put her head up. Or is it down?” Vera said.

  “Put her to bed,” Otto recommended. “We have accidents like this all the time in film. That’s why we have a doctor on the set.”

  “I should take you to the hospital,” Cenzo said.

  “To a hospital where they cut off arms and legs? No, thank you.”

  Cenzo supported her up the stairs to a bedroom that was distinctly feminine, with lace curtains and flocked wallpaper.

  He found Señor Paz in a hospital-style bedroom near the elevator at the end of the hall. The former consul lay in a stupor. On a tray next to him were empty syrettes of morphine. In a chair, the nurse had passed into her own drug-induced stupor, her white shoes tucked to the side.

  Cenzo decided to let them sleep and returned to the reception room. He turned on the desk lamp and played its light over portraits of grim South American statesmen.

  Little mail reached Salò, but what correspondence came through was hand-delivered and bore the stamp WEHRMACHT: TOP SECRET. Two envelopes identical and heavier than usual lay on the desk. They did not constitute much work but more than he would have expected from a consulate that was no longer functioning and a consul too sick to rise from his bed. Cenzo picked up the top letter and an Argentinian passport slid out. A stamped photo of Wilhelm Christian Doorf looked back at him. He was blond, born May 2, 1895, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A German name was not unusual: ten percent of the Argentine population was German and ten percent was Italian. They accounted for Argentina’s sympathies during the war.

  An ID said that Doorf was a mining engineer residing in Tucumán, Argentina, who had been discharged from the military with a document for good behavior and was a member in good standing at the Santo Cristo Sports Club. Cenzo opened the second envelope. It was for Manuel Cristobal Reyes, a dark, heavy-set schoolteacher, born in Corrientes, January 18, 1910. Reyes carried membership in the Argentine Teachers Union and Huracán Football Club. The last Cenzo had seen of either Doorf or Reyes was in formal SS uniforms at the birthday party for Hitler.

  “It’s disappointing, isn’t it?” Otto said as he walked in from the veranda.

  “You’re still here?” Cenzo asked. “I thought you had gone.”

  “Vera left but I decided to stay.” The clock chimed with bell tones. He checked his pocket watch like a stationmaster, satisfied that his railroad was running on schedule. “Now that you have discovered Maria’s side business, what do you think?”

  “She seems to be a talented forger.”

  “Don’t be shocked. Everyone compromises. It so happens that Maria needs money and these gentlemen need to travel. Their needs meet.”

  “Where do you fit in?” Cenzo asked.

  “Oh, I’m just a middleman. I merely address the need.”

  “That’s very Swiss of you.”

  “Tell me, have you found your niece?” Otto asked.

  “No.”

  “How much time do you think you have? Let me put it another way: How long do you think the Salò government will stand after our German comrades leave? A week?”

  “More or less.”

  “I agree. The partisans will swarm in. I tried to convince Vera of this obvious fact but she is true to her friend Claretta, who is true to Mussolini. When the Republic of Salò folds, it won’t be a pretty sight. Streets will be flooded with partisans taking revenge. Worse, most of them will be communists.”

  “What about Vera?”

  “In her defenseless way, Vera has always been able to find a protector. As one man rolls out of her bed, another one tumbles in.”

  “What are you going to do? Stay with Mussolini or betray him?”

  “There’s no one to betray,” Maria said. She had come halfway down the stairway. Her hair was a little undone and she was unsteady, but her pallor was gone. “It’s all an illusion now. Il Duce always was an illusionist, right from the start.”

  “Aren’t you an illusionist too?” Cenzo asked. “Creating passports for Nazis? That’s not the same as doctoring old violins.”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “What is it?”

  Maria dropped her usual sardonic smile. “I don’t know.”

  “I congratulate you,” Cenzo said. “It looks like expert work.”

  “Maria is the best counterfeiter of passports I’ve ever met,” Otto said. “She can turn a Berliner into a gaucho from the pampas. We’re not talking about ordinary soldiers. I mean war criminals of the blackest sort who are getting out while they can. The price goes up accordingly. Quite an artist is our Maria Paz.”

  “Maria, do we have guests?” The consul stood at the top of the stairs, vaguely waving his arms as if brushing aside cobwebs.

  She rushed up the stairs. “They were just going.”

  “Introduce me.”

  “Some other time, darling.”

  “What a shame. I don’t see many people, you know.”

  Maria paused at the top of the stairs. “You know what Otto’s doing, Cenzo? He’s like the manager of a flea circus who enjoys seeing his little acrobats pull carts and jump through hoops. Now he’s training you.”

  Otto replaced the passports in their envelopes and put them on the desk. “As I was saying, everybody compromises. At times like these, there is nothing ignoble about survival. Lord knows what your missing niece has had to do to survive.” He let that idea fester. “If you believe the world is made of ice cream and cakes, I have nothing to offer you. But if you don’t think so—if you think the world is made up of foolhardy young women and monsters that prey on them—I can help you. How can you say no?”

  It was true, Cenzo had spent all his moral indignation.

  “Let me teach you,” Otto said.

  • • •

  Otto drove. He headed to tourist cabins of prewar Salò that had been turned into bivouacs for German troops. Stately poplars gave way to rugged pines, and wind socks of an airstrip snapped in a nighttime breeze. The runway had been a golf course, and signs of this previous existence were a clubhouse and patches of sand.

  Otto rubbed his hands in satisfaction when they got out of the car.

  “We should learn from Il Duce,” he said. “He’s not such a foo
l. He can turn the worthless paper of the Fascist Republic into gold and steal a fortune right from under our nose.”

  “I thought the Fascists were bankrupt,” Cenzo said.

  “There’s plenty of money to be made out of a bankruptcy,” Otto said. “Believe me, I’ve done it more than once myself. Communist? Fascist? Gold bullion doesn’t care about politics. Neither do Swiss marks or notes of credit. While we thought Mussolini was wandering aimlessly around Italy, he’s been emptying federal cash boxes and withdrawing party funds. He’s been peeling off money like banana skins.”

  “And you’re asking me to fly that gold out?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I haven’t flown in years.”

  “It’s a Stork, a little reconnaissance airplane. There shouldn’t be any problem. Nobody owns the gold. It’s free and clear. If you don’t want any of it, give it to the girl. She’s due for a change in luck, isn’t she?”

  “How about the partisans? Maybe they think it’s their due.”

  “They would. But all we have to do is tell the Fascists that the partisans stole it or the other way around. Or stage a crash in the water.”

  “What do you expect the Germans to do? Just watch?”

  “The officers in charge are more concerned about war trials to come. It’s not their money. By the time they know what’s happening, we’ll be gone.”

  “To where?”

  “Switzerland.”

  “If you’re Swiss, why don’t you just leave?”

  “I made the mistake of producing films at transit camps for the Germans. Films of happy Jews and their cultural events. There were some very talented actors and musicians among them. They were happy to dance and sing if that gained them one more day before climbing back onto the train to their final destination. I was not necessarily proud of my work. It wasn’t The Titanic, but it was unavoidable.”

  “It was propaganda.”

  “In the film business, you take what you can get. So you see, I’m not such a bad fellow, after all. I think we will work well together.”